This is an extract of a longer essay commissioned by Karol Hordziej and Daniel Muzyczuk for a book to accompany their show of the work of the photographer and artist Zgymunt Rykta at Galeria Studio in Warsaw – called Zygmunt Rytka: Ciągi projekcyjne. The book will appear in 2024.
[A] curious blend of analysis, fascination and critique is evident in the November 1978 exhibition in Warsaw’s Interpress Gallery that Rytka created with Drabik. Entitled TV/Studio 2 – Rembrandt 78, the exhibition featured more than fifty blow-up photographs of an episode of Studio 2 that had been transmitted on a Saturday evening in October. Already acknowledged as the most spectacular and successful product of Telewizja Polska, Studio 2 achieved large viewing figures. Organised like a mosaic on the gallery walls, Rytka’s ‘video stills’ stressed the visual miscellany that had been transmitted into Polish homes a few weeks earlier: talking heads: the hands of concert musicians in black–tie; scenes from movies (that evening, Aleksander Ford’s Knights of the Teutonic Order had been screened): imported television shows (Space 1999); and television channel branding. Drabik and Rytka declared the purpose of the project thus: ‘Today, television is the ruler of mass communication. Its social significance lies in its universality, method of transmission and full set of functions. At the same time, reflection on the phenomenon of television is still based on imperfect forms of research.’[1] Not only were Rytka and Drabik following McLuhan’s directions for the investigative artist, they shared the media theorist’s talent for memorable aphorisms too, giving their show a strapline: ‘In 1978, Rembrandt would probably be working in TV’. This claim was reinforced, in a somewhat kitsch manner, by a gold frame placed around a ‘video still’ of three presenters of Studio 2.
At the opening of the exhibition, Drabik and Rytka staged what seems to have been a scripted conversation for the cameras of Pegaz, a weekly cultural review on Telewizja Polska. Standing in the gallery, one critic opined:
I cannot agree that TV will replace our contact with the image. It’s absurd. We like absurdity. The authors of the exhibition have breached the boundaries of tact. Rembrandt is a symbol of enormously concentrated creativity: TV is the quintessence of the noise of our civilization. TV dominates people, overwhelms them, does not encourage reflection but only throws out ready–made ideas. Rembrandt was a philosopher. The slogan of the authors of the exhibition has been coined to catch the ear of television, and the margin by which they are wrong is so large that a book could be written on the subject.
A contrasting, more positive view of the connections of television to art was offered by the second commentator:
The exhibition is very important because it shows that the image is the fundamental element of the TV message. Through its slogan about Rembrandt, TV is placed in a certain tradition. But when it is connected to the fate of a culture in which television plays such a large role, only then is it a problem for people.[2]
When broadcast on Pegaz, the conversation and exhibition about television formed a ‘feedback loop’, albeit of a rather different kind to that which had so excited the members of the Workshop of Film Form. Here, it functioned much more like publicity than an experiment. And as a larger-than-life performance before the camera, the conversation also employed a method that Rytka had developed in the Bluff series. But the ‘real’ critics were doubtful: one reviewer in Życie Warszawy asking whether exhibiting ‘video stills’ – or what Rytka called ‘duplicate records’ – could really answer the questions raised about the distinct nature of the televisual image or the experience of viewing.[3] After all, what distinguished broadcast television was its relentless flow, each image washing over that which had preceded it. McLuhan made this point succinctly when he wrote ‘The TV image is not a still shot. It is not a photo in any sense, but a ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by the scanning-finger’.[4] Moreover, what could not be admitted … yet … was the yawning gap between the state’s ‘propaganda of success’ and the queues, rationing and shortage increasingly experienced in everyday life.
