The Games Poles Play

Józef Robakowski, one of the precursors of video art in Poland, perfectly applies and exposes the capability of the media for manipulation. The investigation of interdependence between himself, the artist/subject, and film, the means of communication he uses, are of crucial importance to Robakowski’s consistent artistic path. Socio-political issues examined in his works emerge naturally, on the margin, so to speak, of his observation of the film medium, its creative capabilities and its relation to truth and objectivity, beginning from its susceptibility to extremely subjective and unforeseeable interpretations of the recipients to its conscious applications in propaganda and for indoctrination.

This current of Robakowski’s investigations includes The Games Poles Play (1989), a condensed film bricolage assembled from scenes and expressive images from the last decade of the Communist rule in Poland. The picture created by Robakowski is a 26-minute mix of startling images originating from television materials and documentation of the Orange Alternative actions and artistic performances, a bracket for which is provided by the figure of a girl playing counting-out games.

Records of civic protests and brutal pacifications carried out by the Communist authorities are mainly a visualisation of an individual’s experience in a totalitarian state. Quotidian scenes are intermingled with images of oppression and resistance. Absurdities of that system inevitably resulted in paranoiac everyday life. The collective portrait of Poles in the last years of Communism is a concoction of dramatic choices, conscious escapes into surrealistic humour which enabled people to maintain some distance to the nonsensicalness of the system, and an utopian desire for normality realised only in the child’s unawareness and her counting-out game that is disconnected from the surrounding world.

Izabela Kopania

translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz