European Visions: Small Cinemas in Transition [1. Aufl.] 9783839418185

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Towards a Politics of Scale
Industry/Funding
The Risk Environment of Small-Nation Filmmaking
Maltese Cinema? Politics and Identity on Screen from Independence to EU Accession
Luxembourg’s Film Finance Model, Andy Bausch, and Cultural Identity
The Best of Both Worlds. Taking Advantage of Two Linguistic Traditions in Irish Film
History/Memory
Anxiety, Memory, and Place in Belgian Cinema
Varieties of Smallness. A Swedish Art Film (Persona), a Polish Documentary (Hear My Cry)
At the Crossroads of Time. Memoirs and Becoming in Benone Todica’s Documentary Our Journey
The Archival Impulse and the Digitization of European Film History. The European Film Gateway Project
Realism and its Discontents
Framed by Definitions. Corneliu Porumboiu and the Dismantling of Realism
In the Country of Panpan. Romanian Dark Fun Cinema in and out of Focus
A Decade with the New Romanian Cinema. Stories of Life in an Extramoral Sense
Genre/Adaptation
“A Typical Icelandic Murder?”. The “Criminal” Adaptation of Jar City
How Corto Maltese Died Wayfaring Strangers on the Frontiers of Europe in Milcho Manchevski’s Dust
Exposed: A Short History of Austrian Science Fiction Film
The “Quixote” Myth and the New Eastern Europe. A Hermeneutic Study Based on Film
Small Screens/Private Cinema
The Moral Microhistory of Post-Communism. Zanussi’s Weekend Stories
Polish Film Culture in Transition. On the “Private Films” of Andrzej Kondratiuk (1985-1996)
Desires and Memories of a Small Man. The Poetic Documentaries of Lithuanian Filmmaker Audrius Stonys
Beyond the National
Félix Guattari and Minor Cinema
Veit Helmer’s Tuvalu, Cinema Babel, and the (Dis-)location of Europe
At the Crossroads of Genre and Identity. An Aesthetics of Distance in Thomas Arslan’s From Afar
National or Transnational German Cinema Post-1989?. The Films of Helke Misselwitz and Sibylle Schönemann
The Cinema of the Abject and the Cinema of Capitalist Fantasy in Poland
Contributor Biographies

Citation preview

Janelle Blankenship, Tobias Nagl (eds.) European Visions

Film

Janelle Blankenship, Tobias Nagl (eds.)

European Visions Small Cinemas in Transition

This book has been published with funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

We also acknowledge the financial support of the J. B. Smallman Research Fund, Arts & Humanities, University of Western Ontario.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2015 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Guido Stazinski Cover illustration: Promotional photo from Veit Helmer’s Tuvalu (1999) Courtesy of Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Fotoarchiv Typeset by Mark-Sebastian Schneider, Bielefeld Printed in Germany Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-1818-1 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-1818-5

Contents List of Illustrations | 9 Acknowledgments | 13

Introduction: Towards a Politics of Scale Janelle Blankenship and Tobias Nagl | 15

I ndustry /F unding The Risk Environment of Small-Nation Filmmaking Mette Hjort | 49

Maltese Cinema? Politics and Identity on Screen from Independence to EU Accession Charlie Cauchi | 65

Luxembourg’s Film Finance Model, Andy Bausch, and Cultural Identity Gérard Kraus | 85

The Best of Both Worlds Taking Advantage of Two Linguistic Traditions in Irish Film Heather Macdougall | 101

H istory /M emory Anxiety, Memory, and Place in Belgian Cinema Philip Mosley | 115

Varieties of Smallness A Swedish Art Film (Persona), a Polish Documentary (Hear My Cry) Paul Coates | 129

At the Crossroads of Time Memoirs and Becoming in Benone Todica’s Documentary Our Journey Lenuta Giukin | 141

The Archival Impulse and the Digitization of European Film History The European Film Gateway Project Thomas Ballhausen and Janelle Blankenship | 151

R ealism and its D iscontents Framed by Definitions Corneliu Porumboiu and the Dismantling of Realism Maria Ioniţă | 173

In the Country of Panpan Romanian Dark Fun Cinema in and out of Focus Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu | 187

A Decade with the New Romanian Cinema Stories of Life in an Extramoral Sense Rodica Ieta | 197

G enre /A daptation “A Typical Icelandic Murder?” The “Criminal” Adaptation of Jar City Björn Norðfjörð | 213

How Corto Maltese Died Wayfaring Strangers on the Frontiers of Europe in Milcho Manchevski’s Dust Zoran Maric | 229

Exposed: A Short History of Austrian Science Fiction Film Thomas Ballhausen  | 249

The “Quixote” Myth and the New Eastern Europe A Hermeneutic Study Based on Film Jorge Latorre, Antonio Martínez Illán and Oleksandr Pronkevich | 259

S mall S creens /P rivate C inema The Moral Microhistory of Post-Communism Zanussi’s Weekend Stories Larson Powell | 285

Polish Film Culture in Transition On the “Private Films” of Andrzej Kondratiuk (1985-1996) Iwona Guść | 299

Desires and Memories of a Small Man The Poetic Documentaries of Lithuanian Filmmaker Audrius Stonys Renata Šukaitytė | 317

B eyond the N ational Félix Guattari and Minor Cinema Gary Genosko | 337

Veit Helmer’s Tuvalu, Cinema Babel, and the (Dis-)location of Europe Janelle Blankenship and Tobias Nagl | 351

At the Crossroads of Genre and Identity An Aesthetics of Distance in Thomas Arslan’s From Afar Angelica Fenner | 367

National or Transnational German Cinema Post-1989? The Films of Helke Misselwitz and Sibylle Schönemann Ute Lischke | 389

The Cinema of the Abject and the Cinema of Capitalist Fantasy in Poland Janina Falkowska | 399

Contributor Biographies  | 411

List of Illustrations Page 39: Exhibition poster designed by Fritz Butz (1945). Courtesy of Zürcher Hochschule der Künste/Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich. Page 40: The Film: Its Economic, Social, and Artistic Problems (1948). Private archive. Page 62: FILM-X on the Road in Damascus (2009). Promotional photograph. Courtesy of Danish Film Institute. Page 62: Mobile Studio FILM-Y in Cluj, Romania (2012). Promotional photograph. Courtesy of Danish Film Institute. Page 77: Gaġġa (1971), directed by Mario Azzopardi. DVD screen capture. Studio 7 Productions (2007). Page 78: Gaġġa (1971), directed by Mario Azzopardi. DVD screen capture. Studio 7 Productions (2007). Page 97: The Unemployment Club (2003), directed by Andy Bausch. DVD screen capture. PTD/CAN/Iris/Fama (2004). Page 97: The Unemployment Club (2003), directed by Andy Bausch. DVD screen capture. PTD/CAN/Iris/Fama (2004). Page 110: Kings (2007), directed by Tom Collins. DVD screen capture. BFS Entertainment (2008). Page 110: My Name is Yu Ming (2003), directed by Daniel O’Hara. DVD screen capture, TG4/Irish Film Institute/Bord Scannán na hÉireann (2004). Page 127: Brussels Transit (1980), directed by Samy Szlingerbaum. DVD screen capture. Ergo Media (2004).

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Page 127: The Promise (1996), directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. DVD screen capture. Artificial Eye (2001). Page 138: Hear My Cry (1991), directed by Maciej Drygas. DVD screen capture. Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne (2006). Page 138: Hear My Cry (1991), directed by Maciej Drygas. DVD screen capture. Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne (2006). Page 147: Our Journey (2008-9), directed by Benone Todica. Courtesy of Benone Todica’s personal archive. Page 147: Our Journey (2008-9), directed by Benone Todica. Courtesy of Benone Todica’s personal archive. Page 165: Austria Wochenschau. Frame enlargement. Courtesy of Filmarchiv Austria. Page 165: European Film Gateway trailer (2011), directed by Andrea Meneghelli. YouTube screen capture. https://www.youtube.com/watchXYv=TTnFkHyaoyE (2014). Page 183: 12:08: East of Bucharest (2006), directed by Corneliu Porumboiu. DVD screen capture. Artificial Eye (2007). Page 184: Police, Adjective (2009), directed by Corneliu Porumboiu. DVD screen capture. Artificial Eye (2007). Page 194: Philanthropy (2002), directed by Nae Caranfil. DVD screen capture. MediaPro Pictures (2005). Page 195: 12:08, East of Bucharest (2006), directed by Corneliu Porumboiu. DVD screen capture. Artificial Eye (2007). Page 207: Occident (2002), directed by Cristian Mungiu. DVD screen capture. Filme romanesti (2008). Page 207: Medal of Honor (2009), directed by Călin Peter Netzer. DVD screen capture. Parada Film (2010). Page 224: Jar City (2006), directed by Baltasar Kormákur. DVD screen capture. Universal Pictures (2008).

List of Illustrations

Page 224: Jar City (2006), directed by Baltasar Kormákur. DVD screen capture. Universal Pictures (2008). Page 242: Dust (2001), directed by Milcho Manchevski. DVD screen capture. Medusa Video (2004). Page 242: Dust (2001), directed by Milcho Manchevski. DVD screen capture. Medusa Video (2004). Page 256: The Hands of Orlac (1924), directed by Robert Wiene. Frame enlargement. Courtesy of Filmarchiv Austria. Page 256: The City without Jews (1924), directed by Hans Karl Breslauer. Frame enlargement. Courtesy of Filmarchiv Austria. Page 276: Don Quixote (1957), directed by Grigori Kozintsev. Production photograph. Courtesy of Museum of Cinema, Moscow. Page 276: Don Quixote (1957), directed by Grigori Kozintsev. Still photograph. Courtesy of Museum of Cinema, Moscow. Page 293: Weekend Stories: Dilatory Line (1998), directed by Krzysztof Zanussi. DVD screen capture. Facets Video/Polart (2001). Page 294: Weekend Stories: The Last Segment (1997), directed by Krzysztof Zanussi. Still photograph. Courtesy of Telewizja Polska SA – TVP.pl. Page 311: The Four Seasons (1985), directed by Andrzej Kondratiuk. YouTube screen capture. https://www.youtube.com/watchXYfeature=player_embedded&v =VkVCuYronsU (2014). Page 312: The Spinning Wheel of Time (1995), directed by Andrzej Kondratiuk. DVD screen capture. Iga-Film (1995). Page 330: Alone (2001), directed by Audrius Stonys. Courtesy of Audrius Stonys’ personal archive. Page 331: Uku Ukai (2006), directed by Audrius Stonys. Courtesy of Audrius Stonys’ personal archive. Page 347: Half a Life (1982), directed by Romain Goupil. DVD screen capture. MK2 Éditions (2005).

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Page 347: Fists in the Pocket (1965), directed by Marco Bellocchio. DVD screen capture. 01 distribution (2006). Page 360: Tuvalu (1999), directed by Veit Helmer. Still photograph. Courtesy of Deutsche Kinemathek/Fotoarchiv. Page 361: Tuvalu (1999), directed by Veit Helmer. Still photograph. Courtesy of Deutsche Kinemathek/Fotoarchiv. Page 384: From Afar (2006), directed by Thomas Arslan. DVD screen capture. Peripher (2006). Page 384: From Afar (2006), directed by Thomas Arslan. DVD screen capture. Peripher (2006). Page 396: Verriegelte Zeit (1990), directed by Sibylle Schönemann. Production photograph. Courtesy of Defa-Stiftung. Page 396: Winter adé (1988), directed by Helke Misselwitz. Still photograph. Courtesy of Defa-Stiftung. Page 407: The Offsiders (2008), directed by Kasia Adamik. DVD screen capture. Gutek Film (2008). Page 408: Just Love Me (2006), directed by Ryszard Zatorski. DVD screen capture. Pegaz Art Production (2007).

Acknowledgments The publication of this volume would not have been possible without the support of the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at the University of Western Ontario. Our deepest gratitude goes to our Film Studies colleague Janina Falkowska for spearheading the international conference European Visions: Small Cinemas in Transition on issues small European cinemas encounter as a result of European unification and globalization. We also wish to acknowledge the valuable support of colleagues, students and friends: Wendy Pearson, Andrea Purvis, Michael Milde, Mette Hjort, Randall Halle, Susan Edelstein, Joe Wlodarz, Adam Syzmanski, Tia Wong, Agnieszka Herra, Caitlin Shaw, Jason Swiderski, Jeff Vandusen, Christina Peckett, Mansoor Behnam, Joshua Romphf, Matthew Rossoni, Jen Bryson, Maria Mayr, David Martin-Jones, Kevin Sanson, Eva Näripea, Mari Laaniste, Andreas Trossek, Marina Vargau, Guido Stazinski, Peter Sillaro and Dominik Nagl. The Chair of Film Studies, Chris Gittings, and administrative assistant Jennifer Tramble also deserve special thanks. For permission to include visual material, we are indebted to the following archives, institutions, and individuals: Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich (Alessia Contin); DEFA-Stiftung (Sabine Söhner); DEFA Film Library in Amherst, Massachusetts (Hiltrud Schulz); Danish Film Institute (Charlotte Giese and Barbara Rovsing Olsen); Filmarchiv Austria (Thomas Ballhausen); Benone Todica (personal archive of the filmmaker); Audrius Stonys (personal archive of the filmmaker); Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Fotoarchiv (Julia Riedel); Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Schriftgutarchiv (Lisa Roth, Regina Hoffmann); Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Pressearchiv (Birgit Umathum); Museum of Cinema, Moscow (Naum Kleiman); Moscow Cervantes Institute (Tatiana Pigariova), Telewizja Polska SA – TVP.pl; and Veit Helmer. For permission to reproduce the following copyrighted material, we gratefully acknowledge Yale University Press, Intellect and Routledge/Taylor & Francis (UK): Philip Mosley, “Anxiety, Memory, and Place in Belgian Cinema,” Yale French Studies No. 102 (2002): 160-175; Björn Nordfjörd, “‘A Typical Icelandic Murder?’ The ‘Criminal’ Adaptation of Jar City”, Journal of Scandinavian Cinema Vol. 1, No. 1 (2010): 37–49; Gary Genosko, “Félix Guattari” in Film, Theory and Philosophy: Key Thinkers, ed. Felicity Colman (Durham, UK: Acumen, 2009), 243-52.

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The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada and the J.B. Smallman Research Fund, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Western Ontario provided generous funding to assist with the publication of this edited volume.

Introduction: Towards a Politics of Scale Janelle Blankenship and Tobias Nagl

S creening S mall E urope an N ations : A D iscursive P re -H istory In The Cinema of Small Nations Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie note that some of the small nations they feature in their volume “have been producing films since the silent era, but the idea of a specifically national cinema gained currency across the world in the 1970s and 1980s as part of the wider transformations that have refashioned global relations over the last thirty years.”1 Approaches to small cinemas rarely give the concept and practice a pre-history. For the purposes of introducing this volume (whose focus is primarily post-1989 European cinemas), we would like to argue that it was first in the silent era when the seeds of a discourse on European small cinemas were planted. In the first section of this introduction, we unearth some of these earlier debates in film history, situating the discourse on small cinemas and small nations within a longer history of market research, language strategies, and European film theory. Similar concerns often resurface in some of the contemporary discussions of policies and strategies used in European filmmaking today. Debates on cinematic production, scale and nation-building in the age of Empire were often refractured through the lens of power imbalances, orientalist gestures and imperialist ideologies. It should come as no surprise that the cultural production of small nations, from the early 20th century onward, was also read through a colonialist framework. As early as 1924, journals such as Visual Education introduced a double standard for the cultural production of small nations. Educators, for example, argued that the “mean level of culture in all small nations” was higher than in the larger nation-states. Of course, in a grand colonial gesture such educators were also quick to state that this did not hold true for “backwards small nations.”2 Smallness here is not simply introduced as exceptional “other” to the imagined norm (of averaged-sized nation-states); smallness is also inscribed on the temporal axis in a manner that anthropologist Johannes Fabian has described as “allochronistic.”3 Such forms of political and

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cultural “backwardness” exclude certain small nations from the present and shared discursive space of Western nationhood and place them on an earlier, prehistorical stage in the unfolding teleology of the modern nation-form. In the imperialist logic of the late 19th century, the European colonies were often depicted as “small nations,” either frightfully dependent on the greater nations or in danger of being engulfed by their might. In an 1895 issue of The National and English Review (the year that saw the premiere of both the Lumière Cinematograph and the Skladanowsky Bioscop in Europe), a British writer poignantly used a moving picture metaphor to illustrate this power imbalance. Drawing a parallel to the projected power of magic lantern animation, the author argued that “each colony is in itself a small nation, which, if it stood alone could be swallowed up by the mere capacity for devouring which many larger and older nations possess,” a power imbalance that is comparable “to the marvels of the magic lantern – that of an unhappy blood-worm wriggling in the jaws of a watertiger.”4 The visual entertainment evoked here is a magic lantern exhibition on the marvels of the microscope. During the Victorian era showmen frequently used the lantern to animate and magnify miniscule animalcules such as “water-tigers” and “blood worms.” These popular larvae (dytiscus marginalis and chironomus plumosus) often appeared in Victorian treatises in descriptions of vernacular science displays involving animalcule tanks, compound microscopes, water cabinets and aquariums.5 The lantern with its power to animate and enlarge is not only an apt metaphor for colonialist displays;6 in the late 19th century the apparatus was also used as a propaganda device to spread the imperialist “light of culture.” Interweaving fantasy and reality, in some instances itinerant magic lantern showmen in Europe even created an imaginary imperialist cartography, (con-)fusing the European continent, Africa and the Indo-Australian archipelago.7 As documented in magic lantern manuals and guides to early projection devices, microcinematography – magnifying animalia on the screen – could even be used in the fin-de-siècle period to illustrate the dangers of reverse colonialism to an awe-struck public. William K.L. and Antonia Dickson’s kinetoscope manual of 1895 waxes poetic about the horror of screening a magnified mosquito, a “monstrous Afrite” that could leave “a torrent of appalling impressions” upon the mind (“super-sensitive brain”) and body of the “sensitive” spectator: An unseen enemy is usually voted to be particularly undesirable, but who would not close their eyes to the unimaginable horrors which micro-photography reveals in connection with the kinetoscope? Who would not prefer the mosquito as we know him, a brace of gossamer wings, a tiny bugler in the insectiferous ranks of creation, to this monstrous Afrite with its hungry and innumerable eyes, its ribbed and bat-like pinions, and its formidable arsenal of weapons? [...] What will be the effect of this torrent of appalling impressions upon the mental and physical tissues? Imagine a super-sensitive brain transported from these enlarged monstrosities to the magnifying lenses of dreamland. What howls of mortal

Introduction: Towards a Politics of Scale anguish one may expect [….] our globe is likely to be peopled by singular modifications of existing types, engendered by the frightful scientific discoveries of the day, so that we may confidently look forward to a race of beings before which the twin horrors of Sicily, the Chimeras, the Cyclops and Centaurs, the triple-headed dogs and seven-headed serpants of ancient Greece are respectable and humdrum characters. 8

In this spectatorial fantasy, there is the fear that the tiny or miniscule Other could grow monstrous, insidiously infecting or poisoning Empire. This is a game of Lilliputian proportions, one that informs the discourse on small nations from the late 19th century to the 1920s and 1930s. As Tom Nairn writes in Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited: “Monaco and Liechtenstein existed then as today, exasperatingly small pebbles in the otherwise perfectly fitting shoe of viability’s conventional wisdom. But the League (of Nations) viewed them as unworthy nuisances, feudal vestiges capable only of provoking conflicts among serious nation-states.”9 Although Nairn argues that after the 1997 election of “New Labour” conditions shifted in ways that are highly favorable for the small nation-states or even microstates, he finds public opinion on such microstates still unfavorable: “Tiny states are jokes, rarely referred to in the metropolitan media except in terms of quaint happenings and uniforms – the equivalent of the ‘feudal vestiges’ or ‘left-overs’ theory […] the sole alternative to this seems to be the reprobates theory, which views them essentially as disgraceful and probably germ-laden fleas of the world order […] tax-havens, unseemly focuses of conspicuous or super-rich consumption (Monaco), or vulgar pustules of duty-free commerce (Andorra).”10 Nairn concludes that it was the collapse of the British Empire that “bequeathed most microstates to the New International Order or Disorder.”11 Within the context of fin-de-siècle moving picture modernity one finds further instances of late 19th century magic lantern metaphors conjured up in popular accounts to demonstrate the frailty of small nations and the perceived need for such nations to be linked to an imperial order. The Belgian economist Baron Émile Louis Victor de Laveleye traveling through the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 1880s provides one illustrative example. He recalls a conversation with a member of parliament in Liechtenstein who in professing his allegiance to the Austrian Empire evoked the magic lantern practice of dissolving views (using a pair of lanterns, a showman slowly dissolves from one image or slide into the next) to introduce the fear that if the Empire’s strength is weakened, smaller countries like Liechtenstein could fade from view, become a fragmented and nebulous collection of dissolving views. In his popular travel narrative entitled The Balkan Peninsula (1887), de Laveleye poetically recalls the distressed comment of this older, influential member of parliament and member of the conservative party in Liechtenstein: “I am an Austrian of the old block, a pure black and yellow, what in your strange Liberal tongue you call a reactionary. My attachment to the Imperial family is absolute, because it is the common center of all parts of the empire. I am attached to Count Taaffe, because he represents the Conservative party, but

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I deplore his Federalist policy, which is leading to the disintegration of Austria […] Our good friends the Italians reproach him with having said that Italy was only a geographical expression, but our empire, which he made so powerful and so happy, will no longer remain so if it is constantly broken up into fragments, smaller and smaller every day. It will no more be a State, but a kaleidoscope, a collection of dissolving views.”12 The distracting and disorienting image of the kaleidoscope effectively situates small nationalities within an anchorless space of modernity. If such early discourses screen small nations as fragmented, disorienting images, it is perhaps not surprising that later discourses involving small nations and moving picture modernity displace such disorientation and distraction onto the sonic dimension. The sound of modern Europe, as Fredric Jameson suggested in June 1991 at the “Screening Europe” conference, is still synonymous with the “dilemma of Babel”13, an idea that one can trace back to Rudolf Arnheim and early film theorists’ account of the transition to sound in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In a reading of Godard’s Passion, Jameson argued that “the European idea has to negotiate the impossible situation of multiple languages in which no new lingua franca or transcendental Joycean pidgin is available. This is already registered in Passion (1982), where all the characters have this or that speech defect: stuttering, coughing, ‘multisme,’ heavy accents and so on, and all of this very pointedly in the absence of English as such.”14 In his conference response, Jameson viewed Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels (1991) as the most successful model of contemporary European filmmaking, heralding its “vision of a counter-Europe, a Europe of the federated lumpens and marginal, that is called on to out-trump and cancel the official image of Common Market Europe.”15 Yet what “vision(s) of a counter-Europe” exist today for European filmmakers? Are there new funding schemes or aesthetic strategies that would allow for a more successful negotiation of the “Babel” dilemma? Two decades after the “Screening Europe” conference such questions still seem prescient and timely. But before we move on to the post-1989 era, let us open up a brief parenthesis here to magnify this moment of early sonic disorientation on the small European screen. For, indeed, we would be remiss if we did not note that already in the age of intertitles, in the silent film era, spectators were at times confronted with a Babel-like din or cacophony of voices. Although European film critics bemoaned the loss of the “internationalism” of the silent cinema era in the early sound era, specific language strategies were already in place in the silent era to cater to movie-going minorities and thus speak to a more diverse European market (yet as European film critic Béla Balázs has argued, the words or intertitles were always secondary to the more universal gestures of the silent screen). Early cinema was international, but cinematic operators in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in metropoles such as Prague, for example, still translated films for minority audiences, often using a magic lantern to throw translations of German intertitles in the languages of smaller European minorities (such as Yiddish or Czech) onto the screen. Yet if there was an error with projection the translated

Introduction: Towards a Politics of Scale

titles were sometimes superimposed, the act of translation itself transformed into miscommunication, an act of “Cinema Babel.” In addition, the exhibition space of the silent film theater (especially true for immigrant audiences) often contained a distracting cacophony of interpretations and interpellations, not only diverse tongues and minority languages, but also guffaws and grunts.16 Perhaps one can consider such boisterous bursts of laughter and mistranslations (and the collective exhibition space in which the body received such translations) as the beginning of a “minor cinema” experience in the silent film era. For certainly, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of a “minor literature” reminds us, small nations were paramount in Kafka’s mind when he writes that “minor literatures, ‘in the small nations,’ ought to supplement a ‘national consciousness which is often inert and always in process of disintegration’.”17 For a “people to come,” before it expresses itself collectively, has to reinvent the past, as David Rodowick writes: “This is a historical image that invents a future by creatively transforming occluded elements of the past.”18 In a small cinema vein, Luisa Rivi similarly writes: “Identification with ‘Europe’ would not be as much about a common past as about the shaping of a common future, however elusive and frail this might appear.”19 If a “minor cinema” or “minor enunciation” could usher in a productive re-appropriation of the fragmented, disjunctive speech of the (Cinema) Babel era, European film critics in the late 1920s and early 1930s in their statements mourning the loss of the international “Esperanto” of silent cinema were quick to argue that subtitling and translation strategies provoked not political awareness or heightened consciousness, but dumb misunderstandings. After the introduction of sound, theorists such as Rudolf Arnheim in Intercine, the journal of the International Educational Cinematographic Institute, decried the assertion of national distinctions and national boundaries that seemed to rear their head with the “lost internationalism of the silent cinema’s ‘illustrated Esperanto.’”20 As G. Moulan in Intercine similarly argued, the “precious universality of late silent cinema was replaced by talk, by the misunderstandings too often produced by translation, and by the reassertion of national distinctions and national boundaries.”21 With the coming of sound, critics argued that film, which had been an “international language,” became an “international problem.”22 Although sound film introduced new opportunities to cater to diverse cultures and thus could be made productive for small national cinemas, it also introduced significant risks or “problems”: not only the Babel effect, but also the return of an American hegemony. As Nino Frank wrote in his essay “Babel-on-Seine” on the Paramount studio in Paris, “one would have thought that the ‘100% talkies’ by establishing cinematic national borders, would demolish the American penetration of our studios. Well, rather the opposite: we are the new Eldorado. The Americans are upon us, loaded with millions of dollars, and they merrily start reorganizing French production.”23 According to German critic Helmuth Ortmann, in one short decade “Film Europe” had itself “shrunk” and become a small nation or a “colony” of “Film America”: “In a ridiculously short time span, hardly one decade, Film

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Europe has become a colony of Film America. The once (just several years ago!) prosperous industries of France, Italy and Scandinavia have shrunk to complete insignificance.”24 Even Edward G. Lowry, MPPDA (Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America) European representative, felt compelled to speak up on behalf of the citizens of Europe: “We have a right to make our own national pictures but we can’t have them unless this powerful foreigner is in check. If we are to see our own national life in pictures, the American imports must be held down.”25 Similar to Eurimages and the MEDIA program initiatives and funding strategies today, from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s the “Film Europe” movement attempted to suppress American imports and support the distribution and production of European film. The “Film Europe” movement also sought to increase the circulation of European films through enhanced cooperative measures and strategies such as distribution contracts and quota laws. As Kristen Thompson writes in “The Rise and Fall of Film Europe,” due to a number of factors including the introduction of sound, the Depression, political upheavals in the USSR and Europe and increased consolidation within national film industries, this idea of a “Film Europe” collapsed in the 1930s. However, as Thompson suggests, film researchers today should see “Film Europe” as more than just a fleeting moment. She persuasively argues that the movement was decisive in developing co-production strategies (using multi-national casts and crews, for example) and founding institutions and international film festivals which continued to wield important influence in subsequent decades (indeed, many of these same strategies are in use today).26 Across the Atlantic, the introduction of sound also set into motion specific language distribution strategies and studies of small European film markets. In fact, it was only after the introduction of sound that market researchers in Hollywood start to take note of small European nations’ movie-going habits and needs. In an article written in 1930 on adapting films into multiple languages (which takes into consideration not only the number of foreign language copies or number of negatives and master prints, but also “the number of languages into which film could be adapted”),27 George Romauld Canty of the US Department of Commerce Motion Picture Association differentiated between two film markets in Europe – the markets of smaller European countries and the film markets of the larger European nations.28 Although the trade commissioner recommended English, Spanish, German and French as the principal languages for sound film (he believed this would cover most of Europe), smaller European countries that did not speak these languages also gave Canty pause. As Lisa Jarvina notes in her seminal study The Rise of Spanish-Language Filmmaking: Out from Hollywood’s Shadow 1929-1939, Canty in his market report of 1930 created two different categories for these smaller European countries – “those too small to merit direct productions in their own language, but unlikely to accept films in one of the ‘major’ languages (such as Sweden or Italy), and small countries that might accept

Introduction: Towards a Politics of Scale

sound films in a second language (such as Portugal, which would show Spanishlanguage films).”29 Although Canty in 1930 was trying to establish criteria for foreign language subtitling that would work for smaller European countries, gesturing towards the need to recognize more diverse European markets (even if he does recommend English, German, French and Spanish for most of Europe), his survey of market conditions was still primarily concerned with finding a way around smaller countries’ native tongues. In a different context and on a different continent, the European film theorist Béla Balázs makes a similar point regarding language and small nations when considering translation strategies prompted by the second wave of sound film in the 1940s. In a section (with the provocative title “Why Language Dubbing is Impossible?”) of his The Theory of Film, first published in 1945, Balázs addresses the language issue Canty examined in the context of small nations. Balázs, similar to Canty, argues that some countries simply “don’t have the population to merit production in their own language”: One of the most acute problems of film production today is the question of exports to areas speaking a foreign language. This problem affects especially small nations very seriously. The inner market is insufficient to pay for production costs and the great nations who can satisfy the demand of their own inner market by their own production, very seldom buy films, the foreign dialogue of which has to be conveyed to the public by means of titles. 30

Balázs continues his meditation to state that he finds dubbing disorienting or “impossible” precisely because it does not reinforce what he sees as the “national character” of the film image. He argues that the more sophisticated sound film public of the 1940s recognizes the disjunct between dubbed speech and image, thus refusing to believe in the “synchronized” play of word and gesture. Sound film, he claims, has finally evolved to a higher stage and “has educated the public to see and hear the profound connection between speech and facial expression”.31 For Balázs dubbing films into a foreign language violates the national character of the facial expression or bodily gesture (the sound-gesture that accompanies speech), creating what one could see as a “secondary cacophony” for the viewer: The public today understands not only the meaning of the spoken word but also the soundgesture that goes with it (which was discussed in the preceding chapter) and can hear in it the parallel to gesture and facial expression. A thus sophisticated public immediately feels the contradiction between, say, French facial expression and an English voice subsequently dubbed on to it. In the old days when we as yet paid attention only to the conceptual meaning of the dialogue, it was conceivable that someone in a film should say in English with an English calm, cool intonation “I love you” and accompany the words with passionate Italian gestures. It strikes the present-day public as irresistibly funny if it notices – and it does notice – a discrepancy of temperament between word and gesture. 32

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Yet this cataloguing of the “Babel effect,” of disorienting sounds and gestures, is only one of the many concerns that surface in the discourses on sound film and small European nations in the 1930s and 1940s. Economic questions regarding film financing and international export, but also concerns regarding cultural and aesthetic matters, cultivating national characteristics and promoting film “quality” loomed large during this time period. Characteristic in this regard is a slim publication edited by the Commission of the Swiss Film Archive in 1947 entitled The Film: Its Economic, Social and Artistic Problems. The book is based on a film exhibit first held in the Gewerbemuseum in Basel “Film gestern und heute (Film Yesterday and Today)” in October 1943, on the occasion of the founding of the Swiss Film Archive.33 The exhibit was later also shown at the Film Festival in Brussels in 1945 and in Zurich in 1947. Of particular interest to scholars committed to the study of small cinemas are the two pages in a section on finance devoted to “The Film of Small Nations (Example: Swiss Film).” This short section contains a lengthy paragraph on the dangers and opportunities of small-nation filmmaking. In the prose paragraph delineating the challenges to small-nation filmmaking, the authors make it clear that the “films of small nations” face two dangers or risks: an “over-pronounced nationalism” and the “lack of an international market” or international interest. On the facing page, a fragmented text on the filmmaking of small nations (almost identical to the prose paragraph) is followed by statistics on film financing and film production in Switzerland.34 The editors not only repeat the dangers already emphasized in their first paragraph; in addition, they add that maintaining national characteristics does not mean a digression into “folklore.”35 The archivists also positively mention the Swedish film and Czech film as two small national cinemas that successfully negotiate national characteristics. Roger Manvell of the British Film Academy in his notes to the English edition writes that “While adopting very necessarily a world view of their subject, the Swiss authors of this volume did not forget that their first readers were to be the Swiss themselves. To my mind the occasional appearance of this national view of what is primarily an international subject gives reality as well as perspective to the arguments […].”36 It is worth quoting the “Film of Small Nations” passage (in Manvell’s words, a “national view of an international subject”) at length: The Film of Small Nations (Example: the Swiss Film) With the necessity for an international market the problem of the film production of small nations is introduced. The film of small nations, exactly like the film of all other nations, can only survive with an international market, i.e. by obtaining international interest. This does not mean the abandonment of national characteristics; Swedish and Czech films for instance prove the contrary. However, a forced, over-pronounced nationalism is not less dangerous than a forced internationalism. Between these two dangers the films of small nations have only

Introduction: Towards a Politics of Scale one chance: quality. Hollywood can successfully throw films of a poor quality on the world market: the film of small nations can only count on international interest through especially high human and artistic qualities. The frightening discrepancy between the income of a Swiss film from the home market and its cost of production illustrates the situation strikingly. The entirely national success of the only film produced in 1937, Füsilier Wipf, made it the first successful Swiss film; it was supported by the awakening national self-consciousness of the pre-war years. On the basis of this success production increased rapidly to fifteen films in 1942. However, the market was already saturated, even over-saturated, and the crisis began. In the following years only very few films were made. But of those, one film of 1944 (Marie-Louise), as well as the only film of 1945 (The Last Chance) succeeded abroad because of their quality. The Film of Small Nations The film of small nations can only survive with an international market this means: with international interest. International interest does not mean: abandonment of national characteristics. Maintenance of national characteristics does not mean: folklore. 37

The Swiss archive seamlessly blurs the distinction between the idea of a small country that produces films and the idea of a country that produces a small number of films, offering a more expansive notion of small European cinemas. Yet despite this unique promotional effort, in the 1950s the Swiss film industry was still struggling. The government was still concerned about the fate of the country’s small national cinema. A publication on foreign policy characteristically complained that other small countries were ahead of Switzerland in this vital area: “Die Möglichkeiten, seine Interessen im Völkerkonzert zu wahren, sind für einen Kleinstaat beschränkt [...] Ein Sorgenkind ist der Film. Andere Staaten – auch Kleinstaaten – sind der Schweiz auf diesem Gebiet voraus (The opportunities to preserve one’s voice in the concerto of peoples are limited for a small nation […] One problem child is the film. Other countries – also small nations – are far ahead of Switzerland in this area.)”38 Certainly the development of a film archive and exhibits on the filmmaking of small nations are important first steps for any small country trying to promote their own film culture and industry. In this context it is worth noting that archivists today in Switzerland are actively looking for new strategies to try to preserve and publicize their audiovisual heritage. One such strategy is aptly entitled “Memoriav, the network for the preservation of the audiovisual heritage of Switzerland.” In describing the Memoriav “archival impulse” in a public

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statement, director Kurt Deggeler emphasizes the need to negotiate multiple languages and the cultural autonomy of Switzerland’s small cantons. He writes that it is easier to understand “the organization founded in Switzerland with the aim of improving the preservation and communication of its audiovisual heritage […] if one is aware that this small country with 7.4 million inhabitants is divided in 26 cantons, whose cultural sovereignty is as anchored into the constitution as well as the existence of its four language regions.”39 As Hjort and Petrie write in their introduction to A Cinema of Small Nations, “an important feature of the literature on small nations, and particularly of those writings produced by members of small nations, is to call attention not only to the challenges of small nationhood, but also, potentially, to the opportunities.”40 The Swiss publication The Film: Its Economic, Social and Artistic Problems and the Memoriav mission statement remind us that historically speaking, it has often been the role of archivists (alongside film theorists, educators and critics) to consider such challenges and opportunities. As Thomas Ballhausen and Janelle Blankenship point out in their contribution on the “European Film Gateway” project in this volume, digitalization efforts among EU archive members today are forging new ground in making the film production of small European countries (past and present) accessible to a larger audience.

S mall E urope an C inemas at a C rossroads This collection of essays was motivated by the path-breaking research of scholars Mette Hjort and others on small cinemas, which has led to a series of publications and numerous conferences, including a conference held at the University of Western Ontario in July 2010, entitled European Visions: Small Cinemas in Transition. 41 The number of publications to date on small European cinemas is almost too vast to delineate here. Key books and anthologies include Cinemas of the Periphery, edited by Dina Iordanova, Belen Vidal and David Martin-Jones (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), New Bulgarian Cinema by Dina Iordanova (St. Andrews: College Gate Press, 2008), European Cinema After 1989: Cultural Identity and Transnational Production by Luisa Rivi (New York: Palgrave, 2007), The Cinema of Small Nations, edited by Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), Small Nation, Global Cinema: The New Danish Cinema by Mette Hjort (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press 2005), Scotland: Global Cinema Genres, Modes, Identity by David Martin-Jones (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), The New European Cinema by Rosalind Galt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006 ), Transnational Cinema in a Global Age: Nordic Cinema in Transition, edited by Andrew Nestingen and Trevor G. Elkington (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), The Cinema of Scandinavia, edited by Tytti Soila (London: Wallflower, 2005) and The Cinema of the Low Countries, edited by Ernest Mathijs (London: Wallflower, 2004). 42 Perhaps it will suffice here

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to quote Hjort who in 2011 in an article entitled “Small Cinemas: How They Thrive and Why They Matter” writes “there are many travelers at this point […] it almost makes sense to start talking about ‘small cinema studies.’”43 Following Hjort and others, the editors of this volume construe small European cinemas broadly using four primary criteria: 1) small nationhood as a relational phenomenon (some small European nations are marked by a history of colonial rule, but this doesn’t hold true for all small European countries) 2) geographical scale 3) the gross national product (GNP) and size of the internal market and 4) population size. Perhaps equally important, however, are linguistic factors (minority languages, translation) and per capita film production. As we support a more expansive notion of small cinemas, the contributions in this volume include both microstates relatively new to the European Union such as Malta and larger ones such as Poland. In addition, a transnational turn also provides a crucial economic and socio-cultural context for many of the film cultures examined in this volume. Despite linguistic challenges and risks (as Björn Norðfjörð notes, the Icelandic language sometimes “hampers co-productions and foreign distribution”), Icelandic cinema, for example, has experienced a “transnational turn” since the 1990s, having seen an unparalleled number of co-productions produced with funding from the European Community’s MEDIA program and the European Council’s Eurimages network. (Interestingly, Jar City, the Icelandic film discussed in Norðfjörð’s essay, is not a co-production). In this volume, the term “in transition” is used to depict this transnational turn, but also to describe the break-up of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc, the rapid transformation of the Baltic States and accession of small countries to the European Union. As numerous contributions in this volume demonstrate, festivals, film prizes and funding strategies are important to consider in this transnational context. Alongside the establishment of national film institutions and EU funding initiatives such as the Eurimages fund, the MEDIA program, the Convention on Cinematographic Co-Production, the European Film Academy, and the Europa Cinemas network, contemporary European film festivals, awards and digital archives also play an increasingly important role in shaping and interpreting the cultural messages and motifs of small European cinemas. Veit Helmer’s experimental feature film Tuvalu (1999), for example, one of the “critic-friendly,” transnational art films we discuss in this volume, won the Ghent International Film Festival FIPRESCI Prize “for its harmonic view on a diversity of cultures, for the quality of its photography and for the burlesque humor with which it talks about the actual evolution of Europe.” The LUX European Film Prize awarded by the European Parliament is another prize established more recently (in 2007) to support cultural diversity and build a common “European identity.” The European parliament film prize actively supports a wider European distribution of European films, subtitling the award-winning entry into the 24 official languages of the European Union. The European Parliament claims that it will thus “break down the language

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barriers for distributing European films that have no borders.”44 Numerous small European cinemas have been selected for this award including entries from Greece, Belgium, Romania, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Portugal, and Austria. 45 The trophy itself and logo of the LUX Prize created by the Belgian artist Jocelyne Coster resembles a celluloid spiral, which could be read as a reference to the Tower of Babel. This symbol is used by the European Parliament not as a sign of a disorienting cacophony, however, but rather as a sign of multilingualism and cultural diversity. According to the LUX organizers, the motif of a celluloid reel spiraling upwards symbolizes not fragmentation and disorientation, but a shared European identity; “linguistic plurality and cultural diversity brought together in one and the same place and with one and the same ambition.”46 The films selected for the award should thus “illustrate the European integration process, topical European issues or cultural diversity in the Union.”47 Equally important, the organizers of the LUX prize argue that the award should give European film a chance to reach a wider European market: Compared with the largely unified North American market, Europe faces huge organizational and economic difficulties which are worsened by language barriers. The LUX prize winner will be subtitled by the parliament into the 24 official languages of the EU, including an adaptation of the original version for the visually or hearing-impaired. It also funds the production of a 35mm print for each member state. The last winning film, Die Fremde, for example, was screened in 34 EU cities. Europeans were able to exchange their views on a topic that touches their own reality.48

Pointing back to the 1920s dream of a “Film Europe,” the LUX European Film Prize stresses both the unity of a common “European vision” or spirit and the need to maintain and support cultural diversity. Eligibility criteria number four for the film prize is to “help celebrate the universal reach of European values, illustrate the diversity of European traditions, shed light on the process of European integration and provide insights into the building of Europe.”49 In this context, one can understand the subtitling initiative of the LUX European Film Prize as relational once again, an attempt to overturn Hollywood’s hegemony. The award effectively tries to overrule the verdict that there were some smaller European countries that were, as Canty wrote in 1930, “too small to merit production in their own language.”50 It is worth noting, however, that not all European languages are included in the LUX language strategy. Norwegian, Luxembourgish, Icelandic, Catalan, Basque, Galician, Scottish, Gaelic, Turkish and Welsh are not official languages of the EU and thus are not included in the 24 subtitling languages for the LUX European Film Prize. Co-productions under the MEDIA program which are produced or co-produced in a European Union country or in Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway or Switzerland are, however, eligible for the prize.51 The first film to receive the LUX European Film Prize was a German-Turkish-Italian co-production The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite, 2007) by Fatih Akin. In

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a 2007 press release on the official LUX film prize website, the Turkish-German director issued a personal statement: “The LUX Prize is the most innovative award for European cinema. The sponsored subtitles enabling the laureate to present his film all around Europe is a great idea, and the election process draws attention to foreign productions from Babylonic Europe which otherwise would have remained unknown. Hopefully the European Parliament will continue to promote our diverse and rich cinematographic culture through the LUX Prize.” The organizers in the press release herald Akin’s film as “a German-Turkish cross-cultural tale of loss, mourning and forgiveness.”52 Although Björn Norðfjörð’s critique of Andrew Higson’s famous “consumption thesis” correctly points to the limitations of thinking about small national cinemas purely in terms of reception,53 one could argue that the establishment of the LUX film prize and other initiatives offers a new space for rethinking the reception, distribution and marketing of locally-produced European films. The LUX film prize not only challenges Hollywood’s hegemonic position by translating the award-winning European film into 24 different EU languages.54 The organizers also provide European partner archives a 35mm print of each film; thus ensuring the safe-keeping of this title in the future. The LUX subtitling initiative and archival mission seeks to minimize the risk of European filmmaking and guarantee a wider reception, ensuring that key films stay on the map, in local archives and on screen in numerous European countries. As Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong provocatively points out in her 2011 study Film Festivals: Culture, Power and the Global Screen, festival organizers and the people in this circuit of exhibition also “shape alternative cinema and its subsequent readings and trajectories.”55 Wong productively sees the contemporary film festival as a transnational public sphere that pushes the “boundaries of cinema.”56 However, like Randall Halle in his seminal essay “Offering Tales They Want to Hear: Transnational European Film Funding as Neo-Orientalism,” Wong also cautions that film festivals, like the co-productions financed by MEDIA and Eurimages, could also breed a new form of orientalism in line with European political images.57 Of particular interest to scholars researching small cinemas, Wong notes that “there is a niche for countries that are somewhat less ‘European’ than the powerful European North, where the Balkans, Spain, and Ireland can be seen with a domestic inter-regional orientalist gaze.”58 On first glance, some of the films of the young German director Veit Helmer, winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at the Ghent International Film Festival in 1999, might seem to perpetuate such a neo-orientalizing gaze. Consider, for example, how Helmer replied to the government officials who objected to the title of his 2008 feature film shot in Azerbaijan (co-produced with funds from one of their cell phone providers, Bakcell), Absurdistan. The government officials from Azerbaijan felt that Helmer was mocking the small former Soviet country with his title. Helmer’s reaction was as follows: “Azerbaijan had some trouble with the title. They thought I was mocking them … I like the title and I don’t want to

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change it just because the ambassador of Azerbaijan asked me to change it. So I kept the title. Azerbaijan is a post-Socialist country with a president who passed on his position to his son.”59 Yet, as we demonstrate in our essay on Helmer’s experimental feature film Tuvalu in this volume, Helmer’s films also provide the international market with poignant “counter-visions” of a New Europe. The dry steppe or de-industrialized, derelict landscape of the East in Helmer’s films is easily converted into a utopic space of slapstick anachronicity, non-identity, transitory non-places, haptic sensations and untranslatable foreign tongues. Such international co-productions (shot in Bulgaria, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, among others), as Veit Helmer pointed out in an interview, entail a great degree of danger and uncertainty: “My projects always involve a certain risk. A high degree of risk.”60 In “The Risk Environment of Small-Nation Filmmaking,” Mette Hjort returns to this theme to suggest a conceptual framework to further develop her exploration into the specific local and global conditions and possibilities of filmmaking in small nations at a crucial moment of global economic and political transition. Drawing on the modernization theory of German sociologist Ulrich Beck, Hjort argues that film production in small nations is both “risk diverse” and “risk intensive” and that the “risk environment” of small-nation filmmaking has changed in the course of three broad historical periods: the early silent film era (with its absence of language barriers), the post-World War II period (marked by the emergence of state-centered subsidy systems) and the post-1989 era (characterized by the collapse of state-funded film industries in the East and the expansion of transnational funding schemes). While some of these risks are the effect of certain policies and thus best described as systemic (such as the danger of being dependent on a singular filmmaker, wasting or losing expensively trained talent, or the conformist recycling of established patterns), others must be understood as risk positions to which individual actors within a small-nation context are likely to be exposed as a result of the specificity of their circumstances (such as gender, class background, institutional affiliations, etc.). Building on her interest in “creativity under constraint” (e.g. the self-imposed “Vow of Chastity” by the group of Dogma directors in Denmark), Hjort stresses that “apparent obstacles can be reframed as creative opportunities.” One of the key questions emerging from this line of reasoning, according to Hjort, is whether and how small cinemas can assume a more agenda-setting role in reducing global power imbalances and creating “opportunities for constructive and responsible creative practices.” Charlie Cauchi in her essay “Maltese Cinema? Politics and Identity on Screen from Independence to EU Accession” takes up questions of scale in relation to the possibility of the emergence of an indigenous film industry by focusing on one of the smallest European nations: with a size of 316 km2 and a population of only 0.4 million Malta, like Luxembourg, certainly qualifies as a European “microstate.” Even members of the Malta Film Commission do not hesitate to openly admit

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that Maltese cinema as such is “virtually non-existent,” although there is an active film-servicing sector for international productions which use Malta as a location. It would be wrong however, as Cauchi cautions us, to attribute this unique situation to questions of geographical or economic size alone: Catholic censorship practices, the monopolization of film exhibition and the (socio-)linguistic divide between Maltese (a Semitic European language) and English also play a role. Looking at two cinematic texts made after Maltese independence in 1964, Mario Philip Azzopardi’s oppositional Gaġġa (“The Cage,” 1971) and Mario Busietta’s commercial TV spin-off Anġli: The Movie (“Angels: The Movie,” 2005), Cauchi elucidates the “constraints and opportunities” for filmmaking that a nation like Malta affords. Gérard Kraus in his essay on Luxembourgish film in this volume discusses how local film industry policies have sought to nurture such creative filmmaking opportunities for a country that can rightly be called a microstate: the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, nestled between Germany, France and Belgium, possesses a population of around 536,000 inhabitants and a territory of 2,586 km2. This small scale (both in terms of population and territory), as Kraus points out, has had a profound effect on the development (or non-development) of a native film industry: between 1921 and 1959 only 62 films were made in Luxembourg, all of them almost exclusively “cultural heritage” documentaries with a runtime between 6 and 28 minutes. In his essay “Luxembourg’s Film Finance Model, Andy Bausch, and Cultural Identity,” Kraus traces the economic development of indigenous and international film production in Luxembourg from the 1960s and 1970s erotic films to the debates surrounding Prime Minister Jacques Santer’s 1988 proposed bill to establish a temporary financial scheme to issue tax-sheltered “audio-visual investment certificates.” He also examines the effects of the recent liberalization of the European broadcasting legislation on Luxembourg’s television and the creation of a national film fund. At the same time, Kraus points to the historical importance of self-taught director Andy Bausch, who in the late 1970s began making 8mm and 16mm underground films, later gained success with a series of German TV movies and returned to local film production (and local socio-political concerns) with films such as The Unemployment Club (Le Club des chômeurs) and La Revanche (“The Revenge,” 2004), which portray unemployment and the former factory towns of the deindustrialized South of Luxembourg in a vein similar to The Full Monty (1997) and Brassed Off (1996). Heather Macdougall in her essay “The Best of Both Worlds: Taking Advantage of Two Linguistic Traditions in Irish Film” foregrounds the linguistic aspects of the small nation status, taking the complex and “unique bilingual situation” of Ireland as a jumping-off point for an analysis of the Irish film industry’s attempts to reach both a local and a global audience. For a variety of complex historical and cultural reasons, the Irish film industry for many years remained one of the least developed in Europe. It was not until the 1990s that a commercially viable Irish film industry emerged. During this decade, the newly reconstituted Irish

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Film Board (IFB) kick-started the industry, raising the annual production from three Irish Films (in 1992) to over fifty (in 1997). As in the case of Welsh cinema, another key player behind the resurgence of an indigenous film production was television: In 1996 the Irish-language TV channel TG4 began broadcasting and in 1998 teamed up with the Irish Film Board to launch a funding scheme for Irish-language short films such as Daniel O’Hara’s celebrated, bilingual comedy My Name is Yu Ming Dom (Yu Ming is Ainm, 2003). As Macdougall notes, the Irish Film Board’s Irish-language funding scheme was often accused of being tokenistic, and it perhaps does not come as a surprise that Irish-language short film productions suffered a significant drop when the Irish Film Board changed its language policy and discontinued funding schemes that privileged Irishlanguage submissions. For Macdougall, it is the self-reflexive bilingual language games in films such as Tom Collins’ multi-award-winning immigration drama Kings (2007), the first Irish-language feature film submission to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science for consideration for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, that indicate that “two languages can have a productive relationship within a cohesive national cinema.” Another “split screen,” the cinema of Belgium – due to the country’s small size, the shortage of funds, and the ethno-linguistic divide – has also often remained largely artisanal in its mode of production and relatively unknown beyond Belgian national borders. Philip Mosley’s essay “Anxiety, Memory, and Place in Belgian Cinema” examines the way “national and subnational anxieties” are articulated in a variety of Belgian films which are all deeply rooted in a specific sense of place and function as “powerful transmitters of aspects of social memory.” Travelling, so to speak, through Wallonia, Brussels, and Flanders, the three semi-autonomous regions of Belgium, Mosley focuses on four films which are all the result of a significant kind of creative cooperation: The Promise (La promesse, 1996) and Rosetta (1999) by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Brussels Transit (Bruxelles-Transit, 1980) by Samy Szlingerbaum, and Woman in a Twilight Garden (Een vrouw tussen hond en wolf, 1979) by André Delvaux. While the Dardennes and Szlingerbaum deal with issues of displacement, immigration, and unemployment, Delvaux engages with Flemish collaboration during World War II. Since smallness is a characterization that is always – yet not always explicitly – relational, Paul Coates proposes to make the role of this relation visible by pairing two films which on first sight seem unlikely bedfellows: Ingmar Bergman’s art film Persona (1966) and Maciej Drygas’ documentary Hear My Cry (Usłyszcie mój krzyk, 1991). What both of these films share, however, is not only the fact that they were made in languages that are not globally dominant; they also share a set of modernist tropes (such as enigmatic opening shots that turn out to be flash-forwards, repetition, etc.), powerful images of a burning body and their subject matter: both films are films about human suffering and the limits of language. By tracing aesthetic filiations that link Drygas’ reconstruction of the 1968 self-immolation of a man named Ryszard Siwiec (who set himself on fire on

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8 September 1968 in Warsaw to protest Poland’s participation in the occupation of Czechoslovakia) to Bergman’s minimalist chamber drama, Coates in his essay “Varieties of Smallness: A Swedish Art Film (Persona), a Polish Documentary (Hear My Cry)” raises the “question of the degree to which suffering can be articulated at all” and how trauma can “contaminate its representation.” Coates’ essay importantly notes how Drygas returns to a fleeting moment of archival footage to document Siwiec’s protest against an oppressive regime.61 In 2003, researchers at the Polish Institute of National Remembrance found new film recordings of Siwiec’s self-immolation taken by the Polish secret police. Yet it is through Drygas’ film that Siwiec’s protest first became known in Poland and abroad.62 In “At the Crossroads of Time: Memoirs and Becoming in Benone Todica’s Documentary Our Journey” by Lenuta Giukin, questions of memory, mourning and nostalgia in contemporary Romanian cinema take center stage. In stark contrast to the post-socialist Romanian movies exhibited to great acclaim at European or North American festivals which painted a rather dark view of the last years of Ceaușescu’s regime and reaffirmed the superiority of Western capitalist ideology (such as The Death of Mr. Lazarescu [Moartea domnului Lăzărescu, 2005], Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days [4 luni, 3 săptămâni și 2 zile, 2007] or The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu [Autobiografia lui Nicolae Ceaușescu, 2010]), Giukin is interested in local forms of nostalgia for the past and “expressions of loss” which resemble what in the case of former East Germany has been described as “Ostalgie” (nostalgia for the east). Using a documentary about the abandoned Uranium mine in Ciodanovita and its inhabitants by Romanian-Australian writer, director and journalist Ben Todica (Our Journey [Drumul nostrum, 2008-2009]) as a case study, Giurkin argues that post-socialist forms of nostalgia should be understood as complex and collective forms of counter-memory which are driven by the affective and emotive insight that “something is missing” and that the capitalist “present does not live up to the past.” Since scholarship on European cinema stands and falls with the access to film history documents and artifacts, Thomas Ballhausen of Filmarchiv Austria and Janelle Blankenship recapitulate the motivations behind the creation of the European Film Gateway Project, which in its first phase ran from 2008 to 2011 and united 16 European film archives and cinémathèques. In their essay “The Archival Impulse and the Digitization of European Film History: The European Film Gateway Project,” Ballhausen and Blankenship address some of the issues that emerged in the course of this landmark project to develop a portal that provides digital access to over 555,000 film-related objects. Using the Austrian newsreel (digitized for the EFG portal) as an example, they also discuss visual pedagogy and historical representation, now filtered through the “second digital life” of archival objects. Maria Ioniţă in her contribution “Framed by Definitions: Corneliu Porumboiu and the Dismantling of Realism” takes issue with what has been branded, on the international film festival circuit, the “new wave of Romanian cinema” (even if

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the directors themselves have rejected the suggestions of such a programmatic kinship) and associated with a distinct, auteur-driven brand of (neo-)realism: longtakes, occasionally hand-held camera work, direct sound and minimal editing are some of the stylistic features that contribute to an almost “Dogma-like austerity.” While the films of Corneliu Porumboiu, a comparatively late addition to this “new wave,” on first sight seem to resemble the Bazinian aethetics of directors such as Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Radu Muntean or Răzvan Rădulescu, it seems more productive, as Ioniţă argues in her Deleuzian analysis of 12:08, East of Bucharest (A fost sau n-a fost?, 2007) and Police, Adjective (Poliţist, Adjectiv, 2009), to understand his work rather as “deliberate explorations of the limits of cinematic realism and a polemical engagement with cinema’s ability to present an objective snapshot of the real.” Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu in his incisive and poetic essay “In the Country of Panpan: Romanian Dark Fun Cinema in and out of Focus” discusses the subversive role humor and the telling of jokes has played in Romanian society and culture under communism and how this tradition has been taken up and transformed since the “year zero” of Romanian Cinema in 2000 (when not one single feature film was made in Romania – thus, in a sense, marking the gap out of which the “new” Romanian cinema emerged). Film, as Mihăilescu notes about the role of cinema during the Ceauşescu regime, was “meant to be the visual arm of the one party”, but it was at the same time “surrounded by and hit at by oral culture.” Employing Lacanian art historian Georges Didi-Huberman’s notion of the “patch” (or pan in French), Mihăilescu reflects on the ways in which films such as Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08, East of Bucharest (2007) counter the “self-naturalizing” tendencies of contemporary Romanian media by employing a culturally specific dead-pan humor on the one hand and by ceasing to be “representative” or mimetic on the other, opening a space for expression and reflection. Mihăilescu’s essay also implicitly links the “pan” as a counter detail to a more complex politics of scale, for example referring the reader to the “neoneorealist” amateur aesthetics of Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică’s Videograms of a Revolution (1992). In a poignant moment in this film the voice-over meditates on amateur video of protesters in Timișoara moving towards the center of the city, poetically suggesting that the frame is divided according to two different temporalities. Although the hidden camera tries to get as close as possible, the empty time and desolate cityscapes of Ceauşescu’s rule still dominate the foreground of the screen, while the world-shaking, revolutionary events take place in the “background,” so remote they could almost be overlooked. One of the central experiences of historical trauma that has haunted Romanian society before and after 1989 perhaps more than any other Eastern European nation is its poverty and the pressure of a seemingly permanent economic crisis. To illustrate how even the post-communist present is perceived by many Romanians as an “inherited trauma,” Rodica Ieta in her essay “A Decade with the New Romanian Cinema: Stories of Life in an Extramoral Sense” addresses how

Introduction: Towards a Politics of Scale

the “new” Romanian cinema has depicted the West as a land of opportunity and “measure of prosperity and value” and how such fantasy scenarios of economic mobility are translated into an existentialist, rather than analytical language. Using Cristian Mungiu’s Occident (2002), Bobby Păunescu’s Francesca (2009) and Călin Peter Nemetz’s Medal of Honor (Medalia de onoare, 2010) as case studies, Ieta highlights how generational conflicts issuing from Romania’s communist past are represented, arguing that these films are motivated by the underpinning proposition that besides communism, the West (and its promise of welfare and a better life) is now also “the past” and equally needs to be revised in the national imagination. Björn Norðfjörð in his essay “‘A Typical Icelandic Murder?’ The ‘Criminal’ Adaptation of Jar City” focuses on the domestic and international success of Baltasar Kormákur’s crime thriller Jar City (Mýrin, 2006) as indicative of important changes in both the production and reception of Icelandic films, arguing that they highlight the transformations neoliberalist funding policies have engendered in small European cinemas. Icelandic cinema, as Norðfjörð notes, was established in the 1980s as an “explicitly national institution,” but after a short box-office euphoria it soon became clear that an Icelandic cinema solely catering to its home audience could not survive on its own. Thus, since the early 1990s transnational co-productions through production funds such as Eurimages became the order of the day. These co-productions were motivated by the prospect of international film festival exhibition/distribution and aesthetically influenced by the norms of European art film. Kormákur’s Jar City represents an important shift in this development, as it introduced the idea of genre filmmaking to Icelandic cinema and might be considered “the first time that Hollywood could be said to have served as the primary role model.” As a locally produced film shot in Icelandic, Jar City did not rely on Icelandic cinema’s strategies to appeal to foreign audiences, basing its narrative on globally intelligible (and marketable) generic models instead. In many respects, Jar City, an adaptation of Arnaldur Indridason’s best-selling novel Mýrin, resembles what Andrew Nestingen in the context of Scandinavian cinema has called “medium concept films”: films that speak to national or topical concerns while adapting both genre norms and – to a lesser degree in Iceland – also art-film aesthetics. Jar City thus exemplifies – and helps us further understand – an entire wave of Icelandic crime films and TV series and the production model behind its local and international success. The historic relationship between the perceived smallness (and resulting instability) of particular nations and the Western European colonial project, both in its real and textual/ideological variants, is at the heart of Zoran Maric’s discussion of “Balkanism” and post-Yugoslav cinema. Western perceptions of the Balkans, as Maric points out, are based on the notion that the region is caught in a “ceaseless, visceral cycle of violence” and marked by a quasi-mythical and dysfunctional impenetrable otherness. What such essentializing accounts eclipse, however, are the damaging effects Ottoman imperialism has left on the Balkans.

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In his essay “How Corto Maltese Died: Wayfaring Strangers on the Frontiers of Europe in Milcho Manchevski’s Dust,” Maric unpacks the multi-layered temporal structure and self-reflexive references to early cinema in the MacedonianAmerican director’s “baklava Western” Dust (2001), which connects past and present by transposing an American gunslinger to turn-of-century Macedonia, arguing that the film effectively addresses the “interplay of fiction and fact” in cinematic and historical accounts and uncovers the concealed forces which led to the geopolitical, historical and emotional uncertainty of the Balkans. The contemporary appropriation of production styles associated with Hollywood such as genre filmmaking in small cinemas is subjected to historical revision in Thomas Ballhausen’s contribution. In his poetic essay “Exposed: A Short History of Austrian Science Fiction Film” Ballhausen reconstructs the surprisingly rich history of Austrian Science Fiction cinema beyond Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s comparatively well-known, state-sponsored 1. April 2000 (1952). Ballhausen’s fascinating historiography not only catalogues rare gems from the silent era – e.g. Ludwig Schaschek’s animated Ideale Filmerzeugung (“Ideal Film Production,” 1913) – it also considers the role of modernity in 1920s techno-fantasies such as Das Kind des Teufels (“The Devil’s Child,” 1919), Enoptria – Der Kampf um die Sonne (“Enoptria – The Battle over the Sun,” 1920) or Parema, das Wesen aus der Sternenwelt (“Parema, The Creature from the Stars,” 1922), documents occasional excursions of the Austrian avant-garde (Valie Export, Johannes Hammel, Mara Mattuschka) and analyses media surveillance and architectural alienation in post-modern sci-fi co-productions such as Silent Resident (Weiße Lilien, 2007) and Manu Luksch’s Faceless (2007). Luksch’s film, created under the conditions of the filmmaker’s CCTV Manifesto, is a prime example of what Hjort in this volume has described as “creativity under constraint.” CCTV footage, snowy data that constantly polices and controls behaviour, is transformed into a poetic reverie on potential lines of escape (one pathway leads the nameless female protagonist to an industrial wasteland), and a fairy tale social fantasy of how one might escape capitalism’s numbing emphasis on the “perpetual present.” In the film, global citizens burdened by the trauma of the past and the anxiety of the future, institute a calendar reform, slipping into the ideological slumber of a “perpetual present.” The reappropriation of CCTV footage and its tiny traces of data might thus be described as what Félix Guattari terms a “molecular alternative practice.” In his unpublished fragmented notes “Towards a Post Media Era,” Guattari writes about new technologies as simultaneously fostering both “efficiency and madness in the same flow.” He writes that “the growing power of software engineering does not necessarily lead to the power of Big Brother. In fact, it is way more cracked than it seems. It can blow up like a windshield under the impact of alternative practices.”63 In opposing a mass media age – which would emphasize what Nick Dyer-Witheford has aptly summarized in Cyber-Marx as “unidirectional broadcast technologies” – with a post-media age – which would allow communication

Introduction: Towards a Politics of Scale

technologies to be “reappropriated by a multitude of subject groups,”64 such sci-fi fantasies open up a new vision of a molecular alternative film practice. Informed by recent approaches to literary adaptations by Robert Stam and others, Jorge Latorre, Antonio Martínez Illán and Oleksandr Pronkevich in their essay “The ‘Quixote’ Myth and the New Eastern Europe: A Hermeneutic Study Based on Film” engage in a collaborative analysis of the career of the Don Quixote character in Russian cinema, both in its Soviet and post-Soviet incarnations. Looking at Grigori Kozintsev’s Don Quixote (Don Kikhot, 1957), Vadim Kurchevsky’s Liberated Don Quixote (Osvobozdennyj Don Kikhot, 1987) and Vasily Livanov’s Don Quixote Returns (Don Kikhot Vozvrascaetsja, 1997), Latorre, Martínez and Pronkevich trace the ideological metamorphoses of Cervantes’ literary archetype. Konzintsev’s version, despite the director’s claim at the Cannes film festival to have created a “faithful” adaptation, abounds in class struggle references yet implicitly critiques the contradictions of Stalinism, while Kurchevsky’s 19-minute animation film in the tradition of Czech director Jiří Trnka can be understood as an attempt to rewrite earlier Soviet history from the perspective of perestroika, and Livanov’s Russian-Bulgarian co-production turns the Romantic hero’s quest into a cautionary tale about the “dangers” of the nostalgia for state communism. Moving from theorizations of small cinemas to the small screens and “minor” forms of television, Larson Powell makes a strong case for the rediscovery and re-evaluation of Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi, who remains one of the least discussed Polish directors and whose reputation has always been overshadowed by the internationally better-known Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieślowski. In his essay “The Moral Microhistory of Post-Communism: Zanussi’s Weekend Stories” Powell engages with the eclectic aesthetic, film historical references and role of religion in a series of short films made by Zanussi for Polish television between 1996 and 2000, which can be seen both as a “specifically Polish national answer” to the popularity of Latin American telenovelas and in their “parabolic concentration on moral issues” as a homage to Kieślowski’s Dekalog (1989-1990). Whereas liberal critics such as Stuart Lieberman have registered Zanussi’s catholicism with certain unease and interpreted it as a symptom of Poland’s “antimodernist backlash,” Powell, informed by Slavoj Žižek and Niklas Luhmann, on the contrary discovers in Zanussi’s religiousness a moral stress on contingency, wordliness and spontaneous face-to-face communication, which can be directly linked to the televisual medium itself, allowing to chronicle the day-to-day survival in post-communist societies without “disciplinary moralizing.” Similar to Larson Powell’s analysis of the role of TV aesthetics in the work of Krzysztof Zanussi, Iwona Guść in her contribution “Polish Film Culture in Transition: On the ‘Private Films’ of Andrzej Kondratiuk (1985-1996)” looks at the tensions that can arise between the structures of small national cinemas and “small” forms of filmmaking. Taking her cues from Yuri Tsivian’s seminal reflections on technological innovation and changing reception patterns (which seem relevant not only to early cinema but also to the new forms of spectatorship

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in the age of YouTube), Guść traces the fascinating career of director Andrzej Kondratiuk who in the second half of the 1980s deliberately turned from being a state filmmaker into an independent filmmaker and developed a radically personal “home movie” aesthetic, using his extended family as actors. Whereas Kondratiuk’s small and personal cinema was initially met with extreme hostility because his aesthetic confused the “ontological status of the characters” and questioned the codified line that separates filmic fact and fiction, the slow acceptance of Kondratiuk into the pantheon of Polish cinema in the 1990s, as Guść explains, points to a fundamental reconfiguration of the private and the public sphere in post-socialist Poland. The scepticism towards mimetic notions of realism and cinematic renderings of “truth” described by Maria Ioniţă in relation to contemporary Romanian cinema, is also a distinguishing feature, as Renata Šukaitytė argues, of the post-socialist “Lithuanian poetic documentary” (as practiced by filmmakers such as Arūnas Matelis, Artūras Jevdokimovas or Valdas Navasaitis) – a mode of production which has internationally become almost synonymous with the cinematic output of this extremely small film industry. In 2011, only one indigenous feature film was released in Lithuania. In her essay “Desires and Memories of a Small Man: The Poetic Documentaries of Lithuanian Filmmaker Audrius Stonys,” Renata Šukaitytė engages with the work by Audrius Stonys, an award-winning filmmaker who has come to be known for his introspective attitude, abstract and metaphorical style and a certain skepticism towards language. Utilizing the “rhetorical” analysis of documentary as developed by Bill Nichols, Michael Renov and others, Šukaitytė elaborates on how different discursive and aesthetic modalities overlap in an often performative manner in Stonys’ approach to the “fuzzy reality” of his subjects. While it has become customary in theoretizations of small cinemas to invoke Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s famous notion of “minor literatures” as a somewhat related and productive concept, Félix Guattari’s comments on the cinema have long been overshadowed by the prominence Deleuze’s film theory has attained in Film Studies. Gary Genosko in his essay “Félix Guattari and Minor Cinema” elaborates on Guattari’s dispersed writings on the cinema, pointing to the distinctions between the often conflated concepts of the minor and the marginal. Discussing Guattari’s responses to the politically radical cinema in the wake of May 1968 (such as Marin Karmitz’s Blow by Blow [Coup pour coup, 1972] or Jean Schmitdt’s Comme les anges déchus de la planète Saint-Michel [“Fallen Angels from the Planet St. Michel,” 1978]), Genosko exemplifies how Guattari championed an imperfect cinema which through the use of a-signifying fragments (such as color, non-phonic sounds or rhythms) triggers an “affective contamination” in the spectator, allowing him or her to escape the “semiological subjugations of dominant cinematic representations and capitalist modes of production.” Janelle Blankenship and Tobias Nagl’s contribution “Veit Helmer’s Tuvalu, Cinema Babel, and the (Dis-)location of Europe” focuses on Veit Helmer’s littleknown German-Bulgarian co-production Tuvalu (1999), a “surreal dialogue-free

Introduction: Towards a Politics of Scale

movie” shot in black and white and selectively tinted (with the final cut printed on color positive). The authors draw upon Deleuze’s category of a non-place to depict the decrepit, dislocated or forgotten Europe depicted in Helmer’s fairy tale topography. A silent film/slapstick aesthetic, derelict or ossified objects and a dislocated European time-space are used to frame a farce or parody of the neoliberal restructuring of Eastern European society according to the logic of capitalism. The authors argue that Helmer’s film also introduces a playful politics of scale, positing an escapist fantasy or what one might call a European “countervision,” an escape from Europe in transition, as Helmer carves out a utopic outside and a fantasy travelogue as epilogue to the film – the sailing vessel finally steers away from Bulgaria toward the exotic cartography of another small nation, the Pacific island of Tuvalu. Situating debates on “minor” and “small” cinemas in the broader framework of a “politics of location”, Angelica Fenner turns to Hamid Naficy’s conceptualization of “accented cinema” and French philosopher Jacques Rancière to investigate the visual essay From Afar (Aus der Ferne, 2006) by Turkish-German director Thomas Arslan, whose works have often been attributed to a contemporary form of minimalist “counter-cinema” that film critics have termed the “Berlin School” or la nouvelle vague allemande. In her essay “At the Crossroads of Genre and Identity: An Aesthetics of Distance in Thomas Arslan’s From Afar,” Fenner reads Arslan’s travelogue, which chronicles the filmmaker’s 2005 journey through Turkey, the birthplace of his father, as an attempt to unsettle generic, aesthetic, and narrative boundaries. The political potential of Arslan’s austere documentary, as Fenner suggests, might be located in his mobilization and foregrounding of film style to generate what Rancière has called “a reconfiguration of the given perceptual forms.” Sidestepping the heated debates about multiculturalism in Germany, From Afar refrains from activating the identificatory politics and interpretative frameworks implicit in first-person filmmaking, forcing the viewer “to establish his or her own conclusions” instead. Ute Lischke in her essay “National or Transnational German Cinema Post1989? The Films of Helke Misselwitz and Sibylle Schönemann” explores small forms of filmmaking that have been doubly (or even triply) marginalized: the work of two women (documentary) filmmakers from the former GDR, who after German unification and the collapse of the state-owned DEFA studios found themselves for the most part “isolated from mainstream German, European and global cinema.” Looking at films such as Misselwitz’s Winter adé (“Farewell to Winter,” 1988) and Schönemann’s Verriegelte Zeit (“Locked Up Time,” 1991), Lischke shows how these filmmakers have engaged in an important conversation about gender and national identity and how their films, once a “distinct product of a specific national film culture,” have survived as a “distinctly transnational product” on international film circuits thanks to marketing strategies employed by organizations such as the DEFA Foundation, Progress-Filmverleih or DEFA Film Library in Amherst, Massachusetts.

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While industrial concerns and questions of cultural and linguistic identity have figured large in academic discussions of small cinemas, what often remains conspicuously absent in these debates, as Janina Falkowska reminds us, are the links between national sentiments and class, although class identity has become a major issue in some of the more recent films hailing from post-socialist European countries. In her essay “The Cinema of the Abject and the Cinema of Capitalist Fantasy in Poland,” Falkowska utilizes Kasia Adamik’s The Offsiders (Boisko Bezdomnych, 2008) and Ryszard Zatorski’s Just Love Me (Tylko mnie kochaj, 2006) as case studies to trace the emergence of two different cinematic responses to the growing visibility of class disparities which neoliberal policies have effected in Polish society: on the one hand, a concern with the harsh realities of poverty, homelessness and addiction which is often articulated in the minimalist language of contemporary European art cinema (such as the “Berlin School” or the “new Romanian cinema”) and, on the other hand, a naïve and escapist celebration of the life style of the nouveaux riches, which “combines the aesthetics and narratives of soap operas with elements of the fashion show, the music video or comedy.” While Zatorski’s film depicts a “futuristic dreamscape” of luxury high-rises, the plot of Adamik’s “cinema of the abject” involves homeless who dwell in a dark and dilapidated train station, the Central Train Station in Warsaw. Read together these films poetically depict what in Philip Mosley’s essay is poignantly described as a “double scenography.” Mosley perceptively writes that the characters in the Dardenne Brother’s Rosetta (1999) are haunted by a “double scenography” visible in “every shot, however cursory, of boarded-up windows, grey streets, derelict lots, concrete jungles, and high-rise buildings.” In many small European cinemas represented in this volume one catches glimpses of such a representational strategy. Andy Bausch’s “cinema in transition” catalogues both the personal narratives of the bleak, deindustrialized landscapes of the factories of the South, as well as Luxembourg City’s more anonymous “boardrooms, sleek exteriors and bankers.” The dark Romanian comedy Philanthropy (Filantropica, 2002) also paints a lyrical portrait of the homeless residing in the unfinished highrise apartment buildings lining the “Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism,” while parodying capitalist fantasies of new toothpaste. Such films suggest that behind every vision of Europe, there is a vivid counter-vision told through a labyrinthine web of private, subjective memories and stories.65

Introduction: Towards a Politics of Scale

“The Film Yesterday and Today”: exhibition poster designed by Fritz Butz for the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Zurich (1945)

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“The Film of Small Nations”: modernist typesetting in The Film: Its Economic, Social, and Artistic Problems (London: Falcon Press, 1948)

N otes 1 | The Cinemas of Small Nations, ed. Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 15. 2 | “Culture in Small Nations,” Visual Education Vol. 5, Issue 11 (1924): 428. 3 | See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1983). 4 | National and English Review Vol. 24 (1895): 405. 5 | For a description of visual entertainment featuring the “water tiger” and “blood worm” larvae, see Shirley Hibberd’s The Book of the Aquarium and Water Cabinet, or Practical Instructions on the Formation, Stocking and Management in all Seasons of Collections of Fresh Water and Marine Life (London: Groombridge and Sons, Paternoster Row, 1856). Also see the account in a New Zealand newspaper of a peasant woman who is unable to differentiate between the enlarged representation of the “water tiger” and reality: “Water Tiger,” Inangahua Times Vol. XXI, Issue 1038 (28 September 1896): 4. Strikingly similar to the myths of audiences fleeing the early theaters fearing the oncoming train (during a

Introduction: Towards a Politics of Scale performance of the Lumière Cinematograph), here the “primitive” peasant woman cries out in fear when a “water tiger” magnified to the size of 12 feet is thrown onto the screen: “WaterTigers: At a magic-lantern entertainment recently, where the wonders of the microscope were to be exhibited, an old countryman and his wife were among the spectators. The various curiosities seemed to please the good woman well, till the animalcule contained in a drop of water came to be shown. These appeared to poor Janet not so pleasant a sight as the others. She sat patiently, however. Till the ‘water-tigers’ magnified to the size of 12 feet, appeared on the sheet, fighting with their usual ferocity. Janet now rose in great trepidation, and cried to her husband – ‘For mercy’s sake, come away, John!’ ‘Sit still, woman,’ said John ‘and see the show.’ ‘See the show! Bless us, man, what would come o’ us if the awful-like brutes wud break oot of the water.’” (ibid., 4) 6 | For a more sustained meditation on how national identity is inflected in the early popular science film, see Oliver Gaycken’s “A Note on the National Character of Early Popular Science Films,” in Early Cinema and the “National”, ed. Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini and Rob King (New Barnett: John Libbey Press, 2008), 258-264. On nationalism in Weimar popular science feature film, also consider Martin Loiperdinger’s analysis of Die Biene Maja (1926): Martin Loiperdinger, “Ein deutsches Insekt. Die Biene Maja und ihre Abenteuer (1926),” Filmblatt Vol. 13, No. 37 (Sommer 2008): 64-80. 7 | See Janelle Blankenship,“‘Leuchte der Kultur’: Imperialism, Imaginary Travel and the Sklandanowsky Welt-Theater,” KINtop: Das Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Kinos Vol. 14/15 (2006): 37-49. In an inaugural lecture at the 1991 “Screening Europe” conference, Stuart Hall returned to the idea of the “imaginary geography” (Edward Said) through which identity is figured. He reminds us that “it is not only in this century that Europeans have been unsure about where Europe begins and ends.” (Stuart Hall, “European Cinema on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” in Screening Europe: Image and Identity in Contemporary European Cinema, ed. Duncan J. Petrie [London: BFI Working Papers, 1992], 46) 8 | William K.L. and Antonia Dickson, History of The Kinetoscope, Kinetograph and Kinetophonograph (1895) facsimile ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art 2000), 4546. An Afrite is a lower-level demon in Arabic mythology, a gigantic winged demon of fire. In medieval Iranian literature, the word ifrit often denotes an African. In the kinetoscope manual, the spectacle of the monstrous Afrite is imagined as an infiltration of the spectator’s minds and nervous system, leading to a cine-genetic race of beings. “The Rising of the Afrite” in US popular culture was synonymous with racial politics from 1861 onwards. “The Rising of the Afrite” was the name of a cartoon published in Vanity Fair in January 1861 after several Southern States in the US seceded from the Union. The cartoon shows a swarthy, snake-wielding genie with distinctively African features erupting from a bottle labeled “Secession.” See “The Rising of the Afrite,” Vanity Fair, 19 January 1861, 31. 9 | Tom Nairn, Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (London: Verso, 1998), 144. 10 | Ibid., 146. 11 | Ibid., 147. 12 | Baron Émile Louis Victor de Laveleye, The Balkan Peninsula (London: T. F. Unwin, 1887), 10-12. Although he had a federalist approach, Laveleye took a special interest in the revival and preservation of small nationalities such as Croatia.

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Janelle Blankenship and Tobias Nagl 13 | Fredric Jameson, “Response,” in Screening Europe, 88. Jameson starts his essay with the provocative statement “I’m going to begin with the premise that Europe, and everything associated with it, is not necessarily a good thing, regardless of what one’s feelings are regarding nationalism.” (ibid., 87) 14 | Ibid., 88. 15 | Ibid. 16 | On the significance of the “mistranslations” of international cinema see also Abé Mark Nornes, Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 17 | Kafka’s Diaries, 25 December 1911, as quoted in David Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time-Machine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 230. 18 | Ibid., 153. 19 | Luisa Rivi, European Cinema after 1989: Cultural Identity and Transnational Production (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 38. 20 | As quoted in Richard Maltby, “The Cinema and the League of Nations,” in “Film Europe” and “Film America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920-1939, ed. Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1999), 107. 21 | Ibid. Also see H. G. Knox, “English Gives Way to Babel of Tongues as Foreign Language Film Demand Grows,” Epigram, 1 July 1930, 1. 22 | The Film in National Life: Being the Report of an Enquiry Conducted by the Commission on Educational and Cultural Films in the Service which the Cinematograph May Render to Education and Social Progress (London: Allen and Unwin, 1932), 26. 23 | As quoted in Ginette Vincendeau, “Hollywood Babel: The Multiple Language Version,” Screen Vol. 29, No. 2 (1988): 36. 24 | Helmuth Ortmann, “Film-Europe II,” Reichsfilmblatt, No. 17, 24 April 1926, 2. A translation of this article by Thomas J. Saunders appeared in “Film Europe” and “Film America”: Cinema, Commerce, and Cultural Exchange 1920-1939, ed. Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), 335-341. 25 |  Edward G. Lowry, “Certain Factors and Considerations Affecting the European Market,” internal MPPDA memo, 25 October 1928 (Motion Picture Association of America Archive, New York), 20. This memo is reprinted in “Film Europe” and “Film America,” 353-379. 26 | Kristin Thompson, “The Rise and Fall of Film Europe,” in “Film Europe” and “Film America,” 56-81. 27 | Lisa Jarvina, The Rise of Spanish-Language Filmmaking: Out from Hollywood’s Shadow 1929-1939 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 23-24. 28 | George Romuald Canty was a naturalized US citizen born in Cork, Ireland in 1889. He was appointed trade commissioner of the Motion Picture Section in the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce in 1926. As trade commissioner, he was tasked with “investigating the motion picture markets in Europe.” (See Jens Ulff-Møller, Hollywood’s Film Wars with France: Film-Trade Diplomacy and the Emergence of the French Quota Policy [Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2001], 63, note 14 and 15) 29 | Quoted in Jarvina, The Rise of Spanish-Language Filmmaking, 24-33.

Introduction: Towards a Politics of Scale 30 | Béla Balázs, Theory of Film: Character and Growth of a New Art (1952), trans. Edith Bone (New York: Dover, 1970), 228. Balázs’ text was originally published in Moscow as Iskusstvo Kino (“The Art of Cinema”) in 1945 and first published in Hungarian in 1948. 31 | Ibid., 228. 32 | Ibid., 228-229. 33 | The Film: Its Economic, Social and Artistic Problems (London: Holbein Publishing Company, 1947). The exhibit “The Film Yesterday and Today” had three primary sections. The first part included 64 panels on the economic, social and artistic problems of the fiction film. The second part focused on the educational film and the amateur film (the Swiss archivists and editors of the volume refer to this as “substandard film”). The third part of the exhibit focused on photographic and projection equipment. New panels on Swiss film were integrated into the exhibit when it traveled after its premiere at the Basel Gewerbemuseum. 34 | Although it is a mainstream publication, the typography and layout of the pages on the film industry echo 1920s and 1930s avant-garde treatises on film by Hans Richter, Moholy-Nagy and others. The archivists also write in their foreword that the pages of the text are meant to have a “poster-like layout, designed to be seen from a distance.” 35 | In Film History: An Introduction, David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson also suggest a “folklore” strategy capitalizing on national themes and landscapes as a primary characteristic of the film output of “smaller producing countries.” See their section of Film History: An Introduction entitled “Smaller Producing Countries,” where they refer to “the strategies of using national subject matter and exploiting picturesque local landscapes” that “have remained common in countries with limited production to the present day.” (David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson, Film History: An Introduction [London: McGraw Hill, 2003], 79) 36 | The Film: Its Economic, Social and Artistic Problems (London: Holbein Publishing Company, 1947), x. 37 | Ibid., 10. The film industry statistics they publish are as follows: “Average production cost of a Swiss film (without general expenses and distribution costs): Fr. 120–170,000; Average income of a Swiss film from the home market: Fr. 80–130,000; Deficit without possibility of export: Fr. 40,000; Number of films produced in Switzerland Year 1934 (1 Film), 1935 (0 films), 1936 (0 films), 1937 (1 film), 1938 (4 films), 1939 (2 films), 1940 (8 films), 1941 (12 films), 1942 (15 films), 1943 (5 films), 1944 (2 films), 1945 (1 film), 1946 (1 film), 1947 (1 film).” 38 | Carl Doka, Kulturelle Aussenpolitik (Zürich: Verlag Berichthaus, 1956), 333. 39 | Kurt Deggeller (Director of Memoravia), “Memoravia, the network for the preservation of the audio-visual heritage of Switzerland,” available online at http://de.memoriav.ch/ dokument/Tagungsberichte/conference_200611_girona_en.pdf 40 | The Cinema of Small Nations, ed. Hjort and Petrie, 7. In another essay, Mette Hjort also argues that there are environmental gains to be had from the kinds of practices associated with small-nation filmmaking. See Mette Hjort, “Small Cinemas: Why They Thrive and Why they Matter,” Mediascape: UCLA Journal of Film and Media Studies (Winter 2011): 1-5; available online at http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Winter2011_SmallCinemas.pdf. 41 | Two follow-up conferences have been organized by colleagues in the US and Romania: The Second Annual Small Cinemas in Transition Conference: Small, Smaller, Smallest (State

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Janelle Blankenship and Tobias Nagl University of New York, Oswego 16-18 September 2011), and Small Cinemas: Promotion and Reception, (Timisoara, Romania, 1-3 June 2012). In 2005 the Huston School of Film and Digital Media organized a conference on New Scottish Cinema entitled Cinema in a Small Nation/Small National Cinemas in the World (National University of Ireland, Galway, 4-5 November 2005). 42 | Of the lesser-known publications, we would highlight: Yuri Shevchuk, “Linguistic Strategies of Imperial Appropriation: Why Ukraine is absent from World Cinema?,” in Contemporary Ukraine on the Cultural Map of Europe, ed. Larissa M. L. Zaleska Onyshkevych and Maria G. Rewakowicz (New York: Shevchenko Society, 2009), 359374, and Jerry White, “The Scandinavian Connection: Irish Cinema as a ‘Small’ National Cinema,” in Canadian Journal of Irish Studies Vol. 29, No. 2 (2003): 35-40. 43 | Other publications of note in this burgeoning field of small cinema studies include (but are not limited to): Dina Iordanova, “Jagged Narratives and Discerning Rembrance in Balkan Cinema,” in Shifting Landscapes: Film and Media in European Context, ed. Miyase Christensen and Nezih Erdoğan (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 4967; Michael Goddard, “Deterritorialised Spaces and Anomalous Bodies: New Corporeal Cartographies in Hungarian Cinema,” in Shifting Landscapes, 172-198; Duncan Petrie, “The New Scottish Cinema,” in Cinema & Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 153-169; Thomas Elsaesser, “Real Location, Fantasy Space, Performative Place: Double Occupancy and Mutual Interference in European Cinema,” in Shifting Landscapes, 14-21; Thomas Elsaesser, “Double Occupancy and Small Adjustments: Space, Place and Policy in the New European Cinema since the 1990s,” in Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 108-130; John Cunningham, Hungarian Cinema: From Coffee House to Multiplex (London: Wallflower Press, 2004); Alistair Fox, New Zealand Cinema: Interpreting the Past by (Bristol: Intellect Press, 2011). Extremely valuable in an inter-medial context are also The Media in Wales: Voices of a Small Nation, ed. David Barlow, Philip Mitchell and Tom O’Malley (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005); Global Changes/Local Stages: How Theatre Functions in Smaller European Countries, ed. Hans Van Maanen, Andreas Kotte, Anneli Saro (Amsterdam: Rodopoi, 2009); and Roger Wallis and Krister Malmed, Big Sounds from Small Peoples (New York: Pendragon Press, 1984). Of particular interest in the latter is their reference to French phonogram researcher Antoine Hennion’s caricature of how cultural elitists view the big and small in the “culture industries.” The “small” characteristics of culture industries include “creativity,” “diversity,” “quality” and “active reception.” The “big” characteristics of culture industries are “heavyhandedness,” “uniformity,” “commercial products” and “passive consumption.” Hennion believes the big and small do not work in such a simplistic way, but are mutually dependent in a complex system characterized by reciprocity. (ibid., 90) 44 | Doris Pack, “Film Prize is ‘Tool for Building European Identity’,” Public Service Europe (16 November 2011), available online at http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/ article/1127/film-prize-is-tool-for-building-european-identity 45 | Eurimages officials, film festival organizers, film producers and distributors and film critics are represented on the LUX Prize 17-member selection panel.

Introduction: Towards a Politics of Scale 46 | “Unity Through Diversity. The LUX European Film Prize: an interview with jury member and producer Klaus Maeck,” CDR (Cultural Diplomacy Research), available online at http:// www.culturaldiplomacy.org/culturaldiplomacynews/index.php?aid=1216 47 | Ibid. 48 | Pack, “Film Prize is ‘Tool for Building European Identity’.” 49 | “LUX Prize: Supporting culture and the European identity,” available online at http:// www.luxprize.eu/v1/lux-prize-european-parliament-and-lux.html 50 | As quoted in Jarvina, The Rise of Spanish-Language Filmmaking, 24. 51 | The current eligibility criteria for the 2014 LUX European Film Prize is as follows: 1) They are fictions or creative documentaries (may be animated). 2) They have a minimum length of 60 minutes. 3) They result from productions or co-productions eligible under the MEDIA PROGRAMME produced or co-produced in a European Union country or in Croatia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway or Switzerland. 4) They illustrate universality of European values, diversity of cultures or themes raising the public debate on European building process. 5) Films that had their festival premiere/ first release between 31 May 2013 and 30 May 2014. ( See Eligibility Criteria, LUX Prize-European-Parliament website, available online at http:// www.luxprize.eu/selection-process) 52 | “Fatih Akin,” LUX Prize Vol. 1, (2007), available online at http://www.luxprize.eu/v1/ fatih-akin.html 53 | Björn Norðfjörð, “Iceland,” in The Cinema of Small Nations, ed. Hjort and Petrie, 57. Higson argues that national cinema studies should focus on what the national audience is watching rather than the films produced nationally. See Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen Vol. 30, No. 4 (1989): 36-46. 54 | The organizers also note on numerous websites that the €90,000 prize money is also used to adapt the original film for people with visual or hearing handicaps. 55 | Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong, Film Festivals: Culture, Power and the Global Screen (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 9. 56 | Ibid., 160. 57 | Wong perceptively writes that “film festivals incorporate very contradictory impulses in their texts, audiences, and discussions. On the one hand, most festivals are fairly highbrow and exclusionary. On the other, precisely because of the exclusivity that distances film festivals from the industrial mass cinema, they have the freedom to represent and even debate marginal, sensitive, and difficult subject matters.” (ibid., 164) See also Randall Halle, “Offering Tales They Want to Hear: Transnational European Film Funding as NeoOrientalism,” in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 303-316. 58 | Ibid., 88. 59 | “Veit Helmer presents his feature film Absurdistan (2007),” Sources 2 – Stimulating Outstanding Resources for Creative European Screenwriting 4, available online at http:// www.sources2.de/lectures/Veit%20Helmer%202008.pdf

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Janelle Blankenship and Tobias Nagl 60 | “Meine Projekte bergen immer ein gewisses Risiko. Ein sehr großes Risiko.” (“Interview mit Veit Helmer: Baikonur,” available online at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wU4Ft57R2Qk) 61 | In this context, see also Agata Jakubowska’s discussion of Polish artist Jerzy Bereś. As Jakubowska writes, Bereś has been “dealing with the same forms and topics since the late 1960s. His artistic creation is a reaction to the actual historic events [...] but his main motif – if we may call it that – remains the same. It’s his naked body – one of the most significant elements of his performances. The artist refers to the legacy of Romanticism and to the Christian tradition in which – in the body of Christ exposed to pain in order to bring freedom (or, to use the artist’s exact words, ‘independence’) – he finds his point of reference.” (Agata Jakubowska, “Poljska/Poland,” in Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present, ed. Zdenka Badovinac [Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1998], 125-126) 62 | In 2013, HBO Europe released the three-part mini-series Burning Bush (Hořící keř ), directed by the Academy-award winning Polish director Agnieszka Holland, on the Czech “living torch” Jan Palach, a student who set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square in Prague in 1969. The director has a personal investment in the story, since she was studying at the Prague Film School (FAMU) at the time (see “Agnieszka Holland to shoot story of Czech martyr”, 23 January 2012, available online at http://cineuropa.org/2011/nw.aspx?t=new sdetail&l=en&did=214882). 63 | Félix Guattari, “Towards a Post-Media Era,” in Provocative Alloys: A Post-Media Anthology, ed. Clemens Apprich, Josephine Berry Slater, Anthony Iles and Oliver Lerone Schultz (London and Lüneburg: Mute Books and Post Media Lab, 2013), 27. 64 | Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (Urbana-Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 183. 65 | Here one should also mention the 25 short films on the European Union commissioned by Lars von Trier for his 2004 compilation film Visions of Europe. The compilation includes shorts by directors from Greece, Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland, Belgium, Hungary, Ireland and other small European nations. As Nadja Stamselberg argues in “Visions of Europe: The Ethics Behind the Aesthetics,” Lars von Trier’s DVD compilation portrays a counter-vision of Europe shaped by a “cultural, colonial or neo-colonial dialectic.” She writes that “the Europe portrayed by the Visions of Europe project is increasingly defined by its immigration practices. The new geographies put together by the filmic visions appear to be locked into a fundamentally cultural, colonial or neo-colonial dialectic of appropriation and alienation. Addressing the question of containment in the European Union, they highlight the fact that the discourse of political rights has been renationalized […] Nonetheless, the question posed by Visions of Europe is not that of a just society, but that of a horizon […] its theoretical position addresses a politics of Otherness that it is not reducible to a politics of presentation.” (Nadja Stamselberg, “Visions of Europe: The Ethics Behind the Aesthetics,” in Breaching Borders: Art, Migrants and the Metaphors of Waste, ed. Julian Steyn and Nadja Stamselberg [London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014], 73-95, 90-91)

Industry/Funding

The Risk Environment of Small-Nation Filmmaking Mette Hjort

This chapter builds on the results of a collaborative, interdisciplinary project involving Toby Miller, Hamid Naficy, Faye Ginsburg, Rod Stoneman, Mike Pokorny, and John Sedgwick, among others. The purpose of the collaborative project, the results of which appear in the edited volume entitled Film and Risk,1 is to demonstrate that thinking about risk provides an opportunity for further concept development in the area of Film Studies, and a means of deepening our understanding of a wide range of well-established topics, including cinematic authorship, film spectatorship, film festivals, film and cultural policy, and screen acting. My aim here is to explore the extent to which focusing on risk can help to sharpen ongoing debates about small-nation filmmaking. Part of the specificity of small-nation filmmaking, I believe, is that it is both “risk diverse” and “risk intensive”, and this for reasons that are worth spelling out. A focus on risk has the benefit of providing a particular angle on the phenomenon of “transition” that is part of the story that needs to be told about many small European cinemas today. After all, one way of understanding what counts as being in a state of transition is to consider the extent to which the relevant risk environment has changed. And one way of assessing a given state of transition – its promise, drawbacks and practical implications – is to think in terms of new, aggravated, diminished or resolved risks. This line of reasoning invites an analysis of the causes and types of risk associated with small-nation filmmaking, generally, but also at a particular moment in time, as well as an analysis of the values and socio-cultural frameworks that are the conditions of actually being able to perceive possible scenarios as risky. In what follows I develop my thinking about risk and small-nation filmmaking in a number of steps. I begin by asking whether there is a stable connection between definitions of small nationhood and particular kinds of risks. A second step involves looking at some of the factors that can change the risk environment of small-nation filmmaking. In a third moment, I illustrate what I want to call the “productive” nature of certain kinds of risk, by looking at some of the diverse

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and interesting ways in which agents operating within small-nation contexts are responding to perceived risks. In keeping with my interest in creativity under constraint,2 that is, in the idea that apparent obstacles can be reframed as creative opportunities, I explore the ways in which new global risks can be seen as presenting opportunities to validate small-nation filmmaking practices, and this on a properly global scale. A question warranting consideration is whether the new risk environment that is a feature of small-nation filmmaking at a time of transition potentially enables relevant social actors to play a more agenda-setting role than has arguably been the case over the last many decades. A second equally thought-provoking question is whether film scholars might help to ensure that at least some of the risks currently faced by small-nation filmmakers come to be seen as opportunities for constructive and responsible creative practices. In the course of my discussion I draw on discussions for which the Think Tank on European Film, established in the summer of 2005, has provided a platform. The three examples discussed in the third section involve one small northern European nation-state, Denmark, but also, quite appropriately (given the emphasis in this volume on the concept of transition), East Africa. Filmmaking, after all, is increasingly about partnerships across borders.

R isk and S mall N ationhood If we look to the literature on small nations and small states, we see that there are essentially four ways of determining whether a nation or state qualifies as small. Of these four measures, three are relatively self-evident: population, geographical scale or territory, and gross national product or per capita income. The fourth measure – (a history of) rule by non-co-nationals over a significant period of time3 – may not immediately come to mind, but it is an important one, because it brings some of the challenges associated with filmmaking in postcolonial contexts, as well as in contexts where people strive after an independent state, into the picture. Because it has important implications for “social structure and processes” and determines “the size of the internal market before the foreign trade factor comes into operation,” population is often held to be the most important measure of size, as Björn Olafsson points out. 4 Scholars do not always agree about where the cut-off point should be, in terms of population. Some scholars are particularly interested in microstates, with a population of up to 1.5 million, a figure that brings countries like Qatar (840,926)5 and Iceland (308,910)6 clearly into the picture. But most scholars have tended to work with a much higher figure. For example, in The Inequality of States in the Global System: A Study of the Small Power in International Relations, David Vital argued that a nation or state could be considered small if it had a population under 15 million “in the case of economically advanced countries” and 30 million in the case of developing countries.7

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Vital set the upper limit for the population figure differently depending on a state’s status as either developing or developed, a decision that highlights the extent to which the measures of population and wealth can work together to determine a state’s status as either small or large. Gross national product or per capita income is a crucial measure because it affects a country’s infrastructure, the dynamics of its internal market, and its capacity to participate effectively in external markets. In the context of film, the gross domestic product has clear implications for the kinds of institutions that can be built, the kind of equipment that can be made available to filmmakers, the sorts of budgets that filmmakers and those who market their films have to work with, the frequency with which film professionals are able to practice their craft, and a nation’s capacity to defend its language (or languages) and cultural values from the effects of various profitdriven ventures mounted by companies linked to large nations. In thinking about how risk relates to small nationhood, it is helpful to distinguish between what I want to call “systemic risks” and what German sociologist Ulrich Beck calls “risk positions.”8 In the case of small-nation filmmaking systemic risks would be those that arise from specific measures of size and permeate the entire filmmaking milieu, with potential implications for all who contribute to the filmmaking effort. Risk positions, by contrast, are not collective in the same sense, but capture the degree to which individual agents are likely to be exposed to particular kinds of risk, as a result of the specificity of their circumstances, including their institutional affiliations, networks, age, gender, class background, rural or urban provenance, and so on. The extent to which individuals within a given small-nation film milieu are able to enjoy favorable risk positions depends, I believe, to a significant extent on how the systemic risks are managed, especially through film policies (where these exist). In thinking about small-nation filmmaking and risk positions in the context of Europe, three broad historical periods can be usefully evoked: the early silent film era; the post-World War II period; and, 1989 and beyond. In a keynote speech, entitled “The Challenges In the Twenty First Century for European Cinema” and delivered on the occasion of the first European Think Tank meeting in June 2006, Lord David Puttnam described early European cinema as follows: “[The picture] is of a cinema attracting very large audiences, a cinema based on a combination of contemporary stories, entirely relevant to our daily life in Europe, along with adaptations drawn from our shared literary heritage. This [was] a European film business based on a rapidly developing international network of distribution, with outposts all around the world, and with a market share, in the US, of 60%.”9 Puttnam went on to evoke two of the well-known factors, sound technology and language, that played such a crucial role in the transition from the first to the second period: “It was a period of incredible entrepreneurial energy in Europe, a time when we had the confidence to draw on stories rooted in our own culture and export them to audiences all over the world – but it was also of course a time when there was no language barrier to a film’s success.”10

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Let us think of the post-World War II period as one defined by the emergence of a subsidy culture, and the third, as Mary Wood suggests in her book Contemporary European Cinema, as marked by the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and of “formerly state-supported film industries” in Eastern Central Europe, and by the expansion of the European Union’s MEDIA program from 15 participating countries in the early 1990s to over 30 in the new millennium.11 The contrast between even just the first two periods is suggestive. Inasmuch as the first period was characterized by thriving national cinemas and the second by struggling state-subsidized cinemas in the West and robust national cinemas in the well-integrated Eastern Bloc where rule by non-co-nationals was the order of the day, it seems clear that small nationhood does not automatically produce serious systemic risks. At the same time, it is worth noting that the absence of serious threats during the first period was linked to the technological specificity of silent film production, which effectively neutralized one of the relevant measures of size, that of a limited population (linked to a specific language). In the vast majority of cases, small-nation filmmaking does involve considerable systemic risks, and this in ways that correlate with population size, linguistic reach, relative wealth, and so on. Let us look at some examples of systemic risks, so as to prepare the ground for an examination of the ways in which they interact with individual risk positions. I made the claim early on that small-nation filmmaking tends to be both risk diverse and risk intensive, and I would like to return to this point now, focusing on the second period evoked above, and this with reference to Scandinavian countries. My aim will be to begin, however tentatively, to paint a picture of the risk environment of heavily subsidized small national cinemas, and in so doing to differentiate, concretely, between systemic risks, which tend to be diverse and considerable, and risk positions, which are not necessarily unfavorable. Risks are typically understood to be a matter of possible threats, and reasoning about risks thus involves probabilistic thinking in situations defined by some degree of uncertainty. It is not far-fetched to see the emergence of statesubsidized small national cinemas in the Nordic countries, and indeed elsewhere in Europe, as a response to perceived risks: the risk, if not of outright language loss, then of significant changes to the linguistic habitus of nationals; the risk of an erosion of cultural values viewed as constitutive of national identity; the risk of a homogenized media space dominated by foreign interests. Risk played a motivating and thus constitutive role in the creation of state-subsidized Nordic cinemas, but the cinemas that emerged as a result of various national efforts were themselves fraught with systemic risks. Although concepts of probability and uncertainty necessarily come into play when thinking about risk, the degree of uncertainty can vary considerably. Film history and its analysis – whether this analysis is undertaken by film scholars, or practitioners, or policymakers – can help to diminish the uncertainty associated with filmmaking, by bringing into sharp focus certain regularities or tendencies. At a certain point it became

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possible, with considerable certainty, to articulate the systemic risks that threatened small state-subsidized national cinemas, and as these risks assumed the status of known endemic threats, the uncertainty shifted to the domain of what constitutes an appropriate response, with the responses to recurring threats themselves entailing various risks. Let me provide some examples of what I have in mind when I speak of systemic risks that assumed the status of virtually certain threats over the course of time:

(1) The risk of mono-personalism This risk, which persists beyond the second period and into the third, evokes the danger of a given film milieu, industry, and national cinema being dominated by, and excessively dependent on, a single filmmaker. In an interview conducted by Ernest Mathijs, published in The Cinema of the Low Countries, Belgian filmmaker Harry Kümel puts the point (somewhat provocatively) as follows, with reference to Denmark and Sweden: “These are top-to-bottom subsidized industries, financed in part by a surreptitious pornographic production, whose recognition ebbs and flows with the activities of one internationally recognized director. Nowadays it is (for, to me, unfathomable reasons) Lars von Trier in Denmark. And look what has become of the reputation and quality of Swedish cinema since Ingmar Bergman is no longer active in filmmaking.”12 That the risk of mono-personalism is real, and persists to this day, is evident in Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig’s comments about Ingmar Bergman and Carl Th. Dreyer, in the Danish version of a video clip that was posted on YouTube in connection with the Danish Film Institute’s new website devoted to Dreyer: “He [Dreyer] set a standard that allowed others to take risks that they otherwise might not have taken. At the same time the films were made quite some time ago, so people haven’t felt overshadowed by him in the way that has probably been the case in Sweden, where it was Bergman who set an incredibly high standard, to the point where, as a young director, it was hard to get up the courage to go to work.”13

(2) The risk of wasted talent Here too, we are talking about a risk that persists into the third period. It is eloquently evoked by Henning Camre, former Head of the National Film and Television School in the UK and of the National Film School of Denmark, former CEO of the Danish Film Institute and now President of the Think Tank on European Film and Film Policy. Referring to the film policy initiative known as New Danish Screen, to which I shall return in a moment, Camre draws attention to a persistent systemic risk that policymakers in Denmark and elsewhere cannot afford to ignore: “If you have identified talent and invested in that in film school, you cannot afford to lose it. According to some statistics, on average if you take a director from a film school, it can take him – or her – five+ years before they make their first feature, and some of our best directors (such as Per Fly) took nine years before they made their first feature film! What a potential waste.”14

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(3) The risk of exit Exit takes two forms, and Camre refers to one of them in the statement just quoted: the loss of young and emerging talent to other professions on account of insufficient opportunities. Exit can also take the form of a loss of established talent, with success becoming the platform for a career outside the relevant national film industry, rather than a means of further developing that industry. The second variant on the risk of exit seems to be less salient (at least in western and northern Europe) in the third period than in the second. It is not difficult to add more entries to this list of systemic risks: (4) the risk of conformism (with filmmakers converging on the models, narrative and other, that inform successful films); (5) the risk of neglect (by indigenous and international audiences), and so on. Let me mention just one last systemic risk, one that concerns the relation amongst the relevant system’s constitutive elements: (6) the risk of film-ecological imbalance. This risk arises as a result of various efforts to ward off the systemic risks identified above, typically through various policies. Thus, for example, the risk of audience neglect can be countered by funding policies aimed at circumventing the gate-keeping function of film commissioners, who have often been intent on producing some version of the art film. Or it can be countered by funding policies that set the stage for significantly increased coproductions by TV stations in partnership with private producers backed by film institutes. The risk of film ecological imbalance arises when one of the various solutions to perceived systemic risks succeeds to the point where new risks arise, or existing risks are aggravated. Thus, for example, the New Danish Cinema owes its success with audiences, both nationally and internationally, at least in part, to support for filmmaking based on popular (international) genre formulae, and to an increased emphasis on effective storytelling and scriptwriting at the National Film School of Denmark. Lars von Trier was the first person to sound the alarm (in 2006), at what he saw as the increasingly formulaic nature of Danish filmmaking, but his worries have since been taken up by others, especially in light of a recent Film Policy Accord in which co-production activities involving TV stations were mandated, and thus filmmaking with prime time TV appeal.15 We are now in a position to see why small Nordic cinemas, which have been my principal point of reference, are risk diverse and risk intensive, at least in the second period. These cinemas arise in response to a situation of perceived risk and exist within a space that is pervaded by various systemic risks and threatened at all times by a higher-level risk of film-ecological imbalance. Norms, values, cultural standards – the phenomena that sociological and anthropological accounts of risk would have us pay attention to – help to explain the risk profile of these small national cinemas. In the context of purely commercial, industrial filmmaking there is a monotonic quality to the filmmaking environment, when viewed in terms of risk. The system, quite simply, operates in relation to a single, dominant risk, which is that of economic risk. For small national cinemas the situation is very

The Risk Environment of Small-Nation Filmmaking

different, and this is because the goals pursued through the odds-defying activity of building and sustaining a national cinema are ultimately far more diverse. A diversity of goals involves, quite simply, a greater variety of risks. Let me return now to the question of risk positions, to small-nation film practitioners’ exposure to, and capacity to absorb, risk. With regard to the relation between systemic risks and risk positions, the point to be made is that risk intensiveness and risk diversity at the systemic level do not necessarily translate into highly unfavorable risk positions for individual practitioners. Film policies can work synergistically with a larger social system, and with the constraints of smallnation filmmaking, to establish a film milieu that affords specific groups, as well as filmmakers more generally, quite favorable risk positions. For example, while women tend to be very much under-represented in the categories of director and producer in the context of some of the more influential large filmmaking countries, they play a prominent role, increasingly so, in the Danish film milieu. When queried about the prominence of women in the Danish film milieu – as producers, directors, and film commissioners – director Lone Scherfig drew attention to budgetary restrictions (which she sees as favoring types of filmmaking that are of particular interest to women), a film school that has been eager to train women filmmakers (but without introducing quotas), and the deep-seated commitments and inclinations of Zentropa producer Peter Aalbaek Jensen and Zentropa director Lars von Trier, both of whom have systematically supported and endorsed the efforts of women.16 The result of these combined factors is, without a doubt, a film environment where women who pursue their filmmaking aspirations take far fewer risks than those who seek to make their way as directors and producers in a contrasting, monotonic system where economic risk is dominant.

Tr ansitions : N e w R isks , D iminished R isks , A ggr avated R isks I would like now to take up the issue of transition, which can usefully be thought of in terms of diminished risks, aggravated risks, and new risks. My sense is that when we choose to focus on the idea of transition, and this in the context of small European cinemas today, we do so because we are particularly interested in the category of new risks. That is, in asking about the nature of a given transition, we are likely to be interested in risks that involve a considerable degree of uncertainty, to the point perhaps where the exact nature of the risks involved have yet to become entirely clear. Transition, then, is marked by two levels of uncertainty, uncertainty about the types of risk that are in play, and uncertainty about the probability of possible risks materializing, given various courses of action. My aim in this section is to suggest a spectrum of new types of risk that might warrant our attention, but by no means to discuss them in detail. By economizing on words, this approach makes it possible, in conclusion, to look at some agenda-

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setting examples of how small-nation film practitioners can make productive use of some of these new risks. The spectrum I have in mind can be evoked by means of three categories of new risks. In establishing these categories, special attention has been paid to two factors: the degree to which the new risks are specifically cinematic; and the degree to which the new risks are unique to small national cinemas. In what follows I evoke the categories that strike me as helpful and provide some examples of what they might encompass.

