Monthly Archive: May 2013

60th Belgrade Documentary and Short Film Festival

APRIL 2-6, 2013. BELGRADE YOUTH CENTER AND OTHER VENUES.

April 2013 marked the 60th year of the Belgrade Documentary and Short Film Festival, which places it among the oldest film festivals of any type in Europe. In light of this unique position within the international film festival landscape, it seems that an investigation into the history of the Belgrade Festival, or “Kratki metar,” and its connection with the unpredictable political winds in the former Socialist Yugoslavia (now post-socialist Serbia) would be a welcome addition to the annals of general film culture.

Towards that, a young researcher named Dunja Jelenkovi? has … Read more

Djurdja Bartlett, “Fashion East: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism”

DJURDJA BARTLETT, FASHION EAST: THE SPECTRE THAT HAUNTED SOCIALISM, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.: THE MIT PRESS, 2010, 344 PP.

Impressive in its scope, beautifully illustrated, and admirable for its depth and breadth of archival research, Djurdja Bartlett’s sumptuous book Fashion East: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism does not in any way disappoint the reader looking for a survey of sartorial history in the Soviet Communist bloc. Bartlett does a magisterial job in traversing the cultural space of Soviet fashion from the 1920s “avant-garde” to the late Soviet era. Extraordinary also is Bartlett’s deftness at integrating the post-WWII fashion histories and discourses from … Read more

Interview with Matei Bejenaru

Matei Bejenaru is a visual artist who lives and works in Iasi, Romania. He teaches photography and video art at “George Enescu” University of Arts. He is founding member of Vector Association in Iasi and director of the Periferic Contemporary Art Biennial (1997-2008). He has participated in several group exhibitions, including those at Level 2 Gallery, Tate Modern, London (2007) and the Taipei Biennial (2008). Between November 2010 and July 2011, his experimental project for choral music Songs for a better future was shown at The Drawing Room and Tate Modern (Turbine Hall) in London, at Western Front in Vancouver, … Read more

Birgit Beumers and Nancy Condee (eds.), “The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov”

The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov, Birgit Beumers and Nancy Condee (Eds.), London: I.B. Tauris, 2011, 262 PP.

Alexander Sokurov is, by any standards, a highly original filmmaker, but one whose work is dark, disjointed, and often frustrating to view. The reasons for this are rooted only partially in the norms of auteur cinema that place a premium on making the medium itself difficult. In the case of Sokurov, this difficulty is intensified by a kind of anxiety of influence vis-à-vis his mentor Andrei Tarkovsky, whose vibrant, spiritualized cinematography would have been hard, if not impossible, to top. Sokurov reacted … Read more