Film Form Workshop

The Film Form Workshop was founded in 1970 on the initiative of a group of students and graduates of the State Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre in Łódź. It remained active until 1977. Its members included Józef Robakowski, Wojciech Bruszewski, Antoni Mikołajczyk, Andrzej Różycki, Ryszard Waśko, Paweł Kwiek, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Tadeusz Junak, Kazimierz Bendkowski, Janusz Połom, Marek Koterski, Ryszard Gajewski and Ryszard Lenczewski. Jan Freda, Andrzej Paruzel, Janusz Kołodrubiec, Janusz Szczerek, Tomasz Konart and others also collaborated with the group.

From the outset, the interests of this neo-avant-garde group’s representatives were interdisciplinary. Filmmakers were supported by visual artists, writers, poets, photographers and musicians. The Workshop operated as a student research society, which allowed it to devise its own programme in opposition to the academic model of teaching. Formulated in 1970, the programme called for the disinterested, non-commercial production of films, visual-art exhibitions and artistic events. Its members advocated practising art rather than a profession¹.

The principal aim of the FFW’s activities was to expand the possibilities of the audiovisual arts and, consequently, to cross the traditional boundaries of art and dismantle artistic conventions. These tendencies had begun in the 1960s within the Zero-61 photography group in Toruń, initiated, among others, by several later founders of the Workshop: Robakowski, Bruszewski, Różycki and Mikołajczyk. These artists disrupted established patterns of making and perceiving photographic images, conducting various experiments intended to transform and deform them. They wanted to begin photography ‘from zero’ (hence the group’s name). Their methods included photomontage and multiple exposure; they destroyed photographic images (Robakowski, for example, by immersing prints in water) and created photo-objects that extended flat photographs into space. Through these procedures they expanded the boundaries of the photographic medium.

The exhibitions organised by the group were of particular importance². In 1966, an exhibition was held in the courtyard of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. Photographs of fragments of reality were juxtaposed with their real counterparts: a photograph of a tree hung on a poplar, a photograph of a fence was mounted on scaffolding made of boards, and an image of a bulldozer filled with sand was set beside a mound of sand. Revealing its creators’ conceptual approach, the exhibition sought to blur the boundary between photography and its surroundings. Even more unusual was the group’s final joint exhibition in 1969, arranged in an old, abandoned forge. The negation of traditional artistic techniques and conventions was intensified here by rejecting the artistic and aesthetic standing of photography altogether. It was treated simply as a material trace of reality; indeed, it was completely degraded.

Staging a ‘mental space’, the exhibition elevated old, damaged objects found in or brought to the forge to the status of works of art (decaying boards and window frames, car tyres, shoes, and a coat filled with plaster), while reducing photography to the role of an ordinary, unnecessary object. ‘Photography itself became an object there: singed, turned face down, rolled up, pasted onto a scrap of clothing, laid on a heap of metal or scattered before the viewers’ eyes’³ – wrote Urszula Czartoryska. It was ‘a manifestation of photography “negated” and “humiliated”’. The exhibition in the forge, which displayed a neo-Dadaist, sardonic attitude and recognised readymades and conceptual ideas as works of art (conceptualism, nota bene, drew inspiration from Dada), ultimately identified art with nature. It brought art into reality.

Shortly before the FFW was established, Robakowski showed several so-called interactive mental objects, or interactive photo-objects, in the exhibition Photographic Forms at the gallery of the Łódź Photographic Society; viewers could intervene in them. They could, for example, sit on Chair, turn the Rollers or inflate Inflatable Head. The viewer became a fully fledged, active participant in the exhibition.
The artistic model developed during the Toruń period was continued by the members of the Workshop.

At the same time, it was ‘supplemented’ by an analytical approach. The entry into reality initiated by Zero-61’s exhibitions had to culminate in its genuine discovery: investigating it through new media and analysing the media themselves.

Like photography, the members of the Workshop also wanted to begin film from zero. They therefore adopted a conceptual and analytical stance, while acknowledging their links to the Polish avant-garde of the early twentieth century – the Dadaism of Stefan and Franciszka Themerson and the Constructivism of Władysław Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro. They continued to believe that art should cease to imitate reality. Nor should it fulfil a subordinate role or become an expression or object of emotion or decoration. Working in the spirit of conceptualism, they did not wish to treat film as an artistic object, placing their chief emphasis instead on the creative process itself and its communicative dimension. According to this tendency, the artist becomes a researcher who analyses the creative possibilities inherent in the material that interests them. The aesthetic attitude is rejected in favour of a cognitive one, since what matters is not the work’s appearance but its functions and structure.

