Option Zero

Stormy events in the social-political life of the country – August ’80, martial law, a period of apparent stability after its abolition, the system transformation of 1989 – had an enormous influence on national art, not only its development, but also its distribution. On one hand censorship was partly abolished, so one could speak in a fuller voice, on the other – the national patronage broke down, which led to perturbations in financing culture and its impoverishment. The first years of a free market economy, also largely visible in the cultural sphere, did the rest. A huge crisis began, most noticeable in cinema. While feature films had a chance of surviving in cinema distribution, documents – in the developing TV market, national animation with an almost non-existent financing of children’s production for TV, practically ceased to exist. However at the beginning of the decade everything seemed to confirm Karol Irzykowski’s prognosis, that things would be completely different and animation would be the cinema of the future. In his book ‘The tenth Muse. The aesthetic issue of cinema’, issued in 1924, he wrote: “While the future of regular film belongs to the matter (human body and nature) engineers, the future of drawing films belongs to the painter-poet. In fact only this type of film makes cinema an art.” What’s more, the events of the Polish hot summer of 1980 enabled the ‘painter-poet’ to speak his mind more freely. Jerzy Armata : "1981 - 1990: the terminated decade" w : "Polish Animated Film" edited by M. Giżycki i B. Zmudziński, Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne, Warsaw 2008