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 within a much wider post-socialist Zeitgeist that encouraged filmmakers to look into the socialist past and present that is still laden with remnants of the previous political period. Interestingly, Romanian and Hungarian crime films operate along a well-defined national formula that points toward corrupt post-socialist authoritarian forces in leading legislative positions. The humiliating actions of the Romanian Securitate or the Hungarian Secret Services are recurrent motifs that signal another, more popular form of collective remembrance in cinema. Given the fact that crime and socialism were opposite terms in the socialist dictionary of Eastern Europe, it is no wonder that the narrative focus of some contemporary crime films from Romania and Hungary lies on the sinister actions of ex-Securitate agents and spies. For instance, Tudor Giurgiu’s crime-thriller film, Why Me? (De ce eu, 2015) depicts the deeply corrupt justice system of Romania where a young prosecutor reveals the interconnected network of post-Securitate agents and the cat-and- mouse games that Romanian politics play with innocent people. Being spied on, eavesdropped and constantly harassed, the prosecutor eventually commits suicide, thus signaling the impossibility of breaking the (post-)socialist wall of Romanian (in)justice. The dusty-smoky interiors, the big city-streets, the intellectual-moral approach of the prosecutor to the crime, his rise and fall and threatened position during the investigation, are all elements of a complex political thriller that, brimmed with crime-characteristics, create a thrilling film. Still, like other Romanian films that dig into the socialist past – from Stere Gulea’s State of Things (Stare de fapt, 1996) to Andrei Gruzsnicki’s Quod Erat Demonstrandum (2013) – Why Me has a very elemental dramatic characteristic that pushes the narrative towards a drama. In this regard, Giurgiu’s film remains in the very box of European art cinema for it mainly concentrates on the psychological struggles of the main prosecutor whose personal life collapses within a couple of days. The same dramatic concept can be revealed in Nimród Antal’s The Whiskey Bandit (A viszkis, 2017), an almost-heist-film that, instead of exploiting the immense potential the crime- story of the Hungarian Robin Hood has to offer, remains on the very psychological level of the whole post-socialist phenomenon of capitalist transformation. In this way, the elements of heist

4

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

are pushed into the background, with the psychological vicissitudes of the folk hero remaining dominant. Thus, what Romanian and Hungarian crime cinema offers, is a local form of the global crime pattern that – explicitly or implicitly – recalls the misuses of the socialist period. The corrupt authoritarian figures in the centre of their narratives – in Viktor Nagy’s Father’s Acre (Apaföld, 2009), in Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, adjective (Polițist, Adjectiv, 2009) or in Bogdan Mirică’s Dogs (Câini, 2016) – all draw on the failing system of totalitarian power. The main protagonist in contemporary Romanian and Hungarian crime film – be that a police-man, a detective or the person who committed the crime – is an innocent, sympathetic figure with whom we can easily identify. These everyday-characters who signify one’s hopeless position within the corrupt framework of legislation, stand in contrast with dynamic police-forces and/or politicians that play a witted game with people wanting to reveal the truth. Even Árpád Sopsits’s Strangled (A martfűi rém, 2016) – a film inspired by the true story of a serial killer in socialist Hungary – is embedded into a very strong political subtext. Similar to Why Me, the young prosecutor of the crime must sacrifice his life on the altar of the truth, while the malfunction of police and their interconnectedness with the socialist leadership gets swept under the carpet. The question of the future is whether Romanian and Hungarian crime fiction remains a tool of collective remembrance or, after a couple of years, it leaves behind its socialist-laden thematic of the totalitarian framework and starts to delve into crimes that are not politically- driven. Whatever will be the case, the fact that we witness a great turn in Hungarian and Romanian film and television is a reassuring sign that Eastern European cinema did not give up upon crime cinema.

Hajnal Király: Masculinity – imported (Antal Nimród: The Whiskey Bandit, 2017)

When approaching a cultural phenomenon in a certain film, namely the representation of masculinity, a series of questions arise: why exactly this topic? Why now? Why here, in Hungary and why in this particular way? (meaning the choice of genre, other narrative and formal characteristics). A film on the Whiskey robber could have been made long time ago,

5

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

immediately after or during his long detention or shortly after his release. Besides evident moral considerations (to not make a hero out of a convict, of which Hungarian media has been also accused with), there are a few underlying socio-political, cultural discourses that may have affected this timing. I contend that the new film of Nimród Antal, just like his previous Kontroll, can be conceived as a kind of social allegory thematising a specific image of the “own” migrant (coming from a remote region of the former, historical Hungary), the relationship of the individual with a collapsing capitalism (the topic of bank robbery under the circumstances of economic crisis animates latent social tensions, revengeful desires) and a post-communist crisis of masculine roles so prominent in contemporary Hungarian films. The Whiskey Bandit doesn’t side overtly with any of these discourses, managing to rely on facts and pieces of information already available about the case, most of them “doubled” in media news commenting on the actual stage of the police investigation displayed in the film. The film’s strongest statement is undoubtedly the image of this new type of gangster, a Robin Hood, a Zorro becoming a national hero, a living legend, a possible model (!) for the forthcoming generations. His figure actually owes more to the genre of the western than to the gangster movies: a lonely wolf coming from a remote place, the Secler wilderness, who under the pressure of the chaotic and inhuman rules of a wild capitalism becomes an outlaw. One could say that he just follows the rules set by the system. His natural calmness, expressionlessness and lack of gestures emanate an elementary masculinity in striking contrast with that of the institutional representatives of a declining patriarchy (high officials, bank managers, policemen, whose strength is mainly restricted to a rough vocabulary). This contrast is most prominent when facing – as if in a mirror – in the interrogation scene the detective who has dedicated long years to the case. This sweating, emotionally unstable, divorced man (who cannot even take care of a plant, slowly dying in his office), far from a classic image of a “cool” detective, and a prototype of many helpless “mean” man characters (small officials) from the last decade of Hungarian cinema, in fact seems to be chasing his lost masculinity, the fierce man of action. As concerning the main protagonist, he is more a cowboy than a gangster: while this latter thrives in community, the former acts alone. Moreover, he succeeds as long as he is alone, and is caught after he has paired up with other men and a (fatal) woman. This image of raw, more archaic masculinity complies with both nationalist and liberal views on the acute

6

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

crisis of migration: both see this masculinity as a possible revigorating force of a decadent masculine order, coming either from a “pure” source of the Hungarian culture (Transylvania or Vojvodina, also thematised in Márk Bodzsár’s comedy Heavenly Shift, 2013) or a more multicultural environment (as seen in Mundruczó’s Jupiter’s Moon, 2017). From the perspective of discourses associated to migration, it is not without signification that in all these films this “alien” force appears as elementary and enigmatic: it can be studied, contemplated or temporarily used and detained, but not fully controlled.

Bence Kránicz Hungarian Bandit(s)

Nimród Antal’s The Whiskey Bandit and the HBO series Golden Life are arguably the most successful pieces of recent crime fiction on the Hungarian movie and television screens, respectively. The Whiskey Bandit, with around 280.000 movie theatre admissions, has been the most popular crime/gangster movie in Hungarian cinemas since 1990, while Golden Life enjoys more or less unequivocal enthusiasm from film critics. However, few reviews and analyses deal with the moral position of these films, and even fewer texts question how the Hungarian society perceives the morality of these stories. The way I see it, the authors of the two films – for the sake of simplicity I will treat the two released seasons of Golden Life as one film story – all argue rather openly that the post-socialist Hungarian society and institutional system favoured corruption over honour, lies over truth, ‘back doors’ over ‘front gates.’ As Attila Miklósi, the protagonist of Golden Life discovers at his new job as a security guard, corruption, even downright theft is a common practice in legal businesses just as in the underworld from which he desperately but unsuccessfully tries to break free. On the other hand, Attila Ambrus, the titular character of The Whiskey Bandit, chooses to rob a bank because he needs the money fast, money to bribe a politician with. His real decision, however, is to keep the ‘job’ of bank robber after his successful first attempt. Ambrus is presented as a smart and even talented person who learns quickly. Still, his best career option is that of the bank robber. To risk some critical comments, I’d take it as a flaw in Nimród

7

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Antal’s script that the protagonist makes this decision far too quickly and without much moral struggling. As the success of the two movies and the lack of treating these topics in reviews show, contemporary Hungarian society takes it as an unproblematic or even unquestionable truth that the position of the criminal is equivalent or seemingly better than the position of the respectable man in post-socialist Hungary. In fact, Attila Ambrus was treated as a Robin Hood-type hero in the media, and, according to The Whiskey Bandit, is still perceived as such in the social imagination. If cinema is a mirror of society, then Hungarian audiences might see nothing but a criminal when they look into that mirror.

Zsolt Győri Gangster Zone

Nimród Antal’s A viszkis (The Whiskey Bandit 2017) has a unique place in postcommunist Hungarian crime cinema dominated by gangster comedies and crime thrillers. In comparison with the few Hungarian crime films based on actual events – György Szomjas’ Gengszterfilm (Gangster Film, 1999), Deák Krisztina’s A miskolci boniésklájd (Who the Hell's Bonnie and Clyde?, 2004) and Anna Faur’s Lányok (Girls, 2007) – the story of Ambrus Attila is a real heavyweight. As the title of the film already suggests, the Whiskey Bandit has become a household name, a quasi-mythical folk hero who, unlike the main characters of the films mentioned, gained a celebrity status unmarred by violence. Amongst the 1990s perpetrators whose stories inspired cinema, Ambrus is the one without blood on his hands and the most outstanding ‘track record’. He is the quintessential bandit remembered less for unlawful and inhuman behaviour than his anti-Establishment attitudes and inventive ways to fool the police. Antal’s film emphasises these qualities while telling the story of Ambrus (played by Bence Szalay) as that of a socially underprivileged person. Unlike some filmmakers of the past two decades, the director of The Whiskey Bandit does not pretend to be familiar with the underworld. The criminal milieu is secondary to the person story, well reflected in Antal’s choice to choose the genre of the biopic instead of the gangster film. Whereas cinematic gangster memoires usually talk about moral corruption, here the social commentary is more relevant. Coming from a broken family in rural Transylvania and with a history of cleptomaniac

8

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

attitudes that put him into borstal, the young Ambrus is portrayed more like the orphan of society, an underprivileged person drafted into the Romanian People’s Army straight after leaving the orphanage, who later flees to Hungary by crossing the border illegally. The immigration motif is justly underplayed however, as an ethnic Hungarian from Romania would not be considered an immigrant in the public mind. In fact, the image of the resilient Transylvanian person is regarded as a Hungarian national type, as one of us. Or even more virile, vigorous and creative than us: this is underlined by the superior masculine and athletic qualities of Ambrus compared to the always sweating and chubby chief interrogator (Zoltán Schneider). Antal emphasizes Ambrus’ Transylvanian origins consciously in the film and portrays him as not just an orphan of society but of the cultural nation. After all, the film talks lengthily about how this young refugee fails to take roots in his chosen land and finds it hard to be naturalised. The film identifies a hypocritical Hungarian society as one of the main reasons behind Ambrus’ inability to get settled in his chosen country and transformation into the self- made man of the Whiskey Robber. The 1990s Budapest is depicted as a corrupt and corrupting social environment, exemplified by the dishonest civil servant (Imre Csuja) whose greediness is depicted as the root cause of Ambrus’ criminal transformation. The same is true for Kata (Piroska Móga), the girlfriend, whose superior social status and elitist parents put the boy under the pressure to prove that he is not a loser. The postsocialist value system is portrayed as corrupt, because it values material wealth (and the materialisation of wealth) over other types of human values. Ambrus falls victim of the failing moral standards of the newly emerging entrepreneurial class, the archetype of which were taxi drivers who appeared in popular imagination as an opportunistic tribe, operating on the threshold of legal and illegal enterprises, involved in various types of wheeling and dealing activities. Hungarian cinema seem to have acknowledge this popular perception as Ferenc Grunwalsky’s Egy teljes nap (A Complete Day, 1988) and Faur’s already mentioned Girls testifies. The fact that the real Attila Ambus appears in the minor role of a taxi driver in the The Whiskey Bandit might be more than a meta-cinematic gesture and be understood as a general commentary on the identity strategies called forth by the liberalising market economy of the 1990s. In my view the mentality of the bank robber takes

9

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

root in the same socio-economic setting that serves as a background for the (stereoypical) image of the taxi driver in that decade. It should also be mentioned that the television series Aranyélet (Easy Living, 2015-) also locates the criminal origins of it protagonist, Attila (Szabolcs Thuróczy), in the early 1990s when he worked as a taxi driver. In one of the episodes, after realizing that in Hungary it is counterproductive to play along the rules, he bursts out against the Establishment: “I made up my mind, it’s over. We won’t pay our debt or taxes. They asked for it. Fuck them. You’ll never see me buy a tram ticket again.” Attila articulates the desperation of a generation for whom the postsocialist transformation came with the detoxicating experience that the moral standards and value systems of their parents’ generation is outdated, and that society is hypocritical. Paradoxically, illegal activities and criminal dealings were a form of rebellion against the system; however, they also led to heroes being increasingly entangled in paternalistic criminal networks. Anti-Establishment sentiments become hypocritical when crime and corruption itself becomes a part, if not the most lucrative segment, of the Establishment. This is the case in Easy Living where white collar crime and nepotism – including corruption, overbilling, crimes related to public procurement – no longer offers thrill because it no longer carries the air of non- conformism, but is disguised as beneficial to the community. The personal conflict in the case of Attila does not only follow from the sudden return of his moral conscience but because he no longer feels the liberating excitement of trespassing the law. At the same time he is also aware of the double moral standard according to which ordinary criminals are punished to the full extent of the law while the criminal elite usually gets away with almost any degree of misconduct. The two films I addressed here briefly cannot draw up universal patterns of how postsocialist societies perceive of crime, yet it should be noted that they follow global patterns of the genre and carry a strong compensatory function. Crime films, and more recently the gangster comedies of Guy Richie, idolise ordinary criminals and demonise white collar criminals. Cinema here starts to function as a cultural mechanism of compensation for the corruption attributed to law enforcement and the administering of justice. In other words, it hopes to counterbalance actual situations in which social hierarchy comes with a certain inequality before the law. Subscribing to a sense of justice in a world of injustice is the

10

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

compensatory gesture of popular cinema. This is valid for the The Whiskey Bandit: the 350,000 tickets sold proves the continued public fascination with Ambrus Attila but it also renders legible the disillusionment of people with the Hungarian legal system.

