While Jan Lenica was a visiting artist at Harvard’s Film Study Center, the filmmaker and professor Richard Rogers wanted to make a portrait of the master graphic designer and animator in action. Rogers structures his film much like his subject might, in funny fits and starts, with slightly ominous, minimalist shots interrupted by artfully composed, off-kilter perspectives and an underlying mystery and irreverent humor. When a solemn Lenica admits to having “no working method” and trusting visual information over language, Rogers responds with a close examination of Lenica calmly engaged at the animation stand and, later, an experimental cut-up audio track of Lenica’s terse aphorisms. After witnessing Lenica drawing, painting and shooting segments of his film Landscape in his Carpenter Center studio, Rogers brings them to life so the audience can immediately witness the magical results of Lenica’s understated undertaking.

With vestiges of creatures from the films that came before, Lenica’s expressionistic, enigmatic Landscape seems propelled by somber, more melancholic energies. At a young age, Lenica narrowly escaped concentration camp internment and witnessed gruesome horrors of war. Though oppressive regimes, senseless catastrophe and deep disillusion haunt all of his films, the dreamy ache of Landscape seems to signify a more personal catharsis unfolding. Though softer-edged and hand-drawn, his fossil-like forms are riddled with wounds, scars, disease and dismemberment that slice beyond the physical plane to the psychic. Garby Leon’s otherworldly soundtrack resonates the beauty and the pain of existing in a world layered with allusion and code, yet denying complete comprehension. “Landscape seduces the viewer by being only partly textual,” notes writer Steve Weiner. “That is, there are half-formed metaphors and blatant symbols that invite a reading but deny answers.”

In 1998, Jan Lenica started shooting his new film in Poland titled Wyspa R.O. (The Island of R.O.), the first film produced by this distinguished artist in his native country since 1962. This significant event was used as a springboard for a documentary film summarizing over fifty years of Lenica's creative life. Lenica talks about the ups and downs of his career as a cartoonist, poster designer and filmmaker, visits an exhibition of his father's paintings and the Museum of Caricature, for which he has designed a poster. He is also shown directing The Island of R.O.—the film he describes as his reckoning with two totalitarian systems that have influenced his entire life. – Marcin Gizycki

Lenica desaturates his final work—which is primarily live action enhanced by various forms of animation and video compositing—and adds select, intense highlights to create a consummately Lenician netherworld with a narrative that appears both more linear and more mystical than in his earlier films. A distant relative of Labyrinth’s lost soul, a man from space crashes into a seemingly abandoned industrial wasteland riddled with signs of a former totalitarian state: monuments, photographs, records and, apparently, enough humans to play out the oppressive dynamic of the past. Through the magic of animation, the man constructs a friend and, through the incantation of dreams, finds a lover. While love, ingenuity and imagination prove indispensable for inspiration and survival, Lenica allows the hero’s ultimate fate to reside in the perspective of each individual viewer.