I cut and paste my post from Fileheaven. More links will be added when the first has spreaded.
RaroVideo
Zbig's site
Kwadrat (Square)
1972, Poland, 4’, 35mm, Colour
Zupa (Soup)
1974, Poland, 10’, 35mm, Black and White and Colour
Swieto (Holiday)
1975, Poland, 12’30”, 35mm, Black and White and Colour
Nowa ksiazka (New Book)
1975, Poland, 12’30”, 35mm, Colour
Mein Fenster (My Window)
1979, Austria, 2’30”, 35mm, Colour
Media
1980, Poland, 1’40”, 35mm, Black and White and Colour
Tango
1980, Poland, 10’, 35mm, Colour
Steps
1987, USA/UK, 29’30”, video, Colour
[The Fourth Dimension
1988, USA/Italy/France, 32’, 35mm/video, Colour
L’Orchestre
1990, France/USA, 71’50”, video, Colour
EXTRA
Introduction made by Rybczynski to his works
Zbig chef d’orchestre (making-of of L’Orchestre)
The Fourth Dimension(1988)
ed2k:
Zbig Rybczynski - The Fourth Dimension - DVDRip.ogm 
Codec: ffmpeg
Video bitrate (kbps): 1437
Size:283MB
Lenght:27 min
Resolution: 508 x 366
Audio:Vorbis 128kbps VBR
Language: Wordless, just music
Info:
"The Fourth Dimension was (concerned) with electronic sculpture. The bodies of the two performers re-evoke the iconography of Adam and Eve of Flemish or Renaissance painting. They merge with space and objects, and plunge into a spiral between them (by way of a time gap in reading the images). This occurs in front of windows through which Magritte-like cloudy skies can be glimpsed. Magritte, however, has been a consistent iconographic reference in Rybczynski’s universe, drawn with hyperrealist precision (and definition), peopled with figures that rise in space from “objects of affection” that come to the surface. Magritte-like was the saxophone in flames that danced on the beach in the clip Hot Shot (1985) with Jimmy Cliff. In addition to the skies, the interiors also reminded of Magritte in The Fourth Dimension: the cold dance, the anamorphic rotation of the man and the woman caked with pixels, moulded in the light of the sunset or of the night. They are immobile figures though variable in spatial continuity, pierced by liquefied door and window frames as Boccioni would do. The threshold – once again Imagine comes to mind – is one of the obsessions most intensely cultivated by Zbig, since it symbolizes one dimension piercing into another, life as much as vision. Yet the threshold here is internal to the texture and becomes “folded” in Deleuze’s terms (quoted by Virilio precisely in reference to this video)."
Warning:
This is a DVDRip, and the source is the *official* DVD, so it's likely to be the best copy around. Yet the picture quality is not as good as I expected. Anyway, if you are even faintly interested in avant-garde cinema, animation or computer graphics you should see this movie ( ok, the representation of gender looks a bit ideological, but then ideology never looked so good... )
L'Orchestre [and its Making Of] (1990)
ed2k:
Zbig Rybczynski - L'Orchestre - DVDRip.ogm Codec: ffmpeg
Video bitrate (kbps): 1601
Size:612MB
Lenght:58 min
Resolution: 496x298
Audio:Vorbis 128kbps VBR
Language: Wordless, just music
ed2k:
Zbig Rybczynski - Making of L'Orchestre - DVDRip.ogm Codec: ffmpeg
Video bitrate (kbps): 961
Size:190MB
Lenght:25 min
Resolution: 488 x 378
Audio:Vorbis 128kbps VBR
Language: English
Info:
"The idea of “musical paintings” was magnified in L’Orchestre and applied to six classical compositions. The rules of the game still stayed the same: the multiplication of characters, their uninterrupted handing over of the relay baton to run through one spatial context to another, in the fluidity of the action which only ends when the song is over and the scene changes. A virtual scene, but also a literal one, since it all takes place inside an eighteenth-century theatre. The first shot – conceived to the music of Mozart’s Concerto No. 21 – consists of a dance of elderly ladies and gentlemen who, getting up from their beds, wander aimlessly, meet, and go searching for each other down garden lanes. This was shot by an advancing camera oscillating from right to left. The second – based on Chopin’s Funeral March – returned to the idea of horizontal series that can be found in Imagine. The link is an interminable piano keyboard played by fantastic creatures that embodied the passage from childhood to adulthood, from the time of courting to first loves, and old age. The same contiguity can be found in the next shot with Adagio by Albinoni, which accompanies Lev Shekhtman’s long walk on wooden tables suspended in midair, as in a Buster Keaton comedy. Here