Post-Communist Malaise: Cinematic Responses to European Integration

By Zoran Samardzija

The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was supposed to bring about the “end of history” with capitalism and liberal democracy achieving decisive victories. Europe would now integrate and reconcile with its past. However, the aftershocks of the financial crisis of 2008—the rise in right-wing populism, austerity politics, and mass migration—have shown that the ideological divisions which haunted Europe in the twentieth century still remain. It is within this context that Post-Communist Malaise revives discourses of political modernism and revisits debates from Marxism and seventies film theory. Analyzing work of Theo Angelopoulos, Věra Chytilová, Srdjan Dragojević, Jean-Luc Godard,  Miklós Jancsó, Emir Kusturica, Dušan Makavejev, Cristi Puiu, Jan Švankmajer, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Béla Tarr, the book focuses on how select cinemas from Eastern Europe and the Balkans critique the neoliberal integration of Europe whose failures fuel the rise of nationalism and right-wing politics. By politicizing art cinema from the regions, Post-Communist Malaise asks fundamental questions about film, aesthetics, and ideology. It argues for the utopian potential of the materiality of cinematic time to imagine a new political and cultural organization for Europe.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780813587165

Book preview

POST-COMMUNIST MALAISE

MEDIA MATTERS

Patrice Petro and Cristina Venegas, Series Editors

Media Matters focuses on film, television, and media within a transnational and interdisciplinary frame: environmental media, media industries, media and democracy, information media, and global media. It features the work of scholars who explore ever-expanding forms of media in art, everyday, and entertainment practices. Under the co-direction of Patrice Petro and Cristina Venegas, the series is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The Center seeks to foster innovative and collaborative research that probes the aesthetic, political, economic, artistic, and social processes of media in the past and in our own time.

Nataša Ďurovičová, Patrice Petro, and Lorena Terando, eds., At Translation’s Edge

Elena Gorfinkel and Tami Williams, eds., Global Cinema Networks

Zoran Samardzija, Post-Communist Malaise: Cinematic Responses to European Integration

POST-COMMUNIST MALAISE

Cinematic Responses to European Integration

ZORAN SAMARDZIJA

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Samardzija, Zoran, author.

Title: Post-communist malaise : cinematic responses to European integration / Zoran Samardzija.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2020] | Series: Media matters | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019034571 | ISBN 9780813587141 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813587158 (cloth) | ISBN 9780813587165 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—Europe, Eastern. | Post-communism—Europe, Eastern. | Communism and motion pictures—Europe, Eastern.

Classification: LCC PN1993.5.E82 S26 2020 | DDC 791.430947—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034571

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2020 by Zoran Samardzija

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

For my parents and my sister for all the dinner-table conversations

CONTENTS

Introduction

1 Eastern European New Waves and Political Modernism

2 What Happens after the End of History?

I. From Communism to Capitalism

II. From Capitalism to Nationalism

3 Slow Cinema and the Escape from Capitalist Realism

I. The Materiality of Cinematic Time from Andrei Tarkovsky to Béla Tarr

II. Cristi Puiu between Slow Cinema and Transcendental Style

4 Theo Angelopoulos, Greece, and the Ends of Europe

I. A New Collective Dream

II. Cinema as Past and Future

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

POST-COMMUNIST MALAISE

INTRODUCTION

RETHINKING POLITICAL MODERNISM AND ART CINEMA

Since the global financial crisis of 2008, Europe has witnessed the rise of far-right political parties. Though lacking in overt militarism, their rhetoric echoes the fascism of the thirties. This turn toward the right discredits the end-of-history utopia of liberal democracy promised by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of communism. Instead of liberal democracy, this new right-wing populism promotes a European identity—one that is Christian and white and that reinforces gender binaries—as an alternative to the European Union (EU). For example, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán gained international notoriety when he erected border fences during the refugee crisis in 2015. In fall 2018, after being elected for a third term, his government withdrew funding from university gender studies programs, declaring that the Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women.¹

While many right-wing populists seek to redefine the cultural identity of Europe, they do not challenge its fundamental belief in free-market capitalism. Several months after defunding gender studies, the Hungarian government faced protests over their so-called slave law, which mandated that companies can demand overtime from workers and delay paying them.² This form of capitalist populism is common throughout Europe. Consider the example of Nigel Farage in Britain. A former commodities broker and founding member of the far-right UK Independent Party in the early nineties, the Euroskeptic Farage was instrumental in the pro-Brexit campaign of 2016. Subsequently he launched the Brexit Party, which won the most UK seats in the European Parliament elections of 2019. Though critical of immigration policy, Farage’s column for the Independent also indicates that he is a libertarian capitalist when he characterizes the EU as a stifling bureaucracy opposed to free trade.³

