Although it announces itself as a study of gender, the resonances of Ewa Mazierska's impressive study are in fact broader than its title suggests. The book, indeed, illuminates how the Miloš Hrmas and Mateusz Birkuts of Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Czechoslovak cinema reflect the national cultures from which they emerge. Yet it also intervenes in the geopolitical and historical debates that perpetually surround studies of the cinema of East Central Europe.

In both senses, the book is an important contribution to this area of film studies. While a handful of studies of women in East Central European cinema have been published in recent years (among them, Mazierska's own Women in Polish Cinema [New York/Oxford, 2006]), gender studies remains, as Mazierska observes, “underdeveloped,” both in research on the region's film cultures and in the region itself. Moreover, Mazierska's approach allows her to bypass the Cold War paradigms that too often still define studies of East Central European cinema. The lens of masculinity, for example, allows her to locate the roots of film aesthetics and narratives in a variety of factors and not simply in party politics. And her shrewd choice to limit the geographic scope of her comparison permits her to consider the relevance of the histories and geographies that preceded Yalta—imperial, regional, national—to the region's cinema and cinema cultures. In Masculinities' first chapter, for instance, Mazierska discusses Antoni Kroh's argument that the Polish idea of the “small Czech” (a key dimension of Czech self-identity, reflected both in Czech and Polish cultural productions) can be traced to the cool reception of nineteenth-century Czech immigrants to Galicia. If this narrative emphasizes, in Mazierska's words, the “not convivial” relations between the two neighbors, it also underscores the importance to film scholarship of long-term interactions between the countries of East Central Europe and not only their relationships to the Soviet Union.

From this historical introduction (requisite in studies of the cinema of East Central Europe, a region still relatively unknown to film scholars), Mazierska's book continues to four thematic essays that examine a series of topics in these countries' cinemas from the end of World War II to the present day: the figure of the soldier and the trope of war; fathers and sons; romantic love; and “other sexualities.” Ultimately, despite the numerous national distinctions that Mazierska uncovers, she concludes that “by and large, Polish, Czech and Slovak cinema … is populated by defeated men” who are “products of … histories and ideologies, [rather] than independent agents” (215–16).

Throughout the book, Mazierska focuses on masculine archetypes in cinema and their situation within a national context. Although this aptly illuminates the cultural, political, and historical issues with which Masculinities is primarily concerned, it also emphasizes cinema's narrative dimensions over its formal aspects, causing the study, at times, to lose sight of the reason Lenin so famously called film “the most important art”—that is, why cinema as a visual, and later audiovisual, medium was and is such a powerful ideological tool. In this sense, the book's close readings are among its best sections. Mazierska's discussions of the ways in which masculine archetypes transcend cinema (e.g., her discussion of Socialist-realist depictions of fatherhood) are similarly valuable, precisely for the way they underscore gender's centrality to the places and times that her book discusses.

If the textual dimensions of the films she discusses could have been further explored—as could the theories of identity and nationalism with which the book engages—the breadth of this study must be counted among Mazierska's primary achievements. The history of postwar East Central European cinema has traditionally been narrated as a series of modernist highs (the Polish School, the Czech New Wave, the Cinema of Moral Concern) interspersed with popular or politically unpalatable lows meriting little serious attention. However, in not hesitating to discuss films such as Czech director E. F. Burian's Socialist-realist Chceme žít (We Want to Live, 1949) alongside classics by Kiesłowski and Forman, Mazierska's study goes a long way toward broadening the canon of films from this region that we watch, discuss, and teach.