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From my Window

From my Window
/12
    • From my Window
    • Z mojego okna
  • 1978-1999
  • 16mm film transferred to video, b&w, sound
  • 19min, 9sec
In 1978, Józef Robakowski moved into an apartment in a newly-built high-rise in the center of Łódź. That’s when he began filming the people and events he could see from his kitchen window. Looking down onto the public square below, his witty pseudo-documentary observes the daily activities of his neighbors and mass gatherings such as the annual May Day marches. Part of the project that Robakowski called "My Very Own Cinema," the film spans 20 years with an invisible, omniscient narrator in the manner of a classic 19th-century novel. This unpretentious, seemingly simple work is filled with multiple layers of subtly wrought meanings. The naturalness of the apparently objective documentation of outside events proceeding at their own pace conceals a dense tangle of conventions, from which, paradoxically, a synthesis of authenticity emerges. W.S.