Visual Music - a lecture, by me

Visual Music - a talk at the Tate Modern, July 27 2018

Presented by 4:3 as part of the Uniqlo Tate Late series

There is a subset of experimental animation that is abstract and that  practitioners and scholars call “visual music”

I'm not an expert or scholar, I'm an enthusiast – and it's a relatively recent enthusiasm.

I'm going to talk first about how I got into it this whole area of experimental animation. 

Being a music critic and all, unsurprisingly it’s through music that I got drawn into this world

One of my great passions for 20 years now, is avant-garde electronic music, musique concrete, tape music – the post-WW2 vanguard 

I’m just obsessed with this area and pursued it into all kinds of obscure zones – I'm constantly staggered that SO much of it was made, both within the academy and by lone DIY weirdos – and it’s a global phenomenon, with amazing work done in Eastern Europe and Latin America and Japan....

And I’ve been aided in my quest for more esoteric and arcane electronics by this label Creel Pone, originally based out of Massachusetts – which put out a series of unofficial reissues of fabulously hard to find recordings...  reproducing the original vinyl in miniature form as CDs and copying the artwork and the inserts to a fantastically and fanatically precise level

I’ve been following this label and buying up its output, which now stretches into the two hundreds, for about 12 years

I have no idea by the way what on earth the words Creel Pone refer to....

It’s only recently though that I realised that Creel Pone had a precursor  [this turns out to be not quite correct...]- a label that called itself New England Electric Music Company, and again put out a series– six in a number – of CD-Rs, actually 3-inch CD-Rs – dedicated to the electronic and musique concrete soundtracks to animations and experimental short films.

Named after the original New England Electric Music Company from the early 20th century, which funded Thaddeus Cahill's ambitious plan to transmit music, produced on his Telharmonium – an early proto-synthesiser - to hotels, restaurants, theatres and private homes via the telephone network. 

So again these are unofficial, strictly speaking bootleg reissues – but not done for profit, a labour of love  - recirculating music stripped off these fabulously hard to find animations *.

So there is a real connection there all through 20th Century of these two avant-gardes – the sonic and the visual.

The makers of the films are seeking out music that is appropriately abstract and futuristic – or strange.

Sometimes from established composers, sometimes from lesser known people of their acquaintance who have institutional access to synthesisers or studios.

One example is Bernard Parmegiani, the great musique concrete composer - who appears in the New England Electric Music Compay series with the soundtrack for Piotr Kamler’s The Spider Elephant, which we will be seeing later, and a couple of other scores for animations.

Before he got into making music, Parmegiani had another artistic past-time: photomontage. He cut out a large number of image-fragments from magazines --human limbs, machine parts, etc--and then glued them into surreal assemblages.

His music-making would follow a similar process, starting with the building-up of a sound-bank, an inventoried miscellany of noises, before embarking on composition. 

Photo-collage is like a non-animated form of a particular style of stop-motion cartoon that involves cut-outs – the most famous exponent would be Terry Gilliam of Monty Python, but he was actually influenced by people like Jan Lenica in Poland. 

What musique concrete has – and what stop-motion animation has – is this extra quality that Parmegiani’s photo-collages lacked – life, or at least the queer, unheimlich life of animation.

Parmegiani also made an experimental film himself, L’Ecran Transparent, an excerpt of which is also lined up.

That’s an example of the composer moving into the visual field.

Actually it goes the other way too – you have animators who make their own music. Most famously Normal McLaren, the Scottish-born Canadian animator --who in his long association with the National Film Board of Canada – pioneered many techniques and also brought in and developed talent from all round the world - as we’ll see he often scored his own animations, with a self-devised technique of “hand-drawn sound” that enabled precise synchronization of sonic and visual events. He literally scored the film, scratching miniscule markings on the celluloid’s edge that controlled loudness, pitch and timbre. When the film was run through the projector, this miniature code-work generated electronic-sounding scurries of blips.

 Indeed some of McLarens pieces appeared on a record unofficially reissued by Creel Pone, Musique De L’O.N.F / Music of the NFB. This was originally put out in 1977 and comprised animation and short film soundtracks from the National Film Board of Canada between 1952-71.

So there’s a sort of reversibility there, two art forms that in some profound way are connected - there's a shared synesthetic ambition at work

Animation in its most radical, pure form is aspiring to the condition of music 

Music, in its most radical, adventurous form, is trying to create pictures in your mind.

Now Norman McLaren was this calm, diligent, methodical Scot who talked about frugality of means as a spur to invention, about how having barebones budget inspired him to come up with all these crafty techniques.

And that’s another parallel between experimental music and experimental animation -  this DIY, poorly funded aspect - there is a whole tradition within avant-garde music of inventing your own instruments, tinkering and bodging material together – Percy Grainger’s collages almost of household equipment like vacuum cleaners to invent sound-generating machines, Harry Partch and his gamelan-like percussive constructions made of industrial and scientific objects, glass vessels, pipes and tubes, etc. 

There are dozens more examples. 

The experimental sector of animation is very similar.

And in fact one thing about the abstract animation is that it is usually a lone operator, or maybe occasionally a duo - a driven individual, devising their own techniques, spending months or years painstakingly assembling these works.

There’s an affinity with not just electronic music, but with postpunk and a whole tradition of do it yourself eccentricity - stubborn reclusive individuals pursuing their visions.

It’s very different from mainstream animation, the full-length movies that you see at a big movie theater – which involve teams of people – huge staffs with separate divisions for the backgrounds, for special effects, for the characters – if you go see a movie like Incredibles 2, which is very entertaining for sure, it takes about five minutes for the credits to list all the people involved. 

With the Digital Era, you would think the technology would reduce the need for labour, but in fact more people are involved in these creations than ever, even more than with the Disney extravaganzas of yore that used cels and analogue methods.

But most of the experimental animation, it’s usually just one person who does the whole thing, or two or three people - director, animator, designer maybe. So it’s kinda punk. DIY.

