Lucie Rosenfeldová

The film made by the artistic duo of Lucie Rosenfeldová and Matěj Pavlík deals with the phenomenon of phosphene - the phenomenon when variously coloured lights appear in our vision when pressure is applied to our eyes. Based on this remarkable phenomenon, often called inner sight, which has fascinated philosophers, physicians and scientists since antiquity, in their black-and-white imaginative film, the authors reveal how much human perception is influenced by social, cultural and ideological factors.

A collage of excerpts from Czechoslovak television educational programmes from the 1970s and 1980s devoted to the artificial termination of pregnancy is accompanied by an urgent voice-over reflecting on what really shapes the history of abortion: is it the idea of self- ownership and freedom, the development of medical technologies, state reproductive policy, or market logic? The film paints a complex picture of the reproductive history of socialist Czechoslovakia, in which media representations of abortion—so different from the rhetoric surrounding the feminist pro-choice movement in the US—are transcribed into intimate bodily experience.