ABSTRACT
Alexander Sokurov at his best usually competes with a myriad of new
works by “hot” directors from the trendy national cinemas of Denmark,
Iran, or Korea. Long gone (and forgotten) are the days when Eastern
European films-at least those that had miraculously jumped over the
censorship fence-were a rare and precious festival commodity in a world
divided along stern ideological lines. A new generation of filmmakers, born
in the 1960s and 1970s, has quietly taken the stage, filling in the vacuum
left as a result of the prolonged creative crisis of the middle generation
of filmmakers, a crisis wrestled much more successfully by such veteran
ch ri
st in
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oj an
ov a
trademark Eastern European directors as-to name but a few-the
octogenarian Miklós Jancsó, the septuagenarians Márta Mészáros and
Ve˘ra Chytilová and, most notably, István Szabó, who, despite his Academy
Award-winning Mephisto (1982), has joined the Hollywood hall of fame
only now that he is well into his sixties. Unlike their predecessors, however,
young filmmakers perform miracles on shoestring budgets allotted
by their financially constrained local film industries, and even succeed
in breaking into prestigious international festival networks. As recent
Cold War history drifts into oblivion along with concepts like terror and
propaganda, dissent and compliance, Eastern European countries draw
closer to a pan-European unity.
