Abstract
In 1981–2, two outstanding films from Eastern Europe dazzled Western audiences and won the acclaim of critics. They were Man of Iron, winner of the Golden Palm (for best picture) at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival, and Mephisto, awarded the title of best foreign-language film in 1982 by the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Man of Iron, written by Alexander Ścibor-Rylski and directed by Andrzej Wajda, was produced in Poland. Mephisto, based on a novel by Klaus Mann, was written and directed by a Hungarian, Istvàn Szabó, and put together as a Hungarian-West German co-production.
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Notes and References
James Monaco, How to Read a Film (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977,1981). Though neither a study of film history nor a survey of styles as such, this book does summarize the work of several East European directors other than Wajda.
For a detailed analysis of Jancs?2019;s films through to 1974 (Elektreia), see Graham Petrie, History Must Answer to Man: the Contemporary Hungarian Cinema (Budapest: Corvina Press}, 1978}) pp. 20–
Herbert Eagle, ‘Collage in the Films of Dušan Makavejev’, Film Studies Annual, vol. 1 (1976) pp. 20–37.
See, for example, the following American reviews of Sweet Movie Vincent Canby in The New York Times, 10 October 1975, p. 32; Robert Hatch in The Nation, vol. 221, no. 14 (1 November 1975) pp. 443–4; and, most scathingly, Jay Cocks in Time, vol. 106, no. 18 (3 November 1975) pp. 70ff. For a more sympathetic review, cf.
Marsha Kinder in Film Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 1 (Winter 1974–5), pp. 4–10.
Mira and Antonfn J. Liehm, The Most Important Art: East European Film After 1945 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1977) p. 195.
Two useful essays on Marxist aesthetics are Henri Arvon, Marxist Esthetics, trs. Helen Lane (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973)
Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976).
For a brilliant essay on literature in Stalinist Poland, see Czesχaw Miχ;osz, The Captive Mind, trs. Jane Zielonko (New York: Vintage Books, 1953).
On Czechoslovakia, see the Author’s Foreword to A. J. Liehm, The Politics of Culture, trs. Peter Kussi (New York: Grove Press, 1970) pp. 41–92.
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© 1983 David W. Paul
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Paul, D.W. (1983). Introduction Film Art and Social Commitment. In: Paul, D.W. (eds) Politics, Art and Commitment in the East European Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06734-3_1
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