Iluminace - Nejnovější články

From Homo Sovieticus to Many Selves. Unraveling Identities in (Post)-Soviet CinemaRecenze

Alena Kolesnikova

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):213-221 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1818  

Book review: Heleen Gerritsen and Irina Schulzki, eds., Decolonising the (Post-)Soviet Screen (Apparatus Press, 2024).

Death as a Theme. An Interview with Cristi PuiuRozhovory

Lucian Georgescu

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):197-212 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1817  

This is a seven-hour long conversation that explores the theme of death between two colleagues of the same generation. In this personal documentary project, Lucian Georgescu engages directly with Cristi Puiu, “the Bergman of the East,”1) an auteur known for weaving the Grim Reaper as a fundamental, consistent theme throughout his films, including Stuff and Dough (2001), The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (2006), Aurora (2010), Sieranevada (2014), and Malmkrog (2020). The dialogue ventures into the elusive, fragile, and often hidden realms of the auteur’s creative process, striving to grasp the origins of thematic inspiration. Drawing on sources...

Shifting Screenwriting – The Past, Present and Future of the Craft. An Introduction to a Special Issue “Conversation Beyond Script”Editorial

Jan Černík, Jan Trnka

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):5-10 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1816  

Although the status of screenwriter and screenplay was always uncertain, today‘s precipitous technological and economic changes are affecting its essence - however, history teaches us that no crisis is so deep that it cannot be turned into opportunity. Bunch of detailed analysis forming the core of this special issue of Iluminace can be read as illustration of this overarching simple idea, an invitation to one of the less explored territories and as call for both another adventurous journeys to the roots of screenwriting and erudite reflections of current screenwriting practices made by scholars, screenwriting teachers and authors. In this text,...

Filmový formát 9,5 mm coby obchodní artikl. Historie firmy Cinéma v kontextu českého amatérského filmu v letech 1932–1952Články

The 9.5 mm Film Format as a Commercial Product. The History of the Cinéma Company in the Context of Czech Amateur Filmmaking Between 1932 and 1952

Jiří Horníček

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):177-196 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1809  

At the end of 1922, the French company Pathé Cinéma introduced a new system called Pathé-Baby to the film equipment market, specifically designed for the lay public, with the aim of commercially exploiting its potential interest in sharing cinematographic experiences also in the home environment, in the circle of family and friends. The 9.5mm format with typical centrally located perforation enjoyed considerable popularity among amateur and family filmmakers, and in Czechoslovakia it achieved its greatest boom in the 1930s. The text describes the history of this format in the Czechoslovak, especially Prague, user environment, focusing primarily on...

Talking to You. Addressing the Viewer in Virtual Reality ScriptsČlánky k tématu

Rosamund Davies

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):53-73 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1812  

A recurring feature of virtual reality (VR) narratives, in addition to the ‘spatialized storytelling’ approach that has been extensively discussed in recent screenwriting literature, is the less examined but frequent use of both fictionalized address of a textual narratee/character and direct address of the viewer. This article investigates the different ways in which such forms of address might be used to script aspects of VR experience such as presence, emotional engagement and empathy. It focuses, in particular, on the ways in which they might serve to highlight and creatively exploit the tension between immersion and self-consciousness...

Fascinating Rhythm. The Screenwriting of Sound Symphonies for American and European Film of the 1930sČlánky k tématu

Claus Tieber

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):11-30 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1808  

This paper examines the role of rhythm in screenwriting in the 1930s. By analyzing how the transformation to sound enhanced the musicality of screenplays, the study highlights the emergence of so-called “sound symphonies” and the rhythmic integration of noises in American and German films from that decade. Focusing on the development of this device from the advent of sound until the end of the 1930s, the article reflects how broader shifts in film production shaped screenplay notation practices. The Austrian screenwriter Walter Reisch, who had to migrate to the United States in 1936, serves as a guiding thread throughout this short history...

Subjective Access and Focalization in VRČlánky k tématu

Cecilie Levy

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):75-94 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1813  

This paper examines the challenges of conveying a character’s inner world in virtual reality (VR) experiences, using the production of Finding Frida as a case study. It explores how a “constructive dialogue” with film theory, specifically narratology and cognitive approaches, can inform VR storytelling practices. The discussion originates from a practical problem encountered during the making of Finding Frida: how to lip-sync the virtual character. What began as a technical issue led to deeper dramaturgical questions about perspective, subjective access, and the role of the spectator in VR. Drawing on the work of Murray Smith, Peter...

