Iluminace 2022, 34(3):69-86 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1739

Dobroslav Zborník. Documentary Filmmaker Among Unofficial Visual Artists in the 1970s and 1980s

Sylva Poláková

Národní filmový archiv

This study, written within the framework of a project The Audiovisual Work Outside the Context of Cinema: Documentation, Archiving, and Access, is focused on the collaboration of film documentarian Dobroslav Zborník with independent artists who engaged in performance art in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s. He started this collaboration already during his studies at FAMU in Prague, where he graduated with the documentary movie named Antinomie (1973), in which he recorded the happenings of the Křižovnická škola čistého humoru bez vtipu [The Crusader School of Pure Humour Without Jokes]. In the second half of the 1970s and the early 1980s, he made cinematic documentations of art events for Milan Knížák (a member of the Fluxus movement), and Milan Grygar (whose worked is typified by experiments with connections between graphic art and sound).
The purpose of this study is to review Zborník's role within Czech action art, as well as an attempt at a contextual analysis of the integration of the moving image by artistic disciplines as another expressive, not purely documentary, component. Part of the study is therefore monitoring the gradual acceptance of event documentation based on the local historical context. In 1970s Czechoslovakia, performances and happenings were first recorded onto celluloid because video technologies only made their way to the Eastern Bloc countries with a considerable delay. Zborník's cinematic documentations were later, under various conditions, and with the use of methods corresponding to the times, copied onto video cassettes, or digitised, which contributed to their accessibility, but also to the omission of their specifics.

Keywords: videoart, Moving Image, Performance, Cinematic Documentation, Czechoslovakia

Published: March 1, 2023  Show citation