The Cinema of the Other Europe. Re-opening the question.
Dina Iordanova,
Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film
London & New York: Wallflower Press, 2003.
ISBN: 1 903364 61 2
224pp
UK£14.99 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press)

In 1992, soon after the Eastern European “velvet revolutions”, Catherine Portuges noted that “to refer to the Eastern European cinemas as ‘national'” is to “recall …a now bygone era of filmmaking”. She suggested that “the plurality of the cinematic images and the ubiquity of international co-productions” were border-crossing phenomena that would lead us to re-evaluate the concept of national cinema: “Perhaps it is time to welcome these changes by redefining ‘national’ to acknowledge its intersecting visual and cultural languages.” (Slavic Review, v. 50, no. 3)

Dina Iordanova’s new book Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film seems to take its starting point from a similar idea. Iordanova’s text springs from a desire to revise Eastern European cinematic discourse as a transnational phenomenon rather than as the sum of several national film industries. The book comes two years after Iordanova’s comprehensive study of the Balkan cinema and media (2001). After defining the Balkans as a distinct cinematic territory within Eastern European cinema, here Iordanova continues her project of re-mapping and reconceptualising the cinema of Eastern Europe from the perspective of transnational and global dynamics.

One of the most valuable aspects of Iordanova’s new book is her determination to write both a border-crossing and a comparative study. The survey includes the cinemas of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (former Czechoslovakia), and former East Germany – a regional formation, often designated East Central Europe. The argument rests on the general premise that, like Scandinavian cinema for instance, these national cinemas share a series of common features which allows one to regard them as a cinematic entity. Dina Iordanova finds the nation-oriented study inadequate for today. In a world where “the national cinematic borders are collapsing” the creation of “new theories of national cinemas …is a lost cause – causa perduta.” (15-6) Relying more on the notion of regional critical studies (Edward Soja) than on the national cinema concept, Dina Iordanova is less concerned with the existing boundaries and more open to the new realities of the post-Cold War era.

The transnational approach helps the author to outline common trends that have been neglected in previous nation-focused studies. At the same time this strategy does not efface local cultural originality, the specific imagery bound to certain localities. This shapes an uneven and contradictory trajectory of the “global localisations” within the global/local nexus. It is in this sense that Dina Iordanova regards her study as part of a broader project of re-investigation, re-assessment, and re-mapping of European cinema beyond the Manichean opposition East/West and within the contexts and complexities of the globalising world.

Despite its openness and flexibility, the concept of regional critical study cannot fully avoid the schemes of the old binarism. Concerned by the fact that even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the concept of European cinema is implicitly identified primarily with Western European cinema, Dina Iordanova is aware of the latent binary opposition that still fashions academic accounts. Frequently recalling the traps of hidden binarism, her text’s intention is to return the cinema of the “other Europe” to where it belongs: inside European cinematic heritage. Decades of isolation meant that this cinema was less well known and less frequently studied, and it was hence often misinterpreted in the West. For this reason the author’s primary aim is to demonstrate that, without an acknowledgement of the industrial capacities, artistic achievements, and specific spectatorial experience of Eastern European film practice, the concept of European cinema will remain biased.

The designation “East Central Europe” in the title is a useful indication of the scope of the study. One shouldn’t forget, however, that the concept of East/Central Europe was an object of heated debates in the 1980s and 1990s. For some scholars the term “East Central Europe” is one of those “symbolic geographies” that conceal a political schema. Some authors find the very designation clumsy, artificial (Maria Todorova) and above all an “intellectual construction” (Timothy Garton Ash), behind which one often finds a pro-Western European political agenda rather than historical and political realities. Both Maria Todorova, (Imagining the Balkans, 1997) and Timothy Garton Ash (“Does Central Europe Exist”, in Schöpflin and Wood, 1993) examine the “myth” of Central Europe as an attempted “internal hierarchisation of Eastern Europe” and an expression of the implicit ideology opposing Central European countries to the rest of Eastern Europe. According to Todorova, the writings of the founding fathers of the notion of (East) Central Europe (the historian Jenö Szücs, and the writers Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera) reveal symptoms of an identity crisis and an overt political agenda. The primary purpose of the debate was “to define the Central European idea both in cultural (…) and in historical terms (…) while always describing it in opposition to Russia.” (Todorova, 1997:147)

