The ‘Chemistry’ of Art(ifice) and Life: Embodied Paintings in East European Cinema

The essay focuses on the manifold uses and re-conceptualization of the tableau vivant in recent East European cinema through several examples from Hungarian and Russian films directed by György Pálfi, Kornél Mundruczó, Benedek Fliegauf, Béla Tarr, and Andrei Zvyagintsev. The tableau vivant in these films is not conceived primarily as an embodiment of a painting, the introduction of ‘the real into the image’ (Brigitte Peucker), but it appears more like the objectification of bodies as images, and something that we can associate with what Mario Perniola considers the ‘sex appeal of the inorganic’. The author discusses the case of the paradoxical ‘cadaverous’ tableaux vivants (among them the recurring cinematic paraphrases of Mantegna’s Dead Christ), in which a live body is displayed as a corpse, or the other way round, a corpse is presented as an embodied picture, or an object of art made of flesh. By repeatedly showing us bodies dying into art, and ideas reified as images, these films present us with uncanny rituals of ‘becoming an image’, with a yearning for a reintegration into something universal and lasting, and can be viewed in the context of the reconstructive tendencies of contemporary post-postmodern art.

The Body Breached: Post-Soviet Masculinity on Screen

Whereas the utopian male body of the Soviet Imaginary hyperbolized and recast in steel or bronze the anatomical ideals of classical antiquity (Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘closed body’), post-Soviet cinema typically has featured a male corporeality resembling the open body of apertures and protruberances posited by Bakhtin, but as degraded, marred, and vulnerable (Kenneth Clark) rather than celebratory or regenerative. Thus the indomitable heroes of hypertrophied bulk, brawn, and beauty in Stalinist films such as Grigorii Aleksandrov’s Circus (1936), Mikhail Kalatozov’s Valerii Chkalov (1941), and Mikheil Chiaureli’s Fall of Berlin (1949) have been superseded by the dramatically violated and traumatized physiques of protagonists in recent films confronting war—Aleksandr Nevzorov’s Purgatory (1998 ), Valerii Todorovskii’s My Stepbrother Frankenstein (2004), Aleksandr Veledinskii’s Alive (2006)—and those reassessing the Stalinist era: Aleksei German’s Khrustalev, the Car (1998) and Pavel Livnev’s Hammer and Sickle (1994). Indeed, the latter explicitly deconstructs the forcible transformation of Soviet citizenry into fantastic icons of Stakhanovite virility and its tragic consequences. Similarly, post-Soviet onscreen crime devastates the male body, and nowhere more vividly than in Filipp Iankovskii’s Lermontov-indebted Sword Bearer (2006), which violently imprints all contemporary experience, most of it lethal, on the human form in a world ruled by material values and devoid of communal ideals.

‘What Does Poland Want from Me?’ Male Hysteria in Andrzej Wajda’s War Trilogy

Elżbieta Ostrowska examines Andrzej Wajda’s War Trilogy. She admits that the films need to be located within the vernacular tradition of Romanticism responding to the national trauma, but they also may be located within a broader context of psychoanalysis and universal traumas of modernity. Not only does she suggest necessity of employing these two conceptual frameworks, but she also claims that there is a symbiotic relationship between these two albeit rarely if ever recognised. Using Slavoj Žižek’s concept of ‘hysterical doubt’ and a Polish scholar Michał Paweł Markowski’s discussion of melancholia and hysteria, Ostrowska identifies hysterical subject in Polish Romantic culture emphasizing the uncertainty inscribed in it. She claims that the protagonists of Wajda’s War Trilogy are another embodiments of hysterical male subjects. As hysteria speaks exclusively through the body, the chapter focuses on the haptic potential of the cinematic image as well as specific bodily performances. Ostrowska argues that these excessive bodily spectacles that largely fit clinical descriptions of hysterical symptoms are indeed an attempt to overcome the actual lack of bodily agency and, by extension, male subjectivity. Hysterical body responds to ambiguities and uncertainties regarding vernacular masculine subject.

Shaping the Cinematic Bodies of Eastern Europe and Russia

This collection offers a series of perspectives on the bodies of Eastern European and Russian cinema, a terrain of growing scholarly interest, but one which remains under-researched, for reasons that are both general and region-specific. Our aim is not to provide a monolithic vision of how the body has been configured across this vast geographical area; it is not possible to formulate a single argument concerning the Eastern European and Russian body. Rather, the chapters put forward a series of ‘openings on the body’, to use Shildrick and Price’s terminology, in the cinemas of the region (1999: 1). The kaleidoscopic vision that emerges from these perspectives is of the body, whether individual, collective, symbolic or specific, as a nexus of often-competing forces, affects and ideologies, and as multiple and fluid. We hope that, by making corporeality our focus, we will yield new insights into the material and screen cultures of the countries under consideration: former Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia and former Yugoslavia. With the possible exception of Russia, the cinematic outputs of these countries are marginalised in studies of both ‘European’ and ‘world’ cinema. As Portuges and Hames point out, this is a relatively recent development: between the 1950s and 1970s, these film industries were more widely known and studied; the subsequent decline of interest has meant that ‘a generation of critics and audiences have grown up for whom the cinemas of Eastern Europe are very much unknown territory’ (2013: 3). With our focus on this region, we thus aim to foster a more inclusive vision of material and film culture.

