Fascinations: Progress

This year, in the ongoing series of retrospectives devoted to the history of avant-garde film through the ways of representation of certain topic or motive, we want to map the representation of "progress". Something inscribed in the nature of the avant-garde itself, the topic was also widely represented - typically with enthusiasm and admiration, but sometimes also critically. We are interested in films from the beginning of cinema until today. The works from the beginning of cinema and between-the-war period. The "classical" works and "big" names, but also not so well-known films and authors.

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The stop motion animation which fully exploits the phenomenon of the seeming movement – the so-called phi phenomenon – amazes us with various shapes, colours and movements our own eyesight projects onto a continuously moving object.

Abstract Experiment in Kodachrome

Slavko Vorkapich

United States / 1950 / 2 min.

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Czech Premiere

One of the first movie commercials made by the Edisonʼs company is also a bitter commentary on the social progress which monetizes vice. “We all smoke”, reads the banner, happily unfolded by Uncle Sam, a clergyman, a businessman and a Native American. Their heated dispute ends abruptly when a girl appears and gives them cigarettes.

Admiral Cigarette

William Heise

United States / 1897 / 30 sec.

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Czech Premiere

One day after the presidential inauguration in January 2017, the Womenʼs March took place in Washington D.C. Footage from the demonstration, shot with Super8 camera, is combined with archival footage of the protest marches from various moments in the US history. A visual whirl of the protesters᾽ faces and banners is accompanied by a childʼs voice which is trying to express as accurately as possible what it means to fight for oneʼs own rights.

And Then We Marched

Lynne Sachs

United States / 2017 / 3 min.

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Czech Premiere

A film clip shot for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company captures the foundation excavation for Macy’s department store in Herald Square, New York, in which we see dozens of diggers wielding pickaxes, smoke, dust, and horse-drawn carriages. Although the film’s title suggests it is a future skyscraper, the still-popular Macy’s has only twelve floors.

Beginning a Skyscraper

Robert K. Bonine

United States / 1902 / 40 sec.

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Czech Premiere

Most of the 100+ films that Case made during the test phase of the first sound camera are irreversibly lost. The set of 7 shorts includes a vaudeville duet with Gus Visser and a goose. Another test film shows Case blowing into the microphone and asking: “You over there, watching this film, can you feel the air?”

Case Sound Tests

Theodore Case

United States / 1925 / 10 min.

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Czech Premiere

Three experimental shorts by the father of the special effects, Frederick Armitage, were created by layering two negatives into one frame. These fantastic and spectral films are characterised by exaggeration, humour and ease, reminding us of the inherently playful beginnings of the cinematography.  

Early Superimpositions

Frederick S. Armitage

United States / 1900 / 1 min.

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Czech Premiere

A found footage film is a collage of documentary and training films from the first half of the 20th century. What connects them is the idea of progress and technological development and exploitation of the natural and human resources. The film is congenially complemented by the mechanical rhythms by a French composer Pierre Bastien.

Energy Energy

Karel Doing

Netherlands / 1999 / 7 min.

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Czech Premiere

Inspired by a poem of the same name, written by Anatol Stern (1929), where the famished proletariat yells: “They stuck our throats with the food for soul!”, this experimental film is a homage to committed poetry. The film was thought to have been destroyed by the Nazis, but in 2019 it was discovered in the Bundesarchiv.

Europa

Franciszka Themerson, Stefan Themerson

Poland / 1931 / 11 min.

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Czech Premiere

A plastic puzzle of 16 parts, made in Finland: UFO, uterus, butterfly, playhouse. This prefabricated building, to be placed on the top of the mountains or the African coast, represented the dreamy future the humankind was about to enter in 1968. The story of the rise and fall of Futuro is the story of the idea of a future man, the idea which emerges and disperses.

Futuro – A New Stance for Tomorrow

Mika Taanila

Finland / 1998 / 28 min.

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Czech Premiere

Skills and concentration of the glass-blowers have to compete with the mechanized mass bottle production. The scenes that observe the glass-blowersʼ bodies and their fine, almost imperceptible movements, which are a physical reminder of the craftsmenʼs practical skills, are accompanied by Pim Jacobsʼ jazz performance. The automatic movement of the machine is emphasized by the monotonous counting of the produced bottles.

Glass

Bert Haanstra

Netherlands / 1958 / 10 min.

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The film already had its Czech Premiere

Stan Brakhage's debut film tells the story of the surge, pacification, and outflow of desire awakened by an accidental encounter between two beings temporarily frozen in time — a man and a woman — who stand below an arcade of viaducts as one car after another speeds by above them. The sensual piano accompaniment was complemented by Brakhage's roommate and future composer, James Tenney.

