The annexation of Eastern Europe to the Soviet sphere after World War II dramatically reshaped popular understandings of the natural environment. With an eco-critical approach, Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe breaks new ground in documenting how filmmakers increasingly saw cinema as a tool to critique the social and environmental damage of large-scale projects from socialist regimes and newly forming capitalist presences. New and established scholars with backgrounds across Europe, the United States, and Australia come together to reflect on how the cultural sphere has, and can still, play a role in redefining our relationship to nature.
Arvustused
This collection provides a comprehensive analysis of Eastern European film culture and ecocinema, integrating them expertly to provide a deep historical and geocultural analysis of variations in ecocinematic representations and the ways these film cultures have been engaging with environmental matters. The contextualization of existing scholarship with the particularities of Eastern European political and cultural history is exciting and innovative. Pietari Kaapa, University of Warwick
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Masha Shpolberg and Lukas Brasiskis
Part I: Industrializing the Bloc: Cinema of the Socialist Period
Chapter
1. Sad Landscapes: Panoramic Photography and Documentary Film in the
Czech Lands
Katie Trumpener and Alice Lovejoy
Chapter
2. From Mastery to Indistinction: Nature in Thaw-Era Cinema
Lida Oukaderova
Chapter
3. Spectres of Ecology in Cold War Soviet Science Fiction Film
Natalija Majsova
Part II: Environmental Crisis and the Nuclear Imaginary
Chapter
4. Post-Apocalyptic Landscapes: The End of August at the Hotel Ozone
and the Czechoslovak New Wave
Barbora Bartunkova
Chapter
5. Fallow Fields: Crises of Masculinity and Ecology in Piotr
Andrejews Tender Spots
Eliza Rose
Chapter
6. Catastrophe, Obliquely: The Revival of the Essay Film Form in
Soviet Documentaries About Chernobyl
Masha Shpolberg
Part III: Animals Between the Natural and the Social
Chapter
7. Animals in Modernity: Shaping the Urban Landscape in Lithuanian
Documentary
Natalija Arlauskait
Chapter
8. Mongrelizing Interpretation: The Animal in Contemporary Hungarian
Cinema
Raymond DeLuca
Part IV: From Communism to Capitalism: Privatization and the Commons
Chapter
9. Okraina and Oil Ontology in Post-Soviet Russian Cinema
José Alaniz
Chapter
10. The Commercialization and Destruction of Nature in Contemporary
Bulgarian Cinema
Dina Iordanova
Part V: Towards an Eastern European Eco-cinema
Chapter
11. Coming to the Senses: Environmental Ethics in Contemporary
Slovenian Cinema
Meta Mazaj
Chapter
12. Cinema of the Forest People: Environmental Consciousness,
Authorship and Genre in Post-1989 Polish Film
Kris Van Heuckelom
Chapter
13. Beyond the Utopian Landscape in Post-Soviet Russian Cinema
Jeremi Szaniawski and Michael Cramer
Chapter
14. Recycling, Citroën Cars, and Roma Refugees in Boris Mitis
Pretty Dyana (2003)
Alice Bardan
Chapter
15. From Water to Wind: Elemental Critique in Recent Eastern
European Video Art
Lukas Brasiskis
Masha Shpolberg is Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College. She is currently at work on a book entitled Labor in Late Socialism: The Cinema of Polish Workers Unrest. In addition to this volume, she is also co-editor, with Anastasia Kostina, of Contemporary Russian Documentary, forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press.
