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I am convinced that film is the most influential medium since it is able to shape society from the viewpoint of content and form more than any other types of art.
People adopt diction, gestures, grimaces and patterns of behaviour which they saw in films. Film has the ability to influence public opinion, people´s interest and desires etc. It is not only the content of the film that people remember and are aware of but also certain elements of the film language which they use when talking about their environment. So if we say that something was “just like from a film” or if we describe somebody´s pace as “slow motion film”, everybody understands what we mean. For example listening to music in our headphones while walking could be seen as a kind of a soundtrack to the surrounding reality. There are dozens of other examples. I think that at certain moments films and lives come so close that they become hard to distinguish from each other. Films and videos, in short any motion pictures, have become such an inseparable part of our perception that we do not analyse them anymore, we simply automatically adopt them.
These ideas have become the topic of my contemporary exhibition in Jelení in which I combine sequences of two motion pictures: a notorious film “Arrival of a train at La Ciotat” by the Lumiére brothers shown for the first time to the public in 1895 and a contemporary amateur video showing scenes from the civil war in Syria. I feel that they serve as a good illustration of the above mentioned. While watching the black-and-white film in the Grand Café in Paris the spectators started running away in horror from the approaching locomotive because they thought it was reality, nowadays reality shown on the display of a camera is regarded as a film.
Light and movement of the cine-projector are the fundamental physical magnitudes – premises – for watching a movie on an old celluloid film. Light and movement are also the basis of the formal side of the exhibition in Jelení.
