Film Form Workshop

Founded in 1970 within the framework of the Student Science Club of the National Film School in Lodz, active through around 1977. Members included Jozef Robakowski, Wojciech Bruszewski, Antoni Mikołajczyk, Wasko. The Workshop's practice, focuses on an analysis of the new media language (photography, film, video), drew its inspirations from the constructivist tradition and conceptualism, striving to get film rid of 'alien elements' (anecdote, literary forms, narration), make its language simpler and information denser.

The question the Workshop of Film Form artists were asking was therefore one about whether there exists a language appropriate for the filmic medium. The first piece made as part of WFF was Jozef Robakowski's Market Square (1970), an animated film compiled with still images of Łódź's Czerwony Rynek square, made every five seconds on a single day between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. In the film, that time was compressed to just five minutes. An important aspect of Robakowski's WFF work were also experiments with image and sound - an extra soundtrack, asynchronicity of sound and image, or their mutual relation. The artist experimented with them in, for instance, Próba II (1971), juxtaposing intense red colour with classic organ music. In Dynamic Rectangle (1971), Robakowski manually shaped a rectangle to music by Eugeniusz Rudnik. The issue of the relation between sound and image returned frequently in the artist's oeuvre, e.g. in the films Videosongs (1992) and Videokisses (1992).