Night of the Hunter

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.

The almost hallucinogenic whirlwind of virtual views of potential targets of a nuclear attack in a “buffer zone” shows the viewer an unpleasant proximity of total destruction, which threatened Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. The visuality of the film, reminiscent of direction finding, was created using the data from Google Maps.

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.

A bustling scene somewhere between documentary, abstraction, and animation, based on a static view of the intersection of Adam Mickiewicz and Józef Piłsudski Streets in Warsaw, is transformed into an audiovisual jumble of noises, shapes, colors, and movement, among which we see pedestrians, cars, and public transport vehicles.

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 personal essay inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952). Using machins learning on the level of deep reading, the film processes visual and audio records, distorting them, rearranging them, and subsequently submitting them to an algorithm created in part by artificial intelligence that reconstructs the sequences and arranges them in chronological order.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.