The Fourth Dimension (1988) Poster

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9/10
How, exactly, did he do that?!
planktonrules22 June 2012
Zbigniew Rybczynski is a Polish filmmaker who's made lots of unusual art films. One of them, "Tango", received an Oscar but most of them are the sorts of films the average person would never seen or enjoy--as they are very experimental in nature and don't have traditional narratives. They really are the sorts of pictures you'd expect to see in art houses or museums.

I have seen most of Rybczynski's films and must say that "The Fourth Dimension" is his most amazing and artistic. It's also a film that appears to have taken a HUGE amount of time and specialized equipment to make and I applaud his effort. I assume he used some sort of rotating camera (much like the way the laser moves on an MRI machine). Using this camera, he filmed all four sides of various objects or models. But, to see the fourth dimension, the objects and people are twisted. There really is no plot--just things SLOWLY being twisted--all set to very nice music. It's all quite amazing technically and despite being a bit overlong, it's pretty interesting to watch. Not for all tastes, but quite good.
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10/10
How he did that:
azdinak10 January 2022
Warning: Spoilers
The camera was locked off. The models were filmed as they rotated on a turntable. To achieve the twisting effect the footage was re-photographed on an animation stand though a specially designed mask, a slit shaped window which allowed one narrow horizontal band of footage to be exposed at a time. This window was moved incrementally down the frame, each band corresponding to one of hundreds of lines of resolution the way TV images are composed. But here, each subsequent line was taken from the adjacent frame. In the final film, each frame is composed of hundreds of slices of image from different frames, methodically staggered, to create the illusion of the image twisting.

Today it's possible to write a computer program that would achieve the same effect. But in this film the effect was achieved optically. Part of the charm of many of Zbig's films -- like "Tango" -- is the apparent handmade quality which clues the viewer in to the mindbogglingly meticulous execution involved in its creation.

See Zbig's music video for Accept's "Midnight Mover", which anticipated "The Matrix"' bullet-time effect a decade earlier.
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