Beja Margitházi Dogs and Underdogs at the End of the World (Bogdan Mirică: Dogs, 2016)

Although Bogdan Mirică’s Dogs is set totally outside of everything (out of the city, out of time, out of law), where all the roads end, only a few people live and the surface appears to be untroubled, he seems to explore a different way of reflecting on recent social and institutional changes in Romania, catching some familiar characteristics of post-communist condition. Mirică’s movie switches the well-known urban setting of so many contemporary Romanian films to a rural, peripheral environment, located at the ‘easternmost’ border region of the country, but speaks about the same, old mechanisms and power relations which determine the actual status quo. Thriller and western genre conventions offer useful narrative tools and atmospheric concepts for Mirică to tell the story in a special way, and at the same time to explore some new aspects of the topic. At the beginning Dogs launches two different acts of exploration, and both of them prove to be eloquently failed. In an impersonal, short and supposedly authorial introduction, a slow, smooth camera movement scans carefully the surface of a marshy ground; the close study of the surface finally leads to the sudden appearance of a mutilated and rotting piece of human leg. Whose leg is this? Was he killed? Where is the body? – these are the questions which will never be clearly answered, but this travelling piece of leg proves to be a perfect McGuffin in leading us to other questions and characters of the story. Thus, the explorative attitude of this emblematic opening shot followed by the next scenes’ turn slowly prepares the viewer to pitch upon some signs of dirty, hidden secrets without getting answers and without finding every piece of a big, troubling puzzle. Roman, the guy from the city, arriving from Bucharest to overtake his rightful heritage of this waste, huge Dobrudgean land, confronts this exactly same topology of disturbing surface and silent depth. He is the one who initiates the other exploration, in order to find out the reason behind some disquieting nocturnal actions around (t)his land, and later, to understand the laws

11

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

which rule this strange provincial universe, where ‘calling the Police’ in the best case ends in the arrival of an old, aggressive dog. Armoured with his jeep, mobile phone, modern rationality and urban survival strategies, the young city guy has to face the shadows of an unknown, hardly discoverable past and the undemolishable power relations of the local mafia. While this seemingly no-man’s land slowly gets threatening and foreshadowed by crime, Roman has to understand that this hidden, strong hierarchy is part of his heritage. Past here does not express itself in material traces of some crumbly, old buildings or decayed roads, but a secret relationship between some still faceless, criminal forces. Mirică here sets a clear and pessimistic generational division: the inherited land comes with bargains and deals set by the previous generation, and cannot be reset by the newcomers. Young people, like Roman (see also the naïve officer working near Hogas at the police station) do not own the right tools and means to change old systems and structures. Compared to other recent Romanian films, Mirică takes an alternative path by mixing authorial tone with western and thriller genre conventions. The slow cinematic mood and rhythm of Dogs’ first part with long takes, no actions and minimal dialogues seems to intensify Roman’s attitude of exploration, lack of information, finally arriving to the decision of selling this heavy, dubious heritage, and leaving behind the ambition to unmask the background machinations. What seems to be lost in this slower first part of the movie, is gained back by a strong, powerful atmosphere. The enigmatic characters, laconic dialogues and lack of plot twists outline an almost tactile tension that is imploded in a cathartic, although calculable final scene. Mirică’s contemporary story is a pessimistic one, not because of the final victory of the Bad or because of the defeated Young. The indifference, emotionlessness, even calmness of the mafia leader is more than a genre panel, and it is more disturbing than his triumph, because it tells about the success of resistance to change. Dogs is not about the heavy heritage of communism, it is about crime that survived communism and survives democracy, too – a powerful continuity, independent of changing political systems.

Elżbieta Durys Polish Crime Fiction After 1989

12

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

As it was in other countries of the Soviet Block, before 1989 the crime cinema had an extremely difficult, if not impossible, way to the screens in Poland. The state, which controlled this area of creative activity, did not support these kinds of projects primarily due to the ideological reasons. As a country representing the Soviet Block, Poland was obliged to set an example. According to this reasoning, in a Communist society there were no pathologies and aberrations, and thus no violence and crime which would inform crime fictions. Usually, in good crime stories, one can meet a law enforcement figure who is ethically ambiguous. The most interesting are those detectives who provoke ambivalent feeling among the viewers (like Popeye Doyle, one of the main protagonists of William Friedkin’s The French Connection [1971]). If they do not balance on the edge of law or sell themselves cooperating with criminals, they get broken by an evil that they should fight with. The censorship, however, did not give consent to such an image of a police officer. Notwithstanding, in the 1960s a cycle of so-called milicja movies emerged. These include Touch of the Night (Dotknęcie nocy, 1961, dir. Stanisław Bareja), The Criminal and the Maiden (Zbrodniarz i panna, 1963, dir. Janusz Nasfeter) and The Criminal Who Stole a Crime (Zbrodniarz, który ukradł zbrodnię, 1969, dir. Janusz Majewski). Guided mainly by propaganda goals, milicja movies were to improve the image of the police in Polish society, increase confidence in officers as well as promote their infallibility. Milicja movies were very popular, however, due to different reasons. They were made by very good professionals, and famous actors (Zbigniew Cybulski, Tadeusz Janczar, Zygmunt Hübner among others) were cast as main protagonists. During the next decades one could spot several interesting productions that used the crime formulas, i.e. Excuse Me, Is It Here They Beat up People? (Przepraszam, czy tu biją, 1976, dir. Marek Piwowski), “Ann” and Vampire (Anna i wampir, 1981, dir. Janusz Kidawa) or Kill Me, Cop (Zabij mnie, glino, 1987, dir. Jacek Bromski). However, they did not form a separate strand within Polish cinema of that period. Despite the abolition of censorship in 1990, the situation in Polish cinema has not changed much in this respect after 1989. Every now and then crime movies were produced but they did not form a separate strand within Polish cinema. Released in 1992, Pigs (Psy) by Władysław Pasikowski, despite the fact that it combined elements of genre formulas (both cop and gangster cinema) with social issues (fears and anxieties of Polish society caused by political

13

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

and economic transformation), it remains an exception. Despite two movies from the beginning of his career – after Pigs the director made Pigs 2: The Last Blood (Psy 2: Ostatnia krew, 1994) – Pasikowski abandoned cop and gangster cinema conventions for more than twenty years. In 2018 his new cop movie PitBull: The Last Pig (PitBull: Ostatni pies) is to be released. It should be noted, however, that in the meantime Władysław Pasikowski was director of one of the most critically acclaimed cop TV series. Cop (2003–2008) consisted only of two seasons but combined in a skilful manner elements typical for Polish culture, i.e. a disillusioned protagonist, a lone wolf eager to fight for law and order in a society plunged into chaos. Chronologically earlier, because screened between 1995 and 1999, equally important was Extradition [Ekstradycja] directed by Wojciech Wójcik. This TV series, extremely popular among Polish viewers, also presented a figure of a lone wolf fighting with organised crime that permeated all the layers of Polish society. In 2005 the new act on cinema was introduced followed by the establishment of the Polish Film Institute. Since then on Polish cinema was dominated by historical movies and romantic comedies. Directors like the Czech David Ondrícek in his movie In the Shadow (Ve stínu, 2012) or the Slovak Michal Kollar in his Red Captain (Rudý kapitan/Červený kapitán, 2016) openly referred to film noir conventions to present historical events, Polish movie makers, however, preferred more traditional approach. Films like Red Spider (Czerwony pająk, 2015, Marcin Koszałka) or I’m a Killer (Jestem mordercą, 2016, Maciej Pieprzyca) should be treated as exceptions in this respect. The latter uses genre conventions openly to comment on the Communist system. Only after 2010 and the Nordic Noir craze that went through the entire Europe, Polish directors became more eager to use crime genres conventions. In this context Jeziorak (2014, Michał Otłowski), A Grain of Truth (Ziarno prawdy, 2015, Borys Lankosz) or Servant of God (Sługi Boże, 2016, Mariusz Gawryś) are worth mentioning. While discussing contemporary Polish crime cinema, the extreme popularity of Patryk Vega’s movies should be noted. Born in 1977, the self-taught film director, writer and producer hit the Polish screens with his PitBull in 2005. The movie can be perceived within the context of a formula developed by Pasikowski at the beginning of the 1990s. Vega uses the conventions of cop cinema, gangster movies as well as thrillers in his productions. At the same time he declares in the interviews that he fills the conventions with the material he collects from reality.

14

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Despite the fact that his movies and TV series, shot in a dizzying pace, remain underdeveloped in terms of both narrative and style, and critics seem offended by the profanity and stereotypes, Vega’s movies are box office hits, attracting up to 700,000 at the opening weekend. One more interesting phenomenon can be noticed in the context of Polish crime cinema after 2010. Often labelled as thrillers, conspiracy paranoid movies also had marked their presence. From the critical perspective it is important to mention Entanglement (Uwikłanie, 2011, Jacek Bromski), Traffic Department (Drogówka, 2013, Wojciech Smarzowski), Closed Circuit (Układ zamknięty, 2013, Ryszard Bugajski), and Secret Wars (Służby specjalne, 2014, Patryk Vega). They refer to the American cycle of conspiracy paranoid films of the 1970s. Contemporary political events serve as a background of a story of an individual who gets involved in corruption and crime. These movies can be read as a form of commentary or safety valve for social dissatisfaction. It is worth noting, in this context, one of the most famous, but also the least successful Polish conspiracy paranoid movies up to this day: Smoleńsk (2016) by Antoni Krauze. The plane crash of April 2010, during which representatives of Polish government were killed on their way to Katyń where they were to commemorate Polish officers murdered by NKVD in 1941, becomes a pretext to present right wing conspiracy theories on the enslavement of the Polish nation and state. It seems that Polish cinema after 1989 did not make the most of the potential of film genres, especially of crime cinema. Few exceptions, like Władysław Pasikowski’s Pigs, have not managed to convince Polish film directors to take advantage of forms and formulas elaborated on the American ground.

Balázs Varga Eastern Crime Wave and Its Social and Cultural Intersections

In an important scene of The Whiskey Bandit (Antal Nimród, 2017) the title character states: ”In different countries, they use different words to “make money.” Americans, for example, make money, the French win it – and we, Hungarians, are looking for money.” This quotation (in addition to being a well-known Hungarian saying) links some of the film’s key topics. First of all, the global-local dynamics as crime (i.e. theft, robbery, etc.) is universal, yet it has its

15

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

local character. Secondly, there is a strong but problematic relationship between social elevation, enrichment and crime. And finally, the issue of individualism. The current wave of Eastern European crime films clearly reflects and presents the questions of here-and-now: local aspects of global trends and problems. Crime stories are usually the stories of upward social mobility and enrichment. The relationship between moral/social norms and crime, individuality, private property (“money making”) and upward social mobility is quite definite. It is clear that these topics are particularly important in such transitional times as post-socialist transformation. Crime films address topics and values (individuality, private property, self-made success) that were de-emphasised or stigmatised as “capitalist” during socialism. It is not by chance that so many recent Eastern European crime film discuss the 1990s (i.e. post-socialist transformation period) and/or are based on true stories or actual events (the Slovak-Czech-Polish Red Captain [Červený kapitán, Michal Kollár, 2016], the Czech Kidnapping [Únos, Mariana Čengelová-Solčanská, 2017] and Kajínek [Petr Jakl, 2010] or the aforementioned Hungarian The Whiskey Bandit). The first decade of post- socialism, the decade of “original capital accumulation” obviously offers for discussion the problems of continuation and renewal, system change and social mobility. Another important context of this trend is the turn towards more mainstream narratives and genre patterns in contemporary Eastern European film cultures. Many of the directors of these genre experiments, crime films and TV series have previously been known for remarkable dramas and arthouse films. Such as Kornél Mundruczó with White God (Fehér isten, 2014) and Jupiter’s Moon (Jupiter holdja, 2017), or Marian Crișan with Orizont (2015) and the television series Silent Valley. Or we could mention the Czech filmmaker, Alice Nellis who is the co-director of the striking Czech HBO-produced TV series, Wasteland (Pustina, 2016). But of course we could not forget about those young filmmakers who begun their career in the attraction of American films like Attila Gigor or Áron Mátyássy from Hungary or the Romanian Bogdan Mirică who is behind the HBO-produced television series Shadows and is the director of the compelling rural noir, Dogs. It would be too early or an overstatement to say that this recent crime wave is a turning point in the transformation and history of Eastern European cinemas. However, it is certainly a

16

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

sign that popular culture has begun to systematically elaborate, understand and re-tell the founding myths of post-socialism.

17

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Crises of Care: Precarious Bodies in Western and Eastern European Clinical Film Dystopias2

Eszter Ureczky [email protected]

Abstract: Several recent clinical films have problematised the socio-medical and psychological aspects of the contemporary first world culture of wellness and healthism: The Road to Wellville (Alan Parker, 1994), Hotel Splendide (Terence Gross, 2000), Youth (Paolo Sorrentino, 2015), A Cure for Wellness (Gore Verbinski, 2016); Lunacy (Síleni, Jan Svankmajer, 2005), Johanna (Kornél Mundruczó, 2005), Pál Adrienn (Ágnes Kocsis, 2010), Godless (Bezbog, Ralitza Petrova, 2016) and Scarred Hearts (Inimi cicatrizate, Radu Jude, 2016), which are all set in closed medical institutions designed to rejuvenate or heal their patients/guests, where the protective but at the same time claustrophobic and disciplining microcosm of the hotel/sanatorium/hospital appears as a carefully monitored, safely contained counter-space of external (social) and internal (bodily) risks. As Michel Foucault argues, the disappearance of bedside medicine and the “sick man” after the Enlightenment era was followed by the emergence of hospital medicine and the patient in the 19th century (Foucault 1963), and it seems that the 20th century witnessed the births of the wellness guest and the care home inmate in an increasingly medicalised, somatised and normalised world. On the basis of this insight, the present paper aims to position the chosen clinical films along a biopolitical trajectory of care, outlining the emergence of 21st-century notions of health and precarious embodiment in Western and Eastern European cultural scenarios.

Keywords: biopolitics, medical humanities, care, precarity, Eastern Europe, clinical film

The Crisis of Care in Cinema Several recent clinical films have problematised the socio-medical and psychological aspects of the contemporary first world culture of wellness and “healthism”: The Road to Wellville (Alan Parker 1994), Hotel Splendide (Terence Gross, 2000), Youth (Paolo Sorrentino 2015), A

2 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).

18

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Cure for Wellness (Gore Verbinski, 2016); Lunacy (Síleni, Jan Svankmajer 2005), Johanna (Kornél Mundruczó, 2005), Adrienn Pál (Pál Adrienn, Ágnes Kocsis, 2010), Godless (Bezbog, Ralitza Petrova, 2016) and Scarred Hearts (Inimi cicatrizate, Radu Jude 2016). All are set in closed medical institutions designed to rejuvenate or heal their patients/guests, where the protective but at the same time the claustrophobic and disciplining microcosm of the hotel/sanatorium/hospital appears as a carefully monitored, safely contained counter-space of external (social) and internal (bodily) risks. As Michel Foucault argues, the disappearance of bedside medicine and the “sick man” after the Enlightenment era was followed by the emergence of hospital medicine and the patient in the 19th century (Foucault 1963), and it seems that the 20th century witnessed the births of the wellness guest and the care home inmate in an increasingly medicalised, somatised and normalised world. On the basis of this insight, the present paper aims to position the chosen clinical films along a biopolitical trajectory of care, outlining the emergence of 21st-century notions of health and precarious embodiment in Western and Eastern European cultural scenarios. The cinematic corpus of the study can be characterszed as a spatially focussed selection of clinical dystopias, for they all appear to comment on the present-day biomedical dilemmas of health and disease, normality and pathology as well as youth and ageing within medicalised settings. Some of the films also show a hypotextual and even intertextual connection with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), the literary monument of the interwar period’s escapism, some kind of a counter-reaction to the pressures of accelerated modernist production and capitalism, and marked by a turning towards the pathology of slow-paced consumption (in both the medical and economic senses of the word). As opposed to Mann’s image of the utopistic sanatorium, though, the clinical films to be discussed often create dystopic and post- human cinematic spaces to stage the universal precarity of late-modernity and to question the current regime of care within the welfare state – from which there seems to be no escape. By examining the clinical films as dystopic depictions of the current “crisis of care” (theorised by Susan Phillips [1996] and Nancy Fraser [2016]), the paper reads the institutionalised patients as essentially vulnerable bodies by relying on the notion of precarity understood by Judith Butler and Isobell Lorey (2015) as the prime biopolitical condition of today’s advanced societies.

19

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Despite their shared generic background,3 the somato-spatial politics of Western and Eastern European clinical films show major differences. Western (American, British, German and Italian) works typically problematise wellness culture, ageing and “time poverty” (Fraser 2016) in seemingly utopistic and medicalised scenarios of care, relying on the representation of aestheticised rural institutional spaces, black humour and grotesque bodily imagery. Their settings often come across as uncannily atmospheric sites of a kind of safe timelessness, as if health and care had no actual plot but manifesting as a chronic, vacuum-like condition instead, where resting, that is, the lack of productive labour becomes the ultimate luxury for the citizen guests. Eastern European (Czech, Hungarian, Romanian and Bulgarian) clinical films, on the other hand, are typically set in bleak post-Socialist urban milieus, the dominant biopolitical model of which could be approached by the Agambenian notions of the camp and bare life (1995). The darkly grotesque and melancholic thanatopolitics of these filmic worlds seem to actualise and articulate the harsh reality of the Foucauldian point about the nature of modern biopolitical power, that of “making live and letting die” (Foucault 2003, 241). Thus, these films will be interpreted as examples of a genre one might identify as the Eastern European clinical grotesque.