In other instances, Europe’s fascist past is evoked in the form of direct nostalgia. In March 2019, Antonio Tajani, then president of the European Parliament, sparked controversy for his comments about Benito Mussolini. According to Tajani, aside from his authoritarianism and desire for war, Mussolini accomplished positive things such as building the country’s infrastructure and reclaiming lost territory. In their reporting on the story for the Guardian, journalists Angelina Giuffrida and Jennifer Rakin note that Tajani’s opinion of Mussolini is not uncommon in Italy. They write that Tajani’s views of Mussolini’s positive achievements are shared by many Italians, who yearn for a strongman leader and have long helped keep the spirit of Mussolini alive. The more recent revival of right-wing populism has also helped to dismantle the taboo.⁴ Though Tajani apologized for his comments, this nostalgia for a strongman leader is indicative of the political deadlock facing Europe: its fascist past has become a viable political alternative to the neoliberal dystopia of its present.

It is within this context that this book politicizes art cinema from Eastern Europe and the Balkans to explore fundamental questions about film, aesthetics, and ideology. In particular, it revisits debates about political modernism from Marxism and seventies film theory in order to analyze how select cinemas from the regions offer ideological critiques of the neoliberal integration of Europe, whose failure has accelerated the growth of nationalism and right-wing populism. According to D. N. Rodowick, seventies film theory can be characterized as a discourse of political modernism. In his succinct summary of Rodowick’s Crisis of Political Modernism, Nico Baumbach explains that, in his reading of film theory from the late 1960s through the early 1980s as a ‘discourse of political modernism,’ Rodowick grasped the extent to which ‘theory’ stood for a position that advocated for a new form of filmmaking practice. Ideology critique was tied to an idea of a counter-cinema that performed within film practice the very function of theory.⁵ This notion of an aesthetic practice informed by theory has its foundations in the early twentieth-century Marxist writings of Ernst Bloch, György Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, and others who debated the political efficacy of a realist text compared with the formalist experimentation of modernism. According to Rodowick, post-1968 film theory theorized the possibility of a radical, political text and representational strategies emphasizing the material nature of language or cinematic presentation, especially in the form of an auto-critique.⁶ However, as the title of his book implies, a crisis for theory emerges from this pursuit of a political modernist text because it reduced the problem of meaning to film form alone, which meant that the political force of theory was secondary to the film text. In other words, the paradox of political modernist film theory is that it denies its own political potential for actively constructing meaning in relation to film and for creating new positions of reading.⁷ For Rodowick, this paradox is untangled by what is commonly called a philosophical turn for film studies. According to Baumbach, Politics in this approach is viewed no longer as intrinsic to cinema and a necessary guiding force for film theory, but rather as a commitment that one is ethically obliged to acknowledge if and only if it informs one’s methods and conclusions. Despite Rodowick’s insistence that he has not abandoned the project of film theory, we are a long way from the claim—from Benjamin to Agamben, and including the seminal essays of sixties and seventies film theory—that, as [Jean-Louis] Comolli and [Jean] Narboni put it, ‘every film is political.’ ⁸

Baumbach concludes that Rodowick was right to suggest that film theory in the 1970s tended to undertheorize its own position in constructing the link between cinema and politics.⁹ Throughout Cinema/Politics/Philosophy, he responds to this claim of undertheorization by turning toward philosophers Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben in order to model a new discourse about politics, aesthetics, and cinema. Even if one disagrees with this interpretation of seventies film theory by Rodowick and Baumbach, one can still embrace the invitation to rethink the links between theory, politics, and cinema. Toward that end, Post-Communist Malaise argues that the political modernism of seventies film theory, in particular the belief in counter-cinema aesthetics that function as ideology critique, did not diminish because it paradoxically reduced the political force of theory itself. Rather, the waning interest in grand theories of political aesthetics coincided with the acceleration of neoliberalism in the late seventies and the eighties and the decline of leftist alternatives to capitalism. By the time of the post-communist era in the nineties, the end of history promised by Fukuyama, though now a discredited idea, was quickly internalized throughout the West into the mistaken belief that the grand ideological and political struggles of the century—the conflicts between fascism, communism, and capitalism—had been resolved. Thus, the notion that every film is political moved away from theorizing counter-cinema and its critiques of mass culture and ideology into a diverse array of approaches including cultural studies, which, as Rodowick notes, opened the question of ideology and subjectivity from the side of the audience rather than that of the text in a way that better accounted for resistant, contestatory, or even outright deviant readings or appropriations of film and television.¹⁰ In returning to political modernism, Post-Communist Malaise is not a critique of these subsequent approaches, which extend the question of ideology and subjectivity to account for the complex intersection of ethnicity, race, gender, and sexual identities. Rather, its thesis is that the aftershocks of the financial crisis—the global rise in right-wing populism, the normalization of austerity politics, and mass migration—necessitate that we also revisit the unresolved totalizing ideology critiques of political modernism and our ideas about counter-cinema. It may have seemed that capitalism scored a decisive victory over communism after its collapse in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but the rising tide of right-wing populism since the financial crisis means that the grand ideological struggles of the last century have not been resolved.

