Iluminace - Nejnovější články

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

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...

Karlovarský festival jako platforma kulturní výměny i zbraň hybridní válkyRecenze

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

Ondřej Zach

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

Recenze knihy: 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 ComputingČlánky k tématu

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 LaborČlánky k tématu

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 FictionČlánky k tématu

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...

Techniky a technologie na kompenzaci bezmociČlánky k tématu

Techniques and Technologies to Compensate for Powerlessness

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 AestheticsČlánky k tématu

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 InterfaceČlánky k tématu

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 FilmsČlánky k tématu

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...

Sokol kinematografickýČlánky

Cinematographic Sokol

Ivan Klimeš

Iluminace 2024, 36(1):121-168 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1774  

Tělovýchovný spolek Sokol s masovou členskou základnou, s kořeny hluboko v 19. století a vysokým společenským kreditem díky nacionálnímu obsahu svého programu se stal v meziválečném Československu největším provozovatelem a budovatelem kin. Z přibližně 1 850 kin v republice jich patřilo Sokolu zhruba 40 %, což znamená, že z více než 3 000 sokolských poboček jich provozovala kino asi čtvrtina. Šlo většinou o kina venkovská a 80 % z nich hrálo jen jednou nebo dvakrát týdně. Článek sleduje, jak se pražská centrála Sokola snažila ve 20. letech sjednotit sokolská kina do jednoho gigantického sdružení, jehož členové by získávali od půjčoven filmy výlučně...

Peripheral Vision-MakersRecenze

Jonathan Owen

Iluminace 2024, 36(1):169-174 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1778  

Recenze knihy: Petr Szczepanik, Screen Industries in East-Central Europe (London: BFI and Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021).

Mnohohlas monologů o experimentálním filmuRecenze

Many Monologues about Experimental Film

Kryštof Kočtář

Iluminace 2024, 36(1):181-186 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1777  

Recenze knihy: Ksenya Gurshtein – Sonja Simonyi, eds., Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022).

Reframing Postsocialist Legacy and ImageryRecenze

Tanya Silverman

Iluminace 2024, 36(1):175-180 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1776  

Recenze knihy: Veronika Pehe, Velvet Retro: Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2020).

Přímá profesionalizace režisérů v animované tvorběČlánky

Direct Professionalisation of Directors in Animation

Tomáš Hubáček

Iluminace 2024, 36(1):93-120 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1773  

Tato studie se zaměřuje na pozoruhodný fenomén československého animovaného filmu. V 70. letech 20. století došlo v Československu k unikátnímu spojení dvou odlišných světů – amatérského a animovaného filmu. Amatérští režiséři animovaných filmů mohli přejít přímo k profesionální režii, aniž by získali řádné vysokoškolské filmové vzdělání nebo museli absolvovat předchozí studiovou praxi. Pěti z nich to bylo umožněno na základě předchozích úspěchů na amatérských festivalech a jejich jedinečného výtvarného stylu. Pro tyto účely text definuje pojem "přímá profesionalizace" a vysvětluje její aspekty. Studie sleduje vstup režisérů do profesionální...

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

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...

Sadismus vůči diváctvu filmového díla
Liminální zkušenost a modulace percepce při performanci Náš očistec (Martin Ježek, 2021)Články

Sadism Against the Film Spectator
Liminal Experience and Modulation of Perception in the Performance Our Purgatory (Martin Ježek, 2021)

Kryštof Kočtář

Iluminace 2024, 36(1):29-70 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1772  

Někteří filmoví tvůrci si zvolili, že divákům svých děl nezprostředkují příběh, nýbrž přímo zaútočí na jejich smysly. V této studii se budeme zabývat expanded cinema performancí experimentálního filmaře Martina Ježka Náš očistec (2021), která pomocí různých technik usiluje právě o tento typ tělesného a afektivního diváctví. Je určena pro tři projektory a trojici pláten, přičemž se s ní lze setkat pouze ve formě události. Z tohoto důvodu budeme vycházet z textů teatroložky Eriky Fischer-Lichte, která vypracovala koncept estetiky performativity, jenž nabízí vhodný teoretický rámec pro výzkum uměleckých děl v událostní podobě. Nejprve však musíme...

