Civic Voyeurism. Józef Robakowski’s Aerial Views of the Commons

In 1978, Józef Robakowski moved into the “Manhattan of Łódź:” a complex of five high-rises located at 19 Mickiewicz Street. From his ninth-floor kitchen window, he began recording footage of the courtyard below – a practice he maintained over the next two decades. The product is From My Window: a collection of black-and-white footage shot on sixteen-millimeter film and video between 1978 and ’99 and edited in 2000. Using the device of an offscreen voiceover recorded in hindsight yet seeming to narrate the footage in real time, Robakowski resets the contemporaneity of the last two decades. In this article, I discuss the film’s flexible temporality and the resultant lines of empathy binding window watcher, courtyard subject, and viewer. I make the counterintuitive claim that Robakowski’s observation of his neighbors is a form of engaged empathy. Through his past-yet-present-tense voiceover, he refunctions voyeurism into a kind of civil service.