Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe
Title
Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe
Price
€ 141,00 excl. VAT
ISBN
9789462982994
Format
Hardback
Number of pages
334
Language
English
Publication date
Dimensions
15.6 x 23.4 cm
Also available as
eBook PDF - € 140,99
Table of Contents
Show Table of ContentsHide Table of Contents
Acknowledgments 7
Introduction (Ksenya Gurshtein and Sonja Simonyi)

Part I Key Figures
1. The Experimentalism of Gábor Bódy (Gábor Gelencsér)
2. Circles, Lines, and Documentary Designs: Tomislav Gotovac’s Belgrade Trilogy (Greg de Cuir Jr.)
3. From the Workshop of the Film Form to Martial Law: On the Intersecting and Bifurcating Paths of Pawel Kwiek’s and Józef Robakowski’s Cinematographic Work in the 1970s and the 1980s (Lukasz Mojsak)

Part II Production, Support, and Distribution
4. Amateur Cinema in Bulgaria (Vladimir Iliev with Katerina Lambrinova)
5. The Polish Educational Film Studio and the Cinema of Wojciech Wiszniewski (Masha Shpolberg)
6. Home Movies and Cinematic Memories: Fixing the Gaze on Vukica Dilas and Tatjana Ivancic (Petra Belc)

Part III Viewing Contexts, Theories, and Reception
7. Alone in the Cinemascope (Aleksandar Boskovic)
8. kinema ikon—Experiments in Motion (1970–89) (Ileana L. Selejan)
9. AudioVision: Sound, Music, and Noise in East German Experimental Films (Seth Howes)

Part IV Intersection of the Arts
10. Intersections of Art and Film on the Wroclaw Art Scene, 1970–80 (Marika Kuzmicz)
11. Conceptual Artist, Cognitive Film: Miklós Erdély at the Balázs Béla Studio (Ksenya Gurshtein)
12. Works and Words, 1979: Manifesting Eastern European Film and/as Art in Amsterdam (Sonja Simonyi)
13. Wizardry on a Shoestring: Carodej and Experimental Filmmaking in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia (Tomás Glanc)

Index

Reviews and Features

"This is a gem of a collection. It makes a unique and lasting contribution to film history, film studies, and the history of avant-garde/experimental cinema. The thirteen chapters, shepherded by expert curation by the two editors, provide the definitive, thoroughly researched, interconnected, and yet locally specific histories of experimental cinema in the East European countries under Soviet influence in the 1960s-70s, the most prolific period of this kind of filmmaking during the Cold War."
– Anikó Imre, University of Southern California, editor of East European Cinemas and A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas

"I am extraordinarily impressed by this collection—by its balance of diversity and coherence, the quality of the individual contributions and the “curatorial” work of the editors, the depth of research, and the thoroughness with which it covers its topic. This is a powerhouse collection of scholarship that provides an exceptional introduction to a sadly under-studied and under-represented topic. In both the introduction and the contributions, the editors and authors link their projects to larger questions—historical, theoretical, methodological—in the field, all of which are relevant and indeed at the forefront of current work in cinema and art studies."
– Jonathan Walley, Denison University, author of Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia

"It is among the first editions that do not simply concentrate on the history of local experimental filmmaking practices within Eastern Europe but attempt to give an overview of such practices in the aforementioned region. The publication of this book without a doubt can be a crucial step in the research of this field and will be important and inevitable literature for all the scholars focusing on the area."
- Bori Máté, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Sep 2022

Ksenya Gurshtein, Sonja Simonyi (eds)

Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe

Was there experimental cinema behind the Iron Curtain? What forms did experiments with film take in state-socialist Eastern Europe? Who conducted them, where, how, and why? These are the questions answered in this volume, the first of its kind in any language. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines, the book offers case studies from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, former East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and former Yugoslavia. Together, these contributions demonstrate the variety of makers, production contexts, and aesthetic approaches that shaped a surprisingly robust and diverse experimental film output in the region. The book maps out the terrain of our present-day knowledge of cinematic experimentalism in Eastern Europe, suggests directions for further research, and will be of interest to scholars of film and media, art historians, cultural historians of Eastern Europe, and anyone concerned with questions of how alternative cultures emerge and function under repressive political conditions.
Editors

Ksenya Gurshtein

Ksenya Gurshtein is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. She holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art, and her academic research has focused on post-war conceptual, experimental, and neo-avant-garde art in Eastern Europe. Her scholarship and criticism have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines, exhibition catalogs, and online.

Sonja Simonyi

Sonja Simonyi is an independent scholar working on the audiovisual cultures of socialist Eastern Europe. She completed her dissertation at New York University’s Department of Cinema Studies and her writings on both popular and experimental film have appeared in a number of art magazines, edited volumes, as well as academic journals.