Briefly outlining the idea of “Central Europe” and its significance for the political and cinematic thought in the region, Dina Iordanova carefully avoids the traps of the decades-old identity dilemma and proceeds with a thorough analysis of these countries’ industrial and artistic practices. The text’s “both general and comprehensive” approach covers historically rich and stylistically heterogeneous material. Aware of the dangers of reduction and simplification in any attempt to discuss such broad cinematic landscapes, Dina Iordanova hopes to avoid these risks by structuring the text as a series of navigating paths each exploring a certain trend. She first offers a discussion of the general context of the East Central European film industries, their organisation and functioning (part one). Then the text shifts to the major thematic preoccupations: history, identity, ethics, and society (part two) and proceeds with chapters that discuss these and other aspects in more detail: narratives of identity (chapter three), the discourse on morality (chapter four), the rural/urban conflict (chapter five), and finally, women’s cinema and women’s concerns (chapter six). The concluding chapter (seven) offers a general survey of recent tendencies in East Central European industries – filmmakers, landmark films, and central themes since 1989.

Film industries: highs and lows

Readers for whom this book will be an initiation into the cinema of the region will find a useful introductory guide to identifying East Central European cinema in terms of time and place in Part One. The contours of the national industries and their collaboration in the decades of Cold War isolation helps the reader to grasp the region’s specific practices of production, distribution and exhibition. This initial discussion of the state-run centralised film industries before 1989 is extended into a survey of the market system and entrepreneurial practices since 1989 in chapter seven. Discussing the advantages and disadvantages of both production models, Iordanova emphasises the dramatic reversals and dynamic changes of the transitional period. While state control of the film industry provided some production stability, employment security (relatively permanent jobs), and a constant (although low) flow of funding, the successive period of post-1989 transformations was extremely volatile and unstable, threatening to ruin the national film industries. Yet they proved resilient and even showed signs of stabilisation by the late 1990s. While in 1989, for instance, Hungary produced 37 feature films, Poland 22, and Czechoslovakia 70, by the end of 1990s, Hungary produced 24 films, Poland 14, the Czech Republic 14 and Slovakia one (24,144).

Part of non-competitive monopolised state structures until recently, now the film studios are involved in transnational competition – among themselves and with the Western counterparts – to attract more foreign productions. It seems that Barrandov Studios in Prague has won the race for the time being. Labeled “Hollywood on the Vltava”, Barrandov offers competitively low rental prices for its facilities, and it is obviously becoming one of the most popular European locations for shooting: it has managed to attract such blockbusters such as Mission Impossible (USA,1996), A Knight’s Tale (USA, 2000) and Shanghai Knights (USA, UK, Czech Republic, 2003) among others. Commenting on similar signs of revival, the survey of the industrial practices is a necessary context for the following analysis of the major thematic and stylistic features developed in East Central European cinema.

The burden of the past: history, memory and power.

By devoting two chapters of the book (three and four) to the thematic preoccupation with history, and discussing the great number of films concerned with the past, Iordanova indicates the central place of history in the collective consciousness and the cinematic tradition of East Central Europe. Depicting the historical vicissitudes of the region, “crucified between “East” and “West”, (Todorova, 1997:142), the majority of films are concerned with the controversial relationship between individuals, historical processes, and power. These films are often subtle allegories of the totalitarian society and functioned as a subversive voice within state-controlled production. “The struggle of man against power is a struggle of memory against forgetting” Milan Kundera has written, defining narratives of the past as acts of both resistance and subversion. The treatment of history and the depiction of man’s relations with power are, according to Iordanova, the most significant contribution of the East Central European cinemas to European and world cinema.

As a rule, the film plots stress not so much the historical accuracy as the experience of people involuntarily caught up in the storm of the big events and forced to make tragic choices. Alongside historical epics (such as Andrzei Wajda’s Pan Tadeusz [Poland/France,1999] or Gábor Koltay’s blockbuster The Conquest [Hungary,1996]) the book discusses a number of films focused on individual experience, and memory: personal traumas, the victimisation complex, the helplessness of the ordinary people in the face of the “madness of the world”(57), the psychology of perpetrators. The specific treatment of history leads Iordanova to the conclusion that “some of the finest East Central European films belong to the strong tradition of personalised interpretation of history” where “the relationship between individual experience and national fate is conceived in an entirely different manner than is officially sanctioned memory”(58). Without directly declaring their political intentions, these films are artistic evidence of the gap between the historical master narrative of socialist power and individual remembrance. Thus they form a body of those “small histories”, in Foucauldian terms, that emerge in the interstices of the master narratives. In addition, the directors often transformed the historical plots into a backdrop for exploring the existential and philosophic dilemmas of life opening the historical narratives to universal moral concerns. “Taking sides”, “shifting sides”, loyalty and betrayal are themes which have preoccupied film auteurs in this part of the world for decades.

