New Czech blog about integration in urban space in Europe. Hmmmm. Could be interesting.

Notes on Central European Cinema

The clip above is from the beginning of Daisies by Vera Chytilová. As our film technician pointed out to me the other day, it's hard for most people really to grasp how completely innovative much of the technique was that Chytilová used in making this film in 1966. Apart from the incredibly subversive content of the film, both in terms of the private lives of these two wacky characters, but also in terms of the film images of explosions and other signs of broader social critique, the film is also pretty amazing in terms of the images she managed to produce on film in the absence of digital technologies.

. . .For those of you who didn't know, I'm teaching a Central European cinema course with a professor at U of M this term. I am bracing myself for the upcoming films, Adoption (Örökbefogadás) by Márta Mészáros* and A Woman Alone (Kobieta Samotna) by Agnieszka Holland (better known in the US for her Holocaust film Europa, Europa).



Adoption (see first image above) isn't quite as painfully depressing as Holland's devastating film (see second image above), but both have a kind of unnerving, creeping loneliness that penetrates you as you're watching them. If they weren't genius, I don't know that it would be bearable.


For our other films about gender and women under state socialism, we watched Milos Forman's wonderful 1965 film Loves of a Blonde (Lásky jedné plavovlásky; see image above), Dušan Makavejev's Man is Not a Bird (Covek Nije Tica; 1965) and Vera Chytilová's masterpiece Daisies (Sedmikrasky; 1966; see the clip above!) in the past couple of weeks, since we finished the unit on Holocaust film.

* See the entry on Mészáros here, too, if you're interested, and more on Makavejev here. For a discussion (in Czech) of Loves of a Blonde that includes lots of stills from the film, check this out. For some more discussion of women in Polish women filmmakers' films, check out this discussion in Kinoeye.)

Writing this little entry is getting me really excited about seeing some of these directors' other films, like WR: The Mysteries of the Organism, the film that got Makavejev exiled from Yugoslavia for its sexual-political content (see image below), and Mészáros's Eltávozott Nap, the first feature-length film made by a female filmmaker in Hungary. Oh, and Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which I somehow never managed to see before!

Below is a little clip of Mészáros's Eltávozott Nap.

By the way, in an only distantly related vein, one of the stranger pieces of news from this part of the world recently is that electricity seems to be nothing more than a game of cat and mouse in Albania. No, really. I wonder if I might be able to use this piece of contemporary trivia to my advantage in convincing a friend of mine to watch Emir Kusturica's bizarre and hysterical film Black Cat, White Cat (Crna Macka, Beli Macor; 1998; see below) with me. (Of course, when I refer to a 72-hour blackout in a European capital as "trivia," that is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, perhaps drawing on the older meaning of trivia -- that is, etymologically speaking, a crossroads where three roads meet).

Grad school highs and lows

The good news: I have finally, after more than a year and a half of delay, finished my two final papers for Qualitative Methods. I have my portfolio all ready to submit, and will do so tomorrow. It's not perfect, but it's done. And that is something. And actually, I do really like one of the papers, and my colleague I wrote about seemed to, also. That's also something.

The other good news: I have a paper idea for my Democracy course (also for finishing out a long-incomplete class) that my other professor likes, that she thinks will work well with the course materials, and that I know will also help me tremendously in kick-starting my work on my research internship, which I have to finish next semester. I'm going to examine ideas of participation embedded in housing programs for Roma in Central Europe, considering cultural assumptions about Roma implied in the policies and implementation, and reflecting on connections to rhetoric of the deserving and undeserving poor in American social welfare history. There's really a there there, and I'm excited about it, I have the field data to support this line of analysis, and I'm looking forward to thinking about it.

The bad news: I'm supposed to have submitted work to the professor with whom I'm doing an independent study, today, in preparation for our meeting tomorrow. I have nothing done. I've been teaching, writing and helping prepare the final exam for the Anthro 101 students, writing for other courses (see above!), and commuting to and working in Detroit to finish out my field placement at AFG. Really, that's about all I've been doing except writing in my blog and taking photographs. I've had the occasional Gilmore Girls break to keep myself vaguely sane, but then gone back to writing. And obviously I've taken care of the minimal daily requirements of sleeping, eating, maintaining the minimal level of hygiene, and filling up my grocery cart and my gas tank. Seriously, that's really it. But, it doesn't change the cold stark fact that the work isn't done. Fuck. What do I do?

What I want to do is delay our meeting yet another few days and bust my ass reading and writing this weekend. But I fear I've lost my credibility now. Argh!!! Why is this so hard? And I'm so damned tired -- I only got back from our exam meeting in Ann Arbor at 11:00 last night. SIGH.

Update: I wrote to her asking for another damned extension and telling her about my revised schedule plan. I'm going to work work work tomorrow afternoon and Friday and the weekend and Monday, so that by the time Wednesday rolls around, I can hopefully have solid work done on my doctoral papers and can focus on my field placement. And then somewhere in there I'll fit in my grading for 101.