Radomír D. Kokeš

The Role of the Multiple Plot Structure in the History of (Czech) Silent and Early Sound Popular Cinema?

Masaryk University, Czech Republic

My paper aims to explore the origins of the feature-film narrative tradition in Czech cinema. However, it also raises a broader question: Isn’t it proper to assume that multiple, relatively episodic film plot patterns with multiple protagonists were not so exceptional in the field of popular cinema before the second half of the twentieth century, as is usually supposed? I intend to open the way to this question through the problem of preferred models of plot development in feature films in Czech cinema from 1925 through 1931, as they can be identified through my formal analysis of all preserved Czech works of the era. Indeed, I can already say that after 1925, it is precisely the tension between two frontier narrative models that can be identified, the second of which is certainly not a mere alternative to the prevailing first: the unified narrative and the multiplied narrative (as I call it). Although, of course, it will not be possible to answer the following questions during the presentation of the paper, they will be in the background of my argument: How can the manifestations of this tension be described as a range of narrative alternatives, what plot patterns can we talk about, what more specific narrative techniques are associated with them, how can they be explained in light of specific historical conditions?

Radomír D. Kokeš is an assistant professor in the Department of Film Studies and Audiovisual Culture at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. Primarily, he examines the narrative and stylistic poetics of Czech cinema through 1933, the spiral narrative as an innovative schema of audiovisual storytelling, and features of seriality in fictional worlds. In his Czech-written book Světy na pokračování (2016), he proposed an original theoretical and analytical concept of audiovisual fictional seriality and serial worldbuilding. His latest research output, “The Poetics of a Regional Cinema: Czech Films of the 1920s and Early 1930s,” is a chapter in the book The Barrandov Studios (ed. Bernd Herzogenrath), published by Amsterdam University Press in 2023.