Julian Jozef Antoniszczak, aka Julian Antonisz
Many times awarded at film festivals in Poland and abroad, Antonisz was a maker of animated and experimental films, one of the founders of the Cracow Animated Film Studio, an inventor and a composer.
He made 36 films, of which the majority were drawn directly onto film tape. Working on majority of his films he collaborated with his wife Danuta Antoniszczak (Zadrzyńska). In 1977’s Non-Camera Artistic Manifesto, he formulated his vision of the artistic film, created directly onto the film tape without the use of a camera, stating that: “…Only films made with the Non Camera technique can be called authentic works of visual, painting, graphic and musical art.” “The Non-Camera method facilitates immediate visual control, which significantly reduces the time required to produce the film and provides outstanding visual effects, where the whole ballast is jettisoned, the cameras, lights, lab tape processors and other costly and frivolous photographing paraphernalia, which always produce distortions, and in effect provide only a catalog reproduction of a visual work, which itself ceases to be authentic and original, and becomes a miserable photocopy.”
He graduated from the Painting and Graphic Arts Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. Earlier, he graduated from a Music High School in Cracow and studied physics for one term at the Jagiellonian University. An education in such varying disciplines allowed him to create films that were truly his own: films that he independently directed and animated according to his own ideas, composing his own music, working on the sound, and using equipment of his own devising. He developed his own techniques for working directly onto the film tape, even experimented with drawing sounds onto the soundtrack.
His work is a singular and onetime phenomenon. Deep reflections are hidden under these humorous and seemingly light-hearted films, and the expressive and, as it were, over-wrought music and ‘raw’ animation with its trembling contours and pulsating colors give them their unusual strength of expression.
Antonisz’s films are an inseparable part of most representative showings of Polish animation. His humor has lost none of its charm over the years and still finds many admirers.
Significant awards:
- Award at the Tours International Film Festival 1969 for In the Talons of Sex,
- The 1st Złote Koziołki Prize in the animated films category at the 2nd Polish Festival of Films for Youth and Children in Poznań 1971 for How Education Came out of the Forest,
- Brązowy Lajkonik Main Award at the 12th Polish Short Film Festival (MFFK), Cracow 1972, for How a Sausage Dog Works,
- The Golden Hobby-Horse of Cracow Grand Prix at the 20th Polish Short Film Festival, and the Bronze Dragon at the 17th International Short Film Festival, Cracow 1980, for Hot Engaged Film – Non-Camera,
- The Bronze Hobby-Horse of Cracow Main Award at the 22nd Polish Short Film Festival, Cracow 1982, for Polish Non-Camera Newsreel #1,
- Main Prize and the FIPRESCI Jury Award at the 30th Short Film Festival, Oberhausen 1984, for Polish Non-Camera Newsreel #6,
- The FICC jury Special Award in retrospection set of films from Studio of Animated Films in Krakow at the 30th Short Film Festival, Oberhausen 1984 for „Fobia”, „Kilka praktycznych sposobów na przedłużenie sobie życia” and for „Dziadowski Blues – non camera, czyli nogami do przodu”,
- The FICC Jury Award at the 32nd Short Film Festival, Oberhausen 1986, for Light in the Tunnel,
- The Ministry of Culture and Art Award, for achievements in the years 1980 – Warsaw 1981
- The Ministry of Culture and Art for achievements in the year 1986 – Warsaw 1987