Beyond New Wave Episodicity: Testing Plotting and Attention in Forman’s Czech Films
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| Year of publication | 2026 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In discussions of Miloš Forman’s Czech films, the default frame is “New Wave” episodicity: everyday life, a chaining of situations, and a weakened dramatic architecture. In my paper, I want to treat (and test) this impression as a research problem: how are these films built as feature-length constructions, how do they guide attention, and to what extent (and in what ways) do they work with character goals and with attention foci? As a working hypothesis (not a conclusion), I suggest that rather than - or alongside - New Wave modernism, these films may in some respects activate longer-standing, conventional principles of Czech popular cinema. Analytically, I will concentrate on Black Peter as a case study, using Loves of a Blonde and The Firemen’s Ball as an analytical backdrop. I will track: (1) the management of attention foci (chaining, alternation, multiplication), (2) the presence and character of goals (when they move to the foreground, when they serve merely instrumental functions, when they operate as a deliberately misleading principle), and (3) specific modes of causality: how conflicts are established, how long motifs remain “sustainable” within the plot, and what kinds of payoffs (if any) close them. The aim is to offer a compact analytic test: to what extent Forman’s Czech films modernistically weaken popular plot norms, and to what extent they instead reconfigure them into an alternative (yet functionally stable) set of narrative forms and conventions, and what this may imply for situating these films between modernist and popular storytelling traditions. |