Miscommunication Patterns in Contemporary East-Central European Cinema, International Conference - 28-29th of September 2023, Abstracts and Author's Bios (2025)

Introduction. Broken Mobilities in Eastern European Cinema

Postsocialist Mobilities. Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 2021

Cultural Studies Approaches in the Study of Eastern European Cinema

Contact Zones Transnational Encounters, Dialogues and Self-Representation in Contemporary Eastern European Literature, Cinema and Visual Cultures

Since the fall of communist regimes, the geographical, political, and cultural concept of Eastern Europe has been continuously debated in various discursive and institutional contexts. Rather than engaging further in a discussion operating with exclusion, delimitation, setting borders and limits, we propose to envisage Eastern Europe as a " contact zone " , a place of cultural encounters performed by both social, everyday practices and aesthetical, ideological, discoursive strategies detectable in the literary and cinematic production. The recurrent topics involving various types of mobility, (mis)communication, dialogue or translation often appear both as figurations of (national, sexual, individual) identity quests and as allegorical reflections upon the existing (post-colonial, national) discourses on identity and self-representation. While we value the Eastern European context in terms of a more complex image of a troubled discoursive identity, we consider the case of Hungarian and Romanian literature and cinema as paradigmatic for contradictory transnational encounters. Although sharing a communist past and a post-communist present, the contemporary literature and cinema of the two countries presents big discrepancies when dealing with memory work, identity crisis and self-representation. The different cinematic and literary paradigms they represent are, however, often reconciled and taken onto a metadiscursive level in co-productions and literary adaptations. Literary works and films themselves appear as " contact zone " , and co-productions produce heterotopia (Ewa Mazierska) where cultural encounters take place. Applying to contemporary Eastern European settings Hamid Naficy's term of " accented cinema " , equally referring to the languages, dialects, accents spoken in the film and to the irregularities of the film's production mode, the question arises whether the " accented " term can be used for literary works focusing on intercultural encounter. Arguably, the accented mode becomes a common denominator for those to whom Nicolas Bourriaud's concept of the " radicant " artist (directors, actors, writers), involved in a constant translation between cultures and media, also applies. We encourage the participation of both scholars and artists eager to engage in an intercultural, interdisciplinary and intermedial dialogue on the (interrelated) discursive strategies of self-representation and transnational dialogue in both an Eastern European and a Hungarian-Romanian context. We expect theoretical, conceptual approaches and in-depth analyses of works raising the issue of the applicability of postcolonial theories with regards to the East-West dichotomy, as well as the self-colonizing strategies thematized and performed by Eastern European artists. The international conference will organize a special workshop, dedicated to the dialogue between Romanian and Hungarian cinemas, including academics and film makers. The main event will be joined by two of the most important representatives of the Romanian film industry, Oana Giurgiu and Marian Crișan who will be available for a round table discussion. This will be only one of the series of cultural events including film screenings and discussions with writers, film directors and critics from both countries.

Developments in Eastern European Cinema since 1989

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.

Caught In-Between. Intermediality in Contemporary Eastern European and Russian Cinema (ed. by Ágnes Pethő, Edinburgh University Press, 2020)

2020

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

Studies in Eastern European Cinema Eastern European cinema: old and new approaches

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

Introduction: The Art of In-Betweenness in Contemporary Eastern European Cinema

Introduction to: Caught In-Between. Intermediality in Contemporary Eastern European and Russian Cinema. Edinburgh UP, 2020

It offers an overview of a wide spectrum of approaches to studying intermediality in the context of Eastern European cinemas, from concept-based studies to analyses of films, and the stylistic devices of intermediality. It presents the way in which the poetics of intermediality can reflect not only the correlations between arts and media, but also between art and life. The relevance of intermediality is that it enables us to grasp the complexity of reality and culture, to observe various tensional states of in-betweenness, along with anxieties, relations of power and conflict that define life in Eastern Europe. The introduction outlines some of the main figurations of intermediality or ‘strategies of in-betweenness’ which have significantly shaped the aesthetic of contemporary Eastern European films followed by a brief summary of each chapter in this volume.

Postsocialist Mobilities. Studies in Eastern European Cinema

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 “.

Andrea Virginás, Cultural studies approaches in the study of Eastern European Cinema: Spaces, Bodies, Memories, Cambridge Scho

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...

The Cinema Makers Public Life and the Exhibition of Difference in South-Eastern and Central Europe since the 1960s

The Cinema Makers investigates how cinema spectators in south-eastern and central European cities became cinema makers through such practices as squatting in existing cinema spaces, organizing cinema 'events', writing about film and making films themselves. Drawing on a corpus of interviews with cinema activists in Germany, Austria and the former Yugoslavia, Anna Schober compares the activities and artistic productions they staged in cities such as Vienna, Cologne, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Ljubljana, Belgrade, Novi Sad, Subotica, Zagreb and Sarajevo. The resulting study illuminates the differences and similarities in the development of political culture -and cinema's role in that development -in European countries with pluralist-democratic, one-party socialist and post-socialist traditions.