"When I was a child I was convinced that artists and art are very similar to science." "I believed that artists should do great things;" "that they should be discoverers like scientists:" "be like philosophers, outstanding politicians:" "that the aim of artistic work is to improve the world and to make man better." "But, sent by my parents to take music lessons," "I understood that music was not my area." "On the other hand I drew a lot and soon realized that it was the image that was my realm." "So I decided to work with images." "I visited this place [Cologne] for the first time in 1977 ." "I was travelling from Vienna to Lille, to France." "I stopped over here, I landed here at this stall." "I was standing, watching this cathedral." "And by a strange stroke of fate" " because after all I was later living in America " "I was coming here every two or three years, and stayed in Cologne briefly, for reasons entirely unknown to me, for short periods of time." "I would always stand at this beer-stall here." "And, finally, we are here as well now." "This is a kind of magical place." "I cannot explain it precisely." "we'll fish for facts in my life:" "Lódz, Warszawa, Lódz, Vienna, Warszawa," "Vienna, Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, and...and Cologne." "This is so atypical a road that if somebody told me ten years ago that I would be living in Germany" "I would look at this person with pity..." "We have in ourselves, such..." "I don't know..." "destiny, chance..." "It is difficult to say." "It is other people that always have effect on our lives." "We encounter people who influence our lives." "I'd say that there will always be a guardian angel and a little devil." "Some people help us do something positive in our lives while others destroy it." "If you only encounter those who are good then life is beautiful." "I was lucky to meet many such people who helped me in my life very much and they also had an effect somehow on where I am now, or where I have arrived." "In the times in which I am living" " I've arrived at this conclusion - all great fugues and symphonies have already been written all great novels have been written, all great pictures have been painted, and all things have been discovered, and most importantly, all great films have been made... so I started thinking, what can be done in this world... and I had such an idea that" "when I just walk around such places as here and keep gazing..." "I decided to start exploring... to check if what I see agrees with what is painted in all those pictures and is shown in all those films and things created by people." "And something was wrong." "But I didn't know what." "And it was here in Cologne, in this place, that I discovered this thing." "This thing is our nose." "The nose is the first thing I see when I am looking." "Yes, this is my discovery, which is perhaps the reason why I work and why I am." "I believe that we must change this model of image and introduce the presence of the human body, an observer." "This is my first film, "Kwadrat" [Square]." "I often wonder why I made this film." "And after years I see some sense;" "that inventing this film I opened a path for myself in the future." "It is a problem that remains a challenge today, a most interesting technological problem, to visualize, to depict, by means of a little square and a system of squares," "what we know and what we imagine." "Images are constructed of" " at least we have achieved such a great and clear system nowadays - that an image consists of such tiny points, little squares." "Squares are not necessary but it is most convenient to have squares." "In all of these little squares there has to be a right proportion of colours;" "three colours." "For me it is the most fascinating thing." "How by changing values within visible light to express... what method to create, to make images of everything, including text:" "of everything we see, we know: what we can visualize:" "As a matter of fact, we only need to operate within the spectrum of light by changing the three colors." "Everything started in this film." "We are on the premises of the Academy of Media Arts at which I am a professor." "My field is experimental film." "This is the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne." "This is the studio where I am building a motion-controI prototype." "This is a device built a little in advance, for special explorations of image, with lenses that see 180 degrees." "Therefore a camera has to be installed in such a way that there is nothing within its field of vision." "This place is very small if we talk about film pictures or special effects nowadays." "But such small places interests me very much because I believe that people must start making films in homes or in offices." "So, realizing the idea of the nose is not such a simple thing." "It is interesting that... if somebody tried to carry out an experiment to say "this is my image, and now I must move in this world"" " it is a catastrophe." "The model suggested by the lens makes it possible to look at the world through two very small channels." "This is the image that we know." "This is an image that we paint, which we construct in films and transmit in television." "Image is an individual experience." "In order to capture this thing, to really place ourselves in the image, we must create technology which shows precisely the process of how we see." "And