Iordanova’s comprehensive survey of the films dealing with the past identifies a series of cross-border tendencies: stylistic and narrative approaches that characterise all of the regional cinemas she covers. Gradually, a spectrum of narrative and stylistic techniques is outlined, shaping a remarkable aesthetic tradition. Among the diversity of styles and approaches Iordanova lists are surrealism, the absurd, the grotesque, satire, magic realism, post-modern pastiche and nightmarish allegories, a “rich field crying out for investigation by post-modern historians”(53). Narratives are often non-linear, non-chronological, fragmented, kaleidoscopic, syncretic, absorbing both the Western and Eastern narrative traditions. Multiple examples illustrate the broad range of artistic signatures: from Andrzej Munk’s tragi-comic farcical stories (Eroica, Poland, 1958), to Juraj Jakubisko’s surreal fables (The Desert and the Nomads, Czechoslovakia/Italy, 1968), to Zoltán Fábri’s biblical allegories (The Fifth Seal, Hungary, 1976). Miklós Jancsó’s brilliantly composed light/shadow and vertical/horizontal compositions exist alongside Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s ascetic black-and-white symbolism (Mother Joan from the Angels, Poland,1961), and Jiri Menzel’s mocking camera-gaze. Some of the post-war films, dealing with the history as a tragic burden and life-long trauma – for instance, Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds (Poland, 1958) and the Holocaust films, such as Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, (Czechoslovakia,1963), and Elmar Klos and Jan Kadár’s The Shop on Main Street (Czechoslovakia, 1965) – are among the masterpieces of post-war European cinema. Many films deal with the ironies and traps of (wrong) individual choices in crucial circumstances and examine the moral responsibility of artists and celebrities during major political events. Szabó’s award-winning Mephisto (West Germany/Hungary/Austria,1981), is among the most famous examples. While some directors tended to construct elaborate moral theorems (Jancsó, Zanussi, Kieslowski), most of the directors developed highly sophisticated Aesopean language to tell their subversive political fables. The diversity of (often hybrid) genre forms reveals the directors’ efforts to investigate the strategies of survival of the small man caught in the eye of the historical storms (the tragi-comic films of the Czech New Wave, for instance). Not surprisingly, so many films about the Holocaust are made in the region, dealing with the ruined lives of the victims, with the moral burden of the passive witnesses and the psychology of the persecutors. Szabó’s Taking Sides (UK/France/Germany/Austria, 2003) and Polanski’s The Pianist (UK/France/Netherlands/Germany/Poland, 2002) are among the most recent examples indicating that history and the Holocaust continues to be among the central preoccupations of Eastern Europeans.

State socialist modernity: politics beyond the “apolitical”

In a 1986 interview the Polish director Andrzej Wajda noted bitterly that one of the consequences of the Cold War isolation is the fact that Western audiences show “little or no interest” in films made in Eastern Europe. That is a pity, the director says, “for I am certain those concerns are not ours alone but apply to the world at large, or will in the very near future”(92). Wajda’s prognosis has proved far-seeing: during the following decade the director Krzysztof Kieslowski was labeled the “first European director” (The Encyclopedia of European Cinema, 1995) and “one of the world’s most talented filmmakers” (Portuges), whose “transcendental and philosophical stance was to greatly influence the direction of European cinema” in the 1990s (115). Iordanova’s emphasis on the universal appeal of Eastern European film comes close to Paul Coates’ conclusion that these cinemas were the first to represent power as a diffuse, non-personalised, and global force, a concern typical of the postmodern treatment of power in contemporary Western thought. Eastern European cinema is so bewitchingly accurate a mirror of our era – the era so often described as postmodern – since the crumbling of nationality before the pressure of the empire or the world economy defines power as something, that continually relocates itself on the far side of the continually displaced borders. (Coates, in Graham & Dwyer, Before the Wall Came Down, 1990:113-4)

Discussing the cinema of modern state socialism (chapter five) – which is less well known and seems less interesting to the audiences in the West – Dina Iordanova focuses on a paradoxical feature: the markedly apolitical stance. This aversion to politics and the intentional departure from political examination is the basic difference between the Eastern and the Western cinema from that period. The reason? The apolitical stance was partly due to censorship, partly due to an over-politicised society, which threatened to disrupt any privacy and intimacy: “[In] a social context where state socialist ideology would not leave much space for individual privacy, film-makers vigorously asserted the right of the individual to be indifferent to politics” (93).

