Lenica, Jan

(1928-2001)

   The renowned animator, illustrator, and poster designer, one of the prominent members of the Polish School of Poster. After studying music (piano) and architecture, Lenica turned to painting and poster design. With another poster designer, Walerian Borowczyk, he produced a series of animated short films that won international acclaim: Once There Was (aka Once Upon a Time, Był sobie raz, 1957), Love Requited (Nagrodzone uczucia, 1957), and House (Dom, 1958). The filmmakers relied on cutout technique to produce the absurdist and grotesque spirit in animation. Their works attracted a cult following and influenced future animators in Poland (Daniel Szczechura) and abroad (Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay).

   Like Borowczyk, Lenica also moved to France, where he made his first solo film, Monsier Tete (1959), narrated by Eugene Ionesco. His next films were made in France, Poland, the United States (where he lectured at Harvard), and Germany (where he taught poster design and animation at universities in Kassel and Berlin). In Poland, he produced a pastiche of Henryk Sienkiewicz's novella The New Janko Musician (Nowy Janko muzykant, 1960), awarded at the Kraków Film Festival in 1961, and Labyrinth (Labirynt, 1963), arguably his greatest film, a political Kafkaesque animation that won several prestigious film festivals, including Oberhausen, Kraków, and Buenos Aires. In France, Lenica produced the winner of the Venice Film Festival—The Flower Woman (La femme fleur, 1965)—Fantoro, the Last Arbiter (Fantoro, le dernier justicier, 1971), and Hell (Enfer, 1973). In the Federal Republic of Germany, Lenica started with a variation on Ionesco's play The Rhinoceros (Die Nashorner, 1963), which was followed by his perhaps most ambitious project: the feature-length animation Adam II (1968). In Germany, he also made his first film with actors, Still Life (Stilleben, 1969), followed by the medium-length Ubu Roi (1975), based on Alfred Jarry's play. In 1974 Lenica made his only American film, the semiautobiographical Landscape. His last film, IslandR.O. (WyspaR.O.), which combines animation with live actors, was produced in 2001 in Poland.

   Historical Dictionary of Polish Cinema by Marek Haltof