Healthism in The Road to Wellville, Hotel Splendide, A Cure for Wellness and Youth If each historical epoch seems to produce its own characteristic “period illness” (Spackman 1989, 32), a malady which breeds discourses that reveal a great deal about the most pressing social anxieties and cultural tensions of the day,4 then the period illness of the 21st century can be identified as health itself, that is, the biopolitical ideology of healthism, wellness and youthfulness. The various privately managed or state-governed purification and protection rituals first world citizens willingly or forcefully undergo in the name of health are all part of the contemporary civic religion of wellness. Foucault uses the notion of governmentality to denote the structural interconnection between the government of a state and the techniques of self-government in modern Western societies, and wellness as well as self-care seem to be powerful biomedical elements of current forms of governmentality. Still, there is a visible and

3 On the Hungarian clinical film, especially the medical gaze, see Király 2015. 4 Like, for instance, the interconnections of medieval plague and secularization, Victorian cholera and colonization or the 1980s AIDS panic and homophobia (see Ureczky 2016 Cleanliness).

20

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

growing distrust of medical, welfare and other care institutions today as tools of subjection and normalisation, since “increasingly in the helping professions, personhood and caring have been eclipsed by the depersonalizing procedures of justice distribution, technological problem- solving, and the techniques and relations of the marketplace” (Phillips 1996, 2). Foucault also pointed out that “somatocracy” has been taking over the place of a “theocracy” (Adorno 2014, 99) in the West, and the quick rise of biopolitical theory in the humanities also suggests the overwhelming presence of somatic anxiety and security obsession. In the 21st century, the soul is thus more the prison of the (supposedly healthy and cared-for) body than ever. The films in question all challenge the contemporary notions of health, a concept especially difficult to define either from a medical or a phenomenological point of view. The World Health Organisation’s definition, for instance, is somewhat vague, grasping health as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being” (Aho 2009, 14). Immanuel Kant also uses the expression “well-being” to capture the essence of health, claiming that “well-being is not felt for it is the simple consciousness of living” (qtd. in Canguilhem 1991, 243); while Hans Georg Gadamer defines its meaning by the luxury of being able to forget about ourselves: “our enjoyment of good health is constantly concealed from us” (Gadamer 1996, 112). However, the Western history of healthism shows the opposite of this happy non-awareness: a compulsive and anxious consciousness of one’s own embodiment, as The Road to Wellville shows. Alan Parker’s 1994 piece can be viewed as an early example of the filmic representation of healthism, telling the story of the legendary and controversial American expert, Dr Kellogg’s early 20th- century sanatorium, using comical, even slapstick elements to revisit the roots of the present day health craze. The film foreshadows several current conditions related to wellness culture, such as strict dieting (by consuming corn flakes), sexual self-discipline, prevention and risk reduction, for in the contemporary West, as Alison Bashford puts it, “the good citizen is the healthy citizen” (Bashford 2003, 117). Accordingly, notions like Nikolas Rose’s “biological citizenship” (Rose 2007, 132) have started to define available subject positions, as human beings are increasingly coming to understand themselves in somatic terms nowadays, and are ready to become wellness guests to be clean and cared-for citizens as a result.

21

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

[Fig.1.] The birth of healthism in America. The Road to Wellville

Hotel Splendide, created six years after The Road to Wellville, seems to be the British version of the same story in many ways. This black comedy is set in a family health resort run on a remote island by a family of eccentrics. The guests, typically elderly people suffering from indigestion, are systematically subjected to an unappetizing diet of fish and algae and undergo daily enema treatments. Similarly to Parker’s film, where Dr Kellogg turns out to be a traumatizing and cruel father figure, the oedipal implications of the Freudian family romance are also crucial in Hotel Splendide, as the grotesque health regime and monstrous heating system of the resort were designed by the oppressive mother figure who is already dead. In both films, the obsessive control of the guests’ bodily functions seems to be a parodistic depiction of the modern homo clausus, which can never lose control over its unmentionable parts, and even if such a thing happens, one is expected to attempt to regain control as soon as possible or conceal the damage at all cost. By medicalising non-disease conditions (such as sexual or gastronomic desires), the films also expose the Foucauldian production of docile bodies, which “may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” (Foucault 1979, 136).

22

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

[Fig.2.] The monstrous motherly machine. Hotel Splendide

While the two previous films have happy endings and feature a rebellious romantic plotline, A Cure for Wellness marks a turning point in the evolution of the Western clinical film. Gore Verbinski’s 2016 work is an American-German science fiction or psychological horror thriller, which is set in a Swiss health resort led by an insane doctor obsessed with heredity and eternal life, representing plenty of body horror, a hyper-stylised atmosphere of the gothic macabre and, as most critics have pointed out, several plot holes. Partly as a result of the setting, The Magic Mountain becomes not only a hypotext but an intertextual link as well; for instance, one of the male nurses is shown reading Mann’s novel while administering a treatment. The Swiss luxury resort symbolises the present-day endpoint of the evolution of medical spaces: the Foucauldian proto-clinic of the 18th-century was meant to be an unspecialised, collective study of cases, while the nineteenth century hospital became the hygienic space of increasingly taxonomised cases (Foucault 1963, 59-60).5 The postmodern health resort, however, is aiming to slow down degenerative processes before they even appear, creating a sinister atmosphere of pathological anticipation. Ultimately, instead of the dangerous, potentially infectious patient of the 19th

5 The entry on “Hospitals’” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica is an expressive example of this uncanny model of 19th-century clinical utopia: “Why should we not have – on a carefully selected site well away from the towns, and adequately provided with every requisite demanded from the site of the most perfect modern hospital which the mind of man can conceive – a ‘Hospital City’?” (Armstrong 2002, 130).

23

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

century, now the patient is the one at risk from the “dangerous hospital” (Armstrong 2002, 123) within the biopolitical paradigm of contemporary Western somatocracy.

[Fig.3.] The sinister beauty of the 21st-century Magic Mountain. A Cure for Wellness

Despite its mixed reception, A Cure for Wellness is a symptomatic filmic response to the excesses of contemporary health norms and the all-pervasive power of the medical gaze – both in terms of inner bodily spaces and future temporal planes. The mysterious indigo “vitamin” bottles designed by the doctor protagonist problematise the questions of longevity, incest, eugenics and even the risks of the compulsively capitalist American work ethic,6 but it poses ageing as the greatest threat to the sexually and economically productive individual. The film’s treatment of ageing addresses current views on old age, such as “ageing is not destruction or degradation, but self-destruction” and that “productivity and profitability required the ‘biopolitical’ cultivation of a healthy body” (Miquel 2015, 199) from the 20th century onwards. The increasing normalising and pathologising of old age also demonstrates the changing role of medicine in the extra-corporeal space of lifestyle as well as prognosis and prevention: “the new late twentieth century medical model – that might be described as Surveillance Medicine” (Armstrong 2002, 110). In this paradigm of healthism, “it was no longer the symptom or sign pointing tantalizingly at the hidden pathological truth of disease within the body, but the risk

6 In 1881, the New York physician George M. Beard described the psychic impact of acceleration and new technologies of communication as well as transportation with the notion of “neurasthenia” and “American nervousness”, while Philip Coombs Knapp coined the term “Americanitis” for the same condition. Today, cardiac psychologists Diane Ulmer and Leonard Schwartzburd still talk about “hurry sicknesses” (Aho 2009, 34).

24

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

factor opening up a space of future illness potential” (Armstrong 2002, 110); that is, we live in an era where the medical science of yet unhappened experiences of embodiment rule. This also implies that in what Rose calls the politics of life itself, “biology is no longer destiny […] Judgments are no longer organized in terms of a clear binary of normality and pathology” (Rose 2007, 40).7 The key to 21st-century destinies seems to be rooted in the problem of self-care. Youth similarly addresses the problems of ageing and care, but in a more indirect way. Paolo Sorrentino’s 2015 piece is also set in a luxurious Swiss health resort, featuring an elderly composer and other fellow guests (a senior director, a young actor, etc.), pondering upon the dilemmas of lost youth, memory, health, art and love. The film builds rather on tableaux vivants and isolated set pieces than a continuously evolving plot, evoking a strong sense of nostalgia and melancholia. This atmospheric structuring suggests that health or wellbeing have no real plot but they are manifesting themselves as a chronic, timeless condition (both as a state and an illness). Just like in the case of the previous films, the health resort appears as an uncannily heterotopic, idealised but disruptive space functioning along the lines of its idiosyncratic rules. Youth addresses the so-called crisis of care in a complex way, insofar as it is “best interpreted as a more or less acute expression of the social-reproductive contradictions of financialised capitalism” (Fraser 2016, 99).8 The overworked artistic guests come to the resort to be taken care of, to seek physical and spiritual improvement and inspiration, but the care provided here

7 The prevalence of ageing in contemporary cinema can be partially explained by Nikolas Rose’s historical view of Western medicine. While in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the politics of health primarily concerned rates of birth and death, diseases and epidemics, the policing of water, sewage, foodstuffs, graveyards and cities; in the first half of the twentieth century a new emphasis was put on the inheritance of a biological constitution, producing growing expectations as to our capacities to control, manage and even engineer human beings (Rose 2007, 3). 8 The crisis of care can also be approached by Foucauldian notion of the care of the self, for Giorgio Agamben (2015) comments on it as well. He is reading Foucault’s interpretation of the verb chresthai in Plato’s Alcibiades, in which Socrates, in order to identify the “self” of which one must take care, seeks to demonstrate that “the one who uses” (ho chromenos) and “that which one uses” (hoi chretai) are not the same thing. What uses the body and that of which one must take care, Socrates concludes at this point, is the soul (psychč), while chraomai means: I use, I utilize (an instrument, a tool). But equally chraomai may designate my behaviour or my attitude, Plato intends to suggest that taking care of the self means, in reality, to concern oneself with the subject of a series of “uses.” Taking care of oneself will be to take care of the self insofar as it is the “subject of ” a certain number of things: the subject of instrumental action, of relationships with other people, of behaviour and attitudes in general, and the subject also of relationships to oneself. It is insofar as one is this subject who uses, who has certain attitudes, and who has certain relationships, etc., that one must take care of oneself. What is crucial here is the way in which one thinks the relationship between care and use, between care-of-oneself and use-of-oneself (Agamben 2015, 31- 34).

25

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

only makes them face the utter futility and precarity of their supposedly immortal and precious life projects and the unavoidable loss of self and others in the course of living.

[Fig.4.] The melancholy of old age. Youth

Precarious bodies in Scarred Hearts, Lunacy, Johanna, Adrienn Pál and Godless The Eastern European clinical films to be discussed all emphasise the often very thin borderline between disease and death, not “merely” the issues of health and ageing as the gateways to them, as seen in the previous section. The representation of chronic disease as a source of human agony has not always been a central theme in the arts, as Susan Sontag points out: “the sufferings most often deemed worthy of representation are those understood to be the product of wrath, divine or human. (Suffering from natural causes, such as illness or childbirth, is scantily represented in the history of art; that caused by accident, virtually not at all – as if there were no such thing as suffering by inadvertence or misadventure)” (Sontag 2003, 33). However, several recent Eastern European clinical films seem to focus on the illness experience and the death of their characters to criticise individual and institutional notions of care. If health has been defined above as essentially a lack of an awareness of one’s embodiment, the current cultural treatment of death shows similar signs of a lack of awareness: a desire not having to be conscious of it. As Gadamer claims, one can talk about “an almost systematic repression of death” (Gadamer 1996, 63) today. The modern desacralization of death went hand in hand with its medicalization, and the evolution of civilization has paradoxically led to the inhuman experience of dying, as Norbert Elias puts it: “never before in the history of humanity have the

26

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

dying been removed so hygienically behind the scenes of social life” (Elias 2001, 23). Scientific and social advancement have thus paradoxically brought about the increasing dehumanization of death as well. Elias actually identifies this high level of biotechnological advancement as a paradoxical civilisational failure of first world countries: “the fact that, without being specifically intended, the early isolation of the dying occurs with particular frequency in the more advanced societies is one of the weaknesses of these societies (Elias 2001, 2). Scarred Hearts raises the questions of chronic illness, institutionalisation and death at the same time. Radu Jude’s 2016 film is a loose adaptation based on the autobiographical writings of the Romanian writer Max Blecher, who suffered from bone tuberculosis or Pott’s disease. The film is set in a 1930s sanatorium by the Black Sea’s beautiful horizon, which provides a scenic background to the experience of patienthood. Similarly to Youth and A Cure for Wellness, this biopic has a vignette-based structure featuring beautiful open-air scenery. Another connection is the quasi-utopian depiction of the Magic Mountain-like sanatorium as a place of suffering but also pleasure: “This place is like a drug”, as the protagonist puts it. The film relies on black humour and the grotesque as well as a kind of melancholic nostalgia to make a point about living with chronic illness. While Talcott Parsons used the expression “sick role” to explain the expectation that when ill people get well, they should cease to be patients, and return to normal, Arthur W. Frank talks about “remission society” (Arthur W. Frank 1995), where people who used to be patients can get effectively well but still they could never be considered cured. The latter notions seems to be more useful in the protagonist’s case, who does eventually manage to leave the sanatorium, but only on a stretcher to be hospitalised (and die) somewhere else.

27

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

[Fig.5.] Evoking The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. Scarred Hearts

Emmanuel has to spend all his time in bed, cast into a rigid, painful plaster preventing his spine from collapsing, thus his survival is provided by a system that is designed to secure his insecure body, ceaselessly torturing him in the meantime. His horizontal existence in his plaster and his bed, the total lack of agency or privacy also question the ethical responsibility of 20th and 21st- century late capitalism, which is expected to offer a comprehensive sense of safety to its citizen- consumers along with the right of isolated individualism. As Slavoj Žižek argues: “this is emerging as the central »human right« in late-capitalist society: the right not to be harassed, to be kept at a safe distance from others” (Žižek 2004, 508). The film thus seems to pose the question: what is better, healthier then: having the right to be left alone with a dehumanizing disease or having the right to survive even in inhuman conditions? As “chronic illness makes the repression of death anxiety virtually impossible” (Aho 2009, 125), Emmanuel’s story makes the thanatopolitical dilemmas of chronic disease especially tangible for today’s viewers. If “an acceptable death is a death which can be tolerated by the survivors” (Ariés 1974, 89), his treatment in the remote sanatorium makes his death duly distant and thus tolerable for his family. The fact that the protagonist is a poet makes the story a Künstlerfilm as well, powerfully grasping the difference between the medical and phenomenological understandings of the body, that is, the fissure of Körper and the Leib: “the basic unit of analysis in biomedicine is the Körper, a system of chemical (hormonal), electrical (neurological), and mechanical (skeletal) functions. In medical science the corporeal body is both decontextualised (removed from its

28

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

social-cultural milieu) and de-animated (divested of any semblance of spirit or soulstuff). In other words, it is depersonalized” (Aho 2009, 77). The protagonist’s body becomes especially grotesque as it actually seems to be shown in the act of becoming: becoming a patient, a lover and an even an artist, where the event of death brings nothing to an end in the Bakhtinian sense of the grotesque but becomes part of his bodily and intellectual history. Grotesque embodiment is also crucial in Lunacy’s representation of not physical but mental illness, as Svankmajer’s work, which is also set in a closed institution, but in this case a mental asylum, is surrealistically blurring the boundaries between patients and doctors. In the film, a man moves in with a mysterious aristocrat and is soon persuaded to enter into an asylum for preventative treatment with him. Eventually, nothing turns out to be what it seems to be, and the mysterious marquis proves to be even more sinister than what the young man assumed. Lunacy combines the medically and culturally constructed notion of madness with a critique of institutionalisation and normalisation, featuring not only physical but mental agony as well. One of the film’s central messages seems to be that the cure can actually be the condition itself, and that the sane objectivity of medicine is often but an illusion.