the lost character comes across women in their underwear and men with crutches who must inexorably keep falling. The music of La gazza ladra inspires visions much more lively and spectacular of the following shot, set in the galleries of the Louvre (where Gericault’s Le radeau de la Meduse thrones). Here the spirit of Méliès lingers even crazier than ever, in the plays of screens and white cloth, from which characters and objects appeared and disappeared as if they were swallowed up together with the camera in an extraordinary and dazzling choreographic vortex. In some moments in L’Orchestre, Rybczynski increased to the umpteenth power the mixture of irony and eroticism, an eroticism amplified by the fluidity of the electronic material. This is what also occurs in the fifth shot, in which the same bodies of a man and a woman float in the nave of a cathedral, creating sensuous geometries to the notes of Ave Maria.
L’Orchestre could only end with a grand finale in crescendo. Ravel’s Bolero suggested to Rybczynski the idea of the long march of Communism: a procession of characters who climb the steps of interminable stairs (in fact this was a variation on the theme of Steps) against the background of a sun (that of socialism) now setting. Workers, peasants, bureaucrats, Communist youth groups, party heads, KGB agents, with signs, posters, red flags and portraits, diagonally cross the field. The parade ends with the image of Marx, Fidel Castro and Stalin who trip while bearing a coffin with the skeleton of Communism. With this metaphor (the Berlin Wall had been torn down the year before) the curtain falls. After so much music, at the end credits only the purifying sound of little birds can be heard."
Notes: Very different from "The 4th dimension", this is often pure slapstick. The last segment is the famous "Stairway to Lenin", nearly 20 minutes of ( deceptively ) continuous shot as the swarming history of ( mostly russian ) communism climbs neverending flights of stairs.
The resolution may seem too low, but the picture was already softy so I kept the bits where they were most useful ( lot of movement here ) ( I'm not *really* sure I know what I'm talking about, so if you know better please advise...
)The Making Of is included, as this is definitely one of those "how the hell they've done it" kind of movies.
Various Shorts(1972-1980)
ed2k:
Zbig Rybczynski - Kwadrat - DVDRip.ogm ed2k:
Zbig Rybczynski - Mein Fenster - DVDRip.ogm ed2k:
Zbig Rybczynski - Media - DVDRip.ogm ed2k:
Zbig Rybczynski - Nowa Ksiazka - DVDRip.ogm ed2k:
Zbig Rybczynski - Zupa - DVDRip.ogm ed2k:
Zbig Rybczynski - Swieto - DVDRip.ogm ed2k:
Zbig Rybczynski - Tango - DVDRip.ogm Codec: ffmpeg
Video bitrate (kbps): >1000kbps
Resolution: all are around the 640x480 standard
Audio:Vorbis 128kbps VBR
Language: Mostly wordless
ed2k:
Zbig Rybczynski talks about his works - DVDRip.ogm Codec: ffmpeg
Video bitrate (kbps): >86kbps (this is just a talking head...)
Resolution: 256 x 192
Audio:Vorbis 128kbps VBR
Language: English
Info:
" Rybczynski’s early films focused upon the ambiguity between figurative and abstract modes through an extolling of the kinetic coefficient. His film Kwadrat (1972) begins with a simple white square – a shape which directly evokes the film frame – first split into four parts which are then multiplied again until the effect typical of the photographic halftone screen or of the enlarged electronic pixel is created. Little by little, as the squares become smaller and smaller, a human figure emerges, photographed and then animated against a black background as it performs various movements. As soon as the play of deconstruction and reconstruction intensifies, colour appears in the black and white and, at the end of the film, the coloured squares again merge, enlarge, then become smaller again to form the original white square at the point of departure. The cycle from abstract to figurative and vice versa has come full circle. Though Rybczynski was still using film and the techniques of stop animation, he was already thinking in electronic terms. He thus prefigured the transition from cinema to video which he would actually make ten years later. The square is the central element of the film. Yet this is not used as a basic element as in Richter’s work a half a century before, “to orchestrate space and articulate time”. Rather, Rybczynski used it as the image’s smallest unit, a simulation of television or computer texture and reinvented through a totally graphic device.