Copyright, Credits, and Write-for-Hire Creativity. Authorship and Authority in Czech Silent ScreenwritingČlánky k tématu

Martin Kos

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):31-52 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1811  

This article examines the professional status and creative labor of screenwriters in Czech silent cinema, using the 1926 adaptation of Ignát Herrmann’s novel, Father Kondelík and Bridegroom Vejvara, as a case study. Drawing on Jonathan Gray’s and Matt Stahl’s concepts, the research analyzes how work-for-hire practices and copyright defined creative control and artistic recognition, examining authorship and authority within regional “authorial clusters.” The article reveals screenwriters’ working conditions and their innovative contributions to cinematic storytelling and style under the constraints of corporate and...

Storytelling Beyond Dialogue and Preschool Animation. Rethinking Audiovisual Narrative in the TV Series The Sound CollectorČlánky k tématu

Maria Chiara Oltolini

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):95-113 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1814  

Sound plays an important role in filmmaking, enhancing the narrative power of the image and engaging audiences in various ways. Significantly, when we say we watch a film, we are truly “audioviewing” it — a key point concerning the nature of audiovisual storytelling. In animation, sound representation used to receive limited attention. This perspective, however, is shifting, as demonstrated by the growing awareness in film scholarship and how-to manuals regarding sound design. Within this evolving framework, The Sound Collector (2023) stands out as a preschool television series that places sound at the center of its storytelling,...

The Living Script. Proposing an Adaptive Practice in Humaira Bilkis’s Things I Could Never Tell My Mother (2022)Články k tématu

Imran Firdaus

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):115-132 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1815  

This paper examines Bangladeshi filmmaker Humaira Bilkis’s feature film, Things I Could Never Tell My Mother, through genetic criticism and screenwriting theories to propose the concept of the living script: a dynamic narrative framework that evolves in response to real-time discoveries, emotional shifts, and ethical dilemmas. Bilkis’s film exemplifies this process, weaving intergenerational dialogues and confessional sequences to negotiate complex cultural and inter-religious boundaries within Bangladeshi society. By analysing early drafts, directorial notes, and an interview with the filmmaker, the study reveals how Bilkis’s...

“You All Have Such a Wholesome Look.” Class and the Gothic Family in OzarkČlánky

Veronika Klusáková

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):153-175 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1807  

The paper examines the phenomenon of class in contemporary television broadcasting, which has only recently become of interest for television historians and theorists, as well as for producers and broadcast platforms, and it demonstrates the possibilities of class analysis in the case study of the Netflix series Ozark (Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams, 2017–2022). The introduction to the state of research on class in contemporary cultural studies, demonstrated on the recent works of UK and German scholars (James Bignell, Faye Woods, Sieglinde Lemke and others) is followed by a discussion of several class-based categories that play a major role...

The Anti-Star. Věra Hrubá Ralston and Fault Lines of Classic Models of StardomČlánky

Nicholas David Hudac

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):133-152 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1810  

This article focuses on the Czech actress, Věra Hrubá Ralston, who was a champion athlete, a national celebrity in the United States and Czechoslovakia, stared in over 25 films in nearly two decades in Hollywood alongside some of the most well-known actors of her generation, married the head of her movie studio, and still failed to become a Hollywood star. By examining the career of Hrubá Ralston, we gain new insights as to the limits of star-making power in the postwar studio system as well as the tensions between assimilation and stardom.

Audiovizuální itineráře hudebních videí v současném mediálním ekosystémuRecenze

Miroslava Papežová

Iluminace 2025, 37(1):160-165 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1806  

Recenze knihy Tomáš Jirsa – Mathias Bonde Korsgaard, eds., Traveling Music Videos (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).

Godzilla versus Král monsterRecenze

Godzilla versus King of the Monsters

Rudolf Schimera

Iluminace 2025, 37(1):151-159 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1805  

Recenze knihy Dan Krátký, Král monster! Filmy s Godzillou v letech 1954 až 1965 (Brno: MuniPress, 2023).

Move on Down. Precarity in Contemporary Hungarian CinemaČlánky

László Strausz

Iluminace 2025, 37(1):95-98 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1800  

This video essay engages with the topic of precarity in feature films produced in Hungary around and after the regime change of 1989, which launched tectonic social transformations leading to widespread instability. The essay confronts precarity as downward intragenerational mobility from an economic and social perspective from the final years of state socialism until the present. As an audiovisual product, the video documents the author’s efforts to move beyond the disembodied voice of academic texts and experiment with accent as a marker of social entanglement.