(1) New risks that are specific to both the cinema and to small national cinemas Small-nation film practitioners face new uncertainties as a result of the diminished effectiveness of previously developed strategies for meeting the challenges or threats associated with small-nation filmmaking. For example, the auteur strategy that has long been used by producers, directors, funding programs, and film critics to achieve product differentiation in response to Hollywood’s saturation of markets appears to be less viable today than it once was, and this has consequences for the risk positions of individual film practitioners, especially directors, as well as for the more general risk environment of small national cinemas. In her thought-provoking chapter on authorial filmmaking in the context of European cinemas in transition, Mary P. Wood sees Michael Winterbottom as exemplifying “the contemporary difficulties of the concept of the director as auteur.” She says: “Winterbottom is a chameleon auteur whose films make the commercial and ideological context of film production visible. While admitting that financiers are often puzzled by the diversity of his output, Winterbottom maintains that ‘films are so hard to get financed that if I’m interested in an idea, I’ll just do it, whatever the genre’ (Kevin Maher, “Jack of All Trades, Master of Most,” The Times/Screen, 20 October 2005, 15).”17 With directors such as Neil Jordan and Jean-Pierre Jeunet alternating “between Europe and Hollywood”18 and directors such as Winterbottom pursuing a wide variety of cinematic projects, a distinctive consistency across oeuvres becomes harder to achieve. And yet, as Wood argues with reference to Godard (whose career exemplifies the strengths of the auteur strategy), such consistency provides a means of developing and maintaining contact with a constituency.19 A central element in the audience-building efforts of small filmmaking nations, the auteur strategy has been a well-established and relatively effective response to a particular risk environment. Its diminished efficacy signals a changing risk environment.

(2) New technolog y-based risks with implications for all film industries, but especially – as a result of unequal power relations – for small national cinemas An example of this category of threats and uncertainties would be the technological innovations allowing for the digital distribution of films. The position paper on D-cinema produced by the Think Tank on European Film Policy suggests that

The Risk Environment of Small-Nation Filmmaking

digital technology could have consequences for small filmmaking nations of the same magnitude as those entailed by the invention of sound technology.20 The risks associated with D-cinema have to do with the Virtual Print Fee (VPF) model that currently funds the conversion to digital cinema. It is not necessary to note the intricacies of this model, but merely the conclusion reached in the position paper: “the number of screens at risk [in Europe] is probably somewhere between a floor of 6,000 or a ceiling of 14,000. For every screen that does not fit into a commercial model, a solution has to be found in the public sector. It is also important that the type of cinema that comes into the ‘at risk’ category is also likely to be the type of cinema showing a high proportion of European content.” The report concludes that D-cinema is likely to entail “a serious shrinking of the European film sector, if [the threats and uncertainties it entails are] not handled correctly and promptly.”21

(3) Global risks that are neither specific to the cinema nor to small nations Finally, there is a category of risks that are global and extend well beyond the sphere of the cinema. These are the risks that Beck’s pioneering work on risk society has helped to define and clarify, and good examples include the ecological threats entailed by ways of life that are ultimately unsustainable. The social actors who operate within a given cinematic system may be less inclined to recognize these (apparently extra-cinematic) risks as requiring their attention through systematically coordinated efforts. But as I argue in my concluding section, this category of risks could well be a source of valuable opportunities for practitioners belonging to small filmmaking nations. In the “Copenhagen Report,” produced by the Think Tank on European Film and Film Policy, reference is made to Harvard professor Mark Moore’s concept of public value and the need to “demonstrate how supporting film is about more than enabling civil servants and producers to enjoy a nice life style.”22 Film’s public value, it is argued, will become evident when European film begins to engage seriously, through institutional frameworks as well as the practices of practitioners, with risks that are social, political, ecological, and cultural, and not merely economic. The report makes the following claims: “Increasingly such questions as how different cultures and countries can respect one another, how to achieve social cohesion and prevent communities – inside and outside a given country – becoming alienated and antagonistic, must be addressed. Film’s ability to contribute [ways of …] dealing with these questions may ultimately be as significant as its contribution to the national culture and economy.”23 The risks that especially require a response from the film sector, the report suggests, arise from what Arjun Appadurai would call the ethnoscape of globalization, from those migrations and displacements of persons resulting from the polarizations, inequities, and imbalances of an increasingly globalized world.24

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The “P roductive ” N ature of R isk in S mall-N ation C onte x ts One final point needs to be made about risk in small-nation contexts and that is that risk is not simply a matter for concern, but also a phenomenon that can be selectively affirmed as a source of opportunities for small-nation film practitioners. To make this point, I wish to consider three distinct cases. I begin with an example of how threats arising from within the Danish filmmaking milieu became the basis for the affirmation of a certain kind of positively construed risk. I shall then look at how extra-cinematic social risks threatening a particular region of the world – East Africa – have become the basis for an enduring North/South partnership, one fueled not so much by the kind of solidarity that Beck sees global risks as fostering, but by small-nation solidarities. My third and final example takes up the issue of global environmental risks, and the question of what small national cinemas have to contribute in the way of effective solutions.

Case one: New Danish Screen New Danish Screen, a Danish Film Institute funding scheme, was launched in 2003, with the intent of coming to grips with the dual risks of inertia and repetition that then DFI CEO Henning Camre (and others) saw as endemic to the ecology of small state-subsidized film industries. Inertia is a risk that accompanies a subsidy culture, where commitment levels can be low. Repetition, on the other hand, becomes a threat when a modestly scaled film milieu begins to enjoy a level of success that exceeds all expectations, as was the case for Denmark in the wake of Dogma 95. The challenge for thriving small national cinemas is to ensure that success does not become an obstacle to innovation, or to the risk-taking that is the very basis for renewal. Risk, positively construed, is thus a cornerstone of the New Danish Screen set-up and philosophy, as Eva Novrup Redvall has shown.25 As Camre puts it in an interview conducted by Annika Pham for the Nordic Film & TV Fund, an important consideration was to ensure “that the people who applied [to New Danish Screen] would have something important to say, something that they really wanted to do, using film form and language to break new ways, taking risks that would be difficult or impossible to take forward in the ordinary support systems [emphasis added].”26 Given the diversity of goals that are typically being pursued in the context of small national cinemas, the failure to encourage certain kinds of risk taking, especially creative and artistic risk-taking, is itself perceived as systemically perilous in the longer run. New Danish Screen, it should be noted, has been very successful. With its emphasis on creative teams, productive sparring between the film commissioner and the director, and, above all else, artistic risktaking, New Danish Screen has been the driving force behind remarkable films such as Pernille Fischer Christensen’s A Soap (En Soap, 2006) and Christoffer Boe’s Offscreen (2006).

The Risk Environment of Small-Nation Filmmaking

Case two: A North/South partnership My second case focuses on the recurring collaboration between the Children & Youth section at the Danish Film Institute and the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF).27 Several years ago Martin Mhando, a Tanzanian filmmaker and Australian academic who was also CEO of the Zanzibar International Film Festival, contacted the Danish Film Institute with a proposal for collaboration. The context for Mhando’s proposal was one that envisaged filmmaking as a hopeful response to the social risks that Tanzania (and East Africa more generally) faces. Mhando pointed not only to the absence of a developed film industry in Tanzania and to the lack of training opportunities for film professionals, but also, crucially, to the average age of the country’s citizens. In East Africa, Mhando and his fellow festival organizers emphasized, 50% of the population is 15 years of age or younger. Filmmakers are not required to respond to these social risks, which are extra-cinematic. Yet, in insisting on the need to produce meaningful films for children and young people in an East African context, Mhando essentially argues that extra-cinematic risks can, and indeed should, become a productive force in cinematic contexts. What is needed, following Mhando, are films that develop the problem-solving and coping skills of children in the face of a whole range of social problems entailed by, among other things, AIDS. Speaking of the aims of ZIFF, Mhando says: “ZIFF realized that it can become an intervention program, intervention in terms of bringing messages of development to a group of people. […] We are not showing the Hollywood type of film or the Bollywood type of film, because these they can watch any time they go to the video shop. We want to show films that are totally different from those watched on a daily basis.”28 Mhando and his colleagues became interested in the fact that the “Danish model” for filmmaking earmarks 25% of the government’s support for film for the production of films for children and young people. They were also interested in Denmark’s by now longstanding commitment to providing children and young people with cinematic alternatives to what Ida Zeruneith once called the “candyfloss” of Hollywood.29 The organizers’ proposal was to create a “Children and Film Panorama” at the ZIFF, and this happened for the first time in 2008. Charlotte Giese (DFI) and Martin Mhando (ZIFF) describe the aims of this initiative as follows: “To give children access to a diversity of films in terms of genre, content and cultural origin; To inspire the professional filmmakers in the creation of films for children; To promote debate about a policy for film production, film distribution and film education for children.”30 The initiative was motivated by the idea that Denmark had developed some interesting models that might be transferable to Tanzania, and East Africa more generally. In 2008 the “Children and Film Panorama” featured screenings for three different age groups, with children being bussed to the venue (a former sultan’s palace). It also featured a “master class program,” defined as a “professional forum for debate and capacity building.” Tanzanian directors Farida Nyamachumbe and Beatrix Mugishagwe discussed the African experience in terms of the

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challenges facing African filmmakers. DFI’s Charlotte Giese focused on the Danish experience, and on key policy developments (achieved over a period of many decades and in the face of considerable challenges) that eventually produced the Danish model as we now know it. Crucial with regard to the issue of films for children and young people is the 25% funding rule, but also a broad consensus about childhood and the child’s right “to experience artistic reflection on the realities of life.”31 Also important is a strategy for providing children and young people with a first-hand experience of filmmaking. Relevant in this regard is Film-X, a computer-based film studio in the Film House in Copenhagen.32 In 2008 the Film Institute created a new, mobile studio, called Film-X on the Road, following expressions of interest from Syria, Spain, and Greece, among other countries. Film-X on the Road arrives at its destination in a number of crates, accompanied by technicians and facilitators. The aim now, says Charlotte Giese, with ZIFF in mind, is to ensure that the studio is robust enough to handle a range of temperatures and humidity levels. The partnership between the Danish Film Institute and ZIFF achieved initial funding until 2011, and has since attracted further support from the Danish Centre for Culture and Development. Here then, we find a long-term partnership that begins as a response to perceived extracinematic social risks, builds on shared values and small-nation solidarities, and contributes to the development of clearly identified filmmaking capacities.

Case three: Global risks My last example of how the phenomenon of risk as threat can become an opportunity for small-nation film practitioners and/or the milieus in which they operate has to do with the properly global threats that are entailed by environmental despoliation, by unsustainable life-styles and practices. Small national cinemas have much to offer the world, and not just the small nations that produce them. It is my hope that those of us who are working on small national or peripheral cinemas will become better able to argue this point effectively in the years ahead. Take the example of sustainable cinema. Hollywood, as Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller have shown, has one of the most appalling environmental track records imaginable.33 And if we, in addition to considering the matter of environmental impact, also begin to ask questions about how resources are allocated in this world which we ultimately all share, the picture becomes even gloomier. When I recently converted the cost of producing James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) from American to Hong Kong dollars (for teaching purposes), I ended up with a figure so long that it would not fit on a single line in my Power Point. To anyone familiar with the circumstances of small-nation filmmaking sums of that size are disquieting, and the day may well come soon when the cinemas produced by small nations will be seen as having paved the way for more environmentally sustainable forms of cinematic production, and for resource allocations that make some ethical, political, and prudential sense within the larger scheme of things.

The Risk Environment of Small-Nation Filmmaking

Small-nation film practitioners are accustomed to doing “more with less.” Indeed, “less” is one of those imposed constraints that these practitioners systematically transmute into various types of value – aesthetic, political, cultural and other. In some instances, doing more with less is made possible by digital technology, hardly a green technology, but there are many other examples of how doing more with less becomes the basis for environmentally sustainable practices. Consider the following intervention by Peter Aalbæk Jensen, co-founder with von Trier of Zentropa, one of Northern Europe’s most successful production companies. Targeting readers within a film school context, Jensen generated a manifesto-like statement entitled “Rules to be followed by scriptwriters who want their films to be produced.” In a book celebrating the 40th anniversary of the National Film School of Denmark, the prodigiously productive scriptwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson provides a description of these rules, as he remembers them: Your film takes place no more than 16 kilometers from the Town Hall in Copenhagen. Your film takes place indoors. Your film takes place during the day. Your film takes place in the present. Two actors are twice as good as four actors. That sort of thing. I think there were ten points in all. It was all about money, about understanding that films cost money to produce, that some things are cheap and other things are expensive, and that it makes more sense to shoot in town than to drive the entire crew to Møn [an island in the southeast of Denmark] and spend an hour and a half doing it. Each way. About the weather, that tends to get in the way when you are shooting outdoors. About salaries, which are lower during the day than at night. About four actors costing twice as much as two. 34

Jensen’s “rules” clearly demonstrate that there are environmental gains to be had from the kind of practices that make sense in small-nation contexts. Put slightly differently, small-nation filmmaking offers, without necessarily being explicitly framed as such, the kind of response that would be judicious in the face of global environmental threats. There are examples of small-nation practitioners working in ways that bespeak a strong awareness of the need for a responsible use of resources, and Pernille Fischer Christensen, already mentioned in connection with New Danish Screen, is one of them.35 At the same time, it has to be said that small-nation film practitioners have yet to think probingly and systematically about the extent to which the environmental gains of doing more with less might be seen as providing much-needed examples of best practice in response to global risks. Perhaps film scholars could help in this regard? One of the great advantages, after all, of being a film scholar with a commitment to small national cinemas is that productive exchanges with members of the film milieus and of the policy sectors that support them are actually possible.

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The Danish Film Institute’s FILM-X on the Road in Damascus (2009)

Romanian children in Cluj explore the Danish Film Institute’s FILM-Y studio (2012)

The Risk Environment of Small-Nation Filmmaking

N otes 1 | Film and Risk, ed. Mette Hjort (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012). This volume provides definitions of “risk” and canvasses various approaches to the phenomenon. 2 | See Mette Hjort, “Dogma 95: A Small Nation’s Response to Globalisation,” in Purity and Provocation: Dogma 95, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (London: BFI Publishing, 2003), 31-47. 3 | See Miroslav Hroch, The Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 4 | Björn G. Olafsson, Small States in the Global System: Analysis and Illustrations from the Case of Iceland (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 9. 5 | CIA: The World Factbook – Qatar; https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-worldfactbook/geos/qa.html (accessed 1 February 2011). 6 | CIA: The World Factbook – Iceland; https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/theworld-factbook/geos/ic.html (accessed 1 February 2011). 7 | David Vital, The Inequality of States: A Study of the Small Power in International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 8. 8 | Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage, 1992), 26. 9 | Lord David Puttnam, “The Challenges in the Twenty First Century for European Cinema,” in “The Copenhagen Report,” 37; http://filmthinktank.org/papers/copenhagen-report/ (accessed 1 February 2011). 10 | Ibid. 11 | Mary P. Wood, Contemporary European Cinema (London: Hodder Arnold, 2007), xi. 12 | Ernest Mathijs, “Preface: Interview with Harry Kümel,” in The Cinema of the Low Countries, ed. Ernest Mathijs (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), xiii. 13 | “Lone Scherfig om Carl Th. Dreyer’s betydning idag,” http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=aim-lX74Kgo&feature=related (accessed 1 February 2011). 14 | Annika Pham, “Interview, Henning Camre CEO Danish Film Institute – For Nordisk Film & TV Fond,” http://www.nordiskfilmogtvfond.com/managed_assets/files/henning_ camre_interview_ june_20,_2007.doc (accessed 3 February 2011), 3. 15 |  For filmmakers’ perspectives on the implications of the priority given to co-productions with TV, see The Danish Directors 2: Dialogues on the New Danish Fiction Cinema, ed. Mette Hjort, Eva Jørholt and Eva Novrup Redvall (Bristol: Intellect Press, 2010). 16 | The Danish Directors 2, ed. Hjort, Jørholt and Redvall, 230-231. 17 | Wood, Contemporary European Cinema, 39. 18 | Ibid. 19 | Wood, Contemporary European Cinema, 32. 20 | Think Tank on European Film and Film Policy, “Background and Position Paper on D-cinema,” http://filmthinktank.org/papers/ (accessed 1 February 2011), 4. 21 | Ibid., 12. 22 | “The Copenhagen Report,” 14.

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Mette Hjor t 23 | Ibid., 7. 24 | Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture Vol. 2, No. 2 (Spring 1990): 1-24. 25 | Eva Novrup Redvall, “Encouraging Artistic Risk-taking Through Film Policy: The Case of New Danish Screen,” in Film and Risk, ed. Hjort, 209-226. See also Mette Hjort, Small Nation, Global Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 16-18, where there is a discussion of the talent development program that was eventually dubbed “New Danish Screen.” 26 | Annika Pham, “Interview, Henning Camre CEO Danish Film Institute – For Nordisk Film & TV Fond,” http://www.nordiskfilmogtvfond.com/managed_assets/files/henning_ camre_interview_ june_20,_2007.doc (accessed 3 February 2011); 2. 27 | My understanding of this case is shaped by an interview with Charlotte Giese at the Danish Film Institute (19 August 2009). 28 | “Zanzibar International Film Festival 2007 (Part 1),” http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=FchHjxJkUQw (accessed 7 February 2011). 29 | Ida Zeruneith, Wide-eyed: Films for children and young people in the Nordic countries, 1977-1993 (Copenhagen: Tiderne Skifter, 1995). 30 | Charlotte Giese and Martin Mhando, “Children and Film Panorama/Watoto Na Filamu,” press release, May 2008. 31 | Giese, interview (19 August 2009). 32 | DFI, “Film X,” http://www.dfi.dk/english/children-og-youth/film-x.aspx (accessed 19 August 2009). 33 | Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, “Film and the Environment: Risk Off-Screen,” in Film and Risk, ed. Hjort, 271-289. 34 | Kim Fupz Aakeson, “Honey, I’m Home,” in At lære kunsten: 40 år med Filmskolen, ed. Ole John (Copenhagen: Aschehoug/Den Danske Filmskole, 2006). 35 | Mette Hjort, “Pernille Fischer Christensen,” in The Danish Directors 2, ed. Hjort, Jørholt and Redvall, 61-76.

Maltese Cinema? Politics and Identity on Screen from Independence to EU Accession Charlie Cauchi

This essay is based on my research into cinematic expressions of cultural identity and audiovisual output on the island of Malta. It attempts to explain why Malta, an island with a population of just over 400,000, is well established within the film servicing industry and capable of functioning as a place for film production for foreign projects, but is rarely able to produce films for its domestic market or exportation to a foreign market.1 In 2009 I attempted to obtain official figures from the Malta Film Commission (MFC) demonstrating the number of local features compared to foreign features shot in Malta, and the location budgets involved. I was told: Maltese cinema as such is virtually non-existent. Malta has a very limited indigenous industry (though an active film-servicing sector), and there are no traditional filmmaking practices on the island, in that there are no sources of private or public film finance available. [...] there is no formal training available, there are no film cameras on the island [...] and the scripts and productions that are put together tend to be television-oriented and aimed solely at the local market. If you are referring to the few Maltese productions that have been aired in local cinemas over the past few years, again these do not constitute “films” in the proper sense, but rather are local productions that have been released in Maltese cinemas. 2

Although limited size and monetary resources are arguably the main reasons why a country such as Malta does not possess a flourishing film industry, I believe this premise an oversimplification as it disregards a variety of cultural, national and historical forces that possibly play a vital role in the construction of a country’s own cinema. I aim to investigate whether there is more to Malta’s cinematic output than its film servicing industry. Additionally, I explore the manner in which the few Maltese productions available register national specificity, or adopt

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or appropriate foreign modes of expression. In doing so, I will focus primarily on two cinematic texts: Mario Philip Azzopardi’s Gaġġa (“The Cage,” 1971) 3 and Mario Busietta’s Anġli: The Movie (“Angels: The Movie,” 2005)4 and in the process will hopefully elucidate “the constraints and opportunities” that a nation like Malta “affords.”5 These works will serve as material for textual analysis, making it possible to briefly highlight any cinematic or thematic tendencies they share or disparities between the texts, and the extent to which my chosen films are rooted in Maltese culture. At the same time, contextualizing the films in this manner will aid in illuminating the connection between these cinematic works and the historical and political events that surround them. The first section of this essay is devoted to the period after Malta gained independence from Britain in 1964, when Gaġġa, one of the first feature films made in Maltese by a native “filmmaker” for local consumption, was first screened. I will briefly explore local movie-making practices prior to the film’s production, placing the film in context. Keeping in mind that Gaġġa was criticised by the Catholic Church at the time of its initial release, this section will also raise issues related to censorship, and its effects on indigenous products. A great deal can also be learned from the filmic text itself, as it comments on both “the political polarization characteristic of 20th century Malta”6 and the changes made to social and cultural life during a time when the country was undergoing liberation from colonial subjugation. Moreover, the picture encapsulates many of the characteristics and intricacies associated with Malta’s own national identity. The second section focuses on Anġli and its relation to Malta’s accession to the EU. Originally a TV series, Anġli’s appropriation of generic Hollywood conventions makes for an interesting contrast to Gaġġa, as does the financial backing that supported its creation. Hollywood serves as a model for Anġli, which in its attempt to replicate and mimic dominant cinematic forms, produces an end product that can only be classified as a poor man’s version of the action/detective genre. Anġli’s depiction of the island and excessive use of product placement also suggests this to be more of a promotional exercise than an artistic venture.

I ssues of I dentit y Defining national identity in any scenario is problematic. However, Maltese national identity is particularly difficult to pinpoint, not simply owing to the fact that as a nation Malta is very young, having only gained independence in 1964, but rather because its strategic position within the Mediterranean made it unable to “escape or be immune to the cauldron of political and cultural upheavals that from time immemorial successively engulfed this region as nation after nation, dynasty after dynasty, creed after creed battled it out for supremacy and assertion.”7 Furthermore, its geographical isolation adds to the island’s cultural complexity when one considers how “influences from neighbouring Southern European

Maltese Cinema?

and North African states continued to be integrated into the socio-cultural fabric of Malta.”8 Because Malta’s colonial history and geographical position have profoundly affected its ensuing social, political and cultural development, it would be appropriate to consider those qualities that constitute Maltese national identity. A particular feature of any national identity is its language. Conflicting ideas over what language should be adopted by Maltese nationals in the late 1800s resulted in “an inability to [...] reach a consensus on self-identity.”9 It was not until the 1930s that the Maltese vernacular became a recognised language.10 Even though Maltese was slow to make headway, it remained, and still remains, a fundamental issue of Maltese national identity.

P ost-I ndependence In the mid-1980s, political commentator and writer Paul Xuereb said of local theater: It is a pity – and a shame – that most [theatrical] groups, including those whose financial situations ought to permit it, fight shy of the risks involved in presenting new works in Maltese. It is thus no wonder that Maltese drama has remained poorer in its achievements than Maltese poetry or Maltese fiction.11

I would contend that Xuereb’s comments are not only pertinent to the state of Maltese cinema, but that the development of local filmmaking has been neglected to a far greater degree than even that of theater, with many of the early films made on the island either unavailable to the public or lost forever. The “risks” Xuereb refers to possibly include political and religious censorship, plus those criticisms and divisions generated through the use of the Maltese vernacular. Once again, parallels may be drawn to the cinema, with censorship and the language debate possibly also hampering indigenous cinematic output. With specific reference to small national cinemas, Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie indicate that: [w]hile the cultural and political value of the moving image in nation-building was quickly recognised in some nations, particularly following independence from former colonial rule and in connection with other revolutionary struggles, in other cases the opportunities for filmmakers to address the complex specificity of national formations, post-colonial or otherwise, took time to arise.12

In the case of local cinematic output, Malta could be said to fall into the latter category, Gaġġa being released eight years after independence. This is why it may be productive to describe local filmmaking practices and the cinematic climate

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prior to Gaġġa’s release, exploring the possible causes for this delay in local cinematic output. Cinema arrived in Malta during British rule. Archival material provides evidence documenting that there were a number of cinemas across the island by 1954, but by the late 1970s theaters were being shut down to be replaced by shopping centeres. Early audiences were predominately offered Hollywood and British productions brought to the island through the Malta United Film Corporation (MUFC), which was formed in 1946.13 From what I can gather, nonEnglish language films were not often distributed by MUFC, and the corporation had no competitors until the installment of Dom Mintoff’s Labour government in the 1970s.14 For a brief period the Malta Labour Party (MLP) acted as an alternative distributor, importing films from other parts of the globe. It did this by creating a division within the Xandir Malta (Broadcasting Malta) services.15 So while MUFC held a monopoly over the more commercial releases, Xandir acquired the rights to foreign B-movies. While I do not suspect the MLP of furthering a political agenda in its decision to enter the film distribution business, due to its protectionist stance, I assume this to be a way for the MLP to compete with a British organisation for local expenditure.16 Malta’s rare cinematic presence generally took the form of newsreel footage. When it did appear in fictional works, it was normally seen through the eyes of the colonizer or foreigner – Desmond Hurst’s Malta Story (1954), for instance.17 Nevertheless, it is around the 1950s that local amateurs started to experiment with the medium themselves. The first known feature film was allegedly made around this time. As none of this information is documented, I turned to several sources for information regarding this matter. No one was more insightful than Studio 7 managing director, Jo Debono, whose father, Albert, had owned a film projector business during the 1920s.18 Debono maintains that the first Maltese feature film was made by a movie aficionado known as “Scerrital-Cobra Shoes,” who, after winning some money in the local lottery, decided to invest in filmmaking equipment with the intention of creating a Maltese comedy in the same vein as Laurel and Hardy.19 Enlisting the help of two local comedic actors, Scerri created Nofs Lira Inqas (“Half a Lira Less”). Debono believes a copy of the print still exists, although not in its complete form.20 Without any records of the film, it is difficult to determine who or how many people would have seen it. There were many more film enthusiasts on the island around the same time: the establishment of the Malta Amateur Cine Circle (MACC) in 1952 proves as much.21 In stark contrast to the development of Maltese theater, there has been no evidence of a film movement per se. However, the closest approximation would be the MACC, which was founded in 1952 by a small group of enthusiasts. By 1955, the popularity and accessibility of home-movie equipment, especially with the introduction of 8mm cine cameras, saw numbers in membership increase. In the absence of a film school, the MACC not only acted as a platform for the promotion of amateur filmmaking in Malta, but, through workshops and seminars, also

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provided amateurs with the opportunity to experiment and learn. MCC Chairmen Vincent Lungaro-Mifsud has recalled that the first activities organised by the circle included monthly guest-nights, which featured the productions of both British and Maltese amateur film makers.22 The MACC’s archive constitutes a rare and unique visual record of life in Malta that is not readily accessible to the public. A lack of funding has, so far, made it impossible for the organisation to restore and digitize any of the material Lungaro-Mifsud has collected over the years. In spite of its popularity, the government has not provided the organisation with funding, and it has had to rely on private sponsorship. One figure that must be mentioned is Cecil Satariano. Although his work mainly relates to the post-independence period, he is one of the first pioneers of Maltese film. Unfortunately, access to Satariano’s films is completely at his wife’s discretion and there are no public copies of his work in circulation. Therefore, I am only able to provide a brief summation of his work. Satariano took up filmmaking in 1969 and made a total of five films: I’m Furious Red (1971), Guzeppi (1972), The Beach (1973), Ilona (1973), and Katarin (1977), the latter being his feature length film, and the only one of his films to feature dialogue. In 1972 he was invited to join the Board of Film Censors by the then Labour government. He was also a film critic as well as the author of a book on amateur movie-making, which was commissioned by a British publishing company in 1973.23 On the strength of his first film, he found financial backing in the form of local entrepreneur Ronnie Demajo, and together they created a production company named Stadem. Guzeppi, which tells the story of the eponymous crippled vagrant, was the most notable film of his career. Guzeppi received awards at numerous international short film competitions. Satariano’s only feature film, Katarin, also proved successful. Originally shot on 16mm, it was later enlarged to 35mm by EMI, who purchased the rights to the film. Curiously, it was not released in its native language but was awkwardly dubbed into English, thus erasing any nuances found in the language. Shown in two local cinemas, Katarin was also screened in the West of London. According to a number of sources, it was apparently the first production by a Maltese to be shown there, though, thus far, I have found no record of its British release. Unable to comment on the British reception of the movie, many have claimed that the film proved controversial amongst local audiences owing to the abundance of nudity and overt sexuality. It is unclear what happened to Satariano’s filmmaking career after the release of Katarin. He died in 1996 at the age of 66. The filmmaking and viewing practices of the pre- and post-independence period require further investigation. One film that I am able to comment on is Azzopardi’s Gaġġa, one of the first feature films produced locally and screened to the public. According to Debono the film was projected at both the University of Malta and a local cinema in the 1970s. Gaġġa makes for an interesting case study, not simply because it was made solely through local involvement and funded by the filmmakers themselves; but because it effectively gave voice to Malta’s own histories, experiences, traditions, and narratives. Above all, it was produced in its

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own native language. In this case, similarities can be drawn to cinematic forms of expression in other post-colonial countries of the period, insofar as Gaġġa tried “to give expression to nationalist themes in a national style.”24 The film is also based on Maltese literature, corresponding to Bordwell and Thompson’s assertion that: “the strategies of using national subject matter and exploiting picturesque local landscapes have remained common in countries with limited production to the present day.”25 The film, shot on Super 8, is an adaptation of the novel of the same name, also published in 1972, by Frans Sammut, one of a band of young Maltese writers of the late 1960s. In keeping with the novel, Azzopardi’s Gaġġa centers on the character Fredu (Ray Camilleri): “an anti-hero whose sole problem is communicability.”26 The film, like the novel, is also experimental in structure: moments of mise-en-abyme occur on a number of occasions in Azzopardi’s Gaġġa; it employs the use of contrapuntal sound, and offers no real narrative resolution. At a total screen time of seventy-three minutes, Gaġġa functions as a means to discover and question the national self through celluloid. Gaġġa is set in the 1960s, covering a time span of two years; from 1962 to 1964 – a significant timeframe, one marked by both hostility and change. The film is concerned with three specific historical milestones: the 1962 election campaign, the lead up to independence, and independence itself. In 1955 the MLP were the governing party. Their three years in office witnessed growing animosity between Labour leader Dom Mintoff and the Catholic Church, due to Mintoff’s reluctance to yield to the authority of the church.27 Their relationship continued to degenerate, owing mainly to an interdict placed upon Mintoff and other members of the MLP, so that by the 1962 election, where the story begins, the church launched a vitriolic smear campaign against its opponents. In its backing of the Nationalist Party (PN) and condemnation of the MLP, the church ensured its beliefs were voiced to all, not only from the pulpit, but also outside the churches.28 Gaġġa’s mise-en-scène effectively conveys the time frame in which the film is set. For instance, many of the spaces Fredu inhabits are replete with Catholic signifiers, his surroundings illustrating the power of the church. His bedroom is proof of this. Filled with religious iconography, it registers how Catholicism in Malta was not simply a spiritual belief, but was something that could not be escaped. The room contains numerous religious effects, which, to those unfamiliar with Malta may seem like a gross exaggeration, intended as an embellishment to stimulate comment. However, most Maltese viewers will deem the decor credible, and in keeping with the period. Religious iconography is minimized once Fredu moves to the town of Sliema, and the country closer to independence. Concentrating on Gaġġa’s spatial settings, neither Fredu’s village nor Sliema are romanticized or idealized, with both localities rendered oppressive, imposing displacement, exile and liminality on our main protagonist. Though the two spaces share common traits, the rural and the urban clearly diverge. In sharp contrast to the sectarian village, in Sliema traditional values have been abandoned and class conflicts emerge. In the early sixties, Sliema was seen as a “sprawling residential

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suburb” inhabited by “professionals, wealthy business men, landlords and other important people who influence the affairs of country life,” and Azzopardi makes certain to depict it as such.29 The village appears as a homogenous space devoid of class boundaries. The appearance and mannerisms of the inhabitants of these two spaces also differ, the main difference being the anglicization of the townspeople of Sliema. In order to understand this we must recognize that: [w]ith the exception of Gibraltar, Britain held on to Malta for longer than she did anywhere else in the Mediterranean: six generations. The British layer was the last in certain respects, the most decisively formative on the history of Maltese culture and national identity, prior to independence. 30

Therefore it is not coincidental that names change once we reach Sliema – e.g. Fredu, much to his dislike, is suddenly called Fred/Freddie. Mirroring reality, a distinct switch in language also occurs, with a marked difference in intonation and pronunciation between the two: “There is a noticeable difference between the heavy consonants and the broad vowels of the uneducated countryman, and the English-accented Maltese of the inhabitants of Sliema, many of whose children speak more English than Maltese.”31 The character Dominique’s (Rosette Fenech) Anglo-Maltese patois allows us to place her in the latter category, her speech patterns betraying her class background. Her family, in all likelihood native residents of Sliema, during colonial rule would have attempted to replicate the speech, mannerisms, dress of the foreign occupant. Unlike Dominique, Clara (Liana Caruana Curren) is of a different milieu, but in her wish for social advancement she has become more anglicized. It is also significant that Fredu is in competition with an Italian who works in his office, as this feasibly acts as a reminder of the issue of italianità.32 Distinctions can also be made in the forms of entertainment offered to each group. Aside from the village feast, those of the village usually gather in their local kazin, as demonstrated at the beginning of the film.33 This is only applicable to the men however, as women were not allowed to enter such establishments, except during certain times of the year. In the city recreational habits differ. Not only do we hear Clara and Dominique chatter about city nightlife, but we also overhear a conversation between Dominique and another colleague in which they discuss the cinema. This conversation concerns church and state interference, as both characters complain about the censorship imposed on many films. This argument may be self-reflexively transposed into the real world, for censorship is one of the many factors that may have hindered the nation’s own cinematic output. As indicated above, a number of forces have played a part in hindering indigenous cinema, one of them being censorship. Although the film was not banned, there was much to criticise. To highlight a few examples, the scene in which Fredu stabs his pregnant girlfriend in the stomach during one of the dream sequences caused great offence. Some of the “love” scenes were also deemed too

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explicit. Besides its sexual content, members of the Dioceses who saw the film at the Catholic Institute were not amused by the depiction of the church, which is understandable if one bears in mind that: Censorship is based on a directive from the chairman of the board which is particularly rigorous in matters affecting religion and Catholic faith. Non-Catholic interpretation of Christianity is forbidden, as are “deism,” “reincarnation devices” and the justification of birth control. 34

A thorough study of the social functions and methods of censorship in Malta is much needed, especially in view of the controversy generated by recent motions passed by the board.35 Censorship is an important facet of social history, and any serious investigation would need to consider both pro- and anti-censorship campaigns, and explore state, church and board records. This latter exercise may prove difficult considering that censorship reports are currently inaccessible. It must be noted that issues surrounding censorship cannot be adequately represented here. Therefore I will only provide a brief overview of cinematic censorship in Malta. Shifts in state regulation started to occur in Malta by the early 1970s, and were instigated by more progressive segments of society. Lino Cassar, a local journalist and film critic who held a variety of prominent positions during the Labour administration, worked within both Xandir and the Malta Film Facilities. He was also appointed the head of the board in 1971. According to Cassar, prior to his appointment censors would either drastically cut or completely ban any films they deemed unsuitable for local consumption, and it was not until his appointment to the board that the adult rating changed from twenty-one to eighteen.36 Films that showed nudity or discussed sex, unsurprisingly, came under the greatest scrutiny; Cassar claims that it is due to his insistence that Maltese audiences began to see films that were uncut, even when condemned by local religious groups like the Legion of Mary. Mention of this particular lay movement also leads us to consider censorship within the Catholic community. Thus far I have been unable to find concrete evidence demonstrating the extent of the church’s authority in matters of film censorship; though given the strength of religious influence in Malta, especially during this time frame, it is plausible to surmise that the church would have objected to any material they believed endangered established beliefs. Additionally, I find church involvement entirely possible considering the diocesan established its own film commission, providing an alternative rating to that given by the board.37 However, one must remember that what was deemed appropriate for local audiences did not emerge from the church alone. While the church serves as Malta’s moral voice, its instruction is further often compounded through a population that cherishes and perpetuates the local interpretation of Roman Catholic doctrine, which is part and parcel of their identity.38

Maltese Cinema?

Azzopardi was himself affected by the dogmatic beliefs of the board. He left for Canada in 1977, his move prompted by the reaction to his satirical play Sulari fuq strada stretta (“Stories Above Straight Street”), which was banned from the national theater and landed him in court because it was “deemed too controversial by the Censorship Board.”39 Like censorship, attitudes towards the Maltese language may have suppressed creativity. Producing work in Maltese may have had a bearing upon the reception of films made locally. This can be seen with other works produced in the vernacular, not just in film, but also in television and theater. To cite Vicki Ann Cermona: Up to the 19 th and early 20 th centuries, the general middle-class attitude was (and to a certain extent still is) to look down on plays in Maltese, so staging plays in the vernacular was often in itself a claim to a distinctive identity and a statement about class values.40

I believe there is a direct correlation between theater and the cinema. Since many locals often “refrained from attending an onstage representation in Maltese,” further study may show that the same might be true of cinema. 41

EU A ccession The late 1960s in post-independence Malta in some respects echoed the revolutionary mood which had affected the rest of the world. Through the medium of cinema Azzopardi attempted to break away from the norm, just like other local artists: “For the first time in Malta, local novelists, as well as the poets, dared to speak out in unequivocal terms, pinpoint the most serious maladies of their community and indirectly suggest a diversification founded on integrity, the immediate consequence of the elimination of sanctified hypocrisy which they believed to detect in religion, society and family life.”42 But it would appear that between the seventies and the eighties, while Maltese theater and other art forms experienced a period of progression, cinema did not continue to develop in the same way. Indigenous cinema remained in a state of arrested development; only further research may determine the causes for this. Perhaps, as suggested earlier, more attention has been paid to local television than to local filmmaking since its introduction to the island in the 1960s. Having said that however, since the noughties filmmakers have slowly started to emerge, some creating work that is rich in content and culturally specific. In sharp contrast is Anġli, a millennial film that, rather than experiment with style, is more conservative in its approach to filmmaking. It does this by mimicking dominant forms of cinema, especially the generic formations associated with action and detective movies. Anġli tries to conform to some perceived foreign standard. Unlike Gaġġa, the film is not subversive or experimental, but adheres

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to a blind conservatism. A brief outline of Malta’s accession to the EU will help to unlock or elucidate the film’s text and its ideological underpinnings. The lead up to EU accession was, like most things in Malta, extremely polarized. 43 After years of disagreement between the two main parties, a referendum was held on March 8, 2003, to decide upon the issue. An estimated 53.6 per cent of the electorate voted in favor of membership in a referendum that saw a 92 per cent turnout. Despite this, MLP leader Dr. Alfred Sant rejected the result. Determined to reach a decision, the governing party called a snap general election to confirm the outcome. The election was held on April 12, 2004: four days later, Prime Minister Eddie Fenech Adami travelled to Athens to sign the Accession Treaty. A link between EU membership and the filmic text may be noted, consciously or not, as Anġli shows a very “European” Malta. Therefore, Anġli can possibly be read as a work that attempts to reject any associations the country may have with its past, striving instead for recognition of its modernity, confidence and control, proving to nationals and foreigners alike that Malta is capable of finding its rightful place within a modern Europe. This argument is reinforced by the film’s production context. Made in 2004, Anġli: The Movie, an original screenplay, is a spin-off of a television series entitled Anġli, which was broadcast on the PN television network NET TV. Presumably the incentive for such a project would have been its existent fan-base, as there was no need to build an audience from scratch. The budget was surprisingly large for a local production, with a rumoured 200,000 MLT44 spent on the project. Funding may possibly have come from the numerous sponsors whose products appear throughout the film, while state backing could have also aided the production. Because the Maltese are, as Henry Frendo put it, “increasingly conscious of Europe [...] [they] are not unaware of their own limitations, and their own characteristics.”45 The film could be seen to echo Frendo’s observation; however, I would also argue that Anġli attempts to disguise these “limitations.” This is evident in the story line, in which, as the DVD cover informs us, Malta is used as a testing ground for “new crime fighting technology.” Furthermore, the film’s large budget and production values – i.e. the type of locations used, the overuse of computer graphics, the casting of a foreign stunt artist etc. – endeavours to mask Malta’s inexperience in this field, as it strives to prove that it is capable of attaining foreign standards. However, the final product does not succeed in this regard. Perhaps its largest flaw is the script, which, in its overreaching ambition, is often complicated and convoluted. Set in present day Malta, Anġli’s contemporary surroundings highlight Malta’s modernity, the film acting as a platform for showcasing the island’s advancement more than anything else. The audience is offered a country replete with all the modern amenities and luxuries a European country affords. This is reflected in the film’s main setting, Portomaso, a high-end residential development built on the St. Julian’s seafront. The majority of the action occurs in this area, with filming taking place both indoors and outdoors. On those occasions when we do

Maltese Cinema?

leave Portomaso, we are taken to nondescript, sleek places of supermodernity46: airports, supermarkets, shops. These locations do not carry any significance or specificity, but rather could be anywhere, acting as markers of homogenization. Rather than fight stereotypical depictions of the island completely, the film often embraces the semiotics of the Mediterranean. All these factors create a glossy aesthetic, making Anġli more akin to a travel advertisement than a feature film. On the subject of advertising, the film also acts as a vehicle for the promotion of local products and services. Anġli is oversaturated with product placement, 47 which perhaps explains its sizeable budget. Besides Portomaso, advertisements appear for a host of products including a supermarket, a pest-control company and a dry-cleaning firm, and on many occasions the narrative is broken up to accommodate promotional purposes. Returning to the subject of modernity, the notion of a cosmopolitan Malta is also emphasized through the use of props. This mainly stems from the hyper-use of product placement and excess of modern technology: the film is replete with fast cars, private jets, nifty tracking devices and, undeniably, the Drug Interception Scanner. The fact that the island has been chosen to test the fictitious scanner hints at Malta’s yearning to be perceived as a nation that is as adept as any other modern state at combating crime and placing a plethora of international, modern products. One of Malta’s unique qualities is her bilingualism. In the glossy film, however, the linguistic and cultural differences that were evident in Gaġġa have disappeared. Instead we are shown a Malta where everyone can communicate with ease, in either English or Maltese – indeed “[m]onolingualism certainly does not appear to be an item on Malta’s national identity agenda.”48 Additionally, the internal cultural divides that were so evident in Gaġġa have disappeared, as there appears to be no class or gender divisions. Then again, there is a somewhat disparaging portrayal of women, although all the characters are one-dimensional. The action genre is the perfect vehicle to reinforce masculinity; the heroes are invariably male with clearly defined moral codes. In fact the entire film is extremely moralistic, and is Manichean in its presentation of good and evil – e.g. the titular angels versus the drug ring – alluding to the continued influence of Catholicism on Maltese culture. Gaġġa and Anġli are two extremely divergent texts. While the former uses the medium of film artistically to question authority and society, the latter imitates accepted generic conventions in an attempt to appeal to local audiences. The films’ modes of production and exhibition also differ. Before resurfacing in 2008, Gaġġa had not been seen by the public since its creation in the 1970s. Thanks to Debono, the only available print was restored and screened at the annual European Film Festival at the Eden Century Cinemas in 2008. 49 Anġli was also screened at the Eden, but was made available on DVD straight after its run had ended. Its budget sets it apart from films like from Gaġġa, and most other local productions for that matter.

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There is no easy explanation for Maltese national cinema’s lack of development. Possibly, as Hjort and Petrie indicate: [S]mall nations by definition have very limited domestic markets for all locally produced goods and services – including culture – and so have been forced by the neo-liberal economic and political pressures of globalization into greater dependency on external markets. Filmmakers can also experience forms of creative limitations if non-commercial funding is scarce or the local industry is over-reliant on overseas sources of production finance or markets. 50

This aside, indigenous filmmaking practices may have been hindered for other reasons, chief among them religious censorship and the language debate, but also the total lack of support offered to filmmakers. Fortunately, new initiatives are being set up for audiences and filmmakers alike: events organized by the NGO Kinemastik are a step in the right direction, as are the new funding opportunities provided by the government.51 The year 2011 saw the implementation of a new National Cultural Policy.52 The policy “aims to provide guidelines by which Government entities, voluntary organizations and private enterprise articulate their roles and contributions to the [cultural] sector” in Malta.53 It was the first time a policy of this kind has been adopted – though not drafted – by Maltese government to regulate activities related to the cultural sector in Malta. Adding to its ground-breaking status is the NCP’s inclusion of the local audiovisual sector, which after an absence of administrative support, is finally being acknowledged as a “significant cultural industry.”54 It is only since the recent revision of policy began that audiovisuals – specifically local filmmaking – have been incorporated into the fabric of culture and the arts, as they had previously been held solely under the jurisdiction of those ministries governing finance and investment.55 Equally significant are those measures that have been added to the draft concerning the island’s audiovisual heritage. The government’s new cultural management strategy will hopefully aid in the collection, preservation, protection and promotion of local audiovisual material. Much needed revisions are also set to be made to Malta’s archaic, opaque and often contradictory censorship laws. If fully realized, this policy will finally permit Malta to perform in a manner similar to other nations where “governments have set up agencies, commission, boards, corporations and so on as instruments through which a wide range of supportive and protective measures are put in place” to safeguard and foster national film production.56 This is not to say that Malta has been bereft of governmentbacked film organizations prior to now. The MFC, a governmental body set up by the ruling PN in 1999, is a major player in the assistance of film activity in Malta. However, the establishment of the MFC stems from the realisation that foreign film production can provide a growing boost to the economy.57 Therefore, while the government has created a range of incentives, including investment funds,

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cash rebates and tax credits, aimed at enticing foreign shoots to the country, the development of local film production has, in the past, often been limited. The urgent need to rejuvenate Malta’s culture and art world has inevitably been shaped by the country’s obligation to align itself to a standardised system set up by the EU. Since the country’s pre-accession bid and eventual accession to the EU, Malta has had to actively weave itself into the cultural fabric of Europe. Acting as a catalyst for the country’s modification, the EU has forced Malta to demonstrate through active participation that the country is able make a direct and quantifiable contribution as an EU member state. This cultural rejuvenation has become increasingly urgent as a result of the Council of Europe’s decision to designate the city of Valletta as a European Capital of Culture in 2018. The Right Honourable Mario de Marco, Parliamentary Secretary for Tourism, the Environment and Culture, admits that “this date puts pressure on us” to form a sustainable cultural infrastructure through “excellence at a European level.”58 Pressures aside, accession has also brought with it a number of European initiatives allocated to the sphere of culture from which Malta has benefitted. With reference to film, funding agencies such as MEDIA have offered support to member states like Malta in order to develop their respective audiovisual industries. If brought into effect, these new measures stand to drastically improve the creative industries found on the island, providing organizations and individuals, both in a professional capacity and as consumers of cultural goods, the same opportunities afforded to other European nations. Just how the policy is set to impact the local audiovisual sector is yet to be seen.

Experimental structure: Mario Azzopardi’s independent production Gaġġa

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Questioning national identity on Super 8: Mario Azzopardi navigates the space between church and state in Gaġġa

N otes 1 | The population in 2010 was estimated at 412,970. The Maltese archipelago has a total area of 316km². Figures obtained from the National Statistics Office Malta. 2 | Malta Film Commissioner Louisa Bonello, e-mail message to author, 8 April 2009. 3 | Gaġġa, dir. Mario Philip Azzopardi, perf. Charles Arrigo, Carmen Azzoppardi and Tanya Baldacchino, Studio7 Productions, 1971. 4 | Anġli: The Movie, dir. Mario Busietta, perf. Mikhail Basmadjian, John Montanaro and Mike Möller, Katana Entertainment, 2005. 5 | Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie, “Introduction,” in The Cinema of Small Nations, ed. Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 2. 6 | Jon P. Mitchell, Ambivalent Europeans: Ritual, Memory and the Public Sphere in Malta (London: Routledge, 2002), 9. 7 | Joseph Vella, “Music,” in Malta: Culture and Identity, ed. Henry Frendo and Oliver Friggieri (Malta: Ministry for Youth and Arts, 1994), 159. 8 | Carmel Cassar, A Concise History of Malta (Malta: Mireva Publications, 2000), xiii. 9 | Henry Frendo, “National Identity,” in Malta: Culture and Identity, ed. Henry Frendo and Oliver Friggieri (Malta: Ministry for Youth and Arts, 1994), 14. 10 | “The vernacular of the Maltese language initially developed from a medieval variety of dialectal Arabic. [...] Maltese is the only national language in Europe belonging to the

Maltese Cinema? Semitic family, which also includes Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Phoenician, etc. [...] In addition to the recycling of its native elements, the expansion of the Maltese lexicon has been achieved through massive borrowing from foreign languages, especially Italian.” (Alexander Borg “Language,” in Malta: Culture and Identity, ed. Henry Frendo and Oliver Friggieri [Malta: Ministry for Youth and Arts, 1994], 28]) 11 | Paul Xuereb, “Men Beware of Women,” Sunday Times of Malta, 2 February 1986, 21. 12 | Hjort and Petrie, “Introduction,” 15. 13 | MUFC is now known as KRS Distributors. 14 | The Malta Labour Party (now the Partit Laborista, PL) was founded in 1921. Mr. Dom Mintoff was leader of the MLP from 1949–1984 (Prime Minister: 1955–1958, 1971– 1984), and succeeded by Dr. Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici from 1984–1992 (Prime Minister: 1984–1987): “The sixteen years of Labour government had brought relative prosperity to the Islands, greatly improved the position of the working classes and firmly established Malta’s identity on the international political stage. But Labour’s harsh, often crude and violent methods fuelled mordant political antagonisms and generated wide-spread fear of government and the ruling party. The electoral victory of the Nationalist Party in May 1987 put an end to political violence and ushered in a period of rapprochement with Europe, a free market economic policy and a spirit of internal dialogue.” (Jeremy Boissevain, Saints and Fireworks: Religion and Politics in Rural Malta [London: The Athlone Press, 1965], 154) 15 | Prior to the ruling of the Labour government, an independent British broadcaster, Rediffusion, which operated under the name Malta Television Ltd., supplied local television transmission. However, the MLP nationalized the local station, naming it Xandir Malta. 16 | There is more room for work here, since the MLP’s foray into the movie distribution business has not been documented. From the types of films distributed by Xandir, however, it is possible to surmise that while these were foreign films, they were not titles that would be considered art-house or what many cineastes would consider to be culturally significant. 17 | Malta Story, dir. Brian Desmond Hurst, perf. Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins and Anthony Steel, Ealing Studios, 1953. 18 | Studio7 is a local company providing audiovisual services. They are also responsible for the restoration of Gaġġa. (Joe Debono, managing director, Studio7, in discussion with author, 6 April 2009) 19 | Translation from Maltese: “Cobra Shoes Scerri.” Scerri, the gentleman’s surname, is combined with the name of the establishment that he owned; a shop in Valletta named Cobra Shoes. I have, thus far, been unable to discover Scerri’s forename. 20 | Debono claims his father was in possession of Nofs Lira Inqas in its entirety at some stage; however, due to his penchant for bird collecting he could not resist exchanging the print for an assortment of birds. 21 | The MCCA is now known as the Malta Cine Circle (MCC). It is still in operation, and according to MCC Chairman Vincent Lungaro-Mifsud, its main object is to support local filmmaking at all levels. 22 | Vincent Lungaro-Mifsud (chairman, MCC), in discussion with author, 8 June 2010.

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Charlie Cauchi 23 | Cecil Satariano, Canon Fire! The Art of Making Award Winning Movies (London: Bachman and Turner, 1973). 24 | Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 101. 25 | David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film History: An Introduction (London: McGrawHill, 2003), 79. 26 | Oliver Friggieri, “Literature,” in Malta: Culture and Identity, ed. Henry Frendo and Oliver Friggieri (Malta: Ministry for Youth and Arts, 1994), 59. 27 |  During the post-war period, Malta suffered poor living conditions and hardship, leading Mintoff to believe that the country’s situation could only be improved by full integration with Britain. This idea caused an intense debate between the MLP and the church, the latter believing that integration would only encourage the legalisation of measures such as civil partnership, divorce and birth control, issues much at odds with Roman Catholicism. Though a referendum was held on the issue, the integration plan was thwarted by the British government. By 1962 the church, opposed to Mintoff’s socialist leanings, took on extreme measures to prevent him from gaining power. The MLP lost the 1962 election, and the Church-Labour dispute persisted until 1969. With the relationship between the MLP and the church restored, tension simply shifted onto the polarised two- party system, with the Nationalist Party on one side and the MLP on the other. 28 | The Nationalist Party was founded in 1880 “to fight Anglicization with the weapon of italianità and to demand a new constitutional order” (Frendo, “National Identity,” 22). During the period under discussion it was led by Dr. Gorġ Borg Olivier from 1950 to 1977 (Prime Minister: 1950–1955, 1962–1971). Dr. Eddie Fenech Adami followed, from 1977 to 2004 (Prime Minister: 1987–1996, 1998–2004). The current leader is Dr. Lawrence Gonzi (Prime Minister: 2004–2008, 2008–to date). 29 | Boissevain, Saints and Fireworks, 27-28. 30 | Frendo, “National Identity,” 14. 31 | Boissevain, Saints and Fireworks, 28. 32 | “Italian, for so long the main official language of Malta, was identified with education, public affairs, liberty, religion and contacts in the region. English was seen as useful in some cases or for certain purposes, but generally regarded as the language of domination and despotism, an Anglo-Saxon-tongue. Maltese in this uncultivated state was usually dismissed as a dialect recalling Saracen domination, too restrictive, unbecoming of a modern, secular and European society. On the other hand, by the 1880s a growing category of people were being exposed to English or helped to realise that this could be more important in their advancement than Italian. Maltese political parties thus developed on so called pro-Italian and pro-English lines, with the language of battle, the clash of cultures or interests, a recurring and explosive issue in colonial politics. What this implied, of course, was an inability in the circumstances, to reach a consciousness of self-identity.” (Frendo, “National Identity,” 14) 33 | Trans. from Maltese: band club. Besides having parochial affiliations, the village kazin may also be split into factions (partiti) based on political concerns. The kazin may also act as a local public house.

Maltese Cinema? 34 | Stanley Reed, “Film Censorship: An Analysis of Foreign Systems,” British Film Academy Journal (Autumn 1956), 2. 35 | A recent spate of controversial censorship measures taken by Malta’s Film and Stage Classification Board including the banning of the internationally renowned play Stitching by Scottish writer Anthony Neilson and the threat of a prison sentence for two University of Malta students for the publication of a fictional work in the student magazine Realtà, has ignited a backlash from public and government alike. 36 | An examination of chapter 10.17 of the Laws of Malta reveals that it was in 1975 that an official amendment to the principal regulations of 1937 was made “For the words ‘twenty one year’ or the number and word ‘21 years.’ Whenever they occur in regulations 43, 46, 46A and 47 of the principal regulations there shall be substituted by the words ‘eighteen years’ or the number and word ‘18 years’.” Cinema and Stage Regulations, S.L 10.17; L.N 22 of 1960; L.N43 of 1973; L.N 5 of 1975 37 | The Diocesan Film Commission is still functioning. Though several emails were sent requesting further information about the organisation, I have yet to receive a response. 38 | A good example of this would be the public’s response to the late seventies television mini-series Il-Madonna taċ-ċoqqa (“Our Lady of the Habit,” 1971). We learn from Vicki Ann Cremona that the series was “condemned” by the public “because it depicted a priest who fell in love.” The director, Albert Marshall, and his wife Jane, who played the priest’s love-interest, allegedly emigrated due to public hostility. (Vicki Ann Cremona, “Politics and Identity in Maltese Theaters: Adaptation or Innovation,” TDR: The Drama Review Vol. 52, No. 4 [2008]: 123) 39 | Charlotte Zahra, “Voices Against Censorship,” Malta Today, 27 January 2008, available online at http://archive.maltatoday.com.mt/2008/01/27/censorship.html 40 | Cremona, “Politics and Identity in Maltese Theaters,” 123. 41 | Friggieri, “Literature,” 60. 42 | Friggieri, “Literature,” 58. 43 | The PN had been in favor of EU accession since the early 1990s, however, the MLP, fronted by Dr. Alfred Sant (Labour Leader 1992-2003; Prime Minister 1996-1998), had been against membership, going so far as to halt proceedings during their short term in office in the mid-nineties. Malta was the only EU accession country to have a main political party contest membership, and the first to hold a referendum on the subject. 44 | Approximately €400,000. This information was obtained from the IMDB website. I was unable to procure official information regarding the film’s actual budget; however official sources have suggested that the amount was substantial for a local production. 45 | Frendo, “National Identity,” 20. 46 | On the overdetermined, excessive, and solitary non-places of supermodernity, see Marc Augé Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995). 47 | One blogger named “MaltaGirl” characteristically wrote upon seeing the film: “Also, the product placement was one big joke. It was so blatant, *sigh*. Mike was keeping track of them, lol. See if you can spot the Pfanner fruit juice, Persil detergent, Portomaso, Portughes laundry and drycleaning, Antenna CCTV cameras, jewellers (was it Azzopardi or

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Charlie Cauchi Sterling?), Perugina chocolate (mmmm), St. Philip’s hospital, Cisk Export, Kinnie (carefully placed with its label towards the camera), various alcoholic beverages, Teledeal classified newspaper, Mini Cooper and other flashy cars/motorbikes, etc. etc. But it was very cool to be able to watch a movie made in Malta, in Maltese (and in English and German, we’re a versatile nation!) [...] I hope that we see more Maltese feature-length films. Just with subtler product placements, please.” (See “Diverse Ramblings: The Adventures of Mrs. MaltaGirl,” 6 September 2005, available online at http://maltagirl.typepad.com/diverse_ ramblings/2005/06/anli.html) 48 | Frendo, “National Identity,” 15. 49 | Azzopardi took a copy of the print with him to Canada. Another copy was left with the University of Malta; however it was lost. 50 | Hjort and Petrie, “Introduction,” 15. 51 | In 2009, the Maltese government set up a film fund. In addition, in 2011 new training initiatives will be offered to locals working within the audiovisual sector. As reported on the MFC website: “The training is specifically tailored to the immediate requirements of the Maltese audiovisual sector and is being co-coordinated by the Malta Film Commission and the Culture and Audiovisual Unit within the Office of the Prime Minister. This initiative was announced in the 2011 Budget as one of the measures addressing the creative industries.” (“New Training Initiative for the Audiovisual Sector” The Independent, 4 January 2011, available online http://www.independent.com.mt/mobile/2011-01-04/ news/new-training-initiative-for-the-audiovisual-sector-285735/) 52 | A working draft of the NCP 2010 was created by the Cultural Policy Working Group under the former Ministry of Education, Culture, Youth and Sport. The working draft was published in February 2010. A public appraisal of the draft was conducted in June 2010. Due to a cabinet reshuffle in February 2010, culture is now the responsibility of the Ministry for Tourism, Culture and the Environment. The new national culture policy was implemented in 2011. (See Anthony Attard, “Malta/ 1. Historical perspective: cultural policies and instruments,” Compendium: Cultural Policies and Trends in Europe, available online at http://www.culturalpolicies.net/web/malta.php) 53 | Malta Ministry of Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, National Cultural Policy Draft 2010 – Cultural Policy Working Group (Malta: Ministry of Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, 2010) available online at http://www.education.gov.mt/her_culture/cultural_ policy.htm, 10. 54 | NCP Draft 2010, 76. 55 | To quote the NCP Draft: “Government acknowledges the need for a fully-fledged indigenous film industry which is sustained in the production and promotion of its projects and which can contribute significantly in the creative output and in the exposition of Malta-based creative projects within the international films and documentaries circuit. To this effect, the dedicated allocation of a Film Fund and the support structures it requires, aimed at locally-based film and documentary productions, shall be strengthened and additional ways of supporting this investment through the re-streaming of existent budgetary allocations will be assessed.” (National Cultural Policy Draft 2010, 77)

Maltese Cinema? 56 | Albert Moran, “Introduction,” in Film Policy: International, National and Regional Perspectives, ed. by Albert Moran (London: Routledge, 1996), 7. 57 | Since its inception, the MFC’s function has predominantly been to “assist the production of films in Malta and the set up of industries for the production of films in Malta and to market the locations, facilities, skills, talent and expertise available in Malta in order to attract inward investment in the form of international audiovisual productions shooting on the island. It is also the Commissioner’s function to analyse, assess and certify the eligibility of projects and, or beneficiaries for tax or other incentives provided by the Government of Malta, to approve co-productions and represent Malta and its audiovisual industry on international film bodies.” (“About Us,” available online at http://www.mfc. com.mt/page.asp?n=aboutus) 58 | Mario de Marco, “Introductory Address” (speech given at the launch of the National Cultural Policy Draft 2010, Malta, Valletta, July 8, 2010).

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Luxembourg’s Film Finance Model, Andy Bausch, and Cultural Identity Gérard Kraus

The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is located at the heart of Western Europe. Nestled between major European players such as Germany, France and Belgium, the country has constantly sought to find its way in Europe and the world by negotiating the fine balance between autonomy and allying itself for the common good. It is thus no surprise that the country was among the founding members of the European Union, which now encompasses the majority of the European continent. Throughout its history, Luxembourg has entertained friendly relations with all of its neighbors, joining forces with them through economic treaties. Today the Grand Duchy is probably best known for its financial sector and its reputation as one of a few small European nations competing for the tax haven crown. Historically, Luxembourg was founded in the 10th century on a site at the heart of today’s capital, Luxembourg City. Of strategic importance because of its central location between European superpowers, and eminently defendable because of the city’s many valleys and cliffs, the capital city grew and was later turned into a fortress, known as “the Gibraltar of the North”. The fortress was never taken, but changed hands due to treaties, which often went hand in hand with some of the nation’s territories being handed over to France, Germany and Belgium, successively shrinking the surface of the country from 7,065 km² (2,729 square miles) to today’s 2,586 km² (999 square miles). Luxembourg is one of the smallest countries in Europe, sometimes even considered a microstate. The population of Luxembourg, currently at around 511,000, has developed from a rather homogenous society to a situation where, today, around 43.2% of the population are foreign nationals, bringing with them new cultures and languages. From an initially agrarian society, the advent of the industrial age, through the exploitation of the deposits of iron ore along the southern border with France, in the mid to late 19th century, brought wave after wave of migrant workers, predominantly Italian laborers looking for work in the new mines and factories of the country. Subsequent waves were made up predominantly of Portuguese workers, which today make up a large part of the construction work force.

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According to the national statistics agency (STATEC), the foreign population of Luxembourg currently makes up 43.2% of the total population. Among the foreign population, 36.7% are Portuguese, 14% French, 7.9% Italian, closely followed by former citizens of the Yugoslav Republic, 6%. 9.8% of the total are European citizens and 14% of the foreign population have other national backgrounds. One final element of the multicultural puzzle, and somewhat of a local specificity, are the “frontaliers”, an international commuting workforce from the bordering regions of France, Belgium and Germany. In 2010 around 139,000 workers were considered “borderers”, which amounts to around 38% of the total workforce.1 As seems obvious, this strengthens a culturally unique position, as well as furthering cultural exchange between Luxembourg and its neighboring regions. Luxembourg’s film production and exhibition history can be traced back to the early days of cinema, thanks to the Marzen family’s Edison’s Elektrisches Theater (Edison’s Electric Theater), which documented key local events and festivities in the early 20th century.2 Unfortunately, the local production history in Luxembourg from then on remained one that would only cause occasional blips on the radar, rather than prove to be a sustained effort. In fact, the National Audiovisual Center (Centre national de l’audiovisuel, CNA) lists 62 films made between 1921 and 1959, with runtimes between 6 and 28 minutes. These shorts are registered almost exclusively as documentary films dedicated to cultural and historical events. The dominant names of this time period are René Leclerc and Philippe Schneider.3 After this steady stream of documentary productions a few films that resembled the output of a film industry appeared in the shape of the 1960s and 1970s erotic films. Paul Lesch describes this wave of films as “hot national and international news due to their ‘pornographic’ content!”4 These LuxembourgishFrench co-productions, mainly because of France’s then strict censorship laws, were distributed worldwide. Eventually, concerns regarding Luxembourg’s reputation in relation to these films surfaced, but these were abated when France relaxed the censorship laws, making the “Made in Luxembourg” labels for these films redundant. It was only towards the end of the 1970s that first attempts at autonomous feature film production in Luxembourg surfaced, no doubt helped by the availability of affordable cameras and material. Andy Bausch’s name looms large over the local film industry. Bausch, with his trademark beard, glasses and baseball caps, has been a figure in local cinema since his first public screenings of Rubbish in 1979. Born out of a high school theater group, his Nasty Arts Film Team produced gritty 8mm, then 16mm films based on subjects ranging from youth and drugs and sexual identity to Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. 1985’s Gwyncilla: Legend of the Dark Ages marked Bausch’s maturing, away from the student film team, which had broken up previously, and away from the spectrum of short film genres he had produced, towards full length feature filmmaking. His breakthrough came with Troublemaker which a Washington Times reviewer called “Luxembourg’s answer to The Blues Brothers’’ upon seeing it at the AFI European

Luxembourg’s Film Finance Model, Andy Bausch, and Cultural Identity

Community Festival in 1988.5 The production problems that Bausch encountered during the making of this story about two down on their luck criminals forced him and his producers to look for co-producers which they found in nearby Germany. These problems were to have far-reaching results on a personal and national level. First of all Bausch’s film being co-produced by the Saarland Broadcasting Corporation led to a public television broadcast of the film, and secondly, a debate surrounding the financing of film production was put into motion. It is important to know that hitherto, financial support for film production in Luxembourg came from a cultural fund established in 1982 under the social democratic Minister of Culture Robert Krieps, whose idea it was to open up culture to the masses. Local bands and orchestras, artists and creators would be able to apply for funds, but the fund was under-allocated when it came to large-scale film production. This was remedied by the passing of a series of laws designed to grant government support to film production. Belgian director Harry Kümel famously stated in an interview with film studies scholar Ernest Mathijs, “European cinema is for the most part a subsidized cinema. And when you say ‘subsidy’, you say ‘bureaucracy’. In other words, instead of working for popes or princes as the Renaissance artists did, our filmmakers are working, whether they want it or not, for bureaucrats.”6 In particular, the cinema of the European Low Countries, as Mathijs noted in 2004 in his illuminating study The Cinema of the Low Countries, has been characterized by “small budgets” and a “lack of support” (both from private countries and the state).7 In Luxembourg, it was not until the late 1980s that legislation was introduced by the Prime Minister which enabled the subsidies that in turn sowed the seeds for a film production industry in Luxembourg. On July 12, 1988, then Minister of Finances and Prime Minister Jacques Santer, who would go on to become the president of the European Commission between 1995 and 1999, submitted a bill seeking to establish a temporary special financial scheme for audiovisual investment certificates. This was a first move towards establishing a film production industry in Luxembourg. The submission stated that the audiovisual works that could benefit from these certificates had to be fictional works unless they were documentaries that included originally created elements that gave them a lasting temporal value and also had to be produced under the responsibility or in conjunction with a local capital society or taxable establishment. The law excluded: 1) works of a pornographic nature, works that incite to violence or racial hatred, apologetic of crimes against humanity and, generally, oppose public order and morality; 2) works destined to be used to publicity effects; 3) information programs, current events debates and sports programs.8 The audiovisual investment certificates law allowed local companies to invest in these certificates which, once returned, allowed said companies, or whomever they were passed on to, to deduct the invested amount from taxation.9 The explanation given in the original deposition saw this law “within the framework of governmental initiatives that have as their object the consolidation and diversification of the activities of the audiovisual sector.”10 The project clearly

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positions the country as a very attractive place for new service industries, counting amidst the advantages, the geographical location, quality of life and work, multiple languages as well as the established international financial center. Prior to the submission of this bill, CLT, Luxembourg’s privately owned Broadcasting Company, had to decentralize its activities and the government had actively supported the creation and running of SES (Société Européenne des Satellites) that launches and manages the Astra Satellites. Two main aims suggested by the bill were a) the production of serial television programs and, b) the production of ‘”American” or “European Co-Production” style productions. In the first case, a speculation was made regarding the fact that most television programs are shot on a soundstage. The assumption was made that Luxembourg could benefit by promoting these geographically unspecific productions. In addition, the text foresees the possibility for dubbing and translation work to be done for these shows to be distributed across Europe and the world. The explanations provided along with the bill consider Luxembourg previously unattractive to productions mainly because of a lack of “universal imagery” (generic cityscapes or landscapes) to be used as a backdrop for filmic productions, a situation not helped by the total lack of state support. The explanations go on to cite examples of French, Australian and Dutch initiatives and schemes which led to an increased production activity in their respective locations. The bill envisions the effects of such a policy as threefold: the production would be cheaper compared to other production locations; employment within the field could be created and kept up; and, finally, local producers would be able to accrue profits from these productions, making it easier for them to eventually be more autonomous.11 Further comments explain the eventual profitability, compared to initial expected losses, to be expected from tax returns from the industry itself, as well as the economic side effects of a diversification of the local economy, the resulting stability – both financially and in terms of job numbers – and the general investment in the “audiovisual future of our country.”12 While a number of examples of local state-supported cinemas are cited, there is never a mention of local cinema support. The examples, particularly of other European governments are seen as an attempt to “favour a national production activity, considered as a ref lection of national identity” which is seen as irrelevant to Luxembourg’s case since its “situation on the international media checkerboard does not allow it to make a valid cultural contribution, bringing in mainly exportoriented goods.”13 The intention of the law seemed to be to attract foreign investors and build on local production talent or the implantation of foreign studios in order to generate financial and job market gains with cultural capital generated in the form of film content as an inevitable by-product. A first report from the “Conseil d’État” (the institution that advises the national legislature, the Chamber of Deputies), a Luxembourgish equivalent to the House of Lords in the UK, presided by Georges Thorn, suggested some changes to the wording but importantly highlighted that the bill clearly compares itself

Luxembourg’s Film Finance Model, Andy Bausch, and Cultural Identity

to the “incentives of a nationalist inspiration that concurrent countries use and are capable of using due to the importance of their interior markets related to the audiovisual sector”.14 The council saw the need for this law to provide an incentive to stop the delocalization that the success of CLT-owned radio and television channels, predominantly in the German market, triggered. The Finance and Budgetary Commission noted the government’s attempt to make the audiovisual sector into a third pillar of the nation’s economy, in addition to the steel industry and the financial and insurance sectors. Finally, the Chamber of Commerce’s view on the project was solicited, but their comments focused on a similar, associated bill dealing with high-risk capital investment in small and medium-sized companies. It is not surprising to see them take this stance since they are mainly concerned with finance and commercial matters. The parliamentary debates surrounding the bill seemed to confirm these intentions in many cases and expanded on some issues. Throughout the discussions, it became clear that the recent liberalization of the European broadcasting legislations had made broadcasting from Luxembourg redundant and this was an attempt to bring back some of the industry.15 François Colling of the Christian Social People’s Party contextualized the bill in a general sense of making Luxembourg more attractive to the audiovisual market. He mentioned a brochure the government edited, called Luxembourg looks good, sounds good, and other schemes and incentives like the CERISE digital imagery project in this context. He also instrumentally alludes to the European MEDIA program, arguing that “the European Films, which portray regional characteristics or the human condition in Europe in a way that can be shown in other European countries, are meant to be more widely distributed through this practice.”16 It is wholly unsurprising to find the liberal Democratic Party representatives praising the economic benefits of this project, while the Christian Social People’s Party and the social democrats (Luxembourg’s Socialist Workers’ Party members) merely question some of the finer points and phrasing of the bill. For example, Ben Fayot highlighted the problematic notion of the wording regarding “originally created elements that gave them a lasting temporal value,” arguing that this phrase was in need of some explanation. Erna Hennicot-Schoepges of the Christian Social People’s Party praised the point that the bill “would not prevent the production of these shabby films, but at least prevented that more taxpayers’ money was invested in that sad chapter of our cultural history.”17 She was, no doubt, referring to the “erotic cinema” of the 1960s and 1970s and contextualizing her intervention in the context of her previous claim regarding the state control of films, particularly in light of youth protection and the emerging video phenomenon.18 Surprisingly the only mention of national filmmaking and cultural value came from Aloyse Bisdorff from the Communist Party, who saw the bill as deficient in that it did not offer “direct contributions to artistically valuable productions”; indeed Bisdorff argued that it might be “more likely harmful” to said productions.19

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Answering some of these claims the next day, government representative René Steichen confirmed that the reader’s commission, in charge of pronouncing their opinion on whether or not a project should be supported, was not in charge “of assessing the cultural qualities of the productions.”20 Through these debates and the fact that the already expanding film scene was not mentioned it becomes clear that the main aim for the government at this point was twofold. In the first instance, the liberalization of the broadcasting laws in Europe had left the nation with no perceptible advantage over broadcasting centers in neighboring nations. CLT had transferred some of its operations to Germany (RTL plus, Germany’s first private broadcaster) and Belgium (RTL-TVI). Throughout the debate it became increasingly clear that CLT was threatening to delocalize further and had suggested the government pass this law to aid domestic production of sitcoms, and other studio-based programming. Secondly, the aim was to open the doors to European and global producers (i.e. American); whether or not that would benefit truly local filmmaking was not of importance as long as the industry thrived and the 120 people who according to the newly formed Producers Association of Luxembourg (PAL) worked in the audiovisual sphere were employed, other secondary jobs were created and, in the long run, the audiovisual sector would become a nationally viable economic market. The renewal or prolongation of the law that was handed in on September 30, 1992 noted that while the desired sitcom production stipulated in the original law never bore fruit, it was primarily dynamic local production companies that had used the law. A total of 117 applications had been received in the four years that the law had been in place. Out of these applications, 96 projects were accepted and 43% (36.7% of the total) had been shot or were being shot at the time. An additional five projects were due to be finalized by the end of 1992 which also marked the end of the law.21 The government sought to make three changes to the practicalities of the law. For one, the renewed bill declared that “it was not the legislator’s intention to create an activity sector that could only subsist thanks to important and permanent subsidies”.22 It was suggested that the text be changed to exclude from the law those “works of fiction that were shot in natural surroundings.” This would, according to the argument, lead to producers focusing their attention on studio productions, which as a whole were more economically viable to the nation’s film industry than on location shooting. Secondly, it was decided that the law should include postproduction stages such as editing and sound editing which, in line with the first change, are more standard activities in the line of audiovisual production. Finally, in order to be able to support local productions, projects that had previously obtained endorsement from the cultural fund would be able to apply for tax certificates. This last measure could be seen as a way to allow productions that infringed on the first new clause and were shot on location in Luxembourg to profit from certificates nonetheless. The “Conseil d’État” welcomed this “culturally motivated procedure.”23 In a minor change the

Luxembourg’s Film Finance Model, Andy Bausch, and Cultural Identity

somewhat controversial notion of “lasting temporal value” was removed, leaving more space for interpretation in the evaluation of an application. Looking back on the effects of the law since 1988, the Financial and Budgetary Commission has often praised the “cultural effect” of this legislation, arguing that “in conjunction with the audiovisual support fund,” the bill “contributed to the birth of Luxembourg’s cinema.” In 1992, the Financial and Budgetary Commission released a report that traces Luxembourg’s cinema back to the late 1970s, although it is clear that the public only started to see a local cinema emerge with the likes of Shacko Klak (1989), Dammentour (1992) and Wedding Night – End of the Song (Hochzäitsnuecht, 1992). The 1992 report by the Financial and Budgetary Commission further commented that “many Luxembourgish films are of a cultural nature and are, from their very beginning, known to be unprofitable. The income generated amounts to 10% of the spending and the state guarantees their financing.” The report lists E Liewe laang (1992, based on the award-winning scenario Dem Uedem seng Fra), Schacko Klak (1989), Portrait de Famille (1991), Dammentour, Letzebuerger am KZ (1990), Ex und Hopp – Ein böses Spiel um Liebe, Geld und Bier (1991), Hochzäitsnuecht and Flitze Feuerzahn (1992-1996) as eight examples of cultural Luxembourgish productions. The commission argues that these films are characteristic of the “young Luxembourgish cinema” which they understand furthermore as “a subsidiary product of the law,” films that were supported as they were likely to draw “the establishment of new institutions and investors.” This list interestingly includes the title Flitze Feuerzahn which is a cartoon that originated as a short on German television, thus a film not necessarily of national value. It also includes Bausch’s Ex und Hopp, a production for German television, but excluded his A Wopbopaloobop A Lopbamboom (1988/1989), which is more nationally and culturally specific. Finally, the report admits that “cinema and the co-productions” would likely die without the prolongation of the law as they are unable to subsist on other subsidies.24 Through these preliminary discussions the local cinema industry, while not originally considered in the law, was able to benefit from this law when the intended European and American producers did not make good on their claims. The certificates, along with the establishment of the audiovisual production support fund or Film Fund Luxembourg, helped to bring the local cinema tradition into the public light. While the initial discussions in 1988 take no account of earlier production, primarily by Andy Bausch and AFO, the local film industry stepped into the limelight by profiting, but also, in a way, rescuing a law that was not able to live up to its original intent. The parliamentary presentations in the early 1990s all made mention of the fact that the law had contributed to the production of Luxembourgish films. Reporting on the law, Fernand Rau referred to an “indirect positive effect” in the form of “a cultural effect that contributed to the birth and evolution of Luxembourgish cinema in conjunction with the audiovisual support fund.”25 Rau further expressed the hope that the technical skills developed on Luxembourgish productions could

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positively impact foreign investors and producers.26 François Colling (CSV) noted that the most important result of the law, from a national point of view, was the “creation of an awareness that we Luxembourgish can shoot films too.”27 The opposition, in the form of the liberal democrats, saw the support for national filmmaking as important but also suggested the government use other means beyond the national cultural fund and tax certificates to support local film production. Prime Minister Santer rejected this as bad liberal policymaking and not in the interest of the industry.28 Robert Garcia of the Green Alternative Party highlighted the fact that out of the billion spent on films during the law’s duration, only 10% flowed into the eight aforementioned, so-called Luxembourgish films. He stipulated that “the few Luxembourgish films of a certain quality have to serve as showcase examples to hide the “mass-production of soap operas [distributed] to the outside.” He furthermore states that “it is always revolting to find that, in Luxembourg, culture is always taken seriously when it starts smelling of cash.”29 Garcia, not worried about stirring up the government and a member of the opposition, voiced a concern that was already raised by Jup Weber in December 1984, that of a lack of support for independent local artists. His party consistently raised concerns about a local film culture that was under- or unsupported by the government. René Kollwelter of the Socialist Worker’s Party (LSDP) also argued that the Luxembourgish element of the report was very valuable: The cultural value [of the Luxembourgish film rejuvenation] cannot be measured financially; if we here in Luxembourg speak of cultural identity, that is not limited to our language [...] or our literary production [...] we all know that today modern means of communication, specifically film, is an important part of cultural identity and Luxembourgish identity as a whole, and that we can support [modern Luxembourgish media] through this. 30

In closing, he reminded his audience that they should not forget the positive effects on national filmmaking when considering their vote and asked how the national film industry would fare after 1997, the end of the current law’s validity. Kollwelter, and through him his party, saw the opportunity to enrich Luxembourg’s cultural identity through the modern medium of film, valuing its contribution in the same way that literature or indeed language itself constitutes national cultural identity. An endorsement from such high government officials certainly empowered the producers, but also added to the prestige the medium and its products held among the public. In his reply, Jacques Santer considered the Liberal’s suggestions, but also stressed the point that the quality of the Luxembourgish films had already allowed the nation to be well represented at festivals, notably the Max Ophüls Festival that opened the day before (January 19, 1992). Santer also provided some remarks at the opening of the festival. The law was renewed until 1997. The 1997/98 restructuring and renewal of the law (implemented in 1999 as the Film Fund Luxembourg)31 aimed to combine two legal instruments in relation to Luxembourg’s film production, namely the above-mentioned certificates

Luxembourg’s Film Finance Model, Andy Bausch, and Cultural Identity

and a larger organizing structure, the National Fund in Support of Audiovisual Production. After the relative enthusiasm that had greeted the original proposition to implement tax investment certificates to support audiovisual production, it was decided that Luxembourg needed an additional, more direct way of supporting film and media productions. The first notion of this was a vote on a motion that invited the government to assemble a study group to assess the possibility of creating a series of measures designed to remedy a perceived lack of interest and loss in attendance of cinemas. The motion mentioned a Cinema Production Support Fund. In a bill handed in on May 30, 1989 that aimed to create a national audiovisual production support fund, the responsible Minister of Culture Robert Krieps acknowledged this motion’s pioneering role in the conception of this bill. The bill notes that the national cultural fund had helped many films to be made in the past, but was reaching its limits with the typical expenses of a contemporary film. It also argued that the certificates law would only marginally benefit typical Luxembourgish productions and found that the engagement Luxembourg had taken to support audiovisual production on a European level, through programs like Eurimages, should also be translated into local actions.32 The initial statement conceived of the fund as contributing to the production and co-production of films as well as taking over the cost of dubbing and subtitling. While the “Conseil d’État” harbored some reservations regarding establishing another state fund, fearing that it might lead to more overdrawn budgets, its major objections were to technicalities and the administration of the fund. The Media, Research and Culture Commission on the other hand had no objections to the fund, seeing it as an important measure that other surrounding nations had already adopted. Starting the debate, François Colling noted that audiovisual production in Europe was threatened by increasing production costs and tempting imports from the United States. For the most part, the parliamentary debate surrounding the creation of the Film Fund (“Fonds national de soutien à la production audiovisuelle”) echoed the arguments mentioned in regards to the certificates law. Interestingly though, the discussion took a somewhat more national tone with two core mentions going to the drastic drop in cinemas in the country and the connected drop in cinema-going – from 2 million in the 1970s to 600,000 in 1990 (it is worth mentioning that the number grew to 1.1 million spectators in 201133 – a rise that is due in part to the relatively successful national productions of recent years). Both laws (tax certificate law and the audiovisual support fund) were renewed and connected in 1998, and subsequently renewed until 2015 in 2007. Let us now pause to consider some of the filmmaking that was supported by the certificates law and audiovisual support fund. It is true that Andy Bausch was a pioneer and is a lasting figure in Luxembourg’s film industry, but credit also needs to go to a few individuals who shared his early plight and who are also still strong forces in the local film industry. The Atlantic Film Organisation (AFO) were Bausch’s contemporaries, a group of high school teachers brought together through their love of film and filmmaking. Their efforts Waat huet e gesoot (“What

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did he say,” 1981) and Congé fiir en Mord (“Leave for Murder,” 1983) demonstrated that there was indeed a market for local cinema, when audiences seemed to take to the high school and whodunit genres respectively. Menn Bodson, Marc Olinger and Gast Rollinger, the main figures of RTL (Radio Television Luxembourg) subsidiary RTL Hei-Elei Produktioun, launched into the film adventure with two historical films, one, Déi Zwee vum Bierg (“The Two from the Hill,” 1985), chronicling life under Nazi-occupation during World War II, the other, De Falschen Hond (“The Betrayer,” 1989), a foundation myth set in the 1830s in the tumultuous times of Luxembourg’s independence. Hitting the limelight in 1991 with Wedding Night, Pol Cruchten took his film to Cannes, shot Boys on the Run (2003) in the United States, and adapted Jhemp Hoscheid’s Perl oder Pica (“Perl or Pica”), a semi-autobiographical tale of a boy growing up in the South of the country in the 1960s, drawing in 1800 spectators to see the film in 2006. All of this is without naming talented local directors such as Paul Kieffer, Donato Rotunno, Geneviève Mersch, Beryl Koltz, Jeff Desom, and Paul Scheuer or, more recently, the thriving animation sector, with a Luxembourg studio and directors winning a 2014 Oscar with their animated short Mr. Hublot. The Luxembourg Minister for Media and Communications Xavier Bettel commented that the Oscar both honors the directors and technicians, but also acknowledges the high creativity and quality of the entire Luxembourg audiovisual sector: “This award honors its directors Alexandre Espigares and Laurent Witz and his studio Zeilt Productions and celebrates the talent of our artists and technicians of the animation sector. It is also an international recognition of the high level of creativity and quality of the Luxembourg audiovisual sector.”34 Not surprisingly, Mr. Hublot was also supported by the Luxembourg Film Fund. The two films that I want to look at more closely here in this final section are, however, by Andy Bausch, the filmmaker who has argued perhaps most vehemently for the importance of national cinema in Luxembourg. In one interview, Bausch succinctly stated: “Every country needs cinema that is produced in its own language and that is about its own issues. Iceland is a very small country too, but has its own films, much poorer countries than Luxembourg have their own cinema culture.”35 After breaking through to German television movie production with his collaboration Troublemaker (1988), Andy Bausch made a few more films in Luxembourg, the aforementioned A Wopbobaloobop a Lopbamboom in 1989, Three Shake-a-leg steps to Heaven (1993), and Back in Trouble (1997), a sequel to his 1988 cult hit. Andy Bausch’s documentary L’homme au cigare also won “Best Luxembourg Film” and another special state prize at the First Lëtzebuerger Filmpräis Awards in 2003. Bausch also directed a few German productions, such as the road movie Dirty Sky (2003) shot in Bochum, Luxembourg, Paris, and Saarbrucken and supported by German and Luxembourgish film funds: Filmstiftung NRW, Filmförderung Saarland, Luxembourg Film Fund. In 2004, the director also directed a short parody entitled “The Language School” for the compilation film European Visions, directed by Lars von Trier in 2004.

Luxembourg’s Film Finance Model, Andy Bausch, and Cultural Identity

With the support of the Luxembourg Film Fund, Bausch returned to the local film industry in 2002 with The Unemployment Club (Le Club des chômeurs) and followed it up with La Revanche (“The Revenge”) in 2004. By this point TV production in Germany had ceased to be attractive as the producers preferred young, trained, local talent to Bausch with his self-taught skills. The film starred Bausch regular Thierry van Werveke, well-known local actors like Marc Olinger, Fernand Fox, Camillo Felgen, Christian Kmiotek, and professional actors who primarily worked abroad such as André Jung, Marco Lorenzini and Luc Feit. The Unemployment Club tells the story of a group of five ex-steelworkers who, like the country’s former dominant industry, have fallen on hard times. They have decided to abuse the country’s social system by staying unemployed and earning money through petty crime. More often than not the latter does not work in their favor, as burglaries turn up little of value, or stolen goods are stolen by potential customers. The main character, Geronimo, falls in love with Angie, the unemployment agent assigned to him, and has to negotiate the fine line between the old Luxembourg that he knows and the new, modern Luxembourg that Angie is a part of, and that has done away with the industrial past. The film is shot almost entirely in the industrial southern town of Differdange, which still stands as an emblem of the country’s glory days, when iron ore was turned to steel, which in turn was turned into beams that helped build New York, or so the local story goes. Each of the protagonists have their own background story that firmly anchors them in that long-gone past and their situation and their pact keeps them there. Most interesting is Théid, who, in the fashion of nostalgic workers everywhere, is constantly waiting to unload one of his “factory tales of horror” on some unsuspecting listener, for example a documentary crew out to make a film about the iron mills. When the crew asks if he has some stories to tell, he asks the cameraman how much tape he has. Similarly, we have Frunnes and Jackel. She is a faded beauty queen, ex-Miss Minette (the name for the industrial south), and he is a desperate man ready for anything to lower their debt. They are both still living off their earlier glory. Jackel remains convinced that her sex appeal can sway opinions and often comically attempts to put this to practice, while Frunnes is never at ease, always nervous until his demise in the final act. Meanwhile, Geronimo, a fan of the North American tribes ever since he was given a book on them in his youth, still lives with his mother and hangs out in a garden shed, listening to Rock ‘n’ Roll records. What Bausch is trying to construct can be seen as a somewhat clumsy attempt at portraying the south that was. In interviews around the release of the film, he acknowledges his debt to the wave of films depicting the North of England and Scotland, with the decaying industrial hubs there serving as the backdrop for human drama, such as in The Full Monty (1997) and Brassed Off (1996).36 An allusion to the latter opens Bausch’s film as the credit sequence, accompanied diegetically by a brass band’s rehearsal. It is this intention, to illustrate a past that he, and some, if not many, of the audience remember, that also served as the breaking point for some reviewers, who saw in it an ode to a bygone era, best forgotten.

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Despite this, the film remains an attempt to consolidate the filmmaking mission that the government supported at the outset of the industry and pay homage to local history. Instead of using the popular documentary genre as an expository form to show the viewer what is going on (although, fittingly, there is a nod to this tradition in the behind-the-scenes documentary film-within-a-film), he instead attempts to weave all of this into a story, and make the message much less heavy-handed.37 In Bausch’s film the faded social and architectural remains of Luxembourg’s industrial glory are used to illustrate the identity of an “in-between” lost generation (similarly, in his filmmaking he also explores issues related to another in-between, the foreign work force in Luxembourg).38 In an interview, he claims that his “heart goes out to the little man,” namely the working class, “because the Luxembourgish people also have other faces” than those represented by the banker stereotype.39 In his own words, Bausch wants to illustrate a side of Luxembourg that is not obvious, that you have to search for in the former steelworker housing blocks in this industrial region. Whether the Swiss-Luxembourgish co-production is aesthetically pleasing, well-realized or even structured remains to be determined; what is important is that Bausch, to the detriment of his reputation stayed steadfast and made a film that depicts a period in time and a group of people, a fragment of society which has no place in a Luxembourg of today that wants to present itself as anything but the home of rusting factories and the unemployed. 40 Much less well made, as reviewers aptly noted, 41 is Bausch’s sequel La Revanche. Elsewhere, I have suggested that some of the film’s failures can be directly related to flaws in Luxembourg’s Film Fund model, arguing that there should be more emphasis on funding scriptwriting and films at an earlier developmental stage. 42 Bausch’s sequel itself self-reflexively meditates on international investing and a bewildering world of finance. In La Revanche, Geronimo, and the surviving members of the Club decide to create a professional football team to finally do away with decades of disillusionment on the pitch. As Théid tells one of his bar’s customers, “being a football fan in Luxembourg demands nerves of steel” (the reference to the steel industry and traditional Luxembourg local resources is no doubt intentional). As usual, the group makes the wrong deals with the wrong people and they soon find themselves ousted from the club by the same foreign investor they had invited to join in the first place. The final set piece of the film opposes the footballers to a rag-tag bunch of strippers and waitresses in a match for the honor of the club. While there are few redeeming features to the film as such, the concerns that it presents give the spectator fascinating insight into Bausch’s cinema in transition. Gone are the factories of the south, replaced by Théid’s bar/stripclub, and other Luxembourg City locations, with their boardrooms, sleek exteriors and bankers. Much like Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot character, the unemployed gang find themselves in a world not of their own, where their skills and knowledge are useless. Bausch highlights the general divide which has opened between the nostalgia of the former industrial workers and the cosmopolitan desire of a new

Luxembourg’s Film Finance Model, Andy Bausch, and Cultural Identity

world of investors. Not only are the men constantly faced with the multicultural legacy of the wealth that they, and their industry, have helped to generate, but the very same multiculturalism is now rejecting them. French bankers are bombarding them with financial terms they don’t get, the no-smoking sign in a boardroom is incomprehensible and ignoring it leads to a fire alarm. The footballers themselves, flawed stereotypes as they are, still add more to this mix which eventually suggests that Bausch thinks there might come a point when the old Luxembourg he knows is drowning, welcoming a sleek new society of investors and other money sources, but losing some of its old identity along the way.

Beyond the banker stereotype: petty thieves and losers in Andy Bausch’s The Unemployment Club

In the ruins of fordist production: Thierry van Werveke going native in The Unemployment Club

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N otes 1 | Le Luxembourg en chiffres 2011, ed. Statec – Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques du Luxembourg (Luxembourg: Interpub, 2011). 2 | See Uli Jung, “Travelling Cinematograph Shows in the Greater Region of Luxembourg. An Overview,” Paul Lesch, “Travelling Cinematograph Shows in Luxembourg,” and Brigitte Braun, “Marzen’s Travelling Town Hall Cinematograph in the Greater Region of Luxembourg,” in Travelling Cinema in Europe, ed. Martin Loiperdinger (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 2008), 93-102, 103-18, 119-127. 3 | Letzebuerger Kino: Aspects of Luxembourg Cinema, ed. Jean Back, Joy Hoffmann, Viviane Thill and Robert Thiesen (Luxembourg: Editions Ilot and CNA, 2005). See also Brigitte Braun and Uli Jung, “Local Films from Trier, Luxembourg and Metz: A Successful Business Venture of the Marzen Family, Cinema Owners,” Film History: An International Journal Vol. 17, No. 1 (2005): 19-28. 4 | Paul Lesch, “Of Love and Orgies,” in Letzebuerger Kino: Aspects of Luxembourg Cinema, 57. For more on the public outcry against the so-called “rubbishy films” released from 1966 to 1972, see Paul Lesch, In the Name of Public Order and Morality: Cinema Control and Film Censorship in Luxembourg 1895-2005 (Centre National de l’Audiovisuel: Luxembourg, 2005). 5 | The Washington Times, 14 June 1989. 6 | Ernest Mathijs, “Preface: Interview with Harry Kümel,” in The Cinema of the Low Countries, ed. Ernest Mathijs (London: Wallflower, 2004), xvii. 7 | Ernest Mathijs, “Introduction,” ibid., 1. 8 | Projet de loi, No.3223, Dépôt (12 July 1988), 2. 9 | In John W. Cones’ 43 Ways to Finance Your Feature Film: A Comprehensive Analysis of Film Finance. 3 rd edition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), the tax incentives program in Luxembourg is described as follows: “The producer can then sell this government certification to a bank in Luxembourg, which uses the tax certification for its own tax deduction while paying cash to the producer. In effect, the bank is buying the tax benefit. Per the government regulations, the producer is not supposed to receive the money until the film is completed and the actual amount spent in the country is known, but some Luxembourg banks will cash flow film productions.“ (ibid., 270) 10 | Projet de loi, No.3223, 3. 11 | Ibid., 5. 12 | Ibid. 13 | Ibid., 3. 14 | Avis du Conseil d’État sur les projets de loi 3223 et 3224 (27 September1988). 15 | Mémorial, 11e séance, 22 November 1988; Transcripts of Parliamentary Session, 413. 16 | Ibid., 419. 17 | Ibid., 431.

Luxembourg’s Film Finance Model, Andy Bausch, and Cultural Identity 18 | For a discussion of the late 1980s censorship debate see Lesch, In the Name of Public Order and Morality, 60-62. On the erotic cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, see Paul Lesch’s chapter in Letzebuerger Kino, 56-65. 19 | Mémorial, 11e séance, 22 November 1988; Transcripts of Parliamentary Session, 430. 20 | Mémorial, 12e séance, 23 November 1988; Transcripts of Parliamentary Session, 443. 21 | Projet de loi, No. 3676, 2 and 4. 22 | Ibid., 2. 23 | Avis du Conseil d’État (20 October 1992). 24 | Rapport de la Commission des Finances et du Budget (3 December 1992), 3. 25 | Mémorial, 29e séance, 19 January 1993; Transcripts of Parliamentary Session, 1445. 26 | Ibid., 1447. 27 | Ibid., 1453. 28 | Ibid., 1456, and Mémorial, 30e séance, 20 January 1993; Transcripts of Parliamentary Session, 1490. 29 | Ibid., 1464. 30 | Ibid. 1475. 31 | The Luxembourg Film Fund is a member of the European Film Promotion network and since 2003 has also overseen the bi-annual Luxembourg Film Awards (Lëtzebuerger Filmpräis). On 27 July 2014, the Film Fund of Luxembourg had 1,200 likes on facebook, with the most engaged insight from users in the 25-34 years age-group. The facebook page describes the fund as follows: “The Film Fund of the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg, first established in 1990 then restructured in 1999, exists primarily to promote and foster an environment in which the country’s film production industry can develop and flourish.” 32 | Projet de loi, No. 3345, Dépôt, 30 May 1989, 2. 33 | Le Luxembourg en chiffres, Statec, 2011. 34 | “Luxembourg Animation Studio Wins Oscar,” Luxembourg for Business (4 March 2014), available at: http://ict.investinluxembourg.lu/ict/luxembourg-animation-studio-wins-oscar 35 | Andy Bausch in Tageblatt, 9 July 2001, 13. 36 | See, for example, the interview in Le Républicain Lorrain, 6 July 2001, 5. 37 | Since the film was shot on a low budget, Bausch originally intended to follow the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier’s Dogme 95 manifesto. However, after contacting Lars von Trier about the rules, he ultimately found this too restraining. See my article “Other Faces: Andy Bausch’s Le Club des chômeurs (The Unemployment Club, 2002),” in Kinoeye: New Perspectives on European Film Vol. 4, Issue 3 (26 July 2004), available online at http:// www.kinoeye.org/04/03/kraus03.php and the Bausch interview in Le Républicain Lorrain, 6 July 2001, 5. 38 | On the film’s attempt to address what Hagen Kordes has described as “marginal integration” in Europe, also see Kraus “Other Faces.” 39 | Le Républicain Lorrain, 5. 40 | As I argue in “Other Faces,” the title of the film also caused some trouble. Nicolas Steil, the producer of the film commented that due to the obviousness of the title a number

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Gérard Kraus of potential investors refused to invest. Perhaps this would have been different if the originally planned title, “Steel Crazy after All These Years,” had been used, since it hints more closely at the steelworking context of the film and the fact that the glory days are past. 41 | See Gérard Kraus, “Out of Focus: Andy Bausch’s La Revanche and the Question of Value” forum online für Politik, Gesellschaft und Kultur in Luxembourg Vol. 242 (December 2004), 40-42; available online at http://www.forum.lu/pdf/artikel/5638_242_Kraus.pdf. 42 | Ibid., 42.

The Best of Both Worlds Taking Advantage of Two Linguistic Traditions in Irish Film Heather Macdougall

Irish national cinema, like Irish national culture more generally, has two linguistic traditions on which it may draw. First, and most obviously, there is the dominant language of English, spoken by virtually all of the island’s six million inhabitants.1 There is also, however, the traditional indigenous language of Irish Gaelic (generally referred to simply as “Irish” or “the Irish language”), now spoken as a minority language on the island but still very much part of living culture particularly along the west coast; the Irish language, despite having fewer speakers, is furthermore the official language of the Republic of Ireland. This unique bilingual situation presents a similarly unique opportunity as Ireland seeks to build a stronger national cinema. The linguistic situation, however, is – as in many nations in Europe and elsewhere – complicated by emotional, political and social questions relating to the relative position of each language in the national culture. These questions apply equally to the national cinema. By way of introduction to the situation, I would like to begin with two anecdotes to illustrate the conundrum at the heart of the debate. First, in 1999, a government-appointed Film Industry Strategic Review Group published a report called The Strategic Development of the Irish Film and Television Industry 2000-2010.2 The purpose of the report was to evaluate the effectiveness of existing funding schemes and incentives for filmmaking in Ireland, as well as make recommendations for future actions. The Strategic Review Group stressed that “A strong partnership between the State and the industry is critical into the foreseeable future,”3 but they really concentrated their energy on suggesting ways to make Irish film more commercially viable and economically productive; this included the advice that due to Ireland’s small population, “Producers must focus early on growth in the international market.”4 With this in mind, the report lists as one of Ireland’s greatest competitive advantages “its English-speaking status in a predominantly English-speaking medium.”5 Furthermore, the report is extremely critical of a (supposedly homogenized) European model of filmmaking, noting that most European films have difficulty

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finding an audience in the United States and even in neighboring European countries. The report dismissed what it perceives as the European attitude to film, particularly a perceived stance that blames Hollywood imperialism for unfairly stealing audiences away from superior European productions. The writers of the report assess the European point of view and its resultant films as follows, noting the relevance to the Irish context: There is a degree of muddled thinking here – a sense that the public ought to appreciate the creative expression of European auteurs and would do so except for the fact that the multiplexes and commercial cinemas are full of US commercial productions. In reality, many European productions are obscure and difficult. […] It is notable however – and this is important for Ireland – that English language films have less difficulty in crossing linguistic zones than those made in other European languages.6

In short, the Film Industry Strategic Review Group gives a thumbs-up to commercial cinema in English, and a thumbs-down to arty, subtitled European film. The second anecdote concerns a single film that was released nearly a decade after the report discussed above. In 2007, director Tom Collins made a film called Kings, which despite its English title and London setting was almost entirely in Irish Gaelic, with occasional passages in English. It played at festivals world-wide and was nominated for fourteen Irish Film and Television Awards, of which it won five. It was also submitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for consideration for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. It ultimately failed to secure an Oscar nomination, but what is significant is that this was the first time ever that Ireland submitted a feature film to the Oscars in what is officially its national language. Irish films in English have traditionally done relatively well in other categories of the Oscars, competing as equals alongside American and other English-language films,7 but this submission could in many ways be seen finally as an acknowledgement of Ireland’s Europeanness, at least in the realm of cinema, given that the foreign language category is so often dominated by European films. Furthermore, this feature film was not in fact an isolated text, as it followed a decade of particularly successful Irish-language short films that had been picking up top awards in Ireland as well as prizes at prestigious festivals across Europe and further afield. Taken together, these two anecdotes highlight the complex situation with respect to language in Irish cinema. On the one hand, the predominantly English-speaking nature of Ireland can support the development of commercial film production (including co-productions) that cater to both the lucrative AngloAmerican market as well as a domestic audience that watches mainly Hollywood films, and does so unmediated by dubbing or subtitling as is often the case elsewhere in Europe. The danger with this, of course, is that Irish cinema risks becoming simply a copy – and, given its small size, quite possibly a lesser copy – of

The Best of Both Worlds

English or American cinema, or even being actually subsumed into those larger and more powerful industries, thereby losing any markers of a distinctive national cinema. On the other hand, production in a lesser-spoken European language allows Ireland to assert its uniqueness and to align Irish cinema with other small European cinemas. It can also be used as a complement to the commercial aesthetic often associated with English-language production, by tapping into an alternative or art-house aesthetic more commonly associated with so-called foreign-language films. There is a potential advantage to the art-house association, including a certain prestige that Irish cinema has often found elusive, but there is also the risk of marginalization that comes with subtitled films particularly in Anglophone markets – which for Ireland also includes the domestic market. In order to work through the opportunities and challenges of a bilingual film industry in Ireland, we can start by asking three questions: 1. Given that Irish Gaelic is the official national language of the Republic of Ireland, why has Irish film production historically been nearly exclusively in English, even in its state-sponsored incarnations? 2. What has changed to result in the recent interest in filming in the indigenous language? 3. Finally – and most significantly when considering the possible future of Irish national cinema – given that the Irish industry is relatively small by world standards, does production in two languages serve to divide limited resources, or is a bilingual industry a strength that can be capitalized on? To answer the first question, we need a very brief overview of the history of both Irish film and the Irish language. First, the Irish language: Article 8 of the 1937 Constitution of Ireland declares that “the Irish language as the national language is the first official language.”8 The language has been a compulsory school subject since shortly after Ireland gained independence in the 1920s, and Irish is now one of the official languages of the European Union. According to the Irish constitution, English is given a lesser status, as a “second official language.”9 So, constitutionally, Irish is privileged over English. In terms of use, however, the situation is reversed. The state has poured enormous financial resources into supporting the development of the language, but the main thrust of this investment, at least until recently, has been in the education system, presumably based on the assumption that a greater knowledge of the language will lead to a greater percentage of the population speaking it as the principal means of communication. It is generally agreed now that the language policies of the early governments after Irish independence were quite misguided, at least from a practical perspective, and ultimately ineffective. According to the 2006 census, out of the Republic’s 4.2 million residents, there are approximately 1.6 million (about a third) who self-report as having some knowledge of Irish

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(keeping in mind that it is a required school subject for everyone, that’s actually quite underwhelming) and only 53,000 or just over 3% who use it on a daily basis outside of the school system.10 The language does however continue to occupy an important position within national debates about both heritage and contemporary culture, with no shortage of attention paid by academics, politicians, and language activists about the reasons for the decline of the language and possible strategies for the future.11 So what about film? While the Irish government poured money into the language from an early date, it had a decidedly cooler attitude toward state-sponsored film. Indeed, for decades, state policy on film focused far more on censorship than on support, with successive nationalist governments adopting a view that the cinema was an essentially foreign form of expression that did not fit with their particular view of what the nation should be. In fact, Kevin Rockett points out that most of the people who assumed positions of power in the new Free State government (i.e. after independence from the United Kingdom was achieved in the 1920s) were “opposed to film per se or judged it in purely Catholic-moral terms, as was demonstrated by the speedy passage of the Censorship of Films Act, 1923, one of the first pieces of legislation to be passed by the Free State Parliament.”12 This early act of legislation demonstrates that the official government attitude to film, at least initially, was one which recognized its power to influence the masses, but sought to contain that power through extremely restrictive controls rather than use it as a tool for nation building as was being done in many other European nations in the same decade. Of course, there has never been a shortage of films about Ireland, but in the absence of an indigenous industry or filmmaking culture, these representations have been dominated by foreign – usually American or English – filmmakers. Film scholar Martin McLoone summarizes the two prevailing representations that emerged: The American cinema has largely been responsible for a romantic view of Ireland, representing the nostalgic imaginings and nationalist inclinations of the Irish-Americans, while a darker, more sombre view of a violent Ireland has largely emanated from the British cinema, a reflection no doubt of Britain’s close political involvement in the affairs of Ireland.13

It is not surprising, given both their origin and their target audience that these American and British representations of Ireland were delivered virtually exclusively through the English language.14 While foreign productions continued to dominate Irish screens, by the 1960s and 1970s there were the rumblings of an independent film movement by Irish filmmakers. This movement included a few films in the Irish language, most notably the community film and video projects led by Bob Quinn in Connemara, the heartland of the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking region) on the west coast.15 As part

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of this work, Quinn directed a short feature film on 16mm called The Lament of Art O’Leary (Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoire, 1975) which dealt explicitly with language politics and drew on the rich heritage of the Irish language in order to illuminate its contemporary status. While it has not been as widely seen as most of the foreign representations to which McCloone alludes above, it nevertheless holds an important place in the history of Irish national cinema; in Cinema and Ireland, Quinn’s feature is described as “the first independently produced film in the Irish language and, indeed, […] the first major critical indigenous production of the 1970s.”16 While Quinn did make several films in Irish, other independent filmmakers of the time did not follow suit, and Irish-language production remained a regional rather than national affair, while filmmaking in Ireland in general continued to be on a relatively small scale. It was not until the 1990s – after a short-lived attempt to establish an Irish Film Board in the 1980s – that economic, political, and creative forces combined to allow Ireland to finally begin to develop a commercially viable and culturally important film industry. Most importantly, in this decade, the new Irish Film Board/Bord Scannán na hÉireann (IFB/BSÉ), which was re-established in 1993, kick-started the industry. The annual number of indigenous productions increased rapidly throughout the decade: there were three Irish films made in 1992 (the year before IFB/BSÉ funding became available), twenty in 1997, and over fifty by 1999.17 Ruth Barton adds, “ten years after its inception, the [Irish Film] Board was able to lay claim to having supported the making of nearly a hundred feature films as well as several hundred short films and documentaries, this in a country that produced 18 feature films during the 1980s.”18 While it was a step forward for indigenous cinema, the products of that cinema did not initially differ all that much from the foreign representations. Kevin Rockett, for example, blames “the demands of the international marketplace” for the fact that recent Irish films “often reinforce rather than challenge the inherited stereotypes of the Irish in the cinema.”19 Although he doesn’t remark on it specifically, this includes the representation of Ireland as a monolingual English-speaking island. This brings us to our second question: given this pattern, where did the recent interest in Irish language production come from? While the Film Board was the chief catalyst for indigenous film production in general, the real driver behind Irish-language production was the Irish-language television station TG4, which began broadcasting in 1996. When asked where film fit into TG4’s vision of Irish-language media, Deputy CEO of TG4 Pádhraic Ó Ciardha replied that “it is clearly a badge of honour or a symbol of maturity in a minority-language broadcaster that you make film, and drama particularly […]. When we were founded in 1995 our ambition was, like our Welsh cousins, to make a feature film that would show that the language was alive, could deal with the narrative form, could come alive in that art form.”20 The Welsh example is indeed often held up as a model for Irish-language production. In Wales, as in Ireland, a television station (S4C) acted as a catalyst for Welsh-language drama production.

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After its establishment in 1982, S4C funded films such as the comedy Coming up Roses (Rhosyn a Rhith, 1987) by Stephen Bayly, which was the first Welsh-language film to receive commercial release in London, and Hedd Wyn (Paul Turner, 1992), which was Wales’ first Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. While the Welsh television station has enjoyed a head start of over a decade, the Irish station is clearly eager to follow in its footsteps by commissioning not only programs for television broadcast, but also films with theatrical potential. In order to assist with this project, TG4 sought a partnership with the Irish Film Board, and in 1998 the Board and the television station together launched a funding scheme specifically for short films made in the Irish language. Two years later, the station also launched a parallel scheme with Filmbase, a Dublinbased centre which provides equipment, training, and funding for emerging filmmakers. What kind of short films have come out of these new funding schemes? Really, as diverse a range of themes, genres and perspectives, and the same range of quality as the similar IFB/BSÉ schemes for English-language production. One unique feature, however, is that a number of filmmakers have taken the language itself as the subject of their films, using the opportunity to creatively explore the role of the language in contemporary society. Perhaps the most celebrated example is Daniel O’Hara’s My Name is Yu Ming (Yu Ming is Ainm Dom), a 13-minute bilingual short made in 2003 that took both the Best Irish Short and Best First Short awards for its debut screening at the Galway Film Fleadh, and then went on to win several other awards at international festivals and an IFTA (the Irish equivalent of an Oscar). The narrative follows a young Chinese man who randomly chooses a country to visit (Ireland) and diligently studies up on what the encyclopedia informs him is the national language of that country (Irish). When he arrives in Dublin, he has no trouble reading the bilingual signs but believes his poor command of Irish is to blame when no one understands him. Eventually, an old man at a pub overhears him trying unsuccessfully to communicate in Irish with the bartender and patiently explains, much to Yu Ming’s surprise, that people in Ireland generally speak English. After Yu Ming introduces himself to the man, Paddy, the conversation proceeds as follows (in Irish): Yu M ing: I arrived yesterday from China. M an: Yesterday? And you speak Irish? Yu M ing: I learned the language because I wanted to live in Ireland. But my Irish is not good. No one understands what I say. […] I spent six months learning Irish, but I think it was a mistake. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea. M an: You have better Irish than most people in this country. Yu M ing: I don’t understand. M an: English is spoken here. Yu M ing: English?

