Possibly the second most distinctive feature of the NECS conference this year, aside from its catchy title “Structures and Voices: Story-telling in Post-digital Times,” was its choice of location: If this is not the first time the prestigious European conference has travelled to the Eastern side of the continent, the chosen site at Poland’s Gdańsk University has deep reverberations for political and cultural history. The birthplace of Lech Wałęsa’s Solidarity movement which eventually helped topple Communist governments in the ‘Soviet bloc’, and allegedly inspired the 1989 revolutionary wave in Eastern Europe, Gdańsk was—whether we like to admit it or not—also a controversial location. As I hope to show in the following, there was more than intermediality related to film practices at NECS this year, namely, a political intermediality (or was it interference?) in practices related to the dialogue between two political and economic systems which until 30 years ago, due to their distinct ways of producing and consuming media, were not talking to each other.
Given this one-time rupture, the feeling in the air in Gdańsk was that, while not fully vanished during the recent era that marked the East’s difficult and controversial transition to capitalism, the hatchet symbolizing the erstwhile animosity between East and West ought by now to be definitely buried in the ground of liberalism. This was apparent as early as Miroslaw Przylipiak, the meticulous local organizer of the conference, gave his introductory address. Holding up the conference program in front of a widely diverse audience, Przylipiak pointed to the picture on the back cover to draw our attention to a color photograph taken so as to imitate the feel of a socialist-era lecture hall. In this sepia-toned picture a rather despondent female student dressed in a nondescript block-print shirt and beige skirt holds under her arm a textbook that rather conspicuously displays the title “The Political Economy of Socialism” on its faded red cover. Aside from the (photo-shoped) intermediality resembling a mise-en-abyme effect, which has its own implications for film practices and theory, the photograph symbolised, as Miroslaw pointed out with a particular tinge of pride in his soothing voice the city’s rupture with its dictatorial past, and overall, Poland’s unrestrained embrace of Western-style democracy in the age of European integration.
For a traditionally left-leaning institution like academia, this rupture has its own implications: While Western universities in the last few decades have picked up the pace of condemnation of neoliberal institutions which are currently viewed as agents of a nefarious capitalist system, things look a bit different for East European countries like Poland: Stuck between the resurging nationalism of a rightist government and the country’s three-decade long fervent commitment to European integration, Polish academia seems eager to sever all ideological ties with anything reminding itself of its socialist past, and to favor an alignment with the very neo-liberalism condemned by the West.
The schism between East and West seems to continue running its course therefore, albeit with a mutation: If Western theorists were at one time staunch supporters of the early Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, their stance softened somewhat in the decades following Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes. Even so, Western intellectuals continued to view the idea of Communism—the one practiced in the Eastern bloc1 included—with a certain admiration. Not the same can be said about intellectuals living under the authoritarian regimes of the ‘Eastern bloc’. If most of the Soviet ‘satellites’ saw a certain thaw in cultural practices between the late 1950s and 1960s, which culminated in the light, if short-lived, version of Communism made popular by Czechoslovakia’s Alexander Dubček and its “socialism with a human face” in 1968, the 1980s brought back renewed Soviet pressure, particularly in a rebellious country like Czechoslovakia which remembered the tragic crushing of the Prague Spring. This determined Milan Kundera in 1984 to melodramatically pronounce the “disappearance of the cultural home of Central Europe” to what he perceived to be the engulfment of Soviet Russia. (Kundera 1984)
Inasmuch as memory studies are concerned, it is interesting to see this year’s conference therefore as a moment on the road of transformation, but also as proof that the heritage of socialism for the Eastern bloc 30 years after 1989 is ambivalent if not downright conflictual. After Przylipiak’s introduction, this became even more apparent in the thesis of the first keynote speaker’s address. In tone with the theme of intermediality, using Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as example, film theorist and practitioner Mieke Bal spoke mostly about the incongruities of adapting boredom for the screen: Offering intriguing quotes from Flaubert’s novel in which—as in slow cinema — nothing happens, Bal intimated the difficulties of translating the novelist’s textually rich passages to film, something which constituted one of the most intriguing points of her talk.
