The Orchestra

Rybczyński builds a film out of six parts. Each part takes place in a different setting. A well known piece of music carries each of them. It opens with Mozart’s Piano Concerto Number Twenty One. Chopin’s Funeral March follows. Albinoni’s Adagio, Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie and Schubert’s Ave Maria come in their turn. Ravel’s Bolero closes the film. In the Ave Maria section two figures glide through the interior of Chartres Cathedral. The closing section is called Stairs to Lenin. Soviet history runs down a staircase there. The camera turns without stopping and the spaces flow into one another. Rybczyński gets that effect with machines he built himself. He made the film on a high definition video system in his own studio. The work is packed with symbols and cultural references. A man’s life and his death look like parts of the same movement. Ady Cohen appears in the fifty seven minute film, an American production Zbigniew Rybczyński finished in 1990.