Articulating the free market: A cultural history of the economic transformation in Central Europe, 1989-1999

Project Information

ATFM

Grant agreement ID: 749475

DOI

10.3030/749475

Project closed

EC signature date 17 March 2017

Start date 1 February 2018

End date 17 July 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 142 720,80

EU contribution

€ 142 720,80

Coordinated by

USTAV PRO SOUDOBE DEJINY AV CR V.V.I
Czechia

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ATFM (Articulating the free market: A cultural history of the economic transformation in Central Europe, 1989-1999)

Reporting period: 2018-02-01 to 2020-01-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

This project looked at the cultural responses to the systemic transformations in Poland, Czech Republic, and Slovakia after 1989 through the prism of films and television series.
The study brought together approaches from a variety of social science disciplines in order to question how cultural production represented these changes arising from the new economic conditions and acted as a significant contributor to public discourse. The project analysed film and television series produced in the 1990s to uncover a wider regional dynamic, with case studies from the Polish, Czech, and Slovak contexts. This decade has often been remembered as a time of new-found freedom, but also excess. A number of producers of films and television series attempted to capture these new realities. Filmmakers, and television directors such as Władysław Pasikowski, Krzysztof Krause, Vít Olmer, Juraj Jakubisko, Věra Chytilová, Wojciech Wójcik and Jaroslav Hanuš tackled new social phenomena brought about by the sudden deregulation of the market and decline of the authoritarian structures of the state, including economic crime, prostitution, drug use, the development of mafia structures, etc, in their work. The enquiry analysed the different strategies of portraying these topics in visual production and how these works interacted with economic ideas that circulated in the public sphere, in the broader context of the transformations of institutional structures in culture industries. It will thus trace how economic ideas and language informed the creative force of cultural producers’ conversations about the changing economic and political landscape during the systemic transformations.

The final project sought a reappraisal and new approach to the systemic transformations of the 1990s; an assessment of the role that cultural production played in rendering economic change intelligible through its representation; and an investigation of how the circulation of economic ideas and language gave the transformations social coherence and validity. Research conducted revealed two key topics that will merit from further investigation by historians and scholars of related disciplines: the crucial role of entrepreneurship as a central category structuring the artistic imagination and new social stratification of the 1990s; and the "gendered economic imaginaries" of the transforation that popular culture of the period produced.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project involved desk research (studying relevant relevant secondary literature and analysing primary sources), as well as two research stays in Warsaw in the spring of 2019 and the fall of 2019. Due to limited travel with the onset of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, further research in Warsaw and Bratislava was conducted by research assistants. The material gathered enabled the researcher to produce several outputs. These included a scholarly article on representations of entrepreneurship in Czech, Slovak and Polish cinema of the 1990s, published in East European Politics & Societies in 2021 (online) and 2022 (print). A further peer-reviewed publication emerged from a workshop in October 2020 organized in collaboration with the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies, entitled "Industries, Institutions and Everyday Cultures in Transformation". This event brought together scholars working on the economic and cultural histories of the systemic transformations after 1989 in East-Central Europe. It was also an opportunity to reflect on the state of the art of "transformation studies". Published outputs from this scholarly gathering included a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, co-edited with Vítězslav Sommer. The special issue included a scholarly article by the researcher on the privatization of the Polish and Czech film industry, as well as four other papers that considered cultural-historical approaches to postsocialist privatization.
During the course of the project, the researcher undertook various forms of training, including teaching. Between October and December 201 the researcher designed and taught a course on "History, Memory and Culture: 20th Century Central Europe" at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, Prague. She thus gained experience in creating her own syllabus and conducting a whole course unit from the preparation stage, through teaching, to grading and student feedback, gaining valuable experience of working within the Czech higher education environment. Further skills were acquired through presentations at conferences and internal seminars at the host institution and the organization of an international workshop. Closer integration into the host institution was gained by the researcher through becoming a member of the editorial team of the Czech Journal of Contemporary History.
As the period of the 1990s, on which the project primarily focused, has recently been much discussed in Czech, Slovak and Polish public discourse, the project also offered ample opportunities for popularization. Articles were thus published in the Czech, Slovak and Polish press and in English in the Cultures of History Forum, a popularizing outlet for historical research. A series of three articles dedicated to the cinema of Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia in the 1990s respectively, was published on PoliticalCritique.org.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project produced a number of impacts beyond the academic sphere. The researcher organized a public debate in partnership with the Czech media outlet A2larm. This debate, which took place in 2022 and gathered together several cultural critics, addressed the current "memory boom" for the popular culture of the 1990s. The event took place live and was also live streamed online on A2larm's social media channels. In Poland, the project was introduced to a wider audience through the radio station TOK FM, where the researcher appeared together with journalist Kaja Puto, in the programme "Świat się chwieje". Through these media appearances, the project's aims and findings reached a wide audience of several thousand people.
In the fall of 2019, the researcher was invited by the National Film Archive in Prague to co-curate with colleague Vítězslav Sommer a series of film screenings dedicted to Czechoslovak cinema of the late 1980s and early 1990s. As part of the series, the researcher gave an introduction to a public screening of the film Corpus delicti (dir. Irena Pavlasková, Czechoslovakia, 1991). The project's main findings were summarized in a public lecture as part of the regular seminar at the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences in June 2022.
Further planned outputs include a special issue of VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture on (post)socialist television satire, which the researcher is co-editing with Dana Mustata and Sonja de Leeuw, and to which she will contribute an article (late 2022), and, together with Joanna Wawrzyniak, a collective monograph addressing the way the economic transformations of the 1990s have been remembered across Eastern Europe (2023).

A collage of stills from Slovak films of the 1990s