- THE OXFORD HISTORY OF WORLD CINEMA, in chapter: New Technologies, Oxford University Press 1997
“With Kafka (1992), his most dramatically complex work, Rybczynski has already perfected the motion control mechanism, uniting with great mastery the technical elements of the set, the inlaying work, and the movements of the camera that simulate the three-dimensionality of the space. Forcing himself still to better control and measure the elements in play. The visionary capacity of the Polish artist is the translation of the places and the literary archetypes of the Prague writer, “the most picturesque, the most visual,” as Rybczynski defined him, adding: “When I read Kafka, I not only had ideas, but images." It has been ten years since Kafka and Rybczynski has not made any other videos. All of this time, he has been studying new methods of digital image reproduction, and probably reflecting on new possibilities of representation and mise-enscene. The panel of The Ideal City in Urbino is still there. Ultimately, it is a tabula rasa, ready to welcome actions, characters, micro-stories, further stratifications. Let’s hope that Rybczynski one of the leaders of the electronic renaissance of the late 1900s draws inspiration from this new trip to Pesaro and Urbino, in order to gift us with new and dizzying images, and to give an idea of what digital cinema could be like in this century that has just barely begun.”
- From the Ideal City to the Virtual Reality - An introduction to “Zbig’s vision”, by Bruno Di Marino
“Kafka is part of a French project, The Audiovisual Encyclopedia, on which Peter Greenaway, Francis Ford Coppola Carlos Saura, John Boorman and other directors also collaborated. Why did I choose Kafka from among the themes offered to me? Because he is the most visual writer of this century. […] The camera movements were designed by the computer, which had almost complete control over the video-scenic spaces and the actors.”
- Zbigniew Rybczynski, from Mario Cereghino, Il Rinascimento tecnologico di Zbigniew Rybczynski, “Il Manifesto,” July 1992
“The structure that the director constructed in the studio allowed him to create the impossible: from apparently gigantic set pieces that were actually models onto which the actors’ images were superimposed to the continuous tracking shots (a combined effect of the movements of the revolving sets and the tracks on which the camera is placed, or the repetition of an image over itself). In Kafka, things never cease to move or rotate.”
- Bernardo Carvalho, Zbig vem lançar “Kafka” no Brasil, in “Folha de San Paulo,” April 1992.
“In certain directors, the undertaking of a literary text heralds a wide interpretation, made to fit into the narrative dimensions of cinema. Zbigniew Rybczynski has been planning a feature film based on Bulgakov’s The Master and Margerita for many years, with strong electronic and computer graphic elements. In his video Kafka, shot in high definition in 1992, the director, with the help of a complex revolving set, computer-generated superimpositions and continuous tracking shots, creates a narration that approaches, in a single long shot, various of Kafka’s texts (from The Trial, Metamorphosis and The Castle) and images evoked from the texts themselves (recited by actors and scrupulously authentic), in relation to continguity and ‘circular’ succession. Sets and camera movements, joined together by precise sound editing even in the post-production phase, tend to create an incessant movement from which any kind of editing ‘cut’ is exiled, and according to Rybczynski corresponds well to both Kafka’s powerfully visual universe and to an idea of motion and inexorable circularity. Here, the collage and inlay technique leave room for a development both sequential and circular in the narrative fragments, like in a Moebius strip.”
- Sandra Lischi, Visioni elettroniche, Edizioni di Bianco & Nero, Roma 2001, pp. 64-65.
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