East-West European superpositions as transvergent cinema: Greg Zglinski's Tout un hiver sans feu (2005)

Abstract

This essay will present the film Tout un hiver sans feu/A Long Winter without Fire, directed by Greg Zglinski, as an exemplary case of the contemporary cinematic crossing of Eastern and Western Europe. Using the concept of transvergence developed by Marcos Novak, it will suggest that this film expresses a new experience of East-West mobility that follows the logic of superposition rather than of exile or diaspora. Of particular interest in the film is the use of intercultural communication as a figure of this new mobility as well as the contrast it makes between this transvergent openness to otherness and the dangers of cultural and subjective isolation. The essay will conclude with an examination of fire as a key element of the film which itself functions as a figure of transvergence.