our nose belongs to this world." "First the nose, hands, the body, our presence." "And I imagine that if we had the technology... if we could put such spectacles on our nose that could show what I see without spectacles, and if we could record such image, if we could transmit and reproduce such image," "then, I think, we'd have remarkable progress in what we call "image."" "We need to construct an optical system that'd repeat our manner of seeing." "Based on my various experimental works" "I arrived at a solution for this whole problem and there are a series of patents." "It consists of three main patents and I want to present such technology." "This is my film "Media" in which I joined video image with film image." "The protagonist on the film tape is, as it were, playing with a balloon which appears on the TV." "When I was making this film I had no idea that I'd move from film to video." "But this is my first work where I used video and I have been throwing and catching this ball ever since." "This is the film "Soup"" "a film which I used to think of as autobiographical...." "To a certain degree, so to speak, I decided to take up my then life;" "there are blocks of flats, mundane struggles, which I never liked, that is, shirts, neckties, toilet, and dogs, and travels to Lódz... and here is some and I decided to make a film out of it all." "I attempted to make all images in this film repulsive, horrifying." "I was consciously searching, so to speak, for dirt." "When I saw a flickering frame I'd select it." "It was my attempt to join together different techniques by manipulating the image:" "to construct something that years later I'd do on video." "From time to time something gets into me, and I go and buy something in a shop." "To me there is some mysterious beauty in images." "People were able to reproduce this image that we have in our heads;" "what we know, for instance, about the city..." "I have here somewhere a book about Kraków, photographs of contemporary Kraków, and to me in no photograph is there Kraków." "In this fourteenth-century engraving there is Kraków." "I have always liked very complex images, that is, when a lot was happening in a picture." "Perhaps I was influenced by Matejko and "The Battle at Grunwald" ." "But I liked complex pictures, such as in one Renaissance work where the whole life of Jesus is presented." " when he is a child, and then they are fleeing to Egypt etc." "This is how Botticelli painted, for instance, or many Renaissance or Gothic painters." "I liked it when there was space visible in the picture, big scale, a remote landscape." "In fact, all elements of the world should be in the picture:" "mountains and the sky, and people, and cities, etc." "I remember a picture that made a big impression on me" " I cannot remember where I saw it - an image of a road; two roads." "One was a very broad and straight road of sin, and the other a thin path of virtue." "One was climbing uphill, while the other was a broad highway with coaches and horse riders." "Plenty of people travelled on the broad and straight road, whereas only a few people climbed along the steep path amidst thistles and rocks, up this burdensome mountain." "And somehow I imagined that films should also be like this, the ones I wanted to make:" "of this type, very complex and rich with images and space." "I would often look at such pictures and regret that only a part is painted;" "if one turned to the right - what is this world like further on?" "Simply, I'd like to to enter this world and fly within it." "These were my motivations and I haven't changed them ever since." "In each of these films I introduced an idea which I then pursued further on." "Each film was a very important experience for me because... in doing very different things I was, as a matter of fact, working on one and the same thing." "All in all, it is very simple..." "To take photos ..." "Well, the expression "to take pictures" is not the right way of saying this..." "It's a matter of making visible what we think." " Here you are." " Thank you" "Everything is every which way here..." "Two or three years ago I was in Lódz." "And I happened to have a hotel room in the top floor;" "in the hotel in front of the Lódz Fabryczna railway station." "I came up to the window and through this window I saw the park," "Lódz Fabryczna station, and I saw a corner of Kilinskiego and Narutowicza streets." "I was born in a house, in the third house from the corner." "Then I lived for four years in the first house on the right in Narutowicza street when I moved from Warszawa to Lódz, I was living there with my wife and my son." "My mother used to take me out in a baby carriage with my two other brothers to this park." "That was when my father was working at the Politechnic in Warszawa." "He came home for weekends and we would all go out with my mother to meet my father." "It was when huge steam locomotives were running." "My mother wanted to teach us this poem "Locomotive" by Tuwim." "But after the war it was very difficult to get books - it must have been around 1951 - and my mother wrote to Tuwim that she had three sons and that she'd like to teach this poem to them." "And Tuwim sent us a beautiful letter - which I've still got - with the text of this poem and with a beautiful letter with best greetings to the three of us." "When I was standing in this hotel room I was also thinking of another thing." "I