Julian Antonisz Foundation, Krakow, Poland

Julian Antonisz Foundation was founded in 2013 by Sabina and Malwina Antoniszczak in Krakow to support and preserve artistic legacy of the artist/inventor Julian Józef Antoniszczak also known as Julian Antonisz.

Julian Antonisz (November 8, 1941 – January 31, 1987), born Julian Józef Antoniszczak, was a Polish avant-garde filmmaker, artist, film animator, screenwriter, composer, and inventor.

Julian Antoniszczak graduated from the Faculty of Painting and Graphic Art of the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts in 1965. Two years later he debuted with his first animated film Phobia (Fobia in Polish). Antonisz became known as a Polish promoter of a unique animation technique called direct animation produced by creating images directly on film stock i.e. “non-camera”. Antoniszczak’s Sun: A Non-Camera Film 1977 (Słońce – film bez kamery) was his first all non-camera movie, although the technique has been used also in Antonisz’s earlier productions. The idea after the technique was to paint or scratch the images directly onto the movie tape instead of using a camcorder. Usually one second of movie uses 24 frames. For example, his debut film Phobia 1967, lasts 11 minutes. 660 seconds times 24 frames gives us 15,840 images that had to be painted.

Antonisz famous of his mechanical skills, has constructed numerous accessories supporting the creation of non-camera movies. His own “Antoniszograf fazujący” was a machine which scratched a set of frames, with a fluid frame by frame transition between the following images. Another invention was his prototype of a “chropograf” (which could loosely be translated as texture-graph), which created an image with distinctive levels of roughness, allowing the blind to recognize shapes presented on the picture.

Co-founder of the Jan Zdrój cabaret operating in the Club at Hand. Later under the same name was the team of Zdroj Jan.

Since 1977 he filmed noncamerial films by painting individual frames on a film tape without using a camera. Co-founder of Animation Studios in Cracow. He has won numerous awards at Polish and international film festivals.

Antonisz was an artist combining many specialties. Sam wrote scripts for his films and produced them himself, and composed the music for them. In 1977, in his artistic manifesto, he formulated a vision of a film made directly on the film tape, and since then he consistently made films with this technique. It consisted of abandoning the use of the camera – individual cages were drawn, painted or scratched on tape.

It was fascinated by mechanical devices. In college he built two bikes “car”, arousing sensation when he came to class. Sam built different “film machines” for use in non-camera films. One of them was a phonograph phonograph – a film scraper on a film cage series with a smooth transition between two extreme cages. He also built a prototype of a chopograph, transferring images to pieces of celluloid in the form of more or less rough surfaces; was supposed to serve the blind.

He died while working on the 13th episode of Polish Non-cameraman Chronicle.

His most awarded work was How the Miniature Dachshund Works, 1971 (Jak działa jamniczek).