The volume, published as a special issue of Koht ja paik / Place and Location: Studies in Environmental Aesthetics and Semiotics, assembles sixteen essays by film scholars of international renown as well as young specialist of the field whose work concentrates on East European, Baltic and Soviet film. The core of the writings is based on the papers given during the international film conference Via Transversa: Lost Cinema of the Former Eastern Bloc, in 2007 at Kumu Art Museum (Tallinn, Estonia). The articles concentrate on the cinema of the former Eastern Bloc in the era between the end of the World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The studies are focussed on the issue of "lost cinema", by which everything that has been often excluded from the writings on the cinema of Eastern Bloc and Soviet Union is meant: e.g., mainstream films (as opposed to the works of so-called great masters), the productions of small republican studios, especially those in the Baltic States, etc.
Subversion/Obedience
Katarzyna Marciniak, How Does Cinema Become Lost? The Spectral Power of Socialism
Andreas Trossek, When Did It Get Political? Soviet Film Bureaucracy and Estonian Hand-Drawn Animation
Mari Laaniste, Pushing the Limits: Priit Pärn's Animated Cartoons and Soviet Cinema Censorship
Maruta Z. Vitols, Cinematic Weapons: Subversion and Resistance in Juris Podnieks' Newsreels and Short Documentaries
Natalia Zlydneva, The Trace of the Avant-Garde in Soviet Educational Cinema
Kristel Kotta, Why Was The Mahtra War Never Filmed? A Banned Project
Spectatorship, Nation, Genre
Katie Trumpener, 'When Do We Get Our Cinema?' Stalinist Populism and East German Media Critique
Petra Han?kov?, 'The Films We Are Ashamed of': Czech Crazy Comedy of the 1970s and 1980s
Anikó Imre, Dinosaurs, Moles and Cowboys: Late Communist Youth Media
Bjorn Ingvoldstad, The Paradox of Lithuanian National Cinema
Lilla T?ke, Idiots on the Ball: Ðvejkism as a Survival Strategy in the East European Imaginary
Lauri Kärk, The Last Relic: From a Genre Film to a Genre Film
Spatial Politics
Eva Näripea, A View from the Periphery. Spatial Discourse of the Soviet Estonian Feature Film: The 1940s and 1950s
Brinton Tench Coxe, Screening 1960s Moscow: Marlen Khutsiev's Ilich's Gate
Ewa Mazierska, The Politics of Space in Polish Communist Cinema
Irina Novikova, Baltic Cinemas ? Flashbacks in/out of the House
