Dorota Ostrowska - Böcker

European Cinemas in the Television Age is a radical attempt to rethink the post-war history of European cinemas. The authors approach the subject from the perspective of television’s impact on the culture of cinema’s production, distribution, consumption and reception. Thus they indicate a new direction for the debate about the future of cinema in Europe. In every European country television has transformed economic, technological and aesthetic terms in which the process of cinema production had been conducted. Television’s growing popularity has drastically reshaped cinema’s audiences and forced governments to introduce policies to regulate the interaction between cinema and television in the changing and dynamic audio-visual environment. It is cinematic criticism, which was slowest in coming to terms with the presence of television and therefore most instrumental in perpetuating the view of cinema as an isolated object of aesthetic, critical and academic inquiry. The recognition of the impact of television upon European cinemas offers a more authentic and richer picture of cinemas in Europe, which are part of the complex audiovisual matrix including television and new media.Features*Contains detailed case studies of Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Poland, Italy and Denmark.*Includes contributions from leading scholars in the fields of cinema and television studies: Pierre Sorlin, Luisa Cignoetti, Valeria Camporesi, Gunhild Agger, Magrit Grieb, Malgorzata Radkiewicz and Will Lehman.*Will appeal to students and researchers in a wide range of fields, including cinema, television, media and communication studies.

To live through a film festival is to live through an intensive emotive experience of film viewings, encounters with friends and strangers, travel, displacement and the exploration of new spaces – both real and imaginary. It is the disorientating experience of this modern-day carnivalesque which marks a time out of time of a film festival when the norms of the everyday cinema-based or home-based film viewing experience are suspended, challenged or upended. Although some aspects of the film festival experience have changed over a long history of film festival cultures there are others that remain constant: an effort emotional and physical to attend a festival, excitement or festival buzz of being part of a festival, a sense of community of viewers rooted in the individual response to films, and the impact of seeing a film in the festival environment which ranges from pleasurable and inspiration through boring to outrages and abject. Dorota Ostrowska’s book explores the uniqueness of this occasionally irreverent, often disruptive and at times unsettling festival experience for the diverse festival audiences through the concept of festive chronotopes. It argues the importance of space for our understanding of festival experience as it is this space, intimate and collective, that shapes film festival programmes, moulds curational and programming practice and critical response, and drives the desire for the festive experience to be repeated and reinvented on annual basis. The book explores the idea of festive chronotopes in relation to a myriad of European film festivals, international, human rights, documentary and migrant, each of which is seen as a manifestation of a particular festive chronotope: imaginary, utopic, crisis, migrant and indigenous. Each of the chronotopes is presented as an expression of a different set of spatial relationships that bound the place, audiences and films of a film festival together.

The continued interest in the social and cultural life of the former Warsaw pact countries - looking at but also beyond their socialist pasts - encompasses a desire to know more about their national cinemas. Yet, despite the increasing consumption of films from these countries - via DVD, VOD platforms and other alternative channels - there is a lack of comprehensive information on this key aspect of visual culture. This important book rectifies the glaring gap and provides both a history and a contemporary account of East Central European cinema in the pre-WW2, socialist, and post-socialist periods. Demonstrating how at different historical moments popular cinema fulfilled various roles, for example in the capacity of nation-building, and adapted to the changing markets of a morphing political landscape, chapters bring together experts in the field for the definitive analysis of mainstream cinema in the region.Celebrating the unique contribution of films from Hungary, the Czech Republic/Czechoslovakia and Poland, from the award-winning Cosy Dens to cult favourite Lemonade Joe, and from 1960s Polish Westerns to Hollywood-influenced Hungarian movies, the book addresses the major themes of popular cinema.By looking closely at genre, stardom, cinema exhibition, production strategies and the relationship between the popular and the national, it charts the remarkable evolution and transformation of popular cinema over time.

The continued interest in the social and cultural life of the former Warsaw pact countries - looking at but also beyond their socialist pasts - encompasses a desire to know more about their national cinemas. Yet, despite the increasing consumption of films from these countries - via DVD, VOD platforms and other alternative channels - there is a lack of comprehensive information on this key aspect of visual culture. This important book rectifies the glaring gap and provides both a history and a contemporary account of East Central European cinema in the pre-WW2, socialist, and post-socialist periods. Demonstrating how at different historical moments popular cinema fulfilled various roles, for example in the capacity of nation-building, and adapted to the changing markets of a morphing political landscape, chapters bring together experts in the field for the definitive analysis of mainstream cinema in the region.Celebrating the unique contribution of films from Hungary, the Czech Republic/Czechoslovakia and Poland, from the award-winning Cosy Dens to cult favourite Lemonade Joe, and from 1960s Polish Westerns to Hollywood-influenced Hungarian movies, the book addresses the major themes of popular cinema.By looking closely at genre, stardom, cinema exhibition, production strategies and the relationship between the popular and the national, it charts the remarkable evolution and transformation of popular cinema over time.