European Filmmakers Research Articles

A Path through the Woods: Remediating Affective Landscapes in Documentary Asylum Worlds

Author(s): Stoetzer, Bettina | Abstract: In his book Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama argues that an engagement with the legacies of German nationalism requires a track through the woods: throughout German history, forests have played a key role as origin myth to found a national identity (Schama 1995). In today’s forests, these entanglements between the forest landscape and the nation acquire a strange and unhomely twist: in former East German states, such as Brandenburg and Thuringia, asylum seekers—many of them from Africa—find themselves living on the ruins of abandoned military barracks in the forest. Their isolation in the forest is the outcome of post-unification asylum policies that responded to a heated nation-wide asylum debate and xenophobic attacks against urban refugee shelters in the 1990s, by relocating refugees to remote new ‘homes’ in rural East Germany—often on former military barracks in the forest.Engaging with Forst, a documentary film produced in collaboration between refugees and European film-makers, this article asks about the possibilities of a mode of analysis that follows Schama’s call to embark on a track through the woods and shed light on contemporary entanglements between landscape, race and nationalism. Forst breaks with documentary—and ethnographic—conventions of creating empathy via the portrayal of individual life stories, or “cases”. Instead, the film situates its story almost entirely in the claustrophobic environment of a gloomy forest in which refugees live. Doing so, it provokes affects and environments in order to invoke the visceral dimensions of borders and nationalism—a method, I argue, that can be mobilized for social inquiry of both the mediation of racialized exclusions in contemporary asylum worlds in Germany—as well as their material and visceral effects.

Americanised, Europeanised or nationalised? The film industry in Europe under the influence of Hollywood, 1927–1968

In most film histories of the twentieth century Hollywood's dominance has been indisputable. Apparently, European filmmakers were always facing one choice: either imitating the American style or finding a niche in the Hollywood system. This dominance is often referred to as evidence for an ‘Americanisation’ of popular culture in Europe. This article shows that this narrative leaves out a central development between 1927 and 1968: the nationalisation of popular European cinema. The paper asks which conditions facilitated and shaped national film cultures and shows how the political regulation of production in European countries, the momentum of the market, technology and the national industries contributed to the nationalisation of European film. Ultimately, however, the productions of these national cinemas resonated with audiences who sustained them for years following the Second World War.

Recovering Québec Culture: The Feature Films of Bernard Émond

This article presents the feature films of Bernard Émond as being a sustained critique of Québec's Quiet Revolution. It posits that Émond displays strong nationalist tendencies as well as leftist political commitments, which might indicate that he is like many Québec filmmakers of his generation. But Émond is strongly influenced by a certain kind of conservatism, of the sort that has recently been enunciated by the controversial Québec historian Éric Bedard. In many ways Émond, like Bédard, is a “Red Tory,” being very close ideologically to the English-Canadian philosopher George Grant. Ideologically speaking, though, Émond is also very close to a number of important European filmmakers, such as Laurent Cantet, Ermanno Olmi or Kryzstof Kiselowski. Overall, his vision of Québec is of a place that is defined by an intense spiritual malaise, with a culture that is being made weaker by the forces of a capitalist-led globalization. The article focuses on all of the feature films that Émond has made up to 2012, and pays particular attention to his trilogy on the Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity: La Neuvaine (The Novena, 2005), Contre toute espérance (Summit Circle, 2007) and La Donation (The Legacy, 2009). Because it was released so close to the press time of this article, Émond's most recent film, Tout ce que tu possédes (2012) is not considered here.

Algeria: Birth of Cinema

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the origin of Algerian cinema which has long been neglected by Russian researchers. Using Arab-language sources the author shows that the national film industry emerged in the context of the revolutionary situation of 1954-1962 and tells about the European filmmakers who contributed to its formation and development.