I mentioned digital animation and there is a powerful Analogue Nostalgia syndrome that connects to the interest in early animation – and it overlaps the world of hauntology - which is actually another route that took me in this field, I should give a shout out to blogs like Found Objects, Toys and Techniques, I HATE THIS FILM, and others who have done a lot of great work digging up obscure short films and animations 

Animation is part of the hauntology spectrum – but usually as it relates to children’s TV – particularly Smallfilms, Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmins studio, responsible for Bagpuss, The Clangers etc

Hauntology, if you don’t know, is a sort of loose field of mostly music and para-musical activity (design, film) - labels like Ghost Box, artists like The Advisory Circle, Mordant Music, Moon Wiring Club - that makes a fetish of that zone where the elegiac and the eerie meet up - sort of eerie elegiac zone – so children’s television of the 1960s and 1970s, Public Information Films, horror movies, library music and soundtracks, early electronic music especially BBC Radiophonic Workshop – many other things that are bound up with a vanishing Britishness, often with some kind of institutional, governmental or pedagogic aura to them

And that connects to the experimental animation – because so much of it came out of state-run bodies – in Communist-era Eastern Europe, all this really weird hallucinatory and surprisingly subversive work in animation was funded by the governments of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and the Soviet Union. And often it’s a similar situation in the West – as with the National Film Board of Canada – which incidentally is where the name of probably the most well known hauntology artist comes from – Boards of Canada. 

(This slightly contradicts my point about the DIY  thing - both things are going on simultaneously, the public-funded and the lone-obsessive in the garage or basement)

This is one of the main driving obsessions of the hauntologists, this mournful sense that all kinds of peculiar and unsettling radio or TV was introduced in the consciousness of children and ordinary people thanks to the BBC – and its equivalents in other countries.

Part of the appeal of these experimental animations of the 20th Century relates to hauntology’s nostalgia for early, hardware based electronics and analogue formats - the sound of vinyl and cassette tape, Super-8 film and the low-resolution images of broadcast TV.

Although there are amazing and brilliantly atmospheric animations from the last 25 years that were made digitally, for me there is something about the analogue means of production - whether it’s the draw and painted kind with cels, or stop-motion using cut-outs or puppets, or painting directly onto celluloid as with the camera-less animation technique, or the many other ingenious techniques like animating with sand, or slicing wax.

It’s hard to put your finger on that different quality – it’s not really related to virtue, the idea that so much painstaking, intricate, work went into it, whereas digital is too effortless – it’s more to do with dare I say it a difference of phenomenology or the nature of perception - there is an illusionism that feels magical in both the conjuring trick and the uncanny, sorcerous sense - a creaky kind of artificial life is created – especially with puppets and models, it’s a different order of magic when actual light falls on actual objects and that’s captured and made to move.

There is another personal hauntological aspect to this – some of the East European animations were actually shown on children’s TV in the 70s, they had completely different feeling and vibe to the British or American standard fare - they generally feature odd disjointed music, like a Slavic version of jazz, or electronica – the graphic design was foreign. This was an acquired taste, like the child palate being introduced to black olives or anchovies.

Some of the animations remind me of teenage first encounters with modern art – the thrill of surrealism, that very teen thing of having your mind blown by Dali, which you later learn to be embarrassed by, see as a naïve and immature failure of taste. The paintings of Miro. Discovering the Sixties, psychedelic art and Op Art. The delirious excitement of Terry Gilliam and Monty Pythons’s anarchic absurdist humour

But in tonight’s selection I’m focusing not so much on the figurative forms of animation, but on the purely abstract - patterns of colour, rhythms of light that relates to another subset of avant-garde 20th Century ambition which is a long-running dream cropping up in different contexts and with different composers – the dream of a unified artform in which sound and vision are completely merged – a machine that could produce sound and image simultaneously.

In the UK, from the Sixties onwards, the independent electronic experimentalist F.C. Judd worked on his the Chromasonics system, which would create electronic images whose movements were driven by sound.  Daphne Oram, simultaneously, was working on her Oramics system.

In America, from 1974 onwards Laurie Spiegel also worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey, developing a video graphics system called VAMPIRE, an acronym for “Video and Music Program for Interactive Real Time Exploration and Experimentation”, that would govern parameters like color, saturation, size, texture, and motion, as well as sound. She told me the goal was to create “ a visual analogue to music that involved a similar kind of emotionally meaningful or perceptually meaningful language, with cadences and tension and resolution.... I wasn’t interested in using computers to do realistic animation, I was interested in exploring the possibility of an abstract, nonrepresentational but time-based visual art form.” Because she experienced a degree of synaesthesia, she was “looking for a system that could communicate and share those sensations, using the exact same data to generate the sound and the visuals.”

As we’ll see these aspirations date back much earlier in the century.

There is a whole separate but adjacent history of attempts to build colour organs - like Thomas Wilfred with the Clavilux – which means “light played by key” and allowed the user to perform “lumia” compositions. He saw ‘lumia’ as the eigth art form – however although this art form was like music, it didn’t come with musical accompaniment, in fact Wilfred was clear and strict about the fact that it should be a silent art form.

I find this whole area fascinating - there’s a romance to it, these heroic tales of outsiders struggling to do things their own way, chasing a vision – one thing that has puzzled me is why it is so obscure, as a fields go. There are scholars and institutions dedicated to this area, with conferences and books - there’s an organisation in America called the Center For Visual Music that archives materials and produces DVDs of the life’s work of key pioneers in the field. 

But if you were to ask an averagely hip young person – or indeed an averagely hip older person, such as myself only a year ago – if they’d heard of Jan Lenica or Jiří Trnka or Julian Antoniszczak , Ferenc Cakó, Caroline Leaf, Adam Beckett - you would draw a complete blank, I’m certain. And this is with people whose knowledge of music would stretch into fairly esoteric corners of Krautrock, psychedelia, DIY postpunk, library music.

And these are figures whose work in animation is every bit as strange or raw or chaotic or hallucinatory or disturbing as Beefheart, Faust, Sun Ra, The Fall...

Take a figure like Harry Smith – if he’s known, it’s for his compilation of American folk and blues and roots music, and the influence that he had on Bob Dylan – and not for the handmade animations that were the obsessive focus of most of his artistic life.

I do often wonder why it is relatively peripheral zone.

Probably not getting shown very often is one factor - the lack of exposure.

Perhaps to do with its non-figurative / non-narrative nature. 

Also, it’s not usable in the same way that even quite challenging music can be listened to as background sound, inattentively. 

Like all moving image artforms - films, video art – you have to submit to it, accept that you are being detained - and even though it’s rarely detained for very long with these animations, they range from 5 mins to 10 mins typically, with the occasionally 20 minute piece animation – it’s still a demand on your attention.

Perhaps there is also a lack of an obvious connection to youth culture, and indeed, conversely, a lingering association of animation with children’s entertainment – that persists even though some of the animations are grotesque and ominous and creepy in ways that parallel avant-rock artists like Pere Ubu or The Birthday Party.

