A hushed crisis : the visual narratives of (Eastern) Europe's antiziganism

An exploration of various manifestations of racist filmmaking and representations from across contemporary Eastern Europe and discussion of the attempts to contravene.proo

Archiving and Film Restoration: The View from Asia

Introduction to the Dossier on Asian Archive

The artist in Balkan cinemasuspect аnd insufficiently Balkan

Expanded and revised version of an earlier text on the Artist in Balkan Cinema, published in the book by the Swiss Institute New YorkAs represented in Balkan cinema – and here we mainly look at cinematic texts created in the context of former Yugoslavia’s constituent republics -- the artist is suspect. The presence of the artist is awkwardly tolerated – because the artist is alien, cosmopolitan, and extraneous. He may react in unpredictable ways or have eccentric wishes. The artist may seek fame but no fame can come. The artist is insufficiently Balkan. He is better off being abroad. Even where films put the artist in the centre of attention, there is indolent insufficiency in representing the artist. In this playful exploration, we look at various cinematic texts that have provided commentary on the status of the artist in a Balkan context. The concept of ‘Balkan’ used here is not a geographical category but rather complies with the definition given in my book Cinema of Flames (2001) as well as, occasionally, is used in the sense implied by Marina Abramovic in her short Balkan Erotic Epic (2011).Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Constraints and possibilities: Lima Film Festival, politics and cultural formation in Peru

The Festival de Cine de Lima (Lima Film Festival) launched in 1997 and, from humble beginnings, each year now introduces around 300 films to diverse audiences across the Peruvian capital and beyond. In 2014, for the first time in its history, four of the nineteen films selected for the feature competition were made by Peruvian directors, signalling a growing recognition of national talent by programming panels and critics that had tended to look beyond national borders for inspiration and challenge. Despite the relative paucity of co-ordinated film production activity in Peru, it is argued here that the flourishing of Lima Film Festival provides evidence of a deep sense of film appreciation that conveys a commitment to all forms of cinema. This essay reflects critically on the local, national and international impact of this Festival, its influence on the development of film policy in Peru, and explores its role as a ‘key building block of film culture’ (Iordanova, 2013) across a complex national framework

Postcoloniality without race? Racial exceptionalism and south-east European cultural studies

The black Dutch feminist Gloria Wekker, assembling past and present everyday expressions of racialized imagination which collectively undermine hegemonic beliefs that white Dutch society has no historic responsibility for racism, writes in her book White Innocence that ‘one can do postcolonial studies very well without ever critically addressing race’ (p. 175). Two and a half decades after the adaptation of postcolonial thought to explain aspects of cultural politics during the break-up of Yugoslavia created important tools for understanding the construction of national, regional and socio-economic identities around hierarchical notions of ‘Europe’ and ‘the Balkans’ in the Yugoslav region and beyond, Wekker’s observation is still largely true for south-east European studies, where no intervention establishing race and whiteness as categories of analysis has reframed the field like work by Maria Todorova on ‘balkanism’ or Milica Bakić-Hayden on ‘symbolic geographies’ and ‘nesting orientalism’ did in the early 1990s. Critical race theorists such as Charles Mills nevertheless argue that ‘race’ as a structure of thought and feeling that legitimised colonialism and slavery (and still informs structural white supremacy) involved precisely the kind of essentialised link between people and territory that south-east European cultural theory also critiques: the construction of spatialised hierarchies specifying which peoples and territories could have more or less access to civilisation and modernity. South-east European studies’ latent racial exceptionalism has some roots in the race-blind anti-colonial solidarities of state socialist internationalism (further intensified for Yugoslavia through the politics of Non-Alignment) but also, this paper suggests, in deeper associations between Europeanness, whiteness and modernity that remain part of the history of ‘Europe’ as an idea even if, by the end of the 20th century, they were silenced more often than voiced

East Europe\u27s cinema industries since 1989: financing structure and studios

Desetletne izkušnje vzhodnoevropske tranzicije je mogoče povzeti v nekaj temeljnih ugotovitvah o viharnem in globokem preoblikovanju kulturn administracije. Vzhodnoevropska kulturna industrija je bila v začetku devetdesetih let prva izpostavljena velikemu zmanjšanju sredstev in odpravi vnaprej zagotovljenega financiranja. Še posebej je bil prizadet film. V vseh vzhodnoevropskih državah je bila filmska proizvodnja podvržena nepremišljenim strukturnim spremembam ter pogosto protislovnim ukrepom v upravljanju in financiranju. Drobljenje proizvodnih postopkov je pri mnogih povzročilo ustvarjalno krizo. Značilni problemi so nepoštena konkurenca, poglabljanje generacijskega prepada ter zaton celovečernih, dokumentarnih in animiranih filmov. Hkratna kriza v filmski distribuciji in prikazovanju je pripeljala do upadanja števila gledalcev vseh vzhodnoevropskih filmov, čeprav so hkrati nekateri vzhodnoevropski filmi poželi mednarodna priznanja. Spremembe v vzhodnoevropskem filmu so potekale v obodbju negotovosti zahodnoevropskih kulturnih politik, ki so jih vodila vse bolj protiameriška čustva. Nastanek investicijskih skladov, kot sta Media 95 in Euroimage, je bil reakcija na triumf komercialnega filma. Pod vplivom prevlade ideje "novega evropskega filma" nad "nacionalnim filmom" so se povečale tudi subvencije v vzhodnoevropske studie. Članek podrobneje obravnava spremembe v vzhodnoevropski filmski proizvodnji, konec nacionalnih kinematografij, probleme koprodukcij, zlasti v povezavi z Evroimage, komercialno financiranje,odnos med domačo in tujo filmsko distribucijo in prikazovanjem ter filmske festivale.The decade worth of the East European transition allows us to sum up important lessons of the stormy and profound transformation in cultural administration. The East European cultural industries were the first ones to suffer massive cuts and withdrawal of secure funding early in the 1990s. Cinema was affected most notably. In all of the East European countries filmmaking underwent volatile structural changes and was subjected to often contradictory undertakings in administration and financing. The crumbling production routines caused a creativity crisis in many filmmakers. Problems included unfair competition, deepening generation gap, and decline in feature,documentary and animation output. The concurrent crisis in distribution and exhibition led to a sharp drop in box office indicators for all productions carrying an East European label. At the same time some East European films enjoyed an international critical acclaim internationally. The volatility in East European cinema coincided with a clearly articulated period of insecurity in West European cultural policies, driven by a growing anti-American sentiment. The establishment of such pan-European funding bodies as Media 95 and Euroimage came as a reaction to the overwhelming triumphof commercialism in cinema. The share of international subsidies for filmmaking in poverty-stricken Eastern European studios quickly increased as the concept of "national cinema" gave way to a "new European" one. The article focuses on the following topics: changes in East European production schemes, the end of national cinemas, issues of co-producing with focus on Euroimage, media and commercial financing, the questions of domestic versus foreign film distribution and exhibition, and festivals