Publication details
MODRÉ STÍNY coby zdrženlivá detektivka : Zdůrazňování, potlačování a tradice kriminální fikce
| Title in English | MODRÉ STÍNY as a Restrained Detective Story : Emphasizing, Repression and Traditions of Crime Fiction |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Iluminace |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | Elektronická verze článku, zveřejněna se svolením časopisu Iluminace |
| Field | Mass media, audiovision |
| Keywords | analysis of television fiction; film history; crime fiction; audiovisual narration; poetics of fiction; Czech cinema; contemporary Czech television; genre |
| Description | The article on the one hand analyses in detail the television series Modré stíny (Blue Shadows), and on the other hand it does so on the background of more general phenomena: A. The television cycle Detectives from the Holy Trinity, of which Blue Shadows is a part, while deviating from some of its norms; B. the narrative and stylistic trends of contemporary Czech and international television crime fiction, with which Blue Shadows surprisingly does not appear to communicate; C. the history of Czech detective films with focus on a specific narrative tradition recognized by this article and labelled restrained detective film, which has developed at least since 1940s. With its narrative solutions, Blue Shadows seem to be an unusually intense variation on the restrained detective fi lm: detectives never get to understand the background of investigated events, the solution cannot be deduced from presented clues, and the aim of narration is, above all, to observe the very ramified structure of fictional macroworld. At the same time, the rarity of the composition of Blue Shadows lies in the gradual shift in emphasis from the investigation (first two episodes) to the private aspects of characters in the team of the superintendent Výrová (second two episodes). I claim that the central principle of narration in Blue Shadows is suppressing the expected and emphasizing the unexpected elements, and it is possible to think similarly about the self-conscious stylistic organization of the series — it expectedly provides spectator with elements necessary to comprehend the story but clearly does not follow the principle of functional equivalence in the set of preferred artistic solutions and emphasizes decorative aspects of stylistic construction, which is revealed especially in the way filmmakers approach to dialogues among characters. |