The Polish Non-Camera Newsreel No. 1

Turbulent events in the social and political life of the country – August '80, martial law, a period of apparent stabilization after its abolishment, the political transformation of 1989 – had an enormous effect on the national artistic creativity, not only its development, but also its distribution. On the one hand censorship was more limited, so one could speak his mind more freely, on the other – state sponsorship ended and this lead to perturbations in culture financing which caused its impoverishment. The first years of a free market economy, also largely in the sphere of culture, did the rest. A huge crisis began and was especially visible in cinematography. Feature films had a chance to survive in cinema and video distribution, documents in television, while national animations – due to the lack of financing children’s programs on TV – was left to ruins. The beginning of the decade promised that everything would go otherwise and that the pre-war prognosis of Karol Irzykowski, who claimed that animation was the future of cinema and wrote about it in his book from 1924 ‘The Tenth Muse. Aesthetical issues of cinema’: ‘While the future of an ordinary film usually belongs to the material engineers (the human body and nature), the future of picture films belongs to the painter-poet’. Jerzy Armata, 1981 - 1990: Przerwana dekada, in: „Polski Film Animowany", edit. Marcin Giżycki, Bogusław Zmudziński, Warszawa: Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne,2008, p. 78

COLUMNBREAKPOINT

Antonisz’s films, so full of a specific type of absurd humour, with its original artistic form and interestingly composed soundtrack (he was the author of the music in most of his films), are immediately recognizable. The artist from Cracow did not want to be solely a storyteller, he aimed much higher. His last achievements, especially the 'Polish Non-Camera Newsreel', which had twelve issues in 1981-1986, moved from a pastiche of newsreels to real newsreels. They are animated documents which specifically reproduce the more or less paranoid aspects of our reality. There is a lot of humour and irony in Antonisz’s films, but also a lot of space for reflection upon our daily lives. Jerzy Armata, 1981 - 1990: Przerwana dekada, in: „Polski Film Animowany", edit. Marcin Giżycki, Bogusław Zmudziński, Warszawa: Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne,2008, p. 86