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This paper analyses the non-cinematic manifestations in Bacalaureat (2016), Cristian Mungiu’s most recent movie, at the narrative and visual levels. The author distinguishes between extra-cinematic, post-cinematic and non-cinematic and uses a couple definitions provided by Jacques Rancière in order to establish how the non- cinematic modes of representation in this movie are part of an aesthetics of the ineffable. The main argument is that Mungiu practices a type of non-cinematic cinema, one that takes place in the intervals between the cinematic sequences and in the silences of the frames. By comparing Bacalaureat (2016) with 4 luni, 3 săptămâni și 2 zile (2007), the other masterpiece of the Romanian director, the paper evaluates these movies by re-using Rancière’s concept of écart, or gap. For the author, the use of the extra-cinematic space and the non-cinematic treatment of scenes are the two main tools used by Mungiu to create a non-cinematic cinema takes place in the intervals, in the in-between-ness of the cinematic sequence, scenes and particular shots. Last but not least, the paper concludes that Bacalaureat is an expression of a “cinema which is not” , a type of movie-making that is not taking place exclusively on the screen of the theater room, nor in the reality of the film itself, but rather in the viewers mind.
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This issue of the Ekphrasis journal addresses the status of attractions in media and visual arts of post-cinematic extraction.
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The paper focuses on the supposed fundamental change in contemporary films. After a short survey of several points of view on the matter I discuss the case of mashup cinema. This genre is based on recycling of cinematic sequences in order to create new narrative and fictional discourses. Contrary to Dada’s rhetoric, mashup cinema is prone to create narratives based on continuity. New semantic constructions are elaborated out of heterogeneous filmic scenes and sequences. Discontinuities, viewed as autonomous sequences, are enjoyed per se. Sequences are further bound by narrative roles, and by abstract and sensorial modifiers such as music, movement, shapes and colors. This characteristic has been, since its birth, an explanatory element of what we call film.Today’s mashup cinema tends to become an audiovisual hieroglyphic language available to viewers and users situated at both ends of the spectrum, i.e. producers and addressees. Faced with this democratization of audiovisual use poststructuralist philosophical approaches have a gist of panic, and today’s films and shorts are considered to be the epiphenomena announcing an apocalypse. Film analysts like David Bordwell, Roger Odin or Laurent Jullier adopt a more sober stance and study the new shifts in emphasis and the innovative use of new constructional schemas in a manner closer to the filmic text. Cinematic discourse, through the use of prefabricated chunks, cinematic topoi, is evolving towards a language which resembles the medieval literature and carnival where a common cultural thesaurus was available to users in order to create new conceptualizations and reality conceptions.
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The present paper aims to introduce the work of both Polish and Russian sections of the Department of Slavonic Studies (University of Ostrava). Attention is devoted to joint grant projects in which the members of both sections (including students) have actively participated and continue to participate. The output of the completed project (2014–2015), a collective monograph entitled "Contemporary Russian and Polish Sung Poetry I" will be presented, as will the ongoing two-year project (2015–2017) "Russian and Polish Literary Essays at the Turn of 19th and 20th Centuries in a Comparative Concept".
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The essay is dedicated to the Pieta of Všeměřice, important sculpture of high quality from the beginnings of the Late Gothic art in the Czech lands. On the basis of the formal analysis of the works of Master of Týn Calvary, of the summary of research in art history of his work and investigation of a few preserved archival primary sources to this theme the author draws a new conclusion that the Pieta of Všeměřice was created in the 1420. The essay argues for the thesis that the author of the Pieta was either Master of Týn Calvary himself in the late stage of his creation or some of his excellent collaborators.