The Best of Both Worlds M an: English. From England. Yu M ing: Irish isn’t spoken? M an: It isn’t. Yu M ing: But on every sign… M an: Well, the language is there, but it’s not spoken except for a few regions in Ireland. 21

The punch line comes when the bartender brings them their pints and, noticing his regular customer conversing with the newly-arrived immigrant in what to him is an indecipherable tongue, he remarks incredulously to his friend, “Here, did you know ol’ Paddy could speak Chinese?!” This scene, and indeed the film itself, draws attention to the tokenistic, cosmetic use of the Irish language in modern Ireland: its status as the official language and its use on signs, for example, while it isn’t spoken or perhaps even recognizable in its oral form to natives of the capital city. The Film Board’s Irish-language scheme was itself accused of being tokenistic, and criticized for the fact that many filmmakers simply translate their English scripts into Irish because they feel the competition might be a little softer in that category. In part as a result of this criticism, the Irish Film Board scrapped the scheme, choosing to no longer set money aside specifically for Irish language production. As reported in Film Ireland, the major trade publication for the Irish cinema industry, in December 2007: Concerns about the Irish language short being “ghetto-ised” have resulted in the dedicated scheme Oscailt being discontinued. Instead, all five short schemes have been opened up to Irish language submissions. The thinking behind this is to give those writing as Gaeilge [in the Irish language] as much scope as possible and also to discourage shorts being translated purely for the purpose of funding. 22

While this statement is somewhat misleading – since the other short film schemes (animation, documentary, etc) were never restricted to English-language submissions – the change in policy has resulted in a significant drop in Irishlanguage short films produced through the IFB. In fact, in the year following the change, the IFB received only two submissions for films in Irish, out of a total pool of 108 applicants.23 The IFB funded no Irish-language shorts until a new dedicated funding scheme was introduced in 2011, to produce films that could be used in the school curriculum. The situation described above leads us to our third and final question: how do these two languages co-exist within the film industry? Are they in direct competition for finite resources, or is there a way that they can complement each other? We can approach this from a different angle by asking, how does the choice of language matter when we watch a film? Leaving aside the issues of language rights – which is an important and related issue, and one which is indeed the focus of much scholarly writing on Irish-language media, but is beyond the scope of this

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paper – from a cinematic point of view, does a film actually create a different meaning depending on the language it is in? I would answer, without hesitation, yes. As renowned sociolinguist Joshua Fishman argues, Language itself is content, a referent for loyalties and animosities, an indicator of social statuses and personal relationships, a marker of situations and topics as well as of the societal goals and the large-scale value-laden arenas of interaction that typify every speech community. 24

In other words, beyond the meaning of whatever words are being spoken, the Irish language itself carries certain meanings, for example associations to certain geographic areas, certain historical eras, certain interpretations of Irish identity, and so on. To return to the film I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, Kings, here the language is a marker of community identity and belonging. The film concerns six men who came from rural Ireland to London in their youth. We meet up with them thirty or so years later when the five surviving friends get together to mourn the death (possibly suicide) of the sixth. None of them has found the life they dreamed of in the big city, and most of them are battling their own personal demons. The producer of the film, Jackie Larkin, talks about how the use of Irish Gaelic signals the way these men are trying to maintain their link to each other through their shared language while living in a foreign country. She very cleverly also links it to an important contemporary issue in Ireland: “These guys left Connemara as a gang; the Irish language for them was their first language. So when they stuck together, they spoke it as a way of maintaining their identity, as we see every day here with the Polish [immigrants] in Ireland.”25 Given the relative novelty of feature films in Irish, it is not surprising that the language features heavily in discussions about the film, but there is only one very short discussion of language within the film. It occurs when the two men who have stayed close friends (Git and Jap) meet up with the one who has become the most successful (Joe). While Git and Jap are alcoholics and borderline homeless, Joe is now the wealthy owner of a construction company but carries a lot of guilt about refusing to give jobs to his unemployed friends. In terms of social status and financial success he has left his old friends behind, but just as they find solace in the bottle, he is dependent on “the rich man’s drink,” cocaine. It becomes clear as they chat that Joe has become disconnected from the others (in the transcript that follows, passages in italics are delivered in Irish): J oe : Sorry I missed the service. G it : Mass, Joe, mass. J oe : I had a bit of trouble at one of the sites. […] Jap : We thought you’d forgotten about us.

The Best of Both Worlds J oe : Me? Forget the old gang? Ah. Jap : In Irish, Joe. You know our pledge. Always in Irish. J oe : You still talk in the Irish! Jap : There are some things a man shouldn’t forget. His land, his language… and his friends. J oe : Well I didn’t come for a discussion about the language. I’m here for Jackie, God rest him. Jap : God rest him. G it [raising his pint]: Fair play to the Paddies. Jap [raising his]: Up the Paddies! J oe : Fuck the Paddies. [They all pause, then Joe laughs to break the tension.] J oe [raising his pint]: To the old gang! G it and Jap : To the old gang!26

This scene comes almost exactly half-way through the film, when the audience has already been following the Irish-speaking protagonists for three-quarters of an hour. In other words, the filmmakers clearly did not perceive a need to explain the choice of language at the start of the film, and the audience is given a chance to make their own interpretations about what the use of the language might mean for the characterization of these men. The character of Joe is played by Colm Meaney, who is well known for his English-speaking roles in film and television, in Ireland as well as in the United States – he had small roles in films such as The Commitments (Alan Parker, 1991) and Con Air (Simon West, 1997), but is perhaps most recognizable to an international audience for his long-running role as Miles O’Brien in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Several other notable Irish actors, including Stephen Rea, Brendan Gleeson, Cillian Murphy, Gabriel Byrne, and Fionnula Flanagan have all appeared in both English- and Irish-language productions. Many off-screen workers have also contributed to productions in both languages. This is, I think, one of the most positive signs that the two languages can have a productive relationship within a cohesive national cinema, rather than developing along parallel but isolated tracks (as may be argued is the case with English and French cinema in Canada), or existing in competition with each other. In conclusion, Ireland is a bilingual country that has the advantages of both a globally dominant language and a unique language tied to its own indigenous culture. The opportunities afforded by this fact should not be overlooked as Ireland continues to foster a national cinema. Its bilingual nature can be a key tool in developing a cinema that satisfies diverse audiences at home and abroad, including both mainstream and niche markets.

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A lost generation: the “old gang” of Irish expats gets together in Tom Collins’ Kings

Politics of language: Chinese-Irish immigrant Yu Ming (Diyu Daniel Wu) in My Name is Yu Ming

N otes 1 | This figure includes both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. For the purposes of this essay “Ireland” will refer to the entire island, while “Republic of Ireland” and “Northern Ireland” will refer to the separate states, where appropriate. “Irish national cinema” refers

The Best of Both Worlds to the film culture of the entire island of Ireland; this interpretation of the national cinema is generally accepted by both the Irish Film Board – which funds projects north and south of the border, despite only receiving funds itself from the government of the Republic of Ireland – and by scholars; see for example Ruth Barton, Irish National Cinema (Routledge: London, 2004), Martin McLoone, Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema (London: BFI, 2000), Cinema and Ireland, ed. Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1988). These studies include both states within their examination of the national cinema. 2 | Government of Ireland, The Strategic Development of the Irish Film and Television Industry 2000-2010: Final Report of the Film Industry Strategic Review Group to the Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltach and the Islands (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1999). 3 | Ibid., 11. 4 | Ibid., 16. 5 | Ibid., 23. 6 | Ibid., 40-1. 7 | Examples include My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan, 1989) which received five nominations and won for best actor and best supporting actress, The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992) which received six nominations and won for best screenplay, In the Name of the Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993) which received seven nominations, Six Shooter (Martin McDonagh, 2004) which won for best short, and Once (John Carney, 2006) which won for best original song. 8 | Constitution of Ireland/Bunreacht na hÉireann [1937]. Available on the website for the Department of the Taoiseacht: http://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/upload/static/256.htm [Consulted March 5, 2011]. 9 | Ibid. 10 | Figures from “2006 Census: Principle Demographic Results.” Available online through the Central Statistics Office Ireland: http://www.cso.ie/census/Census2006Results.htm [Consulted March 10, 2011]. 11 | For a more in-depth look at the past, present and future of the Irish language, see for example: Michael Cronin, “The Irish Language: Past and Present,” Van Taal tot Taal Vol. 37, No. 2 (June 1993): 80-83; Tony Crowley, The Politics of Language in Ireland 15372004 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); chapter 5 of Joshua A. Fishman, Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages (Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 1991); Reg Hindley, The Death of the Irish Language: A Qualified Obituary (London: Routledge, 1990); Adrian Kelly, Compulsory Irish: Language and Education in Ireland, 1870s to 1970s (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002); Pádraig Ó Riagáin, Language Policy and Social Reproduction: Ireland 1893-1993 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); The Future of Irish: 10 Essays Celebrating One Hundred Years of the Irish Language Movement, ed. Philip Orr (special issue of Fortnight, No. 316) (Belfast: Fortnight Publications, 1993). 12 | Cinema and Ireland, ed. Rockett, Gibbons and Hill, 40. 13 | Martin McLoone, “Reimagining the Nation: Themes and Issues in Irish Cinema,” Cineaste Vol. 24, Issues 2-3 (June 1999): 28.

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Heather Macdougall 14 | A few minor exceptions exist in the use of short passages of Irish within Englishlanguage films, for example a brief conversation in Irish between Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O’Hara) and Father Lonergan (Ward Bond) in The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952). 15 | For an excellent discussion of the work of Quinn’s production group Cinegael, please see chapter 5 of Jerry White, The Radio Eye: Cinema in the North Atlantic, 1958-1988 (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009). 16 | Cinema and Ireland, ed. Rockett, Gibbons and Hill, 137. 17 | McLoone, Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema, 116. 18 | Barton, Irish National Cinema, 105. 19 | Kevin Rockett, “Irish Cinema: the National in the International,” Cineaste Vol. 24, Issues 2-3 (June 1999): 24. 20 | Interview between the author and Pádhraic Ó Ciardha, Deputy CEO of TG4, Tuesday, 28 July 2009, Galway City, Ireland. 21 | Translation is from the subtitles. 22 | Niamh Creely, “Schemers,” Film Ireland Vol. 119 (November/December 2007): 16. 23 | Correspondence between author and Fran Keaveney, Short Film Executive for the Irish Film Board, 3 September, 2009. 24 | Joshua A. Fishman, Sociolinguistics: a Brief Introduction (Rowley, MA: Newbury House, 1972), 1. 25 | Quoted in Basil Al-Rawi, “Irish Ways and Irish Words,” Film Ireland Vol. 118 (September/October 2007), 17. 26 | Translation is again from the subtitles.

History/Memory

Anxiety, Memory, and Place in Belgian Cinema Philip Mosley

Modern Belgium came into being in 1830 as the result of a need to create a bufferstate between the European powers of the time. The fusion of ethnolinguistic differences in the interest of a unified nation-state began a historical process that has subjected the Belgian people to prolonged anxieties over their identity, the role of their ruling class, and the policies adopted by their successive governments. While such periodic anxieties belong to the histories of any nation-state, chronic doubts about the validity and legitimacy of nationhood have always accompanied the troublesome Belgian case, occasionally destabilizing national unity to an extent that threatened the continued existence of the state. These anxieties have manifested themselves in various momentous historical issues whose import at one time or another has been primarily political, social, moral, religious, and even geophysical (holding the line of internal and external frontiers). These issues have included imperialism and colonialism, wartime collaboration, the role of the monarchy, state versus religious education, languages, unemployment, and immigration. The volatile Belgian national condition has been somewhat defused in recent years by a steady movement toward a form of federalization via constitutional revisions, but at the cost of a weakened unitary state. This widespread loss of confidence produced a moral panic precipitated by a series of traumatic events, beginning in the late 1980s with a wave of urban terrorism, followed by the Dutroux pedophile murders in 1996, and the Agusta-Dassault corruption scandal in 1998. This panic brought huge numbers of citizens onto the streets to express their outrage at the apparent collapse of governmental authority and the corruption of the Belgian establishment. Since the concept of national identity depends heavily on a tradition of collective memory, these anxieties have also raised questions of public remembering and forgetting. Discussion of certain issues – for instance, the imperial-colonial projects in Africa and wartime collaboration with the Germans – has remained quite sensitive, especially at official levels. Since control of collective memory directly affects both self-image and power relations within society, it follows that suppression, elision, and

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revision of history may occur. As Jacques Le Goff reminds us: “To make themselves the master of memory and forgetfulness is one of the great preoccupations of the classes, groups and individuals who have dominated and continue to dominate historical societies. The things forgotten or not mentioned by history reveal these mechanisms for the manipulation of collective memory.”1 Historiographers now generally accept that memory, while an individual cognitive act, is nonetheless at the same time also a social construct, since we remember and forget things within a context of belonging to social groups and engaging in communal patterns of behavior. Furthermore, as Maurice Halbwachs’ pioneering work suggests, we construct the framework of social memory largely by a sense of place: “We situate what we recollect within the mental spaces provided by the group. But these mental spaces, Halbwachs insisted, always receive support from and refer back to the material spaces that particular social groups occupy.”2 As an art that represents both time and space, cinema is particularly able to explore such relationships between society, memory, and place. Belgian cinema, affected in its own historical evolution by the fact of ethnolinguistic division, has nonetheless found ways to articulate national and subnational anxieties in a variety of film forms. Some films function as allegories of national identity problems, despite revolving around fictional (auto)biographies of individual characters. This is true, for instance, of Jan Bucquoy’s The Sex Life of the Belgians (La vie sexuelle des belges, 1993) and especially of Jaco Van Dormael’s Toto the Hero (Toto le Héros, 1991), which ingeniously relates a lifelong anxiety over the mistaken personal identity of the hero against a backdrop, as in Bucquoy’s film, of Belgian social and cultural history from the 1950s onwards. Similarly, we may compare the strong satirical content of Bucquoy’s film to that found in other national visions, such as the political dystopias of Robbe De Hert’s Camera Sutra (1973) or Alain Berliner’s The Wall (Le mur, 2000). The four films I have chosen to discuss in this essay – The Promise (La promesse, 1996) and Rosetta (1999) by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Brussels Transit (Bruxelles-Transit, 1980) by Samy Szlingerbaum, and Woman in a Twilight Garden (Een vrouw tussen hond en wolf, 1979) by André Delvaux – are equally powerful transmitters of aspects of social memory. They are also deeply rooted in place. One way in which a Belgian sense of place has been determined officially is by the three semi-autonomous regions (Wallonia, Brussels, and Flanders), the institution of which reflects the development of political, economic, and ethnolinguistic interests within contemporary Belgium. In considering these films we will travel, so to speak, across these three regions, carrying with us an interweaving tracery of anxiety, memory, and place. Alongside these official designations of identity there exist multiple counterimages, based more closely on popular memory and frequently mobilized as oppositional views of place – as, for instance, in polarized opinions of Brussels as an old, “popular” City to be preserved or as a new “Europolis” to replace it.

Anxiety, Memory, and Place in Belgian Cinema

My juxtaposition of these four films invites a number of comparisons and contrasts. The Dardennes and Szlingerbaum engage distinctively with issues of displacement, immigration, and unemployment, while Delvaux deals specifically with Flemish collaboration during World War Two. All four films represent significant creative cooperations. The Dardenne brothers usually work together, generating a peculiar understanding reminiscent of other fraternal filmmaking teams like Joel and Ethan Coen or especially Timothy and Stephen Quay, whose fantastic-surrealist cinema shares a sensibility deeply embedded in Belgian culture. Szlingerbaum (d. 1986) worked together with his mother, and Delvaux (d. 2002) with Flemish author Ivo Michiels. A major Belgian anxiety during the last half-century, especially for the citizens of Wallonia, has been the declining industrial and agricultural power of that region. This anxiety has been exacerbated by a concurrent increase in Flemish prosperity and influence that, despite a Francophone majority in Brussels, has steadily transferred economic ascendancy in Belgian life from the French- to the Dutch-language region. Several films by Walloon directors – notably Jean-Jacques Andrien, Thierry Michel, and the Dardenne brothers – have addressed this post-industrial condition, its social and psychological effects. Michel has been instrumental in the construction both of a recognizably Walloon cinema sensitive to these issues – as in his dramatization of a failed general strike, Winter 1960 (Hiver 60, 1982) – and of a postcolonial cinema, tackling equally prickly subjects in a series of documentaries such as Les derniers colons (1995) and Mobutu, King of Zaire (Mobutu, roi du Zaïre, 1999). The Dardennes began in documentary video, graduating to fictional features with Falsch (1986) and Je pense à vous (1992), both dealing very differently with questions of history and memory. Basing Falsch on a play by Belgian writer René Kalisky about displaced Jews’ memories of the Holocaust, the directors switch the setting from New York to an anonymous airport. The film is a bold if highly stylized effort to confront issues of alienation and memory through the uncomfortable reunion of the Falsch (false) family at the airport. Set amid the abandoned factories of Seraing, near Liege, where the Dardennes grew up, Je pense à vous is more typical of their realist aesthetic in its portrayal of a man made redundant by the declining steel industry. However, an uneven script and mise-en-scène limit the filmmakers’ success infusing the psychological dynamics of a personal drama with a broader social and historical analysis. The Dardennes honed their vision finely in their next two features, The Promise and Rosetta, both prizewinners at the Cannes festival. The Promise concerns a teenage boy, Igor, caught up in his father’s opportunistic exploitation of a group of illegal immigrant workers. When one of them, an African named Amidu, falls from a construction site scaffold, he asks Igor with his dying words to promise to look after his wife and child. Igor’s filial bond gradually weakens as he turns his youthful energies toward the keeping of his promise. Torn between

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his new commitment and the continuing demands of his father, who conceals Amidu’s death from both his widow and the authorities in order to protect his own clandestine operation, Igor is forced into an ethical awakening. Rosetta tells of another teenager from the same depressed urban milieu faced with equally difficult choices. Engaged in a desperate struggle to survive a hopeless existence caring for her alcoholic mother in a bleak trailer park, Rosetta wants nothing more than a “normal” life and a “real” job, neither of which appear remotely possible in her present circumstances. Though painfully vulnerable, Rosetta steels herself to be fiercely assertive and even unscrupulous in her dealings with others. Success in her terms is measured by selling a home-sewn dress to a clothing store or doing menial work for the owner of a chain of waffle stands. The Promise reveals the uneasy coexistence of native Belgians and immigrant workers in an area where unemployment currently runs between twenty and thirty percent. A long history exists of immigration to the Sambre-Meuse industrial area to fill jobs in the coal mines, steel mills, and other factories. For instance, the life of the Italian mining community has been shown in Paul Meyer’s neorealist-inspired From the Branches Drops the Withered Blossom (Déjà s’envole la f leur maigre, 1960) – which has belatedly received the recognition it deserves – and more recently in the films of Loredana Bianconi, such as Avec de l’Italie qui descendrait 1’Escaut (1993). Since the 1960s, following the decline of the heavy industries and the decrease in immigration of the earliest ethnic groups (Italian, Polish, and Czech), Belgium has become more “an amalgam of peoples who bear the marks of postcolonial relocation, the Jewish diaspora, and general post-war mobility: it is a mosaic of different groups of people, for whom Belgium is a place rather than a nation.”3 An increase in illegal immigration – corresponding to the present climate of Eastern European displacement, global labor mobility, and the relaxation of border controls – provides a means for Igor’s father to earn a living by trafficking in alien workers. The opening shot of The Promise, showing a convoy of transient workers climbing down from an automobile transporter in front of an abandoned factory, powerfully contrasts this postindustrial society with its predecessor. Igor and his father believe that their “enterprise” employing these aliens cheaply will reward the two of them in a community where steady jobs in traditional workplaces have all but disappeared. This exploitation of others for personal gain and the disposal of Amidu’s body suggest a chilling parallel to the Dutroux murders, which occurred in the Charleroi area of Wallonia and for many Belgians were symptomatic of a general breakdown of social and moral values. Charleroi is also the setting for a comparable recent film, The Carriers Are Waiting (Les convoyeurs attendant, 1999), a first feature by documentarist Benoît Mariage. In following the fortunes of a similarly dysfunctional family unit, for whom this kind of bricolage has become a virtual way of life, the film takes the struggle for economic survival in The Promise and Rosetta to an absurdly humorous point. In the context of a magazine interview, Jean-Pierre Dardenne guides dramatist and fellow Seraing native Jean-Marie Piemme on a walking tour of familiar parts

Anxiety, Memory, and Place in Belgian Cinema

of the town. The dialogue between the two artists explores their sense of memory and place as they agree on the crucial role of physical space in structuring mental space. Both consider public spaces – such as squares and bridges, where large communal gatherings occurred in their youth – to represent the most important places of memory, especially in their symbolic connection with the expression of collective will and power by a formerly proud, defiant, and often militant Walloon working class. Both also perceive a “double scenography” in the landscape of present day Seraing, an aspect the Dardennes sought to capture in The Promise: “To film in places built to last and in temporary places next to them. To try to show this evolution.”4 If we may attribute the first of these places to the solid architectural and social fabrics of industrial plant and traditional working-class life, the second is clearly in accord with the fragile, adaptable, disposable quality of postmodern space and the expedient, dislocated culture of late capitalist society that spawns it. Jean-Pierre Dardenne explains that his and his brother’s three most recent features, like their earlier Armand Gatti-influenced documentaries, continue to illuminate the crisis of Walloon decline but now emphasize storytelling and characterization over ideological statement. These later films particularly explore how individuals deal mentally and physically with an uneasy hiatus between old and new ways of life. Thus in The Promise and Rosetta the Dardennes foreground the bodies of their young protagonists, seemingly always in motion, as determinants of the visual style of the films. This is especially true of the close-up, hand-held camerawork in Rosetta, where shot composition and editing rhythm are dictated by the relentless, repetitive physicality of Rosetta’s daily routine. While the postindustrial landscape of the Liege conurbation functions more than before as an emotional correlative to dominant trajectories of narrative and character development, the “double scenography” of Seraing continues to haunt every shot, however cursory, of boardedup windows, grey streets, derelict lots, concrete jungles, and high-rise buildings. Igor and Rosetta literally embody that environment. In every word, gesture, movement, and expression on their curiously innocent yet worldly faces, we see the visible traces of social history and memory. As Piemme astutely observes, “The body is the habitat of history”.5 Lieve Spaas is of the opinion that The Promise and Rosetta differ from Falsch and Je pense à vous in that they offer no sense of the past, abandoning memory for “a new cinematic language to express a new paradigm, where identity emerges in the present.”6 While it is true that neither film makes any direct reference to the past, either in script or flashback form, the continuing engagement with a sense of the past expressed in the Dardenne-Piemme dialogue would seem to support my view that both films carry the unconscious weight of memory, one that is often buried or repressed. I suggest this in the spirit of Marc Bloch’s “prudently retrogressive” historiographic method, whereby the past cannot be understood without a sense of the present, and vice versa. If past and present coexist within the flow of “real” or “lived” time (a basic tenet of “new” history), then memory is always present

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in conscious or unconscious forms. If, as Piemme suggests, “every dive into the past is a reconstruction made from and for the present”7, then do not all present representations in turn depend upon an implicit or explicit sense of the past? As we move northward from Wallonia to Brussels, we remain nonetheless in familiar thematic territory. Brussels Transit is also about displacement and immigration, in this case of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. There were 40,000 Jews in Belgium in 1947: 5,000 citizens, 20-25,000 legal expatriates, and around 10,000 transients. Despite governmental aid, many of the non-citizens faced serious problems of integration and assimilation, a situation worsened in a difficult period of economic and social reconstruction by a surge of xenophobia tinged by residual Nazi propaganda.8 In Le Goff’s words, “the Jewish people are the people of memory par excellence”9. Based on the true story of a single family, Brussels Transit is also a work of collective memory, a contribution to the documentation of the Jewish experience in World War II and the Holocaust. Yet the film breaks with the received history and memory of those events, which Szlingerbaum never directly mentions, though they are implied in everything we see or hear. Instead, the story begins in Poland in 1947, recounting Szlingerbaum’s young parents’ and his twoyear old brother’s ten-day journey by train through Czechoslovakia, Germany, and France to Brussels, where with the help of relatives they abandon their Central American transit visa and make a new home. For this family, as for the itinerant workers in The Promise, a precarious existence after their arrival becomes the norm, defined by short-term renewable visas, rationed food, lack of work permits, shared domestic spaces, and the monotony of a daily routine organized wholly around survival against the odds. As isolated foreigners – and Jews – of extremely limited means, what little contact they have with the native population is restricted to various awkward encounters that heighten their sense of marginality and lack of communication with others. These encounters include a frustrating exchange in a corner bakery, a tense parcelling-out of kitchen space with a haughty neighbor, and a disjointed conversation about their status with a policeman who comes to the door. One of the most vivid scenes is at the bakery. The young woman has prepared farfeleh at home, but her kitchen has no oven. With no knowledge of French she tries vainly to persuade the proprietress to bake it for her, later throwing the whole dish into the canal in anger and despair. We do not see any stage of the family’s journey to Belgium, we only hear about it in the voice-over narration (subtitled in French) by Szlingerbaum’s mother. This narration in unscripted Yiddish (published later in French translation) is the core of the film’s emotional and historical resonance, and the visual images exist in counterpoint to it. Its language gives Brussels Transit an extra dimension both as a rare example of Yiddish cinema and as a memory-text that seeks to preserve an endangered culture within Judaism. Though diegetic sound bolsters a mood of

Anxiety, Memory, and Place in Belgian Cinema

documentary realism, the film has no music and little dialogue, further keeping the narration to the fore. Szlingerbaum permits the flow of memory to express itself naturally in the quiet, even tone of his mother’s account, one nonetheless not without moments of humor and sadness. At times the account is extremely precise, at other times vague and forgetful. The narrator occasionally succumbs to fatigue or loss of concentration; at one point she exclaims in French, “Samy, that’s all for today. Please!”10 By displaying a preference for long takes, frontal shots, and sound-image disjunctions, Szlingerbaum further distances the film from conventional fictional forms. Reflecting the idiosyncrasies of the narration, some images match it, others do not. These images have a meditative quality, depicting specific incidents but also dwelling on the monotony of daily routine. For instance, as the mother recalls the journey from Poland to Belgium, the director slowly intercuts shots of the three refugees arriving at the Gare du Midi in Brussels with obliquely related shots of passing trains, the station, and its immediate surroundings. Though these sites are recognizable to those familiar with them, Szlingerbaum carefully ignores any identifying signs, further allowing him to abstract his geographical context. By shooting entirely on location in Brussels, using simple dress and plain interior decor and employing no archival footage, Szlingerbaum frees his film from any tendency to represent a historical spectacle. He concentrates instead on giving expression to subjective memories of a period’s impact upon a close-knit group of individuals – and, by implication, upon all families, Jewish or otherwise, fleeing from the devastations of war. The film becomes a loose dramatic reconstruction of events recounted by the mother and interpreted visually by her son. However, this double play of memory is not personally synchronous, since the boy we see arriving in Brussels in 1947 is Szlingerbaum’s brother, the filmmaker having been born two years later. The continuity of Szlingerbaum’s own living memory is thus limited to a period after the events shown in the first part of the film. In its formal strategies and exploration of Jewish exodus, the film resembles Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1976), in which random images of New York accompany the voice of Akerman’s mother recounting family news from Brussels to her expatriate daughter. Szlingerbaum had earlier been an assistant to Akerman (who was executive producer of Brussels Transit) and to Boris Lehman, with whom he forms a trio of filmmakers deeply concerned by their Jewish identity and memories of their Brussels upbringing. The train stations of European cities and their surrounding districts continue to reflect a geopolitics of displacement by war, poverty, and political oppression. For the poor immigrant population of today, as for Szlingerbaum’s own family in the wake of the Holocaust, the station has a double meaning. As the initial site of a new beginning in a foreign land, it symbolizes a decisive psychological and cultural step forward. Yet the network of rails leading to and from the station also represents an umbilical cord keeping these newcomers in contact, however tangentially, with their places of origin and their past. Lack of confidence in or acceptance by their host society

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encourages many to stay close to the points of arrival and departure, as if fearful of venturing further into the unknown and distancing themselves from the point of possible return. This double meaning is particularly ironic in Szlingerbaum’s historical context, since Jews and other persecuted minorities soon discovered that the train was for some a means of escape and survival but for others the principal vehicle of deportation to their deaths. Gare du Midi and Treblinka: the peacetime promise of the former and the wartime “promise” of the latter, whose mock façade gaily welcomed new inmates to a camp of no return. Beyond the particular relevance of the Gare du Midi district to the memories recounted in the film, Szlingerbaum displays a fascination with train images and their associations that has attended both realist and nonrealist cinematic modes from the startling actuality of the Lumières’ first films to the staccato, high velocity, time-lapsed images of Wong Kar-Wai’s postmodern world. Szlingerbaum’s documentary style usurps the traditional monumentality of the station, rendering it instead an ordinary, uninspiring place. With subtle irony he thus dedramatizes the extraordinary arrival of his family in Brussels. At the same time his gentle, cadenced montage of the station interior and of trains at night has a hypnotic, oneiric quality often found in the canvases of fellow Belgian artists Paul Delvaux and René Magritte (and of de Chirico, too). Like these painters, Szlingerbaum defamiliarizes the station and its surrounding area in order to reinvest them with the emotional value of a dreamscape, a locus of enigmatic hopes and fears, of strange journeys, long waitings, and brief encounters in silent, empty, timeless space. The cityscape of central Brussels changed greatly in Szlingerbaum’s short lifetime. Anxieties generated by the transformation of old neighborhoods into wastelands of concrete, glass, and steel – as well as the consequent effects upon their inhabitants’ sense of community and identity – have been addressed by a number of other Belgian filmmakers. The approach may be serious, as in André Ernotte’s High Street (Rue Haute, 1976), or in Magnum Begynasium Bruxellense (1978) where Lehman focuses on the history of the Beguinage, another radically redeveloped district in the heart of the city. Occasionally the approach is lighthearted or satirical, as in Benoît Lamy’s Home Sweet Home (1973) or in Kaat Beels’ Bruxelles mon amour (2000). Even Man Bites Dog (C’est arrivé près de chez vous, 1992), an acerbic parody of violence in the media by Remy Belvaux, André Bonzel, and Benoît Poelvoorde, “is studded with allusions to the demise of the old ‘people’s Brussels,’ as when [. . .] a friend [of the protagonist], complains that she has been forced out of the Sablon area [. . .] by property developers.”11 One of the most infamous of these redevelopments was the opening in 1952 of the “train station valley,” a largely underground rail link between the Gare du Nord and the Gare du Midi. This project involved wholesale demolition of medieval sections of central Brussels and their subsequent replacement by a succession of stark office buildings, parking garages, and roadways. We have seen how the space at the southern end of the “valley” (Gare du Midi) articulates the relationship

Anxiety, Memory, and Place in Belgian Cinema

between place and memory in Szlingerbaum’s film. It is a “site of memory” (lieu de mémoire) in Pierre Nora’s sense of “any significant entity [...] which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community.”12 The entire “valley” functions as a site of memory as well, having defined the history of various immigrant groups that settled around Nord or Midi, but also having redefined the idea of Brussels in a highly charged and persistent debate over the transformation of a historic, identifiably Belgian City into the capital of European power. As we circle out from Brussels into the surrounding region, we realize that Flanders too has faced particular anxieties in the course of its slow and often painful rise from subordinate status to a position of political, linguistic, and cultural equality with French-speaking Belgium. The danger of ideological extremism present in nationalist visions of Flemish empowerment and autonomy has remained one of the most persistent of these anxieties, especially in the historical context of collaboration with the Germans during two World Wars. Though collaboration had been an issue during World War I and did not occur solely in Flanders, its recurrence in World War II followed directly on the emergence of militant Flemish politics in the interwar years in the form of right-wing parties such as the Vlaams Nationaal Verbond and the national-socialist De Vlag. After the Liberation, 340,000 Belgians were accused of collaboration, of whom 58,000 were found guilty and 241 executed. The issue lingered in another national anxiety, in this case over the ambiguous wartime position of Leopold III that culminated in his abdication in 1953. A collective memory so sensitive that it was rarely discussed for many years, the “Royal Question” recently began to be addressed in Belgian literature and film in the work, for instance, of writer Pierre Mertens and filmmaker Christian Mesnil. The issue of Flemish separatism did not disappear. In the 1960s “language wars” between French- and Flemish-speaking communities became the major anxiety of the Belgian people. Despite his disavowal of political filmmaking, Andre Delvaux’s magic realist One Night... a Train (Un soir, un train, 1968) touched on an issue so contentious at the time – following the division of Leuven University along ethnolinguistic lines – that it brought down the national government later that same year. A decade later, when Delvaux made Woman in a Twilight Garden (re-released in a French version as Femme entre chien et loup, 1979), Flemish nationalist politics was beginning again to harden its stance with the emergence of the Vlaams Blok party. Breaking a longstanding taboo in Belgian cinema on the discussion of wartime collaboration, Delvaux felt a need to warn his fellow Belgians about a potential resurgence of fascism by representing on film a period in which an earlier flirtation with it had taken place. His boldness paved the way for Hugo Claus, Flanders’ most renowned living writer, to break a corresponding literary taboo in The Sorrow of Belgium (Het verdriet van België, 1983), a highly

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provocative novel filmed as a serial for Belgian television in 1994 by the Swiss director Claude Goretta. Delvaux’s film focuses on three young natives of Antwerp: Lieve, her husband Adriaan, and her wartime lover François. The film moves from 1939, when Lieve marries Adriaan, to 1952, when she leaves him for an uncertain but independent future. Throughout the war she remains in her Antwerp home, torn between Adriaan who, committed to Aryan ideology, is fighting for the Germans on the Eastern Front, and François, the resistance fighter whom she had been hiding from the authorities. François helps Adriaan escape severe punishment for collaboration on his return at the end of the war, but Adriaan soon reverts to his obsessions, reclusively devoting himself to the composition of a lengthy selfdefense. Now with a son to care for, Lieve finally rejects both men in her life along with their conflicting beliefs. Though at first glance an unlikely comparison, Woman in a Twilight Garden resembles Brussels Transit in several respects. Both films deal with the aftermath of World War II, both decline the spectacular lure of “History” for a more personal meditation centered on a woman’s experience, and both confine the locus of memory to a single place. As for the creative cooperation in this instance, Delvaux and author Ivo Michiels had previously worked together on Met [With] Dieric Bouts (1975), Delvaux’s television documentary on the Renaissance painter, another original meditation on Flemish identity, memory, and place. Delvaux explains how they approached the making of Woman in a Twilight Garden: I came to an agreement with Michiels as to how we would do the screenplay and the detail of the film we were to make together. Simply, I had asked him, as a Flemish author, to write this screenplay on the basis of weekly meetings between us. And he wrote down what we discussed. And I accepted that he would publish it under his own name, since it was his writing. But it’s a screenplay conceived by the two of us. As a result, we may say that the formula used in the credits is correct: the screenplay is by Michiels and myself, but it has been written by Michiels. 13

Delvaux’s only modification of Michiels’ work, carried out in front of the camera with the help of his three main actors, was to give greater balance to their roles by lessening Michiels’ emphasis on Adriaan’s character. However, Delvaux requested no rewrites and changed nothing in the script, wherein he claimed to find all that he needed to shoot the film. This cooperation yielded two symbiotic texts: Michiels’ 1977 prizewinning novel, Een tuin tussen hond en wolf (“Garden between Dog and Wolf”) and Delvaux’s film. Michiels’ title stresses the wartime symbols of dog (defender) and wolf (aggressor) rather than the other meaning (“twilight garden”) conveyed by the title when translated literally into French and incorporated into the English release title, Woman in a Twilight Garden. Eventually the film was called “Woman between Dog and Wolf” in both Dutch and French, the title having been changed for French distribution purposes.

Anxiety, Memory, and Place in Belgian Cinema

As in Brussels Transit, a double play of memory structures the film. In this instance a spatial discrepancy exists between the two sets of personal memories since Michiels, unlike Delvaux, spent the wartime period in the Antwerp area and so was able to imbue his script with the authenticity of local experience. Memory in the film is therefore based on parallel recollections that Delvaux transfers to the perspective of his main characters, especially Lieve, whose viewpoint is the focus of the film. This results in less dependence on what Foucault calls “total” history and more on a “general” principle that “turns to novel ways of making historical evidence intelligible in terms of particular problems.”14 In this way Delvaux’s film, like Szlingerbaum’s, constructs a “counter-memory” whose main characteristic is a heterodoxical, albeit chronological, historical view. Unlike in conventional war films, there are no public heroes, famous speeches, or epic scenes of combat. Nor is there any martial music; instead we hear popular tunes performed on radios or in bars and at wedding parties. Colors are not those of flags, uniforms, and panoramic landscapes, but of clothes, interiors, and gardens. By using color and sound thus to express nuances of memory, Delvaux avoids “spectacle elements [that] tend towards a generalized, extrapersonal perspective in portraying historical cause,”15 offering instead an intimate, painterly chronicle of private lives under circumstances of personal and historical duress. It is as if Lieve, the “woman in a twilight garden” becomes the equivalent, in Delvaux’s filmic eye, of a still life by Vermeer. As Szlingerbaum’s film restricts itself to a small area of central Brussels, so Delvaux’s film (other than the scene of Lieve’s uncomfortable visit to her rural relatives) stays in a single Antwerp neighborhood. Apart from several brief scenes representative of wartime history (air raids, round-ups, partisan actions, Liberation parades) in adjacent streets and squares, most of the film’s action unfolds within Lieve’s private space. In a further similarity to Brussels Transit, Lieve exhibits a strong vein of selfprotectiveness. As Szlingerbaum’s mother remembers a resigned domestic existence at least to have been safer than an engagement with society at large, so Lieve clings to the sanctuary of her house and garden, whose walls shield her from the madness beyond. And while Lieve might seem to be freer than Szlingerbaum’s mother to choose her way of life, she finds herself as trapped by her personal relationships as she is by the war. She cannot prevent that external madness from entering her home when it becomes a refuge, first for a fugitive François and, after the war, for an increasingly uncompanionable Adriaan. A potent symbol of fecundity, rootedness to the land, and religious faith, the pear tree in their garden combines the values of domesticity with those of the Flemish cause. Driven to the brink of insanity by the collapse of his dreams, Adriaan chops down the tree in a gesture as desperately defiant as that of the raped girl’s father in Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan, 1960), who strips a birch of its boughs in an effort to purify himself before avenging the crime against his child. Delvaux depicts the consequences of Adriaan’s extremism but carefully avoids a simplistic Manichaeism by subjecting the opposing ideology to a measure of

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critical rememoration. The idealism that drives François in war becomes cynical ambition after the war’s end. Delvaux also demystifies, if more gently, the whole memory of the resistance and the process of reconstruction. We witness ruthless partisan recriminations: for instance, women who had associated with Germans get their heads shaven and are openly humiliated. This scene is reminiscent of one in Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959), another unconventional film about memories of World War II, made by a director whose sensibility has much in common with that of Delvaux, and which again involved a creative cooperation between filmmaker and writer (Marguerite Duras). In her preface to the text of the film, Duras describes a sympathetic relationship not unlike that between Delvaux and Michiels: “Readers should not be surprised that Resnais’ ‘pictorial’ contribution is practically never described in this work. My role is limited to describing those elements from which Resnais made his film.”16 Nor does Delvaux’s film spare the Catholic Church, as it portrays the parish priest who acts as mentor to Lieve and Adriaan as a mediocre, unreliable opportunist. Working largely through the low clergy, the Flemish bishops, motivated by a fear of Bolshevism, encouraged susceptible young men like Adriaan to pursue a pseudomystical blend of patriotism and faith by joining the Flemish battalion of the Wehrmacht, yet abandoned them once the tide had turned against the Nazis in 1943, swiftly consigning the matter to history. This collective amnesia lasted for a long time, and Delvaux found the Church still reluctant to discuss the history of that period more than thirty years later, when he decided to make his film. These films of the Dardennes, Szlingerbaum, and Delvaux reveal complex and unsettling relationships between anxiety, memory, and place that characterize the history of Belgium and of its constituent peoples. By offering distinctive and personalized representations of a number of these anxieties, I believe these films (and others like them) have helped to open up discussion of issues that Belgians have often found difficult to confront. Two recent films support this view. Julie Vrebos’ Le bal masqué (Out of Range, 1998) is a thinly veiled dramatization of the notorious spate of “supermarket slayings” carried out in the late 1980s by a gang of urban terrorists, a series of events that contributed greatly to a growing feeling of malaise on the part of Belgians regarding the state of their society and the condition of Belgium itself. It needed only the Dutroux murders and their mishandling by the authorities to precipitate a huge crisis of faith in the integrity of the Belgian establishment. Marian Handwerker’s Pure Fiction, based on the Dutroux affair, was released barely two years afterwards in 1998, suggesting that at least in the medium of cinema the prevalence of collective amnesia in Belgian history seemed to be coming to an end.

Anxiety, Memory, and Place in Belgian Cinema

Train of life: Samy Szlingerbaum recalls his mother’s post-Holocaust narrative in Brussels Transit

Ethical awakening in a depressed urban milieu: Jérémie Renier in the Dardenne Brothers’ The Promise

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N otes 1 | Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 54. 2 | Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 37. 3 | Lieve Spaas, The Francophone Film: A Struggle for Identity (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 8. 4 | “Café des citoyens. Un dialogue entre Jean-Pierre Dardenne et Jean-Marie Piemme,” Le carnet et les instants 101 (1998): 23. All translations from this source are my own. 5 | Ibid., 24. 6 | Spaas, The Francophone Film, 40. 7 | “Café des citoyens,” 26. 8 | See Willy Bok, “Bruxelles-Transit. Les immigrés juifs d’après-guerre,” in Samy Szlingerbaum, Bruxelles-Transit (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1989), 89-91. 9 | Le Goff, History and Memory, 69. 10 | Bok, “Bruxelles-Transit. Les immigrés juifs d’après-guerre,” 25. 11 | Keith Reader, “Belgian Film Comedy and National Identity,” in Why Europe? Problems of Culture and Identity, ed. Joe Andrew, Malcolm Crook, Diana Holmes, Eva Kolinsky (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), Vol. 2, 32. 12 | Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), Vol. 1, xvii. 13 | My translation from an interview. See my article “From Book to Film: André Delvaux’s Alchemy of the Image,” French Review Vol. 67, No. 5 (April 1994): 817-18. 14 | Mark Cousins and Athar Hussain, Michel Foucault (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 82. 15 | Leger Grindon, Shadows on the Past: Studies in the Historical Fiction Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 6. 16 | Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, trans. Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 7.

Varieties of Smallness A Swedish Art Film (Persona), a Polish Documentary (Hear My Cry) Paul Coates

Since “smallness” is always implicitly relational, this paper proposes to make the role of the relationship explicit by juxtaposing two works belonging to categories that seldom bulk large in the context of the world’s cinematic output. One is a documentary (and, worse still, from a country whose Slavic, i.e. “largely unknown,” nature renders it even smaller on a world cultural stage whose interest in Slavic documentaries, and even features, is unlikely to extend beyond ones involving those most bankable themes, the Holocaust and Nazis). The other is an art-film, also from a “marginal” country, on “the edge of Europe,” with a small population, and for many years, in international eyes, a virtual one-man film industry. The documentary is indeed little-known outside Poland: Maciej Drygas’ 1991 film Hear My Cry (Usłyszcie mój krzyk), concerning the political protest of the self-immolation of Ryszard Siwiec, which is far less well-known than the near-contemporary protest of Jan Palach in another Slavic country temporarily rendered “large” in the world’s eyes by the media attention following its 1968 invasion. (Although this is not a difference Drygas seeks to explain, it surely has some connection with the greater sense of tragedy usually associated with loss of a young life, such as that of Palach.) The other/art film, however, stems from a Swedish film industry often viewed as indeed virtually a one-man enterprise, and by the man in question: Ingmar Bergman. It is the Bergman film that meets most precisely the requirements of an art-cinema recipe (to use barbarous words to indicate the openness of the notion of art cinema simplification into a formula involving sex plus ambiguity, though often just one of the two will do), Persona (1966). Consequently, my title ought perhaps to have spoken, in italics, of the Swedish art film; of a film that indeed bulks large internationally, for all the extreme modesty of its production values. My comparison will focus in particular on the works’ shared concern with the extreme suffering and political status of self-immolation, which in each case is a small moment of screen-time with enormous repercussions (forwards from an

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early moment in Bergman’s case, backwards from the ending in that of Drygas). First, however, a brief interlude on smallness.

Theore tical interlude A useful aid to conceptualizing the status of film in relation to ideas of small nationhood can be found in Milan Kundera’s The Curtain, a series of reflections on literature and Central Europeanness whose very title suggests that despite the disappearance of the barbed wire of an “Iron Curtain” that once divided Europe, a division persists (one Eva Hoffman views as extending even into conceptions of temporality 1). Kundera distinguishes two contexts within which an art-work may be placed: the “small context” that is the history of its creator’s nation; and the “large context” of “the supranational history of its art.”2 Outlining some of the differential perceptions to which various art-forms are subject, Kundera notes that whereas audiences generally view music in a large context, attaching little importance to the question of the language a composer spoke, literature is usually considered in a “small context,” as dependent upon the nationallyinflected element native tongue. Here the position of film becomes ambiguous: usually set in a single place or language, it is transmitted nevertheless through the potentially “supra-nationalizing” medium of the image, which has the potential to circulate much as visual art does: to enjoy legibility at a level above or below those of language and culture, as did the stained glass windows scanned by the illiterate worshippers of a medieval church, embodying what D.W. Griffith termed “the Esperanto of the eye.” (Moreover, to revert to Kundera’s concern with music, films are usually underpinned by scores whose possibilities of international circulation are both indicated and enhanced by the fact that CD formats, unlike DVD ones, are region free, as if a Schengen accord in the realm of the auditory allowed music to circulate across borders flung as open wide as the windows that disclose tunes in the utopian association of summer and music.) Artists seeking the widest possible dissemination of their works may cast them in languages that circulate most widely (particularly English and French), possibly shaping them in a manner congruent with international visual culture. Such would be the case with such “small-nation” directors as Poland’s Krzysztof Kieślowski or Denmark’s Lars von Trier, both of whom also employed a range of other “universalizing” tactics, be it the Kieślowskian high seriousness of reflection upon texts of fundamental significance to wider Western civilization, such as the Decalogue and the maxims of the French revolution (though the height of the seriousness may owe more to the director’s co-scenarist, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, than the ironic Kieślowski himself), or von Trier’s inventively provocative tactics, of which Mette Hjort has written.3 It is hardly surprising that these directors should also tap strategies of abstraction involving both color and eros (with color being the dominant and eros the subdominant in Kieślowski, and the role of the two factors being inverted in

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von Trier’s case): strategies whose relationship to processes of globalization has been studied suggestively by Brian Price. In his intriguing essay “Color, the Formless, and Cinematic Eros,” Price postulates a growing tendency in recent cinema to privilege color patterns which either overlay moments in a narrative – as in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Millenium Mambo (2001) – or interrupt it, in the manner of the abstract compositions by Jeremy Blake interpolated into Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love (2002). For Price, this privileging of color amounts to “an undoing of form that begins at the level of eros, but extends outwards into the aesthetics of global consumption.”4 “Eros” in this context may be read as invoking not just the sensuous appeal of color but the mingling of forms that confounds line. Unfortunately, Price’s argument crossreferences only the Adornian theory of the modernist artwork as a counterweight to social oppression, ignoring the same theorist’s interwoven reflections on its imbrication with the social norms and forms it opposes.5 Thus Price’s contention that “the subjective expansion of color abstraction counters the increasingly conventionalized narrative form of global cinema”6 simplifies the relationship between abstraction and globalization: after all, color’s ability to appeal at a greater distance than line combines with its modernist-inspired liberation from context to enhance its availability for consumption beyond its point of origin, while the appeal of the erotic chimes with the increasingly sexualized forms of modern consumer culture. Thus the “escape from the local” many small nation filmmakers seek can also involve a movement from a modernism with oppositional potential to a postmodernism in which that potential is attenuated. This may well deepen the commodification in which all postmodern culture and consciousness industries are involved inextricably. Thus in this context it may be worthwhile investigating what is in danger of being lost, by juxtaposing a film-text widely deemed modernist with a documentary whose formal interests seem to me more modernist than postmodern, as they preserve modernism’s concern for truth (abstraction and distortion being used to designate the untruth of State-sponsored discourse; and the truth in question being modernist in the sense of complex, even bordering on the ineffable). The documentary in question manages to do this not only because of the habitual truth-telling functions associated with the form, but also to some extent because it emerges from an early-1990s Polish culture still only beginning its integration into global economic structures whose commodification even then was more innocent than it is now.

L imits of representation : I ngmar B ergman ’s P ersona as an interte x t of M acie j D rygas ’ H ear M y C ry On September 8, 1968, during a Harvest Festival celebration at the Stadium of a Decade in Warsaw, Ryszard Siwiec, a Polish man aged sixty-eight, immolated himself amidst 100,000 people/spectators as a protest against the policies of a

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Polish regime he saw as characterized by an oppressiveness, hypocrisy, and – above all else – hatred threatening to engulf the world: after all, earlier in the year, Warsaw police had brutally attacked protesting students, and – of course – the Soviet Union had despatched “fraternal aid” (including that of the Polish armed forces) to end the Prague Spring. As his body burned, his statements – onlookers describe him as having criticized the regime – probably included one he had recorded several days earlier: “hear my cry, the cry of a grey and common man, the son of a nation who loved his and everyone else’s freedom more than anything else, more than his own life. Come to your senses!” Twenty three years later, this event, once wrapped in an official conspiracy of silence, became the subject of one of the most powerful of all the documentaries to emerge from a Polish tradition rich in strong work by such figures as Krzysztof Karabasz, Krzysztof Kieślowski, and Marcel Łoziński. Drygas’ film rivals the work of these other, older documentarists in its thoughtfulness and formal complexity. The profundity of the socio-political, philosophical and anthropological issues raised by its subject matter, however, may lend it even greater resonance than theirs. If I consider it here primarily in terms of its similarities to, and divergences from, a film with which it seems to be, or can logically be placed, in dialogue – Ingmar Bergman’s Persona –, it is because of that shared resonance. After all, in Bergman’s film the image of the burning bonze viewed by Elisabet Vogler has the status of a generative trauma, a self-destruction that both reflects and seeks to reconfigure the destruction of selfhood by a traumatizing world, rather as art may have functioned once for Vogler, who no longer finds meaning in it. If Drygas’ documentary similarly takes one “beyond art,” this is not just in the manner of the many documentaries described as aspiring to transparency, selfeffacement and deliberate artlessness, as its formal dislocations and distancing devices themselves question the comprehensibility and representability of events, and display great virtuosity. Whether or not this lends Drygas’ documentary the status of the sort of critical sublation of art often discerned in Bergman’s film – in the Hegelian sense of both denying and incorporating it – will not be considered here, though the question may haunt any viewer of this great film.

Two films about suffering and representation Strange though it may seem to mention a Polish documentary of 1991 alongside Bergman’s film of 1966, a viewer may well find the later work spinning a series of filaments connecting it to the earlier one, and doing so from the very outset. The filaments attach themselves to such elements as: the roles played by the work’s openings; their use both of burning objects and of the most powerful image of burning, that of a man in flames; the significance for Drygas’ film of Bach, whose music meant so much to Bergman, and whose work is mediated here through its electronic simulation and distortion by Paweł Szymański, in a pastiche whose

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agonized quality is anything but postmodern; the understanding of language as shot through with inarticulacy; and the use of repetition and the close-up. Nevertheless, some fundamental contrasts should be noted at the outset: whereas Bergman intertwines eros and thanatos, Drygas’ work unfolds under the aegis of thanatos alone, and so is less likely to appeal widely or escape the straitjacket of particular smallness habitually imposed on non-English-language documentaries. Moreover, whereas Drygas seeks to decipher the icon of political suffering that is self-immolation, Bergman’s film reserves the effort of contemplation for another document, the Warsaw Ghetto photograph scanned by Elisabet, and its upshot remains obscure. One should begin with the beginning, as each film employs an enigmatic opening that later becomes readable as both a flash-forward and a source of metaphors and formal distortions, though these are of course far more extensive in Persona. In each case, the credits appear to wall off this opening from a work that then enters a far more conventional phase: becoming primarily fictional chamber drama, in Bergman’s case, and primarily interview-based, “interactive” documentary, in that of Drygas. Drygas’ documentary investigation in fact begins as a drama documentary restaging, so its separation from the film’s remainder is justified formally; and, likewise, Bergman begins with one form of film – an avant-garde one – succeeded by credits marking the border of the art-film that follows. Bergman’s famous fractured pre-credit sequence may rehearse elements of his earlier films as fragments shored against sick-bed ruin, but it also prefigures the rapidly tumbling images that accompany the burning out of the film mid-way through it. Drygas’ images of uniformed men removing files leaves their activity slightly enigmatic, as a wall fills the bottom portion of the screen, smoke rising above it. We may deduce that they are burning these files, but the camera is placed strategically to lend the image a metaphorical and multivalent quality. Among other things, it indicates that even seemingly self-evident and readable actions may prove not to be so. The viewer may relocate this image later in the film as one of the security service officers confiscating and destroying the files of Ryszard Siwiec immediately after his hospitalization, but they may also be engaged in the 1985 destruction of the legal records. Like Bergman’s opening, therefore, it may be said to appear twice, even though the second appearance is in the mind’s eye of the spectator. For any viewer aware of the fate of the film’s central subject, however, the flame points towards its key event, Siwiec’s self-immolation. That flame’s initial bare-visibility above the wall anticipates the suppression by both state and consciousness of that traumatic event. In retrospect, the film may seem to have gravitated inevitably towards it, but the initial blocking of information by the wall creates a sense that this event may remain a black hole, unrepresentable: because records may indeed have been destroyed (indeed, only seven seconds – 168 frames – of discarded newsreel survived in a discarded canister enigmatically labelled “film of burning man”); because the work may well prefer to leave it unrepresented, as it only inches towards it, and tact and metaphor may well veil

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it; and because two interviewees speak of it as somehow beyond description and outside consciousness. The first interviewee to describe the self-immolation as resisting description had been a radio commentator at the time. He speaks of the lack of any need to describe it then, as the commotion around it was drowned by the music of the folk-dances, and did not disrupt a speech by Polish United Workers’ Party leader Władysław Gomułka: had it done so, the leader might have hesitated, and this would have required an on-air explanation. Nevertheless, the possibility that this commentator’s apparently humane words may be partly self-serving emerges from their juxtaposition with a more brutal and cynical statement by a cameraman, who mentions the existence of instructions regarding what to say and what not; certain things would not be published, and in any case would only cause trouble for anyone mentioning them. In this context, the radio announcer’s description of the protest as lost in the music acquires an air of self-exoneration, shifting any blame from himself, as well as of self-indulgent literariness. The second interviewee, however – a blonde female not identified in the film, but figuring in the script as Grażyna N. (and in the final credits as Grażyna Niezgoda) –, having been a child at the time, can forgo any such self-protective evasion. The evasion she describes characterizes consciousness itself. She says the incident failed to register in her mind, assuming a status akin to that of a railway accident. Since another interviewee, a lady in charge of children at the time, reports bundling them away from the vicinity of Siwiec, the child’s failure to register the event may also reflect adults’ deliberate blocking of its perception, and their own inability to find a means of categorizing it. Thus the questions of language and representation that pervade Persona are present in Drygas’ film also. As noted above, metaphor is present from the outset. When the opening shots of uniformed militiamen carrying papers down to a hidden place below a wall are followed by a shot of flames and then one of a swaying crowd, one may recall Elias Canetti’s description of flame itself as a crowd symbol.7 A juxtaposition of images possibly intended simply to lay out the main elements of the incipient work may acquire the metaphorical force of an Eisensteinian montage-doublet, even though – as Bronisława Stolarska points out – Drygas is in many respects anti-Eisensteinian.8 Moreover, as in Bergman’s work, an opening sequence apparently hermetically sealed off by credits then breaks into the main body of the work, undermining its conventions with an avant-garde audio-visual vocabulary (I will discuss in due course the role of the music, which also is shot through with an avant-garde dissonance) specifically forged to evoke shock, horror and awestruck contemplation, and functioning as a return of the repressed in, and for, multiple senses. The principles of formalization strongly present in the beginning gradually infiltrate, and begin to dominate, both works. In Drygas’ work, the move is one from metaphorical opening to fearsome reality. The link is an implicit reference to Heinrich Heine’s well-known assertion that those who begin by burning books (the files of the opening sequence) end up burning people. The fact that, of course, in the historical time-line these actions

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occur after Siwiec’s self-immolation, underlines the significance of Drygas’ arrangement of his images and gives his opening prophetic force. The frequency with which Heine’s statement has been applied to the Third Reich that did indeed begin with book-burning and culminate in the crematoria of the death-camps implicitly aligns the evils of post-war Poland with those of National Socialism, indicating Drygas’ deep sympathy with his subject, who would have seen both as manifesting an inhumanity threatening to engulf the world. The principle of stylization, apparently restricted to this prologue, reasserts itself in the slow motion and anamorphic transformation of the folk-dances that distorts their natural rhythm and superficial appearance to suggest a world frozen under a dark spell.9 (Stolarska usefully likens it to the political paralysis within imitation folklore pilloried in Stanisław Wyspiański’s 1900 play The Wedding10, a key work in the Polish repertoire.) That visual stylization is accompanied by an auditory one, Szymański’s electronic recasting of a Bach-like harmony as jagged and halting. It is as if even the bright and colorful reality that blocked the perception of Siwiec’s action had begun to disclose the horror of its own implicit conformism, melting in the heat of the light he trained upon it. The persistence of these formalizing devices into the final screening of footage of Siwiec’s burning body holds its reality at a distance in recognition of the sacred, even taboo, nature of any representation of human death-throes. Meanwhile, in the context of its relations with Persona, the monochrome of Drygas’ film underlines the near-contemporaneity of the self-immolation of 1968 and the film of 1966. It too invites marginalization as that notorious sign of “smallness,” an absence of production values. The most obvious link between the films, meanwhile, is their common meditation on the meaning of a Buddhist monk’s self-immolation: a meditation rendered explicit in Drygas’ work, where it is conducted primarily by the highly-respected Catholic theologian and philosopher Father Józef Tischner, and implicit in Bergman’s work, which shows the actress Elisabet Vogler propelled into a corner by the shock-waves of the televised image of the monk’s burning body. The self-immolation prompts the following reflections by Tischner: “a Buddhist monk, by committing an act of self-immolation, decided to make a sacrifice full of pain. He wanted to state through his cry that he has something very important to say. Nothing in the world hurts more than a burn. By deciding to make such a sacrifice, a Buddhist monk committed an act of selfdestruction, but there is something creative in this act.” Later in the film, a doctor describing Siwiec’s hospital admission notes that when some people called Siwiec a madman and a psychopath, a colleague responded that such comments indicated how indoctrinated the Polish people had become: whereas a Buddhist who immolated himself in protest was declared saintly, a Pole acting thus was labelled insane. However, immediately after this a nurse reports that opinions among her colleagues were divided, and that in any case, even though they had been instructed by the Security Services to dial zero the moment Siwiec received

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visitors, no-one did so. Here, as elsewhere, the juxtaposed statements reveal the complexities and contradictions of Polish reactions. Indeed, the mere discernment of a creative element in suicide by a Catholic theologian indicates a complexity few might have expected. Thus Tischner can comment later that “conscience is the ultimate judge of what a man should and should not do. And if I should see that this was the voice of his conscience, I would have to acknowledge that.” Similarly, even though Siwiec saw himself as deeply rooted in a Polish tradition for which God, fatherland, and family are supreme values, at the same time Grażyna N. can suggest that the national failure to register the self-immolation – its categorization by her childhood self as akin to a train accident – may have been because, as she puts it, “suicide is considered so alien to Polish culture.” The question of the score also justifies comparison with Bergman, as it is well-known that the music of Bach constituted a touchstone of value for him. Drygas’ score may not be from Bach – it is the Partita III for orchestra and amplified harpsichord by Paweł Syzmański – but that piece itself reworks the vocabulary of a Bach partita, and up to the point of its identification in the final credits the viewer is likely to classify it as “Bach in a distorting mirror,” an auditory equivalent of the visual distortions of the Harvest Festival footage. If, for Bergman, Bach’s work threw a shaft of light across a world in the process of disintegration, distortions of his musical vocabulary would connote a corrosion of one of the primary repositories of value. Drygas’ use of Szymański’s electronic distortions of Bach harmonies appears to have a similar import. Drygas presents such harmony as inaccessible in a People’s Poland shot through with mendacity, with the dissonance between slogan and reality lambasted by Siwiec, as within it dance has been co-opted into an all-embracing illusion. Drygas’ opinion of the function of folk culture within the post-war socialist order would thus be as sarcastic as that voiced by the abovementioned Milan Kundera in his fictions. Furthermore, Drygas, in near-Adornian mood, may deem harmony obscene in the face of the extreme suffering Siwiec underwent. In any case, the question of the degree to which suffering can be articulated at all, be it by language or music, reverberates across the work. Thus his title – Hear my cry – dramatizes the ambiguity of an expression that is both articulate and inarticulate, both a rationally signifying word (note Tischner’s use of the same word – the Polish krzyk – in his description of Siwiec’s protest) and expressionistically distorted by suffering. This is because, even as, on the one hand, these words appear on the soundtrack as a quotation from a text of protest Siwiec recorded several days before his self-immolation, the Polish word krzyk means “scream” as well as cry. The importance of the scream to an Expressionist tradition stretching from Munch to Bergman, where language buckles under the pressure of extreme experience, goes without saying. As for the question of the close-up: much of the power of Bergman’s film famously emanates from Sven Nykvist’s arresting and seductive close-ups of the two main actresses, Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson. Drygas, by way of contrast, privileges the close-up not by extensive use but by reserving it for the film’s very

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last image. The whole film may thus be seen as a frequently interrupted, slow zoom towards the image of Siwiec’s face as his body burns. This image’s mere survival is extraordinary, as it is part of only seven seconds of film the censor cut from the Polish Film Chronicle record of the 1968 Harvest Festival, an off-cut which – unsurprisingly – was not even registered in its usual catalogue of cuts. Only as a result of Drygas’ enquiries did an employee of this archive turn up this minuscule roll of film marked in pencil “Man on fire.” Restored, it proved to be an image of Siwiec.11 Such is the reticence of the film that for much of its duration viewers may waver between suspecting that the self-immolation might never be shown (after all, the regime may have succeeded in destroying all visual traces) and sensing in the distorted music an ever-tensing pull towards deeper suffering. That pull strengthens however as portions of the footage showing spectators moving away – some watching, as if mesmerized – begin to appear. Still we do not see what they are seeing, though of course we know full well what it is. Like Bergman, Drygas is preoccupied with effects of repetition, and even as his camera draws closer, each forward movement simultaneously lurches back to the moment of revelation of the burning body of Siwiec: a strategy whose stretching of the few seconds of surviving footage deepens identification and nightmare, as the record of trauma jumps its groove repeatedly and normal temporal progression stutters. What can be described as a rational analysis of this image is simultaneously expressive and poetic, even metaphysical, the stop-start movement suggesting mimicry of the troubled condition of the national psyche. Ending on a freezeframe close-up of Siwiec’s face lends it devastating expressive and interrogative force. He stares straight at the camera, mouth open, words unheard. His face as it were burns out the film, much as trauma appeared to burn a hole in the middle of Bergman’s film itself, the event seeming to contaminate its representation. If, for Astrid Söderbergh Widding, the face in Bergman is pre-eminently “the place where speech is born,”12 it is also the birthplace of the cry – the scream – that may be the only non-deceptive form of speech. As silence supervenes, we may wonder whether the cry has ended, or persists at a different pitch, as if we were now in Georg Büchner’s documentary story Lenz, hearing the poet Lenz speak of the screaming that men call silence: the screaming that seems so silent to them because, unlike Drygas, they move away from it, making it small.

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History and trauma: censored archival footage in Maciej Drygas’ Hear My Cry

The limits of representation: Ryszard Siwiec’s self-immolation in Maciej Drygas’ Hear My Cry

Varieties of Smallness

N otes 1 | Eva Hoffman, Time: Big Ideas, Small Books (New York: Picador, 2009), 2-10. 2 | Milan Kundera, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), 35. 3 | Mette Hjort, Small Nation, Global Cinema: The New Danish Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 18-23. 4 | Brian Price, “Color, the Formless, and Cinematic Eros,” in Color: The Film Reader, ed. Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (New York: Routledge, 2006), 85. 5 | Ibid., 82-83. 6 | Ibid., 86. 7 | Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. C.V. Wedgwood (London: Gollancz, 1962), 75-80. 8 | Bronisława Stolarska, “Usłyszcie mój krzyk…O filmie Macieja Drygasa,” in Między słowem a obrazem, ed. Małgorzata Jakubowska, Tomasz Kłys and Bronisława Stolarska (Cracow: Rabid, 2005), 317. 9 | The air of dark magic may well derive from the intensity of the blow inflicted upon our sense of “the order of things” by the combination of slow motion and anamorphic registration. Admittedly, Ernst Bloch has discerned this effect in slow motion alone, writing that “decelerated processes first must be sufficiently removed from our own time [...]. Otherwise, a crippled quality emerges, something like the halting gait of the dead (nightmares fall into this category, being suited to the quality of half-way slowed motion). [...] Only when time has achieved full magnification can tempos of lightness and tranquility be achieved.” (Ernst Bloch, “Decelerated Time, Accelerated Time, and Space”, in Literary Essays, trans. Andrew Joron and others [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998], 4826) Just as relevant as the issue of speed (measures of “half-way slowness” may be debated, particularly in relation to hand-cranked silent films) may be that of whether or not slow motion enables a grasp of rapid and possibly complex events, or imparts a new quality to them, even a near-theological grace: whether it functions as enlightenment or “lightening.” However, events whose stylization bodies forth a wish that they be fully graspable and graceful in themselves, such as the dance in Hear My Cry, are not enhanced in either way by deceleration. Nevertheless, Bloch’s remarks are highly suggestive, as Drygas’ deceleration surely does seek to add something: the undertone of a Dance of Death (much as the slowed motion in part of the Zone, in Cocteau’s Orphée [1951], matches its underworld status and embodies the struggle against time thematized in the work). (That undertone carries on reverberating in the distortions of the score.) Conversely, Lacanian theory, recalling the skull in Holbein’s The Ambassadors, might declare anamorphosis alone sufficient to disturb, that disturbance apparently being inherent in the absence/presence of the object, irrespective of its status as a skull. Whether the effect requires a combination of slow motion and the anamorphic, or either device could have done so alone, their unification doubles deathliness. Distortions affecting not just the shape of time but that of space also encompass all human endeavour with an ineluctability that is indeed nightmarish (to revert to the terms of Bloch’s essay). The difference is that between the Zeitlupe (the German

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Paul Coates for “slow motion”) and what one might call a Raumzeitlupe (“magnifier of space-time”). Slow motion being a stretching, and anamorphosis a compression, a further vertigo, even uncanniness, may result from the coupling of signals of growth and diminution, a doubleexposure with the large estranging the smallness central to this volume. (Many thanks to Janelle Blankenship for drawing my attention to Bloch’s argument.) 10 | Stolarska, “Usłyszcie mój krzyk,” 313. 11 | Ibid., 306. 12 | Astrid Söderbergh Widding, “What Should We Believe? Religious Motifs in Ingmar Bergman’s Films,” in Ingmar Bergman Revisited, ed. Maaret Koskinen (London: Wallflower, 2008), 204.

At the Crossroads of Time Memoirs and Becoming in Benone Todica’s Documentary Our Journey Lenuta Giukin

Charity Scribner remarked in Requiem for Communism (2005) that “a conceptual iron curtain still divides the [European] continent […] after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.”1 This division is reflected not only in collective memories; most Eastern-European critics agree that various forms of nostalgia exist in former socialist countries with different consequences. Over the past two decades, this East-West polarization became the subject of artistic expression and reflection across the continent, revealing not only a feverish search for new identities, but also one of the widest growing gaps between generations. As Stef Jansen argues, collective or social memories evolve over time, reflecting not only individual experiences but also incorporating powerful discourses,2 through which every generation interprets itself within the whole. Consequently, some ordinary experiences become extraordinary, with time finally converted into history.3 On the other hand, through memories and nostalgia one can lend the past an idyllic hue when daily life does not rise to the socio-economic expectations of the present. Such expressions of loss are common in former East-European socialist countries where the values of Western thinking could not fulfill the gap created by discarded local ideologies. Although via “oppositional memories” the new capitalist governments proceeded to implement processes of forgetting and to condense the past to a totalitarian image, 4 the work of substitution often failed: nostalgia for the past continued to surface publicly through a variety of art work and social forms of expression. The consequences of such deep emotional drama penetrate various social and historical levels, affecting not only the generations directly touched by the events but also future generations by producing a significant generational gap within a short period of time. Inter- and intra-generational national and diasporic divisions constitute the subject of numerous Romanian films that earned international recognition.5 Most of these films display an intense preoccupation with the state of contemporary

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society, especially the issues of national identity in times of globalization, as well as a reconsideration of the controversial socialist period. Unlike the case of countries with a “strong” national past, such as Poland, Romania’s short and contested national history provokes strong sentiments among a population divided by historical territorial divisions and by its new ethnic and socio-economic positioning. Romanian socialist cinema was employed as a propaganda tool for governmental politics and nationalistic aspirations. Former socialist politics contained the expression of ethnic and ideological oppositional groups, pressuring them into the public sphere, where a suppression of existing prejudices was formally implemented at the price of assimilation. As a result, the film industry was channeled towards the creation of a unified national iconography that promoted an idealistic image of the socialist society and of the individual. Writers and artists were drawn into the rewriting of history, contributing to the development of a romantic socialist vision. The film industry brought to life figures such as the haiduk, a lawless man fighting the rich and defending the poor,6 the resistance combatant against the Nazi occupation,7 or historical leaders dedicated to national continuity waging war against various invasions.8 This nationalistic cinema also answered the need for historical and global recognition through heroic images of identification and self-evaluation. Contemporary Romanian cinema is less focused on national unity, as the shift to European integration and the Western set of values requires a re-assessment of the recent past.9 Moreover, most contemporary films directly or indirectly reflect on the world and/or consequences of the former socialist dictatorship in Romania. Highly charged emotionally and ideologically, these works by young directors (Nae Caranfil, Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Corneliu Porumboiu, Catalin Mitulescu, and many others) question the status of a society in transition, the place of old and new ideals, and, indirectly, the nation’s historical transformation and its representation at crucial moments in history. The artistic works involved in this process of revision generate different discourses at home and abroad, where they encounter the West’s own centralizing power of reception and representation: through the distribution of prizes and prestige this Western European authority continues to make its own values central to a so-called “European society.”10 The Romanian movies that premiered or were highly acclaimed critically at Cannes or at other famous European and North American festivals (such as The Death of Mr. Lazarescu [Moartea domnului Lăzărescu, 2005]; Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days [4 luni, 3 săptămâni și 2 zile, 2007], or The Biography of Nicolae Ceaușescu [Autobiografia lui Nicolae Ceaușescu, 2010]) contributed to reaffirming the superiority of Western ideology over “utopian” or “false” socialist values. The preference for such works reflects and encourages at a public level a process of containment or reduction to a certain type of cinema and a social memory not representative of the entire Romanian society. Furthermore, contemporary Romanian cinema’s insistence on the dark periods of socialism (its beginning and ending years), as well as on the immediate

At the Crossroads of Time

post-socialist decade of political confusion, might contribute to creating an overall negative image that denies a number of generations their historic contribution or other forms of public recognition. The East-West paradigm is maintained through artistic representation as long as socialism continues to be portrayed as an unrealistic, impractical ideology. This additionally justifies the West’s long-term efforts to control or eradicate socialism and simultaneously alleviates the feeling of guilt related to the overwhelming poverty that resulted from the economic collapse of East-European governments. Contrary to this naturalized affinity, movies about nostalgia could raise old questions about the necessity to reform capitalism, about “the inadequacies of capitalism and democracy, and the need to modify the West’s seemingly naturalized standards.”11 Stef Jansen points out that social memory can become a counter-discourse, playing a role in the way people make sense of reality and of official ideological accounts.12 He also specifies that memories are constructions that evolve over time within a field of power relations, arguing that they can be used in powerful discourses and can help people position themselves in confusing times.13 They can be employed to similar or different ends by political authorities, cultural institutions or oppositional groups. Considering the extensive work of a certain oppositional memory in removing the signs of former regimes (such as the names of streets, flags, national anthems, monuments, etc.) and the new institutionalized processes of forgetting, Claudia Sadowski-Smith writes that “after all memories of the socialist past had been absorbed, socialism could be associated exclusively with the label of totalitarianism […].”14 The privilege of asserting social constructions always belongs to the last body standing; this applies well to Romania’s situation, a country where the last years of Ceaușescu’s dictatorship alienated the entire society. But collective unity against a rejected socialist past succumbed to more divisions than ever when the capitalist economic system could not live up to people’s expectations. Within the confusing power relation networks generated by internal as well as European integrational changes, memory and nostalgia became a source of multiple social discourses and controversies. The Romanian cultural landscape, already marked by the nostalgic discourses of the World War II generation of political dissidents and exiles, together with those of the diaspora of the 1980s, was exposed in the 1990s to its most dramatic ideological break. Multiple versions of the past contributing to a storm of debates polarized Romanian intellectuals and communities at home and across the globe. Strongly repressed, especially during the eight last years of the Ceauşescu dictatorship, many Romanian artists and intellectuals rightfully found expression in this critique, as well as an audience abroad where accounts of Ceauşescu’s government members and of his personal abuses provided, besides a feeling of ideological validation of the West, a form of exotic entertainment. On the other hand, the expressions of local forms of nostalgia (the equivalent of the German “Ostalgie” or “nostalgia for the east”), usually inhibited by a national politics of European adherence, often attracted the ridicule of the media, intellectuals, and politicians. Artists could only choose to

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avoid the public affirmation of such sympathies due to associations with outmoded ideological practices or simplistic populist manifestations, and because the available market for such nostalgia at home or abroad was too small or non-existent. Benone Todica’s documentary Our Journey (Drumul nostrum, 2008-2009), an exception in this context, analyzes Romania’s socialist past from a perspective that ignores national or European politics. A Romanian-Australian filmmaker, writer, and radio-television commentator, Todica was nominated “Man of the Year” in 2007 for his overall contribution to the community and public life by several RomanianAustralian community organizations. He made himself known in Romania through the publication of his book, In doua lumi (“Beween Two Worlds,” 2009),15 which generated positive comments from the critics and was well received in his home communities. The documentary Our Journey attracted wider attention, as it opened a national debate on the fate of a former uranium mining colony, Ciudanovita. Todica went to school in the colony and later worked for the mining colossus, documenting (through film) the operations of the mine, its workers, and everyday life in the colony. In 1980 he defected, taking with him memories of a relatively prosperous community. In 2000 Todica returned to film Ciudanovita and its people in their new environment. On a winter day, together with a life-long friend (killed in an accident a few years after this trip and to whom the film is dedicated) Todica revisited, in space and time, a ghostly colony. The circular trip allowed him to return to and reflect on places of historical importance during the Cold War. Documentary footage filmed in the seventies is used to show life in places that became home to nature again and to reconstitute in images memories of a flourishing industrial past. For Todica this nostalgic trip into the past is a return to youth and dreams, to the source of growing and becoming. Not having lived through the last eight years of the dictatorship, his relationship to the socialist past is less critical: Todica never knew the realities of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2007) and never had to live in the world of Mr. Lazarescu. Although he always detached himself politically from the official totalitarian ideology, his position towards socialism itself oscillates between rejection and nostalgia. In the comparison between the past he had known and the deceiving present, his conclusion is that “the present does not live up to the past.” Charity Scribner argues that nostalgia for the past shows that something is missing from the present.16 In Our Journey the comparison of past images of busy workers and joyous community holidays and the present ghostly sites points to a lack that represents the failure of the present. Present daily life is documented as empty streets, deserted buildings and ruins, and the failure to celebrate togetherness as a community. Parallel editing of national holiday celebrations in nature and the bleak, wintry landscapes speak of a lack in the community. The newly created national holiday on December 1, celebrating the glorious unification of Transylvania/Banat with Romania, does not live up to the former one on August 23, with its traditional picnics, public music and dancing. “Now everyone is sad,” remarks one of his subjects, while in the past joy was on people’s faces, exhibited everywhere.

At the Crossroads of Time

While the sociologist Norman Denzin notes that longing for the past and present-day nostalgia are linked to postmodern anxiety, the art historian Charity Scribner observes that in the postindustrial age workers tend to carry out their labor in isolation and are “employed on a casual basis.”17 As a result, the site of collective labor is replaced with the site of culture.18 Todica’s documentary becomes such a cultural site for manifesting the collective memory and collective solidarity of a social class at a certain historical moment. It provides a common ground for sharing a common experience of a time that becomes singular through the impossibility of its revival. Life as a collectivity also meant hope and the acknowledgement of a general equality in wealth and status. Padraic Kenney goes as far as to affirm that there is no celebration of communism’s fall among easterners19 and that the anti-communist dissidents disappeared from view. While in Romania the Communist Party did not win top government positions as in Poland, from the people’s deep nostalgia for the past one might conclude with Kenney (at least to a certain degree) that “nostalgia triumphed over revenge […].”20 The subjects of Our Journey repeatedly refer to their former economic prosperity, the availability of social services and national greatness, while they criticize the quality of contemporary products, thus identifying the past as superior to the present from multiple points of view. It is worth noting, however, that scholars such as Susannah Radstone are rather skeptical of the notion that nostalgia is a retreat from uncertainties and a symptom of loss of hope in the capacity for change in the public sphere.21 Although Our Journey could be interpreted along these lines, Todica’s focus rather renders his documentary a vehicle for knowledge and a site of informative reflection. Historical data, testimonies, picture montages, old archival and contemporary footage offer a rich source of information for younger generations. The goal is to raise awareness in more than one way, through documenting the lives of a very special community during the Cold War period, and to draw attention to a place that became a negative geographical reference. Uranium mining left devastating and devastated sites in the area, while possible high radiation levels continue to threaten the depopulated community. Our Journey creates a space of public debate where past and present, prosperity and loss, hope and anxiety, all contribute to questioning history and its possibilities. It is the missing link in the accounts about a past that remains in many ways disturbing, disorienting, disrupting. Considering bleak accounts by young contemporary filmmakers who capture the last years of dictatorship, as well as the sensitive issues of contemporary Romanian society, Todica’s documentary can be defined as a form of artistic counter-memory. The film’s testimony in favor of past happy times and some of the high achievements of socialism intends to recuperate and submit for reevaluation the socio-economic contributions of forty generations of workers. While the accounts of the new generation of filmmakers and their reception of the past should not be minimized or less celebrated, the socialist period should not be exclusively equated with a period of continuous abuses, nor should the historical

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role of millions of people be discarded in the confusion that comes with so many radical changes. Ideologies change, but the ideals at the heart of society do not, as Todica’s documentary proves: the continuity between the generations begins with the dreams that every generation holds and passes on to the next one, such as dreams of individual and collective fulfillment. As Scribner points out, “material remains of Eastern Europe possess subversive energies”22 and the potential to counter capitalist commodification. Our Journey contains such “subversive energies” as it gradually becomes a memorial to people capable of forging their happiness through willpower and hard work. While the notion that socialism was a utopia and that modernity exhausted its potential with the fall of state socialism23 is still taken into consideration by some, many others emphasize the feeling of insecurity brought by the new Europe and globalization. Todica calls this alternative “the cloud of globalization,” indirectly suggesting strong disbelief about the truly beneficial possibilities of a European market for Romania. Padraic Kenney considers that Eastern Europe had a different understanding of and different expectations of Europe, and Keith Tester proposes that nostalgia is culturally generated when a “society is seen as a milieu on the move from somewhere which is defining to somewhere else which is to be defined.”24 Does Todica fear that the “otherness” or specificity of Romanian culture will be sacrificed within the larger entity of the European Union? That Romanians’ expectations will be, as many times before in history, ignored, misled, or deceived? That this new alliance will be generating new problems, not solutions? After 1989, Romanians wished not only for a change in ideology and social order but they also assiduously pursued their integration into the larger Europe. Although changes were welcomed with enthusiasm, as in the rest of Eastern Europe, Romanians never recovered the state of hope, energy and fulfillment they had during the industrial era of socialism, and for certain generations it seems unlikely that this will ever happen. A unique instance of reflection among a large number of critical and artistic works, Our Journey represents a necessary stage in the analysis of past realities and of the conditions that generate social happiness. Paul Ricoeur once remarked that memory cannot be separated from the work of mourning.25 As a cultural artifact, Our Journey allows the viewer not only to learn about the past, to compare it to the present and to proceed to his own critical reflection, but also, by retrieving it from memory and naming the object of loss, alleviates the work of mourning. In addition, younger and future generations may learn to connect to their parents and grandparents in different ways than through exclusively negative images and interpretations of socialism and its years of totalitarianism. They may find inspiration, recognize the source of their dreams, learn to respect their predecessors and accept the historic and heroic role they played in their times. Maybe Romanian society will heal when it makes peace with the past. Benone Todica’s documentary is the kind of artistic work which, in times of great confusion and anxiety, proposes a leap of faith.

At the Crossroads of Time

Past images and the failure of the present: recycled 1970s footage in Ben Todica’s documentary Our Journey

Re-playing history: memories of a uranium miners’ holiday in Ben Todica’s Our Journey

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N otes 1 | Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2005), 15. 2  |  Stef Jansen, “Identities, Memories and Ideologies [Review article],” Social Anthropology Vol. 7, Issue 3 (1999): 331. Important work on the role of cultural memory in this context includes Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Pamela Cook, Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2005); Sigmund Freud, “Morning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1962), 237-259; Michael Schudson, “Dynamics of Distortion in Collective Memory,” in Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, ed. Daniel L. Schacter (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 346-365. 3 | Pirjo Korkiakangas, “Memory and Nostalgia: Reminiscence of Places,” in Times, Places, Passages: Ethnological Approaches in the New Millennium, ed. Attila Palàdi-Kovàc (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 2004), 298. 4 | See Claudia Sadowski-Smith, “Post-Cold War Narratives of Nostalgia,” The Comparatist Vol. 23 (1999), 117-127. 5 | Some recent Romanian films dealing with this theme are Medal of Honor (Peter Netzer, 2009) and First of all, Felicia (Razvan Radulescu, Melissa de Raaf 2009). 6 | Haiducii, Răzbunarea Haiducilor, Haiducii lui Şapte Cai (Dinu Cocea, 1966, 1968, 1970); Profetul, aurul şi ardelenii; Pruncul, petrolul si ardelenii (Dan Piţa, 1978, 1981). 7 | A famous television series was Stejar, extremă urgenţă! (Dinu Cocea, 1973). 8 | Dacii (Sergiu Nicolaescu, 1967); Mihai Viteazul (Sergiu Nicolaescu, 1970); Ştefan cel Mare (Mircea Drăgan, 1974), etc. 9 | On contemporary Romanian cinema, see also Anne Jackel, “Too Late? Recent Developments in Romanian Cinema,” in The Seeing Century: Film, Vision and Identity, ed. Wendy Everett (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 98-110; Calin Căliman, “The New Waves of Romanian Cinema” (2007), http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/6/caliman.shtml (accessed 20 June 2009); Mihai Chirilov, “You Can Run, But You Cannot Hide: New Romanian Cinema” (2007), http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/6/chirilov.shtml (accessed June 20, 2009); Dina Iordanova, “The Cinema of Eastern Europe. Strained Loyalties, Elusive Clusters,” in East European Cinemas, ed. East European Cinemas, ed. Anikó Imre (New York: Routledge, 2005), 229-249; Marina Kaceanov, “On the New Romanian Cinema,” P.O.V. No. 25, http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_25/section_3/artc6A.html (last accessed 20 June 2012); Dominique Nasta, “The Tough Road to Minimalism: Contemporary Romanian Film Aesthetics” (2008), http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/6/nasta.shtml (accessed 20 July 2012); Agnes Petho, “Chaos, Intermediality, Allegory. The Cinema of Mircea Danieliuc,” in East European Cinemas, ed. Imre, 165-175; A. O. Scott, “New Wave on the Black Sea” (2012), http/www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/magazine/20Romanian-t. html_r=1 (accessed 20 June 2012); Alex Leo Şerban, “Cinematograful românesc de la modernitate la neorealism,” http://agenda.liternet.ro/articol/8097/Alex-Leo-Serban/

At the Crossroads of Time Cele-doua-batai-de-pleoapa-ale-modernitatii.html (accessed 15 July 2012); Christina Stojanova, “Fragmental Discourses. Young Cinema from Central and Eastern Europe,” in East European Cinemas, ed. Imre, 213-227; Christina Stojanova, “My Romanian Cinema,” (2007), http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/6/stojanova.shtml (accessed 20 June 2012). 10 | Anikó Imre, “Introduction. East European Cinemas in New Perspectives,” in East European Cinemas, ed. Anikó Imre (New York: Routledge, 2005), xii. 11 | Sadowski-Smith, “Post-Cold War Narratives of Nostalgia,” 123. 12 | Jansen, “Identities, Memories and Ideologies,” 329. 13 | Ibid., 330-331. 14 | Sadowski-Smith, “Post-Cold War Narratives of Nostalgia,” 121. 15 | Ben Todica, In doua lumi (Timisoara: Atticea, 2009). 16 | Scribner, Requiem for Communism, 3. 17 | Ibid., 157. 18 | Ibid., 158. 19 | Padraic Kenney, The Burdens of Freedom: Eastern Europe since 1989 (London and New York: Zed Books, 2006), 81. 20 | Ibid., 87 21 | Susannah Radstone, The Sexual Politics of Time: Confession, Nostalgia, Memory (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 113-123. 22 | Scribner, Requiem for Communism, 13. 23 | Ibid., 3. 24 | Quoted in Radstone, The Sexual Politics of Time, 124. 25 | See Scribner, Requiem for Communism, 20.

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The Archival Impulse and the Digitization of European Film History The European Film Gateway Project Thomas Ballhausen and Janelle Blankenship

This article offers reflections on the European Film Gateway film history project and internet portal, using two primary points of departure. On the one hand, the European Film Gateway is approached from the larger perspective of archival and methodological concerns. On the other hand, the value of the digital portal is explored from the perspective of a smaller case study regarding the role of the Austria Wochenschau, which was digitized by the Filmarchiv Austria as a contribution to the EFG (European Film Gateway) digital project. The Austria Wochenschau, which holds a unique status in the European tradition of the newsreel, serves as an exemplary model for the digitization of rare source material.

Theore tical F r ame work Since the archive is all too often solely discussed from the limited perspective of enabling research, we propose another way of engaging with the topic. Building on basic ideas regarding the archive, we would like to stress a new conceptualization of the archive as techne. In its attempt to fulfill its manifold obligations, in the proper duty or stewardship of its holdings as well as its duty towards the public, the archive has to consciously complicate things. The productive schizophrenia of its labor, which is composed of its support of serious research in the present and the longterm preservation of a specific heritage that spans generations, informs the activities of the archive and the need for a highly sensitive ethical stance. In particular, in an age of digital reproducibility and technical re-invention and redevelopment – innovation which an archive cannot ignore, yet which also should be examined with a critical eye – we are called upon to recall historical realities, challenges and possibilities. To actively promote the accessibility of the archive and stress its public presence does not mean to do away with the experts

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or to mark the disappearance of the archive as a specialized form of intellectual logic. In particular in the age of progressive digitalization,1 the theme of longterm preservation and the archiving of rare materials gains new meaning, as does the need to work against limiting the archive to the role of simply supporting specialized academic disciplines. The pedagogical mission of the archive must therefore not only take into account content-related and media-specific awarenessraising in the context of the respective educational agenda, but also has to fight against the undermining of such educational work and the errors caused by neopositivist source mania. To expand on what Ballhausen argued in his public deliverable for the European Film Gateway Project,2 the labyrinthine techne of an audiovisual archive is inherently woven into a complex archival policy regarding access, protection and disintegration. The vast and interlocking technological network of the film archive consists of cataloguing and indexing media, data transfer media (such as DVD), storage media (primarily celluloid, but also gramophone records and other media), as well as machines for projecting or exhibiting the material. Advances in technology are often geared towards boosting data-storage potential rather than boosting data protection or permanent preservation (of celluloid). But far from arguing that data storage and entry is a poor stepchild vis-à-vis the goal of archival preservation, in the age of digital reproduction data entry and data storage are indeed central aspects of the archive’s techne that should be scrutinized further. The archive represents an ordered collection, which despite its researchoriented focus, has in recent decades conceptually and practically been brought into a more productive relationship with museums and libraries. In addition to the practical advantages of such a relationship, there is also the advantage that these institutional forms frequently have an internal archive they use to adequately organize and administer heterogeneous partial holdings. Beyond the classical content of collections, like the medium book (in libraries) or the more or less singular object (for the museum), estates or unpublished material have often found their way into such institutions. The demands of data collection and the preservation and proper restoration of such material necessitate providing archival access within a specific structure tied to the holdings.3 The conservation of the holdings certainly must be considered the most pressing task. This scholarlysupported activity involving the recovery or retrievability of the forgotten, lost and also repressed can only be conceived of and set into practice through a careful balance involving the conservation and accessibility of collections, as much as the artifacts’ condition and state allows. The archive – simultaneously a system for organizing and a collection whose parts are connected by a difference-creating hinge of administrative, sub-medial processes – in this way can also be conceived of as a site of intellectual valorization that is shaped by its heterogeneous holdings. The diversity of the material in the collection is not only a key characteristic of the archive, but rather a positive and effective general framework for the use of the respective material and the setting

The Archival Impulse and the Digitization of European Film Histor y

of standards for discursive approaches. The constant re-evaluation or reappraisal is not simply an end in itself, as often erroneously assumed, but allows for a better understanding of one’s own discipline and new developments. It also gives us critical instruments for the analysis of larger social processes. The systematic interrogation of the collections at hand – for example, the question of whether or not an item can be exhibited or whether it has to be placed within the discussion of the history of a discipline – cannot take place within the narrow understanding of a misunderstood hermeneutic which claims to be all-encompassing and able to deliver final and everlasting results. Rather, a serious discussion of memory and the archive necessitates a chain (understood in a poststructuralist sense) of interconnected, linked interpretations, which also stimulates and advances the history of one’s own discipline. Despite the occasionally problematic orientation of such an interpretive perspective, it still seems to be the most useful way to describe changes in how the archival materials are valued and contextualized, in respect to contemporary questions and within the framework of a narratively organized history of disciplines.

S ignificance and H istory What also remains to be considered is the effect of specific disciplinary inscriptions of meaning in the context of a dual movement: The first movement is the evolution of the respective artefact out of an arrested phase of entropy, or chaos, perhaps even out of the rubbish, into a state of revalorization. The second movement, which usually follows the first, is the mnemonically relevant circulation of semanticization efforts in the context of a debate on archival holdings and singular objects, a discourse oscillating between two poles. This intellectual and logistic effort is also comprised of deferrals and re-appraisals. Also in respect to the (metaphorical) blind spots, which arise through an embeddedness in a system – understood here broadly as a quantum-mechanical relation in the sense of position, observation and work waiting to be done – recognizing this position in the sense of a connection between rationality and the holdings can lead to an awareness of one’s role in historical or historicizing processes. At the same time, it is however quite desirable not to lose sight of the contemporaneity of this mnemonic archival labor, to participate in contemporary discourses and try to comply with the most pressing desire of the archives: to flee a delirious state and steer towards an order that is capable of critically questioning itself and offering one’s own discipline meaningful possibilities of support and (self-) reflection in the sense of a metaphorical registry. This is also valid in the broadest sense for those individuals employed in institutions, who through their duties are also increasingly co-inscribed into the archival discourse. They are the material stewards, who through their work contribute to maintaining a careful balance of responsibility towards the holdings and the public.

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Already in the first days of film producers, technicians and others responsible for the early development of motion pictures thought about the long-term preservation and archiving of the sensitive material. The desire to adequately store, save and preserve celluloid – the primary task of every film archive – is already documented in the late 19th century. The first film archives to appear in the early years of cinematography were mainly run by single individuals. 4 And yet the wish to preserve material on a long-term basis can be traced back to the pre-cinema era. In 1895, W.K.L. and Antonia Dickson, two of Edison’s engineers who co-invented the Kinetoscope, called for ways of preserving his “vitalized pictures,” arguing “the advantage to students and historians will be immeasurable. Instead of dry and misleading accounts, tinged with exaggerations of the chronicler’s minds, our archives will be enriched by the vitalized pictures of great national scenes.”5 In Europe in the early 20th century, attention was also increasingly put on preserving the moving image. In Paris, for instance, the Polish-born Boleslaw Matuszewski and German cinema-reformer Hermann Häfker formulated farsighted ideas on the subject of film archiving. Both men are considered pioneers in this field and they persisted in drawing attention to the necessity of preserving film sources. While Matuszewski, whose book Une nouvelle source de l’histoire – création d’un dépôt cinématographie historique came out as early as 1898, was more concerned with establishing film as a valuable historical source, Häfker’s 1915 treatise Das Kino und die Gebildeten (Cinema and The Educated) already formulated the opportunities and difficulties facing future archives and depots. His clearly articulated strategies primarily dealt with concepts of preservation and were, when compared with the technical standards of the time, extremely advanced. With the onset of World War I the physical protection of the material became, for obvious reasons, the primary concern of archives. Today, however, the condition of films from this period is extremely poor: after the war ended large collections of films and documents, especially news coverage of the conflict, were destroyed. The end of the 1920s saw the establishment of centers for audiovisual media within established institutions worldwide, as well as the creation of new, primarily state-sponsored institutions with a special focus on the medium film. In the 1930s, almost all classic film-producing countries had film archives; the first film archives, all of them founding members of what we know today as the FIAF (Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film), opened their doors in the 1930s. The Filmarchiv Austria, known at that time as the Austrian Filmarchiv, became a member of FIAF in 1955. Then, as is the case today, the Austrian film archive played an important role in the FIAF organization on the basis of its activities and holdings. Due to the state of material and the fact that most collections were fragmented, the Austrian film archive in the first years concentrated on building a thorough foundation – tasks that are still central to the archive today. The already mentioned circular flow that consists of collecting, storing and making materials accessible has also shaped the new film scholarship and activities of the archive. In particular, since 1997 the film archive has repositioned itself as a major

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player in the areas of teaching and research and in this sense, in repositioning its primary agenda, has also repositioned itself vis-à-vis an interested public. With the creation of a Study Center as active interface and with far-reaching cooperations with international partners the film archive has opened up new possibilities for academic collaboration, supporting not only (inter-)national research, but also a new generation of young academics. Only in this way can one both make the material publicly accessible and cultivate the long-lasting, enduring appreciation of film as a valuable and unique source material. The basis for this idea of a revitalization of archival holdings in the sense of users and material that needs to be preserved involves carefully balancing conservation and the need to make catalogued collections accessible; here digitization of archival holdings is increasingly important.

F rom P roject to P ortal The internet as a media network offers a modern, user-friendly way to improve accessibility, simultaneously providing users across the globe with access to rare materials. Since the European film archives had been working for years on digitization as well as making their collections accessible via the internet, it made sense to cluster these activities to comply with the imperatives of user friendliness. The EFG – European Film Gateway portal, an initiative supported by EU-funding from the eContentplus-Programs of the European Comission, is central to the administration of this task. At the core of this research and developmental project (which began in 2008 and was administered by the Deutsches Institut für Filmkunde/DIF) was the development of a portal which made possible the practical, barrier-free access to the multifaceted European film heritage – from the moving image to censorship records. Using the online portal, the vital balance between breathing new life into the holdings6 and the flawless preservation of the material is thus best achieved. Digitization, in addition to programing, projection and commentary of audiovisual sources in cinematheques, can be used to animate film history and shed new light on historical sources. The European Film Gateway as a central point of departure enables a new indexing and interactive understanding of the unique holdings of European film archives, now integrated into the higher-level internet portal Europeana. The European Film Gateway internet portal offers fast and simple access to hundreds of thousands of film history documents, which are stored in 30 European film archives and cinematheques. In 2012, there were only 22 archive and cinematheque partners, many from small European countries such as Switzerland, Norway, Estonia and Lithuania,7 but by 2014 30 European film archives and cinematheques had contributed data to the portal. The EFG project was initiated by the Association des Cinémathèques Européennes (ACE) and the Europeana Foundation and ran from September 2008 through August 2011. From

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February 2012 to February 2014, another online project that digitized 650 hours of film from and about World War I was also carried out under the auspices of the European Film Gateway project and European digital library. The audiovisual material made accessible through the EFG portal is wide-ranging and includes film stills and set photography, film posters, production records, costume designs, film program booklets, newspapers, censorship records, rare feature films and documentary films, newsreels, magic lantern slides and material from over 16 diverse countries. Using the online portal, researchers are given a rare opportunity to study unique lantern slide collections from France, advertising films from Norway, early erotic films from Austria, newsreels from Lithuania, or a complete poster collection from Denmark. EFG offers researchers and film fans a glimpse into European film production from its earliest days to the present. Users of the portal can do searches based on individual people, film titles or key words. They get an overview of the extant material, which can be viewed directly in the portal. The portal also has a link to the internet home page of the respective archive and thus also serves as a search engine to the entire holdings of the film archive. The European Film Gateway is a building block of Europeana,8 which was called into existence by the European Commission to be a platform for the cultural heritage of Europe. EFG delivers so-called “meta-data,” the cataloging and access information, and makes it available to the European digital library Europeana. Thus, the holdings of the European film archives are brought into a larger network of libraries, museums and archives in Europe and put into a more general cultural context. As stated in a press-release by the Deutsches Filminstitut “Film Archives Showcase their Collections: The European Film Gateway is Online,” the EFG portal and Europeana “bring together the collections of European film archives with holdings of libraries, archives and museums in Europe, and put them in a transnational and multicultural context.”9 Europeana presently offers access to 30 million digital objects. “The European Film Gateway Project Public Report on the Outcomes of the Project” also argues that “by contributing to Europeana, EFG adds to making Europe’s diverse cultural heritage available to a wider public via a single access point.”10 It is worth pointing out that EFG platform is not the only online domain aggregator for documents related to film or audiovisual material in Europe. The Archives Portal Europe provides access to material from national and regional archives in 32 countries, including smaller nations such as Malta, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Latvia, and Georgia.11 In addition, EU Screen, funded by the European Commission, brings together television material from over twenty archives, providing free access to Europe’s television heritage. The enhanced EUscreenXL project (the successor to EU Screen) consists of 29 organisations from 22 European countries who have come together to increase access to their materials. According to their official website, EU Screen “brings together clips that provide an insight into the social, cultural, political and economic events that have shaped the 20th and 21st centuries. As well as chronicling important historical events, the EUscreen portal

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allows you to explore television programs that focus on everyday experience. EUscreen is also intended to be a resource for educators, researchers and media professionals searching for new audiovisual content from across Europe.”12 One of the lead-in images used to advertise their online holdings on the portal ’s home page stresses the use of the portal as a pedagogical tool. It features a mother holding a young child, pointing at a small television screen. The caption that hovers over the image reads: “Europe on Screen: Discover a Century of History, Memories and Culture.” The European Film Gateway promotional trailer created by Andrea Meneghelli at the Cineteca di Bologna advertises the EFG online portal using a montage of clips taken from European film archives. An archivist sits in front of shelves lined with film reels and provocatively picks up a pair of (editing) scissors as the words flash across the screen: “What are you searching for?” This is followed by a montage of clips taken from feature films, shorts and documentary films, accompanied by an emotional narrative, the pulsating words “Action, Fear, Desires, Journeys, Work, Happiness, Facts, Dreams” set to a vibrant soundtrack by the Italian electronic duo Tempelhof. Potential users find the answer to their audiovisual dreams in the imperative: “Find films and more from European Film archives.” One of the various outcomes of the EFG project, linked to data entry, was the creation of a homogenized EFG film glossary. As part of EFG data harmonization work, a work group compiled a list of more than 46 multilingual “minivocabularies” specific to film archiving data entry with over 9,000 terms, and created a simplified, homogenized EFG film vocabulary in 13 European languages (including English). Data in local archives was brought in line with streamlined EFG portal data. The “smaller” local languages of European film archives are thus now translatable into a larger, more globally accessible framework. As the public deliverable ensures, “the EFG data harmonisation work ensures that the heterogeneous and multilingual entries coming from several databases can be displayed coherently in the EFG web portal.” One example used in the public deliverable “EFG – The European Film Gateway. Report on type and quantity of archival resources tagged” is color.13 Disparate technological terms such as Eastman Color, Agfacolor, colorflex or Bellevue-Pathé and multilingual display terms such as the “Czech Kombinovaný – černobílý & barevný” or Greek “ΕΓΧΡ & Α/M” are simplified using the EFG English vocabulary terms “color,” “B/W & Color” or “Color & B/W.” Not surprisingly, the establishment of the EFG multilingual vocabularies (or glossary) has generated much interest in international film archive circles. The impact of this data harmonization work goes well beyond the EFG consortium. As the report on type and quantity of archival resources tagged states, “the FIAF (Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film) Cataloguing Commission requested to align their activities aimed at modernising and reissuing the FIAF Glossary of Filmographic Terms with the EFG activities.” Despite the productive outcomes and many possibilities of the online portal, as the final report points out, there are some obstacles that the European Film Gateway

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has faced. One such challenge involves copyright issues and the accessibility of orphan film works. The report concludes that the current EC directive on copyright issues is not sufficient to enable archives to make such orphan works publically accessible and calls for new legislation. The valid point made in the final report is worth quoting at length “Currently, legislation in member states is not sufficient for dealing with orphan works. Throughout the EFG project it has become clear that a considerable part of the collections held by archives consists of orphan works. The current EC Directive on copyright issues allows for some discrepancy among the Member States’ copyright laws. A unified copyright law could be the way forward for online use. EFG’s investigative work indicates that legislation will be needed to resolve the issue of orphan works, otherwise a large part of European heritage will not be disclosed online.”14

A ustrian C ollections in the E fg P ortal : The A ustria W ochenschau as C ase S tudy In the final section of this essay, we would like to briefly describe some of the work that the Filmarchiv Austria undertook in the EFG digitization project, primarily focusing on the digitization of newsreel material for the online portal. As Work Package Leader, the Filmarchiv Austria selected important holdings for the online portal that would reflect the heterogeneity and value of their archival collections. With the exception of censorship records and the complete holdings of the journal Paimann’s Filmlisten (Paimann’s Film Lists), which is of particular film historical relevance due to its almost continuous publication from 1916 to 1965, Filmarchiv Austria in particular focused on selecting original film material for the online portal (made possible through a favorable legal framework). The EFG, which is searchable through the higher-level Europeana Portal, can be conceived of as a decisive response to the wish of the public to include more audiovisual sources in the family of the Europeana library. The EFG portal forges important transnational liaisons between comprehensive national collections. One of the collections of Filmarchiv Austria which is now partially searchable through EFG and Europeana and was previously unavailable online, will be briefly described below: the Austrian newsreel. We conclude this section with a brief meditation on the “second digital life” of the Austria Wochenschau on the EFG portal and other online research portals on European integration. The Austrian newsreel existed from 1949 until 1982 and is one of the most important news programs ever featured regularly in European cinemas. But it is not only the comprehensive time period covered that renders it a unique, contemporary document of Austrian history: more than other filmic sources, the newsreel can be viewed both as journalistic expression and as historical evidence of social developments in the Second Republic. The cultural potential of the newsreel is mirrored in the commentary texts of the feature reports, which cannot

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be fully removed from their historical time period. The archive can provide an ideal frame for reading this (occasionally problematic) potential of the newsreel. At the point of the repeated viewing of the material, the productive research conjoins the so-called first and second life of sources. In this intertwining material and perspective are mirrored, reflecting possibilities, priorities and demands, which in turn also yield new approaches and cultural debates. As Nicholas Pronay writes in “The Newsreel: The Illusion of Actuality,” films have the power to create illusions and the actuality film, “its final form being the newsreel,” also “created the illusion that the viewer was actually witnessing an event which in reality took place far away both in terms of distance and in terms of space.”15 Already in the early years of film the desire of the audience to take part in events of public life led to the so-called actuality. However, these short reports, which touched on a vast number of topics, are not news in today’s sense of the word. Already the term actuality has multiple meanings. If one understands under the French term actualité a film that was of great public interest, the term can be understood as a synonym for news film. By “news film” here what is meant are film reports in which important (historical) events are documented or re-enacted. Actualitites were eventually replaced by the newsreel program. All the episodes are precursors to the non-fiction films, which were also popular in Austria. Until approximately 1910 one can speak domestically of compact short reports limited to one theme, which stood alone as a cinematic program. A series of several reports finally evolved into the classical newsreel series of World War I, wherein the military conflict shaped the form, content and also narrative description. A series of short reports, with clearly visible political-military influence, replaced the one part actuality. It is perhaps not a coincidence that with the political instrumentalization of the medium film finally oriented itself equally towards the desire for entertainment, information and the scopophilic curiosity of the audience – conditions that also shape the Austrian newsreel in subsequent years. In the first years after the war the four occupying powers dominated the newsreel programming in Austrian cinemas.16 The Americans produced Die Welt im Film for Germany (with one Austrian “window” or special edition per episode); MPEA (Motion Picture Export Association) was an American-British collaborative endeavor, which was released as Fox Sound Newsreel until 1978. The French adapted Les actualités françaises for their sector in a German synchronized version and the Russians produced a daily newsreel Wir sind dabei in the Wien-Film-Studios at Rosenhuegen 14. After an agreement was reached in June 1949 between the federal government and the occupying forces an independent Austrian weekly newsreel was created. The first edition of the Austria Wochenschau made it into cinemas on 11 November 1949. The interest of its owners, the Republic of Austria, lay in the transmission of images of Austria that would elevate the positive endeavours of this small country on a national and international scale and help develop a national identity. Coverage of financial and cultural achievements, as well as achievements in sports, were consequently of special significance. The

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Republic owned 52% of the Austria Wochenschau, while the remaining 48% was split equally between the social-democratic KIBA and the conservative (Christian Social Party-dominated) Sascha Film. The political leanings of the general management determined the content and design of the newsreel for decades and their program advisory board can also be seen as a forerunner to the later ORFBoard of Trustees. If today one measures political events in seconds, at this point it was measured weekly in pictures and meters. Until the international treaty was signed, the influence of the occupational powers was clearly visible. For example, the Russian administrators frequently made use of their right to censor material. Also in the episodes self-produced by Austria Wochenschau there were political perspectives that were entirely missing; the role of Austria during National Socialism was omitted or presented very selectively. Austria Wochenschau was a media format which due to its formal program criteria and production schedule measured out time in weekly units. Programming, filming, editing, sound mixing, composition, mass reproduction and distribution – each and every stage of an individual film production had to be completed within five working days with the finished product lasting on average between 8 and 10 minutes. The years between 1954 and 1971 even saw the simultaneous production of a second newsreel: the Weltjournal. The weekly output of the company amounted to roughly 16 minutes of film. In total, the above production process occurred approximately 3,300 times. The cinema in Austria reached its peak in 1954, a year which saw the Austria Wochenschau providing the country’s cinemas with roughly 300 copies a week. The material which emerged from this period provides a provocative starting point for Austria’s documented audiovisual contemporary history. The film coverage of the time was shaped by an extreme regional-patriotic “us”. To the rest of the world it presented Austria as the “island of the blessed” with an “excellent reputation,” and exhibited a strong preference for western culture and social systems. The early years, the 1940s-1960s, are self-reflexively marked by an enthusiasm for the materiality of cinema and an optimism regarding the renaissance of Austria’s film culture and the arts.17 As early as 1957, a report on the Rendezvous of Film Stars ties the Austria Wochenschau’s successes to a larger revival of Austrian film, remarking that “Austrian film people are looking optimistically into the future and not without reason [...] one sees beautiful young girls, waiting to be discovered by producers, and stars, who have a reason to laugh... and we haven’t yet spoken of the Austrian Wochenschau. Its momentum pulls everyone else in, don’t you think?”18 In 1960, another report celebrates “the sensational premiere of a new cinema, a new apparatus, (the arrival of) wide-gauge film and the premiere of a new film with Kirk Douglas.”19 In 1962, a report enthusiastically called The Cinema is Alive raises its glass to the health of the Austrian film industry, commenting: “Recently the Austria film industry has felt healthy again. It is showing healthy signs of life, particularly when it concerns stepping into the limelight at a grand premiere. The Viennese film fans seize the opportunity to greet guests and local

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stars [...].”20 Ten years later, the Austria Wochenschau’s report on a renovated film theater is tied to a renewed interest in the arts: “A great crowd at the renovated Künstlerhaus Kino. Jacques Tati’s Film Trafic is a hit with the audience. Before the film the audience walks around the foyer, redesigned by Othmar Sackmauer, which now holds exhibits curated by the Künstlerhaus. The first exhibit is by the Carinthian painter Valentin Oman. In this way the cinema should popularize art. A desirable idea!”21 Not surprisingly, by the 1970s the new role of television (itself a competitor to the cinematic newsreel) is also addressed in the programming. In particular, cable television is a sensational event, one that deserves extensive commentary. A report entitled Cable TV and Austria, broadcast in 1978 concludes that despite the enthusiasm for German TV on cable, “Austrian TV is still not bad.”22 The Austria Wochenschau fulfilled a function that was later taken over by the small screen of television. With the spread of television and the waning interest in the cinema, the achievements of the weekly newsreel were diminished. Irrelevant, day-to-day events were billed as headline items since time-consuming film production could not keep up with the electronic broadcast of television news. As a result, the Austria Wochenschau modified its approach towards the end of the 1960s to include new areas of focus and replaced coverage with more universally relevant subjects that took less time to shoot. For the first time after the signing of the treaty a number of reports appeared in color and – after years of Heinz Fischer-Karwin and Walter Niesner – there were regular appearances by female presenters. The transformations taking place in society after 1968 brought with them both aesthetic and content-related changes. For the first time people featured in newsreels were given their own voices (reports with original sound) and were no longer exclusively represented by a speaker using indirect speech. The newsreel also featured early forms of the music video. In the 1970s alone, the Austria Wochenschau changed its design, its logo and, as a result, its appearance on three occasions. With the inclusion of music items covering subjects like the early Austro-Pop scene, which were aimed at an increasingly younger target audience, the Austria Wochenschau succeeded in creating a new image. Its rigid focus on instructive reportage, items like party conventions and educational programs, however, increasingly came across as outdated. This anachronism becomes more apparent when one keeps in mind that the classic, black and white weekly newsreels were still being produced in 1978, at a time when entire residential areas in the Viennese district of Laaer Berg were already being laid with television cables. By the 1980s the cinema had already taken on a new social function. The first urban cinema complexes were built around 1980 and have, since then, been predominantly frequented by younger audiences. In 1982 the project Scope also used a new concept to realise the weekly newsreel in the form of a magazine program in cinemas. Scope was, in its early years, a kind of “Austrian MTV,” covering items such as hits from the Austrian music scene as well as presenting a

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weekly program calendar. Hallo Kino could be seen in cinemas from 1985 onwards and featured a kind of magazine program which included cinema trailers and was presented by well-known cultural, political or sports celebrities. It was initially produced on a weekly basis, then every two weeks and, finally, towards the end of its run in 1994, only once a month. A special episode of Hallo Kino aired in March 1994: the topic was Austria’s accession to the European Union. The episode documents several events held on 2 March 1994 with Alois Mock, Austrian Foreign Minister, Franz Vranitzky, Austrian Federal Chancellor, and Erhard Busek, Federal Vice-Chancellor and Leader of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP). Mock, Austrian Foreign Minister, speaking at the House of Representatives, first announces that the EU accession negotiations in Brussels were successful. In a selfreflexive documentary style, this initial sequence in Parliament ends with a shot of the cameraman at the back of the room, peering through the viewfinder. This self-reflexive interest in filmmaking, accompanied by jaunty music that echoes an action film score, is used to transition to what the commentary calls a “suspenseful” press conference at the Austrian chancellery. This shot of the cameraman at the back of the room is followed by several shots of the camera crew setting up shop at the press conference. While acknowledging the importance of Austria’s EU accession as a symbolic moment, the Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor at the press conference prefer to emphasize Austria’s “historical presence in Europe,” emphasizing continuity, rather than use the rhetoric of an abrupt shift or change. Chancellor Franz Vranitzky announces that Austria was always European and international: “The Austrian path has always been [...] a path to internationalism, an open path [Ein Weg in die Internationalität, ein Weg in die Offenheit].” Busek, echoing these comments, emphasizes that “Austria has always been a European country,” and that “through the good and the bad we [Austria] have shared the fate of the continent.” Although this episode is not available on the European Film Gateway portal, it is available online on the Luxembourg Portal for Innovation and Research, the CVCE Research website.23 The CVCE Research Group is a Virtual Resource Center for Knowledge about Europe, an interdisciplinary research center and documentation center on European integration based in Luxembourg. The Luxembourg Portal for Innovation and Research includes several other examples of Austrian newsreel coverage of Austria’s path to European integration. The “Historical Events” section, according to the CVCE website, serves an interesting pedagogical function. It not only “presents in chronological order the milestones along the path towards European integration from the end of the Second World War to 2009.” The website argues that the more important overarching aim is to “provide accurate information for research and education purposes that gives the fullest possible insight into the history of a united Europe. Far from focusing purely on the European Communities and European Union, the ‘Historical Events’ section strives to cover all the major regional and subregional initiatives for political, economic, social, military, scientific and cultural integration and unification among the countries of Europe.”24 Thus, the CVCE

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Research Group seeks to address smaller regional and sub-regional initiatives. The website also argues that a variety of sources25 are used to present a more complete picture of European integration, including original interviews that “take users right to the heart of events,” virtually allowing users to re-live such historical moments. Of course, original interviews are also mediated historical accounts and the process of mediation and rhetoric involved in such mediation should always be understood as a subjective part of the “second life” of sources, here the shaping of historical narratives. If we examine earlier reports on Austria’s role in the European integration from the 1950s, also available online on the CVCE Research portal, we will see that the rhetoric used in the Austria Wochenschau to document Austria’s vision of its role in Europe reveals a specifically national agenda, as Eugen Pfister writes in Europa im Bild: Imaginationen Europas in Wochenschauen in Deutschland, Frankreich, Großbritannien und Österreich 1948-1959. Pfister argues that in the seven reports that touch on European integration in the 1950s Austria Wochenschau, the historical moments of the integration process, such as the signing of treaties etc., are auspiciously missing. In fact, there are months or years without any reports on the European project. Pfister concludes that the Austria Wochenschau in the 1950s is ambivalent; both aloof and disinterested in the prospect of a monumental Europe but also, as demonstrated in its short reports, at times overly optimistic and positive about Austria’s role in the integration process.26 As Pfister argues, there wasn’t one transnational vision, but multiple visions of Europe that were transcribed into European newsreel programs. Although, at certain historical moments, many of these visions overlapped. 1959, for example, was a key year in marking enthusiasm for the European project. As Pfister recalls, in 1959 a universal catalogue of images used to imagine a new Europe was recycled in newsreel reports in multiple countries. Germany, France and Britain all released newsreel episodes with montage sequences featuring disappearing borders, animated maps, steel factories, coal mines and new consumer goods. Although Austria didn’t release such a newsreel report, its newsreel contribution on the occasion of the establishment of the European Free Trade Association in 1959 also employed some of the same visual tropes. In December 1959, the Austrian cinema newsreel reports on the political and diplomatic debates concerning the establishment of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). The first thing one notices about the 1959 episode is that there is a shift in music, if we compare it to an earlier 1956 episode on the accession of Austria to the Council of Europe. In the 1956 episode a regal, monumental score was used. This classical score is now replaced with jazzy, more upbeat music that almost anticipates the “action” soundtrack used in the 1990s after Austria joined the EU. The commentator reports “What before seemed to be an impossibility” has now been made reality. Six European nations met to create a free trade organization with sovereign rights, while seven other European nations such as Norway and Denmark and “both neutral Alp nations Austria and Switzerland […] met to determine a small free trade

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zone without giving up their sovereign rights.” The episode finale includes an animated map that merges the small free trade zone with the larger European free trade zone. The commentator anticipates a “marriage” of both zones, concluding that this agreement “was an important step on the path to a larger Europe,” while cautioning that the “last goal of all treaties must be Europe.”27 Three years prior, on April 16, 1956 Austria acceded to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. The CVCE Research portal also includes this clip as part of their online research on European integration. On the occasion of Austria’s accession to the Council of Europe, Leopold Figl, Austrian Foreign Minister, and Bruno Kreisky, State Secretary, attend a meeting of the organisation’s Committee of Ministers in Strasbourg. The commentary reports that “Austria is no longer an observer”, but a sovereign member of the European council. The episode ends with the celebratory raising of Austria’s national flag in Strasbourg.28 The same three newsreel clips on European integration (episodes from 1956, 1959, 1994) from the Austria Wochenschau are also made publicly available as part of an online teaching unit on political education sponsored by the Democracy Center in Vienna. One goal of this teaching unit entitled “Austria’s Path to the EU” is to use authentic historical material, like films or posters, to examine the reasons behind the Austrian public’s rejection or acceptance of the EU. The website argues that films and posters are ideal tools, because they can be “‘read’ with critical distance.”29 Four Austria Wochenschau newsreel clips on European integration (including the three briefly examined above, available on the CVRE research portal) are available as part of this teaching tool in a sub-unit entitled “Analysis of Film Reports on Austria’s Path to the EU.” Another sub-unit focuses on advertising films made as part of a campaign to promote Austria’s accession to the EU from 1992 to 1994. The notes for the sub-unit on advertising film ask students “Were the arguments [presented in the advertising film] effective?” or “How do you see these arguments?”30 The teaching tips for the sub-unit on “Austria’s Path to the EU” (using the Austria Wochenschau clips as visual aid) ask students to use the clips to not only rehearse dates and chronological events, but also to interrogate “plot elements” and ask why the filmmaker chose to emphasize these particular elements.31 Such a pedagogical exercise could be used simply to rehearse historical dates or could challenge students and teachers to think critically about the rhetoric frequently used in the news coverage of the European integration process. In this sense, the digital second life of sources could be used to reconstruct (or “deconstruct”) a historical event, as described in the context of “reverse-engineering,” the act of making technology more democratic and open.32 In the CVCE online portal, the Democracy Center Portal, and the European Film Gateway portal, audiovisual material from the Austria Wochenschau is indeed given a second life.

