Polish Animated Film Anthology

[posto]

PWA is releasing 2 disc set: Polish Animated Film Anthology.
Anthology will feature 28 animated shorts. Among others: "The House" by Walerian Borowczykand Jan Lenica, "The School" by Borowczyk, "Soup" and "Tango" Zbigniew Rybczynski and "The Cathedral" by Tomasz Bagiński.
According to a sketchy info on PWA website set will be available in late June. I was unable to find it anywhere yet.
PWA released Kieslowski's documentaries, among other films.
If anybody finds a place that sells this set please do let us know.

Disc 1:

Disc 2:

[Gropius]

Excellent news! If this is the same quality and price as the documentary sets, it is by my reckoning undoubtedly the most exciting release of this year. Now we can all see where Terry Gilliam stole his Monty Python style from. Lenica's Labyrint is to 2D animation what Svankmajer's shorts are to 3D. That looks like 28 films, amazingly comprehensive, including the recent Ichthys, which people were raving about at animation festivals last year.

Traffic Club ought to have it eventually, although that site is a headache to navigate for the Slavonically-challenged.

[alfons416]

i own all the four documentary-sets by PWA, and they are all great. so i'm gonna jump on this one when it drops, i don't tinnk PWA will be able to dissapoint me.

[patrick]

It's a shame that Babelfish doesn't translate Polish (and I don't know anyone in Eastern Europe), because I'm dying to see this set.

[Gropius]

It's a shame that Babelfish doesn't translate Polish (and I don't know anyone in Eastern Europe), because I'm dying to see this set.

It's not out yet. When it is, there are Polish mail-order sites which one can fumble one's way through without excessive difficulty.

[alfons416]

It's a shame that Babelfish doesn't translate Polish (and I don't know anyone in Eastern Europe), because I'm dying to see this set.

check this out

[JanPB]

PWA is releasing 2 disc set: Polish Animated Film Anthology.
Anthology will feature 28 animated shorts. Among others: "The House" by Walerian Borowczykand Jan Lenica, "The School" by Borowczyk, "Soup" and "Tango" Zbigniew Rybczynski and "The Cathedral" by Tomasz Bagiński.

Very good news! The selection isn't bad at all -- I only wish for more films by Jerzy Kucia and Stefan Schabenbeck. And of course Lenica's Labyrinth always remains a must-see.

--
Jan

[posto]

Apparently this set is available now from Merlin, Traffic Club (as a pre-order 6-18), and PWA website.

[Galen Young]

[MichaelB]

I've just ordered via Merlin. The price is so jaw-droppingly low (£11.22 including postage) that I couldn't risk waiting lest it turned out to be a misprint!

[Gus]

I ordered this one from Merlin too. Looking forward to it.
I bought the BFI sets of Quay Brothers and Svankmajer and i'm loving them, both the films and the dvd production of them. Are There any other english friendly dvds with animation of this sort out there?

[alfons416]

got mine this monday, it's as good as the previous PWA releases, in other words, really great!

[Galen Young]

[zedz]

Thanks for posto for alerting us to this release. It arrived today from Merlin in impressively sturdy packaging (a box within a box within a box, swathed in miles of "Police Line - Do Not Cross" tape - it took me ten minutes to get into it!) along with the Kieslowski documentaries set.

They're both beautifully produced sets with comprehensive bilingual books, and incredibly cheap.

[MichaelB]

Agree about the packaging - absolutely impossible to open without scissors!

And the discs themselves are flat-out superb - I've watched half a dozen titles so far, and there's not a single one where the transfer was anything other than state of the art. I suspect PWA had access to the original source materials (presumably Film Polski owns most if not all of this stuff), and it shows. There are no on-disc extras, but with 28 superlatively-presented shorts and a nearly four-hour running time I'm not exactly minded to complain.

The entire package is 100% English-friendly - the booklet (a short essay plus biographies of all the filmmakers) is bilingual in Polish and English and the DVDs offer menus in Polish, English and French. Subtitles translate onscreen text and credits as well as dialogue.

And, as has already been said, this is a truly unbelievable bargain.

[MichaelB]

OK, I've now watched the whole thing, and my comments pretty much stand - aside from noting that the widescreen material is non-anamorphic. But this only affects five titles (and just one is in Scope), so it's not an especially big deal.

Aside from that, I really cannot imagine these films looking any better - they clearly had access to the best possible source materials (presumably original negatives), I suspect there was a fair amount of restoration, and the subtitles were admirably thorough, even covering songs as well as credits and onscreen text. (If I remember rightly, only one or two films had any actual dialogue).

A wonderful range of styles and subjects, too - everything from crude line drawings through collage, claymation and even CGI towards the end. A strong tendency towards ultra-black humour was the only really common characteristic, but that's not much of a surprise.

Best discoveries for me (I was already familiar with Borowczyk, Lenica and Rybczynski) were Witold Giersz and Jerzy Kucia, though I also liked Stefan Schabenbeck's and Piotr Dumala's films (two apiece), especially when I realised that Dumala's A Gentle Spirit was based on the same Dostoyevsky source as Bresson's Une Femme douce, though the crepuscular visual treatment is quite different.

Not everything was a masterpiece, but I don't think there was a single title that didn't deserve inclusion. And I've heard a very pleasing rumour that this is merely the first of PWA's Polish animation releases...

