Our first issue in 2024 includes eight research articles. The first four revolve around the female body and its representations across various Eastern European genres and periods, followed by four articles on different topics: queer images and self-orientalisation on (post)Yugoslav screens, respectively, Czech cinemagoing during the Covid pandemic, and finally a critical-pedagogical analysis of a Hungarian student film award.
Lucie Česalková discusses how the morality of socialist advertising, together with the evolving gender discourse, supported the methods of hiding, masking, or fragmenting the female body in socialist screen advertising. Česálková argues that the reason for restraint in the explicit representation of the female body was, among other things, the specific hierarchy of the media in the geography of the consumer imagination of socialist Czechoslovakia.
Mirela David’s paper examines the representation of back-alley abortions in postsocialist Romanian cinema as reproductive burden and the abortion ban during the socialist period 1966–1989, when Decree 770 was in effect. The article centres on mapping out postsocialist Romanian fiction film and documentary discourses on the communist abortion ban from 1966 to 1989 and Ceaușescu’s pronatalist policies, as a type of memorial discourse.
Lilla Tőke examines cinematic representations of disabled women in recent Hungarian films and argues that women’s lived experiences and corporal realities are often overwritten by deeply gendered and heteronormative expectations. The goal of the essay is to problematize the kinds of happiness accessible to disabled women and to critique some of the ways in which cinema constructs concepts of happiness for the disabled.
Mariliis Elizabeth Holzmann investigates the monstrous mermaid sisters of the musical horror The Lure (2015) and its contemporary story of bodily performativity and sisterhood. The article presents a textual analysis of the film and related paratexts (director interviews, industry expert reviews, scholarly criticism). Throughout, the author develops a counter-reading that attends to the nonhuman relations between the film’s sisters and examines how processes of human exclusion and exploitation are responsible for fracturing the sisterhood.
Jasmina Šepetavc explores the forgotten queer pasts of Eastern European cinema under socialism and highlights the queer cinematic histories of Yugoslavia, specifically its former Republic of Slovenia. Her examples demonstrate that Yugoslav cinema reflected the country’s ambivalent attitudes towards queerness: on the one side, the analysed films featured numerous unhappy queer people and sad endings, on the other, they portrayed images of different non-normative sexualities and gender expressions rebelliously and more openly than is currently acknowledged in queer cinema scholarship.
Bruno Lovric and Miriam Hernández examine the contemporary meanings and functions of self-Orientalism in the Bosnian context by analyzing Jasmila Žbanić’s film, Quo Vadis, Aida (2020). Examining the film both within Bosnian’s specific context and as part of a global phenomenon of cinematic self-Orientalism or autoexoticism, the paper argues that the film self-Orientalizes in an effort to meet contemporary viewers’ expectations for facile resolutions to imperialist Orientalism, as well as to improve the film’s marketability with Western audiences.
Jan Hanzlík, Petr Szczepanik, Karel Čada and Zuzana Chytkov’s essay focuses on the changes of Czech film viewers’ attitudes to cinemagoing during the COVID-19 pandemic. It presents an analysis of three focus group discussions performed in November 2021 with Czech film viewers and describes differing reactions to the pandemic in terms of people’s cinemagoing practices. It concludes that only enthusiastic film viewers with more extensive stocks of film-related knowledge remained faithful cinemagoers during the pandemic, whereas others were more difficult to attract back to cinemas.
In the last long article, Zsolt Győri analyzes the origins, pedagogical aims and framework of the Hungarian University Film Award (HUFA) incorporating the personal experience of its author who participated in the coordination of various stages of the initiative. The essay claims that the initiative created a unique learning environment—an educational corpus comprising of six films from 2019 competing for the awards—and describes the methods and conceptual angles used in class discussions.
Furthermore, the issue contains a book review, a journal- and a festival report, and an obituary. Ewa Mazierska reviews Alphabet of Slovak Cinema 1921–2021, edited by Martin Kaňuch, Jelena Paštéková and Radislav Steranka. Cerise Howard introduces the journal East European Film Bulletin, and Jan Culik discusses the 2023 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Finally, Mina Radović commemorates the recently passed Serbian filmmaker Mladomir Puriša Đorđević.
Each year, the editors of Studies in Eastern European Cinema select a best article from the three previous issues. This year, the honor goes to Żaneta Jamrozik who contributed with the essay ‘An Officer and a Spy: Roman Polanski in the Benjaminian Interior’. Congratulations to Żaneta for her compelling analysis!
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.