In 1958 and 1961, two documentaries on the Holocaust were released in Czechoslovakia: Motýli tady nežijí / Butterflies Do Not Live Here by Miro Bernat and O botičkách, copánku a dudlíku / On Shoes, Braid and Dummy by Drahoslav Holub. Both of these films employed drawings and paintings made by Jewish children imprisoned in Theresienstadt between 1941 and 1945. Apart from using the same material, the films share similarities in style as both directors worked...

Anikó Imre: TV Socialism Vlad Strukov and Helena Goscilo (eds.): Russian Aviation, Space Flight, and Visual Culture Norbert P. Franz (ed.): Andrej Tarkovskij: Klassiker – Классик – Classic – Classico Mary Harrod, Mariana Liz, and Alissa Timoshkina (eds.): The Europeanness of European Cinema. Identity, Meaning, Globalization Michael Gott and Todd Herzog (ed.): East, West and Centre: Reframing Post-1989 European Cinema The Disappearing Theoretician: From Anna Li to A.N. Pudovkina Female editors in Russian Cinema: Vera...

Alexander Schwarz' review of Vlad Strukov and Helena Goscilo's edited book Russian Aviation, Space Flight, and Visual Culture

Viktor Zatsepin`s review of the book Der Neue Mensch. Aufbruch und Alltag im revolutionären Russland by Alexander Schwarz und Rainer Rother (Eds.)

Tyler Adkins`s review of the book Vopros o veshchi: opyty po analiticheskoi antropologii by Valerii Podoroga

Józef Robakowski is a prolific experimental Polish artist who has worked across multiple media including photography, film, video, experimental television, artistic documentation, and curating. This interview was conducted as research into his multifaceted career and informed the article in Apparatus Nr. 9 on his work that appears in this issue. The interview provides vital historical and political contexts to situate the emergence of Robakowski's various artistic practices, in relation to broader developments of Polish cinema,...

The success of the multiply awarded Saul fia / Son of Saul has again directed the world’s attention to the paradox of the representation of the Holocaust. The study first surveys the tradition of the representation of the Holocaust in Hungarian full-length feature films, then, through the analysis of László Nemes’s film, it overviews those stylistic solutions which dissolve the paradox in an aesthetically innovative and valid way. From the 1950s to the regime change...

Political history is traditionally the most evident framework for interpreting post-WWII Hungarian cinema. The film production of the socialist era was influenced by the periodically changing, systematic presence of political expectations. The main context of perception and interpretation of films were conditioned politically. During the same period Hungarian sport successes played an important role in the international and domestic politics of the regime. The nature of political expectations might have changed after 1989 but, as...

Jana Rogoff's review of a book Staré pověsti české edited by Lucie Česálková

Rhythmic Trajectories is a series of short études set to accentuate, visually and sonically, the rhythmic elements of specific film sequences. As a film editor and researcher, I am interested in revealing and visually expressing cinematic rhythm. I am following hereby Karen Pearlman’s idea stating that “the functions of rhythm are to create cycles of tension and release and to synchronize the spectator’s physical, emotional, and cognitive fluctuations with the rhythms of the film.” (Pearlman...

Unser Editorial zur ersten Nummer.

The Topography of Theresienstadt Films (1942-1944/5) The Theresienstadt films made between 1942 and 1944/5 constitute an important source for historians researching the Ghetto. The films cover particular phases of the Ghetto’s development and, in visual form, represent the “highlights of the merits of the SS” concerning the “Paradise-Ghetto” (according to the SS-major Hans Günther). The author presents the two most important uses for these films. On the one hand, the films gave a view of...

Films shot in the ghetto of Theresienstadt between 1942 and 1945 were long considered lost. Several fragments were found and to this day remain scattered in European and Israeli archives. The results of historical research over decades and other newly revealed facts enable us now for the first time to reconstruct how different film fragments made their way into international archives after 1945. Recently found documents in the Archive of Security Services (former archive of...

Rastislava Mirković`s review of the book Der Balkan zwischen Ost und West. Mediale Bilder und kulturpolitische Prägungen by Tanja Zimmermann

In his article, Mark Lipovetsky analyses Pussy Riot’s punk-prayer and the public discussion following the event. The author situates Pussy Riot’s performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour as the cultural return to and rebirth of the trickster trope – which was extremely powerful in the Soviet period but visibly declined in its cultural significance in post-Soviet times. At the background of this tradition, Pussy Riot represents a rare case of the trickstar (Marylyn...

This article investigates the fictionalization of the space age in contemporary Russian spaceflight history blockbusters Gagarin: Pervyi v kosmose / Gagarin: First in Space (2013), Vremia pervykh / Spacewalk (2017), and Saliut 7 (2017). This “second wave” of Russian films on spaceflight exhibits a greater affinity for the patriotic Soviet canon of portraying Soviet spaceflight history than their predecessors from the 2000s – Pervye na lune / First on the Moon (2004), Kosmos kak predchuvstvie...

Marija Weste`s review of the book Border Crossing: Russian Literature into Film by Alexander Burry and Frederick H. White (ed.)

Andrei Linchenko´s review of the book Erinnerungen an den Krieg – Krieg der Erinnerungen. Litauen und der Zweite Weltkrieg by Ekaterina Makhotina

Raoul Eshelman´s review of the book Sincerity after Communism. A Cultural History by Ellen Rutten

The editorial article to the themed issue Mise en geste. Studies of Gesture in Cinema and Art. Cover image: Still from Russkii kovcheg / Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2002, Russia, Germany, Japan, Canada, Finland, Denmark). Time code: 00:41:45.

It is no overstatement to say that gesture defines the universe of Yorgos Lanthimos’s cinema. Entire sequences in his films portray the characters as they perform complex and arbitrary gestures, or as they enact, through a series of orchestrated movements, a script they have been hired to perform in order to flesh out somebody else’s fantasies or to impersonate someone else’s lost loved one. Language itself is often reduced to gesture – to a superficial,...

On January 20, 1944, one day of filming took place at the Theresienstadt ghetto. This can be regarded as a ‘false start’ of Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet, the infamous Nazi propaganda film subsequently shot there during the summer. The essay discusses how it came about, and why the filming, although planned to be the first day of a longer shoot, was aborted after one day. It shows that the shooting was based...

Jean-Luc Marion is well known as a theologian and philosopher, but as yet his innovative postmetaphysical thought, which arose in part as a reaction to Derrida’s deconstructive critiques of traditional phenomenology, has not yet been widely applied to film. The article makes a systematic attempt to show how Marion’s phenomenology of givenness could be made fruitful for film analysis, and it demonstrates how his philosophical approach can be applied to two films, Cristian Mungiu’s 4...

Natalia Meshchaninova is a prominent representative of the new wave of women filmmakers emerging in Russia since 2010. Exploring the micropolitics of gender and location, this new generation of women directors reclaims authenticity as an essential quality of their representations. The conversation with Meshchaninova revolves around the director’s feature debut Kombinat “Nadezhda” / The Hope Factory (2014), cinematic authorship, her ongoing interest in forms that fall between documentary and fiction, the omitted time of documentary,...

Ivan Forgacs' review of the book TV Socialism by Anikó Imre