Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe: From Communism to Capitalism is the first scholarly collection that applies discourses of ecocinema studies to moving-image practices across East Central Europe under state socialism and beyond. As indicated by the five broad sections that organise the material in a roughly chronological order – “Industrialising the Bloc: Cinema of the Socialist Period”; “Environmental Crisis and the Nuclear Imaginary”; “Animals between the Natural and the Social”; “From Communism to Capitalism: Privatisation and the Commons”; and “Toward an Eastern European Ecocinema” – the collection has an ambitious thematic and conceptual scope. The fifteen contributions reflect diverse approaches characteristic of the interdisciplinary nature of ecocinema studies, including contextual and textual analysis, affect theory, ideological critique, structural anthropology, and psychoanalysis. The genres and forms of visual materials likewise run the gamut: photographic albums, documentary and fiction film, experimental video and performance art, and music videos. Given the constraints of the review format, I will highlight a selection of chapters that demonstrate compelling scholarship at the intersection of ecocriticism and cinema studies of East Central Europe and that exemplify the collection’s diverse geographic and cultural reach.
The editors, Masha Shpolberg and Lukas Brasiskis, set the volume’s objective in the introduction: “to apply a systematically ecocritical approach” to a variety of moving-image practices made in the region (3). Rather than aiming to define ecocinema, Shpolberg and Brasiskis have gathered research that teaches us “to see films – all films – ecocritically” (8). The introduction provides indispensable historical, political, and economic contexts while situating the book’s contributions within the field of eco film criticism. The editors posit the region that has transitioned from a planned economy to a market-driven one as especially generative for cultural analysis of environmental concerns. The collection’s handling of the role of the Soviet Union and Russia is apt: while the introduction and volume as a whole address the country’s geopolitical dominance, particularly during the post-World-War-II years and within the Socialist Bloc framework, the articles represent a diverse range of national artistic expressions, an important position in an anthology of this kind.
The first section opens with Alice Lovejoy and Katie Trumpener’s chapter, which focuses on the history of mining in the border region of Saxony (Germany) and Bohemia (the Czech Republic). Told in parallel, the stories of environmental devastation in the Ore Mountains region and their representations in fiction cinema, photography, painting, and documentary film offer a satisfyingly complex view of the topic. Interwoven with a close analysis of artworks depicting the ravaged landscape is a long view of mining in the area and the history of eco-movements in the GDR and Czechoslovakia. Josef Sudek’s series of photographs, taken between 1959 and 1962 and published posthumously in 1999 in a book titled Sad Landscape (Smutná krajina), bear witness to the devastation caused by surface mining in North Bohemia. The images, which could not be published before 1989, depart from other depictions of the area and offer a visual counternarrative to the official rhetoric “of the Ore Mountains as a powerhouse of the Czechoslovak economy” (27). On the GDR side, Kurt Tetzlaff’s DEFA documentary Memories of a Landscape – for Manuela (Erinnerung an eine Landschaft – für Manuela, 1983, GDR) stands out as an example of subtle environmental critique. The redemptive narrative chronicles the destruction of old villages to make space for the expansion of open-pit mining, and the resulting resettlement of the displaced into modern housing; however, the authors’ insightful formal analysis reveals that the documentary registers “mute mourning, even mute opposition” (37).
The Chernobyl catastrophe and its early portrayal on film are the focus of Masha Shpolberg’s chapter. Two Soviet documentaries, The Bell of Chernobyl (Kolokol Chernobylia,1987, USSR) and Chronicle of Difficult Weeks (Chernobyl: khronika trydnykh nedel, 1987, USSR), walk the line between assuaging the authorities and acknowledging “the value of liminal experiences and thinking one’s way through events beyond human measure” (137). In addition to illuminating the films’ difficult production history, Shpolberg places them within the tradition of the essay film. This move culminates in a revelatory discussion of voiceover narration and reflexivity, tools borrowed from the essay film, that prime the audience to listen for radiation and notice the effects of this invisible force. While not essay films proper, these works nonetheless allowed the documentarians, as they were trying to come to terms with the immensity of the disaster, “to resist the urge to contain and explain away the unknown, staying with it for some time instead” (137).
