Introduction
Part One: Documents of Communism: Lost and Found
Rév: The Man in the White Raincoat
Uitz: Communist Secret Services on the Screen: The Adventures of
the Duna-gate Scandal in and Beyond Hungarian Media
Varga: Façades: Private and Public in Kádár’s Kiss by Péter
Forgács
Solomon: Filmmaker’s Experience: Reconstructing Reality from
Communist Archive Documents
Part Two: Subjects of Nostalgia: Selling the Past
Daković: Out of the Past: Memories and Nostalgia in (Post) Yugoslav
Cinema
Sarkisova: Long Farewells: The Anatomy of the Soviet Past in
Contemporary Russian Cinema
Pobłocki: The Economics of Nostalgia: Socialist Films and
Capitalist Commodities in Contemporary Poland
Dominková: “We have democracy, don’t we?” Czech Society Reflected
by Contemporary Czech Cinema
Part Three: Objects of Memory: Museums, Monuments, Memorials
Horváth: The Redistribution of the Memory of Socialism: Identity
Formations in Hungary after 1989
Cristea - Radu-Bucurenci: Raising the Cross. Exorcising Romania’s
Communist Past in Museums, Memorials and Monuments
Vukov: The “Unmemorable” and the “Unforgettable”: “Museumizing” the
Socialist Past in Post-1989 Bulgaria
Mark: Containing Fascism: History in Post-Communist Baltic
Occupation and Genocide Museums
Main: How Communism Is Displayed? Exhibitions and Museums of
Communism in Poland
Oksana Sarkisova is a Research Archivist at OSA Archivum, Central
European University and Program Director of the International
Documentary Film Festival Verzió.
Péter Apor is permanent research fellow at the Institute of
History, Humanities Research Center, Budapest.
"With their collection of essays, Oksana Sarkisova and Péter Apor
aim at an interim statement about this multifaceted wave of
remembrance by focusing on visual material, namely cinema and
museums. Their geographical scope is broad - from the Baltic region
to east central Europe and the Balkans, including Russia. They have
organized the thirteen contributions in three parts "so as to
reflect upon the concepts of 'document,' 'nostalgia' and 'objects,'
which are crucial, but underexplored aspects of the complicated
relationships between professional historical work and other spcial
practices of evoking the past." Past for the Eyes is a major
contribution to the booming field of studies exploring how
communism is remembered in postcommunist societies."
*Slavic Review*
"Books on the CEE transformations that deal with media and popular
cultures should be welcomed. Past for the Eyes belongs to this
extraordinary breed. The book is devoted to the visual
representations of the socialist / communist past and the forms
they took. The interconnected processes of visualization of the
past, and the collective memory sedimentation are the main focus.
The book brings together perspectives of linked but still
distinctive ways of enquiry: visual studies, cultural studies, area
studies, museum studies and contemporary history with its passion
for ethnography and oral evidence. One of the common threads which
stitch the chapters together and turn the collection into a quite
homogenous regional report on an updated 'structure of feeling',
are the authors' horizons referring to the experience of being
post-socialist in a postmodern condition. They help to sense that
there is something peculiar about reconsidering, revisiting and
even rejecting a politically evil regime from the perspective that
does not allow for any clear discrimination between what is
ultimately good and evil. Simultaneity seems to be an important
strategy for both researchers and filmmakers as objects of their
enquiry. In many cases chapters recall visual texts which deplore
the socialist regime while they simultaneously remain aware of the
limits of any orthodoxy. This attitude of alertness and reflexivity
is far removed from any 'so-we-will-be-free-now' optimism, and the
collapse of this particular ideology is combined with the awareness
that 'ideology is not a historically specific bad thing', as John
Corner put it elsewhere."
*Politics and Culture*
"Intellectually engaging and timely, Past for the Eyes inquires
into how socialism is shown and seen in the cinema and museums of
contemporary Eastern Europe. This collection of fourteen fine
essays joins an exciting (and rapidly intensifying) debate in the
social sciences and humanities concerned with the memory's many
manifestations in today's world. The volume demonstrates that the
former communist Bloc offers an especially productive setting in
which to examine practices of social remembrance, especially those
that pertain to the memorialization of the recent Marxist-Leninist
past. Threading through the volume are questions concerning the
uneasy relationship between popular visual representations and
professionally produced historiographic texts as means for
recuperating socialism. The contributors ask whether imagery on the
screen and objects displayed in museum spaces have as much
authority in representing the era of Party rule as the written,
'institutionalized' word. Can word and image as agents of the past
coexist in a complementary dialectic? Who is more 'reliable' as
producer of historical knowledge - the historian or the artist?
Past for the Eyes is an intelligent and welcome addition to the
study of socialist memory (and any other memory, for that matter)
through film and museum displays. Richly illustrated and smartly
argued, the essays comprising this groundbreaking volume should be
read by scholars and students interested in East European socialism
as an 'unforgettable' past that persists in the present."
*Journal of Baltic Studies*
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