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Little Media Normality in the East

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In our imagination, eastern Europe was always black and white. Traveling to East Germany or Poland meant suddenly leaving colorful western Europe and entering a movie from the forties or fifties. Later we simply couldn't remember having seen any color, not the green of the trees, nor the red of the brick buildings. When we went to the movies to see a film by Wajda, Kieslowski or Tarkowsky, the filmmaker's experiments with color only reinforced our image of the east as gray. Europe clearly had an ideologically motivated neurosis when it came to the perception of color. This particular brand of European Orientalism has now grown tired. Nearly ten years after the social upheaval in eastern Europe, these countries have ceased being part of an "eastern block". Each is stepping out of the shadow of the Soviet empire and taking on once again its own particular face in the international arena. Each is becoming recognizable as a participating unit of the European patchwork. While the European U

Date: Sat, 10 May 97 00:01 METDST From: Inke Arns Little Media Normality in the East Inke Arns, Andreas Broeckmann (Berlin/Rotterdam) 1. Autogenerative Europe In our imagination, eastern Europe was always black and white. Traveling to East Germany or Poland meant suddenly leaving colorful western Europe and entering a movie from the forties or fifties. Later we simply couldn't remember having seen any color, not the green of the trees, nor the red of the brick buildings. When we went to the movies to see a film by Wajda, Kieslowski or Tarkowsky, the filmmaker's experiments with color…

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