Anna Estera Mrozewicz | Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (original) (raw)

Journal articles by Anna Estera Mrozewicz

Nordicom Review 41 (Special Issue 1), 2020

This article examines the Norwegian climate fiction television series Okkupert [Occupied] (2015-)... more This article examines the Norwegian climate fiction television series Okkupert [Occupied] (2015-), focusing on the ways in which it reveals the complicity of Nordic subjects in an ecological dystopia. I argue that in illuminating this complicity, the series reimagines the Norwegian national self-conception rooted in a discourse of Norway's exceptionalist relation to nature. I show how Norway's green (self-)image is expressed through what I call "white ecology"-an aesthetics of whiteness encoded in neoromantic mountainous winter landscapes widely associated with the North, but also in the figure of the Norwegian white male polar explorer. I argue in this article that Occupied challenges this white-ecological masculine discourse through "dark ecology" (Morton, 2007), embodied by Russia and expressed by the avoidance of spectacular landscape aesthetics as well as by the strategy of "enmeshment", facilitated by the medium of televisual long-form storytelling and the eco-noir aesthetics.

Body and Place. Images of Contemporary Russia in Polish and Swedish Documentary Films ... more Body and Place. Images of Contemporary Russia in Polish and Swedish Documentary Films

The article provides a comparative analysis of images of Russia in contemporary Polish and Swedish documentary films. In both countries, representations of Russia have deeply-rooted political and historical connotations. Over the last decade, there has been a visible shift in Poland towards new ways of talking about Russia in documentaries, largely as a result of a younger generation of artists taking up the subject. Is a similar transformation visible in the work of Swedish documentary filmmakers? In an effort to answer this question, the author of the article points to similarities and differences in the Swedish and Polish documentary films about Russia, and in doing so, moves beyond divisions along national and generational lines.

Mini-przewodnik po filmowej Kopenhadze.

The article investigates the ways in which Pirjo Honkasalo's documentary The 3 Rooms of Melanchol... more The article investigates the ways in which Pirjo Honkasalo's documentary The 3 Rooms of Melancholia (2004), examining the impact of the Russian-Chechen war on children, engenders a transnational audience through cinematic qualities, and most importantly through embodiment, producing a strongly affective resonance in the spectator. I argue that through a strategically affective approach to transnationality, the documentary establishes what I call a transnational shared space, shaped by a complex dialectics of sharing and non-sharing. My argument revolves around the concept of cinema as a shared space, referring to films that deliberately 'surround' the viewer rather than maintain a distance. As the analysis shows, Honkasalo's documentary pushes the spectator to reflect critically on transnationality and reconsider mass media-created memory of the military conflict. The article addresses issues underlying the film's ethical quest, such as whether this shared space involves both western (Catholic) and non-western (Orthodox and Muslim) audiences, and what the limits are of transnationalism in documentary film.

The article offers a discussion of Sofi Oksanen's novel 'Purge', focusing on the book's strategy ... more The article offers a discussion of Sofi Oksanen's novel 'Purge', focusing on the book's strategy of evoking stereotypical narratives about Eastern Europe, such as the (postcommunist) fallen woman and (Russian) return home narratives, as well as related intertexts, primarily Lukas Moodysson's film 'Lilya 4-ever'. I argue that Oksanen constructs the plot around clichés in order to challenge them in a subversive fashion, first and foremost, in the name of recuperating the notion of home. Related to locality and the feeling of being at-home, where the wholeness of the (national) subject is possible, 'home' is staged as an alternative to stereotypes, associated with transnational travel and the apparatus of colonization. A significant counter-narrative embedded in the novel – and hitherto rarely discussed – is the exilic perspective with its idealization of the lost and imagined home(land). In 'Purge', this is mediated through the main character's postmemory. By means of a postexilic narrative, home is reconfigured as a third space – neither fully ideal and (ethnically) pure nor adhering to the aforementioned stereotypical narratives. The positive valorisation of home, despised by some critics as simplistic and conservative, does not prevent movement and dislocation from being included in the new experience of home(land) emerging from the post-Soviet condition.

