Overview

Was there experimental cinema behind the Iron Curtain? What forms did experiments with film take in state-socialist Eastern Europe? Who conducted them, where, how, and why? These are the questions answered in this volume, the first of its kind in any language. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines, the book offers case studies from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, former East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and former Yugoslavia. Together, these contributions demonstrate the variety of makers, production contexts, and aesthetic approaches that shaped a surprisingly robust and diverse experimental film output in the region. The book maps out the terrain of our present-day knowledge of cinematic experimentalism in Eastern Europe, suggests directions for further research, and will be of interest to scholars of film and media, art historians, cultural historians of Eastern Europe, and anyone concerned with questions of how alternative cultures emerge and function under repressive political conditions.

Full Product Details

Author:   Ksenya Gurshtein ,  Sonja Simonyi ,  Gábor Gelencsér (Professor, ELTE University, Budapest) ,  Greg de Cuir Jr (Independent curator, writer, and translator, Belgrade, Serbia)
Publisher:   Amsterdam University Press
Imprint:   Amsterdam University Press
ISBN:  

9789462982994

ISBN 10:   9462982996
Pages:   334
Publication Date:   20 April 2022
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  College/higher education ,  Professional & Vocational ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 7 Introduction (Ksenya Gurshtein and Sonja Simonyi) Part I Key Figures 1. The Experimentalism of Gábor Bódy (Gábor Gelencsér) 2. Circles, Lines, and Documentary Designs: Tomislav Gotovac’s Belgrade Trilogy (Greg de Cuir Jr.) 3. From the Workshop of the Film Form to Martial Law: On the Intersecting and Bifurcating Paths of Pawel Kwiek’s and Józef Robakowski’s Cinematographic Work in the 1970s and the 1980s (Lukasz Mojsak) Part II Production, Support, and Distribution 4. Amateur Cinema in Bulgaria (Vladimir Iliev with Katerina Lambrinova) 5. The Polish Educational Film Studio and the Cinema of Wojciech Wiszniewski (Masha Shpolberg) 6. Home Movies and Cinematic Memories: Fixing the Gaze on Vukica Dilas and Tatjana Ivancic (Petra Belc) Part III Viewing Contexts, Theories, and Reception 7. Alone in the Cinemascope (Aleksandar Boskovic) 8. kinema ikon—Experiments in Motion (1970–89) (Ileana L. Selejan) 9. AudioVision: Sound, Music, and Noise in East German Experimental Films (Seth Howes) Part IV Intersection of the Arts 10. Intersections of Art and Film on the Wroclaw Art Scene, 1970–80 (Marika Kuzmicz) 11. Conceptual Artist, Cognitive Film: Miklós Erdély at the Balázs Béla Studio (Ksenya Gurshtein) 12. Works and Words, 1979: Manifesting Eastern European Film and/as Art in Amsterdam (Sonja Simonyi) 13. Wizardry on a Shoestring: Carodej and Experimental Filmmaking in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia (Tomás Glanc) Index

Reviews

This is a gem of a collection. It makes a unique and lasting contribution to film history, film studies, and the history of avant-garde/experimental cinema. The thirteen chapters, shepherded by expert curation by the two editors, provide the definitive, thoroughly researched, interconnected, and yet locally specific histories of experimental cinema in the East European countries under Soviet influence in the 1960s-70s, the most prolific period of this kind of filmmaking during the Cold War. - Aniko Imre, University of Southern California, editor of East European Cinemas and A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas I am extraordinarily impressed by this collection-by its balance of diversity and coherence, the quality of the individual contributions and the curatorial work of the editors, the depth of research, and the thoroughness with which it covers its topic. This is a powerhouse collection of scholarship that provides an exceptional introduction to a sadly under-studied and under-represented topic. In both the introduction and the contributions, the editors and authors link their projects to larger questions-historical, theoretical, methodological-in the field, all of which are relevant and indeed at the forefront of current work in cinema and art studies. - Jonathan Walley, Denison University, author of Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia

Author Information

Ksenya Gurshtein is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. She holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art, and her academic research has focused on post-war conceptual, experimental, and neo-avant-garde art in Eastern Europe. Her scholarship and criticism have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines, exhibition catalogs, and online. Sonja Simonyi is an independent scholar working on the audiovisual cultures of socialist Eastern Europe. She completed her dissertation at New York University’s Department of Cinema Studies and her writings on both popular and experimental film have appeared in a number of art magazines, edited volumes, as well as academic journals. Dr. Gábor Gelencsér is a professor of film studies at the ELTE University in Budapest. He has published on various aspects of Hungarian film culture in magazines, journals, and edited volumes and has written six monographs (in Hungarian), including books on the aesthetics of Hungarian cinema in the 1960s and 1970s (2002) and a study of the relationship between cinema and literature in postwar Hungarian film (2015). He also coedited the exhibition catalog on the history of the Hungarian Balázs Béla Studio (2009). Dr. Greg de Cuir Jr. is an independent curator, writer, and translator who lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia. He is cofounder and managing editor of the journal NECSUS, as well as editor of the book series Eastern European Screen Cultures, both published by Amsterdam University Press. De Cuir Jr. received his DPhil from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts at University of Arts Belgrade. Łukasz Mojsak is an independent curator of art and film as well as a writer and translator. He holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London. Between 2011 and 2016, he worked at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. He currently collaborates with the Arton Foundation in Warsaw and was the cocurator of the Polish Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Katerina Lambrinova is a film expert for Bulgarian National Television, where she advises on film projects from the scriptwriting stage and through_x0002_out the production process. She is also a film critic, art journalist, film programmer, and editor in chief at FemGems in the Arts (https://medium.com/femgems). She is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Art Studies of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Dr. Masha Shpolberg is an assistant professor of film studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she teaches courses on Russian and Eastern European cinema, as well as global documentary. Her first book project focuses on the aesthetics of labor in Polish cinema of the late socialist period. She is also the coeditor of Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe (forthcoming). Dr. Petra Belc holds a PhD in Film Studies from the University of Zagreb; her dissertation explored ”The Poetics of Yugoslav Experimental Cinema from the 1960s and 1970s.” She also holds degrees in women’s studies, philosophy, and comparative religion. As an independent researcher, she explores the fields of feminisms and philosophy of image/making; she is interested in the archiving and preservation of small-gauge films. Dr. Aleksandar Bošković is a lecturer in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of The Poetic Humor in Vasko Popa’s Oeuvre (in Serbian, 2008). His articles have appeared in scholarly journals in the United States and Europe (Apparatus, Cultural Critique, Digital Icons, Književna istorija, Slavic Review) as well as in various edited collections Dr. Ileana L. Selejan is a research fellow with the Decolonising Arts Institute and an associate lecturer at the University of the Arts London. As honorary research fellow in the Department of Anthropology at University College London, she participates in the European Research Council–funded project, Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination. She received her PhD in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University Dr. Seth Howes is an associate professor of German at the University of Missouri. His research deals with twentieth-century literature and culture, focusing in particular on German cultures of the Cold War. He is the coeditor, with Mirko Hall and Cyrus Shahan, of Beyond No Future: Cultures of German Punk (2016) and author of Moving Images on the Margins: Experimental Film in Late Socialist East Germany (2019). Dr. Marika Kuźmicz holds a PhD in art history and researches Polish art of the 1970s. She is a dean of the Visual Culture Faculty at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, curator, and author and editor of several books, most recently Workshop of the Film Form (2017), coedited with Łukasz Ronduda, and Historia Performance w Polsce (2019). She is also the head of the Arton Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on researching, exhibiting, and archiving Polish art of the 1970s. Dr. Tomáš Glanc is a senior fellow at Zurich University and a visiting professor at Basel University. He specializes in performance in Eastern Europe, samizdat and unofficial culture, Russian and Czech modernism, Slavic ideology, and contemporary Russian art and literature. Glanc is the author of numerous books and catalogs, most recently Autoren im Ausnahmezustand. Die tschechische und russische Parallelkultur (2017) and Pavel Pepperštejn: Memory is Over (2016).

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