Graduate Student, Film Studies
PhD Candidate
School of Philosophy, Anthropology and Film Studies
Thesis Title: Re-Presenting the Spanish Civil War: Internationalist Non-Fiction Filmmaking
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Dina Iordanova
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About
The Spanish Civil War braided war and cinema, and in the same way that the Iberian country was used as an arena for experimentation in warfare, it was also used for experimentation in film.
I examine the construction and communication of meaning of the Spanish Civil War through the pro-republican non-fiction filmmaking, mainly newsreels, compilation films and committed documentaries, in both Soviet cinema and Socialist Realist influenced filmmaking.
My research seeks to understand how non-fiction filmmaking represented the war, which visual forms and montage techniques were used to (re)interpret the conflict and how the films where used for propagandistic purposes.
I ask how can a historical event be used to analyse filmic discourse, and how can filmic discourse be used to understand the social and political function of a film. In order to answer these questions I use the Spanish Civil War as a fertile ground for film studies as a historical moment.
I approach cinema as a medium capable of representing a multiform reality provided in a specific language, multiple modes of expression and through the decomposition and re-composition of time and space, emphasizing the unspoken and visual impact. Form thus helps to shape content, which shows that there is an intrinsic relation between form and purpose, medium and message.
I graduated with a BA in Modern and Contemporary History from the Metropolitan University of Lisbon, Portugal where I worked the subject of the Hungarian participation in the Spanish Civil War. During my BA I started to work in film as an assistant director of Italian filmmaker Corso Salani among other projects. It wasn’t until my MA in Contemporary History of Central and Eastern Europe at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary that I started to combine my professional experience in cinema with my academic historical background, working on the topic of Soviet non-fiction cinema and the Spanish Civil War, a topic that I wish to expand in my PhD under the supervision of Professor Dina Iordanova.
