Not Only About My Own Cinema

Jacek Michalak: I have had the pleasure of working with you on three occasions. In 2009, we presented your solo exhibition at Atlas Sztuki, followed by two group exhibitions over the next two years. We meet from time to time on various occasions. You are an extraordinarily active person. Your solo exhibition ‘My Own Cinema’ can currently be seen at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Over the years, you have given many interviews and spoken at length about your work. At the time of our conversation, another interview with you has appeared, this time in the widely circulated magazine Wysokie Obcasy. I should also like to persuade you to talk about your private life. Let us begin at the beginning, with the birth certificate recording that Józef Robakowski was born in Poznań in 1939, the year the Second World War broke out—a difficult year.

Józef Robakowski: In 1939, my family was flourishing and prosperous. We were landowners. I had a brother, Andrzej, three years older. We lived in the countryside, in Bodzanowo Wielkie in Kuyavia, and everything was going well. My father, an agricultural engineer, was a professional officer. Like every soldier in the Polish Army, he was preparing for war. He was killed in the first days of the war—on 21 September 1939, at the Battle of the Bzura. I have only one photograph with my father, and even that is torn. It was taken when he visited my mother shortly before the war began; my brother has dozens. After our father’s death, we were left with our mother, a beautiful young woman. She had two older sisters whose husbands had also gone to war, leaving them with children. My mother and her sisters endured the nightmare of wartime displacement. Three beautiful women, children and our grandmother, with German troops there at one moment, Ukrainian troops the next, then Polish and finally Soviet forces. We briefly returned to the estate at Bodzanowo in 1945. Soviet troops, protected by the Volunteer Reserve of the Citizens’ Militia, removed everything they could, while local peasants looted the rest. I remember our departure from Bodzanowo precisely. My brother, my mother and I travelled on a ladder wagon amid wardrobes. We led one cow and were also permitted to take two horses and two sheep, which rode with us. A driver who had previously worked on the estate helped us. That was all we were allowed to take. We could not settle within fifty kilometres of our estate at Bodzanowo.

J.M.: From Bodzanowo, you reached…
J.R.: Gdynia. Like her sisters, my mother had received a secondary education in Toruń. None of the three was particularly prepared for professional work, and they were landowners besides, something one was not supposed to mention after the war. At first, my mother could find no work at all. She therefore worked for one of her sisters, who was considerably better off. After the war, the sister’s husband escaped to Canada, further complicating the situation. He left her a substantial tenement building in Gdynia that housed the Warszawa Cinema. My schooling began here, and so did my cinema. Until 1947, it was a private cinema with a highly interesting repertoire of Western, mainly American, cowboy films. The cinema had a luxurious box where I could sit whenever I wished. My mother ran a small kiosk in the foyer. My brother and I sold newspapers during the evening screenings. Every day, I encountered the projectionists operating the booth, who gave me damaged scraps of film stock. I began constructing my first projection devices then. This was how my passion for cinema was born.
J.M.: How long did you live in Gdynia?
J.R.: We were a serious burden on my aunt—my mother and two boys. Differences of opinion naturally emerged. My mother concluded that she could work as an educator. She found a post in Inowrocław at a children’s home run by nuns. We then arrived in a fascinating place: my mother became director of a children’s home in Tuchola, a small town where many people still spoke German. We lived there during the Stalinist period. My brother and I were forbidden to admit our origins, and my mother concealed her past. For me as a young boy, they were interesting times: before my eyes, communism competed with capitalism. Wars great and small were taking place. Children from Korea and Vietnam were brought to the home, as were Polish orphans from Russia whose mothers and fathers had been shot before their eyes. The children’s home was full of so-called over-age pupils; bearded teenagers attended the fifth class with me. For an adolescent boy, these were extraordinarily interesting times. On top of everything, the children’s home suffered from socialist poverty. Twice a year, vehicles arrived carrying donations of sugar, groats, flour and chocolate. It is remarkable how powerful UNRRA assistance was. My mother was decisive, hardworking and well organised, and transformed the children’s home in Tuchola into a model institution. Inspectors came from the provincial authorities to admire these achievements, for which my mother was awarded a medal. Then the Security Office discovered that she was a landowner and the widow of a fallen officer, and she had to seek work elsewhere. I was in the ninth class when we left Tuchola.