By renewing political modernism, this book also reimagines art cinema as a mode of political discourse. Traditionally, art cinema has had multiple definitions. As Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover write in the introduction to Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, it has always been an impure and elastically hybrid category.¹¹ Its common usage, they argue, refers to narrative cinema situated between mainstream and avant-garde productions, recognizable as a mode of narration … loosened from classical structures and distanced from its representations.¹² This definition recalls David Bordwell’s notion that art cinema is a mode of film practice defined by authorial presence, formal conventions, and narrative strategies of realism and ambiguity.¹³ However, as Galt and Schoonover note, the category also invokes elitist and conservative notions of seriousness about film canons, which both postclassical film theory and the turn to cultural studies have deliberately avoided.¹⁴ Consequently, they argue, little sustained scholarly attention has been paid to refining and updating the parameters of art cinema as a category since the pioneering essays of the 1960s and 1970s.¹⁵ In updating the category, Galt and Schoonover propose that art cinema can overcome its Eurocentric and elitist associations to convey a complex vision of the global that is responsive to geographical complexity and, more important, susceptible to geopolitical analysis.¹⁶ In other words, updating the category of art cinema allows us to analyze geopolitical transformations and new dynamics between the global and local. However, there is an additional purpose. As Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi argue in their introduction to 1968 and Global Cinema, the idea of global cinema reflects more than present geopolitics and the processes of globalization. Historically, it also implies a longer and more nuanced understanding that is linked to radical politics and aesthetics that reflect the politics of international solidarity.¹⁷

Inspired by these collections, Post-Communist Malaise analyzes art cinemas from Eastern Europe and the Balkans to imagine a new radical politics and transnational solidarity for Europe. As Dina Iordanova states in Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film, The forced ‘togetherness’ of these countries led to numerous artistic interactions and mutual influences.¹⁸ It is my argument that this forced togetherness creates a unique discourse of political modernism. In particular, the traditions of art cinema discussed in this book emerged in the decades after the Second World War, rejecting the dogmas of socialist realism in order to develop a dissident Marxism that critiques authoritarian communism. This political modernism evolved into a critique of the neoliberal integration of Europe during the post-communist era. Analyzing this evolution requires first an interpretation of communism as a political and aesthetic project.

COMMUNISM AND THE END OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY

Before the financial crisis, the decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall made it easy to forget the initial emotional allure of communism and its utopian impulses. The Soviet-style communism that spread across Eastern Europe and the Balkans was both the logical culmination and the terrifying perversion of the Enlightenment project to achieve political progress and liberation through the idea of universal history. While theologies with universal histories precede the Enlightenment and are found in early monotheisms, the writings of Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and others serve as the philosophical underpinnings for twentieth-century communism. These intellectual origins are important to remember if we wish to understand post-communist identity and its complex relationship with European integration. The allure of communism can be understood as the desire to be absorbed into a universal history, while its disappearance creates a sense of malaise. For example, in his essay Beyond Diversity: Cultural Studies and Its Post-Communist Other, Russian philosopher and art critic Boris Groys characterizes communism as the promise of an inner transformation of identity into something more modern. He explains, "In the past, to be universal was to invent an idea or an artistic project that could unite people of different backgrounds, that could transcend the diversity of their already existing cultural identities, that could be joined by everybody—if he or she would decide to join them. This notion of universality was linked to the concept of inner change, of inner rupture, of rejecting the past and embracing the future, to the notion of metanoia—of transition from an old identity to a new one."¹⁹ From the vantage point of the present, this may seem like a troubling and idealized interpretation of what it means to become universal. As numerous postcolonial theorists have argued, the category of universal history often reflects a Eurocentric world view and has provided philosophical justification for the worst crimes of colonialism. One does not have to read too far into Hegel’s philosophy of history before encountering his belief in the superiority of Western European culture. Similarly, as Edward Said has observed, Marx’s writings on Asia and India reflect a deeply ingrained orientalist world view. Nevertheless, Groys’s insights about inner change and embracing the future are essential to understanding the allure of communism and its promise for people to become universal and more modern.

