A few weeks ago in the discussion forums, rmarkd asked us what films had floored us. Here's one that floored me years ago but has only just recently been released on DVD: Steps, a wildly entertaining 25-minute mind-blower and part of the Films & Videos by Zbig Rybczynski collection (I: Media, II: Steps and III: The Orchestra).

You've probably seen a sample of Rybczynski's work at some point though you may not have been aware of it. Winner of an Oscar, an Emmy and countless other awards, the 55-year-old Polish wizard amazes just as much conceptually as he does technically in his video art, music videos, even TV network promos for the likes of NBC and VH-1. Maybe you actually remember seeing the clip he did for "Imagine" a few years after John Lennon's death (he'd just made a music video for Yoko Ono the year before). You're looking straight on into a brightly lit white room with two tall windows offering a generous view of the city across the bay. But we're also slipping off sideways (or is it the room that's moving?) so that, in what appears to be a single, seamless 8-minute tracking shot, as the room slips out of the frame, another, identical room takes its place... until it, too, glides evenly out of the frame, replaced by the next identical white room and so on, smoothly on and on.

They're the same room yet different rooms with slight variations and reappearing characters until you begin to piece together the story of a family. Lennon's music and the steadiness of the rhythm of each room passing by simultaneously conjure two conflicting senses: time's passing and the timelessness of time's passing.

Rybczynski's video for "Imagine," one of his most conscientiously "polished," bears several elements that reappear throughout much of his work; he'll astound with some visual trick and then almost immediately ask you to get over it, to watch instead what he does within its carefully chosen limitations. He'll often emphasize the boxiness of video, its uncinematic smallness. His interiors sometimes seem like simplistic paintings, very conscious of their frames; it's just that they happen to move, sometimes very slowly.

And when none of that's true, he'll call attention to the artificiality of it all, as he does in one of his lesser works, the video for Mick Jagger's "Let's Work." "Look," Rybczynski seems to be saying, "you and I both know Mick Jagger is not running through New York City." So he uses the goofiness of the set-up to celebrate the vibrant city itself and the comic diversity of its inhabitants.

But back to Steps. First, the year. It was made in 1987, the tail-end of the Reagan era with no end in sight - though it's hard to imagine it now - to the Cold War. The set-up: A Soviet guide announces to his group of gaudily attired American tourists: "The subject of our show is Odessa Steps, the most famous film sequence in the history of the motion picture."

And that is precisely where they go. They, in color, looking very video-pixelated, all 1980s and all, walk straight into the grainy black-and-white sequence from Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) and tour it as if it were a theme park. Men, women and children are being cut down by the Czar's troops and the Americans are gawking and snapping shots for their photo albums back home. Meanwhile, the guide warns them to brace themselves for each splice; the frame jumps and the tourists are jostled like some spaceship crew in a cheap sci-fi TV series. They have to duck under gun barrels or leap out of the way as the baby carriage comes tumbling down the steps (though they'll also nab a close look at the baby as it goes).

I think that some artists occasionally hit on an idea that resonates so deep and so far and in so many different directions they themselves don't bother chasing all those reverberations down and thinking each of them through to the end. It would, in a case like Steps, take a lifetime. They must know intuitively that they've hit on something - better just to up and do it. I can't imagine Rybczynski's thought all the way through all the questions he raises in Steps: About the distance between film and TV viewers and the mediated tragedies on the screen; about the commodification of a work of art which is, in turn, also a bit of straight-up propaganda making hay out of an uprising that in some ways signaled the beginnings of a revolution that would shape the course of the 20th century; about the then-present relations between the US and the USSR, the mutual stereotyping (shallow Americans; ever-suffering Russians), the course of improving relations (based, naturally, on a capitalist enterprise, the tour); about the clashing natures of video and film "realities," about Eisenstein's beloved montage and how anyone might "inhabit" a cut-up world... and that's just for starters.

I just read the other day that Godard, at least when he was young, didn't much like shorts; there wasn't enough time or space, he felt, to fully realize a whole work of cinematic art. I couldn't disagree more. When I think of, say, Chris Marker's La Jetée or Charles and Ray Eames's Powers of Ten, both in a class into which I'd definitely invite Steps... if they were any more fully realized, I'm not sure I could bear watching them. -- David Hudson

Rent Films & Videos by Zbig Rybczynski I: Media; Rent II: Steps; Rent III: The Orchestra.

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