The FFW’s members thus took an intellectual approach to art, combining a Constructivist reverence for technology with artistic methods grounded in science. They sought to identify the essential, distinctive properties of filmic communication and its material and technological determinants. They analysed the interrelations between the components of a film work: space and time, image and sound, as well as questions concerning film’s relationship to reality and the physiology of perception. Their research into the structure of the medium was supported by theoretical and critical activity. They edited their own publication, the FFW Notebooks, which contained lectures, documentation of completed events and methodological analyses of their works.

As graduates and students of the cinematography and directing departments, and with access to professional equipment, they were exceptionally well prepared for this theoretical and practical activity.

At the same time, their undertakings were accompanied by a Dadaist spirit of irony, contrariness, provocation and the dismantling of ossified conventions in art. The fusion of this attitude with a rationalist one testifies to the group’s extraordinary originality.

One of the Workshop members’ earliest slogans was a call for ‘pure film’, freed from the burden of literature through a break with narrative and anecdote. They therefore created film tests that ‘undermined habits of literary perception’, served to ‘investigate the limits of perception’ of their works and sought an answer to the question ‘what laws govern non-literary film’ – as Józef Robakowski put it in a text from 1971 (see note 4).

The artist made Test I (1971) without using a camera. He cut several dozen holes in film stock in order, on the one hand, to analyse the nature of the light projected onto the screen and, on the other, the physiological conditions of human perception.

During the film’s projection, the cut-out holes admitted a powerful beam from the projector lamp. Its intensity varied according to the size of each hole. This produced the phenomenon of an ‘afterimage’, arising directly from the physiology of vision. With this ‘eye-searing’ test, Robakowski simultaneously demonstrated that film is nothing more than film stock – a flat, material object installed in a projector – and a beam of emitted pure light.

In Exercise (1972/1973), he investigated the constituent elements of a film work, which in its traditional form is based on narrative. Instead of a plot, the artist used rhythmically displayed and repeated letters, assigning each a specific sound different from its phonetic equivalent. Yet his ‘alphabet’ communicated no message. The film was a test of the viewer’s aural memory of sounds, while also expanding their perception.

Józef Robakowski’s 1974 work My Film was another mockery of narrative: it displayed, in succession, filmed letters spelling out the phrase that constituted its title.

Paweł Kwiek went further still in his experiment Commentary (1972), which dispensed with film stock altogether and consisted of recounting some banal story. The artist delivered it while standing before an audience in a cinema. His premise was that there was no need to make a narrative film: it was enough to tell it, whereupon the recipient, visualising the text according to familiar patterns governing productions of that kind, would perform the mental projection themselves. By ridiculing narrative cinema, Kwiek demonstrated that film requires a stimulus other than the simple recounting of a story. Another provocative gesture by the artist that created a filmic reality without film stock was Mirror (1972). During the ‘screening’, the artist stood before the projector and reflected its light with a mirror, directing it straight at the audience in the auditorium.

The Workshop members also discredited existing narrative productions, especially Hollywood films, by deconstructing them – for example, by reversing their dramatic order. The beginning became the end of the film and vice versa: the final shot came first, the penultimate shot second, and so on (Tadeusz Junak’s Episode, 1973).

In general, films by FFW members exposed the conventional, schematic nature of our perception and revealed the relativism of all forms of communication, as the examples above demonstrate. To substantiate this claim, I shall also draw on Wojciech Bruszewski’s 1974 text The Satori Problem⁵. Referring to Zen Buddhism and quoting a passage from Erich Fromm’s Psychoanalysis and Religion, the artist argues that Europeans and people of the East perceive the world in radically different ways.

To clarify these differences, however, I shall invoke the thought of Alan W. Watts⁶ – another authority on Zen. In the briefest terms, people raised in Western culture employ conventional knowledge founded on social agreement (language, science, law, ethics and so forth). We are able to communicate this knowledge only through the systematised signs of the thinking process. Moreover, this knowledge classifies the world, giving us an abstract, schematic, ‘fragmented’ image of it and consequently compelling us to regard these schemes as reality itself. Zen, by contrast, concentrates on non-conventional knowledge and seeks to grasp the essence of life. When a person of the East who practises Zen attains satori (awakening), freeing themselves from the constraining bonds of the mind, they discover the inseparable connection between themselves and the world. They perceive and experience it directly, almost tangibly, without the aid of logic.

Bruszewski rightly concludes that our ‘Western’ perception, ‘our manner of making contact with reality, is not direct but linguistic. Language, in turn, is a category of thought’. Indeed, we cannot think outside language. Referring to Roland Barthes, the artist goes on to state that Europeans possess a sign-based imagination. We therefore see objects and hear sounds not directly (as Zen Buddhists do), but by projecting the clichés of our minds onto them.

