Fatih Akin S Cinema And The New Sound Of Europe

In Fatih Akın’s Cinema and the New Sound of Europe, Berna Gueneli explores the transnational works of acclaimed Turkish-German filmmaker and auteur Fatih Akın. The first minority director in Germany to receive numerous national and international awards, Akın makes films that are informed by Europe’s past, provide cinematic imaginations about its present and future, and engage with public discourses on minorities and migration in Europe through his treatment and representation of a diverse, multiethnic, and multilingual European citizenry. Through detailed analyses of some of Akın’s key works—In July, Head-On, and The Edge of Heaven, among others—Gueneli identifies Akın’s unique stylistic use of multivalent sonic and visual components and multinational characters. She argues that the soundscapes of Akın’s films—including music and multiple languages, dialects, and accents—create an “aesthetic of heterogeneity” that envisions an expanded and integrated Europe and highlights the political nature of Akın’s decisions regarding casting, settings, and audio. At a time when belonging and identity in Europe is complicated by questions of race, ethnicity, religion, and citizenship, Gueneli demonstrates how Akın’s aesthetics intersect with politics to reshape notions of Europe, European cinema, and cinematic history.

This book analyses the uses of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a foreign star in Hollywood through a film philosophical, de-westernizing and sonic critical framework. It offers very close readings of the film texts, of the roles Schwarzenegger performs, and the rhetorical strategies he adopts outside his film performances to show that in spite of attempts to occupy the position of an emblematic member of the U.S. national body Schwarzenegger remains irrevocably outside as an accented migrant body continuously accumulating markers of belonging that by their very necessity attest to their insufficiency. The book’s central project is to trace back, from the uses to which a migrant star such as Schwarzenegger is put on the screen, the construction of a sense or idea of a U.S. national community through the cinema. Given that the appeal to the American myth of an immigrant nation that promises to erase difference is fundamental to the Schwarzenegger star persona, the central aim of this book is to explore the uses of his stardom as an embodiment of the promise of America and its contradictions and exclusions.

The twenty-first century has witnessed a resurgence of economic inequality, racial exclusion, and political hatred, causing questions of collective identity and belonging to assume new urgency. In Making Worlds, Claudia Breger argues that contemporary European cinema provides ways of thinking about and feeling collectivity that can challenge these political trends. Breger offers nuanced readings of major contemporary films such as Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful, Fatih Akın’s The Edge of Heaven, Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, and Aki Kaurismäki’s refugee trilogy, as well as works by Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Through a new model of cinematic worldmaking, Breger examines the ways in which these works produce unexpected and destabilizing affects that invite viewers to imagine new connections among individuals or groups. These films and their depictions of refugees, immigrants, and communities do not simply counter dominant political imaginaries of hate and fear with calls for empathy or solidarity. Instead, they produce layered sensibilities that offer the potential for greater openness to others’ present, past, and future claims. Drawing on the work of Latour, Deleuze, and Rancière, Breger engages questions of genre and realism along with the legacies of cinematic modernism. Offering a rich account of contemporary film, Making Worlds theorizes the cinematic creation of imaginative spaces in order to find new ways of responding to political hatred.

European cinema not only occupies a dominant place in film history, it is also a field that has been raising more interest with the expanding work on the transnational. Euro-Visions asks what idea of Europe emerges, is represented and constructed by contemporary European film. Adopting a broad and wide-ranging approach, Euro-Visions mixes political sources, historical documents and filmic texts and offers an integration of policy and economic contexts with textual analysis. Mariana Liz examines costume dramas, biopics and war films, mainstream co-productions and tales of 'Fortress Europe' by renowned auteurs, showing how films from different European nations depict and contribute to the formation of the idea of Europe. Case studies include Girl with a Pearl Earring, La Vie en Rose, Black Book, Good Bye Lenin!, Match Point and The Silence of Lorna.

This comprehensively revised, updated and significantly extended edition introduces German film history from its beginnings to the present day, covering key periods and movements including early and silent cinema, Weimar cinema, Nazi cinema, the New German Cinema, the Berlin School, the cinema of migration, and moving images in the digital era. Contributions by leading international scholars are grouped into sections that focus on genre; stars; authorship; film production, distribution and exhibition; theory and politics, including women's and queer cinema; and transnational connections. Spotlight articles within each section offer key case studies, including of individual films that illuminate larger histories (Heimat, Downfall, The Lives of Others, The Edge of Heaven and many more); stars from Ossi Oswalda and Hans Albers, to Hanna Schygulla and Nina Hoss; directors including F.W. Murnau, Walter Ruttmann, Wim Wenders and Helke Sander; and film theorists including Siegfried Kracauer and Béla Balázs. The volume provides a methodological template for the study of a national cinema in a transnational horizon.

Dissects the ways filmmakers frame ethnic and racial Otherness in Europe as adornments of catastrophe

This core teaching text provides a thorough overview of the recently emerged field of transnational film studies. Covering a range of approaches to analysing films about migrant, cross-cultural and cross-border experience, Steven Rawle demonstrates how film production has moved beyond clear national boundaries to become a product of border crossing finance and creative personnel. This comprehensive introduction brings together the key concepts and theories of transnational cinema, including genre, remakes, diasporic and exilic cinema, and the limits of thinking about cinema as a particularly national cultural artefact. It is an excellent course companion for undergraduate students of film, cinema, media and cultural studies studying transnational and global cinema, and provides both students and lovers of film alike with a strong grounding in this timely field of film studies.

Re-examines notions of East and West in contemporary European cinema. This book presents a comprehensive investigation of Central European cinema in the early 21st century.