EAST, WEST and CENTRE: REFRAMING POST-1989 EUROPEAN CINEMA

The Routledge Companion to World Cinema. Routledge. R. Stone, P. Cooke, S. Dennison, A. Marlow-Mann (eds), 2018

This chapter examines the ways in which Eastern European cinema has become Europeanized. It looks at how the idea of Eastern Europe and its cinema has been shaped vis-à-vis the West, and redefined after the collapse of communism. Contrary to the received wisdom that a new paradigm emerged in 1989, this chapter argues that it is only since 2000 that Eastern European cinema has enjoyed recognition after the near collapse of its film industries in the 1990s. In the three case studies of the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, Eastern European female directors and the Romanian New Wave, the chapter analyses the emergence in Eastern Europe of a new complex model of film production aligned with its larger European counterpart. This producer-driven model is based on three further aspects: the national film institutes, international co-productions and participation in film festivals.

2009

Postsocialist Mobilities. Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 2021

This volume examines the various forms of mobility in the cinema of the Visegrad countries and Romania, bringing together the cross-disciplinary research of mostly native scholars. In four thematic sections, it expands our understanding of the political transition and the social changes it triggered, the transforming perceptions of gender roles and especially masculinity. The spaces of “in betweenness” and contact zones, be them geographical, interethnic or communicative, (im)mobility and transmedial encounters of Eastern European subjectivity are recurring figures of both cinematic representations and their theoretical analyses. In-depth and transcultural in their nature, the investigations of this volume are informed by political, social and cultural history, genre, gender and spatial theory, cultural studies, sociology and political science and, of equal importance, the rich personal experience of our authors who witnessed many of the discussed phenomena in “close-up “.

East, West and Centre Reframing post-1989 European Cinema 2017-02 | Book chapter, 2017

The NCR (New Romanian Cinema) depicts many stories revealing some of the somber results of the exodus of a population coming from a ‘marginal space’ of Europe, a nation that woke up from the communist nightmare confused about its identity, living a permanent ‘frontier situation’ and ‘still in the search of the way ahead’ (Boia 2001: 12–13, 27). Twenty-five years after the fall of communism, Romanian villages are depopulated. The locals, once not even allowed to hold a passport, are now leaving the country at an alarming and increasing rate. The often tragic results of this exodus are nevertheless profound, with dramatic long-term consequences. Thousands of children are left without proper supervision or education. The family, once at the center of a patriarchal society, has been destroyed in the desperate rush of parents towards the West. A good number of their children will later become criminals, closing a vicious circle. This is the dramatic resort of NCR film productions such as Eu când vreau să fluier, fluier/When I want to whistle, I whistle (Florin Șerban, 2010, Romania/Sweden/Germany) and the philosophy behindPeriferic/Outbound (Bogdan George Apetri, 2011, Romania), the film that closes stylistically the first decade of New Romanian Cinema. This book chapter, authored by dr. Lucian Georgescu, is part of the East, West and Centre EUP volume - where the world’s leading scholars in the field assemble to consider the ways in which notions such as East and West, national and transnational, central and marginal are being rethought and reframed in contemporary European cinema. Assessing the state of post-1989 European cinema, from (co)production and reception trends to filmic depictions of migration patterns, economic transformations and socio-political debates over the past and the present, they address increasingly intertwined cinema industries that are both central (France, Germany) and marginal (Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania) in Europe. This is a ground-breaking and essential read, not just for students and scholars in Film and Media Studies, but also for those interested in wider European Studies as well.

East / West: The Scholarly Journal for History and Culture. Vol. 16-17, p. 447-459, 2013

The analysis of 20 feature films (1994-2007) identified three major representational strategies of post-communist East Central Europe, based on the orientalising “Eastern Europe” concept (Wolff, 1994): (1) subordinative, (2) exotic, and (3) gothic. However, three of the films studied (all of them can be assigned to art house cinema category) completely reject stereotypes of exotic, erotic and backward “Eastern Europe”, utilising a more (4) neutral mode of representation.

Transnational Cinemas, 2014

This collection of 13 well-argued essays has developed from the research project Cinematic Cartographies of European History 1945-2000, funded by the Academy of Finland (2009-2013). The common denominator of these essays is that they are all addressing how matters of 'religious and national identity, migration, transnationalism, and cultural and psychic frontiers mark eleven nations in the European ambit' (Foreword: ix) by looking at European cinema as a geopolitical medium and a framing device: cinema shapes, challenges or alters our collective imagination by displaying or leaving out particular images and, thus, plays a prominent role in the 'dialectics of cognitive mapping' (Jameson 1992). The films studied in this volume are illustrative examples of mostly European cinema focusing on themes of borders, immigration, inclusion and exclusion. They are all situated in the post-WWII era, post-Wende or post-9/11. The authors predominantly discuss the selected films as either addressing the 'geopolitics of locales or, to the contrary, they are seen skittering away from them. In both instances the spectator has the task of sorting through the relations they establish between their politics and their aesthetics' (xi). Next to a Foreword by film scholar Tom Conley and a thorough introduction by the editors, the volume is divided into four thematic parts, each of which contains three or four contextually aligned chapters by individual authors. The first part focuses on 'Worlds divided by the Iron Curtain' (17-113) and presents four chapters: on spatiality and history in Wim Wender's film Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987); on representations of the German-American cultural frontier in the films of the New German Cinema; a study of the collapse of socialist ideology in Peter Kahane's GDR-film The Architects (Die Architekten, 1990); and on the filmic discourse of the Cold War in the two 1950s American films, Guilty of Treason (Felix E. Feist, 1950) and Red Planet Mars (Harry Horner, 1952), which can both be seen as representatives of Hollywood's anti-communist Red Scare movies. The second part of the book discusses 'Alternative Locations' (113-175) in three chapters, which examine: representations of Europeanness, or the possible development of a European identity in the films of Aki Kaurismäki; the 'pop-geographical' borders of London and the relationship between popular culture and urbanity; and linguistic and cinematic frontiers as depicted in French banlieue and beur cinema, especially within the film L'Esquive (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2004). Amongst other findings, the chapters demonstrate cinema's implicit relationship with cartography, where maps-or cinematic imagery functioning as cognitive maps-are used as narrative devices. 'Borders crossed, Borders within' (175-235) is the title of the third part of the volume. The three chapters, respectively, explore the meaning of borders and border-crossings in Fatih Akin's intercultural films, the filmic representation of girlhood in Swedish youth films (in particular the social borders to be crossed by immigrant girls), and the family as an internal border-construct in the Greek film Dogtooth (Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009). The three chapters of the fourth and final part of the collection, 'Post-Colonial Borders and Cultural Frontiers' (235-305), investigate representations of post-colonialism and resulting cultural borders in selected national cinemas: analyses of the gendered nature of the Northern Irish conflict and its portrayal in the two films Some Mother's Son (Terry George, 1996) and Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008); the role of the film El Dorado (Carlos Saura, 1988) in Spain's post-Franco reconnection with Latin America; and the function of comedy and horror film genres in commenting on the British Empire through British film and TV productions from the 1960s to the late 1980s. The range of the presented case studies in Frontiers of Screen History is refreshing, contextually coherent and for the most part persuasive, despite the fact that some of the individual authors' conclusions are not entirely new to professionals in film studies: for example that arguably the most influential cinematic depiction of Berlin and the Wall in Wings of Desire directed by Wenders at the very end of the Cold War era not merely reflects political changes but participated in creating the Book Reviews 537

Postsocialist Mobilities. Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 2021

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2014

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2015