Zachęta – National Gallery of Art

curator: Marta Miś
cooperation: Anna Muszyńska
exposition and visual identification design: Lotne Studio
exhibition production: Andrzej Bialik, Dariusz Bochenek, Remigiusz Olszewski, Grzegorz Ostromecki

Mariusz Wilczyński’s exhibition centres around one film – the full-length debut of this well-known animator titled Kill It and Leave This Town. The film had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in early 2020, but due to the coronavirus pandemic it had to wait almost a year before it arrived in cinemas. During this time it was shown and won awards at the world’s leading animation festivals -– in Annecy and Ottawa, among others.

Originally envisaged as a short film, the animation took 14 years to complete. Finally, a full-length film was made, which represents the artist’s journey through the land of memories, with recurring motifs of people and places close to him. The animator’s home town Łódź provides the backdrop for this surreal story while the characters are real, imagined, or taken from literature. The late Tadeusz Nalepa, Wilczyński’s friend and the author of the film’s score, features as one the most important ones among them. Kill It and Leave This Town combines the climate of a dreamlike fantasy with realism and black humour, high culture with pop culture, personal memories with a description of reality. The author transcribes traditional animation into the feature film format, even though he keeps it in the space of art-house cinema, and gives this thoroughly Polish film a universal character, which is nevertheless also comprehensible for foreign viewers.

Several thousand drawings in various scales, capturing and drawing on the communist era reality and language (the author also displays his ear for dialogues), the voicing of the characters over several years (the voice cast includes Andrzej Wajda, Irena Kwiatkowska, Barbara Krafftówna, Krystyna Janda, Tadeusz Nalepa, Tomasz Stańko, Gustaw Holoubek, Andrzej Chyra and Maja Ostaszewska), and the score by Nalepa and the Breakouts – these are only some of the components of this story of passing time. The exhibition Kill It... at the Zachęta is primarily built around the contexts that make up the world presented in the film and the work itself. On the one hand, they are defined by the visual dimension (multi-plane city scenery, different light as compared to the director’s earlier films), which is shown at the exhibition through original drawings and animated set design. On the other hand, it is expressed by Wilczyński’s total thinking about sound as an important building block of film space. The third important element of the exhibition are the scenes that were not included in the film’s final version film – voiced and edited at the animatic stage, showing the planned character animation in a simplified form, which enables the viewers to get a glimpse of the technique used by contemporary animators.

Mariusz Wilczyński – animation director, painter, performer, set designer, professor at the Lodz Film School. A graduate in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź (diploma in Stanisław Fijałkowski’s studio), he has been focused on animation since 1996. He is the only Polish animator whose retrospective of short films has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as at the National Gallery of Art in London, the Pretoria Art Museum and the National Museum of Brazil in Brasilia. His full-length film Kill it and Leave This Town has won awards at the major animation festivals – in Annecy (Special Jury Award) and Ottawa (Grand Prix for a feature film). It has been the only animated film to win the Golden Lions award at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia and four statuettes of the Polish Eagles Film Award.