Buffer Zone Blues

A film essay based on the conflict between decorative shots from a bird’s eye perspective and three mechanical, linearly-connected monologues dissects the subconsciousness of an individual saturated with a multitude of differing choices, opinions, and possibilities in the numbers-driven age of digital media.

A metaphorical weather forecast portrays human emotions and sentiments in confrontation with contemporary social debates. The lightly satirical tone of the tv moderator’s presentation accompanies a video collage featuring a central motif of the Earth in which Africa is shrouded by clouds of existential questions and a spiritual crisis front threatens Europe.

Stairs leading from nowhere to nowhere, narrow shafts, bridges, ladders from which we fall in our dreams. A string of raster photographs depicting different places imitates a course of dreaming, making the subconscious look real. Frightfully unfamiliar images from the archives of collective memory sneak into the most inward corners of our existence.

A metaphorical reflection on social exclusion using the participation method reveals the relationship between young Ukrainian Elizaveta and her mother, a dentist. A gritty analogy of an extracted tooth, social essentials, and spiritual purity play out on the screen as a conflict of alienating details and an intimate tableau of family life.

imperfect media image can make you give in to emotional illusions. The combination of animation and stable shots of the forest ground is accompanied by the author’s comment on the absurdity of the situation presented.

An archaeologically significant site diffuses its memory through levels of the myths, rituals, and folk tales in an essayist discourse on the forms of historical continuity. Absence of contact sound and minimalist music emphasizing the visual motifs of both alive and inanimate tracks in the landscape.

In a world where wildlife loses its place, there is a need to replace it. The allusion to a trailer advertising the soft green moss ball breaks down the distance between the sterile human habitat and the sea plant popularized as an organic element of any home.

A metacommentary movie about a movie, in which the director and the cameraman are filming a report about the extinction of butterflies and ecosystem collapse, while in the editing room they polemise about ways to communicate clearly and comment on their dramaturgical decisions, as well as express frustration with the difficulty of reaching a modern audience with more complex communication.

This personal essay relates the perception of space to the mental universe of screenwriter and director Pavel Juráček who found his “truly ideal place” in the town of Příbram. The sensitive combination of journal entries, intimate notes, and film fragments tries to break down conventional storytelling techniques to build an original world of timeless thinking.

An engraving by Josef Váchal and a text by writer Karel Klostermann have inspired the author to lament the endangered integrity of the Bohemian Forest, suffering from civilization more than ever before. The visual evocation of an old film suggests the timeless nature of environmental problems that have plagued the wild and lovely Bohemian Forest for a long time.

Blinking icons, pop-up windows, a blaring alarm clock, and the blipping of unread messages are normal parts of our everyday lives. The creator turns her back on the endless stream of information and attempts to escape from the world of modern communication technologies for at least five minutes to devote some attention to herself.

Civilization at the Crossroads: The Scientific-Technical Revolution and the Future of Socialism in Educational Films of the Sixties The screening is a precursor to the exhibition The Self-Awareness of Science: The Scientific-Technical Revolution and the Limits of Emancipation, which will open in December 2018 at Prague’s Display and FUTURA galleries. The exhibition will look at the activities in the 1960s of an interdisciplinary research team led by philosopher Radovan Richta that was expected to present a vision for “the new Czechoslovak model of socialism.” The advent of cybernetics and automatization was expected to help create a more humane socialist society in which people would be liberated from manual labor and from preexisting ideological authorities and predefined roles. The exhibition, which is being prepared by a team of historians, curators, and artists, tries to find the fine line between the liberating potential of science and technology and their use for maintaining and cementing technocratic power or authoritarian regimes. Its aim is to reconstruct the interdisciplinary dialogue of the 1960s, which has recently taken on new meaning, in particular in relation to the subjects of automatization, a society without work, or climate change.   The screening is part of the project “Shape the Future! The Concept of the Science-Technical Revolution,” organized as part of the program “Strategies AV21: Europe and the State: Between Barbarism and Civilization” (Czech Academy of Sciences, 2018)