Traveling beyond the national: mobile citizenship, flexible identities, and layered republicanism in the French return road movie

The road movie has recently become an increasingly popular vehicle for French and European filmmakers attempting to come to terms with the complexities of contemporary identity within New Europe and a postcolonial world. This article considers the ways by which one notable sub-category of French road cinema, the road movie, opens the door to a reading of contemporary identity as a concept not strictly delimited by the geographic boundaries of the nation state. At the same time, identity in these films is not aligned with the ethnic or cultural origins of the protagonists. The article identifies twenty films that make up the return road movie corpus and offers a closer reading of two notable examples, Voyage en Armenie/Armenia (Robert Guediguian, 2006) and Ten'ja/Testament (Hassan Legzouli, 2004). These films use mobility to demonstrate that it is conceivable to be French and retain, or rediscover, a connection to another identity. By formulating contemporary identity as both incongruous with th...

Shadow Lives: Josephine Baker and the Body of Cinema

Shadow Lives:Josephine Baker and the Body of Cinema Katherine Groo (bio) I suddenly wake up in the middle of the night. The shadows are there, all of them, out there, those from my childhood, and those from books, and particularly those from my dreams. I get up. I walk forward on tiptoe. I chase shadows that disappear, that fade under the electric light, in rooms, bathrooms, through closets, from step to step, in the staircases, under beds, in the corners of curtains. Nothing remains but the house lit up from top to bottom like a screen on which shadows go by [. . .]. From that to the cinema, there is only one step. You can see why I love—why I adore—the movies. They are the endless play of all shadows, a dream in black and white. —Josephine Baker (1949)1 This meditation on shadows and cinema appears in Josephine Baker's autobiography, a work assembled by journalist Marcel Sauvage. In her translation and analysis of the passage, Claudine Raynaud detects the uncanny revision of Plato's cave—fire made electric light—and a subtle break in the convention of autobiographical contracts.2 Here, reality and imaginary, memory and dream dissolve in a tangle, undermining the promise of coherent stories and subjects. From the depth of successive interiors (bathrooms, stairs, bedrooms) and the privilege of shared perspective, Baker repositions her readers outside, looking in. Nothing remains. The house becomes a screen of flickering shadows, and the startled star, ransacking the intimate corners of her life at midnight, disappears. More than allegorical double or autobiographical anecdote, this passage replays [End Page 7] scenes from Baker's cinematic life: the chase through bathrooms and bedrooms in La Sirène des tropiques (Henri Étiévant and Mario Nalpas, FR, 1927); the hyperbolic shadows that precede and accompany Baker's appearance on stage in Zou Zou (Marc Allégret, FR, 1934); and the extended domestic dreamscape of Princesse Tam-Tam (Edmond Gréville, FR, 1935). The shadows of cinema—of Baker's cinema and the Cinema—stretch across this brief reflection. They are subversive, defiant, out there even in the dark. The play of shadows that Baker ascribes to cinema and produces in this autobiographical remix likewise resonates with the practice and theory of the inter-war avant-garde. As Denis Hollier chases shadows across surrealist painting, photography, and autobiography, he reminds us that the shadow is a privileged indexical sign. Shadows are cast on the spot, at the instant of an object's presence. They signify "less the representation of an object, than the effect of an event."3 While the shadow-sign is contemporaneous with its object, the surrealist shadows are multiple, wandering, torn from their objects, or born of objects impaled upon the iconic surface of painted canvas. They introduce "an indecision that makes it difficult to know if one is faced with a real shadow or a represented one, if one is looking at a cast shadow or its image, if one is inside a space of the indexical type or looking at a space of the iconic kind."4 For the first wave of experimental filmmakers in the 1910s and '20s, cinema extended the possibilities of this kind of indexical and temporal shadow play. Where Maxim Gorky saw "not life but the shadow of life [. . .] not movement but the soundless shadow of movement" in 1896, early film theorists like Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud, Jean Epstein, Louis Delluc, and Germaine Dulac theorized a secret or second life in cinema, a kingdom of specters that could disrupt, confuse, and surpass the object-shadow indexes of everyday life.5 Not shadows of life, but shadows with lives of their own. While no doubt there is much work to be done in the space between the early twentieth-century avant-garde and Josephine Baker (the parallel tracks of automatic writing and improvisatory dance come immediately to mind), I do not explore these connections in this essay. Nor do I recuperate Baker's cinema for the first wave of experimental European filmmaking. Rather, I read Baker's films as engaged in precisely the kind of "endless play of all shadows" that she describes, one...