[Fig.6.] The colours of madness. Lunacy

Johanna represents the precarity of hospital patients and the hospital itself in a similarly recognisably Eastern European scenario, where the medical encounter is also burdened by the hierarchic, patriarchal conditions of post-Socialist cultures. The film tells the story of a young

29

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

drug addict, who falls into a coma after an accident. The doctors miraculously manage to save her, and then, touched by grace, Johanna cures patients by offering them her body. The head doctor is frustrated by her continued rejection of him and allies himself with the outraged hospital authorities. They fight against her but the grateful patients still decide to protect her. Johanna places special emphasis on the sexuality of suffering bodies, and by doing so connects the disruption of the two major bodily taboos of the recent past: “as, in the 1960s, sexual liberation challenged the taboos around sex so, in the 1990s and in the new millennium, a new movement of ‘death liberation’ has arisen that challenges the taboos around death” (Noys 2005, 2). Johanna is an opera film and thus a musical interpretation of the Passion of Joan of Arc. Thus, the dichotomies of the sacred and the profane, agony and sexuality, pain and pleasure, treatment and miracle, the figures of the angel, the nurse and the prostitute as spiritual, medical and sexual “caregivers” come together in Johanna’s depiction by Christian symbols and medical spaces, subverting all these binary oppositions.

[Fig.7.] The angelic nurse. Johanna

Johanna, Pál Adrienn and the last film to be discussed, Godless, share a major feature in terms of characterisation: they all have dysfunctional female carer figures as their protagonists, as none of them fits the conventional, hygienic and professional image of the Nightingale nurse. The professional and technologised isolating care of bodies is the central theme of Pál Adrienn.9

9 See Ureczky 2016 (Post-bodies).

30

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

The chronic ward appears as the space of posthuman bodies and also marks the logical extreme of the evolution of hospital spaces in the West.10 Since the history of anatomy shows that medical and foremost upon the inanimate, the living patient is often treated in a cadaverous or machine-like fashion, and this is what the film’s dying patients suggest as well. It also grasps many of the flaws of modern medicine: “depersonalization, overspecialization, the neglect of psychosocial factors in the etiology and treatment of disease – can be traced to medicine's reliance on the Cartesian model of embodiment” (Leder 1992, 28). However, Piroska, the obese nurse, manages to awake from her “comatose” condition by dissecting her own past and reconnecting with her own body and the one she takes care of. In this sense, the film poses the present-day problem of precarisation as understood by Judith Butler as a process that produces “insecurity as the central preoccupation of the subject” (Butler 2015, viii). Similarly, Isobell Lorey argues that “contrary to the old rule of a domination that demands obedience in exchange for protection, neoliberal governing proceeds primarily through social insecurity, through regulating the minimum of assurance while simultaneously increasing instability” (Lorey 2015, 2). She adds that “the conceptual composition of ‘precarious’ can be described in the broadest sense as insecurity and vulnerability, destabilization and endanger merit. The counterpart of precarious is usually protection, political and social immunization against everything that is recognized as endangerment” (Lorey 2015, 10-11). According to Lorey’s full definition, “precarity can therefore be understood as a functional effect arising from the political and legal regulations that are specifically supposed to protect against general, existential precariousness. From this perspective, domination means the attempt to safeguard some people from existential precariousness, while at the same time this privilege of protection is based on a differential distribution of the precarity of all those who are perceived as other and considered less worthy of protection” (Lorey 2015, 22). The notions of the crisis of care and precarity seems to grasp the same problem with biopolitical power in the 21st century: the dysfunctional interconnection of social care and individual

10 In the early modern era, the hospital was a house of mercy, refuge; while in the Renaissance its central task was to protect and restore working citizens as a house of rehabilitation. By the eighteenth century, state power focused on economics, science and health, and in the 19th century, the hospital especially appears as a house of cure, teaching and research, but also dissection and surgery. In the early twentieth century it was primarily seen as a house of science and high technology, while today’s post-modern hospital may also be failing patients physically just as much as spiritually (Risse 1999, 675-685).

31

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

vulnerability. The crisis of care is thus also embodied by the depiction of uncaring carers in the Eastern European context, which is especially central to the last film to be mentioned.

[Fig.8.] The monitor room. Adrienn Pál

Godless, a recent Bulgarian film represents both of the above dilemmas, even though it is not set in one single medical institution. The film rather follows the daily routine of a caring home nurse, who visits elderly people in a dilapidated countryside town. The town itself appears as a closed, forgotten institution, where the law is entirely corrupt and illegal trading with patients’ ID cards is an absolutely tolerated practice. (In this sense, Ken Loach’s 2016 film, I, Daniel Blake could be read as another filmic reflection on universal precarity.) In this camp-like, corrupt social space there is no real difference between inmates and carers, prisoners and guards, policemen and criminals, they are equally victims of the biopolitical aftermath of state socialism, leading what Agamben would identify as bare lives. In Agamben, the camp is understood as the biopolitical space of modernity as such: “the camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule” (Agamben 1998, 169), and state order as such can only be born from the enclosed, disciplined, pathologised space of the camp. In Godless, not only the space of the caring home but post-communist society as such appears as a collapsing system producing precarious bodies.

32

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

[Fig.9.] The careless carer. Godless

Conclusion: Cultures of Unwellness Jean Baudrillard in his last, posthumously published book, The Agony of Power articulates the prime ethical task of today’s First World welfare citizen as follows:

we are not succumbing to oppression or exploitation, but to profusion and unconditional care [to the power of those who make sovereign decisions about our well-being]. From there, revolt has a different meaning: it no longer targets the forbidden, but permissiveness, tolerance, excessive transparency – the Empire of Good. For better or worse. Now you must fight against everything that wants to help you. (Baudrillard 2010, 88)

In this passage, Baudrillard describes a kind of utopistic auto-immune reaction within the current biopolitical body of advanced societies, taking the modern project of security, discipline and individualism to its logical extreme: the postmodern collapse of care. What all the films share is the increasingly predominant 21st-century tendency to distrust welfare institutions, security and health services symptomatically represented by the recent upsurge of the above discussed clinical film dystopias, which thematise the crisis of care as well as the anxiety of personalised, institutionalised and precarised wellbeing as the period illness of the post- millennial age: the chronic condition of existential unwellness. This collapse of care, however,

33

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

shows major differences in contemporary cinema: while in Western European and American examples it is especially ageing and unhealthy lifestyles which become pathologised states to be in, in Eastern European cinema it is unavoidable death, often with indignity, which is situated within an institutional framework of care. The cinematic representation of precarity also raises several bioethical questions, as it is not only the medical gaze but also the viewer’s gaze which should be problematised. Sontag argues that such a gaze should be sanctioned: “perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it – say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken – or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be” (Sontag 2003, 34). Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, however, suggests the use of the word stare instead of gaze when looking at other people’s disability and bodily pain, and argues for the humanizing power of the Winnicottian holding function: “another psychological dread that staring ignites in the starer is an unsettling awareness of our own embodiment. The denial of death and vulnerability that the ego relies upon to get us through our days depends upon the disappearance of our own bodies to ourselves” (Garland-Thomson 2009, 58). Maybe this is the ethical task of the 21st-century viewer of clinical film dystopias: to stare at the medical gaze in order to (re)humanise it.

References

Adorno, Francesco Paolo. 2014. Power over Life, Politics of Death: Forms of Resistance to Biopower in Foucault. In The Government of Life Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism. Eds. Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter. New York: Fordham UP: 98- 111. Agamben, Giorgio. [1995] 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ---. 2015. The Use of Bodies: Homo Sacer IV, 2. Trans. Adam Kotsko. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Aho, James and Kevin Aho. 2009. Body Matters: A Phenomenology of Sickness, Disease, and

34

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Illness. New York, Plymouth: Lexington. Ariés, Philippe. 1974. Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present. Trans. Patricia M. Ranum. London: Marion Boyars. Armstrong, David. 2002. A New History of Identity: A Sociology of Medical Knowledge. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York, N.Y.: Palgrave. Bashford, Alison. 2003. Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Baudrillard, Jean. 2010. The Agony of Power. Trans. Ames Hodges. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Butler, Judith. 2015. Foreword. In Isabell Lorey. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. Trans. Aileen Derieg. London, New York: Verso: vii-xi. Canguilhem, Georges. 1991. The Normal and the Pathological. New York: Zone. Elias, Norbert. [1985] 2001. The Loneliness of the Dying. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York, London: Continuum. Foucault, Michel. 1963. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A. M. Sheridan. London and New York: Routledge. ---. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 1979. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York, NY.: Vintage Books. ---. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76. 2003. Trans. David Macey. Eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. New York: Picador. Frank, Arthur W. 1995. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. Fraser, Nancy. 2016. Contradictions of Capital and Care. New Left Review July, Aug.: 99- 117. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1996. The Enigma of Health. Trans. Jason Gaiger and Nicholas Walker. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2009. Staring: How We Look. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP. Gross, Terence. 2000. Hotel Splendide. Canal+. Jude, Radu. 2016. Scarred Hearts. HI Film Productions. Király, Hajnal. 2015. A klinikai tekintet diskurzusai a kortárs magyar filmben. Tér, hatalom és identitás viszonyai a magyar filmben. Eds. Zsolt Győri and György Kalmár.

35

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Debreceni Egyetemi Kiadó: 202-215. Kocsis, Ágnes. 2010. Pál Adrienn. KMH Film. Leder, Drew, ed. 1992. The Body in Medical Thought and Practice. Springer- Science+Business Media, B.V.. Lorey, Isabell. 2015. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. Trans. Aileen Derieg. London, New York: Verso. Miquel, Paul-Antoine. 2015. Ageing and Longevity. The Care of Life: Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Bioethics and Biopolitics. Eds. Miguel de Beistegui, Giuseppe Bianco and Marjorie Gracieuse. London, New York: Rowman & Littlefield: 199-210. Mundruczó, Kornél. 2005. Johanna. Proton Cinema. Noys, Benjamin. 2005. The Culture of Death. Oxford, New York: Berg. Parker, Alan. 1994. The Road to Wellville. Beacon Communications. Petrova, Ralitza. 2016. Bezbog. Klas Film. Phillips, Susan S. 1996. The Crisis of Care: Affirming and Restoring Caring Practices in the Helping Professions. Eds. Susan S. Phillips and Patricia Benner.Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. Risse, Guenter B. 1999. Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP. Rose, Nikolas. 2007. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador. Sorrentino, Paolo. 2015. Youth. Indigo Film. Spackman, Barbara. 1989. Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Svankmajer, Jan. 2005. Lunacy (Síleni). Athanor. Ureczky, Eszter. 2016. Cleanliness as Godliness: Cholera and Victorian Filth in Matthew Kneale's Sweet Thames. Travelling Around Cultures: Collected Essays on Literature and Art. Eds. Zsolt Győri Zsolt and Gabriella Moise. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 101-117. ---. 2016. Post-bodies in Hungarian Cinema: Forgotten Bodies and Spaces in Ágnes Kocsis's

36

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Pál Adrienn. Cultural Studies Approaches in the Study of Eastern European Cinema Spaces, Bodies, Memories. Ed. Virginás Andrea. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 168-191. Verbinski, Gore. 2016. A Cure for Wellness, 20th Century Fox. Žižek , Slavoj. 2004. From Politics to Biopolitics … and Back. The South Atlantic Quarterly 103. 2/3.: 501-521.

37

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Dracula and the Mediaparadox11

András Hlavacska [email protected]

Abstract In the Dracula research it is almost a cliché to say that in Bram Stoker’s novel media considered modern in the 1890s (phonograph, typewriter, telegraph, etc.) are effective weapons in the hands of the vampire hunters against the bloodsucker count. While contemporary vampire movies frequently share this point of view, they often represent the relationship between vampires and modern media in a paradox way. In my study I analyse how contemporary vampire movies come into this discussion: how they transmit and rethink Stoker’s heritage. In the first part of my study I briefly overview this legacy. This is followed by the analysis of two contemporary vampire films: first What We Do in the Shadows (2014) and then Shadow of the Vampire (2000). What We Do in the Shadows deals with the relationship of the vampires and the media on the level of the story while Shadow of the Vampire approaches the question on a meta-level. However, they represent the relationship between vampires and modern media in a similar way: on the one hand they depict vampires as atavistic, primitive creatures who can hardly use modern media; on the other hand they show the vampire-like face of these media. At the end of my study I turn the experiences of the film analyses back to Stoker’s novel, to show that this paradox can also be found in his writing.

Keywords: Dracula, Bram Stoker, vampire, medium, contemporary vampire movies, What We Do in the Shadows, Shadow of the Vampire

In the middle of the 1990s Nina Auerbach was certainly right when concluding that while “we all know Dracula, or think we do […], there are many Draculas” (Auerbach 1995, 1). In the last twenty years the validity of this statement has been further strengthened by contemporary vampire films, novels and short stories: we can find numerous manifestations of Bram Stoker’s bloodsucker Count in these works. But there is no doubt either that the many faces of Dracula

11 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).

38

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

have a lot of common features. In my study I analyse one of these features, that is, the disgust that Dracula feels toward modern media. In the first part I briefly overview how Stoker’s novel represents the relationship between Dracula and the media. This is followed by the analysis of two contemporary vampire films: What We Do in the Shadows (Jemaine Clement & Taika Waititi 2014) and the Shadow of the Vampire (E. Elias Merhige 2000). What We Do in the Shadows deals with the relationship between vampires and the media on the level of the story while Shadow of the Vampire approaches the question on a meta-level. At the end I turn the experiences of the film analyses back to Stoker’s novel, to show that this paradox can also be found in his writing. In the age of Stoker the topics of technology and science were already closely related to the narrower interpretation of media (in this approach the notion of media involves telegraph, diary, newspaper, among others). This relationship is not only due to the fact that the new media were the results of scientific discoveries and technological inventions, but also to the habit to consider broadly-defined media attributes as media. Marshall McLuhan’s broadly-defined media notion could provide a conceptual framework for this approach, allowing to represent these phenomena not separately but together (McLuhan 1994, 3–21). For instance when McLuhan writes about the speedup of exchange and information he does not distinguish the writing from the money or the wheel (McLuhan, 1994, 24). Further on I use the notion of media in this broader sense, in order to be able to put together instruments like the cinematographic apparatus, the printed book and the coach.

1. Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the media

Most of the Dracula research concerning the relationship between the vampire and media agree that in Stoker’s novel new media have a crucial role in the fight against the bloodsucker count (Byron 1998a; Punter 2007; Kittler 1997; Stiles 2006; Wicke 1992; Fleissner 2000; Pedlar 2003). Vampire hunters can triumph over the vampire, because they are familiar with the modern media and they take advantage of them – while Dracula insists on his well accustomed media. When the vampire hunters make a list about things which distinguish them from the vampire they emphasise that they “have resources of science”. (Stoker 277)

39

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

This triumph is seen most clearly in the difference between the preferred vehicles used by the vampire and the hunters. Dracula relies on the conventional forms of travelling: when he is on a long journey he uses carriage and caléche on land and sailboat on sea (from Varna to England he travels on a schooner called Demeter; on the return journey he flees on a sailing ship called Czarina Catherine). By contrast, the hunters prefer steam-driven transports, they like travelling by train and steamship (during the chase from Paris to Varna they use the Orient Express; from Varna they hotfoot after Dracula on a steamboat). Moreover, they do not just use the modern forms of travelling but also emphasise their superiority – even if this is not claimed in an explicit way: when the hunters discuss the circumstances of the chase, Professor Van Helsing says: “To sail a ship takes time, go she never so quick; and when we start we go on land [by train] more quick”. (Stoker 359) While it seems that Van Helsing contrasts the means of transport by land and by sea, actually he classifies sailing as a slow form of travelling. Later Jonathan Harker, while travelling on a steamboat happily notes in his diary that they “overhauled every boat, big and little.” (Stoker 399) It is worth noting that the Count seems atavistic not only because he prefers old forms of travelling, but also because he speaks about them in an archaic mode. In his first letter addressed to Jonathan Harker he assures the young clerk that “on the diligence from Bukovina there is a place kept for him.” (Stoker 34). Later the Count uses the very same word, when he says farewell to Jonathan: “When the [Szgany and the Slovaks] gone, my carriage shall come for you, and shall bear you to the Borgo Pass to meet the diligence from Bukovina to Bistritz.” (Stoker 81) It is not surprising that in our days “diligence” has an archaic impression – but it seems that the western characters of the novel were not familiar with it either. Jonathan on his journey to the vampire’s castle consistently uses “carriage” (Stoker 33, 41) and “coach” (Stoker 34, 35, 36, etc.) instead of “diligence” – just like the vampire hunters do throughout the novel. The only hunter who uses the term “diligence” is Professor Van Helsing, but it does not mitigate the archaic sound of the term. Firstly because the professor is not a native English speaker and he regularly uses archaic expressions. Secondly, because he uses the term “diligence” when he recalls the journey of Jonathan Harker which he knows from the journal of the clerk – so it is likely that he borrows the expression from Dracula himself, because he read the Count’s letter in Jonathan’s journal.

