Rybczynski uses iconic images by Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin for Steps.

We share personal space with the baby in the pram, the woman with the pince-nez and all those notorious Just Folks victims from Eisenstein’s masterpiece. It’s a great premise, and there are some good gags here, but the viewer gets the impression Rybczynski was more concerned with the mise-en-scene than the acting. Too often the more than a dozen speaking parts are delivered with no affect, and the comedy suffers. It could be this one is best watched like the silent film it emulates, with the sound down and some Rimsky-Korsakov on the stereo.

Also on disc two is The Fourth Dimension (1988), a trippy conceptual wonder where past, present and future share a single image. It’s an impressionistic piece, shot on video, depicting classical forms and modern props in a studio interior. A man and a woman, clothed and nude, pose in still life with doors, apples, fluted wine glasses, et al. Sometimes the subjects are still, sometimes they are revolving on wires or lazy Susans. The wrinkle is, each of the 30 frames you see every second contains parts of hundreds of frames; every horizontal scan line going in sequence down the face of the screen came from a different frame. In other words, there’s a continuous future/present/past scroll bar rolling down the screen at all times. This makes for some seriously surreal depictions of reality — when an actor or a marble bust revolve in a circle, the top of the head gets home first; doors peel open like bumper stickers off a backing; apples materialize in thin air before a woman’s mouth.

DVD three is taken up entirely by The Orchestra (1990), an hour-long tour-de-force co-produced by NHK, Canal Plus and PBS’ Great Performances. This is Rybczynski’s Allegro Non Troppo in composite live-action. The interiors were shot on location at the Louvre, the Cathedral at Chartres and the Paris Opera House; the actors were shot separately and composited via blue screen. Not a word is spoken as six classical pieces are illustrated with Rybczynski’s trademark surrealist multi-element bluescreen compositing. Mozart’s pastoral Andante from Piano Concerto No. 21 is the underscore for a trip through an endless formal garden populated by formally dressed elderly men and women in various stages of decrepitude. Chopin’s funereal Piano Sonata No. 2 is the theme to a mournful communion with the dead, as crowds of European men and women — healthy, starving, courting, grieving — flash in and out of vision before the ivories of a thousand-key piano.

Past, present and future come together in The Orchestra.

Albinoni’s elegiac Adagio in G Minor is illustrated with a trip to the clouds, as a man rises into the heavens and goes for a walk along an endless curb in the sky that a group of luckless characters call home. The Louvre is the setting for a jaunty take on Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, where a group of soldiers in full dress would like nothing more than to shed their uniforms after wooing the gaggle of sexy maidens that surrounds them. Schubert’s Ave Maria is played out in a cathedral, where male and female figures soar into the rafters in a delicate aerial ballet.

Rybczynski closes with Ravel’s Bolero, and as Maurice Ravel and Bruno Bozzetto both knew, if you’re going to illustrate this mad exercise in orchestration you’d better have a good joke in mind. In this case it’s one of the best: Communism, whose tale is told from beginning to (then-contemporary) end along the length of an endless staircase peopled with peasants, workers, and secret police with portable phones.

DVDs two and three are interesting artifacts of late-1980s video techniques; DVD one, at least, is a must-have for animators. (Sadly, there’s enough in Rybczynski’s oeuvre to justify a fourth disc compiling his many music videos from 1984-9, including such notables as The Pet Shop Boys’ Opportunities, Rush’s Time Stands Still and the immortal chainsaw-showcasing Close to the Edit for Art of Noise. Unfortunately a Mongol horde of competing publishing interests undoubtedly prohibits such a collection from ever existing.) All three DVDs are zone-free NTSC and are available through Rybczynski’s Website, www.zbigvision.com.

Taylor Jessen is a writer and archivist living in Burbank. He has written more than a dozen impossible avant-garde screenplays, as well as the short stories Chateau Tempestuoso and The Footnote Conspiracy. His article on the production history of the animated feature Twice Upon a Time will appear in Animation Blast #9 in April 2004.