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Written in the early 1890s, before Czech independence and in an age of patriotic upsurge and romanticism, these thirty-four tales quite naturally reflect a glorification of the Czech past. While the details of the legends are necessarily archaic, peopled by kings and noblemen, ghosts and magic, the themes are universal. Now at the dawn of a new era of Czech independence, they provide a fascinating new perspective to the contemporary situation.
The Art of Czech Animation is the first comprehensive English language account of Czech animation from the 1920s to the present, covering both 2D animation forms and CGI, with a focus upon the stop-motion films of Jirí Trnka, Hermína Týrlová, Jan Švankmajer and Jirí Barta. Stop-motion is a highly embodied form of animation and The Art of Czech Animation develops a new materialist approach to studying these films. Instead of imposing top-down Film Theory onto its case studies, the book's analysis is built up from close readings of the films themselves, with particular attention given to their non-human objects. In a time of environmental crisis, the unique way Czech animated films use allegory to de-centre the human world and give a voice to non-human aspects of the natural world points us towards a means by which culture can increase ecological awareness in viewers. Such a refutation of a human-centred view of the world was contrary to communist orthodoxy and it remains so under late-stage consumer-capitalism. As such, these films do not only offer beautiful examples of allegory, but stand as models of political dissent. The Art of Czech Animation is a unique endeavour of film philosophy to provide a materialist appraisal of a heretofore neglected strand of Central-Eastern European cinema.
Emphasizing the importance of popular culture and the wealth of knowledge that can be gained through an analysis of the daily lives and practices of individuals, this book serves as an introduction to Czech popular culture. It includes 600 entries, cross-referenced to allow readers to pursue particular topics in greater depth.
Frances Starn is a writer living in Berkeley, California. --Book Jacket.
This is an appraisal od some of the best Czech fiction of the 20th century. After a brief introduction there are chapters on Hasek, Hrabal, Skorecky, Pavel, Klima and a final chapter on Hodrova, Viewegh and Topol.
Since its foundation in the ninth century Prague has punched way above its weight to become a fulcrum of European culture. The city’s most illustrious figures in the fields of music, literature and film are well known: Mozart staged the premiere of his opera Don Giovanni here; in the early twentieth century Franz Kafka was at the forefront of the city’s intellectual life, while later writers such as Milan Kundera and film directors such as Milos Forman chronicled Prague’s fortunes under communism. Yet the city has a cultural heritage that runs far deeper than Kafka museums and Mozart-by-candlelight concerts. It encompasses the avant-garde punk group Plastic People of the Universe, the “new wave” film directors of the 1960s who made their striking movies in the city’s famed Barrandov studios, and artists such as Alfons Mucha and Frantisek Kupka whose revolutionary canvases fomented Art Nouveau and abstract art at the dawn of the twentieth century. Beyond art galleries, concert halls and cinemas the history of Prague has been one of invasion and sometimes brutal oppression. The great German chancellor Otto von Bismarck once commented that “whoever controls Prague, controls mid-Europe” and a succession of imperialist powers have taken this advice to heart, most recently Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Opposition has taken many forms, from the religious reformer Jan Hus in the fifteenth century to playwright and dissident Václav Havel, whose elevation to the Czechoslovak presidency in 1990 made him a symbol of the rebirth of democracy in Eastern Europe. In this book Andrew Beattie also reflects on the modern city, where bold new buildings such as Frank Gehry’s “Dancing House” rub shoulders with monuments from the Gothic and Baroque eras such as the Charles Bridge and St. Vitus’ Cathedral. He considers the suburbs too, home to world-renowned soccer and ice hockey teams, gleaming shopping centers and grim communist-era apartment blocks that are often home to Vietnamese, Romany and Muslim minority groups who live in a city with a growing international outlook. The Prague he reveals is an increasingly confident and diverse city of the new Europe.
This book explores the Czech composer Václav Trojan (1907-1983) and his compositions for Jiri Trnka's films, a very influential puppet stop-motion animator. Trnka is regarded as one of the finest outcomes of Czech art in the aftermath of the Second World War and inspiration for contemporary directors like Tim Burton and companies such as Aardman or Laika. Trojan's music for animation sets a great artistic model in European animation, at least as meaningful as Carl Stalling's music for Warner Bros. cartoons in the USA. Trojan was an eclectic artist, which encompassed folk songs, jazz and blues influences, neoclassical symphonic and chamber works, opera and more. Key Features: A historical overview of the origins and early development of Czech animation Biographical sketches and stylistic outline of both Trnka and Trojan An audiovisual analysis of all the available Trnka films Trojan wrote music for Filmography and bibliography
The story of modernity told through a cultural history of twentieth-century Prague Setting out to recover the roots of modernity in the boulevards, interiors, and arcades of the "city of light," Walter Benjamin dubbed Paris "the capital of the nineteenth century." In this eagerly anticipated sequel to his acclaimed Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History, Derek Sayer argues that Prague could well be seen as the capital of the much darker twentieth century. Ranging across twentieth-century Prague's astonishingly vibrant and always surprising human landscape, this richly illustrated cultural history describes how the city has experienced (and suffered) more ways of being modern than perhaps any other metropolis. Located at the crossroads of struggles between democratic, communist, and fascist visions of the modern world, twentieth-century Prague witnessed revolutions and invasions, national liberation and ethnic cleansing, the Holocaust, show trials, and snuffed-out dreams of "socialism with a human face." Yet between the wars, when Prague was the capital of Europe's most easterly parliamentary democracy, it was also a hotbed of artistic and architectural modernism, and a center of surrealism second only to Paris. Focusing on these years, Sayer explores Prague's spectacular modern buildings, monuments, paintings, books, films, operas, exhibitions, and much more. A place where the utopian fantasies of the century repeatedly unraveled, Prague was tailor-made for surrealist André Breton's "black humor," and Sayer discusses the way the city produced unrivaled connoisseurs of grim comedy, from Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek to Milan Kundera and Václav Havel. A masterful and unforgettable account of a city where an idling flaneur could just as easily be a secret policeman, this book vividly shows why Prague can teach us so much about the twentieth century and what made us who we are.
The water's edge, whether shore or riverbank, is a marginal territory that becomes invested with layers of meaning. The essays in this collection present intriguing perspectives on how the water's edge has been imagined and represented in different places at various times and how this process contributed to the formation of social identities. Art and Identity at the Water's Edge focuses upon national coastlines and maritime heritage; on rivers and seashore as regions of liminality and sites of conflicting identities; and on the edge as a tourist setting. Such themes are related to diverse forms of art, including painting, architecture, maps, photography, and film. Topics range from the South African seaside resort of Durban to the French Riviera. The essays explore successive ideological mappings of the Jordan River, and how Czech cubist architecture and painting shaped a new nationalist reading of the Vltava riverbanks. They examine post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans as a filmic spectacle that questions assumptions about American identity, and the coast depicted as a site of patriotism in nineteenth-century British painting. The collection demonstrates how waterside structures such as maritime museums and lighthouses, and visual images of the water's edge, have contributed to the construction of cultural and national identities.