Project Description
Jan Lenica
FSC-Harvard Fellow – Before 2004
Polish painter, lithographer, poster designer, and absurdist film animator, Jan Lenica’s films include Monsieur Tête (1959), Labirynt (1963), Adam 2 (1968), and the abstract Landscape (1974), produced while a fellow of the Film Study Center. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Pompidou Center in Paris in the early 1980s. He was working on a feature-length animated film in collaboration with his brother-in-law, the writer Tadeusz Konwicki, at the Miniatura studios in Poland when he died in 2001.
FSC Works
Landscape
Jan Lenica, 16mm film, 10 mins. (1974)
In Landscape, the imagination of the great Polish animator, Jan Lenica, dwells in the turbulent blue-black sky where creatures of nightmares pass, collide and devour each other with heavenly precision.
Puffs of clouds become petrified and thunder to a barren Earth in a hail of rocks. Sinister sights, not wholly unfamiliar, amalgamate animal, vegetable and mineral craftily and freely.
“Landscape is a nightdream, a landscape of my mind, of my imagination. It evokes memories of the past, reflects the images of reality into the world of fantasy. But the word dream has in this case another meaning. There is also the dream of reason which produces monsters and that is what is learned from Goya’s Caprices and explains in the best way the significance of my film,” Jan Lenica.