animation and experimental
Home page Animation and experimental film Splinters
combined film
part: clip 02:28, whole 09:38
Director: Jerzy Kucia
Screenwriter: Ewa Gołogórska, Jerzy Kucia
Director of Photography: Marek Norek, Andrzej Jeziorek
Visual Effects: Jerzy Kucia
Tags: loneliness, reflection, passing away, memory
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Assistant Director: Marek Pieniążek
Music: Marek Wilczyński
Production Manager: Halina Kramarz
Production: Animated Film Studio (Cracow)
Rights: National Film Archive
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A blinding study of human loneliness and the pain of passing away. In the mind of a woman who is doing her daily chores memories of old times come back. The present mixes with the past, reality mixes with imagination. Consistent elements of Kucia's earlier films appear: drops of water, flying insects, a train passing, circular reflections on water… Everything is filmed in a dark, flickering tone, a nervous editing. One can hear shreds of music mixing with everyday sounds.
"Splinters" (1984) remind us of – as Iwona Grodź accurately noticed in her work "The phenomenon of the fourth dimension in Jerzy Kucia's work" – "broken and re-built glass". And adds: "In this film, as in many others, the poetics of minimalism and impressionism are typical, as is the modest form, which generates an increase of film expression". "Splinters" is therefore an incredibly expressive, poetic impression about the passing of time, growing old, "renewing" one's existence by returning to past events. Almost all of Kucia's films have that form, apart from "Reflexes" (1979), in which there is a clear plot based on a cause and effect logic. The rest of his films have no action in the traditional sense of the word, he makes a philosophical reflective cinema which explores areas previously not penetrated by animation – a world of the inner experiences of the human kind. The logic of the precedence of events is substituted by a logic of memory. There are documents of the human's inner world. "The logic of associations, experiences, emotions is more important in my films than the logic of facts" – said the director in an interview with Marcin Giżycki in "Kino" (nr 4/2001).
Giżycki in his book "Not only Disney…" calls Kucia a film impressionist and writes that "he is interested in both the faint images of the outside world and the pre-verbal states of our conscious – images-cliches from our memory, which do not always show their meaning, crumbs of memories". The artist mixes techniques in his stories and does not restrict himself solely to animations. He often uses photography which he adequately processes. In all of his films ("Splinters" is a classical example) he pays a lot of attention to the soundtrack; music, murmurs, shredded words, dramatic moments of silence make the soundtrack fully integrated with the visual elements and often enlarges it with so-called "off the frame" space. Jerzy Armata
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