Recent Eastern European Crime Films Crises of Care
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contact zones STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE 2018/1. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL Recent Eastern European Crime Films Crises of Care: Precarious Bodies in Western and Eastern European Clinical Film Dystopias Dracula and the Mediaparadox Border Crossing in the Textual World of Ádám Bodor Contents Editor’s Introduction Articles Hajnal Király: When East Meets West Eszter Ureczky: Crises of Care: Precarious Bodies in Western and Eastern European Clinical Film Dystopias Q and A András Hlavacska: Dracula and the Mediaparadox Balázs Varga: Recent Eastern European Crime Films Lilla Gregor: Border Crossing in the Textual World Anna Bátori: Local Forms, Global Patterns of Ádám Bodor Hajnal Király: Masculinity – imported (Antal Nimród: The Book Review Whiskey Bandit, 2017) Teréz Vincze: Cultural Studies Approaches in the Study of Eastern European Cinema: Spaces, Bodies, Memories Bence Kránicz: Hungarian Bandit(s) Zsolt Győri: Gangster Zone Conference Report Bence Kránicz and Emanuel Modoc: “Contact Zones: Beja Margitházi: Dogs and Underdogs at the End of the World Transnational Encounters, Dialogues and Self-Representa- (Bogdan Mirică: Dogs, 2016) tion in Contemporary Eastern European Literature, Cinema and Visual Cultures” (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Elżbieta Durys: Polish Crime Fiction After 1989 Hungary, 28-30 September 2017) Balázs Varga: Eastern Crime Wave and Its Social and Cultural Intersections Editorial Board: Mónika Dánél (Eötvös Loránd University) András Hlavacska (Eötvös Loránd University, PhD student) Hajnal Király (Eötvös Loránd University) Judit Pieldner (Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania) Katalin Sándor (Babeș-Bolyai University) László Strausz (Eötvös Loránd University) Teri Szűcs (Independent researcher) Eszter Ureczky (University of Debrecen) Balázs Varga (Eötvös Loránd University) Teréz Vincze (Eötvös Loránd University) Copy editor: Emese Czintos Website Design: Eszter Vidosa Publisher: Institute of Hungarian Literature and Cultural Studies Address: Múzeum körút 4/A, 310, Budapest, H-1088, Hungary Responsible Publisher: Mónika Dánél, Hajnal Király INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH PROJECT (NO. 112700, 2014-2018) FINANCED BY THE HUNGARIAN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH FUND (OTKA) Email: [email protected] HU ISSN 2498-8901 Space-ing Otherness. Cultural Images of Space, Contact Zones in Contemporary Hungarian and Romanian Film and Literature CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1 When East Meets West Hajnal Király Three years ago our research project started from the assumption that the critical approach to contemporary Eastern European literature and film dedicates little attention to the contact zones of local socio-cultural phenomena and leading concepts of Western criticism. As stated in the project description, our aim was and still is to contribute to filling this gap by testing the applicability of Western cultural concepts to Eastern visual and literary representations, reveal the areas of cross-fertilisation or eventual resistance. This meta-critical approach thrives in a contact zone of cultural discourses shaped by ever changing perspectives and the gaze of the colonised staring back at the coloniser. This issue of the project journal reinforces, once again, this critical approach with a set of new research: an article on the work of contemporary Hungarian writer Ádám Bodor which adds a couleur locale to the concept of heterotopia, an article comparing the figurative role of the sanatorium in contemporary Western and Eastern European cinemas, and finally the intriguing correlation between the figure of Dracula, the most important Romanian cultural trademark at the moment, and the use of media in contemporary Western Dracula films. In addition to these, a Q and A block is dedicated to the significance in an Eastern European context of an increasing number of films in the genre of crime fiction, a genre consecrated in the Western mainstream cinema. The conference report and the book review are also in line with the topics debated in the articles: the former presents the international conference organised recently by our research team, and the subject of the latter is an essay collection on cultural approaches to contemporary Eastern European cinema, edited by an Eastern European scholar and published recently. As the editor of the Q and A block argues, in an Eastern Europe continuously affected by socio-political changes crime fiction could become more important than before in the articulation of social imagination, facing post-socialist