Interim

Stan Brakhage

United States / 1952 / 25 min.

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Czech Premiere

This groundbreaking film shot six months after the opening of the New York subway follows a train traveling from Union Square to Grand Central Station. The dark tunnel is illuminated not only by the train that's transporting the cameraman, but also by the headlights of a car driving along the sideline. The lighting takes full advantage of the architecture of the tunnel, which is reinforced with white columns arranged closely together one-by-one.

Interior NY Subway, 14th Street to 42nd Street

Gottfried Wilhelm Bitzer

United States / 1905 / 5 min.

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Czech Premiere

An abstract dance film presenting disembodied parts of dancers clad in tight clothing that move around freely in a blank space. With this film, Arledge helped create a new film genre – ciné-dance – in which the dancing body rids itself of its physical limitations and takes on a pure form.

Introspection

Sara Kathryn Arledge

United States / 1941 / 6 min.

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Czech Premiere

Jack, a puppet dog, has a lucid dream where he encounters not only his brave counterpart but also a dragon, a king, and a princess. The plotline of this small puppet drama alone is, perhaps, enough to label it a surrealist work; but on top of that, the film is interspersed with shots of a sinking schooner and galloping seahorses. The soundtrack to the film was provided by Larry Jordan.

Jack's Dream

Joseph Cornell

United States / 1938 / 4 min.

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Czech Premiere

Four static shots of a girl reading a book accompanied by a voice reading a text in Hungarian are presented in four, increasingly complicated, auditory-image variations that encourage the viewer to learn new, spontaneous ways of watching the film.

Learned Spontaneous Movements

Dóra Maurer

Hungary / 1973 / 9 min.

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Czech Premiere

This experimental video, divided into three chapters, presents a cacotopic vision of society “dragging its feet” into the 21st century. Enter a dystopia where technology pervades the most intimate corners of the human mind and renders interpersonal contact obsolete, resulting in alienation, isolation, and extinction. The video’s bleak tone is underscored by primitive computer graphics and a shot featuring all white noise, in which the last traces of the human illusion are lost.

Leaving the 20th Century

Max Almy

United States / 1982 / 10 min.

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Czech Premiere

Regarded as one of the first avant-garde films made in the US, Sheeler and Strand’s Manhatta is a dialogue of poetry, photography, and New York City. In the poem Mannahatta, which appears in the title cards throughout the film, Walt Whitman invokes the “original name” of his city, the word “resounding, healthy, untamed, musical, self-sufficient.” The bearer of this name is represented by 65 shots emphasizing the contours of artificial, natural, and human layers that intersect within it.

Manhatta

Charles Sheeler, Paul Strand

United States / 1921 / 9 min.

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The film already had its Czech Premiere

According to the Edison Society catalogue, this film captures the master inventor at work in his chemical laboratory. The scene was actually shot on location at Edison's Black Maria film studio, the world's first film studio.

Mr. Edison at work in his chemical laboratory

James H. White, William Heise

United States / 1897 / 1 min.

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Czech Premiere

“I am a commodity that people call oil – and this is my saga,” says the protagonist of this amateur film shot in the spirit of the Soviet aesthetic in Los Angeles. In the intertitles, oil continues to speak to man, leaving him in no doubt as to who the master is. The celebration of a fast-paced, exciting world with the liquid “bones of ages past” running through its veins becomes somewhat bitter.

Oil – A Symphony in Motion

M.G. MacPherson

United States / 1933 / 7 min.

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Czech Premiere

This film, a 360-degree panoramic shot of the Champ de Mars in Paris during the World's Fair in July 1900, begins and ends at the Palace of Electricity, a symbol of progress.

Palace of Electricity

James H. White

United States / 1900 / 1 min.

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Czech Premiere

Using light-splitting prisms, cellophane, sparklers, and ping-pong balls, the film attempts to represent what happens in the mind when listening to Grieg's score for the play Peer Gynt. The circular dance of shapes and lights drowned in darkness is structurally and rhythmically linked to the musical composition, their relationship anchored by a mathematical formula.

Rhythm in Light

Mary Ellen Bute, Melville Webber, Ted Nemeth

United States / 1934 / 5 min.