40

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

However, the contrast of the old-fashioned Count and the up-to-date hunters is not only represented by the vehicles but also by other technologies they use. As Glennis Byron points out, in the novel “[w]ithout the telegraph, the typewriter, the phonograph, the railway, the newspaper, the necessary information could never have been collected, collated, transmitted.” (Byron 1998a, 22) Elsewhere he states that:

[f]rom telegraphs, typewriters, and telephones, to shorthand, phonographs, and kodaks, Bram Stoker’s Dracula flaunts its modernity: it is concretely embedded in the ever-growing late Victorian world of information technology. [...] Newspaper cuttings, telegraphs, ship’s logs, journal entries, letters, interviews all come together in the typescript Mina produces in triplicate. Even Dracula is aware of the need to collect data and avidly seeks the power it confers. (Byron 1998b, 12)

David Punter goes further along this line: the “element of progress stands in stark contrast to the figure of Dracula himself, who signifies a clinging to older roots of power”, to conclude that “the novel ends by demonstrating the superiority of modern technology over older ways of life” (Punter 2007, 36). Indeed, the media which transmit information and the recording techniques have a crucial role in the fight against the vampire. Jonathan Harker writes his journal entries and his letters to Mina in shorthand: this actually saves his life because when Dracula lays his hands on one of the letters he cannot decode the strange signs, therefore he cannot unravel the young clerk’s plan – if he could, he would probably kill him. However, it seems that in the novel it is even more important to collect, sort out and multiply information than to encrypt it (Richards 1993, 5). We must not forget that until Mina Harker collects and copies the diaries, journals and letters, only the reader has the special position to know all the elements of the story – the Western characters are in darkness, they cannot see the relation between cause and effect. The hunters get a comprehensive view on their situation only when they receive and read the copies made by Mina. The metaphorical statement of Professor Van Helsing clearly shows how threatening these copies are for Dracula: after reading them, the Professor declares that “This paper is as sunshine.” (Stoker 221) On one hand

41

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

this sentence obviously indicates how illuminating the diary is, as it throws new light upon the events. On the other hand it connects the paper to a dangerous element (sunshine), which can restrict the freedom of the Count. In what follows, I analyse how contemporary vampire movies transmit and rethink Stoker’s heritage, the media-alienation of the vampire. The subjects of my essay are two horror movies: What We Do in the Shadows and the Shadow of the Vampire.

2. Bloodsuckers and media in contemporary vampire movies

2.1. What We Do in the Shadows

What We Do in the Shadows tells the story of four immortal bloodsuckers (Vladislav, Viago, Deacon and Petyr) who live in Wellington, New Zealand. Their house is not so far from the little city and they successfully keep their real identity in secret from the citizens until a film crew decides to make a documentary about them. The crew equips themselves with crucifixes and follow the vampires everywhere. Regarding the relationship between vampirism and media, the most important character of the movie is Vladislav The movie uses an intriguing solution when drawing his character: his personality strongly recalls both the historical and the fictional Dracula, although some of his features conspicuously do not fit in this parallel. His name invokes Vlad Țepeş, a Voivod of Wallachia in the 15th century; his appearance also resembles that of Vlad: long dark hair, peculiar moustache and goatee [Figs.1–2.].

[Figs. 1–2.] Vladislav and Vlad Țepeş

42

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

His story is similar to that of Vlad Țepeş: both of them were cruel tyrants, gained their reputation from torturing peoples with all kinds of peaked things (such as wooden stakes). Vladislav’s nickname, “Poker” also associates to Vlad’s nickname, “Țepeş”, which in Romanian language means “the Impaler”. Vladislav does not follow only Vlad, but also Stoker’s Dracula – for example the three vampire lovers (who obviously do not appear in the legend of Vlad Țepeş). However, the birthday of Vladislav does not fit in neither timeframe: he is 862 years old, which means that contrary to the historical Dracula, Vladislav was born in the 12th century not in the 15th. With this and the other little differences the movie tries to give the impression that it is the only authentic source of the story of Vlad and the vampires generally, that we can get a full picture of these monsters only from this movie. Not surprisingly, the atavistic element from Vlad’s characterisation could not be missed in the film: he is quite old-fashioned, as his friend, Viago, says: “He has some pretty old ideas.” This also determines his relationship with modern media. One night he wants to show his hypnotic power to the cameraman. He peeps into flats through the windows to find a suitable subject for his demonstration [Figs. 3–4.]. His first potential victim sits with her back to the window watching television. Vlad whispers through the closed window, “Look at me!”, but his effort is useless. He gives a ridiculous explanation to his failure: “She cannot see me from that angle.” The second time his victim is an old man who is busy with searching something on his laptop [Figs. 5–6.]. He does not respond to the calling of Vladislav either, but when the vampire softly knocks on the window he turns his head toward him.

43

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

[Figs.3–6.] What We Do in the Shadows

From our perspective the most important element in these two failed hypnotic experiments is that Vladislav’s potential victims were engaged with modern media (a television and a laptop). This can be interpreted as if these media blocked the hypnotic power of the vampire, as if they protected the users, made them immune against the ability of Vladislav. In this respect, What We Do in the Shadows follows the traces of the novel: although the circumstances and the media are different, the principle is common: modern media always triumph over vampires. It cannot be a coincidence that shortly after this episode the vampires make acquaintance with Stu, an IT specialist, and start to learn about modern media, programs, applications (such as mobile phone, laptop, digital camera, internet, Skype). While on the surface this learning process is very funny, actually it raises a serious issue: the vampires are aware of the threat that media pose, so they try to remove the obstacle between them and their prey – the humans. Therefore their goal is not only to make some funny pictures of Vladislav or to speak with the old servant of Vigo through Skype but also to reclaim their power over humans by the knowledge of modern media. However, we should not forget that the primary function of television is to watch movies – and laptops are also suitable for this. This basic observation leads us to a paradox in the relationship between Dracula and modern media: in the diegetic world of the movie, instruments used/suited for watching movies (as media) block the vampire’s power but the viewer gets this information from a vampire movie. Therefore television and laptop have a two-faced power: they protect humans from vampires but they also help vampires to live on. From a sceptical media theoretical point of view, this protecting ability of modern media can be addressed differently: Vladislav’s failure can be interpreted in another way. He could not hypnotise his potential

44

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

victims because modern media have done it already – the television and the laptop have mesmerised the viewers already. Consequently What We Do in the Shadows emphasises the vampire-like aspect of modern media – the movie confers television and laptop an ability (the hypnotising power) which in vampire narratives is originally attached to bloodsuckers. The Shadow of the Vampire provides a deeper insight into this topic.

2.2. Shadow of the Vampire

The Shadow of the Vampire displays the fictional story of making Nosferatu (Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, F. W. Murnau 1922). What makes it really special is that in it director Murnau asks a real vampire to play Count Orlok. The film sets in the 1920s, in an era when cinema still has to earn its place among other arts. At the beginning of the film, Greta Schröder, a famous actress notes that she would rather play in theatres than in films. She highlights the difference between the two arts with a metaphor: “A theatrical audience gives me life, while this thing [the camera] merely takes it from me.” With this metaphor the film parallels the camera and the vampire at the very beginning of the story. This parallel is interesting in two respects: firstly because in the 2000s the Shadow of the Vampire rightly represents film as a medium which tries to get power over everybody and become immortal; secondly the movie suggests that this process started in the 1920s when the film became the most vampire-like medium. From this perspective it is also significant that during the movie several characters use drugs – by injection (see Aikens 2009). Here I have no room to elaborate on the relation between drugs and vampires, I would like only to point out how the movie juxtaposes these three elements: the vampire, the drug and the camera. It suggests that films are similar to drugs and vampirism: all three are represented as an ever-growing addiction. (In the fictional world of the movie – 1921 – we only have to wait three years for Béla Balázs’s uncanny statement: “the cinema [...] is no educational establishment! It is a simple stimulant, like alcohol.” (Balázs 2010 [1924], 7) Following on the parallel between vampires and media we have to focus our attention on two other scenes of the movie. Firstly, the business between Hutter, a young clerk and Count

45

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Orlok. The actors are sitting at a table. The Count is busy with some papers, Hutter is taking out new documents from his bag and accidentally drops a medallion on the table which – according to the scenario of Nosferatu – shows a picture of his wife. When Count Orlok glimpses at the picture he makes the following comment: “She has a beautiful bosom.” This statement astonishes Murnau and the scriptwriter and makes them angry (however, they do not stop shooting!). At first sight their reaction is very reasonable because the vampire’s comment is not compatible with the motivation of his character. Seemingly he ruins the scene. But we must not forget that this happens in the shooting of a silent movie, not a talkie. That is why it is irrelevant what Count Orlok says – nobody hears it. Furthermore, if the filmmakers add suitable subtitles to this scene during the cutting process, they can fill this instinctive exclamation with new meaning. From the first film theorists we know that silent movie actors often said irrelevant sentences during the shooting – it never was a problem. Béla Balázs writes in The Visible Man that sometimes “excellent film actors produce the most ridiculous nonsense as fill-in text on set. Watching the same sequence on film, on the other hand, may be deeply moving experience.” (Balázs 2010 [1924], 25) Boris Eichenbaum writes the following:

it is incorrect to call cinema a »silent« art: it is not a question of »silence«, but of the lack of the audible word [...]. The theatrical relationship, in which mimicry and gesture accompany the word, is abolished, but the word as articulatory mimicry preserves its force. The film actor speaks during the shooting of the film, and this has its effect on the screen. There was a well-known incident in an English cinema when a group of deaf-and-dumb people were at a film-show and protested against the content of the sentences spoken by the actors, which had no correspondence at all to the scenes depicted on the screen. (Eichenbaum 1982, 13)

Therefore, in the transaction scene the vampire is the only one who acts “suitably”. The movie represents him as someone who is completely alien to the shooting, who is awkward in front of the cameras but actually he fits in this context more naturally than anyone else. As a result, the movie opposes the director and the vampire in its world: seemingly the former has power over the film, the camera obeys him but it is actually the vampire who fits organically in the film.

46

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

The last scenes of the movie confirm this impression, too. In this part Murnau plans to shoot the death of the vampire. He makes a trap for the bloodsucker: in order to destroy the vampire he plans to let the sunlight into the place of the last scenes. Thus he could shoot the real death of the monster, not only a feigned one. Although the vampire figures out Murnau’s plan and puts the purchase out of action, with the help of the locals the director could destroy the monster. It is a cliché of the vampire narratives that vampires can be destroyed by the sunlight – however, the Shadow of the Vampire represents it in a different way. In most of the vampire movies the sunlight burns the bloodsuckers, only smoke and dust remain after them; in the Shadow of the Vampire, Count Orlok first changes his colour, his skin blisters, his body becomes fluid and finally he vanishes [Figs.7–10.].

[Figs.7–10.]. Shadow of the Vampire

This sequence closely resembles the destruction of a celluloid film strip. In the world of the movie the strip used during the shooting is a photosensitive material and it is very flammable. Just like the vampire. As if the movie suggested again that films and vampires are similar. Furthermore, in the movie the vampire often refers to his ambivalent relation to light. When the scriptwriter asks him, “What is it that inspires the most longing in you? That is most desirable and yet unattainable?”, the vampire answers: “The light... of the sun.” Orlok craves for sunlight

47

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

but he cannot have it – the picture strip also needs light to record images but too much light destroys it. The What We Do in the Shadows and the Shadow of the Vampire carry Stoker’s concept to a further stage. Media and media-techniques can help to defeat the bloodsuckers, however – paradoxically – they guarantee the survival of these monsters; they help them to live on. These movies – in a reflexive way – represent the camera and the projector as the strongest enemies and also as the most reliable abettors of the vampires. As mentioned before and as Friedrich Kittler remarks in his essay Dracula’s Legacy (Kittler 1997, 83), in Stoker’s novel we can find almost every medium that counted as modern in the 1890s, except film. Dracula was published in 1897, its story takes place sometime in the 1890s so Stoker should have known and his characters could have known about cinema. But do cinema and film really miss from the novel? Is there any sign of this medium in Dracula?

3. Optical media in Dracula

At the end of the first chapter, Dracula – disguised – carries Harker to his castle. At first sight it is a quite marginal episode but it is important from the perspective of the relation between film and vampire:

Suddenly, away on our left I saw a faint flickering blue flame. The driver saw it at the same moment. He at once checked the horses, and, jumping to the ground, disappeared into the darkness. […] [Then] the driver suddenly appeared again, and without a word took his seat, and we resumed our journey. I think I must have fallen asleep and kept dreaming of the incident, for it seemed to be repeated endlessly […]. Once the flame appeared so near the road, that even in the darkness around us I could watch the driver’s motions. He went rapidly to where the blue flame arose, it must have been very faint, for it did not seem to illumine the place around it at all, and gathering a few stones, formed them into some device.

48

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Once there appeared a strange optical effect. When he stood between me and the flame he did not obstruct it, for I could see its ghostly flicker all the same. This startled me, but as the effect was only momentary, I took it that my eyes deceived me straining through the darkness. (Stoker 43)

At this point of the narrative the “strange optical effect” raises some fundamental questions: Does Harker really falls asleep and dreams the whole adventure? Or does the adventure really happen and his eyes deceive him? Or is it a “marvelous episode” (Todorov 1973: 41–57) And in this last case, which element of the episode is magical: the fire or the body of the Count? This remains an open question in the novel, however other episodes suggest that the answer lies in the incorporeal body of Dracula. In the log of the Demeter we find a strange encounter between Dracula and one of the mates. The latter says the following to his captain: “On the watch last night I saw It, like a man, tall and thin, and ghastly pale. It was in the bows, and looking out. I crept behind It, and gave it my knife, but the knife went through It, empty as the air.” (Stoker 119) In this interpretation Dracula’s incorporeal body is responsible for the strange optical effect. This means that the function of the “ghostly flicker” episode is precisely to draw our attention to the vampire’s special feature, to his incorporeal body. Dracula’s body is located in the dark between a small light source and a viewer (Harker). The light makes this snapshot interesting; but it gives meaning to Dracula’s body. Without this transmitter (this medium) the “strange optical effect” would not be complete. It is worth noting, that other parts of the novel also strengthen this interpretation, and represent Dracula as a “strange optical effect” caused by light. In chapter 8, Mina and Lucy admire the landscape when the latter falls in some kind of unconscious condition. Mina writes the following in her diary:

I said nothing, but followed her eyes. She appeared to be looking over at our own seat, whereon was a dark figure seated alone. I was quite a little startled myself, for it seemed for an instant as if the stranger had great eyes like burning flames, but a second look dispelled the illusion. The red sunlight was shining on the windows of St. Mary’s Church behind our seat, and as the sun dipped there was just sufficient

49

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

change in the refraction and reflection to make it appear as if the light moved. I called Lucy’s attention to the peculiar effect. (Stoker 129)

Although here nobody mentions that Dracula has a phantomatic body, this section closely resembles the “ghostly flicker” episode. The vampire is located between the viewers and the reflective device (the window): the sun lights the window but – in Mina’s explanation – it has an effect on Dracula’s appearance as well. If we accept that in the novel the absence of cinema and film is a sign, then we can consider the above mentioned episodes as concretisation and emphasis of the paradox between vampires and media. In the novel different media help to destroy Dracula: but we know that the ultimate defeat of the bloodsucker is an illusion, he lives on – precisely with the help of media. And from the end of the 19th century cinema proved to be the best ally of vampires. According to the above mentioned parts of the novel and the analysed scenes of the Shadow of the Vampire, film is the most vampire-like medium. However the novel also represents another vampire-medium – the manuscript. In his famous essay, The Flight of the Vampire, Michel Tournier writes the following about the relation between texts and vampires, reading and bloodsucking: When “[t]he writer […] publishes a book, he releases into the anonymous crowd of men and women a flock of paper birds, parched, bloodthirsty vampires.” As soon as the book finds a reader, it becomes fully functional from the imaginations of the reader – but it always has to search for new readers to survive (Tournier 1987, 6). In the world of Dracula manuscripts help the hunters to defeat the vampire; but in our world manuscripts (and the book itself) help the Count to live on – the novel has never been out of print. However – as Tournier points out – the book, the novel not only helps the vampire to live on, but it also becomes a vampire itself. A vampire lives a much longer life than mortals, but he needs blood for this; the novel had also survived many generations, but it constantly needed readers to achieve this.

