Page 159 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 159
Identity in a Notion
of the Eastern and Western
European Cinema1
If there is a distinctive trait of European cinema, it could be seen within
an attitude towards the category of identity in most representative and in-
tellectually challenging feature films. The very notion of identity opens a
field, where we encounter a number of relevant meanings as far as films
are concerned. There are common features between different approaches to
identity in the European cinema in different periods. The notion of iden-
tity concerns a number of its enunciations that touch upon philosophical
subjectivity, psychological subject, an ethnic entity, the political agent, and
so forth. All these different aspects of identity, which naturally are, in most
cases (but not necessarily so) inscribed in a constructions of characters,
are manifested in films from different periods of European cinematogra-
phy. Modernist movements of 1960s and 1970s both in Western Europe (as
in the French nouvel vague or young German cinema) and Eastern Central
Europe (especially Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia) ad-
dressed the theme of identity in a manner that could be read as ideological-
ly subversive. At the end of this chapter, I conclude that after the political
turmoil’s in 1989 the theme of identity emerges in a new context.
1 This chapter is derived from an article published in New Review of Film and Tele-
vision Studies on 11 Apr 2008, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/
full/10.1080/17400300701850616. (Štrajn, Darko. Identity in a notion of the Eastern
and Western European cinema. New review of film and television studies, ISSN 1740-
0309, April 2008, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 41-50.)
157
of the Eastern and Western
European Cinema1
If there is a distinctive trait of European cinema, it could be seen within
an attitude towards the category of identity in most representative and in-
tellectually challenging feature films. The very notion of identity opens a
field, where we encounter a number of relevant meanings as far as films
are concerned. There are common features between different approaches to
identity in the European cinema in different periods. The notion of iden-
tity concerns a number of its enunciations that touch upon philosophical
subjectivity, psychological subject, an ethnic entity, the political agent, and
so forth. All these different aspects of identity, which naturally are, in most
cases (but not necessarily so) inscribed in a constructions of characters,
are manifested in films from different periods of European cinematogra-
phy. Modernist movements of 1960s and 1970s both in Western Europe (as
in the French nouvel vague or young German cinema) and Eastern Central
Europe (especially Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia) ad-
dressed the theme of identity in a manner that could be read as ideological-
ly subversive. At the end of this chapter, I conclude that after the political
turmoil’s in 1989 the theme of identity emerges in a new context.
1 This chapter is derived from an article published in New Review of Film and Tele-
vision Studies on 11 Apr 2008, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/
full/10.1080/17400300701850616. (Štrajn, Darko. Identity in a notion of the Eastern
and Western European cinema. New review of film and television studies, ISSN 1740-
0309, April 2008, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 41-50.)
157
