Dr hab. Stefan Bielański, prof. UP

Dr hab. Stefan Bielański, prof. UP (Pedagogical University of Krakow)

Traditions of Central Europe and Their Relations with Italy
lecture in Polish

Introduction to the cultural relations among Central European countries from the historical and political perspective. The concept of "Visegrad" arises from the complex structure of various cultural identities and political agendas rooted in common historical experiences. It's understanding can be fully embraced when elaborated within larger geopolitical background. The case of Italy functions as an inspirational point of reference - even if politically Italy and V4 countries have remained distant, several shared historical experiences create cultural codes commonly comprehended in the regions.

Bobrowska Olga

Olga Bobrowska, Ph.D. Candidate (Jagiellonian University in Krakow)

No Gods Land. Leszek Kołakowski's Thought in Polish Animated Film
lecture in English

Leszek Kołakowski, a great philosopher has influenced international humanities and democratic movements in Europe in the second half of 20th century. Beside of academic work he was an author of several tales and scripts that inspired Polish animators throughout the years. Two films will be especially discussed (Exile from Paradise, 1966, dir. Jerzy Zitzman; How God Maior Lost His Throne, 1999, dir. Piotr Walicki, Paweł Muszalski).

Bobrowski Michał

Michał Bobrowski, Ph.D. (Jagiellonian University in Krakow) 

From Eternity to Here. Journey of No Return in Films of Zdzisław Kudła
lecture in English

Reflections on animated films made by outstanding and not widely known Polish artist Zdzisław Kudła (filmmaker active during times of communism and 1990s transformation) who dealt with philosophical and political issues in a highly innovative way by disrupting and revolutionizing narrative structures and modes of perception.

Bristot Paola

Prof. Paola Bristot (Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna)

Paola Bristot was born in Aviano (Italy) in1961, graduated in History of Arts in DAMS in Bologna in 1985 with a thesis about Luigi Veronesi and different relations in the artistic expression (drawings, animation on the celluloid, music). Since 1997, hasbeen teaching the Languages of Contemporary Art, and the Theory and Techniques of the Cinema and Audiovisual production at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. She is a curator of visual art exhibitions and is the president of the Vivacomix association. She is the art director for the Piccolo Festival dell’Animazione (Little Festival of Animation) in Udine, Pordenone, Gorizia and Trieste).

She signed with Andrea Martignoni the 3 DVD anthology of italian animation “Animazioni (2010/12/14, ed. Associazione Viva Comix, Ottomani). She produced like art director the animation filmproject “Re-cycling” (Arte Video. 2014).

Vox Lunae. Inner Dynamics in the Female Italian Animation
lecture in English

The feminine sign in visual art is often recognizable by a subtle graphic that is frequently linked to a careful observation of details. From this consideration to a more intimate analysis, or often a self-analysis, it’s really a short path. We retrace the bond of symbolic association that leads the steps from an inner look to an outsider. In the film “Haircut”, that Virginia Mori’s untied tresses cut by a big scissor are connected to a principle of castration; the image of Saint. Lazlo, a main recurring character in Magda Guidi’s animations, is related to a conflicting relationship with subconscious principles imposed by religion… or the butterflies metamorphosis created by Beatrice Pucci in “Imago”, are birth and maternity icons, typically linked to a feminine world. For all these authors the real revolution lies in the artistic expression; a form that has the characteristic to be liberating in itself capable to move ideas, obsessions and thoughts from the individual to the collective soul and open those concepts into a wider view: our collective imaginary.

Chunning Guo

Guo Chunning, Ph.D. Candidate (Renmin University, Beijing)

The Archaeology of Memory: The Explorations of Animated Documentary
lecture in English

This paper aims to demonstrate how Animated Documentary may be used in order to explore memories. With contributions from The Archeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault, archeology has evolved from only an academic field to a philosophical device used to explore the structure of historical narration. In order to translate archeology to fit our context, this exploration requires the use of our curiosity and ambition so that we might look beneath the surface as archaeologists. This paper will be a practice-based research. Firstly, this paper will show the connection between our personal memories with our experience creating the trilogy of Animated Documentary ”The Memories of Growing Up”. It will also explain how the memories of an unnatural death evolved into our first Animated Documentary “Ketchup”. The metaphor from some reseracher, “Animation and documentary may seem an odd couple” I contend that the opposite is true. In this paper, I hope to explore the perfect marriage between Animation and Documentary, and how Animated Documentary was born as a new entity. To offer testimony to this perfect “marriage” between Animation and Documentary, this paper will support its conclusion by examining four aspects:

