TANGO is an Oscar-winning film shot on 35 mm film, created with an optical matting process. It is an experimental short film categorized by The Academy as an animation, because it is shot with stop-motion photography, therefore not the regular film speed rate. Especially in comparison with the kind of movies we see today in the Short Animated Film category, Tango is not a typical animation because actors are performing in real sets. Zbig is more an experimental filmmaker and special-effects inventor than a classic animator.

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LOGLINE

Academy Award-winning masterpiece is a surrealistic tango of alienation of thirty-six people trapped in one room, representing the feeling of oppression, confusion, love, and tension. Ironically in 2020, it's like looking at your own life projected on the screen during lock-downs and quarantine.

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SYNOPSIS

Tango is shot in minimalist room where a plethora of activities takes place. Little by little, the small chamber is occupied by diverse characters whose looping and overlapping daily routine generates a perfectly choreographed ballet, stunningly arranged and orchestrated by the cosmic tango of life.

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ZBIG ABOUT TANGO I had to draw and paint about 16.000 cell-mattes and make several hundred thousand exposures on an optical printer. It took a full seven months, sixteen hours per day, to make the piece. The miracle is that the negative got through the process with only minor damage, and I made less than one hundred mathematical mistakes out of several hundred thousand possibilities. In the final result, there are plenty of flaws black lines are visible around humans, jitters caused by the instability of film material resulting from film perforation and elasticity of celluloid, changes of color caused by the fluctuation of color temperature of the projector bulb, and, inevitably, dirt, grain, and scratches.

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LOGLINE

Emmy Prime Time award-winning The Orchestra is visual poetry without words. Strange, virtuosic surrealism, impudent imaginary to Mozart, Chopin, Albinoni, Schubert, Rossini, and Ravel. In 1990 this production was pioneering in a field of High Definition television technology.  Rybczynski creates the first feature-length, HDTV real-time, no post-production, multi-layer motion picture.

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SYNOPSIS 

The story, music, and dancers “fly” throughout the backdrops of the Louvre, Chartres Cathedral, The Paris Opera House, other mysterious places, and magical gardens. The  Funeral March  is seen as a circle of life at an unending keyboard. Schubert's  Ave Maria  is an areal ballet performed by man and woman in the background of Chartres Cathedral. Sexuality, playful and overt is never far away, and right at the center of Rossini's Overture to  The Thieving Magpie  with its soldiers and whirling dancers. Ravel's Bolero becomes a parable about the rise and fall of Communism, marched, danced, and enacted on an endless brick stair. When The Orchestra was still in the production, the Communism in Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe was alive and kicking, it seems like Rybczynski foreseen the end of the regime. “The director as a virtuoso artist in the sphere of electronic effects, employing seamlessly integrated digital effects and wonderfully atmospheric locations, creates a multi-layer visual symphony. Brilliantly executed and hugely entertaining, provocative, and completely unlike anything you have ever seen before. You truly won’t believe your eyes. And you will never hear this music in the same way again. “ Steven Bonde, London Film Festival.

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LOGLINE

Fusing live video footage with the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin, Rybczynski encourages a clutch of contemporary types to treat this bloody moment in history-and Eisenstein's art- as just another tourist attraction.

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SYNOPSIS

In 1986 an arsenal of pioneering video tricks was used to create this aesthetic and political comment on modern society. Actors shot on a blue stage were keyed into the Potemkin footage in layers, enabling them to interact with the vintage characters. In the tongue-in-cheek pop art style, the piece makes a statement on the human condition and (using a sole-surviving infant as a metaphor) suggests hope for the two societies like Soviet Communism and Modern West. Rybczynski and the Teletronics team used Zbig's instant video technique to create Steps. Three hundred and fifty multi-layer special effects takes were polished off in about two weeks shooting. Using an Ultimatte unit, an Ampex Digital Optics image mover, hand-drawn holdout mattes, and a Foley man for –live sync sound effects, taping and editing of the piece was done simultaneously, requiring only one day of post-production to insert titles

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ZBIG ABOUT STEPS In Steps everything was made  in real time, there was no post-production. It took thirteen full days, there were numerous technical problems that I had to take into account. Many elements decided this project's development, but the most important for me was the experimentation with time. Technology creates a portrait, an emotion, a movement for the events. It gives them time. I was capturing the present, and this present now existed in the future. Therefore, in a sense, I was able to enter Eisenstein's images from 1925. We can say that I was traveling back in time, collaborating with the past. I needed material that was immediately recognizable, and Eisenstein's was perfect.

