 
Contents

Notes on the Editor and Contributors

Foreword

1 Introduction

What Is and What (Really) Was "Eastern European Cinema"?

First Intervention: Un-nationalizing Cinemas

Second Intervention: A Case for European (Post-)Socialism

Third Intervention: East European Cinema within Global Film Studies

Conclusion and Acknowledgments

Part I New Theoretical and Critical Frameworks

2 Body Horror and Post-Socialist Cinema

3 El perro negro

The Way In

The Transnational Stage

The Spanish Context for Reading Documentaries

Re-Imagining Archival Histories

Tren de sombras (1997)

La niebla en las palmeras (2005)

El perro negro (2005)

4 Did Somebody Say Communism in the Classroom?

From Communism to Ethnic Nationalism

From Ethnic Nationalism to Neoliberalism

Conclusion

5 Laughing into an Abyss

6 Jewish Identities and Generational Perspectives

Somewhere in Europe revisited

The Last Stop

István Szabó's Father: An Absent Generation

Related East European Production

Filmmaking after 1989: Generational Perspectives

Kertész, Spielberg, and Lanzmann

Documentary Filmmaking

7 Aftereffects of 1989

Context: Cinematic Reconfigurations of 1989

Understanding the Reception of 12:08 East of Bucharest in Romania: Was There, or Was There Not an Event?

The Question of Making and Saying an Event: Virtuality and Simulacrum

The Use of Language in 12:08

Post-national Pastiche and Cinematic Realism

8 Cinema Beyond Borders

Slovenian Cinema as Small Cinema

When Small Means Invisible

Cinema of National Allegory: Damjan Kozole

Beyond the National in Small Cinema

Part II Historical and Spatial Redefinitions

9 Center and Periphery,

Major and Minor, Nonfiction and Fiction

From Center to Periphery

A Second Society

Afterword

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

The Polish "October Spring"

The Czarna Seria – Critical Social Documentaries in a Socialist State

Polish Documentary Film, The Thaw and the "October Spring"

Polish documentary between East and West during the Cold War

Czarna seria and Free Cinema

12 Red Shift

Before the Fall

From Void to Void

After the Pyramid

The Old and the New

13 National Space, (Trans)National Cinema

(Trans)National Cinema

National Space

Nation-Space: Back to the Past

Conclusion

14 For the Peace, For a New Man, For a Better World!

Part III Aesthetic (Re)visions

15 The Impossible Polish New Wave and its Accursed Émigré Auteurs

Introduction

The Impossible Polish New Wave

Generations of Exile and Accursed Auteurs

Borowczyk, Surrealism, and Eroticism

Polański, Skolimowski, and the Polish Cinema of the Absurd

Żuławski and the Cinema of Expression

Conclusion

16 Documentary and Industrial Decline in Hungary

17 Investigating the Past, Envisioning the Future

Introduction

Latvia's Documentary Past

The 1990s and Beyond: A Phoenix Rising out of the Ashes

A Common Theme

Future Directions for Documentary

18 Eastern European Historical Epics

Introduction

Genre

The Historical Epic

Eastern European Epics: Generic Conventions

Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire in Eastern European Epics

Eastern European Epics: Local Specificity of the Genre

Conclusion

19 Nation, Gender, and History in Latvian Genre Cinema

... A Glimpse into the Launch...

... Genres of the Postcolonial Cinematic ImagiNation...

... Stalinist 1950s: Latvian Riflemen, Adventures, and Biopics

... Thaw, New Genres and Camerawork: Mediating the "national"...

... Film Adaptation, Literary Canon and National Memory...

... Soviet Latvian Detective...

... Freedom and Cinema...

20 A Comparative Study

The Problems of Context

Who Can Read between the Lines?

Rein Raamat's Big Tõll

Priit Pärn's Luncheon on the Grass

21 The Yugoslav Black Wave

Yugoslav History and Context

Black Wave Poetics

Transnational Trends and Connections

Part IV Industries and Institutions

22 Follow the Money

Introduction

Domestic Financing – State System

Domestic Financing – Private Enterprise

International Funding

Conclusion

23 An Alternative Model of Film Production

What was a Film Unit?

Checks and Balances

Why Film Units in Poland?

24 The Hussite Heritage Film

25 International Co-productions as Productions of Heterotopias

Le Départ: Leaving for the West and Finding a Promised Land in Cinema

Birds, Orphans and Fools: Creating a Countercultural Enclave

The Test of Pilot Pirx: Producing an "Other Space"

Conclusion

26 East is East?

Turkey and Europe

A Brief History of Turkish Cinema

(Eastern) European Influences on Turkish Cinema

Financial Connections

Index

#### THE WILEY-BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO NATIONAL CINEMAS

 _The Wiley-Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas_ showcase the rich film ­heritages of various countries across the globe. Each volume sets the agenda for what is now known as world cinema while challenging Hollywood's lock on the popular and scholarly imagination. Whether exploring Spanish, German, or Chinese film, or the broader traditions of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and Latin America the 20–25 newly commissioned essays comprising each volume include coverage of the dominant themes of canonical, controversial, and contemporary films; stars, directors, and writers; key influences; reception; and historiography and scholarship. Written in a sophisticated and authoritative style by leading experts they will appeal to an international audience of scholars, students, and general readers.

####  **Published:**

 _A Companion to German Cinema_ , edited by Terri Ginsberg and Andrea Mensch

 _A Companion to Chinese Cinema_ , edited by Yingjin Zhang

 _A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas_ , edited by Anikó Imre

 _A Companion to Spanish Cinema_ , edited by Jo Labanyi and Tatjana Pavlovic

This edition first published 2012  
© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc

Wiley-Blackwell is an imprint of John Wiley & Sons, formed by the merger of Wiley's global Scientific, Technical and Medical business with Blackwell Publishing.

 _Registered Office_  
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex,  
PO19 8SQ, UK

 _Editorial Offices_  
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA  
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK  
The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

The right of Anikó Imre to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

 _Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data_

A companion to Eastern European cinemas / edited by Anikó Imre.  
p. cm. – (Wiley-Blackwell companions to national cinemas)  
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4443-3725-9 (hardback : alk. paper)  
1. Motion pictures–Europe, Eastern. I. Imre, Anikó.  
PN1993.5.E82C77 2012  
791.430947–dc23

2011044672

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover design by Nicki Averill Design and Illustration  
Cover illustration: Aurora, 2010, directed by Christi Puiu. Courtesy of Mandragora, www.mandragora.ro

# Notes on the Editor and Contributors

 **Alice Bardan** received her doctorate from the University of Southern California in 2011. Her research and teaching interests are in European and East European media, world cinema, and new media. Her publications appeared in the edited volume _Transnational Feminism in Film and Media_ (Palgrave, 2007) and in the refered journal _New Cinemas_ (Intellect, 2008). In addition, she has new articles in _Branding Post-Communist Nations_ (Routledge, 2011), Popular Television in Eastern Europe During and Since Socialism, Not Necessarily the News? News Parody and Political Satire Across the Globe, and Popular Communication.

 **Melis Behlil** is Assistant Professor and department head at the Radio, TV and Cinema Department of Kadir Has University in Istanbul, Turkey, as well as a ­member of the NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies) Steering Committee. Her research interests are film industries, production studies, and ­globalization. In addition to teaching and other academic duties, she writes film reviews for various publications, co-hosts a weekly radio show, and is a FIPRESCI member.

 **John Cunningham** teaches film studies at Sheffield Hallam University in the United Kingdom and is the editor of the journal _Studies in Eastern European Cinema_. His publications include _Hungarian Cinema: From Coffeehouse to Multiplex_ (2004) and numerous articles on Eastern European cinema. _Visions of Europe_ , his study of István Szabó, is awaiting publication. In November 2010 he was presented with the Pro Hungaria Cultura award for his services to Hungarian art and culture.

 **Greg De Cuir, Jr**. is the managing editor of _NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies_ (Amsterdam University Press). His writing has appeared in _Cineaste_ , _Jump Cut_ , _Studies in Eastern European Cinema_ , and _KinoKultura_ as well as other international publications, and his book _Yugoslav Black Wave: Polemical Cinema from 1963–72 in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia_ (Film Center Serbia) was nominated for Edition of the Year at the 2011 Belgrade International Book Fair. Mr de Cuir is a member of FIPRESCI and is also the selector/programmer for Alternative Film/Video Belgrade.

 **Shekhar Deshpande** is Professor and Chair of the Department of Media and Communication at Arcadia University. His main interests are in world cinema, visual cultures, and philosophy of film. His work has appeared in _Senses of Cinema_ , _Journal of European Cinema_ , _Widescreen_ , and _Film International_. He is working on a book on anthology film.

 **Nikolina Dobreva** holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. She has researched and published on Romani representation in international cinema and television. Nikolina is currently setting up an archive/research website on Eastern European cinema and media.

 **Michael Goddard** is a lecturer in media studies at the University of Salford. His current research centers on Polish and European cinema and visual culture and he is reviews editor of _Studies in Eastern European Cinema_ (SEEC). He has just ­completed a book on the cinema of the Chilean-born filmmaker Raúl Ruiz. His research on Deleuze's aesthetic and film theories has resulted in a number of ­publications. He has also been studying the fringes of popular music focusing on groups such as The Fall, Throbbing Gristle, and Laibach. Another strand of his research concerns Italian post-autonomist political thought and media theory, ­particularly the work of Franco Berardi (Bifo). He is now conducting a research project called Radical Ephemera, examining radical media ecologies in film, ­television, radio, and radical politics in the 1970s.

 **Petra Hanáková** is Assistant Professor at the Film Studies Department of Charles University in Prague. Her research focuses on the theory of film and visual ­culture, gender analysis, and the representation of national identity in film. She is the author of _Pando_ ř _ina sk_ ř _ínka aneb Co feministky provedly filmu?_ ( _Pandora's Box or What Have Feminists Done to Cinema?_ 2007), editor of _Výzva perspektivy: Obraz a jeho divák od malby quattrocenta k filmu a zp_ ě _t_ ( _The Challenge of Perspective: Image and its Spectator from Quattrocento Panting to Film and Back_ , 2008), and coeditor of _Visegrad Cinema: Points of Contact from the New Waves to the Present_ (2010) with Kevin Johnson. She is currently working on a book on national imaging in Czech visual culture.

 **Anikó Imre** is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. Her work revolves around film and media theory, global television, national and transnational media, postcoloniality, global consumption and mobility, studies of identity and play, media education, and European media. She is the author of _Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Media Cultures in the New Europe_ (MIT Press, 2009), editor of _East European Cinemas_ (Routledge, 2005), and coeditor of _Transnational Feminism in Film and Media_ (Palgrave, 2007) and _Popular Television in Eastern Europe During and Since Socialism_ (Routledge, 2012).

 **Dina Iordanova** is Professor of Film Studies at the ancient University of St Andrews in Scotland, and Provost of its postgraduate arm, St Leonard's College. She has published extensively on matters covered in this volume, setting the tone of research into East European cinema in groundbreaking works such as _Cinema of Flames_ (2001) and _Cinema of the Other Europe_ (2003). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and on the Board of Trustees of the Edinburgh Film Festival. Her monograph, Change Management: Cinematic Narratives of Post-Communism, is forthcoming.

 **Alice Lovejoy** is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, and a former editor at Film Comment. Her research interests include film historiography; institutional, nonfiction, and experimental film practices and cultures; and East-Central European cinema. She is currently writing a book about experimentation in the Czechoslovak Army Film studio.

 **Marsha Kinder** is Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, where she has been teaching since 1980. In 1995 she received their Associates Award for Creativity in Scholarship and in 2001 was named University Professor for her innovative transdisciplinary research. Starting as a scholar of eighteenth-century English literature, she switched to transmedia relations among narrative forms. As a cultural theorist and film scholar, she is best known for her work on Spanish cinema, children's media culture, and narrative theory. In 1997 she founded The Labyrinth Project, a research initiative on interactive narrative and digital scholarship, producing award-winning database documentaries in collaboration with artists, scholars, scientists, students, and archivists that have been featured at museums, film, art, and new media festivals, and academic conferences worldwide. One of those projects was The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River (2002), a collaboration with Peter Forgács, that premiered at the Getty Center in Los Angeles and is still traveling to museums in Europe.

 **Meta Mazaj** is a senior lecturer in Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her writings on critical theory, new European cinema, Balkan cinema, and ­contemporary world cinema, have appeared in edited volumes and journals such as _Cineaste_ , _Studies in Eastern European Cinema_ , and _Situations_. She is the author of _National and Cynicism in the Post 1990s Balkan Cinema_ (VDM Verlag, 2008) and _Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings_ (with Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White; Bedford/St Martin's, 2010). She is currently working on a book on new world cinema.

 **Ewa Mazierska** is Professor of Contemporary Cinema, School of Journalism, Media and Communication, University of Central Lancashire. She has published over 10 monographs and edited collections, including _European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory and Politics_ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and, with Laura Rascaroli, _Crossing New Europe: The European Road Movie_ (Wallflower Press, 2006). She is currently finishing a book devoted to the representation of work in European cinema.

 **Eva Näripea** is affiliated as a researcher of film theory with the Estonian Academy of Arts and the Estonian Literary Museum. In 2011 she completed her PhD ­dissertation "Estonian Cinescapes: Spaces, Places and Sites in Soviet Estonian Cinema (and Beyond)." A number of her articles have appeared in various Estonian and international publications. She coedited _Via Transversa: Lost Cinema of the Former Eastern Bloc_ (2008) with Andreas Trossek and a special issue on Estonian cinema for _Kinokultura: New Russian Cinema_ (2010) with Ewa Mazierska and Mari Laaniste. Her most recent cooperation is the edited volume _Postcolonial Approaches to Eastern European Cinema: Portraying Neighbours on Screen_ , with Ewa Mazierska and Lars Kristensen (forthcoming with I.B.Tauris).

 **Irina Novikova** is Professor of Cultural and Film Studies at the University of Latvia, and Director of the University of Latvia Center for Gender Studies. She has authored a book on gender and genre in women's autobiography and the ­bildungsroman and edited two volumes: _Anthology of Feminist Theories_ (in Latvian) and _Gender Matters in the Baltics_. She has authored a number of articles addressing gender, race, sexuality, and genre in literature and cinema. Currently, she is ­finishing a monograph on race, gender, and genre in Soviet cinema. She was an organizer of the first international conference on Baltic cinemas.

 **Dorota Ostrowska** is a lecturer in film and modern media at the Department of History of Art and Screen Media, Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of _Reading the French New Wave: Critics, Writers and Art Cinema in France_ (Wallflower Press, 2008) and of _European Cinemas in the TV Age_ with Graham Roberts (Edinburgh University Press, 2007).

 **Francesco Pitassio** is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the Università ­degli Studi di Udine. His articles have been published in international journals such as _Cinegrafie_ , _Bianco e Nero_ , _CINéMAS_ , _Montage/AV_ , _Archivos de la Filmoteca_ , _Europa Orientalis_ , and _Iluminace_. Since 1997 he has been a member of the research ­committee of the International Conference on Film Studies of Udine. He is also a member of the research committee of MAGIS – Gorizia Film Studies Spring School. He coordinates the editorial staff of _Cinéma & Cie_. and is editor of _NECSUS-European Journal of Media Studies_ (Amsterdam University Press). He edited, with Leonardo Quaresima, _Scrittura e imagine_ (Writing and Image, 1998) and _Versions Multiples III_ (Multiple-language Versions III, 2005), with Alessandro Faccioli, _Bianco & Nero_, _Sergio Tofano: Il cinema a merenda_ (Sergio Tofano: Snack Cinema, 2005), and, with Cristiano Diddi, _La caccia alle farfalle: Crisi e rinascita delle cinematografie dei paesi slavi_ (Chasing Butterflies: Slavonic Countries' Cinema Crisis and Renaissance, 2010). Among his books are _Ombre silenziose: Teoria dell'attore ­cinematografico negli anni Venti_ (Silent Shadows: Film Acting Theory in the 1920s, 2002), _Maschere e marionette: Il cinema ceco e dintorni_ (Masks and Puppets: Czech Cinema and Its Surroundings, 2002), _Attore_ / _Divo_ (Actor/Star, 2003) and, with Paolo Noto, _Il neorealismo cinematografico_ (The Neo-realist Cinema, 2010).

 **Catherine Portuges** is Director of the Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies, Professor of Comparative Literature, and Curator, Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival, University of Massachusetts Amherst where she received the Chancellor's Medal for Distinguished Teaching (2010). She was awarded the Pro Cultura Hungarica Medal (Republic of Hungary, 2009) for her contributions to Hungarian cinema, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2007) for her project on Jewish identities in Hungarian filmmaking. Her books include _Screen Memories: the Hungarian Cinema of Márta Mészáros_ (Indiana, 1993) and _Cinemas in Transition: Post-socialist East Central Europe_ (co-edited with Peter Hames, Temple, forthcoming). Her most recent essays appear in _Cinema's Alchemist: The Films of Péter Forgács (2012); The Blackwell Companion to Historical Film_ (2013), _The Reception of the Holocaust in Post-Communist Europe (_ 2012); and _The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema_ (2012). She is an invited programmer, curator and consultant for film festivals and colloquia, and a delegate to international film festivals.

 **Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli** is Associate Professor of Cinema and Technocultural ­Studies, University of California–Davis. She is the author of _The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics_ and is finishing a book on cinema at the margins of Europe. She has published in _Camera Obscura_ , _Representations_ , _Screen_ , _Journal of Modern Greek Studies_ , _Third Text_ , _Film Quarterly_ , _PAJ_ , and a number of other journals and ­collected volumes. She is the co-Film Series editor at Edinburgh University Press, and editor of _Política Común_.

 **Zoran Samardzija** is Assistant Professor of Film/Video at Columbia College Chicago, where he teaches a variety of film theory, history, and aesthetics classes. His main research interest is East European and Balkan cinemas. He has published a variety of articles, including essays on Andrei Tarkovsky, Theo Angelopoulos, and David Lynch.

**Steven Shaviro** is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of _The Cinematic Body_ (1993), _Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism_ (1997), _Connected, Or, What It Means To Live in the Network Society_ (2003), _Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics_ (2009), and _Post-Cinematic Affect_ (2010). He blogs at The Pinocchio Theory (<http://www.shaviro.com/Blog>).

 **Stefan Soldovieri** is Associate Professor of German at the University of Toronto. His current research focuses on GDR cinema, inter-German film relations, and genre cinema during the early postwar period, and remakes in German contexts. His book Managing the Movies (forthcoming from The University of Toronto Press) explores the film crisis of 1965, in which nearly an entire year's film production was withdrawn as a failure of film regulation during a contentious period of modernization in GDR society. Recent articles on genre cinema and East–West film discourses include "Edgar Wallace goes East: Locations of Genre and German Identities in Joachim Hasler's _Fog_ (Nebel, GDR 1962)" in _The Meaning of Culture_ (2009) and the _Cinémas_ article "Germans Suffering in Spain: Cold War visions of the Spanish Civil War" (2007).

 **Bjørn Sørenssen** is Professor of Film and Media Studies at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway. His main research fields are Norwegian and Scandinavian film and television history, and documentary film history and theory as well as digital media. He has a special interest in Eastern and Central European film in the period between 1945 and 1989. He is the author and coauthor of several monographs on Norwegian film and the documentary and has published numerous articles in international journals and anthologies. Among his recent publications are "From 'Super Babies' and 'Nazi Bastards' to Victims Finding a Voice: The Memory Trajectory of the Norwegian Lebensborn Children," in _Documentary Testimonies_ (Routledge, 2009) and the _Studies in Documentary Film_ article "Digital Video and Alexandre Astruc's 'Caméra Stylo': The New Avant-garde in Documentary Realized?" (2008).

 **Andreas Trossek** is a PhD student in the Institute of Art History at the Estonian Academy of Arts. He currently works as editor-in-chief of KUNST.EE, an Estonian magazine of art and visual culture.

 **Ioana Uricaru** is Assistant Professor in the Film and Media Culture Department at Middlebury College. Her doctoral dissertation, "Reconsidering the Cinematic Subject in Light of Neuroscience," focuses on the relationship between discourse and experience. Her scholarly work on contemporary Romanian cinema has been published in _Film Quarterly_ , _The Velvet Light Trap_ , and in several anthologies. Uricaru is also an award-winning screenwriter and has directed films included in the official selections at the AFI Fest, Cannes, and Sundance film festivals.

 **Maruta Z. Vitols** is a film historian specializing in political documentary cinema. Her current research interests center on Latvian filmmaking, and she earned her PhD at The Ohio State University, writing a dissertation on the work of Juris Podnieks. She also holds an MA in Cinema Studies from New York University, and a BA from Wellesley College. She has presented her research at conferences at such institutions as the University of Latvia, New York University, Indiana University, Syracuse University, and the University of Washington. A Fulbright Scholar, she has published articles on Podnieks and Laila Pakalniņa, and she currently teaches at Emerson College in the United States.

 **Bruce Williams** is Professor and Graduate Director of the Department of Languages and Cultures, William Paterson University, New Jersey. His research focuses on issues of national identity and cinema, the sociolinguistics of the cinema, Latin American cinema, and Albanian film. His numerous articles have appeared in such journals as _Quarterly Review of Film and Video_ , _The Canadian Journal of Film Studies_ , _The New Review of Film and Television_ , and the _Journal of Film and Video_. He is currently working on a monograph on film and language.

# Foreword

In my teaching I often face a room full of students who, in 1989, were not even born. I need to explain what the Cold War was, because all they know about is the war on terror. We all tell these students the story of communism: there is a more or less agreed-upon account of it. But we do not really have consensus on what the rundown would be on developments that took place in communism's aftermath. Some of us, mainly based in the social science disciplines, maintain that, once emancipated from Soviet tyranny, the countries of the former Soviet bloc promptly readjusted their political and economic course and soon caught up with the democracies of old Europe, rejoining a position where they always belonged, historically and culturally. Others, mainly from the humanities camp, focus their attention on the hiccups, the failed enthusiasm, and the disillusionment. Yet others simply decide to pass on and avoid the topic altogether.

By looking at film and media representations, at production and reception, this book aims to bridge older and newer narratives and propositions as they play out in the discourse on Eastern Europe's shifting realities.

The more effectively one deals with change, the more likely one is to thrive, management wisdom has it. Just like the natural world, societies and individuals encounter changing conditions that are beyond their control; successful adaptation to change is crucial for the success of the enterprise. Change management, in this context, is an approach to shifting individuals and groups from a current to a desired state, to empowering stakeholders to accept and thrive in an environment that has not settled quite yet.

The post-1989 transition of Eastern Europe makes for a suitable case study of flopped enthusiasm under the change management paradigm, where romantic fervor and zeal were dampened by short-term profiteering and a rush to redistribute limited quantities of wealth and power. The break-up of multicultural conglomerates on the one hand, with the bloody demise of "brotherhood and unity" in Yugoslavia and the proliferation of break-away "statelets" at the periphery of the ­former Soviet Union, and ethnic consolidation on the other, with the reunification of Germany and the reabsorption of various dispersed populations back into a mono-ethnic nation-state, erected nationalism on the pedestal and legitimized it as an energizing political credo across the region. The most radical social change of the end of the tumultuous twentieth century, a soft revolution that was undertaken with a vision of renewal, reinvigoration, and reinvention of a social order, failed to deliver. It descended into economic volatility, precariousness, and massive outmigration.

The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia had dispelled whatever post-World War Two hopes regarding the chances of "socialism with a human face" still ­lingered. In the climate of fear that this event instituted, Eastern Europeans lived in anticipation of change, knowing that transformation of the system, politically oppressive and economically awkward, was inevitable and would come, sooner or later. Waiting for the change to come about, however, was marked by uncertainty and, often, by an inability to plan ahead. The omens of civil society and the change management process could converge meaningfully only after 1989.

In the years since "die Wende," many amazing metamorphoses came about. Mikhail Gorbachev, the visionary general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party who came from within the ranks of the KGB, was emblematically seen in the new millennium actively promoting the consumer society by fronting ads for Pizza Hut and luxury luggage-maker Luis Vuitton. Newly found prosperity in some corners came hand in hand with destitution in other parts.

This transition trajectory was reflected in cinema, both in industry transformation and identity discourse. The film industry saw previous state assets sold off to new, usually foreign, owners, who swiftly turned the region into a cut-price ­production playground. The "film factory," previously run by state apparatchiks, now turned into a bargain-basement service economy offering skilled personnel and amenities to international runaway film businesses. Global film franchises did not take long to arrive; the older one-screen theaters closed down, replaced by ostentatious popcorn-selling multiplexes. There is no longer much difference between the film industries in Western and Eastern Europe, both competing to secure a place in the lucrative manufacturing and exhibition of outsourced content.

Refashioning the narratives related to history, national character, or collective identities has been less straightforward. Any unanimity over what was happening rapidly vanished amidst crumbling communal memory. Post-communism's finest films tackled the vigorous memory work that involved selective forgetting and the formation of new favored narratives. They inevitably evolved around the ambivalence of shared memory and the ambiguity of compromise. Films like _12:08 East of Bucharest_ confirmed that it is no longer possible to reconstruct a shared ­narrative of what happened in 1989, while films like _Goodbye Lenin!_ endorsed the view that it is no longer possible to leave intact previously uncontested storylines.

The East European cinema of post-communism focused on stories of morally ambiguous protagonists, a new array of characters, ranging from gold-­chain-adorned gangsters to budding _Gastarbeiters_ , plotting their move to the West while stuck in the drab environment that communism had constructed and then left behind for future generations to tackle. Other films zoomed in on penurious pensioners ­subsisting on remittances from their absent sons and daughters who had struck lucky somewhere out in the wide world.

Alongside all this, other events emerged and hijacked the global political imagination, pushing the anxieties of post-communism aside. New narratives and ­concerns – of radicalization and terrorist threat, of a bellicose world order, and of environmental self-destruction – came to the fore as the world's attention moved away from the post-Communist world and Eastern Europe. The Arab Spring, most recently, relegated the "velvet revolutions" of 1989 categorically to the pages of history. Change management in the Eastern bloc did not fascinate anymore; the public interest moved away before the culture of communism and its aftermath were properly assessed.

The political venture of post-communism, however, is still in the center of the intellectual filmmaking explored in this volume. On the surface, not much has changed: like before, East Europeans wake up and go to work every morning. But whereas before they would be engaged in a collective effort to construct the bright future charted by the party officials, nowadays they are busy with deconstructing the derelict artifacts of state Socialist grandeur. Social and individual lives intertwine in this vital course of change management.

Dina Iordanova

# 1

# Introduction

#  _Eastern European Cinema From_ _No End_ _to the End (As We Know It)_

Anikó Imre

In the 1980s, the Soviet Empire's last decade, the state of Eastern European cinema was best illustrated by its most recognizable parts: those few art-house films, made by selected national auteurs, that made it across the Iron Curtain to international festivals and distribution venues. If we take as an example the year 1985, the ­midpoint of the decade, Kieślowski's _No End_ , Menzel's _My Sweet Little Village_ , Szabó's _Colonel Redl_ , and Kusturica's _When Father Was Away on Business_ represent the cream of the crop. Recognizable products of Eastern European cinema were almost invariably dark and revolved around the crippling impact on people's ­bodies and minds, particularly those of intellectuals, speaking in a double language to evade censorship. Such films were typically made on modest state budgets, often employed experimental and avant-garde aesthetics, and were treated by Western critics and film buffs "as if they were from the moon," as Miklós Jancsó once put it (Mihancsik, 2000).

A quarter century later, the state of Eastern European filmmaking is best summed up by a range of very different kinds of productions. One of these new kinds is exemplified by _The Borgias_ (Showtime, 2011–), a lavishly cinematic ­English-speaking historical television series. The show has been shot in Budapest and employs an almost all-Hungarian below-the-line crew. It is set in late-fifteenth-century Italy and centers on the dangerous and seductive lives of the infamous papal family of Spanish origin. It was created by Irish film director Neil Jordan and features English actor Jeremy Irons as Rodrigo Borgia, or Pope Alexander VI. The series was co-produced among four production companies and is distributed ­globally, most prominently by Showtime Networks.

What does _The Borgias_ reveal about the transformations that have swept through Eastern European cinema? Most obviously, that filmmaking has become radically decentralized and depoliticized. Its beating heart is no longer the director and his dissident artistic vision but the producer and the political–economic imperatives of a globalized media industry. Nation-states, and the independent film ­production companies that have mushroomed all over the region, are no longer vying just for Western festival attention but, more importantly, for the transnational investments that supply film production. _The Borgias_ represents one of Hungary's victories in the competition among former Socialist states for a slice of the global enter­tainment market, mostly in the form of temporary jobs created by media conglomerates.

This victory has been scored by offering the producers of _The Borgias_ an ­unbeatably cheap and experienced workforce and generous tax credits, which cover up to 25 percent of foreign investors' production costs according to a 2004 law. Thanks to these incentives, Budapest has recently become the most desirable post-Socialist destination for outsourcing Hollywood-based film and television production, overtaking the formerly favored Prague. The latest milestone has been the construction of Raleigh Studios on the outskirts of Budapest, a $700 million investment and "the finest studio on the continent," as company president Michael Moore announced (Verrier, 2009). The facility includes nine sound stages, a 15-acre backlot, equipment rentals, production services, and line producing facilities (Caranicas, 2010). The Hungarian state provided only $1 million of the funds needed to build the studio. It is just one of several production facilities recently built in greater Budapest, which include the Korda Film Studio, where the first season of _The Borgias_ was shot. In addition to offering skilled, inexpensive labor and tax incentives, Moore adds, Budapest can double as other less affordable European locations such as London, Berlin, Paris, and, evidently, Italy.

Such arrangements are now essential to funding film projects everywhere in the region. In Chapter 22, for instance, Ioana Uricaru discusses Castel Films as a new paradigm for film financing. Established in 1993 as a Romanian–American partnership with Paramount Studios, managed and owned by director of photography Vlad Păunescu, Castel Films provides full services – sets, sound stages, personnel, casting, below-the-line talent, postproduction, equipment – to dozens of feature films and hundreds if not thousands of advertising productions. From making mostly B-series genre films in the 1990s (horrors, Westerns, vampire movies, action-adventure), it rose in prominence by contributing to the production of Anthony Minghella's _Cold Mountain_ in 2002. This saved $20 million in film production costs, thanks to the 20 percent tax deduction on the value of new investments over $1 million and tax exemptions for importing film equipment and for profits reinvested in the film industry. Castel Films also trains and employs much of the film industry workforce in Romania.

Between 1985 and 2011, the emphasis has clearly shifted from nurturing national cinema cultures to globalizing national film industries within the region. National cinemas are now organic parts of an increasingly integrating transnational ­entertainment industry in which media forms, platforms, and technologies are intertwined. The economic integration among production and delivery platforms goes hand in hand with an aesthetic convergence, which has challenged the ­long-held hierarchy between art films and popular entertainment. Such class and taste distinctions are no longer drawn exclusively by state-run, nationalistic ­cultural industries but are shaped by niche marketing and the affordability of certain forms of entertainment to specific demographics.

To return to the case of _The Borgias_ , it is a good fit for the brand of the premium cable network Showtime, one of the "quality" television networks that target sophisticated, upscale audiences in the United States and worldwide. The ­producer, Jack Rapke, had long planned to produce the script as a feature film with Oscar aspirations, but eventually decided to transform it into the next best thing, a ­quality costume drama series directed by one of Europe's preeminent auteurs and ­starring one of its most highly reputed actors. The success of _The Tudors_ (2007–), another high production value, spectacular costume drama series elevated by its European historical subject matter and talent, was a reassuring economic trial run for Rapke and Showtime (Rapke, J., in question-and-answer session, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 2011). While the story of the Borgia family has long been a source of intrigue, power, violence, and romance for fictional treatments it has also been popularized recently by the _Assassin's Creed_ videogame franchise, a series of three historical games in which one plays an assassin in Rodrigo Borgia's court. Gaming blogs and discussion sites were animated with comparisons of the game and the television show and speculation about mutual influences even before the series was launched. After the first episodes were aired, gamers immediately commented on the CGI quality of some of the crowd scenes, which showed a remarkable similarity to the highly realistic video game. None of these discussions ever mentioned the actual location of the ­shooting – Eastern Europe – and the entire below-the-line context of production that made possible this spectacular, game-like, cinematic illusion of European ­history, which stays invisible as the other, submerged side of global convergence.

The blurring of the division between high and popular culture, or more ­specifically between art film and quality television, speaks to a global leveling out of geographical and cultural sensibilities in the cheery melting pot of Hollywood production values and European historical heritage and artistic prestige. In the post-Cold War media world, global consumer sensibilities crystallize around brand preferences and economic class. From the ruins of state-run film industries, ­cash-strapped Eastern Europe has emerged as an indispensable site for this transnational rearrangement: a cheap resource for production and a new consumer market, which offers to the cosmopolitan consumer eye an affordable, generic template for virtual historical tourism.

At the same time, while the nation-state is still one of the players, state funding for film and other arts has been consistently dwindling in the region, especially in the wake of the ongoing global economic crisis. The moral obligation to sustain national cinema still lingers and is encouraged by European cultural subsidies. But the state's most important job has become the creation of an economic ­environment that allows for the gradual lowering of regulation to seduce the foreign investment to which much of the actual support of the film industry has been transferred.

In Hungary, for instance, state funds to be distributed among film projects were progressively reduced throughout the first decade of the new millennium. In 2010, the budget spent on making Hungarian and co-produced films was cut in half. The Hungarian Motion Picture Foundation, which has been in charge of handing out money to produce scripts each year, has faced such a deficit that it had to suspend its operations altogether for a while (Gazdaság, 2011). The annual "Filmszemle," (film review), the competition in which the best of the year's films are debuted and compared, came close to being cancelled in February 2011 and had to be rescheduled, in a much reduced format, for May. If it survives in the future, it is likely to transform into a less centralized, international festival. As a perfect illustration of the changing tides, on January 15, 2011 the Hungarian government appointed Hungarian-born Hollywood producer Andrew Vajna, responsible for international blockbusters such as the _Rambo_ series and some of the _Terminator_ movies, government commissioner in charge of the Hungarian film industry. As head of the National Film Fund, the institution that replaced the Motion Picture Foundation, Vajna is responsible for deploying new strategies for Hungarian film preservation and development. The National Film Fund's budget for financing local production is $11.2 million in its first year, barely one-third of what the Motion Picture Foundation used to distribute annually.

#  **What Is and What (Really) Was "Eastern European Cinema"?**

The introduction to this chapter sets out the first goal for this volume: to account for the sea-change that has transformed Eastern European cinema as a cultural, economic, institutional, and political enterprise over the past 25 years. While a ­possible arc of this transformation may be drawn between _No End_ and _The Borgias_ , these productions are only signposts to what are much larger shifts in the ­landscape. In fact, one might wonder – and many have – whether there really is such a thing as Eastern Europe any more. To date, 10 former Socialist states have officially rejoined Europe. The expansion of the European Union has also led to redrawing the boundaries within and around the region. Eastern Europe has effectively disintegrated into smaller geopolitical areas, questioning the very legitimacy of the region as something defined primarily by a shared Socialist past.

The effort to categorize cinema along national lines certainly persists. However, regional rubrics such as "Baltic," "East-Central European," "Balkan," and even "Mediterranean" have also been revived. Much post-Cold War attention continues to be paid to Russia. At the same time, the post-Soviet republics of the Baltic and Central Asian regions, as well as Turkey, Albania, and some of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, have come to constitute the new borders of Europe to the east and south. Slovenia has been welcomed into the Euro-zone, while Serbia and Croatia are still waiting for membership of the European Union. The Czech Republic and Slovakia have moved further apart. Romania has been forcefully rebranded as the land of Dracula, the last remaining resource of Communist ­backwardness and medieval mysticism (Imre and Bardan, 2011).

The consequences of such geopolitical redefinitions for local film cultures have been substantial. Eastern Europe has turned from a cold war other into an important component of the European Union's policy to establish a Europe-wide media and communications area able to stand up to competition with US-based and Asian media empires. As discussed by Ioana Uricaru in Chapter 22 and Melis Behlil in Chapter 26, the Council of Europe's Euroimages fund has been instrumental in financing co-production, distribution, and digitization projects among European states. The MEDIA (Measures to Encourage the Development of the Audio Visual Industries) program, another EU initiative, has provided crucial support for film projects in the areas of training, development, distribution, promotion, and Europeanization. The Television Without Frontiers initiative has been highly influential in integrating and deregulating television services within the European Union, while also setting policies to appease factions that want to protect national industries from corporatization. These European programs have certainly helped to reinvigorate media production in the former Socialist states. At the same time, European integration has further exposed Eastern Europe to neoliberal deregulation, weakening the political and economic power of nation-states and reinforcing existing geopolitical inequalities within Europe.

The post-Socialist revision of Eastern European cinema, the first goal of this collection, thus also brings into view a larger, no less important question: that of how and why these cinemas were constructed and consolidated into "Eastern European cinemas" by the dividing ideological force of the Iron Curtain in the first place. The second goal of this book is thus to peek behind the metaphorical ­curtain to see how it staged the story of Eastern European cinema and what other potential scripts it left untold. An immediate effect of this larger-scale historical revision is that it demystifies the aura created around certain filmmakers, and films that were treated in the West as "messages from the moon." This collection begins to provide a revised historiography of Eastern European cinema from vantage points that have thus far been obscured, selectively forgotten, or distorted by the Cold War dichotomy of "us and them," "East and West," "before and after." As several contributions elaborate here for the first time, Socialist film cultures were much less isolated and insular than earlier accounts would have us believe. Co-productions within the region and between East and West were made throughout the Socialist period and thrived from the late 1970s onwards, in the period of ideological and economic "thaw." The boundaries between genres and formats were much more permeable than the exclusive focus on philosophical art film intimates. Western genre film imports were consumed – national differences notwithstanding – by much of the Socialist viewing audience, and local genre films were widely enjoyed, although without distribution outlets or acknowledgment outside the region. Television and film were also interlaced by sharing production facilities, creative and below-the-line personnel, and, of course, institutions of funding and ­ideological control.

In the light of the revised historiography presented by contributions in this book, perhaps a production such as _The Borgias_ is a less surprising development, as much the result of continuity as of radical restructuring. It may be that the post-Cold War conditions that favor Eastern Europe as a site of runaway production, transnational outsourcing of labor, and tax reductions for corporate media giants run deeper than the four decades of socialism. Perhaps the division between Europe and the "other Europe" should not be EU-phorically cast away as the tainted legacy of the Cold War. Instead, it should be recast as a relationship of ­hierarchical interdependence, which can be traced back to its roots in the enlightenment, as several scholars have suggested. Larry Wolf famously tells the history of Eastern Europe as a discursive construct whose origins date back to two ­hundred years before the Cold War and Churchill's infamous "Iron Curtain speech" (Wolff, 1994). It was in the eighteenth century that the division between Eastern and Western Europe established Europe as the bedrock of rationality and democracy (Korek, 2007: 15) and generated tropes that linked Eastern Europe with ­postcolonial Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America (Buchowski, 2006). While civilization was firmly tied to the West, Eastern Europe shifted to an imaginary location somewhere between civilization and barbarism, to serve as a boundary marker where Western empires were separated and protected from the invasion of uncivilized Eastern forces such as the Ottoman Turks. The borderland's mission to protect Western European civilization became deeply internalized in the course of the struggles for national independence in the 1840s. Eastern European nationalisms were thus formed in the West's image of the region, around a core of ­self-colonization. Although Eastern European cultures did not directly participate in actual territorial imperialism carried out by Western European states, the ­hierarchical division between the two Europes qualifies as an imperial order ­sustained through mutually constituting Eastern and Western discourses (Verdery, 2002; Böröcz, 2001).

The fall of the curtain renewed the discursive hierarchy between East and West within the guise of neoliberal free-market ideology. Most post-Socialist populations have been designated as the losers of capitalism, who are blamed for their immobility and incapacity to adjust (Buchowski, 2006). József Böröcz argues that the European Union's eastern expansion is yet another effort to solidify a contiguous (as opposed to detached) empire. The European Union's rhetoric has in fact revived the discarded modernization scheme to discipline the East through the superior rationality of the market and democracy. The reality of EU expansion, Böröcz claims, is a continued division within the continent. Despite the European Union's pledge to extend the four freedoms (of labor, capital, goods, and services) to all of its citizens, the hierarchy between the former imperial powers and the peripheral newcomers is unmistakable in patterns of governmentality and in markers of an imperial order: the unequal and unidirectional economic flows that have characterized the privatization of post-Socialist government assets, the tax incentives created to lure direct foreign investment, and new policies that have allowed for siphoning off the national wealth of new member states. EU-based corporations are the most prominent investors while Eastern companies have small investment portfolios. Geopolitical power remains concentrated in the Western center; and technologies of Foucauldian governmentality are being deployed to normalize, standardize, and control the operation of post-Socialist states. The European Union's eastern expansion thus features and combines state coloniality with a civilizing mission that features low-level violence (Böröcz, 2001). Reading the persistent symptoms of a two-tiered Europe within post-Socialist films, Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli argues in Chapter 5 that rather than democracy, it was a "cultural wasteland of violence, corruption, isolation, and disenfranchisement that succeeded socialism in the former Eastern bloc countries and the Balkans."

Far from erasing "Eastern Europe" in view of post-Cold War European ­integration, then, this collection also makes an argument for reclaiming it. Despite its Cold War resonances, there is no better term that would allow for a profound understanding of the history of a divided but intertwined, two-tiered Europe. The media cultures of socialism and post-socialism have been mapped onto and are incomprehensible without this larger history. The chapters in this book keep these two goals simultaneously in mind – to account for post-Socialist transformations, but also to place these transformations within a larger perspective that calls for a retrospective historical revision on a European scale. These two goals serve as the context within which this collection makes three major interventions in the study of Eastern European cinema:

it challenges the nationalistic demarcations of film cultures;

it brings into view a Europe-wide circulation and dialogue of films and ideologies during and after the Socialist period; and

it foregrounds the theoretical currency of Eastern European cinemas for a globally conceived and interconnected film studies.

#  **First Intervention: Un-nationalizing Cinemas**

There is no doubt that nation-states have been instrumental in creating and ­sustaining film cultures in the region. It is also undeniable that nationalism remains the primary source of identification for most of the region's population. At the same time, categories of the nation and the national have tended to ossify ­histories, aesthetic forms, and industrial practices in most accounts of Eastern European cinema and culture – something reinforced under but not limited to the Socialist period.

Given that cinema built on and organically integrated pre-cinematic cultures, beyond the national specificities one also discovers a regional cinema that consistently recycles shared cultural elements, from language through historical events and personalities to imagery to a sense of humor and spectatorial sensibility that is hard to define. Furthermore, national cinemas have been thoroughly woven together by economic collaborations and circulations, historical memories of imperial oppression and occupation, and a sense of marginalization in relation to Western Europe. In this longer view, one could argue that the national specificities that have guided cinematic histories have been foregrounded precisely to disavow a shared sense of peripheral marginalization. The claim for unique national ­cinema is part of a broader, unspoken claim to national exceptionalism to a regional ­marginalization within Europe. It is compelled precisely by a self-colonizing ­competition for European/Western recognition and, more blatantly in recent ­decades, economic investment. The structure of the Soviet empire facilitated such a competitive nationalism. The Soviet Union benefited from a divide-and-conquer strategy where neighbors were suspicious of one another, information flow within the bloc was limited, and ethnic tension festered along national borders.

Another way to grasp the relevance of "un-nationalization" is to ask by whom and on whose behalf accounts of national cinema have been written. It quickly turns out that the national spectator has been a missing or entirely imagined ­element. The films that constitute national canons were produced and distributed strategically by institutions of Socialist nation-states in a precarious, often tense relationship with "Big Brother" in Moscow. At the same time, they were viewed and evaluated – that is, legitimized – mostly within a circle of Western-looking intellectuals, the most cosmopolitan population group in each country, those most familiar with international art films, people, and ideas. While "national cinema" traveled within the narrow circuit of cultural institutions, national intellectuals, Western critics, and movie buffs, the actual national spectator avoided national cinema and quietly migrated to television and popular films. Of course, as Andrew Higson (2000) writes, national cinema, at least in Europe, is always an idealistic, top-down, and paradoxical construction in that it foregrounds the most diverse, hybrid, and progressive elements within a national culture. In Eastern Europe, this contradiction – and the gap between national cinema and national spectator – was further widened by the ideological pressure of Soviet occupation, in some cases the lack of national independence, and the peculiar leadership role assigned to national intellectuals.

One of the areas where the particular paradoxes of Eastern European national cinema come into relief is the genre of historical drama. The region-wide ­obsession with national histories involves not only the perpetual work of historical revisionism that has accompanied the post-Socialist transitions and the opening of the archives, it extends to how history has been depicted and manipulated in cinema to select leading figures and formative events in order to foster a sense of national uniqueness that overrides regional solidarity. In Nikolina Dobreva's analysis, in Chapter 18, of the shared regional preoccupation with the Middle Ages in the ­historical epic this has been both a top-down and a bottom-up project. The revival of the historical epic, the favorite genre of Socialist cinema in the 1960s–1980s, was due to a simultaneous turn to popular nationalism. This turn was motivated by local government efforts to consolidate their own power in subtle opposition to the Soviet regime. Importantly, this occurred not only in film but also on ­television, where historical drama series were some of the first popular scripted programs produced by Socialist television (Imre, forthcoming).

In the former Yugoslavia, historical spectacle was also a key tool in consolidating socialism on a national basis. Under former partisan Josip Broz Tito's long ­leadership, the partisan film, a product of the postwar years, endured as a popular genre. However, Greg DeCuir explains in Chapter 21 that the partisan patriotism facilitated by the genre was also criticized in Yugoslavia. The Sixth Party Congress of Yugoslavia officially rejected Socialist realism as a standard of representation as a result of Tito's break with Stalin. This opened the way for the Black Wave, perhaps the most innovative and politically daring film movement during socialism. The films of Makavejev, Pavlović, Petrović, and Žilnik questioned the partisans in power through mocking the partisan film, the vehicle of Communist–nationalist historiography. In Chapter 5, Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli writes that the films made in the wake of the wars of Yugoslav succession, such as _Pretty Village, Pretty Flame_ (Dragojević, 1995), _Underground_ (Kusturica, 1995), or _Cabaret Balkan_ (Paskaljević, 1998), continue the legacy of the Black Wave, not only in their excessive, ­carnivalesque style and frequent citation of the Tito era through the use of documentary footage and partisan songs, but also by exposing and mocking the mythic historical continuities fabricated by nation-states to justify territorial and ethnic violence. Ravetto-Biagioli uses the word "patchwork" to describe the way in which "all of these rival histories edit themselves and each other out of shared stories and experiences and reconstitute their former compatriots as moral enemies through the selective notions of nationalism, ethnocentrism, religion, folklore, and history."

As several other contributions also testify, the effort invested in conjuring up the spectacle of independent national histories in historical films, while it was effective in consolidating nationalist sentiment in opposition to Soviet rule, has also invariably betrayed its own performative dimension. Recognizing this dimension – the fact that such films have constructed the very historical memories that they ­allegedly document – begins to relieve nationalisms from their fixation on the present and reveal them to be evolving and opportunistic processes. As Petra Hanáková observes in Chapter 24 in her analysis of the current nationalistic reinvention of Jan Hus, "it is often impossible to separate the present themes and forms from their historical roots and lineages – and the current uses of nationalist rhetoric and motifs have to be regularly read as relics and revivals of strategies present in the Czech culture throughout its whole modern era." One could substitute virtually any nation for "Czech" here. The ongoing work of geopolitical and cultural ­repositioning to which Hanáková calls attention requires adjustments to the entire fabric of historiography to rewrite national histories as regional at the same time.

As seen in Hanáková's case study, since the nineteenth century, the Hus legacy has functioned as an ambivalent register of nationalism, surfacing in times of uncertainty and transition, as is the case in the current revival of the Hussite film. It is a legacy with multiple, often contradictory, and competing political and ­historical readings. At its heart is a medieval cleric whose figure anchors one of the most secular nationalisms in the world. Hanáková also shows that the historical memory of the martyrdom of Jan Hus was instrumental in giving substance to the Czech film industry. Cinema inherited from other art forms the paradoxical ­mission of codifying a reverse teleology of nationalism, at the beginning of which stands the figure Jan Hus at the moment of national glory to which the nation should try to return.

The selective and contradictory construction of national teleologies is best exposed, Marsha Kinder argues, by considering historical database documentaries – and, conversely, by considering national histories database narratives. The ­database documentary is a genre whose properties are best disposed to reveal "the range of choices out of which any particular narrative is spun, including any ­narrative configuration of the national." Kinder examines films made by both Spanish and foreign filmmakers about the Spanish Civil War, including Hungarian Péter Forgács's database documentary _El perro negro_ (2005):

By revealing the process of selecting particular narrative elements (characters, events, objects, locations, languages) from an underlying database of possibilities and combining them to create a particular narrative account that is presented as only one among many possible versions, this database structure lessens the hegemonic power of any particular configuration and thereby undermines all master narratives, including those on which national identity depends. By acknowledging both the plurality and incompleteness of all narrative texts, this mode of knowledge production always leaves room for the unknown – including foreign and future perspectives. (Chapter 3)

The cinemas of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia abound in historical contradictions of nationalism specific to the Baltic region-within-the-region, which has received little international attention so far in film studies. Local cinema cultures were launched under the Russian empire, gained relative independence in the interwar period, and were forcefully incorporated into the centralized film industries of the Soviet Union after World War Two. Eva Näripea in Chapter 13, Maruta Vitols in Chapter 17, Irina Novikova in Chapter 19, and Andreas Trossek in Chapter 20 ­discuss how the tug of war between domestic and imperial production, and national interests and centralized command, impacted film production and reception in Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian popular cinema respectively. Näripea argues that the very definition of Estonian national cinema in the 1960s occurred within a transnational process of oscillation between foreign influences and national cultural traditions. Trossek's lens is Estonian animation, while Vitols ­considers the recent history of Latvian documentary as the form where the ­complex interaction is best described among the Soviet imperial center, national film authorities, and leading Europhile intellectuals, including filmmakers.

In the Baltic republics, the interruptions in national independence have made it particularly challenging to generate narratives of origin and organic development around which the emotional investment of the population could be consolidated. As Novikova shows, from early on, popular film took over from literature the task of generating these feelings. By virtue of their "low," derivative status, genre films were also able to convey subtle political messages that high-art cinema, prominent on the censors' radars, could not. Much as in the more specific case of the Hus heritage, historical drama had an instrumental role in forging nationalism by ­fusing mythical, fictional, and actual historical events and figures who, in the spirit of a Europe-wide romanticism, crossed these realms with ease. During Soviet occupation, cinema had to do this in a way that also obeyed the imperative to enforce Soviet propaganda and catered to both national audiences and the vast viewership of a Soviet empire. The centrally approved genre of the biopic, ­typically featuring outstanding Soviet men, served as one of the most trusted templates for these negotiated readings. Film adaptations of cherished national literary works from the nineteenth century were also platforms for sustaining nationalism while observing Soviet ideological requirements. But these films were also a part of the international circulation of heroic masculine media images that included Wajda's trilogy, Tarzan, French adventure series, Robin Hood, and East German Indianerfilme featuring the dashing Serbian actor Gojko Mitić as the Indian.

Perhaps the least known and recognized popular genre of Eastern European cinema is science fiction. In Chapter 11, Stefan Soldovieri explains that, despite the high production costs and the ideological burden of such films, the 1950s and 1960s gave rise to a number of homegrown Soviet, Polish, Czech, and East German space adventures. He follows the making of Kurt Maetzig's _Der schweigende Stern_ ( _Silent Planet_ , 1960), which was produced in a collaboration between the German Democratic Republic and Poland after plans for involving Western European ­partners fell through. Soldovieri's meticulous historical account of the process, from scripting to distribution, demonstrates that the film "provides an unusually well-documented and instructive illustration of the multilayered influence of Cold War politics on the GDR cinema and, significant national, political, and institutional differences notwithstanding, other Eastern European cinema as well."

#  **Second Intervention: A Case for European (Post-)Socialism**

The second major intervention of this book, intertwined with the first, is to uncover the ways in which Socialist cinema participated in cultural, economic, and political circulations and collaborations within Europe as a whole, interlacing the two Europes more intricately than Cold War accounts would have us believe. There is a significant register of Eastern European cinema that calls into question the image of a region entirely determined and dominated by Soviet socialism, cut off from the bloodstream of European culture and economy. Conversely, the work presented here also reveals that Socialist ideas had a wide influence, which ­regularly crossed the East–West divide.

As Francesco Pitassio shows in abundant historical detail in Chapter 14, Eastern European socialisms informed and nourished Western socialisms, not least through cinematic exchanges. He uncovers an entire cultural and political network dedicated to importing, exhibiting, and deploying Czech films in Italy thanks to the Italian Communist Party's efforts to implant a version of socialism in the 1950s–1980s. This kind of circulation was not specific to an Italian–Czechoslovak exchange. Ewa Mazierska writes that "by and large, the 1960s, up to 1968, was a period of unprecedented cultural exchange between the European West and East, with Eastern European filmmakers being feted in the West and Western European artists and cultural personalities frequently traveling to the East" (Chapter 25). She shows that co-productions extended well beyond ideologically motivated collaborations among the Warsaw Pact countries. Through case studies of _Le Départ_ (1966), directed by the Polish Jerzy Skolimowski, _Vta_ č _kovia, siroty a blázni_ ( _Birds, Orphans and Fools_ , 1969), directed by the Slovak Juraj Jakubisko, and the science fiction film _Test Pilota Pirxa_ ( _The Test of Pilot Pirx_ , 1979), directed by the Polish Marek Piestrak, in Chapter 25 Mazierska draws ­consistent parallels between the filmmakers' hybrid, inside–outside status, the international production of their films, and the transnational aesthetic–thematic solutions they embrace. Such films tended to be released from the political ­burden of national cinema and therefore received less critical attention. However, they could afford to strike more playful tones and voiced the sensibilities of a contemporaneous European culture, including the counterculture of the 1960s and European cinematic New Waves.

In a similar vein, in Chapter 15 Michael Goddard revises the dominant critical approaches to Polish cinema, which have revolved around the "holy trinity" of Wajda-Kieślowski-Zanussi, often identified as key figures of the Polish School, or the "Cinema of Moral Concern." Goddard reinserts in this history a group of filmmakers who made some or most of their films in exile and have thus been excised from Cold War accounts of Polish cinema. Goddard argues that the oeuvres of directors such as Walerian Borowczyk, Roman Polański, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Andrzej Żuławski, whom he calls the "accursed auteurs" of the Polish New Wave, is both national and international in orientation. As he puts it in Chapter 15,

While new wave and new cinema movements in the 1960s tended to be defined in national terms, their outlook was clearly internationalist both in their critical ­appreciation of films from diverse cultural origins and the orientation of their own works towards the international markets serviced by the contemporary ­burgeoning of international film festivals. New wave movements in places as diverse as Latin America and Eastern Europe also were composed both of a ­reinvigoration of national cinema and an influx of formal influences from the French and other new wave movements that had already begun, which in turn had been nourished on eclectic international sources including Hollywood B movies and Italian neorealism as well as politicized film movements such as, for example, the Polish School.

Goddard proposes that we re-examine the critical opposition towards social ­realism that has defined the image of Polish cinema. While Polish New Wave directors did draw on and participated in the non-realist experimentations and transnational exchange that characterized new waves elsewhere, they were forced to leave the country in the 1960s and 1970s when censorship tightened – in comparison with Czechoslovakia, where filmmakers had relative freedom at this time and thus their work was registered in national film history as the "Czech New Wave," or the rebellious directors of the Yugoslav Black Wave.

Perhaps the least explored and acknowledged aspect of East–West interaction during the Cold War is the extent to which the economic foundations of Socialist film industries depended on European validation. Dorota Ostrowska explains this in her discussion of the Polish film units in Chapter 23 – unique economic and artistic collaborations established in 1955, among which the National Film Board divided state funding each year. While the board ostensibly placed much more weight on the political outcomes of the creative work conducted within the film units, these teams were in fact linchpins in the economic functioning of the Socialist film industry. The industry depended on the hard currency derived from sales of Polish films from the Polish distributor Film Polski to foreign distributors. This favored festival-worthy films, which were exactly the kind that expressed ­subtle, often allegorical critique of the very authoritarian system that supported film production. Ostrowska points to the career of revered auteurs Wajda and Zanussi, also artistic leaders of film units, who straddled the contradictory and muddy international waters of Socialist cinema. The film units, in spite of their entanglement with the Socialist state, were in fact similar to Western European independent production companies formed around individual auteurs, such as Lars von Trier's Zentropa, Pedro Almodovar's El Deseo, and Wim Wenders' Neue Road Movies.

Polish documentary production also attracted considerable interest among cinephiles in Western Europe during the 1960s. In Chapter 10 Bjørn Sørenssen argues that this was because of its performance at international film festivals, where the films referred to as the _czarna seria_ or "black series" were seen as daring detours from Communist propaganda and also benefited from their association with the films of the Polish School. Sørenssen explores the impact of the _czarna seria_ both within and outside the Soviet bloc, especially its connection with the British _Free Cinema_ movement of the same period – a link that has been largely overlooked by documentary film historians. Some films in the series, such as _Warszawa 56_ and _In Old Lublin Town_ , looked back to the British documentary ­cinema of social concern of the 1930s, while others, such as _Article Zero_ , show a formal and thematic affinity with the French cinéma vérité and the American direct cinema of the 1960s. The personal relationships established in the course of exhibiting films of the _czarna seria_ in Western Europe contributed to the ­interchange of ideas and aesthetic impulses, which defied the rigidity of official, institutional cultural exchanges.

Perhaps nowhere in the region were European exchanges as formative as in the case of Yugoslavia. Aleksandar Petrović was born in Paris and, like many other Eastern European filmmakers, studied at the film and television faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague. Miodrag Popović moved to Paris in 1951 and lived there until 1954. Boštjan Hladnik attended the Sorbonne in the late 1950s and then worked as an assistant to Claude Chabrol and German ­filmmaker Robert Siodmak. As Greg DeCuir puts it, "these Yugoslav filmmakers enjoyed an international upbringing in cinema, a cross-pollination that would ­continue throughout their careers" (Chapter 21). Institutional venues of cinematic exchange also enhanced this cross-pollination. Some of the most influential of these were the 1954 French Cinémathèque exhibit organized by Henri Langlois at the Yugoslav Cinémathèque in Belgrade, and the Korčula Summer School in Croatia, attended by notable Western Marxists such as Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm, and Jürgen Habermas. DeCuir writes that Yugoslavia was a powerhouse and ­production center for international collaborations, which included Makavejev's _WR: Mysteries of the Organism_ (an international co-production with the Munich company Telepol, also supported by the Ford Foundation) and Petrović's films _The World Will Soon End_ (Yugoslav–French) and _The Master and Margarita_ (Yugoslav–Italian). Decades before the region's official conversion to capitalist democracy, the economic reform policies implemented in the 1960s turned Yugoslavia into a ­liberalized haven within the bloc where the Fulbright Program opened as early as 1964, facilitating a relatively unchecked trade of ideas between East and West.

Alice Bardan in Chapter 7 and Ioana Uricaru in Chapter 22 both analyze the ­so-called Romanian New Wave's more recent, spectacular success on the ­international festival scene. Uricaru, who, as a director, personally contributed to the new wave's reputation, along with filmmakers such as Puiu, Mungiu, Porumboiu, Mitulescu, and Muntean, points to a less visible but certainly ­crucial component of her generation's accomplishments: the ways in which they have been able to carve out a financing structure within and between the complicated schemes of state and European funding and public and private enterprise. Bardan zooms in on Corneliu Porumboiu's award-winning Film _12:08 East of Bucharest_ to make a more theoretical argument: she draws on Thomas Elsaesser's influential view of European cinema, which makes a political distinction between Eastern and Western Europe that can be traced within distinct ­aesthetic patterns. Bardan argues that _12:08_ is no different from the (Western) European films Elsaesser calls "typical," in which irony, performativity, and reflexivity are linked. At the center of the film, and of Bardan's analysis, is the ambiguous ­spatiotemporal and ­epistemological status of the Romanian Revolution of 1989. An event whose ­definition still causes a great deal of disagreement among the Romanian public, it is also a turning point in European history which has evoked a number of reflections from European intellectuals from Chris Marker through Giorgio Agamben to Andreas Dresen and Jacques Derrida. Bardan cites George Lawson's argument in the introduction to his tellingly titled collection _The Global 1989_ (2011) that we should be careful about using 1989 to divide the old from the new. Given that in many ways post-Cold War capitalist expansion represents a return to old exploitative practices, "a complex picture emerges in terms of the temporality of 1989, one which embraces important continuities alongside, and to some extent instead of, simple notions of 'all change' " (Lawson, 2011: 3).

When it comes to a retrospective revision of the European cinema map, the status of Turkey deserves special consideration. In Chapter 26, Melis Behlil revisits the hybridity of the particular borderland that Turkey represents through the lens of film circulation. She explores Turkey's cinematic connections with Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Europe as a whole. Turkish films have been influenced by Bollywood melodrama as much as by Hollywood genre films, European avant-garde waves, and Eastern European, especially Russian, filmmaking. Behlil uncovers one of the most influential and systematically overlooked bloodlines of (Eastern) European histories, which reach back to the Ottoman Empire and clearly connect present-day Turkey, the longest-standing candidate for EU membership (since 1987), with the rest of Europe. It is a sign of changing geopolitical times that these organic links with Turkey's hybrid Asian–European–Middle Eastern culture can now be acknowledged and valued, rather than simply rendered "other" and excluded. Turkey's situation shows a marked contrast with that of Eastern Europe. Since 2004, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism has embarked on an ambitious and successful funding program to support Turkish films that are competitive on the festival circuit, a program similar to the French system though more limited in scope. Many of these films are Euroimages-funded co-productions, for which ­producers from France, Greece, and Hungary are preferred by their Turkish counterparts.

These studies pose a collective challenge to the national cinema framework and call for new international and transnational histories of European cinema. Making visible the complex routes and venues of interchange between East and West, socialism and capitalism, of which the cinema is just one register, also challenges the neoliberal justification for the "shock therapy" that Eastern Europe received after the Wall collapsed to transform Socialist authoritarian regimes into capitalist democracies from the inside out.

#  **Third Intervention: East European Cinema within Global Film Studies**

The third way in which this collection expands the study of Eastern European cinema is by putting it in a relationship of mutual infusion with the questions that animate contemporary film and media studies. The contributions introduce approaches that have not, or have rarely been posed in relation to cinema and open them up for theoretical reconsideration. This has the effect of liberating Eastern European cinemas from the area studies framework into which they have been locked, along with "other cinemas," in a framework delimited by a bipolar world order. Several chapters explicitly propose dimensions that rethink the region's ­cinema as organic and valuable pieces of a globally conceived film theory and ­history. One of the most obvious such dimensions, long obscured by the exclusive focus on ideology and aesthetics in the work of national auteurs, is the attention to the film industries and institutions within which movies have been made, ­disseminated, exhibited, and consumed. Pioneering work in this area can be seen in the contributions of Uricaru, Behlil, Ostrowska, and Soldovieri.

Several chapters identify specific fields in which studying Eastern European ­cinema can make a unique contribution. In Chapter 6, Catherine Portuges considers the trajectory of Polish, Czech, and Hungarian films about Jews and Jewishness from the theoretical perspectives of Holocaust and memory studies. She tracks the aesthetic and thematic manifestations of the "transgenerational transmission of trauma" in the work and lives of three generations of filmmakers: camp survivors, those who were born just before or during the Holocaust and have direct experience but few or no memories, and those who inherited the trauma indirectly from their parents or grandparents.

Theories of post-coloniality have recently taken on newfound relevance in the wake of the realization that neoliberal shock therapy has failed and European ­integration has in many ways only entrenched the region's subordinate status. In Chapter 19, Irina Novikova describes the situation of the film industry in the Baltic states as explicitly postcolonial and gendered. She engages theories of the ­gendered register of nationalism as it is manifest historically in the historical epic, which first constituted national stories as the struggles of heroic male heroes over feminized battlefields often embodied by actual women.

A theoretical concern with new concepts and experiences of time and space has also emerged in the cinemas of the region as well as in critical approaches to these cinemas. Spatial mapping is a central thread in Eva Näripea's assessment of the transnational features of Estonian cinema, while Ioana Uricaru points to a ­thematic preoccupation with time scales as a unifying feature of the New Romanian Wave. This is also an important thematic issue in Albanian cinema, which Bruce Williams introduces in Chapter 12 in one of the first thorough historical overviews of this small nation's barely known cinema. Williams structures this cinema ­history into three distinct periods, which are nevertheless interwoven by continuities: film ­production during communism, in the interim period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 1998, and the "post-Pyramid" period that stretches from then to the present. The discussion, while it gives a thorough introduction to the major filmmakers and their work, such as Kujtim Çashku, Mevlan Shanaj, and Vladimir Prifti, three veterans of the Communist Kinostudio, and Gjergj Xhuvani and Fatmir Koçi, more recent directors whose work is internationally known, is not limited to film itself: it places films at the cross-section of the training of film ­professionals, the role of domestic and international film festivals, and scholarly work on Albanian cinema. In Chapter 8, Shekhar Deshpande and Meta Mazaj think through Slovenian cinema's struggle for recognition in the map of world cinema through two conceptual lenses: Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie's concept of "the cinema of small nations" (2007) on the one hand and Fredric Jameson's writing on regional cinema (2004) on the other.

Marsha Kinder also contributes to the spatiotemporal theoretical revision of the region's cinema. Bringing together her work on database narrative and Spanish cinema, she identifies Péter Forgács's database documentary _El perro negro_ (2005) as a gateway into what she calls networked relations between national and ­transnational systems of meaning. Kinder's exploration of this cinematic network offers a theoretical model that foregrounds both the national specificities and the transnational interconnections of representing history without pitting these against each other or using one dimension to erase the other.

Steven Shaviro reads Hungarian filmmaker György Pálfi's spectacular "body" film _Taxidermia_ as a reflection of the region's twentieth-century history from the point of view of the disillusionment and demoralization brought about by triumphant late capitalism. He describes the film as an exercise in _genealogy_ , in Michel Foucault's Nietzschean sense of the term: an investigation that works "to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of the body" (Foucault, 1998: 376). Each of _Taxidermia_ 's three parts depicts a particular historical regime (feudalism, communism, capitalism) as a regime of the masculine body and a corresponding body politic and representational/aesthetic style. "Each part of the film," Shaviro says in Chapter 2, "traces one of the ways that social, political, and economic forces are literalized, implanted directly in the flesh, and thereby expressed in the bodily anguish of a single male protagonist"– what he identifies as Deleuze and Guattari's "bachelor machine" ( _machine célibataire_ ). This is a radical view of history, a counterpoint to Western neoliberal views of an organic evolution that supposedly reaches its climax in triumphant Western capitalism.

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli discusses post-Yugoslav and post-Soviet films that counter the epistemological violence of ethno-national mythmaking with the aesthetic violence of the carnivalesque and, in its more extreme forms, the "Nietzschean ass festival." She counters criticism leveled against the work of Muratova, Luzik, Dragojević, Kusturica, Paskaljević, Balabanov, and others, that their films trivialize and perpetuate ethno-national violence and yet fail to entertain. Rather, ­Ravetto-Biagioli finds a different, distinct "entertainment value" in these films, one that is relentlessly critical, that revels in the "joy of negative analysis" and allows for a Heideggerian "unthinking" of violence achieved through claims to purity and self-righteousness.

While film and media conferences in recent decades have devoted increasing attention to strategies of teaching international and global cinema, teaching film from the former Soviet empire brings its own set of challenges. Zoran Samardzija's meditation on these challenges in Chapter 4 starts with a question asked by a ­student in his class: "Why did people choose to be Communists?" This question becomes Samardzija's platform to develop a pedagogy of teaching films made under and in the aftermath of socialism, which are inevitably confronted with powerful ideological templates in the students' minds, formed under the influence of a bipolar world view and the taken-for-granted victory of consumer capitalism. Samardzija takes us through his own experience with teaching two Serbian films that dramatize the defeat of their characters by historical forces: _Lepa Sela Lepo Gore_ ( _Pretty Village, Pretty Flame_ , 1996), a story of inter-ethnic friendship-turned-hatred in the course of the Bosnian civil war; and _Optimisti_ ( _The Optimists_ , 2006), a series of five vignettes set in a post-Yugoslav-War Serbia of general disillusionment. Both are useful pedagogical tools that require students to imagine history before considering individual character choices and to demystify unfettered ­market capitalism as a transparent state of "non-ideology."

Two significant areas of Eastern European filmmaking that have remained ­submerged in film studies – although have been cherished by film buffs and local audiences – are the sizable animation and documentary output of the Soviet era. Andreas Trossek makes one of the few existing contributions to the critical and theoretical appreciation of this work at a time when animation is enjoying a boom within the global industry and study of film. He follows the delicate aesthetic and political maneuvering that Estonian filmmakers Priit Pärn and Rein Raamat had to employ across the ideological minefields of making films for national, Soviet, and international festival audiences simultaneously through the thaw of the 1970s and the perestroika of the late 1980s. Pärn and Raamat exemplify two different strategies of "cultural bilingualism": Raamat took a nationalist and more conservative localist line, while Pärn struck a more innovative and rebellious note. Both trajectories complicate the dichotomy between oppressive state and dissident artist by revealing the entangled and sometimes surprising mechanisms that allowed a film to be produced or prevented it from being produced; and both trajectories are unimaginable without a serious historical grounding of animation in wider European art trends and movements.

Documentary production defined Latvian cinema as much as animation defined Estonian cinema. Maruta Vitols gives an overview of the main trends and players in the thriving Latvian documentary scene. As she notes, to this day, most contemporary Latvian filmmakers begin their careers in documentary. While the first generation of postwar documentary filmmakers were educated in Moscow's ­All-Russian State University of Cinematography, or film school, VGIK, by the 1960s and 1970s, artists such as Hercs Franks, Aivars Freimanis, Ivars Seleckis, Ansis Epners, and Uldis Brauns, constituted themselves into what became known as the Rīga School of Poetic Documentary. This influential movement dominated the Latvian documentary scene until the 1980s, when the arrival of glasnost and perestroika profoundly changed the country's film industry.

In Chapter 16, John Cunningham tracks the post-Socialist transition through Hungarian documentary maker Tamás Almási's seven films, made over the course of 11 years, about Hungary's steel industry and its decline. The films range from _In a Vise_ , made in 1987, which reveals the signs of crisis beyond the last efforts of Socialist propaganda to keep up the charade of robust industrial production in the 1980s, to _Barren_ (1995), in which gypsies pick at the scrap heap that is what is left of Hungary's heavy industry. The series concludes with _Helpless_ (1998), a compilation film that takes the viewer through the entire sad history. These films are unique in that they eschew the authorial "voice of God" narrative and focus on the human face of history across the decades. Almási takes his camera into the ­workers' and managers' apartments and films them at dinner, in the pub, and in their workplaces. After decades of authoritarianism, Almási allows the participants of this story to talk about the past in their own voices as witnesses. Bjørn Sørenssen shows that the Polish _czarna seria_ served a similar purpose: the films were to reveal the hidden realities behind the official propaganda, including those of the Polish steel industry. For instance, Maksymilan Wroclawski's _Place of Residence_ ( _Mijesce zamieskania_ ) confronted the propagandistic image of building the giant steelworks in Nowa Huta with candid and stark depictions of the cramped and deprived living conditions of thousands of workers.

Much like Almási, Czech documentarian Karel Vachek also set out to document the transition from socialism to capitalism in a series of four films he calls his "Little Capitalist Tetralogy." Similar to Almási's films, these long, philosophical, eclectic documentaries, made on 35 mm, are "populated by characters ranging from politicians in the highest positions to ordinary citizens" as Alice Lovejoy describes them in Chapter 9. Far from being a straightforward documentation of the changes from the Velvet Revolution to the country's accession to the European Union, these films, she says, outline "a virtual second society that represents the director's own philosophical and idiosyncratic blueprint for an ideal – and ultimately fictional – state." Vachek, who spent some of his career abroad, accentuates his outsider status with a handheld cinéma vérité aesthetic and a pronounced presence, or rather performance, which very much calls into question the documentary status of his work.

#  **Conclusion and Acknowledgments**

The three main interventions that are discussed in this book have begun to be made since the early 1990s in conferences, workshops, and publications, within a growing network of scholars, curators, and cinephiles. The contributors to this book have been instrumental in these efforts. What this volume offers is only a synthesis of such work, providing the most current and comprehensive overview of the state of cinema in Eastern Europe. While it is dedicated to the twofold goal of assessing post-Socialist change and revising film histories from a transnational vantage point, these goals did not appear out of the blue. Rather, the collection rests on the shoulders of scholars and critics who carved out a critical and cultural context for Eastern European cinema in the first place at a time when access was limited and precarious – Mira and Antonin Liehm, Daniel Goulding, David W. Paul, Peter Hames, and many others who began writing about specific national cinema and filmmakers during the Cold War. Since the Wall fell, the field has grown too large and heterogeneous to make it possible to list everyone who has made a significant contribution to it. I will therefore limit my acknowledgments to a few outstanding people whose work and spirit have been channeled by the authors of this volume: Dina Iordanova, Natasa Durovicova, Pavle Levi, Katarzyna Marciniak, Tomislav Longinović, Dušan Bjelić, Andras Balint Kovacs, and Katie Trumpener. My heartfelt gratitude to Felicity Marsh for the superb copyediting and to Finnian McGillivray for saving me so much time with the index. The credit for creating this assessment of Eastern European cinemas, on an until now unprecedented scale, and my gratitude, go to Jayne Fargnoli, who envisioned it for the Blackwell Companion series, and to the scholars who have brought the vision to life.

 **Note**

The styling of translated film titles is never without problem; in the case of those ­discussed here that is particularly so as a number of them are known under more than one English-language title. It is impossible to differentiate succinctly between the various translated ­titles of all the films under discussion, and for this reason, all translations are treated alike, whether or not the film released in English. The authors' references to the English-­language title of each film are to the versions most commonly used.

 **References**

Böröcz, J. (2001) Introduction: empire and coloniality in the "Eastern enlargement" of the European Union. _Central Europe Review_ , <http://aei.pitt.edu/144/01/Empire.pdf> (accessed December 5, 2011).

Buchowski, M. (2006) The specter of Orientalism in Europe: from exotic other to stigmatized brother. _Anthropological Quarterly_ , 79(3): 463–482.

Caranicas, P. (2010) Raleigh opens Budapest Studio. _Variety,_ February 16, 2010, <http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118015281?refCatId=3284> (accessed December 6, 2011).

Foucault, M. (1998) _Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (Essential Works of Foucault)_ , Vol. 2 (ed. J.D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley _et al_.). The New Press, New York.

Gazdaság, N. (2011) Sokkal többet költenek a külföldi stábok nálunk, mint tavaly. _Index_ , February 4, <http://index.hu/kultur/cinematrix/ccikkek/2011/02/04/sokkal_tobbet_koltenek_a_kulfoldi_stabok_nalunk_mint_tavaly/> (accessed December 6, 2011).

Higson, A. (2000) The limiting imagination of national cinema, in _Cinema and Nation_ (ed. H, Mette and S. MacKenzie). Routledge, London, pp. 57–68.

Hjort, M. and Petrie, D. (eds) (2007) _The Cinema of Small Nations_. Indiana University Press, Indianapolis.

Imre, A. (forthcoming) National history and cross-national television edutainment. _Journal of Popular Film and Television_.

Imre, A. and Bardan, A. (2011) Vampire branding: Romania's dark destinations, in _Branding Post-Communist Nations: Marketizing National Identities in the New Europe_ (ed. N, Kaneva). Routledge, London.

Jameson, F. (2004) Thoughts on Balkan cinema, in _Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film_ (ed. A. Egoyan and I. Balfour). The MIT Press, London, pp. 231–258.

Korek, J. (2007) Central and Eastern Europe from a postcolonial perspective (ed. J. Korek), _Postcolonial Europe_ , 32. www.postcolonial-europe.eu/index.php/en/essays/60--central-and-eastern-europe-from-a-postcolonial-perspective (accessed January 25, 2012).

Lawson, G. (2011) Introduction: the "what," "when" and "where" of the global 1989, in _The Global 1989: Continuity and Change in World Politics_ (ed. G. Lawson). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp.1–20.

Mihancsik, Z.S. (2000) Áltörténelmi filmjeim: Beszélgetés Jancsó Miklóssal (My pseudo-historical films: a conversation with Miklós Jancsó). _Filmvilág_ , <http://www.filmvilag.hu/xista_frame.php?cikk_id=2799> (accessed January 25, 2012).

Verdery, K. (2002) Whither postsocialism? in _Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices_ _in_ _Eurasia_ (ed. C. Hann). Routledge, London, pp. 15–22.

Verrier, R. (2009) Hollywood's Raleigh Studios plants flag in Budapest. _Los Angeles Times_ , November 3, <http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2009/11/­hollywoods-raleigh-studios-plants-flag-in-budapest.html> (accessed January 25, 2012).

Wolff, L. (1994) _Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of Enlightenment_. Stanford University Press, Stanford.

# Part I

# New Theoretical and Critical Frameworks

# 2

# Body Horror and Post-Socialist Cinema

#  _György Pálfi's_ _Taxidermia_

Steven Shaviro

György Pálfi's _Taxidermia_ (2006) is a landmark work of post-Socialist cinema. It reflects upon the history of Hungary over the past century: a history of sociopolitical failures, betrayals, and disappointments. But more particularly, the film is the product of a specific and profound disillusionment – one that still resonates for us today. The end of Communist Party rule in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 led to a "genuine elation, caused partly by the incredible ease with which the much-feared dictatorial powers crumbled"; entire societies felt "a rush of liberty and... an outbreak of collective imagination, intelligence, and inspiration" (Szeman and Tamás, 2009: 22). In the aftermath of this exhilaration, however, things went bad. The newly freed societies were swamped, as the Hungarian ­philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás puts it, by "oligarchic rule, fake electoralism, a yellow press, a precipitous decline in culture and education, a revival of authoritarianism and racism/ethnicism, misogyny, and homophobia" (Szeman and Tamás, 2009: 26). Conditions today, in the early twenty-first century, are thus quite different from anything that Central and Eastern Europeans hoped for, or ­imagined, when they brought down the Socialist regimes that oppressed them, for Hungary and the other former Socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe have been entirely absorbed within the framework of global neoliberal capitalism. The only "winners" in the new social order, Tamás says, have been "the transnational corporations and the power networks that can be loosely called 'Western' " (2009: 20). The result, for the people of Central and Eastern Europe, has been "an inhuman, unjust, unfair, inefficient, anti-egalitarian, fraudulent, and hypocritical system that is in no way at all superior to its predecessor, which was awful enough" (2009: 24).

A similar sense of disappointment haunts the West. In Western capitalist ­societies, the events of 1989 were greeted less with exhilaration than with a smug, triumphalist assurance that the values of liberal capitalism had been established on a worldwide basis once and for all. Symptomatic of this is the way that Francis Fukuyama (1993) celebrated the events of 1989 as marking "the end of ­history." Fukuyama placed capitalism in the very position that socialism had ­previously claimed for itself: that of being the unsurpassable endpoint of social struggle, the Hegelian culmination of all human hope and effort. Today, however, this sort of proclamation rings hollow. Far from fulfilling the needs and desires of humanity, the universal triumph of capitalism seems to have propelled us into a condition of perpetual financial instability, increasing economic inequality, and a ubiquitous cynicism that corrodes all effort and all hope. We are now in the terminal state that Mark Fisher calls "capitalist realism"; a situation in which "beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics" (2009: 4). History has not ended so much as it has been worn out and exhausted.

 _Taxidermia_ is very much a product of – and a reflection upon – this atmosphere of disillusionment and demoralization. The film has a specific Hungarian focus, but it also resonates with Western-capitalist concerns. _Taxidermia_ might well be described as an exercise in genealogy, in Michel Foucault's Nietzschean sense of the term: an investigation that works "to expose a body totally imprinted by ­history and the process of history's destruction of the body" (1998: 376). The film relentlessly foregrounds bodily stress and torment even as it performs an excavation of Hungary's traumatic twentieth-century history. It has three parts, set respectively during World War Two (when Hungary was ruled by a fascist regime allied with the Axis powers), during the time of Communist Party rule, and in the capitalist present. Each part juxtaposes the private and the public: a body-horror case study in imploding masculinity is joined with a parody of the spectacles of power and privilege. The three parts trace the lives of three generations of men (although, from one generation to the next, paternity is dubious).

 _Taxidermia_ 's first part tells the story of Vendel Morosgoványi (Csaba Czene), a soldier during World War Two. Stuck in a remote outpost he does not see combat; lonely and sexually frustrated, he spends his time masturbating in bizarre and inventive ways. The second part of the film focuses on Kálmán Balatony (Gergö Trócsáni), a Socialist sports hero in the 1960s, the era of so-called goulash ­communism (when party rule involved "soft repression" and a certain degree of economic liberalization). Balatony is a champion in the (imaginary) Olympic sport of "speed-eating," which involves shoveling as much food into one's mouth as one can, as quickly as possible. The third part of the film, set in the contemporary ­post-Socialist era, concerns Kálmán's son Lajos Balatony (Marc Bischoff), a pallid, thin, and painfully shy taxidermist, who ultimately applies his grotesque art to human as well as animal bodies.

The first part of _Taxidermia_ takes place deep in the countryside, in almost total isolation. An army lieutenant (István Gyuricza) lives in a small house with his obese peasant wife and their two teenage daughters. There is no hint of warfare, and no contact with the rest of the world – except during one scene in which some other officers visit and they all make a toast to "the final victory" (i.e., that of the Axis powers). Aside from the main house, there is also an outhouse, a barn for the animals, and a shack, in which Morosgoványi, the lieutenant's orderly, has a small room. The lieutenant treats Morosgoványi as his personal servant, browbeating and bullying him and making him do all the household chores. Morosgoványi also serves as a captive audience for the lieutenant's pontifications on how "cunt makes the world go round." The relations between the lieutenant and his orderly could be described as fascist, but perhaps they are better understood as feudal. The ­master's domination of his servant is entirely direct; it is not mediated by money, by spectacle, or by any pretense of personal independence.

This opening section of _Taxidermia_ is centered upon Morosgoványi's grotesque and abject body. The orderly's face is disfigured by a harelip; his expression ranges from a rigid attention to the lieutenant's orders to the tense contortions and ­blissful release of orgasm. Alone in his tiny room Morosgoványi compensates for his servitude and loneliness by engaging in fantastical acts of masturbation. His penis shoots off sparks of flame like fireworks; his ejaculate spurts into the heavens and becomes a star. He stimulates himself by playing with lit candles, by pederastically imagining sex with Hans Christian Andersen's Little Match Girl, and by ­spying through peepholes on the lieutenant's beautiful daughters as they bathe in an enormous tub or engage in a snowball fight. At one point, while he is watching them, Morosgoványi coats a hole in the wall of his shack with lard, and inserts his penis, thrusting it frantically in and out – only to have it pecked at by a rooster. His scream of pain is transmuted into the voice of the lieutenant's wife, calling the girls back into the house for dinner.

Morosgoványi's sexual performances are mostly shown to us in sequences that juxtapose extreme close-up and long-shots with nothing in between. There is ­frequent cutting, but the camera never moves. In this way, we learn the intimate details of Morosgoványi's autoerotic fetishes and rituals, but we never get a sense of him as a feeling and inwardly reflecting subject. The camera treats Morosgoványi in much the same way that it does the barnyard animals with whom he lives; ­especially the pig for which he is supposed to care. "Don't worry about your ­figure, just grow nice and fat for me," he says to the animal, tenderly cradling its head in his lap. Shortly afterwards, the pig is slaughtered for a feast. There is an extended montage sequence of the dead animal being skinned, cut up, and roasted. The sequence includes several close-ups of the pig's internal organs, oozing as they are removed from the carcass. Pig flesh is equated, via montage, with human flesh. Morosgoványi, like the pig, is reduced to the abject status of mere meat. He lives a life entirely subject to the whims of others, tormented both by the cruel limitations imposed upon him and by his own physical cravings. Pálfi's cool, elliptical editing style puts us in a strange position: we empathize with Morosgoványi's ­sufferings, and with his desperation, but he remains too strange and alien for us to "identify" with him.

Eventually Morosgoványi is seduced by the lieutenant's plump wife. His ­frenzied sex with her is presented, like his masturbatory fantasies, in a series of fragmented close-ups. They utter obscene endearments to one another ("my pretty mangalica piggy") as they fuck in the same immense tub that was previously used both for the daughters' bath and to hold the bones and entrails of the slaughtered pig. In a rapid-fire sequence, as Morosgoványi rocks back and forth he seems to be simultaneously (or alternately) penetrating and grunting over the bodies of the wife, the two daughters in turn, and finally the pig. In the next scene, the lieutenant ­executes Morosgoványi for his transgression with a quick bullet to the head. In the scene after that, the lieutenant's wife gives birth to a boy, presumably the fruit of her ­dalliance with Morosgoványi. The midwife, leaving the birth chamber, spits on the ground in disgust, right in front of the lieutenant. The baby is healthy, but he has been born with a little squiggly pig tail. The lieutenant accepts the child as his own, but first he brutally snips off the tail with tweezers.

That baby grows up to be Kálmán Balatony, the protagonist of the second part of _Taxidermia_. Kálmán is enormously stout, as befits his role as a speed-eater, an athlete pushing his body to extremes. Today, there actually is a global fringe ­subculture dedicated to the sport of "competitive eating" (Nerz, 2006), but _Taxidermia_ hilariously presents it as a massively popular, Olympic-level athletic competition, supported and promoted by the Communist state: International speed-eating matches take place in large stadia, before cheering crowds. Jet fighters fly in formation overhead; Young Pioneers march and wave flags during the pauses between rounds; military officers and party officials watch from their box seats. Speed-eaters are trained from childhood, and offered extensive coaching – as ­athletes in the Socialist countries actually were during the Cold War. Successful sportsmen such as Kálmán are rewarded with access to special privileges otherwise only available to the party elite: choice uncrowded vacation spots, rare edible ­delicacies such as fresh fruit and caviar, and even travel to the West. By focusing all this public spectacle and elite privilege on the figure of Kálmán the speed-eater, the second section of _Taxidermia_ grotesquely parodies the official culture of "­actually existing socialism."

This second section also ups the ante on bodily disgust. The camera dwells on the bloated bodies of Kálmán and the other speed-eaters as they gorge themselves on soup, pudding, caviar, chocolate "at the fluid stage," and a horse sausage that is "dry, dangerous, and full of shit like gauze and wadding." The contestants chew and swallow this stuff as the crowd roars and the commentator delivers a ­breathless spoonful-by-spoonful account of the match. Then, between rounds, in order to make room for more, the contestants puke it all up again, in flows of half-digested gruel. The camera seems to dote on these displays. It moves in lengthy, fluid shots, panning horizontally past all the competitors, or circling around Kálmán. These mobile long-takes are strikingly different from the fixed shots and dense montage of the movie's opening section. Morosgoványi's masturbatory fantasies were ­private rituals, gaining their meaning and intensity through metaphorical ­associations – hence the heavy use of montage. But Kálmán's physical convulsions are addressed outward and assume an audience. They are imbued with grandiosity and blown up to spectacular proportions, like everything else in official Socialist culture. This body frantically ingesting and then regurgitating food needs to be shown at length, in order to capture the full duration of its actions. This frenzied rhythm of incorporation and expulsion is only halted when suddenly, in the heat of competition, Kálmán is paralyzed with lockjaw. He halts in mid-chew, his body rigid; then he passes out and topples, his spoon still stuck in his mouth.

Despite his unusual body and his extreme profession, Kálmán seeks to have a "normal" life – something of which Morosgoványi could not even dream. As he recuperates, he starts to woo the female speed-eating champion Gizi Aczél (Adel Stanczel). Eventually they marry. They seem happy enough together, enjoying the domestic bliss and material well-being provided by "goulash communism." We see them in stereotypical romantic poses in locations such as the amusement park, the ski lift, and the beach. Of course, they continue to stuff themselves with large quantities of fattening foods, even as they are engaged in these more typical ­pastimes. However, all is not well in this Socialist paradise. Gizi sneaks out during the wedding celebration to have sex with another speed-eater, Kálmán's rival. After the marriage, Gizi becomes pregnant, much to Kálmán's delight, as he assumes he is the father. The doctor orders Gizi to go on a strict all-vegetable diet, but he relents after Kálmán passes him a bribe: everything is negotiable in actually existing socialism, as long as you have the perks and privileges to pay for what you want. The gynecologist marks down Gizi's condition as a uterine myoma (a non-malignant tumor), so that she may continue her usual speed-eating regime. Sometime later, Kálmán and Gizi are invited onto a high-ranking party official's yacht in order to give a command performance for a visiting Soviet dignitary. As a demonstration of their prowess, they consume 45 kilograms of red caviar in 20 minutes. But Gizi is taken ill after this exhibition, collapsing while the Soviet ­official drones on about international brotherhood and the task of constructing communism. Cut immediately to the sound of infant cries, and a tracking shot of babies in the hospital. Gizi has given birth prematurely to Lajos, an unusually frail and scrawny boy.

Lajos Balatony, as an adult in post-Socialist Hungary, is the protagonist of the third and final part of _Taxidermia_. He is a taxidermist, running his own small ­business. His shop is cluttered and claustrophobic, a grotesque menagerie of stuffed animals of all sorts, much like a real taxidermist's workshop (Milgrom, 2010). There is also a Michael Jackson poster on the wall, reminding us of how Hungary has been entirely incorporated into global capitalist culture. Lajos does not seem to have much of a life. Every day he follows the same routine. After ­completing his meticulous taxidermical labors and shutting up his shop he goes to the supermarket. He buys the same items, in the same quantities, every day – 30 kilos of margarine and 800 candy bars – at a total cost of HUF 38 526. At the checkout counter, he asks the cashier for a date. But she does not even bother to reject his proposition; instead, she simply ignores what he says and informs him of what he owes. After this rebuff, he goes to a cafe, and sits alone for a while at a small table. Then, he heads to his father's apartment to feed the cats and to clean.

Kálmán has become a monster, both physically and morally. Gizi has left him (we glimpse her on television, as the coach of the American Olympic speed-eating team). Now Kálmán is so bloated and enormous that he can no longer move. He has become little more than an obscene mountain of flesh. He sits in his chair watching speed-eating contests on television and devouring the candy bars that Lajos brings him without even bothering to remove them from their wrappers. He alternately feels sorry for himself and boasts that he is still the champion he once was. His only remaining passion in life seems to be to fatten his cats and train them in speed-eating. He has them locked in a cage where they are fed exclusively with the margarine purchased by Lajos, and they are always growling angrily from behind the bars. When Lajos comes by to do the household chores, all Kálmán can do is to curse and insult him; he is disgusted both by Lajos's anorexic thinness and by his introversion and meekness.

One day, faced as usual with Kálmán's bitter recriminations, Lajos angrily storms out, neglecting to lock the cats' cage. When he next returns he finds a new tableau of body horror, an obscene spectacle of excess. Kálmán lies dead, his belly burst open. His bloody entrails extend in a trail outwards from his body; they are strewn across the floor like so many sausages. Maybe his bowels exploded from the stress of junk food overload, or maybe the hungry cats attacked him. In any case, the animals have eaten parts of his body. Lajos, however, is unfazed by his discovery. He calmly responds, in the way he knows best: with the art of taxidermy. He carefully restores Kálmán's flesh and stuffs and mounts him. Then he prepares himself for a similar fate.

In order to embalm his own body while he is still alive, Lajos constructs a ­complex device of gears, wheels, and harnesses. He straps himself into this ­apparatus and proceeds to remove his own viscera, to replace them with stuffing, and to apply preservatives. The apparatus holds him in place, keeps his circulation going, and presumably it dulls the pain enough for him to operate on himself. We see close-ups of flesh being surgically sliced open and sutured up again, of internal organs being neatly extracted, of fluids bubbling through tubes, and of intestines being untangled and wound carefully along spools. At the last moment, Lajos presses a button; the machine decapitates him and cuts off his raised right arm. Lajos has turned himself, as well as his father, into a trophy or a statue.

Each of _Taxidermia_ 's three parts thus presents a particular _regime of the body_ , associated with a dominant political and economic order. This is how the film works within a Nietzschean/Foucaultian genealogy. Each of the three regimes has its own representational style. Each of them also involves a specific organization and regimentation both of individual human bodies and of the general "body ­politic." Each defines "masculinity" in its own particular manner. Each is ­characterized by a certain set of concrete bodily practices together with a certain articulation of power relations. Each regime breaks down the male body in its own way, the better to remold it and control it. Through its form and style, no less than through its content, _Taxidermia_ makes visible (and audible) to us a ubiquitous, but diffuse and impalpable, network of power relations, social norms, and ideological background assumptions. Each part of the film traces one of the ways that social, political, and economic forces are literalized, implanted directly in the flesh, and thereby expressed in the bodily anguish of a single male protagonist.

 _Taxidermia_ does not tell an actual story so much as dramatize and explore a discontinuous series of attractions and repulsions among grotesquely deformed bodies. The film moves, without offering us any explanations or logical connections, from Morosgoványi's masturbation to Kálmán's speed-eating and finally to Lajos's taxidermy. At the same time that it presents these historicized images of bodily appetition and disgust, _Taxidermia_ also deliberately elides the major turning points of recent Hungarian history: the liberation at the end of World War Two; the revolution of 1956; and the dismantling of the one-party Socialist system in 1989. It does not show us those moments of "general elation" and of the "­outbreak of collective imagination, intelligence, and inspiration." Rather, it is entirely ­concerned with the normalized oppression that succeeded each of these moments of opening and hope. In its refusal to focus upon these uprisings, or "lines of flight" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 3–4 and passim), the film emphasizes the arbitrariness and unpredictability of historical change. A social regime is not determined by the events that gave birth to it; if anything, it is organized as a systematic betrayal of these events.

It is worth dwelling on the way in which _Taxidermia_ handles the transitions from one regime to the next – which are also the transitions between the three parts of the narrative. The first segment of the film ends with a shot that shows us baby Kálmán, his pig tail just having been cut off, held up in the air in the lieutenant's arms. From there, the camera pans in a circle, downward to the ground, up again the length of the lieutenant's body, over his head, and into the sky. Without a cut, the sky is suddenly crisscrossed by the flight of 1960s jet fighters. The camera ­continues its circle, down from the zenith to a stadium in which a speed-eating contest is being held. Eventually, the camera reaches the adult Kálmán, shown in a close-up shoveling soup into his mouth with a large spoon. The shot continues as the camera pans around Kálmán, eventually viewing him from the back and showing beyond him the cheering crowds in the stadium's stands. Later in the film, the second segment ends with the scrawny baby Lajos sucking at Gizi's enormous breast. The camera pans sideways to a window of opaque glass; then it passes through the glass, with coruscating, refracted color effects. On the other side of the glass, we see an extreme close-up of feathers: the underside of a wing, the ­bottom of a bird's body, and an orifice from which a bit of excrement squirts. There is a cut to a close-up of the excrement hitting and staining the ground, from which the camera pans upward then zooms through a doorway into the adult Lajos's taxidermy studio. The camera tracks through a series of corridors and into a back room, where it circles around an enormous stuffed bear, finally reaching the sight of Lajos putting some finishing touches to the bear's upraised paw.

In both of these sequences, the passage of time is elided and replaced by a ­camera movement through space. We are taken without pause, and in a single motion, from a character's infancy to his maturity, and from one social system, and one kind of intense embodiment, to another. History does not progress, it merely reconfigures, trading one way of breaking down the male body for another. More generally, _Taxidermia_ systematically avoids portraying any processes of organic development; it relies, instead, upon spatial juxtapositions and analogical ­correspondences. In one astonishing montage sequence in the first part of the film, the lieutenant's enormous tub is rotated on its axis and we see the various uses to which it has been put: bathing, sleeping, storing the pig's bones, laying out a corpse, cradling a newborn baby, doing the laundry. These are all constituent ­elements of the supposedly traditional way of life predating both communism and capitalism which this portion of the film depicts.

There are also repetitions and echoes among the various segments of the film. For instance, animal entrails appear in all three portions. We move from the slaughtered pig upon whose remains Morosgoványi fucks the lieutenant's wife to the viscous gristle-filled foodstuffs of Kálmán's eating competitions, to the animal bodies that Lajos stuffs and mounts. The viscera Morosgoványi removes from the body of the slaughtered pig in the first section are mirrored by the viscera Lajos removes from his own body in the last. Or again, there are suggestive resonances between Morosgoványi's prosthetically enhanced sexual body, Kálmán's monstrously engorged eating and vomiting body, and Lajos's anorexic, self-eviscerated body. In all three cases, the men's bodies directly register, and immediately suffer, the social forces that pass through them and mold them.

 _Taxidermia_ thus insists upon a radically discontinuous history: one that is filled with resonances and reconfigurations but is not subject to mediation and does not exhibit any sort of narrative development. The practice of genealogy, Foucault says, "does not seek to define our unique threshold of emergence, the homeland to which metaphysicians promise a return; it seeks to make visible all of those discontinuities that cross us" (1998: 386–387). Such a vision of history is radically opposed to the sort of unified and self-reflective account advocated by Hegel, Kojève, and Fukuyama. The historical movement depicted in _Taxidermia_ , a ­passage from fascism to communism to capitalism, cannot be understood as a linear or dialectical progression. It is, rather, a succession of contingencies, a series of ­mutations, in the course of which "the body is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is ­poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances" (Foucault, 1998: 380). _Taxidermia_ works precisely by calling attention to, and indeed monstrously inflating, those everyday "rhythms of work" and "eating ­habits" in the course of which the male body, in particular, is systematically and repeatedly broken down.

In this way, _Taxidermia_ offers a reproach to Western neoliberal imaginings. The film's genealogical method underscores the contingency of capitalism's claims to finality and universality. In the United States, and in the West more generally, we feel as if capitalism has always been with us. We cannot remember a time when it was not; and this is part of the reason that we cannot imagine things ever being different. For the people of Central and Eastern Europe, though, the capitalism of the 20 years following the dissolution of the Communist bloc might well seem like a bizarre alien imposition, as hostile and inhuman as socialism before it, and ­fascism before that. We in the West tend to have an inveterate belief in the inevitability of the "free market," even when we are no longer persuaded of its virtues. Today, in the United States and Western Europe, we are no longer told that, as consumers, we can "have it all." Instead, we are told that we must embrace harsh austerity programs and give up on all things that we used to take for granted, but that we cannot any longer afford. Yet the underlying apologetics for corporate and financial domination remain the same: as before, There Is No Alternative. Such is the dilemma of capitalist realism. But as Tamás says, "who can badmouth East Europeans, new to market capitalism of the last variety, if they do not believe in all this nonsense? Why should they?" (Szeman and Tamás, 2009: 26). The corrosive, sardonic wit of Pálfi's film exposes the groundlessness of our Western assumptions. In its historical vision, _Taxidermia_ is almost a work of science fiction as it "cognitively estranges" us (Suvin, 1972: 372) from our sense of capitalism as the end of history.

 _Taxidermia_ performs its task of cognitive estrangement through a series of ­violent contrasts. The film is both viscerally charged and icily allegorical; ­intimately physical in its exploration of masculine desire and bodily disgust, and sardonically distanced in its satirical portrayal of social and political rituals. On the one hand, _Taxidermia_ is a highly controlled, harshly formalist film. In its nearly inhuman detachment, and its rigorously schematic organization, it is as severe as anything by Kubrick. Yet at the same time it is filled with uncomfortable and unpredictable details. With its strategy of gross exaggeration and caricature it insistently focuses on the excesses of the unruly flesh in a way that rivals early Cronenberg. This ­tension between schematic formalist distance and affective intensity has its roots in earlier Hungarian film, and perhaps especially in the historical dramas of Miklós Jancsó. It is also reminiscent of the aesthetic strategies of certain other European directors, such as Pasolini and Greenaway. But Pálfi's particular conjunction of intimacy and allegory, or of body horror and alienation effect, works as a formal methodology for his genealogical investigations.

The difficulty, no less than the beauty, of _Taxidermia_ comes from the way that the film presents its body images directly, without historical development and without psychological explanation. These body images are immediately visceral, and indeed disgusting, and yet they are also abstract and allegorical. Kálmán's binge and purge cycle, for instance, makes me queasy. When I watch the second part of the film, my stomach starts to churn and I have a faint taste of nausea in my mouth. The film, like other works in so-called body genres, operates by a sort of affective contagion. It _forces us to feel_ , arousing the audience with "a sense of over-involvement in sensation and emotion," that implies "an apparent lack of proper esthetic distance" (Williams, 1991: 5). At the same time, however, speed-eating evidently forms part of an abstract intellectual scheme. It has its place in the film as a calculated figure for the excess, the bloated sense of importance, and the empty propagandistic displays that were characteristic of the culture of Eastern European Socialist regimes. Morosgoványi's masturbation and Lajos's taxidermy are similarly emblematic of these characters' social situations. From this point of view, the dramatization of strange bodily practices runs the risk, as allegory so often does, of "seem[ing] willed, reductive, and heavy" (Jayamanne, 2001: 165). Allegory implies too great an aesthetic distance; the opposite of the excessive nearness of body genres. The schematism of _Taxidermia_ goes together with its cool, distanced formalism, and the tight control of its cinematography and editing.

This conflict between visceral intensity and allegorical distance, or between ­vulgar bodily content and abstract, schematic form, is itself the whole point of _Taxidermia_. We might even think of the resultant dissonance as Pálfi's postmodern version of Eisensteinian intellectual montage. The result of this clash of incommensurables, however, is not Eisenstein's dialectic, but rather the collapse of all mediation. For Eisenstein, "from the superimposition of two elements of the same dimension always arises a new, higher dimension" (1949: 49). In _Taxidermia_ , ­however, the superimposition of different dimensions of expression (content and form, or the visceral and the intellectual, or the affective and the cognitive) leads to a flattening, a reduction of dimensions. Reflection is folded back into immediate experience. To embody "actually existing socialism" in a repulsive speed-eating contest, or to express "capitalist realism" in a machine for self-evisceration, is to short-circuit the relation between the literal and the figurative, as well as between what Marxists traditionally call the base and the superstructure. In each of the film's three sections a whole assemblage of social institutions, ideological presuppositions, reiterated practices, and complex determinations is inscribed directly upon, and made to fall back upon ( _se rebattre sur_ – cf. Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 11), the male protagonist's body. In _Taxidermia_ there is no mediating term in between the social regime (fascism, socialism, or capitalism) and the flesh that exemplifies and suffers from it – just as there is no mediation in the historical ­passage from one of these regimes to the next.

As it presents historical assemblages in this way, _Taxidermia_ is haunted by the figure of the "bachelor machine" ( _machine célibataire_ ). I take this term from Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 18), although the official translation unhelpfully ­renders the phrase as _celibate machine_. Deleuze and Guattari borrow the term, via Michel Carrouges (1954), from Marcel Duchamp (who coined it to describe his large work _The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even_ ). The bachelor machine can best be understood, as Constance Penley describes it in relation to film theory, as a highly complex and articulated mechanism that works "to represent the relation of the body to the social, the relation of the sexes to each other, the structure of the psyche, or the workings of history" (1989: 57). The bachelor machine is a male-initiated and male-centered device; it is "typically a closed, self-sufficient system" whose "common themes" include "voyeurism and masturbatory eroticism, the dream of the mechanical reproduction of art, and artificial birth or reanimation" (1989: 57). The bachelor machine is thus a symptom and an expression of "a ­fantasy of closure, perfectibility, and mastery" (58). For Deleuze and Guattari, the ­bachelor machine is an apparatus for producing enjoyment, or _jouissance_ , as a kind of surplus of "intensive qualities" extracted from an oppressive social order: "a genuine ­consummation is achieved by the new machine, a _pleasure_ that can rightly be called autoerotic, or rather automatic; the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new birth, a radiant ecstasy, as though the eroticism of the machine liberated other unlimited forces" (1983: 18).

Lajos's self-taxidermizing device is quite explicitly a bachelor machine, Morosgoványi's autoerotic arrangements, and Kálmán's organized binge-and-purge routines, are more implicitly so. In all three cases, the male protagonists insert their own bodies into complex, extended mechanistic circuits that exacerbate and amplify their desires. These circuits do not just "represent" social forces for the individual subject, rather, they actually _transmit_ these forces directly into the male body, which suffers and "enjoys" them in a solipsistic, self-amplifying spiral that can only culminate in death. In all three sections of _Taxidermia_ the impasses of the social order are experienced as dysfunctions of masculinity. One usually speaks in such contexts of a "crisis" of masculinity, but the film presents this "crisis" as a chronic and recurrent condition. Bachelor machines, like Deleuze and Guattari's "desiring machines" more generally, "work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 8). When mediation is bypassed, and all the determinations of power and authority are directly inscribed in the flesh, there is no room for the "symbolic" dimensions of masculine privilege. All three protagonists of _Taxidermia_ are engaged in starkly material practices of stimulating, regulating, and breaking down their own bodies. These practices can be seen, in Judith Butler's phrase, as "reiterative and citational performance[s]" of masculinity (although, unlike Butler, I do not see the intensely corporeal performances of these bachelor machines as predominantly being ­matters of "discourse": cf. Butler, 1993: 2).

Morosgoványi's furtive pleasures work as crass (and potentially carnivalesque) parodies of the lieutenant's patriarchal commands and pontifications. But at the same time, these private rituals are the orderly's only respite from an otherwise total subordination to the lieutenant. Kálmán enacts something like a normative masculinity as he woos and marries Gizi; his moments with her are the only scenes in the film that offer the prospect of anything like ordinary happiness. But these enactments are little more than a false facade, as is evident both from Gizi's adultery and from the way that Gizi and Kálmán are forced to live their life together entirely at the party's beck and call. As for Lajos, his taxidermic labor is his only line of escape from the depressive position to which he is consigned both by Kálmán's monstrous Oedipal domination and by the total dissolution of social ties in the course of Hungary's post-Socialist transition. For all three men, masculinity is little more than an uncomfortable, and ultimately unconvincing, simulation. For all three, the intensified, and self-annihilating, material performance of masculinity in the bachelor machine marks an attempt to escape from the encompassing social regime. But this attempt inevitably proves futile, because it remains caught within, and materially instantiated by, the very logic from which it seeks to escape.

 _Taxidermia_ offers no visions of liberation, therefore. The film presents all three of its social regimes as claustrophobically closed, self-replicating orders; autopoietic systems, as Niklas Luhmann would say (1996). Each of these systems actively works to repress and stifle change. Each is defined by a reductive, self-confirming logic and a corresponding regulation of the male body. More specifically, each of these regimes has a characteristic political economic system, a particular form of social organization, a set of prescribed ways in which individuals relate to one another, and a preferred form of ritual expression. Each has a set of privileged operations on the body that define its possibilities and limitations. Each has its own set of criteria for determining access to power and material comfort. And each has its own typical forms of affective disorder, from which its protagonists suffer. These characteristics are summarized as follows:

 **Morosgoványi**|  **Kálmán**|  **Lajos**  
---|---|---  
fascism/feudalism| socialism| capitalism  
hierarchical/aristocratic| mass public| private  
military chain of command| prestige and privilege| atomistic isolation  
war| sports| art  
masturbation/murder| feeding/regurgitation| taxidermy/evisceration  
rank| connections| cultural capital  
obsession/compulsion| engorgement/exhibitionism| anorexia/masochism

The first part of the film links military hierarchy and patriarchal authority to sexual frustration. Morosgoványi's phantasmic masturbation is the only form of action open to him in an entirely rigid social order. His every attempt to claim a bit of pleasure for himself is unavoidably transgressive; and he is eventually executed by the lieutenant as punishment for these transgressions. The second part of the film targets the mass spectacles, ubiquitous propaganda, and enforced public ­participation of actually existing socialism. It suggests that this exaltation of the public and the collective can only take the form of a literally nauseating excess, directly manifested in Kálmán's bloated body. Kálmán receives certain privileges from the party, as a result of being a champion, and the husband of a champion. But once the party has fallen from power, he is simply cast aside; he is immobilized, and left to stew in his own impotent anger and self-pity.

The third part of the film registers the ongoing reverberations from the shock of the formerly Socialist countries' transition to actually existing capitalism. The continuing monstrosity of Kálmán's presence in the flesh suggests that the legacy of Hungary's Socialist past still "weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living" (Marx, 1968: 97). Nonetheless, Lajos also suffers in full measure from the alienation and disconnection that are endemic to capitalist society. The traumas of ­privatization and atomization are registered in his scrawniness, his inexpressiveness, and his unhealthy pallor, and above all in his social isolation. He is unable to connect with other human beings – or even to get a date. The Western freedom and abundance that Hungarians dreamed of before 1989 is now achieved in the form of the supermarket, with its bright and sterile fluorescent lighting, its long rows of immaculately packaged products, and its cashiers who scrupulously avoid any contact with the customers. In this context, Lajos's profession of preserving dead bodies seems like a gruesome _reductio ad absurdum_ of the commodity fetishism that drives a capitalist economy. We kill things in order thereby to invest them with an unchanging simulation of life. Lajos only escapes from his unbearable alienation by replicating it in the final form of his own self-extinction and aesthetic self-transmogrification.

This final transformation, which makes a kind of coda to the film, is worthy of greater comment. An extensive sociological study of the transition to capitalism in Central Europe, by Gil Eyal, Ivan Szelenyi, and Eleanor Townsley (1998) suggests that the situation in the formerly Socialist countries is one of _capitalism without capitalists_. State socialism has been dismantled; institutions and enterprises have been privatized; all areas of life have been made subject to the play of market forces. But the newly ascendant "cultural bourgeoisie" of countries like Hungary "appears to have been more successful in establishing the market institutions of modern capitalism than in creating a class of individual private proprietors, especially in the corporate sector" (Eyal, Szelenyi, and Townsley, 1998: 9). The new elite in these countries is a _managerial_ one, rather than a group of _rentiers_ or owners (most of whom remain in Western Europe and North America). This is why, as Tamás also suggests, the "nomenklatura bourgeoisie" are not really dominant ­economically or "in terms of profit" – even if, individually, "most of them are quite wealthy" (Szeman and Tamás, 2009: 20). Rather than forming a traditional capitalist class, the new elite of Central and Eastern Europe is dominant _culturally_. Eyal and his fellow authors argue that "cultural capital" – as opposed to economic or political capital, according to the distinction made by Pierre Bourdieu (1986) – "dominates the social structures of post-Communist societies" (Eyal, Szelenyi, and Townsley, 1998: 36).

How does this emphasis on cultural capital fit into the schematics of _Taxidermia_? An answer comes in the form of Lajos's aesthetic apotheosis. With his bachelor machine, Lajos transforms himself and his father into statues. As works of art, they possess a greater measure of value and prestige than either of them ever had when they were alive. Their uncanny preservation after death recalls the actual work of artists like Gunther von Hagens and Damien Hirst, both of whom have derived considerable cultural cachet from their taxidermical recycling of human (von Hagens) and animal (Hirst) corpses. Von Hagens, himself a refugee from the Socialist world, has gained at least a minor measure of notoriety, or capitalist celebrity, while Hirst has come to epitomize the brash excesses of the post-­Warholian business- and celebrity-centered international art market. Works like those of Hirst have sold for extraordinarily inflated prices; contemporary art has increasingly been conjoined with high fashion on the one hand and with high finance on the other. Lajos ironically joins this international art/celebrity/­fashion/finance circuit as after death he is celebrated both as an artist of genius and as the commodified work of art itself. Lajos had no power, and received no recognition, while he was alive; but now, transformed by death, he achieves prestige by ­embodying "cultural capital" in person, as it were.

In the final sequence of _Taxidermia_ we see the formal opening of a new museum exhibition of Lajos Balatony's work. The museum is an imposing stone structure without windows; the space inside is vast, and only minimally furnished, as befits the postmodern international style. There are many guests at the opening, and they all stand nearly motionless, elegantly and immaculately attired in white, as the camera tracks past them. These people are the new elite, the possessors of cultural capital in a disenchanted, post-Socialist world. Dr Andor Regõczy (Géza Hegedüs) addresses them from the podium. A simultaneous translator repeats all his words in English, the international language of art and commerce. The doctor had previously engaged Lajos to prepare a creepy ornament for him: a tiny human fetus encased in glass. Returning to the taxidermy shop to retrieve this trophy, he was the one who discovered the bodies of Kálmán and Lajos. Now Dr Regõczy presents their preserved figures to the assembled audience. Lacking a head and a right arm, Lajos Balatony has nonetheless preserved himself forever; an "archaic torso," the doctor says, rivaling the statue famously described by Rilke. The ­brutalities of feudalism and fascism and the grandiose ambitions of socialism have both vanished from the world. They only persist embalmed, in a bloodless and idealized afterlife. Lajos's solitary, capitalist bachelor machine has itself been ­dismantled, leaving behind only its final product.

After all the grotesque and disgusting metamorphoses of the flesh that we have witnessed throughout _Taxidermia_ we are left with these sanitized and pacified body images, safely rendered as figures of cultural capital. Such a conclusion is the only one suitable to our neoliberal era, where There Is No Alternative and where everything has already been thought of and subsists only in order to be recycled. In Central and Eastern Europe, as much as in the Anglo-American world, all is ­dissolved in the acid of a universal cynicism. As Tamás says of the mood in ­contemporary Hungary, most people look askance at "the mere implausibility of having social and political principles of any kind at all. Most people do not regard Marxism as criminal, but as naïve. But this is people's opinion of liberalism or Christianity as well. Any view seemingly contradicting individual or collective ­selfishness or self-regard seems incredible" (Szeman and Tamás, 2009: 28). _Taxidermia_ completes its formal scheme by closing the circle, erasing its own ­singularities and excesses in a perfected aesthetic image. At the end of the film we realize that we have already heard the start of the doctor's speech; it came first at the very beginning, over the opening titles. All of _Taxidermia_ 's genealogical work happened in a parenthesis that has now been closed.

But this cynical closure is not Pálfi's final word. At the end of his speech, the doctor warns his audience that there are limits even to art, "there are things that just cannot be mounted." What is missing from the completed work is the _inner experience_ (Bataille, 1998) of its production; what Lajos felt at the very moment of his decapitation. And the other protagonists' deep experiences are missing in the same way: Morosgoványi's masturbatory pleasures and Kálmán's small struggle for a measure of meaningfulness and dignity. These are the exclusions that haunt the capitalist order, even in its subsumption and commodification of all previous orders. As if to demonstrate this absence, in the final shot of the movie the camera slowly zooms in on the mounted body of Lajos. Eventually, the hollow of Lajos's navel fills the screen. But the camera continues to zoom, moving through and inside the navel. _Taxidermia_ ends with a totally dark screen; we have entered the void of Lajos's evacuated insides. There is nothing left to do but to cue the final credits.

 **References**

Bataille, G. (1988) _Inner Experienc_ _e_ (trans. L.A. Boldt). SUNY Press, Albany.

Bourdieu, P. (1986) The forms of capital, in _Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education_ (ed. J. Richardson). Greenwood Press, New York, pp. 241–258.

Butler, J. (1993) _Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex_. Routledge, New York.

Carrouges, M. (1954) _Les machines célibataires_. Arcane, Paris.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983) _Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia_ (trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H.R. Lane). University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) _A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia_ (trans. B. Massumi). University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Eisenstein, S. (1949) _Film Form: Essays in_ _Film Theory_ (trans. J. Leyda). Harcourt Brace and Company, New York.

Eyal, G., Szelenyi, Ivan, and Townsley, E. (1998) _Making Capitalism Without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe_. Verso, New York.

Fisher, M. (2009) _Capitalist Realism_. Zero Books, London.

Foucault, M. (1998) _Aesthetics, method, and epistemology_ , (ed. J.D. Faubion). _Essential Works of Foucault Vol. 2_ __(trans. R. Hurley _et al_.). The New Press, New York.

Fukuyama, F. (1993) _The End of History and the Last Man_. Harper Perennial, New York.

Jayamanne, L. (2001) _Toward Cinema and Its Double: Cross-Cultural Mimesis_. Indiana University Press, Indianapolis.

Luhmann, N. (1996) _Social Systems_ (trans. J. Bednarz and D. Baecker). Stanford University Press, Palo Alto.

Marx, K. (1968) _Selected Works_. International Publishers, New York.

Milgrom, M. (2010) _Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy_. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York.

Nerz, R. (2006) _Eat This Book: A Year of Gorging and Glory on the Competitive Eating Circuit_. St Martins Griffin, New York.

Penley, C. (1989) _The Future of an Illusion:_ _Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis_. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Suvin, D. (1972) On the poetics of the science fiction genre. _College English_ , 34 (3): 372–382.

Szeman, I. and Tamás, G.M. (2009) The Left and Marxism in Eastern Europe: an interview with Gáspár Miklós Tamás. _Mediations_ , 24 (2): 12–35.

Williams, L. (1991) Film bodies: gender, genre, and excess. _Film Quarterly_ , 44 (4): 2–13.

# 3

#  _El perro negro_

#  _Transnational Readings of Database Documentaries from Spain_

Marsha Kinder

#  **The Way In**

This chapter brings two of my seemingly disconnected research areas together – writing on Spanish cinema and producing database documentaries (online and in museums) as archival cultural histories. They come together in _El perro negro: Stories from the Civil War_ ( _The Black Dog_ , 2005), a documentary film on the Spanish Civil War by Hungarian media artist Péter Forgács, with whom my Labyrinth Research Initiative on database narrative previously collaborated.

In this chapter I read _El perro negro_ in two contexts: first, as an historical ­documentary on an iconic Spanish topic (the civil war), made by an Hungarian outsider during a period when Spain was deeply engaged in a "national reconciliation" project called "the recuperation of historical memory"; and second, as a transnational database documentary with striking similarities to two other ­archival cultural histories made by Spaniards on topics outside of Spain, José Luis Guerin's _Tren de sombras_ ( _Train of Shadows_ , 1997) and _La niebla en las palmeras_ ( _The Mist in the Palm Trees_ , 2005) by Carlos Molinero and Lola Salvador. I show how transnational readings of films not only reveal traces of the national specificities they combine but also accentuate rather than minimize the differences between them.

As I argued in _Blood Cinema_ , the national is always a contested construct, ­challenged both from within, by the local or micro-regional cultures whose ­distinctiveness it suppresses, and from without, by the larger macro-regional formations, such as European or Spanish-language media in the case of Spain (Kinder, 1993). These micro- and macro-forces function as transnational entities, which, like rival national cultures, challenge this particular configuration of the national but, unlike those rivals, also undermine the very concept of the national itself.

As a subgenre of documentary, database documentary exposes the range of choices out of which any particular narrative is spun, including any narrative ­configuration of the national. By revealing the process of selecting particular ­narrative elements (characters, events, objects, locations, languages) from an underlying database of possibilities and combining them to create a particular ­narrative account that is presented as only one among many possible versions, this database structure lessens the hegemonic power of any particular configuration and thereby undermines all master narratives, including those on which national identity depends. By acknowledging both the plurality and incompleteness of all narrative texts, this mode of knowledge production always leaves room for the unknown – including foreign and future perspectives. Bakhtin theorized the ­ideological power of such a structure when defining the mixed form of the novel, a genre whose diverse languages prevented any single cultural perspective from being naturalized as the truth, and he was the first to explicitly associate this ­process of ideological awakening with the transnational:

Consciousness awakens to independent ideological life precisely in a world of alien discourses surrounding it, and from which it cannot initially separate itself.... This verbal-ideological decentering will occur only when a national culture loses its sealed off and self-sufficient character, when it becomes conscious of itself as only one among _other_ cultures and languages. It is this knowledge that will sap the roots of a mythological feeling for language, based as it is on an absolute fusion of ideological meaning with language. (1981: 360, 369–370)

These ideas were basic to Barthes's concept of an "absolutely plural text... based on the infinity of language,... a network with a thousand entrances" (1974).

In this chapter, I use _El perro negro_ as an entrance into the networked relations between national and transnational "systems of meanings." In performing this dual reading, I will show how the national and the transnational function effectively together, as if they were rival yet compatible generic contexts for a generic hybrid. I will argue that such a combination prevents a reductionism that merely substitutes the "transnational" or "the global" for the "national" and endows it with the same tyrannizing mythological constraints.

#  **The Transnational Stage**

 _My basic aim was to understand what happens to the individual... not to judge. But to raise good questions and keep the material musical and sensitive enough to involve the viewer... I invite the viewer to say: look what kind of treasures I found, they are dancing and living, they like to live, they like to eat, they are suffering, they are exploited. So it's a panorama, a journey from our 21st century point of view, with the warning, it can happen if we are not aware of it, as it happened in the last ­decade in Yugoslavia._ (Forgács, 2005)

 _My major attempt is to work with private history, which is a kind of alternative_ _to_ _public history.... My country, Hungary, had four revolutions, four counter-­_ _revolutions, two big wars, and that means a constant identity crisis for the population. Everybody had to forget what he was to be something new._ (Forgács, 2005)

What does it mean to read the Spanish Civil War through the experience of another culture and period, as occurs in _El perro negro_? Many would argue that the best cinematic treatments of the Spanish Civil War have been made by Spaniards with close access to personal memories of this traumatic national event. Only _La vieja memoria_ ( _Old Memory_ , 1977), a fascinating three-hour documentary by Catalan filmmaker Jaime Camino, comes close to addressing the complexity of the political conflicts on both the Nationalist and Republican sides and to exposing the ­contradictions between the current memories of participants and what archives actually show.

Yet, other praiseworthy films about the civil war have been made by Europeans who normally work outside of Spain: transnational films that were admired by Spaniards and celebrated worldwide. One thinks of Frédéric Rossif's feature-length documentary _Mourir à Madrid_ ( _To Die in Madrid_ , 1963), winner of the Jean Vigo Prize and an Oscar nominee which was made during Spain's Francoist era by a Yugoslavian-born émigré to France, or, in the realm of realistic fiction, Ken Loach's _Land of Freedom_ (1995), which tells the story of David Carr, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain who joins the good fight in Spain and survives. As lifelong leftists, Loach and Rossif both privilege the Republican side, but their films speak to the specific political moment in which they were produced. With Franco's appointment of Manuel Fraga Iribarne as the new minister of information and tourism in 1962 a fresh cultural period of _apertura_ was opening in Spain, which made 1963 a good year for Rossif to remind the world of the political legacy left by the Spanish Republic. And in the wake of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, shortly before the defeat of Felipe González's Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), or Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, by the right-wing Partido Popular (PP) – the People's Party – in Spain's March 1996 general election, Loach's film showed why the ideals of anarchy and communism were still worth defending.

There were also short films made during the civil war, such as _With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain_ (1938; 18 minutes) by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert Kline, which raised money to bring members of the brigade home to the United States and pay for their medical care. And in the field of photojournalism, three great European photographers documented the civil war for leftist journals in France (such as _Ce soir_ and _Regards_ or for popular US magazines such as _Life_ ) as they participated on the Republican side: Robert Capa (Endre Ernö Friedmann, 1913–1954), who was born in Budapest like Forgács; Chim (Dawid Szymin (David Seymour), 1911–1956) from Warsaw; and Taro (Gerta Pohorylle, ­1910–1937), from Stuttgart. All of these outsiders were passionately committed to the Republican side (Young, 2010).

The situation was different for Forgács's _El perro negro_ (2005), which generated heated criticism in Spain. It was barred from Spanish television and anarchists tried unsuccessfully to ban its theatrical exhibition in Spain for, unlike the other works mentioned, it did not privilege the Republican cause. Moreover, Forgács's film was produced and released during a period of intense national debate in Spain over "the recuperation of historical memory" – a movement launched by "the discovery in 2000 of the burial site in Priaranza del Bierzo" (Jerez-Farrán and Amago, 2010). This discovery not only lead to the uncovering of mass graves all over Spain, it also triggered the call for a process of national reconciliation. Founded in December 2000, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (Asociación para la recuperación de la memoria historíca (ARMH)) was devoted to exhuming and identifying these hidden corpses, and the controversial Historical Memory Law (Ley de Memoria Histórica), first proposed by the PSOE government in 2004 and finally approved in 2007, propelled an ongoing national debate.

An ever-increasing number of volunteers, led by teams of forensic experts, anthropologists, political activists, relatives of the disappeared, and sympathizers with their plight, set out to identify and exhume the numerous mass graves that are scattered throughout the country. As of July 14, 2008... 171 burial sites had been excavated and a total of 4,054 bodies exhumed....The large number of autobiographical accounts and memoirs that continue to be written by people who grew up in Republican families during Franco's dictatorship, together with an increasing output of works of fiction, history books, TV documentaries, newspaper articles, and public commemorations dealing directly with the Civil War, is unprecedented in Spain. (Jerez-Farrán and Amago, 2010: 4–5)

Part of this output was the recovery in 2007 of what has been called _The Mexican Suitcase: The Rediscovered Spanish Civil War Negatives of Capa, Chim and Taro_ , which was originally sent to Paris, for preservation but, when the Germans occupied France, were sent to Mexico. These negatives were recently featured in a transnational museum exhibition curated by Cynthia Young at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York (which ran from September 24, 2010–January 9, 2011 before going on to travel in Spain and Mexico). The images are also ­reproduced in the extensive two-volume catalogue that accompanied the ICP exhibition, and in the 2011 documentary by Trisha Ziff that tells the complex story of the recovery.

Also titled _The Mexican Suitcase_ , Ziff's 86-minute Mexican/Spanish ­co-production emphasizes three transnational dimensions of the story. It explores the identity and collaborative relations of the photographers, the well-known Robert Capa, Gerda Taro (Capa's wife) and Chim (David Seymour), three European Jews who voluntarily went to Spain to cover the war and invented a new genre of modern photojournalism in the process, one that focused on action at the front and ­ultimately cost all three their lives. It explains why the negatives were sent to Mexico, the only nation that accepted thousands of Republican exiles with open arms: the first massive emigration for political reasons in the twentieth century. And it uses Spain's contemporary movement of historical recuperation to show why this recovery is so important now, comparing the retrieval of the negatives with the exhuming of Republican corpses from mass graves. Like the mass graves that open the film, _The Mexican Suitcase_ (in all of its transmedia incarnations) is an archive, a physical site containing material objects that give global spectators a fuller understanding of what Franco's Spanish victims suffered during the civil war and its aftermath. Yet within the film the nationalist issue still arises when noted Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer questions why the negatives were taken to the United States, a culture known for appropriating the artistic legacy of others while ignoring its historical contextualization. He insists they should have remained in Mexico. In a question and answer session following a Los Angeles screening of the film, Ziff claimed the negatives were returned to the heirs of the photographers, including Capa's brother Cornell Capa (also a well-known photo journalist born in Budapest), who founded the ICP in New York. She insists the exhibition, catalogs, and documentary preserve not only all of the images from the suitcase but also their complex transnational contextualization – not just for Spaniards and Mexicans but for posterity worldwide.

When preparing to make _El perro negro_ , Forgács came to the Spanish archives with different narrative goals that were also transnational. He was searching not for more evidence of what the Left had suffered at the hands of Franco's regime during the war, but what these archives could reveal about home movies made by amateur filmmakers of their everyday life, images that had not previously been seen either inside or outside Spain and which therefore might complicate our understanding of the period.

What these contrasting examples reveal is that the ideological meaning of all archival cultural histories grows out of the interplay among three sets of choices made at different historical moments: by the photographers being archived who decided what to shoot, by the archivists who decided what images to include and omit, and by the users who decide which materials to select for their own narrative goals.

Partly as a result of the "recuperation of historical memory" movement, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Spanish documentary enjoyed "unprecedented popularity, both in the global market and in the Spanish peninsula" (Estrada, 2010: 191) – a condition that seemed favorable for the reception of Forgács's film. Although Spaniards explicitly linked the retrieval of historical images from the archives with the exhumation of bodies from the mass graves, they focused exclusively on the Republican victims of Franco and thus did not savor the "treasures" that Forgács uncovered from the Nationalist side. Whereas Jo Labanyi (2008), a leading British scholar of Spanish cultural studies, acknowledges that the Left still "has not sufficiently tackled its responsibilities for extra-judicial killings during the war," most Spanish scholars claim the earlier exhumations (­during the Francoist era and Transition) had already unearthed and reburied right-wing victims, leaving only the mass graves of left-wing victims still festering. Although _El perro negro_ cites the grim statistics (besides the 500 000 who died ­during the war, another 75 000 were executed by the Nationalists and 55 000 by the Republicans; and after the war, in addition to the 300 000 Republicans who left Spain, another 100 000 were executed by Franco's Nationalists and 35 000 died in concentration camps) and although it features a moving sequence where the ­camera pans across the faces of prisoners from the International Brigade just before they are executed, unlike the Spanish documentaries made during this period, it unearthed no new Republican corpses.

The two television documentaries that dealt most directly with the discovery of mass graves were _Els fosses del silenci_ ( _The Graves of Silence_ ) by Montse Amengou and Ricard Belis, broadcast on Catalan Televisión, TV3, in 2003; and _Las fosas del olvido_ ( _The Graves of the Forgotten_ ) by Alfonso Domingo and Itziar Bernaola, made for the national station Televisión Española, TVE2, which aired it in early 2004. Both belong to a larger national movement of independent documentary: "a series composed of 13 documentaries entitled _Imágens contra el olvido_ , which are unified by their participation in the so-called 'recuperation of memory'" (Estrada, 2010: 191). Like _El perro negro_ these Spanish documentaries draw on archival footage, yet they emphasize new graveside testimonies by the friends and families of the ­victims, creating a more journalistic approach rooted in Spain's contemporary moment.

In "Mass graves on Spanish TV: a tale of two documentaries" Gina Herrmann (2010) contrasts these two films, praising Armengou and Belis for letting spectators make their own judgments and accusing Domingo and Bernaola of manipulating "archival images... and editing techniques" to imply an even distribution of blame between "rojos y fachas" ("reds and fascists"), a description that also could be applied to _El perro negro_. Herrmann assumes the aestheticizing of this material carries traces of fascism, an assumption that echoes Walter Benjamin's famous 1955 distinction between fascism and communism: whereas fascism aestheticizes politics, communism politicizes art ([1955] 1985).

As should be clear in my description of _The Mexican Suitcase_ , I am not ­suggesting that this Spanish discourse on the "recuperation of historical memory" was devoid of transnational dimensions. In fact, most Spanish studies scholars acknowledge transnational links to other parts of the world, including Yugoslavia. "Although the present volume focuses on contemporary Spain, the implications of the issues explored here transcend national boundaries.... We only need to think of the Holocaust, _los desaparecidos_ in Latin America, the Yugoslav Civil War, and the Rwandan genocide, to realize that the psychohistorical dynamics of ignored ­atrocities and systematic assaults on truth and memory are of universal concern" (Jerez-Farrán and Amago, 2010). Many even credit transnational precedents in Chile and Argentina with "reactivating" Spain's demands for transitional justice that were "sidelined" during its own earlier transition to democracy (Labanyi, 2008). Yet, they focus on what was unique about the Spanish nationalist context: "Spain, in one sense, is a pioneer again, showing the way for pacted democracies to pursue justice after, and apart from, the transition moment" (Golob, 2008).

Given Spain's focus on "the recuperation of historical memory," it is hardly ­surprising that Spaniards found Forgács's choice of amateur filmmakers politically problematic. The victim whose footage is most prominently featured is Falangist Joan Salvans, a Catalan industrialist from Terrassa who, we are told, was murdered along with his father by an anarchist named Pedro Cruel. The other amateur ­filmmaker featured is Ernesto Noriega from Madrid, an anarchist opportunist who becomes a Falangist convert to survive. Although Noriega comes from Castilla rather than Cataluña and from a lower class than Salvans, Forgács chose him because he shot footage from inside his prison cell. In contrast to the Salvans ­family, who, as powerful industrialists, were solidly committed to the Nationalist cause, we learn from the voiceover that Noriega's "whole family was divided. One brother a liberal, another an extreme conservative, another a Communist, another a Falangist." This diversity helps explain the ease of his ideological conversions. In his story, there is always the sense he could be killed at any moment; he was just trying to survive. As a Falangist he claims, "I was lucky... I never had to shoot anyone."

Surprisingly, Forgács's identification with Noriega seems stronger than with Salvans; in fact, his own directorial credit is superimposed over an image of Noriega's face. By using his own voice for the offscreen narration, Forgács reminds us that his transnational reading of the Spanish Civil War relies not only on these two Spaniards's documentation of their private lives but also on his own East European perspective. Claiming his film provides "a panorama, a journey from our 21st century point of view," he admits it has been shaped not by the unearthing of mass graves in Spain but by the civil wars we have witnessed in the former Yugoslavia. More specifically, he acknowledges that, as a Hungarian, he has been forced by frequent political reversals to become a changeling like Noriega – "to forget what he was to be something new."

Like the Catalan and Spanish documentaries on the mass graves, _El perro negro_ was distributed on television as well as on film, yet its funding was primarily ­transnational. Like most Forgács films, _El perro negro_ was produced and distributed by Cesar Messemaker of Lumen Film, whose base in Amsterdam and Dutch nationality grant him access to several transnational funding sources located in the Netherlands: VPRO Television (a "culturally radical" venue on Dutch television); the Dutch Film Fund (a national agency responsible for supporting film production, distribution, and marketing); the CoBo Fund (a Dutch organization that ­collects fees from Belgian and German cable users to rebroadcast programming from Dutch public television and foster collaboration between national public ­television channels and independent film producers such as Messemaker). Lumen also gives Forgács's films access to other European sources that do not require a Dutch base: Arte France (a Franco-German television network, called "the European Cultural Channel," which is available in several other European nations including the Netherlands but not Hungary or Spain); YLE/TVI Co-productions (a Finnish broadcast company, funded primarily through a television user fee, which provides access to live television programming from all over the world, including Spain and the Netherlands); and Sveriges Television (a national television broadcaster based in Sweden, also funded by the BBC model of compulsory user fees).

 _El perro negro_ won three awards at international festivals: the Documentary Grand Prize at the 2006 Hungarian Film Week in Budapest; the Maysles Brothers Documentary Grand Prize at the 2005 Denver International Film Festival; and the Feature Length Documentary Film Award at the 2005 Tribeca International Film Festival in New York. In 2007 it also helped Forgács win the prestigious Erasmus Prize, "awarded to a person or institution which has made an exceptionally important contribution to culture in Europe." It received no prizes in Spain.

According to Forgács (2005), one anarchist accused him of telling the story of a crime (the murder of Joan Salvans), but _not_ the story of the civil war where the poor were fighting for a better future. Granting the truth of this observation, Forgács claims we have already seen that story in other documentaries. Drawing on the language of Homi Bhabha (1990), he claims he was more interested in showing "a performative history" by individuals, footage that no one has ­previously seen, for it can destabilize our existing pedagogic vision of the war. As historian Robert Rosenstone puts it so eloquently:

The film creates a kind of counter history. ... Of all the documentaries I have seen on the conflict, this is the one that, after years of study, I find the most startling and provocative, a commentary on the others and all that I know about the war. If one of the tasks of history is to make familiar events of the past strange, that is, to make one see them anew, then _El Perro Negro_ is definitely history. (2006)

Yet Rosenstone's reading could be dismissed by Spaniards as that of an outsider who, like Forgács, failed to acknowledge the national "recuperation of historical memory."

Like those in the movement, Forgács emphasizes the interplay between ­personal and public history, yet has a different understanding of this binary. He believes that private history, rooted in the personal memories and lived experience of individuals (and best preserved in home movies), is always a preferable "alternative to ­public history," a discourse inevitably shaped and distorted by those in power. Consistent with Bakhtin's dialogic strategies, Forgács assumes it is a matter of leveraging the former to denaturalize the latter, no matter what ideological ­position the former holds. Yet, many in the "recuperation of historical memory" movement believe in a "collective memory" that can reconcile the opposition between private memory and public history. "Without the 'social frameworks'... provided by collective memory (the sum of understandings of the past that circulate in any given society), individual memories could not be recounted, since narration requires the insertion of data into a narrative structure (or mix of narrative structures) drawn from an available repertoire" (Labanyi, 2008: 121).

My argument is that far from erasing the significance of national specificity, the transnational dimensions in the production and reception of _El perro negro_ make the national distinctions between Spain and Hungary and their respective narrative structures all the more glaring. Perhaps this is particularly the case for documentaries that rely on access to the archives. Thus, a Spanish-language fictional film such as Alejandro González Iñárritu's _Biutiful_ (2010) – a Mexican/Spanish co-­production based on real-life characters – can be enriched by a narrative frame that exhumes the corpse of a man who had been forced into exile by Franco and who is here reunited in an imaginary sequence with the son he had never met. Partly because it is a work of fiction, this film can be celebrated in Spain for its _imagined_ historical frame acknowledges the national drive for recuperating historical memory ­without destabilizing its ideological meaning. But the stakes have always been higher for such reinscriptions in Spanish documentary.

#  **The Spanish Context for Reading Documentaries**

Even before "the recuperation of historical memory" movement, there were at least three reasons why the truth value of documentary has been such a politically charged issue within Spain (Kinder, 1997). First, Spaniards were fortunate to have the extraordinary model of Luis Buñuel's _Las Hurdes_ ( _Land Without Bread_ , 1932), the deeply subversive documentary that launched Buñuel on his own distinctive path. The ironic interplay between reality and fiction had always been a rich topic in Spanish literature, but nowhere is that issue more compelling than in documentary film, where the medium presents indexical photographic images whose ­meanings can easily be transformed by the words with which they are paired. This interaction between concrete images and ironic commentary was introduced in _Las Hurdes_ , whose narration Buñuel first performed live in the early silent screenings of the film. Not only did it lay the groundwork for pseudo-documentary, but it anticipated the ideological critiques of ethnography and anthropology that occurred decades later.

 _Las Hurdes_ also made a subversive use of the interplay between insiders and outsiders, the local and the global. Given the struggle of Spanish regions for autonomy, early documentaries in Spain frequently focused on establishing local identity (through portrayals of picturesque customs). Yet, Buñuel used such portrayals to create a devastating portrait of Spain's most impoverished region, which exposed the corruption of the Spanish nation and of global forces such as capitalism, Catholicism, and colonialism. It is not the locals who are under attack but the ­outsiders who ignore them or who come to document and exploit their misery (including Buñuel and his crew). As Michael Renov (2004) observes, "the ethnographic project has long been haunted by the legacy of its colonialist past" – a connection Buñuel acknowledged. This film enabled him not only to bring the French surrealist aesthetic home to his native Spain but also to invent a new genre – the "surrealist documentary" – whose conceptual power and satiric force were intensified by Spain's homegrown aesthetic of _esperpento_ (a Spanish form of absurdity). It also launched what Scott Macdonald (2010) calls the long tradition of "avant-doc," which enhanced the subversive potential of both genres.

Second, although the Spanish documentary had been a viable political form during the 1930s and a potent ideological vehicle for the various political factions that participated in the civil war, in 1942 Franco's government imposed a ban on shooting, editing, and processing any documentary footage other than that ­produced for the state-controlled Noticiarios y Documentales (known familiarly as "NO-DO" newsreels). Most Spaniards realized the archives were being held ­captive and therefore had political value; but these government newsreels showed them how easily the meanings of specific archival images could be manipulated for propagandistic ends. Paradoxically, it made Spanish spectators distrust all documentaries yet yearn for free access to the archives. It also made them aware of the ideological potential of disjunctive sound–image relations. Given these dynamics and the inaccessibility of the archives during the Francoist era, it is easy to understand why Spaniards welcomed documentaries on the civil war that challenged this "official" perspective, even if they came from outsiders such as Rossif.

Third, during the period of political transition (between the death of Franco in 1975 and the election of the Socialist government in 1982), when filmmakers from the Left finally gained access to the archives, they produced a series of revisionist compilation films that used some of the same archival images but with a different soundtrack and a different ideological perspective. Again, this made Spaniards aware of the power of popular memory and the ideological potential of remix and disjunctive sound/image relations. They realized that how you _reread_ this archival material is far more important than the "authenticity" of the images. In a sense, they performed an earlier "recuperation of historical memory" that applied only to the archives, not to the mass graves that were still hidden. No film made a more powerful use of these dynamics than Camino's 1977 documentary on the Spanish Civil War, _La vieja memoria_ , particularly in those sequences where the personal memories of the person being interviewed are contradicted by the historical ­footage we see on screen.

Even in the late 1970s and 1980s, outsider perspectives on the Spanish Civil War were still welcome. Basilio Martín Patiño, who made two of the most provocative compilation films – _Canciones para despues de un guerra_ ( _Songs for after a War_ , 1971) and _Caudillo_ (1975) – dramatized the process in his Godardian fictional feature, _Madrid_ (1986). This multilingual film (in Spanish, German, and English) focuses on a German filmmaker (played by Rüdiger Vogler, best known from films by Wim Wenders), who is hired by German television to make a documentary on the Spanish Civil War. Not only does he bring his German cultural baggage to the task (as Forgács would later bring his Hungarian identity to _El perro negro_ ) but he becomes so engaged in contemporary Spanish politics (street demonstrations against NATO and the United States) that he ends up abandoning the project. Spaniards such as Patiño were tired of having the Spanish Civil War treated as a dress rehearsal for World War Two and its ideological struggles. They were ready for new contemporary narratives about Spain.

Similarly, I am not really interested in comparing various films about the Spanish Civil War – a task that has been admirably performed by others, including Rosenstone (2006), Herrmann (2008; 2010), Hardcastle (2010), and Estrada (2010). Rather, I am more interested in exploring the combination of archival materials and home movies, public and private history, a narrative strategy found in most films by Forgács, which also has a rich history in Spain.

#  **Re-Imagining Archival Histories**

Amateur films urge us all – scholars, filmmakers, archivists, curators – to re-imagine the archive and film historiography. They suggest the impossibility of separating the visual from the historical and the amateur from the professional. Our collective film archive of the future demands a new historiography that embraces multiple cinematic forms.... We need to imagine the archive as an engine of difference and plurality, always expanding, always open. (Zimmerman, 2008)

The concept of archive I invoke surpasses its institutional, physical, and material definition, focusing instead on its possibilities as a basis for knowledge production, identity formation, and the projection of community imaginaries not only in the past and present but also, notably, in the future. "In rethinking spatial categories, this strategy will allow a reading of history... not from a single, fixed, geographical and conceptual cartography – be it linguistic, ethnic, or otherwise – but according to multiple maps, simultaneously unfolded" (Vizcaya, 2008). What do we gain by doing this second reading of _El perro negro_ in the transnational context of database documentary? We are prevented from wrongly concluding that Spaniards are solely committed to a national context, or that they are resistant to transnational readings or to Forgács's approach to documentary.

In fact, _El perro negro_ shares many themes and textual strategies with José Luis Guerín's _Tren de sombras_ ( _Train of Shadows_ , 1997) and Carlos Molinero and Lola Salvador's _La niebla en las palmeras_ ( _The Mist in the Palm Trees_ , 2005), two database documentaries by Spaniards that focus on topics outside Spain. All three combine images (both stills and footage) from personal and public archives. All three claim to use "found footage" (shot by others) and a database structure, which suggests their images and sounds have been selected and remixed to illuminate an historical subject. In the process, all three create an open narrative field that contains several interwoven stories whose combination deliberately blurs the lines between ­history, home movies, and fiction. All three have titles that pair commonplace material objects (dog, train, palm trees) with a symbolic quality evoking obscurity or death (blackness, shadows, mist). They all raise epistemological questions ("How do we know what we know?") and raise doubts about the truth value of archival materials, showing how easily their meanings can be manipulated through editing. Yet they all present archival data as a tangible form of personal memory, a process that validates the unique experience and creative invention of individuals.

More specifically, all three feature a male figure (a photographer or filmmaker), whose death is a mystery but who leaves haunting images behind as his legacy. Though his story is interwoven with those of others, in each case it is his personal experience that most dramatically enriches, complicates, or challenges the "­official" collective history we thought we already knew. In the presentation of his story, there is a disjunctive gap between word and image. While _Tren de sombras_ has no narrative voiceover and practically no dialogue, an anonymous printed text sets the mystery in motion. Although _La niebla en las palmeras_ uses a first-person narration, the voice is female and the character male. Although _El perro negro_ has a voice-of-God narration voiced by Forgács himself it is gradually decentered by an increasing plurality of voices.

#  _Tren de sombras_ (1997)

 _Tren de sombras_ tells the story of Gérard Fleury, a Parisian lawyer and amateur ­filmmaker who lived in Upper Normandy, a region associated with French literary masters – such as Flaubert (who was born in Rouen) and Proust (who depicted this area as Balbec in _Remembrance of Things Past_ ). In a brief onscreen text (practically the only one in this almost wordless film), we are told that on November 8, 1930 Fleury went out at dawn to capture the right light for filming the local landscape. He was never seen or heard from again. The film closely examines Fleury's ­decaying black-and-white, silent home movies, which are contrasted with Guerín's contemporary color footage that documents the same locale. While the home movies are mobilized to solve the mystery of one man's disappearance, Guerín's contemporary footage leads us to confront the mysterious disappearance of an entire way of life.

Midway through the film – after we have already seen Fleury's home movies (both silent and with different musical tracks) and before we begin to focus on Guerín's contemporary footage (with ambient sound) – we watch Fleury's ­decaying black-and-white images streaming through a Moviola. We discover how new meanings can be excavated from these home movies, which are reanimated with narrative drive. Introduced by the whirring sound of its motor, the Moviola functions as search engine, generating a train of images that position Fleury's brother Étienne next to their young niece Hortense, suggesting a romantic ­relationship between them. At one point, it keeps replaying footage, of Hortense riding her bicycle; the moviola goes forward and backward, as it searches for a third figure hidden in the background (evoking the famous sequence from Antonioni's _Blow-up_ ). It finally discloses the maid with whom Étienne is probably having an affair. The more sexual tensions that are uncovered, the more we begin to read all of the images in this erotic light – even footage of two young boys playing with their ties and giving lascivious looks. We begin to suspect that Fleury may also have been erotically interested in Hortense and realize that his rivalry with Étienne was not only over this young woman but also over opposing models of early ­cinema: the Méliès-type magic evoked by Étienne's performance as amateur ­magician versus the Lumière actualités, which, like Fleury's home movies, ­documented moving trains and domestic life.

Unlike the similar sequence from _Blow-up_ , here the mysteries remain unsolved. We still do not know what happened to Fleury, what exactly was going on within the family's domestic melodrama, or whether these archival images are authentic or fake. Guerín seems more interested in the process of questioning than in providing answers. Through remix, he shows how this found footage can be ­re-read within several regimes of knowledge to generate different meanings about the mysterious disappearance of the auteur, the cultural and historical specificity of this particular region, the materiality and fragility of the film medium, the respective values of film preservation and historical reconstruction, the history of European silent cinema, and the permeability of boundaries between all bordered domains – including genres (documentary and fiction, comedy and melodrama), regions (Normandy and Catalonia), and nations (France and Spain).

Given that meanings are so easily manipulated by editing, Guerín purposely casts doubts on the authenticity of Fleury's home movies. He shows that their value is dependent on other qualities – on what they reveal about the cinematic medium and about cultural change. The home movies contain narrative ­fragments that generate melodrama: a complex network of erotic relations within an ­affluent, extended bourgeois family of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the kind of network that was theorized by Freud and Foucault and dramatized by Proust and Flaubert. In contrast, Guerín's documentary footage uses static long-takes to capture anonymous strangers, sheep, cars, barges, music, light, and shadows drifting in and out of the frame. While the former raises provocative narrative questions about the characters and their erotic relations, the latter moves us with the sheer beauty of its crisp images of nature and industry. They are both compelling, but in very different ways, for they must be read against different cultural regimes of knowledge and pleasure (Kinder, 2003).

#  _La niebla en las palmeras_ (2005)

In contrast to _Tren de sombras_ , _La niebla en las palmeras_ immediately reveals that its central character is fictional; Santiago Bergson is a transnational construct whose composite story embodies the mysteries of the twentieth century. His name ­ineluctably brings to mind the Polish/French philosopher Henri Bergson, which leads us to read the film's subjective stream-of-consciousness as both a unity and a multiplicity (five variations of one man's story). His given name, Santiago, also brings to mind Pinochet's 1973 overthrow of Allende in Chile, which launched the search for twentieth-century political victims buried worldwide. We are told Bergson was a Spanish photographer from Asturias who documented the miners' leftist revolt, an anti-fascist adventurer who fought with the French Resistance during World War Two, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project in the United States to create the atomic bomb, an artist who collaborated with Orson Welles on his radio hoax about an invasion from Mars, and a husband and father who may have been murdered. His fictional status is underscored by having a woman voice his first-person narration and by representing his daughter with three transnational versions, living in Asturias, Havana, and Normandy respectively. Yet each daughter tells the same story with minor variations and different photographic images. Though the filmmakers name these multiple versions of Bergson's story after what they perceive as five qualities of the quark (strangeness, charm, beauty, truth, and color) and call the abstract finale "Higgs" (evoking the Higgs boson or "God particle" in quantum physics that is assumed to exist although it cannot be directly observed), the film's experimental structure and archival data say more about history, memory, and representation than about physics.

The film uses archival images from diverse sources – family photographs and home movies from "real" people who are not related to Bergson, commercial postcards of nude women once sold with packages of tobacco, historic footage from newsreels and public archives, and contemporary color footage of the daughters shot by Molinaro and Salvador. The meanings of these appropriated images are constantly redefined by the voiceovers that accompany them, enabling them to accrue new associations each time they reappear in a new narrative context. This interplay between words and images, between the audio and visual tracks, contradicts Barthes's arguments about the anchoring function of verbal captions that allegedly limit the plurality of meanings in the photographic image (1977). Consistent with Bakhtin (1981), the poetic voiceovers actually increase the plurality of meanings for the images, especially in "Charm" where the text is presented in Spanish, English, French, and German. Although the film may sound abstract and difficult to follow, it is actually quite accessible (in fact, it won the People's Choice Award at the Tribeca Film Festival) for both its train of fascinating images and highly literate voiceovers move at an exhilarating pace, challenging spectators to keep up with their kaleidoscopic juxtapositions.

Although both _La niebla en las palmeras_ and _Tren de sombras_ could be considered pseudo-documentaries, they do not make us question the historical value of the image. Rather, they use this "fictional" dimension to explore the interweaving of history, memory, and photography in the twentieth century and to reimagine the archive as an ever-expanding mode of knowledge production that must always remain open. With their emphasis on plurality and subjectivity, these films can also be read as "poetic" documentaries, the category Rosenstone borrows from Bill Nichols (2010) and Michael Renov (2004) to describe _El perro negro_. Although it may lack a logical argument, the poetic documentary "presents us with bits of lives, mini-narratives, fragments of voices, horrendous images, even moments of humour and good cheer, and say all of these different worlds existed at once" (Rosenstone, 2006).

#  _El perro negro_ (2005)

An archivist (with his own personal collection), as well as a filmmaker and media artist, Péter Forgács is known for the use of amateur home movies that he collects from ordinary people throughout Europe and remixes with more traditional ­archival footage from public institutions. Most of his films create a rivalry between personal and public footage, which becomes a way to question any "official" ­version of history. He puts faith in the knowledge generated by "authentic" home movies and their resistance to manipulation by any collective discourse. He sees his own manipulation as merely enhancement, as bringing out what needs to be revealed. Although he always favors home movies, he chooses only those that have aesthetic power – reaffirming his faith in the epistemological potential of art and its ability to move us emotionally. For his own aesthetic power depends not only on his own masterful re-editing of this material (as in the case of Guerín, Molinaro, and Salvador), but also on his choosing amateur artists whose unique aesthetic makes them worthy of being saved from oblivion. This is his way of recovering dead artists from the grave.

Before introducing its amateur filmmakers, Joan Salvans and Ernesto Noriega, _El perro negro_ opens with a highly ambiguous sequence that documents what looks like a festive local ceremony. But soon it turns into a ritualistic execution committed by a group of young men who push a blindfolded victim off the hillside. We never find out who they are, when or where this ritual occurred, whether anyone actually died, or where this footage came from. Accompanied by Tibor Szemzö's percussive music with rhythmic clapping (which matches the clapping of the men on screen), the ritual becomes totally immersive. The later recurrence of both images and music from this strange sequence underscores its importance to the film, yet Forgács deliberately retains its poetic ambiguity. When I asked him about this footage, he told me it came from the collection of Joan Salvans: "This 16 mm film was shot in the late 20s or early 30s in Catalonia, with friends on a spring excursion, playing a folk game. One falls out at each round. But here the '­execution' scene – I presume – is 'in the air of the times'" (Forgács, pers. comm. with the author). With hindsight, we realize that the ritual prefigures executions to come: real executions that are committed by both sides during the war but whose ­meanings are still difficult to decipher. We never find out more about the ritual. The only way spectators can identify the source of the footage is by retroactively recognizing Salvans's cinematic style, through aesthetics rather than politics.

This strategic ambiguity makes us welcome the voice-of-God narration once it is launched yet question its adequacy to explain everything we see and hear. In fact, as if purposely maintaining the ambiguity for as long as possible, the percussive music from the ritual continues over the titles and over a montage of fragmented poetic images that will be remixed to introduce Salvans's story: the wind in the trees; the sea; the Salvans' palatial home, La Barata; the shadow of the filmmaker with his camera; the industrialist Francesc Salvans; his son Joan; their factory; an overhead shot of the workers; a faceless man retrieving a gun hidden in his bed; a pair of elegant women dancing; a desolate country road. Both the music and ­montage are interrupted by the sound of two gunshots, which trigger the voiceover that unifies these fragments within an emerging historical narrative. Sounding very much like the opening printed text in _Tren de sombras_ , Forgács's opening ­comment roots us in history and underlines the centrality of Salvans: "On 24 July 1936, six days after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, a cyclist found the bodies of Joan Salvans and his father Francesc not far from their house, La Barata. They were killed by an anarchist called Pedro Cruel." This statement's matter-of-fact tone may lead some of us to falsely assume that we have actually seen Pedro ­getting his gun (the only shot in the film that looks like a contemporary insert). It leads all of us to listen for more: "We traveled through Spain's violent decade with the images and stories of amateur filmmakers, such as Joan Salvans from Terrassa in Catalonia, and Ernest Noriega from Madrid in Castilla."

Forgács uses his own voice for this offscreen "outsider" narration, as Buñuel had done in _Las Hurdes_ , at least in the early silent screenings where he performed the voiceover live. Forgács's commentary, like that of Buñuel, acknowledges his own status as an outsider who has come to document this disturbing chapter in Spain's history and who will rely on the "images and stories" of local informants. At one point he picks out Pedro Cruel from an overhead long-shot of workers and pauses the footage so that we can get a better look at this person who has a box drawn around his head and shoulders. Yet, as Rosenstone points out, we never really know whether this blurry figure is actually Pedro Cruel. Repeatedly, like Buñuel's narrator, Forgács either over- or under-narrates what we are seeing, making us aware of the limitations of his commentary. Yet his narration never reaches the same level of disjunctive irony that we find in _Las Hurdes_ because it also serves the practical function of explaining the Spanish Civil War, which was much more complicated than the contextualizing historical narratives of World War Two and the Holocaust that were evoked in most of his earlier films. Well known to most of his viewers, those framing historical narratives could remain offscreen yet influence what we were seeing because we brought that knowledge (what Labanyi (2008) calls "collective memory" or "social frameworks") to the film.

As Forgács has acknowledged, the case was different with the Spanish Civil War. Though everyone has heard of it, few understand its complex politics, so he could not rely on a prior knowledge in his audience. Thus he used his own voiceover commentary to summarize the "official" version of the war: but which official ­version? Given that the commentary is not contradicted by the images we see on screen, the film seems to be endorsing this view. In his earlier films, the "official" history was usually under attack, but here the only "official version" being rejected (or omitted) is the leftist version, which has prevailed in most previous films on the civil war. What is strikingly new is his appreciation for Salvans and for what was lost with his premature death.