J.M.: Where did you go from Tuchola?
J.R.: To Toruń, where my mother found work at an emergency care centre, a very difficult but fascinating place where children with widely differing pasts were assessed and sorted. From this special home, residents could be sent to an ordinary children’s home or placed with guardians, while others could return to their parents. It was an interesting and psychologically fascinating situation for me; I was surrounded by extraordinary company. In 1958, I finished secondary school in Toruń. I developed my interests in the city, becoming interested in photography and film and dreaming of studying at a film school. I travelled to Łódź for the entrance examinations. I was not admitted to the elite Film School in Łódź. Later, once I worked there, I understood that as a lad from Toruń fresh from the general secondary-school leaving examination, I had stood no chance of admission.
J.M.: What were you doing and thinking in 1956—the year Bolesław Bierut died, the year that ended one period of totalitarianism in Poland and began another? Admittedly, you were fifteen, but the experience of war and the post-war years had made you more mature than fifteen-year-olds today.
J.R.: Having witnessed the parcelling out of our estate and the way people were treated after the war, common sense made it impossible for me to believe in communism; there was no way I could support the system. My brother, three years older, studied at the Academy of Physical Education, which at that time was partly a political school admitting young, healthy people. During his studies, he was drawn into the Party. I remember the first freedom march in Toruń in 1956. We marched in a procession that, for me and some of my friends, was more of a joke. We alternately shouted ‘Long live Kowalski’; by then, many no longer believed in the system. My brother’s contemporaries still believed, but those of us three years younger did not. I remember a member of the Union of Polish Youth in my class who cried in 1956. His era was already passing. At last, a period of somewhat greater freedom began.

J.M.: Let us return to your education. What happened after your unsuccessful attempt to enter the Film School in Łódź?
J.R.: In 1959, seeking to avoid military service, I began studying in Gdańsk at a teacher-training college, a partly artistic school. It was an interesting period. I developed my interests; the school had a fantastic photography club, while Bim-Bom and the Tralabomba Circus were active in Gdańsk, with Zbigniew Cybulski, Bogumił Kobiela, Jerzy Afanasjew and Jacek Fedorowicz. The Żak Coastal Students’ Club, with its excellent film society, was also active. In 1959, Gdańsk was a powerful centre of student culture. After a year, I was admitted to the Faculty of Fine Arts at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. I graduated in the conservation of historic objects and museum studies. It was an enormously formative course that included many subjects relating to art and material culture.
J.M.: The Faculty of Fine Arts at Nicolaus Copernicus University takes pride in a long tradition of more than two hundred years, deriving from the eighteenth-century Vilnius school. After the Second World War, under the new political circumstances, many professors from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Stefan Batory University in Vilnius moved to Toruń.

J.R.: Yes, I shall say a little about that. I had friends who were the sons of Vilnius lawyers and professors who found themselves in Toruń after the Second World War. During my studies, professors from Vilnius formed the core of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Nicolaus Copernicus University. The tone of the faculty was set by Tymon Niesiołowski, a painter from Vilnius already recognised before the war. The Vilnius professors were elderly, around sixty, and beside them stood the young staff, the Party cadre. The young militants were led by Professor Stanisław Borysowski, the same man who had removed Władysław Strzemiński from the State Higher School of Visual Arts in Łódź a decade earlier. Borysowski was what was known as a ‘broom’, a political officer and painter whom the ministry sent wherever a clean-up was required. The Vilnius professors and the Party cadre fought each other while we students watched. The professors from Vilnius were close to us. They visited our photography exhibitions. We met in the beautiful flat of Helena Sztukowska—née Falewicz and the author of Fragments of the Memoirs of a Defender of Vilnius—which contained many things brought from Vilnius. Those who had arrived from Vilnius did not love the new political system and, seeing young people who thought similarly beside them, courted their favour. In this way, I befriended Tymon Niesiołowski, which allowed me, as a young man, to make my first documentary film about him. I had many opportunities to visit his studio, observe him at work and listen to stories about Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, who had been his friend. I was able to attend the beautiful lectures of Jadwiga Puciata-Pawłowska, a very important professor and specialist in early Expressionism and Art Nouveau, Malczewski and Wojtkiewicz, an extraordinarily spiritual person devoted to us. We students were cleverly drawn into the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’, a tendency independent of the official socialist politics then in force. We formed the Zero-61 Group, which did not touch politics at all and was a deliberate anachronism. Making ‘art for art’s sake’ at that time was regarded as improper; it was a hostile, nihilistic attitude towards the political system—if someone did not become involved, it meant they opposed the system. We organised our most interesting exhibitions on April Fools’ Day, played pranks and became an influential group in Toruń student life. The next stage in promoting our views and activities consisted of the multimedia student festivals we organised. Natalia Lach-Lachowicz and Andrzej Lachowicz came to the Nationwide Student Photography Festival in 1962, while subsequent events, including the First Student Film Festival, brought together increasing numbers of artists from across Poland. At that time, student artistic life was not monitored as closely as the lives of professional artists belonging to the so-called professional artists’ unions. A censor did not always appear in the student and amateur world. In Toruń, alongside the Pętla creative club, which I ran myself, there was also an excellent film society. It was led by Józef Tęcza, and there we had the opportunity to discover outstanding Western films and a highly interesting Soviet avant-garde. At the creative film club, I made around twelve films, including one of the first so-called compilation films assembled from found footage, the work 6,000,000. It was in Toruń in the 1960s that I developed my way of working in film independently of official structures.