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Zbig creates the second, feature-length, HDTV real-time, no post-production, multi-layer motion picture KAFKA. The whole movie is made using the MCS camera control system, which automatically connects the photographed objects/miniatures made in various scales with playing actors. Most of the shots are composed of several hundred layers in subsequent recordings, without any post-production.
 

Zbig Rybczynski, highly regarded within the film and video industry, a pioneering director of the moving image, constantly tests, innovates and streches the boundaries of his craft. He believes that people want to see magic and technology is the artist’s wand.

Art Futura, 1992

 

"Zbig’s system can execute what would normally be physically impossible with a regular motion control system-such as a 360-degree rotation with a twelve-foot radius that exposes the floor, walls, and ceiling".

American Cinematographer, 1993

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The Zbig technique automatically coordinates the camera moves, scale, position and compositing of any size object or CG element from a pre-visualized software representation. Once the pre-visualized move is created any size element is automatically moved and adjusted for scale, positioned, photographed and composited. Each new element required to complete the scene is simply placed in the center of the turntable, a determination of the desired size is interred, and the rest is automatic.

Poul Vlahos, Chief Executive Director of Ultimatte and iMatte,

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“The structure that the director constructed in the studio allowed him to create the impossible: from apparently gigantic set pieces ­ that were actually models onto which the actors’ images were superimposed ­ to the continuous tracking shots (a combined effect of the movements of the revolving sets and the tracks on which the camera is placed, or the repetition of an image over itself). In Kafka, things never cease to move or rotate.” Bernardo Carvalho, Zbig vem lançar “Kafka” no Brasil, in “Folha de San Paulo,” April 1992.

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LOGLINE

A man gets released from prison and starts taking out his sadistic fantasies on an unsuspecting family living in a secluded house. Based on a true story.

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SELECTED REVIEWS

 

“The ultimate unknown thriller masterpiece, one that I have watched more than 40 times.” – Gaspar Noé

 

“Angst, photographed by a legendary Oscar-winning Polish filmmaker, experimentalist Zbig Rybczynski and scored by Krautrock synth god Klaus Schulze (Tangerine Dream), is one hell of a gorgeously stylized and shockingly visceral experience: a forgotten classic on the fringes of the slasher cycle. Erwin Leder (Das Boot, Schindler's List) plays a maniacal killer based on the real-life serial murderer Werner Kniesek. As he stalks through the bland Viennese countryside, Schulze's music pulses darkly, and Zbig's innovative first-person camerawork grabs you by the throat, never letting go. Angst is one film that, without any empty hyperbole, we can guarantee you'll never, ever forget.”  CULT EPICS, 2015

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“A perfectly disturbing masterpiece”  Mitchell Combden, “I love Horror Movies” IMDb  

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Raw and well-photographed psycho-killer
This relatively obscure German film is very well-done. It's about a schizophrenic man who murders uncontrollably. The film features very innovative camera work (at the time) which includes a recurring POV shot that will impress, no doubt. What makes this film tough to watch is the very realistic murder scenes, which include a graphic rape/murder and the long, drawn-out drowning death of an invalid. It reaches levels of intensity seen in other great psycho films like Seul Contre Tous and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. The lead actor is very convincing, and makes you feel sorry for him as well as loathe him. A highly recommended film. MAT ZODIAC, IMDb

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It is Rybczyński, though, who by all accounts was the real driving force behind the innovative and mind-blowing cinematic experience that is “Angst.” To visually convey the killer’s twisted psychology, he employed an experimental technique in which he shot with the camera upside-down and reflected off an attached mirror. In post-production, the negative was reversed to make the images appear correct. It’s a seamless effect, but still jarring, and adds to the otherworldly atmosphere of a living nightmare.  Erik McClanahan, IndieWire

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LOGLINE

The Fourth Dimension shows a couple (Adam and Eve) and various objects, simultaneously, in time, space and movement.