Thus Bruszewski and the other FFW members, like Zen masters setting their pupils koans – mind-provoking riddles – sought to dislodge viewers from their habitual patterns of perceiving reality and compel them to transcend the conditioning of reason. They made films that disrupted the logical structure of our reception of the world, while continuously analysing the construction of the work itself.

Bruszewski was particularly preoccupied with the process of perception and the attendant relationships between reality and its filmic representation. His films Teaspoon (1974) and Matchbox (1975), based on visual and acoustic asynchrony (sound lagging behind image), demonstrated the conventional nature of our perception. They showed that the audiovisual connections we perceive in the world are in fact merely an impression constructed by the human mind, rather than an objectively existing fact (given the different speeds of light and sound waves). In YYAA (1973), in turn, the artist cried out the titular yyyaaa…, rhythmically modulating his scream for several uninterrupted minutes. Such a long exhalation is physiologically impossible, yet becomes real in film through editing. By manipulating the structures of sound and image, the artist also sought to show that media – both mechanical, such as photography and film, and electronic, such as video – record reality differently from the human senses because they are not subordinate to our conventions. Humans, in turn, are capable of assimilating only that portion of the practices communicated through media which does not violate their perceptual habits.

Józef Robakowski had previously examined the connections between the film image and reality, and the possibility of distorting or ‘de-realising’ it through film technology, in Market Square (1970), made in collaboration with Tadeusz Junak and Ryszard Meissner. In this work, real time was mechanically condensed. Observing and recording the market square with a stationary camera between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m., using time-lapse photography (two frames every five seconds), ‘compressed’ the nine-hour duration of events into five minutes. The work demonstrated film’s capacity to manipulate the viewer’s impressions. The semblance of reality in the film image is purely a product of technology, through which any ‘operation’ can be performed on the real world, creating a new dimension that exceeds normal human perception. The Workshop members wanted to accustom viewers to this dimension.

Besides dislodging audiences from conventional thought, Bruszewski’s films mentioned above had another aim: they investigated the visual and sonic connections within a work. Ryszard Waśko’s Denial (1972) tested this relationship from the perspective of information. In the visual layer, the artist showed a white sheet of paper on which the word ‘no’ was typed, in succession, more than a hundred times. Each inscription of the word was accompanied by the artist saying it with the same unchanging intonation. Even rows of the word ‘no’ appeared and ‘grew’ on the screen. After the final inscription, Waśko reversed the situation. The words disappeared one by one until only the opening frame, the white sheet of paper, remained. The soundtrack, however, did not change: ‘no’ continued to be spoken with the same intonation. Karol Lubelski concluded from the film that in cinematic language ‘the signifying element of the sign prevails over the signified element; as reception progresses, we increasingly forget the conceptual meaning of the titular “denial”’.

The artist also analysed image–sound relationships in Systems I–IV (1973), 30 Sound Situations (1975) and I Walk Between (1975).

Józef Robakowski’s film experiment I’m Going (1973) may be included in the same ‘research’ group. Holding a sound camera in his hand, the artist recorded each step of a staircase as he climbed it. On the soundtrack, meanwhile, the unseen filmmaker could be heard counting the steps he conquered in sequence (from 1 to 200), his fatigue increasing as he climbed higher. The neutral (‘cold’) visual record was juxtaposed with an emotional (‘hot’) soundtrack.

In the artist’s intention, this film was simultaneously a ‘mechanical-biological record’ investigating the links between human biology and the mechanical nature of machines. He treated the equipment he used (a camera, a film camera and later also a video camera) as an extension of the human organism’s psychophysiological functions. In Exercise for Two Hands (1976), he held cameras in both hands, ‘ordering’ them to record reality independently, without the intervention or intention of a director–cameraman. He tested the machine’s creative power and, at the same time, its ability to ‘record’ human expression. Through his film tests, Robakowski demonstrated that devices become saturated with human characteristics, enabling him ‘to transfer (his – A.C.) psychophysical states, temperament and consciousness onto film’⁸. On the other hand, they reveal more than people are capable of perceiving in the world around them.

The artists associated with the FFW also researched space in film. This problem particularly occupied Ryszard Waśko, who – in addition to his analytical attitude – displayed an ‘intertextual tendency to cross genre boundaries’⁹, as Ryszard Kluszczyński observes. He transformed the many photographs he made through drawing or introduced filmic elements into them: movement and time. In film, in turn, he referred to photography by using static framing. He also incorporated graphic structures into his frames. Waśko constructed Padlock and Window (both 1972) precisely on the principle of fixed framing. The latter film consisted of a single static shot showing the titular window recorded from inside a room. Like the occupant of the room, the viewer could observe the reality unfolding beyond the window. At the same time, the film analysed image–sound relationships. Sounds came from beyond the frame, with noises from the outside world mingling with those from within the room.