Politics returned to her address soon thereafter, however, when, referencing such theorists of cultural capitalism as Eva Illouz, Bal introduced the latter’s term “emotional capitalism” (Illouz 2007) to signify the death trap of modernity to which Emma Bovary herself succumbs, a theme that, Bal intimates, has interested her since the beginning of her theoretical work. In fact, possibly the strongest point of her address is her thesis that Flaubert was conscious of the turmoil brought on by the deadly mélange between capitalism and modernity long before Freud asked this question (particularly in relation to what would later develop into feminism). Moreover, according to Bal, Flaubert’s warning seems to also have predated Marx, whose writings became popular only a few years after the French novelist intimated his skepticism about modernity, she argued.
Stimulating as her talk was, particularly for the implications of emotional capitalism in today’s neoliberal society, Bal’s talk took a sharp political turn at the end. Veering abruptly from mainly a cultural critique of capitalism approached through the timeframe of early modernism—maybe in a concession made to the spirit of the city which birthed anti-communism in the 1980s—the talk ended on a surprising note when, using an ex-abrupto concluding slide, Bal condemned what she called the appearance of capitalism with a Stalinist inner-core. If Stalinism didn’t find a place in her pertinent application of Flaubert to contemporaneity, the condemnation of nationalist regimes in Eastern Europe personified on her slide through pictures of Orban, Kaczynski, Putin, and (yes, even though exogenous to the East) Trump, represented a somewhat hurried and not altogether in-depth conclusion to an otherwise solid lecture on narratology and adaptation.
If Mieke Bal’s address gave the conference in Gdańsk a political edge, in Catherine Grant’s third day keynote lecture things returned to more non-ideological territory, as it were, moving closer to the declared theme of the conference. A visual artist in her own right—with a running exhibit in the conference hall to prove it—the Birkbeck, University of London professor intimated her working method used in the creation of her collage pieces. Combining footage from classic and contemporary films, which oftentimes play side by side on the same screen, Grant seeks to remediate and reformulate a view of feminism that neither criticism nor theory by themselves are often able to intimate. In fact, intermediality figured as a leitmotif in her presentation, and that meant a particular focus on post-digital story-telling techniques, which this year’s conference sought to discuss. In that sense, the theme couldn’t have been more timely: According to Thomas Elsaesser, in an era in which found footage films are gaining an increasingly larger visibility, we are witnessing a shift from the mimetic representational mode of realist cinema to an environment in which the archival image is undergoing transformation and recontextualization (from the “The NECS 2019 Conference” Call for Papers). This repositioning of the image, Grant’s creative work seems to teach us, is instrumental in not only restructuring our filmmaking styles, but in helping us relate—through widely available visual data—to a new, post-digital context which could tell us more about who we are in a constantly changing cultural environment. And Grant’s message was simple: Leaving all theory and practical conventions aside, she straightforwardly urged her audience to “just try it,” that is enrich the scholarly community with a practitioner’s view of theory, as it were, a practice that such archival-based media work as her own demonstrates.
If Eastern Europe didn’t figure in any of the keynote speakers’ addresses except as a reference (and a negative one at that),2 theorizing the position of Eastern European film and media in the global environment was central to some of the individual panels at the conference. Covering a wide range of topics such as transmediation, archival storytelling, social media, remediation, and body/identity in a global environment, talks also focused on narrative cinema in Eastern Europe, Balkan cinemas in post-digital times, transition era cinemas in Central Europe, and even a panel on mainland Chinese and Hong Kong cinema. In the peculiar climate of alembicated East-West relations discussed above, as well as in the ongoing debate of Poland’s and Eastern Europe’s cultural identity in an ever-changing geopolitical context, the diversity of such panels demonstrates a clear desire for uninterrupted dialogue.
