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.

Tadeusz Kantor was a great artist. Not only in its own - the twentieth century. Not only in the area of ​​his homeland - Poland. A well-known Krakow documentalist and at the same time his longtime collaborator - Krysztof Miklaszewski- he decided to reconstruct Kantor's road through Europe.

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.

First staged in Krakow and the Gdansk shipyards in 1980, where Poland’s Solidarity movement was born, and here performed at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, Wielopole, Wielopole by the theater company Cricot 2 merges themes of Christ’s Passion and fascism with the Polish director Tadeuz Kantor’s own childhood memories.

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.