Science fiction has long explored the relationship between humans and the universe. In her chapter, Natalija Majasova offers close readings of several Soviet science fiction films, identifying the figure of the woman alien as an intriguing trope that counteracts the unitary ideological perspective. Majasova argues that this trope, by the early 1970s, allows for engagement with otherness, “mediating between different worlds and various positionalities, navigating between humanity, technology, nature, and extraterrestrial intelligence” (79).
The nexus of destruction, ecological awareness, and the past figures prominently in Kris Van Heuckelom’s contribution that investigates the important role forests and woodlands play in Polish culture and cultural memory. The author provides close and contextual readings of Grzegorz Króliliewicz’s experimental project Trees (Drzewa, 1995, Poland) and Agnieszka Holland’s fictional narrative Spoor (Pokot, 2017, Poland) as the films that mark “the gradual transition from anthropocentric (and nation-centred) views of environmental protection toward nonhuman-centred (and transnational) perspectives” (239). Tied to different historical contexts, they offer a reconsideration of the “woodland myth” and, through various visual strategies, shift the spectator’s identification with humans toward imagined perspectives that are more aligned with those of woods and animals.
The thread of anthropocentrism and human control more generally runs through several contributions. Raymond De Luca examines the representation of animals in contemporary Hungarian cinema, arguing for a reading of onscreen animals that abstains from allegorical interpretation. Released from symbolic frameworks, such an approach could be part of the acknowledgement that, the scholar reminds us, “the history of cinema is contingent upon broken animal bodies” (169). Although the narratives of White God (2014) and On Body and Soul (2017) invite figurative readings, which De Luca offers somewhat contrary to his own proposition, his intervention emphasises animal autonomy and animals’ status as our cohabitants rather than semiotic signs, implicitly dismantling the anthropocentric view of cinema and beyond. In this, De Luca’s chapter resonates with the concerns raised by Meta Mazaj in relation to Slovenian culture and environmental art.
Mazaj draws on Claire Colebrook’s critique of the anthropocentric ethos seen in much of popular culture, including ecocinema, that takes as its core premise the superiority of the human, a position inseparable from the neoliberal belief system. Mazaj questions the notion of “a narrating and global ‘we’” that creates an imaginary where a “threat to man” is “presented as a threat to a highly specific, affluent, over-consuming urban middle-class” (221). She urges us to be mindful of the imaginary that ecocinema often constructs, for it is “intimately tied with the question of narration, the ability to make meaning, to make sense of the world, and a possible collapse of this sense achieved through the stability and structure of narrativization when faced with a challenge to imagine a different relationality between the human and the world” (221). How can this “we” speak for those who are marginalized and peripheral, including small nations and their cinemas, particularly within the neoliberalist structures in which they have increasingly become entrenched? Mazaj then goes on to discuss several Slovenian artists, among them Andrej Zdravič, Maja Smrekar, and Sonja Prosenc, who work across different visual media and have made meaningful interventions in the ecocritical discourse, offering alternatives to the anthropocentric ethos.
The collection closes with the essay by Lukas Brasiskis that centres on our coexistence with elements and on their representation in contemporary moving-image art from East Central Europe. For Brasiskis, the elemental world is entangled with humans, our material infrastructures, and sociopolitical systems. Drawing on Nicholas Mirzoeff’s notion of elemental countervisuality, Brasiskis applies elemental critique to Ilona Németh’s The Fog (Hmla, 2013, Slovaika) and Ana Hušman’s Almost Nothing (2016, Croatia). The two artworks engage with atmospheric conditions – the fog in Németh’s video and the wind in Almost Nothing – to deliver, in Brasiskis’s incisive reading, a critique of the instrumentalisation of memory and history in postcommunist Slovakia and of aestheticised views and development of the historic island of Korčula in Croatia, respectively.