A: Individual’s Memories and Historical Narration

B: The Order of Things: Animation or Documentary

C: New Chinese School and Autobiographical Memory

D: Comparative studies of Animated Documentary from Eastern Europe

The first point will set up a hidden bridge between reality and imagination, Memory. By analyzing the example works of Animated Documentary, this paper will reveal the advantages of reliving memories, especially autobiographical ones, by Animated Documentary.

The second point refers to the methodology of this research. How might we categorize this new medium, Animated Documentary? Do we refer to it as an animated short or a documentary short? Actually, this naming issue may offer new point of views if we relate it to some of the thinking in Michel Foucault’sThe Order of Things. In fact, this raises questions as to the nature of how we understand Animation and Documentary. The ambition of this paper’s author is to demonstrate Animated Documentary as a connection to Structural Geology, Historical Geography, Memory Structure and Historical Structure. The conjunction of these areas is based on research concerning system and structure among cross-fields. The aim of this kind of cross-fields research is like the work of archaeologist, to explore the beneath the surface of the Earth, and to testify the identity/age according to the connection among layers of Earth.

The third point is directly responsible for the origin of this research, by the practice of creating “Ketchup” and our mentor of Shuibo Wang, we discovered the genre of Animated Documentary. Only once we became a part of Animated Documentary did we start to discover it. That is also a demonstration of criticism’s connection to experiementation.

Finally, this paper also intends to declare the efforts of artists from Eastern Europe offered Animated Documentary. From Kazimierz Urbanski’s “Slodkie rytmy” (1965), as well as Anca Damian’s “Crulic: The Path to Beyond”(2011) , to Rudolf Smíd’s “Chronicle of Oldrich S. “(2012), these works have demonstrated the potential and possibilities in terms of revealing individual’s autobiography as a reflection of a “big” historical context.

Giżycki Marcin

Prof. dr hab. Marcin Giżycki (Rhode Island School of Design; Katowice School of Technology) 

Where is Polish Political Animation?
lecture in English

Political animated film has a long tradition. From the very beginning it was used as either a satirical weapon or a means of propaganda. Even under communism Polish animators managed to produce a number of films criticizing, more or less directly, the totalitarian system. It seems that this kind of film has almost totally disappeared in today’s Poland. What has happened? Why political satire has lost its edge? These are certainly questions demanding an answer.  

Iványi-Bitter Brigitta

Brigitta Iványi-Bitter, Ph.D. (Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest)

(Storyline structuresinauteur animation films in the v4 countries in theCold War era)
video lecture in Englis

Martignoni Andrea

Andrea Martignoni (IULM University in Milano)

Andrea Martignoni was born in Bologna (italy) in 1961, graduate in Musicology with a thesis on soundtrack in animation and in Geography with a thesis on soundscape. He is a performer, sound designer, historian in Animation. He has created soundtracks for several short animated films He teached history of animation in Fine Arts Palermo, and actually in IULM University in Milan. He works closely with several international festivals with master classes, workshops, lectures on topics related to animation and soundtrack. He is often invited to international juries and selection committees throughout the world. Carries workshops together with Basmati A.C. and Ottomani Cultural Association promotes the Italian animated film internationally. In 2010-2014 he curated with Paola Bristot ANIMAZIONI a collection of three DVDs, about Contempoarary Italian Animation, the fourth DVD is going to be ready soon. He won the Golden Reiter for the best soundtrack to the 23 th edition of the International Short Film Festival FilmFest Dresden 2011 and Asifa Italia Award in 2010.

"Animator of Subconcious". Between Obsessions and Anarchy in Igor Imhoff, Blu, Donato Sansone's Movies
lecture in English

The “Percorsi” by Igor Imhoff, obsessioned by atavistic symbols and images, the urban walls used by Blu as piece of paper where animate his original “weltanschauung”, the sexual phobias by Donato Sansone. What these things have in commons? Apparentlynothing more than being animated films, but the three artists are able to give free rein to their obsessions and their revolutionary spirit, in an autarchic form of cinema, often anarchist, freed from the constraints dictated by Producers.

