East European Cinemas (AFI Film Readers)

The latest volume in the "AFI Film Readers" series presents a long-overdue reassessment of East European cinemas from theoretical, psychoanalytic and gender perspectives. Charting the dramatic changes and the deep continuities that have characterized the cinemas of Eastern Europe in recent decades, the essays in "East European Cinema" question and revaluate such notions as the 'European', 'postcommunism' and 'national cinema. The essays are arranged in three groups that target the key issues: an alternative to reductive understandings of East and Central European politics as they inform cinema; the transition from state-funded modernism to global, international cinema; and the key role of historiography in relation to East and Central European film. Moving the subject beyond the traditional area-studies approach to the region's films, this ambitious collection, situating Eastern Europe's many cinemas within global paradigms of film study, will be an essential work for all students of cinema and for anyone interested in the relation of film to culture and society.