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December 1st, 2008

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Lost essays shed fresh light on film

Young editor and new book may well shake up film studies

By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 27th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO

Petr Szczepanik has co-edited a new book presenting rarely seen essays on early 20th-century film written by Czech artists and intellectuals.

The Szczepanik File

Born: 1974, Prague
Education: Masaryk University, Brno; Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany
Book: Cinema All the Time to be published by the National Film Archive next month in both Czech and English. A two-volume edition has already been published in Polish, though this also includes contemporary essays.
Future project: Czech media culture in the 1930s

“I’m not a typical film buff,” Petr Szczepanik tells me. “I don’t have an extensive DVD collection at home, I don’t watch every new film that comes out, I don’t attend many film festivals and I don’t write reviews.” Yet the young film scholar, along with the New York-based Czech art critic Jaroslav Anděl, may be on the verge of helping rewrite the history of film theory.

That history has long been founded on a handful of early 20th-century writers that were working in France, Germany and Russia: Henri Bergson, Germaine Dulac, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Siegfried Kracauer, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Béla Balázs (the last a Hungarian writing in German).

In their soon-to-be-released book, Cinema All the Time: An Anthology of Czech Film Theory and Criticism, 1908-1939 (to be published simultaneously in Czech and English), co-editors Szczepanik and Anděl will present all-but-lost texts of Czech artists and intellectuals responding to cinema. It’s a surprisingly rich cache, of a caliber rivaling any essays and theories that were being produced elsewhere in Europe contemporaneously. Frequently, the Czechs were there first, though a combination of political turmoil and language barriers kept their work from being widely disseminated.

“Many prominent film historians are enthusiastic about the collection,” Szczepanik says, and the book’s galleys have certainly elicited unqualified praise, with University of Chicago’s Tom Gunning calling it “a major addition to the field of media study,” and Thomas Elsaesser of the University of Amsterdam claiming that the anthology “extends our ability to rethink the cinema creatively in the decades to come.” Though pleased, Szczepanik doesn’t sound too surprised by the reaction. “Karel Čapek was discussing the psychological powers of film editing in 1913, long before Eisenstein was in Russia, while Jan Mukařovský was proposing a structuralist method of film analysis in 1931!”

Born in Prague in 1974 to a Czech mother and Polish father, Szczepanik spent his childhood moving between Poland and Czechoslovakia. He began his university studies in 1993 in Olomouc, transferring the next year to Masaryk University in Brno, where he now teaches. “I decided to study cinema, as it promised to connect several things I was interested in — literature and philosophy,” Szczepanik remembers. “I started a program that comprised literature, theater and film studies, but soon realized that the first two disciplines were too traditional for me, too heavily dependent on ‘high culture,’ whereas cinema allowed me to explore everyday culture. Apart from that, film theory was an exciting field in the ’90s. It was a real intellectual adventure.”

Szczepanik completed his post-doctoral work in media history at Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, returning afterward to Masaryk University to teach. In 2002, he was hired by the National Film Archive in Prague to edit its film studies journal, Iluminace, the country’s only scholarly periodical on film. Szczepanik came to the journal at a good time, as scholarly focus was moving away from pure theory toward historiography, that is to say the study of historical knowledge. “Historiography is where the most interesting research is being done internationally,” Szczepanik explains. “Instead of picking up attractive topics among fashionable film styles, I decided to focus on primary research, which logically means concentrating on the history of Czech cinema, and that’s what can be done here on the highest level.”

This focus would dovetail nicely with the editing of Cinema All the Time. “He is an extremely active, thorough and supportive scholar to work with,” Prague-based film scholar Kevin B. Johnson told me. As one of the translators for the anthology, Johnson worked closely with Szczepanik over the past two years. “It was a tremendous pleasure to work on the anthology, and I am grateful that Petr chose me for this project.” As for Szczepanik, the project seemed to choose him.

