The majority of articles included in this issue of Studies in Eastern European Cinema examine representation of sexuality and gender. The first article, by Aga Skrodzka, considers one of best known Polish émigré directors, Walerian Borowczyk. She focuses on his sexploitation films, which she reviews in the context of commodity culture and the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Such a focus can be regarded as a polemic with the dominant trend of approaching Borowczyk, namely as an arthouse auteur, privileging his early experimental work at the expense of his later, more commercial productions.
Next Vesi Vuković discusses representation of rape in several films belonging to the Yugoslav new film and black wave films. She argues that a raped woman in many films belonging to this movement serves as an allegory of a raped nation. In doing so, she draws on the argument that in former Yugoslavia (as indeed in many other countries), woman's body is seen as a metaphor of nation/farmlands/homes, while female rape is a trope for penetration of different types of boundaries: national territory, property and symbolic space of a man.
The following article by Jovana Djurović looks in detail at one film: Jovan Živanović’s youth melodrama Čudna devojka/Strange Girl (1962). Djurović argues that love, which drives the action in this film, is based on the idea of sacrifice which transforms the young heroine from emancipated modern girl into a working wife and mother. The film's love ideology is thus explained through the larger sociocultural context of Yugoslav self-management reform, and the beginning of a genuine consumerist society. The two opposing tendencies, which also transformed into Yugoslav intergenerational and intra-social clashes of the time, are interpreted as the ideological background of the heroine's patriarchal maturation in a socialist society.
The last article in this issue, co-authored by Eva Näripea and Dirk Hoyer, examines a number of Estonian films from the 1990s, such as Daam autos/The Lady in the Car (Peeter Urbla, 1992), Tallinn pimeduses/Darkness in Tallinn (llkka Järvilaturi, 1993) and Agent Sinikael/Agent Wild Duck (Marko Raat, 2002) as examples of film noir due to their content and mood of pessimism and cynicism pertaining to this period and some visual characteristics. As such, Näripea and Hoyer argue that they capture well the rapid neoliberalisation adopted by Estonia (and many other Eastern European countries), which resulted in the rapid worsening of living conditions, rampant individualism and a sense of insecurity. Although gender is not at the centre of this essay, the authors also draw to the effect of neoliberalisation on male–female relations in these films.
In the review section of the current issue, there are six book reviews. Anna Bátori examines Transformation Processes in Post-Socialist Screen Media edited by Jana Dudková and Katarína Mišíková. Ewa Mazierska reviews Intimations: The Cinema of Wojciech Has by Annette Insdorf. Vesi Vuković discusses Jolted Images: Unbound Analytic by Pavle Levi. Furthermore, Dušan I. Bjelić presents Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli's book Mythopoetic Cinema. On the Ruins of European Identity, Claudiu Turcus's review presents László Strausz's book Hesitant Histories on the Romanian Screen, and Cesar Ballester writes about Krzysztof Kieslowski: Interviews edited by Renata Bernard and Steven Woodward.