Forgács's earlier films frequently created a unique spectator position – largely based on the music provided by his collaborator, minimalist composer Tibor Szemzö. His melancholy music sharply contrasts with the vibrant, playful ­behavior shown in the home movies, creating an historical distance between the viewer and the characters on screen. Yet the melancholy music is appropriate to the historical hindsight we bring to the film, for we know what happens to these characters even though they do not. This dynamic is particularly strong in _The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle_ (1997), a film based on home movies that document the daily life of a Jewish family (the Peerebooms) in the Netherlands, including the day on which they pack for their trip to a "work camp" in Auschwitz. This ironic combination of the minimalist music and vibrant behavior makes our perception of their physical and emotional vitality all the more poignant, for now we have a better understanding of what has been lost in the Holocaust. This dynamic has a mesmerizing effect because it combines emotional engagement with historical distance, a combination that is rare in cinema but that Forgács also tries to achieve in _El perro negro_.

Yet these dynamics did not work in the same way for the Spanish Civil War because Forgács could not assume his Spanish spectators would sympathize with these individuals of different ideological persuasions. Although Salvans may have created "treasures" that show how much he and his friends "like to live" (like the wonderful scene in which he and his fiancé Mercé dance on the terrace at La Barata to a paso doble playing on the phonograph, while the wind animates the trees in the background), he was still documenting the bourgeois life that was under attack by union workers, anarchists, and landless peasants who saw his ­family as the enemy. To fully enjoy Salvans's footage of everyday life, perhaps we need to treat it as "the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie" or "fictionalize the material" by recontextualizing it as melodrama. In fact, the double wedding of the Salvans brothers brings to mind the elegant bourgeois wedding that is contrasted with the working-class barrio in Juan Antonio Bardem's _Muerte de un ciclista_ ( _Death of a Cyclist_ , 1955), the award-winning melodrama that helped launch the modern Spanish cinema. Other scenes of the Salvans' household remind us of Fleury's affluent bourgeois family in _Tren de sombras_ , which came from roughly the same period. But in contrast to Guerín's database documentary, Forgács's melodramatic reading serves to justify the amateur filmmaker and his home movies rather than merely showing how easily the meaning of their images can be re-inscribed. It tries to convince us that with his premature death, something valuable was lost.

The limits of Forgács's voice-of-God narration are exposed not only by ­ambiguous scenes (such as the opening ritual) but also by the inevitable march toward war. The closer it comes, the more other voices are added. There are excerpts from speeches by historical figures such as dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera and his son José Antonio Primo de Rivera explaining the uniqueness of the Falangist Party he is founding; passages by Noriega describing his harrowing experience and explaining his footage; comments by landless peasants expressing their hatred of the Salvans ("When we looked at the landowner, we thought we were looking at the devil himself"), or by an international writer such as George Orwell, acknowledging his ambivalence toward seeing Barcelona under anarchist rule: "Though I don't understand it and don't even like it, I recognize it as a state of affairs worth fighting for." Forgács emphasizes the ironic ambiguity of this line by accompanying it with Szemzö's percussive music from the opening ritual sequence.

The first of these additional voices is introduced by the reading of Lorca's "Eyes," a poem about the subjective experience of death which uses both voice and vision to diversify the perspectives on the war. Later in the film, during some of the most gruesome footage, when Lorca's poem (like the opening ritual) is repeated, it takes on greater emotional resonance.

Forgács's reliance on aesthetics (over ideology) is reinforced by his many ­allusions to Lorca and Buñuel, two of Spain's most famous artists; they shared Salvans's class background but were both committed to the Republican side. Though the film reminds us that Lorca, "the son of a rich landowner from Granada," was murdered by Franco's Nationalists, _El perro negro_ associates him with Salvans, lamenting the loss of two talented individual artists, one famous, the other an amateur, both from the bourgeoisie. No one knows whether, had Salvans lived, he would have become a professional filmmaker but his artistic potential is elevated by being linked to Lorca.

The allusions to Buñuel imply a comparison with Forgács himself. Like his friend Lorca, Buñuel came from the landed bourgeoisie but always supported the Left and was always committed to individualism. In one of his interviews Forgács refers to _Las Hurdes_ (which was attacked both by the Right and the Left), praising Buñuel's courage and implying that he himself was taking a similar risk with _El perro negro_ , which he knew would arouse serious objections in Spain. Within the film, his choice of images sometimes evokes specific references to _Las Hurdes_ ; for example, to illustrate Spain's "extreme poverty" he chooses shots of a sick child in the street and a pig (rather than a bull) entering a poor hovel, choices that evoke Buñuel's memorable images.

The choice of the film's title also strengthens its connections with Lorca, Buñuel, and Salvador Dali. Some claim the title of the first film made by Buñuel and Dali, _Un chien Andalou_ ( _An Andalucian Dog_ ) was a reference to their close friend Lorca, whom Buñuel (1984) had described as "an elegant Andalucian." Although it was Dali who chose the name of their film, he took it from the title of "a forgotten book" of poems by Buñuel, which had been influenced by Lorca's poetry.

Not only is the black dog the first and last image we see in the film, it reappears at the end of the recitation of Lorca's "Eyes," where it begins its association with death. This is an important nodal point in the film which marks the end of a long introduction for the recitation ends the exclusivity of Forgács's narration and introduces a calendar that begins the long chronological drive toward the war.

The dog's identification with death is also strengthened by the image of Dali and his wife Gaia, which leads to an explicit reference to _A Short Report of a Crime_ by Buñuel and Dali, a brief text we both see and hear: in the suburbs of Madrid a dog discovers a girl's body and eats part of her skull. The black dog is also ­associated with the anarchist killer Pedro Cruel (when he gains power) and more generally with violence committed by both sides. At the end of the film, the dog splits in half, evoking Cerberus, the multi-headed hound from classical mythology who guarded the gates of Hades, preventing the dead from escaping. In the context of the Spanish Civil War, the split dog also evokes "the two Spains," both equally immersed in death. Yet the dogs in _El perro negro_ also belong to an array of domesticated animals – pigs, sheep, rabbits, donkeys, horses, bulls – that move through the film, reinforcing one of the lines quoted in the voiceover: "Landless peasants hate the bourgeoisie because they treat them like animals."

This version of the deadly hound also brings to mind the mangy dog at the end of Buñuel's _Los olvidados_ (1950), the Mexican film that brought him back to world prominence. In the sequence where Jaibo, a young killer as vicious as Pedro Cruel, lies dying alone in the street like a dog, he finally gains our sympathy. He futilely calls for his mother, but the last image he sees is this canine creature, both mythic and banal, who becomes the embodiment of death. The image of the dog is superimposed onto Jaibo's body, which gradually freezes into a still image of his corpse.

By strengthening his references to these world-renowned Spanish artists, Lorca, Buñuel, and Dali, as a means of addressing the political critiques from Spain, Forgács was demonstrating his own reliance on the epistemological power of ­aesthetics over ideology.

Given that the sources of only some of the footage are identified, we are left with the sense that the "total" story is still unknowable; even if we scour the archives (both public and private), there will still be holes. Yet it is the home movies that help to fill those gaps. Their primary value depends on this dual status as ­supplementing the story while still remaining rare and unique.

Forgács's acknowledgment of the gaps is also built into the film's modular structure – one that alternates between the two sides without judging either. Instead of talking about the nation he moves from one region or city to another, tracking events that led to the war, its resolution, and its aftermath: recurrent ­ceremonies and strikes, elections, and executions, banquets and battles, parties and parades. He moves from Terrasa and Barcelona in Catalonia to Madrid in Castilla and to other local sites including Andalucia, Valencia, and Alicante. He covers the miner's revolt in Asturias, which was brutally crushed by Franco – an event that is central in _La niebla en las palmeras_. He keeps the structure open, though, as if many more episodes could be added from other cities and villages and other moments of history so long as authentic footage could be found. And he acknowledges the international forces, not only the International Brigade, but also Germans fighting on both sides. Thus, the representation of the war stresses the local, the regional, and the global rather than the national.

Despite Nichols's (2010) claim that documentary is a discourse of "sobriety" that is capable of implementing ideas and actions, it is the formal power of these three poetic database documentaries that is more forceful than their politics. Although Santiago Bergson is fictional and both Fleury and Salvans remain mysterious, all three films filter their respective archival materials and memories, with all of their contradictory and pluralistic meanings, through an individual's subjectivity rather than through some official discourse or "collective memory." That is what makes all three films so emotionally compelling.

However, there are still significant cultural differences. Whereas Forgács sees the "authentic" private history as an alternative to the inevitable distortions of public history, Guerín, Molinaro, and Salvador see them working together productively. These Spaniards do not want to forget who they were – they want to remember. So they freely remix images from public and private archives, as well as from history and fiction, creating dramatic combinations that enable them to reimagine the past and document the future. But Forgács preserves the open-endedness and performative possibilities of his cultural histories by cultivating an intriguing ­ambiguity both in the images and in the music and in the editing rhythms that orchestrate and combine them. By making this historical material "musical" he enables this ambiguity to resist the totalizing impulse of archives and to challenge the hegemonic claims of master narratives and nations.

 **References**

Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) Discourse in the novel, in _The Dialogic Imagination_ (ed. M. Holquist). University of Texas Press, Austin.

Barthes, R. (1974) _S/Z_ (trans. R. Miller). Hill and Wang, New York.

Barthes, R. (1977) The rhetoric of the image, in _Image, Music Text_ (trans. S. Heath). The Noonday Press, New York, pp. 32–51.

Benjamin, W. [1955] (1985) The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, in _Illuminations_ (ed. H. Arendt). _Schocken Books_ , New York.

Bhabha, H. (1990) Dissemination: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation, in _Nation and Narration_. Routledge, London.

Buñuel, L. (1984) _My Last Sigh_ (trans. A. Israel). Vintage Books, New York.

Estrada, I. (2010) The recuperation of memory in regional and national television documentaries: the epistemology of _Els fosses del silenci_ (2003) and _Las fosas del olvido_ (2004). _Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies_ , 11 (2): 191–209.

Forgács, P. (2005) Interview with Péter Forgács, director of El Perro Negro, Vienna, March 25, <http://www.screenrush.co.uk/films/film-60490/photos/detail/?cmediafile> (accessed December 5, 2011).

Golob, S.R. (2008) Volver: the return of/to transitional justice politics in Spain. _Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies_ , 9 (2): 127–141.

Hardcastle, A.E. (2010) "El documental es un arma cargada de pasado": representation in documentary and testimony, in ___Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain_ __. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN, pp. 148–155.

Herrmann, G. (2008) Documentary's labors of law: the television journalism of Montse Armengou and Richard Belis. _Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies_ (special issue: The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Spain, ed. J. Labanyi), 9 (2): 193–212.

Herrmann, G. (2010) Mass graves on Spanish TV: a tale of two documentaries, in ___Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain_ __. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN, pp. 168–191.

Jerez-Farrán, C. and Amago, S. (eds) (2010) Introduction, in _Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain_. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN, pp. 1–27.

Kinder, M. (1993) _Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain_. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

Kinder, M. (1997) Documenting the national and its subversion in a democratic Spain, in _Refiguring Spain: Cinema/Media/Representation_ (ed. M. Kinder). Duke University Press, Durham and London, pp. 65–98.

Kinder, M. (2003) Uncanny visions of history: two experimental documentaries from transnational Spain – _Asaltar los cielos_ and _Tren de sombras_. _Film Quarterly_ , 56 (3): 12–24.

Labanyi, J. (2008) The politics of memory in contemporary Spain. _Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies_ (special issue: The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Spain ed. J. Labanyi), 9 (2): 119–126.

Macdonald, S. (2010) Avant-doc: eight intersections. _Film Quarterly_ , 64 (2): 50–57.

Nichols, B. (2010) _Introduction to Documentary_ , 2nd edn. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis.

Renov, M. (2004) _The Subject of Documentary_. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London.

Rosenstone, R. (2006) Documentary, in _History on Film/Film on History_. Pearson Education, Harlow.

Vizcaya, B.S. (2008) Rethinking the archive and the colonial library: Equatorial Guinea. _Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies_ , 9 (3): 341–363.

Young, C. (ed.) (2010) _The Mexican Suitcase: The Rediscovered Spanish Civil War Negatives of Capa, Chim, and Taro_ , 2 vols. International Center of Photography, New York.

Zimmerman, P.R. (2008) Morphing history into histories: from amateur film to the archive of the future, in ___Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories_ (eds K.L. Ishizuka and P.R. Zimmerman). University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

 **Further Reading**

Nichols, B. and Renov, M. (eds) (2011) _Cinema's Alchemist: The_ _Films of Péter Forgács_. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London.

# 4

# Did Somebody Say Communism in the Classroom?

#  _or_

#  _The Value of Analyzing Totality in Recent Serbian Cinema_

Zoran Samardzija

Whenever I teach courses on Eastern European cinemas, I assign _The Communist Manifesto_ as a primary text. This was not always the case. At first, I felt it best to avoid extensive discussion of the word "communism" in class – mainly because in the United States it is still irrationally invoked in order to Red-bait, as evidenced during the 2000 and 2004 presidential election cycles. Given such unreasonable cultural baggage, I thought an embrace of communism would actually hinder ­discussion of the films under consideration and limit how students relate them to their everyday lives. Best to speak about socialisms, Marxisms, or even the legacies of Stalinism, I thought, than to step into the minefield of communism. Then a student asked a question that made me reconsider my methodology: "Why did people _choose_ to be Communists?"

Although it is tempting to dismiss the question as naïve, it does have a certain logic. From the perspective of students inundated with neoliberal and consumerist worldviews, one can choose an ideology as if it were a commodity: toothpaste, cell phone provider, or communism, are all reducible to lifestyle choices. Asked in the context of a course on Eastern European cinemas, it is a legitimate response to films that offer forceful criticisms of Communist societies. Czech New Wave films such as _Lásky jedné plavovlásky_ ( _Loves of a Blonde_ , 1965) or recent works from Romania such as _A fost sau n-a fost?_ ( _12:08 East of Bucharest_ ) are bound to make ­anyone wonder why people believed in communism. In other words, while the question is valid, it also underscores the difficulty of teaching and surveying ­cinemas from Eastern Europe. In any world cinema class, students frequently ­project their own worldviews onto films that originate from unfamiliar cultures. However, a course on Eastern European cinema presents an additional peda­gogical bind. It confronts students with a political and economic system that has been distorted by propaganda and entangled in historical catastrophe. Consequently, they cannot comprehend communism or imagine why anyone would "choose" it. Historical explanations partially ease this pedagogical bind. It is essential to convey that ­communism was imposed on many in Eastern Europe; that for others, it was ­preferable to Nazism or virulent nationalism; and that some people were true believers. But such explanations do little to challenge students' assumptions that neoliberalism and consumerist choice are the only natural worldviews. If ­anything, these explanations can provide further validation, which is why, in my experience, students have difficulty interpreting post-Communist works, such as _Bolshe Vita_ , which address anxieties about the transition into market economies.

Grasping the anti-communism of classical Eastern European films requires less ideological strain than pondering ambivalences about capitalism. The only ­sufficient response to "Why did people _choose_ to be Communists?" is to ensure that students become familiar with the philosophical justifications for communism. I do not mean that they should be able to define terms such as "class conflict," "superstructure," or "false consciousness," though doing so would be helpful. Rather, they need to understand the basic theory of history and historical change that is central to communism. To state my point directly, every course on Eastern European cinema should foreground the concept of historical totality. To be clear, I use the term "totality" in its most elemental Marxist sense: the entirety of social and economic forces that determine specific historical conflicts and individual choices, or, how the whole of history relates to its parts. This is a strategically ­limited use of the term that does not take into consideration the complex debates and divergent definitions one finds within certain traditions of Marxist philosophy or its modern origins in the systematic philosophy of Hegel. A course on Eastern European cinema cannot survey all Marxisms. Nevertheless, a serious consideration of the philosophy of communism provides students with the grounding to interpret in a complex way how Eastern European films reflect the failures, in lived practice, of that philosophy, and how its aftershocks are still felt in an era of European unification.

Any discussion of totality can emerge from interpretations of course screenings themselves rather than from lengthy excursions into critical and theoretical ­readings. Films that forcefully dramatize characters defeated by their historical ­circumstances or by ideological conflicts beyond their control are especially useful pedagogically because tragic narratives invert the standard relationship between character will and the world. Like most Western spectators, students are accustomed to stories that unfold according to what filmmaker and theorist Raul Ruiz calls "central conflict theory," which he defines as "a story [that] begins when someone wants something and someone else doesn't want them to have it. From that point on, through various digressions, all the elements of story are arranged around this conflict" (1995: 11). In contrast, tragic films ask students to prioritize the entirety of social and economic relations over interpreting character ­psychology and motives. In other words, individual will and choice become secondary to ­history. While there is no shortage of tragic Eastern European films with characters that are destroyed by history, I have had success teaching two pessimistic Serbian films that dramatize the defeat of their characters by historical forces: _Lepa Sela Lepo Gore_ ( _Pretty Village, Pretty Flame_ , 1996) and _Optimisti_ ( _The Optimists_ , 2006). The first of the two films tells the story of the collapse of an interethnic friendship during the onset of the Bosnian civil war in order to represent the shared historical modes of "belonging" created by communism and ethnicity. The latter consists of five vignettes set in postwar, post-Milošević Serbia in which social and spiritual disillusionment has become the norm. Both are useful pedagogical tools that require students to imagine history before considering individual character choices.

#  **From Communism to Ethnic Nationalism**

While there are several films about the onset of civil war in Bosnia, Srđan Dragojević's _Lepa Sela Lepo Gore_ (1996) is noteworthy for how it presents the ­dialectical evolution from Communist solidarity to interethnic hostility in the ­former Yugoslavia. Much of this sophistication derives from its denial of the self-exoticizing "ancient hatreds" thesis found in other, more internationally popular works such as _Before The Rain_ (1994) or Emir Kusturica's controversial _Podzemlje – bila jednom jedna zemlje_ ( _Underground_ , 1995). _Lepa Sela Lepo Gore_ instead presents a nuanced view of how shifts in historical totality divide friends by inverting ­ideological modes of belonging. The friendship in question is between Milan, a Serb, and Halil, a Muslim. Set in a small village in northern Bosnia, where the two were raised, the film is narrated mostly from Milan's perspective as he lies in a ­military hospital in Belgrade having been transported there from the battlefield. Much to the dismay of my students, the gap between the bedridden Milan of the present, who tries to stab the wounded Muslim solider in an adjoining hospital room with a fork, and the Milan of the past, who defends Halil's home from being looted by fellow Serbs, cannot be easily explained. The film purposely avoids tidy, straightforward psychological explanations. Milan is never shown making a clear choice between conflicting ideologies. In other words, there is little insight to be gained from the question "Why did Milan choose to be an ethnic nationalist?" Instead, the film invites students to piece together its non-linear plot fragments and contemplate its representations of historical totality. Only then can they understand why Milan transforms from believing in the Yugoslav ideal of Communist interethnic solidarity to reluctantly participating in the Bosnian war and to becoming a rabid, chauvinistic ethnic nationalist.

The prologue and epilogue in _Lepa Sela Lepo Gore_ consist of two mock newsreels that describe the origin and the future of the tunnel that provides the primary ­setting during the war scenes. They are also two moments clearly not narrated from Milan's perspective. The absence of his point of view highlights the historical and political forces that will determine his bloody transformation. The opening pre-title sequence, for example, begins with a mock Communist newsreel from 1971 that depicts the dedication of the tunnel, which we learn is named "Brotherhood and Unity." During the footage, a narrator explains that workers have triumphed over nature to build a symbol of national unity between the ­peoples of Yugoslavia – the tunnel. Images of happy peasants and proud Communist Party dignitaries accompany the narrator. As the mock newsreel continues, bright colors flood the screen and the image starts to move in slow motion before becoming increasingly exaggerated and surreal. The sudden shift in the formal characteristics of sound and image indicates the transition from the propagandistic version of events depicted in the newsreel into the "actual events" of the ceremony. In this actuality, a Yugoslav Communist Party official, Džemal Bijedić, approaches the tunnel with scissors to cut a large ribbon but instead slices his thumb, causing an excess of blood to spurt from the wound. It is especially significant that a depiction of Džemal Bijedić – who was prime minister of Yugoslavia from 1971 to 1977 – appears at the beginning of _Lepa Sela Lepo Gore_ since he was always a strong advocate for the independence of the republic of Bosnia and the rights of Muslims as a constitutive people of Yugoslavia. If the first newsreel satirizes the Yugoslav Communist ideal of brotherhood and unity for not overcoming ethnic nationalist belonging, then the last newsreel, dated April 1999, casts doubt on Bosnia's ability to integrate successfully into a unifying Europe. The narrator of the newsreel describes how the European Union and the United Nations funded the reopening of the tunnel, the name of which has now been renamed "The Tunnel of Peace." In a repetition of the film's opening, Dragojević shows a close-up of the dignitary's thumb as he slices it instead of the ribbon with oversized scissors. His scream ends the film.

While the mock newsreels associate the tunnel with bloodshed instead of the official ideals of Yugoslav communism and European unity, the diegesis of the film introduces an even darker metaphor about an ogre who sleeps within the tunnel and who, when awakened, "will burn down all the villages." The apocryphal story is introduced immediately after the opening mock newsreel as the film shifts from 1971 to 1980, a historically significant date marking the year of Tito's death. In the scene, Milan and Halil are young boys standing in front of the now dilapidated tunnel, afraid to enter it because they fear the ogre. This situation is ironic, since later in the film the tunnel functions as the primary setting for the Bosnian war scenes; Milan's militia is trapped inside the tunnel while besieged by Halil's army unit. Intended to explain the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the oft-referenced ogre in the tunnel becomes the film's dominant metaphor. In his excellent study _Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema_ , Pavle Levi describes it:

Fulfilling the role of the central metaphor in the film, the tunnel thus functions as a black hole that, during Yugoslavia's communist years, stored everything that was repressed from the surface of the sociopolitical reality so that the country could maintain its image of the peoples' solidarity. The somehow timeless and transhistorical interethnic animosity (the Ogre) was supposedly also building up underneath the surface of multiethnic happiness, and it erupted in the most violent manner with the collapse of the Yugoslav federation. (2007: 141)

The image of the tunnel as a "black hole" is apt since all interpretations of the film gravitate toward it. In interviews, even Srđan Dragojević himself advances the idea that the ogre represents what was repressed by official Yugoslav history. While this is the reading most critics advocate, a close analysis of _Lepa Sela Lepo Gore_ does not fully support this interpretation. Though the ogre metaphor is abstract and ­diffuse, it is neither necessarily "transhistorical" as Levi suggests nor the "timeless" id of the former Yugoslavia repressed by communism. If viewed from the limited ­perspective of the characters in the film, then such descriptions may seem appropriate. But if the bookend newsreels are interpretative guides, then the ogre should be equated with the ideological struggles that structured the history of Yugoslavia, in particular the irreconcilable tension between nationalism and communism.

To be fair, the dominant interpretations of _Lepa Sela Lepo Gore_ correctly imply that nationalism remained a presence in Yugoslavia despite attempts to create a superseding panethnic federal identity. However, nationalist identification did not remain because of the unsuccessful repression of atavistic impulses for ethnic belonging. The relationship between communism and nationalism has always been, in theory, and in historical practice, murkier than the failed repression thesis suggests. Throughout the twentieth century in Eastern Europe, communism was never completely antithetical toward nationalist forms of identification as regimes were often heavily dependent upon folk cultures and traditions. This is shown in the mock newsreel that opens _Lepa Sela Lepo Gore_. In contrast to the narrator's rhetoric about Yugoslav progress forged by Tito's "shock-workers," whom we see raising their jackhammers in glory, peasants dancing in ethnic or folk costumes quickly become visible. Following the slicing of Džemal Bijedić's thumb, the camera whip-pans, revealing the dancers. In theory, their mode of belonging should clash with the workers in industrial attire and the Communist youth at the ceremony. Yet, their coexistence confirms that, in practice, Communist societies did not completely repress folk cultures and ethnic affiliations. Militant movements that challenged the party or state were certainly crushed, but ethnic identification was always present in some form. Communist orthodoxy, on the other hand, declares that nationalism is becoming increasingly outmoded within the capitalist world order and will eventually be cast aside. In the famous passage from _The Communist Manifesto_ , Marx and Engels write,

The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself _the_ nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word. National differences, and antagonisms between peoples, are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. (Marx, 1967: 102)

According to such orthodoxy, national differences will evaporate once the ­bourgeoisie become fully cosmopolitan and completely homogenize the world economy. Class distinctions will replace nationalist ones. Even if one advances Trotsky's ideas about uneven development to account for the lingering vitality of nationalism in regions such as the Balkans then a practical problem still remains. In essence, it is impossible to transform peasants who lived under imperial rule into a proletariat without simultaneously legitimatizing ethnicity as a mediating category of identity.

One might argue that at least Yugoslavia's experiments in decentralization (which allowed for more ethnic self-determination than did most Communist states) implicitly acknowledge that the conflicts between peoplehood and nationhood make it difficult to create a proletariat class. Ideally, ethnicity functions as a vanishing mediator instead of the sleeping ogre in _Lepa Sela Lepo Gore_. Yet, unhinging ethnicity from the idea of peoplehood is likely to be an historical impossibility. As Immanuel Wallerstein writes in _Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities_ :

For more than a hundred years, the world Left has bemoaned its dilemma that the world's workers have all too often organized themselves in "people" forms. But this is not a soluble dilemma. It derives from the contradictions of the system. There ­cannot be _für sich_ class activity that is entirely divorced from people-based political activity. We see this in the so-called national liberation movements, in all the new social movements, in the anti-bureaucratic movements in socialist countries. (1991: 85)

The contradictions of the system to which Wallerstein refers is that capitalism is capable of producing economic equality and inequality at the same time. He writes: "Ethnicization, or peoplehood, resolves one of the basic contradictions of historical capitalism – its simultaneous thrust for theoretical equality and practical inequality – and it does so by utilizing the mentalities of the world's working strata" (Wallerstein, 1991: 84).

Given the convoluted historical complexities of how ethnic nationalism ­functions in the world and evolves over time, it is not surprising that class difference has yet to serve as a viable foundation to identity. In the specific case of Yugoslavia, as long as it showed economic growth – as it mostly did until the 1970s –its ethnic juggling act seemed successful. Its military and economic strength, at least in comparison to that of its Communist neighbors, meant it could assure equality for workers regardless of their ethnic affiliations. This assurance ­especially rings true for the shock-workers who raise their jackhammers triumphantly in the opening of _Lepa Sela Lepo Gore_ ; they believed for a moment that they transcended ethnicity to create a singular, national people. Only later would they become both the foot soldiers and victims of the interethnic war that erupted.

 _Lepa Sela Lepo Gore_ , therefore, is not about what happens when ethnic affiliations are repressed by Communist regimes. Rather, it demonstrates how such regimes are no more capable of reconciling the tensions between nationalism, peoplehood, and economic equality than the capitalist societies that foster such tensions. In truth, the ogre in the tunnel was never really asleep; it reemerged because, as the federal state began to wane, ethnicity became a more viable way for reconciling forms of belonging. This is made clear later in the film when Milan's paramilitary unit hides in the ogre's tunnel to take refuge from Muslim forces. As the space of the tunnel becomes the dominant setting of the film, Dragojević explores the conflicting ideological foundations of Serbian nationalism. In addition to Milan, the soldiers trapped inside are characterized across a broad social and cultural spectrum; they include a former Communist Party member who loved Tito, right-wing peasants, and a thief. Their only common bond is that they assume they are ethnically unified, convinced of the perceived threat of Muslims whom they call "Turks."

The pasts of Laza, one of the peasants turned soldier, and Velja, the thief-cum-soldier, illustrate how ethnic solidarity is now more viable than appeals to "bloodless" forms of belonging. After Laza is killed by a grenade blast in the tunnel, Dragojević flashes back to why he decided to volunteer for the army. It is unclear whether this is filtered through Milan's perspective, since he is not present when we see Laza sitting outside with his large family listening to the words of a propaganda broadcast on the television;

Once again history is repeating itself. Raging hordes of evil have risen against the Serbian people. Croatian armies, foreign mercenaries, and fanatics of Allah's Jihad, just as they did 50 years ago, they are attacking the poorly armed Serbian defenders who are heroically holding their own in this unfair battle... their children will not be the victims of Croatian fascism, assisted by world powers, with intentions to draw a new map of Europe and create a monster with a foreboding name: the new world order. ( _Lepa Sela Lepo Gore_ , 2005)

Upon hearing this, Laza rises in disgust and immediately volunteers for the army. In addition to showing how he has been duped by propaganda, the scene ridicules his newfound ethnic solidarity with the besieged Serbs. After leaving his family in disgust, Laza hitchhikes with a Turkish truck driver. However, he does not recognize the driver's obvious origins, despite the Turkish melodies seeping out of his radio and the hanging crescent-moon jewelry. The fact that Laza cannot recognize "the evil Muslim other" when in its direct presence suggests that his ethnic attachments are not grounded in any primordial reemergence of his ignored Serbian identity but are merely a response to global politics he does not understand. Velja, on the other hand, is cynical and realizes that the war is not a heroic defense against encroaching Islam or the reemergence of fascism in Europe. The only reason Velja "volunteers" for the army is that he assumes the identity of his brother to prevent him from being forcibly conscripted. Is it no wonder, then, that Velja offers the ­bitterest condemnation of Yugoslav Cold War politics and how they mutated into post-Communist ethnic recidivism. He is the only one who infuses an interpretation of the ethnic conflict with direct economic history. After listening to the paramilitary unit captain champion the virtues of honesty and honor that he and other Communist officials supposedly possessed, Velja responds,

Your great honesty, you were always full of shit. Do you think, Mr. Captain, that one single house we set on fire or they set on fire was honestly earned? To hell it was! If it was honest it wouldn't be so easy to set them on fire. As long as Tito stuffed US dollars up your ass you blathered about brotherhood and unity and smiled at each other. And then the time came to settle the score! Fine, but why didn't you do it earlier? Instead you jacked off for 50 years, drove fancy cars, screwed the best girls, and now when you can't get it up you want to be honorable. I shit on that honor of yours and that whole honorable generation of yours. Fuck all of you... honest ­suckers! ( _Lepa Sela Lepo Gore_ , 2005)

Velja's masculine rage critiques the Yugoslav Communist elite for being too beholden to international politics and capital flows. His question " _Why now?_ " ­suggests that "brotherhood and unity" was not a genuine ideological project for overcoming ethnicity and only functioned to obscure the economic self-interest of the Communist elite. Such an argument is a cruder variation of one Milovan Đilas puts forth in his book _The New Class_ (1957): within Communist society, members of the party emerge as a new class that controls the means of production and serves only its own interests. Thus, once global political and economic circumstance evolved, "brotherhood and unity" was abandoned. In that regard, Velja is the one character who understands the essence of the ogre in the tunnel. Unlike Milan, he never successfully internalizes the concrete totality that brings forth "brotherhood and unity." Consequently, he never transforms into a fork-wielding psychopath when geopolitical realignments demand it.

#  **From Ethnic Nationalism to Neoliberalism**

Unlike the characters in _Lepa Sela Lepo Gore_ , those in _Optimisti_ ( _The Optimists_ , 2006) undergo no violent personal transformations between opposing ideologies of belonging.

 _Optimisti_ can be read as an unofficial sequel to the 1998 film _Bure Baruta_ ( _Cabaret Balkan_ ) film, which made its director, Goran Paskaljević, familiar to Western audiences. Describing the narrative structure of _Bure Baruta_ , Frederic Jameson writes that it "stages a totality of interrelations on the order of what I call the providential narrative – the synchronic network or web of social and personal relationships" (2004: 254). Its so-called providential narrative unfolds during a cold night in Belgrade in the immediate aftermath of the Dayton Peace Accords that formally ended the Bosnian war and incorporates several interlocking stories of personal encounters that escalate into violence. The sequence most memorably typifying this escalation is set in a boxing ring where two friends spar. One reveals that he has been sleeping with the other's wife for years, which in turn sets off a series of confessions that quickly devolves into a masochistic game of one-upmanship. The men's admissions include, for example, the fact that one poisoned the other's dog, that one informed on the other to the police, and, in fact, that both have cheated with the other's wife. Up until this point, both men seem to be taking pleasure in their game. However, events turn deadly when one man reveals that the other's wife and best friend are having an affair; he goes on to suppose that the best friend also would confess to this. At this moment, the other man snaps, grabs a beer bottle, breaks off its end, and repeatedly stabs his friend.

As bleak and darkly comedic as _Bure Baruta_ is, its world is one where solidarity and community are still possible despite the threat of violence. Quite rightly, the film does not categorically oppose violence and belonging but instead shows how they simmer beneath the surface of economically and socially strained nations. In the world of _Optimisti_ , on the other hand, solidarity is absent. Its characters are isolated, powerless, or in some cases mentally ill. Those who are rich and powerful exploit others without concern for government intervention or protection. In essence, the historical totality depicted is a slightly exaggerated form of neoliberalism, which the film strongly condemns. In his essay "The 'Bitter Necessity' of Debt: Neoliberal Finance and the Society of Control," Steven Shaviro defines the neoliberal worldview:

For neoliberalism, the legitimate role of the State is precisely to destroy civil society, and instead to incite a war of all against all, in the form of unfettered economic competition. Where Hobbes sees the war of all against all as a primordial condition that we need to escape from, neoliberalism sees the war of all against all as a desirable state that does not arise spontaneously, but needs to be actively engendered... . This is why, as Margaret Thatcher so notoriously put it, "there is no such thing as society" in the neoliberal vision; "there are individual men and women, and there are families." It would be absurd to criticize neoliberalism for failing to recognize the social; for in fact, the extermination of the social – or of any form of relation of broader scope than that of the family – is precisely the goal of neoliberal policy. (2010: 5)

In other words, Shaviro argues that the neoliberal utopia is one where the "war of all against all" is the most important normative human value. Since social, national, or ethnic relations place limits on self-interest and the accumulation of capital, they therefore must be destroyed. The formal structure of _Optimisti_ mirrors this "extermination of the social" by dispensing with _Bure Baruta_ 's network of characters joined by violence and random encounters. Gone also are the shifting national and ethnic affinities depicted in _Lepa Sela Lepo Gore_. In its place, the film presents five diegetically unrelated vignettes, each starring the great Serbian actor Lazar Ristovski as a different character, that dramatize the neoliberal war of all against all.

The first vignette introduces the film's bitter outlook on the social effects of unfettered capitalism. While _Optimisti_ never directly mentions "neoliberalism," it metaphorically alludes to its impact through an environmental catastrophe that occurs offscreen. This, to be sure, is a common representational strategy. As in such post-apocalyptic films as Michael Haneke's _Le Temps du Loup_ (2003) or any of George A. Romero's zombie hexalogy, environmental disasters function as ­allegorical shortcuts in order to engage in sociopolitical critiques. The first vignette starts during the title credits as Paskaljević employs a sound-bridge of rain and thunder. The opening shot is a complex long-take that surveys a flooded village. The camera, tethered on a boat, surveys the devastation before panning right to show Lazar Ristovski entering the frame in extreme close-up, creating a disorienting visual effect. As he looks offscreen to a destroyed house, the camera follows his vision. Throughout the first vignette the motivations of Ristovski's character remain a mystery both to the audience and to the inhabitants of the flooded ­village. Later we learn that he is an escaped psychiatric patient. Though never named, the imdb.com entry for _Optimisti_ credits his character as Professor Gavrilo. This is an ironic choice of name, since unlike that _other_ world-famous Serbian named Gavrilo, who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Ristovski's character does not at all disrupt the current social order. Instead of attempting revolutionary violence, after the opening sequence he arrives at a large barn in which the villagers are seeking shelter and promises to restore their lives via hypnosis and the power of positive thinking. Sounding like a self-help guru, he shouts about using "great positive energy" to become "united as one great strength" as he encourages the villagers to focus their mental energies. His hypnosis or mental exercise is interrupted, however, as he is accused of stealing a wallet from a woman. He is then summoned to the village police chief, an oafish, decadent man shown eating a dozen eggs for breakfast, who interrogates him to no avail. After the woman finds her wallet, which she merely misplaced, _Optimisti_ reveals the truth about Lazar Ristovski's character. A doctor arrives with an ambulance to retrieve him. "He was a professor," he tells the police chief, 'a doctor of psychology. He cured people through hypnosis. An expert. He's completely harmless. I hope you were good to him." During this conversation, Professor Gavrilo cheerfully enters the ambulance, repeating his declaration: "I will help you." In a loaded statement, the police chief responds, "Believe me, we took care of him like he was one of our own." His ironic comment encapsulates the difference between the historical order depicted in _Lepa Sela Lepo Gore_ and _Optimisti_. In the former of the two films, Milan may have transformed into a rabid nationalist willing to kill Muslims with a fork, but he still imagined a form of belonging and community. While _the other_ is the enemy for ethnic nationalists, neoliberalism promotes social regression where _everyone_ is a potential enemy who hinders your individual choice.

Social regression is dramatized throughout _Optimisti_ , but most forcefully in the final vignette. In a conscious echo of the opening of the film, Ristovksi portrays Mr Aleksa. He is leading the blind, sick, and terminally ill on a bus trip to a pond that he claims has healing powers but which the government and the elite keep hidden for themselves. His character mirrors that of Professor Gavrilo with his demands for positive thinking, telling the people on the bus to "be optimistic and think positive" and that "there is no cure if you don't believe." He even leads a rendition of the children's song "If You're Happy and You Know It." The essential difference, however, is that, unlike the professor, Aleksa is not a psychiatric patient. In fact, once he stages a mock arrest in order to get away, he is revealed to the audience – but not to the people on the bus – as a fraud. That he succeeds with his scheme highlights the thematic correspondences and reversals between the first and last vignettes: the sincerely optimistic professor is suspected as a thief, while the insincerely optimistic Aleksa is a thief whom everyone believes. His escape also strengthens the interpretation that the environmental disaster that opens the film is an allegorical shortcut for introducing sociopolitical critiques. In the world of the film, where solidarity is no longer possible because its isolated characters ­cannot transform their neoliberal society, Aleksa's successful swindle becomes highly symbolic. He emerges as the exemplary new neoliberal Serbian citizen, divorced from national sentiment and ethnic attachment so that he can better profit from the personal catastrophes and miseries befalling his countrymen.

 _Optimisti_ does not merely conclude by offering a warning about the _Aleksas_ who will now populate Serbia in its post-catastrophic world. The fact that the people he swindles never discover the truth allows for a more complicated and ambiguous conclusion. After Aleksa stages his arrest, the bus passengers – undeterred and still believing that he is not a fraud – make their way to a small pond in a rock quarry, convinced that it is their intended destination. They wipe mud all over themselves and bathe in the dirty water. The penultimate shot of the film in particular clarifies the moral perspective from which Paskaljević wants the audience to understand their actions. The camera, for instance, is placed at a low angle, extremely close to the ground, toward the top of the hillside that leads to the pond. Into the frame crawls a man with a weak heart who was one of the bus passengers and was left behind when everyone ran to the pond. He strenuously clutches dirt as he peers over the side of hill. The film then cuts to a view of the bathers who are so ­completely covered in mud that the high angle and camera distance renders them virtually indistinguishable from the landscape, making them appear more like organisms dwelling in the ground than humans. The brilliance of this final shot is that it collapses the moral distance between spectators and the delusional bathers. At first glance, this seems like a counterintuitive reading given that the height and distance of the shot appears to imply a safely condescending spectator position from which to mock the bathers and their delusion. Certainly, the one time I screened the film for students there were several who were willing to mock them. Yet, it is important to remember that the shot also reflects the point of view of a dying man. Suturing the audience into such a perspective forces them to question the political value of such optimism and their own commitments to political beliefs. In a brief film festival report, Gabriele Barrera reflects on the film and the meaning of the title:

They are _The Optimists_ , a population with a narrow choice, perhaps without a choice, except the optimism. Then, the optimism, the effort to think positively – even if it's a nonsense – it is definitely the smart choice. Or not? And, above all, are we sure we've selected a different way of life? A different optimism? A different absurd idea of progress and positive-ness, in our quiet and not-post- Milosevic countries? (2006: n.p.)

Because of the narrow choices alluded to by Barrera, the bathers in the mud do have something that the other characters in _Optimisti_ lack: a persistent, unwarranted optimism. In that regard, their exploitation by Aleksa is a preferable fate to that of other characters throughout the film. Consider, briefly, the third vignette, where Lazar Ristovski appears only as a corpse waiting to be cremated for a funeral. The story follows his son, who has a gambling problem. In the small casino where he persistently loses an heirless old woman in a wheelchair ­constantly wins. He convinces her that they should fly to Las Vegas so she can win a lot of money for charity, though presumably he aims to swindle her much as Aleksa does the bus passengers. Before his plan can begin, the old woman dies during the funeral of her father, whose ashes blow back to the son and family in the final shot, making them cough and rub their eyes. In the fourth vignette, Ristovski portrays a father whose daughter is raped by his gangster capitalist boss at the steel factory. He first engages in a futile attempt at revenge but is humiliated, and he and his daughter are forced to apologize to the gangster. Against these hopeless outcomes where characters cannot change their historical circumstances, the optimists of the final vignette can at least imagine a future different to the one to which they have been condemned; that most are dying and all are delusional should not be read as an advocation of nihilistic resignation in the film. As Barrera implies in the earlier quotation, it forces audiences who are not part of the fabric of post-Milošević Serbia to question whether they naturalize their own political systems. The positive value, then, of the bathers' unwarranted optimism is that it asks its audience to choose to believe in another world where the war of all against all is not the norm.

#  **Conclusion**

The conclusion to _Optimisti_ and its invitation to audiences to reconsider their ­political choices speaks to the importance of the idea of historical totality for understanding Eastern European cinema. As a critical taxonomy, "Eastern European cinema" designates more than regionalism, or a loose collection of nation-states. It also affirms the centrality of geopolitics. And even though the Communist states of the former Eastern bloc have now transitioned into market economies, Eastern Europe remains a viable classification for addressing a variety of issues, such as European integration, migration, and the global debt crisis. Yet, this complexity is what makes teaching and surveying Eastern European films so difficult, especially to students who have normalized neoliberalism and consumerism.

Perhaps the ideological divide presumed by the question "Why did people choose to be Communists?" cannot be fully erased. As Slavoj Žižek writes in _First as Tragedy, Then as Farce_ , "on account of its all-pervasiveness, ideology appears as its own opposite, as non-ideology, as the core of our human identity underneath all the ideological labels" (2009: 39). In other words, in a course on Eastern European cinema, communism is understood as an ideological choice, while unfettered capitalism is naturalized as "non-ideology." Films like _Lepa Sela Lepo Gore_ and _Optimisti_ do not completely assault such logic, but they do challenge ­students' belief in "the core of our human identity" that Žižek claims allows us to declare certain economic systems as non-ideology. How they do so can be ­summarized indirectly via a particular reference to Fredric Jameson's comments on the continued importance of Theodor Adorno's philosophy. Arguing over why Adorno and Max Horkheimer and their ideas about totality and the dialectic are still pertinent in our postmodern, consumerist era, Jameson writes in _Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic_ (1990),

This, then, is indeed some first service that they might do for us: to restore the sense of something grim and impending with the polluted sunshine of the shopping mall – some older classical European-style of doom and crisis.... It is, however, a representational problem – pictures of decaying rails and abandoned factories we already had in the thirties; critiques of consumer society and its images (bright teeth and smiles) we had in the fifties. These are now old stuff, even in their unexpected structural combination with each other; the real problem perhaps being... the very matter of representation itself, of the representation of this totality, about which all of postmodernism concurs that even if it exists it would be unrepresentable and unknowable. (Jameson, 1990: 248)

In other words, the bleak moral visions of _Lepa Sela Lepo Gore_ and _Optimisti_ disturb the neoliberal utopia of what Jameson calls the "sunshine of the shopping mall" by offering characters whose "core" of human identity is destroyed by social and economic forces despite individual choice. In doing so, much like Adorno and Horkheimer, they strive to represent a historical totality which must be first understood before it can be changed. Therein lies the persistent value of studying cinemas from Eastern Europe. The seemingly anachronistic commitment to visualizing the "big picture" of history and ontology one finds in many films from the former region asks ­students to imagine alternatives to the failures of modern, neoliberal capitalism.

 **References**

Barrera, G. (2006) _The Optimists:_ _Paskaljevic's Renewed Candide_. FIPRESCI: The International Federation of Film Critics, Festival Reports, January 11, Geneva. <http://www.fipresci.org/festivals/archive/2006/geneva/optimists_gbarrera.htm> (accessed November 14, 2011).

Đilas, M. (1957) _The New Class: An Analysis of The Communist System_. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, New York.

Jameson, F. (1990 _)_ _Late Marxism: Adorno or The Persistence of The Dialectic_. Verso, New York.

Jameson, F. (2004) Thoughts on Balkan Cinema, in _Subtitles: On The Foreignness of_ _Film_ (eds. A. Egoyan and I. Balfour). The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 231–257.

Levi, P. (2007) _Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema_. Stanford University Press, Stanford.

Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1967) _The Communist Manifesto_ (trans. S. Moore). Penguin, New York.

Ruiz, R. (1995) _Poetics of Cinema_ (trans. B. Holmes). Dis Voir, Paris.

Shaviro, S. (2010) The "bitter necessity" of debt: neoliberal finance and the society of control, January 12, <http://www.shaviro.com/Othertexts/articles.html> (accessed November 14, 2011).

Wallerstein, I. (1991) The construction of peoplehood: racism, nationalism, ethnicity, in _Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities_ (ed. E. Balibar and I. Wallerstein). Verso, New York.

Žižek, S. (2009) _First As Tragedy_ , _Then as Farce_. Verso, New York.

# 5

# Laughing into an Abyss

#  _Cinema and Balkanization_

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli

 _Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you_. (Nietzsche, 2000)

 _Our skulls are flowering with laughter_  
 _Look at us your fill look at Yourself_  
 _We mock you monster_.

(Popa, 1997)

Since its launch in December 1997, the Los Angeles Freedom Film Festival ­promoted those films from Eastern Europe that "reveal the impact of Stalinism in the region from the beginning to today," and celebrate "the artistic expression of filmmakers inspired by themes of democracy." Given the festival's billing, I have been struck in recent years by the number of spectators who ask directors from Russia, the Czech Republic, the Republic of Slovakia, and the former Yugoslavia why their films are "so depressing, so nihilistic" and unrelated to the celebration of democracy. Indeed, films set in Eastern Europe's "predemocratic" past often offer poignant criticism of political and social repression under socialism, but do so without also celebrating democracy. Unlike the discourses on globalization, democratization, and neoliberalism that emerged in post-1989 Europe – "the end of history," the erasure of borders, and the triumphant images of the "fall" of the Berlin Wall and the toppling of Soviet icons – these films suggest that it was not democracy but a cultural wasteland of violence, corruption, isolation, and disenfranchisement that succeeded socialism in the former Eastern bloc countries and the Balkans. In many ways the films included in the Freedom Film Festival foresaw the waning enthusiasm for liberal economic democracies that gave way to more sober thinking about the economic and social problems facing these "emerging democracies" or "rogue states." The history of the festival itself reflects this ­transition: 2006 marked the last year that the festival was held under the title "Freedom Festival," by 2007 it had changed to "The South East European Film Festival," and the topic of the last two Freedom Film Festivals was not freedom, but _Ostalgia_ (nostalgia for the East) (2005) and Balkan music (2006).

Many of these films coming from eastern and southeastern Europe represent neither "freedom" nor "democracy" as triumphantly as both Western and Eastern media have done in the wake of the Cold War, nor do they offer any _affirmative_ alternative (be it political, nationalistic, ethnocentric, or even narcissistic). As a result, they seemed to disappoint a large proportion of the audience which was looking only to be entertained, and entertained by simple narratives. The ­audiences, which consisted of many vocal expatriates of the former Eastern bloc countries, seemed to show a preference for Hollywood-style films that provide a diversion from grim political realities and reduce complex issues to the romantic narratives of good versus evil (in which good usually triumphs) that prevail in both mainstream fiction film and news media. These clear-cut representations serve primarily to support Western global hegemony by installing Western characters in the role of heroes in the West's own romantic narrative.

Because of their political investments, Western films exaggerate the villainy of Eastern Europeans and relegate the emerging political conflicts and economic ­crises in the Balkans and former Soviet Union to the background against which narratives of espionage – _The Saint_ (Phillip Noyce, 1997) and James Bond films – terrorism, or war-games – _Peacemaker_ (Mimi Leder, 1997) and _Behind Enemy Lines_ (John Moore, 2001) – are played out. Many other Western European narrative films and documentaries that deal with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Balkans have also presented simplistic moral scenarios by portraying cultural, political, and historical complexities in black-and-white terms. For example, _Serbian Epics_ (Paul Pawlikoski, 1993) sets out to buttress the prevailing Western belief that "Serbians" (a generic entity that is left unqualified) were solely responsible for the breakup of Yugoslavia by manipulating the masses to engage in ethnocentric myth-making,1 while Régis Wargnier's _Est/Ouest_ (winner of the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Picture of 1999) depicts the evils of Stalinism through the eyes of a Frenchwoman who, after marrying a Russian doctor, has to escape the horrors of the Soviet Union and go back to the free West. Michael Winterbottom's _Welcome to Sarajevo_ (1997) portrays the siege of Sarajevo as brutal and inhumane, but while it criticizes the role of the Western media in Bosnia it ultimately boils down the complexities of the political crisis to the need to save the children of Sarajevo. Elie Chouraqui's _Harrison's Flowers_ (2001) relies on the personal narrative of a woman who refuses to believe her husband has died in Vukovar, goes to retrieve him, and encounters the stock Serbian rapists as well as the barbaric violence and the chaos.

Although these narratives tend to be tragic in form, they do not produce a moral revelation. Instead, by reaffirming the Western moral position, they simply legitimize Western political actions and stances. Cinematic representations of the tumultuous transition from Socialist states to liberal democracies have all but ­disappeared since the mid-2000s, but representations of civil wars, war criminals, and ultra-nationalist characters from Eastern Europe have reemerged in the ­gaming industry. For example, the character Niko Bellic that appeared in _Grand Theft Auto IV_ is a Serbian war criminal and the main anti-hero of the game, and Viktor Reznov is a Russian war criminal in _Call of Duty_. These patently stereotypical characters have proven to be more profitable and influential in creating a popular imaginary of the various wars and civil wars in Eastern Europe, reaching millions of gamers worldwide.2

Because even the high-profile films about these crises have had relatively little commercial success it is not surprising that Eastern European films that attempted to represent the complexity of crises facing the region have suffered from a lack of interested distributors and have been confined to the film festival circuit and ­college classrooms. Moreover, they have received mostly negative reviews from both Eastern and Western Europeans, largely because they fail to deliver clear-cut moral judgments, indulge in nostalgia for socialism, or celebrate the joys of capitalism.

A film which has met with such a reception is Emir Kusturica's _Podzemilja: bila jedom jedna zemilja_ ( _Underground_ , 1995). The award of the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1995 to _Underground_ aroused the wrath of several critics who accused it of being apologist for the Milošević regime.3 According to Paris-based Montenegrin journalist Stanko Cerović, "Kusturica's reconstruction of history has nothing to do with reality, unless you accept the theories of Serb nationalists" (1995); Kusturica, though, was born a Bosnian Muslim. Ironically, it was only after (and maybe even in response to) the controversy that he came to identify himself as Serbian Orthodox. Alain Finkielkraut, French philosopher and public defender of Croatian independence, accused Kusturica of betraying his Bosnian heritage by producing "hackneyed and deceitful Serb propaganda" (1995), even though he later admitted he had not yet seen the film. Slovenian cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, meanwhile, has argued that _Underground_ "unknowingly provides the libidinal economy of the ­ethnic slaughter in Bosnia: the pseudo Bataillean trance of excessive expenditure, the continuous mad rhythm of drinking-eating-singing-fornicating" (1997: 37). In a recent discussion with Bernard-Henri Lévy, Žižek collapses this same critique of the film's carnivalesque depiction of a couple of Yugoslav partisans with a more personal attack on the director: "I hope we share another point, which is – to be brutal – hatred of Emir Kusturica. 'Underground' is one of the most horrible films that I've seen. What kind of Yugoslav society do you see in Kusturica's 'Underground'? A society where people fornicate, drink, fight – a kind of eternal orgy" (Kenan, 2008: 24).

This condemnation of _Underground_ for de-politicizing the civil wars of the 1990s (by not being clearly anti-Serbian) and re-Balkanizing Yugoslavs was more sharply found in the work of Eastern and ex-Yugoslav intellectuals. For Marianna Yarovskaya the film represents a "boyish refusal to bury an old and fragmented Europe" (1997: 50); while for Žižek it gives "the western liberal gaze precisely what it wants to see... the spectacle of a timeless, incomprehensible, mythical cycle of passion" (1997: 38). Rather than analyzing the rather tenuous (and I would argue critical) position in which the film places Yugoslavia and the then-emerging nation-states vis-à-vis Europe or the way the film carnivalizes (parodies) the stock images of Balkan stereo-types, critics seemed to demand the same simple condemnations that were already abundant in Western media depictions of the region.

Similarly, some post-Soviet films have elicited negative reactions. Russian ­filmmaker Kira Muratova's _Astenicheskiy sindrom_ ( _Asthenic Syndrome_ , 1989) was criticized at the 2000 Freedom Film Festival for being "too critical" and "too ­complex." Her response was that such criticism (which she claimed to have received not only in Los Angeles but also in Russia) was unjustified because her film was ultimately about joy. _Asthenic Syndrome_ , she continued, was about "the defeat of intellectualism" and "various different reactions to psychological problems in a country where the human skeleton is not hidden so well." As such, her film entertained those who celebrated the "joy of negative analysis." Muratova presented the criticism offered by her film as a different form of entertainment, one that challenged the audience's demand for simplicity.

This tension between audience and filmmaker was not limited to Muratova's film but evolved into a broader debate over the interpretation of "entertainment." Eastern European filmmakers construed "entertainment" as the entertaining of ideas that do not simply replicate conventional cultural constructions (aesthetics, narrative tropes, and characters) but visualize radical shifts in cultural conditions by featuring accelerated temporalities, nonlinear relationships, instabilities, and uncertainties. Reacting to films that depict instability, aporia, and uncertain change, some in the audience called for more easily digestible or familiar filmic images and narratives. Their plea was for readability of political messages, aesthetic styles, and character types, but it was mostly a plea for narrative resolution.

They expressed their frustration by accusing Muratova and other filmmakers of being nihilistic or intellectually elitist. Ironically, Muratova's work, like that of Russian filmmaker Pjotr Luzik ( _Okraina_ ( _Outskirts_ , 1998)) and of Kusturica, reveals that such pleas for simplicity are far more nihilistic and cynical than the joys of critical complexity that they seek to validate. Unlike the blockbuster or the "high-concept" film (which Justin Wyatt defines as a reactionary style of "post-generic filmmaking" based on the simplification of narrative and character), the films of Muratova, Luzik, Kusturica, and many others evaluate the difficulty (if not the impossibility) of reconciling the Socialist past with present global, Balkan, and Eastern European erosion of social cohesion (1994: 60).

These films cannot be reduced to one category or style. Muratova's work is an almost encyclopedic study of the complexity of human responses to personal trauma and to the sociopolitical circumstances leading up to _perestroika_. It marks an abrupt shift from the politics of silence or veiled critique to an open voicing of social and political criticism. Luzik's and Kusturica's films parody popular ­stereotypes and modes of representation, exposing the violence and absurdity that underlie heroic and romantic traditions (epic, historical, patriotic, and personal). This eclectic shuttling between narrative and performative styles ends up challenging the veracity of both Eastern and Western ideological and historical claims and of mainstream media narratives about the Balkans simply by mimicking them. Despite their many differences, these post-Soviet and post-Tito films find common ground within the debate about "entertainment value."

The 2002 Freedom Film Festival featured a round-table discussion, "Does the world need film festivals?" Participants Erika and Ulrich Gregor (curators of the Berlin Film Festival), Kyrill Razlogov (curator of the Moscow International Film Festival), Christian Gaines (curator of the AFI Fest), and Gary McVey (curator of the Freedom Film Festival and executive director of the American Cinema Foundation) all agreed that the world needs film festivals in order to support ­public critical appreciation of independent, political, and art films. Festival sponsors, however, are increasingly concerned about the commercial viability of these events and therefore want to appeal to the mass market. Commercialization of festivals comes with consequences, mainly the loss of any particular festival's brand identity. Razlogov pointed out that whereas in the past the Moscow film festival held an important role in the cultural life of the city, attracting over ten thousand people, now it has to show Hollywood blockbusters to attract attention. The panelists also claimed that the current generation of filmgoers was less ­critically sophisticated and knowledgeable about film, world politics, and mass media than the audiences of the 1960s and 1970s. These earlier festivals supported dissident films because the audience demanded that films be provocative. Lacking this type of politically and critically astute audience, film festivals now showcase "world cinema" instead of providing a forum for dissident or political film.

Though the term "world cinema" is obviously less political than "dissident film," the Gregors defined "world cinema" as "passionate and political," but added the qualification that "passion means different things at different times." They ­suggested that the selection and exhibition of explicitly political films have been curtailed, their place often taken by films that focus on personal politics (coming of age, family romance, or the struggle for personal expression), the exotic history and images of the non-West, and the hybridization of cultures. In their ­assessment, the public's taste for politics has moved from the direct challenging of institutional power to cultural politics, that is, issues of identity.

Speaking at UCLA in March 2000, Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda summed up the problem facing dissident filmmakers, artists and critical thinkers when he jokingly commented, "every filmmaker must have an enemy." He seemed to anticipate that, with the threat of socialism now gone, his 1999 film _Pan Taduesz_ , which debuted in Los Angeles at the festival, would receive a rather dismissive response from Western critics. For Wajda, locating "the enemy" also meant instilling a sense of agency in film. He declared that his films gave a voice to, or spoke for, workers during World War Two, and for the wartime and postwar oppressed. That is, they spoke in the name of those he saw as the victims of Nazism and, later, of socialism. He made an argument for what Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994) call "oppositional ­cinema."4 Because his films were subjected to censorship under the old Soviet ­system, Wajda coded his dissent in what he described as an "ironic wink" between himself and the audience, a wink implying certain solidarity between the two.

Bruce Robbins (1998) explains that such politicized allegories draw on a sense of agency that "legitimates the public representativeness of criticism as such, its responsiveness to the active voice or will of the people."5 But while this "inspirational agency" speaks in the name of public representativeness, it also circumscribes the notion of public will within narrow boundaries – idealism, nationalism, and ethnocentrism. For those who enjoy critical analysis, this situating, locating, and grounding of the collective or oneself in specific political contexts become a very problematic process. Involved in such gestures is also the more or less disingenuous maneuver of simplifying, generalizing, and abridging complex issues and situations. Even dissident acts of positioning have to face Nietzsche's monsters that are reproduced through conventional forms of opposition – oppositions that generate more violence and acts of revenge.

On the other hand, Wajda correctly pointed out that, in order to communicate critically, we need to engage with certain conventional forms, including the form of opposition. However, this does not mean that we need to treat these forms ­conventionally, or that we need to accept their pre-established sociopolitical or cultural groundings. In fact, the very notion of "ground" (identity, belonging, right to speak from a certain position, right to criticize certain claims or people, and so on) has become the rather complex subject of furious debates among filmmakers from the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union. Wars over territorial claims are pernicious not only for the direct consequences of their violence but also because they uproot contemporary identifications (such as Socialist history and politics), traditions, and communities in favor of ones that arc historically revised, if not plainly mythical.

This _terra infirma_ does not suggest that people have become de-territorialized, rootless, or cosmopolitan. On the contrary, they have become over-territorialized in historical, national, ethnic, and religious terms. "Balkanization" became part of political terminology during the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 as a means of defining the process of fragmentation of imperial, historical, and national boundaries as well as of economic, political, and legal systems. As a term, however, "Balkanization" has assumed other charged meanings and ideological functions. As Dušan Bjelić explains, "like Orientalism, Balkanism had been organized around a sense of binaries (rational/irrational, centre/periphery, civilization/barbarism) arranged hierarchically so that the first site ('whiteness' or 'Europe'), is always primary and definitional of the second ('Blackness' or 'Balkans'), and so that the second is always a grammatical, internal effect of the first" (Bjelić and Savić, 2002: 3).

There is nothing new about this identification of the Balkans as a negative image of Europe. Larry Wolff argues (1994) that a concept of "Eastern Europe" has ­circulated from the Enlightenment to the Cold War and has been redeployed to redraw certain mythical lines. The reduction of Eastern Europe to a dumping ground for the things from which Westerners wish to disassociate themselves (­violence, rape, nationalism, ethnocentrism) is often maintained through a drastic simplification of history, nationality, ethnicity, and religion. What makes these _refabricated_ (Balkanized identities of _ex_ -Yugoslavs, _post_ -Soviets, or citizens of any _former_ state) simultaneously complex and simplistic is that the various factions, in an attempt to justify their territorial claims, create competing myths of historical nation-states, ethnic, patriarchal, and historical continuities from a patchwork of dubious historical events, religious beliefs, and mythology. I use the word "patchwork" because all of these rival histories edit themselves and each other out of shared stories and experiences and reconstitute their former compatriots as mortal enemies through the selective notions of nationalism, ethnocentrism, religion, folklore, and history.

There are many examples of these selective histories. In his speeches and his 1989 book, _Godine Raspleta_ (The Years of Solution), former president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Slobodan Milošević positioned the Serbian people (a ­dubious construct to begin with) as "tragic victims of history," and situated the ethnic Albanian Kosovars, Croatians, and Slovenians as historical threats to Serbian security. Analogously, popular mythology likens Kosovar and Bosnian Muslims to both the conquering Ottoman Turks – who colonized Serbia in the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries – and to religious traitors to their own (Orthodox Christian) people, since they converted to Islam. Similarly, Germany's interest in recognizing Croatia and Slovenia was read as an anti-Serbian campaign designed to repeat the atrocities of the Nazi-allied Croatian Ustaša government of the 1940s. However, the former Croatian president Franjo Tuđman has argued in his books _Nationalism in Contemporary Europe_ ([1981] 1996) and _Impasses of Historical Reality_ : _A Discussion_ of _the History and Philosophy of Malevolent Power_ (1989) that accounts of the Holocaust and the extermination of Serbs, Jews, and gypsies at Jasenovac (the World War Two Ustaša concentration camp) were exaggerated by design to oppress the Croatian people (another dubious category). In addition, at the first convention of the Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica or HDZ (the Croatian Nationalist Party) on February 24, 1990, Tuđman stated that the Ustaša state was not really a Nazi criminal construct, but rather the expression of the historical aspiration of the Croatian people for independence. In 1989, then Slovenian president Milan Kućan (a former Communist Party member) maintained that Slovenia (the most "developed" republic) was culturally, politically, and economically part of Mitteleuropa. By the same token, it had to be distinguished (and separated) from what he saw as the more backward states (that is, Balkan, anti-democratic, and opposed to the neoliberal mandate of free trade) of the former Yugoslavia, especially Serbia and Kosovo. Finally, former Bosnia-Herzegovina president Aljia Izetbegović made the dubious claim that Bosnia had always been a "free state," recognized by the Ottoman Turks who, as he put it, were a model of "tolerance" and brought civilization to the region (1993).

In each case, the territorial aspirations of these self-defined ethnic groups are cloaked in the discourse of "human rights." That is, each group's alleged leader laid claim to the "right to self-determination," "territorial autonomy," and ­statehood regardless of the will of the public and at the expense of minorities and disputed territories. In Bosnia and Kosovo "crimes against humanity" were used to justify acts of violence as acts of self-defense (for example, in 1989, Kosovon autonomy was relinquished predicated on the alleged rape and murder of individual Serbians by individual Albanian Kosovars). For journalist Misha Glenny it is not surprising that Yugoslavia exploded into some of the worst nationalist violence in the Balkans because "the democratization of the country in the late 1980s did not see the emergence of just two competing national identities... Suddenly, Serbian nationalism was competing with Slovene, Croat, Albanian, Bosnian-Muslim, and Macedonian nationalism, etc." (2000: 3).

Such extraordinarily revisionary and reactionary forms of identity politics make it difficult to "locate" or "situate" oneself without assuming some, if not all, of the political baggage that goes with such a predicament. Furthermore, highly-charged debates over territorial rights make it almost impossible to engage critically at any level in the discourse on the Balkans without seeming to take sides, especially when the various competing identifications seem to adhere to the old demand "If you are not for us, then you are our enemy." Nonetheless, demands that sides should be taken foreground the glaring inconsistencies and contradictions in such ethnic generalizations. For instance, where do we place those who still call themselves Yugoslavs,6 those who call themselves Serbian but oppose Serbian-nationalists or are just anti-Milošević, those who identify themselves as Croat but are critical of Tuđman (and his successor as president, Mesić), Orthodox Albanian Kosovars, Bosnians who wanted live in a multi-ethnic state, children of "mixed marriages," Russian residents who believe in communism, or those who are nostalgic for the icons or the Soviet regime but not for their political implications?7 And what do we call these people when names like Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Soviet, and Yugoslav have been so deeply compromised by bad faith and ethno-nationalist politics and practices? And how will we speak to these people now that Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian are considered three separate languages with three distinct understandings of their "common" past and when the naming of "Kosovo/a" itself comes a political statement that stakes a claim to territorial propriety ("Kosovo" being the Serbian name for the region, and "Kosova" the Albanian)?

Furthermore, how do we designate shared personal histories or common ­historical experiences when terms like "former Yugoslavia" or "ex-Yugoslavia," "former Soviet" or "post-Soviet" are now only used to denote historical ­phantasms, subjects of a history undergoing erasure? It is hard to tell which identity is more fantastic: that of a former state stripped of any credible historical or territorial identification, or that of the "ethnically cleansed," emulating and embalming an imaginary community.

While all subjects conjure up ghosts, the self-identifying ex-Yugoslav or former-Soviet cling to their memory that "once there was a country," painting pictures of Tito as a liberal or Gorbachev, like Lenin before him, as a failed visionary. This leaves former citizens, as Dušan Makavejev remarked in an interview broadcast on British television's Channel 4, in 1993, to be "citizens of left-overs, [who] watch our past disappearing behind us, and now... see how our future is disappearing too [that is] the loss of our common future." Instead, the ethno-nationalist who affirms tragic ancestral phantasms so as to justify his or her role as the avenger that completes the task of vindication in the name of generations of the downtrodden has prevailed. Michel de Certeau points out that this exclusive, if not openly hostile, form of historiography "tends to prove that the site of production can encompass the past: it is an odd procedure that posits death, a breakage everywhere reiterated in discourse, and yet denies loss by appropriating to the present the privilege of recapitulating the past as a form of knowledge. It is a labor of death and a labor against death" (1988: 2).8 In the case of Yugoslavia, it is a labor to create new ethnic states, but, as Vesna Pesić points out, "The creation of new ethnic states which led to armed conflict, restored forgotten national questions... . These questions are critical since the case of Yugoslavia reveals that the process of creating new national states can lead to ethnic polarization which appears only 'solvable' through the use of force" (2000:10).

Those individuals who cannot be identified or claimed by one group are left to be temporarily embraced by other ethnic, historical, religious, or national groups. Since their identities are fragile, these groups desperately try to cover up the many exchanges, interchanges, assimilations, and transmutations they shared and still share with their "enemies." Both individuality and shared features have often been sacrificed in the name of simplicity, of what Roland Barthes called the "triumphal language of stupidity." Assimilation, boundary crossing, intermarriage, and ­cultural relativism do not erase identities, nor do they undermine a sense of belonging. According to Robbins, it is impossible to not belong: "absolute homelessness is indeed a myth, and so is cosmopolitanism in its strictly negative sense of freedom from national limitations or attachments" (1998: 250). Yet, Robbins overlooks the fact that belonging itself requires participating in the name game, and it is not clear that one can enter such a game without a recognizable, politically determined, and globally sanctioned denomination.

The problem with Eastern Europe is that nationalist movements such as that of former Croatian president Franjo Tuđman or the Ushtrisë Çlirimtare të Kosovës (UCK, or KLA, Kosovo Liberation Army) have often been mistaken as pro-­democratic movements simply because they are anti-Socialist or anti-Serbian. For example, David Rohde concluded his essay "Kosovo Seething" by commenting that: "young Albanians love to wear jeans, listen to American music, and talk of doing business with the West" (2000: 78). Evidently he assumes that these activities are synonymous with developing democratic values. Of course, there are ­contingency clauses to becoming "Westernized": Albanians must submit to the civilizing mission of the West by "giving up lawless retribution" (that is, murdering members of the Serbian and non-Albanian minorities in Kosovo, as well as settling inter-clan vendettas). They must also "understand what democracy means" and "accept western norms." Rohde's argument seems to imply that desperate people are driven to democracy, and that democracy has become a dictate that thinly veils Western interests under ideological pretences. As Larry Wolff puts it, the fact that newly "democratized" Eastern European states "recourse to expert advice and economic assistance from abroad will certainly be construed as the ultimate ­vindication of our own economic success and the backwardness of Eastern Europe" (1994: 9).

However problematic they have become, terms such as "Yugoslav" or "Soviet" were designed to overcome ethnic differences. Unfortunately, they have not been replaced by similarly non-ethnically coded identifications, but only by neo-­nationalist and ethnocentric ones – identifications that often use the rhetoric of democracy in order to appeal for Western military intervention, financial aid, and capital investments. One has only to look at the ethnic makeup of the former Yugoslavian states to realize that what has triumphed is not any form of tolerance, but ethnic cleansing and aggressive capitalism. In the poorer regions, such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, and Montenegro, this has taken the form of mafia-run states.

Arguably, the interest in Western interventions must lie elsewhere, perhaps in a combination of economic, political, and social ventures. In the United States, Anglo-American politicians have used conflicting if not contradictory justifications for intervening in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Iraq, Sudan, and Afghanistan: the "military viability" and "credibility of NATO," weapons of mass destruction, ­sheltering terrorists, "making the world safe for democracy," "protecting national interests," "advancing the cause of peace," "upholding our values," "­circumventing a powder keg in the region," "bombing them back to the stone age," "preventing a global refugee crisis," and the more generic "war against terrorism." These statements attest to the political, rather than the ethical, nature of such interventions. While "human rights" have served as the rallying point for many politicians to intervene in the affairs of other sovereign states, this championing of human rights has been ambiguous at best; the tactics chosen by organizations like NATO often seem less concerned with human life than military strategy.

The antagonism here between ethics and politics exposes problems facing ­historians, cultural critics, and filmmakers who attempt to represent, criticize, or understand these events. The constant slippage of the discourse on ethics into ­politics questions the boundaries drawn between right and wrong, self and other, good and evil, but also the political agenda behind such distinctions. The cynicism behind the Manichaean opposition between good and evil or the concept of just and unjust wars is exposed by the contradiction between promoting democracy and using force, by the conflation of legitimate "ethical critiques" of human rights abuses with moral outrage, or the sanctioning of violent crusades against what often appears to be an over-determined enemy. As Robin Blackburn argues, "those who brandish crusading causes, like Tony Blair, can be the most dangerous militarists of all since they cause massive harm to those on whose behalf [their just war] was undertaken" (1999: 119). Or, as Russian journalist Alexander Safronov puts it, "these fervent crusaders ignore the human rights of one group in order to ensure rights for another" (2000: 25). Similarly, in Zoran Solomun's documentary, _Women in Black_ (1995), one Serbian feminist activist points out that the term "human rights" has only been applied by the West to the rights of Muslims and Kosovars, and only in respect to Serbian oppression. That is, the rights of Serbians, Montenegrins, Muslims, and Kosovars to free speech, freedom of the press, and fair elections have been largely overlooked, unless it has served the interest of the West to support internal opposition parties within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

The practice of distinguishing good from bad nationalism rests on a simple ­principle of contradiction such as side taking, and thus promises its own "triumph" over a designated monster. But the fact that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Croatia, Slovenia, Russia, and the NATO-aligned states appeal to "public" perception in the form of popular narratives – plugging suprahistorical heroes or victims into a romantic battle with an all too inhuman enemy – demonstrates that politics in the age of global communication is not designed just to control knowledge (the "free flow of information") but must aesthetically appeal to public sensibility by producing emotions and providing entertainment. Such wars of words and images and triumphs of victims over victimizers are followed by the installation of weak buffer states that are vulnerable both to their neighbors and to various forms of institutional corruption.

Numerous films from Eastern Europe visualize the transition from repressive Socialist systems to unrestrained capitalism. Some of the best examples of the emergence of capitalist criminal culture are Srđan Dragojević's _Rane_ ( _The Wounds_ , 1998) Luzik's _Okraina_ and Goran Paskaljević's _Bure Baruta_ ( _Cabaret Balkan_ , 1998). Unlike Aleksei Balabanov's _Brat_ (1997), which glamorizes violence within a moral framework, or Pavel Lungin's _Oligarkh_ ( _Tycoon_ , 2002), which has "the diminutive, balding Russian business tycoon Boris Berezovsky," whom many Russians consider to be "the personification of evil," turned into a "dashing genius with personal magnetism" by the casting of Russian sex symbol Vladimir Mashkov, _Rane_ and _Bure Baruta_ point to the contradiction within such representations.9 They illustrate how discourses of legitimacy and righteousness collapse into an economic ­discourse, and how young Eastern European men, disillusioned with the failure of previous generations and accustomed to violence and corruption, are attracted to, and influenced by, mostly Western icons of machismo, organized crime, and ­gangsters as symbols of material wealth.

Perhaps because they play into Western stereotypes about Russians, position themselves as anti-Communist, and borrow their aesthetic style from Hollywood, _Brat_ and _Oligarkh_ have enjoyed a relatively wide distribution in Europe and the United States. _Rane_ and _Bure Baruta_ , on the other hand, explored the problems ­facing Eastern European youth culture, and treat gangster culture and lawlessness as synonymous with the violence of capitalism. In both films sons reject the hard-work ethic and political conviction of their fathers. In _Rane_ , Pinky's father Stojan – a stern, ethically upright, retired military man – represents the ideals of socialist unified Yugoslavia. Once the country begins to collapse, Pinky's father demonstrates his patriotism through verbal haranguing and by becoming an avid ­supporter of Milošević (to the point of replacing Tito's portrait with one of Milošević).

Pinky, unconcerned with politics, joins his friend Svaba in assisting a local gangster who periodically joins militia groups to raid and pillage the houses of alleged "enemies" (Muslims from Bosnia). _Bure Baruta_ features a similar conflict between a Bosnian refugee (who used to be a professor but is now forced to work as a bus driver) and his son, who rejects his father's ethic of hard work and honesty in favor of trafficking arms and drugs. While the older generation wants to believe in the image Milošević constructed of himself as savior of the Serbian people (and with it the Socialist principles they fought for during World War Two and the Cold War), the younger generation (in the model of Arkan) uses the rhetoric of the civil war a ploy to pillage and profit from nationalist violence.

Rather than focus on the despondent youth culture in ex-Socialist states, _Okraina_ depicts organized crime as the transformation of Soviet _apparatchiks_ from "privileged" Socialist bureaucrats to a cartel of venture capitalists. The difference is that, while in the past the Soviets felt obliged to provide some means of livelihood (bread and land) to the peasants, under the policies of deregulation and privatization they are no longer ideologically bound to such a responsibility.

My purpose is not to find a place for all these contradictions but to be able to "unthink" (a term I borrow from Heidegger, 1968) the logic of positionality that gives voice to purity and self-righteousness and whose only display of agency is through violence. My aim is to challenge the rhetoric of power that appropriates for itself the discourse of legitimacy and its symbolic, imagistic embodiments. This requires exposing dogmas within this discourse's own value judgments, such as the statement that the break-up of Yugoslavia was caused by ancient ethnic hatreds, that Yugoslavia was a counterfeit state, that the Balkan people are more primitive than Western Europeans or Americans, and that "we" Westerners have a moral license to "stamp out the disease" and "eradicate extreme Serb nationalism."10 The use of such terms resounds with the very same violence that the West accuses "rogue states" of employing. Appeals to "cleanse" the world of "ethnic cleansers" reopen an abyss – an endless cycle of violence.

Although I will not address Muratova's films here, I write in the spirit of her "joy of negative analysis" and of what Pier Paolo Pasolini labeled "unpopular thinking" (1991: 272) – "unpopular" because it unthinks conventional expectations and truisms and thus makes readers and spectators feel uncomfortable with ­themselves and their positions on issues that come to them via the media. I am not suggesting that the films I have chosen to discuss are "unpopular" in the sense that they have not had some commercial success or critical acclaim. In direct contrast to films that dramatize and moralize the violence that emerged as a consequence of the breakup of the Balkans and the former Soviet Union (for instance, Predrag Antonijević's _Savior_ (1998) and Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Ferrari's _Bosna!_ (1994)), "unpopular' films try to turn such moral imperatives into a scandal. What links films like Dušan Makavejev's _Gorilla Bathes at Noon_ (1993), Luzik's _Okraina_ , and Kusturica's _Underground_ is that they employ black humor to understand the present situation in the Balkans and Russia.

The use of humor alone makes many of these films simultaneously "popular" (they are quite entertaining) and "unpopular" because their humor clashes with moral realism – the Western and Eastern media's favorite aesthetic mode of ­interpreting Balkanization. These films do not construct morally imbued (as well as ideologically and ethnically biased) narrative forms that mimic conventional aesthetics and dominant representations of reality, rather they use the genre of the carnivalesque as a means of upsetting discourses of right. They do not falsify images, facts, and narratives, but rather present truth as neither pre-existent, total, nor fixed. They show that truth participates in what Gilles Deleuze calls "the ­powers of the false" (1989). As D.N. Rodowick argues, putting truth (as totality and identity) into crisis, "it is not a question of pluralism, of tolerating equally ­possible yet incomplete and contradictory perspectives of the true. Nor is it a ­question of nihilism where truth is impossible and all is illusion or fiction. Nor is truth 'historical' in the sense that each era has its own truth that replaces the one preceding it" (1997: 85).

The treatment of truth one finds in these films functions more along the lines of a Nietzschean ass festival than a Bakhtinian celebration of multiplicity. The logic of the ass festival is more than merely oppositional and counter-hegemonic. It laughs in the face of what Nietzsche calls the tarantulas – the spirits of gravity who preach equality but are secretly vengeful. The laughter of the ass is designed to lure cloistered dogmatists "out of their den of lies" and expose their demands for justice as appeals for "revenge against all those who are not like us" (Nietzsche, 1995: 99–102). The excessive carnivalesque theatricality of the ass festival treats societal preoccupations as purely performative. However, in a self-critical move, it also hyperbolizes the role of the ass/artist in its/his/her own performance. Similarly, these films do present certain groups (defined more along political and economic than ethnic lines) as more directly responsible for the violence in the Balkans and the former Soviet states, and yet they do not vindicate any one ­position. They do not reproduce what has been fashionable in mass media or ­politically convenient for Western interventionists, that is, a binary division between an ethnically generalized identification of a pure victim and an ethnically defined group of evildoers. These films, instead, ridicule such generalizations independently of whether they come from the East or the West. In the process of debunking monolithic characterizations, they demonstrate how national and ­ethnic stereotypes have led people to react to absurd falsities, producing a senseless violence that has torn apart friends, families, and local communities.

While this combination of the carnivalesque and the Pasolinian "unpopular" seems to be a contradiction in terms (since carnival is popular by definition), these films partake in the popular rituals that Bakhtin describes as "celebrating violence," "mocking the dogma of Fanaticism," indulging in "critical consciousness," "using laughter to disrupt and delegitimize the rhetoric of authority," and "overturning traditional hierarchies." As Bakhtin explains, carnivalesque representations "exclude all one-sided or dogmatic polar extremes of life or of thought, to be absolutized. [Instead] all one-sided pathos or seriousness is caused to collide" (1984: 165). Unlike Bakhtin's definition of the carnivalesque, these films do not reflect what he calls a "temporary suspension" of time, laws, social hierarchies, morals, and so on – that is, a suspension that promises a return to a rejuvenated order. Instead, these films suspend the closure produced by politically motivated moral judgments. To subvert easy resolutions, they point to an indefinite frenzy of violence that leaves little space for renewal or regeneration.

And yet this violence cannot be completely overcome. The deployment of deployment of popular icons, sexual stereotypes, folk songs, and narratives in these films does not preclude in any way the celebration of the "joy of negative analysis." By borrowing from folklore and from what Bakhtin termed "local humor," these films defy the standard academic definition of "popular" as ­lowbrow and suitable for mass consumption – as something entertaining but not critical.

These "unpopular" films create a sense of indefinite destabilization of frames of reference where each citation displaces the previous one. Yet previous citations return to comment on those that have displaced them. This movement is not ­predicated on a dialectical or synthetic model of transcendence, nor does it ­constitute a synthetic model of heterogeneous ideas and disciplines. Instead, it unhinges a sense of narrativity oscillating between various geopolitical, historical, and cultural icons and thus explodes the possibility of hermeneutic closure. Paul Arthur argues that "in place of Eisenstein's insistence on montage as a template for dialectical argument, Makavejev fosters contradiction for its own sake, withholding the clarifying end point of synthesis or resolution" (2001: 12). I believe Arthur's point applies equally well to the films of Kusturica, Dragojević, Luzik, and other "unpopular" filmmakers.

These films attempt to unthink the common intellectual practice of "­identification" through othering. By doing so, they question traditional othering-based lines between East and West, civilization and barbarism, advanced and emerging markets, self and other, copy and authentic. They try to move away from simple oppositions towards complex relations, thus avoiding the dialectical process of othering that promotes the very differences (monsters) it sets out to undermine and does so at the expense of tolerance. As Althusser puts it, dialectical thinking often reduces "the infinite diversity of a historically given society to a simple internal principle of contradiction" (1970: 103)11 Within this model, the circles of the dialectic revolve around a single center, whose very foundation, according to Deleuze, can only be grounded in the myth of a truth that is conceived in and of itself.12 The dialectic is a method of conserving a pre-conceived mythos of truth.

This mixture of filmic styles – from cinéma vérité to nouvelle vague, newsreel footage, fascist propaganda, and Hollywood action, war, and gangster films – is reminiscent of the Black Wave ( _crni talas_ ) Eastern European cinema from the ­mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, specifically the films of dissident filmmakers such as Aleksander Petrović, Dušan Makavejev, and Lazar Stojanović. Black Wave ­filmmakers explored subjects repudiated by the Socialist state, and experimented widely with film styles. They often intercut historical footage from World War Two, Tito's rise to power, and postwar Communist pageantry to produce a hybrid form of filmmaking that juxtaposed Grierson-type (talking-head) documentary, underground filmmaking and the more monumental visual style of social realism and Hollywood cinema. For example, Petrović's _Skuplja_ ć _i perja_ ( _I Even Met Happy Gypsies_ , 1967) treated the then unpopular subjects of ethnic minorities (gypsies), urban poverty, aggressive machismo, womanizing, wife-beating, and inter- and intra-ethnic brutality. Aggressive machismo is also ridiculed through exaggerated folk icons and national stereotypes in Makavejev's Č _ovek nije tica_ ( _Man Is Not a Bird_ , 1965) and _Nevinost bez zaštite_ ( _Innocence Unprotected_ , 1967) and Stojanović's _Plasti_ č _ni Isus_ ( _Plastic Jesus_ , 1971).

Yet it is the alternation between folk humor and official pomp and ­circumstance – juxtaposing Soviet-style realism and nouvelle vague techniques with documentary footage, folksy slapstick, and magic realism – that drives these films beyond the non-linear narratives, the excessive referentiality, and the visual experimentations of Eastern European _novi_ film. The term "Black Wave" has less to do with what these films have in common than with how they have been received; it derives its meaning from a combination of "French New Wave" and "Prague School black humor," and it also refers to the fact that these films were effectively blacklisted, though often without the open acknowledgement of the censorship system.

Stojanović, however, was briefly jailed for making _Plasti_ č _ni Isus_ on account of the film's polemical content – references to homosexuality, ethnic conflict, mass murder, complicity with Nazism, and genocide in World War Two; comparisons of Tito with Stalin, Hitler, US pop stars, the strong man at the circus, and so on; and the juxtaposition of fascist, Socialist, capitalist, and Hollywood spectacles. What Black Wave films have in common is that they use pastiche as a form of social criticism, as a way to blur the lines between self-proclaimed oppositional ­discourses, aesthetic modes of representation, histories, and ideologies.

These filmic composites are also accompanied by heteroglossic soundtracks that mix patriotic (nationalist) and partisan songs with Gypsy music, German marches, and US pop music. For instance, Goran Bregović's soundtrack for _Underground_ cites a substantial amount of music from _Plasti_ č _ni Isus_ ("Lili Marlene," "Allegro con fuoco" from Dvořák's _Aus Jer Neuen Welt_ , and the partisan song "Druze Tito"). Like _Plasti_ č _ni Isus_ , _Underground_ mismatches familiar sounds with familiar images, ­animating violent images with carnivalesque music and vice versa, and confusing the nationalist pageantry of fascist Europe with postwar Communist and capitalist spectacles. As a result, it makes visible what has allegedly been "covered up" by 50 years of socialism – the history or the Ustaša, Muslim, Slovenian, and Serbian collaboration, US cultural and commercial influences on Eastern Europe.

 _Underground_ , however, is far less caustic than _Plasti_ č _ni Isus_ , which juxtaposes images of the Croatian Ustaša, Bosnian Muslim collaborators during World War Two, Albanian and Serbian fascist puppet states, Hitler, Stalin, and Tito. _Plasti_ č _ni Isus_ dredges up the racially motivated genocides of World War Two, including the Chetnik nationalist–royalist combatants in World War Two, as well as other events that Tito's multicultural policy had sternly suppressed. What scandalized the Yugoslav audience of the late 1960s and early 1970s was not the treatment of rape, homosexuality, pornography, or the Americanization of popular culture, but the use of historical footage of the Ustaša's and Chetnik's fascist puppet states in Serbia, Bosnia, Slovenia, and Albania. Such images, in fact, were unofficially banned. Tito promoted "affirmative" local and ethnic cultural expressions (such as music, dance, folklore, and other arts), but he also upheld a policy of social amnesia to censure or actively repress the memory of ethnic cleansing and the acts of genocide of World War Two by having the Yugoslav constitution prohibit "propagating or practicing national inequality and any incitement of nationalism, racial or religious hatred, and intolerance" (qtd in Woodward, 1995: 37).

Films like _Plasti_ č _ni Isus_ and _Innocence Unprotected_ recall what Srđan Bogosavljević calls the "unresolved genocide" of World War Two: "Yugoslavia was, according to its pre-Second World War borders one of the countries with the highest number of war victims, the greatest amount of war damage and the worst effects of ­genocide. The question of indifference with respect to the war victims therefore arises – while there may be political motives for this indifference, there can be no justification" (2000: 146).

Consequently, there was an "unwillingness to stir up and bring into the ­forefront the barely pacified intolerance among nations" (Bogosavljević, 2000: 146). While derogatory labels such as "Chetnik" and "Ustaša" are still commonly used against Serbs and Croats respectively, there remains little discussion of what these terms mean. Instead, they slip into a generic category of evil. Black Wave films exposed complex histories and compromised political actors by showing that members of all ethnic groups participated in fascist collaboration, anti-fascist, partisan, anti- and pro-Communist, anti- and pro-royalist (Chetnik) politics during World War Two. Films like Dragojević's _Lepa Selo, Lepo Gore_ ( _Pretty Village, Pretty Flame_ , 1995) ridicule the current recycling of Chetnik and Ustaša paraphernalia, post-Socialist anti-Communism and post-fascist anti-fascism, since they have reappeared not only from being underground for 50 years but without any basis in historical ­reality. That is, they appear as if World War Two had never ended – as if the association to collaboration with Italian Fascism and German Nazism had not already ­tarnished these names. Such satires of historical figures – partisans, fascists, Socialist leaders – remind the audience that in the Balkans recent history has not been "worked through" as it has in Western Europe and particularly in Germany. History has remained an underground without a public voice. Even 60 years later, filmic representations of these historical events draw virulent responses from critics, but also stir much popular interest. Many critics of _Underground_ , for instance, argue that the film is technically masterful, but reject what they call its ideological implications. Those who accuse Kusturica of being biased find proof of such bias in his use of archival footage from World War Two and of the song "Lili Marlene," which, ironically, was written during World War One but become popular during the Nazi occupation of Belgrade. More disturbing for the critics was the footage of Nazi troops entering Maribor and Zagreb (where they were greeted by cheering crowds) and Belgrade (where, having bombed the city shortly before their arrival, the Germans were received less enthusiastically). Critics such as Cerović, Finkielkraut, Žižek, and more recently, Dina Iordanova and Pavle Levi, saw the historical footage depicting Slovene and Croat Nazi collaboration as "indirectly glorifying the brave Serbs" (Iordanova, 2001: 116). It appears that these critics expect all Serbians – from all historical periods – to be represented as villains since the Serbian government and its army were the main aggressors in the recent civil wars in Yugoslavia.

This also implies that Kusturica's presentation of his "Serbian" characters as anti-fascist is aimed at turning them into "good guys," but this is far from the case. Kusturica's character Marko blows up men, women, and children of all ethnic backgrounds – people he has entrapped and visually enslaved in his basement for 30 years by tricking them into thinking that World War Two is still raging. Besides manipulating this "underground group" so that they believe that they are still fighting fascism, he traffics the arms produced by his basement slaves and outwardly lives the lie of being both a hero and a poet of the war of liberation. Similarly, Marko's friend Blacky (who is considered by the same critics to be the epitome of a Montenegrin partisan) is so caught up in his image of himself as a partisan he cannot see that he has been duped by his friend and his lover Natalja, nor can he tell the difference between the war against nationalism (the war of ­liberation from Nazi occupation) and the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia. This hardly amounts to a flattering image of "brave Serbs." What Kusturica's critics seem to have overlooked is that _Underground_ condemns Yugoslav Socialist leaders not only for lying to the public (keeping them in the dark, or underground), but also for establishing themselves as a privileged elite that embezzled public funds and profiteered from illegal trafficking of arms and goods.

In the tradition of Black Wave cinema, Kusturica foregrounds the aesthetic ­practices that produce exaggerated pompous forms of political spectacle – the use of dramatic lighting, music, and cinematic orchestration to illustrate heroic acts, as well as the insertion of documentary footage to give the cinematic spectacle a "reality effect," yet one that in turns questions the relation of image to reality. At the same time, he transforms historical figures into both emblems of social ideals and ridiculous caricatures. Furthermore, the juxtapositions and superimpositions of these cinematic techniques, images and soundtracks (for example, when he uses German music to animate Tito) cast Nazi, Yugoslav, Russian, and US political ­pageantry as variations on a theme rather than ideologically and historically ­distinct. The cannibalization of official spectacles and discourses becomes a new aesthetic form – one that helps us unthink filmic and mediated forms of "simple entertainment" that reduce complex relations to basic narratives of good triumphing over evil. While official, "above ground" modes of representation are dumbed down to simple spectacles of power, Kusturica points to what lies beneath this "triumph of the stupid": a network of disparate "underground" forces made up of arms smugglers, blindly patriotic followers of a long-dead Tito, draft-dodgers, nationalists, anti-nationalists, refugees, foreign investors, mercenaries, and UN peace-keepers.

A comparable aesthetic can be found in the Russian film _Okraina_ , in which Luzik incorporates parts of Gavriil Popov's soundtrack for Georgi and Sergei Vasilyev's _Chapayev_ (1934). According to Denise Youngblood, _Chapayev_ marked the end of avant-garde cinema and the beginning of heroic Soviet epic filmmaking sanctioned by Stalin (1991: 230). Luzik, therefore, cites _Chapayev_ 's soundtrack both to pay homage to the Russian avant-garde music it incorporated and to point to the contradictions inherent in that film – a film that utilized avant-garde music while marking the end of avant-garde Soviet film and the beginning of regime-friendly cinema. Luzik's reference to Popov's soundtrack branches out in several other directions, some of them specific to Soviet history, some pointing towards the West. It is meant to recall the censoring of the Russian avant-garde in the late 1930s but also the homage paid to the Russian avant-garde by Western filmmakers and critics in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as Popov's personal involvement in politics (his participation in the Democratic Reform Party in the _glasnost_ period).

Although set in post-Soviet, "democratized" Russia, _Okraina_ 's heroes resemble those of early Soviet cinema (both revolutionary and epic). The protagonists are a group of collective farmers who fight to keep their cooperative farm from being sold off to an oil magnate. Like the heroes of Soviet realist cinema, Luzik's ­fanners are the epitome of manliness and determination. They endure cold winter nights, use all means necessary to hold on to their land, and are eventually successful. However, while the Soviet films of the 1930s – the films _Okraina_ visually refers to – are set in a political context in which capitalism was the ideological enemy of the state, _Okraina_ is set in a period in which capitalism is endorsed by the government. Ironically, the office of the oil magnate is housed in one of Stalin's seven skyscrapers. Because _Okraina_ pokes fun at the kind of epic film sanctioned by Stalin (whose style it mimics as an ironic gesture) while being simultaneously ­critical of the forms of capitalism that have emerged in contemporary Russia, it received ­scathing criticism in Russian papers, and commensurately little visibility and limited distribution.

Yet, the victory of _Okraina_ 's 1930s-style revolutionary agrarian farmers over multinational corporate capitalism does not produce any clear moral or political resolution. The closing image of the farmers in a state of bliss plowing their fields does not reaffirm the goals of the revolutionary past but seems only to confuse our expectations. This hyper-referentiality of sound and image blurs the lines between the past and the present, between Socialist, neo-nationalis,t and capitalist aesthetics and politics. The film does more present the dichotomy of old and new Russia, city and country, capitalism and peasant life in simple terms of a battle, it confuses the old and the new. The hero of the old Soviet era returns as the new Soviet man to fight, in the oil Tsar, an enemy that is at once new and yet the same as ever. Yet, this time the hero is no longer shown to use necessary violence. Instead, he is excessively violent (he even enjoys torturing and killing his adversary), obstinate, and oblivious to global politics. _Okraina_ does not make it clear whether a new ­system has replaced the old Soviet one, if Russia has been returned to its pre-Soviet state or if the Soviets themselves had proven to be just another continuation of Old Russia; after all, the peasants are still fighting for a piece of land.

While _Okraina_ reflects on the predicament of the peasants – the alleged heroes and beneficiaries of the revolution – in the "post-Soviet" era, Makavejev's _Gorilla Bathes at Noon_ concentrates on another typical figure, the Soviet army officer left behind in East Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like _Okraina_ , Makavejev's film refers to a variety of films and styles – from Leni Riefenstahl's _Triumph des Willens_ ( _The Triumph of the Will_ , 1934) to Soviet realist cinema of the late 1930s and early1950s. _Gorilla_ opens with a parody of _The Triumph of the Will_. The establishing shot of Riefenstahl's film depicts Hitler descending from the clouds to visit a Nazi rally in Nuremberg, while in _Gorilla_ we find Viktor Lasukutin, the Soviet army officer, flying over Berlin. But instead of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries," we hear Viktor commenting, "Half a century ago a trivial man from the South, an unemployed artist came here, invaded other places where he was not wanted, and soon the whole world was here." After a short, extreme close-up shot of Viktor eating an apple, the film cuts to the scene from Mikhail Chiaureli's _Padeniye Berlina_ ( _Fall of Berlin_ , 1949) in which the Soviets take over the Reichstag and fly their flag over the city to indicate their victory over the Nazis. The juxtaposition of three epochs of political filmmaking (Nazi propaganda, Soviet propaganda, the filming of Berlin after the reunification of Germany) as well as of three different ideological frameworks (fascist, Socialist, capitalist) is unsettling.

While _Padeniye Berlina_ can be seen as the direct ideological opposite to _Triumph of the Will_ the film copies some of _Triumph_ 's visual techniques. Not only does it enumerate the different ethnic groups who participated in the fall of Berlin as Riefenstahl shows the different regions of Germany that contributed to Hitler's army (while also reminding us that Riefenstahl might owe a debt to Eisenstein's form of typage), it also frames Stalin as a mythical, godlike figure not unlike Riefenstahl's Hitler. Intercut with the clips from _Padeniye Berlina_ and _Triumph_ is a scene in _Gorilla_ where a German officer arrests Viktor for vagrancy. Upon his release he is given a one-way ticket to Moscow, which he unsuccessfully attempts to sell on the black market. Without offering any definitive way of reading this series of juxtapositions, Makavejev forces the audience to situate the reunification of Berlin with respect to these two representations of "historical moments," and to find a place for "a soldier whose army deserted him." Viktor asks "What is a man without a uniform?" Clearly he is a relic of a fallen superpower, a Siberian-born officer of an occupying army, but how are we to place him? Almost overnight, his uniform, his Soviet flag, and all that it stands for have become antiquated. Not only is he a man without a uniform, he is also a man without either a sense of purpose or a clear location, politically, culturally, or ethnically. Makavejev draws analogies between Viktor and the statue of Lenin that is slated for removal from East Berlin. Like Lenin, Viktor is destined to return to Russia, yet Makavejev ­questions why Viktor and the statue must return when they are also Berliners. Both are now men without a country, since they belong not to Russia but to the Soviet Union.

What attracts me to these parodic, carnivalesque films is that although they do _present_ violence they do not reproduce its vicious circle. That is, they do not ­suggest that violent acts should be treated with retributive violence, or that those deemed "inhuman" should be treated inhumanely. These films provide a way of unthinking any romanticization of violence, from national myths of victimization that call for retribution, to heroic (humanitarian) duties of protecting the planet from would-be tyrants and "barbaric peoples" by literally cleansing it of them. Nietzsche writes, "One does not kill with anger, but with laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity" (1995: 153). "Killing gravity" does not mean making light of ethical questions, revising history, or trivializing acts of violence such as ethnic cleansing, mass rape, or killing. Rather, it is an attempt to disarm those discourses and images that legitimate a violent sense of truth by exposing the absurdity of such modes of representation. Laughter confronts all of those who fashion ­historical, national, and religious rhetoric and imagery on their own political objectives.

 **Notes**

This chapter first appeared as Ravetto-Biagioli, Kriss (2003) Laughing into an Abyss: ­Cinema and Balkanization. _Screen_ , 44(4): 445–64 and has been modified for inclusion here.

1 In her talk "It Depends When You Start the Story: Narratives as Camouflage and the Political Use of Scholarship on the Yugoslav Wars," presented at the conference Doing History in the Shadow of the Balkan Wars (University of Michigan, January 17–18, 1997), Susan Woodward argued that documentaries like _Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation_ , _Bloody Bosnia_ , and _Serbian Epics_ are "anti-historical narratives" that themselves seem "obsessed with identifying these conflicts as historical." That is, documentaries that seek to situate modern behavior in an epic are guilty not only of their own version of historical revisionism, but also of myth-making.

2 Niko Bellic is the main anti-hero in Rockstar Games's Grand Theft Auto IV released in 2008. The game sold 3.5 million copies on the first day of its release. The character of Niko is allegedly a Serbian war criminal who fought in the Yugoslav civil wars and an ultra-nationalist. Viktor Reznov, from Activision's _Call of Duty_ , is a Red Army captain who is involved in the fall of Berlin but ends up in a Soviet prison camp with an ­American soldier and, ultimately, in Vietnam as a spy for the Americans.

3 In fact, the film sparked a furious debate between European intellectuals such as Alan Finkielkraut, André Glucksman, Bernard-Heni Lévy, and Peter Handke. Ironically, these intellectuals, rather than engaging greatly with the film as a film (and a fiction film at that), focused only on Emir Kusturica's own statements about the war, where he received money to fund the film (5 percent of the funding came from Radio Serbia while the other 95 percent from a French–German–Hungarian co-production), and the fact that two minor characters who are traitors in the film happen to be a Muslim and a Croatian, ignoring the fact that Marko, the Serbian figure, turns out to be the biggest traitor and war profiteer. While much more sophisticated and engaged with the filmic narrative, this type of ad hominem critique of Kusturica as an international figure has also slipped over into readings of the film by such critics as Pavle Levi (2007) and Dina Iordinova (2001), see also Gocić, 2001.

4 According to Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, narratives of opposition are directly ­political. For example, they condemn colonialism and Western mass culture as well as global capitalism, or in Wajda's case Soviet realism and Socialist repression of expression, politics, and culture. Opposition itself not only reaffirms the dominance of its enemy, but also the dominance of its own master narrative, buy setting up a hero to counter that of the powers that be. See Shohat and Stam, 1994: chs 4–5).

5 Bruce Robbins argues that agency is a general defense of a particular notion of ­selfhood, yet while we do not need "easy generalizations," we do need "more difficult, less pious," generalizations that we can examine our own professional "situatedness" as "metropolitan' or "cosmopolitan." That is, we can "ipso facto judge [ourselves as] ­intolerably contaminated and self-contradictory." Hence, we have to constantly question the gesture of belonging or situating ourselves with respect to political agency. (See Robbins, 1998: 252).

6 Some, like Kusturica, are accused of Serbian nationalism when they identify themselves as Yugoslav, while others, like Croatian writer and journalist, Dubravka Ugrešić are considered nostalgic and naive. Dubravka Ugrešić argues that the dominance of nationalist discourse that triumphed in all of the former Yugoslav territories, as well as throughout the West, has resulted in the confiscation and subjection of collective memory to various projects of anti-memory. Collective memory of the former ­Yugoslavia has been coined _Jugonostalgija_ , which as Ugrešić points out "is used as a ­political and moral disqualification: the Yugonostalgic is a suspicious person, a 'public enemy,' a 'traitor,' a person who regrets the collapse of Yugoslavia... [she] is the enemy of democracy" (Ugrešić, 1996: 36).

7 Here I am referring to the popular demand that the statue of the notorious Feliks Dzierżyński be reinstated in its place in front of the ex-KGB buildings from where it was been triumphantly toppled on August 22, 1990.

8 De Certeau's project is to question the practice of history as a practice of ­interpretation, which he argues is guaranteed by the silence of the other. It is precisely this silence that allows for the transformation of the space of the other "into a system of production" (de Certeau, 1988: 6).

9 See Sabrina Tavernise's (2002) review of _Tycoon_. Tavernise informs the reader that "Mr. Berezovsky still controls about $1.5 Billion in Russian assets, including stakes in an oil company and an aluminum conglomerate." The interesting part of this article is that it points to the contradictory readings of a figure like Berezovsky, while for the Russians he acquired what was previously socially owned under the new laws of ­privatization instituted at the bequest of the IMF.

10 See Harden, 1999.

11 Critiquing specifically Hegel's internalization of the dialectic, Althusser argues that for Hegel there are no true external determinations: "a circle of circles, consciousness has only one center, which solely determines it, it would need circles with another center than itself, decentered circles for it to be affected at its centre by their effectivity." Instead he writes: "Hegelian contradiction is never more than a reflection of the simplicity of this internal principle of a people, that is not its material reality but its most abstract ideology" (Althusser, 1970: 101).

12 Deleuze explains that models need a foundation, and "what needs a foundation, in fact, is always a pretension of a claim... Myth, with its always circular structure, is indeed the story of a foundation" (1990: 255).

 **References**

Althusser, Louis (1970) _For Marx_ (trans. Ben Brewster). Penguin Press, New York, NY.

Arthur, Paul (2001) Escape from freedom: the films of Dušan Makajevev. _Cineaste_ , 27 (1): 11–16.

Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984) _Problems with Dostoevsky's Poetics_ (ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson). Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, MN.

Barthes, Roland (1984) _The Rustle of Language_ (trans. Richard Howard). Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, New York, pp. 350–352.

Bjelić, Dušan and Savić, Obrad (2002) _Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation_. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Blackburn, Robin (1999) Kosovo: the war of NATO expansion. _New Left Review_ 235: 107–123.

Bogosavljević, Srđan (2000) The unresolved genocide, in _The Road to War in Serbia_ (ed. Neboja Povov). Central European University Press, Budapest.

Cerović, Stanko (1995) Canned lies: yellow press heroes. _Bosnia Report_ , August. Also ­available online at <http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/bosnia/caned.html> (accessed May 2000).

de Certeau, Michel (1988) _The Writing of History_ (trans. Tom Conley). Columbia University Press, New York.

Deleuze, Gilles (1989) _Cinema 2: The Time Image_ (trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta). Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis.

Deleuze, Gilles (1990) _The Logic of Sense_ (trans. Mark Lester). Columbia University Press, New York.

Finkielkraut, Alain (1995) Kusturica's Imposture. _Le Monde_ June 2 (16), <http://www.kustu.com/w2/en:polemics> (accessed May 2000).

Glenny, Misha (2000) The road to Bosnia and Kosovo: the role of the great powers in the Balkans. _Eastern European studies Meeting Report at the Woodrow Wilson Center, 199_ , April 18.

Gocić, Goran (2001) _Notes from the Underground: The Cinema of Emir Kusturica_. Wallflower Press, London.

Harden, Blain (1999) What Would it Take to Cleanse Serbia? _The New York Times_ , May 9. Available online at nytimes.com (accessed May 9, 1999).

Heidegger, Martin (1968) _What is Called Thinking?_ (trans. J. Glenn Gray). Harper and Row, New York.

Horton, Andrew (1998) The Russian soul fights back: Peter Lutsik's _Okraina_. _The Central European Review_ , 1:1, <http://www.ce-review.org/99/1/kinoeye1-horton2.html> (accessed May 2000).

Iordanova, Dina (2001) _Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media_. BFi Publishing, London.

Iordanova, Dina (2002) _Emir Kusturica_. BFi Publishing, London.

Izetbegović, Aljia (1993) _Islam Between East and West_. American Trust Publications, Plainfield, IN.

Kenan, Shlomzion (2008) Clash of the Titans. _Haaretz_ , October 23.

Levi, Pavle. 2007. _Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema_. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1995) _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ (trans. Walter Kaufmann). New Modern Library, New York.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (2000) _Beyond Good and Evil_ (trans. Walter Kaufman). Modern Library, New York.

Pasolini, Pier Paolo (1991) _Empirismo Eretico_. Garzanti, Milan.

Pesić, Vesna (2000) The war for ethnic states, in _The Road to War in Serbia_ (ed. Neboja Povov). Central European University Press, Budapest.

Popa, Vasko (1997) _Collected Poems_ (trans. Anne Pennington). Arvil Press, London.

Robbins, Bruce (1998) Comparative Cosmpolitianisms, in _Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation_ (ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins). University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.

Rodowick, D.N. (1997) _Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine_. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.

Rohde, David (2000) Kosovo Seething. _Foreign Affairs_ , May/June, http://www.foreign affairs.com/articles/56047/david-rohde/kosovo-seething (accessed May 2000).

Safronov, Alexander V. (2000) New trials for Europe and Euro-Atlantic Partnership: a View from Russia. _Mediterranean Quarterly_ , 11 (2): 23–28.

Shohat, Ella and Stam, Robert (1994) _Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media_. Routledge, New York.

Tavernise, Sabrina (2002) Film about tycoon reveals lifestyles of the rich and Russian. _The New York Times_ , September 22, A7.

Tuđman, Franjo (1996) _Nacionalno pitanje u suvremenoj Europi_. V. hrvatsko izd, Zagreb: Nakladni zavod Matice Hrvatske./ _Nationalism_ _in_ _Contemporary Europe_. Columbia University Press, New York 1981 (East European Monographs 76) [English version of _Nacionalno pitanje_ ].

Ugrešić, Dubravka (1996) The confiscation of memory. _New Left Review_ , 218: 26–40.

Wolff, Larry (1994) _Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment_. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.

Woodward, Susan (1995) _Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War_. Brookings Institute, Washington, DC.

Wyatt, Justin (1994) _High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood_. University of Texas Press, Austin.

Yarovskaya, Marianna (1997) Underground. _Film Quarterly_ , 51 (2): 50–54.

Youngblood, Denise (1991) _Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era_. Texas University Press, Austin.

Žižek, Slavoj (1997) Multiculturalism, or, the cultural logic of multinational capitalism. _New Left Review_ , 225: 28–51.

 **Further Reading**

Milošević, Slobodan (1989) _Godine Raspleta_. Beogradski izdavacko-graficki zavod, Belgrade.

# 6

# Jewish Identities and Generational Perspectives

Catherine Portuges

Beginning in the mid-1980s, and gaining momentum with the dissolution of ­communism, Jewish protagonists began to reappear on Hungarian movie screens, at first primarily as historical figures. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, ­documentary and historical investigations, fiction features, family narratives, ­biographical and autobiographical treatments, and avant-garde films have ­continued to proliferate, despite the financial and organizational challenges that have plagued the industry. This chapter aims to place in dialogue selected films of the post-Communist era, particularly those by younger or "third generation" ­filmmakers, with earlier postwar productions that both address the Holocaust and avoid referencing questions of Jewish identity, offering spaces for intergenerational reflection and debate.

Despite its distinguished record of innovative and challenging production, Hungarian filmmaking has often been marginalized as a "minor cinema," perhaps in part as a consequence of the country's small size and linguistic isolation. Yet few other East European film industries have consistently produced so many esteemed and influential films with relatively little scholarly inquiry. While the complex ­trajectory of international debates regarding visual representation of the Holocaust lies beyond the parameters of this chapter, the memorialization of victims and the inscription of survivor testimonies include what Vamik Volkan has called "transgenerational transmission of trauma," a process whereby the viewer is ­inevitably implicated in and linked to portrayals of traumatic historical events (Volkan, Ast, and Greer, 2002). Among contemporary theorists the psychoanalyst Dori Laub1 suggests that individual repression and compartmentalization of ­traumatic experience can yield moments of collective insight through artistic ­representation. Marianne Hirsch (1997; 2004; 2010) considers ways in which memory is activated in survivors and their descendants at the sites of past trauma through the lens of what she calls "postmemory" – transgenerational memories of traumatic events suffered only indirectly. My readings of Hungarian films under discussion here are informed by these psychoanalytic, cultural, and historical perspectives and by the communities forged in the virtual and actual afterlives of destroyed East European Jewish worlds.

#  ** _Somewhere in Europe_** **revisited**

The relatively few films of the immediate postwar period that referenced the Holocaust tended to do so within ideological boundaries that portrayed not so much the experience of its victims but rather a mythologized nation that ­protected its Jews, in what might be considered an unofficial censorship or appropriation of Jewish memory. Such a perspective is discernible in Géza von Radványi's _Somewhere in Europe_ ( _Valahol Európában_ , 1947).2 The director's second feature, made with financing from the Hungarian Communist Party, the screenplay was co-written in 1945 by the Hungarian film theorist, Béla Balázs; two other major figures of Hungarian cinema, Félix Máriássy and Károly Makk, also contributed to one of the last postwar films to be released before the Communist takeover of Hungary.3 The first major achievement of postwar Hungarian cinema, the film was shot in black and white by cinematographer Barnabás Hegyi on location in Hungary with primarily non-professional actors (including war-orphaned children) in key roles to impart the naturalism and spontaneity associated with Italian neorealism. The film traces a roving band of orphans made homeless by the wreckage of war, ­identified in the credits only as "25 children," and it is dedicated to "The Nameless Child – to all those children who met the same fate on the high roads of historical times... somewhere where the storms of war swept through countries, regions, lives... in Europe along the Danube." The visual style is clearly imbued with a neorealist esthetic, suggesting that European filmmakers were in search of a ­representational mode commensurate with the reality of the times.4

Although not a Jew, the film's director, Géza von Radványi, originally from Kosice (now Slovakia), changed his name from his original family name, Grosschmid, as did his brother, the renowned Hungarian writer, Sándor Márai, the author (among many other works) of the celebrated novel _Embers_ (1942), a tale of friendship and betrayal set in the fading splendor of a manor house in Hungary, devoid of any reference to war.5

In fact a number of films of the immediate postwar period focused on the larger background of war and, in particular, its impact on children.6 Foregrounding the most vulnerable of protagonists – children traumatized by war – enables these filmmakers to dramatize the impact of war while assuring empathy from the viewer, as when the youngest boy, Kuksi, dies defending the ruined castle where the group has found shelter. The portrayal of children in _Somewhere in Europe_ is indebted to Balázs's engagement with both Soviet montage and Weimar cinematic modernism. Living by their wits and stealing to eat, the ragged band of scavengers take refuge in a ruined castle, only to discover it is inhabited by an eccentric ­orchestra conductor who has himself been emotionally and spiritually ­traumatized by war.

Parallel montages of marching German soldiers and bedraggled children ­walking in formation set the tone for the kaleidoscope of stories of those left homeless by bombardment, those who had witnessed the murder of their parents or been deported by the Nazis. Because of the imposition of official constraints in film production with regard to referencing the word "Jew," none is clearly ­identified as such. Yet halfway through the film's narrative, a young boy reveals that he is in fact female. She makes her confession to the group's leader of the personal sacrifice she made in exchange for a promise that her family will be spared deportation and death: her rape by a German, recapitulated now in flashback. Discovering immediately afterwards that the promise was violated, the girl shoots her rapist. When her interlocutor – the first person to whom she has ever revealed her ­traumatic experience – says, "I've never had anything to do with your kind," she responds, "I've had something to do with your kind," in an ambiguous moment which may be read as suggesting either gender or Jewish identity, or both, suggesting the typical lack of individuation or meta-narrative in early postwar Hungarian cinema of the Holocaust.7 Shifting from the more poetic realism of the first half of the film and the absence of dialogue, the narrative acquires an increasing verbal intensity and specificity, suggesting perhaps a trajectory away from the darkness and despair of chaos in which protagonists are deprived of their ability to feel and to communicate toward potential verbal transformation of that experience. This dynamic recalls Dori Laub's view of the potential effects of testimony on victims of trauma:

Once the process of the interview is set in motion - the process of reflection, of self-reflection, and of telling to oneself and to the listeners - it has a cascade effect. Memory leads to memory, perhaps even to an explosion of memories. In most instances, very few questions need to be asked. Only a certain structure needs to be provided, like the sequence of time, so that the process can both proceed and be contained, leading from one event to the next. (2000: n.p.)

The film's second half evolves into a different narrative mode when the ­children, intoxicated on wine from the castle's cellar, decide to place a noose around the neck of an old man and hang him "for fun." Their hysteria reaches its peak in a moment of savagery when they seem ready to kill for the thrill of it; a sudden reversal redeems them, offering a hopeful conclusion, transforming their potential victim into a benefactor and ­liberator. Markers of European humanism abound, such as when the old man plays Beethoven on the piano and teaches the children to whistle "La Marseillaise," later their anthem of freedom. He is constructed as a principal figure of antagonism to the brutal Arrow Cross militia who beat and ­torment the children in an ostensible parable of Nazi torture of Jewish victims. In extended scenes set in the chateau's interiorized space, an atmosphere of moody interiority and subjectivity prevails, linking the film to the tradition of bildungsroman and positioning the "civilizing mission" of the orchestra conductor as the children's rescuer.

Cited by Christian Metz (1990) as "an exemplary illustration of the idea of the 'Disasters of War,'" some of the young protagonists of _Somewhere in Europe_ are Jewish, although not overtly marked as such.8 The opening sequence locates Central Europe on a period map of the world, followed by a rapidly edited sequence of vignettes of children exposed to the horrors of modern warfare, ­symbolized by violent cuts and extreme camera angles. Tragedy seems to emanate from the scene as the director interprets the toll of war and its traumatic effects on his young protagonists. A boy fleeing a bombing raid takes shelter in an abandoned carnival's House of Horrors where baroquely expressionist cinematography ­foregrounds figures of surreal monsters and a melting wax Hitler that at once embody and exacerbate his terror.

The film's primary villain is, in fact, a member of the fascist Arrow Cross that came to power in the spring of 1944, enabling and indeed facilitating Nazi ­deportation of some 550,000 Hungarian Jews, most of whose lives ended in Auschwitz. When he had returned to his former profession as journalist and ­foreign correspondent traveling throughout Europe after the war, back in Budapest Radványi wrote of finding the city in the throes of incredible devastation, its ­children "phantoms in rages with their brutalized faces... ragamuffins, beggars, highway robbers and worse" (1949).

This postwar landscape was no doubt familiar to audiences of the time, who themselves were likely to have experienced the violence of war so powerfully ­fictionalized in _Somewhere in Europe_ , which was shot shortly after the mass ­deportation of Hungarian Jews. It is worth recalling as well the devastation of postwar Eastern Europe film industries in which resources were severely limited and the political landscape daunting to filmmakers, to say the least. In Hungary, retreating German troops looted a substantial portion of the industry's production equipment; both film studios and theaters had been damaged or destroyed by bombing during the war.9 Radványi had envisioned a trilogy of films about the homeless survivors of Europe following World War Two: the second film, _Donne Senza Nome_ ( _Women Without Names_ , 1949), was released at the apogee of Italian neorealism. The film was originally entitled 'Women of Sabina' in reference to its locale in Italian internment camps, and it is a protest against what Radványi called "this modern, absurd and abject reign of paper and red tape" wherein one's own identity can be quickly and catastrophically obliterated by virtue of misplaced or missing documents. A Hungarian film shot in Italy in 1949 with an unapologetically critical view of government, the film's hybrid style – a mélange of flashback, melodrama and realism – becomes a provocative political critique of postwar Europe. Consigned to oblivion like most of Radványi's work, it is rarely screened outside Hungary.

#  ** _The Last Stop_**

A year later, in 1948, the same Béla Balázs who wrote the screenplay for _Somewhere in Europe_ claimed, "We must first speak about the genre of this wonderful Polish film," thereby opening a discussion of _The Last Stop_ ( _Ostatni Etap_ , 1948), the first feature film to attempt to represent Auschwitz and the universe of mass extermination. _The Last Stop_ was shot during the summer of 1947 on the very site of the camp itself amongst its still almost completely extant structures. Directed and written by two former prisoners of the women's camp in Birkenau, Jakubowska herself and Gerda Schneider, an East German Communist, the film is performed not only by actors but also by extras who were either inhabitants of the town of Auschwitz or had themselves been deported to the camp. Arrested in Warsaw, Marta Weiss is deported to Auschwitz, where she is selected by the authorities to serve as an interpreter. She joins a resistance group composed of women of diverse nationalities struggling against the (primarily Polish) _kapos_ and the SS. _The Last Stop_ soon acquired the status of an iconic document through its portrayal of what soon became a cinematic iconography of the experience of Nazi persecution, thereby laying the groundwork for a new filmic genre that has since become ­ubiquitous: the docudrama.

Subsequently appropriated as an influential source for visual interpretation for other Holocaust film narratives, the iconic images of Auschwitz-Birkenau (where the young Imre Kertész was later deported) and its effect on both individual subjectivity and collective experience include the arrival under cover of darkness of deportation trains, which became a standard reference for Alain Resnais's _Night and Fog_ (1956), Gillo Pontecorvo's _Kapo_ (1960), Steven Spielberg's _Schindler's List_ (1993),10 and Alan J. Pakula's _Sophie's Choice_ (1982), among many others. The _Appellplatz_ sequence imparts the claustrophobic sensation of being anchored in a world of suffering and bondage, an image linked with neorealist location shots framed in open spaces. (In his treatment of _The Diary of Anne Frank_ (1959), director George Stevens borrowed from the film in a dream sequence of female prisoners standing together, transforming a moment of forced attention and solidarity among the prison community into a surreal, oneiric image).

 _The Last Stop_ combines the secondary dramas of female prisoners and their Nazi antagonists with dramatic visions of the camp in carefully composed long tracking shots, stark contrasts of light, and symbolic choreography in cinematography by Boris Monastyrsky, a student of Eisenstein. The central figure, that of a female translator, incorporates the actual experience of Mala Zimetbaum, who was deported to Auschwitz from Belgium. Using her position as translator for the native languages represented there, including Polish, Greek, Hungarian, French, and Portuguese, she worked for the resistance underground in the camp, ­gathering and distributing resistance documents. In June 1944, she succeeded in escaping from the camp, only to be ultimately recaptured and martyred for her actions. Jakubowska's portrayal of the collective experience of the _univers concentrationnaire_ was perceived as so authentic that it has been integrated by other filmmakers as actual footage of the camps. In his study of _The Last Stage_ , Stuart Liebman asks, "What type of narratives can replace classical film plots whose neat contrivances would seriously distort the astonishing primal and unpredictable truths of ghetto or camp existence? Indeed, is there a dramatic structure that can be conceived for a situation whose victims had so little chance to resist?" (Liebman and Quart, 1996: 43). Awarded numerous festival prizes, the film was an international success, screened in some 45 countries. For the first time, a mass audience confronted the reality of the camps in the form of a fictionalized, internal mental representation that drew upon the imagination and the emotions rather than primarily on ­documents and footage shot by the American army during the Liberation. The presence of the filmmakers as first-person witnesses to the very traumatic events they revisit remained a reference point thereafter in the intersecting theories of cinema, psychoanalysis, and the Holocaust. In contemporary theoretical debates, the notion of trauma transcends disciplinary boundaries of psychoanalytic and psychiatric treatment to join the discourses of historical and artistic representation where it is symptomatically inscribed in texts such as these.

#  **István Szabó's** **_Father_** **: An Absent Generation**

It was not until the release of Szabó's 1966 feature film, _Apa_ ( _Father_ , 1966 _)_ that the fate of Hungarian Jews in the winter of 1944–1945 was evoked, bringing to light – if not actually foregrounding – the nation's collective trauma in the form of a repressed Holocaust biography. _Father_ addresses a generation of Hungarians who came of age in the period that included World War Two and Auschwitz, the Communist takeover and subsequent nationalization, and the uprising of 1956. The film's opening sequence begins with documentary footage of Budapest's Chain Bridge (Lánchíd), destroyed by retreating soldiers of the Third Reich in 1944–1945, and segues to a fictionalized sequence of the funeral of the father of young Takó, the film's narrator/protagonist. The fusion of documentary and ­fictional elements sets the stage for a narrative that integrates national memory of the tragic losses of war with the protagonist's personal experience of mourning, structuring the film's narrative arc and setting the tone for future Hungarian ­feature filmmakers engaging issues of Jewish identity.

The first part of _Father_ focuses on Takó's childhood neurosis, which is a ­consequence of his father's death. Fantasizing the absent figure alternately as ­cosmopolitan world traveler and heroic Communist partisan, the boy acts out, through first-person point-of-view camera shots, what many of his contemporaries have experienced. In a scene set in a boys' school classroom, the teacher asks how many of the boys have lost their own fathers. More than half those present stand; ashamed to acknowledge the loss of the most important person in his life, Takó reluctantly joins them.11 Other filmmakers such as Pál Schiffer ( _Magyar Stories_ , 1988) and Zsolt Kézdi-Kovács ( _Az a nap a miénk_ ( _That Day was Ours_ , 2002)) have figured personal memory of the loss of paternal figures in both documentary and fictional form, exploring the painful consequences of absent fathers in a society that discouraged and even denied the impact of these losses upon subsequent generations. Between the murderous figure of Hitler, represented as a melting wax figure in _Somewhere in Europe_ (1947), and the patriarchal images of Stalin and local dictator Mátyás Rákosi, visualized as benevolent father figures to the children of 1950s Hungary, _Father_ powerfully evokes the postwar generation's profound psychological suffering and ultimate developmental task: to liberate itself from the repression that was both directly and indirectly a consequence of these oppressive, dominating presences, and to take possession of its own historical moment.

A closer reading of _Father_ suggests another layer of hidden history: the fate of the Hungarian Jews, and the implication that Takó's father in some sense may have shared that fate. We know from _Sunshine_ (1999) that Szabó reworked this theme in his epic treatment of four generations of a Hungarian Jewish family, whose name, Sonnenschein, was changed to the more Christian-sounding Sors ("fate"). The second part of _Father_ depicts Takó as a university student active in the uprising of 1956; he accepts a role as an extra in a film in which he is to play first a Jew rounded up by the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross, and then, in a gesture laden with irony, is made abruptly to switch roles, replacing the yellow star with the Arrow Cross armband. The sequence completed, he walks along the Danube with Anni, a friend and fellow student, passing the very spot where Hungarian Jews were shot into the river by the Arrow Cross militia.12 We hear in Anni's subjective monologue a ­conflicted and ambivalent stance toward her own Jewish identity and her attempts at assimilation, a conflict shared even today by other Central European writers, artists and intellectuals, in a sequence produced in 1966 when such questions were often repressed in East-Central European cinematic representation.

 _Father_ – and its later iteration in _Sunshine_ – suggests that both documentary and narrative are potent vehicles for enacting and working through trauma and ­mourning, enabling filmmakers and viewers alike to engage in these processes whether directly, as survivors or witnesses, or indirectly, as vicarious participants after the fact. Both are forms of witness and testimony, capable of performing voyeurism, violence, comedy, and propaganda. Both have become objects and agents of historical research.

The second of Szabó's trilogy, _Lovefilm_ ( _Szerelmesfilm_ , 1970) focuses on Jancsi and Kata who, as children in pre-World War Two Budapest, are inseparable until the invading Nazi army succeeds in separating them. Reunited by chance as ­teenagers, they fall in love against the backdrop of the wrenching upheaval, ­insurrection, and occupation of the mid-1950s that links the film's present to the German occupation of Budapest through flashbacks to the protagonists' childhood. Such transgenerational studies include Imre Gyöngyössy and Barna Kabay's _The Revolt of Job_ ( _Jób Lázadása_ , 1983) and András Kovács's compelling drama _Cold Days_ ( _Hideg Napok_ , 1966) In _The Revolt of Job_ , hoping that the child will carry on his tradition and legacy, the eponymous Jewish peasant attempts to adopt a Gentile boy, an act which not only confronted the attitudes of the Orthodox community amongst whom he lives but was also illegal in 1943 Hungary. Based on historical events, _Cold Days_ examines the 1946 trial of four men charged with leading Nazi-ordered massacres of Jews and Serbs during World War Two, drawing parallels between their actions and the Communist crackdown of the 1960s.

#  **Related East European Production**

As these works may suggest, despite the fact that productions were limited, the postwar era did yield a number of memorable films that address Jewish identity in modalities that often lack the individuation or meta-narrative of the Holocaust that is typical of the period. Slovak filmmaker Juraj Herz directed _Spalova_ č _mrtvol_ ( _The Cremator_ , 1968), based on the novel of the same name by Ladislav Fuks and set during the war years before and after the signing of the Munich agreement, in which the Nazi occupying force capitalizes upon the conformist tendencies and dreams of bourgeois family life of a mad cremator. A Prague Spring director who emigrated to Germany in the late 1980s, Herz later directed a second film, _Zastihla mì noc_ ( _Night Caught Up with Me_ , 1986), set in the Ravensbrück concentration camp where the director himself had been interned at the age of 10:

I had been trying to make a film about a concentration camp as black humor for 20 years and everybody was horrified of mixing the suffering and terror of the Holocaust with humor... I completely rewrote it and filmed it the way I saw the camp. I decided to do it about Kafka's girlfriend, Milena Jesenská. I came to know from the prisoners from the concentration camp that what was attributed as happening to Jabůrková in fact happened to Jesenská, who was against communism... . The film was surprisingly well-received... even in the West. (Bird, 2002)

Herz's countryman, veteran Czech New Wave director Karel Kachyňa (see Košuličová, 2003), shot three features on the history of Czech Jews: _Smrt krásnych srnc_ ů ( _The Death of the Beautiful Roebuck_ , 1986), based on the autobiographical novella by Jewish journalist Ota Pavel; _Poslední motýl_ ( _The Last Butterfly_ , 1990), about Jewish children in the tiny Czech village of Terezín where the Nazis plan a propaganda scheme to demonstrate a purportedly human face of Nazism; and, adapted from the novella by Ivan Olbracht that is set in an enclave of religious Jews in Subcarpathian Ukraine in the 1930s, _Hanele_ (1999), in which beautiful Hanele escapes provincial Polana by joining a Zionist youth group that is recruiting youthful workers for jobs in the big city where she falls in love with Ivo a handsome, successful freethinking secular Jew who has renounced traditional religion. Treatments of these and related Holocaust themes reappear on screen in Polish director Andrzej Wajda's _Wielki tydzie_ ń ( _Holy Lady_ , 1995), the Czech production of Jan Hřebejk's _Musíme si pomahat_ ( _Divided We Fall_ , 2000), and the Polish film by Jan-Jakub Kolski, _Daleko od okna_ ( _Far from the Window_ , 2000).

The dramatic consequences of sheltering a Jew during the Nazi occupation and the links between past and present that implicate ordinary citizens in anti-Semitic acts are thematized by the Hungarian director Félix Máriássy in _Budapesti tavasz_ ( _Springtime in Budapest_ , 1955), based on the novel of Ferenc Karinthy in which a young woman leaves the apartment where she is in hiding in order to protect her protectors, and an apolitical, scholarly youth joins the Resistance after falling in love with a Jewish girl. In _Romeo, Julie a tma_ ( _Romeo, Juliet and Darkness_ , 1959) Czech director Jiří Weiss narrates the story of a Jewish family forced to leave their home as another Jewish girl arrives and is hidden in an attic by a fellow lodger. In ­contrast, Zoltán Fábri's _Darkness in Daytime_ ( _Nappali Sötétség_ , 1963) foregrounds flashbacks of the writer's romance with a Jewish woman during World War Two, when sexual relations were illegal between Jews and non-Jews in Hungary, and his ultimate betrayal of her following her arrest and interrogation, while Fábri's _Late Season_ ( _Utószezon_ , 1967) concerns a character who thoughtlessly denounces a Jewish ­family and the relationship between six friends in Hungary against the background of the arrest, trial, and punishment of Adolf Eichmann in Israel.

#  **Filmmaking after 1989: Generational Perspectives**

Since the beginning of the post-Communist era in 1989, Hungarian cinema has undergone continuing dramatic crises, not least with regard to many filmmakers' sense of responsibility and fundamental purpose as artists in communication with their viewers. The years since the fall of the Berlin Wall have also witnessed a renewal of interest in the traditions of Eastern European psychoanalytic practice, and the return of the history of discourse about Jewish experience to the center of the cinematic stage. In successive decades, through historical frescoes as well as intimate personal narratives, retrospective mappings onto the topography of cinematic representations sustain the intergenerational work of memory transmission. Yet, despite the proliferation of publications, memorials, artistic works, and memorialization, it is important to recall the silence that once surrounded discourse of the Shoah and that continues to inform the visual representation of Holocaust trauma.13

The production of literary, artistic, and theoretical works since 1989 suggests that the Holocaust continues to influence and preoccupy contemporary artists and writers in Hungary. The often conflicting desires to remember or obliterate from memory, to describe or imagine its traces are expressed with palpable urgency in the films under consideration here, many of which focalize narrative structures through the point of view of a historically located, specific individual voice – often a first-person voice – rather than the omniscient camera or narrator familiar to audiences from earlier documentary and fictional cinematic examples. Of ­particular interest in the contemporary context is the extent to which these films both solicit and resist the contemporary spectator's engagement with the sequelae of the Holocaust within the framework of Hungary's resistance to confronting this chapter of its history.

While second-generation studies have occupied a major space of historical and cultural examination for decades, the ways in which the legacy of the Holocaust is internalized and retransmitted by the grandchildren and now great-grandchildren of survivors has become the subject of scholarly investigation only since the late 1990s. Growing up at least 40 years after the Holocaust, members of the Third Generation have relied on the mediated information their grandparents and parents may have deemed appropriate or expedient to confide in them about the impact of the Shoah on their families – in some cases, this has been very little indeed. Such recollection or remembrance – what Hirsch (2008) categorizes as "post-memory" – may be the result of a combination of generational distance and a subjective, emotional connection to the traumatic events that marked the lives of those who suffered and of their descendants (Iorio, Libowitz, and Littell, 1997). It is perhaps axiomatic, then, that the capacity for empathy with regard to trauma of which one has only second- or third-hand knowledge requires what we might consider to be a deep psychic investment and imaginative re-creation on the part of the filmmaker (Portuges, 2009).

A number of Hungarian films produced from 1989 to 2010 in fictional, ­documentary, animation, or experimental formats have addressed such Third Generation phenomena, in some cases deriving their narrative styles and plotlines from the after-memories of writers and others whose relatives or friends were Holocaust survivors in one sense or another. The protagonists of these films tend to represent the events and their sequelae in a variety of representational modes including flashback, real-time documentary investigation, by physically (re)-entering the sites where relatives perished or evaded death or where others expropriated the ­former living spaces of those deported or killed, and by means of fantasy and time travel (Baron, 2006). These films illustrate and exemplify a host of Third Generation responses to the Holocaust, ranging from psychological dissociation, intensification, or exaggeration of its influence on the present to an "après-coup" realization that it may in fact be a relevant yet not altogether determining factor in one's life.

In a 1945 essay, "On the Crisis of Hungarian Democracy," István Bibó, the ­influential twentieth-century Hungarian political philosopher and historian, exhorts his compatriots to continue to discuss and confront the "Jewish question"; likewise, in a debate shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissident writer György Konrád cautioned his fellow Hungarians to be prepared for _all_ the ­consequences of the _rendszerváltás_ – the "system change" – insisting that freedom of speech must include the rights of anti-Semites as well, as the rise of the ultra-right-wing nationalist Jobbik Party has all too clearly demonstrated.14 In his memoir _A Guest in My Own Country: A Hungarian Life_ , Konrád notes, "Two generations after the fact, I feel prompted to preserve the memory of the Jews of Berettyóújfalu" (2007: 116). With its Central European focus and multinational production history, and a screenplay co-written by its distinguished Hungarian director (István Szabó) and an American playwright (Israel Horovitz), the multigenerational epic film _Sunshine_ ( _A Napfény Ize_ ), shot on location in Hungary, retrospectively addresses such historical and familial trauma. Spanning four generations of the Jewish-Hungarian Sonnenschein family, the saga unfolds against the backdrop of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, the rise of fascism, and the Stalinist and post-Communist eras. The individual narratives are woven into a text constructed by a fourth-generation Sonnenschein, one of only three to survive the Holocaust. Through a mélange of archival footage and fiction, often intermixed by inserting characters within historical footage, _Sunshine_ foregrounds the residual intergenerational effects of trauma by using the same actor (Ralph Fiennes) in the role of witnessing presence through four successive generations of Sonnenscheins. The family name is changed to the more Hungarian-sounding "Sors" (meaning fate), effectively blurring distinctions between past and present, real and imaginary, yet ultimately returning to the original Jewish name. The second of the three generations of the Sonnenschein family is Ádám, the son of Ignatz. He converts to Christianity, gains admittance to Budapest's most exclusive fencing club and becomes a national fencing champion who leads his team to the 1936 Olympics. But he succumbs to the temptations of snobbery, anti-Semitism, and acquiescence to dictatorship. Despite his exalted status as gold-medal Olympic fencing champion, Ádám cannot save himself and his family from torture and execution. In a sequence that reads as a simulacrum of the Holocaust,15 he is flogged to death and encased in ice in a Hungarian labor camp, witnessed by his son Iván in terrified silence. Iván is the witnessing presence, the narrator of the family's history: "Precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts... even this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness," writes Primo Levi (1969: 233).

If the notion of "second generation" is by now a familiar and fairly stable ­concept in Holocaust studies (the second generation, born in the immediate years after the war, are children of Jews who survived the Holocaust in Europe, a distinction is called for, one that Susan Suleiman (2002) has called the "1.5 generation," referring to child survivors of the Holocaust, too young to have had an adult understanding of what was happening to them, but old enough to have been ­present during the Nazi persecution of Jews).

Unlike the second generation, whose most common shared experience is that of belatedness – perhaps best summed up in the French writer Henri Raczymow's ­rueful statement, "We cannot even say that we were almost deported" [1986: 104] – the 1.5 generation's shared experience is that of premature bewilderment and ­helplessness. This characterization may appear inadequate, in view of the massive trauma experienced by both child and adult survivors during the Holocaust. The operative word, however, is "premature" – for if all those who were there experienced trauma, the specific experience of children was that the trauma occurred (or at least, began) before the formation of stable identity that we associate with ­adulthood, and in some cases before any conscious sense of self. Paradoxically, their "premature bewilderment" was often accompanied by premature aging, having to act as an adult while still a child [Kestenberg and Brenner, 1996: ch. 7]; this was yet another form of trauma specific to the 1.5 generation. (Suleiman, 2002: 277–295)

#  **Kertész, Spielberg, and Lanzmann**

That contemporary filmmakers, writers, and artists continue to re-interpret, ­document, and research these themes should not come as a surprise, given the preceding decades of repression, distortion, and instrumentalization of the Holocaust toward ideological ends. One of the most visible instances of cinematic representation of the Holocaust in Hungary is _Fateless_ (2005), directed by Academy Award-winning cinematographer Lajos Koltai.16 The Nobel Prize accorded to Imre Kertész's novel Sorstalanság17 ( _Fatelessness_ ), on which it is based, paved the way for a film adaptation, scripted by Kertész himself, which won prestigious international prizes and elicited substantial controversy. The perceptions of the first-person ­narrator – György Köves, a 15-year old Hungarian Jewish boy, an ordinary ­metropolitan adolescent who has never felt particularly connected to his Jewish identity 18 – are expressed in a style that avoids emotion or self-pity, despite the horrors he encounters (in this regard, Kertész has acknowledged the influence of the Polish writer and Auschwitz survivor, Tadeusz Borowski). The adolescent György finds himself alone in Auschwitz-Birkenau, struggling stoically to endure its dehumanization and to find meaning in his tragic fate. In the midst of deprivation and ­brutality, he takes solace in the kindness of an array of characters, drawing on the memory of these small gestures of humanity when he returns to Budapest and realizes that his concentration camp experiences have ultimately left him ­profoundly alienated from his postwar community. Like many survivors confronted by indifference or rejection on the part of those unable or unwilling to serve as empathic listener or affirming presence to the narrative of the returning deportee, György lacks a resonating other, an interlocutor whose interest and capacity for listening is, in Dori Laub's conceptualization, indispensable to enabling the traumatized survivor to rebuild his shattered inner and external worlds and counter his conviction that his fate may somehow have been deserved.19

With a budget of US$13 million – one of the largest in the history of Hungarian cinema – 500 extras and a screenplay also written by Kertész, the film aroused a frenzy of media attention that brought to the surface deeply persistent layers of Hungarian anti-Semitism. Echoing Juraj Herz's earlier explanation with regard to the incorporation of his own concentration camp experience as an adolescent in _Night Caught up with Me_ , Kertész has said that "the film is more autobiographical than the book... I'm not even sure if I wrote the screenplay from memories or from memories of the book" (Alan Riding, "The Holocaust from a Teenage View," http://www.jewish-theatre.com/visitor/article_display.aspx?articleID=1680&printerfriendly=yes). The production was quickly targeted for criticism by some Hungarians who objected to plans to film scenes in their villages where the camp of Buchenwald was to be recreated – an unwelcome reminder, they contended, of a chapter of history better relegated to the past. _Fateless_ 's protagonist, Gyuri, is arrested on the street by the Arrow Cross and deported to Auschwitz-Buchenwald,20 where he is subjected to a cycle of starvation, boredom, and forced labor as dissolution threatens to overwhelm his still-developing adolescent personality. Speaking neither Hebrew nor Yiddish, and rationalizing incomprehensible events as "probably natural" or "probably a mistake," he wonders whether he is the pawn of an absurd, arbitrary destiny, asking, "Who can judge what is possible or believable in a concentration camp?" While Koltai minimizes the cinematic use of dramatic climaxes and violent moments, the sumptuous beauty and mastery of his visual compositions (he is credited as both director and cinematographer), and the quality of the film's production values imbue _Fateless_ with a degree of emotional symbolism and affective power that are at odds with the ironic, understated dialogue and brutal settings. Kertész has been critical of Steven Spielberg's film _Schindler's List_ (1993) for portraying those who did not die in captivity as in some sense victorious; for him, there was no victory possible in the concentration system. Yet perhaps unconsciously, _Fateless_ disconcertingly shares certain of its predecessor's perspectives and cinematic techniques. Koltai's directorial decisions, however, may be seen to a certain extent as entering into dialogue with the ethical positions of Claude Lanzmann, director of the documentary masterpiece _Shoah_ (1985), an oral history shot without archive footage or historical reconstruction, utilizing only first-person testimony from Jewish, Polish, and German survivors, camp guards, and local villagers, whose indifference made them "passive collaborators." For Kertész, a member of the last generation of survivors, the major question since _Shoah_ remains whether or not to depict scenes of the concentration camps. As Timothy Snyder suggests,

The mass killings of European Civilians during the 1930s and 1940s are the reference of today's confused discussions of memory, and the touchstone of whatever ­common ethic Europeans may share... . Historians must, as best we can, cast light into these shadows and account for these people... . Auschwitz, generally taken to be an adequate or even a final symbol of the evil of mass killing, is in fact only the beginning of knowledge, a hint of the true reckoning with the past still to come.21

#  ** _Documentary Filmmaking_**

Among the notable documentaries of the pre-1989 era, Gyula Gazdag's ground-breaking _Package Tour_ ( _Társasutazás_ , 1985) records the memories and emotions evoked by a pilgrimage of elderly Hungarian visitors to Auschwitz, where many were once imprisoned; they have made the trip not only as mourners but also as survivors, in a spirit of quiet affirmation. Edit Köszegi, Sándor Simó, and András Surány's haunting _Photographs to Our Children_ ( _Fényképek_ , 1990) evokes a vanished, elegant world. As Holocaust survivors speak, their treasured family photographs fill the screen, interspersed with archival images and footage, marking the traces of prewar Hungarian Jewish life and its ultimate disintegration and destruction. In 1994, the same team made _Bloodplot_ ( _Mid_ ő _n a vér_...), an inquiry into the notorious 1882 blood-libel trials of Tiszaeszlár.

The late twentieth-century resurgence of Jewish subject matter has been largely associated with Jewish filmmakers. Gazdag's _Package Tour_ was followed by _Tutajosok_ ( _Memoirs of a River_ , 1989), in which Judit Elek addressed the taboo subject of the Tiszaeszlár blood-libel trial. An original member of Hungary's experimental Béla Balázs Studio, Elek had been an eminent documentary filmmaker prior to the release of her first feature, _Sziget a Szárazföldön_ ( _The Lady From Constantinople_ , 1969). After exploring a traumatic experience in Hungarian Jewish history with _Tutajosok_ , she recounts in _Ébredés_ ( _Awakening_ , 1994) a Jewish girl's coming of age narrative in the early 1950s and has since produced documentary portraits of Elie Wiesel (1995) and Holocaust survivor Ernö Fisch (1999). The screenwriter János Herskó returned to Hungary to make the autobiographical film _A Kenyereslány Balladája_ ( _The Bread-Girl's Ballad_ , 1996), set in 1944, a decisive moment in his past. Ordered to a forced labor battalion, he escapes near the western border but is later caught. This period – the mid- to late-1990s – ushered in the significant reworking of amateur 16 mm movies shot by Hungarian Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, most notably in the films of Péter Forgács. The first Hungarian artist to receive the ­prestigious Erasmus Prize, he weaves a complex pattern of associations between different kinds and sources of historical information, an intimate yet fragmented perspective on cataclysmic events through haunting images drawn from amateur film footage and home movies.22 Forgács's pathbreaking series, _Privát Magyarország_ ( _Private Hungary_ ), uses pre-war amateur family film footage to evoke the annihilation of a once thriving milieu.23 _A Bibó Reader: The Bishop and the Philosopher 1, Private Hungary 13_ (2001)24 portrays the philosopher and historian István Bibó – arrested in 1944 by the Arrow Cross, sentenced to life imprisonment, and later released under amnesty. The title suggests a video version of a literary text, ­conveying Bibó's analysis in meditative fragments and original amateur home movie footage, interpolating it within the parameters of both public and private ­memory: What, the film invites us to ask, is collective memory? How do we distinguish between official and non-official dimensions of history? Many of Bibó's largely unheeded predictions proved all too tragically accurate, and while in the intervening two decades since the changes, questions of Jewish identity, memory, and history may no longer be taboo, they continue nonetheless to remain contested terrain. The opening intertitle of _Free Fall_ (1997) – "Apparently everything is normal" – recapitulates the film's significance: the daily life of a Jewish family in Szeged during World War Two, when, slowly but surely, the anti-Jewish laws are put into effect and overtake the family's existence. _Lottery Ticket_ (1997) reveals that the story of _Free Fall_ does not end at the close of World War Two: György Petö and his wife Eva have survived the death camps; György takes up his previous life in the lottery shop; and everything seems normal until 1949, when the Communists confiscate whatever property the Nazis had not already seized from the family.

Documentary films play an important role, if a marginalized one (within the context of the politics of international exhibition and distribution), in ­complicating the discourses of Holocaust memory in Hungary. Among the more important yet critically overlooked or marginalized documentary films on the fate of Jews in Hungary is Miklós Jancsó's three-part documentary series, _Jelenlét_ ( _Presence_ ) begun in 1965 and completed in 1985, and the half-dozen pieces of the _Kövek üzenete_ ( _Message of Stones_ ) from the early 1990s: _L'Aube_ ( _Dawn_ , 1985), set in Palestine and two documentaries, _Elmondták-e?_ ( _Have You Been Told?_ 1995) and _Zsoltár_ ( _Psalm_ , 1996). Although in his eighties Jancsó is obviously not technically part of what I am calling the Third Generation, in my view he warrants inclusion here since, in more than a century of film history, few if any other major internationally renowned filmmakers have produced such a quantity of documentaries so consistently devoted to this theme. Jancsó's commitment may be due in some measure to his training as a folklorist, an ethnographer, and an anthropologist dedicated to ­preserving endangered cultures; it may also be related to the oppositional stance of a compassionate leftist artist towards the right-wing movements and discourses that, in diverse modalities, at times resort to racism and anti-Semitism as a _lingua franca_ (Báron, 2008).

Jancsó's unwavering dedication is all the more remarkable given the reluctance of some filmmakers to discuss issues of Jewish identity (Portuges, 1997: 196–215; 1995). (In 1995, I encountered a similar resistance in the process of interviewing filmmakers for an article I was researching on Jewish identity in post-Communist Hungarian cinema (Portuges, 1998).) The contested meanings of Jewish identity are addressed in a number of non-fiction work by younger directors: András Salamon's _Elveszett Család_ ( _Lost Family_ ) and Barbara Spitzer's _Ami megmaradt belöle_ ( _Memories of a Journey_ ) among many others.25 In _Mauthausentöl a Dob utcáig_ ( _From Mauthausen to Dob utca_ , 2004) László Martinidesz retraces the trajectory of a family's success story: one of the fortunate to have returned from the death camp of Mauthausen, a former baker's apprentice opens a pastry shop in the former Jewish district and wartime ghetto of Budapest, subsequently nationalized in the Stalinist Rákosi era. Later, the "maszek" –the abbreviated term for _magánszektor_ , the ­private sector or second economy – was allowed to flourish under close surveillance to ease shortages, enabling the pastry cook, like the owner before him, to survive hard times. In the 1980s, his daughter takes over the _Fröhlich cukrászda_ , which still today functions as a popular meeting place in a revitalized Dob utca (site of the former ghetto and near the Great Synagogue on Dohány utca), where patrons can still enjoy kosher delicacies. Éva Pataki's _Herzl_ uses an international context to frame the life and work of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, who was born and began his education in Budapest; as a journalist in Vienna covering the Dreyfus affair he was among the first to perceive the persistent dangers of anti-Semitism and its effects on personality and identity. The director, a frequent collaborator of Márta Mészáros as screenwriter on such films as _A Temetetlen Halott_ ( _The Unburied Man_ ), admits feeling compelled to continue working on films that bring to light repressed or neglected aspects of Hungarian history.26 _Miracle in Krakow_ (2004) is a fiction feature by the Third Generation director Diana Gróo, who shot this mystical tale of time travel in the old Jewish quarters of Budapest and Kraków. The film follows Eszter, a young Hungarian art historian, on her journey through the Polish city in search of ancient Jewish artifacts. Through significant barriers of language and culture, she in turn follows a young Polish man who steals a sacred book that had been willed to her by her grandmother. In an interview I conducted with her in Budapest, the 30-year-old filmmaker claimed,

We are the third generation after World War Two. Our parents' generation could talk about communism and they were closer to their parents' war experience. For us to talk about the past is very unusual. As a result, our generation is not just searching for money, but also for an identity and for topics that will appeal to a broad audience. We no longer have a common landscape. Everybody is searching to express him or herself. The style of a 1990s director has to be completely different from [that of a] Szabó, Makk, Jancsó, Elek, or Rózsa. (Interview with the author, Budapest, February 2006).

In 1999 Gróo wrote and directed a short documentary, _Melody of the Street_ ( _Kazinczky utca_ ), set in her old neighborhood, Kazinczky Street, where she says "nothing has changed," where memories of the Jewish past and the present come together as she listens to a Mahler symphony.27 Gróo's focus on streets, buildings, and urban space addresses the material and cultural legacies of central European Jewry that have become objects of memorialization and rediscovery by historians, writers, urban designers, and visual artists. These axes of reflection include the renovation and re-appropriation of streets and buildings that once constituted the center of thriving communities. In the wake of the Holocaust, the streets of the Seventh District, transformed by Hitler's Gestapo into the Jewish ghetto of Budapest in 1944, were nearly devoid of Jewish presence. In recent years, however, artists, merchants, and their families have been returning to live and work in these same urban spaces, composed of an amalgam of vacant lots, deserted apartment buildings, abandoned business venues, decaying architectural monuments, the façades and frontal sections of partially demolished buildings, recently built ­apartment blocks, ghost houses, and passages.28 A stroll through the district might well lead one to conclude that a phantom town without residents or vendors is emerging in the place of one of the liveliest and most exciting former merchant districts of Pest. Apart from the synagogues, the distinctive landmarks of the urban landscape, the only sections of the protected quarter that have managed to retain their lively character and historic ambience are those where major alterations, demolitions, and constructions have not yet taken place, such as the alternative cafés, shops, and cultural venues frequented mostly by young people and foreign tourists, in what might be characterized as the urban equivalent of the "Third Generation" phenomenon in cinema.

Denizens of the Seventh District, like the filmmakers of the Third Generation of post-Holocaust Jews, have been reclaiming Jewish heritage on their own terms in bars, restaurants, book-stores, theaters, and movie houses such as Sirály, whose grand opening in Király Street took place on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian uprising of October 1956. Not unlike New York's East Village or Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where the ultra-orthodox community of North Bedford Street segues to the counter-cultural haven of South Bedford, clubs and venues such as Sirály and its counterparts inscribe the post-Communist era while gesturing toward the history and tragic fate of Hungarian Jews. Films such as István Jávor and Dóri Szego's _A Small Town_ (2008), features representatives of different cultural and religious communities living in the area; András Salamon's _Rhythm of the City_ ( _A város ritmusa_ , 2007) is shot from the point of view of a boy walking the district's streets, listening to its sounds; and in Gróo's _Melody of the Street_ visual artists and opponents of "urban renewal" revisit Budapest's Old Jewish Quarter.29 Budapest's venues attract a trendy young clientele including those from the city's Jewish ­community who want to hear Klezmer bands or a rapper in a downstairs theater space, to see paintings by a young Hungarian Jew in a second-floor gallery, marked by Hebrew lettering and a mezuzah on the front door. Reading its streets and buildings suggests ways in which the district's inhabitants, like the filmmakers of the third generation of post-Holocaust Jews, are recovering their heritage on their own terms, in dialogue with Françoise Lionnet's concept of "minor transnationalism" (Lionnet and Shih, 2005), an exploration of the dynamic nature of minority lives in nation-states, and Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli's (2003) formulation that reads the local and the national project as transnational.

It is worth noting that a significant majority of the documentary filmmakers referenced in this group are women, suggesting the strong tradition of women directors in this genre as well as a gendered interest in exploring personal and family history. In _Szomszédok Voltak_ ( _Once They Were Neighbors_ , 2005), another "Third Generation filmmaker," Zsuzsanna Gellér-Varga, addresses the legacy of space and place by questioning neighbors of Jews deported 60 years earlier from Kőszeg, a picturesque small town surrounded by mountains on the Austrian border of Hungary: what do they remember, she asks, of the town's ghetto, its brick factory, the train station, the mass graves right in the very community in which they continued to live? What did they do and what could have been done? What did the bystanders see and what do they believe they saw in their small community during the last days of World War Two? Gellér-Varga continues her investigation of the shadow cast by the failure to face the past in _Zsinagógát Vegyenek_ ( _Synagogue for Sale_ , 2005), in which she again queries the citizens of Kőszeg about the 150-year-old dilapidated synagogue – abandoned, overgrown by weeds, its gates locked, ­officially under landmark protection – which occupies the town center. As it continues to crumble, the cultural heritage professionals take no action, while the Jewish community in a neighboring town joins the local government in setting up a foundation to save the building. Similar phrases recur in the films: "Nem szívesen beszélek róla, mert rossz emlék";"Ők nem mondták, én nem kérdeztem."30 An old man stops in front of the synagogue complaining, "The Jews don't restore it! Those Jews, they have so much money!" A former camp guard and the man who lived near the brick factory as a teenager, the woman who brought food to the ghetto as a young girl, all have similar memories, speaking admiringly of their former neighbors' business talent, blaming the Germans for their fate. Sixty years earlier they had been neighbors, while today – as elsewhere in the countryside –few or no Jews live there. Concerning the present as much as the past, the film raises difficult questions regarding the actions of average non-Jewish Hungarians as their Jewish neighbors were deported and sent to death.

In a Hungarian–US co-production, Pearl Gluck's _A Divány_ ( _Divan_ , 2002) ­proposes the autobiographical urban odyssey of an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn who opts for secular life in Manhattan. Many years later, Pearl's father urges her to marry and return to the community; instead she travels to Hungary to retrieve a turn-of-the-century family heirloom: a couch upon which esteemed rabbis once slept. En route for the ancestral divan, Pearl encounters guidance and inspiration, including a couch exporter, her ex-Communist cousin in Budapest, a pair of Hungarian-American matchmakers and a renegade group of formerly ultra-Orthodox Jews in an entertaining visual parable that offers the possibility of cultural and personal reinvention. An experimental documentary co-production of Hungary, Brazil, Belgium and France, Sandra Kogut's _The Hungarian Passport_ (2002)31 focalizes a postcolonial, diasporic subject who, as the granddaughter of Jewish refugees, dares to challenge rigid bureaucratic definitions of identity in a self-reflexive transnational journey that links past and present through the filmmaker's connection to her Jewish grandmother, who left Hungary in 1937. The filmmaker encounters an archivist in Brazil who wonders how Kogut's grandfather could have obtained a visa, or for that matter even been allowed to disembark, in view of an edict in force at the time that prohibited Jews from entering the country. Verification of the ship's passenger list reveals several who were sent back to Europe as Jews or because they were suspected of being Jewish, while Kogut's grandfather's entry has obviously been altered (thanks to a bribe paid by his brother-in-law, her grandmother later recounts). In pursuit of her family's history Kogut is undeterred by the less glamorous aspects of setting the documentary record straight, including the prospect of examining shipping-manifesto entries, name-change records, and visa applications. Whereas for Gluck's odyssey the mythic sofa serves as a primary signifier, for Kogut the quest for a passport plays a central role in deconstructing identity through the elusive generational desire for Europe as a land of promise and hope. With dialogue in Hungarian, French, English, and Portuguese spoken with various accents, her "third generation" journey of displacement undermines and destabilizes current definitions of borders, migration, and nationality, ­complicating and reversing her grandparents' generation's postwar migration to Brazil as an earlier haven and refuge for European immigrants (Naficy, 2001).

While the emergence of Hungary from the Communist era made possible the achievements of these and other filmmakers, visual representation of commemoration, contrition, and exploration is once again being suppressed. The revival of nationalist and xenophobic agendas (including attempts to rehabilitate the Horthy regime by denying, for example, its complicity in Jewish deportation) and the imposition of government censorship (including ongoing allegations of Jewish over-representation and control of the media) gravely threaten the future of ­independent filmmaking and, for that matter, human rights. Whether a new ­generation of artists will once again have access to the vital resources needed to continue the process of interrogating and reconstructing the past in order to come to terms with these unresolved legacies remains in doubt.

 **Notes**

1 Laub, a Holocaust survivor born in Czernowitz, Romania, was deported with his ­parents in 1942; his father disappeared during a German raid; he and his mother were reunited with his grandparents who had survived in Czernowitz. A psychoanalyst in private practice, Laub is deputy director for Trauma Research for the Yale Genocide Studies Program and co-founder of the Holocaust Survivors' Film Project, which ­became the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale.

2 Radványi, brother of the writer Sándor Márai, was a director, cinematographer, ­writer, and producer who was also appointed the first professor of directing at the Academy for Theater and Film Art in Budapest.

