Pub Date : 2023-11-15DOI: 10.1080/2040350x.2023.2282242
Mariliis Elizabeth Holzmann
{"title":"Reading the Mermaid Sisters of Smoczyńska’s (2015) “The Lure” as More Than Shoreline Strangers: Toward a Feminist Solidarity with Nonhuman Others","authors":"Mariliis Elizabeth Holzmann","doi":"10.1080/2040350x.2023.2282242","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350x.2023.2282242","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52267,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eastern European Cinema","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139275099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-10DOI: 10.1080/2040350x.2023.2279463
Christian Ferencz-Flatz
{"title":"A non-philosophy of non-cinema <b>Romanian cinema: thinking outside the screen</b> , by Doru Pop. New York and London: Bloomsburry, 2022, 280 pp., Hardback £81, ISBN 978-15-01366-23-9","authors":"Christian Ferencz-Flatz","doi":"10.1080/2040350x.2023.2279463","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350x.2023.2279463","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52267,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eastern European Cinema","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135136692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-02DOI: 10.1080/2040350x.2023.2255456
Sony Jalarajan Raj, Adith K. Suresh
Roman Polanski’s films are noted for their subversive psychological style that explores themes of sexuality, desire, alienation, and violence. His narratives often reflect a dark sense of humour through which the director perceives the absurdity of the human condition in relation to his own cultural dislocations and artistic eccentricity. This article investigates how different connotations of transgression play a major role in defining Roman Polanski as a filmmaker. It specifically explores how the polysemy of transgression structures Polanski as an artist whose real and cinematic negotiations are often intertwined. Through the constant subversion of moral, cultural, and social discourses, his visual style and narrative ideology maintain a notorious affinity that disturbs the notion of reality and manipulates it with new narrative texts. It is the idea of transgression that changes the way Polanski’s auteur status is perceived, appreciated, and rejected for his actions and creations in the past and their repercussions in the present. Polanski’s works use historical, social, and personal realities to renegotiate his transgressive image in real life by incorporating his contested victim status and persecuted selfhood in narratives that manipulate both the past and present.
{"title":"Between the Borders of Life and Art: Roman Polanski’s Transgressive Negotiations","authors":"Sony Jalarajan Raj, Adith K. Suresh","doi":"10.1080/2040350x.2023.2255456","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350x.2023.2255456","url":null,"abstract":"Roman Polanski’s films are noted for their subversive psychological style that explores themes of sexuality, desire, alienation, and violence. His narratives often reflect a dark sense of humour through which the director perceives the absurdity of the human condition in relation to his own cultural dislocations and artistic eccentricity. This article investigates how different connotations of transgression play a major role in defining Roman Polanski as a filmmaker. It specifically explores how the polysemy of transgression structures Polanski as an artist whose real and cinematic negotiations are often intertwined. Through the constant subversion of moral, cultural, and social discourses, his visual style and narrative ideology maintain a notorious affinity that disturbs the notion of reality and manipulates it with new narrative texts. It is the idea of transgression that changes the way Polanski’s auteur status is perceived, appreciated, and rejected for his actions and creations in the past and their repercussions in the present. Polanski’s works use historical, social, and personal realities to renegotiate his transgressive image in real life by incorporating his contested victim status and persecuted selfhood in narratives that manipulate both the past and present.","PeriodicalId":52267,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eastern European Cinema","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134968357","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-02DOI: 10.1080/2040350X.2023.2250155
Żaneta Jamrozik
Abstract The article analyses Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper (2016) and Roman Polanski’s Based on a True Story (2017) as post-horrors. Post-horror, sometimes called slow, quiet, or ambient horror, focuses on creating atmospheres rather than chains of events. Its themes of family and loss are often focalised through a single, female character. Sound design becomes key in creating auras of suspension as the films tend to omit dramatic events and focus on their aftermaths, showing the characters struggling to re-establish their daily routines. Assayas’ Personal Shopper begins after Maureen (Kristen Stewart) has lost her twin brother and Polanski’s Based on a True Story – after the suicidal death of Delphine’s (Emmanuelle Seigner) mother. In both films the loss is not followed by mourning but by what both characters verbalise as waiting. The films foreground the scenes of waiting: from the most mundane of waiting at the train station to the most sophisticated of waiting for the spectre. Spectres are waited on and appear, manifesting the fluidity between life and death rather than the linearity and the acceptance of loss typical for mourning. Waiting for the spectre is the main trope in Derrida’s ‘Specters of Marx’, where he imagines it as an ethics of responsibility towards that which does not exist according to traditional western ontology. He argues for a relational ethics that takes seriously the agency of such absent others, suggesting that ethics should reach beyond the immediate and the present. The figure of the spectre, through its hauntings, is both present and absent and, according to Derrida, tele-technologies like cinema were invented to explore such disturbances in time and space. The two films emphasise sound as a way to communicate with spectres, playing with Gothic and Victorian motifs of female mediumism, as they present the women’s waiting as transcending the personal (and interpersonal) and reaching towards a cosmic awe or terror that can be analysed through a combination of what Bauman called the ‘cosmic fear’ of negative globalisation and Lovecraft – cosmic indifference.
