Cultural Memory in Representations of Central Europe: The Case of Slovak Cinema after 1989

Abstract

This paper concentrates on some distinctive modes of negotiation of Slovak identity as an identity lost between various notions of the centre and the margin. Inspired by texts of A. Kiossev, H. K. Bhabha and M. Augé, it proposes an account of contemporary Slovak cinema as the cinema of the lack (of national identity). This lack is both metaphorically masked and metonymically recalled or made present by various treatments of communal memory and by various references to the geopolitical location of the country.

Keywords

• Central Europe, Slovak Cinema, representation, marginality, self-colonisation