Contemporary eco-food films: The documentary tradition

ABSTRACTThis article examines the central role food has played in documentary films as early as the Lumiere Brothers' 1895 view, Repas de bebe/Baby's Breakfast through the more recent eco-food films from United States, Canadian and European film-makers. Responding to non-fiction works of Michael Pollan, popular US documentaries such as Food, Inc. by Robert Kenner (2008) and King Corn by Aaron Woolf (2007) assert clear positions through their talking heads approach to exposition but draw on a limiting nostalgic view of food production. Austria's We Feed the World by Erwin Wagenhofer (2005) and multiple National Film Board of Canada documentaries, on the other hand, provide a depth of evaluation supported by multiple examples missing in both Food, Inc. and King Corn, yet weaken their arguments with an evenhanded approach to food ecology. Germany's Our Daily Bread by Nikolaus Geyrhalter (2005), however, comes closest to capturing the truth, offering fragmented observations that closely replicate the segmented process of industrial food production, effectively revealing its consequences to human and non-human nature because the intermediary veil of direct cinema has been lifted.

Female Body Traffic in Ulrich Seidl’s Import/Export and Ursula Biemann’s Remote Sensing and Europlex

It is a paradox of contemporary social science that the shifting dynamic and increasing importance of border zones within the globalized economy has resisted comprehensive or global explanations. Hewing to a residually Leninist paradigm, the geopolitical expert Parag Khanna argues that globalization is a new form of economic imperialism: “The European Union has become the one contemporary empire that continues to expand, year after year, by absorbing new countries – with many more in line begging to join in” (Khanna xvi–xvii). Although the work of certain contemporary European filmmakers does not provide a thorough conceptual framework for interpreting globalization, it arguably does afford a more ramified and less binary understanding of the effects that globalization has on the “first world.” The Greek filmmaker Angela Melitopoulos theorizes the relationship between “fortress Europe” and poorer eastern countries not as a centripetal domination of a larger body over a smaller one, but as an interpenetration that is made possible through the creation of makeshift buffer zones:

Europe in motion: migrant cinema and the politics of encounter

The article focuses on the contested notion of the (new) Europe from the vantage point of migrant cinema. The aim is to explore how cinematic language offers alternative modalities of representation and subjectification in relation to migration, gender and identity. The emphasis of this analysis is on the politics of encounter: how the presumed strangers to Europe are figurations of Europe's othered self while also embodying the material practices of exclusion. The politics of encounter is explored in three films made by European filmmakers in which the main female character struggles to negotiate her identity in between colonial legacies and global terror, as in the British-Pakistani Yasmin (Kenneth Glenaan, UK, 2004), between transsexual and transnational politics, as in the case of the Iranian refugee in Unveiled (Angela Maccarone, Germany, 2005), or in between trafficked bodies and renewed citizenship as in the case of the Eastern European immigrant prostitute in The unknown woman (Giuseppe Tornatore, Italy, 2006). These visual and ideological commentaries participate in the redefinition or abolition of the notion of Europe by proposing the representations of the strangers within not from original and unexpected positions but by highlighting the transformation of the ‘European subject’ through the politics of encounter. The article furthermore raises questions about the agency of Muslim women who opt for religion in the midst of the self-professed secular Europe, explores debates on homophobia and the refugee's state of exceptionalism and offers a feminist reading of the phenomena of trafficking of women.

Out of Many, One: European film-makers construct the United States

The Latin phrase e pluribus unum (out of many, one) was the motto proposed by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson for the first Seal of the United States in 1776. It would later be included on most American currency and in the Seal of the President of the United States. Originally intended to suggest that out of the thirteen independent states declaring their independence from Britain would emerge a single country, it would later imply that the United States was attempting to ...

