Zbig Rybczynski’s celebrated avant-garde career is the focus of this three-disc DVD set. All images © Zbig Vision Ltd.

Zbig Rybczynski is a technician, artist, and lapsed animator. As an experimental filmmaker Rybczynski put in some hardcore hours at the animation stand in the 1970s and early ‘80s producing short films like the Academy Award-winning Tango (1980), a bouillabaisse of overlapping looped action sequences playing out in a small furnished room. His films’ constituent parts are always documentary reality captured with movie cameras, but they enter the realm of animation through his manipulations, as he collapses and reverses time, deconstructs objects into geometric patterns and applies surreal color schemes. In three DVDs now available through the artist’s Website, the works of Zbig Rybczynski are being redistributed, a turn of events that should gladden the hearts of avant-garde enthusiasts everywhere.

Rybczynski was born in Poland in 1949. A Los Angeles resident, he has taught at Poland’s Lodz Film School, New York’s Columbia University and Cologne’s Academy of Media Arts. The first DVD in the set, Media, includes works he created in Poland and Germany between 1972 and 1980. The first two items are color-wheel freakouts: Kwadrat (1972) anticipates the mosaic effects of digital photography as a single screen-sized white square subdivides itself, moving from one-bit resolution to a photographic representation of a person in motion. A four-color scheme is introduced, images overlap and blend and the resolution retreats back to a single white square. Plamuz (1973) is free jazz; black-and-white footage of a small jazz ensemble is stuffed into a psychedelic food processor as images break up into multicolored grids of alternating colors and shapes.

Nowa Ksiazka (New Book) weaves nine stories within 10 minutes.

Nowa Ksiazka (New Book, 1975) is Rybczynski’s first foray into narrative, and it’s enough to make your head spin. Nine films play out at once in a tic-tac-toe formation. The action all takes place within a few city blocks. A man in a red trenchcoat exits his apartment, and, over the course of 10 minutes, he ventures out into the city to buy a new book, chat with a friend in a bar, and sit on a park bench. The nine cameras are strategically placed so that we never lose sight of him. Simple enough — but just try to get your head around watching the interactions of the other characters, all perfectly synched between frames: a boy bouncing a ball into an open window, a blind violinist busking, workmen hoisting buckets, a postman doing rounds. Furthermore the films aren’t progressing at speed; they’re stopping and starting, racing and crawling, rolling forwards and backwards. The kicker comes at the seven-and-a-half minute mark, when a unifying accident occurs in all nine frames at once. Quirk of fate, act of God, or bibliographic voodoo? Who can say.