This promise is central to twentieth-century modernity and its ideological conflicts. As Evgeny Dobrenko writes in Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History: Museum of the Revolution, The present was the main sacrifice of the twentieth century; all totalitarian regimes worked for the ‘future.’ ²⁰ However, not all totalitarian regimes worked for the future in the same manner with their cinema. Consider, for example, the differences between Nazi and Stalinist cinema. While propaganda was common, most films produced during the Nazi era were nevertheless escapist genre films such as musicals or comedies without explicit political content. Instead, social life itself was transformed into an aesthetic expression of ideology through mass spectacles in the form of orchestrated Nazi rallies with their ornamentalized pageantry. To use Dobrenko’s terminology, under Nazism, the present was sacrificed through its simultaneous commitment to technological progress and rejection of the social egalitarianism of the Enlightenment for a horrific vision of romantic nationalism. Historian Jeffrey Herf notably describes this contradiction as a form of reactionary modernism.²¹ In contrast, under Stalinism, communism coalesces into a totalitarian vision of the derealization of the present. As Dobrenko argues, this creates a new temporality of the concluded future. He explains, The famous ‘abolition’ by Stalin of Hegel’s law of negation of the negation left without an answer the question of what there would be ‘after communism’; the horizon of expectations was directed towards the past, in so far as there was already nothing to ‘expect’ in the future. Stalin introduced a new temporality: the concluded future (a kind of future pluperfect). In order to free the ground for this new future, the present was shifted into the past, and the future-directed future was transformed into the present, as a result of which the present itself underwent complete de-realisation.²² The idea of the concluded future can be understood through the highly aestheticized imagery and plots of Soviet socialist realist cinema. This is especially true with the notorious Stalinist musicals produced throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. As the most aestheticized expression of socialist realism, the ideological function of such musicals was, to quote Lev Manovich, to show the future in the present by projecting the perfect world of future socialist society onto a visual reality familiar to the viewer.²³ The musical Traktoristy (1939), which, like many films from the era, was later re-edited to remove references to Stalin, is a notable example. In the film, a soldier returns to his collective farm to find that his romantic interest, Mariana, has become an esteemed tractor driver who organizes other women to become more productive. Like many Stalinist musicals, it is primarily a romantic comedy with a highly standardized plot, though it is also intended as propaganda for mobilization since productivity with tractors is considered training for driving tanks in the war. The concluded future is clearly on display in its musical numbers, with happy peasants dancing and singing about the joys of labor and protecting the fatherland. The final stage of communism has already arrived in the present, and the peasants live in total harmony with the land and their labor.

Because communism already delineated the end of history, post-communist identity becomes indeterminate. If the promise of communism meant embracing universal history and living in the concluded future, then there is no subsequent stage of development. There can be nothing new in the future in terms of economic and social relations. Thus, the aftershocks of the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Balkans left no coherent or stable identity in their place other than a deferred promise of becoming European and integrating into its marketplace. For Groys this loss of identity allows the free market to supersede the universal project of communism. He explains, The post-communist subject must feel like a Warhol Coca-Cola bottle brought back from the museum into the supermarket. In the museum, this Coca-Cola bottle was an artwork and had an identity—but back in the supermarket the same Coca-Cola bottle looks just like every other Coca-Cola bottle.²⁴ Coca-Cola, of course, is a recognizable signifier of American imperialism and global capitalism. Groys’s comparison, therefore, structures the post-communist condition as a historical regression, a return to the marketplace determining identity and history, which is what communism promised to overcome. However, this regression into the capitalist past was itself upended by the economic crisis of 2008 and the subsequent politics of austerity, which deferred the utopia of a European common market into the future. This is why the art cinema analyzed in this book tends to imagine post-communist identity as liminal. For many in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, there is no returning to the communist past and there is no chance to accumulate wealth and capital, a deadlock that accelerates right-wing populism.