When you read old interviews with some of these animators, a leitmotif is the question of access to audiences – some of them, poignantly, imagine the cassette being their savior – they imagine a market developing for short animations and experimental films, that would be bought in the same way that singles or EPs were bought.

But it has remained a minority interest.

THE FILMS AND THEIR CREATORS

Walter Ruttmann - Lichtspeil Opus 3 (1924)

Walter Ruttman was not the first person to conceive of abstract animation, that was Leopold Survage, just before World War 1, but his colored plates were never turned into film sadly. So Ruttmann became the first to actually complete a film.  From his series of  “Lichtspiel’ works  – that translates as game of light or play of light -  the first “Lichtspiel Opus I”  was shown in Frankfurt in 1921 and immediately hailed as the birth of a new art form,  christened as “Visual Music” by one critic and “Absolute Film” by another. Informed by his studies of painting and architecture and work as a graphic designer, it was made by daubing oil paint onto a glass plate, then wiping it clean or augmenting the pattern for the next frame he shot. Ruttman was dissatisfied with his debut effort, so here we see Opus III or  Opus IV.  Alongside the abstract short films, Ruttmann created more figurative animations for adverts, the non-animated masterwork Berlin-Symphony of a Metropolis and – bizarrely – a sound-only film,  Wochenende.  He also contributed a dream sequence to Fritz Lang’s movie Siegfried.  Regrettably after Hitler’s rise to power, Ruttmanns worked with Leni Riefenstahl and making propaganda reels, then died in 1941 from injuries incurred as a war photographer on the Russian front.

Hans Richter – Rhythmus 21 (1921) / Viking Eggeling "Diagonal-Symphonie" (1924)

The next two films “Rhythmus 21” and “Diagonal-Symphonie” are by two close colleagues associated with Dada – Hans Richter and Viking Eggelin. Both were heavily inspired by music –using terms like counterpoint and orchestration, and  referring to elements of any given work as themes or instruments. Born in Sweden, Eggeling travelled around Europe and settled in Paris a few years before WW1  where he dedicated himself  to finding a universal language of abstract symbols, which he would draw onto large scrolls of paper – Eggeling’s Diagonal Symphonie, took three or four years to make and was a step towards “an all embracing system based on the mutual attraction and repulsion of paired forms” – the name Eggeling gave for that system was Thorough Bass of Painting  - thorough bass (also known as basso continuo, or figured bass) is yet  another term from music, referring to an approach that flourished in the 17^th and 18^th centuries involving keyboard  improvisations over a stable bassline – Bach would be the supreme exponent there, at least until The Doors. Eggeling believed that film would reach its highest potential as a completely non-representational form with no reference to the literary or theatrical (so there goes plot, character, motivation) or indeed the natural world.  Richter’s Rhythmus 21 is as we shall see in a second, black-and-white, but with the tragically lost later film Rhythmus 25, he embarked upon the “orchestration of colour” and devised a system of notation on graph paper, which according to the critic Brian O’Doherty promised “a method of composing films according to scores, where both musical and visual consideration could come into play”.

 

Oskar Fischinger - An Optical Poem -1938

Fischinger started out as a draughtsman and engineer and then, reading the critic Bernard Diebold’s calls for a purely abstract form of cinema, started experimenting with moving graphs, a self-invented technique of animation involving sliced wax, clay-figure animation, and animation based around charcoal drawings. By the mid-thirties he hooked up with Bela Gaspar who had invented a form of color film and created the acclaimed film Composition in Blue. Then he moved to Hollywood to work for Paramount Pictures, which didn’t work out well, and he ended up in New York trying to get backing for a full length and completely abstract interpretation of Dvorak’s New World Symphony.  That sounds a bit like what Walt Disney did with Fantasia and in fact there is a connection - Fischinger approached the conductor Leopold Stokowski with the idea of animating one of his Bach orchestrations – Stokowski promptly sold the idea to Disney, and Fischinger was signed to work on what would become Fantasia.  However once again his approach and temperament did not fit in with the American way – and all that survived into the finished movie was his work on the Back Toccata and Fuge in D Minor. But apparently Disney used to screen Fischinger’s earlier work like his Studies series of films to the animation teams on a weekly basis to inspire them – one of them, Study No. 8 used the same music as the most famous and popular sequence in Fantasia, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Another brief stint in the Hollywood studio system – this time at MGM – led to the film we are about to see, “An Optical Poem”, which was made using an unusual method – paper cut-outs suspended on sticks and wires, moved around in front of backgrounds, to create a sense of spatial volume and depth  -  it is soundtracked by Liszt’s  Second Hungarian Rhapsody.

Mary Ellen Bute – Tarantella (1940)

Originally a painter, Texas-born Mary Ellen Bute Bute decided that the static forms of visual art were “not flexible enough and too confined” within their frame. Forming a company named Expanded Cinema, she adopted the term “abstronics” to describe her goal: “images in rhythm”, light manipulated to create “visual compositions in time continuity much as a musician manipulates sound to produce music.” This quest led her to experiment with color organs. She then attempted to develop with Leon Theremin an optical version of his electronic instrument, a device that would completely synchronize light and sound as a single unified artistic mode.   Bute also collaborated with Bell Telephone Laboratories on an oscilloscope-based device that could electronically paint with light and choreograph the movements of graphic patterns. The piece were going to see if from earlier in her career in “visual music” –“Tarantella” titled after a folk-dance from southernmost Italy that according to legend originally served as a magic remedy for the tarantula spider’s  venomous bite.

James Whitney - Variations on a Circle (1941-42)

 

Alongside Bute, the brothers James Whitney and John Whitney are American pioneers of visual music.  “Twenty-Four Variations on an Original Theme” was the title of their first collaboration and it drew inspiration from Schoenberg -  as a response to the way Fischinger – who they admired – relied on traditional orchestral music, which seemed stuffy and retrograde for such a 20^th Century modernist artform as atract animation. William Moritz, the eminent historian of visual music, describes their process as follows:

“James designed geometric shapes on small index cards and created positive and negative stencils that could be painted or air-brushed onto the cards. They intended these modular elements to function like tones in Schoenberg's musical theories, and submitted them to musical permutations (such as inversions, counterpoints, chord clustering and retrogressions).”

