Iluminace, 2022 (roč. 34), číslo 1

Migrating Archives of Reality. Programming, Curating, and Appropriation of Non-Fiction Film

Lucie Česálková

Iluminace 2022, 34(1):5-8  

Shaping the Unshapeable? Videographic Curation of Early Czech Cinema

Jiří Anger

Iluminace 2022, 34(1):9-29 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1721  

Whenever a curator attempts to present films from the very beginnings of cinema to contemporary spectators, multiple pressing questions always come to mind. Shall the ephemeral one-minute scenes be shown individually or as parts of larger wholes, sorted out according to thematic or chronological affinities? How to successfully reproduce not only the films' content but also their inherent technological features or the distinctive quality of early cinematic experience? How is it possible to make the audience aware of the historical distance that the surviving archival artifacts covered? How can we navigate between the film materials' past, present, and...

Super-8 in Calcutta. Analysis of a "Failed" Movement

Amrita Biswas

Iluminace 2022, 34(1):31-51 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1722  

The Super-8 films that flourished in the city of Calcutta during the 1980s had been central to a very conscious film movement that wanted to propagate the culture of non-commercial filmmaking by organizing film festivals and workshops on the format. The movement played a pivotal role in Calcutta's film culture because it initiated film enthusiasts to a new horizon of filmmaking where anybody, on a shoestring budget, could narrate a story or document an event that the mainstream media would not cover. However, the discourse around the movement was one of failure that witnessed the production of poor-quality films. There has also been a conspicuous...

Polish Memory of the Second World War and its Afterlife in the Early Cold War Italian Film Culture

Karol Jóźwiak

Iluminace 2022, 34(1):53-71 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1723  

In this article I discuss production, distribution and reception contexts of Michal Waszynski's films produced in Italy in the wake of the Second World War. Particularly, I pay attention to the found-footage sequences embedded in those films. I analyze them in terms of a testimony and proofs for the war experience, which was hardly acknowledged in post-war Italy. Thus, I aim at reconstructing the wider political plan to which these films were inscribed, locating them on the backdrop of the Polish Army propaganda activity and diplomacy in Italy in the eve of the cold war. I show to what extent these films were entangled into diplomatic, political and...

Virtual Looking. Home Movies as Historical Evidence in The Future Is Behind You (Abigail Child, 2004)

Zachariah Anderson

Iluminace 2022, 34(1):73-90 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1724  

Twenty-first century scholars debate the epistemological and historiographic questions that emerge when once-private home movies are appropriated to support public-facing histories. Building on the work of Jaimie Baron, Catherine Russell, Jeffrey Skoller, and others, I approach archival filmmaking practices - in which filmmakers appropriate extant images for (re)use in alternative audiovisual contexts - as sites that make these questions and concerns analyzable. I turn to the archival film The Future Is Behind You (Abigail Child, 2004) as a space for exploring reflexive modes of looking at and appropriating home movies as historical evidence. Building...

(Auto)biographical Documentaries as Audiovisual Microhistories of Pinochet's Chile

Vladimir Rosas-Salazar

Iluminace 2022, 34(1):91-106 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1725  

Historians work with documents as sources to research the past and elaborate a narrative. This article proposes that documentary filmmakers perform a similar practice, excavating the past by working with audiovisual documents to produce a documentary film, thus allowing stories of anonymous people to emerge. I elaborate on historian Carlo Ginzburg's approach to microhistory and propose to study this type of documentary as audiovisual microhistories. That is to say, as an experimental practice that pays attention to small-scale research units to access previously unknown stories and explore how they interrelate with the wider historical context. Here,...

How to Benefit from Academics? A Roundtable with Film Archives

Rossella Catanese

Iluminace 2022, 34(1):107-114  

Český film jako důsledek proměny kulturního pole (Petr Bilík, Financování filmu jako aspekt kulturní politiky)

Czech Film as a Consequence of Changing the Cultural Field (Petr Bilík, Financování filmu jako aspekt kulturní politiky)

Tereza Czesany Dvořáková

Iluminace 2022, 34(1):115-118 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1727  

Pod povrch věcí (Rachael Hutchinson, Japanese Culture Through Videogames)

Underneath Things (Rachael Hutchinson, Japanese Culture Through Videogames)

Josef Tichý

Iluminace 2022, 34(1):119-125 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1728