The Cinema Makers

Public Life and the Exhibition of Difference in South-Eastern and Central Europe Since the 1960s

The Cinema Makers investigates how cinema spectators in south-eastern and central European cities became cinema makers through such practices as squatting in existing cinema spaces, organizing cinema ‘events’, writing about film and making films themselves. Drawing on a corpus of interviews with cinema activists in Germany, Austria and the former Yugoslavia, Anna Schober compares the activities and artistic productions they staged in cities such as Vienna, Cologne, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Ljubljana, Belgrade, Novi Sad, Subotica, Zagreb and Sarajevo. The resulting study illuminates the differences and similarities in the development of political culture - and cinema’s role in that development - in European countries with pluralist-democratic, one-party socialist and post-socialist traditions.