This collection of essays responds to the recent surge of interest in popular television in Eastern Europe. This is a region where television's transformation has been especially spectacular, shifting from a state-controlled broadcast system delivering national, regional, and heavily filtered Western programming to a deregulated, multi-platform, transnational system delivering predominantly American and Western European entertainment programming. Consequently, the nations of Eastern Europe provide opportunities to examine the complex interactions among economic and funding systems, regulatory policies, globalization, imperialism, popular culture, and cultural identity.This collection will be the first volume to gather the best writing, by scholars across and outside the region, on socialist and postsocialist entertainment television as a medium, technology, and institution.

Eastern Europe has produced rich and varied film cultures--Czech, Hungarian, and Serbian among them--whose histories have been intimately tied to the transition from Soviet domination to the complexities of post-Communist life. This latest volume in the "AFI Film" "Readers" series presents a long-overdue reassessment of East European cinemas from theoretical, psychoanalytic, and gender perspectives, moving the subject beyond the traditional "area studies" approach to the region's films. This ambitious collection, situating Eastern Europe's many cinemas within global paradigms of film study, will be an essential work for all students of cinema and for anyone interested in the relation of film to culture and society.

This collection of essays responds to the recent surge of interest in popular television in Eastern Europe. This is a region where television's transformation has been especially spectacular, shifting from a state-controlled broadcast system delivering national, regional, and heavily filtered Western programming to a deregulated, multi-platform, transnational system delivering predominantly American and Western European entertainment programming. Consequently, the nations of Eastern Europe provide opportunities to examine the complex interactions among economic and funding systems, regulatory policies, globalization, imperialism, popular culture, and cultural identity.This collection will be the first volume to gather the best writing, by scholars across and outside the region, on socialist and postsocialist entertainment television as a medium, technology, and institution.

In TV Socialism, Aniko Imre provides an innovative history of television in socialist Europe during and after the Cold War. Rather than uniform propaganda programming, Imre finds rich evidence of hybrid aesthetic and economic practices, including frequent exchanges within the region and with Western media, a steady production of varied genre entertainment, elements of European public service broadcasting, and transcultural, multi-lingual reception practices. These televisual practices challenge conventional understandings of culture under socialism, divisions between East and West, and the divide between socialism and postsocialism. Taking a broad regional perspective encompassing Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Imre foregrounds continuities between socialist television and the region's shared imperial histories, including the programming trends, distribution patterns, and reception practices that extended into postsocialism. Television, she argues, is key to understanding European socialist cultures and to making sense of developments after the end of the Cold War and the enduring global legacy of socialism.

A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas showcases twenty-five essays written by established and emerging film scholars that trace the history of Eastern European cinemas and offer an up-to-date assessment of post-socialist film cultures. * Showcases critical historical work and up-to-date assessments of post-socialist film cultures * Features consideration of lesser known areas of study, such as Albanian and Baltic cinemas, popular genre films, cross-national distribution and aesthetics, animation and documentary * Places the cinemas of the region in a European and global context * Resists the Cold War classification of Eastern European cinemas as other art cinemas by reconnecting them with the main circulation of film studies * Includes discussion of such films as Taxidermia, El Perro Negro, 12:08 East of Bucharest Big Toll, and Breakfast on the Grass and explores the work of directors including Tamas Almasi, Walerian Borowczyk, Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Andrzej -u^3awski, and Karel Vachek amongst many others

In TV Socialism, Aniko Imre provides an innovative history of television in socialist Europe during and after the Cold War. Rather than uniform propaganda programming, Imre finds rich evidence of hybrid aesthetic and economic practices, including frequent exchanges within the region and with Western media, a steady production of varied genre entertainment, elements of European public service broadcasting, and transcultural, multi-lingual reception practices. These televisual practices challenge conventional understandings of culture under socialism, divisions between East and West, and the divide between socialism and postsocialism. Taking a broad regional perspective encompassing Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Imre foregrounds continuities between socialist television and the region's shared imperial histories, including the programming trends, distribution patterns, and reception practices that extended into postsocialism. Television, she argues, is key to understanding European socialist cultures and to making sense of developments after the end of the Cold War and the enduring global legacy of socialism.