This asymmetry, appearing between the two sides of the Iron Curtain, was not as big as it might seem at first glance. During the decades in which Western political cinema was “busy exposing the faults of capitalism” in the film of directors like Costa-Gavras, Ken Loach, Reiner Werner Fassbinder and Bertrand Tavernier, Eastern European cinema was busy “subverting state socialism”, its own totalitarian, repressive political system (94). The investigation of personal experience under totalitarian regimes depicts the moral crises, degradation, spiritual and physical destruction of individuals in a society now labeled a “velvet prison”. Without dealing with politics directly and often narrated in the form of “cryptic allegories”, these films are, in fact, powerful political statements.

I would like to have read more in Iordanova’s book about the deeper reasons behind this “apolitical stance”, which appears to be a carefully designed intellectual political strategy of subversion, but the book does not offer more than the most obvious explanation. It makes sense to remember Hungarian writer Gyõrgy Konrád’s comment on the strategic goal behind the Eastern Europeans’ “apolitical” attitude:

Our conduct was based on the Biblical commandment ” Thou shalt not kill” …We did not respond to the state’s violence with violence; on the contrary – we implanted another language and another way of thinking into the society’s consciousness and thus also altered the consciousness of the authorities. (Konrád, Cultura Weekly,no.18, 1999)

This “velvet” subversive strategy, along with Biblical references and allegorical style, would find artistic equivalents in such famous cinematic trends as the Polish Cinema of Moral Concern and the Czech New Wave. The aim of the artistic statements was “to make people less susceptible to the official propaganda and more sensitive to the humanist artistic messages.” (Konrád, ibid.)

Further discussion of this issue can lead to interesting conclusions regarding the other major trend in Eastern European cinema – the demonstrated affinity to ethics and the metaphysical and philosophic problematic. This may in many respects be closely linked to the aversion to politics. Salman Rushdie has noted that “writers and politicians are natural rivals, “[b]oth compete for the same territory – human minds – and both create visions of the world.” (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 1991:14) An interview with Kieslowski offers another glimpse into the complex relation/aversion between art and politics in Eastern Europe. Explaining his shift from politically engaged plots to metaphysical, elliptical, metaphorical and symbolic narratives in the 1990s, he says:

During the martial law, I realised that politics aren’t really important. In a way, of course, they define where we are and what we’re allowed or aren’t allowed to do, but they don’t solve the really important human questions. They’re not in a position to do anything about or to answer any of our essential, fundamental human and humanistic questions. In fact, it doesn’t matter whether you live in a Communist country or a prosperous capitalist one as far as such questions are concerned, questions like, What is the true meaning of life? Why get up in the morning? Politics don’t answer that.” (Stok, D., 1993:144)

Both Kieslowski and Konrád give an indication of the intellectual context in which the films of the Czech New Wave in the 1960s and Polish Cinema of Moral Concern of the 1970s existed. They were usually read by the audiences as something more than innocent accounts of everyday experience since the directors did not limit their messages to the political and intellectual situation of Eastern Europe. Iordanova prefers not to go deeper into this discussion; rather she keeps to a generalised view of the cinematic landscape and goes on presenting the landmarks of production – with an emphasis on their rich arsenal of psychological observation, narrative techniques and stylistic devices.

Women’s cinema: “reluctant feminism”

The special emphasis on women’s cinema and women filmmakers (chapter six) aims at drawing the reader’s attention to another less well-known aspect of Eastern European cinema. Iordanova carefully investigates and elaborately muses on another East/West asymmetry, this time in the territory of feminist cinema. The major concern of women’s films in Eastern Europe is not usually gender inequality in patriarchal society; rather their interest is in the social, personal and existential problems of people living in a system of total oppression. Reading this chapter one might be surprised to discover how many women have been engaged in filmmaking during the decades when Western women-filmmakers have fought (and still fight) for the equal right to work in this “man’s” profession. The proclaimed equality of the state socialism allowed many women to work in the industry alongside men for equally pay. Could this alone explain their “reluctant feminism”? Iordanova asks. Indeed, there is a paradox: while the women-filmmakers create powerful feminist cinema they either reluctantly accept their affiliation with the feminist project or reject it altogether. Márta Mészáros’s Adoption (Hungary, 1975) and Diaries trilogy (Hungary, 1982, 1987, 1990) and Vera Chytilová’s Daisies (Czechoslovakia,1966) have the status of classic feminist works whose significance transcends the borders of the region. Despite their powerful messages and the subversive energy of their films, both these directors and other women filmmakers dismiss the label “feminist” regarding it as “pointless and primitive”(Chytilová) or a constraining platform (Ibolya Fekete) (124). Trying to explain this phenomenon, Iordanova looks at both the different social/culture realities in which the Eastern and Western feminism is rooted, and at the use of the term itself. For women directors in Eastern European the notion of feminist cinema and the mission of the cinema in general obviously mean more than “a simple engagement with the political cause of the day” or a “blind commitment” to “any identifiable feminist cause” (124), imagery or vocabulary. Hungarian filmmaker Ibolya Fekete, for instance, regards the cinematic medium as an investigating device, which by no means should be limited to women’s world and their concerns:

Normally, the female film used to be concerned with the so-called ‘female issues’. I was accused of not being a real woman because I wasn’t dealing with these things. […] I understand women, what they do and why they do it. But I don’t really know why men are doing what they are doing. What is their motivation for acting that way? (124)

Regarding cinema as a device for searching for answers to these questions, Fekete echoes similar declarations made by Tarkovsky and Kieslowski, for instance. For both, cinema is not just a modern medium but a new epistemological device, an investigative apparatus that could not and should not be limited to the simple task of representing and describing the visible world. For these directors the cinematic medium has a unique ability to reveal and to investigate aspects of reality that are inaccessible to other media. This attitude generated their specific attention to the film’s expressive capacities and the experimental film language.

Discussing the “unresolved” issues of the women-filmmakers’ “reluctant feminism”, Iordanova points to another field open to debate. She cites the scholar Anikó Imre who argues that this “reluctant feminism” might be a result of the female directors’ allegorical representation “..whether acknowledged or not – of specifically masculine themes and causes, thus suggesting unspoken endorsement of nationalist patriarchal causes (as seen in the excessive use of the mother figure as nation-symbol, for example)”(125). This argument echoes Kristeva’s warning of the “facile symbiosis between nationalism and, if not ‘feminism’, at least a certain conformist ‘maternalism’ that lies dormant in every one of us and can turn women into mystical nationalists as they were in the Nazi mirage.” (Kristeva, Nation without Nationalism, 1993:34) From this perspective, the women’s films and the women’s images in the films of Holland, Bugajski, Makk, Szabó, Menzel and Jakubisko, among the others, could provide rich material to explore the “use of female images within the range of nationalist symbolism”. (197-8)

Reforms and survival: cinema since 1989

The final chapter of the book is an attempt to present more than a decade long cinematic period (since 1989) in less than twenty pages. The survey guides the reader through the labyrinth of the transitional period, discussing its reversals and uncertainties, and describing cinemas in flux, which continue to redefine their terms. The chapter focuses on the industries’ recent transformation, the appearance of a new generation of filmmakers and the crises of identity in the older generation. The migration and movements across national borders are now more intensive – this time not only within Eastern Europe but across the world. Despite radical economic and social changes, a certain continuity can be observed in the filmmakers’ preoccupations: the conditions of market competition and the limited funding have not reduced filmmakers’ interest in the traditional themes of spirituality and existential dilemmas. Thus, in the post-communist period, moral concerns and artistic experimentation with style and expression are still alive, alongside flourishing popular mainstream genres.

The appendix at the end of the book contains a comprehensive list of research resources, including Internet sites, useful information for lecturers, proposals for further reading, and an expended bibliography and filmography. It should be added that the notes to each chapter contain information as interesting and important as that found in the main body of the text. Iordanova’s book is valuable and useful for both teachers and students. Some readers may find that general arguments prevail over comprehensive study of particular film texts. But we should remember that the aim of this revision of the East Central European cinema is more to re-open the question rather than to offer comprehensive answers.

Reaching the last pages of Cinema of the Other Europe one closes the book with a clear awareness of several re-definitions that Iordanova presents. First, the text successfully breaks with the stereotypical view of Eastern European cinema as the totally controlled “state art” of “socialist realism”, obsessed mainly with the gloomy aspects of the socialist reality. Second, it powerfully demonstrates the richness of artistic tradition, the proliferation of hybrid generic forms in a regional cinema, which is now engaged in an uneven struggle against the remnants of the Cold War isolation and the non-reciprocal exchange between Eastern and Western Europe. Finally, by paying special attention to cross-border aesthetics, the book defines the industry and the artistry of East Central European cinema as a unique contribution to world cinema. It is in this sense that the book is both a useful referential text and an illuminating study whose author does not hide her affinity with and admiration for Eastern European cinema. Having all this in mind, Cinema of the Other Europe certainly extends the limits of the recent academic interpretations of Eastern European cinema and draws the attention of the international community of scholars to many issues that still await academic investigation.

Violetta Petrova
Victoria University, New Zealand.
Created on: Tuesday, 4 May 2004 | Last Updated: 4-May-04