Mladenova, Radmila: The ‘White’ Mask and the ‘Gypsy’ Mask in Film
Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2022 (Interdisciplinary Studies in Antigypsyism – Book series initiated by the Research Centre on Antigypsyism, Band 3).
The study ventures into a topic that has been so far largely neglected in film studies: the ‘gypsy’ phantasm on the big screen. It reconstructs the history of ‘gypsy’ representations in film since the birth of the medium providing a systematic film-theoretical analysis of their aesthetic and social functions. Based on a corpus of over 150 works from European and US cinema, it is shown that ‘gypsy’-themed feature films share the pattern of an ‘ethno-racial’ masquerade, irrespective of the place and time of their origin. The author thus expands the research, concentrated until now in the field of literature, with another art form, film, opening up new dimensions of (popular) cultural antigypsyism.
This new study is already the third volume in the series “Interdisciplinary Studies in Antigypsyism” initiated by the Research Centre on Antigypsyism at the Heidelberg University. Radmila Mladenova’s fundamental work – published in English – critically revisits antiziganist constructions in film, which will certainly generate a long overdue discussion among filmmakers and media scholars alike, at both the German and European levels.
Like all volumes in this series, Radmila Mladenova’s monograph is freely available under Creative Commons License 4.0 and is also available in hardcover. The full HTML version will soon be made available online with all image reproductions.
https://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/catalog/book/989?lang=en