Eastern European Screen Cultures – serie

Albanian cinema truly represents a terra incognita for most of the world. Decidedly Europe’s most isolated country during the Cold War era, communist Albania had already been cut off from the West for centuries as a one of the western-most outposts of the Ottoman empire. Nonetheless, and unknown to most of the world, communist Albania had a vibrant cinema tradition. Although bound by official orthodoxy, the films of the state-run Kinostudio enterprise were surprisingly innovative and, at times, daringly subversive. This book opens with examinations of moving images in Albania from the Ottoman period, through those captured under independence and the Fascist occupation. It subsequently foregrounds transformations in Kinostudio, from the early optimism of socialist realism through the brooding social angst of the 1980s, which constitute a bridge to the socioeconomic concerns of Albanian films of the postcommunist period.

Andrzej Zulawski (1940–2016) was born in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) and educated in Paris. From 1971 to 2015 he directed thirteen feature films. Andrzej Zulawski: Abject Cinema interprets the director’s oeuvre through the methodological lens of Julia Kristeva’s notions of the abject and the semiotic chora, with the narratives in Zulawski’s filmography amounting to an experience of the abject -being not merely the state of affairs among the films’ subjects but also of their collective regression to a semiotic non-verbal state divorced from the symbolic verbal-visual language employed by cinema as a whole. It further contextualizes this interpretation with the sociopolitical circumstances from which Zulawski emerged, specifically his Polish homeland occupied by various foreign powers, his emigre status in France, and the influence of the Polish Romantic movement.

Based on original archival research, Early Cinema, Modernity and Visual Culture: The Imaginary of the Balkans is the first study on early cinema in the region from a transnational and cross-cultural perspective. It investigates how the unique geopolitical positioning of the Balkan space and its multiculturality influenced and shaped visual culture and cinema. Countering Eurocentric modernity paradigms and reframing hierarchical relations between centres and peripheries, this book adopts an alternative methodology for interstitial spaces. By deploying the notion of the haptic, it establishes new connections between moving image artefacts and print media, early film practitioners, the socio-political context and cultural responses to the new visual medium.

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, the 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.

What does it mean for someone or something to be Hungarian? People in Hungary grappled with this far-reaching question in the wake of the losses and transformation brought by World War I. Because the period also saw the rise of cinema, audiences, filmmakers, critics, and officials often looked at films with an eye to that question, too. Did the Hungary seen on screen represent the Hungary they knew from everyday life? And-crucially-did the major role played by Jewish Hungarians in the film industry make the sector and its creations somehow Jewish rather than Hungarian? Jews, it was soon decided, could not really be Hungarian, and acts of Parliament soon barred them from taking major roles in cinema production. This book tells the troubled story of that period in Hungarian cinematic history, taking it up through World War II.

The Barrandov Studios are one of the largest and oldest film studios in Europe. For more than 80 years so far, the studios have been the location of choice for over 2,500 Czech and International films. Barrandov's founding fathers, the Havel brothers Vàclav and Milo (the grandfather and uncle of later president Vàclav Havel), built the 'Hollywood of Eastern Europe' in the 1930s. A legendary studio like this, and its story, has so far not been told to an English-speaking readership. This collection aims to correct this, presenting the studio's rich history, its esteemed directors, and their most important films.

Andrzej Zulawski (1940–2016) was born in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) and educated in Paris. From 1971 to 2015 he directed thirteen feature films. Andrzej Zulawski: Abject Cinema interprets the director’s oeuvre through the methodological lens of Julia Kristeva’s notions of the abject and the semiotic chora, with the narratives in Zulawski’s filmography amounting to an experience of the abject -being not merely the state of affairs among the films’ subjects but also of their collective regression to a semiotic non-verbal state divorced from the symbolic verbal-visual language employed by cinema as a whole. It further contextualizes this interpretation with the sociopolitical circumstances from which Zulawski emerged, specifically his Polish homeland occupied by various foreign powers, his emigre status in France, and the influence of the Polish Romantic movement.