Neděla Jiří

Jiří Neděla, MA (Pedagogical Faculty of Palacký University, Olomouc)

Jiří Neděla (1982)

In 2009, he graduated from the field of Czech philology and film studies on Philosophical faculty of Palacký University in Olomouc, the Czech Republic. Since the years of his studies he´s been a member of a team organising Festival of Film Animation (Přehlídka animovaného filmu - PAF), dramaturgically distinctive event presenting not only animated films, but also works from the fields of new media, videoart and performance.

Apart from his dramaturgical activities, currently he is a student of postgraduate studies on Pedagogical faculty of Palacký University, on the department of intermedia arts.

Dream As Second Life
lecture in English

This paper will concern the work of Czech filmmaker and animator Jan Švankmejer, a worldwide known author whose artwork is inseparable from the activities of Czech surrealistic group since no later than late 1960´s. The paper will treat the work of Jan Švankmajer by means of a film language analysis via methodology derived from the film semiotics field, represented by Christian Metz. Along with Metz´s theories, a psychoanalytic model of psychic apparatus (id – ego – superego) and a theory of dream interpretation described by Sigmund Freud will be applied, considering the fact that Švankmajer refers it in both his theoretical and artistic work. Specifically, an analogy between the mechanism of so called dreamwork on one side and metaphor and metonymy as semiotic and art figures on second side will be highligted and explained. The mechanisms of methaphor and metonymy will be applied on selected examples of Jan Švankmajer´s work, on various syntagmatic levels of film media – a shot, a scene or a collision of more shots and their components. Also, within this analysis, some specific characteristics of Jan Švankmajer´s work will be highlighted – primarily his using of the components of film language (particularly animation) and an emphasis of a dream phenomenon in his films, both in a context of his affiliation to the surrealistic movement.

Orosz Anna Ida

Anna Ida Orosz, Ph.D. Candidate (ELTE’s Institute of Art Theory and Media Studies, Budapest)

Satire and Sociography: the Depicition of History in Hungarian Animated Short Films before 1989
lecture in English

By the very end of the 1960s, most notoriously after the crush of Prague Spring in 1968, which also had the effect of disillusionment on the Hungarian intelligentsia, art in general, including film and animation, turned away from the grand ideologies (and fake illusions) of Socialism towards the sociological record of the everyday life of small people. Many of the films created in this period, including some animated films, look more like to be part of (and some actually were) larger social studies. In the upcoming years, the sociographic approach – in a more and more abstract and indirect way – became part of many authorial animated short films, including documentaries, fictional and experimental pieces. By combining documentary and fictional elements, and with the use of allegories and metaphors, these films express a critical view not only on the periods before Communism, but also on the Stalinist personality cult of the 1950s and the controversial nature of Hungary being “the happiest barrack in the Socialist camp” with its elements of limited freedom and control. This paper will look at the various animation film practices before 1989, which were combining neutral sociographic studies and a highly subjective artistic approach to depict the troubled history (and also the contemporary situation) of a small Eastern European country. The artists to be discussed are György Kovásznai, Katalin Macskássy, Béla Vajda, Péter Szoboszlay and István Orosz.

Sedia Giuseppe

Giuseppe Sedia (FIPRESCI)

Giuseppe Sedia is a French-born Italian journalist. He is reporter for the Italian daily Il Manifesto in Poland. He writes regularly about Polish cinema for The Krakow Post and is a member of FIPRESCI.

Twisting Genres - 2 Examples of Western Animation Film from Italy and Poland
lecture in English

Have animation really called into question aesthetic canons of the western movie? It would be an overstatement to say that Small Western (1961) and West and Soda (1965) revolutionized the genre. Still, Witold Giersz and Bruno Bozzetto on a formal and content level, respectively, violated conventions before the emergence of the spaghetti western and Peckinpah's films. At the same time they managed to maintain conventions needed to identify their works as respectful of the genre imagery. The point here is not only to demonstrate how both auteurs were trailblazers but rather to dissect their innovative sense humour and its desecrating potential.

