Jiří David created this film for entirely personal reasons: as a gift for his father (who had shot the original footage) in order to raise his spirits as he suffered from an incurable illness. “The film’s creation was entirely unplanned. I took my father’s 8 mm films and transferred them onto VHS in the simple conditions of our flat: i.e., by projecting them on a screen and filming it with a VHS camera.” David set the family movies from the 1960s to a mix of pop and classical music. The result is an emotionally charged work that David later decided to exhibit: “I first screened these films at a painting symposium at AVU sometime in the mid-1990s. This led to some misunderstanding, since none of those present understood why my presentation was on this subject.” The film is an early example of Czech video art to work with found archival materials.
In the Window to the Archive programme the AVU Research Center in Prague (VVP AVU) in conjunction with Artyčok.tv regularly release works from the VVP AVU video archive. The selection for Artyčok.tv focuses on older works (materials from the end of the 20th century), works bordering on video art, film and documentation, or on purely documentary materials related to the recent development of Czech and Slovak visual art.
