Publication details
Česká kinematografie jako regionální poetika : Otázky kontinuity a počátky studiové produkce
| Title in English | Czech Cinema as a Regional Poetics : Questions of Continuity and the Beginnings of Studio Production |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Iluminace |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | Obsah čísla na oficiálních stránkách časopisu Iluminace. |
| Keywords | aesthetic film history; poetics of cinema; concept of a regional cinema; Czech cinema; Barrandov; the introduction of sound |
| Attached files | |
| Description | Generally, this article asks what it requires to write an aesthetic history of Czech cinema. As such, it tries to sketch possibilities of a research project on a poetics of Czech cinema illustrated through an example of period till the opening of Barrandov studios in 1933. The poetics of cinema explores construction principles of film work regarding (a) their relationship to individual works and groups of works, and (b) their re¬lationship to empirical conditions of the creation of these works. The article argues in accordance with these starting points that an internal co¬hesiveness of a research corpus is key for such a project. Although Czech cinema represents a very diverse group of films, if we define the research corpus based on a dominant language, dominant place of production and preferred distribution type, we can arrive at a logically consistent corpus of so-called regional cine¬ma, i.e., a group of films that aim at functionally comparable goals. In the following part, the article begins from the long-term perspective, by a polemics with such expla¬nations of poetic approaches to regional cinemas in comparison to Hollywood cinema on the one hand, or international stylistic tendencies on the other. In the case of Czech cinema, in the 1930s studio requirements for systematic work and standard procedures were confronted with practices, preferences, and systems of norms from periods when filmmakers adopt¬ed them in an unsystematic way and with no externally prescribed standards. They follow a different creative logic than in the case of international norms. Consequently, the article comes back to the question of the relationship between creative and studio continuities in the analysis of the first feature film made in the Barrandov studios. The epilogue reflects from previous findings to more general reflections on how research into so-called Czech regional poetics can contribute to the over¬all knowledge of an aesthetic history of Czech cinema. |
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