Syndicate: very short history of experimental filmmaking in Poland

["Ryszard W. Kluszczynski" <rwk@krysia.uni.lodz.pl>]

Ryszard W. Kluszczynski


Four chapters from the history of the Polish avant-garde film


The history of the avant-garde cinema in Poland began in 1930. Since then
numerous interesting films have been made, many filmmakers have developed
their uniques film styles and poetics. Among them there are few phenomena
of extreme importance. The films of Franciszka and Stefan Themersons,
animation of Jan Lenica, Walerian Borowczyk, and of other artists from the
late fifties and early sixties, films made by the members of "Film Form
Workshop", and works by Zbigniew Rybczynski, formed together the main and
the most influential stream in the avant-garde filmmaking in Poland. They
all composed also a line of continuation, since the artists of "Film Form
Workshop" and Rybczynski, extended the Themersons' interests, ideas, and
experiments.
In the mid-eighties the history of the experimental cinema in Poland seemed
to be over. The unfavourable conditions, the lack of facilities, and the
increasing access to video equipment, were the major reasons to transform
the Polish film avant-garde into the video avant-garde. The coming time
will show whether this end was ultimate or temporary.
1.
Films by Franciszka and Stefan Themersons constitute the most interesting
part of the history of independent, experimental, pre-war cinema in Poland.
Between 1930 when they made film Apteka (Pharmacy), and 1945 when they
completed The Eye and the Ear, the Themersons created seven films (the last
two when already residing in Great Britain). Their significance for the
development of the avant-garde film in Poland is enormous. The Themersons
were the founders of many organisations and events held to promote the film
avant-garde in Poland (as, e.g., the "Film Authors Co-op.", film magazine
"f.a", screenings of experimental films from England, France, etc.). They
are regarded as the precursors of structuralist film, the pioneers of
expanded cinema, initiators of main tendencies in Polish experimental
filmmaking.
The Themersons' film strategy was characterised by the exceptional concern
with the substance of image. Their inventiveness was not confined to formal
experiments only, which brought new dimensions to the iconic sphere of the
cinema and were frequently inspired by photography, but they were also
interested in more fundamental issues such as the ontology of the film
image, and the nature of creative processes in filmmaking. These interests
are evident both in the films and in the writings of Stefan Themerson,
among which the essay The Urge to Create Visions is of particular
importance. In the essay the cinema is discussed in the context of the
history of man's visual experience, with its origins discovered in a
Bushman tale, when "a girl from long ago took a handful of embers and threw
them up into the air; and the sparks became stars". Themerson's persistent
"praise of slovenliness" can be regarded not only as the apologia of
chance, outlining the aleatory method in filmmaking, but also as a sketch
in the history of visual arts, for which the film has always been a hidden
archetypal model.
The Themersons' idea of the "urge to create visions", as the only valid
stimulus for filmmaking, accounted for the unique character of their oeuvre
in which a diversity of poetic devices used in particular films is
compatible with consistently uniform artistic expression. This trait of the
Themersons' films - a combination of pure "filminess" with intermedialism
(relationship to other arts) - was later to become one of the main
characteristics of the Polish avant-garde cinema.
2.
The first post-war decade in Poland, for political reasons, was a most
discouraging period for any autonomous artistic practice, including
independent cinema, which lost its significance at that time. The end of
the fifties only brought a revival of experimental film. The shift of
interests towards broadly understood animated film was essential for that
period. The films of Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica  - Byl sobie raz
(Once Upon a Time, 1957), Szkola (School, 1957), Dom (House, 1958) - were
recognised as initiating the experimental trend in Polish animation.
Collage structure, pixilation, combination of live action and animation
were the most dinstictive features of their style. A separate position in
this context was occupied by two films of Mieczyslaw Waskowski:
Somnambulicy (Somnambulists) and Uwaga, malarstwo (Attention, Painting),
both realised in 1957. The pictures, made on the glass plate with paint
applied to its surface, were a unique attempt at achieving tachiste/action
painting effects in film. Another significant contribution was made by
Andrzej Pawlowski. His Kineformy (Cineforms) consisted in the projecting of
a moving, spatial and abstract models onto a screen, through a special
image-distorting lens. Pawlowski was using two crank-like handles to move
the models and the lenses. The light, passing through the lenses, distorted
the forms, resulting in a very complex images. In 1957 Pawlowski made a
film version of his light show, also entitled Kineformy.
The next steps in film experiment in Poland were made by the artists of
"Film Form Workshop".
3
Workshop began in 1970 from the initiative of a group of students and
graduates of Lodz Film, TV and Theatre School. Together with the filmmakers
there are in the Workshop painters, musicians, cameramen, poets,
technicians... Workshop realises films, recordings and TV transmissions,
sound programmes, art exhibitions, different kind of events and
interventions... Workshop also follows the theoretical and critical
activity. Workshop does not represent any commercial activity and their
makers work totally gratuitously.
(The Manifesto of the Film Form Workshop, 1970)
"The Film Form Workshop" was founded by Jozef Robakowski, Ryszard Wasko,
Wojciech Bruszewski, Pawel Kwiek. In their effort to examine and develop
the means of expression of audio-visual arts, the members of the FFW
emphasised the need for systematic research on the medial properties of
film. The preoccupation with medialism situated the activity of the FFW in
the context of the broadly understood conceptual trend in art, manifested
in the cinema in the rise of so-called structural film. Drawing upon the
traditions of Polish, and Russian avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, the
participants of the Workshop developed their own way within the conceptual
movement, with their artistic and theoretical approach being particularly
indebted to the ideology and practice of constructivism.