3 The co-screenwriter, legendary film critic and scholar Béla Balázs, a German- speaking Hungarian Jew, was born Herbert Bauer – his name change echoes that of many Central European film artists persecuted by anti-Semitism. He was also a ­librettist for Kodály and Bartók. Balázs was also a celebrated film theorist who wrote Visible Man in 1934 and a scriptwriter in Weimar who co-wrote Leni ­Riefenstahl's The Blue Light.

4 By 1948, the brief window of opportunity for the struggling Hungarian film industry was closed as the Soviets occupied the region, controlling who was allowed to make films and subjugating film production to the politics of nationalization which ­mandated the conventional Socialist realist style favored by the Communist Party in the Eastern bloc nations.

5 Both brothers left Budapest soon after the Communists prevented them from ­exercising their professions productively; Márai ended up in the United States, where he ultimately committed suicide, and Radványi in Germany. Balázs hoped to return to Hungary but remained at odds with the Communists, despite considering himself one (he had previously lived in the Soviet Union). A prophet without honor in his homeland, he died in 1949, shortly after the film was completed.

6 In Poland, for example, there was Alexander Ford's _Border Street_ ; and the banned Polish film, _Unsere Kinder_ (in Yiddish). Beyond Eastern Europe, neorealist films such as ­Vittorio de Sica's 1946 masterpiece _Shoeshine_ extend into the 1950s along with René Clément's _Forbidden Games_ (1952) and Andrei Tarkovsky's _Ivan's Childhood_ (1962), constituting an important cinematic subgenre. Among the film's antecedents are, from 1931, _Boys in the Road_ , directed by Nikolai Eck, and _Wild Boys of the Road_ , directed by William Wellman in 1933.

7 The Soviet approach to this era of filmmaking disdained individuating victims in order to uphold the contention that all were equally victimized, including those motivated by anti-Semitism.

8 The film premiered on New Year's Day 1948, the very year Hungary underwent the "Great Change," becoming a satellite of the Soviet Union which nationalized the ­Hungarian film industry.

9 The year 1945 marks the liberation of Eastern and Central Europe from German ­occupation, while 1948–1949 delineates the moment when Socialist realist doctrine ­imported from the Soviet Union was imposed on the cinemas of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other countries under Communist control.

10 The 1993 release of Steven Spielberg's _Schindler's List_ gave rise to bitter controversies and debates: perhaps especially in France, the film was regarded as transgressing boundaries of decency in Holocaust representation that had been rigorously promoted by filmmakers such as Claude Lanzmann, whose _Shoah_ remains a landmark documentary film of the genre. Lanzmann and others accused Spielberg of humanizing the Holocaust using Hollywood techniques that made too approachable and ordinary what some critics judged sacred and therefore unrepresentable. The increase in the volume of production of films that reference the Holocaust may in part be attributable to the release of _Schindler's List_ ; among other factors, public debate surrounding the film led to the creation of Spielberg's "Survivors of the Shoah Visual History ­Foundation," which has since become a major site of international archival, oral ­history, film, video, and digital research and preservation.

11 This percentage corresponds to that of those Hungarian families from which a ­parental figure disappeared or was killed in World War Two. At one point, Takó's mother says "The wanted to kill us, too," referring to the Arrow Cross (the political police), which targeted Jewish families for elimination. István Szabó was born in ­Budapest to Jewish parents one year before the outbreak of World War Two has spoken of his memories of hiding in cellars during the siege of Budapest, when Soviet troops fought in door-to-door combat against the last German holdouts. Thanks to the help of family friends, Szabó and his parents escaped the Holocaust. Just as the war ended, however, the elder Szabó died of natural causes. (cf Paul, 1994).

12 Located on the Pest side of the capital near the Parliament and the Hungarian ­Academy of Sciences, _A Cip_ ő _k a Duna-parton_ ( _Shoes on the Danube Bank_ ) is a memorial created by Gyula Pauer and Can Togay consisting of 60 pairs of cast-iron shoes ­attached to the stone embankment of the Danube to honor the memory of Jews shot into the river by the fascist Arrow Cross militia in 1944–1945.

13 The post-Communist era has opened new spaces for research on the history and ­status of the moving image: its construction, interpretation, ethical encounters, and the multiple purposes of memory transmission. In the decade and a half since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new generation of filmmakers has been engaging these issues in innovative film language that opens horizons for critical analysis in conversations that confront the contradictions and ambivalences characteristic of contemporary public and private Jewish identities. This transgenerational approach provides fresh angles of vision on assimilation (István Szabó's _Sunshine_ , 1999; Péter Forgács's _Private Hungary_ , 1989–2005; and Miklós Jancsó's ethnographic films on the lost Jews of Transylvania), religious affiliation (Judit Elek's _The Rafters_ , Diana Gróo's filmed interviews of young Jews) and trans-national migration (Sandra Kogut's _Hungarian Passport_ , 2003).

14 The Jobbik Party garnered nearly 15 percent of the Hungarian vote in the June 2009 elections for the European Union Parliament. The Hungarian Guard, the paramilitary organization founded by Gábor Vona and distinguished by its Nazi-like iconography and menacing marches through Roma areas, is locked in conflict with police and the judicial system.

15 Ádám Sors's character is based on the Hungarian national fencing champion Attila Petschauer. According to Dori Laub, the degradation and annihilation of the parents can cause their children to both idealize and denigrate the parents (Laub, 2000: n.p.).

16 A Hungarian–German–UK co-production.

17 See also Fejtö, (1997). In May 2011, Kertész was awarded the Grande Médaille de Vermeil, the highest award of the city of Paris, by Mayor Bertrand Delanoë as "sign of gratitude, admiration, trust and hope" (see <http://www.hungaropress.hu/Imre_Kertesz_Received_Vermeil_Medal_in_Paris.php>).

18 Kertész has said that, as a child, he was perplexed by the Jewish identity that had been thrust upon him: "What kind of a Jew is one who did not have a religious upbringing, speaks no Hebrew, is not very familiar with the basic texts of Jewish culture, and lives not in Israel but in Europe?" (Radai, 2006).

19 Dori Laub (1992: 78) has called the Holocaust "an event without a witness" in reference to the inability of some survivors to acknowledge and express the trauma they experienced.

20 It was not until 1950, after the founding of the German Democratic Republic, that Buchenwald was closed and the site was transformed into a site of memory. But it was only after 1989, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Empire and after German reunification, that Buchenwald assumed responsibility for its double memory, its double past as, successively, a Nazi and a Stalinist camp – a unique location, in a sense, for transnational reflection on the European past.

21 András Jeles's _Parallel Lives_ ( _Senkiföldje_ , 1993) dramatizes Jewish deportation; short films and documentaries including Gábor Kálman's _Keepers of Memory_ (in progress), András Salamon's _Tell Your Children_ ( _Meséld el_ , 2007), and Péter Forgács' _Private ­Hungary_ attest to an ongoing preoccupation with revisiting the Holocaust in Hungary and the trajectory of cinematic representations in light of Hungary's relationship to its Jewish history.

22 Awarded in 2007 by Praemium Erasmianum Foundation, a Dutch non-profit foundation (since 1958), the annual prize pays tribute to Forgács's "original contribution to the process of cultural memory and the transmission of culture, thereby furthering and deepening our understanding of the past."

23 "Private Hungary" is a series of award-winning films by Péter Forgács, based on home movies from the 1930s and 1960s that document ordinary lives soon to be ruptured by the extraordinary historical traumas taking place off-screen.

24 _A Bibó Reader_ , Official selection, Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, Cannes Film Festival 2001; Best Director Prize, Short & Experimental Film, Thirty-Third Magyar Film ­Szemle, Budapest.

25 It is worth noting that a significant proportion of these documentaries are the work of women directors.

26 I thank Eva Pataki for sharing these thoughts with me in Budapest in the context of the 38th Hungarian film Week, Budapest, February 6, 2007.

27 Gróo's other projects include a romantic feature comparing the bonds of heritage discovered by a Jewish girl from Budapest and a Jewish New Yorker, and a documentary about young Hungarian Jews who, like herself, emigrated to Israel after the changes, only to return to Hungary: "Here," she says, meaning Budapest, "life is more ­interesting: you have to fight for your identity as a Jew" (Personal interview with the author, ­Budapest, February 2008).

28 Special thanks to Diana Gróo for her perspective on issues of Jewish identity, ­interview with the author in Budapest, February 5, 2006, and February 2, 2007, in the context of the 39th Annual Hungarian Film Week.

29 Hungarian filmmaker Ferenc Moldoványi blames his native city for not pursuing the enlightened policies of Prague and Berlin:

What we are witnessing now is not only the slow disappearance of a historical area, but also the destruction of our culture, of our own identity. Europe should preserve its past... it should not be forgotten that Erzsébetváros was the very place where the ghetto stood. To erase these old buildings is an outrage to the memory of those who were dragged from their houses to be shot on the Danube banks or died in the ghetto. (Personal interview with the author, Budapest, May 2011)

30 "I don't like to talk about it because it's an unhappy memory"; "They don't explain, and I don't ask."

31 Sandra Kogut (born in 1965 in Rio de Janeiro) is an artist and academic who has been working in video, film, and installation since 1984 in Brazil, France, and Japan.

 **References**

Báron, G. (2008) Dead Sea Scrolls: Hungarian documentaries before and after the ­political changes. _Kinokultura_ (special issue: Hungarian Cinema, ed. C. Portuges), 7, February, <http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/7/hungarian.shtml> (accessed November 17, 2009).

Baron, Lawrence (2006) Shoah déjà vu in American Feature Films about Third Generation, Association for Jewish Studies, Thirty-Eighth Annual Conference, San Diego, December 2006.

Bird, Daniel (2002) To excess: the grotesque in Juraj Herz's Czech films. _Kinoeye_ , 2 (1) January 7, <http://www.kinoeye.org/02/01/bird01.php> (accessed September 9, 2003).

Bori, E. (2005) The second wave: speaking out on the Holocaust. _The Hungarian Quarterly_ , 177, Spring.

Fejtö, François (1997) _Hongrois et Juifs_. Balland, Paris.

Hirsch, M. (1997) _Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory_. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Hirsch, M. (2008) The generation of postmemory. _Poetics Today_ , 29 (1): 103–128.

Iorio, Dominick A., Libowitz, Richard L., and Marcia S. Littell (eds) (1997) _The Holocaust: Lessons for the Third Generation_. University Press of America, Lanham, MD.

Kertész, Imre (1975) _Sorstalanság_. Trans. Tim Wilkinson (2004) _Fatelessness_. Knopf, New York.

Kestenberg, Judith S. and Brenner, Ira (1996) _The Last Witness: the Child Survivor of the Holocaust_. American Psychiatric Press, Arlington, VA.

Konrád, György (2007) _A Guest in My Own Country: A Hungarian Life_. Other Press, New York.

Košuličová, Ivana (2003) After the black wave: poetry and tragedy in the post-1960s films of Karel Kahayan. _Kinoeye_ 3 (9) September 15, <http://www.kinoeye.org/03/09/kosulicova09.php>, (accessed June 18, 2009).

Laub, Dori (2000) Not knowing is an active process of destruction. Why the testimonial procedure is of so much importance" Available online at <http://www.traumaresearch.net/focus1/laub.htm> (accessed October 10, 2007).

Levi, Primo (1969) _Survival in Auschwitz_. Collier, New York.

Liebman, Stuart and Quart, Leonard (1996) Lost and found: Wanda Jakubowska's _The Last Stop. Cineaste_ , 22 (4) Fall: 43–45.

Lionnet, Françoise and Shih, Shu-mei (eds) (2005) _Minor Transnationalism_. Duke University Press, Durham and London.

Márai, S. (2002) _Embers_ (trans. C. Brown Janeway). Vintage, New York.

Mazierska, Ewa and Rascaroli, Laura (2003) _From Moscow to Madrid: Postmodern Cities_ , _European Cinema_. I.B. Taurus, London.

Metz, Christian (1990) _Film Language: a Semiotics of the Cinema_. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Naficy, Hamid (2001) _An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking_. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Paul, David (1994) _István Szabó in_ _Five Filmmakers_ __(ed. Daniel Goulding). Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN.

Portuges, Catherine (1995) Exile and return: Jewish identity in post-Communist Hungarian cinema. _Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture_ , 17 (3): 24–37.

Portuges, Catherine (1997) Hidden subjects, secret identities: figuring Jews, Gypsies, and gender in 1990s cinema of Eastern Europe, in _Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe_ (ed. Gisela Brinker-Gabler and Sidonie Smith). University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.

Portuges, Catherine (1998) Jewish identity in post-Communist Hungarian cinema. _Assaph: Studies in the Cinema & Visual Media_, 1.

Portuges, Catherine (2009) The third generation: Hungarian Jews on screen. _E-Journal of the American Hungarian Educators Association_ , 2.<http://ahea.net/e-journal/volume-2-2009/2> (accessed May 1, 2011).

Radai, Eszter (2006) Interview with Imre Kertész ( _Élet és Irodalom_ ), Signandsight.com (August 22) <http://print.signandsight.com/features/908.html> (accessed September 29, 2009).

Radványi, Géza (1949) Film on war waifs. _The New York Times_ , September 18, X6.

Raczymow, Henri (1986) La Mémoire trouée. _Pardès_ , 3: 177–82. Translated in Discourses of Jewish Identity in 20th Century France. _Yale French Studies_ , 85 (1994): 98.

Snyder, T. (2009) Holocaust: the ignored reality. _New York Review of Books_ , 45 (12): 14–16. http://www. nybooks.com/articles/22875 (accessed December 9, 2010).

Suleiman, S. (2002) The 1.5 generation: thinking about child survivors and the Holocaust. _American Imago_ , 59 (3): 277–295.

Vamik D. Volkan, Gabriele Ast, and Greer,William F. Jr. (eds) (2002) ___The Third Reich in the Unconscious: Transgenerational Transmission and its Consequences_ __. Brunner-Routledge, New York.

 **Further Reading**

Felman, Shoshana and Laub, Dori (1992) _Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History_. New York, Routledge.

Kende, P. (2004) _Le Défi hongrois: de Trianon à Bruxelles_. Buchet Chastel, Paris.

Koauliov, A. (2002) Strach: Czech horror, drowning the bad times: Juraj Herz interviewed, _Kinoeye_ , 2 (1), January 7. <http://www.kinoeye.org/02/01/kosulicova01.php> (accessed December 9, 2011).

Suleiman, S. and Forgács, E. (eds) (2003) ___Contemporary Jewish Writing in Hungary_ _:_ _an Anthology_. Bison Books, Nebraska.

# 7

# Aftereffects of 1989

#  _Corneliu Porumboiu's_ _12:08 East of Bucharest_ _(2006) and Romanian Cinema_

Alice Bardan

 _I believe always in the necessity of being attentive first of all to the necessity of ­language, naming, and dating, to this repetition compulsion (at once rhetorical, magical, or poetic). To what this compulsion signifies, translates or betrays_ _._ (Derrida, 2004 _:_ 87)

Echoing Hamlet's famous soliloquy, the title of Corneliu Porumboiu's film _A fost sau n-a fost?_ (2006) translates as "Was there, or was there not?" This playful title went through a succession of stages until it finally pleased the filmmaker: "Was There or Was There Not a Revolution in Our Town?" (namely, Vaslui, a small city with 70 000 inhabitants in Eastern Romania), which mirrors the title of the real TV show that inspired Porumboiu to make his film, sounded too much like a tabloid headline to the filmmaker. The one that made the second cut – "Was There or Was There Not a Revolution?" – had a comical, historical-philosophical flavor. The ultimate version seems mischievous and slyly teasing: "Was There or Was There Not?" For Romanian filmmaker Lucian Pintilie, it has the effect of a "time dilation," sending the film towards a "playfully metaphysical and oneiric space." It registers, he says, a moment of panic and a void that Romania cinema has hardly ever seen. This is a film about people in transition, wandering, lost: about "ghostly people... walking through vertical cemeteries. Is it a dream or not? Was there, or was there not? But why is it funny? Because nothing is funnier than unhappiness, says Beckett... ' _Il n'y a rien de plus drôle que le malheur_ ' " (Pintilie, 2006).

The film's English title, however, is radically different than the Romanian one: _12:08 East of Bucharest_ sends us both to a specific time, "12:08," and to a vague location, somewhere east of "east," with Bucharest as a capital already coded as a marginal space, "somewhere east of Europe," east of a city often mistaken for Budapest, Hungary's capital. We learn, in the second half of the film, that "12:08" refers to the exact moment when, on December 22, 1989, Romania's dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu fled his palace via helicopter, as protesters and the entire nation watched on television.

Despite their obvious dissimilarity, the two titles (Romanian and English) index a similar indeterminacy, a similar "time dilation" effect: while the Romanian one ­registers a nameless apparition or event – was _there_ , or was _there_ not – the English version switches from an anguished state of questioning to a somewhat stubborn affirmation: not signaling a date, it raises one's curiosity about the event it tries to name. It could have been _1989, 12:08, East of Bucharest_ , or _12/22_ (standing for December 22). But the missing year and month give the event the film tries to encode a special mode of temporalization, a timeless, _suspended temporality_ : it could refer to any given day or year, eight minutes after noon, somewhere east of Bucharest. The nameless event, the Romanian "revolution," is designated through a code, "12:08," which, for many critics, became the shorthand reference to the film.

Let us take a detour for a moment to think about another "impossible name," the one which came to be known as 9/11. Jacques Derrida asserts that to mark a date in history presupposes that "'something' comes or happens for the first and last time, 'something' that we do not yet really know how to identify, determine, recognize, or analyze" (2004: 86). Speaking about 9/11, Derrida points out that the place and meaning of this "event" remain indescribable, unique, "like an intuition without concept," an event we could not find a language to describe. Instead, Derrida remarks, we keep pronouncing a date mechanically, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, journalistic formula, or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it is talking about. The telegraphic, concise, and short appellation (September 11, 9/11), Derrida notes, does not only come from an economical or rhetorical necessity. Rather, "this metonymy – a name, a number," also reveals our inability to recognize or understand how to qualify what happened" (2004: 86).1

Drawing on Derrida, Akira Lippit also comments on the numerical designation of 9/11 as a numerical event named in a code that _defers_ the designation of the event. For Lippit, this numerical euphemism seems borrowed from another dialect, invoking the Asian mode of designating (historical) events by abbreviating and collapsing the dates into clusters of numbers. This indeterminacy, he observes, signals the quality of an event that escapes naming and even descriptive language itself (2008: 143), as if the date could serve as a numeral in place of the name, as a code which could substitute a historical idiom not yet available in and as language. Lippit points out that in many Asian instances, significant historical events are ­designated by numerical codes extracted from dates. Moreover, since the numbers are read separately as distinct digits ("Two hundred and twenty-six," for example, is read "two two six"), such events are "unnamed, _described_ by numbers, and ­reassigned numbers: designated, _designed_ , designified" (Lippit, 2008: 131).

 _12:08 East of Bucharest_ similarly functions as a numerical euphemism for an event named in code, whose naming is postponed, delaying the arrival of the end, its finitude. By foregrounding the characters' efforts to probe the question of "the event," to describe it, de-signify it, and designate its importance the film makes visible the discursive practices used to understand and negotiate historical events. Throughout the film, "12:08" becomes a mechanical date, a conjuration, a refrain that recognizes people's inability to understand what happened to them in 1989. In trying to discover the authenticity and true nature of the "event," the film foregrounds the struggle to frame and control the meaning of "the events of 1989" in Romania as a revolution. In other words, it asks, How is an event produced, made through interpretations, selections, and filtering? How does a political event acquire an identity? What is the relevance of history as collective remembering? How are revolutions made?

 **Figure 7.1** Prologue frames from _12:08 East of Bucharest_ (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2006).

An elaborate economy of signs prefigures the film, as its prologue draws ­attention to numerical codes. During the opening credits, we see a departures board. The type of train, the time of departure, and the destination all change quickly. Some trains are "Inter City" or "Inter-City Express," meant for routes between major cities, others are "Accelerat" and "Rapid" – slower, but which also stop between major towns and cities. Others are in "Revizie," that is, scheduled for technical repair. Gradually disappearing, one by one, the numbers indicating the departure time and the types of train give way to the film production company's logo, _42. KM Film_ (i.e., "42 Kilometers Film," which was set up by Porumboiu in 2004). When the logo appears, all the remaining listed trains listed below it are the ones called "Persoane," highlighted in blue to stand out from the rest. Cheap, slow, and stopping at numerous stations, "Personal" trains usually have open wagons and no compartments. _12:08_ therefore announces itself as a film about personal matters, about a "revision" of history from below that will explore dilemmas of representation without falling into pre-established compartmentalization. For some of these trains, the time is indeed "dilated": One is supposed to leave at "45:83," which, of course, does not make sense.

Porumboiu is a filmmaker obsessed with definitions and signs. Both _12:08_ and his second film, _Police, Adjective_ (2009), he tells us, stem from his own obsession with words and their interpretation from different points of view. If _12:08_ is a collage of definitions of the word "revolution," _Police, Adjective_ tries to define the word "conscience" (Peranson, 2009: n.p.). In Porumboiu's own words, in a televised interview, _Police, Adjective_ is moreover "about the sign as a mode of representation," ending as it does not only with a key scene which involves a policeman's argument with his captain over the dictionary definitions of the words "conscience" and "­justice," but also with a drawing full of signs for _the staging_ of an event. The ­protagonist of the film, a young policeman, sketches on a blackboard the street plan for an impending drug bust of some children, with exits, everyone's positions, and arrows indicating the course of action. "Pay attention to these signs,"2 Porumboiu tells us in an interview with Horia RomanPatapievici.3

 **Figure 7.2** Drawing at the end of _Police, Adjective_ (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009).

For Porumboiu, "the philosophy behind a language influences both a culture and its way of being" (quoted in Harris, 2010). At the heart of _12:08_ is not only a question of language and of naming an event but also of characters being trapped by language structures and often relying on cliché-ridden vocabulary to find their way out of an impasse. The film reveals, on the one hand, the role of ­collective remembering and the modalities of "saying and making an event" (Derrida, 2007: 445) and, on the other hand, how the values of Romanian culture are implied in the language that people speak, and how these values pervade all their exchanges.

#  **Context: Cinematic Reconfigurations of 1989**

The fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 marked the beginning of a process of collective remembering and reckoning with the Communist past which involves a variety of complex relationships between active agents and the narrative tools they use. The case of Romania is especially significant in this respect, as there is no general consensus as to what really happened in December 1989 and what _name_ should be given to the political event that opened the way for democracy in Romania. In fictional film, the topic of the "revolution" was not fully addressed by Romanian filmmakers until 2006, when not one but three films on the topic were released. Although all these films won awards at important film festivals, _12:08 East of Bucharest_ stood out from the rest when it won the Caméra d'or prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006. The directors were teenagers at the time of the ­revolution, and therefore are reluctant to associate their work with it (all of them emphasize that their films are not _about_ the revolution). Their turn to the past, however, activates the memory of the revolutionary upheaval that swept away the Ceauşescu dictatorship.

Cătălin Mitulescu's _The Way I Spent the End of the World_ (2006) and Radu Muntean's _This Paper Will Be Blue_ (2006) follow the destiny of young, inexperienced characters whose coming of age is linked to radical historical changes. Mitulescu's film chronicles the last few months of 1989 as they are seen through the lives of one family in a poor neighborhood in Bucharest. Set during the final days of the Ceauşescu regime, Muntean's work comes closer to the revolution, taking viewers back to the moment riots filled the streets. By recreating the confusion that ­followed the departure of the Ceauşescus, the film recreates a time when it was unclear who were the so-called terrorists, who was the enemy, and who was firing at whom.

 _12:08_ should also be placed in the context of a larger body of films that revisit the events of 1989 with the aim of changing historical consciousness or of ­exposing the way in which these events are transmitted to us. These films restage and replay to new effect the "image-event" (Manghani, 2008: 32) of the fall of communism in Romania, renewing our experience of what happened. Bringing together multiple contexts and recontextualizations of images, they seek to re-scale the events of 1989, furnishing them with new critical opportunities. In other words, they afford a space within which it is possible to reflect on the complexity of the events.

Chris Marker's eight-minute video piece _Détour: Ceau_ ş _escu_ (1990), in which the filmmaker reedits taped television footage into a sardonic commentary on the French television coverage of the trial and execution of Ceauşescu and his wife, is one of the first attempts to see the Romanian events in a new light. Marker inserts into the grim reportage snippets of cheerful television commercials and a ­montage advocating new uses for kitchen paper and laundry detergent to deal with the bloody aftermath of the execution. His aim is to highlight how the claim to ­neutrality often made by commercial television news reportage is mediated and compromised by its role in selling products. Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică's _Videogrammes of a Revolution_ (1992) is another televisual analysis of the fall of Ceauşescu. The authors edit together found archival material from collected video footage produced by the camcorders of private citizens as well as the cameras in the besieged television studio that broadcast the 1989 Revolution continuously for 120 hours. At times, the footage is stopped and replayed, with a voice-over ­commentator explaining what happens in these images, drawing our attention to the style and position of the camera. Farocki and Ujică ultimately show how the demonstrators who occupied the television station in Bucharest established a new historical site for revolution: the television studio.

The ludic approach to the past in _12:08_ also reminds one of Marcel Ophüls's _November Days_ (1990), an essay film (dubbed by the director a musical comedy) composed mainly of interviews with East German citizens. Ophüls shows BBC television coverage of November 1989 in East Germany and then, through ­detective work, tracks down the people who, on November 9, stood in front of the cameras ecstatic about their liberation.The new interviews put to test the original understanding of the events, revealing how, in retrospect, these people interpret the same events differently (since they have no jobs and are skeptical about their future).

By setting the action in a provincial town, _12:08_ may remind us of Andreas Dresen's _Silent Country_ (1992), a film which portrays the struggles of a provincial theater group attempting to stage Samuel Beckett's _Waiting for Godot_ in the weeks directly preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall. _Silent Country_ features a young, idealistic director who, newly arrived in a provincial town, attempts to convince the actors to act seriously in his rewriting of Vladimir and Estragon as an old couple waiting for a change that isn't going to come. He is driven to exasperation, ­however, as the cast is ignorant and barely listens to him. In the midst of all the preparations, they hear about what happens in Berlin and gather around a television set to watch the historical events.

#  **Understanding the Reception of** **_12:08 East of Bucharest_** ******in Romania: Was There, or Was There Not an Event?**

Reviewing the film in _The Guardian_ , Philip French asserts that, for him, _12:08_ was a disappointment. He contends that "the characters are neatly located in their sad domestic and professional contexts. But the core of the film, the live TV ­discussion, raises the old dramatic issue of how to make tedious people interesting, boring occasions exciting, and embarrassment funny. The film is at best mildly amusing, at worst unconvincing and dreary" (French, 2007). Few Romanians, however, would find the film unconvincing or dreary. In a Romanian context, the way in which the film activates collective memory and historical revisionism holds a special significance. It reverberates with endless debates on what exactly happened in 1989, despite the live coverage of the December events on television.

To this day, the exact nature of the events of December 1989 in Romania remains an issue of deep controversy among scholars, politicians, and lay people. All sorts of revisionist theories still circulate, penetrating the collective imagination to such an extent that the original understanding of these events has become difficult to remember. In what follows I will track some of the debates around the question of whether, from a theoretical point of view, what happened in Romania in 1989 could be justifiably named a revolution.

Richard Andrew Hall, a specialist on the historiography of the Romanian ­revolution, has shown that the historiography of the December events presents a "dizzying array of theories" about what happened and why. Hall notes that, although at the time when they were taking place the events of the dictator's overthrow were viewed as clear and uncontroversial, almost universally understood as a revolution, today many analysts suggest that the December events were in reality a coup d'état or a "stolen revolution" (1999: 505). In a recent article significantly titled "What is a 'revolution'?" Cristian Tileaga also points out that various authors referred to the Romanian revolution as a "quasi-revolution" or an "unfinished ­revolution." Still others, he notes, have argued that the events left an ideological void that was previously filled by the political imaginary of the Ceauşescu regime (2008: 363). In addition, a number of critics have also traced diverse interpretations of the revolution in the public sphere of the elites. These interpretations dealt with the idea of a "pure" revolution, as well as a "plot" hypothesis (internal/external) and the "hybrid" revolution (revolution + coup d'état) (Tileaga, 2008: 364). In a brilliant study of the way in which the 1989 moment was commemorated in the Romanian parliament (especially by former Romanian president, Ion Iliescu), Tileaga analyzes not only how the "facts" were described in order to authorize a specific perspective for explaining and representing the events, but also how the discursive procedures used ensured "the recognition of the Romanian 'revolution' _as_ revolution, and therefore, as a true and meaningful 'object' of ­commemoration" (2008: 365). Through detailed discourse analysis, Tileaga demonstrates how ­various commemorative discourses were used to produce a dominant version of the revolution as "'authentic,' foundational and a turning point in the nation's ­history" (2008: 364).

In 1999, Sergiu Nicolaescu, a movie director and independent senator, started an immense scandal in the Romanian senate. He was outraged to discover that the events of December 1989 were presented in the twelfth-grade high school ­history books as a popular rebellion followed by a coup d'état, and not as a ­revolution. Other senators joined Nicolaescu in his demand for a public burning of the books, accusing their young authors of having insulted Romanian national dignity. The scandal generated intense discussions in the media, especially in the most popular political talk shows, such as the _Marius Tuca Show_ on Antena 1. Moreover, as Dan Pavel documents, the "crusade against the new textbooks" (2000: 187) "held centre stage in the political, intellectual, media and public arena" for more than two months (182). It led Dan Berindei, president of the History and Archaeology Department of the Romanian Academy, to publish a declaration in October 2000 in which he expressed his conviction that students should not learn from textbooks things that would make them "ashamed of being a Romanian" (Pavel, 2000: 186).

Another major incident that undermined the Romanians' sense of agency in their own history was sparked by the airing in 2004 of Susanne Brandstätter's ­documentary _Checkmate: Strategy of a Revolution_ on the French–German Channel Arte. Since its main thesis is that the revolution was orchestrated from outside Romania, and mostly by the intelligence agencies of Western countries, the ­documentary invited further questions and revisions of history. When the Romanian daily newspaper _Jurnalul National_ reported on _Checkmate_ , the news provoked a national debate in Romania about the elusiveness of ­historical truth.4

In light of these considerations, the talk show in _12:08_ acquires greater ­significance, as it mirrors, on a micro-level, real life debates in Romanian media. The "coup d'état" appellation was not accepted by many officials, because the new self-proclaimed authority that seized power after the Ceauşescus left wanted to gain credit for, and legitimacy from, defending the anti-Communist revolution and did not welcome inquiries into the swift, summary trial and execution of the Ceauşescus. As Siani-Davies rightly points out, "both coups and revolutions are extra-legal take-overs of power, but compared with a revolution, a coup has a ­certain ring of illegality and is perceived as conspiratorial rather than 'open' and 'spontaneous'" (1996: 458). Today, the history manuals generally avoid using the word "revolution" to describe the events of 1989. The words "rebellion" and "revolt" are sometimes used, but "because they conjure up images of the pre-­modern period, the more contemporary sounding phrase 'popular uprising' is ­preferred" (Siani-Davies, 1996: 460).

#  **The Question of Making and Saying an Event: Virtuality and Simulacrum**

Derrida comments that there are two ways of determining the "saying" of an event: an utterance that is _constantive_ , a theoretical speech that consists in saying what is; and an utterance that is _performative_ , that does in speaking. Saying the event is a saying of knowledge, saying what happens, what comes to pass. It refers to an enunciation that says something about something. But there is also a "saying that _does in saying_ , a saying that does, that enacts," which refers to the way events are produced. The "saying of the event" as a description is always problematic (Derrida, 2007: 446). Its "structure of saying" always _comes after the event_ and its structure of language is bound to iterability and repeatability, its generality always missing the singularity of the event. The event as such is absolutely singular, it comes unforeseeably.5 The "live" coverage of events relies on mechanisms of selection, intervention, interpretation, filtering, or framing: "what is shown to us live," Derrida insists, "is already not a saying or showing of the event but _its production_ " (2007: 447, my emphasis). It is performative, it functions as an interpretation that does what it says. Even if it pretends to ­simply state, show, and inform, in reality it _produces_. Derrida urges political ­vigilance in examining the mechanisms that hold out the appearance of _saying_ the event when in reality it is a question of _making_ the event, a saying of the event which is passed off as a saying of the event in an ­unavowed and ­undeclared way (2007: 447).

Speaking about the Romanian Revolution of 1989, which achieved notoriety as the first televised revolution, Giorgio Agamben suggests in _Means without End_ that this occasion marked "a new turn in world politics," where the true political ­function of the media was revealed through a staged event that "Nazism had not even dared to imagine" (2000: 80). As he famously put it, "In the same way in which it has been said that after Auschwitz it is impossible to write and think as before, after Timişoara [the town in which it all started] it will no longer be possible to watch television in the same way" (2000: 82). What Agamben underscores is that the legitimization of the new regime claiming power in Romania in December 1989 seemed to register with precision the _mise-en-scène_ script predicted by Guy Debord in his _The Society of the Spectacle_ and the subsequent _Commentaries_ , published just a year earlier in 1988. As it happens, what the entire world was watching as a real truth in a December 23 broadcast was entirely staged to confirm the reported rumors that the death toll was in the thousands. A few bodies were dug out of graves and lined up in a ghastly layout to authenticate for the press that atrocities had taken place. Thinking about Debord's inheritance in the age of the complete triumph of the spectacle, Agamben notes, "in this way, truth and falsity became indistinguishable from each other and the spectacle legitimized itself solely through the spectacle" (2000: 82).

A similar view is expressed by Jean Baudrillard who, writing about "The Timisoara Massacre" in _The Illusion of the End_ , laments that "[with Timişoara] we were able to say 'It's just TV!' " (1994: 55). Baudrillard argues that we can take the Romanian revolution as an "invisible," virtual event that happened in the ­television studio. In this case, the street became a virtual space, "a non-site of the event," an extension of the studio. Because they were mystified television viewers, Baudrillard explains, the Romanians experienced the revolution as "touristic spectators of a virtual history" (1994: 56) in a "parody of history" (55) where the screen became an empty space of representation.

For Derrida, the question "Is saying the event possible?" is also a question of virtuality, "What is a virtual event?" (2007: 454). But for him, the virtualization of an event must be understood differently. He disagrees with Baudrillard when the latter says, for instance, with heavy postmodern irony, that events such as the Gulf War "did not take place" (2007: 460). What happened during the Gulf War, which was reported live, could be reduced neither to interpretative information, what Derrida calls "trans-information," nor to a simulacrum. The event, if there is one, says Derrida, resists reappropriation, it is singular, each and every time, and no utterance of knowledge or information could reduce or neutralize: "the event that is ultimately irreducible to media appropriation and digestion is that thousands of people died" (Derrida, 2007: 460).

But what does Derrida mean by virtuality, then? In the seminar titled _Dire l'événement_ , where he addresses the question of "what does it mean _to say_ the event?" he comments that in the event of the seminar, unforeseeable and improvised to a large extent, something is being said through this event and of this event. But "who says the event?" he asks, noting the rhetoric of the title and the infinitive of the verb form _dire_. The infinitive of the verb indicates that there is no one ­present and no subject of enunciation to say the event. This means, therefore, that the question of the saying of the event is no longer either _constative_ (descriptive) or _performative_ but "symptomatic," that is, beyond the telling of the truth or the ­performativity that produces the event. Moreover, whenever the event resists being turned into information, resists being known or made known, "a secret is at work in the story" and "an event is always secret... like giving or forgiving it must remain a secret" (Derrida, 2007: 456).

When Derrida says that the secret belongs to the structure of the event, he does not refer to something hidden or private, but to that which does not appear, a symptom which signifies an event but over which nobody has control, that no conscious subject can appropriate.

There is symptom in what is happening here [in the seminar], for instance: each of us interpreting, foreseeing, anticipating, and feeling overwhelmed and surprised by what can be called events. Beyond the meaning that each of us can read into these events, if not enunciate, there is the symptom. Even the effect of truth or the search for _truth is symptomatic in nature_. (Derrida, 2007: 457)

Derrida understands the symptom in a way similar to Deleuze, that is, in a _philosophically_ -informed way, not in its clinical or psychoanalytical sense as a code that needs to be deciphered. "Psychoanalysis is so reductive in the secrets it pursues, so reductive of signs and symptoms," Deleuze reminds us (1995: 143). Symptom, in this case, is to be understood as "meaning that no theorem can exhaust" (Derrida, 2007: 457), and that is why Derrida links it with the concept of _verticality_ : "A symptom is something that falls. It's what befalls us. What falls vertically on us is what makes a symptom" (2007: 457).

The meaning of the symptom in Deleuze's understanding of "the clinical" is neither related to etiology (the search for causes) nor to therapy (the development and application of treatment), but to _symptomatology_ , that is, the study of signs (2004: 132).6 When Derrida says that in every event there is secrecy and ­symptomatology, and that discourse that corresponds to the quality of eventfulness is always symptomal or symptomatological, he refers to a discourse on the unique and the exceptional. An event is an exception to the rule, but there are no rules, norms, or criteria to evaluate it. The singularity of the exception without rules can only bring about symptoms, says Derrida. But if the secret or the symptom does appear and we are not talking about etiology or therapy, this does not mean that we should give up knowing. This is not something negative or ­paralyzing for philosophical knowledge, but a promising aporia which, Derrida explains, in Nietzsche takes the form of the "possible-impossible," what Nietzsche called the modality of the "maybe." The difficulty, Derrida says, is to find a symptomatical procedure, a ­discourse for structures that ­constitute so many challenges to traditional logic. In other words, the category of "maybe" (that is, of the possible-impossible, the unique as substitutable, ­singularity as reiterable), belongs to the same ­configuration as that of the ­symptom or the secret.

Was the Romanian revolution an exception to the rule? Princeton history ­professor Stephen Kotkin argues that, contrary to the general impression, Romania in 1989 was not an exception, but part of a continuum that includes East Germany as well as most other cases that concern the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. It was Communist-era Poland, usually taken as paradigmatic, that proved to be the grand exception, he claims, since only Poland had a fully articulated alternative to the regime. Significantly, Kotkin begins his book on 1989, _Uncivil Society_ , with a description of _12:08 East of Bucharest_ as an example of his thesis. Noting that the film examines whether a revolution can take place if no one risks anything – at least in the small provincial town of Vaslui – the ­historian suggests that Romania "offers a fine example of what could be called nonorganized mobilization, which in 1989 was actually the norm across Eastern Europe" (2009: 6).6 There was no civil society in Eastern Europe in 1989, Kotkin convincingly argues. On the contrary, it was the establishment (the majority of party and state officials, the army officers, the police, who controlled everything, worked and lived together, and had their own clubs, shops and resorts) – the uncivil society – that brought down its own system (2009: 7). If civil society, the slogan most used by scholars, means that people take responsibility for ­themselves and are able to self-organize by having recourse to state institutions to defend associations, civil liberties, and private property, the lack of such institutions under Soviet-style systems means that in 1989 such a society could not be labeled civil. Kotkin concludes, "Romania's 1989 revolution seems highly distinct – each country's was, in its own way, yet Romania, too, fits a pattern of uncivil-society paralysis and non-organized mass mobilization" (2009: 71). This summarizes, in a way, the thesis put forth by one of the characters in _12:08_ : "One makes whatever revolution one can, each in their own way." In other words, the Romanian ­revolution was indeed a singularity and an exceptional case, but this does not signify that it was "an exception to the rule." Indeed, as George Lawson rightly argues in his introduction to _The Global 1989_ , we should be careful about using 1989 as a barometer of old and new (2011: 2). Given that in many ways post-Cold War capitalist expansion represents a return to old exploitative practices, "a ­complex picture emerges in terms of the temporality of 1989, one which embraces important continuities alongside, and to some extent instead of, simple notions of 'all change'" (Lawson, 2011: 3).

The question posed by the television host in _12:08_ implies that violence and revolution are co-determinous. If there is no violence, then there is no revolution, he reasons at the end. Yet violence is most often used to _suppress_ rather than instigate change, stemming from battles after the initial takeover of state power, and Hannah Arendt (1963) has shown how the apparent close link between revolution and violence is a relatively modern connection (in Lawson, 2011: 8). If we are to ­follow Derrida's urge to find "symptomatic procedures," 1989 marked neither a distinct end nor a distinct beginning in world historical time. The thorny question of timing posed, tongue in cheek, in _12:08_ (Did people go out in the streets before 12:08 on December 22, or after?) is important, but this does not mean that it should be taken literally, just as the question of 1989 should not be asked in terms of when exactly the border between Hungary and Austria opened in September 1989. Indeed, as Lawson rightly underscores, if we take the temporal frame of 1945–1989, the events of 1989 may appear to signal the end of the Cold War. But if we follow Eric Hobsbawn (1994) and see the twentieth century as "short," wedged between 1914 and 1989, we achieve a second picture, more of a bird's-eye view, of what happened. If we go back to 1848 which, like 1989, also saw the mobilizing force of nationalism and the apparently spontaneous eruption of protests in major European cities, we see a different structure. If we go back to 1789, which François Furet reads as the final burial of the modern revolutionary _geist_ – or illusion – first witnessed in France, we see yet another pattern. If we take 1648 as a starting point, as some politicians do, 1989 marks the end of an era of state sovereignty first inaugurated by the Peace of Westphalia. Still another perspective can be reached if we consider how the Cold War operated in the Middle East, with its reasoning and modus operandi distinct from those of Europe (Lawson, 2011: 11). Certainly, much is at stake in terms of when observers start counting and when they choose to stop doing so.

#  **The Use of Language in** **_12:08_**

The protagonists of _12:08_ remind us of Samuel Beckett's heroes, as they continuously resurrect the past but ultimately _fail to communicate_ , becoming lost in nuances or details that prohibit the discernment of meaning. Influenced by Romanian comic writers and by authors such as Beckett, Joyce, Chekhov, Kafka, and Ionesco, who deal with the absurdity of daily life (Porton, 2010: 2), Porumboiu depicts a society in which characters "live in an intermediate world" (quoted in Porton, 2010: 3), lacking concern for cooperative social intercourse. The director evokes a universe in which people either rebuke or scoff at each other, impatient, ­disrespectful, raising objections, constantly interrupting and undermining each other. As if stuck in a perpetual loop which does not allow proper closure, most characters squabble over trivial matters, deviating from or delaying "proper" ­communication. Reflecting on the post-Communist transition, the film ultimately exposes a debt-ridden society, poor and disillusioned, proving that the ­"revolutionary changes" acclaimed by the protagonists are mere empty words. In an interview for _Observatorul_ , Porumboiu asserts that "ultimately, _12:08_ is a film about the ­transition, not about the Revolution. If one thinks from the perspective of each character, these people don't even lie about their past, they merely try to justify their ­existence after the fall of communism" (2006). "I wanted to make a movie about people who distorted history in order to survive. It's human" (quoted in Porton, 2010: 3).

Was there or was there not a revolution in the town of Vaslui (Porumboiu's hometown, unnamed in the film) on December 22, 1989? Obsessed with this question, the host of the local television station, called Virgil Jderescu, plans a "commemoration," a live discussion about the "revolution" on his daily talk show _Issue of the Day_. It is the sixteenth anniversary of Romania's 1989 revolution – December 22, 2005 – and so he wants to "celebrate the heroes of the Romanian liberation" and to "pay them tribute." After some potential panelists turn out to be unavailable, Jderescu invites, out of desperation, a lonely, retired man named Emanoil Piscoci and Tiberiu Mănescu, a debt-ridden, high-school history teacher who likes to drink at the local bar. The film is divided into two sections. While the first section introduces us to the small lives and routines of the three ­protagonists, the second section, filmed in real time, focuses on the television show itself, with the characters and callers trying to figure out what happened 16 years before in their town. If they went out in the street before 12:08, after Ceauşescu's impromptu flight from the capital, this means, according to Jderescu, that they had a revolution. If they went after, then there is no history, they were all ­cowards. Speaking in earnest, the host begins the show confidently, smiling towards the camera:

Today, as we all know, is a very important day for our country. Sixteen years ago, on December 1989, the revolution broke out in Bucharest. A new era dawned in Romanian history, so let's turn our looks towards those events in order to examine whether we, the citizens of this town, took part in this moment in history.

But before he can even announce the question, old man Piscoci interrupts the rhythm of his speech by stretching his neck towards him to ensure that he is not left out of the frame. When Piscoci hears that the host will announce the question of the day, he takes a piece of paper from the table, "steals" the pen from Jderescu's hand, writes down the question with pursed lips, and then circles it as if to meditate on its importance. When Jderescu introduces him, he is quick to correct him by insisting that his name is Emanoil, not Emil. He literally "knocks on wood" when the host announces that what happened after communism might be much more dangerous and scary than the darkness of communism.

Lacking professionalism, Jderescu, a former textile engineer turned journalist, adopts solemn poses and creates a theatrical discourse filled with quotations from Heraclitus. Before the show he consults a dictionary of mythology to spice up his flamboyant rhetoric. As soon as he is done with the introductory phrases about his _responsibility_ as a journalist to revisit history, he loses his confidence, hesitates, and starts improvising:

Many of you may wonder why we still have a talk show about such a topic after such a long time. Eh, to be honest, I think that... in accordance to... well, as in Plato's Myth of the Cave, when people mistook a small fire for the sun, well... I think that it is my duty as a journalist to ask whether we left the cave so that we may enter an even bigger cave... and if we, in turn, are not mistaking a straw fire for the sun... I think there is no present without the past and no future without the present. That is why, the more transparent the past is, the more transparent the present, I mean, the future, will be.

Thus, "for the sake of truth and a better future," he invites his guests and the audience to tell him what they did at noon on December 22, 1989. Acknowledging the elusiveness of historical truth, the host anticipates that his show may be a futile endeavor anyway, since, "as Heraclitus once said, 'one cannot step into the same river twice.'"

Unable to answer Jderescu's question in a straightforward manner, Manescu, the first interlocutor, declares that he and two other colleagues went to the main square in front of the town hall before noon on December 22, 1989. They all shouted "Down with Ceauşescu!" in order to "put an end, _once and for all_ , _to the Communist nightmare_ ," he claims. Clearing his throat, he solemnly begins by ­thanking Jderescu for giving _him_ the opportunity to talk about what happened " _on those dramatic days_." Circling around the answer, Manescu relies on language ­patterns almost out of reflex, especially when he feels pressed to respond to the callers' heckling comments. Like Jderescu, he searches for metaphors: "It took one spark to make _this nightmare_ be taken off our country's map. And this spark came, of course, _from the very heart of our country_ , Bucharest." When, impatient, Jderescu interrupts him repeatedly: "Well, was it, or was it not?" "Just tell us: how did you spend December 22, 1989?" Manescu agrees to answer, but immediately ­circumvents the host's question yet again, _delaying_ a straightforward response with comments that are beside the point: "Sure, I will answer. But first of all, I would like to add that, you know, as time goes by, people forget and it's a shame, a great shame."

As soon as callers start to debunk Manescu's version of events, the show devolves into a live confrontation based on blame and shame. Called a liar, a drunkard, and a slanderer, the teacher desperately defends himself, retreating into humiliated ­resignation yet sticking to his account of events until the end, even as he signals defeat in the slump of his shoulders. The first caller, a woman with a vitriolic voice, dismisses any hypothesis for the existence of a revolution, claiming that the teacher and his friends merely drank their way through the revolution at the local bar. A second one asserts that since at the time he was working as a guard for the town hall, he can testify that nobody was in the square before Ceauşescu's departure. Yet another one claims that a tire of his "personal" car went flat in front of the town hall that day, and, while waiting to get help, he noticed that nobody was in the square at 12:03, when he checked the big clock on top of the town hall. The conversation becomes even more absurd when old man Piscoci challenges ­everybody else's version of events in order to insert ­himself into the dialogue by offering his own rationale. According to his theory, the guard in the sentry box could not have possibly seen the teacher protesting because the latter was in front of the statue in the square, and thus outside his field of vision. When the guard admits to having left the sentry box in order to run some errands, Manescu starts interrogating him, resolved to reckon the exact time during which he was gone by adding up all the minutes on a piece of paper. "What did you buy at the farmer's market?" "Did you walk there, and if so, how long did it take you?" "If you bought the Christmas tree, did you carry it home, or did you bring it with you to the town hall?" Instead of talking about the ­subject they set out to discuss, the characters thus "lose ­themselves" in pointless, endless calculations. Rather than figuring out, by public deliberation, what exactly happened in their town on the day when Ceauşescu left, they re-stage the image of the event, renewing their experience of it from their fragmented ­vantage points.

 **Figure 7.3** Piscoci, Jderescu, and Manescu. _12:08 East of Bucharest_ (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2006).

Piscoci reasons that they are all splitting hairs over nonsense, yet he cannot help intervening in the heated discussion. Like most people on the show, he loses his temper easily and even swears, although he feels deeply offended when asked by Jderescu to promise not use bad language in his show. "God forgive me for my swearing language at this holy time before Christmas, but ever since they hung it up on the town hall, that clock has kept running slow," he explodes at one point, as if a few minutes would have made a difference for a "revolution" with only a ­couple of people.

Speaking about metalinguistic acts in Beckett, one critic draws attention to the "self-thematising of language which constantly questions and exercises its potential; characters announce that it is their turn to speak, check on the remarks of other people, seek to clarify the illocutionary force of other ­people's remarks, ­correct each other's pronunciation or vocabulary or their own, assess or comment on their own utterances" (York, 1983: 244). This is exactly what happens in _12:08_. While the conversation wanders off every time someone new intervenes, often verging on the ridiculous, most characters have a desire to go on speaking, sometimes even after they realize that this may be in vain. Piscoci not only corrects Jderescu's pronunciation of his name ("Emanoil is my correct name, [not Emil]!"), but also announces that it is his turn to speak. "I am boring you, am I not?" Piscoci asks when he realizes that his impassioned description of what he did on December 22, 1989 may sound irrelevant. Such concern for the explicitness and lucidity required of dramatic language reveals, as in Beckett, "a rather anxious spectacle: concern for correctness, for clear communication, implies an embarrassing recognition of existing not just in one's own desires or conceptions but as an object for (real or imagined) other people to judge" (York, 1983: 244).

With minute details, Piscoci recounts how on that special day he woke up at 7:00 a.m. Then he corrects himself that this is not true, for in those days he actually used to wake up at 6:30. When the revolution hit, he was busy trying to win back the affection of his wife by offering her "three splendid magnolias" plucked from the botanical garden. It was his way to apologize for his fits of jealousy, but his wife pretended to be upset. Suddenly, the _Laurel and Hardy_ episode on TV was ­interrupted by a besieged Ceauşescu promising an insignificant wage increase, which made Piscoci naïvely hope that he could use the money on a trip to the seaside with his wife. With great honesty, the old man confesses that the revolution actually frustrated him, ruining his vacation plans. When he joined the protesters in the street, after Ceauşescu fled his palace, he did so only to show his wife that he is a hero, too. "One makes whatever revolution one can, each in their own way," Piscoci proclaims in a forgiving tone, tinged with sympathy rather than scorn. Striking a chord of poignant reconciliation for the show, he expounds on his own theory of how revolutions are made. The revolution, he surmises, spread from Timişoara and Bucharest to the rest of the country just as the string of Christmas street lights turn on in sequence, one after the other, moving outwards from the center to the most marginal streets. "Old man Piscoci, excuse me, but you're just full of nonsense sometimes," Manescu interrupts him. "We all know that the Christmas streetlights turn on at the same time!"

In the end, however, the old man's theory that history is never instantaneous proves right, poetically framing the narrative. The film's final series of dusky ­compositions trace the town's streetlights turning back on, echoing the opening which followed the same lights turning off through the awakening town at dawn. Watching the last light at the periphery turn on for the night, Jderescu's cameraman confirms in voiceover that the old man's theory is true. This is also the voice of the director, who in several interviews has declared that he aligns himself with the much-derided cameramen of the show, berated repeatedly by Jderescu for his awkward shots, clumsy zoom-ins, wide angles, and overall faulty camerawork. As Porumboiu explains, after seeing the local television show which inspired him, he first became interested in the subject, then amused, and then angry to the point that he turned off the television. "I tried to communicate all these feelings through an implicit commentary, suggested by the style of filming," the director tells us.7

 **Figure 7.4** The Cameraman in _12:08 East of Bucharest_ (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2006).

Since the first part of the film is told using the third person, Porumboiu chose an almost theatrical _mise en scène_ with a fixed camera, perpendicular on the set, which created realistic pictures of the characters. The second part is told in the first person, through the eyes of the cameraman, who, according to the director, at first "tries to find the truth in all the different versions of the story he is given, then he lets the camera fall, and at the very end he doesn't know what to think anymore" (quoted in Rossini, 2009).

#  **Post-national Pastiche and Cinematic Realism**

Thomas Elsaesser asserts that after 1989, "the national" acquired a different ­meaning in cinema, which is no longer either essentialist (i.e., cinema's ability to reflect something specific about a country) or constructivist (when the nation is constructed as an imagined community), but 'post-national,' reintroduced for external use while suspended within the European Union (2005:70). Although ­various national stereotypes are indeed reinvented or re-launched, contemporary European films have developed a formula that accommodates various, even ­contradictory, signifiers of nationhood. It is pointless to call such processes of re-assignation of the nation constructed, Elsaesser contends, because these films (such as _Run Lola Run_ , _The Full Mounty_ , _Brassed Off_ , _The Remains of the Day_ ) self-consciously use parody to define identity.

The use of parody to define one's identity is reserved, unfortunately, only for Western Europe, as Elsaesser puts Eastern Europe in its (usual) place, noting that the post-Communist states in the 1990s have not only "asserted their ­nationalism as a motor for cultural identity" but have also "come to the fore with a renewed concern for a national cinema" (2005: 70). Unlike the auteur cinema of the 1970s, post-national (Western) European films of the 1990s, Elsaesser ­contends, "now address themselves to world audiences," no longer asserting their national or regional identity _in difference_ , but presenting themselves "as the impersoNation of 'difference'" (2005: 72). The difference between old-style and "retroactive" ­nationalism (2005: 71), Elsaesser explains, can be summed up if we think of the difference between Wim Wenders's famous assertion as a German auteur in _Kings of the Road_ that "the Yanks have colonized our subconscious" and the famous scene in _Trainspotting_ in which Renton despairs at being Scottish: "We're the ­lowest of the fucking low.... Some people hate the English, but I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers." The _Trainspotting_ example ­indicates that its "self-loathing is also a double take on national identity," Elsaesser claims, marking an instance of "post-national Scottishness" (2005: 72) and, on a larger scale, indicating a more fluid understanding of European identity, which appeals to audiences receptive to films from Britain, France, Germany, or Spain (2005: 72).

It is my contention here that such clear cut distinctions between post–1989 Western and Eastern European cinema cannot be sustained, and _12:08_ is a case in point. Clearly, the film's irony, performativity, and reflexivity highlight the fact that contemporary Romanian cinema is also part of "retroactive nationalism," asserting its status as projected impersoNation.

"What are you doing there, filming like that?" asks an exasperated Jderescu at one point in the film, when he sees his amateur cameraman filming a small ­musical ensemble with a jittery hand-held camera. "Ah, boss, but this is the latest trend!" the latter replies, echoing Porumboiu's initial desire to "find the truth of the ­characters" by letting reality edit itself and reflecting the fact that he is consciously addressing a world audience alert to new cinemas and cinematic trends. Put ­differently, Porumboiu is aware of both expectations to "represent the nation" as a filmmaker and of the fashionable indie and Danish Dogme-style art-house hits whose use of high definition cameras and digital technologies has been enthusiastically embraced by some as "kind of a revolution" (quoted in Martin, 2006). In an insightful article on low-budget digital cinema, Adrian Martin cautions, much like Porumboiu, that "this is an area in which filmmakers need to tread carefully. Despite the admirable adoption of artistic slogans such as 'creativity comes from constraint'... there is already an abundance of clichés bearing down upon this field of production" (2006).

Rodica Ieta finds it fascinating that the newly emerged _auteurs_ in Romanian cinema resorted to realism, one of the most stigmatized artistic trends in former Communist countries because of its original application as Socialist realism. Emphasizing that the young directors turned to realism with the same passion that their masters and forebears (important names in Romanian cinema such as Lucian Pintilie, Dan Piţa, Mircea Veroiu, and Mircea Daneliuc) showed in undermining realism through encoded meanings, undertones, and philosophical speculations, Ieta suggests that

Perhaps repeating under new circumstances the radical gesture of the French New Wave school, the Romanian New Wave looks back in anger and from that anger weaves, unpretentiously, the texture of a new kind of cinema, which redeems socialism on the basis of its revolutionary potential, proving that realism at its best does establish a relation between experience and memory (2010: 23).

In other words, what Porumboiu and his colleagues do should be interpreted as a conscious effort to reinvent realism for a twenty-first century understanding of the ambiguous revolutions of recent history.

The turn to the difference between image and symbol, and to the definitions of what "conscience" and "police" mean in _Police, Adjective_ , also demonstrates Porumboiu's concern for the type of "abstract" imagery that "audiences around the world," _pace_ Elsaesser, can fill in with their own experiences. Contemporary Western audiences may, for instance, be prompted to reflect on their disavowal of their role as witness as they substitute abstract images (much like the policeman making the drawing at the end of the film) for atrocities of war structured by media coverage which is "increasingly produced as distant, abstract, and uncertain" (Parks, 2001: 606).

Lisa Parks reminds us, for instance, that during the US war against Iraq in 1991, US military and media collaborated in order to make citizen/viewers accept the US military undertakings and thwart their possible opposition. Instead of focusing on Iraqi casualties and devastation, the commercial television networks created euphemistic catch phrases for the war such as "Operation Desert Storm," "Showdown in the Gulf," and "collateral damage" (2001: 598). Moreover, reminding us that the circulation of US satellite images "was calculated and strategic" in the televisual coverage of the 1995 war in Bosnia, Parks underscores that these images' "remoteness, emptiness and abstraction privilege the panoramic and the territorial over that of the close-up and the bodily" (2001: 593). Ultimately, examples such as those given above reveal that in Porumboiu's films, the national loses its primacy and ultimately accedes to political universality. In other words, insofar as they are neither essentialist nor constructivist, one may very well call them "post-national."

 **Figure 7.5** Ground Troop Movements: Image for the Operation Desert Storm on Wikipedia's page for the Gulf War.

 **Notes**

1 For W.T. Mitchell, 9/11 does not name the event, but day One of an event whose days are indefinite, unnumbered. It stands for an "emergency in which the emergent order has yet to make itself clear" (2002: 568). Akira Lippit, citing Noam Chomsky among others, points out on the other hand that September 11, 2001 is the _second_ 9/11, as it comes after September 11, 1973 when a US-backed coup-d'état overthrew the government of democratically elected president Salvador Allende Gossens and installed the Pinochet dictatorship. Lippit comments: "Two 911s, each singular, although the first one has received its name posthumously after the second 911, after the fact and as an aftereffect of the second 911, underscoring the first 911 as an event that has not reached its end" (2008: 144).

2 The interview can be watched in Romanian at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64RU43lTQ8s&NR=1. It is part of a television show called _Inapoi la Argument_ ("Back to Argument") which aired on the Romanian television station TVR Cultural in February 2010.

3 _Politist, Adjective_ , translated in English as _Police, Adjective_ is also a strange title. In English, "police" exists only as a noun and as a verb, whereas in Romanian "police" can be an adjective as well. If a policeman does not function as a noun, as an adjective this means that he is not standing by himself, that he is "dependent." An adjective describes a noun, is merely an attribution, it does not stand on its own. The Oxford English Dictionary defines "adjective" as "that which cannot stand alone; a dependent; an accessory." The example OED gives to illustrate the word "adjective" is from Thomas Fuller's _Holy War_ (1639) and quite illustrative: "Subjects should be adjectives, not able to stand without their prince."

4 For an analysis of this documentary, see Rohringer, 2009: 199–219.

5 For more discussion of this theme, see Alain Badiou, 2006.

6 For Deleuze, using a symptomatological method involves taking apart certain symptoms and grouping together others which were previously disconnected. As a consequence of such reconfigurations of relations between symptoms, new syndromes are created, not in the sense of creating or inventing an illness, but rather, of recognizing a symptomatological table in order to individuate the signs of an illness in different, more refined ways.

7 In "Back to Argument." Online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64RU43lTQ8s&NR=1.

 **References**

Agamben, G. (2000) _Means without End: Notes on Politics_ (trans. V. Binetti and C. Casarino). University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Badiou, A. (2006) _Being and Event_ (trans. O. Feltham). Continuum, New York.

Baudrillard, J. (1994) _The Illusion of the End_ (trans. C. Turner). Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.

Deleuze, G. (1995) _Negotiations: 1972–1990_ (trans. M. Joughin). Columbia University Press, New York.

Derrida, J. (2004) _Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida_ (ed. G. Borradori). University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Derrida, J. (2007) A certain impossible possibility of saying the event (trans. G. Walker). _Critical Inquiry_ , 33: 441–461.

Elsaesser, T. (2005) _European Cinema Face to Face With Hollywood_. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam.

French, P. (2007) _12:08 East of Bucharest_. _The Observer_ , August 19, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/aug/19/worldcinema.drama> (accessed March 19, 2011).

Hall, R.A. (1999) The uses of absurdity: the staged war theory and the Romanian revolution of December 1989. _East European Politics and Society_ , 13 (3): 501–542.

Harris, M. (2010) Romania finds bold new voice in _Police, Adjective_. _Straight.com_ , January 28, 2010, http://www.straight.com/article-282239/vancouver/romania-finds-bold-new-voice (accessed January 24, 2010).

Ieta, R. (2010) The new Romanian cinema: a realism of impressions. _Film Criticism_ , 34 (2/3): 22–38.

Kotkin, S. (2009) _Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment_. Modern Library, New York.

Lawson, G. (2011) Introduction: the "what," "when" and "where" of the global 1989, in _The Global 1989: Continuity and Change in World Politics_ (ed. G. Lawson, C. Armbruster and M. Cox). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 1–20.

Lippit, A. (2008) Aftereffects of the end of the world (I ♥ NY). _Differences_ , 19 (2): 127–145.

Manghani, S. (2008) _Image Critique and the Fall of the Berlin Wall_ , Intellect Books, Chicago.

Martin, A. (2006) Kind of a revolution, and kind of not: digital low-budget cinema in Australia today. _Scan_ , 3 (2), <http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=76> (accessed May 5, 2011).

Mitchell, W.J.T. (2002) 911: Criticism and crisis. _Critical Inquiry_ , 567–572.

Parks, L. (2001) Satellite views of Srebrenica: tele-visuality and the politics of witnessing. _Social Identities_ , 7 (4): 585–611.

Pavel, D. (2000) The textbooks scandal and rewriting history in Romania: letter from Bucharest. _East European Politics and Society_ , 14 (2): 179–189.

Peranson, M. (2009) Corneliu Porumboiu. Interview. _Cinema Scope_ , <http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs39/spot_peranson_porumboiu.html> (accessed January 13, 2011).

Pintilie, L. (2006) Corneliu Porumboiu: _A fost sau n-a fost_? Istoria celor trei titluri (Corneliu Porumboiu: Was there, or was there not? The history of the three titles). _Liternet.ro_ , <http://editura.liternet.ro/carte/211/Corneliu-Porumboiu/A-fost-sau-n-a-fost.html> (accessed January 5, 2011).

Porton, R. (2010) Language and power: an interview with Corneliu Porumboiu. _Cineaste_ , 35 (2): 26–29.

Porumboiu, C. (2006) Corneliu Porumboiu, autorul filmului _A Fost sau n-a fost_ (Corneliu Porumboiu, author of _12:08 East of Bucharest_ ). Interview. _Observatorul_ , http://www.observatorul.com/articles_main.asp?action=articleviewdetail&ID=4220 (accessed January 5, 2011).

Rohringer. M. (2009) The making of history: the different faces of the so-called revolution in Romania, in _Documents on the Balkans – History, Memory, Identity: Representations of Historical Discourses in the Balkan Documentary Film_. Scholars Publishing, Cambridge, pp. 199–219.

Rossini, A. (2009) East of '89. _Osservatorio balcani e caucaso_ , <http://www.balcanicaucaso.org/eng/Regions-and-countries/Romania/East-of-89> (accessed January 10, 2011).

Siani-Davies, P. (1996) Romanian revolution or coup-d'état? A theoretical view of the events of December 1989. _Communist and Post-Communist Studies_ , 29 (4): 453–465.

Tileaga, C. (2008) What is a revolution? national commemoration collective memory and managing authenticity in the representation of a political event. _Discourse & Society_, 19 (3): 359–382.

York, A.R. (1983) Presuppositions and speech acts in Beckett's _Fin de Partie_. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. Section C: Archaeology, Celtic Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature 83 C, pp. 239–250.

# 8

# Cinema Beyond Borders

#  _Slovenian Cinema in a World Context_

Meta Mazaj and Shekhar Deshpande

 _You have all seen Slovene natural landscape. You all know our economic and ­gastronomic landscape. But is it possible that some of you might be interested in some pictures that formed on our mental or even sentimental landscape? It's quite risky to present Slovenia and its cinema to the people who visit it at least once a year. It's even_ _more risky to present it to people who live here every day. Instead of_ ethos _and_ ethnos, _I would prefer to talk about_ photos _and_ pathos: _about [a] few_ moving pictures _and some emotions they were able to create in their time – and to stay in our minds. I hope that through some of those pictures you would also feel parts of our_ _cinematographic history – and when I say "ours," I don't have in mind national frontiers but simply this part of the world and this part of its first – and last – century_ _._ (Pelko, 2006)

One of the distinct characteristics of contemporary Slovenian cinema is that it is a "small" cinema in the scheme introduced in Hjort and Petrie's work on "the ­cinema of small nations" (2007), with a population of about two million people that has produced about eight features yearly over the past two decades. Since the mid-1990s, the work of the young generation of Slovenian filmmakers, such as Jan Cvitkovič, Damjan Kozole, Igor Šterk, Janez Burger, Hanna Slak, and Maja Weiss, started receiving ­considerable festival exposure and international recognition, ­suggesting a remarkable cinematic renaissance and the emergence of a new wave. Some of the recent films, particularly Damjan Kozole's _Rezervni deli_ ( _Spare Parts_ , 2003) and _Slovenka_ ( _Slovenian Girl_ , 2009) and Vinko Mönderndorfer's _Pokrajina št. 2_ ( _Landscape no. 2_ , 2009), have been released in the United States and international markets to relatively wide acclaim. Slovenian cinema also makes its presence felt in the form of retrospectives and ­screenings of individual films from Cannes and Barcelona to New York and Los Angeles and has become a dynamic participant in the regional and global networks.

Despite its recent presence on the international stage, Slovenian cinema is still caught up in what Hjort has described as a "politics of recognition, the desire to see expressions of culturally inflected identities recognized as valuable both ­internally and externally" (Hjort and Petrie, 2007: 25), a struggle to carve out a ­visible spot and "stage oneself" through film that is so typical of many small nations. Stojan Pelko's invitation to see his country well beyond the natural ­landscape into the "mindscape" in picture frames, his call to see Slovenian cinema as an important part of the country's identity, can be understood on the one hand as a call to transcend the lack of confidence that is "a typical marker of small nationhood" (Hjort, 2007: 25), but it also points to the significance of the politics of recognition that determines the positioning of such small cinema in the broader context of European and world cinema. The forces influencing which cinemas are noticed are complex and multiple, from the financial pressures which barely allow filmmakers from the small producing countries to fund their projects, through the demanding and expensive publicity machinery at the major film festivals, to the reliance on state-sponsored retrospectives abroad that may help attract the critics and the media. In addition, some of those in the media and the academic world who write on film approach small cinemas with trepidation, often with preconceived notions about films from small countries, and fixed conceptual frameworks that determine the strategy of inclusion and exclusion.

While this interplay of forces characterizes many, particularly small, cinemas, we will examine the position of Slovenian cinema on the international stage as ­emblematic of the dialectic between political, economic, and institutional forces and of the dominant conceptual paradigms that define small cinemas and thus help shape the politics of recognition and cinematic mapping. This dialectic marks the struggle for recognition on the map of world cinema, and, to gain insight into it, we intend to use Hjort and Petrie's concept of "the cinema of small nations" (2007) and Fredric Jameson's writing on regional cinemas (1986; 2004); while the first offers ­useful empirical mapping of cinemas of small nations, the second charts an influential conceptual paradigm that serves as a lens through which we understand and define small cinema. If the position of Slovenian cinema – its popularity at home on the one hand and its invisibility on the international stage on the other – is not ­atypical, it offers important insights into the process of marginalization and points to a need to consider examples of "small cinema" away from their conceptual encasings or, as Dudley Andrew put it, free of the "discursive weight that cinephiles (critics) and academics (theorists) have brought to bear upon them" (2009: 913).

#  **Slovenian Cinema as Small Cinema**

The concept of "small cinema," proposed formally by two works, _Small Nation, Global Cinema_ : _The New Danish Cinema_ by Mette Hjort and _The Cinema of Small Nations_ by Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie, has gained wide currency in film studies. It is an important intervention in film studies, particularly for cinemas that are vibrant yet relegated to a marginal place both in film studies and in the geopolitics of the world.

The suggestive title of _Small Nation, Global Cinema_ shows clearly that the intent here is to "understand the nature and dynamics of globalization from the ­perspective of small nations" (Hjort, 2005: 24) in order to move beyond the broad discourse of globalization and understand how it works in specific contexts. The central purpose of such a study is to map out the empirical as well as discursive status and relationships of small cinemas to their broader, world contexts. Borrowing the notion of small nations from political science, the concept of small cinema is useful to film studies in assessing how a specific film industry is shaped by and attempts to influence, in its own ways, forces of globalization, retaining the centrality of the nation in understanding the transnational and global processes. In their introduction to _The Cinema of Small Nations_ , Hjort and Petrie emphasize that the concept clearly shows the "persistence of nation in various transnational ­constellations" (2007: 2). It is the nuanced approach to the relationship between the national and transnational or global, and the charting of identity of small ­cinema as both an empirical, geopolitical entity and a cultural, discursive ­formation that makes the concept of small cinema viable in the emerging contexts of ­globalization or world cinema.

Approaching Slovenian cinema as a small cinema in these terms is key to ­understanding the dynamics of Slovenian cinematic landscape and film industry. Even though Slovenian cinema has a long and unique history within the broader context of (former) Yugoslavian cinema, it emerges as a distinct national cinema in the mid-1990s with the founding of the Slovenian Film Fund (SFF) in 1994, which replaced the Ministry of Culture as the new state funding agency for film ­production. While individual film projects were carried out by independent film producers, who provided 10–20 percent of the film's budget, the fund significantly promoted the emerging new talents of the early 1990s (most of them young first-time directors), backed the debut works of more than 20 filmmakers in its first decade and significantly increased the pace of film production.1 In the two decades following its founding, 65 theatrical feature films were produced, most of them either entirely or partly financed by the fund, with another 13 films as co-­productions. TV Slovenia, in addition, became an important backer of the Slovenian film production, participating in over 30 theatrical features. In addition to film financing, the fund is also charged with promoting Slovenian cinema in foreign countries and with organizing numerous retrospectives abroad, where the fund presents not only contemporary films but also classics (as in the 2008 ­retrospective of Slovenian cinema at the Lincoln Center in New York).2 The fund has also presented films at important international film festivals, such as Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Rotterdam, Toronto, San Sebastian, and Karlovy Vary.

The central position of the SFF can be considered a benchmark for Slovenian cinema, for until the 1990s, Slovenia was practically the only Central European country which had failed to produce a significant body of cinematic art and was literally stuck when it came to filmic production. Now the festival successes and transnational visibility of the new generation of young Slovenian filmmakers have given Slovenian cinema a visible spot on the larger cinematic map and have urged film critics to reconsider Slovenian cinema as a national cinema distinct from that of former Yugoslavia, a broad umbrella under which Slovenian films were ­traditionally placed. Further, considering the number of cinemas in Slovenia (close to 100), films like Košak's _Outsider_ (1995), Burger's _V leru_ ( _Idle Running_ , 1999), Cvitkovič's _Odgrobadogroba_ ( _Gravehopping_ , 2005), Đurić's _Kajmak in marmelada_ ( _Cheese and Jam_ , 2003), and Naberšnik's _Petelinji zajtrk_ ( _Rooster's Breakfast_ , 2007) have had a substantial audience in Slovenia, often outperforming the most ­successful Hollywood blockbusters.

The important role of this national film agency (as controversial in its financial politics as it may be) in boosting national film production is particularly instructive in the context of the 1990s, which announced a new beginning for Europeanism through the implementation of various pan-European support mechanisms, especially the MEDIA programme and the Eurimages Fund. As Luisa Rivi points out, these programs were essential in the case of small productions from the countries of Eastern Europe, where filmmakers used to be dependent on state support (2007: 58). Slovenia itself became a member of the Eurimages fund in 2001 and the MEDIA programme in 2003, participating in, among other things, the co-­production of the hugely successful _No Man's Land_ by Danis Tanović (shot almost entirely in Slovenia), which ended up winning the Academy Award for best foreign feature in 2001. In 2005, the fund also became a member of the European Film Promotion, the only European network devoted to the promotion of European film outside Europe. However, despite the opportunities created by these new initiatives, which clearly played a significant role in the promotion of new European film culture, the existence of the fund, a state agency, remained key to Slovenian film production. Sources such as the MEDIA programme would contribute up to 50 percent of the cost of the film production, and the rest would originate from other funding (­public or private) sources; similarly, Eurimages grants only support films that already have 50 percent of their financing covered. For a country as little as Slovenia, where substantial private investments into film production are still difficult if not impossible to attract because of the country's size and the small potential for domestic commercial return, it is often necessary at least to have initial support from the national film institution before seeking additional funding from pan-European programs. It is the filmmaker's dependence – a frustrating one at that – on these state institutions, and not only the lack of film infrastructure, that led the Slovenian filmmaker Damjan Kozole to ­proclaim that "it's easier to become an astronaut than a filmmaker in Slovenia" (2009) and the leading Slovenian film producer, Danijel Hočevar, to emphasize the ­importance not of pan-European and global mechanisms but rather of local and regional ­collaborations (which includes the crucial involvement of national television):

What all the states in Southeast Europe should understand is that they will always be in a subordinate position in relation to Western Europe. We need to unite our small financial resources so that we are more open to co-productions; we shouldn't ­gravitate towards the West for finances where we are not going to be interesting with our local projects. (in Trajkov, 2003).

Thus, it is the consideration of Slovenian cinema as small cinema that provides us with a better understanding of the key role of local, regional (which in Slovenia's case includes former Yugoslav and Eastern European networks) collaboration within a broader, pan-European network, where the local institutions and ­industries are not simply cannibalized by the global forces.

As important as it is to acknowledge the advantages of the concept of small cinemas, which recovers the too-easily buried significance of national institutions in the global arena, it is equally imperative to consider its troubling implications. For Hjort and Petrie, the concept of small cinemas is not meant to be a demeaning characterization that reduces these nations to a marginal position because of their small, suggestively insignificant size (2007). Nevertheless, in the field of competing marketing forces, where the number of films begging for a visible spot and the places from which they come rapidly increases, the process of marginalization implied in the notion of small cinemas is difficult to escape. Consider one of the early provocations of this kind cited by Hjort and Petrie (2007: 3), Bordwell and Thompson's problematic account of "small producing countries," where they say that cinemas of Mexico, Columbia, New Zealand, and Ireland have a place in the history of cinema in part because they share common traits. The specific features that Bordwell and Thompson identify with these "smaller" national cinemas include "the strategies of using national subject matter and exploiting picturesque local landscapes" (qtd in Hjort and Petrie, 2007: 3). This homogenizing posture points to the prevalent tendency in film studies, further perpetuated by the publicity machinery of film festivals, to see a group of films from a specific nation in terms of similar aesthetic and narrative commitments. It has serious implications for cinemas that are struggling with a politics of recognition according to which they will always be seen through an essentializing lens of some preconceived national character or conceptual framework.

A significant case presents itself in the visibility of contemporary Iranian and Romanian cinemas on the world stage, first generated by their presence at the film festivals then put firmly in place by the critical discourse they generated. Bill Nichols provides a formidable introduction to how film festivals produce a space where one can encounter films from "unfamiliar contexts," thus opening up ­avenues to think about cinema outside of one's own position (1994). His ­encounter at the Toronto Film Festival in 1993 with a "sizable cluster" of films from Iran led him to discover that "certain similarities began to arise against the ground of this unfamiliar cinema" (Nichols, 1994: 79). In the process of discovering Iranian ­cinema, which has achieved its fame through film festival circuits, Nichols ­identifies a "form of narrative structure that could be called inferential," as he also locates patterns of editing and composition, all leading to qualities that emerge from the films (1994: 80). There is no doubt that an initial encounter with any cinema ­outside of one's context leads to the imposition of patterns and structure on the as-yet-unknown and unfamiliar. It is important to consider, though, how the ­persistence of such readings, aided by the festival machinery, confers a notion of identity on cinemas struggling for recognition, and how a gap emerges between the collective imagination that is developed within a nation and one that grows from the responses to the films from the outside world. Although Nichols points out that the process of discovering form and inferring meaning is crucial in that it "defines the act of making sense from new experience" (1994: 80), the impulse to infer meaning and to categorize that experience into existing frames of ­interpretation also inevitably forces a homogenizing and reductive construction of that cinema.

Romanian cinema has been similarly characterized as a rather uniform cinema, generating an exciting "new wave" because the emergent generation of Romanian directors all received festival recognition within a short time of each other. Here also, this small cinema, despite the resistance its filmmakers have expressed to being perceived as a coherent group, is received in the shorthand of perception, as a group of films showing their "hallmark humor and deadpan style" (Roddick, 2007: 37) or sharing "a penchant for long takes and fixed camera positions; a taste for plain lighting and everyday décor; a preference for stories set amid ordinary life" (Scott, 2008).

Although Slovenian cinema has not achieved the kind of spotlight that is given to Iranian or Romanian cinema, critics who have considered the new Slovenian ­cinema similarly tend to trace commonalities and characteristics that would define the new wave as a whole. Tom McSorley, in one of the more comprehensive accounts, defines the Slovenian cinematic wave in terms that in fact apply to most new waves, as "a winning combination of artistic invention with low budgets, ­intimate stories, marginal protagonists, and location shooting" (2006: 1). After offering an account of the diversity of the films, he asserts that "what unites all these disparate ­narratives is a sense of marginality and alienation that stem from making – for Slovenia – yet another transition from one political and economic order to the next, all the while trying to retain autonomy and dignity in the ­process; to resist, however modestly" (2006: 3). Likewise, Zdenko Vrdlovec, in his indicative title "Slovenian Outsider Gone with Express Train," suggests that "it has been through the forms and motifs of marginality that Slovenian cinema has touched on domestic transitional reality and the new status of Slovenia as an independent country" (2003: 331). He traces this tendency from films like Metod Pevec's _Carmen_ (1995), which focuses on the social fringe and a group of social outcasts (tramps, whores, and gypsies), continuing with Košak's _Outsider_ (1997), which centers on a decadent, lost, rebellious punk youth, and Burger's _Idle Running_ (1999), about an eternal student vegetating in his dorm room with no sense of direction or ambition.

Thus, small cinemas not only have to struggle to be recognized for their ­contributions, but they must also struggle against being reduced to essential ­narrative and aesthetic qualities that can be easily traced to the established political and ideological framework of the nation.

#  **When Small Means Invisible**

The important and problematic role played by the conceptual parameters of small cinemas in determining their visibility becomes more apparent in the case of Slovenian cinema, which barely manages to be noticed, let alone receive the ­recognition of some other smaller cinemas. It is not surprising, then, that those few accounts of Slovenian cinema which do exist must begin with, and focus on, identifying its place on the map rather than discussing or understanding the films. For example, in an article that sums up the problem in its title, "Finding Slovenian Cinema on the International Map," Sandy Mandelberger begins an account of the retrospective of Slovenian cinema at Lincoln Center in New York City in 2008 thus: "What most Americans do not know about the country of Slovenia could easily fill the mileage that separates the two countries" (2008). Tom McSorley, in his account of the new Slovenian cinema, begins his article in similar terms: "Off the beaten, banal, accelerated track of globalization, somewhere among the ruins of that seemingly anachronistic and unfashionable notion of 'national cinema,' you will discover a small, tenacious surprise called Slovenia" (2006). And responding to the first New York retrospective of Slovenian Cinema in 2003, Brian Požun's piece in _Kinoye_ , which presents "new perspectives on European film" declares that Slovenian cinema is "terra incognita no more" (2003:1), only to express hope that the event brings it back onto the map. Scarcely any scholarly articles or broader coverage of Slovenian cinema exist. And the most famous Slovenian outside the country, philosopher-film theorist Slavoj Žižek, whose sharp insights into the films of Hollywood and elsewhere is one of his trademarks, and who has spoken widely about the internationally visible Balkan films, has all but ignored any significant mention of Slovenian films, which have a strong presence in the capital Ljubljana, where he resides for part of each year. In the insightful interviews he has given on the Balkan peninsular and its cinema (Lovink, 1995 and Žižek, 2008), he tends to align himself with the Western critics' perspective on Balkan cinema, alluding only to the already famous, and famously controversial, Balkan filmmakers (such as Kusturica) even as he frequently brings up the specific context of Slovenia. It is ­difficult to interpret Žižek's as-yet unexplored silence on Slovenian cinema, but it certainly underscores the invisibility of the major cultural product of the country in which he is so keenly involved.

If Slovenian cinema is not easily identified in an empirical sense it becomes equally difficult to find its identity on a conceptual map of world cinema, where it remains marginal at best, even as other small cinemas have begun to appear on the radar of discourse. Circumventing both the quantity and quality of film ­production, it is the discursive construction of small cinema that can help us understand its positioning on the larger cinematic map. One of the notable and influential attempts to define smaller cultural entities within the larger framework is Fredric Jameson's seminal article "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism" (1986), whose key ideas are then extended to the context of small ­cinemas, particularly Balkan cinema, in "Thoughts on Balkan Cinema" (2004). If the concept of small cinemas provides a way to frame small cinemas in an ­relatively empirical framework of identities, then Jameson's work charts one of the ­dominant paradigms of how small cinemas are seen from and defined by the outside world, offering a useful illustration of why some (small) cinemas end up achieving broad, though reductive recognition, while others continue to be undiscovered by any spotlight on the world stage.

In his "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism," Jameson outlines an expansive theory to grasp the place of emerging literatures from the third world into the canons of world literature when he says that "any conception of world literature necessarily demands some specific engagement with the ­question of third world literature" (1986: 68). His specific treatment of third world literature sheds light on how the marginal continue to stay in their assigned places in the scheme of world cultures, literatures, and cinemas. The article puts forward three important aims in examining third world literature as part of world ­literature: first, it places the construction of the nation and the marginal in a broader, global context; second, it puts forward a perspective of the dominant that looks at the third world as the "other"; and third, it provides a singular rationale for reading marginal and diverse literatures as part of a larger totality in which all enunciative positions are always-already part of the discourse of the dominant. For the nations of the third world, as he conceives it, there is urgency in the notion of a nation, especially when one looks at the emergence of nations in the third world after their liberation struggles and in the wake of the demands for their own identities on the world stage (a situation quite similar to the demands on national identities after the end of the Cold War and the breakup of Yugoslavia). These nations, Jameson says, represent their national identity in narratives where the figure of the nation assumes an allegorical form which is overt and conscious. This unique sense of allegory shows how the narrative of a national community is embodied in the psychic or existential life of an individual character and, for Jameson, is a unique attribute of the third world nations. Jameson clearly suggests here that the national identity of small, marginal nations is a product of their position in relation to the first world and its dominant discourse rather than some sort of internal reflection of national aspirations. That is to say, national identity is a response to the "gaze" of the outside world, constituted by it and including it, a point that Jameson emphasizes in his elaboration of how identity is constructed in Balkan films after the breakup of Yugoslavia (Jameson, 2004: 235).

In his article on Balkan cinema, or the "cinema of new small nations" in the Balkans as he puts it, Jameson proposes in a tentative form a theory of national cinema (2004). The features he outlines for what constitutes national cinema, ­particularly relevant to post-Yugoslavian nations as well as to the broader Balkan sphere, are strikingly reminiscent to the generalizations of Bordwell and Thompson regarding the cinemas of "small producing countries" cited earlier. In both schemes, these cinemas are reduced to essential features ascribed to them from the outside, reproducing the "gaze" that is brought upon them. The three features outlined by Jameson include "the presence of collective assemblages,... groups as agencies, rather than individuals"; the "emergence or identification of a singular director" who comes to represent that cinema outside national borders (here Jameson thinks that abstraction of this kind is necessary for any small cinema to be noticed as part of world cinema); and a "stylistic distinction" that foregrounds peasant culture or some equivalent aspect as part of its national character (2004: 248–251). Again, Jameson considers here films produced by small nations as part of a generalization that groups them together, as national allegories overtly couched in psychic or existential problems, and in a style that somehow bears the preconceived cultural specificity to the outside viewer. Seemingly generous in including the "cinemas of new small nations" in a larger global framework, this perspective thus ends up further marginalizing the already marginal participants in world cinema, valorizing them as "the other." Once thus situated, these cinemas have the option of marketing themselves as what seems palatable and appealing to the larger audiences outside of their borders or facing obscurity in the vast arena of world cinema.

#  **Cinema of National Allegory: Damjan Kozole**

The invisible place of contemporary Slovenian cinema is a telling example of this conceptual framework of "cinema of small nations." Despite its variety, only one filmmaker – Damjan Kozole – has appeared on the radar of world cinema, ­recalling Jameson's pronouncements about the "emergence of a singular director." Not ­surprisingly, Kozole is also a filmmaker whose work more readily fits into a preset mold that Jameson describes, where the work of one filmmaker is seen to ­encapsulate the imagination of the nation. In fact, Kozole is often seen (problematically so) as a representative of the new Slovenian cinema, and his _Spare Parts_ (2003) has been analyzed in several broader thematic studies (see, for example, Brown, Iordanova, and Torchin, 2010 or Loshitzky, 2010). He was also the sole Slovenian contributor to the Zentropa omnibus production, _Visions of Europe_. Although not as aesthetically compelling as many other new wave directors, Kozole's films have achieved the largest festival recognition and praise, as well as international distribution. _Spare Parts_ (2003), a drama about human trafficking, was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, positively received at 50 other festivals, proclaimed in _The Guardian_ as "one of the strongest and most provocative films of the year" (Bradshaw, 2004: 1), and was included in the list of "10 key films of the New Europe" in the June 2008 issue of _Sight and Sound_. Kozole's next feature, _Delo osvobaja_ ( _Labor Equals Freedom_ , 2004) continued to reap awards (among others the Grand Prix at Valencia), and his most recent feature, _Slovenka_ ( _Slovenian Girl_ , 2009), after a smashing debut at the Sarajevo Film Festival, achieved success at many other international film festivals and became one of the very few Slovenian films to receive distribution in the United States. In contrast to most new wave films that do not directly invoke the contemporary political ­context of Slovenia and its integration into the European Union, in Kozole's films, this new reality provides a potent and critical backdrop – both in _Spare Parts_ , which directly addresses human trafficking and the question of borders in the New Europe, and in _Slovenian Girl_ , which tackles the question of prostitution within the setting of the capital, Ljubljana in 2008 (the year of Slovenian presidency over the European Union), with motorcades sweeping through the city and the ­concentrated presence of international politicians showcasing the glamor of the new Europe.

In international critical circles, Kozole's _Spare Parts_ (2003) is often seen as one of the more important examples of the cross-border or journey genre. The film is, on a general level, an exploration of the paradox of contemporary, global Europe, where open borders coexist with increased boundaries, and where the question of citizenship is magnified and enforced. More specifically, it is about the position of Slovenia, whose transformed frontiers place it on the receiving end of refugees not just from the former Yugoslavia but also from Africa, Kurdistan, China, Pakistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. If the film's title refers to the unfortunate fate of those "lucky" few who do make it past the border control into the promised land (Europe) – they are killed and their organs sold for money – its narrative focuses on the life of smugglers: Ludvik, an experienced smuggler and a former motorcycle racing champion, and Rudi, a novice smuggler trying to adapt to his new role. The film is set in Krško, in the 1970s the triumphant setting of the first nuclear power plant in Yugoslavia, now a depressed industrial town whose existence still revolves around its plant, standing in opposition to the otherwise idyllic, picture-perfect landscape of Slovenia.

In the larger context of cross-border films in Europe, which often frame the question of immigration in Europe around the binary opposites of host/guest country, natives/strangers, traffickers/refugees (regardless of which side of the opposition they stand on),3 Kozole's film presents the problem differently and ­successfully avoids the simple binary relationship between traffickers and ­refugees, perpetrators and victims. Instead it draws a parallel, and thus blurs the line, between the two, placing both groups on the fringes of a criminal underworld, with both groups lacking agency and both trapped and captive in the processes of Europeanization. Krško – the rugged, liminal border zone between Central Eastern (Slovenia) and Western Europe (Italy) – is not only used as a backdrop for the refugee drama but also "bears silent witness to the tragedy of the traffickers themselves who, like the refugees, are the victims of globalization and the New Europe" (Loshitzky, 2010: 24). If refugees are the unfortunate products of the ­sociopolitical processes that prevail in the new Europe, equally, the traffickers are not criminals on the opposite side of the equation but the victims of the same processes, subjected to dehumanization, suffocating in the diseased landscape of pollution and over-industrialization (the main character, Ludvik, is dying of ­cancer, a direct result of his toxic environment). However, what may be considered the strength of the film within the critical discourse on new European cinema also presents us with a problem when the film is considered as the dominant ­representative of Slovenian cinema in a broader context. This straightforward, realist, and apparently faithful representation of the invisible human trafficking business appealed to the international market not only because of its "crime news" marketability (giving the impression of interesting and controversial "action" in an otherwise relatively peaceful and non-eventful country) but because its realist ­aesthetic, combined with images of poverty, crime, an underworld, and other ­similarly gritty and nefarious features, translates smoothly into a familiar signifier for supposedly genuine descriptions of transitional societies such as Slovenia. In direct contrast to its welcoming and positive international reception, the film received heavy criticism at home, and its portrayal of refugees was accused of being stereotypical. Matic Majcen (2010) contrasted the film with Želimir Žilnik's documentary _Fortress Europe_ (2001), whose depiction of Western Europe as the final destination and refugees offers a much more complex, albeit less appealing, image. In _Fortress Europe_ refugees are "ordinary people with real problems, needs and ambitions... several of them highly educated, raking the stereotype that most of them are going to Fortress Europe on the grounds of sex trade, involuntary slavery, etc." (Majcen, 2010). Very much as the Balkan filmmakers who achieved popularity in the 1990s (Kusturica, Dragojević, Manchevski) were criticized, Kozole was accused by Majcen of "autointerpellation,"which according to Majcen "occurs on the axis between impulse on the side of the individual and recognition on the side of the dominant ideology" (2010: 3). In its deliberate offering of the simplistic, semi-popular cinematic discourse to appeal to wider international audiences, "autointerprellation" thus recalls Iordanova's concept of "voluntary self-exoticism" (2001) and Tomas Longinović's concept of "self-balkanization" (2005). Majcen was hardly alone in this critique of Kozole; in fact, as he himself points out, the film resulted in one of the most notorious episodes in the history of Slovenian film criticism, when a group of renowned film critics organized a discussion panel in the national film magazine _Ekran_ and shredded it to pieces, accusing it of being "irresponsible," "fetishist," "trendy," "counterproductive," "childish," "manipulating," to name just a few of the less than complimentary adjectives.

In a broader sense, this controversy surrounding the film and its contradictory reception is important for our purposes because it is indicative of a larger problem of framing small national cinemas and their spots on the map of world cinema. It points to the politics of recognition that not only creates and re-creates a ­considerable division (within Eastern European cinema) between traditionally larger and historically more visible cinemas (those of Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic) and smaller ones (of Slovenia, Macedonia, Estonia, Latvia, etc.), a division that is based purely on the basis of international reach and offers no ­serious account of important cinematic development in these countries, but also makes it impossible to develop nuanced approaches to the processes that occur in each particular national space, even as this space is a part of larger, global entities. The work of Damjan Kozole becomes exemplary in how the enunciations of ­filmmakers from "small new nations" are produced by the very discourse that recognizes them, and how it captures the kind of crises that would embed the film narrative as an allegory of the nation. The problem, therefore, is not so much an individual filmmaker, as the above criticism would have us believe, but the very conceptual and discursive practices that assign to the filmmaker the "national ­burden" of capturing the essence of national cinema if she or he is to be offered a visible spot on the map of world cinema.

#  **Beyond the National in Small Cinema**

In contrast to Kozole's work, the majority of films of the Slovenian New Wave are strongly marked by a distance from the familiar aesthetic and ideological matrices that characterize the discourse of cinema of small nations, and remain – perhaps precisely for this reason – invisible in comparison. In the midst of a glowing ­political and journalistic discourse on Slovenia's successful development and its ascension into membership in the European Union these films show very little interest in the historic event of the creation of an independent Slovenian state or its political and ideological imperatives. Distancing themselves from this presumably crucial historical and political development, they also distance themselves from national heritage and national literature, which has played a key role in ­shaping and maintaining a distinct national identity in Slovenia. Mostly based on original screenplays rather than being adaptations of literary texts, these films thus bracket common characterizations of cinemas of small nations which argue that the cinema of "smaller producing countries" differentiates its low budget films from the more polished imported works by using national literature and history as sources for their stories (Thompson and Bordwell, 2003: 78) and make difficult the process of framing them within the model of national allegory. If the impulse of the small nations to embed their aspirations in national allegories is clearly realized in Kozole's work, other filmmakers explore the medium of film away from easily identifiable frameworks of small cinema. Their cinematic statements can be seen as functioning on a broader, universal level without losing the specificity of the vernacular idiom.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from Kozole's films, which strike a chord with international festival and critical circles yet are unpopular at home and least representative of the new wave of Slovenian films, are films that have been hugely successful with domestic audiences but have had virtually no presence outside of Slovenia and have completely eluded the international festival and critical radar. Films like _Outside_ r (1997) by Andrej Košak, _Jebiga_ ( _Fuck It_ , 2000) by Miha Hočevar, _Kajmak in marmelada_ ( _Cheese and Jam_ , 2003) by Branko Đurić, and more recently _Petelinji zajtrk_ ( _Rooster's Breakfast_ , 2007) by Marko Naberšnik, have commanded more than impressive audience and have often outsold the biggest Hollywood blockbusters – an impressive fact given that Hollywood traditionally wins the box office receipts for eight or nine of the top ten films in most European countries every year. Branko Đurić's popular comedy _Cheese and Jam_ set an all-time box office record for Slovenia in 2003, selling almost 140 000 tickets (Hollywood films sell an average of 100 000 tickets in Slovenia), a record which was recently broken by Naberšnik's romantic comedy _Rooster's Breakfast_ , which in 2007 became the most successful film in the Slovenian film history (achieving about 180 000 admissions), second only to _Troy_ (2004) and _Titanic_ (1997). The film was not only a popular but also a critical success in Slovenia; it won five major awards at the 10th Festival of Slovenian Film, received overwhelmingly positive critical reception, and was Slovenia's 2009 Academy Awards submission to the Foreign Language Film category. And yet, this most commercially successful film in Slovenia is "barely a blip on the international radar" (Rizov, 2008:1).

The "perversely insular" success of _Rooster's Breakfast_ led Vadim Rizov of _IndieWire_ to wonder, "If dank, depressing Romanian films can conquer the film festival world, why not a leisurely, ingratiating portrait of small-town life built around drinking hijinx and a low-key romance ( _Variety_ didn't even review it)?" (2008:1). Whether he knew it or not, Rizov in fact offers an answer in the question itself. _Rooster's Breakfast_ revolves around the story of Gajaš – the elderly owner of a car repair shop who loves to drink, play cards with his buddies, and dream about meeting notorious pop star Severina (who wrote and recorded a song for the film and appears in it), who is coming to town for a concert – and Djuro, his young and attractive apprentice. Djuro falls in love and has an affair with a beautiful woman, who is married to the local mafia boss and pimp, who will spare nothing to get rid of Djuro after he finds out about the affair. The film is a love story set in a very small rural town where people live quiet, slow, lives unnoticed by the larger world, but where their own hidden passions eventually result in a series of dramatic events. Besides the fact that the film is beautifully written and shot, there are several aspects of it that can help explain why this portrait of a time and place had such popular appeal: its sharp humor; great performances (especially from Vlado Novak, who plays Gajaš); its nostalgia for the Socialist past (Gajaš always talks about better times under Tito, when people didn't have to worry about unemployment and health insurance); the role of the notorious pop star Severina (whose song for the film became one of her biggest hits); and the fact that the film is an adaptation of a novel by Feri Lainšček, the most popular writer in Slovenia, whose following Naberšnik has compared to that of Stephen King (in Rizov, 2008). It also helped that the film had one of the biggest marketing campaigns for a domestic product, with advertising that began eight months before the film opened in theaters.

But the very elements that characterize this film's success at home are also the elements that contribute to the its international invisibility. It is not only that the film's vernacular language and humor, its portrait of a local community, its popular references (Severina and Feri Lainšček), the particular focus of its nostalgia, are entirely lost in translation, the very premise of the film and its generic framing make it difficult to place it in the critical discourse that shapes our reception and understanding of Eastern European "small cinema." Naberšnik's film can thus be seen as taking an uncompromising posture that refuses readily to present itself for recognition outside of the local, vernacular idiom.

When asked about the film's non-presence abroad, Naberšnik himself hinted that the film's lightheartedness, its slow-pace, peaceful atmosphere, "non-­eventfulness," and lack of an explicit political context would not be appealing to festival audiences, who expect to see a specific kind of realism that is imbued either with controversy, decay, poverty, crime, and depression, or with bombastic exoticism (of a kind found in Kusturica's films): "My film," said Naberšnik, "is neutral; it's a love story, and has no political context in my country." He continues to explain that while in Romanian films one can clearly sense the "really bad life," which is what makes them interesting for festivals, "in Slovenia, nothing; not one thing... The war is only 10 days long, you know? When I look at the film festivals, even a film like _Kolya_ , which is very romantic... they still had their revolution!" (qtd. in Rizov, 2008). What Naberšnik alludes to in his observations about the lack of dramatic crises suited to the outside gaze is precisely the framework of national allegory that seems essential for the recognition of small cinema, and that is clearly lacking in his film. Avoiding explicit and familiar political context, Naberšnik constructs a rather universal narrative that is nevertheless embedded in, and reflects, specific local and regional traditions, in a style of storytelling that invokes neither the ­conventions of art-house cinema nor those of the mainstream cinema. His films do not offer anything specifically exotic, odd, or particularly "Slovenian" to the outside world.

Positioned in between these two poles – Kozole's cinema as national allegory and domestically popular but internationally invisible films – is the work of the most prevalent group of filmmakers, which most strongly represents the new wave. For filmmakers like Igor Šterk ( _Express, Express_ , 1996; _Ljubljana_ , 2002; _Tuning_ , 2005; and _9:06_ , 2009), Jan Cvitkovič ( _Bread and Milk_ , 2001; _Gravehopping_ , 2005; _Archeo_ , 2011), Janez Burger ( _Idle Running_ , 1999; _Ruins_ , 2003; _Circus Fantasticus_ , 2010), or Maja Weiss ( _Guardian of the Frontier_ , 2002; _Installation of Love_ , 2007) it is not the specificity of the national context and how it is represented in a wider sphere that matters, but rather the specificity of the medium of cinema itself. Their work, while not entirely devoid of its regional, national context, is not only intensely personal but also intensely cinematic, concerned with the ability of the cinematic language to embody individual as well as collective consciousness – ­significant in the context of Slovenian history (as well as many other Eastern European nations), where art, particularly literature, has been pressed into the service to express the ideology of the nation.

Jan Cvitkovič, the leading filmmaker in this group, can be seen as one of the most important and provocative filmmakers in contemporary Slovenian cinema. An archaeologist, actor, writer, and director, Cvitkovič wrote and played the main role in _Idle Running_ (1999) by Janez Burger, a film that announced the new wave in Slovenia. His first feature film, _Bread and Milk_ (2001), presented at the Venice International Film Festival in 2001, received, among other awards, the Golden Lion of the Future and the Luigi de Laurentis Award for Best First Film. In 2002 Cvitkovič worked on a TV series called _Death is Far Away_ , and in 2003 he made the short film _Heart is a Piece of Meat_ , which brought him several short film awards. His second feature film, _Gravehopping_ (2005), won numerous awards at international film festivals, including the Altadis Award for Best New Director at the San Sebastian film festival in 2005, and the Cinema Without Borders Critics Award for the Best Film at the Southeast European Film Festival. His most recent feature, _Archeo_ , was released in 2011 and received the Best Feature Film Award at the fourteenth Festival of Slovenian Film in Portoroz in 2011.

Cvitkovič's first feature, _Bread and Milk_ , one of the first of the new wave films, is considered a major achievement in Slovenian cinema, winning significant awards at the international film festivals and capturing wide viewership at home. Set in the small provincial town of Tolmin (where the director grew up), the film is a story about a recovering alcoholic who, after being dismissed early from a rehab center when the medical staff go on strike, returns home to his wife and teenage son. After a peaceful family day, he goes out to buy bread and milk and runs into an old school friend. Their conversation, which reveals that his friend had slept with our hero's wife years ago, plunges him back into the dark abyss of alcohol. An extraordinary study of the downfall of a nuclear family, the film centers – ironically – on people the country left behind. Certainly ripe with political implications and social critique, the film, with its episodic, elliptical structure, grainy black-and-white cinematography, and stunning use of light, already announces the distinctness of Cvitkovič's style, in which the image dissociates itself from the content in order to explore the depths of its capabilities.

This emphasis on the purely cinematic qualities of the medium (rather than some pre-established political or ideological context) and its ability to capture the often repressed yet significant traces of individual and collective consciousness continues and is further developed in _Gravehopping_ , which in its plot returns to the theme of provincial misfits. The main character here, Pero, is a professional funeral speaker who turns his eulogies into a peculiar form of personal confession. He lives with his widowed father who keeps trying, innovatively but without success, to commit suicide; Pero's sister, Ida, who is mute and deaf, and another sister who is infatuated with her abusive and absent husband. Pero's best friend, Šuki (a local mechanic), and the amazing relationships Šuki develops with other characters, but particularly with Ida, is at the forefront of the narrative. After the brutal rape of Ida by a local gang, Šuki equips his beloved Fiat Cinquecento with sharply welted and deadly wheels (inspired by the 1963 film _Maciste_ ) and strikes back with ­violence (which we never see depicted on the screen, and which ends with his death) to avenge his grossly violated love. Šuki's funeral, the last sequence in the film, is a culmination and at the same time a conceptual and aesthetic subversion of the previous funeral scenes. It is depicted from deep within the soil, silent yet pulsating with life-like sounds; Pero, with so much (this time genuinely) to say is left utterly speechless; and Ida, who has secretly sneaked into Šuki's adored Fiat (in which he is being buried) to join him in death, reinforces the death's silence yet imbues it with life and love that seemed impossible in the world above. This most beautifully poetic scene of the film unites the two in an intimate space where they can fulfill their love and their life only as they are ready to face death.

As in _Bread and Milk_ , it is not so much the mundane small-town reality presented by the plot, but the other-worldly nature of an alternate reality captured by the camera that marks the film, the world that is somewhere in between the physical and the psychic and at the same time transcends them both. As Pelko put it in his insightful review of the film, "It is not the adventures that astonish, but how what happens becomes a filmic event; not the escape of Sonja Savič through the vineyard, but rather how the camera follows her just a breath away; not the final burial but the way the image darkens" (2005: 1). Rather than following the Aristotelian structure whereby events are linked by cause-and-effect logic, each individual scene in the film is built as a separate unit that stands on its own but speaks to the rest in a meaningful and complex way. In this elliptical narrative, it is not the events but the opposing metaphysical fragments that meet and establish a dialogue with each other: birth and death, laughter and crying, heaven and hell, the earth and the sky, violence and love, beauty and ugliness slowly begin to merge into each other without losing their distinctiveness, and it becomes impossible to understand one side of the duality without experiencing the other. Accordingly, the Karst landscape that provides the setting for the film ceases to function as a mere backdrop, a natural landscape but, to return to the opening statement by Pelko, it becomes a "mental" or emotional landscape. As captured on film, the soil that makes up this bucolic landscape shot with caves begins to breathe and becomes perhaps the most significant and determining character in the film. It has the ability to embrace within itself those who cannot materialize their aspirations above ground (Šuki and Ida). It opens up its borders to reach to the sky, but it also bursts out volcanoes of suppressed violence that emerges suddenly and brutally from the otherwise peaceful environment.

Pelko concludes his essay on _Gravehopping_ by meditating on its final scene, ­indicative of what Cvitkovič's films represent. In this final scene, the lovers and the cinema, the image with its arms of visibility and sound, are trapped in silence, just as the screen goes blank to end the film. It is here that Cvitkovič shows what ­cinema both can and cannot do, how it captures what is well beyond its ­capabilities, and how it becomes mute when it cannot. Cvitkovič is in search of that dimension of cinema where it attempts to articulate beyond the given syntax, over the limits. Here, he has freed cinema from the constraints of national narratives, taking it into the realm of language and form, toward an idiom that can be captured neither by what Jameson calls a "style," a simple reflection of what one expects from the outside, or what Bordwell and Thompson have described as a regional essence of cinema. Without losing specificity, the film seeks recognition well beyond what the association with national allegories can offer, something that can be found in the realm of cinematic language and image.

Vying for international recognition, Slovenian cinema, like many other small cinemas, remains productive and popular with home audiences. As those few films that fit the expectations and the dominant conceptual categories gain recognition, most remain invisible despite their remarkable diversity and grasp on the popular imagination of the country. While the logic of recognition of a small cinema in the broader contexts of world cinema is complex and intricate, it is important to recognize that not all cinematic practices and referents can be traced to the same dominant models of world cinema. As Dennison and Hwee Lim point out in their introduction to _Remapping World Cinema_ , most dominant models of world cinema include "a set of smart, politically correct films standing against Eurocentric global media forces" but fail to account for popular genres and internal critical successes (2006: 6). Returning to the films themselves, transcending the "denial of pleasure" for home audiences and "the implicit dichotomy set up between popularity and integrity" (Dennison and Hwee Lim, 2006: 6) in most concepts of world cinema is thus one of the first steps towards recognizing the diversity of small cinemas and including them into the expanding map of world cinema.

 **Notes**

1 One of the most prominent and enduring producers has been Danijel Hočevar and his E-Motion Film.

2 Retrospectives were organized in Germany, Canada, and the Czech Republic in 2001; Hungary and Austria in 2002; Austria, Spain, the United States and Italy in 2003, etc.

3 See, for example, Jasmin Dizdar's _Beautiful People_ (1999), Bernardo Bertollucci's _Besieged_ (1998), and Stephen Frears's _Dirty Pretty Things_ (2002).

 **References**

Andrew, D. (2009) The core and the flow of film studies. _Critical Inquiry_ , 35 (4): 879–915.

Bradshaw, P. (2004) Spare Parts. _The Guardian_ , <http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_review/0,4267,1167230,00.htm>, accessed March 12, 2004.

Brown, W., Iordanova, Dina, and Torchin, Leshu (eds) (2010) _Moving People, Moving Images_. University of St Andrews, St Andrews.

Dennison, S. and Hwee Lim, S. (2006) Situating world cinema as a theoretical problem, in _Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film_ (ed. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim). Wallflower Press, New York, pp. 1–19.

Hjort, M. (2005) _Small Nation, Global Cinema: The New Danish Cinema_. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Hjort, M. and Petrie, D. (eds) (2007) _The Cinema of Small Nations_. Indiana University Press, Indianapolis.

Iordanova, Dina (2001) _Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media_. BFi, London.

Jameson, F. (1986) Third-world literature in the era of multinational capitalism. _Social Text_ , 5 (3): 65–89.

Jameson, F. (2004) Thoughts on Balkan cinema, in _Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film_ (eds Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour). The MIT Press, London, pp. 231–258.

Kozole, D. (2009) Video interview, the Balkan Survey of the Thessaloniki Film Festival, http://cineuropa.org/video.aspx?lang=en&documentID=115859, accessed September 20, 2009.

Longinović, Tomislav (2005) Playing the Western eye: Balkan masculinity and post-Yugoslav war cinema, in _Eastern European Cinema_ (ed. Anikó Imre). Routledge, New York, pp. 35–47.

Loshitzky, Y. (2010) _Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema_. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

Lovink, G. (1995) Reflections of media and politics and cinema: Slavoj Žižek, interviewed. _InterCommunication_ , 14 (June 20), <http://www.ntticc.or.jp/pub/ic_mag/ic014/zizek/zizek_e.html>, accessed July 5, 1995.

Majcen, M. (2010) _Giving Europe what it desires: Damjan Kozole and the cinema of autointerpellation_. The Europeanness of European Cinema Conference, Kings College, London.

Mandelberger, S. (2008) Finding Slovenian cinema on the international film map, <http://filmandfestivals.blogspot.com/2008/07/finding-slovenian-cinema-on.html> (accessed July 14, 2008).

McSorley, T. (2006) Vive la resistance! a new wave from Slovenia. _Cinema Scope_ , 28 (September 11).

Nichols, B. (1994) Global image consumption in the age of late capitalism. _East–West Film Journal_ , 8 (1): 68–85.

Pelko, S. (2005) Maciste & Muta. _Ekran_ , <http://www.odgrobadogroba.com/en/rekli_so/#pelko> (accessed October 8, 2006).

Pelko, S. (2006) Senti-mental landscape. Lecture at the Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia. <http://www. filofest.com/arhiv06/program/pelkoeng.htm> (accessed September 24, 2009).

Požun, B. (2003) Terra incognita no more: the "New Films from Slovenia" season in New York. _Kinoeye_ , 3 (10), <http://www.kinoeye.org/03/10/pozun10.php> (accessed Feb 21, 2008).

Rivi, L. (2007) _European Cinema After 1989: Cultural Identity and Transnational Production_. Palgrave MacMillan, New York.

Rizov, V. (2008) Slovenian Cinema and _Rooster's Breakfast_ , _IndieWIRE_ , <http://www.indiewire.com/article/world_cinema_column_slovenian_cinema_and_roosters_breakfast> (accessed July 16, 2008).

Roddick, N. (2007) Eastern Promise. _Sight and Sound_ , 17 (10): 36–39.

Scott, A.O. (2008) New wave on the Black Sea, _The New York Times_ (January 20).

Thompson, K. and Bordwell, D. (2003) _Film History: An Introduction_. McGraw Hill Higher Education, New York.

Trajkov, I. (2003) We need to unite: leading Slovene producer Danijel Hočevar interviewed. _Kinoeye_ , 3 (8), <http://www.kinoeye.org/03/08/trajkov08.php> (accessed August 20, 2005).

Vrdlovec, Z. (2003) Slovenian outsider gone with the express train, in _Filmography of Slovenian Feature Films: 1994–2003_ (ed. Alenka Korpes and Denis Valič). Slovenska Kinoteka, pp. 277–335.

Žižek, S. (2008) _Euronews_ talks films and Balkans with Slavoj Žižek. _Euronews_ , <http://www.euronews.net/2008/09/12/euronews-talks-films-and-balkans-with-slavoj-zizek/> (accessed September 12, 2008).

# Part II

# Historical and Spatial Redefinitions

# 9

# Center and Periphery,

#  _or_

# _How Karel Vachek Formed a New Government_

Alice Lovejoy

 _New Hyperion_ ( _Nový Hyperion_ ), the first film in Czech documentarian Karel Vachek's Little Capitalist Tetralogy, begins with the following title:

"A real and incomplete story of philosophers, heads of state and church, artists and party secretaries, scientists, ministers of the Federal Government and the ­governments of the Republics, pensioners and prisoners, trades-unionists and ­officials, dissidents and the twilight zone, priests and armed men, the radical right and left, past and present, citizens and their representatives concerning the free ­election comedy – Czechoslovakia 1990."

This paragraph is a concise reduction both of _New Hyperion_ , which documents the Czechoslovak elections of that year, and of the Tetralogy itself, which is populated by characters ranging from politicians in the highest positions to ordinary citizens. Taken together, the Tetralogy's four films – _New Hyperion or Liberty, Equality, Fraternity_ ( _Nový Hyperion aneb Rovnost, volnost, bratrství_ , 1992); _What Is To Be Done? A Journey From Prague to_ Č _eský Krumlov or How I Formed a New Government_ ( _Co d_ ě _lat? Cesta z Prahy do_ Č _eského Krumlova aneb Jak jsem sestavoval novou vladu_ , 1997); _Bohemia Docta or The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart (Divine Comedy)_ ( _Bohemia Docta aneb Labyrint sv_ ě _ta a lusthauz srdce (Božská Komedie)_ , 2000); and _Who's Gonna Watch the Watchman? Dalibor or The Key To Uncle Tom's Cabin_ ( _Kdo bude hlidat hlída_ č _e? Dalibor aneb Klí_ č _k Chaloupce strý_ č _ka Toma_ , 2003) – are an impressive document of the shifts that took place in Czech politics and society from the Velvet Revolution to European Union accession. Vachek's films, however – each over three and a half hours long, garrulous and philosophical – are hardly straightforward chronicles of this transition. In fact, as the Tetralogy progresses, the films move away from these "heads of church and state" and come to focus on a set of characters in the periphery – artists, intellectuals, and former and current ­dissidents. In this process, the Tetralogy interrogates the very constitution of the Czech periphery, delineating a virtual second society that represents the director's own philosophical and idiosyncratic blueprint for an ideal – and ultimately fictional – state.

 **Figure 9.1** _New Hyperion or Equality Liberty Brotherhood_ (Karel Vachek, 1992) PRODUKCE RADIM PROCHÁZKA.

#  **Major and Minor, Nonfiction and Fiction**

The many characters who occupy the Tetralogy can be divided into two principal categories. First are the "major," politically central, characters involved in the History-writ-large that the films depict. These are figures like Václav Havel, Alexander Dubček, and Václav Klaus; characters whom Vachek films in ­government chambers, receptions, and official meetings, as they go about the task of creating and governing a new state. The second category of characters in the Tetralogy, and its most important, are its "minor," or peripheral, figures, individuals who are not politicians, but who nonetheless exemplify the questions and complications of the transition at hand. This set of characters can be further categorized according to their relationships to the Czechoslovak state before and after the revolution. Some, like sculptor Milan Knížák, a former underground figure who has curated the Czech National Gallery since 1999, have, like Havel and others, become ­members of the cultural "center," but unlike Havel, maintain a maverick stance within it. Others, like musician Jim Čert, are former members of the underground who were accused of working with the communist Secret Police. Still others, such as philosopher Ivan Svítak (who was both a politician and public intellectual before his death in 1994), are formerly "peripheral" characters who became central to life after the revolution. Finally, and essentially, are individuals who were on the ­periphery of "official" society under communism, and who remain decidedly on its outskirts. Primary among these are poet and art critic (and former manager of the Plastic People of the Universe) Ivan "Magor" Jirous and poet Andrej Stankovič.

In accordance with their former or current "outsider" status, all of Vachek's "minor" characters function as critical or thinking presences in the Tetralogy, offering a complex and nuanced perspective on the films' action. Their commentary takes different forms, depending on their métier: Jirous reads from his "Swan Poems" in _New Hyperion_ 's opening moments; in the same film, Ivan Svítak delivers philosophical speeches and bard Pepa Nos sings off-the-cuff folk tunes that ­comment on politics in Czechoslovakia and beyond. The most trenchant critiques of the country's transition are often legible in these figures' biographies, which challenge the neat division between past and present, communist and post-­communist, that the revolution of 1989 and its aftermath attempted to impose.

Vachek, however, does not choose his minor, peripheral characters merely on the basis of political conviction, but also according to his own philosophical ­taxonomy of character. There is a clear hierarchy of figures in the Tetralogy, with characters like Jirous and Stankovič occupying its highest ranks. Figures like these, the director says in a 2003 interview in _Revolver Revue_ :

'are absolutely dignified.... I took great care about this, because [my films] compos[e] a particular and defined image of positive thinking in the Czech Republic. For me, this image is made up of a number of things about which we do not talk much. In [these individuals], there are many seeds of change for the future.' (Krumphanzl and Vašícek 2003: 169)

The notion of "dignity" corresponds with Vachek's category of "centeredness," a state of being in which a person

'listen[s] to an inner intuitive sense (wisdom) until... [they] begin to say important things, even when the time does not want to listen to them and what they are saying appears totally stupid to the time. Centeredness depends on the fact that I do what I have to do (listening to the center of my being, not to fate).' (Krumphanzl and Vašícek 2003: 170)

The films of the Tetralogy, according to Vachek, are organized around moments in which individuals display "centeredness," in which they talk about issues that are not often publicly discussed, despite the fact that in doing so, they mark ­themselves as out of step with the world around them (Vachek, personal ­interview). These moments allow us to read dissent in Vachek's films not as a relationship to a government or state, but rather as a philosophical and deeply personal state of being; a general condition of outsiderness.

A final character in the Tetralogy is the director himself. Vachek is the protagonist of his own films, and is present in many of their scenes, either in conversation with his subjects or in acted set-pieces in which he explains philosophical concepts to the camera. In the Tetralogy's episodic and deliberately non-linear structure, which weaves narrative fragments in and out of one another, the director is a ­uniting element. Misanthropic and often combative in his conversations with his subjects, he relies on his own history of exile to create the image of the ultimate outsider. This image is hardly fictional: Vachek was forced to leave Czechoslovakia in 1979, after two banned films – _Moravian Hellas_ ( _Moravská Hellas_ , 1963), a satirical, partly-staged documentary about the Strážnice folk festival, and _Elective Affinities_ ( _Sp_ ř _izn_ ě _ní volbou_ , 1968), a film about the Czechoslovak elections of that year – left him unable to find a job in the film industry. After sojourns in Germany and France, he emigrated to the United States, where he worked, at one point, in the darkrooms of _The New York Times_. Vachek returned to Czechoslovakia in 1984, and worked tending high-pressure boilers and as a truck driver until his return to ­filmmaking in 1989. In the last paragraph of his book, _The Theory of Matter_ ( _Teorie hmoty_ , 2004), he summarizes this experience: "I leave when no one is leaving and I return when no one is returning, and I think that that is my fundamental life ­situation." (Vachek 2004: 128)

Vachek's continued outsiderness is also visible in his stubborn adherence to somewhat anachronistic aesthetic standards in filmmaking. All of the Tetralogy's films are over three hours long and all are shot in 35 mm, a type of film more ­commonly used to shoot fiction films than documentaries. In keeping with this format, Vachek's films straddle generic boundaries. The Tetralogy hinges on the handheld, _cinéma vérité_ style in which much of it – primarily scenes in which "major" characters go about their business (rallies, meetings, performances, etc.) – is shot. Elections are, naturally, a major theme in both _New Hyperion_ and _Elective Affinities_ , and the latter, one of the first _cinema vérité_ films to be made in Czechoslovakia, bears more than a passing resemblance to Robert Drew and Richard Leacock's _Primary_ (1960), an idea to which I will return later. Furthermore, Vachek continually positions himself and his crew within the frame, a traditional device of _vérité_ filmmaking, and one that appears for the first time in _Moravian Hellas_ , in which young brothers Jan and Karel Saudek stand in for the director, conducting provocative interviews with folk artists (and actors portraying them).

Yet whereas in _Elective Affinities_ , the filmmaker's presence serves to authenticate the events documented, Vachek's presence in the Tetralogy (like the Saudek brothers' in _Moravian Hellas_ ) calls the documentary status of his films into question. The four films are filled with long conversations, often staged in symbolically resonant locations, between the director and "minor" characters, as well as periodic set pieces in which Vachek performs for the camera, demonstrating philosophical or literary concepts. In _Bohemia Docta_ , for instance, Vachek films a conversation between himself and Egon Bondy among the massive canvases of painter Alfons Mucha's _Slav Epic_ ( _Slovanská epopej_ ). And in _Dalibor_ , the director marches theatrically in riot gear, holding a shield and baton, as Jan Vodňanský sings "the generals are coming." Indeed, the fictional aspects of Vachek's Tetralogy are as, if not more, integral to its construction as the _vérité_ aspects: the director refers to the four parts of the Tetralogy as "film-novels," and the films take their names from books: _Elective Affinities_ from Goethe, _New Hyperion_ from Hölderlin, _What Is To Be Done?_ from Chernyshevskii, _Bohemia Docta_ from Jan Amos Komenský, and _Dalibor_ from Smetana's opera.

The Tetralogy's proximity to fiction is also borne out in Vachek's relationship to his subjects. Like other documentarians who are characters in their own films – such as Nick Broomfield or Michael Moore – Vachek is often accused of being unnecessarily provocative, manipulative or bullying. His detractors claim that the dialogues in the Tetralogy are less conversations than disquisitions by the director; that the films' considerable length is pretentious or self-indulgent; that the Tetralogy, as a whole or in individual installments, is unwatchable. This is, perhaps, the reaction Vachek desires: in provoking arguments and announcing controversial hypotheses, the director aligns himself with characters like Jirous or Stankovič, "centered" outsiders with the agency to comment authoritatively on current events – or, again, to "say important things, even when the time does not want to listen... and what they are saying appears totally stupid...." (Krumphanzl and Vašícek 2003: 170) Alternately, in keeping with the films' literary nature, we might read Vachek as a _picaro_ – a traveler through the Tetralogy's various episodes and the consciousness through which its viewpoints are refracted – or, better, as a Švejk (for Jaroslav Hašek's novel is central to the Tetralogy's structure, its version of nationalism, and its iconography) (Vachek 2004: 31) . Indeed, as the Tetralogy ­progresses, Vachek leaves less and less room for the contingent moments of _cinéma vérité_ , and comes to rely on these literary or fictional strategies. The director describes his ostensibly nonfiction films' increasing resemblance to fiction as a "progression towards total theater," and this progression, in turn, reflects Vachek's gradual abandonment of the _Realpolitik_ of the Czech state in favor of the philosophical second society that the four films metaphorically build (Vachek, personal interview).

#  **From Center to Periphery**

In _New Hyperion_ , filmed in 1989 and 1990, the narrative of political reversal that the Tetralogy as a whole captures is established: the old guard leaves power, and a new guard assumes it. We meet such a formerly central figure in Josef Bartončík, who was forced out of office over accusations that he informed for the Secret Police. Vachek films Bartončík in a hospital bed, as he shows the director and his crew a copy of the newspaper that claims his history of collaboration and points out the article's errors and inconsistencies. Conversely, the previously officially "invisible" Czechoslovak cultural and political underground becomes visible again, as former dissidents move into politics, in various ways: Petr Cibulka, the creator of "Cibulka's List," a list of figures who Cibulka claims worked with the Secret Police, is present in government chambers, debating the rules for the new election and claiming that the voting system is corrupt; and the newly presidential Havel ­awkwardly addresses his entourage, wearing a T-shirt and holding a beer. Throughout _New Hyperion_ , Vachek remains optimistic about the potential for the periphery to move to the center; about the possibility for "centered" individuals to become the core of Czechoslovak politics. Simultaneously, Czechoslovak politics appear prepared to facilitate this process.

In its confident outlook, as well as in its _vérité_ style, _New Hyperion_ resembles Vachek's _Elective Affinities_ , a film that, twenty years earlier, chronicled the rise to power of politicians who promised a new, and more open, form of governance. In the later film, characters from _Elective Affinities_ (notably Alexander Dubček) return, but in a more important sense, _New Hyperion_ echoes the striking intimacy with which Vachek approached the reformers in 1968, an intimacy enabled by the ­techniques and technology of _cinema vérité_. _Elective Affinities_ ' roving handheld ­camera captures moments that would have startled a contemporary viewer accustomed to mediated, distanced images of communist politicians: close-ups on the faces and hands of Central Committee members at a cocktail party (a gathering that bears a resemblance to the aforementioned gathering in _New Hyperion_ , in which Havel addresses the new government); unscripted encounters with Josef Svoboda within governmental chambers. These recall similar moments in _Primary_ , such as the indelible image of Jacqueline Kennedy's gloved hands fidgeting ­nervously behind her back at a Milwaukee rally, which, Brian Winston argues, "seemed to convey an intimacy with the subject, a candour, which... looked utterly fresh and new." (Winston 1995: 152)

 **Figure 9.2** _Elective Affinities_ (Karel Vachek, 1968) PRODUKCE RADIM PROCHÁZKA.

While on one level images such as these exemplify, quite literally, the now-­mythical ideal of "socialism with a human face," on another level, _Elective Affinities_ ' use of _vérité_ technology and style transforms politics – just as the Prague Spring did – into something approachable and comprehensible. The revolution of 1989 held similar promises of transparency, proximity, and accessibility for Czechoslovakia, and in keeping with this, Vachek has called the Tetralogy a process of "waiting for something better" (Vachek, personal interview). In this sense, it is not unreasonable to view _Elective Affinities_ and its depictions of the Prague Spring and 1968 as the Tetralogy's zero hour, or, alternately, to view _New Hyperion_ as simply a continuation, after an intermission, of the earlier film.

The Tetralogy's second film, _What Is To Be Done?_ , released in 1996, is markedly less optimistic about the prospects for post-revolutionary Czechoslovak ­government and society. By the time this film was released, Slovakia and the Czech Republic had separated, Havel had settled into his presidency, and the concrete tasks of state-building had become less pressing; the euphoria of 1989 muted. In _What Is To Be Done?_ , which is subtitled _A Journey From Prague to_ Č _eský Krumlov, or How I Formed a New Government_ , Vachek brings many of _New Hyperion_ 's "minor" characters – Jirous, Stankovič, filmmaker Jiří Krejčík, and others – together in the eponymous bus trip from Prague to the South Bohemian town of Český Krumlov. During the trip, these "minor" characters engage in lengthy discussions of philosophy, art, and history. This group comes to symbolize the new government that the film's title suggests, constituents and rulers of a state that is centered in the ­geographic and political periphery.

 **Figure 9.3** _What Is To Be Done? A Journey From Prague to_ Č _esky Krumlov or How I Formed A New Government_ (Karel Vachek, 1996) PRODUKCE RADIM PROCHÁZKA.

This government, however, ultimately redefines the very idea of the periphery, largely in step with Vachek's philosophy of character. This is visible in a subplot of the film that follows Jirous, who, as the film progresses, gradually alienates ­himself from his fellow travelers in the bus, drinking heavily and insulting them. By focusing his film's narrative on Jirous, Vachek again holds up the ideal of "centeredness" that the former exemplifies, in the process shifting and narrowing his definition of the "periphery" to exclude formerly peripheral characters who have gravitated to the "center" in the years since 1989. At the same time, figures like Havel and Klaus become even further removed from the film's action, visible only in distanced, media-ready images, or photographed at press events.

The shift in the constitution of Vachek's "periphery" that takes place in _What Is To Be Done?_ is further developed in _Bohemia Docta_ (2000), which also experiments with the idea of creating a new state and a new government. Here, Vachek seeks "centered," peripheral characters in history: Placing a water-soaked picture of Komenský in a spent light bulb, the director brings the author of the text that ­provides one of the film's subtitles, _The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart_ , to life again, while painter Alfons Mucha is present in the film through his _Slav Epic_. Resurrection, in _Docta_ , also signifies the return to public life of ­individuals like Milan Knížák, whom Vachek tells as the two walk through the pathways of Vyšehrad's Art Nouveau cemetery, "I am making a film about the rising of the dead."

 **Figure 9.4** _Bohemia Docta or The Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart_ ( _Divine Comedy_ ) (Karel Vachek, 2000) PRODUKCE RADIM PROCHÁZKA.

This "resurrection" of long-dead figures also points to another important ­element of the Tetralogy: Vachek's concern with exploring and preserving Czech national identity. This identity is one that was born with the writings of figures like Komenský in the 16th century, linguist Josef Jungmann in the 18th, and historian František Palacký during the Czech national revival in the 1840s, and that flourished during the interwar Czechoslovak Republic (Gellner 1994: 140–141). Through the metaphor of resurrection, _Bohemia Docta_ establishes a parallel between the idea of founding a contemporary political culture on this version of national ­identity and forming a government around a peripheral figure. Both acts appear to be, in Vachek's perspective, of vital importance to the future of the Czech lands – perhaps partly as a response to the very different, populist brand of nationalism that arose in Central Europe after 1989.

The concluding film of the Tetralogy, _Dalibor: The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin or Who's Gonna Watch the Watchman_ , unites peripheral characters in the present-day Czech Republic, as well as icons from the nation's past, within Prague's National Theater. The film takes as its core a full-length piano rehearsal of Smetana's opera _Dalibor_ , between whose sections, which Karel Slach captures in fluid handheld camerawork, moving among, above, and below the actors, Vachek inserts conversations with various individuals, whom he places in the theater's seats and boxes. Alongside many of the Tetralogy's core characters, _Dalibor_ also features characters who echo the film's interest in a new set of political questions and problems. These characters, like the anarchist Jakub Polák and members of the group Ya Basta, represent a contemporary generation of dissidents, one concerned with the issues facing the Czech Republic in the new millennium: globalization, the environment, discrimination against the Roma population. And _Dalibor_ , in turn, is filled with a pervasive sense of crisis, as if the theater's walls are a protective shell against the destructive elements in the 21st-century world.

The notion of the theater as shell underscores the centrality, to the Tetralogy, of Vachek's version of Czech national identity, which focuses on language, geography, and culture. Prague's National Theater is a monument to this sort of nationalism: above its stage is emblazoned the phrase "Národ sobě," or "The Nation for Itself," and the myth of the theater's founding holds that, after Prague's German-language theater burned down in the 19th century, Czechs collected donations from their countrymen to build a construction in which performances would be held in Czech. Additionally, however, in _Dalibor_ – a film in which _Elective Affinities_ ' and _New Hyperion_ 's hope for a government based on morality and philosophy, in which the periphery would come to rule justly, has been abandoned – the walls of the theater take on new meaning. Unlike its _vérité_ predecessors, the film becomes a hermetic space in which its characters are removed from official politics, just as official politics are removed from the Tetralogy; the end-point of Vachek's "­progression towards total theater." Indeed, nothing in the film is accidental: the director casts his characters carefully; films an opera rehearsal; and acts out small roles himself in the drama. The contingencies – _vérité_ moments – of the outside world enter the film only in an already-mediated version, through a small television set placed in one of the opera boxes, and the images we see of this world (primarily footage of a plane hitting one of the World Trade Center towers) are terrifying.

 **Figure 9.5** _Who's Gonna Watch the Watchman? Dalibor or The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin/ Who Will Guard the Guard? Dalibor or the Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin_ (Karel Vachek, 2003) PRODUKCE RADIM PROCHÁZKA.

#  **A Second Society**

While the walls of the National Theater offer a suggestive metaphor for the ­segregation of Vachek's second society from the first, the 16-plus hours of the Tetralogy itself might also be read as a meta-expression of this society's boundaries, and as a chronicle or map of its shifts and changes. Here, too, Vachek questions the line between past and present, for not only is the Tetralogy's second society populated by figures who were members of "peripheral" communities in communist Czechoslovakia, it also echoes the structure of these communities.

The notion of a second society is suggested, for instance, in Czech philosopher Václav Benda's 1978 samizdat publication "The Parallel ' _Polis_ '," where Benda writes:

'I suggest that we join forces in creating, slowly but surely, parallel structures that are capable, to a limited degree at least, of supplementing the generally beneficial and necessary functions that are missing in the existing structures.' (Benda 1991: 36)

Benda, in formulating the idea of the parallel _polis_ , borrows from the Czechoslovak cultural underground, whose social configuration Ivan Jirous describes in his seminal 1975 essay "Report on the Third Czech Musical Revival":

'... the goal of our underground is to create a second culture, a culture completely independent from all official communication media and the conventional hierarchy of value judgments put out by the establishment. It is to be a culture that does not have as its goal the destruction of the establishment, because by attempting this, it would... mean that we would fall into the trap of playing their game.' (Jirous 2002: 64–65)

As this quotation illustrates, the cultural underground was deliberately ­non-political – the members of the Plastic People of the Universe, for instance, were brought into politics during their trial in 1976, after which they were adopted as a _cause celèbre_ by Havel and the Czechoslovak dissident movement. Benda's ­parallel _polis_ , conversely, adopts a political model both in name (the Greek _polis_ ) and structure. Despite their differences, both "second societies" (the parallel _polis_ and the cultural underground) were self-sufficient, designed to function entirely independently of "official" society, which the authors and the cultures they were part of perceived as corrupt, bereft of meaning, and dangerous. Vachek's second society shares ­concerns with both. It prizes, as the cultural underground did, ­independence from official culture and its deliberately maverick nature (both emphasized in the films' formal characteristics), while at the same time maintaining a concern for political structures and political history (the Tetralogy never truly abandons the idea of the state or of government).

An important link between the Tetralogy's social structure and those of the cultural underground and parallel _polis_ is its figuration of conversation as a social model. In communist Czechoslovakia, the underground in all its manifestations adopted communication strategies that ensured secrecy and safety; conversation, more difficult to monitor and censor than television, radio, or print, came to stand in for these media. News of underground occurrences was thus disseminated in a fashion that replicated dialogue, passed from person to person and gradually distributed throughout the web of the underground, while conversation also became the model for the circulation of texts within these communities, as _samizdat_ and _tamizdat_ materials changed hands between friends, were read or played aloud to private gatherings. Thus, in addition to their informational capacity, the ­underground's communication networks also reinforced social networks and the idea of community among its constituents, who were often geographically dispersed.

Vachek's films, as I have argued, are constructed around conversations, ­generally between the director and his subjects, but also, at times, among larger groups of individuals. Conversation is the tissue that links the individuals in his films to one another, that creates continuity between the four films of the Tetralogy, and that, in turn, links the politics of Vachek's films to those of the recent past. Conversation and its links to community are also a thematic concern in the films – i.e., in _Bohemia Docta_ , where the mycological concept of the rhizome is used to explain the notion of the underground, a metaphor that also extends to the Tetralogy's "­underground." _Docta_ is interspersed with references to mushrooms: in interviews with ecologists, a conversation with Václav Hálek, a musician who composes by listening to ­mushrooms, and in stand-alone shots of mushrooms that appear throughout the film (each set against the background of a Czech castle, accompanied by the pronouncement of their name and a drumbeat). As these shots suggest, mushroom picking is a cherished activity in the Czech lands, and thus beyond expressing the structure of the underground's social (conversational) networks, the metaphor of the rhizome is also a national reference. If, in _Dalibor_ , the 21st-century world appears terrifying and almost apocalyptic, this world remains outside the film. And perhaps, within the "parallel _polis_ " of the Tetralogy – as in rhizomes that exist invisibly below the surface of the world – lie, as Vachek has said, "seeds of change for the future."

#  **Afterword**

The hope for the future that Vachek's Tetralogy embodies is also visible in the director's pedagogy – and the theme of the rhizome offers a poetic illustration of this point, as it forms the core of former Vachek student Vít Janeček's documentary _Fungus_ ( _Houba_ , 2000). Janeček is one of a number of Vachek's students who became prominent figures in the Czech (and Central European) documentary scene of the late 1990s and 2000s; among others are filmmakers Jan Gogola, Jr., Vit Klusák and Filip Remunda, Erika Hníková, Lucie Králová, and Martin Mareček. All seven have adapted Vachek's techniques and approaches into their own films, which address, variously, the legacy of the Holocaust (Králová and Miloslav Novák's _The Ill-Fated Child_ [ _Zlopov_ ě _stné dít_ ě, 2002]), immigration (Gogola's _Borderless_ Č _eské Velenice_ [Č _eské Velenice bez hranice_ , 2004]), the country's NATO membership (Janeček's _Rules of the Game_ [ _Pravidla hry_ , 2005]), questions of gender and body image (Hníková's _The Beauty Exchange_ [ _Ženy pro m_ ě _ny_ , 2004]). The performativity of their work ranges from the grand theatricality of Klusák and Remunda's _Czech Dream_ (Č _eský sen_ , 2004) to quiet and insistent on-camera questioning by Hníková and Janeček, but in each case it is at the center of the films' social praxis. To put it differently, Vachek's students, following their professor's lead, are asking important questions in a society where the intimate interactions with government that one sees in _Elective Affinities_ and _New Hyperion_ are increasingly impossible.

And as his students are moving further into the tangles of politics and society, Vachek continues to distance himself from them. His 2006 film _Záviš: The Prince of Pornofolk Under the Influence of Griffith's_ Intolerance _and Tati's_ Mr. Hulot's Holiday, _or the Rise and Fall of Czechoslovakia, 1918–1992_ ( _Záviš, kníže pornofolku pod vlivem Griffithovy_ Intolerance _a Tatiho_ Prázdnin pana Hulota _aneb vznik a zánik_ Č _eskoslovenska, 1918–1992_ ) follows the path the Tetralogy establishes, relying less on _vérité_ camerawork and more on static, meditative shots; less on politics (although it is an abiding concern) and more on the everyday, the natural world, the absurd, and the personal. The latter is reflected most clearly in a lecture by the director to his students to which the film repeatedly returns, amidst scenes such as those at a funeral home for pets, or long takes of children circling around a dirt-bike course. Vachek's lecture performs a philosophical function familiar from his earlier films, touching on ideas central to the director's thinking (stories about Czech national figures Jaroslav Hašek and Edvard Beneš, for instance), yet it also gives the distinct sense that _Záviš_ might reflect a process of private stock-taking, much as _The Theory of Matter_ did. And at the same time, this film – as well as Vachek's current project, _The Obscurantist and His Lineage_ , whose subject is metaphysics, the supernatural – represents a further step in the gradual movement towards fiction that has been visible in the director's work since the early 1960s.

 **Note**

This essay was originally published as Lovejoy, Alice. "Center and Periphery, or How Karel Vachek Formed a New Government," _KinoKultura_ 's special issue on Czech ­cinema (no. 4, November 2006), and is reprinted here with minor changes. I would like to thank Michal Bregant, Peter Hames, Vladimir Padunov, and Katie Trumpener for their thoughtful ­readings of earlier versions. The research for this essay was supported by the J. William Fulbright Commission in Prague.

 **Filmography**

 _The Beauty Exchange_ (Ženy pro měny). Dir. Erika Hníková. Czech Republic, 2004.

 _Bohemia Docta or The Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart (Divine Comedy)_ (Bohemia Docta aneb Labyrint světa a lusthauz srdce (Božská Komedie). Dir. Karel Vachek. Czech Republic, 2000.

 _Borderless_ Č _eské Velenice_ (České Velenice bez hranice). Dir. Jan Gogola, Jr. Czech Republic, 2004.

 _Czech Dream_ (Český sen). Dir. Vit Klusák and Filip Remunda. Czech Republic, 2004.

 _Elective Affinities_ (Spřiznění volbou). Dir. Karel Vachek. Czechoslovakia, 1968. _Fungus_ (Houba). Dir. Vít Janeček. Czech Republic, 2000.

 _The Ill-Fated Child_ (Zlopověstné dítě). Dir. Lucie Králová and Miloslav Novák. Czech Republic, 2002.

 _Moravian Hellas_ (Moravská Hellas). Dir. Karel Vachek. Czechoslovakia, 1963.

 _New Hyperion or Equality Liberty Brotherhood_ (Nový Hyperion aneb Rovnost volnost bratrství). Dir. Karel Vachek. Czech Republic, 1992.

 _Primary_. Dir. Robert Drew. US, 1960.

 _Rules of the Game_ (Pravidla hry). Dir. Vit Janeček. Czech Republic, 2005.

 _What Is To Be Done? A Journey From Prague to_ Č _esky Krumlov or How I Formed A New Government_ (Co Dělat? Cesta z Prahy do Českého Krumlova aneb Jak jsem sestavoval novou vladu). Dir. Karel Vachek. Czech Republic, 1996.

 _Who's Gonna Watch the Watchman? Dalibor or The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin/ Who Will Guard the Guard? Dalibor or the Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin_ (Kdo bude hlídat hlídače? Dalibor aneb Klíč k Chaloupce strýčka Toma). Dir. Karel Vachek. Czech Republic, 2003.

 _Záviš: The Prince of Pornofolk Under the Influence of Griffith's Intolerance and Tati's Mr. Hulot's Holiday, or the Rise and Fall of Czechoslovakia, 1918–1992_ (Záviš, kníže pornofolku pod vlivem Griffithovy Intolerance a Tatiho Prázdnin pana Hulota aneb vznik a zánik Československa, 1918–1992). Dir. Karel Vachek. Czech Republic, 2006.

 **Works Cited**

Benda, Václav (1991). 'The parallel 'polis',' in H. Gordon Skilling and Paul Wilson (eds) _Civic Freedom in Central Europe: Voices From Czechoslovakia_. London: Macmillan, pp. 35–41.

Gellner, Ernest (1994). _Encounters With Nationalism_. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Hašek, J. (1974) _The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War_. Penguin, NY.

Jirous, Ivan (2002). 'A report on the third Czech musical revival,' trans. Erich Dluhosch, in Laura Hoptman and Tomas Pospiszyl (eds), _Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art Since the 1950s_. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, pp. 57–65.

Krumphanzl, Robert, and Zdeněk Vašícek (2003), 'O Radosti, důstojnosti a několika dalších věcech,' _Revolver Revue_ 52: 167–178.

Vachek, Karel. Personal interviews with the author, 2000–2006.

Vachek, Karel (2004). _Teorie Hmoty: o vnit_ ř _ním smíchu, rozdvojení mysli a st_ ř _edovém osudu_. Prague: Herrmann & synové.

Winston, Brian (1995). _Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and its Legitimations_. London: BFi.

# 10

# The Polish Black Series Documentary and the British Free Cinema Movement

Bjørn Sørenssen

On February 5, 1956, at the National Film Theatre in London, a group of young documentary filmmakers arranged a screening of their recent work under the title _Free Cinema_. The screening was repeated for three more nights and attracted wide attention, to the extent that it led to a continuation of five more _Free Cinema_ ­programs between 1956 and 1959. As Alan Lovell has pointed out, the initiators of _Free Cinema_ would later claim that it was not really a movement but served as a springboard for a new generation of British filmmakers, most prominently Lindsay Anderson but also Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, Claude Goretta, and Alain Tanner (Lovell and Hillier, 1972: 144–146). Another important impact was that it served as a clean break with the Griersonian utilitarian documentary principles of the prewar and wartime British documentary movement.

The series of six _Free Cinema_ screenings presented films that would later enter the documentary canon: Lindsay Anderson's _O Dreamland_ and _Every Day Except Christmas_ ; Karel Reisz's _Momma Don't Allow_ (with Tony Richardson) and _We Are the Lambeth Boys_ ; and _Nice Time_ by Alain Tanner and Claude Goretta, two Swiss filmmakers residing in London at the time. The British productions were presented in programs 1, 3, and 6, while the three other programs were devoted to French, American, and Polish new cinemas. In these programs not only documentaries but also short films (Truffaut's _Les Mistons_ and Polański's _Two Men and a Wardrobe_ ), feature length fiction (Chabrol's _Le beau Serge_ ), and animation (Norman McLaren, Jan Lenica, and Walerian Borowczyk) were screened.

The common denominators for the programs were films that institutionally fell outside what may roundly be described as the "movie industry" and, in terms of aesthetics, presented a challenge to the visual style of the products of that industry. Furthermore, another common denominator could be termed as "modern ­urbanity," with an emphasis on cultural forms, especially the emerging youth ­culture of the 1950s. Concerning the predominantly documentary focus of the series, there was a clear confrontation with the aesthetics of the British documentary movement, with its strong utilitarian ethos. Lindsay Anderson had already ­challenged the British documentary movement in articles in _Sequence_ and _Sight and Sound_ , and both Reisz and Anderson were significant contributors to the short-lived _Sequence_ , representing an intellectually elitist view on cinema. In an article in _Sequence_ Anderson presented Humphrey Jennings, who was, in many ways, an outsider in the Griersionian documentary movement, as a positive example of a documentary ­aesthetic that in many ways contradicted mainstream British documentary.

Anderson's film _O Dreamland_ is undoubtedly inspired by Humphrey Jennings's 1939 film _Spare Time_ , a film that came under strong crititicism by his contemporaries for presenting a condescending view of the leisure activities of the British working class. Anderson's film from an amusement park is personal (the very quality he found lacking in the work of British documentarists other than Jennings), direct, and uncompromising in its critique of the culture offered to the working class.

The main part of this chapter will, however, be devoted to the films and, ­especially, the documentaries that were presented in the fourth _Free Cinema_ ­program: "Polish Voices."

#  **The Polish "October Spring"**

At the end of October 1956 the Polish Newsreel – _Polska kronika filmowa_ – ­presented an "extra edition" with the title _The Great Gathering_ ( _Wielki wiec_ ) that covered the mass meeting in Warsaw on October 24 at which the newly elected first secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR), Wladyslaw Gomulka, spoke to an enthusiastic crowd of 300 000. The enthusiasm of the crowd was fired by the fact that Gomulka had been reinstated to the Polish Communist Party only two months earlier, after having been ousted in the Stalinist campaign of 1948 and imprisoned between 1951 and 1954.

The eight-minute-long movie reportage from the meeting was carefully edited in order to avoid putting a further strain on the relationship between Poland and the Soviet Union, whose leaders had strongly opposed the choice of Gomulka as party first secretary and even had instigated Soviet troop movements in order to prepare to put military might behind words, a fact referenced by Gomulka in his speech (Kemp-Welch, 2008: 103.) This reference was omitted in the newsreel, which instead concentrated on Gomulka's conciliatory remarks towards continued Polish–Soviet friendship and cooperation. However, the newsreel contained some of the criticism the prodigal son directed at the former leadership of the People's Poland, among which was his criticism of the unwillingness to allow an open discussion about party policy and negligence of elementary civil rights, which, in Gomulka's words, led to distortion of the ideas of socialism. He also pointed to the discrepancy between official propaganda and everyday life in Poland: "Words did not find a reflection in the actual reality."

The fact that this event and these words appeared on hundreds of movie theater screens in Poland within a week was in itself proof that something had indeed changed in Poland and that the Polish movie establishment was involved in this change. As a matter of fact, because of several factors, to be discussed in this chapter, the film community of Poland was, in many ways, in the vanguard of the events leading up to the Polish "October Spring" of 1956 because of initiating a series of documentary films that would later be termed the "Black series" ( _czarna seria_ ).

In this chapter the _czarna seria_ will be presented in two contexts. The first ­concerns the question of how a series of critical realist documentaries was possible at all, given the political climate of the the mid-1950s in Poland. Possible answers may be found, I suggest, in the organization of the Polish film production system as well as political conditions that were unique in comparison with other countries behind the iron curtain. The other question concerns the impact of the _czarna seria_ outside Poland and both inside and outside the Eastern bloc, especially the connection with the British _Free Cinema_ movement of the same period, a connection that has been largely overlooked by documentary film historians.1

#  **The** **_Czarna Seria_** **– Critical Social Documentaries in a Socialist State**

What very soon was given the name _czarna seria_2 started in 1955 with a 12-minute film on youth problems in Warszawa, _Look Out! Hooligans!_ ( _Uwaga!Chuligani!_ ) by Jerzy Hoffman and Edward Skórzewski. The film starts dramatically in a dark alley: the audience catches a glimpse of the faces of youths as they light cigarettes, a ­close-up of a knife and then, as the titles come – accompanied by dramatic music – a fight between youths, leaving a lifeless body on the ground for the police and ambulance to take care of. Only at this point does the normally ubiquitous offscreen commentary begin and, as Gershwin's _An American in Paris_ is played over the busy everyday life of Warsaw, the theme is introduced: how do we deal with violent and criminal youths and what causes this problem? The theme of the film is dramatic enough, given the time and place – an Eastern bloc country two years after the death of Stalin – and it would, of course, have to be treated with care in order to escape the censors and the accusation of being "defeatist" and "negativist."

The documentary technique used is that of dramatization and reenactment – a technique well-tested and dominant in the school of British documentary. At a time when filmmakers were totally dependent of extremely heavy and bulky 35 mm camera and sound equipment this was the only solution. However, Hoffman and Skorzewski infused an extra realistic effect into the film by actually using "genuine" hooligans to recreate the situations (Lubelski and Zarebski, 2006). The message of the film was clearly aimed at understanding the roots of "­anti-social behavior" as well as providing a (mild) critique of the social conditions that might have caused it. The main message, though, was aimed at the audience: Don't look away, take action!

How much this documentary deviates from the usual contemporary cinematic treatment of the subject matter can be seen by comparing it to an item in the newsreel _Polska Kronika Filmowa_ from two years earlier (PKF 17/53). In this, the camera follows a number of long-haired misfits with fashionable hats, coats, and shoes drifting ­aimlessly through the streets, drinking, playing cards, dancing to decadent jazz music, and loitering in public places. Then we see them swept away by positive youths enganging in sports, obviously representing the sound element in society that will prevail, providing the audience – and the censors – with a final _positive_ image of Polish youth.

According to Tadeusz Lubelski, _Look Out! Hooligans!_ caused something of a ­sensation as it was shown as an addition to the _Polska Kronika Filmowa_ (Lubelski and Zarebski, 2006) and was nominated for best film at the first Polish film award ceremony in 1956. In this way it opened up for the films produced in 1956 that together came to be viewed as the first year of the Hoffman and Skorzewski's _czarna seria_ : _The Children Accuse_ ( _Dzieci oskar_ ż _aj_ ą), Jerzy Bossak and Jaroslaw Brzozowski's _Warszawa 56_ , Kazimierz Karabasz and Wladyslaw Ślesicki's _Where the Devil Says Good Night_ ( _Gdzie diabeł mówi dobranoc_ ), Bohdan Kosinski's _The Lublin Old Town_ ( _Lubelska starówka_ ), Jerzy Ziarnik's _Little Town_ ( _Miastecko_ ), and Włodzimierz Borowik's _Rocky soil_ ( _Skalna ziemia_ ).

These documentary films may truly be said to represent the spirit of October 1956, sharing an unrelenting critical view of the social conditions in the Polish ­cities and countryside 10 years after World War Two. _The Children Accuse_ brought attention to the effects of alcoholism by concentrating on the fate of children with alcoholic parents. Both _Warszawa 56_ and _The Lublin Old Town_ show the reverse side of the reconstruction of the war-ravaged cities of Poland and, most important of all, the gap between outer appearance and reality, by contrasting the rebuilt façades of houses with the living conditions for families who have to survive in the ruins more than 10 years after the war.

Furthermore, these films sharpen the critical tone present in _Look Out! Hooligans!_ by implicating not only the audience but also state and party officials. _Warszawa 56_ starts out by presenting the sunny side of Warsaw on a summer's day, with tourists arriving to admire the rebuilt palaces and streets, ending up with the towering, newly completed Palace of Culture and Science, with the phrases about beauty and serenity expected in a travelogue on this subject on the offscreen soundtrack. But then the perspective shifts abruptly, with a cut to a shot of the Palace of Culture and Science from a vantage point dominated by derelict and ruined housing, and the tone of the voiceover shifts as well, reminding the audience that these are, indeed, new times:

 _But 1956 is different from the previous years. The chronicler watches more carefully and sees what he earlier tried not to see_.

Bossak and Brzozowski then show the appalling living conditions of those Varsovians who have to makes their homes in unsanitary and highly dangerous ruins that have not been cleared. The _pièce de résistance_ of the seven-minute-long documentary is a scene in which a toddler manages to escape from the bed to which he has been tethered and sets a straight course for a balcony without any fence, avoiding a fall and certain death by a couple of millimeters. After giving the audience a chance to breathe after this harrowing experience, the voiceover returns with a stern rebuke to the shortsightedness of the present building policy:

 _Six thousand Varsovian cavemen are waiting for rooms that are still illegally occupied by offices and bureaus. We have built enough office blocks in Warsaw. They are capable of housing all administration and headquarters. Dwelling quarters belong to the people of work and their children. They need to be returned to their owners_.

Seen in an international documentary perspective, _Warszawa 56_ is highly reminiscent of a classic from the British documentary canon of the 1930s – Arthur Elton's and Edgar Anstey's groundbreaking critique of the London slums, _Housing Problems_ (1935). The British documentary movement was well known and respected among Polish filmmakers, and the similarity may be seen as an intended paradox – living conditions in Socialist Poland in 1956 are no better than living conditions in capitalist Britain in 1935.

An even stronger indictment of official power is presented in _Where the Devil Says Good Night_ , representing the debut of Kazimierz Karabasz, the undisputed doyen of Polish documentary film since the late 1950s. This film takes the audience to the poor Warsaw suburb of Targówek, where youths idle away their time smoking and drinking and generally behaving like the antisocial characters of _Look Out! Hooligans!_ This time, however, the fire is not directed at the average audience member and his or her lack of a sense of social engagement. Karabasz and Ślesicki set their aims higher. At the center of the narrative is the Targówek Culture House, where planning and building started in 1948, but which at the time of shooting the documentary in 1956 still stands unfinished. The filmmakers more than hint that this is because of inefficiency, bureaucracy, and a general disregard for the needs and welfare of ordinary people on the part of those in power.

 _We have deceived the inhabitants of Targówek.... We disappointed the hopes of these people. Can we regain their trust?_

The voiceover invokes a collective _we_ that nevertheless passes the question on to a higher level:

 _A Palace of Culture was planned here – it has been forgotten.... Who is responsible for that? Who is guilty for the fact that Targówek is still a place where the devil says good night?_

After these damning words, the film ends with a scene very similar to the opening shot of _Look Out! Hooligans_ : a dark street, a gang of youths, the sound of a window being smashed, and running feet.

 _Where the Devil Says Good Night_ was another stark and dark documentary of the black series, made as if to illustrate Gomulka's words during the October manifestation about official declarations not matching reality. Against the background of the restrictive cultural climate of the first half of the decade, the film must have appeared almost revolutionary to its audience, as it obviously did to an official chronicler of Polish film in a later decade. In the book _Polish Cinema_ , published in English, French German, Polish, Russian, and Spanish in 1973, the author ­obviously has some difficulties with the disrespectfulness of the _czarna seria_ towards the authorities:

These films not only brought a reminder of difficult, complex problems, but also give witness to positive changes in the life of the community. Karabasz' and Slesicki's film _Where the Devil Says Good Night_ for example carries out a sociological probe into the world of young Warsaw suburb dwellers who have no profitable way of spending their free time. At the same time it shows a community centre being built in the district. (Fuksiewicz, 1976: 61)

This represents such a blatant misinterpretation of the film that it can only have been intentional. Obviously the frankness and openness that characterized the documentary was as shocking and unwanted for the official voice of Poland in 1973 as it was in 1956.

The _czarna seria_ continued in 1957 with films that were uncompromising in their wish to show the reality behind the official image of the Polish people's democracy. Maksymilian Wrocławski made _Place of Residence_ ( _Miejsce ­zamieszkania_ ), which confronted the rosy cinematographic image of the effort to build the giant steelworks in Nowa Huta (so eminently parodied in Wajda's _Man of Marble_ ) with a candid and stark description of the cramped and difficult living conditions for the thousands of workers there. Karabasz and Ślesicki made another report about youth from a dreary Warsaw suburb, this time Praga, in _People from an Empty Zone_ ( _Ludzie z pustego obszaru_ ) – without, however, the indignant tone and pronounced argument of _Where the Devil Says Good Night_. Instead we find the first example of the kind of detached observationalism so prominent in Karabasz's documentaries of the 1960s and 1970s. Karabasz would develop this further in _From Powisle_ ( _Z Powisla_ ) in 1958 and in the last documentary he made with Ślesicki, _A Day Without Sun_ ( _Dzie_ ń _bez sło_ ń _ca_ ) in 1959.

The most controversial documentary of 1957, and perhaps the most controversial film of the _czarna seria_ , was Włodzimierz Borowik's exposé _Article Zero_ ( _Paragraf Zero_ ). The title refers to a non-existent article in the penal law of the People's Republic of Poland, as the problem of prostitution, which it addresses, was deemed non-existent in a Socialist country. The film opens with shots of night life in Warsaw, with streets, streetlights, cafes, and restaurants. The voiceover (in this film as in most of the other films of the _czarna seria_ it is the pleasant voice of prominent actor Tadeusz Łomnicki) informs the audience, over images from a popular café, that the Varsovians like a good chat over a cup of coffee, and then, over shots of a man approaching a table where some girls are sitting, talking to one of them and then leaves the place with her, adds,

 _But take a closer look: This coffee house is a meeting place not only for socializing and pleasant chats, it is also for other meetings_...

