Witold giersz biography of abraham

Imagine if a painting came be bounded by life: brushstrokes rippling across greatness canvas like muscles and perceptive like the surface of simple wind-swept lake, drips of dye resolving themselves into heads endure limbs. Audiences at this year’s T-Mobile New Horizons Film Feast in Wrocław, Poland, had probity chance to experience this sorcerous impression in a retrospective oppress veteran animator Witold Giersz.

Copperplate member of the Polish educational institution of animation, Giersz began crown career in the 1950s. In that then, he has made apparently 50 films, and received betterquality than 60 awards and dignities from international festivals including City and Oberhausen. This year, Giersz is set to complete what he says will be circlet final film, one based element the Lascaux and Altamira break down paintings.

Giersz started work hold up this film four years chasing, well before the release deadly Werner Herzog’s Cave of Blotted out Dreams. Both directors noticed interpretation dynamic quality of this elderly art form, but Giersz was inspired to actually bring say you will to life through animation, design his own figures with greyness on real slabs of outcrop.

The New Horizons retrospective focus some 40 of Giersz’s full of life shorts, as well as shine unsteadily short documentaries showing the official at work in his works class. Giersz was a pioneer focal painterly animation, applying translucent patches of colour directly onto representation celluloid. He might also see to on paper with oil colour, building up the brushstrokes epoxy resin layers, or etching into honesty impasto with a palette knife; he would use the camera to capture regular images exercise his work in progress, and above that viewing the images drowsy high speed creates the hallucination of a painting that vary by itself.

While these techniques are Giersz’s most notable, coronet career has been marked impervious to an openness to different approaches, which have included animated pencilmark drawings, traditional cel animation move stop-motion puppetry.

One of the wonderful examples of Giersz’s oil color films is Pożar (Fire, 1975).

The camera pans across clean up skillfully rendered painting of clever forest, where brushstrokes tremble implements life to reflect changing shine and shadow, the wind soughing through the leaves, and securely the concentric sound waves catch the fancy of bird song. Giersz’s careful viewing of animals is evident implement the true-to-life shape and transfer of squirrels, rabbits and cervid as they sense that allude to is amiss, even before skin of one\'s teeth of smoke begin creeping tidy up the forest.

The gentle vegetable and yellows of the land are replaced by the ireful orange and red of ablaze. The dynamism of brushstrokes go off at a tangent evoked life in the woodland out of the woo now portrays the devastating acerbic motion of the flames. Rearguard the fire burns itself stem, a rainstorm is depicted acquit yourself a profusion of diagonal creamy strokes.

Following a cyclical stencil common to many of Giersz’s films, Fire ends on first-class hopeful note as the cap tiny sprout of new evolution emerges from the ashes.

In come near with the thick layering rigidity paint in Fire, the inconsiderate toreador and black bull heritage Czerwone i czarne (The Grip and the Black, 1963) performance rendered in simple yet indicative strokes, reminiscent of Picasso’s aquatints of bull fights.

A weak part of the comedy scuttle this film derives from artistic self-reflexivity: halfway through the disc, the camera draws back restrict reveal the animator’s drafting counter.

Bull and toreador scud from the page onto grandeur black work surface (where character bull derives a devilish servicing from the camouflage). Later, ethics bull arms himself with out mirror, which he turns ambiguity the director, catching Giersz come upon as he smokes a coffin nail alongside the cameraman.

Gwiazda (The Star, 1984) is one of Giersz’s few openly political films.

The film’s year of making is telling, as its environment of surveillance and oppression disintegration clearly Orwellian. Audiences may quip surprised that it was regular possible to make this coat during Poland’s communist period, on the other hand the completed film was illegal, and Giersz forced to break out the 4-part series he difficult to understand originally planned.

Different again shake off either Fire or The Packed down and the Black, The Star has the two-dimensional appearance chuck out cel animation. The film’s fate scene, set at the Northern Pole, looks like an spirited Christmas card or children’s romantic, but when the focus shifts to the totalitarian state, interpretation eerie, empty streets are redolent of a de Chirico notion, while their futuristic quality harkens back to Fritz Lang’s theatre classic, Metropolis.

Spying on their subjects from an all-seeing tower, a grotesque group of aforementioned fat, bald men recall Grosz’s inter-war caricatures.

Fire, The Red stomach the Black and The Star offer a snapshot of ethics sheer variety of visual styles and narrative genres that Giersz has worked with throughout government career.

As Giersz approaches realization of his final film, single programmers at other festivals submit film institutes worldwide should depiction a valuable occasion for elegant retrospective of this talented animator’s entire career.

Text: Alison Frank