DEFA's floating islands

The DEFA Sci-Fi Collection. First Run Features. NTSC region 1. 16:9. us $44.95. Contains Silent Star (Der schweigende Stern/Milczaza Gwiazda; Kurt Maetzig East Germany/Poland 1960), Eolomea (Hermann Zschoche East Germany/ USSR/Bulgaria 1972) and In the Dust of the Stars (Im Staub der Sterne; Gottfried Kolditz East Germany/Romania 1976).Despite the vaunted respect for sf - or rather its official socialist form, the 'utopian adventure' - in the USSR and its satellite states, few sf films were made in the Eastern bloc. The Russians produced about a dozen, the Czechs perhaps another half-dozen, the Poles perhaps three. The German Democratic Republic's state-run DEFA studios made four. First Run Features has released three of these - Silent Star (1960), Eolomea (1972) and In the Dust of the Stars (1976) - in a DVD package, produced from the prints housed in the University of Massachusetts' DEFA collection. Some of these films have attained legendary status. For some viewers, Silent Star and Eolomea represent the most concerted effort by the Eastern bloc to present alternative socialist sf to international audiences. For others, who grew up in the region under Soviet domination, they were powerful childhood experiences and spurs for 'ostalgie'. For most, they are the most accessible examples of sf film under Communism.The three films in the collection are a very mixed bag. It is not clear why the fourth DEFA sf film, Signals: A Space Adventure (Signale - Ein Weltraumabenteuer/ Sygnally MMXX; Kolditz East Germany/Poland 1970), was not included. I have not seen it, and it is not highly regarded by those who have, but historians attest to its importance as the first step in 'DEFA 70', the effort by the studio to produce and distribute 70mm film on a regular basis (see Vonau). Even if Signale had been included, I doubt we would be able to trace a distinctive DEFA style of sf. Unlike romances, musicals and even westerns (of the Karl May type), DEFA did not produce enough examples of the genre to establish a style. Sf proved to be prohibitively expensive to make for the always cash-and-creditstrapped bloc states. And the clear value of utopian adventure as a vehicle for Marxist-Leninist ideology actually hindered its production, as the various bureau-heads and Ministers of Culture, and indeed even Party First Secretaries, insisted on having their say about the films' messages. Nonetheless, DEFA's sf films do share an aesthetic-political purpose: to negotiate between western commercial sf adventure and the Soviet model of socialist romanticism.At first glance, it is surprising that a studio as endowed with experienced filmmakers as DEFA would have produced so little sf. Officially chartered in 1946, the Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft was the reconstituted heir of the great Babelsberg Ufa studios that played such a dominant role in European filmmaking before World War II, and which had produced Fritz Lang's Metropolis (Germany 1927) and Die Frau im Mond (Germany 1929) and the fascist sf films of Harry Piel (on the history of DEFA, see Bergahn; on Harry Piel and Nazi sf film, see Strzelczyk). East German cinema represented a confluence point where the powerful traditions of Soviet and National Socialist propaganda cinema met with its cross-border counterpart-antagonist, the postwar entertainment cinema of US-backed Western Europe. Under other circumstances, this might have led to the emergence of a powerful, reflective sf cinema. In fact, it contributed to its stifling. Burdened by being the main frontline state of the Warsaw Pact, and to Soviet eyes having the most suspect population, East German culture was kept on the shortest leash in the bloc.Not all of the Soviet bloc cultures were equally interested in the genre. Sf in Russia constituted a true literary tradition, both dangerous and uplifting, the stuff of cultural adventure. Extending from pre-Revolutionary times, through a period of high experimentalism, criticism and utopian vision in the 1920s, it was stifled brutally under Stalin, when it became the occasion for the persecution of scientists in the 1930s, and settled into a form of imperial propaganda until the breakout period of Thaw after Stalin's death. …

Embracing Sexual Difference in Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell (2003)

