From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Białystok Reversal
This article concerns a lost film. For experimental film adaptations, see Films (list) and Lost media.
The Białystok Reversal is a lost 16mm experimental film first reported in ██ (1988) as having premiered at an undocumented venue in Białystok, Poland. No print survives; no archival photographs are known.
The sole description—an anonymous review—describes footage shown in temporal inversion: surgical theatre imagery and abstract heartbeat patterns reversed into landscape of the Polish inland plain. The reviewer identifies the film's concern with "reversal as refusal of causality," echoing Katita's mission to break the cycle.
The title invokes both Białystok—a city in experimental Eastern European cinema linked to border-crossing and ontological instability—and "reversal," terminology recurrent in the doctrine of refusal scholarship. Possible influence from Andrzej Żuławski's formal investigations of temporal recursion is speculated but unverified.
A 1997 Polish film festival retrospective lists it with annotation "(Status Unknown, Possibly Lost or Unconfirmed)." A preservation report filed in ██ contains a fragmentary notation: "Archive_Index_Recursive_Pointing_To_Itself_And_Its_Own_Absence.index (source corrupted)." No archival search has recovered evidence of completion, screening, or surviving material.
Whether the film was finished, screened, or exists solely as archival notation remains unresolved.