Marina Gržinić, Aina Šmid

1958, Rijeka; 1957, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia; live in Ljubljana / Slovenia

Moments of Decision, 1985

video, 13' 59''

In 1955, the Czech film director František Čap, who immigrated to Slovenia, created the Slovenian feature film Trenutki odločitve – »Moments of Decision«. The video »Moments of Decision« by Gržinić and Šmid is a reconstruction of this partisan film. By emphasizing the role of the leading heroine from Čap’s partisan film drama through the video, a video love melodrama is produced. Formally this entailed a special visual solution as well, a synthesis of Čap’s film sequences with the new produced video pictures. The story from the black and white film occurs in the video through newly introduced iconographic elements. The video is also significant in the context of current research in the field of art history, as it quotes from historical periods parallel to the time when the film was produced, and also parallels the time when the video was produced. It rearticulates socialist-realist and pop-realistic elements and historical data. In the video excerpts from the book The Lover by Marguerite Duras are used, as well sentences from the original film screenplay found in the Slovenian Film Archive, sentences that were left out or censored at the time the film was produced.