Martin Kos

Copyright, Credits, and Conditions of Writing: Mediating Authorship from Screenwriters’ Perspective in the Czech Silent Cinema

Masaryk University, Czech Republic

This paper deals with the issue of exercising and claiming authorship by Czech screenwriters
vis-à-vis the industrial structure and production practices as well as the process of establishing creative standards in the 1920s. It focuses on the nature of relationship between the pioneering generation of professional screenwriters who worked almost solely as freelancers, and local film companies. Despite the growing interest in the Czech silent cinema and domestic screenwriting practice, the question of authorship has drawn a minor scholarly attention within the research of individual screenwriting careers and personal poetics. Drawing on the concepts of Jonathan Gray and Matt Stahl, the paper, thus, examines the screenwriters’ position in thecontemporary film production environment, their forms of employment and contracts, and the role of their public image. Based on the records of personal testimony, contemporary film trade press, and historical
evidence, the paper addresses various problems faced by the screenwriters in the silent era, with regard to performing their creative power. Special attention is paid to the topic of film adaptations of popular local novels. Relating to the issue of acquiring rights, the paper shows how adapting books for the screen limited screenwriters’ artistic choices and complicated their working conditions. Moreover, it argues that this process also frequently resulted in diminishing the credit assigned to the particular screenwriter in favour of promoting the author of the original story. In so doing, it deepens our understanding of the Czech silent cinema ecosystem, explains the patterns of creative and legal practice, outlines the forms of local industrial dialogues, and uncovers crucial aspects of being a professional screenwriter in the regional film industry.

Martin Kos is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Film Studies and Audiovisual Culture at the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. His main research interests concern silent era in the Czech cinema, analysis of narrative techniques and film authorship. Currently, he focuses on the development and screenwriting process of the Czech silent epic drama St. Wenceslas from 1926 to 1929 for his Ph.D. thesis. In 2015, he contributed to the collection of essays on Jiří Trnka’s Old Czech Legends and cooperated three years later with the National Film Archive in Prague on the special DVD edition of Jan Stanislav Kolár’s films. He frequently publishes his research outcomes in the Czech peer-reviewed film studies journal Iluminace, and his articles on the Czech screenwriting practice in the silent era were published in the special issues of Journal of Screenwriting and Studies in Eastern European Cinema.