Mariana Ivanova

In Fall 2019, Mariana Ivanova joined the German and Scandinavian Studies Program as an Associate Professor of German Film and Media and the Academic Director of the DEFA Film Library. Her scholarship focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century German and European cinemas and cultures, theories of transnational filmmaking and coproduction, artistic networks, and cultural mediation. At the DEFA Film Library, she co-directs Summer Film Institutes and works within a vibrant team to support research and teaching of East German cinema in the US and around the globe. Her monograph, Cinema of Collaboration: DEFA Coproductions and International Exchange in Cold War Europe approaches the Cold War division through the lens of film coproductions and exchange, artistic collaboration, and cultural mediation, and thus responds to the need to rethink socialist cinemas, and in particular East German cinema, within the constantly evolving discursive space of European filmmaking. Ivanova has also published and given talks on the ways the GDR is represented and “remembered” in film, on genre and censorship practices within socialist cinematic industries, and on transborder movement for the purposes of producing and distributing films. She is currently working on two new projects. A monograph, Re-claiming the Producer: From Cold War Networks to Contemporary European Cinema tackles continuities in German producers’ aspirations for international market presence before and after the German Reunification; specifically, it examines a transnational network established by less-studied figures of West German film, such as Artur Brauner, Ilse Kubaschewki, and Manfred Durniok and their Eastern European, Asian, and North American partners. Ivanova’s other project focuses on re-thinking heritage cinema within the context of the recent proliferation of historical films about private lives impacted by both ideological division and transborder movement during the Cold War. By examining the phenomena of multi-layered temporalities juxtaposed in post-2000 films, this project intertwines various memory discourses with the current priorities and realities of European filmmaking.