The article argues that by means of qualities intrinsic to the medium of the photobook, the renow... more The article argues that by means of qualities intrinsic to the medium of the photobook, the renowned Danish photographer Krass Clement (b. 1946) constructs a complex narration, which, on the one hand, seeks meta-reflection on the relationships between photography, memory, and the perception of reality, and, on the other, explores the post-GDR condition of Berlin and Germany. "Venten på i går. Auf Gestern warten" (Danish and German for “Waiting for yesterday”) includes both old and contemporary images, in both colour and black-and-white, but the book is neither (n)ostalgic nor documentary. Rather, I insist that Clement’s project epitomizes memory work and that its guiding principle can be understood through Rosalind Krauss’ concept of the grid. The grid is here inseparable from photography’s relation to memory and reality. I explore how the dialectics between remembering and forgetting, inherent to photography, is enacted by the book, and how it foregrounds the opaqueness rather than the transparency of the medium and perception. I also present how the universe constructed by Clement unfolds within the three temporal dimensions suggested in the title of the book: a present (post-ideological) suspension between the future and the past.

RETURNING TO UNFAMILIAR PLACES. PLACE AND POSTMEMORY IN THE WORKS OF JACOB DAMMAS, JACOB KOFLER, ... more RETURNING TO UNFAMILIAR PLACES. PLACE AND POSTMEMORY IN THE WORKS OF JACOB DAMMAS, JACOB KOFLER, AND MAJA MAGDALENA SWIDERSKA
The emigration of three thousand Polish-Jewish citizens to Denmark as a result of the events in March 1968 in Poland has only recently attracted attention from filmmakers and writers in Denmark. Two documentary films and a novel, created within a relatively short period of time, deal with the topic: Jacob Kofler’s "Statsløs" (Stateless), 2004, Jacob Dammas’ "Kredens" (Dresser), 2007, and Maja Magdalena Swiderska’s "The Border Breaking Bunch", 2008. The authors are all children of refugees and represent second generation in relation to the cultural trauma of exile. The article examines aesthetic approaches developed by the authors as they (re)tell personal stories, which are mediated through various strategies of postmemory (Hirsch 1997). Postmemory is distinguished from memory by a non-indexical relation to the past and a generational distance, and from history by a highly personal approach. However, it is not addressed here as a psychological category. On the contrary, I argue that postmemory can be viewed as both an analytical and a narrative and aesthetic tool. Questions of place and place-related identity are relevant and inseparable from the three authors’ creative reimaginings of the cultural and personal trauma. Thus, the article focuses on the concepts of place and postmemory, and their interdependencies in the analysed works. Close readings are com- bined with theoretical reflection, which allows the objects and theories to illuminate each other.

In Scandinavian crime fiction, an implicit dynamics is noticeable between the adjacent worlds: Sc... more In Scandinavian crime fiction, an implicit dynamics is noticeable between the adjacent worlds: Scandinavia and ‘Eastern Europe’. The author of the article approaches their relation using the two interrelated concepts of border and boundary (Casey, 2011). While borders are fixed and established by conventional agreements, boundaries are natural, perforated, and undermine the impenetra- bility of the border. Accordingly, two main strands are discernible within the representations of ‘Eastern Europe’ in Scandinavian crime fiction: a ‘border perspective’ and a ‘boundary perspective’. The first strand is rooted in the old world with pronounced nation- al divisions, while the other anticipates a globalised world, involv- ing a dynamic view of the relation between the neighbours across the Baltic. As the article attempts to demonstrate, the border/bound- ary distinction can be fruitfully applied to the analysis of the Scan- dinavian discourse on ‘Eastern Europe’ with all its implications.

The article discusses three feature films produced in Denmark and Sweden in the 1990s: Kajs fødse... more The article discusses three feature films produced in Denmark and Sweden in the 1990s: Kajs fødselsdag/The Birthday Trip (Scherfig, 1990), Torsk på Tallinn/Screwed in Tallinn (Alfredson, 1999) and You Can’t Eat Fishing (Windfeld, 1999). All of them, applying various genre conventions, take up the subject of encounters between Scandinavians and ‘East Europeans’ from neighbouring countries. The point of departure for the analysis is the notion of the ‘periphery’, understood as a culturally constructed and relative concept. As the analysis demonstrates, the binary centre/periphery relation is challenged in the films through an active reflection on their own cultures. A recurring motif is the critique of the Scandinavian welfare state and its consequences for the individual, which can be perceived as a particularly Scandinavian feature of the films that highlight neighbouring ex-communist countries.

