Festiwal Animator 2008

Artists: Animator 2008

Lenica Jan

Jan Lenica was born 1928 in Poznan, Poland. Artist, screenwriter, art critic, animator.
Graduated from Warsaw Polytechnic. He became an illustrator and art journalist. He worked as an art editor in the satirical weekly magazine "Szpilki". He was assistant professor at Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. In 1957 he made his first animation film together with Walerian Borowczyk. After making a few more, and having experienced problems with their release, Lenica settled abroad. He gave lectures on art of poster at Harvard University in Cambridge, USA. He was a director of an Animation Film Department at Kassel University, and a Professor of Poster and Graphic Arts at the Berlin Hochschule der Kunste.

Lenica was a very versatile art creator. A noted director of animations, he stood out as one of the finest artists of the Polish School of Poster as well as an illustrator of books, caricaturist and a costume designer for theatre. His posters, prints and drawings were shown at numerous exhibitions in Poland and abroad. His lifetime achievement was recognized with the Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation Award, New York 1987 and with the Smok Smokow Award of the Kraków Short Film Festival in 1999.

Together with Borowczyk he made in 1957 “Once Upon a Time”, followed a year later by “House”. Lenica’s films triggered a true revolution, turning this peripheral genre into an art capable of communicating the most complex, difficult and serious messages. The cutout technique used by Borowczyk and Lenica in their first films, and then by Lenica in a couple of his subsequent film, proved successful in producing effects which were funny and satirical, surrealistically grotesque, or absurd and horrific as in Ionesco and Kafka. Lenica did not find this formula satisfying for long however, and having parted from Borowczyk he combined films with live-action films, photographic stills; and, finally, cartoons.

In film A, Lenica's simply structured tale of the struggle of a lonely man against the terror of the first letter of the alphabet, a conflict with the machinery of state. The same theme is found in films “Monsieur Tete”, “Adam 2”, “Rhinoceros” and, particularly, Lenica's last film, “Island R.O.”. His films are considered pessimistic and catastrophic, and he himself admitted to balancing "between grotesque and drama". In the other work Lenica invoked the myth of Ikar “The Labyrinth” as well as the myths of the lower culture, such as that of Phantomas “Fantorro”; mitigated the Kafka-esque “The Labyrinth”, “A”, “Adam 2” and Ionesco-like “Monsieur Tete, Rhinoceros” absurdity of existence with Max Ernst-like, surprising, surrealistic juxtapositions of objects Monsieur Tete”, “Nowy Janko Muzykant”; contrasted with the beauty and order of the Art Nouveau world “The Labyrinth” with the monstrous shapes of skeleton-like dream beasts in “Landscape”, invoking Lenica's Nazi occupation experience or the grotesque characters from the adaptation of Alfred Jerry’s “Ubu Roi.

Despite the variety of techniques, themes and genres, Lenica’s style is quite easy to recognize. Zdzislaw Schubert wrote that Lenica's work was very expressive and at the same time had a clear intellectual dimension, each film conveying a personal message "revolving around the dilemmas of human existence".
Jan Lenica died in Berlin in 2001.