Franciszka and Stefan Themerson -  The Eye and The Ear  (1944/45)

The first, but not last of the Poles in this selection – and cutely, a husband and wife partnership (again, not unknown in this field) – were a multi-talented pair, working together or separately in the fields of poetry, painting, fiction and music, as well as in experimental film, and also writing criticism and theory.  The Eye and The Ear was made in London, where they settled after an eventful and nomadic World War Two, and is their last film.  It is based on a score, four songs composed by Karol Szymanowski based on a poem by Julian Tuwim.  As Marcin Gizycki explains,  the film was made in simple but highly inventive ways - organ-like forms were created by glass sticks - triangular smoke-like forms symbolizing notes were achieved by passing the light beams emitted by small bulbs through a special lens-  a glass container filled with water become a receptacle for small clay balls’ – and was approached almost as a scientific study  - “They treated the film medium as a tool for the analysis of musical structure.

Norman McLaren  - Blinkity Blank / National Film Board of Canada (1955)

I mentioned Normal McLaren earlier – he is probably the best known and most widely seen of these animators, for great humour and playfulness, as well as technical ingenuity of films like “Neighbours”. In swift succession, we see “Blinkity Blank” from 1995 - brilliant scribbles directly engraved onto the film surface, then colored by hand, create an effect like mischievous fireworks -  a collaboration with the NFB’s Evelyn Lamart, and then a film that’s actually about his techniques – specifically the way he hand drew the soundtrack to the films directly onto the celluloid.

Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica - Dom (1958) 

Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk  are two giants of Polish animation  - Poland probably was the leading country in the world for animation for much of the post-War period in fact, the number of talented directors and designers and amazing films is staggering. This particular film strays from the visual music concept, but I wanted to get some East Europe flavour in there – like Lenica’s famous “Labirynt” animation, there’s a mixture of stop-motion photographs and drawn and painted illustration  - and there’s a vibe that you get a lot of the Communist Bloc work of that time that coming from the same place – absurdist and surreal with a tinge of the macabre and grotesque – as Ionesco, Kafka, Max Ernst, and Bruno Schulz.  Everything works according to dream logic. The musical element here is the collaboration with the avant-garde Wlodzimierz Kotonski  - who like his compatriot Eugeniusz Rudnik – contributed frequently to the animations pouring out of Warsaw animation houses like Studio Miniatur Filmowych.

Piotr Kamler - L'Araignéléphant / The spiderelephant / Slonoiga (1968)

(Shadok and Co)

Another Polish giant, although he made most of his classic animations in France – again the music connection is the working relationships Kamler forged with with musique concrete composers like Luc Ferrari,  Francois Bayle, and Bernard Parmegiani, who does the soundtrack to “The Spiderelephant” – a gorgeous  tone-and-texture poem of glowing and mottled pink, violet, and grey. Between 1977 and 1982, Kamler devoted five years of his life to creating a  full-length animated science fiction movie called Chronopolis – then he returned to Poland and switched artistic lanes to  sculpture.

 

Bernard Parmegiani – L’Ecran Transparent (Shadoks and Co)

longer version here - https://vimeo.com/25135972

Parmegiani’s solitary foray into animation

Pramod Pati  - ABID (1970) India Film Division

Pramod Pati head the animations division of the state-run Films Division in Mumbai, India.  During his brilliant but tragically brief career, Pati made a host of innovative educational films, documentaries, and animations characterized by rapid editing and inventively rhythmic use of sound. Titled after its subject and sole character, the artist Abid Suri, “ABID” uses pixilation – a technique of stop-motion animation in which human beings are essentially used as puppets: posed for frame-by-frame shots that are then reinjected with a zany simulation of life. The original meaning of “pixilated” is eccentric, mentally disordered, or whimsical.  the technique allowed the film-maker to caricature normal gestures and movements, while also evade the natural laws of physics like momentum, inertia, centrifugal force and gravity. The tempo of action could be modulated drastically and objects or persons made to appear and disappear at will.  The idea for ABID came to Pati after reading a magazine story about Surti’s single-room apartment-cum-studio, which he had turned into a unified artwork – painting not just the walls and ceiling, but the furniture, the overhead fan, and everything right down to the smallest utensil. Pati approached Surti and they recreated Surti’s apartment in the Films Division studio. It took 20 days of 19-20 hours work to shoot the film. It has a very suitably frantic and intricate soundtrack of perrcussive psychedelia of Vijay Raghav Bao.  Sadly, Pati died in 1975 at the age of 43.

 Ishu Patel - Perspectrum (1975) / National Film Board of Canada

Not much information out there about "Perspectrum"  - this is what it says at the NFMBoC:

"In this animated short, simple geometric forms as thin and flat as playing cards constantly form and re-form to the sound of the koto, a 13-stringed Japanese instrument".

But here is a Wiki on Patel, who is still alive.

Here's some more of his films for the NFBoC. 

Jeff Keen – Irresistible Attack (1995) 

Brighton-based Jeff Keen was an important figure on the  1960s British underground scene of happenings and “expanded cinema”. This film “Irresistible Attack” comes from 1995 but is essentially of a piece with his earlier work  - typically consisting of short bursts of rapid-fire imagery, scrawled drawings, roughly clipped photographs from magazine advertisements and newspaper stories, and sometimes 3D objects like plastic toys that melt before our eyes.  Although not typical ‘visual music’ in the sense we’ve seen earlier, there’s two connections to music here. There’s a violence that convulses Keen’s work, in both the editing and imagery itself - endless explosions and savage acts, mutilated scraps from the mass media, the burned black materials – and that reminds me of Bomb Culture by Jeff Nuttall – a British counterculture contemporary of Keen’s, although involved in experimental poetry more than the visual arts – in which Nuttall writes evocatively of for the orgiastic violence coursing through the music of the Sixties – the overloaded, distorted guitars, the heavy amplification, The Who and Hendrix destroying their instruments – which Nuttall saw as a kind of Dionysian reaction to the threat of living under perpetual threat of nuclear obliteration, as well as to contemporary carnography of Vietnam. And then there’s soundtrack, which Keen made himself, using processed shortwave radio sounds and other electronic effects. The scores to the films were released a few years ago by Trunk Recordings under the title Noise Art.  So let’s go out with bang not a whimper, with “Irresistible Attack”.

 * A la New England Electric Music Company,  I have made my own compilations of electronic and wacky soundtracks and sound FX from animations, that are otherwise completely unreleased and unsourceable. 

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Yes, a lecture, given at the Tate Modern, by yours truly,  who'd have thought it... 

I had naively imagined, what with it being a venerable and powerful state-run institution, that they might source the original films in pristine quality. But no, I had to play them off of YouTube.  And for reasons I can't  remember - legal? institutional protocols?  - I was instructed to only play only 10 percent of each animation. Given that one animation was 81 seconds long, this was a ridiculous stricture. A total travesty of the visionary artistry of the animators.   