J.M.: I understand that your distance from official structures resulted from your childhood and youthful experiences. This experience fundamentally directed your path in life.
J.R.: Yes. My social and political position, my particular experiences, equipped me quite early with the awareness that an artist possesses no power other than his own conviction in the value of acting in one way rather than another. That helped. I later continued this manner of acting and proceeding here in Łódź. The Workshop of the Film Form, created at the Łódź Film School in 1970, was regarded by many as a formalist group that made no sense under socialist conditions. Fortunately, we found supporters in the West quite quickly, despite never being representatives of Polish cinema. It emerged that an ‘other cinema’ could be created by our own efforts. Our cinema was professional and thus decidedly different from underground cinema in the West. Unlike the artists making underground cinema there, we were trained film and television professionals. In 1972, and then in 1974, our cinema came into contact with cinema in the West. It became clear that our analytical films were synthetic, expertly edited and made on 35 mm rather than 8 mm. I emphasise that, when analysing our cinema, one must remember that until 1970 Poland was in total isolation and had very few contacts with the West.
J.M.: What prompted you to choose art as your field of activity?
J.R.: Art, involvement in art, allowed me to retain the status of a free person in a ruthless socialist reality. I quickly realised that one could do whatever one wanted within the field of art. To make art, one did not have to join the Party or become an activist. What mattered was remaining outside the regime-controlled system of official cinema. Pure art allowed me to make ‘My Own Cinema’, which I continue to practise to this day. After all, I also practised so-called ‘My Own Cinema’ successfully under the supremely extreme conditions of totalitarian Martial Law.

J.M.: Before Martial Law, we experienced the first Solidarity for more than a year. What were you doing then? Where were you?
J.R.: In 1980, three years after the Workshop of the Film Form ceased its activities, we established the University Reform Movement. We wanted to reform the Film School. The School had an inactive old guard. These people were already giving the institution very little, despite including outstanding artists and professionals. Many were heavily involved in work outside the School. This was a problem that dogged the institution for years. I remember that when I began studying at the Łódź Film School in 1966, classes were often cancelled because lecturers were occupied with other matters outside the School. We were the first to create a confrontational situation involving debate with the professors. In 1980, under Rector Stanisław Kuszewski, the School was in a state of absolute, blissful lethargy. The reform proposed by the University Reform Movement was intended to transform the institution into a multimedia school in which fiction film, documentary and animation would develop in the context of new electronic media. We believed that through multimedia practice and a multiplicity of disciplines, the School could become a modern institution. The old guard, associated only with film, opposed the reforms. A fierce struggle erupted. In the final contest, when we proposed Jerzy Skolimowski—a new and creative figure—as rector, the old guard consolidated and attacked vigorously. To them, Skolimowski was a schemer, womaniser and careerist, a man roaming the West who had nothing to do with Poland. That is how he was described during electoral senate meetings. Ultimately, we lost by two or three votes. From Institute of National Remembrance materials now published online, I know that colleagues from the Independent Students’ Association—the people from the revolutionary group—betrayed us. The rector’s post went to a man from the old communist tradition: Roman Wajdowicz, a professor of sound, more technician than filmmaker. After 13 December 1981, all the reforms that had occurred at the Film School through the University Reform Movement were revoked. At the beginning of Martial Law, seeing what was happening—that the old order had returned and there was nothing left for me to seek there—I ended my collaboration by personally handing in a letter during the School senate’s first meeting under Martial Law. In this way, I left the School for years. I did not return until 1995. Soon after my departure, almost the entire young staff involved in the University Reform Movement also left. The Łódź Film School was left with a new rector, appointed at the beginning of Martial Law: Professor Henryk Kluba, a deeply entrenched Party activist. Kluba actively supported Jaruzelski’s regime in the 1980s. He chaired the Film Group of the National Council of Culture and was a member of the Cinematography Committee.