4. Conclusion

50

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

While Dracula adaptations (such as Dracula [1931, Tod Browning], Horror of Dracula [Terence Fisher, 1958], Dracula [1992, Francis Ford Coppola]) and Dracula sequels (such as Dracula: Prince of Darkness [Terence Fisher, 1966], Dracula Has Risen from the Grave [Freddie Francis, 1968]) are mainly occupied with drawing – and reinterpreting – the plot and the characters’ features, contemporary vampire movies focus on metaphors, symbols and narrative techniques of the novel. In my essay I analysed two of these movies, Shadow of the Vampire and What We Do in the Shadows but my research has a broader scope and involved movies like Therapy for a Vampire (Der Vampir auf der Couch, 2014), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) etc. The main point of my study was the relationship between media and Dracula. As we saw in the novel – on the story level – modern media such as phonograph, telegraph, and typewriter help the vampire hunters to achieve their Holy Mission to destroy Dracula. Shadow of the Vampire and What We do in the Shadows carry on this concept: in their diegetic world modern media (like the laptop and the television) seem to provide protection against vampires. However on a meta-level they emphasise the very opposite of this: media are always on the vampire’s side, they help them (and their myth) to live on. Shadow of the Vampire puts cinema, the apparatus in focus. In What We Do in the Shadows television and laptop (technical equipments suitable to watch movies) are central metaphors. Moving picture projection is seemingly missing from the novel, but certain parts of the text suggest that a relationship can be established between Dracula and optical illusion caused by light, recalling a basic cinematic mechanism. From this point of view the novel advances the relation represented in contemporary vampire movies, the close connection between vampires and equipments suitable to watch movies. Meanwhile the novel points out another medium which is able to defeat Dracula, but at the same time it helps him to live on – the typewritten, multiple piles of paper.

References

Stoker, Bram. 1998. Dracula. Ed. Glennis Byron. Peterborough & Ontario: Broadview Press.

51

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Aikens, Kristina. 2009. Battling Addictions. In Dracula. Gothic Studies. vol. 11. no 2. 41–51. Auerbach, Nina. 1995. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Balázs, Béla. 2010. Early Film Theory. Visible Man and The Spirit of Film. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books. Byron, Glennis. 1998a. The Advancement of Science and Technology. In Bram Stoker: Dracula, ed. Glennis Byron. Peterborough & Ontario: Broadview Press. Byron, Glennis. 1998b. Dracula Then and Now. In Bram Stoker: Dracula, ed. Glennis Byron. Peterborough & Ontario: Broadview Press. Eichenbaum, Boris. 1982. Problems of Cine-Stylistics. Trans. Richard Sherwood. In Russian Poetics in Translation. vol 9, ed. Ann Shukman. Somerton & Oxford: Old School House. Fleissner, Jennifer. 2000. Dictation Anxiety: The Stenographer’s Stake in Dracula, Nineteenth-Century Contexts. vol 22. 417–455. Kittler, Friedrich. 1997. Dracula’s Legacy. In Friedrich Kittler: Literature. Media. Information Systems: Essays, ed. John Johnston. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International. McLuhan, Marshall. 1994. Understandig Media – The Extension of Man. Cambridge: MIT Press. Pedlar, Valerie. 2003. Experimentation or exploitation? The investigations of David Ferrier, Dr Benjulia, and Dr Seward. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. vol 28. no 3. 169–174. Punter, David. 2007. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Tradition, Technology, Modernity. In Post/modern Dracula. From Victorian Themes to Postmodern Praxis, ed. John S. Bak. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Richards, Thomas. 1993. Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. London: Verso. Stiles, Anne. 2006. Cerebral Automatism, the Brain, and the Soul in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Journal of the History of the Neurosciences. vol 15. no 2. 131–152. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca & New York: Cornell University Press. Tournier, Michel. 1987. The flight of the vampire. Trans. Ninette Bailey & Michael Worton. Paragraph. vol 10. October. 4–11.

52

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Wicke, Jennifer. 1992. Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media. ELH. vol 59. no 2. 467–493.

53

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Border Crossing in the Textual World of Ádám Bodor12

Lilla Gregor [email protected]

Abstract. In the oeuvre of Ádám Bodor genre and the unity of his texts are always central questions. 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. In his novel The Sinistra Zone logical temporal structure and money serve as an outstanding example that connects the inner sphere and order of the zone to the world outside of it. In my essay, I would like to understand the irregularity of the zone’s temporal and logical structure through Miklós Mészöly’s concept of atonal systems.

Keywords: atmosphere, atonal systems, contemporary Hungarian literature, hybridisation, reiteration

A homogeneous oeuvre The works of the Transylvanian-born author Ádám Bodor are well-integrated in the Hungarian literature from Romania of the second half of the 20th century. These texts have a close connection with everyday life as well as with the everyday life of the communist era and the Ceaușescu regime, not only through their topics but through their specific atmosphere. In the reception of all of Bodor’s works, including his short stories and novels “there appears to be consensus in the sense that the author’s writings are characterised by a powerful and unique atmosphere” (Dánél 2016, 1). In the oeuvre of Bodor genre and the unity of his texts are always central questions. His first novel published in Hungary, The Sinistra Zone (A Sinistra körzet, 1992), points out this issue: the subtitle is Chapters of a Novel (Egy regény fejezetei). Throughout his work one can easily find the relation between the idea of connecting single chapters to build a novel and circulating short stories between several books. Bodor publishes many of his short stories in more than one book and through these re-publications, the short stories are put into different

12 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).

54

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

contexts and tend to re-contextualise the texts around them. This kind of iterative construction can be observed between texts and within them as well. As it will be discussed later in this essay, characters, motifs, even whole sentences or paragraphs often re-appear in different stories. Regarding the iterative construction and the homogeneous atmosphere, the field opens for crossing from one text to another, therefore the whole oeuvre can be read as one homogeneous corpus. I argue that this homogeneity is caused by the different techniques of reiteration and hybridisation. But besides the homogeneous atmosphere, these mechanisms also construct irregular temporal and logical structures.

Textual iteration “The zone” in Bodor’s novel The Sinistra Zone, which is considered to be his most important book, can represent the system and mechanism of all his texts on the grounds that the zone is closed and things – people, positions, relations – can only be circulated (iterated) within its borders. Thus, the following ideas and interpretations of the examples can be extended to all of Bodor’s texts, although this essay works with examples exclusively from The Sinistra Zone. As the zone becomes an enclosed space that has its own regulations (everyone gets a new name, adapts to new ethical norms, gains a whole new personality – just to mention some of the changes that people go through entering the zone) (Bengi 2005, 123–129), the novel becomes the representative model of the entire textual world of the author. Since it is not impossible to pass through the borders of the zone (Mustafa Mukkerman crosses them on every Thursday, sometimes even taking escapees along with him, as Andrei) the borders of the novel are neither clear nor certain. It is questionable whether the imaginary worlds of the chapters that had been published separately before the publication of the novel are included in the imaginary world of the novel. Furthermore, would it be possible to synthesise the world of the novel with the world of some of the short stories that are not included in it? I argue that on the basis of the forthcoming formal and topical characteristics, it is possible. The cyclic order appears on a textual and on a topical level as well. Beside the switches of stories within and between different volumes, textual cycles are realised in the iteration of segments of the texts (Bengi 2005, 117–120). An eloquent example of this is the frame-like

55

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

structure of The Sinistra Zone: sentences in the first chapter are repeated with some changes in the last one. There is a report on the circumstances of the zone in the first chapter, when Andrei reappears there:

Many years later, a Greek passport in my pocket, I rolled about the roads of the Sinistra Zone in my sparkling new, four-wheel-drive, metallic green Suzuki jeep […] before me were two tight parallel bands of depressed soil that sparkled in the reflection of the clouds – ice or, it seemed, maybe glass. All at once it hit me that these were my own old ski tracks. (Bodor 2013, 13) also in the last chapter:

It was a spring afternoon when I arrived in the Baba Rotunda Pass in my brand new, metallic green, four-wheel-drive Suzuki jeep, a Greek passport in my pocket. […] Even my old ski tracks still wound their way toward the Kolinda forest. (Bodor 2013, 173)

There is only a slight difference between the two descriptions and that is the information which the reader has gained by the last chapter. Words and phrases like “a Greek passport” or “old ski tracks” get such connotations by the end of the novel that can place the whole description into a different context. A report on the actions happening when Andrei returns to the zone is also given in the first chapter:

There I was lolling beside her, feeling my pulse, and just beginning to muse about staying near Aranka Westin for at least one more day, when that clarinet-like, caterwauled shrieking from high above us broke the spell: wild geese were announcing their presence in the clouds over Dobrin. As could be heard unmistakably through the silence of the night, they were coming from the south, from the Kolinda forest, and turning overhead suddenly north, toward Pop Ivan

56

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Mountain. I felt their calls to the tips of my little fingers. There’s not a sound more disquieting than theirs. So when the mountain infantry came to get me around dawn – stating that since I’d secretly left my designated lodgings, they must revoke my residence permit and ban me forever from the Sinistra Zone – I’d long been wide awake, waiting for morning, waiting to finally be done with the place. (Bodor 2013, 14-15) it is also repeated with some changes at the end of the novel:

Languidly, tapping my artery, I lay there nestled close to her warmth when, all at once, wild geese honked from the clouds above us. […] I swear there’s not a sound more disquieting than theirs. As could be heard unmistakably through the silence of the night, they were coming from the south, from the Kolinda forest; and on arriving above Dobrin they’d turned suddenly north, toward Pop Ivan Mountain. Their calls stirred the pit of my stomach. So when the mountain infantry soon came to get me – saying I’d abused the people’s hospitality by leaving my designated lodgings, and so they would have to revoke my permit and ban me forever from the Sinistra Zone – I hadn’t even gotten to sleep yet. Like a sentry I’d been long been alert, waiting for morning, waiting to finally be able to leave this place. (Bodor 2013, 176)

The changes issued within these texts show that besides gaining all the extra connotations throughout the novel, one can also get used to the mechanisms working in the zone. While in the first chapter, the scene looks like a romantic meeting and the narrator also uses terms like “clarinet-like shrieking” to describe the sound of the birds, by the end of the novel one already knows enough about usual relationships in the zone to know that they are less romantic and more animalistic. While in the beginning feelings like the sound of the wild geese stay at the surface of the body, so the outer perception does not become an inner experience (“to the tips of my little fingers”), at the end they penetrate the body of Andrei (“stirred the pit of my stomach”). Similarly, in the first chapter Andrei only wants “to finally be done with the place”.

57

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

However, in the last chapter there is more emphasis on the fact that his life is somehow conformed to the zone; he is “waiting to finally be able to leave this place” – to get the permission to leave Sinistra. So instead of escaping, this time he waits until the zone forces him to leave.

A cyclic plot Circulation appears topically as well as on a structural level. None of the phrases that seem to indicate a specific date or period of time are certain at all. Although every chapter starts with a sentence which contains a time-reference, these references are only connected to events happening in the very same chapter: “When it was announced that Colonel Puiu Borcan has been found […]” (Bodor 2013, 35) or “One fine spring day, back when I worked as an assistant corpse watchman […]” (Bodor 2013, 101). These timestamps do not signify the point of the current acts within the whole plot either. In fact, it is impossible to find such a place since the novel does not have an entirely linear plot. Instead of having the events in a temporal or logical order, chapters are organised by the characters. Every chapter has its own protagonist and the events relating to that character are told in that character’s chapter, whether they have been told before or not. Regarding the plot, there are some events that are opposed to one another when reading them as parts of a temporal structure, such as the case of Elvira Spiridon’s hair. In Chapter 11, titled Severon Spiridon’s Surprise, due to a regulation, Andrei cuts off Elvira’s hair. Chapter 13, Gabriel Dunka’s Name Day, is definitely telling the reader about the last couple of hours or days that Andrei spends in the zone, since that is the one in which he escapes. After the escape, Elvira is standing on the road “completely nude but for her thick head of hair, matted against her neck like an old, threadbare scarf” (Bodor 2013, 157). At this point, there are two possibilities: either several years has passed between the events of the two chapters, or something illogical is happening here. The first case points out that in the novel one cannot find any concrete description of the time passed apart from the first and the last chapters. Within this frame, time has stopped: every event of the plot from Chapter 2 to Chapter 14 happens in a timeless space. The second case refers back to the segregated status of the zone, meaning that the logical structure of that area cannot be compared to the logical structure of the readers’ everyday lives.

58

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Besides this unusual temporal and logical structure of The Sinistra Zone, the cyclic mechanisms of the topical level can also be identified in Bodor’s other stories, through some characters that appear in more than one short story or novel. However, it is important to mention that these characters do not know about their lives and activities in other texts. Despite having the same figures in different stories, these texts do not refer to each other, they do not construct whole personalities or life stories.

Other types of reiteration: mixed, broken or overextended categories Looking through the examples of the cyclic structures in Bodor’s short stories and novels, it is apparent that there are many examples of other types of reiteration as well. Firstly, the combination and hybridisation of different registers of a language and even different languages in The Sinistra Zone can be simply the result of the position of the zone: Sinistra lays on the borderline of Ukraine and Romania. According to this specific place, there are not only strange names and a grammatically misused language, but an ethnic amalgam can also be detected. Secondly, different lifestyles meet and things even switch, swing or mix between different biological categories. Such union of categories usually happens in moments of intensity,13 for instance in moments of fusion between human and nature. In The Sinistra Zone as well as in Bodor’s other texts, these shifts appear during the description of death and sexual acts (or during the build up to them). The meeting of Elvira Spiridon and Dunka is a spectacular example of this: Elvira’s body flourishes in the rain when Dunka first recognises her. “Her wet thighs, her loins strewn with spruce needles and with blue, white, and yellow flower petals had seemingly blossomed in the spring storm.” (Bodor 2013, 157) Another instance of mixed up biological categories is the animalisation of humans. This can be seen through use of language (“the Red Rooster” (Boor 2013, 5) and “the grey ganders” (Bodor 2013, 36–37) are not the only examples) and also in the plot – such as the transformation of Connie Illafeld from a beautiful woman into a bear (Bodor 2013, 101–111).

13 Although Gumbrecht uses the term “moments of intensity” or “moments of epiphany” as aesthetic experiences that take place in the interaction of the artwork and the audience (e.g. the reader and the text), I would like to bring attention to the quality of a moment of epiphany. Epiphany has the status of the event, firstly because we never know when it would happen and we cannot predict what form it would take and how intense it will be (Gumbrecht 2004, 113). In such moments of intensity “production of presence” can happen: the moment has the status of the event, as it is short and unique, and it also emphasizes the presence and the spatial dimension of the people or objects participating in that moment (Gumbrecht 2004, 17).