stayed in this hotel when I was making "Tango."" "I did not live in Lódz anymore then." "Somehow I had in front of me a strange small scale model of a big part of my life that I spent in this place." "And this condensation of things in one spot, and that I could see it from such a high altitude caused some strange feelings in me." "I still have Tuwim's letter here;" "or perhaps it is at home..." ""Tango" was a film about time:" "about overcoming certain technical problems" " carrying out this complicated process of drawing tens of thousands of masks on celluloid." "It required an organizational system - some form of recording." "How to control those drawings, phases, cycles." "It was a very complicated process indeed:" "reaching the limits of the technical durability of negatives." "One day I was walking, it must have been winter of the year 1980." "I was going to the studio for 3:00 am, in this part of Lódz" " everybody knows what Lódz was like then and in many places still is - and in this cold, in the middle of the night, there were queues of people standing in front of shops waiting" "because in the morning something might be brought to the shops to sell." "All those lines, people crowding, no one was talking because it was cold, in this meagre light those gray silhouettes there waiting for something perhaps to buy in the morning...." "And then I thought: what am I doing here?" "Where am I going?" "I am going to make a film, I thought." "What is this film for?" "Who is this film for?" "Is it moral that I am doing anything like this in this country?" "Indeed, one should do other things." "I remember I had quite a dilemma about this." "This was also a "Tango" of mine." "My Oscar was first and I went out." "There were some corridors there." "These corridors were full of people who looked, I thought, like some waiters in bow ties," "I was smiling at them and they all looked at me in a peculiar way." "I was the only man who was simply walking along those corridors because this is the moment of awarding those Oscars and if somebody got in the building, with certainty he wasn't there to wander in the building but to sit in the hall" "with the cream of American society... and suddenly there is a guy there wandering around," "with long hair, smoking a cigarette and wearing sneakers." "I decided to go back." "But the moment I returned a huge group of those...waiters...as I thought... pounced on me and very professionally commenced checking what I was carrying in my pockets." "I did not have anything because it was awkward to receive an Oscar carrying all passports, documents etc." "on me." "I had nothing." "I said: "I have Oscar." "I don't speak English, I speak Polish."" "And I tried to say something in German." "But unfortunately nobody knew these languages." "It was quite brutal." "I was completely taken aback and, as I had my legs free, some of those officers got it in the sensitive spots of their bodies..." "I simply kicked them." "I had sneakers so it wasn't that heavy." "Yet, it really got them furious and they handcuffed me and took me downstairs to the garage." "Police cars were parked in the garage and one of them pulled alongside me and I was driven with the siren on to a building with gates." "It turned out to be a prison." "The whole cycle - they put some plastic bands on my wrists, beautiful yellow overalls." "In the morning, at dawn, there was a knock and somebody, perhaps a prison warden, brought a heap of newspapers," "The New York Times, or rather The Los Angeles Times that were already out, with news on the first page that an Oscar winner kicked two officers in their hmmm, and has been put in prison;" "and a photo of me kissing Oscar." "So the warden asked for my autograph." "I am leaving the prison, it's very early in the morning, and all TV stations are waiting." "You understand, they are waiting for my release." "And, of course, interviews." "But I was not inclined to give interviews and said I was not going to speak." "I went back to my uncle's place and my life went on." "What to do next?" "So many people imputed to me that I directed it all myself and that I must be an outstanding director because I made such publicity for myself;" "that not too many people have such publicity." "I was then on the news, in papers, etc." "I don't think it is important." "But I realized that finding oneself on the utter top and then getting pushed to the lowliest position within, let's say, an hour's time" "was an exceptional experience for me." "But you have to live through it yourself to understand it." "And I think it was more interesting for me than landing at some Beverly Hills hotel at a cocktail party after this Oscar award, as was officially planned." "I was awarded and punished at the same time:" "perhaps so as not to become too cocksure, or too big for my boots." "When I came to the States I was doing exactly the same as I was doing in Poland." "I had the same attitude whenever I was doing something." "In point of fact I was continuing what I was doing in Poland." "Of course, with different tools, tools which would be out of my reach in Poland." "This is my first music video I made in the States for Art of Noise." "I made this and it became a video #1 and they became very famous owing to this, while on the following day after this video was released" "I had a road open to realise more such works." "It was the year 1984." "It was such an