35 mm, 6'
1972–1973
In Exercise, one of his most radical works in terms of moving away from traditional filmic forms, the artist experimented with the potential of the medium, revising the established relations between sound and the written character. The film’s audiovisual structure followed a special (drawn) visual score. Successive frames show the following letters: ‘abckspfhnpacoacotwojuabcifydimozkwehzwnwodrijgabcdktkinsoaucduantwfztfztdrjyrjdrtacozsk’. The different letters, which appear on screen for several (or more) seconds, are accompanied by a particular sound from a pump organ. The graphemes do not arrange themselves into words, and the sounds do not comprise a melodic line. By repeating frames many times, the artist created a new code where a particular letter can be replaced by a signal other than its phonetic equivalent. In a system thus constructed of relationships between visual and audio signals, barely perceptible deviations appear, distorting the correlation between letter and sound. Such experiments were theoretically explained in a 1975 text, A Non-linguistic Semiological Conception of Film, where the artist opposed the exploration of film media using terms developed by structural linguistics: ‘The linguistic concept system has been proven by research to be an artificial procedure, an operation that violates, as it were, the pure film medium. Film is a different order of signs, one that is not a language, hence analysing it using linguistic categories makes no sense.’*
* Józef Robakowski, ‘Bezjęzykowa koncepcja semiologiczna filmu’, Warsztat Formy Filmowej (Łódź), no. 7, 1975, n.pag.
