Iluminace 2020, 32(3):5-40 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1672

Czech Cinema as a Regional Poetics. Questions of Continuity and the Beginnings of Studio Production

Radomír D. Kokeš

Masarykova univerzita

At the most general level, this article wanted to answer the question of what it requires to write an aesthetic history of Czech cinema. As such, it tried to sketch possibilities of a research project on a poetics of Czech cinema illustrated through an example of Czech cinema to the period around 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 relationship to particular empirical conditions of the creation of these works in synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The article argued in accordance with these starting points that an internal cohesiveness of a research corpus is key for such a research project. However, Czech cinema represents a very diverse group of films. What is more, it is hard to decide what categories all the films fall into, let alone get a convincing corpus based on them. Yet, as was discussed in the first part of the text, 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 cinema. In other words, it is possible to create a group of films that aim at functionally comparable goals. In the second part, the article began from the long-term perspective, by a polemics with such explanations of poetic approaches to regional cinemas in comparison to Hollywood cinema on the one hand, or international stylistic tendencies on the other. The first argument was that 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 adopted them in an unsystematic way and with no externally prescribed standards. The second argument was that there were several parallel dominant systems of feature film norms in the 1920s that did not tend towards unification. They follow a different creative logic than in the case of international norms. The third part of the article came back to the question of the relationship between creative and studio continuities from a more short-term perspective in the analysis of the first film made in the Barrandov studios, Murder on Ostrovní Street from 1933. The article asked the following question: To what measure and in what ways is Murder on Ostrovní Street a project representing a stylistic continuity or, discontinuity, in its relation to films made in previous years? The text demonstrated that although the film was supposed to perform a variety of self-conscious film techniques, it did so in continuity with conventionalized practices of Czech films and filmmakers from previous years. The fourth part of the article, the epilogue, reflected from previous findings to more general reflections on how research into so-called Czech regional poetics can contribute to the overall knowledge of an aesthetic history of Czech cinema.

Keywords: aesthetic film history, poetics of cinema, concept of a regional cinema, Czech cinema, Barrandov, the introduction of sound

Published: September 1, 2020  Show citation