{"title":"The Women in Waiting: Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper and Roman Polanski’s Based on a True Story","authors":"Żaneta Jamrozik","doi":"10.1080/2040350X.2023.2250155","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2023.2250155","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The article analyses Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper (2016) and Roman Polanski’s Based on a True Story (2017) as post-horrors. Post-horror, sometimes called slow, quiet, or ambient horror, focuses on creating atmospheres rather than chains of events. Its themes of family and loss are often focalised through a single, female character. Sound design becomes key in creating auras of suspension as the films tend to omit dramatic events and focus on their aftermaths, showing the characters struggling to re-establish their daily routines. Assayas’ Personal Shopper begins after Maureen (Kristen Stewart) has lost her twin brother and Polanski’s Based on a True Story – after the suicidal death of Delphine’s (Emmanuelle Seigner) mother. In both films the loss is not followed by mourning but by what both characters verbalise as waiting. The films foreground the scenes of waiting: from the most mundane of waiting at the train station to the most sophisticated of waiting for the spectre. Spectres are waited on and appear, manifesting the fluidity between life and death rather than the linearity and the acceptance of loss typical for mourning. Waiting for the spectre is the main trope in Derrida’s ‘Specters of Marx’, where he imagines it as an ethics of responsibility towards that which does not exist according to traditional western ontology. He argues for a relational ethics that takes seriously the agency of such absent others, suggesting that ethics should reach beyond the immediate and the present. The figure of the spectre, through its hauntings, is both present and absent and, according to Derrida, tele-technologies like cinema were invented to explore such disturbances in time and space. The two films emphasise sound as a way to communicate with spectres, playing with Gothic and Victorian motifs of female mediumism, as they present the women’s waiting as transcending the personal (and interpersonal) and reaching towards a cosmic awe or terror that can be analysed through a combination of what Bauman called the ‘cosmic fear’ of negative globalisation and Lovecraft – cosmic indifference.","PeriodicalId":52267,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eastern European Cinema","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79232141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-07DOI: 10.1080/2040350x.2023.2233306
E. Mazierska
{"title":"A Concise History of Slovak Cinema","authors":"E. Mazierska","doi":"10.1080/2040350x.2023.2233306","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350x.2023.2233306","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52267,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eastern European Cinema","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90559804","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-07DOI: 10.1080/2040350x.2023.2220251
Andrea Průchová Hrůzová
{"title":"From Ruptures to Continuities: Czechoslovak Cultural Heritage in Non-Fiction Cinema 1948-1956","authors":"Andrea Průchová Hrůzová","doi":"10.1080/2040350x.2023.2220251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350x.2023.2220251","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52267,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eastern European Cinema","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80403276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-26DOI: 10.1080/2040350x.2023.2217031
Teisi Ligi, Teet Teinemaa
{"title":"Performative Cinematic Acts of Form in the Baltic New Wave Documentary: The Old Man and the Land, Ruhnu, and Bridges of Time","authors":"Teisi Ligi, Teet Teinemaa","doi":"10.1080/2040350x.2023.2217031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350x.2023.2217031","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52267,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eastern European Cinema","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82164404","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-16DOI: 10.1080/2040350x.2023.2213539
Robert Birkholc
{"title":"Polanski on the Set. About the Production of Cul-de-Sac","authors":"Robert Birkholc","doi":"10.1080/2040350x.2023.2213539","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350x.2023.2213539","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52267,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eastern European Cinema","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88281971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-25DOI: 10.1080/2040350x.2023.2203578