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Czech Premiere

Oscillating between homage and obsession, the film distills the gestures, expressions, and posture of Rose Hobart, the heroine of the exotic Hollywood drama East of Borneo (G. Melford, 1931). Cornell's version of the film, reckless with the plot and other characters, slowed down, shrouded in violet blue, complete with Brazilian underscore and eclipse shots, frees Hobart from the encumbrances of cliché, stereotyping, and narrative gossip.

Rose Hobart

Joseph Cornell

United States / 1936 / 19 min.

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Czech Premiere

Profiles of the Eiffel Tower's steel structure punctuate the view of the receding Champ de Mars during the World's Fair in the first year of the 20th century. The newsreel clip from the Edison Studio consists of several shots that eventually, as the studio catalogue says, lays a view of a vast white city out before the eyes of the astonished audience.

Scene from the Elevator Ascending Eiffel Tower

James H. White

United States / 1900 / 2 min.

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Czech Premiere

VanDerBeek describes his neo-Dadaist film collage, shot using the technique of phase animation, as “a social satire aimed at the rockets, scientists, and competitive mania of our time”. In his vision, science inevitably becomes an accomplice of power, a means of torture, manipulation, and control that ultimately threatens not just some, but the entire planet.

Science Friction

Stan VanDerBeek

United States / 1959 / 10 min.

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Czech Premiere

The film made in Edison᾽s studio Black Maria was to test the kinetophone – the machine which was both a kinetograph and a phonograph. It shows two men dancing in a tight embrace to violin music played by Dickson himself. He plays straight to the metal horn of the phonograph, recording the music. The picture and the sound were synchronized at the end of the 20th century.

The Dickson Experimental Sound Film

William K. L. Dickson

United States / 1894 / 1 min.

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Czech Premiere

Portrait of “Edison” (1926–1930), the world's first public kinetic sculpture by Zdeněk Pešánek. The sculpture consisted of 420 colored light bulbs, whose play was controlled by a pneumatic piano in the evening. The film opens with a view of the sculpture situated on the roof of a building in daylight, then darkness engulfs everything, punctuated by electrical discharges, rhythmic lighting, and a play of light reflections.

The Light Penetrates the Dark

František Pilát, Otakar Vávra

Czechoslovakia / 1930 / 4 min.

section: Fascinations: Progress

The film already had its Czech Premiere

A Maltese cross and crescent moon drive the intermittent mechanism inside a film projector, which ensures quick change of individual film frames. The accelerating exchange of segments of different types of film material also characterises this poetic structural film, which culminates in a poem addressed to the projection device: If you die tonight / you'll be gone tomorrow.

The Maltese Cross Movement

A. Keewatin Dewdney

Canada / 1967 / 6 min.

section: Fascinations: Progress

Czech Premiere

The first in a series of films about holding time on one reel of 16mm film. The photographer operates a Polaroid camera pointed at the camera, which returns the view. The Polaroid portraits of the camera that emerge during this dialogue of cameras gradually obscure the field of view until it is completely replaced by fifteen versions of what usually remains hidden.

Transformation by Holding Time (Landscape)

Paul de Nooijer

Netherlands / 1976 / 2 min.

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Czech Premiere

The first March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights took place in October 1979, and another eight years later. In a non-violent juxtaposition of footage from both marches, Hubbard allows us to reflect on subtle and distinct shifts in the modes of protest expression, atmosphere, and shared perspectives.

Two Marches

Jim Hubbard

United States / 1991 / 9 min.

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Czech Premiere

Joseph Cornell's original compilation from his own film collection is based on the low-budget slapstick cartoons produced in the 1920s and 1930s by the Weiss Brothers, which Cornell turns into a parody of newsreels through subtle textual intervention.

Unreal News Reels

Joseph Cornell

United States / 1924 / 8 min.

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Czech Premiere

Although Marinetti wrote the Manifesto of Futurist Cinema, Velocità is seen by some as the only futuristic film in its own right. Beside a dense intertextual network and a mechanic dance of the screen titles and objects dancing to stop-motion beats, the movie features a unique showcase of air painting on film and a few swinging frames from the streets of Turin.

Velocità

Guido Martina, Pippo Oriani, Tina Cordero

Italy / 1930 / 13 min.

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Czech Premiere

Brebbia’s film shot in his native town is a mix of footage from the historical core of Varese that has to give way shortly to new residential areas and building sites. The major focal points of the camera eye are young people huddled on the main square, Piazza del Podesta. Fleeting details of their facial expressions, held for an extra second before they vanish, focus on musings about lives of the locals in the year 2000.

Year 2000

Gianfranco Brebbia

Italy / 1969 / 13 min.

section: Fascinations: Progress

Czech Premiere