Pavement (1972), made with a time-lapse camera, was likewise edited by linking static frames.

Straight–Curved (1973) and Wall (1972) followed from the films above. Ryszard Waśko’s experiments constituted a particular game between the two-dimensional nature of the medium (photographic and filmic) and the impression of viewing three-dimensional space within it. In Straight–Curved, the artist superimposed various geometric figures over the recorded images (individual frames). By showing the contrast between the flatness of the figures and the view of three-dimensional reality, he sought to demonstrate that film merely creates the illusion of multidimensionality (with sound adding a further dimension to the film work). In fact, film is recorded on flat stock – as Robakowski had already shown in Test – and projected onto a flat screen.

In Wall, Waśko employed achronological editing by first cutting the film stock into short sections. He filmed reality against the wall of the State Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre, so the building’s flat façade is present, immutable and ‘fully fledged’ in every frame. People who appear at random (not in every frame), as a result of the work’s arbitrary editing, seem like ephemeral beings momentarily ‘thrown’ into filmic reality. Making the building’s two-dimensional wall the ‘protagonist’ once again emphasises the flatness of the film stock. Spatial (and temporal) relations in film arise from the medium’s immanent properties, rather than solely from interdependencies between elements arranged in the real world. In manipulating spatial structures, Waśko naturally again challenged viewers’ perceptual habits.

In Recording (1972), he analysed constructions of reality of his own making. He showed the space of a street that had become a line segment bounded by points A and B. The artist divided this segment into 29 parts while establishing the camera’s positions. From these points he recorded in two directions: from A to B and from B to A. He then alternated the fragments in the edit, assigning synchronous sound to every first image and silence to every second image. ‘In this way an objective (mathematical) system is created through which the relationship between the image and its corresponding reality is reversed’¹⁰ – wrote Jan Świdziński. The viewer, meanwhile, was ‘imprisoned’ in a claustrophobic, impossible space. In other works, Waśko used boards divided into fields and mathematical systems to analyse various patterns of camera movement.

Kazimierz Bendkowski was interested in every kind of visual relationship (space, person, object; shifts in depth of field, dynamic and static elements, the succession of shot scales, camera movements) and image–sound relationship – Point, Circle and Area (all 1973).

In the film 1,2,3 – Camera Exercise (1972), Paweł Kwiek experimented with camera movement, colour changes and repeated shots. He also introduced animated drawn elements.

The Workshop members also made films without the participation of a director or cameraman. These works made use of chance, for example by placing a camera on the back of a protagonist riding a bicycle (Ryszard Waśko’s Wacław Antczak’s Journey to the Kiosk on Główna Street, 1973). They also enabled – above all Paweł Kwiek did so – any person to make a short film, allowing for an impartial recording of the characteristics of an individual or social group.

Kwiek devised the concept of an ‘Objective Document about a Human Being’¹¹. He believed that a director always deforms the image of the person portrayed in some way by imposing their own interpretation upon it. Within this understanding of ‘sociological art’, the artist ‘made’ the film Niechcice (1973). In fact, he allowed a group of young people associated with the Niechcice Community Centre to make it themselves, according to their own ideas and decisions about what, where and how to film. He adopted only the role of cameraman. By giving the initiative to a particular community, he awakened its creative attitude towards the surrounding world. He also emphasised the process of making the work at the expense of its final result. During the International Meetings of Artists, Scientists and Art Theorists in Osieki in 1974, Kwiek enabled more than a dozen artists to make one-minute films about their own art. He did the same in Elbląg during the fifth KINOLABORATORIUM Biennale of Spatial Forms in 1973. The artist later edited the completed ‘one-minute films’ into a single sequence.

Robakowski’s films were also made according to the same principle. The first work of this kind was 22x (1971). The artist gave several metres of film stock to each of 22 art-school students, asking them to make a distinctive artistic statement. The young artists scratched their films into the stock with sharp tools. Record (1972) comprised camera-recorded portraits of participants in the ‘Cleansing of Art’ event. Living Gallery (1975) consisted of self-portraits by leading Polish artists of the 1970s. Door – Window – Chair (1974) presented applicants to the acting department of the Łódź ‘Film School’. These ‘compilation’ films are known as assemblage films¹².

Józef Robakowski’s After Man (1970), in which he recorded objects left in a flat after his aunt’s death, had a documentary dimension.

