A Companion To Eastern European Cinemas

A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas showcases twenty-five essays written by established and emerging film scholars that trace the history of Eastern European cinemas and offer an up-to-date assessment of post-socialist film cultures. Showcases critical historical work and up-to-date assessments of post-socialist film cultures Features consideration of lesser known areas of study, such as Albanian and Baltic cinemas, popular genre films, cross-national distribution and aesthetics, animation and documentary Places the cinemas of the region in a European and global context Resists the Cold War classification of Eastern European cinemas as “other” art cinemas by reconnecting them with the main circulation of film studies Includes discussion of such films as Taxidermia, El Perro Negro, 12:08 East of Bucharest Big Tõll, and Breakfast on the Grass and explores the work of directors including Tamás Almási, Walerian Borowczyk, Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Andrzej ̄u3awski, and Karel Vachek amongst many others

This work maps the rich, varied cinema of Eastern Europe, Russia and the former USSR. Over 200 entries cover a variety of topics spanning a century of endeavour and turbulent history from Czech animation to Soviet montage, from the silent cinemas dating back to World War I through to the varied responses to the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. It includes entries on actors and actresses, film festivals, studios, genres, directors, film movements, critics, producers and technicians, taking the coverage up to the late 1990s. In addition to the historical material of key figures like Eisenstein and Wadja, the editors provide separate accounts of the trajectory of the cinemas of Eastern Europe and of Russia in the wake of the collapse of communism.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Presenting new and diverse scholarship, this wide-ranging collection of 43 original chapters asks what European cinema tells us about Europe. The book engages with European cinema that attends to questions of European colonial, racialized and gendered power; seeks to decentre Europe itself (not merely its putative centres); and interrogate Europe’s various conceptualizations from a variety of viewpoints. It explores the broad, complex and heterogeneous community/ies produced in and by European films, taking in Kurdish, Hollywood and Singapore cinema as comfortably as the cinema of Poland, Spanish colonial films or the European gangster genre. Chapters cover numerous topics, including individual films, film movements, filmmakers, stars, scholarship, representations and identities, audiences, production practices, genres and more, all analysed in their context(s) so as to construct an image of Europe as it emerges from Europe’s film corpus. The Companion opens the study of European cinema to a broad readership and is ideal for students and scholars in film, European studies, queer studies and cultural studies, as well as historians with an interest in audio-visual culture, nationalism and transnationalism, and those working in language-based area studies.

A Companion to German Cinema A Companion to German Cinema regards the shifting terrain of German filmmaking and film studies against their larger social contexts with twenty-two newly commissioned essays by well-established and younger scholars in the field. While several of these focus on classic topics such as Weimar cinema, Fifties cinema, New German Cinema and its legacy, and Holocaust film, the collection is distinguished by its focus on new developments and the innovative light they may shed on earlier practices. A Companion to German Cinema includes essays on Berlin Film, Neue Heimat Film, New Comedy, post-Wall documentaries, the post-Wende RAF genre, and Rabenmutter imagery, as well as on the persistently overlooked and under-theorized Indianerfilme, post-AIDS documentaries, sexploitation films, and new multicultural and transnational films produced in Germany under the auspices of the European Union. Organized into three “movements” representing the significance of these developments for their aesthetic theorization, A Companion to German Cinema challenges its readers to address critical gaps in the field with the aim of opening it further onto new terrains of intellectual engagement.

An analysis of films produced in post-World War II Eastern Europe featuring the trope of the orphan, and the issues these characters addressed. Unlike the benevolent orphan found in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid or the sentimentalized figure of Little Orphan Annie, the orphan in postwar Eastern European cinema takes on a more politically fraught role, embodying the tensions of individuals struggling to recover from war and grappling with an unknown future under Soviet rule. By exploring films produced in postwar Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland, Constantin Parvulescu traces the way in which cinema envisioned and debated the condition of the post-World War II subject and the “new man” of Soviet-style communism. In these films, the orphan becomes a cinematic trope that interrogates socialist visions of ideological institutionalization and re-education and stands as a silent critic of the system’s shortcomings or as a resilient spirit who has resisted capture by the political apparatus of the new state. “By using the trope of an orphan Constantin Parvulescu demonstrates how films made in countries such as Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania reflected on the specific problems affecting Eastern Europe after 1945, such as the loss of population, economic backwardness, the legacy of the Holocaust, while engaging in wider debates, especially the superiority of socialism over capitalism. Economically and elegantly written, it demonstrates that cinema produced in the periphery can be central to our understanding of films as ideological tools. This is one of the best books on Eastern European cinema ever written.” —Ewa Mazierska, University of Central Lancashire “Groundbreaking. . . . The author’s comparative, transnational perspective in chapters devoted to close textual analyses of each narrative demonstrates the value of reading film as a primary source for understanding the relationships among state power, intergenerational trauma, and revolutionary subjectivity. Parvulescu’s highly original portrayal of a landscape of parentless children evokes the trauma of war and the specificity of the socialist experiment in the former Eastern Bloc.” —Catherine Portuges, University of Massachusetts-Amherst “Parvulescu has taken a highly innovative approach to socialist and post-socialist cinema in the region, and one that is vividly illustrated by a superb selection of films.” —Studies in European Cinema

The “spatial”, the “bodily”, and the “memory turn” in the humanities and cultural studies are well-canonized developments. These features of our being in the world are fundamental in the medium of cinema, which is an art of spaces, bodies, and memories, increasingly so today when the analogue platform has been running parallel with the digitalized method of filmmaking. The three nodal concepts define the tripartite structure of this volume, composed of an overview study and twelve case-studies of post-1989 Eastern European film and cinema. The overarching questions of space representation and construction, bodies on screen, issues of national identification in a postcolonial framework, and cinema as a form of cultural memory are explored through the lens of specific national cinemas or contemporary Croatian, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Slovakian, Slovenian, and Romanian films. In addition to investigating the cohesive forces that mark the postcommunist Eastern European region as a coherent cultural entity in its cinematic representations, the volume also stands as a witness to the importance of transnational approaches.

Was there experimental cinema behind the Iron Curtain? What forms did experiments with film take in state socialist Eastern Europe? Who conducted them, where, how, and why? These are the questions answered in this volume, the first of its kind in any language. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines, the book offers case studies from Bulgaria, Czech Republic, former East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and former Yugoslavia. Together, these contributions demonstrate the variety of makers, production contexts, and aesthetic approaches that shaped a surprisingly robust and diverse experimental film output in the region. The book maps out the terrain of our present-day knowledge of cinematic experimentalism in Eastern Europe, suggests directions for further research, and will be of interest to scholars of film and media, art historians, cultural historians of Eastern Europe, and anyone concerned with questions of how alternative cultures emerge and function under repressive political conditions.