A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas

Anikó Imre

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781444337259
• eBook ISBN: 9781118294352
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas showcases twenty-five essays written by established and emerging film scholars that trace the history of Eastern European cinemas and offer an up-to-date assessment of post-socialist film cultures.

• Showcases critical historical work and up-to-date assessments of post-socialist film cultures
• Features consideration of lesser known areas of study, such as Albanian and Baltic cinemas, popular genre films, cross-national distribution and aesthetics, animation and documentary
• Places the cinemas of the region in a European and global context
• Resists the Cold War classification of Eastern European cinemas as "other" art cinemas by reconnecting them with the main circulation of film studies
• Includes discussion of such films as Taxidermia, El Perro Negro, 12: 08 East of Bucharest Big Tõll, and Breakfast on the Grass and explores the work of directors including Tamás Almási, Walerian Borowczyk, Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Andrzej ¯u³awski, and Karel Vachek amongst many others

1

Introduction

Eastern European Cinema From No End to the End (As We Know It)

Anikó Imre

In the 1980s, the Soviet Empire’s last decade, the state of Eastern European cinema was best illustrated by its most recognizable parts: those few art-house films, made by selected national auteurs, that made it across the Iron Curtain to international festivals and distribution venues. If we take as an example the year 1985, the ­midpoint of the decade, Kieślowski’s No End, Menzel’s My Sweet Little Village, Szabó’s Colonel Redl, and Kusturica’s When Father Was Away on Business represent the cream of the crop. Recognizable products of Eastern European cinema were almost invariably dark and revolved around the crippling impact on people’s ­bodies and minds, particularly those of intellectuals, speaking in a double language to evade censorship. Such films were typically made on modest state budgets, often employed experimental and avant-garde aesthetics, and were treated by Western critics and film buffs “as if they were from the moon,” as Miklós Jancsó once put it (Mihancsik, 2000).

A quarter century later, the state of Eastern European filmmaking is best summed up by a range of very different kinds of productions. One of these new kinds is exemplified by The Borgias (Showtime, 2011–), a lavishly cinematic ­English-speaking historical television series. The show has been shot in Budapest and employs an almost all-Hungarian below-the-line crew. It is set in late-fifteenth-century Italy and centers on the dangerous and seductive lives of the infamous papal family of Spanish origin. It was created by Irish film director Neil Jordan and features English actor Jeremy Irons as Rodrigo Borgia, or Pope Alexander VI. The series was co-produced among four production companies and is distributed ­globally, most prominently by Showtime Networks.

What does The Borgias reveal about the transformations that have swept through Eastern European cinema? Most obviously, that filmmaking has become radically decentralized and depoliticized. Its beating heart is no longer the director and his dissident artistic vision but the producer and the political–economic imperatives of a globalized media industry. Nation-states, and the independent film ­production companies that have mushroomed all over the region, are no longer vying just for Western festival attention but, more importantly, for the transnational investments that supply film production. The Borgias represents one of Hungary’s victories in the competition among former Socialist states for a slice of the global enter­tainment market, mostly in the form of temporary jobs created by media conglomerates.

This victory has been scored by offering the producers of The Borgias an ­unbeatably cheap and experienced workforce and generous tax credits, which cover up to 25 percent of foreign investors’ production costs according to a 2004 law. Thanks to these incentives, Budapest has recently become the most desirable post-Socialist destination for outsourcing Hollywood-based film and television production, overtaking the formerly favored Prague. The latest milestone has been the construction of Raleigh Studios on the outskirts of Budapest, a $700 million investment and “the finest studio on the continent,” as company president Michael Moore announced (Verrier, 2009). The facility includes nine sound stages, a 15-acre backlot, equipment rentals, production services, and line producing facilities (Caranicas, 2010). The Hungarian state provided only $1 million of the funds needed to build the studio. It is just one of several production facilities recently built in greater Budapest, which include the Korda Film Studio, where the first season of The Borgias was shot. In addition to offering skilled, inexpensive labor and tax incentives, Moore adds, Budapest can double as other less affordable European locations such as London, Berlin, Paris, and, evidently, Italy.

Such arrangements are now essential to funding film projects everywhere in the region. In Chapter 22, for instance, Ioana Uricaru discusses Castel Films as a new paradigm for film financing. Established in 1993 as a Romanian–American partnership with Paramount Studios, managed and owned by director of photography Vlad Păunescu, Castel Films provides full services – sets, sound stages, personnel, casting, below-the-line talent, postproduction, equipment – to dozens of feature films and hundreds if not thousands of advertising productions. From making mostly B-series genre films in the 1990s (horrors, Westerns, vampire movies, action-adventure), it rose in prominence by contributing to the production of Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain in 2002. This saved $20 million in film production costs, thanks to the 20 percent tax deduction on the value of new investments over $1 million and tax exemptions for importing film equipment and for profits reinvested in the film industry. Castel Films also trains and employs much of the film industry workforce in Romania.