Sowa Robert

Robert Sowa, Ph.D. Adjunct (Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow)

Born in 1972, Kraków, Poland. Animation film director and graphic artist.

In his work he is looking for visual experimentation and it's connections to experimental sound and contempo-rary music. He creating individual language egually by different media and the relationship between visual and sonic spaces. The common problem he touches in his films is focused on emotions, suspended between the ma-terial and the imaginary world. Robert Sowa makes animation films using stop motion, mixed media, lighting, painting, and photography.

Currently Robert Sowa is head at Animation Film Studio, Graphic Department Academy of Fine Arts Krakow, Poland.

His works have been presented at many festivals, screenings, and art galleries, including:

CENTRUM POMPIDOU, Paris, France

MUSEUM of MODERN ART, NOWY JORK, USA

FESTIVAL DEL FILM LOCARNO, Swiss

CENTER for DIGITAL ARTS and EXPERIMENTAL MEDIA DXARTS, University of Washington, USA

ANIMA MUNDI GALLERY, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Brasil

NATIONAL MUSEUM Krakow in permanent exhibition „Gallery of XX century Polish Art”, Poland

CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, Warsaw, Poland

BARBICAN CENTRE, London, GB

CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART (CCCB), Barcelona, Spain

Prizes:

Polish Ministry of Culture Stypendy, 2015

visiting artist - Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) University of Washington, Seattle, USA

Special Jury Award “Sekwens”- ODENSE International Film Festival, Denmark

Special mention “Sekwens” - Etiuda&Anima International Film Festival

Critics Award “Sekwens” - 27 Festiwal „Młodzi i Film”, Koszalin

Grand Prix za film pt.: „The barber” na Ogólnopolskim Festiwalu Filmów Autorskich w Krakowie. Special Jury Award „Interior portrait”, XXXIV Festiwal Filmów Krótkometrażowych w Krakowie

National Museum, Krakow, Gallery of Polish Arts “Graphic and Animation” in permanent exhibition

Grant Award of the City of Kraków for young artist

Polish Ministry of Culture Film Genre Stypendy

Robert Sowa cooperate with the:

Krakow Film Festival - as a curator of the international animation program

Deutsches Institut für Animationsfilm e.V. Drezno

Swiss Foundation for Culture Pro Helvetia

Robert Sowa is a member of:

Polish Filmmakers Association

Association of Animated Experimental and Video Film Artist

Association Internationale du Film D'Animation, ASIFA

expert of Polish Film Institute

Immersive Genres
lecture in English

"We spend part of their lives in virtual cyberspaces, can operate simultaneously in parallel
worlds, quickly changing its personality according to the requirements of the new reality-
simulated or real. We live in a world concise, striking slogans. We are accustomed to quick
search the required data. We are less inclined to reflection, and more spontaneous. We prefer to
pass for creative than urgent. Our life has become more temporary. We think the images rather
than words. We perceive reality in a systemic way and subjective rather than linear and
objective, modifying their identity by trying new incarnation. Our world has no boundaries and
constantly changing "
Jeremy Rifkin "Age of Access"
New genres, including the immersive media, stereoscopic imaging methods and technologies
related, sound, for example - ambisonic, are an example of opening up new opportunities. The
avant-garde of the twentieth century m.in grew as a result of cooperation between science and the
arts. Photography, animation, film, multimedia activities, performances, audiovisual
experimenter's action on the basis of scientific achievements marked a new poles of creative
exploration. Research and experiments on digital infrastructure change reality and new
possibilities challenge.
Blurring the boundaries of species generates new ...
What does this mean ...
Analysis on the basis of selected examples

Sowa Wiola

Wiola Sowa, MA (Pedagogical University Art Department Krakow)

Born in 1972 in Gniezno, Poland.

Animated film director.

Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow graduate at the Faculty of Graphics. Graduation at the Studio of Animated Film in 2000.

A two-time winner of the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage Scholarship,

City of Krakow Art Scholarship and Goethe Institut Scholarship.

Currently PhD student at Film School in Łódź and a tutor at the Art Faculty at Pedagogical University in Krakow.

In the years 2008-2012 she was President of ASIFA Poland, national group of Association Internationale du Film d'Animation International.

Since 2010 she is expert of Polish Film Institut.

