Silver dust...Selection from Slovak Film Photography

The exhibition will last from October 1st until November 2nd, 2003
Opening hours: daily from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. except Mondays

Probably we all are occasionally lit up with the silver dust off a film screen, its stars and episodes... We had our first contact with it through film photographs, the so-called "snapshots" when they addressed us on our way to our humdrum tasks, on the bulletin board of a cinema-hall or in the daily press. It may never have occurred to the uninitiated that these snippets, torn off the mosaic of a film episode, are not simple copies of the film band exposed by the film camera, but that they are the result of a photographer's work - an independent member of the film crew.

To be a film photographer is a fairly demanding branch of the photographic activity, involving as it does the entire broad scale of the photographic "craft". A film photographer has to be a ready reporter, alert and wide-awake, a cheeky papaparazzo, a sensitive portraitist, a day-dreamy landscape-painter a concerned documentarist... Sometimes he is exposed to unbelievable working conditions, to the caprices of the instruments and the weather, the whims of actors, of the producer... But in every situation, which is unprecedented, unique, he is expected to deliver a one-hundred-percent job. Polemics have often been carried on as to how far this work is creative, for its results are decided upon by the colourfulness of the episode, the producer's notion, the choice of environment, the actors... But precisely the abundance of what is a priori given, often presents a limitation, and simplicity is a challenge to the creation of a telling, appealing photographic image. Naturally, the appearance of film photographs depends to a large extent, on the artistic view of the makers of the film, but it does matter who decides on how and when to press the release. Anyone who has tried his hand at it has certainly succombed to its charm. Sundry remained faithful to it for long, to others it proved to be a colourful, sometimes only a fleeting pause, inspirational for their subsequent work. Let us recall some names that we should encounter in reviewing film photographs: the couple Karol and Gita Skoumal, Milan Kordoš, Magdaléna Robinsonová, Ladislav Bródy, Zuzana Mináčová, Jitka Ondrejkovičová, Anton Podstranský, Vladimír Vavrek, Milan Švehlík, Ivan Matejka, Milota Havránková, Anna Antalová-Stock, Judita Csáderová, Elena Hríbiková-Považanová, Gita Polónyiová, Tibor Borský, Václav-Miro Polák, Zuzana Jójárt, Tóno Stano, Táňa Hojčová, Dušan Dukát, Robo Kočan, Martin Kollár.

Initially, we intended to highlight in our installation the contents of our exhibition , to set out certain photographs, but the spatial facilities in the exhibition premises and the quantity of the material preserved in the fund of the Slovak Film Institute have prompted us to adopt the simplest mode of presentation so as to put on view as many photographs as possible. At the same time, insofar as possible, we gave priority to authentic period enlargements, for in most cases the authors themselves were present at this operation.

In view of the eventful fate of Slovak cinematography during the course of recent years and the ensuing anxiousness regarding our photographic archives of negatives, it proved rather a pleasure to be able to rummage through the profusion of positives stored at the Slovak Film Institute. A pity though, that it has not been possible to keep in force the erstwhile enactment compulsively to hand in the so-called "selective series" of every film produced to the archives for keeping.

Judita Csáderová