Iluminace, 2025 (roč. 37), číslo 2

Shifting Screenwriting – The Past, Present and Future of the Craft. An Introduction to a Special Issue “Conversation Beyond Script”

Jan Černík, Jan Trnka

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):5-10 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1816  

Although the status of screenwriter and screenplay was always uncertain, today‘s precipitous technological and economic changes are affecting its essence - however, history teaches us that no crisis is so deep that it cannot be turned into opportunity. Bunch of detailed analysis forming the core of this special issue of Iluminace can be read as illustration of this overarching simple idea, an invitation to one of the less explored territories and as call for both another adventurous journeys to the roots of screenwriting and erudite reflections of current screenwriting practices made by scholars, screenwriting teachers and authors. In this text,...

Fascinating Rhythm. The Screenwriting of Sound Symphonies for American and European Film of the 1930s

Claus Tieber

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):11-30 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1808  

This paper examines the role of rhythm in screenwriting in the 1930s. By analyzing how the transformation to sound enhanced the musicality of screenplays, the study highlights the emergence of so-called “sound symphonies” and the rhythmic integration of noises in American and German films from that decade. Focusing on the development of this device from the advent of sound until the end of the 1930s, the article reflects how broader shifts in film production shaped screenplay notation practices. The Austrian screenwriter Walter Reisch, who had to migrate to the United States in 1936, serves as a guiding thread throughout this short history...

Copyright, Credits, and Write-for-Hire Creativity. Authorship and Authority in Czech Silent Screenwriting

Martin Kos

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):31-52 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1811  

This article examines the professional status and creative labor of screenwriters in Czech silent cinema, using the 1926 adaptation of Ignát Herrmann’s novel, Father Kondelík and Bridegroom Vejvara, as a case study. Drawing on Jonathan Gray’s and Matt Stahl’s concepts, the research analyzes how work-for-hire practices and copyright defined creative control and artistic recognition, examining authorship and authority within regional “authorial clusters.” The article reveals screenwriters’ working conditions and their innovative contributions to cinematic storytelling and style under the constraints of corporate and...

Talking to You. Addressing the Viewer in Virtual Reality Scripts

Rosamund Davies

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):53-73 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1812  

A recurring feature of virtual reality (VR) narratives, in addition to the ‘spatialized storytelling’ approach that has been extensively discussed in recent screenwriting literature, is the less examined but frequent use of both fictionalized address of a textual narratee/character and direct address of the viewer. This article investigates the different ways in which such forms of address might be used to script aspects of VR experience such as presence, emotional engagement and empathy. It focuses, in particular, on the ways in which they might serve to highlight and creatively exploit the tension between immersion and self-consciousness...

Subjective Access and Focalization in VR

Cecilie Levy

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):75-94 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1813  

This paper examines the challenges of conveying a character’s inner world in virtual reality (VR) experiences, using the production of Finding Frida as a case study. It explores how a “constructive dialogue” with film theory, specifically narratology and cognitive approaches, can inform VR storytelling practices. The discussion originates from a practical problem encountered during the making of Finding Frida: how to lip-sync the virtual character. What began as a technical issue led to deeper dramaturgical questions about perspective, subjective access, and the role of the spectator in VR. Drawing on the work of Murray Smith, Peter...

Storytelling Beyond Dialogue and Preschool Animation. Rethinking Audiovisual Narrative in the TV Series The Sound Collector

Maria Chiara Oltolini

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):95-113 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1814  

Sound plays an important role in filmmaking, enhancing the narrative power of the image and engaging audiences in various ways. Significantly, when we say we watch a film, we are truly “audioviewing” it — a key point concerning the nature of audiovisual storytelling. In animation, sound representation used to receive limited attention. This perspective, however, is shifting, as demonstrated by the growing awareness in film scholarship and how-to manuals regarding sound design. Within this evolving framework, The Sound Collector (2023) stands out as a preschool television series that places sound at the center of its storytelling,...