59

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

The appearing human bodies do not fit the phenomenological experience of the body: they are not inseparable, they do not work as a continuous and homogeneous surface. In Bodor’s texts, there are several examples of fractal or discontinuous bodies as well as bodies which overreach their own borders, even by incorporating other bodies. Overextended bodies show up many times in Bodor’s short stories relating to the concept of twins. The Hamza Petrika twins at first seem to be two different persons regarding their physical bodies, but they are somehow equal: they have the same job, the same desires, even their names are the same – inhabitants of the zone do not look at them as if they were two different people. “>>Yes indeed,<< grumbled Doc, >>these damn twins. That’s how they are. Tear them apart from each other for a couple of hours and they get into all kinds of trouble.” (Bodor 2013, 94) Although at this point Doc clearly refers to them as separate men, the word tear indicates a more physical relation between them. This presumption is verified on the next pages: as soon as one of the Hamza Petrikas learns of his brother’s suicide, he leaves “as if his soul was fast departing his body” (Bodor 2013, 98). This unifying mechanism works in reverse too, when a character’s body part appears as separated from its owner.14 Concerning these body parts there is usually a metonymical connection between the character and the missing body part, and on the grounds of this metonymical connection, the body part can replace the whole body, it can include and construct the identity of its (former) owner character. Replacement is also a common practice among characters, considering the constant job-switches in The Sinistra Zone: workers of the wild berry depot, the photographer and the coroner’s assistant are all seeking for job replacements all the time. Similar border-crossing mechanisms can be seen in the iteration of texts and in the relationship between characters and their bodies. The act of continual reorganising of the texts points out the deficiencies caused by the ever-shifting focuses of the stories, and it also implies that there is no final or complete order.15

14 Many examples can be found for this mechanism in Bodor’s short stories such as Tárkonyfű-illat (The scent of tarragon) (Bodor 1978, 38–40) and A szántóvető szerencséje (The ploughman’s luck) (Bodor 1985, 148–151). 15 See on this Mészöly (1996, 48): “A képekkel teleaggatta a deszkafilagória falát, s órákig cserélgette őket, mintha valamilyen sorrendre, értelemre akart volna rájönni. Ez a munka néha hajnalig is eltartott, s többnyire úgy fejeződött be, hogy alig maradt kép, amit ne követett volna a falon egy görcsös hézag, kiáltó semmi, aminek a helyét képtelen volt az elkészült fotókkal kitölteni.” “He hung the pictures all over the walls of the deck pavilion and he was constantly reorganising them for hours, as if he wanted to get to know some kind of order or sense. Sometimes he kept going on with this activity until

60

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Time and money As previously mentioned, the borders of the zone construct a different and closed world: every person gets a new name and new personality when entering this magical (in terms of the postcolonialist interpretations of Bodor),16 mythical (concerning the temporal and story-telling structure of The Sinistra Zone, and the manner that it builds up a whole universe), and fantasy (the plot contains a dwarf, a giant etc.) world. However, there are people crossing these strict borders, and the crossing always happens in connection with leaving the temporally undefined or timeless space: Mustafa Mukkerman’s arrivals every Thursday strengthen the periodicity of the temporal structure of the zone. Andrei’s first arrival to the zone does not define a real starting point but a place where he, along with the reader, enters the world of The Sinistra Zone – the novel begins. The only part where one can get concrete information about time is when Andrei returns to the zone: “[…] Aranka Westin – whom I’d parted from exactly seven years earlier without so much as a farewell.” (Bodor 2013, 175) Apparently, time only passes in the usual way (or it is only described in the usual way) when Andrei stays out of the zone. Like time, the appearance of money is firmly related to leaving the zone. This is shown in the last chapter, in which Andrei returns to the zone because he has to pay back the money he borrowed from Dunka (Bodor 2013, 173). When he borrowed it, he wanted to give the twenty dollar bills to Mukkerman so he would transfer Andrei to the south (Bodor 2013, 77 and 152– 153; Nikifor Tescovina steals some money from Andrei in order to escape (Bodor 2013, 152), Dunka gets paid for his soon-to-be death and for giving his body to the museum as an artifact (Bodor 2013, 162), and Béla Bundasian pays “with the twenty dollar bill his stepfather had once given him” (Bodor 2013, 171) for the oil and the gasoline that he uses for his suicide. Whenever the text speaks about money, dollar bills are mentioned, except for this last example, that of Béla Bundasian: “He got so much change in return – in coins in the local currency that all his pockets were overflowing.” (Bodor 2013, 171) With the exchange to the local currency dawn, and usually when it was finished there were hardly any pictures that were not followed by a cramped gap, crying emptiness, which he could not fill up with the photos that had been prepared.” (Translation by me, G. L.) 16 The idea of magic realism as a common tool of Hungarian artworks in the 21st century appears in some theoretical works in connection with the so-called “trauma culture”. As Judit Pieldner shows in her study, Romanian and Hungarian movie-making nowadays tends to use magic realism to represent “the real” and the traumas of the communist past. Following her argumentation, Bodor’s texts can also be seen as examples of the Hungarian magic realism (Pieldner 2016, 87–114).

61

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

the zone seems to approve of his suicide. It is important to affirm, however, that unlike money, denatured alcohol is constantly present in the world of the novel, and it is definitely valuable. This can be clearly detected in the scene where Andrei recounts all his belongings: “Besides what fits in my pockets, back then I owned a tin plate, two sheet-metal mugs, a horse blanket, a couple of socks, a few odd shreds of fabric, some cord, and a bottle of denatured alcohol.” (Bodor 2013, 65) It is even more interesting to consider that since they handle and hand out denatured alcohol as if it was water, it is highly probable that for the majority of the novel most of the characters are continuously drunk. If one compares this discovery to the idea of atonal systems, it can be seen that in the atonal system of Bodor’s world not one absolute of a referential reality is applied. There is no referential centre, because the referential frames are always moving and revaluing themselves. The system is based on temporally functioning absolutes which are only applicable for one moment at a time.17 The most self-evident instance of this is Coca Mavrodin and the long list of her unexpected and always changing regulations: the colonel herself can be seen as one of the temporally functioning absolutes of the zone. Above this, the mythical cyclic and iterative structure, the web of tale-like motifs, the homogeneous atmosphere, and the non-logical and non-linear plot all proves that the zone, as well as the text and the entire textual world, can be read as atonal systems. Every single short story, novel, and the whole oeuvre, the represented worlds and the zone in The Sinistra Zone – can all be read as atonal systems. But at that precise moment when a character leaves one of these systems above, which can be described as spaces of the non- reconstructable chronology and logic, or when an act of the plot seems to be “regular”, that character or act would divert from the system as if they were foreign bodies. Considering that in Bodor’s system the so-called “normative” elements stand out, although the system seems to be hybrid overall, I believe that some of the basic questions that Bodor’s texts are raising are whether it is possible or worthwhile to talk about normative logic, normative chronology, or generally speaking, norms.

References

17 For further information on temporally functioning absolutes, see the atonal systems of Mészöly Miklós. (Mészöly 2006, 187–194)

62

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Bengi László. 2005. A szövegszegmentumok iterációja mint az epikai világ megalkotása: Bodor Ádám: Sinistra körzet. In Tapasztalatcsere. Esszék és tanulmányok Bodor Ádámról. eds. Scheibner Tamás–Vaderna Gábor, 123–129. Budapest: L’Harmattan. 117–129. Bodor Ádám. 2013. The Sinistra Zone. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation. Bodor Ádám. 1985. Az Eufrátesz Babilonnál. Budapest: Szépirodalmi. 148–151. Bodor Ádám. 1978. Megérkezés Északra. Bukarest: Kriterion. 38–40. Dánél Mónika. 2016. Atmospheric Adaptation as Cultural Translation. Contact Zones. Studies in Eastern European Cinema and Literature vol. 2. http://contactzones.elte.hu/atmospheric-adaptation#_ftn1 (Last accessed: 30. 10. 2017.) Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2004. Production of the Presence. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 17–113. Mészöly Miklós. 1996. Magyar novella. In Mészöly Miklós: Oh, che bella note. Budapest: Pont. 48. Pieldner Judit. 2016. Magic Realism, Minimalist Realism and the Figuration of the Tableau in Contemporary Hungarian and Romanian Cinema. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies. vol. 12. 87–114. Mészöly Miklós. 2006. Realizmus, nem realizmus. In Mészöly Miklós: A pille magánya. Pécs: Jelenkor. 187–194.

63

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Cultural Studies Approaches in the Study of Eastern European Cinema: Spaces, Bodies, Memories. Edited by Andrea Virginás. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016, 291 p. ISBN: 1-4438-0059-718

Teréz Vincze [email protected]

In the introduction, the volume's editor, Andrea Virginás, describes the collection as a project that represents a generational perspective. Most of the authors present in the book are members of the “early-to-mid-career generation of Eastern European film scholars who were formed in the post-communist period” (p. iix.). This is the first generation that started their university studies after the fall of communism and has been exposed to all the new ideas and trends present in the Humanities since the 1990s. This exposure has its special geopolitical structure – the many ideas that have become increasingly available to East European scholars were not always applicable to the post-communist situation. Hence the modernisation of the Humanities studies in Eastern Europe has not been and is still not an easy task. The real scholarly discussion about the film culture of Eastern Europe between Western and Eastern scholars has just been started. And the present volume – where almost all the authors are natives of the countries they study – is another proof that this new generation of Eastern European film scholars is ready to participate in and contribute to this discourse. The introduction characterises the concept of the volume as having a double perspective: treats the post-socialist East European region as a coherent cultural entity, but also uses a transnational approach. However, considering the articles featuring in the volume, this double perspective does not seem too evident. What makes the volume – and consequently the region represented in it – a seemingly coherent entity is the fact that the authors and the editor are in tune with the current international trends (the spatial, bodily and memory turns in the Humanities) and produce the reception of these ideas in relation to their native film cultures. But in reality, I see only a few actual traces of the transnational approach in the volume – the

18This work was supported by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund, project number NN 112700, entitled Space- ing Otherness. Cultural Images of Space, Contact Zones in Contemporary Hungarian and Romanian Cinema and Literature, and the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

64

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

fact that it collects articles from different nations about different nations' cinemas does not make the "approach" transnational. I believe "transnational" is a methodology that must be used in research and presented in the articles themselves. Naturally, this does not lessen the value of the published articles, it only makes the label mentioned in the introduction somewhat misleading. Anikó Imre’s essay "The Case for Postcolonial, Postsocialist Media Studies" (published originally in Boundary in 2014) serves as a methodological introduction to the volume. Imre argues that the postcolonial and the post-socialist approach are interconnected and must be studied as such. In her opinion it is the European postcolonial tradition that is at the root of the current European crisis: the post-colonial status of the Eastern European countries causes tension. She suggests the inclusion of anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and media and communication studies in the methodology of studying the post-socialist situation – disciplines that are able to discover information about the everyday reality in post-socialist countries. In this framework she proposes to study popular (post) socialist TV from a post-colonial perspective – especially early socialist historical adventure series, and also virulent forms of racism in reality TV. She argues that during the Cold War the positioning and reception of East European art cinema was a tool in maintaining the postcolonial status quo by positioning socialist film cultures strictly in the framework of national cultures, while the Western films represented universal meaning and values. In the East-West connection the traditional postcolonial paradigm remained present – after the iron curtain, the neoliberal free market ideology helped to reinforce the reappearance of the hierarchy. In order to understand cultural racism that is present in the East-West European context, the cultural studies approach seems to be a proper tool. Imre stresses the importance of the cultural studies approach and proposes the study of popular culture in order to understand the post-socialist everyday and cultural racism. However, the texts in the collection do not really follow these suggestions. The essays included in the volume can sometimes be labelled as 'cultural studies', but they practice a different approach compared to the one suggested by Imre. For example, most of the articles study art cinema and so they stick to the film culture that is traditionally contributing – according to Imre – to the old, postcolonial paradigm. Although the theme of East-West relations is present in

65

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

many of the articles, in general I am not sure how the article by Imre can be understood as a general methodological introduction to the volume. But again, this does not lessen the value of the articles themselves. The first chapter, "Postcolonial, Postsocialist Spaces (of the Nation)", upholds in its title the theme of postcolonial, although the articles do not use postcolonial methodology, but provide interesting and enlightening analyses in relation to real and cinematically created post- socialist spaces. The article of Zsolt Győri, Concrete Utopias: Discourses of Domestic Space in Hungarian Cinema, provides a historical account of how housing discourse has been developed and practiced in Hungarian socialist and post-socialist cinema. The films that the article discusses have been selected and arranged in order to ensure the plasticity of the historical perspective of the theme. Since cinema is a perfect tool to register social and spatial relations, films seem to be perfect material to better understand the meaning, symbolism and ideological constructedness of panel buildings. These (often) monumental constructions, that are still very much part of the Eastern European landscape, had once been the forerunners and symbols of the communist future. Győri intends to work out the relationship between the ideological and cinematic construction of domestic space. He also provides a historical account of the housing film from the early strategies of ideological education through the criticism of indoctrinating strategies towards full-blown identity crisis of individuals and communities represented in the spaces of panel buildings. The article positions itself as a preliminary step to the theoretisation of space relying on the dialogue between architecture and cine texture – which is a really intriguing proposition. Jana Dudková in her article titled From Heterotopias to Non-Places: The (National) Identity Reviewed through Spaces of Contemporary Slovak Cinema analyses Slovak cinema in connection to the conceptual framework provided by the work of Marc Augé on the concept of so-called "non-places". The text seems to be struggling to use the chosen theoretical framework as a stable structuring element in the argumentation. Hence Dudková's work is more like a loosely structured, although informative survey of a certain motif in the Slovak cinema that could be a springboard for further research into the topic.

66

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

In her article Fragile Diegetic Spaces and Mobile Women: Coping with Trauma in Hungarian and Romanian Films, Andrea Virginás continues her earlier research about the relationship between traumatised women and spatial constructions present in films. She considers the contemporary (new) waves in Hungarian and Romanian cinema as responses to the historic trauma of 1989. She argues that in films such as Tamara (2004); Bibliothèque Pascal (2010); 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile; 2007); Katalin Varga (2009) there are places and spaces that are able to speak for themselves and on behalf of the traumatised female characters. She follows this line of thought in relation to further films and argues that the female traumas represented have unique post-socialist characteristics. These films make possible to re-experience traumas that revive the socialist past in the post-socialist present. The article concentrates on the formal and narrative analysis of the filmic constructedness of using concepts such as the 'impossible objective shot' formulated by Francesco Casetti. This essay, by concentrating mainly on formal and narrative constructions in art films, is in my opinion a fine example of the missing cultural studies approach that characterises many of the essays in the volume. The essay of Edward Alexander titled The Titular Nation in (Post-)Yugoslav Cinema builds on the very special position of former Yugoslavia in relation to the concept of transnationalism. It is a unique case since the former Yugoslavia existed as a national film culture that was composed of a mosaic of interacting, overlapping (national) elements. The essay poses a very interesting question: what happens when a film that comes from an ex- Yugoslav state defines itself as a decidedly national narrative using the name of the nation in its title. Alexander conducts two case studies, and demonstrates how the films Slovenian Girl (Slovenka, 2009), and A Serbian Film (Srpski film, 2009) uses the national as brand names, and how this strategy influences the reception of the films. The interesting analysis demonstrates how these films use certain allegories in order to thematise the nation and national, and how these allegories become more and more camouflaged and displaced as the films travel outside of their places of origin. The author provides an interesting discursive analysis about the constructedness of national space and place. The second chapter entitled Subjectivities Embodied in/through Spaces is the strongest part of the volume. Its articles create a certain coherence where the arguments are able to

67

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

support each other across the boundaries of individual texts. This is the part where I feel that the collective spirit of the volume is really at work and most rewarding. György Kalmár's essay titled Apostate Bodies: Nimród Antal's Kontroll and Eastern European Identity Politics represents the East-West cultural dynamics by analysing the Hungarian cult movie Kontroll made one year before Hungary's entrance into the European Union in 2004. According to Kalmár the film provides images of national and/or European identity, while creatively juxtaposes Eastern and Western narrative patterns, characters, perspectives and ideologies. In order to redefine Hungarian post-communist masculinities, the text analyses the male bodies on the screen in relation to the ideological crisis of post-communist Hungary. All the important characters are male – male bodies embody social-cultural allegory, and the mystical serial killer symbolises the collapse of the ideological belief that is needed in order to maintain a working society. The author points out that 'apostate' bodies similar to those present in Kontroll in the West are only imaginable in non-mainstream, art house films. In Hollywood one can only find examples of such marginal masculinities in times of major historical crises like Word War II, for example. The essay by Katalin Sándor: Corporeality and Otherness in the Cinematic Heterotopia of Bibliothéque Pascal analyses the brothel-library of Szabolcs Hajdu's film as a heterotopic social space and demonstrates the overly interesting relationships between body and heterotopic spaces in the film. This text again is connected in many ways, directly and indirectly, to the East-West relationship. For example, Romania's entrance into the European Union is present in the film. The author very creatively demonstrates how the story of Mona, the central character, displays discursive cultural practices of defining, shaping, and disciplining the body, and how the social, economic, and cultural inequalities manifested through the instrumentalisation of the Other's body (as female, Eastern European, foreign, etc.). Sándor's essay points out the spatial and bodily logic that helps Hajdu to speak about actual social problems of the region by using a non-realistic, stylised language that positions him in the mainstream of Hungarian cinema's contemporary artistic trends. Mihaela Ursa in hertext Monstrous Maternity as Disembodied Materiality in Romanian New Wave Cinema gives a summary about how the body of the mother has been charged with

