The film The Angel is his most prominent, fascinating, and obsessive work. It is accompanied by a soundtrack made by his wife, Michèle Bokanowski, and released during 2003 on a CD album by the label under the title L'Ange. Bokanowski develops work between the traditional cinematographic genres: short film, experimental film, and animation. His manner of treating filmic material is his research at the frontier of optical and visual arts, always in an "in-between" to create. He calls into question the idea that cinema's essence should be to reproduce reality, that is, our habits of thinking and feeling. His films contradict the "objectivity" of photography that is solidly essential to most of the global film productions. Bokanowski's experiments, with the aim of opening cinema to other expressive possibilities – for example the "warping" of objective lenses – testify to purely mental visions that ignore conventional representations, affecting reality, transforming, and giving the viewer of his films new perceptual adventures. In the booklet that accompanies the DVD which contains Bokanowski's sole two documentaries, editor Pip Chodorov wrote: "The search for the overrunning of perception, and thereby oneself, is an expression of the spirituality present in the lives of these two figures: inspiration that we also found in Bokanowski's films, which are also searches into abstraction in the real, mysterious blanks that recover the daily. In his film The Angel, characters search for light, and rise in spirals towards beacons of white and pure light, the librarian-researchers conduct a fierce intellectual quest, hoping for an illuminating response buried under mountains of books. Light plays a central role for the filmmaker, just like it does for the painter and therapist, as a peak of dramatic pleasure. We are pulled forward, upward, through these leaks in the twilight towards the light." According to Raphaël Bassan, in his article «L'Ange: Un météore dans le ciel de l'animation,» Patrick Bokanowski's work can be considered the beginnings of contemporary animation.
Dominique Noguez, ', Classiques de l'Avant-garde, Paris, Éditions Paris Expérimental, 2ème édition, 1999.
Hugo Bélit, «Des flammes! Notes sur trois courts métrages de Patrick Bokanowski,» Bref, le magazine du court métrage, n° 42, automne 1999, p. 10–11.
Patrick Bokanowski, «,» Sous la direction de Christian Lebrat et Nicole Brenez, Jeune, dure et pure! Une histoire du cinéma d'avant-garde et expérimental en France, Paris et Milan, Cinémathèque française, Musée du cinéma, et Mazzotta, 2001, p. 486–489.
Hugo Bélit, «Bokanowski, Patrick,» Sous la direction de Jacky Evrard et Jacques Kermabon, Une encyclopédie du court-métrage français, Côté cinéma, Pantin et Crisnée, Éditions festival Côté Court et Yellow Now, 2004, p. 54–59.
Tamara Rama and Carmen Lloret, «Unvealing and Revealing the Mirror: Mobile Reverberations in Patrick Bokanowski’s Animated Films,» Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal. UK SAGE publishing. Vol 14; Issue 2. July 2019, pp. 83–101.
