"This short passage, read by Józef Duriasz, comes from Dostoyevsky's story "A Gentle Spirit"." "GENTLE SPIRIT" "Duriasz's voice and posture reminded me of Dostoyevsky's characters." "It was my first, and so far last, collaboration with an actor." "A very short one, too." "My idea here was to make an animated psychological film," "and not a philosophical fable, a humorous or impressionistic sketch." "I wanted to tell a story with characters that would be almost real." "I used here an animation technique which I discovered two years before:" "animation of drawings scratched out in plaster slabs." "The texture visible in the bright parts of the image is a texture of plaster polished with sandpaper." "It was meant to resemble canvas." "I wanted the film to look like an animated Rembrandt painting." "It is also reminiscent of some graphic works." "Generally, it gives an impression of something old." "This technique allowed for a very fluid animation of characters, as well as their transformation:" "you'll see a face transform into a clock," "and a clock into a human figure." "AII the camera movements, which create the impression of a shifting perspective," "are also animated." "There were no three-dimensional objects there." "I used oil paints as I would with a painting." "Several scenes were inspired by graphic works of Odilon Redon," "among them the scene with the turning girl we just saw." "An animated psychological film was a very attractive idea to me then." "The only adaptation I'd heard about was Caroline Leaf's" ""The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa" based on Kafka,s story." "The film met with interest at festivals both for the technique employed and the fact that it treated characters like actors," "showing their psyches." "The challenge was to show the relation between the two characters without the use of dialogue." "Another was to convey the passage of time " "their marriage lasted several years, while the silent tension grew." "I think animation has this miraculous power to condense time and symbolize tension." "It is a pantomime played not only by characters, but also by a butterfly, for example," "and every object, because they are all infused with symbolic meaning" "and -- just like in a dream -- can be the language of this story." "The bottle, the red color, the cracking glass " "these are not special effects but the language of the film." "This big spider was also inspired by Redon." "The morphing I used" "in a moment you'll see a face change into a clock was also something I,d never seen in films and invented" "for my own purpose." "Again, thanks to the technique employed it was easy to make fluid changes and go from one meaning to another." "This is also inspired by a graphic work of Redon called The Haunted House." "The music was written by Zygmunt Konieczny." "This scene of running through the enfilade took me over" "a month of work." "The space had to be redrawn frame after frame." "Every movement phase was drawn on the previous one and then the earlier one was painted over." "Flies, which appeared in this film for the first time, became a frequent motif in my work." "Flies, which we dislike and kill, live a life closely connected to ours." "They are also great to animate:" "a real fly could never be forced to walk or fly, stop or go back the way it does here." "In the scene where the girl is taken away, the man is somehow separated from reality and remains outside, in a void." "The girl disappears and so does he." "The sound of the clock returns in my film Crime and Punishment." "The same recording, accidentally found, is used for the clock ticking in the old pawnbroker's room."