Wojciech Bruszewski, in turn, made objective recordings of his surroundings. He believed that even in a conventional documentary film, a record never ceases to be a narrative and never ceases to interpret reality. It shows only a fragment of reality (limited by the frame and the duration), without revealing what lies beyond the frame and the selected interval of time. The very selection of this fragment of the world is an interpretation of it, a creation of its meaning. In place of a film recording, he therefore proposed a live transmission.

‘In the case of a film recording,’ he wrote, ‘the projection time is equal to, but not identical with, the time of the events presented. In live transmissions, reality and its image function synchronously. The duration of a transmission can be unlimited. In the case of transmitting acoustic spaces, there are not even any distinct boundaries to the areas being transmitted’¹³. Among other works, the artist carried out the sound action Crossroads (3 February 1973) as part of the several-day ‘Workshop Action’ organised at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. The artist installed four microphones at the corners of the junction of Więckowskiego and Gdańska streets, close to the museum. Using amplifiers, he connected these microphones to four loudspeakers set up in the museum’s exhibition room. In this way, the gallery space also contained the soundscape of those streets¹⁴.

The collective work Objective Television Transmission was also carried out as part of ‘Workshop Action’. This time, cameras were placed at three locations in the city (in a carpenter’s workshop, a private flat and the junction of Gdańska and Więckowskiego streets). Three monitors in the museum continuously transmitted the images relayed by the cameras. These actions – which also took the form of installations – again constituted a multifaceted analysis of the relationship between reality, its representation in media and the recipient. They addressed communication and public information by examining the structure of television transmission. The FFW members investigated how structures of thought previously shaped through linguistic communication changed in the processes of communicating by contemporary means of transmitting information. In short, they examined the influence of media on the formation of our mental structures.

The Workshop members were the first in Poland to experiment with video technology.

Wojciech Bruszewski used it in an attempt to translate abstract verbal language into concrete visual language. In Pictures Language (1973), he replaced individual letters with fragments of nature, creating a new alphabet. He assigned a letter to a particular object outdoors: for example, ‘O’ was water and ‘N’ a bush (seeing first the image of water and then the bush, the viewer read ‘ON’). With this alphabet, he conveyed a specific text (information about the transport of baggage by LOT Polish Airlines). In another of the artist’s films, individual letters corresponded to the angles at which a door was opened (Door – Text, 1973). Bruszewski was again playing with the linguistic conditioning of our perception.

Janusz Połom, in turn, was the first to experiment with computers and other electronic devices. His Alphabet (1974) resulted from translating sounds into images with an oscilloscope (the acoustic signal was converted into its visual equivalent, visible on the device’s monitor). In the performance Electronic Antinomies, he translated Samuel Beckett’s text How It Is in every possible variant, using an ODRA 1304 electronic digital computer, a tape recorder, oscilloscopes, a teleprinter and a system of punched cards¹⁵.

Alongside recordings on magnetic tape, the Workshop artists also created video installations and video performances. They investigated the properties of this medium as well. They conducted analyses similar to those they had undertaken with film, demonstrating the relativity of information conveyed by media, which possess the capacity to manipulate images of reality.

Below are descriptions of two of Antoni Mikołajczyk’s video installations, which tested how far a media image of the real world could be falsified while remaining equally credible to the viewer. Object in Motion (1976): ‘The camera was positioned outside the gallery, recording street traffic. A mirror was placed halfway across the camera frame at an angle of 45 degrees to the camera; the image on the monitor recorded both the actual street traffic and its mirror image. The monitor produced an image of two mutually exclusive, oppositely directed flows of traffic’.

Reality – Image of Reality (1976): ‘Two monitors showed identical fragments of a cityscape at night. After some time, it became apparent that moving points of light could be observed on one monitor while the other remained unchanged. The installation was made using two cameras, one of which recorded reality and the other a photograph of it taken the previous day’¹⁶.
The artist was most interested in the function of light in art. For him it had the status of an elemental force. He understood it as a mysterious medium that could be neither measured nor tamed. His fascination with its properties led him to create light installations: to employ this element directly in art as a particular kind of material – the work’s most important component. He called these works, which he continued making until his death in April 2000, ‘liberating light’.

Zbigniew Rybczyński’s work, which disrupted viewers’ perceptual habits like that of every Workshop member, is also worth mentioning. Using various technical devices, the artist visualised musical structures. He combined traditional animation with live-action footage, using a time-lapse camera, zoom lens, optical printer, rear projector and coloured filters. He superimposed images through multiple exposure (Square and Take Five, 1972) and employed the simultaneous organisation of images (New Book, 1975), coordinating them perfectly with the film’s music¹⁷.

The implementation of the theory known as ‘simultaneism’ – showing a multiplicity of events unfolding in parallel – received an Academy Award in 1983 (for Tango, 1980).

