Tango

• Mieczyslaw Janik
• Janusz Hajdun
• Barbara Sarnocińska

The 1980 animated avant-garde film »Tango« by the Polish experimental filmmaker and artist Zbigniew Rybczyński begins with a boy climbing over a window into a room to retrieve a ball. A snapshot that is repeated seemingly endlessly in what follows. Gradually, the room fills up with more people repetitively performing everyday actions. Like in a choreographed dance, the 36 people circle through and around the room without ever colliding with each other.

On the one hand, the film interrogates the meaning of the off-screen setting. This is the space that is not usually depicted in the cinematic image but nevertheless determines the action. On the other hand, the crowded room, whose size could never accommodate all the people at the same time, reinforces the artificial character of the medium. Rybczyński created this effect by combining 16,000 painted and drawn cell-mattes. The various image elements were copied in with the help of an optical printer. The purely analog production process of this animation took several months.