Dialogue and openness was also underscored in a workshop organised by the NECS “Pub Comm” committee. This year it was dedicated to “Open Science”, asking participants to voice their ideas concerning Open Access to scholarship interactively. Current political issues were not addressed in the workshop. Since independent Open Access journal publishing as well as traditional academic journals are under attack in Poland since last year, this development was discussed over coffee and cold cucumber soup. A new law forces scholars in the humanities to publish in journals which are indexed in a non-open as well as commercially driven system of metrics. One can only hope that open repositories and databases such as the Germany based Mediarep or the international platform MediarXiv,3 an ambitious free digital archive destined to host articles, book chapters and other scholarly material (whether preprints or published work) on film and media, will remedy this situation. Since this NECS committee seeks to increase scholarly access to otherwise costly and difficult-to-access resources it could in the future be more inclusive towards the East as well as the South (the next conference will take place in Palermo), engage with the more recent or future European member states, offer training workshops and develop strategies to counter the monopolising forces of the big aggregators.
As this initiative equally demonstrates, whether Eastern or Western in approach (whatever these markers mean in a post-socialist context), the conference in Gdańsk shows that Western-bound as Poland may portray itself at the moment, what the European academic community values above all is the facade of a dialogue between East and West that reflects the solidarity of this community—pun intended—in name only; or to paraphrase Mieke Bal: This is cooperation on the outside, rupture at the core.
I would therefore like to mention in closing one thing: Favored as it may have been this year in Gdańsk, the academic dialogue of the future should be more clearly contextualized within the historical trajectory of a formerly divided continent whose identity cannot be—as current socio-political turmoil shows it—taken for granted. After all, the diversity in voices and structures that the NECS steering committee clearly favored this year (in the panels more evidently than in the keynote addresses), comes from weaving together both the ‘ideological’ Eastern past and the ‘liberal’ Western present. Given both sides’ commitment to openness, I believe it is not too much to ask that a responsible dialogue between diverse forms of heritage in an enlarged Europe (that of diverse historical pasts included) will make the kind of intermediality present this year in Gdańsk even more promising for furthering critical dialogue in the future.
Lucian Țion
National University of Singapore
e0008668@u.nus.edu
1 Although an ambiguous term, by ‘Eastern bloc’ in this article I refer to the group of Eastern European countries situated in between the Soviet Union and Western Europe, therefore the ‘satellite countries’ like Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, etc.
2 I am referring to the slide in Mieke Bal’s lecture discussed above, in which, by referencing the figures of Putin, Orbán, and Kaczyński, she implied that Eastern Europe might be sliding in an authoritarian direction.
3 “MediArXiv is a free, community-led digital archive for media, film, and communication research (hosted on the Open Science Framework). We provide a non-profit platform for media, film, and communication scholars to upload their working papers, pre-prints, accepted manuscripts (post-prints), and published manuscripts. The service is open for articles, books, and book chapters. The mission of MediArXiv is to open up media, film, and communication research to a broader readership and to help build the future of scholarly communication. In the course of its developments, MediArXiv is working toward interoperability with other important open access scholarly platforms in the humanities and social sciences, such as Humanities Commons.” https://mediarxiv.com/ [27/6/2919]
Lucian Țion is a Theatre Studies PhD candidate in his final year at the National University of Singapore. His PhD thesis explores the similarities and contrasts between East European and Chinese cinemas in the socialist and postsocialist eras. His articles were published in Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Senses of Cinema, and Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Film and Media Studies.
Illouz, Eva. 2007. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge.
Kundera, Milan. 1984. “The Tragedy of Central Europe.” New York Review of Books, 31(7): 33-38.
“The NECS 2019 Conference”, CFP: “Structures and Voices: Storytelling in Post-Digital Times,” https://necs.org/conference/cfp-2019/cfp-conference.
Tion, Lucian. 2019. Review: “The NECS conference in Gdańsk, 2019. The Network for Cinema and Media Studies Goes Back to Eastern Europe Thirty Years after the Downfall of Communism.” Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 8 (2019). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2019.0008.171
URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/
Copyright: The text of this article has been published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This license does not apply to the media referenced in the article, which are subject to the individual rights owner’s terms.