Structure of the Book

In the simplest terms, this volume seeks to bring together and share with an interdisciplinary readership the histories of experimental filmmaking in state-socialist Eastern Europe between the 1950s and the late 1980s. This introduction is our effort as coeditors to be as transparent and self-aware as we can about the motivations and underlying assumptions that guided us in putting together a book that could accomplish that seemingly simple goal.

When we began this project in 2015, our assessment of the limited relevant English-language scholarly terrain came from having previously coedited a special issue of the journal Studies in Eastern European Cinema (SEEC) on experimental cinema in socialist Eastern Europe and, prior to that, having worked together on the film series and accompanying web-based project Artists, Amateurs, Alternative Spaces: Experimental Cinema in Eastern Europe, 1960–1990 (2014). Our first aim was to give the broadest possible regional account of experimental filmmaking in the former socialist bloc. The geographic scope of the Amsterdam University Press's Eastern European Screen Cultures series, for which this book was commissioned, is defined as including “All of the former socialist and current post-socialist states in Europe, excluding Russia.” In soliciting essays for this volume, we chose to focus on state-socialist countries outside the former U.S.S.R., given that the conditions of cultural production in the latter (including the special case of the Baltic republics) have been more extensively addressed in the existing Anglophone literature. In the end, we identified case studies from seven countries: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Finding authors to address countries on which little to no scholarship existed, such as Bulgaria, or countries less frequently discussed in the context of Eastern Europe, such as East Germany, was a particular priority. The resulting book contains the widest geographic overview of its topic in one place to date.

Another choice that shaped the book was its temporal focus, which is concentrated mainly on the long 1960s and 1970s. These two decades saw the greatest flourishing of experimentation on film stock globally, and Eastern Europe was no exception.