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