Return of the Repressed. A Response to Ewa Mazierska’s ‘The Sight and Sound Poll and Eastern European Cinema’

The 2022 edition of ‘The Greatest 100 Films of All Time’ poll by the British journal Sight & Sound brought to surface important debates linked to the topics of cultural canon, decolonization, and perceived visibility of so-called1 minority artists in the mainstream. One of the main question has been: how do we interpret the fact that for the first time in the poll’s history, a woman filmmaker, Chantal Akerman’s film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) came out as number one? In the previous polls, no woman has even reached the top ten. As Laura Mulvey put it, ‘things will never be the same’ (2022). But what caused this landslide? And how do we interpret this paradigm shift? Due to the fact that the poll, conducted every ten years, showed the diminishing critical relevance of feature films produced in the Eastern European region, the waves of these debates have reached the shores of Studies in Eastern European Cinema as well. In her opinion article ‘The Sight and Sound Poll and Eastern European Cinema’, Ewa Mazierska related this trend, among other factors, to the appearance of the quota system that ensures the visibility of the currently trendiest minorities and their cultural products. In the quota system, according to Mazierska, ‘[t]he question is what minority groups are regarded as important enough to be included in the system’ (2023). Eastern Europeans, once the repressed Others to the dominant Western Self, have fallen out of this position, and gave place to new Others more central for the collective social imaginary. She suggests that the high volume of films canonized by the poll that were produced by women, non-(Western)-European-or American filmmakers is a political reaction to several contemporary political movements such as MeToo and Black Lives Matter. In turn, this argument also suggests that there exists some kind of invisible political correctness authority, which sanctions all those who do not adhere to these progressive voices. It follows that out of fear of becoming pariahs, critics simply fall in line with the inclusivity dogma, and vote for so-called minority artists and films. In this brief response I will argue that the quota argument (whether applied in the context of the diminishing visibility of Eastern European cultural goods, or elsewhere) is, in my opinion, the rearguard action of a now declining Eurocentric worldview that has dominated much of political, social and cultural thinking for the past several hundred years. Since the late 1970s, a large number of arguments came to light that effectively described how dominant discourses have worked to maintain political oppression over the subaltern once military control over a conquered land, a nation, a class or an ethnicity gave way to more subtle channels of cultural coercion. The postcolonial condition has also been examined in the Eastern European context, and there are convincing arguments for and against comparing the relationship of Easternand Western Europe to those political interactions formed by a more classical colonial-style oppression. Since I cannot do justice to the diverse