European Cinema In The Twenty First Century

This book rethinks the study of European Cinema in a way that centres on students and their needs, in a comprehensive volume introducing undergraduates to the main discourses, directions and genres of twenty-first-century European film. Importantly, this collection is the first of its kind to apply a transversal approach to European Cinema, bringing together the East and the West, while providing a broad picture of key trends, aesthetics, genres, national identities, and transnational concerns. Lewis and Canning’s collection effectively addresses some of the most pressing questions in contemporary European film, such as ecology, migration, industry, identity, disability, memory, auteurship, genre, small cinemas, and the national and international frameworks which underpin them. Combining accessible original research with a thorough grounding in recent histories and contexts, each chapter includes key definitions, reflective group questions, and a summative case study. Overall, this book makes a strong contribution to our understanding of recent European Cinema, making it an invaluable resource for lecturers and students across a variety of film-centred modules.

From hairdressers and caregivers to reproductive workers and power-suited executives, images of women's labor have powered a fascinating new movement within twenty-first century European cinema. Social realist dramas capture precarious working conditions. Comedies exaggerate the habits of the global managerial class. Stories from countries battered by the global financial crisis emphasize the patriarchal family, debt, and unemployment. Barbara Mennel delves into the ways these films about female labor capture the tension between feminist advances and their appropriation by capitalism in a time of ongoing transformation. Looking at independent and genre films from a cross-section of European nations, Mennel sees a focus on economics and work adapted to the continent's varied kinds of capitalism and influenced by concepts in second-wave feminism. More than ever, narratives of work put female characters front and center--and female directors behind the camera. Yet her analysis shows that each film remains a complex mix of progressive and retrogressive dynamics as it addresses the changing nature of work in Europe.

Contemporary Holocaust cinema exists at the intersection of national cultural traditions, aesthetic conventions, and the inner logic of popular forms of entertainment. It also reacts to developments in both fiction and documentary films following the innovations of a postmodern aesthetic. With the number of witnesses to the atrocities of Nazi Germany dwindling, medialized representations of the Holocaust take on greater cultural significance. At the same time, visual responses to the task of keeping memories alive have to readjust their value systems and reconsider their artistic choices.

This book investigates screen representations of 21st century nationalism—arguably the most urgent and apparent phenomenon in the Western world today. The chapters explore recurrent thematic and stylistic features of 21st century western European cinema, and analyse the ways in which film responds to contemporary developments of mounting tensions and increasing hostilities to difference. The collection blends incisive sociological and historical engagement with close textual analysis of many types of screen media, including popular cinema, art-house productions, low-budget independent work, documentary and video installation. Identifying motifs of nationhood and indigeneity throughout, the contributors of this volume present important perspectives and a timely cultural response to the contemporary moment of nationalism.

This is the first English-language book to provide a critical panorama of the last twenty years of Peruvian cinema. Through analysis of the nation’s diverse modes of filmmaking, it offers an insight into how global debates around cinema are played out on and off screen in a distinctive national context. The insertion of post-conflict Peru within neoliberalism resulted in widespread commodification of all areas of life, significantly impacting cinema culture. Consequently, the principal structural concept of this collection is the interplay between film production and market forces, an interaction which makes dynamism and instability the defining features of 21st-century Peruvian cinema.

This book explores the cinematic representations of the pervasive socio-cultural change that the 21st century brought to Europe and the world. Discussing films such as I, Daniel Blake, Cold War and Jupiter’s Moon, it puts distinctively “post-crisis”, gendered representations in a complex, theoretically informed and socially committed interdisciplinary perspective that maps the newly emerging formations of masculinity at a time of rapid socio-economic transition. Kalmar argues that the series of crises that started with the 9/11 terrorist attacks changed some of our fundamental expectations about history, debunked many of our grand narratives, and thus changed the cultural logic of our (thoroughly globalized) civilization. The book focuses on the ways cinema reflects, interprets and shapes a rapidly changing world: the hot issues of the times, the new formations of identity, and the shifts in cinematic representation. This is an interdisciplinary research that is equally interested in what new the 21st century brought about, most specifically to Europe and to its white men, as in film and its responses to these socio-cultural changes.

Twenty-First-Century Hollywood looks into the contexts of studio film production in the new century in order to understand what shapes the style and content of present-day cinema. In an era dominated in box-office terms by the franchise and the family film, this book combines close textual readings and industrial analysis, illustrating why these kinds of movies are favored in the contemporary climate by producers and audiences alike. Neil Archer critically explores the narrative and aesthetic strategies at work in Hollywood’s most high-profile films, from Harry Potter, to Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, to The Lego Movie. Along the way, the book answers some often unexpected questions: Why is Hollywood nervous about flying saucers? Why might the cinematic auteur be Hollywood’s savior? And why are the most grown-up movies those made for children? As this study shows, like the films themselves, the answers to these questions are often complex and surprising.

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.