Wie viele Schritte bis zur Drehfassung? Eine Politische Historiographie des Drehbuchs
| Title in English | How Many Steps to the Shooting Script? A Political History of Screenplay |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Montage/AV |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Art, architecture, cultural heritage |
| Keywords | screenwriting; Stalinism; State-socialist Mode of Film Production; Film Studios Barrandov |
| Description | In this article, I will outline the place of screenwriter and screenplay in the political history of the Czechoslovak production system between 1945 and 1990 - to make a case for more politically and historically specific production studies. To acknowledge different political dimensions of screenwriting, I will differentiate between top-down political initiatives that attempted to ideologically reform cinema via controlling screenplay, and micro-political behavior of communities of practice that were largely resistant to those initiatives, and I will focus on sites of intersection of the two. By micro-politics of production communities, I am referring to power relations on the level of basic creative groups - in this case, to power struggles between literary writers, directors, screenwriters, and "dramaturgs". Their everyday conflicts, fluctuating careers and shifting positions in professional hierarchy were interrelated, but also significantly differed from the macro-political struggles on national and international level. In the following text, I will first discuss theoretical concepts explaining screenplay as a convention and screenwriting as a collective practice. I will then contextualize the changing position occupied by screenplay and the screenwriter in the "state-socialist mode of production". Finally, more detailed analyses of development formats, and specifically of so-called "literary screenplay", will allow demonstrating political significance of screenwriting. The aim of the analysis is to show how the case of the small-nation cinema’s political history might serve to make production studies more attentive to embeddedness of production systems and practices. |
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