During the Cold War, Western scholarship on Eastern European cinema focused, appropriately so, on national cinemas²⁵ or politically committed aesthetics as a regional phenomenon.²⁶ Studies of national cinemas are still written today, but the transition into post-communism means a lack of definitive geopolitical identity for interpreting cinemas from the regions. This has led to innovative scholarship that interprets the regions through the lens of postcolonial theory. Influential books that establish this perspective are Larry Wolff’s Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment²⁷ and Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans, which, inspired by Said, analyze the regions as discursive constructions of the West originating in the Enlightenment.²⁸ Both books convincingly show how the cultural identities of the regions are entangled with the historical legacies of the geopolitical divisions of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires and their geographical status as the periphery of Europe. Recent cultural critics and film scholars map this postcolonial perspective onto the communist–post-communist divide and argue that the Soviet influence over the Eastern bloc was itself a form of colonialism. For example, in Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization, Nataša Kovačević carefully analyzes select writers for how they narrate the ideological borders between Eastern Europe and the civilized West. She posits Eastern Europe as a postcolonial terrain and claims that the significance of communism to its history and the formation of its identity should be considered in postcolonial terms.²⁹ For Kovačević, a postcolonial reading of the post-communist condition is a necessary supplement to a Marxist perspective because it accounts for feelings of cultural inferiority. She writes,

Eastern European communist legacies should not be analyzed only in terms of the degree of economic innovation upon or departure from Western capitalist practices. Indeed, if one does that, then one will conclude, like Immanuel Wallerstein (1991), that communism and capitalism are parts of the same world system; or, like Slavoj Žižek, that ‘actually existing Socialism’ failed because it was ultimately a subspecies of capitalism, used its instrumental reason, was not radical enough. These are of course valid assertions, but what this type of approach misses is the significance of communism as a line of flight for Eastern Europeans from not only the power grids of Western nations, but also the stigma of economic and cultural inferiority, escape from the logic of capital and the logic of being the other.³⁰

This passage recognizes the complexities of identity formation in the regions. To be sure, the spread of communism was also a pragmatic response to the threat of fascism and the horrors of Nazism during the Second World War. Yet, as Kovačević convincingly argues, escaping from the cultural stigmas of the West—and its long history of projecting inferiority onto Eastern Europe and the Balkans, as detailed in the Wolff and Todorova books—helps explain the allure of communism. In other words, in addition to harboring the desire to become modern and live in the future, East Europeans participated in a universal political project in which they imagined themselves to be superior to the capitalist West precisely because they wished to escape from its dehumanizing gaze. Communist propaganda routinely expressed this superiority, which many people internalized before the grim realities of actually existing communism became obvious. Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin! wonderfully satirizes this phenomenon. Late in the film, for example, the son creates a mock newsreel to convince his mother, who went into a coma before the Berlin Wall fell, that East Germany still exists and refugees from the West are arriving to escape the excesses of capitalism in the West.

While understanding Eastern Europe through a postcolonial lens reveals the nuances of identity formation and the psychologies that determine political affiliations, it also highlights the pitfalls of a totalizing analysis of ideology. In the introduction to the comprehensive collection Postcolonial Approaches to Eastern European Cinema: Portraying Neighbours On-Screen, the editors state their preference for postcolonial theory for analyzing cinema from the regions and disparage Marxism for its, broadly speaking, sympathy toward the Soviet political project.³¹ They write, For Marxist scholars the Cold War and the East-West divide were less important than the issues of the global spread of capitalism and conflicts between the ‘First’ and the ‘Third World.’ Moreover, they construed the socialist part of Eastern Europe as a monolith entity, a claim which we obviously disagree with and which, in our view, betrays a colonial mindset.³² The authors appropriately warn against a monolithic interpretation of Eastern Europe, which can result from thinking about historical totality. In contrast, Postcolonial Approaches focuses on how the existence of neighbours, ethnic minorities and border territories undermined the modernist homogenizing projects of both nation states and the Soviet bloc.³³ This thoughtful injunction against monolithic thinking and homogenizing projects means that any attempt to revisit political modernism must acknowledge the realities of actually existing communism as well as analyze it as a utopian ideology. To be sure, in historical practice, communist identity was never completely uniform. Many communist regimes appealed to ethnicity as a shortcut for integration into ideology, such as with the Russification of the Soviet Union or the constitution of Yugoslavia, which formally recognized ethnic identity. Yet, far from undermining the homogenization of identity, this acknowledgment of difference