A book Minor Cinema. In the Circle of Films of the Czech and Slovak New Wave (UG Publishing House, Gdańsk 2022) by dr Grażyna Świętochowska (Department of Film and Media at the Institute for Cultural Research of the Faculty of Philology, UG) was awarded the prestigious annual prize of the Polish Society for Film and Media Studies for the best debut of 2022.

The work is an attempt at an analytical reading of films belonging to the trends of the Czech and Slovak New Wave, which use tendencies occurring rather on the periphery of traditional cinema and enter into a dialogue with the practices of global art and modernist cinema.

The author uses the tools proposed by the great philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, using the category of the so-called minor cinema. From this angle, she discusses such productions as Diamonds of the Night (dir. Jan Němec, 1964), Sun in the Net (dir. Štefan Uher, 1962) or Wasted Sunday (dir. Drahomíra Vihanova, 1969). What is minor cinema, and what is the result of the interpretative strategy adopted? Grażyna Świętochowska answers these and other questions in her book.

According to the jury of the Polish Society for Film and Media Studies, the entry ‘is a thoughtful, mature, exciting and inspiring theoretical statement on the seemingly all-too-familiar phenomenon of the explosion of talent in Czech and Slovak cinema of the 1960s [...] Grażyna Swietochowska’s book provides immense cognitive satisfaction, within which tracing a different perspective on the “minor” fragment of the history of cinema in the second half of the 20th century is just one scenario’.

Dr Grażyna Świętochowska – film scholar, Polish philologist, assistant professor at the Institute for Cultural Research, University of Gdańsk. For many years, she was editor-in-chief of the academic journal Panoptikum. She is interested in the history of audiovisual culture in Central Europe and the common area of cinema, art, architecture and design, which is most fully realised in the space of world fairs. With her book Minor Cinema, the author concludes her long-standing research interest in Czech and Slovak cinematography.

Our sincere congratulations!