Screen Memories

"Screen Memories: The Hungarian Cinema of Marta Meszaros" provides a fascinating exploration of the culture of post-Stalinist Eastern Europe through a detailed study of the achievements of its foremost woman director. Marta Meszaros's visual representations of youth, sexual difference, and class conflict challenged official socialist versions of gender, family relations, and workers' lives. Her films, poised between documentary and fiction, demonstrate that cinema is an ideological as well as personal instrument. Informed by contemporary debates in film theory, psychoanalysis, and gender studies, Catherine Portuges's book foregrounds autobiographical and artistic elements of Marta Meszaros's cinema and draws on revealing interviews and conversations with the filmmaker and her collaborators. Covering Meszaros's documentaries and feature films, through to her recently completed "Diary of My Father" and "Mother", "Screen Memories" brings to Marta Meszaros's films long-overdue attention. This volume launches the new series "Women Artists in Film" edited by Roswitha Mueller and Kaja Silverman. There is by now an impressive history of women's cinema.
However, film criticism and theory have tended to focus more on male directors than on their female counterparts. It is the aim of this series to redress that imbalance by generating a large body of sophisticated, rigorous writing on women's cinema. The studies are keyed to recent debates in feminist, poststructuralist, and film theory, and are written in a lively and accessible style. Future volumes will explore the work of Chantal Akerman, Dorothy Arzner, Marguerite Duras, Leni Riefenstahl, Yvonne Rainer, Louise Brooks, Ulrike Ottinger, Valie Export, Margarethe von Trotta, and Sally Potter.