The Living Script. Proposing an Adaptive Practice in Humaira Bilkis’s Things I Could Never Tell My Mother (2022)

Imran Firdaus

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):115-132 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1815  

This paper examines Bangladeshi filmmaker Humaira Bilkis’s feature film, Things I Could Never Tell My Mother, through genetic criticism and screenwriting theories to propose the concept of the living script: a dynamic narrative framework that evolves in response to real-time discoveries, emotional shifts, and ethical dilemmas. Bilkis’s film exemplifies this process, weaving intergenerational dialogues and confessional sequences to negotiate complex cultural and inter-religious boundaries within Bangladeshi society. By analysing early drafts, directorial notes, and an interview with the filmmaker, the study reveals how Bilkis’s...

The Anti-Star. Věra Hrubá Ralston and Fault Lines of Classic Models of Stardom

Nicholas David Hudac

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):133-152 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1810  

This article focuses on the Czech actress, Věra Hrubá Ralston, who was a champion athlete, a national celebrity in the United States and Czechoslovakia, stared in over 25 films in nearly two decades in Hollywood alongside some of the most well-known actors of her generation, married the head of her movie studio, and still failed to become a Hollywood star. By examining the career of Hrubá Ralston, we gain new insights as to the limits of star-making power in the postwar studio system as well as the tensions between assimilation and stardom.

“You All Have Such a Wholesome Look.” Class and the Gothic Family in Ozark

Veronika Klusáková

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):153-175 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1807  

The paper examines the phenomenon of class in contemporary television broadcasting, which has only recently become of interest for television historians and theorists, as well as for producers and broadcast platforms, and it demonstrates the possibilities of class analysis in the case study of the Netflix series Ozark (Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams, 2017–2022). The introduction to the state of research on class in contemporary cultural studies, demonstrated on the recent works of UK and German scholars (James Bignell, Faye Woods, Sieglinde Lemke and others) is followed by a discussion of several class-based categories that play a major role...

Filmový formát 9,5 mm coby obchodní artikl. Historie firmy Cinéma v kontextu českého amatérského filmu v letech 1932–1952

The 9.5 mm Film Format as a Commercial Product. The History of the Cinéma Company in the Context of Czech Amateur Filmmaking Between 1932 and 1952

Jiří Horníček

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):177-196 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1809  

At the end of 1922, the French company Pathé Cinéma introduced a new system called Pathé-Baby to the film equipment market, specifically designed for the lay public, with the aim of commercially exploiting its potential interest in sharing cinematographic experiences also in the home environment, in the circle of family and friends. The 9.5mm format with typical centrally located perforation enjoyed considerable popularity among amateur and family filmmakers, and in Czechoslovakia it achieved its greatest boom in the 1930s. The text describes the history of this format in the Czechoslovak, especially Prague, user environment, focusing primarily on...

Death as a Theme. An Interview with Cristi Puiu

Lucian Georgescu

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):197-212 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1817  

This is a seven-hour long conversation that explores the theme of death between two colleagues of the same generation. In this personal documentary project, Lucian Georgescu engages directly with Cristi Puiu, “the Bergman of the East,”1) an auteur known for weaving the Grim Reaper as a fundamental, consistent theme throughout his films, including Stuff and Dough (2001), The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (2006), Aurora (2010), Sieranevada (2014), and Malmkrog (2020). The dialogue ventures into the elusive, fragile, and often hidden realms of the auteur’s creative process, striving to grasp the origins of thematic inspiration. Drawing on sources...

From Homo Sovieticus to Many Selves. Unraveling Identities in (Post)-Soviet Cinema

Alena Kolesnikova

Iluminace 2025, 37(2):213-221 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1818  

Book review: Heleen Gerritsen and Irina Schulzki, eds., Decolonising the (Post-)Soviet Screen (Apparatus Press, 2024).