The Europeanness of European Cinema

Identity, Meaning, Globalization

Mary Harrod, Mariana Liz, Alissa Timoshkina, Mary Harrod, Mariana Liz, Alissa Timoshkina

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857738486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Globalización

From The Artist to The White Ribbon, from Oscar to Palme d'Or-winning productions, European filmmaking is more prominent, world-wide, than ever before. This book identifies the distinctive character of European cinema, both in films and as a critical concept, asking: what place does European cinema have in an increasingly globalized world? Including in-depth analyses of production and reception contexts, as well as original readings of key European films from leading experts in the field, it re-negotiates traditional categories such as auteurism, art cinema and national cinemas. As the first publication to explore 'Europeanness' in cinema, this book refocuses and updates historically significant areas of study in relation to this term. Leading scholars in European cinema - including Thomas Elsaesser, Tim Bergfelder, Anne Jackel, Lucy Mazdon and Ginette Vincendeau - acknowledge the transnational character of European filmmaking whilst also exploring the oppositions between European and Hollywood filmmaking, considering the value of the 'European' label in the circulation of films within and beyond the continent.
The Europeanness of European Cinema makes a lively, timely intervention in the fields of European and transnational film studies.

Section 1
Defining Europe and Its Cinema

1
European Cinema into the Twenty-First Century: Enlarging the Context?

Thomas Elsaesser

One of the most familiar but increasingly obsolete ways of asserting the identity of European cinema is to define it in opposition to Hollywood. As the ‘good’ other, it is a self-ascription, where European directors and national cinemas are lined up in binary pairs, such as ‘art versus commerce’, ‘auteur versus star’, ‘critical prestige versus box office’, ‘realism versus dream factory’ or – more recently – ‘the movement image versus the time image’ (Deleuze 1986; 1989). These and many similar constructions of identity through difference tend to disguise the fact that the major changes – technological, political and demographic – which have affected how films are being produced, distributed, viewed and used have left especially the national cinemas of Europe in a crisis of identity: they no longer quite know what they are, and whether their directors feel allegiance to a national project, to authorial representativeness or to diffuse audiences at festivals, on television and in the dwindling DVD market (see also Elsaesser 2005).

As in other areas of economic and cultural life, the de-centring of Europe as a consequence of globalization has also led to a loss of prestige for art and auteur cinema. Traditionally strong filmmaking countries like France, Italy and Germany may still boast world-class festivals in Cannes, Venice and Berlin, but the films showcased and winning prizes often come from outside Europe. And looked at from outside (including from the USA), films made in Europe now share the generic label ‘world cinema’, where they compete with those from Turkey and Thailand, Iran and Mexico. This apparent ‘demotion’ of European cinema to ‘world cinema’ status (in sharp contrast to the rise of Asian cinema, notably that of South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and now mainland China as commercial rivals to Hollywood, as well as artistic rivals to Europe) might be regretted or lamented, but it is a fact, just as the prefix ‘Euro’ is now more often linked to cheapness and embarrassment, not wealth or welfare: Euro-trash, Euro-pudding, Euro-shopper, Euro-crisis. Provided we can acknowledge the realities of these trans-valuations of our idea of ‘Europe’ – so my argument runs – this also represents an opportunity: first to let the label ‘Europe’ find its own fluctuating ‘value’ on the stock-exchange of cultural capital, and second to rethink what is or could be specific about Europe, not just in matters concerned with cinema – maybe even leading to a new ‘political’ understanding of cinema, as part of some larger, common European project.

Being part of ‘world cinema’ highlights how films come about in contemporary Europe: they are financed via co-productions and television money, and distributed mainly through the film festival circuit, which acts as filter and gatekeeper and bestows cultural capital on the handful of films it green-lights through awards and prizes every year. At these festivals, such films are classified, categorized and valorized more than ever through the auteur-as-artist value attribution, and more rarely through the ‘new national cinema’ label. The rest of the world’s productions are exotic flora and fauna that are exhibited and discussed at specialized – often ‘themed’ – retrospectives, at travelling festivals on the EU folklore circuit of ‘capitals of Europe’ or at nationally inflected art events, book fairs and academic conferences.

What might a cinema be like that knew it was no longer a competitor to Hollywood in the classic self-other construction? One that, furthermore, tried to think past the kind of self-exoticism, or auto-ethnography, which is the perpetual temptation of such a co-produced, multi-platform ‘national cinema as world cinema’, where films and directors represent themselves to the (big) Other as they imagine the other imagines them? These may be unanswerable questions, because too narrowly phrased or still haunted by the need to define identity through either ‘essence’ and ‘being’ or ‘difference’ and ‘distinction’. Perhaps what is at issue is a much more momentous change in how we think about cinema: definitions commensurate with the digital age, with social networks and the ubiquity of moving image displays in art and design, advertising and politics.

European Cinema beyond Ontology and Alterity

The view of cinema described above might imply a change of metaphor, and a new philosophy of film: no longer thinking of the screen as either a ‘window-on-the-world’ or a ‘mirror-of-the-self ’, the two abiding – even though apparently diametrically opposed – aesthetics as well as epistemologies of modern European cinema. Since the end of World War II and the revival of European art cinema, the metaphor of the ‘window’ has stood for the aesthetics of transparency and realism, as exemplified by neo-realism and the theories of André Bazin (1967–71) and Siegfried Kracauer (1960), while the ‘mirror’ came to signify the European auteurs’ modernist turn to self-reference, reflexivity and techniques of spectatorial distanciation, as exemplified by Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Jean Luc Godard, and theorized as apparatus theory, suture and mise-en-abyme by Christian Metz (1982) and Jean Louis Baudry (1974) and in Jacques Lacan’s mirror phase (1968).

