Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- The Contributors
- Introduction: The Art of In-Betweenness in Contemporary Eastern European Cinema
- Part 1 Entangled Sens ations, Cinema in-between the Arts
- 1 Intermedially Emotional: Musical Mood Cues, Disembodied Feelings in Contemporary Hungarian Melodramas
- 2 Black-and-White Sensations of History and Female Identity in Contemporary Polish and Czech Cinema
- 3 Sculpture and Affect in Cinema’s Expanded Field. From Aleksey Gherman’s Hard to Be a God to Aleksey Gherman Jr’s Under Electric Clouds
- 4 Intermedial Densities in the Work of Jan Švankmajer: A Media-Anthropological Case Study
- Part 2 Immersions into Memory , Culture and Intermediality
- 5 Trickster Narratives and Carnivalesque Intermediality in Contemporary Romanian Cinema
- 6 Photographic Passages to th e Past in Eastern European Non-Fiction Films
- 7 Trauma, Memorialisation and Intermediality in Jasmila Žbanić’s For Th ose Who Can Tell No Tales
- 8 An Immersive Theatrical Journey through Media and Time in Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark
- Part 3 Refl ections upon Reality, Representation and Power
- 9 The Real and the Intermedial in Alexander Sokurov’s Family Trilogy
- 10 Th is is Not Magritte: Corneliu Porumboiu’s Theory of Representation
- 11 Intermedial Détrompe l’Oeil and Contemporary Polish Narrative Cinema
- 12 Superhero Genre and Graphic Storytelling in Contemporary Hungarian and Russian Cinema
- Index
6 - Photographic Passages to th e Past in Eastern European Non-Fiction Films
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- The Contributors
- Introduction: The Art of In-Betweenness in Contemporary Eastern European Cinema
- Part 1 Entangled Sens ations, Cinema in-between the Arts
- 1 Intermedially Emotional: Musical Mood Cues, Disembodied Feelings in Contemporary Hungarian Melodramas
- 2 Black-and-White Sensations of History and Female Identity in Contemporary Polish and Czech Cinema
- 3 Sculpture and Affect in Cinema’s Expanded Field. From Aleksey Gherman’s Hard to Be a God to Aleksey Gherman Jr’s Under Electric Clouds
- 4 Intermedial Densities in the Work of Jan Švankmajer: A Media-Anthropological Case Study
- Part 2 Immersions into Memory , Culture and Intermediality
- 5 Trickster Narratives and Carnivalesque Intermediality in Contemporary Romanian Cinema
- 6 Photographic Passages to th e Past in Eastern European Non-Fiction Films
- 7 Trauma, Memorialisation and Intermediality in Jasmila Žbanić’s For Th ose Who Can Tell No Tales
- 8 An Immersive Theatrical Journey through Media and Time in Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark
- Part 3 Refl ections upon Reality, Representation and Power
- 9 The Real and the Intermedial in Alexander Sokurov’s Family Trilogy
- 10 Th is is Not Magritte: Corneliu Porumboiu’s Theory of Representation
- 11 Intermedial Détrompe l’Oeil and Contemporary Polish Narrative Cinema
- 12 Superhero Genre and Graphic Storytelling in Contemporary Hungarian and Russian Cinema
- Index
Summary
In the contemporary post-media landscape re-assemblage has become a memory practice that is omnipresent in amateur media and also within experimental art projects. In ‘the new post-historical reign of the technical image’ (Ruchel- Stockmans 2015: 40) found footage films have become generic templates to rethink or narrate past events. Contemporary filmmakers mine the audio-visual archives in order to shape and explore world-memory, thus they become ‘metallurgists’ ‘bending the material images and sounds that contribute to our political consciousness’ (Pisters 2016: 150). Meanwhile in documentary cinema firstperson narratives and home-made images have become powerful political tools, methods of reclaiming collective memory or history (see Renov 2004).
This essay investigates the re-shaping of audio-visual material and the reassembling of history in a group of recent Eastern European non-fiction films (or more precisely, what could be called ‘memory films’) that resort to personal memory to revitalise past cultural experiences by bringing together archival photographs and film footage with painterly artifice in visually stimulating ways. Some of them belong to the genre of animated documentary, like Anca Damian’s Crulic. The Path to Beyond (Crulic – drumul spre dincolo, 2011), Vladislava Plančíková Felvidék. Caught in Between (Felvidék. Horná zem, 2014) or the short film I Made You, I Kill You (2016) by Alexandru Petru Bădeliță. These films renegotiate the way photographs can point to past experiences. In a similar experimental vein, Zbigniew Czapla meditates upon the fading of the photographic memory in Paperbox (Papierowe pudełko, 2011). Radu Jude, on the other hand, constructs his film exclusively from archival photographs and experiments with the boundaries of cinema in Dead Nation (Țara moartă, 2017).
These films remediate photographs as ‘prostheses of memory’ in hyper-mediated contexts in order to meditate upon history and time, personal and collective identity, so as to give voice to the unheard, to unearth repressed traumas or to produce an alternative version of Eastern European history. But the ways in which photography is inserted in the first-person narrative of these films displays a heterogeneity that goes far beyond the ‘indexical verifier’ (Rozenkrantz 2011) or the evidentiary status associated most commonly with repurposed photographs in a documentary. These found footage films that combine photographs, films and videos or other type of visual documents can be understood as a dialogical form between ‘competing, unstable signs’ (Dalle Vacche 1996: 6), of media that are being in the process of being defined in their interaction with other media.
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- Caught In-BetweenIntermediality in Contemporary Eastern European and Russian Cinema, pp. 127 - 146Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020