Documentary Aesthetics in the Long 1960s in Eastern Europe and Beyond

This book is the first to deal with documentary aesthetic practices of the post-war period in Eastern Europe in a comparative perspective. The contributions examine the specific forms and modes of documentary representations and the role they played in the formation of new aesthetic trends during the cultural-political transition of the long 1960s. This documentary first-hand approach to the world aimed to break up unquestioned ideological structures and expose tabooed truths in order to engender much-needed social changes. New ways of depicting daily life, writing testimony or subjective reportage emerged that still shape cultural debates today.

Table of contents

• Introduction: Firsthand Time
  Clemens Günther and Matthias Schwartz | 1–28

Part I Exposing a Painful Past: Modes of Testimony

• “Document of the Soul:” Varlam Shalamov’s Documentary Writing in a Contemporary Context
  Franziska Thun-Hohenstein | 31–51
• The Dreyfus Affair for Soviet Children: on the Encoded Poetics of Aleksandra Brushtein’s Documentary Prose
  Natasha Gordinsky | 52–70
• Supplementing Evidence: Danilo Kiš’s Poet(h)ics in the Context of Yugoslav Documentarism of the 1960s
  Tatjana Petzer | 71–93
• Hands of Time and Large Numbers in Alexander Kluge’s (Post-)Documentary Literature
  Gunther Martens | 94–114

Part II Discovering the Self and the Other: Modes of Expressing Individuality

• Celebration and Abstraction: the Documentary Mode of Jonas Mekas’s Diary Films
  Christian Zehnder | 117–144
• Documentary and Poetics Interwoven: Mikhail Kalik’s Cinema
  Elena Nekrasova | 145–163
• The Technique of Documenting: on the Early Reportages of Ryszard Kapuściński and Hanna Krall
  Matthias Schwartz | 164–185

Part III Refining the Senses: Modes of Self-Reflective Artistic Practices

• “Dramas of the Fact:” Soviet Conceptualisations of Documentary Theatre in the 1960s
  Anna Hodel | 189–216
• “Instead of Approximate Precision—Precise Approximation:” Ian Satunovskii’s Poor Poetry
  Georg Witte | 217–240
• Reproductions without an Original: the Self-Published Aesthetics of Cold War-Era Copies
  Sarah A. Burgos | 241–266

Part IV Exploring the Everyday: Modes of Perceiving Social Issues

• The Trials of Documenting: Frida Vigdorova’s Notes of the Brodsky Court Proceedings
  Anja Tippner | 269–287
• The Poetry of Mikhail Sokovnin: an Aesthetic Opposition to the “Literature of Fact”
  Ilya Kukulin | 288–310
• “Discourses of Sobriety:” Documentary Aesthetics in Conceptual Art in the United States
  Renate Wöhrer | 311–335

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