Józef Robakowski

Trying to describe oneself is a movie about representation. How it is possible, through film, to describe oneself and describe others. With the camera as mirror and third eye. At first, a collage-like combination of letter-writing, investigation and journey, something between documentary and feature film. Finally, a portrait of Boris Lehman from 1989 to 1995, part II of BABEL.

In Impulsators, Robakowski rejects the narrative film form and the representational function in the spirit of his radical manifestations against the illusory character of traditional film in the 1970s, such as e.g. Test, Test II. Like Impulsators, those non-camera films came into being as a result of perforation of film stock, which thus lets through in a desired way the light from the projector, which is in turn “fixed” on the retina and produces after-images. The movement of the film stock generates lively flicker targeted directly at the viewer’s body, above their imagination. Immersed in the trance rhythm, the impulsator becomes a new psychophysical force.

In 1978, Robakowski moved into a new flat in a newly-built high rise in the center of Łódź. That’s when he began filming the people and events he could see from his kitchen window. The film was made on the basis of a dozen or more hours of footage shot during 1978–1999. The artist filmed the front yard of his block of flats in a part of Łódź called “Manhattan”—a cluster of tall, cement housing buildings vaguely resembling New York’s skyscrapers. The images are accompanied by the artist’s commentary, which brings the viewer closer to his neighbors and family, including his then-wife, Małgorzata Potocka. The film comments on the gradual yet profound political and social transformations that took place in Poland over these two decades.

A short showing Robakowski peeling and eating an apple, which itself produces the sound.

ince the 1970s, Robakowski has been experimenting with the category of the author, transferring the authorship of his works onto the film camera. Implementing the strategy of biological-mechanical records, Robakowski continues his experiments, carried out since the 1970s, consisting in the transfer of the authorship of the film onto the film camera, as well as initiates relations between the mechanical medium and the human organism. On the one hand, it embraces collaboration, on the other, human struggle with the machine, extending from the “integration” of its logic and the attempts at its “anthropomorphisation”.

Dancing with trees

Video performance

Robakowski directs the camera to zoom back and forth.

The ritual transmission of a military parade from Moscow’s Red Square: On every anniversary of the October Revolution, this was loyally broadcast by all the television stations in the so-called people’s democracies. In Robakowski’s work, this material is used to reconstruct and deconstruct public spectacle. The substitution of the original  television commentary with a song sung in German by Laibach (a group from what was then Yugoslavia and is now Slovenia) removes the spectacle from its pompous temporal context and reveals the absolutism of its alluring power. The totalitarian display is in itself art – politically active art, the art of all-out pathos – even if we call it only “quote art unquote”.

"...We came to the conclusion that the event recorded on the film does not have to be logically interpreted or named, because its meaning or even nonsense is justified by the fact that this phenomenon took place in a state of war."

Video: Józef Robakowski, music: Laibach Werkstatt, production: Exchange Gallery.

From 'The Workshop of the Film Form'. // In I'm Going Robakowski attempted an iconoclastic representation of the human body. He initiated a situation in which the materiality of film engaged in a dialogue with the materiality of the human body. Over the course of the film, the growing fatigue of the body carrying the film camera can be heard in the artist's voice and increasingly heavy breathing. The effect is that of the artist delving into his own materiality. The subject becomes merely a thing among things, a living fragment of the matter. With their attempt to shift the "film gaze" onto the machine (a non-anthropocentric point of perception of the world), Robakowski's Records most fully illustrate the antivoyeuristic ambitions of structuralist cinema, which aimed to subvert the traditional voyeuristic model.

From 'The Workshop of the Film Form'.

A classical organ composition by the Johann Sebastian Bach can “stretch” a transport red strip in time. An exploration of musical memory.

Rectangles pulsate to an electronic sound loop.

White circles appear and disappear on a black surface.

From 'The Workshop of the Film Form'

A short film by Józef Robakowski

video, 5', 2004, collaboration with Wiesław Michalak