During four decades of Communist Party rule, the film industries of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia were under state control. One positive result of this was ample funding for serious films about social and political topics. In certain thematic areas, particularly those dealing with racial and ethnic intolerance and with the plight of women in patriarchal societies, filmmakers in East Central Europe were able to be more incisive, frank and provocative than is often the case in profit-driven Hollywood film. Talented and committed filmmakers were able to take advantage of the regimes’ progressive official pronouncements with regard to ethnic and gender issues to craft powerful films which the regimes had no grounds to suppress. In the post-Communist period, this tradition of critical filmmaking continues. The course has three units :
- the Holocaust—how people in East Central Europe reacted to the genocidal plans of the Nazis, from indifference and collaboration to heroic acts of altruism: pre-war relations between Jews and non-Jews, reasons for acquiescence to racist policies and the expropriation of Jewish property, the motivations of those who protected Jews at great personal risk, the reactions of the Jews themselves to the nightmare in which they found themselves;
- women’s lives under state socialism--women in the work force in large numbers, but with continued primary responsibility for domestic work and child care, and plagued by persistent patriarchal attitudes toward sex and marriage--some male directors represent this situation critically, but it is women directors who confront it most uncompromisingly;
- animosity among Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, Moslem Bosnians, Orthodox Macedonians and Moslem Albanians, leading to Yugoslavia’s wars of the 1990s--as well as the countervailing examples of friendship and peaceful coexistence among people of these ethnicities.
We will view and discuss fifteen films from Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia, and Macedonia dealing with the above issues. We will also consider the artistic structure of the films--how they go about transmitting their themes with power and emotion. Grades are based on participation in class discussion and three medium-length (7-8 page) papers; the first two papers will involve a first version, followed by a revised and expanded second version; (this second version should be 8-10 pages in length). Paper topics will be given out toward the beginning of each unit.
Course Requirements:
Three papers.
Class Format:
In person.