The Art of the Impossible. Karel Zeman's Combined Feature Films and the Genre Practice of Nationalized Cinema
Abstract
The study seeks to blend two levels. On the one hand, it examines the assumptions of the possible appearance of the science fiction genre in Czechoslovak nationalized cinema, especially in the second half of the 1940s and during the 1950s.
I proceed from the thesis that the fundamental and period-recognized aspects of the observed genre had a very ambivalent position from the cultural-political and technical-economic point of view. Although in some ways they accommodated the period's preferred accents, the demands and stratified expectations were often mutually exclusive, which permanently blocked possibilities, generated undeveloped alternatives and blind development branches.
The second level is represented by the personality of the director Karel Zeman, who was able to assert a specific and supposedly blind branch of development on many levels, consistently develop it and later offer it to a wider international debate. The study approximates how Zeman dealt with the conventions of the science fiction genre; respectively, how he adapted them to domestic traditions or concurrently enforced standards.
In addition, he asks how these creative transformations were reflected by various actors who had an influence on the application of individual genre designations. The wider events are followed with special attention to the film Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955), during the making of which one of the central phases of the debates surrounding popular genres culminated.
Its result had an impact (not only) on Zeman's future work.