overview
About the film
Assistant Director: Marek Pieniążek
Assistant Camera: Tadeusz Dzień
Animator: Jerzy Kucia, Marek Pieniążek
Music: Józef Rychlik
Production Manager: Halina Kramarz
Production: Animated Film Studio (Cracow)
Rights: National Film Archive
Language: pl
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storyline
A sunny summer, harvest time. A countryside road, men walking with scythes, women with wooden rakes, a large van full of hay. From the natural sounds of summer – insects’ hums, scratching wheels of the wagon pulled by horses – music arises, and in its rhythm a procession of harvest accessories moves along the screen: sickles, scythes, blades, agricultural machines, mowed grain, beams of hay, harvest festival wreaths. They are accompanied by musical instruments – the violin, ruffle, percussion… and people – happy, ceremonial, like in a parade. A harvest “natural-mechanical ballet” is taking place, the celebration of work and its effects. Harvest time brings back memories and causes reflections.
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“The Parade” (1986) is definitely the brightest film that Jerzy Kucia ever made. The light tonality is already visible in “The Spring” (1980), realised six years earlier, a romantic impression about time, in which everything comes to life. This time Kucia dedicated his impression to an even more joyful time of harvest. He made it in a collage manner similar to his film “Splinters” (1984) from two years earlier. The logic of the precedence of events is substituted by a logic of memory, but the editing is more calm – it is no longer so nervous, but even dignified, its character adjusted to the style and content of the story. Kucia made the harvest parade animation in a “parade” way.
Ewa Gołogórska, the co-scriptwriter (as in most of his films), privately his wife, helped him achieve this, as did Józef Rychlik, the composer of the beautiful musical motive with a poetics and atmosphere that reminds us of the very best of Nino Rota. The soundtrack in this film is perfectly built – joyful, parade music, natural sounds (e.g. the sounds of nature and of machines), as well as short elements of silence which greatly co-play with the unrealistic, hallucinatory images (mobile graphics made with a laser copy method), giving a poetic film of rare beauty. That was in fact the intention of the artist. “I find poetry between image and sound” – said Kucia in Jerzy Kapuściński’s TV program “Other Cinema.”
These qualities were appreciated by the jury of several important festivals, awarding “The Parade” with: Main Prize – ex aequo – at the XXXIII International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, 1987; a Golden Kuker award at the V International Animation Film Festival in Varna, 1987; a Bronze Hobby-Horse award in the animated film category XXVII National Short Film Festival in Cracow, 1987; and the Main Prize – ex aequo – at the II Animated Film Festival „Animafilm” in Zamość, 1988). Jerzy Kucia’s films are a wonderful example of the full cohesion of image, sound, and literary meanings. In his films these elements are inseparable, they constitute a whole. “The Parade” is – along with “The Tuning of instruments” (2000) – the best example of this. Jerzy Armata