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Cronfa - Swansea University Open Access Repository _____________________________________________________________ This is an author produced version of a paper published in : The Routledge Companion to World Cinema Cronfa URL for this paper: http://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa29914 _____________________________________________________________ Book chapter : Rydzewska, J. (2017). Developments in Eastern European Cinema since 1989. R. Stone, P. Cooke, S. Dennison, A. Marlow-Mann (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to World Cinema, Routledge. _____________________________________________________________ This article is brought to you by Swansea University. Any person downloading material is agreeing to abide by the terms of the repository licence. Authors are personally responsible for adhering to publisher restrictions or conditions. When uploading content they are required to comply with their publisher agreement and the SHERPA RoMEO database to judge whether or not it is copyright safe to add this version of the paper to this repository. http://www.swansea.ac.uk/iss/researchsupport/cronfa-support/ Developments in Eastern European Cinemas since 1989 Elżbieta Ostrowska, University of Alberta Joanna Rydzewska, Swansea University ABSTRACT This chapter examines the ways in which Eastern European cinema has become Europeanized. It looks at how the idea of Eastern Europe and its cinema has been shaped vis-à-vis the West, and redefined after the collapse of communism. Contrary to the received wisdom that a new paradigm emerged in 1989, this chapter argues that it is only since 2000 that Eastern European cinema has enjoyed recognition after the near collapse of its film industries in the 1990s. In the three case studies of the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, Eastern European female directors and the Romanian New Wave, the chapter analyses the emergence in Eastern Europe of a new complex model of film production aligned with its larger European counterpart. This producer- driven model is based on three further aspects: the national film institutes, international co-productions and participation in film festivals. Elzbieta Ostrowska teaches film at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her publications include The Cinematic Bodies of Eastern Europe and Russia, co-edited with Ewa Mazierska and Matilda Mroz (Edinburgh University Press 2015), Women in Polish Cinema, co-authored with Ewa Mazierska (Berghahn Books, 2006), The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World, co-edited with John Orr (Wallflower, 2006), The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda: The Art of Irony and Defiance, co-edited with John Orr (Wallflower, 2003), Gender in Film and the Media: East-West Dialogues, co-edited with Elzbieta Oleksy and Michael Stevenson (Peter Lang, 2000). Her articles have appeared in Slavic Review, Studies in European Cinema, and Holocaust and Genocide Studies. She is a deputy editor of Studies in Eastern European Cinema. Joanna Rydzewska is senior lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Swansea University. Her research interests lie in the field of European cinema, transnational cinema, migration, gender theory, and issues of identity in film. She has written on Polish émigré directors and 1 the representation of Polish migration in both Polish and British film and television, and her articles have appeared in Journal of British Cinema and Television, Studies in European Cinema, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, and Critical Studies in Television. She has co-edited Representing Gender in Cultures (with E.H. Oleksy, 2004), and her books Sculpting Stories: The Cinema of Paweł Pawlikowski (Columbia University Press) and From Valiant Warriors to Bloody Immigrants: Poles in Cinema (Routledge) are published in 2017 and 2018. Introduction At the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, Romania could boast the third largest number of films shown, after only the U.S.A. and France. Out of its six entries, Bacalaureat (Romania/France/Belgium, Graduation, 2016) won its director Cristian Mungiu the Best Director Award, while Câini (Romania/France/Bulgaria/Qatar, Dogs, 2016) by Bogdan Mirică won the FIPRESCI Award (Zeitchik 2016). The 2016 Cannes story is only the latest in a series of successes for Romanian films over the past decade since Cătălin Mitulescu won the Palme d’Or for his short film Traffic (Romania) in 2004. In the subsequent four years, for example, – between 2005 and 2009 – the five main prizes at the Cannes Film Festival went to Romanian films, solidifying their claim to be the next European movement – The Romanian New Wave (hereafter: RNW) as critics have termed it – after von Trier and Vinterberg’s Dogme 95. The success of Eastern