Lukas Brasiskis

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (February 21 - May 21)： 

Brasiskis's dissertation focuses on Environmental Memories in East-Central European Film and Media, 1988—2018 is the first scholarly study of East-Central European post-socialist film and media to focus on representations of socialist environments and their mnemonic affects. This dissertation responds to the growing field of eco-criticism, which, when considered as a method for film and media analysis, helps him to reassess post-socialist representations of socialist landscapes, ideological spaces and architectural sites where the human, the natural, and the material commingle. In this work, he employs ecocritical reading of screen representations, theorizes them from the two perspectives: media production and media reception. He employs the close analysis of his Dissertation Summary 2 films and video works, alongside a range of primary archival sources that include production records, interviews and documentations of reception. He investigates fifteen politically and aesthetically important and yet under-examined films from Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria and Russia. Brasiskis draws his interdisciplinary methodology from the fields of Film and Media Studies, Memory Studies, Anthropology, and Environmental Studies.