Eastern European Cinema Research Papers (original) (raw)

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- Eastern European Studies, Film Studies, Romanian Studies, Eastern European Cinema
- by Stefania Marghitu
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- Eastern European Studies, Russian Studies, Film Studies, Soviet History

Hukkunud Alpinisti hotell (Отель ‘У Погибшего Альпиниста’/The Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel; Kromanov Estonia 1979) was made at the height of the era of Soviet political stagnation in the late 1970s. It is a stylish screen adaptation of the novel of the same name written ten years earlier by the celebrated Russian sf authors Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii, who also scripted the screenplay. Hukkunud Alpinisti hotell was the first of their works to be filmed, closely followed by Сталкер (Stalker; Tarkovsky Russia 1979), based on their 1972 novel Пикник на обочине/Roadside Picnic. This article concentrates on two aspects of the film: its interesting combination of genres and intriguing interpretation of gendered representations. A certain sense of ‘queering’ prevails in relation to the film’s rather unconventional
approach to genre as well as its discourse on gender and sexuality. Our analysis is primarily concerned with the film, but also considers various units of its intertextual universe, such as
the novel and the different versions of the script.

- by Eva Näripea
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- Science Fiction, Science Fiction Film, Film Noir, Science Fiction and Fantasy

This chapter aims to offer a model with which to compare the historical character of the various nationalized cinemas of East-Central Europe. The example of Barrandov Studios in the Czech capital of Prague provides my case study. The chapter pays particular attention to the manner in which day-to-day creative activities were managed within a system that designated the state the sole official producer, and to organizational solutions that were introduced in an effort to strike a balance between centralized control and creative freedom. I also focus on the ways in which such a mode of production operated within the historical realities of this production community, and on how its activities responded to institutional interests. I begin by sketching what I call the “state-socialist mode of film production”--which comprises management hierarchies, the division of labor, and work practices--through the example of Czechoslovak cinema from 1945 to 1990, and the systemic variations that it exhibited to other film industries in the region. There follows a description of “dramaturgy”: a system of screenplay development and creative supervision that was typical of both the Czech and East German production systems, and which serves to highlight the revisionist dimensions of my model. A further three sections reveal some important aspects of the “production culture,” which is to say a set of lived realities as they were experienced by workers throughout the professional hierarchy. The combination of these two approaches--one organizational in perspective (top-down), the other cultural (bottom-up)--enables us to read official production documents against the grain and to show that they offer limited accounts of what actually took place. Consequently, this chapter is able to shed new light on how production communities “internalized and acted upon” regulatory environments and institutional interests.

- by Petr Szczepanik
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- Film History, Film Industries, Critical Production Studies, Czech Cinema

Dedicated to Věra Chytilová
The Czechoslovak New Wave and its Reception in Cuba. How did the Cuban spectator and film critic receive Czechoslovak cinema? In the study, The Czechoslovak New Wave, by Peter Hames, the author explains that it is clear that this was a film movement marked by the socio-political changes that took place in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s: "What is less easy to explain are the hostile or apathetic attitudes adopted by many Western ‘Marxists’ to the films produced? When Vláčil’s important precursor of the new wave, Holubice (The White Dove, 1960), was shown at the Venice Film Festival, it was condemned as a ‘nonpolitical fantasy.’ Luc Moullet condemned Nĕmec’s Démanty noci (Diamonds of the Night, 1964) for its reactionary aesthetics. Jean Luc Godard, one of the foremost critics of Czech film, interviewed Vĕra Chitylová in his Pravda (1969), and came up with the equation ‘Chitylová= Zanuck and Paramount.’ He criticised her for her incorrect attitude, and commented that she spoke ‘like Arthur Penn and Antonioni." In Cuba, film critics had a different perception from Godard’s. In the mid-1960s a substantial number of Cuban articles praised these films and their directors. Some were dedicated to an analysis of the life and works of the filmmakers of the ‘milagro checoslovaco