Kritické Dědictví
Exkomunikace a blahořečení prvního porevolučního filmu Věry Chytilové.Články

Critical Inheritance
The Excommunication and Beatification of Věra Chytilová’s First Post-Revolutionary Film

Ondřej Zach

Iluminace 2024, 36(1):71-92 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1771  

Na základě částečně autobiografické perspektivy se článek zabývá případem heteronomního kritického hodnocení filmu Dědictví aneb Kurvahošigutentag (Věra Chytilová, 1992) ve světle transformace českého filmového průmyslu v 90. letech 20. století. První postsocialistický film emblematické režisérky československé nové vlny byl zprvu považován za zradu kulturního dědictví, které jeho autorka reprezentovala. V roce 2020 byl však tentýž film českou kritikou označen za třetí nejvýznamnější dílo postsametové éry. Text konstatuje, že rétorické využití téhož kulturního kánonu československé nové vlny použité při estetickém hodnocení téhož filmu v různých...

„The Victims Were Apparently Eaten“ Reflexe japonské estetiky a společnosti 90. let v trilogii Resident Evil (1996–1999)Články

„The Victims Were Apparently Eaten“. Reflections of the Japanese Aesthetics and Society of the 1990s in the Resident Evil Trilogy (1996–1999)

Josef Tichý

Iluminace 2023, 35(3):5-38 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1770  

The Japanese video game series Resident Evil is often cited as a prime example of the mukokuseki (“without nationality”) aesthetics due to its setting in the fictional world of the United States. Thus, the principal aim of this article is to explore within the broader context of Japanese culture and society, how the above-mentioned saga reflects a whole range of elements specific to the Japanese environment and even the personal experiences of its creators. The opening quote appropriated from the introductory video sequence of the first title, speaks somewhat pathetically about victims who “were apparently eaten,” thus...

(Více než) kompetentně o nekompetenci. Becky Bartlett, Badfilm: Incompetence, Intention and Failure (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021).Recenze

(More than) Competently about Incompetence. Becky Bartlett, Badfilm: Incompetence, Intention and Failure (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021).

Jan Bergl

Iluminace 2023, 35(3):159-164 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1769  

Recenze knihy Becky Bartlett o takzvaných "špatných filmech".

Chůze velrybou: imerzní výstavní design jako forma muzejní komunikaceČlánky

Walking Through the Whale: Immersive Exhibition Design As a Form of Museum Communication

Ondřej Táborský

Iluminace 2023, 35(3):39-58 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1768  

In recent years, visiting certain types of museums has become much more of an experience anchored in the mediality of the space. In a situation of gradual decline of the reach of traditional audiovisual media such as television or cinema, the museum appears as another significant platform for viewership. This shift is greatly aided by the popularity of immersive exhibition tools. The transfer of communication from objects (touchable or contextual) and dioramas to immersiveness increases the importance of bodily and emotional experience but also brings great challenges for some types of cultural organizations focused on the interpretation of history....

Nation-building Across Media. Lumière films’ intervention in the Hungarian visual sphereČlánky

Izabella Füzi

Iluminace 2023, 35(3):135-158 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1767  

One of the major mediatized political events in Hungary was the procession organized on 8 June, 1896 as part of the Hungarian millennial celebrations intended to express national progress, pride and unity. Captured by professional and amateur photographs, represented in drawings, paintings, a cyclorama, as well as actuality films recorded by the Lumière travelling operators, the political event of the procession reached a much larger audience than the actual public present. The article aims to show the differences between the staged event of the procession intended to bolster the image of a unified nation and its visual mediation ‒ for example...

Animovaný film a pochybnosti kozmického veku. O skepticizme vo filmoch Václava Mergla: Laokoon, Krabi a HomunkulusČlánky

Animated Film and the Doubts of the Space Age. About Scepticism in Václav Mergl’s films: Laokoon, Crabs and Homunculus

Veronika Liptáková

Iluminace 2023, 35(3):103-134 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1766  

This article primarily focuses on Václav Mergl's sci-fi films Laokoon, Crabs and Homunculus. With the help of theoretical frameworks of technological skepticism (or skepticism of the so-called Space Age), it interprets these movies, whereas significantly working with the considerations of Hannah Arendt, presented in her text “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man”. Since Václav Mergl takes his works to the level of relatively complex philosophical ideas, which he often expresses through images, this article also takes into account his independent artworks. However, it observes the artist's creative processes primarily in his films....

