Directed by: Ryszard Czekała
Although Ryszard Czekała tried his hand as a feature film director in the 1970s, he will be remembered for the narrative urgency of his animated films. Film director Jerzy Kucia told me that the artists who once worked at the Krakow Animation Studio on ul. Kanonicza had little in common in terms of style and imagery.
But Czekała’s cut-out animations, together with the works of Kucia and Julian Antonisz, contributed to a renaissance in Polish animation with an abrupt return to realism that was typical of the Cracovian school. Despite the censorship problems faced by Czekała’s debut Ptak (Bird, 1968), Czekala did not put aside brutal realism for Apel (The Roll-Call), which evokes the merciless suppression of a revolt in a Nazi death camp.
With this black and white feature, Czekała placed himself with painter Andzrej Wróblewski and cineaste Andzrej Munk as part of a small group of Polish artists who succeeded in depicting the banality of evil during World War II without descending to Romantic grandiloquence.
Originally published by The Krakow Post on December 15, 2011