Iluminace 2020, 32(1):77-92 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1656

Ivan Tatíček - from Amateur Film to Professional Video Production

Martin Blažíček, Sylva Poláková

Národní filmový archiv

This study, written within the framework of a project aiming to reconstruct and digitise the original films and prepare a public presentation of the works of Ivan Tatíček from the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, focuses on introducing and contextualising the amateur films and video art of this half-forgotten artist. Ivan Tatíček completed five films in the 1980s: Kruh D (D Circle, 1982), Vojáci (Soldiers, 1982), O ničem jiném (On Something Else, 1983), Metrofilm (1984), and Všude doma dobře nejlíp (East or West, Home's Best, 1986). Most of them were warmly received at amateur film festivals and elicited positive reactions from the press. During his employment in the video studio of the PR department of Armabeton, a state-run construction company for which he mostly filmed tutorial videos and construction processes, he had unlimited access to a Video 2000 camera (later VHS) and a linear editing unit. He could thus create his idiosyncratic attempt at a musical, Miss Rock'n'Roll, and make recordings of concerts. In 1988, he began working as a freelance documentary and events cameraman. Thanks to a loosening of the legislation, he established his own studio: DADA. He joined the community around Radek Pilař and Obor video (Video Department) before 1989; with them, he helped realise the first-ever video art exhibition in Czechoslovakia, Den videa (Video Day), which infiltrated the traditional Salon of Applied Art in the Julius Fučík Park of Culture and Leisure several months before the Velvet Revolution. In the first half of the 1990s, he maintained a close relationship with Obor video, which later transformed into the Asociace pro video a intermédia attached to the Unie výtvarných umělců (Union of Visual Artists). In the second half of the decade, it was documentary work that dominated - mostly commissioned by Czech Television and private subjects. For most artists of Tatíček's generation, the transformation of Czech culture meant an abandonment of old aesthetic positions and a search for new ones, a partial professionalisation, and a dependence on current television formats. For some artists, this was also a period of detachment from the independent film community and the art scene in general, which led to their work being forgotten; only in recent years has their work been assessed historically and stored by experts.

Keywords: Ivan Tatíček, amateur film, experimental film, videoclip, videoart, Radek Pilař, normalisation, post-socialist transformation

Published: March 1, 2020  Show citation