Bahun, Sanja and Haynes, John (eds) Cinema, State Socialism and Society in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1917–1989: Re-visions (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 527 the quality of the poetry in SSh varies, but there is no hard evidence of this particular shortcoming; • inappropriate use of ‘netsenzurnaia leksika’. Such words are indeed used, but — as it seems to me — perfectly within context, e.g. on p. 100 and p. 170; • would-be poets who use Belarusian as a means to popularity but who do not really know the language. Again this does not accord with the impression given by the poets presented in SSh; • by contrast with the lively poetry scene of the 1990s, a kind of calm (štyĺ) seems to have descended. This book demonstrates his error of judgement. The last point emphasizes the unique nature of McMillin’s achievement in writing a ‘history of Belarusian literature’ that looks to the future. One of the books on display at the recent Minsk book fair was Moj dzień pačynajecca, an anthology of verse and prose by young writers described in the publisher’s blurb as presenting ‘a collective portrait of Belarusian literature in the future’. It will indeed be interesting to see how many of McMillin’s poets are included in this home-produced collection. Spring Shoots is a highly engaging and stimulating book written by a scholar with an infectious enthusiasm for his subject, but it is indeed a book — as the author says — ‘without an end’. On 24 February the ‘Golden Apostrophe’ prize of the Union of Belarusian writers (the non-Lukašenka one) for poetry was awarded to Vitaĺ Ryžkoŭ (SSh, pp. 85–91) for the second time, and to Valieryja Danilievič (not in SSh) for the best debut poem. The story continues... Margate Jim Dingley Bahun, Sanja and Haynes, John (eds). Cinema, State Socialism and Society in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1917–1989: Re-visions. BASEES/ Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies, 97. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2014. xviii + 215 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliographies. Filmographies. Index. £90.00. The key to Cinema, State Socialism and Society in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1917–1989 lies in the title’s end — Re-visions. Indeed, as the editors Sanja Bahun and John Haynes emphasize in their Introduction, the impetus behind the book is the reconfiguration of how Eastern European state-cinema of the Communist era is approached. To this end, ‘this volume aims to showcase and guide readers through a range of methodologies, and across a wide temporal and geographical scope, in turn reassessing and questioning some boundaries — of nations, cinemas and methodologies’ (p. 2). SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 528 ‘On Spaces and Nations’, the first part of the volume, includes research on the cinematic representation of territories, boundaries and space from a variety of theoretical perspectives. First, Ewa Mazierska takes up Foucault’s assertion that space and simultaneity are winning over history and time in contemporary culture and sets out to revisit four essays that deal specifically with spatial research. These essays bring to light aspects of regional cinema that have been so far overlooked, as in the case of Brinton Tench Coxe’s captivating take on the representation of movement and stasis in Khutsiev’s 1967 film July Rain. In the second chapter, Lilya Kaganovsky sets out to probe the Cold War ideological underpinnings of science fiction films in both the US and USSR. Although her work is incisive and wide-ranging, covering the best of sciencefiction films to be produced towards the end of the Cold War, some of her arguments are tendentious. For example, her reading of Blade Runner and Solaris sets them ‘firmly within the discourse of the Cold War’ (p. 33) due to the collapse of the binary of self versus Other in the former and the transcendence of this duality in Tarkovskii, whereas both prove that these films in fact rise above Cold War ideology. In the third chapter, Dusan Radunovic investigates the evolution of Georgian cinema and the formation of its minority identity in the context of the larger, transnational context of Soviet cinematography. The second part of the volume, which looks at the ideologies of representation in the cinema of the region, starts with Evgenija Garbolevsky’s investigation of the reasons for...