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Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe
From Communism to Capitalism
Edited by Masha Shpolberg and Lukas Brasiskis
321 pages, 29 illus., bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-80539-105-0 $135.00/£99.00 / Hb / Published (October 2023)
eISBN 978-1-80539-375-7 eBook
Reviews
“This collection provides a comprehensive analysis of Eastern European film culture and ecocinema, integrating them expertly to provide a deep historical and geocultural analysis of variations in ecocinematic representations and the ways these film cultures have been engaging with environmental matters. The contextualization of existing scholarship with the particularities of Eastern European political and cultural history is exciting and innovative.” • Pietari Kaapa, University of Warwick
Description
The annexation of Eastern Europe to the Soviet sphere after World War II dramatically reshaped popular understandings of the natural environment. With an eco-critical approach, Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe breaks new ground in documenting how filmmakers increasingly saw cinema as a tool to critique the social and environmental damage of large-scale projects from socialist regimes and newly forming capitalist presences. New and established scholars with backgrounds across Europe, the United States, and Australia come together to reflect on how the cultural sphere has, and can still, play a role in redefining our relationship to nature.
Masha Shpolberg is Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College. She is currently at work on a book entitled Labor in Late Socialism: The Cinema of Polish Workers’ Unrest. In addition to this volume, she is also co-editor, with Anastasia Kostina, of Contemporary Russian Documentary, forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press.
Lukas Brasiskis is an adjunct professor at New York University and CUNY/Brooklyn College, as well as Associate Curator of Film and Video for e-flux. His texts were previously published in journals, such as Found Footage Magazine, The Cine-Files, Screening the Past, and Senses of Cinema. He is a co-editor of Jonas Mekas: The Camera was Always Running (Yale University Press, 2022).
Subject: Film and Television StudiesEnvironmental Studies (General)Cultural Studies (General)
Area: Central/Eastern Europe
Contents
Download ToC (PDF)
Of Related Interest
Transactions with the World
Ecocriticism and the Environmental Sensibility of New Hollywood
International Organizations and Environmental Protection
Conservation and Globalization in the Twentieth Century
Cinema of Collaboration
DEFA Coproductions and International Exchange in Cold War Europe