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Reel history: the Austria Wochenschau logo used in the 1950s and 1960s

“What are you searching for?”: archiving as adventure in Andrea Meneghelli’s European Film Gateway trailer

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N otes 1 | Here see Nick Peim’s “Walter Benjamin in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Aura in Education. A Rereading of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’” Journal of Philosophy of Education Vol. 41, Issue 3 (August 2007): 363-380; and Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 217-252. 2 | Thomas Ballhausen’s essay was drafted as part of Deliverable D.1.1. of the European Film Gateway Project. The complete essay was not a public deliverable, so an edited version was made publicly available. Thomas Ballhausen, “On the History and Function of Film Archives,” available online at http://www.efgproject.eu/downloads/Ballhausen%20 -%20On%20the%20History%20and%20Function%20of%20Film%20Archives.pdf. Also see Thomas Ballhausen and Katharina Stöger’s collaborative essay “Asking the Girls Out: Reverse Engineering and the Rewriting of Austrian Film History,” in The Art of Reverse Engineering: Open, Dissect, Rebuild, ed. Günther Friesinger and Jana Herwig (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014), 159-176. 3 | As Ballhausen argued in “On the History and Function of Film Archives”: “In sharp contrast to books, for example, any reduction of film material more or less automatically impairs the information it communicates. In other words, even small amounts of damage to film material have an adverse effect on its totality. Besides the danger of material becoming obsolete, i.e. the fact that machines needed for exhibition purposes are seldom produced today, the material itself poses a threat which must not be underestimated. Storage media on the whole have an increasingly shorter lifespan: advances in this area of technology are geared more towards boosting data capacity rather than data protection in terms of permanent preservation. Without a doubt therefore it is the holdings of an archive which determine its key functions and on which its necessary autonomy rests […] the authority of independent AV archives is found in the fact that they fulfil a particular function that no other organisation can. It is a function that springs from the structural quirks of audiovisual media themselves: the ability to reflect the particularities of the medium, or rather methods of transferring information onto it, the enormous vulnerability of the medium, and finally, the juxtaposition of published and unpublished material such as oeuvres (estates) and documentary records.” (Ballhausen, “On the History and Function of Film Archives”) 4 | For more information on the history of film archives see also Thomas Ballhausen’s European Film Gateway essay, “On the History and Function of Film Archives.” 5 | W. K. L. and Antonia Dickson, History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope and Kinetophonograph (New York: Albert Bunn, 1895 [Reprint: New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2000]), 51-52. Charles Urban’s fifty-six page treatise, The Cinematograph in Science, Education and Matters of State (London: Charles Urban Trading Company, 1907), also makes a case for film archives. 6 | On the use of programming, projection and commentary to “animate” film prior to or during a screening, see Ballhausen “On the History and Function of Film Archives”: “When exhibiting archive-specific material one has to take into account the numerous features of programming which themselves affect the form the final performance will take. Projecting

The Archival Impulse and the Digitization of European Film Histor y the film onto the screen does not just bring the medium to life, but, if accompanied by such additional features as introductions and other forms of commentary, it can (re)animate film history and open the door for challenging discussions. Without hindering cross-media interaction, this ultimately leads to a clearer profile for the area of film. Commenting on films as part of a performance is especially necessary if the films have been deemed impossible to programme by cinematheques: film fragments, restored treasures from archive holdings or even fragile material. These kinds of performance also encourage traditional exhibition practices, for example accompanying silent films with live music.” (Ballhausen, “On the History and Function of Film Archives”) 7 | The initial list of contributing countries with film archives included France, Romania, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Estonia, Austria, the UK, Serbia, Finland, Switzerland, Lithuania, Hungary, Czech Republic, Norway, Scotland, and Greece. The EFG project ran from September 2008 until August 2011. Its successor project EFG1914 focused on World War I footage and ran from February 2012 to February 2014. 8 |  Europeana was designed to include four types of content: image, text, audio, and moving images. The European Project CARARE is an expansion of Europeana which will enable architectural and archeological data sets to be included in the online portal. CARARE will use 3D and virtual reality models to record and exhibit historic buildings, architectural monuments, landscapes and sites. The goal is to have “cultural heritage without borders.” See A. Sánchez, F. Gómez, A. L. Martínez, A. Ruiz, and M. Molinos, “Project 3D-Icons: The Iberian Heritage at the European Digital Library” in Science, Technology and Cultural Heritage, ed. Miguel Angel Rogerio-Candelera (London: Taylor and Francis, 2014), and Henrik Jarl Hansen and Kate Fernie, “CARARE: Connecting Archeology and Architecture in Europeana,” in Digital Heritage: Third International Euro-Mediterranean Conference, ed. Marinos Ioannides, Dieter Fellner, Andreas Georgopoulos, and Diofantos Hadjimitsis (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer, 2010), 450-462. 9 | “Film Archives Showcase their Collections: The European Film Gateway is Online,” Press Release Deutsches Filminstitut, Frankfurt am Main (26 July 2011). 10 | “The European Film Gateway Project: Public Report on the Outcomes of the Project,” 2, available online at http://www.efgproject.eu/downloads/D6.5_Public_Report.pdf. Also see the 2011 “EFG User Survey – Konzept einer zielgruppenorientierten Nutzeranalyse für das Online Portal European Film Gateway,” ed. Ulrike Spree and Ralph Schmidt (Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften, Hamburg, Abteilung Information), available online at http://www.efgproject.eu/downloads/EFG_UserSurvey_Report_final.pdf 11 | The Archives Portal Europe also delivers data to Europeana. An example of visual material presented on the Archives Portal Europe website includes a photograph of “The Baltic Way – The Human Chain linking three European States, 1989.” The photograph, donated to the portal by the Lithuanian Central State Archives, documents the peaceful demonstration on 23. August 1989 when over one million people in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia joined hands to demand the independence of the Baltic States, forming an over 600 kilometer long human chain. The Archives Portal Europe database also provides a link to a video tape housed in the National Archives of Estonia, “The Baltic Way.”

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Thomas Ballhausen and Janelle Blankenship 12 | See EU Screen’s official website: http://www.euscreen.eu/about.html. The EUscreen project ran from 2009 to 2012. Its successor, EUscreenXL, runs until 2016 under a different support program. 13 | “EFG – The European Film Gateway. Report on type and quantity of archival resources tagged” (ECP-2007-DILI-517006), available at http://www.efgproject.eu/downloads/ D3_1_Report_Archival_Ressources_Tagged_public.pdf 14 | “The European Film Gateway Project Public Report on the Outcomes of the Project,” 7. Parts of the following section on the Austrian collections in the EFG portal have previously been published in German in Thomas Ballhausen and Renate Maragh-Ablinger, “Das audiovisuelle Gedächtnis einer Nation: Zur Geschichte der AUSTRIA WOCHENSCHAU,” Medienimpulse No. 59 (March 2007), 69-71. 15 | Nicholas Pronay “The Newsreel: The Illusion of Actuality,” in The Historian and the Film, ed. Paul Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 97. Also see Frank Kessler, “Actualitiés,” in Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel (New York: Routledge, 2005), 5-6. Kessler perceptively argues that “a word of French origin, actualités can refer to different types of film. In its most general meaning it can be seen as synonmous with ‘factual’ film. [...] the English word ‘actuality’ [is] commonly used as a synonym for ‘reality.’ [...] The original French term, however, clearly involves a temporal reference: an actualité is a current event or something which happened relatively recently. In the narrower sense, commonly used on the European continent, actualités are topical films and can be seen as an early form of news event films and newsreels.” (ibid., 5). 16 | For a related study of the newsreel in another small European country, see Paul Lesch, “The Reception of the Deutsche Wochenschau in Luxembourg during the Occupation,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television No. 1 (2004): 35-44. 17 | Already in 1934, the Austrian newsreel self-reflexively reported on the importance of film in cultivating Austria’s public image abroad. A special episode (available on the EFG portal as part of the Austria Wochenschau collection) entitled “Moderne FremdenverkehrWerbung“ (Modern Tourism Advertisement) aka “Das Österreichische Propaganda-Auto” (The Austrian Propaganda Car) highlights the important achievements of a propaganda vehicle sponsored by The Advertising Branch of Tourism in the Austrian Federal Ministry of Trade and Transportation. The propaganda van traveled to Belgium, Holland, France, England, Spain and Italy with a film apparatus, slides and a loud speaker for music and presentations on travel to Austria. See Moderne Fremdenverkehrs-Werbung. Das österreichische Propaganda-Auto (“Modern Tourism Advertisement: The Austrian Propaganda Car,” 1934), Österreich in Bild und Ton 40b/1934, Beitrag 3 (available on the EFG portal). 18 | Rendezvous der Filmstars (“Rendezvous of Film Stars,” 1957), Austria Wochenschau 1957/9, Beitrag 9 (available on the EFG portal as part of the Austria Wochenschau collection). 19 | Ein neuer Filmpalast (“A New Film Palace,” 1960), Austria Wochenschau 1960/52, Beitrag 6 (available on the EFG portal as part of the Austria Wochenschau collection). The Austria Wochenschau reports now made available to the public online, through the EFG portal include several reports devoted to modernity and technology. At times the newsreel

The Archival Impulse and the Digitization of European Film Histor y is also sceptical of modern technology. A 1957 report (available on the EFG portal as part of the Austria Wochenschau collection) Sorgen mit dem Telefon (“Concerns about the Telephone”) focuses on telephone disruptions in Vienna, due to the fact that after system upgrades many numbers had to be changed. The report ends with a direct address to the audience, instructing them to “look numbers up in public telephone books.” See Sorgen mit dem Telefon (“Concerns about the Telephone,” 1957), Austria Wochenschau 1957/12, Beitrag 5 (available on the EFG portal as part of the Austria Wochenschau collection). 20 | Das Kino lebt (“The Cinema is Alive,” 1962), Austria Wochenschau 1962/7 (available on the EFG portal as part of the Austria Wochenschau collection). 21 | Mobilia Phantastica – im Museum für angewandte Kunst (“Mobilia Phantastica – in the Museum of Applied Arts,” 1972), Austria Wochenschau 1972/2, Beitrag 2 (available on the EFG portal as part of the Austria Wochenschau collection). 22 | Kabelfernsehen und Österreich (“Cable TV and Austria,” 1978), Austria Wochenschau 1978/44 (available on the EFG portal as part of the Austria Wochenschau collection). 23 | Das erfolgreiche Ende der Beitrittsverhandlungen: Reaktionen (“The Culmination of the Accession Negotiations: Reactions,” 1994), Hallo Kino 3/94, Beitrag 1. The Hallo Kino Austrian newsreel program is available online on the CVCE website at http://www. cvce.eu/obj/the_culmination_of_the_accession_negotiations_reactions_vienna_2_ march_1994-en-c57f8646-f4cf-4cfb-90d3-16034e0f0d4e.html. The CVCE Research Group acknowledges Filmarchiv Austria as the source of the Austria Wochenschau material. 24 |  “Historical Events in the European Integration Process,” available online at http://www. cvce.eu/en/recherche/unit-content/-/unit/02bb76df-d066-4c08-a58a-d4686a3e68ff 25 | The “Historical Events in the European Integration Process” webpage on the CVCE research portal argues that “significant events in the history of European integration are illustrated by introductory texts and material from a variety of sources. Official publications, documents from public and private archives, extracts from the memoirs of witnesses or major players in European integration, topical compositions, press articles, opinion polls, photographs, film recordings, audiovisual archives, cartoons, graphs and statistical data all help provide a greater understanding of the many aspects of the European unification process. Original interviews conducted by the CVCE offer new audio resources that take users right to the heart of events.” “Historical Events in the European Integration Process,” available online at http://www.cvce.eu/en/recherche/ unit-content/-/unit/02bb76df-d066-4c08-a58a-d4686a3e68ff 26 | Eugen Pfister, Europa im Bild: Imaginationen Europas in Wochenschauen in Deutschland, Frankreich, Großbritannien und Österreich 1948-1959 (Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2014), 330. Also see Anne Brusch and Eugen Pfister, “What Europeans saw of Europe: Medial Construction of European Identity in Information Films and Newsreels of the 1950s,” Journal of Contemporary European Research Vol. 10, No. 1 (2014): 26-43. 27 | Österreich, Gründungsmitglied der EFTA (“Austria, Founder Member of EFTA,” 1959), Austria Wochenschau 49/59, Beitrag 2. The Austrian newsreel program on EFTA is available online on the CVCE website at http://www.cvce.eu/en/obj/austria_founder_member_of_ efta_1959-en-e6e5ccdc-8667-4f40-9456-84b1b65c2f55.html. The CVCE Research Group acknowledges Filmarchiv Austria as the source of the Wochenschau material.

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Thomas Ballhausen and Janelle Blankenship 28 | Österreich tritt dem Europarat bei (“Austria accedes to the Council of Europe,” 1956), Austria Wochenschau 18/56, Beitrag 1.The Austrian newsreel program on the Council of Europe is available online on the CVCE website at http://www.cvce.eu/en/obj/austria_ accedes_to_the_council_of_europe_strasbourg _16_april_1956-en-0860e92f-053841e7-af2a-194482375a24.html. The CVCE Research Group acknowledges Filmarchiv Austria as the source of the Wochenschau material. 29 | Demokratiezentrum Wien, “Unterrichtssequenz 2: Analyse von Filmberichten über Österreichs Weg in die EU,” available online at http://www.demokratiezentrum.org/ bildung/lernmodule/oesterreich-in-die-eu/unterrichtssequenz-2.html 30 | Demokratiezentrum Wien,“Unterrichtssequenz 4: Analyse von Werbefilmen zum EUBeitritt Österreichs,” available online at http://www.demokratiezentrum.org/bildung/ lernmodule/oesterreich-in-die-eu/unterrichtssequenz-4.html 31 | Demokratiezentrum Wien, “Unterrichtssequenz 2.” 32 | Frank A. Schneider and Günther Friesinger, “Technology vs. Technocracy. ‘Reverse Engineering’ as a User Rebellion,” in The Art of Reverse Engineering: Open, Dissect, Rebuild, ed. Günther Friesinger and Jana Herwig (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014), 14. Editorial Note: This article was developed and written within the dissemination activities of the EFG - European Film Gateway and EFG1914 (2014).

Realism and its Discontents

Framed by Definitions Corneliu Porumboiu and the Dismantling of Realism Maria Ioniţă

Corneliu Porumboiu’s 2007 film 12:08, East of Bucharest (A fost sau n-a fost?) opens with a number of short, precisely framed scenes, meant to give the viewer a glimpse of the lives and temperaments of its three protagonists, as their routines gradually converge in the tiny studio of the local television station, where they will take part in a hilariously misguided debate on whether their provincial town had a popular uprising on December 22, 1989. The 12:08 of the title represents the exact time when Nicolae Ceauşescu fled Bucharest, and hence a precise divider: the revolution could have occurred before, but not after. In one of these scenes Pa’ Pişcoci – a cranky widower in his sixties, and occasional amateur Santa Claus – sits motionless at a table in his sparsely furnished kitchen. The framing is symmetrical and austere: dressed in a sharp black suit, the old man looks into the middle distance, his right hand pointing vaguely towards a half-eaten bread roll – a leftover of the lunch he has just finished. It may be a very subjective reading of the scene, but Porumboiu’s positioning of his character has always reminded me of The Pleasure Principle (Le Principe du Plaisir), one of the two portraits of Edward James painted in 1937 by Réné Magritte. In it, the English poet and patron of the Surrealists sits at an empty table, dressed in an elegant suit, his right hand pointing at a small rock; his face is invisible, his entire head having been replaced by a blinding flash of light. The second portrait, Not to Be Reproduced (La reproduction interdite), shows James, with his back turned to the audience, dressed in the same impeccable yet anonymous suit and looking into a mirror which incongruously reflects the back of his head. The resemblance of Pa’ Pişcoci’s pose and James’ may be fortuitous, but I think that it also can also illustrate quite well Porumboiu’s very distinctive voice in contemporary Romanian cinema. Magritte’s two portraits of James, like many of his paintings, are about the inherent strangeness of images as reflections of the real – their studied, almost photographic character belies the playful opacity of what they purportedly represent – a man with a flash for a head, an impossible reflection in a mirror, or a pipe that, as we well know, is not a pipe; while some

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of their titles (“Not to Be Reproduced,” “The Treachery of Images”) seem to point towards a fundamental incompatibility of the visual and the linguistic. In a similar manner, I hope to demonstrate, Porumboiu’s first two feature films (12:08, East of Bucharest and 2010’s Police, Adjective [Poliţist, Adjectiv]) represent a deliberate exploration of the limits of cinematic realism and a polemic engagement with cinema’s ability to present an objective snapshot of the real. 12:08, East of Bucharest revolves around the efforts of Mr. Jderescu – the owner of a local television station based in Vaslui (Porumboiu’s native city, in Eastern Romania) to set up a live call-in debate concerning an apparently straightforward question: in December 1989, was there an authentic revolutionary uprising in the city? The parameters are very simple: Nicolae Ceauşescu abandoned power on December 22 at 12:08 pm. If people had gathered in the central square of Vaslui before then, there was a revolution. If, not, there wasn’t. And yet, the panel – which takes up more than half the film – remains hopelessly confused. One of the guests, Mr. Mănescu, a history professor, is revealed to be an alcoholic whose recollections are challenged by most callers, including a rather intimidating former member of the secret police, now turned prosperous businessman. Other witnesses have immigrated or are dead. The callers themselves, while challenging Mănescu’s story, produce conflicting recollections. Finally, Pa’ Pişcoci, as it turns out, wasn’t even in the square – instead he was at the Botanical Garden, stealing “a splendid magnolia branch” for his wife with whom he had had a fight. The debate ends on a somber note, when a woman calls in to tell them that her son had been killed on December 23, after the Revolution had theoretically been over.1 She adds: “I called to let you know it’s been snowing, gentlemen. Enjoy the snow today, before it turns into mud tomorrow.” Police, Adjective is the story of Cristi, a young cop, also from Vaslui, who conducts an investigation concerning a group of three teenagers who smoke hash after school. Cristi focuses on one of them, seemingly the leader, but is reluctant to make an arrest because he feels that the punishment under Romanian law is too severe for such a petty crime. Besides, the supplier may be the boy’s brother, and Cristi’s “conscience” and “moral law,” as he puts it, make him feel he shouldn’t force the kid to turn him in. He follows the boy in long, tedious takes through the streets of the city – which, in late fall, looks as if it is built exclusively from concrete and rusty rebars – procrastinating as much as he can. Meanwhile, he eats lunch – three times! – has a discussion with his wife regarding the lyrics of a pop song, and spends an inordinate amount of time walking up and down disconcertingly similar corridors. However, in a display of stern Socratic “maieutics,” as well as unquestionable authority, his commander eventually convinces him, with the help of a well-employed Romanian language dictionary that “moral law” is a contradiction in terms, as the dictionary contains no definition of it. The film ends with a tightly framed shot: we see Cristi from the back as he describes the soon to be played out sting and arrest and sketches the plan on a blackboard.

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The last words belong to the commander: “Communicate with each other and pay attention to the signs.” In 2010 the exact nature of Police, Adjective’s engagement with the realist and neorealist vocabulary of contemporary Romanian cinema was the topic of a very lively debate between two prominent Romanian film critics: Andrei Gorzo and Alex. Leo Şerban. Andrei Gorzo’s argument is that the long takes where virtually nothing happens – the film is 113 minutes long, but can easily seem much longer – are in fact indicative of the film’s commitment to realism. Police, Adjective, he argues is a cop movie, a policier, but one that gives up the standard thrills and excitement of the genre in order to focus on the reality of the job – the tedious stakeouts where nothing happens, the dead time, the bureaucracy, and the boredom which make up the vast majority of police work. Porumboiu himself admits as much in several interviews, where he acknowledges that he consulted with police officers to get a better understanding of what a typical day’s work may be like for them, and that the conflict between the penal law and the protagonist’s notion of “moral law” was inspired by a similar story told to him by a friend. For Gorzo, however, the real innovation of the film lies precisely in its fearless use of “real time”: the endless scenes where Cristi loiters about an empty street watching a house, where he eats a bowl of soup, where he waits to enter his boss’ office; scenes, in other words where nothing happens. Gorzo considers these takes to be an apex of realism. The action signifies nothing except itself: when Cristi eats his soup meticulously tearing chunks of bread, the scene means nothing but “the character eats” – there is no symbolism, no signification in the filmed action; whatever meaning there is, lies with the spectator. Similarly, rather than using montage to express the tediousness of stakeouts, Porumboiu shows it to us, in long excruciating takes of inactivity that force us to experience Cristi’s boredom. The film thus resists conventionalizing images, substituting a code for a specific intended meaning, and comes very close to André Bazin’s definition of neorealism – an ontological rendering of reality.2 Classical realism, argues Bazin, reflects reality according to a specific moral conception about the world, somewhat in the same way in which stones or bricks or wood are used to make a house: their qualities as stone or clay are secondary to the purpose for which they are employed – the house itself – whose purpose or artistic qualities dictate how these materials are used. Neorealism reflects first the innate “thingness” of reality, and only second its potential for meaning – much like the stones or logs in a river can be used to cross it, according to the ingenuity of the observer, but without ever becoming anything less than stones and logs. To simplify, classical realism re-constructs reality, neorealism presents it. This is, according to Gorzo, the key to Police, Adjective: the excruciating slowness of events, the “dead times,” the endless takes of written reports which offer no new information, but repeat in detail what we have just seen, all contribute to the creation of as unmediated a vision of reality as it is artistically possible – Police, Adjective is not a film about what waiting, or words mean, but rather about what they are, in the most immediate sense.3

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For Alex Leo Şerban, on the contrary, the long takes where Cristi eats his lunch, or follows the boy around do not serve to illuminate the essential thingness of reality, but rather to render it more opaque. The film plays with the idea of realism to better undermine it – in fact its drive is away from dispassionate representation and towards abstraction, as demonstrated in the last scene where the stakeout is reduced to a map, and its participants to letters: A,B,C… Porumboiu’s film, Şerban says, becomes tremendously important precisely because it signals “a break from the (neo)realist model” in recent Romanian cinema. 4 Both Gorzo and Şerban are right, even if each discusses only one part of the issue. Since 2001 (when Cristi Puiu’s seminal Suff and Dough [Marfa si banii] premiered) Romanian cinema has been increasingly associated with a distinctive brand of realism: a Dogma-like austerity displayed in long takes, minimal editing, direct sound and, occasionally, hand-held camera work. As exemplified by the films of Cristi Puiu, Radu Muntean, Răzvan Rădulescu, or Cristian Mungiu, this type of realism demonstrates a gift for the patient observation of characters and surroundings, and an attraction towards the more unvarnished, marginal, or muted aspects of reality: a city-to-city trip in a beat-up car for a delivery of narcotics (Puiu’s Stuff and Dough); the dingy apartment of a dying old man, and his nocturnal journey through the hospitals of Bucharest (Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu [Moartea domnului Lăzărescu]); the oppressive ashen tones of Romania at the end of communism (Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days [4 luni, 3 săptămâni şi 2 zile]); the creeping tension between parents and children, and the listlessness of the immigrant experience (Rădulescu’s First of All, Felicia [Felicia, înainte de toate], 2009); or the disintegration of a comfortable, middleclass marriage (Muntean’s Friday after Christmas [Marţi după Crăciun], 2002). The formal (if not necessarily thematic) similarity of the most prominent examples of recent Romanian films, as well as the almost synchronous emergence of their authors has led to the labeling of a whole group of young directors working today as a “new wave of Romanian cinema,” suggesting a programmatic kinship that the authors themselves have rejected. Nevertheless, a penchant for realism (or even a type of neo-neorealism) is common to all, and is most manifest in the patient, objective exploration of filmic space. Long takes allow for the gradual, almost imperceptible revelation of small details of apartments and cars, or urban landscapes. In Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu or in Rădulescu’s First of All, Felicia, for example, the apartments of the titular characters act as echoing chambers for their temperaments and predicaments. Puiu’s tight framing and handheld camera work create a claustrophobic space which amplifies the heavy, unbearable presence of the ailing Mr. Lăzărescu; at the same time its ceaseless back-and-forth through the old man’s cramped apartment allows the spectator to become aware of inconspicuous details, from the fading stickers on the fridge, to the brand of flour in the kitchen. In Puiu’s sparse presentation, they acquire an objectiveness, an almost auratic thingness, so, when Mr. Lăzărescu leaves the apartment on the journey that we already know will end with his death, they

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persist in the spectator’s memory as traces and aftereffects which circumscribe an unbearable absence. First of All, Felicia opens with a long static shot of the room where the heroine sleeps, ignoring the persistent beeping of her phone alarm. The medium distance of the shot and the depth of field create a space that is at the same time open for exploration and partly hidden from view. We see the brimming, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, Felicia’s yellow suitcase propped open on a chair, and catch a glimpse of the sleeping Felicia herself, on a sofa, buried under a blanket. But our vision is also restricted: a piano in the foreground blocks part of the room, and the fixed camera keeps the protagonist somewhat out of frame. The atmosphere is one of impatient expectation: we want Felicia to wake up, stop the persistent alarm and animate the frame; and our impatience is eventually echoed in her predicament. Like her incongruous suitcase, lost among books, she is caught in a perpetual state of indeterminacy, between her parents’ home in Romania, and her life in Holland, and belonging fully to neither. The examples can continue – from Mungiu’s meticulously selected, historically accurate objects and details that recreate the shabby atmosphere of late 1980s Romania in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days to Muntean’s dispassionate explorations of a motley Romanian seaside resort in Boogie (2008). All of them testify to a distinct confidence in the revelatory potential of filmic space. This space, only minimally intruded upon by camera work, montage or soundtrack, is meant to be contemplated, subjected to an exhaustive field of vision; it is not subordinated to characters, it does not merely exist to underline action or certain emotional states. Rather, with their naturalistic, often muted style, the actors, and consequently, the characters, become extensions of this space whose primary function appears to be the presentation of a fully authentic world. Talking to the French film journal Positif about Kieslowski’s influence on his films, Cristi Puiu offers an assessment which could just as well be applied to most of the Romanian new wave’s conception of cinema: “His way of approaching daily life under communism moves me profoundly. He tried to bring back the world that surrounded him, rather than imagine it. In my opinion, cinema must fulfill a function for those who practice it: it is a tool that allows you to know the world around you and to register its events. It has to do with replicating the initial act of creation.”5 A somewhat later addition to the Romanian new wave (his first feature film, 12:08, East of Bucharest premiered in 2007), Corneliu Porumboiu displays a markedly different approach to both realism and its use of cinematic space. What is most striking about his films is how they straddle the line between realism and formalism, how they seem to initially align themselves to a recognizably Romanian new wave aesthetic – long takes, minimal editing, location shots, natural sound etc. And yet something is different. The long takes have none of the revelatory power to be found in Puiu or Muntean’s films. Instead of opening a discreet window onto a complete world, they seem to refuse direct contemplation, and rather appear to build an inner rhythm, based in repetition and symmetry. The characters’ apartments are sparse and anonymous, the spaces, geometrical and

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flat. Whatever vision there is – of a revolution, or of a morally charged situation – it takes place outside the frame completely. We see neither the Romanian revolution, nor the act(s) that convinced Cristi of the moral ambiguity of his actions. All that is left in the frame is a sense of form and organization – an apparently accurate rendition of reality from which meaning has been somehow excised: a pipe which is not a pipe. Puiu’s previously cited comment testifies to his confidence in the ability of cinema not to mirror, but rather duplicate the real, in all its complexity. The shots and the framing consequently become endlessly elastic. Whether handheld or static, close-ups or medium, the variety of these shots reflects only a variety of modes of seeing. What never changes is the immediacy of vision, and the ability of film to transmit this vision to the audience unhindered. In contrast, Porumboiu’s concern lies at the margins of this experience. Both his films are about seeing, witnessing – the Romanian revolution in 12:08, East of Bucharest, a drug deal in Police, Adjective. But what interests Porumboiu is the way in which vision becomes internalized and then reemerges as story – a narrative that may or may not retain all the immediacy and urgency of the initial act of seeing. Vision thus becomes a doubly articulated process. On one end, we find immediate, direct perception. On the other, there is language, which gives coherence to, and fixates this perception, but which also annihilates its immediacy. What results therefore is not a replica of the real, but rather an attempted reconstruction, a play of often conflicting versions that take the place of, and often annihilate, the event itself. Despite the tonal and thematic differences of 12:08, East of Bucharest, and Police, Adjective (one a comedy, the other a police drama), Porumboiu’s central concern appears to be in both, the exploration of the critical intersection of image and language, of the process through which immediate perception gradually settles into a definitive shape and becomes codified. In both films this transition involves the parsing of an irreducible event into a series of definitions whose forms are primarily linguistic. Porumboiu has acknowledged the influence of both Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1957) and Michelangelo’s Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) on Police, Adjective, which explains the mixture of observational realism and geometrical abstraction in the treatment of space. The film even contains a brief oblique homage to Blow-Up: a scene where Cristi and a few of his friends play a game of foot tennis on a field framed by the graceful, proscenium-like arch of a water pipe. Nevertheless, of the two, Antonioni’s shadow looms largest by far, and is the most important, not only for Police, Adjective, but also for 12:08, East of Bucharest, explaining both films’ approaches to the complexities of the act of seeing. In the beautiful analysis of Antonioni’s poetics which opens Cinema 2, Deleuze repeatedly discusses “the pure optical situation”6 that emerges from films like L’avventura (1960) or L’eclisse (1962). Antonioni’s characters, like many other neorealist characters, he explains, are seers, watchers, enacting an “optic drama,”7 projecting their subjective gazes over situations that often overwhelm them. Most neorealist cinema is in fact a “cinema of the seer and no longer

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of the agent.”8 This plurality of subjective gazes has as its most direct effect a dissolution of concrete space, and its transformation into “the any-space-whatever” or “disconnected space,” whose unity can only emerge as a result of subjective perception, which is nevertheless absent from the world, literally (as it happens in L’avventura), or symbolically, as is the case of L’eclisse, whose empty spaces point to “the lost gaze of the being who is absent from the world as much as from himself.”9 The preeminence of these “pure optical situations” has a number of profound implications, the most significant being the transformation of the movement-image into a time-image (where movement is a function of time, rather than the other way around), and a rearrangement of cinematic functions. The act of visionary seeing, of “clairvoyance”10 rearranges the elements of the image, and renders the world readable. This in turn, and especially in Antonioni’s later films, or Godard’s, continually displaces the original object – rather than its presence, this type of cinema offers rather a grammar – a relational structure where reference becomes secondary.11 As I have already shown, both 12:08, East of Bucharest and Police, Adjective center on the act of seeing. Equally important however, is the transformation of vision into story, a syntactical arrangement of pure experience into meaning. As in Deleuze’s analysis of Antonioni, this involves loss and displacement: with the awareness that vision needs to be given a sense in order for it to acquire coherence and meaning, comes also the realization that this coherence comes at the loss of reference. In both films events disappear under the weight of words, and images are displaced by significance. The difference, however, lies in the fact that the “optical drama” is displaced as well: in its place we find either more words (12:08, East of Bucharest), or a series of opaque images (Police, Adjective). The experience is always mediated, never fully accessible, if at all. In 12:08, East of Bucharest, the pedantic Jderescu offers a hilarious description of the philosophical underpinnings of his talk-show, which doubles as an exact (if somewhat dim) acknowledgement of the conflict between vision and meaning: “Many of you will probably wonder why we’ve picked up a topic like this after such a long time? Well I think that … according to the great Plato’s ‘Myth of the Cave’ there was a time when people mistook the sun for a small fire … I think it’s my duty as a journalist… okay, say we got out of this cave, but what if we got into another, bigger cave, where we mistake the sun for a straw fire? My point is that there is no present without a past, and no future without a present. That’s why I think the clearer the past, the clearer the present and the future. On the other hand, as Heraclites said, we humans cannot dive twice in the water of the same river.” In both cases, at least in the way Jderescu describes them, direct experience is displaced – in the case of Plato’s allegory, by its inherent deceitfulness, and in Heraclitus’ account by its irreproducibility. All that is left then are the words which replace both the event and the lived vision, and Jderescu’s show becomes a power struggle between conflicting narratives expressed in the flat, constricted space of the television studio. Unsurprisingly, the studio opens not onto Vaslui’s central square, the primal space where Mănescu

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and Pişcoci’s primal vision had occurred, but rather on its flimsy reproduction – a large photograph which fills the background. In Police, Adjective, Cristi lives his own “optical drama.” His stakeouts reveal to him the complexity of the interactions between the three teenagers, two boys and a girl. His target, the supposed dealer, may be getting the hash from his older brother and Cristi worries about what would happen if the kid were forced to turn him in. The other boy, the informant, may be trying to get rid of the first because of a romantic rivalry for the girl’s affections. None of this is however visible to the audience. We see Cristi watching prosperous houses and shabby apartment buildings; we see him following the three teenagers and picking up the cigarette butts they leave behind. We also see him procrastinating: trying to postpone closing the investigation, avoiding his boss, hiding at home, eating, requesting more information from disinterested colleagues, talking to his wife… What remains unseen, however, is precisely the crux of his vision, the crucial events which create the conflict between moral law and penal law that he is unable to solve. Their effect on him is unmistakable. Like Professor Mănescu, another ineffective seer, Cristi hunches and stoops, and mumbles his words at a barely heard pitch sometimes, stubbornly holding to his vision even as his commander demonstrates its falsity. And, just as in 12:08, East of Bucharest, in the absence of vision, words take over. Several times in the film, Cristi’s actions are duplicated in images of his handwritten report: slow, lengthy vertical pans of written texts that do not do much to illuminate the drama of the protagonist. Even more than the characters of 12:08, East of Bucharest, Cristi is a man who appears rather ill at ease with words. He speaks relatively rarely, and seems rather skeptical of the expressive capacity of language. In one of the most important scenes of the film, his wife, who teaches Romanian language and literature at a high school tries to explain to him her fascination (obsession even, as the film shows her listening to it three times, in real time) with a cloying love song. Its lyrics are a sequence of simple synecdoches: “What would the sea be without the sun? What would the meadow be without the flower?” etc. The sea, the sun, the flower, she explains are not really the sea, the sun or the flower. Rather they are symbols, expressions of something hidden, something deeper, which in this case is love. You hear them, she says, and you’re supposed to see (and think of) something else. Always a man of unmediated vision, Cristi asks, baffled: “Do you see any images?” when she starts listening to the song a third time, and then jokes meditatively after brushing his teeth: “What would the toothpaste be without the toothbrush?” Cristi’s distrust of words serves him ill in his final confrontation with his commander, a man whose allegiance to language is as absolute as his dismissal of subjective vision. Cristi’s vaguely articulated misgivings which the commander makes him scrawl on a blackboard (“Conscience is that which prevents me from doing something I might later regret.”), are no match for the Romanian language dictionary from which his superior makes him read the definitions of “law,”

Framed by Definitions

“moral,” and “police.” The trajectory of Police, Adjective goes from subjective vision (inaccessible to the audience), to traces of this vision (Cristi’s stakeouts), to poetic language mixed with music, which still maintains a certain flexibility, as well as the promise of some sort of vision (“Do you see any images?”), to handwritten reports (a subjective attempt at reproducing a subjective vision), to printed language – the dictionary in which the rigidity of words eliminates any need for the real. Unsurprisingly then, the film ends with a sublimation of reality and action into an abstract code: Cristi’s map which anticipates the teenagers’ arrest, reducing the space to a series of lines and the participants to a few letters. In purely visual terms, Porumboiu represents the conflict between perception and language through his treatment of filmic space. At the end of 12:08, East of Bucharest a static shot shows an unlit streetlamp in front of an apartment building. From off-screen a voice counts down from ten, and entreats it, then threatens it to light up: “Come on, man, light up, I’m freezing here. […] Light up, or I’ll break you in a thousand pieces.” The voice belongs to a cameraman, who, some time before had been rebuked by Jderescu for altering the framing by filming with a hand-held camera, “in the new style.” The street lamp he is addressing is a call back to an earlier remark of Pa’ Piscoci: that, just as the street lamps in town light up gradually from downtown to the periphery, so did the revolution spread from Bucharest to the provinces. But the cameraman’s most important point comes before this, and it addresses the rigidity of the frame, its inherent limitative capacity: “I should have let them [i.e. Jderescu and his guests] break their necks to fit into the frame.” For Bazin, the revolution introduced first by photography, and then by cinema into the way we represent and make sense of reality lies in their ability to present an unmediated image: it “completely satisfies our appetite for illusion by means of a process of mechanical reproduction in which there is no human agency at work.”12 And again: “For the first time the only thing to come between an object and its representation is another object. For the first time, an image of the outside world takes shape automatically, without creative human intervention, following a strict determinism (…) Whatever the objections of our critical faculty, we are obliged to believe in the existence of the object represented. (…) Photography transfers reality from the object depicted to its reproduction.”13 Film, of course, adds movement – of the camera, and of the images – to this mix, but the notion of a representation of reality almost unmediated by human presence remains. This is why montage for Bazin “plays tricks with time and space” and “it is essentially and fundamentally opposed to the expression of ambiguity.”14 Minimal montage is of course unavoidable, but it can also be made as unintrusive as possible – the authentic realism that the mechanically produced image’s ontologic drive towards an immediate representation of the world favors, is drawn towards the exploration of space. As Jean Renoir says, quoted by Bazin: “The farther I advance as a filmmaker, the more I stage scenes in depth.” Bazin further talks about the

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“partial suppression of editing” which “requires respect for the continuity of dramatic space, and, naturally, for its duration.”15 What then, of Corneliu Porumboiu’s films? The duration is certainly there – evident, to the point of excruciation in Police Adjective, and somewhat attenuated by the comedy of 12:08, East of Bucharest, which nevertheless sticks its characters in a small TV studio before the halfway mark, and leaves them there until the end, in that unmoving, cramped shot whose frame comes perilously close to “breaking their necks” as the cameraman says. What links both films more profoundly, however, is the shallowness, the flatness even, of cinematic space. This is evident even in the scene I have just mentioned, where the inherently flat background of the TV studio – an illusory window on Vaslui’s main square – is replaced with an equally shallow outdoor space, obstructed by the hulking mass of the apartment building with the street lamp in front. Even when it spends time in its characters’ apartments, 12:08, East of Bucharest constructs a curiously anonymous space. Rooms are always filmed from a medium distance by a fixed camera, whose field of vision is always obstructed by various blockages: furniture, doors etc. The “frame within a frame” structure, the blackness that surrounds the pools of light within the rooms themselves appears like a curious reversal of John Ford’s iconic final image from The Searchers (1956), only this time, rather than being on the inside looking out towards an endlessly open space, the camera appears on the outside looking in. However these spaces contain very little information – one apartment looks very much like the next – similar furniture, similar layouts, and the permanent distance the camera keeps makes it rather hard to make out any details. 12:08, East of Bucharest takes place mostly inside, and the rigidity of its camera work and mise-en-scène is made prominent. Police, Adjective is a more complicated beast, as, at least at first glance, it appears to employ a more naturalistic approach: long takes, and a liberated camera that follows the protagonist around. Yet, a closer inspection reveals the same flat, anonymous space. Cristi’s apartment is heavily framed and blocked, with almost no visible items that would make it more personal, and the camera keeps the same reserved distance that we encountered in 12:08, East of Bucharest. Even more interesting is Porumboiu’s treatment of deep fields and open space, and movement. As I have mentioned, several key actions involving Cristi’s stakeout are shown twice: once as the act itself, and then as the reduction of the same act to written words, by means of the camera scrolling down what must surely be some of the lengthiest handwritten intertitles in movie history. In what seems to be almost a running joke in the movie, Cristi is also shown walking along various corridors, which although almost always situated in different buildings, look the same. The depth of the space is illusory, as the tendency is once again towards anonymity and flatness – there is virtually no difference between the hallways of the police station, and those of the passport office, for example. The outdoors, where most of the film takes place is a space of angular geometric forms: squares, triangles

Framed by Definitions

and polygons layered one on top of the other refusing depth and individuation. Sometimes the effect can be quite spectacular, as in the foot tennis scene, or in those where he stakes out the boy’s house near a wall scrawled with bright red and yellow graffiti which contrast with the usual grays and browns of the city. Nevertheless, the drive seems to be towards creating an almost purely geometric space, sparse and abstract, populated less by individual things and people, as by signs and substitutes for people and things. Both films then, move towards abstraction, repetition and framing. The deep field of Bazinian realism, through which the essential “thingness” of reality is revealed is replaced instead by a constant sublimation of detail, by the abstract “any-space-whatever” that Deleuze saw in Antonioni’s films. Even the seemingly open vistas of Police, Adjective are partitioned and cut by the anonymous geometry of urban space. Reality, in both Police, Adjective and 12:08, East of Bucharest is permanently boxed in: by frames the characters can break their necks in, by poorly articulated concepts, by dictionaries and schematics. It has been argued that Police Adjective is a film about the opacity of both reality and words, “a polemics with the very idea of realist cinema” (Şerban). I would qualify this assertion somewhat. As a natural continuation of 12:08, East of Bucharest, however, it is a realistic film about the unreality of representation.

Treachery of images: Mircea Andreescu in Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08, East of Bucharest

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Cinema of the seer: Dragos Bucur in Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective

N otes 1 | The political dimension of 12:08, East of Bucharest is unmistakable, as are its cynical and absurdist undertones, which Porumboiu has acknowledged more than once. The Romanian revolution was especially bloody (over a thousand dead), and debates about its exact nature and causes, as well as about the role of the secret police are still common, as is the feeling that its idealistic nature has been ignored and betrayed almost immediately: “For me personally, after the revolution, I was thinking all the changes would come the next day. I had quite a romantic point of view about it and life in general. Years after, I’ve become more cynical. Maybe it’s the way things should be, but, for me, the expectations that I had were broken.” (James Hansen, “An Interview with Police, Adjective Director Corneliu Porumboiu,” Out 1 Film Journal (23 December 2009), available at http://www. out1filmjournal.com/search?q=the-expectations-that-I-had-were-broken [accessed 14 August 2013]). Moreover, the incident on December 23 to which the last caller alludes – a battle at Bucharest’s main airport when forty soldiers and eight civilians were killed by friendly fire as a result of confusion and the general incompetence of the police commanders – underlines once more the absolute irreducibility of the event itself, its resistance to definitions: did the revolution really end on December 22, at 12:08 pm? Or did it continue afterwards? 2 | For Bazin’s “ontological” notion of realism, see “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” “The Myth of Total Cinema,” “The Evolution of Film Language” and “Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of Liberation,” in the new translation of André Bazin, What is Cinema?, trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), 3-12,13-20, 87-106, 215-249.

Framed by Definitions 3 | Andrei Gorzo, “Despre îndrăzneala lui Poliţist, Adjectiv [About the Originality of Police Adjective],” Dilema Veche, July 2009, available at http://agenda.liternet.ro/articol/9406/ Andrei-Gorzo/Despre-indrazneala-lui-Politist-adjectiv.html (accessed 14 August 14 2013). 4 | Alex Leo Şerban, “Despre îndrăzneala lui Poliţist, Adjectiv (scrisoare penru Andrei Gorzo) [About Police, Adjective’s Realism (Letter to Andrei Gorzo)],” Dilema Veche (July 2009), available at http://agenda.liternet.ro/articol/9531/Alex-Leo-Serban-AndreiGor zo/Despre -realismul-lui-Polit ist-adjec t iv-scr isoare -pentr u-Andrei- Gor zo.html (accessed August 14, 2013). 5 | Cristi Puiu, “Copier l’acte de la creation initiale. Entretien avec Cristi Puiu [Replicating the Initial Act of Creation. Interview with Cristi Puiu],” Positif No. 539 (2006): 30 (my emphasis). 6 | Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlison and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005), 2. 7 | Ibid., 17. 8 | Ibid., 20. 9 | Ibid., 9. 10 | Ibid., 21. 11 | Ibid., 22. 12 | Bazin, What is Cinema, 6. 13 | Ibid., 7-8 14 | Ibid., 76. 15 | Ibid., 99.

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In the Country of Panpan Romanian Dark Fun Cinema in and out of Focus Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu

Agitation, palpitations, awe, dizzy spells, fussy states, fainting, and a feeling of general weakness have Romanians all too often overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by crises, the country’s heavy communist past, untouchable mafias, droughts, floods and Western impositions – in all, by a persistent, complex and moody bad luck – Romanians are busy 24/7 with being Romanian. The outside world, largely abandoned by Romanian media, lies once more on its futile laurels. Ratings go up as the TV cameras turn towards internal affairs – local scandals, political stench, news porn, pity porn, freak shows out of nothing, and other Balkan delicacies. If this land of the too much of the too little – intensely, absurdly navel gazing – were an art gallery, moving around its insides would lead to a national Stendhal syndrome. The race between thick problems and transparent solutions is rarely won by the latter. Bound by unclarity like Prometheus by forgetfulness, Romania stands firmly as the country of a pantheistic counter-detail – or the country of panpan. Panpan obtains at the intersection of imprecision with imperfection, the resulting generality extending (like in pan-theism) over a fluid semantic field: as Didi-Huberman has described it, a “pan” is a distressing “patch” of paint that invades the space of representation and screams at the spectator, an apparent flaw within the image; in radio communication, a “pan-pan” is a code that conveys a state of urgency or an accident; in filmic language and media representation, a “pan” is a surveying tool or a panoramic view (a panorama of history); and dry or dark humor is better delivered with an expressionless face, or deadpan. A significant example of Romanian film’s take on media’s pan is Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08, East of Bucharest (A fost sau n-a fost?, 2006). In a small Romanian province town, the TV station boss invites two locals to declare their involvement in the fated events of December 22, 1989. On that day, at 12:08 p.m., Ceauşescu abandoned power and flew on a helicopter from the Communist Party HQ in Bucharest. Before that minute, any act of openly confronting the establishment of communist power would count as revolutionary. One of the guests, boozy

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teacher Virgil Mănescu tells of his anti-Ceauşescu antics and valiant resistance to the agents of the Securitate (the Romanian version of the KGB). Yet, as various callers challenge his version, things get muddy, the heroic version wavers, and the storyteller’s answers sink into whispers. As if the TV screen were the cape to the couch bulls taken with the freak show, whose stampede does nothing but push up the ratings, our dubious hero hides behind the screen: Mănescu melts into the pan’s sheltering imprecision, no longer a sitting duck to the bullying callers. And so the show comes to an end which proves again that dialogue is as rare and dangerous as plutonium in this country uniquely fitted for TVision. Did his heroics actually occur? Was he a hero of the revolution? Was there a revolution in this little town, where nothing ever happens? These questions match the momentous ones regarding the December 1989 “revolution,” which have haunted Romanian society for the past quarter of a century: was it a spontaneous popular uprising or a well disguised coup?; or both?; were there foreign powers (the USSR, the US...) involved in overturning the Ceauşescu regime?; given that the number of victims made after 12:08 p.m. on December 22 was tenfold that of those killed between December 16 and 22, were the coup leaders guilty of genocide? The original pan of post-communist Romania is the labyrinth of scenarios in which one is pushed to wobble when attempting to clarify the inner workings of the “revolution.” Among the films that exposed this pan the most salient are Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică’s1 Videograms of a Revolution (Videogramme einer Revolution, 1992) and Radu Muntean’s 2006 The Paper Will Be Blue (Hârtia va fi albastră). The former, a montage of – mostly amateur and low quality – TV footage from those December days abounds in freeze frames, excessively mobile hand-held camera, dizzying mobile pans, rough sounds and static (static in that eastern TV being what commercials are in their western counterpart). Farocki and Ujică’s film is the first and influential document of the neo-neorealist poetics that will become the ground of the Romanian new wave cinema of the 2000s. Muntean’s film, on the other hand, is a feature told from the standpoint of a group of militaries caught in the bloody carnival of the December 22, 1989 events. Both films restate that battles are too tough for cinema’s milk teeth – tout court, they can’t be represented without trans-cinematic efforts (as Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket masterfully shows). This is not to say that cinema is flimsier than other visual media: visual representation of open conflict is fundamentally limited. As much as philosophical polemics cannot be captured by positive dialectics, war and revolution cannot be represented visually without the medium’s finiteness having to transcend itself towards impotence, blindness, scandal, or exasperation. Porumboiu’s satire of media and mores, in turn, spares little of the encyclopedia of human misery; its grotesque “in your face” attitude is spruced by reticence and cushioned by sympathy. Unlike the addictive circularity of the Cartesian cogito (dubito, cogito, sum, dubito), the TV show-trick-freak triad jolts the viewer’s self-image into the untouchable superego’s stratosphere: the couch of mastery.

In the Countr y of Panpan

12:08, East of Bucharest is wise enough not to hark back at media’s own brand of democracy, according to which what one may call the “LCD” (the lowest common denominator) provides both the ground and the desert from which the TV viewer must take off to the unenduring freedom of self-satisfaction. Romanian media is dominated by manufactured varieties of neorealism; the recent Romanian film wave and corpuscles muscle their way into a neo-neorealism, which fights the view of the daily life as the toxic waste of those media.2 The richness of sensation bars sensationalism from contemporary Romanian cinema. From behind those bars, the media’s “watch and ditch” raises its Hydra heads screwed in redneck pedestals: stale primitive capitalism on ceaseless sale. Yet, contemporary Romanian cinema resists the scandals of public life and the media misery which fold into one another with the eagerness of the unsuspecting and the je m’en fiche of the entitled. That poetics of filmic resistance combines the harmony of means and ends with a minimalism which chases kitsch away. Let us make an exception and assume that we know what we are talking about: recent Romanian cinema got enough international exposure for the non-Romanian viewers to acknowledge its edgy irony and the latter’s darker flanks. While everyone is welcome to enjoy the cinematic products coming from yet another Eastern European country whose capital is not Budapest, some speculative clarifications are in order. The movies directed in the first decade of the third millennium by Nae Caranfil, Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Radu Mihăileanu, Radu Muntean, Alexandru Solomon, Cristian Nemescu, Radu Jude, Igor Cobileanschi, Marian Crişan, Călin Peter Netzer or Florin Şerban contribute to a certain unity of vision and atmosphere, in which dark fun plays no small part. I label the bulk of their oeuvres “neo-neorealist,” a blend of minimalism, slice-of-life realism, and rich humor where the local allusions open themselves to deciphering techniques available to viewers anywhere. These directors reaped a bundle of awards at various international festivals (culminating with the 2007 Palme d’Or won by Mungiu’s Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days at Cannes), as their productions were able to survive success by not slipping on the slopes of mere entertainment. “Bad movies are illegal in Romania,” stated a Californian critic, innocent about the status of the law in that country. A country wherefrom the recent Romanian directors come, and to which they return with vengeance and care, has been accustomed to a full-time choir lamenting its lack of luck, inconvenient geographical position, linguistic and cultural marginality, bad rulers and not quite dependable subjects. During the century when literature was deemed Queen of all arts, the untranslatability of Romanian literary masterpieces was the leitmotif of an introverted cultural landscape whose excesses were blunt nationalism and the empty universals of the Reds. During the communist period, the equality extolled by Marx translated as the parity of the poor. This bottom-line equality figured as both the base of every superstructure in society and its farce. So poor that they could not pay attention to detail, Romanians had to survive in a country they generally viewed as an abstract camp, a contour-less hole in the map,

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a generality lacking in color, hope, dynamics and often – life. As details succumbed to this titanic encounter on the symbolic battlefield of survival, the devil did not have where and why to hide anymore. The devilish fear enforcement machine was resisted by, among other things, an affluent army of jokes (usually, the populace provided the jokes; the Communist Party – the punch line).3 Before 1990, reactive humor had to be as subtle and inventive as to trick – and communicate itself over – the layers of Party censorship. Thus, the masters of dark humor, Lucian Pintilie and Mircea Daneliuc, were forced to stick quasisubliminal messages as means of slapping back at the dominant empty rhetoric of the Ceauşescu “Years of Light” through which the starving country limped for two decades. The standard works of the period are Pintilie’s Sunday, 6 p.m. (Duminică la ora 6, 1965), Reconstruction (Reconstituirea, 1969) and Why Do the Bells Toll, Mitică? (De ce trag clopotele, Mitică?, 1980), and Daneliuc’s Mike Test (Proba de microfon, 1980), Cruise (Croaziera, 1981), and Glissando (1983). The gloomy tones that dominate all of them are accompanied and saved by an even darker humor, whose punch lines, fraught with allusiveness, come in the middle. These punches between-the-lines often acted as passageways to alternate worlds, worlds more intimate, more substantial, and more hopeless than the one given to Romanians as the real. 4 On the other hand, most standard comedies of the 1960-80s took their spectators for accomplices, with a wink to them (as in the asides of classical drama), and a tad of pedagogy, in which both filmmaker and spectator acted as teamteachers to a universe of infantile pupils. The spectator was conventionally drawn into action as a quasi-participant. The admission price for this generous offering was seeing the punch line for a mile out. Things were to remain in order, as comic justice was already packaged in – a sturdy remnant of the Socialist Realism lack of lustre and surprise of the 1950s. With the jokes therein gone flabby, the merciless culture of hard jokes from the street was growing stronger. Film, meant to be the visual arm of the one party, was surrounded by and hit at by oral culture. Dark fun and its bloody tapestry of jokes – what one may call Romania’s “weapons of fuss destruction” – would later be redeemed in Nae Caranfil’s Sundays on Leave (È pericoloso sporgersi/Les Dimanches de permission, 1994), and Radu Mihăileanu’s The Train of Life (Train de vie, 1998), before the 2000s settled in. One distinction would have pre-1990 Romania as a grey country in which detail and color were crushed under the power of empty exercises (the empty empties the rest); post-1989 Romania, still bent on myth and rushing to assent, saw its origins in the December, 1989 TV revolution, as the advent of an age in which no event proper is admitted which is not televised. Life used to be on file; now it’s on screen; the pan grows on both sides of the revolution. As to the very term “pan,” I borrow it from psychoanalytic art historian, Georges Didi-Huberman,5 who in turn borrowed it from Proust (who wrote of the “petit pan”), who adapted it to French from the Italian pictorial vocabulary. In Didi-Huberman’s preliminary formulation, a “pan” is a symptom of paint

In the Countr y of Panpan

within the picture, “paint” understood here in the sense of a material cause, and “material” understood in the sense ascribed to it by Aristotle – something that pertains not to a logic of contraries, but to a logic of desire and protension (the e´phiestaï of Aristotle’s Physics).6 If a spectator like Bergotte in Proust’s La Prisonnière looked at Vermeer’s “View from Delft,” Didi-Huberman argues, he “might ‘fix’ his gaze upon it to the point of becoming mesmerized – until dying from it, as Proust fathomed. For such a person it is the pan that is yellow: a particolare of the painting, quite simply, but efficacious, electively and enigmatically efficacious; not ‘cleansed of all matter’ but, conversely, envisioned as ‘precious matter.’” For Didi-Huberman, this yellow materiality or pan is a “‘layer’; not incited by a ‘photographic still’ of time past, but inciting a tremor in time present, something that acts all of a sudden, and that ‘breaks down’ the body of the viewer.” The art historian argues that “for such a person, the yellow in the painting by Vermeer, as color, is a whack, a distressing zone of paint, of paint considered as ‘precious’ and traumatic material cause.”7 The pan “unsettles, even tyrannizes, the representation [...] it infects, we might even say affects – phantasmatically, through an effect of the Freudian uncanny in action – the entire picture.” Didi-Huberman claims that Vermeer’s pans are “partial intensities in which the customary relation between the local and the global is upset: the local can no longer ‘isolate itself’ from the global, as in the case of the detail; on the contrary, it invests it, infects it”8 and “the mass of […] [color] tends to ‘move forward,’ to tyrannize the represented space.”9 It is in this sense that the “‘pan’ of paint imposes itself in the picture, simultaneously as accident of representation (Vorstellung) and sovereignty of presentation (Darstellung).”10 What is at stake for Didi-Huberman in this parsing is a game in which representation and reality fight each other without a point of resolution in sight. Whereas “the object of the detail is an object of representation of the visible world; even elevated to the level of a symbol, it presupposes, in the final analysis, an object of reality, one that it strives to delineate and render legible. Conversely, the object of the pan, as intrusion – presence – of the pictorial in the representational system of the picture, is a real object of paint/of painting, in the sense that Lacan situated the ‘real object’ of the gaze as a ‘pulsatile, dazzling, and spread-out function’ in the picture itself: a function connected to ‘unexpected arrival,’ to trouble, to encounter, to trauma, and the drive. [...] At the extreme, we might say that in the pan painting becomes hysterical, whereas in the detail it is fetishized.”11 Even if Romania did not figure out the status of detail, driven as it was and is by a hysterical search of a master, at least it has allowed the production and dissemination of those films which have exposed its own unclarity. After one post-communist decade during which the Romanian movie industry ailed,12 a new generation of filmmakers emerged, who would figure the sum total of this country’s disfigurations as panpan. Not that Romania is the largest pan on the world map, but the precision with which its imprecision touches the ground of entropy singles it out with charm, exasperation and gloom. As opposed to the flat

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humor of Communist Romanian comedy and to the grotesque of show media hands, contemporary Romanian cinema is no longer reactive (i.e., proactive), but, in Nietzsche’s sense, active. It posits with avant-garde impetus a world other, on the go. By and large, Romanian cinema is no longer representative, but falls under the demands and traps of expressive art. It cuts down on lazy allusions, it simplifies, but it does not mimic; it expresses, and at that it gives time for reflection. Romanian film exposes self-naturalizing media with Stoic scruples and dead pan humor. The self-naturalizing media unfold along the exciting lines of entertainment. Enter the tain, the double tain between the TV screen and the viewer’s self, which mediates their dual narcissism. The tain which disturbs, occults and appropriates what Aristotle called “phantasm,” what Kant called “imagination” (Einbildunskraft) – the imaginal mediator between sense impressions and logos/reason. That the visual media allow no time for reflection is the essence of its transformation into the message. The beneficiary of this lack of reflection time is the viewer, or the soft man. Woody Allen’s soft man. “Matter tends to flow out of the frame, as it does often in trompe l’œil compositions, where it extends forward horizontally,” wrote Deleuze.13 From grotesque protuberances to imperial or totalitarian advances to the pan then to the soft man, material intrusions can no longer be resisted: matter steps out of its mythical frame and bullies itself into the viewer’s field of panic. Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry (1997) offers the parodically exact prophecy of the transformation of the viewing subject into the tain of entertainment. On a film set, the character played by Robin Williams goes out of visual focus. A cameraman discovers that it is not the lens, but the actor himself who has grown blurry. The cameraman then blurts out, “The actor’s out of focus” and calls out to Robin Williams to stand next to the camera: “Mel, come here, please. I don’t know how to tell you this, but um you are soft… You are out of focus... Just look at yourself... You’re sure you’re OK? …Well, go home.” There he goes, a little disgruntled, staring at his blurry hands. The kids greet him: “Daddy’s out of focus! Daddy’s out of focus!” As the narrator (a writer played by Woody Allen) recalls, “the following morning, however, things did not improve. In fact, the situation had gotten worse. Mel was more out of focus than ever.” He is taken to the doctor. The doctor says, “I’ve never seen anything like this… You are out of focus.” – “Look! l’m out of focus!” echoes later in the film the protagonist, the writer who had scripted Mel, interpreted by Woody Allen. – “Well, you look ok to me. I mean you’re a little pale, but you’re all right,” retorts the prostitute who is trying to comfort him. – “l’m out of focus. l’m soft! [...] l’m a huge blur.” (Woody Allen) – “l’ve seen all kinds of guys O.D. Heroin, acid, crack [...] You look fine.” (Prostitute) – “l didn’t take any of that. lt’s me. l’m OD’ing on myself.” (Woody Allen) – “Come on. Hold my hand [...] See? lt’s just panic. You’re not a blob.” (Prostitute)

In the Countr y of Panpan – “l’m going to get over this. l’m having a panic attack. (Woody Allen) – “What sports do you like? (Prostitute)

As the question of sports is asked, on the spot Woody comes back from the blobby pan into the focus of detail (while Robin Williams’ Mel and the TV viewers are supposed to remain forever soft). The spectator constructed by the young Romanian filmmakers is, ideally, situated at the antipodes of the soft, out of focus TV viewer. This “aesthetic pedagogy” has its merits, even if its public is reduced in numbers (in 2010 there were some 75 cinema theatres left in this country of 19 millions). One prime, dark fun example of such pedagogy is to be found in Nae Caranfil’s Philanthropy (Filantropica, 2002).14 “Once upon a time,” begins the movie, “there was a city split between princes and paupers. Between the two only stray dogs were left. They were called the middle class.” The city is post-1989, “anything goes” Bucharest, the main character is the high school teacher Ovidiu Gorea, a loser and aspiring writer interpreted by Mircea Diaconu and the plotline delivers the latter to the hands of Pavel Puiuţ (Don Pepe). This able gentleman, played by Gheorghe Dinică, is the President of the “Philantropica” charitable society. Once he had been an aspiring young writer, like Ovidiu, but after spending some years in prison for having written too freely and rubbed the Communist Party the wrong way, he changed his profession: he now writes lyrics for beggars. As organized begging is a very profitable enterprise, Puiuţ is making a killing. After teaching Ovidiu the ABC of begging – “The stretched hand which doesn’t tell a story doesn’t get the alms!” 15 – Don Pepe sends him to scam money out of rich patrons in high-end restaurants. Business flourishes for everyone (including Miruna – Ovidiu’s fake wife, played by Mara Nicolescu –, and the “in” waiters), until one night Ovidiu and Miruna go to a restaurant where no previous arrangement with the waiters had been made. Surrounded by the deafening karaoke gymnastics, Ovidiu tries the usual scheme (“We are poor, we can’t pay the bill, we are celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary...”), but the massive waiter, who would have none of that, pushes Ovidiu to the basement and proceeds to beat him up thoroughly. In a dark comic dialogue, the waiter cries out: “Mai vrei?” (Romanian for “do you want more?”, sounding like “my vray?”), and hits him again. The waiter then repeats “Mai vrei?” “Mai vrei?”, hits him once more, then picks up the mike and finishes Frank Sinatra’s song ecstatically: “Myyyyy waaaaay!” Yet that was part of another scheme by Puiuţ, the master-cracker of passwords into the human soul. The stretched hand that doesn’t tell a story doesn’t get the alms, and the story is always surprising and dark. It tells you to have pity on the disenfranchised; pity is to give, is not to have anymore; not to have is to be. This cheap affirmation of life links, at the moment you give something to the beggar, your past and present, as a clean justification of that living in denial you just asserted. Giving to beggars is self-calming and -aggrandizing reactivity: it takes the blob that you are on the couch in front of the TV to see your own good deed.

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The end of the movie makes its plotline tuck in the viewers, to only swirl them around. “Do you feel pity?” asks Pavel Puiuţ turning sardonically to the camera, “Then I got your dough”. Pity and pleasure, rather than horror, jump off screen to grab the viewer’s gaze and buck. The harmony that links the hoaxes – pity on screen and fun off it – would normally relax the viewers. Yet, it doesn’t, as the viewers’ side comes to amount to the drainage of the one on the screen. Now the spectator has the chance to reflect for a bit, turn around and see that s/he is in the punch line of fire. The second blow of the movie’s finale would have the spectator realize that his world is the dregs of media, and that the real may be accessed only by turning off the TV screen. By resisting panpan’s toxic overtake, and by turning TV on its head, Romanian film makes room for the real. It is in this sense that I call the overarching poetics of Romanian new wave cinema neo-neorealist, rather than neorealist. While the latter presupposes the existence of a reality which is independent of, and essentially unchanged by visual representations, neo-neorealism is critical and active: it deconstructs the images stuck in the viewers’ minds by the media, particularly television, and exposes them for what they are worth: sites of manipulation that have been naturalized as “real.” By making room for the real as sheer potentiality, Romanian new wave cinema builds neo-neorealist ways out of the country of panpan into the dark fun of an exacting, exciting freedom.16

Patched reality: Mircea Diaconu’s theatrical suffering in Nae Caranfil’s Philanthropy

In the Countr y of Panpan

Reframing the revolution: a small TV station struggling with history in Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08, East of Bucharest

N otes 1 |  Two years earlier, the latter co-edited an important collection of articles on the December 1989 events in Romania, which points to the “failure of paper” when confronted with the fact that, in December 1989, revolution and television have become virtually indistinguishable entities (see Television/Revolution: The Ultimatum of the Image [Television/Revolution, Das Ultimatum des Bildes], ed. Hubertus von Amelunxen and Andrei Ujica [Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1990]). Ujică went on to direct a three hour-long documentary, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu (Autobiografia lui Nicolae Ceauşescu, 2010), made up entirely of TV and film footage. 2 | Two of the many critics who consider the trend as neorealist are Leo Alexandru Şerban (“Romanian Cinema: From Modernity to Neorealism,” Film Criticism Vol. 34, No. 2-3 [2010]: 2-21), and Doru Pop (Romanian New Wave Cinema: An Introduction [Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2014]). Pop, for one, writes that neorealism was associated with a “politically correct” cinema during the communist era; thus, Romanian directors in the new millennium refused to see their filmmaking as “simple neorealist statements, although they use some of the basic functions of this type of movie-making. The main idea of neorealism, that of ‘being always in the present tense,’ was adopted as central dogma in the philosophy of the Romanian new ways of making cinema.” (Pop, Romanian New Wave Cinema, 53) 3 | A dark joke, telling for and of the times when Romania was part of the world’s largest red district, has Nicolae Ceauşescu, the Communist Party’s General Secretary, gathering a million people in Bucharest’s main square and telling them that the times were getting rough and that there wouldn’t be any gas available for the following year. The square promptly erupts in general applause. “Unfortunately, comrades,” adds the Great Man, “there will be very little food available over the winter that’s coming over us!” / applause /

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Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu “But,” he adds, “we have to think of the future of our country” / applause / “we have to use the limited food we have for the children” / applause / “so all of you present here today will be hanged” / applause / “the Party will provide the rope.” The whole square – quiet. After a few embarrassing moments, an old man’s voice whispers from the crowd: “Should we bring the soap, comrade General Secretary?” (Another version of this joke can be found in Ben Lewis, Hammer and Tickle: The History of Communism told through Communist Jokes [London: Weidelfeld & Nicholson, 2008], 3). 4 | Daneliuc pushed this dark poetics in his post-1990 works, especially in The Conjugal Bed (Patul conjugal, 1993) and The Senator of the Snails (Senatorul melcilor, 1995), where humor is overwhelmed by darkness. 5 | Georges Didi-Huberman, “Appendix: The Detail and the Pan,” in Confronting Images. Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005): 229-271. 6 | Ibid., 268. 7 | Ibid., 248. 8 | Ibid., 256. 9 | Ibid., 257. 10 | Ibid., 259-260. 11 | Ibid, 271. Didi-Huberman continues: “In this ‘objet’ (object) we must first hear the word jet (gush), and the prefix that indicates the act of placing there before us, the act of what presents a front to us – of what looks at us – when we look. In this object, simultaneously intense and partial, insistent although accidental, in this contradictory objet we must understand the fragile moment of a disfiguration that nonetheless teaches us what figuring is.” (ibid.) 12 | Culminating with 2000, the “year zero” of Romanian cinema, when no movies were produced in the country. 13 | Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 123. 14 | Philanthropy, a French-Romanian co-production, was the first Romanian feature film to receive funding from Eurimages, the European Cinema Support Fund. 15 | “I left one eye and one leg at Stalingrad in ’42,” he dictates to an old beggar; to a pregnant woman, whom he instructs to carry around a decrepit doll in a carriage: “Maybe the one I am pregnant with will live!”; and, turning to contemporary Romanian cinema, Don Pepe casts a middle aged beggar as an ailing film director. The sign that he is supposed to wear reads: “Film director. During the dictatorship I made movies. Today our cinema is dead and I’m incurably ill myself.” 16 | Janelle Blankenship and Tobias Nagl deserve my genuine thanks for their careful reading and useful suggestions which added substance to this text.

A Decade with the New Romanian Cinema Stories of Life in an Extramoral Sense Rodica Ieta

One of the constant pressures exerted upon the modern subject is that of history, especially of surviving it, in the sense of both living through and witnessing it. When history is no longer made by individuals but by the headlines and the wind they blow into people’s faces, it increasingly becomes an issue of representation; it is a story played out in different keys (less and less intelligible for an individual) and then recorded in yet other codes and ciphers. In this labyrinth of signs, survival acquires an extramoral sense. These few sentences attempt to sum up Hayden White’s view of history as narrative, while simultaneously echoing the Nietzschean adage: truth is “a mobile army of metaphors […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions.”1 In the ever deepening cleavage between history and truth, to be blamed on language, if one falls for Nietzsche’s predictions terribles, lightness comes to reign over human life. The same aura of lightness, albeit not in a terrible vein, prevails in Benjamin’s theses on history as well as in his comments on Klee’s sketch Angelus Novus. Ultimately, history is preserved in the language of the victorious puppet; personal experience amounts to being summoned to subscribe to the order of the day, and the overall orgy finds a resting place in a domesticated Apollonian sense of finality, doom, and organized spectacle full of noise, but devoid of music. While the modern subject no longer follows the trajectory of a destiny ultimately controlled by gods, she nevertheless finds herself more or less in the position of a puppet inserted in a world that makes less and less sense, driven by obscurely and obtusely interrelated historical and economic strings. Modernity cast the subject into perpetual doubt about herself and her relation with the world (usefulness, purpose, authority). Always modern, by virtue of its date of birth, cinema has constantly had this problematic modern self to tackle; famous auteurs come to mind, such as Bergman, Antonioni, Truffaut, who all created a unique contour of the individual trapped on a solitary island called self. It is perhaps worth noting, even if only in passing (since the idea requires more elaboration), that if one attempted to find auteurs with similar preoccupations in former socialist Eastern European cinema, an example would not easily come to mind. As Dina

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Iordanova points out in her pioneering Cinema of the Other Europe, films from the former Communist Bloc follow certain themes and trajectories that can be used to characterize them collectively (examples to the contrary notwithstanding), but probing of the self is not one of them: “this cinema is mostly preoccupied with investigations of morality, of the relationship between the individual and social and historical processes.”2 Nevertheless, both the liberally-inclined directors of the 1960s (some met with international recognition) and those practicing “the cinema of moral concern and committed political film-making”3 at the end of the 1970s sometimes employed introspection in order to address political issues obliquely; this tendency was exacerbated in the last decade of socialism. 4 The fall of communism brought about not only dramatic socio-political changes, but also a new operating scenario for the film industry. The four axes chosen by Iordanova to trace the common history of Eastern European cinema – industry, themes, style, geopolitics – meet major and sometimes radical turning points in their articulation. Twenty years later, some of the problems of production and distribution seem to have been alleviated with the help of international film festivals and pan-European systems of sponsorship and collaboration. Ironically echoing the Marxist dichotomy between forces and relations of production (with the latter always lagging, hence occasionally causing the sparks of much-needed revolutions), geopolitically and industry-wise, the newly configured post-communist cinemas are catching up to standards. Yet the other two axes singled out by Iordanova, namely themes and style, rather follow the Hegelian winding path of the spirit not yet enlightened by full comprehension of the dimensions of its newly conquered freedom. Perhaps not surprisingly, most film critics from the region (and this is an important distinction, because Western critics have another perspective, due to their frame of reference) would agree with Roumiana Deltcheva that Eastern European cinema after 1990 fell prey to “a new hegemonic discourse, which carried the exterior label of ‘democratic’ yet refused to engage in a dialogic relation with the past.”5 Cristina Stoianova diagnoses the symptoms of “the postmodern post-communist condition,”6 reflected in the young Eastern European directors’ preference (with few exceptions; she discusses Nimród Antal’s Control [Kontrol], 2003) for “the solace of closed existential worlds, far from engaged analyses of the maddening postcommunist social and ethical tensions, focusing their tongue-incheek curiosity on the strangest aspects of the post-communist existence.”7 From a slightly different angle, Peter Hames launches similar reproaches to the New Czech New Wave, decrying the lack of thorough analyses and moral stand in post1990 films dealing with the past; instead, emphasis falls on everyday experiences and things anyone can identify with.8 For instance, he criticizes Jan Svěrák and Petr Jarchovský for prioritizing entertainment over “film as an expression of experience”; none of these films, he argues, “provides an analysis of its period that would leave the audience genuinely disturbed.”9 Hames’ conclusion can serve as manifesto for an engaged cinema; his feeling is that TV documentaries and books about the past do not suffice and that feature films need to use “an imaginative

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examination going beyond the requirements of the market.”10 Roumiana Deltcheva also calls for radical changes in expectations and perspective, this time regarding the stereotypes inherent in the East vs. West dichotomy (passive vs. active; offer/ response vs. demand). Stock “Eastern” characters persist in contemporary Western art: the Romani Gypsy beggar, the Polish conman, the Slovenian petty crook, the violent macho man from the Balkans, or the Eastern European femme fatale turned prostitute.11

M ee ting the S phinx : Twent y Y e ars L ater Two decades of Eastern European original versions of social, political and cultural democracy position filmmakers at the crossroads, with riddles behind and ahead, in both space and time. The two famous questions asked at the gates of the Ancient city of Thebes have metamorphosed.12 Temporally, the crossroads indicate that sufficient time has lapsed to contour an image of possibilities, trends, flaws, and new directions in the cinema of the region. The spatial aspect of the riddle is tackled in Dina Iordanova’s Cinema at the Periphery, which raises questions about the viability of the concept of national cinemas and about cultural hegemony (e.g., the dominance of Hollywood in Europe, contradicted by collected data about top popular films with national audiences in France, the UK, or Japan).13 Instead, in the context of seemingly inevitable globalization, the concept of “small cinemas” is gaining critical favor as well as weight. In the past twenty years, Romanian cinema, whether framed as “national” or trans-national/European, has accumulated a quite impressive history of its own. While genealogical analyses of its broken or mostly re-shaped rapport with the past are still sparse, the critical literature related to post-1989 films starts to gather visibility.14 The New Romanian Cinema (a rather inadvertent term coined by critics and legitimized as such, despite the young directors’ open rejection of belonging to any school) now has a corpus of films which, on the one hand, potentially target a variety of audiences15 and on the other lend themselves to indepth scrutiny and critical dissection. Arguments to the contrary notwithstanding, I believe that the New Romanian Cinema now has a history, characterized by more depth and nuances than the by now classical distinctions related to minimalism.16 As the organizers of the Fifth Romanian Film Festival in NYC (December 3-5, 2010) implied through the choice of a bold poster announcing “a new beginning,” the New Romanian Cinema is at a crossroads. To illustrate this positioning, I shall pay close attention to three Romanian films of the New Wave, coming from different directors, at different stages of creative maturity, and tackling the same thorny issue faced by all Eastern European countries (and cinemas implicitly), namely the West as dreamland/land of opportunity/measure of prosperity and value. Cristian Mungiu’s Occident aka West (Occident, 2002), Bobby Păunescu’s Francesca (2009) and Călin Peter Nemetz’s Medal of Honor (Medalia de onoare, 2010) bring fresh

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insights into the thwarted rapport between Romanians and the West, as well as into generational conflicts issuing from Romania’s communist past. Moreover, I shall argue that one of the major contributions of these films is the underpinning proposition that, besides communism, the West is also the past (hence, part of a history that needs revision, since nuances can no longer be swept under the hegemonic carpet of Western democracy and welfare).

E nfants terribles de aling with H istory – Past and P resent Following a transparent thematic tradition of the Romanian New Wave, all three films contour individual destinies touched by communism, by dreams about the West, as well as strong clashes between parents’ and children’s priorities, whether stemming from past family history or from recent events. If one were to seek an overarching question to address these films, it could be the following: How does the all-alone all-forsaken individual withstand the maelstrom (so as not to use the Hegelian “march”) of history’s pervasive and invasive forces? Inspired by the nuanced and painful existential problems advanced by the three films under investigation, I want to propose that from an individual point of view the burden of history ultimately leads to a false choice between survival and honor, between action and passivity. Dealt not in moral currency but in primary instincts, this false choice absurdly (sometimes even tragicomically) results in the individual’s temporary annihilation.

L iving B e t ter : The D espair of a F ailed , U ngrounded R esponsibilit y The three films essentially tell a story about the protagonists’ single-mindedness, which renders any moral judgments pretentious, although judgments always press themselves upon the mind; their lives ultimately partake of an ultra-moral context of the stories, as they weave themselves into an intricate net of tragedy, coincidence, seeming victory, and ultimate irreparable damage. Life appears as a tragedy devoid of the tragic, a moral conundrum devoid of an overarching moral meaning or purpose. The characters’ despair to live better, to justify their life choices to themselves and in the face of others, and to assume ungrounded responsibilities traverses a range of nuances, from comical, to pathetic, to a muffled sense of the tragic. One cannot but wonder at the cleverness with which these films demand and achieve the suspension of moral judgment, when its application would cast doubt on the price paid in the name of living better. Ten years after the film was made, the tainted choices weighed by the main characters in Mungiu’s Occident remain as current and sharp as ever. Mungiu addresses the problem of choice in a specific Eastern European context: the West

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as dreamland, the promised land that renders any sacrifice acceptable and whose righteousness is unquestionable, examples to the contrary notwithstanding. He calls for the suspension of moral judgment by intertwining and occasionally overlapping three fast-paced developing stories about choice between the East (home) and the West (the promise and universal fix): with a heart as heavy as the historical legacy that issued it, the fiancée (Sorina) of a disoriented Romanian intellectual (Luci) chooses to flee to the West with an obscure Belgian entrepreneur and benefactor (Jerome); a naïve and customarily obedient daughter (Mihaela) gives up idealism for an emptily professed creed that “we need to do what’s in our best interest,” choosing to try out her luck in the West, with the help of a German-Romanian (Nae) who fled the country during communism and “made it in the West”; a former defector (Nae Siegfried) returns to bring the news of his buddy’s (Nicu) not-so-successful life and tragic death in a car crash in Germany and ends up confronting the police officer (Mihaela’s father) who beat him when he attempted to cross the Danube illegally (when Nicu and Luci planned to swim across the Danube, Luci ended up abandoned on the shore). Occident cleverly combines cine-verité realism of location, sound, and dialogue, French New Wave relativism of storytelling, and highly stylized photography (color filters, fading) as it manipulates time and the telling of three intertwined stories which take off from one another while the mesh keeps all characters en-messed and resolution-free. Two young lovers, Luci and Sorina, who fight poverty and a prevailing sense that their lives are being wasted as they wait for things to improve (and for their life to change miraculously or get a fix from somewhere), meet the protagonists of future episodes as they go to the grave of Sorina’s father to ask for a sign whether they should stay or leave for the West. The seriousness of the question is deflated by the ensuing comedy: Luci gets hit on the head by an empty bottle thrown by Mihaela’s drunken bridegroom, who, in the second episode, fails to show up for his own wedding; the benefactor who stops his Jeep to take Luci to the hospital becomes the fix that Sorina has been waiting for – she moves in with him and will eventually leave the country, giving up love for all the other glittery promises manufactured about the West by the Romanians’ avid imagination and talent for cover-ups; Mihaela, the abandoned bride, cries on a bench in the same cemetery and her smile at the princely arrival of the Jeep quickly becomes a grimace as Sorina’s cry for help draws Jerome’s attention. Abandoned by his fiancée, Luci moves in with auntie Leana, the mother of his friend Nicu, who went to Germany to make money and “become someone.” In the meantime, the police look for him, as Mr. Nae Siegfried arrived in Bucharest to bring tragic news about Nicu’s death and failure to accomplish anything. The episode ends with Luci, Nae and police Colonel Visoiu (Mihaela’s father) attempting to break the news to Nicu’s mother. Each episode offers another variant of this moment, thus placing it under the sign of a relativism that speaks volumes: nothing is certain, not even death; imagination can supply what reality lacks; living is a form of dying and vice versa.

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Francesca unfolds the crisis of a young preschool teacher desperate to collect enough money for a trip to Italy, where she plans to open a daycare facility for the children of Romanian immigrants. Like Occident and Medal of Honor, the film offers Chekhovian slices of life that outline the characters, their crises and doubtful victories. The opening of Francesca slightly confuses the audience, as it presents a young man speaking Russian on the phone, presumably talking to his child, left home with the mother. Very quickly, the spectator realizes that the action happens in a city in Romania; moreover, the title creates the expectation of a heroine, which makes the film even more intriguing. This initial suspense continues for quite a while, and even when the young man’s identity becomes clear (he is Miţă, Francesca’s boyfriend), the puzzle deepens. Everything related to Miţă bears the mark of a thriller: his hopes of finding a better life in Romania (as a citizen of the former Soviet Republic of Moldova, which was part of Romania before World War II) lead him into the obscure and dangerous underground world of money lenders. Romania is the West for Miţă, and his dreams ironically follow the same trajectory as the Romanians’ dreams about the other West (i.e., Western Europe): the more eager one is to settle into the clichéd comfortable life associated with the West/the better world, the more traps one encounters. Bobby Păunescu dissects Miţă’s and Francesca’s stubborn and painful pursuits of a better life by making them revolve around money, to the point where the constant pressure for money becomes almost absurd; the elliptical stories of the protagonists merely enhance this relentless presence of money. Practically every major scene stems from the financial mess to which Miţă and Francesca finally succumb (the former de facto, the latter potentially). Because Miţă fails to return the borrowed money, the gang who pursues him more and more aggressively ends up staging his accidental fall from Francesca’s apartment staircase. While Francesca leaves on the bus to Italy thinking that her sacrifices to help Miţă financially (the spectator is uncomfortably privy to Francesca’s self-flagellation, as she agrees to sit on her godfather’s lap to gratify his sexual frustrations, while he in turn will gratify her financial ones) will bear fruit, she receives the news of Miţă’s death. The same relativism that ends Occident infuses the paralyzing final scene: Francesca sits on a bench, under the fixed gaze of the camera, suspended in time and space, not quite capable of thinking or comprehending the news of Miţă’s death (perhaps not even understanding the reasoning behind her own decision to get off the bus). Throughout the film, Francesca sought a dream that never seemed quite her own. Instead of character depth and inner motivations, one finds in her story mostly gaps that generate multiple possible motivating scenarios. Perhaps this is the film’s strongest realist vein, justifying its New Wave impressionist style: the story is told so as to appeal to the spectators’ personal experience and observations, to feed their thirst for logic and resolution with a series of events correlated randomly (there is no clear explanation or reason for Francesca’s decision to go to Italy, while

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Miţă’s and Francesca’s relationship is merely sketched), and to end just as it started – in medias res and disturbing. Francesca seems to claim nothing (in the best tradition of high modernism, before post-modernist relativism made a name for itself), yet it captures a major crisis following Romania’s EU accession on January 1, 2007: the massive exodus of the workforce, especially of young people, all driven by the myth and frenzy of a better life, of “real money,” worth any sacrifice. Francesca’s case, cleverly sketched to transcend individuality, captures the uncontrollable maelstrom faced by present-day Romania, where constant instability, socio-political betrayal, and endless transition have led to generalized disillusionment. Perhaps more boldly than Occident, Francesca also gestures towards a reconsideration of the West’s validity as a pillar of welfare, stability, and trust. One character raises the issue of prostitution (which may become reality once Francesca reaches Italy and finds herself penniless), while the very idea of opening a Romanian-language day care indicates the major impact of immigrants upon the Italian society. Francesca’s father and grandfather speak quite scandalously about Italy (in fact, Alessandra Mussolini threatened to sue the producer for an uncomplimentary remark jokingly made about her grandfather). To the spectators’ neutral eye, the West in fact appears as anything but the place to seek a better life; to deepen the existential crisis, staying home is equally tormenting. In the case of Romania functioning as the West for people like Miţă, one can only think of the inscription above the gate to hell in Dante’s “Inferno”: lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate (“abandon all hope, ye who enter”). Medal of Honor complicates the thorny issue of immigration by focusing on those left behind: the aging parents, living from one phone call to another, trying to relate to estranged children and to grandchildren who hardly speak Romanian. Călin Peter Netzer does not fall for the minimalist fashion, which occasionally renders Francesca a belated and unoriginal copy of Stuff and Dough (Marfa şi banii, 2001), Cristi Puiu’s groundbreaking controversial film now generally considered the trendsetter.17 Instead, the story is masterfully built from initially confusing slow-paced patches of the parents’ daily life, until a plot contour unfolds and grips the spectator’s imagination. Humor, whether dark or light, constantly saves the story from falling prey to pathos and pity, always a pitfall in the case of films dealing with old fellows and the past that overflows into the present with irrepressible force. Initially, the main drama confronting Ion Ion (admirably played by master Victor Rebengiuc) and Nina (his wife, played by Camelia Zorlescu, who is superb in the role) appears to be his wife’s refusal to talk to him, which started six years before. The cause of this painful silence is not revealed until Ion snatches the phone one day and confronts his son, who immigrated to Canada in spite of the father denouncing him to the secret police. This personal detail singles Ion out as incapable of understanding both his son and history at large; while all Ion wanted was a better life for his only son, he ended up ruining the entire family’s life. Still, Ion is far from Niki and Flo, the parents in Pintilie’s Niki and Flo (Niki

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Ardelean, colonel în rezervă, 2003), where repression and grotesque actions lead to murder.18 Amidst the spouses’ daily routine and the constant unfolding of small domestic dramas, the silence between them remains unexplained for the longest time, challenging the audience and stretching one’s patience. What saves the day is humor: from Ion’s prolonged fight with the building administration over not paying his heat bill (he refuses to pay for a service he does not receive, as all the heat pipes in the apartment building are clogged and need to be replaced), to his interaction with the mailman who brings the pension money and expects to be recompensed, even if only with a small amount of money (and Ion always refuses to do that), to the nuisances of old age (hearing aids, lack of sympathy from everybody around) and the generalized mistreatment of old people, everything is infused with streaks of humor that deflate the heavy underpinning drama and prevent pathos from ruining the film. The story of Ion Ion blends individual details with facts to which anyone who lived in Romania under communism and after can relate. Moreover, from beginning to end, the film sustains this popular appeal without slipping into clichés – an extraordinary achievement in itself. Ion Ion could have been an ordinary aging citizen of Romania, with a son who immigrated in spite of his father’s will, facing the usual crises of a man of his age. Yet, something outstanding touches his life, even if only fleetingly, and this gives the film its original vision, in the best tradition of Aristotelian plot reversal: Ion I. The veteran Ion receives a medal for heroic acts during World War II, although he can hardly think of anything heroic that he might have done so many years ago. Eventually, he comes up with a scenario of faint heroism, if only to justify the medal to himself and to have a coherent story (albeit doctored) to boast to his wife and son. The medal immediately places everything in a different perspective: Ion can become “somebody” for his estranged family members, in whose eyes he has come to mean nothing. In fact, he examines his whole life to adjust it to the newly acquired recognition; he digs through his letters to his wife and eventually finds an event which, with some imagination, can pass for an act of heroism on his part. Yet, not all is well that starts well. Like Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich, the pathetic old fool from “The Overcoat,” and like Caragiale’s Lefter Popescu (who possesses two grand lottery winning tickets, but each is the winner in the other category), Ion Ion finds himself on an emotional roller-coaster: from euphoria to disappointment, from renewed hope to final despair. From his best friend and aid, the medal becomes his worst enemy and the source of unprecedented anxiety when he learns that a mistake had been made and that the medal belongs to a World War II veteran named Ion I. Ion (what a difference an initial makes!). However, Ion ultimately finds a solution to lead him out of the tragic end befalling both Akaky Akakievich and Lefter Popescu (the former dies and the latter loses his mind): he obtains a similar medal from a pawnbroker and has everything ready for the day when his son arrives home for the first time after his illegal flight from Romania.

A Decade with the New Romanian Cinema

Upon close examination, Ion Ion appears to have little depth, like the main characters in Occident and Francesca. His deeds revolve around seeming trifles, and he gets involved in mundane errands that throw a thick fog over his inner being. But Ion is slightly more complicated than the young protagonists of the other two films discussed here: his depth arises from his guilt, although his actions present only the character’s surface. The scene that closes Medal of Honor gestures towards a much needed moral repair in present-day Romania. Ion’s Canadian grandson plays with the medal and damages its clasp. The medal is symbolically put in its place, so to say, and when Ion casually and left-handedly drops it in his pocket he perhaps feels the uselessness of all those months of fretting over winning the medal back, stuck on its potential to help recover his son’s respect and his own dignity. But real change is due from within, for each one of the protagonists of the three films, and those coming home from the West seem to make one thing clear: change must happen inside, as it did for them upon the clash with another culture and while struggling to adapt to a foreign land and make it their adopted home. Actual immigration, as opposed to work migration, brings such an inner change and this is what Medal of Honor proposes. And the changed loved ones can change the ones left behind, even if only temporarily.

The Par adox of M ir acles Romanians have a penchant for expecting to be “saved by the bell,” for receiving unexpected favorable turns of fate and for meeting with better luck. From folk ballads such as “Miorita” (“The Ewe”), which allegorizes the murder of a shepherd into a wedding of cosmic proportions, to Romania’s slowly-paced acceptance into the European Union, the nation’s collective unconscious seems to register that miracles, although granted randomly, are still possible. In their respective ways, the lives of the protagonists in the three films are guided by such expectations of miracles, in spite of their faith having moved from religion to money (Occident and Francesca) or material objects (Medal of Honor). Occident ends with a communist song about the year 2000; like all communist songs for children, it is full of élan and promise of a glorious future, with social harmony and peace. The song forces the question upon any viewer, whether from the East or the West: what miracle did the year 2000 bring for those who lived to see it? The children who sang the song in their early school years are the ones choosing to leave for the West when it is their turn to fulfill their promises, symbolic as they may have been. And the West comes across in this film as a monstrous gravity force that attracts like a vampire although its envoys to Romania are mostly ignoble characters, disguised as charitable donors, disinterested helpers, or menin-search-of-an-easy-bride. But nothing can wake the Romanians up from their dreams: the West has been for too long the only guaranteed promised land on earth, hence they welcome all foreigners with an absurd mixture of imbecility and

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kindness (as if trying to prove that they, too, belong to the human species). The film seems to suggest that the miraculous year 2000 dissolves on airwaves just as the reflections of street lights dissolve in the puddles after rain. Francesca leaves the viewer with an uncomfortable sense of defeat. While the entire film created a strong bond between viewers and Francesca, making them wish, with her, that she should win at all costs in reaching her final destination, Italy (the dreamland where she can start her own daycare and make real money), when Francesca gets off the bus in the middle of nowhere to return home to a dead boyfriend, capitalist logic meets Romanian tradition become non-sense and success is denuded of all glory. It seems that an ancient sense of duty and responsibility finally strikes Francesca; presumably, she feels that she must be present at Miţă’s funeral (a twisted Romanian version of Antigone), or that she must investigate the murder, although her single-minded pursuit of the trip to Italy does not grant the character much moral depth in that direction. The end appears puzzling and disturbing, verging on absurdity; it relies on what has by now become the trademark minimalism of the Romanian New Wave, whose masterful effects in Cristi Puiu’s Stuff and Dough (2001) or Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective (2009) won much envied international appreciation. Just like Francesca, the viewers receive a hammer stroke, as the film does not aim at building a momentum, but rather at capturing the underpinning nonsense of the protagonists’ accidental choices. In Medal of Honor gestures and silence that speak a thousand words create a highly dramatic ending around the welcome meal for the son and his Canadian family. Following its burlesque trajectory, the medal finally becomes a plaything for Ion’s five-year-old grandson, while Ion unconvincingly tries to rescue it from damage or loss, eventually giving it up altogether and placing it in his pocket. The film ends with this symbolic burial of the medal, while Victor Rebengiuc’s impeccable acting renders the character’s hard to suppress realization of utter futility: of his banal life, of his desperate fight to retrieve the medal and with its help redesign a better (more honourable and glorious) past for himself, of his dreams for a family legacy.

To choose or not to choose When films dive into everydayness with such seeming nonchalance as Romanian New Wave films do, spectators can easily feel that art has trespassed its boundaries. Yet, one should not judge a book by its covers; these films address trauma in the only way they can, that is, at an angle, by analyzing its effects: the present as an inherited trauma. The people of post-1989 Romania are both witnesses to and survivors of historical trauma with the ensuing multi-twisted paths of return to what was never there in the first place (except in an obstinately present collective unconscious demanding its toll): living better. In the absence of moral grounding, living becomes a responsibility verging on instinct, a choice in disguise: people merge with a projected life, dive into it empty-handed and land a victory that may

A Decade with the New Romanian Cinema

as well be called defeat. And all the time they find themselves facing a thorny threshold.

The West as dreamland: Anca Androne in Cristian Mungiu’s Occident

Accidental hero: Ion Ion (Victor Rebengiuc) in Călin Peter Netzer’s Medal of Honor

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N otes 1 | Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001), 878. 2 | Dina Iordanova, Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film (London: Wallflower, 2003), 13. 3 | Ibid., 8. 4 | In the case of Romania, for instance, accentuated state censorship triggered elaborate parabolic representations in such films as Mircea Daneliuc’s Glissando (1984) or Dan Pita’s The Last Ball in November (Noiembrie, ultimul bal, 1989). Pita and Daneliuc have always used the subversive possibilities of the medium to question the status quo and to satisfy the intellectual sophistication of their audience. See their earlier films such as Daneliuc’s The Cruise (Croaziera 1981) and Pita’s Contest (Concurs, 1982) and Justice in Chains (Dreptate in lanturi, 1983). 5 | Roumiana Deltcheva, “Reliving the Past in Recent Eastern European Cinemas,” in East European Cinemas, ed. Anikó Imre (New York: Routledge, 2005), 197-211. 6 | Christina Stojanova, “Fragmented Discourses: Young Cinema from Central and Eastern Europe,” in East European Cinemas, 222. 7 | Ibid., 227. 8 | Peter Hames, “The Ironies of History: The Czech Experience,” in East European Cinemas, 147-8. 9 | Ibid., 148. 10 | Ibid., 149. 11 | Deltcheva, “Reliving the Past in Recent Eastern European Cinemas,” 208. 12 | The most famous riddle of the Greek Sphinx is: “Which creature in the morning goes on four legs, at mid-day on two, and in the evening upon three, and the more legs it has, the weaker it be?” Only Oedipus was able to answer it by saying “man.” Apparently, there was a second riddle: There are two sisters: one gives birth to the other and she, in turn, gives birth to the first.” The answer is “day and night” (both words are feminine in Greek). 13 | In “Rise of the Fringe: Global Cinema’s Long Tail” Dina Iordanova states her task as follows: “to point out the ascendant global presence and impact of cinema from the periphery that, by virtue of entrenched perceptions of ageless hegemony is often regarded as secondary and, even where acknowledged, still classified as lacking impact.” (Dina Iordanova, “Rise of the Fringe: Global Cinema’s Long Tail,” in Cinema at the Periphery, ed. Dina Iordanova, , David Martin-Jones, and Belén Vidal [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010], 25) For Iordanova’s perspective, see also her “The Cinema of Eastern Europe: Strained Loyalties, Elusive Clusters,” in East European Cinemas, 229-49, and “College Course File: Eastern European Cinema,” Journal of Film and Video Vol. 51, Issue 1 (1999): 56-77. For important perspectives on European cinema, see also The European Cinema Reader, ed. Catherine Fowler (London: Routledge, 2002), Rosalind Galt, The New European Cinema. Redrawing the Map (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) and Mary P. Wood, Contemporary European Cinema (London: Hodder Arnold, 2007).

A Decade with the New Romanian Cinema 14 | While many major international festivals have now come to expect the presence of at least a couple of new Romanian films, criticism moves at a slower pace. In the United States and Canada, Romanian film festivals are organized annually by the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York City (directed by Corina Suteu) and by a group of film students in Toronto (ToRo film festival), among many others, usually affiliated with universities, such as MIT, Harvard, University of Pittsburgh. On the other hand, important progress has been made in the international critical reception of the new films coming out of Romania: see the special issue of KinoKultura 6 (2007), available at: http://www. kinokultura.com/specials/6/introduction.shtml, or the special double issue of Film Criticism, Winter/Spring 2010, guest-edited by myself and Ramona Uritescu-Lombard. Important background information on Romanian cinema can also be found in “Cinema – noua generatie/Cinema – the new generation. Interviews with directors and film critics,” Revista Vol. 22, Issue 5 (5 October 2007), available at http://www.revista22.ro/cinemanoua-generatie-4053.html, and “Filmul românesc – cine are nevoie de el? [Romanian cinema – Who needs it?].” See also the series of articles collected in Dilema veche No. 353 (18-24 November, 2010), available at http://www.dilemaveche.ro/category/editie/ dilema-veche-nr-353-18-24-noiembrie-2010?page=4. 15 | A prevalent argument among Romanian film critics is that the young directors keep their attention focused mostly on international success, film festivals, and Western audiences. Obviously, this is a subjective perception of the Romanian audience’s needs and tastes, and this paper attempts to nuance it. Also, critics keep pressing for home-made genre and entertainment films, and for box-office success of Romanian films. Conversely, from reading film chronicles and national and international film festival reports (available at http://agenda.liternet.ro/film and http://www.tiff.ro/en), I have not been left under the impression that the few home audience successes recorded so far have been emphasized enough. For instance, Mungiu’s Occident (2001) struck a strong rapport with the audience, as did 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 săptămâni şi 2 zile, 2007), even if (as the critics claimed) it was only because people were curious about a movie that won the Palme d’Or. In 2007 Mungiu started the cinema caravan, a cinema-on-wheels type of network for showing his 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in cities without working cinema theatres across the country. 16 | For an excellent introduction to Romanian cinema, old and new, see Alexandru Leo Serban’s “Romanian Cinema: From Modernity to Neo-Realism,” Film Criticism Vol. 34, No. 2-3 (Winter/Spring 2010): 2-21. For a detailed theoretical inquiry into the minimalist-realist art of the new directors, see my “The New Romanian Cinema: A Realism of Impressions,” Film Criticism Vol. 34, No. 2-3 (Winter/Spring 2010): 22-36. 17 | Both Francesca and Cristi Puiu’s Moartea domnului Lăzărescu (The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, 2005) were produced by Mandragora, a company in which Bobby Păunescu and Cristi Puiu are financial partners, which may also explain some of the minimalist similarities. Originally a businessman, Păunescu sought to make a story that would sell both at home and abroad and, judging by the film’s reception and success so far, he seems to have reached his goal.

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Rodica Ieta 18 | For an excellent analysis of Pintilie’s film, see Maria Ioniţă’s “Niki and Dante: Aging and Death in Contemporary Romanian Cinema,” Film Criticism Vol. 34, No. 2-3 (Winter/ Spring 2010): 37-50.

Genre/Adaptation

“A Typical Icelandic Murder?” The “Criminal” Adaptation of Jar City Björn Norðfjörð

Towards the end of Baltasar Kormákur’s Jar City (Mýrin, 2006) the police detective Sigurdur Óli (Sigurður Óli) can be seen running after an escaped convict. In a move calculated to arouse laughter no less than suspense, the much larger and altogether gruesome convict alters the stakes and begins chasing after the detective. It is a chase without precedent in Icelandic cinema – a national cinema almost devoid of chases in the first place – and is also suspiciously absent from the best-selling novel Mýrin/Tainted Blood (2000) by Arnaldur Indriðason from which the film is adapted.1 Instead it relies on genre conventions familiar from many a Hollywood crime film and even good old-fashioned American slapstick. As such the chase and Jar City raise pertinent questions regarding contemporary Icelandic cinema, shedding light on a fundamental change of direction. I will start by offering an overview of these changes beginning with the influential role of European art cinema during the 1990s before addressing Icelandic cinema’s current surrender to a new and unparalleled turn towards Hollywood. A survey of the recent Icelandic “crime scene” in both film and literature follows, whose striking success has coincided with a remarkable neoliberal shift in Icelandic economic policy. I then turn my attention to the essay’s primary topic, the film adaptation Jar City. Two quintessential themes shape the crimes committed in the novel Tainted Blood. One is the conception of their being uniquely Icelandic; the other is that these are crimes committed primarily against women. The film has faithfully adapted the prior element while engaging in some fundamental and problematic alterations as regards the latter – thus the “criminality” hinted at in my title. These changes made during the adaptation are symptomatic of the different economic models, aesthetic norms and political implications of Hollywood filmmaking as compared to not only European art cinema but also Scandinavian crime fiction – if in quite different ways. Thus a close reading of the adaptation helps to shed light on what is at stake in the recent transformation of Icelandic cinema.