Natascha Drubek-Meyer
Many festivals and their programming choices in 2022 were overshadowed by the war against Ukraine – in several cases leading to a radical change in outlook when it comes to accepting or boycotting productions funded by the Russian state, which went hand in hand with a heightened interest in films from Ukraine. Policies have been changing, as well as strategies for submitting films to Festivals. The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) was also affected by this circumstance, as it coincided with the decision to remove the ‘East of the West’ perspective of its internationally most followed ‘second’ competition. Truth be told, this proposition had already been made at the end of 2021. As it transpired, this was happening at a moment when the festival’s historical expertise as well as the traditionally strong Czech pragmatism and political grasp of the rapidly changing situation in the East of the West would have been badly needed. Despite the programmers’ in-depth knowledge and experience, namely Lenka Tyrpáková and the festival’s CEE networks dating back to the 1940s, and regardless of the interest of international professionals and cinephiles, the distinctive presentation of moving images from Eastern Europe and the Post-Soviet countries, which was both analytical and historically informed, had to leave centre stage. This decision was perceived by many professional visitors as casting away one’s old identity before defining a new one, and it appeared to have some effect on the reformed 56th edition and its coverage by English-speaking media which seemed less thorough in 2022. Could it be that KVIFF, which is the biggest cultural event in the Czech Republic, during the pandemic has become more inward-looking? Partially this was reflected in the prizes. Even though the Crystal Globe for Best Film in 2022 went to Sadaf Foroughi’s CanadianIranian drama, Summer with Hope, ‘the latest crop of Czech films by the young generation stole the limelight’, as Martin Kudláč (2022) remarked. Adéla Komrzý – the discovery of last year’s festival edition – in 2022, together with Tomáš Bojar won with the observational documentary Art Talent Show the Proxima award for Best Film. Aware of its value as a strong Czech brand (both locally and internationally), KVIFF appeared well recovered from the Covid-19 pause and the delayed date in 2021, returning to its slate at the beginning of July. KVIFF in 2022 presented itself confidently, with plans of the newly formed KVIFF Group with several arms, grouped around the body of the festival. They are called KVIFF Events (such as ‘Variace’, with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Prague Shorts, the COVID-19 created ‘Tady Vary’, a traveling programme in regional cinemas), KVIFF Distribution, and KVIFF TV. The ambitious media group in 2021 has purchased a majority stake in Ivo Andrle’s Czech art-house distribution company Aerofilms which runs its own internet VOD platform, Aerovod, merging the Aerofilms catalogue with t
{"title":"Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2022: A Shift in Perspective","authors":"Natascha Drubek-Meyer","doi":"10.1080/2040350x.2023.2203578","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350x.2023.2203578","url":null,"abstract":"Many festivals and their programming choices in 2022 were overshadowed by the war against Ukraine – in several cases leading to a radical change in outlook when it comes to accepting or boycotting productions funded by the Russian state, which went hand in hand with a heightened interest in films from Ukraine. Policies have been changing, as well as strategies for submitting films to Festivals. The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) was also affected by this circumstance, as it coincided with the decision to remove the ‘East of the West’ perspective of its internationally most followed ‘second’ competition. Truth be told, this proposition had already been made at the end of 2021. As it transpired, this was happening at a moment when the festival’s historical expertise as well as the traditionally strong Czech pragmatism and political grasp of the rapidly changing situation in the East of the West would have been badly needed. Despite the programmers’ in-depth knowledge and experience, namely Lenka Tyrpáková and the festival’s CEE networks dating back to the 1940s, and regardless of the interest of international professionals and cinephiles, the distinctive presentation of moving images from Eastern Europe and the Post-Soviet countries, which was both analytical and historically informed, had to leave centre stage. This decision was perceived by many professional visitors as casting away one’s old identity