The Bulgarian Cinema

The Bulgarian Cinema

Author: Ronald Holloway

Publisher: Rutherford, N.J. : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press ; London : Associated Presses

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13:

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This survey of Bulgarian cinema from its beginning to its present situation under the current government reveals this country's vital and original filmmakers at work expressing and continuing their nation's rich artistic and cultural heritage.


The BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema

The BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema

Author: Richard Taylor

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-07-25

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1838718508

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This work maps the rich, varied cinema of Eastern Europe, Russia and the former USSR. Over 200 entries cover a variety of topics spanning a century of endeavour and turbulent history from Czech animation to Soviet montage, from the silent cinemas dating back to World War I through to the varied responses to the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. It includes entries on actors and actresses, film festivals, studios, genres, directors, film movements, critics, producers and technicians, taking the coverage up to the late 1990s. In addition to the historical material of key figures like Eisenstein and Wadja, the editors provide separate accounts of the trajectory of the cinemas of Eastern Europe and of Russia in the wake of the collapse of communism.


The Conformists

The Conformists

Author: Evgenija Garbolevsky

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2011-05-25

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1443830194

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"The complexities and paradoxes of the Bulgarian film industry during the era of Communist rule (1945-1989) are explored.... This influential industry was mobilized for the needs of the state. During its creation and development, cultural institutions and those involved in film production operated within a relatively closed system, based on rewards and punishments imposed by the Communist bureaucratic apparatus. Sub-textual content in films produced in Bulgaria during this period highlights the attitude of the elite towards the regime. Understanding this multifaceted relationship helps explain why so many intellectuals found the film industry to be an attractive field in which to work, and decided to remain loyal to the regime instead of leaving or openly rebelling against it. This work challenges the historiographical perception that the arts in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War were largely unsuccessful vehicles of propaganda and dissent. By using a comparative methodological approach, the cinema arts in the East and West are shown following similar paths despite the Iron Curtain."--Provided by publisher.


Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria

Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria

Author: Raymond Detrez

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-12-18

Total Pages: 761

ISBN-13: 1442241802

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Bulgaria is a country of extraordinary beauty, with high, wild mountains and gentle valleys, and with picturesque cities and idyllic villages. It’s bordered by Romania, Serbia Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, and the Black Sea. After many years of communist rule, Bulgaria adopted a democratic constitution and began the process of moving toward political democracy and a market economy while combating inflation, unemployment, corruption, and crime. The country joined NATO in 2004 and the EU in 2007. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Bulgaria.


The Cinema of Robert Altman

The Cinema of Robert Altman

Author: Robert Niemi

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2016-03-01

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0231850867

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In a controversial and tumultuous filmmaking career that spanned nearly fifty years, Robert Altman mocked, subverted, or otherwise refashioned Hollywood narrative and genre conventions. Altman's idiosyncratic vision and propensity for formal experimentation resulted in an uneven body of work: some rank failures and intriguing near-misses, as well as a number of great films that are among the most influential works of New American Cinema. While Altman always professed to have nothing authoritative to say about the state of contemporary society, this volume surveys all of his major films in their sociohistorical context to reposition the director as a trenchant satirist and social critic of postmodern America, depicted as a lonely wasteland of fraudulent spectacle, exploitative social relations, and unfulfilled solitaries in search of elusive community.


The Cinema of Michael Haneke

The Cinema of Michael Haneke

Author: Ben McCann

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2012-05-29

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0231504659

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Michael Haneke is one of the most important directors working in Europe today, with films such as Funny Games (1997), Code Unknown (2000), and Hidden (2005) interrogating modern ethical dilemmas with forensic clarity and merciless insight. Haneke's films frequently implicate both the protagonists and the audience in the making of their misfortunes, yet even in the barren nihilism of The Seventh Continent (1989) and Time of the Wolf (2003) a dark strain of optimism emerges, releasing each from its terrible and inescapable guilt. It is this contingent and unlikely possibility that we find in Haneke's cinema: a utopian Europe. This collection celebrates, explicates, and sometimes challenges the worldview of Haneke's films. It examines the director's central themes and preoccupations—bourgeois alienation, modes and critiques of spectatorship, the role of the media—and analyzes otherwise marginalized aspects of his work, such as the function of performance and stardom, early Austrian television productions, the romanticism of The Piano Teacher (2001), and the 2007 shot-for-shot remake of Funny Games.


Cinema of Flames

Cinema of Flames

Author: Dina Iordanova

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-07-25

Total Pages: 510

ISBN-13: 1838715037

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First study of cinema, media and the Balkan wars; Wide-ranging view of politics and culture of the region; The break-up of Yugoslavia triggered a truly international film-making project. Underground, Ulysses' Gaze, Before the Rain, Pretty Village, Pretty Flame and Welcome to Sarajevo were amongst a host of films created as the conflicts in the region unravelled. These conflicts restored the Balkans as a centrepiece of Western imagery and the media (especially cinema) assumed a leading but ambiguous role in defining it for global consumption through a narrow range of selectively defined images. Simultaneously, a lot of the high-quality cinematic and television work made in the region (much of it discussed in this book) remains relatively unknown. Cinema of Flames attempts to go deeper than the imagery and address some of the general concerns of the cross-cultural representation and self-representation of the Balkans: narrative strategies within the context of Balkan exclusion from the European cultural sphere, the cosmopolitan image of Sarejevo, diaspora, and the representations of villains, victims, women, and ethnic minorities, all considered in the general context of Balkan cinema. 'encyclopaedic in scope and brilliance, making excellent use of the scholarly literature whilst interweaving analysis of films and other mass media. The book will be a superb addition to the literatures on Bosnia and Yugoslavia. It will also serve as a standard reference on Balkans film.' Robert Hayden (University of Pittsburgh)


The Cinema of Paolo Sorrentino

The Cinema of Paolo Sorrentino

Author: Russell Kilbourn

Publisher: Wallflower Press

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780231189927

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"Paolo Sorrentino, the director of Il Divo (2008) and The Great Beauty (2013) and the creator of the HBO series The Young Pope (2016) (and The New Pope (2019)), has in recent years emerged as one of the most popular figures in 21st century European filmmaking. Critics, however, remain sharply divided in their opinions of his films and what tradition his work can be placed in. Questions of what his stylistic relationship to Neorealism, the touchstone of virtually all Italian cinema, his local/national identity, and the posturing of his films vis a vis gender and a seemingly reactionary conceptualization of masculinity, his embracing or subverting of the role of art house "auteur," surround his films, with little consensus as to the answers. He is a confounding figure that seems to occupy contradictory roles in each of his films. In taking up the question of how best to contextualize Sorrentino's work, this book tracks his progressive departure from the localized world of Neapolitan and middlebrow "quality cinema" tropes in favor of a more expansive and transnational approach to filmmaking. Sorrentino's more recent work explicitly engages late-capitalist spaces and aesthetics and problematizes authorial interpretation, the idea of the "foreign" film, the supposed dichotomy between the "realist" ethos that has, in the past, dominated Italian cinema, and a "post-realist"/"post-modernist" emphasis on style. Critically, Kilbourn tracks two key themes through Sorretino's oeuvre: the idea of "impegno" - often translated as "commitment" and referring to the social activist aims of Neorealism - and the director's repeated attempts to create a distinctive kind of subjectivity. Though often thought to be mutually exclusive with the flamboyant and de-subjectivized style in much of contemporary art cinema, Sorrentino continues to find ways to merge these themes in his work"--