An outside camera then implies the development of the situation by a tilting shot up the façade of a hotel. Cut to a shot at street level and a young woman walking on the pavement at night and the voiceover becomes more direct, as the woman is approached by a man and another man turns up and the three of them walk out of the frame:

 _Prostitution does not exist in our country, our legislation has eliminated it successfully. Not only are we progressive, we are subtle as well. Every woman is allowed to take long night walks. Every woman can make passing acquaintances. Every woman can have a protector_.

A dramatized scene of the murder of a prostitute follows as an introduction to an explanation of the only way the police can act on prostitutes and pimps – the crime functions as a pretext for a raid on the hotels, cafes, and street, and the suspects are brought in. It also functions as the pretext for a change in the documentary modality of the film. The reconstruction gives way to observational and participatory scenes, as the camera follows the police on a raid and later is witness to the chaos at the police station where the suspects are brought in. Over the undoubtedly authentic images of prostitutes and pimps fighting each other, the voiceover defends the use of these shocking images:

 _The truth is bitter, but silence is impermissible. Night after night the constabularies fill with drunk prostitutes and pimps. This scene is not staged, this is no feature film. The camera is shooting from concealment. We are collecting material for sociologists and lawyers_.

This leads up to a sequence of filmed interviews with some of the prostitutes, now with their faces slightly blotted out, relating different stories of how they ended up on the street. These interviews manage to give an impression of some of the social causes that lead young girls to turn to this "profession." _Article Zero_ ends with a moving and beautiful shot of a girl released from the police headquarters wandering and disappearing in the bleak morning fog of a Warsaw street, but not before the filmmaker issues another strong warning about the consequences of refusing to accept realities:

 _In order to save and treat, legislation is necessary. There is no article in our law that would regulate the issue of prostitution_.

Seen in the context of documentary film history, _Article Zero_ is sensational in every sense of the word. It takes on a subject matter that at the time was a taboo, not only behind the iron curtain, but in Western Europe and North America as well, where, given the financial situation of documentary in the West, it would have had problems in making it through the screenplay stage. Even more remarkable is the appearance of a film treating this social issue head on in the Eastern bloc ­countries. In this way it signifies both the dramatic change in cultural policy in Poland in connection with the events of 1956, as well as the importance of the film community in this respect

But the film is also revolutionary in its formal aspects. Whereas films like _Warszawa 56_ and _In Old Lublin Town_ looked back to the British documentary ­cinema of social concern of the 1930s, _Article Zero_ appears as a harbinger of the revolution of the documentary form connected with the French cinéma vérité and the American direct cinema of the 1960s. The introduction is in the classic expository form of the British documentary, with its omniscient voiceover and dramatizations, but the major part of the film is a foray into new and uncharted documentary waters. The observational and, strictly speaking, voyeuristic scenes at the police station test the limits of ethical documentary representation, as do the interviews of the thinly disguised girls by a uniformed and formidable female policewoman. It is safe to say that similar images were totally absent from contemporary news film and documentaries both in the East and West.

#  **Polish Documentary Film, The Thaw and the "October Spring"**

With _Article Zero_ and a few other films, like Maksymilian Wrocławski's _Place of Residence_ ( _Miejsce zamieszkania_ , 1957) and Jerzy Dmowski and Bohdan Kosinski's _The City on Islands_ ( _Miasto na_ wyspach, 1958), the _czarna seria_ petered out.

Tadeusz Lubelski (Lubelski and Zarebski, 2006) suggests two main reasons for the end of the movement – one was that the political conditions for this kind of film were no longer favorable, the other was that the filmmakers involved started to look for new outlets for their creativity – especially Kazimierz Karabasz, who would develop the kind of emphatic observationalism he had demonstrated in _People From an Empty Zone_ in films like his famous _The Musicians_ ( _Muzykanci_ ,1960), _People on the Road_ ( _Ludzie w drodze_ , 1960), and _Railway Junction_ ( _Wesel_ , 1961). As an answer to the natural question of why these documentaries appear as early as 1955 (if we include _Look Out! Hooligans!_ in the _czarna seria_ ) and most of the films in question were planned and made before October 20 and the meeting of the Seventh Plenum of the PZPR, Lubelski suggests, based on cited archival research of Joanna Lemann, that this kind of criticism was encouraged by factions within the PZPR working for change. In this connection Lubelski refers to "The Thaw" that followed in the Soviet Union and the iron curtain countries between the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953 and Nikita Khruschev's famous "secret speech" at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1956. "The Thaw" refers to Ilja Ehrenburg's novel of the same title published in the official Soviet literary periodical _Literaturnaja gazeta_ in August 1954 and is generally thought to have heralded in the period of ­"de-Stalinization" culminating in Khruschev's 1956 speech.

As Ray Taras (1984) has pointed out, de-Stalinization began in Poland well before Gomulka's return to power in 1956. Taras points to a Plenum meeting of the Central Committee of the PZPR in November 1954 as the starting point, where "a very critical attitude was adopted towards the Politburo and party leadership" (1984: 47). Significantly, Gomulka was released from prison within a month of this meeting, starting on his way back to rehabilitation and party leadership. Anthony Kemp-Welch also points to a development in the direction of reinstating Gomulka starting in 1954, calling it a period of "silent destalinisation" and placing a special emphasis in its expression in the cultural field: "There were significant stirrings amongst intellectuals.... A newly formed intelligentsia discussion club, 'The Club of the Crooked Circle', named after the street in Warsaw's old town where it met, sought official recognition. As state censorship lessened, radical young intellectuals transformed the journal _Po prostu_ from a boring Youth Union (ZMP) rag into an important social institution" (Kemp-Welch, 2008: 68).

This general development places the _czarna seria_ films in perspective, since Polish film had come to represent a very important field of Polish culture. The establishment of the _Polska Kronika Filmowa_ in 1945, the Polish film school in Łódź and the Warsaw Documentary in 1948, had opened up opportunities for a new generation of postwar filmmakers, who approached the medium with an enthusiasm and with ideas that were not easily stifled by the cultural bureaucracy. Some extremely significant organizational changes took place in Polish film, starting with the 1954 Congress of the Polish Association of Theatre and Film Artists. Here, the prewar film veteran and leading academic Jerzy Toeplitz attacked the narrow application of "Socialist realism" in the Polish cinema and made a plea for a more decentralized, independent film production system (Bren, 1986: 47). During 1955 this bold and, for the Eastern bloc countries, unprecedented move was ­supported higher up at the party level and led in 1955 to the unique organization of the Polish film industry into eight independent production groups ( _zespoly_ ) in strong contrast to the monolithic structure of previous years and the Soviet model.

Against this background, it is not unlikely to find the Polish film industry and filmmakers in the vanguard in the events leading up to October 1956 in Poland.

#  **Polish documentary between East and West during the Cold War**

Polish documentary attracted considerable interest among cinephiles in Western Europe during the early 1960s. The main reason for this was undoubtedly ­exposure at international film festivals, where Polish documentary productions were viewed as daring detours from the perceived narrow path of Soviet bloc Communist propaganda. The Polish documentary film also benefited from being associated with the contemporary fiction films of the _Polish School_ , where directors like Andrzej Wajda, Aleksander Ford, Andrzej Munk, and Jerzy Kawalerowicz had made a strong impression at the Cannes and Venice international festivals.

In 1961 the French journal _Image et son_ devoted a double issue to Polish film in which the documentary filmmakers received the same attention as the fiction film directors. The editors had asked Polish scholars connected to the film section of the Warsaw Institute of Art to write the articles, and Jerzy Toeplitz, head of the Polish Film School in Łódź, edited the issue. Writing for the country that 20 years earlier had coined the term _film noir_ in connection with certain Hollywood films of the 1940s, Helena Opoczynska, in her article on the Polish documentary, made the wry comment that in Poland the concept of " _série noire_ " had taken on a new ­meaning. She discussed the importance of the _czarna seria_ documentaries, using the films mentioned earlier as examples. Since she was writing under the auspices of the Polish cultural authorities, her assessment of the phenomenon is interesting, given the temporal proximity of these films. Although maintaining that the _czarna seria_ was a thing of the past, and that the contemporary Polish documentary had widened its scope in choice of subjects and formal treatment, she nevertheless acknowledged the groundbreaking importance of these films: "The [documentaries of the] black series, which we now regard as a closed chapter in documentary ­production, had, in addition to functioning as a wake-up call for social consciousness, another important influence: they won an audience for documentary films and conquered a space for them on Polish screens" (Opoczynska, 1961: 29).

At the 1964 Mannheim International Film Festival UNESCO sponsored a Round Table Conference on film and society, and for this the organization had asked Jerzy Toeplitz to prepare the report "New Trends in Cultural and Sociological Films in Poland" (Toeplitz, 1964). The report is written in the dry style of the UNESCO bureaucracy with a thorough and detailed itemization of the social themes and problems addressed by the Polish documentary and a large filmography containing the documentaries the author has found worthy of the title of "sociological film." It is, however, interesting to note that Toeplitz in his overview of the "Polish sociological film" singles out the films of the _czarna seria_ : "After a succession of panegyrics depicting life in Poland in the rosiest of hues, there came the famous 'black series' – a series of exposures of the worst ills of society, the black spots that the the [ _sic_ ] socialist régime could not manage to erase, with films on alcoholism, prostitution, the family crisis and delinquent youth" (1964: 11).

Having mentioned and described a few of the documentaries of the black series – _Look Out! Hooligans!_ , _Warszawa 56_ , _Where the Devil Says Good Night_ , _The Children Accuse_ , _People From an Empty Zone_ – Toeplitz concludes that the series "is already a thing of the past, but the tradition goes on, and every year a number of films of social criticism are made, calling for remedies to the ills of society." (1964: 11)

The "official" Polish assessment of the _czarna seria_ as represented in Opoczynska's article and Toeplitz's report was, on the whole, considerably more positive at this time than in later official reactions to the phenomenon, as demonstrated when comparing the citation from Fuksiewicz above. In his book on Polish film, Fuksiewicz avoids using the "black cinema" label altogether and, after making the skewed comment on _Where the Devil Says Good Night_ , dismisses this and the other films of "reporting nature" as "quick and frequently superficial journalistic ­forays". (Fuksiewicz, 1976: 61)

In 1968 the East German Ninth International Leipzig Film Festival (Leipziger Dokumentar- und Kurzfilmwoche für Film und Fernsehen) arranged a major ­retrospective on Polish documentary. On that occasion the State Film Archive of the German Democratic Republic published a volume dedicated to the Polish ­documentary, _Dokumentarfilm in Polen_. The contents of this book, like the special issue of _Image et son_ was dedicated entirely to Polish authors and the book was characterized as a "product of socialist cooperation between representatives of film activities in the Polish People's Republic and the German Democratic Republic" (Klaue, Lichtenstein, and Jahnke, 1968: 235).

The chapter on Polish documentary between 1956 and 1960 was written by Alicja Iskierko and is clearly influenced by a more reserved attitude towards the _czarna seria_. Where Helena Opoczynska in her article in _Image et son_ put the emergence of the socially critical documentary in a political perspective by explicitly emphasizing the connection between these films and the events of October 1956 (1961: 28), Iskierko in her chapter acknowledges the importance of these events, but claims that the emergence of the _czarna seria_ reflected a general topical ­discussion in the Polish nation at the time on questions concerning, among other themes, education and economy (Klaue, Lichtenstein, and Jahnke, 1968: 67).

The four pages devoted to the _czarna seria_ are highly critical of what the author perceives as propagandistic and simplistic methods and the use of metaphors and symbols "not always of the best quality" (Klaue, Lichtenstein, and Jahnke, 1968: 71). She especially takes issue with Karabasz's and Ślesicki's _Where the Devil Says Good Night_ and Bossak's and Brzozowski's _Warszawa 56_ , criticizing the former for ­painting a "simplistic and confusing" picture of the life of working-class youths in Warsaw in the mid-1950s, emphasizing the dark sides, and omitting to refer to positive examples (68–69). According to Iskierko, _Warszawa 56_ clearly demonstrated the weaknesses of the _czarna seria_ in its "accusing character, symbol-laden forms of expression, staged episodes and bathos" (69–70).

 _Paragraph Zero_ was more favorably described as a film that managed to disclose and demand action on a social problem that had been overlooked by society. However, in her discussion of this documentary, Iskierko touches on what she perceives to be the main problem of the films of the _czarna seria_. She claims that, in order to find matching images to the informational soundtrack, the tendency of the documentary filmmakers to rely on staged episodes got out of hand. Since this practice tended to obfuscate the line between the images that were "true" and the staged episodes, Hoffman and Skorewski had inserted a title stating that the scenes shot in a well-known restaurant in Warsaw were staged, using extras, while "all other images were authentic" (Klaue, Lichtenstein, and Jahnke, 1968: 70). Here, Iskierko finds part of the failure of the other films in the series: "The problem in question was treated demonstratively, (Ger. _plakativ_ ) meaning that [the filmmakers] resorted to staged scenes or dubious symbols where facts could not be proven" (69).

Iskierko's (1968) critique of the _czarna seria_ can be seen as representing two points of view. On the one hand, it reflects the changes in the policy of the Polish Communist Party in the decade following the events of 1956, when enthusiasm soon gave way to disappointment over the Gomulka regime and when explicit social criticism again was censored by the authorities. On the other hand, it also refers to the changes in film technology and forms of expression in documentary film associated with American direct cinema and French and Canadian cinéma vérité during the 1960s. Inspired by these movements, although still not in possession of the lighter 16 mm equipment used by the direct cinema practitioners, Polish filmmakers managed to emulate the observational style successfully. Kazimierz Karabasz's intimate portrait documentary of an amateur brass band, _The Musicians_ ( _Muzykanci_ ), from 1960 became legendary and garnered more international film prizes than any previous Polish film had done.

As for the political situation in 1968, there is a certain irony in reading the final acknowledgment of the authors of _Dokumentarfilm in Polen_ where they specifically give thanks to Professor Jerzy Toeplitz as the person primarily responsible for the Polish contributions to the book. At the time of the Leipzig Festival in November 1968 Jerzy Toeplitz had been fired from his position as head of the Polish Film School in Łódź for showing support for the protesting students during the events of March 1968. Toeplitz was one of the veterans of Polish cinema, having been active in the prewar avant-gardist START group, and he was instrumental in the creation of the Film School in Łódź from 1947, becoming its rector in 1957. He was later forced to leave Poland as a result of the vicious anti-Semitic campaign against "Zionists" led by the interior minister Moczar and went to Australia to become the first director of the Australian Film Television & Radio School.

Given the lengthy discussion dedicated to the _czarna seria_ in the official publication for the Leipzig Polish documentary retrospective it is also interesting to observe that among the 87 Polish documentaries chosen for the retrospective, not one of the films belonged to the _czarna seria_. The only film representing the years 1956 and 1957 was one made by Konstanty Gordon, _Sztuka ulicy_ ( _The Art of the Street_ , 1957), a film not mentioned either in Iskierko's article or in the ample ­filmography of _Dokumentarfilm in Polen_.

Equally interesting is the absence of titles like _Warszawa 56_ , _Where the Devil Says Good Night_ , _People from an Empty Zone_ , _In Old Lublin Town_ , and other similar documentaries from the 1958 Oberhausen Film Festival and the Mannheim Film Festival in West Germany of the same year. These two film festivals for films associated with the German concept of _Kulturfilm_ very soon became central meeting places for documentarists from all over the world, and both festivals also ­functioned as important in the exchange of film and ideas about documentary, animation, and experimental film across the Iron Curtain.

In 1958 the Oberhausen festival was organized under the motto _The Road to the Neighbor_ ( _Wege zum Nachbarn_ ), initializing the function of this international short film festival as an important meeting place for filmmakers from the East and the West during the Cold War. The omission of films from the _czarna seria_ was not noted by Ronald and Dorothea Holloway in their book on the Oberhausen Festival, where they mention that the documentaries of the "black series" "revealed a commitment to contemporary life and paralleled the British documentary tradition from Grierson to 'Free Cinema'" (Holloway and Holloway, 1979: 130–131).

However, there seem to be strong hints of a connection between the Oberhausen festival in February 1958, the Mannheim Festival in May and the fourth "Polish" _Free Cinema_ program at the National Film Theatre in September 1958. The Oberhausen festival emphasized its _neighborhood_ theme that year by inviting to a comprehensive presentation of contemporary documentary and animation film from 35 countries. On Tuesday February 11, the first day of the festival, there was a presentation of "Documentary Film From Great Britain," in which the film critic David Robinson, who was closely associated with the filmmakers of the _Free Cinema_ movement, gave an introduction to Lorenza Mazetti's _Together_ from the first Free Cinema program and Lindsay Anderson's _Every Day Except Christmas_ from the third program, with Lorenza Mazzetti present as a guest for the festival. Saturday February 15 saw another presentation of British "short films," again with an introduction by David Robinson, this time comprising animation films by John Halas and Peter Foldes, an experimental short fiction film, _The Door in the Wall_ by Glenn Alvey, and three documentaries.

A Polish delegation with the participation of director Andrzej Munk presented the last screening of national film at the festival after an introduction by the ­journalist Leon Bukowiecki. As mentioned above, none of the films from the _czarna seria_ were shown, and those selected did not make any great impression in terms of documentary history. This also applies to Munk's 1955 film _Men of the Blue Cross_ , a film about a dramatic episode in the Tatra Mountains at the end of World War Two, which may be characterized as a docudrama in today's terminology. In addition, three films from the Warsaw Studio for Animation Film were shown along with a nature documentary on ants by Stanislaw Konesz.

The Mannheim International Film Festival was to become as important as Oberhausen as a meeting place for documentarists. As a matter of fact, the two festivals considered joining forces by arranging the event in alternate years in order to avoid competition, which led to Oberhausen renounce their arrangements for 1957, obviously with the expectation that Mannheim would do the same in 1959. However, local pressure in Mannheim prevented this from happening, and the two festivals continued, with Oberhausen taking place in February and Mannheim in May (from 1961 it was moved to October). Already in 1956 the Mannheim festival had a considerable number of films from countries behind the iron curtain: that year, 34 of the 81 participating films were designated as being from "Eastern bloc" countries, and the winner of the critic's prize was a Polish film, Andrzej Munk's lighthearted color documentary comedy _One Sunday Morning_ ( _Niedzielny poranek_ , 1955).

In 1958 Polish film was also well represented at Mannheim, but still without documentaries from the _czarna seria_ being shown or mentioned. Of the seven films receiving prizes and honorable mention during the festival, no less than three were Polish, and two of these titles point toward the "Polish" _Free Cinema_ event later that year. Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk's absurdist and minimalist ­animation film _Once Upon a Time_ ( _Byl sobie raz_ ) received one of the main prizes, and Jan Łomnicki received honorable mention for his documentary _The House of Old Women_ ( _Dom starych kobiet_ ). Both of these films found their way to the _Free Cinema_ program in September.

Against this background it seems natural to assume that the Oberhausen and Mannheim festivals in February and October were important in the emergence of the "Polish Voices" manifestation of _Free Cinema_ in London in September. However, the fact that two films of the _czarna seria_ made it to the London screening, when they had so obviously been omitted at Leipzig, Mannheim, and Oberhausen,3 may be attributed to personal contacts made at another and more famous film festival. In 1957 Lindsay Anderson attended the Cannes Film Festival, both in the capacity of a film journalist as well as a contributor with _Every Day Except Christmas_. In his report from the festival, published in the _New Statesman_ May 25, 1957, he enthusiastically promoted the two films by Andrzej Wajda shown at the festival ( _A Generation_ ( _Pokolenie_ ) and _Kanał_ ) (Anderson, 2004: 575–578).

During the festival Anderson became acquainted with Wajda, and this personal contact, in addition to the contacts made at the documentary festivals in Leipzig, Oberhausen, and Brussels, were no doubt instrumental in securing the _czarna seria_ films for the _Free Cinema_ program. In a letter dated February 6, 1958 a press counselor at the Polish Embassy in London writes to assure Lindsay Anderson that he will assist him in securing the documentary films he has requested for a _Free Cinema_ screening at the National Film Theatre.4

#  ** __** ** _Czarna seria_** **and** **__****_Free Cinema_** ** __**

The fourth program of _Free Cinema_ was presented from September 3 to 6, 1958. A year and three months had passed since the third program, with the subtitle "Look at Britain," and the first _Free Cinema_ event was two-and-a-half years in the past. At this point most of the documentaries that would be associated with _Free Cinema_ had been shown: Lindsay Anderson's _O Dreamland_ and _Every Day Except Christmas_ , Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson's _Momma Don't Allow_ , Claude Goretta and Alain Tanner's _Nice Time_ – the last of the _Free Cinema_ "classics"; Reisz's _We Are the Lambeth Boys_ , would be shown in the sixth and last _Free Cinema_ program, in March 1959. The fifth program, following consecutively on from the Polish program, from September 7 to 9, 1958, gave a preview of the French _nouvelle vague_ featuring Francois Truffaut's short fiction film _Les mistons_ and Claude Chabrol's feature film _Le beau Serge_.

 _Free Cinema – Polish Voices_ consisted of seven films, opening with the two _czarna seria_ films _Where the Devils Says Goodnight_ and _Article Zero_ , followed by Bohdan Poreba's _Island of Great Hope_ ( _Wyspa wielkiej nadziei_ ), a film about a hospital for children suffering from tuberculosis and Jan Łomnicki's _The House of Old Women_. This was the film that had received honorable mention at the Mannheim festival. Jan Łomnicki belonged to the same generation of directors as Karabasz, Slesciki, and Borowik, and would become famous for his industrial documentaries of the 1960s, especially _Birth of a Ship_ ( _Darodziny statku_ , 1961), which received almost as many international prizes as Karabasz's _The Musicians_. _The House of Old Women_ is a low-key, poetic study of life in a home for elderly women, with exquisite photography by the cinematographer Stanislaw Niedbalski (who also was the cinematographer on _The Musicians_ ), and together with Poreba's quiet study it made an effective counterpart to the two films on more pressing social issues.

This first part of the program was bundled together under the label "Documentaries" in the presentation flier. The final three films were designated "Experiments," starting with two animated films jointly directed by Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk. _Once Upon a Time_ had received a Golden Ducat Award at Mannheim in May and is a minimalistic cut-out animation story, without, as the program flier notes, "commercial smartness." Lenica and Borowczyk's second contribution, _Dom_ , is typical for the kind of absurdist modernism prevalent in Polish art at the time. Using stop-motion and cut-out animation, the film appeared to the _Free Cinema_ programmers as "a symbolist poem on contemporary insecurity, shadowed by nostalgic memories of the past and by the threat of the disaster which hangs over all of our heads." The last part of this sentence serves as a reminder of the overarching problematic in Europe during the Cold War – the threat of nuclear annihilation.

The last film on the program, Roman (misspelt in the flier as "Raymond") Polański's _Two Men and a Wardrobe_ ( _Dwaj ludzie z szafa_ ) represented the same trend of dystopic fantasy found in _Dom_ : two men emerge from the Baltic Sea, carrying a large wardrobe. They enter a modern city, only to find city people to be extremely hostile to them and their wardrobe, and after seeing and experiencing acts of unkindness, selfishness, and cruelty, decide to return to the sea with their wardrobe. Both of these films reflect on a kind of absurdist modernism prevalent in and, in terms of Eastern Europe, unique to Poland at this time. As Ray Taras writes of the Polish cultural scene of the decade 1960–1970 in his study _Ideology in a Socialist State_ : "operative ideology on culture in the 1960s [in Poland] permitted a considerable degree of freedom of expression, experimentation with form and style, and treatment of various topics" (1984: 103). This openness might have come as a surprise to a British audience expecting the films to live up to the stereotypical image of Soviet bloc "Socialist realism."

When looking at the screening of the Polish _czarna seria_ films in the context of the British _Free Cinema_ documentaries, it is interesting to note the difference in attitude that the two schools of film manifest. The social criticism of modern urban life in the _Free Cinema_ films may be characterized as _implicit_ in its critique of passive material consumption and its embrace of the emerging youth culture in modern society. In contrast, the Polish "black series" represents an _explicit_ criticism of the powers that be, which may also be interpreted as a systemic criticism. This was duly noted in the flier presenting the _Polish Voices_ program at the fourth _Free Cinema_ screening in September 1958:

Imagine a British documentary, sponsored by the C.O.I. [Central Office of Information, United Kingdom], on the refusal to fulfill the pledge to build a National Theatre. Imagine a film on prostitution which endorses the recommendations of the Wolfenden report. Imagine a poetic study of the spiritual problems of the ­old-aged.... It is almost impossible for us to conceive of so vital an official policy, yet these are precisely the kind of subjects that the young Polish documentarists have been ­tackling, forthrightly and urgently, in the last few years.5

The anonymous author(s) of the flier may be accused of painting an overly rosy picture of the state of openness in Polish society on the basis of the two films from the _czarna seria_. As indicated above, at this time these "accusatory" ( _anklägerische_ ) documentaries, as Alicja Iskierko chose to call them, were regarded as a parenthesis in Polish documentary, both by the officials of the Polish film industry and by the practitioners themselves, who, inspired by new developments in international ­documentary, were looking at other possibilities of expression.

To conclude, the appearance of three of the central _czarna seria_ documentaries at the fourth _Free Cinema_ program may be said to have several implications in terms of documentary film history, the most important one being the aspect of _transnationalism_ as opposed to the traditional view of national isolationism in Eastern Europe during the Cold War period. It is also a reminder about the often significant differences of culture and politics _within_ what was perceived as the political and cultural entity of the "Soviet satellite states." The European film festivals in the postwar era were of crucial importance in this respect, functioning as a ­meeting point between East and West and making personal contacts possible.

The personal relationships established in this way were many and important and contributed to an interchange of ideas and aesthetic impulses transcending the rigidity of "official" Cold War cultural contacts. This article has mainly been preoccupied with the impact the Polish documentary film of the late 1950s in Western Europe, but it should be noted that impulses, thanks to this informal East–West network also travelled the other way. An article in the culture section of _The Times_ in January 1958 mentions the fact that the British _Free Cinema_ documentaries have attracted a larger audience abroad than in Great Britain, and specifically mentions reception in the Polish press following a screening in Warsaw. Later, Lindsay Anderson would be invited to direct a documentary for the Warsaw Documentary Film Studio and Polish documentarists would frequently mention British documentary as an inspirational source for their work.

Thus, the "Polish" _Free Cinema_ program in London in 1958 was instrumental in creating a two-way lasting connection between documentary film makers on both sides of the iron curtain.

 **Notes**

1 The author wishes to acknowledge the extremely valuable help of Maciek Wiktor, Michael Brook, and Christophe Dupin in connection with this chapter.

2 According to Jazdon 2008 the concept was coined by the journalist Aleksander ­Jakiewicz in the influential weekly "Po prostu."

3 Kazimierz Karabasz claimed, in conversation with the author of this article, that, after 1959, there was an informal ban on public screening of films of the _czarna series_.

4 Lindsay Anderson Archives, Stirling: Ref No LA/1/02/3/4Letter from K Malcuzynski to Lindsay Anderson. The letter from Anderson referred to has not been found.

5 The Wolfenden report – _The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution_ – was published in England in 1957 and caused a great public debate.

 **References**

Anderson, Lindsay (2004) _Never Apologise: Collected Writings_ (ed. Paul Ryan). Plexus, London.

Bren, Frank (1986) _World Cinema 1: Poland_. Flicks Books, London.

Fuksiewicz, Jacek (1976) _Polish Film and Television_. Editions Interpress, Warszawa.

Holloway, Ronald and Holloway, Dorothea (1979) _O. is for Oberhausen: Weg zum Nachbarn_. Verlag Karl Maria Laufen, Oberhausen.

Iskierko, Alicja (1968) Der polnische Dokumentarfilm 1956–1960, in Klaue, Lichtenstein, and Jahnke, _Dokumentarfilm in Polen._

Klaue,Wolfgang, Lichtenstein, Manfred, and Jahnke, Eckart (eds) (1968) _Dokumentarfilm in Polen_. Henschelverlag, Berlin (DDR).

Jazdon, Mikolaj (2008) The Black Series 1955–1958. In booklet for DVD set _Polska szkola dokumentu: Czarna seria/The Black Series_. Polskie wydawnictwo audiowizualne, Warszawa.

Kemp-Welch, A. (2008) _Poland under Communism: A Cold War History_. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Lovell, Alan and Hillier, Jim (1972) _Studies in Documentary_. BFi/Secker and Warburg, London.

Lubelski, Tadeusz, and Zarebski, K.J. (2006) _Historia kina polskiego_. Warsaw.

Opoczynska, Helena (1961) Le documentaire polonais de 1945 a 1960. _Image et son: la revue de cinema_ , 136/137: 27–30.

Taras, Ray (1984) _Ideology in a Socialist State: Poland 1956–1983_. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

The Times (1958) _Progess of Free Cinema_ , Encouragement at Home and Abroad. London, Friday January 3.

Toeplitz, Jerzy (1964) New Trends in Cultural and Sociological Films in Poland. Contribution to the Mannheim round-table, organized under the auspices of UNESCO. Paris: UNESCO 30 December 1964 WS/0964.45 (CUA)

 **Further Reading**

Brooke, Michael (n.d.) _The Polish Documentary Movement 1947–60_ in Kinoblog: a survey of Central and Eastern European cinema <http://filmjournal.net/kinoblog/category/directors/jerzy-bossak/> (accessed November, 3, 2010).

Curry, Jane Leftwich (ed.) ( 1984) _The Black Book of Polish Censorship_. Vintage Books, New York.

Coates, Paul (2005) _The Red & The White: The Cinema of People's Poland_. Wallflower Press, London.

Dolan, Josephine and Spicer, Andrew (2008) The Outsider: Anthony Simmons. _Journal of British Cinema and Television_ , 5 (May): 132–145.

Haltof, Marek (2002) _Polish National Cinema_. Berghahn Books, New York.

Higson, Andrew (1986) Britain's Outstanding Contribution to the Film: The Documentary-Realist Tradition, in: _All Our Yesterdays. 90 Years of British Cinema_ (ed. Charles Barr). BFi Publishing, London.

Lubelski, Tadeusz (2001): Polish Contemporary Documentary Film. culture.pl <http://www.culture.pl/en/culture/artykuly/es_film_dokumentalny> (accessed September 3, 2010).

# 11

Text not available in this digital edition.

# 12

# Red Shift

#  _New Albanian Cinema and its Dialogue with the Old_

Bruce Williams

For most non-Albanians, Albanian cinema has always been, like the country itself, a _rara avis_. The mere mention of the "land of the eagle" conjures up a combination of the romanticism of Lord Byron and the country's virtual isolation during the Communist period. Granted, Albanian films became extremely popular in China during the Cultural Revolution, yet this was certainly not the case in other Communist countries or in the West. Under communism, rare showings of Albanian films in international festivals offered outsiders a halting impression of the isolated country's film tradition, but their international reception was ­muddied by a critical discourse that rendered them mere vehicles of Albania's propaganda mechanism. Indeed, the Hoxha regime routinely set aside impressive funds for the film industry to be used for ideological and propaganda purposes while other sectors of the economy suffered. Such funds allowed Albanian cinema to become most prolific during the Hoxha years, with 247 films being produced between 1957 and 1990. Following the fall of communism, however, Albania's ­cinematic output was drastically reduced. With communism went the entire ­infrastructure of the Albanian film industry. But the momentous events of 1991 and the nation's path to a market economy provide only a partial explanation for the difficulties encountered by the new Albanian cinema. Unlike most other ­formerly Communist countries, Albania has gone through a second dramatic transition. The chaos following the fall of communism – which was graphically depicted in Gianni Amelio's _Lamerica_ (1994) – was mirrored by the anarchy that accompanied the collapse of a number of pyramid schemes in 1996. Fully endorsed by the Albanian government, these Ponzi schemes collapsed when some two-thirds of the Albanian population invested in them and the pyramid schemes were no longer able to pay out. Known as the "Lottery Uprising," the ensuing public outcry dealt a disastrous blow to the already troubled economy and led to the downfall of the Sali Berisha government.

Paradoxically, despite the difficult economic and logistical situation Albanian cinema faces today its films are enjoying a somewhat wider distribution than those works produced during the heyday of the New Albania Kinostudio (Kinostudio "Shqipëria e Re"), the state film enterprise under communism. What remains of Albania's film industry is a mesh of continuities and disjunctions. Three of the directors whose works have been most widely viewed and distributed internationally, Kujtim Çashku, Mevlan Shanaj, and Vladimir Prifti, were veterans of Kinostudio. Two others whose work is also known abroad, Gjergj Xhuvani and Fatmir Koçi, received an important part of their training there. Despite the radical difference in aesthetics and themes of this new cinema from its predecessor, one can thus argue that today's Albanian films are in many ways in a dialogue with Kinostudio. This dialogue, moreover, is further problematized by the extensive reliance upon international co-production, a direction in which, by virtue of the potential it offers for survival, Albanian cinema is now moving.

This chapter will first provide an overview of Albanian film under communism. It will then turn to an analysis of the situation of the nation's cinema between the fall of communism and the pyramid schemes, years which hereinafter will be designated the "interim period." Finally, it will explore what can be defined as the "post-pyramid period," which has run from 1998 to the present. The discussion will not be limited to film itself. Rather, it will examine three additional areas essential to an understanding of Albanian cinema: the training of film professionals, the role of film festivals both domestically and internationally, and scholarly work on Albanian cinema. These three areas provide an essential paratext to the study of Albanian film inasmuch as this small cinema depends on training and festivals for its continuing existence and on academic work for its validation. The latter is of particular consequence since Albania lacks a lacks a popular academic journal altogether. Particularly given the scarcity of published primary sources, this paper will draw in part upon interviews and discussions with film professionals who have made the transition from Kinostudio to today's context.

#  **Before the Fall**

Abaz Hoxha has referred to the Manaqi brothers as the "Lumières of the Balkans" and deems their 1905 film _The Weavers_ to be a pivotal moment in Albanian cultural history (2002b: 57). But this film was an isolated phenomenon; it failed to give way to a true Albanian cinema made by Albanians. Indeed, from 1905 to 1943, many films were shot on Albanian soil, but these were made by foreign production companies, mainly Italian. This period has been extensively examined by Hoxha (1994; 2002b). It was not until 1943 that a short subject was made by an Albanian with an Albanian cast. Mihallaq Mone's 1943 _Takim në liqen_ ( _Encounter at the Lake_ ) has been deemed the first authentic Albanian film. Interestingly enough, this national work was produced prior to the liberation of Albania. Only three years later, the new Communist regime established the Albanian State Enterprise of Cinematography, which was housed under the Ministry of Press, Propaganda and Popular Culture.

Following 1945, the Enver Hoxha regime paid particular attention to the ­development of the cinema. Abaz Hoxha stresses, "[The cinema] was evaluated as a powerful means of propaganda to introduce the new ideology and to avoid [the] entrance of the adversary ideology and tendencies. It was considered as a way to fill somewhat the gap created from the gradual and complete isolation of the country from the world [sic] art, culture, and progress" (Hoxha, A., 1994: 74). The early Hoxha years saw the nationalization of private cinemas together with a great deal of effort being invested in the construction of movie houses in remote areas of the country. In the early years of the Communist regime there were no Albanian films to be seen. Rather, Soviet films were particularly popular. We need only ­mention how familiar Albanians were with the musicals of Grigori Alexandrov, in particular _Volga-Volga_ (1938). Despite the presence of Stalinist films, this period witnessed a steady increase in national film production. In 1947, a documentary, _Komandanti viziton Shqipërinë e Mesme e të Jugut_ ( _The Commander Visits Central and South Albania_ ) was shot by cinematographer Mandi Koçi. This work, which marked the birth of Albanian cinema under communism, coincided with the initial phases of an extensive campaign to train film professionals in Prague, Budapest, and Moscow. On July 10, 1952, film editor Xhanfise Keko (later Albania's foremost woman director, known especially for children's films) handed a pair of scissors to Comrade Enver Hoxha who, in turn, cut the ribbon to open the New Albania Kinostudio for its first work day. The infancy of Kinostudio was dominated by newsreels and short subjects that served to further the ideological path of the state. It was not until 1958 that director Kristaq Dhamo, who had been trained in Budapest, made Kinostudio's first feature film, _Tana_. The studio would remain Albania's sole cinema enterprise until the fall of communism.

Most information regarding the internal processes of Kinostudio under the Hoxha regime is available exclusively through personal interview. According to director Kujtim Çashku, each year, the Albanian Ministry of Culture determined a thematic line. Writers and directors, who were on salary at the studio, would then author and present appropriate scripts to an artistic council for selection. Directors were obliged to make one film every two years. As Çashku articulates, the process combined filming as an obligation with the limited right to choose one's own projects. Moreover, directors had only partial control over the selection of their crew. Since reports had to be made to the Central Committee of Tirana, the Central Committee of Albania, the Politburo members in charge of Culture and Propaganda, etc., "insiders" had to be part of the crew (Çashku: October 8, 2006, pers. comm.).

Despite the widespread belief that Kinostudio was merely an instrument of propaganda, its history was complex and its ideology more ambiguous than many acknowledge. These problematics reflect the official state view of cinema ­aesthetics, which in and of itself was somewhat contradictory. Enver Hoxha argued that "revolutionary art is created by revolutionary artists whose hearts beat with the heart of the people" (Kinostudio Shqipëria e Re, 1977: 3). A 1977 manifesto by Kinostudio further clarifies his remarks:

[An] important feature of Albanian films is that the positive hero, the new man ­educated by the Party, occupies the central position. Socialism is the affirmation of the new, the positive, and the progressive. This is brought out clearly on the screen through heroes who are distinguished by their spiritual strength and moral purity, their readiness to sacrifice themselves. They are completely devoted to the Party, the people and socialism, and have a profound hatred for the enemy, either internal or external. (Kinostudio Shqipëria e Re, 1977: 9).

Kinostudio furthermore categorized Albanian films through the mid-1970s in terms of their thematics. These included the National Liberation War; the Socialist construction of the country; vigilance to protect the victories of the Socialist ­revolution; the reconstruction of Albania; the role and figure of the working class; the collectivized Socialist countryside; social transformations and the formation of our new man; the struggle against erroneous concepts and "hangovers" in the human mind; the struggle for the emancipation of women, and family life (Kinostudio Shqipëria e Re, 1977: 8–9).

The Enver Hoxha government was adamant about the importance of the cinema to the education of the Albanian people. In a 1974 speech, Hoxha directly addressed spoke directly of the significance of this didactic role, and his words helped set the Kinostudio agenda for the following year (1974: 240). Such a pedagogical aim for the cinema is underscored by the 1970s tradition of two screenings per week of films appropriate to youth at Young Pioneer homes – centers of instruction and ­enlightenment for Communist youth. (Although it is difficult today to ascertain which films were actually screened in these sessions, we can note that this period corresponds to the work of Xhanfise Keko, whose youth-oriented films stressed the values of socialism and the need for strong allegiance to the nation.) The artistic agenda of Kinostudio thus was closely tied to the educational goals of the Hoxha regime. The Kinostudio doctrine deemed that form and structure must mirror the social and national content of individual films. Realism was key. "The simplicity and clarity of the narration [was] a permanent feature in all the works of Albanian cinematography" (Kinostudio Shqipëria e Re, 1977: 9). Such an affirmation follows suit with a 1973 speech by Enver Hoxha on the occasion of the fourth Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Worker's Party of Albania on June 26, 1973, in which the chief of state argued that artists and writers must follow the norms of Socialist realism and fight against the influence of foreign ideologies, be they old or new, conservative or modernist (Groupe de travail sur le cinéma albanais, 1975: 37). Furthermore, the mass audience was of particular consequence:

The implementation of the mass line as a characteristic feature of all creative work in every field of artistic activity, has [also] served... the Albanian film producers not only [ _sic_ ], but also to train a whole army of new artists and young talents, many of whom have been discovered during the broad participation of the masses in the actual process of shooting feature and documentary films. (Kinostudio Shqipëria e Re, 1977: 9)

Nonetheless, as will be demonstrated in what as follows, Hoxha's ideas on artistic activity were not uniformly so simple.

Although opponents of the regime argue for the lack of freedom of expression in the arts – a stance that this article will attempt to debunk in the following sections – scholars such as James S. O'Donnell have explored the positive contributions of the regime. O'Donnell stresses:

'Almost all future development in Albania will have been made possible due to the growth which took place in the Hoxha period. The Albanian people have become literate, become conscious of themselves as a nation, had the building blocks of modern society put into place'....Thus, Enver Hoxha and his leadership can be considered a positive stage in Albania's progression from a backward, feudal society (which is the condition Albania was in at the beginning of the period) into a modern nation, though less developed, but certainly one of the twentieth century' (1999: 242).

Ironically, Enver Hoxha himself was a key player in the development of this new national culture, inasmuch as his personal stance on the arts was ambivalent and allowed artists a number of loopholes whereby they could cut through the official orthodoxy of the regime. The Socialist realist aesthetics of the arts in Communist Albania differed from those of other Communist states in their particularly ­problematical relationship with foreign influences. Such a stance reflects on a surface level what was then the party line. In a speech given to the Ninth Congress of the Albanian Party of Labor on November 3, 1986, Ramiz Alia lauds the accomplishments of his predecessor. Arguing that Albania's long-term leader was the key figure in formulating and applying the party's policy of self-reliance, Alia foregrounds that Hoxha strove to make Albania a completely free and independent nation. But this independence was specious at best, inasmuch as Alia appears to have oversimplified Hoxha both as a person and as a leader. A highly educated man with great respect for the arts, Hoxha was very knowledgeable about Western cultural history. Perhaps the key text that best epitomizes the self-contradictory nature of his views on aesthetics is a speech delivered at the Eighteenth Plenary of the Central Committee of the Party of Labor on October 26, 1965. In this speech, Hoxha on the one hand argues the need for a Socialist realism in the arts that speaks to Albania's self-reliance:

Literature and art reflect the existing social relations. This is true of all periods, from Homer and the Greek society of that time to capitalism, from the Enlightenment to Gorky, Mayakovsky, and the Great October Revolution.

Our new literature and art, national in form and socialist in content, follow this course too....When you read them, hear them, or see them, you are seeing and feeling the pulse of the life and struggle of our people' (1977: 240).

Hoxha speculates on how Albanian artists should "study and use the experience of the foreign world in the fields of literature and music, fine arts, theatre, and _cinematography_ " (1977: 255, my emphasis). It would be contrary to the Marxist position to fail to learn from such international experience. Rather than condemning all foreign works a priori, Hoxha stresses that "every work, of every genre and period, has its good aspects and also has its bad ones. We must choose what is good. Each of these good aspects has its own technique, ideas, art of expression, sound, etc." (1977: 256). Nonetheless, an artist cannot blindly follow foreign ­influences and ignore the realities of Socialist Albania:

Thus, study of the works of foreigners must serve the acquiring of knowledge of the life, struggle, and development of these peoples. This does not mean that the struggle, ideas and development of your own people are the same as theirs, in spite of the fact that there may be some similarities or connections with those of others. This lesson, this experience from the foreign works, must serve you to open horizons in order to study the history of your own people better.... We should learn their art of writing, their style, their method of work, rhythms and metre, but we should [study] learn them not to become slaves to them, because our people have their own style and rhythms. We are creating our socialist style which is our basis, on which we shall work, build, and create our own originality, for only in such a way will our people understand us and will we inspire them (Hoxha, E., 1977: 257–258).

Thus, in contrast to a blanket condemnation of all foreign influences and styles, Hoxha, in actuality, calls for a study of these art forms and an assessment of their potential for expressing Albania's reality. He, in fact, challenges artists to greater levels of creativity.

The quality of its film production notwithstanding, it is significant to note that Kinostudio also played a pivotal role in the training of film professionals. Following the initial period during which future filmmakers were educated in the Soviet Union, Hungary, or Czechoslovakia, professional development became an "­in-house" phenomenon, well in line with the country's politics of isolation. (A noteworthy exception is Kujtim Çashku, who completed advanced studies at the Institute for Theatre and Cinematography in Bucharest.) Describing the climate of Kinostudio in this regard, Abaz Hoxha stresses that Kinostudio was the "only school that trained the film-makers by working and learning" (2004: 77). He clarifies this by explaining that, while directors received training at the Institute of Arts and screenwriters were prepared by a literature department at the University of Tirana, other professionals did not receive university education (2004: 77). Instead, Kinostudio erected a creative studio near its premises for the preparation of film technicians. This situation, as Hoxha argues, brought "the danger of the [ _sic_ ] ­turning the artists into workers, even for the talented staff" (2004: 77). As Hoxha stresses, admission to film education was based largely on student "militarism" and nepotism (1994: 81). Hoxha further indicts the education offered by the Institute of Art and other postgraduate courses for being too general in nature and not cinema-specific, stressing that the nation's isolation had kept filmmakers away from modern, international cinema. He asserts, "The majority of them knew only what they had theoretically learned from the ex-socialist countries, 30–40 years ago and never had the smallest contact with world cinema" (Hoxha, A., 2004: 78).

Despite Abaz Hoxha's indictment of Albanian film critics during this period for their lack of intellectual capacity, their inability to judge artistic merit, and their role as mere instruments of the state (1994: 81), the recognition of films and artists at the Albanian National Film Festival had a positive impact on the public reception of Albanian cinema. Screenwriter and former director of the Albanian State Film Archive, Natasha Lako (2004) has discussed at length the importance of this festival, which was held eight times between 1976 and 2001, in the maturing of Albanian cinema. Deeming the festival a venue through which filmmakers and the public could enter into dialogue with the art form and view and compare films, Lako implies that such a forum constituted, in essence, a recognition of intellectual property and artists' rights (2004: 290). Thus, one saw, even during the height of the Communist period, the emergence of the artist as an individual, as a "positive hero." The Albanian National Film Festival, moreover, focused public attention to the work of Kinostudio. It was another mechanism through which Albania could divert the public's eyes from the country's complete isolation and the virtual absence of foreign films. The festival was also instrumental in cementing the high status of Albanian actors in the eyes of film spectators. Such status, as discussed below, would be a significant factor in the shaping of post-Communist cinema.

The presence of Albanian film abroad, however, was very limited. China, as was mentioned, provided virtually the only and certainly the major foreign audience, and there the work of directors such as Hakani and Gjika was extremely popular during the Cultural Revolution. (Actor/director Mevlan Shanaj, in a discussion with the author (March 2005: pers. comm), stressed that "in China, [he] was more popular than Robert De Niro.") Even today, Albanian films with Chinese subtitles can be found on the Internet and constitute an integral part of Cultural Revolution nostalgia. In contrast to this, following Albania's split with the Soviet Union, the presence of Albanian films in other Communist countries was extremely rare. In the West, the situation was only slightly better. Xhanfise Keko's films were represented on several occasions in the Giffoni Festival in Salerno. Perhaps this is because of the notion that children's films are, by nature, more universal and tend to transcend local political contexts.

Hand in hand with the relative international neglect of Albanian cinema comes a dearth of scholarly work on the subject. Given the high output of the Albanian film industry under communism, it is significant that this country's cinema has been one of the least studied of Central and Eastern Europe. This is not only a result of Albania's isolation under Enver Hoxha, but also because of issues of ­language. Albanian is an Illyrian rather than a Slavic language. Hence, much academic criticism and many non-subtitled films are inaccessible to Slavicists, whose specialties are most directly related to most scholarship on the former Soviet Union, East Central Europe, and the Balkans. The earliest study, surprisingly, was actually published in France and not in Albania. In 1975, the Groupe de travail sur le cinéma albanais of the Department of Film Studies of the University of Paris, Vincennes, published _Le Cinéma albanais_ (Albanian Cinema), a brief treatise on the history of Albanian film. This work includes a brief discussion of the history of Albanian film, discussions of Enver Hoxha's speeches on the arts and literature, and ­numerous film summaries.

At home, Kinostudio's 1977 _The Albanian Film_ , a trilingual English/French/Albanian opus, was the first study devoted to the subject. It summarizes and ­categorizes Albanian films that had been produced up to that time. The volume is closely aligned with the dominant ideology of the era and presents film as an ­integral part of the overall political and social agenda of the Enver Hoxha regime. _The Albanian Film_ , moreover, is selective in its quotations from Hoxha and tends to paint the national leader as monolithic in his views. In 1986, Abaz Hoxha published _Filmi artistik shqiptar_ (Albanian Feature Films), an overview of Albanian film from 1957 to 1984. Following a brief historical introduction, the work proceeds film by film and provides production credits, casts, screenings at festivals, and a bibliography of film reviews. Published in 1990, Gazmend Hanko's _Filmi shqiptar: realizime të Kinostudios 'Shqipëria e Re_ ', a volume which is virtually unattainable at present, discusses Albanian film from 1977 to 1987. What is most noteworthy is that, during the Communist period, critical works on Albanian film, whether published in Albania or France, either ­foregrounded the country's sociopolitical agenda or were merely descriptive in nature.

The films of Kinostudio were indeed rich. Although the cinema of Communist Albania had predictable themes, as Kinostudio itself has documented (Kinostudio Shqipëria e Re, 1977: 8–9), it also evinced a high level of aesthetic quality. Such films as Hysen Hakani's _Debatik_ ( _United Youth for Communist Ideas_ , 1961), Dhimitër Anagnosti's _Duel i heshtur_ ( _Silent Duel_ , 1967) and _Lulëkuqet mbi mure_ (Red Poppies on the Wall, 1977), Viktor Gjika's _Gjeneral gramafoni_ ( _General Gramaphone_ , 1979), Xhanfise Keko's _Tomka dhe shokët e tij_ ( _Tomka and his Friends_ , 1977) and _Pas gjurmëve_ ( _On the Track_ , 1979) are but some of the most innovative. It is most unfortunate that this cinema has remained so unknown outside of Albania.

#  **From Void to Void**

In 1991, the New Albania Kinostudio was dissolved. The former entity was split into four sectors: Albafilm, Albafilm Distribution, Albafilm Animation, and the Albanian State Film Archive. In the initial years of the new system, special attention was paid to the creation of animated films. Although some 150 cartoons were made, this activity was later all but abandoned. Moreover, in contrast to the prolific years under communism, Albafilm made only 17 feature films and Radiotelevizioni Shqiptar made 7 during the interim period. Film professionals were particularly hard hit. Some became severely under-employed in the film or television industry; many were forced to seek other types of employment. To reiterate, of all of the formerly Communist countries, Albania was especially disadvantaged. The fall of communism and the pyramid schemes were separated by only five years. In 1996, the National Center for Cinema (Qendra Kombëtare e Kinematografisë) was established to aid in the financing and promotion of Albanian films regardless of genre. The center coexisted with Albafilm until the latter's dissolution in 2000.

Discussing the effects of the transition to the market economy, actress Elvira Diamanti, currently the director of the Albanian State Film Archive, has articulated that Kinostudio films "had been part of a reality and of a spiritual life within the values promoted in that system. Artistic creativity had served to intellectualize suppression" (October 21, 2010, pers. comm.). Such remarks reflect Abaz Hoxha's assertion that cinema was a vehicle employed by the state to fill the gap left by Albania's isolation. Nonetheless, Diamanti points out that, despite political transformation, the Albanian public surprisingly continued to prefer Kinostudio works, feeling "spiritually detached from brand new movies, shot only recently" (October 21, 2010, pers. comm.). Given the rapidly shifting landscape of Albania's cinema mechanism, Kinostudio veterans, who were already well trained, were the most likely candidates for filmmaking during the interim period. Even with a drastic shift in film thematics, this phenomenon symbolically perpetuated some of the "reality and spiritual life" of the Kinostudio days.

Kujtim Çashku, who had directed nine films from 1976 to 1989, is one of the artists who successfully transitioned from Kinostudio to the post-Communist context. In 1995, Çashku founded Orafilm and entered into Albania's first international co-production agreement to make _Kolonel Bunker_ (1996), a direct indictment of the Hoxha regime. In cooperation with 3B Productions in France and the Dom Film Studio in Poland, the film was successfully made and disseminated despite Albania's paralyzing economic situation at the time. Based on historical incidents, _Kolonel Bunker_ focuses on an individual who is placed in charge of Hoxha's "bunkerization" campaign, which extended from 1974 to 1981. This operation, undertaken at the height of Albania's isolation, was largely intended to instill fear and paranoia in the country's population. Protagonist Muro Neto, upon receiving his orders, learns that all military ranks in Albania have been abolished and that his yearnings to become a general are now a pipedream. All the same, he is determined to complete the construction of the required 800 000 bunkers, and destroys everything in his path to do so. Over the course of his work, Neto becomes acutely aware of the inanity of the project, and descends into madness and isolation. In the film, Neto's open indictment of the Albanian government leads to the deportation of his wife, a Polish pianist, and ultimately to his death. The historical Neto, Josif Zegali, who, unlike his film counterpart, survived the events, served as a consultant on the film. (The prototype for the protagonist's wife was actually a Hungarian pianist who had resided in Albania.)

Marking a new era of co-production, _Kolonel Bunker_ was significant for a number of reasons. For the first time, an Albanian filmmaker was able to cooperate closely with both the former Soviet bloc and the West. Çashku's cooperation with French producer Jean Bréhat and Polish producer Filip Bajon saw Albanians working side by side with foreign professionals. The film's female protagonist, for instance, was played by veteran Polish actress Anna Nehrebecka, who learned to pronounce Albanian phonetically for the film. As a co-production, the film was much more widely distributed internationally than were the works of the Communist period. It became the official Albanian entry to the Academy Awards in 1997 and, further, received the Critics' Award at the 1996 Bastia Mediterranean Film Festival and the UNESCO award at the 1997 Venice Film Festival. At home, it was recognized with first prize at the Albanian Film Festival in 2000.

Together with the plight of the film industry at large, the interim period witnessed severe difficulties for education, festivals, and scholarly research. The demise of Kinostudio led to a crisis in the training of Albanian film professionals. There remained virtually no opportunities for film education. This condition was worsened by the crisis of 1996 and 1997 and would prevail until 2004. Such a context was instrumental in keeping film industry power well within the hands of former Kinostudio professionals.

Similarly, the Albanian National Film Festival was only held twice (1991 and 1995) during the interim period, which is in part explained by how few films were made at the time. On the other hand, Albanian films were much better represented in international festivals. In 1993, Gjergj Xhuvani's _E diela e fundit_ ( _The Last Sunday_ ) received the Special Jury Award at the Festival International du Cinéma Méditeranéen de Montpélier in France. The following year, Besnik Bisha's _Zemra e nënës_ ( _Mother's Heart_ ) was awarded the Silver Trophy in the Salerno International Film Festival. During the years of the pyramid schemes crisis (1996–1997), aside from the international awards given to _Kolonel Bunker_ , the only foreign recognistion was for Petrit Ruka, who would later become director of the National Center for Cinema. His _Plumbi prej plasteline_ ( _Toy Bullet_ ), received the President's Award at the 1997 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

The interim period, moreover, saw very little scholarly research on Albanian film. A noteworthy exception is Abaz Hoxha's 1994 _Arti i shtatë në Shqipëri_ ( _The Seventh Art in Albania_ ), which provides an extended discussion of film productions, mainly by foreign entities, in Albania from 1905 through 1944. Unlike Hoxha's 1986 volume, it makes virtually no reference to the Kinostudio era. Perhaps more critical distance was needed for an in-depth reassessment of the Communist period.

Despite the roller coaster years that followed the demise of Kinostudio, the interim period led to several significant developments. A model was in place for co-production, and such initiatives offered considerable opportunities not only for production within Albania but also for the dissemination of Albanian films internationally. Moreover, this period afforded Albanian filmmakers the opportunity to decry the former regime openly. Such a process would be continued during the post-pyramid period, in which this theme, coupled with that of emigration, would mark a good deal of Albanian cinematic output.

#  **After the Pyramid**

As Natasha Lako affirms, the transition to the market economy has implied both loss and gain for the Albanian film industry. Although today's climate offers more freedom and possibilities for actors, there is a shortage lack of both money and movie houses (Lako, September 29, 2010, pers. comm.). In other words, there exists a converse relationship between artistic freedom and the availability of resources. Referring to the difficulties that contemporary Albanian filmmakers are having in financing their films, Elvira Diamanti (October 21, 2010, pers. comm.) stresses that today's directors are at a certain disadvantage inasmuch as their films are being unfairly compared to those of the Communist era or to European and American works, all which have enjoyed considerably more backing. We must recall that the new Albanian cinema is a nascent phenomenon. Diamanti further argues that while cinematography photography has become more sophisticated, the defective acting and stilted editing interpretative and rhythmic defects that characterized Kinostudio still remain. Nevertheless, in spite of the difficulties present, the post-pyramid period has shown a considerable growth in film production. A number of films have received international distribution and festival awards, largely owing to international co-production coupled with subsidies from the National Film Center. In a like manner, there has been noteworthy progress in film education, the festival scene, and scholarly research during this time.

In continuity with the thematics of _Kolonel Bunker_ , films of the early years of the post-pyramid period were dominated by a reassessment of the Communist era and an examination of the problematics of emigration, which plagued Albania following both the fall of the Socialist regime and the collapse of the pyramid schemes. One of the first major films of the period was Vladimir Prifti's _Dasma e Sakos_ ( _Sako's Wedding_ , 1998), a co-production between Eurofilm (Tirana) and Focus Film (Budapeset), with additional support from the National Center for Cinema. _Sako's Wedding_ is an oneiric allegory set in the early twentieth century, when feudal beys were still a powerful presence in Albania. Resembling the atmosphere of a Kadare novel, the film relates the story of Sako, a servant, who has been in the employ of a bey for many years and who has drawn the amorous attention of his master's wife. The bey seeks brutal and humiliating revenge by arranging for Sako to marry. When the bride is unveiled at the wedding, she proves to be a man. The film's primary theme is arguably despotism, and the feudal context serves as a metaphor for more recent political events. (In this respect, _Sako's Wedding_ is not unlike María Luisa Bemberg's 1984 _Camila_ , which was made only a year after the fall of Argentina's dictatorship and decried the military government through the metaphoric use of a nineteenth-century context.) Present in _Sako's Wedding_ , moreover, is a framing device in which members of a contemporary Albanian family living abroad visit the site of the earlier events. Such a device evokes the theme of emigration, which was ever present in the late 1990s.

Two films made in 2001 treated the themes of dictatorship and emigration respectively. Gjergj Xhuvani's _Parrullat_ ( _Slogans_ ) received sponsorship from a number of sources and was made through the most complex co-production to date in Albania. Receiving sponsorship by the National Center for Cinema, the Albanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Culture and Communication, it was further funded by the French National Center for Cinema, THECIF Région Île-de-France, the French Direction du développement et de la coopération, the French Département féderal des affaires étrangères, the Agence intergouvernamentale de la francophonie, Fonds Sud (a French entity aimed at fostering film production in developing countries), and the Monte Cinema Verità foundation of Locarno. Slogans relates the story of a young schoolteacher who, upon accepting a position in Albania's south, finds himself compelled to erect political slogans out of rocks on neighboring hillsides. The events, which take place in the late 1970s, focus on the efforts made by students and teachers to demonstrate their loyalty to the state. The film depicts the effects of totalitarianism on a rural community. A boy is chastised for confusing China and the Soviet Union in a rote recitation; a man whose goat has knocked loose the stones of a slogan is accused of imperialist leanings; and the young teacher is ultimately placed on trial by the local Party Committee.

The same year, Fatmir Koçi's _Tirana viti zero_ ( _Tirana Year Zero_ , 2001) explored at length the chaos of the pyramid schemes years. Funded by Fonds Sud (France), Alexis Films (Belgium), and Kkoci Productions (Albania), the film also enjoyed the support of the National Center for Cinema. It became the most widely distributed Albanian film to date and received the Golden Alexander at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival. The title's reference to Rossellini's _Germany Year Zero_ (1948) conveys the message that, during the chaos of the pyramid schemes, Albania was essentially a war zone. In 1997, protagonist Niku has opted to remain in Albania, despite pressure from his girlfriend to accompany her to France. Niku survives by employing his dilapidated Chinese truck to earn any money he can. On a road trip through southern Albania he meets a French journalist who photographs locals without their permission, using her camera without discretion, and a German tourist determined to export an abandoned bunker to Germany as a souvenir. In the end Niku is reunited with his lover, who has returned to Albania. _Tirana Year Zero_ , through its depiction of the plight of an Albania plagued by massive emigration, makes a poignant plea for Albanians not to abandon their country.

Mevlan Shanaj's _Lule të kuqe, lule të zeza_ ( _Black Flowers_ , 2003) further explores the theme of emigration, but does so through the use of a highly poetic and metaphorical discourse. Unlike the post-pyramid period films discussed so far, which relied heavily on co-production, _Black Flowers_ was produced by Zig-Zag Films (Tirana), Televizione Shqiptar, and the National Center for Cinema. The production was indicted by Shpetim Alimeta, the director of the Albanian film festival that took place during London's Golden Autumn in 2005, for having received all of the 2003 budget of the National Cinema Center. According to Alimeta, such moneys could have produced 25 short films and given the opportunity for young directors to prove themselves (Alimeta, 2006). Alimeta's claims that _Black Flowers_ was received negatively in London are largely unsubstantiated. The film was also very well received in New York and won the Best Picture Award of the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival of 2004.

Depicting the catastrophic effect of emigration on a small town in Albania's far South, _Black Flowers_ is dreamlike and episodic. Its elliptic screenplay by Natasha Lako is well in keeping with the writer's renown as a poet in Albania. The film focuses on Liliana, a woman who has been abandoned by both her husband and daughter, and who must come to terms with life in a decimated village that is rapidly being deserted. _Black Flowers_ is a challenging film and is arguably the most complex and enigmatic film of the Post-Pyramid era. Uncompromising in its oneiric atmosphere, it interweaves sequences of childhood innocence, emigration scams, the presence of Protestant missionaries, and homoerotic rituals.

In 2005, Albanian cinema took a dramatic turn. Kujtim Çashku's _Syri magjik_ ( _Magic Eye_ , 2005) broke with the repetitive themes of dictatorship and emigration, using the events of 1997 merely as a backdrop to an examination of the global theme of media manipulation. The film was financed by Orafilm in cooperation with Elsani Films in Cologne. It was further supported by the National Center for Cinema and by the German government. _Magic Eye_ has doubtless received the most international awards of all Albanian films to date. At the 2005 Cairo International Film Festival, it won the Best Screenplay Award, the FIPRESCI Prize, the Best Actor Award (for Bujar Lako), and the Silver Pyramid. At the 2006 Valencia Mediterranean Film Festival it was awarded a Bronze Palm for Cinematography and a Best Music Award. Çashku was further recognized at the 2007 Trieste Festival for his "brave commitment to the development of Albanian cinema." _Magic Eye_ achieved third place in the Audience Award at the same festival.

The film focuses on Petro, a retired photographer in the southern Albanian city of Gjirokastër, who accidentally captures the death of an old man and a child with his super-8 camera, a tragedy actually caused by a television journalist out to secure a hot story. While the media seeks to manipulate the journalist's images to reframe the events, Petro sets off to Tirana to have his own film developed. Unbeknownst to him, his traveling companions are the journalist and his ­girlfriend. Risking his life on a return trip to Gjirokastër, Petro struggles to screen his film for the family of the victims so that the truth can be known.

In 2004, shortly before the release of _Magic Eye_ , Çashku initiated a giant leap forward for film education in Albania by founding the Akademia e Filmit e Multimedias Marubi (Academy of Film and Multimedia Marubi, AFMM). Located between the former Kinostudio complex and the Albanian State Film Archives, Marubi is the first private film school in Albanian history. The academy draws upon European and North American educational traditions and articulates its curriculum with that typical of three-year film programs in a Western European university. A fully-accredited Albanian institute of higher learning, Marubi integrates theoretical lessons and practical assignments. Its faculty is multinational. While most Albanians are employed on a part-time basis, foreign instructors conduct short-term master classes, often sponsored by the embassies of their home countries. Some 18 Albanian faculty members, including former directors Mevlan Shanaj and Vladimir Prifti, scriptwriter Natasha Lako, actress Elvira Diamanti, actor Timo Flloko, and film historian, Abaz Hohxa, have taught at Marubi. The 21 international faculty members have included directors Goran Marković (Serbia), Javier Rebollo (Spain), and Gareth Jones (United Kingdom). Marubi's Board of Directors is comprised of representatives from the Embassies of Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States; a representative of Unesco in Tirana; a representative of Pro Helvetia, and the director of the Harry Fultz Institute of Tirana (see Academy of Film and Multimedia Marubi, www.afmm.edu.al, accessed November 4, 2010).

It is especially significant to note that the core faculty members, who teach part-time or full-time over the course of a complete academic year, are mainly veterans of Kinostudio. Hence, to a large extent, students learn from those who were leaders in the defunct establishment. (It is ironic that the Marubi Academy lies very close to the site where Kinostudio had its Creative Studio for the practical training of film professionals.) Marubi's Albanian instructors are, by and large, those who have made successful transitions to the new film environment and have directed, written, or acted since the demise of Kinostudio. Yet Marubi has fought a hard ­battle against the academic in-breeding that such a teaching cadre would imply. Çashku's investment in the frequent presence of professors and professionals from Europe and the United States has avoided the provincialism that Abaz Hoxha encountered in the Kinostudio system. Like the films of the interim and ­Post-Pyramid periods, which draw upon familiar faces of the Kinostudio to explore social or political issues diametrically opposed to those of the previous era, the Marubi Academy places Kinostudio professionals in a setting in which they ­interact with colleagues from around the world. International master classes are attended not only by students but also by Albanian faculty members, who contribute a wealth of experience to the discussions and, in turn, learn from new perspectives. The internationalization of the academic experience at Marubi has been further enhanced by international exchanges in which Albanian students travel to Germany or Serbia, and Serbian students and Germans spend a short time in Tirana.

Aside from its function as an academic institution, the Marubi Academy has also played a pivotal role in disseminating international cinema. Beginning with a Thursday-night series of free public screenings of important films introduced by faculty or embassy representatives, Marubi has afforded Albanians the opportunity to view films that would never have been possible during both the years of isolation and the anarchy of the 1990s. Recently, it added "Spanish Fridays," in which recent and classical Spanish films are screened and discussed, in cooperation with the Spanish embassy. Marubi is also the home of the Albanian Human Rights Film Festival, which began in 2006.

Unfortunately, in February 2009, the municipal police of Tirana, together with representatives of Alba Film and Top TV, surrounded the academy with barbed wire, alleging that Marubi had encroached on a plot of land they claimed for themselves. Over the course of the spring of 2009 Marubi faculty members and ­students were beaten in confrontations with the police. Ironically, the burning of an ­outdoor movie screen in _Magic Eye_ prefigured the destruction of such a screen in the garden near Marubi that had served both the Albanian Human Rights Film Festival and other screenings of the Academy during the spring and summer months. At the time of writing, Marubi students, instructors, and staff must still follow a ­circuitous route, flanked by barbed wire, to enter the facility. The escalation of this siege has led to an outcry among the international diplomatic community in Tirana; a ­number of ambassadors have stood side by side with Provost Çashku, students, faculty, and even the academy's cleaning staff to express outrage at the events. Although there is no end in sight to the conflict, two observations can be made at this time: firstly, Marubi is becoming increasingly separated from those Albanian film entities with which, ideally, it would work most closely. Cooperation among the diverse film and television enterprises that surround the former Kinostudio complex would assure employment for Marubi graduates and allow for a symbiotic dialogue. Secondly, such separation has, in turn, encouraged the academy to strengthen its ties with its international partners, all of whom have come out strongly in support of the school.

Hence, in film education as well as production, the post-Communist, ­Post-Pyramid dynamics of the cinema world in Albania have been considerably complex, drawing former Kinostudio professionals into the fold while cementing ties with international entities. Although most Marubi graduates are employed in film or television production within Albania, an impressive number have presented their own short subjects at international festivals. In fact, far more Marubi student films have appeared in international festivals than did Kinostudio films over the course of the institution's history. Thanks to the efforts of Marubi, coupled with the works of post-Communist era directors, Albanian film is gradually becoming known in the rest of the world.

Unlike the former Albanian Film Festival of the Communist period, Albania's new festival, TIFF (Tirana International Film Festival), provides a venue for the viewing and judging of international films. Initiated in 2003, TIFF was invited to become a member of the European Council of Film Festivals in 2006. Its international emphasis notwithstanding, TIFF has played a role in the dissemination of Albanian films. For instance, among the prizes awarded is one for the Best Albanian Film. Furthermore, in 2009, TIFF included as part of its program an academic workshop entitled "Balkan Cinema through Cross-Cultural Perspective." Chaired by Danish film scholar Lars Christensen, this workshop was comprised academic talks by scholars from the Balkans, Western Europe, and the United States. Only one talk, however, focused on Albanian film and it was presented by a US academic. Bruce Williams' paper, "The Eagle Spreads Its Wings: The Reception of Albanian Film in the Anglophone World," concentrated on post-Communist Albanian films that have been subtitled and screened abroad. The TIFF workshop has led to an international dialogue among junior and senior scholars interested in Balkan cinema. Such a dialogue promises increased scholarship on Albanian film.

During the post-pyramid period, there has been a considerable increased in ­academic work undertaken within Albania over that of previous years. Abaz Hoxha has been particularly prolific in his historical writings, the publication of his works being funded by the National Film Center, the Soros Foundation, and the Pro Helvetia foundation. In 2002, he published an _Enciklopedi e kinematografisë shqiptare_ (Encyclopedia of Albanian Cinema) (2002a). This extensive reference volume provides biographies and credits for virtually all Albanian film professionals from the time of the Manaqi brothers to the time of publication. Interestingly enough, Hoxha also includes such emigré Albanians and Albanians by descent as Melina Mercouri and John and James Belushi. The _Enciklopedi_ also offers production credits on all films produced by Kinostudio and Radiotelevizioni Shqiptar, a list of animated films, and mention of festival awards at home and abroad. In 2002, Hoxha further published _100 vjet kinema në trojet shqiptare_ (100 Years of Cinema in Albanian Dwellings) (2002b), a chronology of film and its precursors from the late 1800s to 1996. The volume includes several sections in fairly comprehensible English. Hoxha's 2004 _Kinematografia shqiptare 1985–2005_ (Albanian Cinematography 1985–2005) essentially picks up where his 1986 _Filmi artistic shqiptar_ left off and explores the period 1985 to 2005 through film-by-film analyses. The volume includes historical discussions and a section in English extremely similar to that of his 2002 chronology. Finally, in 2007, Hoxha published _Historia e kinemasë në Shqipëri_ (The History of Cinema in Albania), a work which traces Albanian film from 1987 to 1955.

Funded by the Albanian State Film Archives, in 2004 Natasha Lako published _Energjia filmike_ (Film Energy), which seeks to explore Albanian film in the broader context of world cinema. The volume contains an English-language summary devoted to nineteenth-century precursors to film in Albania, the Manaqi brothers, and film during the fascist occupation. Another English-language discussion highlights the history of the Albanian Film Festival from 1976 to 2000. Despite the wealth of information presented in _Energjia filmike_ , the English summaries are poorly translated and render the work next to impossible to decipher for ­non-Albanian readers.

Under the sponsorship of the Albanian National Academy of Science, Abdurrahim Myftiu has published three extensive scholarly books on Albanian film. Unfortunately, none of these have been translated into English or another language. His 2002 _Nga letërsia te filmi_ (From Literature to Film) presents an analysis of film adaptation in Albania. In 2003, Myftiu published _Koha e filmit_ (The Age of the Cinema), a study of films of the Kinostudio era. The book is divided into sections focusing on popular memory, drama and poetry, the inter-war period, Albania's remote north, humor and satire, and ancient and modern life. Myftiu's most recent volume, _Filmi në kapërcyell të shekullit_ (Film at the Transition of the Century) published in 2004, comprises close readings of films from the interim and Post-Pyramid periods by such directors as Kujtim Çashku, Vladimir Prifti, Gjergj Xhuvani, Fatmir Koçi, and Mevlan Shanaj.

Critical positions vis-à-vis Albanian cinema on the part of Albanian critics have, like Enver Hoxha's views on foreign cinema, been ambivalent in nature. The same critic or historian will either be self-contradictory in her or his stance or overtly stress that dogmatic constraint can actually foster innovation. Abaz Hoxha describes at length the repressive nature of Kinostudio by foregrounding the fact that artists became self-censors in order to avoid problems with the official censors. Characters were thus '"black and white" and one film resembled another (2004: 75). Hoxha indicts Kinostudio films for intellectual and artistic "sloth" as well as for a lack of a "necessary innovative spirit" (2004: 75). Yet, in an earlier publication, he argues that "the values created by the Albanian cinematographers [ _sic_ ] laid the foundations of a new national culture" (Hoxha, A., 2002b: 76). Such words mirror remarks made by Natasha Lako in a discussion with the author (October 12, 2006). Speaking of the innovative and often subversive nature of the films of Xhanfise Keko, Lako alluded to the presence of genuine creativity in the Kinostudio mechanism and stressed that Keko was able to negotiate her way through the complexities of bureaucracy and ideology and make highly innovative films. In a reassessment of the Hoxha era, Lako (2004: 78–79) further attests to the dialectic between freedom of creativity and constraint during this period. There is no doubt that Albanian film, even at the height of the nation's Maoist Cultural Revolution, trod a tightrope between orthodoxy and artistic possibilities, a fact that fostered a great deal of creativity during the period.

Internationally, on the other hand, very few studies on Albanian cinema have been published since _Le Cinéma albanais_ in 1974. Mention has been made of Albanian film, although haltingly, in studies devoted to the broader context of Balkan Cinema. While Dina Iordanova's extensive filmography in _Cinema of Flames_ lists 75 Balkan films, only 2 are Albanian. In a like manner, the _BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema_ (Taylor _et al_., 2000) virtually discounts Albanian cinema. Matthew May's entry on Albanian film indicts the oppressive propaganda that characterized this cinema for some 45 years. The sole entry in the _Companion_ for any Albanian cinema figure is that for novelist Ismail Kadare, from whose works numerous Albanian and international cinematic adaptations have been made. Iordanova's brief entry on Kadare delves into the significance of the writer rather than foregrounding these film adaptations. Similarly, Stojan Pelko's entry on the Manaki brothers does not discuss their links with Albania.

#  **The Old and the New**

Contemporary Albanian film has indeed broken with the dogma and aesthetics of the Kinostudio era. Even during the interim period, it was able to tackle topics that would have been forbidden under strict state censorship. Albania has been able to assess critically both the country's Communist past and the sociopolitical situation since the 1990s. Further, it has begun to explore less regional, more universal topics. Film education has been internationalized, and film festivals and screenings have made foreign films available to Albanians in an unprecedented manner. Cinema scholarship in Albania, moreover, has moved well beyond the documentation of production details and has begun to situate Albanian film in a global context. International scholars are just beginning to recognize Albanian cinema as a valid field of academic inquiry. But the past is not dead and, in fact, has managed to remain a key component of today's cinema reality. As Lako (September 2010: pers. comm) has affirmed, despite the difference in systems, the main concern of Albanian cinema continues to be sociopolitical reality. Furthermore, the Albanian films that have been most widely distributed abroad have been those made by Kinostudio veterans and trainees. Hence, power structures from a bygone era remain, to a large extent, in place. From the audience perspective, older viewers still prefer to see the familiar faces of the "bad old days" on the screen. The past has become a parallel thread that runs through the new thematic dynamics and provides a reminder of what Diamanti has described as the "spritual life" of Kinostudio. For Lako (2010: pers. comm.), the dynamics of past and present in Fellini's _Ginger and Fred_ (1986) serve as a metaphor for Albanian cinema today.

Granted, Çashku's _Magic Eye_ explores universal themes, and the films made by his students at Marubi are looking well beyond the "land of the eagle," but this ­emerging global perspective does not imply an end to Albanian cinema per se. Both scholars and viewers now are blessed with the critical distance to reassess the Kinostudio era. And such reassessment can be a part of a broader discourse on the post-Communist world. But one must proceed with caution in this regard. Yes, there are many ­commonalities between contemporary Albanian films and those of the nation's neighbors in Central and Eastern Europe. Co-production is now an almost unavoidable reality, and if a film becomes universal in its production, distribution, and ­thematics, wherein lies the Albanian perspective? But we cannot forget the particularly bumpy path Albania has traversed towards a market economy. The chaos of the pyramid schemes renders Albania distinct from most other post-Communist nations. The country must both recover completely from these events and come to grips with the notion of a greater Albanophone phone world, as ties with Kosova, Macedonia, Montenegro, and the Albanian diaspora become a tauter nexus. Thus, any critical perspective on Albanian film must consider both regional and global phenomena, at least for the present. Albanian film has evolved, but in its own unique way. It is now in the hands now of a generation born well after the fall of the Berlin Wall who are global in their perspective. The future of Albanian cinema is just as uncertain today as it was 20 years ago when Kinostudio shut off its lights.

 **References**

Alia, R (1986) Report on the Activity of the Central Committee of the Party of Labor of Albania and the Tasks for the Future: Submitted to the 9th Congress of the Party of Labor of Albania, November 3, 1986. Tiranë: 8 Nëntori.

Alimeta, S. (2006) "Albanian films in London's Golden Autumn '05." July16, <http://­albafilmfest.wordpress.com/2006/07/16/albanian-films-in-london%E2%80%99s-golden-autumn%E2%80%9905/> (accessed November 25, 2011).

Groupe de travail sur le cinéma albanais (1975) _Le Cinéma albanais_ (Albanian Cinema). Paris: Université de Vincennes-Paris VIII.

Hanko, G. (1990) _Filmi shqiptar: realizime të Kinostudios "Shqipëria e Re_."

Hoxha, A. (1986) _Filmi artiskik shqiptar_ (Albanian Feature Film). Tiranë: 8 Nëntori.

Hoxha, A. (1994) _Arti i shtatë në shqipëri_ (The Seventh Art in Albania). Tiranë: Albin.

Hoxha, A. (2002a) _Enciklopedi e kinematografisë shqiptare_ (Encyclopedia of Albanian Cinema). Tiranë: Toena.

Hoxha, A (2002b) _100 vjet kinema në trojet shqiptare_ (100 Years of Cinema in Albanian Dwellings). Tiranë: Marin Barleti.

Hoxha, A. (2004) _Kinematografia shqiptare 1985–2005_ (Albanian Cinematography 1985–2005). Tiranë: Toena.

Hohxa, A. (2007) _Historia e kinemasë në shqipëri_ (The History of Cinema in Albania). Tiranë: Ilar.

Hoxha, E. (1977) Literature and the arts should serve to temper people with class consciousness for the construction of socialism, in _Speeches, Conversations and Articles_ _(_ 1965–1966 _)_. Tiranë: 8 Nëntori, p. 255.

Iordanova, D. (2001) _Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media_. London: British Film Institute.

Kinostudio Shqipëria e Re (1977) _The Albanian Film_. Tiranë: 8 Nëntori.

Lako, N. (2004) _Energjia filmike_ (Film Energy). Tiranë: 2004.

Myftiu, A. (2002) _Nga letërsia te filmi_ (From Literature to Film). Tiranë: Botim i Akademisë së Shkencave.

Myftiu, A. (2003) _Koha e filmit_ (The Age of the Cinema). Tiranë: Botim i Akademisë së Shkencave.

Myftiu A. (2004) _Filmi në kapërcyell të shekullit_ (Film at the Transition of the Century). Tiranë: Botim i Akademisë së Shkencave.

O'Donnell, J.S. (1999) _A Coming of Age: Albania under Enver Hoxha_. New York, Columbia University Press.

Taylor, R., Wood, N., Graffy, J. and Iordanova, I. (eds) (2000) ___The_ _BFi Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema_ __. London: British Film Institute.

 **Further Reading**

To date, no book-length studies on Albanian film exist in English. Moreover, other ­scholarly works on the subject are in press or under preparation. As mentioned in the text of this chapter, it is only recently that Albanian cinema has begun to elicit academic attention. Readings on the subject are mainly from solid but non-refereed sources or sophisticated online sites. Three individuals whose work can shed further light on Albanian film are James Andrew Horton, Gareth Jones, and Dina Iordanova. Suggested readings are as follows:

Horton, Andrew James (2001). Will the last person to leave the country please turn out the lights. _Kinoeye_ 1 (7) (November 26), <http://www.kinoeye.org/01/07/horton07.php> (accessed December 4, 2009).

This article consists of a review of _Tirana Year Zero_ and foregrounds Koçi's position that the film presents reality and not a mere denigration of contemporary Albania. It places the film within the broader context of emigration in the post-Communist world.

Horton, Andrew James (2001) How to make a film in a country that barely has a film ­industry: the making of this year's Albanian hits. _Kinoeye_ 1(7) (26 November), <http://www.kinoeye.org/01/07/horton07_no2.php> (accessed November 30, 2010).

Horton assesses the limitation of possibilities within Albania for film production, given that most local entities provide assistance in kind rather than hard currency. He explores the essential role of coproduction in the future of Albanian film.

Jones, Gareth (2007) _Kolonel Bunker_ / _Magic Eye_. _Cinéaste_ 32 (3) (Summer): 52–53.

Jones's insightful review of these two films focuses on the progression of Kujtim Çashku's development as an artist and explores continuities between his works.

Iordanova, Dina. Whose is this memory? hushed narratives and discerning remembrance in Balkan cinema. _Cinéaste_ 32 (3) (Summer): 22–27.

Iordanova integrates discussions of the work of Kujtim Çashku into a broader analysis of Balkan film. The dialect between the local and regional is especially evident in this work.

# 13

# National Space, (Trans)National Cinema

#  _Estonian Film in the 1960s_

Eva Näripea

The recent upsurge of Estonian cinema, characterized by an increased number of productions as well as by the remarkable success of these productions both at international film festivals and at the domestic box-office, has left broader ­audiences with a strong conviction that Estonian cinema as a national cinema was not born until after the Estonian state was re-established in 1991. The title of this paper, ­however, as well as the rather scarce historical accounts of Estonian cinema (e.g., Orav, 2003: 20ff), proposes that something called "Estonian national cinema" did emerge in the 1960s, despite the absence of a nation-state.1 Yet for a long time this advent was not seen as a process related to the "national culture" proper, and to this date the lion's share of Soviet Estonian cinema (i.e., films (co-)produced by local film ­studios and/or set in Estonia between 1940 and 1941 and from 1944 to 1991) is often not recognized as a self-evident part of Estonian cultur **e**. The main causes of such a rejection are rooted in the specific conditions of the Soviet film system that functioned as a transnational enterprise: multinational republican ­talent was trained solely in the metropolitan center of Moscow; the work of republican ­studios was centrally coordinated in terms of ideological instruction and control, as well as allocation of finances; and the finished products, ­frequently made by multinational crews and cast, were distributed in the Union-wide ­network. However, as was typical of the Soviet period, these centrally imposed regulations and policies, which are now often considered in the framework of a transnational discourse of complex interrelations rather than from a victimizing perspective of colonialism and Russification (see e.g., Brüggemann, 2009), left a number of ­loopholes for Estonian filmmakers to tackle locally bounded issues and to engage in national themes and narratives, (re)producing a "national imaginary." The results of these "cross-cultural transactions" (Bergfelder, 2005: 322) are shaped by a complex set of negotiations between national/local and transnational/Soviet currents, and thus it has often been difficult for the local audiences to embrace these films as manifestations of "true" national culture, equal to literature or theater. In the following discussion I will first sketch some general outlines of the emergence of Estonian "national school" and delineate the interplay between national and transnational factors in this process, before, in the second part of the chapter, investigating spatial representations in Estonian fiction films of the 1960s, with the intention of demonstrating that in a number of films a specific ­chronotope in the Bakhtinian sense (Bakhtin, 1981) becomes apparent. According to Bakhtin, in an artistic chronotope "space becomes charged and responsive to the ­movements of time, plot and history" (Bakhtin, 1981: 84). It is precisely the chronotope of "nation-scape," described in more detail below, that reveals the essential character of these films as "national" and sets them apart from the products of the ­homogenizing/transnational Soviet culture.

#  **(Trans)National Cinema**

In February 1962 a new Estonian feature film, _Ühe küla mehed_ ( _Fellow Villagers_ ), premiered in Tallinn. It told the story of a group of fishermen from a northern Estonian coastal village whose boat loses its course in a violent storm and drifts to Finnish shores. The men find shelter with their Finnish peers, while also ­encountering a former fellow villager, Feliks Kandel, an émigré spy of an ­undefined "capitalist agency," who tries to persuade his countrymen to stay in the West. Finally, despite this and several other enticements, all the men return home safely. Set against the background of earlier formulaic Socialist realist films, the critics were positively stunned by the newcomer's subtlety and relative lack of explicit ideological instruction. After a whole array of typical master plots (Clark, 2000) based on the codes of the bildungsroman,2 historical epics of ideological ­struggles,3 and didactic lightweight comedies and (kolkhoz) musicals,4 _Fellow Villagers_ stood out for delicate representations of the characters' inner psychological conflict and its nuanced take on the topic of emigration, and, in direct relation to the latter, for a sensitive contemplation of the deep scars left by the turmoil and in the aftermath of World War Two. For the local audiences the film rang with much more truth than earlier cookie-cutter portrayals of the country's presumable progress under the Soviet rule. The film's crew attracted attention as well: it was a diploma film at the All-Russian State University of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow for the director Jüri Müür, the cinematographers Jüri Garšnek and Harri Rehe, and the production designer Linda Vernik. These young Estonian filmmakers represented a new generation of filmmakers, consisting to a great extent of ethnic Estonians and local talent – as opposed to the so-called visiting filmmakers, such as Aleksandr Mandrykin, Viktor Nevezhin, Mikhail Yegorov, and, most famously, Herbert Rappaport, who had dominated the sphere of Soviet Estonian film in the ­immediate postwar era. These directors had been appointed to the newly founded Estonian studio, Tallinnfilm, in the late 1940s and early 1950s by the central authorities in Moscow, who struggled with the drought of _malokartinie_ ("film famine") and channeled the leftover manpower to gear the cinematic apparatuses of the recently (re)conquered territories. More often than not these cineastes, sent to the freshly established studios with the mission of disseminating the fertile seed of Soviet cinematography, proved to be less than talented and equally little interested in the local traditions, culture, and language.5 Compared to the films they had made, young Jüri Müür's _Fellow Villagers_ , scripted by local writers Aimée and Vladimir Beekman (Aimée was also a VGIK graduate), attracted attention as an early ­example of the emerging local cinema. Tatjana Elmanovitš later emphasized that the "film carried a special mission – at last our _own_ cinema was made, scripted by our _own_ writers, directed and cinematographed by our _own_ film-makers" (Elmanovitš, 1995: 517–518; cf. First, 2008: 73).

Although the film contains several emblematic codes of the Socialist realist canon, most importantly the typically unsuccessful attempt of a Western spy to harm the Soviet system and people, the filmmakers' approach to the story reveals a marked break from the previous discourse. Above all, as is typical of post-­Stalinist narratives in general (Prokhorov, 2002: 193ff), even though the fishermen ­constitute a collective working-class protagonist, the Stalinist myth of the Great Family (see, e.g., Clark, 1997) is decisively atomized into a set of smaller families and individual relationships. The group of fishermen consists of men whose ideals and problems, pasts and goals are distinctly diverse. Furthermore, while Niglas's religiosity, reinforced by his sparing and rigid character, is clearly disapproved of as anachronistic, and he is the only one seriously contemplating the betrayal of his homeland, his relative negativity is downplayed just as Juhan's party membership is deemphasized. The filmmakers avoid clear-cut, black-and-white ­characterizations and judgments; most notably this is manifested in the portrayal of Kandel, the emigrant spy: while he is identified as an enemy, his potential dangerousness is neutralized by his mousy appearance and helplessly propagandistic utterances – the latter becomes especially obvious in the absence of straightforward Soviet propaganda in the dialogue.6 Compared to the spies in, for example, Igor Yeltsov's _Kutsumata külalised_ ( _Uninvited Guests_ ), made only three years earlier, Kandel seems less demonic – in a grotesquely caricatured manner – and more humanized: he is represented as an individual entrapped by greater historical ­circumstances.7 As such, this portrayal can be regarded an early and, admittedly, modest manifestation in Estonian cinema of a more general characteristic of Soviet cinema during the Khrushchev Thaw, which concentrated on the "shock of war in the consciousness of innocent civilians," although, as pertinently asserted by Tatjana Elmanovitš, because of the historical conditions of the Baltic countries, in the early 1960s, "the time was not yet ripe for giving sense to the particularities of the conflict (brothers fighting on the opposite sides, the war of large countries in the home yard of a small nation)" (Elmanovitš, 1995: 518).8 The true traumas of war still remained unacceptable in the realm of Estonian cinematic portrayals, but the issues of emigration provided a chance to challenge the limits of this prohibition.

On the one hand, then, _Fellow Villagers_ demonstrates a significant change towards greater "localness," towards distinct national concerns (cf. Woll, 2000: xiv), brought about by the new generation of native filmmakers. On the other hand, the film also bears witness to conditions and processes that originated ­outside the borders of the national community. As indicated above, by the late 1950s and early 1960s the changing political and cultural situation of the Khrushchev Thaw led to a new mode of filmic thinking in the Soviet Union, to a modification of the Socialist realist canon, which affected first the productions of central and, after a short delay, republican studios. In addition, the Soviet ­film-system policy promoted the crossing of internal borders between the republican states of the Union by encouraging and sometimes imposing co-operation between the Socialist Republics, as well as with other members of the Eastern bloc, and by centralizing the professional training to the VGIK (cf. Higson, 2002b: 67–68; Ezra and Rowden, 2006: 4). The school functioned as a true melting pot, not only synthesizing Soviet policies and multiple national identities but also adding elements of Western origin to the mixture. While the centrally implemented Soviet policies were certainly intended to function as devices of subjugation, it is more productive to consider them and their ramifications in a dialogic framework of intercultural encounters. Moreover, a number of historians of Baltic history have by now come to the conclusion that the victimizing discourse of Russification is too limited to describe the complicated relationships between the Baltic ­periphery and the Soviet center. In what follows I will try to shed some light onto certain aspects of these transnational developments, mechanisms, and ­engagements, in terms of industrial and artistic, narrative and formal exchanges inside the Soviet Union and beyond its borders.

Although the filmmakers involved in the production of _Fellow Villagers_ were almost invariably ethnic Estonians, it is also important to keep it in mind that even if the first wave of centrally appointed filmmakers soon disappeared without much of a trace from the arena of Estonian cinema, and their work was effectively removed from the national discourse of cinematic history,9 the structure of ­filmmaking teams on many occasions still remained decisively multinational (not to mention the fact that the overall Soviet system of film production remained basically unchanged). This is already apparent in the case of the fairly uniform ethnic structure of the group working on _Fellow Villagers_ : the second director, Grigori Kromanov, hired in order to compensate for Müür's lack of experience in working with actors – whose theatrical background added to the difficulties of directing them in film – was Russian by descent, although born and raised in Tallinn. The local culture and language was an integral part of his personal ­universe, just as were the Russian roots inherited from his ancestors, making him a transnational figure par excellence (he later married a Jewish-Lithuanian theater critic and shared his time between Vilnius and Tallinn). Together with Müür they went on to direct the first and much-celebrated adaptation of Estonian classical literature – _Põrgupõhja uus Vanapagan_ ( _The Misadventures of the New Satan_ ) in 1964; moreover, a romantic historical adventure, _Viimne reliikvia_ ( _The Last Relic_ ), ­produced in 1969, (and also, notably, based on another Estonian literary classic), made Kromanov the author of the most popular Soviet Estonian (genre) film, which arguably reached a Union-wide spectatorship of 44.9 million viewers and was also widely distributed in both Socialist and capitalist countries. In addition to local ­talent, filmmakers from other parts of the Soviet Union also continued to ­participate actively in Estonian film production. It is noteworthy, however, that these visiting (and, importantly, invited) artists – most often actors, ­cinematographers, and occasionally also scriptwriters – predominantly came from the republics situated in the Western part of the Soviet Union, that is Latvia, Lithuania, the Ukraine, and Byelorussia, while the script consultants were, as a rule, appointed by the central authorities in Moscow. The latter practice can ­doubtless be considered another exercise of censorship and control, although now and then these revisions unquestionably also helped to advance the level of ­professionalism and improve the outcome, as was the case with _Fellow Villagers_ , the script of which was mercilessly critiqued and edited by Lev Kuleshov, Müür's teacher at VGIK. Notably, the crucial emphasis usually still remained on the local idiosyncrasy, as demonstrated so convincingly by Müür's debut.

As already indicated, then, nearly all the filmmakers holding key positions in the creative unit of _Fellow Villagers_ – the director, the cinematographers, the ­production designer – had been educated in VGIK, in Moscow, under the influence of a wholly different set of cultural factors. The institute of cinematography had put them into contact with Western cinema's history and its newest trends, both directly – through films that were shown as part of their coursework but whose screening was prohibited to the general public – and indirectly – through the works of their teachers who were among the best filmmakers of their times.10 For example, Müür, who, against all odds,11 and despite the fact that the quotas of places set aside for students from the small republics were not yet established, meaning that all candidates had to compete for admittance on equal terms (see Remsu, 1986: 22), had become Dovzhenko's student at this elitist institution in 1955, along with Leida Laius, another important Estonian director,12 Otar Iosseliani, and Larisa Shepitko, among others. VGIK, whose professors and students had always been carefully monitored in terms of ideological correctness, had nevertheless ­managed to become a major incubator for an open-minded, socially conscious young ­intelligentsia, where reportedly the first acts of student unrest against the ­authorities took place as early as 1956 (Fomin, 1998: 203–208). The cultural ­atmosphere of Moscow was particularly fertile between 1955 and 1965, and events such as the 1957 World Festival of Youth and Students, which under the motto "For Peace and Friendship" brought to the city unprecedented 34 000 participants from all over the world, must have provided mind-broadening experiences to the young filmmakers. Thus, the liberating breeze of the Thaw, spreading the hope for change, was felt more rapidly and immediately after Stalin's death, and especially after Khruschev's Secret Speech in 1956, in the metropolitan center of Moscow than in the peripheral province of Estonia. The creative conditions of the second half of the 1950s, too, were undeniably more favorable in Moscow, and especially in a relatively well-protected artistic sanctuary such as VGIK, than in Estonia, where the cultural sphere was still headed by the Stalinist-minded and ­conservative Secretary of Ideology Leonid Lentsman (see, e.g., Ehin, 2001; Kuuli, 2002: 55ff.), and where the energies of the creative elite were only beginning to regain impetus after the repressive and depressing period of the immediate postwar decade. Later, however, the tables turned and the Baltic periphery became an important hub of dissent, although considerably more so in other cultural spheres than in cinema.

But to return to the late 1950s when Müür, Garšnek, Rehe, and Vernik studied in VGIK, the Western influences in terms of cinematic models more precisely meant Italian neorealism, which was undeniably the most important trend of the day.13 In her review of _Fellow Villagers_ , Tatjana Elmanovitš argues that the film's "script betrays the formal aspirations of 1950s Italian neo-realist cinema," it "lacks conventional plot structure," and "instead of suspenseful and thrilling adventures the filmmakers aimed towards observing the men who found themselves thrown away from their familiar surroundings into an alien territory, and towards studying their feelings, reactions, thoughts and conclusions." (1995: 518). Many other ­critics, too, had unanimously noticed and welcomed this change in the deep structure, the replacement of "false-classicist" and airbrushed Socialist realism with "­observation of life," "genuine environments," and "casual improvisations," as described by Elmanovitš. This tendency of deheroization had found its way to the Soviet ­cinema to a great extent precisely through the neorealist films and had formed the basis of such works as Kalatozov's   ( _The Cranes Are Flying_ , 1957) and Chukhrai's   ( _Ballad of a Soldier_ , 1959), both of which were widely acclaimed by the Estonian press and audiences, and must have made quite an impression on the film students. At Tallinnfilm, numerous works ­demonstrating similar dramaturgical shifts followed _Fellow Villagers_ , most famous, and probably most prominent, of them being Kaljo Kiisk's _Jääminek_ ( _Ice Drift_ ) from 1962.14 Later, some slight vibrations of the "new waves" of both the Eastern bloc and Western countries found their way to the Estonian filmic field through the same channels, exemplified best by such films as Kromanov's _Mis juhtus Andres Lapeteusega?_ ( _What Happened to Andres Lapeteus?_ , 1966), and Kiisk's _Keskpäevane praam_ ( _Midday Ferry_ , 1967) and _Hullumeelsus_ ( _Madness_ , 1968); although the boldest experiments took place in the production of Estonian television film studio, Eesti Telefilm, in the 1970s (see Näripea, 2010). Just as elsewhere in the Soviet Union, the range of devices for visual expression expanded considerably, and filmmakers, although not always entirely successful in their results, became profoundly interested in ­pictorial experiments. The work of perhaps the most influential Soviet cinematographer during the Thaw, Sergei Urusevsky, whose style combined "fast-paced montage, multiple superimpositions, complex panoramic shots, and subjective camera angles" (Prokhorov, 2001: 13), revitalizing the practices of the 1920s Soviet ­cinematic avant-garde, was highly relevant to Estonian film.15 It made probably the greatest impact on a cinematographer of the Eesti Telefilm studio, Anton Mutt, another VGIK graduate, who in Tõnis Kask's tripartite TV-miniseries _Pimedad aknad_ ( _Dark Windows_ , 1968) shot a whole sequence by running with a hand-held camera – the only one of its kind in Estonian (narrative) cinema of the 1960s. Algimantas Mockus, the Lithuanian cinematographer of _Ice Drift_ and Laius's _Libahunt_ ( _Werewolf_ , 1968), also adopted elements of Urusevsky's stunningly ­inventive visual language to powerful effect. In addition to the stylistic fireworks of Urusevskian play with angles, motion, light, and shadow, the documentary-like aesthetics – "the basis of poetry in the cinematography of the 1960s" (Woll, 2000: 197) – also penetrated the pictorial modes of communication, either by inclusion of documentary footage (as in _People in Soldier's Uniforms_ ) or by adopting an "observational" approach to the narrative and/or visual structure (Müür's _Kirjad Sõgedate külast_ ( _Letters from Sõgedate Village_ , 1966), _Midday Ferry_ , etc.). Furthermore, the relative geographical proximity of the Baltic states to the Western capitalist countries, and especially to Finland, whose television broadcasts were accessible to the spectators on the northern coast of Estonia, opening a ­literal "window to the West," to the Soviet audiences,16 left significant traces on the ­cinematic culture, as witnessed, for example, by the Bergmanesque style of several Estonian films (such as _The Misadventures of the New Satan_ ,17 which has been ­compared to Bergman's _Seventh Seal_ and _Winter Light_ (see, e.g., Elmanovitš 1995: 519) or _Madness_ , which bears a certain likeness to his _Persona_ ). However, while the particular formal devices signaled a significant change, it is important to stress that the general so-called politics of the author was extremely highly esteemed and made a substantial impact on the consciousness and aspirations of the local ­filmmakers. An Estonian critic Ülo Matjus even wrote in 1968, "World cinema is _auteur_ cinema. Estonian cinema needs _auteur_ cinema." Indeed, the achievements of Polish and Czechoslovakian _auteurs_ became a source of national envy for their Estonian colleagues who attempted to make their "authorial voices" heard despite the "castration machine"18 of the Soviet filmmaking system.

#  **National Space**

It thus seems that what is commonly referred to as the emergence of Estonian national cinema was actually an essentially transnational process. The "national school" was conceived by filmmakers whose personal (hi)stories and professional connections often crossed the national borders and who had been educated in the metropolitan center of Moscow – a fact that frequently made their compatriots doubt their "loyalty" to a nation robbed of its sovereignty – where they had been acquainted with the latest trends in Western cinemas. The institutional conditions supporting the cultivation of national cinema were also mainly beyond local ­control: the financial means and basic ideological instructions came from central authorities. At the same time, however, the picture is still incomplete without the local, national, part of this _trans_ -national development, and the argument that the 1960s can be considered the moment of the appearance of Estonian national ­cinema still holds a good share of truth. While the shift from Stalinist, stereotyped mode of representation to a more variegated range of narrative and visual devices was typical to the cultural production of Khrushchev Thaw everywhere in the Soviet Union, it is also important to stress that Jüri Müür planned his first film as an openly and straightforwardly national enterprise. Defending his diploma ­project at Tallinnfilm, Müür boldly stated at a meeting of the studio's Artistic Council, "I'm not afraid to earn the title of a bourgeois nationalist by saying that they [the characters of _Fellow Villagers_ ] are Estonians. They do have national character. [...] The film is intended to become a national film, _a film with a particular environment and characters of the northern coast_ " (my emphasis).19 He also argued that although the men are encouraged to stay in Finland for good, they clearly do not decide to return because of the so-called advantages of the Soviet society, but rather because "Estonia is the place where the fishermen's wives, homes and co-workers are, and they cannot bear to live anywhere else."20 Critics were quick to comprehend these intentions from the finished product, as testified, for example, by Ivar Kosenkranius's review, which summarized the fundamental nature of the film as follows: "The fellow villagers implicitly connote homeland and nation." (1962). In other words, the identity of the characters is defined less by social class or ideological ­inclination than by their sense of belonging to a particular place that is regarded an inalienable domain of their linguistic and cultural community, the land and the nation being one and the same. Thus, it appears that the film's national frame of reference is first and foremost related to and discussed by means of categories of territory and space. Indeed, although many other aspects also set the previous filmmaking ­practices apart from the cinema of the 1960s, as demonstrated above, the essence of the shift – a crucial change in the perspective – becomes especially evident when one considers representations of space. Most importantly, in the films made by the centrally appointed visiting filmmakers in the 1950s urban environments had held a relatively high significance. In the 1960s, on the other hand, the majority of ­fiction films produced by Tallinnfilm presented rural or small-town settings. Furthermore, those few films from the 1960s that featured urban areas tended to represent the city as a place of (ideological and/or personal) corruption, as, for instance, in _What Happened to Andres Lapeteus?_ , which was quite unabashedly ­critical towards the recent Stalinist past, and the social legacies and behavioral models it had left to the 1960s. Another example of demoralizing urban conditions is Veljo Käsper's _Viini postmark_ ( _The Viennese Postage-Stamp_ , 1967), a comedy ­ridiculing the slow progress of industrial advancement, the low moral attitude of workers, and the general roguish mentality. The countryside, in contrast, was ­frequently portrayed as a "site of cultural tradition and heritage" (Fowler and Helfield, 2006: 2). As suggested by Tiina Peil and Helen Sooväli (2005: 50), "­rurality and the narrative of land... maintain a central role in Estonia's imagination of its homeland" (see also Peil, 2008: 147). In contrast to the Stalinist cinematic villages of the 1950s, the rural environments in the films of the 1960s usually managed to avoid exoticized representations of the nation and the national, the varnished ­collages of ethnographic elements and falsely embellished depictions of people's everyday lives. Instead, as revealed by Kosenkranius's 1962 review of _Fellow Villagers_ , the atmosphere of these rural settings was "created by the people and the distinctive nature of the environment, which the authors have framed in the ­spectre of well-chosen details." The pseudo-ethnographic imagery, which lent an unmistakably artificial, misleading, and alienated look to the first products of "Soviet Estonian cinema," such as Rappaport's _Valgus Koordis_ (Light in Koordi, 1951), had finally been replaced by a milieu more plausible to the local audiences. Or, from the point of view of phenomenological theories of environmental ­representations the gaze of an outsider, the "touristic" sense of place, inauthentic, distorted, and stereotyped, was replaced by a "local" point of view and sense of place (Relph, 1986: 80–87).

#  **Nation-Space: Back to the Past**

While the Estonian countryside had enjoyed considerable wealth and prosperity in the late 1930s, and the interwar Estonian Republic and its government had relied heavily on the political support and tax resources of the rural bourgeoisie, the wealthier and middle-class farmers had been effectively abolished by the late 1940s – either deported or killed or both by the Soviets or driven to exile in order to escape the onslaught of the war and the "dictatorship of the proletariat." The city, ­meanwhile, had appeared in the literature of the 1930s as a predominantly ­negative phenomenon, exploiting the products of the farmers' hard work in order to feed the useless army of bureaucrats; additionally, because of the lower birth rate, urban dwellers were accused of attempting to annihilate the Estonian nation (see Märka, 2004: 67–68, 74). War-related losses in the countryside and the postwar campaigns of forced collectivization had left the rural areas impoverished and ­ailing, making so much more clear to the local audiences the flagrant lie of films like Light in Koordi, but also of productions completed as late as 1961, such as the kolkhoz musical _Laulu sõber_ ( _Friend of Singing_ ), which portrayed the life of a ­collective farm called Kalev – a name tellingly borrowed from a hero of ancient Estonian mythology. In this film, following the typical Socialist realist plotline, the collective farmers, having ­overcome the initial obstacles and struggles of ­establishing the kolkhoz, lead their untroubled lives in nice new apartment ­buildings and work in mechanized cow barns, wearing spotlessly white smocks – a revealing sign of the advent of the "­scientific–technological revolution" in the Khrushchevite Soviet Union – and refine their cultural sophistication by means of various amateur artistic practices. Later, in the 1970s, the programmatic ­industrialization of farming did indeed help to raise living standards in rural areas above those in towns and cities, and ­agriculture became an object of true national pride as the most Estonian-minded branch of the economy. In the beginning of the 1960s, however, the general picture of life in the countryside was "symbolized by muddy roads, poverty, pilfering, alcoholism and hopelessness" (Kalm, 2008: 61). In this respect, it is especially significant to find that alcoholism triggered, in a way, the whole narrative of _Fellow Villagers_ : Raim, one of the fishermen and the mechanic of the boat, was too drunk to join his crew on the morning of the ­accident, and when the engine failed in the middle of the sea there was no one on board to fix it, so that the boat and the men were left helplessly at the mercy of the raging storm, drifting towards unfamiliar waters and shores. Equally notably, the character of the drunkard does not change by the end of the narrative; he keeps up his customary ways even after the upsetting incident, therefore ­escaping the usual Socialist realist formula of personal, and thus political, reform.

According to the third program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, issued in 1961, the kolkhoz villages were supposed to be transformed into large urban settlements with apartment buildings, a proper infrastructure, a network of shops, various service-providers, and cultural and health institutions – a process pertinently defined as agro-urbanization (Maandi, 2005: 180). The social, ­economic, and cultural divisions between the country and the city were to be abolished (see Kalm, 2008; Jänes, 2004). Yet the actual implementation of these goals progressed slowly. More often than not the establishment of entirely new centralized ­settlements was not realized and the kolkhoz centers were built as extensions to already existing villages and historical manor complexes. Nevertheless, as Hannes Palang and Ülo Mander have explained, the transformation of landscape and ­lifestyle was dramatically visible already in the mid-1960s. The land was ­nationalized and the rural households were forced to join the collective farms, the kolkhozes. Small backcountry villages disappeared, farmsteads were abandoned, the arable land, formerly divided into smaller plots, now formed massive fields. New ­machinery favored the disappearance of individually maintained plowlands and the abandonment of little hayfields, which, in turn, led to the expansion of forests (Palang and Mander, 2000: 172).

On the whole, the progressive ideology endorsed by the party program was clearly geared towards the future, towards neutralizing the previous, old-­fashioned, and ideologically outmoded ways and vistas, towards erasing memories of the past. In this respect, the above-mentioned musical, _Friend of Singing_ , released in the same year as the new party program, functions as a representation of a wishful reality, a glimpse into the bright Communist future, executed as a perfect product of a Socialist realist illusion-generating machine.

In this context it is somewhat surprising to find that the Soviet Estonian cinema of the 1960s demonstrates relative indifference towards the development of the kolkhozes. While in the 1950s the establishment and progress of collective farms provided a staple substance for cinematic stories, in the 1960s, with only a few exceptions from the earlier part of the decade,21 the topic of dramatically changing landscapes and lifestyles is virtually absent. Instead of contemporary rural ­everyday life, the filmmakers often found their inspiration in another era, another time and space. On many occasions, the space-time of the 1960s Estonian cinema appears to be decisively divorced from the contemporary, that is, Soviet realities, from the real _and_ officially envisioned landscapes described briefly above. It is also important to bear in mind that it is not only cinema that fled the countryside but also real ­people: in 1940, only 34 percent of the population inhabited urban areas, while in 1962 as much as 64 percent of Soviet Estonian residents were town- and city-dwellers. The process of rapid urbanization, however, was also ignored by the Estonian cinema of the 1960s.22 Instead of the quotidian Soviet existence, whether rural or urban, the filmmakers frequently seemed to strive towards creating a world apart from the immediate reality, an escapist sphere of locally situated and nationally bound themes in the wide ocean of the "international" Soviet cinema. Furthermore, in hindsight it is almost ironic how much the underlying principle resembled that of the Stalinist cinema: both Stalinist film and the newly established "Estonian school" did their best to dissociate from the circumstances that actually existed and conjure up a new world, which, although sometimes reminiscent of the immediate ­surroundings, was decisively different on a symbolic level. For Stalinist cinema it meant the processing of "Soviet reality" into de-realized Socialist realism, into a "commodified reality" – "something akin to enriched uranium" (Dobrenko, 2004: 690). According to Evgeny Dobrenko,

Stalin introduced a new temporality: the concluded future (a kind of future ­pluperfect). In order to free the ground for this new future, the present was shifted into the past, the future-directed future was transformed into the present, as a result of which the present itself underwent complete de-realisation. The completed ­construction of the past turns out anew to be an ideal, a model for the future (either as a direct projection or 'in reverse'). (2008: 7)

The new generation of Estonian filmmakers, similarly, created screen spaces which implied, to an extent, another time and space. Yet, contrary to the Stalinist practices, they conjured up bygone eras and places, and resurfaced powerful ­memories of cancelled opportunities and void hopes. Perhaps the employment of this Aesopian language was their only opportunity to retain at least some level of integrity in the situation where the brutal honesty of the true state of life in the countryside was a representational taboo and the portrayal of the varnished ­version of it would have signaled the servile acceptance of Socialist realist tenets, that is, the betrayal of local culture, its continuity, and viability.

According to John Agnew (1998; cited in Sooväli, 2008: 132), the image of ­landscape is one of the most important mechanisms of creating national identities. So, the extent to which Estonian filmmakers paid attention to the rural ­representations can partly, perhaps, be explained by their efforts to investigate national identity,23 which was suppressed by the Soviet regime and faced the threat of complete annihilation in favor of the uniform _homo Soveticus_. Jüri Müür's ­statements, quoted above, laid the emphasis, quite openly, precisely on the ­distinctive character, maybe even uniqueness, of locality and nationality. Thus, latent in the work of Müür, as well as other filmmakers of the time, is a search for contact with the past, both in his evocation of certain life-styles and traditions and in his covert commemoration of lost a independence and statehood in order to sustain the sense of the Andersonian "imagined community" (Anderson, 1983).The rural realm became the basis for constructing, reconstructing and ­reestablishing local and national mythologies, winning a voice and space for identity in peril of fading away. As emphasized by Fowler and Helfield (2006: 3), "rural cinema ­frequently plays an important role as a conservator of the culture and a kind of archival entity." Instead of envisioning the Communist future, then, the local ­artists and audiences were keen to plunge into the past, irretrievably lost in the sociopolitical reality yet vividly alive in their minds, and, in part, in the rural ­landscapes of the immediate postwar years.24

In this respect it is also important to stress that Estonian cinema of the 1960s is to a great degree seen as the cinema of adaptations of local literary classics written between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s and often presenting stories set in this period and mostly in rural environments.25 This policy of adapting the local literary classics was not looked upon favorably by the authorities in Moscow, who, according to the decisions of the 20th and 22nd Congresses of the Communist Party, endorsed representations and stories of contemporary times and ­revolutionary themes. The new, Estonian-minded editorial staff of Tallinnfilm had, to the relative aggravation of the studio's Russian-speaking and ­Moscow-orientated management, already started to draft lists of important works for screen adaptation sometime in the late 1950s, but those plans were realized only partially and only from the 1960s onwards, when the young, VGIK-educated Estonian filmmakers brought a new and stimulating breeze of inspiration to the studio. Between 1961 and 1969 Tallinnfilm produced altogether 23 feature films, 5 of which were adaptations of Estonian literary classics, 8 were adaptations of ­contemporary prose and plays (sometimes with subject-matter from the recent history, harking back to the 1940s), 6 were based on original scripts by local authors, and 4 on works of scriptwriters from elsewhere: 1 from Latvia ( _Madness_ by Viktors Lorencs) and 3 from Russia (quite objectively the 3 weakest films of the decade). Although the adaptations of literary classics were intended to consolidate and ­buttress the local national sentiments and indeed were somewhat subversive towards Moscow's policies, cinematic or otherwise, paradoxically they still also managed to play a part in ghettoizing the local cinematic achievements in the Estonian cultural sphere at large, mainly, and surprisingly enough, with the help of contemporary Estonian critics who had often been trained as literary scholars and tended to downplay the films in comparison with the original literary sources. According to Tiina Lokk, the gap created between cinema and audiences by the productions of the so-called visiting filmmakers of the 1950s, which, in ­comparison with literature, told blatant lies, was unfortunately not overcome even when the new generation of Estonian directors introduced adaptations of classical literature to the Estonian cinematic arena. Even if they were seen as innovative and ­distinctive in the larger, Union-wide context, the local critics could only look upon them as inferior to their written precursors (Lokk, 2003: 15), creating an unjustly negative image of Estonian cinema, which persisted for decades to come, and keeping it from entering the circulation of national culture.26 A remarkable, although by no means singular, example of this conscious degradation is the story of adapting _The Misadventures of the New Satan_. This classic tale, the last novel of the celebrated author Anton Hansen Tammsaare, published in 1939, was an allegorical story based on folkloric motifs: the devil himself comes to Earth as a human being in order to find out if it is indeed impossible to be redeemed, to lead a life as a human and still go to heaven after death. As a work concentrating on and criticizing the profound contradictions of the bourgeois society it was a fairly acceptable ­candidate for screen adaptation in terms of its ideological implications in the Soviet context. In fact, Müür had started working on the script as early as 1957 and was planning to direct it as his diploma project at VGIK. In 1960, a board of professors discussed the proposal (which Müür presented to them as an intentionally Estonian and national project) and found it "dramaturgically interesting, highly cinema-specific and significant for the contemporary context."27 But when Müür approached the editors of Tallinnfilm, his intentions were nipped in the bud, as an "expert evaluation" commissioned from a local literary scholar Helene Siimisker deemed the screenplay entirely worthless, dismissing the philosophical core of Tammsaare's work, deforming its ideas and characters.28 Müür's initial offer was shelved and he was assigned to direct _Fellow Villagers_ instead. Nevertheless, in 1962 he returned to _The Misadventures of the New Satan_ and completed the film by 1964.

#  **Conclusion**

As, hopefully, I have demonstrated, the story of Estonian cinema, the paths of which have so far been trodden far too rarely, is a captivating and complex ­­phenomenon waiting to be (re)discovered in fuller detail, both by its native ­audiences, as part of their cinematic inheritance, and by international ­commentators, as a full and equal part of East European film history. Although the scope of this chapter prevented me from considering the whole range of ­cross-national links between Estonian cinema and the wider, regional network of Soviet and East European film culture, I have attempted to offer at least some introductory insights into what has been considered the moment of Estonian ­cinema's inception. On the one hand, this process, as well as its results, were ­subject to numerous transnational impulses. On the other hand, these films also betray traces of an unmistakably local sensibility, demonstrating clear intent to participate in the "national project." While several contemporary critics remained suspicious of cinema as "nationally impure," shaping the image of the local film industry as a marginal player on the domestic cultural field for decades to come, it is the responsibility of the subsequent generations to reconsider these evaluations critically, and to recognize that this "impurity" might, in fact, be a virtue and not a flaw. In other words, it is crucial for the domestic debates to catch up on ­developments in the international research and theorization of national cinemas, and to acknowledge that _any_ national cinema is inevitably related to various ­networks and structures of transnational origin. Under Soviet rule, the control measures imposed on cinematic affairs by the central authorities in Moscow prompted mistrust towards the budding "national school" amongst the local ­community, who often failed to notice the potential of the transnational system of the Soviet film industry, as well as the generally sincere intentions of the ­filmmakers in advancing the "national project." It is high time, firstly, to integrate the story of Soviet Estonian cinema into narratives of Estonian national culture, and, secondly, to consider local film production as subject to fascinatingly complex cross-cultural web of influences.

 **Notes**

1 In the period of interwar independence (1918–1940) the young nation-state did not ­succeed in establishing local film culture comparable to budding national cinemas that appeared with the support of government-promoted cultural policies and subsidies elsewhere in Europe. In the prewar Estonian Republic, the state agencies did not ­support (feature) filmmaking substantially, and the miniscule domestic market was too weak for initiating and sustaining regular film production locally. True, from 1931 the state film studio Estonian Culture Film was established, and in 1936 it became an ­organ of state propaganda, producing "compulsory newsreels that propagated values ­established by the state, and benevolent educational films" (Ruus s.a.), but its ­development was cut short by World War Two. Film-related legislation was absent until 1935 and there was no film school.

2 E.g., _Vihmas ja päikeses_ ( _In Rain and Sunshine_ , 1960), directed by Herbert Rappaport.

3 E.g., _Perekond Männard_ ( _The Männards_ , 1960), directed by Aleksandr Mandrykin.

4 E.g., _Juhuslik kohtumine_ ( _A Chance Encounter_ , 1961), directed by Viktor Nevezhin; _Laulu sõber_ ( _Friend of Singing_ , 1961), directed by Ilya Fogelman and Reet Kasesalu.

5 In order to give a fair overview of the situation, however, one has to admit that not all of them were mediocre, chronically untalented artists: for example, Yuli Kun, who ­co-directed a comedy _Vallatud kurvid_ ( _Naughty Curves_ , 1959) with a local, Kaljo Kiisk, belonged to the ranks of the best filmmakers of the time and was sincerely admired by Kiisk (see Kiisk, 2005: 127); Herbert Rappaport, who directed altogether four feature films in Estonia between 1947 and 1960, including the very first Soviet Estonian ­production _Elu tsitadellis_ ( _Life in the Citadel_ , 1947), was also a well-established director who in the late 1920s and early 1930s had served as an assistant director to G.W. Pabst (including, for example, on _Die Büchse der Pandora_ ( _Pandora's Box_ ) in 1929) and had worked in Germany, Austria, France, and the United States, where he met Boris ­Shumyatsky, the reorganizer of the Soviet film industry, who subsequently invited him to work at Lenfilm. Kaljo Kiisk has also testified that through personal relations Iosif Heifits and Mikhail Romm made a relatively significant impact on the Estonian film of the 1960s (Kiisk, 2005)

6 Admittedly, this, on the other hand, also serves to "normalize" the Soviet regime, and the near absence of overt ideological statements does not remove the film from the sphere of politicized mode of articulation. As Dina Iordanova has ­pointedly indicated,

well aware of the excesses and the dangers of totalitarianism, film-makers saw the making of "apolitical" films as a matter of priority. The films that they opted for would often be about disturbances of intimate relationships rather than heroic confrontations and class struggles; they would focus on ordinary everyday life and thus, in the context of imposed excessive politicization of the personal domain, deliver a covert political statement. Their "apolitical" cinema was, in fact, ­profoundly political.(Iordanova, 2003: 95)

Furthermore, Müür's decision to downplay the role of unconcealed ideological ­indoctrination can also be seen as a sign of social adaptation, which characterized the broader mentality of Estonians in the 1960s, when "many Estonians came to think that they have to settle with and adjust to the Soviet regime imposed on them" (­Kuuli, 2002: 98) and that "the inner structure of the system might change slightly, but its existence is permanent and unchangeable" (Olesk, 1999: 391).

7 The film's script editor, Valter Kruustee, even admitted during a discussion of the script at the studio's Artistic Council that "last summer I had several contacts with members of the émigré elite in Sweden and saw their newspapers and magazines, and I have to say that I would like to see them portrayed as they are in reality. They do not represent a force we must fight against." (Estonian State Archive (ESA), f. R-1707, n. 1, s. 566, l. 56).

8 However, Jüri Müür did return to this issue on a much more profound level in his ­ _Inimesed sõdurisinelis_ ( _People in Soldier's Uniforms_ , 1968), which was one of very few ­Soviet Estonian fiction films attempting to tackle more or less honestly the true ­tragedies of Estonian soldiers, forced by the historical circumstances to fight on ­opposite sides of the front in World War Two. It remained one of the rare occasions during the Soviet period on which Estonian soldiers in foreign uniforms were depicted in films and, even more importantly, one of the very few sympathetic portrayals of Estonians in the German army. This problematic focus of attention caused ­considerable aggravation to the central authorities of cinema in Moscow. Because of the sensitive nature of the subject matter, the studio received several rigorous instructions from the Committee for Cinema in Moscow, demanding extensive revisions and pointing out in a condescending manner that the wartime conditions were not adequately presented and that the story of Estonian soldiers "converting" to become good Communists was not entirely convincing. When finally completed, the film wasdenied a screening ­license outside the Baltic republics and Karelo-Finnish SSR (­according to Enn Säde's biographical documentary _Jüri – see mulk: Ehk mis tuul müürile_ about Jüri Müür).

9 See, for more detail, Näripea, 2008.

10 When the school was over, relatively close contacts with the latest developments of Western cinema were sustained through regular closed screenings organized by the Union of Soviet Filmmakers and its republican branches, and in Estonia also through access to Finnish television, which reached the northern part of Estonia and made a great impact on the awareness of the Estonian audiences and doubtlessly also on the work of the local film industry.

11 Müür's past as a teenage _Luftwaffenhelfer_ (child soldier, Luftwaffe support personnel) in the German army during World War Two, although a carefully kept secret, had made him an unlikely candidate.

12 Notably, Laius's biography is also crisscrossed by transnational patterns: her ­grandparents emigrated from Estonia in the mid-nineteenth century and she was born in 1923 near Leningrad, in Russia. In 1938, her father was arrested as a _kulak_ and Leida, her brother, and their mother, a native of the Estonian border-town Narva, were forced to move (back) to Estonia. During World War Two she joined the Red Army, but failed, contrary to her desire, to fight on the front, becoming instead a member of the art ensemble with the Estonian Rifle Corps.

13 According to Josephine Woll, by 1956 "Italian neo-realist cinema had altered viewers' expectations. Film professionals, film club members and urban residents generally had easy access to Rossellini's _Rome – Open City_ , De Sica's _Umberto D_. and _Bicycle Thief_ , and to all of De Santis' films; the regime permitted liberal distribution because these movies dealt with social issues and depicted 'simple' working-class characters" (2000: 35). In 1962, an article introducing the tenets of Italian neorealism also ­appeared in Estonian press: "Tracing Neorealism" by Valdeko Tobro, a local film critic.

14 _Ice Drift_ , Kiisk's solo directorial debut, also enjoyed considerable success on a regional level: at the annual film festival of the Baltic states and Byelorussia, it won the main prize, the Grand Amber, and earned additional awards for the best cinematography, the best screenplay, and the best actress. Kiisk had consulted Iossif Heifits and Mikhail Romm (Kiisk, 2005: 123–124, 127) during the production, thus introducing some ­reverberations of their talent to the Estonian filmic field.

15 As noticed by Prokhorov (2002: 63), during Thaw the "narrative is suspended" at its nodal points and "yields to the visual spectacle of characters' suffering or extreme emotional stress. In such episodes, Thaw directors usually employ sequences ­imitating the style of avant-garde montage or literal quotations from the films of the 1920s. The visual ambiguity of such sequences signals emotional tension, subjectivity of point of view, and concern with the emotional state of an individual." This pattern was ­already in place in _The Cranes Are Flying_ , where the scenes that are shot in a manner ­reminiscent of the Stalinist practices – "bodies fill the foreground, often from the waist up; a face may hang very close to the camera...; characters are arrayed in steep diagonals ­plunging into the distance" (Bordwell, 2001: 19) – are punctuated by sequences which borrow their abstract aesthetics from the cinema of Eisenstein, Vertov, and other avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s. This overall visual configuration also ­characterizes several Estonian films of the 1960s, including _Fellow Villagers_.

16 Moreover, Urho Kaleva Kekkonen, the Finnish president, visited Estonia in 1964, ­bringing about a change of focus in Finnish policies: the Finnish state now officially ­concentrated on developing relations with Soviet Estonia instead of Estonian ­communities in exile (see Lilja and Olesk, 2005). In July 1965, a regular ferry service ­between Tallinn and Helsinki was (re)established, creating a direct channel of ­communication. The cultural ties ­between the two neighboring countries were ­manifold and multidisciplinary, and included also (unrealized) plans for cinematic ­co-production (see Lõhmus, 2009).

17 During the film's first screening to Tallinnfilm's Artistic Council, one of its members, a writer (and the editor-in-chief of Tallinnfilm between 1961 and 1963), Ants Saar, declared quite openly thatin the course of making this film we once again looked to the West and kept in mind the audiences outside the Soviet Union. And we have been obliged to do so in order to follow a recent order issued by the Central Committee about taking greater concern for exports. This is undoubtedly one of those productions targeted to foreign markets." (ESA, f. R-1707, n. 1, s. 821, l. 57)Unfortunately, as it often happened with Müür's films, his trouble-seeking, ­arrogant, and stubborn personality caught the unfavorable attention of ideological watchdogs and _The Misadventures of the New Satan_ never crossed the borders of the Soviet Union. The fact that overseas audiences were consciously targeted by the policies of the ­highest level, however, resonates well with Andrew Higson's claim that "the ­parameters of a national cinema should be drawn at the site of consumption as much as at the site of production of films" (2002a: 52) and thus emphasizes once again the profoundly transnational character of Soviet (­Estonian) cinema.

18 An eloquent expression coined by an Estonian film critic Tiina Lokk in the 1980s (1989: 57) and brought to my attention by Andreas Trossek (2008: 39).

19 ESA, f. R.1707, n. 1, s. 566, l. 80–81.

20 He also suggested that "we should not include great arguments with Feliks Kandel about whether the men should stay or not. Nor the great discussions about the ­fishermen getting paid more or the life being better [in the West]." These choices are witness to the tactics Müür used to avoid the typical codes and patterns of ­Socialist realist discourse, replacing it with a different, more subtle, and, most ­importantly, ­locally bound angle of representation.

21 In addition to the kolkhoz musical _Friend of Singing_ , two films dealing explicitly with life on kolkhozes were produced: Yeltsov's _Ühe katuse all_ ( _Under One Roof_ , 1962), and Kiisk's _Jäljed_ (Traces, 1963). The latter is interesting in several respects. First, looking back to the immediate postwar era, it was the earliest Estonian film attempting to deal more or less openly with various problems faced by the rural communities ­under the Stalinist period of forced collectivization. It did so by showing the ­establishment of a kolkhoz as a relatively repressive and painful process, pointing out the corruption of the imposed system and ridiculing its ways of operation. So much so, in fact, that the film was banned from screening outside Estonia (Kiisk 2005: 123). Secondly, it was the first film made in the Baltic republics investigating the highly problematic subject ­matter of the so-called Forest Brothers – anti-Soviet partisans who waged guerrilla warfare against Soviet rule at the time of the Soviet invasion and occupation of the Baltic countries during and after World War Two. For the broader audiences, ­however, the Lithuanian film _Niekas nenor_ ė _jo mirti_ ( _Nobody ­Wanted to Die_ , 1967) by Vytautas Žalakevičius, was to become the quintessential ­representation of this topic.

22 It is important to keep in mind, however, that although the 1950s saw an accelerated growth in the population of smaller towns and townships, "the bigger towns got new inhabitants via immigration, [while] smaller towns gathered mainly 'refugees' from the countryside, escaping the awful living conditions in the early kolkhozes" (Mander and Palang, 1994: 48). This might well enough be one of the reasons ­behind the ­relative absence of bigger cities from the films of the 1960s (as well as the ­negative portrayal of the few that showed up in films), and it may explain the more favorable attitude towards smaller towns and townships in terms of cinematic ­representations.

23 The fact that the national narrative, as established by the elite of the prewar ­nation-state, was closely connected with rural imagery is further confirmed by the design of the interwar currency. According to Helen Sooväli (2008: 136), in the ­European context the dominance of village landscapes on the Estonian bills was only comparable to the Latvian currency.

24 According to Peeter Maandi, to the extent that we can speak of a "Soviet landscape" we cannot disregard the fact that to a certain degree, it coexisted with the old (pre-Soviet) landscape. Thus, many manor complexes became the centers of the new collective farms, and new Soviet-style buildings were simply appended to the old manor houses and parks. Many of the ancient field patterns could still be identified at the end of the Soviet period, partly because numerous fields were converted to grazing land, which did not necessarily imply that impediments had to be removed.(Maandi, 2005: 202) In fact, his research shows that many people used the "material landscape as an aid to memory. To some extent, this memory-laden landscape served as a link to the ­pre-Soviet past" (Maandi, 2005: 203).

25 In this context it is also interesting to note that according to Jaan Kross (2008: 304–305) the relatively small Estonian community in New York had sometimes in the early 1970s also cherished the idea of establishing a diasporic film industry, and the first project was supposed to be the adaptation of August Kitzberg's much celebrated ­tragedy _Libahunt_ ( _Werewolf_ , 1912), which in 1968 had already been adapted for screen in Tallinnfilm ­under Leida Laius's direction.

26 Some critics have since argued, however, that these adaptations are the only Soviet ­Estonian films which deserve to be labeled "national" (e.g., Vaher, 2009: 18). Still, similarly to the critics of the 1960s, Vaher does not acknowledge them as proper ­cinema, because, arguably, the dominant voice in them belongs to the language of literature, not film.

27 ESA, f. R-1707, n. 1, s. 843, l. 47.

28 ESA, f. R-17-07, n. 1, s. 843, l. 2–3.

 **References**

Agnew, J. (1998) European landscape and identity, in _Modern Europe: Place, Culture and Identity_ (ed. B. Graham). Arnold, London, pp. 213–235.

Anderson, B. (1983) _Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism_. Verso, London,

Bakhtin, M. (1981) Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel: Notes toward a historical poetics, in _The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin_ (ed. M. Holquist). University of Texas Press, Austin, pp. 84–258.

Bergfelder, T. (2005) National, transnational or supranational cinema? Rethinking European film studies. _Media, Culture & Society_, 27(3): 315–331.

Bordwell, D. (2001) Eisenstein, socialist realism, and the charms of mizanstsena, in _Eisenstein at 100: A Reconsideration_ (ed. A. LaValley and B.P. Sherr). Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick and London, pp. 13–37.

Brüggemann, K. (2009) Writing national history in a globalising world. _Tallinn University Newsletter_ , November 30, www.tlu.ee/?LangID=5&CatID=3918&ArtID=6643&action=article (accessed 13/01/2011).

Clark, K. (1997) Socialist realism with shores: the conventions for the positive hero, in _Socialist Realism without Shores_ (ed. T. Lahusen and E. Dobrenko). Duke University Press, Durham and London, pp. 27–50.

Clark, K. (2000) _The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual_ , _Third Edition_. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis.

Dobrenko, E. (2004) Socialism as will and representation, or what legacy are we rejecting? _Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History_ , 5(4): 675–708.

Dobrenko, E. (2008) _Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History: Museum of the Revolution_. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Ehin, A. (2001) Nelikümmend aastat vabavärsivaidlusest. _Looming_ , 9: 1398–1401.

Elmanovitš, T. (1995) Grigori Kromanovi filmid, in _Lavastaja Grigori Kromanov. Mälestused. Artiklid. Kirjad. Päevikud_ (ed. I. Veisaitė-Kromanova). Eesti Raamat, Tallinn, pp. 517–532.

Ezra, E. and Rowden, T. (2006) General introduction: what is transnational cinema? in _Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader_ (ed. E. Ezra and T. Rowden). Routledge, London and New York, pp. 1–12.

First, J.J. (2008) Scenes of belonging: cinema and the nationality question in Soviet Ukraine ­during the long 1960s. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Fomin, V. (ed.) (1998) _Kinematograf ottepeli: Dokumenty i svidetel'stva_. Materik, Moskva.

Fowler, C., and Helfield, G. (eds) (2006) _Representing the Rural: Space, Place, and Identity in Films about the Land_. Wayne State University Press, Detroit.

Higson, A. (2002a) The concept of national cinema, in _Film and Nationalism_ (ed. A. Williams). Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick and London, pp. 52–67.

Higson, A. (2002b) The limiting imagination of national cinema, in _Cinema and Nation_ (ed. M. Hjort and S. Mackenzie). Routledge, London and New York, pp. 63–74.

Iordanova, D. (2003) _Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film_. Wallflower, London and New York.

Jänes, L. (2004) The Stalinist collective farm village: attempts to establish town-type ­settlements in the Estonian landscape, in _Constructed Happiness – Domestic Environment in the Cold War Era_ (ed. M. Kalm and I. Ruudi). Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn, pp. 184–199.

Kalm, M. (2008) Ons linnaelu maal hea? Majandi keskasula Eesti NSV-s. _Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi_ , 17(4): 61–87.

Kiisk, K. (2005) Kaljo Kiisa ebatavaline elu. _Teater. Muusika. Kino_ , 12: 121–128.

Kosenkranius, I. (1962) "Ühe küla mehed." _Sirp ja Vasar_ , February 23.

Kross, J. (2008) _Kallid kaasteelised II_ (Dear Fellow Travellers II). Eesti Keele Sihtasutu, Tallinn.

Kuuli, O. (2002) _Sula ja hallad Eesti NSV-s. Kultuuripoliitikast aastail 1953–1969_ (Thaw and Freezes in Estonian S.S.R.: On Cultural Policies between 1953 and 1969). O. Kuuli, Tallinn.

Lilja, P. and Olesk, S. (2005) Urho Kaleva Kekkoneni kõne Soome estofiilidele. _Akadeemia_ , 2: 243–254.

Lokk, T. (1989) _Eesti tõsielufilmi suundumustest. Teater. Muusika. Kino_ , 6: 57–64.

Lokk, T. (2003) _Vastab Tiina Lokk. Teater. Muusika. Kino_ , 11: 3–16.

Lõhmus, J. (2009) "Sarv soe, Samm sees, Säde silmis ja Meri põlvini!" _Sirp_ , March 27.

Maandi, P. (2005) _Change and Persistence in a Reformed Landscape: A Geographical Analysis of Land Reforms and Landscape Change in Muhu and Rapla Municipalities, Estonia, c. 1840 to 2003_. Uppsala University, Uppsala.

Mander, Ü. and Palang, H. (1994) Changes of landscape structure in Estonia during the Soviet period. _GeoJournal_ , 33(1): 45–54.

Märka, V. (2004) Töö kui eesti kirjanduse püha lehm. Rahvakasvatusliku kirjanduse ­aastasada 1870–1970. _Vikerkaar_ , 6: 58–76.

Matjus, Ü. (1968) Ei üksi, siis hulganisti. _Edasi_ , July 24.

Näripea, E. (2008) A view from periphery: spatial discourse of the Soviet Estonian feature film. The 1940s and 1950s, in _Via Transversa: Lost Cinema of the Former Eastern Bloc_ (ed. E. Näripea and A. Trossek). Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn, pp. 193–210.

Näripea, E. (2010) New waves, new spaces: Estonian experimental cinema of the 1970s. _Kinokultura: New Russian Cinema_ , Special Issue 10: Estonian Cinema, www.kinokultura.com/specials/10/naripea.shtml, (accessed November 9, 2010).

Olesk, S. (1999) Jää all ja peal. Eesti nõukogude luule kontekst aastatel 1956–1962, in _Mis on see ise: tekst, tagapõhi, isikupära_ (ed. M. Kalda, Õ. Kepp). Eesti Teaduste Akadeemia, Underi ja Tuglase Kirjanduskeskus, Tallinn, pp. 390–402.

Orav, Õ. (2003) _Tallinnfilm I. Mängufilmid 1947–1976_ (Tallinnfilm I. Narrative Films 1947–1976). Tallinn: Eesti Entsüklopeediakirjastus.

Palang, H. and Mander, Ü. (2000) Maastiku muutused Eestis, in _Kaasaegse ökoloogia probleemid. Loodusteaduslikud ülevaated Eesti Maa päeval_ (ed. T. Frey). Eesti Põllumajandusülikool, Tartu Ülikool Tartu; EV Keskkonnaministeerium, Tallinn, pp. 169 –179.

Peil, T. (2008) Kodu maastikus. _Vikerkaar_ , 7–8: 145–151.

Peil, T. and Sooväli, H. (2005) Estonian national landscapes – the sum and its parts, in _Landscape, Law and Justice_. Proceedings of a conference organized by the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Oslo, 15-19 June 2003 (ed. T. Peil and M. Jones). Novus, Instituttet for sammenlignende kulturforskning, Oslo, pp. 49–60.

Prokhorov, A. (2001) The unknown new wave: Soviet cinema of the 1960s, in _Springtime for Soviet Cinema: Re/Viewing the 1960s_ (ed. A. Prokhorov). Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Russian Film Symposium, pp. 7–28.

Prokhorov, A. (2002) Inherited discourse: Stalinist tropes in Thaw culture. Doctoral ­dissertation. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh.

Relph, E. (1986) _Place and Placelessness_. Pion, London.

Remsu, O. (1986) Aastad ja filmid: Essee Leida Laiusest. _Teater. Muusika. Kino_ , 11: 20–33.

Ruus, J. (s.a.) "Tallinnfilm" kui monument, www.tallinn film.ee/index.php?page=67 (accessed January 13, 2011).

Sooväli, H. (2008) Maastiku kirurgia. _Vikerkaar_ , 7–8: 130–137.

Tobro, V. (1962) Neorealismi jälgedes. _Edasi_ , August 7.

Trossek, A. (2008) When did it get political? Soviet film bureaucracy and Estonian hand-drawn animation', in _Via Transversa: Lost Cinema of the Former Eastern Bloc_ (ed. E. Näripea and A. Trossek). Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn, pp. 31–45.

Vaher, V. (2009) _Kino on saatan, kes imeb su rinda: Vene kino katekismus_ (Cinema Is a Devil Who Sucks Your Breast: The Catechism of Russian Film). Pegasus, Tallinn.

Woll, J. (2000) _Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw_. I.B. Tauris, London and New York.

# 14

# For the Peace, For a New Man, For a Better World!

#  _Italian Leftist Culture and Czechoslovak Cinema, 1945–1968_

Francesco Pitassio

Italy and Italian culture in the second half of the twentieth century were shaped by the presence of the largest Communist party in Western Europe. Therefore, they have been influenced by the role played by a subculture based on a shared Marxist ideology, albeit in a peculiar Italian way and in an increasingly ­fragmented ­multiplicity of communities. A part of this subculture was formed by cultural ­artifacts of the people's democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, which were founded soon after World War Two, and by the political and symbolic use the Italian Left made of these in the national debate. In film culture a relevant role was assigned to Czechoslovak cinema – mostly Czech cinema, because of the minority status of the Slovak nation and its production both on domestic markets and in international releases. For a number of reasons, the Czechoslovak film ­production, at least in the relatively limited framework in which it was accessible to the Italian cinephile, became a reassuring and acceptable representation of ­cultural activities beyond the Iron Curtain. As Communist Party member and renowned historian Paolo Spriano explained in his memories of the Cold War period, in 1952 Prague was a quiet gatehouse, before immersing itself in the true Communist and ­faraway realm of the Soviet Union; but it was also a comfortable rest house in which to recover from the depressing and gloomy scenery of ­capitalist and severely damaged Vienna. The comparison is surprisingly built upon film references:

When our train arrived from Rome to Vienna (we would travel further on to Prague, and then by plane to Moscow), the atmosphere evoked Orson Welles's _The Third Man_.... Vienna was poor: everything was bleak at the railway station from where the trains towards the East departed.... Compared to this, the spring Prague, splendid and golden, and its modern airport, that taste for the rational that sprang even out of the adventures of Trinka's puppets that were continuously screened in the halls, looked to us as the greeting of socialism. (Spriano, 1986: 163)1

Thus, the function of Czechoslovak cinema in film culture debates was always a matter of negotiation between different social and political conditions and ­experiences. It nevertheless confirmed an overall Czech mythology, which posited that the nation was a "proper centre" for Europe, from geopolitical and cultural perspectives alike (Macura, 1999). This function was subjected to major changes in the Italian political and social scene, even more than in film culture, although the latter became more prominent in the sixties, as will be shown. Hence, three major periods may be distinguished in order to describe relatively coherent phases of the diffusion and discussion of Czechoslovak film and its institutions in Italy: a "great hopes" period (1945–1955); a "repentance" period (1956–1963); and a "film ­culture" period (1963–1968). I have decided not to extend my purview beyond 1968. This choice was dictated less by the impact on film ­production of the brutal invasion of Czechoslovakia by five nations of the Warsaw Pact (the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, Poland, Bulgaria, and Hungary). The results of that event did not suddenly affect film production or international distribution (Pitassio, 2009).2 It is, rather, the effect that such a political and military choice had on the Italian Left that justifies drawing a line in the chronology: The invasion produced a major break in the Italian Left and shut down any possibility of considering the Eastern European people's democracies as spaces for vigorous and outspoken ­cultural ­elaboration and debate – at least in the eyes of the Italian leftist observers and ­commentators (Caccamo, Helan, and Tria, 2011; Pons, 2009). A few years after the ­invasion, both the rituals of the Italian Communist Party (PCI – Partito Comunista Italiano) and the cultural products available through the party's ­organization became outmoded and unfit for a new generation, as grotesquely described by a well-known sequence in Nanni Moretti's second feature film, _Ecce Bombo_ (1978), where a youngster complains,

I should have been born a hundred years ago, in 1848, on Lipsia's barricades, when I was 22 years old I would have already done the Paris Commune.... Now I am a state employee, and _all_ my colleagues spend _all_ their holidays attending all the Feste dell'Unità [the PCI festival, a fund-raising event usually held in late summer], with the Moldavian ballets and the peasant sandals imported from Hungary.... What are we doing? What is happening? When are we going to see the sun? I am sick, and even cold.

The "great hopes" phase is characterized by a double movement, both in the national and international sphere, with powerful consequences in Communist ­cultural policies in Italy. As is well known, after a short postwar period during which the PCI, up until then the second largest Italian party, was part of the national government, it was quickly marginalized. The 1948 elections confirmed the limited penetration of the party into the masses and at the same time mirrored the harsh international opposition between the two blocs (Ginsborg, 2003: 72–120). As a result of such opposition, the PCI developed its own vernacular culture in a rather eclectic way, composed of both orthodoxy and submission to the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) political line along with heterogeneous features that included national, European bourgeois, and leftist, even Soviet, ­traditions, and attempts to cope with American mass culture. The means of ­diffusing this subculture were publishers, journals, magazines, newspapers, and common spaces devoted to cultural activities, including filmgoing (Forgacs and Gundle, 2007). The fact that the Christian Democratic Party (Democrazia Cristiana) had an ambiguous relationship with both the recent, obscure past of the nation and the Church and counted many former fascist militants and conservative Christians among its members gave the PCI a leading role among intellectuals. As the historian Silvio Lanaro points out, commenting the remarkable success of the party with the _intelligentsia_ ,

the "liberal" intellectuals supporting the PCI, looking for a shelter as far as they endured the situation and were not expelled... is the epiphenomenon of the laic and democratic bourgeoisie's underrepresentation, a chronic disease of the Italian ­political system: during the oppressive years of ždanovism, as a matter of fact they endured without rebellion the aesthetics of socialist realism... just because they considered the PCI, besides all its faults, the only barrier against the flood of Italian factions identified with Catholic organizations, parishes, administrative abuses and the reduction of freedom. (1992: 72)

The political competition before the elections of 1948 deeply involved ­intellectuals, and the PCI appeared as their protector and supporter. Under its benevolent gaze, some associations were born whose purpose was to defend ­cultural freedom (Ajello, 1979: 139–174): the Alleanza per la difesa della cultura (Alliance for the Defense of Culture), the Fronte delle arti (Arts Front), and the Movimento per la difesa del cinema italiano (Movement for the Protection of Italian Cinema), whose leader was Antonio Pietrangeli, also President of the Federazione Italiana dei Circoli del Cinema (FICC) or Italian Film Clubs Federation ("In difesa del cinema italiano," 1949: 137–142). The link between culture and ­ideology was thus established and progressively tightened in the succeeding years, as the actions of the ruling Christian Democratic Party were indeed aggressive towards dissidence (Crainz, 2003: 3–52). In this period, Socialist realism had an influence on Italian leftist culture. As a result, the contemporary reader may encounter arguable opinions expressed even by the most engaging and remarkable writers or critics, such as Italo Calvino. "In the eyes of many Communists of a certain generation, the years between 1948 and Stalin's death would come to ­represent a sort of 'golden age,' when the PCI was hard pressed and political ­battles were infused with unprecedented animosity, but when faith in Communist values was unquestioned and belief in the ultimate triumph of good over evil prevailed" (Gundle 2000: 43).

The Cold War era saw the constitution of an alternative sphere for political and cultural debate and consumption: film clubs were part of a wider project, an attempt to constitute a different market for cultural artifacts, not merely based upon commercial motivations and financial outcomes. The movies produced in the people's democracies seemed very suitable for this purpose. In this same period, Central-Eastern European people's democracies were established: the attention paid by the Italian Left to establishing of Socialist regimes and societies in Central and Eastern Europe and the propagandist diplomatic pursuits of some of these countries promoted cinema as an important expression of a supposed new order.3 Cinema was not "just" entertainment, but something more valuable and important, deeply linked to the cultural roots of the country, which at the same time revealed a new way to produce art and culture without the mechanisms of capitalism. For instance, in Italy the magazine _Europa nuova_ , published by the Embassy of the Czechoslovak People's Democracy between 1951 and 1952, often included articles on cinema. During this phase some intellectuals acted as ­mediators, diffusing a better knowledge of Czechoslovak and Italian cultures and cinemas across the two countries. Quite obviously, the commitment to Marxist ideology was a prerequisite of this collaboration, although the persons involved always proved brighter and more curious than the dogma.

Moreover, at this time the PCI began to promote the idea of a national culture: a highly conservative notion based both on a class perspective (popular art as an expression of the proletarian masses) and a national one (production specific to single communities). The people's art was free from the influence of market or industry, or if by some accident this was not the case, it was to be redeemed as such. It is not hard to see that this position owed more to the Soviet Union's ­glorification of folk culture than to the rediscovered writings of Antonio Gramsci, published right at the end of the 1940s. Cinema was a significant part of popular culture, and was to be protected from the corruptions of the market, mostly ­identified with the invasion of American production. As Senator Emilio Sereni, who was responsible for the cultural policy of PCI at the end of the 1940s, explained to the Assembly, "We are not intending to support in our country an industrial or even cultural autarchy. But what is at stake here is film production's cultural and artistic nature, its national character, the defense of national culture" ([1948] 1974: 74).

According to the PCI, it was popular cinema that was to be considered ­politically progressive in Italian film production, that is neorealism (Forgacs, 1989; Lizzani, 1949). Popular cinema was conceived and realized without market pressures and with the means of production in the people's hands, that is, they were films ­produced in people's democracies, and first of all in the USSR (Mida, 1946), but also in Czechoslovakia.

The second phase in my periodization, though not much shorter, is less intense. The processes implied are long-lasting, but not as quick and structured as the immediate postwar phase. Two shocking events marked 1956: the Nikita Khrushchev's revelations about the Stalin era and the Soviet invasion of Hungary to crush the national uprising. The two events had a tremendous impact on the involvement of cultural elites in the party's life, as several noteworthy intellectuals resigned from the party, generating a consistent diaspora. This process was ­twofold: on the one hand, it spread the cultural debate in the leftist area, updated the terms, and often stimulated an open criticism of obsolete and disputable positions. On the other hand, the decreased attention to Eastern bloc cultural production was coupled with the crisis in that production itself. Although very interesting, it is not arguable that the period from the late 1950s through the early 1960s was a ­controversial one for Czechoslovak film production, from a political, economic, and aesthetical perspective, without the monolithic consistency of Stalinist era, but not as rich and varied as the new wave phase (Štábla, 1993). In this phase, Communist supporters began overtly questioning the ideological and cultural experience that had characterized the preceding years, which even involved film criticism. An open and frequently bitter discussion took place on the pages of _Cinema nuovo_ , a film journal not directly published by the party but explicitly Marxist in its assumptions and interests. The focus was on the critics' relation to Socialist realism, and was titled "Sciolti dal giuramento" ("released from the vow"), with a clear reference to Stalin's cinematic hagiography _Kljatva_ ( _The Vow_ , 1946), directed by Michail Čaurelij (Aprà, 1978: 97–265; Aristarco, 1981). Around the PCI the taste paradigms changed, with relevant effects on the party itself, as noted the cultural secretary of the PCI in the 1960s, Rossana Rossanda:

I knew people of high reputation such as Glauco Viazzi and Ugo Casiraghi, and even a genius such as Umberto Barbaro, who stood up for [Soviet] film production because they thought that it was the outcome of a less cultivated society trying to build socialism, despite Western opposition. It was an alibi and it worked for most of us, although it was easier to realize it afterwards. Anyway, in the sixties things changed... even in Eastern Europe cinema changed – in 1965 in Prague I saw the first Russian critical film, I think it was named _Twenty Years_ , and in Budapest a Zoltán Fábri movie on the 1956 conflict. (qtd in Medici, 2001a: 75)4

It is probably because of the peculiar role played by Prague in the Communist system that two critical films from Socialist democracies were available to a Western intellectual. As a matter of fact, in the postwar years Czechoslovakia ­provided important shelter for Italian Communists fleeing from trials for crimes committed during the Resistance, became an international Communist center, and further on a window for Western militants, displaying what was happening behind the Iron Curtain. Moreover, Radio Prague broadcast in several foreign ­languages through the shortwaves, hiring Italian journalists and intellectuals until 1968. Therefore, the city somehow played the role of a transnational political and cultural crossroads.

The period between the 20th Communist Party of the Soviet Union congress and the rise of the cinematic new waves is also marked by a historical impulse, somehow releasing the reflection upon Czechoslovak cinema from its mere ­ideological ­function and aiming at a more objective consideration. Through longer essays, books, and retrospectives the attempt to fill gaps in historical knowledge was pursued.

The third phase is both the outcome and extension of the preceding one: some important features are confirmed in the organization of cultural consumption and access, owing to the increasing importance of film festivals and debates elicited by the screenings – a tool inherited from the experience of film clubs, which grew in number in the 1960s. At the same time, the ideological trauma experienced in the previous decade changed both the nature and tasks of leftist cultural policy. The intellectual diaspora generated multiple sites of discussion, including journals, magazines, and conferences, and undermined the party control over the cultural debate, while still acknowledging the political hegemony of the organization. As explained by one of the official film critics of the PCI, Mino Argentieri,

I don't think that in the party at that time [early sixties] there were any official ­positions on this or that film. Such a bad habit existed, but was already decaying after 1956.... The journal _Cinemasessanta_ [on which Argentieri worked] was peculiar, since it was founded by people already working for leftist newspapers and ­periodicals, who did not seek to show themselves off but felt the need to go further in criticizing Stalinism and its remains. (Medici, 2001b: 65)

This longing for a deeper ethical and political reflection was connected to similar tasks assigned to the cinema. As a matter of fact, in the second half of the decade the impulse to renew political life was coupled with an analogous impulse to renew film language. In this respect, the new waves offered an extraordinary chance to merge a cultural rebellion with the search for political autonomy and purity, both recovering a leftist revolutionary tradition. Therefore, the reflection upon film ­discourse and representation, as the battle for art cinema, goes together with the analysis of the modes of production and market conditions and the attempt to give a new shape to cultural organization and consumption. Czechoslovak cinema offered in this phase an unprecedented and unique example of a Socialist mode of production within art cinema, at least for a short period. The transformation ­process that Czechoslovak cinema, culture, and society were undergoing in the 1960s ( _Zlatá šedesátá_ , 2000), and analogous turns on the Italian scene, elected new intellectuals to mediate between the two contexts.

The Italian leftist culture assigned different functions to Czechoslovak film ­institutions in the different phases that I outlined. This operation was possible through several cultural agencies, partly under the control of the PCI, partly ­independent. As a matter of fact, the image of Czechoslovak cinema in postwar Italian culture – an image still active nowadays – was formed by three institutions: film criticism, film clubs, and film festivals. Quite obviously, on an empirical level the three tended to overlap; nonetheless, they played distinct roles and served ­separate purposes.

Festivals and film clubs, through their exhibition policies, were most responsible for spreading familiarity with Czechoslovak film production, as were the party's own festivals (Feste dell'Unità) and other cultural initiatives. This would barely qualify as commercial distribution, since very few Czechoslovak films were released for the market, and for the most part this was in the 1960s, when the ­interest in Western releases was part of the policy of the Czechoslovak Film Industry General Director, Alois Poledňák. In that decade, for instance, the Italian distributor Cinelatina emerged, which released some of the works of Jiří Weiss (e.g., _Taková láska_ ( _Such a Love_ ), 1957, _Romeo, Julie a tma_ ( _Romeo, Juliet and Darkness_ ), 1959), of Jiří Krejčík ( _Vyšší princip_ ( _Higher Principle_ ), 1959); and of the animator Jiří Trnka ( _Sen noci svatojánské_ ( _A Midsummer's Night Dream_ ), 1958) to the national ­market. All of these titles had already premiered at an Italian film festival, some years before as it had happened, when the film that received the Golden Lion at the Mostra Internazionale dell'Arte Cinematografica in Venice, K. Steklý's _Siréna_ ( _The Strike_ , 1947), was released onto the market, although with a one year delay. In the 1960s producers Carlo Ponti and Moris Ergas also attempted to cooperate with the Czechoslovak film industry, financing domestic production and releasing films to the international markets with mixed results. Among the destinations was Italy, but the overall number of films was low. More noteworthy is the cultural function of the film clubs, and particularly their most important organization, the FICC (Tosi, 1999). Via the medium of film clubs an unprecedented knowledge of film history and national cinemas that was barely known to exist otherwise, was spread among the rural middle and working classes through screenings, film critics' ­introductions, debates and, less frequently, publications. One of these was devoted specifically to Czechoslovak cinema (Casiraghi, 1951a), and was associated with the first retrospective on Czechoslovak national cinema, the result of a huge effort by individual clubs around Italy. So the writer Luciano Bianciardi remembered in an ironic and partly autobiographical novel:

We organized some screenings and a festival focused on Czechoslovak cinema, and it was tough work. Even I, who was responsible for the popular sport category, was engaged since a scheduled documentary presented a whole sequence on the great long-distance runner Emil Zatopek. There was a matinée for children, with two ­animated shorts by Trnka. Partisans were interested instead in _Silent barricade_ , by Otakar Vavra, and workers in _The Strike_ , by Stekly. Anybody could find what they were looking for; we even took care of the youngsters at the café.... Since it was a retrospective, we dug out an old copy of _Ecstasy_ , Machaty's movie, a film famous because Hedy Lamarr, at that time sixteen years old, made an appearance ­completely naked. To introduce the festival and provide us with a historical frame an intellectual from Rome was called in, a slim guy, blond, round-shouldered, with a pale face and yellow teeth... a sad guy but strong on the matter. (Bianciardi [1957] 2005: 236–237)

Unfortunately, the result of the film clubs' work is hard to detect: often exploiting personal contacts with film archives, distributors, or foreign embassies, and with individual clubs responsible for their own programming, most of the time these institutions did not leave records of their cultural policy and actions.5 Moreover, a place for Czechoslovak cinema in the programs of the film clubs and societies was not peculiar to leftist associations after 1956: within the whole film club movement the attention shifted to works of art excluded or marginalized by the mainstream market, including Catholic initiatives. As documented in a mid-sixties survey on film clubs, programs were mainly based on film art more than on ideological divides; therefore, a Czech film could as well be scheduled in the Catholic network as in a secular one, as were _Romeo, Julie a tma_ and _Vyšší princip_ (Rositi, 1966).6

Film festival programs are easier to describe. For a long time, the main ­opportunity to gain an idea of Czechoslovak film output in Italy was the Venice film festival, which quite regularly offered Czechoslovak films, except for some years during the 1950s when it was affected by the limited political communication through the Iron Curtain. The early postwar years of the festival saw consistent cooperation with what was to become the Eastern bloc represented in the ­selection of films and jury members from the cinemas of Eastern Europe: for instance, in the 1946 selection there were six feature films from the Soviet Union, including Socialist realist classics as _Kljatva_ , Aleksandr Zarchij and Josif Chejfic's _Deputat Baltiky_ ( _The Baltic Deputy_ , 1937) and Č _apaev_ (1934) by Sergej and Georgij Vasil'ev. The year after that _Siréna_ , as has already been mentioned, was awarded with the Golden Lion, the vice-president of the international jury was the Communist film critic Antonín Brousil – for a long time then dean of the Filmová Akademie Muzických Umění (FAMU) and chairman of the jury of the film festival in Karlovy Vary – and the Soviet director Grigorij Aleksandrov sat as a member of the ­international jury for the special section. However, from 1948 to 1953 access to the jury and the selection committee was restricted to Italians, and practically all the Socialist democracies recently established, such as the Soviet Union, were absent from the festival. Yet, it seems as if the deaths of Stalin and Klement Gottwald released the cultural production of their respective nations into the international arena and at the same time reopened the space for cultural interchange in the ­festival and in the juries, again composed by international members, including some from the Warsaw Pact area: from 1956 to 1960 Soviet film directors Friedrich Ermler, Ivan Pyr'ev, Sergej Vasil'ev , and Sergej were members of the Venice ­international juries (Bondarčuk twice in a row, in 1959 and 1960!). Between 1946 and 1968 the Venice film festival offered a varied selection of Czechoslovak work, including 28 feature films and over 150 shorts. Among the selected works were masterpieces of animation (films by Brdečka, Hofman, Pojar, Švankmajer, Tyrlová, Trnka, and Zeman), films of the "middle generation" (such as Kachyňa, Krejčík, Kadár/Klos, Krška, Vláčil, Weiss), but also the most renowned titles of the _nová vlna_ (the Czech and Slovak New Wave) (Laura, 1985).7 In 1961 the festival also organized a retrospective that focused on Czechoslovak cinema, comprising some of the best known films from before World War Two as well as classical (and sadly, often Socialist realist) movies from the postwar epoch (Laura, 1960): among these titles, also the unbearable _Vstanou noví bojovníci_ ( _New Fighters Shall Arise_ , 1951) directed by Jiří Weiss and based on the account written by prime minister Antonín Zapotocký (then president) of the life of his father Ladislav and the workers' ­struggles in nineteenth-century Bohemia. The festival thus contributed for a long time to diffusing an image of Czechoslovak film culture designed by the regime itself and based on three major areas: feature, animation and/or children's (Stringa, 1963, 1964, 1965; r.a. 1968), and either science or documentary short films (Anonymous, 1969). This was a threefold structure promoted since the late 1940s by the Czechoslovak state, as proved by articles published in the magazine _Europa nuova_. Italian leftist critics regularly formed their judgment based on this structure (Anonymous, 1949; Malík, 1950; Anonymous, 1951a; Anonymous, 1951b). But then it was also used by a renowned Czech film critic in a contribution to an Italian journal to classify the recent national film production as feature films – with ­subcategories such as agitation/propaganda and biography – and animation films (Brož, 1953).

