Zbigniew Rybczynski – { feuilleton }

Oj! Nie moge sie zatrzymac!, a film by Zbigniew Rybczynski

The title translates as Oh, I Can’t Stop!, and the camera shows 10 minutes of unstoppable momentum beginning with a stealthy creep through woods on the outskirts of a Polish city, and quickly evolving into a hurtling flight through streets, yards and buildings. The viewer is left to guess at the identity of the point-of-view but given the sounds of destruction the thing produces it’s evidently large and heavy. When you start to think you’ve got the measure of this film it speeds up even more. Oj! Nie moge sie zatrzymac! was made in 1975, a few years before Rybczynski’s Oscar-winning Tango. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Fourth Dimension
• Tango

Qualia

Qualia is a 10-minute film by Vincent Ciciliato subtitled “A remake of Salò“, a reference to Pasolini’s notorious Sadeian indictment of Italian Fascism, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Calling this a remake is something of a stretch, it’s more accurate to describe it as a mash-up of vague gestures in the direction of Pasolini’s grim tableaux via Zbigniew Rybczynski’s celebrated short film, Tango (1980). The latter is represented by the single room in which the action develops, and the jerking movements of the actors although their movements don’t attempt to match the clever dispersal of Rybczynski’s characters. We’re not exactly starved of unusual juxtapositions these days but a Salò/Tango mash-up is something I wouldn’t have expected to see. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tango

The Fourth Dimension

This post ought to have followed the one about Tango since it concerns another experimental film by Zbigniew Rybczynski. The Fourth Dimension was made in 1988 and like many of the director’s films uses a single effect to create striking results. In this case the effect involves photographing people and objects one narrow line at a time. When the lines are combined then shifted slightly the objects seem to bend and twist like melting plastic. This is the kind of semi-analogue technique which has now been made redundant by computer animation but Rybczynski gives his compositions a quasi-Surrealist quality, reinforced by the Magritte-like windows in some of the rooms.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tango

Tango

Further film formalism. Tango (1980) by Polish filmmaker Zbigniew Rybczynski is a static shot of an empty room. A boy throws a ball in through the window, retrieves it, exits then throws the ball in through the window. His repeated action is the first of an interwoven series of looped actions by thirty-six different people who eventually form an impossible crowd passing through the room. All human life is here: eating, drinking, sex, death, exercise, breastfeeding, theft, an accident—there’s even a man carrying a toilet bowl. Rybczynski spent seven months doing this the hard way with optical printing which is why the quality fluctuates as the room becomes more crowded. The whole thing lasts eight minutes and you can watch it here.