The collapse of the state socialist regimes in Eastern European brought to the surface several international, regional, ethnic and religious conflicts that erupted into armed confrontation and war. From the Yugoslav wars and the various armed conflicts in the Caspian-Black Sea region to the ongoing Russo-Ukranian war, screen media representations played an important part in the shaping of these conflicts. Whether feature films, television broadcasts or online social media videos, the confronting parties relied on moving images as part of their arsenal in waging war. The contemporary weaponization of moving images across traditional- and new media outlets, and the rise of fake news as a political-epistemological category point at the necessity to understand the interplay of global and local strategies that underlie the new role of the images of war.
In this special issue dedicated to the representations of contemporary (post-1989) war and armed conflict, Studies in Eastern European Cinema would like to contribute to the understanding of these processes in the post-Soviet region. On the one hand, the issue would like to map how armed conflicts in the region have been represented in screen media texts. On the other hand, we are also interested in receiving submissions that contemplate the role of media images and institutions that participated in shaping the outcome of war in the region. Moreover, we also invite submissions that analyze what connects and separates images of war in Eastern European region from larger, global representations of armed conflict.
Topics include but are not limited to:
- depictions of war in the region across genre and author cinema
- the role of television in war in EE
- newsreels, archives, documentaries: non-fiction images of armed conflict in the post-Soviet block
- participatory- and amateur footage on EE war imagery
- war in EE computer games
Please send 200 word proposals for papers with short bios to László Strausz by March 31 2023. The deadline for full articles will be August 31 2023.
