Journal of Baltic Studies

"Intellectually engaging and timely, Past for the Eyes inquires into how socialism is shown and seen in the cinema and museums of contemporary Eastern Europe. This collection of fourteen fine essays joins an exciting (and rapidly intensifying) debate in the social sciences and humanities concerned with the memory's many manifestations in today's world. The volume demonstrates that the former communist Bloc offers an especially productive setting in which to examine practices of social remembrance, especially those that pertain to the memorialization of the recent Marxist-Leninist past. Threading through the volume are questions concerning the uneasy relationship between popular visual representations and professionally produced historiographic texts as means for recuperating socialism. The contributors ask whether imagery on the screen and objects displayed in museum spaces have as much authority in representing the era of Party rule as the written, 'institutionalized' word. Can word and image as agents of the past coexist in a complementary dialectic? Who is more 'reliable' as producer of historical knowledge - the historian or the artist? Past for the Eyes is an intelligent and welcome addition to the study of socialist memory (and any other memory, for that matter) through film and museum displays. Richly illustrated and smartly argued, the essays comprising this groundbreaking volume should be read by scholars and students interested in East European socialism as an 'unforgettable' past that persists in the present."
Reviewed book: 
Editor: 
Péter Apor
Oksana Sarkisova
ISBN: 
978-963-9776-03-6
cloth
out of print
ISBN: 
978-963-9776-05-0
paperback
$35.95 / €29.95 / £25.95