Ester Krumbachová: the obscured lady of Czech cinema

• Grant number: 25/01896-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: July 01, 2025
• End date: October 27, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Cinema
• Principal Investigator: Esther Império Hamburger
• Grantee: Luiza Wollinger Delfino
• Supervisor: Petr Szczepanik
• Host Institution: Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Charles University in Prague (CU), Czech Republic
• Associated to the scholarship: 24/00235-2 - Articulations between screenplay and production design: Ester Krumbachová, BP.MS

Abstract

This project is part of a larger inquiry that seeks to stimulate transnational and transmediatic approaches to production design studies. The research in Brazil develops previous FAPESP projects, including a research internship at Charles University in Prague, when the investigations at the screenplay collection at the National Film Archive raised new inquiries regarding the creative and institutional processes of the Czech film industry. Thus, on my master's project, I analyse the possible articulations between art direction and screenwriting through a rare case in which both these roles are performed by the same professional: the Czech art director, costume designer and screenwriter Ester Krumbachová, who was part of the creation of essential films of the Czech New Wave in the 1960s. Even though her creative outputs are the most visible elements in these films (astonishing visualities and absurd dialogs), she remains an obscured creator in this filmography. The current internship at Charles University aims to advance the results obtained until now in Brazil, and to contribute to a bibliography still scarce on Czech production design ("výtvarník", in Czech, or "artist").