Firstly, some housekeeping. You will have noticed that the blog looks quite different. I have decided to discard the previous theme. Perhaps it was too colorful, even garish. In any case, I have gone with a darker variant this time. Nothing fancy, but it should be more appropriate for the content on the blog. Some minor layout changes have also been made. One of them is the inclusion of a new way to receive updates about the blog, through follow.it. Unfortunately, Google had decided to shut down FeedBurner, so I had to find an alternative. I have switched the 13 of my previous followers to this new platform, so tell me if everything went okay. I've also finally done something with the header. Actually, Rakso did the work from my ideas and layout as what he did in less than an hour I would do in less than a few days or so. Thanks to Rakso, as always. Finally, I have noticed that videos did not show up on mobile versions of the site for some time. I have figured out the problem (again a redundant change in programming!) and amended the latest posts.
Finally, the post. This blog has, almost by accident, been in an aiF-mode recently, so today, I will air my thoughts on the individual episodes from the studio. These comments actually originated a few days ago in an email I wrote to a friend who had not yet seen most of them and is/was preparing to do so. I had some of these discussions regarding aiF already, but why are they so interesting? Well, as I mentioned in my post on Parkety and Vrata, there is a definite amplitude in quality between individual episodes from aiF. While the 1989-90 episodes did not really reach the heights of previous episodes, they were still quite a concentrated and consistent bunch. When aiF came about, that consistency went out of the window and some episodes are noticeably lagging behind others.
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| What about this? Not so good? Eh, so I thought. |
Presumably, Luboš Beneš paid a lot less attention to these episodes than those that came before. Before 1990, he was in a semi-comfortable position of a director at Krátký film's Barrandov studio. Then, along with the other directors, he was laid off and had to start his own studio. As he was really the lynchpin of aiF, he became manager, negotiator, employer and probably had much less time on his hands, meaning that his mantra of "don't mess with it too much, just make it fast", which Jan Klos called an unpleasant feature of Beneš, came into full force. He was running on autopilot at times. Given that the episodes also passed through fewer hands, the standards had to drop off and they did.