Rytka’s attitude to broadcast television, like that of his compatriots, began to change at the end of Gierek’s rule, during the ‘Carnival of Solidarity’ – 18 months of protests and concessions that ended with the imposition of martial law in December 1981. Television changed considerably too: no one was ‘sleeping’ in front of the small screen anymore.[5] All of this is evident in Rytka’s Retransmission (1988), a 15–minute compilation of footage of Telewizja Polska broadcasts between 1978 and 1983. (Watch the film here)
Organised as an inexact timeline of events, Retransmission has a number of phases. In the first, the fast rhythm and abrupt cuts of Rytka’s edit accelerate time. Two years in two minutes, or so it seems. Without pause for reflection or even comprehension, much of the imagery is, nevertheless, familiar. Iconic images from around the world flash and flicker: Elvis crooning on stage; the weather map; Ayatollah Khomeini speaking in Iran; the launch of NASA’s Challenger space shuttle; the weather map, again; grainy historical footage of Second World War battles; catwalk fashion shows; football matches; the animated title sequences of foreign and home-grown movies; news reports and talking heads. Popular entertainment and news of dramatic events wash over each other just as they had during the Gierek years. Throughout this phase, the audio, taken from broadcast footage, is unintelligible, sounding much like the hiss and broken speech of radio interference. This frenetic pace suddenly abates: longer cuts and audible voices make it clear that the pointer on the timeline has moved on to the period of conflict between the opposition and the state: the strikes of the summer of 1980; reports of the February 1981 meeting of the Solidarity trade union leader Lech Wałęsa and Deputy Prime Minister Mieczysław Rakowski; news anchors dressed in military uniforms and then footage of troops on the streets when martial law was declared in December. Perhaps suggesting the confusion and tension of the months that followed, the footage thereafter becomes frenetic and unstable and the image splits with sports footage or variety shows overlaying grim–faced news reporters. The steady flow of television pictures was broken: here was overlaid with there. At one point, pornography fills the screen. Rytka also cut in ‘found texts’ from state broadcasts (including Dni nadziei, dni dramatu/Days of Hope, Days of Drama, a pro–regime documentary broadcast during martial law to defend the state’s actions) and the headlines of newspapers. One stating ‘Miejsce i rola dziennikarzy w aktualnej sytuacji kraju’ / ‘The Place and Role of Journalists in the Real Situation of the Country’ appears before a sustained passage of close–up footage of the hands of a newsreader shuffling his script over and over again. Using a vision mixer, Rytka also overlaid the word ‘ocenzurowano’ (censored) in the characteristic daubed lettering of Solidarity on the screen; first over electronic ‘noise’, and, later, over images of the ailing Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow. A power that belonged to the state was turned into the punchline of a bitter joke.
Unlike the dispassionate analysis of television that had been offered by Rytka and Drabik in their TV/Studio 2 – Rembrandt 78 exhibition, Retransmission – completed in 1988 – is agitated and emotional. The basic method is much the same: a camera is pointed at a TV screen. But now the jarring pairings, the syncopation of the cuts and the hallucinogenic doubling of broadcast footage form an indictment of the role of the media in Poland. In this, Rytka shared the sentiment of many others. During the Carnival of Solidarity, one of the most loudly-voiced demands of the opposition was to put an end to censorship. Telewizja kłamie! (Television lies!) was widely adopted as a slogan, often graffitied in the street. The actions and declarations of the Solidarity trade union were either ignored or dismissed by the state media. At its first congress in September 1981, Wałęsa was so frustrated by media misrepresentation that he declared that Solidarity would build its own TV transmitter. Telewizja Polska was itself a site of tense conflict too, with many of its journalists and other workers going on strike in 1981 (during which broadcasts were paused and the union’s logo appeared on screen). After the December clampdown, many reporters and presenters were interned, and television production was ‘militarised’; with ‘Top’, an army film unit making content for Telewizja Polska, much of which blamed the opposition, now silenced, for the crisis.[6] In response, Polish citizens adopted the habit of taking demonstrative walks outside their homes at the same time as the major news bulletin was broadcast, to declare that they were not watching.
Completed in 1988, just before the end of communist rule, Retransmission anticipates Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică’s 1992 Videograms of a Revolution, a brilliant documentary about the fall of communism in Romania that treats television as a key actor in those events. Decisions made in the headquarters of Romanian television about what could be transmitted live – as protests and fighting blew up on the street – affected the course of the country’s history. Amateur video footage captured the stunned faces of the viewers of the broadcast of the terse court martial of President Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena, as well as the grim footage of their crumpled bodies following their execution which was carried out by firing squad. Not shown live, it was screened on Romanian televisions within hours of their deaths and repeated frequently thereafter. Combining and comparing material from different sources, Farocki and Ujică’s film reconstructs these decisions to screen (or not) and interprets their effects. Likewise, in Retransmission, Rytka treats television as a historical actor, drawing attention not only to its reporting of events but also to its omissions and its analgesic effects. (One section shows an accusatory banner on a Warsaw balcony with the words ‘TVP milczy … strajk’ / ‘TVP silences … strike’). Farocki and Ujică’s method was that of the historian or perhaps the detective, sifting the evidence. And a voice–over explains everything. Rytka also acted like a historian, editing footage that he had made over many years. But, in 1988, communist rule had not yet given up on ruling Poland, and his source was almost entirely that of Telewizja Polska, the mouthpiece of the state. Rather than explain the events of this turbulent period, his film reconstructs the often confusing experience of watching them on the small screen – the distracting pleasures, the rousing events, the lies and absurdity, the pain, the noise and the silence.
[1] Cited by Bogdan Słowikowski, ’Rembrandt pracownikiem telewizji’ in Życie Warszawy, 271(15 November 1978), np. Available at the Rytka archive – https://zygmuntrytka.pl/archiwum – accessed August 2023.
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] McLuhan, Understanding Media, 272.
[5] In a parallel series called 1981 (and made in 1980-81) Rytka recorded the deep attention given to newspapers during the Carnival of Solidarity in dozens of candid photographs of people reading on the streets.
[6] See the ‘Introduction’ to Sebastian Ligarski and Grzegorz Majchrzak, Polskie radio o telewizja w stanie wojennym (Warsaw: IPN, 2011) 15-62.
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