- by Florentina Andreescu
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- Eastern European Studies, Feminist Theory, Democratization, Romanian Studies

From the Central and East-European small-market perspective, the recent boom in minority co-production marks a turning point away from the strategy of increasing the production values of Western-assisted local blockbusters toward the adoption of a more measured and pragmatic approach that prioritises internationally appealing directors and themes, ensures lucrative production service commissions and sustains reciprocity ties. This chapter addresses questions about the structural position minority co-production occupies within the Czech screen industry ecology and shows how local producers are the key agent in cementing that position. It starts by contrasting minority co-production with other international “production technologies” before reconstructing the cautionary discourse of producers on majority co-production. After providing a basic structural analysis of industry and policy, it switches to focus on the day-to-day collaborative processes being forged by local independent producers through an exploration of their strategic thinking and lived realities. As well as raising questions about the roles of knowledge transfer and symbolic capital accumulation, it investigates the new power hierarchies and barriers that have begun to emerge from these transnational production contexts.

- by Petr Szczepanik
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- Film Studies, Media Industries, Critical Production Studies, Czech Cinema
- by Yuliya Komska
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- Eastern European Studies, Cold War and Culture, Cultural Cold War, Cold War

Mónica Mendes História do Cinema Europeu, UAb 17/Abril/2016 1
A Evolução do Cinema Europeu desde o seu aparecimento até à I Guerra Mundial
By learning about the earliest technologies, and how their inventors were influenced by each other, we can gain a better understanding of the cinema of the past as well as the future (Ezra, 2004: 39),(1) leva-nos a conhecer e a melhor compreender porque a invenção do cinema é indubitavelmente atribuída a várias personalidades, tais como: Thomas Edison, George Eastman. Eastman, em 1884 inventou a bobine, posteriormente, as perfurações nas extremidades das películas, contribuindo para a precisão junto da objetiva.

The aim of the article is the interpretation of spatial systems which were created by Andrei Zvyagintsev in the film Elena. The analysis shows that the space allows recognizing not only the quality of the relationships existing between the characters but it also encodes and anticipates the fictional pattern of this work of art. The verbal layer seems to play a minor role, i.e. it supplements and modifies observations of the recipient who
uses the spatial code. The meaning is expressed in the juxtapositions of subsequent shots, functioning as assonances or dissonances, as well as in the inner montage of single units, revealing important elements of the film structure. The spatial systems which turn attention to the ambiguous nature of the reality constitute the dominant metaphors of the film, which — together with the play of the light and darkness — can be read
as signum of the disintegration of the contemporary world.

- by Terri Ginsberg and +1
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- Queer Studies, Avant-Garde Cinema, Film Studies, Film Theory
- by alina popescu
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- Eastern Europe, Soviet History, Romanian History, Romanian Studies

This collection of essays explores intermediality as a new perspective in the interpretation of the cinemas that have emerged after the collapse of the former Eastern Bloc. As an aesthetic based on a productive interaction of media and highlighting cinema’s relationship with the other arts, intermediality always implies a state of in-betweenness which is capable of registering tensions and ambivalences that go beyond the realm of media. The comparative analyses of films from Hungary, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Russia demonstrate that intermediality can be employed in this way as a form of introspection dealing with complex issues of art and society. Appearing in a variety of sensuous or intellectual modes, intermediality can become an effective poetic strategy to communicate how the cultures of the region are caught in-between East and West, past and present, emotional turmoil and more detached self-awareness. The diverse theoretical approaches that unravel this in-betweenness contribute to the understanding of intermedial phenomena in contemporary cinema as a whole.
Introduction here: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/media/resources/9781474435505_Introduction.pdf

- by Ágnes Pethő and +4
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- Intermediality, Intermediality In Cinema, Eastern European Cinema, Russian Cinema
- by gareth dale
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- European Cinema, Cinema, Eastern European Cinema, GDR
- by Mari Laaniste
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- Eastern European Cinema, Estonian Cinema, Identity, Estonian History
- by Jonathan Owen
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- Czech Cinema, Eastern European Cinema, Czech New Wave, Czech and Slovak Studies

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 “.

