Apparatus — Issue 20 | 10th-Anniversary Edition

Editorial Introduction

Apparatus20_EditorialIntroduction.docx.tmp/word/media/image1.jpg
Cover of Apparatus #20. Design by Nino Dzandzava, based on a screenshot from Slike iz života udarnika / Life of a Shock Force Worker (Bahrudin Bato Čengić, 1972, Yugoslavia).

A decade ago, in 2015, Natascha Drubek launched Apparatus as a bold experiment: a peer-reviewed, multilingual, not-for-profit journal devoted to the study of film, media, and digital cultures of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia. Apparatus received 3-year start-up funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The journal embraced an open-access ethos long before it became a mainstream academic aspiration in the field. Ten years on, we proudly present Issue 20 – a landmark that testifies to the vitality of our scholarly community and the collaborative spirit that sustains it.

From the beginning, Apparatus set out to be more than a repository of articles. We aimed to create an evolving platform where diverse linguistic, methodological and disciplinary voices could meet without the usual paywalls or geographic silos. Today, the journal publishes in English, German, French, Polish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Czech, Latvian, Russian, and other languages, ensuring that scholarship speaks in the idioms of its subjects and audiences alike. This is reflected in the diversity of our editorial board: Manuel Burghardt (Universität Leipzig), Vladimir Blaževski (Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje), Ewa Ciszewska (University of Łódź), Tereza Czesany Dvořáková (Charles University), Raoul Eshelman (LMUt Munich), Norbert Franz (Universität Potsdam), Nikica Gilić (University of Zagreb), Adelheid Heftberger (Das Bundesarchiv), Anke Hennig, Naum Klejman, Michal Kosák (Institute of Czech Literature, CAS), Ivan Kozlenko (Ukraine), Magdalena Marszałek (Universität Potsdam), Rachel Morley (UCL SSEES), Bohdan Nebesio (Brock University), Irina Sandomirskaja (Södertörn University), Alexander Schwarz, Dmitri Zakharine, and Tanja Zimmermann (Universität Leipzig).

Milestones invite retrospection, and we wish to honour the colleagues whose expertise guided Apparatus through its formative years. We warmly thank our former Editorial Team members: Mario Slugan (Managing Editor & Editor), John Leman Riley (English Language Editor), Elena Hamidy (Review Editor & Managing Editor), John-Thomas Eltringham (IT Director), and Evgeniia Trufanova (Review Editor). We also gratefully acknowledge the dedication of our former interns: Karolina Anna Hicke, Theo Kraus, Florian Olbrich, Maria Oprea, and Natalia Livshitz.

Our current Editorial Team consists of:

Apparatus has been hosted by Freie Universität Berlin, and we extend our sincere thanks to Carola Fanselow and Ronald Steffen for their generous support and technical guidance.

The contributions assembled in this anniversary issue span a century of East-European and Eurasian screen culture: Dijana Jelača reclaims Yugoslav editor Olga Skrigin as an auteur of the cutting room; Nino Dzandzava decodes Eldar Shengelaia’s satirical Blue Mountains and its after-lives in today’s Georgia; Larysa Naumova uncovers how 1920s Ukrainian theorists of cinema borrowed from photography, painting and architecture to shape frame composition; Raymond De Luca maps a feedback loop between David Lynch and late-/post-Soviet cinema; Anna Hurina re-reads the city-symphony genre through the contrasting urban imaginaries of the Kaufman brothers; Sonya Vseliubska shows how recent Ukrainian documentaries wield technology to mobilise global opinion; Viktoria Paranyuk’s video essay places Chantal Akerman and Lana Gogoberidze in dialogue over women’s creative space and intergenerational trauma; interviews by Olga Blackledge and Eva Zak with festival director Heleen Gerritsen and curator Konstantin Akinsha probe, respectively, the state of Central-Eastern European cinema and the modernist roots of Ukrainian art. Three incisive book reviews round out the volume, broadening the conversation with fresh perspectives on the region’s media histories. Together, they emphasise Apparatus’s core belief: that critical scholarship prospers when disciplinary boundaries are flexible and knowledge flows freely. As always, every article, review, and dossier can be read, downloaded, and shared without restriction.

Powered entirely by the voluntary efforts of our remarkable team, Apparatus has developed into a Scopus-indexed, open-access platform that uniquely bridges the West–East scholarly divide, fostering research on Central, Eastern, South-Eastern European, Russian, and Eurasian film, media, and digital cultures into a truly global conversation. None of this would be possible without our authors, reviewers, and readers. We invite you to continue contributing to Apparatus by submitting innovative research, proposing special issues, volunteering as peer reviewers, and sharing our work in your classrooms and networks. Let this 20th issue serve not as a conclusion, but as a new beginning towards the next decade of open, multilingual, and globally accessible scholarship.

The Editorial Team
July 20, 2025

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