Musical Visions

Musical Visions

Experimental Czechoslovak music videos since 1971

Music has a profound influence on the quality of film image and vice versa. Film image can fundamentally transform the perception of music. This dynamic had already been reflected by the artistic avant garde of the 1920s, but it became a common motif of artistic creation after the development of audiovisual technologies after World War II. Arists produced experimental films in cooperation with musicians, created official and unofficial video clips and drew from popular audiovisual production. In the Czechoslovak environment of the 1970s, the experimental music scene existed on the periphery of normalisation culture, which is portrayed on film e.g. by the artist Jan Ságle whose recordings of underground concerts are paradoxically silent. The independent scene also had the director Ivan Tatíček who was inspired by videoclips from TV broadcast in his pioneering film Metrofilm from 1984. More intensive development of artistic portrayal of videoclips came to the Czech artistic scene at the beginning of 1990s when the transformation of national TV and the establishment of new TV stations opened the space for experiments which no longer had to conform to political or commercial interest. Aristis working at FAMU Prague were close to the musical scene and TV studios in this era, allowing the production of a mutitude of original audiovisual works.