The lecture was sponsored by Uniqlo, to add an extra level of comedy to the proceedings - and I didn't even get any free T-shirts or those cool capri shorts they used to do!

The idea originated with the Boiler Room and its then recently created website for underground and weird film / video, 4:3 - now defunct or at least dormant (much of the stuff is still up there). For 4:3 I had done an annotated playlist of experimental animation. They had some kind of team up with Uniqlo and the Tate.  The second half of the lecture, about the specific animators and their work, is based on the text for that 4:3  playlist.

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Via "abstract cinema" connoisseur John Coulthart of { feuilleton }, an old doc, "Doodlin", about one of the visual music pioneers I couldn't squeeze into the lecture: Len Lye. 

The maker of the Lye doc - Keith Griffiths - made a whole film about visual music for Channel 4. 

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Another exp animator in the lecture I wanted to include but couldn't: Julian Antonisz 

'His works are characterised by the "non-camera films" technique, with which he explored transience and fallibility by doing away with the camera in favour of applying animations directly onto film... Fascinated by kinetic toys, optical machines and the variety of effects attained by experimenting with film tape, Antonisz strove to uncover the roots of cinema and created his own devices for producing films using a non-camera technique. Many of his findings were published in his 1977 Artistic Non-Camera Manifesto. In formulating his vision for producing works directly on film tape, he surmised that "Only films made with the Non Camera technique can be called authentic works of visual, painting, graphic and musical art"'

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Another text on the same subject, the introduction to my immense YouTube playlist of "dreams built by hand", which is at 751 films and counting... 

It was music that actually led me into the world of 20th Century experimental animation. I noticed that some of my favorite avant-garde electronic composers had provided the scores to various films: Bernard Parmegiani and Francois Bayle both made music for Piotr Kamler, a Polish animator transplanted to France, while his erstwhile compatriots Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk  drew on the eerie abstractions of composers like WlodzimierzKotonski  and Eugeniusz Rudnik.The makers of the films sought out music as alien and futuristic – or surreal and creepy – as the moving images they created.  Sometimes that was from established composers;  other times from lesser known people  of their acquaintance who had institutional access to synthesisers or studios at universities. In some cases, animators like Norman McLaren and Jeff Keen, created their own peculiar scores, using various methods. In McLaren’s case, this involved a self-devised technique of “hand-drawn sound” whereby he literally scored the film, scratching miniscule markings on the celluloid’s edge that controlled loudness, pitch and timbre. When the film was run through the projector, this miniature code generated electronic-sounding scurries of blips.  

The connection with avant-garde sound makes sense because much of this animation is so abstract it falls into a category that scholars call “visual music”.  So there’s a reversibility at work: two art forms united through their shared synesthetic ambition. Animation in its most radical, pure form is aspiring to the condition of music; music, in its most radical, adventurous form, is trying to create moving pictures in your mind

Another parallel between experimental music and experimental animation is that much of the work involves a do-it-yourself, outsider ethos. Just as there is a whole tradition within avant-garde music of inventing instruments (Percy Grainger’s assemblages of ready-made household equipment like vacuum cleaners to invent sound-generating machines, Harry Partch and his gamelan-like percussive constructions), likewise in experimental animation, it is usually a lone operator, maybe occasionally a duo, creating these projects over a long period of time. You often have an obsessive, eccentric individual, like Harry Smith, devising their own techniques and spending months or years painstakingly assembling these works.

Hence the playlist title “Dreams Built By Hand”. It’s almost all animation from the pre-digital era. The means of production is manual, laboriously fiddly, time-consuming, and it involves working with the stubbornly material realm of the analogue. Techniques range from widespread ones like drawing cels and stop-motion using puppets, models, paper cut-outs, etcto more bizarre, self-invented modes (Julian Antonisz’s “non-camera films” that involve painting directly onto the surface of the celluloid film, Ferenc Cakó’s patterns drawn in sand, etc).  

These literally hand-made movies have a certain quality that is phenomenologically different from digital animation. The illusionism at work feels like magic, in both senses: conjuring tricks, and the uncanny and sorcerous. A creaky kind of artificial life is created before your disbelieving eyes.

Józef Robakowski - Prostokąt dynamiczny / Dynamic Rectangle - 1971)

                                                    Muzyka: Eugeniusz Rudnik

                                                    Józef Robakowski

"An integral part of Robakowski's work are his statements and self-commentaries, as well as numerous programming texts and manifestoes, e.g. Calling Once Again for 'Pure Film' (1971), Video Art - a Chance to Approach Reality (1976), or Manipulating! (1988).

"Robakowski made his first experimental film in 1962, 6,000,000, a compilation of fragments of Holocaust-era documentaries. Photographic activity dominated the early period of his practice, also as part of the collective Zero-61..... According to Robakowski, the group drew inspiration from the "tradition of metaphorical montage known from interwar painting, photography, and avant-garde cinema." During that time, besides various photographic experiments (e.g. Photo-Painting, 1958-1967; double-exposure photographs employing mirror-image composition), Robakowski made photo-objects, such as Colander (1960), the photograph of a colander nailed to a plank. 

"One of Zero-61's most important presentations was an independent exhibition at a deserted smithy in 1969, where instead of photographs the viewer encountered 'objects for photographing'. 

"Between 1965-1967, Robakowski was also active on the collective Grupa Krąg, which brought together visual artists, filmmakers, poets, sculptors, and photographers. The artist remembered: These exhibitions were like quasi-theatrical happenings, with all kinds of actions, 'tricks', transforming exhibition presentations into spectacles (...) I was closest to a simulated character that didn't really exist, and its name was Józef Korbiela. Józef Robakowski 

"The smithy exhibition took place at a time when Robakowski was already studying in Łódź. There, in 1970, the Workshop of Film Form (Warsztat Formy Filmowej) was founded, initially within the framework of the Student Science Club of the National Film School in Łódź, active through around 1977. The Workshop's practice, focuses on an analysis of the new media language (photography, film, video), drew its inspirations from the constructivist tradition and conceptualism, striving to get film rid of 'alien elements' (anecdote, literary forms, narration) and make its language simpler and information denser. The artist's analytical position at the time was also manifested in his interest in the peculiarities of human perception towards the still cameras and film cameras, in questions about these tools as extensions of the human organism's mental and physiological functions. 

