My impressions of this book are contradictory. It boldly tackles an innovative topic. But it has been tossed in public before it matured enough to make a meaningful impact. First, some praise. This is the second monograph of Anna Batori, a recent PhD in film from Glasgow, specializing in Romanian/Hungarian cinema. Its focus is on east European “extreme” cinema, namely films that use the shock value of sexual and other violence and bodily extremes, which abound in the post-communist space.
The study draws on a growing body of films that present assaults against women, animal suffering, trafficking, sex trade, aestheticized ferocity, domestic abuse, transgressive representations of gender, objectification, victimization, exploitation, and visceral brutality. It persuasively shows how this large body of works (“cinema of castration,” 37) tracks the difficult post-communist shift, and how the extreme violence and shock value make for radical social statements. Film is contextualized within the social practices of post-communist and post-colonial neoliberalism, as well as linked to matters of the symbolic loss of father figures, the crisis of masculinity, and the decline in women’s standing; a solid and important topic, consistently traced across three decades and a dozen countries.
As proponent of transnational film studies (which claims that in film influencing is more transnational than national), I endorse the framing through influential foreign “extreme” directors like Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noe, Michael Haneke, Carlos Reygadas, and others. The eastern extreme films are also selected transnationally, representing about ten countries. I commend the inclusion of Mircea Daneljuk’s Conjugal Bed (Romania, 1992), a little-known yet quintessential film about disorientation and panic in communism’s immediate aftermath.
Now, the criticism. There is too much, too rushed, too soon. Loads of evidentiary “bodily sensationalism” (8), hard-hitting and overpowering, is thrown with breakneck urgency to get it all out. Arguments are launched but never properly developed. The outpouring of opinions overwhelms. The result is sloppy and poorly articulated scholarship. It needs some more rounds of thinking through to get to maturity.
The presentation is poor in the overall. Many names appear incorrectly; too many to list. Some are misspelled within the same page—as with Dirk/Dirks (14), Godard/Goddard (59). In the course of just a few pages, the name of the same director is listed ten times correctly and six times incorrectly (Petrov/Petkov, 92–97). Running over 30 pages, the extensive bibliography is a compendium of negligence. Many studies are quoted but are not in the bibliography (Dirk/s, 14; Tlostanova, 15; Popa, 95). Many other studies are in the bibliography but not in the text. Various authors are referenced by their given name while the family name is abbreviated to an acronym (Vlastimir S., Vesi V., 171). The filmography, in comparison, is quite short, especially as the author said she worked from an “ever-growing list of Eastern European extreme films of 1,336 titles” (19). Had this list been shared, it would have been a useful resource.
The method for selecting films for analysis is not disclosed. Most are by male directors. Why not more by women? For one exception (Estonia’s Somnambulance, 2003), Russia and the whole former USSR do not really figure—yet some of the most “extreme” films are made there, so why include references to French and other cinemas but not to those? Chs. 1, 4, and 5 rely on debating important films made in the Balkans, mainly Serbia (from the Black Wave to present-day obsession with snuff and porn). These I find particularly shallow, lacking in understanding of the specific context of Yugoslavia and its social discourse. Batori is right to observe post-war traumas, anger, “self-balkanization,” and generational breakdown but she swiftly lumps it together with the rest of eastern Europe, where processes follow a different logic. Ultimately, it never goes farther than just rehashing the plots of films by Dušan Makavejev, Želimir Žilnik, Mladen Đorđević and Srdjan Spasojevic.
This book differs from traditional studies in one specific way. Already in the very first paragraph the author makes a shocking acknowledgment—the whole project has been triggered by the need to process her own nightmarish rape trauma; she has been writing in anger and pain, against the advice of family and friends (2). It is difficult to judge a text after such admission; and I deeply sympathize with all accumulated rage and the need to process. Writing is, undoubtedly, a solid form of therapy. Batori is bold and brave in this undertaking. I still believe, however, that she would have done significantly better if she had kept the text for a while longer before making it public.
The publisher does not seem to have followed standard procedures in handling this manuscript. As Edinburgh is a University Press, I assume the manuscript has been peer reviewed. If the reviewer did not identify shortcomings and did not pick up on the numerous mistakes, the Press needs to seriously consider its roster of reviewers. If shortcomings were identified but not addressed by the editor, this raises another red flag. Most certainly, no copyediting nor proofreading seems to have taken place. And, as the peer review, editing and copyediting/proofreading seem to have been skipped, on what basis has the price tag been set at over $100?
To conclude, this is a commendable yet half-baked effort. Had Batori made allowances for a critical distance and then come back to revise and refine the articulation, she could have a solid study; it could have even been a groundbreaking one.
