Space, Place, and Mediated Memory in Baltic and East European Cinema

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel examines how Baltic and East European filmmakers mediate personal, historical, and collective memory through spatial and aesthetic strategies while foregrounding cinema as both a site of mnemonic negotiation and a vehicle for intergenerational transmission. Through autobiographical narratives, poetic documentaries, film diaries, and cinematic lineage, the films at hand inscribe, contest, and reconfigure histories of displacement, trauma, and cultural identity. Addressing the tensions between official historiographies and personal memory work, these papers collectively reflect on how archival assemblage, aesthetic appropriation, and urban imaginaries construct alternative genealogies of belonging and remembrance.

Sub Unit

• Cinema, Television, Electronic Media

Chair

• Alexander V. Prokhorov, College of William & Mary

Papers

• First-person Encounters with Family Histories: Autobiographical Narratives about Historical Trauma in Recent Documentary Cinema in Baltic Countries - Zane Balcus, Vilnius U (Lithuania)

• Cinematic Lineage in Ukrainian Women’s Cinema: Kira Muratova and Eva Neymann - Irina Schulzki, Ludwig-Maximilians-U Munich (Germany)

• Palimpsestic Cities: Riga, Tallinn, and Vilnius in 1960s Baltic Poetic Documentaries - Samantha Bodamer, U of Pittsburgh

• A Place of One's Own: Returns to Eastern European Homelands in Autobiographical Documentaries - Łukasz Kiełpiński, U of Warsaw (Poland)

Discussant

• Olga Kim, Williams College