Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: East, West and Centre: ‘Mapping Post-1989 European Cinema’
- Part I Redrawing the Lines: De/Recentring Europe
- Part II Border Spaces, Eastern Margins and Eastern Markets: Belonging and the Road to/from Europe
- 8 Contemporary Bulgarian Cinema: From Allegorical Expressionism to Declined National Cinema
- 9 The Point of No Return: From Great Expectations to Great Desperation in New Romanian Cinema
- 10 ‘Weirdness’, Modernity and the Other Europe in Attenberg (2010, Athina Rachel Tsangari)
- 11 Lithuania Redirected: New Connections, Businesses and Lifestyles in Cinema since 2000
- 12 Lessons of Neo-liberalism: Co-productions and the Changing Image of Estonian Cinema
- 13 Decentring Europe from the Fringe: Reimagining Balkan Identities in the Films of the 1990s
- Part III Spectres of the East
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Contemporary Bulgarian Cinema: From Allegorical Expressionism to Declined National Cinema
from Part II - Border Spaces, Eastern Margins and Eastern Markets: Belonging and the Road to/from Europe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: East, West and Centre: ‘Mapping Post-1989 European Cinema’
- Part I Redrawing the Lines: De/Recentring Europe
- Part II Border Spaces, Eastern Margins and Eastern Markets: Belonging and the Road to/from Europe
- 8 Contemporary Bulgarian Cinema: From Allegorical Expressionism to Declined National Cinema
- 9 The Point of No Return: From Great Expectations to Great Desperation in New Romanian Cinema
- 10 ‘Weirdness’, Modernity and the Other Europe in Attenberg (2010, Athina Rachel Tsangari)
- 11 Lithuania Redirected: New Connections, Businesses and Lifestyles in Cinema since 2000
- 12 Lessons of Neo-liberalism: Co-productions and the Changing Image of Estonian Cinema
- 13 Decentring Europe from the Fringe: Reimagining Balkan Identities in the Films of the 1990s
- Part III Spectres of the East
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The increased mobility of people within Europe has shaken up the sociogeographical fixity of a continent of nation states, creating new modes of transnational culture and becoming a recurrent subject in what Luisa Rivi calls ‘declined national cinema’ (Rivi). Rivi appropriates Gianni Vattimo's notion of ‘weak’ or ‘declined’ thought – pensiero debole – and transfers it to the debate on national cinema. The notion of pensiero debole refers to the exhaustion – but not the vanishing – of the project of modernity (the belief in reason, progress, history, the nation state, etc.). In The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, Vattimo argues that the postmodern is ‘not only […] something new in relation to the modern, but also […] a dissolution of the category of the new – in other words […] an experience of “the end of history” rather than … the appearance of a different stage of history’ (4). Vattimo does not read the postmodern dehistoricisation of experience nostalgically or pessimistically. Rather, he argues that the ideas of Nietzsche and Heidegger
offer us the chance to pass from a purely critical and negative description of the postmodern condition, typical of early twentieth-century Kulturkritik and its more recent offshoots, to an approach that treats it as a positive possibility and opportunity. Nietzsche mentions all of this […] in his theory of a possibly active or positive (accomplished) nihilism. Heidegger alludes to the same thing with his idea of a Verwindung of metaphysics which is not a critical overcoming in the ‘modern’ sense of the term. (11)
Heidegger's term Verwindung seeks to describe the overcoming of modernity and metaphysics, ‘a going-beyond that is both an acceptance and a deepening’ (Vattimo, 172). Analysing the etymology of the term Verwindung, Vattimo underscores the connotation of ‘convalescence’ (to be healed, cured of an illness), also linked to resignation, and the connotation of distortion (to turn, to twist).
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- East, West and CentreReframing post-1989 European Cinema, pp. 127 - 146Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014