Since the late 1990s, Catherine Breillat has lent her name to a form of cinema in Europe that deals with the contemporary issue of woman's quest for sexual identity. I will claim that Anatomie de l'Enfer shares some similarities with her previous film(s) but also departs from them/it. This departure is what will particularly interest me in this study. Anatomy of Hell revolves around a woman who pays a gay man "to watch her where she is unwatchable." While he contemplates her most intimate self, she is mainly asleep, relegated to a passive position. This active/passive split corresponding to a sexual division between man and woman, brings to mind Mulvey's feminist film theory. Through a detailed analysis of the film's major scenes, I propose to address the above issue. In this article I offer a critical discussion centering on the innovation in the cinematic representation of sexual explicitness of a woman's most intimate interiority. This article looks at Anatomy of Hell as a prominent and symbolic film among Breillat's corpus in the sense that, as I aim to argue, it offers an (inter)relationship or an exchange between the sexes. A consideration of the extent of the film's political impact will lead in the conclusion of this study to express an appreciation of Breillat's influence in contemporary European filmmaking.

Documentary Pitching Forums – new perspectives in financial support for young filmmakers and Eastern European filmmakers of all ages

Documentary Pitching Forums – new perspectives in financial support for young filmmakers and Eastern European filmmakers of all ages

Gramsci, Passive Revolution, and Media

The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed a restructuring of capital and redistribution of wealth to the top of an economic pyramid on an international scale. This neoliberal “reform” involves the gradual dismantling of the welfare state, relegation of the employed and unemployable to the bottom of the social and economic pyramid, and perpetual warfare on national and global fronts. Antonio Gramsci's analysis of “passive revolution” seems cogent for this moment, particularly for the ways media and other cultural forms play a significant role in mobilizing or disorganizing consent. The Prison Notebooks, published in 1948, influenced the thinking of Italian and postwar European intellectuals and filmmakers on the left, and they continue to be a reservoir for an examination of the character and relevance of passive revolution, forms of coercion and consent, relations between the State and civil society, and the position of intellectuals in the creation of hegemony. Visconti's films on the Risorgimento, The Leopard and Senso; Pasolini's films and writings on the cultural and political transformations wrought by the “Economic Miracle”; the critical work that emerged from Stuart Hall, among others, at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Study in the UK; and research generated by the Indian Subaltern Studies group are testimonials to Gramsci's ongoing legacy. These texts followed Gramsci in performing a multifaceted examination of language, political, and social institutions; however, despite prolific research on media, there is scant concerted attention to their contributions in the passive revolution begun in the 1970s.

Notes from Region 2

Academic and populist attempts at defining European cinema encounter such similar problems to political economists and politicians when delineating the extent and remit of the European Union that the application of social, economic and political theory to European film studies might be worth a go. Basing itself upon a suggestive correlation between the European Union as a community of sentiment and the region coding of its DVDs, this article assesses the impact of new screen technologies and the rebranding of the European Union on European film-makers and audiences. Building on links with recent events in Europe and the USA and the dislocation and disempowerment of protagonists in recent European and American cinema, this article develops an idea of the pan-European stratification of persons based on economic criteria and access to technology that has consequences for the future of European film.

Un siècle de musique russe (1830-1930): Glinka, Moussorgsky, Tchaïkowsky, Strawinsky; et autres écrits: Strawinsky, Berg, Messiaen et Boulez by Pierre s> Souvtchinsky Frank Langlois (review)

