35 mm, 6'
1971
This non-camera film was one of the first contribution-based projects realised in the early 1970s as part of the WFF. The contributors were 22 art school students, each of whom Robakowski presented with several metres of unexposed 35 mm film stock, asking them to alter it manually. Using sharp tools, the students scratched their works directly onto the film, ‘both in the image field and that of the optical soundtrack’, with the individual contributions montaged by Robakowski into a single sequence. In a film thus made, his role was limited to initiating and coordinating the collective effort. The artist derived the structure of such works from Katarzyna Kobro’s sketches of the ‘chain-like construction of a line divided into equal parts’. Assemblage films, where authorial claims are abandoned on behalf of the objectivisation of the message and the pluralism of action, are among the WFF’s most characteristic practices.