UNDERWATER, COSMIC, SPIRITUAL. RUSSIAN CITIES AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN SCANDINAVIAN DOCUMENTARIES... more UNDERWATER, COSMIC, SPIRITUAL. RUSSIAN CITIES AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN SCANDINAVIAN DOCUMENTARIES
The article discusses three documentaries made since 2000 by Scandinavian filmmakers: the Finnish director Marja Pensala’s The Eclipse of the Soul (2000) and two films by Danish authors: Boris Bertram’s Tankograd (2010) and Ada Bligaard Søby’s The Naked of Saint Petersburg (2010). All the films are portraits of Russian cities and their residents. In my study, I draw on concepts such as the “Russian soul”, private/public and bytie (the spiritual being)/byt (the daily grind), which, as I argue, are important aspects of all three films, and at the same time, useful tools for their analysis. Common to these documentaries is the fact that the authors direct their attention to the asymmetrical relation between the state’s position of power and its largely powerless citizens. The constitutive element of a city as such – being a public space, i.e. a space to which all people should have equal access and rights – appears largely distorted. As a consequence, the residents escape from their stark reality to create alternative, imaginary spaces – be it a lost paradise, like the underwater city of Mologa in Pensala’s film, a cosmic heterotopia, like the space of art in Bertram’s Tankograd, or a spiritual universe, like in Søby’s short documentary. In all these films, the directors’ point of reference – their cultural perspective – is emphasized as a filter, through which the Russian reality is perceived.

WATER AGAINST THE WALL OR EXIT THROUGH A CONCRETE WINDOW: ON SOME GRAFFITI OF BANKSY The paper di... more WATER AGAINST THE WALL OR EXIT THROUGH A CONCRETE WINDOW: ON SOME GRAFFITI OF BANKSY
The paper discusses a series of five graffiti pieces made in 2005 on the Israeli-Palestinian separation barrier by the English street artist Banksy. Location is here key to the understanding of the messages. The departure point for my analyses is, on the one hand, the meaning connoted with the ‘wall,’ the aim of which is to separate two peoples in a conflict, and, on the other, the representations of landscapes, often with water, painted by Banksy in most of the works. To answer what symbolic role landscape plays in the conflict-ridden area, I look at some other art works, made by contemporary Israeli artists for whom place, landscape and the related question of identity and belonging seem to play a central role. Painted by Banksy on the Palestinian side, the utopian, Eden-like sights, which ‘make holes’ in the concrete barrier, undermine, in an ironic fashion, the hierarchical discourse of power relations
constructed by the ‘opposite’ side, and give ‘water’ to the evicted.

THE VOICE OF JOAN. ON PARAGONE OF THE ARTS IN CARL TH. DREYER’S "The Passion of Joan of Arc" The... more THE VOICE OF JOAN. ON PARAGONE OF THE ARTS IN CARL TH. DREYER’S "The Passion of Joan of Arc"
The last mute film in Carl Th. Dreyer’s oeuvre, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), is often referred to as a film “made of close-ups” and purely cinematic. Dreyer used to stress himself that close-up was the specific cinematic device that asserted film’s position as autonomous art. He especially insisted on film’s independence from theatre. Thus, it might sound quite surprising that in an interview from 1965, Dreyer draws attention to the underestimated, according to him, role of theatre in Joan of Arc. In my article I focus on the theatricality in Dreyer’s film, arguing that “the theatrical” and “the cinematic” are two strategies used to present two different worlds of ideas and beliefs: that of the judges, clergymen and inquisitors, which at the same time is the world of males, and that of Joan, an illiterate woman who strives alone for her idea against a group of powerful men. What we observe in the film is a growing presence of ‘the cinematic’, the strategy allied with Joan, who in the final scene triumphs over the judges, just like cinema triumphs over theatricality.

Morten Søndergaard is one of the best known Danish poets who made their debut in the nineties. Th... more Morten Søndergaard is one of the best known Danish poets who made their debut in the nineties. The visual arts as well as the ten- sion between language and the reality to which words are supposed to refer play a remarkable role in the poet’s oeuvre. The article investigates the problem of poetic language in an encounter with a sculpture. The first part introduces some issues of ekphrasis, which serve as a point of departure for an analysis of Søndergaard’s poem. The aim of the analysis is an examination of a paradox central to the meaning of the poem: while undermining the possibility of verbal representation, the poem introduces various strategies attempting to imitate sculpture. The poet’s struggle with language becomes simultaneously the reader’s, who faces the question of how to “find our way through what separates words from what is both without a name and more than a name: a sculpture.”

