Accompanying DVD contains ten short movies: Rynek / Józef Robakowski (4:21) -- Test / Józef Robakowski (2:10) -- Okno / Ryszard Waśko (8:25) -- 1,2,3 ćwiczenie operatorskie / Paweł Kwiek (7:54) -- Ćwiczenie / Józef Robakowski (4:20) -- YYAA / Wojciech Bruszewski -- Ide / Józef Robakowski (2:35) -- Zaprzeczenie / Ryszard Waśko (4:00) -- Obszar / Kazimierz Bendkowski (4:43) -- A-B-C-D-E-F = 1-36 / Ryszard Waśko (6:10).

This is the first comprehensive English-language account of the Polish avant-garde film, from its beginnings in the early decades of the last century to the collapse of communism in 1989. Taking a broad understanding of avant-garde film, this collection includes writings on the pioneering work of the internationally-acclaimed Franciszka and Stefan Themerson; the Polish Futurists' (Jalu Kurek, Anatol Stern) engagement with film; the Thaw and animation (Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk, Andrzej Pawlowski, Zbigniew Rybczynski); documentary (Natalia Brzozowska, Kazimierz Karabasz, Wojciech Wiszniewski), Polish émigré filmmakers (Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Andrzej Zulawski) as well as essays and documentation on the highly influential Film Form Workshop (Józef Robakowski, Ryszard Wasko, Wojciech Bruszewski). Including a mix of historical writings from early film magazines with commissioned essays, this book constitutes an important source on the rich, complex and diverse history of the Polish film avant-garde, which is presented from the perspective of both British (A. L. Rees, Jonathan Owen, Michael O'Pray) and Polish (Marcin Gizycki, Ryszard Kluszczynski, Kamila Kuc) authorities on the subject. This book is thus an indispensable introduction to the theories and practices of critically important avant-garde artists and filmmakers.

Artists’ Film offers a lucid, accessible account of artists’ unique contribution to the art of the moving image in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. International in scope and accessibly written by a renowned authority on the subject, Artists’ Film is an introductory guide to the exciting and expanding field of artists’ film and an alternative history of the moving image, chronicling artists’ ever-evolving fascination with filmmaking from the early twentieth century to now. From early pioneers to key artists of today, writer and curator David Curtis offers a vivid account of the many creators who have been inspired by the cinematic medium and who have felt compelled to interpret and respond to it in their own way. In doing so, Curtis discusses these artists’ widely differing achievements, aspirations, theories, and approaches. Featuring over four hundred international moving-image makers and drawing on examples from across the arts, including experimental film, video, installation, and multimedia, this generously illustrated account offers an incomparable introduction to this continually evolving art form. A perfect read for anyone with an interest in the intersection of contemporary art and film.

How artists wield demonstration to question the status quo both aesthetically and politically, marshaling art and education as powerful agents of change. Demonstration, in short, says: See here. It is the practice of pointing to something in order to explain or contest it. As such, Sven Spieker argues that demonstration has helped reshape art from the height of the Cold War to the late twentieth century, reformatting our understanding of how art and political engagement relate to each other. Focusing on Western Europe (especially Germany), Eastern Europe, and the United States, Art as Demonstration expands on contemporary discussions of art-as-protest, activism, and resistance. Spieker shows how a closer, more historical look at art’s connection with demonstration reconnects us with earlier efforts, notably by the early twentieth-century avant-garde, to marshal art for the purpose of instruction and engagement. Art as Demonstration reconceives the history of postwar art in Eastern and Western Europe from the perspective of demonstration, understood formally (as a technique for showing and pointing) as well as politically (as protest, resistance, etc.). Close analyses of individual artworks reveal how the deployment of demonstration has changed over time. Spieker shows how “protest” and “resistance” organize art and artists not only politically but also and especially formally and aesthetically—a development of particular importance in the Cold War art and politics of Eastern Europe. The book illustrates how from the 1960s onward demonstration radically changed the way artists thought about art: no longer as an object but as a form of education.

This book explores music/sound-image relationships in non-mainstream screen repertoire from the earliest examples of experimental audiovisuality to the most recent forms of expanded and digital technology. It challenges presumptions of visual primacy in experimental cinema and rethinks screen music discourse in light of the aesthetics of non-commercial imperatives. Several themes run through the book, connecting with and significantly enlarging upon current critical discourse surrounding realism and audibility in the fiction film, the role of music in mainstream cinema, and the audiovisual strategies of experimental film. The contributors investigate repertoires and artists from Europe and the USA through the critical lenses of synchronicity and animated sound, interrelations of experimentation in image and sound, audiovisual synchresis and dissonance, experimental soundscape traditions, found-footage film, re-mediation of pre-existent music and sound, popular and queer sound cultures, and a diversity of radical technological, aesthetic, tropes in film media traversing the work of early pioneers such as Walther Ruttmann and Len Lye, through the mid-century innovations of Norman McLaren, Stan Brakhage, Lis Rhodes, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and studio collectives in Poland, to latter-day experimentalists John Smith and Bill Morrison, as well as the contemporary practices of Vjing.

Workshop of the Film Form provides an in-depth overview of the achievements of Warsztat Formy Filmowej (WWF; Workshop of the Film Form), a group of avant-garde artists who were working at the Leon Schiller National Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre in Lodz, Poland, between 1970 and 1977. WWF was founded by the students and graduates of the school, now known as the National Film School, and included: Wojciech Bruszewski, Paweł Kwiek, Andrzej Różycki, Józef Robakowski, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Kazimierz Bendkowski, Antoni Mikołajczyk, Janusz Połom, and Ryszard Waśko. As pioneers of video art in Poland and structural cinema in Central and Eastern Europe, the artists refused classical narrative and traditional film media, working instead somewhere between cinematography and contemporary art. This publication examines all aspects of WFF's activity, from their films, photographic experiments, video art, and performative actions to their teaching work, which includes previously unexplored pedagogical contributions to the National Film School. Drawing on the private archives and oral testimonies of the WWF, Workshop of the Film Form attempts to provide a full account of the group's history as well as a comprehensive survey of each member's practice. The writers who were invited to respond to the WWF for this book provide insightful new readings of the group's output and activities, contextualizing their work in the history of the prewar Polish avant-garde and the politics of experimental filmmaking in Poland under the rule of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR). Copublished with Fundacja Arton