Between 1985 and 2011, the emphasis has clearly shifted from nurturing national cinema cultures to globalizing national film industries within the region. National cinemas are now organic parts of an increasingly integrating transnational ­entertainment industry in which media forms, platforms, and technologies are intertwined. The economic integration among production and delivery platforms goes hand in hand with an aesthetic convergence, which has challenged the ­long-held hierarchy between art films and popular entertainment. Such class and taste distinctions are no longer drawn exclusively by state-run, nationalistic ­cultural industries but are shaped by niche marketing and the affordability of certain forms of entertainment to specific demographics.

To return to the case of The Borgias, it is a good fit for the brand of the premium cable network Showtime, one of the “quality” television networks that target sophisticated, upscale audiences in the United States and worldwide. The ­producer, Jack Rapke, had long planned to produce the script as a feature film with Oscar aspirations, but eventually decided to transform it into the next best thing, a ­quality costume drama series directed by one of Europe’s preeminent auteurs and ­starring one of its most highly reputed actors. The success of The Tudors (2007–), another high production value, spectacular costume drama series elevated by its European historical subject matter and talent, was a reassuring economic trial run for Rapke and Showtime (Rapke, J., in question-and-answer session, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 2011). While the story of the Borgia family has long been a source of intrigue, power, violence, and romance for fictional treatments it has also been popularized recently by the Assassin’s Creed videogame franchise, a series of three historical games in which one plays an assassin in Rodrigo Borgia’s court. Gaming blogs and discussion sites were animated with comparisons of the game and the television show and speculation about mutual influences even before the series was launched. After the first episodes were aired, gamers immediately commented on the CGI quality of some of the crowd scenes, which showed a remarkable similarity to the highly realistic video game. None of these discussions ever mentioned the actual location of the ­shooting – Eastern Europe – and the entire below-the-line context of production that made possible this spectacular, game-like, cinematic illusion of European ­history, which stays invisible as the other, submerged side of global convergence.

The blurring of the division between high and popular culture, or more ­specifically between art film and quality television, speaks to a global leveling out of geographical and cultural sensibilities in the cheery melting pot of Hollywood production values and European historical heritage and artistic prestige. In the post-Cold War media world, global consumer sensibilities crystallize around brand preferences and economic class. From the ruins of state-run film industries, ­cash-strapped Eastern Europe has emerged as an indispensable site for this transnational rearrangement: a cheap resource for production and a new consumer market, which offers to the cosmopolitan consumer eye an affordable, generic template for virtual historical tourism.

At the same time, while the nation-state is still one of the players, state funding for film and other arts has been consistently dwindling in the region, especially in the wake of the ongoing global economic crisis. The moral obligation to sustain national cinema still lingers and is encouraged by European cultural subsidies. But the state’s most important job has become the creation of an economic ­environment that allows for the gradual lowering of regulation to seduce the foreign investment to which much of the actual support of the film industry has been transferred.

In Hungary, for instance, state funds to be distributed among film projects were progressively reduced throughout the first decade of the new millennium. In 2010, the budget spent on making Hungarian and co-produced films was cut in half. The Hungarian Motion Picture Foundation, which has been in charge of handing out money to produce scripts each year, has faced such a deficit that it had to suspend its operations altogether for a while (Gazdaság, 2011). The annual “Filmszemle,” (film review), the competition in which the best of the year’s films are debuted and compared, came close to being cancelled in February 2011 and had to be rescheduled, in a much reduced format, for May. If it survives in the future, it is likely to transform into a less centralized, international festival. As a perfect illustration of the changing tides, on January 15, 2011 the Hungarian government appointed Hungarian-born Hollywood producer Andrew Vajna, responsible for international blockbusters such as the Rambo series and some of the Terminator movies, government commissioner in charge of the Hungarian film industry. As head of the National Film Fund, the institution that replaced the Motion Picture Foundation, Vajna is responsible for deploying new strategies for Hungarian film preservation and development. The National Film Fund’s budget for financing local production is $11.2 million in its first year, barely one-third of what the Motion Picture Foundation used to distribute annually.

What Is and What (Really) Was “Eastern European Cinema”?

The introduction to this chapter sets out the first goal for this volume: to account for the sea-change that has transformed Eastern European cinema as a cultural, economic, institutional, and political enterprise over the past 25 years. While a ­possible arc of this transformation may be drawn between No End and The Borgias, these productions are only signposts to what are much larger shifts in the ­landscape. In fact, one might wonder – and many have – whether there really is such a thing as Eastern Europe any more. To date, 10 former Socialist states have officially rejoined Europe. The expansion of the European Union has also led to redrawing the boundaries within and around the region. Eastern Europe has effectively disintegrated into smaller geopolitical areas, questioning the very legitimacy of the region as something defined primarily by a shared Socialist past.

The effort to categorize cinema along national lines certainly persists. However, regional rubrics such as “Baltic,” “East-Central European,” “Balkan,” and even “Mediterranean” have also been revived. Much post-Cold War attention continues to be paid to Russia. At the same time, the post-Soviet republics of the Baltic and Central Asian regions, as well as Turkey, Albania, and some of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, have come to constitute the new borders of Europe to the east and south. Slovenia has been welcomed into the Euro-zone, while Serbia and Croatia are still waiting for membership of the European Union. The Czech Republic and Slovakia have moved further apart. Romania has been forcefully rebranded as the land of Dracula, the last remaining resource of Communist ­backwardness and medieval mysticism (Imre and Bardan, 2011).