Book chapters by Anna Estera Mrozewicz

Od Ibsena do Aho: Filmowe adaptacje literatury skandynawskiej, red. Lech Sokół, Tadeusz Szczepański

Zobaczyć siebie. Polski film dokumentalny przełomu wieków, red. Mikołaj Jazdon, Katarzyna Mąka-Malatyńska

Éfficacité/Efficacity: Word and Image Interactions, ed. Jan Baetens, Catriona MacLeod & Véronique Plesch

Books by Anna Estera Mrozewicz

Beyond Eastern Noir. Reimagining Russia and Eastern Europe in Nordic Cinemas, 2018

Addressing representations of Russia and neighbouring Eastern Europe in post-1989 Nordic cinemas,... more Addressing representations of Russia and neighbouring Eastern Europe in post-1989 Nordic cinemas, this book investigates their hitherto overlooked transnational dimension. Departing from the dark stereotypes that characterise much of ‘Eastern noir’, the book presents Russia and Eastern Europe as imagined spaces depicted with a surprisingly rich, but previously neglected cinematic diversity. Cross-disciplinary in its approach, and utilising in-depth case studies of feature films, documentaries and television dramas, such as Lilya 4-ever, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence and Occupied, the book presents a variety of perspectives on Russia and Eastern Europe found in the Nordic audiovisual imagination and considers how increasingly transnational affinities have led to a reimagining of Norden’s eastern neighbours in contemporary Nordic films.

Nordicom Review 41 (Special Issue 1), 2020

Body and Place. Images of Contemporary Russia in Polish and Swedish Documentary Films ... more Body and Place. Images of Contemporary Russia in Polish and Swedish Documentary Films

Mini-przewodnik po filmowej Kopenhadze.

Od Ibsena do Aho: Filmowe adaptacje literatury skandynawskiej, red. Lech Sokół, Tadeusz Szczepański

Zobaczyć siebie. Polski film dokumentalny przełomu wieków, red. Mikołaj Jazdon, Katarzyna Mąka-Malatyńska

Éfficacité/Efficacity: Word and Image Interactions, ed. Jan Baetens, Catriona MacLeod & Véronique Plesch

Beyond Eastern Noir. Reimagining Russia and Eastern Europe in Nordic Cinemas, 2018

Audiowizualne widma Wschodu, filmowe cienie Rosji. Recenzja książki Anny Estery Mrozewicz pt. Beyond Eastern Noir: Reimagining Russia and Eastern Europe in Nordic Cinemas, 2019

Panoptikum nr 20 (27) 2018 Varia Rynek książek akademickich poświęconych kinematografii krajów sk... more Panoptikum nr 20 (27) 2018 Varia Rynek książek akademickich poświęconych kinematografii krajów skandynawskich wciąż charakteryzuje się niedostatkiem wydawniczym i sporą liczbą białych plam oraz czarnych dziur, które pokornie oczekują na odkrycie i opisanie. Tym większą radość sprawi badaczom i miłośnikom kultury skandynawskiej fakt, że nakładem prestiżowej oficyny Edinburgh University Press ukazała się w ubiegłym roku anglojęzyczna książka naszej rodzimej badaczki, Beyond Eastern Noir: Reimagining Russia and Eastern Europe in Nordic Cinemas. Monografia dr hab. Anny Estery Mrozewicz z Uniwersytetu Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu przybliża czytelnikom tematy nieczęsto analizowane kompleksowo. Wśród nich znajdują się między innymi strategie ukazywania w kinie nordyckim osób z krajów tak zwanego bloku wschodniego, analizy wybranych lęków społecznych Skandynawów, a także przykłady reinterpretacji różnych sposobów postrzegania Rosji przez twórców przekazów audiowizualnych z północnych krańców Euro-py. Autorka skupia się w największym stopniu na filmach wyprodukowanych w Danii, Norwegii, Szwecji i Finlandii, zaś w swoich interpretacjach aż 113 tekstów kultury nie ogranicza się jedynie do dzieł kinowych, lecz sięga również po filmy dokumentalne oraz produkcje telewizyjne.

Beyond Eastern Noir

This chapter focuses on the films whose plots are set in the period following the break-up of the... more This chapter focuses on the films whose plots are set in the period following the break-up of the Soviet Union and in which the Baltic Sea undergoes symbolic transformation from a metaphor of liminal space into a space which links the Nordic peripheries of Europe with neighbours on the opposite shores. Rather than being positioned as small nations facing a large and dangerous neighbour, the small Nordic countries now find themselves among equally small neighbours that have (re)emerged in the northern consciousness after the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc. In these pictures (such as Aki Kaurismäki’s Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana), Baltic is an expanse of ambivalence, reflecting both fear of and fascination with the newly opened borders and increasing globalisation. Plots structured on the cognitive binary of centre/periphery are examined as baselines for narratives showing various forms of distant neighbourhood. Here, the Nordic subjects are often ousted from the centre positi...

