Kontrapunkt within the 9th edition of CRIC – Festival for Critical Culture titled “Desired machines – art as a (r)evolution” invites you to a screening of the film “Ekzitus” (1989) by Krassimir Kroumov, to be followed by a talk by the Bulgarian philosopher and theorist Stanimir Panayotov. The screening and lecture will take place at SCS Centre Jadro on 5th of July at 18:30.
In 1989 director Krassimir Kroumov (1955-2015) released his first full-length film Exitus, by adapting the eponimic novelette by Zlatomir Zlatanov as a critique of the stagnation of late socialist Bulgarian society. Little did he know that that same year perestroika would change the country forever, but he did capture that Zlatanov’s philosophical and Buddhist-tending prose, which already influenced his first novel The Drowned, also published in 1989, would reflect his own aesthetic and ideological protest against the stifling atmosphere of a failing communist project. All the less did he expect that soon after the changes, Exitus would be a transideological work that can diagnose also the transition to liberal capitalism and its effects.
The talk by Stanimir will focus on and present the philosophical background in Zlatanov’s Exitus and its placating in the eponimous film; though briefly discussing how Kroumov integrates both literature and philosophy in his cinema, and the specific weaponizing of Eastern philosophy during late socialism. The talk will also focus on the role of the 1990s and early neoliberalism as defining Kroumov’s later philosophical writings – his philosophical prose in Unknown Roads, vols I and II (2002, 2004) and The New Conformism (2015). Kroumov represents a philosophy-driven cinema unique to Eastern European aesthetics with its near-immediate response to neoliberalism, reflected both in his 1990s films and his 2000s writings. Kroumov’s legacy needs to be understood as a lonely and unexpected critique of both late socialism and early capitalism, something almost entirely alien to both Bulgarian and Eastern European realities in the early 1990s, but a critique that remains both transideological and left nonetheless.
Stanimir Panayotov is a researcher at the Department of Literary Theory, Institute for Literature, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He holds a PhD in comparative gender studies from Central European University, Budapest and is also a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Logic, Ethics, and Aesthetics in Sofia University, working on his project Nemopolitics (2023-2026). Previously, he was Assistant Professor in Philosophy and Cultural Studies (Tyumen, 2021-2023), a postdoctoral fellow at Center for Advanced Study in Sofia (Bulgaria, 2020-2021), and has taught various courses in humanities in Budapest, Jerusalem, Skopje, and Sofia. He works at the intersections of continental and feminist philosophy, non-philosophy, and late antique philosophy, and has published in the Minnesota Review, Aspasia, Heathen Harvest, and Metal Music Studies.
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CRIC – Festival for Critical Culture is financially supported by the Goethe Institute, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of North Macedonia and the Creative Europe program of the European Commission, financed by the European Union. However, the views and opinions expressed therein are those of the author(s) alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the grantor can be held responsible for them. As well as, the Agenzia Italiana per la Cooperazione allo Sviluppo (AICS), Tirana in the framework of the project “Culture and Creativity for the Western Balkans” (CC4WBs), a project funded by the European Union that aims to encourage dialogue in the Western Balkans by strengthening cultural and creative sectors for increased socio-economic impact.
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Споделено на: June 30, 2024 во 4:48 pm