Piotr Dumala – { feuilleton }

The Return, a film by Jerzy Kucia

“Jerzy is the greatest among the living—the greatest Polish author of animated films that is still alive.” So says Piotr Dumala, a formidable animator in his own right, in a video discussion of Jerzy Kucia’s films. The first of these, The Return (1972), is collected on Studio Miniatur Filmowych, a YouTube channel devoted to Polish animation. My complaints about YouTube are legion but the place is still worthwhile when it allows channels like this one to exist. The same goes for the channel devoted to films from the Zagreb Studios. The only trouble with these outlets is a lack of translation for the films that feature dialogue.

This isn’t an issue with The Return, however, a wordless account of a nocturnal train journey undertaken by a shuffling man in a cloth cap. Stills don’t convey the remarkable sense of verisimilitude that Kucia creates with the patterns of light flashing over the walls and against the windows of the unlit carriage. The whole piece is meticulously observed, and a reminder to keep searching for the director’s other films.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Crime and Punishment, a film by Piotr Dumala
• Walls, a film by Piotr Dumala
• Academy Leader Variations

Stairs, a film by Stefan Schabenbeck

YouTube in recent years has become an increasingly worthwhile repository for short animations or experimental films, many of which you might otherwise never get to see. Stairs (1969) is another great piece of Polish animation, a brief scenario concerning a Plasticine figure who wanders into a terrain of random steps which soon turns mountainous. The obvious precursor is MC Escher’s stairways, but Escher’s worlds are always very formal despite their paradoxes. Schabenbeck’s film, like many Eastern European animations, can be read as allegory although this only becomes apparent at the very end. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Walls, a film by Piotr Dumala

Crime and Punishment, a film by Piotr Dumala

More from the Polish animator, and a stunning, wordless adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novel. Crime and Punishment dates from 2000, and utilises the same technique as Dumala’s earlier films—images scratched into a plaster ground—only this time there’s a muted colour palette and considerable depth achieved through cast shadows and blurred objects layered over the drawings. Yuri Norstein achieved a similar sense of depth in Hedgehog in the Fog (1975) and Tale of Tales (1979), and Dumala’s film also shares the latter’s umber tones and sombre lighting. The story is pared to its bones, as it would be with a running time of 30 minutes, but it’s still a marvellous adaptation. There’s even a nod to Walls when an omnipresent fly disappears for a moment into a hole in the wallpaper.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Walls, a film by Piotr Dumala
• Academy Leader Variations
• Yuri Norstein animations
• Screening Kafka

Walls, a film by Piotr Dumala

Polish animator Piotr Dumala was among the filmmakers contributing to Academy Leader Variations, the short anthology that was the subject of a recent post. He also received a mention in the Screening Kafka post for his memorable animated portrait of Franz Kafka. Walls (1988) is another short film made just after Academy Leader Variations, and like all of Dumala’s films the images are created by scratching lines into painted plaster. The cross-hatching that results from this means the animated images are much closer to drawings than the vaguely similar pinscreen animations of Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker. Walls is moody, inexplicable, and may be watched here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Academy Leader Variations
• Screening Kafka

Screening Kafka

Kafka (1991).

This week I completed the interior design for a new anthology from Tachyon, Kafkaesque, edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly. It’s a collection of short stories either inspired by Franz Kafka, or with a Kafka-like atmosphere, and features a high calibre of contributions from writers including JG Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, Carol Emshwiller, Jeffrey Ford, Jonathan Lethem and Philip Roth, and also the comic strip adaptation of The Hunger Artist by Robert Crumb. When I knew this was incoming I rewatched a few favourite Kafka-inspired film and TV works, and belatedly realised I have something of a predilection for these things. What follows is a list of some favourites from the Kafkaesque dramas I’ve seen to date. IMDB lists 72 titles crediting Kafka as the original writer so there’s still a lot more to see.

The Trial (1962), dir: Orson Welles.

Orson Welles in one of his Peter Bogdanovich interviews describes how producer Alexander Salkind gave him a list of literary classics to which he owned the rights and asked him to pick one. Given a choice of Kafka titles Welles says he would have chosen The Castle but The Trial was the only one on the list so it’s this which became the first major adaptation of a Kafka novel. Welles always took some liberties with adaptations—even Shakespeare wasn’t sacred—and he does so here. I’m not really concerned whether this is completely faithful to the book, however, it’s a first-class work of cinema which shows Welles’ genius for improvisation in the use of the semi-derelict Gare d’Orsay in Paris as the main setting. (Welles had commissioned set designs but the money to pay for those disappeared at the last minute.) As well as scenes in Paris the film mixes other scenes shot in Rome and Zagreb with Anthony Perkins’ Josef K frequently jumping across Europe in a single cut. The resulting blend of 19th-century architecture, industrial ruin and Modernist offices which Welles called “Jules Verne modernism” continues to be a big inspiration for me when thinking about invented cities. Kafka has been fortunate in having many great actors drawn to his work; here with Perkins there’s Welles himself as the booming and hilarious Advocate, together with Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider and Akim Tamiroff.

Continue reading “Screening Kafka”