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The Sunday Christ, or the “Saint Sunday” as the medieval texts call this depiction, is surviving as a wall painting in about ninety European parish churches until today, with oldest examples from round 1350. The image was banned by both: the Reformation and the Catholic Church in the 16th century. The image was researched in several studies since the beginning of the 20th century. The aim of this article is to approach these images in relationship to the general features of the Eucharistic devotion showing its function as a Mahnbild, Andachtsbild and as an epitaph. The relationship to medieval texts of the Sunday letter, Visio Pauli and the mystical visions of Archbishop John of Jenstein seems to vary with time and place. With help of various motives and the social context, I try to argue these images had a certain revolutionary potential, relating workers directly to Christ himself. Finally, I focus on the end of this particular medieval devotional image in the sixteenth century, mentioning the art related to criticism of this image. I argue that two famous works of the Flemish painting are related to the topic of the Sunday Christ: the work of the “Proverbs” by Pieter Bruegel and the Haywain triptych by Hieronymus Bosch.
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Illustrated magazines are specific phenomenon in the 19th century culture. Especially between the 1860s and 1890s they published an enormous number of pictorial materials of diverse content and quality. The text deals with Czech artists whose work significantly influenced the visual aspect as well as the content of the magazines. Some of the names mentioned are František Bohumír Zvěřina, Adolf Liebscher or Luděk Marold. The final part of the text is devoted to the relation of image and text that created very complex interrelations within the magazine structure.
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This text focuses on the role of the brushstroke in Vincent van Gogh’s work. Van Gogh’s brushstroke technique draws on the tradition of European painting, spanning from Titian to Delacroix and the Impressionists, a tradition in which brushstroke played an important role. Van Gogh, however, was the first to make it an autonomous element in his paintings. European Post-Renaissance painting features tendencies which favored either colors or lines, with the contradiction between these two trends being essential for defining different principles in painting, and naturally in the brushstroke as well. Van Gogh’s prominent brushstroke represents a deliberate synthesis of the line and the color, thus bringing the line-color controversy to an end. Van Gogh’s brushstroke, however, also has its semiotic meaning. Constituting an artistic formula, an individual stroke can represent different objects, which makes it not only a medium, but also a sign. Van Gogh arranges brushstrokes to create an open system, which is capable of the unique rendition of the notion of time, or a moment in time through a semiotic syntax of strokes. This text presents an analysis of van Gogh’s individual works of art as well as his texts.
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This work deals with a physical body imprint in Art of sixties and seventies, analysing – in a form of comparative and case studies – selected works of the Czech sculptor Eva Kmentová (1928–1980). The issue of body imprint is gripped in a broader theoretical context and is based on decisive foreign works of George Didi-Huberman and of Rosalind Krauss with Yve-Alain Bois. The aim of the thesis is to show another possible perspective of Kmentová’s work in the much broader international perspective.
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This paper deals with the topic of artist’s archive with an emphasis on Julius Koller’s archive. It concerns with the broader discursive frames of archives understanding and its specific framework within the art production. It reveals Koller’s archive practices as a whole with his conceptual work included, as well as they are put in the context of selfhistoricizing practices, that are typical for the former Eastern Bloc situation. It illustrates similar strategies in the work of the IRWIN group, Museum of American Art in Berlin, Lia Perjovschi, J. H. Kocman, KwieKulik, Artpool Art Research Center, Tamás St. Auby and Ilja Kabakov. Their artistic practice constists of selfdocumentation and self-administration that serves to draft some kind of the para-institution due to lack of independent platforms for presenting visual art not necessarily bound to official doctrine of social realism. This activity turns out to possess substantial power to become effective subversive tacticts within the existing system. In the last part, the anthropological matter of the archive as a mind-map is discussed in a new relation to memory, from the photomontage, through The Mnemosyne Atlas and an imaginary museum of Aby Warburg to the Gerhard Richter’s Atlas. It provides another possibility how to grasp the phenomenom of art archive in the framework of visuality of modernity.
