This film belongs to a group of works that constitute manifestations of Robakowski’s engaged attitude towards social reality. Here, his interests focus on the rhythm of the city, the dynamics of passing cars, recorded with a fast-panning camera set at a single point. The video recording is accompanied by Robakowski’s voice, commenting off-screen, with constantly varying intonation and speed of uttering words, on what is happening in the street. The energy of the urban landscape is contrasted with the calmness of the space in which the camera is placed, which introduces a tension that reflects the author’s emotional state.

A film sketch for a portrait of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz by multimedia artist Jozef Robakowski.

A film sketch for a portrait of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz by multimedia artist Jozef Robakowski.

A highly expressive cry from the author of the manifesto, uttered while his head emerges from the water: "I should like to tell you all that art is energy!"

A short film by Józef Robakowski

The film is dedicated to the memory of American surrealist Paul Sharits. Sharits sent Robakowski a film score with a proposal to use it in a film production, but the outbreak of martial law prevented the idea from being realised. The film was not made until 2004. The film was created as a result of a very rigorous, constructivist formal procedure, subordinating specific visual values to the melodic line of the musical piece. During the screening, as the notes of the composition are played, corresponding colours appear on the screen, eight colours that correspond to the notes of Fryderyk Chopin's Mazurka Op. 68 No. 4. The vibration of the changing colours and the radiance of the light create a coherent whole with the composer's nostalgic piece. The colourful fields pulsating to the rhythm of the music evoke, on the one hand, the American's structural cinema and, on the other, show the almost vital energy of colour.

White circles appear and disappear on a black surface.

Rectangles pulsate to an electronic sound loop.

The film is an experimental documentary form, made using the stop-motion method. It is a single shot in total plan, showing an aerial view of the Balucki Market in Lodz. The realization method involved recording two frames every five seconds without changing the camera setting. From 'The Workshop of the Film Form'.

From 'The Workshop of the Film Form'. // In I'm Going Robakowski attempted an iconoclastic representation of the human body. He initiated a situation in which the materiality of film engaged in a dialogue with the materiality of the human body. Over the course of the film, the growing fatigue of the body carrying the film camera can be heard in the artist's voice and increasingly heavy breathing. The effect is that of the artist delving into his own materiality. The subject becomes merely a thing among things, a living fragment of the matter. With their attempt to shift the "film gaze" onto the machine (a non-anthropocentric point of perception of the world), Robakowski's Records most fully illustrate the antivoyeuristic ambitions of structuralist cinema, which aimed to subvert the traditional voyeuristic model.