Digital Combat examines how contemporary warfare and historical traumas reshape the study and practice of film in Eastern Europe. Bringing together leading international scholars, the volume interrogates cultural canons, reframes national film histories, and situates recent Ukrainian cinema at the center of urgent debates about violence, testimony, and survival.

Structured in four parts, the collection moves from revisiting canonical questions to highlighting women's voices, the ethics of documentary, and the role of new media. The chapters analyse diverse case studies, including the recovery of early Ukrainian cinema overlooked by Russian imperial narratives; portrayals of the Donbas as a 'non-space' caught in perpetual conflict; female filmmakers' reframing of war and gendered trauma; and the reflexive strategies of documentaries confronting displacement and atrocity. Further chapters explore how digital technologies, smartphones, and TikTok poetry videos transform both the aesthetics of wartime filmmaking and the preservation of cultural memory.

By combining close formal analysis with postcolonial and trauma theory, Digital Combat situates Eastern European cinema within a broader global discourse on war, exile, and the ethics of representation. It demonstrates how film and media not only record catastrophe but also create spaces of resilience, agency, and resistance. Timely and interdisciplinary, this book offers essential analyses for scholars of film studies, Slavic and East European studies, cultural memory, and conflict studies.

Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Foreword

Flickering Pain: How to Re/frame the Eastern Turn?
Yuri Leving

Part I: Re/framing

1. Canons of Eastern European Cinema and the Place of Eastern European Films in Global Film Canons
Ewa Mazierska

2. Reframing Early Ukrainian Film History: A Case Study in Decolonization
Yuri Shevchuk

3. Reframing or Unframing: Donbas/s as Cinematic Non-Space in Non-Time
Birgit Beumers

4. Representation of Survivors in Donbas Documentary: Reframing Objects as Subjects
Anna Tropnikova

Part II: The Unwomanly Face of War: Women’s Voices

5. Approaching War Anew: Female Filmmakers of New Ukrainian Cinema
Justin Wilmes and Beata Waligorska-Olejniczak

6. The Occupied Body: Women and War in Recent Ukrainian and Russian Feature Films
Irina Schulzki

Part III: Documentary in the Time of War: Witnessing, Advocating, Narrating

7. Nonrepresentation and Intergenerational Trauma in Transnational Ukrainian Documentary Cinema
Emily-Rose Baker

8. The Reality of War: Russian Documentary Films about Ukraine
Anastasia Kostina

9. War as Subtext and Context in Sergei Loznitsa’s Films
Lioudmila Fedorova

10. Did I Hear Right? Re-Sounding Archival Images in the Films of Sergei Loznitsa
Daniel Schwartz

Part IV: Eastern European Cinema and New Media

11. GoPro Cruelty: Finding Film Truth in Yevhen Titarenko and Vitaly Mansky’s Eastern Front (2023)
Sue Matheson

12. Intimate Visions of War: Film Style, Technology, and the Mediated Experience of the Russo-Ukrainian War
Zdenko Mandušić

13. The World Witnessed: Ukrainian Animation in Times of War
Olga Blackledge

14. Taras Shevchenko is Alive on TikTok: Poetry Videos and National Identity During Russia’s War Against Ukraine
Alyssa Virker

List of Contributors
Index