Kateřina Svatoňová: Jaroslav Kučera

Not even close collaborators of Jaroslav Kučera knew about the extensive and elaborate archive one the most prominent Czech directors of photography and longtime professional and personal partner of the Czech New Wave director Věra Chytilová amassed over a nearly forty-year career. Preparing for the shooting, but often just a personal exploration of composition, color, and light, have led to a number of sketches, photographs, and private experimental films. Some of them Kučera used in feature films only after several decades. Furthermore Kučera, greatly inspired by painting, and especially by Vladimír Boudník, himself painted. Film theorist Kateřina Svatoňová now for the first time went through the tens of thousands of materials to produce their pioneering interconnection with footage from the movies, documenting the thinking of a cameraman and perhaps even newly defining the creative contribution of DOP and director. The exhibition spin-off to the monograph was spread between the four walls under the name In Between Images: The Archive of the Cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera by the author together with the exhibition architect Zbyněk Baladrán in the House of the Lords of Kunštát in Brno (19/4—11/6/2017). All in the period-suited design of Bohumil Vašák and Aleš Najbrt.