Cinema of The Other Europe

Dina Iordanova's Cinema of the Other Europe is a book film scholars should have on their shelves for ready reference. Generally speaking, books on cinema written by professors in university film departments are brushed lightly aside by those critics who haunt film festivals and write extensively on directors of choice. And since many of these university editions stem from an in-depth analysis of videotapes and DVDs supplied for classroom courses and film seminars, they are overlooked by the film historian as being a trifle "academic" - meaning: tedious, partial, pedantic, even dogmatic. By the same token, the research academician specializing in the sociology, psychology, and semantics of the cinema tend to dismiss "over the top" eulogies by the film critics whose so-called expertise stems from a portfolio of interviews with favourite directors, while paying little attention to the sociopolitical context from which certain key films were formed....