Whether entering the volume by way of Lida Oukaderova’s analysis of the Soviet politics of nature in the cinema of Mikhail Kalatozov and Larisa Shepitko; Barbora Bartunkova’s examination of a post-nuclear landscape and search for traces of the past in a new reading of the Czechoslovak New Wave film The End of August at the Hotel Ozone (Konec srpna v Hotelu Ozon, 1966, Czechoslovakia); Alice Bardan’s consideration of the dignified depiction of a group of Roma refugees living in a Belgrade suburb and their relationship to old recycled cars in the documentary Pretty Dyana (Lijepa Dyana, 2003, Serbia); or Eliza Rose’s interpretation of the science-fiction film Tender Spots (Czułe miejsca, 1981, Poland) as a crisis of masculinity informed by the environmental crisis in late-socialist Poland, the reader is bound to be rewarded.
Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe is valuable for several reasons. It shines a light on media cultures and cinemas that remain underrepresented, particularly in Anglophone academia. It creates an alternative and rich archive of media objects to draw on while augmenting ecocritical scholarship. Moreover, the volume manifests the vibrancy of East Central European film and media studies as evidenced by the interventions this diverse field makes into questions of anthropocentricity and anthropomorphism, climate and animal justice, and into environmental humanities more broadly. The collection stands as an invitation to continue probing our complex relationship with cinema and the world.
Viktoria Paranyuk
Pace University
vparanyuk@pace.edu
Viktoria Paranyuk is a lecturer in the Department of Film and Screen Studies at Pace University, a video essayist, and freelance programmer based in New York City. Her first book, Cinema of Sincerity: Soviet Films and Culture during the Thaw (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025), explores what she calls sincerity aesthetics and informal circulation of ideas in the cinemas of the post-Stalin years. Her research has been published in Film History, ASAP/Review, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, Apparatus, Slavic Review, and in edited collections, such as ReFocus: The Films of Larisa Shepitko (ed. Lida Oukaderova, EUP 2024).
Colebrook, Claire. 2019. “Slavery and the Trumpocene: It’s Not the End of the World.” Oxford Literary Review 41 (1): 40–50. https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2019.0264.
Colebrook, Claire. 2017. “Cinemas and Worlds.” Diacritics 45 (1): 25–48. https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2017.0001.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2014. “Visualizing the Anthropocene.” Public Culture 26 (2): 213–32. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2392039.
Sudek, Josef. 1999. Josef Sudek: Smutná krajina: Severozápadní Čechy 1957-1962. Litoměřicé: Galerie výtvarného umění v Litoměřicích.
Example: Vertov, Dziga. 2005. Entuziiazm: Symfoniia Donbasu / Enthusiasm: The Symphony of Donbass. Ukrainfil’m.
Andrejew, Piotr. 1981. Czułe miejsca / Tender Spots. Studio Filmowe KADR.
Enyedi, Ildikó. 2017. Testről és lélekről / On Body and Soul. Ernő Mesterházy, András Muhi, Mónika Mécs.
Holland, Agnieszka. 2017. Pokot / Spoor. Janusz Wachala, Krzysztof Zanussi.
Hušman, Ana. 2016. Almost Nothing.
Króliliewicz, Grzegorz. 1995. Drzewa / Trees. Studio Filmowe N, Telewizja Polska,
Mitić, Boris. 2003. Lijepa Dyana / Pretty Dyana: A Gypsy Recycling Saga. Boris Mitić.
Mundruczó, Kornél. 2014. Fehér isten / White God. The Chimney Pot, Film i Väst.
Németh, Ilona. 2013. Hmla / The Fog.
Schmidt, Jan. 1966. Konec srpna v Hotelu Ozon / The End of August at the Hotel Ozone. Československý armádní film.
Sergienko, Rollan, and Vladimir Sinelnikov. 1987. Kolokol Chernobylia / The Bell of Chernobyl. TsSDF.
Shevchenko, Vladimir. 1987. Chernobyl: khronika trydnykh nedel / Chronicle of Difficult Weeks. UkrKinoKhronika.
Tetzlaff, Kurt. 1983. Erinnerung an eine Landschaft – für Manuela / Memories of a Landscape – for Manuela. DEFA.
Paranyuk, Viktoria. 2025. Review: “Masha Shpolberg and Lukas Brasiskis (eds.): Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe: From Communism to Capitalism. Apparatus”. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 21. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2025.00021.412.
URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/
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