The Sixth Annual Screen Industries in East-Central Europe Conference (SIECE): The Long 1990s

The Sixth Annual Screen Industries in East-Central Europe Conference (SIECE) shifts attention from structural transformations to the longer-term continuities shaping post-socialist media in the last 26 years. Instead of isolated changes, it focuses on slower historical time, evolving beneath the visible surface of “big” historical events. The topic of the “Long 1990s” (usually defined by historians as the period between November 1989 and September 11, 2001) aims at both historicizing the turbulent decade and at identifying ways it is still shaping current industry practices, although often in an unacknowledged or hidden way. The decade’s improvisational, informal, anachronistic, do-it-yourself, and ad-hoc practices that emerged from the ruins of state-owned media institutions gradually solidified into a system of values and norms which we are still witnessing today. The conference invites participants to adopt a critical perspective: to test an assumption that, in many ways, the heritage of the 1990s limits the way “things are done” in film and television today, and that it has cemented the image of Central and Eastern European audiovisual culture in the West. (For example, how is it that the era of political upheavals gave birth to such an apolitical media culture and politically fragmented professional community which are suspicious of any collective action?) The conference also opens the floor for more positive views of the period: its experimental ethos and the awareness that rules of the game can be changed. As an ECREA pre-conference, SIECE aims to be more interdisciplinary than ever before, welcoming topics from all cultural industries, especially those which transverse institutionalized boundaries and categories.