CONVERGING APPROACHES

At a time when all sorts of transitions are taking place in the post-communist societies of Europe, when former borders have collapsed but differences remain, when the relationship between the cultures of the East and the West have become more complicated, paradoxical or tense than ever before, when the idea of national cinemas has been eroded by transnational productions, yet films still address issues grounded in local realities, in short: when in-betweenness has become the key term in almost all aspects of life, quite a lot of Eastern European films seem to resort, time and again, to a diversified poetics of intermediality, i.e. to an aesthetic highlighting cinema's relationship with the other arts and the media complexity of moving images. Even in less ostentatious and more covert forms, intermediality – as a veritable art of in-betweenness – appears as a way to register all kinds of ambivalences that pervade the culture of the region and is capable of becoming an efficient catalyst of self-reflection.

Despite the major historical events that swept away the past regimes and clearly marked the beginning of a new era, the slice of time referred to as ‘contemporary’, as we see in the title, is not easy to delimit, for historical events seldom coincide with paradigm shifts in the arts and aesthetic phenomena often persist across the ages. The term was therefore applied with certain flexibility in the selection of works analysed (or referred to) in this volume. Not only films that were made after the collapse of the Iron Curtain were considered, but also works of highly influential authors whose oeuvre connect the period before the fall of communism with that of the new generations of filmmakers, and which are important for understanding the major strategies of cinematic intermediality visible in the Eastern European cinemas of today.

The ways in which these cinemas harness the potential of intermedial and inter-art relations is not a widely researched subject in film (or media) studies. There are, however, important forerunners of the essays published in this book that need to be pointed out. In what follows, I will proceed with a concise survey of these previous researches in which such a subject has emerged so far1 taking into consideration their main goals, the topics that have been discussed, and how they have enriched our knowledge of intermediality in Eastern European cinemas.