J.M.: What did you do after leaving the Film School? How did you live?
J.R.: I had serious family difficulties at the time. My wife, an actress, encountered many problems because of me and found herself in an unenviable professional situation; we separated. When I appeared in the courtyard of the Educational Film Studio, people passed me with quickened steps, while some fled for fear that a conversation with me would lead to questioning by the Security Service. Deprived of a passport, I was a frequent visitor to the Security Service office on Lutomierska Street.
J.M.: How did you support yourself after 1982?
J.R.: In the 1960s and 1970s, I collected classical painting. I had quite a good collection. After 1982, I sold several good paintings for ‘small sums’. Foreign artists sent me many parcels, and I began to feel embarrassed continually collecting them from the same post office. The parcels contained coffee, among other things, which I then sold at a kiosk for half price. A Hungarian colleague smuggled videotapes of our works to Budapest and from there to West Berlin, because it was difficult to move anything across the border with the GDR; it was very tightly sealed. Thanks to friends, my works began circulating in the West. From time to time, I received awards, including prize money, at various festivals and screenings. Another source of strength was my comprehensive education and multitude of professions. Because of utter poverty, I returned to conservation work, which I had abandoned in the 1970s.
J.M.: What did those years mean for Józef Robakowski as an artist?
J.R.: Eight years of non-existence in Polish culture. Not a single text or even mention in the press, radio or television. Someone decided it, and that was the end of the matter. Officially, you would appear nowhere. Many younger colleagues left for the West. On the other hand, it was an extremely interesting and creative period, a time of underground activity and isolation. I was an active participant in Pitch-In Culture. I sustained considerable activity at the domestic Exchange Gallery, founded in 1978, which assembled works donated by artist friends. The Gallery continues to operate and new works constantly appear. The Exchange Gallery is my continuation of what Władysław Strzemiński once did with the ‘a.r.’ group. I have never sold a single work from the Exchange Gallery collection, even during the difficult years of Martial Law. I am proud of the Exchange Gallery, which flourishes and develops. Today, my wife looks after it to a greater extent than I do. The Exchange Gallery collection has been shown at Muzeum Sztuki, Zachęta in Warsaw, the National Gallery in Prague, and in Berlin and Budapest, as well as at the District Museum in Bydgoszcz. Another presentation is about to open at the Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń on the occasion of my large solo exhibition.

J.M.: From today’s perspective, through hard work, talent and coincidences, you transformed the difficult 1980s into your own success.
J.R.: From the position of an artist, yes; privately, I often lost during that period.
J.M.: What prompted you to return to the Łódź Film School in 1995?
J.R.: By then, it was a different School. Young teachers had appeared. They needed me to establish a multimedia studio; I was one of the few specialists in the field. I believe the future will belong to new media. On the other hand, my beloved opponents, by then professors, still maintained quite a strong position at the School. The initiative to employ me came from the School, from Professor Jerzy Woźniak, rector from 2002 to 2008. I had thought I would never have the opportunity to return to the Film School. Other higher-education institutions courted me, and I had brief flirtations with them. Yet I always felt tremendous affection for the Film School, the institution of my second degree and of the Workshop of the Film Form: an elite, intimate, intelligent and international School, a place where, despite everything, one could realise individual plans.