"During this time, from 1974, Robakowski also embraced a new medium - video. The move away from the traditional forms of filmic narration often went hand in hand with a rejection of the representational function. The non-camera film Test II (1971) is among the most radical statements against the narrativity and illusiveness of the traditional filmic message, made by puncturing a dark film tape, as a result of which the viewer was 'attacked' by a strong beam of projector light, producing the effect of afterimage. During a festival in Knokke-Heist in Belgium in 1971, Robakowski enhanced the effect by using a mirror to reflect the projector light towards the audience (Test I). 

"Light also played an important role in many of the artist's later works, such as 1, 2, 3, 4... (1992), or Attention: Light! (2004), made in collaboration with Wiesław Michalak, with a score by composer Paul Sharits, and music by Fryderyk Chopin. In the 1971 manifesto Calling Once Again for 'Pure Film', the artist wrote, Currently the subject of my work is eliminating from film elements characteristic for literature. I am aware that such a conception constrains my freedom of action, raises artificial barriers, and leads me to the peripheries of the genre. I believe however, or rather, am convinced, that through various kinds of experiments, trials, propositions, I will succeed in freeing film from the ballast of habits adopted from literature, uncritically accepted almost universally by both filmmakers and viewers. The question the Workshop of Film Form artists were asking was therefore one about whether there exists a language appropriate for the film medium. 

"The first piece made as part of WFF was Robakowski's Market Square (1970), an animated film compiled with still images of the Łódź market square, Czerwony Rynek, made every five seconds on a single day between 7 am and 4 p.m. In the film, that time was compressed to five minutes. 

"An important aspect of Robakowski's WFF work were experiments with image and sound - an extra soundtrack, asynchronicity of sound and image, or their mutual relation. The artist experimented with them in Próba II (1971), juxtaposing intense red colour with classic organ music. 

"In Dynamic Rectangle (1971), Robakowski manually shaped a rectangle to music by Eugeniusz Rudnik. The issue of the relation between sound and image returned frequently in the artist's oeuvre, including the films Videosongs (1992) and Videokisses (1992). Józef Robakowski’s Own Cinema at CSW - Image Gallery 1 / 13 

"Since 1978 Robakowski has run Exchange Gallery (Galeria Wymiany), a private gallery of recent art featuring leaflets, films, videos, objects, photographs, books, posters, documentations, and all kinds of publications, both the artist's own and donated by other artists. The guiding idea of Exchange Gallery is to 'exchange artistic ideas, cause ferment, and stimulate creative initiatives'. 

"In 1987, Robakowski photographed himself - or, rather, his chest - with objects from the collection, creating the Fetishes series. Exchange Gallery was also responsible for initiating a number of important artistic initiatives - exhibitions, symposiums, publications, particularly in the 1980s.....

"Since the 1970s, an important role has been played in Robakowski's art by his concept of art as a field of energy transmissions. Hence he has focused in many of his works, which are often biological-mechanical recordings, on issues such as vitality or energy resulting from the contact with a tool. The film are often an effect of an encounter between the mechanical camera and the human body, a confrontation between man and medium

""I want to tell you all that art is energy", Robakowski says, jumping out of water in his Energy Manifesto (2003), as if paraphrasing and referring to a conception by Andrzej Pawłowski, who claimed that "art is an energy field". 

"Robakowski wrote in 1977, For many years I have been studying the relationship between my psychophysical organism and the devices I make mechanical recordings with (film camera, still camera, video camera, tape recorder). These studies have resulted in a sense that technological inventions are of fundamental significance, because they make it possible to convey my psychophysical states, my temperament and consciousness, to tape. 

"The best example of this may be the film Walking, made during the Workshop of Film Form period (1973), recording the artist's climb up the stairs of a parachute tower. In the single-sequence film, growing increasingly tired, he counts off steps from one to two hundred. 

"In 1975, Robakowski started a series of works called Energetic Angles, which, as he says, reflect my fascination with the problem of the existence of 'Angles' as a kind of intuitive geometry. (...) I've been wondering to what extent geometry, whose goals are intended to be purely practical, can function in art. For the problem to gain significance, I've decided to establish the Angles as an energetic culture sign in the form of a personal fetish. 

"Energy fields have also been realised in Robakowski's art in other ways. In the 1980s, he made films based on recordings of rock concerts, especially his favourite band, the punk group Moskwa. In 1989, in the film My Videomasochisms, he mocked self-mutilating tactics of performance artists: during a for-camera performance, he manipulated various tools next to his face, inflicting a kind of torture on himself. 

"In 1996, in a TV studio, he carried out a happening, broadcast live, during which he was connected to electricity, asking viewers to increase the voltage (I Am Electric). Most recently, in 2008, the artist introduced, as Energy Manifesto, the vastness of the Niagara Falls in the space of Galeria Atlas Sztuki in Łódź. The artist said in an interview given prior to the exhibition's opening, "This is to be a laboratory-like, artificial situation, but favourable for the person willing to spend time in it. The viewer's contemplative bliss, despite the powerful audiovisual energy, is to be guaranteed by a stylistic figure I call monotony". 

"In the early 1980s, Robakowski introduced yet another term explaining his practice - 'personal cinema', that is, one based on the observation of one's immediate surroundings as well as 'self-observation'. He wrote in 1981, "So let's keep filming everything, and it will turn out we're always filming ourselves. Such a filmed and filming individual lives fully only on screen and while his physique is similar to yours, his character and personality are different. It is extremely interesting that you can polemicise with yourself via the screen. So keep filming and keep looking closely and critically with a sense that you on screen are more wonderful than in nature, because you are better able to remember the past. Finally, take into account the fact that your memory often becomes the viewer's memory." 

"At the time when Robakowski wrote these words, he had already begun shooting footage for From My Window (1978-1999), a collection of camera observations of the courtyard of the artist's tenement in a part of Łódź known as Manhattan, recording the residents and the changes occurring in the space over the years. The film ends with images of the construction of a hotel that is to ultimately obscure the view from Robakowski's window. The moving video About Fingers (1982) is, in turn, a kind of biography, told for each finger separately (with the characteristic independent narrator from Robakowski's works delivering a background monologue), and at the same time, a 'self-observation document', revealing the private and subjective. Patricia Grzonka notes that, given the piece's historical context and the artist's personal situation at the time - he had just been fired from his teaching position - About Fingers "can also be interpreted as a metaphor of the political situation of the era, a manifesto of the artist's withdrawal at a time of his exclusion from public life". 