In New Book, the screen was divided into nine sections (the interior of a bus, a bar, a bookshop and a room, and five fragments of a street). The film’s action unfolded simultaneously in all these sectors, moving successively from one to the next. Only the relationships between the individual images formed the complete film narrative.

Tango was constructed differently. Although it was produced after the FFW period, I shall quote its synopsis. ‘Twenty-two shots of people performing various activities (the duration of these shots ranges from twelve to thirty-six seconds). Each is copied into a cycle of repetitions, meaning that the figures perform their actions repeatedly. As time passes, the number of people present in the frame simultaneously increases. At the climax, everyone is there. The screen then gradually empties, returning to its initial state at the end’.

Alongside films belonging to the analytical tendency, artists from the Workshop circle made so-called ‘expanded cinema’, combining different creative disciplines: film, video, visual art and action art (performance and happening). Robakowski’s experimental works Test, I’m Going and Exercise for Two Hands were already film performances. Andrzej Różycki’s Live Projection (1975) was also a film performance. The artist offered the following commentary: ‘(…) my film screening does not require a “finished product”; a small element of “preliminary film material” is enough. The projection material consists of three frames of positive film stock. I attach these film frames at the top to the lens, leaving the bottom loose. The film stock attached in this manner is affected by the constant ventilation inside the projector. The circulation of air sets the piece of film stock in motion (…)’¹⁹.

Apparent Identification (1973), in turn, may be called a photo-film performance. During the screening of the film, whose protagonist was Różycki himself, the artist appeared in front of a screen made, moreover, from a life-size photograph of him. The filmed, photographic and real figures of Różycki interpenetrated.

The aforementioned ‘Workshop Action’, held at the Muzeum Sztuki from 31 January to 25 February 1973, had a multimedia character. Besides Różycki’s work just mentioned, the sound action Crossroads and Objective Television Transmission, Połom’s Electronic Antinomies, Mikołajczyk’s installation and screenings of FFW films, the programme included the theatrical performance The Career and Death of Adolf Hitler, the exhibition of Zbigniew Dłubak’s photographs Ocean, a shadow theatre, a spectacle from the ‘sound–colour–movement’ series and many other activities. It was, indeed, a project that employed every possible means of expression and communication (cameras, film cameras, computers, oscilloscopes and so forth).

Other artistic events – manifestations of avant-garde art – likewise had a transmedia dimension. These included Mechanical Methods of Recording and Transmission (film, installation, television, performance, photography and sound), Warsaw, 26–27 April 1975, and Theory–Practice Workshop (film, video, performance, photography and texts), Łódź, 20–28 November 1976. ‘Cinema Laboratory’ – the first international review of independent film (Elbląg, 15–20 June 1973) – had a similar character. In addition to screenings of experimental films, it presented numerous artistic disciplines: visual art, visual poetry, music, theatre and photography, as well as spontaneous actions and activities ‘negating all artistic conventions and norms’²⁰.

As noted above, the Constructivist-conceptual and analytical work of the FFW’s members was also underpinned by another tradition. The Workshop members’ activities were accompanied by the spirit of Dada, which marked their provocative films. It found direct expression, however, in happenings, or ‘open activities’, and so-called interventions²¹. In these actions (as in Dadaist events of the early twentieth century), the artists followed no programme, but were guided by exuberant youthful enthusiasm. They brought art into life, staging these actions in public places, shocking viewers and provoking them to perceive reality consciously.

They also collaborated with non-professional artists, including the amateur theatre of Edward Kowalski – a retired community activist and author of the performance The Career and Death of Adolf Hitler – and Wacław Antczak. The latter, a spontaneous and unconventional artist and representative of Łódź folklore, described himself as a self-taught actor, poet, playwright, screenwriter, director, dancer and even an art critic and philosopher. He took part in most events organised by the Workshop. As a non-professional actor, he appeared in several films by Andrzej Kondratiuk (Ascended, Barabbas’ Sunday) and Marek Piwowski (The Cruise, Flyswatter, Psychodrama). He was the protagonist of films by Ryszard Waśko, Andrzej Różycki and Józef Robakowski, as well as Transmission of Wacław Antczak’s Personality – a presentation prepared by FFW members for the 12th São Paulo Art Biennial in 1973.

As part of the ‘Eighth Cinema’ event (Łódź, 18 December 1971), which was ‘intended to bring cinema to the masses’²², a Permanent Sale of Goods of Dubious Origin Belonging to Robakowski’s Late Aunt took place. The action was staged at the Czerwony Rynek market in Łódź. Mr Wacek (Antczak) conducted it, offering old furniture, books and even tins at absurdly low prices. The Workshop members pretended to be customers. The happening ended with the unsold items being looted and an old bed set on fire by the crowd.

