5 P.M., TUESDAY, 12 MAY
OUR GUEST SZOLOK – INTERNATIONAL FINE ARTS FILM FESTIVAL
PARTICIPANTS OF THE ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION ISTVÁN DEMETER festival director, JÓZSEF SZURCSIK artist and GÁBOR ULRICH animation filmdirector
SELECTION FROM THE WINNERS OF THE FESTIVAL
György Szemadámat the opening ceremony of the 2014 festival: “While wemay say about traditional genres of art that they are just as old as homo sapiens, film has only celebrated its 150 year birthday since the first moving image was made in 1878 on Sallie Gardner at a gallop and the Lumiére brothers held their first public screening on the 28th of December, 1895. Of course in the beginning this youngest member of the visual arts was spoiled since people such as Lenin – as an unmistakable critic – declared that “Among all the arts, for us the most important one is the film!” (Regarding his propagandistic goals he was perfectly right, too.) However early twentieth century artists weremesmerized by the possibilities inherent in the moving image and they prophesized that this genre would have a great future. László Moholy-Nagy for instance, with his pedagogic rigorousness, sketched its future as follows: (“Feature films – that are at least in the intellectual sense an ambiguous category of films – are already there to be switched off.”) What is left then is reportage, the color and point of view – and experiments withmovement, trickster films, and the filmmontage as the culmination of the entire structure. We know well… this prophesy did not work out since what László Moholy-Nagy mentioned only in parenthesis – and meanwhile becoming extremely popular, now called as movie – the feature film pushed other possibilities of film to the background. Later on – just as we have become used to by the spoiled young inheritors – he even denied the viability of fine arts (see his comment: tableau painting is dead) and together with his brother he demanded his legacy with the photo. As a result we may rarely see art works created by traditional methods at the great international art fairs while photos and video installations gained ground as works of art in their own right. What remains strange, while the fine arts appear as timeless, the film seems more and more precocious. The figures painted by Rembrandt or Velazquez may even be living in our time while in a film from fifty years ago almost everything seems old-fashioned and outdated from women’s hairdo and their dresses to the technique of lighting, and the rhythm of the cuts. Here, in Szolnok, in the past 45 years we may happily celebrate the Fine Art Film Festival gaining international fame since the year 2000 generating a kind of good feeling in me – myself being an artist – similar to when I hear someone speak about his ancestors with respect, something that happens rather rarely.”
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