Wiola Sowa creates auteur animated films, but she also does mixed-media films, which combine animation with documentaries and fiction .

Female Approach to the World
lecture in English

During last decade a new generation of Polish directors had a possibility to speak by their films. The most important voices belonged to women directors. Małgorzata Bosek, Olga Wroniewicz from Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Izabela Plucińska, Anita Kwatkowska-Naqvi from the Film School in Lodz, Wiola Sowa, Marta Pajek and Ewa Borysewicz from Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, created animated shorts about relationship, women condition in the surrounding reality and unique experience of the reality. Diversity of film language, visual stylistic and plots is characteristic for those artists. However the most interesting is analyzing individual progress in touching personal topics and evaluation which is done at each film, but also from one film to another. Małgorzata Bosek in her triptych (Dokumanimo, Wyspa Gibonów, Dwa żywioły) analyzed not only relationship, but by creating pictures from collected trashes, she made critique of herself.

Marta Pajek begun her filmmaking from describing unreal reality and from “Slippingcord” she develops and explores femininity in the context to the world that her protagonists do not understand. In the coming project “Impossible figures” her research reach conclusion.

We just experience the most interesting change in the polish animation. Domination of women directors changed topics to more emotional and more personal and it is like a different kind of critique of our society.

Stasiowski Maciej

Maciej Stasiowski, Ph.D. Candidate (Jagiellonian University in Krakow)

Pathological outgrowth: animated film as a virtual medium for Zdzisław Beksiński’s artistic investigations
lecture in English

Even ten years after his death, Zdzisław Beksiński remains a controversial figure. The positive aspect of this resurgence is a growing interest in not only paintings and photographs, but the very person – other areas of his artistic endeavour, most prominently writing and his vision of cinema; merely notes on the margin, yet outlining a coherent project. In one of his taped conversations with Piotr Dmochowski – his French art dealer – Beksiński reveals that if he came to be involved in film, not painting, he would have been most fond of the possibilities of experimental animated films. Gathering those scattered evidence, why not imagine what cinema according to Beksiński might have looked like, had he decided to attend film school in Łódź, not study architecture in Cracow? Especially as his legacy emerges in the guise of set designs and is frequently referred to by such directors as Chris Landreth or Guillermo del Toro.This speculative study aims at bringing together various loose threads that verge into an outline of Beksiński’s never realized project of animated cinema, which could be assembled from his incomplete short stories, video recordings of the painting process, offhand remarks on film, along with a range of citations of his works by contemporary filmmakers. Withholding from inventing its own object of study, my paper will review those aspects from the perspective of his artistic obsession with decay and rebirth, which in itself was a theme pursued by means of a fluid process involving destruction (sculptures, photographs) and outgrowth; a metaphoric evocation of a lifecycle. Be it the form of Andrzej Pawłowski’scineforms, or Tomasz Bagiński’s The Cathedral (regarding Beksiński’s interest in the development of CGI), with imaginative exuberance of style and form borrowed from Fellini, one could suppose that the only force opposing the painter’s potential cinematic output of themes already present in his art, was time itself; or rather, lack thereof.

Viren Denis

Denis Viren, Ph.D. (State Institute for Art Studies, Moscow, Russia)

Various obsessions of Alexander Sroczyński
lecture in Polish

Alexander Sroczyński – director, scriptwriter and illustrator living in USA – is a highly original and interesting author even though his work is not widely recognized in Poland. Animation and drwing of his stylistically incisive films remind sometimes of Bill Plympoton or recently succesful on festivals „Consuming Spirits” by Chris Sullivan, yet they remain unique. Work of Sroczyński is fascinating both on the formal and generic level as the director freely combines animation and live-action while pastiche of brutal horror interweaves with perverse humour psychologism. Sroczyński's characters are driven by various obsessions such as l'amour fou, hopeless attempts to escape from the troubled world or hunger for blood... To what degree depicted obsessions can be read as perversion and to what degree as a rebellion against grey, souless reality? The lecture aims to synthesise artistic explorations of Sroczyński by the example of his chosen films.

Zmudziński Bogusław

Bogusław Zmudziński, Ph.D. (AGH University of Science and Technology)

Animation as Detonation. Counter-culture and Anti-civilizational aspects of Cinema of Jan Švankmajer
video lecture in Polish