On another occasion, to activate viewers waiting for a screening (during the second Festival of Art Schools in Nowa Ruda in 1973), they distributed 400 whistles. While the audience ‘performed a concert’ on them, the Workshop artists carried out various activities onstage and behind the curtain (including reading an English-language guide to Nowa Ruda and performing a ‘hummed melody’ with their lips and hands). The disorientated viewers eventually joined the action, carrying a rubbish bin onto the stage²³.

Other actions by FFW members had a dissident dimension. In the 1973 text A Lampoon on Polish Cinema, Józef Robakowski pointed to the ‘appalling administrative structure’, the ‘mass of unproductive “directors” with nothing to say’, their complete satisfaction with their own work, ‘confirmed every year by numerous reviews, competitions and festivals’, and expensive prizes and official trips. He criticised Polish film criticism, concluding with the slogan: ‘disband this “film community” – sick, unproductive, isolated and mannered, and at the same time leading to provincialism’²⁴. Hence the Workshop members’ interventions contesting this situation, their attacks on the people responsible for it and their mockery of state film events. Among other places, they carried them out at the Polish Film Review in Łagów in 1971, setting an intellectual trap for well-known critics and directors who were present and discussing their films. On another occasion, during the first Festival of Art School Students in Nowa Ruda in 1971, they carried Jan Świdziński out of the conference room while he was delivering a paper. During the fifth Review of Films on Art in Zakopane in 1972, they protested against the jury’s verdict by firing cap guns at the director and cameraman of the award-winning film as they stood onstage accepting the prize. The Workshop artists also issued a statement at the time, which included the following: ‘(…) We believe that organising festivals and reviews in Zakopane is pointless. Let them be held where they will be accessible to genuine, ordinary art enthusiasts, rather than enthusiasts of free tourism on official expenses. We believe that material prizes should not be awarded at festivals and reviews. The festival discussions were a display of a lack of constructive thought, of people talking past one another and of gibberish (…) We warn incompetent persons against rashly undertaking to deliver all manner of talks and hack papers at festivals, symposia and reviews. We shall also ruthlessly stamp out any discussions conducted according to the formula “perhaps, yet nevertheless, possibly, indisputably”, which is a perfect and insidious tool for obscuring, losing and muddying the truth (…)’²⁵.

The Film Form Workshop was therefore independent of state distribution mechanisms and repertory policy. Its members created their own alternative events at which they presented their films, and those of other artists – the aforementioned ‘Eighth Cinema’, ‘Cinema Laboratory’ and others. These events had no juries, verdicts or prizes. Participation in them, like the Workshop members’ film works produced entirely through their own efforts, was non-commercial and disinterested.

They also participated in many prestigious international film festivals and reviews, including Edinburgh²⁶ (‘Atelier’, 1972), Knokke-Heist (fifth International Experimental Film Festival, 1974), Antwerp (‘5th International Eucounter on Video’, 1976), Amsterdam (‘Works and Words’, 1979), Kassel (‘Film über Film’ as part of ‘Documenta 6’, 1977), Cologne, Essen, Hamburg, Düsseldorf and Oslo, and even – as I have already mentioned – São Paulo in Brazil (12th São Paulo Art Biennial, 1973).

An exceptionally important action involving several former Workshop members, no longer associated as a group (each now working ‘on their own account’ and developing individual interests), was the major international artists’ meeting ‘Construction in Process’. Realised in Łódź in 1981 according to a concept by Ryszard Waśko, its spirit referred to the tradition of Polish Constructivism represented by the Łódź avant-garde formation a.r. (Władysław Strzemiński, Katarzyna Kobro, Henryk Stażewski, Jan Brzękowski and Julian Przyboś). It was an independent event that brought together around 50 eminent artists from all over the world and emphasised the very process of creating an object, the moment when the construction itself came into being. These artists, who made their works on site without remuneration, initiated a new international collection deposited at the Muzeum Sztuki. This happened exactly on the fiftieth anniversary of the creation, in the same museum, of the famous collection of European avant-garde works by the a.r. group.

The text was originally published as ‘Die Łódźer Werkstatt für Filmgestaltung’, in ‘fair – Zeitung für Kunst und Ästhetik’ (www.fairarts.org), no. 03/2010, pp. E9–E13.

