European Cinema And Intertextuality

This book offers an up-to-date approach to the question of representing history through film, exploring how films represent crucial events in twentieth-century European history. This includes the Second World War, Armenian Genocide, anti-Semitic attacks in Poland, European terrorism of the 1970s, and the end of communism.

Contrary to the assumption that Western and Eastern European economies and cinemas were very different from each other, they actually had much in common. After the Second World War both the East and the West adopted a mixed system, containing elements of both socialism and capitalism, and from the 1980s on the whole of Europe, albeit at an uneven speed, followed the neoliberal agenda. This book examines how the economic systems of the East and West impacted labor by focusing on the representation of work in European cinema. Using a Marxist perspective, it compares the situation of workers in Western and Eastern Europe as represented in both auteurist and popular films, including those of Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrzej Wajda, DušanMakavejev, Jerzy Skolimowski, the Dardenne Brothers, Ulrich Seidl and many others.

The concept of intertextuality has proven of inestimable value in recent attempts to understand the nature of literature and its relation to other systems of cultural meaning. In The Memory of Tiresias, Mikhail Iamposlki presents the first sustained attempt to develop a theory of cinematic intertextuality. Building on the insights of semiotics and contemporary film theory, Iampolski defines cinema as a chain of transparent, mimetic fragments intermixed with quotations he calls "textual anomalies." These challenge the normalization of meaning and seek to open reading out onto the unlimited field of cultural history, which is understood in texts as a semiotically active extract, already inscribed. Quotations obstruct mimesis and are consequently transformed in the process of semiosis, an operation that Iampolski defines as reading in an aura of enigma. In a series of brilliant analyses of films by D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, and Luis Buñuel, he presents different strategies of intertextual reading in their work. His book suggests the continuing centrality of semiotic analysis and is certain to interest film historians and theorists, as well as readers in cultural and literary studies.

Cinema frequently depicts various types of work, but this representation is never straightforward. It depends on and reflects many factors, especially the place and time the film is made and the type of audience it addresses. Here, the contributors employ transnational and transhistorical perspectives to compare filmic depictions of work.

Like many Eastern European countries, Poland has seen a succession of divergent economic and political regimes over the last century, from prewar “embedded liberalism,” through the state socialism of the Soviet era, to the present neoliberal moment. Its cinema has been inflected by these changing historical circumstances, both mirroring and resisting them. This volume is the first to analyze the entirety of the nation’s film history—from the reemergence of an independent Poland in 1918 to the present day—through the lenses of political economy and social class, showing how Polish cinema documented ordinary life while bearing the hallmarks of specific ideologies.

This book offers a range of accounts of the state of "European Cinema" in a specific sociopolitical era: that of the global economic crisis that began in 2008 and the more recent refugee and humanitarian crisis. With the recession having become a popular theme of economic, demographic, and sociological research in recent years, this volume examines representations of the crisis and its attendant market instability and mistrust of neoliberal political systems in film. It thus sheds light on the mediation, reimagination, and reformulation of recent history in the depiction of personal, cultural, and political memories, and raises new questions about crisis narratives in European film, asking whether the theoretical notion of "national" cinema is less or more powerful during moments of sociopolitical turbulence, and investigating the kinds of cultural representations and themes that characterize the narratives of European documentary and fictional films from both small and large national markets.

A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas showcases twenty-five essays written by established and emerging film scholars that trace the history of Eastern European cinemas and offer an up-to-date assessment of post-socialist film cultures. Showcases critical historical work and up-to-date assessments of post-socialist film cultures Features consideration of lesser known areas of study, such as Albanian and Baltic cinemas, popular genre films, cross-national distribution and aesthetics, animation and documentary Places the cinemas of the region in a European and global context Resists the Cold War classification of Eastern European cinemas as “other” art cinemas by reconnecting them with the main circulation of film studies Includes discussion of such films as Taxidermia, El Perro Negro, 12:08 East of Bucharest Big Tõll, and Breakfast on the Grass and explores the work of directors including Tamás Almási, Walerian Borowczyk, Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Andrzej ̄u3awski, and Karel Vachek amongst many others

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, efforts to improve human rights, social equality, and democracy in western Europe have faced growing challenges that range from economic and medical crises to the resurgence of the tribalist far right. Studying western European cinema reveals how filmmakers have been using their art to reflect on the region’s contemporary problems and potentials. In Conflict and Survival in Contemporary Western European Film, John Alexander Williams and Alexandra Hagen have collected a diverse array of essays that analyzehow filmmakers have portrayed forms of strifeand endurancein the new century. Divided into three thematic sections—historical conflicts and national identities; migrants, natives, and battles over space; and ethical struggles in everyday life—this book offers case studies of historical context, narrative, and form in a range of significant recent films. Showcasing such movies as Days of Glory, A War, Code Unknown, The Edge of Heaven, Toni Erdmann, The Great Beauty, and Weekend, this fascinating collection presents contemporary filmmakers as critical citizen-artists who are directly involved in interrogating the past, present, and future of Europe.