Zbigniew Rybczyński
Zbigniew Rybczyński is a Polish filmmaker, director, cinematographer, screenwriter, creator of experimental animated films, and multimedia artist who has won numerous prestigious industry awards both in the United States and internationally including the 1983 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for Tango.
The short film Tango interweaves the looping action of thirty six characters playing out different stage of life - (running the full gamut of conception to birth to death) - in a single room. This complicated and beguiling orchestration of movement, made in 1981, uses a hand-painted matting technique that won an Oscar for best short film in 1983. Here, it is shown as an installation with a print of its visual score that shows the orchestration of this meticulous and mesmerising work.
Tango won the Academy Award for Best Short Animation in 1983. It is a mesmerising animation set entirely in one room in which a series of events - some naughty - take place, repeat and overlap each other in time to a tango soundtrack.
"Thirty-six characters from different stages of life - representations of different times - interact in one room, moving in loops, observed by a static camera. I had to draw and paint about 16.000 cell-mattes, and make several hundred thousand exposures on an optical printer. It took a full seven months, sixteen hours per day, to make the piece. The miracle is that the negative got through the process with only minor damage, and I made less than one hundred mathematical mistakes out of several hundred thousand possibilities. In the final result, there are plenty of flaws ® black lines are visible around humans, jitters caused by the instability of film material resulting from film perforation and elasticity of celluloid, changes of colour caused by the fluctuation in colour temperature of the projector bulb and, inevitably, dirt, grain and scratches.”
- Zbig Rybczynski –Looking to the Future - Imagining the Truth,” in FranÐois Penz, Maureen Thomas, Cinema& Architecture. Mþliús, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia, BFI, London, 1997
*****
"In Tango, Rybczynski exploits this concept of the single offscreen space by filling it with a plethora of actions. It soon becomes obvious that such a small space, that of a small room, could not possibly contain all the actions taking place. Rybczynski also makes critical use of off-screen space, exposing it for the artifice it is. Off-screen space is the imaginary area beyond the edge of the screen, and in front of or behind the camera. There are a number of ways through to off-screen space in Tango - a window and a door in the back wall, doors on either side of the room, and cupboard which also has its uses. Rybczynski orchestrates his entrances and exits with great precision.”
- Roger Noake, Animation Techniques, Secaucus, Chartwell Books Inc., 1988.
AWARDS
Oscar - for Best Animated Short Film, Academy Awards® 1983, Jury Commendation for Experimental Technique and Prize of the Public - Ottawa, Canada 1982, Best Animation - Tamperee, Finland 1982, Grand Prize and Prize of the Public - Annency, France 1981, Grand Prize and Fipresci Award - Oberhausen Film Festival, Germany 1981, Grand Prize and Prize of the Public - Hueska, Spain 1981, Main Prize - Cracow Film Festival, Poland 1981