- by Hajnal Kiraly
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- Masculinity Studies, Postsocialism, Hungarian Cinema, Czech Cinema

a new approach to the work of film-maker Theo Angelopoulos

- by Vrasidas Karalis
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- European Cinema, Greek Cinema, Eastern European Cinema, Film Auteurs

Qui connaît en France l’existence d’une «Convention européenne du paysage», qui fait de celui-ci «une com- posante fondamentale du patrimoine culturel et naturel de l’Europe»? Aujourd’hui les paysages européens con- naissent des transformations accélérées du fait de la mondialisation.
Cet ouvrage permet de mieux comprendre les enjeux multiples (politiques, sociaux, économiques, écolo- giques, mais aussi culturels et artistiques) de cette évolution. C’est pour mieux les comprendre dans leurs spécificités et dans leurs interactions que ce volume réunit des spécialistes de plusieurs pays et de diverses disci- plines (droit, sciences politiques, sociologie, urbanisme, économie, histoire, géographie, philosophie, arts plas- tiques, cinéma, littérature...), offrant un très large panorama, abondamment illustré, des paysages européens et de leurs représentations.

- by Estelle Bayon
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- Landscape, Eastern European Cinema, Postcommunism, Bela Tarr

The book explores east-central European media industries (namely those of the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary) through the lived realities of producers as key initiators, facilitators, and cultural intermediaries. Based on a broad set of in-depth interviews, it looks closely at how their agency is circumscribed by the limited scale and peripheral positioning of the markets in which they operate, and how they struggle to come to terms with these constraints through their business strategies, creative thinking and professional self-perceptions.
Each of the seven chapters discusses a specific producer type and area of producer practice: independent producers circumscribed by the smallness and/or peripherality of their home markets; a prominent arthouse producer who managed to overcome the limits of the peripheral market; the ‘service producers’ working on large Western projects in Prague and Budapest, vitally dependent on financial incentives introduced by their national governments; the ‘minority co-production’ that serves national policymakers as a measure of internationalizing local producers and gaining more festival recognition; in-house producers of public service television, whose agency is limited by the broadcast organization; the regional operation of HBO Europe, which uses original local content production as a vehicle of its transnational corporate strategy; and finally, short-form online video production, which is an extremely diverse and volatile field, but promises dynamic growth in the era of mobile, ‘procrastination’ viewing. However diverse, all these cases illustrate how producers in east-central Europe are affected by and act upon the transformative forces of digitalization, globalization and Europeanization.

- by Petr Szczepanik
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- Global Media Studies, Postsocialism, Media Industries, Polish Film

Estudio sobre las relaciones entre la Nová Vlna, o Nueva Ola de cine Checoslovaco y la sociedad de la época, especialmente en las derivaciones que dieron paso a la Primavera de Praga. La intención es encontrar qué patrones sociológicos dan pie al nacimiento de este movimiento considerado dentro de los Nuevos Cines, y cómo estos se imbrican en los modos de construcción del discurso de los autores y autoras esenciales para comprender la Nová Vlna entre 1963 y 1969.

- by Luis E. Froiz Casal
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- Film Studies, European Cinema, Czech History, Film History

Starting from the assessment that the recent success of Romanian cinema should be considered in relationship with outstanding acting performances, the author analyzes their contribution through the grid of rhetorical figures. Analytical categories such as hyperbole and litotes serve for the classification of the main trends of Romanian acting techniques and compare the acting style of Lucian Pintilie`s cinema with the acting style in recent films signed by directors of the Romanian New Wave such as Cristian Mungiu, Cristi Puiu or Corneliu Porumboiu.