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Icelandic cinema was established in the early 1980s as an explicitly national institution making films by local filmmakers and for a local audience. After a noteworthy early success at the national box office it soon became apparent that Icelandic cinema could not survive on its own, leading to what I have referred to as its transnational turn.2 The financial crises threatening the film industry during the late 1980s and early 1990s were abated with the help of the production funds Eurimages and the Nordisk Film and TV Fund; transnational co-productions soon became the order of the day. Aesthetically this shift adopted the European art film as the norm, no doubt partly motivated by the promise of exhibition at film festivals and international distribution. Exemplary films that garnered some success include Kormákur’s debut film 101 Reykjavík (2000) and Dagur Kári’s Nói the Albino (Nói albínói, 2003). The primary exemplar, however, was Friðrik Þór Friðriksson, Iceland’s most influential and important filmmaker of the 1990s (as a producer as well as a director). His leisurely paced road movies depicted social outsiders in a symbolic and formalistic manner, often giving a wink to established auteurs. For example, Children of Nature (Börn náttúrunnar, 1989) and Movie Days (Bíódagar, 1994) included the angels from Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987), played by Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander respectively, while Movie Days also opens with a screening of Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961) and concludes with a freeze frame evoking François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups, 1959). Friðriksson has also frequently voiced his distrust of Hollywood, a stance typical for Icelandic filmmakers during the 1990s and one which remained the norm into the new century.3 However, midway through the aughts a most dramatic shift occurred as genre cinema – and primarily that of crime – took center stage. Although both British and Scandinavian influences can be detected, particularly in crime series made for television, this was the first time that Hollywood could be said to have served as the primary role model for Icelandic filmmaking. Certainly, crime had surfaced as a subject earlier but only rarely in the genre-specific manner that became the dominant trend in Icelandic cinema around the middle of the decade. 4 In addition to Jar City such prominent films were made as A Little Trip to Heaven (Baltasar Kormákur, 2005), Cold Trail (Köld slóð, 2006) by Björn Br. Björnsson, Reykjavík-Rotterdam (Óskar Jónasson, 2008) and The Higher Force (Stóra planið, 2008) by Ólafur Jóhannesson, while numerous other projects are in various stages of development and production, including another Indriðason adaptation, Silence of the Grave (Baltasar Kormákur). Perhaps even more striking was the swift introduction of crime series on television and their rapid ascendancy to dominance over other fiction series. Examples of such series include Every Colour of the Sea is Cold (Allir litir hafsins eru kaldir, 2005) by Anna Th. Rögnvaldsdóttir, Svartir englar (“Black Angels,” 2008) by Óskar Jónasson, I Hunt Men (Mannaveiðar, 2008) by Björn Br. Björnsson, Pressa (“Press”, 2008) by Óskar Jónasson and The Cliff (Hamarinn, 2009) by Reynir Lyngdal.5 Also signifying the embrace of American film and television industry models are the first generic Icelandic horror film

“A Typical Icelandic Murder?”

Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (Júlíus Kemp, 2009) and the popular sitcom series by Ragnar Bragason, Næturvaktin (“The Night Shift”, 2007), Dagvaktin (“The Day Shift”, 2008), Fangavaktin (“The Prison Shift/Watch”, 2009) and their film sequel and box-office hit Bjarnfreðarson (2009). Bragason had earlier directed the socially conscious art cinema dyad Children (Börn, 2006) and Parents (Foreldrar, 2007). Remarkably, when Óskar Jónasson, one of the more prominent directors of the crime wave, directed his debut film Remote Control (Sódóma Reykjavík) in 1992 it was a comic spoof of the crime genre, which relied on the incongruity between Icelandic society (little organized crime for one thing) and genre conventions. When making Reykjavík-Rotterdam and the television series “Black Angels” and “Press” fifteen years later, this incongruity would seem to have evaporated altogether as Icelandic society was placed firmly within these American genre conventions. I suspect that this stems less from changes taking place in the Icelandic “crime scene” itself than the impact of the recent rampant neoliberalism on the Icelandic film and television industry – both direct and indirect. As many other Icelandic institutions, filmmaking became subject to such neoliberal criteria as efficiency, privatization and profitability; acceptance and popularity were now to be gained from genre cinema and television serial production. Not surprisingly Hollywood (already monopolizing local cinema and televisions screens) became the primary role model. All in all, Icelandic cinema was increasingly thought of in industrial rather than cultural terms, with even filmmakers themselves lobbying for increased state support by citing tourism revenues and job creation, rather than older criteria emphasizing artistic merit or cultural independence (not least from Hollywood).6 And as the business models of Hollywood have in recent years replaced earlier norms, they have brought with them the narrative formulas, generic patterns and even the ideological baggage of their product. Judging by contemporary Icelandic cinema and television, the old Marxist dictum of the base shaping the superstructure would seem to have lost little of its analytical power. The transformation that has occurred in Iceland has not done so in isolation, and the shift to the crime genre in film and television can be seen to follow changes that have taken place in Scandinavia. Andrew Nestingen has described how a neoliberal shift originating in the 1980s began altering film industries throughout the Nordic countries in the following decade: “The national film institutes transformed themselves from aesthetic gatekeepers to cultural-economic facilitators during the 1990s. […] As a result, film production became more diverse and more economically driven.”7 A decade later a similar transformation took place in Iceland and helped to instigate this shift towards Hollywood most conspicuously evident in the new Icelandic crime film. One should not, however, overlook the possibility of direct influence from Scandinavian filmmaking, as many of Nestingen’s more prominent examples were exhibited in Iceland, albeit primarily those of Danish origin, including Nightwatch (Nattevagten, 1994) by Ole Bornedal, Pusher (Nicolas Winding Refn, 1996) and In China They Eat Dogs

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(I Kina spiser de hunde, 1999) by Lasse Spang Olsen. However, one result of the neoliberal shift has been the total dominance of Hollywood films in the Icelandic market during the aughts. The exhibition of Scandinavian films has diminished to the rare festival screenings or a possible television broadcast. It should be noted, however, that on the state television channel Ríkissjónvarpið the Danish police procedural series The Eagle (Ørnen, 2004–2006) was extremely popular (no doubt helped by its half-Icelandic police detective Hallgrim Ørn Hallgrimsson), as was another Danish production, Forbrydelsen (“The Crime,” 2007–2009). Scandinavian – and primarily Swedish – crime fiction has also indirectly impacted on film and television production by creating a dramatic shake-up of the Icelandic literary landscape. Icelandic crime fiction was virtually non-existent until the late 1990s and translations of the Scandinavian subgenre were rare – even the internationally renowned Henning Mankell was not translated until 1998, a year after Indriðason wrote his first novel. Although the groundbreaking police procedural series of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö of the 1960s and 1970s were indeed translated into Icelandic, they never helped establish crime fiction as an integral part of the Icelandic literary scene as was the case elsewhere in the Nordic countries. In the year 2010, however, it is not uncommon to see Scandinavian crime novels crowd the local bestselling lists; translated authors include Tom Egeland, Karin Fossum, Anne Holt, Mons Kallentoft, Jens Lapidus, Camilla Läckberg, Liza Marklund, Jo Nesbø, Vidar Sundstøl and Johan Theorin, not to mention the global phenomenon of Stieg Larsson’s “Millenium” trilogy.8 As regards Icelandic crime fiction, itself immensely popular at home and abroad, it can be broadly divided into three categories, although such a grouping admittedly excludes numerous authors addressing crime in a less generic fashion. The first is characterized by writers like Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and Óttar Norðfjörð whose work is based on a fanciful plotting in the mould of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code – often written with translation in mind. The second is inspired by hard-boiled fiction of the American kind and includes writers Stella Blómkvist (pseudonym; the author’s name remains undisclosed) and Árni Þórarinsson. The third group consists of police procedurals written by, amongst others, Ævar Örn Jósepsson and Indriðason. It is also this group that is most heavily influenced by the left-leaning and socially conscious Swedish authors Sjöwall and Wahlöö and their heir Mankell, who leave a clear mark on Iceland’s most popular author, Indriðason. His detective Inspector Erlendur bears an uncanny resemblance to his Swedish predecessors Martin Beck and particularly Kurt Wallander. Both Erlendur and Wallander are divorced and suffer from various ills, including a past trauma, face constant familial problems centered on their relationship with their daughters, and are somewhat old-fashioned and troubled by today’s society. Society is indeed the central concern of these police procedurals as the crime and its investigation invariably also uncovers one social problem or another. Tainted Blood was Indriðason’s third entry in his series on Detective Inspector Erlendur, who despite being born in the remote Eastfjords of Iceland lives and

“A Typical Icelandic Murder?”

works in the capital Reykjavík. On the police force Erlendur is assisted by both Elínborg, a female partner, and Sigurdur Óli, whose American influence provides a counterpoint to Erlendur’s rather old-fashioned local customs: “Sigurdur Óli was […] a graduate in criminology from an American University. He was everything that Erlendur was not: modern and organised.”9 Although these three provide the core of Erlendur’s team, numerous other characters enter the fray, as is typical of the police procedural: forensic experts, pathologists, retired colleagues and meddling supervisors. The plot of Tainted Blood is quite complicated as it involves numerous crimes – two murders, two rapes and a case involving child sexual abuse. It turns out that the murder victim found at the beginning of the novel, an older man named Holberg, had back in 1974 murdered a former friend, Grétar, who had apparently been blackmailing him, and whose mysterious disappearance is solved when a body is discovered buried under Holberg’s floor. It is also discovered that Holberg had raped two women at an earlier time, resulting in their respective pregnancies. Unbeknownst to him he had carried a genetic disease, which led to the early death of Audur (Auður), the daughter of his first rape victim, Kolbrún, who subsequently took her own life. The second rape victim, Katrín, raised her son Einar as if he were one of the children she had had with her husband. While Einar showed no signs of the disease he unknowingly passed it on to his daughter, who died of it. After her death, Einar began a secret investigation at his workplace, which happened to be the national Genetic Research Center. Having discovered the truth of the matter he confronted his real father, Holberg, and killed him, unpremeditatedly, before ultimately committing suicide at the grave of his half-sister Audur. The complex and intriguing plot also draws parallels to the investigator Erlendur’s personal life, for his daughter Eva Lind is a drug addict facing numerous difficulties including an unexpected pregnancy. Eva Lind also encourages Erlendur to look for her friend Dísa Rós, who has disappeared; Erlendur discovers that her disappearance is a consequence of having suffered prolonged sexual abuse by her father. The social problems uncovered and highlighted in this expansive narrative concern widespread and multifaceted gender-based injustice. Icelandic crime literature as a whole has been remarkably successful at home and in translation and the figure of Indriðason looms largest. He is the pioneering figure of the literary phenomenon and its most popular representative in Iceland and abroad, having almost certainly replaced Nobel prize winner Halldór Laxness as Iceland’s all-time best-selling author.10 Considering his popularity it was only a matter of time before an attempt would be made at adapting his work to the big screen. When released in Iceland in 2006 Jar City was an instant hit at the local box office, helped by the popularity of the original novel and a marketing and distribution campaign modelled on Hollywood. It was given a wide release that had earlier been reserved for the biggest of Hollywood’s blockbusters, which the Icelandic media promoted with continuous updates on its box-office take. In terms of attendance and box office Jar City soon became the most successful

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film in Iceland since the early 1980s; unlike previous local successes it also did remarkably well in foreign markets. What is rather striking about the film’s international success is that Jar City was a local production, unlike the earlier transnational film productions, which had garnered success outside Iceland partly by catering to a foreign audience. For example, in adapting Hallgrímur Helgason’s novel 101 Reykjavík in 2000 and Ólafur Haukur Símonarsson’s play The Sea (Hafið) in 2002, director and scriptwriter Kormákur changed a character’s nationality to allow for extensive dialogue in English and introductory scenes to clarify Icelandic society and customs. In this regard the adaptation process became a matter of transnationalization – making what was primarily national material accessible to a foreign audience. Also relevant in this context is these films’ adherence to the contemporary European art film model; certainly 101 Reykjavík is indebted to the queer aesthetics of Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar. No such catering to art cinema or narrative changes occur in the adaptation of Tainted Blood despite arguably ampler opportunity, for example the inclusion of foreign police assistance with a real-life precedent in Iceland’s most famous murder case, which also revolved around a mysterious disappearance in 1974. Apparently no attempts were made during the adaptation to make Jar City more accessible to a foreign audience and its address would seem to be primarily local.11 Although Reykjavík is the scene of the murder at the opening of Tainted Blood, the crime investigation reaches throughout Iceland. Interestingly, the publisher of the English translation includes four maps to help situate the reader: one of Iceland, one of Reykjanesskagi (the south-west corner of Iceland), and two of Reykjavík. Many of these settings call for a local knowledge not easily translated, and while the novel has been simplified in the film adaptation by delimiting it to Reykjavík and Reykjanesskagi (e.g. by relocating one of the rapes from Húsavík in the far north-east to Reykjanesskagi and thus closer to Reykjavík), locations are otherwise true to the novel. Although prior familiarity with the setting remains helpful, I suspect locations are more easily apprehended in the film than in the novel, as the mise-en-scène speaks volumes. Reykjavík, including the modern office building of the Genetic Research Center, often resembles any other city in the West, in opposition to the countryside, typified by the rustic house and cemetery by the coast. It is also worth pointing out that the landscape in Jar City differs significantly from the majestic and tourist-friendly imagery we have grown accustomed to in transnational Icelandic cinema. Atmospheric though it may be, the lavascape of Reykjanesskagi and the grey Atlantic Ocean appear gruesome and cold; the harrowing wind, bleak skies and relentless rain contrast with typical tourist imagery. Unlike many of the earlier transnational films in which the landscape was the ultimate national signifier, in Jar City landscape functions primarily as background, even if it does have some narrative importance and may still generate some exotic appeal abroad. The novel involves an altogether different

“A Typical Icelandic Murder?”

national motif – “the not so typical Icelandic murder” – to which the film adheres faithfully. This motif was to arouse considerable interest abroad. Perhaps one reason why Icelandic crime fiction arrived so belatedly to the literary scene, compared to the other Nordic countries, is that the genre was considered incompatible with Icelandic society and its crime scene – or lack thereof. This is explicitly addressed in relation to the murder of Holberg at the opening of Tainted Blood: “Isn’t this your typical Icelandic murder?” asked Detective Sigurdur Óli who had entered the basement without Erlendur noticing him and was now standing beside the body. “What?” said Erlendur engrossed in his thoughts. “Squalid, pointless and committed without any attempt to hide it, change the clues or conceal the evidence.” “Yes,” said Erlendur. “A pathetic Icelandic murder.”12

Sigurdur Óli’s complaint about the murder’s apparently crude obviousness speaks to the lack of “exciting” crimes in the Icelandic context. As a genre, crime fiction of course requires complicated crimes with their clues, evidence and investigations. In the end this murder will also turn out to be a complicated one, and therefore not a typical Icelandic crime, yet nonetheless quintessentially Icelandic. Step by step, Erlendur and his colleagues begin to realize the unusual nature of the murder: “I know Icelandic murders aren’t complicated, but there’s something about this one that doesn’t fit if you just want to put it down to coincidence.”13 As it turns out, the solution to the crime is found in the genes of the Icelandic nation as a whole, which by implication raises relevant questions regarding contemporary Icelandic society: The Genetic Research Center had recently begun collecting medical data about all the Icelanders, past and present, to process into a database containing health information about the whole nation. It was linked up to a genealogy database in which the family of every single Icelander was traced back to the Middle Ages; they called it establishing the Icelandic genetic pool. […] It was said that the homogenous nation and lack of miscegenation made Iceland a living laboratory for genetic research.14

Having first discovered to his dismay that Audur’s brain has been kept in a jar for research purposes in the so-called “Jar City”, a bio-sample bank from which the film takes its name, Erlendur is in for another shock when he realizes the extent of personal information gathered in the database of the Genetic Research Center. Face to face with one of its directors, Erlendur rants: “And you keep all these secrets. Old family secrets. Tragedies, sorrows and death, all carefully classified in computers. Family stories and stories of individuals. Stories about

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Björn Norðfjörð me and you. You keep the whole secret and can call it up whenever you want. A Jar City for the whole nation.”15

Thus the riddle first solved by Einar and only subsequently by Erlendur, the complex weave untangled by tracing the hereditary disease from Holberg down to Einar’s daughter, is presented as just one emblematic secret in the vast database. Or rather, the database is a web made out of the family secrets that comprise the Icelandic nation – “that little community, Iceland, where everyone seem[s] related or connected in some way.”16 The national character uncovered or “decoded”. ‘“Paternity,” Sigurdur Óli said, putting on his rubber gloves. “Can we ever be sure about that in Iceland?”17 The murder mystery is thus embedded in the Icelandic nation’s genetic code, its obsession with family trees and origins, and the attempt of corporations to turn the nation into a profitable guinea pig. In adapting the novel, Kormákur has kept faith with and emphasized these national elements ranging from the typical Icelandic murder to the genetic database. Considering the extensive nationwide debates regarding the controversial deCODE Genetics, upon which the Genetic Research Center is explicitly modelled (and whose founder and director Kári Stefánsson even plays himself in a small role in the film), Jar City has much in common with what Nestingen has defined as a “medium concept cinema” (not to be confused with Justin Wyatt’s “high concept”) in contemporary Scandinavian filmmaking, and which he considers a key product of its neoliberal shift. In particular, medium concept’s topical nature in a national or regional context is relevant: Medium concept can be understood as filmmaking that involves the adaptation of genre models and art-film aesthetics; an engagement with political debates, lending the films cultural significance; and that integrates with these elements a marketing strategy designed to reach a specific audience. […] Medium-concept films are a type of popular fiction that uses crime narratives and other violent genres to stage conflicts over notions of individualism.18

Jar City would seem to be an exemplary case of medium concept, as topical questions of individual rights are addressed by tightly interweaving the genetic database with a crime narrative, resulting in a remarkable local box-office success. However, the film also deviates from the concept in rather perplexing ways, although considering the medium concept’s multivalence and broad applicability it should hardly be surprising that specific films should fall partly within its parameters while remaining outside in other aspects. Nonetheless, a quintessential part of Nestingen’s definition is a clear demarcation and distancing of medium concept and its mixture of genre and art cinema from the transnational Scandinavian auteur cinema.19 Unlike such Scandinavian crime films as the Norwegian doppelgänger study Insomnia (Erik Skjoldbjærg, 1997) or the Finnish

“A Typical Icelandic Murder?”

“chaotic” network narrative Frozen Land (Paha maa, 2005) by Aku Louhimies I find Jar City mostly devoid of traditional art-cinema aesthetics (although I may rely on a more narrow definition than Nestingen does). Nonetheless, Jar City’s exhibition and distribution has far surpassed the national or regional range of the medium-concept film. In this regard it has followed the example of Scandinavian auteur cinema – even winning the main prize at Karlovy Vary in 2007 – despite being a local film without the typical credentials of art cinema. As a case in point, the reception of Jar City in both the United States and the United Kingdom downplayed questions of film aesthetics, which tend to figure prominently in the critical reception of “foreign” films. Critic Kate Stables even described it as showing “downright disinterest in conventional aesthetics.”20 Instead, most critics are preoccupied with and seem fascinated by the “typical Icelandic murder” and the crime’s solution in the Icelandic gene pool.21 As a local film garnering such interest abroad, due to a topical national theme rather than art-cinema aesthetics, Jar City seems to undermine what had appeared in the Icelandic context as a rather straightforward distinction between national films and transnational ones. Closer analysis suggests, however, that rather than undermining that distinction Jar City complicates it. A film that encourages foreign viewers to obsess over the genetic pattern of the Icelandic nation is surely an exemplary case of the transnational. In any case, Jar City is hardly a typical local film; it is simply that its global register is of an altogether different nature, stemming from the now universal crime genre, with a notable slant towards Hollywood, rather than the European art cinema that has previously supplied Icelandic cinema’s evaluative norm. As noted, Kormákur’s adaptation remains true to the characters, setting and “national” theme of Tainted Blood. As regards the plot, Kormákur has rearranged it in such a manner as to tell simultaneously the story of the crime and the story of the investigation – to recall Tzvetan Todorov’s well-known two-part definition of detective fiction.22 Although the distinction is not explicitly stated or explained, the alert viewer can gather from the blue-grey color palette used to portray the story of the crime that its scenes are set in the past, unlike those of the investigation, shown in a more ordinary palette. This strikes me as a case of successful adaptation, since so much of the plot is set in the past that it would have been cumbersome to convey these elements solely with dialogue and/or more conventional flashbacks. In fact, extensive information regarding the genetic theme provided late in the novel, including Einar’s long explanatory confession before he shoots himself, is arguably somewhat heavy-handed.23 Otherwise the mostly objective third-person narration (of Tainted Blood specifically and the police procedural more generally) lends itself easily to adaptation. Evaluating the success of particular adaptations is in many ways a subjective enterprise; to a considerable extent a matter of interpretation rather than objective analysis. As Brian McFarlane has pointed out in his influential study of adaptation it is especially important to treat with care the issue of fidelity. He observes that:

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Björn Norðfjörð Fidelity criticism depends on a notion of the text as having and rendering up to the (intelligent) reader a single, correct “meaning” which the filmmaker has either adhered to or in some sense violated or tampered with. […] The critic who quibbles at failures of fidelity is really saying no more than: “This reading of the original does not tally with mine in these and these ways.” 24

In place of such naïve and subjective fidelity criticism McFarlane proposes a more rigorous and objective method of analysis based up Roland Barthes’ “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.”25 McFarlane distinguishes between those elements of the narrative that must be adapted, and thus remain subjective to interpretation, and those that can be transferred, and therefore can be evaluated objectively.26 Central to the latter are so-called cardinal functions (Barthes’ term) or key events that constitute “the irreducible bare bones of the narrative.”27 McFarlane’s conclusion in this regard: “The filmmaker bent on ‘faithful’ adaptation must, as a basis for such an enterprise, seek to preserve the major cardinal functions.”28 The extensive restructuring of the plot does not in and of itself alter the novel’s cardinal functions as they are simply distributed differently. What is curious, however, is that in a film adaptation that otherwise would seem to aspire to fidelity (even avoiding the transnationalization typical of Kormákur’s earlier adaptations 101 Reykjavík and The Sea), and was presented and marketed as such, the crimes – the most salient cardinal functions of any crime narrative – at the heart of Tainted Blood have been fundamentally altered. This change cannot be emphasized enough. Although the novel’s two murder victims were male, Tainted Blood is ultimately about crimes against women. Grétar and Holberg generate little sympathy, particularly the latter, who is himself guilty of raping two women in a gruesome manner. Attention is likewise drawn to the difficulty women face in pressing charges for sex crimes and the poor handling of such cases by the police force. Furthermore, the novel includes the subplot of Dísa Rós, who suffers extensive sexual abuse by her father. These elements have fallen by the wayside during the adaptation process. No doubt it could be argued that subplots such as the one regarding Dísa Rós are quite typically sacrificed due to constraints of space. However, the issue of space is irrelevant to the film’s most questionable alteration; if anything, it makes the plot more convoluted and unconvincing. In Jar City Katrín is “guilty” of cheating on her fisherman husband while he is out at sea rather than the victim of a horrendous crime. Thus in one “masterstroke” the narrative has changed its character: it no longer concerns crimes against women, but rather a woman’s “crime”. This is what ultimately makes Jar City not only an adaptation of a crime, but itself a “criminal” adaptation. In a pivotal scene, Einar confronts his mother Katrín about his paternity, finding her half-naked; this unmotivated nudity directly follows a scene in which old black-and-white photographs of Katrín making love to Holberg surface among the rats and bones in Grétar’s grave. The nudity in the confrontation scene would

“A Typical Icelandic Murder?”

seem to serve little other purpose than to associate a woman’s flesh with crime and death. During Einar’s confrontation with his mother, Katrín leads her son to believe that she was raped, thus prompting Einar’s murder of Holberg and his own suicide. The adaptation thus acquits Holberg of the rape and by implication indicts Katrín for the death of her granddaughter. The origin of this family tragedy is now to be found in Katrín’s sexual sinfulness, as it is her affair with Holberg that brings the bad gene into the family tree. It is this association of sex and death that ties Katrín to the figure of the femme fatale, although her appearance has little of the glamour and seductiveness of her more famous and younger Hollywood cousins, the old photographs notwithstanding. As already noted, Indriðason’s police procedurals are very much an heir to the Swedish prototype in which the genre is used as a tool for social critique. Kristín Árnadóttir has pointed out that: Indriðason’s polemic is not as political as that of his Swedish mentors who in the name of left radicalism are determined to unveil the surface image of the Swedish welfare state where it fails to live up to its promise. […] Nonetheless it is clear that Indriðason wants to address with his stories the problems of modern society in a realistic manner and explain them sociologically. 29

In the novel Tainted Blood the problem addressed is the social violence perpetrated against women – not merely a single crime but systematic gender-based injustice. In the film Jar City the social critique of the Scandinavian police procedural has given way to rather questionable genre elements of the Hollywood prototype – the sinful femme fatale, the inhuman villain and such typical narrative formulas as spying through a window, a prison escape and the chase that opened this article. The novelty of these elements in Icelandic cinema along with Jar City’s wide release and marketing campaign are indicative of the shift towards genre cinema and the Hollywood model, stemming from an era of unparalleled neoliberalism. The great irony is that the neoliberalism pivotal in bringing about these changes in Iceland is now putting them in jeopardy. Following the economic collapse of 2008 the Icelandic film industry has faced extensive budget cuts, and the production of dramatic television material is suffering even greater setbacks. It remains to be seen whether these changes will encourage a return to earlier film norms or perhaps an utter subjection to Hollywood. Kormákur’s latest crime film, Inhale (2010), is a thriller set in the United States and Mexico, and next in line are Hollywood remakes of both Reykjavík-Rotterdam and Jar City.

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De-coding the nation: Inspector Erlendur (Ingvar E. Sigurðsson) at the Genetics Research Center in Jar City

Return of the repressed: Ingvar E. Sigurðsson investigating a history of crime in Baltasar Kormákur’s Jar City

N otes 1 | The Icelandic title of the novel is Mýrin or “The Mire,” but it was first published in English under the title Tainted Blood. After the film’s release that title was replaced with the film’s English title Jar City. I have kept faith with Tainted Blood for the novel to better distinguish it from the film. In 2009 the tenth novel of the series was published in Iceland,

“A Typical Icelandic Murder?” and currently six of these have been translated into English. I have quoted from the 2006 English translation by Bernard Scudder (see Arnaldur Indriðason, Tainted Blood, trans. Bernard Scudder [London: Vintage/Random House, 2006]). Note that I use “Hollywood” rather broadly to refer to elements typical of the kind of mainstream variety we have come to associate with Hollywood filmmaking whether the films are actually made in California or somewhere else. For practical purposes I also distinguish between Scandinavia and the Nordic countries by including Iceland only among the latter. 2 | Björn Norðfjörð, “Iceland,” in The Cinema of Small Nations, ed. Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 46–49. 3 | Due to reasons of space I cannot discuss these changes in greater detail but the interested reader can look up my essay on “Iceland” (see note 2) while a more general survey can be found in Birgir Thor Møller’s “In and Out of Reykjavik: Framing Iceland in the Global Daze,” trans. Rune Christensen and Trevor G. Elkington, in Transnational Cinema in a Global North: Nordic Cinema in Transition, ed. Andrew Nestingen and Trevor G. Elkington (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 307–340. Previously Hrafn Gunnlaugsson’s Viking films When the Raven Flies (Hrafninn flýgur, 1984) and In the Shadow of the Raven (Í skugga hrafnsins, 1988) had received some distribution outside Iceland, but their Icelandic/Swedish production partnership was a result of Gunnlaugsson’s educational background in Sweden and shared little with the transnational co-productions of the following decade. 4 | A notable early exception is the work of director Jón Tryggvason and scriptwriter Sveinbjörn Baldvinsson, including Foxtrot (Jón Tryggvason, 1988) and No Trace (Sporlaust, 1998) by Hilmar Oddsson. 5 | Although my interest in this article is the more general impact of neoliberalism upon the industrial practices of Icelandic media, it is worth noting that some of these productions were directly sponsored by major financial institutions. The series’ narratives on the other hand often betray suspicion towards the new financial system, e.g. both those of I Hunt Men and “Press” include criminal businessmen. 6 | Not unrelated is the growth in foreign film crews, and primarily that of Hollywood, including such films as Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005) and Flags of Our Fathers (Clint Eastwood, 2006), making use of Icelandic locations and providing the industry with jobs. 7 | Andrew Nestingen, Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia: Fiction, Film, and Social Change (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 67. 8 | Although Scandinavian crime fiction is currently the most popular one in Iceland, it is far from the only one being translated – also quite popular are other best-selling crime novelists, primarily of American and British origin. Nor should one underestimate the influence of British crime series long popular on local television channels, as perhaps is acknowledged by Indriðason with his forensics expert Ragnar who is “a particular devotee of British detective series on television” (Indriðason, Tainted Blood, 210). Outside the Scandinavian context the police procedural is typically considered to originate with Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series, whose first installment Cop Hater was published in 1956, or a decade earlier than the series written by Sjöwall and Wahlöö that have so strongly

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Björn Norðfjörð associated this subgenre with Scandinavia/Sweden. It is worth noting, though, that Stephen Knight has problematized the McBain ur-narrative by pointing out not only the works of writers Maurice Procter and John Creasey but also popular radio and film series Dragnet (see Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction 1800–2000. Detection, Death, Diversity, [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004], 154–155). On the occasional early Icelandic crime novel, see Katrín Jakobsdóttir, “Söguljóð borgarinnar: Um borgarlandslagið í íslenskum glæpasögum,” Tímarit Máls og menningar Vol. 66, No. 1 (2005): 10–29. 9 | Indriðason, Tainted Blood, 37. 10 | Sunna, “Arnaldur Indriðason: Brátt söluhæsti íslenski höfundurinn. Stefnir hraðbyri í Laxness,” Fréttablaðið, 24 October 2007, 30. 11 | In this regard a comparison of the book covers of Indriðason’s series in different markets can be quite illuminating. In Germany the covers typically depict idyllic countryside images of turf farms and churches in green nature and mountain settings, totally out of character with the books’ settings and subject matters; in the United Kingdom icy northern images are most prominent, emphasized by such titles as Arctic Chill and Hypothermia; while in the United States stylized images downplay any local specificity. 12 | Indriðason, Tainted Blood, 8. 13 | Ibid., 188. 14 | Indriðason, Tainted Blood, 306. 15 | Ibid., 317. 16 | Ibid., 270. 17 | Ibid., 305. 18 | Ibid., 53. 19 | Ibid., 73–75. 20 | Kate Stables, “Jar City,” Sight & Sound, October 2008, 70. 21 | See e.g. Peter Bradshaw, “Jar City,” The Guardian, 12 September 2008; Eddie Cockrell, “Jar City,” Variety, 2 July 2007; Jim Ridley, “Jar City. CSI: Reykjavik,” Village Voice, 26 February 2008; Andrew Sarris, “Ice, Ice Baby,” New York Observer, 26 February 2008; Anthony Oliver Scott, “A Haunting Enigma of Violence and Chaos,” New York Times, 29 February 2008. 22 | Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 42–52. 23 | It may be worth noting that in the series’ next installment after Tainted Blood, The Silence of the Grave (Grafarþögn, 2001), Indriðason makes use of a similar structure as the narrative moves back and forth in time. 24 | Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 8–9. 25 | Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” in Image– Music–Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 79–124. 26 | Essentially this is the structuralist distinction between story and discourse (e.g. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978]) and although there is little room here to delve into the narrative theory upon which McFarlane bases his premise it may be worth questioning

“A Typical Icelandic Murder?” whether this distinction between adaptation and transfer holds up altogether as any function/story is arguably shaped by its manifest medium/discourse. By no means does this, though, refute the practical merits of McFarlane’s approach and its convincing debunking of conventional fidelity criticism. 27 | McFarlane, Novel to Film, 14. 28 | Ibid. 29 | Kristín Árnadóttir, “Hverra manna er Erlendur? Sögur Arnaldar Indriðasonar um Erlend Sveinsson og tengsl þeirra við sænsku raunsæissakamálasöguna,” Tímarit Máls og menningar, 64.1 (2003): 53 and 55.

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How Corto Maltese Died Wayfaring Strangers on the Frontiers of Europe in Milcho Manchevski’s Dust Zoran Maric

When it premiered at the Venice Biennale, Milcho Manchevski’s Dust (2001, UK/ Germany/Italy/Macedonia) was met with harsh criticism for its portrayal of the Ottoman Empire in decline. At the press conference for Dust, a critic suggested that the film was racist and part of a conspiracy aimed at preventing Turkey from entering the EU.1 The bombastic claim appeared integral to the campaign of intimidation against the film’s director and spearheaded a slew of negative reviews.2 Earlier, Manchevski had been pressured by a Turkish diplomat who, having somehow gained access to the shooting script, came to the set of Dust to object to the negative depiction of the Ottoman Empire in the film.3 Presumably to avoid controversy, plans for worldwide theatrical distribution were immediately drastically scaled back and the promotional campaign avoided any reference to the Ottoman component of the film. 4 The centuries-long Ottoman occupation contributed greatly to the proliferation of Balkan discord, especially in parts of the former Yugoslavia, by provoking comparatively late, paranoid nationalist movements that almost always saw neighboring nations as threats. The Ottoman Empire was in a steady decline in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Seizing the moment, the empire’s most tyrannized subjects, the Christian peasants, frequently rebelled. Rebellions were invariably repressed with a shocking brutality by the rotting imperial machinery who could do nothing but lash out as Europe watched in horror but failed to act. To the delight of the Ottoman authorities, Christian factions battled each other, too, making it difficult for Western observers to determine just whom they should condemn. The Balkans acquired the status of a dangerous frontier territory on the western perimeter of the Ottoman Empire, just outside of Europe “proper.” Rather than being considered a consequence of imperialism, the ethnic discord was perceived as a uniquely Balkan affliction and the region itself as an atypical European territory. This stigma remains attached to the Balkans to this day. The

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view that the Ottomans were socially progressive as compared to the West is often proposed both by historians eager to squash hoary Orientalist stereotypes and by Turkish politicians with Neo-Ottomanist aspirations. The fall of the Ottoman Empire is lamented because, as the argument goes, the empire promoted religious pluralism through its Millet system, designed to grant a degree of autonomy to other “peoples of the book,” and expertly managed its non-Muslim subjects, especially the ever-quarrelsome Balkan Slav Christians unable to control their violent impulses. In Dust, Manchevski depicts the Ottomans as a ruthless imperial force desperately trying to hold onto its Balkan possessions – a view, any comparative progressiveness notwithstanding, that is considerably closer to reality. Often described as a “baklava Western” or an “Eastern,”5 Dust is a film about an icon of the Wild West, a gunslinger who, at the very beginning of the 20th century, goes to the Balkans to escape his brother’s revenge and to avoid being expunged by the modern world. Prompted by a newsreel he sees in Paris, Luke travels to a Macedonia still under the Ottomans, a place seemingly steeped in the chaos of tribalism and violence, a place where myth is still unspoiled by modernity. Hoping to get rich, Luke joins a gang of bounty hunters searching for the leader of bands of fierce fighters against Ottoman oppression. Soon, Luke begins to realize that his is not an innocuous presence in Macedonia, but one that could bear relevance to the outcome of the uprising against the Ottoman Empire. Ultimately, Luke is forced to question his status as a privileged, neutral outsider in a foreign colonial context, and must unlearn what he thinks he knows about the region’s political dynamic. Luke’s story is told by Angela, the daughter of the rebel leader, now a century old and on her deathbed in present-day New York. Angela tells the story to Edge, a young African American man pursued by crooked police officers, who is surprised by the feisty Angela when he tries to rob her apartment and now must listen to the story against his will, at gun point. The implausibility of Angela’s story about Luke and Macedonia frustrates Edge who, although at first unable to see the story’s relevance to his own predicament, feels entitled to contribute to it. Eventually, Edge realizes that within Angela’s story lies his own salvation – he allows himself to get caught up in the story’s lore and becomes one of its characters in order to escape his own harsh reality. After Angela dies, Edge becomes the chief teller of the seemingly uncontainable story and embellishes it with his own hyperbolic style. In Dust, storytelling is a negotiation between the teller and the listener – at any time one or the other can assume authority and take the story in a new direction.6 The film accommodates multiple storytellers who each build something of themselves into the narrative and insist on a direction which best serves their own purposes. Dust suggests that there are no reliable storytellers and therefore no completely accurate historical narratives – a tall tale once begun is difficult to halt. Dust hints that the Balkans have been a particularly fertile territory for tall tales. Through its depiction of Luke’s adventures as told first by Angela and then by Edge, Dust signals that

How Cor to Maltese Died

stories about the Balkans have typically been fantasies. This is a de-ideologizing act because it symbolically dismantles dogmatic historical projects which claim absolute knowledge of the Balkans. Dust exposes the ways in which narrative form camouflages contradiction and fabrication which, in turn, compounds the validity of a text’s historical interpretations. How history is understood depends upon the form in which it is presented. That form is laden with the dogma of those creating it, which, in turn, is rendered invisible because an overarching straightforward (with coherence and closure) narrative form is almost always expected and provided. If, as Lyotard and other poststructuralist thinkers argue, the world is not a whole to be grasped, no attempt should be made to “correct” that incomplete grasp. Perhaps instead, attention should be drawn to the fact that no one teller’s version of history is the right one. Dust discredits those forces which have aligned (by virtue of taking one another as accurate) to situate the Balkans inside of historical narratives that are constructed around a single, pre-set outcome: the Balkans are a savage territory which cannot be civilized. As Manchevski himself points out in an interview, Dust is not a “big history of major events.”7 Somewhat paradoxically, the film’s own narrative – weaving together smaller stories about individuals who witness “major events” and whose private histories intersect in order to make sense of a larger history – never quite becomes a metanarrative that legitimizes this or that view of history. Instead, the film acknowledges that any history, is, of course, a narrative, but affirms that larger (global) histories are made up of smaller (local) ones, which, when considered individually, neither exclude one another nor add up to a comprehensive perspective. While Dust does acknowledge the traumatic historical memory of Ottoman imperialism in the Balkans, it does not concern itself with methodically indicting the Ottoman Empire, let alone its successor state, Turkey. The film deals with the legacy of Ottoman presence in Macedonia rather obliquely, through its depiction of the Ilinden/St. Elijah Day Uprising (one assumes, given the time period, but this is never specifically stated in the film, only alluded to in different ways – for example, via the character of Luke’s brother who is named Elijah) of 1903. The anarchic Balkans of the early 20th century are the refuge for a wandering Wild West gunfighter looking to remain untamed for as long as possible. Dust uses as its backdrop the fringes of the collapsing Ottoman Empire and inserts into that context a visual and ideological marker of the Western genre. The film suggests that the notion of the Balkans as the European frontier vilifies the Balkan “natives” just like the Wild West mythology vilified the Native Americans. Many classical Westerns present an idealized version of the West, which carefully balances the opposition between “civilization” and “wilderness.” The former rests on idealistic visions of future democratic communities but also implies rapid industrialization, moral corruption, compromise, and inevitability of change without consensus, while the latter implies freedom and equality but also a solipsistic focus on the individual and a harsh eye-for-an-eye form of justice.8

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Westerns validate the European/white American colonial presence in North America by depicting the Native Americans as sub-humans in need of civilizing, but often feature romantic heroes who themselves shun this frontier-pushing, “civilizing” drive Westward and who even empathize with Native Americans. In Dust, a Western hero is situated on the frontiers of Europe and must consider the moral implications of using the Balkan context just to maintain his own myth. Luke must decide whether to become a part of the community and support the Macedonian revolutionaries or remain a staunch individualist and so validate the Ottoman colonial presence. Dust utilizes the paramount trope of the Western film genre – the loner negotiating the frontier wilderness – in order to debunk the popular mythology of the Balkans disseminated by outsiders with little knowledge of or genuine interest in the region. The anthropologist and feminist critic Svetlana Slapšak argues (perhaps somewhat controversially) that in Dust Manchevski excises “without a trace of sentimentality or nostalgia the search for the Balkan memory from the space of reality, and put[s] it back into the space of fiction, imaginary, narrative, and myth, where it has belonged anyway.”9 Dust depicts the Balkans as a place where legend and myth can be indistinguishable from historical truth – precisely the type of predicament the West both fosters and condemns in the Balkans. If the Balkans are lost in some mythical historical blur, the West is implicated in its creation. This is a remarkable feat because as Vojislava Filipčević suggests, Dust does not engage in any form of celebration of Balkan exceptionalism nor wallows in Balkan marginality; it rejects and resists the aesthetics of self-exoticization and self-colonialism.10

“C orpses of E mpires ”: Tr avel W riting and B alk anism The Western imaginary tends to position the Balkans, especially the former Yugoslavia, as caught in a ceaseless, visceral cycle of violence that is as unknowable as it is paradigmatic. This Balkanist stereotype positions the Yugoslav peoples as bellicose, ever-quarrelsome tribes bent on mutual destruction and locked in never-ending mythical battles in order to settle ancient accounts. The writer and poet Vesna Goldsworthy suggests that the “predominantly right-wing perception is of the Balkans as a contagious disease, an infectious sore in the soft underbelly of Europe, best left to fester in isolation. The opposing, mainly left-wing – but unconsciously neo-colonial – notion is of Balkan conflicts as revolting departures from the ideal of cosmopolitanism.”11 Balkanism, although in its logic similar to Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, which sees the East as the antithesis of the West, differs from it in one important aspect. As Maria Todorova points out, “while orientalism is dealing with a difference between (imputed) types, balkanism treats the differences within one type.”12 The “in-betweenness of the Balkans, their transitionary character, could have made them simply an incomcplete other;

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instead they are constructed not as other but as incomplete self.”13 Balkanism, after all, is about the differences Europeans detect in other Europeans. Goldsworthy points out that the trend of depicting the Balkans as populated by sub-Europeans actually originates with late 19th and early 20th century British travel writers who were exploring the fringes of the Ottoman Empire and reporting their findings to the public. Within their travelogues lie the origins of the Western perception of the Balkans as culturally regressive and irretrievably lost to the subterranea of history.14 It was the travel writers who first boasted of having located in person and demonstrated in their works the fundamental differences between their own “properly” European environment and that of the ostensibly still wild Balkans. These popular narratives depicted the region as permanently occupying a mythical, pre-industrial past and as stuck “in an ambivalent oscillation between ‘Europeanness’ and ‘Oriental difference’.”15 Travel writers also perpetuated a particular aspect of Balkanism: the region’s peoples are unable to tolerate one another let alone govern themselves without the Ottomans (or one of the Great Powers) overseeing them. Despotic yet presumably noble Ottoman rule was seen as the right remedy for the Balkan “savages.”16 Many writers had a special affinity for the Ottomans and perceived the local population as ungodly philistines.17 Literary critic Andrew Hammond suggests that the impoverishment and crudeness British travel writers encountered among the local Christian population likely reminded them of how those residing in British colonies as well as those living in Britain, but not sharing their class status, looked, lived, and interacted. Travel writers tended not to be overly critical of the Ottoman colonial enterprise in the Balkans because it offered them the comfort of knowing that, in comparison to the local population, they were socially privileged.18 As Maria Todorova succinctly puts it, for a Westerner traveling the Balkans, it was “easier to comprehend the masters rather than the slaves.”19 Travel writers saw not the local Christian population but the Ottoman occupiers as their hosts and they acted as a guest should: with respect for the rules of the house. Some Western philanthropists, having witnessed in person the animosities among the enslaved Balkan peoples, picked favorites and chose to champion the causes of autonomy or statehood of those they deemed most victimized and least savage. Rebecca West, one of the few travel writers who made a genuine attempt to understand the Balkans, explains that many Westerners “concerned” with the well-being of the local population ignored the role of the Ottomans in creating the appalling conditions, particularly the tendency to keep the local Christians at odds with each other in order to easily rule them. Such Westerners “came back with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacred and never the massacrer.”20 The role of the selective benefactor that many Western philanthropists assumed is itself an expression of Balkanism and one of its more devious manifestations. This tendency to pick the righteous among the Balkan peoples only deepened the local divisions by blaming the chaos on one or on all-but-one of the subjugated peoples instead of on the Ottomans.

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Naturally, such travel writers’ lazy philanthropist fantasies provoked resentment from those they presented in an unfavorable light. They incited antagonism and rivalry among the Balkan peoples who each made efforts to promote themselves as civilized and less “Balkan” than their neighbors in order to solicit support for their causes from Western activists and politicians.21 This shading of the region in different degrees of “Balkanness” amplified ethnic and religious discord and played into the paramount Balkanist myth (promoted, of course, by the Ottomans themselves) that Balkan peoples should not be allowed to govern themselves.22 The popular representations of the Balkans as a territory that cannot be left without an overlord were in alignment with the policies of the Great Powers, especially Great Britain, vis-à-vis the Balkans and had a specific political purpose, which was to ensure that even after the Ottomans depart, the Balkans remain a semi-colonial territory and therefore easy to manipulate.23 Balkan peoples under the Ottomans in the 19th and early 20th centuries were pawns in the struggle for domination among the European powers who acted as “sponsors” and “protectors” of those Balkan ethnic groups they saw as “theirs” (based on religious affiliation, geographic location and other factors). Even after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, major European powers, looking to expand their spheres of influence, retained their “clients.” This dynamic continues unchanged to this day.24 While travelling through Yugoslavia in 1937, the British travel writer Rebecca West poignantly observed: “I hate the corpses of empires, they stink as nothing else. They stink so badly that I cannot believe that even in life they were healthy.”25 With these dramatic words, West sums up the catastrophic effects of imperialism and colonialism on what used to be Yugoslavia. West’s admittedly hyperbolic proclamation is fittingly devoid of romantic nostalgia for the past. The legacy of empires is almost always a culture of discord among the formerly conquered subjects, followed by a prolonged semi-colonial dependence on those eager to take advantage of the instability of formerly colonized states.

W hat L uke L e arned at the M ovies Perhaps the most damaging effect of Balkanism today is the implication that all the region’s troubles stem from some kind of mysterious and uniquely Balkan dysfunction rather than from centuries of subjugation and manipulation by outside powers. Film has been instrumental in the promotion of such stereotypes. Western cinematic depictions of the Balkans often play out as frontier narratives – as tales of Western presence traversing the dangers posed by both the people and geography of the region.26 This gaze that sees in the Balkans an aggregation of ancient, cyclically recurring violent passions and which colored the discourse about the Balkans in the Western public sphere during the 1990s Yugoslav wars still persists. Many overtly Balkanist films appeared that utilized these still topical stereotypes. Abel Ferry’s High Lane (Vertige, 2009) is a B horror film about

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a group of French mountaineers in Croatia’s national park of Risnjak who are attacked by a crazed, human head-collecting mountain hermit out to cut their adventure short.27 John Moore’s Hollywood-made action film Behind Enemy Lines (2001) depicts blood-thirsty Bosnian Serbs bent on eliminating an American pilot stranded in their territory. Discussing the alienating depictions of the Balkans in Western cinema, Frederic Jameson suggests that “such movies seem to offer eyewitness proof that the people in the Balkans are violent by their very nature; they seem to locate a place in which culture and civilization – the law, civility, the most elementary forms of compassion and cooperation – are the thinnest veneer, at any moment capable of being stripped away to show the anarchy and ferocity underneath. The inhabitant of this landscape is the wild man of the Balkans.”28 Dust hints at the role of visual media in perpetuating the stereotype of “the wild man of the Balkans.” Trying to escape his brother’s wrath, Luke happens upon an early film projection in Paris. He is enraptured by the images of the Balkans on the screen and believes those images constitute a personal message directed at him. From the newsreel, Luke finds out about the reward offered by the Ottomans for the rebel leader known as the Teacher, and decides to travel to Macedonia to capture the famed outlaw. Immediately preceding the newsreel, the cheerful Parisian spectators are treated to James Williamson’s film, The Big Swallow (1901), which depicts, in an extreme close-up, a mouth which consumes the camera. The enormous grinning mouth gobbles up Luke, too, when he stumbles in front of the canvas at a critical moment, symbolically suggesting that Luke is about to be taken in by the power of representation capable of “devouring” the spectator. At the Parisian screening, cinema is shown to be a mobilizing force that reveals Luke’s destiny. When Luke walks in front of the projector, his silhouette merging with the canvas, f lickering images displayed on his body, the viewer is reminded that Luke is, after all, a film genre trope. Luke walks into the newsreel and into the Macedonian myth seamlessly, as if he rightfully belonged there. Crucially, the newsreel does not concern itself with finer details of what is happening in Macedonia but rather serves as an invitation to a lucrative adventure in an exotic land.29 The newsreel depicts Macedonia as a wilderness populated with just the kind of characters Luke prefers: outlaws, robbers, paramilitaries, and tribes of “natives.” Consequently, Luke has no hesitation about bringing to Macedonia exactly what Macedonia does not need: another character with a gun, himself.30 Manchevski reenacts a moment in the history of cinema when the Teacher points, first his rifle then his two handguns at the camera and “fires” at the Parisian audience watching the newsreel. The reference is, of course, to one of the earliest Westerns, Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) in which one of the characters also “shoots up” the audience at the end of the film. Just as, according to early cinema lore, audiences winced at the sight of Porter’s cowboy shooting at them, the spectators at the far-removed Parisian movie house of Dust duck for cover as if in real danger of getting shot by a Macedonian rebel.31 Cinema facilitates the merging of fantasy and reality as if to promise to Luke that he

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can last a while longer as a character in the world it depicts. Angela’s voiceover accompanies the self-reflexive moment with the following words: “What did he learn at the movies? He learned where the money was.” The Balkanist fiction of the newsreel mythologizes and subsequently poisons the place it depicts. It sends a traveling mercenary to Macedonia. After seeing it, Luke cannot help but wish for Macedonia to remain what it appears to be on the silver screen: an exotic and violent European frontier.

(P ost) modern Times : S tory telling , G enre C rossing There are significant parallels between the treatment of the Balkans by travel writers and depictions of the Wild West in the Western film genre. In the Western, the frontier is seen “as a symbol of fundamental moral antithesis between man and nature.”32 The “civilization,” often bringing with it the vices of the modern world, always came from the East, in the form of school teachers, lawyers, bankers, industrialists. In a directional reversal, in the works of Balkan travel writers, relative to the Balkans, civilizational values are located in the westerly direction. The fundamental difference between the American frontier and the European one, however, is that the former provided a setting for “a locus of conflicts which were always qualified and contained by the knowledge that the advance of civilization would largely eliminate them” 33 while the latter was assumed to be irretrievably lost to “in-betweenness.” The historic importance of what John Cawelti terms the “epic moment,” when the frontier needed taming, was greatly exaggerated: “The relatively brief stage in the social evolution of the West when the outlaws or Indians posed a threat to the community’s stability has been erected into a timeless epic past in which heroic individual defenders of law and order without the vast social resources of police and courts stand poised against the threat of lawlessness or savagery.”34 Similarly, in travel writing and in subsequent public discourse, the Balkans are rendered as a distant European frontier, slow to embrace civilization coming from the West, first in the form of travel excursions and, later on, in the form of diplomatic and military interventions.”35 Dust heavily utilizes the Western genre tropes, especially those of the Spaghetti Western. Dust’s Luke bears similarities to “The Man With No Name” from Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari, 1964), For a Few Dollars More (Per qualche dollaro in più, 1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, 1966), played by Clint Eastwood. Like No Name, Luke is a gruff, detached outsider, skilled with a gun and independent; he has his own sense of justice and he is morally ambiguous. Like Eastwood’s character, Luke is reluctant to become involved in matters which do not serve his own interests and which would undermine his individualism. Jim Kitses suggests that Leone’s style in the three No Name films “keeps the audience off balance, making the familiar genre strange [thus creating] the distance, the Brechtian rupture or space that invites

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contemplation of the film’s ideological operation, its interrogation of Hollywood’s West and the genre’s heroic stereotypes, conventions and ideology.”36 In Dust, Manchevski interrogates the view of the Balkans as an innately savage territory by appropriating Leone’s subversion of the Western genre – by inserting a No Namelike character into an unfamiliar setting and substituting the Ilinden Uprising for the Civil War.37 As Kitses points out, Leone’s West is populated not by cowboys, but by “bounty hunters, bandits and drifters.”38 Similarly, Manchevski’s Dust is populated by just such characters, out to take advantage of the Balkan chaos for personal gain. As they observe the corpses of Macedonian rebels left to rot in the sun, the Teacher’s wife Neda tries to explain to Luke just how cruel the Turks have been in quashing the rebellion. Implicit in Neda’s account is the suggestion that Luke should either help the rebels or leave. Luke’s reply, “I’m sure you’ll be real nice to the Turks if you win,” suggests that when confronted with the villainy of his own presence in Macedonia, he can only retreat into refusal to commit to the rebellion, into lazily equating the colonizer and the colonized. Travel writers were able to relate to the Ottomans on account of their shared social status and were often in awe of their sophistication and thus indirectly supported the Ottoman imperialism. Luke, too, is a traveler initially apathetic to the suffering of the local population, happy to be able to disregard the finer points of the local quarrels on account of being a foreigner. He is not the only such character in the film. Manchevski inserts an intruder into Dust’s fiction who parallels Luke’s intrusion into Macedonia’s. Corto Maltese, a graphic novel character created by Hugo Pratt, unobtrusively appears in several sequences throughout the film. In the original source material, Corto Maltese is a sailor, an adventurer who roams the world during the first half of the 20th century. He was involved in many major world events – the October Revolution, the Spanish Civil War – and has encountered world leaders and cultural icons like Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Joseph Stalin. Although he tends to help the disadvantaged, Corto’s trademark is that he has no firm allegiances. In Dust, Corto seems to spend his time travelling the Macedonian countryside in dubious company – that of the foot soldiers of a colonial power and their collaborators. He is a sailor far from sea who appears to be on a quixotic adventure in the Wild East. Corto Maltese is a character analogous to Luke: a drifter without allegiances, a character inside the wrong fiction. In Sergio Leone’s films, “the struggle is not between the civilized and the savage: Leone’s frontier is one where everyone appears corrupt, but where fine distinctions can still be made.”39 Similarly, in Dust, although there are hardly any innocents among the warring factions, distinctions have to be made between those fighting for freedom, those fighting for personal gain, and those clinging to their imperial possessions. Unlike the disinterested Corto, Luke does begin to understand the criminality of the Ottoman presence in Macedonia and begins to sympathize with the rebels. Rather than blaming this or that local faction, Luke realizes that there are only two sides: the occupier and the occupied. When he

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meets Corto Maltese, Luke is incensed. As if suddenly realizing the immorality of his own reasons for being in Macedonia, he asks Corto: “What are you doing here?” Without waiting for an answer he shoots Corto dead. The killing is a result of Luke’s epiphany and a symbolic act of suicide. Luke kills one who is not unlike himself and, as Angela says when she first introduces Luke and his ethos: “Luke never killed without a good reason.” Dust was inspired by the work of journalists like H. N. Brailsford and John Reed who wrote extensively about their experiences traveling through Macedonia under the Ottomans. 40 Brailsford and Reed, it is important to note, were not dismissive of Balkan peoples as “savages.” Although often casually Balkanist, their work is of great importance as it provides vivid descriptions of the life of Balkan Christians under the Ottomans. Yet inevitably, they too, wrote from the position of privileged Westerners trying to “master” the local environment. In Luke, Dust has its own outsider/adventurer trope, but uses it to question the accuracy of narratives which depicted the Balkans as far removed from the modern world and therefore from the West. In fact, in Dust, all straightforward narratives and claims to authenticity are revealed to be tenuous and subjective. The film makes references to various aspects of Western cultural development at the beginning of the 20th century: the birth of cinema, processes of internationalization, the advent of modernity and, in doing so, symbolically brings together the Balkans and the West. After he captures Luke, the Turkish major on the hunt for the Teacher is offended by Luke’s inauthentic presence in Macedonia. He attempts to communicate with Luke in German and French, snidely informing him that he does not speak “barbaric” English. The major is upset that Luke’s gang has chased away the Teacher and his men, making it more difficult for him to put down the rebellion. It is ironic that the major resents Luke’s presence in Macedonia since he himself represents the foreign occupying force which offered the reward that brought Luke to Macedonia. The major’s presence in Macedonia is “inauthentic,” too. Before giving orders for Luke to be shot because “he doesn’t belong here,” the major chastises Luke for being greedy and proclaims that Luke is the last of the Wild West characters: “Your kind is history. Your time is over.” But if a character from the West(ern) can enter the Ottoman Balkans and become a disturbance, that surely means that the Ottomans no longer have full control of their domain. In Dust, the major and, by extension, the Ottoman Empire have no control over Luke’s or Macedonia’s story. The major’s self-righteous grandstanding then compounds the irony of the fact that his time is over as well: the empire he helps run is about to grind to a halt. In Dust, the archaism of the 19th century and the modernity of the 20th “bleed” into one another. Luke’s presence in Macedonia as a Wild West gunfighter is geographically incongruous but temporally correct – there still was a Wild West in 1903. Scrutinizing the captured Luke, the arrogant Turkish major exclaims: “The day you see a flying machine, you’ll know you’re a dead man.” The major’s prediction that Luke’s demise will come with the arrival of the modern era also

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implies that the Ottoman Empire is about to expire, that it, too, will have to adjust to the changing times (give up its imperial possessions, become a republic). That an Ottoman official speaks to Luke in major European languages and discusses the first flight by the Wright Brothers as the event which has announced the arrival of “new times” hints at the increasingly Westernized disposition of the Ottomans. 41 It points to the irony that having “de-Europeanized” the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire was now itself heavily influenced by the Western cultural perspectives of the early 20th century. Dust points to the “paradoxical” historical simultaneity, at the beginning of the 20th century, of the European Wild East and American Wild West, both of which were struggling to accommodate the march of modernity. In Dust, the Balkans are a place where the past, present and, importantly, the future combine into a single entity, a place where, as Angela (quoting H. N. Brailsford) only somewhat sarcastically puts it, “the centuries don’t follow one another; they coexist.” In true postmodernist tradition, the film hints at the routine interplay of fiction and fact in its own narrative and, by extension, in historical narratives in general. The story of Dust is told by a narrator who, although related to some of the protagonists, has no intimate knowledge of the historical events she describes. 42 Her story shifts between past and present, meanders from verifiable fact to preposterous fiction, but gets reined in by both the teller and the listener in order to remain at least somewhat plausible. Angela describes a situation when Luke was “surrounded by 200 Turkish soldiers”. Edge protests: “You know, before you said 20 A-rabs surround the fucker.” Angela initially replies with “It’s my story, I’ll say 2,000 if I want to,” but relents: “You can pitch in too. 20. 20 it is.” As this exchange continues, the Turkish soldiers, 200 strong, begin to vanish one by one in a series of rapid shots until only 20 remain. The film’s elastic, unstable narrative form, which configures its own depictions of history, is transparently unreliable. 43 Edge “pitches in” and, like Luke, seeks a refuge in a Balkan narrative out of desperation. He must find $8,000 in order to pay off the criminals who are threatening his life. Once he realizes that Angela’s story may reveal the whereabouts of the gold coins Macedonian peasants collected to fund the rebellion, Edge becomes determined to believe Angela’s story, hoping that it will lead him to the money he desperately needs. The urgency of the present circumstances (Angela wants Edge to listen and continue telling her story; Edge wants to find in Angela’s story a clue about the whereabouts of the gold coins) rather than those of the past being recollected necessitate that Angela tells a story that is sufficiently coherent. Edge has to be able to make sense of it and so alleviate both Angela’s and his own anxieties. 44 After he finds the gold coins, Edge escapes into the narrative that has been presented to him; he weaves himself into the tale and becomes one of its performers. After Angela dies, her story unfinished, Edge boards a plane to Macedonia to take Angela’s remains to her homeland as he had promised he would. On the plane he meets a woman to whom he continues telling Angela’s and Macedonia’s story. But by now Edge has not only fully bought into Angela’s

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narrative, he resides in this fiction. He even shows the woman a photo depicting himself with Luke and his brother Elijah. When the woman shakes her head, the implausibility of this young man being depicted in this very old photo dawning on her, Edge asserts himself as an equal character in the narrative of which the photograph is “evidence” and says: “It’s my story. Remember the Alamo? I was there.” The allure of the story for Edge is its power to liberate him. Edge’s decision to believe Angela’s story about Luke’s time in Macedonia allows him to escape his environment and his pursuers. Mirroring Luke’s escape into the Macedonian myth, Edge becomes a character in a trans-historical, transnational narrative rather than a disadvantaged man pursued by crooked cops in 21st century New York City.

C onclusion Dust brings together two frontiers, the Wild West and the Ottoman Balkans, whose mythologies are often treated as historical “fact.” The film appropriates the Western genre in order to subvert the stereotype of “the wild man of the Balkans.” The Western is a genre whose paramount trope is the frontier – the chimerical location where “civilization” and “wilderness” meet and where those uncomfortable with advances of modernity can take refuge. The displacement in Dust of a Wild West hero from one colonial context – the American frontier – and his repositioning into another colonial space – Macedonia under the Ottomans – serves to challenge assumptions about the Balkans as a European fringe territory whose inhabitants are unfit to self-govern. In Macedonia, Luke is an outsider who must navigate local passions, but he is reluctant to stick his neck out for any cause other than his own. Luke’s notion that Macedonia is a place where he can go on being an indifferent outsider suggests that he is trapped in the fiction of the Parisian newsreel. The film, however, suggests that Macedonia is nothing like its depiction in the newsreel. It hints that it was the Ottoman invaders who violently lashed out at those who dared to rebel that created the near-chaos that ruled the Balkans in the 19th and early 20th century. The film exposes the Balkanist dynamic whereby outsiders from the West – journalists, adventurers – who visited the region tended to view the locals with contempt for their alleged inability to live peacefully and disregarded the role of foreign oppression in fostering the discord. Such travelers held the mistaken belief “that complex cultural formations could be reduced to an object and textually reconstituted as ordered knowledge, during even the shortest jaunt around a region.”45 Implicit in this fantasy of mastery was a validation of the Ottoman presence in the Balkans. In dealing, however indirectly, with the subject of Ottoman imperialism in the Balkans, Dust points to the origins of the preconception of an “inborn” Balkan dysfunction – a stereotype which still proliferates (owing especially to cinematic depiction of the region) and continues to pervade Western perception of the Balkans. The film

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suggests that Balkanist prejudice was borne out of imperialist fantasies regarding the fringe European territory under the rule of the Oriental Other. Although it depicts Macedonia of the early 20th century as a violent backwater suffering under the Ottoman boot, Dust is not a film that aims to inculpate the Ottomans or today’s Turks. To take exception to its portrayal of Macedonia under Ottoman rule is to erroneously deny a history of imperialism in the Balkans – an imperialism as brutal as any other. When asked to comment on the film’s controversial reception, Manchevski suggested that artistic expression necessarily involves interpretation and reflection, and need not focus on depicting “any kind of historical truth alone.” Yet, to shy away from sensitive topics in order to appease is “unethical.” He states: “At the turn of the 20th century the Ottoman army would go into villages and kill civilians, even pregnant women, would burn young children alive and chop peoples’ arms and heads off. That is a documented fact [...] So I don’t see why it constitutes a prejudice on anyone’s part if this historical truth is being mentioned or portrayed. Sounds like a chip on someone’s shoulder.” 46 The attacks on Manchevski and Dust falsify and ultimately pejorate the discourses of identity politics. To be offended by the film’s portrayal of the Ottomans is to profoundly misunderstand its oppositional contribution to depictions of Balkan character and history. That Dust would be stigmatized by writers resolved to identify instances of chauvinism in a depiction that deviates from the dominant one should not be surprising. As Slapšak suggests “a product of a colonized country cannot compete and sell on the market controlled by a colonizer, without complying to the existing rules on power and imagination.”47 Dust does not seek to arbitrate disputes about the specifics of Balkan colonial past and offers but a fleeting look at life in Macedonia under the Ottoman rule. Perhaps it was Manchevski’s status as an “insider” who pointed to the paternalism of both the West and of Turkey in their dealings with the Balkans that caused the Western critics and Turkish diplomats to respond to the film with sanctimonious derision for its supposed jingoism. Such a reception is deeply rooted in Balkanist stereotypes. Fatuous grandstanding of the critics who saw nationalist zealotry in Dust reduced the film to local color – to being just a part of the regional caldron of irrational, uncivilized passions. Because this narrow interpretation dominated Dust’s initial reception, the film “found itself unable to transcend the Balkan context.”48 Although the irony of this response to the film is almost fitting, Dust deserved a far more thoughtful critical reception.

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Magic hour on the European frontier: Western iconography in Milcho Manchevski’s Dust

“The Teacher” (Vlado Jovanovski) shoots at the audience from a Paris movie screen in Milcho Manchevski’s Dust

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N otes 1 | Zoran Maric, “Interview with Milcho Manchevski,” New York City, 21 July 2010. The critic – Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard – not only reiterated his claims in his review of Dust, but also returned to the film almost a year later to decry the fact that it received a (limited) theatrical distribution in the UK. See Alexander Walker, “Dusty and Dire,” available online at http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/film/dusty-and-dire-7432809.html. 2 | Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian argues that the film serves to glamorize “Macedonian nationalism.” See Peter Bradshaw’s review, available online at http://www.theguardian. com/film/2002/may/03/culture.peterbradhshaw4. In a particularly cynical, defamatory attack, one reviewer suggested the film was a call to arms against Macedonia’s minorities. See Jan Schulz-Ojala, “Filmfestival von Venedig: Krieg an allen Fronten,” Der Tagesspiegel (August 29 2001), available online at http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/filmfestival-vonvenedig-krieg-an-allen-fronten/252086.html. The charges of jingoism featured in the initial reception of the film may have been elicited by an editorial written by Manchevski, titled “Just a Moral Obligation” and published shortly before the film’s premiere in the Macedonian daily, Dnevnik (Milcho Manchevski, “Само морална обврска,” Dnevnik, August 11, 2001). The article, which gained notoriety after it was published in an edited form and without Manchevski’s approval by The Guardian (Milcho Manchevski, “Nato Gave us this Ethnic Cleansing,” The Guardian, 15 August 2001, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/aug/15/comment), appeared at a time when Macedonia came dangerously close to war. The editorial goes counter to the Western media assessment of the culpability of the warring factions in the Balkan conflicts. It criticizes NATO for supporting the Albanian insurgency based on the shaky pretense of fighting against Macedonian repression. Manchevski takes NATO to account for manufacturing a crisis in Macedonia following its Kosovo intervention, and questions the “humanitarian” motives of such interventions. For more on the chain-reaction set off by the editorial, including its impact on how the critics engaged with Manchevski and the film, see Marina Kostova “The Dust Files: One Example of How Macedonia Lost the War for Truth – The West with a Skeleton in the Closet.” (Vest, 22-23 December 2001, available online at http://www.vest.mk/). For a nuanced analysis of how the film – without attempting to disparage any ethnic group – does engage in a form of nationalist discourse, see Vojislava Filipčević, “Historical Narrative and the East-West Leitmotif in Milcho Manchevski’s Before the Rain and Dust,” Film Criticism Vol. 29, No. 2 (2004): 3-33. 3 | Maric, “Interview with Milcho Manchevski.” 4 | Ibid. According to Manchevski, the film’s international distributor, The Works Film Group, “stopped pushing the film after Venice,” while Lions Gate, which handled the distribution in the US and Canada, supported only a limited theatrical run and promoted the film as a Western. 5 | See, for example, Roderick Coover, “History in Dust: An Interview with Milcho Manchevski,” Film Quarterly Vol. 58, Issue 2 (2005): 2-8. Also see Fiachra Gibbons, “Come on. It’ll be Fun,” The Guardian, 13 April 2001, available online at http://www.theguardian. com/film/2001/apr/13/culture.features1

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Zoran Maric 6 | Manchevski refers to his fractured approach to storytelling as “Cubist.” For more on this narrative strategy, see Erik Tängerstad, “When the Story Hides the Story: The Narrative Structure of Manchevski’s Dust,” in Storytelling in World Cinemas (Vol. 1: Forms), ed. Lina Khatib (New York: Wallflower, 2012), 150-164. 7 | Necati Sönmez, “The Rain Comes Again: Macedonian Director Milčo Mančevski interviewed,” Central European Review: The Fortnightly Journal of Central and Eastern European Politics, Society and Culture Vol. 3, No. 15 (30 April 2001), available online at ce-review.org. 8 | Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood, 2nd ed. (London: BFI Publishing, 2004), 1-25. 9 |  Svetlana Slapšak, “Luke Balkanwalker shoots down Corto Maltese: Milcho Manchevski’s Dust as an answer to the Western Cultural Colonialism,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture Vol. 1, No 3 (2002): 95. 10 | Filipčević, “Historical Narrative.” 11 | Goldsworthy further adds that this prejudice manifested itself most acutely in the language of political pundits, diplomats, and journalists commenting on the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, when offensive and discriminatory (sexist, racist etc.) language was becoming unacceptable in Western public discourse. As Goldsworthy points out, to malign the Balkans was somehow not deemed inappropriate: “It is possible for writers who consider themselves to be advanced exponents of European multicultural ideals to write about Albanians, Croats, Serbs, Bulgarians and Romanians with the sort of generalized, open condescension which would appall them if applied to Somalis or the peoples of Zaire.” (Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998], xi) 12 | Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 19. 13 | Ibid., 18. 14 | James T. Shotwell, an American historian who travelled the Balkans in the mid-20 th century, suggests: “One does not have to be more than a few days in the Balkans to realize that neither country nor people can be understood by viewing them in the present alone. They are still living largely in their own past. It is the penalty of isolation that forces people to find in the deeds of their own ancestors that kind of interest in human affairs which modern peoples satisfy in their dealings with one another. Of all characteristics of Balkan life, this is supreme and outstanding.” (James T. Shotwell, A Balkan Mission [New York: Columbia University Press, 1949], 32) 15 | Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania, 2. 16 | “Savages” is not mere hyperbole. This is how British travel writer John Foster Fraser describes the average Serb: “He is emotional. So he loves well and hates well. He will do anything for you if he loves you; if he hates you he will kill you, and mutilate your body afterwards.” (John Foster Fraser, Pictures from the Balkans [London: Cassel and Co., 1912], 59). 17 | John Foster Fraser finds among the Turks examples of “real Christianity,” presumably lacking among local Christians, such as “courtesy, kindliness, hospitality.” (Fraser, Pictures from the Balkans, 152)

How Cor to Maltese Died 18 | See Andrew Hammond, “Imagined Colonialism: Victorian Travelers in South-East Europe,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts Vol. 28, No. 2 (2006): 87-194. 19 | Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 103. 20 | Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (New York: Viking Press, 1941), 19. 21 | Milica Bakic-Hayden refers to this phenomenon as “nesting orientalism.” A hierarchy of otherness constructs Balkan identities: while all are otherized by “real” Europeans, there are distinct degrees of otherness. As Bakic-Hayden points out, “Yugoslavs who reside in areas that were formerly the Habsburg monarchy distinguish themselves from those in areas formerly ruled by the Ottoman Empire, hence ‘improper.’ Within the latter area, eastern Orthodox peoples perceive themselves as more European than those who assumed identities of European Muslims and who further distinguish themselves from the ultimate orientals, non-Europeans.” (Milica Bakic-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review Vol. 54, No. 4 [Winter 1995]: 922). 22 | This “pet Balkan people” dynamic remains a feature of political life in the former Yugoslavia and still produces the same effect. For specific instances of what Svetlana Slapšak calls the “saint of a small nation” phenomenon, see Slapšak, “Luke Balkanwalker,” 96. 23 | Andrew Hammond argues that Balkan travel writers’ representational strategies served an important diplomatic purpose in creating “a kind of political distance between South-East Europe and the West, a sense of mutual isolation, or extreme disassociation, which effectively masked the intimacy that Western diplomacy often had with Balkan misfortune.” (Andrew Hammond, “The Uses of Balkanism: Representation and Power in British Travel Writing, 1850-1914,” The Slavonic and East European Review Vol. 82, No. 3 [July 2004]: 614-615). 24 | For insight on this subject, see Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804-2012, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Anansi, 2012). 25 | West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 280. 26 | For a brief overview of excursions into the Balkans by early filmmakers, see Stephen Bottomore’s article “The Balkans,” Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel (New York: Routledge, 2005), 58. 27 | Tim Palmer classifies the French production High Lane as a slasher film in the Hollywood tradition. It follows then that in its European instance, the genre’s often politically progressive (albeit still sexist) formula which typically addresses societal ills and exposes murderous male aggression is here transmuted into an instrument of scapegoating entire nationalities or peoples. See Tim Palmer, Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011). 28 | Frederic Jameson, “Thoughts on Balkan Cinema,” Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film. ed. Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 232. 29 | As James Chapman and Nicholas J. Cull write, “Imperial subjects were a natural for the travelogues or ‘scenics’ that provided a staple of early film exhibition. They impressed audiences with their images of imperial splendor and brought pictures of exotic lands and customs to the patrons of the cinematograph. At the same time, early cinematographers were involved in the propagation of imperial propaganda.” (James Chapman and Nicholas

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Zoran Maric J. Cull Projecting Empire: Imperialism and Popular Cinema [New York: Palgrave, 2009], 1) For more on how the newsreel functions as a tool of mythmaking, see Filipčević, “Historical Narrative,” 25-26. The newsreel footage in the film was assembled using a variety of sources including, somewhat ironically, authentic early Balkan cinema made by “insiders” – the Manaki brothers. 30 | Also see Slapšak, “Luke Balkanwalker.” Slapšak also argues that Dust exposes “strategies of colonial manipulation” and points to the tendency of Western commentators on the 1990s wars to see the Yugoslav’s own accounts of the trauma they experienced not as authentic testimonies but as “raw material for further, more objective investigation,” eventually shaped into exotic narratives that validate the foreign intrusion into the Balkans (ibid., 96). 31 | Although, as Jared Gardner writes, “contrary to the myths of startled audiences running screaming from oncoming trains and gun-wielding bandits, early audiences knew what they were looking at was, in fact, a ‘series of pictures,’ a ‘series of scenes.’” (James Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First Century Storytelling [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012], 30) Also see Martin Loiperdinger, “‘Lumière’s Arrival of the Train’: Cinema’s Founding Myth,” The Moving Image Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring 2004): 89-118. 32 | John G. Cawelti, “Savagery, Civilization and the Western Hero,” in Focus on the Western, ed. Jack Nachbar (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 57. 33 | Ibid. 34 | Ibid., 58. 35 | The “invention” of the Balkans is not unlike what had happened to the American West itself. In her discussion of how the Old West became the Western – a “habitable space” where identities are malleable and myth and history interchangeable, and into which adventurers could escape – Rebecca Solnit argues that the Old West gave birth to postmodernism. Another reason why Luke is predisposed to enter the cinematic depiction of the Balkans is because, as a Wild West icon, he has done it before. As Solnit argues, the “habit of walking into pictures is the defining cultural habit of the American West, a habit that could be called identity-shifting, self-mythologizing, self-reflexive, simulationist, and a host of other words more often associated with the present moment.” (Rebecca Solnit, “The Postmodern Old West, or the Procession of Cowboys and Indians,” Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008], 22) 36 | Kitses, Horizons West, 253. According to Filipčević, Dust employs a similar strategy and offers “an ironic collision of the heroic modes in which both East and West tell narratives of their presumed dominance and their national virtues forged with arms.” (Filipčević, “Historical Narrative,” 19). For more on the implications and aims of genre crossing in Dust – the collision of East and West, of history and myth – and the inbetweenness it produces, see Filipčević, “Historical Narrative”. 37 | Fredric Jameson suggests that through this insertion, “turn-of-the-century America becomes very much an old European country.” He also suggests that this is a feature of the film which functions to deliver both Balkan history and identity “from stereotype, and to project some new ideological vision of history from which American exceptionalism

How Cor to Maltese Died is effaced.” (Fredric Jameson, “Globalization and Hybridization,” in World Cinemas: Transnational Perspectives, ed. Natasa Durovicova and Kathleen Newman [New York: Routledge, 2010], 318) 38 | Kitses, Horizons West, 255. 39 | Ibid., 256. 40 | Maric, “Interview with Milcho Manchevski.” In our conversation, Manchevski also pointed out that Luke’s adventure most closely resembles that of Albert Sonnichsen, an American who roamed Macedonia in 1906, but whose memoir, Confessions of a Macedonian Bandit (New York: Duffield & Company, 1909), he came across only after writing the screenplay for the film. 41 | The 19 th century was a period of steady decline of the Ottoman Empire. The Porte attempted to reverse the trend by modernizing and implementing, with Western European input and assistance, “a thorough overhaul of the mechanisms of the state,” which unfortunately “led not to modernization but to chaos.” (Glenny, The Balkans, 84) 42 | Donald P. Spence argues that “[n]arrative truth is confused with historical truth, and the very coherence of an account may lead us to believe that we are making contact with an actual happening.” (Donald P. Spence. Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis [New York: Norton & Co., 1982], 27) 43 | Ironically, the manner of Angela’s transformation of her memories into history is not unlike the work performed by a narrative historian. Hayden White argues that “the historian performs an essentially poetic act” and carefully “chooses conceptual strategies by which to explain or represent his data.” (Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973], x) 44 | That Luke (on his first trip to Europe) witnesses Freud (returning to Europe following his first trip to America) vomit on his manuscript is more than just a clever historical marker. Angela’s and Edge’s laboriously negotiated narrativization of history is not unlike Freud’s narrativization of his patients’ dreams and memories. Like a patient and therapist, Angela and Edge must work together to steer the story towards coherence. Donald P. Spence explains that “Freud made us aware of the persuasive power of a coherent narrative – in particular, of the way in which an aptly chosen reconstruction can fill the gap between two apparently unrelated events and, in the process, make sense out of nonsense.” (Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth, 21) For more on the parallels between Freud’s work and historical narratives, see Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth and Donald Polkinghorne “Narrative Psychology and Historical Consciousness: Relationships and Perspectives,” in Making Sense of History: Narration, Identity and Historical Consciousness (Oxford/New York: Berghahn, 2005), 3-22. 45 | Hammond, “Imagined Colonialism,” 96. 46 | Richard Raskin, “On Unhappy Endings, Politics and Storytelling: An Interview With Milcho Manchevski,” P.O.V. 19 (2003), available at http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_16/ section_1/artc9A.html. 47 | Slapšak, “Luke Balkanwalker,” 96. 48 | Filipčević, “Historical Narrative,” 13.

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Exposed: A Short History of Austrian Science Fiction Film Thomas Ballhausen

L ight W ork Somewhere on a coast, a man steps on a ramp, aims his rifle at the sun and, after several attempts, shoots it from the sky, forcing it to stop in an infantile, Oedipal rebellion. Cut. Resembling little stars, space shuttles descend on Heldenplatz in order to bring the rebelling Austrians of the year 2000 to reason. The beings that disembark the vehicles are both alien and human. Cut. The sun’s rays have become a lethal hazard, an all-destroying force providing a terrorist regime with the right pretext to enslave the population. Cut. A catastrophe has happened, the world is destabilised. The sunshine appears pale in comparison to the constantly burning fires, until, in the last scene, it shines through the carriage window, offering hope. Cut. Austrian film that can be attributed to science fiction refracts and reflects the broad range of subjects characteristic to the genre. However, it is striking how often the sun and its light are central subjects in these works. The examples mentioned above – Sonne Halt! (“Sun Stop!,” 1959-1960), 1. April 2000 (1952), Half the World (Halbe Welt – Gute Nacht, 1993) and Time of the Wolf (Wolfzeit, 2007) – are not the only films that demonstrate this clearly. The sun – or its representative, light in general – is a constant of Austrian fantastic film. Spatially and also narratively it is the star closest to us, as well as the source of our home planet’s warmth and light. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, science has placed the sun at the middle of its lifetime, giving it about 4.5 billion years until helium fusion begins and it gradually turns into a red giant. The unequal relationship between the sun and the earth and the occasionally abstract-seeming calculations of the precise practice of astronomy cannot be dismissed as being inconsequential sources of inspiration for our enduring fascination with the sun. If we observe – whether in film or in real life – the glare of heavenly bodies, we need to constantly remind ourselves that we are looking into the past. According to the principle of the so-called redshift effect, when we see

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the light of distant stars, the further away the star, the further back in time we see. Taking inspiration from this concept, science fiction carries out a reassessment of the synchronisation of time and space: the act of looking up into the starry night sky and the act of looking at a screen make it possible to connect past and future through the actual moment of watching. It is not a far lunar leap from the system that illuminates the world to photographic exposure. Additionally, neither the universe nor the film stops: the reels run, the universe – constantly and variously on the move anyway – expands and with it spacetime too. In a perpetual play on scale, the distances between the stars grow ever bigger, the culmination of both “shows” is an irrevocable darkness that approaches the observer, whether they like it or not. The sparks and light of the projector itself bespeak a glittering resistance that offers fantastic global visions and gleaming images of destruction and downfall. Technology is reflected and the limits of feasibility tested, the boundlessness of human desire proven once again. When this light is condensed in Austrian science fiction film into an all-engulfing, ravenous fire, it also creates shadow and twilight, revising the dark past and projecting the future through political satire and social commentary on Austria’s “small” screen.

Turning U p the L ights In keeping with this play on light and shadow, the animated short Ideale Filmerzeugung (“Ideal Film Creation,” 1914) is the first instance of Austrian sci-fi. First shown in 1914, Ludwig Schaschek’s animated film is an early demonstration of inanimate matter gaining independence from man. Without human assistance and with virtually no human roles, this short film reflects on film production processes and celebrates as if only by accident, the dominance of machines over these men of yore. The apparatus itself is also projected as an element of fantasy in Erich Kober’s Das Kind des Teufels (“The Child of the Devil,” 1919): a mad scientist from the age of silent film constructs a device with which electricity can be controlled and also directed, allowing this power source to become a giver of life but also a weapon. Three productions from the following year again position the topic of life and animation as the primary attraction. In Leo Stoll’s Enoptria – der Kampf um die Sonne (“Enoptria, the Struggle for the Sun,” 1920), Jacob and Louise Fleck’s Der Herr des Lebens (“The Master of Life,” 1920) and Rudolf Stiaßny’s Narr und Tod (“The Fool and Death,” 1920) impending doom is overcome or halted from laboratories and workshops. The consequences of the hubris and megalomania of new technological visualisations are intriguing subjects from the start. In Mano Ziffer-Techenbruk’s Parema, Creature from the Starworld (Parema, das Wesen aus der Sternenwelt, 1922), two competing scientists are successful in bringing the corpse of a woman back to life. In their dispute over the reanimated beauty, however, both die. The beautiful woman returned from the dead is not much luckier and after only a short time dies once again – of all things it is a romantic night spent with a third doctor

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that is her downfall. The opposite is true in Alfred Deutsch-German’s Die Welt in Gefahr aka Der Herr des Mondes (“The World in Danger,” 1922). Here love becomes a moment of redemption: a renowned astronomer builds a piece of machinery that can influence the path of the moon. He wants to obliterate life on earth to avenge himself for being rejected by his colleagues. It is only the love of his daughter for one of his young opponents that brings him – and the Earth’s satellite – back on the right track. To keep the world turning smoothly, Ladislaus Tuszinsky smears the axis of the earth with reindeer fat in Die Entdeckung Wiens am Nordpol (“Discovery of Vienna at the North Pole,” 1923). The imperialist discourse about the exotic, the disturbing and the strange is more than obvious here: that ice cream is made from polar bears is just another delicious and fantastical detail of this animated film. In H. K. Breslauer’s The City without Jews (Die Stadt ohne Juden, 1924), which can (and should) absolutely be seen as a political sci-fi film, one gets the impression that time has stood still. A reactionary party demands the expulsion of all Jewish citizens from an expressionist-looking town. The resultant collapse, a dystopian scenario in an expressionistic setting, and the duping of a bibulous anti-Semite enables the return of the displaced persons. The fact that this account turns out to be a man’s bad dream in no way detracts from the film’s edge and contemporary relevance. If one avoided naming names in The City without Jews, the productions that followed this film proceeded less tentatively. In Robert Wiene’s The Hands of Orlac (Orlac’s Hände, 1924), a Nip/Tuck of the 1920s, one can see allusions to not only the vision of plastic surgery but also the trauma-afflicted negotiations of World War I. In contrast, Lois Seel’s animated industry film Wiener Bilderbogen Nr. 1 (“Viennese Panorama Nr. 1,” 1926) presents us the future of the city. His coquettish, witty game ultimately condemns the female protagonists, but fantasizes that the future is shaped by female dominance, technically savvy and attractive Amazons. Seel’s vision of the future in the film appears, nonetheless, not so very unhappy, despite an emerging inequality between the sexes. The last Austrian science fiction film made before the outbreak of World War II and the onset of technically dominated fantastic films made by the German Reich promised its audience – as long as it made the right political choices – a wonderful future. Vienna would, in 2032 (a hundred years after the release of Artur Berger’s Die vom 17er Haus [“Those from House 17”, 1932]), be under social-democratic rule. The building that houses the town archives, seen in the first scene, upstages St. Stephen’s Cathedral with its lively story and assorted functionaries. The personal account of the inhabitants puts the famous monument, and thus the clergy, firmly in its place with a mild but definite authority. There is a problemfree correspondence between the archive and political allies in Asia; a curious grandson is told the history of his family and the importance of solidarity is demonstrated to the audience. A promotional film for the Social Democrats at the Viennese City Elections (Landtagswahlen) on April 24, 1932 – as this is how the film was used – could hardly have been more perfect: looking at the future in order to address the problems of the present.

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Twilight After the horrors of the war, the newly formed film industry sought its salvation with a cycle of exonerating films that were intended to build identity and promote Austria politically. Such strategies did not leave fantastic film and the remains of its former self untouched. Thus, in J.A. Hübler-Kahla’s The World Turns Backward (Die Welt dreht sich verkehrt, 1947) a disagreeable Viennese civil servant is sent back in time by means of a magic ring. Equipped with healthy self-assurance and a bottle of wine, the central character travels through time and experiences the Congress of Vienna in 1815 as a town chronicler, the Ottoman siege in 1529 as a herald and encounters Roman Vienna as mayor. Just as in H.G. Well’s The Time Machine (1895) he travels through time, but not space. The political message of this film is abundantly clear: the occasionally grumpy but essentially peace-loving Austrians have always been the victims of foreign aggressors. The same point is conveyed in a much-discussed production commissioned by the state and directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner, 1. April 2000 (1952).1 It is the year 2000, and Austria is still occupied. The reason for this occupation is of course omitted. When the Austrians revolt and declare their independence, the international powers suppress them using advanced technology and pass judgement on the country and its history. What is presented of Austria’s history during the film ends, however, during the imperial era. The document that ultimately allows the country to gain its freedom – very calculatedly, the Moscow Declaration of 1943 – makes it possible to perceive Austria as the sole victim of recent historical events. The revocation of the country’s emancipation depicted in the last scene – intended to link the film’s plot and the political reality of the occupation – once again draws attention to the title of the film in a probably unintentionally way. Half operetta-nightmare, half April Fool’s Day joke: on this occasion the escape into the future is a tactic deployed by those who are burdened by the past. The filmic avantgarde, who celebrated their morbid resurgence with Kurt Steinwendner’s literary adaptation of Der Rabe (“The Raven,” 1951), also integrated elements from fantastic films into their formal and narrative structures. Apart from propaganda and political “image films”, amid growing fears of an arms race and atomic threat, a much less positive future was being revealed under the auspices of the conservative cultural policy. In the film fragment Das Floss (“The Raft,” 1954), an attempt to escape the fall-out of atomic war by a group of people thrown together by fate proves to be completely futile. In Stop Sun! (1959/1962), based on Konrad Bayer’s Der sechste Sinn (posthumously published 1966/1969) aggression is directed outwards. Reality is blurred in negative images, utopias of space travel and arms races merge into surreal scenarios of threat. The biblical command to stop – “Sonne halt!” (as it appears in the book of Joshua) – is replaced by an act of technology: The sun is shot down with an airgun, put out of service. The military’s fantasies of omnipotence are laid bare and reinterpreted as a

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childish protest. The suggested linearity of Radax’s film – he was also responsible for Das Floss – ultimately vanishes at this point in the story. A shift from the normal, from normality, is also a defining factor in Valie Export’s Invisible Adversaries (Unsichtbare Gegner, 1977). The leading character Anna, a photographer, listens to news about the invasion of the Hyksos, alien beings who appear deceptively similar to humans. Once again, extraterrestrials and humans are lumped together, a superimposition that has without a doubt a political edge to it. Very taken with the idea of the message relayed by the invasion, the protagonist begins to view her surroundings with a new and critical eye. The result is the unmasking of her human society and the system that dominates it: the disparities between people in general and especially between the sexes. Export vividly relates in her unconventional and hallucinatory way the story of an invasion that has long since taken place. Her portrayal of this takeover also encourages one to reflect on the objectives of (female) self-empowerment and artistic tactics of appropriation. This empowerment of the avant-garde continues to be a determining factor in the filmic dialogue with science fiction on the Austrian “small” screen.

R ise /F all In recent years there has been a multitude of pioneering Austrian films with narratives of a reflective nature. Along with Michael Schottenberg’s The Arrival of Averill (Averills Ankommen, 1992), which once again makes it possible to perceive the urban environment as a space for the fantastic and which effortlessly reinterprets Enki Bilals comparable work, Florian Flicker’s Half the World (1992) can be regarded as an Austrian classic in the sci-fi genre. In the latter film, the rays of the sun have assumed a lethal force, making life for mankind in the not so distant future only possible at night. Like vampires, they sleep through the day in order to survive in their otherwise dark half-world. Instead of dealing in drugs, the trade here is in images reminding one of a rosier past. The authorities frown on this activity, but people understandably still yearn for these memories. The catastrophe awaiting the actress in the title role is inevitable, just as in Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007), the all-consuming sun provides the longed-for release as well as a liberating obliteration. A shift in subject matter to interspecies desire and the cultural play of the sexes happens in The Black Sun (Die Schwarze Sonne, 1992) by Johannes Hammel, who in this short film presents an adaptation of a short story by the American science fiction author Samuel R. Delany. This time, aliens are the objects of desire for humans but in order to fulfil this longing they have to undergo a metamorphosis that results in the loss of their sexual identity. The idea of toying with biological sex and cultural formations of gender is also present in the work of the artist Mara Mattuschka. After her contribution to the “scavenger hunt for faces”, Loading Ludwig (1989), she produced S.O.S. Extraterrestria (1993) and

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Beauty and the Beast (Der Schöne, Die Biest, 1993) a critical update of disaster movies on the one hand, and a “bursting open” of the natural on the other. An agenda intended to be continued in Project Arse Machine (Unternehmen Arschmaschine, 1997) or ID (2003) – if the overeager mad scientist is called into action again or the extraterrestrial-like monster crawls out of hiding from its human shell. With the exception of the formal and highly contemplative work of the artistic duo reMI, namely Mobile V (2000) and Teufel Eintritt (“Enter the Devil,” 2000), or Harald Hund’s 3-D animated dystopic tale of a city in All People is Plastic (2005), it is possible to discern a general return to classic narrative in late 20th century, early 21st century Austrian science fiction film. Valentin Hitz’s Rat Race (1998) is set in a Vienna of the near future. The economy has collapsed and a barter trade in organs has taken the place of money. Kater, the shady main character is one of the traders in this risky merchandise and eventually almost gets caught in the crossfire. Memory is a central theme in Rat Race, where a brain is considered the jackpot amongst the traded innards. This topic has something of a twin film in Michael Palm’s 2001 Sea Concrete Human (Malfunctions #1). If in Rat Race everyone is chasing after itinerant brains, or the subject of men’s fantasies, a woman without this organ, in Palm’s fake documentary the brain caught on film is all that is left over. His short film, infused with melancholy in the spirit of Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), is a speculative effort at answering the question of how possible it is to recount history. The black and white images are material from the future, the narrator’s voice-over an attempt to reconstruct the calamities described. The vocal present is an attempt to deal with the voiceless future. The solution lies in the coherent combination of the material, in the interlinking of the audiovisual. Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf (Wolfzeit, 2003) also focuses on the apocalyptic, or more precisely, post apocalyptic. The catastrophe has already occurred at the beginning of the story; the event that has changed everything hangs in the air but remains undisclosed. A similar scenario haunts his film Code Unknown (Code Inconnu, 2000), which poses the question as to how long western society can continue going as it is – a family shattered by violence is used to query how one should continue to exist after devastation.2 If big Hollywood productions usually resolve these complex issues in favor of a restored family unit or group of people, with Haneke it is always the individual who carries the commitment, burden and load of the situation. It is only through recourse to mythological elements that a way out is revealed in Austrian sci-fi – and only then can the sun afford light and hope in full brilliance. In the case of the large-scale production Ainoa (2006), Marco Kalantari’s film about global salvation through time travel, tribute should at least be paid to its incredible technical finesse. If audio tapes left behind by Ainoa’s Dr. Kerensey offer some skeletal clues as to how one might reprogram history and save the world, the director Manu Luksch in Faceless (2007) takes a completely different approach as regards technology. Having availed herself of material taken from CCTV footage in London, an artificial narrative structure is then planted into the existing material, which clearly exposes how easily data can

E xposed: A Shor t History of Austrian Science Fiction Film

be manipulated. Faceless, a “science fiction fairy tale,” was produced under the rules of the Manifesto for CCTV Filmmakers.3 The manifesto, one could argue, ushers in another form of European minimalism, similar in some ways to the scaled down filmmaking embraced by Dogma filmmakers. It also calls for a new documentary style, stating that “additional cameras are not permitted at filming locations, as the omnipresent existing video surveillance (CCTV) is already in operation.”4 In the film, a “new machine” surveys the city, monitoring data traces left by citizens and even dispensing overseers to correct any errors or deviations. There is no memory or anticipation, as in a “distant era,” as the poetic voice-over tells us, “people had become discontented. Anxiety about the future and guilt over the past caused great unhappiness. A reform of the calendar was proposed to dispense with the troublesome past and future and fill everyone’s lives with the perfect present.” The official synopsis of the film reads: “In a society under the reformed ‘Real-Time’ Calendar, without history nor future, everybody is faceless. A woman panics when she wakes up one day with a face. With the help of the Spectral Children she slowly finds out more about the lost power and history of the human face and begins the search for its future.”5 A rhetorics of surveillance also informs other Austrian science fiction films, including Christian Frosch’s Silent Resident (Weiße Lilien, 2007), a co-production with partners from Germany, Luxembourg and Hungary, something characteristic of the development of small cinema and big genre within Europe. Silent Resident also calls into question a supposedly utopian community of people living under the security of an all-seeing eye. The heroine Hannah moves into the gated community of Neustadt, where everything is presented as being flawless and “secure” (a glossy TV advertisement for the community promises that Neustadt is a “secure city in an increasingly insecure world”). Her curiosity finally exposes the system as being a perfected expression of paranoia. This shiny new world supports inhabitants whose identity begins to blur. As Mary Elizabeth O’Brien writes in Post-Wall German Cinema and National History: Utopianism and Dissent, Frosch’s Weiße Lilien is “a futurist surreal vision of Neustadt, a fortified new city that promises total security service and delivers a nightmarish realm of control, violence and paranoia.”6 At a key point in the film an official of the fortified city hands the female protagonist CCTV footage that shows her burying her husband. Hannah says that the visual evidence she is shown are “falsified photos.” When she is told they are not photographs, but “video prints from the CCTV cameras” on the night her husband disappeared, she replies: “Videos can be falsified.” The film, which the director classifies as “social fiction,” instead of “science fiction,”7 is a perpetual play on twilight delusions, illusions and falsifications; it starts with a suicide carried out in darkness and ends with radiant light, the female protagonist swimming on a rooftop pool in dazzling sunlight. Whether atomic war is meant to be forestalled in Ainoa or if the (un)security measures of contemporary society are reflected on by way of fantastical means in Faceless or Silent Resident – melodramatically and unrelentingly, the sun in Austrian sci-fi always rises. The darkness mentioned earlier, the to-be-expected Blackout will come early enough, anyway.

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Trauma-aff licted negotiations of World War I: Conrad Veidt’s prosthetic anxiety in Robert Wiene’s The Hands of Orlac

Uncanny superimposition: expelled Jews reappear as nightmare vision in H. K. Breslauer’s The City without Jews

E xposed: A Shor t History of Austrian Science Fiction Film

N otes 1 | On this expensive sound production, see Gernot Heiss, “Österreich am 1. April 2000: Das Bild von Gegenwart und Vergangenheit im Zukunftstraum vom 1952,” in Wiederaufbau in Österreich, 1945-1955: Rekonstruktion oder Neubeginn? ed. Ernst Bruckmüller (Vienna: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Politik, 2006), 102-124. 2 | See also Michael Cowan’s article on the filmmaking of Michael Haneke as an attempt to use film aesthetics to critique the “fortress mentality” of the New Europe: Michael Cowan, “Between the Street and the Apartment. Disturbing the Spaces of Fortress Europe in Michael Haneke,” Studies in European Cinema Vol. 5, No. 2 (2008): 117-131. 3 | At the end of the film, we read that “London has the highest density of CCTV cameras in the world.” 4 | The Manifesto for CCTV Filmmakers, “The Filmmaker as Symbiont: opportunistic infections of the surveillance apparatus,” states: “Filmmakers render aspects of nature, human activity and imagination visible. The documentary film continues to be a potent form in all its variety, from the personal video diary to ‘objective’ fly-on-the-wall shoots, to the hybrid fact/fiction (‘faction’) film. But the most prolific documentarists are no longer to be found in film schools and TV stations. In some European and American cities, every street corner is under constant surveillance using recording closed-circuit TV (CCTV) cameras. Such cameras are typically operated by local government, police, private security firms, large corporations and small businesses, and private individuals, and may be automatic or controlled (zoomed and panned) from a remote control room. Filmmakers, and in particular documentarists of all flavours, should reflect on this constant gaze. Why bring in additional cameras, when much private and public urban space is already covered from numerous angles?” (Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel, “The Filmmaker as Symbiont: Opportunistic Infections of the Surveillance Apparatus,” Ambienttv.net [2006], available online at http:// www.ambienttv.net/content/?q=dpamanifesto). The manifesto is reprinted in Media Mutandis: A Node. London Reader, ed. Marina Vishmidt (London: Node, 2006). 5 | Official synopsis available online at http://www.ambienttv.net/content/?q=faceless themovie 6 | Mary Elizabeth O’Brien, Post-Wall German Cinema and National History: Utopianism and Dissent (Rochester: Camden House, 2012), 236. 7 | See Karin Schiefer’s interview with the director, Karin Schiefer, “Christian Frosch: Silent Resident – Interview” (10 Feburary 2006), Austrian Film Commission Newsletter, available online at http://www.afc.at/jart/prj3/afc/main.jart?rel=de&reserve-mode= active&content-id=1164272180506&artikel_id=1187260608618. Editorial Note: This paper was developed and written within the framework of the FWF project “‘Bewegte’ Bilder zu Habsburgs letztem Krieg/‘Moving’ Images on Habsburgs’ Last War” (Project Coordinator: Prof. Hannes Leidinger; Project Duration 2013-2016). Austrian Science Fund (FWF): P 25685-G23.

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The “Quixote” Myth and the New Eastern Europe A Hermeneutic Study Based on Film Jorge Latorre, Antonio Martínez Illán and Oleksandr Pronkevich

This essay compares different quixotic archetypes in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema and traces the development of these archetypes over the last fifty years. Don Quixote is a foreign myth that has wielded great influence on Russian literature and culture. This transnational influence in Russian and Soviet literature has been the subject of much in-depth study, especially in recent years.1 The Romantic and heroic approach to the myth has been the dominant interpretation of Don Quixote in Russia and the countries under its cultural influence; and as examined in this essay, this unique interpretation has unfolded over a number of historical stages. Eastern European literary works have figured Don Quixote as a messianic or revolutionary hero (from the second half of the 19th century to the 1930s); as an anti-totalitarian rebel or critic of Soviet totalitarianism (from the 1930s, after the Stalinist purges, until the early 1980s); and, more recently (during the Perestroika and post-Soviet era), as a nostalgic hero. This essay aims to explore how the various historical stages of the Romantic approach to the myth of Don Quixote are also represented in Eastern European film adaptations. The analysis addresses three feature films in this regard, from three different historical eras: Don Quixote (Don Kikhot, 1957; directed by Grigori Kozintsev), Liberated Don Quixote (Osvobozdionny Don Kikhot, 1987; directed by Vadim Kurchevsky), and Don Quixote Returns (Don Kikhot Vozvratshchayetsya, 1997; directed by Vasily Livanov). We ask when and how the three Romantic archetypal figures referenced above – the tragic messianic or revolutionary hero, the anti-totalitarian rebel, and the nostalgic hero – appear in the above-mentioned Soviet and post-Soviet film versions of Don Quixote. Although all three films bear traces of the Romantic typology, we find one key variation: in the 1990s Russian-Bulgarian co-production Don Quixote Returns and a number of other coproductions with small post-Soviet nations, comedy is often used to articulate an alternative vision of Don Quixote that clashes with the Romantic portrayal. Here late-Soviet messianic nostalgia is undermined and critiqued; at the same time, in

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many of these Eastern European small national cinemas there is a new emphasis on preserving local culture, folklore and tradition.

D on Q uixote and R ussian film […] if Turgenev made a Russian out of Cervantes’ character, Dostoyevsky went even further. He identified the character of Don Quixote with Russia; with the mystic, imperialistic and cosmic ambitions hidden in the soul of his nation. What a strange destiny for a character, which in addition to being a personification of courage, incarnates at the same time moderation, balance and classicism 2.

Only recently have attempts been made to critically rediscover the bulk of the quixotic filmography, notably between November 1997, the occasion of the 27th Alcalá de Henares Film Festival (held on November 14-21, 1997), and October 2005, the occasion of an international film congress hosted by the Spanish Filmoteca to honor the fourth centenary of the publication of the first edition of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, written by Miguel de Cervantes. This is surprising, because Don Quixote was shown on screen from the earliest years of cinema. The French filmmaker Méliès directed an adaption of Don Quixote in 1908; a decade earlier, in 1898, the Gaumont Company in Paris filmed a scene of twenty meters – barely a minute long – which preceded the first adaptations of William Shakespeare’s work by a year. Presently there are almost (over) 50 important screen adaptations that span a variety of genres, from cartoons, animated features, children’s films, westerns and road movies, to musicals, tragicomedies or romances.3 Furthermore, if we were to consider TV films or series (not to mention advertisements) that make some reference to Quixote, the number of adaptations would run into the hundreds, with representatives in all the great literary traditions (British, French, German, Italian, Russian and American) and also in the most unsuspecting filmographies. Quixote as a myth or universal archetype seems able to adapt perfectly to all cultures: for example, in Argentina, Don Quixote assumes the form of a Gaucho, in Japan that of a Samurai, in the USA he tends to resemble an adventurer from the Wild West and in Russia he calls to mind a religious visionary, a dreamer of utopias. Don Quixote is thus an imagotype that transcends the content of the novel, as conceived by Cervantes, and speaks differently about the imaginary groups that have popularized the myth and adapted the archetype to their cultures. 4 Some of the most striking film versions of Don Quixote come from Russia and the former USSR. It has become commonplace to refer to an “elective affinity” between both cultural traditions, although there are few significant historical connections between the two countries given their geographical distance. Many reasons have been proposed to explain this communion or continuity, one of the most important of which is the role that the myth of Don Quixote has come to

The “Quixote” Myth and the New Eastern Europe

play in Russian culture. Not only is the influence of the myth of Don Quixote continuously reflected in the Russian cultural tradition; it has also been creatively incorporated into the collective imagination, where it continues to make its presence felt. An analysis of film versions of Don Quixote may shed new light on this outside influence on Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet culture. The parameters of research in this regard have generally been limited to examining how this myth has been revised and reshaped in literature.5 To explore how this myth developed from the first thaw of Stalinism to the end of the 20th century, this article examines three representative films: Don Quixote (Kozintsev, 1957); Liberated Don Quixote (Kurchevsky, 1987) and Don Quixote Returns (Livanov, 1997). As we will try to demonstrate, not only may each film adaptation listed above be read as an expression of the artist who made it, but also as a reflection of the collective imaginary and historical and geographical contexts in which it was produced. Such retellings may explicitly (in narrative structure, for instance) or implicitly echo the quixotic myth anew in modern history and specific cultural contexts, rather than merely defer to the novel itself. Our article is informed by the Jungian concept of the archetype-like structure of the collective unconscious, the theory of parody by Bakhtin and Hutcheon6, and the studies of Bagnó and Kornevá, who embrace a metaphorical use of archetype. For Bagnó and Kornevá, the presence of Don Quixote in Russia and the former USSR is a phenomenon tied to an “alien name”7. Like other phenomena of this type (Machiavellianism, Wagnerianism, Hamletism, Sadism, Don Juanism), Quixotism emerged as a simple imitation of a literary character and subsequently has been transformed into an independent living culture of its own. This article is part of a larger project entitled “The Quixote Myth and the Shaping of the New Europe.” In this project, the authors have worked together with an international team of researchers from different Spanish universities and the Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine and Russia8. The selection of the abovementioned countries on the hazy frontiers of Europe, countries that once belonged to the now dissolved Warsaw Pact, is due to the fact that the influence of Don Quixote as a myth has been felt there continuously and creatively incorporated into the collective imagination. The project investigates how the Quixote myth has developed since the first thaw of Stalinism until the end of the 20th century, and also examines how the cultural survival of quixotic ideals in the new millennium is related to European “values” in these border areas. If, as José María Beneyto states9, and most scholars agree, Don Quixote is one of the great myths of modern European consciousness, and its spread and survival has helped shape Europe as a cultural unit, then we need to see what effect it has had as a cultural factor in proEuropean ideas and resistance to the imperialist aims of the USSR, and also try to gauge if it is still an important factor for the integration of these countries into the EU.10 In order to reach these goals, in our larger project we analyze the relationship between the archetypical character created by Cervantes and the idea of individual ethical responsibility as a foundation of European identity, as described by Max

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Weber with his juxtaposition of an “ethics of responsibility” and an “ethics of conviction” characteristic of religious fundamentalists and totalitarian ideologies11. More recently, Tzvetan Todorov has expressed similar ideas about humanism vs. a totalitarianism of “good intentions” in his famous Memorie du mal, tentation du bien 12. Here it is important to note that from the 19th to the 21st century Don Quixote has not only been seen as a national symbol; he has also been drafted into a larger battle regarding European identity. Ivan Turgenev presented the two characters in his 1860 speech “Hamlet and Don Quixote” (both created in 1605) as opposing symbols in order to define Europe: apathetic doubt versus utopian ideals. Paradoxically, Quixote (who would become a symbol of both Russia and Spain) served as a source of utopias for opposing ideologies and, unforeseeably, built cultural bridges between two countries whose borders were hermetically sealed. Today, in Eastern Europe Don Quixote is often used as a stand in for postSoviet democracy, revolution and ethical responsibility. For example, a number of recent obituaries for the controversial free-market advocate and political dissident Valeria Novodvorskava, referred to her as “Russia’s Don Quixote of Democracy and Human Rights.”13 Although early in the post-wall years comic interpretations of Don Quixote were used primarily to parody and deconstruct Russian figures of power, in the European Union and Eastern Europe today, one can say that the Quixote myth is used interchangeably to stand in for democracy and revolution. Not surprisingly, the same poll in the European Union in 2013 that selected democracy as the “most important contribution” of Europe to culture also selected “Don Quixote” as “Europe’s most outstanding literary figure.”14 It is important to note that recourse to a myth such as Don Quixote often allowed artists and filmmakers to speak visually about their time without being inhibited by censorship. At the same time, the figure of Don Quixote has a special value for artists and film directors whose vital trajectory is marked by the struggle between the desire for change and an unmoving or stagnant reality. Russia and the Ukraine now represent opposing models of quixotism: universalism vs. nationalism. There are more than sixty-two Ukrainian works of different genres whose main subject is Don Quixote. Unfortunately, only recently can we find scholarly work on a national Ukrainian cinematographic tradition, as the Ukraine was included in Soviet film histories until 1989. And this is also a problem of other small nations born from the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc, such as Georgia or Armenia. Nevertheless, we hope that the case studies from Eastern Europe in our article represent a sufficiently wide and contrasting variety of countries, allowing us to bring back into focus the (after-)lives of the Quixote myth in the Soviet and post-Soviet world. In order to pay homage to how the Quixote myth has impacted smaller nations of Eastern Europe, we thus conclude our article with thoughts on a Russian-Bulgarian co-production and brief comments on two TV films on the Quixote myth produced in Georgia, a country at the crossroads of Europe and Asia.

