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

by Mazierska, Ewa; Mroz, Matilda; Ostrowska, Elzbieta

• ISBN13: 9781474431941
• ISBN10: 1474431941
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2018-03-01
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Summary

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. It draws on the history of the region, as well as Western and Eastern scholarship on the body, and focuses on three areas: the traumatised 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.

Author Biography

Ewa Mazierska is Professor of Film Studies at the School of Humanities and the Social Sciences, University of Central Lancashire.

Matilda Mroz is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex.

Elzbieta Ostrowska teaches film at the University of Alberta.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Shaping the Cinematic Bodies of Eastern Europe and Russia, Ewa Mazierska, Matilda Mroz and Elzbieta Ostrowska

I: Wounds and Traumas
Chapter One:"What does Poland Want From Me?": Male hysteria in Andrzej Wajda's War Trilogy, Elzbieta Ostrowska
Chapter Two: Alcoholism and the Doctor in Béla Tarr's Satantango, Calum Watt
Chapter Three: Playing Dead: Pictorial Figurations of Melancholia in Contemporary Hungarian Cinema, Hajnal Király
Chapter Four: The Body Breached: Post-Soviet Masculinity on Screen, Helena Goscilo

II: Transgressions and Pleasures
Chapter Five: Borowczyk as Pornographer, Ewa Mazierska
Chapter Six: Queering Masculinity in Yugoslav Socialist Realist Films, Nebojsa Jovanovic
Chapter Seven: Geographies of Carnality: Slippery Sexuality in Wiktor Grodecki's Gay Hustler Trilogy, Bruce Williams
Chapter Eight: A Mass Doubling of Heroes: Post-Human Objects of Queer Desire in Vladimir Sorokin and Ilya Khrzhanovsky's 4, Alexandar Mihailovic

III: Carnal Histories
Chapter Nine: The Touch of History: A Phenomenological Approach to 1960s Czech Cinema, David Sorfa
Chapter Ten: Corporeal Exploration in Györgi Pálfi's Taxidermia, Malgorzata Bugaj
Chapter Eleven: Aerial Bodies in Polish Cinema, Dorota Ostrowska
Chapter Twelve: The 'Chemistry' of Art(ifice) and Life: Embodied Paintings in East European Cinema, Ágnes Petho

Index