Iluminace - Latest articles

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

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 TheatreArticles

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) FilmsArticles

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 ImperialismArticles

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. JacobsonInterviews

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 StrongholdsReviews

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.

Even a Temporary Stop Can Be a DestinationReviews

Jan Bergl

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

Book review: 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 StudioTheme Articles

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)Theme Articles

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 MotoTheme Articles

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 PolandTheme Articles

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 1980sTheme Articles

Tereza Bochinová, Agata Hofelmajer-Roś

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

Seriously Unserious: Theoretical Implications of the Gimmick for Film and Media StudiesReviews

Veronika Hanáková

Iluminace 2024, 36(2):133-139 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1787  

Book review: Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020).

Configuring computer labor in film and audiovisual media:
an introduction to a special issueEditorial

Veronika Hanáková

Iluminace 2024, 36(2):5-22 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1786  

This text invites a critical examination of how computer labor – in all its diverse forms,  modes, and manifestations – has been represented, constructed, and reflected through the formal capacities of audiovisual media from the 20th century to the present day. In a world where technological advancements constantly introduce new gadgets, software, platforms, and algorithms, our perception of information technology is in perpetual motion. Computer labor encompasses all forms of work facilitated by information technologies, whether performed by humans, machines, or through human-machine collaboration. This concept provides a lens for...

Karlovy Vary Film Festival as a Platform for Cultural Exchange and a Weapon of Hybrid WarfareReviews

Ondřej Zach

Iluminace 2024, 36(2):127-132 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1785  

Book review: Jindřiška Bláhová, ed., Proplétání světů: Mezinárodní filmový festival Karlovy Vary v období studené války (Praha: Národní filmový archiv, 2023).

Ordinatrices: About the Negative Spaces of Early ComputingTheme Articles

Occitane Lacurie

Iluminace 2024, 36(2):41-50 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1781  

The history of computing is notoriously incomplete when it comes to the women who have shaped it as engineers, scientists, and theorists. This video essay hypothesizes that this invisibility originated well before that, in the age of computing as manual labor, a profession once known as secretarial work. Two images support this view. The opening shot of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, showing a colossal New York building full of rows of busy secretaries as far as the eye can see, might seem like a computer tower to the 21st-century eye that has since contemplated the humanoid programs that populate the mainframes of Tron. In the same...

Who Is Awful? Black Mirror and the Dystopian Imaginary of AI LaborTheme Articles

Tibor Vocásek

Iluminace 2024, 36(2):79-106 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1784  

The future of labor has become one of the most urgent topics in the current public debate regarding Artificial Intelligence. Related imaginaries, primarily following the emergence of Chat GPT, have gravitated towards blaming the technology for threatening people’s livelihoods. However, these visions suffer from “sociotechnical blindness” and overlook the human actors who create and hold the decisive power behind AI. One of the most mediatized examples of this was the strike by Hollywood workers in 2023. Pop culture, notably sci-fi television series, has been an influential source of inspiration for these dystopian visions. Despite...

The Allure and Threat of the Cine-Computer:
A Supercut of Onscreen Computers in Speculative Screen FictionTheme Articles

Daniel O’Brien

Iluminace 2024, 36(2):29-40 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1780  

This video essay explores the enticement and anxiety of onscreen computers across a range of films and television programmes. The onscreen computer is a frequent prop of dystopian fiction within the sci-fi genre, often presented as an allure that promises increased power or knowledge balanced by the anxiety of technophobic otherness. From the late 1950s onwards, cinema and television, particularly sci-fi and speculative fiction, have used computers as a form of adversary, which eventually turns on their human operators. The video essay portrays the evolvement of computing in regard to apparatus and embodiment through user interfaces, software, and...

Techniques and Technologies to Compensate for PowerlessnessTheme Articles

Matěj Pavlík

Iluminace 2024, 36(2):71-78 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1782  

The video essay Techniques and Technologies to Compensate for Powerlessness is an artistic research output that exemplifies Matěj Pavlík’s approach to historiography, developed through individual projects and interdisciplinary collaborations. Pavlík’s work often focuses on a reflexive approach to fiction, speculation, or myth-making. In this essay, the artist examines the role of borderline science technologies invented in late socialist Czechoslovakia. These technologies (e.g., telesthesia, healing, and locating geopathogenic zones) were linked to research in borderline scientific fields like psychotronics and psychoenergetics. The artist...

Nostalgia Isn’t What it Used to Be:
On Vaporwave’s Glitched, Aspirational AestheticsTheme Articles

David Álvarez

Iluminace 2024, 36(2):107-126 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1788  

Vaporwave is an internet-native aesthetic movement that emerged in the early 2010s. It directly addresses the presumed condition of living at the “end of history” that was proposed during the 1990s by enmeshing images from aspirational consumerism into an audiovisual aesthetic. This aesthetic is mainly distinguished by its use of the glitch as a unifying element, ironically fusing different forms of noise, muzak and interference with visual and aural refrains and pop culture objects and other images belonging to neoliberal consumerism. This article argues that Vaporwave’s “glitched” aesthetics are the manifestation of...

Envisioning the InterfaceTheme Articles

Steve F. Anderson

Iluminace 2024, 36(2):21-28 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1779  

Envisioning the Interface presents an interpretive chronology of Hollywood’s imaginings of computer interfaces from the 1950s to the present. Although not rigidly chronological, this video essay observes a historical evolution from early visions of gestural interfaces when computers were linked with superhuman or extra-terrestrial intelligence, to the mundane, physical and punch-card based interfaces of the mainframe era, followed by a wave of strangely recalcitrant voice and anthropomorphic interfaces that emerged in the PC era. Drawing on the concept of cinema as a source of “diegetic prototypes” for the technology industries, this...

Do Corporate Films Dream of Cybernetic Governance?
Computers (as Metaphors of) Industrial Labor and Society in Olivetti-Sponsored FilmsTheme Articles

Simone Dotto

Iluminace 2024, 36(2):51-70 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1783  

Addressing the audiovisual construction of computer labor, the essay focuses on the relationship between computers and film in their lifetimes as useful media. It analyzes the films sponsored by the leading Italian IT manufacturing company Olivetti between the late 1950s and the 1970s. Questioning Vinzenz Hediger’s hypothesis on industrial cinema’s inability to make computing visible, it argues that the cinematic representation of computers is invested with broader rhetorical functions and responds to a specific form of governmentality, inflected by the application of cybernetics in scientific management. Based on this premise, the essay...

Cinematographic SokolArticles

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...

Peripheral Vision-MakersReviews

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).

Many Monologues about Experimental FilmReviews

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).

Reframing Postsocialist Legacy and ImageryReviews

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).

Direct Professionalisation of Directors in AnimationArticles

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...

Negotiating Organizational Cultures
The Evolution of the VOD Platform Implementation in Czech Public Service TelevisionArticles

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)Articles

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...