Representation and Reception – cinematographic portraits of Central Europe and the Balkans

Timetable

Module aim (aims)

Course aim (aims):

• Providing the students with examples of films about Central Europe and the Balkans – including works of foreign directors from that region or living in exile.
• Getting the students acquainted with the most important concepts and methods of researching the cinema of Central Europe and the Balkans (e.g. national and transnational cinema, ethnic and religious diversity, cinema of ethnic minorities).
• Developing the ability of multi-faceted analysis of an audiovisual work with particular emphasis on its historical, social and cultural conditions.
• Shaping the skills of interdisciplinary reflection on the relations between film and regional culture.

Pre-requisites in terms of knowledge, skills and social competences (where relevant)

Syllabus

Course learning content:

Introduction of issues related to the historical and cultural specificity of the Central Europe region and the Balkans

Presentation of basic film trends that influenced not only the shape of European, but also worldwide cinematography (including Czechoslovakian New Wave, Cinema of Moral Unrest, Zagreb School of Animated Films)

Outlining the specificity of contemporary cinema in the region of Central Europe and the Balkans (Romanian New Wave, Greek Weird Wave, Hungarian New Wave)

Analyzing the methods of coping with historical trauma of the Balkan Wars (examples from Serbian and Bosnian cinema) and the Abkhazian-Georgian conflict

Presenting a view on history from the perspective of Polish works (e.g. Ida by Paweł Pawlikowski or Pokłosie (Aftermath) by Władysław Pasikowski)

Introduction of issues related to migration/life in the diaspora and analysis of specific artists/works

Familiarizing the students with the challenges, which national cinematographies have to face (difficulties with financing, political impasse, transnational nature of production, economic situation [e.g. the financial crisis in 2008])

Reading list

• Kwiatkowska, From Don Kichote to Albertus. Adaś Miauczynski’s literary kinship, transl. A.Z. Jezierna, „Images” 2008, no. 11-12, pp. 79-84.
• Mazierska, Polish postcommunist cinema: from pavement level, Peter Lang, Oxford 2007.
• LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, Johns Hopkins university press, Baltimore 2014.
• Nasta, Contemporary Romanian Cinema: The History of an Unexpected Miracle, Wallflower Press, London 2014.
• Galt, The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map, Columbia University Press, New York 2006
• Holloway, Z is for Zagreb, Tantivy Press, London 1972.
• Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Locked doors and Hidden Graves Searching the past in ‘Pokłosie’, ‘Sarah’s Key’ and ‘Ida’: Images, Memory, and the Ethics of Representation, in: Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century. Memory, images, and the ethics of representation, ed. by Oleksandr Kobrynsky, Gerd Bayer, Columbia University Press, New York 2015, pp. 135-154.
• Contemporary Balkan Cinema: Transnational Exchanges and Global Circuits, ed. by Lydia Papadimitriou, Ana Grgić, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2020.
• In contrast: Croatian film today, ed. by Aida Vidan, Gordana P. Crnković, Berghahn Books New York 2012.
• The Cinema of Central Europe, ed. by Peter Hames, Wallflower Press, London 2005.
• Transnational Cinema, The Film Reader, ed. by Eliabeth Ezra, Terry Rowden, Routledge, London 2008.