Cinema, State Socialism and Society in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1917-1989: Re-Visions (BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies)

This book presents a comprehensive re-examination of the cinemas of the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe during the communist era. It argues that, since the end of communism in these countries, film scholars are able to view these cinemas in a different way, no longer bound by an outlook relying on binary Cold War terms. With the opening of archives in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, much more is known about these states and societies; at the same time, the field has been reinvigorated by its opening up to more contemporary concepts, themes and approaches in film studies and adjacent disciplines. Taking stock of these developments, this book presents a rich, varied tapestry, relating specific films to specific national and transnational circumstances, rather than viewing them as a single, monolithic "Cold War Communist" cinema. Cover 1 Title Page 10 Copyright Page 11 Table of Contents 12 List of illustrations 14 List of contributors 15 Acknowledgments 18 Introduction: questioning and questing: re-staging state socialist cinema 20 PART I On spaces and nations 26 1 Squeezing space, releasing space: spatial research in the study of Eastern European cinema 28 2 Thinking again about Cold War cinema 43 3 Incommensurable distance: versions of national identity in Georgian Soviet cinema 68 PART II Ideologies of representation 94 4 Mirrors of death: subversive subtexts in Bulgarian cinema, 1964–1979 96 5 Popular cinema in late 1960s Romania 113 6 Stalinist cinema and the search for audiences: Liubov0 Orlova and the case for star studies 134 PART III (Re)recordings, (re)focusings, (re)discoveries 168 7 The political camera: comparing 1956 in three moments of Hungarian history 170 8 Back to the archives: the testimonial power of Soviet silent footage of the Holocaust 191 9 The human and the possible: animation in Central and Eastern Europe 205 Index 228 Re-Visions