Checkpoint Karlovy Vary 2014 (Sight & Sound)

Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies, 2020

The cinema of the Balkans has a rich history of creativity, having contributed to world cinema with a fair number of masterpieces, as well as with significant national film movements and trends. Directors such as Dušan Makavejev, Yilmaz Güney, Lucian Pintilie, Emir Kusturica, Theo Angelopoulos, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Cristian Mungiu, and Yorgos Lanthimos are auteurs of international stature, known much beyond the cinephile cycles. At the same time, the Yugoslav Black Wave, the Zagreb School of Animation, the Romanian New Wave and the Greek Weird Wave have created an artistic and cultural legacy that constitutes an indisputable point of reference for its achievements. This cinematic tradition remains vibrant today by a new generation of filmmakers who, responding to the global developments of the film industry, are making films in a framework of regional and international cooperation. Following the existing scholarship in cultural, historical and film studies, editors Lydia Papadimitriou and Ana Grgić, present, through a collection of thirteen essays, an examination of the latest developments in Balkan cinema, putting special emphasis on transnational collaborations. Taking as a starting point 2008, the year of the global economic crisis, the assigned texts cover all national cinemas of the region in individual chapters. Balkan cinema is approached with a unified geographic scope, strengthening thus its existence as 'an entity of clearly discernible thematic and stylistic affinities' (Iordanova, 2006: 3). Most importantly, the collective volume enriches Balkan cinema's study by focusing on film industry activities and highlighting sociοpolitical contexts. It is worth noting that some of the cinemas examined in the book (i.e. those from Montenegro, North Macedonia or Kosovo) are discussed for the first time in English literature.

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.

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.

Film Quarterly

Since 1993, Thessaloniki International Film Festival has been home to the Balkan Survey program, showcasing new films from the region as well as presenting retrospectives of the work of significant Balkan film directors. Now in its 24th edition, the Balkan Survey offered a survey of new and exciting films from the region, and also included a special tribute on film adaptations. This special tribute, “From Words to Images: Balkan Literature and Cinema,” presented, both new and old, important and ground-breaking works from the archival collections and film heritages of each nation. This selection of landmark works from Balkan cinema comes at a mature moment when the Balkan Survey has almost completed a generation of screenings, now celebrating the best of Balkan cinema through the tribute to film adaptations. However, access to archival films in the Balkans still remains a challenge. The lack of formal cooperation and infrastructure in the region has a detrimental effect on the preser...

2017

Cultural Studies Approaches in the Study of Eastern European Cinema represents the materialization of a moment that started in 2014 with the 12th conference of the European Society for the Study of English/ESSE, which took place in Slovakia. As the editor, Andrea Virginás, participated in a panel named “The use of Cultural Studies Approaches in the Study of Eastern European Cinema”, she was suggested the idea of a possible volume on that topic. Hence, the book under review is a collection of 12 case studies of post-1989 national cinemas such as Croatian, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Slovakian, Slovenian and Romanian. The Eastern European film and cinema are generally subsumed within a postcolonial reading of the New Wave Cinema. Using this postcolonial framework the authors rethink national cinematic canon and present the various aspects of the ”spatial”, the ”bodily” and the ”memory turn” as represented on screen. The articles work on a double concern; on the one hand, they follow t...

This thesis investigates famous Balkan films that explore the post-communist narrative while reflecting on certain issues, such as violence and war in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the emigration and identity crisis in Bulgaria, and the overall consequences of dismantling the oppressive communist regimes in the Balkans.

To cite this article: Ewa Mazierska (2010) Eastern European cinema: old and new approaches, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 1:1, 5-16

Postsocialist Mobilities. Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 2021

Thomas Elsaesser pointed out in his seminal book European Cinema / Face to face with Hollywood (2005) that in the post-national period “Films’ attention to recognizable geographical places and stereotypical historical periods” begun to “echo Hollywood’s ability to produce ‘open’ texts that speak to a diversity of public, while broadly adhering to the format of classical narrative.” (p. 82) No matter how much this tendency had appeared in the past in the cinemas of the Balkans, not so rarely also in the period of “national” cinemas under communism, we have to deal today with small cinemas, which in most part confirm just mentioned hypotheses. This holds true in the case of many feature films, which deconstruct the past, but it could be proven in an increasing number of feature films, which make use of genre codes or simply try to work on globalized topics. However, at the same time, the location of the Balkans, its immeasurable cultural diversity, reach and in many respects baffling violent history remains to be a ground for some singular visualisations and dramatization in films by younger generations of film makers. On the other hand the “language” of visual media interferes into the formation of local cultures. Furthermore, digital technologies, which work not only in favour of democratisation and accessibility of contemporary visual media, are modifying perceptions and modes of appropriating cultural traditions. In such a framework aesthetics become interlaced with the social context and political statements in the cinema. Therefore aesthetics cannot be so transparently formulated as they could have been in times, when they made use of metaphors and “hidden” messages. Small cinemas of the Balkans nevertheless enter the world cinema as rather “readable” to global audiences and especially to those, who attend many film festivals. Keywords: film, socialism, post-communism, world cinema, nationalism