Filmoteka Muzeum

In Rybczyński's A Square a simple shape is deconstructed into a series of smaller animated squares. As colour infiltrates these pixels-in-motion, human figures emerge, dancing from one color square to the next. Ultimately, the human shapes degenerate, returning to the square from which they emerged. A Square represents Rybczyński's interests in the intersection of dance, film and music.

As Rybczyński wrote: “It was a mix of photography and animation and it took up my whole vacation - sixteen hours a day. I analysed, through a film camera, a loop of thirty-six squarish black-and-white photographs representing a human being moving in a circle. What was the logic of my analysis? I decided to photograph the loop on film and repeat it 36 times. During every repetition, I divided the film window, which I made in the shape of a square, so that in every circle there was an increasing number of subdivisions; today I would say different resolutions. I put a white square of paper in the subdivisions where, in the photograph, there was a part of a figure. Where there was not, I put a black square. I had to rearrange the white and black squares at least one hundred thousand times. On the lens, I put a colour filter and then rotated it - but I don’t want to bore you. What is the most important about this is that not being aware of computer imaging – it was the 1970s in Poland – I manufactured my own 'digital' processing on film. It's strange that I needed 26 years of work – including my work during all my next 25 vacations – to come back to A Square with full awareness and understanding of why.”

Quoted from: 1,2,3... Avant-gardes. Film/Art between Experiment and Archive, Ł. Ronduda, F. Zeyfang [eds.], Warsaw 2007.