The beginnings

At a Goethe Institute conference in 2001 presciently titled “Excavating the Future,” Szczepanik was given a gentle push toward his own future. “The conference was not a big event,” he says, “but for me it meant a lot.” There he met his future collaborator, Jaroslav Anděl. “At the conference, Jaroslav told me about his old, unrealized project of creating an anthology of Czech film theory and avant-garde manifestos from 1907 to 1938, which he had prepared at the end of the ’70s, but was never able to finish.” A year later, Szczepanik’s Polish film mentor, Andrzej Gwóźdź, approached him about creating an anthology of Czech film theory in Polish. “I immediately recalled my conversation with Jaroslav,” says Szczepanik, “and asked him to cooperate.”

After Anděl gave him his material, along with an introductory essay on the texts, Szczepanik began reworking the material for the forthcoming anthology in 2003. “If I’d known how much work it was going to be, I might have given up at the beginning,” Szczepanik claims. But the young scholar immediately saw the astonishing originality of the work. “No film scholars from abroad could imagine how advanced the ideas about cinema as an art, a medium and a cultural form were during the interwar years in a small Central European country.”

What’s striking about the essays and manifestos gathered for Cinema All the Time is that most of them came from well-known, popular Czech cultural figures, rather than academics. These were ideas hammered out over pivo at the local hospoda, rather than high table musings. Along with that Renaissance pair the Čapek brothers, there are pieces by composer/theater impresario E.F. Burian, playwright František Langer, writer Vladislav Vančura, actor Jiří Voskovec and poet Vítězslav Nezval, most of whom would eventually become affiliated with the commercial Czech cinema cranked out at Barrandov. Their writings are joined by essays from the artist/philosopher Karel Teige (who is finally gaining notice in the United States and the United Kingdom) and filmmaker Alexander Hackenschmied, who, after arriving in America and changing his last name to Hammid, is probably the best known contributor internationally (except for Karel Čapek) due to his own work with the experimental American filmmaker Maya Deren. The pair collaborated together on what is arguably the most famous American avant-garde film, 1943’s Meshes of the Afternoon, and Hackenschmied actually coined the term “independent film.”

Film as art

“Film was analyzed by poets, linguists, theater directors, architects and musicians not as an isolated phenomenon, but as a new medium that posed new challenges to their own work,” Szczepanik explains. He is, perhaps, the most passionate about the writers he discovered during the process of constructing the anthology. “When you read the piece ‘Kinema’ by the theater critic Václav Tille from 1908, it’s clear that he was far ahead of even his French and German counterparts,” Szczepanik states. “At that time there was no permanent film production here, and only several cinemas in Prague, and yet he was able to describe cultural-historical, aesthetic, social and anthropological dimensions of cinema in an unbelievably complex form. I think Tille should really be studied, along with Langer and Čapek. Their work on film is unquestionably of the highest level for its time.”

As important as Cinema All the Time will undoubtedly be for non-Czech students of film, the anthology will also do much to firmly establish these texts for Czech scholars. “As a body of work they are not very well known to Czech scholars,” Szczepanik says. “Some of the pieces are virtually unknown. One by Hackenschmied has actually been translated from English into Czech, while another from film critic Lubomír Linhart was translated from a German film journal. The essays by sociologists Jiří Kolaja and Přemysl Maydl were totally forgotten.”

Szczepanik’s devotion to this long-buried treasure is understandable from an aesthetic point. This very same film scholar, who turned away from literature and theater’s preoccupation with high art, undoubtedly found himself among kindred spirits with the Devětsil intellectuals of Prague, who made Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin honorary members of the group. “Of course, there was no film studies or academic discipline at that time,” Szczepanik states. “But, on the other hand, there was much more interest in film across all of the arts and humanities than today.” Like its young co-editor, Cinema All the Time manages to bridge modern lecture hall lessons with historic beer hall arguments, all to the benefit of film.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com

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