Reluctant Feminists, Powerless Patriarchs, and Estranged Spectators: Gender in Post-1989 Eastern European Cinema

Elżbieta Ostrowska

doi:10.20897/femenc/8520

Abstract

The article analyses several films made within Eastern Europe during the first decade of the postcommunist period that represent the crisis of traditional gender models which permeated popular cinema. As the author argues the films represent ‘transition cultures’ in regard to gender discourse. The film Ildiko Enyedi’s My Twentieth Century (Az en XX. szazadom, Hungary/GDR/ Cuba, 1989) destabilises normative models of femininity by means of both the narrative content and formal strategies. Dorota Kedzierzawska’s Nothing (Nic, Poland, 1998) and Ildiko Szabo’s, Child Murders (Gyerekgyilkossagok, Hungary, 1993) denounce its discriminatory politics, especially effective on women that represent marginalised sectors of society. Finally, The Garden (Zahrada, Slovakia, France, 1995) directed by Martin Sulik, demonstrates how breaking with the code of realism facilitates the process of ‘correction of patriarchy’. The article will establish that these films significantly disrupt the national and thus patriarchal mode of address. This shift from the national to the gendered mode of identification also marks a new point of encounter between Eastern European and Western feminism. Due to represented gender uncertainty and aesthetic modes of spectatorial distanciation, the analysed works indicate this resistance and scepticism towards any singular mode of identification.

Highlights

The article analyses several films made within Eastern Europe during the first decade of the postcommunist period that represent the crisis of traditional gender models which permeated popular cinema
As I will establish, at that time Eastern European feminism defined itself through the negation of a communist concept of gender equality as well as Western feminism
I will establish that these films significantly disrupt the national and patriarchal mode of address. This shift from the national to the gendered mode of identification marks a new point of encounter between Eastern European and Western feminism

Summary

INTRODUCTION

“Love is when your legs are trembling, when your lips are wet, and that’s a state, which I love, which I need,” says Anka, the female protagonist of Barbara Sass-Zdort’s film Like a Drug (Jak narkotyk, Poland, 1999). During the time of the ‘postcommunist condition’, Eastern European gender discourse had to face patriarchal structures of state socialism and emerging neoliberal anticommunism, neoliberal triumphalism and neo-colonialist bias, and assume linear, from-to, historical transformation This approach has overemphasised the importance of 1989 as a radical break, the legacy of the communist doctrine in the post-1989 present, the sheer rejection of the past as the main motor of development, politicised approaches to history, cultural pessimism, orientalising aspects, and the national character of cultural production.” (2018: 1). For each country within the region, anti-feminist attitudes, sentiments and legal actions had their own specific determinants, all of these originated from communist legacy and its official ‘gender equality’ doctrine which had not been implemented in socio-political reality and resulted in the notorious ‘double burden’ (Funk, 1993:1); some emancipatory possibilities for women were opening during this period, these were strictly limited within the system of patriarchal state socialisms. The film does not offer a clear narrative resolution and none of the sisters is presented as either victorious or defeated which parallels the co-existent and often contradictory gender discourses during the first decade of postcommunism

PREGNANT BODIES AND ABJECT SPACES

CONCLUSION