Description:
Post-Communist Malaise examines political modernism within the context of post-communist Eastern Europe and the Balkans. It focuses on how select cinemas from the regions critique European unification and how they represent related issues like the transition from communism to free-market capitalism, the Euro crisis and austerity, and the rise of nationalism and right-wing politics.
Review Quotes: "Forging upstream against critical currents, Samardzija's book stubbornly holds out for the principle of aesthetic hope, extracted from the carapace of political modernism with a set of sharp theoretical tools. Within the unique neither-quite-West-nor-anymore-East terrain of Europe's post-communist countries, he finds a set of films capable of giving shape to the 'post-communist malaise' by capturing and making visible the gap between the expired promises of universal utopia and the disenchantments and exclusions of neoliberal Euro markets. His ingenious close readings bring the revisionist contours of such latent hope to light."--Natasa Durovicová "co-editor of World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives"