Surreal images make up Zupa (Soup).

Zupa (Soup, 1974) is a slice-of-life hallucination of domestic life, a nightmare riff on courtship, marriage and living together. It opens in a dream — the sound of deep breathing is played under a looped image of a building collapsing and rebuilding itself. A man opens a door to see himself drowning at sea, and he rips the sea off the wall like wallpaper. Then he wakes, and his situation doesn’t improve. The film plays out as an illustrated game of free-association — the food on his spoon eats a chunk off his face; a two-tailed dog dances with a two-headed dog; and there’s a derailed train in his soup. The soundtrack is appropriately Dada, with a licked stamp screeching like a rusty gate. Blocks of false color jump and clash, and the piece ends as the burnt film tail seizes in the gate and melts.

Oj! Nie Moge Sie Zatrzymac! (Oh, I Can’t Stop! 1976) is another short nightmare, this one with a punchline, shot from the point of view of something that has slowly emerged from the forest to terrify the local population. Over nine minutes, this unseen beast zips around and through an unnamed Polish town, jumping fences and leaping in windows and out of doors as it goes increasingly and impossibly faster towards a sudden and sticky end. Shot as a series of stills, this breathtaking piece is a breakneck tour of an entire metropolis, a sort of blitzkrieg travelogue of Communist-era Poland, and on home video it’s a still-framer’s paradise.

Orange people get the day off in Swieto (Holiday, 1975), an elaborate meditation on prosaic human activities. In just a few scenes intercut over time, a man washes his car, a couple have sex in the park and a family gathers for an outdoor meal. In every shot the camera has been locked down and Rybczynski has kept only about eight frames from every second of footage, and he rocks the action back and forth, speeding and slowing, so a simple family greeting on a staircase becomes an endless festival of smooching noises and hearty embraces. Everyone glows reddish-orange, and, diabolically, every frame is separated from its neighbor with a short dissolve. The results are drolly comic; the act of watching a man pulls his car out of the garage, wash it, and then put it back without driving anywhere is made even more poignant by the baroque means used to depict his activity.

Orange people populate Swieto (Holiday).

Grouped at the end of the disc are three hilarious riffs on the concept of TV-screen-as-proscenium. Weg zum Nachbarn (The Way to Your Neighbour, 1976) is a silent-comedy era throwback filmed in grainy black-and-white. A traveler falls asleep under a road sign, and, while he naps, the camera slowly rotates clockwise 180 degrees while the gravity stays firmly planted on the bottom of the screen. Only luck and a fierce somnambulant grip on the road sign prevent the traveler from falling off the planet. In Mein Fenster (My Window, 1979); the exact opposite occurs; gravity goes for a joyride as a simple domestic scene — television, wine bottle, bird in a cage — is subjected to a slowly loop-de-looping gravitational force. And a TV goes spinning in Media (1980), a sweet vignette where a man stuck in a Moviola plays around with a balloon whose movements are followed by a similarly lighter-than-air television set.

The disc culminates with Rybczynski’s Oscar-winning short Tango (1980), a dance choreographed for 21 teams. There’s a room with three doors, a window, a wardrobe, a bed, a crib and a table. A ball flies in the window, and a boy climbs in after it, retrieves it, and exits — and a ball flies in the window. And a boy climbs in after it. It’s a loop, and over the course of eight minutes, 20 more action loops appear, from a naked woman putting on a dress to a man falling while reaching for a light fixture to a man endlessly stealing a parcel from the wardrobe. Everyone darts to and fro, moving obliviously around and beside each other, until, one by one, they exit. This monster job of rotoscoping and sequencing is still capable of taking the breath away.

The second DVD in the series is Steps, and includes the title piece as well as the meditative Fourth Dimension. Steps (1987), a live-action video, has a killer film geek premise. Russia needs some cash, so it’s invited a group of American tourists to indulge in the ultimate filmic experience: Through the miracle of modern technology, you, yes YOU, can actually join in the famous Odessa Steps sequence of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin! This 25-minute short subject follows a gaggle of hamburger-munching Yankees as they walk in, around and through the advancing soldiers firing on the crowd in cinema’s most famous montage.