Dina Iordanova

Migration and Cinematic Process in Post-Cold War Europe

The year 1989 remains of definitive importance for the recent migratory and diasporic dynamics of Europe at large, and for European migrant and diasporic cinema in particular. Many of the developments that define today’s Europe were, directly or indirectly, triggered by the events of that year, including the German reunification, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the wars of Yugoslavia’s succession in the 1990s and the 2004 enlargement of the European Union, which saw the admission of a range of former communist countries.

INDIAN CINEMA'S GLOBAL REACH: Historiography through testimonies

It was at a conference in London in the spring of 2005. Nirmal Purwar, a sociologist from Goldsmiths, was showing a nostalgic video compilation chronicling the 1960s efforts of the Indian community in Coventry to organise showings of Indian films. There were clips from the films that had been screened, from Mughal-e-azam and Shree 420 to Chaudhvin Ka Chand and Sholay, alongside photographs of the people who had been instrumental in bringing the prints and interviews with women and men from the community. During the Q & A session, I briefly spoke of my childhood memories from the same period: Indian films had a major presence in cinemas and were extremely popular, even though no Indians lived in the Bulgaria of my childhood. I remembered most vividly the films of Raj Kapoor, who was a megastar, much bigger then any American stars of the time. Haim Bresheeth, London-based film and media scholar, originally from Israel, was sitting nearby in the conference room. Reacting to my words, Haim passed me a little note, which read: ‘Dina, our experience in Israel of Indian cinema was exactly what you described and Kapoor was really the most popular star, much more than any Hollywood star at the time. H.’ Haim’s note was yet one more confirmation of something that had preoccupied me for a while. Once again, I was coming across evidence of the popularity of Indian cinema in countries that did not have any significant Indian diasporic presence; once again the evidence was sporadic and based on personal memory.

Intercultural cinema and Balkan hushed histories

Everybody in the Balkans has fought against everybody else and has practiced the assimilation business at some point. The official history books of each Balkan nation tell the past in a way that implies idiosyncratic and often self‐serving approaches to reconciling conflicting historical records of contested events. The narratives of displacement and assimilations that have taken shape as part of bigger historical processes are usually contested and remain suppressed in official historiography. They are regularly avoided in public discourse yet are nonetheless kept alive in oral history and are tackled in anthropological writing. Films that address these issues are considered highly awkward. In my paper I will look at the cinematic representation of some of these ‘hushed histories’ from the Balkans, concerning forgotten forced population movements, linguistic coercion and identity curtailment. I will consider several important and politically sensitive cinematic texts made across the region, all of which address the divided state of the nation whose discourse they are tackling (e.g. Crno seme/Black Seed, Yugoslavia/Macedonia, Kiril Tsenevski, 1971; Mera spored mera/Measure for Measure, Bulgaria, Georgy Dyulgerov, 1981; Taxìdi sta Kìthira/Voyage to Cythera, Greece, Theo Angelopoulos, 1984; Kalì patrìda, sìntrofe!/Welcome Home, Comrade!, Greece, Lefteris Xanthopoulos, 1986; Bulutlari beklerken/Waiting for the Clouds, Turkey/France/Germany/Greece, Yesim Ustaoglu, 2004). These films are contentious because they often depict events that take place on foreign territory people that are de facto foreign subjects. The directors of these films believe that issues of identity can be addressed adequately only by including in the national narrative the experiences of those whose lives have been, for one reason or another, spent outside of the (shifting) nation‐state borders of their respective countries.

Before the Rain in a Balkan context

Even though director Manchevski rejected the idea that all Balkan nations are doomed to live through the violent nightmare of ethnic war, this was the dominant Western reading of his film. By uncritically continuing the line of traditional representation of the Balkans as a mystic stronghold of stubborn and belligerent people, Before the Rain continued an existing Balkan trend of voluntary self-exoticism. The picture effectively contributed to the perception of Macedonia as a deceptively quiet but potentially explosive powder keg. Nonetheless, the film managed to show remarkably well to people in the Balkans what was wrong with them, and thus it had a therapeutic effect. I will look at Before the Rain and its prophecy in the light of current events in the Balkans.