The Venice film festival was an unquestioned reference point until the 1960s, when a new festival became the main window onto the new waves and the main arena for debating them: it was the Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema di Pesaro. Besides these two important cultural events – one institutional, the other rather politically driven – thanks to a political, or rather cinephile, interest, or both, there were many other, smaller opportunities to screen Czechoslovak movies, such as at the Mostra del cinema libero, in Porretta Terme, or the festival devoted to science fiction in Trieste.

Most documents dedicated to Czechoslovak film institutions, useful to describe how the films were perceived, depicted, commented, and played in the national arena by the Italian Left, are to be found in film criticism. A considerable number of leftist journals, magazines, newspapers, and books discussed and categorized that cinema and its culture, mythologizing it sometimes, at other times criticizing its trends or changes. Therefore, I base my argument mostly on this corpus.

The first period (1945–1956) is marked by an intense engagement on the part of many intellectuals, together with a somewhat blind trust in ideology and its ­realization in the Soviet Union. With regard to policy on film exhibition, this phase placed what was considered as marginal by both official power and market ­strategies into an alternative sphere of display and consumption. The films excluded from the mainstream market and circulating in this alternative sphere were a restricted group of neorealist movies – the majority of which depicted the harsh postwar social conditions of the Italian population or narrated the partisans' sufferings and struggles – European film art's masterpieces and the recent ­productions of Socialist countries (Cosulich, 1975). As a result, the FICC took on heterogeneous films, assimilating them into a cultural and political strategy that offered a market for work that was both too open to Hollywood production and too narrow for Italian art cinema, cinephilic culture, and different social models and narratives (Jancovich, 2002a; 2002b). This was a quite explicit attempt to ­create an alternative cultural sphere, socially and politically distinct from the hegemonic forms of cultural consumption, based on entertainment, thus creating value. For instance, in 1952 a critic, discussing the Karlovy Vary film festival and the films offered in Czechoslovakia, regretted the exclusion from the Italian market of films from the people's democracies, and invoked a struggle to improve cultural access (Casiraghi, 1952). The task of creating such an alternative sphere was indeed an enduring one, as in 1965 the film critic and then highly regarded scholar Adelio Ferrero stated,

From my point of view... there is a felt need for film clubs to play an alternative and antagonistic role, against the trends and contents of the cultural industry and its poisoned current mythologies. Film clubs should be a tendentious instrument... according to a renewed and impassioned claim to a Marxist doctrine, that constantly faces the problems and turns of its time. (Ferrero, 1965: 193)

It is then no big surprise that in this constellation, neorealist and Socialist realist movies could be easily associated, often through the representation of World War Two resistance movements. Resistance was considered a Communist legacy, the movement that had won the battle in the European clash of civilizations, but also a transnational experience that linked Italy to the countries that fought for ­freedom – among them, Czechoslovakia. The critics usually linked film ­production on the subject to the Soviet output (Ferrara, 1955; Vento and Mida, 1959). It very often derived its narratives and aesthetics from films on the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945, as many other Czechoslovak film genres during the Cold War derived from Soviet models (Turovskaya 1993). In some cases, contemporary observers already noted such an origin (Anonymous, 1952; Brož, 1952). Therefore, films as Miroslav Cikán's _Hrdinové ml_ č _í_ ( _The Heroes Are Silent_ , 1946), Jiří Weiss's _Uloupená hranice_ ( _The Stolen Border_ , 1947) and _Poslední výst_ ř _el_ ( _The Last Shot_ , 1950) Pal'o Bielik's _Vl_ č _ie diery_ ( _The Wolf's Den_ , 1948), or Otakar Vávra's _N_ ě _má barikáda_ ( _Silent Barricade_ , 1949) became part of a common tradition of resistance to Nazist barbarism, which also included literary classics such as Julius Fučík's _Reportáž psaná na oprátce_ ( _Notes from the Gallows_ , 1947), translated from Czech into Italian in 1949 (Fučík, 1949).

The "great hopes" period looked to the Soviet Union as a utopia where social equality and rational development came to full fruition. The Socialist democracies established between 1945 and 1948 in Central-Eastern Europe were hybrids of Soviet-type accomplishments and capitalist conditions. But the building of ­socialism was itself an epic, fascinating narrative. Cinema played its role. The socialization of the film industry was a first, extraordinary step towards ­socialism – as a matter of fact, the result of the political action of the KSČ (Communist Party of Czechoslovakia) in the preceding years, and an object of widespread ­discussion at the end of the 1940s (Štábla and Taussig, 1981; Bernard, 1991; Klimeš, 1991). But not a single observer ever remembered that it was made possible in August 1945 by President Edvard Beneš, who had already held power before the war, and was then forced to resign his second presidency after the Communist putsch in February 1948. On the contrary, numerous commentators underscored the importance of the succeeding laws, proposed in the summer of 1948. The rebirth of the film industry was above all considered a social miracle: "Czechoslovak machines, Czechoslovak materials are the base for training artistic and technical professionals, for accelerating film's social function and for defining more and more deeply its ideological content" (Jacchia, 1949a: 13). The social and aesthetic transformations were aligned; more precisely, the latter derived from the former. Only this social organization could respond to the cultural needs and traditions of the nation. Therefore, what had previously been shown was rejected and ­condemned, including almost everything except the work of directors well ­established in the film industry after 1948. Moreover, since Czechoslovakia had proved to be a vital film industry in the interwar period, relatively well-known on international markets or festivals, it was expected to expiate its sins with greater energy than the majority of the new people's democracies. "The controversial turn to a democratic and realistic cinema was then more complex for Czechoslovak cinema, which was to struggle against bourgeois residues much more consistently than its Polish or Hungarian counterparts" (Viazzi, 1949: 533). This rhetorical strategy also affected directors who refused to take part in the industry after 1948, such as František Čáp, who fled the country.

The main question was the paths of a national culture. One path included the ownership of the means of production and the construction of an exhibition ­circuit dominated by ideological and cultural purposes, instead of commercial ones. Another one was the redemption of national progressive trends, which before the Socialist era had unfortunately been oppressed and were unable to flourish fully: the newly established Socialist society finally enabled the true national and popular character to blossom. This, for instance, was the case of ­narratives depicting the sufferings of the population during the Nazi occupation, or the difficulties in building socialism and the effort it required. This was best exemplified by puppet animation, which perfectly fitted the image of a popular tradition that could not find its way into cinema in a capitalist economy but could instead develop its full potential in a Socialist one.

During the first republic8 all the efforts of capitalist producers to cinematically exploit the puppets failed. It is easy to understand the reason why, given the deep national and popular nature of these Czechoslovak creations. But soon after ­liberation and nationalization, suddenly new opportunities opened up. In a short while, the animated puppets movies created in Gottwaldov and Prague amazed and conquered the world.... We don't know anything so "Czechoslovak" [ _sic_ ] as these famous animated films. And what constitutes the fascination and quality of these refined and at the same time spontaneous works, poetic and yet documentary... is exactly their national color, the technical expertise rooted in their forerunners' ­infinite efforts and results, themes so respondent to the nation's actual problems, the adaptation of popular fairytales and legends. (Casiraghi, 1951a: 43)

Moreover, the animated films were at the same time realistic and popular, in ­contrast to Disney cartoons, which were seen as commercial and artificial (Casiraghi, 1947).

The national culture needed to be shared for a higher purpose: for exchange among single countries in order to build a better man and maintain peace in the world. The perfect site to realize such an ambitious plan through cinema was the international film festival formerly held in Mariánské Lázně, and from 1950 in Karlovy Vary. The festival offered an international platform for cultural and ­political exchange among those who considered themselves to be representatives of a progressive culture under shared slogans: peace, the new man, social equality. It is indeed revealing that the narratives on the festival, elaborated retrospectively, always connect the cultural event to the first World Festival of Youth and Students held in Prague in 1947, enthusiastically described by a young Italo Calvino:

It was not surprising to see how merry our young volunteers were, but it was ­particularly astonishing to discover young students or graduates using a pickax or a shovel so cleverly and with such a professional pride; and fashionable young ladies with varnished nails passing to one another bricks as if they were playing ball on a beach.... Let's get to the point: this is a democratic country, where people work with enthusiasm for the peace and reconstruction. While in our country instead... (Calvino, 1947, qtd in Ajello, 1979: 17. See also Casiraghi, 1964)

The project of an international cooperation of well-intentioned people beyond class divides and with a pacifist purpose was a rhetoric not properly prevalent _in_ the film festival, rather subjugated by political control; but its Italian leftist ­commentators applied it _to_ the film festival when trying to discuss and judge the cultural event to the point where an Italian film critic proposed to make a ­pilgrimage with his colleagues to the sacred event (Renzi, 1951). In their eyes, the event favored and supported a new culture, an engaged cinema opposed to ­escapism, an ­international cultural exchange, the proletarian appropriation of ­cinema, and an ideal convergence between progressive intellectuals and proletarians:

"For a new man, for a better mankind!" – this is the festival's slogan, summarizing a new socialist and humanistic notion of art, culture and particularly cinema, the most popular among the arts. There were films from all over the world, which discussed the most dramatic... issues for people.... These films facilitate understanding among people who are involved in the same struggle for freedom, work, social ­justice, and peace.... They support international understanding between workers and progressive intellectuals... and... popularize film art for a new workers' ­cinema. (Jacchia, 1949b. See also Casiraghi, 1951b)

This was also the perfect place for an aesthetic and political exchange between Italian progressive cinema, that is neorealism, and Socialist realism, a place from which vague and absolutist claims could be made: for instance, a declaration of gratitude to all the workers, particularly the Soviet ones (!), made by democratic filmmakers (Viazzi, 1950). Therefore, even if producers always ignored the festival, albeit Italian film critics reproached their blindness, films, filmmakers, and ­intellectuals often took part in the event: for instance, in 1949 neorealist films such as Vittorio De Sica's _Ladri di biciclette_ ( _Bicycle Thieves_ , 1948), Luchino Visconti's _La terra trema_ ( _The Earth Trembles_ , 1948), and Alberto Lattuada's _Senza pietà_ ( _Without Pity_ , 1948) were screened in Mariánské Lázně. Among the filmmakers, Cesare Zavattini and Carlo Lizzani were part of a network that linked film and political culture. In 1949 the same network brought Antonín Brousil, the dean of FAMU, the film school established in Prague in 1946–1947, to take part in the renowned Perugia conference on cinema and the modern man (Brousil, 1949; Barbaro, 1950), and in the fifties, the Communist film director Giuseppe De Santis to teach at FAMU. Moreover, the Karlovy Vary film festival was not enclosed and restricted to an elite, but rather disseminated its programs through a workers' festival all over Czechoslovakia, where thousands of people could attend the screenings.

In Italy, the optimistic and possibly misleading contributions from the Cold War epoch were criticized, disputed, and rejected after 1956. Still, the terms of the ­discourse tended to remain the same, although doubt permeated ideological ­monoliths. The widespread discussion on Socialist realism developed on the pages of _Cinema nuovo_ demanded a rethinking of three different myths: those of ­Socialist realist aesthetics, of Socialist canons, and of cultural policy. Thence, in a self-­critical attitude, a leftist film critic looking back on the previous decade ­confessed, "The boredom of representation, the embarrassed plot, pedagogical attitudes, the ­positive hero and the healthy world inevitably lacking any serious conflict, the clear nationalism, or the goofy imitation of American movies,... all this became signs of a superior civilization" (Renzi, 1956, qtd in Aristarco, 1981: 73). This article solicited brutal defences, which not only rejected Socialist ­aesthetics and canonical films but even suspended the association between politically and aesthetically ­progressive films such as Michail Čaurelij's _Kljatva_ , _Padenije Berlina_ ( _The Fall of Berlin_ , 1949), Ivan Pyr'ev's _Kuban'skije kazaky_ ( _The Cossacks of the Kuban_ , 1949) or Grigorij Aleksandrov's _Vstrecha na Elbe_ ( _Meeting on the Elbe_ , 1948) were rejected,9 but even the association between politically and aesthetically progressive films ceased to be applied.

Given that the government was so hostile to Soviet cinema we thought that it was our duty to help the latter; and since the audience was suspicious, we were ­convinced that we should transform our critics in promotional leaflets.... Let's admit that while the all of us, communist critics, communist directors, communist filmmakers close to the communist party, were crying all around the "defense of the Italian ­cinema," we were not its best champions. (Gobetti, 1956 in Aristarco, 1981: 85–86)

Such a widespread and deep criticism did not fully remove the myth of a more just society. Therefore the Italian Left continued to hope that after the fall of the personality cult new opportunities might arise in Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, suspicions and confusion were expressed when evaluating film production. This was not only because several films of the "middle generation", or what others called the "first wave" (Hames, 1983; Žalman, 1993), presented doubtful ­characters, possibly Communist militants reflecting deeply on and expressing doubts about the society they had helped to build, as was the case of Otakar Vávra's _Ob_ č _an Brych_ ( _Citizen Brych_ , 1958), Ladislav Helge's _Velká samota_ ( _The Great Solitude_ , 1959), Václav Krškas _Zde jsou lvi_ ( _Hic Sunt Leones_ , 1958) or Elmar Klos and Jan Kadár's _Obžalovaný_ ( _The Accused_ , 1964), it was also because for many critics these films had moved away from Socialist realism without finding other ethically or aesthetically ­convincing options. The doubts of Italian leftist critics' were centered on three major areas: psychological depiction, petit-bourgeois ideology, and the ­relationships between postwar and interwar national culture.

The use of complex characters, psychologically well-defined and often ­determining the narrative through their perspective, was often perceived as an ­outmoded ­strategy, losing the political features of Socialist realism but not gaining much of what art cinema at that time already deeply explored (Bálint Kovács, 2007). The psychological representation was prized at times, since an important reference in Italian leftist debate was Marxist Hungarian philosopher György Lukács and his theory of ­realism, in which characters played a major role. Thus, for instance, in 1958 at the Venice film festival Jiří Weiss's _Vl_ č _íjáma_ ( _The Wolf Trap_ , 1958), a ­psychological and retro- drama set in a _fin-de-siècle_ Bohemian province, was awarded a prize by the journal _Cinema nuovo_. Still, this mode of representation was often met with confusion by critics because it was neither notably different from Western ­capitalist forms, nor ­particularly new. Commenting on the same movie, Ugo Casiraghi wrote, "The depiction of habits, the social critic, the claim to human dignity are relegated to a second place, when compared to the sharp, brilliant but also obsolete depiction of a sentimental depravity. In the end, it is a drama, and not particularly interesting, or not enough, for a modern ­consciousness" (1962: 10).10 In addition, such ­representative forms revealed the permanence of petit-bourgeois models in Czechoslovak culture, through a non-correspondence between themes and ideological claims on one side and aesthetic options on the other. An anti-authoritarian, grotesque, and class-rooted character such as Švejk might be a reference point and an antidote to conservative trends remaining within national culture despite socialism: "[Czechoslovak ­cinema's] limits... derive ­precisely from this merging of culture and ideology, which damages products ­otherwise valuable: it strengthens in palatable forms dangerous contents, or inserts the noblest ideas in obsolescent or ambiguous linguistic frames' (Pellizzari, 1961: 421. See also Renzi, 1959; Fink, 1968).

Lastly, in the passage from the first republic to a Socialist republic the rhetoric of total change was reversed. As the cultural debate in Czechoslovakia begins to recall and rehabilitate the interwar culture – a process also recorded in Italy (l.a., 1963; Goldstücker, 1963) – sometimes Italian leftist film critics enhance the ­importance of that legacy in contemporary films. This was so, for example, with Vojtěch Jasný,s _Až p_ ř _ijde kocour_ ( _When the Cat Comes_ , 1963), which was awarded with the Special Jury Prize in Cannes:

Even if just on a moral level, which is indeed proper to a fairytale, and even if the director often burdens its style, through the repetition of the brightest motives, there is no doubt that the charge is well brought and revives a trend in Czechoslovak ­cinema for too long a time dismissed. Jan Werich's personality... helps us tracing it back. This trend goes back to the inter-war period, when the avant-garde and ­satirical theatre bloomed... here could be found a fruitful tradition, irreverent and ­courageously polemical. (Casiraghi, 1963: 196)

The last period coincides with the rise of the new waves, and in it ­representational, linguistic, social, and ideological features and demands intermingle in the attempt to elaborate a general reflection and strategy. This phase also coincides with a major change in Italian politics, marked by the Socialist Party finally coming to power in alliance with the Christian Democrat Party, thus also creating new ­opportunities for discussion on cultural industry and production.11 The debate spread beyond official publications and, as already noted, found an unusual and yet fertile territory in film festivals as well. The most important place for this from the mid- to late 1960s was the Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema in Pesaro, in central Italy, a film ­festival founded in 1965 by critics Lino Micciché and Bruno Torri, both of whom came from the leftist wing of the Socialist Party (Pescatore, 2003; Micciché, 2004). The festival was intended to offer a huge selection of works otherwise ­impossible to see in the market, thus continuing a tradition of cultural action belonging in the film clubs; but at the same time, it meant to promote those films and filmmakers whose works radically renewed film language. Furthermore, through important conferences sponsored by UNESCO, it encouraged an overall reflection on ­production and market conditions, in order to ease and improve ­cultural exchange ( _Per una nuova critica_ , 1989). The first national cinema presented in the festival was the Czechoslovak New Wave: an event which brought ­filmmakers and critics from beyond the Iron Curtain to Pesaro that year and the next (Aprà, 1989), tightened the ties between Italy and Czechoslovakia, and connected the ­aesthetic debate with economic and political projects. As Micciché claimed in a longer, and for the times very well documented, essay, "Czechoslovak cinema's ­present situation is almost a unique case in film's young history" (1965: 46). But what made this phenomenon such a unique and historical phase, known as _nová vlna_ , at least in the eyes of Italian leftist culture? Probably the fact that cinema acted as a language and cultural ­revolution at the same time, for one thing. As Micciché put it, in another dense ­contribution, "One may talk of the content of a style, not any more of the style of a content" (1966: 36), thus stressing the priority accorded to reflection on the means of expression in the new Czechoslovak films. Yet along with this, cinema proved that a sustainable Socialist society was possible, that a transformation of socialism from the inside was ­neither avoided nor refused in the Warsaw Pact area. As Hames said, "internationally, Czechoslovak cinema provided the most visible manifestation of the intellectual ferment that developed from the mid sixties onward." (1983: 4) For this reason, if non-conventional ­narratives or film discursiveness were highly praised, at the same time critics ­highlighted the ­heterodox political and literary ­legacies of the young filmmakers: dissident Marxist philosophers and thinkers, such as Karel Kosík or Robert Havemann, or writers rejected during the Stalinist era, such as Franz Kafka and Jean-Paul Sartre. It is, then, not surprising that rather than the works admired in France for rupturing conventions – for example, Věra Chytilová's _Sedmikrásky_ (Daisies, 1966) – the films most appreciated in Italy were those balancing formal innovation with political reflection, such as Jan Němec's first feature film, _Každý den odvahu, Démanty noci_ ( _Diamond of the Night_ , 1964) – which was awarded with both the critics' and the audience's prize – and his _O slavnosti a hostech_ ( _The Party and the Guests_ , 1966), whether they were realistic or metaphorical narratives. Somehow, Czechoslovak cinema realized the secret dream of leftist intellectuals, conjugating a Socialist economy with the freedom of expression, an intermediate solution between ­market and ideology. At least, that was the myth, perpetuated even 10 years later by Milan Kundera, when he stated that "the ­foolishness of commercial interests and the intransigence of ideological dogma are the two illnesses threatening film art. As the Czech cinema was nationalized just after the war, it was free from the effects of the first illness; during the Sixties it got slowly rid of the second [ _sic_ ]." (Kundera, 1996: 5) This is the main reason for the wide interest in that national production across different journals and magazines of the Left, not necessarily just those devoted to film, as was the case with _Marcatré_ , a very interesting journal put together by some of the most remarkable names in Italian culture in the 1960s, figures such as Maurizio Calvesi, Gillo Dorfles, Umberto Eco, Roberto Leydi, Vito Pandolfi, Paolo Portoghesi, and Edoardo Sanguineti (Liehm, 1966; Olivová, 1966); but a similar interest was largely shown in the already mentioned _Cinema 60_ (Liehm, 1964; Argentieri, 1966), which also devoted an entire issue to Czechoslovak cinema in 1967. An image of Czechoslovak cinema centered on art cinema – which excluded a relevant part of the production – and was strongly supported by few Czech intellectuals, mostly by Antonín Liehm, whose tireless role in mediating between two (or several) cultures and societies was certainly not ­limited to film.12 Many critics, still close to a more traditional Marxist perspective, remained rather faithful to typical Socialist genres – such as partisan films (Gobetti, 1965; Savioli, 1966) – and remained fairly suspicious of changes considered mostly superstructural, not really involving the social and economical forms, and possibly leading to nihilism (Togliatti, 1967). On the one hand, some invoked a more radical turn in language and representation (Toti, 1967). On the other hand, what was at stake was rather the structure of state cinema (Liehm, 1967). The main concern was the risk of corruption, identified with Western financial support to young Czech and Slovak filmmakers: a support that could crystallize stylistic features without truly changing power conditions in Czechoslovakia. As a long-time expert on Czechoslovak cinema and devoted Marxist critic noted in 1968, commenting on the Karlovy Vary film festival,

There's been a lot of talk at the "free platform" of freedom, but certainly more in a philosophical sense than in a _cinematic_ one.... The main problem today is not any more that of freedom in capitalist countries, in these last twenty years explored in all its possible forms; _the main problem and the very modern one is that of freedom in socialist countries_. (Casiraghi, 1968: 362)

Given the publishing date of the article, how could we nowadays deny how right he was?

 **Notes**

This essay benefited from the suggestions and friendship of Virgilio Tosi, former ­general secretary of the Federazione Italiana Circoli del Cinema, film director, and historian, representative of a film culture, and a general culture, which is disappearing day by day. We should like to thank him for the help and patience. A very reliable, ­extremely useful and complete working tool was Wildová Tosi 1978.

1 Of course, _The Third Man_ was directed in 1949 by Carol Reed, although Orson Welles played a major role; and Trinka is the Czech director and painter Jiří Trnka. These two slips are revealing of the attention paid by prominent party members to films, for whom they were mostly a tool. The quotations I cite are very often mistaken in the use of directors' names and films' titles. I have left them in their original form, assigning to my text the function of restating the correct version.

2 As a confirmation of the lack of coincidence between the political situation and ­policies of film production and international release, this should be considered a huge ­retrospective of Czechoslovak cinema, comprising several films of the local new wave ( _nová vlna_ ), organized in Sorrento in September 1969: Incontri internazionali del ­cinema – Incontro con il cinema cecoslovacco. See Kopaneva 1969.

3 For instance, Czechoslovakia was culturally not at all alien to the Italian intellectual: in the interwar period several Czech writers were translated into Italian, mostly thanks to Slavia, a publisher based in Turin; regular news on the life of theaters was published in magazines such as _Scenario_ ; and some important scholars or intellectuals, such as ­Ettore Lo Gatto or Wolfango Giusti, contributed to an improved knowledge of Czech culture. But even Czech cinema was not a total stranger to Italian film critics, thanks to the ­informative role of the Venice film festival from 1932 onwards. For this latter, see ­Pitassio 1995.

4 Rossana Rossanda was the responsible for culture of PCI from 1962 to 1967, and ­founded the left-wing newspaper _il manifesto_. She fiercely opposed the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and was consequently expelled from the party. In the interview she probably refers to _Mne dvadtsat let_ ( _I Am Twenty_ , 1964), directed by M. Chuciev, and Z. Fábri's _Húsz óra_ ( _Twenty Hours_ , 1965).

A very rich and insightful survey on periodicals associated to PCI and cinema is the MA dissertation by Protano (2009–10).

5 An attempt to research the central archive of the FiCC was frustrated by its recent ­removal; moreover, as the collection has not so far been catalogued, it has proven ­difficult to make a detailed study of the collection.

Nevertheless, I would like to thank Dr Susanna Zirizzotti and Mr Amedeo Mecchi, respectively former vicepresident and actual president of the association, for their ­helpful attitude, and I hope one day I will be able to explore the archive.

6 This progressive, less ideologically marked film club policy is confirmed by a list of 16 mm films compiled in the seventies: among the titles are several which come from Socialist countries, obviously including Czechoslovakia, including, for instance, ­psychological dramas such as Zbyněch Brynych's _P_ ě _t z miliónu_ ( _Five Out of a Million_ , 1959) and _Transport z ráje_ ( _Transport from Paradise_ , 1963), Elmar Klos and Jan Kadár's _Vyšší princip_ or _Obžalovaný_ ( _The Accused_ , 1964); genre movies such as Vladimír Čech's _105% alibi_ (1959), _Kde alibi nesta_ č _í_ ( _Where an Alibi Is Not Enough_ , 1960), and _Mezi nami zlod_ ě _ji_ ( _Between Us Thieves_ , 1964); Czechoslovak New Wave classics, such as Věra Chytilová's _Strop_ ( _Ceiling_ , 1962) and _O n_ ěč _em jiném_ ( _Something Else_ , 1963) and Jaromil Jireš's _K_ ř _ik_ ( _The Cry_ , 1963); rough Socialist realist propaganda movies, such as Martin Frič's _Past_ ( _The Trap_ , 1950); animated movies, like Karel Zeman's _Sen noci svatojánské_ , _Výnalez zkázy_ ( _A Deadly Invention_ , 1958) and _Bláznova kronika_ ( _The Jester's Tale_ , 1964).

See Anonymous, 1973[?]

I would like to thank Mariagrazia Fanchi for the valuable suggestions.

7 In 1963 the festival presented Věra Chytilová's _Pytel blech_ ( _A Bag of Fleas_ , 1962) and Evald Schorm's _Železni_ č _á_ ř _i_ ( _Railway Men_ , 1963); in 1964, Miloš Forman's Č _erný Petr_ ( _Black Peter_ , 1964); in 1965, Miloš Forman's _Lásky jedné plavovlásky_ ( _Loves of a Blonde_ , 1965) and Evald Schorm's _Zrcadlení_ ( _Reflections_ , 1965); in 1966, Evald Schorm's _Každý den odvahu_ ( _Courage for Everyday_ , 1964); in 1968, Jan Němec's _O slavnosti a hostech_ ( _The Party and the Guests_ , 1966), Evald Schorm's _P_ ě _t holek na krku_ ( _Five Girls around the Neck_ , 1967), and Juraj Jakubisko's _Zbehovia a putníci_ ( _The Deserter and the Nomads_ , 1968).

8 The First Czechoslovak Republic was the state born out of the dissolution of the Habsburgh monarchy in 1918, composed of Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia and Rutenia (now Western Ukrainia), and Czech Silesia, ruled over for a long time by President Tomáš Masaryk, and then by his minister of foreign affairs, Edvard Beneš. From 1933 it was the only true democracy in Central-Eastern Europe, since most of the other states became authoritarian or totalitarian regimes and succumbed to Nazi German and internal pressures in 1938. In post-1989 debate it acquired the status of a golden age for the national cultural life, although in fact it was also marked by significant social and ethnic tensions.

9 It should be noted, by the way, that the first three titles had an American theatrical release, which makes the whole thing possibly more interesting.

10 This essay originated in a retrospective organized in the film club circuit, with the explicit purpose of opening spaces and perspectives for alternative culture, film ­history and contemporary national cinema. As a matter of fact, the preceding books focused on new Italian cinema, independent American cinema and the revision of the work of Marcel Carné.

11 The minister for Tourism and Entertainment between 1963 and 1968 was the Socialist deputy Achille Corona, under whom the law on film industry and market was ­approved that provided the nation with a framework that lasted with minor changes for practically three decades. Achille Corona came from Pesaro.

12 Liehm made available interviews and texts for the Italian translation, so too were those with prominent _nová vlna_ 's filmmakers originally published in the cinema's craft union organ _Filmové a televizní noviny_ and then republished in _Cinema 60_. Liehm is ­often credited too for the collection of writings from the Prague Spring, published under the pseudonym Jan Čech (Čech, 1969). After 1968, he went into exile and ­mostly worked in France and Italy. See, for instance, Liehm, M.,1977.

 **References**

Ajello, Nello (1979) _Intellettuali e PCI, 1944–1958_ (The Italian Communist Party and the Intellectuals, 1944–1958). Laterza, Rome and Bari.

Anonymous (1949) Un nuovo mondo di poesia si è aperto per il cinema (A new world of poetry unfolded for the cinema). _Europa nuova_ , 1 (3): 22–23.

Anonymous (1951a) Cinematografia scientifica popolare e didattica (Popular and educational scientific film). _Europa nuova_ , 3 (4): 11.

Anonymous (1951b) Nuovi film cecoslovacchi (New Czechoslovak movies). _Europa nuova_ , 3 (10): 16–17.

Anonymous (1952) Cinema cecoslovacco nazionalizzato (The nationalized Czechoslovak cinema). _Sipario_ , 7 (74): 36.

Anonymous (1969) _Giornate del film scientifico cecoslovacco_ (Days of the Czechoslovak scientific film). Viminalgrafica/Associazione italiana di cinematografia scientifica, Rome.

Anonymous (1973?), _Repertorio di film a 16 mm. per attività culturali_. La Nuova Italia, Florence.

Aprà, Adriano (ed.) (1978) _Materiali sul cinema italiano degli anni Cinquanta II_ (Materials on the Italian cinema in the fifties 2), Quaderno informativo 74bis. Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema, Pesaro.

Aprà, Adriano (ed.) (1989) ___Poetiche della nouvelle vague_ _(New wave poetics)_. Marsilio, Venice.

Argentieri, Mino (1966) Cinema cecoslovacco: una fiducia pervasa dal pessimismo dell'intelligenza (Czechoslovak cinema: a confidence pervaded by intelligent pessimism). _Cinema 60_ , 7 (59): 3–11.

Aristarco, Guido (ed.) (1981) _Sciolti dal giuramento: Il dibattito critico-ideologico sul cinema negli anni Cinquanta_ (Released from the vow: the critical-ideological film debate in the fifties). Dedalo, Bari.

Bálint Kovács, András (2007) _Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–1980_. Chicago University Press, Chicago.

Barbaro, Umberto (ed.) (1950) _Il Cinema e l'uomo moderno_ (Cinema and the modern man). Edizioni sociali, Milano.

Bernard, Jan (1991) Diskuse o pojetí rozvoje našeho filmu v první polovině roku 1948 ve filmovém tisku (The discussions on the developments in our cinema in the first half of 1948 through the film press). _Filmový sborník historický_ , 3: 75–80.

Bianciardi, Luciano [1957] (2005) _Il lavoro culturale_ (The cultural work); now in _L'antimeridiano: Opere complete_ [Morning: complete works], Vol. 1. Isbn/Ex Cogita, Milan.

Brousil, Antonín M. (1949) Il congresso cinematografico di Perugia (The cinema congress in Perugia). _Europa nuova_ , 1 (1): 12.

Brož, Jaroslav (1952) Uomini illustri sullo schermo (Famous men on the screen). _Il calendario del popolo_ , 8 (90): 1088.

Brož, Jaroslav (1953) Gli innamorati di Stekly e le marionette di Zeman (Stekly's lovers and Zeman's puppets). _Cinema nuovo_ , 2 (3): 50.

Caccamo, Francesco, Helan, Pavel, and Tria, Massimo (eds) (2011) _Primavera di Praga, risveglio europeo_ (Prague Spring, European awakening). Firenze University Press, Florence.

Calvino, Italo (1947) Brigata, parola di festa e di lavoro (Brigade, a word for holiday and work). _L'Unità_ , 15 August.

Casiraghi, Ugo (1947) Il punto su Praga – Il cinema (Focus on Prague – cinema). _Sipario_ , 2 (18): 13–14.

Casiraghi, Ugo (1951a), _Cinema Cecoslovacco ieri e oggi_. Edizioni dell'Ateneo: Rome.

Casiraghi, Ugo (1951b) I festival cecoslovacchi (Czechoslovak festivals). _Il calendario del popolo_ , 7 (77): 777.

Casiraghi, Ugo (1952) Unico assente: Hollywood (The only absentee: Hollywood). _Il calendario del popolo_ , 8 (96): 1233.

Casiraghi, Ugo (1962) Cinema cecoslovacco, cinematografia minore? (Czechoslovak Cinema: A Minor Cinema?) _Cinestudio – Quaderni del circolo monzese del cinema_ , 4: 1–36.

Casiraghi, Ugo (1963) Cannes spettacolo e cinemaverità (Cannes: entertainment and cinéma vérité). _Cinema nuovo_ , 12 (163): 195–202.

Casiraghi, Ugo (1964) Elogio di Karlovy Vary (A praise to Karlovy Vary). _Il calendario del popolo_ , 20 (239–240): 6512–6513.

Casiraghi, Ugo (1968) Inflazione di premi quest'anno a (This year in Marienbad an awards inflation). _Cinema nuovo_ , 17 (195): 360–363.

Cosulich, Callisto (1975) Neorealismo e associazionismo 1944–1953: cronaca di dieci anni (Filmclubs movement and neorealism 1944–1953: chronicle of a decade), in, _Il neorealismo cinematografico italiano_ [The Italian cinematic neorealism] (ed. Micciché, Lino), Marsilio: Venezia, pp. 90–97.

Crainz, Guido (2003) _Storia del miracolo italiano: culture, identità e trasformazioni tra gli anni 50 e 60_ (A history of the Italian miracle. cultures, identities, and transformations between the fifties and the sixties). Donzelli, Rome.

Čech, Jan (Antonín Liehm) (ed.) (1969) _Praga 1968: le idee del "Nuovo corso." "Literární listy"aprile–agosto 1968_ (Prague 1968: the ideas of the "new course." Literární listy April–August 1968). Laterza, Rome and Bari.

Ferrara, Giuseppe (1955) La Resistenza nel cinema europeo (Resistance and European cinema). _Filmcritica_ , 6 (47–48): 133–157.

Ferrero, Adelio (1965) I circoli del cinema e l'industria culturale (Film clubs and cultural industry). _Cinema nuovo_ , 14 (175): 192–196.

Fink, Guido (1968), Treni strettamente sorvegliati (Closely watched trains). _Cinema nuovo_ , 17 (194): 290–293.

Forgacs, David (1989) The making and unmaking of neorealism in postwar Italy, in _The Culture of Reconstruction. European Literature, Thought and Film, 1945–50_ (ed. Nicholas Hewitt). St. Martin's Press, New York, pp. 51–66.

Forgacs, David and Gundle, Stephen (2007) _Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War_. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN.

Fučík, Julius (1949) _Scritto sotto la forca_ (Notes from the gallows) (ed. Franco Calamandrei). Universale economica, Milan.

Ginsborg, Paul (2003) _A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988_. Palgrave MacMillan,New York–Houndmills.

Gobetti, Paolo (1956) Confessioni di un critico comunista (Confessions of a Communist critic). _Cinema nuovo_ , 5 (95); now in Aristarco _Sciolti dal giuramento_.

Gobetti, Paolo (1965) Cannes: la guerra vent'anni dopo (Cannes; the war, twenty years after). _Cinema nuovo_ , 14 (175): 199–203.

Goldstücker, Eduard (1963) Un metodo per Kafka (A method for Kafka). _Rinascita_ , 20 (33): 28.

Gundle, Stephen (2000) _Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture_. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.

Hames, Peter (1983) _The Czechoslovak New Wave_. University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London.

In difesa del cinema italiano. (1949) _Rinascita_ , 6 (3): 137–142.

Jacchia, Paolo (1949a) _La rinascita cinematografica_ (The rebirth of cinema). _Europa nuova_ , 1 (1): 13–14.

Jacchia, Paolo (1949b) Il Festival cinematografico di Marianske Lazne (The film festival in Marianske Lazne). _Mondo operaio_ , 2 (37): 8.

Jancovich, Mark (2002a) Genre and the problem of the audience: genre classifications and cultural distinctions in the promotion of _Silence of the Lambs_ , in _Horror: The Film Reader_ (ed. Mark Jancovich). Routledge, London and New York, pp. 151–161.

Jancovich, Mark (2002b) A real shocker: authenticity, genre and the struggle for distinction, in _The Film Cultures Reader_ (ed. Graeme Turner). Routledge, London and New York, pp. 469–480.

Klimeš, Ivan (1991) _K povaze historismu v hraném filmu poúnorového období_ (On the nature of historicism in fiction film in the post-February 1948 period). _Filmový sborník historický_ , 3: 81–86.

Kopaneva (Kopaněvová), Galina (1969) A Sorrento l'incontro con il cinema cecoslovacco (Meeting the Czechoslovak cinema in Sorrento). _Il dramma_ , 45 (12): 94–101.

Kundera, Milan (1996) _Formanovo Ho_ ř _í, má panenko_ (Forman's _The Fireman Ball_ ). _Iluminace_ , 8 (1): 5 [Czech trans.]. Originally published in 1976 as Les enfants de Kafka' (Kafka's children). _Le Point_ , April 26;

l.a. (Antonetti Luciano) (1963) La conferenza internazionale su Kafka (The international conference on Kafka). _Il contemporaneo_ , 6 (62): 90–93.

Lanaro, Silvio (1992) _Storia dell'Italia repubblicana_ (A history of postwar Italy). Marsilio, Venice.

Laura, Ernesto G. (1960) _Il film cecoslovacco_. Edizioni dell'Ateneo, Rome.

Laura, Ernesto G. (ed.) (1985) _Tutti i film di Venezia, 1932–1984_ (All the films in Venice, 1932–1984). La Biennale di Venezia/ERI, Venice.

Liehm, Antonín (1964) Il "miracolo" del cinema cecoslovacco (Czechoslovak cinema's "miracle"). _Cinema 60_ , 5 (45): 3–8.

Liehm, Antonín (1966) Untitled. _Marcatré_ (19–22): 53–56.

Liehm, Antonín (1967) _La morte del cinema cecoslovacco non ci sarà_ (The Czechoslovak cinema will not die). _Cinema 60_ , 8 (67–68): 21–28.

Liehm, Mira (ed.) (1977) _Il cinema nell'Europa dell'Est, 1960–1977_ (Cinema in Eastern Europe, 1960–1977). Marsilio/La Biennale,Venice.

Lizzani, Carlo (1949) Per una difesa attiva del cinema popolare (For an active defense of popular cinema). _Rinascita_ , 6 (2): 90–92.

Macura, Vladimír (1999) Č _eský sen_ (The Czech dream), Lidové noviny: Prague.

Malík, Jan (1950) Sviluppo del film a pupazzi (The puppet film developments). _Europa nuova_ , 2 (9): 12–13.

Medici, Antonio (2001a) La libertà della cultura: conversazione con Rossana Rossanda (The freedom of culture: a conversation with Rossana Rossanda, in _Il PCI e il cinema tra cultura e propaganda 1959–1979_ , (PCI and cinema between culture and propaganda 1959–1979) (ed. Antonio Medici, Mauro Morbidelli, and Ermanno Taviani). Archivio audiovisivo del movimento operaio, Rome, pp. 44–48.

Medici, Antonio (2001b) Un grande disegno riformatore: conversazione con Mino Argentieri (A great reformist project: a conversation with Mino Argentieri), in _Il PCI e il cinema tra cultura e propaganda 1959–1979_ , (PCI and cinema between culture and propaganda 1959–1979) (ed. Antonio Medici, Mauro Morbidelli, and Ermanno Taviani). Archivio audiovisivo del movimento operaio, Rome, pp. 64–87.

Micciché, Lino (1965) Una generazione senza monumenti nel nuovo cinema cecoslovacco (A generation without monuments in the new Czechoslovak cinema). _Bianco e nero_ , 9: 6–69.

Micciché, Lino (1966) Cinema – la _nová vlna_ (Cinema – _nová vlna_ ). _Sipario_ , 21 (248): 35–39, 91.

Micciché, Lino (2004) Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema, in _Enciclopedia del Cinema Treccani_ (Treccani film encyclopaedia), Vol. 4, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Roma, pp. 406–410.

Mida, Massimo (1946) Caratteri del nuovo cinema sovietico (The new Soviet cinema nature). _Rinascita_ , 3 (11–12): 327–329.

Olivová, Drahomira (1966) Untitled. _Marcatré_ (19–22): 58–60.

Pellizzari, Lorenzo (1961) L'ombra di Švejk nel cinema cecoslovacco (Švejk's shadow on Czechoslovak cinema). _Cinema nuovo_ , 10 (153): 421–425.

 _Per una nuova critica: I convegni pesaresi, 1965–1967_ (For a new critique. the Pesaro conferences, 1965–1967) (1989). Marsilio, Venice.

Pescatore, Guglielmo (2003) Pesaro e i nuovi festival (Pesaro and the new festivals), in _Storia del cinema italian_ _o, 1965–1969_ (History of the Italian cinema, 1965–1969), Vol. 11 (ed. Gianni Canova). Marsilio–UTET, Venice, pp. 520–525.

Pitassio, Francesco (1995) ' Československé filmy na Mezinárodní přehlídce filmového umění v Benátkách 1932–1941 (Czechoslovak films at the International Festival of Film Art in Venice, 1932–1941). _Iluminace_ , 7 (3): 93–119.

Pitassio, Francesco (2009) Da una primavera all'altra e quel che ne consegue (One spring to another, and what follows). _eSamizdat_ , 7 (2–3): 55–59.

Pons, Silvio (2009) _Il comunismo italiano e il '68 praghese_ (Italian communism and 1968 in Prague). _eSamizdat_ , 7 (2–3): 47–50.

Protano, Emanuele (2009–10) Il cinema nei periodici del P.C.I. (1944–1969) (Cinema in the PCI Periodicals, 1944–1969), MA dissertation, Università degli Studi di Roma 2 – Tor Vergata: Rome.

r.a. (1968) Diffondere anche in Italia i film per la gioventù (Films aimed at youth should be released also in Italy). _Cinema nuovo_ , 17 (194): 282–283.

Renzi, Renzo (1951) Passaporto per Karlovy Vary (Passport to Karlovy Vary). _Cinema_ , 4 (55): 29.

Renzi, Renzo (1956) Sciolti dal giuramento (Released from the vow). _Cinema nuovo_ , 5 (84); now in Aristarco, _Sciolti dal giuramento_.

Renzi, Renzo (1959) Un occhio selvaggio tra ceneri e diamanti (A wild eye within ashes and diamonds). _Cinema nuovo_ , 8 (141): 434–440.

Rositi, Franco (1966) I cineclub in Italia: ricerca con referendum postale (aprile–giugno 1965) (Filmclubs in Italy: a survey through a postal inquiry (April–June 1965)). _IKON: Cinema, televisione, iconografia_ , 16 (57): 29–89.

Savioli, Aggeo (1966) Burocrazia e meditazioni del passato (Bureaucracy and meditations over the past). _Cinema nuovo_ , 15 (183): 360–363.

Sayer, Derek (2000) _The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History_. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

Sereni, Emilio [1948] (1974) Per la difesa del cinema italiano (For the Italian cinema defense), in _Sul neorealismo: Testi e documenti_ _(1939–1955)_. Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema: Quaderno informativo 59, Pesaro.

Spriano, Paolo (1986) _Le passioni di un decennio, 1946–1956_ (The Passions of a decade, 1946–1956). Garzanti, Milano.

Stringa, Enzo (1963) Documentari e film per ragazzi (Documentaries and children's films). _Cinema nuovo_ , 12 (165): 350–352.

Stringa, Enzo (1964) Documentari e film per ragazzi (Documentaries and children's films). _Cinema nuovo_ , 13 (171): 358–360.

Stringa, Enzo (1965) Documentari e film per ragazzi (Documentaries and children's films). _Cinema nuovo_ , 14 (177): 364–365.

Štábla, Zdeněk (1993) K poválečnému vývoji v kinematografii (The postwar cinema development). _Filmový sborník historický_ , 4: 13–20.

Štábla, Zdeněk and Taussig, Pavel (eds) (1981) _KS_ Č _a_ č _eskoslovenská kinematografie_ , (The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and the Czechoslovak cinema). Československý filmový ústav, Prague.

Togliatti, Vittorio (1967) Locarno: poche opere valide in un panorama desolante (Locarno: a few worthwhile works in a desolate landscape), _Cinema nuovo_ , 16 (189): 376–379.

Tosi, Virgilio (1999) _Quando il cinema era un circolo: la stagione d'oro dei cineclub_ _(1945–1956)_ (When cinema was a club. the filmclubs golden age, 1945–1965). Bianco & Nero, Venice.

Toti, Gianni (1967) Ha superato gli "anni di Cristo" il cinema cecoslovacco? (Did Czechoslovak cinema overcome "Christ's years"?). _Cinema 60_ , 8 (67–68): 19–21.

Turovskaya, Maria (1993) Soviet Films of the Cold War, in _Stalinism and Soviet Cinema_ (ed. Richard Taylor and, Derek Spring). Routledge, London and New York, pp. 131–141.

Vento, Giovanni and Mida, Massimo (1959) _Cinema e Resistenza_ (Cinema and resistance). Luciano Landi, Florence.

Viazzi, Glauco (1949) Il cinema democratico a Mariánské Lázne (Democratic cinema in Mariánské Lázne). _Società_ , 5 (3): 509–549.

Viazzi, Glauco (1950) Il festival cinematografico di Karlovy Vary (Karlovy Vary film festival). _Società_ , 6 (4): 708–733.

Waldenberg, Marek (1992) _Kwestie narodowe w Europie_ Ś _rodkowo–Wschodniej: Dzieje. Idee_ (The national questions in Central-Eastern Europe: stories. ideas). Wydawnictwo ­naukowe, Warsaw.

Wildová Tosi, Alena (1978) _Bibliografia degli studi italiani sulla Cecoslovacchia (1918–1978)_. Bulzoni, Rome.

Žalman, Jan (1993) _Uml_ č _ený film_ (A silenced cinema). Národní filmový archiv, Prague.

 _Zlatá šedesátá:_ Č _eská literatura a spole_ č _nost v letech tání, kolotání a... zklamání_ (The golden sixties: Czech literature and society in the years of thaw, whirl and... deception) (2000). Ústav pro českou literaturu, Prague.

# Part III

# Aesthetic (Re)visions

# 15

# The Impossible Polish New Wave and its Accursed Émigré Auteurs

#  _Borowczyk, Pola_ ń _ski, Skolimowski, and_ Ż _uławski_

Michael Goddard

#  **Introduction**

The recent (2008) publication of a bilingual volume entitled _Polish New Wave_ / _Polska Nowa Fala_ , edited by Barbara Piwowarska and Łukasz Ronduda and featuring ­contributions by both leading Polish film critics and younger writers generally more engaged with contemporary art and culture, has raised important questions that go well beyond simple questions of cinema historiography. As will be ­discussed further below, technically speaking there never was a new wave in Poland in the same way that there was in France or, to give a more comparable example, Czechoslovakia; as a historical entity it doesn't exist – and yet it is possible to ­reconstruct it. This fact is acknowledged in the subtitle of the book, _The History of a Phenomenon that Never Existed_. However, the interest of the book goes beyond ­historical debates over whether there were at least elements of, or the potential for, a new wave cinema movement in Poland in the 1960s. More than this, one of the key effects of the volume is to confer cultural and aesthetic value on a range of generally marginalized filmmakers, including Andrzej Żuławski, Grzegorz Królikiewicz, and Witold Leszcyński to give only three examples.

The extent to which these filmmakers have been marginalized in Polish film history and criticism can be confirmed by the brief and dismissive one or two ­paragraph mentions they and their films receive in works like Marek Haltof's _Polish National Cinema_ (2002), relative to that accorded to the work of filmmakers such as Andrzej Wajda or Krzysztof Zanussi. Yet this is not a simple case of ­proposing an alternative new wave canon to the dominant "historical" or "realist" one; after all both Zanussi and Wajda had their brushes with the new wave, and the former was even part of the cinematic retrospective that the book was published to accompany. Rather, what this book suggests is a different prism through which to evaluate the historical accomplishments of Polish cinema, a prism emphasizing artistic experimentation over social realism and formal risk-taking over historical engagement. As such it suggests an overturning of the dominant critical approaches to Polish cinema and the prejudices towards social realism that have distorted the image of Polish cinema and arguably Polish cinema itself from the Communist period right up until the present. This is the case whether one looks at the work of Polish or international critics for whom the holy trinity of Wajda–Kieślowski–Zanussi (possibly with a few other directors form the Polish School or the Cinema of Moral Concern thrown in for good measure) is usually seen as sufficient to sum up Polish cinema as a whole, even in books published as recently as Paul Coates's _The Red and the White_ (2005). So whether or not the concept of an impossible Polish New Wave is a sustainable critical construct, the effort at opening up critical engagement with Polish cinema beyond its sacred heroes and critical clichés is something to be applauded and continued.

It is in the interests of such a continuation that this chapter seeks to pay ­attention to four directors who were obliged to work in exile either earlier or later in their careers, namely, Walerian Borowczyk, Roman Polański, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Andrzej Żuławski. While this will be done in part to test the hypothesis of an impossible Polish New Wave to which they all would be major contributors, it is also in the interest of further extending the image of Polish cinema beyond the abovementioned critical limitations. This poses the question, given the historical instability of the concept of a Polish New Wave, why use it at all to account for the works of these accursed auteurs? Why not instead use the widely circulating critical terms of "exile" and "diaspora" to account for their work and its marginalization within critical discourse on Polish cinema? While the latter approach might be equally valid, this chapter will argue that the idea of an impossible Polish New Wave serves a specific critical function ­highlighting the cultural exclusion of these filmmakers who, along with others might well have constituted an historical new wave movement in Polish cinema in other circumstances. Even more importantly, the concept of a Polish New Wave has the tactical purpose of conferring cultural value on these films and filmmakers, of inserting them in a consistent and recognizable framework. This is of special significance in the Polish context as a more effective way of opening up critical film prejudices than using the less familiar frameworks of diaspora. After all, if new wave movements such as the French New Wave often began life in the world of tactical criticism, not only in that many of the filmmakers were previously critics but also in the invention of new critical approaches to a given cinematic tradition, perhaps it is first and foremost in contemporary Polish film criticism, rather than in historical film practices, that a "new wave" has at least the potential to take place in Poland.

#  **The Impossible Polish New Wave**

As suggested above, applying the term "new wave" to Polish cinema presents ­historiographic difficulties since, if a new wave means a coherent group of filmmakers with a shared interest in formal experimentation producing work against or as a revision of inherited cinematic traditions, no such historical tendency can be clearly located in Polish cinematic history. As opposed to the French New Wave, whose principal filmmakers shared a common formation in key critical journals, or the equally coherent Czech New Wave, who were for the most part of the same generation and began or revived their cinematic careers at the start of the 1960s, in Poland there was only a string of idiosyncratic directors whose careers started in different periods and usually, sooner or later, resulted in being forced into or ­choosing exile or other forms of marginalization. Borowczyk, for example, left at the end of the 1950s, well before he even began making live action films, while Polański would leave soon afterwards, following the negative official critical reception of his feature debut _Knife in the Water_ ( _Nó_ ż _w wodzie_ , 1962). Skolimowski is perhaps the only Polish filmmaker about whom it can be said that he pursued a "new wave" career in Poland in the 1960s, but even then this is only meaningful in stylistic terms, since one director can hardly constitute a wave or movement; a ­collectivity and relationships among directors and other creative personnel is ­necessary for any genuine cinematic movement that could properly be considered a new wave. Certainly at the end of the 1960s, at the time of Żuławski's debut, there were considerably more filmmakers interested in experimentation with film form who showed the imprint of international new wave movements. Yet there was no more a sense of either related aesthetic approaches or even a coherent generation, especially since even "old hands" like Wajda were trying their hands at producing "new wave" films like _Everything for Sale_ ( _Wszystko na sprzeda_ ż, 1967). This is not to say that there were no relationships whatsoever between these "new wave" filmmakers – as the fact of Skolimowski's involvement in Polański's feature debut shows – but rather that these relations were not sufficient to specify a ­unified movement and were, as often as not, trans-generational rather than intra-­generational, as, for example, in the productive relationships Skolimowski and Żuławski enjoyed with Wajda at key moments of their careers.

Despite the nod their subtitle gives towards acknowledging the impossibility of specifying an historical Polish New Wave the editors of _Polish New Wave_ actually propose an intriguing solution to the problem. Treating the Polish New Wave more as a curatorial challenge than as a problem of cinema historiography, they propose a purely formal, explicitly ahistorical, definition of the Polish New Wave: "by introducing the term 'Polish New Wave' we aim to define an ahistorical phenomenon permitting us to mark out a group of films that share a common domain between art and cinema" (Piwowarsk and Ronduda, 2008: 4). It is necessary to note the assumption here that New Wave cinemas necessarily occupy a domain between art and cinema, which goes well beyond the more modest claim that this group of films "transgress the traditional methods of narrative building characteristic of their genres" (Piwowarsk and Ronduda, 2008: 4) a statement that could apply to a wide range of innovative films which would hardly all be considered as new wave. For example, Piotr Uklański's film _Summer Love_ (2006), in many ways the impetus for the project, is not only from an entirely distinct historical period but enacts an approach to genre that has much more in common with contemporary US genre-based Indie films such as the work of the Coen Brothers or Quentin Tarantino than it does with any of the strategies associated with new wave cinema movements or the other filmmakers discussed in the volume.

These historical problems are further complicated by the fact that in the 1950s there _was_ a coherent film movement that became known as the "Polish School," consisting of Wajda, Andrzej Munk, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Wojciech Has and others whose films anticipated some aspects of the French New Wave, while their ­aesthetics remained somewhere between Italian neorealism and new cinema movements with a nationally distinctive tendency to interrogate the recent historical past. The fact that this very quickly became the dominant tendency in Polish cinema meant that there was no "cinéma de papa" for the new wave generation to attack; it is telling in this respect that Tadeusz Konwicki's _The Last Day of Summer_ ( _Ostatni dzie_ ń _lata_ , 1958) is singled out by Mateusz Werner as a proto-new wave film (Werner, 2008: 8) (Konwicki not being a representative of the Polish School movement but nevertheless an auteur of the same generation), while Lubelski refers to Wajda's _Innocent Sorcerers_ ( _Niewinni czarodzieje_ , 1960) in similar terms (2008: 17). The trouble is that the very concept of a new wave assumes conflictual relations between identifiable generations, which were simply not the dynamics of Polish cinema at the start of the 1960s. As Werner points out, it was the Polish School generation that actually staged a rebellion less against a father's cinema than a "policeman's cinema" (2008: 12), and also, the dynamics of censorship had major impacts on different generations of Polish filmmakers. So while the Polish School barely had time to develop into the orthodoxy it might have become had it not been delayed by the imposition of Socialist realism up until 1956, this ­experience of censorship also rendered its proponents more open than they might otherwise have been to new developments in cinematic form, thereby leading to sympathy rather than antipathy between successive cinematic generations. Censorship was then also intensified around 1960, just when a new wave ­movement was most likely to emerge, thereby curtailing the Polish career of Polański, whose debut was used as a key justification for this new policy. In short, the result was that rather than any coherent new wave movement, there were only particular films or filmmakers whose interrogation of film form at specific times was only a precarious and idiosyncratic irruption of artistic rebellion, tempered by a negotiation with the limits of film censorship at that particular historical moment rather than anything resembling a coherent new wave movement. Any positing of a Polish New Wave can therefore only be a historically questionable retrospective construction, referring only to perceived common tendencies that are more the results of historical hindsight and a reading strategy than any commonality in how the films were actually produced, as borne out by the eclecticism of the ­filmmakers, films, and periods dealt with in the _Polish New Wave_ volume.

Strangely, this confusion around generations did not stop the idea of generation from being used to classify Polish filmmakers. This primarily consisted in the idea of three distinct generations of filmmakers: the immediately postwar generation, such as Aleksander Ford and Wanda Jakubowska, whose careers had begun before the war and who were seen as tainted with the doctrine of Socialist realism; the Polish School, who made their debuts in the 1950s and who were the first film-school trained generation of filmmakers; and filmmakers like Skolimowski and Polański, whose cinematic beginnings were at the start of the 1960s; as well as those filmmakers like Zanussi, Żuławski, Królikiewicz, Henryk Kluba, Witold Leszcyński, and Andrzej Kondratiuk whose debuts were in the mid- to late 1960s. All of this last grouping, despite considerable variations in their ages and the ­beginnings of their respective careers, became labeled critically as the "third ­generation." However, as Lubelski points out, it is difficult to know what these third generation directors really shared and to a large extent "critics – craving for a generational change – imposed a 'group' label on them" (2008: 20). Lubelski points out that the critic who originally proposed this term, Jerzy Płażewski, had already questioned it in the mid-1960s; however, it was very popular with critics, and Lubelski himself identifies some common traits shared by these directors: "a manifestation of the author's identity... a fine form; a tendency to poetic stylization" (2008: 20)1 However, such common traits are fairly vague and only point to the general idea of an auteurist art cinema, less obviously engaged with history or social issues than the work of earlier filmmakers.

This commonality was also fairly short-lived; if it is possible to treat films like Zanussi's _Illumination_ ( _Iluminacja_ , 1973) and Żuławski's _Third Part of the Night_ ( _Trzecia cz_ ęść _nocy_ , 1971) as inhabiting a similar generational "post-new wave" framework or auteurist mode of production, the same could hardly be said a ­decade later of the former's biopic of Karol Wojtila, _From a Far Country_ (1981) and the latter's science fiction epic _On the Silver Globe_ ( _Na srebrnym globie_ , 1977/1988). Nevertheless, the idea of "generations" is a persistent one in Polish cinema, not only in terms of its filmmakers but as a cinematic theme beginning with Wajda's debut feature, _A Generation_ ( _Pokolenie_ , 1955), made under the policy and influence of Socialist realism. The fact that Żuławski's _The Third Part of the Night_ directly references both this film and, via its title, a third generation of Polish cinema, means that the idea of generations in and of Polish cinema cannot be so easily dismissed. If Zanussi and Żuławski have anything in common whatsoever, it is perhaps that both had an encounter with the French context around the period of the new wave, with Zanussi writing reports form the sets of French New Wave films while Żuławski studied at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC) rather than the Polish Film School in Łódź. Nevertheless, the latter's disparaging comments about the French New Wave serve to indicate that he saw it less as a coherent cinematic movement than as just another site of generational conflict: "infighting among a group of young [filmmakers] who, in the process of ousting the old hands, had found a way of making movies about their own cousins, mothers, fathers, and housekeepers... I saw nothing interesting from an artistic standpoint" (Żuławski cited in Kletowski, 2008: 72).

#  **Generations of Exile and Accursed Auteurs**

This last citation should be enough to indicate caution when using terms like "new wave" or "generations" in relation to Polish cinema; and yet it paradoxically underlines the centrality of generations to Żuławski's own conception of cinema. It also points to the role of transnational exchange that informs the very concept of new wave movements and the (im)possibility of the Polish New Wave in particular. While new wave and new cinema movements in the 1960s tended to be defined in national terms, their outlook was clearly internationalist both in their critical appreciation of films from diverse cultural origins and the orientation of their own works towards the international markets serviced by the contemporary burgeoning of international film festivals. New wave movements in places as diverse as Latin America and Eastern Europe also were composed both of a reinvigoration of national cinema and an influx of formal influences from the French and other new wave movements that had already begun, which in turn had been nourished on eclectic international sources including Hollywood B movies and Italian neorealism as well as politicized film movements such as, for example, the Polish School.

In Poland and other Eastern bloc countries, however, there was another level of internationalism surrounding new wave films and filmmakers; the more a ­formally or politically subversive mode of cinema was adopted, the more the filmmakers involved would be obliged to either compromise with censorship regimes or else leave the country. While innovative filmmaking was possible in Poland in the mid- to late 1950s, this was not the case in Czechoslovakia, while, conversely, at the start of the 1960s, filmmakers who would constitute the Czech New Wave had relative freedom to experiment compared to their Polish counterparts. So in addition to national generations there are also generations of new wave exiles in Polish ­cinema, from Borowczyk, who left in 1958, to Żuławski, who finally left Poland in the late 1970s. While in some instances, such as that of Borowczyk, the choice to emigrate seems almost to have preempted any real obstacles to their career (which in Borowcyk's case would no doubt have arisen given the future erotic and ­transgressive nature of his work), in most of these cases, exile was the only available response to the impossibility of continuing their specific film practices in Poland. Other filmmakers, even, arguably, new wave ones, did remain in Poland, often at the cost of considerable compromise or difficulties in getting their films produced, see, for example, the long delays in the production of Wojciech Has's _Sanatorium Under the Hour-Glass_ ( _Sanatorium pod Klepsydr_ ą, 1973). Nevertheless, since it is the exiled film directors who are debatably the most excluded from accounts of Polish national cinema, the rest of this chapter will focus on the ­trajectories of the four filmmakers mentioned above. Whether in the cases of Borowczyk or Polański, who undoubtedly would have made major contributions to a Polish New Wave movement had they remained in the country, or Skolimowski and Żuławski, whose decade-long Polish careers were still violently truncated by state censorship, these filmmakers are "accursed" in the sense of being ejected from standard histories of Polish cinema, as if exile was an unforgivable act of treason. This chapter will argue, in contrast to this standpoint, that these filmmakers, both in their work in Poland and abroad, have made major contributions to Polish cinema that deserve a much greater acknowledgment whether in "new wave" or other terms.

#  **Borowczyk, Surrealism, and Eroticism**

Walerian Borowczyk had perhaps the strangest and most perverse trajectory of any of the filmmakers discussed in this chapter. Beginning with both national and international renown for his animated work in Poland in the late 1950s, both with Jan Lenica and separately, he continued to find at least minor appreciation for his work in France up until the production of his first live action feature films, _Goto, Island of Love_ ( _Goto l'île d'amour_ , 1968) and _Blanche_ (1971). However, few ­filmmakers have done a better job of destroying their reputation both with audiences and with critics than Borowczyk did in the period beginning with _Immoral Tales_ ( _Contes immoraux_ , 1974). Initiating a unique type of cinema on the borders between art, eroticism, and exploitation, Borowczyk alienated those critics who had hailed _Blanche_ as the revelation of a new talented director with a Buñuelian surreal ­sensibility who was capable of extending the accomplishments of the French New Wave. Even appreciation by cult audiences was limited because Borowczyk's later films were too artistic to operate as sexploitation films, while too erotic to fit ­comfortably into art cinema. Nevertheless, there are major continuities in the themes, style, and expressive techniques between all these phases of Borowczyk's work, from his earliest animations to later films such as _Love Rites_ ( _Cérémonie d'amour_ , 1987), for example, in a particularly animate treatment of and focus on objects. Therefore, it is worth examining some of Borowczyk's key works which, given more favorable circumstances, might well have made a major contribution to a Polish New Wave.

Before examining his work, however, it is necessary to point out the extent to which it has been almost entirely excluded from considerations of Polish cinema. Even in the _Polish New Wave_ volume discussed above, Borowczyk is not even ­mentioned. In part this is because his work completed in Poland, with the ­exception of _Story of Sin_ ( _Dzieje grzechu_ , 1975), was limited to animations, which are hardly at the forefront of international considerations of new wave movements, which is not to say that they have not played a significant role. Given Borowczyk's ­association in France with Chris Marker and the Left Bank group, it is no more farfetched to consider his work in relation to the idea of a Polish New Wave, and in fact this has considerably more historical justification than similar considerations of some of the filmmakers treated in the _Polish New Wave_ volume. Borowczyk does feature prominently in the more recently published _A Story of Sin_ on Polish cinema and surrealism, which takes its title from Borowczyk's film. However, this is largely the result of a recent reevaluation of his work and especially a response to the first proper retrospective, which took place at contemporary art centers in Warsaw and Poznan.2 Nevertheless, Borowczyk's work should by no means be limited to a strict association with surrealism, as it fulfills many of the formal criteria of new wave cinema, such as experimentation with visual style and narrative form and an interest in finding a new cinematic language to account for contemporary experience.

If many of the animations Borowczyk made with Lenica, such as _Once Upon a Time_ ( _Był sobie raz_ , 1957) find their closest analogs in the works of Czech surrealist animators like Jan Švankmajer, whose work and obsessive motifs are indeed very resonant with Borowczyk's, by the time of _House_ ( _Dom_ , 1958), there is something more at play than the mere surrealist investigation of the potential life of graphic forms and inanimate objects. According to Jonathan Owen (2010: 50), the work of Borowcyk and Lenica's in a Polish context, with no surrealist tradition to draw on in contrast to the rich vein of Czech surrealism, was much more prone to ­inventing entirely new and "poor" forms of animation, often drawing as much on popular culture as any artistic tradition. This idea of poor forms of animation resonates with Grotowski's contemporaneous conception of a poor theater without ­implying any direct influence between these two spheres of artistic practice. In the case of animation this meant using simple, even naïve techniques to animate ­contents ranging from newsprint to children's drawings. In fact, if there was an historical antecedent to Lenica and Borowczyk's work it was much more that of the Polish poster school – a type of vernacular surrealism pioneered by Henryk Tomaszewski –used to create an imaginative entry point into a variety of forms of cultural production but especially cinema. Both Lenica and Borowczyk were designers with a background in producing such posters; and their earliest animations can be seen largely as animated posters, a quality bringing them closer to the French and international new wave movements' interests in revaluing the popular and the contemporary over even avant-garde traditions. This was only intensified by Borowczyk's increasing interest in animating photographs, evident in _House_ and even more so in _School_ ( _Szkoła_ , 1958), which animates a series of still photographs of a cadet attempting to go through various military routines while being ­disturbed by a fly and his own exhaustion.

While Polański and Skolimowski clearly left Poland in response to disapproval and censorship of their work, there is no evidence that Borowczyk faced the same situation, perhaps because of the relatively marginal status of the animation ­cinema which, at this time, was his sole output. However, as already stated, if one considers the future development of his cinematic career, it is clear that it would never have been tolerated in Poland. In France in the 1960s, Borowczyk made a number of animated short films, of which the most famous was _Les astronautes_ (1959), officially co-directed by Chris Marker, who lent his name to the project largely to enable Borowczyk to work in the country. In 1968 he made his first fully live action feature film _Goto, Island of Love_ , which has since become a cult classic. Shot in black and white with stunning compositions, this film evokes both the Western and specifically the Polish theater of the absurd, such as Gombrowicz's _The Marriage_ (Ś _lub_ ), for example. In this film, the fine attention to composition that Borowczyk had developed as an animator is applied to live action scenes to the extent that each scene seems almost like a painting, a tendency that Borowczyk would continue in his subsequent films, often working not only as a director but as art director and even editor. While there is some nudity and explicit eroticism in the film it is within the limits of art cinema conventions, enabling it to be read as the first live action work of a filmmaker destined to become a great cinematic auteur.

This impression was reinforced by Borowczyk's next feature, _Blanche_ (1971), which, for many of the critics who reject his later development, remains his greatest work. This medieval story of doomed love is filmed with an almost Bressonian detachment and involves a similar narrative to _Goto_ in that it concerns the conflict between desire and power. In this story, Blanche, the young bride of a much older lord, is "caught" having a suspected affair with a young seducer, Bartolomeo, the page of the king. In fact, there is instead a passionate but repressed courtly love between her and the lord's son. Again the attention is on objects, both objects of desire and the ceremonial objects of power. It presents a world in which desire cannot be expressed directly, and in fact even the lord's rage is articulated obliquely as he devises the cruel and unusual punishment by which he will wall in the suspected lover, intending him to starve or suffocate; ultimately killing him by having him dragged along the ground by horses. Meanwhile, both the doomed lovers meet self-inflicted tragic ends, as does the lord, who only wishes to be buried as far as possible from the others. As such it can be read as the post-1968 sequel to _Goto_ , in which the possibility of revolutionary desire has been fully repressed. This film is probably Borowczyk's most ascetic and least explicitly erotic feature, in that with the exception of a few scenes between the young lovers an atmosphere of extreme sexual repression dominates the film. However, not only is there an eroticization of objects, which would continue throughout his subsequent work, but also the very way the film is constructed itself generates a highly erotic atmosphere, despite the absence of sexually explicit scenes.

Up to this point it would seem that Borowczyk was set to become a major poetic auteur, whose surrealist animation of the inanimate and obsessive focus on the conflict between _amour fou_ and power, would render him the cinematic heir to the work of Luis Buñuel. However, Borowczyk's next film did not exactly conform to these expectations. _Immoral Tales_ (1974) marks for many critics the downfall of Borowczyk's career into the realm of artistic pornography. In the words of Scott Murray (2005), this film, featuring four sexually explicit tales set in different eras and concerning the same clashes between sexual desire and both power and religion that characterized his earlier films, caused most of Borowczyk's critics "grave alarm." Since any close examination of these tales reveals a continuation and sophistication of Borowczyk's already developed surrealist cinematic aesthetics, one can only conclude that it is the mere presence of a more explicit eroticism that these critics found so alarming. In other words, Borowczyk's films were seen as too erotic to be accepted as art films and too artistic to work as pornography. However, it is precisely this division between these two realms of high art and eroticism that Borowczyk's films most seek to challenge.

Borowczyk's next film, _Story of Sin_ (1975), which was filmed in Poland, was the adaptation of a Żeromski novel and must be seen as a miraculous compromise between what Borowczyk and the Polish censors were willing to accept. It is therefore one of the most restrained and historically realist films by Borowczyk without abandoning the director's thematic and stylistic tendencies altogether; at the same time it is one of the most erotic films made in Poland at that time and contrasts markedly with other contemporaneous literary adaptations. If this film redeemed Borowczyk to some extent in the eyes of both Polish and international film critics, his next film _The Beast_ ( _La bête_ , 1975), which dealt explicitly with bestiality, would serve to completely destroy it.

 _The Beast_ was originally intended as an episode for _Immoral Tales_ ; however, Borowczyk developed it into his most controversial feature film, which was hated by the majority of critics and banned in many countries but considered by sympathetic critics to be one of his greatest works. The centerpiece of this film is a 20-minute sequence in which a noblewoman is pursued by of a hairy beast ­complete with a prosthetic and very large penis and succumbs to the sexual advances. Arguably this film is at once Borowczyk's most pornographic and most artistic; in comparison, the eroticism of _Immoral Tales_ seems very mannered and mild, while in _The Beast_ , especially in the central wordless sequence, there are images that even the publicity for this film describe as being more at home in a porno film. Nevertheless, the film also contains some of Borowczyk's most ­exquisite imagery and certainly one of his most developed narratives, making it in the end a kind of "accursed masterpiece" of his cinema.

As stated previously, one of the most important contributions that Borowczyk's cinema makes is breaking down the distinction between high art and exploitation, through the development of a unique form of cinematic eroticism. This is highly resonant with the new wave tendency to mix popular and artistic modes of representation. In the contemporary era, when art has lost its privileged position in relation to normalized mass culture, it could be argued that both high art and genres such as horror and pornography both function as a form of cultural excess, with a lot more in common than might at first be thought, since both are ways of activating the erotic imagination and intense sensations that are excluded from reigning regimes of value. There is therefore a cultural politics at work in Borowczyk's films, a politics that would seek to bring together these excluded elements and oppose them to the conformity of both mass culture and bourgeois values. This provocation exerts a singular force in his unjustly neglected cinema.

#  **Pola** ń **ski, Skolimowski, and the Polish Cinema of the Absurd**

One can hardly claim a similar neglect in relation to the career of Roman Polański, who is probably one of the most celebrated transnational filmmakers of the new wave period. For this reason his career will not receive as in-depth a treatment here as Borowczyk's. Nevertheless, there are surprising parallels between the two filmmakers' beginnings in the production of internationally acclaimed short films, even if in Polański's case these were live action, short absurd fictions rather than animations. Despite, or perhaps because of, Polański's international success, he has still been excluded from most considerations of Polish cinematic history. There is a sense that despite the censorious state response to _Knife in the Water_ , Polański would have been able to stay in Poland if he had been more strategic, in the manner of Andrzej Wajda. According to Ewa Mazierska, "his decision to leave Poland for good after _Knife in the Water_... was not political... it rather reflected Polanski's restless personality" (2007: 15). This has led to his work being read predominantly in terms of international new wave and new cinema movements rather than as Polish cinema. Nevertheless, if any filmmaker was capable of making a major contribution to a Polish New Wave, it was certainly Polański, whose films in the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and elsewhere, while uneven, clearly continue the absurdist vein developed in his Polish shorts and first feature.

While several critics, most recently Kamila Kuc in _A Story of Sin_ (2010), have read Polański's short films in relation to surrealism, it is a specifically Polish vein of surrealism, drawing as much if not more on prewar Polish authors like Gombrowicz and Witkacy as on Western European surrealism. His most famous short, _Two Men and a Wardrobe_ ( _Dwaj ludzie z szaf_ ą, 1958), bears close resemblances to the Polish postwar theater of the absurd, which, at the same time as the cinema of the Polish School, was benefiting from the relative relaxation of censorship in the late 1950s. According to Kuc, "what otherwise would have been a symbolic tale of alienation and intolerance, turns into a poeticized background for Polański's exploration of cruelty" (2010: 66). In other words the surreal, poetic image of two men emerging from the sea with a wardrobe is a mere contrasting background for the surrounding atmosphere of casual violence and social hypocrisy that its intrusion illuminates. The same is true of the short he made in Paris, _The Fat and the Lean_ ( _Le gros et le maigre_ , 1961). While Western critics read this as an attack on the class system, it was more the case that, as Daniel Bird argues, "in this film austere absurdity displaces outright surreal effects" (2002: 28). By the time Polański came to make his first feature, all whimiscal and surreal dimensions were stripped away leaving a taut minimalist, almost formalist drama, based on a power play between generations.

 _Knife in the Water_ was made in 1962 in the Mazury region of Poland and was in part fueled by Polański's desire to make a feature film with the dramatic constraint of almost all the action taking place between three characters on a boat. In this way he was able to maintain the formalism of his shorts while at the same time make a realist film in conformity with many of the conventions of the thriller genre. This film flew in the face of both the socially responsible films of the Polish School and the expectations of the Polish censors and was highly criticized on its release, so much so that its director emigrated to France, thereby depriving Poland of one of its major directing talents. Critics are divided as to whether _Knife in the Water_ truly constitutes a new wave film; despite the freshness of its style and its focus on an inter-generational conflict, it is on one level a classical Hitchcockian thriller rather than a Godardian reinvention of cinematic language. Nevertheless, even in the French New Wave, not every filmmaker wanted to reinvent cinema style completely – for example, Claude Chabrol's entire career can plausibly be seen as a series of homages to Hitchcock. So while Tadeusz Lubelski claims that the film "did not represent New Wave aesthetics... although being an evident expression of New Wave topics" (2008: 17), Paul Coates (2004: 77) points to its Western critical reception as being between Godard and Antonioni; even Lubelski makes a comparison between the protagonists of the film and those of the new wave generation in Godard's _Breathless_ ( _À bout de souffle_ ), who are "out of touch with their own tradition" (2008: 17).

Certainly, being new wave was one of the criticisms aimed at the film even at the script approval stage, and it met with a mixed critical reception in Poland, with critics generally praising its form but skeptical of its content as too empty, ­insubstantial, and pessimistic. It was especially considered a bad example for Polish youth. Władysław Gomułka, the secretary of the Polish Communist Party, even singled out the film for criticism at a party congress in 1963 (Haltof, 2002: 108). Given the lukewarm reception of the film in Poland as aping Western trends such as the French New Wave and its corresponding appreciation in the West (in fact it was the first Polish film to be nominated for a foreign film Oscar), it is hardly surprising that its director was shortly to emigrate to the West. In fact, some critics see the film as a deliberately designed passport to the West on Polański's part. Of course, these Polish beginnings in surreal, absurd, and new wave aesthetics by no means ended with Polański's departure from Poland, and especially in films like _Repulsion_ (1965), _Cul-de-sac_ (1966), _The Tenant_ ( _Le locataire_ , 1976) and _What?_ (1972) it is possible to see their traces as one of the greatest lost opportunities for the constitution of a Polish New Wave.

Many of the elements that the Polish authorities found so objectionable in _Knife in the Water_ derived as much from the dialogues written by Skolimowski as from Polański's direction, and indeed it is the former who would become, after Polański's emigration, the main representative of new wave filmmaking in Poland in the 1960s. The generational difference and conflict that animated this script as well as his script for Wajda's earlier proto-new wave film _Innocent Sorcerers_ (1960) would be continued in Skolimowski's first film, _Identification Marks: None_ ( _Rysopis_ , 1964), and indeed throughout his filmmaking in Poland during the 1960s. These films fit much better within the conventional understanding of new wave aesthetics. Not only did Skolimowski make these films from the mid- to late 1960s, but they were explicitly acknowledged by French critics, including Jean-Luc Godard, as ­belonging to new wave cinema. From a formal point of view, elements such as the use of available light, cinematically inventive shots, elliptical narrative, and the ­documentary-like focus on the younger generation clearly resemble the French New Wave, perhaps more so than the films being made at the same time in Czechoslovakia. However, such new wave "recognition" was a double-edged sword in that it was precisely this outside recognition and identification that Skolimowski's protagonists, and by implication Skolimowski himself since he ­frequently featured in his own films, were trying to avoid.

As Lubelski has pointed out (2008: 17), _Identification Marks_ is a unique cinematic debut in that Skolimowski, rather than waiting for the opportunity to make a ­feature film after graduating from the national film school in Łódż, simply designed all his film school exercises to be parts of his first feature. After graduation, all he had left to do was to edit these pieces together to create his debut film. Whether impressed by the audacity of this procedure or the film itself, the powers that be then immediately gave him the opportunity to make a second feature, _Walkover_ (1965), and both films were released in the same year. This unique method ­generated a singular mix between amateurism and innovation that is evident from the first sequence of the film. Beginning in complete darkness, the room in which the main character is sleeping with his partner is then illuminated briefly by a match, which shortly goes out, plunging the scene back into darkness while he asks her if she is sleeping. The scene continues in semi-darkness illuminated only by the light from streetlamps pouring in through the windows, the pale light which enters through the door as the main protagonist exits the room; outside, the semi-darkness is lit only by a fire which casts gigantic shadows onto a wall. This scene, which is as choreographed as any street scene from European directors such as Fellini, uses very simple means to achieve dramatic effects, generating an entirely new way of perceiving the world of the protagonist and that of the society in which he lives.

The rest of the film concerns 10 hours in the life of Andrzej Leszczyc, played by Skolimowski himself, starting with his appearance before a draft board and ending with him boarding a train to go off to military service. This figure would, over the course of Skolimowski's 1960s Polish films, become emblematic of the younger generation that found itself at odds with the imposed ideals of the Socialist state, its hypocrisy, corruption, and especially the lack of possibilities for this generation to develop itself outside of a set of inherited rules of conduct. However, this ­rebellion is not presented in any clichéd way but through the main character's apparent submission to military authority since, having successfully avoided military service for years through his supposed "ichthyology" studies, he now makes no attempt to do so. As the film unfolds, this seeming compliance to authority is shown to be a response to, and indictment of, the emptiness and cynicism of Andrzej's social environment; he would rather join the army, where there is no pretense of freedom, than stay in a world that pretends to be free but in fact ­operates according to a set of suffocating constraints. Yet none of this is stated directly but rather emerges over a set of apparently haphazard wanderings and encounters in the city of Łódż; nevertheless, these encounters, as Tadeusz Lubelski has suggested (2008: 18), sum up the various phases of Andrzej's life from ­childhood, to adolescence, to his interrupted studies, to the various phases of his erotic experience.

Throughout all of this, Andrzej is presented as an outsider, a complex figure at once seemingly aimless and unmotivated and strangely compelling. This is perhaps because he embodies the anomie of being young and at odds with established society that has resonances beyond the Polish context to the worldwide youth rebellion that was bubbling under the surface of the mid-1960s and which this film captures in a not yet fully articulated form. What is fascinating about this film is that it does this not so much through its content, which is in fact banal, but through its form, thereby transforming the seemingly accidental and meaningless experiences into a critical account of an entire society.

While all of Skolimowski's first three films are of interest and share a good deal in terms of style and subject matter, there was a definite sharpening of the socially critical aim over the course of these films, so that the third film, _Barrier_ ( _Bariera_ , 1966), was at the limit of what could be accepted in Poland both aesthetically and politically. Employing an even looser narrative structure than _Identification Marks_ , _Barrier_ was an outright attack on the older generation, accusing them of leading comfortable and corrupt lives at the expense of selling out the younger generation to a dead-end existence. According to Lubelski it was in _Barrier_ and _Hands Up_ ( _R_ ż _ce do góry_ ) that Skolimowski became explicitly "a representative of the generation and acquired many characteristics of a typical anti-bourgeois rebel" capable of initiating a "serious national discussion" (2008: 20). However, this discussion never happened because the the latter film was banned, largely on the basis of a scene involving the defacement of a poster of Stalin, meaning that this was a message that would not be received by its own generation, since the film would only be screened in a modified version in 1981. In the meantime, Skolimowski transformed the film into a kind of diary, interspersing more recent scenes shot in London and Lebanon, and thereby producing a work that has to be seen as one of the high points of the Polish New Wave, even if an accursed one. Of special interest in the film are Skolimowski's reflections on the banning of the original film and its effect on him as an artist, who by his own admission was never able to reach the same level of achievement in his subsequent films. Nevertheless, as Mazierska has ­demonstrated, certain of his films made in exile, such as _Moonlighting_ (1980) or _Success is the Best Revenge_ (1981), do display decidedly new wave features such as "thematic shiftiness, gaps in the narrative, disrespect for psychological explanations and internal contradictions in the protagonists" (2010: 29). In summary, while Skolimowski's films, at least those made in Poland in the 1960s, can be seen as typically new wave explorations of disturbed communication, both at an interpersonal and intergenerational level, at the same time their sheer energy and inventiveness imply an optimism that better alternatives are possible, and not only on an ­individual but on a social scale. This is an optimism that would not be shared, however, by many of the later filmmakers who took up the new wave legacy of Skolimowski in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as did the final example in this chapter, Żuławski.

#  ****Ż **uławski and the Cinema of Expression**

In choosing to address Poland's experience of war and Nazi occupation in his debut _The Third Part of the Night_ (1971) Żuławski's was deliberately revisiting of the Polish School, since this was both the subject of Wajda's first films as well as the other key films of the Polish School that announced the emergence of Polish postwar cinema from complicity with Socialist realism. As if to underline this point, the film explicitly refers to Wajda's _A Generation_ (1955), in which the ­resistance fighter Jasio escapes his German pursuers by climbing a staircase, only to be trapped at the top of it. In _Third Part of the Night_ , the staircase scene is an essential one, in which the main character Michał, having just seen his friend shot in the street, ascends a staircase and only escapes because a man who shares his appearance is mistaken for him by the Germans. The pursuit, which lasts a long time, at once combines American genre conventions of the shoot-out from the Western and the gangster film with expressionist tendencies, all captured by a dizzying choreography of Sobociński's hand-held camera. In part the difference between these two films can be seen as that between Wajda's generation, which lived through the war, if only as children, and Żuławski's generation, who knew about the war from their father's stories, as well as from Polish cinema itself. But the film's revision of the myth of Poland under Nazi occupation and of the Polish resistance is more aggressive and delirious than a mere generational difference could account for. Every aspect of the film can be seen as either an exaggeration or destruction of the myths sustained by Polish School cinema about this history, even if ironically enough, the film was made for Wajda's "Wektor" film group and he was one of the film's main defenders. While the title of the film might well derive from the biblical Book of Revelation, which is cited at the film's opening, it also clearly refers to the third generation of Polish filmmakers as the "third part" of Polish cinema after the Polish School. No doubt this was intended ironically, even sarcastically, but it is hard not to see the combination of the title and the ­revisiting of Wajda's debut as the announcement of a new, darker beginning for Polish cinema.

Crucial to the film are Żuławski's father Mirosław's wartime memories, on which the script was partially based, in particular of the Rudolf Weigl Institute in Lwów, where Jews and members of the intelligentsia were able to survive the war by "feeding lice" (Bird, 2007: 4–5) in order to develop the typhus vaccine for German soldiers. This parasitic operation is the unheroic double in the film for the mythology of action surrounding the Home Army; and in fact Michał's foray into heroism is just a brief interlude in his wartime involvement in feeding lice, which radically undermines the heroic myths of Polish resistance. Not only does this activity involve a physical complicity with the occupying forces, a submission to a biological, medical process that ensures survival only at the cost of sickness and delirium but it also operates in the film symbolically as a type of fatal toxicity spreading throughout the infected subjects. It is as if the whole film could be understood as a delirium induced by this toxic process, which nevertheless is the only bargain available that might render survival possible.

Żuławski's next feature, _The Devil_ ( _Diabeł_ , 1972) dealt with a no less "sacred" moment of Polish historical trauma, namely the late eighteenth-century partition of Poland by Prussia, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Instead of ­cinematic history this was a return to the context and themes of Polish romanticism, as if the film was the adaptation of an undiscovered and incendiary work by Adam Mickiewicz, despite being based on an original script. From its excessive beginnings, in the horror of a hospital/prison, which is in the process of being sacked by invading soldiers, the film is less an attack on Polish romanticism than an apotheosis, far outdoing the most baroque productions of Wajda in its ­expressionist excess. This film went considerably beyond the aesthetics of its predecessor, and it seems to take place in a continual state of delirium as the main character Jakub is "rescued" by the devil, in the form of a Prussian spy, and ­proceeds to visit and murder his mother, sister, fiancée, and others in a kind of divine ­retribution for their complicity in Poland's capitulation. Piotr Kletowski describes the demonic possession in the film in Oedipal terms as a horrified response to a world upside down in which "a father rapes his daughter who he takes for her dead mother, and a mother, desiring all the men in the world, wants to make love to her son" (2008: 75). Yet, the historical chaos in the film clearly exceeds an Oedipal framework, and the family and the nation are represented as inseparable and permeable constructs which are simultaneously prone to violence and destruction. In fact the mythical model here is less Oedipus than Hamlet since Jakub not only returns to find that "all is not well" in the house of Poland but also encounters a group of nomadic and licentious actors who perform _Hamlet_ and who number among his first victims, inevitably referencing the actors of the play within the play in Hamlet and its part in mirroring and invoking bloodshed.

What is most shocking in the film, however, is not its content but its style. From its opening scenes of carnage the film operates at a level of delirious intensity that seems to aim at inducing an audiovisual trance in the viewer. Certainly many of the characters onscreen, especially the female ones, all seem to be in a trance-like state, but this sense of trance also permeates the _mise en scène_ and rhythm of the film. As Bird has indicated (2003: 147), there are direct links between this film in particular and Grotowski's theater laboratory. Grotowski sought to create a more authentic and intense form of theater by breaking away from the conventions of the proscenium arch and its attendant imaginary division between spectators and performers. In its place he developed what he called a theater laboratory designed first of all to strip away the artificial habits and masks of the performers and then to use this training to create a ritualistic form of theater which the performers and the audience would both participate in creating. It is little coincidence that some of the most commonly used materials in Grotowski's laboratory were the works of Polish Romanticism, sometimes superimposed on more modern settings such as locating the play _Akropola_ in a concentration camp. While Grotowski and Żuławski both wanted to strip away the surface layers of both the performers' and the audience's personalities in order to activate deeper resources, their approaches to doing so were almost opposite. If Żuławski aimed to reinvent the powers of cinema in a manner analogous to Grotowski's reworking of the theater as a space of ritual, this was done without the mystical idea of revealing a truer, good, authentic self. As Daniel Bird puts it, "Żuławski is the devil to Grotowski's angel" (2010, 87). This is because, while Grotowski is hailed, or even worshipped, as a healer, restoring his performers to their inner, authentic selves, Żuławski is regularly reviled as a Svengali, manipulating and damaging his performers. Żuławski's use of terms like "exhaustion" and "evacuation" to describe his way of working with performers reveals a completely different metaphysics to Grotowski's, one based more on Nietzschean than ultimately Christian premises.

While _The Devil_ may have been mostly concerned with death and violence, his next film, _On the Silver Globe_ , was instead an account of birth, posing at once an alternative genesis for humanity and a critical account of the reborn Polish state under the regime of socialism. _On the Silver Globe_ was filmed in 1977, at the same time that a new tendency in Polish cinema, The Cinema of Moral Concern, was becoming dominant. The formal experimentation of the "third generation" ­having been left behind, Polish filmmakers of several generations were now making highly realist films that aimed to criticize the regime in often ways that were often indirect and subtle. These films had to play a game with the censorship regime, presenting minor and ambiguous criticisms of aspects of contemporary life that would, however, be extended to Poland as a whole by knowing audiences. A typical example was Kieślowski's film _Camera Buff_ ( _Amator_ , 1979) in which a worker starts making amateur films, an activity that soon starts to reveal the shortcomings and corruption in the town in which he lives and by implication in Poland in general.

For Żuławski, this was a highly limited approach to filmmaking, which he described in the following terms: "The Cinema of Moral Qualm [ _sic_ ]... managed to create radiophony. Pictures were not needed" (cited in Piwowarska and Ronduda, 2008: 40). For Żuławski cinematic politics and aesthetics are inseparable and it is hard to imagine anyone more at odds with this prevailing tendency in late 1970s Polish cinema; perhaps the only thing _On the Silver Globe_ shared with it was being equally the target of censorship, or rather more so, since it was an unusual case of censorship not of a script but of a film in the middle of its production. Ironically, 11 years later when Żuławski finally had the opportunity to complete his film he would do so via the incorporation of documentary scenes of contemporary Poland, rendering the final film at once a visionary fiction and a unique document of Poland under socialism. As the director put it, the completed film is "simultaneously a film in itself and a history of that film. It is the history of a certain life and a certain country" (in Piwowarska and Ronduda, 2008: 40).

The film itself is a unique example in Poland at the time of its production of epic science fiction that needs to be understood as a critical alternative to the aesthetics, or lack thereof, of the Cinema of Moral Concern. The film is based on _The Moon Trilogy_ , written by the director's uncle Jerzy Żuławski, which recounts a type of ­second genesis by means of recordings left behind by the first astronauts to colonize an Earth-like planet. In the film, this is presented as a process of rapid degeneration in which all the norms and standards of human civilization are swiftly abandoned and all the mistakes of human history such as organized religion, oppression, and ­systematic violence are repeated. After only 50 years, the descendants of the original colonizers are little more than instinct driven, if highly adorned, animals. While it might seem provocative to interpret this film as a critique of the People's Poland, in many ways it is a more direct critique than the Moral Concern films in its denunciation of a project of building a new society that nevertheless repeats, in a worse form, all the errors of an old one. This reading is reinforced by the fact that, 10 years later, when the authorities finally gave Żuławski permission to complete the film, he did so by incorporating documentary scenes form contemporary Poland, at the end of the Socialist era, as if to underscore these critical dimensions of the film. Apart from this partial return at the end of the 1980s, the only other film Żuławski would make in Poland was _The She-Shaman_ ( _Szamanka_ , 1996), which arguably continued this ­critical engagement with Poland under post-communism, and while it was not banned it was especially reviled by most Polish film critics. Of course, by then, the new wave period in international cinema was well and truly finished, as was every possibility for any new wave of Polish cinema, given the economic crisis in which the Polish film industry found itself during the decade after 1989.

#  **Conclusion**

This chapter has developed the idea of an impossible Polish New Wave, following the impetus of the recent attempts to construct such a cinematic category. Despite the problems surrounding such a construct, whether taken in a literal, historical sense or a curatorial, ahistorical one, it does open up the possibility for much deserved critical attention to be paid to films and filmmakers who have previously been virtually excluded from accounts of Polish cinema. This is especially so in the case of the exiled directors who have been considered in this chapter, all of whom have operated as accursed outsiders at various times of their careers, despite the fact that all of them have shown an interest in maintaining links with Poland and Polish cinema through their various returns to making films in Poland, including Borowczyk's _A Story of Sin_ , Żuławski's _The She-Shaman_ , and more recently, Polański's _The Pianist_ (2002) and Skolimowski's _Four Nights with Anna_ ( _Cztery noce z Ann_ ą, 2008). Owing to a combination of censorship regimes, personal choices, and prejudices against non-realist forms of cinema that were and are by no means limited to officials but also characterize the attitudes of many critics, it was ­impossible for a real new wave cinema movement to be developed in Poland in the 1960s. Nevertheless, as this chapter has argued, the positing of an impossible new wave that while it never existed might well have, given more favorable circumstances, is one way of arguing for a more inclusive reconceptualization of Polish cinema that might, in fact, constitute a new wave of Polish film criticism.

 **Notes**

1 This quotation was poorly translated in the volume in which it appears.

2 On this retrospective see the catalogue, Śniegowska and Vimenet, 2008.

 **References**

Bird, D. (2002) _Roman Polanski_. Pocket Essentials, Harpenden.

Bird, D. (2003) Żuławski and Polish Cinema, in _Eyeball Compendium_ (ed. S. Thrower). Fab Press, Godalming, pp. 147–150.

Bird, D. (2007) _The Third Part of the Night_ : piercing reality. _The Third Part of the Night_ DVD booklet. Second Run, London.

Bird, D. (2010) Devil's games: surrealism in Polish émigré cinema, in _A Story of Sin_ , (ed. K. Mikurda and K. Wielebska). Kraków, Korporacja Ha!art, pp. 75–94.

Coates, P. (2004) Nóż w wodzie/Knife in the Water, in _The Cinema of Central Europe_ (ed. P. Hames). Wallflower, London, pp. 77–85.

Coates, P. (2005) _The Red and the White: The Cinema of People's Poland_. Wallflower, London.

Haltof, M. (2002) _Polish National Cinema_. Berghahn, New York and Oxford.

Kletowski, Piotr (2008) Andrzej Żuławski's _The Third part of the Night, The Devil_ and _On the Silver Globe_ as specimens of Polish New Wave auteur cinema, in Piwowarska and Ronduda, _Polish New Wave_ , pp. 72–79.

Kuc, Kamila (2010) A cruel imagination: Roman Polański's short films, in K. Mikurda and K. Wielebska, _A Story of Sin_ , pp. 60–74.

Lubelski, Tadeusz (2008) Was there at least a bit of the New Wave in Polish cinema? in Piwowarska and Ronduda _Polish New Wave_ , pp. 16–23.

Mazierska, E. (2007) _Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveler_. I.B. Tauris, London.

Mazierska, E. (2010) _Jerzy Skolimowski: The Cinema of a Nonconformist_. Berghahn, New York and Oxford.

Mikurda, K. and Wielebska, K. (eds) (2010) _A Story of Sin: Surrealism in Polish Cinema_. Korporacja Ha!art, Kraków.

Murray, S. (2005) Walerian Borowczyk's heroines of desire. _Senses of Cinema_ , 36, July–September (n.p.).

Owen, Jonathan L. (2010) Motion without escape: the bleak surrealism of Czech and Polish animation, in Mikurda and Wielebska, _A Story of Sin_ , pp. 44–59.

Piwowarska, B. and Ronduda, Ł. (eds) (2008) _Polish New Wave: The History of a Phenomenon that Never Existed_. Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Center for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw.

Śniegowska and Vimenet (eds) (2008) _b.Boro.Borowczyk: Walerian Borowczyk (1923–2006)_. Centurm Kultury "Zamek," Poznan.

Werner, Mateusz (2008) A rebellion á la Polonaise, in Piwowarska and Ronduda, _Polish New Wave_ , pp. 6–15.

# 16

# Documentary and Industrial Decline in Hungary

#  _The "Ózd Series" of Tamás Almási_

John Cunningham

From a cinematic point of view, if you want to build up a comprehensive idea of what happened to Hungary during the transition period from communism or bureaucratic socialism or "real" socialism to free-market capitalism then you may be well advised to check out that country's prolific documentary output rather than its fiction feature films.1 While the latter can give moving and powerful accounts of the effects of the changes, particularly on individual lives and destinies – for example, István Szabó's _Sweet Emma, Dear Böbe_ (1992) – films of this kind are relatively few and far between. Hungarian documentarists, however, have produced a consistently powerful body of work depicting (and often dissecting) almost the full range of human experience in the years before and after 1989/1990.2 There is nothing startling about this, after all this is what documentarists do; this is a key part of their craft and they have done it since the days of the Grierson group in Britain in the late 1920s and 1930s, Pare Lorentz in the United States, and the START group in Poland to name just a few.

Alas, Hungarian documentaries are not seen abroad as often as they should be. I just happen to work five minutes away from the venue for the biggest annual documentary film festival in the United Kingdom (Sheffield's DocFest) and am a regular attender at this event but I have yet to see a Hungarian documentary there (despite my numerous promptings over the years). This is a shame, not least because Hungarian documentary filmmakers have a strong sense of the "here and now," an acute social awareness, and can, indeed usually do, cast a critical eye over political, economic, cultural, and other developments. However, it should also be noted that Hungarian documentaries usually do not fare very well within Hungary itself as distribution and exhibition possibilities, both in cinemas and on television, are limited, (see Bori, 2009).3

In this chapter I want to look at documentary depictions of the decline of the Hungarian heavy industry by the filmmaker Tamás Almási, mainly his films about the plight of the Ózd steel complex, its workers, and the city. Partly, my interest stems from having once been a steelworker myself, in Sheffield, England, and having witnessed the decline of that industry, and partly it is because I think Almási's films are such valuable documents about the fate of the industrial working class in what was once called the Workers' State. The Ózd steel complex, about 40 ­kilometers north of Miskolc on the borders of Hungary and Slovakia, was once one of the jewels in the industrial crown of Communist Hungary. Not that there was anything particularly unique about it – similar huge industrial complexes sprang up all over the Eastern bloc, most notably at Nowa Huta in Poland (part of the background for Andrzej Wajda's classic film _Man of Marble_ ).

Unsurprisingly, post-World War Two industrial developments in Hungary were modeled on those of the Soviet Union. This meant, above all, a concentration on heavy industry and the adaptation of the Five Year Plan strategy so beloved of Stalinist industrial development in the 1930s and after. Hungary had not only to become self-reliant in terms of steel production but also supplied the Soviet Union and the growing armaments industry, a spin-off from the Cold War. Thus great stress was placed on such projects as developing the iron and steel complex at Ózd, to the detriment of much else but particularly the production of consumer goods. Hungary had to be transformed, in the words of the Stalin-loyalist Ernő Gerő, into "a country of iron and steel" (Romsics, 1999: 275). Between 1950 and 1954, Hungary invested more of its national income (25.2%) in industry than any other Eastern bloc country, and of this figure a staggering 92.1 percent went into heavy industry and construction (Swain, 1992: 79). As Nigel Swain remarks, "Hungarian investment programmes were, by this measure, the most unbalanced in Eastern Europe" (Swain 1992: 79).

Against this background it is easy to see why the Ózd steelworks became so important and why their decline was so traumatic, particularly for the workers for whom steel working was a way of life. Further five-year plans followed, the second spanned 1961 to 1965 and the third 1966 to 1970. However, despite investment, industrial planning was often poor, technological innovation was limited, and management, mired in bureaucracy, often inadequate to the tasks required of them. There were substantial economic reforms in 1968 – the so-called New Economic Mechanism (NEM), which was designed to replace bureaucratic structures and turn the economy towards some form of autonomy, market forces, and the pursuit of profit. However, the NEM had only a limited success and, in the long run, Hungarian heavy industry continued to encounter massive structural and other problems. Substantial borrowing of hard currency did little to ease a deteriorating economic situation and further reforms were attempted in the mid-1980s. By the time of the system change in 1989, Ózd, and industry in general, was in a poor state. In early 1991, when real GDP dropped by a staggering 11 percent (Frydman _et al_. 1993: 98), Mihály Kupa, the finance minister, introduced a "­capitalist" five-year plan, speeding up liberalization, turning to the West and away from trade with Hungary's former COMECON Eastern bloc partners. With this bare bones history alone it is apparent that the problems of the Ózd plant did not begin with the system change in 1989, that they can be traced back to the early/mid-1980s, if not earlier.

It is at this point, the mid-1980s, that Tamás Almási began to take a keen interest in Ózd and its deepening predicament. The result was _In a Vise_ ( _Szorításban_ ), his first in a series of films about the steel plant and its workers, shot between April 29 and August 3, 1987 and released in the same year.4 There was a certain element of serendipity in how the filmmaker was drawn to this project. While attending a television festival in nearby Miskolc in the mid-1980s, Almási spoke to a high-­ranking local Communist Party official who, perhaps unwittingly, let it slip that within the next two to three years, some 35 000 miners and steelworkers in the region were to be made redundant. Almási realized that the official had let the "cat out of the bag." This was still, by and large, a taboo subject – workers in the "Workers' State" were never supposed to be made redundant and, as Almási observed, "nobody spoke about this topic."5 He resolved to make a film about the situation and at first envisaged a feature-length fiction film and even lined up the well-known and popular Hungarian actor György Cserhalmi for the leading role. However, although Almási had the highest respect for the actor, he came to the opinion, when visiting Ózd, that, compared to real steelworkers, Cserhalmi 'wasn't believable." At this point he decided to make the first of what was planned as three documentaries to cover a time span of five years. Perhaps inevitably, the project grew and eventually embraced seven films over eleven years. In his own words, "I was motivated by two main ideas – first, the personal stories of the workers and secondly the system [...] I was very curious about what would happen in the countryside, to the workers who were the basis of the Communist ideology."

 _In a Vise_ opens with a compilation of archival footage of the plant, going back to the very earliest days of the Stalinist-inspired industrialization drive of the postwar years. It is a familiar mix of glossy reportage, parades, and propaganda with a triumphal voice delivering the usual mixture of exhortation, inflated production statistics, portraits of Shock Brigades, and "model workers" (Stakhanovites). The footage takes in 1978 when the plant, for the first time, produced one million tons of steel in one year, the opening of a new computer center, and the presentation of medals to the workers 1981. The film then cuts to 1987 and the city of Ózd, where a First of May festival is underway, and we enter the main body of the film. An official addresses a crowd from a platform backed by a huge banner proclaiming "május 1" (May First). The platitudes he delivers are not that different from those we have just heard in the archival footage, and at the end of a stunningly uninspiring speech there is some scattered applause and he walks away. The camera then zooms out to reveal that the orator has been addressing a very thin crowd indeed. This is followed by a cut to a small group of workers who speak, unlike the official, directly, passionately, and in no uncertain terms, about their working ­conditions, pay, and concerns for the future. The subtle camera adjustment and the strategy of contrasting edits – which juxtapose the overblown rhetoric and pomposity of officialdom with the actuality of the situation as articulated by the workers and their wives – is used throughout this first film and the rest of the series; Almási uses this understated and subtle technique to great effect on a number of occasions.

The films therefore, as it were, inhabit two worlds – that of the plant management, government officials, and top trade union officials and, counterposed to them, the workers and their families, often shot either on the shop floor or in the domestic sphere – what might be called the "official voice" versus the "unofficial voice."6 Although Almási does not separate them out completely, indeed their meetings form an integral part of the film, usually when the two encounter each other they do not communicate in any meaningful sense. The workers express their concern about their future and their growing frustration powerfully, whether speaking to the camera or to officialdom.7 For their part, however, the representatives of officialdom often act as if the workers weren't there. Their talk is platitudinous, clichéd, and sometimes even robotic, and this is regardless of whether the time frame is before or after the system change. In one powerful scene a trade union representative, reading from a piece of paper, "reports back" to a gathering of shop floor workers. They are unimpressed by his platitudes as he talks of the necessity for "modernization" (interestingly enough he never mentions redundancies although this is obviously what is entailed). One worker in particular berates him in no uncertain terms, talking of having done one of the worst jobs in the plant for over 30 years for low pay. He is now 50 and asks, "Where can I go if I lose my job?" To drive home his point he adds that the area once had twelve mines but only one is still working. The trade union official looks uneasy and, almost as if he is embarrassed, mumbles, "Trust us with these decisions," turns his back on the workers, and walks away.

It is part of Almási's strategy in these films to focus mainly on a few people. One of these individuals decides to get out before the plant closes. The camera follows him to a medical center where he is examined to see if he is fit enough to work in a mine. Later, almost at the end of the film, we see him leaving home to take up his new job, while his wife stays behind. Also near to the end we see András Pethes, the general manager of the plant, clearing his desk and saying goodbye to his secretary as he has no future in Ózd either. For the first time, when speaking to the film crew, he appears to speak from the heart and drops the clichés. He leaves his office, walks down a corridor (paralleling the soon-to-be miner walking down the street away from his home), turns left, and is not seen again. In one of the very last scenes his replacement, Ernő Lotz, arrives, surprisingly sprightly considering the enormity of the task ahead of him. There follows a final shot of the now deserted shop floor and the film ends.

Almási returned the next year and made the second film, _Slow Motion_ ( _Lassítás_ ), which actually opens with the same footage of the May Day gala seen in the ­previous film. The time frame then shifts to March 1988, as we see an item on Hungarian television news (MTV-Hiradó) on the fate of the Ózd plant. In this film there is a subtle shift as we spend more time watching the managers and politicians involved in deciding the fate of Ózd than we did in the previous film. Lotz (the new general manager), Frigyes Berecz (minister of industry – ipari miniszter), József Almássy (works commission minister – miniszteri biztos munkatársa), and József Dudla, the county first secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (the MSZMP)8 based in Miskolc, all make a number of appearances usually speaking from behind their office desks. They all make more or less the same points – that the plant is uneconomical, inefficient, and needs to be re-structured. Redundancies are only alluded to but it is clear that this is the "subtext" beneath the dazzling array of statistics (often incoherently explained) which they throw around with great abandon. Almási again gives us the stark contrast of the workers, on the shop floor, expressing their anger and frustration at the lack of information they receive and how they are expected to "carry the can" for the failures of the management. Two workers in particular, Attila Kovács and István Harkai, both described as rolling-mill operatives (hengerész), are highlighted, and the latter makes a number of further appearances in this film and those that follow. With his ruddy complexion, large "Magyar moustache," his thatch of black hair (which always seems to be plastered down), and his easy-going manner, Harkai is an ideal foil to the oleaginous appearance, speech, and mannerisms of the politicians and management.

There are shots of another open air event (it is dated onscreen as September 10, 1988) where, again, we see officialdom occupying a platform, standing erect as solemn music is played. In a repeat of the zoom out that featured in _In a Vise_ , the audience (of the film) is again treated to the bizarre sight of the platform party and an empty field in front of them. This time there is absolutely no one in attendance. The pompous and ridiculous-looking officials are totally ignored – it is a scene that Luis Buñuel would have been proud of! Towards the end of the film there is a demonstration in Ózd and a group of protesters stand around holding up placards, one of which reads "Work, Bread!" ( _Munkát kenyeret!_ ). The weather is cold, there is snow on the ground, and the demonstrators look grim faced as the camera pans along a line of them. Almási seems more interested in their faces than in the placard and slogans they are carrying and throughout the series he continually uses the human face to register reactions to developments and news. This personal dimension is paramount and he rarely uses statistics except when they are part of the diegetic world, as for example when the management are expostulating on the latest production figures. The television news broadcasts which punctuate some of the films also supply various bits of information. The demonstration is a significant scene as it appears to be the only time when there was any kind of organized protest about the closure plans; it was called by the union, but this appears to be their only initiative other than talking to management, usually behind doors. It is hard to resist the conclusion that the demonstration was called mainly for "­cosmetic" purposes – to give the appearance that they were actually doing something. A cut then returns us to Lotz's office, where the general manager, who in his light blue suit looks rather like a second-hand car dealer, expresses his sympathy for the workers. It is an unconvincing performance and the film ends with the factory band playing a rousing tune as they march through the plant which is deserted and looking rusty and dilapidated.

The next film in the series, _The First Hundred Years_ ( _Az elsö száz év_ ), shot between April 28, 1987 and August 8, 1988, is primarily an attempt to put the Ózd series into historical perspective. Ózd did not simply spring into existence after World War Two; it had been an iron and steel center since the late nineteenth century. A series of talking heads, including the last managing director of RIMA (as the Ózd plant was known before it was taken over by the state), give various accounts of the plant's development and that of the city that sprang up around it. There is some more archival footage, mostly from the post-World War Two period. This includes the first color newsreels from the early sixties, of which one bears striking similarities to the archive footage of Sheffield "City on the Move" – heavy industry as the driving force of social well-being – which acts as the prologue to the popular British comedy _The Full Monty_ (1997). The film ends unusually with scenes of Ózd, rather than the steel plant, revealing dilapidated houses in what looks like a part of the town inhabited by Gypsies, children running in the street, and then, incongruously, a brand new and very expensive looking house. This collage and the film end with an apartment block as we hear the voice of a young woman talking about the town, accompanied by the haunting soundtrack of István Slamovits.

 _Bonds of Steel_ ( _Acélkapocs_ , 1989) is the next in the series and it marks a departure from the previous films. By now the plant is almost deserted and looking increasingly run down. Only a small group of management and a few workers remain, one of whom is Sándor Csákányovszki, who is one of the foci of this particular film and is described as acting works manager. The other focus of the film is Katalin Morvai who, although not employed at the plant, is feeling the pressure of the economic downturn in the city's fortunes. She attempts to make a living by selling clothes at an open-air market. In one scene we follow her and a number of others on a coach trip to Istanbul where she stocks up with cheap clothes from a wholesale store which she takes these back to Ózd to sell. Her oldest son, Krisztián, who is just leaving school, has no illusions about his chances of finding work. Previously in the series women were seen mainly as the wives of steelworkers but Morvai appears to have no man in her life and is independent. Management is seen only once when they address a meeting. The other main character who is introduced in this film and reappears elsewhere is Ferenc Seller, the one-time mayor of Ózd, who relates his average day now that he has no work. Seller is perhaps one of the most tragic figures in the whole series. He had hoped that having been elected mayor he would be able to do something to help the city and its inhabitants, but he is sorely disappointed. He is in no position to fight the powerful combination of management, government, and various investors. Needless to say, his day consists mainly of activity dedicated to killing time, such as working in the garden or the garage or watching television. _Bonds of Steel_ therefore continues the momentum of the previous film, _The First Hundred Years_ , by opening out the series' parameters and adding more context. Towards the end of the film Morvai packs her belongings and leaves Ózd. The film ends with a long pan of the silent, depopulated shop floor, in contrast to early scenes in the series when it was a hive of activity, and, significantly, the first shots of a demolition squad dismantling the plant.

It was to be some three years before, in 1993, Almási released his next Ózd film. In this time much had changed: the Communists were now out and Hungary's first election had ushered in the government of József Antall and his Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) in an alliance with the Free Democrats (SZDSZ). By this time the plant was, in effect, dead, although there was much going on behind the scenes in terms of stitching up various deals about who would benefit from selling off any remaining assets or rejuvenate those sections of the plant that might be commercially viable in the new free-market economic climate. With Nyika Jancsó (son of famous Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó) on camera, Almási and his team made a number of visits to the town in the years leading up to 1993. The result was _The Factory is Ours I–II_ ( _Miénk a gyár I–II_ ), possibly the most central component of the whole Ózd series. Although shot in 1993, the film takes us back a few years to late 1989, when sections of the plant, in particular the rolling mill, are still working.

The film opens with scenes of the rolling mill shop floor as steel ingots are rolled out and we hear the voice of one of the workers, the furnace-man István András, talking about his attitude to the place: "I like working here," he affirms.9 He reappears at various points in the film and is its main "star." A cut shifts us to the parliament building in Budapest where a delegation is to meet government representatives. The date is August 23, 1989. István András, assisted by his wife, then continues his story. It is here that we first encounter the name of János Petrenkó, a local "entrepreneur" (vállalkozó) who is mentioned by András and who, it is rumored, will buy the rolling mill.10 He completes the deal a few months later, thus guaranteeing some work for those who are chosen to stay on. András admits to feeling a little optimistic and a little afraid.

We then meet Petrenkó, whose star will rise quickly but also fall just as quickly. He takes great pride in his self-appointed role as a "man of the people" and recounts his past, which included stints as a musician in a miners' band and later in a pop music group that played at weddings and other functions. Almási then enacts one of his editing strategies that do so much to prevent the films from becoming just a series of "talking heads." He cuts between Petrenkó, his wife, and his son (also described as an entrepreneur) in their comfortable-looking living room and István András and his wife eating a fairly basic meal in their cramped kitchen. The stiffness of the Petrenkós, who do not yet seem to have adjusted to the presence of cameras in their life, contrasts with the András family, who talk agitatedly while sitting around their linoleum-covered kitchen table. The Petrenkó family scene looks formally composed and well-lit; the András family, by contrast, look as if they have been caught or interrupted by the camera in the middle of their meal. It is no doubt the case that both scenes have been carefully composed by the director, but the former is closer to the notion of the formal voice while the latter veers towards the informal voice and hints at the American school of the direct cinema of Frederick Wiseman and others. The result is that Petrenkó explains his situation and ambitions with, I presume, what he (if no one else) considers to be an air of authority, but it looks and sounds pompous and inauthentic. The voice of authority, ironically, therefore belongs to András who shows us what the real situation is like. This rhetorical appeal is implicit through his placing in the domestic sphere and our earlier encounter with him on the shop floor. It may be implicit but it is nevertheless powerful in its emotional impact if nothing else. In contrast, Petrenkó's authority and authenticity is undercut.11 Although Almási allows a voice and ample time to Petrenkó, to management, politicians, and other authority figures it is clear, nevertheless, where his sympathies lie, even though András initially supports Petrenkó and say so publicly at a meeting.

However, to have a voice in a documentary is one thing, to have money and access to the levers of power is something else. On December 22, 1989, Petrenkó and Lotz are seen signing an agreement as the former, with a start-up capital of 90 million Hungarian forint, buys the rolling mill, one of the few parts of the old plant still operating. There is the customary pomp and ceremony, including the obligatory dull speeches and champagne, but Lotz looks muted despite the ceremonial extravaganza. As well he might: the presence of an initially successful privately run plant in the middle of the crumbling Ózd complex is clearly not something he welcomes and there is tension between the two men. One of Petrenkó's first acts is to sack all the old managers, many of whom are "Lotz's men." ÓKÜ (Ózdi Kohászati Üzemek – Ózd Metallurgical Works) once the pride of communist Hungary's heavy industry is, in reality, no more. It exists only as a shell of its formerly self with the Petrenkó-owned Rolling Mill in its centre. In a poignant scene, reminiscent of a similar moment in Ken Loach's film _The Navigators_ (2001) (which also deals with the transition from state to private ownership), two workers erect the sign and logo of PEKÓ, as the new enterprise is to be known, partially covering the old sign of ÓKÜ in the process. A group of workers are then seen donning their new overalls and are introduced to that icon of the free market, the company logo, which adorns their red overalls (which are rather shabby and look as if they have been bought second hand). All the while some fading pictures of Marx and Lenin look down at them from the walls.

Petrenkó is the subject of Almási's next film in the series, appropriately if rather predictably called _Petrenkó_. Made in 1995 it is the shortest of the Ózd films at just 48 minutes but it contains one of the key scenes in the whole series. Just under five years after signing the deal to bring PEKÓ into existence, Petrenkó announces at a meeting of the remaining workers that it will close. The workers are predictably angry but also subdued and István Harkai puts in another appearance. After many promises, false starts, and false hopes it is now the end of the road. Petrenkó, hailed as a hero of the new free market era, the first factory owner to emerge in Hungary after the system change, has gone bust. He blames government interference and hostility from Lotz and the remaining managers of the old plant but there is a feeling that much of the background to this story remains hidden.12

 _Barren_ (Meddő), made in the same year, is the first film in the series where the Ózd plant is completely closed. Not only is the plant closed but the entire site, now in an advanced state of demolition, is fenced off and guarded by security teams, who wear military type uniforms. Most of the film concerns the people at the very bottom of Ózd society – the Gypsies. However, Almási denies that this is a film specifically about Gypsies. The plant, which is seen in the opening traveling shot, now looks as if it has been destroyed in a war. The only life appears to be the people who pick scrap metal from the ruins and slag heaps and the security guards who constantly chase them. The camera follows one of these guards from the passenger seat of his car as they search for people taking scrap from the site. One man has to throw his "hoard" back over the fence while he protests to the security guards that he has eight children to look after. This enforcement looks brutal, unnecessary, and a complete waste of time. As the unfortunate man says, "Someone will only come and take it tomorrow." The security guards, however, do later allow someone to walk away with his takings, saying it's just not worth the bother of stopping him. Whether or not this display of indulgence is played out for the benefit of the camera is impossible to tell. This, of course, raises the perennial question of this kind of documentary – whether or not the presence of the camera affects or influences the behavior of the people who are being filmed.

The scrap-metal collectors often work in family groups and the camera crew follow one such group to the place where the scrap is weighed and they receive their payment. The man in charge of this operation also earns a living from slaughtering cows and pigs, and he buys scrap at 3 forint a kilo. The other main element of the film is the evictions of squatters from housing blocks. According to the council officials who are protected by the police, there are many families living illegally on run-down housing estates, sometimes in houses which are not fit for habitation. The families, for their part, object that they have nowhere else to go. Almási's hand-held camera follows the police and the housing officials closely as they go from house to house throwing out families they deem to be squatting illegally. It's very much "in your face," close-up camera work, squeezing through doorways, elbowing past housing officials and police alike. It has a power, urgency, and directness unparalleled in the rest of the series. The police, not usually known for their lenient attitudes towards Gypsies, are out in force but are restrained no doubt by the presence of the camera. Interestingly, the police have their own camera there as well, and Almási agreed when the question was put to him that the presence of his camera no doubt affected the police's behavior, although he also added that the police gave permission to film and no restrictions were placed on him. The council dog-catcher, who brutally plies his trade, completes this ­thoroughly depressing scenario of people trapped at the absolute bottom of society's ladder. The film ends with lengthy shots of a family scraping away at the earth trying to locate more scrap metal. The environment looks like a moonscape, bereft of anything remotely human or appealing – "barren," indeed, a point which is given emphasis by the haunting soundtrack and a wailing vocal.

Almási abandons the strategies of his previous films in the Ózd series, and it is difficult to see if anyone receives "preferential" treatment, in terms of framing, background, etc. On the other hand, the images are often so powerful that maybe this was not necessary. One would have to have a heart of stone not to sympathize with these families when confronted by the weight of the police and the coldly efficient ways of the housing officials, the whole operation so utterly devoid of any humanity.

It is noticeable that the titles of the last two films consist of just one word each, both stark and to the point and promising little in the way of optimism or hope – _Barren_ is followed by _Helpless_ ( _Tehetetlenül_ ), finished in 1998 and, at 98 minutes, the longest film in the series. It is really a compilation film that takes the viewer through the whole gamut of the Ózd experience right from 1987 to the present day using, mainly, footage already seen. It is an appropriate way to end, although it adds little to the overall understanding of the series. It is also in line with Almási's strategy of making each film complete in itself so that it isn't necessary to have seen any of the others.

It is now an appropriate place to try and extend the analysis of the series a little. The first point to make here is that the Ózd series fits in not only with other Almási films but also with films made by other documentarists in Hungary that examine issues related to Hungary's past and the system change. Almost all of them have eschewed the authorial voice, "the voice of God," as it is sometimes known. Almási creates situations, of course, he takes his camera into the workers' apartments and films them at dinner or in the _kocsma_ (pub) having a few beers after work. He films managers in their office or, as with Petrenkó, in his home; and occasionally we hear a voice from outside the frame asking a question (although these are few and far between). Thus, there is a degree of intervention, but it is minimal and the workers and others are free to voice their opinions, to be witnesses to the processes going on around them. After years of officialdom acting as the "voice of the people," Almási's overriding principle is to allow the people their voice, to talk about the past, to be its witness. This is a long way from the Wordsworthian notion of "emotion recollected in tranquility"13 but it is one which can and often does give vent to a righteous and justified anger. The result can sometimes be cloudy, unfocused, and inarticulate; and the anger often expressed does not necessarily assist clarity but, as far as the Ózd workers are concerned, it is rarely inauthentic. As Plantinga remarks, "Not every nonfiction film has a voice-over narrator, but every non-fiction film has a discourse that takes an implicit stance or attitude towards what it represents" (1997: 100). From what I have tried to outline I think it is clear that Almási's implicit (and sometimes not so implicit) stance is to side with the steelworkers of Ózd, to provide the circumstances in which they can be their own tribunes and witnesses to history in the making.

In order to capture this sense of authenticity, Almási (in line with the practice of many filmmakers engaged in such specific locally based projects, whether ­documentary or fictional) spent a lot of time in Ózd. In his own words, "I was very curious about the workers' lifestyle and I stayed in their apartments, their houses many times," to which he adds, "During the making of the Ózd films no one objected to my presence." Over such a long period of time it is highly likely that people simply grew used to the camera being there and were therefore more inclined to "be themselves." Almási became very friendly with a number of the workers who feature in the film and remains in touch with them (though some have since died or moved away). However, it is not strictly speaking correct to say that everyone welcomed Almási, There was sometimes hostility from various branches of officialdom. Thus, when there was a screening of the first film in Ózd, the management did not want the workers to attend, and in 1995 the city council actually tied to prevent Almási from entering the city. When cities have their main industry taken away, the local authorities are naturally keen to attract new investment and films such as Almási's are often regarded as inimical to this process of rejuvenation and "re-branding." For obvious reasons they prefer more up-beat narratives. For example, Sheffield City Council in the United Kingdom, after massive closures in the local steel industry, embraced _The Full Monty_ (in which redundant steelworkers become strippers to earn money) with an almost embarrassing enthusiasm.14

Stylistically, the films are not challenging, which, of course, does not mean tthat they are run-of the-mill or boring; Almási uses few devices which depart from the standards of documentary practice in his unobtrusive, observational style. In fact, when he does use slightly "offbeat" stylistic devices, such as the superimposition of a young woman's face over a workers' apartment block at the end of _Bonds of Steel_ , it looks out of place and strained. Likewise, his use of non-diegetic music is sparing and is often brought in just at the beginning and end of a film, as in _Barren_ , where the desolation of the site of the former plant is given added emphasis by haunting music. At the beginning or end of these films, as the broad themes (desolation, destruction, hope, despair, anger, etc.) are being introduced or summed up, there is (sometimes) no human agency present in the film and music is deployed to fill these gaps. Music is used sparingly when people are in the frame. On the other hand, diegetic music can often be encountered, at the May Day gala, for example, or in the pub. But its most effective use is in ironic juxtaposition when, for instance, a brass band plays a bouncy, rousing marching tune which then carries over into a panorama of rusting machinery and the empty, crumbling hulks of buildings.

There could be a complaint that Almási portrays the steelworkers primarily as passive, as victims who have things done to them but never respond, people who do not take their destiny in their own hands. I put this to Almási in the form of a question about why it was that the workers never really protested at the closure of the plant (with the exception of an apparently isolated street ­demonstration which has been mentioned) and never, for example, contemplated going on strike. Almási replied that the workers basically "accepted their fate," for which he cites a number of reasons, all of which, at some point, are aired in the films. "When I was shooting in 1988 everybody knew the factory would collapse. Some of the workers talked about going on strike, but how? 'How can we do this?' 'We've never been on strike.' This is very important, you can see this in the film."

Linked to this was an interesting and important observation made by Almási. The people in Ózd were not like the people in Budapest: they lived 25 years or more in the past, in a time warp almost, and going to Ózd was a bit like visiting the Soviet Union. Many of the people in Ózd believed, to some extent, in the old system. Politically, they were Kádárites15 and retained a number of practices from the past such as the institution of worker brigades, awards for "star" workers (a sort of watered down Stakhanovism) and in the films you sometimes hear them speak of socialism in a way rarely heard in Eastern Europe. In a sense, to go on strike was to go against something they believed in. Of course, they also had criticisms of the system, particularly of their appalling pay, but most often the target of their criticism was what they saw as the continuing ineptitude and incompetence of management and the deviousness of politicians in Budapest. Added to this was the fact that the government agreed, quite early on in the closure process, to give the redundant workers 80 percent of their wages. As Almási remarked, "The price of their silence was 80% of their wages," adding that "the problem [now] is that many have forgotten how to work and many children have never seen their father work." As generous as this sounds, however, it should be borne in mind that this was 80 percent of what is already a very low wage.

Given the various scenarios represented by the films, it was impossible to end on an optimistic note. Ózd spiraled into decline, many left the city trying to find work elsewhere, and those who remained were condemned to a twilight existence, living on their subsidies or scraping together some kind of meager income from salvaging scrap metal. In the early nineties over 10 percent of the adult population were unemployed. István Horkai and István András were both made redundant in October 1991. In 2006 Almási was back in Ózd, on the very day that Hungary joined the European Union. The result was _Our Own Little Europe_ ( _A mi kis Európánk_ ) made in the same year. The former steelworkers and citizens of Ózd, at last, could indulge in some optimism for the future. Whether joining the European Union turns out to be the panacea some seemed to expect is questionable, but this remains another story for another time.

 **Notes**

My warm thanks to Tamás Almási for agreeing to be interviewed (in March 2010) and for his generosity in supplying me with those films I wasn't able to locate myself.

1. After writing these opening lines I was pleased to notice that György Báron has ­expressed similar sentiments in his survey article, "Dead Sea Scrolls: Hungarian Documentaries Before and After the Political Changes" in the online journal _Kinokultura Hungarian Special Issue_.

2 Other films of this kind would include Pál Schiffer's documentaries about the ­Videoton factory in Székesfehérvér, _Videoton Saga_ ( _A Videoton-sztori_ , 1993) and _Elektra Ltd. Or an Introduction into the Political Economy of Capitalism_ ( _Elektra, avagy: Bevezetés a kapitalizmus politikai gazdaságtanába_ , 1995).

3 For a very accessible account of Hungarian documentary since the end of the Second World also see Erzsebet Bori's article "The Hungarian Documentary" (2003: 169).

4 Almási had a well-established career in the Hungarian film industry prior to making the Ózd series. He has made more than 10 films as a director's assistant working with, amongst others, Marta Mészáros, Miklós Jancsó, Zoltán Fábri, and István Szabó. His documentary output is prolific; his latest and most popular offering, _Puskás Hungary_ (2009) concerns the great Hungarian footballer Ferenc Puskás. Although he now works almost solely in documentary he has made a number of other films including his first feature fiction film, _Graduation_ ( _Ballagás_ ) in 1981 for the Dialóg Studio and _Mario the Magician_ ( _Marió a varázsló_ ) in 2008. He has also worked in television.

5 Unless otherwise indicated all quotations from Almási are from an interview with the author in March 2010 in Budapest.

6 The trade union officials are shown working hand-in-hand with management. Those lower ranking trade union officials, who are closer to the rank and file workers, are distinctly uneasy with this. On the whole the workers are scathing about their union.

7 To be accurate no one speaks directly to camera, remarks are almost always aimed at someone (Alamási?) just off camera.

8 A.k.a. the "Communists."

9 In a huge plant such as Ózd there would certainly be more than one rolling mill but as far as I am able to make out Almási concentrates on one particular rolling mill.

10 In this period in Hungary it is probably no exaggeration to say that the term "entrepreneur" had a variety of meanings, not all of them necessarily flattering to the individuals concerned. I have come across no evidence that suggests Petrenkó was ­involved in any illegal dealings.

11 My use of the notion of the formal voice and the open voice follows that of Carl Plantinga 1997, see in particular Chapter 6, "Voice and authority."

12 An online article which includes a section on Petrenkó – Palubinskas, 1998 – gives no substantial reason for the demise of this particular "champion"; rather lamely (considering the grandiose title of the article) stating that "The literature does not explain why Petrenkó's company went bankrupt [...] Petrenkó may have over extended himself."

13 A phrase used by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth in his preface to the _Lyrical Ballads_ , which has been published on many occasions in various editions.

14 Ózd City Council now has its own revival plan, based apparently on some of the ideas of English Heritage. However, they note that most of the city's industrial heritage has been destroyed. See: kereso.koh.hu/ozd/doc/eng/ozd_02_e.doc.

15 János Kádár, Hungary's Communist leader from 1956 to 1988 and chief architect of so-called Goulash Communism – the more flexible, more open version of official state doctrine introduced gradually in the 1960s.

 **References**

Báron, G. (2008) Dead Sea Scrolls: Hungarian Documentaries Before and After the Political Changes. _Kinokultura_ (Hungarian Special issue), ed. Catherine Portuges: <http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/7/baron.shtml> (accessed March 3, 2010).

Bori, E. (2003) The Hungarian Documentary. _Hungarian Quarterly_ , 44 (169): 132–143.

Bori, E. (2009) Puskás puzzle. _Hungarian Quarterly_ , 50 (194): 152–156.

Frydman, R., Rapaczynski, A., Earle, J., _et al_. (1993) _The Privatization Process in Central Europe_. Central European University Press, Budapest.

Palubinskas, G.T. (1998) The Role of Champions in the Development of Markets in Central and Eastern Europe: Guides for Leadership Input in the Market Development Process. Institute of Public Policy, George Mason University. <http://www.sba.muohio.edu/ABAS/1998/palub.pdf> (accessed February 9, 2012).

Plantinga, C.R. (1997) _Rhetoric and Representation in the Nonfiction_ _Film_. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Romsics, I. (1999) _Hungary in the Twentieth Century_. Corvina, Budapest.

Swain, N. (1992) _Hungary: The Rise and Fall of Feasible Socialism_. Verso, London.

 **The Ózd series by Tamás Almási**

 _Helpless_ ( _Tehetetlenül_ ) 98 mins. 1998. _Petrenkó_ 48 mins. 1995. _Barren_ ( _Medd_ _ő_ ) 73 mins. 1995. _The Factory is Ours I–II_ ( _Miénk a gyár_ ) 62 mins. 1993. _Bonds of Steel_ ( _Acélkapos_ ) 68 mins. 1989. _The_ _First Hundred Years_ ( _Az elsö száz év_ ) 68 mins. 1989. _Slow Motion_ ( _Lassitás_ ) 62 mins. 1988. _In a Vise_ ( _Szorításban_ ) 93 mins. 1987.

# 17

# Investigating the Past, Envisioning the Future

#  _An Exploration of Post-1991 Latvian Documentary_

Maruta Z. Vitols

#  **Introduction**

The year 2011 marks the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the occasion will be commemorated across the globe as one of the most significant events of the twentieth century. In addition to recognizing the vast political and economic changes that have since occurred in Europe and Russia, this date also provides the opportunity to reflect on and assess the substantial cultural and artistic transformations that have transpired in these regions since 1991. For example, many of the thriving film industries in former Soviet bloc countries all but disintegrated following the dissolution of the Soviet Union; and the years since then have been a challenging period of creative, as well as financial and administrative, reconstruction and reorganization. This liminal space has provided rich soil for artistic inspiration when addressing issues of national and transnational identification, and nowhere is this more evident than in the films being made in the areas that once comprised the Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, despite the relevance and resonance of the films made since 1991 in post-Socialist states, cinema scholarship on the former Soviet nations lags behind the artistic production of these countries. Media scholar Anikó Imre has aptly explained this phenomenon: "The loss of interest in East European films has been a part of a more general loss of interest in the Second World in the aftermath of the post-Berlin Wall euphoria. The celebration engendered by the end of socialism failed to create an equal ground on which to integrate Eastern Europe in the global circulation of ideas" (2005: xv). Moreover, although, to date, 10 countries formerly under Soviet influence have joined the European Union since the collapse of the Soviet Union, these once Communist states have not yet been successfully integrated culturally into the "New Europe."1 Instead, artistic hierarchies continue to prevail, and are particularly apparent in the silence in academic attention to the cinemas of this area. Film scholar Dina Iordanova offers a useful characterization of this situation, suggesting that the old cultural configuration of the former Soviet bloc and Europe has been replaced by an equally challenging order. In other words, political, economic, and social inequalities persist, and the "Southeast or East of Europe" continues to be seen as "supposedly culturally inferior" (Iordanova, 2010: 52). Indeed, this enduring postcolonial vision of Eastern Europe as a cultural "backwater" helps to explain why so little research has been conducted on the cinemas of this region. As Ewa Mazierska notes, "the study of transnational issues, such as genre, or sexuality within world or European cinema or, indeed, transnational cinema itself, is conducted with disregard to Eastern European cinema or, at best, this cinema receives only token recognition" (2010: 13).

Yet, scholarly attention to these cinemas is increasing, indicated by the recent birth of the journal _Studies in Eastern European Cinema_ , as well as by the work of such notable academics as Imre, Iordanova, Mazierska, Marguerite Waller, Katarzyna Marciniak, Catherine Portuges, John Cunningham, and Petra Hanáková among others. Recent publications, such as _Via Transversa: Lost Cinema of the_ _Former Eastern Bloc_ in 2008 and _Baltic Cinemas After the 90s: Shifting (Hi)stories and (Id)_ _entities_ in 2010 (special issues of the journals _Place and Location: Studies in Environmental Aesthetics and Semiotics_ and _Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis_ , ­respectively) demonstrate the emerging intellectual interest in post-Socialist cinemas. This study participates in the growing awareness of the films from this region of the world, and engages in the ongoing project of expanding the discourses on these cinemas.

Part of this developing attention to the cinemas of the former Soviet Union involves an exploration of Latvian documentary cinema. Filmmaking in the Baltics in general has suffered from academic neglect, as observes Imre: "Baltic successor states [possess] cultures that remain invisible without an updated post-Cold War affiliation, and [have] cinemas [that] routinely remain left out of considerations of both Russian and East European film" (2005: xxii). Scholars such as Eva Näripea, Mari Laaniste, and Bjørn Ingvoldstad are giving much needed attention to Estonian and Lithuanian cinemas, and Irina Novikova and Inga Pērkone and Agris Redoviča have contributed to the burgeoning canon of academic writing on Latvian fiction films. Yet, Latvian documentary cinema, particularly since 1991, remains academically ignored. The main purpose of this article is to begin to fill this void, focusing on many of the significant Latvian nonfiction filmmakers to have emerged since the collapse of communism. This study is intended as an introduction to some of the key figures and works that have characterized the Latvian documentary landscape for the past 20 years, recognizing that much more research remains to be done.

#  **Latvia's Documentary Past**

In order to better understand the Latvian documentary present, some knowledge of the Latvian documentary past is necessary. From the very start, documentaries have always been closely linked to state politics in Latvia. Latvia's strong documentary tradition began in 1910, when the first known motion picture was filmed in the country, a recording of Tsar Nicholas II's visit to Rīga. Newsreels and other documentary films played an important role in expressing the changing political, social, and cultural landscapes in the country, capturing events ranging from the German fleet attacking the city of Liepāja in 1914 to the expulsion of the Bolsheviks from Riga in 1919 to the formation of the first Latvian Parliament and the establishment of a sovereign Latvian state. Documentaries offered witness to these events, thus nurturing and solidifying a national identity.

The intimate relationship between politics and documentary cinema continued through the two decades of Latvian independence (i.e., from 1920–1940), with filmmakers creating works that explored various aspects of the fledgling democracy's economic infrastructure, educational system, and the lives of cultural and political icons. Just as the newly sovereign country was growing, so, too, documentary cinema was expanding in Latvia. Journalist Kristīne Matīsa observes, "Documentary film developed at an intense rate in Latvia [...] – by 1931, the most active film chronicler, Eduards Kraucs, had already shot 100 silent news reels, which were regularly shown in cinemas" (2006: 1).

This prolific cinematic period was briefly suspended when the Soviet army occupied Latvia in the summer of 1940. Filmmaking soon came under the control of the foreign forces, and the newsreel series _Padomju Latvija_ ( _Soviet Latvia_ ) first appeared.2 The new Soviet government utilized this documentary series for propagandistic aims, so it was no surprise that its production ceased in 1941, when the German Nazi forces invaded Latvia and began producing propaganda of their own in this Baltic state.

At the end of World War Two, the Soviet government was reinstated in Latvia, and promptly began the reconstruction of the Latvian film industry. In addition to reviving the _Padomju Latvija_ newsreel series, the Rīga Film Studio created various new periodical documentary film series, called _kinožurn_ ā _li_ (literally "film journals" or "film magazines") throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Among the most popular were _Pionieris_ ( _Pioneer_ , 1953), _Sporta apskats_ ( _Sports Review_ , 1957), and _M_ ā _ksla_ ( _Art_ , 1963). These short documentaries offered budding filmmakers an opportunity to gain valuable experience, as well as giving them a platform to showcase their talent and potential in order to obtain the permission and funding to create future full-length film projects. As film scholars Juris Civjans and Anita Uzulniece note, "almost every documentary director and many fiction film directors have also worked in the field of periodical documentary film series" (1989:103). Even to this day, most contemporary Latvian filmmakers begin their careers making documentaries.

With the advent of a new generation of energetic filmmakers, all educated in Moscow's State Cinema Institute, or VGIK, Latvian documentary filmmaking began to thrive, so much so that it surpassed the accomplishments of fiction filmmaking in the country. By the 1960s and 1970s, artists, such as Hercs Franks, Aivars Freimanis, Ivars Seleckis, Ansis Epners, and Uldis Brauns became known as part of the Rīga School of Poetic Documentary.3 Akin to the French New Wave or to New German Cinema, the Rīga School of Poetic Documentary provided audiences with films focused on artistic expression (as opposed to a didactic delivery of news, facts, or state-endorsed propaganda) that encouraged metaphoric readings, frequently suggesting a subversive critique of the totalitarian regime.4 This influential movement dominated the Latvian documentary landscape until the 1980s, when the arrival of glasnost and perestroika profoundly changed the country's filmmaking industry. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the figure who defined Latvian documentary cinema in the 1980s: Juris Podnieks.

Born in Rīga on December 5, 1950, Podnieks began working at the Rīga Film Studio when he was 17, becoming a cinematographer at the age of 22. Encouraged by his mentors at the studio, all of whom were associated with the Rīga School of Poetic Documentary, Podnieks graduated from VGIK in Moscow with a degree in cinematography in 1975. Having established himself as a premier cinematographer by the late 1970s, Podnieks began directing documentaries, starting with short films for newsreels and making his first feature-length documentary _Str_ ē _lnieku zvaigzn_ ā _js_ ( _The Constellation of the Riflemen_ ) in 1982. This film examined the lives of the few remaining Latvian veterans who had fought for the Red Army during World War One, exploring how their fateful choices had profoundly transformed not only public history but also their personal lives.

While Podnieks had become a well-known and respected documentary filmmaker in Latvia by the early 1980s, international fame arrived in 1986 with his breakthrough feature-length work _Vai viegli b_ ū _t jaunam?_ ( _Is it Easy to be Young?_ ). This film took advantage of Communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev's new policy of glasnost or "openness," and offered audiences a scathing critique of the severely detrimental effects of a repressive political regime and culture on contemporary youth. In addition to portraying the despair and hopelessness of young adults living there, the documentary was the first film made in the Soviet Union that openly denounced the seemingly endless Soviet war in Afghanistan and that castigated the government's handling of the then recent Chernobyl disaster. _Vai viegli b_ ū _t jaunam?_ became an international blockbuster, with audiences across the Soviet Union lining up for blocks to see the landmark film.

With the international success of _Vai viegli but jaunam?_ Podnieks became the most successful and openly political Latvian documentarian of his time, and his works became synonymous with Latvian cinema. His film projects in the late 1980s took him all over the Soviet Union, as he documented the tragedies of the Karabakh genocide at the hands of Azerbaijani gangs, the abuse and murder of Islamic women in Uzbekistan, and the neglect of Afghanistan war veterans, among other topics. Podnieks also chronicled the resurgence of nationalism in the Baltic states, exploring the calls for political sovereignty in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia in his film Krustceļš (released as _Homeland_ in the United Kingdom and as _A Baltic Requiem_ in the United States, 1990). Podnieks and his crew were in Rīga in January of 1991 when his cameras captured the violent clashes between Latvian protesters demanding their country's independence and the Soviet Union Special Forces (a.k.a., the OMON or Black Berets).5 Because of his personal sacrifice and professional dedication to exposing the great problems inherent in the Communist government, Podnieks easily came to be regarded as an artistic emblem of Latvia's struggle for political freedom.6

Podnieks lived to see the fall of the Soviet regime that he so vehemently denounced, with Latvia declaring itself a sovereign nation on May 4, 1990 and the Soviet Union effectively collapsing after an abortive coup on August 19, 1991 before formally dissolving in December, 1991. However, he did not survive long enough to be a part of the post-Soviet Latvian documentary cinema cadre. On June 23, 1992, Podnieks drowned, his death shocking both filmmakers and the Latvian nation.

The significance of Podnieks's death cannot be overstated, since it left a tremendous void in the Latvian documentary sphere. His considerable national and international success had made him the definitive figure of Latvian documentary filmmaking (a role he still plays posthumously today), as well as an embodiment of Latvian national and cinematic identity. With his passing, Latvian documentary filmmakers were left at a loss, not having a clear leader or film style to emulate. In many respects, Latvian documentary cinema after 1991 may be understood as a quest to rebuild an artistic identity shattered by the death of Podnieks.

#  **The 1990s and Beyond: A Phoenix Rising out of the Ashes**

In addition to the devastating loss of Podnieks, Latvian documentary filmmakers, like their colleagues in the other former Soviet bloc countries that had regained their political independence, had to contend with a seemingly insurmountable number of challenges in the early 1990s. The dissolution of the Communist government meant the disintegration of all state resources for film projects. The massive economic shift from socialism to free-market capitalism left Latvian filmmakers scrambling to identify new avenues of funding, resulting in a steep drop of cinematic production in the initial years following the regaining of independence. While fiction filmmaking suffered the most, with production dropping 50 percent between 1991 and 1992, the creation of documentary works also decreased: 41 nonfiction films were made in 1991 and 1992, but only 33 in 1993 (Pērkone and Redovičs, 1994: 5–61).

As the new government stabilized and Latvia's economy began to grow, some state monies for the arts were restored, albeit not at the levels of the Socialist era. Moreover, the distribution of state funding reflected the reality that the Communist belief that cinema was the most important of the arts was no longer in vogue. For example, in 2007, the government budgeted 1.017 million lats (approximately US$2.034 million) for the Latvian film industry. The National Film Centre was charged with the task of deciding which projects would be awarded subsidies. Meanwhile, in the same fiscal year, the Latvian National Theatre Company received over 1.1 million lats (or $US2.2 million) from the government, demonstrating how just one of the five major theater companies in Rīga at the time received more funding than the entire film industry (Rietuma, 2007:1).

This economic privileging of theater over cinema and the other arts reflects the primacy of theater in the Latvian cultural imagination. Theater has been an integral part of Latvian life for centuries, with folk songs relating the highly performative aspects of traditional rituals (some of which are still observed in modern times). Moreover, the birth of organized Latvian theater coincided with the period known as the "Awakening" – the time in the nineteenth century when waves of nationalism swept across Europe. This event strengthened the association between theater and a Latvian national identity, a link that has obviously persisted to present day.7

The powerful relationship between live performance and national character may also help explain why Latvians do not properly fund their cinema industry currently, and why Latvian filmmakers have always gravitated towards documentary. Since cinema flourished under the Soviets, filmmaking may forever be connected to foreign occupation (much like organized religion) in the Latvian psyche. Nurturing a film industry in Latvia today may appear to some as cultivating a Soviet legacy. Similarly, nonfiction filmmaking is considerably more developed than its fiction counterpart in Latvia in part because artists may not have seen the need to cultivate the latter because of the well-established theater culture. In this respect, Latvian filmmakers may be perceived as espousing Vertov's dichotomy between fiction and nonfiction cinema, literally aligning the former with theater and equating "cinema" with documentary. In other words, Latvian filmmakers favor nurturing nonfiction filmmaking as the more evolved form of cinematic expression in the country, leaving the recounting of fiction narratives to the stage.8 In addition to funding woes, Latvian documentary filmmakers have also had to contend with post-Communist changes in exhibition. Many movie theaters have ceased operation since the early 1990s, with the number of theaters in Rīga alone decreasing from 12 in 1994 to 4 in 2007 (Pērkone and Redovičs 1994: 92–93).9 Moreover, the few theaters that remain devote much of their programming to foreign films, with Hollywood blockbusters routinely dominating the Latvian box offices. With the exception of the recent fiction film successes _R_ ī _gas sargi_ ( _The Defenders of R_ ī _ga_ , 2007) and _R_ ū _dolfa mantojums_ ( _Rudolfs' Inheritance_ , 2010), Latvian spectators express little interest in their national cinema. Most Latvian films, fiction and nonfiction alike, receive a single, opening-night screening in a theater and then either travel the foreign festival circuit or are aired occasionally on one of the Latvian television stations. Furthermore, these films are rarely commercially released on DVD, again owing to the apathy of the local audiences.

Yet, despite these adverse conditions, Latvian documentary filmmakers have managed to thrive. While arguably no central figure comparable to Podnieks has emerged in nonfiction cinema, documentary film has blossomed since the reestablishment of a sovereign Latvian state, generating many diverse and talented artists. What follows is only a sample of the most notable contemporary Latvian nonfiction filmmakers active today, and should be understood as a basic introduction to their work.

By far the most internationally known and critically successful of the post-1991 Latvian documentary filmmakers is Laila Pakalniņa. Her fiction and nonfiction films have screened and won awards at Cannes, the Berlin International Film Festival, and the Venice International Film Festival. Born in 1962, Pakalniņa graduated from VGIK with a degree in Film Directing and began her life in cinema in the late 1980s and early 1990s, just as Podnieks was reaching the height of his worldwide success.10 Following in the footsteps of her filmmaking predecessors, she began her career making documentaries. Though her first documentary shorts, _Un_ ( _And_ , 1988) and _Izv_ ē _le_ ( _The Choice_ , 1990) were made in Russia, both films address different aspects of Latvia's political situation. The former examines Latvia's relationship with Russia while in limbo between being a Soviet state and a democratic republic, while the latter investigates a Latvian man's decision to join the occupying German police force in the 1940s. Pakalniņa's first film made in Latvia, _Doms_ ( _The Dome_ , 1991), continues this concern with documenting her homeland's political climate, chronicling the events that transpired in Rīga in January 1991 when Latvians took to the streets to protest against Soviet rule. While similar in subject to Podnieks's _P_ ē _cv_ ā _rds_ ( _Postscript_ , 1991), Pakalniņa's work offers a more intimate look at the camaraderie and fervent belief in political freedom that thrived at the Doms cathedral. (The historic Rīga landmark that had been a place of worship before the Communist regime became an improvised hospital, food pantry, and shelter during this period).

After the turmoil initiated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pakalniņa's documentaries underwent a significant shift in focus, changing from films that centered on explicitly political topics to works concentrating on exploring and aestheticizing the everyday. The next seven nonfiction films that she made during the remainder of the 1990s all considered some aspect of the banal things, events, and people that most Latvians assumed were unremarkable and thus took for granted. _Ve_ ļ _a_ ( _The Linen_ , 1991) follows a man who delivers laundry to a children's hospital every day, while Iešana (The Pilgrimage, 1991) chronicles young Christians traveling to Poland to meet the pope. Pakalniņa's next work, _Bazn_ ī _ca_ ( _The Church_ , 1993), documents the construction of a church in Stoļerova, a small parish in the Latgale region of Latvia. 1994's _Pr_ ā _mis_ ( _The Ferry_ ) shows the daily passages of local inhabitants running errands on either side of a river, while _Pasts_ ( _The Mail_ , 1995) depicts postal deliveries. _Ub_ ā _ns_ ( _Ubans_ , 1995) explores the professional and personal life of Latvian painter Konrāds Ubāns. Meanwhile, _Ozols_ ( _The Oak_ , 1997) is concerned with a 700-year-old tree in the village of Sēja in the Vidzeme region of Latvia.

Pakalniņa's short and simple film titles suggest the deceptively basic and uncomplicated subject matter of her work. Yet, all of these documentaries offer complex and layered investigations of daily life in a post-Soviet world. Indeed, the important transformation from filmmaking focused on overtly political subjects to a valorization of the everyday may reflect Pakalniņa's own change of perspective in reaction to the enormous political and social upheaval in her country. With the end of Soviet rule, the urgency of open political inquiry dissipated, allowing Pakalniņa to devote her cinematic attention to the more subtle and complicated ways this great paradigm shift affected (and continues to affect) ordinary people. Moreover, one should note that, although no longer explicitly political, her post-1991 documentaries certainly still contain political implications and subtexts.

Pakalniņa made her first feature-length fiction film, _Kurpe_ ( _The Shoe_ ), in 1998 and now spends her professional life alternating between fiction and nonfiction filmmaking. Her twenty-first-century documentaries continue to express her dedication to the banal and to the customarily marginalized. _Mostieties_ ( _Wake Up_ , 2000) reveals to spectators the lives of the children who inhabit the former military port Kaŗosta, located in the city of Liepāja, while _Papa Gena_ ( _Papa Gena_ , 2001) displays the reactions of different people in various locations in and around Rīga who are listening with headphones to an aria from Mozart's opera _The Magic_ _Flute. M_ ā _rti_ ņš ( _Martins_ , 2002) gives viewers a glimpse into the life of a disabled child, as Pakalniņa's next documentary, _B_ ū _s labi_ ( _It'll Be Fine_ , 2004), made as part of the Visions of Europe project, displays the director's perception of the citizens of the European Union. Pakalniņa's two films from 2004, _Autobuss_ ( _The Bus_ ) and _Lejputrija_ ( _Dream Land_ ), respectively depict the passengers traveling on a bus between Tallinn and Kaliningrad and the range of activity one finds in a dumpsite. In 2006, Pakalniņa made _Teodors_ ( _Theodore_ ), a film that examines the daily routine of an elderly man who eventually passes away. _Par dzimten_ ī _ti_ ( _Three Men and A Fishpond_ , 2008) examines the routines of three fishermen living in a rural section of the Latgale region. Her most recent documentary, _Pa Rubika ce_ ļ _u_ ( _On Rubik's Road_ , 2010) details the activities that transpire on a bicycle path, and was screened at the Venice International Film Festival.11

Pakalniņa's documentaries form a significant contribution to post-1991 Latvian nonfiction filmmaking since her works currently dominate the "public face" of Latvian documentary cinema in the international arena. Her perennial presence at the major European film festivals assures her nonfiction works a prominent place in the global film world. Moreover, her documentaries draw much-needed attention to the daily struggles and triumphs of the average Latvian citizenry, encouraging global audiences not only to appreciate the aesthetic values of this historically peripheral space but also to bring awareness to the traditionally marginalized inhabitants as they negotiate their post-Socialist existence. In this respect, Pakalniņa's films may be viewed as drawing from a Griersonian documentary tradition of fusing the artistic with the political, although her works are far less overtly propagandistic than the British nonfiction films of the interwar era or the films made by Podnieks in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Perhaps the filmmaker who most literally and metaphorically continues Podnieks's legacy is his former colleague Antra Cilinska. A trained film editor who turned to directing and producing after Podnieks's death, Cilinska has been the managing director of the Juris Podnieks Studio in Rīga since 1994. Educated at the University of Latvia, she began making documentaries of her own in 1993 with _Nepabeigt_ ā _filma_ ( _Unfinished Business_ ), a tribute to Podnieks and his work. Throughout 1994 and 1995, she directed and produced a series of twenty-five 30-minute episodes for Latvian television chronicling the history of filmmaking in Latvia, while she directed and produced her next film, which revisited the political turmoil in Latvia in January 1991, _Provok_ ā _cijas anatomija_ ( _Anatomy of a Provocation_ ) in 1996. In 1997, Cilinska made Č _aka iela meitenes_ ( _Girls from_ Č _aka Street_ ), an examination of the sex trade industry that has thrived in Latvia since the regaining of independence, as well as _Vai viegli b_ ū _t... ?_ ( _Is It Easy to Be... ?_ ), a work that investigated what had happened to the young protagonists of Podnieks's documentary _Is It Easy to Be Young?_ 10 years on. Her next documentary, _Baltijas s_ ā _ga_ ( _Baltic Saga_ , 2000), explored the lives of the Latvian refugees who fled their homeland during World War Two, while the following year she and fellow director Raitis Valters made _M_ ū _su barik_ ā _žu laiks_ ( _Freedom for Barricades_ , 2001), a film that offers the reflections of politicians, journalists, diplomats, activists, and witnesses on the Baltic calls for independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 on the event's tenth anniversary. The same year, Cilinska also made a documentary on Latvian artist and set designer Ilmārs Blumbergs, called _Kas no k_ ā _rodas_? ( _Where Does It All Begin_?), and in 2004 she participated with nine other Latvian filmmakers on a project entitled ES, a collection of cinematic portraits of Latvia's citizens on the eve of the country's joining the European Union (the title may be understood as both the abbreviation of the Latvian translation of "the European Union" or "Eiropas savienība," and as the Latvian pronoun for "I").

Like Pakalniņa's oeuvre, Cilinska's work has been screened at international festivals and won awards, for example a prize at the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film. Although Pakalniņa's films have received more attention from the art world, Cilinska's documentaries have achieved greater recognition in the journalistic realm. This may be because of the dominant subject matter of Cilinska's productions. Unlike Pakalniņa, whose work is primarily concerned with the aesthetics of the everyday, the majority of Cilinska's nonfiction filmmaking directly addresses significant political and social issues that inform and shape modern Latvia, such as international prostitution and the role that the Barricades protests in 1991 play in contemporary politics.12 Nowhere is this more evident than in her 2006 documentary _Vai citi... ?_ ( _Us and Them_ ). The film examines the intense ethnic strife in Latvia between Latvian and Russian inhabitants and considers the sources of this political and cultural conflict. Through interviews with different residents, such as a Russian taxi driver, a young Russian actress, and a Latvian language teacher, Cilinska demonstrates how profoundly differing interpretations of history inform this discord. For example, many Russians believe that the Soviet forces liberated Latvia at the end of World War Two, while the ethnic Latvians insist that the Soviets forcefully occupied their country. Such contrasting views of history fundamentally color the contemporary debates over the official state language in Latvia (whether Latvian should be the only official language of the country), as well as citizenship regulations (who is eligible for Latvian citizenship and how this may be obtained). Cilinska's film also suggests that the Russian media and politicians exacerbate the ethnic hostility in Latvia by exploiting Russian youth in their campaigns and showing them as victims of Latvian discrimination and oppression. Understandably, assertions about such very sensitive subjects as the outcome of World War Two and minority rights in Latvia have resulted in contentious and heated arguments about whether Cilinska's work is helping or hindering ethnic relations in the country.

