Media Art in Poland: Workshop of Film Form

An art group, Workshop of Film Form, was established in the year 1970 and started as an academic club at Lodz film school. The group was active between 1970 and 1977 where it criticized both educational systems and entire cinematography institution. Students and graduates of Leon Schiller National School joined together to form the workshop, and they were disappointed by school curriculum and teachings methods. Leon Schiller was a national school of film, television, and theatre. The Workshop of Film became most influential in Poland as it created a paradigm to investigate filmmaking throughout decades. The group founders had a wide range of interest and consisted prominent individual like Jozef Robakowski, Ryszard Wasko, Wojciech Bruszewski and Pawel Kwiek (Kaminska, 2016). Many other members joined the group later after its formation, shaping the experience from other groups like the amateur film club.

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The group referred the works of Stefan Themerson, a mentor from avant-garde movement, whose work existed in the year 1920s and 1930s (Guzek, 2017). In fact, the group borrowed Stefan's character, and it made it natural to collaborate with Lodz art museum. Within the workshop film form group, the members became able to form educational and research curriculum, which was independent of the school requirements. The workshop members became key figures in the art of Poland and film. At the workshop, group members performed experiments using structures of cinematic production, with aims to release it from narratives and literature confines. Such tasks proved them to be a profoundly subversive in Polish film and painted the team as the center of creative rebellion. Cinemas got a critique as the mindless creation of the imagined world, and this raised the need to analyze film medium in an attempt to unmask the ease of manipulation. Items like film cameras and portable video cameras were valuable tools of work, and these made the group to get a new alternative way to interpret reality.

The workshop film form criticized cinema for conforming much to literature, politics and as well as didacticism. Instead, the group preferred cinema to be self-reflective and disapproved role of directors, making the film form, an opaque medium, their principal interest. Workshop film form was so influential in that; they revealed the manipulation subjected to the commercial viewers of cinema. The group was remarkable for exercising the degree of freedom which its members enjoyed and had the quality professional equipment. The influence of workshop film form brought members together.

Jozef Robakowski: - The artist is said to belong to the circle of the outstanding multi and intermedia artists in Poland. The creations of Jozef became most recognized as the flagship of neo-avant-garde. Along with his artistic activities, he got engaged in curator and academic functions for an extended period. The artist graduated from fine art department in Milolaj Kopernik university, Torun. Also, he had a connection with the department of television, film and theatre academy in Lodz. In the year 1971 and 1981, he taught as a lecture in Lodz art and film theatre (Dziamski, 2014). Jozef Robakowski organized films workshops, television and creative group station, which took an experimental work to connect films, pictures, and sound. He worked with movies, videotapes, drawings, photographic series, exhibitions, conceptual projects, artistic actions and helped initiate events. Also, Jozef was an editor and a critic of contemporary art.

Jozef made his first footage film, 6000000, in the year 1962, which was one of the found footage in Poland. While making his footage, he worked simultaneously in two different artistic groups, the Petla and Zero-61. He negated formed boundaries between media, art and the real world, as well as between the artist and audience. His techniques of doing work influenced the Polish artists to deconstruct traditional art values and at the same time to intervene in surrounding realities. In Jozef's footage, 6000000, his sign of artistic transformation into a typical tactic form can get discerned. The artist plays tactic games in his film's structure, with artistic tradition. At the same time, he can be observed to delve deeply into the sphere of social-politics. In his footage, Jozef seems to combat a process of creative forgetting, whereby memory and forgetting get entwined inextricably. The memory gets viewed as a form of forgetting while forgetting on the other hand seen as a hidden memory.

By shaping the recollections in a dialectical manner, it influences contemporary public discourse on historical memory. Jozef seems to treat the visual culture as amnesia, an elimination of tension between past and present. When summoning up traumatic holocaust images in his footage, the artist criticizes an effort to make horrifying history tolerable and user-friendly (Stanczyk, 2014). His work seems apt nowadays in the era of historical memory, where museums are being constructed to resemble theatres for the culture of remembering. Jozef is known to experiment systematically with the technology of television. After drafting the video art by the name, A Chance to Approach Reality, he started formulating theories to see the connection between artists and medium (Jelewska & Krawczak, 2014). He regarded television an institution of artistic movement to manipulate people by instructing them how to live. Hence art is power.

References

Kaminska, A. (2016). Polish Media Art in an Expanded Field. Intellect.

Dziamski, G. (2014). Polish Files In The Lomholt Archive Of Mail Art. Art Inquiry. Recherches Sur Les Arts, (XVI (XXV)), 138-146.

Stanczyk, E. (2014). The Absent Jewish Child: Photography and Holocaust Representation in Poland. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 13(3), 360-380. Doi:10.1080/14725886.2014.951536

Guzek, L. (2017). What the avant-garde stands for today. Art Inquiry. Recherches sur les arts, 19, 45-56.

Jelewska, A., & Krawczak, M. (2014). The difficult relations between art, science and technology in Poland.