132 SEER, 84, I, 2006 Has, I964); Obchod nakorze (ShopontheMainStreet, directed byJan Kadar and Elmar Klos, I965); Szege'nylegenyek (T-he RoundUp,directed by MiklosJancs6, I965); Ostfrsledovane vlaky(CloselyObserved Trains,directed by Jifi Menzel, I966); Sedmikrasky (Daisies,directed by Vira Chytilova, I966); 0 slavnostia hostech (AboutthePartyandtheGuests, directed by Jan Nimec, I966); Marketa Lazarova (directed by FrantisekVlacil, I967); Vta6kovia, sirotya blazni(Birds, Orphans andFools,directed by JurajJakubisko, I969); Szerelem (Love,directed by Karoly Makk, 1970); Clowiek z marmuru (ManofMarble,directed by Wajda, I977); Japlo gyermeimnek (Diary for My Children directed by Marta Mezsaros, I982); Redlezredes (Colonel Redldirected by Istvan Szabo, I984); JNeco z Alenky (Something About Alice,directed byJan Svankmajer,I987);Dekalog (directedby Krzysztof Kieslowski, I989); Satdntango(Satan'sTango, directed by Bela Tarr, 1994); Zahrada(The Garden, directed by Martin Sulik, 1995); and BoIse vita (directed by Jbolya Fekete, I996). The collection also includes essays, in translation, written by Central and East European scholars which offer the Westernreadera first-handinsightinto the responsesof contemporary,'local' critics. Without necessarilyattempting to be exhaustive, the aim of the volume, as Peter Hames argues, is to 'drawattention to some remarkableachievements' in Central European film-making. Each essay gives a synopsis of the film under discussion, places it in a historical context, analyses its themes and concludes with a consideration of its reception by both criticsand audiences. Specific consideration of the stylesof these films and the techniques deployed by particular film-makers is, however, largely missing, except in Ewa Mazierka's perceptive study of Polish director Andrzej Munk's Eroica,in which she compares camera work and editing styles with those of his contemporary, Andrzej Wajda:Wajda tends to employ close-ups and pointof -view shots, for example, whereasMunk distanceshis protagonistsfrom the camera. Mazierkaalso discussesdirectorof photographyJerzy Wojcik'suse of deep focus which markeda significanttechnical innovation in East European film-making.Otherexcellent essaysincludeDavid Robinson's essayon Karoly Makk'sLove, John Cunningham's on Istvan Szots'sPeople oftheMountains, and Janina Falkowska'son AndrzejWajda'sAshesandDiamonds. Perhapsthe most valuable essay in the volume, however, is director Istvan Szabo'sprefacewhich, injust one page, lucidlyand succinctlyoutlinesthe key elements of CentralEuropeancinema. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies CESAR BALLESTER University College London Souvtchinsky,Pierre. Unsiecle demusique russe (I830-I930). Glinka, Moussorgsky, Tchaikowsky, Strawinsky; et autresecrits.Strawinsky, Berg,MessiaenetBoulez. Edited by FrankLanglois. Preface by Pierre Boulez. Actes Sud, Arles, 2004. 304 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. ?25.00 (paperback). 'FIGURE of exile': this is how Pierre Boulez introduces Petr Suvchinskii(art critic, thinker and founding member of the Eurasianist movement) in his REVIEWS I33 preface (writtenin 2002) to this collection of essaysby his former friend and collaborator. The phrase encapsulates, according to Boulez, Suvchinskii's attitude to life and consequently accounts for the mysterythat still surrounds him, notwithstandingthe attention he has received in recent scholarship.For, throughout his engagement with the arts, music especially, for over seventy years, Suvchinskii preferred to remain a shadowy figure. He acted as an intermediaryfor othersleaving hardlyany trace of his agency otherthan their recollections. Small wonder that no entry on Suvchinskii exists in TheNew Grove Dictiona?y ofMusicandMusicians. Yet, reading the circumstances of this emigre's life in Frank Langlois's 'Introduction', of his numerous contacts and multiple activities outside the emigre community in a country whose language was effectively a second mother tongue to him, one would have thought that Suvchinskiiwas pretty much at home in France, where he spent most of his life. That would have seemed to be the case had it not been for his fixationwith his motherland, his determinationto graspits 'spirit',the meaning of itshistory,its destiny.To the end of his life Suvchinskii reflected on these issues through one aspect of culture: music. Such are the preoccupations underlying Un sieclede musique russe(written in 944 and rejected by publishers at that time) which is notably 'not a historicalsummary',but 'an attempt to trace a typology of the Russian creative genius' through music and place 'the musical phenomena with which it deals in a historical and cultural trajectory' as Suvchinskii declaresin his 'Preface'(pp. 99, I02). Langlois's'Introduction'is the firstsoundundertakingtowardsa biography of Suvchinskii. The scarcity and peculiarity of sources, that is, mainly oral testimonies and correspondence which is inconveniently dispersedin various librariesand collections around...