Another controversial new Latvian documentarian, Edvīns Šņore, made tremendous waves internationally with his first film _Padomju st_ ā _sts_ ( _The Soviet Story_ , 2008). Šņore, who earned a Master of Arts degree in Political Science and International Relations from the University of Latvia in 1998, spent 10 years researching and 2 years filming his documentary, which examines the atrocities committed by Stalin's regime, such as the Katyn massacre of Polish army officers and intelligentsia in 1940 and the innumerable mass Soviet deportations. The controversy surrounding the film emanates from Šņore's assertions that the Soviets collaborated with the Nazis before 1941 to instigate the Holocaust, while the other Allied powers overlooking Stalin's crimes against humanity. Funded by the Union for Europe of the Nations political group (UEN) of the European Parliament, _Padomju s_ _t_ ā _sts_ received both global praise and Russian condemnation for its historical revisionism. An article in _The Economist_ deemed Šņore's work "the most powerful antidote yet to the sanitisation of the past"; and the filmmaker even appeared on a special edition of _The Glenn Beck Show_ on the Fox News Channel on January 22, 2010 to discuss the research he conducted for Padomju _s_ _t_ ā _st_ _s_ ( _The Economist_ , 2008: n.p.). The film received the "Mass Impact Award" at the Boston Film Festival in 2008, while, later that year, Šņore was awarded Latvia's highest civilian honor, the Order of the Three Stars, by the president of Latvia, Valdis Zatlers. In 2009, Šņore also received the highest state honor bestowed on a foreign citizen by the government of Estonia, the Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana, a distinction he shares with many heads of state and the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda. In addition to these accolades, _Padomju_ _s_ _t_ ā _st_ _s_ inspired fierce protests in Moscow, where Šņore's effigy was burnt in front of the Latvian Embassy in May 2008 while additional rallies occurred in St Petersburg in front of the Estonian Consulate in March 2009. The Russians involved in the demonstrations protested against Šņore's indictment of Stalin and his government, reflecting the contemporary rehabilitation of the former Soviet leader under Putin's regime. Both celebrated and reviled since its release, _Padomju_ _s_ _t_ ā _st_ _s_ has been translated into 30 languages and has been shown on public television and at festivals in the United States, Israel, Asia, Australia, and Europe. Though only Šņore's first film, the notable success of _Padomju_ _s_ _t_ ā _st_ _s_ indicates that a promising career awaits this young documentarian.

Dzintra Geka is also no stranger to politically charged filmmaking. Her career as a documentarian has been primarily characterized by a devotion to chronicling the lives of Latvians who were politically oppressed and deported to Siberia. Born in 1950 and educated in the St Peterburg (then Leningrad) Theater, Music, and Film Institute, Geka began working as a film editor in 1970 at the Rīga Film Studio. In 1978, she directed her first documentary, an issue of _Padomju Latvija_ ( _Nr. 4_ ), after which she began creating made-for-television films such as Voldemārs un Leontīne ( _Voldemar and Leontine_ , 1987), a nonfiction love story. Geka has proved to be one of the most prolific contemporary documentarists, directing over 38 nonfiction films since 1982. In her work, she has investigated famous figures in film history, such as Eduard Tisse and Sergei Eisenstein in _Tiss_ ē _skatiens_ ( _Eduard Tisse_ , 1996–1998) and _Eizen_ š _teina_ Ē _dene_ ( _Eisenstein's Eden_ , 1998), respectively. She has also chronicled the lives of people in politics. For example, Geka's 1993 film Č _akstes koks_ (Č _akste's Tree_ ) examines the life of Latvia's first president, Jānis Čakste (1859–1927), a subject she would return to in her 2004 work _Amats Nr.1, Valsts prezidents_ ( _Occupation No. 1, State President_ ). Geka's recent work also includes _Signe un..._ ( _Signe and..._ , 2003), an investigation of the work of Latvian animator Signe Baumane, and _Džona Doreda sala_ ( _John Dored's Island_ , 2007), a film about the accomplished cinematographer John Dored. In addition to her own filmmaking projects, Geka also worked with Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (now the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education) in the 1990s as a camerawoman, recording the testimonies of Holocaust survivors in Latvia.

Yet, Geka is best known for her cinematic portraits of the Latvians deported to Siberia by the Soviet regime. This theme has dominated her work, perhaps because of her own personal connection to this subject: Geka's father, a member of the resistance movement against foreign occupation, was deported to Siberia and spent 20 years in a gulag. Geka's collection of documentaries that study the lives of politically oppressed Latvians all address the topic of historical trauma and how the events of the past, specifically the nightmares of World War Two, continue to shape the contemporary condition of many Latvians. _Aleksandrs Pel_ ē _cis_ ( _Alexandrs Pelecis_ , 1992) considers the work of the Latvian author who described his 23-year imprisonment in a Siberian gulag in his memoir _Sib_ ī _rijas gr_ ā _mata_ ( _The Siberian Book_ ).13 _Sib_ ī _rijas_ _b_ ē _rni_ ( _The Children of Siberia_ , 2001) studies what happened to the approximately 4,000 Jewish, Latvian, Polish, and Russian children who were deported to Siberia by the Soviets on June 14, 1941, examining the lives of the 400 of those boys and girls who survived and still live in Latvia and Siberia at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

In _Sveiciens no Sib_ ī _rijas_ ( _Greetings from Siberia_ , 2004), Geka explores the broken lives of the Latvians who were deported to the Krasnoyarsk, Tomsk, and Yenyiseiska regions (among others) in 1941 and 1949, and how these survivors conceptualize their identities today, while _Atcer_ ē _ties vai aizmirst?_ ( _Remember or Forget?_ , 2006) chronicles how the violent deportations from the 1940s decimated the native Latvian population and how the forced Sovietization process that began during this period still influences contemporary politics. _Igarka, Cer_ ī _ba un Taurenis_ ( _Igarka, Hope and Butterfly_ , 2008) investigates the personal histories of Laima Āriņa and her daughter Naģežda. Āriņa was sent to a concentration camp in Igarka on June 14, 1941, where she gave birth to her daughter. The film tells the story of how Naģežda grew up in the camp, befriending a boy, Anatolijs Taurenis, and of what happened to the pair when Naģežda returned to Latvia while Taurenis remained in Igarka. _Agapitova un izgl_ ā _btie_ ( _Agapitova and the Rescued_ , 2009) details the memories of the 6 Latvian children who were among the 60 survivors of a mass deportation of 700 people to the Siberian "death" island of Agapitova in 1942.

Geka's latest film, _Piemini Sib_ ī _riju_ ( _Remember Siberia_ , 2010) recounts the present-day pilgrimage to Siberia made by a group of Latvians who, as children, survived the gulags in the 1940s. The documentary details theirs childhood memories of being arrested and deported, and immortalizes their oral histories of witnessing interrogations and executions. In many respects, Geka's greatest contribution to post-1991 Latvian documentary filmmaking is in committing to celluloid the personal narratives that illuminate a devastating period in Latvian history, literally and metaphorically giving a voice to those people who have been ignored for decades.

Another well-established and prolific documentary filmmaker is Ināra Kolmane. Born in 1961, Kolmane received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Television Directing from the St Petersburg Institute of Theater, Music, and Cinema in 1994. She began her career as a producer at the newly formed Rīga Video Center from 1988 to 1991, and, along with some of her colleagues from the Video Venter, she founded the Deviņi Film Studio in the fall of 1991. During the 1990s, she moved into directing by making several award-winning commercials, while also making documentary shorts, such as _Baltijas smagais mar šs_ ( _The Heavy Baltic March_ , 1991) and _Latvijas_ _jaunatne starp Astrumiem un Rietumiem_ ( _The Youth of Latvia – Between East and West_ , 1998). Kolmane continued developing her interest in political and social topics in her films _Latvie šu le_ģ _ions_ ( _The Latvian Legion_ , 2000), about the Latvians drafted by the Nazis during World War Two; _Poco a poco_... (2001), profiling a young Latvian musician's struggle to choose between devoting his life to art and pursuing a more financially secure profession; and _Aiziet tums_ ā ( _Going into Darkness_ , 2003), addressing youth drug addiction in Latvia.

Kolmane has also made several notable documentaries that focus on particular individuals living outside Latvia. _Pasaules nepasaule_ ( _A World Apart_ , 2002) depicts the circle of Latvian artists that formed in New York's Hell's Kitchen district in the 1950s and thrived through the following decades. As exiles who fled their homeland during World War Two, these poets, painters, and literary critics created a community devoted to supporting Latvian culture in the United States. In _Vijaya_ (2004), Kolmane shows audiences a profile of Vija Vētra, a Latvian dancer and choreographer who has devoted her life to Eastern and modern dance. Vētra, who also fled from Latvia during World War Two, has spent her career popularizing Indian dancing in the United States and Europe, and Kolmane's work celebrates Vētra's various accomplishments in bridging the cultural divide between East and West.

By far, Kolmane's most successful film to date is _Mans v_ ī _rs Andrejs Saharovs_ ( _My Husband Andrey Sakharov_ , 2006). Screened internationally in over 24 film festivals in 17 different countries, and winning the Lielais Kristaps Award (the Latvian equivalent to an Academy Award) for Best Documentary in 2007, _Mans v_ ī _rs Andrejs Saharovs_ asks how a well-respected and highly regarded academician in the Soviet Union could become one of its most vocal and public dissidents. To answer this question, Kolmane interviews, among others, Sakharov's widow, Yelena Bonner, as well as the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. The documentary addresses the subjects of human rights, free speech, democracy, and the abuse of power – themes that, Kolmane suggests, are even more relevant in 2006 than they were during Sakharov's time.

Since making _Mans v_ ī _rs Andrejs Saharovs_ , Kolmane has devoted her time to making the documentary film Akts ( _The Nude_ , 2008), which examines the relationship between photographer Gunārs Binde and art historian Sarmīte Sīle. Kolmane also made her first feature-length fiction film, entitled _Mona_ (2009). Her most recent nonfiction film, _Pretrun_ ī _g_ ā _v_ ē _sture_ ( _Contradictory History_ , 2010), relatesthe stories of three men in Latvia who survived World War Two, representing the experiences of history from Latvian, Russian, and Jewish perspectives respectively. The first endured multiple incarcerations and torture by the Soviets, as well as deportation to Siberia. The second remained alive despite time in a concentration camp where he lost his parents and younger brother. The third miraculously survived the Nazi Liepāja massacres in 1941, and, as an adult, has helped build a war memorial in Šķēde to all victims of the war. The film ultimately explores the personal narratives of these individuals to demonstrate how and why competing histories of World War Two continue to shape the public discourse in Latvia.

Finally, it is important to note that, while the aforementioned documentarists are among the most prominent, prolific, and controversial artists active in Latvia today, this list is, by no means, comprehensive or definitive. Pakalniņa, Cilinska, Šņore, Geka, and Kolmane are, by far, the most media-savvy among contemporary Latvian documentarians. With many connections abroad in film festivals and schools, these five exceptional filmmakers know how to market themselves and their work outside Latvia. The resulting amount of information available about each one of them may lead one to assume that, with the exception of Šņore, female documentarists dominate the field. This is certainly not the case! However, what may correctly be concluded from the examples of the filmmakers highlighted in this chapter is that English-language skills, a network of colleagues in Europe and North America, and a commitment to self-promotion garner more media attention and produce more resources on these artists and their works.

Besides Pakalniņa, Cilinska, Šņore, Geka, and Kolmane, there are many more notable filmmakers who have been making nonfiction works in Latvia since 1991 that merit serious academic attention, but whose work falls outside of the limited scope of this study. Among other noteworthy documentary filmmakers from this period, one should mention Juris Poškus ( _Bet stunda n_ ā _k_ ( _But The Hour is Near_ ), 2004), Uma Celma ( _Olu kundze_ ( _The Egg Lady_ ), 2000; _Sievietes un sargi_ ( _Women and guards_ ), 2009), _Ivars Zviedris_ ( _SIB-_ Ī _rija_ ( _SIB-Ireland_ ), 2007; _B_ ē _gums_ ( _Low Tide_ ), 2009), _P_ ē _teris Krilovs_ ( _Klucis – nepareizais latvietis_ ( _Klucis – The Deconstruction of an Artist_ ), 2008), Kaspars Goba ( _Seda: Purva_ ļ _audis_ ( _Seda: People of the Marsh_ ), 2004), Viesturs Kairišs ( _Romeo un Džuljeta_ ( _Romeo and Juliet_ ), 2004; _Piemineklis_ ( _Memorial_ ), 2004), and Andis Mizišs ( _Jumta likums (Roof on the Moonway_ ), 2001; _T_ ā _rps_ ( _The Worm_ ), 2005). One must also acknowledge that many of the members of the Rīga School of Poetic Documentary, such as Hercs Franks ( _Flashback_ , 2002; _Aufenhalt Germania_ , 2004) and Ivars Seleckis ( _Jaunie laiki Š_ ķē _rsiel_ ā ( _New Times at Crossroad Street_ ), 1999; _Zem ozola kuplajiem zariem_ ( _In the Shade of the Oak Tree_ ), 2007), have continued creating films since the regaining of independence and persist in contributing to Latvia's documentary landscape.

#  **A Common Theme**

As demonstrated above, the topics that Latvian documentary filmmakers have explored since 1991are varied and extensive. They have examined such disparate issues as the legacy of the deportations to Siberia, the colorful life of a Latvian dancer, the contemporary sex trade, and the ecosystem of a landfill. Moreover, their approaches to showing this material have also represented a spectrum of documentary methods, ranging from Pakalniņa's poetic meditations on the everyday to Šņore's lacerating expository indictment of Stalin's regime. Yet, given the multifariousness of these documentaries, one may still identify a prevalent theme that invariably informs post-1991 Latvian nonfiction works: the traces of the past on the present. Whether investigating a devastating event from World War Two or exploring a current social concern, the filmmakers who have filled the Latvian documentary world since the collapse of communism are all unfailingly preoccupied with coming to terms with historical trauma and understanding how Latvian lives today have been overdetermined by past occurrences. Even in Pakalniņa's nonfiction oeuvre, consisting of works that initially appear only to involve a fascination with the present moment, one may still find vestiges of the Soviet era in the spaces and in the people that she films.

Why this ubiquitous attention to the presence of the past? It is important to remember that documentary cinema has always been closely tied to politics and national identity in Latvia. Considering this connection, it is no surprise for nonfiction filmmakers to seek to illuminate today's people and their problems by turning to historical events. Likewise, one may even argue that these filmmakers heralded the growing contemporary cultural drive to analyze and comprehend Latvia's complex history. The first post-1991 social impulses to forget the Soviet past and embrace all things Western are slowly being replaced by a desire to generate a new public dialogue and understanding about Latvia's tumultuous past during the twentieth century. Recent examples of this trend include the popular one-man show of the Jaunais Rīgas Teātris (The New Rīga Theater) company entitled _Vect_ ē _vs_ ( _Grandfather_ ), a play that opened in January 2009. It explores the history of two grandfathers during World War Two – one was a Soviet partisan, the other a legionnaire. Later in 2009, the Ministry of Education announced that beginning in 2011 Latvian history would be taught as a subject in its own right (i.e., separately from world history) in primary schools (Arnicāns, 2009: n.p.). While the emphasis on publicly discussing the nation's difficult history and its effect on today's life is very recent, Latvian documentary filmmakers have proved to be in the vanguard of the articulation of their country's zeitgeist in the new millennium.

#  **Future Directions for Documentary**

This obsession with the past's influence on the present in the work of contemporary Latvian documentary filmmakers will likely continue to dominate the sphere of nonfiction cinema in this Baltic country for the foreseeable future, although these artists will also have to contend with new, critical issues. The worldwide economic emergency of 2008 affected Latvia deeply. The country has since transformed from having the fastest growing economy in the entire European Union to possessing the highest unemployment rate of the European Union, with nearly 23 percent of its population jobless in early 2010 (McGuinness, 2010: n.p.). Wages have fallen while inflation has risen, inciting violent riots in the streets of Rīga in January 2009 demanding the dissolution of the parliament (Barry, 2009: A10). In an attempt to stabilize the economic free fall, Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis issued severe government budget cuts and revenue increases. In the fall of 2010 the Unity Party gained reelection, making it likely that these austere measures will continue until Latvia reemerges from recession.

The global economic crisis of 2008 profoundly affected Latvia not only financially and politically but also culturally. In the realm of cinema, Latvian filmmakers found themselves to be in a climate similar to the one they experienced immediately after the collapse of communism. Private funding opportunities diminished as state subsidies available for the arts decreased, consequently increasing the already fierce competition among filmmakers for limited monies. In March of 2010, filmmakers from 36 documentary projects applied for 522 131 lats (or roughly US$1 044 262) worth of state grants; a mere 122 400 lats (US$244 800) of government funding was awarded to just 13 proposals. In other words, the documentary filmmakers received only 23 percent of the money requested for their projects (Delfi, 2010a: n.p.). Complicating matters even more, the legislation passed by the parliament on June 17, 2010 requires all films that receive state funding to conform to at least three of the following six stipulations: (i) the action featured in the film must transpire in Latvia or in another European nation; (ii) one of the main protagonists must have some connection with Latvia; (iii) the director or the screenwriter must be either a Latvian citizen or possess the equivalent of a green card, or the screenwriter must speak Latvian; (iv) the film's theme must address some aspect pertaining to Latvia; (v) the final version of the film must be in the Latvian language; and (vi) the film must be based on an original Latvian literary work (Delfi, 2010b: n.p.). While these provisions have clearly been constructed with fiction films in mind, nonfiction filmmakers will be required to comply with the new regulations as well if they receive any government grants for their projects.

It remains to be seen how Latvian documentary cinema in the new millennium will respond to these challenges. Now filmmakers must contend with this new state censorship in addition to continued funding woes and audience apathy. Yet, despite the growing constraints, Latvia's nonfiction filmmakers are playing key roles in provoking public discourse on the nation's troubled history and how this past continues to inform the present. As the inhabitants of Latvia struggle with questions of statehood, history, and identity, particularly in light of their recent membership in the European Union and N.A.T.O., the country's documentary cinema persists as a space for artistic and political exploration and provocation. Latvian nonfiction filmmaking has proved that it can endure anything, from massive political upheaval to total financial collapse. Undoubtedly, the cinema will survive the contemporary crisis, but the question remains, will Latvia?

 **Notes**

I would like to offer my sincere thanks to the people and organizations that provided ­valuable assistance in the researching and writing of this article: Laila Pakalniņa, Antra Cilinska, Andrejs Feldmanis, Ieva Gundare, Rasma Birzgale, Flavia Laviosa, Anikó Imre, the Rīga Film Museum, and the Latvian National Film Centre.

1 The 10 countries are, in alphabetical order: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

2 _Padomju Latvija_ would reappear in 1944 with the return of Soviet rule, and it would become one of the most prolific newsreel series in Latvian history, regularly producing 32–34 "issues" in each subsequent year (Civjans and Uzulniece, 1989: 103).

3 One must note that the labeling of this loose association of filmmakers as part of a "poetic school of documentary filmmaking" differs from the way such documentary historians and theorists as Erik Barnouw and Bill Nichols define "poetic documentary." For Barnouw and Nichols, poetic documentary filmmaking entails a focus on form and abstraction, as well as an investigation of romantic vision and experimentation. The Latvian filmmakers, however, produced documentaries which critics labeled "poetic" because of the films' conduciveness to metaphoric readings, and not because of a sole concentration on form or experimentation. For more on Barnouw and Nichols' views on poetic documentary, see Barnouw, 1993: 185–198 and Nichols 2001.

4 For more information on the Rīga School of Poetic Documentary, see Vitols, 2008: 11–25.

5 Two of Podnieks's cameramen, Gvido Zvaigzne and Andris Slapiņš, where fatally shot during these confrontations. The footage of their deaths is included in Podnieks's 1991 documentary _P_ ē _cv_ ā _rds_ ( _Postscript_ ).

6 For more information on Juris Podnieks and his work, see Vitols, 2008: 30–224.

7 For more information on the "Awakening" movement in Latvia, see Plakāns, 1995: 80–111.

8 For more information on the Latvian theater tradition, see Kārlis Kundziņš, _Latvie šu_ _te_ ā _tra v_ ē _sture_ , Vol. 1 (Rīga: Liesma, 1968) and Vol. 2 (Rīga: Liesma: 1972).

9 Since 2007, an additional theater has closed while a new, 3D-equipped multiplex cinema has opened its doors in the Rīga Plaza Mall.

10 Pakalniņa also holds a degree in television journalism from Moscow University.

11 For more information on Pakalniņa's treatment of the banal in her oeuvre, see ­Vitols (2010).

12 The Barricades protests occurred in Rīga in January 1991 when Latvians demanded their independence from the Soviet Union. Podnieks famously filmed these events in his documentary _P_ ē _cv_ ā _rds_ ( _Postscript_ , 1991). For more information on the Barricades protests, see Plakāns 1995: 178–180.

13 The censored version of this text, entitled _Ar Melno v_ ē _ju_ ( _With the Black Wind_ ), was released in Latvia in 1991, while the complete uncensored version was released in the United States in 1993 under the title of Sibīrijas grāmata. For more information on Pelēcis's work, see Jirgens, 2006 and 2007 and Nesaule, 2006.

 **References**

Arnicāns, Matīss (2009) Latvijas vēsturi atsevišķi skolās mācīs no 2011.gada (Latvian history will be taught separately in schools beginning in 2011), _Diena_ , October 3, 2009, <http://diena.lv/lat/politics/hot/latvijas-vesturi-atseviski-skolas-macis-no-2011-gada> (accessed October 3, 2009).

Barnouw, Erik (1993) _Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film_ , 2nd rev. edn. Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford.

Barry, Ellen (2009) Latvia is shaken by riots over its weak economy, _The New York Times_ (January 15), A10.

Civjans, Juris and Uzulniece, Anita (1989) Dokumentālā kino attīstība (The Development of Documentary Film), in _Padomju Latvijas kinom_ ā _ksla_ ( _Soviet Latvia's Cinema_ ) (ed. Lilija Dzene). Liesma, Rīga, pp. 103–132.

 _Delfi_ (2010a) Piešķirts finansējums animācijas un dokumentālo filmu projektiem (Financial grants awarded to animation and documentary film projects), _Delfi_ (April 12, 2010),<http://kultura.delfi.lv/news/entertainment/movies/pieskirts-finansejums-animacijas-un-dokumentalo-filmu-projektiem.d?id=31200449> (accessed April 12, 2010).

 _Delfi_ (2010b) Saeima pieņem Filmu likumu (Parliament passes film law), _Delfi_ (June17, 2010), <http://kultura.delfi.lv/news/entertainment/culturenvironment/saeima-pienem-filmu-likumu.d?id=32559483> (accessed June 17, 2010).

_The Economist_ (2008) Telling the Soviet story: A new film about Nazi–Soviet links, _The Economist_ (May 22, 2008), <http://www.economist.com/node/11401983> (accessed July 18, 2010).

Imre, Anikó (2005) Introduction: East European cinemas in new perspectives, in _East European Cinemas_ (ed. Anikó Imre). Routledge, New York and London, pp. xi–xxvi.

Iordanova, Dina (2010) Migration and cinematic process in post-cold war Europe, in _European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe_ (ed. Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg). Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 50–75.

Jirgens, Karl (2006) "Labyrinths of Meaning," in Aleksandrs Pelēcis' _Siberia Book_ and Agate Nesaule's _Woman in Amber_ : A Postmodern/Postcolonial Reading, in _Baltic Postcolonialism_ (ed. Violeta Kelertas). Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, pp. 359–385.

Jirgens, Karl (2007) Censorship after independence: the case of Aleksander Pelēcis, in _History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries_ , Vol. 3 (ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer). John Benjamins Publishing Co., Amsterdam and Philadelphia, pp. 138–142.

Kundziņš, Kārlis (1968/1972) _Latvie_ š _u te_ ā _tra_ _v_ ē _sture_ , Vols 1 and 2. Liesma, Rīga.

Matīsa, Kristīne (2006) Yesterday and Today of Latvian Documentaries: Looking to the Future. _Film News from Latvia_ , Special issue of _Latvian Documentaries_ , 1–3.

Mazierska, Ewa (2010) Eastern European cinema: old and new approaches. _Studies in EasternEuropean Cinema_ , 1(1): 5–16.

McGuinness, Damien (2010) Latvia economy reels in recession, _BBC News_ (February 4, 2010),<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8496925.stm> (accessed February 4, 2010).

Nesaule, Agate (2006) _Woman in Amber_ : A Postmodern/Postcolonial Reading, in _Baltic Postcolonialism_ (ed. Violeta Kelertas). Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, pp. 359–385.

Nichols, Bill (2001) _Introduction to Documentary_. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, pp. 88–91 and 102–105.

Pērkone, Inga and Redovičs, Agris (1994) _Latvijas kino: 1991–1993 (Latvian Cinema: 1991–1993)_. Nacionālais Kinematogrāfijas centrs un Rīgas Kino muzejs, Rīga.

Plakāns, Andrejs (1995) _The Latvians: A Short History_. Stanford University Press and Hoover Institution Press, Stanford, CA.

Rietuma, Dita (2007) Latviešu kino meistari cīnās par naudu filmām (Latvian cinema masters fight for money for films). _Diena_ (March 1), 1.

Vitols, Maruta Z (2008) _From the personal to the public: Juris Podnieks and Latvian documentary cinema_. Ph.D. dissertation, The Ohio State University.

Vitols, Maruta Z (2010) Alternative spaces, alternative voices: the art of Laila Pakalniņa. _Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis_ , 56 (2010): 33–39.

# 18

# Eastern European Historical Epics

#  _Genre Cinema and the Visualization of a Heroic National Past_

Nikolina Dobreva

#  **Introduction**

With the exception of some research on Westerns and science fiction films produced by the East German studio (DEFA), genre is rarely studied in the context of pre-1989 Eastern European cinema.1 Monographs on national cinemas in the region tend to highlight auteurs and dissident movements, such as "new waves," but ignore genre cinema.2 Critics find the latter unworthy of analysis, since genre films are rarely innovative or original in terms of aesthetics and content.3 Distribution problems further contribute to the gap of scholarship, as genre films made in the Eastern bloc have rarely if ever been released in the West. Nevertheless, genre films, such as comedies, war films, children's films, science fiction, and musicals, are an essential part of Eastern European cinema, and have been both popular and influential in their respective countries of origin. It would be impossible, within a single chapter, to construct a complex analysis of genre that could encompass the whole region. However, with this critical piece I would like to open a discussion on genre cinema in the region by addressing the role of one particular genre, the historical epic. Prior to 1989, almost every Eastern European country made at least one big-budget epic based on important events in the nation's history which were used in official discourse to inspire national pride and establish a continuity with the past. While subject matters ranged from founding a medieval state ( _681: The Glory of the Khan_ , Bulgaria, 1981) to resistance against the Nazi armies ( _Walter Defends Sarajevo_ , Yugoslavia, 1972), the region's struggles against the Ottoman Empire remained an important shared topic. Films such as _The Great Warrior Skanderbeg_ (Albania, 1953), _Crescent Moon_ (Hungary, 1968), _Colonel Wolodyjowski_ (Poland, 1969), _Mihai Viteazul_ (Romania, 1970), _Measure For Measure_ (Bulgaria, 1981), and _Battle of Kosovo_ (Yugoslavia, 1989) are all historical epics that offer similar approaches to this topic and serve as a space of complex interactions between nationalism, Orientalism, and Marxism.

These productions (as well as other historical epics) served as channels of Marxist ideology and pro-Soviet sentiment but also functioned as narratives that established national pride and constructed an identity that could build a bridge between a distant national past and a modernity that allegedly breaks away from primitivism and nationalism. In Marx's view of history, society undergoes four successive socioeconomic stages depending on the ownership and availability of the means of production (primitivism, feudalism, capitalism, socialism) to eventually reach communism.4 While capitalism is seen as exploitative of the proletariat, it is nevertheless an essential stage of social development that is based on industrialization. That is why prolonged feudalism becomes an obstacle on the way to communism not only of itself but also because it delays the historically necessary rise – and fall – of industry and capitalism. Thus Marxist–Leninist historiography in Eastern Europe inevitably described a feudal entity such as the Ottoman Empire as primitive, and welcomed the emergence of independence movements brought about by the early stages of capitalism.

This perception of the Ottoman Empire overlapped with the one that had been embraced by nationalist ideologies in Eastern Europe throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for, regardless of individual country specificity, nationalism in the region invariably embraced a European (including indigenous) identity and rejected the "Oriental" one associated with the Ottomans.5 Marxist historiography was thus able to build on already existing nationalist assessments of the region's late medieval and early modern past. The perception of the Ottoman Empire as an outdated entity that brought stagnation to the region became (or rather remained) part of official state ideology and was further embedded into the national consciousness of people in the Eastern bloc. This is also how the Ottoman Empire is represented in the historical epics that are the subject of this chapter. Although they come from different countries and are made during different decades, the films share these attitudes, as well as a specific visual style. In addition, they conform to most of the conventions of the historical epic genre. I will examine some of these features in an attempt to show how ideology and specific national contexts have affected the visualization of the past within an otherwise international genre.

All of these films, as well as other epics from Eastern Europe, have been studied before. These studies, however, have tended to address the films as individual texts, and not as part of a general trend that can be observed in Eastern European filmmaking. In addition, they analyze the films from a variety of perspectives, none of which accounts specifically for genre. For example, Jackel provides some background information on _Mihai Viteazul_ as one of a number of historical epics produced in Romania at the time, but concludes that the film is a reflection of "the megalomania and opportunistic ambitions of its director" (2006: 84). Petrova (2003) offers an extensive analysis of _Measure for Measure_ ; however, her approach is psychoanalytical. I contend that historical epics are an essential part not only of individual Eastern European national cinema traditions but of the region's cinema in general, and, in order to be fully understood and appreciated, they must be studied as genre cinema.

#  **Genre**

While audiences are likely to be able immediately to identify a certain cinematic text as belonging to a certain popular film genre, articulating what defines that genre or "genre" in general is a much more demanding task. Scholarship on genre is abundant but critics disagree even on basic theoretical precepts and employ a variety of methods to address the topic (Schatz, 1981; Reed, 1989; Neale, 2000). In addition, studies on genre often consist of analyses of clusters of genre films, an approach that relies on the presumption that the films analyzed belong to the genre that is the topic of study (Nelmes, 2003: 153–58). Nonetheless, some recent authors have attempted to offer a consistent theory of genre that builds on previous scholarship. One of the most useful books in this respect is Rick Altman's _Film Genre_ (1999). Altman traces the study of genre along two separate lines of criticism: those that focus on semantics and those that focus on syntax. The semantic definitions of genre are concerned exclusively with content and meaning, while syntactic ones rely on form. Criticism that employs a semantic approach would be exploring common themes (e.g., what themes are often tackled in a family melodrama?), common narrative patterns, specific character types, and specific actors within a body of works that could be classified under the umbrella of a genre. In contrast, the syntactic approach is concerned with conventions (frequently used stylistic devices), iconography (themes or concepts expressed by symbolically charged objects and events), and setting (where and when a film takes place). When discussing genre, however, it is arguably best to incorporate both, since each of the two lines of thought offers only limited insight into the way in which genre functions. In addition to semantics and syntax, factors that need to be considered in a discussion of genre include the way the filmmaking industry is structured, audience expectations, and contemporary (pop) culture, among others (the "pragmatic" aspect of genre studies). Altman embraces precisely such a combined semantic/syntactic/pragmatic approach, which views genre as a set of formal conventions triggered by a certain theme and analyzed in its sociocultural and production context (1999: 207–211). This is the approach that I find most useful in my discussion of Eastern European historical epics, as these films all share a theme (struggles against the Ottoman Empire) which is represented within the formal conventions of the historical epic that have been used by Hollywood and Italian productions that fall within the same genre and inevitably reflect the specificity of the society and of the structure of the film industries of their countries of production.

Not long after the birth of cinema, producers, especially in the United States, began to coordinate promotion campaigns around generic concepts. Genre films were easy to sell to audiences who had certain expectations and were willing to see more of the same type of film. In fact, the whole Hollywood industry was organized to create such expectations by producing genre films and marketing them and their star vehicles to appropriate audiences. Audiences, however, change together with changes that occur in national culture. That is why many genres that were popular in the 1940s and 1950s in the United States, such as the Western and the musical, have become all but obsolete or completely transformed by the 2000s.6 Genres tend to be affected by changing audiences and cultures, and often reflect the dominant ideology at the time. More importantly, however, as narrative methods and filmmaking techniques evolve, genres evolve with them. Some of the generic conventions change, since genres are dynamic: they develop and change over time, yet remain easy for audiences to identify (Altman 1999: 179–194).

In the context of pre-1989 Eastern Europe the study of genre has been generally neglected.7 The film industries of the Communist countries of the Eastern bloc were nationalized after World War Two and operated under the guidance of Communist governments aligned with the Soviet Union. Unlike Hollywood, then, these national industries did not depend on sales, since their production was entirely subsidized by the state. Thus, they did not need to attract audiences by producing genre films or conventional narratives that would meet a potential viewer's expectations. Nevertheless, Eastern European countries of the Communist bloc did produce a large number of genre films, and locally made comedies, war movies, and even Westerns were very popular in their respective countries of origin, as well as in other Communist countries.

My choice of the historical epic as a starting point in the exploration of genre in Eastern European cinema is motivated by the complex ramifications of this particular genre in the region that touch on Marxist ideology, nationalism, and Orientalism. The version of the past that historical epics present to the viewer is inevitably subjective and subject to manipulation depending on filmmakers' agendas, generic conventions, and audience expectations. In pre-1989 Eastern European cinema the representation of history in historical epics is further complicated, as it had to comply with official state and Communist Party directives while fostering national pride without being jingoistic and hence at odds with Marxist ideology which embraces class rather than national allegiance. This fine balance was achieved by representing nationalist struggles as popular movements led by sympathetic royal figures. In addition, criticism that normally would have been reserved for the bourgeoisie or foreign powers was aimed instead at the Ottoman Empire, an approach which created a consistent Orientalist depiction of that political entity.

#  **The Historical Epic**

Historical film has been the subject of a number of studies. Some of the most prominent authors in the field are historians who attempt to theorize how films can function as historical narratives (Rosenstone, 1995; Davis, 2000) or critics who study how films reshape our collective imaginary of history (Burgoyne, 1997; Landy, 2001). Critics sometimes focus on a particular time period (Wyke, 1997; Solomon, 2001) or region (Iordanova, 2001 and 2003). However, since all of these authors are concerned predominantly with how history is (re)constructed in film, the cinematic texts they study vary in genre, and only a small number of these are historical epics.

Other studies have been dedicated to epics, but not necessarily historical ones. Both King (2000) and Hall and Neal (2010), for example, consider certain science fiction productions, such as _Star Wars_ , epic films. More recently, Burgoyne (2011) has edited a collection of essays that offer a variety of contemporary theoretical perspectives on epics from around the world. He fails, however, to offer any general conclusions on the ways in which the historical epic has been established or functions as a transnational genre.

Unlike the scholars of historical film, my purpose is to explain how genre, and not history, was used in Eastern European cinema to support Marxist and nationalist ideology. I find Derek Elley's _The Epic Film: Myth and History_ (1984) a particularly useful reference text as far as generically defining the historical epic is concerned, since the author studies a large database of films in order to list and explain the most prominent recurrent characteristics of Hollywood historical epics. Elley searches for the origins of the epic film in literature. He also observes a certain shift in meaning of the word "epic" from its original denotation of heroic exploits to its current usage of "awesome" or "monumental." Elley believes that the pomp and glamor of historical epics is partially responsible for this shift. Indeed, one of the characteristics of the historical epic on which all critics agree is precisely the genre's visual style, which inevitably involves the grandeur of mass scenes, monumental sets, and elaborate costumes. These formalistic elements became a necessity in the 1950s when the advancement of television prompted Hollywood film studios to make their films more spectacular in order to compete with the easy access to films on television and comfort of viewing them there, which was drawing audiences away from the theaters.

Nonetheless, opulence is by no means the only characteristic of a historical epic. Indeed, many authors are careful to distinguish between "epics" and "spectacles." For example, in their _Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters_ , critics Hall and Neals observe that

[the epic] was as indicative of size and expense as it was of particular kinds of historical setting, of protagonists who are caught up in large scale events as it was of those who sway the course of history or the fate of nations. The [spectacle] tended ­simply – and tautologically – to indicate the presence of spectacular settings, actions, and scenes. (2010: 5)

Critics such as Patrick Lucanio (1994) make the distinction within the context of Italian cinema, which has not only produced just as many and as spectacular epics as Hollywood but has also successfully exported their dubbed versions to the United States.8 Lucanio claims that all Italian "peplums" (historical films dealing with ancient Rome) are spectacles that are defined exclusively by their opulent visual style including melodrama and fairy tale motifs, while many of the Hollywood historical films are epics that also involve complex narrative and character development (1994: 20–22).

As a rule, Hollywood historical epics are concerned predominantly with the distant past. In his extensive study on the topic, Elley groups the large number of films that fall into the genre into those that deal with the Bible, ancient Rome, ancient Greece, and the early Middle Ages. While Hollywood epics about the American Civil War or the War of Independence do exist, the vast majority are focused on European topics that are removed in both space and time from contemporary American audiences.

Eastern European historical epics were similarly focused on the distant past. A number of epics dealt with World War Two, but the majority explored the Middle Ages, whether concerning the establishment of a nation-state or its struggles against powerful empires. In this chapter I focus exclusively on historical epic films that present certain East European countries' attempts to resist the advancement of the Ottoman Empire into Europe during the Middle Ages or to rebel against its already established dominance in the early modern and late medieval era. Since in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Ottoman armies coming from Asia marched into Europe reaching as far west as Vienna, all of Eastern Europe was historically affected by their advance. All the Eastern European countries that fell under Soviet influence after World War Two, possibly with the exception of East Germany and Czechoslovakia, have produced at least one major historical epic dealing with their contact with the Ottomans. While the visual splendor of these films might seem incongruent with the austerity of Communist ideology, lavish productions nevertheless served a very specific purpose in Eastern European cinemas. As Michael Stoil observes in his study of Balkan cinema, while Hollywood productions were considered decadent and hence undesirable viewing (1982: 24), local productions that emphasized continuity with the past were welcomed (49), at least until they became too expensive and were abandoned in favor of cheaper films with everyday themes.

Before analyzing some of these films, an integral part of Eastern European cinema, it is important first to contextualize them. The 1953 Albanian–Soviet coproduction _The Great Warrior Skanderbeg_ ( _Velikiy voin Albanii Skanderbeg_ , dir. Sergei Yutkevich), which is to this day considered a landmark in Albanian filmmaking.9 The film tells the story of Albanian national hero Skanderbeg from the time when as a child he is sent to Hadrianopolis as a hostage to the invading Ottomans, through his return to Albania and his military exploits against the Ottoman armies, and ultimately to his betrayal and death. Hailed as the "first" Albanian feature film, the picture was directed by a Russian and employed a large Soviet production team and cast (including in some of the leading roles).10 It served a twofold purpose: to set up a national cinema industry and to promote a pro-Soviet Marxist agenda by retelling the story of Skanderbeg as a hero of the people rather than one of the fifteenth-century Balkan feudal lords involved in a local power struggle.

The much more recent Yugoslav film _Battle of Kosovo_11 ( _Boj na Kosovu_ , dir. Zdravko Šotra, 1989) deals with similar events that occurred in medieval Serbia. The battle of the title was the final stand of the Serbian king Lazar against the invading armies of Sultan Murad in 1389 in which both sides suffered heavy losses and both rulers lost their lives. In the film, the narrative builds up gradually to reach a climax with the battle itself, which led to the Ottoman Empire's conquest of the Kingdom of Serbia but prevented the Ottoman Turks from advancing further into Europe.12 The film, based on a play by Ljubomir Simović, was commissioned for the five-hundredth anniversary of the battle of Kosovo, an event that by the late 1970s had developed into a focal point of Serbian nationalism.

The Romanian film _Mihai Viteazul_ (dir. Sergiu Nicolaescu, 1970) and the Bulgarian _Measure For Measure_ ( _Mera spored mera_ , dir. Georgi Dyulgerov, 1981) feature events that occurred not during the expansion but during the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, and they focus on independence movements that emerged with the development of a proto-nationalist ideology in seventeenth-century Romania and nationalism in early twentieth-century Macedonia respectively. _Mihai Viteazul_13 was one of several historical epics made around the time of Ceauşescu's distancing from the Soviet Union.14 The film tells the story of seventeenth-century Wallachian ruler Mihai Pătraşcu, dubbed "Viteazul" (the Brave), who fought against both the Ottoman Empire and the rulers of Moldova and Transylvania, succeeding eventually in pushing back the Ottomans and gaining brief control over all three principalities that form the core of present-day Romania. _Viteazul_ 's nationalist topic and its emphasis on Romanian unity and independence from foreign rule were part of Ceauşescu regime's efforts to break away from Soviet influence in the late 1960s and early 1970s.15

 _Measure for Measure_ , on the other hand, was one of two major historical epics commissioned to commemorate the thirteen-hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the Bulgarian state.16 The three-part 280-minute film follows the course of the Ilinden Uprising in August 1903 from its inception to its bloody aftermath. The uprising's purpose was to gain Macedonia's independence from Ottoman rule, and it is portrayed in the film as an attempt to unite what were considered inherently Bulgarian territories into a viable ethnic state. The topic was controversial in view of the strained relationship between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia at the time, and the film, based on _A Liturgy for Ilinden_ , the acclaimed novel by Svoboda Buchvarova (1977), was clearly aimed at reasserting Bulgarian national pride. It was also the first Bulgarian feature film to portray the independence of Macedonia, a previously taboo topic, seen in Yugoslavia as a manifestation of dangerous pro-Bulgarian nationalist sentiment (Holloway, 2008: 201).

#  **Eastern European Epics: Generic Conventions**

Despite the fact that the four films were made in different countries and a number of years apart they all share some of the generic conventions of the historical epic. All four productions are focused around an epic hero involved in monumental events that change the course of his nation. These events are depicted with varying amounts of historical accuracy, but they are inevitably constructed as a spectacle featuring extravagant mass scenes, heroic battles, and elaborate period costumes. The films comply with and promote Marxist ideology and Cold War political alignments as they emphasize the relationship between the hero and the common folk and portray Western Europe in a negative light. More importantly, they construct the Ottoman Empire as a brutal militant colonizer that cannot be allowed to establish a lasting presence in the region.

In his book about Hollywood historical epics, Derek Elley searches for the roots of the historical epic film in epic poetry, observing that, "the literary epic generally turns on the exploits of a single central character, surrounded by a broad substratum of secondary characters who react upon him morally. This focus, this pyramidal structure, gives epic much of its power – the characters are supra (and sometimes super-) human, waging an allegorical struggle on their own plane" (1984: 16). He goes on to explain that cinema is "perfectly equipped" to handle this type of narrative, since it "has its own levels of reality, depending upon its stylisation of 'real life'" (16). In addition, the star system also contributes to epic character depiction, since the charisma of a star functions as a focal point for the protagonist's portrayal in the film.

Eastern European historical epics dealing with nationalist struggles against the Ottoman Empire similarly organize their narrative around an epic hero. All the four films I discuss in this chapter feature an important central character involved in monumental events. _Viteazul_ and _Skanderbeg_ are evidently named after their protagonists, historical figures essential to Romania and Albania's respective attempts to resist the Ottoman Empire. The protagonists in both films are of aristocratic origin and initially seem compliant with the Ottomans. However, as the narrative develops, both are revealed to be selfless defenders of their land and their people. They inspire by example and are able to gather armies powerful enough to stand their ground in the face of the advancing Ottomans. The two films also abound in detail about their protagonists' personal lives. In this they are similar to the Hollywood epics, in which the protagonist is often a sympathetic member of the royalty or a natural leader whose personal life is intricately bound to the fate of his country and his people (e.g., _The Ten Commandments_ , 1956; _Spartacus_ , 1960; _Braveheart_ , 1995). However, in Hollywood productions love motivates the protagonist, offers him consolation, or is simply added to the plot in order to attract larger, presumably female, audiences. In Kubrick's 1960 _Spartacus_ , for example, a film that could easily have the epic hero fight to help his fellow slaves, Spartacus's rebellion is directly motivated by his love for Varinia, not by the suffering of the other gladiators. In the more recent _Gladiator_ (2000), the protagonist, devastated after the murder of his wife and child, finds the strength to live in the hope that he will reunite with them in the afterlife.17

In contrast, in epics made under communism love is never distracting to the protagonist and always remains in the service of the nationalist cause. For instance, Skanderbeg's staunchest supporter throughout the film is his wife, Donika (Besa Imami). She stands by him no matter how many battles he has to fight. Even their newborn son is presented to the other nobles as just another warrior to join the Albanian army. Shortly before the end of the film Donika reminds Skanderbeg of their seventeenth wedding anniversary, which he has forgotten. He is instantly filled with remorse, but she assures him that he and Albania are inseparable in her mind, and if she was able to help him just a little with his struggle, that will be enough for her. King Lazar's wife in _Kosovo_ has a similar supportive role. In _Viteazul_ , however, Mihai's wife, Doamna Stanca (Ioana Bulcă) is seen as a destructive entity. She refuses to participate in the prince's power struggles and strives to prevent their only son from fighting together with his father. Mihai, however, does not waver. He finds a female friend (and possibly lover) from an Italian aristocratic family, who supports him morally and financially. In the end, he forces his wife to allow their son to fight, but the young man loses his life in his first battle. Stanca, now almost mad with grief, asks where her son's body is so that she can bury him properly, to which Mihai responds that "he is buried in Romanian soil." As these examples suggest, family is important to the epic hero, but is always placed in the service of a higher cause. Wives, sons, and personal happiness are easily sacrificed in the name of the nation. Even in _Viteazul_ the hero easily ignores and even abandons his wife when she refuses to participate in his historic struggle against the Ottomans.

Although filmmaking in countries with a centralized national industry functions in a manner quite different from that of Hollywood, and does not depend on a star system, actors behind the Iron Curtain achieved national, and often international, fame within the Soviet bloc. _Viteazul_ 's star actor, Amza Pellea, and the film's director, Sergiu Nicolaescu, in the role of Mihai's friend Selim Pasha, were both very attractive to Romanian audiences, who were by then well familiar with their work.18 In both _Kosovo_ and _Measure_ , the protagonists are also portrayed by well-known "stars." Miloš Žutić (Lazar) was a famous Serbian actor, who had taken on roles on the silver screen since the 1960s. The importance of his life's work is evident in the fact that an acting award was established in his name in Serbia in 1994, a year after his death. The protagonist of _Measure_ , Dilber Tanas, is portrayed by one of the best-known Bulgarian theater actors, Russi Chanev, who had also appeared on the big screen since the late 1960s.

All of these actors, as well as _Skanderbeg_ 's Khorava, share an acting style familiar to audiences of Hollywood epics. There is an air of solemnity about them, and they always hold their heads high as befits a larger-than-life noble hero. Each historical figure in the four films is carefully constructed to inspire awe in view of his actions and his personal sacrifice. The actors are consistently positioned in the center of the frame and display emotion with only fleeting eye or mouth twitches on their otherwise inscrutable faces. The screenplay supports this acting style, as the lines that the actors utter are succinct and rarely express any feeling except for patriotism and hatred for the enemy. The monumentality of the performance is ultimately congealed into a real visual monument. _Skanderbeg_ ends with shots of a statue of the protagonist in modern-day Albania; _Kosovo_ displays a rainbow at the end of the road that the Serbian people are taking, and in _Measure_ , Dilber Tanas's journal, albeit unfinished, has become part of the official records of the Bulgarian state.

The epic heroes of these films are thus simultaneously the focal point of the narrative and its main vehicle. Their depiction as monumental figures is further supported by the construction of each film as spectacle. Each of the four productions features numerous mass scenes with hundreds of extras.19 _Skanderbeg_ and _Viteazul_ are particularly impressive with their lavish battle scenes. _Viteazul_ recreates with historical accuracy a lengthy multipart battle between the armies of Mihai and Sinan Pasha armies at Călugăreni, featuring even a detailed discussion of the strategy of the two leaders as they are trying to outwit each other on both banks of a river. The camera pans on large-scale troop movements then cuts to individual duels on the battlefield. The costumes and props used are also quite impressive as they recreate a living past. Nothing is overlooked, including minute details such as stands for the guns of the shooters and different uniforms for troops of different geographic origin within the same army. This attention to detail remains effective throughout each film and applies to scenes as diverse as the protagonist's wedding in _Measure_ , church rituals in _Kosovo_ , or aristocrat gatherings in _Skanderbeg_.

The soundtrack of the four films is also specifically suited to contribute to their epic breadth. Orchestral music with heroic overtones plays at all the important scenes in each film, particularly those featuring cavalry rides across endless open plains. Furthermore, the native and the foreign are juxtaposed through musical motifs. Long takes of Ottoman armies preparing for an attack are scored to "Oriental" music featuring a lot of musical ornamentation and traditional Turkish instruments, such as the zurna (e.g., at the onset of the battle in _Kosovo_ ). The use of music allows for an aural juxtaposition of the Ottomans to the films' eponymous heroes, who are often encountered in the midst of local celebrations complete with folk music and dancing. Such is the case in both _Skanderbeg_ and _Measure_ , in which Skanderbeg and Dilber Tanas, respectively, attend weddings where they observe lengthy musical numbers that make no contribution to the plot other than to create an atmosphere of authenticity and local color.

#  **Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire in Eastern European Epics**

One of the most important aspects of the Eastern European epics is their portrayal of the relationship of their respective countries of origin with the Ottoman Empire and with Western Europe. Initially, in each film the viewer is left to wonder where the protagonist's loyalties lie. In both _Viteazul_ and _Skanderbeg_ , the title characters have strong connections to the sultan's court. The Romanian aristocrat Mihai navigates dangerous political currents in the capital of the Ottoman Empire in order to gain the sultan's trust and to be granted rule over the principality of Wallachia. In the process he exploits every possible angle, including borrowing money from Western Europe by using his charms on the heiress of a powerful family and his close relationship with the Ottoman aristocrat Selim, a childhood friend who admires Mihai and often provides supportive advice.

Skanderbeg is also seemingly caught up in political intrigue and forgets his Albanian origins. As a child, he is taken from his family as a hostage, and 20 years later returns to Albania. Both he and Mihai are reprimanded by Christians who suffer under Ottoman rule, the former by his ageing mother, who laments her son's submissiveness to the sultan, and the latter by a poet who sings of the Albanian prince's treason to his own blood. However, the films quickly make it clear that the two aristocrats have only been pretending to comply with the Ottomans and are in fact secretly involved in plots to start wars against them. In an exaggerated gesture, Skanderbeg, on his return to Albania, throws off his Turkish costume and dons traditional Albanian attire signaling where his true loyalties lie.

The Ottoman Empire is personalized in _Viteazul_ through the character of Mihai's friend Selim, who grounds the protagonist, offers impartial comments on his actions, and gives a human face to the empire. However, in general, the empire is portrayed as but a distant enemy in the four films. Viewers catch glimpses of sultans and military leaders, as well as hordes of soldiers advancing fast on the defending armies. The Ottomans are never examined in detail, and their motivation remains unknown. The films rely entirely on audiences' familiarity with or preconceptions about the history of the region. Based on the movies' depiction of these events alone, one is likely to assume that the Ottomans are motivated solely by a thirst for conquest, and perhaps a determination to crush Christianity and impose Islam on the conquered territories.20 Despite their one-dimensionality, however, they are revealed to be a worthy enemy, a portrayal that highlights the superhuman efforts of the protagonists to stop their advance. Characters often refer to the size of the opposing armies, with those of the Ottoman always greatly outnumbering those of the protagonist ( _Skanderbeg_ ). In addition, Ottoman military command is shown creating a sound and complex strategy, which nonetheless remains inferior to the protagonist's ( _Viteazul_ ). Finally, Ottoman leaders are regularly depicted talking about the prince whom they are fighting. These conversations reveal the former's familiarity with their enemy and their great respect for him ( _Kosovo_ ). The efforts of the protagonists are thus elevated to epic proportions as they face and defeat a mighty adversary who is impressed with their military prowess and their moral qualities.

The representation of Western Europe, however, is radically different. The protagonists are constantly involved in political negotiations with aristocrats and representatives of the Roman Catholic Church. Both Mihai and Skanderbeg, for example, have extensive relationships with Western Europeans. Both ask for military support in their campaigns against the Ottomans and are promised large armies that never arrive or, in the case of _Skanderbeg_ , are replaced with useless gifts. In _Measure_ , European powers turn a deaf ear to Macedonian pleas for independence, and Dilber Tanas refers to Europe in his journal as "that Babylonian harlot." Even the United States is ridiculed briefly when an American citizen, Miss Stone, is kidnapped for ransom, which is to be used to fund the armed resistance in Macedonia. Based on the historical occurrence of the kidnapping, the events related in the film depict the United States as helpless before the Ottomans since American representatives are unable to negotiate the terms of the hostage's liberation. Miss Stone herself (played by Christine Bartlett, a Brit who was working as an English teacher in Bulgaria at the time when the movie was made) is a ridiculous Bible-reciting character who, despite her predicament and that of her kidnappers, displays grief and regret only at the news that American President McKinley has died. This depiction of the West as destructive and treacherous not only complies with Cold War political alignments but also underscores further the hero's moral qualities, since, in contrast to the devious Western Europeans and Americans, he fights the Ottoman Empire on principle, not for money or as part of an internal power struggle.

The depiction of Western Europe, however, is complicated by the protagonists' perception of themselves as European, or at least as the last obstacle on the Ottomans' way to Europe. They are portrayed as protectors of Europe against a Muslim threat ( _Skanderbeg_ and _Kosovo_ ) or as children of Europe who are attempting to break away from their antiquated colonizer and rejoin their European peers ( _Viteazul_ and _Measure_ ). While this representation may seem inconsistent with the cinematic construction of Western Europe as a place of treachery and self-interest, I believe it reflects the overlap of Marxist and nationalist ideology on viewing the Ottoman Empire as the worst possible alternative because of the obsolete socioeconomic order and value system it embodies. Despite their shortcomings then, Europeans, with their Enlightenment ideas, are seen as more progressive than the Ottomans, who are consistently associated with patriarchy and oppression, and thus Europe needs to be protected.

#  **Eastern European Epics: Local Specificity of the Genre**

By focusing their narrative on an epic hero and by employing visual spectacle, East European historical epics strictly follow the conventions of the genre. In addition, they offer a clear delineation of a perceived East–West European division that coincides with Cold War political divisions along the same lines. However, they also share certain unique features that are rarely if ever present in Hollywood epics and that reflect the precepts of a dominant Marxist ideology and serve as an attempt to promote a nationalist agenda veiled under the presentation of the Ottoman Empire as an evil aggressor. Among these are the depiction of a strong bond between the protagonist and common people, the focus on internal enemies that destroy the epic hero, and the employment of certain cinematic techniques inconsistent with the historical epic genre.

In three of the four films the protagonist is an aristocrat, a king or prince of noble blood who owns the lands the Ottomans invade or control. Nevertheless, as the narrative progresses, it becomes apparent that he is not interested in ruling over those lands but, rather, is risking his social position and sacrificing his assets in order to protect his subjects from the impending Ottoman threat. The best example is probably Skanderbeg, whose brother betrays him for fear that Skanderbeg's son will inherit the lands the two brothers received from their father. On uncovering his brother's treason, Skanderbeg exclaims, "The only thing I will bequeath to my son is hatred for the Turks. I do not own land or people; these belong to Albania."

This connection of the protagonist to the land and the people is established from the very beginning of the film when Skanderbeg's father, on parting with him, urges the boy to look around and "remember [his] fatherland forever." In a later scene, on his return to Albania from his service in Murad's court, Skanderbeg challenges his friends and his subjects to an arm-wrestling match. He prevails over a number of people who respond to the challenge, but in the end he is defeated by a shepherd. Instead of being offended or humiliated, however, Skanderbeg is invigorated and thrilled by the fact that Albanian peasants are so strong. He gives his sword to the shepherd as a gift and encourages him to join the fight against the Ottomans. The two meet again later in the film as the shepherd is indeed fighting for Albania and proudly reminds Skanderbeg of their earlier encounter. Throughout the film Skanderbeg is also cinematically inscribed as an ordinary Albanian who is just one of the people. He appears at the center of the frame when common folk are present and fits seamlessly into the scene with his native costume and his imposing personality.

King Lazar's relationship with his subjects is similarly highlighted throughout _Kosovo_. The king's plotline runs parallel to other minor plotlines that involve peasants and small merchants. Ordinary people are shown to be affected by the Ottoman invasion as well as by major decisions made in court. Although some of them complain or claim that life under the Ottomans will be the same as life under Lazar, these dissenting voices are quickly drowned by the majority, who cling to their religion and their national pride at all cost. For example, a woman who sells fish at a village market asks rhetorically whether the Turks "eat fish," after which she proclaims loudly that she would be happy to sell fish to them instead of the Serbs who are too poor or stingy to buy from her. She is, however, silenced by multiple other sellers and buyers who tell of the horrors of the Ottoman invasion, which leaves numerous ordinary people dead, maimed, or enslaved. Most significant, however, is the subplot of a blind monk who claims to be able to see a world beyond. The film opens and closes with his revelations. In the final scene he walks towards a rainbow together with another man whom he has changed with his words. The two are symbolically treading toward a bright future in which King Lazar's actions have a lasting effect and are appreciated by his people.

Mihai's attachment to his subjects is not as easily discernible. In an early scene the character displays compassion for a few young boys who are enslaved by his friend Selim and made to fight each other for the latter's enjoyment. Yet it is unclear at this point whether Mihai defends the boys because they are Romanian or simply because they are children. The protagonist makes repeated claims that all his efforts are in the name of the Romanian people. However, his actions are often at odds with his words. Unlike Skanderbeg, Mihai is never seen in direct contact with his subjects, and unlike _Kosovo_ , _Vitaeazul_ does not offer an alternative view from the perspective of common people. Mihai is alienated from his wife and, toward the end of the film, also from his nobles. Nevertheless, the film does not seem to be critical of Mihai's relationship with the people. In fact, they are shown rejoicing when he rides into Transylvania on a white horse, signaling the unification of Romania, and are apparently aware of the significance of this event and their prince's role in it.

In _Measure_ , there are no aristocrats. The protagonist is a shepherd (he is loosely based on the real-life rebel Dilber Ilia), and the leaders of the rebellion whom he encounters are also ordinary people pushed into a prominent position by historical necessity. All of them are often shown in closed spaces with none being privileged within the frame. They are evidently in charge, and the peasants obey them without question. However, this appears to be inevitable, since the peasants are uneducated and inarticulate, and, despite their suffering under a foreign rule, they need guidance to fight the Ottomans. The protagonist Dilber Tanas himself is one of the people who undergo a dramatic transformation as a result of his encounter with the revolutionaries.21

These Eastern European epics thus appear to violate generic conventions by consistently highlighting the connection between the protagonist (especially when he is an aristocrat) and ordinary people. By establishing this bond, the films defy the conventions of historical epics made in capitalist countries, which promote individualism and emphasize the ability of the epic hero to establish himself as a leader because of his superhuman faculties and not because he works for the common people.22 In Eastern European epics, even though the protagonist is an epic hero and the main vehicle of the narrative, his greatness depends on the extent to which he is able, or at least willing, to serve his people.

An important consequence of this emphasis on the bond between the hero and the nation he serves is the films' preoccupation with unity and loyalty. Skanderbeg, for instance, puts an end to a generation-long feud between two Albanian families by asking both to forgive and unite in the face of the real enemy, the Ottomans. In a similar vein, the more ruthless Mihai kills or exiles greedy aristocrats until all of Romania is united under his rule. In fact, the film presents the protagonist as a founder of modern Romania, as he is the one with the vision and the leadership skills necessary to bring together the three principalities of Wallachia, Transylvania, and Moldova into a single state. The whole plot of _Kosovo_ similarly revolves around unity, as Serbian nobles are forced by their king to set aside their rivalries and join forces in a final stand against the Ottomans. The focus on unity thus places the protagonist of each film in the role of a national icon, a symbol of the struggles of the nation against an external enemy.

Internal enemies, however, are equally important, which was probably a reflection on the concern of the Communist elites with subversion and espionage. Loyalty to the leaders is crucial in all the films. Mihai, for example, binds the serfs to the lands owned by the nobility upon the request of a group of aristocrats who are close to him and provide him with military support for his campaigns. The king does not make this decision lightly and agrees to it only as a last resort, yet the binding of the serfs remains only one of a string of actions that involve procuring others' loyalty or support by offering them money and ranks. In _Kosovo_ , loyalty lies at the core of the narrative as one of the aristocrats in Lazar's court, Miloš Obilić, is accused of treason by the others and sacrifices his life in a reckless but noble attempt to prove his loyalty by assassinating the Ottoman sultan on the battlefield. In _Skanderbeg_ and _Measure_ , loyalty is earned by personal example. In the latter film, Dilber Tanas confronts the leaders of the rebellion, including Gotse Delchev, at a restaurant, where he accuses them of squandering the money raised to fight the Ottomans. They are, however, quick to point out to him that no money is wasted, since they are making important strategy decisions while eating nothing but cheap bean soup. Later, Tanas tells Gotse Delchev of his recurrent dream, in which he loses two of his teeth. Delchev interprets this dream as an allegory of unity. He claims that "if I fall, you will fall with me, so we have to stick together."

While some of these scenes may be loosely based on historical events, the fact that the films focus so much on loyalty is no coincidence. Together with unity, loyalty is central to each narrative, for ultimately, the protagonist's failure to stop the Ottomans is the result of treason (both from within the country and from outside) and does not reflect on his own leadership or military abilities.

The other region-specific feature of the historical epic which does not comply with international generic conventions is found in the inclusion of some distinctive artistic choices and in the non-linear narrative structure of the films that often undermine the latter's entertainment aspect. While they use spectacle to create an epic atmosphere, the films are also often disjointed and feature redundant long-takes of lush scenery as well as inexplicable bouts of silence. All the lead actors attempt to portray the dignity that befits their character by punctuating their lines with long pauses and looking sternly into the distance. This performance fits well with the narrative, which alternates battle scenes or squabbles with contemplative moments, but it creates an uneven narrative pacing that is frequently tiring to the viewer. The main plotline is also often interrupted to provide the audience with the points of view of minor characters who serve as the voice of the people in the film. Cases in point are the three scenes featuring the fish seller in _Kosovo_ , or the ones revolving around a young soldier who loses his eyesight in _Viteazul_. These distractions serve the purpose of integrating the voice of commoners into a predominantly aristocratic narrative, but they slow down the plot development and detract from the spectacle of the film.

 _Measure_ is perhaps the most prominent example of a narrative and visual aesthetic incongruent with the historical epic.23 The excerpts of Dilber Tanas's journal that frame the narrative provide an unusual perspective on the events depicted in the film. Unlike other historical films that rely on presumably objective and neutral intertitles to fill in the viewer's gaps of knowledge about the past, these journal excerpts are shown on screen and read by the character himself in a way that clearly points to the subjectivity that his version of history employs. Despite the epic dimensions of the film, it is constructed as a personal story, with the protagonist present in every single scene. This skewed perspective also accounts for the multiple dream sequences and other surrealist moments, such as the appearance of a ram that leads the rebels out of an Ottoman ambush. The narrative in general lacks continuity, skipping over significant events to focus instead on the protagonist's emotional state. The passage of time is not indicated clearly, and it is often difficult to follow the plot when in two consecutive scenes several months have passed, a development of which viewers become aware only later when suddenly presented with a new setting or an aged character.

Despite the unusual narrative or visual aesthetic that they employ, the films discussed are easy for Eastern European audiences to follow, since they all rely on the audience's shared background knowledge of at least some of the events depicted. That is also why the Ottomans' motivation does not need an explanation. The Ottomans are almost never shown to be ruthless or dangerous. Many of the characters do talk about them and sometimes provide exaggerated accounts of their brutality, but, if they are onscreen at all, the Ottomans appear as an ordinary albeit very powerful army. Yet the protagonists' hatred of the Ottomans is never questioned. Indeed, it is taken for granted that the audience has the necessary historical perspective to appreciate the ruthlessness of the Ottoman Empire and does not need further visual or narrative emphasis to prove it.

While recently some attempts have been made to revise the region's history in late Middle Ages and early modern period, the official history taught under communism in pre-1989 Eastern Europe maintained that Ottoman rule in the region was characterized by a brutality that bordered on savagery and that hindered the development of nations by crushing freedom and economic development through a backward and unfair feudal system. This view of the history of the region supported by both Marxist and nationalist ideology seeps through East European historical epics that consistently portray the Ottomans as an unstoppable all-conquering force whose actions do not require clarification, just countermeasures.

#  **Conclusion**

I have attempted to demonstrate how Eastern European historical epics featuring struggles against the Ottoman Empire follow generic conventions but also share some unique features that reflect Cold War political alignments and highlight preconceptions about the history of Eastern Europe under the Ottomans. The films I discuss all endorse loyalty for a well-intentioned leader and unity within the state. In addition, they advocate a distancing from the West, but nevertheless privilege a connection with Europe over one with the primitive Ottoman Empire,and inspire patriotism by establishing their nation of origin as the true defender of Europe against the barbaric Ottomans.

The films portray the Ottoman Empire as a very real external threat and underscore cultural difference, placing special emphasis on an Islam versus Christianity dichotomy. The nation featured in the film is then exalted as "the last obstacle" in the Ottomans' way to Europe. All the protagonists articulate their commitment to save their people _and_ Europe from the impending Asian threat. The films thus assert a national pride that is seemingly inconsistent with Communist ideology, but that allows viewers to feel as valuable members of the European community. Furthermore, this nationalist approach overlaps with Communist ideology by serving as a metaphor: viewers are urged to transpose their perceived historical role as the defenders of Europe onto their current belonging to the right ideological bloc.

While with this chapter I have offered only a brief and limited discussion of Eastern European historical epics within the larger framework of genre criticism, my goal was to raise awareness of the significance of these films to the national cinema traditions in the region, as well as to demonstrate how the films function as a regional, not a national, phenomenon that emerged within the specific context provided by the Cold War and the adoption of Marxist ideology in the region. Furthermore, it is important to conclude by underscoring the legacy of the historical epic in Eastern Europe in general. The films I discussed present a version of history that is recreated to this day and used in nationalist discourse in the region. References to the battle of Kosovo, for example, were used in speeches during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, with the film ( _Kosovo_ ) offering the best-known visualization of the historical events that provided the point of reference for those speeches.

With the expansion of the European Union in the 2000s, East European countries have revised their relationship with Western Europe but remain wary of Turkey as a potential unwanted connection to Asia and a deviation from "European values." The latter view coincides with the message of the Communist epics, as now Eastern Europe again sees itself as a defender of Europe, although this time it is cultural influences and not armies that they are eager to fight. Most importantly, while budgetary restrictions have hindered the creation of new historical epics in Eastern Europe, some of the former Soviet republics have continued to explore the genre. Through films such as _Turkish Gambit_ ( _Turetskiy Gambit_ ; dir. Dzhanik Faiziyev, Russia, 2005) and _Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan_ (dir. Segey Bodrov, Kazakhstan, 2007) they have attempted to inscribe themselves again into epic history that changed the fate of continents. In Eastern Europe, locally produced pre-1989 genre cinema and the historical epic in particular have preserved their significance since, until the appearance of new productions, the epics made under communism remain the only, quite memorable and influential, visualization of the region's medieval past, and specifically its encounter with the Ottoman Empire.

 **Notes**

1 DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft) was the film studio owned and operated by the government of the German Democratic Republic. Its formidable production also included some very popular Westerns and a few science fiction films. See, for example, Gemunden (1998), Fitz (2008), Dika (2008).

2 There are a number of monographs on the cinema of various Eastern European countries (e.g., Goulding, 2002, Haltof, 2002) and some on auteurs within Eastern Europe (e.g., Iordanova, 2002), but these books rarely focus on genre, referring instead to movements, themes, and cinema industries in the region as they relate to political and economic development.

3 This is true for genre studies in general, as, since the 1950s, the academic study of genre has been affected by the popularity of auteur theory. While auteur films were considered the product of original creative thinkers, genre films were often seen as mass-produced conventional narratives that only merit attention if directed by an auteur. This is particularly true for historical epics (Sobchack, 2003: 296–298).

4 Or at least that was the version of the Marxist view of history that became "Stalinist orthodoxy in the early 1930s" (Miller, 2010: 211). It was adopted as the official view of history throughout the Eastern bloc and was taught in schools there at least until 1989.

5 See, for example, Verdery, 1991 (ch. 1) on Romanian national identity and Kosseva, Zhelyazkova, and Hajdinjak, 2009. on Bulgarian national identity. For an overview of national identity in post-Communist Balkan states and its reflection in cinema, see Iordanova, 2001: 32–38.

6 One could argue, for example, that contemporary films not set in the Wild West but sharing some of the themes and the aesthetics of the old Westerns also belong to the genre (e.g., the Cohen brothers' _No Country for Old Men_ , 2007 or even the Brazilian _City of God_ , dir. Fernando Meirelles, 2002). However, the Wild West setting was originally one of the most fundamental features of the Western.

7 One notable exception is Christina Stoianova's unpublished dissertation (1999) which uses a genre approach to examine Eastern European cinema as a site of negotiation between society and the state. This work, while very original, does not employ film analysis, but groups a large database of films into clusters that fall into a specific generic structure.

8 In fact, it has been observed that Italian neorealism began partially as a reaction to Italian fascist spectacle films (Landy, 2000).

9 Henceforth referred to as _Skanderbeg_ , the film was popular with critics and audiences alike. In 1954 it was entered at the festival competition in Cannes, where it won two awards.

10 For example, Georgian actor Akaki Khorava was cast in the title role, and he was dubbed by Pjetër Gjoka in the Albanian soundtrack of the film.

11 Henceforth referred to as _Kosovo_.

12 For an interpretation of the film as a perceived ultimate clash between Islam and Orthodox Christianity, see Iordanova (2001: 227).

13 Henceforth referred to as _Viteazul_.

14 For an analysis of the split, see Verdery, 1999: 103–106. For other Romanian historical epics of the time period, see Stoil, 1982.

15 See Verdery for an overview of national identity debates in Romania after Ceauşescu's break with the Soviet Union (1999: 119–120).

16 The other film, _681: The Glory of the Khan_ , chronicled the establishment of the first Bulgarian state and the lifework of its ruler, Khan Asparuh.

17 Grindon points to romance as one of the defining characteristics of the historical film in general. The author claims that romance is indispensable, as it stands for the personal aspect of the film, while spectacle stands for the grand scale of the events in which the individual is involved (1994: 9). Landy identifies a more general element, melodrama, as indispensable. She asserts that, since they are watching a historical film, viewers are already familiar with the outcome of the story and they are more interested in the "affect accompanying the predicted outcome" (2001: 24).

18 Nicolaescu's career is built upon making historical movies, while Allea has acted in many such films, despite the fact that he is also known as a comedian.

19 One needs to remember that these films were made before the existence of CGI, so thousands of extras were employed for each film. For example, some sources quote the mobilization of as many as 10 000 Romanian troops in the shooting of _Viteazul_ 's battle scenes.

20 For an analysis of the tendency of Balkan cinema to represent Muslims in general as brutal, and the implications of that representation in the post-Socialist world, see Iordanova, 2001: 226–229.

21 For a detailed analysis of the character's transformation and its cinematic expression, see Grozev, 2006.

22 In _Ben-Hur_ (1959), for instance, the protagonist is inspired by his love of God and his family and also by a bitter rivalry with a former close friend. He thus enters the film's famous chariot race for personal reasons alone and wins it because of his individual physical qualities and mental strength.

23 This was a deliberate choice on the part of the filmmakers as explained by Russi Chanev. Further, when asked whether _Measure_ is a historical epic, the actor replied that it is "above all a work of art" (Atanasova, 2008: n.p.).

 **References**

Altman, R. (1999) _Film Genre_. BFi, London.

Atanasova, A.Prerovih Arhiva... (I rummaged the archive...). _Standart_ (August 19, 2008): n.p., www.standartnews.com/interviews/details/id/144 (accessed December 4, 2011).

Buchvarova, S. (1977) ___Liturgiya za Ilinden_ (Liturgy for Ilinden). Narodna Mladej, Sofia.

Burgoyne, R. (1997) _Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History_. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Burgoyne, R. (ed.) (2011) _The Epic Film in World Culture_. Routledge, New York.

Davis, N. (2000) _Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision_. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Dika, V. (2008) An East German Indianerfilm: the bear in sheep's clothing. _Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media_ , 50: n.p., www.ejumpcut.org (accessed December 4, 2011).

Elley, D. (1984) _The Epic Film: Myth and History_. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London and Boston.

Fitz, K. (2008) Screen Indians in the EFl-classroom: transnational perspectives. _American_ _Studies Journal_ , 51: n.p., <http://asjournal.zusas.uni-halle.de/archive/51/106.html> (accessed October 14, 2009).

Gemunden, G. (1998) Between Karl May and Karl Marx: The DEFA Indianerfilme (1965–1983). _Film History_ , 10 (3): 399–407.

Goulding, D. (2002) _Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience, 1945–2001_. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

Grindon, L. (1994) _Shadows on the Past: Studies in the Historical Fiction Film_. Temple University Press, Philadelphia.

Grozev, A. (2006) Mera spored mera/Measure for Measure, in _The Cinema of the Balkans_ (ed. D. Iordanova). Wallflower, London and New York, pp. 195–204.

Hall, S. and Neale, S. (2010) _Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History_. Wayne State University Press, Detroit.

Haltof, M. (2002) _Polish National Cinema_. Berghahn Books, New York.

Holloway, R. (1986) _The Bulgarian Cinema_. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Rutherford, NJ.

Iordanova, D. (2001) _Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media_. BFi, London.

Iordanova, D. (2002) _Emir Kusturica_. BFi, London.

Iordanova, D. (2003) _Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film_. Wallflower Press, London and New York.

Jackel, A. (2006) Mihai Viteazul/Michael the Brave, in _The Cinema of the Balkans_ (ed. D. Iordanova). Wallflower Press, London and New York, pp. 75–85.

King, G. (2000) _Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster_. I.B. Tauris, London and New York.

Kosseva, M., Zhelyazkova, A., and Hajdinjak, M. (2009) Catching up with the uncatchable: European dilemmas and identity construction on Bulgarian path to modernity. International Center for Minority Studies and Intercultural Relations. <http://www.imir-bg.org/imir/reports/Catching%20up%20with%20the%20uncatchable.pdf> (accessed April 10, 2011).

Landy, M. (2000) _Italian Film_. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York.

Landy M., ed. (2001) _The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media_. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ.

Lucanio, P. (1994) _With Fire and Sword: Italian Spectacles on American Screens, 1958–1968_. Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ.

Miller, O. (2010) Marxism and East Asian history: from Eurocentrism and nationalism to Marxist universalism. _Marxism 21_ , 7 (3): 202–238.

Neale, S. (2000) _Genre and Hollywood_. Routledge, London and New York.

Nelmes, J. (2003) Genre and Hollywood Cinema, in _An Introduction to Film Studies_. 3rd edn. Routledge, New York, pp. 151–161.

Petrova, V. (2003) _Syankata na Lay: Metafori na vlastta v kinoto_ (The shadow of lay: metaphors of authority in cinema). Titra, Sofia, Bulgaria.

Reed, J. (1989) _American Scenarios: The Uses of Film Genre_. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT.

Rosenstone, R. (1995) _Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History_. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Schatz, T. (1981) _Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System_. Temple University Press, Philadelphia.

Sobchack, V. (2003) "Surge and splendor": a phenomenology of the Hollywood historical epic, in _Film Genre Reader III_ (ed. B.K. Grant). University of Texas Press, Austin, pp. 296–323.

Solomon, J. (2001) _The Ancient World in the Cinema_. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.

Stoianova, C. (1999) _The Eastern European crisis of self-knowledge (1948–1989): the relationship between state and society as reflected in Eastern European film – a genre approach_. PhD dissertation, University of Michigan.

Stoil, M.J. (1982) _Balkan Cinema: Evolution after the Revolution_. University of Michigan Research Press, Ann Arbor, MI.

Verdery, K. (1991) _National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu's Romania_. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

Wyke, M. (1997) _Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History_. Routledge, New York.

 **Filmography**

 _681: The Glory of the Khan_ _[_ _681: Velichieto na hana_ _]_ __(L. Staykov, Bulgaria: Bulgarian National Film Center, 1981).

 _Battle of Kosovo_ _[_ _Boj na Kosovu_ _]_ __(Z. Šotra, Yugoslavia: Centar Film and Radiotelevizija Beograd, 1989). In Serbo-Croatian. 117 minutes.

 _Ben-Hur_ (W. Wyler, USA: Warner Brothers, 1959).

 _Braveheart_ (M. Gibson, USA: Icon Entertainment and Paramount Pictures, 1995).

 _City of God_ _[_ _Cidade de Deus_ _]_ __(F. Meirelles. Brazil: Globo Filmes, 2002).

 _Colonel Wolodyjowski_ _[_ _Pan Wolodyjowski_ _]_ __(J. Hoffman. Poland: Film Polski, 1969).

 _Crescent Moon_ _[_ _Egri csillagok_ _]_ __(Z. Várkonyi. Hungary: Mafilm, 1968).

 _Gladiator_ (R. Scott, USA: DreamWorks and Universal Pictures, 2000).

 _Measure For Measure_ _[_ _Mera spored mera_ _]_ __(G. Dyulguerov, Bulgaria: Boyana Film, 1981). In Bulgarian. 288 min.

 _Mihai Viteazul_ (S. Nicolaescu. Romania: Romania Film and Studioul Cinematografic Bucuresti, 1970). In Romanian. 107 minutes

 _Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan_ _[_ _Mongol_ _]_ __(S. Bodrov, Kazakhstan: Eurasia Film Production and Russia: Kinokompaniya CTB, 2007).

 _No Country for Old Men_ (E. Coen and J. Coen, USA: Miramax, 2007).

 _Spartacus_ (S. Kubrick. Bryna Productions and Universal Pictures, 1960).

 _The Great Warrior Skanderbeg_ _[_ _Velikiy voin Albanii Skanderbeg_ _]_ __(S. Yutkevich. Russia: Mosfilm and Albania: New Albania, 1953). In Russian. 120 minutes.

 _The Ten Commandments_ (C.B. DeMille, USA: Motion Picture Associates and Paramount Pictures, 1956).

 _Turkish Gambit_ _[_ _Turetskiy Gambit_ _]_ __(D. Faiziyev, Russia: Channel One, 2005).

 _Walter Defends Sarajevo_ _[_ _Valter brani Sarajevo_ _]_ __(H. Krvavac, Yugoslavia: Bosna Film, 1972).

# 19

# Nation, Gender, and History in Latvian Genre Cinema

Irina Novikova

Genre films as a significant component of popular cinema (Altman, 1999; Keith, 2007) interpellate a spectator into the nation and its past through different ­cinematic modes of address, narrative conventions, and gender iconographies. The ways of deploying genre formulas of popular films (Neale, 1995; Stam, 2000) or their modalities vary in different cinematic traditions, specific historical contexts, and concepts of national cinema.

The cinemas of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were launched when the Baltic littoral was part of the Russian Empire. In the interwar period of political independence, filmmakers tried to relaunch domestic film productions, with varying degrees of professionalism and technological standards, and to adapt the genres popular in European cinema after World War One to the ideological and cultural agenda of the state- and nation-building process. After the end of World War Two the Baltic states were completely incorporated into the Soviet Union, and the former, even modest, achievements of national filmmakers were "erased" from cultural memory. Films had to be made in compliance with the canons and censorship of Soviet political and cultural ideology and tied to the centralized financial patronage of filmmaking process in the studios. Those who wanted to pursue professional careers as film directors or as cinematographers had to go either to Moscow or Leningrad. Nevertheless, during the 50 years of making films of different genres within the Soviet cultural and ideological space, the cinemas of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were streamlining distinctive genre preferences and variations appealing to heterogeneous Soviet spectators, as in the Latvian _Breathe Deeper_ ( _Elpojiet dzi_ ļā _k!_ , 1967) by Rolands Kalniņš and _My Frivolous Friend_ ( _Mans draugs – nenopietns cilv_ ē _ks_ , 1975) by Jānis Streičs, or in the Estonian urban film _I am Not a Tourist Here, I Live Here_ ( _Ma pole turist, ma elan siin_ , 1988) by Peeter Urbla. Furthermore, generic expectations could be used either for engaging with the complex experiences of national history, as in the Westernized _Nobody Wanted to Die_ by Lithuanian Vytautas Žalakevičius, or for turning a representation of the distant past into an Aesopian parable about the desires and resistances of the present as in the Estonian adventure/adaptation _The Last Relic_ ( _Viimne Reliikvia_ , 1969) by Grigorii Kromanov.

#  **... A Glimpse into the Launch...**

Latvian film historians are not unanimous about the origins of the national ­cinema. These are attributed either to the first movie shown in Rīga, on May 28, 1896, and the premiere of the first Latvian feature film, Vilis Segliņš's _I Went to the War_ ( _Es kar_ ā _aiziedams_ , 1920), or to a documentary film by the cameraman Stanke about Russian Tsar Nikolai II's visit to Rīga in 1910. After gaining independence in 1918, Latvia had the enormous task of proposing a political ideology of ­nationhood and a functional cultural/historical narrative of the modern nation and its past which would reach and trigger the non-rational core of national identity (Connor, 1994) in the new political and national space. Traditional cultural forms such as the theater and literature were recruited to serve the politics of the primordialization of ethnic identity and a sense of cultural and historical unity. The ­proliferating entertainment industry and newly available visual media such as ­photography and film engaged the collective pleasures of watching films into nationalizing "a new sensorium" (Hansen, 1999: 71) and constituting a new national subject.

The national film industry only started to develop in Latvia in the period between the two world wars. The first sound feature film, _The People's Son_ ( _Tautas D_ ē _ls_ ), was released in 1934. Literary adaptations (e.g., Vilis Lapenieks's 1939 film _Zeneca d_ ē _ls_ ( _The Fisherman's Son_ )) and historical–ethnographic films – Latviešu kā _zas N_ ī _c_ ā ( _Latvian Wedding in Nice_ , 1931) and _K_ ā _zas Alsung_ ā ( _Wedding in Alsunga_ , 1935), also released as _Dzimtene sauc_ ( _Motherland is Calling_ ) – were the most popular genres in the national film production of the interwar period. These films did not become known to international audiences, and nor were they exportable, as were other emerging national cinemas on the cinematic peripheries from the north to the south of Europe. They conformed more to the definition of national cinema that proceeds "from the basis of popular film, which has been seen by a majority audience in the country where it was made and which has been perceived by this audience to be specifically national" (Soila, Söderbergh-Widding, and Iverson, 1998: 3).

#  **... Genres of the Postcolonial Cinematic ImagiNation...**

One of the principal tasks for interwar national cinemas in Europe was the ­postwar and post-imperial cultural nationalization of audiences, and their historical and local experiences, alongside modernist debates about the qualities of the medium, the auteur, and stylistic and technical experimentation. The genre of historical film, with its specific social and cultural function of re-enacting or reconstructing the past, its myths and events, had the cultural task of mobilizing national ­sentiment in the audiences of the postwar nations (Hayward, 1993; Elsaesser, 2000). In the countries that emerged or were unified after the collapse of the continental empires, mass-marketed historical films were made not just for asserting unifying cultural competences and nationalizing cultural identities. These films negotiated visual images of historical genealogies of nationhood that were usable in the ­modernist functional narratives of postcolonial nation-/statehood. In Poland, as Skaff argues, "a genre would emerge that combined elements of documentary and fiction in service of propaganda" and historical narrative films "recalled events that had taken place during the independence movement as a means of garnering ­support for the country's present military adventures" (2008: 69).

In Latvia a historical/war film called _L_ āč _pl_ ē _sis_ ( _Bear-slayer_ , 1931) by Aleksandrs Rusteiķis1 was made as a filmic "sequel" to the eponymous literary epic by Andrejs Pumpurs (1888) which was central to the Latvian cultural nationalist movement of the late nineteenth century.2 The film contributed to the process of privileging "cinema's role as an agency that could recruit, codify, and circulate the cultural terms for a modern national identity" (Ricci, 2007: 38). Like Ganse's _Napoleon_ , or Niblo's _Ben Hur_ , the film had to manifest the moral power and vitality of the national will. In the relative scarcity of indigenous film production, _L_ āč _pl_ ē _sis_ was produced in the wake of the democratic 1920s and in the growing shadow of the authoritarian 1930s.

In the national cinemas of Europe, historical films were often film adaptations of recognized literary works. The original literary text of _L_ āč _pl_ ē _sis_ (Pumpurs, 1888) was not a genuine folk epic although it was based on folk songs perceived as authentic pieces of truth about past events in the Latvia of the thirteenth century. Like Finland, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Latvia of the interwar period was going through an intensive nation- and state-building modernization. The cultural discourses of the national _sensus communis_ privileged shared ideas – folklore, nature, peasant population – with fewer bases for collective identification available than the so-called old nations of Europe in the process of economic and political modernization.3 The literary epic was canonized into the text _mythomoteur_ of ethnic authenticity and the nation's _ancience_ in the cultural imagination of national identity. The film _L_ āč _pl_ ē _sis_ claimed the literary myth for a visual rendition, while at the same time reinforcing the text's cultural and political canonization. The film production was supported by leading political figures such as President G. Zemgals; The Chairman of the Parliament, P. Kalniņš; President of Ministers H. Celmiņš; and by the Cabinet Of Ministers.4 The film was expected to reassert the cultural respectability of the literary epic as "a prime token of authority and continuity, of closure and truth" (Hansen, 1994: 144) in the national historical imagination. In the film the "transhistorical temporal omnipresence" (Hansen, 1994: 148) of its mythic characters Lāčplēsis and Laimdota is rendered as reincarnated in the figures of Jānis Vanags and Mirdza as they are involved in the historical events of the 1905 Revolution, World War One, the Proclamation of Independence of Latvia, and the subsequent war for independence. The episode representing the Proclamation of Independence involved real participants of this key event in modern Latvian history. This masterful application of "documentary" elements in the filmic narrative produces an impressive fusion of the mythic (Lāčplēsis), the fictional (Jānis Vanags), and the real (participants of Proclamation Act and the war for independence), thus, positioning the real as a projection of the transcendental power, truth, and values of the national spirit canonized in the literary epic.

An icon of the late nineteenth-century national emancipation, the book itself emerges on the screen as a "container" of Lāčplēsis's mythic presence, whose text connects both the fictional hero Jānis Vanags and the film spectators with their common primordialized past. While reading the last available page of the literary epic (the struggle of Lāčplēsis with the Black Knight for his beloved Laimdota), Jānis is being transformed into a new Lāčplēsis for the sake of his nation's freedom. The mythic hero is reincarnated in his body. The subtitles of this episode read, "And the spirit of Lāčplēsis was reborn in Jānis Vanags." The death of Lāčplēsis in the waters of the Daugava (the actual end of the literary epic) is not shown on the screen; instead, a new national hero, Vanags, emerges in front of the film's audience as a reborn contemporary Lāčplēsis. From this moment on, Jānis Vanags is led by the spirit of Lāčplēsis in his social growth from a rural farmhand to a ranked military officer, from his spontaneous resistance to the Russian punitive expedition in 1905 to his participation in issuing the Proclamation of Independence in 1918. The mythic hero Lāčplēsis thus evolves into an endless internal and essential source, embodied in every Latvian _vanags_ ("hawk"). A Black Knight, a Russian imperial officer, a German officer, a spiderlike black-market merchant – all these negative characters emerge in the narrative as male embodiments of evil and threatening otherness, either mythic or real, either in the past or in a possible future, obsessed with the fantasy of conquering a mythic Laimdota (Lāčplēsis's beloved) or a real Mirdza (Jānis's beloved).

The story of Jānis Vanags as an identificatory "route" from the text of the literary myth to his social and political development structures the film's chronological account of the nation's recent past, on the one hand, while on the other, his social and professional development, central to the filmic construction of an idyllic national time-space, is also a spatial narrative. Rural iconography turns into an enchanted landscape, reviving the romantic notion of natural purity and urban corruption and adhering to the stereotypical idea that village folk possess intact family structures and close social bonds, a source of authentic national identity. The narrative development of the filmic plot engages the well-known genres of the fairy tale and the melodrama in motifs such as "the princess in the castle" and "the victim of a villain." In a rather formulaic representation of an ideal Latvian woman, the rescue scenario centers upon the figure of the virginal victim and the noble rescuer. Both clichéd images of a princess and a victim for mythic Laimdota (in the literary epic) and fictional Mirdza (in the film adaptation) render national territoriality the metaphorical value of female bodies while the battle over these bodies – in myth and in history – is represented as men's battle for freedom made manifest in the war for establishing independent statehood.

Jānis's socially inferior status of a farmhand turns out to be insignificant in his brotherhood with the farmer Saulītis, built for the sake of Mirdza and national independence. In staking out a feminized affective territory for the audience, he embodies an ideal warrior figure, combining codes of traditional and modern masculinity, his peasant belonging and professional military career. At the same time, the mythic element of his male power functions as the limit between the supernatural and the melodramatic, a crucial underpinning to the mythic solemnity and political centrality of the love story between Jānis and Mirdza. In its turn, melodrama, with its pathos, emotionalism, and moral polarization, merges into the war narrative, in which the mythic substratum delegates a national male body to be the site of power, truth, and moral goodness.

I would emphasize here that the filmic mythologizing of heroic masculinity in the spirit/body duality in fact creates an aura of triumph and sacrifice around the political and military leaders of the nation, such as the authoritarian president of the 1930s Kārlis Ulmanis and the hero of the independence war Oskars Kalpaks. Opposed to them, an evil male stranger emerges in different historical guises but with the same face, betraying the gendered substratum of an adversary eternally obsessed with the desire to conquer and possess mythic Laimdota, chaste Mirdza, and the pure space of the nation.

The literary epic _L_ āč _pl_ ē _sis_ is once again given iconic status in this film as a morally imperative meta-text in its essential power of "absolute substratum" in the conceptions of nation, belonging, and identity. In its didactic authority, the film was expected to become a visual representation of the nation's path to independence and of its transcendental meanings, values, and characters, to bring myth into history, and to historicize the myth. The visual narrative reenactment of the recent past to effect a national cultural unification was particularly important in a society with vast rural mythology and little urban or modern experience –visualizing myth and history as a "place of memory." Nineteenth-century Latvian romanticism, with its idealization of the countryside, served as the visual manifestation of a unifying historical and political narrative from the recent collective past, which also demonstrated how the history of the cinema involved relationships with the other arts.

 _The Fisherman's Son_ ( _Zvejnieka d_ ē _ls_ , 1940) by Vilis Lapenieks was a landmark film for the genre of film adaptation, most actively used in Latvian cinema of the twentieth century to translate literary narratives of nationhood into visual and auditory regimes. This film adaptation of Vilis Lācis's novel _The Fisherman's Son_ ( _Zvejnieka d_ ē _ls_ , 1933–1934) visually spelled out the writer's goal of creating idealized characters of Latvian men and women, inhabitants of the fishermen's village Zvīņu in the late 1920s to early 1930s. The novel was extremely popular immediately after its publication as Vilis Lacis offered his readers new types of Latvian characters, imagery, conflict, and plot to put a specific ideology of masculinity (fishermen's professional homosocial bonding) into the center of his vision of both community and national order and authoritarianism.

In their constant struggle either with nature, dishonest tradesmen, and poverty, the fishermen lack an independent and strong leader. In traditional fishing culture, high levels of navigational and boat-handling skills in sail boats and the physical demands of the work itself have been perceived as a measure of a man's ­masculinity, to be passed on by fathers to their sons. The central character, Oskars Klava, embodies much of this notion of masculinity held by fishermen, upon which both the literary text and its film adaptation built a sense of ethnic identity, order, belonging, and community. Fishermen's gendered work stands in the center of shared literary and cinematic images of ethnic patriarchy, which emphasized ­fishing as a principal role for family breadwinners. Being a fisherman means ­participating in a homosocial culture of masculinity that emphasizes individual independence, physical prowess, and courage (Flood _et al_., 2007: 295) as well as the production of male leadership as a major imperative in securing social cohesion within a community. Fishing as an exclusively male experience is framed into an emblematic image of patriarchal order in the village community delegating the power of central authority to its leader. Gender features of the protagonist, ­fisherman Oskars, are not only inherent in his social subject-position, but they constitute the system of cohesive values elaborated by the village community as a local embodiment of the Latvian national order.5

#  **... Stalinist 1950s: Latvian Riflemen, Adventures, and Biopics**

After the end of World War Two, when Latvia was completely incorporated in the USSR, all of the prewar cinematic legacy was rejected by the Stalinist ideological apparatus. The task of launching a Soviet "republican studio" turned the Rīga film studio ( _R_ ī _gas kinostudija_ ) into a beneficiary of financial allocations from Moscow, ideological censorship, and recognized (or not recognized) film directors sent by Moscow. This launch and development of so-called national or republican studios in the Baltic countries was similar to the Soviet prewar policies of building a film studio in each Soviet republic, where films had been made in the national language and dubbed into Russian or vice versa. The national cinemas in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were transformed into parts of Soviet film production and circulation, and in the span of around 50 years they managed to move from a Soviet cinematic "periphery" to "mainstream" cultural recognition.

The very first films of _R_ ī _gas kinostudija_ produced in different genres focused on historical choices made by the men of the nation in the twentieth century. Pavels Armands's _The Story of a Latvian Rifleman_ ( _Latvie_ š _u str_ ē _lnieka st_ ā _sts_ , 1957), a ­historical war drama, takes place in the pre-independence period of 1915–1919. Its ­protagonist, Jānis Pipars, a young working-class man, is conscripted into the Russian Imperial Army to serve in a unit of Latvian Riflemen. His soldiering experience in World War One changes his worldview, and he becomes a committed fighter for social injustice and national emancipation and a supporter of the Bolsheviks. It is ­important to note that this film launched the popular Soviet image of Red Riflemen as political icons of Latvian manhood, in the staunch support of the cause of Soviet Russia and, personally, of Lenin.

However, war dramas would remain the sociopolitical prerogative of the ­central film studios, which were entrusted with the ideological duty of mentoring the growth of Soviet citizens to a patriotic and politically correct perspective on the history of the World War Two. In the 1960s, Latvian cinema offered the Soviet audience Aleksandrs Leimanis's politically correct adventure film " _Tobago" Changes its Course_ (' _Tobago' maina kursu_ , 1965), related to the events of 1940 in Latvia. Based on the script by Latvian writers Gunars Cirulis, Anatols Imermanis, and Mihails Bleimanis, it tells a story about the ship _Tobago_ , whose owner senses the inevitable fall of President Ulmanis's reign and sails away from Latvia forever. However, the crew finds out that Soviet power has been established in Latvia and changes the course of the ship to return home.

In the 1950s, film specialists were posted to the Baltic republics by Moscow, including celebrities such as Herbert Rapaport and Yulii Raizman, the director of a very popular film, _Mashen'ka_ (1942). He came to Latvia to make the biopic _Rainis_ about a romantic Latvian poet and social-democrat of the early twentieth century, Jānis Rainis, one of the key cultural figures in contemporary Latvian ­history. The affective force of the biopic was traditionally used for creating a visual iconography of great men, whose life stories were representative of the nation's historical course. The Stalinist tradition of Soviet male biopics, marked with the monumental grandeur of historical reflection, was also exclusive and selective in terms of ethnicity. In Soviet popular cinema this genre, involved in the visual ­construction of hegemonic ideology and identity, focused on outstanding men's lives representing Russian history in its politics, culture, science, and military ­victories ( _Peter the Great_ , _Kutuzov_ , _Glinka_ , _Suvorov_ , _Mikluho-Maklai_ , etc.) and cult figures of Soviet politics and history (Leniniana, biopics about the heroes of the civil war and the Great Patriotic War).

Republican studios released biopic films about outstanding men of the nation, following the Stalinist cine-indoctrination (Dobrenko, 2000) of the national pasts with the totalizing canons of Soviet historiography. Igor Savchenko made the film _Taras Shevchenko_ in Ukraine, Efim Dzigan directed _Dzhambul_ in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, and Kamil' Yarmatov made _Alisher Navoi_ in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. But these male biopics were few and radically marginal in comparison with the biopic production at the central Soviet studios in Moscow and Leningrad. In this Soviet cine-gallery of men, the figure of Jānis Rainis appeared in the Stalinist biopic of 1949 as a male "voice" of the nation to guide Latvian and Soviet audiences in the politically correct way to look at Latvia's recent political history.6 However, after _Rainis_ the genres of biopic and historical film disappeared from Latvian produced feature films. Only in 1989 did Aivars Freimanis make the film _The Life_ ( _Dz_ ī _v_ ī _te_ ) about the famous Latvian collector of folk songs Krišjanis Barons, called "Father of Dainas." As I mentioned earlier, folk songs, or _dainas_ , were mediators of the past and were considered to be the major cultural legacy of the Latvian people. This male biopic about one of the central figures in the First Awakening ( _Atmoda_ ), the cultural and political emancipation of the Latvian nation in the late nineteenth century, was released just a couple of years before the Soviet political implosion, appealing to a rise in ethnic nationalist sentiment and the spirit of the Third Awakening towards independence in 1991.

#  **... Thaw, New Genres and Camerawork: Mediating the "national"...**

The monumentalist style of Stalinist cinema was splintered in the films of the Thaw period, which generated a turn to cinematic mediations of national identity beyond the overarching political discourse of Sovietness. In _Ballad of a Soldier_ (1959) by Grigorii Chukhrai a morally perfect Russian soldier, Alesha, is ­represented as nested in the natural elements of idealized Russian landscape and village. A sequence of episodes about Alesha's trip back home is conducted in consonance with iconic and expressly gendered nationalist idioms of "roots" and soil, of a Russian peasant soldier and his sacrificing mother, as a defining moral framework of historical references to the war and its results.

Lithuanian film director Vitautas Žalakiavičius addressed the questions of national identity and the effects of the war upon Lithuania in his film _Nobody Wanted to Die_ ( _Niekas nenorejo mirti_ , 1963) in which he "pioneered the concept of national identity as a thematic and stylistic issue by entering a forbidden zone – that of nationalist resistance to Soviet postwar control" (Prokhorov, 2001). The film introduced the theme and the controversies of nationalist resistance to Soviet power in Lithuania, but the narrative framing of the story refers to the meanings of roots, masculinity, and national identity as important values with universal appeal. Žalakiavičius employed a set of narrative elements characteristic of the Western as a genre about defining masculinity and its control. By "Westernizing" the filmic narrative, Žalakiavičius foregrounded a plot of the revenge taken by sons for their father, reemerging in a specific historical time of postwar Soviet Lithuania. The visual authentication of the revenge plot is emphasized in the static setting of a village, the rural landscape, and an ancient idol, which offers a ­symbolic entry into this sacred national territory. The Lokis (Bear) brothers ­perform the (b)ordering roles of the guardians of Lithuania against internal fratricide and ­destructive violence in the primordial space of a Lithuanian village, detached by forests (and an ancient idol) from external and nearly invisible Soviet power. Furthermore, the forest brethren do not appear in the film as thoughtless and evil antiheroes to be annihilated but as fighters for their cause and values. This transgressive questioning of heroes and anti-heroes in the film, their terms of law and order, and their acts against what they see as lawlessness effected by the film director's genre mixing, alluded more to the archaic patterns of family vengeance, patriarchal order, and ethnic fraternalism than to the Soviet ­ideological imperatives.

The antihero theme started by Žalakiavicus might have been influenced in Baltic cinemas by Andrzej Wajda's _Ashes and Diamonds_ (1958) and the postwar ­existential films of Polish filmmakers. This film is referred to by contemporary masters of Russian cinema as the one that influenced their views in the times of Thaw with its cinematographic significance and its ideological impact. The antihero is the central character in the Latvian film directed by Rolands Kalniņš, _I Remember Everything, Richard_ (also known as _Stone and Splinters_ ( _Akmens un_ šķ _embas_ ), 1967), which was banned several times, had many episodes eliminated, and its title changed three times. The film addresses the question of national identity, history, and belonging in a story about three Latvian friends who served in the German army during World War Two. One of them fled to the West and later returned as a tourist to the Soviet Rīga of the 1960s, modern and rebuilt.

There are three establishing shots in the film – a long mourning procession commemorating soldiers who died in the war (the Brothers' Cemetery), the arrival of "stranger" Richard in Rīga at the newly constructed central railway station, and his _flaneur_ walk through the city. He is walking towards the station's main exit. A flashback episode about his prewar youth in Rīga, then the capital of an independent European nation, is followed by him leaving the station to enter the capital's new Soviet life, whose image looms large behind the huge paned glass wall. The paned glass wall, however, offers only an impaired image as its framework can also be looked at as a barred gridwork imposed upon the glass, disrupting the ­harmonious cityscape behind it, a metaphor of enclosure and imprisonment. It can also be read as a metaphor of a boundary between a lost past and divided present, between those who are "here" and those who are "there" after 1944. Further on in the filmic narrative, it is actually the camerawork that visualizes hidden splits and splinters in the "stone" monumentalism of one Soviet nation and one Soviet history.

The next episodes show Richard's nostalgic walk in the street of his youth, ­mundanely washed by a yard keeper in the morning. No less important, he is ­visiting the Rīga central market and tasting milk brought there by a local peasant woman, just as in the old times, and as a signature of his belonging and origins. Soviet, modernized Rīga is pictured as peaceful, quiet, and living its own intensive working life. At the same time, Richard's _flaneur_ walk, represented in a ­documentary manner (he is a tourist in the city of his youth), brings in the mood of nostalgia for the idyllic and lost prewar past and the desire to remember everything in his and his friends' life.

The cinematography dramatizes the city by using its central landmark as the opening setting for future dramatic events. A spectator's gaze follows what Richard looks at and what he hears in the alienated urban environment of Rīga. First, the camera shows Richard at a distance, next to the concrete wall. This shot, as a ­gradual close-up, is alternated with the shots upon the Monument of Freedom, erected in the times of Latvian political independence. The next shot represents the statue in the background as alienated from the spectatorial gaze (and Richard's) with the grid of trolley-bus wires in the foreground and trivialized by the passing trolley bus, a symbol of Soviet modernization in the 1960s. The Monument of Freedom is untouched in its sculptural wholeness, as a symbolic "navel" of the national capital. However, montage technique and a carefully selected sequence of shots, camera angles, and frames masterfully demonstrate how everyday public traffic acts as a procedure of erasure in desacralizing the statue's symbolic value for the nation on a daily basis, in the eyes of the city dwellers and tourists. The motif of barring and enclosure (paned window at the railway station, trolley-bus wires), divison and alienation, persists in the private as well when the filming of his friends' apartment from the outside shows Richard with his Rīgan friends sharing their memories and sitting behind the gridded window. The camerawork introduces more and more chiaroscuro effects of film noir, particularly in the final scenes, in which the consistent cinematic construction of barring and enclosure culminates with the death of both "hero" and "antihero" against the stones of the Brothers' Cemetery, their erasure in the unifying monumentalism of national _lieu de m_ _emoire_.

In the 1970s, however, the cinema, having emerged from the anti-­monumentalism, moral sensibility, and anxiety of the Thaw (Woll, 2000), was moved to the margins of Soviet film production (e.g., the Latvian _Stone and Splinters_ ) and even muted (as in _Commissar_ by Aleksandr Askol'dov, the Latvian _Breathe Deeper_ by Rolands Kalniņš or the Estonian _Madness_ by Kaljo Kiisk).

#  **... Film Adaptation, Literary Canon and National Memory...**

In Soviet popular cinema, because of it occupied a peripheral status as being a "copy," film adaptation actually remained a major, and seemingly safe, genre ­available for visual dramatization of plots, conflicts, characters, and settings beyond the Soviet chronotope. At the same time, a literary text and its adaptation, or a variation of the familiar, were culturally legitimate forms of memory, engaging national audiences of the Soviet republics with a meaningful sense of their own past, owing to its unmediated pleasure and affective engagement with its visual images. In Latvia, the works of the outstanding realist writer Rūdolfs Blaumanis were turned into films such as _Edgars un Krist_ ī _ne_ ( _Edgar and Kristina_ , or _Purva Bridejs_ , 1966), directed by Leonīds Leimanis; _The Late Frost_ ( _Salna pavasar_ ī, 1955), directed by Pavels Armands and Leonids Leimanis; and _In the Shadow of Death_ ( _Naves_ ē _n_ ā, 1971), directed by Gunārs Piesis. The film _Serving a Rich Mistress_ ( _Pie bag_ ā _t_ ā _s kundzes_ , 1969), directed by Leonīds Leimanis, was based on the novel _A Smiling Leaf_ by a no less famous writer, Andrejs Upītis. The adaptation _Ceplis Ltd_. (1972), directed by Rolands Kalniņš, popularized the novel by Pāvils Rozītis with Soviet audiences. _In the Shadow of a Sword_ ( _Zobena_ ē _n_ ā, 1976), which was directed by Imants Krenbergs, was based on the play _A Love Stronger than Death_ ( _M_ ī _la stipr_ ā _ka par n_ ā _vi_ ) by romantic writer Jānis Rainis and Latvian folklore. Rainis's other play about fatal love, _Blow the Wind_ ( _P_ ū _t, v_ ē _ji_ ņ _i!_ ), was also filmed in 1973 by Gunārs Piesis. The film _Tom the Werewolf_ ( _Vilkatis Toms_ , Eriks Lācis, 1983), based on the novel _Traces_ by Janis Maulinš, which had some horror elements that were not ­typical in the Soviet cinema of the times, told a story of Latvian peasants' lives in the eighteenth century. Gunārs Piesis also made _Tom's Thumb_ ( _Spr_ ī _d_ ī _tis_ , 1985) and _Maija and Paija_ **(** 1990) after the work of a Latvian woman writer Anna BRīgadere. An emphasis on the issues of identity, belonging, and home was an emergent impulse in the Latvian cinema of the 1970s, and several adaptations of women's fiction responded to this impulse expressed in the melodramatic mode. The melodrama _Lake Sonata_ ( _Ezera son_ ā _te_ , 1976), directed by Gunārs Cilinskis and Varis Brasla and based on the novel _The Well_ by the contemporary woman writer Regīna Ezera, and the popular comedy _The Limousine in the Color of Midsummer Night_ ( _Limuz_ ī _ns J_ āņ _u nakts kr_ ā _s_ ā, 1981), directed by Janis Streičs and based on a story by Māra Svīre, referred Latvian audiences to sentiment about the idealized rural home, depicting individual and communal identity as well as traditional gender relations through a visual focus on nature and its elements. The melodramatic mode of the literary originals and their adaptations conveyed feelings concerning family and personal relationships, with a clear focus on private life, portraying national identity in its most unmediated space of rural landscape and explicitly naturalizing women's characters.

On the one hand, Latvian film adaptations in the Soviet period were moved to the foreground of "republican production" for Soviet re-canonization of national literary history, granting an ideological value to the selected authors and works. On the other, adaptations should also be seen as visual enactments of national history and culture, playing a liminal role in the maintenance of the national literary canon and its (b)ordering centrality to the national narrative and history beyond the Soviet ideological dogma of selection and exclusion. These filmic "variations on the familiar" mediated literary texts as authentic representations of the national past, confirming the notion of national culture and authorship beyond its appropriations by Soviet canon-making dogmas. In their derivative and inferior status as filmic copies, adaptations mobilized a particular code of national memory – "adaptational" – to connote past sensibilities charted in literary texts as profilmic ­models. For example, _The Boy_ ( _Puika_ , 1977), directed by Aivars Freimanis and based on the autobiographical novel _The White Book_ ( _Balt_ ā _gr_ ā _mata_ ) by the Latvian writer Jānis Jaunsudrabiņš, gives a panorama of life in the Latvian countryside at the end of the nineteenth century, with iconic images of the Latvian home, belonging, and identity. Jaunsudrabiņš, exiled from Latvia in 1944, was known for writing mainly about Latvian rural life. The film adaptation of his autobiographical novel reclaimed the exiled author, according him iconic value as the "rural heartbeat" of the national literary history, and positioning his autobiographical _The White Book_ as a canon-forming text in the national literary tradition, transgressing its ­ideologically imposed boundaries.

The perception of adaptations as an ideologically safe – because they are ­derivative and therefore inferior – genre in the Soviet popular cinema (Hutchings and Vernitskaya, 2009) grew out of a traditional view of the status of adaptation in the hierarchy between a literary work and its film version, where the latter is seen as a copy of an original "subordinate to or parasitic on its source" (Stam and Raengo, 2004: 8). In Latvian popular cinema, the prestige of a literary original was reaffirmed by its filmic copies, testifying to the original's historical ­permanence and marshalling its original status as an overweening authority in the continuity of national cultural production. Literary works were "stored" in spectatorial memory, whose filmic "copies" and their fidelity, despite cinematic refraction, allegedly provided an imminent though fictional entry into the past beyond its Soviet historiography. At the same time, a literary text as a profilmic model was perceived in a culturally specific and referential, strictly territorialized and ­nationalized, sense, with very little potential to be critical and transgressive for the process of spectatorial formations of memory. Film adaptations accessed the displaced past nostalgically, playing a significant role in the gradual cultural ­actualization of ethnic nationalist sentiment and a rise of "restorative nostalgia" (Boym, 2001).

Remote historical times rendered in national classics and their filmic "copies" tended not to raise questions about overdetermined historical moments of the recent past and present. Films like Aleksandrs Leimanis's _Devil's Disciples_ ( _Vella kalpi_ , 1970) and _The Devil's Disciples on the Devil's Mill_ ( _Vella kalpi dzirnav_ ā _s_ , 1972) became very popular among Soviet audiences: both were among the top 10 most popular Soviet films in 1972 and 1973, combining the features of adventure, ­historical, and musical films. Rutku Tevs's original novel _The Devil's Three Disciples_ ( _Tr_ ī _s vella kalpi_ ) was a popular historical adventure novel about real events during the Polish–Swedish War, when a mill at Mara's Pond was defended by the citizens of Rīga. The plot takes place in seventeenth-century Rīga and centers around the dangerous adventures of three young men from the Latvian countryside and their brides. The foreign powers – Poles and Swedes – want to obtain the keys of Rīga in order to capture the city, and the local gentry are willing to sell the city to the conquerors. When the conquerors unite their forces and start attacking the Devil's Mill, the brave defenders of Rīga return to town and win city back for its people.

This film adaptation about the adventures of the fictional Latvian heroes Andris, Jēkabs, and Ērmanis appeared when Soviet audiences had already watched Westerns produced in the German Democratic Republic starring ­legendary Yugoslavian actor Gojko Mitić ( _Osceola_ , 1968, _Chingachgook, the Great Serpent_ , 1967, and many others) and the Karl May Westerns (produced in France, Italy, Yugoslavia, and the Federal Republic Germany). The legendary Mitić's Indian warrior ­embodied a role model of idealized heroic and noble masculinity, a romantic image of man's nature for Soviet boys and teenagers. Even more important – ­following the appearance of _Tarzan_ on the Soviet screens – Mitić's Indian warriors turned the male body into an appealing form of spectacle. This emphasis on the externality and male body was not so explicit in Soviet ­adventure films, but the generic imperatives of action, weaponry, chase, and romance implied a focus on the male body even under pressure from Soviet ideological puritanism. Adaptations of James Fenimore Cooper's novels in the late Soviet period demonstrated quite a tension between the traditional representation of the male body on the Soviet screen and the Western genre's focus on the male body's virility, as in Pavel Lyubimov's _The Pathfinder_ ( _Sledopyt_ , 1987), starring Latvian actor Andrejs Žagars, and Władysław Rostockii's _The Deerslayer_ ( _Zveroboi_ , 1990).

In the Soviet cinema, the masculine codes of justice, dignity, and chivalry, ­individual heroism and resistance to power (Imre, 2009: 92) were re-articulated for available heroic male characters, _à la_ Robin Hood, narrative formulas of adventure plots and fantasmatic identities, from the historical _Devils' Disciples_ in Latvia and _The Last Relic_ in Estonia to the cult films such as a revolutionary ­adventure film _Uncatcheable Revengers_ and the revolutionary Eastern _The White Sun of the Desert_. Soon after the Latvian and Estonian historical adventure films had enjoyed an overwhelming success on the Soviet screens, central studios ­produced film adaptations of the novels of Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas. Romantic adventure films such as those directed by Sergei Tarasov _Robin Hood's Arrows_ (1975) and _The Ballad about a Brave Knight Ivanhoe_ (1983) and Georgii Yungvald-Hil'kevich's _D'Artagnan and Three Musketeers_ ( Д'Apmaньян u mpu мyшкemepa, 1978) evoked images of the European past as a backstage "­decoration" of the romantic plots and performances of noble male heroics. Film adaptations of world classics (e.g., Scott's or Conan Doyle's novels) or of the national canon (e.g., _The Tale of How Peter the Great Found the Wife for His Negro_ , after Pushkin's short story, or _Devil's Disciples_ ) engaged Soviet spectators with idealizing images – "copies" – of the past and its transcendental ideals of manliness. This happened at the same time that, following an article by the demographer Boris Urlanis (­published in the Soviet _Literary Gazette_ , 1968), the question of a Soviet "masculinity crisis" was under discussion, perceived as a negative effect of the politics of sexual equality. Images of romantic masculinity and ideal brotherhood extracted from the proliferation of adaptations of literary originals, with an emphasis on the a male body as a spectacle, streamlined the desire for recovering normative meanings and values "natural" to men's "essence," encoded in literary legacy and historical references.

#  **... Soviet Latvian Detective...**

The challenge of identifying a criminal who is shielded by the anonymity of the modern masses is at the origin of the detective story (Benjamin, 2002). The ­genealogy of the detective genre was related to the creation of the professional police in ordering the social world, its professional surveillance, and "the will on the part of modern governments to know and thus to control the varying elements of their administrative areas" (Jameson, 1970: 629). The genre of Soviet detective novel and film retained the (re)ordering power of the detective's ­panoptic gaze and action pinning down actual identities behind masquerade, anonymity, and invisible traces of fingerprints. A Soviet detective plot, either in fiction or in film, linked action elements of the plot to the psychological analysis of criminal behavior and its social or ideological causes. This narrative focalization on the ­causality of allegedly atypical and socially deviant behavior was characteristic of Latvian film director Aloizs Brenčs' films, such as _Being Unwanted_ ( _Liekam b_ ū _t_ , 1976). The film reflects a concern with the flaws of Soviet social engineering (Vatulesku, 2010: 32).

In the late 1960s, Latvian detective films were quite popular on Soviet screens, and most of them were made by Aloizs Brenčs: _When the Rain and Wind Knock on the Window_ ( _Kad lietus un v_ ē _ji sitas log_ ā, 1967), _24-25 Won't Come Back_ ( _24-25 neatgriežas_ , 1968), _Being Unwanted_ (1976), and _A Check for the Rook of Diamonds_ ( _Šahs briljantu karalienei_ , 1973). Brenčs might have been influenced by the genre ­conventions of the 1930s American crime films. He popularized American detective writer James Chase to the Soviet audience with the three-part made-for-TV series _Mirage_ (1983) based on Chase's novel _The World in My Pocket_ (1959). Because of Aloizs Brenčs, detective films developed into a distinctive marker of Latvian popular cinema in the 1970s–1980s, when this genre was on a rise in Soviet cultural production, particularly with a proliferation of detective fiction and television detective series, mentoring home audiences with pedagogical messages of Soviet law and order.

At the same time, the history of Soviet detective film was the struggle of the genre with the ideological constraints and with its use as a tool for the education of Soviet citizens in law and order – the sympathetic and credible Soviet detective who never questioned or transgressed the social order (Gobler, 1987: 58). Censorship did not allow critical or ironic images of law enforcement institutions, and the very idea of a psychoanalytical detective was impossible. But the films of this genre had to turn to hidden sides of otherwise idealized social reality, impossible without picturing social and everyday life. Aloiz Brenčs actually used this potentiality of the genre in his films by turning the biographical agenda of his heroes (or antiheroes) into a psychological drama and social analysis.

In general, Latvian films of this genre, like all other Soviet detective fiction, ­follow the generic formula that the "most powerful weapons against crime are ­intelligence, observation, and deduction" (Gates, 2006: 5). They focus on men and detection, on a male investigator's skills, expertise, and political and professional commitment. The traditional male-centeredness that never disappeared from Soviet detective fiction served the political uniformity of mores and values to be taught in its different narrative versions of detecting a smuggler, a Western spy, a traitor, a corrupted and morally degrading individual, a thief, or a former Nazi ­collaborator. Although a couple of Brenčs's films put a woman detective in the midst of the plot, she always had to be in the circle of professional men supporting and facilitating her investigation. The gendered icon of an educated male, ­ideologically flawless, screening criminals and "removing a tumor" from the ­otherwise healthy "social body" of Soviet society became a "brand" for Latvian detective films on the Soviet screens. Some of them were adaptations of popular detective novels, written in Latvia. These adaptations facilitated the recognition and popularity of Latvian detective fiction (Gunārs Cirulis, Andris Kolbergs, and Anatolijs Imermanis) among Soviet readers, even with the predominance of detective fiction in translated literature that also "testified to a great demand for the detective genre among Soviet readers" (Nepomnyashchy, 1999:165).

#  **... Freedom and Cinema...**

In the late 1980s, Latvian filmmakers turned to national history and identity in ­family melodramas. Aloizs Brenčs directed the family saga _The Zitar Family_ ( _Zitaru Dzimta_ , 1989), based on a novel by Vilis Lācis and the TV-series _Long Way in the Dunes (Ilgais ce_ ļš _k_ ā _p_ ā _s_ , 1980); and Arvids Krievs made the nostalgic melodrama _Eve's Garden of Paradise_ ( _Ievas parad_ ī _zes d_ ā _rzs_ , 1991) about the pre-Soviet "golden thirties." Brenčs' TV-series _A Long Way in the Dunes_ dramatized the experiences and conflicting memories of Latvians against the national history of the 1940s–1980s encapsulated within a narrative about a woman's fate. What earlier would have been a historical epic was compressed into the genre hybrid of family melodrama and romance. Thus, the narrative focus on the romantic and innocent heroine's love, motherhood, suffering, and return home, Marta's "long way in the dunes," turns the national past into a backdrop, and in this secondary function history reemerges as a course of events to which she is mostly an innocent witness. This generic choice and its gendered focus on a woman's private biography, her feelings and attachments as a way of conveying the nationalistic sentiment of "coming home" in the Soviet space allowed the filmmaker to move away from political ambiguities and historical taboos towards sentimental empathy with the politically innocent but suffering heroine (deported to Siberia) played by a very popular Latvian actress Lilita Ozoliņa.

After the restoration of political independence in Latvia and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, the centralized budget of film production, as well as its networks of local movie theaters, was seriously compromised. Latvian ­filmmaking found itself in a deep financial crisis, with no experience of acting within the European ensembles of production. With the available funding, film directors experimented with genre forms, characters, and themes previously unavailable, or continued with already established genre traditions. Jānis Streičs made a film ­adaptation of Jānis Klīdzējs's _A Man's Child_ ( _Cilveka berns_ ,1991) which won the Rights of the Child Award at the Chicago International Children's Film Festival, 1994. For telling the story of an aging KGB agent in psychotherapy in _The Mystery of the Old Parish House_ ( _Vec_ ā _s pagastm_ ā _jas mist_ ē _rija_ , 2000), Streičs used elements of mysticism and Gothic fantasy to pose questions of guilt, responsibility, and ­memory to the audience. In the early 1990s, Aloizs Brenčs moved away from a detective genre that had brought him recognition in the Soviet cinema to the ­genres of melodrama and the biopic. The plot of _Romance Alla Russa_ (1994), which was made in Byelorussia, takes place in contemporary Venice, and the characters are played by Russian actors. In 1998 he made the female biopic _Anna_ about Anna Notken, who lived in Livonia in the seventeenth century – a film that that put ­forward the challenging theme of a Baltic German woman's role in Latvian history.

Since the early 1990s, Latvian films have gained some visibility at different international festivals. Varis Brasla's children's film _Ziemassv_ ā _tku jampadracis_ (1996) won the Children's Film Award at the Würzburg International Filmweekend and the Children's Jury Award at the Chicago International Children's Film Festival. Viesturs Kairišs's debut feature film, _Leaving by the Way_ ( _Pa ce_ ļ _am aizejot_ , 2001), won the Jury Prize at the Raindance Film Festival in 2002. Jānis Putniņš was the winner of Best Film and Best Screenplay at the Latvian National Film Festival in 2007 for _Vogelfrei_ (2007), and Laila Pakalnina, the winner of several film awards, was a nominee for the Golden Berlin Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival for _Water (_ Ū _dens_ , 2006). So far Laila Pakalniņa has made 20 short feature and documentary films, and her _Shoe_ was selected for the _Un Certain Regard_ section in Cannes (1998). More successfully than other filmmakers who allegedly make up a new ­generation, she has been trying to sustain Latvian cinema's presence on the international ­festival circuit. However, new names and new films, falling into the genre of a "festival film," a niche in East-Central European low-budget art-house cinema, should not create an illusion that Latvian cinema is robust, as film critic Dita Rietuma (2010) points out about the current state of the arts.

Alongside some successful achievements of short feature or documentary films in international festival rankings, popular narrative cinema has been reanimated by epic representation of the nation's past. Films such as Aigars Grauba's _Dangerous Summer_ ( _Baiga Vasara_ , 2000) and, the most expensive so far, his _Defenders of R_ ī _ga (R_ ī _gas Sargi_ , 2007), address crucial events of the nation's history, such as the ­struggle for national independence in 1919 and its loss in 1940. These formula-ridden ­historical films, of mediocre cinematic quality, traditional images of gender and propagandistic fervor, did not appeal to the international market, though were rather popular with domestic audiences. This kind of historical patriotic spectacle has occupied a sizeable niche in post-Soviet popular cinema, appealing to the ­nationalist sentiments of audiences in the Russian _Aleksandr, Battle on the Neva (Aleksandr, Nevskaja bitva_ , 2009) or Vladimir Khotinenko's _1612_ (2007) or the Estonian _Names in Marble (Nimed marmortahvlil_ , 2002) by Elmo Nüganen. Jānis Streičs, a _maître_ of the Latvian cinema, in his Hollywood-style film _Rudolf's Legacy_ ( _R_ ū _dolfa Mantojums_ , 2010) moved beyond the past of wars, conflicts, and losses to a nostalgic narrative about a well-off Latvian peasant and his family in the late ­nineteenth century, appealing greatly to the sentiments of soil, roots, tradition (including gender ­relations), authentic Latvianness, and masculinized national values.

However, contemporary Latvian film production has been somehow chaotic, and domestic films occupy a very marginal share in the national film market. The emergence of independent film studios and financial support from the funding agencies (Cultural Capital Fund, European Union programs) could not prevent a rapid decline in national film production, which is unable to compete in the European and global film production and distribution markets. Film productions, distributional capacities, and screening policies had to be reconceptualized in the 1990s, which was a period of transition towards a market economy and ­engagement with a more intensive rate of transnationalization of capital and culture. But ­thinking about the films of the two decades since the restoration of independence in 1991, I would rather agree with Lithuanian critic Skirmantas Valiulis, who argues about the "death of cinema" in post-Soviet cultural contexts as a certain myth,

Everybody says it's because of finances. But I think that there are more reasons: the different existence of the state, different themes, the arrival of new cinematographers; the older generation is dying, and a middle generation is coming, especially lots of young people who are just starting out or waiting for start out and can't go any further. There are many reasons, and the word "dying" is obfuscating a little bit, as something totally new and unseen for our eyes is coming into life. (2010)

On the other hand, I would problematize this "organicist" approach towards the post-Soviet cultural condition as a "seasonal" or a "generational" process. Firstly, the desire for "something totally new and unseen for our eyes," apart from a ­radical change in film economy and politics, nevertheless does imply a rise in technical competence, stylistic expressivity, and something that Thomas Elsaesser (1994) calls "a return to the artisan tradition" in his discussion of Ingmar Bergman's films. Secondly, in my view, the post-Soviet revisions of the past ruled by restorative ­nostalgia have frequently caught us up in a "presentist" view of cinematic ­production, which remains entrenched in the "national cinemas framework" and "attention to the cultural and cinematic process" only within a given national ­cultural context (Iordanova, 2003: 12). What is needed to overcome ossifying dogma in the critique of cinematic processes and film production is to generate a critical revision of the concept and genealogy of national cinema, its popular ­genres and their development as they intersect with transnational legacies, controversial political and ideological contexts and issues of cinematic value.

 **Notes**

1 Aleksandrs Rusteiķis (1892–1958) himself was trained as an actor in St Petersburg, worked in Berlin and Tashkent for a time, then became the art director of the Russian Drama Theater in Rīga.

2 The literary epic _L_ āč _pl_ ē _sis_ ( _Bear-slayer_ , 1888), which has a national status similar in its significance to the Finnish epic _Kalevala_ or the German poem _Nibelungenlied_ , was ­converted into a defining text of Latvian nationhood during the national emancipation movement in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries.

3 _Sensus communis_ was conceptualized by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, as a commonality of feeling, a natural affection, a sense of community that has become self-conscious (Cooper, 1709).

4 Around five hundred non-professional actors participated in the shooting of the film. Lilita Bērziņa (1903–1983). who played central women's roles in the film (Laimdota and Mirdza). was the only professional actress involved in the film shooting.

5 In 1957 the novel was screened again (dir. Varis Krumins). In this screen version of the novel the plot is modified so that Oskars becomes a chair of the Soviet fishing cooperative.

6 The film received a very prestigious Stalin's Award.

 **Further Reading**

Altman, R. (1999) _Film/Genre_. BFi Publishing, London.

Benjamin,W. (2002) _The Arcades Project_ (trans. Eiland McLaughlin). Harvard University Press, Boston.

Boym, S. (2001) _The Future of Nostalgia_. Basic Books, New York.

Connor, W. (1994) _Ethnonationalism_. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Cooper, Anthony Ashley (1709) _Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour_. London.

Dobrenko E. (2000) Russia that we have acquired: Russian classics, Stalinist cinema and the past in its revolutionary development     5: 45–80.

Elsaesser, T. (1994) Putting on a show: the European art movie. _Sight and Sound_ 4 (4): 22–27. Available online at <http://bergmanorama.webs.com/sightsound94_elsaesser.htm> (accessed, December 2, 2011).

Elsaesser, Th. (2000) _Weimar Cinema and After: Germany's Historical Imaginary_. Routledge, London.

Flood M., Gardiner, J.K., Pease, B. _et al_. (eds) _International Encyclopaedia of Men and Masculinities_ (2007) Routledge, London & New York.

Gates, Philippa (2006) _Detecting Men: Masculinity and the Hollywood Detective Film_. SUNY Press, Albany, NY p. 5.

Göbler, Barbara (1987) _A. Adamov und A. und G. Vajner: Aspekte des sowjetischen Kriminalromans_. O. Sagner in Kommission, Munich.

Hansen, M. (1994) _Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film_. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Hansen, M.B. (1999) The mass production of the senses: classical cinema as vernacular modernism. _Modernism/Modernity_ , 6 (2): 59–77.

Hayward, S. (1993) _French National Cinema_. Routledge, London.

Hutchings, S. and Vernitskaia, A. (2009) _Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 1900–2001: Screening the Word_. Routledge, New York.

Imre, Anikó (2009) _Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Post-Communist Media Cultures_. MIT Press Cambridge, MA.

Iordanova, D. (2003) _Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film_. Wallflower Press, London.

Jameson, Frederick (1970) On Raymond Chandler. _The Southern Review_ , 6: 624–650.

Keith, B. (2007) _Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology_. Wallflower Press, London.

Neale, S. (1995): Questions of genre, in _Approaches to Media: A Reader_ (ed. Oliver ­Boyd-Barrett & Chris Newbold). Arnold, London, pp. 460–472 .

Nepomnyashchy, C.T _._ (1999) _Markets_ , _mirrors, and mayhem_ : Aleksandra Marinina and the rise of the new Russian detective, in _Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, And Society Since Gorbachev_ (ed. A.M. Barker). Duke University Press, Durham, NC, pp. 161–191.

Prokhorov A. (2001) The unknown new wave: Soviet cinema of the sixties, in _Springtime for Soviet Cinema_. _Re/Viewing the 1960s_ (ed. A. Prokhorov). Pittsburgh. Available online at: <http://www.rusfilm.pitt.edu/booklets/Thaw.pdf> (accessed December 2, 2011).

Pumpurs, A. (1888) _L_ āč _pl_ ē _sis_ (Bear-slayer). s.n., Rīga.

Ricci, S. (2007) _Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922–1943_ , University of California Press, Berkeley.

Rietuma, D. (2010) _Rietuma: Tas, ka Latvijas kino ir dz_ ī _vs, ir il_ ū _zija_ (Rietuma: Latvian cinema is Alive – This is Illusion) BNS (September 16), <http://www.tvnet.lv/izklaide/kino/346443-rietuma_tas_ka_latvijas_kino_ir_dzivs_ir_iluzija> (accessed December 20, 2010).

Skaff, S. (2008) _The Law of the Looking Glass: Cinema of Poland_. Ohio University Press, Athens, OH.

Soila, T., Söderbergh-Widding A., and Iverson, G. (1998) _Nordic National Cinemas_. Routledge, London and New York.

Stam, R. (2000) _Film Theory_. Blackwell, Oxford.

Stam, R. and Raengo, A. (2004) _Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation_. Blackwell, Oxford.

Valiulis, S. (2010) _How is Lithuanian Cinema Getting on Today?_ <http://www.straipsniai.lt/en/People/6> (accessed December 21, 2010).

Vatulesku, C. (2010) _Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times_. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.

Woll, J. (2000) _Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw_. I.B. Tauris, London and New York.

# 20

# A Comparative Study

#  _Rein Raamat's_ Big Tõll _and Priit Pärn's_ Luncheon on the Grass

Andreas Trossek

The natural progress in the western provinces of the Soviet Union was quickly separated from the current of contemporary art, at the same time also severing the preconditions for starting a dialogue between art and society and strengthening the social mode of thinking.... It was probably during that period that the so-called _living in two different eras_ emerged. In one of them real life and its requirements were faced, at the same time trying to protest against its restrictions and demands in various ways.... In the other, the logic of contemporary art was followed, constantly trying to establish contacts with it and, not being able to participate in it in a natural way, to turn it into a myth, a kind of model of Western virtual art life based on specialized articles and books with their reproductions that had found their way to Estonia. (Helme & Kangilaski, 1999: 167; my emphasis)

Occupation that lasts a couple of months or even a couple of years determines behavioral solutions different from those caused by living under the rule of alien power over several decades. This is the case in the film world as well. _It was like leading a double life_. On the outside the prevailing political game rules were accepted, but in their shadow people still tried to pave their own path and stay honest on the inside. Glavlit could also have a prolific effect, encouraging artists to find other, artistically more figurative forms of expression instead of straightforwardness. (Kärk, 1996: 70; my emphasis)

The last period of the occupation era, 1987–1991, started with the considerable weakening of art censorship, which was accompanied by a rapid increase in international connections and the pluralism of art forms.... The former art financing system collapsed; honorary titles and other institutional attributes lost their significance; the importance of the Artists' Association decreased. (Kangilaski, 2000: 235)

In 1988 the Supreme Council of the Estonian SSR, eager to enact reforms, eliminated the Cinema Committee and delegated all cultural affairs to the newly established Cultural Committee. Art censorship disappeared. The governmental censorship agency Glavlit was closed in 1990 and the official cinema censorship in Estonia seized to exist. (Ruus, 2000: 12)

These quotations on art and film were chosen here as vague landmarks of the period in recent Estonian history that started with the wave of Russification in the late 1970s and culminated with the national movement, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Estonia's regained independence in the early 1990s. During this political period all cultural activities were affected by (over)politicization, and even the slightest gesture could divide cultural producers into the categories of "our people," "Soviets," and those standing between these ideological options. On the national scale of values, Estonian animation filmmakers were mostly categorized under "our people," mainly considering the melancholic-satirical auteur films of Priit Pärn completed in the 1980s: for instance, _Some Exercises in Preparation for Independent Life_ (1980), _The Triangle_ (1982), and _Hotel E_ (1992), and undeniably one of the most celebrated works of Estonian film, _Luncheon on the Grass_ (1987). The other important hand-drawn-animation director of the 1980s, Rein Raamat, has received more controversial reception in his homeland. Doubtlessly, his best-known films are _Big_ _T_ _õll_ (1980) and _Inferno_ (1983), which interpret the painting style of Jüri Arrak and the graphic art of Eduard Wiiralt, respectively. They show the director's pretension to make "pure art" within the technological framework of animation. However, both Pärn's painful irony and Raamat's epic morality operated in the specific cultural system of the Soviet Estonian context, where allegory became a certain form of "straightforwardness" and its decoding in the reception of the public became the dominant means of comprehension.

#  **The Problems of Context**

That is to say, it would not make much sense to describe Pärn's or Raamat's animated films simply because of their medium and in the context of the general history of animation, where they would still be set against the background of global entertainment industry, which would primarily reduce them to niche products aimed at international animated film festivals. Instead of this too hermetic approach it would be more interesting to try mapping out, as thoroughly as possible, the "functioning" of Estonian animated film of that time in the context of the local cultural sphere and abroad, although this would inevitably entail the risk of deviating from the initial objects of examination – the films. At the same time, one must also keep in mind the context of the Soviet Union's film industry. Ignoring this would create an impression that the films were only produced for the local audience, which, considering the role of Goskino (the USSR State Committee for Cinematography, located in Moscow) as the final censor and main producer incurring all costs, was not the case at all. The decisively important role of cinema bureaucracy inevitably raises the question of the coauthorship function of the state censorship apparatus. For reasons of space this subject will not be analyzed in detail here, yet it is constantly present as a sub-text.

Weak control over their creative work was apparently the main reason why innovative young artists like Ando Keskküla, Leonhard Lapin, Sirje Lapin (Runge), and Aili Vint, who had worked for the cartoon department established by Rein Raamat in 1971 under Tallinnfilm studio, gave up that collaboration already in the mid-1970s. From among the artists who had experimented in animated film during the 1970s, only Rein Tammik was still actively involved in the field by the early 1980s. In those days, Jüri Arrak also contributed, but just episodically.1 On the studio level it was, in fact, the director and editor, not the artists, who were held responsible for the narrative integrity of animated films; thus, only they would have to make sure that the artwork would be consistent with the script. However, it would also be correct to conclude that the pressure of ideological engagement of fine art in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), one of the most "Western" provinces of the Soviet Union in its relative liberalism, was not even remotely comparable to the humiliation the filmmakers constantly had to face, travelling back and forth between Tallinn and Moscow in quest of approval from the Goskino officials. The question of what exactly directors meant by this or that was as topical in the seemingly peripheral field of animated films, which were officially aimed at children, as elsewhere.2 The Estonian example demonstrates that it was still possible to produce a surprising number of animated films with a more artistic and adult pretension, and often with a political undertone.

The fact that young pop art-inspired artists of the time quickly distanced themselves from animated film during the 1970s can mainly be explained by the prosaic fact that animated film as a collectively made synthetic form of art does not favor individualistic artists who wish to see the uncompromised realization of their personal agendas as a finished product on the screen.3 Besides, filmmakers, who had to follow the bureaucratic rules imposed on the cinema industry across the Soviet Union, and artists, working at the local level within the rules of moderate Socialist realism, cannot really be treated as being within the same categories. Figuratively speaking, the "freedom coefficient" of the first group was considerably lower than that of the second one – both in practical and ideological terms.4

Yet, why shouldn't we discuss 1980s animated films through the naïve rhetoric of "pure art," when Rein Raamat's background as a trained painter and Priit Pärn's work as a self-taught graphic artist would give enough reason for just such an art-oriented approach? Estonian hand-drawn animation of the 1970s could indeed be viewed less through the sociopolitical filter than through explanatory models existing in the history of recent Estonian art. Already by means of mere empirical observation it is easy to draw parallels between the influences of western pop art deprecated in the official art life of the Estonian SSR and the local animated film production, which easily absorbed these influences and involved several young artists.5

Nevertheless, animated films produced in the Estonian SSR during the decade that saw the Moscow Olympic Games' Tallinn Regatta in 1980 but also the Baltic Way in 1989 can no longer be subordinated to such art and film-centered comparisons;6 and they are difficult, if not altogether impossible, to deciphersimply through visual categories.7 In most cases, the best animation output of the 1980s already represents a new paradigm in which the narrative and the auteur's attitude towards the surrounding Soviet reality became more important than visual experimentation. This process culminated at the end of the decade in pure social criticism: for instance, in the aforementioned _Luncheon on the Grass_ and _Hotel E_ by Pärn, but also in _City_ (1988) by Raamat, brimming with critique against the Soviet districts of blocks of flats (which were mostly built for immigrant workers sent to Estonia from other parts of the Soviet Union) and _Departure_ (1991) by Heiki Ernits, in which black humor is once again used to tear open the wounds of the Estonians' national trauma, the Stalinist mass deportations. During these years even the traditionally rather children-friendly Estonian puppet animation was affected by social sensitivity, as, for instance, in the big-budgeted _Theatre Papa Carlo_ (1988) and _Noblesse Oblige_ (1989) by Rao Heidmets, made in cooperation with Priit Pärn as co-screenwriter. Sociocritical Estonian animated films align with movies from the age of perestroika, realized in a similar key, for example, _Please Smile!_ (1985) and _Only for the Crazy, or Nurse_ (1990).

Why draw such loose parallels? Because the entire output of Tallinnfilm studio, including the animation department, was subordinated to the union-wide rules of cinema bureaucracy, which, in turn, depended on the political decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. All these films are simultaneously restless, cruel, deadly serious, and even parodic. What "speaks" in them is the empire, or more precisely, that immanent decay, non-subordination, inevitable resistance, and rebellious logic inherent in the totalitarian-authoritarian form of government that is based on relationships of control and subordination. In a way, these are all films about "the beginning of the end."

On the other hand, some Estonian hand-drawn animated films of the 1980s and the local art scene were also closely connected – perhaps even more than recent accounts of art history may indicate. At close quarters, behavioral patterns of artists and filmmakers in the Socialist political-ideological system seem surprisingly similar. Beyond the intrinsic interest of many of the films to the general Estonian art public, who followed them attentively, both the local animation and the whole Estonian art scene were characterized by a certain "cultural bilingualism."8 By "cultural bilingualism" I mean an ambivalence, a set of words to be spoken and to be silent about, making it a political-ideological question of hidden logic in communication rather than an actual difference between the Estonian and Russian language, between the Latin and Cyrillic alphabet per se. A truly intriguing example of this was the effect of the Estonian slide painting: it functioned in the already quite flexible canon of Socialist realism all over the Soviet Union with its northern cool and, more narrowly, it also worked in the local context as ideologically opposing "Western hyperrealism." A similar playfulness on multiple levels is also typical of the best animation output of the decade, which, with its local national and political connotations, did not cease to be understandable – although in different background systems – and appreciated-awarded throughout the whole Soviet Union.

During the 1980s, Goskino in Moscow no longer rejected any of the Estonian animated films from its union-wide distribution, as it had in 1977 Priit Pärn's director's debut, _Is the Earth Round?_ , which defied all the basic ideas of animated film typical of the output of Soyuzmultfilm, and, in 1978, Avo Paistik's _Vacuum Cleaner_ , which turned out to be a scary technocratic nightmare of the Soviet children's film category thanks to Rein Tammik's hyperrealist artistic work. Filmmakers had learned from their mistakes (as financial loss followed the rejection of works), and from then on, the ball was seemingly kicked into two goals at the same time: filmmakers' creative plans were one thing, while the union-wide cinema officials' protocols were the other.

#  **Who Can Read between the Lines?**

It was Rein Raamat who most straightforwardly adopted the models of conformity known in the Estonian cultural space. His film _Field_ (1978) had already made a visual reference to the graphic novel _Kodalased_ by Kaljo Põllu, a highly popular artwork that cultivated a regional–national Finno-Ugric identity in the Estonian SSR while remaining ideologically acceptable to the Soviet system within the rhetoric of fellow nations. Põllu's pseudo-mythological style, which had withdrawn from pop art experiments in the early 1970s, as well as that of Jüri Arrak's, who contributed to the film _Big Tõll_ (1980), represented the national-conservative line that best suited the concepts of Rein Raamat. Integrating this national-conservative line with the general union-wide tendencies of the Sovietization of the Soviet film industry was a daring act in itself, but formula-based calculations did not leave much to chance. Sure, in Tallinn the audience would understand the inside jokes but who would be able to read between the lines in Moscow? It was the provocative film works of Priit Pärn that started to strike an innovative and unexpected note in the context of the Soviet film industry during the 1980s. With their enjoyable caricature-like puns they sometimes nevertheless managed to spill over into satirical social criticism. The sense of restriction typical of this historical situation, the conscious "cultural bilingualism" and rebellion within the constraints apparently caused even more complex paradoxes and dichotomies than that of "dissident _versus_ conformist" model.9

In Estonian animation, the best examples of this "cultural bilingualism" are Rein Raamat's animated films _Field_ , _Big Tõll_ , and _Inferno_ , where the visual language interpreted by Estonian artists in national-mythological key is transferred to the medium of animated film aimed at international audiences.10 The background for these films was formed by one of the most forceful periods of Russification in the Soviet era,11 which gained its final form on a political level in 1978.12 Compared to the early 1970s, this raised a more pressing question about the national affiliation of creative individuals. Their positioning on the scale of values based on the typical Cold War era opposition of West and East ( _i.e_. capitalism _versus_ communism) was now replaced with a considerably more demanding question about the nation's survival: while the Prague Spring in 1968 was only a more remote lesson about the rigidity of the Soviet Union's leadership, every local citizen could feel the shift towards Russification in the local cultural policy of the Estonian SSR from the late 1970s on.

Inevitably the question arises of whether artists and filmmakers actually found it important who the addressees of their artworks were. Were these film made primarily for Estonian or international audiences? And what can researchers draw on today, when the written Soviet sources fail to provide a sufficient overview and the later memoirs of the parties involved – if they have agreed to publish them at all – are often tendentious, filtered through the requirements and prerequisites of the new times, the post-Socialist years? Who can read between the lines today?

#  **Rein Raamat's** **_Big_** **_Tõ_** ** _ll_**

By 1977 Estonian animated film as a whole (that is, puppet and cartoon animation) had a 20-year history and had gained a favorable reputation in Soviet film politics.13 Rein Raamat, a painter by education, was directing his most important works: _Hunter_ (1976) and _Antennas in Ice_ (1977) were already finished; _Field_ (1978) was still in production. At the same time Priit Pärn, a professional biologist who had gained recognition in Estonia as a cartoonist, started his directing career with _Is the Earth Round?_ (not all voices within Goskino circles were favorable to him).14 Ando Keskküla, who had directed two children's films inspired by pop art, gave up animated film for painting. Thus, from among the artists with a diploma who had contributed to animated cartoons in the early 1970s only Rein Tammik was left working in the field. This meant that only two names emerged during the 1980s within the so-called artistic section of Estonian hand-drawn animation: Raamat, who continued to seek connections with the art world, and Pärn, who surprised others as a self-taught "barbarian" coming from outside the system.

Produced for a budget of 81 000 Soviet rubles, the animated film _Big_ Tõll (1980), based on a folk tale about a mythical Estonian hero, became the most expensive Estonian animated film to have been made.15 Lepo Sumera composed the grim symphonic soundtrack with a national undertone; the chief artist of the film was Jüri Arrak. According to the files about animated films produced in Tallinnfilm Studio, currently stored in the state archives, the budget for an average one-part, 10-minute animated film at the time was roughly around 30 000 rubles. This means that, with a running time of approximately 15 minutes, _Big Tõll_ had considerably more funding than was usually given. Its costs were only outweighed by Raamat's next work, _Inferno_ , inspired by the artwork of Eduard Wiiralt and finished three years later. The initial budget of the two-part film was 95 000 rubles,16 which equaled the cost of more than three one-part animated films. Apparently, producing such an ambitious and technically demanding project was justified in cinema circles by the long list of awards _Big_ _T_ _õll_ had won, including first prize at the international Varna Animated Film Festival (1981) and second prize at the reputed Ottawa International Animation Festival (Žavoronok, 1984: 91).

After preliminary viewing by the art council of the Tallinnfilm Studio, which was the primary institution for determining the fate of new films, _Big Tõll_ was categorized under "for adult viewers" (not in the pornographic sense of the term).17 This already implied an assessment of the film's export potential: "We have come to folk tales about heroes, which also possess international value."18 The same minutes from the meeting of October 9, 1980, explaining the story of making the film, also make a reference to the film's local orientation. Silvia Kiik, an editor in the animation studio, said, "In folk mythology, Tõll is the symbol of home-making and protection, who never lets his people down, even in the times of suffering." Considering that everything was registered in the minutes, one of the attendants stated with surprising straightforwardness that "the Russification problem has been given much emphasis lately."19

People involved in the making of this film later recalled that Rein Raamat was invited to Moscow to give answers regarding the tragicomic incident that occurred during the process of developing the film when, as a result of technical failure, the armies of cone-headed enemies that were initially designed in purple, turned red. Set against the actual political background of the 1980 youth riots in Tallinn and the subsequent affair of "the letter of 40,"20 it seemed as if the local folklore hero Tõll was slaying the "reds" in the peaked _budyonnovka_ hats of Russian soldiers, with blood flowing in wide waves.21 Also, local politicians were able to read themselves into some national-political connotations, which, phrased as an accusation, would sound downright absurd: according to Raamat, the "boys" in the Central Committee in Tallinn noticed that the eyes in Tõll's chopped-off head were blue, black, and white, the colors of the national flag.22 It is easy to draw a parallel here with the ironic remark by Jüri Arrak, who had also been disciplined by Estonian SSR art politics, that during the Russian era he was merely a "dissident of color."

Talking about cases similar to that of _Big Tõll_ , it is important to note that these edgy interpretations did not entail any serious penalties for the parties involved. Quite the opposite, _Big Tõll_ turned out to be one of Raamat's most appreciated and decorated films. It was as if the imperial system had "commissioned" rebellion within itself; it established meanings and crossing over the allowed borders even where perhaps they did not exist in the first place. Verifying the existence of potential insubordination, it actually only tested the validity of its own power and potential to raise terror in its subordinates.

Thus, in the case of _Big Tõll_ , Rein Raamat represented the national-conservative line in Estonian art, "translating" the local folk legends and the visual style of his selected artist Jüri Arrak into international animation language,23 at the same time having become a master _par excellence_ in ambivalent behavior as a film director already experienced in the Soviet Union's cinema politics. Raamat himself also admitted this afterwards, noting, among other things, that "animated films are characterized by multilayeredness. In most cases there is no single answer; our films can be treated as ambivalent works of art; viewers can freely interpret them, whereas the director will guide them and offer them an opportunity for interpretation" (Ruus & Teinemaa, 1991: 5). However, critics have usually not forgiven Raamat his games of multiple addressees; and his films have been mostly praised in hindsight, rather than at the time of their completion.24

But why did Rein Raamat choose Jüri Arrak for the project of _Big Tõll_ after all? Arrak played a secondary role in the making of the film, only creating the characters and backgrounds and proposing the color solution. Nevertheless, he serves here as an intriguing example of the self-mythologizing artist type dwelling in his personal aesthetical "ivory tower" the middle of the Soviet reality of the 1970s and1980s. Arrak is a good example of an artist who primarily carried ideological significance for Estonians in the years of occupation. The artist represented something very important in terms of collective national identity, being encapsulated in his personal world of values and therefore being outside the Soviet reality where political compromises were a necessity. In the eyes of the art public with national-conservative inclinations, Arrak always seemed to "stick to Estonian business" and made the "right" aesthetic decisions.

For instance, the allegory of one of Jüri Arrak's best known paintings from the Soviet era, _Saint George and the Dragon_ ( _Jüri võitlus lohega_ , 1979), consists in the personification and "domestication" of the Christian myth on the one hand – as the saint's name was transformed into its Estonian equivalent Jüri and the word "dragon" was replaced by the more colloquial "lohe" – and in the rewriting of that myth on the other. In the painting one may see that Jüri did not win over the dragon but, instead, was swallowed by the creature. The hero survived somehow and continued his (hopeless) fight inside the (red!) dragon's body, using his spear to "undermine from within the monster that beat him in battle."25 Jüri obviously refers to the artist himself, and the red dragon is the Soviet system, which has incorporated the struggling national figure. (Not much is left of the Christian allegory.) It was precisely an artist with such a "heroic" public reputation that turned out to be the best choice in the context of the artistic endeavors of a director of animated films like Raamat. This was a choice that legitimized Raamat in the eyes of the local cultural public when _Big Tõll_ was completed and which brought him national praise. Also, the singularity and idiosyncrasy of Arrak's visual style brought him more universal recognition in the animation circles of both the Soviet Union and the rest of the world.

#  **Priit Pärn's** **_Luncheon on the Grass_**

While Rein Raamat often flirted with Estonian art in the animated films he directed, the other important director of the 1980s, Priit Pärn, intentionally created for himself the image of the outsider, in spite of the fact that from the beginning of the decade he was also seen as a decent graphic artist. "Even in terms of form his works have a surprising and singular effect," remarked the renowned graphic art critic Jüri Hain, praising Pärn's free graphic art, displayed for the first time alongside his drawings in the Tallinn Art Salon in 1982 (Kirt, 1984: 18). In 1984 he also joined the Artists' Association.26 Pärn, whose public reputation rose from being a gifted caricaturist and humorist to being a talented animation director, insisted that his links to the Estonian art world were extremely weak (Ruus, 1986: 7), describing his own position in the bureaucratic and diploma-centered art politics of the Estonian SSR as that of a "dilettante outsider" (Ruus 1986: 5) who thus had to prove his worth.

In the 1980s, Pärn also made each of his films as if it were his last because many of his projects were either left unrealized or indefinitely postponed owing to cinema politics. According to Pärn himself, the situation in Soviet society tightened from the late 1970s (both economically and ideologically), and you could no longer do what you wanted.27 This was partly the reason why he joined the Artists' Association as a film artist and turned more seriously toward graphic art, which balanced his role as a cartoonist and illustrator of children books and the children's magazine _Täheke_.

Taking a closer look at Pärn's filmography, one can see a certain irregular pattern in which the unsuccessful, more playful, and philosophical works that tend to presume adult viewers alternate with successful and more simple award-winning ones aimed at children. Pärn's philosophical directing debut rejected by Goskino, _Is the Earth Round?_ (1977), was followed by the humorous... _And Plays Tricks_ (1978), which must have already been entered into the studio's production plans before Goskino's crushing judgment, and which turned out to be one of his most awarded films. It was probably because of the success of the latter that the mechanically monotonous _Exercises in Preparation for Independent Life_ (1980), with its allusions to René Magritte, became the next serious film in Pärn's filmography. According to an Estonian art critic, "nothing is happening there at all" (Olep, 1983: 31). This was, in fact, meant as praise for Pärn's growing seriousness as a director of animation. Yet, at first, this work was only appreciated and awarded at the fifteenth union-wide film festival in Tallinn in 1982, (Žavoronok, 1984: 91), not anywhere else in the entire Soviet Union.

It was not until 1982 that Pärn was offered a new chance to make an auteur film, when _Triangle_ was accepted into the annual production plan of the studio. This was perhaps one of the most serious of Pärn's films, ambivalently combining the popular story _The Goblin of the Hearth_ , written by Juhan Kunder in the nineteenth century, with details from the divorce statistics section of the Estonian SSR Central Statistics Office, and thus mocking the cinema bureaucracy that automatically tended to favor projects based on folk tales. According to Pärn, the logical sequel for _Triangle_ would have been _Luncheon on the Grass_. However, by 1983 it was still not possible to start work on that film – which is why Pärn finished _Time Out_ (1984) as his next work, a film with a non-demanding plot that combined the caricatures that published in _Täheke_. Again, it proved to be one of his most awarded films at festivals. This work "had to be made, because the studio had to realize a film unit, and I found a solution which satisfied both me and the studio," Pärn said in 1986, at a time before _Luncheon on the Grass_ existed.28

The literary scenario of _Luncheon on the Grass_ was presented to Goskino for the first time in 1983 (Lõhmus, 1987: 69). The project was categorically rejected: "Such a film will never be made," one of the Goskino officials said to Pärn.29 In 1984 the studio once more proposed the same scenario under a different title, _Picture_. Still, the text went unrecognized.30 However, in 1986, in the context of the fresh changes of perestroika, the editor-in-chief of Goskino was replaced in Moscow,31 along with some other people, as part of a general reorganization campaign that expanded over the entire Soviet Union.32 Thus, Pärn's scenario for a film that had been "non-existent" for several years went into production without further obstacles.

Why did this happen? In the view of Enn Rekkor, the former director of Tallinnfilm Studio, the script might have deviated from its classical route – from studio to national film committee to Goskino – and the project might have traveled straight to Moscow without the requisite signatures in the Central Committee of the Estonian Communist Party. Signatures given in Tallinnfilm Studio did not bear as much importance in the odyssey of obtaining approval for a film as the signature of the Secretary of Ideology, for example. It happened rather frequently that a film production was "sabotaged" by the local authorities, whereas Goskino took a milder approach toward the activities of state-sponsored studios and only required that the finished film, should, above all, be a product of a generally sound "artistic-ideological level."33

However, it seems that the ideological system of the Soviet Union itself had also changed by that time. Critiques of the system during perestroika had appeared as if they had come from the new official commission appointed by the renewed administration. Their aim was to prove the standstill of the pre-reform empire and to celebrate fresh solutions and better decisions to previous problems. The institutions were going through restructuring, and the necessary rhetoric would follow. In this sense the Soviet Union remained true to the logic of Marxist class struggle until its end. This thought is confirmed by Rein Ruutsoo, who has called the opposition between stagnation and perestroika into question as a rhetorical democratization:

Such was the self-created myth of the initiators of perestroika, justifying the need for changes.... Stressing stagnation was necessary to legitimize the substitution of one elite Party group for another. In the societies ruled by nomenclature-based power arrangement the substitution of one elite group for another is called "revolution", and it was in 1989 that people started talking about revolution in the Soviet Union. (Ruutsoo, 2006: 144)

In their everyday consciousness, however, people tended to see the empire's restructuring programs under the aegis of perestroika as something apolitical, a half-allowed and half-prohibited personal liberation. Even in just a few years' time the trend would visibly change. While the original implication of perestroika might indeed have been liberation without democratization – the illusion of the central power of the Kremlin that an efficient party state could also be built up without political terror – the accompanying phenomenon of perestroika enabled various citizen initiatives that came to play an important role in Estonia's regaining of independence (Ruutsoo, 2006: 150). In 1987, for instance, when the scandalous caricature _Sitta kah!_ was discussed in the Political Bureau of the Estonian Communist Party, only the responsible editor of _Sirp ja Vasar_ , the weekly newspaper that had published the caricature, received a reprimand,34 no one even contacted Pärn personally on this matter.35

Times were indeed changing.