* Alicja Cichowicz graduated in film studies from the University of Łódź and in philosophy from the Theological Institute in Łódź. She has written texts on the visual arts (principally film and photography), published in ‘Kino’, ‘Arteon’, ‘Art & Business’, ‘Exit’, ‘Format’, ‘Magazyn Sztuki’, ‘Obieg’, ‘Gazeta Wyborcza’ and ‘Kalejdoskop’, as well as in the book Spaces of Photography and exhibition catalogues; she has served as a juror in photography competitions. She has curated multimedia exhibitions at the Museum of Cinematography in Łódź, where she has worked since 1998.

¹ The text, in the form of a leaflet, has been reprinted many times; cited here after: Living Gallery: The Łódź Progressive Art Movement 1969–1981, ed. J. Robakowski, ŁDK – Galeria FF, Łódź 2000, p. 35.
² See J. Robakowski, Installation, in: ‘Rzeźba Polska’ Yearbook: The Art of Installation, vol. VII (1994–1995), Centre of Polish Sculpture, Orońsko 1998; M. Baciarelli, In the Old Forge, ‘Fotografia’ 1969, no. 9; idem, Zero-61 and Others, ‘Gazeta Pomorska’ 1969, no. 147; U. Czartoryska, Identification Challenged (on the Zero-61 Group in the 1960s), ‘Fotografia’ 1987, no. 3.

³ U. Czartoryska, Identification Challenged…, op. cit., p. 24.
⁴ J. Robakowski, Once Again for Pure Film, cited after: Readings from Art, Galeria Arcus, Lublin 1978, pp. 7–9.
⁵ Cited after: Living Gallery, op. cit., pp. 136–138.
⁶ A. W. Watts, The Way of Zen, Dom Wydawniczy REBIS, Poznań 2003, pp. 23–28.
⁷ K. Lubelski, The Film Form Workshop – an Attempt at a Contemporary Avant-Garde, in: From the History of the Film Avant-Garde, ed. A. Helman, University of Silesia, Katowice 1976, p. 139.
⁸ J. Robakowski’s 1977 text Mechanical-Biological Records, cited after: Living Gallery, op. cit., p. 220.
⁹ R. Kluszczyński, Transmedialism: On the Work of Ryszard Waśko, in: Images at Liberty: Studies in the History of Media Arts in Poland, Instytut Kultury, Warsaw 1998, p. 92.
¹⁰ J. Świdziński, A Model of Cinema, cited after: Living Gallery, op. cit., pp. 168–169.
¹¹ See P. Kwiek, Objective Document about a Human Being, 1975, in: Living Gallery, op. cit., pp. 193–196.

¹² For more on these films, see Ł. Ronduda, Polish Assemblage Films of the 1970s, http://csw.art.pl/archfilm/polasembling.html [accessed: 21 November 2016].
¹³The Satori Problem, op. cit., p. 137.
¹⁴ Description cited after: K. Lubelski, The Film Form Workshop..., op. cit., p. 141.
¹⁵ A description of the performance can be found in Połom’s text Higher Brain Functions – or in Search of a Universal Language, in: Film Form Workshop 1970–1977, exhibition catalogue, CSW, Warsaw 2000, pp. 74–76.
¹⁶ Cited after: A. M. Leśniewska, Chronology, in: Antoni Mikołajczyk, Space of Light, exhibition catalogue, Xawery Dunikowski Museum – Branch of the National Museum in Warsaw, October–November 1998, p. 88.
¹⁷ Ryszard Kluszczyński discusses the tension between reality and virtuality in Rybczyński’s films; see idem, Zbigniew Rybczyński, or Cinema as Video, in: R. Kluszczyński, Film – Video – Multimedia: The Art of the Moving Image in the Electronic Age, Instytut Kultury, Warsaw 1999, pp. 160–176.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 168.
¹⁹ Cited after: Living Gallery, op. cit., p. 184.
²⁰ Cf. J. Zagrodzki, Cinema Laboratory, in: Living Gallery, op. cit., pp. 112–113.
²¹ Lechosław Olszewski discussed the Workshop’s various actions in the text The Activities of the Film Form Workshop as an Example of an Artistic Strategy towards Power in Poland in the 1970s, in: ‘Artium Quaestiones’, issue IX, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań 1998, pp. 111–154.

²² See the ‘Eighth Cinema’ leaflet, in: Living Gallery, op. cit., p. 46.
²³ Description after: B. Zagroba, Concert for 400 Whistles, or the Exorcisms of New Art, ‘Film’ 1973, no. 25.
²⁴ Cited after: Living Gallery, op. cit., p. 92.
²⁵ Cited after: ibid., p. 73.
²⁶ Participation in ‘Atelier’ was the FFW’s international debut. Its organiser, Richard Demarco, appreciated the Workshop members’ work and invited them to Edinburgh. At the exhibition of Polish art, their films were presented alongside works by Henryk Stażewski, Tadeusz Kantor and Władysław Hasior.