Dancing into Acoustic Space

Tango (1980, 8 mins) is an animated film that was completed at the Se-ma-for studio (Studio Małych Form Filmowych – Studio of Small Film Forms) in Łódź by Zbigniew Rybczyński. It was the first Polish Oscar winner in the animation category in 1982 and catapulted Rybczyński on a successful journey into the frontier of emerging technologies of new media in both the United States and Germany. Rybczyński produced numerous films and music videos in the 1980s and 90s in the new emerging media and developed innovative electronic imaging technologies used in film and television for which he holds a number of patents. Media theorists Marshall McLuhan, Lev Manovich, Vilem Flusser and Peter Weibel have been enlisted here to frame the technological changes envisioned in Tango. Tango sits at a historic fulcrum in the shift from analog to digital media, which Flusser mapped on to the rise to the technical image and McLuhan described as a shift from visual to acoustic space. This shift privileges post-Euclidean geometry, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. This paper puts forward the innovative Tango as a case study in a paradigm shift from analog to digital short filmmaking.