In the new underlying rules adopted at the second plenum of the Management of the Soviet Film Association, the right to the submission of new films was given to the studios. The union-wide Cinema Committee only controls the compliance of films with constitutional provisions. State committees do not deal with the content and creative side of films at all. In any case, a paragraph will be added to the Statute of the Film Association, clearly stating the copyrights of film-makers and the specific ways of protecting them from the domination of cinema officials. (Ruus, 1987: 3)

In fact, _Luncheon on the Grass_ , which was divided into five episodes, moves towards a single goal that is quite abstract. To the viewer this goal becomes clear only in the final scene. The four grotesque main characters, having obtained different items (an apple, a black suit and white trousers, etc.) from their revolting Soviet sur­rounding during their respective episodes, meet up to enjoy one beautiful moment together in the fifth scene, fusing into one with the characters of Édouard Manet's world-famous painting _Déjeuner sur l'herbe – Luncheon on the Grass_ (1863). Figuratively speaking, they become "one with art" before going back to their everyday life.

It is the final scene of the film, the fifth episode, which reveals the strict mathematical logic of the seemingly loose narrative and explains all previous jumps or dissociations. In the first episode, Anna receives an apple, which is present in Manet's painting. In the second, Georg is trying to find an outfit for the same reason. In the third episode, Berta has no face (or no smile) to appear in the painting. In the fourth episode, Eduard is trying to get the officials to sign a document allowing access to a key (in order to enter the park or the green area visible in the painting). Tellingly, the signature is sought in an office resembling a film censorship bureau in Moscow (Valgemäe, 1989: 87), but since no officials are actually signing the document it is Pärn's own signature that appears on the paper at the culmination of the scene. In the final scene all characters "blend" impressionistically with Manet's painting. Once this is done, the film reel winds back to the "reality" of the previous grotesque aesthetics as if nothing had happened. The viewer recognizes the same totalitarian-authoritarian state, fear, hopelessness, corruption, and the oppressing pressure of forcing people into uniform masses shown before in the film.

Undoubtedly, one of the important factors influencing the seriousness of the film was its music soundtrack, written by Olav Ehala, which was unequivocally composed in the style of intellectual progressive rock – a music genre that was seen as ideologically opposed to the Soviet Estonian kolkhoz parties and union-wide "soft"-style music. The composition of the wistful recurrent motif on the film's soundtrack, which sometimes becomes downright anguishing, demonstrated that _Luncheon on the Grass_ is not just a "cartoon" but something altogether much more pretentious.

Still, Jaan Ruus, who worked as an editor in Tallinnfilm studio for some time, argued as a film critic that although _Luncheon on the Grass_ gained a lot of media coverage, the published reviews did no justice to the thoroughness of the film's composition and its strong social stand. "It received eight international prizes abroad, and one could think that many of the activities in the film were seen as pure absurd... while in fact it was the genuine social reality it reflected" (Ruus, 1992: 38).

True, absurd is always the first key factor in Pärn's films. The easily accessible visual language of caricature veils _Luncheon on the Grass_ , like several other films by Pärn, in order to make the film readable on as many levels as possible, including that of innocent laughter. Social criticism is, however, immanent in these games, which were typical of the "culturally bilingual" and ambivalent Soviet cultural model. Predictably, such equivocal mimicry, or the presentation rules acquired by an author in the course of the "hide-and-seek" game played with the Soviet censors for many years, directed attention to the funny parts and thus naturally solicited a more superficial reception from the audience. Social criticism could resonate in the minds of Pärn's viewers only by going deeper than the absurd jokes in the film – that is, after suddenly noticing that there are tears behind the laughter.

As Soviet film censorship sought out ideological errors in films until the late 1980s, authors often intentionally inserted these in their works. As a perverse paradox, there is actually no more attentive reader to evaluate an author than a censor. It is, thus, logical that animated films with a political undertone vanished from Estonia as soon as the social situation "producing" such films changed, that is, as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed.

Nevertheless, thanks to international film awards and despite all previous odds, _Luncheon on the Grass_ and its maker Priit Pärn managed to acquire the status of cultural icons in the newly independent Estonia of the 1990s. Although animation generally does not belong among the widely popular and highly prestigious film genres and the film's author was not active in the "high" art world, the film's reputation was built upon its contextual and local background in recent political history. The scenes of _Luncheon on the Grass_ contain many era-specific elements, such as the standard-looking locks on the doors of the blocks of flats, the cigarette brand  , ruble banknotes, intra-building radios or "USSR intra-translation devices," dull grey buildings, and so on. These details lend the film a documentary nature and create an effect that was quite unusual in the context of Estonian animated film. In other words, this film can no longer be viewed today simply as the author's ingenious creative spark, but rather, as a condensation of collective memory: it is a typical metaphor of the years of stagnation and perestroika – the last quarter of the twentieth century – which also saw the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In place of the logo a dedication appeared on the screen at the beginning of _Luncheon on the Grass_ : "To artists who did everything they were allowed to." This is a clear reference to, and at the same time a bitterly satirical judgment on, the actual historical context that is never really expressed in words, neither in the dedication nor in the film itself: that it reflected the Soviet Union during the first half of the 1980s. Nevertheless, having started off with an idea of making a film about "the artist's role in society,"36 Pärn managed to portray the shaky system as a whole, while refusing to propose any final positive solutions. With fragmented yet extremely coherent episodes he had drawn together the unwritten set of rules needed for living in the Soviet society of that time: how to obtain something in a situation where even the most basic commodities were sometimes hard to come by. Speaking of boundaries within a totalitarian system and the hunger it caused (for food, services, commodities, individuality, freedom of expression, and many other things), Pärn created an allegorical comparative narrative on the (mal)functioning of a twentieth-century empire.

 **Notes**

This chapter was translated from Estonian to English by Epp Aareleid and revised by the author.

1 Kaarel Kurismaa, who mainly worked as a background-coloring artist, Miljard Kilk, and Lemming Nagel are not counted here because of the strictly illustrative nature of their work.

2 In 1935, Sojuzdetmultfilm Studio was established in Russia. A year later the studio changed its name to Sojuzmultfilm ( ), by removing the short form "det" from its name, which had unambiguously stated children as a target group of its production. Predictably, the makers of Soviet animated films nevertheless aimed their work at children, ignoring the avant-garde experimentations of the previous decade: they focused on films based on didactic folk stories, fairy tales, etc. This direction was further helped by the Walt Disney Studio, which gained worldwide popularity during the very same years (Bendazzi, 1994: 101).

3 This is the impression gained by the author during brief interviews on animated films with Ando Keskküla and Leonhard Lapin in 2003, for instance. Priit Pärn also describes the conflicts between the film director and the artist, which were based on purely artistic issues. Having become active in the same field slightly later, he argues that the so-called graduate artists primarily wished to see their artwork in motion, while directors had to follow other essential rules for making the film (Mari Laaniste's interview with Priit Pärn, August 18, 2006; notes in the possession of the interviewer).

4 As animated films had to comply with the literary scenario approved by Goskino, it would have been rather difficult for a film artist to insert visual elements in the final product that might have been interpreted as a political message. Yet, Leonhard Lapin, for example, has later spread the self-constructed myth that in _Colour Bird_ (1974), the animation on which he worked as an artist with Sirje Lapin, the white dove (which was eventually replaced by the director with a bird of multiple colors) unambiguously represented the Holy Spirit, and that he had intentionally used Christian symbols deprecated on the official level.

5 I have tried to articulate this aspect with more detail in Trossek, 2009.

6 The Baltic Way or Baltic Chain was a political demonstration on August 23, 1989, which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Approximately two million people joined their hands to form a human chain spanning over 600 kilometers across the three Baltic states that Hitler handed over to Stalin according to the secret protocols of the pact.

7 Take, for instance, the more general Pop-likeness of Priit Pärn's film design, such as allusions to the Beatles's cartoon directed by George Dunning, _Yellow Submarine_ (1968), or his surrealist inclination towards collage. In the context of the 1980s Soviet Estonian art these cannot be seen as innovative anymore. That, however, could not be said in the context of the Soviet animated film, where Pärn's style had a downright revolutionarily innovative effect.

8 Besides being considered by film critics Raamat's films were also discussed by a renowned art theoretician Boris Bernstein (see Bernstein, 1984). In addition to the articles by Jaak Olep, who worked as the editor of the art section of the _Sirp ja Vasar_ weekly in the 1970s (see Olep, 1988), Pärn's films were also reviewed in separate texts by Heinz Valk, the first secretary of the Board of the Artists' Association (see Valk, 1984 and 1985).

9 In an interview given in 1990 about his scenarios for the films concerning Communist heroes, _Ask the Dead about the Price of Death_ (1977) and _A Hundred Years from Now, in May_ (1986), the writer Mati Unt said that looking closer, it becomes "clear what we were talking about, although it is not verbally articulated there. [...] Because it was a paradoxical situation... that in reality it was impossible to criticise the society, it just didn't go through; thus, no-one really did it in a straightforward way. [...] And so the perverse paradoxes emerged: attempts to spill hints to the KGB through the secret services of the Estonian SSR... This might feel perverse now, but intelligent people had to be able to read these things as a code. And so they did." (Neimar, 1990: 6)

10 One could say that the wide popularity of Kaljo Põllu and Jüri Arrak as well as Eduard Wiiralt had developed by the 1980s precisely through their definition as "Estonian" artists, which in the official sovietized art scene meant the most positive possible ­assessment from the national point of view. Põllu started _Kodalased_ , his first graphic series inspired by Finno-Ugric motifs, in 1976, in the same year that Lennart Meri, the future president of Estonia, published his famous book _Silver White_. From the national perspective, it is hard to overestimate the ideological importance of either of them. Tõnu Aru has eagerly perpetuated Arrak's national-religious self-created myth in the approximately 20 portrait films he has made about the artist since 1978, which are ­accompanied by countless exhibitions, as well as articles and reproductions. In 1977 Mark Soosaar finished _Earthly Desires_ , a full-length portrait film about Wiiralt. He was even granted permission to visit Paris for that purpose, thanks to the irrefutable aureole of "national treasure" surrounding Wiiralt as one of the most honored Estonian graphic artists. (The rehabilitation of the work of the artist, who had died in exile, had already started in Soviet Estonian art politics in the late 1950s, and he was praised as a realist artist). While directing _Inferno_ , the film inspired by Wiiralt's art, Rein Raamat, in a way stepping in the footprints of Soosaar, stayed in the studio of Maire Männik, the designer of Wiiralt's tombstone in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. In addition to Soosaar and Lennart Meri, mentioned above, Männik also hosted several other Estonian public figures and writers during the occupation years (see Kärk, 1999).

11 The aim of tightening the grasp of the central power was also evident in the Soviet ­Union's film politics. One of its manifestations was Goskino's decision in 1979 to require animation studios of the Soviet republics to present working sketches of artists and drawn-out scenarios or storyboards in addition to the written screenplays, to keep a closer eye on the development of the film and to ensure the compliance of the finished product with the written film decree previously approved by Goskino. (From an interview with Silvia Kiik, March 4, 2003, notes in possession of the author; see also Robinson, 2003: 102.)

12 In Estonia, the propaganda of bilingualism had a forceful start in 1978. On 19 ­December 1978 the Central Committee of the Estonian Communist Party ­adopted a secret decision on improving the teaching quality of the Russian language and increasing its importance in Estonia. The 30 paragraphs of this secret decision provided privileges for the teachers of the Russian language (in comparison to the teachers of other languages), to writers writing in Russian, etc. Several paragraphs in the decision include elements of direct linguistic discrimination. (Hint, 2002: 96)

13 In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Estonian animated film, the weekly newspaper _Sirp ja Vasar_ published a two-page article _Pürgimine mitmekesisuse poole (­Eesti multifilm 20-aastane_ written by Sergey Assenin, the Moscow-based animated film critic and PhD candidate in art history, which mainly highlighted the works of Rein Raamat (Assenin, 1977). Later, the same author wrote a longer treatment of Estonian animated film (Assenin, 1986), which remained the only text of its kind until the ­publication of Chris J. Robinson's book _Between Genius and Utter Illiteracy_ in 2003.

14 The film caused great polemic in the Soviet Union at the time, because no-one was used to see an animated film in this light. "This is not a film, but graphic art in motion," Fyodor Khitruk, the "Jupiter" of animation of that time announced, seeming to use "graphic art" as a curse word. Pärn arrived to it a little early, but apparently it was precisely why he was on time. He thus became the innovator of the entire Soviet Union's animated film. (Ruus, 1992: 38)

15 Archive folder of the animated film _Big Tõll_ in Estonian State Archives ( _Eesti Riigiarhiiv_ , hereafter ERA), f. R-1707, No. 1, s. 1879, p. 21.

16 Archive folder of the animated film _Inferno_ in ERA, f. R-1707, No. 1, s. 2186, p. 18.

17 Archive folder of the animated film _Big Tõll_ , p. 16.

18 Archive folder of the animated film _Big Tõll_ , p. 67.

19 Archive folder of the animated film _Big Tõll_ , p. 67.

20 "Public letter sent from the Estonian SSR" was a letter dated October 28, 1980 and posted a week later. It was signed by 40 Estonian intellectuals who were trying to protect the Estonian language, as well as the pupils who had stepped forward during the mass demonstration a few weeks earlier against persecution by the organs of Soviet power and to make a stand against the general pressure towards Russification (see Kiin, Ruutsoo, and Tarand, 1990).

21 As a perfect example of "peasant cleverness," Rein Raamat reputedly submitted a copy of the film to be approved by the central government, in which the red color was of a cold and bluish (slightly violet) shade. It was apparently another version with "warm red" that was sent to be distributed in the entire Soviet Union. (Author's interview with S. Kiik, April 3, 2003.)

22 From an interview with Rein Raamat dated April 8, 2002, notes in possession of the ­author. That such an accusation would have been serious, is, however, shown by an incident that occurred during the same period, when a young artist Andres Rõuk had to temporarily interrupt his studies in the Estonian National Institute of Art (ERKI) because of a poem published in _Looming_ magazine (1981, No. 9). The first letters of the lines of the poem _Sky and Sea in the Eyes_... ( _Silmades taevas ja meri_...) formed the words blue-black-and-white.

23 I could be the artist of my films myself, but when I see that someone else's form is more expressive and appropriate as a solution of a given idea, I start negotiations with that artist. [...] Acknowledged painters and graphic artists have no time to delve into all the problems of filmmaking. [...] Jüri Arrak created characters and backgrounds for _Big Tõll_ ; however, Heiki Ernits and Valter Uusberg too were involved in the work. Within a couple of weeks they had adopted Arrak's style and methods of composition. Once we had agreed on the storyboard, Arrak came and proposed his colour solution, without practically changing the composition that had been in fact created by Ernits and Uusberg under my instructions. [...] Yet, this was not the straight path; initially we were working for two months without Arrak's help. [...] We had talked with Arrak several years before and he had agreed on doing this. Yet, when we started making the film, he had several panel paintings in progress and he declined. Feeling that we have come to a dead end, we went asking Arrak for advice. He looked at the drawings for a quarter of an hour and said he would come and do it himself. In two week's time all the characters were finalised, just like they appear in the film, except that they were drawn on paper. (Ruus and Teinemaa, 1991: 10)

24 The reception of Rein Raamat's work in Estonia has been somewhat paradoxical. ­Almost every new film of his is received with reluctance and unwillingness to ­understand, while usually opposing his new ("failed") work to his older ("good") ones. Only when the film has been given praise by both Soviet and international film audiences and critics and Raamat's next film is about to be screened in ­Estonia, he unnoticeably and self-evidently becomes a classic of our animation. (Lotman, 1989: 21)

25 "Undermining the system from within" became the widely used apologetic figure of speech in the rhetoric of citizens with a Communist past, especially during the 1990s. Usually it signified somebody's arguably dissident or nationally minded deeds during the Soviet era that normally did not entail any penalties, party-related or otherwise.

26 This was to get a studio space, but also because his film projects were not particularly successful in an administrative sense and Pärn was not sure about his film career. (From an interview with Priit Pärn, April 29, 2003; recording in the possession of the author.)

27 "The bolts were tightened," is a figure of speech Pärn himself likes to repeat when discussing the late 1970s. (Interview with P. Pärn, April 29, 2003.)

28 _Luncheon on the Grass_ does not yet exist. This is, again, one of the unfortunate aspects of films that as long as they are in the idea phase, they do not exist, and there are so many factors that have to fall together to make their realization possible, that sometimes the question even arises, as to whether it is worth the effort at all. And especially when the finished product turns out to be so different from the initial idea, we come to ask ourselves as to whether it was all necessary at all. (Ruus, 1986: 12)

29 This is how Pärn remembers the story of creating _Luncheon on the Grass_ in _Pärnography: Man from Animation_ ( _Pärnograafia: mees animatsioonist_ ), the playful documentary directed by Hardi Volmer (Acuba Film, 2005). Also see: Laaniste, 2006.

30 Without much success the scenario was proposed to Goskino for three years in a row. Each time it had been slightly modified, and each time the film project was rejected. (Interview with P. Pärn, April 29, 2003.)

31 This was confirmed by Silvia Kiik (in aninterview with the author, March 4, 2003), but also many other Estonian film people have recalled that this personnel change was significant.

32 A foreign journalist asked Elem Klimov, the new First Secretary of the Soviet ­Union Cinema Association: "What actually happened at the V Congress of Cinematographers?" – "The majority, who were favoring reforms, gained predominance over the minority, who were against them," Klimov replied. In everyday consciousness this was seen like this: Kulidzhanov was replaced by Klimov. Historical consciousness says: our earlier film art was no longer satisfactory. (Ruus, 1987: 3)

33 Interview with Enn Rekkor, March 25, 2003, notes in possession of the author.

34 Priit Pärn's caricature _Sitta kah!_ (direct translation _Just Shit!_ or _I Don't Give a Shit!_ ), published in the local cultural weekly _Sirp ja Vasar_ on 8 May 1987. Two issues later an announcement appeared in the 'short chronicle' section of _Sirp ja Vasar_ , mentioning that the Central Committee of Estonian Communist Party had discussed the issue of one caricature at their meeting and designated a Party penalty to the newspaper's editor in chief (Ilmar Rattus – _A.T_.) for publishing 'an ambiguous and politically incorrect caricature'.

35 In Pärn's words it was common in the Soviet system to blame the publishers, not the authors. (Interview with P. Pärn, 29.04.2003).

36 Archive folder of the animated film _Luncheon on the Grass_ in ERA, f. R-1707, No. 1, s. 2635, p. 115.

 **References**

Assenin, Sergey (1977) Pürgimine mitmekesisuse poole (Eesti multifilm 20-aastane). _Sirp ja Vasar_ November 25.

Assenin, Sergey (1986) _Etüüde eesti multifilmidest ja nende loojatest_ (Studies on Estonian Animated Films and Their Creators). Perioodika, Tallinn.

Bendazzi, G. (1994) _Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation_. John Libbey, London.

Bernstein, B. (1984) "Põrgu" – filmi tõlgendamisest. _Teater. Muusika. Kino_ , 8: 70–75.

Helme, S. and Kangilaski, J. (1999) _Lühike eesti kunsti ajalugu_. Kunst, Tallinn.

Hint, M. (2002) _Keel on tõde on õige ja vale_. Ilmamaa, Tartu.

Kangilaski, J. (2000) Okupeeritud Eesti kunstiajaloo periodiseerimine, in _Kunstist, Eestist ja eesti kunstist_. Ilmamaa, Tartu, pp. 228–235.

Kiin, S., Ruutsoo, R., and Tarand, A. (1990) _40 kirja lugu_. Tallinn, Olion.

Kirt, L. (1984) Priit Pärn: "Olen tegutsev pessimist." _Noorus_ , 12: 16–18.

Kärk, L. (1996) Korstnapühkija siseneb majja ukse kaudu. _Teater. Muusika. Kino_ , 7/8: 70–74.

Kärk, L. (1999) Pariisi taeva ja eesti katuse all. _Postimees_ , June 5.

Laaniste, M. (2006) "Eine murul": Ühe animafilmi tekst ja kontekst. _Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi_ ( _Studies on Art and Architecture_ ) 15 (4):77–95.

Lõhmus, J. (1987) Kavandite sõnaõigusest. _Teater. Muusika. Kino_ , 8: 69.

Lotman, M. (1989) Tööd ja tegemised: Mõtteid Eesti animafilmist 1988. _Teater. Muusika. Kino_ , 11: 14–22.

Neimar, R. (1990) Vastab Mati Unt. _Teater. Muusika. Kino_ , 4: 5–14, 76.

Olep, J. (1983) "Kolmnurga" taustast. _Teater. Muusika. Kino_ , 12: 30–31.

Olep, J. (1988) Priit Pärn kunstnikuna. _Vikerkaar_ , 10: 29–38.

Robinson, C. J. (2003) _Between Genius and Utter Illiteracy: A Story of Estonian Animation_. Varrak, Tallinn.

Ruus, J. (1986) Vastab Priit Pärn. _Teater. Muusika. Kino_ , 1: 4–12.

Ruus, J. (1987) Editorial. _Teater. Muusika. Kino_ , 5: 3.

Ruus, J. (1992) Uuendaja Pärn. _Teater. Muusika. Kino_ , 7: 38–42.

Ruus, J. (2000) Kino ja raha Eesti Vabariigis, in _Eesti film 1991–1999_ (ed. K.-E. Rääk). F-Seitse OÜ, Tallinn, pp. 10–21.

Ruus, R. and Teinemaa, S. (1991) Vastab Rein Raamat. _Teater. Muusika. Kino_ , 5: 4–14.

Ruutsoo, R. (2006) Liberaliseerimine ilma demokraatiata. _Vikerkaar_ , 7/8: 144–150.

Trossek, A. (2009) Eesti popanimatsioon 1973–1979: joonisfilmist lähikunstiajaloo kontekstis. _Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi (Studies on Art and Architecture)_ , 1–2: 69–107.

Valgemäe, M. (1989) Et in Arcadia ego ehk "Eine murul". _Teater. Muusika. Kino_ , 8: 86–87 (also published in: _Vaba Eesti Sõna_ , February 23,1989, p. 4).

Valk, H. (1984) Edasi, Priit! _Sirp ja Vasar_ February 8.

Valk, H. (1985) Triibuline kass võtab "aja maha." _Teater. Muusika. Kino_ , 4: 60–61.

Žavoronok, L. (ed.). (1984) Auhinnatud Eesti multifilmid 1960–1984. _Teater. Muusika. Kino_ , 4: 90–91.

# 21

# The Yugoslav Black Wave

#  _The History and Poetics of Polemical Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s in Yugoslavia_

Greg De Cuir, Jr.

#  **Yugoslav History and Context**

The history of cinema in Socialist Yugoslavia begins in 1946 with the establishment of the Committee for Cinematography in what was then called the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia – this immediately after the Axis powers had been expelled from the country at the conclusion of World War Two. The Serbian writer Aleksandar Vučo was put in charge of this committee, and he quickly published a manifesto in the new journal _Film_ that detailed the standards to which the fledging Yugoslav film industry was expected to adhere:

1 Films should be based on the principles of Socialist realism, avoid abstract experimentation, and offer clear, effective communication.

2 Films should serve heuristic and propagandistic purposes with a deeper understanding of the revolutionary struggle, a deep collective bond in meeting the challenges of creating a new Socialist state.

3 The cinema of the Soviet Union offered the best prospect for illuminating the path which Yugoslav cinema should follow.

4 Film work itself should be fashioned on collectivist rather than individualistic principles. (Goulding, 1985: 9)

This four-point program dictated that the primary aims of Yugoslav films should be to play a part in furthering Socialist goals. These dogmatic mandates created a Yugoslav variant of Socialist realism which was not much different (ideologically) from the genre as seen in the Soviet Union (as was specifically directed in the manifesto).

In 1946, Soviet film director Abram Room and the well-known Soviet cinematographer Eduard Tisse realized a Mosfilm production shot in Yugoslavia about the Yugoslav Partisan liberation struggle during World War Two. The film told the story of a small-town hero named Slavko Babić who began fighting in the Bosnian mountains, tracing his rise within the ranks of the Partisans until he reached a liberated Belgrade at the film's conclusion whereafter he suffered a melodramatic death at the hands of insidious Chetniks. This film was called _V gorah Jugoslavii_ ( _In the Mountains of Yugoslavia_ ) and it functioned like a training ground for the first generation of Yugoslav filmmakers, as many of them worked on the production crew. In his book on the history of Yugoslav cinema Petar Volk wrote, "This was the first lesson in socialist realism for Yugoslav film workers" (1983–1986: 137). Playing the role of General Draža Mihailović (leader of the Chetniks, a military detachment loyal to the Yugoslav king in exile and arch enemies of the Partisans) was the theater actor Vjekoslav Afrić. Afrić would go on to become the director of the newly formed Yugoslav School for Film Acting and Directing in 1946. He also directed the first domestic feature film production in Socialist Yugoslavia.

Afrić wrote and directed the film _Slavica_ in 1947. This film can be considered to have introduced what would be the most pervasive form of Yugoslav Socialist realism, the Partisan war film, which followed a stylistic pattern laid down by _In the Mountains of Yugoslavia_. Partisan war films detailed mythologized wartime plots about virtuous Partisans fighting against evil Germans and treacherous Chetniks to liberate the country. In an effort to practice "unity and brotherhood," as was the slogan of this new country, Slavica was produced in Belgrade (Serbia), the federal capital, with Afrič, a director from Zagreb (Croatia).1 The second feature film produced in the country was _Ž_ _ivje_ č _e ovaj narod_ ( _This Nation Will Live_ ), also made in 1947. This film was produced in Zagreb and directed by Nikola Popovič, a filmmaker from Belgrade. Like _Slavica_ , _This Nation Will Live_ was a film about the wartime occupation of the country and the struggle of the Partisans to liberate it.

This mode of production dominated the Yugoslav film scene (along with _Filmske novosti_ newsreels, produced to serve "heuristic and propagandistic purposes" through documenting the rapid development of the country and delivering news on domestic and international events) and the first generation of filmmakers continued to manufacture these Partisan war spectacles. Other examples include the film _Na svoji zemlji_ ( _On Native Soil_ , 1948) by France Štiglic – the first feature film from the Socialist Republic of Slovenia – and _Život je naš_ ( _Life is Ours_ , 1948) directed by Gustav Gavrin. In discussing these films and their use of the revolutionary struggle, Nemanja Zvijer has written that "the struggle for liberation can be viewed mythically as an exalted event that marked the symbolic beginning of the political odyssey of an ideological system. Therefore victory in war, in a larger context, justified itself as the socialist order and because of that was necessary for its achievements, finally relating itself towards something sacred" (2009: 57–58).

Concurrently, on the sociopolitical scene, in June 1948, Tito broke with Stalin, and as a result Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau, which was organized in 1947 with its first seat in Belgrade). Yugoslavia began building its own unique path to Socialist goals, which included the principle of self-management in the workplace. This unique path was derogatorily called "Titoism" by Stalin – a term that was used to tar any Communist leader seen to be straying from the dogmatic values and approach of the Soviet Union.2

In November 1952, Yugoslavia's sixth Party Congress was held in Zagreb. Tito spoke of Stalin's betrayal of socialism and of the need for the Yugoslav Communist Party to step back from direct control of the central government. At the Congress, delegates voted in favor of changing the party name to the League of Yugoslav Communists and also, the influential Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža rejected Socialist realism as a cultural standard. This ideological break with the Soviet Union opened a gulf that ultimately allowed new film tendencies to flourish.

By 1953 one can begin to see some chipping away at the conservative tenets of the prevailing national film style. In that year the Serbian director Radoš Novakovič made a film called _Daleko je sunce_ ( _Far from the Sun_ ). This was a Partisan war film, though one that included expressionistic effects and thematic and emotional ambivalence. Following this in the mid-1950s a new generation of filmmakers was beginning to come of age in Yugoslavia. They spent their time in the Yugoslav Cinematheque watching a variety of films from all over the world, began writing film criticism in various publications criticizing the ideological traditions and stale formulas of Yugoslav Socialist realism, and they joined their local ciné-clubs and began making short films. Some enrolled in the national film school, which by 1950 had merged with the Academy of Theater Art to form the Academy of Theater and Film Art.

This new generation constituted a new wave of cineastes (soon to be grouped under the name Yugoslav New Film) and first made itself apparent in 1961 with the release of two feature-length films: _Dvoje_ ( _The Couple_ ) by Aleksandar Petrović, a Serbian director, and _Ples v dežju_ ( _Dance in the Rain_ ) by Boštjan Hladnik, a Slovenian director. These two films were characterized by an auteurist approach which rejected collectivism and embraced individual subjectivity. The films were not concerned with heurism or propaganda and began venturing towards experimentation with form and content instead. In addition to these two, an important group of cineastes who came from the Belgrade Ciné-club made their presence felt, including Dušan Makavejev, Živojin Pavlović, Kokan Rakonjac, Mića Popović, and Marko Babac. Many of these ciné-club filmmakers formed the core of what would be called the Yugoslav Black Wave. Others soon followed and continued opening up the realm of filmic expression, including the influential Serbian directors Puriša Djordjevič and Đorđe Kadijević, who both made films that questioned the tradition of the Partisan war spectacle (Kadijević made _Praznik_ ( _Holiday_ , 1967), a wartime film focused on Chetniks that hardly featured any Partisans at all, which in itself was a radically oppositional idea).

The 1960s were a time of great sociocultural change, not only in Yugoslavia but also on an international scale. Young people began to question and criticize their societies along with the values that they were founded upon which were invariably the values of the older generation. By this time Tito's Partisans, who had been in control of the country since first liberating it in World War Two, were middle-aged or older. They had hoped to maintain their grip on the power structures of society (in addition to often abusing those powers for personal gain), which set the stage for the ensuing conflict of ideologies that would take place in the latter half of the decade.

The years 1963 and 1964 were periods of intense public debate in anticipation of the eighth Congress of the League of Yugoslav Communists. In the summer of 1963 a group of progressive philosophers in Zagreb who called themselves the Praxis group organized the first Korčula Summer School on the island of Korčula in the Adriatic Sea. This quickly became a yearly meeting place for "Western Marxists," who were interested in liberal ideas about culture and other relatively untouched areas of Marxist philosophical contemplation. Certain filmmakers, influenced by this revolutionary climate of critique, attended the summer school, including Makavejev and a young Serbian director named Želimir Žilnik who worked as an assistant director to Makavejev. The Praxis group published the first issue of their humanist philosophical journal, _Praxis_ , in September 1964. They were chiefly interested in promoting a "struggle of opinions" through a "critique of all existing conditions" ( _Praxis_ , 1965: n.p.) in the tradition of the writings of Early Marx.

The prestigious Fulbright Program opened in Yugoslavia in 1964, and as a result faculty and student exchanges with the West increased, also augmenting the trade of progressive, democratic ideas. In December of 1964 the eighth Congress took place, which dealt head on with the "struggle of opinions" that was brewing. By this time the National Assembly was composed of educated younger men and women, a situation that came about as a result of the relaxations instigated by the sixth Congress in 1952. General economic reform was implemented in 1965, which the Praxis group rallied against as it introduced market-driven motives at the expense of Socialist idealism. Other distant rumblings were beginning to be felt as well.

When in Paris in May 1968 there were student occupation protests and workers took to the streets in a general strike they inspired a similar student rebellion in Belgrade in June. Some students were demonstrating for an improved and more humane socialism, some were demonstrating against perceived inequality and exploitation by the "red bourgeoisie" and some were agitating for an outright end to socialism and a move towards a more democratic society. These latter voices were not as prominent, for a number of reasons that cannot be fully investigated here. A clash between students and the police in the Student City section of Belgrade left a number of people seriously injured. Students were also reacting to the Prague Spring liberalizations taking place in Czechoslovakia as well as the eventual Warsaw Pact invasion used to suppress them. Tito began to fear the possibility of a similar invasion in Yugoslavia to quell dissent (which would also threaten his own position of power). With these conflicting pressures the Yugoslav landscape was beginning to darken, and it was around this time that the Black Wave emerged.

The Yugoslav Black Wave can be seen as a subset of Yugoslav New Film, which was alternately anti-traditional, oppositional, and critical; it was a polemical film form that was distinctive in its often fatalistic outlook. Noticing this trend towards a very dark, combative, and cynical thematic preoccupation the president of the commission for ideological action in the Serbian Communist League, Vladimir Jovičić (who was also a journalist), wrote a programmatic denunciation of these films while simultaneously coining the very term "Black Wave" as a pejorative.3 The article was entitled " _Crni val" u našem filmu_ ( _The Black Wave in Our Cinema_ ) and was printed in August 1969 in the pages of the newspaper _Borba_ , a party organ (Jovičić, 1969). Jovičić's article marked the beginning of the official counterattack on the films and filmmakers that could be associated with this wave. As documented in a US government report, "Tito had indeed ordered a general attack on 'Cominformism' (i.e., on all those who could be depicted as enemies of the existing Yugoslav system) at a meeting in September 1969" (Ogle, 1970: 39). Furthermore, "At the time he had a specific target in mind: Yugoslav playwrights, poets, and novelists who dared obliquely to question Party authority and policy" (Ogle, 1970: 34–35). Based on the concurrent events it can be inferred that this targeting included filmmakers as well.

By the beginning of the 1970s an oppositional political movement appeared in Croatia that was designed to achieve greater republican rights along democratic, economic, and cultural lines. This movement was called either "Croatian Spring" or "Maspok," depending on the point-of-view of the speaker. Those who were demonstrating and representing a form of Croatian nationalism in the process self-identified as part of the "Croatian Spring," while those who were against this movement, reading it as an attack on the integrity of the Yugoslav nation, denounced it as "Maspok," a neologism derived from "masovni pokret" or "mass movement." In 1971 a large number of students demonstrated in Zagreb in connection with this movement, adding to the ripple effect created by the earlier Belgrade student demonstrations.

Also in 1971, the controversial student film _Plastic Jesus_ was completed; it was directed by Serbian Lazar Stonjanović, who was also a member of the student opposition, and starred Tomislav Gotovac, a Croatian experimental filmmaker. This film did the unthinkable: it depicted images of Tito in an unfavorable light (as well as some high-ranking officers of the Yugoslav National Army). The film was used as a trigger to dismantle the Black Wave in 1972, and as a result Stonjanović was imprisoned and his professor Aleksandar Petrović was removed from his teaching post at the national film school, as was Živojin Pavlović. Both of these filmmakers had also come under fire for the scathing critiques presented in their films. Petrović had his passport confiscated but eventually retrieved it and then promptly left the country for Paris. Makavejev had relocated himself to Western Europe and then America because of the scandal surrounding his film _WR: Misterije organizma_ ( _WR: Mysteries of the Organism_ , 1971), while Žilnik left for West Germany after the furor over his Berlin Golden Bear-winning debut _Rani radovi_ ( _Early Works_ , 1969), which he defended in court after various state bodies concluded that the Yugoslav film industry "reveals enemy contents" and some authors "annihilate the successes of socialism " (Stojanović, 2003: 138).

In January 1975 eight professors at the Faculty of Philosophy in the University of Belgrade who had been associated with the Praxis group were removed from their teaching positions. They became known as the "Belgrade Eight" and in February of that year the journal _Praxis_ was closed down. Party purges occurred continuously as Yugoslav society was "re-Stalinized." After this a period of relative tranquility dawned.

#  **Black Wave Poetics**

At its most essential level the Yugoslav Black Wave film is a polemical film. The polemical method of the Black Wave operates on three levels corresponding to three defining characteristics of Hungarian philosopher György Lukács's "Orthodox" Marxism: _anti-traditional_ , _oppositional_ , and _critical_. Lukács was one of the Western Marxists who began to exert some influence in Yugoslavia when his writings were widely translated and published in the 1960s. More accurately, the line of thought he laid down in his book _History and Class Consciousness_ (1923) played a large role in initiating the methods and concerns of Western Marxists given that it prioritized the revolutionary, morally aware strategies of Early Marx. In a generic sense "Western Marxism" referred literally to a grouping of Marxist thinkers who were based in Central and Western European countries as well as in North America. Western Marxists emphasized the study of culture in an effort to understand society, and they focused not on economic analysis, which had concerned Marx himself, but rather on the more philosophical areas of Marxist thought. Lukács's chapter "What is Orthodox Marxism?" in _History and Class Consciousness_ was an attempt to reset and refocus the Marxist method, in short, to "lay the foundations of a Marxist aesthetic" (Kołakowski, 2005: 1016), and in doing this he paved the way for a Marxist contemplation and realization of art.

The _anti-traditional_ component in the Yugoslav Black Wave relates to form. Inherent in the Black Wave film is an argument against classical principles in Yugoslav cinema – an argument that is carried out on the level of film style. Black Wave films take a modernist turn away from the style of "romantic" Socialist realism and are a critique of the Partisan war film that is sometimes explicit, at other times implicit. Of course, this offensive was also carried out through written film criticism by the Black Wave filmmakers – a critique that was literalized and given aesthetic form when they began making films. Classical Yugoslav cinema, characterized by the Partisan war film, was a strong symbol of the presiding powers in Yugoslavia in terms of myths and traditions and also in terms of ideology.

Ideological criticism was carried out in an _oppositional_ mode in Yugoslav Black Wave films. As the Serbian film critic Dušan Stojanović wrote in an article in 1969, these films substitute an individual for a collective mythology and counter a reactionary repressiveness with progressive liberalism. The films and the filmmakers of the Black Wave were not necessarily anti-Socialist, as can easily be misconstrued. However, they were deeply opposed to Socialist ideology when used as a tool for subjugation rather than edification, when used to preserve and concentrate power in the hands of a few rather than dispersing it into the hands of the masses. These filmmakers aimed their critique of all existing conditions squarely at ideology and understood that ideological manipulation that runs unchecked puts people to sleep, making them passive rather than active citizens engaged with their society.

Živojin Pavlović played on this theme in the film _Povratak_ ( _The Return_ , 1966) during which, in the opening shot of the opening sequence, we see a man amazing a young woman with a disappearing cigarette trick as well as magical card tricks. The young woman is mesmerized by these sleights of hand as the man speaks of mental telepathy and his ability to read into the future. This everyday magician correlates with the power brokers in Yugoslav society, those who are in the business of casting spells and coercing people to follow – sometimes against their will or better judgment.

In the film _Uloga moje porodice u svetskoj revoluciji_ ( _The Role of My Family in the World Revolution_ , 1971) by the Bosnian director Bata Čengić, a young Partisan soldier played by Dragan Nikolić utilizes magic spells to astound a bourgeois family for the purposes of leading them onto the right path – the path of socialism. This path is littered with ideological musings used as distractions as depicted in the film (which is full of farce and rapid mood shifts), and the family often behaves as if they are sleepwalking into their new lives as virtuous proletarians. One of the objects that the soldier pulls out of his magic box is the Yugoslav national flag, which literally appears out of thin air as the _raison d'être_ for these spells of delirium. When the soldier demonstrates his capacity for hypnosis, placing the young woman of the family (Milena Dravić) into a deep sleep, he does so not only for national-ideological purposes but also so that he can win her heart for himself. This is a comment on the fact that those in society who weave spells often do so for personal gain, which, of course, is in opposition to the values of collectivity and sacrifice that were preached and it was expected would be followed in order to build a better socialism.

Yugoslav Black Wave films often revealed a layer of society that remained buried from public view for the purposes of exposing faults. An overall _critical_ approach focused directly on contemporary society was why the Black Wave films and filmmakers were considered volatile by those in power. As Boris Buden writes in an article on the Black Wave, in the view of the party leaders the filmmakers "real 'crime' consists in misrepresenting the society they belong to" (2010). Their critique was a struggle for the identity of Yugoslavia, fought along the lines of cultural representation with the party functionaries. The true revolutionary nature of Black Wave films was that they were in dialogue with the times and not content with accepting a status quo fostered by these party functionaries for the purposes of conserving their own values and positions of power. Present in the Black Wave films is an outrage at the imbalances in society and the bitter ironies that this imbalance revealed in relation to the ideological myth upon which the country was founded. Želimir Žilnik's (1968) idea that "it would be very useful to begin liquidating the things which provoke us to shoot socially critical films" is one of the more revolutionary statements associated with the Black Wave. It clarifies the conflict and the stakes at hand, also demonstrating why this liquidation he agitated for was pointed at him and his contemporaries – because the struggle of opinions was perceived as struggle for power by the leaders of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

The most general distinguishing element of the Black Wave film is an anti-traditional form – anti-traditional in relation to classical Yugoslav cinema, which appropriates the classical Hollywood cinema model of a self-effacing visual style and causal narrative structure that observes continuity, though of course also with a stern eye towards the principles of Soviet-style Socialist realism. The Black Wave film features a modernist stylistic outlook. If _Grad_ ( _The City_ , 1963) is cited as the first of the Black Wave films, not only because of its aesthetics but also because of the unprecedented ban imposed on it,4 it immediately announced its stylistic departures from the norm.

 _The City_ is an omnibus film composed of three short treatments by three different directors: Živojin Pavlović, Kokan Rakonjac, and Marko Babac. The first story, _Veza_ ( _Connection_ ), takes place in the bedroom of two lovers; the second, _Srce_ ( _Heart_ ), is set in a doctor's apartment and tells the story of a visiting friend who has a heart attack there; the third, _Obru_ č ( _Encirclement_ ), tells the story of a loner in a café on the wrong side of town and his confrontation with a street gang. These divergent storylines are united by a common exposure of contemporary city life and a dark, ambivalent tone with endings that feature a lack of closure. In _Connection_ a couple is metaphorically trapped in their bedroom in a dead-end relationship; in _Heart_ the visiting friend suffers from a life-threatening condition; in _Encirclement_ the loner is beaten by the street gang, then left to wander off into the shadows of the night and the city. The omnibus film – a feature that consists of multiple short episodes – is a non-linear form composed of natural disjunctions of space, time, and characters. These disjunctions are the markers of a non-traditional style.

Dušan Makavejev's _Ljubavni slu_ č _aj ili tragedija službenice PTT_ ( _Love Affair or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator_ , 1967) is a film that follows a non-linear/non-oneiric narrative structure, shuttling back and forth between the course of the story of a love affair between a Yugoslav Hungarian (Eva Ras) and a Yugoslav Muslim (Slobodan Aligrudić) and its ending in death before finally concluding on a visual note that reverses time, with the two lovers resurrected and reunited walking down the stairs hand-in-hand. The flow of this narrative is constantly interrupted further by digressions and asides that range from expository documentary sequences to archival footage to the appearance of onscreen poetic verse, creating a modernist mélange of disparate artifacts.

The film _Mlad i zdrav kao ruža_ ( _Young and Healthy as a Rose_ , 1971) by the Serbian director Jovan Jovanović makes extensive use of jagged cuts, quoting liberally from the style of Jean-Luc Godard's influential film _À bout de soufflé_ ( _Breathless_ , 1960). Also featured in the film are numerous reflexive moments in which the main character, a young hoodlum played by Dragan Nikolić, constantly delivers direct camera addresses. Jovanović's film captures a restless energy characterized by the nervous, handheld camera movements that jerk in and out of focus and focal length in an anarchic manner. This is a film that attempts to destroy any semblance of a seamless construction.

In addition to featuring anti-traditional forms, the Black Wave film also features contemporary stories which are modern in theme and outlook. The reason that _The City_ was banned was because of opportunistic political maneuvering to be sure, but also because of its ruthless portrayal of contemporary city life (as well as because the loner who is beaten in Pavlović's segment was seen to be a war veteran (i.e., Partisan)). The directors unveiled a segment of society that had rarely been seen on film in Yugoslavia before, particularly in Pavlović's short _Encirclement_ featuring the criminal underworld. This unveiling was considered problematic at best and dangerous at worst, and action was taken.

Sutjeska Film in Sarajevo, the production company behind the film, was undergoing a power struggle between studio chief Danko Samokovlije and the president of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Association, Slobodan Jovičić. When Samokovlije was ousted and Jovičić became the new head of Sutjeska one of his first orders of business was to ban the film. The case was tried in the Sarajevo circuit court and _The City_ was legally prohibited for "presenting a Yugoslav city in a negative light,... anti-social types,... [and] morbid sexuality," among other charges (Tirnanić, 2008: 39). The Black Wave film attempts to pull its stories and contents from present-day society and life in all its permutations, as Makavejev noted in the title of one of his critical articles: _Kad pišeš scenario pogledaj kroz prozor_ ( _When You Write a Scenario Look through the Window_ ) (Munitić, 2002: 204–206). The general method of the Black Wave is an unrelenting focus on the present, where the classical Partisan war film was more often interested in mythologizing the past.

In those instances when the focus of the Black Wave film was not a contemporary story it often featured allusions and thematic links to the present, and it invariably presented the past in a questioning, critical light. The immediate postwar era with its Informbiro paranoia, people jockeying for political positions, not to mention the settling of old scores that went on between Chetniks and Partisans, is given a scathing critique in films like _Zaseda/The Ambush_ (1969) by Pavlovič and _Delije/Tough Guys_ (1968) by Mića Popović. These films depict the challenges and contradictions of building a revolutionary society and the outlook presented is unapologetically bleak. The film _Lisice_ ( _Handcuffs_ , 1969) by the Montenegrin director Krsto Papić (who studied and worked in Croatia) details the insidious nature of the Informbiro period in Yugoslavia, when the dividing line between friends and enemies of the state was constantly shifting.

While looking to the past some Black Wave films did the unthinkable: telling of World War Two-era stories with a focus on Chetniks instead of – or totally at the expense of – Partisans. Popovič's film Č _ovek iz hrastove Šume_ ( _The Man from the Oak Forest_ , 1964) features Mija Aleksić in the leading role of a Chetnik killer-for-hire. Đorđe Kadijević's film _Holiday_ , which details an entire regiment of Chetniks and the well-known story of how they saved two downed American pilots, is a particularly interesting film in this instance. Though this film was fiercely oppositional to the tradition of the Partisan war film (an open affront even), the attention given to Chetniks is tempered by the fact that they are depicted alternately as either animalistic or incompetent. In one scene their stupidity is exploited when they put their American charges into confinement only to be easily tricked by the lure of a shiny new lighter and a shirt offered to them by the Americans – who then have an opportunity to escape while the Chetniks are transfixed with the consumer items. In another scene during the feast for the eponymous holiday the Chetniks tear into their dinner with their bare hands – tossing food around like frenzied savages who have never seen a cooked meal before. This satirical view of Chetniks surely helped the film pass unmolested under watchful eyes.

The Black Wave filmmakers were very forward and blatant in their use of contemporary stories to critique society. The typical Black Wave film features everyday people in everyday situations. There is no fantasy in the Black Wave film (a notable exception being Aleksandar Petrović's adaptation of Bulgakov's _Majstor i Margarita_ ( _The Master and Margarita_ , 1972) with its occult themes and events). If these films were dark it was so because the tragedies of modern life were depicted as everyday occurrences, and the distance between contemporary existence and an idealized, humane society was far off. In some ways the Black Wave filmmakers functioned as reporters. Their ethical responsibility was to question, not to confirm or console. As long as faults exist in society it is the artist's task to expose and analyze them with clarity and precision.

The recurring characters within these contemporary stories of Black Wave films are figures living on the margins of society, somehow ostracized by either their experiences or their actions. As the Serbian screenwriter and film critic Branko Vučićević states, the Black Wave filmmakers were interested in accenting things that were not normally shown, such as decaying buildings and marginal people.5 This characterization was an attempt to counter the mythological, larger-than-life depiction of the Partisan war hero in classical Yugoslav cinema, and it was also used as an entry point toward approaching an analysis of contemporary society. Theoretically there should be no underprivileged or marginal people in a classless society – everyone should belong to a collective whole. The use of the marginal figure as a protagonist carried with it inherent critical views; and the humanism of the Black Wave films can be located in their siding with the downtrodden.

These marginal figures were often wanderers and drifters shuttling between spaces in an existence lacking stability. Constantly in transition, they were restless travelers in their own country. Petrović's film _Skuplja_ č _i perja_ ( _The Feather Collectors_ , 1967) depicts the lifestyle of the Roma, who are marginalized wherever they reside. The main character in the film, Bora (played by Bekim Fehmiu), ends up on the run from the authorities for killing a man, forever banished to the fringes because of his criminal status and also because of his ethnicity. The empty, disjointed shots of the roads that close the film symbolize the plight of the Roma not only in Yugoslavia but across the rest of Europe as well.

Žilnik's film _Early Works_ is about a traveling band of young Marxist revolutionaries who hope to foment an awakening among people in the Serbian countryside. They drift from space to space creating makeshift homes along the way and constituting their own sort of makeshift family. The characters in this film paint a portrait of abandoned youth seeking not rapprochement with their parental figures but rather a solid break that is capable of overthrowing their rule. It should be kept in mind that this film was conceived in direct relation to the student demonstrations of 1968. Furthermore, exemplifying the inability of the parental figures in society to comprehend the younger generation, Tito's famous response upon seeing this restless film was, "What do these crazy people want?"6

Family life for the marginal Black Wave protagonist is non-existent. If it does exist, it is depicted as fragmentary and problematic. This can be seen within the abusive household where Jugoslava (Milja Vujanović) lives in the film _Early Works_. Her father is a drunk who beats her and her mother, and her escape from what she calls a "feudal" home is the catalyst for her to embark on the road with her surrogate family of young revolutionaries. Unfortunately, this makeshift family proves to be more abusive than the first – she is shot dead by them at the conclusion of the film on the charges of "making a half revolution." There is no room in the domestic unit for the Black Wave protagonist and his or her attempts to foster a patchwork family are doomed to failure.

These wanderers in Black Wave films are not only residing in the marginal spaces of society but are also often in-between jobs as well, if not outright unemployed. The corresponding social critique within this predicament is obvious, as any Socialist landscape should make the very notion of unemployment untenable. Yet there they are, the Black Wave drifters, constantly searching for work in a hostile environment. In the film _Vrane_ ( _Crows_ , 1969) by the Serbian writer-directors Ljubiša Kozomara and Gordan Mihić the main characters are an out-of-work boxer and three unemployed dancers who band together to form their own patchwork family. Djuka (Slobodan Perović, the boxer) and Čedica (Milan Jelić, one of the dancers) are cousins and Djuka's elderly mother also tags along when they hit the road in search of a means of subsistence. However, they quickly become involved in a life of crime, and the film proposes the notion that in order to survive in society one must be a ruthless scavenger – a crow.

There are many criminals in Black Wave films. Rakonjac's film _Zazidani_ ( _The Inmates_ , 1969) is set in a prison featuring a world-weary inmate (Ljuba Tadić), a vindictive, murderous guard (Danilo "Bata" Stojkovič), and the mutually dependent relationship they share. Stojkovič plays the leader of a gang of political subversives engaging in criminal activities in Rakonjac's film _Izdajnik_ ( _The Traitor_ , 1964). Sometimes seemingly responsible and forthright citizens turn into criminals in these films – a fate that befalls an unemployed locomotive engineer (Boris Dvornik) who shoots his girlfriend in a fit of jealous rage in Croatian-born Zdravko Randić's film _Tragovi crne devojke_ ( _Traces of a_ Brunette, 1972). A similar fate awaits a wandering proletarian organizer (Rade Šerbedžija) in Pavlović's film _Rde_ č _e klasje_ ( _Red Grain_ , 1970) when he shoots a man in an uncontrollable outburst after embroiling himself in multiple love affairs within a peasant family he instructs in the ways of collectivization. The marginal figures in Black Wave films have no glorious past to speak of, a tenuous present, and a cloudy, disastrous future. The misfortune of modern life often crushes the Black Wave protagonist if he does not also actively contribute to his own downfall.

Black Wave films exhibit a disturbing amount of violence directed towards women. Women in these films are often innocents, or at least passive players in the destructive narratives; yet, women are attacked in numerous ways in the Black Wave film – almost as if they are constantly being punished. This punishment has patriarchal overtones, of course, as Yugoslavia was a society dominated by males. Females were often subjugated to the whims of men and sometimes treated as second-class citizens. However, this is a curious opposition to the Partisan war film, which often featured noble female soldiers who fought valiantly side by side with their compatriots and contributed to the revolutionary struggle. Women in the Partisan war film were treated with respect and were usually able to avoid any violence being directed their way. However, in the Black Wave women are often beaten, raped, or brutally murdered – sometimes all in the same film.

In _Early Works_ Jugoslava is shot dead at the conclusion of the film. She is depicted throughout as a strong and assertive revolutionary woman who is not afraid to speak her mind. The motive for the extreme cruelty towards women in the Black Wave film seems to be ambivalence towards their assertiveness and power. This assertive power was utilized in the Partisan war film to support the war effort and nation-building, which means it was co-opted. In the Black Wave film women can only challenge the patriarchal system and must be attacked for it.

In Papić's _Handcuffs_ a woman (Jagoda Kaloper) is raped by the man she nurses back to health (a national hero played by Adem Čejvan). At the conclusion of the film, after this hero is accused of Stalinist sympathies and led away in handcuffs, the woman is chased and assaulted by a pack of angry men who rip her clothes off and then shoot her, leaving her discarded corpse on the rocks of a nearby mountain. In the Serbian director Jovan Živanović's _Uzrok smrti ne pominjati_ ( _Do Not Mention the Cause of Death_ , 1968), which tells the wartime story of a village under German occupation, the raping of two women is intercut in one scene. A German officer cruelly whips a young girl into submission while at the same time a war profiteer (Velimir "Bata" Živanović) forces himself upon his former lover (Olivera Vučo) who is now happily married – both assaults occurring amid the constant sounds of gunfire and explosions in the distance, as if they are approaching storms. Rape is a recurring method of attack in Black Wave films and sexual infidelity, whether experienced or perceived, is a common reason for the catastrophic fate of women.

The violence towards women and their violation of in the Black Wave film reveals a deep mistrust and also a slight fear – perhaps because as wartime concerns moved further into the background women were no longer relegated to roles of either supportive Partisan fighters or supportive homemakers. The Black Wave offered visions of (sexually) liberated women who work to support themselves and live alone without marrying, such as the various women in Pavlović's _Kad budem mrtav i beo_ ( _When I am Dead and Pale_ , 1967) who enter into casual sexual relationships with the protagonist (Nikolić) or, in a more extreme example, the strong-willed prostitute (Dravić) wandering the open highways in Rakonjac's film _Nemirni_ ( _The Restless_ , 1967).

This violence exhibited towards women is often extremely brutal and exaggerated – it can even be read as cruel and unusual punishment, lending an air of uncontrollable danger to the Black Wave film. There is a death by decapitation with an ice skate after a night of passion between a free-thinking woman (Dravić) and her repressive lover (Ivica Vidović) in Makavejev's _WR: Mysteries of the Organism_ , and in his _Love Affair or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator_ the heroine is killed during an argument with her lover when she drops to her death at the bottom of a well. Jugoslava, in Žilnik's _Early Works_ , is not only shot, her body is set on fire with a gas bomb and incinerated by her revolutionary comrades. Women in Black Wave films often die horrible deaths and almost always at the hands of the men who are close to them.

One of the interesting motifs in the Black Wave film is the locomotive train. The iconographic use of these trains within the films hails from the famous Marxist postulate that revolutions are the locomotives of history. Trains become a recurring visual motif which stands for the history of the revolution in Yugoslavia and the forward social momentum of the country. Trains represent progress – a coupling that is commented on from multiple angles in the Black Wave film. The train ride that opens Čengić's _Slike iz života udarnika_ ( _Scenes from the Life of Outstanding Workers_ , 1972) is an exaggerated celebration of revolutionary iconography, featuring Yugoslav national flags and excited workers shooting their guns in the air. The occupants of the train are also celebrating a wedding; and we see them collecting numerous people along the train tracks to join in their collective march forward. This film is a biting satire of the ideological propaganda that governed Yugoslavia. In one scene we witness the _Filmske novosti_ newsreel cameras as they capture workers in action but with a negligible amount of documentary realism, the director working frantically on the _mise en scène_ to create the most flattering conditions possible.

Trains are omnipresent in these films, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background. The main character (Tomislav Gotovac) in Lazar Stojanovic's _Plastic Jesus_ watches a train pass by in the distance just before he is shot and killed at the conclusion of the film. In _The Feather Collectors_ Bora gazes out of a window at a passing train while he sits in the office of the local police captain to answer for the crime of disturbing the public, which foreshadows the murder he commits at the end of the film and his subsequent flight from the authorities. The captain asks him if he would prefer to pay a fine or spend time in jail. The disaffected Bora, staring forlornly out of the window, knows that it matters little as he is ultimately cursed with an unlucky lot in life.

In Pavlović's _The Return_ the opening pre-credit scene takes place on a train, and over the opening credits of the film a wide shot of the train approaching is utilized. This image is inverted and bookended at the close of the film, which features a train pulling away. The central character in the film, a gangster who goes by the nickname Al Capone (Živojinovič), is shot by the police as he runs towards the train in an attempt to escape, and it continues to move away from him when he collapses and dies. The film concludes on a long shot of his body in the snow next to the empty train tracks as the camera rises higher and higher into the air. The train (or revolution) is always one step ahead of the Black Wave protagonist, just out of reach or sometimes moving in the opposite direction.

The conclusion of _The Return_ prefigures the conclusion of the Bosnian director Boro Draškovič's _Horoskop_ ( _Horoscope_ , 1969), a film that mostly takes place in a train station among a group of directionless youths who live there. The plot is structured by the comings and goings of the trains. _Horoscope_ also features the leader of its youth gang (Nikolić) being shot as he races after a train in a hopeless effort to escape the police. He is able to hang on to a window but dies before he can pull himself onto the train, which, his lifeless body, still hanging from its open window, carries him off. It is difficult for the Black Wave protagonist to hitch himself on to the revolutionary train of progress, literally and metaphorically, and the distance he must traverse often exceeds his final breath of life.

The most consistent convention of the Black Wave film is a fatalistic, downbeat conclusion which in some ways this is the defining characteristic of the movement. This very fact is what helped earn it the descriptive name "black" as it often marked the films as cynical and depressing. Disaster often waits for the protagonist at the conclusion of the Black Wave film. While this characteristic worked in opposition to the optimism of Yugoslav Socialist realism it also helped to delineate the worldview of the Black Wave directors. For them life was not only difficult but unpredictable and downright dangerous as well. This stance functions as a critique regarding the "realism" of classical Yugoslav cinema. There was not a lot of "romanticism" in everyday life; people were often locked in a daily struggle for survival. This was the reality of contemporary city life as the Black Wave directors saw it.

Popovič's film _Tough Guys_ ends with two brothers going insane as a result of not being able to integrate with postwar society even though they proudly served with the Partisans during the war. They are "demobilized," which, in this case, equates to "destabilized." The two (Stojković and Jovan Janićijević) turn on each other, hunt each other down in a deadly reenactment of a war game and shoot each other to death. Kozomara's and Mihić's _Crows_ ends with the deaths of all the characters except for Djuka, who kills his unstable and dangerous cousin Čedica, which actually precipitates the unraveling of his own mind. Djuka ends the film at the abandoned home of his mother, sitting alone in a snowstorm while visions of the "crows" with whom he previously associated haunt him – tossing snowballs at him while laughing uncontrollably in the film's final maddening shot. At times the Black Wave protagonist must suffer a fate worse than death: a living hell.

Pavlović's cinema is full of disastrous conclusions. In _Sovražnik_ ( _The Enemy_ , 1965) Slobodan (Živojinović) dies at the hands of his double. This in effect becomes a suicide as his double can be seen as a manifestation of his own imagination. He ends the film on a coroner's table, as does Milena in Makavejev's _WR: Mysteries of the Organism_. In _Bu_ đ _enje pacova_ ( _Awakening of the Rats_ , 1967) Baumberg (Perović) witnesses a murder, narrowly escaping with his own life to rejoin the choir where he sings while thinking about facing a murky future bereft of work opportunities and without the girl who left him and stole his money. In _The Ambush_ Ivan (Vidović) is shot down by half-wit members of his own revolutionary guard, who are ignorant of his identity as one of them. In _Red Grain_ Južek (Šerbedžija) kills a man in a spontaneous burst of rage and then is sent to jail with the very enemies of communism from whom he proudly stood apart throughout the film. In _When I am Dead and Pale_ Jimmy Barka (Nikolić) is shot to death while sitting on a toilet. The fatalistic conclusions in the cinema of Pavlović are often cruelly ironic, even humorously black at times.

The cinema of Rakonjac is also littered with dark conclusions. In _The Traitor_ the title character played by Bata Stojković is shot dead in the street at the end. In _The Restless_ the weathered and world-weary truck driver loses the only girl with whom he has ever connected when she disappears into a forest to continue her flight from society. In the same film Zorica (Dravić), the independent hooker, is given up to face the police for a crime she did not commit. In _Divlje senke_ ( _Wild Shadows_ , 1967) Života (Ljuba Tadić) is cut up with farming equipment by a vengeful group of peasants, then left to stumble over a hill to his death. In _Pre istine_ ( _Before the Truth_ , 1968) Strahinja (Tadić) beats his friend Mladen (Branko Pleša) to death with a rifle when he finds him kissing his wife. In _The Inmates_ , which is a sequel of sorts to _Before the Truth_ , picking up with Strahinja in jail and featuring numerous flashbacks of his time with Mladen, Strahinja is given a false escape plan by a guard (Stojković) who pretends to befriend him in a sadistic game of cat and mouse. The guard shoots him in the back as he runs away in an attempt to make his escape.

Violent death is common at the conclusion of Black Wave films. In Popović's _The Man from the Oak Forest_ the protagonist Maksim (Aleksić) is shot and crawls to his death in a graveyard. In the Croatian director Vatroslav Mimica's _Kaja, ubit_ č _u te!_ ( _Kaja, I'll Kill You!_ , 1967), an Ustasha soldier shoots and kills the title character (Zaim Muzaferija) along with another civilian in the closing moments of the film. In the Serbian director Miroslav Antić's _Doru_ č _ak sa_ đ _avolom_ ( _Breakfast with the Devil_ , 1971) a land mine blows up Boško (Živojinović) and his girlfriend as they attempt to ride off into the sunset on horseback – a very blunt and brutal rejection of any possible happy ending. The Black Wave film is "black" essentially because it had the courage to say that the Yugoslav revolutionary struggle along with the society that grew from it was drenched in blood and moral uncertainty.

#  **Transnational Trends and Connections**

There are a number of transnational developments and movements that helped shape the growth of many Black Wave filmmakers and the Black Wave as a series in general. These connections put the Black Wave in dialogue with the shared geopolitical and historical circumstances of East Europe (also West Europe) as well as placing the Black Wave (Yugoslav New Film in a larger sense) on a continuum with postwar European new waves including those of the Polish, Czechoslovakian, German, and French.

Petrović was born in Paris in 1929. In 1947 he began his studies in film directing at the newly formed FAMU (Film and Television Faculty of The Academy of Performing Arts) in Prague, making him part of the initial class of 35 accepted in the academy, a class that was international in character.7 FAMU was the educational home of many of the members of the Czechoslovakian New Wave, much in the same way that a large number of the Black Wave filmmakers were associated with their national film school as either students, professors, or both (the same can be said as well for the Polish New Wave and their Łódź Film School). Petrović was forced to discontinue his studies at FAMU in 1948 because of the split between Stalin and Tito and the excommunication of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia from the Communist Information Bureau, which created a political and cultural split between Yugoslavia and the satellite states of the Soviet Union.

Popović also had a close connection to Paris. He had come to filmmaking not through film criticism, the ciné-clubs or the film academy, as did so many of his contemporaries within the Black Wave, but rather through painting. In 1947 he and a group of his colleagues from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade organized an experimental artists' commune in the city of Zadar in Croatia. They became known as the "Zadar group" and their work was considered to be subversive by the authorities. When they returned to Belgrade they were not allowed to continue with their university studies. This action prefigured Popović's continual brushes with the authorities and the suppression of his film work in the 1960s. Popović moved to Paris in 1951 to continue his studies independently, and he lived there until 1954. While in Paris he came under the influence of the postwar art movement known as "Informel." The methods he absorbed were carried over to his later film work, most notably in _The Man from the Oak Forest_ with its visual "stacking" and images that are often composed through thick tree branches and other objects in the foreground that create a layered, multi-plane effect.

Drašković received practical experience by working as an assistant to Andrzej Wajda, the great director of the Polish New Wave, in Yugoslavia in the 1960s. Boštjan Hladnik attended the Sorbonne in the late 1950s and then worked as an assistant for French New Wave legend Claude Chabrol and also for the accomplished German filmmaker Robert Siodmak. In 1959 Pavlović interviewed Chabrol for the magazine _Film danas_ , later expressing how important the French New Wave was as "moral support" for Yugoslav New Film (Pajkić, 2001: 246). These Yugoslav filmmakers enjoyed an international upbringing in cinema, a cross-pollination that would continue throughout their careers.

There were a number of formative influences and events of a transnational nature that occurred on domestic terrain in Yugoslavia, one of the earliest being a visit by the Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens in 1947. The student body at the newly formed film academy organized a presentation and lecture by Ivens, who was in Yugoslavia at the time working on his film project about Eastern European socialism (he was also a guest lecturer during this time at FAMU in Prague). Perhaps the most momentous event which helped to formulate a film consciousness in Yugoslavia was the 1954 French Cinematheque exhibit.

Henri Langlois visited the Yugoslav Cinematheque in 1954 and organized a large exhibition called "French Cinematheque Exhibit and Retrospective of French Film" which lasted for three months and consisted of 53 different programs covering the first films of the Lumière Brothers in 1895 to the newest documentary films of 1953 by Jean Rouch, Georges Franju, and others. Of course, in those days Langlois was busy introducing young French cinephiles to the various treasures of international cinema, influencing and helping to start the French New Wave in the process. The impact of Langlois's visit had a similarly profound effect on young Yugoslav cinephiles, and this introduction would also eventually give way to the era of Yugoslav New Film.

There existed a crucial non-cinematic transnational event that ran concurrently with the Black Wave and which helped to amplify its effects: the Korčula Summer School. Some of the notable Western Marxists that attended the school included Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm, and Jürgen Habermas. These thinkers helped to promote the climate of progressive social criticism that marked the 1960s. By 1974 the Korčula Summer School ceased operations because of the official counterattack that had targeted not only those professors associated with _Praxis_ and who had helped to organize the school but also the Black Wave filmmakers.

Of all the European new waves, perhaps the most interesting connection with Yugoslav New Film and the Black Wave was the Polish New Wave and more specifically, the Polish "Black Series" of documentary films in the late 1950s. Besides sharing a synonymous description the films of these "Black" waves/series shared a modernist, anti-traditional form and a progressive critical view of and engagement with society.

Bjørn Sørenssen (2010) has called the Black Series "a number of social documen­taries with a surprisingly candid critical message." This documentary practice echoes the early work of the Black Wave filmmakers, many of whom including Petrović, Makavejev, Žilnik, and Jovanović started out making short documentary films and whose burgeoning social awareness can be seen in these works. Sørenssen notes that the term and concept "Black Series" was coined by the writer Aleksandar Jackiewicz in the pages of the influential weekly _Po prostu_ , which further prefigures the birth of the phrase "Black Wave" in Yugoslavia. Similarly, Jackiewicz was a film critic and essayist (also a professor at the Łódź Film School) while _Po prostu_ was a sociopolitical magazine aimed at students and young intellectuals who were involved in the movement for political reform that ultimately resulted in the "Polish October" of 1956, which Sørenssen feels was reflected in the spirit of the Black Series films (of further interest and serving as another connection is that _Po prostu_ established a ciné-club in 1955).

Unlike the situation with Jovičić and _Borba_ in Yugoslavia it seems possible that Jackiewicz and _Po prostu_ were on the side of these filmmakers of the Black Series in support of their critical views ( _Po prostu_ was forcibly discontinued in 1957 by the authorities because of its transformative societal views). Therefore, perhaps the term "Black Series" was not loaded with discriminatory and destructive meaning in the same way that the term "Black Wave" was. Another divergence is the manner in which the respective movements ended. Sørenssen observes that by the end of the 1950s the Black Series gradually dissipated. He cites as possible justification for this dissipation the fact that the political conditions for those types of films were no longer favorable and also that the filmmakers involved began to look for new outlets for their creativity. Yet and still, Sørenssen offers the possibility that the Black Series may have been used for internal political purposes in the turbulence of the events in Poland in 1956, which would also seem to align the series with the subsequent Black Wave.

Further connecting the Polish New Wave (and Black Series) with Yugoslav New Film (and Black Wave) was the cinematographer Jerzy Wöjcik. Wöjcik studied at Łódź Film School with his classmate Wajda in the 1950s, afterwards going on to serve as cinematographer for his influential film _Popiól i diament_ ( _Ashes and Diamonds_ , 1958). Wöjcik moved to Yugoslavia in 1968 and shot the film _Do Not Mention the Cause of Death_ , after that shooting _Crows_ in 1969, for which he won a diploma for outstanding cinematography at the Pula Film Festival. He shot three other feature films in Yugoslavia before returning home to Poland in 1974 and continuing his work there.

Wöjcik left Poland around the time of Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion. Seeing what happened to his social and artistic contemporaries in Czechoslovakia as well as witnessing the end of the period of free speech liberties that were enjoyed at Łódź Film School, Wöjcik must have sensed a greater opportunity to live and work without restraint in Yugoslavia. It is important to note that after the conclusion of the counterattacks on the Black Wave in 1972 Wöjcik shot no more films in Yugoslavia.

The Black Wave enjoyed an _annus mirabilis_ 1969, when some of its best films went _en masse_ across national borders and earned a short-lived outpouring of international recognition and celebration. (This was also the year that marked the beginning of the official domestic counterattack on the films and filmmakers). A Yugoslav film week was organized at the Berlin Film Festival in 1969, and among the seven feature films (and two shorts) programmed were the Golden Bear-winning _Early Works_ and _Horoscope_ , winner of the UNICRIT Award. Because of these high profile awards Yugoslav cinema must have seemed to dominate the festival that year. The fact is that Yugoslav films had a strong presence in general at the Berlin Film Festival in those years, with some other Black Wave films winning awards as well, most notably the works of Makavejev. This presence simply climaxed in 1969, as did the Black Wave itself.

Across the Atlantic, also in 1969, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City hosted the program "New Yugoslav Films," featuring a preponderance of Black Wave selections. Many of the same films that played at the Yugoslav film week in Berlin were also presented here. This panorama can be seen as the peak of Western validation for the Black Wave as the Museum of Modern Art is perhaps one of the loftiest stages any artist or art work can achieve. This success demonstrates the rapid, dramatic rise and fall of the Black Wave.

That fall began taking place almost immediately after 1969 when the Black Wave filmmakers were "blacklisted" and forced to find a way to continue making films in opposition to the hostile environment that surrounded them. The solution for many of them was to become transnational filmmakers as they reached out for diverse opportunities across borders. International co-productions were not a novelty in Yugoslavia as it boasted one of the more picturesque and film-friendly landscapes in the Western world. Yugoslavia was, in fact, a powerhouse of a production center, and many of the largest international production companies took advantage of the favorable possibilities there.

Petrović already had experience with international co-productions in 1968 with his film _Bi_ č _e skoro propast sveta_ ( _The World Will End Soon_ ), which was co-produced by the Parisian company Les Productions Artistes Associés. This film employed two directors of photography, one Frenchman and the other a Yugoslav, and also French actors mixed in among the cast. In 1972 Petrović's film _The Master and Margarita_ was also organized as an international co-production, this time with Euro International Film from Rome as the partner. Among the film crew were Italian co-writers, an Italian director of photography, and Italian cast members. By this year Petrović was already feeling pressure from above, and this film served the final blow as it was perceived to be a direct assault on communism. He subsequently fled to Paris, his birthplace, and in 1977 made the film _Gruppenbild mit Dame_ ( _Group Portrait with Lady_ ) as a French–West German co-production, again with Les Productions Artistes Associés.

Draškovič also found himself blacklisted in Yugoslavia after _Horoscope_. In 1971 he was engaged by Italian producers to make the film _Nokaut_ ( _Knockout_ ). The film was an Italian–Yugoslav co-production with Roberto Cinematografica, and it had a multi-national cast and crew. Draškovič signed this film under the pseudonym "Barry Norton." Though he remained in Yugoslavia he did not direct another feature film until the end of the decade.

Makavejev's film _WR: Mysteries of the Organism_ was an international co-production with the Munich company Telepol. This film can also be said to be something of an American co-production as well, since Makavejev had received a Ford Foundation grant for research in America which led to him shooting the documentary segments of the film focusing on the life of Wilhelm Reich in the United States. As a result of the difficult reception of this film at home in Yugoslavia, Makavejev fled to West Germany and then to America. His subsequent film _Sweet Movie_ (1974) was a Canadian–French–West German co-production. Throughout the rest of the 1970s and into the 1980s Makavejev worked as a film professor in America at Harvard University and Columbia University. His status as a nomadic transnational artist continued for the remainder of his career as the rest of his films were all either international co-productions or productions in countries where he worked as a freelance artist.

Žilnik left Yugoslavia for West Germany in 1974 and began making films there for the next couple of years. During this time he joined the German Filmmakers Association where he was asked by its president Alexander Kluge to help apply Yugoslav film laws in creating what would be a German filmmakers' cooperative. Žilnik edited some of his short films in this cooperative as well as a feature film he made called _Paradies, Eine imperialistische Tragikomödie_ ( _Paradise, an Imperialist Tragicomedy_ , 1976). While there he worked alongside the luminaries of New German Cinema such as Edgar Reitz, Ula Stöckl, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and others who had been a part of the cooperative.

Ironically, because of Žilnik's film _Paradise_ , which was based on new radical leftist activities in West Germany, he would leave the country and return to Yugoslavia after being warned by film critics and other friends that his film could cause trouble. When he returned to Yugoslavia the only working space open to him was in television. The cultural climate had changed completely in West Germany during this time as society was forced to come to terms with the appearance of anarchy and terrorism. Žilnik was _persona non grata_ , and his status as a transnational wanderer, forced to work in the margins of international motion picture industries, became a powerful and expressive symbolization of the consequences of the Black Wave as a whole.

 **Notes**

This is an expanded and revised version of a chapter on aesthetics in _Yugoslav Black Wave: polemical cinema from 1963–72 in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia_ (Belgrade: Filmski centar Srbije, 2011) written by the author.

1 The optimistic sentiment of the slogan apart, the country was made up of nations and people who had not been successfully united before, and who were often at odds during the war years and earlier. They had been united in the short-lived Kingdom of ­Yugoslavia, which earlier existed as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Prior to that some of the nations and peoples were united within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, others within the Ottoman Empire, though neither of these imperial contexts could be described as "unity" or "brotherhood" in non-problematic terms (and neither could the Socialist Yugoslavia context, as history has tragically shown). The national balance in the elements of the production was not accidental.

2 This break engendered the _Informbiro_ period in Yugoslavia which, in an analogous fashion, was a time when those who exhibited pro-Soviet/Stalin tendencies (or could be made to appear as so doing) were attacked as enemies of the state.

3 Jovičić introduced the term "Black Wave," but as early as 1968 numerous articles were already discussing "black films" or a "black series" in Yugoslav cinema.

4 _The City_ is the only film in the history of Yugoslav cinema to have suffered a court-­ordered ban. The legal attack on this film prefigured the general counteraction mounted against the Yugoslav Black Wave.

5 Interview with Branko Vučićević conducted by Greg DeCuir, Jr. in February 2008.

6 Recalled by Žilnik in the documentary film _Zabranjeni bez zabrane_ ( _Censored without Censorship_ , 2007) by Milan Nikodijević and Dinko Tucaković.

7 <http://www.famu.cz/fakulta/historie/famu-at-its-origins/> (accessed on January 20, 2011).

 **References**

Buden, Boris (2010) Shoot it black! an introduction to Želimir Žilnik. _Afterall_ , 25: 41–47.

Goulding, Daniel J. (1985) _Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience_. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

Jovičić, Vladimir (1969) "Crni val" u našem filmu (The "Black Wave" in our cinema). _Borba Reflektor_ (August 3), pp. 1–8.

Kołakowski, Leszek (2005) _Main Currents of Marxism_. W.W. Norton & Company, New York and London.

Munitić, Ranko (ed.) (2002) _Beogradski filmski kriti_ č _arski krug_ , _prvi tom 1896–1960_ (Belgrade Film Critics Circle, Vol. 1, 1896–1960). Niški kulturni centar/Art Press, Niš.

Ogle, James V. (1970) "Yugoslavia: The Outworn Structure." United States of America Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Intelligence Report. (Approved for release in 2007.)

_Praxis_ ( _International Edition_ ) (1965) Why Praxis? 1, <http://www.marxists.org/subject/praxis/issue-01/why-praxis.htm> (accessed February 27, 2012).

Pajkić, Nebojša (2001) _Jaha_ č _na lokomotivi: razgovori sa Živojinom Pavlovi_ ć _em_ (Rider on the locomotive: conversations with Živojin Pavlović) Studentski kulturni centar, Belgrade.

Sørenssen, Bjørn (2010) _Dystopian images of the city on both sides of the iron curtain: the Polish "Black Series" and British "Free Cinema."_ Paper presented at the 2010 NECS conference in Istanbul.

Stojanović, Dušan (1969) Velika avantura film (Great Film Adventure), in (2002) _Beogradski filmski kriti_ č _arski krug, drugi tom 1961–2001_ (Belgrade Film Critics Circle, Vol. 2, 1961–2001) (ed. Munitić, Ranko). Niški kulturni centar/Art Press, Niš, pp. 622–623.

Stojanović, Miroljub (ed.) (2003) _Želimir Žilnik iznad crvene prašine_ (Above the Red Dust). Institut za film, Belgrade.

Tirnanić, Bogdan (2008) _Crni talas_ (Black Wave) Filmski centar Srbije, Belgrade.

Volk, Petar (1983–86) _I_ _storija jugoslovenskog filma_ (The History of Yugoslav Film). Institut za film, Partizanska knjiga, Belgrade.

Vukšić, Slobodan and Predrag Lazović (1997) _Živojin Pavlovi_ ć. Centar film, Prizma, RTS, and 38th International Thessaloniki Film Festival, Belgrade, Kragujevac, and Thessaloniki.

Žilnik, Želimir (1968) Sineasti maleni mi smo vojska prava (Little cineastes we're a real army). _Sineast_ , 3: 73–74.

Zvijer, Nemanja (2009) Ideologija i vrednosti u jugoslovenskom ratnom spektaklu (Ideology and values in the yugoslav war film spectacle). _Hrvatski filmski ljetopis_ , 57–58: 27–40.

 **Further Reading**

I would like to direct the reader to my own article entitled "Black Wave Polemics: Rhetoric as Aesthetic" which appeared in the journal _Studies in Eastern European Cinema_ (1: 1: 85–96). The journal and article are available online as a free download at the following site:<http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=176/.I> would also like to suggest the book _Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema_ , written by Pavle Levi (Stanford University Press, Palo Alto), for its insightful chapter dealing with the Black Wave. The edited collection _The Cinema of the Balkans_ by Dina Iordanova (Wallflower Press, London) offers relevant analyses of a number of key Black Wave films. To date the only Black Wave director who has attained a level of worldwide notoriety is Dušan Makavejev and, the only book-length study written on him in English is _Terror and Joy: The Films of Dušan Makavejev_ by Lorraine Mortimer (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis). Furthermore, for the BFi Modern Classics monographic series, Raymond Durgnat has written a unique in-depth study of Makavejev's most well-known Black Wave film, published under its proper title: _WR: Mysteries of the Organism_ (BFi Publishing, London). For a much larger context, regarding the general history of Yugoslavia, I would recommend the excellent _Yugoslavia as History: Twice There was a Country_ by John R. Lampe (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge).

# Part IV

# Industries and Institutions

# 22

# Follow the Money

#  _Financing Contemporary Cinema in Romania_

Ioana Uricaru

 _"_ _My last two_ _films have been_ _financed mostly by the Romanian government_ _."_  
 _"_ _Why would the government_ _finance a_ _film????_ _"_ (on-set conversation between the author and an American assistant director)

#  **Introduction**

The year 2000 had an apocalyptic resonance for Romanian cinema: no domestic films were released in the country that year, which led to concerns of extinction – succinctly summarized by Anne Jäckel:

With a rapidly shrinking output of films, Romanian hopes remain with the new generation of film-makers trained at the University of Drama and Cinematography I.L. Caragiale. The awards their short films have collected over the last few years may well testify to the excellence of Romanian artists but a national production which relies on box office takings for support needs quantity as well as quality in order to survive. Should the young film-makers trained at Bucharest University not be given a chance to emerge soon as fully-fledged filmmakers, Romanians may well find themselves without images of their own. (2000: 000).

At the lowest point of Romania's cinematic presence, Jäckel's prophecy seemed to be as good as fulfilled. After a steady output of around 30 features per year during the Communist rule – with production, distribution, and exhibition fully funded and administered by the state – the 1990s brought a dramatic decrease in both quantity and quality of Romanian production, down to the aforementioned zero-level in 2000. And then, in a dramatic turn of the tides, Romanian cinema started a heavy, excruciating move uphill initiated by _Stuff and Dough_ ( _Marfa_ ș _i Banii_ , 2001), the ­feature debut of a young filmmaker, Cristi Puiu, who had returned to Romania after having completed his studies (ironically, in view of Jäckel's statement) in Switzerland. Selected in several second-tier competitive festivals and presented in the Directors' Fortnight (Quinzaine des réalisateurs) during the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, _Stuff and Dough_ did not make a huge impact in the international film world (the way Puiu's second feature, _The Death of Mr. L_ ă _z_ ă _rescu_ , would four years later) but it definitely shook things up at home among critics and young filmmakers.1

The next 10 years would be almost eerily productive in terms of both quality and quantity. The Romanian presence in Cannes – the gold standard for auteur ­cinema – has been steady every year, winning a number of awards that seemed unthinkable in 2000: the Prix un Certain Regard for _The Death of Mr. L_ ă _z_ ă _rescu_ ( _Moartea domnului L_ ă _z_ ă _rescu_ , 2005) by Cristi Puiu and _California Dreamin' (Endless)_ ( _California dreaming (nes_ _f_ _îr_ ș _it)_ , 2007) by Cristian Nemescu; the Caméra d'Or for _12:08 East of Bucharest_ ( _A fost sau n-a fost_ , 2006) by Corneliu Porumboiu; and the supreme distinction, the Palme d'Or, for the shorts _Traffic_ (2004) by Cătălin Mitulescu and _Megatron_ (2008) by Marian Crișan and the feature _4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days_ ( _4 luni, 3 s_ ă _pt_ ă _mîni_ ș _i dou_ ă _zile_ , 2007) by Cristian Mungiu.2

After the initial first wave of successful auteurs (Puiu, Mungiu, Porumboiu, Mitulescu, and Muntean), who have already confirmed with second and third features that their debuts were not accidents or exceptions, a fresh group of even younger Romanian filmmakers has recently emerged with equal force and energy: Marian Crișan, Adrian Sitaru, Radu Jude, Bogdan Mustață, Călin Netzer, and Bogdan Apetri – and it seems that the reservoir of Romanian talent is far from being exhausted.

The paradox of this success is that the films are being produced in a country with dwindling audiences, with an incredibly low number of theaters, and basically with no film industry in the sense of a commercially viable enterprise. The market is extremely small and almost entirely occupied by Hollywood product; and Romanian audiences explicitly shun Romanian films, which they find ­depressing, slow, boring, and too close to reality. _4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days_ , the most successful of Romanian auteur films – due in part to the enormous publicity brought by the Palme d'Or win – made under 80,000 entries (although it was ­number 7 at the Romanian box office in 2007).

I have been asked repeatedly by foreign film scholars, critics, and filmmakers what made possible the domestic emergence and the international success of recent Romanian cinema. The question begs a detailed answer that would address the style and content of Romanian films in the last decade, their position in a European and global context, their historical placement in relation to pre- and post-1989 European film currents (especially Italian neorealism), and an examination of the whole concept of a "new Romanian wave" or a "new Romanian cinema": is it a wave, a movement, a manifesto, or just a serendipitous string of fortunate events?

From a business point of view, one thing that all these films – and their ­directors – have in common is the generally successful striving for complete creative freedom, which is ensured mainly by keeping the budgets extremely low, making it possible for the director to assemble the funds by using financing mechanisms designed to encourage auteur rather than business initiatives. While an argument can be made about the relationship between the low budgets and the thematic and stylistic choices of Romanian films post-2001 (location shooting, raw realism, the refusal of coverage and elaborate camera movements, time of action close to real time, a focused attention to detail, low-key performances), the scope of this chapter will be limited to the examination of this less visible and yet fundamental determinant of recent Romanian cinema: its financing sources.

#  **Domestic Financing – State System**

The Romanian system of financing is modeled after the French one – even the name of the government agency that manages the funds is a literal translation of its French counterpart, with which it shares its acronym (CNC: the Centrul Național al Cinematografiei and the Centre National de la Cinématographie, respectively).3 The French government made cinema a state-protected institution during the Occupation and Vichy regime (Hayward, 1993), while the Romanian one adopted this model following the totalitarian period, when the state owned every item involved in the production, distribution, and exhibition of films. A ­protectionist system of centralization and regulation became thus the desired standard in the society of transition, being imported mostly by virtue of cultural affinity (francophony) and because it was just a few comfortable steps removed from the full state ownership and control of national cinema established during the totalitarian regime.

The overseeing institution responsible for the regulation of the Romanian film industry, the National Council for Cinema (Consiliul Național al Cinematografiei), is an autonomous agency of the Romanian government, ­subordinated to the Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs. The centralized regulation and support of cinema has a long tradition in Romania: as far back as 1934, the Law for a National Cinema Fund established a financial resource for "the creation of an infrastructure and the financing of national film production." The funds were going to be generated through two taxes: on film tickets and on imported raw footage (CNC web site: <http://www.cncinema.abt.ro>). In 1948, the film industry was entirely nationalized by the new Communist regime and all production, distribution, and exhibition of films became a monopoly of the state. The two sides of government intervention – regulation and support – became totalizing: everything was regulated by the state, which also provided all necessary financial resources.

Similar to all other industries in Communist Romania, the film industry became an example of planned economy. The state owned all the means of production, planned and decided what the industry was supposed to produce, distributed the product, and handled all the money: that which entered the system (for financing) and that which resulted (from theatrical exhibition and other forms of commercialization). There needed to be no relationship between the input of capital and the output of revenue, as the main function of the industry was not to generate profit but to maintain a certain amount and a designed content of cultural product.

According to film historian Călin Căliman (2000), at its peak, in the late 1970s, the Romanian film industry produced 30 to 40 feature films a year in its five units (named "Case de filme" – "Film houses"), plus a steady flow of animation (between 50 and 60 titles a year in the "Animafilm" studio) and documentaries (around 300 documentary shorts in the "Alexandru Sahia" studio).4 The training of personnel for staffing the production units – as well as of participating talent – was also ensured by the state, through the elite Institute for Theater and Cinema Art (in the case of directors, cinematographers, screenwriters, film critics, and actors) and through a specialized high school and on-the-job training (for below-the-line ­technical positions). The system bred in this _in vitro_ environment had the ­appearance of a real industry – studios, production, a film festival (in the Black Sea ­summer resort Costinești), a very successful full-color monthly magazine ( _Cinema_ ), stars, and genres, such as "revolutionary" comedy, realist-Socialist drama,5 revisionist history drama, and auteur art films.6

This last category had its prominent representatives, who usually started by working in one of the other genres but eventually adopted an allegorical style, very much influenced by filmmakers from the Soviet Union such as Andrei Tarkovski and Tenghiz Abuladze. With an oblique way of addressing the audience and using an elaborate codespeak disguised by storylines that were either hermetically obscure or apparently innocent, films such as Mircea Daneliuc's _Croaziera_ ( _The Cruise_ , 1981), Dan Pița's _Concurs_ ( _The Competition_ , 1982), or Lucian Pintilie's _De ce trag clopotele Mitic_ ă _?_ ( _Why do they ring the bells, Mitic_ ă _?_ , 1981)7 managed to bypass censorship and be completed – only to be withdrawn from theaters almost instantly. Depending on the type of filmmaking they wanted to practice, Romanian directors before 1989 had to overcome various obstacles, to be sure: to be ideologically correct, to please or entertain the party decision-makers, to generate the glamor of spectacle and star vehicles within the strict confines of government directives, or to prove themselves shrewd enough to fool the censors (mainly through the use of opaque cinematic communication, only accessible to the audiences "in the know"). But on the whole, finding ways of financing their films was not the main concern.

Things changed, of course, dramatically after 1989 – and yet, they somehow remained the same in terms of the reliance of the film industry on the state. As Sparks observed about all Eastern European countries,

the end of communism and of the cultural subsidies has meant that films have to ­survive on the market, and in these countries the film market is as dominated by Hollywood productions as it is almost anywhere in the West.... These states face a very obvious choice: either they allow the collapse of their national film industries or they find some way of subsidizing them and protecting them from market forces. (1997)

The first legislative act referring to film production, distribution, and exhibition was the decree-law 80 of February 8, 1990 (<http://www.cdep.ro/pls/legis/legis_pck.htp_act_text?idt=11157>), which ceased the activity of pre-1989 production units, established a National Center for Cinema ("centralized state-budget funded institution, with its objective the encouragement and protection of national film production, stimulating the production of films with high artistic value"), and decreed that films were to be made by "creation units" (which would belong to the professional association Uniunea Cineastilor) in production studios, through collaboration contracts. The money for financing cinema production would come – according to this law – from the pre-sales to distributors, national and international, as well as from bank loans. For exceptional projects, deemed of national interest and/or high artistic merit, the government would approve supplemental funding at the request of the National Center of Cinema (<http://www.cdep.ro/pls/legis/legis_pck.htp_act_text?idt=11157>). This vision of cinema as a production of ­cultural goods that will somehow be accepted by the market – and if not, will be taken care of by the state – is in tune with the post-1989 general policy regarding the arts, as Dan Eugen Rațiu explains in his study "The arts support system in a transitional society,"

the cultural policies after the fall of Communism were shaped by the tradition of centralization of power, the dominant étatique mentality, and a paternalistic attitude based on the notion that culture is a state responsibility and that it serves as a "carrier and generator of national identity," an idea that provided the most important rationale for supporting culture and the arts. (2007)

This legislation proved of course to be naïve at best, and was endlessly amended in the following years as Uniunea Cineaștilor became irrelevant as an organization, the pre-sale of Romanian films proved to be an impossible task, and bank loans were a practical impossibility in a country with huge inflation and a banking ­system out of control. The economic, legislative, and social transition destabilized all Romanian institutions – including the film "industry" – and 1990 was another kind of year zero for cinema: no narrative features were produced by the still-standing studio units, but numerous films were premiered or re-released, in an elated attempt to make up for lost time and almost-lost-to-censorship works.8 Interestingly – but not unexpectedly, considering the richness of real-life events in 1990 – the documentary film studio "Sahia" produced 65 titles, of which few were released, however (Căliman, 2000).

Even if actual production stagnated in 1990, the effervescent atmosphere ­generated by the release and re-release of several iconic works seemed to promise a hopeful new beginning. Unfortunately, as was the case with most domains of Romanian culture and economy, what followed was a period of confusion, disorientation, and disjointed attempts at replacing the old structures with functional new ones.

Between May 1991 and April 1992, eight directors released their debut films – one of which, Ș _obolanii ro_ ș _ii_ (directed by Florin Codre) proudly advertised itself as "the first Romanian film made with private funds." The others were produced by several newly minted production companies such as Filmex ( _Unde la soare e frig_ , directed by Bogdan Dumitrescu), Gamma Film ( _Pasaj_ , directed by Paul Ghițiu) or Star Film 22 ( _Innebunesc_ ș _i-mi pare r_ ă _u_ , directed by Jon Gostin), presumably using state funds for financing at least in some proportion.9 At least one of them ( _Lacrima cerului_ , directed by Adrian Istrătescu) was produced by a still-extant pre-1989 ­production unit, Casa de filme 1. The apparently encouraging bottom line of this period turned out to be, as Călin Căliman (2009) notes in his history of Romanian cinema, "just an illusion." Just three of these directors later made (only) a second film and none were significantly recognized in festivals or achieved box-office success.

An important moment in the development of new state funding systems came in1991.The Government Decision 530 from August 1, 1991 regulated the partial privatization of the film industry by creating two autonomous self-administrating units ("regie autonomă"), which functioned as economic enterprises with capital fully owned by the state – one for film production (Regia autonomă Cinerom) and one for distribution and exhibition (Regia autonomă România Film – RADEF). The same regulatory act also established two private companies ("societate comercială") – one for animation production (Animafilm Studio) and one for film production (Studioul Cinematografic București). The destiny of these companies would be abrupt and tortuous: Cinerom was also turned into a private company five years later (under the name of Rofilm), Studioul Cinematografic București basically ­disappeared, and Animafilm was reduced to producing educational films commissioned by religious or health organizations. (Săptămîna financiară online, 2005).

During a press conference at the Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs on May 19, 2005, the bottom line of the four companies owned by the state, overseen by the Ministry but functioning as private enterprises (RADEF, RoFilm, Animafilm, and Sahia film, the documentary production studio) was summarized succinctly: they were all practically bankrupt, deeply in debt, with a catastrophic track record. RoFilm owed so much money to the Ministry of Defense (because of the latter's involvement in the historical World War One superproduction _Triunghiul_ morții (1999), directed by Sergiu Nicolaescu) that its property was being seized and was going to be confiscated. At the same press conference, it transpired that the disastrous management ("the black period") of RoFilm started during Mircea Daneliuc's tenure as a director and that RoFilm had only stayed afloat for as long as it had because of an infusion of more government money – from the National Cinema Fund (Fondul Cinematografic) – which basically meant transfer of capital from one state institution to another (Ministerul Culturii, 2005).

Established in 1999 through Law 22, which aimed to finally and fully regulate the transition from a state cinema industry to a private cinema industry that can benefit from state aid, the Cinema Fund was modeled after its European ­counterparts (especially the French one) and was meant to provide financial aid mostly in the form of interest-free loans to Romanian private production companies. After a few years of unsuccessful attempts at making the Fund – and its administering institution, the National Film Office – fully and effectively functional, attempts that included a new legislative overhaul in 2002 and the change of name to the National Center for Cinema, an exasperated Ministry of Culture announced, in the aforementioned press conference, the launching of a new set of ­comprehensive legislation that would finally establish a healthy relationship between the ­private production companies and the state sources of funding, encouraging private enterprise while also recognizing that cinema is a cultural product of national importance that should be supported by the state.

One of the scandals that led to the close scrutiny of the National Film Fund was the fact that it refused funding to Cristi Puiu's project _The Death of Mr. L_ ă _z_ ă _rescu_ after the latter participated in the yearly competition. Puiu contested the results and took his plea straight to the Minister of Culture, Răzvan Theodorescu, who overrode the funding committee's decision and awarded financing to Puiu's ­project (Teodorescu and Mihai, 2005). In January 2006, another scandal involving Puiu hit the headlines: after two of his treatments submitted for the competition for development funding were both rejected by the CNC commission, Puiu declared ­publicly that he was going to return previous funding received for feature production and not ask for money from the CNC administered National fund until the legislation was changed. It is worth noting that at the same competition Cristian Mungiu's project _4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days_ , which would go on to win the Palme d'Or, came in a distant second after Supraviețuitorul, helmed by Sergiu Nicolaescu.

Nicolaescu, a specialist of action-adventure entertainment and historical films, had been extremely prolific and popular before 1989. In the next two decades though, the continuous financial support from the state for his works generated anger and consternation among film critics, filmmakers, and cinephiles. It seems that all Nicolaescu needs to do is enter a project in a CNC competition and some amount of funding is guaranteed.10

The most recent cinema legislation, Law 328, July 14, 2006, was an improvement in that it tried to comply with European regulations and be more specific about the sources of funding and the methodology of awarding the funds through the CNC-organized bi-annual competition. The money comes mostly from the broadcast and cable television stations (which are obligated to contribute a ­percentage of their advertising dollars), from a tax on theater entry tickets, one on the sale and rental of DVDs and video tapes, and a percentage of the profit from all gambling activities.

The majority of production funds are awarded as reimbursable interest-free loans to Romanian production companies based on a point system that takes into consideration the quality of the screenplay, the track record of the production company, and the director's previous accomplishments. The first round consists of the evaluation of screenplays, which is done anonymously by a committee ­assembled by the CNC director based on suggestions from various professional organizations. Screenplays that accumulate a passing grade are then considered for financing, and the actual amount of financing is determined through a percentage combination of factors: the grade received by the screenplay, the festival or box-office success of the production company's previous releases, and the festival or box-office success of the director's previous work. The previous selections to ­prestigious film festivals become of paramount importance for awarding the funds, and the legislation thus validates in a very material way the decisive role of the international film festival circuit – something that is true of most countries that do not have a real, profitable film industry. The funds are awarded in decreasing order of total points, and the maximum award for a non-debut film cannot be over 50 percent of its budget (which has as a consequence the fact that most ­projects are submitted with inflated budgets so that even if they are awarded less than 50 percent of the amount requested they can still go into production).

The interest-free loan has to be reimbursed in the 10 years following the film's completion, with the rights to the film's negative as collateral. Almost every round of competition ends up being contested in a more or less loud and public manner for various reasons: irregularities in the implementation of these rules, the exploitation of vague and ambiguous language, errors in the calculations of the point system (especially when it comes to evaluating previous participation in international festivals, as the list of qualifying festivals is being constantly rewritten). Usually, the winners of the competition represent a combination of directors and production companies representative of the "New Wave"; so-called dinosaurs (directors who worked, some very successfully, before 1989); post-1989 directors whose work received a unanimous thumbs-down; and a few surprises – debutants who have not yet caused either dismay or enthusiasm among critics and cinephiles.

It is interesting that among the "dinosaurs" we find names such as Dan Pița and Mircea Daneliuc, art cinema auteurs during the Communist regime, now considered obsolete especially since the emergence of post-2001 Romanian cinema. Mihai Chirilov explains their increased irrelevancy as a result of their hermetic auteur style and of an unwelcome need for exorcizing the past

What hitherto had been hidden in innuendos and subtle jokes could now be told in the open, without any additional makeup – even though, out of habit, some filmmakers preferred metaphors and heavily burdened associations. In a contextual delirium, we saw familiar scenes over and over again – people standing in lines or shivering in theatres, or tap water stubbornly refusing to run as the faucets issued heavy burps – and we were exhilarated.... As a bonus, we were offered suburban slang and dirty sex scenes, something we had been denied for so long, leaving us frustrated for what we thought would be an eternity. There were very few who tried to grasp the spirit of the time in those turbulent transition days. As long as you can run, but cannot hide, coping with the demons of the Revolution-era proved, for lack of anything better, the best exorcism we could hope for – despite the deepest regret that we didn't have our own _Good Bye, Lenin!_ (dir. Wolfgang Becker; Germany, 2003) to wrap up, in an acceptable manner, our growing nostalgia. (2007)

Probably the most resounding – if not the most "juicy" – scandal surrounding the competition happened after the December 2008 competition, when Cristian Mungiu – fresh off his Palme d'Or win in Cannes – accepted becoming part of the selection committee and was thus able to observe the process closely. He then proceeded to publish an open letter to the Minister of Culture, outlining ­irregularities, loopholes, conflicts of interests, and errors that he was able to witness in person during the selection process.11

As a result of this protest, the Ministry of Culture suspended the CNC ­competition in 2009 – therefore, no funds were awarded that year. CNC called for filmmakers' associations and production companies to submit their suggestions for changes in the regulations, but in 2010 the competition was back with virtually no changes in the regulations, except for a more rigorous and precise list of the international film festivals that can count for company or director "quality" points. The winners of the most recent narrative feature competition (summer 2010) show the same combination: six directors who can be grouped under the "new wave" banner, two "dinosaurs" (including the ubiquitous Nicolaescu), one whose first film generated mixed responses, and one who somehow manages to keep obtaining financing despite his previous results.12

The tensions between CNC and the filmmakers and production companies associated with the recent successes of Romanian cinema are very similar to the type of conflicts that arise in Hollywood between a producing studio and the hired director/auteur. CNC, through its director and representative, understands its role as being very much like that of a studio, which offers the financial possibility for the director to complete his work, and therefore sees itself as the main player, with the liberty of discretion within certain contractual rules. The difference, though, is that CNC-awarded money is public money, and it is the international success of Romanian cinema that gave legitimacy to CNC in its newest incarnation, not the other way around. The astonishing apparent productivity of the state financing system is down to the fact that directors such as Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Corneliu Porumboiu, and Radu Muntean managed to become prominent voices of European and global cinema on shoestring budgets, which is their merit as ­artists and entrepreneurs. CNC, however, chooses to see things differently, downplaying these successes just as it takes advantage of them when convenient. The question remains whether the system really works, or if the admirable results of Romania's "new wave" are not actually a result of the filmmakers working the system with the same creativity that they employ in the making of their films.

In all fairness, we have to point out that despite its flaws, especially when it comes to the generating and managing of the National Film Fund, the legislative framework shows a strong protectionist intent towards national cinema, imposing, for example, distribution and exhibition quotas that would be unthinkable in a country where cinema is not considered a cultural product of national importance (such as the United States). For example, theaters, regardless of their ownership status (independent, administered by local government, or privately owned by major corporations, such as mall multiplexes), are required to schedule at least 5 percent of their programming with Romanian films – 1 percent at peak times – while for television stations, including private and cable, the quota is 2 percent.

A new law of cinematography is in the works in Parliament as of writing, again shepherded by Sergiu Nicolaescu, and so far the proposal has already created a major point of controversy: Nicolaescu came up with the idea of making the Romanian state a fully fledged co-producer for all films that receive CNC financing. The proposal has received a favorable vote in the Senate committee in March 2010 and incensed the filmmaking community, including the CNC director (ziare.com, 2010). In September 2010, the law proposal was still being discussed in Parliament and contested by representatives of the filmmaking community (directors Corneliu Porumboiu, Tudor Giurgiu, Radu Gabrea) who participated in the debate in the Commission for Culture (Bună ziua Iași, 2010).

The Film Fund administered by CNC is not the only state source of funding. In 1991, Lucian Pintilie, at the time the most important Romanian auteur, who had a successful career as a theater and opera director abroad, came back from his French exile to become the director of a new government institution: the Film Studio of the Ministry of Culture (Studioul de creație Cinematografică al Ministerului Culturii).13 Funded, as the name indicates, by the budget of the Ministry of Culture, the studio represented Pintilie's carte blanche to exert a strong influence on the course of Romanian cinema in the years to come. While it predictably became the main co-producer for most of Pintilie's post-1990 films (Balanța, 1992; _Un été inoubliable_ , 1994; _Prea tîrziu_ , 1996; _Terminus Paradis_ 1998; _Dup_ ă _amiaza unui tor_ ț _ionar_ , 2001, _Niki Ardelean, colonel în rezerv_ ă, 2003 ), the studio was also the Romanian primary financing source for a few landmarks of the country's recent cinema: the feature documentary Piața Universității, _România_ (1991), directed by Stere Gulea;14 Nae Caranfil's _E pericoloso sporgersi_ (1993), a film that brought the first breath of fresh air in the landscape of Romanian cinema but unfortunately found no followers; Mircea Daneliuc's _Senatorul melcilor_ (selected in the Cannes competition, 1995); Cristi Puiu's all-important feature debut _Stuff and Dough_ (2001); and even _Corul Pompierilor_ (1999), a medium-length dark comedy directed by Cristian Mungiu, then a fresh film school graduate.15 It would be fair to say that the support given by Pintilie – both personally and through the government institution he was directing – has been instrumental in the discovery and promotion of three extremely important auteurs.16

Finally, we have to mention the important contribution of another state ­institution, the Romanian Cultural Institute (Institutul Cultural Român)17 in the promotion of Romanian cinema abroad. Its branches in 18 cities around the world as well as the home office in Bucharest often sponsor exhibition and promotion of Romanian cinema, a sponsorship that in the case of the New York Institute goes way beyond the demands of cultural activity. The vast majority of the Institute's branches are located in Europe, which means they are geographically and administratively "close to home," functioning within the familiar parameters of European culture, economy, and a cultural value system. The New York branch (ICR NY) and its director, Corina Șuteu, have the difficult mission of supporting, among other things, Romanian cinema as an artistic ambassador in the context of a culture and an economy (the United States) that generally sees cinema as a product. It is somehow ironic that an internationally acclaimed and successful film such as _4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days_ , while having an American distributor, was ­supported in its US publicity campaign with US$80.000 by ICR NY, which is a negligible amount when compared with the advertising budgets of American studio films but which represented a crucial contribution made from Romanian public funds. ICR NY regularly sponsors the exhibition and promotion of Romanian cinema in the United States, spending between $100 000 and $120 000 annually for this purpose. Its most important feature, the Romanian Film festival in New York, which has its headquarters at the Lincoln Center, was staged for the sixth time in 2011. While these efforts might seem small in comparison with the huge marketing and publicity apparatus that serves the American film industry, they give an appropriate measure of the competition faced by Romanian cinema on an international market and an answer to the question "why would the government sponsor cinema?" In this particular case, many Romanian films would never have any form of theatrical presence in the United States if it were not for their home funding, and even those that do have distribution would have a smaller promotion budget. In the US market-based, industrial film economy, the comparatively small monetary and logistical intervention of an institution such as ICR NY is necessary for the survival of Romanian cinema's products, even when the press, critics, and prestige awards environment is already overwhelmingly favorable to them.

#  **Domestic Financing – Private Enterprise**

The involvement of private capital and enterprises in Romanian cinema started as early as 1990. Probably the first private production company, Filmex, was founded by Constantin Popescu – former director of one of the pre-1989 production units– and registered as a business in 1991. Filmex started its activity by co-producing Pintilie's film _Balan_ ț _a_ ( _The Oak_ ), and stayed on as Pintilie's producer for most of his post-1989 films (Căliman, 2000). Filmex is still in business, having co-produced a few other important works (such as Nae Caranfil's _E Pericoloso Sporgersi_ ). Its most recent title is _Portretul lupt_ ă tinerețe (2010), directed by Constantin Popescu jr., a film about anti-Communist resistance guerillas from the 1960s. Popescu was recognized during the 1990s as one of the very few true producers in Romanian cinema, a profession that did not exist in the generally accepted definition before 1989, as Iordanova points out:

With all funding coming centrally from the State budget in the form of annual grants and with a semi-autonomous status of the units, there was no need of producer. Many people involved in the filmmaking process did not even need to know the exact cost of the productions they were involved in.... In the new times, even a film which has been granted a state subsidy, is ultimately financed from a patchwork of funding sources, like grants, loans and investments.... As a result of the changing structure of film financing, the demand for competent producers far outweighs the supply, and there is growing recognition of the fact that the producer is at least as important as the director. (1999)

Popescu's example was followed by dozens of filmmakers and other former employees of pre-1989 production units who started their own production companies. The incentive and motivation for this was clear: all the different waves of Romanian legislation regarding cinema had one thing in common – state funds would always be awarded to a Romanian production company, never to individual writers or directors; therefore, only a legally established company could claim a piece of the pie. Romanian directors quickly learned the lesson of financial independence as a prerequisite for creative freedom. Most of the prominent new Romanian directors have their own production companies (Cristian Mungiu – Mobrafilms; Cristi Puiu – Mandragora, in association with Bobby Păunescu; Corneliu Porumboiu –Km 42 Film; Cătălin Mitulescu – Strada Film; Tudor Giurgiu – Libra Film), which sometimes produce the work of fellow directors who do not (yet) have their own companies. (Mandragora is Marian Crișan's producer, Strada Film produced features by Bogdan Mustață and Ruxandra Zenide, Mobrafilms invited four directors aboard its Cannes-selected omnibus _Amintiri din Epoca de Aur_ ( _Tales from the Golden Age_ ).)18

All these companies – maybe with the exception of Km 42 Film – are open to, and involved in, the production of advertising and in providing services to foreign productions that are seeking to shoot or do post-production in Romania. Keeping these enterprises afloat – even just by paying rent for their offices and the salary of permanent employees – is a complicated and adventurous proposition, as the auteur films they are primarily set up for are basically money pits. Taking on extraneous activities – advertising, production services, distribution, sales – is necessary for survival, but the bread and butter of these companies remain the CNC-administered state funds and distribution and promotion subsidies.

A private company that functions like a studio in the American sense is MediaPro, the Romanian branch of a multinational media giant. A vertically ­integrated ­company that is big enough to handle sizeable production, mostly of television content and advertising, MediaPro also occasionally becomes involved in narrative features – either calculated to appeal to a large audience (such as _Lacrimi de iubire_ (2006), directed by Iura Luncașu, a feature sequel to one of the company's primetime soaps) or aware that they would make no profit, in which case they do not hesitate to request state funding through CNC ( _California dreamin_ ' by Cristian Nemescu, _Supravie_ ț _uitorul_ by Sergiu Nicolaescu). MediaPro's film production activities were kickstarted by a very profitable and eyebrow-raising deal it made when acquiring the Buftea Studios, former home of Communist film production, from its principal owner, the Romanian state:

the Romanian government announced that it would let the 70% control packet of the Buftea studio go for $2,7 million U.S. The privatization was announced in mid-January 1998, with a deadline for bids of only about a month. In March the studio was acquired by Media Pro, the Romanian partner of CME in PRO TV, and by the Acasă cable channel. (Iordanova, 1999)

A few profitable and successful companies that initially specialized in advertising only, inspired by the glamor that surrounded domestic auteur cinema in the recent years, took the leap into feature film territory (Multimedia Est produced Radu Muntean's excellent and underestimated _Hîrtia va fi albastr_ ă ( _The Paper will be Blue_ , 2006), as well as his later works _Boogie_ (2008), and _Mar_ ț _i dup_ ă _Cr_ ă _ciun_ (2010); Saga Film provided production services for _4 luni 3 s_ ă _pt_ ă _mîni_ ș _i dou_ ă _zile_ and _Amintiri din Epoca de Aur_ , then produced its first auteur film, _Periferic_ (2010), directed by Bogdan George Apetri).

All these films' budgets are made up in majority by state funds awarded through the CNC competition, but gathering the rest of the budget is no small feat. The law requires the principal producer – the company that submits the project to the funding competition – to ensure a contribution of minimum of 6 percent of the film's budget, a modest percentage that is usually covered in the form of services, so the producing company does not actually have to contribute any money. Some portion of the budget is usually covered through commercial sponsorship (in exchange for some tax relief or, sometimes, product placement) and/or from the institutions that are required by law to contribute to the National Film Fund but have the option to channel some of those contributions directly to a production company, bypassing the CNC (for example, the National Television has to contribute 15 percent of its advertising revenue to the Film Fund, but can opt to use up to half of that amount for the direct financing of film productions of its choice, which explains its presence as a financing partner in many of the recent auteur films). Finally, there is hardly a Romanian film that does not have some involvement from foreign (almost exclusively European) companies – more about that in the next section.

To be sure, every year there are a number of completely independent ­productions – and by that I mean those not supported through the National Film Fund. Of the 76 films produced in Romania between 2005 and 2009, CNC statistics indicate that 41 have received support from the state, which would seem to indicate the ­existence of a healthy, self-sustaining private film industry. The statistics do not include the excellent feature _Elevator_ (2008), directed by Gabriel Dorobanțu, a film that cost literally 500 euros, being set entirely in a freight elevator, and that thrilled Romanian cinephiles and critics. Also missing from the tally is Adrian Sitaru's self-financed _Pescuit Sportiv_ ( _Hooked_ , 2007), which was re-discovered and released internationally by a French company after the director won an impressive number of awards with his short _Valuri_ ( _Waves_ , 2008). The reason for the exclusion of these two important features is probably the fact that they have been shot and released (at least initially, in the case of Sitaru's film) on video format. CNC's regulations require a film answer print as deliverable for the projects financed by the Film Fund, so it presumably applies the same criterion for counting the projects it didn't support – therefore video releases are not included in the statistic.19

Established in 1993 as a Romanian–American partnership with Paramount Studios (Căliman, 2000), managed and owned by accomplished director of photography Vlad Păunescu, Castel Films has been offering full services – sets, soundstages, personnel, casting, below-the-line talent, postproduction, equipment – to dozens of feature films and hundreds if not thousands of advertising productions.20 In the 1990s, Castel was mostly involved in B-series genre films (horrors, Westerns, vampire movies, action-adventure), but in 2002 they had a big break with their ­participation in Anthony Minghella's _Cold Mountain_.21 While the low-brow genre and advertising fare continues to be their main source of income, Castel, just like its only competitor for industrial-style production, MediaPro, occasionally becomes involved in Romanian productions – or co-productions, such as Radu Mihăileanu's French-produced critical success _Train de Vie_ (1997) and international co-production and box office blockbuster _Le Concert_ (2009).22 Castel Films, MediaPro, and a few other smaller companies that specialize in providing services for international production bring to the table valuable tax incentives and trade advantages in exchange for their participation as co-producers. As the Film Finance Handbook mentions, some of the fiscal advantages are: tax exemptions for import of film equipment, tax exemption for profits that are reinvested in the cinema industry, 20 percent tax deduction on the value of new investments over one million d. While the Handbook warns of the considerable bureaucracy and necessary paperwork, it also mentions that apparently the production of _Cold Mountain_ saved 20 million dollars because it was shot in Romania (Davies and Wistreich, 2007). It is worth noting that one of the main functions fulfilled by Castel Films and MediaPro pictures is that they train, professionalize and keep employed most of the film industry workforce in Romania, which makes it possible for small auteur films to crew up with highly skilled personnel (even if their rates, set by the advertising industry standards, are sometimes difficult to accommodate on an under-$1 million budget).23

#  **International Funding**

The contribution of funds from outside Romania has been steady and essential, even if relatively modest. First of all, the importance of France and French companies for Romanian cinema cannot be overestimated. The two countries have a long tradition of cultural affiliation – Romania is considered a "francophone" country – and a standing agreement of collaboration in the field of film production (Jäckel, 1998). Even during the darkest hours of the totalitarian regime, the French ­influence remained strong. It was at the insistence of the French that Romanian authorities allowed Pintilie to temporarily return home in 1981 and financed his _De ce trag clopotele Mitic_ ă _?_ (even if they banned it upon completion), and in 1989 Sergiu Nicolaescu directed a TV mini-series biography of François Villon, a French–Romanian co-production with an international cast, which was also edited and released as a theatrical feature that same year.

After 1989, French influence – and support – became extremely visible and strong. All of Pintilie's films have been co-produced by Marin Karmitz' MK2, a production/distribution/exhibition giant that prides itself on supporting art film and auteurs adopted by France (such as Kieslowski and Kiarostami). Nae Caranfil's works have been co-produced by Compagnie des Images and MACT productions, Phillippe Bober's prestigious Coproduction Office produced Cristi Puiu's _Moartea domnului L_ ă _z_ ă _rescu_ and _Aurora_ , as well as Porumboiu's _A fost sau n-a fost_ , Why Not Productions is the co-producer for _4 luni 3 s_ ă _pt_ ă _mîni_ ș _i dou_ ă _zile_ and for _Amintiri din Epoca de Aur_. The French contribution (through co-­productions and direct funding such as ECO) was so strong, Pintilie even described it as a "happy colonization," indispensable for keeping Romanian cinema alive in the1990s (Jäckel, 1999).24

Because of France's policy of supporting foreign cinema through government awarded aid,25 Paris is always the first obligatory stop for all Romanian filmmakers searching for additional funds. Immediately following the 1989 regime changes in Eastern Europe, the French government set up a special fund destined for the support of emerging new film industries:

For France, official co-production agreements with countries East of the Danube go back a long way (USSR, 1956; Yugoslavia, 1957; Romania 1966; Czechoslovakia 1968; Hungary and Poland, 1970 and Bulgaria, 1971), but it was in 1990 that the French government stepped up to help the rapidly disappearing film industries of Central and Eastern Europe with the setting up of a special co-production Fund under the responsibility of the Ministry of Culture, (Fonds d'aide aux coproductions avec les Pays d'Europe Centrale et Orientale) known as Fonds ECO.... To receive support, a film had to be in French or in the language of the East European director and its budget not over Ff 15 million.... Almost all "Fonds-ECO" supported films were shot on location in the country of the director; 95 percent of them were shot in a ­language other than French. (Jäckel, 1998 pp. 45–46)

Beyond the actual financial contributions, we have to remember that it was a French national institution, the Cannes film festival, that put Romania's cinema on the map in the 2000s, discovering and recommending to the world all of its prominent auteurs.26

At a broader European level, there have been several support initiatives aimed at the countries of Eastern Europe (such as the MEDIA – Measures to Encourage the Development of the Audio Visual Industries – program, which provided development, production, training, and distribution grants and became available to Romanian companies in 2007). Romanian co-productions with European Union countries have also had access to Eurimages funds (the program of the European Council for supporting the audiovisual industries). Eurimages is a highly selective fund awarded through competitions three times a year, which is geared towards productions that can strengthen Europe's cultural presence in a competitive global media environment: "the purpose of the Fund is both economic and cultural," as Ryclef Rienstra, Eurimages' former Executive Secretary, explained in 1993: "The main aim of Eurimages is not to get its money back, but to support an activity which is both industrial and cultural, and which asserts Europe's identity" (Jäckel, 1998). Some of the films co-produced by a Romanian company that received Eurimages production funds (some as high as 600 000 euros) are: Radu Mihăileanu's _Trahir_ (in 1991) and _Le Concert_ (in 2008), Nae Caranfil's _Filantropica_ (in 2000), Cristi Puiu's _Aurora_ (in 2009), and Adrian Sitaru's _Din dragoste cu cele mai bune inten_ ț _ii_ (2010).27

Usually, the flow of financing montages goes like this: first a project is submitted to the domestic CNC competition, then, if it is selected among the competition winners, the Romanian producer looks for one or two foreign co-producers, often by participating in the Rotterdam, Berlin, or Cannes markets. Once two or three production companies are on board (including the Romanian one), they can apply for Eurimages production funds. It is important to note, though, that all these companies are actually investing money awarded by national, regional, or local film funds in their home countries through a system that is very similar to the Romanian domestic one. There are very few companies that sometimes invest their own money in auteur films (Why Not Productions is one of them) – most of them are just looking for projects that have a good chance of securing some sort of financing from their governments.

Except for the French national funds – which are open to foreign filmmakers with relatively few restrictions – these governments (including the local and regional ones, such as Île de France or the German lands) place various conditions on the productions, from mandatory locations to crew and/or talent quotas, which disqualify projects that have not included, for example, characters of a ­certain ethnicity or scenes set in a certain country. Interestingly enough, Romanian legislation is rather permissive in this regard, so that a project that participates in the CNC competition as a co-production can receive financing from the Romanian government even if it is technically a foreign film that does not have anything to do with Romania, as long as a Romanian company is included with a minimal ­contribution of 20 percent. Very few foreign companies have tried this so far, ­probably because it is somehow understood that the CNC competition is meant to support national cinema and the committee that evaluates the screenplays would never give passing grades to a script that is obviously outside of that scope.

And yet, in 2010 one of the obligatory scandals surrounding the CNC competition was generated by just such a case. The project _Bonded_ was submitted as an international co-production by the Romanian company Artis film, with the Romanian Adrian Popovici as sole director, and it was awarded about 260 000 euros of interest-free credit, to be reimbursed in 10 years. After the results of the competition were announced, Artis Film and Adrian Popovici declared that the film was actually going to be co-directed with a foreign director, and according to the foreign co-producer (Pierce Brosnan's Irish DreamTime) Adrian Popovici is not mentioned as director at all (Sauciuc, 2010).

Things have not been yet settled, but it does appear that a foreign production is simply trying to obtain some Romanian funding by bringing on board a local ­company with a minimal contribution. This is not against the law; however, if the project had been submitted with that intention (i.e. with a foreign director attached), the evaluation process would have been different (since the director and the submitting company are very important in the calculation of the point ­system). The laws' and regulations' provisions regarding international co-productions can therefore prove to be one sneaky loophole through which funds intended for the support of national cinema in dire need of financing can end up as completion money for foreign productions – although, arguably, as long as these foreign films employ Romanian personnel and contribute to the growth of domestic companies, their use is legitimate. It is interesting to notice, as well, that the legislation does not account at all for factors such as stars or potential marketing that are attached, and other things that are paramount in the green-light process of a ­studio (genre, possible tie-ins, prospects of a franchise, success of source material) are left at the discretion of the selection committee, without actually being ever specified as possible criteria. As a result, the idea that CNC funds might support or encourage films with potential box-office success is clearly exposed as a complete utopia. In fact, the only film that received some CNC funding and then went on to become a true box office success – internationally – was Radu Mihăileanu's _Le Concert_ (2009), in which the Romanian side (Castel Films) is one of eight co-producers.

#  **Conclusion**

The financing mechanisms that made possible the resurgence of Romanian ­cinema in the 2000s – both at the national and European level – are clearly designed to support this particular type of cinema: low-budget, artistically important (as defined by critics and film festivals), auteur-driven by a strong director or writer-director who has confirmed repeatedly the originality and force of his vision, and placed in a market niche that does not overlap with commercial blockbusters. Some decry this general tendency of European legislation(s) to support and encourage a type of cinema that is meant to be everything that a Hollywood blockbuster is not (Puttnam, 1994).28 Others suggest that Europe could learn the lessons of ­marketing and adjust them to its specific products, positioning itself as viable complement to Hollywood cinema in

the absence of any pan-European popular sensibility which could sustain a ­popular European cinema. The popular cinema which Europe shares emanates from Hollywood and Europe possesses neither the economic means nor the cultural resources to compete with it successfully.... Europe is now as much Hollywood's "home" market as the US itself and many Hollywood films perform significantly better in Europe than in the States.... The central product of the Hollywood studios is therefore the rootless "global event" movie experience.... It is therefore all the more ironic that so much thinking within Europe should be committed to ideas of "global" fictions. For it is precisely the many spaces which Hollywood leaves empty that European films would most usefully be involved in filling. (Hill, 1994: 00).

In a healthy film industry, from a business point of view, the logical trajectory of these young filmmakers and their production companies would be to grow into bigger budgets, more diversified output, and actual profits. Romanian cinema is not an industry, though, and its financing practices (which also fit the broader European context) bred a certain type of film precisely because they are tailored that way. As Kaceanov observes,

Runaway Hollywood productions, such as Miramax's _Cold Mountain_ , have done a world of good for the local industry; while the privatized Castel Film and MediaPro Studios served as training grounds for a number of now successful filmmakers who later went on to found their own production companies. Still, having only 38 movie theatres in the whole country and almost zero audience, Romanian cinema seems to thrive only in the rarefied environments of world film festivals, and like Iran's cinema, to be almost totally ignored at home. (2008: n.p.)

Even _Amintiri din Epoca de Aur_ , which is both a popular film (a comedy about Romania in the 1980s, sold internationally in over 30 countries) and a critical success (Official Selection Cannes 2009), has not been able to bring more than 50 000 spectators into theaters across its home country. The highest grossing movie that year was _Ice Age 3_ , with 335 000 entries, which translates into $2 290 000 at the box office. If _Ice Age 3_ were a Romanian auteur film made on the usual under-one-million-euro budget, it would be borderline profitable. With ticket sales of 270 000, Radu Mihăileanu's _Le Concert_ is the greatest box-office success with a Romanian participation, but it is as far from Cristi Puiu's _Aurora_ or Radu Muntean's _Tuesday after Christmas_ as one can imagine – both in terms of its business aspect (the budget was 13 million euros, its Romanian partner was giant studio Castel Films) but more importantly in terms of its aim and content. _Le Concert_ is as flawlessly commercial as a European film can be, and the fact that it was directed, co-written and generally conceived by Mihăileanu, who had started his filmmaking career in the 1990s as a potential auteur, is an interesting indication of what might happen if the Romanian "New Wave" decided to go industrial.

The bottom line is that _Le Concert_ is by no means a Romanian film – no more than _Cold Mountain_ was one because of Castel's contribution; it is rather one of the exemplary French blockbusters that manage to compete with Hollywood productions (such as _Les Visiteurs_ , 1993, which had a worldwide box office 98 million ­dollars, or _Bienvenue chez les ch'tis_ , 2008, 245 million dollars worldwide). Looking at the ways in which the New Romanian Cinema is being produced, by auteurs whose main concern is their creative freedom and complete control of the result, the only two possibilities I can see in the near future are either accepting offers from the United States or maybe France to direct projects in different industrial conditions (something that Cristian Mungiu, for example, has already repeatedly declined), or persevering in the creative financing methods, combining state loans and subsidies with small private sponsorships and European grants and co-­production funds, in order to generate the same type of artistic product.

 **Notes**

1 When the film premiered, I watched it together with Cristian Mungiu in a virtually empty cinema theater; and we walked out fully aware that we had witnessed something extraordinary. This is how Mihai Chirilov – one of the most prominent Romanian film critics and director of the Transilvania Film Festival – describes this emergence:

The veterans were growing stiff and were too bogged down by the plagues of the past. Romania had gone through a revolution and Romanian cinema also desperately needed one in order to get rid of the ballast. And this revolution began in 2001 with the premiere of director Cristi Puiu's debut film, _Stuff and Dough_ ( _Marfa_ ș _i banii_ ). It took Romanian cinema out of the black corner into which it had painted itself, and threw it into the international film festival circuit, launching a new wave of young filmmakers who, while having lived in the old regime, were not obsessively clinging to it. (2007: n.p.)

2 There was a Romanian presence at Cannes in the 1990s as well – Nae Caranfil's _E Pericoloso_ _Sporgersi_ (Director's Fortnight, 1993), Lucian Pintilie's _The Oak_ (1992, Out of Competition), _An Unforgettable Summer_ (1994, Competition) and _Too late_ (1996, Competition), Mircea Daneliuc's _The Snails Senator_ (1995, Competition). Although both _The Oak_ and _E Pericoloso Sporgersi_ have been critical and audience successes in Romania, and their thematic and stylistic approaches were refreshingly innovative at the time, they didn't manage to inspire a whole generation or to fit into a consistent stream of ­high-quality creative output as would happen a decade later with the works of Puiu, Mitulescu, Porumboiu, and Mungiu.

3 One important distinction between the two systems of government aid to cinema is that in France the filmmaker (screenwriter and/or director) can apply for it directly, while in Romania only production companies can apply. In theory, this should encourage the development of a more "industrial" mode of production in Romania, and yet it is in France that an actual film industry has developed with an output that is occasionally profitable.

4 Film production was administered by Centrala România Film (subordinate to the Ministry of Culture), which also handled distribution and exhibition, including imports and exports.... Directors, producers, writers, and all other creative and ­professional/technical personnel were employees of these studios. Every foot of film shot and processed through the lab had to be recovered and ­accounted for at the end of the editing process. With the economy strictly ­controlled, advertising was virtually nonexistent, and media productions were evaluated for their ideological content and political implications only, not for audience appeal or commercial potential. (Dwyer and Uricaru, 2009: 00)

5 "Socialist realism," the general style that was supposed to permeate even the comedies and the historical dramas, is succinctly summarized by Dina Iordanova:

Socialist Realism made several demands: the suppression of "formalism" and all experimentation with the art form and commitment to "realist" content; an outspoken commitment to the cause of building socialism and communism; the presence of a strong hero, a member of the working class, who promotes the party line; and a plot developing in the canon of "historical optimism" (occasionally expressed with the concept of "revolutionary romanticism"), namely one that keeps in view the ultimate triumph of the socialist idea – no matter what tremendous difficulties the hero may encounter in the course of his struggle to build the bright socialist future, this future should never disappear from sight, thus determining all outcomes in a historically optimist framework. (2003: 37)

6 In the post-war period, the Communist regimes of the Eastern Bloc (with the exception of Albania) made a strong commitment to supporting their film industries, as well as film education, even in periods of economic crisis.... In 1948, Hungary and Romania both nationalized their film industries. The I.L. Caragiale Institute of Theatre and Film Art was founded in Bucharest in 1950, and between 1952 and 1958, the Buftea studios were built. Known as "the Cinecitta of South-Eastern Europe", the Romanian studios were the ­centre of a highly centralized film industry. With some of the largest sound stages in ­Europe, a wide range of impressive permanent sets, and good-quality ­European equipment, the Buftea studios attracted productions from all over Europe. (Jäckel, 2003: 9)

7 While Daneliuc and Pița attempted to slide several "coded" works past the censors during the 1980s, Pintilie – who had already achieved considerable international exposure with _Reconstituirea_ (1968), which was both presented in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 1970 and forbidden by the Romanian government – chose the exile to France after one of his theater productions was also shut down. _De ce trag clopotele Mitic_ ă was produced in Romania but immediately banned by the government and only released in Romanian theaters in 1990 (Căliman, 2000: 396).

8 Some of the 1990 belated premieres were Nicolae Oprițescu's _Sezonul pesc_ ă _ru_ ș _ilor_ (1984), _Un bulg_ ă _re de hum_ ă (1989) by Nicolae Mărgineanu, and Lucian Pintilie's _De ce trag clopotele Mitic_ ă _?_ (1981). Other films were re-released for the insufficient previous ­acknowledgment of their aesthetic value, their perceived historical importance, or ­because they had been banned and withdrawn from the screens immediately after their initial premiere: Lucian Pintilie's _Reconstituirea_ (1968), Lucian Bratu's _Un film cu o fat_ ă _fermec_ ă _toare_ (1967), Radu Gabrea's _Dincolo de nisipuri_ (1973), Alexandru Tatos's _Secven_ ț _e_ (1982), and _Croaziera_ (1981 ) by Mircea Daneliuc.

9 The distribution rights of these films (except for Ş _obolanii Ro_ ș _ii_ are now owned by the National Center for Cinema). The process of transition from state-owned to private or semi-private owned companies in the early 1990s was chaotic at best, as regulations were being changed overnight and the fiscal system was in an unstable limbo for ­several years.

10 Having also been a member of the senate for two decades, member of the Senate Committee for Culture and head of CNC's Advisory Board (Consiliul Consultativ) in the 1990s, he has been instrumental throughout the 1990s and 2000s in the writing, discussion, and eventual approval of all legislative initiatives concerning cinema. Moreover, according to film critic Valerian Sava, specific changes in the wording of the CNC competition regulation clearly gave Nicolaescu an advantage over other contestants, as his comedy _Nea M_ ă _rin Miliardar_ was specifically held as the standard for "box office success," although it had been released in 1979 and the cinema attendance in Communist Romania was completely irrelevant for determining a filmmaker's potential for success in 2006 (Sava, 2006: n.p.).

11 After pointing out the successes of the Romanian "new wave" (which had been ­recently, publicly acknowledged by the Minister of Culture, Theodor Paleologu), ­Mungiu expresses the frustration he and his fellow directors are feeling when they see no change in the institutional and legislative frameworks that are supposed to protect and support the one thing that seems to go well in Romania: "From both the organizational standpoint and the principle one, Romanian cinema's public structures and ­official representatives do not rise to the level of successes acquired by Romanian films in the recent years, and I believe that the public cinema support system is in need not of a superficial makeover, but of a profound change in structure and approach" (Mungiu, 2009: n.p.).

12 In an April 2010 interview for the national newspaper România Liberă, Eugen Şerbănescu, the CNC director, points out that Romanian cinema registered its most astounding ­successes during his mandate (since 2006) and that CNC-awarded funds have been the backbone of financing for all these projects. (He is wrong about ­Corneliu Porumboiu's _12:08 East of Bucharest_ , Caméra d'or in Cannes 2006, which "flunked" the CNC competition and was made with personal and private funds.) Şerbănescu decries a recent ­government decision that cuts CNC funds by 20 percent by eliminating the contribution from the gambling industry and the National Lottery but insists that "nothing would move" in Romania in terms of cinema if it weren't for the funds ­administered by his ­institution (CNC also awards non-reimbursable grants for the ­support of distribution, ­exhibition, film festivals, training programs and other cinema-related activities) (Fati, 2010).  
In presenting these facts, he admits that sometimes there are "skids" in the judging process, but brushes away any real concerns regarding the competition regulations maintaining that nobody's perfect, and even a close to perfectly organized competition will be contested by naysayers. Şerbănescu does not answer the main concerns of Romanian filmmakers and production companies regarding the competition: lack of transparency (most would want to do away with the provision of anonymity in screenplay evaluation and make the committee's debates as transparent as possible, with each member taking responsibility for their vote and decision); lack of criteria in selecting the committee members; the deliberately vague language when it comes to the attribution of "quality" points, allowing for several loopholes; the lack of rigorous documentation required for certain statements upon submitting a project (for ­example, that the project has the rest of financing in place); uncertainties in defining the competency of the selection committee (for example, should they be allowed to evaluate the submitted budgets, or just the scripts?); superficial examination of the submitted dossiers; insufficient definitions of what constitutes conflict of interest; ­arbitrariness in the final stage of determining the actual funding amount; and even the fact that according to the present law hundreds of thousands of Euros are being "lent" for the production of films with only those films as collaterals – in other words, if a film is a failure and the production company cannot pay back the loan, CNC (and the Romanian state) have bought a very expensive piece of exposed negative film.

13 Also under the administration of the Ministry of Culture is _Editura Video_ , a small ­studio for documentary and videography production, surveyed by Adina Brădeanu:

Ever since its inception as an institution, Editura Video customarily provided a ­temporary workplace for film professionals formerly attached to Sahia. What was striking about most of the production of the studio was its minimal engagement with the issues of the present and its concentration on topics usually attached to a distant past, which frequently extended back to the pre-socialist past. As a result, the films produced by Editura Video were frequently described by younger filmmakers as ­routine engagements with "dead topics" and the institution came to be identified as the epitome of a type of irrelevant documentary, unable to attend to the pressing ­social and political issues raised by Romania's present. (2007: n.p.)

14 _Pia_ ț _a Universit_ ăț _ii, România_ was the first work financed by the Film Studio of the ­Ministry of Culture. It recalls the events of April–June 1990 (a marathon sit-in ­demonstration that blocked the center of Bucharest and was eventually brutally ­repressed by the police and civilian militias summoned by the president) using ­archival footage and testimonies of the participants. Of inestimable historical value, the film manages to document a major anti-government protest using the funds provided by the same government.

15 We should also mention, to its credit, that the studio was a co-producer for Michael Haneke's _Code inconnu_ (2000), which is set (and was shot) partially in Romania.

16 As Călin Căliman (2000) points out, many films have been produced in the 1990s by the film studio of the National Television (Studioul de Film TVR) headed by Dan Necșulea. Since the national television is also state/public property (even if it functions as a for-profit commercial enterprise), technically these films were also financed by the state. Romanian National Television continues to contribute financially to many film productions.

17 The Romanian Cultural Institute is a public institution directly subordinated to the President of Romania.

18 Mobrafilms also has a satellite distribution arm, Voodoo films, which sometimes ­releases films produced by other companies. In 2010 it released the documentary ­ _Autobiografia lui Nicolae Ceau_ ș _escu_ , by Andrei Ujica, produced by Icon Production and sold internationally by Mandragora, and _Portretul lupt_ ă _torului la tinere_ ț _e_ by Constantin Popescu jr., produced by Filmex.

19 A closer look will reveal, though, that of the 35 independent productions, 1 was ­produced by the national television ( _Alegerea lui Alexandru Sutto_ , 2005, directed by Dominic Dembinski), 3 by MediaPro (which, as previously mentioned, is a major ­studio, part of a media trust that also comprises several television channels), 2 was self-financed by its director after the screenplay was rejected by CNC ( _A fost sau n-a fost_ , by Corneliu Porumboiu) and only 3 are produced by Romanian companies – the ­remaining 27 being international co-productions (meaning that the Romanian side participated with at least 20 percent of the budget for bilateral coproductions, or 10 percent for multilateral ones) (source: Studii, Statistici – 2009 on the CNC web site: <http://www.cncinema.abt.ro> . Statistics regarding the production of films in Romania 2005–2009 can be found at http://www.cncinema.abt.ro/Vizualizare-DocumentHTML.aspx?htm_ID=htm-414). Among these 27 co-productions, 3 involved the same MediaPro and 8 were partnerships of Castel Films, the other giant of Romanian film industry, which specializes in providing services for foreign – mostly American – ­run away productions. Incidentally, Porumboiu is independently wealthy – his father's fortune representing a safety net for his cinema endeavors (Tolontan, 2009). On April 1, 2011, Voodoo films in collaboration with an online sale and marketing company, Q2M, launched the first pay-per view Internet streaming film distribution venture, Webkino.ro. Its first product was the feature _Periferic_ ( _Outskirts_ ), directed by Bogdan George Apetri, which premiered in theaters on March 31 and online the day after.

20 Launched around 1992, Castel remains the only studio built from scratch in the region of Eastern Europe – not to mention Europe at large – since 1989. Situated near Bucharest airport, not far from the site that PwC had recommended for the Dracula Park, Castel is adjacent to a fifteen-mile forest and the eight-mile Snagov Lake. It boasts five sound stages and a water tank, as well as recently built post-production facilities.... By the end of 2003 the company had worked on over eighty features and hundreds of commercials, claiming to be "the most cost ­effective" solution for shooting in Europe. (Iordanova, 2007: 00)

21 Romania has become a popular destination for Western European and US ­producers – not only for features but also minis and commercials. "We're about 30% cheaper than Prague", says Bogdan Moncea, who reps Castel Film, the Romanian production service provider on Anthony Minghella's "Cold ­Mountain" in 2002.  
... Since then, Castel Film has grown into a studio with seven sound stages, one of which is one of the largest in Europe. Castel has also done a lot of ­straight-to video-fare, and some 40% of Castel's biz is commercials, and for anyone involved in advertising trips to Bucharest have become part of the job description.  
The other main player in Romania is MediaPro Pictures. Boasting 15 soundstages and four water tanks, the studio is part of the Mediapro Corp., one of the largest media and entertainment groups in eastern Europe, encompassing broadcasting, distribution, publishing and new media. Media Pro has worked with Lionsgate Entertainment on "Catacombs" and Lakeshore on Katja von Garnier's "Blood and Chocolate". "An American Haunting" also was shot at the studio as was Oscar-nominated "Merry Christmas".  
Media Pro is taking steps into film financing and co-production. ­Romanian/English-language laffer "California Dreaming" is Media Pro's first self-­financed pic, helmed by newcomer Cristian Nemescu. (Hofmann, 2006).

22 _Le Concert_ also received some CNC funding as an international co-production with a Romanian partner, Castel Films.

23 It is also worth mentioning that these studios constitute a very tangible contribution to the media industry – and sometimes to the country at large, as evidenced by the impact made by rich foreign productions on small communities, such as the village of Potigrafu, where Cold Mountain was shot:

Western producers say the unspoiled and underdeveloped Romanian countryside saves filmmakers the trouble and expense of digitally removing signs of modern times, such as buildings or power lines, that exist in the U.S. countryside....The movie's battle scenes will be thrashed out on pastures where cattle usually graze; dozens of villagers have helped set up wagons, watchtowers, and U.S. flags, and more than 100 cattle farmers have been compensated about $300 a head for the inconvenience. Film producers have laid gravel on the road, the first time it's been repaired in 60 years. Romanian extras are paid about $10 a day, less than a tenth of what their Hollywood counterparts would make, while a small medieval castle can be rented out for a few hundred dollars a day. (Mutler, 2002)

24 One of the most recent aspects of this "happy colonization" is the expansion of the French education program "Lycéens et apprentis au cinéma" to Romania. Now in its second year (academic year 2010–2011), the program consists of film appreciation classes that stress the importance of the theatrical version. Students from five Romanian high schools and their teachers participate in this program so far as an extracurricular activity (for which the teachers are not paid), supported logistically by the French embassy, which provides teaching materials, training and know-how. The students and teachers travel to cinema theaters to watch a film that has been previously selected in consultation with the French counterparts, and have two classes discussing the film. For each film, there is also an invited guest speaker, a Romanian filmmaker. (I have participated as guest speaker in the 2009–2010 academic year, discussing Claude Chabrol's _La ceremonie_ ).The program aims to become institutionalized as part of the national elective curriculum sanctioned by the Ministry of Education, and one of its declared goals is to prepare the next generations of movie-goers who will appreciate watching films in the cinema theater.

25... in 1993 France produced 152 films, sixty of which were directed by non-French filmmakers. Of the 101 "French-initiated films", six were shot in languages other than French, and ten were made by non-French directors. These figures do not include the thirty-six cinematographic co-productions where France was a minority partner (half a dozen of which were in English with a British partner), nor the fifteen films shot by filmmakers from the former eastern bloc and supported by ECO, the special fund set up by the French Ministry of Culture in 1989.... In the early 1990s, the number of films co-produced with a foreign partner remained fairly stable and equal to the number of 100 percent French films. (Jäckel, 1996: 85)

26 The support of the Cannes film festival does not stop at including films in its ­selection – through its Cinefondation programs (Atelier and Residence) the festival picks ­emerging talent and helps with the development and packaging of upcoming ­projects, actively creating a community of "Cannes filmmakers."

27 Some other small and extremely competitive international grants that have at times been awarded to Romanian productions were: the Hubert Bals Fund (a Dutch grant for development, production of post-production awarded through the Rotterdam film festival, its availability to Romania discontinued after the country joined the European Union in 2007), the South Eastern European Cinema Network ­production grant (apparently discontinued as well), and some German-based European co-­production grants for short films such as the Berlin Today Award and the Robert Bosch fund.

28 the Americans see their industry as a totality. They recognize that an "industry" is not simply a manufacturing process – whether it's cars or food or movies. It's a series of connected activities – production, distribution, marketing and so on – all of which are important, all of which are mutually dependent. The marketing budget for Jurassic Park exceeded its production budget – and the studio is ­collecting a handsome reward on both investments. At the other extreme, the UK promotion budget of The Crying Game (1992) was 50.000 pounds and, sadly, it paid the price at the UK box-office. In the United States however, it has done more than $60 ­million worth of business for its courageous distributor. (Puttnam, 1994: 83)

 **References**

Brădeanu, Adina (2007) "Death" and documentary: memory and film practice in post-­communist Romania. _KinoKultura_. <http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/6/bradeanu.shtml> (accessed November 23, 2010).

 _Bun_ ă _ziua Ia_ ș _i_ (2010) Legea cinematografiei, modificata dupa discutii pe articole (September 23). <http://www.bzi.ro/legea-cinematografiei-modificata-dupa-discutii-pe-articole-­audio-188924> (accessed November 26, 2010).

Căliman, Călin (2000) _Istoria Filmului Românesc (1897–2000)_. Editura Fundatiei Culturale Române, București.

Chirilov, Mihai (2007) You can run but you cannot hide: New Romanian Cinema. _KinoKultura_. <http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/6/chirilov.shtml> (accessed November 24, 2010).

Davies, Adam P. and Wistreich, Nicol (2007) _The Film Finance Handbook: How to Fund Your Film_. Netribution Limited, London.

Dwyer, Tessa and Uricaru, Ioana (2009) Slashings and Subtitles: Romanian Media Piracy, Censorship and Translation. _The Velvet Light Trap_ , 63 (Spring): 45–57.

Fati, Sabina (2010) Exista derapaje de jurizare. _România Liber_ ă, April 22.

Hayward, Susan (1993) State, culture and the cinema: Jack Lang's strategies for the French film industry 1981–93. _Screen_ , 34 (4): 380–391.

Hill, John (1994) The future of European cinema: the economics and culture of pan-­European strategies, in _Border Crossing. Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe_ (ed. John Hill, Martin McLoone and Paul Hainsworth). The Institute of Irish Studies The Queen's University of Belfast in association with the University of Ulster and the British Film Institute, s.l., pp. 53–80.

Hofmann, Katja (2006) Fresh produce market. _Variety_. June 26–July 9: A1, A8.

Iordanova, Dina (1999) East Europe's cinema industries since 1989: financing structure and studios. _The Public_ 6: 45–60.

Iordanova, Dina (2003) _Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film_. Wallflower Press, London.

Iordanova, Dina (2007) Cashing in on Dracula: Eastern Europe's hard sells. _Framework_ , 48: 46–63.

Jäckel, Anne (1996) European co-production strategies: the case of France and Britain, in _Film Policy - International, National and Regional perspectives_ (ed. Albert Moran). Routledge, London.

Jäckel, Anne (1998) Cooperation between East and West in Europe: film policy and integration, from hope to disenchantment? in _Central and Eastern Europe in Transition_ , Vol. 2 (ed. Frank H. Columbus). Nova Publishers, s.l., pp. 41–68.

Jäckel, Anne (1999) The Grand Theatre of the World: The Films of Lucian Pintilie. _Cineaste_ , 25 (December 1): 27–29.

Jäckel, Anne (2000) France and Romanian cinema 1896–1999. _French Cultural Studies_ , 409–424.

Jäckel, Anne (2003) _European Film Industries_. British Film Institute, London.

Kaceanov, Marina (2008) On the new Romanian cinema. _P.O.V_. (March), <http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_25/section_3/artc6A.html> (accessed November 24, 2010).

Ministerul Culturii (2005) Sinteza conferinței de presă din 19 mai 2005. _www.cultura.ro_. <http://www.cultura.ro/DosarPresa.aspx?ID=43> (accessed November 24, 2010).

Mungiu, Cristian (2009) News: mobrafilms. _Mobrafilms website_ , <http://www.mobrafilms.ro/News> (accessed November 15, 2010).

Mutler, Alison (2002) A village's "cold" comfort. _The Record, Bergen County, NJ_. (July 21), E04.

Puttnam, David (1994) Creativity and commercialism: film making in Europe, in _Border Crossing. Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe_ (ed. John Hill, Martin McLoone and Paul Hainsworth). The Institute of Irish Studies The Queen's University of Belfast in ­association with the University of Ulster and the British Film Institute, s.l. pp. 80–87.

Rațiu, Dan Eugen (2007) The arts support system in a transitional society: Romania 1990–2006. _The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society_ , 3 (37): 201–223.

 _S_ ă _pt_ ă _mîna financiar_ ă _online_. 2005. Tristetea omuletului lui Gopo (June 17), <http://www.sfin.ro/articol_1157/tristetea_omuletului_lui_gopo.html> (accessed November 24, 2010).

Sauciuc, Gloria (2010) Cinemagia stiri (August 20), <http://www.cinemagia.ro/stiri/cazul-bonded-adrian-popovici-si-cornelia-palos-intr-un-nou-scandal-16226/> (accessed November 24, 2010).

Sava, Valerian (2006) _Observator Cultural_ , <http://www.observatorcultural.ro/Anatomia-unei-infamii-legale*articleID_16800-articles_details.html> (accessed November 26, 2010).

Sparks, Colin (1997) Post-communist media in transition, in _International Media research – A Critical Survey_ (ed. John Corner, Philip Schlesinger and Roger Silverstone). Routledge, London, pp. 96–122.

Teodorescu, Cristian and Mihai, Silviu (2005) Arte&Popcult. _cotidianul.ro_. (December 26, 2005), <http://old.cotidianul.ro/istoria_agitatiilor_noastre_culturale_din_contestatii_s_au_intrupat_vedetele-6462.html> (accessed November 24, 2010).

Tolontan, Cătălin (2009) _Gazeta Sporturilor_ (May 26), http://www.gsp.ro/gsp-special/superreportaje/adrian-porumboiu-nu-vreau-să-fiu-Polițist-substantiv-139806.html (accessed November 21, 2010).

 _Ziare.com_ (2010) CNC ar putea deveni coproducator al filmelor pe care le finanteaza, <http://www.ziare.com/articole/cnc+finantare+filme> (accessed November 26, 2010).

# 23

# An Alternative Model of Film Production

#  _Film Units in Poland after World War Two_

Dorota Ostrowska

 _Now, after_ _five years of knowing the solitude experienced by_ _filmmakers in the West, I am much better placed to judge what a blessing, what an asylum, what a support, what a school, what a kindergarten, what a mother's womb, what a club, a_ _film unit is, when it functions properly, and when it is headed by the people who have the authority, energy, enthusiasm for cinema, and a sense of responsibility_. (Agnieszka Holland in Wertenstein1991: 70)1

After the end of the World War Two film production in Poland underwent a ­radical transformation to reflect the cultural politics of the new Socialist state. Film production was seen as paramount to the state propaganda machine, and thus a focus of much internal debate and bureaucratic effort aimed at establishing a state-run national film industry which could contribute to the development of the Socialist culture in Poland. Because of the absence in Poland of a filmmaking infrastructure in the form of large production facilities, such as Babelsberg in the German Democratic Republic or Barrandov in Czechoslovakia, and a lack of funds to build them from scratch, the centralizing drive of the state was often ­difficult to realize. This created an opportunity for the filmmaking community to push for the establishment of an alternative production structure, a system of "film production units" that survived in various forms after 1989. Within them filmmakers were able to exercise some degree of not just creative but also political freedom. The production units were thus semi-autonomous teams of film practitioners, funded by the state, and operating within the state-owned and state-run film industry, often questioning the ideological boundaries of socialism. The ­history of the film units in Poland reflected a tension between, on the one hand, the drive of the Socialist state to control the creative community and to bring their aims in line with the ideological objectives of the state, and, on the other, the desire of the filmmaking community for creative and intellectual autonomy.

The culture of debate and consultation which stretched from the film units through different committees of the National Film Board (Naczelny Zarząd Kinematografii –NZK) was how the creative impulse in Polish cinema was both controlled and fostered. The ways in which this culture was shaped by the powers of the state bureaucracy and by the creative collectives, the film units, is the main subject of this article.

#  **What was a Film Unit?**

The term "film unit" is an indirect translation of the Polish term _zespół filmowy_. _Zespół_ means a "team" rather than a "unit." The term "team" reflects better what _zespół_ actually was, because it emphasizes the community element of the _zespół filmowy_ , and its team-work and team spirit. Thus film units were the teams of permanently employed film creatives established by the National Film Board. The structure of the units and the duties of its members were all meticulously spelled out, often revised and redrafted, and enshrined within a complicated administrative framework stretching from the Ministry of Culture to the Socialist Party Executive Committee.

The units were strictly creative entities, whose role was "to produce feature films and to educate young filmmakers" (NZK, 1956a: 9). Film units were focused on development of new projects because they did not have any production facilities of their own and had to subcontract the services of the production studios, which had sound stages, editing suites as well as costume storages and an army of various technicians and tradesmen. There were feature film production facilities in Łódź (Wytwórnia Filmów Fabularnych w Łodzi) (employing 1020 people in 1978 and having the largest production base) and in Wrocław (Wytwórnia Filmów Fabularnych we Wrocławiu) (employing 418 people in 1978) and a documentary filmmaking facility in Warsaw where some feature films were also made (Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych) (employing 400 people in 1978). In contrast, in 1978 there were 7 film units in Poland which employed in total 735 people (NZK, 1978: 83). The collaboration between the studios and units was often tense because of the low quality of the service provided and various material shortages that the studios suffered. But as the units were state owned, they did not have the option to opt out or find another service provider but had to rely on the studios.

The units had only limited financial responsibilities because of the centralized economy in Socialist Poland. They had to draw up budgets and were reprimanded by the National Film Board for exceeding them. Occasionally, going over the budget or underperforming and not having enough projects in the pipeline or completed was used as a threat to dissolve the unit. Overall, however, the ­economics mattered little in comparison to politics: "while in a state-owned industry there is always an immanent threat of creative independence, the other side of the coin is that the threat of unprofitability is of no concern. The director needs not to worry about financial success" (Michałek and Turaj, 1988: xi–xii). Given that, historically, even the units which performed very well, such as Wajda's Unit X, were restructured, as we will see later on in this chapter, suggests that the criteria of efficiency and profitability were less important than political concerns. The latter were far more difficult to quantify and measure than the economic factors. A unit would usually develop and present up to three new projects to the National Film Board, knowing that only one of them was going to be accepted. The general policy was that even the units which were not favored by the National Film Board would be allowed to make at least one film out of the three they might have had in the ­pipeline (Michałek in Wertenstein, 1991: 48). Perhaps the most telling illustration of the insouciance of the state managers in regard to film financing that this ­politically motivated planning entailed was the fact that films were often seen through all the production stages and brought to the completion but were halted at the point of distribution because they came to be regarded as politically compromised.

Socialist states never quite managed to balance their books, which was one of the principle reasons why they eventually yielded to capitalism in 1989, and the film industry in Poland was no exception. Throughout the Socialist period an important way of bringing some real cash into the system was the injections of hard currency from the sales of Polish films to foreign distributors by the state distribution and film promotion agency – Film Polski. The films which sold best in the West were the ones which enjoyed recognition on the film festival circuit, which served as an opportunity to showcase an annual crop of the best films to an international audience of critics and potential distributors. These festivals did not award films which were examples of Socialist propaganda. Rather they were ­interested in the pictures which showed some signs of dissent from the Socialist dogma and, even better, could be seen as examples of the new filmmaking style emerging on the other side of the Iron Curtain where the Socialist experiment was under way (Ostrowska, forthcoming). How did all this relate to the film units? In fact, the relation was direct. The opinion of the festival world and Western critics did have bearing on how certain filmmakers were treated in Poland and how much independence they were given in their creative work. The career of Andrzej Wajda is probably the best reflection of these complex internal and international dynamics. He broke new grounds in Polish film history more than once. For the first time, with the festival success of _Kanal_ ( _Canal_ , 1957), he effectively launched the Polish School; and then his _Człowiek z marmuru_ ( _Man of Marble_ , 1976) was regarded as the key work of the Cinema of Moral Concern. It may sound paradoxical, but the Socialist system was rewarding dissent or some subtle challenge to the principles of socialism, especially if that resulted in international prestige and the influx of hard currency into the state coffers. But dissent could only happen, and ­subsequently be awarded, at times of political "thaws" in Poland. What was ­interesting about the units is that because of their size and loose internal organizational structure, which relied on informal and personal networks, their potential for creative dissent was preserved in spite of all the pressures they had to face – from the bureaucrats and party apparatchiks .

From 1955,2 the first year when the units came into existence, there were around seven to nine units operating at a time. Each unit was set up for an authorized period of three years, which was a reflection of the mistrust of the authorities towards any types of even semi-autonomous organizations. During this time the work of the unit was constantly monitored and evaluated by the National Film Board through an intricate control mechanism. Interestingly enough, units were not dissolved and restructured just because they were too free or independent. Sometimes the restructuring was demanded by the filmmakers themselves, who wanted the units to become more autonomous. A constant feature of the units' existence under socialism was the bureaucratic web woven around them by ­various departments and sections of the National Film Board. This baroque bureaucracy contrasted with the structure of the units themselves, which was quite simple, making them seem to be very agile and to have the potential to innovate and take risks, and, perhaps more importantly, to develop a shared ethos regarding their creative output.

Each unit was headed by a triumvirate, including an artistic chief, who was a major film director with a proven track-record – for example, Andrzej Wajda (Unit X) or Krzysztof Zanussi (Unit TOR) – a literary chief, and a production chief. The role of the artistic chief was "to oversee the ideological, artistic and production activities" of the unit; to represent the unit outside; to organize the work of the unit in both the short and long term; to support the entry of first-time ­filmmakers into the unit; to oversee their progress by integrating them into the work of the unit and by analyzing their work and giving them appropriate ­feedback (NZK 1956b: 9–12). The role of the artistic chief was paramount to the character of the unit and the projects undertaken there. This is how Wajda described his role as the head of the Unit X:

Regardless of the opinions of the young filmmakers, of their past experiences, their attitudes, and their opinions of the unit, and of my films, from the very beginning I was consequent in making it loud and clear what I think of their films, without making anybody any special favors. If I liked the film, I praised it even more than it deserved, when I disliked something, I was damning in my criticisms.... But this is what my role as the artistic chief was all about. As I was an older and more experienced director, I had a right to judge their films and to do it according to my own set of criteria. (Wajda in Wertenstein 1991: 35)

In many ways, then, the character of the unit was determined by the interests and personality of the filmmaker heading it. The chief's preferences determined not only what films were made and how but also who was admitted to the unit. An interesting example is that of a comedy filmmaker, Stanisław Bareja, who was considered as a candidate for Zanussi's TOR but was finally rejected (Hollender and Turowska, 2000: 125–126). Bareja was associated with some of the most absurd and surrealist portrayals of everyday life in Socialist Poland, which did not quite fit with TOR's take on Socialist life from the existentialist perspective, which came to be known in history as the Cinema of Moral Concern. When Wajda's Unit X was approached by Polish television to make what became one of the most successful comedy serials in Polish television history, _Czterdziestolatek_ ( _Forty-Year-Old Man_ , 1974), the members of the unit made strong objections on the grounds that this kind of production – comic and popular – would misrepresent what the unit stood for collectively (Wajda in Wertenstein, 1991: 34; Ostrowska, 2009: 93).3

The artistic chief was accompanied by a literary chief, who was usually a writer or sometimes a film critic. It was the artistic chief together with the literary chief who gave the tone to the films produced by the unit, shaped the image of the unit, and had direct impact on the films which were made there. The job of the literary chief was to "maintain contacts with the literary circles in order to gather script-ideas" and to "oversee the writing of the scripts" (NZK 1956b: 9–12). The literary chief would also advise on the development of original scripts. She or he collaborated with the artistic chief to develop the artistic plan for the unit and to oversee the making of the films. The fact that the status of the literary chief within the film unit was on par with that of the artistic chief indicates how important script development and scriptwriting was. This was not only for artistic but also for ­political reasons; the ideas for scripts, and the scripts themselves, were the first step taken by the representatives of the National Film Board in vetting potential film projects, and they were responsible for giving the green light to the production of any film.

