Hoax

An animated depiction of the half-waking state before we fall asleep. Various people describe how they see the state between waking and sleeping, while the visual show hypnagogic hallucinations – i.e., the vision that accompany the process of falling asleep. Colours are intertwined with shapes to create abstract landscapes from which every now and then concrete objects emerge.

A poetic short portrait of the Ústí region of the Czech Republic. Using experimental means of expression, the director creates a hypnotizing study that combines natural and urban landscape motifs into a multi-layered dynamic collage. The film was shot on 16 mm stock and was created without the use of visual effects.Fascinations: Exprmntl.cz: Out of competition

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.

An essay focusing on the topic of the exploitation of natural resources has as its primary theme water, showing its forms and changes in the chain of industry. The deep soundtrack is as dark as dirty water leaking from a power plant and, together with images of industry, evokes a sense of ecological anxiety.

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.

The film essay brings the audience right into the heart of a historical battle re-enactment. The hundreds of soldiers fighting in historical costumes imitate organized violence; the film oscillates between a game, a theatre play, a Spartakiad and Land art. The multiplied projections evoke war turmoil, further enhanced by quotes from Karel Čapek’s anti-war drama The Mother.

A mysterious cinematic poem about remembering a long-lost summer afternoon. Disturbing abstract details of natural elements permeate the metaphor of a children's game, passing in a contemplative vision of the spiritual essence of light and darkness, in which opposites eventually dissolve into units of primal matter.

Recent history dies out in the overgrown landscape of a former German military base where children are playing. Through performances by young protagonists and disturbing commentary that suggests that the innocence of the images isn’t what it appears to be, the film reflects on the phenomenon of violence and encourages us to learn from the past.

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)  

A series of three experimental films, which can be projected also in a loop, deals with nature through quick, dynamic camera movements, attacking the viewer’s perception. The films were produced as a final examination work in the studio of time-based media whose students try a variety of methods of multimedia processing of sound and image.

This film by the author duo Geislerová and Mazúr builds on the concept of the so-called liquid love introduced by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and the work of theorist Elisabeth Badinter in its critical analysis of the question of predestination of women for the mother role realized through a collage of shots of women symbolizing motherhood as well as emancipation which questions the inevitability of this frequently debated social role.

A dialogue between audio and video reinterprets a scene from the movie The Stranger (1967, dir. Luchino Visconti), in which the condemned debates with a priest about the absurdity of life, death, and the non-existence of God. The debate is abstracted by the skewed image as seen through cut glass and the meanings of their words take on a certain timelessness.