The “Quixote” Myth and the New Eastern Europe

R ussian /S ovie t Q uixotism in L iter ature The Soviet versions of Don Quixote are deeply rooted in the Russian literary tradition. Such literary precedents are well known because their influence is universally acknowledged; the most famous of these are Gogol’s use of Cervantes’ novel as a model for Dead Souls (1842) and Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot (1868), which was equally inspired by Jesus Christ and Don Quixote, the novel that he considers the best book ever written15. At the beginning of the 20th century, Mikhail Chekhov dreamt of playing the part of Don Quixote on stage, and although he did not manage to accomplish his goal, he left many notes and letters about the work that was so dear to him.16 During the Soviet period, Don Quixote was transformed into a symbol of the fight for freedom and equality against the authorities. Even then, Cervantes’ book was – as it still is – included on the list of compulsory reading for students. In this regard, Vsévolod Bagnó comments: Don Quixote’s destiny in Russia is very special: this character has not only been converted into a national reincarnation of the global cultural trend, but has proven to be a unique case in cultural history when a purely literary phenomenon from one country becomes a highlight in the cultural and public life of another, inevitably losing many, if not most, of its historical and literary peculiarities.17

To what peculiarities is Bagnó referring? Many scholars agree that Don Quixote was first read as a comedy, a book to make readers laugh.18 The Christian, European society of the Baroque era interpreted Cervantes’ text as a moral warning against the follies of imagination and anti-realism, which did not address any profound metaphysical problems for the general public. The interpretation of Don Quixote as a modern novel full of complexity first emerged in Germany and gained popularity in the Western world during the Romantic period. The German Enlightenment, influenced by French thinkers, had despised Spanish theater and literature. Thus, the Romantic defense of anti-classical values involved a rediscovery of previously ignored authors from marginalized countries, such as Russia and Spain, and Don Quixote became known as a tragic hero to be admired in spite of his apparent failure19. The key moment in the late Romantic mythmaking of Don Quixote, which triumphed and remains preeminent in Russia, was marked by a lecture delivered by Ivan Turgenev in 1860, one of the most frequently cited essays throughout Europe. The title of the essay is “Hamlet and Don Quixote.” According to Turgenev, Don Quixote is not merely an archaic and conservative man, a man outside time; he is a positive and eternal hero, a fighter and a revolutionary, an exponent of a new ideology. To use Turgenev’s own words, Don Quixote symbolizes “the faith, the faith in something eternal, unchangeable, the faith in the individual’s superior truth, […] the truth, which is attained through a long fight and self-denial without limits.”20

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By presenting Don Quixote as the antithesis of Hamlet (both characters appear in works published for the first time in 1605), Turgenev in his seminal speech of 1860 distinguishes Russia from the Europe of realism – or pragmatism, the term Russians of that period used in reference to Westerners. In the course of the controversy sparked by Turgenev’s speech, references to Don Quixote were a rhetorical device widely used by Slavic intellectuals and Westernizers, by conservatives and revolutionaries, and contributed to the project of building a messianic utopia in which the quixotic archetype aimed to unite the Russian intelligentsia under the banners of love for humanity and common faith in humanism. In February 1877, Dostoyevsky wrote “Metternichs and Don Quixotes” in his Diary of a Writer, revealing his view of the destiny of Russia also by comparing it to Don Quixote, a renewed Don Quixote, in full possession of his “genius”; a Russia which “has come to realize its position in Europe.”21 Even the Russian revolutionaries saw a symbolic image of the relationship between the revolutionary leader and the masses in Turgenev’s interpretation of the bond between Sancho and Don Quixote. Perrot notes that such Romanticism is still reflected in the vision of Georg Lukács and Vladimir Nabokov, and among Russian intellectuals generally during the Soviet era.22 As already stated in the introduction, according to the literary critic Vsévolod Bagnó who has carried out an in-depth study of the influence of Don Quixote on writers, there are three historical stages in this late-Romantic, messianic quixotism, among Russian intellectuals.23 The nationalist-revolutionary stage runs from the last third of the 19th century to the 1930s. This revolutionary interpretation of the myth still informs Anatoly Lunacharsky’s play Liberated Don Quixote (Osvobozdionny Don Kikhot, 1922), wherein Don Quixote is figured as a lonely resistance fighter. Lunacharsky was a People’s Commissar of Education after the Revolution. Before we continue to discuss the second historical stage in the late-Romanitic messianic quixotism among Russian intellectuals, it is important to probe the influence of this Don Quixote in Soviet history, since our essay later analyzes an animated short directed by Kurchevsky in 1987, which was inspired by Lunacharsky’s play. Both play and film open with the episode of the galley slaves and their liberation by Don Quixote. Taking one of the hero’s famous adventures (the liberation of the galley slaves in Don Quixote I, 22), Lunacharsky structured his play in ten acts. The slaves are depicted as political dissidents, rather than as slaves. Following this episode, the knight and his squire are arrested and taken to the palace of the Duke, where they are humiliated. The revolutionaries liberated by Don Quixote attack the palace, set Don Quixote free and are about to give the aristocrats their due, the same fate that they themselves had been condemned to face: the death penalty. But the “hidalgo”, who always supports the weak, stands up to defend their offenders, provoking the anger of the revolutionaries. One of the leaders, the student Baltazar, lets him go because his behavior is motivated by innate kindness. Nevertheless, the moral is clear: under a regime of political terror, enemies may expect no mercy.

The “Quixote” Myth and the New Eastern Europe

In fact, when Don Quixote and Sancho leave the castle, the reactionary troops, outnumbering their enemy in soldiers and arms, are already besieging the palace where the rebels had resisted. In Bagnó’s account of Lunacharsky’s work, the abstract humanist Don Quixote, who incarnates love for all living beings in the world, is juxtaposed with the character of the blacksmith Drigo and the student Baltazar, the “Don Quixotes” of revolutionary ideals, who incarnate hatred of evil. There is an interesting difference between these two forms of revolutionary Quixotism: love of good and hatred of evil. According to Bagnó, the dichotomy presented in the work of Lunacharsky (which tolerates the ideals of Don Quixote, but puts them on hold), explains the personal features and philosophy of Korolenko, who denied the cruel truth of the revolution. Korolenko was a prototype of Don Quixote, symbolizing the philosophy of humanism and denying the terror of the revolution. His letters to Lunacharsky, inspired by Leninist ideals, may have moved the author ultimately to pen the play’s strange ending.24 That the exile of Western-style liberal intellectuals from the country began in the same year (1923) in which the play was published and performed may come as no surprise.25 At this historical point, a new stage of Romantic quixotism started in Russia, anti-Soviet critique. According to Bagnó, dissident, anti-Soviet critique is represented mainly in two literary works: Don Quixote by Andrei Bulgakov and Chevengur by the former “Proletcult” member Andrei Platonov (written between 1927 and 1929, but published, except for one chapter, in its entirety only in 1988). Platonov’s novel can be interpreted – as Bagnó does – as containing implicit critique, a parodist parable of the “fanatic Quixotes” who seized power at the beginning of the USSR. Although other critics such as Thomas Seifrid have argued that the novel is a more nuanced and “complex meditation on Utopian thought in the early Soviet context,”26 Bagno argues that it is a story full of tragic thoughts about the destiny of Russia and those Bolshevik-Don Quixotes, who have “ayes without attention” and ambition of saving not the particular human being, but humankind as an abstract mass27. Mikhail Bulgakov is another example of this second stage. He tried without success to get his play Don Quixote (1938) performed on the stage of the Vakhtnagov Theater in Moscow. The performance was eventually staged not in Moscow, but in the small town of Kineshma following Bulgakov’s death, silenced by the Stalinist system. Bulgakov’s Don Quixote could be interpreted in terms of critique simply because Stalin did not like Don Quixote as a myth and because the knight lacks his grip on reality. Tatiana Pigariova states that the death of Stalin resurrected Don Quixote in Russia28. Despite the fact that it follows the Russian Romantic approach, the theater play is quite faithful to the spirit of the novel; only the ending is different: in Bulgakov’s posthumous play, as if expressing his ultimate will, the dying Don Quixote exclaims in the last scene with regard to his defeat at the hands of Sansón Carrasco: “He has taken the most wonderful gift ever given to man, he has taken

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my freedom! Sancho, the world is full of evil but the worst of all is being a prisoner! He chained me, Sancho! Look, the sun is cut into halves, the earth is rising; it is rising and is going to devour it. The earth is approaching the prisoner! It will absorb me, Sancho!”29 One can assume that Bulgakov was speaking about Stalin and himself, as “Don Quixote, Don Quixote” were the last words the defeated Bulgakov said before he died, a few months after he had finished writing the play.30 The final scene in Bulgakov’s Don Quixote strongly deviates from the portrayal of Don Quixote in the previous sequences, in which Don Quixote differed little from the rest of the characters in either artistic depiction or human qualities. In being raised to such heights on his deathbed by the author, the character can be seen to resemble the famous tragic Adventures of Don Quixote (Don Quixote, 1933) by the Austrian G. W. Pabst. The final reel of Pabst’s film offers only one, ultimate and unavoidable choice: madness, on the one hand, or failure and death, on the other. When the books are fired on by the Inquisition, as the nearby events in German and Austria are announced, the knight says to Sancho: “My friend I have lied to you; I do not have an island for you.” The third stage of Romantic quixotism, nostalgic post-Soviet quixotism (during the Perestroika and after the collapse of the USSR), tends to underscore resistance to capitalism and globalization, and draws its inspiration either from the Holy Russia prior to the Revolution or the Bolshevik stage of a messianic, pure and disinterested love for humanity and protection of the marginalized. There are innumerable examples of this nostalgic post-Soviet Romantic quixotism in literature, since we are still historically in this third stage in Russia and other postSoviet countries. Perhaps one can conjure up this nostalgic sentiment by heeding the following words of the famous cinema and theater actor Vladimir Zeldin, who played Don Quixote and Cervantes in the show Man from La Mancha on the stage of the Red Army Theatre in Moscow in 2006, during the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the first edition of Don Quixote: Among the many aphorisms, I found this sentence: One “Don Quixote” is excellent. A hundred Don Quixotes are fearsome ... That is true. But times are different now. Now, when art is measured by profit, by level of popularity, by success, it would be no bad thing to get the support of a hundred Don Quixotes or of Baron Munchausen. When we began the rehearsals for Man from La Mancha, a journalist came to me with questions: “Are you going to play the part of Don Quixote? Do you think the audience will respond to the character?” I have no doubt, I answered, and I feel sure that this character must appear before audiences today. In my opinion, contemporary audiences miss characters that inspire generous and noble emotions. My character says: Fill your lungs with the reviving air of life and think about how to continue living. Don’t consider yourself an owner of anything, except of your own soul. Do not be proud of what you are, but of what you want to be and of what you can become… Isn’t it wonderful to remind the audience of this? 31

The “Quixote” Myth and the New Eastern Europe

D on Q uixote in S ovie t and P ost-S ovie t C inema : D on Q uixote (K ozintse v, 1957) The Soviet and post-Soviet films that we are going to analyze in this section of the essay are informed by three different stages that Bagnó analyzes in literature, but often represent several stages at once. Don Quixote by Grigori Kozintsev (1957) is the first adaptation in chronological terms. The main characters are performed by the actors Yuri Tolubuyev (as Sancho Panza) and Nikolai Cherkasov (Don Quixote), also known as Alexander Nevski and Ivan the Terrible in the movies of Eisenstein. Alberto Sánchez, a famous Spanish sculptor exiled to Moscow, worked with the artistic director Nathan Altman on props and costume design for the film. This may explain why the landscape, the reconstruction of the town in La Mancha and the interiors of the Duke’s palace look so realistic. Don Quixote was first screened at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival. At a press conference, the director stated that he had done his best to provide a faithful adaptation of Cervantes’ book, and had made only the modifications required to adapt such a long novel to feature-film length, using the conventions of cinematic language. These statements are not entirely true: Kozintsev’s Don Quixote speaks on behalf of its epoch and to its epoch. It is still a Soviet adaptation, which contains most of the class struggle tropes, typical of Russian movies of that period. Due to this Soviet context, and above all to the Cold War and the Bay of Pigs, the film’s premiere in the US was delayed until 1961. It was the last Russian film to reach the US in the program of “joint cultural exchange.”32 In Spain the premiere was also delayed until 1966, although this version was the first Russian film screened in Spain after the war.33 The film was also accompanied by a music score by the famous Azerbaijani composer Qarayer Qara, who later in the 1960s released an independent symphonic sketch entitled “Don Quixote.” Grigori Kozintsev’s cinemascope production was inspired by G. W. Pabst’s version Adventures of Don Quixote (1933), as can be seen in the windmill scene, which appears at the end of both films (Kozintsev also foreshadows this windmill scene in the opening credits), and includes the knight impaled on the blades – an element introduced by Pabst in his early sound film,34 which was subsequently incorporated into the film iconography of Don Quixote. Pabst’s film was shot in German, French and English language versions and includes a stunning sequence conceived by Lotte Reiniger featuring animated silhouette or shadowplay drawings of knights that are superimposed with pages of the printed medieval romance.35 However, Kozintsev’s adaptation contains a different moral message, in line with the Romantic Bolshevik interpretation described in Bagnó’s first stage. The narrative enacts liberation from the traditional social evils of the ancient régime. In Kozintsev’s Don Quixote, when everything seems lost, the friendship of simple people (represented by Sancho and Aldonza) is a redeeming force that moves him to carry on. In Cervantes’ novel, Sancho is a contradictory and – at the same time – complementary character; in Kozintsev’s film, however, he is another

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idealist, though one with more common sense. He rises above the simple people, the representative of the social class from which he comes, although in the end the authorities do not allow him to govern prudently. Sancho is sometimes more important than Don Quixote himself. “I can do anything”, he says to the courtier who expels him from Barataria, “What about you, parasite?” Sancho represents the ideals of the folk against wealthy aristocrats and lazy bureaucrats. Kozintsev’s Don Quixote is an idealist, the archetypal image of an anachronistic aristocrat. Don Quixote is not mad; rather, Romantic literature taught him the wrong – that is, old-fashioned – ideal of bringing justice to the world. The scene with the galley slaves appears to be a sarcastic symbol of the corruption of the capitalist world. He is presented as a victim of the Duke and Altisidora, both aristocrats in the film. This perverse woman provides a striking contrast to the innocence of Aldonza, “quixotized” in the film. She never fully realizes that she is the beloved Dulcinea; and at the end of the film, along with Sancho, she goes to Quixote’s bedside – in a hallucination or in reality? – to encourage him to pursue his adventures, instead of letting him die of melancholy as in Pabst’s 1933 version. Although the image of Don Quixote riding with Sancho for the last time may be real or imaginary, there can be no doubt about the squire’s last request: “Sir, say but a few words in chivalrous language to me, and there will not be a happier man in the world!”; to which Quixote responds: “We will live and struggle without rest. Sancho, you and I will live until the Golden Age. Justice will destroy greed and abuse. Forward! Forward! Not one step back.” The moral is still utopian, but at the same time, Kozintsev uses Cervantes’ irony (his quotes on bribery and torture) and turns these lines into a weapon in the struggle to “restore truth and justice in the world,” developing the ideas postulated by Tugenov in his famous essay, “Hamlet and Don Quixote.” For that reason, Kozintsev’s Don Quixote could also be read as symbolizing a critique of the corrupt authoritarian system of Stalinism (the second historical stage of the Romantic “quixotic” myth according to Bagnó). 1957, the year Kozintsev’s Don Quixote was released, saw the first political thaw, when Khrushchev condemned Stalinism. The elements typical of this second stage are present in the film, such as the scenes in the court of the Duke, which may be a disguised critique of the leaders of the Communist Party; and a number of critics have also noted a parallelism between the Spanish Inquisition and the Soviet political commissar.36 For film historian and literary scholar Robert Stam, Kozintsev’s Quixote might be seen as a “veiled critique of the contradictions of Stalinism.” Quixote’s impotent fundamentalism is ultimately less dangerous than that of the master of Soviet power, of course, but it belongs to someone who seems to incarnate the commandeering ideology of the “vanguard party.” As Barbara Learning has written of Kozintsev’s hero, “no more are we given the wooden perfection of the almost godlike positive heroes of the Socialist Realist cinema. Kozintsev’s depiction of character is something entirely different.”37 She argues that Kozintsev’s critique of socialist realism translates aesthetics into politics. In particular, she highlights his decision to use

The “Quixote” Myth and the New Eastern Europe

color film stock, instead of black-and-white, as he had done for the Hamlet and Lear productions. As Mary Ann Conroy Moore summarizes Learning’s argument, “Kozintsev’s decision to use color stock for the film instead of his favored blackand-white (as in Hamlet and King Lear) is a nod towards the illegitimacy of the narratives of the State. As if painting reality in new colors, the propaganda machine and State pressures forced everyone to see (or at least pretend to see) a brightly illumined, Technicolor world instead of the stark shapes and outlines created by the shadows of deception and suffering.”38 During the darkest days of the Stalinist repression, between 1945 and 1951, Kozintsev was accused of “cosmopolitanism” (i.e. the worship of “foreign” culture). His much more pragmatic friend and co-author Leonid Trauberg accepted the accusation in his stead, thus saving his partner, who was allowed to continue his filmmaking. The Russian playwright Yevgeny Shvarts wrote the screenplay. In 1955, having read Shvarts’ screenplay, the set department at Lenfilm produced a report detailing how it depicts Don Quixote as a friend to all humankind, praising his capacity for all-encompassing love, whereas in the novel Don Quixote loses his grip on reality (as Stalin used to say), unleashing great evil through his intentions to do good.39 Despite its hint of political satire, the film remains utopian; critics have argued that Kozintsev’s Don Quixote (and his Hamlet) are films that speak “with hope to the Thaw audience, putting forth the notion that out of the filth, darkness and silence of the Stalin period could emerge integrity and truth – the better part of humanity has not perished.”40 Kozintsev’s film is more than a product of its political times; it also probes the depth of the novel in all its complexity41. As Stam has argued, Kozintsev’s adaptation “highlights both the novel’s comic and burlesque features as well as its tragic and philosophical aspects.”42 In comparison to the 1980s film Don Quixote Returns, however, and several post-Soviet productions, the burlesque and comic elements are here overshadowed by the film’s Romantic tragicheroic interpretation and the messianic ideas of “love for humanity” introduced by Dostoyevsky and Turgenev that profoundly influenced the utopian Soviet reading of the novel.

L iberated D on Q uixote (K urche vsk y, 1987) Liberated Don Quixote was directed by Vadim Kurchevsky (1928-1997) and shot in 1987, during the third phase in Bagnó’s account of the historical stages of the quixotic influence: nostalgic post-Soviet Romantic quixotism. It is a 19-minute animated film made using the stop-motion technique, influenced by the Czech director Jiří Trnka. 43 Kurchevsky had been working at the Soyuzmultfilm animation studio, where the film was produced, since his youth. Soyuzmultfilm was established in Leningrad in 1936 and is still one of the leading animation studios in Europe. Kurchevsky sought to imbue a traditionally child-oriented cinematic genre with

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more complex political meaning. Vladimir Kernike and Kurchevsky wrote the script, drawing on Anatoly Lunacharsky’s play of the same title, written in 1922. As Maurice F. Speed and Jameson Cameron Wilson have written in the context of the Zagreb Film Studio, one might consider animation a “minor art,” in the sense that it could escape censorship and offer more substantial critique than other cinematic forms. The authors argue: “The very fact that an animation has been regarded as a minor art has made it subject to less careful scrutiny. Thus, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Bulgaria cartoons with a moral, a sting in their tale, a symbolic meaning which dig at the authority or establishment became very popular.”44 Thus, it is not surprising to see that over twenty-five years before Kurchevsky’s adaptation another director used animation to present political satire in Croatia. Vlado Kristl, a member of the Zagreb animation school, in 1961 debuted his animated short Don Quixote (Don Kihot). As Speed and Wilson write, the short “presents the eccentric individualist assailed by all the forces of the modern state – guns, radar, tanks, planes, patrols, armies – and in some amazing way the nonconformist deviationist Don triumphs over them all.”45 Kurchevsky’s animated short is slower-paced and certainly less radical in its vision of resistance or critique. Based on Lunacharsky’s 1922 play, the film also presents Don Quixote as a lone rebel, but in 1987 this depiction is underscored by nostalgia and a perceived need to restore order to a crumbling Soviet Union. The beginning of the film spells out the moral of the story: “This is a sad story about the noble knight Don Quixote and his devoted man-at-arms, Sancho Panza, about a cruel Duke and his heartless court, about the insurrection of the people, and about how sometimes good deeds could turn into evil.” This text scrolls across the screen during the title credits, superimposed onto images of Don Quixote and Sancho, the Duke, the slaves and Don Quixote’s helmet and lance. The one who brings about evil through a desire to do good deeds is Don Quixote, not the revolutionaries; and for that reason, he should be exiled. Through the character of Don Quixote, therefore, both play and film interrogate the notion that kindness may devolve into cruelty in a time of civil war. According to renowned Cervantes scholar Anthony Close, the comedy in Part I of Cervantes’ novel stems from the recurrent conflicts between the hero and the world around him, and in this chapter in particular, “one can read the adventure as a right-wing fable about the folly of doing good to the undeserving.”46 Kurchevsky’s rediscovery of Don Quixote during Perestroika may be read as a nostalgic invitation to return to authoritarian rule during the years that foresaw the collapse of the former USSR. Both Kozintsev’s Don Quixote and Kurchevsky’s Liberated Don Quixote end with the same long shot showing the characters riding towards the horizon; that is, an open-ended scene that reflects the eternal values of a Russian, “quixotic” utopia. There are other points in common: The exiled knight is treated with great respect in Liberated Don Quixote. The difficult relationship between Don Quixote and

The “Quixote” Myth and the New Eastern Europe

the galley slaves in Kurchevsky’s Don Quixote may also symbolize the beautiful ideals of defeated socialism by Stalinism, at times perhaps even a return to Leninist revolutionary ideals. Despite the different kinds of quixotism depicted in Kozintsev’s version and Kurchevky’s animated film, both articulate the nationalistrevolutionary portrayal associated with the first Romantic stage in positive terms. There are, however, also significant differences between the two versions, one produced at the beginning of the Thaw and the other at the end. The representatives of simple people in Kurchevsky’s film resemble faces from Hieronymus Bosch’s early 16th-century The Carrying of the Cross. They are full of anger. They incarnate primitive instincts and the group scenes resemble Goya’s paintings in their composition. Thus, one could argue that the visual meaning can be interpreted as somewhat more complex than the narrative insight, and despite the allegoric message of Lunacharsky’s play, Kurchevsky’s film might be considered not only as a proposal for the future, but also as part of a trend in late Soviet cinema to rewrite Soviet history, in this case the authoritarian rule established after the October Revolution and the Civil War.

D on Q uixote R eturns (L ivanov, 1997) Don Quixote Returns is a 1997 Russian-Bulgarian co-production, directed by Vasily Livanov. Livanov, a Russian actor famous for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes in the Soviet screen adaptations of the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, was director, screenwriter, producer and actor on the project. In this Quixote, the idea of Russian Romanticism is also taken as a given, but only so that it might be undermined: to show the dangers of the new late-Soviet messianic nostalgia at a time when large parts of society felt threatened by the possible return of communism. The following statement, made by the director on the film’s opening night, is quite explicit in this regard: I thought a lot about this character... Because the first time I read the story of the noble knight Don Quixote, the old hidalgo was made into a French encyclopedist. Those atheists needed heroes of this type; they made Sancho a smart guy of the village. However, there is nothing like that in the book if we read it attentively. The representatives of Soviet power, the communists, developed the idea of the French encyclopedist. They insisted that Don Quixote was the defender of the masses. Cervantes was a man of a deep faith and he was not writing about the defender. As a defender, Quixote seems not to be a real knight! He is a hidalgo who grew old. All his heroic deeds consist of chasing rabbits around his house. He simply read too many tales of chivalry. If we use Marxist language, he had read too many books by founders of the Soviet state. There is a brilliant phrase in the novel: Don Quixote says that if he does not set off for his trip armored, the delay for him would be equal to death itself. I don’t know whether Lenin had read this phrase, whether he had learned these words by reading Cervantes’ book, but in any case this coincidence makes us think about

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Jorge Latorre, Antonio Mar tínez Illán and Oleksandr Pronkevich it. [...] The movie title is Don Quixote Returns. What does “return” mean? Firstly, he comes back to the screen. Secondly, he comes back to every one of us ... this is the anticipation of the communist point of view: “we are going to make all mankind happy.” Who? Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Let’s say that a spectrum has been haunting Europe [...] Don Quixote’s folly does not consist in the fact that he is clinically mad. His madness consists in his belief that he knows how to make all humankind happy. We can already see the results of this.47

An analysis of the film may contribute to an understanding of this implied warning. Don Quixote Returns is full of references to communism. Don Quixote plays with Lenin’s words. In the scene opening the episode when Don Quixote and Sancho are leaving to look for adventures, Don Quixote says: “My delay will be like death for humanity.” The words sound like an allusion to the words of Lenin “Промедление смерти подобно” (“Delay will be like death”) which were written by Lenin on the eve of the October Revolution. Another Lenin reference is “Учение Маркса всесильно, потому что оно верно” (“Marx’s teaching has unlimited power because it is correct”). The last part of the quoted phrase is used in the conversation between Don Quixote and Sancho at the opening of the windmill scene. Don Quixote: “Never argue with me, Sancho, because all I say is true – it is true because it is correct.” The sentence imitates the syntactic structure and idea of Lenin’s saying, functioning in the film as a parody of the Soviet ideology. The ending is open, as in the other films under examination, but Livanov’s film contains a different moral interpretation than that of Kozintsev and Kurchevsky: On his return to La Mancha, following his defeat at the hands of Samson Carrasco, Quixote sits and stares quietly at the table, saddened by his failure. His hands are in front of him while he talks quietly to Sancho Panza. Suddenly, the sound of chivalric music is borne to them on the wind, which Don Quixote interprets as another invitation to go back to his adventures. The old man is transformed into a maniac ready to head out once more onto the highways and byways of the world. Livanov depicts this transformation comically using the body language of pantomime: his hair and moustache stand up on end like a lion’s mane flushed for attack, as Quixote looks around, his eyes popping out of his head. Interestingly, in the journal Sputnik: Digest of Soviet Press and Literature the director and actor Livanov in an interview argued that it was this comic portrayal of Don Quixote that first returned his humanity to the screen: “the film is called ‘Don Quixote Comes Back’ not only because Don Quixote returns home in it after his incredible travels but also because since the 18th century he has turned into an image devoid of human features. The habitual portrayal – a noble knight and a wise, common man – can be endured by modern viewers only for five minutes. The superficial treatment has emasculated the conception of the great writer.”48 Although the idea of returning humanity to Don Quixote might sound like the work of Romantic post-Soviet nostalgia, the director clearly states that what is at work here is parody, not nostalgia, arguing that the primary comedy and tragedy of the film, which

The “Quixote” Myth and the New Eastern Europe

garnered UNESCO funding in 1997, on the 450th anniversary of Cervantes’ birth, is that the hero is trapped in revolutionary “dogmas.”49 In Don Quixote Returns, scenes similar to those in Kozintsev’s film appear alongside other invented scenes. For instance, Don Quixote and Sancho meet two anachronistic German travelers, a botanist and an entomologist. Quixote tries to force the entomologist to swear to Dulcinea’s beauty without the slightest success. Another striking difference in the two films is that unlike in Kozintsev’s film, the members of Duke’s court are depicted in Livanov’s film as uneducated rabble, accompanied by a semi-naked black servant and a dwarf. Sancho escapes before he becomes an object of mocking laughter; and while the wittiness of this important character might be interpreted as an echo of the popular Soviet depiction of Sancho, it appears more closely related to a nationalist vision of Sancho Panza (played by Armenian actor Armen Dzhigarkhanyan) as a symbol of a natural/ rural tradition in contrast to urban/intellectual corruption. Such depictions of Sancho Panza are characteristic of literary and visual representations of Don Quixote produced in the Ukraine, Armenia and other small countries that are or have been under Russian cultural and political influence, but which also have their own local cultures, national identities and traditions.50 Therefore, one could argue that Don Quixote Returns represents another vision of Don Quixote as a force of resistance – but in this case, comic resistance to the situation emerging in the early years of Putin’s new Russia, with some details that may well be read as in some sense prophetic. Certainly Livanov’s Quixote is more Caucasian than Russian, cast with Armenian actors and shot against the backdrop of Bulgarian scenery. It is worth noting here that Don Quixote Returns internationally was seen to be more “Bulgarian” than “Russian”; in 1997 Sergei Bayer, director of Ark-Film Studios, was compelled to tell a Cine-eye journal reporter that he “denied the rumor that now Vasily Livanov’s three-part television film The Return of Don Quixote belongs wholly to the Bulgarian side who took part in the project on account of an improperly drawn-up contract.”51 Although some critics argued against the film’s artistic merit, international media reports were also quick to see the film as part of a larger revival (or renaissance) of the Bulgarian film industry. For example, the film received a positive mention as a genre vehicle in Peter Cowie’s report on the Bulgarian film industry in Variety International Film Guide in 1998. The report notes “a change for the better is expected in Bulgarian cinema, as in all other spheres of life, after the fall of the communist regime.”52 The Bulgarian National Film Center (the organization represents Bulgaria on the Board of Management at the Eurimages Fund on the Council of Europe) also explicitly relates the themes of the film to the fall of communism. In their brief description of Livanov’s film, the organization writes: “Cervantes’ genius for predicting historical events is really amazing. 400 years prior to the events of today, he could forebode and ridicule characters openly devoted to communist ideology. Riding his scraggy horse round the world, this mock-knight tries to convince people that what they see is not windmills, grinding grist to make f lour,

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but hostile giants. The shepherd Sancho Panza is ready to pretend he believes his master because his loyalty will be rewarded with real power. A crazy revolutionary of a liar and a cook, wishing to rule the country – these two characters are familiar to us from our deplorable historical experience.”53 A new use of parody and comedy to reflect on historical experiences can also be found in another post-Soviet quixotic portrayal in TV culture. In the 1990s, the figure of Don Quixote was used to openly critique Boris Yeltsin, first president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, on television in the early 1990s. In 1995, after the USSR collapsed, scriptwriter and radio host Viktor Shenderovich54 created a satirical image of the post-Soviet Don Quixote. In one of the issues of his program Puppets (NTV, 1995) Boris Yeltsin suffering from alcoholism appears on the screen as Don Quixote together with his bodyguard Alexander Korzhakov as Sancho Panza and Pavel Grachov, former Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation in an episode entitled “Viktor Shenderovich: Don Quixote and his Bodyguard.” In this TV episode, any utopic discourse used to portray Russia is shown to be bankrupt. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, smaller states that had been within the Soviet sphere of influence did not simply lose interest in the myth of Don Quixote; rather, this myth was pressed into new service, to function as an icon of national identity, as in other Quixotes from the former USSR, like the RussianSpanish-Georgian or Basque-Georgian co-production The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho (Tskhovreba Don Kikhotisa da Sancho Panchosi or Zhitie Don Kikhota I Sancho, 1989) by Rezo Chkheidze,55 a nine part mini TV series financed by Euskal Telebista and produced by Kino Most (Russia) and Quartuli Pilmi (Georgia) with Georgian actors and scriptwriters, or the award-winning TV comedy co-produced by Kino Most (Russia) and Quartuli Pilmi (Georgia) The Chained Knights (Midjachvuli Raindebi, 1999), directed by Goderdzi Chokheli.56 Both films were produced in Georgia. As Rafael de España writes, for a Western European spectator, some of the most attractive elements of the former TV series are its exotic characters and its references to Georgian folklore.57 The Chained Knights contains numerous musical numbers featuring special Georgian folkloric dress, including a spectacular wedding sequence with Chokhas. There is also a comic soccer match between English ladies and Sancho Panza and Don Quixote. The English ladies sing “God save the Queen” in English and plant an English flag on a small bale of hay in the Georgian village of Kitokhi. The bale of hay has been claimed new territory as indicated by a handwritten sign on the hay, with the name “New Kitokhi.” This parody of imperialism perhaps thematizes how Western expansionism and geopolitical interests have replaced the Soviet imperialism of the past. A surreal scene with a character drinking wine through an image of historical trauma, a gas mask, comically suggests how the carnivalesque themes of Cervantes could be translated into the dark humor of the present. As we have seen in this essay, numerous Soviet film adaptations preserved the messianic interpretation of the Don Quixote myth, highlighting the heroic and

The “Quixote” Myth and the New Eastern Europe

tragic values of the novel rather than the comic or moral ones. Don Quixote has often figured in Russian culture as an idealist who fights for justice and freedom in this world; a model of utopia. The shift from the Romantic vision to a darker and more realistic interpretation of the myth of Don Quixote, which took place in Central Europe in the second half of the 19th century, when scientific positivism and literary Naturalism held cultural sway, came about in Russia much later. As charted out in the essay, the influence of the Romantic interpretations of the myth had a significant bearing on Soviet and post-Soviet cinematic versions of the story, as many of the film productions made after Kozintsev’s Don Quixote drew on heroic and tragic themes and Romantic literary sources. Yet, as already seen, the amplification of parody, comedy and the carnivalesque in the depiction of Don Quixote presented by Livanov in 1997 in Don Quixote Returns, which contrasts in striking ways with Kozintsev’s 1950s dramatic vision, represents a dramatic turning point for the quixotic typology. Mikhail Bahktin argued that Don Quixote belonged to the carnivalesque, Mennipean tradition58. According to David Gillespie, Kozintsev presented “Cervantes’ picaresque novel as a mixture of burlesque and political satire.”59 However, among the three primary filmmakers examined in this essay it is the filmmaker Livanov who emphasizes these carnivalesque aspects over the heroic and tragic motifs which are predominant in Kozintsev’s and Kurchevsky’s adaptations. Although it references some elements of the Romantic interpretation, Don Quixote Returns (Livanov, 1997) also undermines and parodies these elements as Livanov finally departs from the Romantic Russian quixotic portrayal and the utopian and messianic ideas of Dostoyevsky and Turgenev and assumes a more Central-European re-reading of the myth, similar to that which Milán Kundera defends in The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts. The last paragraph of the chapter about Cervantes’ novel concludes with this statement: “Epic heroes conquer or, if they are themselves conquered, they retain their grandeur to the last breath. Don Quixote is conquered. And with no grandeur whatever. For it is clear immediately: human life as such is a defeat. All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That – that is the raison d’être of the art of the novel.”60 Anticipating the Russian-Georgian co-productions to come, Livanov’s cinematic version of Don Quixote is no longer a mere example of Bagnó’s third, nostalgic stage, which also reflects the first Romantic stage in positive terms; rather, it inscribes a new vision – albeit, perhaps, also a utopian-defiant vision, emphasizing the need to preserve and sustain smaller local traditions as well as larger myths and national narratives, both resisting and recycling myths of the past.

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Behind the scenes artistry: director Grigori Kozintsev painting wrinkles on Don Quixote’s horse Rocinante

Veiled critique of Stalinism: Nikolai Cherkasov (l.) and Yuri Tolubeyev (r.) in Grigori Kozintsev’s Don Quixote

The “Quixote” Myth and the New Eastern Europe

N otes 1 | See Lecturas cervantinas 2005, ed. Vsévolod Bagnó (St. Petersburg: Fundación Cervantes de San Petersburgo, 2007) and Roberto Monforte Dupret, “El ‘Quixote’ en la Ilustración y el Romanticismo Ruso,” in Don Quijote en su periplo universal: Aspectos de la recepción internacional de la novela cervantina, ed. Hans-Christian Hagedorn (Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2011), 149-165. 2 | Santiago Montero Díaz, El Quijote desde Rusia: Turguenev, Dostoievsky, Merejkowsky (Madrid: Visor Libros and Biblioteca Cervantina, 2005), 26-27. 3 | On influential screen adaptations of Cervantes’ Don Quixote see, for example, Sébastian Lefiat, “Re-Adaptation as Part of the Myth: Orson Welles and Don Quixote’s ‘Outings,’” in Screening Text: Critical Perspectives on Film Adaptation, ed. Shannon Wells-Lassagne and Ariane Hudele (Jefferson: McFarland, 2013), 185-196; Robert Stam, Literature through Film: Realism, Magic and the Art of Adaptation (Maiden: Wiley-Blackwell: 2004), 22-62, and Jorge Latorre Izquiero and Antonio Martínez Illán, “Cultural Crossover: Don Quixote Visual Ridings,” in Directory of World Cinema: Spain, ed. Lorenzo J. Torres Hortelano (Chicago: Intellekt, 2011), 22-36. 4 | On the theory of adaptation, see André Bazin, “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest,” trans. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, in Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 19-27; Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation, Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005). 5 | Santiago Montero Díaz, Cervantes compañero eterno (Madrid: Editorial Aramo, 1957), Vsévolod Bagnó, El Quijote vivido por los rusos (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1995); Vsévolod Bagnó, “El aspecto mesiánico del Quijotismo ruso” in Lecturas cervantinas 2005, ed. Vsévolod Bagnó (St. Petersburg: Fundación Cervantes de San Petersburgo, 2007); Vsévolod Bagnó, Dorogami Don Kikhot (Moscow: Kniga, 1988); Dupret, “El ‘Quixote’ en la Ilustración y el Romanticismo Ruso”; Ludmilla Buketoff Turkevich, Cervantes in Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950). 6 | On the notion of a mythical archetype (universally available and inherited forms which together form the structure of the collective imagination) please see the work of Carl Gustav Jung and Northrop Frye’s definition of the mythical archetype in the classic Anatomy of Criticism. See Frye in particular on the idea of archetypes in relation to the mix of different genres. The notion of parody as articulated by Linda Hutcheon is also part of the basic methodology of the larger project. Linda Hutcheon offers a new definition of parody, arguing that it must be understood as “a form of imitation, but imitation characterized by ironic inversion, not always at the expense of the parodied text” (Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth - Century Art Forms [New York: Methuen, 1985], 11). See also her texts: A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1988) and Irony’s Edge. The Theory and Politics of Irony (London and New York: Routledge, 1985). Also see Carl Gustav Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective

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Jorge Latorre, Antonio Mar tínez Illán and Oleksandr Pronkevich Unconscious, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969) and Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). 7 | Vsevolod Bagnó and M. Kórneva, “Ejo v culture,” in Vozhdi umov i mody. Chuzhoe imia kak nasleduyemaia model’ zhizni (Nauka: San Petersburgo, 2003), 5. 8 | This research is part of the project The Myth of Don Quixote and the Shaping of the New Europe (HUM2007-64546), financed by the Spanish Ministry of Sciences and Innovation (quijoteste.casadelest.org). Also see El telón rasgado: El Quijote como puente cultural con el mundo soviético y postsoviético, ed. Jorge Latorre, Antonio Martínez and Oleksandr Pronkevich (Pamplona: Eunsa, 2015). 9 | See José María Beneyto, “Don Quijote y la identidad de la cultura europea,” in El Quijote y el pensamiento Moderno, ed. José Luis González Quirós and José María Paz Gago (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 2005), 81-94. 10 | Although this falls outside the parameters of this article, a more detailed historical study would also examine how Don Quixote as a myth was used as a tool to refashion European consciousness during World War I and World War II. During World War I, for example, official Spain’s decision to side with the Germans in a “New Europe” was described in media reports in mythic terms, conjuring up Don Quixote as a “false” knight: see Salvador Madariaga, “Don Quixote Is Not Neutral,” New Europe 1 (1916): 298-299. 11 | See Max Weber, Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerths (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946). 12 | “People who believe themselves to be invested with a ‘mission’ to make ‘freedom’ triumph over its foes have a pretty strange world view – one that belongs, incidentally, neither to the Christian tradition nor to secular humanism. Both of the latter are based on the idea that this world is irremediably imperfect (humans are tainted by original sin; their existence is an ‘imperfect garden’), and that no definitive triumph over evil can ever be achieved. Only militarist heretics and revolutionary utopians have ever maintained such an illusion.” (Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth-Century, trans. D. Bellow [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002], xx) 13 | Robert Coalson, “Valeria Novodvorskaya: Russia’s ‘Don Quixote’ Of Democracy, Human Rights,” Radio Free Europe – Radio Liberty, 14 July 2014, available online at http:// www.rferl.org/content/obituary-novodvorskaya-russia-rights/25456847.html 14 | “The results of the ‘Europe List’ survey revealed key European values,” The Lithuania Tribune, 6 July 2013, available online at http://www.lithuaniatribune.com/43829/ the-results-of-the-europe-list-survey-revealed-key-european-values-201343829/ 15 | Vsévolod Bagnó; “El aspecto mesiánico del Quijotismo ruso,” in Lecturas cervantinas 2005, ed. Vsévolod Bagnó (St. Petersburg: Fundación Cervantes de San Petersburgo, 2007), 95. 16 | On July 1 1876, Chekhov in a letter to his brother Mihail writes: “Read Don Quixote. It is a fine thing. It is by Cervantes, who is said to be almost on a level with Shakespeare. I advise my brothers to read – if they haven’t already done so – Turgenev’s Hamlet and Don Quixote.” (Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends trans. Constance Garnett [New York: MacMillan, 1920], 39) 17 | Bagnó, “El aspecto mesiánico del Quijotismo ruso,” 90.

The “Quixote” Myth and the New Eastern Europe 18 | Anthony Close, La concepción romántica del Quijote (Barcelona: Crítica, 2005), 17; Jean Canavaggio Don Quijote, del libro al mito (Madrid: Espasa, 2005), 69. 19 | Close, La concepción romántica del Quijote, 81, and Canavaggio, Don Quijote, del libro al mito, 190-207. 20 | Ivan Turgenev, The Essential Turgenev, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Cheresh Allen (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 554. 21 | Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky, A Writer’s Diary, Vol. 2, 1877-1881, trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994) 867. 22 | Danielle Perrot-Corpet, Don Quichotte, figure du XXe siècle (Paris: Klincksieck, 2005), 69. 23 | Lecturas cervantinas 2005, ed. Vsévolod Bagnó (St. Petersburg: Fundación Cervantes de San Petersburgo, 2007), 91-103. 24 | Lunacharsky never answered Korolenko. But his letters to Lunacharsky were well known before they were published for the first time in Russia in 1988, the same year that Bulgakov’s play Don Quixote (Don Kikhot, 1938) was published. See Bagnó, “El aspecto mesiánico del Quijotismo ruso,” 90-103. See also also Vsévolod Bagnó, “El utopismo como base de la mentalidad quijotesca, y del quijotismo mundial,” AIH. Actas XII (1995), Centro Virtual Cervantes available online at http://cvc.cervantes.es/obref/aih/pdf/12/ aih_12_2_007.pdf 25 | As Emmanuel Waegemans has noted, just as the Bolsheviks exiled intellectuals who bothered them, Lunacharsky exiled the idealist Don Quixote to Spain and Stalin exiled him to Spain as an ambassador. (Emmanuel Waegemans, “Don Quijote libertado. El caballero de la Triste Figura en el país de los soviets,” in Tras las huellas de Don Quijote: Actas de la Jornada dedicada a Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. L. Behiels [Antwerp: Lessius Hogeschool, 2007], 105) 26 | Thomas Seifrid, “Andrei Platanov 1899-1951,” in Encyclopedia of the Novel, Vol. 2, ed. Paul Schelling (New York: Routledge, 1998), 1007. 27 | Bagnó, “El aspecto mesiánico del Quijotismo ruso,” 90. 28 | Tatiana Pigarova, “El Quijote versus 1957: las aventuras de un ingenioso hidalgo en el país de los soviets,” in Memoria Rusa de España. Alberto y El Quijote de Kózintsev (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, 2005), 68. José Luis Sánchez Noriega and Jaime Brihuega y Alcaén Sánchez, “El idealista caballero andante en Crimea. Notas sobre la estética y recepción del Quijote de Grigoriy Kózintsev,” in Memoria rusa de España. Alberto y el Quijote de Kózintsev, 85-98. 29 | Mikhail Bulgakov, Don Kikhot. Don Quixote: A Play (Letchworth: Prideaux Press, 1971), 132. 30 | Vsévolod Bagnó, El Quijote vivido por los rusos, 80. 31 | Vladímir Zeldin, “Don Quijote en Rusia”, La voz de Rusia (26 February 2007), available online at http://spanish.ruvr.ru/2007/02/26/1090309.html. 32 | As Tony Shaw writes in his article “Ambassadors of the Screen: Film and the StatePrivate Network in Cold War America,” “Several companies relented somewhat at the behest of the State Department following the first Soviet-American cultural exchange agreement of 1958, agreeing to distribute seven apolitical Russian productions, including

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Jorge Latorre, Antonio Mar tínez Illán and Oleksandr Pronkevich Len film’s Don Quixote (1959).” (Tony Shaw, “Ambassador of the Screen: Film and StatePrivate Network in Cold War America,” in The US Government, Citizen Groups and the Cold War: The State-Private Network, ed. Helen Laville and Hugh Wilford [New York: Routledge, 2006], 161) Also see Brooks Atkinson, “Soviet Don Quixote shows that Artistic Gifts of Russian People Survive,” New York Times, 7 February 1961 and Bosley Crowther, “Don Quixote Russian Film Opens at Two Theaters,” New York Times, 21 January 1961, 18. 33 | See Jorge Latorre, Antonio Martínez, and Oleksandr Pronkevich, “Recepción del cine soviético en España: una historia entre guerras, censuras y aperturas,” Anagramas Vol. 9, No. 17 (2010): 93-106. 34 | According to Lee Atwell, the idea of shooting a multilingual version of Don Quixote in the early sound era was suggested by a “Greek financier in London who wanted Chaplin to direct the film and Maurice Ravel to compose a special score.” (Lee Atwell, G.W. Pabst [Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977], 16) 35 | See Bettina Bildhauer, Filming the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion, 2011). Bildhauer claims that Pabst bookends the film with “sequences of state-of-the-art animation and technology,” wherein “film hammers home its victory over the printed word.” (ibid., 116) 36 | See Marcel Olms, “Grigori Kozintsev,” in Cervantes en imágenes, ed. Emilio de la Rosa, ‎Luis Mariano González and ‎Pedro Medina (Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, 1998), 243-245; Isabel Castells, “El ingenioso hidalgo cabalga en Rusia: La versión cinematográfica de Don Quijote, de G. Kozintsev,” La Página No. 31 (1996): 18-23; Stam, Literature through Film, 40. 37 | Barbara Learning, Grigori Kozintsev (New York: Twayne, 1980), 86. 38 | Mary Ann Conroy Moore, Kozintsev’s Shakespeare Films: Russian Political Protest in Hamlet and King Lear (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), 79. 39 | Yuri Ayjenvald, Don Quihot na russkoi pochve (Moscow: Minsk, 1996), 307. 40 | Moore, Kozintsev’s Shakespeare Films, 81. 41 | Jane W. Albrecht, “Theater and Politics in Four Film Versions of the ‘Quijote,’” Hispania Vol. 88, No. 1 (2005): 9. 42 | Robert Stam, Literature Through Film, 40. 43 | Jiří Trnka also gave some thought to producing a version of Don Quixote; a few still photographs from the uncompleted project are extant. 44 | Film Review 1973-74, ed. F. Maurice Speed (London: W.H. Allen, 1974), 36. 45 | Ibid. 46 | Close, La concepción romántica del Quijote, 23. 47 | “Vasily Livanov,” available online at http://vasily-livanov.narod.ru/index.html. 48 | Michail Gurewitch, “Sherlock Holmes has become Don Quixote [Interview],” Sputnik, Issue 11 (October 1996): 57. 49 | The director in the Sputnik interview further states that Don Quixote reads books about the old knights, “just like we once read the Marxist-Leninst classics” (ibid.). 50 | Oleksandr Pronkevich, “La demonización de Sancho Panza y la crisis de las elites ucranianas,” Mundo Eslavo Vol. 4 (2005): 179-188. 51 | Cine-eye (Kino-glaz), Issue 18 (1997): 8.

The “Quixote” Myth and the New Eastern Europe 52 | Variety International Film Guide, ed. Peter Cowie (London: Andre Deutsch, 1998), 116. 53 | Bulgarian National Film Center, Don Quixote Returns synopsis, available online at http://www.nfc.bg/en/viewfilm-go?filmId=91&type=667 54 | Victor Shenderovich, Russian satirist, writer, scriptwriter and radio host, was the scriptwriter of the popular political puppet show Kukly (Puppets) which aired on NTV from 1994 to 2002. See “Viktor Shenderovich. Don Quixote and his Bodyguard” (Дон Кихот и его телохранитель), available online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmQ_euzt1Ak. 55 | The Georgian National Film Center filmography website does not list “Kino Most” (Russia) as a co-producer of the TV film, only “Basque TV” (Eusteal TB), “Migel SanCes Infante” and “Quartuli Pilmi” (Georgia). According to Peter Rollberg, the made-for-TV film was seen as an artistic failure at the time of its release. See Peter Rollberg, Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Cinema (Lantham: Scarecrow Press, 2009), 148. 56 | The film is currently available for online streaming on the Georgian National Film Center filmography website at http://www.geocinema.ge/en/index.php?filmi=742 57 | Rafael de España, De la Mancha a la pantalla. Aventuras cinematográficas del ingenioso hidalgo (Barcelona: University of Barcelona Press, 2007), 164. 58 | Both Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), and Mikhail Bakhtin (in Rossia i Ispania: obsaa granica [Nauka: St. Petersburg, 2006]) argue that Cervantes wrote in the carnivalesque, Menippean tradition; the latter is a school of fiction marked by constant digression, comic erudition and generic hybridity. 59 | David Gillespie, “Adapting Foreign Classics: Kozintsev’s Shakespeare,” in Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 1900-2001, ed. Stephen Hutchings and Anat Vernitski (London: Routledge, 2004), 79. 60 | Milán Kundera, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 9-10. Kundera’s reading of the novel is in tune with the spirit of postmodern culture. Given all its complexities, its experimental, formalistic and paratextual innovations, Don Quixote is defined as the first modern novel in history. Don Quixote is no longer read as a mindless maniac, but as embodying an invitation to think in existential terms; and Cervantes, in turn, is now regarded as one of the predecessors of postmodernism.

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The Moral Microhistory of Post-Communism Zanussi’s Weekend Stories Larson Powell

That Krzysztof Zanussi remains one of the least commented and least well understood of Polish auteur directors1 may be linked to the influence of television on his aesthetic. Zanussi’s earliest work from the late 1960s was for television, and he continued to work with the medium on into the 1980s. Television series production, even in an age of globalization, has often been seen as linked to local audiences.2 Although Zanussi’s early films, from The Structure of Crystal (Struktura Krysztalu, 1969) and The Illumination (Illuminacja, 1973) to Camouf lage (Barwy Ochronne, 1977), were acknowledged as defining the so-called “Cinema of Moral Concern,” and even quoted in Kieślowski’s Camera Buff (Amator, 1979), his work since 1989 has been eclipsed by Kieślowski’s international renown and Wajda’s continuation of his familiar historical-epic vein, whether in the heritage blockbuster Pan Tadeusz: The Last Foray in Lithuania (Pan Tadeusz, 1999) or in Katyn (2007). One difficulty of placing Zanussi might be that he is neither an auteurist representative of an old-national grand narrative as Wajda, nor as postnational as later Kieślowski. Another lies in his occasional eclecticism. Many of Zanussi’s post-1989 films seem like remakes of, or homages to films by other directors: thus Silent Touch (Dotkniecie reki, 1992) strongly resembles Blue (Trois couleurs: Blue, 1993), and Persona Non Grata (2005) combines aspects of Without Anaesthesia (Bez znieczulenia, 1978) and No End (Bez konca, 1985) (with a reference to the first shot of Blind Chance [Przypadek, 1981] in the main actor’s opening “No!”). These eclectic borrowings may reflect the director’s uncertainty about his audience after 1989: perhaps a reaching for an international public at a time when Polish viewers – including television ones – were no longer as interested in his work. Weekend Stories (Opowieści weekendowe, 1996-2000), a series of eight short films made for Polish television, is Janus-faced in its aesthetic. On the one hand, one might see Zanussi’s use of the genre of the miniseries as a specifically Polish national answer to the globalizing flood of Latin American telenovelas that were imported into Eastern Europe in the wake of 1989-1990, reaching their peak at the

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time Zanussi’s film was produced. The kinship would be one of narrative form more than content, for Zanussi’s novellas have none of the sensationalism of their popular Latin American namesakes. (The director had also written and published his scripts in novella form before 1989.) As Zanussi wrote in his postface to the published script, “I wrote each of these seven stories knowing that they would be found on programs in the company of American serials and Polish gunslinger films (rewolwerowców), or between the next sequence of Ekstradycja and a Brazilian telenovela.”3 On the other hand, these films also appear a clear homage to Kieślowski’s Decalogue (Dekalog, 1989-90), in their parabolic concentration on moral issues. There are also tongue-in-cheek references to Kieślowski’s French films, such as the little boy putting bottles in the glass recycling bin in number four. Comparisons have not always been in Zanussi’s favor. 4 At first viewing, Weekend Stories can seem simpler than Decalogue: in particular the moral oppositions are more black-and-white, the villains more obvious, the right course of action, even when requiring characters to surmount inner obstacles, thus clear. This is most apparent in number six, Unwritten Law (Niepiesane prawa), where (as Josephine Woll notes) Krzysztyna Janda’s Halina becomes so repulsive by the end as to lose any sympathy, but it may also seem true of number two, Urok wszteteczny – oddly translated as Deceptive Charm, although it should be “Indecent Lesson”5 – where Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, a character actor who once played corrupt communists in Wajda’s Without Anesthesia or Zanussi’s own Camouf lage – is cast as a manipulative ageing gay aristocrat. In number one, A Woman’s Business, the brassy-blonde figure of Lukowska, played by Magdalena Zawadska, who had also played the Prorektor’s wife in Camouf lage, is a hardened representative of postcommunist New Money. Numbers three, four and five, Weak Faith (Slaba wiara), Delay Line (Lnia opóżniająca) and The Soul Sings (Dusza śpiewa), do not have such clear-cut figures of evil, at least not as central protagonists, and yet here, too, the moral choice seems fairly straightforward: marriage in Delay Line, helping the old woman neighbor in The Soul Sings. Such clarity means that Zanussi’s protagonists do not visibly go as far into the dark night of their souls as must Kieślowski’s: they are less driven to Grenzerfahrungen or liminal experiences. If, as Slavoj Žižek has argued, Kieślowski’s protagonists are driven to a confrontation with the Real of trauma, Zanussi seems more traditionally Kantian in his “refusal to go right to the end”6 of a confrontation with radical evil or trauma. “For […] Kant, the last support of ethics consists not in the attitude of unconditional persistence […] but in the subject’s capacity to restrain himself, to stop before the abyss.”7 Thus at the key, climactic moment of The Last Circle, when the central figure Witold Crac has barely averted the threat of injury from his angry ex-wife, the text of Zanussi’s novella (used as the filmscript) reads: “The finale was performed without incident (bez wypadku).”8 The accidents or incidents (wypadki) studiously avoided by Zanussi are precisely those which Kieślowski – the title of one of whose best-known films is “Accident”

The Moral Microhistor y of Post-Communism

or Blind Chance (przypadek) – does not evade. This preference would be in agreement with the ethical stance of Zanussi’s teacher Władislaw Tatarkiewicz, a Polish neo-Aristotelian or neo-Thomist: one of Tatarkiewicz’s books is titled Analysis of Happiness and concludes with a chapter on the duty to be happy, hardly a very Kieślowskian idea.9 To be sure, the protagonists of many of Zanussi’s other films – whether of Family Life (Zycia rodzinne, 1970), A Woman’s Decision (Bilans kwartalny, 1975) or the more recent Persona non Grata – have not shied away from such abysses. Even the protagonist of The Illumination pursued his quest for meaning in an open-ended narrative alternating documentary passages on science with visionary religious ones. Weekend Stories, however, seems to revert to the muted restraint of his first feature, The Structure of Crystals. To borrow a term again from Tatarkiewicz, the “implicit aesthetic”10 of this film series is not one of the sublime, but one of the beautiful. Rather than tearing open the individual protagonist through extreme situations, Zanussi prefers to contain tensions within character – again perhaps a neo-Aristotelian trait, referable to a notion of person as entelechy or self-realization. In a German context, one would think of the later Goethe’s idea of renunciation or self-limiting (Entsagung) as paradoxically necessary to that realization.11 This is also why Weekend Stories is more driven by dialogue than gaze or fantasy, and less abstract in its filmic language, than Decalogue,12 or than Three Colors (Trois couleurs, 1989-1990) (which exploited a different televisual technology, namely the Steadicam first popularized by the American TV serial ER). This difference of content, of ethical stance, matches that in the lighting and setting of Weekend Stories is less nocturnal and dimly lit than was Decalogue. A critical view – such as Stuart Liebman’s – might relate this to Zanussi’s Catholicism and go on to note, as corollaries, the strange references to Freemasons in number four, traces of traditional gender roles in the wife’s forgiveness of adultery in number six 13, or homophobia in the portrayal of Zapasiewicz’ character in number two.14 Such a view would see Zanussi, since 1989, as having become only more provincial than earlier on, when he had claimed in an interview that he had “always opposed Wajda who was more romantic, more emblematically Polish”15 – thus as only another symptom of Poland’s “anti-modernist backlash”16 since 1989. Zanussi’s Catholicism caused some viewers unease long before 1989. The same criticisms were made already of his films in the late 1970s: one French commentator particularly objected to the implicit morality of A Woman’s Decision, wherein the protagonist played by Maja Komorowska, finally returns to her rather limited marriage in despair of a newfound freedom.17 Kieślowski, too, has been criticised in the same way (notably by Fredric Jameson).18 Yet the opposition may be too simplistic, for a number of reasons. Zanussi’s version of Catholicism is not the same as that of the aggressively theocratic politics of the Polish Catholic hierarchy, which have alienated even many believing Poles since 1989. The quietistic aspects of Zanussi’s “illuminationism” – to make a term from the title of one of his best

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films – have more in common with the contemplative mysticism of François Fénelon than the imperial ecclesialism of Bossuet.19 Thus the ethical model put forth in Zanussi’s characters is one of deliberate kenosis or self-emptying, of giving up power or money or self-interest. Polish popular piety has had a “Franciscan” cast to it due to the influence of the medieval mendicant orders,20 and Zanussi’s Catholicism, even if more intellectual, is no exception to this. We can go even further here. Against the modern tendency of religion – especially the Catholic Church – to ossify into ever-more bureaucratic forms of organization, Zanussi’s variant stresses the potential religious dimension of spontaneous face-to-face interaction, the grass-roots level of the community as opposed to the ecclesial hierarchy: this is precisely what gets lost in officially regulated religiosity.21 It is this interactive dimension, that of everyday life, wherein the religious once had its roots, 22 and it was there that Solidarity found its practice of protest, in a religious symbolism referring less to any transcendental reality, and even less to the church, than to the body of practitioners themselves.23 Moreover, this stress on the interactive as opposed to hierarchy or transcendence may be directly linked to the televisual medium itself, which forces the content of religion into at least partial secularization in order to be shown in televisual situations. Televisual religion “shows an experienced belief,” an “everyday belief that grows out of concrete situations of life.”24 Zanussi is no exception to this rule. Weekend Stories stresses again and again that it is less the protagonists’ direct relation to the divine than to each other that matters. In the third film of the cycle, concerning a child who may have leukemia, the overtly Catholic wife is an unsympathetic and irritating character, her piety expressed chiefly in the form of tormenting her stoic spouse with hysterical demands to placate an angry god with some irrational form of “sacrifice.” At the end of the film, it is clear that there has been no sign given from above, no miracle, and that even the wife’s spectacular self-prostration in the aisle of the church was irrelevant; what matters instead is a very this-worldly form of charity, performed for nothing but itself. Similarly, in the seventh film, The Last Circle, Daniel Olbrzychski’s ex-wife’s pleading with him in the name of god ultimately does not matter, for Olbrzychski makes his charitable donation not due to any theological argument, but rather to his own more fatalistic sense of contingency and risk. In the very last film as well, Hidden Treasure, the role of the Catholic priest as confessor is marginal to the central moral event of the film, the young daughter’s renunciation of a property stolen from an aristocratic emigrée. What we do not see in Zanussi is anything like the shot of Witek in Kieślowski’s Blind Chance, asking god to exist now that Witek is trying to be a believer. The shots of the praying wife in Weekend Story number three always include her husband and the rest of the apartment, the context of everyday life. Beyond even this, though, Zanussi appears to be sketching in a modernizing reform of religion that is also proposed in a late, posthumously published work of Niklas Luhmann’s, Die Religion der Gesellschaft. Luhmann must be quoted at some length to make the point clear.

The Moral Microhistor y of Post-Communism The functional differentiation of modern society has handed over the regulation of social inclusion to function systems and thereby abandoned any centralizing inclusion via hierarchical levels or morality. Religion reacts to this with intensified expectations of conviction while leaving participation free. The individual is in need of an identity on the basis of a self that is no longer transparent to it. It can make use of social resonance, love or career to build up its own identity, but this remains an uncertain construct. Doesn’t it stand to reason to say that the individual is transcendent to itself? And this no longer with the final goal of ascertaining transcendental aprioris, but in the rather romantic sense of an ironic (since reflected) relation to oneself […]. Another version could say: the individual itself is transcendence, and precisely for this reason required to commit itself to a constantly precarious self-determination. Then one should understand that the individual experiences the paradoxical unity of the difference of immanence and transcendence in itself and may thus tend to resolve this paradox through externalization, through doubling reality, through assumption of some Nirvana or of an immediately giving God. With this any possibility is lost of basing faith on authority. 25

Luhmann is not just arguing here for some sort of woolly New Age “spirituality.” Nor can his argument here be reduced to the platitudinous pieties of neoconservatives who argue that one needs Christianity to preserve belief in the sacrosanct middleclass individual. Individuality is, for Luhmann, far too instable to serve as the basis for this sort of ideology. The key aspect of this passage is that the individual does not know what it is, has no essential self-definition, can only find out what it is through action, especially interaction. No substantive identity, neither national nor even religious, can fill this gap out. The individual can only discover its own transcendence though specific everyday situations – which are those that television happens to focus on most closely. The subtle ambiguities and confusions this leads to make Zanussi’s film cycle even closer to Eric Rohmer’s Six Contes moraux (Six Moral Tales, 1963-1972) than was Kieślowski (who was often compared to Rohmer). As in Rohmer, Zanussi’s protagonists are often self-deceiving, in denial of uncomfortable truths; as in Rohmer, too, their gradual moral education is led by a series of accidents following the probabilistic logic of Pascal. Pascal Bonitzer wrote of Rohmer that “la véritable passion de ses protagonistes [est] l’ignorance,” and “l’ignorance est le moteur de la fiction.”26 This can give the filmic narration an “ambiance de paranoïa légère”27, both in Rohmer and Zanussi – one may think of Pawel in the fourth Weekend Story, but this is a leitmotiv in all of Zanussi, right down to the suspicions of the main character in Persona non Grata. It also means that Zanussi’s films, like Rohmer’s, are closer to comedy than tragedy.28 As in Rohmer, too, appearances may be deceiving. The happy end of Ma nuit chez Maud (My Night at Maud’s, 1969) is undermined by its dependency on white lies.29 In the fourth Weekend Story, the main character Pawel’s belief that simply letting live television coverage show everything, letting public opinion judge, is shown to be wrong. The somewhat manic Doctor whom Pawel allows onto prime-

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time, claiming he had been cheated out of his rights to a medical invention, turns out to be delusional, of which his conspiracy theories about French Freemasonry versus the Polish Pope turn out to be an indicator. In a key conversation in the film, Pawel and the Doctor discuss the nature of live TV programming. Unlike television under communism, where nothing could be shown live, and television in America, where fear of lawsuits causes broadcasting companies to use a “delay line” so that they can cut off and censor potentially problematic material, Polish TV simply broadcasts its talk shows live in real time. This is what allows the mad Doctor to get onto broadcasting and interrupt the program about a Polish-French medical technology collaboration. Yet just as the Doctor’s claims to “truthfulness” are later shown to be false, so Pawel’s own motivation in letting him on the air was clouded by his desire to get even with his televisual co-worker Leszek, whom he suspects of poaching on his girlfriend Agata. The moral of the story is thus a very eighteenth-century one; as the Old Man says in the discussion following Goethe’s “Geschichte vom Prokurator” in the Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, “only that story deserves to be called moral which shows us that man has a force in himself to act against his own inclinations out of conviction of something better.”30 The “delay line” of the film’s title proves to be not only that of telecommunications technology, but also that of perception, whether neuronal or, most importantly, moral. Much as in Kieślowski’s Camera Buff, absolute documentary “truthfulness” proves to be damaging and not helpful. This central problematic has moreover a specific political and mediahistorical index. In the context of Polish society in the late 1990s, Delay Line could be taken as an oblique reproach to the bitterly divisive lustration politics of the Kaczyński brothers’ Law and Justice party, founded in 2001, not long after Zanussi’s film cycle was completed. The period in which Zanussi made Weekend Stories was one of extreme political contentiousness, with the mass media very much caught up in the fray.31 The amateurishness and tendentiousness of Polish TV shown in Delay Line accurately ref lect the problems of a post-socialist public sphere which had not developed the professional ethos of Western-type media.32 Pawel’s and the mad doctor’s overestimation of the political power of television precisely mirrors a belief common at this time among Polish politicians. The delay line, linia opóżniająca, could be related to the thick line (gruba kreska) under the communist past requested by Poland’s first post-communist prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki in 1989. The intense polarization of Polish politics in the late 1990s, which drew the mass media into its wake, is thus seen as linked to, or emblematized by, a specifically media-technical device. But even the intimate realm of Pawel and Agata’s sexual relation has been transformed by the post-1989 privatization of television. At one point in the film’s opening dialogue between the two, after Agata has accused him of having an “Othello complex,” Pawel answers: “Brawo. Bon mot do talk show.”33 His polyglot riposte, a global macaronism of French, Polish and English, condenses several different cultures of wit in one phrase, from eighteenth-century esprit to Americanized televisual presence, and

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also signals his awareness that even in the bedroom, he is still performing as if he were on television (as indeed he is; situation comedy always includes a “double address” to both spectators and other actors within the scene).34 Paradoxically, it is only when Pawel escapes the pressure of having to produce the bons mots of witty televisual dialogue to a “delay line” of silent ref lection that he is able to understand his situation. The subtle irony of Zanussi’s title in this short film is even more pronounced in number seven, Ostatni Krąg. Krąg in Polish means “circle,” but ostatni krąg, the last circle, means the sacrum or last vertebrum at the base of the spine. The Last Circle could also resonate with Dante’s Inferno, to the moral hell of which Olbrychski’s calculating coldness has condemned him. This resonance is suggested by his wife’s saying that he is “black as a well” (“czarno jak w studni”), a favorite image used by Dante.35 This part of the body is the focus of the anxiety of the ageing ballet dancer who is the film’s main figure, played by Daniel Olbrychski. (Olbrychski makes an appropriate choice for a dancer, since he is known as a rider and athlete who performed his own stunts in many films.) Not only could the title, “Last Circle,” refer to what might be the dancer’s final pirouette, but the screenplay repeatedly refers to spine or backbone in its figurative sense. Olbrychski’s bitter ex-wife remarks of her second husband that he “had no spine,” and her plea to Olbrychski to donate his fee to charity could also be seen as one to show a kind of moral backbone himself. All these details, as in Rohmer’s films, only reveal themselves upon repeated viewing. The subtlety of Zanussi’s metonymic titles, which pick up small details of the narrative as emblems of their totality, exemplifies Adorno’s idea, in his essay on titles, that the latter must “hit upon” the substance of a work, not name it directly. “In the title, the paradox of the art work is actually repeated, condensing itself. The title is the microcosm of the work.”36 Equally subtle in this film is the possible correction made to Olbrychski’s ex-wife, who appears to hold the moral high ground in her plea that Olbrychski abandon his usual hard self-interest for an act of altruism. Many viewers may wince at her mention of God during their argument: if Stendhal called politics in art “a pistol shot in the middle of a concert,”37 then mention of religion might have the effect of the entrance of a Salvation Army band. Yet the wife’s religious arguments turn out to be irrelevant to Olbrychski’s decision, since he has already – unbeknownst to her – decided to donate his performer’s fee before she brings in the battalions of God. Moreover, her appeal to “the fear of God” or divine punishment have a slightly nasty tone to them, as do the masochistic fantasies of the pious wife in the third Weekend Story. (Reading these films together adds further dimensions to them, although they are not obviously cross-linked as the films of Decalogue.) Much like the stoic husband in that third film, who adopted a somewhat agnostic position relative to Providence or any divine activity, Olbrychski conceals his motives for acting as he does. Those who claim to know the ways of God have only, as the title of the third film has it, weak faith. Once again we see that if Zanussi may work within a context defined by religion, his own relation to

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the latter is a highly mediated and self-reflective one. The moral of the story is here left open, for the dignity of the dancer, fully aware of his own ageing and his risk of injury, is presented as the equal of any explicit religious code, particularly one based on discipline or punitive fear.38 An ethics of reflected contingency is thus shown to be preferable to merely disciplinary moralizing. Thus although Weekend Stories may not be as strikingly visually stylized as Decalogue, given their classicizing aesthetic, they are neither mere mouthpieces for religious reaction, nor aesthetically uninteresting. Their finest point may be their scripts, written as always by Zanussi himself. The scripts’ quick pace and multiple story threads, along with their centering on character relations, are characteristic of television screenwriting. Could we see here a filmic equivalent of the “strategy of the tale-teller” or return to story-telling that critics found in Polish literature of the 1990s?39 Televisual also are the everyday settings and reliance on medium length shots. 40 The performed excerpt from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet 41 in number seven features a camera mobility and f luidity of editing typical of television dance aesthetics. 42 Ironically, given the discord in real life between the formerly married couple who dance this scene, Zanussi has them perform the scene of the lovers’ meeting in Act Two, Scene 4. It is the public objectivity of dance performance that brings the two together again and allows them to work out their old marital differences through the enacted roles of Shakespeare and Prokofiev: their public stage performance becomes a rehearsal for the intimacy of real life. The televisual reliance on medium closeups reinforces this intimacy within the theatrical, undermining the spectacular through the private. Here, as in the opera singer’s rehearsing in the fifth Weekend Story, we do indeed have something of an aesthetics of the sublime, although it is a deliberately undermined form of the latter. (The singer in this fifth film practices Calvaradossi’s romanza, E lucevan le stelle, from Puccini’s Tosca, a farewell letter written in prison before death.) The difference between Zanussi and Kieślowski is that the sublime is, in Zanussi, shown in analogical relation to the everyday (moral) life of the performing character: it can thus be integrated into the latter, as it cannot in Kieślowski. Zanussi’s constant evasion of dramatic excess, his muting of any potential violence, makes such integration possible. Or to put it otherwise: abstraction, in Zanussi, is found in the script, the narrative, more than in the cinematography. This is thus the polar opposite of late Kieślowski, where an often simple script, such as that of Red (Trous couleurs: rouge, 1994), with Irène Jacob as the allegorical emblem of innocence and good, is masked in brilliantly virtuosic cinematography. This integration of sublime and beautiful might again be linked to Zanussi’s intellectual Catholicism; a philosophical pendant to this could be found in the modern theologian Erich Przywara’s idea of the analogia entis or analogy of being, which seems to have been making something of a comeback in theological circles. 43 (Kieślowski, by contrast, is more of a descendant of Przywara’s doctrinal opponent Karl Barth, with his drastic emphasis on Divine revelation

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unattainable by any human effort and unmediated by any cultural traditions, and his rejection of the analogia entis in favor of an analogia fidei.)44 As one defender of Przywara has argued, “the analogia entis radically suspends the creature between its own essence and existence in such a way that this difference (which is the very dynamism of becoming)” is entailed “in any supposed self-identity.”45 What else is being staged in Zanussi’s heroic ballet dancer and opera singer, or even, in more modest fashion, in the everyday heroism of his other protagonists? The balancing act Zanussi chronicles is also that of day-to-day survival in post-Communist societies. If we remain skeptical of references to religion in these films – as also in Kieślowski – we might recall a German critic’s similar comments on the role played by the Lutheran Church in the collapse of the GDR: “It is hard to say whether this is a question of an anachronism that contributed to getting rid of an anachronistic political system. For what is an anachronism? Against what could we measure it? We may have to reckon with the possibility that the figure of the anachronism will disappear along with the old belief in progress.”46 At the very least, Zanussi has given the lie to the Polish film critic Alicja Helman’s claim that after 1989, “the old masters are tired.”47

Intimacy and spectacle: a young TV producer in Krzysztof Zanussi’s Weekend Stories

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Ballet legend Crac (Daniel Olbrychski) returning to Poland in Krzysztof Zanussi’s Weekend Stories

N otes 1 | There is no monograph on Zanussi in English, only in Italian (Paolo D’Agostini, Krzysztof Zanussi [Florence: La nuova Italia, 1980]) and French (Krzysztof Zanussi, ed. Michel Estève [Paris: Minard, 1987]). The most recent book on the director is Arystokratyzm ducha: kino Krzysztofa Zanussiego, ed. Marek Sokołowski (Warsaw: Comandor, 2009). 2 | Timothy Havens, Global Television Marketplace (London: BFI, 2006), 9; Milly Buonanno, The Age of Television: Experiences and Theories (Bristol: Intellect, 2008), 113; Gunhild Agger, “National Cinema and TV Fiction in a Transnational Age,” in The Aesthetics of Television, ed. Gunhild Agger and Jens F. Jensen (Aalborg: Aalborg University Press, 2001), 56, 70. On global TV generally, see Joseph Straubhaar, World Television: From Global to Local (Los Angeles: Sage, 2007). 3 | Opowieści weekendowe: cykl nowel telewizyjnych (Wrocław: Wacław Bagiński, 1997), 169-170. Ekstradycja was a sensationalist police series that ran from 9 November 1995 to 10 June 1999. 4 | A sympathetic view is given by Josephine Woll in Kinoeye Vol. 1, No. 4 (Oct 2001); Stuart Liebman is less so (“Weekend Stories,” Cineaste, Winter 2002, 44-46). 5 | Wszeteczny is commented as “oddający się rozpuście” or “nieprzyzwoity, gorszący.” 6 | Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 238. On this type of ethic generally – with which one would now also associate the name of Badiou – see Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000). 7 | Ibid.

The Moral Microhistor y of Post-Communism 8 | Opowieści weekendowe, 73. 9 | Władislaw Tatarkiewicz, Analysis of Happiness, trans. Edward Rothert, Danuta Zielińskn, i.e. Danuta Zielińska (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976). 10 | Władislaw Tatarkiewicz, The History of Aesthetics ed. J. Harrell, trans. Adam and Ann Czerniawski (NY: Continuum, 2006; originally published in Polish in 1962), 7. 11 | Rüdiger Görner, Goethe. Wissen und Entsagen – aus Kunst (Munich: Iudicium, 1995); Børge Kristiansen, “Zum Verhältnis von Selbstsein und Anderssein in Goethes Urworte. Orphisch,” Goethe-Jahrbuch XV (2008), 131-159. 12 | “Zanussi’s films pay less attention to the surface, and to a concomitant concern with formal abstraction, than Kieślowski’s.” (Sarah Davis, “Living On: From Kieślowski to Zanussi,” in After Kieślowski :The Legacy of Krzysztof Kieślowski, ed. Steven Woodward [Detroit: Wayne State, 2009], 42) 13 | As Davis notes, “Zanussi, at times, is the more normative.” (Davis, “Living On: From Kieślowski to Zanussi,” 45) 14 | See the denunciatory reading of Ewa Mazierska (in her Masculinities in Polish, Czech and Slovak Cinema: Black Peters and Men of Marble [New York: Berghahn, 2008], 203), who claims that Zapasziewicz’ role here permits one to read all his previous roles as implicitly gay, and even that the director himself is closeted. The opposite, however, could just as easily be asserted: namely that as in Camouflage, where Zanussi shows Zapasziewicz’ idealistic young opponent as deluded and ultimately violent, so here, too, Indecent Lesson shows the brutal vengeance briefly considered by the heterosexual protagonist – who wants for a moment to incinerate an older gay man alive with gasoline for daring to have been attracted to him! – as homophobic and inhumane. Mazierska’s reading is singularly flat in its absence of any psychoanalytic dimension. Lacan’s dictum that the subject receives his message from the Other in inverted form (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III: The Psychoses, trans. Jacques-Alain Miller and Russel Grigg [New York: W. W. Norton, 1993], 52) is literally staged here: it is the older gay man who “teaches” the younger straight one, even if ex negativo, what he wants. (The straight man’s rage against Zapasziewicz should be read as a displacement of anger against his wife, whose careerist ambitions led him to his gay counterpart in the first place.) Zapasziewicz’ quoting of St. Augustine to do this is not simply an attack on supposed homosexual “decadence,” but shows that the gay man is in fact in possession of (part of) the truth here. That Zapasziewicz is not “punished” in the film acknowledges as much. (It might also be noted that Zanussi signed an open letter protesting the May 2006 appointment of the openly homophobic and anti-Semitic Roman Giertych as minister of education.) 15 | Krzysztof Zanussi, ed. Estève, 7. 16 | Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 40-41. See for more detail Adam Hetnal, “The Polish Catholic Church in Pre- and Post-1989 Poland: An Evaluation,” East European Quarterly, Winter 1998 (32), 503-529. 17 | Jacques Chevalier, “Zanussi moraliste ou moralisateur?,” La revue du cinéma 361 (May 1981), 115-117. 18 | In his “Afterword: Lenin’s Choice” in Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso

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Larson Powell 2002), 165-336, Žižek refers to the UCLA conference on Kieślowski in April 2001, where Jameson “violently protested” against the boy’s death in Decalogue One (ibid., 219). 19 | François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651-1715), friend of the mystic Madame Guyon, condemned by the Inquisition in 1699, in large part due to the political machinations of Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704). 20 | On this, see Patrick Michel, Politics and Religion in Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 114. 21 | This was the central diagnosis of Luhmann’s sociology of religion, although some of his critics have noted that his stress on the modern religious tendency to organization made him blind to the activity of the community (Gemeinde) in periods of social transition (see Michael Welker, “Die neue ‘Aufhebung’ der Religion in Luhmanns Systemtheorie,” in Theologie und funktionale Systemtheorie: Luhmanns Religionssoziologie in theologischer Diskussion, ed. Michael Welker [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985], 93-119, esp. 108 and 110). 22 | Luhmann, Funktion der Religion (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982), 94. 23 | So Wałęsa noted in his memoirs: “Prayer protected us, but… it had ceased to have anything to do with devotion.” (Lech Wałęsa, Un chemin d’espoir [Paris: Fayard, 1987] 274-5, cited in Michel, Politics and Religion In Eastern Europe, 178) 24 |  Elisabeth Hurth, Der kanalisierte Glaube: wie das Medium Fernsehen Religion und Kirche in Szene setzt (Nuremberg: VTR, 2006), 5 and 43. See also Diane Winston’s discussion of how television shows “lived religion,” i.e. “the ways in which religion is practiced and experienced in everyday life.” (Diane Winston, “Introduction,” in Big Picture, Small Screen. Television and Lived Religion, ed. Diane Winston [Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009], 5) 25 | Niklas Luhmann, Die Religion der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002), 110-111. The German for “relation to oneself” is “Verhältnis zu sich selbst,” a formulation recalling Idealism (locus classicus: Dieter Henrich, Selbstverhältnisse [Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001]). We could restate this reformulated role of the individual in Lacanian terms: the individual steps in where it discovers a lack in the Other, via “the heroic acceptance of the fundamental gap […] as the very condition of desire.” Or: “The symbolic act is best conceived of as the purely formal, self-referential, gesture of the self-assertion of one’s own subjective position.” (Slavoj Žižek, On Belief [London and New York: Routledge, 2001], 83-84). 26 | Pascal Bonitzer, Eric Rohmer (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1991), 15-16. 27 | Ibid., 25. 28 | Ibid., 29. 29 | Marion Vidal, Les Contes moraux d’Eric Rohmer (Paris: Lherminier, 1977), 106. 30 | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke (Hamburger Ausgabe), Vol. 6, (Munich: DTV, 1998), 186. 31 |  Frances Millard notes that “criticism of Polish television escalated in 1996 and 1997 as the parliamentary elections of September 1997 approached” (“Democracy and the Media in Poland, 1989-1997,” in Democratization and the Media, ed. Vicky Randall [London: Taylor and Francis, 1998], 95). See also Karol Jakubowicz, “Social and Media Change in Central and Eastern Europe: Framework of Analysis,” in Business as Usual: Continuity and Change in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. David L. Paletz and Karol Jakubowicz (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press), 2003], 3-42.

The Moral Microhistor y of Post-Communism 32 | Tomasz Goban-Klas, “Politics vs. the Media in Poland: A Game without Rules,” in PostCommunism and the Media in Eastern Europe, ed. Patrick O’Neil (London: Cass, 1997), 32. 33 | “Bon mot for a talk show.” (Opowieści weekendowe, 147) 34 | Jørgen Stiegel, “Aesthetics of the Moment in TV. Actualisation in Time and Space,” The Aesthetics of Television, ed. Agger and Jensen, 25-53, 41-42. 35 | Opowieści weekendowe, 69. See also Dante’s Inferno Canto XXXIII: 16, “pozzo scuro,” or Canto XXXIII: 133, with the soul calling into a “cisterna”. 36 | Theodor W. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, Gesammelte Schriften 11 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 326. 37 | Stendhal, Racine et Shakespeare (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1994), 76. 38 | Olbrychski’s pretending that he did not donate his fee is not merely a power game with his wife, but a principled objection to her using “blackmail” (szantaż) on him during the performance (with an implicit threat of physical injury). 39 | Przemysław Czapliński, Ślady przełomu: o prozie polskiej 1976-1996 (Kraków: Wydawn. Literackie, 1997), cited in Tadeusz Lubelski, “A Difficult Return to ‘Freedom Cinema,’” The New Polish Cinema, ed. Janina Falkowska and Marek Haltof (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 2003), 24. 40 | “By moving quickly among plots, the narrative gives the impression of considerable density and ‘lifelikeness.’” (Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in Film and Television [Cambridge: Harvard UP 2003], 57) “Fictional television narratives have learned to compensate for their lack of suspense by proliferating storylines […] it is characters and their interrelationships that dominate television stories.” (Sarah Kozloff, “Narrative Theory and Television,” in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed. Robert C. Allen, [Chapel Hill: UNC, 1992], 74 and 75; see also page 75 on the “relatively undistinguished setting” for most television series) 41 |  The ballet was in fact staged at the time (1996) at the National Opera with choreography by Emil Wesełowski. 42 | On televised dance, see Sherill Dodds, Dance on Screen. Genres and Media from Hollywood to Experimental Art (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), especially 19-26 and 56-62. Dodds points out that television’s “potential for close-ups, reaction shots, [and] point of view shots” may make it more suited to the narrative dimensions of dance-theatre (ibid., 21). 43 | A much-discussed example: David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). 44 | See now Keith L. Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (London: T & T Clark, 2010). 45 | John R. Betz, “Beyond the Sublime: The Aesthetics of the Analogy of Being” (Part Two), Modern Theology 22:1 (Jan. 2006): 17. 46 | Dirk Baecker, Poker im Osten (Berlin: Merve, 1998), 17. See also pages 33 and 35 on Nischengesellschaft. 47 | Alicja Helman, “The Masters are Tired,” in The New Polish Cinema, ed. Falkowska and Haltof, 37-53.

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Polish Film Culture in Transition On the “Private Films” of Andrzej Kondratiuk (1985-1996) Iwona Guść “By historicizing the viewer we are taking a step towards a truer history of film.” Yuri Tsivian1

P rologue : F ilm C ulture in Tr ansition Astonished by the new developments in the field of film, Alexandre Astruc wrote in a seminal 1948 essay: “the cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression.”2 Nowadays, more than six decades later, one can hardly question this statement. This is also because film has become a medium that many people employ to express themselves on a daily basis. To a certain degree, Astruc himself anticipated the massive proliferation of the visual medium he was writing about. Due to “the development of 16mm and television the day is not far,” he predicted, “when everyone will possess a projector, will go to the local bookstore and hire films written on any subject, in any form [...].”3 Time has proven that Astruc was not wrong. Today, besides being able to find films of any kind and to watch them at any time without leaving home, we are also able to make a variety of films ourselves. More than ever before since the digital revolution we communicate with and express ourselves through the visual medium. Using regular camcorders, built-in cameras in mobile phones, tablets or computers we capture our lives constantly. We record everything and are able to reedit it by ourselves. Apart from being viewers we step into the role of filmmakers, producers and distributers. One hundred hours of film material is uploaded every single minute to YouTube. 4 All these films made by or re-edited by ordinary internet users consist of important and unimportant details, sublime and trivial moments, deep or shallow observations, but we mainly upload those bits and pieces in order to share them with friends, relatives, but also with strangers. During several decades our film practice changed radically. It encompasses not only “viewing,” it is also more and more about “being viewed.” It also encompasses re-making or re-editing

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existing film material. The once sharp line between filmmaker and film viewer is in that sense constantly being suspended. The same holds true for the line between film character and filmmaker and to some extent also for the boundary between fiction and non-fiction. In this way, immersed in this visual medium and what Tom Gunning has termed its “gnostic impulse” (the desire to use cinema to discover new visual knowledge and worlds) we have become a true homo cinematicus.5

F rom N e w V ie wing E xperiences to N e w Pat terns of R ecep tion Only in retrospect can we see how much film as a medium has evolved. The abrupt shifts and changes are barely visible, though. It is all due to the reception process, which, as Yuri Tsivian in his seminal book on film reception has put it, “works like a diffusing lens: whatever comes into its field ‘goes out of focus’ and comes to look like something else rather than itself.”6 The mechanism seems therefore always the same: what once seemed a cardinal deviation from the norm resolves subsequently into the habitual patterns of culture. Nonetheless it seems essential to unravel the very moments of transition, to ask the question: how did film, at first seen as a collective art form par excellence, become a natural part of our daily routines? How exactly did it change from an art for the crowd to an art that can be contemplated and (re-)created individually? How did the unconventional become a part of the cultural code and what precisely has been gone missing? How can the numerous small changes lead to new cultural forms and new cultural behaviors? Within the field of early cinema studies those questions are approached from the perspective of new viewing experiences triggered by new optical technologies.7 Technologies and techniques like film editing, mobile cameras, sound effects, and close-ups were not immediately applauded. Such novel devices often encountered opposition, but also, by confronting spectators with a new sort of viewing experience, provoked them to rethink their own viewing experience in terms of their cultural background. Tsivian’s analysis shows that at the beginning of the previous century “old literary clichés” were often recycled to channel and familiarize the unexpected new film experience. The analytical framework proposed by Tsivian aims to reconstruct the actual historical responses to a novel technical or poetical practice. His approach encompasses two steps: first of all we need to uncover the moments in which novelty enters into the field of reception, profoundly destabilising it. In other words we can do this best by studying the first reactions provoked by any new (optical) technique or artistic device as long as it is new, but not yet “out of focus,” not yet absorbed by culture. Secondly – in order to understand how any new device finally becomes acculturated – we need to analyze the specific patterns of reception in a given context. Thanks to those patterns functioning as a “buffer zone” between new film phenomena and existing, conventionalised culture any

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new device can “go out of focus.”8 This essay follows Tsivian’s method and the two steps mentioned above in order to (1) uncover striking moments in responses to a new viewing experience in Poland during the transitional decade 1985–1996 and in order to (2) understand how the novel aspects of the film culture in transition have been acculturated to the point that these eventually “went out of focus.” In other words: the main problem I would like to analyze concerns the question of how the changing context on the one hand and existing cultural patterns on the other hand interchangeably mediate and help to acculturate novel forms of (film) expression, forms that once had been received as surprising or even shocking. How does the culture change along with the changing reception? How does the novelty “go out of focus”?

F ilm H istorical Tr ansition in P ol and and A ndrze j K ondr atiuk In what follows I would like to address the general questions raised above through a specific, local case study: the emergence of a new film practice, namely private filmmaking in Poland. As a new form of expression, it appeared during the time of transition from communist to democratic rule. The political changes were in fact one of the factors that stimulated the emergence of private filmmaking. To analyze this new cultural practice, I will look at the work by Polish film director Andrzej Kondratiuk. He was among the first filmmakers in Poland who already before 1989 decided to make independent, “private” films, even though such practice was not yet officially sanctioned within that communist state-run film industry. Through the analysis of the shift in the reception of two of his films: The Four Seasons (Cztery pory roku, 1985) and The Spinning Wheel of Time (Wrzeciono czasu, 1996), I hope to gain some insight into the specific historical appropriation of novel filmmaking practices. The contextual background will be limited to Polish film and the transitional period between 1985 and 1996. As we all know, this decade was about to bring radical changes not only in Poland, but in the whole Eastern Block. The year 1985 was marked by perestroika. It was the first strong signal of a growing liberalisation, especially in the economic sense. In 1989 the state eventually lost its control and monopolized position in the film industry for good. As a result after more than forty years, Polish film stopped being “the most important of all arts”9 in service of the (socialist) society. This meant that the ideological fundaments, the censorship as well as the restrictions of the socialist mode of production and distribution, finally could have been abolished. The radical institutional shift liberated Polish filmmakers also from moral, didactic or political commitment. They finally could employ a different poetics too. From that moment on film could be made outside the state film industry and be art for whatever purpose one desired it to be. In this context of reception several other factors seem to be significant too: the emergence

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of a new (electronic) medium like video; the new practice of using that medium in the form of private filmmaking and viewing, and finally the interaction between the new medium and older media, especially television and film, and the impact this change had on the conditions of public reception.

A ndrze j K ondr atiuk ’s F irst P rivate F ilm and P olish M edia in Tr ansition In 1955 Andrzej Kondratiuk (born in 1936) started his academic education at the famous Polish Film School in Łódź. Together with his fellow-student Roman Polański, Kondratiuk became known as the creator of a new type of absurd, grotesque short film. In the 1960s he worked as one of the pioneers for television and throughout his career he considered television a fascinating medium. In the 1970s Kondratiuk made his cinema debut. His successive movies were often negatively received. He also faced some difficulties trying to get his projects off the ground within the state film industry. The officials and most of the critics were quite ambivalent about his cinema. He always stood out as an unconventional and problematic filmmaker. His work troubled Polish film critics for many decades and especially during the communist era it was not always clear how to classify his remarkable diverse oeuvre. His way of filmmaking never settled easily into the usual categories and viewer expectations.10 Growing interest in Kondratiuk’s cinema suddenly became noticeable during the second half of the 1980s, just before the end of the communist era. This was a moment when he turned from a state filmmaker into an independent filmmaker. As early as 1983, contrary to what was allowed within the communist film industry, Andrzej Kondratiuk decided to make a film on his own: The Four Seasons. The state film institute participated only in the post-production; in fact Kondratiuk was the executive producer of his film. An unprecedented situation. No one had tried anything similar in Poland before Kondratiuk.11 In 1985 Kondratiuk succeeded in challenging the state monopoly and his private film was released through the public distribution channels (film houses, festivals and later television).12 It was a decisive moment for his career too. After the release of the film in 1985 the critical and academic attention for Kondratiuk’s cinema increased significantly. However, at first the opinions about his cinema were still quite diverse and there was no consensus among the critics. What nowadays, when anyone can make films, seems common, was in Poland or even in the entire Eastern Block in the 1980s an extraordinary enterprise. Within a socialist and therefore monopolized film industry this was a subversive activity, because in those days, film production was restricted to the rules set by the state. Only the state could decide whether a film could or could not be produced, and – maybe even more importantly – what it could be about. So Kondratiuk’s decision was indeed a very daring experiment, comparable to samizdat, the illegal press

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underground. However, in contrast to most samizdat publications, Kondratiuk did not express any direct criticism of the dominant ideology in his film, which allowed his movie to finally gain official acceptance at the end and be screened in art house theaters. The official commission appointed to screen and to control all film productions at that time had no objection to The Four Seasons. Nonetheless the discussion provoked by the film during the commission gathering shows that the evaluators did not really know how to qualify nor disqualify this movie.13 This was the first completely independent film production ever to appear in a communist country. Independent production also became Kondratiuk’s way of adapting to the post- communist changes in the following years, and his cinema has soon afterwards been labeled a “family,” or “private” cinema. Terms like independent or off-cinema are applied to his films now, but critics did not use them at first.14 To me it is very striking that the critics have chosen to call this cinematic enterprise private and I hope to clarify why this was probably the best way for them to come to terms with this novel cinema. It is highly significant that at this transformational moment academic critics started to pay attention to Kondratiuk’s cinema for the first time; to some extent it looks like these films appealed to the Polish public especially at the moment of transition from communism to capitalism. In this essay I will try to elaborate on this shift in reception in order to understand why it occurred and what the underlying cultural conditions and changes were that influenced these critical responses. As stated above I will refer to two films and two specific moments in the history of the reception of Andrzej Kondratiuk’s cinema: The Four Seasons from 1985, and The Spinning Wheel of Time from 1996. The release of The Four Seasons marks the moment when Kondratiuk broke through as an independent filmmaker. The year 1996 might be seen as a peak moment in the popularity of this filmmaker in Poland and it coincides with an almost unanimous recognition of the importance of Kondratiuk as a director, among the public, critics and scholars. The fact that The Spinning Wheel of Time won five important awards at various festivals should also be mentioned. At that point, the first monograph on Kondratiuk’s cinema was published by Marek Hendrykowski and Malgorzata Gromadzinska in Poland.15 Their book and the ones that followed have consolidated the critical consensus about his cinema and further enshrined Kondratiuk in the pantheon of Polish cinema. This overview of facts shows a change in the reception of the new private cinema by Kondratiuk between 1985 and 1996. What seemed rather disturbing and confusing at first, finally became a highly-acclaimed convention and even a commodity around 1996. Thus, I would argue that in the course of ten years Kondratiuk’s previously experienced novel mode of filmmaking became part of the cultural conditions that allowed it to be received and absorbed as “normal,” so that it could “go out of focus.” Apart from the production changes that coincided with the fall of the communist system, what came afterwards must also be taken into account. The first years of transformation brought about a sharp increase in cultural

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novelties. Private producers dominated the cultural market and in the 1990s new television formats appeared. Home video became one of the most popular forms of entertainment. The 1990s were also the time when new types of television entertainment appeared in Poland. Most famous and groundbreaking was the talk show produced and emitted by Polsat – the very first Polish private and commercial television channel.16 The show called On every subject (Na każdy temat) broke all possible expectations and taboos.17 For the first time in their life Polish viewers were confronted with subjects and stories that have never been voiced in public before: transvestites, porn stars, drag queens, prostitutes, people with all kind of disabilities and individual, rare problems. The popularity of this particular show made it clear that the Polish public at that time was extremely interested in the extraordinary confessions of seemingly ordinary people. The Polish public was for the first time entertained by people from the streets, not only by celebrities. Moreover, anyone could suddenly become a celebrity, by actively participating in television programs.18 Seeing a neighbor on TV suddenly became a real possibility.19 Soap operas, reality shows and (family) game shows also gained popularity. Apart from public television, people now had private channels at their disposal – from local television to global network channels. The active preoccupation with video making also seems very important in this context. Video cameras gradually became more and more available. They were a powerful way for a democratic society to express a variety of voices. This created a cultural context in which anybody could become a movie character and director of his or her own cinema. A camera could indeed replace a diary or a family album by translating personal feelings and memories into a visual form. Nowadays, when we all can be stars on YouTube, this tendency has “gone out of focus”, but in 1985 in Poland it was highly surprising to see a private film on a large cinema screen. This context is important for our understanding of the dynamic reception of Andrzej Kondratiuk’s “private cinema” between 1985 and 1996. This is why it seems productive to focus on the moment when Kondratiuk’s “private cinema” appeared. This will help us understand how his filmmaking practice evolved from a marginal and deviating niche to an accepted and mainstream cultural position (or cliché), in other words, how the novelty of his filmmaking at some point “went out of focus” again.

1985: A N e w V ie wing E xperience – Too I ntimate and Too R epulsive Between 1983 and 1985 Kondratiuk wrote, directed, and produced his first homemade (one might even say handmade) film: The Four Seasons. For this production Kondratiuk used an old Arriflex camera, which he had managed to borrow from a state film company, and leftover film stock, collected by Kondratiuk himself in

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official film studios. The Four Seasons was shot in picturesque surroundings, just outside Warsaw, around a primitive wooden country cabin that the director had built in the 1970s and where he would later spend most of his time. The film set was built and decorated by Kondratiuk as well, with props collected in garbage facilities or made by the filmmaker himself. And finally, the all-star cast was made up entirely of Kondratiuk and his family, including his actress-singer wife and brother Janusz Kondratiuk, a director also known for his television films. It is obvious that these conditions of production looked very different from the usual production of socialist films. As one of the critics wrote, it was more than just an example of “auteur-cinema”; it was entirely private. The film had its premiere in September 1985, during the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia. The conditions of production, under which Kondratiuk took the cinematic enterprise into his own hands instead of relying on the state film industry, seemed highly intriguing to Polish critics in 1985. They all praised the brave effort to make independent cinema in communist Poland. I would even dare to say that this was probably the decisive factor in the huge amount of attention that Kondratiuk’s film received at that moment. Even a critic for Variety was aware of this unprecedented production, writing that it was a surprising film “from a country with a socialized film industry which still manages to be completely personal and even selffinanced.”20 As we read the reviews of The Four Seasons, another characteristic becomes obvious: there was no consensus among critics how to evaluate this film, neither in artistic terms, nor in regards to the possible meaning of this film. Reactions varied from, on the one hand, excitement about the new authentic reflection of existential truths to irritation and even anger directed at the private entourage of the director, with its infantile, naive characters, on the other hand. Some critics felt disturbingly trapped in unresolved sensations, full of extremely mixed feelings about this movie. As one of the critics, Janusz Zatorski, confessed: “It has been a long time since a Polish film evoked in me such mixed feelings. On the one hand I feel a deep sympathy and even some nostalgia; on the other hand – particularly embarrassment, if not irritation.”21 What was this private film about? The film tells a rather simple story about a family consisting of aging parents, two sons and a daughter-in-law. One son lives in the countryside, with his wife and a bunch of animals as loveable company. Expecting a visit by their parents, they prepare a new accommodation where the father and mother can stay comfortably for some time. At the end, the old and paralyzed father dies. One of the background stories behind the film is that Kondratiuk wanted to film his father’s last days and he also wanted to realize his father’s secret wish to be a movie star. Arkadiusz Kondratiuk, Andrzej’s father, passed away right at the end of the shooting. All characters were played by Kondratiuk and his relatives, and we can definitely see that there is some overlap between the diegetic story and the real life that unfolds in front of the camera. Even the names of the characters mimic the real persons. This information was not

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hidden by Kondratiuk either. Shortly before the premier of the film, Kondratiuk published notes from his production diary in the press, in which he pointed to the story elements that overlapped with real life situations.22 The visit of Kondratiuk’s parents is very well documented in those notes. In the notes one finds evidence that Arkadiusz and Krystyna Kondratiuk spent almost the whole summer in the countryside with their son. They visited Gzowo in 1983, between July 26 and September 22. The activities that one could follow on screen are also rendered with much irony in Kondratiuk’s diary. By publishing the fragments of his diary Kondratiuk added another layer to his private film. So at the end what the Polish film viewers received was some hybrid between the personal diary and the visual documentation of the confessions of a filmmaker. Not unimportant was also the fact that the recorded footage showed a very intimate and touching moment in the lives of all the people appearing on screen. Polish viewers were invited by Kondratiuk to participate in the last summer of his father. These particularly private moments were screened for the broad Polish film public on the big screen and later also on television. The main problem posed by this film to its viewers in 1985 seems to concern the evaluation of the main characters and their ontological status. All critics asked themselves the same question: what exactly is the relation between the actual filmmaker and his family, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the characters on screen, who resemble them physically, and carry their (first) names? Are they meant to be seen as fictional characters, coincidently given the same name as the real people? Do they represent the Kondratiuks? Are they maybe a parody of them? Or an artistic family like they are? Or artists in general? How to make sense of the Kondratiuk-family-as-actors-and-characters on screen? The confusion about the ontological status of the characters sensed in the critical responses, thus, was based in part on the fact that the critics found it difficult to differentiate between a cinematic illusion and a registration of reality, in other words, between fiction and reality on screen. But why was it so difficult to accept these characters as either fictional or real? Why was it so difficult for the viewers to forget that the characters on screen are real people too? Why did people continue to perceive Kondratiuk as the director of the film as well, and not just as an extravagant character that simply resembles him? In the end, knowing the biography of a movie star often does not affect our perception of the role that he/she plays, so we don’t necessarily use all of our non-diegetic knowledge during the viewing of a film. On the contrary, we often prefer to forget that the actor has his own life too, in order to maintain the illusion. What, then, has kept the viewers of Kondratiuk’s film from forgetting the real identity of the actors and what elements violated the process of submitting to the cinematic illusion? Why did this particular actor-character situation not “go out of focus”? And what made these characters be perceived as a novelty against the known cultural conventions, as deviations of both narrative characters, and real people registered by the camera? My point is that the main problem concerned the use of very private, intimate allusions and information that did not fit the cultural horizon

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of expectations of that time. To me it looks like the violation of the clear distinction between the public and private spheres was at the heart of the new experience offered by Kondratiuk’s film. Zatorski, already quoted earlier, who struggled with exactly those ambiguous feelings about the people inhabiting The Four Seasons, could not believe that the apparent authenticity could indeed be true, because as he stated, film as art relies on staging, a mechanism that is counter-authentic in its essence. So, to a certain extent, he was enchanted by this film, but at the same time – as he voiced it – he felt “trapped.”23 He was emotionally touched by the portrayal of the parents, their symbolical last visit in the Arcadian, rural space. At the same time, he was angry to realize that it was just a staged film, where these emotional scenes were played out, exploiting the genuine public. It seems as if the critic was frustrated when he painfully realized that his own feelings might have been exploited in this experience as well. When we look closely at the critical responses we can see how confrontational the images and allusions to private, even intimate life appeared to many reviewers. I will focus specifically on one critic, Bożena Janicka, who reviewed both successive films. Interestingly, her responses shifted remarkably between 1986 and 1996. In her review in 1986, Janicka resisted speaking about the characters of The Four Seasons as real people at all, because she was also particularly disturbed by their ideas about life. Especially one sentence caught her attention. At one point, after watching dogs and other animals mating, the main character, Andrzej, states: “humans too reach their immortality in a dogs’ way,” meaning that people are mating in order to get offspring, to become immortal, in the same way dogs do. Knowing the grotesque type of humor that Kondratiuk’s films often employ, one may understand this sentence as a pun as well, referring to what is colloquially named “doggy style.” This comparison however made Janicka furious. For her, this comparison was absolutely degrading; as she stated, it showed “a disdain for the miracle of life.”24 This is why she spoke of the characters’ “lack of charm” and chose not to confirm that these might actually be the views expressed by Andrzej Kondratiuk himself and his relatives, probably in order to negate their, in her eyes, unacceptable traits and ideas. These characters cannot be seen, she said, as real Kondratiuks, otherwise “I could not speak about them like that in public.” What we encounter here is a particularly embarrassed and angry spectator, who cannot even bear to hear the ideas and thoughts of the characters on screen and cannot accept that it could have been the real ideas of Kondratiuk himself. She did have her doubts about the experience, the real embarrassment and anger she felt while watching the film. What is a critic supposed to do in the face of a film like this, she asked in her review in 1986. I would like to illustrate my argument with a small scene that Bożena Janicka probably found particularly disturbing. Other critics also called this particular scene “very hurtful” and spoke of it as a “hostile criticism of human nature.” In this short scene we see a group of mating frogs. A rather unpleasant image. The

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voice-over belongs to director Andrzej Kondratiuk. But the viewer is not the only one who seems to be the addressee of Kondratiuk’s commentary. Kondratiuk directs his “acting” skills towards his screen and life partner who is also the film’s producer, Iga Cembrzyńska. He calls his wife to come closer and watch the frog show together. He re-enacts a romantic dialogue between the frog-man and frogwoman, which finally ends in the sound of orgasm. It is a grotesque performance in which one could also see the degradation of a romantic story about the Frog Prince.25 The wife on screen is not really amused. Kondratiuk’s commentary ends with a banal statement “C’est la vie.” As I mentioned earlier, Janicka and some other critics were not at all amused by the kind of jokes Kondratiuk liked to make. I assume the question Janicka posed at the beginning of her review refers to these kinds of scenes: What is a critic supposed to do when confronted with them? How to relate, she said, to the infantile behavior of the main characters? But I would assume instead she probably thought: “What the hell can I say about the idiotic way Andrzej Kondratiuk, the film director I know, behaves here!?” As her anger at Kondratiuk suggests, she also disliked the fact that she as a professional film critic had to face the shameless act of mimicking an orgasm by a man she probably even knows personally from festivals and other professional situations. These, and other similar scenes, in which the boundaries between the very private, even intimate sphere and public sphere were unexpectedly and unavoidably crossed, embarrassed Janicka the most, and so she said, arguing similarly to Zatorski, “the viewer must feel trapped” by this cinema. The rhetorical solution Janicka came up with in 1985 was to compare the film to a family album that has been displaced from a private room to a public space. Once again in the 1980s in Poland family pictures still belonged to the private sphere and were not on display like nowadays in the social media. Thus, it is not surprising at all that Janicka strongly disapproved of this device. But the comparison she made to cope with her experience is particularly interesting, because it touches on the very point of the experience of private life shown in a public space, and because it shows that she had no artistic conventions at her disposal to frame this film experience. A family album was the only comparison she could think of at that time. Such a novelty did not belong to the realm of Polish film at that time, and was felt to be misplaced, just like showing a family album to unknown people on the street.

