PostCommunist East European Cinema

1
Post-Communist East European Cinema

• Marginality and socio-political instability

2
The New Europe

• 1990s
• End of cold-war line dividing Europe in two
  abolished
• Repositioning of former soviet bloc within new
  Europe
• Central Eastern Europe
• Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia
• looked to West
• South-East Europe
• Balkans
• Former Yugoslavia Bulgaria, Macedonia,
  Montenegro, Albania
• Looked to East

3
Central Eastern Europe

• Post communist Eastern Bloc
• broken political state of region
• Hungarian director Bella Tarr
• Satantango (1993)
• Werckmeister Harmonies (2001)
• conflict between light and dark
• inevitable political revolution

4
Cinematic Minimalism

• Narrowing of stylistic palette
• Black and white
• Long, slow, semi abstract shots
• Sustained stasis
• Metaphor
• Few full
• Deep staging
• Deep focus
• Aesthetic rigour
• response to excessive possibilities of CGI

5
Representing the Balkans

• a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the
  backward, the primitive, the barbarian (Larry
  Wolff, 1994)
• Europe/the Wests internal other

6
The Roma

• Stateless ethnic minority within and beyond
  Balkans
• Key tropes
• Excitingly other lifestyle
• Dance, music vitality
• Excessive exoticism
• Passionately romantic heroines
• Non threatening
• Powerless translational minority
• Critique of rigid norms of mainstream society
• Geo-social freedom contrasts with Rationality
  morality of West