INTRODUCTION: Indian cinema in the world

While there are regular references to Indian cinema’s international circulation since the 1930s the prevailing view remains that it is only recently that a significant break across international borders was achieved that has made Indian cinema, ‘a visible part of the media landscape in the West’ (Ganti, 38). Within such historical paradigm the role of Indian diaspora takes central stage both as a means of explaining Indian cinema’s global reach and as an accessible and crucial market for the Indian film industry. As Raminder Kaur suggests, ‘despite the longstanding appeal of Indian cinema across the globe, the more lucrative markets of Europe and the US with their relatively successful Indian diasporas are targeted for their economic capital’ (Kaur, 311). The pragmatic perceptions of the industry, however, are somewhat misleading as they overlook historically significant processes, periods and cultural exchanges. Indian cinema has claimed durable presence across a range of international territories over a number of decades, and it is essential to acknowledge this presence and influence. The high visibility of the recent scholarship around diasporic cultural production and distribution has overshadowed other, equally viable and important, forms of international circulation of images. Desai, for example, while acknowledging that Indian cinema has had significant international presence and influence in the past by stating that

Yingying, Zhenzhen, and Fenfen? China at the Festivals

The chapter focuses on an array of Chinese film festivals and dedicated programs that take place in the West, with examples primarily from France, the UK, and the USA. Adapted from a longer study that explores the determinants of global circulation of cinematic material as related to film festivals, Iordanova’s chapter argues that it is the stakeholder configurations, the context of reception, and the projected/desired relationship outcomes that ultimately shape the nature of the festival and the material that will be screened at it. It offers a categorization that distinguishes between different types of festivals depending on the interests of major stakeholders: in this case, represented by the cultural diplomacy festival, the “corrective” festival, and the business card exchange festival.

European cinema after the Wall: screening East–West mobility

clarifies the extent to which Sokurov’s totalizing vision overwrites its source material, for example Days of Eclipse (1988) recasts the Strugatsky Brothers’ novella Definitely Maybe (1974) as a ‘late-Soviet fairy tale’ on postcolonial themes. Throughout, Szaniawski shows how Sokurov’s films have reflected their times, from the stagnation era (with documentaries such as Maria [1978/1988], about a humble collective farm worker) to the disastrous 1990s under Yeltsin (the beginning of the Men of Power tetralogy, with Moloch [1999]) to the Putinshchina (‘imperialist’ fantasias like Russian Ark and Alexandra [2007]). To his credit, the author complicates these readings, highlighting the countervailing (read: ‘paradoxical’) trends in Sokurov’s work in all these periods. And, though he does not focus on it, Szaniawski rightly discusses Sokurov’s vast non-fiction filmography, relating each feature to a relevant documentary (such as Elegy of a Voyage [2001] to Russian Ark [2002], or Confession [1998] to Father and Son [2003]). Nor does the author shy from the most vexed controversy in Sokurov scholarship: what many consider the filmmaker’s deeply closeted homosexuality and its refraction in his work (whether in the long, meaningful glances between Malianov and Vecherovskii in Days of Eclipse or the whole of Father and Son). Indeed, Szaniawski advances the most astute and balanced discussion of Father and Son as a queer text – by no means the same thing as calling it a gay text (as some early critics had done). He brilliantly relates the film’s fluid notions of sex – many of which the director himself has vigorously resisted – to Sokurov’s own shifting and ambiguous career. In a similar vein, Szaniawski compares the antagonistic/symbiotic relationship between Faust and Mauricius (representing art and power, broadly) in Faust to that of Sokurov (the principled artist; mouse) and Putin (his despotic patron; cat). While at times I felt the author stretches the definition of terms such as ‘sublime’ and ‘kitsch’ to breaking point, and his footnotes seem more chatty than useful, insights like the aforementioned make The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov: Figures of Paradox a more than welcome addition to the growing scholarship on Russia’s most intriguing – and yes, paradoxical – living director.

Film Review: Mother and Son

Film reviewed in this article: Mother and Son. Russia/Germany 1997. Director, Alexander Sokurov. Camera, Alexei Fedorov. Cast, Aleksey Ananishov, Gudrun Geyer