An International Exhibition of Film and Video Art
A MILLION AND ONE DAYS
An Exhibition
LITHUANIAN ART AND CINEMA
15 October – 19 December 2010
Friday 15 October 2010, 18.00 You are cordially invited to the opening of the
international exhibition of film and video art A Million and One Days and the
exhibition Lithuanian Art and Cinema at the National Gallery of Art
(Konstitucijos ave. 22, Vilnius). A special audiovisual programme of the
exhibition opening will be held. National Gallery of Art is opened until 22.00
on the opening evening.
15 October, 11.00 Press conference. Speakers: Chief curator of the National
Gallery of Art Lolita Jablonskienė, curators of the international exhibition of
film and video art A Million and One Days – Giedrius Gulbinas, Eglė
Mikalajūnaitė, Dovilė Tumpytė, and artists Deimantas Narkevičius (Lithuanian)
and Tamás St. Auby (Hungary); curators of the exhibition Lithuanian Art &
Cinema – Donata Griciutė, Helmutas Šabasevičius, director of the Lithuanian
Teatre, Music, and Cinema Museum Regina Lopienė.
Opening programme
18.00 Official opening of exhibitions
19.30 Performance of the indie rock band Without Letters featured in the film
by Deimantas Narkevičius Ausgeträumt (2010)
20.00 Film soundtracks from selected vinyls performed by Emanuelis Ryklys,
producer of the radio broadcast program and web-diary Bangos
Screening of the publicly collected video-records My Screen
An International Exhibition of Film and Video Art
A MILLION AND ONE DAYS
Tamás St. Auby, Vidmantas Bačiulis, Raimundas Banionis, Artūras Barysas (Baras)
ir Jonas Čergelis, Balys Bratkauskas, Richard Donner, Marijonas Giedrys,
Jean-Luc Godard, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Almantas Grikevičius, Omer Fast,
Adam Leech, Jonas Mekas, William Cameron Menzies, Aernout Mik, Michael Moore,
Deimantas Narkevičius, Sergej Paradžanov, Ivan Pyrjev, Roman Signer, John
Smith, Hiroši Sugimoto, Raimondas Vabalas, Bill Viola, Vytautas Žalakevičius,
Arūnas Žebriūnas
Curated by:
Giedrius Gulbinas, Eglė Mikalajūnaitė, Dovilė Tumpytė
Exhibition architecture by:
Andrius Skiezgelas, Aleksandras Kavaliauskas
The exhibition A Million and One Days aims to reflect on the dissemination of
moving images through cinema, television, the Internet, contemporary art, and
so on, which has been going on for more than a century already, and which has
influenced significantly the development of society and culture in the 20th
century, becoming one of the principal factors shaping the way of seeing the
world today. The show’s title is inspired by Terry Ramsaye’s book about the
early years of the film industry entitled A Million and One Nights (1926), in
which cinema is referred to as the most popular and attractive art form, while
the history of cinema is equated with the history of the world. The exhibition
also looks at moving images from the point of view of the construction of
images of the world: which hopes and fantasies the medium is allowed to embody,
which form of language was selected, and how it is related
to the
social, political and cultural context. With the aim of presenting a diversity
of preconceived world-views, popular movies are shown alongside avant-garde
films and video works.
Using the metaphor of the collection of Arabian tales in A Thousand and One
Nights, the exhibition emphasises one aspect of the moving image: storytelling.
Moving images are viewed here as a new medium that expands strikingly the
possibilities of the age-old art of telling stories, rather than as a
completely new and independent phenomenon.
The exhibition consists of three parts that reflect the different relationships
between the real and the fictional reality produced by moving images: Dreams –
A Never-Ending Story, Puzzles – A Million Stories, and Doubts – A Story within
a Story.
Exhibition
LITHUANIAN CINEMA AND ART
Production design is an integral part of the art of film. The production
designer is the first person to convert the literary language of the script
into a visual one. It is the production designer who creates the “illusion of
reality”, and sets a certain stylistic direction for the film. In this way, the
scenery of the film facilitates the realisation of the director’s concept. It
can be artificial, created with the help of the visual arts, or natural, with
views selected directly from the landscape. Depending on the film’s genre and
the expressive style of a particular artist, film sketches may be precise
depictions of the locations of a film’s action, or they can be abstract,
conveying only the mood and the style of the film. Usually, their aesthetic
qualities are related to general trends in the visual arts of the period. The
foundations of Lithuanian production design were laid by artists f
rom
different areas who started working in the second half of the 1950s.
This exhibition covers the period in Lithuania from the 1950s to the 1980s,
which produced a generation of artists who created an idiosyncratic language of
art direction, revealing the individual style of particular artists, in spite
of the restrictions imposed by the Soviet authorities. From the very beginning,
this generation’s specific aesthetic values were influenced by processes of
modernisation. Changes in the visual arts, especially in painting, had a direct
effect on the work of production designers. The first production designers
whose sketches are presented in this exhibition were either architects (Arūnas
Žebriūnas [b. 1930] and Algirdas Ničius [b. 1929]), graphic artists (Vytautas
Kalinauskas [1929-2001] and Algimantas Švažas [1933-2003]) or painters (Juzefa
Čeičytė [b. 1922]) and Jeronimas Čiuplys [1928–99]) and include just one set
designer (Filomena Linčiūtė-Vaitiekūnienė [b. 1
947]).
Of course, since its very birth, Lithuanian cinema has been particularly close
to theatre. Both institutions frequently shared the same artists. Most film
production designers first worked as stage designers (or they were otherwise
associated with the theatre), and switched to cinema later.
Like cinema itself, production design in Lithuania was often developed by
people who were not professionals, but that is precisely what makes it unique.
Exploring the expressive means used by other art forms together with the film
director, the production designer would eventually develop a distinctive
understanding of the specifics of the trade. Exhibits from the collection of
the Lithuanian Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema presented in this exhibition
demonstrate the increasing emancipation and independence of the language of
Lithuanian film production design. Artists gradually distanced themselves from
literal depiction on paper, and switched to more abstract ways of conveying the
plot.
Donata Griciutė
Jei daugiau nebenorite gauti Nacionalinės Dailės Galerijos naujienų
el. paštu, spauskite čia: atsisakymas
Naujienlaiškis sukurtas ir išsiųstas naudojant mailer.lt
.. REZONE http://re-lab.lv/rezone
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
.. WWW: https://lists.rixc.lv/mailman/listinfo/rezone