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SYNOPSIS

A poetical, erotic, surreal, and strangely metaphysical masterpiece. Bizarre, gliding shapes twist around each other, creating Dali-esque ballet. Bodies merge, stretch, curl, twist, and elongate- melting from the top of the frame and recomposing at the bottom. Light beams undulate like water, shadows curl around objects, fire rotate in midair, flowers and rocks intertwine, doors peal open and melt shut.
Words don't do justice to this dream of evolving and devolving caught in a musical web by Michal Urbaniak.

 

 

ZBIG ABOUT THE FOURTH DIMENSION

I got the idea for this film at the time of New Book, but I did not have the chance to translate it into images early on. I shot the actors in their sets with all the movements, then in the printing phase, I visualized the image in 480 lines and reproduced the images delaying, for example, each frame by one line. Thus, the last line ended up being 480 images later in respect to the higher one, so that when the head of a character is rotated, his feet are still in their original position.

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LOGLINE

The Art of Fashion shows a woman changing her clothes,  inspired by Botticelli's painting. 

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LOGLINE

A short story about a man, who after losing his family has lost himself in his memories, alcohol, and visions. He knows that he has to stop blaming himself for losing them, but it seems to be something he can't overcome. The question is: who has lost whom?

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Cast

Petros: Argiris Thanasoulas

Angela: Nina Adamopoulou

Skia: Antigoni Doomou

Daughter: Rania Gossiar

 

Crew

Producer:  Dorota Zglobicka

Screenplay, Director: Dorota Zglobicka

D.O.P: Dionisis Likiardopoulos, Kosmas Kokkaris

1st assistant director: Olga Bakopoulou

Production manager: Efstathios Matsouris

Costumes: Christina Mathea

Choreographer: Olga Spyraki

Photographer: Kosmas Kokkaris

Editing: Dorota Zglobicka

Composer: Adrian Newgent

Sound mixing: Szymon Straburzyński

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DESCRIPTION

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A collection of experimental films where Zbig kept working on his inventions and created his motion control system which was finalized and realized in Kafka.  

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1981
WDECH-WYDECH(Inhale-Exhale) - 35mm paradocumental film, 30 min, in collaboration with B.Dziworski, SMFF Se-Ma-For Lodz, for TVP, Poland

1980
TANGO - 35mm short film, 8:14, SMFF Se-Ma-For Lodz, Poland
MEDIA - 35mm short film, 1:36, SMFF Se-Ma-For Lodz, Poland
SCENY NARCIARSKIE Z FRANZEM KLAMMEREM (Ski Scenes with Franz Klammer) - 35mm documental film, in collaboration with B.Dziworski, WFO Lodz, Poland and Signal Film, Vienna

1979
MEIN FENSTER(My Window) - 35mm short film, 2:26, Vienna

1976
OJ! NIE MOGE SIE ZATRZYMACI! (Oh, I Can't Stop!) - 35mm short film, 10:07, SMFF Se-Ma-For Lodz, Poland
WEG ZUM NACHBARN (Way To Your Neighbor) - 35mm short film, 2:30, SMFF Se-Ma-For Lodz, Poland

1975
NOWA KSIAZKA (New Book) - 35mm short film, 10:26, SMFF Se-Ma-For Lodz, Poland
LOKOMOTYWA (Locomotive) - 35mm short film, 9:38, SMFF Se-Ma-For Lodz, Poland
SWIETO (Holiday) - 35mm short film, 9:38, SMFF Se-Ma-For Lodz, Poland

1974
ZUPA (Soup) - 35mm short film, 8:22, SMFF Se-Ma-For Lodz, Poland

1973
PLAMUZ (Music Art) - 35mm short film, 9:38, SMFF Se-Ma-For Lodz, Poland

1972
KWADRAT (Square) - 35mm short film, 4:40, PWSTiF Lodz, Poland
TAKE FIVE - 35mm short film, 3:36, PWSTiF Lodz, Poland

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