The Touch of History: A Phenomenological Approach to 1960s Czech Cinema

The films of the Czechoslovak filmmakers, František Vláčil and Karel Kachyňa, employ distinctive formal features, such as shallow focus, action obscured by objects in the foreground and symmetrical image composition, that emphasise the experience of both spectators and characters. I map this haptic visuality onto the importance of phenomenology as the primary philosophical tendency during this period in Czechoslovakia, and particularly consider Jan Patočka’s work on history, freedom and the body. I also argue that this style is a reaction to the dictates of socialist realism. I consider three films in detail: Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová (1967), often hailed as the most important masterpiece of Czech cinema, Kachyňa’s Kočar do Vidně (Coach to Vienna, 1966) and his Noc nevěsty (Night of the Bride / The Nun’s Night, 1967). All three films are linked by a consideration of Christianity as an institution of political freedom as well as oppression. I consider these films phenomenologically and argue that their concrete engagement with the experience of the spectator creates a strong connection between the historical and fictional plights of the vulnerable bodies of their characters.

Queering Masculinity in Yugoslav Socialist Realist Films

The chapter analyzes queer male bodies in the Yugoslav socialist realist cinema, from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, in order to challenge the views that relegate cinema of that period to the handmaiden of the totalitarian ideology. In order to elaborate my point, I explore the corporeal dimension of the queer representations of masculinity in the three films from the first decade of Yugoslav cinema. Život je naš (Life is Ours, Gustav Gavrin, 1948) raises the issue of the rendering the blurry zone between homosexuality and homosociality, Crveni cvet (Red Flower, Gustav Gavrin, 1953) boasts the very first case of gender cross-dressing in Yugoslav cinema, whereas Bakonja fra Brne (Monk Brne’s Pupilii, Fedor Hanžeković, 1954) features the first protagonist who is unmistakably coded as a homosexual. The queering of these films substantially questions the scholarly narratives that posit the notion that the Yugoslav filmmakers were in cahoots with the socialist ideologues in the joint project of degrading the homosexuality as such.

A Mass Doubling of Heroes: Post-human Objects of Queer Desire in Vladimir Sorokin and Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s 4

In their 2004 film 4, the contemporary Russian novelist and screenwriter Vladimir Sorokin and the filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky create a nightmare fantasy about the intersection of two seemingly unrelated processes of production. In Moscow, a new corrupt industry of processing chemically injected and possibly cloned pig meat and, in the countryside, a community of elderly women who create a series of eerie life-size dolls out of masticated bread dough. Both processes address anxieties about body boundaries being breached or invaded, with the national body becoming tainted or jammed up by what it ingests. The symbolic palette of 4 paints a picture of queer intimacy that knowingly embraces sterility, while also encoding gay male sex as emasculating and unclean. Within the film, the fear of death through feminisation is projected onto the portrayal of the economic changes that wreak havoc with individual autonomy.

Aerial Bodies in Polish Cinema

This chapter focuses on the representation of the dynamics of the body in flight in selected Polish films from the period of state socialism including The Case of Pilot Maresz, Against Gods, To Destroy the Pirate and On the Earth and in the Sky. The discussion centers on the idea of ‘socialist aerial bodies’, which is informed by Paul Virilio's reflection about the relationship between the body and technologies developed for the most part during the Cold War, which coincided with the period of state socialism in Poland. Virilio’s arguments are not nuanced in the way that reflects the differences in the impact that war technologies, such as flying, might have had in the socialist context as opposed to the non-socialist one with which he was much more familiar. This chapter is an attempt to fill this gap in Virilio's reflection on the aerial body by discussing the development of a specific representation of the body, referred to here as a ‘socialist aerial body’, which is impacted not only by the advancements in the technologies of flying, but also by ideological concerns - some of them unique to the socialist context.

Borowczyk as Pornographer

This chapter examines Borowczyk’s representation of sex and the erotic body. It argues that by becoming a pornographer the director chose a career path which placed him in conflict with the two dominant ideologies in Poland: Catholicism and state socialism; hence he treated both of them in contempt. Yet, something blocks the erotic pleasure of the viewers of Borowczyk’s films; the sexual acts take place behind the curtains or other objects blocking our access to vision, such as pieces of furniture. Another specificity of his films is engaging in a discourse about the relationship between body and mind. In Borowczyk’s films we observe a reversal between the spiritual and the corporeal – the spirit is thrown from the pedestal, the body is upgraded.

Playing Dead: Pictorial Figurations of Melancholia in Contemporary Hungarian Cinema

Contemporary Hungarian cinema has been often coined as "dark", depicting an "ontological melancholia" paired with a preference for the still image. In films by Béla Tarr, Kornél Mundruczó or Benedek Fliegauf for example, tableau-like compositions serve as "interruptions" revealing the single image as a site in-between where figuration happens. These painterly images relate to the narration metaphorically, triggering an aesthetic detachment of a "pensive spectator." This chapter focuses on a corpus of contemporary Hungarian films in which bodies are represented in pictorial compositions evoking either Andrea Mantegna's The Lamentation over the Dead Christ or Hans Holbein's The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, with the aim to identify 'the figural' that makes sense without a story. Relying on Kristeva's controversial "gendered" interpretation of melancholia, the chapter includes comparative analyses of films by Hungarian female and male directors (Ágnes Kocsis and Kornél Mundruczó, for example).