Politics of Contemporary European Cinema

Mike Wayne

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781841508221
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Managerial Accounting
• Index: Business

How does contemporary European Cinema reflect the drive for political and economic integration and recent trends in globalisation, if at all? This book is a valuable excursion into the politics of European cinema and extensively addresses questions like this.Mike Wayne identifies some key themes pertinent to a study of the contemporary cultural and political dynamics of European cinema from the mid-1980's, including the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Soviet Empire.Throughout the book, issues are raised that question European culture and the nature of national cinema, including;• The cultural relationship with Hollywood;
• Debates over cultural plurality and diversity;
• The disintegration of nation states along the eastern flank;
• Postcolonial travels and the hybridisation of the national formation.

1 European Cinema: In The Shadow of Hollywood

This chapter begins by mapping out the economic reasons for Hollywood’s global domination and explores the UK film industry’s subordinate position within that hegemony. I will situate the European film industry and film policy within the contemporary and contradictory drive towards economic and political union. The European Community has implemented a number of strategies designed to help sustain the European film industry in its unequal struggle with Hollywood. I will focus on a case study of one film, The Disappearance of Finbar (Sue Clayton, 1996), to show in detail, how the Eurimages scheme works to encourage European co-productions and what its limitations might be. This chapter focuses on questions of industry, its structures and strategies, for the simple reason that conditions of production, distribution and exhibition help shape the kinds of films which get made. But we must also engage with the cultural debates circulating around European cinema, since these also shape the kinds of films which get made, not least by shaping the industrial arrangements which make film production and consumption possible in the first place. On the one hand we must call into question the arrogance, the complacency, the assumptions and self-delusions involved in an uncritical celebration of Europe as the source and guarantor of Enlightenment ideals. On the other hand (and much less fashionably) we must call into question the mirror image of this position which is common amongst the western intelligentsia. This postmodern position can best be described as post-Enlightenment liberalism, in which cultural difference becomes the Holy Grail, the only debate in town worth having. It is an important theme throughout this book that questions of cultural diversity, while quite proper and important, must not be formulated in such a way that notions such as social progress, justice, and questions around social solidarity, become marginalised. Within this broader cultural debate, I will plot some of the cultural positions implied by various strategies for European cinema. We shall find a number of tensions particularly around ‘big’ filmmaking vs. ‘small’ filmmaking; tensions between commercial and cultural ambitions; between popular and high culture, and between Europe’s differentiation from or influence by Hollywood.

Globalisation and National Culture

Before plunging into the details of European cinema and its economic and cultural relations with Hollywood, it would be useful to situate the debate within the wider context of debates around globalisation and national culture. For Hollywood is of course a major globaliser of symbolic material. In order to provide some focus to a large subject, I want to concentrate on an essay by the American Marxist critic Fredric Jameson. This essay, ‘Globalization as a Philosophical Issue’,¹ is a typically Jamesonian mix of eloquently crafted insights and curious blind spots. This combination will help identify some of the problems and issues surrounding current thinking on global, national and pan-national cultures.

Jameson’s central concern in this essay is to try and formulate why globalisation appears to be simultaneously about two contradictory dynamics. This, as Arjun Appadurai has noted, ‘is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization.’² Jameson defines globalisation as centrally about the export and import of culture.³ At one level, globalisation appears to be the process whereby all the world’s cultures are being drawn together in new creative combinations. Here globalisation links to a postmodern celebration of heterogeneity, with cultural differences jostling in ‘tolerant contact with each other’.⁴ Linked to this expanded and extended communication network is the emergence ‘into the speech of the public sphere’ of a whole range of formerly marginalised groups and cultures.

However, the duality of the concept of globalisation means that the term also has a dark side insofar as it is associated with the coercive integration of national economies, markets and cultures into a homogenous, essentially American dominated culture. Here we are reminded that the import and export of culture does not take place on a level playing field. While Hollywood captures at least 70% of the British film market, the British film industry captures only 1% of the American film market.⁵

Jameson suggests that the homogenisation/heterogenisation couplet is applied across the global/national culture couplet depending on where ‘a malign and standardizing identity is discerned.’⁶ If it is perceived to be the state (or the culture industries) using the nation as its sphere of legitimacy, to be an agent of uniformity in which difference is marginalised or concealed, in which the hierarchies of power which structure the nation are masked, and where the interests of political and economic elites are projected as general interests when in fact they are not, then it is at the level of the nation where a despotic homogenisation may be said to accrue. Here then the market, with its cosmopolitanism and its transnationalism, can be mobilised as a site of resistance and difference to a national culture which is in fact the class, gender and ethnic encoded culture of a national dominant. And this is of course precisely the way in which Hollywood has functioned for the working classes of Britain⁷ and Europe,⁸ for many decades. However, Jameson suggests that when we move ‘to a higher level globally, then everything changes: at this upper range, it is not national state power that is the enemy of difference, but rather the transnational system itself.’⁹ Here then, nation-states are called on to protect the difference of national cultures and to affirm their particularity in the face of global homogenisation.

