Iluminace 2021, 33(2):27-57 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1701

El Dorado of Traitors. Unrealized Production Cycle and Cultural-Political Collisions of Post-War Czechoslovak Cinema

Martin Mišúr

Univerzita Karlova

This paper provides a view of the genre phenomena from an atypical perspective: It attempts to capture and functionally explain the production cycles in their unrealized form. The paper follows a thematically coherent group of films during a specific limited period, which were considered but not finally produced and to which certain material traces have been preserved. The existence and analytical extraction of these existing traces - made on the example of the stimuli of genetic criticism - will make it possible to look into the history in its unseen and discontinuous form. The idea laid out at the beginning of the study is that the fact that something did not happen in the end - it was either inactive, forbidden or it hit a "dead end" - also says a lot and provides invaluable information about the ultimately active, permissible and dominant. The study tests this hypothesis on a specific production system of the Czechoslovak nationalized cinema, specifically in the first half of the 1950s. The so-called state-socialist mode of production posed significant obstacles to the development of production cycles during this period, but it also encouraged internal work on unrealized production cycles. The case study of the unrealized production cycle of the second center will then present a coherent group of existing screenwriting formats. However, not a single film from this group was created in the end, even though the materials about the so-called second center were then officially preferred. The fact that these films were not realized can be explained precisely by a careful intersection of the theory of production cycles, the history of production culture (state-socialist mode of production) and genetic criticism.

Keywords: genre theory, nationalized cinema, unrealized production cycle

Published: June 1, 2021  Show citation