Event
Masha Shpolberg
Ecocinema Beyond the Iron Curtain
Discussions of climate change tend to foreground the insatiable consumerism of the former “first world” – and the price the “third world” is already paying for it. What gets left out of the conversation is the ecological imaginary of what was once thought of as the “second world” – the countries relegated to the Soviet sphere of influence after World War II. Yet these countries experienced some of the most dramatic transformations, from rapid industrialization to total dereliction, and, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, an especially troubled revival. In this presentation, Professor Shpolberg charts the way Eastern and Central European filmmakers helped audiences process these changes. She discusses what was possible within the fiction, documentary, experimental, and animation modes given varying degrees of censorship, and draws on specific examples from Soviet, Polish, and Czech cinemas. Professor Shpolberg concludes by considering why it might be worth attending to these cinemas as we strive to reimagine our relationship to the environment today.
Masha Shpolberg is a film and media scholar specializing in global documentary, Central, and Eastern European cinema, ecocinema, and women’s cinema. Her first book, Labor in Late Socialism: The Cinema of Polish Workers’ Unrest, explores how filmmakers responded to successive waves of strikes by co-opting, confronting, or otherwise challenging the representational legacy of socialist realism. Together with Lukas Brasiskis, she is co-editor of Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe (Berghahn Books, 2023) and with Anastasia Kostina of The New Russian Documentary: Reclaiming Reality in the Age of Authoritarianism (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press in Fall 2024). Her academic articles have appeared in Slavic and East European Journal, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, The Polish Review, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. She has also contributed film criticism to Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, Tablet, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She holds a PhD in film and media studies and comparative literature from Yale University.