before defining a new one, and it appeared to have some effect on the reformed 56th edition and its coverage by English-speaking media which seemed less thorough in 2022. Could it be that KVIFF, which is the biggest cultural event in the Czech Republic, during the pandemic has become more inward-looking? Partially this was reflected in the prizes. Even though the Crystal Globe for Best Film in 2022 went to Sadaf Foroughi’s CanadianIranian drama, Summer with Hope, ‘the latest crop of Czech films by the young generation stole the limelight’, as Martin Kudláč (2022) remarked. Adéla Komrzý – the discovery of last year’s festival edition – in 2022, together with Tomáš Bojar won with the observational documentary Art Talent Show the Proxima award for Best Film. Aware of its value as a strong Czech brand (both locally and internationally), KVIFF appeared well recovered from the Covid-19 pause and the delayed date in 2021, returning to its slate at the beginning of July. KVIFF in 2022 presented itself confidently, with plans of the newly formed KVIFF Group with several arms, grouped around the body of the festival. They are called KVIFF Events (such as ‘Variace’, with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Prague Shorts, the COVID-19 created ‘Tady Vary’, a traveling programme in regional cinemas), KVIFF Distribution, and KVIFF TV. The ambitious media group in 2021 has purchased a majority stake in Ivo Andrle’s Czech art-house distribution company Aerofilms which runs its own internet VOD platform, Aerovod, merging the Aerofilms catalogue with t","PeriodicalId":52267,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eastern European Cinema","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79466981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-19DOI: 10.1080/2040350X.2023.2201975
Robert Birkholc
Abstract The article is devoted to the reception of Roman Polanski’s cinema in Poland. The author examines both critical-film articles (opinions formulated in reviews after the first viewing of a movie) and academic articles and monographs. Instead of criticizing the existing readings of the director’s works, the author considers which frames they were inscribed into by the reviewers and how this placement influenced the interpretations and evaluations of the films. As he argues, Polanski’s artistic propositions did not quite fit the vision of great cinema shared by Polish journalists at a given moment. The author shows that the reception of the artist’s work is a testimony to the changes in Polish critics’ attitude towards genre cinema and to the gradual mending of the division between high and low art. When commenting on the director’s works, Polish critics and scholars have had to struggle with a socialist realist view of art, an aversion to popular culture, and finally, postmodern prejudices against the “classic” form of cinema. The Polish researchers have not always overcome the limitations of dominant discourses, but it seems that Polanski’s cinema shaped and changed these discourses to some extent.
{"title":"Polish Reception of Roman Polanski’s Films. Outline of the Main Tendencies in Film Criticism and Film Studies","authors":"Robert Birkholc","doi":"10.1080/2040350X.2023.2201975","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2023.2201975","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The article is devoted to the reception of Roman Polanski’s cinema in Poland. The author examines both critical-film articles (opinions formulated in reviews after the first viewing of a movie) and academic articles and monographs. Instead of criticizing the existing readings of the director’s works, the author considers which frames they were inscribed into by the reviewers and how this placement influenced the interpretations and evaluations of the films. As he argues, Polanski’s artistic propositions did not quite fit the vision of great cinema shared by Polish journalists at a given moment. The author shows that the reception of the artist’s work is a testimony to the changes in Polish critics’ attitude towards genre cinema and to the gradual mending of the division between high and low art. When commenting on the director’s works, Polish critics and scholars have had to struggle with a socialist realist view of art, an aversion to popular culture, and finally, postmodern prejudices against the “classic” form of cinema. The Polish researchers have not always overcome the limitations of dominant discourses, but it seems that Polanski’s cinema shaped and changed these discourses to some extent.","PeriodicalId":52267,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eastern European Cinema","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90235104","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}