Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe

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.

List of Illustrations



Introduction

Masha Shpolberg and Lukas Brasiskis



Part I: Industrializing the Bloc: Cinema of the Socialist Period



Chapter 1. Sad Landscapes: Panoramic Photography and Documentary Film in the Czech Lands

Katie Trumpener and Alice Lovejoy



Chapter 2. From Mastery to Indistinction: Nature in Thaw-Era Cinema

Lida Oukaderova



Chapter 3. Spectres of Ecology in Cold War Soviet Science Fiction Film

Natalija Majsova



Part II: Environmental Crisis and the Nuclear Imaginary



Chapter 4. Post-Apocalyptic Landscapes: The End of August at the Hotel Ozone and the Czechoslovak New Wave

Barbora Bartunkova



Chapter 5. Fallow Fields: Crises of Masculinity and Ecology in Piotr Andrejew’s ‘Tender Spots’

Eliza Rose



Chapter 6. Catastrophe, Obliquely: The Revival of the Essay Film Form in Soviet Documentaries About Chernobyl

Masha Shpolberg



Part III: Animals Between the Natural and the Social



Chapter 7. Animals in Modernity: Shaping the Urban Landscape in Lithuanian Documentary

Natalija Arlauskaitė



Chapter 8. Mongrelizing Interpretation: The Animal in Contemporary Hungarian Cinema

Raymond DeLuca



Part IV: From Communism to Capitalism: Privatization and the Commons



Chapter 9. Okraina and ‘Oil Ontology’ in Post-Soviet Russian Cinema

José Alaniz



Chapter 10. The Commercialization and Destruction of Nature in Contemporary Bulgarian Cinema

Dina Iordanova



Part V: Towards an Eastern European Eco-cinema



Chapter 11. Coming to the Senses: Environmental Ethics in Contemporary Slovenian Cinema

Meta Mazaj



Chapter 12. Cinema of the Forest People: Environmental Consciousness, Authorship and Genre in Post-1989 Polish Film

Kris Van Heuckelom



Chapter 13. Beyond the Utopian Landscape in Post-Soviet Russian Cinema

Jeremi Szaniawski and Michael Cramer



Chapter 14. Recycling, Citroën Cars, and Roma Refugees in Boris Mitić’s Pretty Dyana (2003)

Alice Bardan



Chapter 15. From Water to Wind: Elemental Critique in Recent Eastern European Video Art

Lukas Brasiskis