Description
Book SynopsisThis book is the first to deal with documentary aesthetic practices of the post-war period in Eastern Europe in a comparative perspective. The contributions examine the specific forms and modes of documentary representations and the role they played in the formation of new aesthetic trends during the cultural-political transition of the long 1960s. This documentary first-hand approach to the world aimed to break up unquestioned ideological structures and expose tabooed truths in order to engender much-needed social changes. New ways of depicting daily life, writing testimony or subjective reportage emerged that still shape cultural debates today.
Table of ContentsContents Acknowledgements List of Figures Notes on Contributors Introduction Firsthand Time Clemens Günther and Matthias Schwartz Part 1: Exposing a Painful Past: Modes of Testimony 1 “Document of the Soul:” Varlam Shalamov’s Documentary Writing in a Contemporary Context Franziska Thun-Hohenstein 2 A Dreyfus Affair for Soviet Children: on the Encoded Poetics of Aleksandra Brushtein’s Documentary Prose Natasha Gordinsky 3 Supplementing Evidence: Danilo Kiš’s Poet(h)ics in the Context of Yugoslav Documentarism of the 1960s Tatjana Petzer 4 Hands of Time and Large Numbers in Alexander Kluge’s (Post-)Documentary Literature Gunther Martens Part 2: Discovering the Self and the Other: Modes of Expressing Individuality 5 Celebration and Abstraction: the Documentary Mode of Jonas Mekas’s Diary Films Christian Zehnder 6 Documentary and Poetics Interwoven: Mikhail Kalik’s Cinema Elena Nekrasova 7 The Technique of Documenting: on the Early Reportages of Ryszard Kapuściński and Hanna Krall Matthias Schwartz Part 3: Refining the Senses: Modes of Self-Reflective Artistic Practices 8 “Dramas of the Fact:” Soviet Conceptualisations of Documentary Theatre in the 1960s Anna Hodel 9 “Instead of Approximate Precision—Precise Approximation:” Ian Satunovskii’s Poor Poetry Georg Witte 10 Reproductions without an Original: the Self-Published Aesthetics of Cold War-Era Copies Sarah A. Burgos Part 4: Exploring the Everyday: Modes of Perceiving Social Issues 11 The Trials of Documenting: Frida Vigdorova’s Notes of the Brodsky Court Proceedings Anja Tippner 12 The Poetry of Mikhail Sokovnin: an Aesthetic Opposition to the “Literature of Fact” Ilya Kukulin 13 “Discourses of Sobriety:” Documentary Aesthetics in Conceptual Art in the United States Renate Wöhrer Index