interesting moment because an entirely new video technology started, with new equipment, new possibilities." "MTV came into being." "My first videos had very strong support from MTV." "There was a group of people there who did not so much want to present popular music but rather to show good videos." "There was such an idea, a hope that something completely new would develop in art." "Because for the first time a situation arose that a short form, 3-4 minutes long, could be produced in extremely short time and shown to millions of people." "I was making those music videos over the period of two or three years." "Then I stopped making them because I was a little tired with a lack of vision in all this on the part of the musicians and the groups I was working with." "I was tired with the aridity of the texts, and with the fact that all anyone cared about was looking beautiful." "And I had a feeling that some depth or sense was lacking in all that." "And this is "Imagine", an important film of mine because it was the first high definition test." "I could do within three days the things that took months of hard work when making "Tango" and the quality was higher;" "with no drawings, no masks:" "without poring over it for hours." "And I could move in space." "I could create an illusion of a sequence:" "a sequence of life, a sequence of scenery." "I could easily build some scenes because" "Lennon's text is beautiful and it all works well as a counterpoint to Lennon, and what he's singing." "It was my first high definition work." "I was surprised at the quality of it." "I wanted such technology to be accessible so that one could create worlds, and erase them:" ""This should take place in the mountains" - "No, it should happen in the desert"" "" a man should look different" ;" ""now I'd like to have this and now I'd like to have that" :" "simply to be able to realise these ideas, these thoughts on the spot, right away" "and be sensitive to what is going on." "I was somehow lucky enough to have there a proper place, a big studio in relatively short time:" "a place to live, a studio and all this high definition equipment, which was rather unusual." "After around a year and a half, a Polish emigrant, has his own studio, two floors, with the cutting edge technology available then." "I simply must have been very lucky." "And here is a scene from that studio." "The problem was that in some moments it was difficult to know what was where." "But this was good." "It was very interesting." "This is what I am after;" "so that the reality of the film became actual, and one could participate in it:" "so that films were made in this way." "There was something in this - of course this whole realisation is a failure, but this experience... this thing was for me a blueprint, a sketch of what I want to do." "Why I decided to take up Eisenstein?" "Because I needed something that is very recognisable, in the film, in time." "I wanted to do it in such a way that somebody comes from Russia, and the Russians have an idea for a new technology, such a virtual world." "I made something that is slowly setting in, and is taking shape now;" "that you can enter that other film and that other time." "My engine, my recipe is incessant experimenting." "When experimenting, you know, this is so that you must.." "...that you are going into the unknown." "Strive to do that which you have never tried." "Program something, plan something and create such conditions in which something will come out of it." "But this thing does not say anything, you cannot plan that this thing will become exactly this planned creation." "No, you must look and find out for yourself what this thing is." "But if something can come into being, it is already a great success." "In this film I did things which..." "This is, for instance, an image of fire." "We don't see fire in this way." "Look what happens to his hand." "After this experiment I realised that time is a terrific tool." "We have the biggest problems with time." "We don't know what time is, we have no definition of time." "I realized that time has to be introduced into the light in pixels." "There is certain evidence..." "There are very interesting things in certain takes, which were a surprise to me." "A very interesting phenomenon takes place because there is a relation between time, velocity and distance." "An entirely new value emerges which does not happen in reality." "And this take here - which I call "my take"." "This is the only take in my films that I like." "There is also this phenomenon there." "They are spinning into and simultaneously out of the fabric." "Time is visible." "You can see the past and the future; and the present." "And this is for me phenomenal." "In the world of the image, light can get bent circularily, why not?" "In the picture, or in our imagination, we can make something from our world change:" "we can make light turn, return, go along as spiral, why not?" "Pondering such things, thinking in terms of the image one can do things which are impossible." "The definition of technology is simply how to do something, how to realize an idea:" "how thought makes use of material means, things that surround us, minerals, all sorts of materials;" "how to make thought less ephemeral, how to cause it to be a not so ephemeral phenomenon." "We can think that yes, it is worth changing." "But then you have to implement this change." "And this is what