Iluminace - Latest articles
Results 31 to 58 of 58:
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...
Critical Inheritance
The Excommunication and Beatification of Věra Chytilová’s First Post-Revolutionary FilmArticles
Ondřej Zach
Iluminace 2024, 36(1):71-92 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1771
The article explores the case of the heteronomous critical evaluation of the film The Inheritance or Fuckoffguysgoodday (Věra Chytilová, 1992) in light of the transition of the Czech film industry in the 1990s. The first post-socialist film by Czechoslovak New Wave's emblematic director was at first regarded as a betrayal of the cultural heritage its author has represented. In 2020, though, the same film was marked by Czech critics as the third most important work of the post-velvet era. The text notes that the rhetorical use of the same cultural canon of the Czechoslovak New Wave used in the aesthetic evaluation of the same film at different...
„The Victims Were Apparently Eaten“. Reflections of the Japanese Aesthetics and Society of the 1990s in the Resident Evil Trilogy (1996–1999)Articles
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...
(More than) Competently about Incompetence. Becky Bartlett, Badfilm: Incompetence, Intention and Failure (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021).Reviews
Jan Bergl
Iluminace 2023, 35(3):159-164 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1769
A review of Becky Bartlett's book on so-called "badfilms".
Walking Through the Whale: Immersive Exhibition Design As a Form of Museum CommunicationArticles
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 sphereArticles
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...
Animated Film and the Doubts of the Space Age. About Scepticism in Václav Mergl’s films: Laokoon, Crabs and HomunculusArticles
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....
Decentralization in the Czech Nationalized Cinema 1957–1962: A Consequence of Cultural Liberalization or Effort to Work More Effectively?Articles
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
Bori Máté
Iluminace 2023, 35(2):5-8 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1764
Special Issue Editorial
Oldřich Nový Never Actually LeftReviews
Valerie Coufalová
Iluminace 2023, 35(2):113-118 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1763
Review of Šárka Gmiterková's monograph: ON: Kristian v montérkách (Praha: Národní filmový archiv, 2022).
Journeys to the Journey to the Beginning of TimeReviews
Jakub Egermajer
Iluminace 2023, 35(2):119-124 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1762
Review of the collective volume Lukáš Skupa (ed.): Cesta do pravěku. Dobrodružná věda (Academia – Casablanca, 2023).
Becoming-Grains of Mercury: Documentary Ecologies, Posthumanism, and the Entanglements of TraumasTheme Articles
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 ChernobylTheme Articles
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 MetarretratosTheme Articles
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...
Traumatic Landscapes from Above: Images of Colonization and Violence in the Sea of PlasticTheme Articles
Miguel Fernández Labayen, Loreto García Saiz
Iluminace 2023, 35(2):9-30 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1755
The so-called “Sea of Plastic” in Almeria (southern Spain) is the largest concentration of plastic greenhouses in the world. Because of its monumentalism and “accidental aesthetics” (Davis, 2015), this geographic region has been extensively depicted from above by aircrafts, satellites, and drones from the 1950s to the present. The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, it offers a historical account of these images from above (from the ones obtained during the Francoist period for geopolitical purposes to those taken by local farmers today) in order to understand its colonial condition and legacy; second, it explores the...
Diffractive Way of Thinking and the Possibilities of Capturing Ecological Trauma in Tomonari Nishikawa’s sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars (2014)Theme Articles
Bori Máté
Iluminace 2023, 35(2):73-94 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1761
sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars (2014) is a camera-less two-minute-long film directed by the Japanese experimental filmmaker Tomonari Nishikawa. He buried a 100-foot-long 35mm negative film under fallen leaves alongside a country road close to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station where it was exposed to the possible remains of radioactive materials. The film is a document of an intrusive past. It becomes an (eco) traumatic landscape and a local manifestation of a hyperobject called radiation. This article will employ the concept of diffraction as a new materialist concept whose qualities are quite underexplored in...