The article offers a discussion of Sofi Oksanen’s novel Purge, focusing on the book’s strategy of... more The article offers a discussion of Sofi Oksanen’s novel Purge, focusing on the book’s strategy of evoking stereotypical narratives about Eastern Europe, such as the (postcommunist) fallen woman and (Russian) return home narratives, as well as related intertexts, primarily Lukas Moodysson’s film Lilya 4-ever. I argue that Oksanen constructs the plot around clichés in order to challenge them in a subversive fashion, first and foremost, in the name of recuperating the notion of Home. Related to locality and the feeling of being at-home, where the wholeness of the (national) subject is possible, ‘home’ is staged as an alternative to stereotypes, associated with transnational travel and the apparatus of colonization. A significant counter-narrative embedded in the novel – and hitherto rarely discussed – is the exilic perspective with its idealization of the lost and imagined home(land). In Purge, this is mediated through the main character’s postmemory. By means of a postexilic narrative...

In Scandinavian crime fiction, an implicit dynamics is noticeable between the adjacent worlds: Sc... more In Scandinavian crime fiction, an implicit dynamics is noticeable between the adjacent worlds: Scandinavia and ‘Eastern Europe’. The author of the article approaches their relation using the two interrelated concepts of border and boundary (Casey, 2011). While borders are fixed and established by conventional agreements, boundaries are natural, perforated, and undermine the impenetrability of the border. Accordingly, two main strands are discernible within the representations of ‘Eastern Europe’ in Scandinavian crime fiction: a ‘border perspective’ and a ‘boundary perspective’. The first strand is rooted in the old world with pronounced nation al divisions, while the other anticipates a globalised world, involving a dynamic view of the relation between the neighbours across the Baltic. As the article attempts to demonstrate, the border/boundary distinction can be fruitfully applied to the analysis of the Scandinavian discourse on ‘Eastern Europe’ with all its implications.

Gräns (Border) (2018) is an adaptation of a short story by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist (... more Gräns (Border) (2018) is an adaptation of a short story by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist (2006). The film retains large parts of the literary plot as well as its focalization through the troll-protagonist Tina/Reva. At the same time, Border introduces significant modifications. I argue that by expanding the plot to include a number of new elements and amplifying Lindqvist’s strategy of ‘a shimmering movement’, including the experience of transness and identity as change, Abbasi’s film disrupts more forcefully our ideas about the human/nonhuman divide, sex and gender dualism, aesthetics, ethics and other normative regimes regulating our social and human lives. By examining the film as a post-celluloid adaptation, I show how Border incorporates Lindqvist’s critique of technology while also embracing the imaginative and affective possibilities of digital cinema to interrogate the responsibilities of humanity from a posthumanist perspective.

The article discusses three documentaries made since 2000 by Scandinavian filmmakers: the Finnish... more The article discusses three documentaries made since 2000 by Scandinavian filmmakers: the Finnish director Marja Pensala’s The Eclipse of the Soul (2000) and two films by Danish authors: Boris Bertram’s Tankograd (2010) and Ada Bligaard Soby’s The Naked of Saint Petersburg (2010). All the films are portraits of Russian cities and their residents. In my study, I draw on concepts such as the “Russian soul”, private/public and bytie (the spiritual being)/byt (the daily grind), which, as I argue, are important aspects of all three films, and at the same time, useful tools for their analysis. Common to these documentaries is the fact that the authors direct their attention to the asymmetrical relation between the state’s position of power and its largely powerless citizens. The constitutive element of a city as such – being a public space, i.e. a space to which all people should have equal access and rights – appears largely distorted. As a consequence, the residents escape from their st...

