This book offers a unique perspective on contemporary Polish cinema's engagement with histories of Polish violence against their Jewish neighbours during the Holocaust. Moving beyond conventional studies of historical representation on screen, the book considers how cinema reframes the unwanted knowledge of violence in its aftermaths. The book draws on Derridean hauntology, Didi-Huberman's confrontations with art images, Levinasian ethics and anamorphosis to examine cinematic reconfigurations of histories and memories that are vulnerable to evasion and formlessness. Innovative analyses of Birthplace (Lozinski, 1992), It Looks Pretty From a Distance (Sasnal, 2011), Aftermath (Pasikowski, 2012), and Ida (Pawlikowski, 2013) explore how their rural filmic landscapes are predicated on the radical exclusion of Jewish neighbours, prompting archaeological processes of exhumation. Arguing that the distressing materiality of decomposition disturbs cinematic composition, the book examines how Poland's aftermath cinema attempts to recompose itself through form and narrative as it faces Polish complicity in Jewish death.

Bringing together a range of theoretical and critical approaches, this edited collection is the first book to examine representations of the body in Eastern European and Russian cinema after the Second World War. Drawing on the history of the region, as well as Western and Eastern scholarship on the body, the book focuses on three areas: the traumatized body, the body as a site of erotic pleasure, and the relationship between the body and history. Critically dissecting the different ideological and aesthetic ways human bodies are framed, 'The Cinematic Bodies of Eastern Europe and Russia' also demonstrates how bodily discourses oscillate between complicity and subversion, and how they shaped individuals and societies both during and after the period of state socialism.

Bringing together a range of theoretical and critical approaches, this edited collection is the first book to examine representations of the body in Eastern European and Russian cinema after the Second World War. Drawing on the history of the region, as well as Western and Eastern scholarship on the body, the book focuses on three areas: the traumatized body, the body as a site of erotic pleasure, and the relationship between the body and history. Critically dissecting the different ideological and aesthetic ways human bodies are framed, The Cinematic Bodies of Eastern Europe and Russia also demonstrates how bodily discourses oscillate between complicity and subversion, and how they shaped individuals and societies both during and after the period of state socialism.

This book places the concept of duration at the centre of an understanding of cinema and spectatorship. The process of aesthetic imaging in time is a unique and fascinating characteristic of cinema. Why, then, has temporality, and specifically duration, received so little attention in theoretical accounts of film experience? This book makes the concept of duration the central tenet in an understanding of cinema and spectatorship. From this vantage point, the book reviews two major strands of film theory: embodied viewing and the senses, and the film-philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Unlike much contemporary film theory, Mroz's book emphasises the necessity of considering the close relationship between intellectual comprehension and sensual apprehension, as mediated through film aesthetics. In the duration of the film experience, sensual responses to filmed textures and the interpretive contexts that we inevitably bring to bear on films are continually interacting. Exactly how this occurs is demonstrated in detailed case studies of films by Antonioni (L'Avventura), Tarkovsky (Mirror) and Kieslowski (The Decalogue).

This book presents a new approach to the issue of temporality in film. Matilda Mroz argues that cinema provides an ideal opportunity to engage with ideas of temporal flow and change. Temporality, however, remains an underexplored area of film analysis, which frequently discusses images as though they were still rather than moving. This book traces the operation of duration in cinema, and argues that temporality should be a central concern of film scholarship. In close readings of Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'Avventura", Andrei Tarkovsky's "Mirror", and the ten short films that make up Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Decalogue" series, Mroz highlights how film analysis must consider both particular moments in cinema which are critically significant, and the way in which such moments interrelate in temporal flux. She explores the concepts of duration and rhythm, resonance and uncertainty, affect, sense and texture, to bring a fresh perspective to film analysis and criticism. Essential reading for students and scholars in Film Studies, this engaging study will also be a valuable resource for critical theorists.