Canis Lupus

Through performances in the post-industrial landscape of the Most Basin, the filmmaker addresses the consequences of exploiting natural resources. Live tableaux, in which symbolic funerals for the devastated landscape - paradoxically full of strange unnatural beauty – are held, are a critical commentary on how we deal with the natural environment.

A flying saucer floats through the sky in black and white, creating the illusion of alien forces; upon taking a closer look, it’s obvious that it’s just a toy. The filmmaker examines the issue of videos spreading untruthful alarm messages using the same principles, highlighting the fine line between fact and fiction.

A portrait of sunlight, created on 35mm film negative using a camera obscura built by the filmmaker. The camera records a plant from morning to evening at several-minute intervals. The sequence of images compiled from these photographs create a cinematic sundial.

The slow movement of various species of insect in an abstract, brightly lit setting creates suggestive allusions to incontrollable chaos, apathy, and the decay of social structures. The minimalist visual imagery is accompanied by ambient music that works with realistic sound and static. 

Fascinations: Exprmntl.cz - Out of competitionThe common denominator of the videos is the theme of therapeutic or relaxation exercise, the goal of which is to release mental and physical tension. In each of these works, however, a critical sting can be observed, honed by the frustrations of man in today’s world – whether they’re related to politics, interpersonal relations, or pressures at work. The transfer of these videos from a gallery context into a cinema changes the viewers’ experiences: the viewer is confronted with the images more urgently, they feel the tension building and releasing, and hence empathy with those observed.The series of videos was developed in cooperation with the Jindřich Chalupecký Society. Curated by Tereza Jindrová (Jindřich Chalupecký Society) as part of her research while organizing the exhibition Healing, dedicated to the topic of health in contemporary art.Prezentovaná díla:Migra jóga / Migra YogaCzech Republic, 2012, 10 min.Director: Markéta MagidováPrvotní promluva / Primal SpeechUnited States, 2016, 12min.Director: Liz Magic LaserNěkdy se cítí skoro šťastně / Sometimes They Almost Feel HappyCzech Republic, 2015, 9 min.Director: Barbora KleinhamplováSpolečně 2017 / Together 2017United Kingdom, 2017, 10 min.Directors: Lucy Beech & Edward ThomassonDvě minuty / Two MinutesCzech Republic, 2016, 6 min.Director: Jakub Jansa

This experimental film collage makes use of documentary, fiction and animated film techniques. The fading traces of childhood are mixed with the folk culture of the Haná region, all of it shot on 16mm film. The filmmaker thus preserves her chosen motifs, which are slowly but irrevocably disappearing from the present day.

Domlátil’s short animated film shows the daily rhythms of life at a speed of twelve frames per second. He works with real objects that we use in our regular lives or that we pass by without noticing them. Working with the textures, patterns and symbols he finds on them, he creates a visual continuity.

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)  

Excerpts from a television interview with Eugène Ionesco in an adaptation of his absurd story The Colonel’s Photograph, which is dominated by the motif of a swimming pool that conceals drowned bodies. The visual pun is a compilation of techniques: animation, video, 3D graphics, and text, which give the seemingly random scenes a sort of structure.

Technology as a silent witness to the permanent movement of celestial bodies... The light installation visualizes the arrival and departure of daylight as contemplation and a dramatic process. By condensing one day into a few minutes, it thematizes the passage of time and the cyclicity of natural processes.

This journey in a static shot from Lubomír Lipský's Cirkus je cirkus (Circus Is Circus) explores the relationship between memory and visual history. A fragment from the visual database of the collective memory is accompanied by excerpts from an essay by Karel Kosík on the inability of Czechs to affect real politics through democratic elections.

In her short, emotional film about life after the loss of a loved one, the author enthrallingly deals with a difficult topic, using techniques of both feature and animated film. Real experiences of the narrators, accompanied by an animated reconstruction of the painful situation, create a mournful insight into the thoughts of three young people untimely exposed to death.