Both Zupa and Swieto (1975) were characterized by a narrative structure and were based on the technique of animated photography. The elements of the collage were in black and white yet some were painted colour. Both of these shorts were studies of the nightmare of everyday life through the obsessive repetition of the gestures of certain situations. In Zupa the tone was decidedly surreal and there is a meta-ending. The hero – holding the soup plate of the title, an allusion to the boredom and squalor of life – throws open a door/threshold to the unconscious and plunges into the void. The subsequent image was the film itself consumed in flames as comes out of its sprocket holes. In Swieto however, Zbig describes the usual routine of a bank holiday and a family gathering. The father only takes his car out of the garage to wash it, and then immediately puts it back into the garage again. Two lovers slip away for a quick one, etc. No less important – in this film as in other films by the Polish director – was the use of sound in a hyperbolic function: the creaking of a door, the growling of a dog, or the peeping of a chick were amplified to render reality mechanical and therefore more alienating[...]
Nowa ksiazka , however, was a study of surfaces which – as Italo Calvino reminded us in his Palomar – can be infinite. The deconstruction of a shot in nine “windows” that look out over the world, corresponding to just as many contiguous environments in which various characters live, gave viewers a new “reading” of mise en scène. It forced them to rethink narrative space and time simultaneously. In this series of nine sequence shots, there was a child who plays with a ball, men who take the bus, labourers at work. They all pass from one frame to another, suggesting to us that they are all nearby in the same block. Even though – paradoxically – Rybczynski shot the film in three different cities, and thus created his own imaginary topography. In its structure as hypertext, more than to film, Nowa ksiazka already refers to the marvellous possibilities of electronic art. The opening of windows inside the shot springs from the need to overcome the idea of editing in favour of a co-existence of different points of view. This resulted in a structure whose reconstruction is so difficult for viewers that they have to see the film several times in a row before they can comprehend the whole of its combinations.
Five years later, in Tango (1980), the Polish artist continued to represent reality in a simultaneous way. Nevertheless he began from a reverse process, that is, he grouped dozens of characters in a single shot. The usual little boy playing with a ball, a thief, a man who tries to hang himself, a woman who undresses... all the extras in Tango went through their solitary actions into infinity inside a bedroom. In fact, each one lived in his or her individual portion of space, barely coming into contact with the lives of the others. Tango also inevitably referred to a discourse between technique and specifics, to a comparison between analogue texture and the effects created digitally. The patient work of pixilation, photographic collage and mattes (16,000 cell-mattes), which was combined with a superb use of an optical printer, was the prelude to more sophisticated techniques of electronic processing (Ultimatte, a type of matte which combines foregrounds and backgrounds) that Rybczynski only used a few years later, once he had emigrated from destitute Poland to the affluent United States. In other words, if the director had had access to the hardware in 1980 that he used later for dozens of musical videos and works in high definition, he would have been spared the hard work of months and months in “re-animating” the various cut-out figures.
