overview
About the film
Production Manager: Halina Kramarz
Production: Animated Film Studio (Cracow)
Rights: National Film Archive
Language: pl
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storyline
A city park, in it Auguste Rodin’s famous sculpture “The Thinker”, which presents a naked man sitting and holding his chin while lost in thought. We can hear birds tweeting, branches of trees are swaying with the wind. The camera is patiently observing the sculpture. Like in the popular song by Grzegorz Turnau “Nothing is going on”. Suddenly something makes a noise, the thinker springs up, moves, takes a look around and after a moment… goes back to his disrupted meditation, changing only the hand holding his chin.
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The shortest film in Krzysztof Kiwerski’s output (projection time 1’16”) and also the shortest film in the Animated Film Studio in Cracow. The main character of this short joke is the famous sculpture by Auguste Rodin. It was made by the artist when The Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris ordered it as part of a bigger whole – the monumental entrance of the museum. Rodin was inspired by Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy”. The first, plaster version of the sculpture was made in 1880, its full size bronze casting was done in 1902, and the monument was shown to the public two years later. “The Thinker” quickly gained popularity and common acknowledgement and became a symbol of intellectual effort, for some even the symbol of philosophy as a science. It also became an object of satire. Armand Hammer, a famous American industrialist, inspired by “The Thinker” seemingly gave Włodzimierz Lenin a statue of a chimpanzee reflecting on a human skull as an insinuation of Darwin’s theory, which the ex-Bolshevik Russian leader was a supporter of. Kiwerski’s joke is much more innocent and discrete. His film, which is a combination of the live action and a paper-cut received an Honourable Distinction at the One-Minute Film Mini-Max Festival in Sosnowiec (1988). Jerzy Armata