Steven Shaviro. Eastern European Film.

Steven Shaviro's currently teaching a class on Eastern European Film, 1956 - 2006. He's asked his students to keep a film journal, and he's been keeping one himself as well.

Perhaps a few excerpts will encourage you to subscribe to his feed. Watching Milos Foreman's The Fireman's Ball (1967), for example, he finds at least one way in which it demonstrates "less the violence and absolute control of the post-Stalinist system than its complete (and absolutely demoralizing) cynicism."

Updated through 1/14.

Then there's Andrzej Wajda's Kanal (1957): "The film's power comes from the way it makes us inhabit the duration of lives with no future and no prospects." But: "Ashes and Diamonds (1958) is more ambiguous, less monolithic and stark, than Kanal, but for that very reason is perhaps even more troubling."

And one from 1959: "[T]he ironies of [Andrzej Munk's] Bad Luck's comedic situation are as dizzying, and as deep, as the ironies of the tragic, existential situations of Wajda's contemporary films Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds."

I'm emphasizing his notes on the relationships between these films because - well, in part, because he does - but also: one of the strengths of this journal is that, by focusing on the cinema of a particular time and place, it - like the class, I'm sure - allows insights into one film to draw from and add to insights into others more immediately. Anyway. Recommended.

Update, 1/14: The latest entry is on one of Jonathan Marlow's favorites, the "intensely, and quite classically, surreal" Valerie and Her Week of Wonders.

Posted by dwhudson at January 13, 2007 3:48 PM