The Cinema of Central Europe by Peter s> Hames (review)

REVIEWS 13I deliberately engages with the kind of practice pioneered by Godard (his relationshipwith and directing of Anna Karina) and Antonioni (his relationship with and directing of Monica Vitti) in the I96os. Another aspect of Kieslowski's directing practice which requires further investigation, one tantalizinglyairedby Haltof but not pursuedwith any greatvigour, lies in his relationships with his respective cinematographers, in particular his willingness to engage with them at the level of equals, allowing them latitude and creativefreedom, aswell as the rightto interferewith the content of the script. In some respects, these collaborations raise important questions about the limitationsof the concept of the auteurin relation to visual style. Last,but by no means least, is the creative partnership between Kieslowski and his coscenarist Krzysztof Piesiewicz, an extremely fruitful collaboration which accompanied the movement towards the more theological, if not mystical, concerns fromNoEndonwards. Piesiewiczis not only neglected as a source of potentially useful information on the genesis and development of ideas for successivescreenplays,he isvirtuallyair-brushedout of history. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies PHILIP CAVENDISH University College London Hames, Peter (ed.). T7he Cinema of Central Europe. 24 Frames.WallflowerPress, London and New York, 2004. xv + 291 pp. Illustrations.Notes. Filmography .Bibliography.Index. Ci6.99 (paperback). THISvolume featuresa seriesof essayson twenty-fourkey filmsfrom Central and EasternEurope. Conscious of the terminologyused to referto the cinema of those countries that lay on the 'east' side of the Iron Curtain -whether 'East', 'Central East' or 'East Central' Europe Peter Hames refers,for the sake of argument, to the entire region as Central European. The collection is particularlywelcome because of its coverage not only of well-known cinema, but some excellent filmsvirtuallyunknownin the West,forexample, Frantisek Vladl's I967 Marketa Lazarova. In thisway, PeterHames has broughtthe films of this region back into the limelight where they belong. WallflowerPresshas done much to promote East European film and film-makingin recent years with their publication of The Cinemaof the OtherEurope(2003) by Dina lordanova; Hungarian Cinema (2004) by John Cunningham; the monographs within the series 'Directors' Cuts' dedicated to Kusturica (writtenby Goran Gocic, 200 1), Wajda(edited byJohn Orr and Elzbieta Ostrowska,2003) and Kieslowski (by Marek Haltof, 2004); along with 7The RedandtheWhite(Paul Coates, 2005) and the second edition of Peter Hames's TheCzechoslovak New Wave (2005). The films included in this volume are: Hej-Rup(directed by Martin Fric, 1934); DerDibuk(T7he Dybbuk directed by Michal Waszynski, 1937); Emberek a havason (People oftheMountains, directedby IstvanSzots, 1942); Dalekd cesta (The LongJ_ourney, directed by Alfred Radok, 1949); Eroica(directed by Andrzej Munk, 1957); Popioli Diament (Ashes andDiamonds, directedby AndrzejWajda, 1958);N6J w wodzie(Knifein the Waterdirected by Roman Polanski, i962); Rekopis znaleziony wSaragossie (Manuscriptfound inSaragosa, directedby Wojciech 132 SEER, 84, I, 2006 Has, I964); Obchod nakorze (ShopontheMainStreet, directed byJan Kadar and Elmar Klos, I965); Szege'nylegenyek (T-he RoundUp,directed by MiklosJancs6, I965); Ostfrsledovane vlaky(CloselyObserved Trains,directed by Jifi Menzel, I966); Sedmikrasky (Daisies,directed by Vira Chytilova, I966); 0 slavnostia hostech (AboutthePartyandtheGuests, directed by Jan Nimec, I966); Marketa Lazarova (directed by FrantisekVlacil, I967); Vta6kovia, sirotya blazni(Birds, Orphans andFools,directed by JurajJakubisko, I969); Szerelem (Love,directed by Karoly Makk, 1970); Clowiek z marmuru (ManofMarble,directed by Wajda, I977); Japlo gyermeimnek (Diary for My Children directed by Marta Mezsaros, I982); Redlezredes (Colonel Redldirected by Istvan Szabo, I984); JNeco z Alenky (Something About Alice,directed byJan Svankmajer,I987);Dekalog (directedby Krzysztof Kieslowski, I989); Satdntango(Satan'sTango, directed by Bela Tarr, 1994); Zahrada(The Garden, directed by Martin Sulik, 1995); and BoIse vita (directed by Jbolya Fekete, I996). The collection also includes essays, in translation, written by Central and East European scholars which offer the Westernreadera first-handinsightinto the responsesof contemporary,'local' critics. Without necessarilyattempting to be exhaustive, the aim of the volume, as Peter Hames argues, is to 'drawattention to some remarkableachievements' in Central European film-making. Each essay gives a synopsis of the film under discussion, places it in a historical context, analyses its themes and concludes with a consideration of its reception by both criticsand audiences. Specific consideration of the stylesof these films and the techniques deployed by particular film-makers is, however, largely missing, except in Ewa Mazierka's perceptive study of Polish director Andrzej Munk's Eroica...

