Mazierska, Ewa and Zsolt Győri, ed. 2019. Popular Music and the Moving Image in Eastern Europe. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. 250 pp.

Abstract

Popular music in Socialist and Post-socialist Eastern Europe was one of the important cultural spheres where ideological and political dissent could be embraced by millions of young people. Before 1989 underground rock music, blues, and other Western music genres were largely disseminated through underground channels. At the same time, local bands also developed their own versions of these genres by adapting them to the specific musical and political traditions in the region. Besides the dissemination of Western styles, folk music and folk dance movements also served as crucial tools for political resistance. Starting in the early 1990s, new music genres found their way into Eastern Europe and since then local music industries have continued to play a key role in the region’s cultural arena. The political nature of Eastern European music is the focus of several monographs and collections such as Rocking The State: Rock Music And Politics In Eastern Europe And Russia by Sabrina Petra Ramet (1994), Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe by Maria Cizmic (2012), and Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc: Youth Cultures, Music, and the State in Russia and Eastern Europe by William Jay Risch (2015). However, the intersection between music and cinema has so far been largely overlooked, if not altogether neglected. The articles in the volume Popular Music and the Moving Image in Eastern Europe, edited by Ewa Mazierska and Zsolt Győri, offer a long overdue correction to this imbalance. The present collection is a testimony to both Eastern Europeans’ long-standing fascination with British and American music and to the ways in which this music has continuously been appropriated and infused with an Eastern European “flair.” Exactly what the word “flare” means is the subject of the studies carefully curated by Ewa Mazierska and Zsolt Győri. The editors describe three identifiable themes in the collection. The first group of studies examines Eastern European musicals or “films approximating to this genre” (18). The second part of the book deals with films that “document specific music or music traditions” (19). Short experimental films are at the center of the book’s third and last part. Interestingly, neither the Table of