To Save the Whole through AmbiguityReviews
Benjamin Slavík
Iluminace 2023, 35(1):110-117 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1753
Review of Jan Bierhanzl's Aesthetics of Ambiguity (2022).
Ester Krumbachová's Phenomenon: Creator of Film ImagesReviews
Jiří Voráč
Iluminace 2023, 35(1):103-109 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1751
Reviews of books and exhibition projects about Ester Krumbachová.
Ghosts On and Off Screen. An Interview with Helen WheatleyInterviews
Klára Feikusová
Iluminace 2023, 35(1):91-102 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1750
In the interview, Professor Helen Wheatley discusses her past and current research with an emphasis on her forthcoming book, Television/Death, and research project Ghost Town: Civic Television and the Haunting of Coventry.
Pandemic Television
Television Industries in the midst of COVID-19Editorial
Jana Jedličková
Iluminace 2023, 35(1):5-6 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1754
Editorial for a special issue on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the television industry.
Framing pandemic news. Empirical research on Covid-19 representation in the Italian TV newsTheme Articles
Andrea Miconi, Simona Pezzano, Elisabetta Risi
Iluminace 2023, 35(1):65-90 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1752
The article contributes to the vast literature on the media representation of Covid-19, by exposing the results of a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Covid-19 media coverage in Italy, run on the full archive of prime-time TV news – Tg1, Tg2, Tg3, Tg4, Tg5, Studio Aperto, Tg La7 – between February 28, 2020, and February 27, 2021. All verbal contents of TV news have been analyzed, based on a sample of 2,555 news shows and 14,304 news stories related to the epidemic, for a total of 1.6 million words. By applying the media framing models, we realized a two-step work: a mapping of TV coverage across one year; and an in-depth investigation...
Fictionalizing the COVID-19 pandemic “instantly”. A case study of the German comedy drama Drinnen – Im Internet sind alle gleichTheme Articles
Florian Krauß
Iluminace 2023, 35(1):7-26 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1749
Based on interviews with production members and trade magazine articles, the paper discusses how the German comedy drama Drinnen – Im Internet sind alle gleich (2020) dealt with COVID-19 in its production. The series—whose title translates to “Inside – On the Internet All Are Equal”—is obviously about the pandemic: it tells the story of Charlotte, who is planning to quit her job and leave her marriage when she suddenly has to self-isolate and communicate with others only online. Not only Charlotte’s fictional life but also the show’s real-life production was very much affected by the COVID-19 pandemic....
Spanish TV Fiction in Times of Pandemic. Nuclear and Transversal Stories About COVID-19Theme Articles
Tatiana Hidalgo-Marí, Patricia Palomares-Sánchez
Iluminace 2023, 35(1):27-42 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1748
2020 marked an unprecedented change in the world population, social relationships, and cultural consumption itself. The outbreak of COVID-19 not only distanced people, families, and countries but also had many consequences on how we relate to each other. In this context, television was one of the sources of communication, entertainment, and bonding that resonated the most in times of crisis. This research aims to provide an in-depth study of the Spanish TV and VOD series born in the context of the pandemic to show how the discourse of COVID-19 has gone through the ways of consumption and entertainment and also through the fictional narratives. A content...
#QuedateEnCasa:
How did the Argentine and Spanish TV Industries React to the Outbreak of the Covid Pandemic in 2020?Theme Articles
Concepción Cascajosa Virino, Pablo Mendez Shiff
Iluminace 2023, 35(1):43-64 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1747
In March 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic hit the world, television industries had to rapidly adapt to the circumstances. While a substantial number of people were able to spend more time in front of their TVs, the executives had to make choices: should they tell stories about what was going on or should they try to create escapism? This article compares the responses given to these challenging times by the Argentine and Spanish television industries. Whereas both countries have long-standing cultural and economic ties, they were different in the length of their respective lockdowns, and this had an impact on the televisual answer to the crisis....