Iluminace - Nejnovější články

Toward a Geographically Specific Understanding of Filmic and Media Matter: An Introduction to a Special IssueEditorial

Byron Davies, Jiří Anger

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):5-20 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1831  

It can be difficult to articulate a substantive materialism in film and media studies, owing to the slipperiness of that term and its cognates. Changes in media and their technology can even bring out the materialist elements of supposedly idealist views in past film theory, thus raising the question of whether there is any meaningful contrast with “materialism.” We proffer the hypothesis that these difficulties lose their force as we move away from the global center and toward sites shaped by material scarcity and colonial extraction. Consequently, a materialism thought through to its full implications must be a geographically grounded...

Prostor a čas v japonských videoherních centrechRecenze

Space and Time in Japanese Videogame Centers

Josef Tichý

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):241-247 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1830  

Recenze knihy: Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon, Space and Play in Japanese Videogame Arcades (New York: Routledge, 2024).

Chudáci chlapci a ti druzíRecenze

Poor Boys and the Others

Jakub Egermajer

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):233-240 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1829  

Recenze knihy: Pavel Skopal a kol., Lidé – práce – animace: Světy animovaného filmu na Kudlově (Brno: Host, 2024).

Středověký partyzán v barvě. Restaurování filmu Jan Roháč z Dubé jako pramen kulturní historieČlánky

Medieval Partisan in Color: Restoration of the Film The Warriors of Faith as a Source of Cultural History

Tereza Frodlová, Jakub Egermajer

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):199-232 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1828  

Předkládaná studie vychází z výzkumu realizovaného u příležitosti digitálního restaurování snímku Jan Roháč z Dubé (Vladimír Borský, 1947), na kterém se Národní filmový archiv podílel v letech 2022–2024. Studie rekonstruuje okolnosti vzniku filmu, jeho spletitou distribuční historii a jeho místo ve společenském a kulturně-politickém kontextu poválečného Československa. Současně se věnuje otázce ideologického rozměru subžánru historicistně pojatého historického filmu a produkční a distribuční praxi zestátněné československé kinematografie v jejích formativních letech, tedy v období tzv. třetí republiky. V části věnované restaurování sleduje postupy...

Moving in Circles: Space and Place in Media Archaeology and the Art of Jop HorstČlánky k tématu

Floris Paalman

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):171-198 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1823  

This article is a media-archaeological investigation of the work by Dutch artist and experimental filmmaker Jop Horst (1961–2014). He was interested in the defining principles and features of moving image media: stillness/movement, on/off, light/dark, present/absent. He built his own zoetropes and produced Super 8 and 16mm trick films. Old appliances, such as ventilators, toasters, and washing machines, were turned into media machines, while overhead projectors showed truly moving images of larvae. The dispositif of his installations collided with the exhibition spaces, such as an old mill, a former school, or an aviary, often in his hometown,...

Kidlat Tahimik: Metaphorical Journeys in Decolonial CinemaČlánky k tématu

Ludo de Roo

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):147-170 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1827  

Philippine filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik’s debut film Perfumed Nightmare (1979) reveals a sophisticated use of what I term “concrete metaphor:” while evoking complex layers of decolonial critique, his 16mm cinematography keeps the metaphorical abstractions firmly grounded in material reality — a stone bridge, tropical foliage, and rustic sounds of nature. This essay considers the complex role of concrete metaphors in Tahimik’s evolving style. I start by showing how, on the one hand, multimodal extensions of cognitive metaphor theory (CMT) illuminate the dynamic structure of Tahimik’s cinematic metaphors. On the...

Refiguring the Buryat Photographic Archive: Ethnographic Visuality, Vernacular Montage, and Shamanic TemporalityČlánky k tématu

Aleksei Ziniuk, Margarita Galandina

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):77-108 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1826  

This article examines the Buryat photographic archive as a contested site of visual ethnography, historical trauma, and postcolonial critique. Spanning late Imperial ethnography (1880s), early Soviet ethnographic activism (1910s–1920s), and anthropometric studies (1930s), the archive documents the transformation of Buryat communities under imperial and Soviet regimes. Its dispersed materiality and digital aggregation foreground gaps, absences, and the mediated nature of memory, prompting an approach that combines archival analysis, vernacular photography, and contemporary photographic intervention. Structured in three parts, the article first...

