16 mm, 5'
1962
The first of 12 films made by the artist in the 1960s, and one of the three that have survived. At the time, Robakowski was a member of the photographic collective Zero 61 and was experimenting with photomontage. Simultaneously, he was able to make films as part of the ‘Pętla’ [Loop] Student Film Club, which he ran from 1961.
Today, 6,000,000 is widely considered a pioneering work in the field of Polish found-footage films. Robakowski made it even before enrolling at film school. Manually editing film footage and photographs, he experimented, manipulating focus and combining negative and positive images.
Using fragments of documentary films and WWII-era German newsreels found by the Club, he combined – in an increasingly tense narrative – peaceful images of the countryside accompanied by the piano music of Frédéric Chopin (Waltz in C-sharp minor, Op. 64, No. 2) with vignettes of marching German troops, air raids, execution scenes and death camps. The film’s opening and closing frames show the face of the artist’s then-wife in close-up. Produced in the early 1960s, Robakowski’s film was one of the first works on the narrativisation of memory and on social amnesia.