I think this is a very useful way of formulating the problem and plotting the different responses of commentators to the global vs national culture tension. However, we need to explore the implications of the relations between the global and the national in a bit more detail. Jameson’s own position within this formulation is problematic because, as his language about moving to ‘a higher level’ suggests, the main threat to cultural diversity comes, for him, from the corporate interests which dominate the transnational markets. While I would not disagree with this diagnosis, within Jameson’s essay, it is a diagnosis premised on a rather uncritical support for the nation-state. It is also premised on some problematic assumptions concerning American cultural domination.

The latter is worth exploring not least because Jameson takes as his example, the case of Hollywood. Jameson falls into the problematic assertion that the consumption of Hollywood films breaks up the ‘seamless web of habits and habitual practices’ of a national culture. Here, Jameson presents Hollywood film, particularly in the context of the Third World, as ‘the apprenticeship to a specific culture’, a kind of Trojan horse that lays the ground in converting unique national cultures into an American global cultural hegemony.¹⁰ Here Jameson seems quite unaware of the critiques of this kind of simplistic notion of cultural imperialism.

One scrupulously detailed critique of this argument has been made by John Tomlinson. He notes that discussions of cultural domination often locate the media as central to cultural imperialism.¹¹ However, we cannot conflate media products with culture per se. The former may enter as ‘foreign’ bodies into another cultural matrix, but be ‘indigenised’, which is to say, read not in accordance with the American cultural framework from which they have originated and now exited, but read in relation to the cultural framework they subsequently enter. As Tomlinson notes:

media texts of Western origin are massively present in other cultures. But the key question is, does this presence represent cultural imperialism? Clearly the sheer presence alone does not. A text does not become culturally significant until it is read.¹²

This argument is equally applicable to Hollywood films playing in European cinemas or on European television. This distinction between media products (films, television programmes, books, etc) and culture (which draws on a broader repertoire of meaning making resources and interpretive codes) opens up the space for the audience to become active rather than merely passive consumers of culture.This has been a familiar theme in the populist turn in much contemporary cultural theory.¹³

Yet while this position rightly deals a blow to any simplistic cultural imperialism model, what it often fails to address is whether it would be desirable to have media forms which are rooted in and sensitive to more local, national or regional (in a pan-national sense) realities and cultures. This is not to deny that there may be ‘universalist’ or at least transnational themes and concerns in global cultural products such as provided by Hollywood, or that Hollywood films may well be inflected differently according to the cultural frameworks into which they enter; yet neither of these possibilities are a substitute for cultural plurality to be rooted in thriving production units outside Hollywood/America. Without access to indigenous production, cultural consumption is always having to work with symbolic material fashioned elsewhere under material and cultural determinants that may be quite different and remote from the place(s) of reception.

As Hollywood’s global hegemony expands, the resulting homogenisation of world film culture is complexly coupled with Hollywood’s own differentiation as it incorporates stylistic elements and the creative personnel it sucks up from the film cultures it gradually displaces or marginalises. But this internal differentiation is not, I would argue, an adequate compensation for the diminishing scope which other film cultures have to develop in. Even under conditions of economic inequality between film industries (to be explored below) cultural exchange has its benefits, but it is a skewed and one-sided process, with Hollywood conceding rather less culturally, than its competitors, and with losses that are entirely avoidable if we were operating outside the economic metabolism of capital.

There are two arguments running along here which it is worth drawing out more explicitly. In part, my argument is a geo-cultural one, that it is desirable for there to be film production that displays a familiarity with local, national or pan-national realities and cultures. However, ‘local’ production (at whatever geographical scale) is not necessarily desirable in and of itself. Ideally, local film production should adopt a critical and questioning perspective on the material and cultural realities it is in proximate contact with.

It is precisely this critical stance that does not come through strongly enough in Jameson’s valorisation of the nation. The nation-state of course has often provided the legal power, the financial resources and the institutional apparatuses to foster and sustain indigenous cultural production. Yet as I have already indicated,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 European Cinema: In The Shadow of Hollywood
• 2 National Cinema/International Markets
• 3 Pan-European Cinema
• 4 After The Fall: Cinema and Central and Eastern Europe
• 5 Diasporan Travels: British Asian Cinema
• Conclusion
• Index