Iluminace, 2024 (vol. 36), issue 1
Articles
Negotiating Organizational Cultures
The Evolution of the VOD Platform Implementation in Czech Public Service Television
Lukáš Slavík, Klára Smejkal
Iluminace 2024, 36(1):5-28 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1775 
In response to the digital transformation and the surge of commercial video-on-demand (VOD) platforms like Netflix, public service media (PSM) face the challenge of adapting while preserving their core values. While current studies predominantly focus on the adaptation process of the Western European PSMs, this research contributes a novel perspective by investigating the case of Central and Eastern European countries, specifically the Czech public service broadcaster Česká televize (Czech Television, CT). The emphasis on the role of the organizational culture within this institution shows the social nature of digital innovation. It complements the...
Sadism Against the Film Spectator
Liminal Experience and Modulation of Perception in the Performance Our Purgatory (Martin Ježek, 2021)
Kryštof Kočtář
Iluminace 2024, 36(1):29-70 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1772
Some filmmakers choose not to convey a narrative to their viewers, but to attack their senses directly. In this study, we will examine the experimental filmmaker Martin Ježek’s expanded cinema performance Our Purgatory (2021), which uses various techniques to target precisely this type of bodily and affective spectatorship. It is designed for three projectors and three screens, which can only be encountered in the form of a performance. For this reason, we will draw on the work of theater scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte, who has developed a concept of the aesthetics of performativity that offers a suitable theoretical basis for research on...
Critical Inheritance
The Excommunication and Beatification of Věra Chytilová’s First Post-Revolutionary Film
Ondřej Zach
Iluminace 2024, 36(1):71-92 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1771
The article explores the case of the heteronomous critical evaluation of the film The Inheritance or Fuckoffguysgoodday (Věra Chytilová, 1992) in light of the transition of the Czech film industry in the 1990s. The first post-socialist film by Czechoslovak New Wave's emblematic director was at first regarded as a betrayal of the cultural heritage its author has represented. In 2020, though, the same film was marked by Czech critics as the third most important work of the post-velvet era. The text notes that the rhetorical use of the same cultural canon of the Czechoslovak New Wave used in the aesthetic evaluation of the same film at different...
Direct Professionalisation of Directors in Animation
Tomáš Hubáček
Iluminace 2024, 36(1):93-120 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1773
The presented study focuses on a remarkable phenomenon of Czechoslovak animated cinema. In the 1970s, Czechoslovakia witnessed a unique combination of two different worlds — amateur and animated film. Amateur directors of animated films could proceed directly to professional directing without obtaining a proper university film education or the need to undergo previous studio practice. This was made possible for five of them on the basis of their previous successes at amateur festivals and their unique artistic style. For these purposes, the text defines the term „direct professionalisation“ and explains its aspects. The study traces...
Cinematographic Sokol
Ivan Klimeš
Iluminace 2024, 36(1):121-168 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1774
The Sokol Physical Education Association, with its mass membership, with roots deep in the 19th century and high social credit due to the national content of its programme, became the largest operator and builder of cinemas in interwar Czechoslovakia. Of the approximately 1,850 cinemas in the country, Sokol owned about 40%, meaning that of the more than 3,000 Sokol branches, about a quarter operated a cinema. These were mostly rural cinemas and 80% of them played only once or twice a week. The article traces how in the 1920s the Prague Sokol headquarters tried to unite the Sokol cinemas into one gigantic association whose members would obtain films...
Reviews
Peripheral Vision-Makers
Jonathan Owen
Iluminace 2024, 36(1):169-174 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1778
Book Review: Petr Szczepanik, Screen Industries in East-Central Europe (London: BFI and Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021).
Reframing Postsocialist Legacy and Imagery
Tanya Silverman
Iluminace 2024, 36(1):175-180 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1776
Book Review: Veronika Pehe, Velvet Retro: Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2020).
Many Monologues about Experimental Film
Kryštof Kočtář
Iluminace 2024, 36(1):181-186 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1777
Book review: Ksenya Gurshtein – Sonja Simonyi, eds., Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022).