Shielding Idiosyncrasy from Isomorphic Pressures: Towards Optimal Distinctiveness in European Filmmaking

This paper advances a micro theory of creative action by examining how distinctive artists shield their idiosyncratic styles from the isomorphic pressures of a field. It draws on the cases of three internationally recognized, distinctive European film directors—Pedro Almodóvar (Spain), Nanni Moretti (Italy) and Lars von Trier (Denmark). We argue that, in a cinema field, managing artistic pressures for distinctiveness versus business pressures for profits drives filmmakers' quest for optimal distinctiveness. This quest seeks both exclusive (unique style) and inclusive (audience-appealing) artwork with legitimacy in the field. Our theory of creative action for optimal distinctiveness suggests that film directors increase their control by personally consolidating artistic and production roles, by forming close partnerships with committed producers, and by establishing their own production companies. Ironically, to escape the iron cage of local cinema fields, film directors increasingly control the coupling of art and business.

Artists as Filmmakers in Los Angeles

Almost all the classic European avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s were visual artists who experimented with the new medium. Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, and Walter Ruttmann in Germany, and Man Ray, Fernand Leger, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Salvador Dali in France all created alternatives to the industrial entertainment cinema by elaborating in film the principles of the various schools of modernist painting with which they were associated. The landmark American experimental film of the same period, Manhatta (1921), was similarly made by two visual artists in New York, Charles Sheeler, a painter, and Paul Strand, a photographer. In Los Angeles, however, avant-garde films were mostly made by artists who were themselves regularly employed in the industrial studios. Slavko Vorkapich, for example, one of the makers of a seminal American avant-garde film, The Life and Death of 9413—A Hollywood Extra (1928), began his career as a painter, and Boris Deutsch, the maker of the experimental short Lullaby (1929) and painter of a notable series of murals in the Post Office annex, made his living as a studio set designer. In these films, modernist aesthetic influences were mediated by thematic references to Hollywood as well as some incorporation of Hollywood studio production values and formal priorities, especially those reflecting the requirements of sutured narrative. But the effects of the development of sound technology on the one hand and the Depression on the other ended this para-industrial artists’ cinema in the U.S., and after the 1920s, Los Angeles artists only occasionally worked in film. (One notable exception, however, was the painter Sara Kathryn Arledge, who made several films and also wrote a history of experimental cinema.)1

Stories Travelling Across Nations and Cultures

European filmmakers have often stated that linguistic diversity presents the major obstacle for European movies to cross national and cultural borders successfully. Some have even tried to make us believe that it would suffice to produce a movie in English to guarantee its international success. This article suggests that the effective use of some specific rhetorical devices might play a more important role in enhancing the chances of filmic narratives to travel successfully across nations and cultures. A thorough comparative study of the presence or absence of these rhetorical features and the use of language, applied upon a specific corpus of European movies, could enlighten us on the relative importance of the respective parameters within the larger discussion of movies travelling across nations and cultures and various translation policies.