How They Studied at UMPRUMka

For the wider public, the results of the entire research project will be made available via a twenty-minute animated film, directed by Michaela Režová with scholarly assistance from Milena Bartlová. The film will be projected as part of the exhibition UMPRUM 1885–1990, with a historical perspective that will be updated towards the present, after which it will be accessible online.

The film outlines the changes in the possibilities and methods of instruction at UMPRUM across the years from 1885 to 2000 and draws upon the research findings of the other scholarly teams. Our chosen form is that of an interactive animated document, since Michaela Režová has exceptional experience with this form and already achieved successful results. This relatively little-known film method presents a highly suitable medium for conveying information that is, on one side, largely factual and didactic and as such requires its scholarly basis, yet on the other involves unique human stories: the essential content of the film will be three or four individual biographic trajectories of actual people who studied at UMPRUM in its first years, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, during the First Republic, under state socialism, and at the start of the 21st century. Rendering the film unique is its combination of expert erudition and the emotional force of what it presents.

Milena Bartlová

Milena Bartlová, Michaela Režová

Cyril Říha, Pavla Pauknerová

Jak se studovalo na Umprumce: Odborný scénář.pdf

The Students of Umprumka. Professional script for an animated documentary with interactive elements

Until the early 1990s, the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (UMPRUM) founded in 1885 was the only higher education institution for arts and crafts, applied arts, and design in the Czech lands, and the research project “Places of Creativity: Art and Design Education between 1850 and 2000” is currently being carried out at UMPRUM. One of its outputs will be an exhibition with a critical catalog entitled “History of the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague 1885–1990.” As part of the exhibition, an animated documentary film entitled “The Students of UMPRUM” will be screened as an audiovisual output; afterwards, the film will be accessible online. Using the specific means of expression of animated documentary, the film will present the results of the art-historical study of the entire team.

The first chapter introduces the specific features of the topic, which lies at the intersection of historiographical research and memory (of students, teachers, and the cultural public). It shows proven methods for dealing with the difficulties of historical representation that are specific to the four decades of totalitarian and authoritarian rule under the dictatorship of the Communist Party (1948–1969). The second chapter provides a detailed overview of the media specifics of animated documentary films with interactive elements. The most important moment is to accept the fact that it is precisely the technique of animation that highlights the issue of documentary authenticity and the credibility of documentary films in general.

The biographical method was chosen as a particularly effective form of accessibility and emotional identification with the topic. Chapters 4 and 5 show in detail the steps involved in transferring the scientific results of arthistorical studies into the final form of the film script. First, the specific results of the individual parts of the project that will be used for the script are presented. The most extensive is the 6th chapter that forms the core of the publication: the content script which uses seven selected “typical” students, both male and female, to address individual key events and issues in the history of the school, as well as their general historical context. Each of the individual chapters concludes with an overview of other important figure, graduates of the school whose lives were related to the highlighted topic.