Avantgardní poetika Vítězslava Nezvala dvacátých let pod vlivem filmových vyjadřovacích prostředků
The avant-garde poetics of Vítězslav Nezval in the 1920s under the influence of cinematic expressive techniques

Summary/Abstract: Among Czechoslovak writers and artists, Vítězslav Nezval was—especially during the 1920s—one of the most prominent advocates of cinema as the most modern artistic discipline, alongside figures such as Karel Teige and Vladislav Vančura. Nezval’s engagement with cinema extended beyond literary reflection: he worked as a film critic, a partial theorist, and also as a writer of story ideas and screenplays, participating in several film crews. This enthusiasm and artistic activity significantly influenced his literary work, both lyrical and prosaic. Nezval’s imagination and stylistic techniques were undeniably shaped by film culture and cinematic language; however, these “intermedial” transformations of his creative output have not yet been subjected to sustained and detailed analytical attention. This study traces the nature of the transformations in Nezval’s avant-garde poetics during the 1920s, focusing on literary techniques that simulate cinematic narration—such as visual composition, editing, optical phenomena and effects, “camera movement,” and mise-en-scène. These features, which may be collectively described as a tendency toward cinematicity, will be examined in his Poetist poetry collection Pantomima (1924) and in his first prose work Karneval (1926). In light of Nezval’s screenwriting involvement at the end of the 1920s—when he worked as an active member of several film crews on the realization of three of his scripts—this study also addresses the question to what extent these techniques and cinematic experiments could be applied in actual screenplay production, an issue explored in the concluding section.

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