Tadeusz Kantor

In 1958, graduates of the Film School in Łódź – director Mieczysław Waśkowski and camera operator Adam Nurzyński – produced in cooperation with Tadeusz Kantor the short film Somnambulists. The colourful, painting-like moving image was an attempt at transferring the informel onto film stock.

A haunting theatrical memory play in which actors and their mannequin doubles reenact five episodes, from a wedding to a last supper, set in the claustrophobic room of the director’s own childhood village of Wielopole. Through repeated motifs, mirrored characters, and a living stage that Kantor continually “resets,” the piece collapses past and present, life and death, into a surreal reconstruction of personal and collective history.

The Dead Class (1975), by Tadeusz Kantor and the Cricot 2 company, is considered one of the most innovative and influential works of twentieth-century theatre. The breakthrough first version of the production - performed to great critical acclaim, but only rarely seen live by audiences outside Poland - was documented on film in 1976 by the Oscar-winning director Andrzej Wajda.

A unique documentary on the work of a legendary genius of theatre, Tadeusz Kantor. Filmmaker Denis Bablet traces Kantor's roots as a visual artist in Poland and explores his ingenious methods of designing the props which become living sculptures in his extraordinary theatre productions.

Two fairies, Terencja and Felicja are in posession of the Lucky Rain Boots, which they intend to give to the most deserving person in the city of Kraków. However, they consistently fall into the wrong hands, creating a multitude of absurd and comedic situations.

Tadeusz Kantor’s “Theatre of Death” is based on a singular reversal of traditional values: in this work, which indirectly relates to the world of puppetry, death is seen as a positive counter to the values of a consumer society. Thus, in accordance with this perspective, the actor was to appear to the viewer with the same strangeness and the same distance as though surrounding a corpse.