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The study deals with the relations between literature and film industry from the 1910s to 1945. It draws attention to the publication of screenwriting manuals in the 1910s and 1920s aimed at the lay user with no literary experience. It then pays great attention to the organisation of theme competitions and other similar events, organised in the early 1920s first by production companies, but in later years exclusively by industry associations of film producers. During the period of German occupation under the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the Czech-Moravian Film Headquarters organised these competitions as an umbrella organisation of the self-government with a privileged position. The theme competitions were characterised by a very high participation of authors (1,040 themes in the 1941-1942 competition), and in each of them, among the prize-winning works, there were themes that were made into films. Through these competitons, the film producers tried to attract established writers to collaborate with the film, to raise the level of screenwriting and thus to stabilize the literary background of the domestic film industry. The study is linked to an edition of archival documents that provide insight into the operation of the dramaturgy department of Lucernafilm, one of the two most important film companies of the Protectorate period, and a closer look at the 1944 action of Czech writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is focused on unrealized screenplays written by the director Karel Vachek. It deals with nine extant texts of the screenplays: Hero Bohemia, Who Will Watch the Watchman?, Flying Unidentifiable Czech Objects, Czech Regurgitation and Romany, written in the 1960s, Bohemia Docta, written in the second half of the 1970s, What to Do? and Via Lucis, written in exile in the early 1980s, and the Members of the Revival movement and the Revival Movers and Communisum, written after the year 2000. The scripts are briefly introduced and the gradual transformation of their function is described in the article. Since the 1970s, Vachek had not emphasized the utilitarian function of screenplays, i. e. a direct description of images to be filmed. Instead, he was creating, as he himself called it, rather "over-texts", oft en composed of excerpts that served him as a space for reflection and thinking about selected topics. The main part of the study is focused on the significant formal uniqueness of Vachek's scripts: the interweaving of elements typical for fiction and non-fiction cinema. The methods of this symbiosis are explored, which allows to broaden research of Vachek's authorial poetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a view of the genre phenomena from an atypical perspective: It attempts to capture and functionally explain the production cycles in their unrealized form. The paper follows a thematically coherent group of films during a specific limited period, which were considered but not finally produced and to which certain material traces have been preserved. The existence and analytical extraction of these existing traces -- made on the example of the stimuli of genetic criticism -- will make it possible to look into the history in its unseen and discontinuous form. The idea laid out at the beginning of the study is that the fact that something did not happen in the end -- it was either inactive, forbidden or it hit a "dead end" -- also says a lot and provides invaluable information about the ultimately active, permissible and dominant. The study tests this hypothesis on a specific production system of the Czechoslovak nationalized cinema, specifically in the first half of the 1950s. The so-called state-socialist mode of production posed significant obstacles to the development of production cycles during this period, but it also encouraged internal work on unrealized production cycles. The case study of the unrealized production cycle of the second center will then present a coherent group of existing screenwriting formats. However, not a single film from this group was created in the end, even though the materials about the so-called second center were then officially preferred. The fact that these films were not realized can be explained precisely by a careful intersection of the theory of production cycles, the history of production culture (state-socialist mode of production) and genetic criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The article is focused on the issue of the screenplay, until recently completely neglected despite its key role for filmmakers, historical research and its irreplaceable position in the collections of memory institutions. The aim is to clarify on a theoretical level the paradoxical and ambiguous nature of the screenplay and to reflect our own approach to this entity on the level of classification and cataloging procedures, as applied in the Library of Národní filmový archiv, Prague. Design/Methodology/Approach - The New Film History implicitly serves as a foundational and overarching paradigm. Following its example, emphasis is placed on the analysis of a wide range of primary sources. Theories, concepts and methodologies from related fields, such as literary science or librarianship, are also taken into account. In an effort to cover the topic in a more comprehensive way, the methods of qualitative and quantitative research (for example: textual, discursive, statistical analyzes) are used in partial respects. Results - The main, contradictory theoretical concepts of the screenplay as "work" and "text" are presented, a perspective reconciling these approaches is proposed, and with regard to the changes in the formal aspects of the screenplays the direction for rethinking the question of the screenplay as a generic and conceptual problem is indicated. Finally, a collection of the Library's screenplays and classification cataloging procedures are presented, and the possibilities of their further development and the shortcomings of the methods and tools used are critically evaluated. Originality/Value - The topic is opened with regard to the number of approaches to the phenomena of a screenplay across disciplines, as well as to the insufficient research of the problem outside the field of film studies and screenwriting studies and also as to the absence of classification cataloging standards for screenplays. Be it the shared practical know-how or the conclusions of the analysis, such as the proposed flexible and prospectively sustainable approach to screenplay, these represent the sum of potentially transferable knowledge usable by other disciplines and institutions for the screenplays and similar ephemeral entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is focused on the multimedia phenomenon called Laterna magika, or more precisely on its screenplays seen as an alternative to mainstream film screenwriting and traditional play writing. I try to fill one of the blind spots in the history of Czech screenwriting by seeking for answers to very basic questions regarding the form of scripts and nature of their development. I argue that there were two basic models of text and writing: a) a convergent model of text and writing: demonstrated by examples of two main types of formats distinctively determined by theater and film conventions, so called literary-dramatic and technical-directorial formats, which at the same time stands for traditional verbal, linguistic kind of text and writing process; b) an iterative model of text and writing: represented by many examples of different, less conventional or completely unconventional formats and forms of expression of ideas about the future work, based on the crucial assumption made by Steven Maras (and many other leading scholars in screenwriting studies) that it is possible to link process of writing to other media, not just the page, and write by other means than words. Finally I suggest that the process of screenplay development should be understood as development of the complex software which was characterized by a combination of linear-sequential and dispersiveprototype approach, in which creative re/conceptualization of the future multimedia work fluidly continued during its execution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of the article is the development of so-called technical screenplays in Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1954. Using statistical analyses of technical screenplays, we have been able to investigate the development of this type of document. USSR production norms were imported to Czechoslovakia after 1946. his fact affected, amongst other things, the practice of technical screenplays. Technical screenplays in this era became more closed of to dramaturgical modifications and also the form of technical screenplays changed. Although technical screenplays in Czechoslovakia were under the influence of USSR norms, they nevertheless preserved elements derived from the tradition of Czechoslovak screenwriting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]