1996: A S hif t in R ecep tion and A ccultur ation of “P rivate ” and “I ntimate ” E xpression Bożena Janicka is a particularly interesting reviewer in the context of this analysis, and she will also remain an important reference in the following historical period. Interestingly enough, since she seemed so angry at Kondratiuk in 1986, she was also very intrigued by his next films, and wrote about every single film by Kondratiuk that appeared in cinemas from that moment on.26 However, in

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1996, her response had shifted remarkably. She was much more approving in her analysis and judgment: she called his subsequent film, Spinning Wheel of Time, an incredible work of art.27 Spinning Wheel of Time, released in March 1996, is more or less a continuation of The Four Seasons, in the sense that the main actors/characters appeared on screen again and were filmed at the same place, during their daily activities, discussions, conflicts and leisure time. This time, however, the relation between husband and wife was the main focus. Even the frog-theme was incorporated again. For many critics this film was also seen to be a continuation of the first private film. So let us now have a look at the reception of what one could consider a sequel of Kondratiuk’s “private cinema.” In 1996 Bożena Janicka saw Spinning Wheel of Time indeed as a continuation of his private filmmaking, but a better sequel: “The 50-year-old main character [from the previous film], euphoric about his infantilism, irritating in his naivety, was now replaced by someone who does not have illusions [...] and changed into someone coexisting with nature.”28 Therefore, in her eyes, the new film was not a deviation, not an irritating, misplaced family album anymore: it was a poetic document, cheerful and funny, which offered serious reflection that conventional cinema could never have expressed, she said. She thus even considered the film a true work of art.29 Subsequently, film scholars such as Marek Haltof have praised The Spinning Wheel of Time and its “slow-paced scenes” and “sarcastic humor,” claiming that “the discourse on aging, temporality, family bonds, and art is enhanced by the film’s exhibitionist style, the creation of characters who border on being pretentious, and the inclusion of clever dialogue about existential problems. The Spinning Wheel of Time, in particular, succeeds in capturing the grotesque aspects of life, as well as its poetry.”30 This shift is remarkable: Janicka and other reviewers and scholars were at some point convinced by Kondratiuk’s unique aesthetic. After the initial rejection they finally accepted it as an appropriate convention for personal, intimate reflection on existential problems about life and death. We cannot help but notice how the anger, embarrassment and confusion disappeared. What was novel and unacceptable before, from the mid-1990s had become an accepted convention for telling the truth. For a short period Kondratiuk’s cinema was seen not as an eccentric enterprise but as a nuanced, intimate artistic reflection of the changing times. The reception of his later films, after 2000, was again problematic, but the more recent history of Andrzej Kondratiuk’s work in Poland is beyond the scope of this article.31

C onclusion Only in retrospect can we see how much film as a medium has evolved and how much film viewers and their habits have changed. Comparing the reception of two subsequent films by Andrzej Kondratiuk in Poland we see how the initial problem

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disappeared and was resolved. We see how what was experienced as private and disturbing in the mid-1980s “went out of focus” and became a conventional way to express oneself through the filmic medium by the mid-1990s. By 1996 no one seemed to have problems with the private aspects exhibited on screen. On the contrary, Kondratiuk was heralded as one of the most important Polish auteurs, someone who was able to give the expression to the authentic changes of life in Poland after 1989. His cinema was suddenly praised and perceived as artistic. In 1996, a monograph was devoted to the director, and in the same year the first PhD project was launched in Poland, which resulted in a book publication in 1999.32 Kondratiuk’s private cinema was granted its own place in the history of Polish film. Nowadays people expose themselves in a much more extreme fashion on the internet, posting personal films on YouTube, writing blogs, sharing pictures etc. But the reception history of this filmmaker reminds us that Poland, just before the fall of communism, was definitely a very different place. Before 1989, both public and private spheres had their own places and limits, hardly ever co-existed and were experienced as very different, incompatible domains. Moreover the media were devoted only to public life, and could be inhabited and used by public personae only. It was precisely those codes that had to change after 1989 and this change enabled new artistic codes to appear. In 1985, as discussed in this article, it appeared problematic in Poland to accept such a private, exhibitionist type of cinema, full of personal allusions and intimate information. Such aesthetics was only comparable to the behavior of immoral or naive people, who share their personal memories, thoughts and feelings with people they do not know and transgress the holy and heavily policed borders of public discourse. But as soon as the media business was privatized, content changes were just a matter of time. Video fundamentally challenged the larger media landscape in Poland in the 1990s. So did private television. We ought to remember that the talk shows presenting ordinary people on a public screen, talking about their most intimate problems and deviations, would not appear on Polish television until the nineties. The same holds true for reality shows, reality soaps etc. These new programs on public and private television would become accommodated within Polish culture only after the fall of communism. Kondratiuk was a pioneer in this regard with his private cinema, which experimented with transgressing the boundaries between public and private. At this crucial time of rupture, Kondratiuk’s small cinema signified a big change. In retrospect, it is no surprise that in 1996, little was novel about such cinema anymore, and critics like Janicka could even praise it. Although Kondratiuk’s film probably was still more personal and intimate than average narrative films, it offered more sophisticated reflections on life in the age of serial screenings of “World’s Funniest Home Videos” on television and in the age of girls and boys next door becoming extraordinary television stars. By looking at the critical responses and the changing cultural conditions that allowed the personal and intimate on screen to be received first as an irritating novelty and later as an artwork or commodity, we can analyze an

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important shift in reception and reflect on the changing culture. The moments when these shifts occur are particularly interesting, because such transitional moments indicate how new devices and cultural practices impact the spectator, creating an impression that after a period of time fades or “goes out of focus.” However, this isn’t to say that cultural products and techniques can’t shift back in and out of focus. The aesthetics of intimacy that was initially criticized and then praised in the “private films” of Andrzej Kondratiuk slowly slips back into critical focus in the early millennium in Polish public discourse on reality TV. In 2001, a number of influential Polish directors including Andrzej Wajda wrote an open letter to a Polish newspaper, criticizing the negative effect of reality TV on viewers. Demanding that the government regulate the “growing phenomenon,” the directors appealed to the National Council for Radio and Television in Poland to ban the new reality TV show Amazons. The show focused on the lives of six couples as they flirt with one another and swap partners. In their letter, the directors claim that through reality TV shows the private, intimate and familiar is put up for sale for public viewing. They lament precisely the shift traced above in this essay, whereby intimate gestures and small, private lives become voyeuristic commodities (in the age of YouTube). The letter the Polish film directors published in Poland’s largest daily Gazeta Wyborcza complains that what the shows are selling is intimacy: “The shows become more and more drastic. They sell more and more intimate spheres of life.”33

Private visions: Polish filmmaker Andrzej Kondratiuk in The Four Seasons

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A family affair: Andrzej Kondratiuk and his wife Iga Cembrzyńska in The Spinning Wheel of Time

N otes 1 | Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception, trans. Alan Bodger, ed. Richard Taylor (London & New York: Routledge, 1994), 171. 2 | Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: le caméra-stylo,” in The New Wave, ed. Peter Graham (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 17. First published in L’Écran français 44 (1948). 3 | Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde,” 19. 4 | See YouTube statistics http://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics (last accessed 25 September 2014). 5 | My usage of this term “cinematic human” differs sharply from how the term was initially employed by Wilhelm Stapel in early moral reform discourse in Germany, where it was used to depict an intellectually and morally inferior individual. Stapel in 1919 wrote that “The cinema is forming a new type of human being, inferior both intellectually and morally: the Homo cinematicus.” (Wilhelm Stapel, “Der Homo Cinematicus,” Deutsches Volkstum 10 [1919]: 319f.) I use the term playfully to describe the millennial proliferation of private screens and the new, embodied spectator, who is also a director of the continuous flow of images. However, the Polish reception of reality TV in the early millennium as discussed at the end of the essay and the reception of Kondratiuk’s early “private films” show that there is indeed a concern today that the continuous streaming of images is voyeuristic and sometimes morally suspect. 6 | Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception, 9. 7 | In addition to Tsivian’s study, one must point to the research on the early cinema of attractions done by, among others, André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning. See their

Polish Film Culture in Transition influential articles reprinted in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). See also Annie van den Oever, Sensitizing the Viewer: The Impact of New Techniques and the Art Experience (Groningen: University of Groningen, 2011). 8 | Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception, 1-4. 9 | “Directives on the Film Business” (Note 446), in Collected Works of V. I. Lenin Vol. 42, trans. Bernard Isaacs (Moscow: Progress, 1969), 591. The note with Lenin’s famous quote references a conversation between Lenin and A. V. Lunacharsky, recalled in Sovietskoye Kino No. 1-2 (1933): 10. 10 | On the difficulties in classifying Kondratiuk’s cinema in Polish film history see my dissertation: Iwona Guść, Polished Cinema: Over de receptie van het werk van Andrzej Kondratiuk in Polen en het groteske. (Groningen: Proefschriften Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 2012), See also a small excerpt of this study published in Polish: Iwona Guść, “Zdiagnozowany: ‘artysta osobny’ [...] Szkic o recepcji twórczości Andrzeja Kondratiuka,” in Kino polskie: reinterpretacje. Historia – ideologia – polityka, ed. Konrad Klejsa and Ewelina Nurczyńska Fidelska (Kraków: Rabid, 2008), 413-431. 11 | It should be mentioned here that Andrzej Kondratiuk always had the ambition to make films on his own and outside of the state film system. In 1970 shortly after the release of his first feature film Kondratiuk confessed in an interview that he would prefer to work independently, but he added “let’s not talk about it now,” because “film is a social enterprise and there is only one producer and I can’t make film with my own money.” (Elżbieta Smoleń-Wasilewska, “Sądziłem, że można zbudować film opowiadający stany psychiczne,” Kino No. 6 [1973]: 16-21) See also chapter 6 in Iwona Guść, Polished Cinema, 145-154. 12 | Only three film copies were made, though. 13 | See the commission report from 28 June 1984, preserved at the National Film Archive in Poland. Inventory number: A-344/368 “Stenogram. Komisja Kolaudacyjna, z dn. 28 June 1984, dot. Cztery Pory Roku.” 14 | In retrospect critics started to realise the profound significance of this private enterprise. In 2007, Andrzej Kołodyński pointed out that this cinema “blew away the existing communist (film)model.” See Andrzej Kołodyński, “Andrzej Kondratiuk tworzy kino osobne,” in Historia kina polskiego (Warszawa: Fundacja Kino, 2007), 235. 15 | See Marek Hendrykowski and Małgorzata Gromadzińska, Andrzej Kondratiuk: praca zbiorowa (Poznań: Zakład Teatru i Filmu Uniwersytetu Adama Mickiewicza, 1996). 16 | Polsat had its debut on December 5, 1992 and it was first broadcasted from the Netherlands. 17 | On every subject was first broadcast in October 1993 and its popularity amazed everyone involved in television making in Poland at that time. In June 1997, 50% of the regular Polish television viewers were awaiting the weekly transmission of the talk show. See Tadeusz Święchowicz, Pod słońcem Polsatu: rzecz o powstaniu i rozwoju prywatnej telewizji w Polsce (Poznań: Akwilon, 2000), 98. 18 | For more on the ordinary people who “made it big” on the reality TV screen, see Anita Biressi and Heathan Nunn, “Reach for the Stars: Celebrity, Social Mobility and the

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Iwona Guść Future of Reality TV” in Reality TV: Realism and Revelation (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 144-155. The authors write “These new media stars appeared to be able to ‘make it big’, to not only become wealthy, but more importantly to sustain a transformation into celebrity stardom without overtly drawing on education, entrepreneurial skills or even any obvious talent.” (ibid., 149) 19 | As Václav Štětka states in an essay on audio-visual flows and growth in domestic TV production in Central and Eastern Europe, most of the programming viewers watched in the 1990s in Central and Eastern Europe consisted of “domestic variety shows, soap operas and reality TV programs.” (Václav Štětka, “Back to the Local? Transnational Media Flows and Audience Consumption Patterns in Central and Eastern Europe,” in Central and European Media in Comparative Perspective: Politics, Economy and Culture, ed. John Downey and Sabina Mihelj [Farnham: Ashgate, 2012], 182) Also see “Reality TV Beams Up in Poland,” Variety “World Brief,” 22 August 2000, available online at http://variety. com/2000/tv/news/reality-tv-beams-up-in-poland-1117785408/ (last accessed 25 September 2014) and Popular Television in Eastern Europe During and Since Socialism ed. Anikó Imre, Timothy Havens, and Katalin Lustgik (London: Routledge, 2013). 20 | (strat), “Cztery Pory Roku,” Variety, 19 June 1985, 25. 21 | Janusz Zatorski, “Tacy Prości Oboje,” Kierunki No. 5, January 1986. 22 | Bogdan Zagroba, “Dla DKF i kin studyjnych: Cztery pory roku.” Filmowy Serwis Prasowy No. 17 (1 September 1985): 17-21. The notes were republished after The Four Seasons was broadcast on Polish public television. See Mikron, “Opowieść o synowskiej miłości.” Sztandar Ludu No. 259, 5 November 1986. 23 | Zatorski, “Tacy prości oboje.” 24 | Bożena Janicka, “Zdrajczyni – Kamera,” Kino No. 224 (1986): 15. 25 | On this recurring tendency in Kondratiuk’s work to degrade and deform all kinds of symbolic and traditional images in a grotesque manner, see also Iwona Guść, “Film Style: The Grotesque in Film. The Romantic Arcadia and Its Grotesque Enemy in Polish Cinema,” in Lo stile cinematografico/Film Style, ed. Enrico Biasin, Giulio Bursi, and Leonardo Quaresima (Udine: Forum, 2007): 263-277. 26 | Bożena Janicka, “Wrzeciono czasu,” Filmowy Serwis Prasowy (1996): 13-14; Bożena Janicka, “4 pytania po Gdyni,” Film, No. 1 (1996): 7; Bożena Janicka, “Żuczek i dwa księżyce,” Film No. 5 (1996): 7; Bożena Janicka, “Nad strumieniem we wsi Gzowo,” Kino No. 11 (1997): 27-30. See also her article on Polish cinema in the first post-communist decade in which she praised Kondratiuk’s work: Bożena Janicka, “Polish Cinema During the Period 1989 – 1999. A Decade Crowned by an Oscar,” available at http://www.culture. pl/en/culture/artykuly/es_film_fabularny_8999 (last accessed 25 September 2014). 27 | The film won a special Award of the Jury at the 1995 Festival of Polish Film. 28 | Janicka, “Żuczek i dwa księżyce.” 29 | Ibid. 30 | Marek Haltof, Polish National Cinema (New York: Berghahn, 2002), 190; my italics. 31 | In my dissertation I also analyzed the reception of the films that Kondratiuk subsequently made after the successful release of The Spinning Wheel of Time. In general

Polish Film Culture in Transition all three films that Kondratiuk made after 2000 were almost completely ignored by the critics as again too eccentric. See Iwona Guść, Polished Cinema, 220-228. 32 | See Hendrykowski and Gromadzińska, Andrzej Kondratiuk: praca zbiorowa; Jacek Nowakowski, Filmowa twórczosc Andrzeja Kondratiuka (Poznan: Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza, 1999). 33 | The letter also complains that the shows have a particularly negative impact on children: “They draw in millions of young, morally defenseless viewers.” See “Reality TV under Fire in Poland,” BBC News (3 July 2001), available online at http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/1420850.stm (last accessed 25 September 2014). A 2007 Radio Polonia news release, entitled “What ever happened to the Polish Big Brother?,” also explored the relevance of reality programming for Polish TV audiences, concluding that “voyeuristic reality TV does not fit comfortably into the culture.” Peter Gentle, “What ever happened to the Polish Big Brother?,” Radio Polonia (30 January 2007), available online at http://www2.polskieradio.pl/eo/dokument.aspx?iid=47567 (last accessed 25 September 2014).

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Desires and Memories of a Small Man The Poetic Documentaries of Lithuanian Filmmaker Audrius Stonys Renata Šukaitytė

This essay focuses on the work of Audrius Stonys, an influential filmmaker belonging to a younger generation of auteurs in Lithuania who have devoted themselves to the short film, “often wordless, often symbolic, and often observational.”1 Many of Stonys’ films were supported by the Kinema Studio, an independent film studio in Lithuania established by director Šarūnas Bartas; the studio was founded in 1989 as an important site of production for the younger generation of filmmakers. As I have described elsewhere, the Kinema Studio can be understood as fostering a minoritarian “molecular cinema.”2 Indeed, one could argue that Stonys’ filmmaking at times resembles what Deleuze and Guattari have referred to as a “minor cinema,” a political film practice tied to a collective in the making, a “people to come,” often featuring non-professional actors, non-narrative rhythms and affective intensities.3 The renowned Lithuanian director is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades including the FELIX award from the European Film Academy (now known as the European film prize) for his documentary film Earth of the Blind (Neregių žemė) in 1992 and the Lithuanian National Prize for his contribution to arts and culture in 2002. In 2000, he and co-director Arūnas Matelis won several prizes at the Hanover Expo for their documentary short Flight over Lithuania or 510 Moments of Silence, an extremely low flight over the Lithuanian landscape, mystically hovering over the countryside treetops, dunes of Nida, the Trakai castle, the lakes of Aukštaitija, and the roofs and steeples of the Old Town of Vilnius. In 2003, the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture also honored the directors with the Platinum Film Award for their documentary short. 4 When the film was exhibited at the Expo in Hanover, “a complex new-generation sound system was used, where sound [...] was transmitted not only in a usual Dolby surround, but also from above and below. To intensify the impression, gusts of wind, vibration of the chairs, and lighting effects were used in the hall.”5 The vibrations, lightning and gusts of this immersive experience, enveloping the spectator in the perceptual cries of nature,

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indeed evoke the power of the unique aesthetic pioneered in Stonys’ filmmaking. Not surprisingly, the short documentary Flight over Lithuania is also used as “Unspoken Cinema: Slow cinema & filmed landscapes and sceneries” source material in Jérôme Joy’s online No Cinema art project. Critics have claimed that the director is “lord” over an “aesthetically created microcosm”6; his use of grainy black and white footage, extreme angles, close-ups, long shots, disjunctive editing and periods of intense emotional silence7 also bespeak a personal idiom, pointing to the power of life’s intimate and hidden gestures. As the MEDIA documentary film consultant Tue Steen Muller argues, Stonys is “an auteur with an uncompromising, personal film idiom who makes films on the little support he can raise from his own ministry of the arts, augmented by Western funds (from the Danish Film Institute, for example).”8 The Lithuanian director has no doubt benefited from the support of a variety of European funding programs, institutes, and studios including the Danish Film Institute, Lithuanian Ministry of Culture, Arte, and the MEDIA program among others (the director is also a member of the European Documentary Network and European Film Academy, perhaps best known to international readers for his 2011 documentary Ramin [selected as Lithuanian entry for a Foreign Language Oscar, although it did not make the short list]). But perhaps more important to understanding his work is his status as a transitional figure whose work primarily spans two and a half decades of the post-Soviet era, but started in the Soviet period. As Stonys himself writes: “I began my creative activities in the last years of the Soviet Empire – under the reality of collapsing monsters and false mirrors. The word has long discredited itself. So many lies have been told that any word uttered in public would only create distrust. It was not so important what you actually wrote or spoke, but what remained between the lines, not what you showed, but what hidden meaning this outwardly innocent image created in the viewer’s mind. Even not speaking was meaningful.”9 In this article I will try to investigate the strategies which help to constitute trustworthy and neutral storytelling in Audrius Stonys’ films, in particular those aiming to capture the inner world of everyday people (such as a small girl and an elderly countryside man), especially their desires, feelings and memories. These issues are extremely sensitive and they cause tensions between the filmmaker and the (interview) subjects or/and between the filmmaker and the spectators. I am particularly interested in investigating Stonys’ creative strategies through which the discourse of truth construction in documentary filmmaking is developed and questioned. I will mainly refer to Stonys’ films, Fedia: Three Minutes After the Big Bang (Fedia. Trys minutės po Didžiojo sprogimo, 1999), Alone (Viena, 2001), Uku Ukai (Ūkų ūkai, 2006), The Bell (Varpas, 2007), and Four Steps (Keturi žingsniai, 2008), which relate to the subject under consideration. My insights are influenced by Stella Bruzzi’s idea that “a documentary is a negotiation between reality on the one hand and image, interpretation and bias on the other. Documentary is predicated upon a dialectical relationship between aspiration and potential, that the text itself reveals the tensions between the documentary pursuit of the most

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authentic mode of factual representation and the impossibility of this aim.”10 A certain skepticism about the documentary’s pursuits of objectivity is also shared by other influential and respected theorists of the documentary, such as Michael Renov and Bill Nichols. Their concerns are based on a post-modernist discredit of the “objectivity of knowledge” and the institutions that stabilize it. The documentary, being one of these institutions which produce knowledge and truth, however, also employs modes of performativity and selectivity, and this tends to make documentary films “biased” in the eyes of many. My exploration into Stonys’ cinematic discourse regarding truth and everyday reality is also based on Noël Carrol’s arguments in defense of the genre’s “mode of selectivity,” which in his eyes not necessarily causes bias in a documentary, especially if we take into account “other forms of inquiry or information communication like history, journalism, or science – where there are no doubts about the possibility of objectivity.”11 Audrius Stonys is one of those filmmakers who treat documentary filmmaking as a certain compromise between a subject and the act of documenting, in other words between a filmmaker’s stance and the representation of reality. In his works a filmmaker seeks to discover and disclose the fragments of people’s lives, which are usually neglected, hidden, forgotten or even lost. In the sense that many of his shorts can be described as “wordless,” Stonys’ search for fragments and lost or hidden realities is often shrouded in poignant moments of silence. Regarding silence, the filmmaker writes: “I love silence. Silence is a powerful tool in cinema language. It gives space for the imagination and contemplation. Silence is not a hole in the soundtrack. It has many colors and meanings.”12 Any documentary claim to contemplate such hidden meanings and remain “objective” (as much as it is possible for a filmmaker) and even comprehensible or argumentative in representing this “fuzzy” and “complicated” reality is challenging (when compared to those who deal with social or political issues). Stonys himself argues that when he is filming something with his camera, what he also creates is a “subjective reflection” of his reality, his “thoughts, fears and desires.”13 Stonys emerges as a real master of balancing inner or subjective truth and beauty in the documentary form, which preconditions the poetics of documentary (to invoke the term introduced by Michael Renov) and is an indexical attribute of the so called Lithuanian poetic documentary style. I will give a short introduction to this phenomenon in the next section of this article. Stonys mixes different documentary functions and modes of representation in his films, some of which are typical of experimental filmmakers who have questioned the objectivity and truthfulness of cinematic representations, while some of his other approaches to reality resemble the standpoint of an ethnographer (which is quite common in the Lithuanian documentary tradition). I will discuss these issues by invoking the conceptual framework of some of the basic tendencies/ functions of the documentary proposed by Michael Renov (the notion of a poetics of documentary in his Theorizing Documentary [1993]) and Bill Nichols (the classification of documentary modes of representation in his Representing Reality [1991]). The latter

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theoretician points to the dominant modes of documentary representation – notably, the expository, observational, interactive, and ref lective modes – to organize film texts in relation to certain regular features and cinematic conventions.14 These modes have historically evolved and developed in line with technological advancements and developments in cinematic form and style and still exist in documentary film practice today. However, the teleological and dialectical logic of the scheme poses certain limitations to its usage. Hence, I will be careful in applying this theoretical framework and will use it only for the analysis of several selected films. In addition to these modes, I will refer to the concept of performative documentary as one of those vivid modes for non-fiction film construction proposed by Stella Bruzzi in her important study New Documentary (2009). Being performative and thus “naturally fictive,” this mode is a very revealing form of documentary discourse, as it “emphasizes […] the often hidden aspect of performance, whether on the part of the documentary subjects or the filmmakers.” This mode of documentary filmmaking “uses performance within a non-fiction context to draw attention to the impossibilities of authentic documentary representations.”15 Bruzzi invites us to consider performative elements within the framework of non-fiction as devices of alienation and distanciation and not as tools for strengthening identification. This notion of the performative documentary corresponds well with the performative techniques applied by Audrius Stonys in his films to emphasize the “unwillingness” on his side to create a fictive representation of reality (thus trying to remain sincere and honest with his viewers) while being fictive/performative at the same time. Michael Renov has proposed another critical framework, the so called poetics of documentary, which I find very applicable to an analysis of Stonys’ films (within the context of Lithuanian tradition of poetic documentary), because this framework allows us to assess the rhetorical/aesthetic functions characteristic of the documentary. The poetics of documentary is conceived by Renov as a key strategy for achieving the scientificity of aesthetic inquiry, in other words for achieving objectivity through rhetorical/aesthetic means. Moreover, Renov develops this concept through an elaboration of four discursive modalities/tendencies in documentary filmmaking – those of preservation (aiming to record, reveal, or preserve), persuasion (aiming to persuade or promote), analysis (aiming to analyze or interrogate), and expressivity (aiming to express). These modalities are shared by documentary filmmaking with history and science – two other producers of discourses of knowledge. At the same time, these modalities have proven useful for the critical analysis of cinematic texts which deal with historical, political and scientific realms.16 I will also support my observations on Stonys’ docu-inquiries into the discourses of objectivity and truthfulness with Catherine Russell’s understanding of ethnography and ethnographic filmmaking introduced in her pioneering Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (1999) and utilize ethnography as a conceptual framework for the analysis of non-narrative film in a broader sense. Russell argues that “ethnography […] refers not to the presentation

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of other cultures but to the discourse of culture in representation. Any and all films could thus be described as ethnographic insofar as they can be read as cultural texts.”17 In this vein, she proposes the term experimental ethnography for the rethinking of both aesthetics and cultural representations, since such an understanding of “ethnography” allows a shift in the focus from formal concerns to the recognition of the diverse “textual innovations” of avant-garde filmmakers that were used as “the critique of authenticity” in mainstream film. Thus, experimental film can be seen as a kind of laboratory in which the modes of representation and the conventions of cinema are questioned.18 The concept of experimental ethnography proposed by Russell refers to a mode of representation that is based on a historical logic (i.e. social practice that takes place in a certain time and place); therefore it seems very appropriate for the reworking of memory, tradition and desire in documentary film.

The P oe tics of L ithuanian D ocumentary : B e aut y and O bjectivit y Before starting my discussion of Audrius Stonys’ films I would like to briefly return to the phenomenon of Lithuanian documentary, often examined under the umbrella term of the poetic documentary, in order to indicate the influence of socialpolitical factors on the development of documentary discourse in Lithuania. Here, it seems apt to recall Renov’s idea that “the film ‘movements’ that have so frequently functioned as the motor force in the development of the documentary (...) have been, in every case, deeply politicized”19 or ideologized, since this is also certainly the case for the Lithuanian poetic documentary. The term points to the national documentary tradition of the 1960s, which was an alternative documentary discourse to the one developed by the official (favored) Soviet documentary-makers. The Lithuanian poetic documentary is characterized by the aesthetization of the everyday life of small “non-heroes” (ordinary people, usually old, provincial eccentrics, etc.) and a complete refusal to address contemporary issues related to the Soviet government. The “ethnographer’s paradigm” that was cultivated by oppositional documentarymakers such as Robertas Verba, Henrikas Šablevičius, Edmundas Zubavičius was chosen very purposefully, because, to paraphrase Hal Foster, the ethnographer’s paradigm displaces the problematic of class and capitalist exploitation with that of colonialist oppression, and also the social with the cultural or the ethnographical.20 Another strategy worth mentioning which was developed by these filmmakers was the adoption of the aesthete’s attitude, as this posture could be considered to possess a certain subversive power, if we look at the polarization of truth and beauty in the tradition of Western aesthetics. In the (anti-Soviet) Lithuanian documentary tradition the artful shaping of the real world was not considered to be untruthful, similarly as coexistence of “beauty” and “objectivity” were not perceived as opposite sides of the same coin. Bearing in mind the aforementioned strategic games, these

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films (at the time) were usually screened only in Lithuania and did not reach the big screens of the Soviet Union (not to mention international screens) due to their political and ideological refusal to address Soviet issues. When one surveys the field of Lithuanian documentaries of the 1990s to the 2000s – especially considering the filmmakers who debuted in the beginning of the 1990s (Audrius Stonys, Arūnas Matelis, Valdas Navasaitis, Šarūnas Bartas) – several things stand out: first, their keenness or willingness to employ an aesthetic filter while telling stories about real life, real people and their desires; second, their claim to truthfulness and objectivity without any ambition to give the viewer an all-encompassing truth in an explicit way, because the reality they deal with is also “symbolic” and subjective in the sense of being neither true nor false. Though diverse, most of these shorts – Ten Minutes Before the Flight of Icarus (Dešimt minučių prieš Ikaro skrydį, 1991), Sunday. The Gospel According to Lift-man Albertas (Sekmadienis. Evangelija pagal liftininką Albertą, 2003), and Before Flying Back to the Earth (Prieš parskrendant į Žemę, 2005) by Arūnas Matelis; Idylls of Kirtimai (Kirtimų idilės, 1991) by Artūras Jevdokimovas; The Autumn Snow (Rudens sniegas, 1992) by Valdas Navasaitis and The Earth of the Blind (1992), Alone (Viena, 2001), or Countdown (Tas, kurio nėra, 2004) by Audrius Stonys – share a common stance of respect and detachment toward their subject of inquiry. These documentaries reveal real lives, feelings, desires and document collective memories and human experiences. They lack strong social or political engagement and the wish to shape spectators accordingly. Rather, they aim at building a sensitive, lyrical discourse that reflects the real needs, dreams and expectations of local people and their sense of temporality, loneliness and companionship in Lithuanian society. The films of Audrius Stonys, Šarūnas Bartas, Valdas Navasaitis and Arūnas Matelis have often been promoted at international film events or in publications under the moniker poetic film, an umbrella term referring to the similarity of cinematic strategies as well as to the historical, conceptual and aesthetic framework of these filmmakers. These two generations of the poetic documentary (of the 1960s and the 1990s) share the artistic strategy of an “aesthete-ethnographer,” documenting, revealing and analyzing marginalized cultural phenomena. When in the early 1990s a new generation of Lithuanian documentary filmmakers (the above mentioned film directors and cinematographers such as Vladas Naudžius and Rimvydas Leipus) stepped into the public and received immediate international recognition (in prestigious film festivals), this appeared to be relatively symbolic, as it happened alongside significant social, cultural, and political changes taking place in the country at that time. These were the first years of regained Lithuanian statehood, and it seemed that the country’s national cinematography was now reappearing on the world’s map after fifty years as well. In the first films (Ten Minutes Before the Flight of Icarus [1991] by Arūnas Matelis, Autumn Snow [1992] by Valdas Navasaitis, and Earth of the Blind [1992] by Stonys) these filmmakers openly acknowledged their interest in aesthetic and philosophical forms of filmmaking and in experimenting with documentary conventions, telling small

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stories about the existential experience of temporality and human loneliness, about the importance and the beauty of simple and trivial things, while trying to sound sincere and present their subjects in a non-manipulative way. Their stylistic choices, like static shots, deep focus, long takes, slow camera motion, and synchronous sound (often considered traditional indicators of an indexical/realist Bazinian ontology), helped to produce such a “reality” effect.

A udrius S tonys ’ D ocu - inquiry M odes and S tr ategies Audrius Stonys is one of the most productive and acclaimed representatives of the Lithuanian poetic documentary. Moreover, he seems particularly creative in developing different modalities within the discourse of the documentary (preservation, persuasion, analysis, and expressivity, as proposed by Michael Renov), modes of representation (expository, observational, interactive, and ref lexive, as suggested by Bill Nichols) and strategies of visibility (those of the aesthete, ethnographer or performer) for discovering and revealing those glimpses of people’s lives that are usually hidden, forgotten or neglected, and those fragments of collective knowledge and experience that are considered natural or routine, but which are often hidden from view. And, he is a real master in balancing truth (understood as a “scientific” detachment from the reality depicted) and beauty (involving the aesthetics of the reality depicted) in the documentary form. In most of his films Stonys discloses his working methods and his presence behind the camera (especially in Fedia: Three Minutes After the Big Bang, Alone, The Bell, Countdown), and in such a way seems to tell the spectator that a documentary filmmaker cannot always control the whole process of truth construction, pointing to the ways the cinematic image is incorporated into the production of knowledge. Besides, he demonstrates that “every documentary representation depends upon its own detour from the real, through the defiles of the audiovisual signifier (via choices of language, lens, proximity, and sound environment).”21 Therefore Stonys’ films could be considered to represent a certain aesthetic investigation into the documentary’s ability and limits to produce “objective” and “trustworthy” knowledge. Stonys himself writes “objective reality in film does not exist.”22 Instead of heralding a cinema of information, he embraces a cinema of slow contemplation, arguing “documentary film has not been born out of the desire to inform. It was born out of wonder, with the discovery of the possibility to stop time and contemplate the world’s miracle.”23 In what follows, I will examine Stonys’ films Fedia: Three Minutes After the Big Bang (1999), Alone (2001), Uku Ukai (2006), The Bell (2007), and Four Steps (2008) as inquiries into the documentary discourse of truth and reality, taking my cues from Michael Renov’s critical framework, the poetics of documentary, which he defines through an elaboration of four discursive modalities/tendencies in documentary, namely preservation, persuasion, analysis, and expressivity. I will argue that Stonys

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succeeds in disclosing lost memories, hidden feelings and desires of a human by employing multiple strategies and modes of representation. He considers the documentary to be a sensitive and detached instrument to question and challenge reality rather than a device for documenting and preserving it, although the latter function can be found in Stonys’ films as well. First, I will examine the usage of the most fundamental rhetorical/aesthetic functions of documentary, which according to Renov is preservation. This function is most noticeable in Alone, Uku Ukai and Four Steps. Renov refers to recording, revealing or preserving as the most primary and elemental of all the documentary functions, since it aims at capturing “the imponderable movement of the real” and “the creation of a secondorder reality cut to the measure of our desire – to cheat death, stop time, and restore loss.”24 In Uku Ukai the human desire to reach the harmony of the body, mind and the surrounding world as well as man’s attempts to slow the process of aging and obsolescence are revealed through the observational and pseudo-expository modes. One of Stonys’ original aims in the film was to “expose the beauty industry,” but as the filming progressed, he became more and more invested in painting an empathetic portrait of aging. In the film a soft female voice-over gives orders to the viewers (“take a deep breath in … and out”, “be aware of your physical body”, “be in harmony with environment”, “be aware of your feelings”, “become aware of the sensations in your body,” etc.) claiming that this might create “harmony with your thoughts.” The voice-over comments are accompanied by medium shots and medium close-ups of the film’s characters: we see a young woman putting make-up on an old woman’s face, a man jogging, an old woman lying in bed and doing exercises in her room, marathon race participants, a group of swimmers, and a group of elderly people doing gymnastics, people lying on the grass and doing “laughter exercises,” or a young gymnast exercising. We witness their attempts to keep the human body agile and the mind clear and alert. In these sequences the body is documented in a very pictorial way, lending a sense of rhetorical unity to the film. The harmonious coexistence of shots documenting the human body, urban and natural landscapes in different seasons as well as the sparse rhythmical usage of illustrative music and sound effects strengthen the overall feeling of harmony in the film. After careful observation of different shots of “harmonious” beings, we hear a familiar female voice-over, affirming that “now you’re in harmony with your thoughts.” It is employed in a “voice of God” manner (characteristic of more traditional documentaries in the “expository” mode), trying to “convince” the viewer that the observed practices can be effective – which in Stonys’ film, however, sounds a bit ironic.25 Towards the end of the poetic documentary, the harmony seems to rupture and give way to moments of isolation and alienation. The camera literally soars over human skin, panning and tracking over the pockmarks and craters in extreme close up. Another dramatic sequence depicts an older woman watching the flickering of TV in the dark. The soft female voice-over chants “There are good thoughts and bad thoughts. Be in harmony with them.” Here Stonys’ introspective gaze again self-reflexively turns

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towards modern media. Using subversive representational strategies he seems to ask if media has influenced our thinking, our thoughts, our desires? In Uku Ukai the observational mode is very skillfully mixed with the ref lexive mode and used as an ethnographic tool, allowing the filmmaker to analyze the film’s inner form and retain in the film diverse spiritual rituals and modes of exercise, such as New Age yoga practiced by isolated individuals and various communities. Bill Nichols compares observational filmmaking to ethnography, as both share certain features, such as an empathetic, non-judgmental and nonauthoritative mode of observation. Moreover, “observational cinema affords the viewer an opportunity to look in on and overhear something of the lived experience of others, to gain some sense of distinct rhythms of everyday life […].”26 The ethnographer’s stance in this film helps to convince the viewer that the documented “social actors” (or performers of rituals) represent a wide spectrum of effective practices to achieve inner harmony and harmony with the world surrounding us. The author does not hide the selective process of filmmaking; instead he openly exposes it (the viewer can easily distinguish single shots and sequences documenting different practices performed by different social actors), and in so doing he strengthens the objectivity and detachment in representing the subjects of his docu-inquiry. In Four Steps, as in Uku Ukai, Stonys uses the aesthete’s and ethnographer’s strategy and employs the same modes of representation (the observational and the reflective) in uncovering lost wedding traditions and disclosing what it means to be human. He reworks marriage footage from 1961, 1972, 1983 and 2007 to create a comparative study of the historical changes customs and celebration traditions underwent, illustrating the fact that historical knowledge of past traditions shapes a nation’s (and an individual’s) understanding of who they are in the present. Four Steps, often considered an observational film, grants the viewer an opportunity to again quote Renov to see, hear and experience the “lived experience of others, to gain some sense of the distinct rhythms of everyday life, to see colors, shapes, and spiritual relationships among people […].”27 As already mentioned earlier, Stonys used home movie footage of wedding celebrations of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, which he acquired from the private archives of simple Lithuanians. In addition to this “historical collage” he added a prologue, an epilogue and a sequence from a 2007 film shot by his team. The usage of personal archives instead of state TV or state audiovisual archival collections both increases the credibility and emotional immediacy of the film images and evokes a sense of nostalgia for long-forgotten narratives. As Catherine Russell writes, “as a form of recovery, found footage renders culture not as lost property but as an image sphere in which the real is found in a new form.”28 Thus, marriage scenes from home movies of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s enter into a new representational sphere through their relocation in a documentary by professional filmmakers. Four Steps is structured as a montage of human memories and recycled episodes of Lithuanian cultural history: By losing the wedding traditions of our forefathers, the film seems to suggest, we lost

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something more than celebratory customs. This traditional use of found footage is self-reflexively related to the filmic discourses surrounding memory and history. In Alone, a 2001 documentary short supported by the Danish Film Institute, Stonys attempts to document and analyze the feelings of a small girl traveling (together with a social worker who is the father of Audrius Stonys) to visit her mother in prison while also touching on a very painful, larger social problem: the loss of emotional ties between people, especially children and parents. In the film Stonys combines two discursive modalities – those of preservation and analysis – and applies observational and ref lexive modes of documentary representation when tackling with these subtle issues. However, nothing else, apart from immense loneliness and indifference, can be captured by the camera. Although the film also features extreme close-ups of hands holding steaming beverages, bleak, industrial footage of the prisonscape, and lyrical shots of flocks of birds, the short primarily consists of grainy, black and white footage of the traveling girl (sitting in the back seat of a car or on a bed) interrupted by a few self-reflexive shots showing how the filmmakers are preparing to continue the shoot. The black and white footage is both exploited for its graphic and haptic qualities and also subject to self-reflexive moments of “correction.” The film, shot on 35mm with an Arriflex camera, begins with a man touching the camera and adjusting it like a rear-view mirror from the same backseat of the car that transports the girl to the prison. The self-reflexive scenes demonstrate to the viewer that sometimes corrections are needed behind the scenes of the filmmaking process and, at the same time, indicate the selectivity of the documenting/revealing techniques used by the filmmakers. In Alone, Stonys questions the capability of the documentary to reveal the inner world and feelings of a human by utilizing a set of analytical/deconstructive strategies characteristic of experimental filmmaking, such as exposing video defects (several self-reflexive episodes for the film were shot on video), inserting uneven shifts of shots or scratched images as well as the juxtaposition of real events (a girl’s journey home after a meeting with her mother) and surreal images (a tree full of white birds resembling a blossom, what critics often interpreted as “The Tree of Life”).29 These and similar film techniques30 destabilize the rhetorical and aesthetic integrity of the film and thus create a space to question its truthfulness and ability to produce a reliable document of a girl’s journey and meeting with her mother. In Alone and some of his other films, Audrius Stonys consciously leaves a trace of his and/or his crew’s presence, a strategy not commonly found in nonfiction films, which, according to Bill Nichols, allow little or no time for revealing the process of their own construction to the viewer. The utilization of such subversive representational strategies in Stonys’ film at the same time nuances the documentary discourse on objectivity and detachment, since the filmmaker openly discloses his filmmaking techniques to the viewer, and in this way engages the spectator in questioning the ability of a documentary to reveal the feelings and emotions of a human when he/she does not want to share them. Thus, Alone can be considered an auto-reflexive documentary, simultaneously analyzing the

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cinematic apparatus and the subject matter of the film. The ref lexive mode of representation is used here to reveal the truth of the film, i.e. the truth about the limited powers to reveal the truth of the reality documented. This cinematic paradox is described very accurately by Linda Williams who argues that “on the one hand the postmodern deluge of images seems to suggest that there can be no a priori truth of the referent to which the image refers; on the other hand, in this same deluge, it is still the moving image that has the power to move audiences to a new appreciation of previously known truth.”31 In the films discussed above, Stonys besides relying on the discursive modalities of preservation and analysis also employs expressivity. According to Renov, the expressive is the cinematic function that has consistently been undervalued within the nonfiction domain, because the modality of expressivity encompasses the aesthetic function to produce a “pleasure of the text” capable of merging intellectual inquiry and aesthetic value.32 As I have already argued in the section on the Lithuanian poetic documentary, the emphatic coexistence of “beauty” and “objectivity” is an exclusive feature of the Lithuanian non-fiction tradition. Therefore, I completely agree with Renov who writes that “there can be little doubt that our critical valuations and categories (…) depend on various protocols of reading which are historically conditioned.”33 Next, I would like to scrutinize how the modalities of persuasion, analysis and expressivity are developed together in two of Stonys’ other films: Fedia: Three Minutes After the Big Bang and The Bell. The modality of persuasion should be considered a traditional historical function of the documentary. It expresses a rhetorics of truth in film; the persuasive documentary, as documentary theorist Renov would argue, is capable of mobilizing its explanatory power at the level of meta-criticism. Even though persuasion is most frequently “identified with projects exhibiting a singularity of purpose and tone,”34 it is quite rich and diverse from the point of view of promotional strategies and aesthetics. In a documentary the viewer can be persuaded by the ethical or aesthetic stance of the filmmaker, the interviewed subject, the stance of the interviewee, by the details of the scenery, diegetic sound or other cinematic elements. Stonys uses all these elements for persuasive purposes but also employs the interactive and the ref lexive modes of representation described by Bill Nichols. For Nichols the ref lexive mode of representation is a key category for analyzing the very process of representation as this mode questions how we talk about the world: “Reflexive texts are self-conscious not only about form and style […], but also about strategy, structure, conventions, expectations, and effects.”35 Moreover, “the reflexive mode emphasizes epistemological doubt. It stresses the deformative intervention of the cinematic apparatus in the process of representation. Knowledge is […] itself subject to question.”36 I have already briefly discussed how this mode of representation was employed in Alone, thus in this section I will focus on Fedia: Three Minutes After the Big Bang and The Bell, in which the ref lexive mode is very creatively combined with the interactive mode. The latter mode circumscribes how the verbal and visual testimonies of the cinematic

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text were collected using various forms of dialogue and monologue and points to the real encounter of the filmmaker with social actors. Fedia: Three Minutes After the Big Bang could be called an anti-persuasive film rather than a persuasive one, as it questions the documentary’s and the media’s persuasive powers and their ability to “extract” a truth from the social actor. In the film we hear (but never see) the film director interrogating Fedia, the main character of the film, and trying to figure out his opinion about “the Big Bang and the origin of the Earth,” “God,” “eternity,” ”prophetic dreams,” “hell and the heaven” and similar issues. The film spectator has no information about the main character nor his competencies. Fedia remains silent, instead of answering the filmmaker’s questions. Juxtaposed with the interview are found footage sequences from a TV reportage on the Big Bang and the origin of the Earth presenting scientific explanations of the phenomenon that sound boring and uncanny. In this way, Stonys’ film seems to indicate that the documentary can reveal certain truths about (or multiple perspectives on) the world but not a single “truth” that might interest the filmmaker in particular. In the film, Fedia, as a social actor, is given very little autonomy for self-expression which is noticeably limited by the very formal structure of the interviews. Yet instead of reflecting on the questions posed by the film director, Fedia: Three Minutes After the Big Bang enthusiastically reflects on the status and the quality of Lithuanian and American film. The interviewee’s understanding of a good movie corresponds with what could be considered a good documentary, best described in the words of Patricia Aufderheide: “reality is not what is out there but what we know, understand and share with each other of what is out there.”37 At the end of the short, there is an offscreen dialogue between the filmmaker and an interviewee, presumably Fedia, about the possibilities of Lithuanian filmmaking. The film transitions from the scientific commentary on the “Big Bang Theory” to a self-reflexive conversation about the “shooting, chasing, sex” (or “boom boom”) of American film and the reality of filmmaking in Lithuania. The interviewee argues against sensational “boom boom” action pics in favor of a Lithuanian filmmaking that would promote a “normal aesthetic”, documenting “life” itself: D irector : Will you come see the film? I nterviewee : Film? Where, in a movie theater? D irector : In a movie theater. I nterviewee : I already have five times. D irector : Do you like movies? I nterviewee : It’s Lithuanian movies I like. D irector : Lithuanian? I nterviewee : Yeah. Well, all they show on TV now. – Boom boom. I nterviewee : They used to show movies about kolkhozes, and now… I nterviewee : We should do everything like normal people.

Desires and Memories of a Small Man I nterviewee : And now it’s boom boom and that’s fucking it. There are no Lithuanian movies, none. D irector : What should movies be like? I nterviewee : They should be normal, about life and all that. And now they only show American movies all the time and have nothing of their own. I nterviewee : They show movies about Mafia. I nterviewee : Yesterday they showed about Mafia they did, yesterday. I nterviewee : Shooting, chasing, sex. I nterviewee : To hell with it. I don’t like it. No.

If matter was first “conceived in a tiny volume” and then gradually life in the universe exploded, as the “Big Bang” theory teaches us, perhaps it is worth mentioning that Stonys as a filmmaker stays on the side of the small and miniscule, the everyday instead of the global, as the auteur himself notes: When everyone is talking, I will choose silence, when everyone is rushing, I will stop and stand still, when everyone is focusing on global issues, I will be watching an ant crawl. In the face of a rational, sensible world I will engage in something seemingly useless and senseless – I will film how spider webs break, what the sightless see, how an old woman wearing a white kerchief looks from the skies. I will look for a reflection of an approaching shadow of death in a cow‘s eye […] A deep emotional stirring, passion, the community of thoughts and souls, the feeling remaining after a film – the one that can be interpreted in endless ways – is a thousand times more important than the mission of filling information gaps or giving a life lesson. Wonder and the desire to share. 38

In The Bell, Stonys very visibly employs the interactive and the ref lexive modes of representation in exploring the relationship between individual and collective memory and thoughts. This film is structured as a multi-layered docu-inquiry and performative exchange between social actors, filmmakers and film viewers. In addition to traditional strategies of representing lost memory in documentary filmmaking, such as certain forms of storytelling (including black and white archival footage and historical photographs), the director also relies heavily on the performative aspects of filmmaking, since in most of his films the cinematic “truth” comes into being at the moment of filming and is revealed through the process of the filmmaker’s encounter with social actors (e.g. the divers and residents of Plateliai). In this respect, The Bell almost seems to resemble Rashomon (1950) because it abandons the pursuit of truth in favor of a quest for truths. Stonys remains faithful to Kurosawa’s notion of cinematic truth, the idea that there is not one single truth, but several truths that are woven into a larger context, in a relationship with each other and with the lies that surround them. In The Bell the filmmakers, the divers and the rural dwellers of Plateliai (a town with only 1,100 inhabitants) each try to persuade the viewer to believe their story about the bell of the Plateliai church that sank into a lake more than 300 years ago, each proposing plausible, but also enigmatic scenarios. Stonys intercuts

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black and white Soviet-era archival footage of parades and recreational pastimes with interview footage and dramatic underwater shots of the divers’ quest for the lost artifact. The murky waters do not bespeak transparency, but rather shroud our visual perception, concealing instead of revealing life’s secrets.

C onclusion In this article I examined how memories and desires of everyday people are sensitively disclosed in Audrius Stonys’ films such as Fedia: Three Minutes After the Big Bang (1999), Alone (2001), Uku Ukai (2006), The Bell (2007), and Four Steps (2008). By invoking Michael Renov’s poetics of documentary and using Bill Nichols’ typology of modes of representation, I attempted to show how Stonys manages to reveal the lost memories, hidden feelings and desires of human protagonists through his creative use of the aesthete’s, ethnographer’s and performer’s strategies (the first two were traditionally used by representatives of the Lithuanian poetic documentary school) and his skillful mixing of the observational, interactive and ref lective modes of representation. His documentary filmmaking can be considered a compromise between truth and beauty, or between the filmmaker, a social actor, and reality. Moreover, the poetic observation of the documentary, if used in Stonys’ manner, could be used to interrogate and challenge cinematic reality. Through its intense imagery captured on black and white film, archival footage, and contemporary color cinematography, Stonys’ post-Soviet personal filmmaking is invested in both a dynamic archeology of the past and a new understanding of the present, illuminating the hidden stories, hopes and desires of Lithuanian society.

“Loneliness and nothing more”: A child visits her mother in prison in Audrius Stonys’ Alone

Desires and Memories of a Small Man

Poetic meditation on aging and the human body: Audrius Stonys’ documentary Uku Ukai

N otes 1 | Tue Steen Muller, “Reality Pics in European Production,” Film (November 2002). Review excerpt quoted on Audrius Stonys’ website, available online at http://www.stonys.lt/index. asp?DL=E 2 | See Renata Šukaitytė, “Practice-based Film Education in Lithuania: Main Actors and Sites of Struggle,” in The Education of the Filmmaker in Europe, Australia, and Asia, ed. Mette Hjort (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 25-44. 3 | On the notion of a “minor cinema” in Deleuze and Guattari’s writing, see William Brown, “Minor Cinema,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, ed. Edward Brannigan and Warren Buckland (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 290-294. Also see Gary Genosko’s essay in this volume. 4 | This Platinum Film Award is granted when more than 10,000 video or DVD copies of a film have been sold. Press releases pointed out that as of 2012 “no other film in Lithuania (including famous Hollywood films) have come near this limit. The sales of Flight over Lithuania or 510 Seconds of Silence in Lithuania surpassed even the most popular American and European productions by 3-4 times.” See “Flight over Lithuania or 510 Moments of Silence – About the Movie,“ available online at http://www.510.lt/Default. asp?DL=E&TopicID=11&Code= 5 | Ibid. 6 | Juratė Visockaitė, “Stonys: The Last Shot,” Kinas (Winter 1999). Review quoted on Audrius Stonys’ website, available online at http://www.stonys.lt/index.asp?DL=E

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Renata Šukaitytė 7 | It is worth noting that for an international audience watching his films, the director makes subtitles only when he feels it is necessary. 8 | Muller, “Reality Pics in European Production.” 9 | Audrius Stonys, “Biography as an Artist,” available online on Audrius Stony’s website http://www.stonys.lt/index.asp?DL=E. Stonys’ ten minute short, Baltic Way (1990), codirected with Arunas Matelis, poetically depicts this time of transition. The film includes footage of a political demonstration on 23 August 1989, when two million people joined their hands to form a human chain spanning over 600 kilometres across the three Baltic states Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. 10 | Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary (London, New York: Routledge, 2009), 6. 11 | Noël Carroll, “Nonfiction Film and Postmodernist Scepticism,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 300. 12 | Stony, “Biography as an Artist.” 13 | Ibid. 14 | In his seminal Representing Reality, film theorist Bill Nichols develops four “modes” of documentary filmmaking: expository, observational, interactive, and reflexive. The expository uses cinematic footage to support the narrative and argument put forward by a (mostly) omniscient narrator; the observational mode attempts to observe reality without interpreting or stylizing it according to aesthetic principles; the interactive mode exhibits strong traces of the filmic and social interaction between the filmmaker and the film’s subjects; the reflexive mode turns its attention to the filmmaking (and meaning making) process itself. See Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 32-75. 15 | Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary, 185. 16 | Michael Renov, “Toward a Poetics of Documentary,” in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 21. 17 | Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), xvii. 18 | Russell, Experimental Ethnography, xi-xii. 19 | Michael Renov, “Toward a Poetics of Documentary,” 19. 20 | Hal Foster, Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Boston: MIT Press, 1996), 174. 21 | Renov, “Introduction: The Truth about Non-Fiction,” 7. 22 | Audrius Stonys, “Conception of Cinematography,” available online at http://www. stonys.lt/index.asp?DL=E&TopicID=4 23 | Audrius Stonys, “Biography as an Artist.” 24 | Renov, “Toward a Poetics of Documentary,” 25. 25 | Critics often comment on irony as one of the trademarks of Stonys’ filmmaking. For example, Juratė Visockaitė writes: “the most attractive feature of Stonys’ Fedia is irony. The viewer who does not have any contact with contemporary cinema vocabulary will not even feel, and without that feeling will be lost completely in the film and might be even shocked: how carelessly, sluggishly it is made! Only the keen critic’s eye discovers that the

Desires and Memories of a Small Man cinematic lines are written in vers libre, that’s why they create a sense of a masquerade and mask (Zivile Pipinyte). However, to how many chosen ones (or specialized festivals) can such a masquerade be dedicated to? And can the author permit himself such a luxury of sharpening his pen for so long? Or, to quote Stonys from his own films, to meditate between the earth and the sky, between being and nonbeing, to be honest, in the artificial and cleaned waters of the swimming pool – only between the surface of the water and the bottom of the pool.” (Visockaitė, “Stonys: The Last Shot”) 26 | Nichols, Representing Reality, 42. 27 | Ibid. 28 | Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography, 272. 29 | Tue Steen Muller, Documentary Film Magazine: DOX (October 2001). Review quoted on Audrius Stonys’ website, available online at http://www.stonys.lt/index.asp?DL=E 30 | There is also a subjective use of sound, muted conversations that are not fully heard by the film’s spectators. This defamiliarizing use of sound, however, is counterbalanced by the emotional intensity of Handel and Purcell’s music in the film. 31 | Linda Williams, “Mirrors without Memories. Truth, History, and The Thin Blue Line,” in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, ed. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (Detroit: Wayne State University Press), 380. 32 | Renov, Toward a Poetics of Documentary, 35. 33 | Ibid. 34 | Renov, Toward a Poetics of Documentary, 29. 35 | Nichols, Representing Reality, 57. 36 | Ibid., 61. 37 | Patricia Aufderheide, Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5. 38 | Audrius Stonys, “Biography as an Artist.” Acknowledgments: I would like to express my sincere thanks to Janelle Blankenship for generously spending her time providing me with valuable feedback and thoughtful comments at different stages of writing which was very helpful for shaping this chapter. I am also very thankful for her great help with editing the piece.

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Beyond the National

Félix Guattari and Minor Cinema Gary Genosko Félix Guattari’s most sustained comments on cinema consist of several interviews and occasional pieces dating from the 1970s gathered together in the Encres edition of La Révolution moléculaire (Molecular revolution) under the title “Cinema: A Minor Art.”1 For Guattari, cinema is a privileged medium for minoritarian becomings that show a specific orientation towards the progressive goals of anti-psychiatric social and political practices. Guattari’s approach to cinema through the minor is generally consistent with Deleuze’s deployment of the anti-colonialist, revolutionary Third Cinema2; yet Guattari did not adopt this approach wholesale. He shared with Third Cinema progressive political goals and artistic experimentation; he did not accept the typology in Third Cinema between Hollywood’s industrial model, auteur cinema (a miniature version of industry) and a valorized radical cinema that is grounded in anti-colonial struggles and the aspirations of emerging national cinemas.3 Although the minor is not usually affixed to oppressed minorities (who might, on a restricted view of identity, author only marginal works), this does not change the fact that many people struggling with mental illness and poverty and racism – some treated in the films favored by Guattari – are oppressed and socioeconomically and psychically ghettoized. Guattari does not conflate minor and marginal. He is not making a socio-demographic claim, although the basis to do so surely exists in some cases. Marginal is distinguished from minor in Guattari’s thought inasmuch as a minority (for example, first-wave gay rights activists in the US) refuse their marginality because it is tied to repressive recentrings on normative models of sexuality and lifestyle. 4 The transition from margin to minor may be used to describe numerous social movements that make significant gains for themselves and on this firmer ground are able to explore minoritarian and other becomings in the creation of new alliances, ultimately finding a receptive audience not yet formed, but which would hopefully participate in the labor of emancipation. Guattari cites the example of the occupation of Lincoln Hospital in the summer of 1970 by the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican group advocating self-determination and engaging in coordinated health activism with allies such as the Black Panthers. Although the occupation of the long-condemned facility

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lasted only a few weeks, the protest action had the goal of reorienting practice away from research and training to serving neighborhood interests, agitating for a new building, linking housing and health, and reinventing the marginal as a vital force of social change and expression of collective values and tactical deterritorializations such as using former drug addicts to run the detox unit. Guattari did not elaborate a comprehensive theory of the cinema and he discusses few films in depth. Minor cinema exudes the spirit of revolutionary politics in Guattari’s working out of the minor’s connectivity in a progressivist voice, indeed, in film’s ability to give voice to workers themselves (for example Third Cinema theorists Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino favorably cite Chris Marker’s experiments in France to empower workers to film their own realities with 8mm equipment).5 There is not, in Guattari, a straightforward valorization of documentary cinema, even though he cites a significant number of such films. Guattari’s interest in a wide variety of documentary works within the stream of the anti-psychiatry movement is subject to the same criticisms he levels at the movement and its stars: creeping familial analysis (Oedipalism), reformist sentiments, a reactionary countercultural abdication of concrete struggle and taste for media spectacle. Even the intensity of these criticisms was tempered by exceptions, like the cinematic works dealing with the Italian situation of the movement and the institutional experiments of guerrilla psychiatrist Franco Basaglia.6 We need to take care when noting the affinities between minor cinema and Third Cinema. There is some continuity at the level of film praxis with a cinema without bosses, that is, of “total filmmakers,” as Solanas insisted, not directors, stars, studio mandarins and long lines of specialists, but revolutionaries prepared to tackle all of the dimensions of film production.7 To the extent that Guattari valorized a democratization of production and the responsible documentation, he is in line with Third Cinema objectives. Deleuzian film critics point out that the major statements of Third Cinema by Solanas and Getino as well as Julio Garcia Espinoza’s “For an Imperfect Cinema and Meditations on Imperfect Cinema ... Fifteen Years Later” are “movements” in which nomadic cinema participates, not in terms of representation, but along political lines of becoming.8 This takes place inside colonial situations, working against mastery, towards imperfection, carving out sites of struggle whose effects make beautiful, celebratory, commercial cinema with stars in its eyes and imported abstract standards take flight, forcing it out of its self-sufficiency and narcissism.9 Fifteen years after publishing “For an Imperfect Cinema,” Espinoza clarified that one of the stakes of imperfection in a cinema of struggle was to find an audience not yet formed, and that perhaps never will be denumerable, but will hopefully “become conscious and participate with those who are making changes.”10 Always changing shape, deviating, experimenting and giving the slip to dominant representations, a minoritarian cinema of producers, directors, actors, distributors and audiences, following Espinoza, “isn’t the one that is participating

Félix Guattari and Minor Cinema

in the changes, or isn’t even potentially able to do so.”11 It is an audience in formation, that still needs to be invented, that cannot be counted nor counted on in advance, but is becoming through contact with the vital part-signs of minor cinema’s explorations of madness and commitment to struggle. On this point Guattari connects with Espinoza. Deleuze confronts the same problem as Espinoza: the people are missing in modern political cinema. This is political cinema’s minor condition, and the condition of the minority’s political predicament, and the task of the filmmaker is to sow the “seeds of the people to come,” to “prefigure a people.”12 In Deleuze the minor erases the distance between the private and political. This is especially the case in films concerning mental health in which the social character of illness, and the state of the family, is immediate. The political multiplies with the private, and peoples multiply to infinity; so the filmmaker becomes a movement among other movements with no unifying consciousness. Yet the prefiguration of a people is carried by the filmmaker’s work, which, Deleuze explains, catalyses by expressing potential forces and collectively assembling movements (across the private and political), and in Third Cinema this is accomplished by exposing the dual impossibilities of living under the yoke of colonialism and raising the consciousness of a unified people because neither unity nor a people exist. Guattari does not divide minor cinema into cinemas that display worker struggles and those that explore madness (and related conditions of epilepsy, autism and suicide) in documentary or fictional forms. Like Deleuze, Guattari sees political film’s task in terms of the multiplication of connections between disparate fragments: between, for instance, anti-psychiatric struggles and the labor movement; between the family as a domain of containable private problems and dramas and as an already social and political entity. But at the core of Guattari’s minor cinema is the idea that cinematic investigations of everyday struggles precipitate changes in those hitherto removed from them, removing the distance that separates private from political, issue from issue, and the many ways problems are swept from view in being compartmentalized. Guattari elegantly expresses this in terms of Jean Schmidt’s film Comme les anges déchus de la planète Saint-Michel (“Fallen angels from the planet St Michel,” 1978). Guattari is struck by the immediately political effects of the homeless speaking freely about their lives; Schmidt “takes things as they come; he has not selected from their remarks in order to obtain the best effects of montage.”13 Instead, he includes tirades, racist outbursts and clichés alongside passionate and poetic statements. Guattari enumerates several kinds of dependencies that structure the lives of these marginal people subsisting in the center of Paris: physiological (drugs, cold weather and alcohol); psychological or ethological (occupying precariously the territories populated by many different homeless and transients but also tourists – in the square before the Pompidou Centre, for example); institutional (the social services, jails, hospitals, shelters, benevolent organizations peddling false hope ...); and exhibitionist (the spectacles of street youth). No easy solutions are proffered; groups are shown to coalesce in collective projects and then decay into

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atoms of loneliness, delirium and violence. For Guattari, Schmidt “is not content with denouncing a scandal: he squarely puts the blame on sensibilities dulled, ‘drugged’, and infantilized by mass media, and by a public opinion that ‘does not want to know about it.’”14 Guattari champions minor cinema’s ability to promote through a-signifying part-signs and ethically responsible film praxes the release of becomings-minor in the masses (or strains therein), or at least move towards this utopian goal that he shared with Espinoza. By promoting the release of creative potentialities, and examining how minor cinema extracts and communicates them, Guattari hoped they would mutate and emerge as components in new auto-modelizations of subjectivity. This way of establishing existential coordinates would include the ethico-political imperatives of an engagement with madness and poverty, as well as taking forward the references they trigger by all concerned, intimately and in terms of potential praxes. Let us turn to the minor and consider how it conjoins with cinema. From A Thousand Plateaus we learn that minorities are opposed to axioms.15 An axiomatic describes how a system such as capitalism works directly on decoded flows (the condition in which capital can become anything without regulatory reference points) regardless of their specific characteristics, domains in which they are realized and relations between such elements. The axiomatic is thus immanent (and not transcendent or perfect and thus closed) to the decoded flows and thus more flexible than coding operations, which are attached to specific domains and establish rules for relations among their elements. An axiomatic is aligned with the models of realization through which it is effectuated; the models differ widely but are all isomorphic (e.g. each different type of state and capitalism is different from the others but also corresponds to the others). Axiomatic capitalism may add new axioms in response to events or in order to master certain kinds of flows, and also subtract axioms. The nation-state in all its remarkable diversity is one model of realization for the capitalist axiomatic that Deleuze and Guattari note has the task of “crushing” its own minorities in an effort, for instance, to manage nationalist aspirations.16 Minorities are not easily quashed, but they are captured in the name of an axiomatic of the majority that is countable and modelled by a standard form. A minority is not countable and thus has nothing to do with the smallness or largeness of its numbers but rests on the production of connections between its elements. To the extent that the axiom of the majority manipulates countable elements, non-countable minorities elude its grasp. New axioms are introduced in order to translate minorities into majoritarian clusters (e.g. granting some political autonomy and therein integrating them as an entity in a political union). The power of minorities rests with the multiplication of connections among their elements and the forging of lines of escape and errant trajectories, even though the assertion of such powers through demands (i.e. rights, territory, self-government) against the countable generates new axioms. In abstract terms, the opposition

Félix Guattari and Minor Cinema

that Deleuze and Guattari posit is between revolutionary connections of becoming minor available for all and the conjugations of the axiomatic that inflect and fix the flows.17 For Guattari, cinema is a minor art that “perhaps serves the people who constitute a minority, and this is not at all pejorative. A major art is at the service of power ... A minor cinema for minorities ... and for the rest of us, too, since all of us participate in these minorities in one way or another.”18 A minor cinema precipitates becomings-minor in the mass. And to become minor is not to be in a minority or the representative of a minority or even to formally acquire the characteristics or status of a minority through some affiliation such as spouse, expert or even informant. How is cinema minorized? How does it produce becomings with which everyone can connect? In order to answer this question we need to turn to some of the films that Guattari discusses within the terms of both the European antipsychiatry movement and under the general heading of a cinema attuned to madness: a cinema that is not of a clinical, criteriological character, but that can open all of us to the exploration of our own anoedipal becomings, in the process of which normopathic subjecthood gives way to an inclusive and non-specific madness, not in accordance with a model, but by getting in touch with certain affective intensities made available through specific cinematic works. These affective intensities “start to exist in you, in spite of you.”19 How is cinema minorized by mental illness? How does it produce becomings that summon a people with whom it connects? The fundamental theoretical problem here is at the heart of what it means to summon a new people outside a political or messianic telos. After all, Guattari laments the popular “taste for morbidity”20 that brought psychiatric patients to the big screen in 1970s blockbusters (e.g. Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest [1975]). This interest in madness was for him subsumable under the same impulse that made pornography and cop stories so successful. Less dejectedly, Guattari considers that during these decades non-spectacular (not on the order of May 1968) and softly subversive molecular disturbances across the sociopolitical spectrum were causing primary institutions of socialization to decay and reorganize themselves. These subversions were picked up on by filmmakers, some of whom caught wind of developments in the anti-psychiatry and other social movements and took them beyond the discourses of professionals (analysts, doctors and nurses) as well as psychiatric survivors. Guattari triumphed a cinema that provided the means for the multitude to connect with the struggles it communicated but not in the form of an ideological conversion or the dictates of a leadership caste. This simultaneously involved demystifying big studio representations of social issues and the pseudoobjectivity of cinema-vérité that puts the struggles of minorities under its lens instead of putting the combatants and agitators themselves behind the camera lens. This is key to understanding Guattari’s favorable mention of films such as

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Marin Karmitz’s Blow for Blow (Coup pour coup, 1972), in which non-professional actors who were engaged in a protracted labor struggle in a textile factory created a document of their own actions. Guattari is comfortable with a core idea of militant cinema: democratization of the means of production, specifically overcoming the barriers of specialization, technical and cost challenges by such actions as putting cameras in the hands of workers. A further example of this democratization of the means of cinematic production in the service of summoning a people to come is found in Guattari’s short reflection on hyperdense urban life in Tokyo and the district of Sanya in which foreign and day laborers live under the yoke of organized gangs.21 The cinematic significance of Sanya is that Sato Mitsuo, a Japanese documentary film director known for his social activism, was murdered during the making of his 1985 film YAMA: An Eye for an Eye; the colloquial name for Sanya is Yama. The film follows the struggles of the district’s day laborers to organize themselves and the clashes they had with the local yakuza family, which led to the death by stabbing not only of Mitsuo: Yamaoka Kyoichi was a labor activist who took the reins of the project and saw it through to its completion after Mitsuo’s murder, and he too was murdered. A becoming-minor may be effectuated in this instance through an ethics of film praxis that is built around respect for subjects and responsibility for the creation of documents. Guattari theorizes how minor cinema “intervenes directly in our relations with the external world”22 and influences the semioticizations of viewers. Dominant and reactionary values are attacked in a variety of ways within film praxis. Guattari selected key early films by directors whose importance has grown over time as vital to minoritarian cinematic becomings. Guattari enthusiastically endorsed David Lynch, who, in Eraserhead (1977), has made “the greatest film on psychosis, alongside Fists in the Pocket (1965) by Marco Bellocchio. I find these two films over-whelming.”23 Guattari’s minor cinema is catalysed by the schizo process that escapes the semiotic subjugations of dominant cinematic representations and capitalist modes of production. Guattari’s high praise for Eraserhead is evident enough in Henry Spencer’s molecularizations: the “psychotic multiplicities of dispersion”24 in the eraser shavings that swirl around him. In Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket there is a thorough critique of the claustrophobia of family values. Split by name – sometimes Ale, sometimes Sandro – Alessandro (Lou Castel) succumbs to his matricidal and fratricidal fantasies as he terrorizes the family’s villa outside Piacenza, arranging the “accidental” deaths first of his mother and then his mentally deficient brother, while attempting to smother his sister and kill his older brother, the family patriarch. Finally, Alessandro falls victim to a massive grand mal seizure, his psychosis orchestrated by a refrain of Verdi’s La Traviata. Generally Guattari considered most commercial cinema to be a drug whose trip is adaptation.25 However, for him one commercial film that displayed the textures of psychosis was Terence Malick’s Badlands (1973), which displays the

Félix Guattari and Minor Cinema

effects of amour fou: “the story is only there to serve as support for a schizophrenic journey.”26 In this respect Kit (Martin Sheen) was an abstraction from the intensities of amour fou released by Holly (Sissy Spacek) and the film is marked by vivid and intense blues, bizarre behaviors and circulation of objects (stones and toasters) in support of the schizo journey that follows intensities and desires that escape dominant values. Guattari’s focus on the minor within a diverse range of engaged cinemas runs all the way from the emotional textures of collective creation in Germany in Autumn (Deutschland im Herbst, 1978; directed by Alf Brustellin et al.), which exposes the role of the mass mediatic machine in distributing subjugating affects through its reportage of acts of armed struggle in Germany in the late 1970s, staging the Manichean confrontation between a “monstrous state power and pathetic politico-military apparatuses,”27 to the documentary style of Raymond Depardon in Emergencies (Urgences, 1988). The twenty sequences shot at the emergency psychiatric service at Hôtel-Dieu in Paris not only interpellate viewers into the alienations and deceits of intake interview situations with psychotherapists and those suffering from everything from dereliction to psychosis, but also, Guattari believed, “the spectacle of these existential ruptures works directly upon our own lines of fragility.”28 Indeed, while struggling with his own depression, Guattari was deeply moved by the suicide of the soixante-huitard in Romain Goupil’s Half A Life (Mourir à trente ans, 1982). Guattari’s sense of minorization rests on the capacity of a-signifying part-signs. For Guattari, commercial cinema not only serves the interests of corporate power as a vehicle through which docile models of subjectivity are communicated by means of dominant signifying semiologies, but also reveals beyond its thematics (star system, studio moguls, static genres, hackneyed plots) militant becomings in the sociopolitical effects of its technological organization. Guattari sought a direct and efficacious contact between semiotic and material fluxes that he found in the free radio movement, for instance. The directness between semiotic and material fluxes (intense and multiple) is not diverted into a sphere of representation or signification (psychical quasi-objects such as the Saussurean sign consisting of sound-image and concept) that results in their mutual cancellation, which is how Guattari characterizes the condition of the subject in both structuralism and psychoanalysis; instead, the a-signifying particles, the most de-territorialized types of signs (not fully formed but part-signs), provide lines of escape from the snares of representation. Guattari wants to outflank representation and its failures predicated on language altogether by focusing on a-signifying semiotics. And these signs play an important role in cinema. Guattari writes: “It is equally important to underline and insist on the independent status of what are called a-signifying semiotics. This will allow us to understand what permits cinema to escape from semiologies of signification and participate in collective assemblages of desire.”29 First of all, signifying semiologies are based on dominant systems of encoding such as non-

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verbal codes, speech and writing, and thus constitute stable “centring” codes of fully formed substances indexed on individuated subjects (even if the non-verbal is, it is claimed, universally translatable into a linguistic-based semiology, and the letter insists in the unconscious). Guattari clarifies that a-signifying particlesigns “break the effects of significance and interpretance, thwart the system of dominant redundancies, accelerate the most ‘innovative,’ ‘constructive’ and ‘rhizomatic’ components.”30 While signifying semiologies want to find meaning everywhere, and therefore refuse any independence to a-signifying semiotics that can function without them (but may make tactical use of them), Guattari resists embalming cinema in meaning, that is, in transcendent narratives and syntagmatic/paradigmatic chains of relations and clusters. Instead, he proposes that these incomplete part-signs, which are not interpretable and centered on the signifier but non-singularly expressive of the unformed signaletic matter of cinematic images, trigger a becoming-minor in those sensitive to their encounter with them. Dynamic cinematic particle-signs trigger becomings-minor in the same way that thought is forced or shocked in an immanent encounter. A-signifying fragments populate the cinema as colors (or in black and white), non-phonic sounds, rhythms and facility traits: in short, in manifold modalities and expressive matters that are open, Guattari specifies, to “multiple systems of external intensities.”31 One does not connect with these ideologically, but rather is transported and reassembled by them, moved into configurations of components and new universes of reference because one’s existential territory has been enriched by them. Such expressive matters, claims Guattari quoting Christian Metz, have unbounded matters of content or “semantic tissue”32 that run beyond the reach of signifying semiologies and the dominant values that their encodings presume, like stereotypes (i.e. “normal”, likeable, characters and model families) and behaviors (i.e. going to school, cooperating with authority). By the same token, Guattari adds that the textures and traits of expressive matter at the disposal of filmmakers elude stabilizing codes or deep syntaxes that might still the restless deployment of heterogeneous semiotics and their creative constellations. Cinema emits a-signifying particle-signs that trigger the desire to follow their leads. But what does this mean for film criticism? A good example is Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1989). Laleen Jayamanne displays acute attention to non-narrative rhythms and textures through the work of a-signifying signs in the film’s visual and aural fluxes, focusing on the staking of territories by means of a sonic motif – blasts of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” – and the dilly-dallying of Mookie in the sinuous everyday life on the block.33 These a-signifying particles have the power to throw one into becomings-minor that cannot be captured by the stock discourse of racial violence that took the film hostage shortly after its premiere. Guattari’s overt interest was in a cinema of madness. Peter Robinson’s film about R. D. Laing, Asylum (1972), is included in a list of films that inaugurate something new: a minor cinema. Asylum, Guattari thought, found a significant audience and “indirectly revealed an anti-psychiatric current.”34 Minor cinema

Félix Guattari and Minor Cinema

probes a potential public, a public yet to come, with which it attempts to connect by bringing its a-signifying particle-signs flush with sensibilities not yet entangled in dominant modelizations of identity and social relations. The study of how subjectivity is modelled is, Guattari noted, really the sole question of schizoanalysis: Schizoanalysis is not an alternative modelisation. It is meta-modelisation. It tries to understand how it is that you got where you are. What is your model to you? It doesn’t work? Then, I don’t know, one tries to work together. One must see if one can make a graft with other models. It will be perhaps better, perhaps worse. We will see. There is no question of a standard model. And the criterion of truth in this comes precisely when the metamodelisation transforms itself into auto-modelisation, or auto-gestation, if you prefer. 35

Guattari enlisted the becomings-minor – which we can call “affective contaminations”36 after Guattari – released by the cinema of anti-psychiatry for schizoanalysis’ criticism of standard systems of modelization, but not towards a general model; rather, “as an instrument for deciphering systems of modelisation in diverse domains, in other words, a meta-model”37 of subjectivity’s autopoetic formation in context through the assemblage of heterogeneous coordinates on different levels and of various types and the discovery of consistency among its components by means of refrains: those felicitous “existential communicators” (a refrain is any iterative composition) catalysing passages into new universes of reference.38 Minor cinema can and must contribute to a practical self-enrichment, either through making or viewing films. The documentary Asylum undoubtedly impressed Guattari because of the intimacies of the household dramas it revealed in true vérité style, right down to the exposed microphones, in the context of Laing’s post-Kingsley experiment in community care, Archway House. The commitment of the filmmakers was evident inasmuch as they stayed in the therapeutic community for six weeks during the filming (echoing Mitsuo’s commitment), and over this period they not only recorded but played active roles in the group problem-solving sessions. This community was itself questioning existing models of community and family and struggled with its own alternative auto-modelizations through the episodes of its key denizens. Asylum follows a schizoanalytic process of assisting in the discovery of passages between assemblages by releasing blockages. Guattari focuses on the Italian strain of anti-psychiatric activity, particularly the work of Franco Basaglia and members of the Psichiatria Democratica movement. Anti-institutional struggle in Italy was necessary owing to the archaic nature of the asylum system and absence of patients’ rights. An institution is negated, Basaglia explained, “when it is turned upside down, and when its specific field of activity is called into question and thereby thrown into crisis.”39 Guattari remained suspicious of this strategy, not because he believed that the hospitals in Gorizia and Parma were not totally repressive but because negation was not sufficiently

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anchored in extra-institutional social reality and tended to result in a denial or suppression of madness: in short, that negation overwhelmed madness, too. 40 Yet to read Basaglia is immediately to acknowledge that the institutional experiments in “negative thinking” undertaken by him parallel those of Guattari and Jean Oury at La Borde. Certainly the daily collective assembly at Gorizia in which patients and staff met voluntarily in a dehierarchized environment in which roles and uniforms were abandoned and topics for discussion came from the floor, were disorganized and at times confrontational; they were not as tightly semioticized as the table of work rotations on display at La Borde – the abstract machine that diagrammed that clinic. Notwithstanding this chaos, this was for many the first occasion they had to voice their concerns and needs and have them heard. It was the translation of these individual demands into a collective assumption of responsibility that could be addressed by changes in the institution itself. Guattari praises the “exceptional” film Fit to be Untied (Matti da slegare, 1976) made by the March 11 Collective (Silvano Agnosti, Marco Bellocchio, Sandro Petraglia, Stefano Rulli) about the hospital in Parma, where Basaglia had moved in 1969. 41 Guattari focuses largely on the youth and women in the film because their recounting of experiences of psychiatric repression in the hospital and triumphs in everyday life on the outside are the most moving, but he also notes how labor activists have come to integrate the psychiatricized and ex-patients into their political projects. This connection between mental health and industrial workers and patients was for Guattari one of the most remarkable features of the documentary because it provided evidence of new alliances across otherwise noncommunicating sectors. Guattari’s praise for Fit to be Untied is marked by provisos that should be read as general comments about how he tempers his enthusiasm for progressive documentary work in the anti-psychiatric milieu: that “truth” does not always come from the people, even if he is convinced that repression almost always comes from the care-givers; that good intentions and community actions are not enough to ameliorate the suffering of the mentally ill; that there are pressing issues within psychiatric hospital practice that need urgent revision. European anti-psychiatry movements were dominated by leading radical psychiatrists and theorists whose ability to speak in the language of Michel Foucault’s History of Madness, appropriated for anti-psychiatry when it was originally published in 1961, often took precedence over making concrete interventions. A sophisticated social realist work on schizophrenia, such as Ken Loach’s Family Life (1971), was brilliant but still short on concrete reforms, according to Guattari. Guattari makes no mention of classic anti-psychiatric documentaries such as Fredrick Wiseman’s “reality fiction” about the conditions in Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane, Massachusetts, Titicut Follies (1967). However, “popular” works such as these held promise because of the potential publics they catalysed that, Guattari hoped, would make new demands on the dominant commercial film industry to deliver radically different messages.

Félix Guattari and Minor Cinema

Minor cinema as militant film practice: Paris student demonstration in Romain Goupil’s Half a Life

Affective intensities: Lou Castel in Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket

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N otes 1 | Félix Guattari, “Le Cinéma: un art mineure,” in Révolution moléculaire (Fontenay-sousBois: Recherches, 1977), 203-38, reprinted in Félix Guattari, Soft Subversions, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext[e], 1996), 143-187. 2 | Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone 1989), 221-224. 3 | Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World,” in New Latin American Cinema, Vol. 1, ed. Michael T. Martin, trans. Julianne Burton and Michael T. Martin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 33-58. 4 | Guattari, Révolution moléculaire, 185-186; Félix Guattari, “Revolution and Desire: An Interview with Félix Guattari,” with H. Levin & M. Seem (interviewers), State and Mind 6(4) & 7(1) (Summer/Fall 1978): 57. 5 | Solanas and Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema,” 45. 6 | Félix Guattari The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 42-45. 7 | Fernando Solanas, “Fernando Solanas: An Interview,” Film Quarterly 24.1 (1970): 38. 8 | Dudley Andrew, “The Roots of the Nomadic: Gilles Deleuze and the Cinema of West Africa,” in The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2000), 224-5. 9 | Julio Garcia Espinoza, “For an Imperfect Cinema and Meditations an Imperfect Cinema ... Fifteen Years Later,” in New Latin American Cinema, trans. Julianne Burton, 81. 10 | Ibid., 84. 11 | Ibid. 12 | Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 220-221. 13 | Guattari, Révolution moléculaire, 348. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 14 | Ibid., 350. 15 | Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 16 | Ibid., 456. 17 | Ibid., 473. 18 | Félix Guattari, Soft Subversions, 180. 19 | Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis, trans. Paul. Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1990), 93. 20 | Guattari, Soft Subversions, 177. 21 | See Félix Guattari, “Tokyo, the Proud,” trans. Gary Genosko, Deleuze Studies 1.2 (2007): 96-99. 22 | Ibid., 164. 23 | Félix Guattari, “La machine à images,” Cahiers du cinema 437 (November 1990): 71. 24 | Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone. 1984), 375. 25 | Guattari, Soft Subversions, 162.

Félix Guattari and Minor Cinema 26 | Ibid., 167. 27 | Ibid., 187. 28 | Félix Guattari, “Urgences: la folie est dans le champ,“ Le Monde, 9 March 1988, 22. 29 | Guattari, Soft Subversions, 149. 30 | Ibid., 154, note 2. 31 | Ibid., 151. 32 | Ibid., 150-51. 33 | Laleen Jayamann, “Forty Acres and A Mule Filmworks: Do the Right Thing – A Spike Lee Joint: Blocking and Unblocking the Block,” in Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Patricia Pisters (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001), 235-249. 34 | Guattari, Soft Subversions, 177. 35 | Guattari, The Guattari Reader, 133. 36 | Guattari, Soft Subversions, 92-93. 37 | Guattari, Cartographies schizoanalytiques (Paris: Galilde, 1989), 27. 38 | Ibid., 27-28, 304. 39 | Franco Basaglia, Psychiatry Inside Out: Selected Writings of Franco Basaglia, ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Anne M. Lovell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 63. 40 | Guattari, The Guattari Reader, 44. 41 | Guattari, Soft Subversions, 177-180.

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Veit Helmer’s Tuvalu, Cinema Babel, and the (Dis-)location of Europe Janelle Blankenship and Tobias Nagl

The question of human language and the impact linguistic barriers had on cinema as a global public sphere is as old as cinema itself. According to standard film history accounts, it was the economic dominance of the Hollywood studio system, already visible after World War I and largely a result of its large domestic market, followed by the transition to synchronized sound in the late 1920s that brought the internationalism of silent film to an end and sealed the status of American English as a global lingua franca, broadcast as a universally marketable commodity through American film. Similarly, scholars of American cinema working in a Frankfurt school tradition such as Miriam Hansen and Lauren Rabinovitz have argued that early cinema, due to the absence of intertitles or writing, constituted not just a proletarian public sphere but also a transnational one that could cater to largely illiterate immigrant masses precisely because it did not require any linguistic competencies and thus could slowly habituate European immigrant audiences to modernity and a new cultural environment through means of the image alone.1 Such a perspective recalls what film theorists of the silent period had to say about the unique properties and utopian potential of cinema. For the GermanHungarian film theorist Béla Balázs, for example, the question of cinematic language appeared as part of a larger messianic cultural and technological history of perception that he first sketched out in his book-length study Visible Man (Der sichtbare Mensch, 1924). Following a Babylonian narrative of downfall and redemption, Balázs understood the emergence of cinema as a return to a visual culture that had gone underground with the invention of the printing press. Expressing one’s “soul” through a dramatic performance of gestures, once the entire body had been a vast arena of the visible. This gestural language was neither “verbal” (like the sign language of deaf mutes) nor “conceptual” (in any representational or semiotic sense). According to Balázs, human gestures expressed man’s “irrational self” directly and in an unmediated manner. This gestural or physiognomic “language” gave body/flesh to the human “spirit,” making it “visible” without using the detour of words. However, the advent of

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the book ended the paradisiacal age of a universal visual ur-language and made the human face unreadable. With the cinema a “new machine” had begun its workings, Balázs believed, which would point human culture in a visual direction and give man a “new face.” Film, he hoped, could thus restore man’s “visibility” and create the foundation for a new internationalism.2 Balázs’ film theory, as Sabine Hake reminds us, is not only characterized by a strong “romantic” and “metaphysical” tendency, it also possesses a deeply nostalgic quality that is at heart both formalistic and adheres to a technological determinism.3 While Balázs did not completely reject sound film in his later The Spirit of Film (Der Geist des Films, 1930), his statements on synchronized sound merely recap and remake his earlier hopes that cinema as an art form associated with an age of the masses would give voice to the “language” of things. In his notes on the sonic physiognomy of a modernity that in the 1920s perhaps most fully realized its global contours Balázs distinguished between the innovative sound film (Tonfilm), characterized by acoustic montage, de-familiarization and contrapuntal sound effects, and the mere talking picture (Sprechfilm). 4 Balázs’ belief in cinema as a utopian, potentially transnational social site for a new understanding of man and his/her being in the material world is probably best understood as an aesthetics or stylistics of a new visual culture, a symptom as much as it is an attempt to theoretically account for his own historical period. It seems moot to point to the many theoretical impassés of Balázs’ cine-poetics, but we might at least briefly recall some of the historical blind spots of his hypostasis of silent film stylistics in respect to the question that seems most pressing in this essay: that of transnationalism. More recent research into the history of film economics, exhibition practices and the emergence of the “art film” as category (or genre) in the 1920s has pointed out that the sort of exaggerated visual style Balázs’ praises was already part and parcel of conscious production strategies by European production companies and their American distributors which allowed for the successful export of national cinemas on a global high-brow or niche market in the shadow of Hollywood; just think of the reception of German expressionism in the U.S. or Soviet cinema in Western Europe.5 Similarly, the relation between the transition to sound and the decried nationalization of film culture is more complex on a conceptual level as well as in terms of periodization, for European producers attempted to counter U.S. hegemony already around 1924 by creating the institutional framework for a series of international (mainly French, German and British) co-productions, a development commonly referred to among film historians (as briefly mentioned in the introduction to this volume) as the “Film Europe” project.6 At the same time, the transition to sound and the barriers it erected for film export led to a fascinating, albeit short-lived and largely unsuccessful, period of experimentation with multi-language versions where directors would reshoot the same film in different languages with different stars for different national audiences, not to mention a small number of multi-lingual films (such as Victor Trivas’ pacifist Hell

Veit Helmer’s Tuvalu, Cinema Babel, and the (Dis-)location of Europe

on Earth [Niemandsland, 1931]), which featured a transnational cast of actors and simultaneous use of a variety of languages.7 This pre-history of contemporary transnational aesthetics and language strategies we have just sketched out is important to keep in mind when discussing the filmmaking career of German director Veit Helmer, a filmmaker deeply invested in film history whose claim to fame rests, in addition to his often-noted predilection for visual storytelling, on the fact that in most of his feature films he obsessively avoids the use of his native German tongue, and, more importantly, is one of the few contemporary directors who have produced modern-day silent films. Veit Helmer’s films have been hailed “surreal dialogue-free multicultural movies,” “speechless poetic fairytales,” or masterpieces of “magical realism” which feature a “fascinating, funny intersection of engineering and romance.”8 Tuvalu, Helmer’s feature debut shot on a shoe-string budget of 1.4 million Mark in 1999 in Bulgaria, revolves around a run-down bath house and its bizarre guests in an unspecified Eastern European setting. The dilapidated bathhouse is managed and maintained by Anton (Denis Lavant), an idealistic day-dreamer. His elderly and blind, but also authoritarian father abuses Anton repeatedly when he fails to perform the required repairs in an efficient manner, but Anton never dares to tell his father that there are hardly any guests on the premises and prefers to deceive him by playing anachronistic tape recordings of seaside revellers, broadcast by what looks like the speaker of a 1920s gramophone. This is a world reigned by poetic imagination, as we soon learn from a series of Fellini-esque guests who walk into the pool with strange costumes and props and pay with buttons. Among these individuals are the beautiful Eva (Chulpan Khamatova) and her father, and Anton soon falls for her and dreams of escaping with Eva to the Pacific Island Tuvalu, one of the smallest island nations in the world which for many years was thought to be rapidly shrinking because of rising sea levels.9 But the relationship grows sour when Anton’s brother Gregor (Terrence Gillespie), who sports an Eraserhead haircut, also takes a shine to Eva. Gregor is hell-bent on demolishing the bath house and replacing it with modern condominiums using the help of comic local politicians. While Gregor schemes to try to get the public swimming pool condemned, even killing Eva’s father in the process, Anton tries to win Eva back, save the bathhouse and finally escape to Eva’s nearby steamship. As multiple critics have noted, Helmer’s dark comedy self-consciously evokes the exaggerated style of German Expressionism, Soviet Montage or the physical and acoustic comedy of Jacques Tati.10 Burlesque moments involving Anton’s fumbling repairs and his attempt to keep the IMPERIAL apparatus, 11 an imposing industrial-era water pump and pipe system, well-oiled recall the fascination with technological failure that is key to what Tom Gunning in an essay on Buster Keaton has called the “operational aesthetic” of silent slapstick which in an almost Deleuzian fashion constructs man-machine assemblages that rest on the principle of malfunction and disjunction.12 As one film critic succinctly states in Die Welt in

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a 2008 review of the feature film Absurdistan [celebrated as a “Balkan fairy tale”], a prototypical Helmer film is “silent, playful, poetic and plays itself out in a place that cannot be located, neither geographically nor temporally [stumm, verspielt, poetisch und spielt an einem Ort, der sich weder geografisch noch zeitlich festmachen lässt].”13 One might be tempted here to draw upon Deleuze’s category of a non-place to depict the decrepit, dislocated or forgotten Europe depicted in Helmer’s fairy tale topography.14 Deleuze in Cinema I: The Movement Image attributes the idea of “any space whatever” to either the anthropologist Marc Augé or his student Pascal Auger who originally articulated the depersonalized nonplace (sites such as the airport lounge, shopping mall, motorway service station or hotel room) as ahistorical, anonymous spaces of urban supermodernity, which usher in a loss of identity in a never-ending labyrinth of transition and passage. Deleuze predictably reads Auger’s spatial concept against the grain, arguing that “any-space-whatever” is a space of “virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible,” “a perfect singular space of potentiality which has merely lost its homogeneity.”15 If for Deleuze it is especially post-World War II Europe where he sees a proliferation of “any-space-whatever” (“deserted […] disused warehouses […] cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction”16), for Helmer it is post-1989 Eastern Europe that now serves as a site of utopian fragmentation, disuse and dislocation. Just as the crumbling swimming pool in Sofia is in a state of constant decay and fragmentation, language itself has also deteriorated into a surreal assemblage of convoluted grunts, mumbles and pantomimes, minimalist snatches of speech that are both efficiency and crisis-driven: Helmer utilizes a universal artificial machine-language or kauderwelsch comprised of bureaucratic terms that could be appropriated in Russian or German but sound alike in almost any language, such as “Profit,” “Protokoll,” “Inspektion,” “Imperial,” “modern,” or “Achtung.” Yet the imperial machines and language of economic efficiency also stutter, repeatedly lose their lustre or power. The major-turned-minor language of bureaucracy represented in the film (oral and written) is a language in crisis, an almost expressionist performance of imperative commands, accusations, urgent or desperate cries (“Anton! Eva! Gregor!”) or capitalist slogans, such as the infamous “Technology – System – Profit!”. Keeping his dialogue to a minimum, Helmer employs alongside his silent film aesthetics of dislocated, dysfunctional and exaggerated bodies, a translational language strategy that both satirizes an abstract economic lingua franca of European efficiency, but also allows actors to speak in their native Eastern European tongues without subtitles or translation – an “abusive” (not “corrupt”) transnational language strategy, to use the illuminating terminology of Abé Mark Nornes’ fascinating study Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema.17 The major language or code of the State apparatus – what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Kaf ka: Towards a Minor Literature 18 describe as the imperial language of techno-bureaucracy – is played in a minor key.

Veit Helmer’s Tuvalu, Cinema Babel, and the (Dis-)location of Europe

In Helmer’s fairy tale feature, the EU language of “democracy,” “reform” and efficiency is presented in burlesque parody when five highly-decorated European politicians commemorate the occasion of demolishing the turn-of-the-century apartment building with a fragmented programmatic speech, delivered in a strong Eastern European accent that seems to spoof the rebuilding of the “New Europe.” The speech (“Prazident! – Minister! – Revizion! – Pop-u-lation! – Reform!, Demokratie-Zentral-Program-Doktrine!“) is literally burst asunder by the sound of explosives, revealing the power dynamics behind the EU integration “rebuilding” doctrine, what economist Joseph Schumpeter would have called capital’s need for “creative destruction.” What the capitalist system destroys is a “moral economy” (E.P. Thompson) of subsistency. As Die Welt writes “Tuvalu is a parable about the changes in the East and the blind belief in progress [Zugleich ist Tuvalu eine Parabel über die Veränderungen im Osten Europas und blinden Fortschrittsglauben].”19 The name of the scale set of buildings symbolizing the “new” European city is important in this regard. Gregor (played by the only American actor in the film, comedian Terence Gillespie) seeks to memorialize himself in the future cityscape, naming the future city “Gregorsgrad.” Gregorsgrad again articulates a disembodied time-space, as post-wall, post-EU integration capitalist development is given a name in Cyrillic script, conjuring up memories of Soviet megaprojects. Progress is here regress: Helmer’s language politics signal that in the New Europe an old Empire (Soviet Union) has been abolished, but a new empire simply rears its head in the old one’s place. This use of European languages in crisis evokes what Stuart Hall has termed “European cinema on the edge of a nervous breakdown” (characterized by fraying borders, disintegration, disorientation).20 European language, at a moment of transition or crisis, is perpetually “accented,” disembodied, fragmented and explosive. The sparse dialogue, fragmented speech depicting crisis, is also related to the idea of navigation and mechanical codes. Language – intimately related to scale and territory – is broken down into orientational clues or commands. At the end of the film, the French actor speaks in his native tongue, uttering “à droite!” and “arrêt!” In sharp contrast to Tuvalu, Helmer’s Gate to Heaven (a light romantic comedy released in 2003 and strongly criticized for its depiction of migrant identities and asylum seekers populating an “any-space-whatever” locale of conveyor belts and empty planes in an airport terminal)21 was shot in more traditional English, although ten other languages are also used in the film without subtitles. Absurdistan (2008, a film that takes its epic cues from Euripede’s Lysistrata) was shot in Russian and contains a poetic voice over, although here as well Helmer avoids dialogue and instead makes excessive use of fragmented emotional speech, or a sparse language of economic gain or profit (a sign reading “Special! Aktion!” for example, is used to advertise a foot massage). Only in Helmer’s Tuvalu, “Technology – System – Profit” fails, and the coin-consuming robot is demolished, along with the bath house itself. Helmer himself in an interview explains that the deteriorating bath house is also a metaphor for the disappearance of movie theaters in the digital age.22

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As a political satire, some reviewers have argued that the film posits Europe as a place that is “ripe for a change from the ruins of socialism to the giddy wildfires of capitalist greed and exploitation,”23 but on closer analysis it can be seen that the film not only seeks to preserve the memory objects of the socialist past,24 it simultaneously ridicules capitalist greed and the incessant drive for profit. The slogan “technology – system – profit” is first introduced in the context of a visit by a building inspector who deems the public bath a public risk and leaves behind a bureaucratic document with the title “protocol” (but on closer look, even the “protocol” of repairs also conveys its information via iconic pictograms, not written language – check marks next to pictures of the machine or door, etc. represent items that did not pass the inspection and need to be updated). But the guests of the swimming pool reject this profit-based system, preferring to pay in buttons, and in slapstick comedy shot in slow motion, the robot is destroyed. In the film a gift economy – a currency of memory objects that operate outside of use-value and exchange-value cycles – and a mimetic response system evoke an earlier pre-industrial language and knowledge structure, a privileged outside to the capitalist rationality of exchange. The lumpen – a “people to come” (Deleuze) – who rush to Anton’s aid in the swimming pool’s moment of crisis, helping Anton fake repairs for the inspector’s next visit also gain entry to the swimming pool through what one might term a “gift economy.” Instead of heralding EU neoliberal principles, the film celebrates the “general intellect” (Marx) of the dispossessed. Communicating through whistles, knocking, tap signals, and pantomime, this alternative community perhaps evokes Fredric Jameson’s “vision of a counterEurope” (“a Europe of the federated lumpens and marginal, that is called on to out-trump and cancel the official image of Common Market Europe”).25 Tuvalu’s interior vision, one should note, is also not the disembodied transparent gaze of the voyeur, not vision that offers a “transparent” window onto the world but vision as sensation (often physically marked through prisms or masks).26 For example, through intimate touch Anton is able to access Eva’s memory. Helmer provides us with a haptic reading of the visual. Just as Anton is able to view Eva’s fantasy world of hand-tinted colorful dreams, his cinematic language itself approaches Guattari’s minor or imperfect cinema of disfunctionality and asignifying parts, machines and intensities.27 Finally the film’s industrialist villain, the businessminded brother who is bent on demolishing older structures in the derelict East, including the public baths, is locked up, put in a straitjacket for all to see. Yet we would still be remiss if we did not note in passing that Tuvalu (a German-Bulgarian co-production) and Helmer’s other features in some respects conflate what Randall Halle in a classification of recent co-production strategies has called the “quasi-national” approach with the older “Europudding” strategy. While part of the latter is the casting of actors in disregard of their national origin or language solely according to the requirements of co-production agreements or auteurist creative intention, in the former “the transnational is disguised as a national product.”28 The “Europudding” approach of popular national cinema

Veit Helmer’s Tuvalu, Cinema Babel, and the (Dis-)location of Europe

and the art film of the post-war period rely on an audience address that mobilizes references to well-known world or popular literature, genre, star power or auteurist signatures. The “quasi-national” approach, on the other hand, often keeps the actor-ethnicity/nationality relation intact, frequently uses magical realist devices and seems to narrate stories that are culturally specific. Employing local talent and supporting “underdeveloped” film industries under educational premises, these films one could argue resemble a kind of Euro-funded “world cinema” and thus have been charged by critics as promoting essentialist cultural naval-gazing and fulfilling orientalist audience expectations.29 Tuvalu was shot in an abandoned bath house in Sofia, Bulgaria, using fantastic machines designed by a professor from the Sofia art academy as set-design – a look that resembles the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro such as Delicatessen (1991) or The City of Lost Children (La cité des enfants perdus, 1995) or the surrealist animation of Jan Svankmejer and the Quay brothers. Casting for the film took place in fourteen countries, before Helmer found the French actor Denis Lavant (The Lovers on the Bridge [Les amants du Point-Neuf, 1991]) and the Russian actress Chulpan Khamatova (Goodbye Lenin!, 2003) for the leads. For the international casting of Gate to Heaven (2003), a romantic comedy on asylum seekers and illegal immigrants working at the Frankfurt airport, Helmer traveled to twelve countries and finally hired the Russian actor Valera Nikolaev (U-Turn [1997], The Terminal [2004]) and the German Udo Kier, a histrionic specialist in slightly psychopathic characters following in the footsteps of Klaus Kinski (with a similar track record of employment in Eurotrash/exploitation pictures), alongside a Bollywood star, the stunning Masumi Makhija. For the international casting of his third feature film Absurdistan (2008), a sex comedy set in Muslim Azerbaijan with a production cost of one million Euros, Helmer boasts that he traveled to twenty-eight countries and hired actors from sixteen countries, including the Czech Kristyna Malérová and the German Max Mauff.30 Such a global orientation in terms of casting was already a distinct hallmark of over a dozen, award-winning shorts which Helmer directed as high-budget co-productions (e.g. 120,000 Euros for Tour Eiffel [1994]) or as lowbudget collaborations with film students at workshops hosted by the Goethe Institute in Beirut, Indonesia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan.31 Judging from the locales of his shorts and his three feature films Tuvalu (shot in Bulgaria), Absurdistan (Azerbaijan) and Baikonur (Kazakhstan), Helmer’s œuvre is characterized by a predilection for Eastern European settings and topics, and it comes as no surprise that Helmer in interviews often refers to the work and production strategies of his Berlin-based neighbor and close friend, Tajik director Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov. Khudojnazarov’s Luna Papa (1999) has been used by Randall Halle as an illustration of more recent forms of Euro-funded, faux world cinema – although a “quasi-national film” that seems to tell a culturally specific story, Luna Papa nevertheless features the star German actor Moritz Bleibtreu. Since Bleibtreu did not speak Tajik, he was cast as a mute character who mainly

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communicates through physical slapstick routines; thus, one can observe a similar silent film slapstick-informed language strategy in Khudojnazarov’s “quasinational” romantic comedy. Helmer himself in an interview for his film Absurdistan (closest in its strategy to Luna Papa) explains the complicated debt he owes to silent film and sound in an interview for the journal Filmmaker: “I think I like to take the best from silent filmmaking, as the visual language before sound came was much more elaborate than most of what we see nowadays in the cinema. Films were about visual storytelling at the time, but I think I can combine the best of both because I like to work with sound. For me, sound has the same importance but I don’t like to use sound just as dialogue […] my sound designer is on the verge of getting a pump gun after working a year [on the film Absurdistan] and then reading that Veit Helmer made this silent movie.”32 In this film foray into a forgotten, ossified and orientalized Europe, a poetic voice-over is layered on top of a silent film aesthetic of noisy projectors, black and white travelogue footage, and imperfect, dusty celluloid. As we have argued in this essay, Helmer’s refusal to create an identifiable German product (one reviewer writes that the director “isn’t much at home in his own country, having helmed productions in Bulgaria, Portugal, Japan and Kazakhstan”)33 and his celebration of either a cinema babel of transnational tongues or the exaggerated gestures of a silent film aesthetic can be viewed as part of a larger aesthetic strategy of dislocation, which despite its investment in history, or at least the material traces of film history, facilitates a confusion of temporal and spatial coordinates, positioning Eastern Europe as an anachronistic space and utopian site beyond or before capitalist rationalization where everyday trick games with state bureaucracies, romantic chaos and communal values have survived. To frame this utopian space, the director draws upon the anachronistic role of film technology itself, what the Kodak journal incamera refers to as “silent film methodology”: Both directorially and cinematographically Veit, whilst working through modern eyes, has paid homage to earlier genres. Chaplin’s influence, both from the early shorts, plus City Lights and Modern Times, is strong but Veit spans more widely, at least from Monty Python to 1984. He reinforced his vision, moreover, by employing much silent film methodology, thus setting DP Christov numerous challenges which were triumphantly overcome. Carbon arc lighting was the norm. Noisy and inconvenient as it may be, but the quality of the light is unique and, being DC-driven, there is no restriction on frame speed. Each sequence was re-shot at differing speeds between 21 and 28 frames/sec and all takes were printed for visual selection in the final cut. Although the film has a complex soundtrack there is neither meaningful dialogue, nor any subtitling. What words there are, are laconic and in various languages to keep the location non-specific. All shooting was in black-and-white, (Eastman double X negative film 5222 or Plus-X negative film 5231) followed by selective tinting, each location being characterized

Veit Helmer’s Tuvalu, Cinema Babel, and the (Dis-)location of Europe by its own shade, with the final cut being printed on color positive. The colors were selected closely with grader Bernhard Huhn at the lab Geyer-Werke Berlin. It was shot using an Arri BL3 supplied, as was much else, by Sofia’s Boyana Film Studio, with matte painting to eliminate inconvenient buildings and scenery. But lenses have improved and formats changed, so modernism crept in with the use of Hawk anamorphic lenses (from Vantage Film Germany) shooting widescreen 2.35:1 format. Editing was done by Araksi Mouhibian on an old two-screen Steenbeck, with bi-weekly visits for him and Veit to check the cuts on a big screen. 34

This exaggerated silent film artistry (consisting of, as the Kodak technician describes, a use of carbon arc lights, black-and-white film stock, selective tinting, etc.) and the confusion of spatial and temporal coordinates are in fact a signature element of the Helmer aesthetic. Here one should note that three years prior to his first feature film debut, Tuvalu, Helmer also wrote the script and served as co-author, assistant director and producer of the Munich Film School semidocumentary on the German film pioneers Max and Emil Skladanowsky, A Trick of Light (Die Gebrüder Skladanowsky, 1995). It is perhaps fitting that Wim Wenders’ search for traces of forgotten artifacts and apparatuses takes the film crew to the transitional topography of the former East Berlin (shot in aerial perspective, as in Wings of Desire [Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987]) where Helmer studied at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst (HFS) “Ernst Busch” in 1988, after he was rejected from a West German film school, the Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin. After several years of course work at the HFS, Helmer completed his studies at the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München.35 In Helmer’s first script for Wenders’ semi-documentary A Trick of the Light one can already detect key features that dominate his later fictional filmmaking. In a comic cinephilic and nostalgic account of German’s forgotten film history, Helmer conflates Berlin’s past and present monumental eras, moving fluidly between Wilhelmine Germany and the post-wall present, conflating and (con-)fusing two historical periods, just as the cinematography oscillates between still photography, grainy black and white “fakes” of historical footage of the 1895 Wintergarten filmed circus attractions, including the “Boxing Kangaroo” and “The Gymnastic Family Grunato,” and sweeping tracking shots in color of the former border areas or no-man’s land surrounding Potsdamer Platz. It is as if the flickering of the Berlin Bioscop apparatus – an example of imperfect, failed projection – continues to haunt Helmer as he moves in and beyond the European film landscape.36 Certainly this distinct interest in tinkering with machines, engineering new, often useless apparatuses is a distinctive aesthetic signature that challenges strict models of EU efficiency or capitalist “productivity” or even film production values. The Skladanowsky Bioscop may remain outmoded and imperfect (in 1995, as it was nearly 100 years ago), but Helmer seizes the “promise” of moving pictures, placing himself in the tradition of the tinkering projectionist. Explaining his keen predilection for all that has ossified (what Walter Benjamin might describe as the surrealist potential of the “recently

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outmoded” 37), Helmer once quipped: “For me everything has a soul which has attained an oxidized patina.”38 The flickering projector, long thought to embody the essence of a “soulless machine” (as described, for example in Pirandello’s 1916 novel Shoot: The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator), is the perfect vehicle to articulate and animate the derelict, forgotten interspaces that populate Helmer’s European fantasy.39 Throughout his filmmaking career, Helmer conflates spatial and temporal registers and a linear version of history as progress. The transition from socialism to capitalism is rendered burlesque comedy. In light of this rejection of productivity and perfection at a time when Europe undergoes an era of neoliberal reform and risk intensification, Helmer’s nostalgic silent film aesthetics with its dysfunctional, dislocated, and disembodied European cartography can be seen to convey a uniquely utopian impulse, offering audiences a “minor” escape from the EU mastercode of valorization, privatization, and financialization. When Tuvalu won the international critics prize at Flanders, the awards committee commended it “for its harmonic view on a diversity of cultures, for the quality of its photography and for the burlesque humour with which it talks about the actual evolution of Europe.”40 Only Tuvalu also posits what one might call a European counter-vision, an escape from Europe in transition, carving out a utopic outside and fantasy travelogue as epilogue to the film, as the sailing vessel finally steers away from the anonymous “non-place” of Bulgaria toward the exotic cartography of another “small nation.” As the title of the film indicates, the line of flight for the post-socialist couple Anton and Eva is the Polynesian island adrift in the Pacific, Tuvalu.

European counter-visions: Dennis Lavant in Veit Helmer’s Tuvalu

Veit Helmer’s Tuvalu, Cinema Babel, and the (Dis-)location of Europe

Machinic assemblage: Chulpan Khamatova, Dennis Lavant and the IMPERIAL machine in Veit Helmer’s Tuvalu

N otes 1 | Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/modernity Vol. 6, No. 2 (1999): 59-77. Also see the debate complicating the discursive understandings of “nation” and the “national” in the context of early cinema in Early Cinema and the “National,” ed. Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini and Rob King (New Barnet, Herts: John Libbey, 2008). 2 | Bela Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films [1924] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001). For Balázs silent cinema was an art that could “restore to modernity the lost expressive capacities of the visual body.” See also Erica Carter and Rodney Livingstone, “Béla Balázs, Visible Man, or the Culture of Film (1924),” Screen Vol. 48, No. 1 (2007): 91-108. 3 | Sabine Hake, The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany 1907-1933 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). 4 | Bela Balázs, Der Geist des Films [1930] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001). 5 | See Mark Betz, “Beyond Europe: On Parametric Transcendence,” in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 31-47; Mike Budd, “Authorship as a Commodity: The Art Cinema and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” Wide Angle Vol. 6 (1984): 12-19; Mike Budd, “The National Board of Review and the Early Art Cinema in New York: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as Affirmative Culture,” Cinema Journal Vol. 26, No. 1 (Autumn, 1986): 3-18; Mike

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Janelle Blankenship and Tobias Nagl Budd, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories (Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 1990); David Bordwell, “Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” Film Criticism Vol. 4 (Fall 1979): 56-64; Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Steve Neale, “Art Cinema as Institution,” in The European Cinema Reader, ed. Catherine Fowler (New York: Routledge, 2002), 103-120 and John E. Twomey “Some Considerations on the Rise of the Art Film Theater,” Quarterly Review of Film, Radio and Television Vol. 10 (Spring 1956): 239-247. 6 | On the “Film Europe” movement of the 1920s and 1930s, see Kristen Thompson, “The Rise and Fall of Film Europe,” in “Film Europe” and “Film America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange, 1920-1939, ed. Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), 56-81. 7 | On the role of the African colonial as an interpreter and mediator between the German, French, silent Jew and the Briton, see Nancy P. Nenno’s “Undermining Babel: Victor Trivas’ Niemandsland (1931)” in The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema, ed. Christian Rogowski (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 286-298, and Tobias Nagl, Die unheimliche Maschine: Rasse and Repräsentation im Weimarer Kino (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2009), 735-745. 8 | See, for example, Michelle Strozykowski, “Tuvalu – A Film by Veit Helmer. A Surreal Dialogue-Free Multicultural Movie Starring Denis Lavant,” 24 April 2009, available online at http://suite101.com/article/tuvalu-a-film-by-veit-helmer-a112135 or the German review: “Ein Halbgott in Absurdistan,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 13 August 2006, 6-7. In an interview for this article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Helmer states that the genre he is working with could be described as “magical realism” (7). 9 | Andrew Orlowski, “Pacific islands growing not shrinking, says old study. This time, somebody’s noticed,” http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/03/pacific_islands_ok/ In 2010 a media scandal erupted when newspapers announced that “small island developing states” (to use the language of “The Copenhagen Accord”) were not actually shrinking, but growing. Orlowski’s article describes such “small island states” as climbing on the “compensation bandwagon” to present their situation as more risk-prone than it actually is. For example, “The Copenhagen Accord” pledged $100 billion a year “prioritized for the most vulnerable developing countries” including “small island developing States.” Tuvalu, formerly known as the Ellice Islands, is a Polynesian island nation located in the Pacific Ocean midway between Hawaii and Australia. Its nearest neighbors are Kiribati, Samoa and Fiji. 10 | Other reviewers trace an affinity between Helmer’s magical realism and Buñuel’s or Švankmajer’s surrealism. 11 | This apparatus is reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s “heart machine” in Metropolis. The IMPERIAL machine in its dysfunctional state (and need for constant repair), however, rather resembles Deleuze and Guattari’s “desiring machines” (not a Moloch). 12 | Tom Gunning, “Buster Keaton or the Work of Comedy in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Hollywood Comedians: The Film Reader, ed. Frank Krutnik (London: Routledge, 2003), 73-77.