technology is about - a realisation of thought;" "a realisation of...our dream." "In the mid-1960s I went to Gdansk to buy an engraving." "I entered the Gdansk cathedral and there I was, listening to Bach's music, and I saw a couple flying in space." "And I have somehow realised this idea" " thirty years have elapsed since - in the cathedral of Chartres." "I had an idea involving the Nike of Samothrace, this sculpture." "I wanted to do some story with Ave Maria:" "I had the project prepared in a vague outline and I then built," "one of the first motion control devices, a computer remote control of camera ." "But it either would or would not work." "And after building everything, after bringing in all cables, equipment;" "the cables, I remember, dragging along the whole section of Greek sculptures, none of which could be jolted or harmed..." "Only 45 minutes was left in the end," "I was in front of this Nike from Samothrace and the device would not work." "But I had music." "Because when I was recording I was always recording with a playback." "Just empty frames, but I wanted to hear the music." "It was Ave Maria by Schubert." "And I realised that probably nobody had ever played music to those works of art in the Louvre." "Most likely all those extraordinary objects had never heard this music." "It was at night, all the doors open, various other sections were close by, such as galleries of paintings." "And I decided to play this Ave Maria at full blast in the Louvre." "I had a bottle of red wine and I simply said that we were not going to shoot anything." "I lit everything - it was a staircase so I switched the light on and I played this music." "And I was watching how those sculptures and paintings had an encounter with another masterpiece, a musical masterpiece." "I was observing that." "Those were grand moments in my life." "The Orchestra was a complete improvisation." "This is what I did in most films." "And in those very mathematical films, when I had some construction prepared," "I was rather free in my decisions concerning what the film I am shooting is about." "I began studying the problem of motion and had been doing so for several years and this led me to this invention, my motion control, which indeed enables you to move in space in spite of the fact that your camera and your objects," "your people are in one small room, in one place." "But you can move into infinity in the world;" "freely, as if a fly was moving in space." "And I must say that this idea that if I had not been in the Louvre and had not sat in the presence of all those works of art... this idea would have never entered my mind!" "I don't know..." "Perhaps those works of art simply reciprocated for listening to this Ave Maria." "When I made "Tango" and I could not move with the camera then..." "I always wanted to be free... to move, fly in the world, in space..." "To have the same freedom of movement that we have." "Or even better than that, because we can only move with certain limitations." "In the image, for instance, we can for sure imagine that we can move faster than light." "Here we have a fragment from Manhattan." "This was a film I devoted to exploring the phenomenon of movement:" "the perception of seeing movement in an image." "There are interesting things, what in fact is moving here." "We have an impression that they, this couple, are growing, becoming taller and taller, when in fact only a part of the picture is moving." "And here it is me; a little younger and with longer hair." "I am sitting in my room in Hoboken and I am saying something on very similar topics." "I did not want to leave the States and I treat it as if I never left the States, but after all, time is fleeting, and I am not in the States at the moment." "It is connected with all my personal matters, with, you know, Wanda's illness..." "These were matters of chance and fate, which..." "I, of course, made a decision to leave, but... this is what life is like..." "When I started to work in Lódz I never imagined that I would land in America." "When I was in America I never imagined I'd land in Germany, you know." "I never imagined that my wife would die..." "Nevertheless, this is what happens in our lives..." "So..." "I have no special commentary about this..." "This is life... which we can effect very little, ...at present." "There is a certain mystery for me in the image." "Not only for me, I believe, but for anyone who is sensitive to it." "You can be immortal in an image." "I can move in space, switch years, locations, places, pop in to Greece, Egypt, move from one planet to another, see... visit hell, and visit paradise wherever I want to go." "It is quite difficult to build such a device." "It is my dream, so to speak, to begin a theme and to have this technology be so invisible, so easy in use, so as to try to visualize this theme, this area, and simply observe what is going on in that world and follow what happens." "Not necessarily in order to realise what you have intended, but simply, like in life, just to develop." "You cannot, I imagine, "force" the reality that has emerged from your realisation." "You cannot, by some erroneous thinking..." "You must let this reality develop, you must participate in it." "I assume that you can finish such a realisation with something that is a surprise for everybody taking part in an event of this kind." "Thank you." "Thank you." "Subtitles:" "MENiSCUS"