A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas
Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas Series

A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas showcases twenty-five essays written by established and emerging film scholars that trace the history of Eastern European cinemas and offer an up-to-date assessment of post-socialist film cultures.

• Showcases critical historical work and up-to-date assessments of post-socialist film cultures
• Features consideration of lesser known areas of study, such as Albanian and Baltic cinemas, popular genre films, cross-national distribution and aesthetics, animation and documentary
• Places the cinemas of the region in a European and global context
• Resists the Cold War classification of Eastern European cinemas as ?other? art cinemas by reconnecting them with the main circulation of film studies
• Includes discussion of such films as Taxidermia, El Perro Negro, 12:08 East of Bucharest Big Tõll, and Breakfast on the Grass and explores the work of directors including Tamás Almási, Walerian Borowczyk, Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Andrzej ¯u³awski, and Karel Vachek amongst many others

Notes on the Editor and Contributors viii

Foreword xv
Dina Iordanova

1 Introduction: Eastern European Cinema From No End to the End (As We Know It) 1
Anikó Imre

Part I New Theoretical and Critical Frameworks 23

2 Body Horror and Post-Socialist Cinema: György Pálfi’s Taxidermia 25
Steven Shaviro

3 El perro negro : Transnational Readings of Database Documentaries from Spain 41
Marsha Kinder

4 Did Somebody Say Communism in the Classroom? or The Value of Analyzing Totality in Recent Serbian Cinema 63
Zoran Samardzija

5 Laughing into an Abyss: Cinema and Balkanization 77
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli

6 Jewish Identities and Generational Perspectives 101
Catherine Portuges

7 Aftereffects of 1989: Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006) and Romanian Cinema 125
Alice Bardan

8 Cinema Beyond Borders: Slovenian Cinema in a World Context 148
Meta Mazaj and Shekhar Deshpande

Part II Historical and Spatial Redefinitions 167

9 Center and Periphery, or How Karel Vachek Formed a New Government 169
Alice Lovejoy

10 The Polish Black Series Documentary and the British Free Cinema Movement 183
Bjørn Sørenssen

11 Socialists in Outer Space: East German Film’s Venusian Adventure 201
Stefan Soldovieri

12 Red Shift: New Albanian Cinema and its Dialogue with the Old 224
Bruce Williams

13 National Space, (Trans)National Cinema: Estonian Film in the 1960s 244
Eva Näripea

14 For the Peace, For a New Man, For a Better World! Italian Leftist Culture and Czechoslovak Cinema, 1945–1968 265
Francesco Pitassio

Part III Aesthetic (Re)visions 289

15 The Impossible Polish New Wave and its Accursed Émigré Auteurs: Borowczyk, Polañski, Skolimowski, and ¯u³awski 291
Michael Goddard

16 Documentary and Industrial Decline in Hungary: The “Ózd Series” of Tamás Almási 311
John Cunningham

17 Investigating the Past, Envisioning the Future: An Exploration of Post-1991 Latvian Documentary 325
Maruta Z. Vitols

18 Eastern European Historical Epics: Genre Cinema and the Visualization of a Heroic National Past 344
Nikolina Dobreva

19 Nation, Gender, and History in Latvian Genre Cinema 366
Irina Novikova

20 A Comparative Study: Rein Raamat’s Big Tõll and Priit Pärn’s Luncheon on the Grass 385
Andreas Trossek

21 The Yugoslav Black Wave: The History and Poetics of Polemical Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s in Yugoslavia 403
Greg De Cuir, Jr .

Part IV Industries and Institutions 425

22 Follow the Money – Financing Contemporary Cinema in Romania 427
Ioana Uricaru

23 An Alternative Model of Film Production: Film Units in Poland after World War Two 453
Dorota Ostrowska

24 The Hussite Heritage Film: A Dream for all Czech Seasons 466
Petra Hanáková

25 International Co-productions as Productions of Heterotopias 483
Ewa Mazierska

26 East is East? New Turkish Cinema and Eastern Europe 504
Melis Behlil

Index 518

Anikó Imre is an Associate Professor of Critical Studies at University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. Her books include East European Cinemas (2005); Transnational Feminism in Film and Media (co-authored with Katarzyna Marciniak and Áine O’Healy, 2007); Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Media Cultures in the New Europe (2009); and Popular Television in Eastern and Southern Europe (co-authored with Timothy Havens and Kati Lustyik, 2011). She is also co-editor of the Global Cinemas book series.