Decentralizace v české zestátněné kinematografii 1957–1962: Projev kulturní liberalizace, nebo snaha o zefektivnění práce?Články

Decentralization in the Czech Nationalized Cinema 1957–1962: A Consequence of Cultural Liberalization or Effort to Work More Effectively?

Marek Danko, Petr Hasan, Lucie Hurtová

Iluminace 2023, 35(3):59-102 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1765  

This study deals with decentralization processes in the nationalized Czechoslovak cinematography, which took place in the second half of the 1950´s and the first half of the 1960´s. It contextualizes these organizational changes within the historical and political-cultural developments in Czechoslovakia and approaches them from two main perspectives: from the point of view of changes right in the top management of the Czechoslovak cinematography and in other organizational parts of the Czechoslovak Film and from the point of view of changes in the relationship between this film management and the superior Ministry of Education and Culture. The role...

(Eco)Traumatic Landscapes in Contemporary Audiovisual CultureEditorial

(Eco)Traumatic Landscapes in Contemporary Audiovisual Culture

Bori Máté

Iluminace 2023, 35(2):5-8 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1764  

Editorial tematického čísla.

Oldřich Nový vlastně nikdy neodcházelRecenze

Oldřich Nový Never Actually Left

Valerie Coufalová

Iluminace 2023, 35(2):113-118 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1763  

Recenze monografie Šárky Gmiterkové: ON: Kristian v montérkách (Praha: Národní filmový archiv, 2022).

Cesty za Cestou do pravěkuRecenze

Journeys to the Journey to the Beginning of Time

Jakub Egermajer

Iluminace 2023, 35(2):119-124 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1762  

Recenze kolektivní monografie Lukáš Skupa (ed.): Cesta do pravěku. Dobrodružná věda (Academia – Casablanca, 2023).

Becoming-Grains of Mercury: Documentary Ecologies, Posthumanism, and the Entanglements of TraumasČlánky k tématu

Erica Biolchini

Iluminace 2023, 35(2):51-71 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1759  

Félix Guattari, in his ecosophical work The Three Ecologies, urges us to contemplate and, most importantly, to live transversally with the entangled ecologies of nature and culture/society. Specifically, he states that “it is simply wrong to regard action on the psyche, the socius, and the environment as separate;” particularly, he adds, when it comes to the “simultaneous degradation of the three areas.” Guattari’s transversal process is more accurate than ever if we consider how human activity, in the context of the current geological epoch — the Anthropocene — has sent the Earth’s natural ecosystems...

‘Traumatomic’ Encounters. Trauma through Radioactivity in Photofilmic ’Experimental Documents’ of ChernobylČlánky k tématu

Beja Margitházi

Iluminace 2023, 35(2):95-112 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1760  

Nuclear trauma has always resisted verbal and visual portrayal, calling for various alternative, form-breaking methods. This article discusses three artistic works which I consider “experimental documents” because of their various photographic and filmic practices of intimately approaching the radioactive contamination still present in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The site-related projects of Alice Miceli (Chernobyl Project, 2006–2010), Lina Selander (Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut, 2011), and Daniel McIntyre (Lion series, 2011–2014) go beyond the journalistic representations of the...

The Rhythms of More-than-human Matter in Azucena Losana’s Eco-developed Film Series MetarretratosČlánky k tématu

The Rhythms of More-than-human Matter in Azucena Losana’s Eco-developed Film Series Metarretratos

Salomé Lopes Coelho

Iluminace 2023, 35(2):31-49 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1758  

This essay explores the eco-developing project Metarretratos by Mexican filmmaker Azucena Losana, addressing it in the context of a set of cinematic gestures concerned with the environmental impact of film. Focusing particularly on the film Ceibo/Erythrina crista-galli, the article argues that the series contributes to the three main axes that characterize academic debates about film and environmental concerns: a) with regard to cinematographic modes of production, b) concerning the thematization of the more-than-human and its relationships with humans and the environment, and c) with reference to the understanding of images as matter...