68

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

different ideological meanings during the last 50 years in Romanian history and cinema – starting with the moment when the body of the mother was made into a field of communist propaganda –, and argues that an ideological change can be detected in contemporary Romanian cinema in relation to this theme. One of the focal points of the text is a parallel analysis of a 1970s film about abortion and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. However, it was not clear for me what is the final conclusion that this comparison can contribute to. But the essay is clear about the recent turn to a negative image in relation to mother figures, and about the fact that this phenomenon can only be understood in a wider social-political context. As Ursa argues, the negative image is an effect created by the erosion of the image of the mother-nation in general. The motherland does not take care of her children – Romania has the greatest migration rate in times of peace in Europe. The society in which thousands of children are left behind is the context for the films where negative maternal images dominate. Eszter Ureczky's essay Post-bodies in Hungarian cinema: Forgotten Bodies and Spaces in Ágnes Kocsis's Adrienn Pál provides an intriguing view into another Hungarian film. The author analyses the film by following the metaphors of forgetting, illness, and spaces. Ureczky argues that the alienation of reality is demonstrated by the fact that the spaces in the film are not real, lived spaces. The stages of the quest conducted by the main character in the film create a chain of heterotopic spatial signifiers, and the whole pilgrimage demonstrates that lived spaces are absent from her life. This essay provides a truly creative and enlightening reading of the visual and cultural motifs of bodies (in pain), forgetting, illness, and spaces present in the film. The last part of the volume, titled Cultural Memory – Work in Post-socialist Cinemas is a rich collection of knowledge on the history and memory of the region. The essays not only speak about film history but through their argumentation the reader learns how the film contributes to the historical memory of different nations. In her article, Elzbieta Durys analyses the issue of memory in the Polish film, Aftermath (Poklosie, 2012). Durys points out that traditionally Polish cinema plays an active role in the national politics of memory and helps to maintain a culture of Polish national myths of victimisation and heroism. Aftermath proves to be an important example because it breaks the usual stereotype. The essay analyses how the director of the film uses the language and

69

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

strategies of popular culture (for example the conventions of the thriller genre) in order to break old stereotypes. According to Durys, Aftermath is the only film so far that openly questions the mythologising dimension of Polish national identity. Claudiu Turcus's essay Paradigms of Rememoration in Post-communist Romanian Cinema discusses post-1989 Romanian cinema and analyses how the films of the period construct the memory of communist times. The author raises the issue of self-colonisation in relation to the New Romanian Cinema: could the success of this trend represent a certain case of East European Orientalism? The author creates a typology of representation of communism in New Romanian Cinema and concludes that the strategies of filmic rememoration of communism used in films invalidate both dichotomous approaches and unilateral ideological perspectives. While the Romanian cinema of the 1990s was preoccupied with condemning communism, the appearance of the New Romanian Cinema brought about a new period of a more neutral, nostalgic and ironic disavowal of communism. The new director generation gave memory work a different character: made it into a more democratic, self-questioning, plural process. According to the author the cinematic rememoration is filtered through the themes of trauma, community, and revolution, and there are enough elements in the films that save them from self-colonisation. He quotes the example of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days where the components that help the film to embody a non-orientalist, realistic voice of the East are the authentic background, and the poetics of naturalness and intimacy. The article of Katarína Misíkováabout cinematic memory in Slovak cinema after 1989 seems to be struggling with one of the most crucial and almost invincible tasks of scholars studying so-called "small cinemas". To argue for general trends and motifs present during a relatively extended period of time, the scholar of a film culture that is relatively small and unknown to the international audience naturally feels the urge to educate the reader about the films and film history of their field. In order to support the main argument, the scholars might find themselves entangled in recounting film history and listing and describing films while holding loosely onto the main argument. In my opinion this is what has happened here, hence we get an informative account of Slovak film history, but get less information about the unique features of memory work done by contemporary Slovakian cinema.

70

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

In his article Making and Breaking the New Wave Canon in Romanian Cinema, Doru Pop situates the New Romanian Cinema in the double framework of Europeanness versus local cinema movement. According to Pop the cinematic canon in Europe was traditionally defined by the names of great auteurs, and New Romanian Cinema followed this trend: it had been canonised through the names of the directors who collected many prestigious awards at international film festivals and had become great auteurs themselves. And the author points out how the authorial tactics of self-reflexivity and artistic self-awareness led to a certain self- canonisation process, that included the implicit canonisation of themes, narratives and visual practices, and ultimately led to the loss of originality. The most problematic point of the article is the concept of canon itself. It seems to me that it is too early to speak about or use the concept of canon as something relatively closed in relation to New Romanian Cinema. When the author speaks about Aferim! (2015) as a de- or re-canonisation of the New Romanian Cinema, the concept of canon and canonisation gets really foggy. How can a single film canonise other films, or a cinematic trend? I believe canonisation is done by various cultural institutions such as film festivals, education, monographs and edited volumes (such as the book discussed here), but can't be done by single films. The New Romanian Cinema as an ongoing, contemporary phenomenon should rather be referenced as an open trend at the moment, which needs to be going through and is going through the canonisation processes by these various institutions. In this sense the clearest canonisation gesture of the text is the list composed by the author as his personal "best of" list of the New Romanian Cinema films that is attached to the article as some kind of appendix. While this gesture signals the clear intent of the text to become part of the canonisation process, it does not eliminate the methodological problem related to the concept of canon and canonisation – probably by the label of canon the author simply means the "most typical" films. This volume has fine examples of how different texts that concentrate on similar themes and discuss films that come from the same geopolitical region are able to support each other's argumentation. The essays collected here are proof that the generation of East European film scholars the authors represent is ready to not only participate in, but lead the international discussion about the film culture of this part of Europe.

71

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Report on the International Conference Contact Zones: Transnational Encounters, Dialogues and Self-Representation in Contemporary Eastern European Literature, Cinema and Visual Cultures (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, 28-30 September 2017)

Bence Kránicz and Emanuel Modoc krá[email protected] [email protected]

The study of transnational cultures has been on a rising tide in the field of academic research since its proliferation in the nineties. While transnational communities and diasporic cultures are far from being a new sociological phenomenon, the rise of transnationalism today is influenced by what Steven Vertovec described as “the scale of intensity and simultaneity of current long distance, cross-border activities” (Vertovec 1999, 448). Moreover, the recent technological developments in the field of communication (telecommunications, global travel, Internet) further stimulate contemporary transnational communities. Aspects such as border- crossing, bricolage, cultural syncretism, hybridity or spatial displacements need not necessarily involve the creation of radical new identities that are in a critical position towards the colonial discourse, such as in the case of postcolonialism. That is why transnationalism is concerned with a wider range of cultural dimensions that span from social morphology and new iterations in reconstructing place and locality to the ability to create new types of consciousness that envelop multiple identifications with more than one nation. This was the crux of all subjects discussed during the conference organised by the Contact Zones research group as part of their ongoing research project Space-ing Otherness: Cultural Images of Space, Contact Zones in Contemporary Hungarian and Romanian Film and Literature. The conference was hosted by Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, between 28 and 30 September 2017, in collaboration with the Romanian Cultural Institute in Budapest, the Ekphrasis Research Centre for Trans-disciplinary Studies and Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, both from Cluj-Napoca. While most topics were general, ranging from our shared Communist heritage, which can be traced in post-Communist literature, or topographies of “eastness” in transnational narratives to issues of authorship, industry and festivals in Romanian and Hungarian cinemas, some other recurrent features also surfaced, such as the

72

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

transnational encounters between Romanian and Hungarian cinemas and literatures, shared diasporic communities and, most important of all, a comparison and differentiation between Romanian and Hungarian cultures, be it cinema, literature or visual cultures. Ágnes Pethő’s (Sapientia University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania) keynote lecture that opened the conference, titled Changing Strategies of In-Betweenness. Intermediality in Contemporary Eastern European Cinema, as well as Doru Pop’s presentation (Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania) comparing contemporary trends in contemporary Hungarian films focusing on cultural and aesthetic similarities, were eloquent demonstrations in this respect. While the former reassessed the implications of using the theoretical instruments of intermediality in scholarly research applied to Eastern European and Russian cinemas, the latter analysed the cultural strategies employed in Romanian and Hungarian cinemas with regards to the development of the film consumption, reception, and the overall progress of their respective film industries. Similarly to Doru Pop’s endeavour, Hajnal Király’s (ELTE) presentation on Romanian and Hungarian cinemas’ preference for family (melo)dramas constituted a very good example of how two cultures that stylistically stem from different aesthetic traditions can thematically be analysed in their similarities. Zsolt Győri from the University of Debrecen also approached new Hungarian and Romanian films through their genre connections. He argued that the gangster characters of recent Hungarian cinema are not only underdogs but cheap parodies of the Western gangster, as if the postsocialist society itself could not produce its own heavy-weight criminals. On the other hand, new Romanian films tend to embed the gangster figures into social dramas, provoking questions of masculinity using the stylistic manners of the Romanian New Wave. Balázs Varga of ELTE and Elzbieta Durys of the University of Lodz also aimed to highlight the national, or specifically Eastern European elements in the transnational genre crime fiction. With regard to literary studies, Mihaela Ursa-Pop’s (Babeș-Bolyai University) keynote lecture approached the transnational features of György Dragomán and Radu Pavel Gheo’s novels. She elegantly demonstrated her thesis of a shared community and, more than that, a shared peripherality between the two authors, that make them belong to a culture that is rather transnational/translational than simply national. Other lectures that dealt with Hungarian and/or Romanian literature covered topics such as the historical avant-garde of the two countries (by

73

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Emanuel Modoc of Babeș-Bolyai University), the dialogue on solidarity between state and literature in Hungary (Teri Szűcs of ELTE used Szilárd Borbély’s To the Body – A Testhez), or historical contact zones of World War I as seen through contemporary novels (by Júlia Vallasek of Babeș-Bolyai University). Andreea Coroian-Goldiș and Alex Goldiș, both from BBU, described the ’collective novel’ and the ’polyphonic novel’ in Romanian literature, respectively, while less known and canonical writers of the two countries were also subjects of different papers (Tímea Jabloczay of King Sigismund University, Budapest, talked about the works of Erzsi Szenesh, Stefan Firica of the University of Bucharest introduced Aglaja Veterányi, Edit Zsadányi of ELTE focused on László Krasznahorkai’s Sátántangó from the aspect of the postcolonial subaltern). Apart from using the more frequently applied frameworks of film and literature studies, the interdisciplinary approach of the conference inspired some lecturers to base their arguments on different theoretical grounds, or work with different works of art in their analyses. The intermedia artist Szabolcs KissPál’s keynote lecture gave example to both: his project From Fake Mountains to Faith not only documents the fictionalisation of historical memory in the aftermath of the Trianon peace treaty after World War I, but also effectively builds a pseudo- museum of nationalism, where historical facts and cultural imagination interweave (KissPál’s work was analysed by Mónika Dánél of ELTE in a previous panel). The representation of national identity through art and architecture in the former Yugoslavia is the core of Jasmina Cibic’s work, according to Flóra Gadó from ELTE, while Diana Melnic and Vlad Melnic of Babeș-Bolyai University focused on Eastern European identity in video games. As seen in these lectures, the examinations of geographical, social and theoretical contact zones were also expanded to analyses of different media and different modes of representation and interpretation. Melinda Blos-Jáni’s (Sapientia University) lectured about animating oral histories through the medium of photography in Eastern European documentaries, while Beja Margitházi’s (ELTE) talk on different modes of using the archive in documentaries and Bence Kránicz’s (ELTE) paper on the differences between interpretations of the human and nonhuman in Hungarian experimental cinema and genre literature were also examples of this multi-layered approach. The concept of the “Other Europe” was debated in Orsolya Rákai’s (Hungarian

74

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

Academy of Sciences) presentation about traces of climate theory in discussions about Central Europe, or Anna Bátori’s (University of Glasgow) analysis of city-texts in the Balkan. Other panels were organised around the topics of historical and personal trauma, with special focus on Holocaust narratives (Miklós Sághy of the University of Szeged detailed contemporary Hungarian approaches, Lóránt Stőhr of the University of Theatre and Film Art in Budapest talked about Holocaust documentaries), and female trauma (Judit Pieldner of Sapientia University analysed Polish and Czech films, while Katalin Sándor of BBU talked about Jasmila Zbanic’s oeuvre). As arguably the most debated social issue of contemporary Europe, migration was examined in several papers (notably by György Kalmár of the University of Debrecen in connection with the masculine identity, by Horea Poenar of BBU who talked about figures on the threshold, and by Michael Gott of the University of Cincinnati, who was focusing on New Czech Cinema). The later works of New Romanian Cinema also inspired presentations (by Teréz Vincze and László Strausz of ELTE, Zsolt Gyenge of Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest), and a separate panel focused on the positions of Eastern European cinema in the global film industry and festival circuit (with papers by Andrea Virginás of Sapientia University, Natália Fábics of MOME and Ileana Nicoleta Sălcudean of BBU). Scholars such as Balázs Zágoni of BBU, Alina Gabriela Mihalache of UB and Ferenc Boné of Sapientia University detailed modern historical events of Eastern Europe, while others chose to talk about lesser-known films of Eastern European cinema, such as Aglaja (Éva Szabó of the University of Debrecen), A Village Romance (Fanni Feldman of UD), Lokis (Jason Hartford of the University of Chester), or contemporary Romanian and Irish short films (Cristina Diamant of BBU). The conference also hosted a number of events that complemented the academic lectures, in the form of roundtable discussions. The first roundtable discussion, Intersections of Space, Cultures, and Accented Literatures, chaired by Mihaela Ursa-Pop, hosted writers Andrea Tompa and Radu Pavel Gheo and problematised issues on narrative displacements, intersections of space and culture and notoriety through translation. The second roundtable discussion, Regional and Trasnational Film, chaired by Doru Pop and Balázs Varga, hosted Oana Giurgiu and Ágnes Kocsis in a dialogue about the importance of co-productions and their role in the transition of regional cinema towards transnational cooperations. Other topics of the

75

CONTACT ZONES. STUDIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN FILM AND LITERATURE. A BIANNUAL ONLINE JOURNAL 2018/1

discussion included their shared experiences as female directors, inquiring to what degree is there a cinema for men or for women only, as well as the critical reception received for approaching subjects such as Oana Giurgiu’s documentary on Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janko’s Dada movement and their Jewish identity. This roundtable discussion was followed by a screening of Oana Giurgiu’s Aliyah Dada at the Urania National Cinema and a short Q&A session with the director. Book and journal launches rounded up the conference. Beside the new issues of Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Film and Media Studies, Ekphrasis, Metropolis and the organising group’s own Contact Zones, two recently published books were also presented. Both László Strausz’s (ELTE) take on New Romanian Cinema (Hesitant Histories on the Romanian Screen, Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) and Doru Pop’s novel Szocialista Szappanopera [Socialist Soap Opera, Lektor Publishing House, 2017] clearly demonstrate that the goal of the conference – to encourage dialogue between nations and perspectives of Eastern Europe – is, in many ways, already reached. The dialogue remains open in the follow-up proceedings of the conference, in articles to be published in the journals of the organisers, as well as in a volume containing a selection of contributions of both the conference participants and of the members of the organiser research group.

Link to the official website of the conference: http://contactzones.elte.hu/archives/category/events

Reference Vertovec, Steven. 1999. Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism. Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 447–462.

76