Perhaps no one in the world has composed such a large amount of film music as Zdeněk Liška. It was for over a hundred and thirty feature films alone! Together with the mid-length and short ones, it comes to more than three hundred. Despite being overlooked by the general public, Liška’s creative and experimental approach to composing film music, its orchestration and the impact on the atmosphere or tempo-rhythm was pivotal for the final character of the fundamental milestones of Czechoslovak cinema, such as Karel Zeman’s (The Deadly Invention , films by Kadár & Klos or František Vláčil, Juraj Herz’s The Cremator or Jan Švankmajer’s shorts.

The retrospective of Zdeněk Liška at 50th Summer Film School does not aim to showcase his collaborations with famous directors on famous films. We want to encourage the audience to listen to film and film music with its individual components, to perceive its fusion with sound (since the beginning of his career, Liška’s works oscillated between music compositions and sound design) and to pay more attention to the ways how dramatically ahistorical music can create a sense of history, how music can sound like the future or even narrate a story or paint pictures.

Liška was certainly a master of all of this. At the same time, he seemed to live entirely in the world of tones, outside the reality. He didn’t care about politics and divided his time solely between work and family. He guarded his privacy so meticulously that he gave only one interview in his lifetime, in which he answered a couple of random questions of an apparently unprepared journalist. This is perhaps why he’s been slowly fading from public memory. And this should be definitely halted.