35 mm, 5'
1971
A non-camera film animation where the artist analysed the constituent elements of filmic language, building a scale of tensions controlled by sound-and-image synchronicities. A dynamically changing red rectangle was manually shaped by Robakowski in relation to Eugeniusz Rudnik’s suggestive music, recorded at the Polish Radio Experimental Studio in Warsaw. The relationship between image and sound was one that the artist would return to in many later works, such as Video Songs and Video Kisses (both 1992). The Dynamic Rectangle was an example of what Robakowski described four years later as an interest in ‘pure cinema, a desire to purify film of all possible narrative structures and the methodology of literary poetics’.
* Józef Robakowski, ‘Bezjęzykowa koncepcja semiologiczna filmu’, Warsztat Formy Filmowej (Łódź), no. 7, 1975, n.pag.
