Contested Interpretations of the Past in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian Film ― Screen As Battlefield

This volume brings together nine contributions from the conference Suffering, Agency, and Memory in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian Films, held in Gronigen, the Netherlands, in March 2012, focusing on the varied representation--despite the shared history--of the Soviet regime in the contemporary films of Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. They argue that the construction of the Soviet experience as Empire is used by filmmakers and politicians to understand the traumatic experience of the Soviet past. They discuss the evolution of Ukrainian World War II films; stereotypes of the neighbor in films on cities in wartime from a post-communist postcolonial perspective (Defenders of Riga, Attack on Leningrad, and Battle of Warsaw 1920); Polish-Russian/Soviet relations in Polish films on military conflicts between the two countries; the representation of the post-war period in contemporary Polish films; the portrayal of Russians in Polish documentaries on the Smolensk plane crash of 2010; the Chernobyl disaster in Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian films; the Ukrainian historical contestation of Russian imperial power in A Prayer for hetman Mezepa; and the narrative of traumatic survival in Dreams. Annotation c2016 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Sander Brouwer, Ph.D. (1995) teaches Russian literature and cultural history at Groningen University, the Netherlands. For this volume, he collected a group of specialists in Polish, Russian and Ukrainian media from the Netherlands, Poland, Ukraine, the UK and the USA.