- by Dominique Nasta and +2
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- Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky, Eastern European Cinema, Romanian cinema
- by Constantin Parvulescu
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- Eastern European Studies, Film Studies, Polish Film, Polish Studies
- by Robert Burgoyne
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- Film Studies, Film Analysis, Documentary (Film Studies), Migration Studies

This essay explores the inner workings and power dynamics involved in story development in the history of Czech cinema. It focuses on the political history of screenplay development practices and formats, especially on the “Literary Screenplay”. This Soviet-inspired screenplay type was introduced to Eastern Europe in the late-Stalinist era to attract literary authors to write for the screen, to elevate the cultural status of the screenplay, and to facilitate pre-censorship. The primary means by which communist ideologues sought to reform screenwriting was the dramaturgy, organized in a complex hierarchy of dramaturgical institutions with the state or central dramaturgy at the top and “units” at the bottom. In the state-controlled system of production, the dramaturg or unit head supervising four dramaturgs was a close equivalent to a producer albeit without the usual financial, green-lighting, and marketing responsibilities, which were held by the state or by the Party and its representatives. The units oversaw story development, the selection of casts and crews, and, in some historical periods, shooting and post-production, and occasionally even distribution. This essay shows how uncovering the logics of institutionalized practices of collaborative creative work that took place under the influence of political forces can help us to make sense of the vast screenplay collections housed at Prague archives. The essay combines production studies and political history of the production system to reveal the differences between the production modes and the screenwriting practices of Hollywood and Europe, and between the Western and the Eastern halves of this continent. It is based on an analysis of 100 Czech screenplays from the 1920s to the1980s, and of records of their development, as well as on oral history and institutional history.

Na Barrandově se dnes natáčí víc zahraniční než domácí filmy, ale do roku 1990 tamní studio platilo za symbol a pomyslné centrum české kinematografie. Kniha, kterou držíte v rukou, je prvním pokusem o historii tohoto centra. Nezabývá se jen výjimečnými herci a režiséry, ale celým „světem filmu“, jeho organizací práce, vnitřním sociálním životem, nepsanými pravidly a konflikty s politickou mocí. Jak filmaři přemýšleli a tvořili v dobách, kdy si stát uzurpoval roli monopolního filmového výrobce a komunistická strana rozhodovala o kulturní hodnotě filmů i kariérách jejich tvůrců? Jak reagovali na nápad aparátčíků udělat z filmových studií továrnu, která bude vyrábět podle stejných plánů a norem jako těžký průmysl? Proč se komunistickému režimu nepodařilo nahradit filmové veterány novým typem proletářských „tvůrčích pracovníků“? Jaké změny v organizaci produkce umožnily obrovské mezinárodní úspěchy českého filmu a nástup nové vlny šedesátých let? Proč se na Barrandově dařilo vždy nejlépe ze všech žánrů komedii a jakou roli sehrála parodie v procesu emancipace filmového smíchu od propagandy? Na tyto a další otázky odpovídá kniha, která si za východisko volí každodenní zkušenost filmařů v zestátněných studiích, pod dozorem totalitní moci.

- by Petr Szczepanik
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- Film History, Critical Production Studies, Czech Cinema, Eastern European Cinema

This is an open access book. Media industry research and EU policymaking are predominantly tailored to large (and, in the latter case, Western) European markets. This open access book addresses the specific qualities of smaller media markets, highlighting their vulnerability to global digital competition and outlining survival strategies for them. New online distribution models and new trends in the consumption of audiovisual content are limited by, and pose new challenges for, existing audiovisual business models and their legal framework in the EU. The European Commission’s Digital Single Market (DSM) strategy, which was intended e.g. to remove obstacles to the cross-border distribution of audiovisual content, has triggered a heated debate on the transformation of the existing ecosystem for European screen industries. While most current discussions focus on the United States, Western Europe, and the multinational giants, this book approaches these industry trends and policy questions from the perspective of relatively small and peripheral (in terms of their population, language, cross-border cultural flows, and financial and/or symbolic capital) media markets.

