Matilda Mroz – författare

Katyn– the Soviet massacre of over 21,000 Polish prisoners in 1940 – has come to be remembered as Stalin’s emblematic mass murder, an event obscured by one of the most extensive cover-ups in history. Yet paradoxically, a majority of its victims perished far from the forest in western Russia that gives the tragedy its name. Their remains lie buried in killing fields throughout Russia, Ukraine and, most likely, Belarus. Today their ghosts haunt the cultural landscape of Eastern Europe.This book traces the legacy of Katyn through the interconnected memory cultures of seven countries: Belarus, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic States. It explores the meaning of Katyn as site and symbol, event and idea, fact and crypt. It shows how Katyn both incites nationalist sentiments in Eastern Europe and fosters an emerging cosmopolitan memory of Soviet terror. It also examines the strange impact of the 2010 plane crash that claimed the lives of Poland’s leaders en route to Katyn.Drawing on novels and films, debates and controversies, this book makes the case for a transnational study of cultural memory and navigates a contested past in a region that will define Europe’s future.

Katyn– the Soviet massacre of over 21,000 Polish prisoners in 1940 – has come to be remembered as Stalin’s emblematic mass murder, an event obscured by one of the most extensive cover-ups in history. Yet paradoxically, a majority of its victims perished far from the forest in western Russia that gives the tragedy its name. Their remains lie buried in killing fields throughout Russia, Ukraine and, most likely, Belarus. Today their ghosts haunt the cultural landscape of Eastern Europe.This book traces the legacy of Katyn through the interconnected memory cultures of seven countries: Belarus, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic States. It explores the meaning of Katyn as site and symbol, event and idea, fact and crypt. It shows how Katyn both incites nationalist sentiments in Eastern Europe and fosters an emerging cosmopolitan memory of Soviet terror. It also examines the strange impact of the 2010 plane crash that claimed the lives of Poland’s leaders en route to Katyn.Drawing on novels and films, debates and controversies, this book makes the case for a transnational study of cultural memory and navigates a contested past in a region that will define Europe’s future.

Matilda Mroz argues that cinema provides an ideal opportunity to engage with ideas of temporal flow and change. Temporality, however, remains an underexplored area of film analysis, which frequently discusses images as though they were still rather than moving. This book traces the operation of duration in cinema, and argues that temporality should be a central concern of film scholarship. In close readings of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, and the ten short films that make up Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Decalogue series, Mroz highlights how film analysis must consider both particular moments in cinema which are critically significant, and the way in which such moments interrelate in temporal flux. She explores the concepts of duration and rhythm, resonance and uncertainty, affect, sense and texture, to bring a fresh perspective to film analysis and criticism.Essential reading for students and scholars in Film Studies, this engaging study will also be a valuable resource for critical theorists.

Matilda Mroz argues that cinema provides an ideal opportunity to engage with ideas of temporal flow and change. Temporality, however, remains an underexplored area of film analysis, which frequently discusses images as though they were still rather than moving. This book traces the operation of duration in cinema, and argues that temporality should be a central concern of film scholarship. In close readings of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, and the ten short films that make up Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Decalogue series, Mroz highlights how film analysis must consider both particular moments in cinema which are critically significant, and the way in which such moments interrelate in temporal flux. She explores the concepts of duration and rhythm, resonance and uncertainty, affect, sense and texture, to bring a fresh perspective to film analysis and criticism.Essential reading for students and scholars in Film Studies, this engaging study will also be a valuable resource for critical theorists.

This book offers a unique perspective on contemporary Polish cinema’s engagement with histories of Polish violence against their Jewish neighbours during the Holocaust.

This book offers a unique perspective on contemporary Polish cinema’s engagement with histories of Polish violence against their Jewish neighbours during the Holocaust. Moving beyond conventional studies of historical representation on screen, the book considers how cinema reframes the unwanted knowledge of violence in its aftermaths. The book draws on Derridean hauntology, Didi-Huberman’s confrontations with art images, Levinasian ethics and anamorphosis to examine cinematic reconfigurations of histories and memories that are vulnerable to evasion and formlessness. Innovative analyses of Birthplace (Łoziński, 1992), It Looks Pretty From a Distance (Sasnal, 2011), Aftermath (Pasikowski, 2012), and Ida (Pawlikowski, 2013) explore how their rural filmic landscapes are predicated on the radical exclusion of Jewish neighbours, prompting archaeological processes of exhumation. Arguing that the distressing materiality of decomposition disturbs cinematic composition, the book examines how Poland’s aftermath cinema attempts to recompose itself through form and narrative as it faces Polish complicity in Jewish death.

Bringing together a range of theoretical and critical approaches, this edited collection is the first book to examine representations of the body in Eastern European and Russian cinema after the Second World War. Drawing on the history of the region, as well as Western and Eastern scholarship on the body, the book focuses on three areas: the traumatized body, the body as a site of erotic pleasure, and the relationship between the body and history. Critically dissecting the different ideological and aesthetic ways human bodies are framed, The Cinematic Bodies of Eastern Europe and Russia also demonstrates how bodily discourses oscillate between complicity and subversion, and how they shaped individuals and societies both during and after the period of state socialism.