The Czechoslovak New Wave Reconsidered Through the Sources of Those Who Created It

5th session of CEFRES in-house seminar
Through the presentation of works in progress, CEFRES’s Seminar aims at raising and discussing issues about methods, approaches or concepts, in a multidisciplinary spirit, allowing everyone to confront her or his own perspectives with the research presented.

Location: CEFRES Library and online (to get the link, write to cefres[@]cefres.cz)
Date: Tuesday, February 17, 2026 at 16:30
Language: English

Speaker: Garance FROMONT (CEFRES / Université Paris Cité)
Discussant: Petr SZCZEPANIK (Department of Film Studies, FF UK)

Abstract

Since the historic turning point of ‘New Cinema History’ in the mid-1980s, the value of using archival documents to write film history has been undeniable. Screenplays, script documents, and shooting diaries are all used to understand and analyse the creation of a film, the career path of a director or technician, or the economic context of a film production. However, the scope of these documents remains underestimated for the study of broader subjects, such as aesthetic movements or national film industries. The thesis presented at this conference, entitled “Too loud a freedom: emergence of a Cinematographic New Wave in communist Czechoslovakia (1956-1968)” proposes to trace the economic, political, aesthetic, and cultural conditions of the emergence of an artistic movement that revolutionised the codes and practices of a film industry controlled since 1948.

To do this, it relies on archival documents, both institutional—those produced within the Ministry of Culture, the Czechoslovak State Film Office, or the Barrandov Studio – and personal – diaries, such as that of screenwriter and director Pavel Juráček, or private correspondence found in the holdings of the Czech National Film Archive, which are all sources through which to penetrate the intimacy of a production context, in an attempt to move beyond the myths surrounding it. Thus, our purpose is to trace the historical movements which leads to this New Wave and finally to question, with what we found in the archives, the regime of historicity of this artistic movement by rethinking and problematising its periodisation.

Please find the complete program of 2025–2026 seminar here.