"Of similarly private nature was My Theatre (1985), enacted for the camera by the artist's hands and fingers, again accompanied by an off-screen monologue..... 

 https://culture.pl/en/artist/jozef-robakowski

Eugeniusz Rudnik

Ryszard Czekała - Sekcja Zwlok (1973)

"Czekała was one of the reformers of Polish animation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. What sets him apart from our other animation artists? First of all, his focus on the plot of a film, his way of treating material in a way that brings animated film closer to feature film or documentary. Therefore it is the themes, which seemed reserved for feature films and documentaries until Czekała's animation appeared. He has said,

"I take the themes for my films from everything around me [...] I model the matter of my films from everyday life accessible to everyone [...] eliminating all the formal ornamentation and spectacular material - I select the form to match what I want to say. What I say are simple things. (Polska 5/1971)

"Today it seems obvious that an animated film can tell a story, that it can be subtle, expressive, close to people's hearts, yet still remain an animated film. This has been proved by Czekała's successors, mentioning especially Piotr Dumała. Though critics point out that Czekała's films might just as well have been told with actors, the formula of animated films give them additional meanings, greater expression, strengthening an impression that maybe the same stories told traditionally could not have created.

"What were those stories? Ptak (The Bird, 1968) - the main character dreams of freedom, its substitute being freedom for a bird that he is saving up his pennies to buy. Syn (The Son, 1970) - the loneliness of parents abandoned in the countryside by their now "urban" son. Finally, Apel (TheRoll-Call, 1970) - a shocking picture of life in a concentration camp, a story of fear, humanity and the inhumane camp system. These stories could have been told differently. However, what Czekała did when he made these three films can be compared to the contemporary achievements of Art Spiegelman, author of the Maus comic book, and Zbigniew Libera, who proposes that we build ourselves a concentration camp from Lego yoy bricks (LEGO Concentration Camp), where the material adds meanings but also forces people to take an aloof look at the consumers of things that, one would think, are impossible to consume.

"Andrzej Kossakowski wrote that with Apel (The Roll-Call), Czekała contributed to overcoming certain mental barriers: "It's true that animated films have long come out of the nursery ... but not all issues seemed possible to transfer to the world of animation." The director also showed that animated films can be used "to speak about serious matters seriously, without that seemingly necessary wit, that 'tongue in cheek'," something that had seemed reserved for documentaries or acted films. (Film 50/7)

"Ryszard Czekała's proposal was interpreted by many critics as a reaction to the ossification of philosophical films, which dominated the 1960s. Czekała confirmed this:

"I simply don't really like animated films which are allegories, or films which are philosophical tales, where people and objects have symbolic meanings. I want to show specific events and situations. My only concern is that they be evocative. ("Film" 25/1970)
As Kazimierz Żórawski writes:

"The works of Ryszard Czekała are a natural and conscious reaction to the philosophical or rather pseudo-philosophical aspirations of many makers of animated films, to those films - parables of the world, films - syntheses of existence, films - grand symbols. 'Ptak', then 'Syn', and finally [...] 'Apel', are works telling simple and uncomplicated stories, where the simplicity is intentional, it is an artistic method [...] The aim of a realistic story line supported by a visual setting reminiscent of documentaries, is to bring the author's thoughts closer to the viewer." (Kino 10/71)

"It is worth noting this comparison, because it comes up in texts by critics analysing Czekała's early animated films. Alicja Iskierko compares them to documentaries in her book Znajomi z kina. Szkice o polskim filmie krókometrażowym / Cinematic Acquaintances. Sketches on Polish Short Films (Warszawa 1982). So does Kazimierz Żórawski, mentioned earlier, many times in fact, writing even more explicitly:

"His films give [...] the impression of being "documentaries" transposed to the language of animated film, not only in the images which Czekała composes three-dimensionally, but equally, thanks to the themes and references to reality, in moving from the realm of"'thinking" to the realm of "feeling". (Film 12/71)

"In fact, Czekała comes much closer to feature films. The drama of his works, the way he leads the camera, the rhythm, sound, the precise and extremely meaningful editing similar to that of features, the use of detail, all this gives them an affinity to feature films.....

"Ryszard Czekała said:

"I try to create a certain evocative vision of the world in my films which would make the viewers forget they are at the cinema. The audience should feel participants in the events, they should identify themselves with the characters. [...] Even a world drawn on paper can look enough like genuine reality for the viewer to believe in its existence. Even a drawn person can betray their personality, their feelings. (Film 9/1971)

"Asked point blank if that meant he wanted to make feature films, he replied:

A producer who can narrate an event with the help of drawings should also be able to narrate it with the help of staged shots. ... We should think in film terms, not in terms of graphic art, painting, or theatre. To a filmmaker all these disciplines are only an element of directing. (Film 25/70)

"As Kazimierz Żórawski writes (Kino 10/71), Czekała emphasised that he thought in film images from the start, including the sound, or maybe even initially he heard his films more than he saw them. That's an important confession. It is exactly this equal value of story line, sound and image that constitutes the value of Czekała's films. Żórawski writes:

"It is that naturalistic and surreal sound to which the black-and-white images in Ptak are synchronously set, which creates images of the loneliness of a hunched man, and in Syn the loud swallowing of soup, the sound of a piece of bread falling to the ground, the quiet splash of a tear flowing down the father's cheek and hitting the smooth surface of the liquid filling his plate, finally the rustle of the newspaper as the son reads it, create the mood and the audience's emotional reception.

"After he made his feature debut Zofia / Sophia (1976) and abandoned animation for 10 years, Wanda Wertenstein wrote that a careful observer could have predicted that Czekała would find animated film too confining. In his three early pieces, "Their graphical realism was not far from photographic realism, while the notional, philosophical aspects were shaped by classic means of expression of narrative cinema - the choice of standpoints, light gradations, editing, the relation of image and sound. The drawn figures were surrogate actors, the animated cut-outs - a substitute for real gestures." (Kino 10/76)....

- Culture.Pl

Jerzy Zitzman - Maszyna Trurla (1975)

Fantasticated score by Antoni Mleczko

The title translates as "Trurl's Machine" and is based on a story by Stanislaw Lem from his collection The Cyberiad: 

"Trurl and Klapaucius are "wizard robots" — brilliant engineers, also called "constructors" because they can construct practically anything at will — and capable of almost God-like exploits. For instance, on one occasion Trurl creates an entity capable of extracting accurate information from the random motion of gas particles, which he calls a "Demon of the Second Kind". He describes the "Demon of the First Kind" as a Maxwell's demon. On another, the two constructors re-arrange stars near their home planet in order to advertise.