- by Jakub Macek and +2
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- Media Studies, Cultural Policy, Digital Media, Media Industries

Based on the analysis of Adina Pintilie’s early works and her Golden Bear winning film Touch Me Not, this article connects the film with the evolution of the Romanian New Wave, both in the context of international film festivals and the domestic film industry system, in order to analyze the dynamics of the Romanian New Wave. This article announces the end of Romanian New Wave with Touch me not as a possible
milestone

- by Wang Yao
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- Eastern European Cinema, Film Festival Studies, Romanian cinema

This bilingual (English, Hungarian) edited volume explores the shifting changes of the concept of Europe in the context of 21st century cinema. It argues that today Europe is not only facing economic, social, environmental and health crises, but also a profound ideological crisis, the stakes of which include the very cultural and political concept of Europe. The papers published here explore the cinematic responses to this situation: how films reinterpret Europe and the meaning of European, and how they represent geopolitically marked identities.

- by György Kalmár
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- Eastern European Studies, Film Studies, Eastern European Cinema
- by Ágnes Pethő
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- Avant-Garde Cinema, Film Studies, Film Theory, Intermediality

The figures of femininity appearing in the Milcho Manchevski’s film Mothers (2010) are presented in
the following temporal order: a young girl, a young woman as a sexual (though not maternal) subject,
an old woman in her post-reproductive years, and, finally, mothers. The section of the film which deals
with figures of motherhood is not only executed in documentary style but literally is a documentary. The
first two sections of the film, constituting separate stories, are fictional. The main characters in the first
section are two little girls who create a fictional story within a fictional story: based on a rumor of an
alleged flasher they create a story of the imagined flasher and give false testimony at a police station
in Skopje. They end up knowingly accusing an evidently innocent person. In the final section of the
film, the director explores an actual case of three women who were tortured, raped, and murdered in the
small Macedonian town of Kichevo between 2005 and 2008. The victims (Mitra Simjanoska, found dead
in January, 2005, Ljubica Licoska, murdered in February, 2007 and Zivana Temelkoska, murdered in May,
2008) were all working-class mothers in their late fifties to mid-sixties.
The brutality of the acts of torture, rape and murder culminating with the mutilation of the victims’ bodies
intimates the inextricability of sexuality and destructive violence in a man with sadistic fixation on
the image of the mother. Purportedly, the convicted perpetrator, journalist Vlado Taneski, had traumatic
childhood experiences with his allegedly emotionally absent, aggressive and promiscuous mother. The
film seems to leave open the question of his guilt, to some extent. Vlado Taneski or, for that matter,
the “invisible perpetrator” is portrayed as a heterosexual man motivated by sexualized hate for women
who are immediately and most pronouncedly identified as “mothers.” The victims are all reduced to and
primarily described by their roles as mothers by the witnesses, family members, officials and experts
featured in the mini-documentary embedded in the last part of the film.

- by Katerina Kolozova
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- Feminist Theory, Film Studies, European Cinema, Gender and Media
- by Eva Näripea
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- Cinematic Space, National Cinemas, Film and Architecture, Eastern European Cinema

A comprehensive interpretation of Michael Cacoyannis' films

- by Vrasidas Karalis
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- European Cinema, Greek Cinema, Eastern European Cinema, Greek Cinema of the '60s

Magic Realist Cinema in East Central Europe explores the interlocking complexities of two liminal concepts: magic realism and East Central Europe. Each is a fascinating hybrid that resonates with dominant currents in contemporary thought... more

- by Aga Skrodzka
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- Eastern European Studies, Translation Studies, Postsocialism, Magical Realism

This paper attempts to draw an intermedial comparison of László Krasznahorkai's 1985 novel Satantango and Béla Tarr's 1994 eponymous adaptation through the perspective of their treatment of time and narration, by reflecting upon the specificities of their respective media. The two works advance the hypothesis of a circular experience of temporality defying the linear flow of literary and cinematic discourse. Aesthetically, their approach is characterized by a strong emphasis on seemingly meaningless and bleak contingency, in an atmosphere of claustrophobic closure shaped by the dance metaphor already transparent from the title, which is also central to the structure of both the novel and its cinematic adaptation. In exploring the various cinematographic and typographic mechanisms through which the tango sequence of steps configures the imagery and the sensorial landscape of the two works, our analysis refers to a multi-modal, comparative usage of key concepts such as narrated time, narrative time and Gilles Deleuze's time-image.

