Ebook: The Cinematic Bodies of Eastern Europe and Russia: Between Pain and Pleasure

A critical exploration of the human body in Eastern European and Russian film

Bringing together a range of theoretical and critical approaches, this edited collection is the first book to examine representations of the body in Eastern European and Russian cinema after the Second World War. Drawing on the history of the region, as well as Western and Eastern scholarship on the body, the book focuses on three areas: the traumatized body, the body as a site of erotic pleasure, and the relationship between the body and history. Critically dissecting the different ideological and aesthetic ways human bodies are framed, The Cinematic Bodies of Eastern Europe and Russia also demonstrates how bodily discourses oscillate between complicity and subversion, and how they shaped individuals and societies both during and after the period of state socialism.

Case studies include:

• Andrzej Wajda’s War Trilogy
• Béla Tarr’s Satantango
• Wiktor Grodecki
• Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s 4
• Györgi Pálfi‘s Taxidermia
• Czechoslovak New Wave
• Yugoslav Socialist Realism

Contributors:

• Malgorzata Bugaj, University of Edinburgh and the University of Stirling
• Helena Goscilo, Ohio State University
• Nebojša Jovanović, Central European University
• Hajnal Király, Eötvös Lóránd University
• Ewa Mazierska, University of Central Lancashire
• Alexandar Mihailovic, Hofstra University
• Matilda Mroz, University of Sussex
• Dorota Ostrowska, Birkbeck College, University of London
• Elżbieta Ostrowska, University of Alberta
• Ágnes Pethő, Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania
• David Sorfa, University of Edinburgh
• Calum Watt, King’s College London
• Bruce Williams, William Paterson University