The first period of the activities of the FFW was marked by the attempts to
eliminate from the cinema the elements borrowed from literature and the
theatre. Such endeavours are particularly noticeable in the early films of
Robakowski, which are characterised by a markedly test-like quality. In
later years Robakowski focused his attention on the relationships between
the mechanical character of the equipment used in film-making and the
psychophysiological nature of the cameraman. In Robakowski's interpretation
these relationships are based on mutual influences. The
mechanical-biological records led to another stage in Robakowski's
film-making, that of the personalist, "individual" cinema, characterised by
a considerable degree of subjectivity, an evident link with the personality
of the artist. The artistic transgressions, game playing and energetic
values of works, there were characteristics of the cinema of Robakowski
and, to some extend, works of the other members the FFW as well.
The participants of the FFW were particularly preoccupied with the
relationships between the reality and its audio-visual representation, and
between the reality, its reflection and the spectator. In his analysis of
reality Wojciech Bruszewski emphasised the existence of the dichotomy
between the material (external) and the spiritual (subject to individual
perception) dimensions of reality, both inherent in the concept of reality
itself. He put forward a thesis that our contact with reality is not of
direct nature, but is mediated by language instead.
4.
Zbigniew Rybczynski started his film career in the early 1970s, as a member
of the "Film Form Workshop". But he occupied there a very separate
position. Rybczynski's interests were focused on the formal arrangement of
an image, its orchestration and atonement to music. Yet, the visualisation
of musical structures was not an ultimate objective of his experiments,
providing only a framework of reference for a more comprehensive analysis.
Using a wide range of devices, such as an optical printer, colour filters,
zoom, a frame by frame camera, and combining them with live action footage,
Rybczynski arrived at a unique, idiosyncratic style of his own. One can
find in such a style the desire of creating a world independent on reality
and more perfect, the virtual world. In many films this virtual world of
art is produced through Rybczynski's inclination to create a closed
composition, to introduce order into the many-level, many-motif film
structure, varied in its substance, by reducing it to the form of circle.
Circle - the perfect figure, each point of whose circumference is of the
same distance from the centre, whose each point is both the beginning and
end, circle in which the motion once started goes eternally and acquires a
static quality. In these films we can find the same structure: the end is a
return to the starting point. This type of composition makes more distinct
the autonomy of the film world, it makes more intensive the inner closeness
of the work and makes us reluctant to refer anything from its area to the
outer world. Each element of the film refers us only to its other
components and the film as a whole fulfils the Kantian postulate of beauty
in itself.
Zbigniew Rybczynski's work is a very consistent phenomenon, that the ideas
used in one film in the state of their inception will flourish, will become
in later films dominant and basic features. Rybczynski returns to past
ideas not only because they have in the meantime assumed a new shape but
also in order to find out how they will behave in the new circumstances. At
the same time the techniques he applies frequently do not let him
contemplate the results of his work before it has been finished, as only
then the concepts can be confronted with their final effects. Indeed in the
case of this artist the word "experiment" sounds very true.
Those spectators who do not know Rybczynski's output and are looking now
his films may be convinced that they have to do with video realisations.
The style of this artist seems to have anticipated the possibilities
offered by the video technique. He used to do at the same time one and the
other, video in film, as he was striving to achieve his aims and in doing
so was rejecting all that stood in his way. Cinema, with all its
possibilities, was only a substitute for the tools he actually needed. A
substitute for video. So he used cinema in such a way as to achieve the
results that could be produced only by video. A dozen of years later he
would say: "Film is dying away. Only video is alive". No wonder therefore
that his films did anticipate it sometimes.
In the film Take five (1972) the characters were appearing simultaneously
owing to the overlapping shots. In the New Book (1975) the simultaneousness
of the numerous motives was achieved owing to the partition of the screen
into sections and the parallel showing of them. In the Tango (1980) the
characters appeared again in the same time-space and the same picture, but
being in fact separated, deprived of any contact between one another. The
distance between these films demonstrates not only the evolution of
Rybczynski's poetics going from the well-known techniques, and arrives
eventually at dazzling innovations. It also shows the process of leaving
the cinema and reaching the video. The image in the Tango seems no longer
to look like the image in film with the latter's texture, light values,
reference to the world of matter. Instead it is getting increasingly closer
to the world of video, formed by the blue box and the techniques of the
overlapping, multi-layer composition of the image. "There is nothing more
to be discovered in the cinema".


Bibliography:

Urszula Czartoryska, Visual Researches, Theory and Praxis, in: Stefan &
Franciszka Themerson. Visual Researches, catalogue, Museum of Art, Lodz 1981.
Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, Avant-garde Film and Video Art in Poland. An
Historical Outline, in: The Middle of Europe, ed. R. W. Kluszczynski,
Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw 1992.
Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, Absolute Against Casuality. Zbigniew Rybczynski's
Cinema 1972-1980, "Exit. New Art in Poland", 1993, NR 3 (15), s. 608-611.
Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, Skizze zur Geschichte des Avantgardefilms in
Polen, "Journal Film. Die Zeitschrift fur das andere Kino", 1994, NR 1 (27).
Stefan Themerson, The Urge to Create Visions, Gaberbocchus - De Harmonie,
Amsterdam 1983.
Nicholas Wadley, On Stefan Themerson, "Comparative Criticism", 12, 1990.
Janusz Zagrodzki, Outsiders of the Avant-garde, in: Stefan & Franciszka
Themerson. Visual Researches...