Following on from earlier attempts to describe the hybrid states and hyphenated identities of European cinema by introducing the concept of ‘double occupancy’ and ‘mutual interference’ (Elsaesser 2005) – locutions meant to address multi-cultural aspirations and anxieties by making the connection with ‘hospitality’, for example, of how to accommodate the stranger, the intruder, the guest, both from without and already within – I now want to extend this enquiry into mutuality beyond the complex dynamics of self and other that are invariably associated with the cinema when its guiding metaphors are either ‘window’ or ‘mirror’.¹ Understanding the epithet ‘European’ across a different dynamic of antagonism and mutuality means accepting at face value the judgement of others, as well as Europe’s self-image. It involves taking seriously the characteristic I alluded to in the beginning: the new ‘marginality’ of Europe, which, when applied to the cinema, I see as an opportunity as much as an occasion for regret. At first glance, the negative qualifications associable with European cinema seem overwhelming: artificially kept alive with government subsidies, Council of Europe directives (see Anne Jäckel’s piece in this collection) and cheap television co-production deals; bolstered by being co-opted for cultural tourism and city branding; speaking on behalf of no constituency, and for the most part, speaking to no public other than festival audiences, loyal cinephiles and university students. Looking more closely, these apparently fatal weaknesses might yet be turned to advantage. Precisely because they exist at the margins, in a sphere of dis-investment and disinterest, European films have a special kind of freedom, which is also a power and a strength: having ‘lost’ the (illusory) status of paragon of virtue, integrity and victimhood vis à vis Hollywood, they have little or nothing else to lose. Their inconsequentiality either in economic or ideological terms frees them from the burden of being ‘representative’ and allows them to develop a new kind of autonomy and a different kind of critical reflexivity.

In contrast to Hollywood films, European cinema does not have to prove that it is ‘post-9/11’ or ‘post-racial’, that it has global audience appeal or plays equally well as a gripping story and a video-game, that it holds up to repeated viewing on a DVD, or that it will still be remembered when it is time to sell the television rights to cable and the syndicated networks. Not having to ‘reflect’ specific values, and therefore not being answerable to the kinds of critique to which Hollywood films are routinely subject – by way of any of the many hermeneutics of suspicion that nowadays make a mainstream film symptomatic of this or that trend or tendency, guilty of this or that mis-representation, or an allegory of this or that political event – represents a special kind of privilege and freedom. European cinema can, as a consequence, more easily transcend or ignore the geometry of window and mirror, indeed any kind of fixed spatial coordinates, which make such critiques ontologically possible in the first place, because of the mimetic-representational correspondences they imply about the relation of cinematic realism (however stylized) to physical reality (however ideological).

Therefore, in order to come to another way of classifying European cinema, I dispense with the usual taxonomies, not only by ignoring individual national cinemas, but also leaving aside the interpretative schemata of a) classical film theory (ideological critique) and b) cultural studies (the politics of representation and identity), while also excusing myself for not adopting the Deleuzian toolbox of crystal image, minor literature and sensory-motor schema, which has become the customary consequence of rejecting both a) and b). Instead, I want to invoke three readily available narratives that try to explain this collapse of relevance within the geopolitical context of Europe’s new marginality.

First, we encounter the narrative of globalization and the end of the Cold War. Europe from 1945 until 1990 had a unique strategic value for the USA as its buffer zone and front-line with the Soviet Union; since the 1990s, however, Europe has lost much of its political significance for the USA, which is now turned to China, Asia and the Middle East. Globalization has decisively shifted the epicentres of power, and the bi-polar face-to-face of Europe is over, either in relation to the USA or in confrontation with the USSR. We witness here the downsides to the upsides of the EU: in a few brief decades, it has established partnership between nations that used to be arch-enemies, notably France and Germany, Britain and France, Germany and Britain, and it has healed or at least re-arranged the East–West divisions brought about by the Cold War. It has brought prosperity to Europe’s impoverished periphery, notably to countries like Spain, Portugal, Greece and Ireland – even though we only now realize the price that will have to be paid for this sudden wealth.

Secondly, Europe, based as it has been on its nation-states, with their firm borders, distinct peoples, languages and territories, has gradually lost these markers of identity which differentiated one from the other. Within the EU, there are hardly any borders: Europe has absorbed millions of ‘foreign’ nationals (from within or from outside the EU), it has become multinational, multi-religious and multi-ethnic, and there has been an unprecedented mobility of goods, labour, people and property. The self–other therefore no longer applies as the Gestalt model regulating self-perception, except as populist ressentiment, mostly on the extreme right of the political spectrum. In short, Europe no longer has a heroic narrative of self-identity and self-creation. The French and American Revolution, Rousseau and Hobbes’s social contract leading to democracy, the critical hermeneutics of the Enlightenment, which established empirical knowledge, technological improvement of life and the prospect of unlimited progress: all these represented European narratives of heroic-collective self-creation and self-realization. But now that we know how much this heroic narrative was also based on imperialism, slavery and colonialism, on exploitation and exclusion, we are no longer quite so proud of it. Central and Eastern Europe – as a consequence of its freedom from totalitarianism – has seen a resurgence of nationalism, but it is one born out of fear and resentment, clinging to the remnants of the heroic narrative in distinctly un-heroic times of corruption and cronyism. In other words, the post-national condition has led neither to a credible post-heroic narrative (whatever this might turn out to be), nor to a whole-hearted embrace of globalization, other than in the form of tourism, leisure and consumption. Instead, Europe is turned obsessively inward, towards the past, towards commemoration and coll...

Table of contents

• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Content
• List of Illustrations, Table and Graph
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• The Europeanness of European Cinema: An Overview
• Section 1 Defining Europe and Its Cinema
• Section 2 Transnational Europe: Genre, Stardom and Language
• Section 3 Circulating Europeanness
• Bibliography