Past for the Eyes
East European Representations of Communism
in Cinema and Museums after 1989
Edited by
Oksana Sarkisova, OSA Archivum; International
Documentary Film Festival Verzio, Budapest
Péter Apor, Pasts Inc., Center
for Historical Studies at the Central European University
How do museums and cinema shape the image of the Communist
past in today’s Central and Eastern Europe? This
volume is the first systematic analysis of how visual
techniques are used to understand and put into context
the former regimes.
After history “ended” in the Eastern Bloc
in 1989, museums and other memorials mushroomed all
over the region. These efforts tried both to explain
the meaning of this lost history, as well as to shape
public opinion on their society’s shared post-war
heritage. Museums and films made political use of recollections
of the recent past, and employed selected museum, memorial,
and media tools and tactics to make its political intent
historically credible.
Thirteen essays from scholars around the region take
a fresh look at the subject as they address the strategies
of fashioning popular perceptions of the recent past.
"Books on the CEE transformations that deal with
media and popular cultures should be welcomed. Past
for the Eyes belongs to this extraordinary breed.
The book is devoted to the visual representations of
the socialist / communist past and the forms they took.
The interconnected processes of visualization of the
past, and the collective memory sedimentation are the
main focus.
The book brings together perspectives of linked but
still distinctive ways of enquiry: visual studies, cultural
studies, area studies, museum studies and contemporary
history with its passion for ethnography and oral evidence.
One of the common threads which stitch the chapters
together and turn the collection into a quite homogenous
regional report on an updated 'structure of feeling',
are the authors' horizons referring to the experience
of being post-socialist in a postmodern condition. They
help to sense that there is something peculiar about
reconsidering, revisiting and even rejecting a politically
evil regime from the perspective that does not allow
for any clear discrimination between what is ultimately
good and evil. Simultaneity seems to be an important
strategy for both researchers and filmmakers as objects
of their enquiry. In many cases chapters recall visual
texts which deplore the socialist regime while they
simultaneously remain aware of the limits of any orthodoxy.
This attitude of alertness and reflexivity is far removed
from any 'so-we-will-be-free-now' optimism, and the
collapse of this particular ideology is combined with
the awareness that 'ideology is not a historically specific
bad thing', as John Corner put it elsewhere." -
Politics
and Culture
"With their collection of essays, Oksana Sarkisova
and Péter Apor aim at an interim statement about
this multifaceted wave of remembrance by focusing on
visual material, namely cinema and museums. Their geographical
scope is broad - from the Baltic region to east central
Europe and the Balkans, including Russia. They have
organized the thirteen contributions in three parts
"so as to reflect upon the concepts of 'document,'
'nostalgia' and 'objects,' which are crucial, but underexplored
aspects of the complicated relationships between professional
historical work and other spcial practices of evoking
the past."
Past for the Eyes is a major contribution to
the booming field of studies exploring how communism
is remembered in postcommunist societies." - Slavic
Review
"Intellectually engaging and timely, Past for
the Eyes inquires into how socialism is shown and
seen in the cinema and museums of contemporary Eastern
Europe. This collection of fourteen fine essays joins
an exciting (and rapidly intensifying) debate in the
social sciences and humanities concerned with the memory's
many manifestations in today's world. The volume demonstrates
that the former communist Bloc offers an especially
productive setting in which to examine practices of
social remembrance, especially those that pertain to
the memorialization of the recent Marxist-Leninist past.
Threading through the volume are questions concerning
the uneasy relationship between popular visual representations
and professionally produced historiographic texts as
means for recuperating socialism. The contributors ask
whether imagery on the screen and objects displayed
in museum spaces have as much authority in representing
the era of Party rule as the written, 'institutionalized'
word. Can word and image as agents of the past coexist
in a complementary dialectic? Who is more 'reliable'
as producer of historical knowledge - the historian
or the artist?
Past for the Eyes is an intelligent and welcome
addition to the study of socialist memory (and any other
memory, for that matter) through film and museum displays.
Richly illustrated and smartly argued, the essays comprising
this groundbreaking volume should be read by scholars
and students interested in East European socialism as
an 'unforgettable' past that persists in the present."
- Journal of Baltic Studies
Contents
Introduction, Part One:
Documents of Communism: Lost and Found Rév:
The Man in the White Raincoat Uitz: Communist
Secret Services on the Screen: The Adventures of the
Duna-gate Scandal in and Beyond Hungarian Media
Varga: Façades: Private and Public in Kádár’s
Kiss by Péter Forgács Solomon: Filmmaker’s
Experience: Reconstructing Reality from Communist Archive
Documents Part Two: Subjects of Nostalgia:
Selling the Past Daković: Out of the Past:
Memories and Nostalgia in (Post) Yugoslav Cinema Sarkisova:
Long Farewells: The Anatomy of the Soviet Past
in Contemporary Russian Cinema Pobłocki: The
Economics of Nostalgia: Socialist Films and Capitalist
Commodities in Contemporary Poland Dominková:
“We have democracy, don’t we?”
Czech Society Reflected by Contemporary Czech Cinema
Part Three: Objects of Memory: Museums,
Monuments, Memorials Horváth: The Redistribution
of the Memory of Socialism: Identity Formations in Hungary
after 1989 Cristea - Radu-Bucurenci: Raising
the Cross. Exorcising Romania’s Communist Past
in Museums, Memorials and Monuments Vukov:
The “Unmemorable” and the “Unforgettable”:
“Museumizing” the Socialist Past in Post-1989
Bulgaria Mark: Containing Fascism: History
in Post-Communist Baltic Occupation and Genocide Museums
Main: How Communism Is Displayed?
Exhibitions and Museums of Communism in Poland, About
the Authors, Index
2008
436 pages, 30 photos
ISBN 978-963-9776-03-6 cloth $49.95 / €35.95 /
£33.00
ISBN 978-963-9776-05-0 paperback $24.95 / €17.95
/ £16.99
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