[zedz]

I agree. It's a really solid collection, and there were only a handful of titles I'd seen before. I was pleased to see that I hadn't imagined the lovely handcrafted glitch I'd noticed years ago in Banquet (near the end, a green waiter's hand gets overlooked on a plate of prawns for a few frames). Further volumes is great news - this is an exemplary release.

[MichaelB]

I agree. It's a really solid collection, and there were only a handful of titles I'd seen before. I was pleased to see that I hadn't imagined the lovely handcrafted glitch I'd noticed years ago in Banquet (near the end, a green waiter's hand gets overlooked on a plate of prawns for a few frames). Further volumes is great news - this is an exemplary release.

Zbigniew Rybczynski's Tango is full of similar glitches, but I like them - as Jan Svankmajer pointed out when asked if he'd ever use CGI, he prefers the hand-crafted feel of manual methods because of the inevitability of making small mistakes, which humanise the work.

[Steven H]

I agree. It's a really solid collection, and there were only a handful of titles I'd seen before. I was pleased to see that I hadn't imagined the lovely handcrafted glitch I'd noticed years ago in Banquet (near the end, a green waiter's hand gets overlooked on a plate of prawns for a few frames). Further volumes is great news - this is an exemplary release.

Zbigniew Rybczynski's Tango is full of similar glitches, but I like them - as Jan Svankmajer pointed out when asked if he'd ever use CGI, he prefers the hand-crafted feel of manual methods because of the inevitability of making small mistakes, which humanise the work.

I *must* get this DVD. Tango is one of those films that I'm forced to show friends who come by my house (another is Back's Hedgehog in the Fog.) I also have to pick up the Svankmajer set, as I just read the Sight and Sound article and it sounds amazing (as much as I've seen Jan's feature films, you'd think I'd leap through the air for a short collection, Alice is especially brilliant.)

[MichaelB]

I *must* get this DVD. Tango is one of those films that I'm forced to show friends who come by my house (another is Back's Hedgehog in the Fog.)

Or Yuri Norstein's...

I also have to pick up the Svankmajer set, as I just read the Sight and Sound article and it sounds amazing (as much as I've seen Jan's feature films, you'd think I'd leap through the air for a short collection, Alice is especially brilliant.)

Much longer reviews here and here (and Marina Warner's recent piece on Å vankmajer here).

[Steven H]

I *must* get this DVD. Tango is one of those films that I'm forced to show friends who come by my house (another is Back's Hedgehog in the Fog.)

Or Yuri Norstein's...

Blame it on the weather. Thanks for the links.

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

Or Yuri Norstein's

On said subject. What are the chances of making a Norstein collection - a resounding hat trick alongside Quay and Svankmajer ????

[MichaelB]

On said subject. What are the chances of making a Norstein collection - a resounding hat trick alongside Quay and Svankmajer ?

There already is a Norstein collection, released in Region 0 NTSC by the world rightsholder. And it's pretty good - if I redid it, I'd be more sensitive about subtitle placement (and make them optional), but that's my only real niggle.

(I am actively pursuing other DVD projects in a similar vein to the Quays and Svankmajer, but I'm generally favouring people whose work is much harder to get hold of - for obvious reasons)

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

(I am actively pursuing other DVD projects in a similar vein to the Quays and Svankmajer, but I'm generally favouring people whose work is much harder to get hold of - for obvious reasons)[/quote]

I don't know whether this means you are only on the search for mixes of animation and live action but I just wonder if you've ever come across the work of Bogdan Dziworski??

You may have seen a short film he did for the BBC called 'The Prisoner' years back but it is his 'documentary ' work that I find truly admirable. A lazy description would be ' Fredrick Wiseman meets Jacques Tati.'

[JanPB]

Best discoveries for me (I was already familiar with Borowczyk, Lenica and Rybczynski) were Witold Giersz and Jerzy Kucia

Jerzy Kucia is truly great - anyone in Europe with access to digital satellite TV can pick the Polish KULTURA channel (and several other art channels, I think) which show animated films quite regularly as well as other odd stuff like Czech rock group concerts pre-1989. A friend of mine in the UK has accumulated almost-complete Kucia works in this way - something Kucia himself has no access to (I know it because I telephoned Kucia last year, he lives in Cracow and he talks your ear off in a delightful fashion). Witold Giersz brought his canvas to the TV studio once, he showed his technique in detail. Quite tedious but the result! He made one more well-known film similar to The Red and the Black called Little Western. In The Red and the Black Witold Giersz is the guy on the left in the brief live-action sequence.

though I also liked Stefan Schabenbeck's and Piotr Dumala's films (two apiece), especially when I realised that Dumala's A Gentle Spirit was based on the same Dostoyevsky source as Bresson's Une Femme douce, though the crepuscular visual treatment is quite different.

Not everything was a masterpiece, but I don't think there was a single title that didn't deserve inclusion. And I've heard a very pleasing rumour that this is merely the first of PWA's Polish animation releases...

That would be great. I can rattle right from the top of my head another list of films that should be released (and that includes the remaining Schabenbeck's works).

An interesting factoid about The Cathedral is that it's practically a home movie. Tomek Baginski who made this film has a DVD out explaining the technicalities of every sequence in detail. See e.g.

--
Jan