He was also a pioneer of new film technologies. Familiar with novelties, always ready to experiment. And just as he perfected the colour-work in The Promised Land or in the Hourglass Sanatorium, in O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilisation, he created a new standard for camerawork in Polish cinema.
In 1984, he was the first person in Poland to use the Steadicam – a system that allowed to shoot in motion and eliminated the shaking of the moving camera. It is Steadicam that made it possible to shoot the scenes with Jerzy Stuhr walking through long, dark corridors (those scenes were inspired by hotel shots from Kubrick’s The Shining).
In O-Bi, O-Ba... Szulkin and Sobociński attempted the seemingly impossible – they wanted to create a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie with the not-so-big budget of Polish cinema. They could not afford to build expensive sets or use special effects. They had to depend on skilfully operating the space of the shot and the lighting to create an illusion of reality on screen. In a conversation with Małgorzata Domagalik, Sobociński said:
I don’t really know, how much of my effort went into the creation of this disgusting and depressing world, how much I thought about my ideas on the colours, the movement of camera, etc.
In order to achieve the correct temperature of the lighting, Sobociński, after a series of attempts, went to a factory that produced glow-tubes and ordered ones that would be best in contributing to the cold, alienating air of the movie.
Frantic, directed by Roman Polański (1986)