Aparátová teorie, postkinematografické dispozitivy a algoritmická interpelace subjektuČlánky

Apparatus Theory, Post-Cinematic Dispositifs, and the Algorithmic Interpellation of the Subject

Jiří Sirůček

Iluminace 2025, 37(1):99-121 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1799  

In the 1960s and 1970s, film studies scholarship linked to psychoanalysis and Marxism attempted, under the umbrella of apparatus theory, to examine the ways in which cinema reproduces capitalist power and ideologically affects the perceiving subject. Rather than analyzing the narrative configurations of films, its proponents focused on the hidden effects of the cinematic apparatus itself, and the ways in which it inscribes itself imperceptibly into the unconscious of viewers and interpellates them. Building on the insights of apparatus theory, this text asks how the analytical inputs of this thinking and its theory of the constitution of the subject...

Historický vývoj terminologie českého animovaného filmu v období 1919–1990Články

Historical Development of Terminology of Czech Animated Film in the Period 1919–1990

Dita Stuchlíková

Iluminace 2025, 37(1):123-149 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1801  

Pojmy užívané pro označení animačních technik i samotné formy animovaného filmu se v průběhu historie velmi výrazně měnily. Docházelo k vzniku synonym, nepřesných definic a k rozvolněnému a neukotvenému užívání termínů. Skrze pochopení historie terminologie lze pochopit vnímání jednotlivých technik i animace v tuzemském prostředí v průběhu let a vlivy, které pojmy a vnímání formovaly. Toto pochopení usnadňuje orientaci v nejednotném užívání terminologie téměř po celé století v mezinárodním měřítku.

From Post-Communist to Post-Human Care. A Comparative Study of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and EdenČlánky

György Kalmár

Iluminace 2025, 37(1):5-25 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1802  

On basis of a comparative close reading of two paradigmatic Eastern European films about precarious lives and acts of care, this article explores the relationship between three distinct but interrelated phenomena: (1) the early 21st century experience of increased precatity and vulnerability, (2) certain philosophical or theoretical trends (such as care ethics and critical posthumanism) that aim to conceptualize this new state of insecurity, and (3) new Eastern European cinematic trends that can be understood as responses to the first two phenomena. The article’s starting hypothesis is that socially committed Eastern European art cinema responds...

The Clash of Sino-Tibetan Propaganda On-screen. A Case Study of Tibetan Exile Movie TheatreČlánky

Martin Špirk

Iluminace 2025, 37(1):27-47 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1804  

Different self-presentation strategies constantly compete on the battlefield between two propagandas using various media — documentary films and docudramas are among the most used persuasive tools to convey and disseminate a specific worldview through the mediation of selected information and analysis. The target audience of the films is influenced by techniques to maximize the effect of propaganda, including the emphasis on the credibility of the information conveyed, specific truth claims concerning the topic discussed, and, finally, the very nature of the visual message itself, which gives the impression of an authentic depiction of reality....

Visual Expansions in Narrating Contemporary Conflicts and History. The Possibilities of Virtual Reality (VR) FilmsČlánky

Agnieszka Kiejziewicz

Iluminace 2025, 37(1):73-91 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1803  

This article focuses on Virtual Reality films depicting contemporary conflicts, with an emphasis on building viewer-screen relations and considering the cinematographic elements establishing the emotional reaction to the films. Analyzing the visual and narrative architecture of chosen Virtual Reality productions, the author explains correlations between the level of immersion and the viewer’s experience from the perspective of film and media studies. Furthermore, the author uses multimodal critical theory as the primary methodological tool to focus on modes experienced through different sensual channels during the 360° screenings. Moreover, it...

Polish Contemporary Cinema. Between Right-wing Cultural Policy and Netflix ImperialismČlánky

Anna Wróblewska

Iluminace 2025, 37(1):49-71 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1798  

This article is the first synthesis of the social, political and economic conditions of Polish cinema in recent years and their influence on the current shape of Polish cinema. This shape is changing dynamically all the time, although the direction of the changes is not obvious at the moment. In many respects the situation of Polish cinema has been exceptional in recent years. But the processes or elements of the processes described in this article are reflected in the internal markets of Central and Eastern Europe. This situation should prompt researchers to analyse the impact of the external and internal environment on national film markets in this...

“Studios Are Fundamentally about Controlling the Environment.”
Space Control and Epistemologically Challenging Failures in the Film Studios’ Research 
An Interview with Brian R. JacobsonRozhovory

Pavel Skopal, Ewa Ciszewska, Michał Pabiś-Orzeszyna

Iluminace 2024, 36(3):127-135 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1797  

An Interview with Brian R. Jacobson.

