FAVz063 Screen Industries in East-Central Europe

Faculty of Arts
Autumn 2016
Extent and Intensity
2/0/0. 5 credit(s). Type of Completion: zk (examination).
Teacher(s)
Mgr. Radomír D. Kokeš, Ph.D. (lecturer)
Mgr. Šárka Jelínek Gmiterková, Ph.D. (assistant)
Mgr. Kateřina Šardická (assistant)
Guaranteed by
prof. PhDr. Jiří Voráč, Ph.D.
Department of Film Studies and Audiovisual Culture – Faculty of Arts
Supplier department: Department of Film Studies and Audiovisual Culture – Faculty of Arts
Course Enrolment Limitations
The course is also offered to the students of the fields other than those the course is directly associated with.
fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with
there are 10 fields of study the course is directly associated with, display
Course objectives
The Sixth Annual Screen Industries in East-Central Europe Conference (SIECE) shifts attention from structural transformations to the longer-term continuities shaping post-socialist media in the last 26 years. Instead of isolated changes, it focuses on slower historical time, evolving beneath the visible surface of “big” historical events. The topic of the “Long 1990s” (usually defined by historians as the period between November 1989 and September 11, 2001) aims at both historicizing the turbulent decade and at identifying ways it is still shaping current industry practices, although often in an unacknowledged or hidden way. The decade’s improvisational, informal, anachronistic, do-it-yourself, and ad-hoc practices that emerged from the ruins of state-owned media institutions gradually solidified into a system of values and norms which we are still witnessing today.
Syllabus
  • Topics for papers and panels (3-5 November 2016) include:
  • - Geo-politics and historicity of the 1990s: The end of grand polar narratives; Europeanization and provincialization of the post-socialist screen industries
  • - The Long 1980s: Persistence of state-socialist practices; survival of underground and/or alternative cultural and aesthetic patterns and communities
  • - Culture as pure business, and its adversaries: Negotiations between show business and so-called „anti-commercialism“; the ways Václav Klaus and other ideologues of the free market influenced approaches to audiovisual culture policies of the respective national states; the cultural field struggling to resist “commercialism” while often trapping itself in anachronistic cultural ghettos
  • - Centers and peripheries: Reshuffling of high and low, official and suppressed, or dominant and alternative cultural forms, while cementing new, often analogical hierarchies and stereotypes
  • - The “corrupted” artist: Practices of negotiating and adapting to the new heteronomous power; tactics of defending or re-gaining symbolic capital endangered by the change of the political regime
  • - Post-socialist popular film and television: The re-emergence of commercial genres, stars, and fans
  • - “Exploitation” as a metaphor of the 1990s: The rise of “crude commercialism,” partisan financing practices, and pornography
  • - Cultural intermediaries: The re-emergence of producers, managers, marketers, publishers and other cultural brokers, and the ways their (often non-standard) practices have conditioned cultural markets
  • - “Old new” media: The “newness” of 1990s media as a phenomenon of the history of material culture; the hype of video rentals; pirated video/CD distribution; video games; media art
  • - Post-socialist politics of taste: Persisting taste patterns from the past underpinning the craze for Western entertainment
  • - Apolitical media: The erosion of collective action, the reticence of public discussion, and the ideological conformity of screen media’s professional community as a heritage of the 1990s
  • - The 1990s as an epistemological framework: how has the decade been shaping the reflexivity of screen industries and the methods of studying them
  • The conference will be preceded by the Czech Society for Film Studies’ pre-conference meeting, which will be held on 3 November and conducted in Czech. This pre-conference will consist of four workshops, which will be devoted to ongoing research projects.
Teaching methods
Lectures of multiple visiting lecturers in English (plus a pre-conference session on distribution in Czech).
Assessment methods
Written conference report (short summaries of at least 60 % of papers).
Language of instruction
English
Further comments (probably available only in Czech)
Study Materials
The course is taught: in blocks.
  • Enrolment Statistics (recent)
  • Permalink: https://is.muni.cz/course/phil/autumn2016/FAVz063