East, West and Centre: Reframing Post-1989 European Cinema ed. by Michael Gott and Todd Herzog (review)

In the sixteenth century, a Bohemian artist visualized Europe as a woman, Europa regina, whose head and crown were placed on the Iberian Peninsula, while her heart, both symbolically and geographically, was in Bohemia. The queen's arms represented the periphery, both to the north in Scandinavia as well as to the south and the Mediterranean. Still today, the borders and limits of Europe are contested (and constructed) with changing geopolitical realities influencing how we imagine Europe and where the geographic and cultural heart may lie. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent expansion of the European Union, the center and periphery once again shifted, so that the geographic heart of Europe may once again lie in Bohemia, even though the economic heart may arguably lie still farther west, along the Franco-German axis. This new volume of essays, edited by Michael Gott and Todd Herzog, surveys recent cinematic explorations of these borders and how they have been affected by movement, mobility, and transgressions in this expanded Europe.

In their introduction, Gott and Herzog state that their goal is not to present a static or settled vision of what Europe is, rather they seek to offer essays which explore "the ways in which notions of East and West, national and transnational, central and marginal, are being rethought and reframed in contemporary European cinema" (6). While they state that for the purposes of their study, the eastern border corresponds to the border of the European Union, the present volume nonetheless includes discussion of a variety of films from the center and the eastern periphery. While there is little mention of the cinemas and cultures of the West and South, the majority of the essays nevertheless explore the relation between the center and the margins and how the cinema of the periphery is informed by and relates to discourses of the center. Conceptually, Gott and Herzog divide the collection into three sections. The first, "Redrawing the Lines: De/Recentering Europe," concentrates primarily on French and German films that explore the East-West divide. While European cultural production has often been defined by the economically constructed North-South dichotomy, the essays in this first section analyze the borders, walls, and demarcations that divide eastern and western Europe and consequently recenter Europe. The opening essay, for instance, reconsiders the legacy of the Berlin Wall and the relationship between space and historical meaning. The remaining contributions in this section, perhaps not surprisingly, examine road movies which traverse (and transgress) the East-West divide. From the comedies Stealth (Lionel Baier, 2006), In July (Fatih Akin, 2000) and Salami Aleikum (Ali Samadi Ahadi, 2009) to the more complex films of Michael Haneke and Krzysztof Kieślowski, and finally to two devastating films about human trafficking and capitalism, Ulrich Seidl's Import/Export (2007) and Szabolcs Hajdu's Bibliothèque Pascal (2010) (both of which explore the underside of eastern and western Europe), the films discussed in part 1 present visions of the East as imagined by directors from west-central Europe and on how mobility can illuminate both stereotypes and the realities of eastern Europe.

Part 2, "Border Spaces, Eastern Margins and Eastern Markets: Belonging and the Road to/from Europe," contains several intriguing essays on "minor" cinemas, which offer important analyses and overviews of less-studied cinemas. Included in this section are discussions and broader overviews of recent Bulgarian, Greek, Romanian, Baltic, and Balkan cinema. Eastern cinema of the post-Soviet era confronts a number of challenges, as these studies articulate: on the one hand, they seek to define a sense of space and identity freed from the influence of the Soviet era, at once looking to the west (Romania) yet also struggling to define a sense of local identity (Lithuania). Coproductions, as Eva Näripea argues in the case of Estonian cinema, are similarly fraught with the challenges...