Water on the wall or exit through the concrete window. On some graffiti of Banksy The paper discu... more Water on the wall or exit through the concrete window. On some graffiti of Banksy The paper discusses a series of five graffiti pieces made in 2005 on the Israeli-Palestinian separation barrier by the English street artist Banksy. Location is here key to the understanding of the messages. The departure point for my analyses is, on the one hand, the meaning connoted with the ‘wall,’ the aim of which is to separate two peoples in a conflict, and, on the other, the representations of landscapes, often with water, painted by Banksy in most of the works. To answer what symbolic role landscape plays in the conflict-ridden area, I look at some other art works, made by contemporary Israeli artists for whom place, landscape and the related question of identity and belonging seem to play a central role. Painted by Banksy on the Palestinian side, the utopian, Eden-like sights, which ‘make holes’ in the concrete barrier, undermine, in an ironic fashion, the hierarchical discourse of power relat...

Beyond Eastern Noir

Whereas Eastern noir narratives reproduce the ‘iron’ border and operate by means of clear-cut nat... more Whereas Eastern noir narratives reproduce the ‘iron’ border and operate by means of clear-cut national identities, Chapter 2 reconsiders the hard border promulgated by the master narrative of the Cold War. Devoted to a set of films which address historical themes (late 20th-century and 21st-century productions looking back to the Cold War and earlier periods), the chapter focuses on spies and double agents, who by default operate by navigating across borders. The films analysed do not utilise typical spy film formulas and their protagonists are nowhere near the affirmative James Bondian narrative. The films re-examine a range of historical issues which during the Cold War qualified as inconvenient (and were therefore censored), often relating to the complicated past of the border regions (such as Finnmark) and involvement of Nordic citizens on the wrong side of the global conflict. Using the concept of infiltration, the analysis follows the spies that embody the discourses of bounda...

Beyond Eastern Noir

The first chapter is concerned with the cinematic narratives of Eastern noir, which adopt a borde... more The first chapter is concerned with the cinematic narratives of Eastern noir, which adopt a border discourse and imagine Russia (and thereby often Eastern Europe) as a crime scene. In these crime narratives, Russia is essentialised as a crime scene, where the traces of crime comprise evidence of an omnipresent evil emanating from the centre of power. The chapter argues moreover that whereas Russia serves as the ‘great Other’, in whose gaze the small nations from the Nordic region are controlled and overseen, Eastern Europeans function merely as unfamiliar, rather than threatening, ‘others’. By juxtaposing diversity of genres, including popular Nordic action films (Orion’s Belt and Born American), two documentaries and a television series (Occupied), the chapter shows that the hegemonic Eastern noir narrative, although persistent in mainstream cinema, functions across various modes of cinematic expression. The analyses corroborate the fact that border discourse affords the viewers a ...

Folia Scandinavica Posnaniensia, 2016

The article offers a discussion of Sofi Oksanen’s novel Purge, focusing on the book’s strategy of... more The article offers a discussion of Sofi Oksanen’s novel Purge, focusing on the book’s strategy of evoking stereotypical narratives about Eastern Europe, such as the (postcommunist) fallen woman and (Russian) return home narratives, as well as related intertexts, primarily Lukas Moodysson’s film Lilya 4-ever. I argue that Oksanen constructs the plot around clichés in order to challenge them in a subversive fashion, first and foremost, in the name of recuperating the notion of Home. Related to locality and the feeling of being at-home, where the wholeness of the (national) subject is possible, ‘home’ is staged as an alternative to stereotypes, associated with transnational travel and the apparatus of colonization. A significant counter-narrative embedded in the novel - and hitherto rarely discussed - is the exilic perspective with its idealization of the lost and imagined home(land). In Purge, this is mediated through the main character’s postmemory. By means of a postexilic narrative...

Beyond Eastern Noir

While Chapter 3 analyses how the Baltic morphs from a border to a boundary, Chapter 4 concentrate... more While Chapter 3 analyses how the Baltic morphs from a border to a boundary, Chapter 4 concentrates on the less illustrious aspects of neighbourhood and movement of commodities across the Baltic. In the first part, two Swedish films are discussed (Lilya 4-ever by Lukas Moodysson and Buy Bye Beauty by Pål Hollender), which stage the Baltic as a moral and economic border/boundary, delving into sex-tourism and sex trafficking. The analysis follows the discourse of guilt which these two pictures epitomise, arguing that the ostensible ‘admission of guilt’ is rooted in narcissism. The second part of the chapter explores the narratives of shame – an emotion often confused with guilt – in a transnational, Nordic/Russian context. Relying on ethical-philosophical and psychological conceptualisations of guilt and shame, the chapter seeks to demonstrate that narratives of shame allow limits of the ‘self’ to be questioned to a greater extent than guilt does. This is particularly palpable in The 3...