Part one of Labyrinth by Jan Lenica
Made in 1963, Lenica created "Labyrinth" a self-consciously Kafka-esque tale of a winged lonely man literally devoured by totalitarian rule. Along with Jiří Trnka's Ruka (The Hand, 1965), Labirynt is considered to be one of the finest political animations ever made. Jan Lenica's checkered caree
r has encompassed excursions into music, architecture, poster-making, costume design, children's book illustration, and all aspects of filmmaking. It is, however, for his animation that he is best known, particularly his collage and "cutout" films, which have their roots in the art of Max Ernst and
John Heartfield. The films have influenced the work of Jan Švankmajer and Terry Gilliam. In the 1950s, his films with Walerian Borowczyk led an aesthetic revolution in Poland that sent reverberations all over the Eastern European animation scene. Before Lenica entered the scene, Polish animation c
onsisted mainly of American-influenced character animation, over which the shadow of Walt Disney lugubriously hung, sometimes with vaguely political overtones on the fringe. Lenica and Borowczyk moved the avant-garde into the mainstream. They attempted to forge a new experimental cinema that would c
oalesce contemporary artistic practices such as abstraction, collage, and satirical surrealism without jettisoning commitment to the Marxist concepts of artistic integration of form and content and art for the masses. Often their films deal with alienation in a modern world, and the challenge of the
detritus of history, figured in their use of old newspaper and postcards and the ironic confrontation with the "Great Masters" of painting which consume the protagonist of Once upon a Time . . . . In The House, a wide range of techniques illustrate a strange mechanical rite. The rough simplicity of
their materials in these films conveys simultaneously the menace of an absurd disordered universe, and an affecting artlessness of execution.

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