The subject of the thesis is the work of the ideology of the transformation in Polish cinema of the transformation period (1987-2005). The goal of the thesis is to demonstrate - with the use of critique of ideology tools - that Polish cinema of the transformation period played the role of the "Chicago boy", creating the vision of a new, capitalist reality and its subjects with their ambitions, dreams and fears, as well as teaching the viewers the rules governing the new reality. In the first chapter, the author discusses the term ideology, the use of critique of ideology in film analysis (including a summary of the state of research in Poland). The second chapter features a presentation of metaphors related to the figure of the homo oeconomicus, the desired subject of the transformation: "take matters into your own hands" (Młode Wilki), "West kidnapped by the East" (Bank nie z tej ziemi) and "can-do Poles" (Mów mi Rockefeller). The third chapter is devoted to the homo sovieticus: a subject who was rejected and blamed for the failure of the transformation. This chapter features discussion of several metaphors of the "Polish People's Republic mentality" (Hi, Tereska), "parasite-state” (Kapitał, czyli jak zrobić pieniądze w Polsce) and homo polonicus (The Debt) The fourth chapter discusses the problem of the limits of the transformation (including the transformation of the homo oeconomicus) based on the example of figures of "cowboys" (Three Colors: White) and "nouveaux riches" (Złote runo).

- by Kaja Puto
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- Eastern European Studies, Eastern Europe, Film Studies, Ideology

Following a previous international conference at the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and the subsequent publication of a volume of studies with the title Film in the Post-Media Age (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), which insisted, citing the ideas of Jacques Rancière, that the ecosystem of contemporary moving images should be understood not as a unified digital environment, but as a highly diversified, “multisensory milieu,” another conference was organised, focusing this time directly on the “multisensory” nature of moving images. Pairing the keywords “cinema” and “sensation”, an invitation was extended for presentations offering a closer examination of the sensual aspects of moving images in order to identify and map out at least some of the possible new directions perceived as taking shape as “sensuous” film studies.The conference took place between the 25th and 27th of May 2012, with the title The Cinema of Sensations, and attracted researchers from all over the world for what turned out to be three days of presentations on extremely varied subjects and lively discussions conducted in a memorably cheerful atmosphere. The present volume having the same title as the conference is the palpable outcome of these debates, and publishes a selection of articles that have been written for this conference, alongside a few essays written afterwards within the framework of a subsequent research project focusing on questions of intermediality in the cinema of Eastern Europe, and which has also been premised on the sensuous nature of the complex medial experience of film.

- by Ágnes Pethő
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- Avant-Garde Cinema, Film Studies, Film Theory, French Cinema

This chapter focuses on the ways in which foreign sound films were distributed, shown and received in Prague between 1929 and 1939. Comparing the popularity of Czechoslovak, American and German productions on the local market, it presents a list of each year’s top-ten hits, and draws conclusions about the short- and longerterm tendencies of local cinemagoing preferences. The chapter asks why the English language and American culture were considered to be disturbing elements by local audiences. What made German films not only more popular than American ones, but also more popular than German versions of American films? Was it the German language, which was more comprehensible to the local public than English, or the archetypes of German-Austrian popular culture represented in these films? How can we explain the extreme but short-term popularity of American talkies in the first year that they were shown in Prague, and their sharp decline in popularity in the following years? What kind of American films continued to be hits after 1930?

Analysis of the great Soviet cinema classic

- by Masha Shpolberg
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- Russian Studies, Film Studies, Soviet History, Film History