Whereas pre-WWII cinema approached the orphan figure from the sentimental, non-political point of view, the post-war representation of orphans was immediately politicized. For many east European film directors, the orphan character became a means to explore the radical historical shift toward the Soviet model of socialism, social engineering, and the transformation of the private and public spheres, resulting in personal and social alienation. The orphan in post-war east European films typically reflected the parameters of socialist life. Orphans were no longer considered “social or individual pets” (4), but rather “political subjects” (5) to be disciplined and reprogrammed by the state, their new adoptive parent. Constantin Parvulescu argues that the orphan becomes a target of contradictory political discourses. On the one hand, orphans were perceived as the “other,” marginalized and alienated from traditional social structures (the family) and in need of social protection and integration. On the other hand, new social institutions sought above all to instill in orphans allegiance to the common socialist cause while discouraging them from withdrawing into family life. In this book, the orphan is used as a “cinematic and intellectual trope” (6) that shows both the process of integration of the “other” into the New Order but also the extent to which the “other” is willing to accept the imposed discipline and ideology. In Parvulescu’s view, the post-war orphan’s predicament opens discussion of several important issues in east European studies, including totalitarianism (Hannah Arendt), technologies of the self (Michel Foucault), and private life/“bare life” (Giorgio Agamben).

To demonstrate various stages of transformation of the social subject in post-WWII eastern Europe, Parvulescu selects five films, each of which has an orphan or abandoned child as a main character. Chapter 1 focuses on the 1948 Hungarian drama, Somewhere in Europe, directed by Géza Radványi and Bela Balázs. One of the first post-war films, it depicts the life of a gang of homeless children who commit despicable acts in order to survive. In their hiding place, they stumble upon an old man who makes them question their actions and willingly and consciously change their way of life. Despite some tribute to social realist tropes (like ritual sacrifice and death for the common cause), Somewhere in Europe is a transitional film made by Old School/pre-Soviet directors. It expresses hope in the creation of a community that comes together in order to overcome the chaos of war and—through joint effort—build a new social order based on reason and humanism. Chapter 2 analyzes an early GDR film, Story of a Young Couple (1952), directed by Kurt Maetzig. Produced under Stalinism, it bears the aesthetic and ideological traits of socialist realism and celebrates the role of Soviet ideology in helping East Germany become a progressive socialist state. In this rags-to-riches narrative, the initially marginalized and scared orphan Agnes becomes the “new woman” of socialist Germany and symbolizes the triumph of Soviet socialist engineering.

In the subsequent three chapters, Parvulescu explores how the initial enthusiasm of east European cinema for a successful socialist future begins to wane. Chapter 3 dissects Antonín Moskalyk’s film, Dita Saxová (1968), released during the political unrest of the Prague Spring. One of the “uncomfortable films” (72) of that time, it casts doubt on the positive outcome of social engineering—especially when it involves “disciplining and silencing” (90). Dita, a young orphan and Holocaust survivor, personifies a “reactive subject” (72) who resists integration into the New Order and prefers to take her own life. In the 1970s, east European cinema took its critique of the production of the socialist subject even further. Chapter 4 focuses on the “alienation of the working class, its domestication and manipulation” (117) in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Camera Buff (Poland, 1979). Its main character is an orphan raised within and fully integrated into the Soviet “family.” Yet his socialist beliefs and optimism are shattered when he comes face-to-face with political realities. Finally, chapter 5 revisits the historical legacy of Stalin’s purges in Diary for My Children (1982), shot by the Hungarian director Márta Mészáros. In this film, the rebellious orphan Juli seeks refuge not in the adoptive family of the totalitarian state but rather, unwilling to forget the brutality of past history in which her father perished in Stalinist purges, in the family of the regime’s oppressed victims, which Parvulescu calls a “network of resistance against often brutally articulated narratives of political change” (8).

The book’s “Epilogue” is actually an additional chapter covering the Romanian film Sand Dunes (Dan Pița, 1983) about the moral crisis of the socialist subject in the last years of social and political stagnation in eastern Europe. The real epilogue that summarizes the fate of the symbolical orphans of socialism comes, however, in the last few pages of Parvulescu’s book: the socialist experiment in eastern Europe failed to produce “strong, ethical, and especially intellectually emancipated subjects” but only weak, infantilized subjects “perverted by authoritarianism and the corruption of the system” (158). Although occasionally repetitious, Parvulescu’s is a complex, competent, and engagingly written interdisciplinary book bringing together history, cultural and political theory, and film analysis. It should be of considerable interest to a wide range of scholars and students of European cinema, history, and cultural studies.