The consequences of such geopolitical redefinitions for local film cultures have been substantial. Eastern Europe has turned from a cold war other into an important component of the European Union’s policy to establish a Europe-wide media and communications area able to stand up to competition with US-based and Asian media empires. As discussed by Ioana Uricaru in Chapter 22 and Melis Behlil in Chapter 26, the Council of Europe’s Euroimages fund has been instrumental in financing co-production, distribution, and digitization projects among European states. The MEDIA (Measures to Encourage the Development of the Audio Visual Industries) program, another EU initiative, has provided crucial support for film projects in the areas of training, development, distribution, promotion, and Europeanization. The Television Without Frontiers initiative has been highly influential in integrating and deregulating television services within the European Union, while also setting policies to appease factions that want to protect national industries from corporatization. These European programs have certainly helped to reinvigorate media production in the former Socialist states. At the same time, European integration has further exposed Eastern Europe to neoliberal deregulation, weakening the political and economic power of nation-states and reinforcing existing geopolitical inequalities within Europe.

The post-Socialist revision of Eastern European cinema, the first goal of this collection, thus also brings into view a larger, no less important question: that of how and why these cinemas were constructed and consolidated into “Eastern European cinemas” by the dividing ideological force of the Iron Curtain in the first place. The second goal of this book is thus to peek behind the metaphorical ­curtain to see how it staged the story of Eastern European cinema and what other potential scripts it left untold. An immediate effect of this larger-scale historical revision is that it demystifies the aura created around certain filmmakers, and films that were treated in the West as “messages from the moon.” This collection begins to provide a revised historiography of Eastern European cinema from vantage points that have thus far been obscured, selectively forgotten, or distorted by the Cold War dichotomy of “us and them,” “East and West,” “before and after.” As several contributions elaborate here for the first time, Socialist film cultures were much less isolated and insular than earlier accounts would have us believe. Co-productions within the region and between East and West were made throughout the Socialist period and thrived from the late 1970s onwards, in the period of ideological and economic “thaw.” The boundaries between genres and formats were much more permeable than the exclusive focus on philosophical art film intimates. Western genre film imports were consumed – national differences notwithstanding – by much of the Socialist viewing audience, and local genre films were widely enjoyed, although without distribution outlets or acknowledgment outside the region. Television and film were also interlaced by sharing production facilities, creative and below-the-line personnel, and, of course, institutions of funding and ­ideological control.

In the light of the revised historiography presented by contributions in this book, perhaps a production such as The Borgias is a less surprising development, as much the result of continuity as of radical restructuring. It may be that the post-Cold War conditions that favor Eastern Europe as a site of runaway production, transnational outsourcing of labor, and tax reductions for corporate media giants run deeper than the four decades of socialism. Perhaps the division between Europe and the “other Europe” should not be EU-phorically cast away as the tainted legacy of the Cold War. Instead, it should be recast as a relationship of ­hierarchical interdependence, which can be traced back to its roots in the enlightenment, as several scholars have suggested. Larry Wolf famously tells the history of Eastern Europe as a discursive construct whose origins date back to two ­hundred years before the Cold War and Churchill’s infamous “Iron Curtain speech” (Wolff, 1994). It was in the eighteenth century that the division between Eastern and Western Europe established Europe as the bedrock of rationality and democracy (Korek, 2007: 15) and generated tropes that linked Eastern Europe with ­postcolonial Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America (Buchowski, 2006). While civilization was firmly tied to the West, Eastern Europe shifted to an imaginary location somewhere between civilization and barbarism, to serve as a boundary marker where Western empires were separated and protected from the invasion of uncivilized Eastern forces such as the Ottoman Turks. The borderland’s mission to protect Western European civilization became deeply internalized in the course of the struggles for national independence in the 1840s. Eastern European nationalisms were thus formed in the West’s image of the region, around a core of ­self-colonization. Although Eastern European cultures did not directly participate in actual territorial imperialism carried out by Western European states, the ­hierarchical division between the two Europes qualifies as an imperial order ­sustained through mutually constituting Eastern and Western discourses (Verdery, 2002; Böröcz, 2001).

The fall of the curtain renewed the discursive hierarchy between East and West within the guise of neoliberal free-market ideology. Most post-Socialist populations have been designated as the losers of capitalism, who are blamed for their immobility and incapacity to adjust (Buchowski, 2006). József Böröcz argues that the European Union’s eastern expansion is yet another effort to solidify a contiguous (as opposed to detached) empire. The European Union’s rhetoric has in fact revived the discarded modernization scheme to discipline the East through the superior rationality of the market and democracy. The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on the Editor and Contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: New Theoretical and Critical Frameworks
• Part II: Historical and Spatial Redefinitions
• Part III: Aesthetic (Re)visions
• Part IV: Industries and Institutions
• Index