The production chief was second in command to the artistic chief and responsible for the organization and financial management of the unit. His or her role was to organize the actual film production and to see that it ran smoothly. All the financial and administrative responsibility regarding the running of the unit lay with the production chief. However, the financial responsibility was different in character from the work of a Western executive producer because of the centralized budget of the Socialist state. For this reason, the role of the production chief was closer to that of the production manager for the whole unit. In fact, throughout the 45-year-long existence of the film units, it was never clearly defined who the producer of a film was. Whilst the artistic chief of the unit, with the help of the literary chief, acted as a creative producer, their activity was further checked by the Artistic Board within the National Film Board through their control of both scripts and completed films. The National Film Board bore ultimate responsibility for financing the film, which indicated that the state bureaucrats acted as a highly politicized kind of executive producer.

Other members of the unit were filmmaking creatives such as: film directors, cinematographers, art directors, sound designers, scriptwriters, and production managers, who all had a track record of working in film.4 Each unit also had a number of first-time filmmakers who were fresh from film school. Either they would be invited to join the unit or would attempt to secure an admission into one after graduating from the Łódź Film School. The established creatives could choose which unit they would like to join or might be invited to join a particular unit. This freedom in terms of the membership was crucial in developing the unique profiles of units and it had an impact on their output. As the independent or freelance filmmaker did not exist, all filmmakers were associated with a film unit. Some units were smaller than others, but, ideally, they were not supposed to have more than 40 members, which made it possible for most of the team to know each other quite well and have personal relationships with each other. The unit also had a secretary, whose job was to run the unit's office, which served as a ­regular meeting place for the members and contributed to creating a sense of ­community among them. Jan Bugajski, most famous for his film _Przesłuchanie_ ( _Interrogation_ ) – which was made in 1982 but not released until 1989 – describes his visits to the unit's office in the following way: "The film unit (X) was one of few public places, where while drinking weak tea, made heroically by Miss Halinka, it was possible to express loudly and without any inhibition various opinions, usually most unflattering, as though one was in London's Hyde Park" (Bugajski in Wertenstein, 1991: 59). The ongoing conversation, which was associated with the familial atmosphere of the unit, did not just happen informally but also took the form of debates and seminars, which were organized on a regular basis. The artistic chief led the meetings, during which the members of the units collectively explored ideas for their new films. On other occasions they would engage with broader issues in contemporary cinema:

We organized seminars. Somebody gave a paper about the condition of world cinema, and how we see the situation of cinema in Poland. We were trying to determine the direction in which cinema in Poland was going to develop, and what topics it will tackle.... It was important that we were asking questions, that we were trying to understand the direction in which cinema was heading, that in order to start making new films, we had to understand how our audiences have been changing (Wajda in Wertenstein, 1991: 35).

In a way, then, the film units were discussion clubs not just filmmaking entities. This discursive element present in the workings of the unit was very important because it allowed it to become a forum for freely conducted debate.

The units were almost exclusively focused on the production of feature films that could be classified as art-house cinema.5 They were supposed to marry the innovative formal aspects with the content, which was ideologically relevant to the policies of the Socialist state. Popular and genre productions, apart from period dramas based on the Polish literary classics, were very rare,6 as were documentaries, with the exception of the films and series commissioned by Polish television, which did not have its own production facilities. Even when the television ­production arm, POLTEL, was eventually established in the early 1970s, the film units developed and produced the bulk of the features and series shown on Polish television (Ostrowska and Radkiewicz, 2007). In some cases, as with Kieślowski's _Dekalog_ ( _Decalogue_ , 1988), some episodes of the television series were re-edited and given a cinema release (Ostrowska, 2009). Productions for television were seen as good opportunities for first-time filmmakers to make their debuts, and as a de facto training ground, but they were not considered the main focus of the film directors in the units, who aimed at cinema productions. On occasion it took a long time before a filmmaker was allowed to make a cinema film, as was the case with Agnieszka Holland. Even more often, the units were criticized by the National Film Board for letting young and inexperienced filmmakers make feature-length cinema films as their debut rather than trying to make medium-length films or films for television first. (NZK, 1978–1980: 12).

After 25 years of the units' existence, it became apparent that in Poland there were few opportunities for directors who were not auteurs and were interested in other forms of filmmaking than contemporary art-house films (NZK, 1978–1980: 12). The review of the workings of the units conducted by the National Film Board in the late 1970s concluded that many of the filmmakers who made art-house and contemporary films "were proud of becoming vocal and non-­conformist ­witnesses of their time" (NZK, 1978–1980: 12). That, however, raised the question for the members of the National Film Board of whether "the filmmakers made the best use of their polemical attitude focused on diagnosing signs of the public evil," as their films with few exceptions attracted only limited interest among the ­audiences (NZK, 1978–1980: 12). Consequently, the units were strongly encouraged to broaden their production to include more films for children and young people, genre filmmaking, and, in the 1980s, costume dramas that were adaptations of literary classics (NZK, 1978–1980: 15).

# Checks and Balances

The actual role of the permanent members of the units can only be understood when it is considered in relation to, on the one hand, the National Film Board and, on the other, that of the shooting group which was established within the film unit for the purposes of making a particular film. The composition of the shooting group and the way it was to be run were outlined in the regulations of the National Film Board down to the minutest detail (NZK, 1973: 46–172). The regulations give a sense of constant supervision and monitoring of the filmmakers by the unit's chiefs. However, in practice, shooting was quite an unsupervised experience, with the artistic chief, Wajda, for instance, intervening only after the shoot was ­completed, at postproduction (Michałek in Wertenstein, 1991: 46–47). The chiefs would visit the studio or the location during the shoot, but these visits did not bring a halt to production (Konwicki in Zawiślański and Kuśmierczyk, 2002: 8). Before the film was submitted to the National Film Board, it was the subject of an internal debate within the unit aimed at assessing the artistic and political merits of the film and "confronting different opinions, finding weak points and establishing the ways in which the film could be improved" (Pec-Ślesicka in Wertenstein, 1991: 57). The importance of these discussions could not be overestimated in view of the scrutiny to which the films would later be subject by the National Film Board.

The artistic chief of the unit oversaw the creation of the shooting groups within the film unit in order to carry out a production of a film. For the unit to have the output of approximately eight films per year expected by the National Film Board, the film unit had to be able to form two shooting groups from its members, each of which would make about four productions annually. The shooting group ­consisted of a director, cinematographer, sound designer, art director, and a ­production manager (Wertenstein, 1991: 38–39). The director oversaw all the activities of the shooting group and was responsible for the artistic, ideological, and economic aspects of the film. At the same time, their work was supervised by the artistic chief of the unit, who could intervene during the shoot. The literary chief was also present during the shoot and could make suggestions.

The power of the artistic chief within the unit was checked by the National Film Board, which employed all the members of the units and funded and approved all the projects initiated and realized by them. The artistic and literary chiefs of all the film units, some film directors and cinematographers, together with the representatives of the Film Board, formed the Artistic Board within the National Film Board. The Artistic Board was responsible for approving the scripts presented by the units, and also for approving the films for distribution after they were finished, through the process called _kolaudacja_. This was a meeting of the members of the Artistic Board with the heads of the unit to discuss a film's artistic value and its political correctness. The Artistic Board also debated all the artistic and ideological aspects of the units' filmmaking activity and had the power to halt the production of a film if necessary (NZK 1956a). Each unit was periodically assessed according to the number of films it produced, including the debut production, and the artistic quality of the films and their ideological content. There was an effort to see the activity of particular units in the context of other units and to promote certain topics. The Artistic Board tried to avoid a situation where two units were working on the same script, or attempting to adapt the same literary work or idea onto the screen. For example, in the mid-1970s there was a debate in the Artistic Board regarding the low number of films concerning contemporary topics and portraying people in situations from everyday life. The participants in the debate admitted openly that "many filmmakers and scriptwriters avoid contemporary topics because they don't want to make a false step" (Kawalerowicz in NZK, 1975: 45). This statement was a de facto admission of the existence of self-censorship among the filmmakers, but it was also testimony to how frank the debate was. Both within the film units and within the Artistic Board these debates created an opportunity for a certain freedom of ideas, which trickled down into the actual film projects and shaped Polish cinema at the time. It paradoxical that this culture of debate was actively fostered within the state bureaucracy. Arguably, it was this culture of debate and consultation that prevented Polish cinema from serving only the ­narrow interests of the Socialist government and allowed for the cinematic art form to continue to exist and at times even to flourish.

The rules according to which the works of the units were organized were shaped and reshaped constantly, often in response to the changes in the political climate. Units were given greater or less financial responsibility at different times, which was seen as a way of curtailing their autonomy. Unit X was created in 1972 and dissolved in 1983 – both moments of political upheaval in Poland. KADR, the film unit headed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, was founded in 1955, dissolved for a period of three years from 1968 to1971, when Poland was in the throes of political turbulance, and reinstated after that. Although the existence of individual units was easily threatened, the core elements of the organization and structure of the units remained mostly intact, with the system centered on a figure of an auteur filmmaker who was able to realize his or her artistic vision within ideological limits maintained through the complex system of bureaucratic checks and balances.

# Why Film Units in Poland?

Why was this particular kind of filmmaking structure based on the units ­developed in Socialist Poland? The question is particularly interesting because in 1945 there were no film units in the Soviet Union, the place which at the time would normally provide a blueprint for the organization of cinema production in its political sphere of influence.7 One of the reasons that is commonly given for the creation of the units is the lack of scripts and the very low quality and output of Polish cinematography around 1945. Lots of talent perished in the war. Some creative workers who survived decided not to return to Poland after World War Two. Commentators on the industry in Socialist times proudly cited the fact that after the units were set up the number of films nearly doubled and their quality greatly improved. The same commentators pointed out that the foundation of the units coincided with the beginning of a very important movement in Polish film history, the Polish School, which was seen as an additional testimony to the strength of the film units model (Zajicek, 2009: 178).

Yet the story behind the establishment of the units is even more complicated. The first decade of the Polish People's Republic (1944–1955) coincided with Stalinization and the introduction of the doctrine of Socialist realism. Stalinization turned Poland into a totalitarian state run by militarized secret services and caught up in the midst of a civil war while struggling to begin a postwar reconstruction. At that time, whatever was left of Polish cinema infrastructure after World War Two was nationalized. A central film board was established, which was to control and monitor all aspects of the filmmaking process. Scripts submitted to the board were vetted carefully for any anti-Soviet and anti-Communist messages, and were often changed beyond recognition. A large number of scripts were never passed into production at all. The films that were made often smacked of propaganda and appeared simplistic, their messages were forced, and people did not want to watch them (Toeplitz, 1969: 50). Those films that did make it through to production were often recut after the film was finished, leading to a situation where the original scriptwriters often disowned the film. This was the case with the film about the life of a Polish pianist of Jewish origins, Władysław Szpilman, entitled _Robinson Warszawski_ ( _Unvanquished City_ , 1950). The script was co-written by Czesław Milosz and Jerzy Andrzejewski, who refused to have their name put on the credits once the film was through the changes required by the board.

The establishment of the units in 1955 occurred at the time of the post-Stalinist thaw and as the direct result of de-Stalinization in Poland, which brought about a greater degree of freedom, including creative freedom. The units were an attempt on the part of Polish filmmakers to benefit from this by regaining control over the creative process of filmmaking. Many of the individuals who were responsible for the establishment of Polish postwar cinematography, and the film units, Aleksander Ford, Jerzy Bossak, Wanda Jakubowska, and Jerzy Toeplitz, in particular, were associated with a prewar left-wing Warsaw-based discussion club called Stowarzyszenie Miłośników Filmu Artystycznego "START" (Society of the Devotees of the Artistic Film, 1929–1935). This society had very broad social aims, not just artistic ones. The members of START wanted to "raise standards, to root Polish film in reality and to change the attitude of the state, which preferred to tax the industry to the limit, rather than regard it as an asset. START's credo in 1932 was: 'fight for films for the public good'" (Bren, 1986: 22). Jerzy Toeplitz, a film critic associated with START, defined the idea of "films for the public good" in the following way:

Cinema must become a useful art. A spectator should leave the cinema perfectly satisfied with the perfect form (of the film) but also with the interesting material which is basis for reflection. Understood in this way the usefulness of the films will not constrain the creativity of the individual artist, will not impose any limits, but just force everybody, who profits from the box office, to abandon the fertile land of film production and to radically revise their views (Toeplitz (1932) in Armatys 1961: 25).

START members did not manage to make any films before the war, and the ­society was dissolved owing to internal differences (Bren, 1986). The idea of "films for the public good" as defined by Toepliz was revived after the World War Two along the lines suggested by Jerzy Bossak:

The idea of START was first of all to find a way to make it connected to art... above all a social art. The second point was that the state would support this direction, to launch a new school. Before the war there was a school for the theatre actors, but not for film. The third was to make film directors not only employees of the industry, but also to give them influence, to organise the cinema in a new way. (in Bren, 1986: 22).

Most of these ideas were developed before the war and inspired by the example of Soviet cinema and in this way they were not "just an artistic program but a political declaration, siding with the leftist attudes" (Giżycki, 1996: 23). It was the left-wing sympathies of the START members that made them into possible allies of the newly emerged Socialist state in Poland in advancing a new idea of culture and reorganizing film production.

During the war, members of this club found themselves in the Soviet Union and marched back to Berlin with the Polish divisions integrated into the Red Army, filming its progress as a military film unit called Czołówka. The army gave these young filmmakers an opportunity to finally start making films, providing them with film stock, cameras, room and board, and a clear brief on what they needed to film and how: the triumphant Red Army helped by the Polish divisions liberate Eastern Europe all the way to Berlin. The filmmakers of Czołówka were part of the army and supported the war effort. Arguably, film units in postwar Socialist Poland do not appear to be so different from Czołówka. They were dependent on the Socialist state in the same way that the war reporters were reliant on the army. During peace times the state was the filmmakers' enabler in very practical terms, providing them with the means of production. It also broadly defined the thematic focus of their films, which, like the work they were expected to produce in return for this provision, was to service the state and support the propaganda effort.

This parallel between the role of the army and the state in relation to cinema, and their use of film in the war and peace time, may be the real clue to understanding the reasons for the existence of film units in Poland. This link with the army experience was arguably as important as the prewar leftist ideology, which was most often quoted as being at the origins of the units. Czołówka was semi-­autonomous, in the avant-garde of the army, but nonetheless loyal and committed to the war effort. The film units by and large proved to be the same in postwar Poland – enclosed in the bureaucratic machine, semi-independent, but ultimately loyal to the state on which they completely depended for their very existence.

The Polish film units definitely constituted a new model of organizing film production; in spite of their entrenchment and entanglement within the Socialist state they were not so different to the independent production companies centered on an individual film-maker, such as Lars von Trier's Zentropa, Pedro Almodovar's El Deseo, or Wim Wenders' Neue Road Movies (Ostrowska, 2005). It was the key role of an auteur filmmaker who determined the character of the films the units produced which made these cooperatives into a Socialist prototype of the independent film production companies. Out the Socialist film units in Poland Krzystof Zanussi's TOR is the only one which has survived until today.8 It is not surprising, given that Zanussi, next to Wajda, was the most international of the Socialist auteurs, with the best grasp of the business element of filmmaking and an ability to act as a creative producer in a truly competitive environment which emerged in Poland after 1989.

 **Notes**

1 All translations from Polish are mine unless otherwise indicated.

2 Between 1955 and 1957 the first nine film units were formed. A film unit under the name Iluzjon was headed by a director, Ludwik Starski; Kadr, by Jerzy Kawalerowicz; Rytm, by Jan Rybkowski; Start, by Wanda Jakubowska; Studio, by Aleksander Ford; Syrena, by Jerzy Zarzycki; Po prostu, by Antoni Bohdziewicz and Jakubowska. Ford and Bohdziewicz were linked to the prewar START. This subject is discussed further later on in the chapter. Younger directors who came to be associated with the Polish School, Andrzej Wajda and Andrzej Munk, were part of Kadr (Zajicek, 2009: 168–174).

3 _Forty-Year-Old Man_ was eventually made by the Unit X, but it remained a single example of such production in the unit's creative portfolio.

4 The units did not include actors, for whom theater was the main place of employment.

5 Boleslaw Michałek, a literary chief in Wajda's Unit X and a film critic, noted that given the organization of the system into semi-autonomous units, "it is not surprising that the auteur phenomenon should have manifested itself. Indeed, it came into being ­immediately after the creation of the film unit system of production, even before the theory of auteurism was articulated in France and the US in the 50s and 60s" (Michałek & Turaj 1988: xii).

6 Depending on the political climate, genre productions were criticized for being examples of the entertainment and leisure industry characteristic of capitalism. At other times, starting in the 1970s with the growing popularity of television and dwindling cinema attendance figures, genre projects were in fact encouraged. However, they ­never outnumbered the art-house productions, which were low-budget, dealt with ­contemporary themes, and were aimed at raising political and socials issue.

7 By the mid-1970s, and building on the Polish success, film units were also established at the Mosfilm film studio (USSR), Barrandov Studios (Czechoslovakia) and DEFA-­Babelsberg (GDR).

8 <http://www.tor.com.pl/> (accessed April 1, 2011).

 **References**

Armatys, L. (1961) Myśl filmowa i dzialalność artystyczna STARTU (1930–1935), _Kwartalnik filmowy_ , 1 (41): 24–42.

Bren, F. (1986) _World Cinema 1: Poland_. Flicks Books, London.

Giżycki, M. (1996) _Awangarda wobec kina_. Wydawnictwo małe, Warsaw.

Hollender, B. and Turowska (2000) Z. Zespół "TOR." Prószyński i S-ka, Warsaw.

Michałek, B. and Turaj, F. (1988) _The Modern Cinema of Poland_. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis.

NZK (1956a) Sygnatura 1/99a. Regulamin Rady Artystycznej. Archiwum Akt Nowych (Archives of New Records), Warsaw.

NZK (1956b) Sygnatura 1/99b. Regulamin wewnętrzny Zespołów Autorów Filmowych 1956. Archiwum Akt Nowych (Archives of New Records), Warsaw, pp. 9–12.

NZK (1973) Sygnatura 2/79. Regulamin grupy zdjęciowej/produkcyjnej/filmu fabularnego (18 grudnia 1973). Archiwum Akt Nowych (Archives of New Records), Warsaw, pp. 46–172.

NZK (1975) Sygnatura 1/65. Stenogram z Narady Zespołów Filmowych 5.03.1975. Archiwum Akt Nowych (Archives of New Records), Warsaw, pp. 1–47.

NZK (1978) Sygnatura 9/18. Informacja w sprawie obecnego systemu kierowania produkcją filmu fabularnego oraz program jego usprawnień, W-wa grudzień 1978. Archiwum Akt Nowych (Archives of New Records), Warsaw, pp. 83–97.

NZK (1978–1980) Sygnatura 2/78. Ocena działalności zespołów filmowych kadencji 1978/80, Archiwum Akt Nowych (Archives of New Records), Warsaw, pp. 12–15.

Ostrowska, D. (2009) Cinema in ten TV episodes: _Dekalog_ by Krzysztof Kieślowski. _Critical Studies in Television_ , 2 (4): 90–98.

Ostrowska, D. (forthcoming) Three decades of Polish films at Venice and Cannes film ­festivals: 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

Ostrowska, D. and Radkiewicz, M. (2007) Poland: costume dramas: cine-televisual ­alliances in the Socialist and post-Socialist Poland, in _European Cinemas in the TV Age_ (ed. D. Ostrowska and G. Roberts). Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, pp. 107–124.

Ostrowska, D. (2005) Zentropa and Von Trier: a marriage made in heaven. _Studies in European Cinema_ , 3 (2): 185–198.

Toeplitz, J. (1969) _Dwadzie_ ś _cia pi_ ęć _lat filmu Polski Ludowej_. PWN, Warsaw.

Wertenstein, W. (1991) _Zespół filmowy "X_." Wydawnictwo Officina, Warsaw.

Zajicek, E. (2009) _Poza ekranem: Polska kinematografia w latach 1896–2005_. Stowarzyszenie Filmowców Polskich, Warsaw.

Zawiślański, S. and Kuśmierczyk, S. (eds) (2002) Księga "Kadru": _O zespole filmowym Jerzego Kawalerowicza_. Wydawnictwo Skorpion, Warsaw.

# 24

# The Hussite Heritage Film

#  _A Dream for all Czech Seasons_

Petra Hanáková

Every year at the beginning of July, around the anniversary of the tragic death of Jan Hus, the fifteenth-century religious reformer and most venerated Czech ­martyr-hero, discussions about the legacy and importance of the Hussite period for the present Czech nation proliferate in the media, including the mainstream newspapers. In 2010, well-known medievalist Martin Nodl, in a debate organized by the leading daily _Lidové noviny_ , made the following claim when discussing national memory and identity: "We really need to make a movie about Hus, shot Hollywood style, or in the way they make heritage films in Poland. The idea of [communicating the historical legacy via] a museum, as it originated in the ­nineteenth century, is practically dead now, and historical consciousness can be changed only by film" (Zídek, 2010). For anyone familiar with the history of Czech cinema and broader visual culture this short comment stands out as a heavily loaded déjà vu, or more precisely _déjà lu_ – something already stumbled upon in other (con)texts.

But the claim also raises important questions: why a film about Hus? or, why would one of the most secular nations in the world need to evoke a man of clergy as the model for the present, and specifically do so via the medium of film? 1 Why, when the modern nation usually derives its identity from later periods of national awakenings and industrial or imperial expansions, should the national model relate back to the late Middle Ages, to a time before the Renaissance had begun its long sweep across Europe? And why do the Czechs, the people usually depicted as insolent Švejks, the cunning jesters of Europe (or _lachende Bestien_ , the laughing beasts, to quote the Nazi Reich Protector of Bohemia, Reinhard Heydrich), materialistic, down-to-earth folks proud of their plebeian roots and sly pragmatism, evoke and reactivate so urgently this ancient memory of an ascetic theologian who never compromised his self-abnegating fight for (religious) truth? In short, the idea of making a film about Hus might seem simply obsolete and defunct at the present time.

Although this text is not meant to be about the paradoxes and aporias in the forms of Czech national self-identification, it is on the basis of these contradictions that the Hussite themes proliferate in Czech visual culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and reemerge strongly in the post-Communist times. This peculiar presence is intimately bound with the history of Czech cinema, or more precisely, with the national dreams and goals projected into it from its humble beginnings up to the present. I look at the complicated and revealing "desire for the Hussite film" in Czech culture throughout the twentieth century and its ­specific resurrection in recent years. What I trace here is a history of the recurring yearning for a heritage film that remains "virtual" and "imaginary" throughout most of the twentieth, as well as at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This yearning typically intensifies in periods of crisis or historical change and transformation, which atavistically reactivate the past as a model for the present. Both the virtual character and the proclaimed necessity of the film about Hus and/or about the Hussite movement (the two possible narrative foci became soon subsumed under the general label "the Hussite film") are vital for this analysis, which in many ways stays experimental in method – considering both the projects that reached completion and the less lucky stillborn, dead, or "mummified" plans and proposals. Although the Hussite film remains only a dream and an aspiration during most of the history of Czech cinema, it exposes significant aspects of the social ­functioning of cinema and its intricate relations to national representation.

As my broader research on nationalism(s) in recent Czech cinema indicates, it is often impossible to separate the present themes and forms from their historical roots and lineages – and the current uses of nationalist rhetoric and motifs have to be regularly read as relics and revivals of strategies present in the Czech culture throughout its whole modern era. And although there are plentiful references to other historical times and themes in recent films, the Hussite motifs function as an emblem of the Czech historical fixation. So this is not a standard text about nationalist tendencies during a specific period of time (for example, in the cinema of the so-called transformation era after the Velvet Revolution in 1989) but is more of a cross-section between both virtual and actual histories of visual culture and ­historical consciousness in relation to this specific cluster of historical references. The Hussite film is never just an actual, finalized product – it also remains virtual, imagined, but never disconnected from the hidden movements, obsessions, and traumas in the visual culture of the time and place. As this heritage is inherently ambivalent and emotional, its reflection necessarily takes us on a meandering ­journey throughout history, media, and representation.

The theoretical premises that underlie this text fall within the constructivist approach to national formation and nationalism that sees the nation as a processual, constantly transforming entity appearing only through the shared imagined vision of community (as analyzed classically by Benedict Anderson), or as, in an older definition, an "everyday plebiscite" (Ernest Renan). My concept of the active, inventive, and dynamic structure of national formation is also influenced by Homi Bhabha's take on the nation as narration, and the specific clash of temporalities embodied in the pedagogical and performative aspects involved in the narrative strategy of national creation (1994). On the other side, this process must be, in my opinion, connected to the ambivalent and problematic notion of memory – as a guarantor of identity and specific mechanism of retention not only on the ­personal but also collective level. Memory can be seen here not only as the keeper of stories, but also of images, the meaning of which might become much more fluid and changeable. While a nation can be connected by the shared will to forget (as Renan famously claims), it is most of all formed by a will to share memory, to have a "historically specific... constellation of discourses and practices within which memory is entrusted with a certain goal and function, and is invested, routinely, as an institutional matter, with certain hopes and fears as to what it can do. It is always against this goal that memory is measured and found wanting" (Eyal, 2004: 6–7). The crucial point in understanding the national imagination here is grasping the will to consider and treat the invention of history as a naturalized collective memory.

The Hussite historical heritage arguably forms one of the most important semantically and symbolically charged clusters of Czech national mythology, reflected in visual and textual self-representation throughout the centuries. It also remains one of the most baffling traditions, with multiple, often contradictory and competing, political and historical readings. The heritage includes both the influence of the heretical teaching of Jan Hus in the legendary Bethlehem chapel in Prague, and his excommunication and tragic trial, which ended in his execution by the Catholic Church and secular authorities in 1415 in Constance. 2 But it also involves the consecutive wave of heretic wars sweeping Bohemia between 1420 and 1434, 3 during which the Hussite army bravely resisted the Catholic crusaders, mostly drawn from German lands, and was vanquished only because of the schism inside the Hussite movement itself, with the defeat of the radical Taborites by the more amenable Utraquists at the Battle of Lipany in 1434. 4

This complex history offers multifaceted material with immense narrative and self-identificatory potential, and its polyvalence and distance in time facilitates ideological uses and manipulations. Even a little shift of focus brings forth different themes and possible ideological interpretations: on one pole stands the spiritual, intellectual, and pedagogical example of Master Jan and his followers, on the opposite the revolutionary, democratic, emancipatory, and equalitarian character of the Taborite society, and somewhere between them the cunning warfare tactics and heroic victories of the Hussite army lead by Jan Žižka, or even the "hippie" radicalism of the naturist Adamite sect. Besides, as a political inspiration for the modern Czech nation, the heritage offers support for the liberal, nationally ­integrating tradition (most exemplified by T.G. Masaryk's political treatise Č _eská otázka_ , 1895) but can also provoke a completely opposite, nationalistically ­aggressive response, and even inspire colonizing projects. 5 The whole perspective also changes according to the religious preferences of the public: when looked at by the secular majority, the Hussite period is the high point of national glory (a perspective shared, of course, with the small Protestant community), while Catholic and conservative readings view the Hussite movement as an upsurge of heresy, barbarism, and tragedy, in short a historical and national regression. (Even current Catholic circles often consider the Hussites as terrorists of the Middle Ages endangering the entire European civilization.) 6

The commemoration of the Hussite tradition became ubiquitous when the revival of the Czech nation throughout the nineteenth century accelerated the move towards national independence, as demonstrated in the vogue of ­memorials, convocations, _tableaux vivants_ , and pilgrimages to sites connected with the Hussite times, or the plethora of historical publications. The Hussite times were ­considered a symbol of Czech greatness and courage, the apex of historical revolutionary development, the culmination of historical progress, the era when the spiritual quest of the Czech people and their early democratic and education-oriented ­society served as a model for the whole world. But all the competing readings coexisted: for democrats the Hussite times were the apex of democratic developments, for Catholics a fatal historical mistake and a national tragedy, while Communists celebrated the Hussites as the first revolutionaries – a reading that became official after 1948 with the Communist overthrow. All this polyvalence only complicates the fact that the Hussite narrative is a cherished national treasure and always more than a (his)story, abundantly remembered up to the present in the cultural and political life of the country. 7

But how is this heritage represented in the modern visual media at the time of the formation of the modern Czech nation? The imprint of the Hussite times in popular visual culture historically culminated with the Czech national revival around the end of the nineteenth and in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when classical paintings like Václav Brožík's _Master Jan at the Council of Constance_ (1883) and Mikoláš Aleš's drawings of the Hussite warriors attained such popularity that they were widely circulated in reproductions and postcards (and could be found displayed at that time in almost any household in these forms). Similarly, Alfons Mucha, in his monumental cycle the _Slavic Epic_ (painted between 1910 and 1928), which presents both allegorical visions of Slavic greatness and the decisive moments and figures in the history of Slavs, included several tableaux concerning the Hussite times, the most famous being probably _Master Jan Preaching at the Bethlehem Chapel_ ( _Truth Prevails_ ) and _Meeting at K_ ř _í žky (Sub Utraque)_. But the subject most daringly entered the new visual regime of modernity in1898 at the Architecture and Engineering Exhibition in Prague. Since the inaugural (and, for national self-awareness, seminal) Prague Jubilee Exhibit of 1891, the national fairs and exhibits became vastly popular showcases of national advancement and vigor, and a visit to the exhibit was seen as a patriotic act of support expected of every "true" Czech. 8 The 1898 exhibit, in particular, is commemorated as the place where the new or "reborn" media were proudly displayed. Special attention was attracted by the pavilion called The Czech Cinematograph, which showed the first Czech films shot by the film pioneer Jan Kříženecký with a camera purchased from the Lumière brothers. But while the showcasing of Kříženecký's "actualities" and "staged living photographs" has been the most widely remembered event, the exhibit also spotlighted another important media installation – the huge, circular panorama _Battle of Lipany_.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, trade exhibitions around Europe were the sites of panoramas' "last and impressive resurgence" before these ­proto-cinematic apparatuses were replaced by popular magazines, photographs, and cinema as the leading media of the times (Comment, 2004: 67). The relation of these huge canvases to nationalism was often blatant, and the Czech exemplar is not an exception. 9 As other late nineteenth-century panoramas, _Battle of Lipany_ was built and painted as a collective work, supervised and "directed" by the ­popular painter Ludřěk Marold, with the assistance of landscape painter Václav Jansa, stage designer Karel Štapfer, figurative painter and projectionist Karel Rašek, colorist Theodor Hilšer, and horse painter Ludvík Vacátek. It was the first (and only) Czech "grand style" panorama, consisting of a monumental painted canvas circle with three-dimensional objects in the foreground that enhanced the illusion of being present at the site of the battle.10 The panorama was located in its own pavilion, a dodecagonal building with a circular interior, where an elevated observer platform in the center guaranteed maximum spectatorial immersion in the depicted scene. Although publicized as an attraction that should relax and raise the spirit of the visitor overwhelmed by the technical and industrial part of the exhibit, the panorama showed a rather disturbing scene from the famous battle that ended the Hussite revolution, the scene which one newpaper report at that time also described as an epitome of "the tragic run of national fate" ( _Sv_ ě _tozor_ , 1898: 426).

The spectator was virtually transported into the middle of the final fratricidal battle, where in the logical center of the scene the Taborite leaders stand courageously, with the chalice flag and monstrance still aloft, but on the side the wagon forts are already torn apart and one can see the Taborite troops defeated by the Utraquist party and the gentry alliance. Even further from the midpoint, dead horses and captured warriors already reveal the result of the battle, while escaping riders at the back almost fuse with the landscape. Although heavily populated, the scene is dominated by the landscape to the point that it almost becomes picturesque, punctuated by recognizable landmarks and miniature soldiers.

The scene has a peculiar feeling to it. It is strangely melancholic, serene – this is the scenery and witness of national heroism, but also of its greatest tragedy. As the exhibit brochure states,

Among the plentiful tragedies, which beset our lands and choose the story of our nation as their stage, see the ending of the bloodiest and most lamentable one, the grand fratricide and the soil of Lipany soaking in blood, which made it forever into a site of the saddest memory, for which a memorial was built on it centuries later – a memorial to the Czech Hussite democracy of the fifteenth century. (Marold, 1898: 3)

At the same time, there is almost a farcical, absurd aspect in commemorating this scene, to which many commentators were simply oblivious. One review in the daily newspaper _Národní listy_ in 1898 expresses this unintentionally in his commentary: "It is beyond our imagination that the spectator, if he has at least a bit of a Czech heart, would resist the deep emotion at the sight of the vast, sweet Czech landscape with all the clamor of the Czechs fighting the Czechs in the midst of it" ( _Národní listy_ , 1898). Nationalist exhilaration and melodramatic excitement obscured to the author the paradoxes of selective historical memory apparent in his account. The elation experienced at the sight of "Czechs fighting Czechs" reveals the underside of the historical memory and translates the event into a story of national treason and schism. Not just forgetting (as Renan famously claimed), but holding a partial, distorted view that refuses to see the whole picture behind the nationalist screen is here a crucial factor in the creation of a nation and its ­historical memory.

In its nationalist reading, the scene of the Lipany battle concentrates both on the moment of national tragedy and on the instant in which national greatness is remembered in its very passing. At the same time, the panorama is a bridge to the present and stands open to ideological uses as a peculiar reminder of the historical mission and importance of the Czech nation. In a strange combination of self-celebration and self-pity, which is seen already in the Lipany myth, the ideal of national self-representation tends to this masochistic, ambivalent vision – the pleasure derived from watching the nation fall and rise replayed again and again, as if in a strange variation of the _fort–da game_. This interestingly corresponds to the examination of the Czech martyr complex and the acceptance of suffering as a national mission, as analyzed by Pynsent (1994: 191 ff.).

Not long after the success of the panorama, the emergence of film brought along copious debates about the national function and character of the new medium. The Hussite themes came once again to the center of attention in ­cultural debates. Among the film historians who researched the importance of historical representation within Czechoslovak cinema throughout the twentieth century, the work of Ivan Klimeš and Jiří Rak is especially pertinent here, as they trace the history of the Hussite film as the "unfulfilled dream" of the Czech ­cinema up until World War Two. With the establishment of a free Czechoslovakia in 1918, the Hussite heritage, which had been central to the national revival throughout the whole nineteenth century, was remembered again as both the ­ideological origin of the Czech nation and a model for the new state (Klimeš and Rak, 1992: 69).

The first reports about preparations for a "historically true, big budget film about our martyr in Constance" appeared in newspapers already around 1915, when the Czech film industry was still in its cradle. It is hardly surprising that in the year celebrating the five-hundredth anniversary of Hus's death the plans were rather grand – the film was to be scripted by Alois Jirásek, the author of classic works of Czech historical fiction (the prolific "Walter Scott of Czech literature"), and to feature well-known actors from the National Theater (Klimeš and Rak, 1992: 71). Albeit the film never made it into production, it started long discussions about the concept of the Hussite film in the newspapers and trade press and inspired later projects. Around 1918, after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the establishment of an independent Czechoslovakia, historical themes became central in Czech culture.11 The same year saw the beginning of another telling project: the film _Utrpením ke sláv_ ě ( _Greatness through Martyrdom_ , 1919, unfinished), which was supposed to emphasize the meaning of history for the national venture. Although the film was never completed and released, and only one ­photograph about its making survived, we can reconstruct its intention: to create a _tableau vivant_ of the greatest personalities in Czech history and to present a ­fantastic vision of Czech martyrdom as a national mission culminating with the final apotheosis and resurrection of "Hus's and Žižka's nation" (National Film Archive, 1995: 212). The pride of national self-assertion and political sovereignty is thus referred back to a distant point in history, considered not only as the origin and emergence of national greatness but also as a heritage to which the nation has to return in order to emancipate itself. This reference atavistically presumes a reverse teleology, in which the national progress is in fact a historical regression to some presumed national essence that was already fully formed centuries ago. When Bhabha claims that "the language of national belonging comes laden with atavistic apologues" (1994: 141) and wonders why it is the antiquity, not the ­modernity of the nation that is celebrated, he points exactly to the importance of these invented, pedagogical narratives that weld the paradoxical fold between the present and the (fabled) past.

Further film projects considered more acutely practical issues. The first ­surviving script for a Hussite film dates back to the early 1920s and was written by famous theater author Arnošt Dvořák (the author of successful plays about the Hussite period) as another patriotic panorama of the entire Hussite epoch, "culminating" in the battle of Lipany. But at the time the authors were fully aware of the still unpromising state of the Czech film industry and entered into negotiations with the German UFA (Universum Film AG) studios to secure funding. (Several sources also mention that the script was sent to Ernst Lubitsch as he was among the possible directors considered.) The possibility that a national project would be funded by the arch enemy (both in the Hussite times and in the present) led to severe protests in the film press.12 Although this anti-German outcry is historically understandable, similar difficulties also faced a theater group of Russian émigrés who staged a play inspired by Hus's life in the early 1920s and planned to capture it on film (Klimeš and Rak, 1992: 82–83, 92–93). Undoubtedly, the Hussite themes had already become a national "sacred" heritage, and every attempt on the part of foreign hands to touch them was considered sacrilegious by Czech nationalists.

In the second half of the 1920s the film and cultural event projects celebrating the Hussite heritage stand in direct opposition to the Catholic lobby. Already in 1925, when the Hus anniversary was declared and first celebrated as a national holiday, the copious festivities and the president's participation in them triggered a conflict with the Vatican, known as "the Marmaggi affair."13 The Catholic Church considered the celebrations to be a direct anti-Catholic provocation, and the papal nuncio, Monsignor Marmaggi, was called away from Prague,14 which meant that the diplomatic connections between Czechoslovakia and Vatican were interrupted.

The confrontation between the Catholic and the nationalist view of history in the film industry was initiated by the preparations of a big budget, state-funded production of the film _Svatý Václav (St Wenceslas), representing the life of Wenceslas, the first Catholic ruler of Bohemia and patron saint of the Czech state_ , the millennium of whose death was to be celebrated in 1929.15 The ninth-century ruler known for his religiosity and for spreading the faith peacefully among the pagan population also introduced the _tribut pacis_ , or tribute paid regularly to Bavarian and Saxon dukes in exchange for peace. While this can be considered a wise, statesmanlike decision from today's perspective, it can be also read as an act of cowardice and collaboration with the enemy. For this reason, St Wenceslas's heritage, together with Catholic emblems like the Marian Column, represented in the nationalist reading a rival tradition to the Hussite legacy, and were often considered as a ­symbol of German, Habsburg, and Catholic oppression.16

At the end of the 1920s, with the approaching anniversary of Wenceslas's death, and while the Catholic circles were openly involved in the preparation of the _Svatý Václav_ film, several projects were envisioned to counterbalance the image of Czech history and also to commemorate the heretic tradition and the glory of the Czech nation at the times when the (Catholic) world feared the Czech (Hussite) warriors. The newspapers of the time reported on the preparations of what was literally presented by them as a _trucfilm_ ("spitefilm," a direct challenge to Svatý Václav), a production about about Hus's life, initiated by the reinstituted Czechoslovak Hussite Church, which planned to provide partial funding (Klimeš and Rak, 1992: 97–102). (Klimeš and Rak 1992: 97–102).17 In the second part of the 1930s, the Hussite theme appears again in another unrealized project about the battle of Lipany, but none of these projects reached production, mainly for financial ­reasons. Eventually, with the outbreak of the World War Two, Hussite themes as an expression of Czech nationalist spirit became ­unacceptable in the German Protectorate.

The turbulent years following the war and the dramatic political changes in society and in the organization of film industry also brought about the revival of the Hussite themes. Hussites were officially declared the "first Communists" by the Communist ideologue and minister of education Zdenřěk Nejedlý (originally a historian and musicologist), who significantly started his political career by fulfilling his dream to re-erect the demolished Bethlehem chapel – rebuilt on its original location between 1947and 1954, its restoration became reality in the first years of the Communist rule. This is, of course, one of the most paradoxical cultural acts of the period: a hardline Communist re-erecting a church at the time of drastic political measures against the representatives of the church (see Kaplan, 1986). Again, the interpretation of the Hussites as the avant-garde of the Communist, revolutionary struggle suppressed ideological contradictions.

But this was only the beginning of a Hussite revival: in 1948, the state cultural policy, introduced and designed by Nejedlý and the Communist president, Gottwald, inaugurated the so-called Jirásek Action, a centralized ideological ­campaign that promoted the work of the Communist's historical writer of preference, Alois Jirásek's, advocating the publication of his novels, the staging of his plays, and mounting monuments to him. As Jirásek's view of Czech history was in tune with the Communist reading of it and promoted the Hussite period as the climax of Czech history, this cultural campaign had direct ideological implications. As a part of the campaign, the newly centralized and nationalized film industry also provided funding for a cycle of "heritage" Hussite films based on Jirásek's vision of Hussite times, starting with Vladimír Borský's _Jan Rohá_ č _z Dubé_ (1947). This was the first Czechoslovak color film, and it showed one remaining locus of the Hussite resistance after the defeat at Lipany. The cycle culminated with Otakar Vávra's large-scale Hussite trilogy _Jan Hus_ (1954), _Jan Ži žka_ (1955), _Proti v šem_ (1956), which became the showcase for Socialist cinematography. The films set the tone in which the Hussite motifs will be depicted throughout the entire Socialist period: Hus's followers are portrayed as revolutionaries and social reformers; all events are stripped of their religious meanings; and the Hussite virtues lie dormant for a few centuries in the Czech nation, waiting to be inherited by the Communists.

Although Socialist cinema did not produce other Hussite film epics, numerous minor references in other films follow the same ideological line. We can see this typically in Vojtřěch Trapl's propagandistic feature _Vít_ ě _zný lid_ ( _Victorious Nation_ , 1977), picturing the so-called Victorious February events, which is to say, the Communist _coup d'état_ in 1948. In the decisive scene of this film, where the Communist leader, Klement Gottwald, announces to the rally in the Old Town Square the establishment of the Communist government, the mob of workers climbs up on to the Hus Memorial and mounts a red flag there. The Hus statue effectively becomes a member in the Communist line, as the Hussite war hymn "Ye Who are the Warriors of God"18 thunders under the future president's speech. Similarly, in the nationalist biopic by Jiří Krejřčík, _Bo žská Ema_ ( _Heavenly Ema_ , 1979), dedicated to the life and work of Ema Destinová, the famous opera diva sings this Hussite chorale to a patriotic gathering as a sign of national support.

Interestingly, after the fall of communism in 1989, the newly decentralized and privatized film industry came back to the Hussite heritage, even though it was deeply compromised by the Communist ideologues. One of the first transformation films, Jan Svřěrák's _Obecná škola_ ( _Elementary School_ , 1991), incorporated the Hussite motifs prominently in the story of schoolboy Eda and his unruly ­classmates. But _Elementary School_ does not trace only Eda's formative years; it is also the ­coming of age story of the Czech nation. Set at the historical crossroads in the time ­immediately after World War Two, in the few years before the Communists seized power, it depicts a class of disobedient boys as they are taught how to be citizens and subjects of their nation. Their knowledge of history is shaped by their teacher, Hnízdo, who evokes the great figures of the past in his melodramatic, histrionic accounts. In one of the central and most emblematic scenes of the film, Hnízdo retells the fate of Hus through a nationalistic revivalist song and finally turns the pupils into the subjects of national pride. Listening to this song, performed by his unschooled voice and with the instrumental accompaniment that shows him as a lousy violin player, the camera pans across the faces of the boys who previously did not respect anything and anyone but now start to sob and finally burst out ­crying heavily in the shared, overwhelming outburst of melodramatic national sentiment.19 The scene is framed as a performance within performance. The ­contrast between the amateurish presentation with the simple patriotic rhetoric and its overpowering effect on the unruly boys shows the national investment in history as a melodramatic narration, but it also provides self-reflection on the didactic efforts of the film itself. In many ways, this is a treatise on nationalist didacticism and a study of the processes through which the formative myth of a martyr who did not hesitate to die for truth is constantly re-inscribed in the culture through a pedagogical gesture. The boys try to follow the motto "truth prevails"20 to set right their earlier pranks but quickly learn how the pedagogical function of history and the performative incorporation of its message in everyday reality do not easily match – their later attempts to apologize for their antics and tell only the truth are only perceived as further mischief and punished.

The film was also immediately read by reviewers as a paratext, a form mediating between the film and its political, extrafilmic functions. One reviewer comments on this hybrid form, describing the film as a "national exploit":

Nothing is so characteristic of this movie as its Czechness.... _Elementary School_ is a commentary on the Czech fate in this century... an elementary school of democracy... if there are to be more such commentaries, they will make the anxiety for the fate of this nation and state and the fear for the future of our cinema disappear. (Lukeš, 1993: 195–196).

History, here exemplified in the condensed form of the Hussite heritage, is considered not only a model for the present, but also a possible savior of the Czech nation and cinema at the times of crisis.

This conviction is also notably present in the vivid discussion that animates the prominent web database dedicated to all aspects of the Hussite tradition and imagery, _Husité_ (www.husitstvi.cz). The dialogue was triggered by a vision of a "big Hussite movie" first presented to the discussion forum on May 5, 2005 and continues up to the present. The author of the project first states that he only wants to share his "boyhood dream, yet a deadly serious dream that can be realized only by our mutual efforts"; but the project is indicative of the collective, cyclical afterlife of Hussite themes and iconography in Czech culture. He muses:

we need to make a Hussite film that would conquer the world and become a ­box-office hit... Just imagine how the movie theaters in multiplexes around the world equipped with digital surround sound resonate with the Hussite hymn or the clamor of the war wagons rushing into a battle. And picture how the contemporary heirs of the Saxon Elector Frederick IV the Belligerent (i.e. the anti-Hussite agitator) in cinema in Dresden [the present day capital of Saxony] get shivers down their spine when watching these suggestive scenes. The big Hussite film would of course require the style of movies like _Braveheart_ , _Gladiator_ , _Troy_ , _Alexander_ , or _Kingdom of Heaven_.... Can you imagine how much publicity for a small country in the middle of Europe would a film about its greatest historical period bring? Let's aspire to show the whole world who were God's warriors!"21

The dream evidently resonated with many users of the forum, who unanimously agreed on the need for such a film and shared their own suggestions as to how to make the dream come true. The discussion provides fascinating material for analysis, and not only because it obviously repeats the anti-German (anti-Saxon) sentiments of the nationalist discourse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and transposes the logic of a "hereditary sin" to the current German spectator (i.e. it assumes that the present-day Dresdeners can be held responsible for the sins of their forefathers). It also expresses the striking ambition to conquer the world with a film and to become visible again on the cultural and political world map via history mediated by a moving picture – which is, in fact, a very archaic idea, strangely out of place in the globalized, fantasy and technology-­oriented pop culture of the early twenty-first century.

The discussion continued in strangely familiar ways: the author of the idea recounted how he had unsuccessfully sent off his script for the Hussite film to numerous film and television producers and had received a lot of support and advice from the group about how to proceed. He also shared his plan to send the script to ex-president Havel and ask him to contact Miloš Forman, as the only director worthy of such a project. The example of Polish film also comes up in the discussion – with the films of Jerzy Hoffman, _Ogniem I mieczem_ ( _With Fire and Sword_ , 1999), _Potop_ ( _The Deluge_ , 1974), and _Pan Wolodyjowski_ ( _Colonel Wolodyjowski_ , 1969) serving as possible models. One of the participants also brings up the "Slavic fantasy" writer Andrzej Sapkowski and his trilogy inspired by the Hussite times – namely _Narrenturm_ (2002), _Bo_ ż _y bojownicy_ ( _Warriors of God_ , 2004), and _Lux perpetua_ (2006) – as a possible source for adaptation. Yet other participants immediately protest in the typical patriotic tone we witnessed earlier that the Hussite film should stay fully Czech, and not only actors, but the original script, direction, and cinematography should remain in Czech hands, a "Czech business," because "it cannot be otherwise, and Sapkowski is, with all due respect, still a Pole."22 The rhetoric is almost identical with the protests against the German or Russian ­productions from the beginning of the twentieth century. This similarity is even intensified by the suggestion that the funding for the film could be acquired in a national collection, which echoes the legendary collection organized in 1851 for building the National Theater. Other ideas include finding a producer in the United States or Japan, making the Hussite Saga into an animation film, or even remastering and digitally enhancing Vávra's Hussite trilogy "like Lucas did it with the ­original _Star Wars_."23

But the dominant tone of the discussion is set by the discourse of salvation: nothing smaller is at stake here than saving the nation, cinema, and "objective" history. The Hussite film is presented as "a debt of our cinema to our nation," a necessary didactic vehicle that should raise the national spirit, as we are currently facing the loss of historical memory ("our kids know less and less about the Hussites").24 A big Hussite film for the six-hundredth anniversary of Hus's death that we will celebrate in 2015 is in this context regarded as having the power to save Czech cinema from its present crisis and to put it back on the world map. But the most important mission of today, according to the discussants, is to purify the Hussite heritage from the ideological baggage that it accumulated throughout centuries and to achieve the most objective view of the Hussite era possible. Yet this cleansing process is, of course, incompatible with the idea of big commercial production that needs to cater to the tastes of the broadest possible audience and thus work with the familiar, mythological, and expected.

Here we return to the belief of the historian Martin Nodl quoted at the ­beginning of this chapter, that Czech society does not know Hus anymore, as it is only presented with a mythology passed on by Catholic, Protestant, and Marxist discourse. For Nodl, the new film about Hus should purge the historical memory but at the same time offer ideals and models for present: our times lost touch with Hus's heritage, because "he was a man of vision. The present society doesn't have any visions, we live day after day as an amorphous mass" (Zídek, 2010) In the return to Hus as a man of vision Nodl thus calls both for Hus to be resurrected as a moral and intellectual hero for the present and at the same time for him to be demythologized. By implication, the "pure" Hussite film should be suitable for the post-ideological society and at the same time should communicate a clear ­historical, thus ideological, message. And so he connects history and pedagogy in an oxymoronic call for the impossible: de-mythified mythology and un-political politics.

This overview can only briefly sketch the significance of the Hussite themes in the history of Czech modern visual culture and merely touch upon the paradoxical urge to represent and reactivate this ancient history as a confirmation of national greatness and historical mission. The Hussite motifs not only the reveal the historical fixation of the Czech nation but also disclose the processes of the reinventing the nation through narrative performance. As film becomes an important vehicle of national self-representation and self-generation throughout the twentieth ­century, the ideal of the "Hussite movie" becomes an obsession that stands out both as the ultimate aspiration of the national film culture but also as an expression of the ideological requirements structuring the respective historical periods. And as the demand for a Hussite film has been always bound by conservative ­historicism and patriotic sentiment, as it is constrained by so many ­conflicting expectations and alleged cultural functions, the position as a never fully realized national fantasy might be the only possible one for a Hussite movie. Only as a dream and an ideal can it serve as the eternal holy grail of national pedagogical narrative.

 **Notes**

1 This fixation on religious history and the urge to represent it would not be very surprising in the deeply Catholic and iconophilic Poland, for example, but is definitely surprising in the Czech context.

2 Jan Hus (also transcribed as Johannes Huss) was a priest, religious reformer, dean, and rector of Charles University in Prague in the early fifteenth century. Inspired by the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe, Hus in his writings and famous sermons in the ­Bethlehem chapel spoke against the depravities of the church, and especially criticized the unrestricted sale of indulgences. Hus's ideas for church reform included a radical democratization of the religious life and the right of the people to study the Bible both without church supervision and in vernacular translations. (This lead the chronicler Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who later became Pope Pius II, famously to note in his 1457 _Historia Bohemorum_ that "every peasant woman in Bohemia knows the Bible better than an Italian priest.") In 1411, Hus was excommunicated from the Catholic Church as a heretic and lived as an outlaw in the country. In 1414, he was invited for a hearing at the Church Council in Constance, and accepted the invitation in the belief that he would be able to defend his cause and would eventually be cleared of the accusation of heresy. But he was arrested soon after his arrival in Constance, sentenced to death at the stake, and executed on July 6, 1415. For a detailed history of Hus's life in English, see Fudge, 2010.

3 After Hus's trial, the discontent of his followers escalated into an open rebellion. When the Hussites took control over Prague in 1419, the pope together with King Sigismund, the German successor to the throne of Bohemia, organized the first of several crusades to end the heretic insurgence. In a series of battles, the Hussite peasant troops, led by the remarkable strategist Jan Žižka z Trocnova, though greatly outnumbered by ­armies of professional soldiers managed to defeat them using guerilla-style tactics. The ­Hussite wars came to a tragic end in the Battle of Lipany in 1434, in which two antagonistic ­factions of the Hussite movement fought against each other in a fratricidal clash. For a detailed history of the Hussite times, see Bartoš, 1986.

4 The Hussite camp was, from its beginnings, far from united. We can distinguish two main groups: the moderate Hussites, mainly from Prague, who were known as the Utraquists or Calixtines, and the radicals, who called themselves Taborites, after the ideal city of Tábor, which was founded by the Hussites in South Bohemia (where most of the troops of the Hussite army were trained). A small group of Picards, or Adamites, who preached nudity and free love, was expelled from Tábor in 1421 and exterminated by Žižka's guards. The Hussite ideals attracted people from a wide range of social groups and positions: as Robert Pynsent reminds us, with the Hussites heroism offers a series of dichotomies: we can chose between the intellectual and the warrior, the elite and the popular, the war of minds and the war of flails.

5 Several dreams and projects designed by Czech nationalists in the second half of the nineteenth century had colonial implications. Most notably, the traveler Emil Holub in his expeditions to Africa in the 1870s and 1880s openly declared that he was trying to find a space for relocating Czechs to escape the tyranny of the Habsburg monarchy. In his expedition notes, he even invents toponyms for places in Africa that reminded him of Czech landscape – among them "Palcát Hill" (palcát is the feared Hussite flanged mace) or "Žižka's ridge" stand out in our context as direct references to the Hussite heritage (Kosatík, 2010: 193–194). After 1918, several radical nationalist voices even called for the colonization of the German territory – notably the 1919 book _Ná š stát a sv_ě _tový mír_ (Our State and the World Peace) by Hanuš Kuffner argued for the Slavic control over German territories and for enclosing the German population in a controlled "German Reservation" as a necessary final guarantee of world peace (Kosatík, 2010: 205–206).

6 A popular book offering foreigners an easy guide for "understanding all things Czech" summarizes the current media discourse on this matter in a simplified yet telling ­analogy: "many Czech Catholics still regard Master Jan as a fanatic, the Hussite warriors as a medieval Taliban and their leader Jan Žižka as a predecessor of Osama bin Laden (Englund, 2004: 155).

7 The cultural remembrance in the twentieth century includes (apart from vast historical research and plentiful official historical publications) a large number of historical fictions, theater plays, revivalist poems, several realized Hussite movies, many classical paintings, permanent museum expositions, statues and monuments, and school ­programs, but also a legendary computer strategy game _Husita_ (1999), numerous fan webpages, children books and educational games. Hussite themes and costumes are also a common part of gatherings for live-action role-playing games, historical reenactments, and living history events. On the far Right of the political spectrum, Hussite insignia are often used by ­extreme nationalistic and right-wing groups, Hussite themes are also staple motifs of nationalist music groups. A variation on the Hussite war song was also used as a jingle in the World Hockey Championship in 2004.

8 This obsession is wonderfully mocked in the satirical novel by Svatopluk Čech, _Pan_ _Brou_ č _ek na výstav_ ě (Mr Beettle at the Exhibition, 1892). Čech's novels from the Mr Beetle cycle are based on a simple but productive juxtaposition – Mr Beetle, a pragmatic petit-bourgeois Prague citizen, is sent off to a place with a set of rules different from those of his everyday existence. In the two preceding volumes of the series, Mr Beetle is sent first to the moon and secondly to Prague during the Hussite times. This juxtaposition allows Čech to satirize contemporary society and nationalistic sentiments at the turn of the century.

9 Oetterman quotes a treatise on the history of German art, which claims that in panoramas "the nation was delighted finally to see its victories celebrated in an appropriate format" (Oetterman, 1997: 236). He also reminds us that "frequently the choice of theme and manner of depiction were so closely designed to appeal to the patriotic sentiments of an audience in one country that it became totally unsuitable for export" (Oetterman, 1997: 239).

10 The panorama was enormous by Czech standards, the canvases were 11 meters high and 90 meters long (matching the standard size of European panoramas of the time), a fact that was also widely publicized (see Marold, 1898: 8). The panorama survives to the present day and can be visited at the Prague Exhibition Grounds.

11 In politics, the importance of the Hussite movement for the ideology of the newly established state is revealed in the fact that Hus's motto, _Omnia vincit veritas_ (Truth Prevails), was inscribed on the new presidential standard. During World War One the Czechoslovak Legions also used the Hussite salutation "brother," chose the Hussite names for regiments, and put the symbol of the chalice on their flags.

12 The tensions between Czechs and Germans date back at least to the German ­colonization of some areas in Bohemia in the Middle Ages. They were aggravated by the forced Germanization of the Czech population that started in the seventeenth century, and sealed by the German annexation of the Czech Lands during World War Two.

13 This tense atmosphere can be already seen in the complicated negotiations that preceded the building of the Hus Memorial next to the Marian column on the Old Town Square in Prague (see Paces, 2009: 21–36).

14 A "Hussite" joke was popular in the streets of Prague at the time: "Why did Marmaggi leave? Because he was afraid that he would be burned" (Bucur and Wingfield, 2001: 219).

15 The religious situation in late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the Czech lands was rather schizophrenic – while the majority of the nation was already non-religious, officially they remained Catholic (a result of the forced re-Catholization of the seventeenth century), but spiritually considered the Hussite, heretic times to be the climax of the Czech religious history. This is also well documented in the mocking Slovak saying "Take a Czech Catholic priest, shake him up, and a Hussite falls out of him" (Kosatík, 2010: 266).

16 Marian and Plague Columns are typical baroque religious monuments that can be found around all of Central Europe, built as an expression of gratitude for the ending of a plague, war, or other adversity. The Prague Marian Column was erected in the Old Town's Square in 1650 after the end of the Thirty Year's War with the Swedes as a means of thanking Virgin Mary for saving Prague from destruction. In a final act of reckoning with the Austrian and Catholic despotism and a symbolic return to "true" Czech heritage, it was knocked down by an angry mob that saw it as a symbol of Habsburg and Catholic oppression on November 3, 1918, only a couple of days after the declaration of independent Czechoslovakia. As Cynthia Paces recounts,

minutes later the Žižkov [Prague neighborhood named after Žižka] firemen, who had tied a noose round the neck of the Virgin Mary, pulled down the column, in the direction of Our Lady before Týn Church. Sauer-Kysela [the leader of the mob] had planned to fell the column toward the Hus Memorial, so it would lie at Hus's feet, but for safety reasons the plan was changed. The symbolic effect remained: the Marian Column has succumbed to Hus's memory. Never again would the most vexing emblems of the Habsburg Monarchy tower over the symbols of the Czechs. (Paces 2009: 90–91)  
Attempts to officially re-erect the column continue up to the present time (Paces, 2009: 229–234).

17 It was never produced, only the script from the early 1930s survives.

18 The Hussite war chorale, _Kdo ž jsú boží bojovníci_ (Ye Who Are the Warriors of God) was both a religious hymn and a war song which fortified the fighting spirit and the religious zeal. Sung when the battle was approaching, the hymn became itself a weapon, as some enemies supposedly surrendered merely on hearing the Hussites to sing it.

19 The lyrics of the revivalist song are as follows: "Hranice vzplála, tam na břehu Rýna, na ní umírá dálné vlasti syn.... A vy se ptáte, kdo v třech plamenech? TořtČ Mistr Jan, tořtČ neslavnřější řČech. ("The stake blazed at the shores of Rhine, at it the son of a distant land dies.... And you ask, who is it in the flames? That's Master Jan, the greatest of all Czechs.")

20 Only a couple of months before the making of this movie, the Hussite concept of "truth" was taken up by Václav Havel as his political credo for building of a society of "truth and love" as opposed to the Socialist "society of lies and hatred."

21 <http://husitstvi.cz/forum/viewtopic.php?p=729#729> (last accessed December 5, 2010).

22 <http://husitstvi.cz/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1759#1759> (last accessed December 5, 2010).

23 <http://husitstvi.cz/forum/viewtopic.php?p=987#987> (last accessed December 5, 2010).

24 This is further developed in another project by the same author for a short 3D educational film _Dobývání Karl štejna_ ( _Hussites Storming the Karl štejn Castle_), currently in ­production, see <http://www.husitstvi.cz/3d/cile.php>.

 **References**

Bartoš, F.M. (1986) _The Hussite Revolution, 1424–1437_. Columbia University Press, New York.

Bhabha, H. (1994) _The Location of Culture_. Routledge, New York.

Bucur, M., and Wingfield, N.M. (2001) _Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present_. Purdue University Press, West Lafayette.

National Film Archive (1995) Č _eský hraný film I_. _1898–1930_. NFA, Prague.

Comment, B. (2004). _Panorama_. Reaktion Books, London.

Englund, Terje B. (2004) _The Czechs in a Nutshell: A User's Manual for Foreigners_. Baset, Prague.

Eyal, G. (2004) Identity and trauma: two forms of the will to memory. _History &Memory_, 16 (1): 5–36.

Fudge, T.A. (2010) _Jan Hus: Religious Reform and Social Revolution in Bohemia_. I.B. Tauris, London.

Kaplan, K. (1986).Church and State in Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1956, Part I. _Religion in Communist Lands_ , 14 (1): 59–72.

Klimeš, I., and Rak, J. (1992) Husitský film – nesplněný sen české meziválečné kinematografie. _Filmový sborník historický_ 3: 69–135.

Kosatík, P. (2010) Č _eské sn_ ě _ní_. Praha. Torst, Prague.

Lukeš, J. (1993) _Orgie st_ ř _ídmosti aneb Konec_ č _eskoslovenské státní kinematografie_. _(Kritický deník 1987–1993)_. NFA, Prague.

Marold, L. (1898) Průvodce _panoramou 'Bitva u Lipan'_. Praha: Topiřč.

 _Národní listy_ (1898) Výstava architektury a inženýrství v Praze 1898. _Bitva u Lipan_. 38:146 (May 28), p. 2.

Oetterman, S. (1997) _The Panorama. History of a Mass Medium_. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Paces, C. (2009) _Prague Panoramas. National Memory and Sacred Space in the Twentieth Century_. University of Pittsburg Press, Pittsburg.

Pynsent, R.B. (1994) _Questions of Identity: Czech and Slovak Ideas of Nationality and Personality_. Central European University Press, Budapest.

Renan, E. (1994). _Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?_ Academic Press Leiden, Leiden.

Zídek, P. (2010) Natořčme o Husovi velkofilm', _Lidové noviny_ , July 3, 2010. http://www.lidovky.cz/natocme-o-husovi-velkofilm-dd2-/ln_noviny.asp?c=A100703_000076_ln_noviny_sko&klic=237819&mes=100703_0 (accessed December 5, 2010).

 _Sv_ ě _tozor_ (1898) Výstava architektury a inženýrství. III. Atrakční a zábavní podniky. _Sv_ ě _tozor_ 32 (36): 426–428.

 **Further Reading**

Macura, V. (1983) _Znamení zrodu:_ Č _eské obrození jako národní typ_. Československý spisovatel, Prague.

Pecht, F. (1888) _Geschichte der Münchener Kunst Im Neuzehnten Jahrhundert_. Munich: Verlagsangtalt für Kunst und Wissenschaft.

# 25

# International Co-productions as Productions of Heterotopias

Ewa Mazierska

Since around the 1990s international co-productions have attracted growing ­attention from film scholars, especially in the field of European cinema (see, for example, Jäckel, 2003). This interest reflects the fact that a large proportion of films made in Europe today are financed by international companies using ­multinational casts and crews. Another factor is the attractiveness of the concept of "transnationalism," which lends itself perfectly to the study of co-production. The term emerged within theories of globalization and late capitalism and describes phenomena linked to flexible accumulation and time-space compression and is associated with the effects that the shedding of nation-states, the increasing mobility of monetary capital, and the lack of geographical anchoring have had on the global economy. When applied to the field of cultural production, "­transnationalism" is often associated with the ideas of "syncretism, ­creolization, bricolage, cultural translation, and hybridity" (Vertovec, 1999: 451). Studying international co-productions might also be explained by the desire felt by film scholars to transcend long-established but, by now, outworn theoretical frameworks – primarily those of national film and of auteurism, but also those of World and Third cinema and the need to account for a new, intercultural cinematic imagination.

However, in the study of Eastern European cinemas, national frameworks still dominate, and co-productions are rarely tackled by scholars specializing in this area. This statement applies especially to co-productions made before the fall of the Berlin Wall.1 An important factor is Eastern European hostility towards "transnationalism," which is inevitably associated with the enforced internationalism imposed by the Soviet Union on its satellite countries during the Communist regimen. There is a common view that many Eastern European co-productions were made for the wrong reasons, such as fulfilling centrally imposed financial plans or testifying to the friendship between nations, rather than enhancing artistic effects.

This chapter is meant to make up for this neglect in some measure by discussing three co-produced films made before the fall of the Berlin Wall: _Le Départ_ (1966), directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, _Vta_ č _kovia, siroty a blázni_ ( _Birds, Orphans and Fools_ , 1969), directed by Juraj Jakubisko, and _Test Pilota Pirxa_ ( _The Test of Pilot Pirx_ , 1979), directed by Marek Piestrak. Each of them constitutes a specific case of co-production, being made in different political and economic circumstances and enjoying a unique status within respective their national cinemas. At the same time, they reveal remarkable textual similarities.

In his discussion of European transnational cinema, Tim Bergfelder advocates exploring issues of production and distribution, as well as translation and ­cross-cultural reception, which include the need to understand "the strategies and practices by which filmic texts 'travel' and become transformed according to the requirements of different cultural contexts and audiences" (2005: 326). In line with his directive, my chapter will tackle issues concerning institution, authorship, and reception, and their mutual relationships. I will discuss why and how a specific project was made as an international co-production and how the film was received in the national and international context.2 Most importantly, however, I will attempt to establish how the international character of the film's production is reflected in the film diegesis: the choice of characters, the representation of setting, the film's ideology. For this reason I find it useful to refer to the notion of "heterotopia." Michel Foucault, who introduced the concept in 1984 – later widely appropriated by postmodern thinkers, such as David Harvey (1989) – defines ­heterotopias as "counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality" (Foucault, [1984] 1998: 231). Foucault lists as examples of heterotopias cemeteries, psychiatric hospitals, brothels, and colonies, and argues that a ship is the ultimate heterotopia (236). In the subsequent parts of this chapter I will argue that these three films can be treated as examples or even stages in the creation of an Eastern European ­version of this strange entity.

#  ** _Le Départ_** **: Leaving for the West and Finding a Promised Land in Cinema**

 _Le Départ_ was Jerzy Skolimowski's fourth full-length feature film and his first international co-production. The film, as the director himself admitted, would not have been made if it were not for the international successes of his first three, entirely Polish, films, testified for by awards at international festivals, including the Grand Prix at the Bergamo Film Festival in 1966 and the Special Prize in Valladolid in 1968 for _Bariera_ ( _Barrier_ , 1966). They also attracted the attention of critics and fellow filmmakers from the West, most importantly of Jean-Luc Godard, who regarded Skolimowski as a new voice in European cinema. Consequently, Skolimowski's films were analyzed in a book entitled _The Second Wave_ , edited by Ian Cameron (1970), along with the work of filmmakers such as Nagisa Oshima, Glauber Rocha and a fellow East-European, Dušan Makavejev. Michael Walker, who wrote an essay dedicated to Skolimowski for this collection, presented him as a worthy ­successor of Godard and one of the main representatives of the international movement that led to the renewal of world cinema in the 1960s (Walker, 1970). By and large, the 1960s, up to 1968, was a period of unprecedented cultural exchange between the European West and East, with Eastern European filmmakers being feted in the West and Western European artists and cultural personalities ­frequently travelling to the East (French, 1982: 218).

Critical appreciation of Skolimowski's work led to a proposal to make a film as a Dutch–Belgian–Polish co-production. The Polish partner was Film Polski, a state institution which during the Communist period practically monopolized official contacts between the representatives of Polish and foreign film industries. However, I was unable to find out what constituted, in practical terms, its involvement in what eventually became _Le Départ_ , as its archive did not contain any ­relevant documents to the subject. According to Skolimowski, the entire funding and all the logistics were provided by the Western side.

Skolimowski's initial idea was to make a film entitled _Le Depotoir_ , which is French for "rubbish heap." It was meant to be about the landing of a glider from Eastern Europe on a rubbish heap located in Holland or Belgium. The pilot, who does not speak any foreign language, attempts to communicate with two people, a man and a woman, whom he meets there, using some English, French, even Latin. Eventually a relationship of sorts is born between the pilot and the woman, but the other man attempts to break their bond. The producers liked the idea and Skolimowski tried to write a script, but realized that he was unable to make a full-length film of it. He was considering repaying the advance, but on his way to meet the producers he invented a new story about a young man who would like to be a racing-car driver, which was accepted. Jean-Pierre Léaud, at the time one of the most famous French actors thanks to roles in films by François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, was cast in the main part. It might be regarded as a great success on the part of the young Polish filmmaker to ensure the presence of such a star. However, Skolimowski claimed that Léaud did not need persuasion because he was available at the time. The female lead, Michèle, was played by Catherine Duport, an actress whose only memorable part prior to _Le Départ_ was in Jean-Luc Godard's _Masculin féminin_ (1966). Other parts were played by French or Belgian actors because the film was meant to be shot in French and the budget did not allow for dubbing. The members of the crew were also non-Polish, with the exception of the composer, Krzysztof Komeda, who was Skolimowski's friend and long-time collaborator.3

 **Figure 25.1** Jean-Pierre Léaud in _Le Départ_. (Jerzy Skolimowski, director; Bronka Ricquier, producer; 1967).

The budget of _Le Départ_ was about US$100 000, which according to Skolimowski was low even for the standards of the 1960s. This affected its shooting schedule, which amounted to only about 20 days and the director's fee, which was US$4000, a very small sum in his view. However, by this time Skolimowski made predominantly low-budget films, which he shot on a reduced schedule and in difficult ­circumstances. _Le Départ_ thus did not represent a departure from his usual working methods. Furthermore, his fee, which allowed him to buy a Ford Mustang, was a fairy-tale sum for the majority of Poles, even those working in the film industry. Skolimowski's Mustang became a legendary vehicle, not least because in due course he sold it to Czesław Niemen, the greatest Polish pop star of the 1960s. The shooting of the film was accompanied by media hype in Poland. The Polish press published reports from the sets, underscoring the role of Léaud as a sign of the international success of Skolimowski and the Polish film industry at large, and a television report was made on the set. In it, the director came across as a "golden boy" of Polish cinema, handsome, self-confident, and inventive with his cinematic equipment, as conveyed in an image of him lying on a tram track while preparing to film Léaud and Duport.

 _Le Départ_ belongs to the coming-of-age genre, popular in cinema at large and especially widely used in the 1960s European new waves, with which Skolimowski's cinema had many features in common. The advantage of choosing a young protagonist, therefore somebody without a history, was that it allowed the director to conceal his lack of knowledge about the culture which shaped his character. This is because, as Jean-Luc Godard observes in one of his films, _Éloge de l'amour_ ( _In Praise of Love_ , 2001), young people do not have history; history only moves through them. They can thus be regarded as immigrants even in a culture into which they were born. Their whole identity is encapsulated by one or two superficial features, which in the case of Marc are working as a hairdresser apprentice and his burning desire to be a champion racing driver. His urge to drive fast cars signifies Marc's rejection of the place and time in which he finds himself: he always wants to be elsewhere and therefore cannot stop moving. Moving and restlessness is also an expression of his youthfulness, understood as a lack of form and a frantic search for it. The whole narrative revolves around Marc's efforts to procure a vehicle, which includes attempting to steal cars from a Porsche showroom and a petrol ­station and obtaining enough money to rent a car. In the course of his efforts Marc meets a pretty girl, Michèle, who helps him to realize his dream. In the end, ­however, Marc fails to take part in the race because the couple oversleep in a hotel, where they have gone for some rest before the race. Although Marc fails to become a racing-car champion, in the final part of the film he appears to achieve the fulfillment he was yearning for. It comes to him when he is looking at a series of ­photographs that Michèle brought to the hotel and which they project on the wall. What Marc sees in this projection can be regarded as heterotopia: a place that simultaneously exists and does not exist and which is made out of many incompatible elements. This is because every film or rather every screen, like every mirror, is a heterotopia. As Foucault maintains,

In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. (Foucault [1984] 1998: 231–232)

 **Figure 25.2** Jean-Pierre Léaud in _Le Départ_. (Jerzy Skolimowski, director; Bronka Ricquier, producer; 1967).

In Skolimowski's film, in a fashion which brings to mind Godard's _Les ­carabiniers_ (1963), this heterotopic aspect of the slide projection is underscored by Michèle's photographs merging with Marc's shadow as it is cast on the wall. At one point the slides start to burn because the projector is too close to the lamp. Their melting melds the photographic image with the wall and Marc's image on it. For Marc this heterotopic projection has the power of illumination. After a long search for the "right" place he finds it on the screen, realizing that this place can be anywhere and nowhere. His face, which for the first time is peaceful and practically immobile, conveys the fact that he has reached his fulfillment. For Iwona Grodź (2011), this immobility signifies that Marc finally achieved maturity. It is tempting to "project" Marc's experience onto the director and see in the story of an aspiring racing champion a narrative of the maturation of the director himself, who after searching for his place in the West has realized that his true habitat will always be a film screen.

The search for heterotopia on the part of the film's character and, perhaps, its author, and the perspective of an outsider is also conveyed by the film's setting and cinematography. Being predominantly a Belgian production, _Le Départ_ was shot in Brussels. However, Skolimowski's Brussels comes across as a nameless French-speaking town and some viewers, unaware of the film's background, took it for Paris. Despite the fact that a large part of the film is set outdoors, the director shows no distinctive parts of this city. Instead, he privileges those features of Brussels which it shares with other Western towns, such as streets full of cars and places of transition or, to use Marc Augé's (1995) term, "non-places": pedestrian passages, subways, tunnels. They reflect the protagonist's rejection of the world which surrounds him and his dream of being elsewhere. It is also difficult to create a "mental map" of the town – for example, to assess the distance between the point of Marc's departure and destination – because the travel is either abruptly cut short or torturously extended. Similarly, it is difficult to say whether, upon ­leaving somewhere, Marc has reached the suburbs or found himself hundreds of miles away. Like a purposeless drifter, Marc has no sense of time or his time is asynchronous with that of the natives, therefore he is always late, or in the wrong place. The camera also obsessively returns to and magnifies signs of capitalist ­consumption, such as gigantic billboards, advertising cars, which also serve to cover a building site and cars displayed at a motorcycle exhibition, creating a kind of urban hyper-reality. The latter are represented much as models at fashion shows, as being unattainable idealized forms rather than having everyday practical value. The manner of representing objects of consumption, on the one hand, reveals the Easterner's superficial fascination with Western consumer culture. Such an ­interest can be seen as a specific case of every foreigner's approach to an unknown city. It is worth invoking here Walter Benjamin, who wrote, "The superficial, the exotic, the ­picturesque affects only the stranger. To approach a sight of a city as a native demands other, deeper motives" (1987: 183). On the other hand, it conveys the fear of objects thwarting human beings and the alienating effect of Western ­consumerism. This ambiguity concurs with the film's narrative, in which the sports car plays the role of a dream object that allows the protagonist to distance himself from his mundane and low-status job and find a purpose in life, but at the same time blinds him to other spheres of existence, changing him into an egoist and a solipsist. The ambiguous attitude to capitalistic materialism, as revealed in the film, can be seen as an attempt to cater to different types of audiences: Left-leaning or apolitical Western viewers, who are likely to condemn consumerism as leading to alienation, and East Europeans, for whom the film is a portal to a more attractive and even somewhat exotic reality.4 No doubt the portrayal of Brussels as an unfriendly "any town" was facilitated by the use of the same cinematographer, the Belgian Willy Kurant, and the actors, the previously mentioned Léaud and Duport, who had worked on Godard's _Masculin féminin_. Critics who wrote about Godard's film emphasized the fact that in it Paris comes across as unappealing and "dirty," despite the fact that Godard set it largely in areas of consumption and hedonism.

Skolimowski's lack of familiarity with Belgian culture and the French language, and hence the difficulty he found in filling the film all the way through with a ­convincing narrative explains the important role music plays in _Le Départ_. One feels that without the soundtrack the film would not survive as a coherent artifact and would instead break into a series of disjointed episodes. Music not only illustrates events or counterpoints them, it practically replaces them, filling long passages without words and endowing the whole film with energy as an episodes at the motor exhibition or one in which Marc is driving his car through the deserted streets and tunnels of Brussels exemplify. In the second case the music is very loud and aggressive, conveying Marc's approach to driving as if it was his private war against other people and the forces of nature. The sharp tones of Komeda's score are alternated with a lyrical song performed by Christiane Legrand (the sister of the famous composer), obviously exhibiting the more delicate side of a young car fanatic. The music in _Le Départ_ is also frequently mimetic. For example, in a scene when Marc quarrels with the driver of a motorcycle who caused an accident, the music amplifies the characters' quarrel, making it look comical. The replacement of words by music and other nonverbal means of communication can be construed as a perfect strategy to cover the director's lack of knowledge of the language spoken in his film. In a wider sense, the score in _Le Départ_ can be seen as a bridge between his Polish inheritance and the foreign world which the director would soon embrace for good.

It is difficult to create a coherent image of _Le Départ_ 's international reception. On the one hand, the film achieved an unquestionable success in terms of prestige, winning a Golden Bear, the main award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1967. It was also praised by some leading European film critics and cultural icons such as Marguerite Duras (B.S., 1967). Yet, on the other hand it remained unknown to a wider audience in 1960s Europe, including Poland. According to the director, its distribution must have been botched, because the producers were not happy with their returns and _Le Départ_ did not lead to any new proposals from Belgium. Unlike Skolimowski's "truly" Polish films or _The Shout_ (1978), _Le Départ_ does not have any after-life. The film is not available on DVD in any of the countries which were involved in its making and it is omitted from discussion in the more substantial articles devoted to the works of its director or from the histories of Polish cinema.

Equally, it is impossible to reconstruct what Skolimowski expected from _Le Départ_ for his career as there is a surprising lack of interviews with the director from this period; all opinions come much later. When talking with Jerzy Uszyński (Uszyński, 1990) and with me, he revealed a dismissive attitude to it, regarding it as an "unserious" work, unlike his Polish films of the 1960s, which dealt with ­important issues pertaining to Polish history and politics. He also admitted that during the shooting he was not fully in control of what was going on on the set, largely because he was not able to communicate effectively with the crew and cast, especially with Léaud, who did "his own thing" rather than following directions. Skolimowski also claimed that he did not have a copy of this film, neither did he watch it again after the 1960s.

Yet, despite its marginal position within Skolimowski's _oeuvre_ and the history of Polish cinema, for me _Le Départ_ constitutes one of the best films in Skolimowski's career. This is because it is a rare case of "pure cinema" created by a Polish ­director: a film unburdened by heavy political baggage, unlike most Polish films of the auteurist tradition, and taking full advantage of the opportunities of the medium. It excellently "programs sensations," to use Susan Sontag's phrase (1994: 303), ­giving immense pleasure to the eyes and ears of the viewer. Furthermore, I regard it as an interesting document of the youth-obsessed 1960s. The hyperactive Jean-Pierre Léaud gives one of the best performances of his career, almost standing for youth itself, or at least its 1960s connotations, as free, shunning responsibility, and rebellious (Oleksiewicz, 1969). The making of the film also helped Skolimowski in the years to come to make a successful transition to being a Western and nomadic director by teaching him how to work in an unfamiliar environment and use the limitations of such a situation creatively. Most importantly, from my perspective, in _Le Départ_ Skolimowski created a Polish and Eastern European version of heterotopia, understood as a way to achieve freedom in a situation where freedom was a great luxury.

#  ** _Birds, Orphans and Fools_** **: Creating a Countercultural Enclave**

In the 1960s, Juraj Jakubisko occupied a somewhat similar position in Slovak ­cinema to that of Jerzy Skolimowski in Polish cinema as both a national and transnational director. Practically all Jakubisko's films are, in a sense, very Slovak, thanks to being saturated with references to his nation's history, politics, and folklore. For many viewers, especially after the death of Elo Havetta, Jakubisko simply stands for Slovak cinema. Of course, this relates to when Slovakia did not exist as a separate state but was part of Czechoslovakia. But even at that time Slovak cinema, thanks to evoking a different cultural heritage and using a different language was frequently considered as a separate phenomenon from Czech cinema. This approach, inevitably, became even more common after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993.

At the same time, Jakubisko's films demonstrate allegiance to pan-European ideas, political movements, and styles, such as surrealism and 1960s counterculture. Jakubisko always presents a situation which is universal, such as the ­approaching apocalypse, and he talks on behalf of the whole of humanity rather than in the name of a specific nation or class. Thanks to his surrealist sensibility he tends to be compared to Federico Fellini and Alejando Jodorowsky, although he himself is more willing to acknowledge his debt to Godard on account of Godard's method of filmmaking (Hames, 2004) and his interest in alternative lifestyles (Owen, 2010).

Jakubisko's sense of belonging to movements that transcend national boundaries made the idea of co-production very appealing to him. It is worth mentioning that before embarking on _Birds, Orphans and Fools_ he made _Zbehovia a pútnici_ ( _The Deserter and the Nomads_ , 1968) as a Slovak–Italian co-production. However, his closeness to Godard rendered France an even more attractive partner than Italy. _Birds, Orphans and Fools_ , a co-production between French Como Film and Studio Hraných Filmov Bratislava, the main production company in Slovakia, was thus a dream which came true. In comparison with _Le Départ_ , the input of the "East side" was on this occasion much greater, both in terms of finance and the human ­contribution. The film was shot in Slovak and two of the three main roles were filled by Slovak actors, Magda Vásáryová, who despite her youth was by the time a major star in Czechoslovakia, and Jirí Sýkora, who played the main part in _The Deserter and the Nomads_. A French actor of moderate success, Philippe Avron, ­completed the trio.

The making of the film, in common with Skolimowski's _Le Départ_ , was marked by a low budget and reduced shooting schedule, in the style of Godard's 1960s productions. As the director put it himself:

[Godard] was an inspiration for me, in _Birds, Orphans and Fools_ , so I went out into the real world and let myself be inspired by what I observed there, and immediately filmed what I saw. This film was made very, very quickly. It had a very short script; it's the shortest of any that I've used. Normally I have a script which might have 200 pages, but this had about 30. A whole load of scenes came into being just on the run – they were done on the hoof. We ran into something, we saw something and we filmed it immediately. (Jakubisko quoted in Hames, 2004: n.p.)

Jakubisko's film appears to be more undisciplined and spontaneous than ­anything done by Godard, with many dialogues or even entire scenes improvised. The approach adopted by the director to various aspects of the film, such as ­characters, narrative, _mise en scène_ , and music consists of universalizing nation-specific ­features, seeing them as trans-historical and transcultural. The three main characters in the film are Slovak Yorick, Polish Andrej (whose name is spelled in the Slovakian form in the credits, though it would in fact be "Andrzej" in Polish), and Marta, who is presented as Jewish, rather than having a national identity, which reflects the fact that Jews in Eastern Europe are often treated as a separate ­category. The choice of a Pole as one of the main characters in the film by a Slovak director can be explained by Poland's proximity to Slovakia; like Czechs, Poles are Slovaks' "brothers," ­sharing with them chunks of history and mythology (including the famous Robin Hood-like hero, Janosik), as well as being their competitors, often for the favors of their masters during the period of Austro-Hungarian Empire, within which Poles and Slovaks played rather minor roles. Yorick and Andrej's competion for a woman, which Andrej eventually wins, can be regarded as a metaphor of turbulent Polish–Slovak relations. Both Poland and Slovakia had large Jewish populations, which perished during World War Two. In common with Slovaks, during the war Poles both helped the Jews and took advantage of their misery. Jakubisko refers to this legacy early in the film by showing Marta in striped clothes of the type worn by concentration camp inmates with her head almost shaved bald because she has lice. Yet, Jakubisko does not ponder the different histories or national identities of the three characters. There is nothing particularly Polish about Andrej or Jewish about Marta's behavior. They speak, metaphorically and literally, the same ­language. Jakubisko gives these characters different nationalities to investigate whether they are able and willing to live together and love each other, in contrast to their nationalistic ancestors, as expressed by Yorick's words, "Our parents killed each other."

Overcoming cultural and national boundaries is linked in Jakubisko's films to the 1960s counterculture (Mazierska, 2008: 159–160; Owen, 2010), which was a transnational phenomenon. The characters manifest their allegiance to this movement in two somewhat contradictory ways. On the one hand, they are preoccupied with the idea of revolution. As Jonathan Owen observes, it is incarnated in the film in such noble and "liberatory" endeavors as the 1944 Slovak National Uprising and the drive for Czechoslovak independence around the time of World War One. The sanctified figure of Milan Štefánik, a Slovak general and politician instrumental (along with Jan Masaryk and Edvard Beneš) in the creation of the 1918 Czechoslovak state is particularly central, as Yorick claims that he is Štefánik's son (Owen, 2010: 21). Revolution is also evoked by references to Godard's _La Chinoise_ (1967) – for ­example, by mentioning Mao in dialogue. The gun-toting Slovak Partisan, who runs alongside Yorick's car, apparently convinced that the fascists have not yet been vanquished, and an incongruous band of guerrillas who fall down "dead" in a street skirmish, only to get up again attest, as Owen argues, to the continuity of revolutionary attempts throughout history (2010: 22). In my opinion, this stream of characters and events belonging to different times and cultures demonstrates that Andrej, Yorick, and Marta align themselves more with universal and transhistorical emancipatory urges than with a specific revolution. To refer to the central term of my chapter, they dream about "heterotopian" revolution, not a "located" and provincial uprising.

On the other hand, the counter-cultural views of the trio are confirmed by their decision to live outside (mainstream) society. Owen aptly describes them as ­decidedly demoralized hippie trailblazers and strangely meek Surrealist refuseniks (2010: 22). Indeed, they behave as if they were an island, unperturbed by the waves passing through the sea that surrounds them. They are obsessively preoccupied with each other; it feels as if they do not allow anybody to enter their space, unless it is on their own terms: the outsider has to agree to fool with them. Equally, they show no interest in other people's pursuits. They abandon work or remunerative activity and engage in "free love." They refuse to be "normal" citizens because they find "normal life," encapsulated by the dilapidated houses and orphanages, police patrols, and continuous shoot-outs on the streets frightening and repulsive.

Ultimately, Jakubisko demonstrates the failure of the trio not only to make any change in the wider society but even to maintain their freewheeling lifestyle. Yorick is arrested when he stops a police car asking for petrol and is sentenced to a year in prison. Inevitably, this event marks the end of their _ménage à trois_. While Yorick is in prison, Andrej starts to work as a photographer and Marta becomes pregnant by him. The couple welcome Yorick back home, and for a while all of them again wear silly hats when running crazily through their enormous half-ruined house, but by this time their paths have begun to separate. Yorick cannot accept Martha's embrace of the future and domesticity, and he brutally murders her and takes his own life. Their deaths ultimately show the Eastern European countercultural ­heterotopia as possible to create, but impossible to sustain.

The characters' rejection of national and historical boundaries and their search for a transcultural and trans-historical enclave is also articulated by the construction of _mise en scène_ , camera movements, and the use of color. The clothes which Yorick, Andrej, and Marta wear signify different periods and cultures. They include typical Slovak sheepskin waistcoats, Gypsy dresses, heavy military jackets and caps, clown attire, and the fake concentration camp uniform. At home the ­characters wear "Archimboldo" masks, and in one scene we see Yorick styling a naked woman on an Archimboldo or Dalí sculpture. The interior décor includes references to surrealists Chirico and Dalí, as well as to the style of petit ­bourgeoisie. Unlike a normal house, which constitutes a buffer between its inhabitant and the external world, the first house the trio live in is both a more enclosed and more open space. The doors do not close rooms but stay or lie unattached to ­embrasures. Windows, which normally border inside and outside space, lie inside and serve the characters as mirrors. The house is connected with other houses from where uninvited guests arrive, such as a group of children from an orphanage, behaving as if they were in their own home. Moreover, the house is fortified by some beams which look like birch trees growing indoors. The inhabitants hang a huge canvas with painted landscape, which adds to an illusion that their home borders inner and outer space, civilization, and nature. The second house, to which Andrej and Marta move when Yorick is in prison because of their need to have a warmer place for their future child, is more conventional inside, but from outside appears to be even less "normal" than their first home. It is a small building perched on top of a large house, and thus can be regarded as a link between earth and heaven. Its detachment from the street and city might suggest the couple's need for security and privacy, but, paradoxically, Marta finds death here at Yorick's hands.

The space which Jakubisko's trio traverses is also liminal: it borders countryside and the city, as well as historical and present reality, as already indicated. For example, when they leave their home they find themselves on a street where people are shooting at each other, which brings association both with the World War Two and the intervention of the army of the Warsaw Pact, following the Prague Spring. Afterwards, we see them in an open car, somewhere in a non-specific countryside. It is not clear how they moved from the city to the country or, indeed, how they acquired a car. The sense of fluidity of space is further added to by the camera, which is relentlessly moving, encircling or squashing the people, shooting from a very high or a very low angle, zooming and moving away. On several occasions the characters look straight into the camera, in this way also breaking "the fourth wall," dividing the cinematic reality and the real world inhabited by the viewers. The color changes throughout the film. Part one is shot in clear, garish colors, bringing to mind Godard's late 1960s films. By contrast, the episodes of Yorick's term in prison and his return to his friends are in black and white – the style of old newsreels, documentaries, and war films. Finally, the last part of the film, showing Yorick's visit to Marta and Andrej's house, is in sepia: the color of old photographs. Hence, the experiments with color signify Jakubisko's rambling through history: his unwillingness to fix his characters in any time or culture.

Equally trans-cultural is the score, written by Zdeněk Liška, the most acclaimed composer of film music in Czechoslovakia, who in _Birds, Orphans and Fools_ , in my opinion, reached the peak of his abilities. As with _Le Départ_ , music guides the viewer through the meanders of the narrative. The score is dominated by two motifs. One, very dynamic, played by brass instruments and inspired by Slovak folklore, prevails in the first part of the film, when the three characters live happily together in their dilapidated castle. It brings to mind military parades, popular in Czechoslovakia.5 The second motif, played by a symphonic orchestra with a choir, is lyrical and draws on romantic Western music, and it prevails in the second part of the film, marked by the disintegration of the bond between Yorick, Andrej, and Marta. This motif furnishes the love affair with an almost epic dimension and at the same time universalizes it by placing it in the tradition of Western romanticism and melodrama.

Jakubisko mobilizes all these visual and aural means to construct his own version of a world made up of many worlds overlapping each other, and at the same time standing outside a normal spatial-temporal order. Jakubisko's creation of heterotopia resembles "rambling through space and time," as practiced by Godard in his 1960s films, including _Pierrot le fou_ (1965), _Made in USA_ (1966), and _La Chinoise_ (1967). One reason that Godard created heterotopias in his films was to convey his characters' desire to escape from the "here and now" of France of the 1960s, a country marred by the Algerian war and the permeation of indigenous culture by American influences. Likewise, in the case of Jakubisko the search for a ­heterotopia expresses a desire to escape the "here and now," although on this occasion it is the reality of a totalitarian state. In common with his characters, Jakubisko was also unable to escape this reality. His film, the making of which coincided with the intervention of the armies of the Warsaw Pact to crush the Prague Spring, was shelved and only had its premiere in 1976. Yet, partly thanks to problems with ­censorship it became a cult film for cosmopolitan cinephiles.

#  ** _The Test of Pilot Pirx_** **: Producing an "Other Space"**

Unlike Jerzy Skolimowski and Juraj Jakubisko, who are identified with the ­auteurist tradition in Eastern European cinema and epitomize its connections with the West, Marek Piestrak, the director of _The Test of Pilot Pirx_ is one of the main ­representatives (and in the Polish context the ultimate representative) of Polish genre cinema and stands for this cinema's links with the Socialist East. Yet, ­contrary to his reputation as a model "Socialist filmmaker," before becoming an ­independent director Piestrak gained a distinctive taste of the West, working as an assistant to Roman Polanski on his Hollywood production _Rosemary's Baby_ (1968). This experience also affected his decision, unusual in the Socialist context, to make ­popular films.

In a broader context, as Eva Näripea (2010) and Piotr Kletowski (2008) observe, the production of _Pirx_ coincided with a burgeoning generic trend that saw a true blast of interest in science fiction cinema in the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc. This, in turn, had been affected by a popular renaissance of the science fiction film in Hollywood after the 1977 release of George Lucas's _Star Wars_ and Steven Spielberg's _Close Encounters of the Third Kind_. Näripea (2010) also situates the ­production of _Pirx_ in the context of the Soviet film industry taking a firm course towards the politics of mass entertainment during the 1970s, which saw an ­officially sponsored campaign for the production of more entertainment-oriented films (on the politics of mass entertainment see also First, 2008). A somewhat similar trend could be observed in an analogous period in Poland, as well as in other East European countries. In Poland, it reflected the country's opening up of itself to Western influences and an attempt to commercialize the film industry (as well as the Polish economy at large), with a number of then young filmmakers, led by Juliusz Machulski, proclaiming their wish to entertain the audience.

 _Pirx_ occupies a special place in Piestrak's career as it is his first full-length feature film, his first international co-production, and his greatest commercial and, ultimately, critical success. Its origin lies in the director's interest in Stanisław Lem's works, as testified by his making, prior to filming _Pirx_ , the television film Ś _ledztwo_ ( _Interrogation_ , 1974), based on Lem's short horror story set in London. For his full-length feature debut Piestrak also wanted to use the work of the most famous Polish author of science fiction. A short story, _Rozprawa_ ( _Trial_ ), from a volume on Pilot Pirx was optimal because it was largely set in a court and inside a space ship, which did not require building elaborate sets. Still, Piestrak realized that even _Pirx_ might have to be an international co-production because Polish film studios did not have the required special effects capability. He hoped to find partners somewhere in Eastern Europe; to involve Western producers was out of the question, as much for economic as for political reasons.

The Committee of Cinema (Komitet Kinematografii), the highest film institution in Poland, decided to make _Pirx_ as a Polish–Soviet co-production. Yet, of course, the Soviet Union, from the viewpoint of film industry, meant many different studios, landscapes, and cultures of filmmaking. Piestrak's first choice was Georgia, but it turned out that the conditions in the Tbilisi studio were too primitive and communication with the people working there too difficult to guarantee a successful outcome. By contrast, people in Tallinnfilm, which was Piestrak's second option, were enthusiastic and professional; therefore _Pirx_ effectively became a Polish–Estonian co-production. Unlike Skolimowski and Jakubisko, who were working on a tight budget, Piestrak, in typical Socialist fashion, was detached from the institutional and financial side of making _Pirx_. He did not know the budget of his films and presumed that nobody did: it was obscured by the Socialist bureaucracy, currency exchange rates decided by politicians, and Socialist disrespect for money.

However, Tallinnfilm lacked all the resources needed for making such a complicated film. As a result, Piestrak and other members of his crew rambled through Europe in search of suitable locations. In Tallinn, they used principally Viru, a luxurious and somewhat futuristic hotel targeted at Western guests. Other scenes were shot in the hotel Victoria in Warsaw, again, the most luxurious hotel in Warsaw at the time, and the seventeenth-century castle in Moszna in southern Poland. Some scenes were shot in the then newly built Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. The multinational setting has its equivalent in casting decisions. Owing to the difficulty in obtaining Polish stars, such as Daniel Olbrychski and Andrzej Seweryn, Piestrak opted largely for Russian and Estonian actors, such as Sergei Desnitskii, Vladimir Ivashov, Tõnu Saar, and Aleksandr Kaidanovskii, who is best known for his later role in Tarkovskii's _Stalker_ (1979).6 Of course, the method of shooting the film, which the director himself described as "patchwork," namely using elements from different settings and cultural traditions to achieve a specific effect both reflected and affected the narrative and ideology of the film, and subsequently its reception.

The film, in common with Lem's Pirx cycle, on which it is based, and in accordance with many other sci-fi films, projects a world of "international unity" without the Iron Curtain or, for that matter, without any clearly discernible national boundaries (Sontag, 1994; Näripea, 2010). It is set somewhere in the Western hemisphere, in the twenty-first or twenty-second century. In this future, mankind has already thoroughly traversed much of the solar system, has colonies on the moon and Mars, and has begun to explore further parts of the galaxy. Accordingly, the film concerns a top secret mission, publicly announced as a space flight around Saturn to test new automatic probes for passing through the Cassini Division. The true purpose of the operation, however, is to test new kind of "super-human" robots, developed by the United Atomic Laboratories, which are expected to replace humans in most functions yet also bring the risk of rendering people redundant. Pilot Pirx is chosen as the commander for the mission. He is given a crew of five persons, all of whom are unaware of the human or non-human identity of the others. After the space ship, quite tellingly called Goliath, embarks on its interplanetary journey, several crew members come to Pirx, one after another, to confess their identity in confidence. Pirx manages to find out who is human and who is not and save Goliath from total destruction. He does so precisely because he is himself human, which means imperfect but "multidimensional," and able to balance emotions with rational judgments.

The names of Piestrak's characters, John Calder, Tom Nowak, Jan Otis, Kurt Weber, and Harry Brown, suggest Anglo-Saxon, German, and Polish origin, but also, as in the case of Jan Otis, a post-national, hybridized identity. Even those characters with "national" names do not have a nationality or history. Some of them are robots: they are defined by what they do and how well they fulfill their tasks. The fact that Goliath's crew does not work well together, as shown by their ­continuous spying on each other and their choice of self-destruction over cooperation, suggests that the project of creating a postnational society whose _raison d'être_ is work is ultimately doomed Such representation, although not unusual in Western science fiction cinema (Kuhn, 1990; Sontag, 1994), can be read as a veiled criticism of a project to create a "postnational nation," which strongly informed Soviet ideology and which, as we learnt, led to the collapse of communism, many ethnic conflicts, and the dissolution of multi-ethnic countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall, such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and, of course, the Soviet Union. Equally, in the idea of replacing humans by human-like robots we can read a ­condemnation of the Soviet plan to create a Stakhanovite working force made up of people who are indestructible and loyal to the Communist cause rather than one's family or nation.

 **Figure 25.3** Multiplied identities in _The Test of Pilot Pirx_ (Marek Piestrak, 1979).

Yet, Piestrak's representation of, and attitude towards, the post-national world is deployed largely through visual means, which is the aspect of the film where Piestrak could best convey his authorial perspective. As Näripea observes, _The Test of Pilot Pirx_ only includes some very general geographical references. For example, English language is used on the signs – "Laboratory," "Police," "Airport"; the names of the companies such as the United Atomic Laboratories and Cybertronic, Inteltron, and Nortronics indicate an Anglo-American origin, as does an aircraft bearing the logo of PAN-AM and a billboard advertising Delta Airlines. The architectural attributes, including an unmistakably American gridded cityscape full of skyscrapers, an eclectic historicist palace (for which the castle in Moszna was used) and several high-rise curtain-walled slabs of international style and numerous modern interiors create an image of a generic West rather than of a particular locality (Näripea, 2010), which also, as I argued, was the case in _Le Départ_. In this universe the historical buildings suggest a long lineage of past heritage and thus an advanced cultural consciousness, while the modern constructions exemplify the technologically sophisticated and cosmopolitan present and future. As Näripea observes, the unmistakably positive depiction of Western architectural reality, which in Soviet cinema would have been a representational taboo in any other framework than that of science fiction (which offered a certain freedom as a genre of the fantastic), the awe-inspiring Western-built environments, these images of sleek and chic modernist interiors and exteriors very likely threw into relief the disappointments of the Soviet-style interpretations of modernist conceptions, thus providing a covert critique of the immediate architectural realities of the Soviet bloc blocks (2010).

Such a reading of the film as a criticism of the poverty of Eastern architecture and urban design is to some extent confirmed by the anecdotes told by Piestrak about the making of the film. For example, he mentions the awe with which his actors reacted to the modernist architecture of Paris and how he selected from the buildings available in Poland and Estonia those most likely to be associated with the West. Even the fact that he chose as his partner the studio in Tallinn, arguably the most culturally Westernized of the capitals of the Soviet republics over the more Eastern and Southern Tbilisi, on account of the fact that the Estonians were more "Western" in their outlook than the Georgians, points to him being Western-oriented. The fascination with Western technology and lifestyle is also suggested by a long sequence in which Pirx is escaping in his convertible from a lorry that chases him on a steep and twisting road. The whole sequence emulates the style of American road movies, and no doubt the director wanted to create such an effect. On the other hand, Piestrak draws on the conventions of representing space and particularly interiors in the Cinema of Moral Concern, a paradigm dominating Polish cinema in the second half of the 1970s, the time concurrent with making _Pirx_. For example, we see long corridors and huge offices, which allows those in a position of power to emphasize their distance towards their subordinates and ­customers. Such representations suggest a sinister and totalitarian world where important decisions are made in secrecy and those at the bottom of the social hierarchy have no access to those at the top.

We also find such a mixture of elements from Western and Eastern architecture in Godard's _Alphaville_ (1965) and Ridley Scott's _Blade Runner_ (1982). These films propose an idea that the abolition of national boundaries or the division between East and West led to the creation of a reality which has the worst features of the two old systems. For example, the futuristic Los Angeles in _Blade Runner_ is simultaneously totalitarian and chaotic. Piestrak's universe is not chaotic, but it is ­certainly disorientating and alienating; one cannot feel at home in the reality he shows us.

Not only is it the space that is fragmented but also the film's narrative. This is largely a function of the way Piestrak edits separate images and whole sequences. For example, close-ups tend to be juxtaposed with images shot from a great distance and high-angle shots with low-angle ones. There is also no indication why and how Pirx finds himself in places such as an eclectic palace or in the mountains. This style, which, again, can be explained by the "patchwork" method of shooting the film, nevertheless conveys the disorientation and homelessness of the characters, and is disorienting to the viewer. As in _Le Départ_ , music is given the role of filling some gaps in the narrative and keeping the film together. The score, ­composed by Arvo Pärt, the most famous Estonian composer, is in large part ­electronic and has an "out of this world" feeling to it, but at the same time it has a distinct melody and conveys a specific mood for each episode. It can also be described as "heterotopic," as it combines different musical traditions: futuristic electronic music with classical, inspired by Romanticism and 1970s pop.

 **Figure 25.4** An inter-galactic ship in _The Test of Pilot Pirx_ (Marek Piestrak, 1979).

The combination of signifiers of Western and Eastern cultures produces a ­heterotopia in _Pirx_. On this occasion the heterotopia is both the whole world and the ship led by Pirx. Of course, in science-fiction cinema heterotopia is a norm, because by definition such films are set in "other places." However, the choice of using this genre and creating this particular kind of heterotopia, in which East and West, history and future, intermingle, is not ideologically neutral. It points to the dream to travel freely, typical of people from the Socialist East, for whom a ­passport was a luxury. At the same time, it conveys their fear of losing their identity if they are absorbed by the West.

The inconsistencies in the film's construction of space, narrative, and ideology prompted Näripea to describe _Pirx_ as a cult film, in line with Umberto Eco's definition: "To become cult, a movie should not display a central idea but many. It should not exhibit a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on in and because of its glorious incoherence" (1985: 4). _Pirx_ is also a cult film because it has attracted faithful audiences, as confirmed by its frequent broadcasting on Polish private ­television channels. It was also an unquestionable box office success. Its audience in Poland and the Soviet Union alone was counted in millions and it was sold to over 20 countries. To its successes we should also add the main prize at the Festival of Science Fiction Films in Triest in 1979 and enthusiastic reviews in _Variety_ and the Italian press. It also gained popular and critical acclaim in Estonia. Yet, in the director's native country until recently _Pirx_ was everything but critically acclaimed. It has been a fixture on various lists of the worst Polish films and Piestrak was often labeled the worst Polish director. When _Pirx_ was not derided, it was ­overlooked. For example, it is not even mentioned in the recent _History of Polish Cinema_ , ­written by Tadeusz Lubelski (2009). When I asked its author about the reasons for this absence, he admitted that he never watched it, assuming that it was not worth his time. This case suggests that once a film gains a bad reputation in Poland, it is very difficult to shed it.

But why did _Pirx_ get such a reputation? One likely reason is its aura of being a Soviet product, tainted, therefore, by a disgraced ideology to a much larger extent than "purely" Polish films.7 Another reason is the prejudice of Polish critics towards popular cinema and especially non-realistic genres, such as science-fiction and ­horror, which are regarded as Western and specifically American specialties. Finally, the negative attitude reflects the rejection of hybridity, detected in Piestrak's product.

However, time works in favor of _Pirx_. Its critical reputation is slowly changing, largely thanks to the fact that the work of younger Polish and Estonian film historians, in comparison with that of their older colleagues, shows a greater interest in genre and popular cinema (Kletowski, 2008; Näripea, 2010). The factors which previously aroused contempt in critics, the film's hybridity and its alleged incompatibility with the national style of Polish cinema, began to be viewed as assets. Polish historians are thus catching up with the fans of Piestrak, who from the time of the film's premiere were the ones who revealed more postmodern sensibility. I welcome this interest, regarding _The Test of Pilot Pirx_ as an interesting case of stretching the boundaries of "Polish cinema," an important contribution to the history of science fiction, and a fascinating attempt to create an Eastern European heterotopia.

#  **Conclusion**

Despite the differences in genres, the nationalities of the directors and of their foreign partners, the result in the three films discussed is the construction of ­heterotopia: a space created out of real but incompatible spaces and existing ­outside the normal political, cultural, or even physical order. Such a result can be partially explained by the difficulties of shooting the films far from home. More importantly, however, these heterotopias evince their authors' and viewers' desire for liberation from the constraints of living in a specific place and time (Eastern Europe, time of Communist rule and loss of individuality) and, equally, their ­anxiety over living in the opposite system (Western Europe, capitalism, alienating ­consumerism). For this reason, the heterotopias that I found in these films are fragile and not overly happy places; they rather mark a search for a better place than the fulfillment of this search. Yet, this search is worth celebrating as a form of (even if not always conscious) political and cultural dissent. It is worth referring here again to Foucault who in "Of other Spaces" calls for a society with many ­heterotopias, as a sign of affirmation of difference and a means of escape from authoritarianism and repression. Foucault uses a ship as the ultimate metaphor of heterotopia, claiming that a society without ships is inherently a repressive one ([1984] 1998). In _The Test of Pilot Pirx_ that ship has a literal presence. In my view, though, the desire to find or build a ship is inscribed in the narratives of all three films discussed in this chapter.

 **Notes**

1 The films made by Krzysztof Kieslowski in France, Roman Polanski's _The Pianist_ (2002) or the films by Béla Tarr attracted much attention both in the directors' countries of origin and internationally. Equally, they are often treated through the lenses of "transnationalism."

2 As a large proportion of the information I needed proved unavailable in the existing sources, I conducted interviews with the directors of the films discussed.

3 By this time Komeda had written scores for a number of non-Polish films.

4 The attitude to Western consumerism in this film also reflects the stance taken in ­Skolimowski cinema at large, which simultaneously reveal fascination with and ­repulsion of wealth (Mazierska, 2010).

5 Liška wrote a similar type of music for _Lalie polné_ ( _Field Lilies_ , 1972) by Elo Havetta.

6 In due course the casting of Russian actors caused a lot of problems because arranging passports and visas for them was always a challenge. This was especially true of Kaidanovskii who was then regarded in Russia as a dissident.

7 In this respect _Pirx_ can be compared to _Sibirska Ledi Magbet_ ( _Siberian Lady Macbeth_ , 1961), which Andrzej Wajda made in Yugoslavia. This film, which I find to be one of the most interesting in Wajda's career, is practically non-existent in Polish history or the history of Wajda's cinema, unlike his _Danton_ (1983), which was made in France.

 **References**

Augé, M. (1995) _Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity_. Verso, London.

Benjamin, W. (1987) Die wiederkehr des flaneurs (Return of the flaneur), in _Beroliniana_. Union Verlag Berlin, Berlin.

Bergfelder, T. (2005) National, transnational or supranational cinema? Rethinking European film studies. _Media, Culture & Society_, 27 (3): 315–331.

B.S. (1967) Filmy, o których się mówi: _Start_ (Films which are talked about: _Le Départ_ ). _Film_ , 23: 3.

Eco, U. (1985) _Casablanca_ : cult movies and intertextual collage. _SubStance_ , 14 (2): 3–12.

Foucault, M. ([1984] 1998) Of other spaces (trans. Jay Miskowiec), in _The Visual Culture Reader_ (ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff), 2nd. edn. Routledge, London, pp. 229–36.

First, J. (2008) From spectator to "differentiated" consumer. _Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History_ , 9 (2): 317–344.

French, A. (1982) _Czech Writers and Politics 1945–1969_. Columbia University Press, New York.

Grodź, I. (2011) _Jerzy Skolimowski_. Więź, Kraków.

Hames, P. (2004) Interview with Juraj Jakubisko, <http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/­interviews/jakubisko.html> (accessed May 14, 2010).

Harvey, D. (1989) _The Condition of Postmodernity_. Blackwell, London

Jäckel, A. (2003) _European Film Industries_. BFi, London.

Kletowski, P. (2008) Polska fantastyka filmowa, czyli przypadek Marka Piestraka (Polish film fantasy, or the case of Marek Piestrak). Polskie kino popularne (Polish Popular Cinema) conference, Bydgoszcz, May 2008.

Kuhn, A. (ed.) (1990). _Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema_. Verso, London.

Lubelski, T. (2009) _Historia kina polskiego: tworcy, filmy, konteksty_ (History of Polish cinema: authors, films, contexts). Videograf II, Katowice.

Mazierska, E. (2008) _Masculinities in Polish, Czech and Slovak Cinema: Black Peters and Men of Marble_. Berghahn, Oxford.

Mazierska, E. (2010) _Jerzy Skolimowski: The Cinema of a Nonconformist_. Berghahn, Oxford.

Näripea, E. (2010) Transnational spaces of science fiction: an Estonian–Polish ­coproduction _The Test of Pilot Pirx_ ( _Test pilota Pirxa_ / _Navigaator Pirx_ , 1978). _Kinokultura_ , <http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/10/pirx-naripea.shtml> (accessed June 6, 2010).

Oleksiewicz, M. (1969) Podarunek dla aktora (Gift for the actor). _Film_ , 10: 5.

Owen, J. (2010) Slovak bohemians: revolution, counterculture and the end of the sixties in Juraj Jakubisko's films. _Studies in Eastern European Cinema_ , 1 (1): 17–28.

Sontag, Susan (1994). The imagination of disaster, in _Against Interpretation_. Vintage, London, pp. 209–225.

Vertovec, S. (1999) Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism. _Ethnic and Racial Studies_ , 22 (2): 447–462.

Uszyński, J. (1990) Jerzy Skolimowski o sobie: Całe życie jak na dłoni. _Film na_ ś _wiecie_ , 379: 3–47.

Walker, M. (1970) Jerzy Skolimowski, in _Second Wave: Newer than New Waves Names in World Cinema_ (ed. Ian Cameron). Studio Vista, London pp. 34–62.

# 26

# East is East?

#  _New Turkish Cinema and Eastern Europe_

Melis Behlil

Within the last decade, one of the most attention-grabbing cinemas in the ­geographic region of Eastern Europe has been that of Turkey. More and more films from Turkey are being shown at international film festivals around the world, highlighting an upsurge in auteurist filmmaking. In 2008 Leslie Felperin noted in _Sight & Sound_ that "the word right now on the streets in film-festival-hosting towns is that Turkish cinema is hot in the way, say, Korean cinema was a few years ago." In 2009, the Rotterdam International Film Festival and Linz, the European capital of culture, hosted special programs devoted to "Young Turkish Cinema," ­comprised mostly of debut films made within the last few years. In addition to Nuri Bilge Ceylan's regular success at Cannes (Grand Jury Prize for both _Distant_ ( _Uzak_ ) in 2003 and _Once Upon a Time in Anatolia_ ( _Bir Zamanlar Anadolu'da_ ) in 2011, the FIPRESCI Prize for _Climates_ (İ _klimler_ ) in 2006, Best Director for _Three Monkeys_ ( _Üç Maymun_ ) in 2009), and Fatih Akın's numerous awards, Semih Kaplanoğlu won the Golden Bear in 2010 with his _Honey_ ( _Bal_ ). While Akın stands outside the "Istanbul School" with his German/Turkish background, Ceylan and Kaplanoğlu are joined by Yeşim Ustaoğlu, Derviş Zaim, Zeki Demirkubuz, and Reha Erdem as filmmakers who started out in the 1990s and changed the face of Turkish filmmaking. They are being followed by a new generation of directors who have made their feature debuts after 2006.

In addition to the festival cycles, popular cinema is also undergoing a revival in Turkey. Since the 1930s, various institutional attempts have been made in Europe to counter Hollywood's domination, both on a national (quotas, institutionalized financial support systems) and a regional level (transnational funding initiatives, film festival markets). In the last few years, however, the European country with the highest market share of locally produced films was neither France nor Germany, with their strong traditions of governmental backing for the film ­industry, but Turkey, which has limited and only very recent state support. Out of 264 films shown in the country in 2008, 50 were Turkish and 214 foreign (19 percent and 81 percent, respectively); nonetheless, Turkish films accounted for 60 percent of the tickets sold in the country, placing it fourth in the world after the United States, India, and South Korea in terms of market share held by local ­productions.1 This figure, much higher than in any other European country, would have been unimaginable in 1995, when the local films held 1 percent of the market share.

And yet, using the adjectives "European" or "Eastern European" is not ­something one can do without a second thought when the subject is Turkey. The European nature of Turkish "identity" has been a major point of discussion within the context of Turkey's application for membership of the European Union. Kevin Robins has argued that Turkey is seen as "an in-between place," with "a particular kind of hybridity" that does not "conform to European standards" (1996: 65–66). Geographically as well as culturally, it is at once both European and Asian, or more specifically, Middle Eastern. Its position inside Europe is similarly questioned; while lying on the outskirts of Eastern Europe, Turkey is also often not considered to be a part of that region. Dina Iordanova has called Turkey "non-Eastern European" (2002: 533), although she has since included the country in the Balkans, which she considers a "general area" (along with Eastern-Central Europe) of the Eastern bloc. While never a member of the bloc, Turkey has land in the Balkans, which places it alongside the former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and Greece (Iordanova, 2003: 14–15).

This chapter aims to examine contemporary Turkish cinema, while positioning it within a European, and more specifically, Eastern European context. This will involve an analysis that will investigate cultural influences, economic support, and production collaborations. I am not setting out to "prove" that Turkey is European, but I would like to put on display the existing connections on creative as well as institutional levels that may not be evident to all. In order to understand the current dynamics underlying the web of relations between Turkish and European cinemas, it is imperative to take a look at both Turkey's relationship with Europe and the history of its cinema.

#  **Turkey and Europe**

An analysis of Turkish–European relationships could go as far back as to the Ottoman era, when the Ottoman Empire ruled over a sizable portion of Eastern Europe, stretching to present-day Hungary. The empire's attempts to conquer Vienna were thwarted, however, and by the time the Turkish Republic was founded in 1923, Turkish land in Europe was reduced to a small piece in Eastern Thrace. The Ottoman presence in Eastern Europe did leave its mark, as the predominantly Muslim empire was properly othered and therefore acted as a catalyst in the ­forging of a common European identity. In Iver B. Neumann's words, "the ­dominant other in the history of the European state system remains 'the Turk' " because of the Ottomans' "military might," "physical proximity and a strong religious tradition" (1999: 39–40). The declaration of the republic represented the start of Turkey's ambitions for Europeanization.2 Following its neutrality in World War Two, Turkey positioned itself with the West, receiving American military and economic support from the Marshall Fund. One of the founding members of the Council of Europe since 1949 and of the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OECD) since 1961, the country also entered the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1952, placing itself at a distance from the Eastern bloc.

The most significant chapter in Turkey's saga of Europeanization began in 1959 when it first applied to become a member of the European Economic Community (EEC). An Association Treaty was signed in 1963, making the country the longest standing associate partner of the European Union. This was followed decades later by an application for full membership in 1987 and a customs union in 1995. In 1999, Turkey's status as a candidate was formally recognized, and accession talks began in 2005, only to be frozen the following year because of a number of obstacles, most significantly the issue of Cyprus. In the meantime, the European Union went through three enlargement phases in 1995 (Austria, Sweden, and Finland), 2004 (Malta, Cyprus, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, and Hungary), and, 2007 (Romania and Bulgaria).

Another significant aspect of Turkey's relationship with Europe is its migrant population in Western European countries, most significantly Germany, but also the Netherlands and Belgium. In 1961, Turkey and Germany signed a bilateral recruitment agreement, opening the way for unskilled Turkish migrant workers to move to Germany in large numbers. Many of them were later joined by their families, never to return. The number of Turkish citizens currently living in Germany is close to two million, not including over half a million Turks who have naturalized German citizens since 1972.3 As Dimitris Eleftheriotis notes, "a powerful racist perception of Turkish _Gastarbeiter_ as cultural and racial others, rather than fellow European cosmopolitan citizens," remains commonplace, all the while "Turkish songs compete in the Eurovision Song Contest and Turkish football teams play in the various UEFA competitions" (2006: 221).

Turkey's relationship with Europe is a complex one on many levels, reflecting the country's "in-between" position. Cinematically, Turkish styles and genres have traditionally had close relationships not only with Europe but also with the popular cinemas of India and Egypt, as well as the political filmmaking of the 1970s inspired by the Third Cinema movement. In his comprehensive historical survey of Turkish cinema, Savaş Arslan gives an account of its inclusion in various histories of world cinema – none of which devote more than simply a few pages, if that, to cinema in Turkey (2011: 2). Defining the boundaries of European cinema is not a simple task either. As Thomas Elsaesser notes, even demarcating Europe with spatial parameters would not solve this problem, as Turkey has land in both Europe and Asia (2005: 492). Consequently, Turkish cinema can, and indeed does, often appear in volumes exploring Asian or Middle Eastern cinemas.4 Despite being (at least partially) located in Eastern Europe geographically, the country is frequently left out of any accounts of the region because of its twentieth-century alliances, much like its neighbor Greece. Nevertheless, significant relationships exist, and stronger alliances have been formed between Turkey and the other countries in the region, as I hope to demonstrate in the following pages.

#  **A Brief History of Turkish Cinema**

As Savaş Arslan notes, cinema in Turkey has primarily been a form of entertainment (2009: 85). Until 1950, only about 100 films had been made in Turkey by a handful of directors, but throughout the 1950s, annual output reached an average of 60 films. The _Ye_ ş _ilçam_ period, named after Yeşilçam Street, on which most ­production companies were based, started in the late 1950s. Its peak was reached in the 1960s with an average of 150 films per year and continued until the ­mid-1970s, when it averaged about 175 films (Arslan 2009: 85). In 1972, Turkish cinema set a record with 299 films, making Turkey one of the most cinematically prolific countries in the world (Directorate General of Press & Information 2009: n.p.). A large number of the films were melodramas and comedies, with a strong star presence. 'Yeşilçam' was also greatly influenced by other cinemas; Turkish film historian Giovanni Scognamillo claims that 90 percent of the nearly 300 films produced in 1972 were remakes, adaptations, or spin-offs (qtd in Gürata, 2006: 242). This figure included both the cinemas of Hollywood and Europe in the West and India and Egypt in the East.

The dominance of local productions came to an end in the late 1970s for a ­number of reasons. After the 1973 OPEC crisis and the 1974 military intervention in Cyprus, the general wellbeing of the Turkish economy deteriorated notably. As ticket prices went up by 50 percent, the overall attendance at movie theaters declined by 45 percent (Scognamillo 1975: 351). The general unrest in society that made the streets unsafe kept families away from the theaters (Çetin-Erus, 2007: 124). The proliferation of television further abetted the decline of ticket sales. The popularity of soft-core porn films, along with the musical "arabesk" genre, both aimed at poor male urban migrants, helped keep production levels still relatively high in the late 1970s despite the drop in general admissions. All the same, the number of films produced per year sharply declined throughout the following two decades. Concurrently, the number of cinemas also declined, particularly that of smaller independent theaters, a large number of which closed down. From 2242 screens in 1970, the number of cinemas dwindled to 281 by 1991 (Erkılıç, 2003: 125, 177), an enormous 87 percent drop.

After the _coup d'état_ of 1980, Turkey underwent enormous social changes. All trade unions and associations were banned under the military rule, and censorship regulations were tightened. In the film industry, many of the smaller companies shut down, giving way to a newly flourishing video market (Tunç, 2006: 70). On the whole, the 1980s are considered to be a period of crisis in the industry. Attempts at a quota system by the post-military government were stifled, allegedly owing to prompt intervention by the US Embassy (Çokyiğit, 1989). At the same time, the structure of distribution was drastically altered. In 1989, Warner Bros. (WB) and United International Pictures (UIP) started distributing both local and foreign films in Turkey. Throughout the 1990s, the prominence of these foreign distribution firms was seen as one of the reasons why Turkish cinema could not recuperate its former health (Açar, 1996: 1186; Evren, 1997: 102).5 While films were still being produced in Turkey, distribution was a significant problem. Out of 37 films produced per year in 1995 and 1996, only 10 were released in theaters each year (Erkılıç, 2003: 177).

One of the most significant changes during this decade, especially in terms of relations with Europe, was Turkey's inclusion in Eurimages in 1990, cementing the country's position in Europe at least on an institutional level. Eurimages is the Council of Europe fund for the co-production, distribution, and exhibition of European cinematographic works. Following Turkey's 1987 application for membership, the European Community suggested it improve relations in a number of areas including culture (Ulusay, 2004: 113). It was soon after this that Turkey applied for membership of Eurimages. I will examine the influence of Eurimages on recent productions; but before moving on to more current events, one should look at the transformation that the Turkish film industry has experienced since the early 1990s. It is worthy of note that it was also one of the Eurimages-supported releases in 1996 that is now often seen as the turning point for this resurgence.

Yavuz Turgul's _The Bandit_ ( _E_ ş _kıya_ ) came out in November 1996, and ultimately sold over 2.5 million tickets. As the box-office numbers from the _Ye_ ş _ilçam_ era were not properly maintained, _The Bandit_ was considered the highest grossing film in Turkish film history (Mengü and İnci, 2000: n.p.). Since then, 39 local films have sold over a million tickets as of mid-2010. The market share of Turkish films does fluctuate, but there has been a steady overall increase since 2002.6 More importantly, the overall number for movie-going audiences showed an increase of over 50 percent, from 25 257 326 in 2000 to 38 528 956 in 2008.7 In fact, 1996 was also a turning point for independent filmmaking in Turkey, as Derviş Zaim's _Somersault in a Coffin_ ( _Tabutta Röva_ ş _ata_ ), an ultra-low-budget art-house picture, picked up four awards at the Antalya Film Festival, the oldest and most prestigious national film event.

From 1996 on, Turkish cinema has blossomed both in the local market in terms of ticket sales, and on a global scale at international film festivals. Arguably the most visible and significant influence to fire up Turkish cinema in the 2000s is the support system set up by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. After years of ­complaints from the industry about how the state never provided any help to the cinematic sector, a law overseeing "the Evaluation, Classification and Support of Feature Films" was passed in July 2004, followed by the "Regulation for the Support of Feature Films" established in November of the same year. Since 2005, the ­selection board has been convening twice a year to determine the projects to be supported in development, production, and post-production. This is a support ­system analogous to those in European countries, most notably to the French system.

While there is also support for short films and feature documentaries, the greater part of the funding the ministry provides is allocated for feature films. These funds are to be repaid to the ministry only in those cases where the film can recuperate its production costs at the box office. Although producers who are ­unable to repay their support funds are not allowed to apply with a new project for three years, if their film is invited to a competitive feature film festival or wins a significant award, this waiting period is deferred. Hence, there is a strong incentive for either doing well at the box office, or for entering the festival circuit.

The selection board has been evaluating feature film debut projects separately since 2008, presenting new filmmakers with an opportunity by evaluating them on a different set of criteria than the more experienced and established directors. The support for a first feature film is slightly lower, varying between 160 000 and 250 000 Turkish liras for all projects. From 2005 until 2009, a total of 140 films have been given nearly 30 million Turkish liras. While the amounts handed out may be only a portion of the films' budgets, they do provide a good starting point. Beyond the economic stimulus, the entire process of application and pronouncements produce excitement, motivation, and much debate within filmmaking circles (Köstepen, 2009: 7). However, one should keep in mind that in comparison, the total support fund provided by the French Centre National du Cinéma et de l'Image Animée (CNC) in 2008 alone was over 540 million euros, of which over 112 million euros were spent on production support (CNC, 2009: 13). The staggering difference is a clear indication that the support from the Turkish state is still fairly limited.

#  **(Eastern) European Influences on Turkish Cinema**

Despite the strong influences of Indian melodrama and classical Hollywood narration on popular Turkish cinema in the _Ye_ ş _ilçam_ era, the mid-1960s saw the rise of interest in, and emulation of, European art cinema. Gathered around the newly founded Cinematheque and the film magazine _Yeni Sinema_ ( _New Cinema_ ), a group of writers advocated a national cinema with international concerns, which would transcend _Ye_ ş _ilçam_ (Erdoğan, 2006: 231). The magazine published interviews with filmmakers such as Antonioni and Godard, whose influences are particularly noticeable in the works of Metin Erksan in the 1960s and the 1970s. Throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, this impact would strengthen as a young generation of filmmakers including Ömer Kavur and Ali Özgentürk sought to differentiate ­themselves from Yeşilçam. Erdoğan notes that John Gillet, a British film critic reporting to _Sight & Sound_ from the 1992 Istanbul Film Festival, describes a number of Turkish films at the festival as "pretentious allegories drawing on influences from Bunuel to Bergman" (2006: 233). In any case, a significant number of Turkish filmmakers have positioned themselves within the European art cinema tradition, and ­continue to do so.

In the recent decades following the fall of the Eastern bloc, this alignment with European filmmaking styles has shifted more to the East. It would be accurate to say that Russian culture is the greatest influence for the post-1990 generation of Turkish art-house filmmakers. In terms of directors, Andrei Tarkovsky is a clear inspiration, possibly more than any other. His influence on Nuri Bilge Ceylan has long been evident; many critics have made the comparison between the two auteurs. What is just as significant is that on Ceylan's web site, which has excerpts from glowing reviews for _Uzak_ during and after the Cannes Film Festival, five ­featured reviews mention Tarkovsky.8 And if stylistic similarities were not enough, in Ceylan's _Uzak_ the main protagonist, Mahmut, is accused by a friend of selling out: he had set out to be a director in the footsteps of Tarkovsky; instead, he became a commercial photographer. Later in the film, Mahmut watches _Stalker_ (1979) at home, only to switch to porn when his houseguest is bored enough to go to bed. Ceylan clearly adopts a position as Tarkovsky's follower not only in the film but also in its marketing.

Semih Kaplanoğlu has similarly singled out the Russian filmmaker as one of his favorites. In 1988, before launching his filmmaking career, Kaplanoğlu published a poetic piece about the director titled "For Tarkovsky, in view of the _Mirror_." More than two decades later, _Altyazı_ film magazine published a special issue to which filmmakers submitted short pieces illustrating their muses. Kaplanoğlu's contribution was a brief description of his visit to Tarkovsky's grave in Paris, accompanied by several photographs from the grave itself, as well as from _Honey_. This affinity has also been remarked upon by critics. In her review of _Milk_ ( _Süt_ ), titled " _Milk_ salutes _Mirror_ ," Ruken Öztürk analyzes the numerous parallels between the two films (2009: 85).

Other contemporary Turkish directors whose films have been called into ­comparison with those of Tarkovsky or who cite the Russian filmmaker as an influence include Yeşim Ustaoğlu and Tayfun Pirselimoğlu (Taubin, 2001; Çıtaklar, 2009; Akça, 2010: all n.p.).9 In many instances, these influences demonstrate themselves in a minimalist cinema with extremely long takes and a keen interest in the poetics of ordinary people's daily lives. Özcan Alper, who worked as the assistant director on Ustaoğlu's _Life on their Shoulders_ ( _Sırtlarındaki Hayat_ , 2004), directed his feature debut _Autumn_ ( _Sonbahar_ ) in 2008. _Autumn_ tells the story of a terminally ill convict, who is released from prison to spend his final days with his mother in their mountain cottage by the Black Sea. This can be seen as a twist on Aleksandr Sokurov's _Mother and Son_ ( _Mat i syn_ , 1997), where the mother is dying. Alper has also commented on Sokurov's influence on his work, citing Tarkovsky's heir ­apparent as a favorite (Akça, 2008: n.p.).

On the literary front, Zeki Demirkubuz has often alluded to Dostoevsky as a major influence on his work. In _The Waiting Room_ ( _Bekleme Odası_ , 2003), which he produced, directed, wrote, shot, edited, and even starred in, he tells the story of a filmmaker who is trying to make an adaptation of _Crime and Punishment_. Dostoevsky is also an inspiration for Ceylan, but it is his favorite author, Chekhov, who is always present in his mind when writing a script.10 In Alper's _Autumn_ , Russian literature becomes a prop when the protagonist meets a beautiful Georgian prostitute in a bookshop where she is looking for Russian novels. She later likens him to "a character from a Russian novel."

While Russian film and literature emerge as major sources of inspiration, ­connections with other East European countries can also be observed. Tolga Yalur has drawn a number of parallels between Béla Tarr's cinema and some of the ­contemporary works by Turkish filmmakers. For instance, he has argued that there are crossovers in terms of characters and aesthetics, especially between _Damnation_ ( _Kárhozat_ , 1987) and Ceylan's _Three Monkeys_. Other similarities can be seen between _Autumn Almanac_ ( _Öszi almanac_ , 1984) and Ümit Ünal's _Ara_ (2007) in their uses of space to create a sense of claustrophobia (Yalur, 2009: 136). Yalur sees _Kárhozat_ as also providing an inspiration for, or being a kindred spirit to, Zeki Demirkubuz's film duo _Innocence_ ( _Masumiyet_ , 1997) and _Destiny_ ( _Kader_ , 2006) in their uses of music.

A more direct and personal influence comes in the form of filmmakers trained in Eastern European film academies. Semir Aslanyürek, who received his training at All-Russian State University of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow in the early 1980s, is the most notable of these. While he has directed only four feature-length films since 1990, he has published widely on cinema and has been teaching at one of the leading film schools. His first feature, _Wagon_ ( _Vagon_ , 1992), was supported by the Turkish Ministry of Culture. Shot in Moscow, with a cast and crew consisting entirely of former Soviet nationals, the film was never released in Turkey: Aslanyürek said it was too Russian. The director of photography on _Wagon_ , Hayk Kirakosyan, is also a graduate of VGIK from the same era. A Russian citizen, he has been established in Istanbul for over a decade, and has worked with a number of prominent directors such as Semih Kaplanoğlu and Ezel Akay. From the younger generation, Seyfi Teoman, whose feature debut _Summer Book_ ( _Tatil Kitabı_ ) premiered in Berlinale 2008 and won the Best Turkish Film Award at the Istanbul Film Festival the same year, received his professional training at the National Film School in Łódź, Poland. Yusuf Aslanyürek, son of Semir Aslanyürek, who also graduated from VGIK, has been working as a director of photography in Turkey and founded a production company in 2008.

#  **Financial Connections**

While it may be many more years before Turkey becomes a member of the European Union, the country has already joined the most significant financial ­network of the region in terms of film business. According to its web site, "Eurimages aims to promote the European film industry by encouraging the ­production and distribution of films and fostering co-operation between professionals" (Eurimages, 2010a). In addition to its "cultural" objective of supporting "works which reflect the multiple facets of a European society whose common roots are evidence of a single culture," Eurimages also has an "economic" objective that still seems informed by the art-house cinema discourse: "the Fund invests in an industry which, while concerned with commercial success, is interested in demonstrating that cinema is one of the arts and should be treated as such" (Eurimages 2010a). In 1990, shortly after Eurimages' foundation in 1988, Turkey became its eighteenth member. At this point, Greece (1988) and Hungary (1990) were the only East European countries in the organization, eventually to be joined by Poland (1991), Bulgaria (1993), the Czech Republic (1994), the Slovak Republic (1996), Romania (1998), Slovenia (2001), Latvia (2002), Croatia (2003) The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (2003), Estonia (2004), Serbia (2005), Bosnia and Herzegovina (2005), Lithuania (2007), and Albania (2009).

Meeting four times a year, Eurimages currently offers four types of assistance: for co-production, for distribution, to cinemas, and to digitization for Eurimages-funded projects. Among these categories, supporting co-production is by far the most significant, amounting to 90 percent of the fund's resources. Since its ­establishment, Eurimages has supported over 1300 European co-productions for a total amount of approximately 390 million euros as of late 2010. Of these co-­productions, 63 have Turkish companies as their primary producers, and these pictures have received a total support of over 22 million euros in funds (Yılmazok, 2010: 101). Like the Turkish ministry funds, these amounts are interest-free loans that are repayable from each producer's net receipts. Filmmaker Derviş Zaim, himself a frequent recipient of Eurimages funds, argues that production support from the fund almost directly results in closer attention from international festivals and distributors (Zaim, 2008: 53). Although Eurimages requires that "at least 50 per cent of the financing from each of the co-producing countries must be ­confirmed by formal undertakings or agreements" in the shape of "contracts, deal memos, letters of intent with amounts, confirmations of public support and bank statements" (Eurimages, 2010b), the amount it does contribute is significant to independent filmmakers. Reis Çelik notes that he would simply have been unable to make his _Goodbye Tomorrow_ ( _Ho_ ş _çakal Yarın_ ,1998) without financial support from Eurimages (Zaim, 2008: 53).

In terms of cooperation, producers from France, Greece, and Hungary are ­preferred by their Turkish counterparts. There are different reasons behind these choices. France's leading role in European film production and its strong tradition of co-production make it an ideal candidate for a variety of projects (Yılmazok, 2010: 92). For Greece, there is an economic as well as a cultural rationale. Greek post-production facilities are much more advantageous in terms of costs, and their geographical proximity enhances their appeal. There have also been a number of transnational productions that employ the cultural proximity of the two nations, telling stories of migrations between the neighboring countries. As for Hungarian co-productions, the country's excellent post-production facilities, which are available at a low cost, explain why it is often chosen as a partner. Some filmmakers argue that the styles of filmmaking are similar between Greece and Turkey (Ömer Uğur quoted in Yılmazok, 2010: 93) and that Turkish producers prefer collaborating with their Balkan and Central European counterparts because of geographical proximity and comparable work mentalities (Zaim, 2008: 53). Iordanova noted (2002: 529) that "a large number of co-productions include participants from at least two Balkan countries: there are partnerships between Bulgaria and Turkey, Cyprus and Greece, Cyprus and Bulgaria, and even the unlikely pair of Greece and Turkey." Clearly, this trend has continued in the intervening years, particularly as concerns Greece.

In addition to being a significant source of funding, these co-production ­assistance schemes encourage co-productions across Europe, pushing Turkish filmmakers into a direction that formerly was not often preferred. Furthermore, the distribution assistance provided by Eurimages has allowed many Turkish films to be screened across theaters in Europe and enabled Turkish distribution companies to import films that would be otherwise unavailable. While most of the imported films originate in Western Europe, particularly France, the United Kingdom, and Italy, an analysis of export recipients of recent Turkish films shows an interesting connection with Eastern Europe. Figure 26.1 demonstrates the number of Turkish films that received distribution support in European countries between 1998 and 2010. In the top five, one can see countries with large Turkish communities (Switzerland and Germany), but more significantly, Eastern European countries (Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria). One should also note that more than half of the distributed films belong to the period 2008–2010 and that films with major international awards achieve a wider distribution.11

 **Figure 26.1** Turkish films that received distribution support in European countries (data from <http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/eurimages/>).

While Eurimages is the most important source of funding, it is not the only one. Turkey is not yet a member of Media Programme, another European Union initiative that aims to develop the European audiovisual sector. Media provides support in five areas: training, development, distribution, promotion, and pilot projects that ensure that the program adjusts to market developments. Nonetheless, Turkey is among the candidate countries and negotiations have opened. As a ­non-member of Media, Turkey is still eligible for support in overlapping fields (distribution and cinemas) from Eurimages, and certain training projects led by groups from the region have included Turkish participation. Furthermore, other sources of funding have been launched across Europe since 2000.

The Hubert Bals Fund, an initiative of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, has been providing grants to projects in various stages since 2005. The support is given to independent filmmakers from Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America. This geopolitical distribution places Turkey in the broader economic category of a "developing country," which could be a part of the Middle East, or Eastern Europe. Similarly, Berlinale's World Cinema Fund also provides production and distribution support to filmmakers from "transition countries." The geographical focus was on Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia until 2007, and now includes South East Asia and the Caucasus. In this case, not being considered as a part of Europe works to Turkey's advantage. While these funds often offer smaller amounts, their well-regarded status allows films that receive a grant from these programs to move into important networks and festivals.

Where Turkey belongs in the world and whether it will ever become a part of the European Union – that is of "Europe proper" – are questions that go far beyond the scope of this chapter and this volume. Admittedly, answers to these questions are likely to be nothing more than speculation and prophecies. However, it is clear that Turkey does have a close cinematic affiliation with Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, on many levels. There are the individual connections forged through personal relationships, admirations, and affiliations; there are also the more institutionalized ties established through national and regional cultural ­policies. Looking at the cinema of Turkey within an Eastern European context provides one with new perspectives on both. Such an approach not only contextualizes Turkey and it cinema in a fresh setting, it also allows a fresh definition of Eastern Europe that expands the boundaries of the former Soviet bloc.

 **Notes**

1 These figures, based on audience numbers, are from Yunus Kaya: "Türk Sinema ­Sektöründe 2008 Yılı Değerlendirmesi" "2008 Year-end Report for Turkish Film Industry"]. Gedik Yatırım: Istanbul, 01.08. 2009, accessed 03.13.2009. <[http://www.gedik.com/Analiz/2008%20YILI%20SINEMA%20SEKTORU%20DEGERLENDIRMESI.pdf>.

2 For a thorough discussion of Turkey's relationship with Europe, see Wendy Asbeek Brusse and Richard T. Griffiths, "Good Intentions and Hidden Motives. Turkey-EU ­Relations in a Historical Perspective," in Richard T. Griffiths and Durmuş Özdemir (eds), _Turkey and the EU Enlargement_ (Istanbul Bilgi University Press, Istanbul, 2004), pp. 13–27.

3 For a history of migration in Germany, see Veysel Oezcan, "Immigration in Transition," on _Migration Information Source_ , accessed 05/11/2010, <http://www.migrationinformation.org/Profiles/display.cfm?id=235>.

4 See D. Eleftheriotis and G. Needham (ed.s) _Asian Cinemas: A Reader & Guide_, (­Honolulu, University of Hawai'i Press, 2006), Shohini Chaudhuri, _Contemporary world cinema: Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia_ , (Edinburgh: Edinburgh ­University Press, 2005), or Gönül Dönmez-Colin, _The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East_ , (London: Wallflower Press, 2007).

5 In 2008, UIP held a market share of 34.62% out of a total of nearly 37 million tickets, while WB's share was 14.18%. Their biggest competitor is Özen Film, Turkey's ­second largest distributor with 26.69% market share in 2008.

6 arket share figures for Turkish films are as follows: 8.5% in 2002, 22.9% in 2003, 37.4% in 2004, 42% in 2005, 51.8% in 2006, 38.1% in 2007, 60.1% in 2008 and 50.9% in 2009.

7 One would need to note that the average annual attendance for the whole population has increased from 0.37 to only 0.53 per year. In comparison, French audiences go to the cinema around 3 times per year per capita (<http://stats.uis.unesco.org>).

8 These reviews are By A.O. Scott ( _The New York Times_ ), Jonathan Romney ( _Independent_ ), Stephen Garrett ( _Indiewire_ ), Peter Bradshaw ( _Guardian_ ) and Larry Gross (­Telluride Film Festival); accessed 06/11/2010 <http://www.nbcfilm.com/uzak/newscannesspecial.php?mid=3>.

9 As a sidenote, I would like to note that Pirselimoğlu wrote the script for the first ­feature film by Ustaoğlu, who was his wife at the time.

10 Interview with the filmmaker in _Uzak_ 's DVD.

11 Ceylan's _Three Monkeys_ (2008), winner of Cannes Best Director Prize, was distributed in 12 countries. It is followed by Özer Kızıltan's _Takva_ (2006), which won the ­FiPRESCI Prize in Berlin and was distributed to 8 countries.

 **References**

Açar, M. (1996) Türk sinemasında Amerikan hakimiyeti (American Dominance in Turkish Cinema), in _Cumhuriyet Dönemi Türkiye Ansiklopedisi_ (Encyclopedia of the Republican Era Turkey). Iletişim Yayınları, Istanbul, Vol. 14, pp. 1186–1189.

Akça, K. (2008) Ölümü ve aşkı unutmadan çektim (I shot without forgetting death or love)" _Radikal_ , http://www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?aType=RadikalHaberDetay&ArticleID=883266&Date=26.11.2010&CategoryID=113 (accessed November 26, 2010).

Akça, K. (2010) Kentsel zombileşmenin sonuçları (Results of urban zombification). _HaberTürk_ <http://www.haberturk.com/yazarlar/kerem-akca/518509-srek-ruhu-geri-dondu> (accessed November 26, 2010).

Arslan, S. (2009), The new cinema of Turkey. _New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film_ , 7 (1): 83–97.

Arslan, S. (2011), _Cinema in Turkey: A New Critical History_. Oxford University Press, New York.

Asbeek Brusse, W. and Griffiths, R.T (2004) Good intentions and hidden motives. Turkey–EU relations in a historical perspective, in R.T. Griffiths and D. Özdemir (ed.s), _Turkey and the EU Enlargement_. Istanbul Bilgi University Press, Istanbul, pp. 13–27.

Chaudhuri, S. (2005) _Contemporary World Cinema: Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia_. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

CNC (2009), Public funding, <http://www.cnc.fr/CNC_GALLERY_CONTENT/DOCUMENTS/UK/publications/report_2009/13_public_funding.pdf>

Çetin-Erus, Z. (2007) Son on yılın popüler Türk sinemasında televizyon sektörünün etkileri (Television's influence on popular Turkish cinema of the last decade). _Marmara Iletisim Dergisi_ , 12: 123–133.

Çıtaklar, H. (2009) Yeşim Ustaoğlu: "Sanatçı dediğin buram buram muhalefet kokmali" (Yeşim Ustaoğlu: "An artist must be steaming with opposition"). _Bianet_ <http://ww.bianet.org/biamag/kultur/112993-yesim-ustaoglu-sanatci-dedigin-buram-buram-muhalefet-kokmali> (accessed November 26, 2010).

Çokyiğit, C. (1989) Türk sinemasi, Amerikan darbesi (Turkish cinema, American coup), _Tercüman News_ _paper_ (December 15, 1989).

Directorate General of Press & Information (2009) Turkish Cinema, <http://www.turkishculture.org/performing-arts/film-591.htm> (accessed November, 8, 2009).

Dönmez-Colin, G. (2007) _The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East_. Wallflower Press, London.

Eleftheriotis, D. (2006) Turkish national cinema, in _Asian Cinemas: A Reader & Guide_ (ed. D. Eleftheriotis and G. Needham). University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, pp. 220–228.

Eleftheriotis, D. and Needham, G. (eds) (2006) _Asian Cinemas: A Reader & Guide_. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu.

Elsaesser, T. (2005) _European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood_. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam.

Erdoğan, N. (2006) Narratives of resistance: national identity and ambivalence in the Turkish melodrama between 1965 and 1975, in _Asian Cinemas: A Reader & Guide_ (ed. D. Eleftheriotis and G. Needham). University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, pp. 229–241.

Erkılıç, H. (2003) _Türk sinemasının ekonomik yapısı ve bu yapının sinemamıza etkileri_ (Economic structure of Turkish cinema and its effects), PhD thesis, Mimar Sinan University, Institute of Social Sciences, Istanbul.

Evren, B. (1997) _De_ ğ _i_ ş _imin dönemecinde Türk sineması_ (Turkish Cinema at the Cusp of Change). Antrakt Yayınları, Istanbul.

Eurimages (2010a), <http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/eurimages/About/default_en.asp> (accessed May 29, 2010).

Eurimages (2010b), Regulations concerning co-production support for full-length feature films, animations and documentaries, <http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/eurimages/Source/Regulations/Co-productionRegulations_EN%202010.doc> (accessed May 29, 2010).

Felperin, L. (2008) Review: _Times and Tides. Sight & Sound_, 18 (9): 78.

Gürata, A. (2006) Translating modernity: remakes in Turkish cinema, in _Asian Cinemas: A Reader & Guide_ (ed. D. Eleftheriotis and G. Needham), University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu.

Iordanova, D. (2002) Feature filmmaking within the new Europe: moving funds and images across the East–West divide. _Media Culture Society_ , 24: 517–536.

Iordanova, D. (2003) _Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film_. Wallflower Press, London.

Kaplanoğlu, S. (1988) _Mirror_ 'ı eksen alarak Tarkovski için (For Tarkovsky, in view of the _Mirror_ ). _Nisan_ , 8: 13–15.

Kaplanoğlu, S. (2010) 1 Eylül 2010, Paris (1 September 2010, Paris). _Altyazı_ , 100th Special Issue: 48–49.

Kaya, Y. (2009) Türk sinema sektöründe 2008 yılı değerlendirmesi (2008 Year-end report for the Turkish film industry), http://www.gedik.com/GetData/FnnWebDosya.ashx?Dizin=AnalizDosyaKlasoru&File=111.pdf&DownloadFile=2008 YILI SINEMA SEKTORU DEGERLENDIRMESI.pdf (accessed November 8, 2009).

Köstepen, E. (2009), Beyond the great divide of art-house versus popular? Emergent forms of filmmaking in Turkey, in _Young Turkish Cinema_ (ed. S. Aytaç and G. Onaran). Altyazı, Istanbul, pp. 6–10.

Mengü, N. and İnci, D. (2000) Türk sinemasının serüveni (The adventure of Turkish cinema), <http://dosyalar.hurriyet.com.tr/sanat/sinema/anasayfa.htm> (accessed November 12, 2009).

Neumann, I.B. (1999) _Uses of the Other: "The East" in European Identity Formation_. Manchester University Press, Manchester.

Oezcan, V. (2004) Immigration in Transition, on _Migration Information Source_ , <http://www.migrationinformation.org/Profiles/display.cfm?id=235> (accessed November 5, 2010).

Scognamillo, G. (1975) Turkey, in _International Film Guide 1976_ (ed.P. Cowie), The Tantivy Press, London.

Öztürk, S.R. (2009) _Süt Ayna_ 'yı Selamlıyor (" _Milk_ Salutes _Mirror_ ). _Altyazı_ , 81: 85.

Robins, K. (1996) Interrupting identities: Turkey/Europe, in _Questions of Cultural Identity_ (ed. S. Hall and Paul Du Gay). Sage Publications, London: pp. 65–86.

Taubin, A. (2001) International geographic. _The Village Voice_ , <http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/163226/> (accessed November 26, 2010).

Tunç, E. (2006) Türk sineması'nın ekonomik yapısı (1896–2005) (The Economic Structure of Turkish Cinema (1896–2005). MA thesis, Istanbul Technical University, Institute of Social Sciences, Istanbul.

Ulusay, N. (2004) Globalization and national film industries: the Turkish case. _Bo_ ğ _aziçi Journal_ , 18 (1–2): 107–119.

Yalur, T. (2009) _Yönetmenlerin_ İ _zinde Macar Sineması_ (Hungarian Cinema and Its Directors). Phoenix Yayınevi, Ankara.

Yılmazok, L. (2010) Turkish films co-produced within Europe: the story after twenty years' experience in _Eurimages_ _._ _SineCine_ , 1 (2): 87–108.

Zaim, D. (2008), Odaklandığın şey gerçeğindir: Türkiye sineması, alüvyonik Türk sineması ve uluslararası kabul – 1. Bölüm (You are focusing on your reality: Turkish cinema, ­alluvial Turkish cinema and international recognition – Part 1). _Altyazı_ , 78: 48–55.

# Index

absurd

Albania

allegory

Almási, Tamás

Althusser, Louis

Anderson, Lindsay

animation

archive

Arrak, Jüri

Arrow Cross

 _Article Zero_

 _Ashes and Diamonds_

Auschwitz

Austria

avant-garde

Balabanov, Aleksei

Balázs, Béla

Balkan cinema

Balkanization

Balkans, the

Baltic

cinemas

countries

Bareja, Stanisław

 _Barren_

Barthes, Roland

 _Battle of Kosovo, The_

 _Beast, The_

Beckett, Samuel

Benjamin, Walter

Bergfelder, Timothy

Berlin

Berlin Film Festival

Berlin Wall

Bhabha, Homi

 _Big Tõll_

biopic

 _Birds, Orphans and Fools_

body genre

body horror

 _Bohemia Docta_

Bollywood

 _Bonds of Steel_

Borowczyk, Walerian

Bosnia

Brdecka, Jirí

Bucharest

Budapest

Bugajski, Jan

Bulgaria

Buñuel, Luis

 _Bure Baruta_

Byelorussia

Calvino, Italo

 _Camera Buff_

Cannes

Castel Films

Catholic Church

Ceaușescu, Nicolae

censorship

chronotope

Cilinska, Antra

 _Cinema nuovo_

cinéma vérité

Coates, Paul

Cold War, the

colonialism

COMECON

comedy

 _Communist Manifesto, The_

consumerism

co-production

Cultural Revolution, The

Cvitkovič, Jan

 _czarna seria_

Czech

cinema

New Wave

Czechoslovakia

Daneliuc, Mircea

 _Death of Mr Lazarescu, The_

DEFA

Deleuze, Gilles

Derrida, Jacques

 _Devil, The_

diaspora

digitization

dissident

Dobrenko, Evgeny

documentary

database

DVD

 _Elementary School, The_

Elley, Derek

Elmanovits, Tatjana

Elsaesser, Thomas

emigration

entertainment

eroticism

Estonia

Eurimages

Europeanization

European Union

FAMU

 _Fellow Villagers_

film

adaptation

business

clubs

criticism

distribution

festivals

financing

industry

reception

studios

units

Film Polski

Finland

 _First Hundred Years, The_

 _Fisherman's Son, The_

Ford, Aleksander

Forgács, Péter

Foucault, Michel

Franco, Francisco

Free Cinema Movement

French New Wave

GDR/East Germany

Geka, Dzintra

gender

genre cinema

Germany

Godard, Jean-Luc

Gombrowicz, Witold

 _Goodbye Lenin!_

Gorbachev, Mikhail

Goskino

 _Goto, Island of Love_

Gramsci, Antonio

 _Gravehopping_

 _Great Warrior Skanderbeg, The_

Greece

Grotowski, Jerzy

Guerin, Jose Luis

Guattari, Pierre-Félix

Gypsy

Haltof, Marek

Has, Wojciech

Havel, Václav

Hegel, Friedrich

 _Helpless_

heritage film

heterotopia

Hjort, Mette

Hoffman, Jerzy

Holland, Agnieszka

Hollywood

Holocaust, the

Hoxha, Enver

humor

Hungary

Hus, Jan

Hussite film

Imre, Anikó

 _In a Vise_

intelligentsia

Iordanova, Dina

Iosseliani, Otar

Italian neorealism

Italy

 _Is It Easy to be Young?_

Jäckel, Anne

Jakubisko, Juraj

Jakubowska, Wanda

Jameson, Fredric

Jancsó, Miklós

Karlovy Vary

Kawalerowicz, Jerzy

Kertész, Imre

Kieślowski, Krzysztof

Kinostudio

Klimeš, Ivan

 _Knife in the Water_

Koçi, Fatmir

Kolmane, Inara

Kosovo

Kozole, Damjan

Kundera, Milan

Kusturica, Emir

Labanyi, Jo

 _L_ āč _pl_ ē _sis_

 _Lamerica_

Latin America

Latvia

Lem, Stanisław

Lenica, Jan

Lenin, Vladimir

 _Lepa sela lepo gore_

Lithuania

 _Look Out! Hooligans!_

Lubelski, Tadeusz

Lungin, Pavel

Macedonia

Maetzig, Kurt

Makavejev, Dušan

Marker, Chris

Marx

Marxism

masculinity

Mazierska, Ewa

 _Measure for Measure_

MEDIA Programme

Menzel, Jiří

memory

and history

Jewish

popular

post-

Mexico

 _Mexican Suitcase, The_

 _Mihai Viteazul_

Milošević, Slobodan

minor cinema

Mitić, Gojko

Molinero, Carlos

Montenegro

Mungiu, Cristian

Munk, Andrzej

Muratova, Kira

musical

Muslim

Müür, Jüri

national cinema

nationalism

Nemescu, Cristian

neoliberalism

 _New Hyperion_

Nicolaescu, Sergiu

 _niebla en las palmeras,_ _La_

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Noriega, Ernesto

nostalgia

 _Okraina_

Orientalism

Ottoman Empire

Ózd series

Pakalnina, Laila

Pálfi, György

Pärn, Priit

Partisan film

Paskaljević, Goran

Pavlović, Živojin

 _perro negro,_ _El_

Petrie, Duncan

Petrović, Aleksandar

Piestrak, Marek

Pintilie, Lucian

Podnieks, Juris

Poland

Polanski, Roman

 _Police, Adjective_

Polish

Cinema of Moral Concern

New Wave

School

 _Polska Kronika Filmowa_

popular cinema

Porumboiu, Corneliu

postcolonial

Prague

Puiu, Cristi

Raamat, Rein

Radványi, Géza von

 _Rane_

Rappaport, Herbert

realism

Reisz, Karel

Renan, Ernest

Richardson, Tony

Riefenstahl, Leni

Riga Film Studio

Riga School of Poetic Documentary

Romanian

New Wave

Revolution

Russia

Salvador, Lola

Salvans, Joan

 _Schindler's List_

science fiction

Serbia

sexuality

Shepitko, Larisa

Shoah

shock therapy

Skolimowski, Jerzy

Skorzewski, Edward

Slovak cinema

Slovakia

Slovenia

 _Slovenian Girl_

 _Slow Motion_

Socialist realism

 _Somewhere in Europe_

Soviet Union

Spanish

cinema

Civil War

 _Spare Parts_

Spielberg, Steven

Sputnik

Stalin, Josef

 _Story of Sin, The_

 _Sunshine_

surrealism

Švankmajer, Jan

Svejk

Szabó, István

Tarkovsky, Andrei

 _Taxidermia_

television

Television Without Frontiers

 _Test of Pilot Pirx, The_

Thaw, The

theater

Tito, Josip Broz

transnationalism

 _Tren de sombras_

Trnka, Jiří

Turkey

 _12:08 East of Bucharest_

 _Underground_

Ustaoglu, Yesim

Vachek, Karel

Vajna, Andrew

Vanags, Jānis

Velvet Revolution

VGIK

Wajda, Andrzej

 _Walkover_

Warsaw

Warsaw Pact

 _Warszawa_

Weiss, Jiří

Western film

West Germany

 _What Is to Be Done?_

Wolff, Larry

world cinema

World War Two

 _WR: Mysteries of the Organism_

Yeşilçam era

youth culture

Yugoslav Black Wave

Yugoslavia

Zanussi, Krzysztof

Žilnik, Želimir

Žižek, Slavoj

Żuławski, Andrzej
