Post-Communist Malaise

Cinematic Responses to European Integration

Zoran Samardzija

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780813587141, 9780813587158
• eBook ISBN: 9780813587165
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Eastern European History

The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was supposed to bring about the "end of history" with capitalism and liberal democracy achieving decisive victories. Europe would now integrate and reconcile with its past. However, the aftershocks of the financial crisis of 2008—the rise in right-wing populism, austerity politics, and mass migration—have shown that the ideological divisions which haunted Europe in the twentieth century still remain. It is within this context that Post-Communist Malaise revives discourses of political modernism and revisits debates from Marxism and seventies film theory. Analyzing work of Theo Angelopoulos, Vera Chytilová, Srdjan Dragojevic, Jean-Luc Godard, Miklós Jancsó, Emir Kusturica, Dušan Makavejev, Cristi Puiu, Jan Švankmajer, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Béla Tarr, the book focuses on how select cinemas from Eastern Europe and the Balkans critique the neoliberal integration of Europe whose failures fuel the rise of nationalism and right-wing politics. By politicizing art cinema from the regions, Post-Communist Malaise asks fundamental questions about film, aesthetics, and ideology. It argues for the utopian potential of the materiality of cinematic time to imagine a new political and cultural organization for Europe.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Eastern European New Waves and Political Modernism
• 2. What Happens after the End of History?
• 3. Slow Cinema and the Escape from Capitalist Realism
• 4. Theo Angelopoulos, Greece, and the Ends of Europe
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author