Cinema’s Atmospheric A Priori: How Weather and Environment Shaped Celluloid Film Manufacturing and Raw Material Supply at Fujifilm, Daicel, and AgfaČlánky k tématu

Marek Jancovic

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):21-42 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1819  

Where was the cotton for Fujifilm’s cine-film grown? Who supplied the animal parts that would end up coated on Agfa’s film as gelatin? How did climate, environment, geology, and river hydrology shape the history of celluloid film manufacturing, and thus of cinema? This article enlists several archival collections and a range of little-known, multi-language secondary sources in the broader task of understanding cinema’s relationship with the material environment and climate, and its historical role in global trade, extractivist practices, and colonial politics. Drawing on primary source research in the archives of film stock and chemical...

Language Matters in the Geography of AI: French-Language Uses of Generative Artificial Intelligence in FilmmakingČlánky k tématu

Maxime Harvey

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):57-76 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1822  

This paper examines how generative artificial intelligence (AI) reconfigures linguistic practices and labour in contemporary filmmaking. Building on relational-materialist approaches, it argues that recent controversies and transformations in the film industry, such as synthetic voice generation, AI-assisted dubbing, and prompt-based creative tools, are deeply entwined with issues of language. The case of French-language filmmaking serves to foreground the geopolitical and sociolinguistic specificities that are often flattened in global AI deployments. Through a critical analysis of discourse around AI voice technologies and ethnographic observations...

Ritualization and Táltos Procedures in Péter Lichter’s Nutrition Fugue (2018)Články k tématu

Bori Máté

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):119-146 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1825  

In his film Nutrition Fugue (2018), Hungarian experimental filmmaker Péter Lichter appropriates remnants of discarded film strips from a socialist grocery advertisement (közért, literally, “for the community”), featuring images of processed meat dishes. As an exemplary case of geographically specific materialist film practice, the film functions as both a historical artifact — documenting East Central Europe under the socialist regime — and as a disruptive rupture, bringing past and present materialities into dialogue. This paper argues that Lichter’s process of cutting, decaying, and reassembling the film stock...

Hussein Shariffe’s Filmic Ruins: Archival Noise and The Dislocation of Amber (1975)Články k tématu

Laurence Kent

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):109-118 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1820  

My audiovisual essay explores Hussein Shariffe’s The Dislocation of Amber (1975) as a filmic “ruin” within his archive. Described by collaborator Sondra Hale as “Sudan’s first art film,” The Dislocation of Amber was filmed in the Sudanese city of Suakin, which lies in ruins. The available digitised copies of the film are degraded and disrupted by noise. Hale interprets the film as “a metaphor for a society decimated by colonialism,” and this essay uses Shariffe’s approach to the ruins of Suakin as a model for how to approach the ruins of Shariffe’s film itself, along with the...

Por un cine cachinero: Reappropriation as a Survival Strategy in Contemporary Experimental Cinema from GuayaquilČlánky k tématu

Libertad Gills

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):49-56 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1824  

The video essay Por un cine cachinero, based on the manifesto of the same title published in the book Guayaquil en ruinas (“Guayaquil in Ruins,” Guayaquil Analógico, 2023), brings together films made in Guayaquil on analog film or made by reappropriating archives. The aim is to recontextualize these works within the local framework of “cachinería,” the name of popular second-hand markets. What would a film theory inspired by the cachinería look like? This video essay considers reappropriation in experimental cinema in Guayaquil as a practice that resignifies international found footage tendencies or fashions...

Knitting on Location: The Norfolk Knitting Pattern Film SeriesČlánky k tématu

Jennifer Nightingale

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):43-48 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1821  

This audiovisual essay and written statement unpack two films from the Norfolk Knitting Pattern series, which I created in 2023. The 16mm landscape films discussed here aim to translate Norfolk fisherman gansey knitting patterns. The films were shot and edited on location in two Norfolk fishing villages, Sheringham and Cromer, in the UK, where the patterns have been historically produced. The production of the films creates a structural relationship between a stitch of knitted textile fabric and a frame of film. In this methodology, gesture, landscape, and film are “knitted together” as a material object, re-embedding the knitting...

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.