J.M.: How do you feel at the Łódź Film School today?
J.R.: Good, very good. Multimedia photography and animation at the Łódź Film School are in excellent shape. I believe other higher-education institutions cannot match us and that our graduates are well prepared to enter so-called real life.
J.M.: From today’s perspective, whom would you mention as an important figure in your artistic life?
J.R.: Ryszard Stanisławski. He had an enormous influence on what took place at the Film School. Thanks to him, we established ourselves internationally. Through him, in 1972, at Richard Demarco’s invitation, we travelled to the great international festival in Edinburgh. We were fortunate: as the Workshop of the Film Form, we were his protégés there. In 1973, he placed a temporary-exhibition gallery at Muzeum Sztuki at our disposal for a month, where we could organise artistic workshops that were revolutionary for the time.
J.M.: What did the political transformation of 1989 bring you?
J.R.: I was beginning everything again. International relationships had largely been severed, and the people, directors and experts had changed. One had to remind them of oneself. New artists also appeared, understanding the world differently, and a postmodern understanding of art began. Because of Martial Law, we were somewhere on the threshold of Postmodernism. Since I loved the magnificent democratic spirit of Dada, it was easy for me to exchange one for the other. One had to adapt to changing times, but without pretence; one had to be genuine. Not everyone could do so. Many Structuralist colleagues disappeared. Colleagues who engaged in politics also lost out. The so-called nationalists lost too. They could be ridiculous, always somehow behind the times, convinced that they stood on the firm foundation of tradition, although that tradition also frequently fractured and broke. What mattered was an uncompromising nihilistic approach to the prevailing official state of affairs. It was important to be authentic in what one did.

J.M.: The last twenty years have fundamentally changed our lives. Everything looks different; technological development has simplified our lives on many levels. How do you feel as an artist when a growing army of filmmakers around you uses mobile telephones and festivals are organised for films made with them?
J.R.: I look at my students. They cope brilliantly with the present situation. They are curious about the world: they travel, visit and observe their surroundings. They operate in an entirely different way from us. If you have something interesting to say, if you can interest a recipient, that is what counts, what matters. Anyone can be an artist; what matters is the ability to generate an interesting message from within oneself and to interest another person in one’s work.
J.M.: Complaints about the standard of contemporary students can be heard everywhere. You value them.
J.R.: Today, they have entirely different possibilities. Art once performed a different role and was more a source of pleasure. Today it is different: art’s field of operation is far broader. New, often unpleasant and irritating subjects have been added—subjects once regarded as shameful, such as disability, ageing and our biology. Art’s boundaries have shifted considerably. In Polish art, Katarzyna Kozyra moved successive boundaries through her highly drastic actions. Today, she is a recognised and outstanding artist, although her art was once difficult to accept.

J.M.: Your telephone rang during our conversation. I realised that you were speaking about a forged work. Are Józef Robakowski’s works forged?

J.R.: Yes. It is sad. For some time now, photographic works signed with my name but not made by me have been appearing for quite substantial sums.
J.M.: Our next collaboration will be your fourth project at Atlas Sztuki. Is ‘Eastern Front’ an exhibition curated by Józef Robakowski, or an exhibition by the artist Józef Robakowski?

J.R.: The exhibition Eastern Front is my statement as an artist. I can be both curator and artist. What matters, however, is knowing precisely which role one is performing. As an artist, I do not have to defer entirely to art history and historians’ established way of understanding Constructivism. In this exhibition, I instead become an active intruder interested in the question: do the works that appear in the space I have organised currently possess the power to act energetically? Arranged within a new multimedia order, they should activate new sensations in visitors. The situation is intended to be risky; otherwise, I shall not achieve the creative shift that matters greatly to me.

J.M.: The overwhelming majority of the fifty-eight exhibitions presented at Atlas Sztuki to date have been solo shows, few of which had a curator. Many artists appreciated the opportunity to realise an exhibition without a curator, and many expressed quite exuberant delight at being able to decide on their own presentation. When you realised ‘Energy Manifesto’ three years ago, you likewise had complete freedom.

J.R.: At present, I watch the curatorial race with concern; it is extremely dispiriting. There are centres in Poland whose curators have prescribed tasks for art as a matter of policy. Polish art revolves around the names of a handful of curators. Instead of developing freely, art is constrained by a self-appointed, doctrinaire curatorial system. The political, prescriptive determination of what art should be is a gesture that negates it. The strength of authentic art will always lie in its unpredictability. I have absolutely no interest in achieving ordinary individual success through art.

J.M.: What currently gives you pleasure as an artist?
J.R.: An artist’s work must contain ambiguities, inconsistencies, negations and risky betrayals. What matters is a permanent flight from self-satisfaction and success. The artist’s strength is absolute freedom. I find it interesting to flee the approval of decision-makers. For me, this game of blind man’s buff is also a strategy for life. Recently, I have been offered many survey exhibitions and retrospectives. I shall not permit it. I divide my life’s work into smaller fragments. The situation of a total retrospective does not interest me. I do not wish to know who I am. Let others do that after my death. Besides, today I would struggle to find someone to whom I could entrust such an absurd task.