Publication activities

This collective monograph by editors Sylva Poláková and Martin Mazance maps the history of the Czech moving image in the context of artistic practice from the turn of the 1960s and 1970s to the present. The authors of the original studies (M. Blažíček, M. Mazanec, S. Poláková, M. Meixnerová, T. Pospiszyl, K. Svatoňová, M. Mansfieldová, E. Krátká, M. Forejt, L. Střeláková and M. Strnad) look beyond the widespread idea of the so-called Czech video art as a heterogeneous and underappreciated artistic discipline and trace the interrelationships between groups, individual artists and events that contributed to the spread and legitimization of the moving image as a means of artistic expression.

The book has two covers and is available on the eshop.

The first-ever scholarly publication devoted to the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival before 1989 by editor Jindřiška Bláhová offers a new perspective on the history of the festival from its very beginning (1946) to the first post-revolutionary edition (1990). Straddling disciplines, the book shows the Czechoslovak festival as a complex cultural, economic, and political institution against the backdrop of the interests of the Czechoslovak film monopoly, the Cold War, Communist internationalism, state socialism, and the changing geopolitics and landscape of world cinema. The book is based on extensive research in Czech, American, French and Russian archives, supplemented by analysis of press and audiovisual materials and oral interviews with employees of the Czechoslovak State Film.

The book has already been published and is available on the eshop.

Jiří Anger's collective monograph is based on many years of research, presentation and curation of Jan Kříženecký's "first Czech films" from 1898 to 1911. Digitization from original nitrate prints and negatives has not only made the pioneering images accessible, but also opened up many questions about their past and future. The book will explore, among other things, the changing material form of the films, their circulation across eras and contexts, and the possibilities of exhibiting or using the newly created digital artefacts for practical research.

The book has already been published and is available on the eshop.

Jan Trnka's book is a research probe into the roots of Czech film scriptwriting and dramaturgy of the 1920s to 1950s, which he conceives as a system of beliefs, institutions and authors, and thus their works, practices and ideas about what a good script is and what is the right way to write it. Particular attention is paid to a forgotten figure of Czech cinema, Josef Neuberg, one of the first professional screenwriters, who began his extremely prolific and successful lifelong career as a screenwriter in the silent era of cinema and ended only at the time of the rise of the Czechoslovak New Wave.

The book will be published in 2024.

Martin Mišúr's monograph traces the appearance of feature-length detective stories in Czechoslovak cinema in the first twenty years after its nationalisation. It asks what preconditions enabled or prevented the dozens of films that sought to be made under Barrandov conditions between 1945 and 1965. The author solved the convoluted research puzzle in the archives of relevant institutions, with the help of suggestions from historical production studies and genre theory. The book offers an answer, taking into account three levels of assumptions: cultural, creative, and economic. Rather than privileging one level over the other, the text will encourage the perception that together they both needed and held each other in check.

The book will be published in 2025.

This book on the history of Czech feature films for children goes back to the time when this genre was undergoing a fundamental development and when it functioned as a "showcase" of Czechoslovak cinema. Behind its artistic, audience and international successes were the diverse tasks and demands placed on children's films by the film industry and various non-film actors. This publication reveals the background of the development of a genre that almost disappeared in post-Soviet cinema. It will introduce the reader to previously unknown facts and contexts, as well as well-known trends and personalities, which it will present from a new perspective.

The book will be published in 2025