Veit Helmer’s Tuvalu, Cinema Babel, and the (Dis-)location of Europe 13 | Hanns-Georg Rodek, “Sprachlos in Absurdistan: Veit Helmers neuer Film ist ein versponnenes Balkan-Märchen,” Die Welt, 20 March 2008, 5-7. 14 | German critics often refer to Helmer’s interstitial European space or space between the high-tech and archaic, super-modernity and de-industrialization as a “Niemandsland” or “No Man’s Land.” 15 | Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 109. 16 | Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), xi. 17 | See Abé Mark Nornes, Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 18 | Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 19 | Katharina Dockhorn, “Veits Tanz in der Erfolgsspur: Heute startet Tuvalu, der erste Spielfilm des Wahlberliners Veit Helmer,” Die Welt, 22 June 2000, 143. 20 | Stuart Hall, “European Cinema on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” in Screening Europe ed. Duncan Petrie (London: BFI, 1992), 45-53. 21 | Consider for example Jan Distelmeyer’s critique: “Lustig ist das Migrantenleben: Veit Helmers Spielfilm Tor zum Himmel macht den Frankfurter Flughafen zum Erlebnispark für Flüchtlinge (The Gay Life of the Migrant: Veit Helmer’s Feature Film Gate of Heaven turns the Frankfurt Airport into an Amusement Park for Refugees),” Die tageszeitung, 18 December 2003, available online at http://www.taz.de/1/archiv/archiv/?dig=2003/12/18/a0187. Brigitte Jähnigen in the Stuttgarter Nachrichten writes: “an ambitious theme, for which the award-winning director chose the wrong genre. Asylum, illegality and illegal work do not have to be forcefully examined through the lens of social advancement.” (Brigitte Jähnigen, Tor zum Himmel: Träume von einer besseren Welt,” Stuttgarter Nachrichten, 18 December 2003). 22 | Katharina Dockhorn, “Veits Tanz in der Erfolgsspur: Heute startet Tuvalu, der erste Spielfilm des Wahlberliners Veit Helmer,” Die Welt, 22 June 2000, 143. Helmer’s films are still shot on 35mm. Signaling to his audience the fact that he has not made a full transition to the “digital” (although he does use digital color correction), each Baikonur (2011) DVD jewel case includes a piece of his 35mm film as anachronistic memory object or memorabilia of the analogue age. In this volume “cinema in transition” also refers to an uneven and at times contested digital turn in cinema. 23 | Dennis Grunes, “Tuvalu (Veit Helmer, 1999),” available online at http://grunes. wordpress.com/2007/02/10/tuvalu-veit-helmer-1999/ 24 | Perhaps the most iconic of the socialist memory objects that are anachronistically preserved in Tuvalu are the “Ampelmännchen” from the former GDR. The “Ampelmännchen” are stop lights featuring an iconic pedestrian with a hat. In the film, when Denis Lavant tries to cross the street, he takes a mimetic turn. He thinks the “go light” commands him to wear a hat to cross the street, so he borrows a hat from another pedestrian in a short slapstick sequence, reminiscent of the Czech children’s TV series Pan Tau (1970-1978, co-produced with the West German TV station WDR) which contained a silent title character using a

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Janelle Blankenship and Tobias Nagl “magical” hat as a key prop. For a reading of Tuvalu in relation to nostalgia, see Herrad Heselhaus, “Dimensionen von Zeit und Raum: Veit Helmer’s Tuvalu,” Rhodus: Zeitschrift fur Germanistik, Issue 21 (March 2005): 1-20. 25 | Fredric Jameson, “Response,” in Screening Europe, ed. Duncan Petrie (London: BFI, 1992), 89. 26 | In another intimate and haptic moment of vision, transparent globes project the fantasy cartography of Tuvalu onto Anton’s face in the film. In two short, artificial dream sequences, the lovers access each other’s dreams by putting their hands on the other’s eyelids – the haptic here is connected to the oneiric and the film for a brief moment switches to negative film stock rendered in color. 27 | For Félix Guattari’s notion of “minor cinema,” see Gary Genosko’s chapter in this volume. 28 | Randall Halle, “Offering Tales They Want to Hear: Transnational European Film Funding as Neo-Orientalism,” in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 308. 29 | For more on “Europudding,” also see Randall Halle, German Film after Germany: Towards a Transnational Aesthetic (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008). 30 | Dockhorn, “Veits Tanz in der Erfolgsspur,” 3. 31 | For Helmer, such “low budget” filmmaking is specifically formulated as a series of risks. Helmer holds workshops on low-budget filmmaking (with budgets from 0.5 million to 2.5 million Euro) which specifically address the challenges and risks such productions offer. It is interesting that Helmer also as part of his creative funding strategy sometimes uses “small sources” from partner countries to supplement German state funding. For example, for his third feature film Absurdistan, Helmer asked a cell phone company in Azerbaijan for phone cards. They ended up investing in what he describes as a “small film” shot in a series of “small villages.” (“Veit Helmer presents his feature film Absurdistan [2007],” Sources 2 – Stimulating Outstanding Resources for Creative European Screenwriting, 4, available online at http://www.sources2.de/lectures/Veit%20Helmer%202008.pdf.) See also his video interview on his most recent feature film Baikonur (2011), shot at an old Russian space station in Kazakhstan. Here Helmer discusses both bodily and financial risks that he and the crew took in order to get this film “off the ground.” It is worth noting that Helmer also states that it would have been a risk “if he had not started the film.” (available online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU4Ft57R2Qk) 32 | “Veit Helmer, Absurdistan,” Filmmaker Magazine (6 January 2009), 3. Available online at http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/news/2009/02/veit-helmer-absurdistan/ 33 | Devin O’Leary, “Absurdistan” [Review, May 2009)], available online at the New Zealand Wellington Film Society website http://www.filmsociety.wellington.net.nz/db/ screeningdetail.php?id=537 34 | “Will a Dream come true in Tuvalu,” incamera, July 2000, 7. 35 | Jonathan Marlow, “Veit Helmer’s European Declaration of Independence,” 18 December 2005, available online at http://www.greencine.com/article?action=view&art icleID=223

Veit Helmer’s Tuvalu, Cinema Babel, and the (Dis-)location of Europe 36 | On the Bioscop apparatus and its afterlife, see Janelle Blankenship, “1 November 1895: Premiere of Wintergarten Program Highlights Transitional Nature of Early Film Technology,” New History of German Cinema, ed. Jennifer Kapczynski and ‎Michael Richardson (Rochester: Camden House, 2012), 23-30. 37 | Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” [1929], in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 1927-1934 Vol. 2, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 207-221. 38 | Dockhorn, “Veits Tanz in der Erfolgsspur,” 3. (“‘Für mich hat alles Seele, was Patina angesetzt hat,’ erzählt Helmer, der lieber Briefe schreibt als mailt, auf Kino statt auf Video setzt.”) 39 | Luigi Pirandello, Shoot: The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator [1916], trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 40 | As cited in Dennis Grunes’ review “Tuvalu (Veit Helmer, 1999)” (10 February 2007), available online at http://grunes.wordpress.com/2007/02/10/tuvalu-veit-helmer-1999/. If the LUX European Film Prize had existed in 1999 or 2000, would Tuvalu have won the prize for the film’s “harmonic view of a diversity of cultures” and its dark, albeit comic view of the “actual evolution of Europe”? It seems unlikely.

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At the Crossroads of Genre and Identity An Aesthetics of Distance in Thomas Arslan’s From Afar Angelica Fenner

L ocating B order C inemas The 21st century has witnessed the proliferation of heterogeneous film cultures in both established and emerging regions of the world. The critical scholarship generated to make sense of this filmic output relative to an imputedly mainstream monolith often employs a terminology evoking the spatial, the scalar, and the geographical, herein underscoring the importance of the politics of location. We have, for example, the “cinema of small nations”1: small in number, low in budget, and produced in a language only a minute percentage of spectators will understand. Other spatial metaphors also apply: the “cinema at the periphery,”2 references examples from Palestinian “stateless” cinema, Australian aboriginal filmmaking, or Quebecois cinema – all produced within the geographical bounds of the nation state, yet harboring an ambivalent or unresolved relationship to its political terms. In turn, the term “minor” cinema, loosely inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, encompasses filmmaking practices by members of a deterritorialized populace or a social, cultural, ethnic, or other minority who reframe the available representational discourses of the majority.3 Tom Gunning invoked the term when identifying trends among American avant-garde filmmakers of the 1980s, while Alison Butler argued for women’s cinema as a minor cinema “inside” others. 4 Meaghan Morris has applied the term to exemplars of Hong Kong cinema, and D.N. Rodowick to the work of West African filmmaker Ousmane Sembene.5 More recently, the term has gained traction in Marco Abel’s framing (2013) of a counter cinema movement that emerged parallel to the founding of the Berlin Republic and which film critics have come to refer to as the “Berlin School.”6 Both Rodowick and Abel attend to films that, while emerging out of a national cinema framework, do not necessarily aim to consolidate either the nation-state or cultural identities per se. Rather, Deleuze’s future perfect notion of “a people to come”7 offers both scholars a means to rethink cinema’s utopian potential for a wider populace, whether in First, Second, or Third World frameworks.

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In making his case for a German counter cinema, Abel engages closely with individual directors, including the Turkish-German filmmaker Thomas Arslan. While extant scholarly literature has often framed Arslan’s work in relation to minoritarian identity politics, Abel argues for “a realism beyond identity” that instead attends to his characters’ perception of the sensible world. My own ensuing analysis of Arslan’s unique visual essay From Afar (Aus der Ferne, 2006) is influenced by some of the same aesthetic frameworks that inspired Abel’s approach.8 However, in this instance, I also argue for the continuing relevance of spatial frameworks such as those exemplified by Hamid Naficy’s conceptualization of an “accented cinema.”9 Naficy’s thoughtful classification of stylistic approaches and themes in the artisanal work of geographically displaced (e.g. exilic and diasporic) filmmakers is particularly salient for Arslan’s travelogue, which emerged from his first visit to Turkey in nearly 20 years. His only feature-length documentary is comprised entirely of footage shot in May/June 2005 while journeying eastward across Turkey, using his camera to gaze “from afar” upon distinct locations. Beginning in Istanbul, he moved inland to Ankara, and from there to Gaziantep, Diyarbakir, and Van in the southeast, finally ending in Dogubayazit near the Iranian border. Arslan was born in Braunschweig in 1962 to a Turkish father and German mother. Although his primary schooling and socialization took place in Essen, he spent formative years in Ankara, Turkey between 1967 and 1971, while his father was completing his military service there. He later studied German literature and history in Munich and filmmaking at the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin from 1986 to 1992. Together with contemporaneous DFFB graduates Angela Schanelec and Christian Petzold, Arslan emerged as a driving force of the film movement that came to be known as the “Berlin School.” To date, he has produced seven feature-length fiction films, including the triptych comprised through Brothers and Sisters (Geschwister – Kardesler, 1996), Dealer (1999), and A Fine Day (Der schöne Tag, 2000) – three films focusing on youth of Turkish heritage growing up in Germany. As a whole, Arslan’s oeuvre can be categorized as “interstitial,” to borrow Naficy’s term for films he describes as “created astride and in the interstices of social formations and cinematic practices.” Oriented simultaneously towards the local and the global, they signify upon exile and diaspora by expressing, allegorizing, commenting upon, and critiquing the home and host societies and cultures and the deterritorialized conditions of the filmmakers. They signify and signify upon cinematic traditions by means of their artisanal and collective production modes, their aesthetics and politics of smallness and imperfection, and their narrative strategies that cross generic boundaries and undermine cinematic realism. 10

Arslan’s From Afar (2006), in particular, accords with what Naficy has coined the “border film,”11 since liminality governs the filmmaker’s identity, the diegetic fo-

At the Crossroads of Genre and Identity

cus of his project, its unsettling of aesthetic and narrative boundaries, and, of course, its geographical traversals. His travelogue also exceeds its generic bounds to display affinities with the autobiographical documentary. For although not offering extensive recollection of the childhood he spent in Turkey, there is a selectivity to the choice of scenes and settings that betrays a personal imprint. His choice not to create an explicitly autobiographical film in an era when such identity-based projects have gained popularity among television networks holds a political and aesthetic significance that I intend to unpack further. Turkey, the manifest object of study, can be understood as at once a geography, a culture, and a geopolitical entity holding a precarious status. A secular republic that emerged out of the multiple religious and ethnic affiliations of the former Ottoman Empire, Turkey also comprises the geographical gateway between continental Europe and the Middle East, and hovers in limbo regarding its petition for membership in the European Union. Regarding the latter, Arslan maintains, At the time I was shooting the film, the public discussion about Turkey had become quite intense. And it still is. It became almost the major task of the film to avoid immediately landing into the trap associated with the current slogans about Turkey and the stereotypical imagery. Occident, Orient, the West, the East: I can’t associate anything real with these terms. The starting point for the film was to be able to get an impression at all, and not to fall in line with some theory or to illustrate something you thought you already knew. I wanted to keep my eyes open for simple, concrete things in everyday life in this country.12

In unpacking Arslan’s unique cinematographic and narratological approach towards his object of study, my ensuing analysis accords with Rosalind Galt’s call for an assessment of post-wall European cinema that assumes “the logic of cartography: a form of writing that articulates both the discursive and the referential spaces of nations.”13 Existing scholarship on Arslan’s fiction filmmaking has already recognized the importance of spatiality evidenced in the careful framing of his characters in Germany’s urban milieu 14; under debate in these discussions is the extent to which his characters exercise emancipatory agency in relation to the physical and discursive topographies they inhabit and by which they are variously constrained. My own discussion of Arslan’s documentary bypasses judgments pertaining to what Abel summated as “the logic of identity,”15 which scrutinizes the sociological authenticity of such portrayals; I instead take the discussion of mobility in a different direction entirely. Guided by the writings of two French cultural theorists, Michel de Certeau on the role of “spatial practices” in storytelling and Jacques Rancière on “the politics of aesthetics,” I situate Arslan’s film relative to the broader aesthetic and political project of the Berlin School and its interventions in the very terms of European modernity.

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The S ignificance of a R oom with a V ie w The immersive affective qualities that will govern Arslan’s documentary style and aesthetic are signaled from the film’s very opening: a black screen and ambient urban white noise, onto which the film title and credits are, in turn, projected. The ensuing establishing shot from within an interior domestic space reveals an empty table in the foreground before an open window. As cultural prop, the table can be regarded as the locus for human labors, including those of a contemplative nature that involve generating inspirational thoughts. As such, this lingering opening image metonymizes a space of interpretive potentiality, yet one to be filled not so much by the filmmaker as by the viewer, with the table mediating between the originating gaze of the filmmaker/author and the framed world beyond. The setting’s self-conscious liminality is reinforced by the distinction between interior and exterior spaces, which correlates with the interiority of the psyche and the world without. The window, in turn, frames our view to the outdoors, over the rooftops of Istanbul to the Bosphorus – that channel of water lending this city the unique distinction of straddling two continents and cultural worlds. Arslan will repeat this device at nearly each stage of his journey, using the view out of an open window, presumably his respective hotel room in each city, as the stage for his sparse voice-over explanation of the region to be explored: Ankara as the capital, where his father was born and where he attended elementary school; Gaziantep, not far from the Syrian border, as the center of the Southeast; Diyarbakir, the second largest city in the Southeast predominantly inhabited by Kurds; Van, where speaking Kurdish in public only recently became permissible; Akdamar Island, where a 9th-century Armenian church stands as one of the few cultural icons remaining since the ethnic genocide of 1915; and finally, Dogubayazit, where once Christian, Muslims, and Jews cohabited in the foothills surrounding Mount Ararat, a site alleged to hold the archaeological remains of Noah’s ark. Throughout the film, Arslan’s gaze will remain fixed upon the world at large; he abstains from exploring interior emotional states and withholds visual access to his person and any discernible accompanying affect. His richly evocative film title, From Afar, thus speaks to his immediate subject position in more ways than one: as anchored in another culture and geography (Germany), but also as situated at an emotional remove both from the scenes unfolding before the camera and his own possible responses to them. Equally importantly, Arslan’s film title articulates an aesthetic stance that, although implemented in the documentary mode, accords with the feature films of the “Berlin School,” whose practices and tenets comprise a veritable “minor cinema.” In their stylistic approach, scale of financing, and audiences reached, these films diverge from what Eric Rentschler has coined “the cinema of consensus,” i.e. polished big budget German productions substantially backed by U.S.-based transnational media conglomerates such as Time Warner and Universal, who tap the global market via distributors such as Miramax and Lionsgate.16 Those employ a global vernacular that increasingly resembles

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Hollywood: air-brushed comedies such as Sönke Wortmann’s Maybe…. Maybe Not (Der bewegte Mann, 1994) and revisionist plunderings of German history for sensational storytelling and mass entertainment, vividly brought forth in Max Färberböck’s Aimée & Jaguar (2000) and Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall (Der Untergang, 2004). While Rentschler’s oft-cited manifesto on post-wall German cinema does not explicitly reference the definition of consensus first developed by French philosopher Jacques Rancière and widely reprinted, it seems highly salient to this discussion, and thus merits review here: [C]onsensus does not simply mean the agreement of the political parties or of social partners on the common interests of the community. It means a reconfiguration of the visibility of the common. It means that the givens of any collective situation are objectified in such a way that they can no longer lend themselves to dispute, to the polemical framing of a controversial world within the given world. In such a way, consensus properly means the dismissal of the “aesthetics of politics.”17

By contrast, the distinctive stylistic techniques that have become associated with the Berlin School are very much engaged in redefining aesthetics; I suggest that this, in turn, constitutes a politics, effectively, a “politics of aesthetics.” For Rancière, “an aesthetic politics always defines itself by a certain recasting of the distribution of the sensible, a reconfiguration of the given perceptual forms.”18 If this approach seems reminiscent of filmic modernism of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the similarity has been duly noted by contemporary French film critics; though usually less enthusiastic about production across the Rhine, they have taken to describing this emerging body of German films as la nouvelle vague allemande. They thereby implicitly locate these films within a genealogy retracing to Jean-Luc Godard, himself famous for making the pointed distinction between political films and making films politically. What is entailed in making films politically has, of course, preoccupied scholars and filmmakers alike since at least the films of Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein. Bertolt Brecht, as well, weighed in with great bitterness on the obstacles inhering in cinema’s capitalintensive industrial mode of production.19 These have resulted in its alignment with dominant modes of representation whose mainstay is predicated upon concealing the gaping discrepancy between social reality and bourgeois ideology. Rather than resort to mimetic portrayals of “reality” as a remedy to this, both Brecht and Rancière in his stead advocate techniques that unsettle our way of perceiving reality. By the same token, while Marco Abel regards “Berlin School” films as taking a critical stance relative to what he frames as the “neoliberalization” of modern societies, including Germany, he maintains their stance is not political in any explicit sense, e.g. these are not “message” driven films, nor do they undertake any sort of agitational rhetoric.20 I suggest that this accords with Rancière’s ideal for political art, which is “the dream of disrupting the relationship

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between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle.”21 Among those directors increasingly convened under the Berlin School moniker, each has generated a stylistically singular body of work, while also sharing certain similarities.22 Paraphrasing Abel, nothing much happens in these films: they are sparse on dialogue and action, make minimal use of extra-diegetic music, rely on nonprofessional actors chosen for who they already are rather than whom they could portray, and thematize the quotidian as a source of extraordinary events occurring on a minor scale.23 As such, stasis or immobility can be said to be central to their aesthetic and offers a counterpoint to the conventions of action and goal driven narratives, which constitute, in their own right, a certain “distribution of sensory experience,” a junction between aesthetic and political practices. According to Rancière, any such distribution is going to involve apportionment of parts and positions, “based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what ways individuals have a part in this distribution.”24 This complex assertion is central to the way I unpack Thomas Arslan’s documentary, and I will return to it repeatedly. For Rancière’s invocation of “activity,” of “participation,” and of “distribution” directly bears upon Arslan’s choice of film genre and aesthetics and how those provoke thoughtful reflection on broader terms of migration, mobility, and the politics of place and belonging in contemporary Europe.

Turkish -G erman V oyages of R e turn The expansion of the European Union continues to wreak havoc for professional mapmakers who must repeatedly redraw Europe’s boundaries. Filmmakers, as well, have felt compelled to retrace both fading and newly emerging vectors of East and West, North and South across cinematic landscapes that frequently exceed the current parameters of Europe. Arslan’s journey across Turkey is exemplary for such a recharting, and bears implications for his film’s narrative form. On first glance, he would appear to employ a genre centrally implicated in the emergence of the documentary mode, framed by John Grierson “as having certain fundamental chapters. The first chapter is, of course, the travelogue.”25 Indeed, the latter form is considered synonymous with the emergence of the cinema itself, as exemplified in such parlance as the traveling shot, the moving image, motion pictures, or the roving camera. The travelogue has also been most closely associated with footage of the material world, beginning with the early actualities gathered from the farthest corners of the earth for the Lumière brothers’ production company, or the clips shot in the same era by American entrepreneur Burton Holmes to accompany his traveling lectures on such disparate topics as “Cycling through Corsica” or “Yellowstone National Park.”26 Arslan’s film adheres to several criteria

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Jeffrey Ruoff suggests characterize the travelogue, traditionally understood as “an open form; essayistic, it often brings together scenes without regard for plot or narrative progression.”27 It blends restrained qualities of poetic non-narrative montage familiar to us from Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, 1927) or Joris Ivens’ Rain (Regen, 1929) with the most minimalist voice-over commentary, which recurs exactly seven times in the course of 89 minutes. The result is an episodic structure reminiscent of the spatiotemporal ambiguities previously cultivated in disparate modernist variations on the travelogue such as Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy (Viaggio in Italia, 1953) and Chris Marker’s Sunless (Sans Soleil, 1983). However, the detached observational mode and peripatetic structure are also subtended by personal motives, towards which the opening voice-over gestures only impassively: “Istanbul April 2005. Istanbul is the starting point for my journey through Turkey. A journey beginning in the West and ending in the East. Turkey is the country where my father came from. I haven’t been here for over 20 years.” This use of the first-person therefore also qualifies the film for consideration among a body of autobiographical documentaries produced in Germany since the mid-1990s by filmmakers of Turkish descent. While several, like Seyhan Derin and Yüksel Yavuz, were born in Turkey and moved to Germany in childhood or young adulthood, where they also received some portion of their schooling and later professional training, others, notably Thomas Arslan and Fatih Akin, were born in Germany.28 Each has had occasion to explore their personal and familial connection to Turkey via the personal documentary mode and each has included footage framed as a significant “voyage of return,” whether or not they were actually born in Turkey. In contrast to the others, Arslan’s film contains no footage shot in the German geographical arena but is nevertheless similarly permeated by an elusive quality of “double occupancy,” the term Thomas Elsaesser uses to describe “hyphenated nationals, meaning that their identity can come from […] a divided allegiance: the nation-state into which they were born, and to the homeland from which (one or both of) their parents came.”29 Traversals of national borders in these personal documentaries enact journeys of passage in more ways than one, as the investigation of defamiliarized geographical and cultural settings also becomes a foil for excavating ambivalent psychical terrain bound up with their personal heritage. In his discussion of f lanerie, or what he refers to in the English translation as “walking in the city,” Michel de Certeau maintains, “the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered.”30 One can, of course, extrapolate from the urban setting to any terrain, and interpret walking to other forms of motivated movement across time and space. Important is to understand that these offer “a series of turns (tours) and detours that can be compared to ‘turns of phrase’ or ‘stylistic figures,’ effectively, a rhetoric of walking. The art of ‘turning phrases’ finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path. This art combines styles and uses.”31 Effectively, walking and, by extension, other

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modes of volitional navigation by automobile, bicycle, or other transport, can be understood as modes of enunciation across space, which cumulatively enact their narratives. Each of the afore-mentioned filmmakers thus arguably engages in a specific process of creating “space out of place” – e.g. revealing or enacting with the mobile camera material and discursive relations that are, in turn, inscribed upon specific localities across Germany and Turkey – or alternately, turning social spaces into recognizable places, e.g. lending social relations of personal relevance in specific contexts a geographical or discursive imprint iconically recognizable to others. Whereas popular reception has often dwelled upon the sociological significance of these films, reading them as mimetic documents in relation to social realities, my reading of Arslan’s documentary as of those by Akin and Derin discussed in other publications,32 situates their material practices as performative, as tracing vectors in space that enact what de Certeau would refer to as “phrasing.”33 As such, these “diasporic documentarians” enact a historically unique relationship to that fraught and contested concept known as “mobility.” Their parents, for the most part, arrived in Germany as temporary workers intent upon returning to their homeland or ambivalent about the possibility of settling permanently in another culture. Born into this instability, the second generation may often, though certainly not always, be better equipped to embrace transience or a “mobile mentality” as part and parcel of the modern condition of residency. Certainly, the migratory experience for millennia has been defined by a transaction in which geographical and cultural rootedness are bartered to gain socio-economic, i.e. class mobility. Yet today this frame of mind is one for which not only those that leave their homeland must be equipped, but increasingly also resident populations in post-industrial nations worldwide. Mobility, as the international shibboleth of neoliberal political discourse, is a term that has gained a specific historical and political change in Western Europe since the collapse of the Iron Curtain, ensuing globalization of labor markets, and establishment of a single monetary currency. In discussing the relevance of the term for unpacking the counter narratives of the Berlin School, Marco Abel has pointed to several well-publicized speeches delivered by German Presidents Roman Herzog in the 1990s and by one of his successors, Horst Köhler, who assumed his post in 2004. Both leaders called for greater flexibility on the part of employers and workers alike in accepting broader economic “reform” measures pressed upon Europe by most particularly American neoliberal economists.34 These reforms involve reconfiguring the social welfare system, implementing more part-time labor, encouraging greater flexibility among workers in relocating to geographical areas where work has become available, and also in assuming employment that may deviate from their original training. Effectively, what is called for is an unrelenting mobility, a preparedness to be “on the move” in every facet of one’s existence. Mainstream and art cinema alike have responded with action narratives whose heroes and heroines respond to global instabilities and increasingly combative societal conditions and ecological environments with an almost robotic, machine-

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like resilience and heightened space-time compression across the centers of global capital, in examples as disparate as Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (Lola rennt, 1998), Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity (2002), and the films of Jackie Chan. Yet what interests many filmmakers of the Berlin School are, instead, those individuals who arguably comprise the silent majority, who are, in the words of Christian Petzold, “poorly prepared for modern life and always carry archaic remainders of another life. It is these people who are being pushed out of societies or are put in motion, but they do not even know where to go, where all of this is supposed to lead.”35 Rather than mythologize the movement of traveling business executives and tourists, whose mobility is financed by capital and connotes power and autonomy, Petzold is interested in mobility’s underside, in the fact that underpinning that appearance of endless movement are feelings of emptiness, loneliness, stasis. Petzold observes: “This unmoving movement, this immobile mobility, I think, is something, a place, an uncanny place, that has emerged as a fundamental condition of life in the present: a new form of loneliness of the traveler. And this new loneliness has not even been researched.”36 I see an affinity between this “loneliness of the traveler” and specifically Thomas Arslan’s subject position in his personal documentary, one the camera work defines as governed by stasis, mute observation, and distance. As such, his film offers a third and quite distinct panel among the triptych of “journeys of return” comprised through Seyhan Derin’s I Am My Mother’s Daughter (Ben Annemin Kiziyim – Ich bin Tochter meiner Mutter, 1996) and Fatih Akin’s We Forgot To Go Back (Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren, 2001). The latter two documentaries possess tremendous archival value for the testimonials collected from immediate and extended family members, out of which emerge intergenerational portraits of individual pathways of movement and accommodation across continents and cultures. Stylistically, Akin’s family film contrasts with the feminist framework, lyrical dream sequences, and confessional intimacy of Derin’s film. He instead operates very much in the postmodern mode of citation, or “sampling” as he likes to call it, invoking tropes of upward mobility and ethnic integration originating in American popular culture, including in the work of Martin Scorsese, who early in his career also made a personal documentary about his parents titled Italianamerican (1974). As well, a medley of American funk, soul, and pop music recurs during transitional sequences to create an upbeat affective filter of reified pop cultural associations through which spectators assimilate the disparate testimonials. Despite their divergent modes of narration, both films possess an emancipatory ethos that results from the catharsis of testimonial witnessing and memory work among family members, and the valorization of class and gender mobility and socio-cultural integration. Both films also underscore personal filmmaking as a mode of epistemological inquiry that ultimately consolidates the bounds of the self and does so through relational encounters with others. Arslan’s film presents something entirely different, something that contrasts with both Derin’s intricate resolution of lingering familial rift and Akin’s upbeat

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inscription of himself as investigative journalist probing his family history in the style of Michael Moore. In all instances, the filmmaker, like de Certeau’s “walker,” “constitutes in relation to his position, both a near and a far, a here and a there.”37 However, Arslan, as his film title implies, underscores rather than tries to overcome the gap between the two. His approach is defined by an austerity of affect, and a disavowal of those narrative conventions that have come to be associated with an autonomous and self-emancipating subject, who, precisely through efforts to gain greater proximity to his/her project (e.g. through interviews, travel, selfreflection, etc.), may actually enact a degree of mastery over, and thus, distance from this material. Certainly, Arslan’s journey to Turkey, like those undertaken by Derin and by Akin, inevitably bears some correlation with his personal association with that country. But his impassive opening voice-over betrays no motivating grounds for his presence there, no emplotment, no back story of familial intrigue or personal trauma that justifies or explains either his presence in Turkey, the scenes and sites he chooses to (re)visit, or his impressions of and response to what he finds there. In effect, he refuses the implicit or explicit psychologization and confessional stance that otherwise lends a degree of interiority to first-person filmmaking and that increasingly defines both character driven documentary and mainstream fiction filmmaking alike – what Christian Petzold calls “the cinema of identification.”38 Moments of personal investment in Arslan’s footage can only be discerned indirectly, primarily through the changing relationship of the camera work towards the pro-filmic. The encounter with his Turkish aunt in Ankara comes the closest to engaging his family history directly, as the scene deviates from the otherwise narrow cinematographic repertoire of static “staring” shots, occasional subtle pans, and forward tracking captured by Arslan’s camera from his car dashboard as the filmmaker drives along highways and country roads from one region to another. The scene begins with several static shots of narrow alleys lined by two-story stucco and wood beam houses in a historically older part of Ankara. On a frontal view of a simple doorway cut into an exterior courtyard wall, Arslan’s voice-over intones: “In the house beyond this wall my father and my aunt were born.” The next shot from within the gated courtyard pans slowly 90 degrees along the dilapidated exterior of the houses, mimicking the movement of the human head, of someone trying to glean something of his paternal heritage along the wall’s uneven surfaces, or listening for the echo of voices long departed. In the next shot, an older woman whom we can infer to be his aunt stands before a door, in the only use of medium close up and the only direct address to the camera within the entire documentary. The woman reminisces slowly and deliberately, with several thoughtful pauses, “When we moved away from here as children, we cried a lot … We didn’t want to leave this part of the city, the park, our friends … Everything looks exactly as it did before … It’s nice to live with these memories here … I was never as happy anywhere else because it was the house of my birth.” Cutting back to the alleyway, the camera follows her steadily as she walks down the street towards another gate and passes through into

At the Crossroads of Genre and Identity

the courtyard of, presumably, the house to which the family moved next. Turning to face the camera again, she stands before the door, and nods knowingly towards the camera operator, i.e. Arslan, as she explains, “After your father left for Germany, it was hard to live here with my grandmother … My father died here.” The elderly woman’s statements are expressed simply and with restraint, leaving much room for inference, particularly about how migration unsettles the continuities of family lineages. As such, this scene in Ankara enacts in more condensed form the spatialization of the search for lost origins undertaken by Seyhan Derin in returning to the building ruins where her mother gave birth to her, or by Fatih Akin when visiting the house where his father was born and where his uncle still lives. Yet, in contrast to their footage, no further affect is projected into the scene by the filmmaker; while his aunt may harbor sentimental recollections, he does not appropriate these as his own or indulge in the type of nostalgia viewers have come to subconsciously expect and enjoy from such journeys of return. When Akin journeys, for example, by mini-van from Istanbul to Zonguldak, the fishing village where his father’s brother returned after a short and unsatisfying stint in Germany, the brief “road movie” montage is accompanied by the Odyssey tune “Goin’ Back To My Roots” in the soundtrack, thereby filtering its significance through pre-existing nostalgic associations with 1970s pop culture. Derin’s film, as well, cuts from her mother’s confession of a less than satisfying marriage to the sight of a peasant woman sifting a basket of grain against the backdrop of the setting sun, while a folk song in the soundtrack wistfully intones, “a woman’s night before her wedding should not be filled with hot tears.” The effect is to situate her mother’s experience in an earlier “pre-modern” temporality, that of cyclical tasks such as the harvesting of foods, with which women in agrarian cultures are often associated. All three filmmakers do, however, also capture a degree of ambivalence about the nature of social change under modernity experienced by Turkish citizens – those abroad and those at home. Arslan, for example, cuts from his aunt’s remarks to a little boy staring forlornly from the barred window of a brownish-orange stucco building façade that, on first glance, could be located in the same historic district. We understand moments later why the window has steel bars, however, as the camera pans left to reveal that this is actually a high rise building, behind which loom others in equally stark anonymity. Arslan explains in voice-over that his aunt now lives in Koru Sitesi (“wooded district”), where residents have all the modern comforts and are guarded by a private security service. The sight of the little boy watching the world from behind barred windows raises for discerning spectators the question of whether security from external intrusion in the modern age is purchased at the price of also isolating residents from an earlier web of social relations mapped across heterotopic spaces. Editing, composition, and camera work hereby collude to create a “spatial story” (de Certeau) about how an individual close to Arslan’s family history has experienced modernization across time and space. If Arslan’s father chose extra-territorial mobility through migration to Germany, the

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consequences of intra-territorial mobility within Turkey are here conveyed through transformations in architectural form, from the horizontal relations traced across labyrinthine domiciles and courtyards, to the verticality of the modern high rise, which, one might conclude, conceals evidence of class differences through social isolation and architectural homogeneity. As Adorno and Horkheimer concluded half a century ago, such planning projects, “which are supposed to perpetuate individuals as autonomous units in hygienic small apartments, subjugate them only more completely to their adversary, the total power of capital.”39 Yet Arslan’s voice-over does not judge this footage, nor retroactively frame the unfolding present in the reified terms of cultural conflict or its resolution. As such, he adheres to a different vision of critical art, one not preoccupied with revealing forms and contradictions of domination, but rather, one that “questions its own limits and powers, that refuses to anticipate its own effects.”40 Only the editing and camera work reveal a critical logic, albeit one that is never situated relative to his own subject position, identity, or desire. Cumulatively, these choices constitute a politics of aesthetics, in the sense intended by Rancière, but one that refrains from activating the politics often implicit in first person filmmaking, particularly when generated from within an identity positioned as visible minority relative to the dominant culture. Both Akin and Derin have produced personal films that participate in the self-authentication of the artist. The identities thereby consolidated are self-consciously situated relative to their gender and ethnic heritage, but also relative to the broader groups in which they bear membership, that of Turkish-Germans residing in, having settled in, or born in Germany. Identity politics within cultural production can all too easily become imbricated in a broader “politics of recognition,”41 one sometimes encouraged by the authors themselves in their search for societal approbation of a unique artistic identity or to maximize niche audiences or markets. Alternately, a given art work or text may be appropriated by third parties with vested interests, be these politicians, educators, critics, scholars, sociologists, or members of various ethnic, gendered, or social constituencies operating at a subnational level or from abroad. Whatever the impetus, these claims may serve alternately as a call for recognition of difference (the claim for a unique cultural identity within Germany) or of inherent sameness (“we are all German citizens,” regardless of other vectors of identity). Governmental regimes – what Rancière would refer to as “the police order” – presuppose precisely “a reified subject or predefined group of individuals such as the proletariat, the poor, or minorities,” when in fact, the “only possible subject of politics is the people or demos, the supplementary part of every account of the populations.”42 Arslan arguably sidesteps debates about multiculturalism in Germany, and for that matter, in Turkey – debates that have become such an enduring and fraught topic in the public sphere, in policymaking and various print and broadcast media. But he does so not in order to abnegate that anything could be at stake in the realm of representation, but rather in order to radically provoke the viewer to establish his or her own conclusions.

At the Crossroads of Genre and Identity

The R edistribution of the S ensible Such an approach necessarily calls for an entirely different “phrasing,” to invoke de Certeau’s terms. These personal films each engage in some sort of “tour,” a series of topological speech acts. But where Akin and Derin stress their own movement and agency, and actively participate in the pro-filmic operations that allow spaces to emerge, Arslan seems more intent upon foregrounding the act of seeing and the image as a plane projection. An early scene in his documentary pays homage to at least one Turkish filmmaker with whom Arslan shares many stylistic affinities: it opens with a side view of two men in profile sitting at a table, the one in the foreground resting his hand on a computer mouse as both direct their attention to something just beyond the left frame. The camera is placed in such a manner as to block our view of the object of their gaze, compelling us to instead contemplate the fixated staring of the two men, from whose conversation we gradually deduce that they are sitting before a computer monitor, digitally editing a film. The man in the foreground points out that the excerpt in question has to be shorter, the cutting, faster, confronting us with the central role that rhythm and timing play in generating film discourse. The longer duration of this self-reflexive scene with the two men itself encourages viewers to apply their own powers of deduction to determine the identity of the mystery director. A poster for Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Distant (Usak, 2002), situated frame right on the wall behind the two men, offers a clue: the film title bespeaks an aesthetic of distance, contemplation, and long takes akin to Arslan’s own choice of title. The ensuing reverse shot of the computer screen the men have been so intently scrutinizing also offers another clue: two open film frames in Final Cut, one of which is a widely publicized and, by now, iconic image of the director’s wife Ebru Ceylan that was used on the film poster for Climates (Iklimler, 2006) – probably recognizable to many film scholars also from its use on the cover of Gönül Dönmez-Colin’s monograph Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance, and Belonging. 43 In Climates, which won the FIPRESCI film critics’ award at Cannes in 2006 and Best Director at Antalya’s Golden Orange Film Festival, Nuri and Ebru Ceylan play a married couple who become emotionally estranged, herein continuing a motif of modern alienation that has preoccupied the director throughout his oeuvre and that, along with his cinematographic style, displays striking affinities with films of the Berlin School, including also his employment of amateur actors to stage his studies on human estrangement and the everyday. As well, he pursues a similarly low-budget auteurist practice, consistently incorporating extended family and himself into the film cast, and serving as director, writer, editor and producer of his own films. Like Ceylan, Arslan unsettles the division between his subject position as cameraman/director and the pro-filmic material. But he does so not by crossing that divide and appearing in his own footage, as does Ceylan, but rather by underscoring the ongoing aporia between the two poles of subject and object, between interiority and exteriority, which, in this case, also comprise the poles

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between his present-day identity and his memories and earlier associations with Turkey. A remark by Christian Petzold in the context of discussing “the loneliness of the traveler” seems salient to Arslan’s situation in Turkey: he figures as one of “those who end up in transitional spaces, transit zones where nothingness looms on one side and the impossibility of returning to what existed in the past on the other.”44 Arslan does not shape his material into a nostalgic “journey of return” of the sort already familiar to spectators, nor does he profess potentially contrived or forced affinities or alliances with the culture or its people on the basis of his ethnic heritage. Firmly anchored in the immediacy of the moment, the duration of Arslan’s static shots heightens the viewer’s awareness of a differential between the mobility of the pro-filmic bodies and the immobility of the observational camera; this, in turn, disarticulates cinematic space from geopolitical space and thereby foregrounds the performativity of culture. This rigorously austere technique can be read as in its own right constituting an act of what Rancière would describe as “dissensus,” here understood not as a conflict of interests or values, but rather, “a dispute over what is given and about the frame within which we sense that something is given.”45 Each shot provided us by the immobile camera observing verité life in Turkey has clearly been prepared in advance with regard to framing, distance, and composition. But in the absence of a unifying pro-filmic protagonist as site of identification, spectators must discern for themselves the significance of quotidian movements of unidentified anonymous strangers, and moreover, of shot-to-shot relations from one setting to the next. One could even say that the editing is guided by a logic emerging between places rather than people. Thus, the afore-mentioned opening sequence from atop Istanbul looking toward the distant Bosphorus cuts to a “reverse” shot from aboard one of the numerous ferries that traverse the channel, looking upward to the dwellings atop a hill, from which the earlier shot would have originated. The white noise of the city morphs into the white noise of churning waters, a veritable match on sound. From the moving ferry, Arslan then offers a match on movement, now carried along the long corridor of an automated “movator” in one of Istanbul’s subway tunnels. The ensuing “reverse” shot, in turn, is situated on the other side of the turnstile through which pedestrians exit the station. The spectator’s inclination to observe and reflect upon the unfolding patterns of human activity is only further reinforced by the fact that most (international) viewers will not understand the language spoken in the fragments of speech overheard in disparate public spaces. Barred direct linguistic access, our powers of visual scrutiny necessarily gain intensity, as does our attention to the aural texture of the landscapes, comprised as they are of the cadences of human voices, technology, and environmental white noise. Cumulatively, what is achieved is a “re-distribution of the sensible.” Recall, again, Rancière’s partage du sensible, defined as “a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what ways individuals have a part in this distribution.”46 Rancière’s rendering

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of the term “distribution” is intended to set into play dual meanings of the verb partager in relation to images, bodies, and places: namely, both their organization (i.e. the construction of a social order) and their partitioning (the politics of access, of allocating resources and power). The possibility of a redistribution is facilitated by the way Arslan positions himself relative to his object of study; he does not conceal the partition created by his German upbringing by suturing it over with pre-existing tropes and false identifications. Instead, his camerawork displays an almost anthropological fascination with observing bodies in formation, engaged in synchronized movement to music, be it in marching bands, national anthems, exercise groups, circular line dancing at a wedding. These enact the literal subdivision of community into groups, social positions, and functions, with implications also for the terms of membership – a membership Arslan does not contrive to share, even empathetically. This is richly illustrated in the footage shot in Ankara, where Arslan initially explains in voice-over he once went to elementary school. We observe children playing in a schoolyard, then teachers assembled outside in an open courtyard collectively leading orderly rows of pupils in singing the national anthem. Several staring shots of the grounds surrounding the Atatürk mausoleum ensue, including long shots of tourists milling across the enormous plaza like ants and a medium shot observing a helmeted soldier in uniform, performing at regular intervals the robotic paces that corporealize the vigilant patriarchal Turkish State “at attention.” Arslan does not use this material to undertake confessional recollections of his own childhood nor alternately to critique the present day interpellation of Turkish children into what Aksoy and Robins have elsewhere referred to as the “deep nation,” involving “the collective processes that work towards the normalization of cultural homogeneity and against cultural diversity and change.”47 Yet the close (academic) observer is likely to recall Althusserian processes of interpellation in the scene of teachers and school children assembled in the school courtyard, or Kracauer’s “mass ornament” in the synchronized movements of soldiers at the Atatürk Memorial, or in a stadium filled with uniformed young girls performing eurythmics. 48 Reflexivity about the spectatorial labors involved in making sense of movement in visual representation is signaled in footage shot in an art museum, showing a schoolteacher surrounded by her young flock and standing before a painting. She guides them through the interpretation of a pastoral image by asking them why the stalks of wheat appear blurry, and goes on to explain that this is a technique with which a static image can convey that the wheat is actually moving in the wind. Within the context of Arslan’s documentary, her explanation becomes an extra-textual commentary on “moving” images, on the illusion of movement in the two-dimensional image projected on a screen at 24 frames a second. Elsewhere, a schoolteacher guides her class through rote repetition from their English textbooks, with individual students carefully reading aloud sentences that roll awkwardly off their tongue and seemingly without comprehension of their meaning. By analogy, one may recall the camera mechanically recording what it

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sees and our own inclination to view documentary as a mimetic rendering of the phenomenal world, when in fact, processes of translation, most particularly cultural but also political, drive the viewer’s ethnographic perusal of the movement of bodies and our apperception of sounds across different sites. For example, in footage shot in the east, near the Syrian border, the editing situates us first amidst haunting static shots of half-submerged buildings of the village of Halfeti, flooded in 1999 by damming the Euphrates in the service of state-led agricultural and economic initiatives implemented in southeastern Anatolia. In an ensuing long shot, the camera is positioned at waist-height on the side of a hill, gazing upon an arid, lifeless landscape that includes some young people visible on the distant horizon. Descending the hill and approaching the immobile camera, the throng includes several students playing snare drums that grow louder with proximity. Their marching bodies threaten to overrun the camera, but diverge to the right or left at the last moment, immersing the viewer in a human formation tenaciously moving forward against the backdrop of an inhospitable natural landscape. It would seem that ensuing generations forge onward even in the face of the destruction of local architectural history or social infrastructure in southeastern Anatolia, a region often subjugated by the governing powers in Ankara for broader nation-building initiatives. In Diyarbakir, by turn, Arslan’s camera observes young men wordlessly engaged in assembly work in different industrial settings. In turn, a young boy gazes fixedly at a console in a video arcade, and in another shot, an array of silently flashing yellow lights regulate the movement of cars at a lonely intersection at dusk. The audiovisual montage weaves a counterpoint of aural rhythms and visual movement, with bodies entering into and moving out of social formation against disparate architectural backdrops – simple open markets, elegant interior malls with escalators, decrepit lean-tos. A woman walks along a dirt road towards the camera, surrounded on both sides by rows of lifeless and seemingly empty concrete high-rise apartment buildings; in the foreground, a paper bag flutters across the austere rubbled terrain, bringing to mind the landscapes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s early films, Red Desert (Il deserto rosso, 1964) and Eclipse (L’Eclisse, 1962) and offering an analogous visual commentary on Turkey’s rapid and uneven modernization. If the aesthetic practices of the Berlin School with which Arslan is associated trace a debt to exemplars of modernist cinema, they also move beyond, or perhaps, sublate that tradition by dint of the historical moment in which these contemporary practices issue and their geographical travel beyond Europe. David Bordwell has coined the term “parametric narration” to identify this highly stylized mode of filmmaking which has, over time, become associated with a heterogeneous body of “world cinema,” i.e. art house cinema closely wed to the international film festival circuit. 49 Parametric cinema, in Bordwell’s original formalist framework, foregrounds style (through sound, camera movement, duration, editing) to a shaping force in the film.50 By contrast, he regards the invisible style of Hollywood as coalescing out of its resolute subservience to syuzhet (plot, or the actual

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ordering of events), which itself subserviates to fabula (the actions and characters that comprise story), with style mediating between the two to produce narration. “Style-centered” or parametric films such as From Afar thwart our habituated desire to construct a linear story from what we see. Thus, while opening the window (as it were) to further personal insights about the filmmaker’s biography (i.e. his bi-cultural identity), the potential to weave this into a coherent story is withheld, not least through an elliptical audiovisual montage of verité footage that defies character-centered emplotment. Style herein seems to inherently resist interpretative frameworks in a manner also touched upon by Susan Sonntag in her pivotal essays on Bresson and Godard.51 Although Bordwell’s conceptualization of parametrics may bring a systematicity to the way we understand formal stylistic strategies to operate in select films, to automatically assume that style in a film that necessarily constitutes narrational meta-commentary or is otherwise compositionally motivated would impose a degree of rationalization I hope my examination of Arslan’s film has been able to avoid. I find convincing the suggestion Mark Betz advances, that what style may “do” in these elusive films is to generate productive frisson: “it raises important questions regarding the relation of the global to the local,” and “throws into relief the ways in which local knowledges are inflected, indeed even explicitly foregrounded as such, by parametric form, knowledges that insist on being heeded (even as unknowns) through that form.”52 The knowledge such art makes visible may be conveyed, in Rancière’s terms “in partitions of space and time that it produces to define ways of being together or separate, being in front or in the middle, of being inside or outside.”53 The afore-mentioned mise-en-abyme created by filming Nuri Bilge Ceylan, a director similarly associated with parametric cinema and shown absorbed in editing his own film, literalizes the partitioning that Arslan’s film also captures in random glimpses of life in Turkey – glimpses which, in their cumulative effect, cannot fully reduce to the anthropological and, instead, remain, in Betz’s terms, “transcendent.” Arslan’s closing sequence confirms Bordwell’s own observation of parametric cinema as “open-ended, with no predictable point of termination.”54 From a traveling shot behind a pick-up truck rumbling along a dirt road somewhere close to Iran, the film cuts back to the moving waters of the Bosphorus and Istanbul visible on the horizon, and from there, by reverse shot to the exact same “room with a view” from which his visual essay first launched. If the overly tidy and hasty circularity of this final shot serves to remind us that one can only fly back to Europe from Istanbul, it also seems to symptomatize the filmmaker’s surrender to the futility of a more “profound” closure: endings, too, offer only provisional partition.

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Space of interpretation: mediating between filmmaker and framed world in From Afar

Spectatorial labor and sensory experience: school children in an art museum in Thomas Arslan’s From Afar

N otes 1 | See The Cinema of Small Nations, ed. Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 2 | See Cinema at the Periphery, ed. Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones, and Belen Vidal (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010).

At the Crossroads of Genre and Identity 3 | Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 4 | See Tom Gunning, “Towards a Minor Cinema: Fonoroff, Herwitz, Ahwesh, Klahr, Lapore and Solomon,” Motion Picture Vol. 3, No. 1-2 (1989-90): 2-5; Alison Butler, Women’s Cinema – The Contested Screen (London: Wallflower, 2002). 5 | See Meaghan Morris, “Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema: Hong Kong and the Making of a Global-Popular,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 5 (2004): 189-92; David N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time-Machine (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 139-169. 6 | See Marco Abel, The Counter-cinema of the Berlin School (Rochester: Camden House, 2013). Writers often credit the film reviewer Rainer Gansera with first using the term in his review of Thomas Arslan’s A Fine Day (Der schöne Tag, 2001). In actual fact, it seems impossible to establish a precise originating moment for the term, which has also been identified in a review by Merten Worthmann of Angela Schanelec’s Passing Summer (Mein langsames Leben, 2001), which was issued a few weeks earlier than that of Gansera (see Rainer Gansera,“Glücks-Pickpocket. Thomas Arslans traumhafter Film Der schöne Tag,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 3-4 November 2001; Merten Worthmann, “Mit Vorsicht genießen,” Die Zeit, 27 September 2001). 7 | See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 8 | This essay was originally composed in 2011, prior to the release of Marco Abel’s 2013 monograph. Because my essay’s publication now postdates that of his book, I have reframed my introduction to acknowledge his important intervention. However, it would be disingenuous to try to reframe my ensuing argument in relation to that book, since the conclusions drawn here, while bearing some affinity with his own, were developed independently. 9 | Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 10 | Ibid., 4-5. 11 | Ibid., 239. 12 | “Thomas Arslan Talks about his Film” (excerpts from an interview with Michael Baute, on January 3, 2006 in Berlin), available online at www.peripherfilm.de/ausderferne/ 13 | Rosalind Galt, The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 4. 14 | See Deniz Göktürk, “Turkish Women on German Streets: Closure and Exposure in Transnational Cinema,” in Spaces in European Cinema, ed. Myrto Konstantarakos (Exeter: Intellect Books, 2000), 64-75; Barbara Mennell, “Bruce Lee in Kreuzberg and Scarface in Altona: Transnational Auteurism and Ghettocentrism in Thomas Arslan’s Brothers and Sisters and Fatih Akin’s Short Sharp Shock,” New German Critique No. 87 (2002): 13356; Jessica Gallagher, “The Limitation of Urban Space in Thomas Arslan’s Berlin Trilogy,” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies Vol. 42, No. 3 (2006): 337-52; Joanne Leal and Klaus Dieter-Rossade, “Negotiating Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Fatih Akin’s and Thomas Arslan’s Urban Spaces,” German as a Foreign Language No. 3 (2008): 59-87;

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Angelica Fenner Randall Halle, German Film After Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 2008). 15 | Marco Abel, The Counter-cinema of the Berlin School (Rochester: Camden House, 2013), 48. 16 | Eric Rentschler, “From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus,” in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (New York: Routledge, 2000), 260-277. 17 | Jacques Rancière, “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics,” in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Beth Hinderliter, William Kaizen, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, and Seth McCormick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 48. 18 | Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 63. 19 | See Bertolt Brecht, “From the Three Penny Trial: A Sociological Experiment [1931],” in German Essays on Film, ed. Rick McCormick and Alison Günther-Pal, trans. Lance W. Garmer (New York: Continuum, 2004), 111-132 20 | Marco Abel, “Intensifying Life: The Cinema of the ‘Berlin School’,” Cineaste Vol. 33, No. 4 (Fall 2008), available online at http://www.cineaste.com/articles/the-berlinschool.htm 21 | Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 63. 22 | In addition to the three “founding” members mentioned earlier, these include, but are not limited to: Maren Ade, Christopher Hochhäuser, Benjamin Heisenberg, Henner Winckler, and Valeska Griesbach. 23 | Marco Abel, “Intensifying Life”. 24 | Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 12. 25 | Cited in Elizabeth Sussex, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary: The Story of the Film Movement Founded by John Grierson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 29. 26 | Rick Altman, “From Lecturer’s Prop to Industrial Product: The Early History of Travel Films,” in Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (Durham: Duke University Press), 64-5. 27 | Jeffrey Ruoff, “Introduction: The Filmic Fourth Dimension: Cinema as Audiovisual Vehicle,” in Virtual Voyages, ed. Ruoff, 11. 28 | See Yüksel Yavuz, Mein Grossvater, der Gastarbeiter (My Father, the Guestworker, 1995); Seyhan Derin, Ben annemin kiziyim/Ich bin die Tochter meiner Mutter (I am my mother’s daughter, 1996); Fatih Akin, Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren (We Forgot to Go Back, 2001). 29 | Thomas Elsaesser, “Double Occupancy and Small Adjustments: Space, Place, and Policy in the New European Cinema Since the 1990s,” in European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 118. 30 | Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 97.

At the Crossroads of Genre and Identity 31 | Ibid., 100. 32 | I refer here to my essay “Roots and Routes of the Diasporic Documentarian: A Psychogeography of Fatih Akin’s We Forgot to Go Back,” in Turkish German Cinema in the New Millenium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens, ed. Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennell (New York: Berghahn Press, 2012), 59-71. See also Angelica Fenner, “She’s got her own way of asserting herself: Interview with Seyhan Derin,” Women in German Yearbook Vol. 22 (2006): 43-61. 33 | De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xviii. 34 | See the speeches of Roman Herzog compiled as “Roman Herzog: Lessons From the Past, Visions for the Future,” German Issues (AICGS) Vol. 18: 1-98, available online at http:// www.aicgs.org/documents/herzog.pdf. See also the following speeches by Horst Köhler: Standards and Codes: A Tool for Growth and Financial Stability (7 March, 2001), available online at http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2001/030701.htm. Strengthening the Framework for the Global Economy: A speech given on the occasion of the Award Ceremony of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation Social Market Economy Prize (15 November 2002), available online at http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2002/111502.htm The Challenges of Globalization and the Role of the IMF: Address at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Economics and Management (15 May 2003), available online at http:// www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2003/051503.htm 35 | Marco Abel “The Cinema of Identification,” 9. 36 | Ibid. 37 | De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 99. 38 | Marco Abel, “The Cinema of Identification.” 39 | Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Stanford University Press, 2002), 94. 40 | Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), 149. 41 | Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25-74. 42 | Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 3. 43 | Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance, and Belonging (London: Reaktion, 2008). 44 | Abel, “The Cinema of Identification.” 45 | Rancière, Dissensus, 69. 46 | Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 12. 47 | Aksoy and Robins, “Deep Nation,” 205. Aksoy and Robins borrow the term from Daniel Sibony, for whom it characterizes “the primordial aspect of the group – the basic appeal just to be together and to survive as a group” (Daniel Sibony, Le racisme ou la haine identitaire [Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1997], 247). 48 | See Louis Althusser, Lenin and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971) and Siegfried Kracauer The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

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Angelica Fenner 49 | David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1985). 50 | Ibid., 278. 51 | See Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Dell, 1966). 52 | Mark Betz, “Beyond Europe: On Parametric Transcendence” in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 33. 53 | Rancière, Dissensus, 136. 54 | Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 286.

National or Transnational German Cinema Post-1989? The Films of Helke Misselwitz and Sibylle Schönemann Ute Lischke

Many German writers and filmmakers have examined their position within the discourses that shape their personal and multiple national identities since 1989. The process has been, for them, one of historical, cultural and personal transition in a post-unified Germany and in a new transnational era of filmmaking. Moreover, there has been a continuous debate on issues such as gender and identity in a re-united Germany. This essay explores, first of all, how East German women filmmakers – using the example of Sibylle Schönemann and Helke Misselwitz – locate themselves in a unified Germany. Secondly, this essay also addresses how these two East German directors and their films have survived in a politically reconfigured Europe.1 Since the German Wende, the political utopia of “unification” quickly splintered and the impact on cultural production has been gaining increasing attention. Since unification, these two filmmakers from the former GDR have remained, for the most part, isolated from mainstream German, European and global cinema. Their films, made during the time of transition, remain cultural artifacts of a distinct national cinema. However, through the intervention of marketing strategies employed by the DEFA Foundation, its distribution arm, defa-spectrum and Progress Film-Verleih, and the DEFA Film Library in Amherst, Massachusetts, GDR film culture continues to survive in a unified Germany, in North America and on international film circuits.2 What was once a distinct product of a specific national film culture has now become a distinctly transnational product through the efforts of organizations established to promote East German cinema. The shadow of the former GDR still looms large even though that nation-state began to disappear into Ostalgie in the early 1990s. Since the dissolution of the only East German film studio (DEFA), all of the directors, screenwriters, actors, among others, saw their careers interrupted, if not destroyed. When the GDR ceased to exist, the state-controlled studio

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system that had defined the life, politics, and culture of its citizens for almost fifty years vanished, to be resurrected and eventually transformed in 2004 into a private company, Studio Babelsberg. Consequently, the East German past became part of a new national, if not broader, transnational European history. In the post-Wende context – and in a cultural climate sometimes characterised as postmodernist, post-histoire, or post-feminist – questions of race, gender, and class must be re-examined. In particular, localised texts, practices and subjectivities were reconfigured and situated within larger historical and discursive contexts. Misselwitz, born in 1947, and Schönemann, born in 1953, are part of the last generation of DEFA filmmakers and as women, part of a very small group of female directors working at the studio during the 1980s. Ironically, both achieved their breakthrough and success as filmmakers only after unification. In 1984, Sibylle Schönemann and her husband, both filmmakers working at the DEFA studios, applied to the East German Government for exit visas. Recent graduates of the Filmhochschule Konrad Wolf (Konrad Wolf Academy for Film and Television-Babelsberg), in the former German Democratic Republic, they had been working at the DEFA film studio, the state-owned facility located in Babelsberg near Berlin. Considered part of the “young” generation of up and coming filmmakers, they were eager to engage in a new, creative style of filmmaking; yet they felt frustrated by the restrictions and limitations placed on their work by the studio bosses. They believed that they could work more independently in West Germany. Without warning, and not ever knowing the exact charges against them, both were quickly arrested by the Stasi and incarcerated. Sibylle Schönemann spent one year in the “Lindenhotel” in Potsdam as a political prisoner. Then, as suddenly as her arrest, she was placed on a bus for the West – part of an exchange of political prisoners between East and West Germany. Hannes Schönemann, who had served a somewhat longer sentence, and their two young children, were expelled soon thereafter with only a few belongings. Thus began their new lives in Hamburg, West Germany. Verriegelte Zeit (“Locked Up Time,” 1991) is Schönemann’s documentary about this experience. In 1990, after the Berlin Wall had been dismantled, she returned to the former East Germany to confront the past. But the documentary deals less with how she confronts her own psychological trauma of political imprisonment and expulsion from her homeland, than demanding answers from those individuals she believed were responsible for her arrest and imprisonment. Shot in black and white, and beginning with the actual television news footage of the bus carrying her leaving East Germany for the West, the documentary has a style that exhibits the personal excursion into a still raw and immediate past. The technique Schönemann employs as she tracks down the various people in Potsdam and former East Berlin who were responsible for her arrest, sentencing, and incarceration – including her lawyer, neighbors of the prison, and former cellmate – creates an ironic tension. The memories are still too fresh, too raw, for anyone to have achieved an emotional distance. Further, the citizens of the

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former East are now also citizens of a unified Germany and their actions in the former communist state simply reflected the need – as most of them admit – to acquiesce to the laws, rules, and regulations of a now-defunct regime. Throughout the interviews, the documentary reflects how the politics of a state affected the director and her family. Yet as the interviewer, Schönemann always remains restrained, never confrontational; she is not a talking head. She only wants an apology and acknowledgement of what has been done to her. As she travels into the past, the “locked-up time,” this is exactly what remains – no apologies from perpetrators, no admissions of any wrongdoing. Most importantly, there is also no self-realization or catharsis for the director. What the documentary does not reveal are the long-term psychological consequences of political incarceration and expulsion and their implications not only for the filmmaker, but also for her family, friends, and colleagues. For Sibylle Schönemann, the process has been complex. Her documentary, intended to provide self-awareness and a means of coming to terms with the past, was a failure insofar as the process did not lead to a redefinition or change. Isolated first in her jail cell, then later in an alien city where she could not have contact with family, friends, or colleagues, she found it difficult to adjust to a new mode of filmmaking. Her own memories, brought to the surface, continued to haunt her. In 1997 her documentary Diese Tage in Terezin (“These days in Terezin”) was released. Again, a film about her past, when her parents would pass by Terezin on their way from Berlin to spend holidays in the former Czechoslovakia. Curious about why her parents would never stop, she decided to make a documentary about the concentration camp, focusing on the poet Karel Svenk who had become known as the “Chaplin of Terezin.” Both of her documentaries won national film prizes. During the same period that Schönemann was making her documentary, another DEFA filmmaker was actively engaged in promoting her own film, touring the USA with her newly released documentary Winter adé (“Farewell to Winter”). In February 2009, the International Berlin Film Festival, the Berlinale, offered a special panorama series entitled “Winter adé, a retrospective of films from Eastern Europe.” This series celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall separating East from West Germany, an event that had finally marked an end to the cold war. Helke Misselwitz’s same-titled documentary Winter adé (GDR, 1988) was the opening film for this series and the director – significantly the only woman – was invited to introduce her film and lead a discussion afterwards. Then, a few weeks later, across the Atlantic in Los Angeles, an equally significant event took place. “Wende Flicks: Last Films from East Germany,” a retrospective that also commemorated the unification of East and West in 1989. This series showcased ten feature and four documentary films made by East German filmmakers between 1988-1994, in the immediate years of unification. Organized by the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in collaboration with the Wende Museum in Los Angeles, this series also featured films by East German filmmakers – films that had all but vanished during the

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turmoil of social change. Most of these films had not been subtitled nor shown outside of Germany. At the Los Angeles film festival, Misselwitz’s first feature film Herzsprung (“Heart Leap,” 1992) was presented. She was the only woman whose film was screened during these festivals. Then, during the 19th Filmkunstfest in Schwerin (Germany) from May 5 to 10 in 2009, this film festival also highlighted a series on “Filme der Wende,” films made during the transition. However, no films made by women were presented during this event. The exhibition of Wende Flicks was organized so that these films could be brought to the attention of an international public. All of these films have a common theme – the depiction of the disintegration of the Eastern bloc mostly through the representation of everyday life. The films also showcase the talents of those filmmakers who were trained professionally in the East German Academy for Film and Television in their broad range of cinematic styles and vocabulary – the last generation of filmmakers who were educated in the GDR. In their depiction of the everyday and blending the political with the personal, these films stand out because they contain elements that represent sites of memory located within the former GDR that, after unification, have seemingly disappeared and been absorbed by the West. In 1987 Misselwitz set out by train across East Germany to begin filming a documentary depicting the lives of women in the GDR. At this point there is no hint that the GDR will cease to exist a short while later. Winter adé documents a rail journey she takes from the south in her native Zwickau north through Berlin, ending at the Baltic Sea. Shots of crisscrossing train tracks serve as a metaphor for the women’s different choices and paths in life. Her interview subjects are representative from all walks of life and of all ages. The director’s social critique exists almost exclusively in the images and the montages of her documentary, rather than the dialogue, which illustrates a tension between the personal and the political. Parallel to the interviews in the film, the director recreates her own past through memories and a family photomontage. The film’s intent is to understand the intrinsic values and changing roles of women’s lives in relationship to their work, family, and society. Here, cinema, with its unique ability to use reflected reality to “interrogate the more subjective and inaccessible realms of identity,” plays an important role in the process of redefinition of self and society.3 Misselwitz makes some important observations about East German society through her interview subjects. They represent a mirror through which Misselwitz, by pointing out the difficult issues of gender relations, hopes that German society can work toward a better future. Winter adé uses “different cinematic techniques to create a sense of authenticity to experience the GDR […]. In particular, Misselwitz’s use of the ‘talking heads’ technique, a traditionally realist structure, engages directly with feminist film debates regarding the social and political role of documentary film practices.”4 Significantly, Misselwitz’s intent is to offer a public forum to women where they can speak about their lives and experiences. Furthermore, the documentary is significant because it does not

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concentrate on a single region, factory, or working brigade, but the film presents a more universal picture of the various stages of women’s lives in the former GDR, a picture that does not hold true to the socialist doctrine and propaganda of the state. Misselwitz depicts the variety of lifestyles and work and family constellations – in essence a collage, of women’s experiences. In its emphasis on autobiography the film presents an intertwined text of multiple voices. This self-ref lexive technique enables an alternative narrative of women’s experiences in the GDR. The use of an autobiographical frame for the opening sequence is significant; Misselwitz narrates her own personal history in voice-over. Standing in front of the barrier at a railroad crossing in her home town of Zwickau, she recounts how her own mother had delivered her, right there, in an ambulance. She reads from her mother’s diary that recounts what a wonderful birthday present this baby is, even though it is not the expected son her husband had hoped for. The camera cuts to the still of a family photo, a grandmother holding a small girl and a baby, another girl, with a younger couple, Misselwitz’s parents. This image is replaced by another – a photo of two girls receiving diplomas while the sound of the opening sequence, a passing train, is replaced by the sound of creaking. Thus begins the director’s journey exploring the lives of women in the GDR. While born into a state of supposed gender equality, her gender is presented as a disappointment, a barrier, reflected by the barrier of the passing train. The private documents, diary, photos, become a tool for public discourse in anticipating the historical narrative of the documentary. Towards the end of the opening sequence, as Misselwitz enters the main hall of the train station in Planitz, she recounts the first time she left her small hometown at nineteen; she learned a trade, married, divorced, the birth of a daughter, a second marriage; then further studies with a young child and a second divorce all the while striving towards fulfilling work. She talks of knowing many women whose fears and desires she shares; how the self-assurance of her almost-grown daughter makes her insecure – yet gives her hope at the same time. The monologue functions to explain the residual sexism women experience at all levels of GDR society. The monologue ends when the announcement is broadcast to board the train; the viewer is invited to join the journey as Misselwitz finishes the monologue with the subtitle to the documentary: “Frauen und Mädchen in diesem Land,” women and girls in this country. Winter adé caused a sensation when it was first shown in the Eastern German city of Leipzig exactly one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. But it was no hit. In fact, Misselwitz was convinced that it was going to be stopped when it was first shown at the Leipzig Documentary Festival. The frankness with which the women speak about the struggles they face in their daily lives was just not acceptable in the GDR. Yet, somehow, Misselwitz constructed a film that contained only voices of discontent. The train journey ends at the border of the GDR, the Baltic Sea. The end of the train tracks, the beginning of the sea, and the lyrics to “Summertime” suggest a change of season from the title, farewell to winter. Will women begin

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to be able to embark on new journeys? But this remains ambiguous and the film refuses closure. Ironically, one year later, the borders opened and Germany was unified. After the Wende, the East German past became part of a new national, if not broader, transnational European history that continues to evolve. During this period there was a distinct lack of women directors making films at the DEFA studios, except for Iris Gusner, Evelyn Schmidt and Sybille Schönemann, among the few. Helke Misselwitz seemingly remains the only one who continues to strive to survive the transition from making films in the former East Germany in a transnational framework. One reason is that she made an international breakthrough with Winter adé which received the Silver Dove at the Leipzig Documentary Film Festival and became a cult film in the United States. She followed her documentary with her first feature film Herzsprung (1992), which appeared after unification and was made in co-production with a revamped DEFA and the German television channel ZDF. Misselwitz’s career was also helped by the fact that the DEFA Foundation and the DEFA Film Library at Amherst were involved in promoting GDR film culture through research, the subtitling of films, the transfer of films to DVD format and obtaining rights for film distribution from Progress in the United States. The situation for women filmmakers in the former GDR was difficult but for different reasons than their male counterparts. Within DEFA women worked as scriptwriters, editors and cutters, rarely as directors of feature films. They were not promoted to directors of feature films since the administration assumed that the long hours required for feature film shoots were too time consuming for women who had families. Consequently, as directors, they were usually relegated to documentary filmmaking, television studios or children/youth programming where the hours were more regular. After unification, both men and women faced serious difficulties. They lost their jobs and found it difficult to adapt to a free market economy where they went from full employment in the DEFA system to a competitive marketing and funding system post-1990 that was completely alien to them. Post-unification, Misselwitz recognized that a now-united Germany was not totally without its problems. By 1996 she expressed her unhappiness with the imperialistic attitude of the West (Western Germany, the United States) in her second feature film Engelchen (“Little Angel,” 1996). Here it becomes clear that her allegiance remains with the East (East Germany, Poland, Eastern Europe) and the narrative portrays the East (Eastern Europe) as a gentler, kinder and more sympathetic space. However, many issues regarding the cinematic production between eastern and western Europe and the nature of transnational identities in a unified Germany/Europe remain unresolved.

National or Transnational German Cinema Post-1989?

R e trospect Today Misselwitz continues to teach film direction in Babelsberg and struggles to finance the making of new films in a period of European integration, globalization, and competition. She has made a mark in North America, but finds it more difficult to assert her filmmaking and filmmaking style in Germany, outside the parameters of her GDR production. Her work was well received in the new capital of Berlin at the 2009 Berlinale, with her documentary giving its title to a retrospective dominated by male filmmakers. Her films have become part of the process of redefinition and change, through a re-evaluation of the past. Clearly, the films by these two directors are united by the particular historic past they share, and by a complex and deep-rooted fund of cultural points of reference. Cinema, with its unique ability to use reflected reality to interrogate the more subjective and inaccessible realms of multiple identities has an important role to play in the process of transnational redefinition which Europe is facing. In the 1990s Sibylle Schönemann spent most of her time freelancing, working from time to time with the Hamburg television studio. By 2010, she has returned to Potsdam, where she is working in an antique store, around the corner from where she was incarcerated at 55 Linden Street, the “Lindenhotel.” She considers this a homecoming, of sorts. In this former prison, now a museum, she sells the DVD of her documentary and occasionally conducts tours. In essence, she has had to become her own marketing machine. It is obvious that it has not been an easy transition, especially for women, for this last generation of GDR filmmakers. Still absorbed by their past, they have a difficult time adjusting to the demands of the free market economy demanded by filmmaking in an ever increasingly globalized field that demands alliances and funding from both national and international sources. United by the common past, history, and culture of the former GDR, it continues to be difficult to adapt and compete in a globalized market influenced by rapidly expanding new technologies.

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Divided screen: Sibylle Schönemann and Thomas Plenert filming Verriegelte Zeit

Feminist framework: Margarete recalling her youth in Helke Misselwitz’s Winter adé

National or Transnational German Cinema Post-1989?

N otes 1 | I would like to acknowledge the support of Helke Misselwitz and Sybille Schönemann, who I interviewed on 23 February 1997 (Misselwitz) and 15 May 2010 (Schönemann). 2 | DEFA or Deutsche Film-AG (German Film Company) was founded on 17 May 1946 by the Soviet military and became the official film company that served the former German Democratic Republic as a state company with a monopoly of film production. The DEFA studio for feature films used, since 1947, the premises of the former Ufa (Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft founded in 1917) film studio space in Neubabelsberg. Until 1991, DEFA produced about eight hundred feature films, as well as television, documentary, and animation films. After reunification, DEFA came into the hands of Treuhand, the official German holding company, and was sold in August 1992 to a French consortium, the Compagnie Générale des Eaux, of which Volker Schlöndorff is a member. The film distributor for all DEFA films is Progress Film-Verleih. In 1950 Progress took over Sovexportfilm in Berlin and has undergone several name changes. After unification it was finally privatized in 1997 and in 2001 Tellux Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH became its sole owner. It remains a significant distributor of East German and Central and East European films and serves as one of the biggest and diverse film archives in Germany. Progress Filmvertrieb GmbH is also one of the biggest distributors of repertoire films in Germany. Its film stock includes the complete DEFA film library as well as Eastern European film classics. These include features, award-winning children’s films, documentaries, and newsreels. Progress also holds the rights to Vietnamese film stocks. The holdings are updated by new acquisitions of Arthouse films. The DEFA Foundation was established on 25 September 1990 as one of the last legal acts of the former GDR government. However, the DEFA Foundation only became more active after the privatization of Progress, after 1996. Rights of the DEFA film stocks are assigned to the foundation which in turn assigns all distribution rights to Progress. The foundation’s responsibility is to support German film culture through the distribution of DEFA films. In 2006 it also established its own distribution arm, defa-spectrum in order to improve its global marketing. The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is home to the DEFA Film Library, the only archive and study collection of East German films outside of Europe. It is devoted to the study of a broad spectrum of filmmaking by East German filmmakers or films related to East Germany from 1946 to the present. In 1997, a groundbreaking agreement brought the largest collection of 16 and 35mm DEFA prints outside of Germany to the UMass Amherst campus, and the DEFA Film Library also hosted the first international conference on East German cinema in North America – thanks to collaborations with Progress Film-Verleih and the DEFA Foundation in Berlin. In 1998, Icestorm International brought East German titles on video to North America. Since then, the DEFA Film Library has continued to grow. It continues to hold international conferences, Summer Film Institutes and organizes touring film series. In 2005 The Museum of Modern Art New York and the Goethe-Institut New York, in collaboration with the DEFA Film Library, presented the most comprehensive retrospective of East German films ever screened in the U.S., “Rebels with a Cause: The Cinema of East Germany.”

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Ute Lischke The Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen (HFF) “Konrad Wolf” Potsdam-Babelsberg is the only academy of arts in the province of Brandenburg. It is the oldest and most modern academy for film in Germany that trained most of the creative talent that worked at the DEFA studios. The Wende Museum, founded in Culver City in 2002, acquires, preserves, and facilitates access to cultural materials from Cold War-era Eastern Europe for museums and other cultural institutions worldwide (see www.wendemuseum.org). 3 | Wendy Everett, “The Autobiographical Eye in European Film,” Europa. An International Journal of Language, Art and Culture Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring 1995): 9. 4 | Jennifer Creech, “Image, Voice, and Truth: Narrating Women’s History in Helke Misselwitz’s Winter ade,” Seminar Vol. 43, Issue 4 (November 2007): 413.

The Cinema of the Abject and the Cinema of Capitalist Fantasy in Poland Janina Falkowska

Although Mette Hjort notes that a “small cinema” can also be called “world cinema,” “accented cinema,” “regional cinema” or “transnational cinema,”1 debates on the term “small cinemas” have in the past primarily concerned cinemas emerging from small geographical areas, cinemas with small-scale film production and film distribution, or a small cinema has been described as displaying a specific national identity and sensibility. These definitions reflect on trajectories which are linked more to the recent past than to the recent present. They also recall the discussions related to the origin and the history of cinemas delineated by national borders, rather than inviting us to move beyond national divides. Today in Europe, the disappearing national borders triggered by the creation of the European Union, globalization and transnationalism, recall a time even further away from the present, a time when nations did not exist at all. In his seminal study, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe, historian Patrick Geary dismantles the nationalist myths about how the nations of Europe were born by contrasting the myth of nations with the actual history of Europe’s grand migrations between the fourth and ninth centuries. Geary proves that transnational trends were already present in Europe at that time and “only the horrors of the twentieth century have created the illusion that language and ethnicity could or should be mapable.”2 In a strange return to the far away past, contemporary European cinemas no longer stimulate debates related to national sentiments, but rather those related to other socio-political factors, like class allegiance and socio-economic determinants that shape societies according to the interests of capital.3 A consideration of class and the social and ideological effects of neoliberalism, in particular, seem to offer new and exciting possibilities for rethinking cinemas which have recently emerged from the new member countries of the European Union. Countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Hungary, are witnessing phenomenal economic growth which is leading to visible class differentiation and to the creation of enormous disparities between a small group of super-rich, an emerging middle class and the poor. These disparities are illustrated in a growing

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number of films in which class anxieties are inscribed into the country’s political and socio-economic landscape. In his article “Real Location, Fantasy Space, Performative Place, Double Occupancy and Mutual Interference in European Cinema”, Thomas Elsaesser mentions class identity as a rarely discussed focal point of representation and cultural identity. As he notes, “Over the past twenty years, perhaps as a consequence of the decline of auteurism and national cinemas, we have become used to discussing European cinema and media in terms of cultural identity, made up of the various struggles over representation – of ethnicity, gender, religion – and, less frequently, class-identity.”4 I would suggest that “class identity” has indeed become a major factor/orientation point in the newest films from former socialist countries. Many of these films either affirm social advancement or relentlessly criticize social decay, a phenomenon I will analyze in more recently produced Polish films. Some of these films like Hi, Teresa (Cześć Tereska, 2001) or Blokersi (“Blockers,” 2001) show crumbling social relations and downhearted families of the lower-middle class who live in a state of economic and social discomfort in anonymous socialist era “housing projects,” while others like Snow White and Russian Red (Wojna polsko-ruska, 2009) or Shopping Girls (Galerianki, 2009) show members of the young generation corrupted by capitalism and selling their bodies for expensive gifts and money. In his essay on the geopolitics of European cinema, Elsaesser further introduces the term “hyphenation or double-occupancy” to signal the need to theorize the new Europeans as occupying two spaces simultaneously and “to signal our discursive as well as geopolitical territories as always already occupied.”5 While useful for the discussion of another problem addressed in my essay, the European/national divide, the term also proves useful for discussions of the dialectic between nation and class. Of all Eastern European countries, Poland has especially witnessed incredible economic growth after 1989. Class divisions have always existed in pre-1989 Poland, but have never been openly discussed because the very affluent were either members of the old nomenclature, or, they were linked to the growing capitalist underground which did not always carry out its dealings in a legal manner. After 1989, Poland proudly declared its shift to capitalism, and material disparities between classes became the fodder of both researchers and the tabloid press. With accession to the EU in 2005, the move to capitalism has become even more pronounced and the economic growth and growing divide between the rich and poor has become greater. Moreover, the new political change has also led to a marked shift in the common perception of the divide between European and national identity in Poland, which since 2005 has signalled that economic inequality has become a European matter, and not necessarily a Polish one. Accordingly, the nation/class dialectic in recent films has to be seen in the context of larger issues regarding European identity and class conflict, as Poland slowly sheds its national identity and gets

The Cinema of the Abject and the Cinema of Capitalist Fantasy in Poland

absorbed by the globalized economy of the European Union. Consequently, this essay views more recent Polish films through the prism of these three areas: nation, class and Europeanism. Thus, Elsaesser’s “hyphenation” in my analysis does not necessarily express diaspora, displacement and overlapping geographical territories, but rather hyphenation in the sense of class and social advancement linked with Europeanism. Here it is worth noting that the wish to become more “European” and “Westernized” has been on Poles’ agendas for centuries. Despite “Poland’s official accession to what is often called ‘Europe’,” Paul Coates notes that Poland “had never left, only been locked inside one half of a house partitioned artificially”, referring to the post World War II “cold war” divide of Europe into Western and Eastern Europe.6 The idea of “Europe” according to Coates functions within Polish cinema (as in much of Polish life) in the disguise of code, and in relation to a loose and disputed notion of “the West” that is seldom addressed directly, perhaps because it is identified in part with a geopolitical past swept aside in 1989, perhaps because of the wounds to one’s pride potentially inflicted by a continuing awareness of second-class economic status.7

Ryszard Kapuściński, a renowned Polish journalist and author of political essays about Europe and Poland, comments on the dream to become more westernized in the following way. In Rwacy Nurt Historii. Zapiski o XX i XXI wieku (“The Swift Course of History. Notes from the 20th and 21st Centuries”), he notes that it is Eastern Europeans who desperately want to become members of an enlarged Europe. In 1996, I was interviewed by an American journalist who came to Boston from Europe and prepared a series of reportages about the opinions of Europeans about Europe. In Western Europe he could not find anybody who gives Europe any thought. Only in Eastern Europe he found people who think about Europe at all. It is us who want Europe to be enlarged. Western Europe is afraid because they do not know what to do with Eastern Europe and is afraid of the cost involved. And if one wants to discuss Europe, one can do it in Prague, Budapest, Warsaw and Poznań, but not in Western Europe because they are in the West already. 8

Beyond welfare provisions and the improvement of living standards, Poles associate the move to Europe and their European Union membership with social mobility and with the recognition of their cultural aspirations and ambitions. In Polish cinema, the manifestation of this social and cultural transformation is most striking, culminating in a screen fantasy that combines European dreams with class mobility. The “second-class economic status” usually accorded to Poles is what they desperately want to change and this is why class matters figure in almost every recent film in a more or less overt manner.

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At the same time, Eastern Europeans see the future in Europe as a kind of a nation-less (or post-national) dreamscape. In a more or less obvious manner, this idealized Europe is present, to some degree, in recently produced Polish, Hungarian or Czech films which share similar preoccupations/themes: the rigorous, sometimes ironic and nostalgic approach to the national past; the relentless criticism of the present, and, an uncritical and naive approach to the future expressed in idealistic romantic comedies which take place in a “perfect” pan-European environment and naive bourgeois surroundings.9 The two films I cover in this essay illustrate the relentless criticism of the present and the idealistic presentation of the enlightened, capitalist European future in Polish cinema. Kasia Adamik’s The Offsiders (Boisko Bezdomnych, 2008) and Ryszard Zatorski’s Just Love Me (Tylko mnie kochaj, 2006) seem to be representative case studies of the above-mentioned trends in cinema today. These two films represent two kinds of cinema, the cinema of “the abject” and of “capitalist fantasy” respectively. They also illustrate a growing class disparity in Polish society and a dream of class advancement linked to the political aspirations of Poles to join the Western world which is embodied in the European Union. The cinema of the abject relentlessly criticizes contemporary Polish society, with its acute social problems, including alcoholism and the problems of the disadvantaged and poor, while the cinema of capitalist fantasy presents Poles’ aspirations for the future, the Poland of ostentatious buildings filled with young and satisfied working professionals. The plot of The Offsiders takes place at the infamous Central Railway Station in Warsaw. The protagonists of the film (alcoholics and homeless people) sleep in the dark halls and back corridors of the station. They beg for food, warm themselves around primitive camp fires, take care of themselves under the most horrific conditions and, in general, lead the lives of outcasts. The film shows the most appalling moments of the lives of drunkards who are former doctors, politicians and even priests who became destitute due to unfavorable life circumstances. The viewer is not spared any graphic details in the presentation of their moral and social decay. The Offsiders is unremittingly didactic in its honest portrayal of the lives of protagonists who spend their time in the dark abyss of the dirty and forbidding Central Railway Station in Warsaw, here portrayed as hell, from which one may rise through the painstaking purgatorial process. Kasia Adamik, the film’s director and daughter of Agnieszka Holland, a prominent Polish filmmaker famous for her films focusing on social matters, is relentless and remorseless in her portrayal of this existential degradation. Jacek from Zabrze, the main protagonist in the film, illustrates the destitution that befalls a Pole stereotypically portrayed as a dishevelled drunk. A successful soccer player in the past, Jacek starts drinking at some point, gets involved in the dirty practice of soccer match “fixing,” is fired as a trainer and later employed as a phys-ed primary school teacher. Frustrated and disappointed with his mundane job, he drinks and verbally abuses pupils at the school.

The Cinema of the Abject and the Cinema of Capitalist Fantasy in Poland

One day after a quarrel with his wife, he finds himself near the Central Station in Warsaw, drunk and beaten by his former fans who were disappointed when they saw him in his drunken state. Homeless people from the Central station save him from freezing, bring him into the building and introduce him to life at the station. Jacek joins a group of drug addicts and alcoholics, former ministers, doctors, priests and miners, who started drinking under duress. They form an underclass, a group of people shunned by Poles of all other classes, hated by everybody not only at the central station, but also beyond it. Even the lowest and most despised of the entrepreneurs such as a restroom attendant (babka klozetowa) tries to get rid of them when they attempt to wash at the station restroom. The problem of the homeless and destitute in Poland is acute: these people are shunned by society and blamed for the fact that they find themselves in this situation. Kasia Adamik tries to explain the situation of each of these unfortunate individuals by giving them visual and aural space in the film. By providing detailed explanations of their situations and dividing the film into “personal” segments devoted to each member of the group, the director personalizes the problems of these people and provides a social and political background to their actions and circumstances. In the spirit of the films of the “School of Moral Concern,” the protagonists are shown honestly and in an unpatronizing manner. They are shown as ordinary citizens who talk intelligently about their downfall in monologues which sound strange when voiced by dirty drunks dressed in rags. As the film progresses, the homeless find their dignity and slowly return back to life, thanks to an event which they organize and in which they participate. One of the homeless individuals finds an ad for the “Homeless People Soccer Competition.” The group, at first reluctantly and more enthusiastically later on, decides to take part in the competition. Jacek persuades them to make an effort and promises to train them as a former world class soccer player and trainer. Through Jacek’s efforts, the group turns into a well-behaved and trained football team. The transformation from homeless into civilized individuals goes through all the rituals of a society driven by capitalism. The homeless organize into a soccer team, a group representing one of the most commodified areas of Polish sport. To become a team, they have to wash, dress decently, stop drinking and become the well-behaved citizens the new Europe loves so much. They have to re-enter society and become “socialized” and “normal” again. The director even celebrates their “otherness,” personal tragedies and their spectacular transformation by bringing in a young French tourist who documents their personal stories on her video camera. Sevka considers documenting their predicaments so important that she abandons her train trip to Moscow and stays with the group. By according this underclass group a status worthy of the documentary, Adamik seems to state that the problems of the Polish underclass are short-lived, so they have to be “documented” and immortalized on film. All these problems will pass because the Polish social system, helped by the European Union, will quickly turn these hapless individuals into well-functioning members

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of a new, European society. Indeed, Jacek after undergoing the “normalizing” transformation returns to his middle class family, mainly for his young daughter, as he claims. It is not accidental that the director Sevka is a young woman from France. As a representative of the young generation of Europeans, she puts “a stamp of approval” on the efforts of the homeless. She legitimizes their attempts at normalization by making a film about this segment of society; she gives the protagonists emotional support and cheers them on, as if in a synecdochical manner, reiterating the approval and support of the EU for Poland itself. This critical re-evaluation of present national vices like alcoholism and “slovenliness” and the attempt to mould citizens into more sophisticated, orderly, industrious and addiction-less individuals, is related to the fact that Poland itself is transitioning from an economically and politically underdeveloped country into an affluent new organism with the overall living standards almost equal to the standards of highly developed Western democracies. These changes have been triggered by profound political, economic and social processes that have reshaped Eastern Europe after it joined the European Union. The notions of class and social position have been re-evaluated to adhere to the new requirements of the European Union and a whole array of new regulations dealing with new capitalist conditions of production and newly-minted lifestyles. The remnants of socialism in the organization of work have been gradually phased out by a series of regulations and the rules of a capitalist system of production have been introduced on a large scale. The growing capitalist class has started to organise and shape life in Poland according to their own interests. They have started to operate according to “the logic of capital” with its two main features: “the drive to accumulate profit and competition,”10 a success formula initially disregarded by the homeless at the beginning of the film only to be embraced later on in their rigorous training for the soccer match. The portrayal of Poles as homeless alcoholics did not prove appealing to Polish spectators, resulting in very low attendance at the screenings. According to the official site “Stowarzyszenie Filmowcow Polskich” (The Association of Polish Filmmakers) and their database “kinematografia w liczbach” (Cinematography Statistics), this film attracted fewer than 173,000 viewers.11 By comparison, the film Lejdis (“Ladies,” 2008) by Tomasz Konecki attracted 2,529,122 viewers in 2008. Even the title most likely worked against the film. The Offsiders functions as a disincentive to many. Those who did choose to see the film witnessed an ambitious attempt at presenting the reality of the disadvantaged in Poland in a thoughtful way. On the other hand, the realistic presentation of the life of the homeless was not so subtly undermined by a positive ending with its unrealistically glorious future for a newly-reformed Jacek. His fresh European outlook was further polished by his amorous association with Sevka, a romantic Parisian. Undoubtedly, the cinema of the abject which focuses on the underprivileged and disempowered and continues the tradition of the “Cinema of Moral Concern”12

The Cinema of the Abject and the Cinema of Capitalist Fantasy in Poland

and the Polish documentary tradition, is addressed to intellectual audiences in Poland who can understand and appreciate its frankness in exposing social problems previously banned from view. In their opposition to the film, one could argue that the majority of Polish spectators have reacted along the lines of “resisting spectatorship,” the term Mantha Diawara coined when he analyzed the position the black male spectator takes when he watches Hollywood films. In his detailed analysis of an African-American’s reaction to The Birth of the Nation (1915), Diawara suggests that a black male spectator vehemently reacts to the scenes in the film in which “the black man’s place of origin, Africa, it is implied, is the source of his essential evil and cruelty.”13 In a similar manner, a Polish spectator may resist the cause and effect attribution of personal downfalls to the “body” of the nation. The viewer resists tying specific social situations of the protagonists to the lack of social services in Poland or the lack of awareness regarding particular medical conditions. The average spectator in Poland (also cognizant of their position as “other” in Europe) prefers to “blame the victim” and relegate the guilt to the characters, rather than point the finger at the malfunctioning of the social system in Poland. Thus, the Polish spectator resists the implication that the new capitalist system with its system of rewards is malfunctioning. The spectator rather suggests that it is the fault of the protagonist who chooses addiction, instead of pursuing success and prosperity. When the cause of alcoholism is carefully explained by the protagonists in the mini-interviews carried out by Sevka, it clearly appears that a former miner suffers from a post-traumatic stress disorder after an accident in the mine he worked, a former priest slowly drifts into alcoholism as a result of the professional duties he performs, while a former politician suffers psychological hardship because of the personal slander he has endured during his political career. All of the characters needed psychological help which was not provided by any social service. In their harsh reaction to the fallen protagonists, the Polish spectator turns away from the inevitability of hardship caused by the capitalist system’s exclusion of those who are less successful and “weaker” psychologically than others and resists any identification with the less victorious members of society. Instead, the average Polish spectator turns to the cinema of escapist illusion, which fulfills their dreams of professional and material success. The cinema I call escapist combines the aesthetics and narratives of soap operas with elements of the fashion show, the music video or comedy, peppered with gags and visual puns also characteristic of popular Polish TV shows. While the cinema of the abject is seen by an audience of about two hundred thousand people – a highly educated and intellectually engaged minority in Poland – the escapist cinema of fantasy boasts more than twenty million viewers and is often distributed on cheap or pirated DVDs, not only in Poland, but also in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and in the Polish diaspora. The cinema of capitalist fantasy thus crosses national borders and transgresses the geographical constraints of a “national cinema.” On another note, one could argue that Polish cinema of capitalist fantasy joins ranks with

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Hollywood or Bollywood cinemas, while the cinema of the abject is comparable to independent or art cinemas in many Western countries (such as the cinema of the “Berlin School” or Michael Haneke’s “cinema of provocation”). The film Just Love Me clearly represents the cinema of capitalist fantasy. Here, we observe the fascination with the new capitalist Poland and its highly successful young professionals who flourish in their workplaces performing their highly paid work without any visible effort. The action of the film takes place in the most expensive and fashionable Polish cities such as Warsaw and Sopot where people work in beautiful high-rises, are dressed in expensive clothes and mostly think about sex, not work. Work is considered a boring activity which simply has to be performed. Thus, the film ironically comments on the move from socialism to capitalism, as the spectators do not see the link between labor and value but see value as existing independently from the social relations of production. Consumer products do not seem to result from alienated work associated with capitalism but rather are a pleasant addition to a futuristic dreamscape in which capitalism showers Poles with constant rewards. The film Just Love Me showcases young professionals who live an extravagant yuppie lifestyle with a new entourage of exciting accoutrements and possessions: a new car, a beautiful apartment with an elegant kitchen, well-appointed living room, and expensive dishes and cutlery. All these material possessions prove that the capitalist effort is a pleasant and trouble-less endeavour which bears visible fruit. Merging the West’s cynical product placement with a stereotypical Slavic approach to work, the film’s ironic and light-hearted interpretation shows the life of yuppies as a mix of easy work and occasional sex in an unreal phantasmagoric Poland. When a child appears amidst these riches, it is treated as a pleasant addition to the life of grownups and, in fact, this is the child’s function in the film – to improve the life of the adults who conceived the child in the past and later forget their parental responsibilities. This film expresses the aspirations of Poles dreaming about the comfort and opulence of life driven by capitalism and epitomized by the European Union. This idealistic dreamscape sharply contrasts with reality. It is true that in 2008, Poland was considered a highly successful country in the opinions of Poles and of the Western world. With its high GDP, growing standard of living and increasing salaries, Poles saw themselves as successful, content with their lives and proud of their country. They chose to dismiss the sad truth that those earning less do live in real poverty, disregarding alcoholics and drug addicts just as they ignored the poverty-stricken houses in rural areas, beyond the gates of their opulent residences. Not surprisingly, the top film in Poland that year was Lejdis with an audience of 2,529,122 and Nie klam kochanie (“Darling, Don’t Lie to Me”) with 1, 395.471 viewers. Lejdis is an amusing comedy about female yuppies in Warsaw who chatter about their husbands and lovers in a way similar to the protagonists of the infamous Sex in the City. The film is a follow up to Testosteron (2007) which boasted 1,300,000 viewers in one year, a fascinating comedy about

The Cinema of the Abject and the Cinema of Capitalist Fantasy in Poland

successful men emasculated by their women.14 Both films deal with the successful and attractive inhabitants of big cities who live their fantasy lives in fantastically beautiful and polished surroundings. In the above-mentioned escapist films, overt social or political commentary is scarce, as is the portrayal of the real Warsaw traversed by deep social and economic divisions. According to statistics, only 5% of Warsaw population enjoys higher than average earnings and improved living conditions while the remaining 95% are unevenly divided into the middle class, lower class and the poverty-stricken lower classes, who usually suffer from alcoholism and drug addiction. As in the case of Just Love Me, an escapist illusion expresses the wishes of the general population and does not reveal the bitter truth of economic inequality or shed new light on the obvious lack of social services needed to address acute social problems, such as alcoholism and drug addiction, in Poland. The thematic and aesthetic characteristics in these two kinds of cinemas respond to varied spectatorial expectations and fulfill the wishes for selfrepresentation of social groups along generational, social and intellectual lines. What is clear in both cinemas, whether it is the cinema of the abject or that of capitalist fantasy, is a fusion between the desire to join the West and class mobility, twin aspirations which Poles only vaguely recognize as part of a larger capitalist shift today. The newly cast Europeans try to look towards the future, where Poland blends into a successful and affluent Europe, rather than analyze the past full of old nationalist skeletons.

Portraying the abject: the homeless near Warsaw central station in Kasia Adamik’s The Offsiders

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Capitalist desire: Julia Wroblewska as Michalina in Ryszard Zatorski’s Just Love Me

N otes 1 | The Cinema of Small Nations, ed. Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). Also see Mette Hjort’s recent essay, “Small Cinemas: How They Thrive and Why They Matter,” Mediascapes: UCLA’s Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (Winter 2011), available at: http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Winter2011_ SmallCinemas.pdf 2 | Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations. The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 39. 3 | On the other hand, national themes still continue to appear in recent Polish films, especially films which melancholically return to reprehensible events in Polish history. For instance, Andrzej Wajda’s autobiographical film Katyń (2007) recounts the events which have led to the massacre of the Polish Army officers in the Katyń forest by the hands of the Red Army soldiers in September 1939. The Reverse (Rewers, 2009) by Borys Lankosz deals with the times of Stalinist oppression in the 1950s, when almost every citizen of Poland had to deal with Polish security forces, and Jan Kidawa-Błoński’s Little Rose (Różyczka, 2010) tells a story based on real historical facts and historical personae living in Poland in 1960s. The film is based on the lives of Paweł Jasienica, a well-known Polish writer, and his second wife, Zophia O’Bretenny. The latter collaborated with Polish security forces and regularly reported on her famous husband. Treason, fear and collaboration with the dreaded secret police were part and parcel of the horrific period of the 1950s and 1960s.

The Cinema of the Abject and the Cinema of Capitalist Fantasy in Poland Despite Poland’s other political allegiances at present, there is still a pressing need to come to terms with this painful period in Polish national history. 4 | Thomas Elsaesser, “Real Location, Fantasy Space, Performative Place, Double Occupancy and Mutual Interference in European Cinema,” in European Film Theory, ed. Temenuga Trifonova (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 49; my italics. 5 | Ibid., 50-51. 6 | See Paul Coates, “Ideologies of the Sacred and the Profane: ‘Europe’ and ‘The Country and the City’ in Polish Cinema,” Central Europe Vol. 5, No. 1, (May 2007): 65. The social and political aspirations of Poland were brutally suppressed after World War II when the nation became part of the Eastern bloc. Most Poles opposed Soviet dictatorship, sided with the Polish aristocratic government in exile in London, England and tried to resist Soviet indoctrination in everyday culture whenever possible. This indoctrination took place in myriad ways, for instance, in the Soviet presentation of a skewed Polish history in schools and in the imposition of Soviet culture in the satellite states. As a result of this systemic indoctrination, Polish social life and culture became increasingly proletarian, simplistic and monolithic. In their ruthless attempts at one-size-fits-all policy (urawniłowka), the Soviets, their representatives in the communist party and the ministries supervised and governed by the Soviet communist party tried to stifle intellectual freedom. This governmental policy prompted Polish artists, writers, poets, and filmmakers to instrumentally use irony to distance themselves from the version of reality forced upon by the nation by the Soviets. 7 | Ibid., 66. 8 | Ryszard Kapuściński, Rwacy Nurt Historii. Zapiski o XX i XXI wieku (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2007), 152-153. 9 | This cycle of uncritical and naïve comedies, which one could compare to what film historian Eric Rentschler termed the 1990s German “Cinema of Consensus” also includes Wojciech Wójcik’s Randka w Ciemno (“Blind Date,” 2010), Patryk Vega’s Ciacho (“Beefcake,” 2010) and Piotr Wereśniak’s Och Karol 2 (“Oh Charles 2,” 2011). See Eric Rentschler, “From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus,” in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie (London: Routledge, 2000), 260-277. 10 | Mike Wayne, Marxism and Media Studies (London: Pluto Press, 2003), 10. 11 | This market statistic on cinema attendance is taken from the Polski Portal Filmowy (Polish Film Portal), the official webpage of Polish film sponsored by the Polish Institute of Film Art: www.stopklatka.pl. 12 | The “Cinema of Moral Concern” has been extensively discussed in Marek Haltof, Polish National Cinema (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2002), 147-159. 13 | Manthia Diawara, “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 774. 14 | This market statistic on cinema attendance is taken from the Polski Portal Filmowy (Polish Film Portal), the official webpage of Polish film sponsored by the Polish Institute of Film Art: www.stopklatka.pl.

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Contributor Biographies Thomas Ballhausen is Lecturer at the University of Vienna and member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He previously worked as Director of the Department for Studies and Advanced Research at Filmarchiv Austria. He has worked on several research projects involving European film heritage and archival studies. His publications on film history, media theory, and popular culture include Kontext und Prozess (Löcker, 2005), Psyche im Kino: Sigmund Freud und der Film, co-edited with G. Krenn and L. Marinelli (Verlag Filmarchiv Austria, 2007), Delirium und Ekstase: Die Aktualität der Monströsen (Milena, 2008), Urban Hacking: Cultural Jamming Strategies in the Risky Spaces of Modernity, coedited with Günther Friesinger and Johannes Grenzfurthner (transcript, 2010), Bewegungen des Schreckens (Peter Lang, 2010), and Mind and Matter: Comparative Approaches towards Complexity, co-edited with Günther Friesinger and Johannes Grenzfurthner (transcript, 2011). Janelle Blankenship is Associate Professor of Film Studies and Graduate Faculty at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. She has published essays on German film history, film theory, and literary modernism and has also edited a special issue of the journal Polygraph on Media and Spatiality in Deleuze and Guattari. She is now completing a book on the early German film pioneer and magic lantern showman Max Skladanowsky. Charlie Cauchi is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London. She has presented a number of conference papers on Maltese cinema and filmmaking in the Mediterranean microstate. Her recent article on film education and training on the Island of Malta was published in Mette Hjort (ed.), The Education of the Filmmaker in Europe, Australia and Asia (Palgrave, 2013). She has also served as Festival Director of BornShorts Film Festival, Denmark and as a juror for the Malta Film Fund Awards. Paul Coates is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of a number of books, including, most recently, Screening the Face (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2012), Cinema and Color: The Saturated Image (BFI, 2010),

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The Red and the White: The Cinema of People’s Poland (Wallflower, 2005), Cinema, Religion and the Romantic Legacy (Ashgate, 2003), and editor of Lucid Dreams: The Films of Krzysztof Kieślowski (Flicks Books, 1999). Janina Falkowska is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Western Ontario. She is the author of numerous books on Polish cinema, including Andrzej Wajda: History, Politics, and Nostalgia in Polish Cinema (Berghahn, 2007), The Political Films of Andrzej Wajda (Berghahn, 1996), and with Marek Haltof The New Polish Cinema (Flicks Books, 2003). She is co-editor with Lenuta Giukin and David Desser of Small Cinemas in Global Markets: Genres, Identities, Narratives (Lexington Books, 2014). Angelica Fenner is Associate Professor of German and Cinema Studies and Graduate Coordinator of the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include migration in European cinemas, autobiographical non-fiction film in contemporary Germany and race and ethnicity in contemporary German visual culture. Her articles and interviews with filmmakers have appeared in Camera Obscura, Journal of Feminist Media Studies, CineAction, and Women in German Yearbook. Recent publications include Race Under Reconstruction in German Cinema: Robert Stemmle’s Toxi (University of Toronto Press, 2011) and (co-edited with Robin Curtis) The Autobiographical Turn in Germanophone Documentary and Experimental Film (Camden House, 2014). Gary Genosko is Professor of Communication at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. He previously held a Canada Research Chair from 2002 to 2012 in Technoculture Studies. His book publications include When Technocultures Collide: Innovation from Below and the Struggle for Autonomy (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013) and Remodelling Communication (University of Toronto Press, 2012). He is also the author of three books on Félix Guattari, Félix Guattari: A Critical Introduction (Pluto Press, 2009), Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction (Continuum, 2002) and The Party without Bosses: Lessons on Anti-Capitalism from Félix Guattari and Lula da Silva (Arbeiter Ring, 2003) and has also edited The Guattari Reader (Blackwell, 1996) and three volumes of Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments (Routledge, 2001). In 2012, he edited a special issue of the journal Deleuze Studies on “Félix Guattari in the Age of Semiocapitalism.” His most recent book is co-edited with Jay Hetrick, Machinic Eros: Félix Guattari’s Writings on Japan (Univocal, 2015). Lenuta Giukin is Associate Professor of French at Oswego State University of New York. She is co-editor with Janina Falkowska and David Desser of Small Cinemas in Global Markets: Genres, Identities, Narratives (Lexington Books, 2014) and author of numerous articles on French and Romanian Cinema. In 2013 she received a Fulbright Scholarship to do research on the Moldovan-Bessarabian film industry.

Contributor Biographies

Iwona Guść is a cultural historian with a wide range of interests related to post-war European identities and encounters. She received her PhD in Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. After completing her PhD, she held a Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen Institute for Advanced Study. Her current research is on the Polish reception of the Diaries of Anne Frank and the differences in reading the story of Anne Frank in Western and Eastern Europe. Mette Hjort is Chair and Professor of Visual Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, where she also serves as Associate Vice President for Internationalization. She is an Affiliate Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, and an Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Modern European Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her publications include Small Nation, Global Cinema: The New Danish Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), Lone Scherfig’s Italian for Beginners (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010), and the edited volume The Education of the Filmmaker in Africa, the Middle East and the Americas (Palgrave, 2013). She has a strong interest in practitioner’s agency and has published a series of interview books with filmmakers, most recently, with Ib Bondebjerg and Eva Novrup Redvall, The Danish Directors 3: Dialogues on the New Danish Documentary Cinema (Intellect, 2014). She co-edits the Nordic Film Classics series for the University of Washington Press. Rodica Ieta is Visiting Assistant Professor of Film and English at Oswego State University of New York. She has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Western Ontario, with specialization in literary theory and criticism, and modern English literature. She has published several articles in her areas of specialization including “James Joyce’s Ulysses in Romanian: An Uncanny and Foreign Language” and the “The New Romanian Cinema: A Realism of Impressions” in a special issue of the journal Film Criticism. Maria Ioniţă received her MA in Comparative Literature and PhD in English Literature from the University of Western Ontario. She specializes in literary theory, film, and narrative theory and television. She teaches literature and popular culture at Ryerson University in Toronto. Most recently she has been studying narratives of migration in contemporary Romanian cinema. Gérard Kraus has researched the reception of Luxembourg’s cinema over the last thirty years. His research interests lie in national cinemas (particularly Japan and Luxembourg) as well as in fantastic film. His publications include articles on the films of Andy Bausch and a chapter on digital games in Glen Creeber and Royston Martin’s Digital Cultures: Understanding New Media (Open University Press, 2009). He holds an MA in Science Fiction Studies from the School of English at

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the University of Liverpool. He collaborates with the National Audiovisual Centre (CNA) in Luxembourg, Film Fund Luxembourg, the National Literary Centre, and national filmmakers on a regular basis. Jorge Latorre is Professor of Visual Culture in the School of Communication at the University of Navarra, Spain. In 2001-2002, he was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Fine Arts Department, New York University. Latorre has published five books on the history of photography, the arts, film and media and written more than 30 articles and chapters, including “Pictorialism in Spanish Photography: ‘Forgotten’ Pioneers” and “Martín Chambi: A Self-Portrait” in the journal History of Photography, and “Poetic Realism: The Complete Work of Víctor Erice” in the Directory of World Cinema: Spain (Intellect, 2011). Ute Lischke is Professor and Chair of English and Film Studies at Wilfred Laurier University. Her research interests include European cinema, German Cinema, women writers and filmmakers, and Indigenous literature and film. She is the author of the book Lily Braun: (1865-1916): German Writer, Feminist, Socialist (Camden House, 2000) and has also published numerous articles, including an essay on the films of Helke Misselwitz in Women Filmmakers: Refocusing, ed. Jacqueline Levitin, Judith Plessis, and Valerie Raoul (Psychology Press, 2012) and an essay on the representation of Indigenous people in East-German Indian films in the late 20th century in Walking a Tightrope: Aboriginal Peoples and their Representation, ed. Ute Lischke and David T. McNab (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005). Heather Macdougall received her PhD in the Humanities from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University in Montreal, where she also taught courses in the Irish Studies and Film Studies departments. In addition to her academic research, she has worked internationally as a festival programmer. Zoran Maric is Lecturer in the Department of Film Studies at the University of Western Ontario and PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University. His research focuses on Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cinemas. Antonio Martínez Illán is Professor of Narrative Studies in the School of Communication at the University of Navarra, Spain. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bath and the University of Iowa. He has published critical studies of the writers Joseph Brodsky, José Jiménez Lozano and numerous articles on film and literature, including an article on Gogol’s “The Overcoat” on the Russian screen in Literature/Film Quarterly. His book Seis poemas de Joseph Brodsky/Joseph Brodsky’s Six Poems was published in 2005.

Contributor Biographies

Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu is Professor of Comparative Literature, Critical Theory, and Hispanic Studies at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. In addition to his academic publications spanning a number of disciplines, he writes prose, poetry, children stories and texts which defy pigeonholing. His recent publications include Happy New Fear! (in Romanian, 2011), “Literary Theory and the Sciences” (ed.; special issue of Neohelicon, 2014). Forthcoming in 2015 are “Rereading Faces” (a special edited issue of The Yearbook of Comparative Literature dedicated to Matei Călinescu) and An Astrocentric World (essays on the philosophy of culture; in Romanian). Philip Mosley is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University, Worthington Scranton. He is the author of Ingmar Bergman: The Cinema as Mistress (Marion Boyars, 1981) and two books on Belgian cinema: Split Screen: Belgian Cinema and Cultural Identity (SUNY Press, 2000) and The Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers (Wallflower, 2013). Mosley is also translator of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Intelligence of Flowers, Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-laMorte, and Tea Masters, Teahouses by Werner Lambersy. In 2008 he was awarded the Prix de la Traduction Littéraire by the French Community of Belgium for his translations of Belgian authors into English. His translation of The Book of the Snow by François Jacqmin was shortlisted for the 2011 Griffin International Poetry Prize. Tobias Nagl is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Western Ontario and teaches at the interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism. He is the author of Die unheimliche Maschine: Rasse und Repräsentation im Weimarer Kino (The Uncanny Machine: Race and Representation in Weimar Cinema, edition text + kritik, 2009), winner of the international Willy Haas Award in 2009. He has published extensively on German film history, film theory, race and postcolonialism, Afro-German history, R.W Fassbinder, Michael Haneke, and the Holocaust in film and memory culture. Björn Norðfjörð is Associate Professor and Director of Film Studies at the University of Iceland. He recently edited a volume on world cinema in Icelandic, and is the author of a monograph on Nói the Albino in English. His Icelandic translation of Rudolf Arnheim’s Film as Art was published in 2013. Larson Powell is Professor of German at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. His most recent book, The Differentiation of Modernism: Postwar German Media Arts was published by Camden House in 2013; a first book was on modern German poetry. He is currently co-editing (with Kyle Frackman) a book on classical music in the GDR, and (with Robert Shandley) a book on German TV. A book on East German film maker Konrad Wolf is in progress. He has published and lectured on German film and literature, media theory, and film sound, as

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well as on musicology and philosophical aesthetics. Recent publications include a contribution to Jennifer Kapczynski and Michael Richardson (ed.), A New History of German Cinema (Camden House, 2012) and one to Marc Silberman and Henning Wrage (ed.), DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and International Film Culture (De Gruyter, 2014). Oleksandr Pronkevich is Dean of the College of Foreign Languages at Petro Mohyla Black Sea State University in Mykolaiv, Ukraine. He is an alumnus of the Fulbright Exchange Academic Program (Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Wisconsin-Madison) and an alumnus of AECI (University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz). He has also served as Visiting Professor at Montclair State University (New Jersey, USA) and President of the Association of Hispanists of Ukraine. He has published extensively on Spanish literature and culture and comparative literary studies. Two recent books are Nation as Narration in the Spanish Literature of the Modernist Period and Don Quixote: The Novel – the Myth – the Commodity. Renata Šukaitytė is Associate Professor of Film and Media and Director of the Institute of Creative Media, Faculty of Communication at Vilnius University, Lithuania. Her publications include the edited volume Baltic Cinemas after the 90s: Shifting (Hi)stories and (Id)entities (Acta Academia Artium Vilnensis, 2010) and (with Christopher Hales), The Garden of Digital Delights: Rethinking Crossmedia Practices in Contemporary Art and Culture (Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis, 2012). She has published numerous articles on Deleuze and cinema and Lithuanian and Baltic film including “The New Businesses, Lifestyles and Subjectivities in Lithuanian Film since the 2000s,” in Michael Gott and Todd Herzog (ed.), East, West and Centre: Reframing post-1989 European Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and “Practice-Based Film Education in Lithuania: Main Actors and Sites of Struggles,” in Mette Hjort (ed.), The Education of the Filmmaker in Europe, Australia and Asia (Palgrave, 2013).