Andrzej Pawlowski

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Andrzej Pawlowski (1925-1986) was a painter, sculptor, photographer, experimental filmmaker, theoretician, and educator. He also designed industrial forms and exhibition arrangements. He was a professor and co-creator of the Industrial Forms Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. He was co-founder of the KRAKOW GROUP and the Association of Designers of Industrial Forms.

Bruce Checefsky's film Kineportrait Andrzej Pawlowski (2008, Betacam, color/b&w, 12:10 min) includes rarely seen interviews from an education television program first aired in Poland in the 1950s. Also included are film clips from Kineformy, his influential 1957 experimental color film. Kineformy catapulted Pawlowski to international fame, and influenced a new generation of experimental filmmakers. There are scenes from Pawlowski's 1967 film Professor Morpheo Cracoviensis, a satirical and often humorous look at university teaching and a film he collaborated with design historian Krzysztof Meissner. The documentary includes examples of Pawlowski's extensive industrial design products and expressive black & white photographs.

In 1958, Pawlowski wrote a script based on a 1941 diary written by a patient at a psychiatric hospital in Kobierzyn near Krakow. The original diary was found stashed in a wall, and in the early 1950s, the director of the asylum gave it to Pawlowski. The diary chronicles the daily atrocities committed by the Nazi under the operation Ausmerzung Lebensunwerten Leben during the occupation of Poland. The diary survived the war but its author did not. Pawlowski submitted his script to the national film board in Warsaw but they failed to produce it before he died in 1986. Bruce Checefsky made a film based on the script, IN NI (Others, 2005, Betacam, color/b&w, 20:43), filmed entirely in Warsaw.


See also: Poland#Experimental_film.2C_avant-garde_film