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Article examines the group of statues in the park in Lysá nad Labem, that was commissioned by the Count František Antonín Špork and which usually been associated with the famous Baroque sculptor Matyáš Bernard Braun. This article shows the possibilities of using historical survey methods in the analysis and interpretation of the sculptures. The main sources of new information about statues in th park in Lysá nad Labem are their pedestals, where we find the interesting clues revealing the history of the group and its main ideological program. The comparison of this group of the statues with the selected famous works of European Baroque sculpture demonstrated that its author, sculptor Johann Lang-Dlouhý, was very well focused on current trends, and that his works was not dependent only on production Prague sculpture studios.
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This text focuses on Joris-Karl Huysmans as an art critic and on his influence on the Czech environment. As during his lifetime, Huysmans’s critical work as well as his personal life underwent significant transformations, his work found favorable response among several different opinion groups, which engaged in controversies with one another.The circle associated with the Moderní revue (Modern Review) magazine presented Huysmans as a decadent and focused on his texts such as A rebours (1884). Of the Moderní revue circle, particularly Antonín Procházka’s and Karel Hlaváček’s texts featured inspiration by Huysmans. The Volné směry (Free Styles) magazine, on the other hand, perceived Huysmans as a naturalist and a defender of impressionism. Huysmans influenced particularly Miloš Jiránek and František Xaver Šalda; the latter wrote an extensive obituary of Huysmans. Huysmans was further mentioned in Rozhledy (Horizons), a periodical which voiced opinions which were less limited in breadth, and his conversion made him an attractive figure also for the Catholic Nový život (New Life) magazine, which however did not focus on his critical thought on art.Generally speaking, Huysmans’s reviews were widely read in the Czech Lands, although their selection was limited. Czech art periodicals found his reviews interesting for his daring style and a broad range of themes, which also included little-known artists, caricatures and posters.
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Older interpretations of Egon Schiele’s self-portraits are based primarily on psychoanalysis, seeking the source of inspiration of his artistic expression in the artist’s spirit and mind. Later views associate the artistic style employed by Schiele and other Vienna-based expressionists with the development of psychiatry and hysteria, a diagnosis discovered by Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893). The extensively published research on hysteria, and later also of other neuropathological disorders, affected the scientific as well as the social environment. Photographs which feature Charcot’s construct of hysteria as well as photographs of patients suffering from other neuropathological disorders spread from the Salpetriere Hospital in France to Vienna thanks to periodicals. The photographs that illustrate hysteria typically feature multiple pictures of female patients in extreme tonic spasms during a bout of hysteria. The extreme nature of the photographs and often also their erotic overtones ensured their wide-spread publicity.These photographs helped disseminate the image of “a pathological body” among the broader public, with the “language” of this body subsequently appearing in fine arts as well as in the theater. Artists often cooperated with clinics and mental institutions, be it to paint portraits of the patients or to decorate the institutions’ interiors. This allowed them to stay in touch with new research and its documentation. Egon Schiele maintained contact with these artists as well as with doctors, which afforded him access to the publications which documented the patients.Society gazed at photographs of exalted women (hysteria) and deformed male bodies (neuropathology) with voyeuristic interest. The language of the “pathological body” was supposedly comprehensible in general and the “pathological body” was perceived as a symptom of the times. Egon Schiele employed the extreme expression of the deformed bodies in his self-portraits as well as in the portraits of his benefactors and collectors. The quick succession of Schiele’s self-portraits can be seen as an obsession to extensively document bodies of people with neuropathological disorders to map out and characterize the disease. At the same time, Egon Schiele was evidently attempting to fully encompass himself.
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The text examines the works of the representatives of the institutional critique, in particular the works of Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers, Michael Asher and Daniel Buren. It starts with the discussion on the institutional definitions of art and continues with the analysis of the concrete events. The situation in West in 60s and 70s is compared to the institutional conditions of the Czechoslovakian art scene in 70s and 80s. In the end the text demonstrates the idea of considering the notion of institutional critique from a broader point of view that challenges the prevailing narrative of the Western art history.
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