Yet the fascination of Tango is contained precisely in the imperfection of analogue techniques of animation. It is easy to see the trick every so often, that is the black area of the matte which was used to insert a new character on screen or to make one action co-exist with another in a mad mechanism of spatial compression. Magician Rybczynski was successful in introducing a portion of the world in that little bedroom – and in the even more microscopic space of the frame. In addition to working through multiplication or synthesis of points of view, the director, in two other shorts of that period, Weg Zum Nachbarn (1976) and Mein Fenster (1979), described the chaos of reality. This was thanks to a very simple and effective idea: the rotation of the shot by 360°, which threw the inside in disorder. In the first case, an unfortunate gentleman who was victim of this fatal angle begins to slip to the right, along with a suitcase and other objects which go off screen. He is forced to cling to a traffic signs pole to not completely plunge, when the shot is by then totally upside down. Shot in black and white, scratched on purpose and accompanied by a little tune played by a piano, the film clearly paid tribute to silent movies. Mein Fenster was a variation on the same theme regarding the dependent relationship between frame and image, container and content, representation and the profilmic. On screen there was a television switched on, a bottle, and a small cage with a little bird in it. To complete the entire rotation cycle was a news commentator, some wine and the little canary, while everything else remained immobile, including the shot. Here it was no longer the camera that altered reality, but the very real that altered itself before the camera’s objective point of view.
The play of frames was more evident in Media (1980) which was an anticipation in miniature of the contrast between cinema and video. Years later Rybczynski fully experimented with this in his Steps. Just as in the music video Sex Machine, this conflict, which was created between two spatial dimensions, was basically born out of Zbig’s attraction for collage. Here a man in waist shot, framed by the viewfinder of a moviola (a tool of cinema, therefore). He starts to play with a balloon (the recurring childhood image-memory not only in Duel but also in L’Orchestre). The image was reproduced in black and white on a small monitor (an electronic tool), which hops on the editing table to these movements. Through the shot, the monitor internally re-cut portions of space which were part of the field of vision, that is, of a first level of the image. In short, the video functioned as a magnifying lens which a hand drew over the page of a book creating an uneven surface. The decoupage between the film image and the video image was interrupted as soon as the balloon burst and the bearded man emerged out of the viewfinder. The last image of Media – with the film inside the moviola’s viewfinder that comes out of the sprocket holes leaving the little white film screen and, on the left side, the monitor switched on – may be read as the metaphor of a new period. Indeed this was the director’s departure for the United States, as he was also gradually leaving film and first converted to the electronic medium. Then immediately afterwards, he went on to experiments in high definition. "
Note: Weg Zum Nachbarn is in the same file as Media
Steps (1987)
ed2k:
Zbig Rybczynski - Steps - DVDRip.ogm Codec: ffmpeg
Video bitrate (kbps): 1560
Size:300MB
Lenght:26 min
Resolution: 506 x 396
Audio:Vorbis 128kbps VBR
Deinterlacer filter: Smartyuv (this was good!)
Language: English
Info:
"This resulted in the intelligently ironical work Steps (1987) in which, for the first time, Rybczynski adopted a full-fledged narrative structure and used dialogues. This time characters originating from two different dimensions were brought together in the same image: photochemical bodies in black and white on one hand - the inhabitants of Odessa massacred by the soldiers of Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin; on the other hand, electronic and coloured images of some of the “worthy” representatives of American society who found themselves parachuted into one of the most famous sequences of film history. The bodies slightly touch, crisscross, pierce one into the other. Yet each remains in its own temporal and structural dimension (a bit like the crowd in Tango). The blood of the victims of the Tsarist repression of 1905 becomes mere ink that stains the frivolous garish tourists who – driven by morbid curiosity and an unstoppable cynicism – film the scene from the inside with both video and photographic cameras. Thus they create a fatal short circuit in its representation, and the device is explicitly revealed for once. Indeed Steps begins and ends in a television studio where the blue screen had been set up. It was used to produce the superimpositions between backgrounds and figures thanks to the so-called chroma-key, a basic stylistic element – as Alessandro Amaducci so justly pointed out 3 – present in all of Rybczynski’s work. The dramatic steps sequence created by Eisenstein was set up again for the occasion by a well-meaning and enthusiastic Soviet civil servant, and admiringly commented by a mysterious American film director, John Kane Jr (an allusion to Charles Foster Kane, and therefore to Orson Welles?). Thus the sequence can incite only slight consternation and discomfort among the American tourists, incapable of understanding neither the allusion to Russian history nor the cinematic avant-garde the film represented.
Zbig repeated the impossible encounter between two temporally distant realities on two other occasions. "
(Trep, you are really my hero! glad to see you here.)
