Date: 25.09.2018
Beginning: 19:00

The fourth chapter of the Program on documentary tendencies in the video deals with examples of staging or actors’ reenactment of events asking to be reassessed. It is about strategies used in cases when direct recording of the event appears to be insufficient or problematic, or is not possible due to the absence of archival materials. Videos will be selected from both Czech and foreign authors where this kind of reenactment is deliberately present.

Four videos by foreign artists will be shown during the screening night, which employ the reenactment format in an explicit way. First comes Spielberg’s List by Omer Fast, built on dialogues with the crowd members acting in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Recollections of events that took place during filming mingle with memories of actual historical events and the narration is heading toward a multilayer interpretation of the “past” experience.

Romanian artist Irina Botea Bucan together with students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago shot a half-hour video called Auditions for a Revolution, in 2006. In it the protagonists reenact before the camera the key moments of Ceaușescu’s regime fall in 1989 Romania. Iconic scenes, at that time broadcast live by the Romanian TV, are being reiterated in almost every detail, revealing thus the fact how hard it is to grasp and process even recent history.

In Mrs. Goldstein video from 2006, Avi Mograbi returns to a traumatic event from 1994, when Baruch Goldstein committed a massacre of Palestinian Muslims in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Mograbi avoids direct documentary materials connected with the event, inviting three actresses instead and staging before the camera a casting for the role of the mass killer’s wife.

The screening night will wind up with the work of a young Ukrainian artist Mykola Ridnyi from 2016, called Grey Horses, where the author recalls his great grandfather, anarchist Ivan Krupský. With the help of friends and Ukrainian activists they reenact episodes from his life, thus creating a picture that interconnects both past and current events in the Ukraine.

 

Presented videos:

Omer Fast – Spielberg’s List (2003)

Irina Botea Bucan – Auditions for a Revolution (2006)

Avi Mograbi – Mrs. Goldstein (2006)

Mykola Ridnyi – Grey Horses (2016)

 

Project curators: Alžběta Bačíková and Anna Remešová

The commentary will be held in Czech.