✸ Refle-x-périmental #27 : Aimless Walks. The Czech avant-garde ✸ 

► For its opening screening of the season at the Reflet Médicis, Cinédoc Paris Films Coop presents, in collaboration with the Národní filmový archiv (National Film Archive),a unique programme of short films from the Czech avant-garde, recently restored by the National Film Archive in Prague.

Czech experimental cinema of the interwar period had close ties to the Surrealist movement and to the innovations transforming photography at the time. A variety of genres and disciplines was commonly seen at exhibitions and cultural events in Czechoslovakia, with the same permeability applying to professional, artistic, and amateur practices. A key event to influence the development of the Czech avant-garde was Film und Foto, an international exhibition held in Stuttgart in 1929, which prompted Alexander Hackenschmied to organise an exhibition of Modern Czech Photography in Prague soon after, together with the first show of avant-garde cinema, premiering his film Aimless Walk (1930).

The films of Alexander Hackenschmied, Čeněk Zahradníček, and Vladimír Šmejkal, among others, testify to the diversity of these trajectories and to the blurring of boundaries between genres throughout the 1930s. Their early films elude the categories traditionally associated with amateur, documentary, or advertising cinema, while sharing an interest in Surrealist imaginaries and practices such as collage, at once lyrical and parodic, in Bauhaus ideas, particularly functionalism and constructivism, and in formal experimentation informed by Soviet montage.

From Hackenschmied’s peri-urban aimless walks  – whose distinctive style would leave its mark even on the films of his future partner Maya Deren – to the choreography of everyday gestures in the work of Zahradníček and Šmejkal, Czech avant-garde films trace a cartography of Prague and take the pulse of a modern world that is at once hallucinatory and hallucinated. The same Prague that, sixty years later, Pascal Baes would revisit in turn in Topic I & II, presented as a bonus to close the programme.

Thanks to: Národní filmový archiv, Cinémathèque16

► Screening: 

Bezúčelná procházka (Aimless Walk)
Alexander Hackenschmied
1930, b&w, silent, 8’05

Na Pražském hradě (At Prague Castle)
Alexander Hackenschmied
1931, b&w, sound, 11’52

Školní úkol (School Assignment) [version tchèque]
Elmar Klos, Alexander Hackenschmied
1935, b&w, sound, 3’36 

Atom věčnosti (The Atom of Eternity)
Čeněk Zahradníček, Vladimír Šmejkal
1934, b&w, silent, 6’04 

Ruce v úterý (Hands on Tuesday)
Čeněk Zahradníček, Vladimír Šmejkal
1935, b&w, silent, 12’04 

Příběh vojáka (A Soldier’s Story)
Čeněk Zahradníček, Vladimír Šmejkal
1935, b&w, silent, 8’08

Máj (May)
Čeněk Zahradníček, E. F. Burian
1936/1976, b&w, silent, 10’34 

Topic I & II
Pascal Baes
1989, b&w, sound, 12’27

✸ 

This screening is part of the Cinédoc cine-club program at Reflet Médicis.