Overview

After WWII, cinema was everywhere: in movie theatres, public squares, factories, schools, trial courts, trains, museums, and political meetings. Seen today, documentaries and newsreels, as well as the amateur production, show the kaleidoscopic portrait of a changing Europe. How did these cinematic images contribute to shaping the new societies emerging from the ashes of war, both in the Western and in the Eastern bloc? Why were they so crucial in framing and regulating new places and practices, political systems, economic dynamics, educational frameworks, and memory communities? This edited volume explores the multiple ways nonfiction cinema reconfigured public spaces, collective participation, democratisation, and governmentality between 1944 and 1956. Looking back at it through a transnational perspective and the critical category of spatiality, nonfiction cinema appears in a new light: simultaneously as a specifically situated and as a highly mobile medium, it was a fundamental agent in reshaping Europe’s shared identity and culture in a defining decade.

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Lucie Cesálková is an Associate Professor at the Department of Film Studies, Charles University, and an editor at Prague’s National Film Archive. At the Institute of Contemporary History, CAS, she was the Principal Investigator of the HERA funded international project Visual Culture of Trauma, Obliteration, and Reconstruction in Post-World War II Europe. In her research she focuses on nonfiction and documentary film, educational and advertising film, on film exhibition and moviegoing. Johannes Praetorius-Rhein is a research associate at the Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg (Potsdam) and an adjunct lecturer at Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main. Previously, he was a researcher at the Goethe-University for the ViCTOR-E-project. His research focuses on postwar cinema, Jewish film history, and producer studies. Perrine Val is a film historian. She is a research and teaching assistant at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her research focuses on transnational cinematographic exchanges during the Cold War. She published a book based on her Ph.D. thesis about the cinematographic relationships between France and the GDR, entitled Les relations cinématographiques entre la France et la RDA: entre camaraderie, bureaucratie et exotisme (1946–1992) (Villeneuve d’Asq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2021). Paolo Villa is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pavia, after being a member of the ViCTOR-E project at the University of Udine. Alongside articles on journals and edited volumes, he authored a book on art documentaries in Italy, La camera di Stendhal. Il film sull’arte in Italia (1945–1970). His research focuses on non-fiction and industrial cinema, the mediatisation of cultural heritage and landscape, the history of movie theaters in Italy.

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