Iluminace, 2022 (vol. 34), issue 3

And Then the Mania Began. Czech Teen Comedies as a Peculiar Film Cycle of the 2000s

Sandra Hezinová

Iluminace 2022, 34(3):5-23 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1737  

Shortly after its theatrical release on November 4, 2004, the Czech teen comedy Snowboarďáci (The Snowboarders) became a sensation. The success of Karel Janák's full-length debut was remarkable in two respects. On the one hand, the comedy aimed at a teenage audience, that is, an audience that domestic cinema neglected for some time. At the same time, The Snowboarders stimulated the production of thematically related films. This study explores whether it is possible to consider this small group of teen comedies produced during the 2000s as a film cycle. For this purpose, the article uses a model of film cycle development proposed by Richard Nowell....

Who's Looking Back at the Sunflower? The Nostalgic Construction of Inka Zemánková's Star Image

Jiří Anger, Miroslava Papežová

Iluminace 2022, 34(3):25-68 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1738  

Inka Zemánková (1915-2000) is known as a pioneering Czech female swing singer, a symbol of burgeoning Czech popular music under the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Due to personal, cultural, and political circumstances, her professional career, spanning over sixty years, did not ever reach nearly the same level of fame and success as in the early 1940s. Since the 1960s, however, there were many waves of nostalgia for the singer (and the golden days of swing) driven by radio and especially television that strove to bring her back to the spotlight. Our study argues for the significant role of nostalgia and recycling in (re)defining Zemánková's star...

Dobroslav Zborník. Documentary Filmmaker Among Unofficial Visual Artists in the 1970s and 1980s

Sylva Poláková

Iluminace 2022, 34(3):69-86 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1739  

This study, written within the framework of a project The Audiovisual Work Outside the Context of Cinema: Documentation, Archiving, and Access, is focused on the collaboration of film documentarian Dobroslav Zborník with independent artists who engaged in performance art in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s. He started this collaboration already during his studies at FAMU in Prague, where he graduated with the documentary movie named Antinomie (1973), in which he recorded the happenings of the Křižovnická škola čistého humoru bez vtipu [The Crusader School of Pure Humour Without Jokes]. In the second half of the 1970s and the early 1980s, he made...

Youth Forward or Backward? The Department of Directing at FAMU during the Normalization and the Possibilities of Employment of its Graduates

Ondřej Toužimský

Iluminace 2022, 34(3):87-113 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1740  

This article deals with the education, teaching and the careers of students of the Institute of Directors at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU), who studied their course from the academic year 1972/73 during the normalization era. The first part of the work concentrates on the process of education of graduates of the Institute of Directors at FAMU during the normalization era. This article argues that for these students it was easier to get a job in the film industry than for the previous generation. One of the reasons why it was so is that the new generation was studying at the "normalizied" FAMU. The artistic...

When is an Application of Quality? A Study of the Priorities of the Audiovisual Fund's Evaluators in the Feature Film Programme

Miroslav Vlček

Iluminace 2022, 34(3):115-138 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1741  

The study analyses different representations of qualities of projects submitted to The Slovak Audiovisual Fund based on interviews with commissioners. First, and most important quality, according to commissioners, is related to the content: topics, themes, genre, structure, scriptwriting. If the content-related qualities are met, commissioners focus on the symbolic capital of applicants, and external validations by film festivals and workshops, then on funding, potential distribution strategies, etc. Genre film gets specific attention, because commissioners consider it to be an undeveloped field in Slovak cinema, and, in the opposition to film...

LGBTQ+ Representation in Video Games through the Eyes of the Queer Community

Martin Látal

Iluminace 2022, 34(3):139-163 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1742  

This article discusses the questions of LGBTQ+ representation in video games through the eyes of queer gamers and creators. The methodology of this work is based on Fairclough's critical discourse analysis, which is applied to a corpus of texts primarily from the social website Reddit. Critical discourse analysis is used to contextualize the statements of the speakers in the wider sociocultural framework. The findings are supported by previous research done in queer game studies by authors such as Bonnie Ruberg and Gaspard Pelurson. The first part of the work focuses on the approach game creators choose when creating a queer representation, which can...

The Czech Film Industry and the World of Literature 1919-1945

Ivan Klimeš

Iluminace 2022, 34(3):165-189 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1743  

The study deals with the relations between literature and film industry from the 1910s to 1945. It draws attention to the publication of screenwriting manuals in the 1910s and 1920s aimed at the lay user with no literary experience. It then pays great attention to the organisation of theme competitions and other similar events, organised in the early 1920s first by production companies, but in later years exclusively by industry associations of film producers. During the period of German occupation under the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the Czech-Moravian Film Headquarters organised these competitions as an umbrella organisation of the self-government...

Dramaturgical Operation of the Film Industry during the Protectorate

Ivan Klimeš

Iluminace 2022, 34(3):191-212 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1744  

The Future Perfect of South/East/Central European Early Cinema Studies (Ana Grgić, Early Cinema, Modernity and Visual Culture: The Imaginary of the Balkans)

Eszter M Polónyi

Iluminace 2022, 34(3):213-220 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1745  

Suspension between Realism and Modernism (Emre Çağlayan, Poetics of Slow Cinema: Nostalgia, Absurdism, Boredom)

Dana Licehamrová

Iluminace 2022, 34(3):221-230 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1746