Useful Cinema in State Socialist Europe offers a ground-breaking exploration of “useful” film production across Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the wider socialist world from the postwar period to the late Cold War. Moving beyond economically driven models of commissioned filmmaking dominant in the West, it shows how socialist cinema was shaped instead by the ideological power of representation and self-representation, positioning film at the heart of political and cultural governance.Rejecting any notion of a unified socialist cinema, the chapters reveal a diverse field of practices - educational, instructional, research, safety, promotional, and amateur films - produced within complex institutional and party frameworks. Drawing on internationally significant and topical case studies from both well-known and underexplored national contexts, the book demonstrates how these films simultaneously served centralized political agendas and developed distinct regional and national dynamics. With its interdisciplinary approach and extensive engagement with archival and audiovisual sources, this book makes a major intervention in Film and Media Studies it brings marginal, functional, and non-fiction film forms into the centre of scholarly debate.A major intervention in Film and Media Studies, this book will appeal to researchers in the field as well as and Communication, Archival and Audiovisual Heritage Studies, International and Political Studies, Slavic and East European Studies.

This book investigates the “Golden Age” of Yugoslav cinema and sheds light on it from a fresh perspective. By examining various tropes and discourses of the “archaic” that shaped not only the flourishing Yugoslav cinematic modernism of the 1960s but also a broader Yugoslav cultural politics, the book reveals a nuanced panorama of cultural negotiations.The “archaic” – that which is at odds with modernity – is a peculiar crossroads where Marxism intersects with Balkanism, while both are circumscribed by a general distrust towards representation. The analysis thus opens new perspectives on a politics of aesthetics that shaped some of the most successful Yugoslav films of all time. Furthermore, its findings will be relevant to any context in which a political as well as artistic movement seeks to present itself as avant-garde but is confronted with a discourse assigning it time-lag.Addressing an academic audience of scholars and postgraduate students interested in Balkan and East European area studies, Slavic studies, cultural studies, film, and postcolonial studies, this book is also of interest to those researching the intersections of time, aesthetics, and politics.

Yugoslav Black Wave was originally published in 2011 by Film Center Serbia. At that time it was the first comprehensive study of the Black Wave to appear in English and is still one of the rare monographs dedicated to the subject. The Yugoslav Black Wave represented a new generation in Socialist Yugoslav cinema in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Albanian cinema truly represents a terra incognita for most of the world. Decidedly Europe’s most isolated country during the Cold War era, communist Albania had already been cut off from the West for centuries as a one of the western-most outposts of the Ottoman empire. Nonetheless, and unknown to most of the world, communist Albania had a vibrant cinema tradition. Although bound by official orthodoxy, the films of the state-run Kinostudio enterprise were surprisingly innovative and, at times, daringly subversive. This book opens with examinations of moving images in Albania from the Ottoman period, through those captured under independence and the Fascist occupation. It subsequently foregrounds transformations in Kinostudio, from the early optimism of socialist realism through the brooding social angst of the 1980s, which constitute a bridge to the socioeconomic concerns of Albanian films of the postcommunist period.

This book tells the troubled story of a period in Hungarian cinematic history during which audiences, filmmakers, critics, and officials grappled with questions surrounding Hungarian national identity.

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.

This book brings together a large cast of mainstream and avant-garde cineastes, artists, photographers, comics creators, poets, and more, to reflect on a wide range of phenomena from the realms of cinema and visual culture in the Yugoslav region, broader Europe, and North America.

The Barrandov Studios are one of the largest and oldest film studios in Europe. For more than 80 years so far, the studios have been the location of choice for over 2,500 Czech and International films. Barrandov’s founding fathers, the Havel brothers Vàclav and Milo. (the grandfather and uncle of later president Vàclav Havel), built the ‘Hollywood of Eastern Europe’ in the 1930s. A legendary studio like this – and its story – has so far not been told to an English-speaking readership. This collection aims to correct this, presenting the studio’s rich history, its esteemed directors, and their most important films.

This edited collection examines how the film cultures of Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine have engaged with the built environment. Across political upheavals and shifting borders, filmmakers have documented, interpreted, and imaginedthe evolution of urban life.From Soviet-era planned cities to post-Socialist urban renewal, and from industrial decline to the impact of war on public space, the essays in this volume uncover the role of cinema in constructing—and contesting—visions of urban life. How have films documented social change and revolution, engaged with histories of migration and displacement, and dreamed up alternative urban futures?