Abstract: The chapter has two aims. First, it wants to move towards writing an aesthetic history of Czech cinema from the perspective of the poetics of cinema. The first section of the chapter introduces the methodological background of such research. In a critical debate with existing approaches, the second section formulates more general hypotheses about the typical features of Czech silent and early sound films. The third section is then a more focused case study of the first film shot in Barrandov Studios. This analytical part also discusses both one particular genre tradition and the thoughtful embedding of the extraordinary technical options of Barrandov Studios into relatively longer-term stylistic continuities. Second, the chapter aims to sketch the possibilities of its concept of regional poetics, proposing and illustrating with an example of Czech cinema in the period preceding and immediately following the opening of Barrandov Studios in 1933. The notion of regional poetics refers to the analytical and historical research regarding what is typical for a particular area: as such, it inquires a corpus of feature-length film works, each of which was predominantly made in a specified territory, predominantly in the official language of that territory, and for standard commercial distribution within that territory.

Keywords: Czech cinema, regional poetics, silent cinema, poetics of cinema, research program, film narrative, film style