transformation, inequality, social tensions and frustration, and also in coming to terms with the region’s socialist past. Accordingly, the individual short contributions are answering questions like: How do these films and series describe and interpret the post-socialist transformation of Eastern European societies? What do we think about their heroes? What moral standards and norms do they 1 CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1 represent? To what extent do they follow the global genre patterns – and what are their local specificities? In the same vein of cultural comparison focusing on the figurative aspects of the sanatorium narrative in both Western and Eastern context, Eszter Ureczky’s article, after describing the socio-medical and psychological characteristics of the contemporary first world culture of wellness and healthism, brings cinematic examples of the births of the wellness guest and the care home inmate in an increasingly medicalised, somatised and normalised world. She is also preoccupied with a biopolitical trajectory of care, outlining the emergence of 21st-century notions of health and precarious embodiment in Western and Eastern European cultural scenarios. A similar cultural cross-fertilisation is at the centre of András Hlavacska’s article discovering a paradoxical representation of the relationship between the vampire and media in contemporary vampire films. As he argues, these films depict on the one hand vampires as atavistic, primitive creatures who can hardly use modern media (which are effective weapons in the hands of the vampire hunters), while on the other hand they show the vampire-like face of these media. Finally, Lilla Gregor’s article on Ádám Bodor’s oeuvre, providing a much debated allegory of an Eastern European, post-communist cultural-social-political zone of in- betweenness, is dealing with the recurring narrative and figurative details of Bodor’s novels. As she argues, “the reiteration of textual segments as well as of topical elements and the hybridisation of linguistic, ethnical and biological categories altogether lead to a not normative logical system.” The Zone that appears in the novels under analysis cannot be fully described with Foucault’s concepts of other spaces. Therefore, to understand the irregularity of the zone’s temporal and logical structure, the analysis uses the concept of “atonal systems,” introduced by an “insider,” Hungarian writer Miklós Mészöly. 2 CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1 Recent Eastern European Crime Films Q and A Dialogue of the Members of the Contact Zones Research Group1 Edited by Balázs Varga [email protected] Q: Crime fiction has always been an important site for the discussion of values, conflicts, fears and moral norms of societies. After the political changes in Eastern Europe, crime fiction could become more important than ever before in the articulation of social imagination, facing post- socialist transformation, inequality, social tensions and frustration, and also in coming to terms with the region’s socialist past. Yet, until recently, crime films were mostly missing from Hungarian and Romanian film culture. However, some current and successful films (Nimród Antal’s The Whiskey Bandit [A viszkis], 2017, Bogdan Mirică’s Dogs [Câini], 2016) and television series (the Hungarian Golden Life [Aranyélet], 2015, the Romanian Shadows [Umbre,], 2014, and Silent Valley [Valea Mută], 2016) seem to have made a turn. How these films and series describe and interpret the post-socialist transformation of Eastern European societies? What do we think about their heroes? What moral standards and norms do they represent? To what extent do they follow the global genre patterns and what are their local specificities? A: Anna Bátori Local Forms, Global Patterns While crime fiction is not alien to Hungarian and Romanian cinema – let us recall Lajos Fazekas’s Flat Tire (Defekt, 1977), György Dobray’s The Victim (Az áldozat, 1980), Ferenc András’s The Vulture (Dögkeselyű, 1982), Pál Erdőss’s Last Seen Wearing a Blue Skirt (Gyilkos kedv, 1996), the recent proliferation of crime on screen indicates a turn in Eastern European genre film. European cinema’s never-ending competition with Hollywood in an attempt to 1 This work was supported by the project entitled Space-ing Otherness. Cultural Images of Space, Contact Zones in Contemporary Hungarian and Romanian Film and Literature (OTKA NN 112700) 3 CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1 invite their audience to watch local productions, together with the birth of a whole new generation of directors and production framework, were the factors that triggered this post-2010 genre-shift. Still, I think that in Eastern Europe this change can be located