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.

A young married couple and their everyday hardships. Unemployed Wojtek decides to sell grilled chicken from a street stall. His wife Agata is a film student making a documentary on her husband.

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.

Words and abstract shapes on a film strip, shot on video

From 'The Workshop of the Film Form'.

The film is an experimental documentary form, made using the stop-motion method. It is a single shot in total plan, showing an aerial view of the Balucki Market in Lodz. The realization method involved recording two frames every five seconds without changing the camera setting. From 'The Workshop of the Film Form'.

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”.

A film sketch for a portrait of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz by multimedia artist Jozef Robakowski.

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

Rectangles pulsate to an electronic sound loop.

A classical organ composition by Johann Sebastian Bach “stretches” a red strip of film; An exploration of musical memory.

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.

An autobiographical, auto-therapeutic take, laced with deadpan humor. Here we learn about another identity crisis as Robakowski speaks of his fear of putting on his late grandfather’s glasses.

No description available.

A film with Robakowski's characteristic single-shot structure, filmed from the perspective of a character who struggles to walk along a forest path, constantly complaining of nagging pain in his leg.

From the heaps of rusted scrap metal, a metal, fully functional figure shapes up, trying to get out of there to reach the horizon. He is aiming high. Puppet animation directed by Jerzy Kotowski.

A highly expressive cry from the author of the manifesto, uttered while his head emerges from the water: "I should like to tell you all that art is energy!"

The equation of organically generated soundtrack with the video image.

The camera records the trajectory and dynamics of Robakowski's movement: he walks, turns and spins with his head up in the woods.

Abstract, geometric forms, became the basis for the most outstanding works of the avant-garde sculptor Katarzyna Kobro. With her 'Spatial Compositions', she created her own artistic language, with which she aroused a lot of criticism, which was based on the traditional assumption that a sculpture should be a compact, modelled mass. However, the task of "Composition" was to shape forms that were to come into being. Kobro, however, still wanted to change the space surrounding people with her own art.