Refusing to Fade: Soviet Domestic Photography Archives as Memory StrongholdsRecenze

Liri Alienor Chapelan

Iluminace 2024, 36(3):137-142 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1796  

Book review: Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko, In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2023).

Animation Studios: People, Spaces, LaborEditorial

Pavel Skopal, Ewa Ciszewska

Iluminace 2024, 36(3):5-10 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1794  

An Introduction to a Special Issue.

I provizorní zastávka může být cílRecenze

Even a Temporary Stop Can Be a Destination

Jan Bergl

Iluminace 2024, 36(3):143-150 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1795  

Recenze knihy Jiří Anger (ed.), Digitální Kříženecký: Nový život prvních českých filmů (Praha: Národní filmový archiv, 2023).

Bring Your Toys to Works.
Desk Displays at the Animation StudioČlánky k tématu

Colin Wheeler

Iluminace 2024, 36(3):101-125 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1789  

Animators distinguish themselves through decorating their workspaces, which is why we should explore how this social ritual reflects the values inherent in animation production culture. Previous analyses have interpreted these practices as resistance to the alienating power of the studio, focusing on large companies such as Nickelodeon. However, many diverse office environments remain unexplored. Drawing from long-form interviews with animators across Atlanta, Georgia, this research uses discourse analysis and ethnographic methods to study how decorations differ in their purpose and function. Participants revealed myriad motivations for their choices:...

How Serials Reshaped Animation Production. 
Comparative Analysis of Animated Film Serials Produced by the Studio in Gottwaldov and ‘Se-Ma-For’ Studio of Small Film Forms (1960s–1980s)Články k tématu

Michal Večeřa, Szymon Szul

Iluminace 2024, 36(3):11-34 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1793  

The 1960s marked a significant shift in animation production in socialist Czechoslovakia and Poland toward serial formats, and our text focuses on a comparative analysis of the adoption of animated serial production at the Polish studio Se-Ma-For and the Gottwaldov animation studio in Czechoslovakia. In Gottwaldov, evening serials for television were the predominant form of production, while Se-Ma-For favored co-produced serials. The shift to serial production required adjustments in production practices, including changes in workforce composition and skill requirements. Comparative analysis reveals divergent approaches to serial production, influenced...

Transcontinental Studio Collaboration in the Production of the African-futurist Anthology Kizazi MotoČlánky k tématu

Jane Cheadle

Iluminace 2024, 36(3):81-100 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1791  

This paper explores the production of the animated anthology Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire as a case study for understanding the transnational dynamics and power relations within the global animation industry in the post-colonial context. Utilizing qualitative research based on interviews with key decision makers, the paper examines the production culture, the complexities of identity and representation, and the ideological tensions embedded in the animation tools and processes. Through the interview record, moments of resistance and acceptance emerged, revealing uneven access to resources and the colonial legacies influencing contemporary African...

From Semi-Amateur to Professional Production Conditions.
The Irzykowski Film Studio and Animation in the Late People’s Republic of PolandČlánky k tématu

Emil Sowiński

Iluminace 2024, 36(3):63-79 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1790  

The present paper contextualises and closely analyses the production strategy of the Irzykowski Film Studio (a communist-era film institution founded in 1981 that produced debut films of all types and lengths) for animated films in the 1980s. In reconstructing the realities of animated film production, the author points out not only the reasons for their making, but also draws attention to production conditions. It proves that the Studio operated under semi-amateur (1980–1985) where films were produced on extremely limited budgets as well as professional (1986–1989) production conditions. The research draws on archival materials, including...

The Agency and Effect of Technical Equipment on Animation Production in Studios Se-Ma-For and FS Kudlov in the 1970s and 1980sČlánky k tématu

Tereza Bochinová, Agata Hofelmajer-Roś

Iluminace 2024, 36(3):35-62 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1792  

This study examines the animation studios FS Kudlov in Gottwaldov and Se-Ma-For in Łódź in the 1970s and 1980s through the lens of Actor-Network Theory (ANT). The goal is to demonstrate ANT as a tool for understanding the role of human and non-human actors (such as equipment, materials, and spaces) in shaping work processes. In Se-Ma-For, the “reprojector kit” used by Zbigniew Rybczyński for the Oscar-winning Tango (1981) prompted innovative techniques, while in FS Kudlov, a work process supplementing a copy machine influenced Karel Zeman’s work. Both studios faced constraints due to limited technology access in the Eastern Bloc,...