European films at the arguably most prestigious European film festival is significant given that as recently as 2000 not a single film was produced in Romania (Uricaru 2012: 427). The crisis of film production was endemic in the region in the 1990s following the break up of the Soviet Bloc, which freed a number of states from Soviet domination but left them economically, politically and socially lagging behind the rest of Europe, and the film industry was no exception (Wood and Iordanova 2000; Iordanova 2002; Imre 2005). The lack of funding in the 1990s which followed the transformation from the communist state-owned system to the producer- 2 driven free market drove Eastern European cinema near to collapse. It is the accelerated re-structuring of their financing model throughout the 1990s into an interface between national and transnational enterprise, however, which led to the Europeanization of Eastern European films. At the time of writing, Eastern European films are sponsored by a host of European production companies, as in the case, for example, of the Paris-based Why Not Productions, which has recently produced both the award-winning Graduation and Dupa dealuri (Romania/France/Belgium, Beyond the Hills, Cristian Mungiu, 2013), but also such European art-house hits as De rouille et d'os (France/Belgium, Rust and Bone, Jacques Audiard, 2012) and I, Daniel Blake (UK/France/Belgium, Ken Loach, 2015). Nevertheless, the role of the national institutes has also been central in enabling the success of Eastern European films. Indeed, the Romanian Law of Cinematography introduced in 1999 (analyzed below) was so successful that Poland introduced its own Act on Cinematography and created the Polish Film Institute in 2005, which led to the international success of such Polish films as W imię… (Poland, In the Name of, Małgorzata Szumowska, 2013), Ida (Poland/Denmark/France/UK, Paweł Pawlikowski, 2013) and Zjednoczone stany miłości (Poland/Sweden, United States of Love, Tomasz Wasilewski, 2016). Identifying directorial talent through national funding, fostering films’ transnational universal themes aimed at international art-house audiences and international forms of distribution, including film festivals’ visibility and international funding, and authorial freedom as a function of directors’ own private production companies are all emblematic of the Romanian New Wave’s success, and underpin a transformative financing model across Eastern Europe. The example of Romania, on the one hand, illustrates how the break-up of the Soviet Bloc led to the increased diversification, localism and enhanced significance of 3 national cinemas in Eastern Europe. On the other hand, it shows how the return to the national is countered by the creation of pan-European, post-national or indeed worldwide configurations fuelled by globalization, the advancement of the neoliberal market economy, the expansion of new social media, and increased migration (Imre 2012: 2). In securing a place in the canon of (Western) European film movements, along with such well-established ‘moments’ in national cinemas as German Expressionism, Italian Neo-Realism and the French New Wave, the Romanian New Wave has put Eastern European cinema on the Film Studies map of European cinema from which it has too often been erased. The RNW thereby redraws the cultural map of Europe by moving the border eastwards, and questions the established axiology of the concepts of (Western) European and Eastern European cinema, where ‘European’ has more often than not stood for certain privileged countries such as France, Germany or Italy (although the exact countries of European cinema can be difficult to establish without risking a debate). Given Eastern Europe and Eastern European cinema’s entrenched real and perceived marginalization, as a result of political isolation behind the Iron Curtain and their geographical location on the periphery of what has traditionally been regarded as Europe, the fact that Eastern European cinema is starting to achieve the same kind of recognition and inclusion as more westerly- located countries points to its increasing Europeanization. There is consequently a great need to reassess the position of Eastern European cinema. While its marginal and subordinate position has often been acknowledged in academic writing (Wood and Iordanova 2000; Iordanova 2003; Hames 2004; Imre 2005 and 2012; Hames and Portuges 2013), including from a postcolonial perspective (Mazierska, Kristensen and Näripea 2013), a study of the ways in which Eastern European cinema has joined the European mainstream is long overdue. In order to 4 redress this imbalance, one goal of this chapter is to argue that since around 2000 Eastern European cinema has become subject to accelerated processes of transnationalisation. Contrary to the received wisdom that the year 1989 was the watershed for