"The duo are best friends and rivals. When they are not busy constructing revolutionary mechanisms at home, they travel the universe, aiding those in need. As the characters are firmly established as good and righteous, they take no shame in accepting handsome rewards for their services. If rewards were promised and not delivered, the constructors may even severely punish those who deceived them." - Wiki 

Longin Szmyd - Oficyna (1983)

 

"An attempt to reconstruct the history of the old nineteenth-century building, when the people who once lived there were just memories, shadows, old photographs, and broken items. The director completes the parts with drawings, animations, graphics, and builds a strange, somewhat surreal whole."- Mubi

"Longin Szmyd was born on December 20, 1955 in Bytom, Slaskie, Poland. He is a director and actor, known for Królestwo zielonej polany. Powrót (1998), Lampa i slowik (1995) and Nostalgia (1984)" - IMDB

Cool, proggy-80s score from Janusz Grzywacz - founder and leader of the legendary Polish jazz band Laboratorium apparently - and sounding here a bit like Hassell's City of Fiction meets Associates "Q Quarters" meets Startled Insects. Dank and shadowy, modern yet dated, laced with absurdist vocals. 

A symphony of browns and moss-greens (and that's just the clothing and the hair). 

Zbigniew Rybczyński - Tango / Pol / Hell in Paradise / Imagine

 

 

"Rybczyński was born in Łódź in 1949. He finished an art high school in Warsaw. After graduation, Rybczyński worked in the Studio Miniatur Filmowych...  As a member of the vanguard group Warsztat Formy Filmowej, Rybczyński did the camerawork on a few etudes, features and short films...Upon graduating in 1973, Rybczyński went on to make animated films at the Se-Ma-For Study in Łódź. He spent two years in Vienna on a Polish Film contract, mostly teaching. After Tango, a film produced at Se-Ma-For, which won an Oscar in 1983, Rybczyński decided to stay and work in the US, initially making short video films and music videos commissioned by TV channels.

... In 1986 he started using High Definition, a computer-integrated system, and in 1987 opened his own studio, Zbig Vision Studio, in Hoboken near New York. Rybczyński became a highly popular maker of music videos, creating approximately 30 of them in a span of three years, including the remarkable work that became the video for John Lennon's Imagine. 

... At the time Rybczyński worked closely with the painter Miłosz Benedyktowicz, using his set design ideas. In 1992 Rybczyński, who had veered from commercial to more ambitious art, was no longer able to support the production and was forced to close his Studio.

.... In 2009, after years of working abroad, Rybczyński has decided to come back to Poland. He took up the position of the head of Drimage – 3D Animation & VFX Academy, established in association with Wyższa Szkoła Biznesu – National Louis University in Nowy Sącz. He also run a school called Wrocław Visual Technology Studios...

Film critics tend to hail Zbigniew Rybczyński the contemporary Mélies. As Marcin Giżycki wrote:

Rybczyński belongs to the line of Mélies's descendants, the cinematic craftsmen combining extraordinary plastic imagination with an aptitude for inventing and constructing, and endowed with Benedictine patience.

.... According to what he has professed in a number of interviews, Rybczyński went to study camerawork so that he could make films entirely on his own rather than relying on co-operation between the director and cameramen.... 

From 1972 onwards Rybczyński worked on his own films, notably Square, Take Five and Plamuz. These early works, in which Rybczyński experimented with the form, are characterised by the prominence of dynamic, changing abstract forms and synchronisation of the picture with the music. Soup (1974), which portrayed an ordinary daily routine presented in a way unattainable by the senses, was the first film to delineate the artistic path which Rybczyński would consistently follow in his later productions.

Rybczyński explains his artistic creed in an interview given to the film critic Tadeusz Sobolewski:

The film was invented to register the world. Yet then they noticed that if more pictures were shot and then played at a normal speed, you would see the world in a slow motion. The camera that was meant to re-create the reality began to see record much more than we do.

Rybczyński, who considers the human perception of the world limited and relative, looks for ways to find a new point of view and wants to see more, better and differently, for example a few places at one time, like in New Book, or one place at many times, like in Tango, and involves the spectator in the play with time and space. Tadeusz Sobolewski has called the trick of dividing the screen into parts, used by Rybczyński in New Book, 'the simultaneity of story-telling'. Rybczyński enhanced it further in the famous two-minute commercial of the GMF Group insurance company, showing a number of scenes of daily lives of families dwelling in a twelve-storey high-rise simultaneously, each floor symbolising a different life stage.

.... Rybczyński is fascinated with creating new worlds, his own reality: 'I want people to look at films without regarding them as imitations of the world', said Rybczyński in the above-cited interview. His role-models are Walt Disney, the creator of the cartoon reality of the world, as well as Chaplin and Lucas 'who did not imitate the reality, but enriched it'.

Rybczyński builds the world of his films in a Demiurgic manner, making creative use of archetypal motifs, clichés and pastiches of well-known works. Miłosz Benedyktowicz, a painter who worked for a few years with Rybczyński, described his work - 'What he creates is basically a manipulation of time and space. He is not much interested in reality or history of art at the moment -he borrows freely from all painting as needed'.

Rybczyński's artistic goals make him reach out far....

Frankly speaking, it would be wonderful to have a technique allowing to make paintings and whatever scenes, landscapes, props you want. To free oneself from reality, from the so-called realism, which is not realism at all. To free oneself from the realism of the circumstances existing only and exclusively at a certain place and time, for the reality is in us and not in some 'objective' world. The world exists in our imagination, in our experiences, memories, conjectures, anxieties'.

....The technological capabilities of HD provide for an integrated use of a video tape and a computer, and so the montage capabilities are huge. Rybczyński in an interview given to Maria Kornatowska in 1987:

A traditional film picture once fixed on the tape, can be modified only to a small extent and the montage combinations are limited. The electronic picture can be electronically processed to create a new reality, non-existent in front of the camera. You can make non-existent sceneries, remove people and objects from the shots and bring them in exactly where you would dream them to be. You can make all sorts of wonders, play a sorcerer.

..., The substance of animation in all of Rybczyński's films is the pre-registered reality. All of his films are about the same thing: searching for different ways of creating the film narrative, attempting to break away from the limitations of montage, sequential shots and sets and moving to one set.

...  The prominent theme of his films is usually referred to as 'travelling through life' or 'reflection on human fate', that is on the banality and inevitability of all the events from birth to death and of the death itself. Can this be reconciled with all of the prestidigitatory, technological tricks applied in his works? The answer is 'yes', for Rybczyński's art successfully bridges all such contradictions."

from Culture.Pl.