Meeting with
Pavel Koutsky

The Czech animator and director Pavel Koutsky meets the audience of Bergamo Film Meeting at the Meeting Point in Piazza della Libertà.

Along with Jan Švankmajer and Jiří Barta, Pavel Koutský is considered as a master of contemporary Czech animation cinema. The peculiar critical sense of East European animation is perfectly represented in his many films – including Dilema (1984), Curriculum Vitae (1986), Ať žije myš (Long Live the Mouse, 1993), Duel (1997) and Média(1999) – which are distinguished for their dynamic brevity and marked symbolic value. These are works of great intellectual vivacity and bitter humour, in which the individual is subjected by the forces of a system – be it the media, modern technology or ideological indoctrination – that manipulates and imposes homologation. The protagonist’s victory, if there is one, is just provisional: it is a pure illusion.

Pavel Koutský (Prague, Czech Republic, 1957) reveals his first artistic talents as a kid; his interest in animation already begins to show at 13, when he joins the Czech Cineclub and creates his first experiment, and continues in high school years. In 1977 he enters VŠUP – Vysoká škola um leckopr ě ůmyslová v Praze, the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague, where he will qualify in TV and Cinema Graphics. After some experiences in the animation field, at 16 he wins his first awards. A disciple of cinema master Jiří Trnka, in 1984 he creates his first professional film, Laterna muzika, already showing a distinctive feature of his following work: music as a leitmotif producing animation rhythm. Later on he joins the famous production company Krátký Film, working full time on animation films. With Curriculum Vitae, showing with biting humour the many years of study and efforts which lay behind a professional career, Koutský wins the Golden Bear for the best animation film at the 1987 Berlin festival; in 2000 Média, exploring the relation between man and mass communication, is awarded the Silver Bear and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Annecy animation festival.
With Michaela Pavlátová, Koutský is the exponent of a unique technique that he called “total animation”, in which the effects of editing and camera movement are directly created by the animator, without image overlapping, by modifying the drawing at a single level. Beside his admired philosophical comedies – some twenty short films he wrote, drew and directed – Koutský directed television productions, advertisements and music themes. Since 1993 he has been teaching at the animation department of FAMU – Filmová a televizní fakulta Akademie múzických umění v Prazea (the Prague Academy of Cinema, Television and Applied Arts). His name is also strictly linked to Anifest, the international animation film festival in Třeboň, the first editions of which he has been a protagonists of, and whose logo he created. As to private life, he is married and has one son; he loves animals, airplanes and red wine.