Film Europe And Film America

A volume of specially-commissioned essays dealing with the attempts to create a pan-European film production movement in the 1920s and 1930s, and the reactions of the American film industry to these plans to rival its hegemony. The book has an impressive array of top scholars from both America and Europe, including Thomas Elsaesser, Kristin Thompson and Ginette Vincendeau, as well as essays by some younger scholars who have recently completed new archival research. It also includes a number of primary documents selected by the contributors to illuminate their arguments and provide a stimulus to further research. This book is a volume in the series Exeter Studies in Film History, and represents a major contribution to cinema scholarship as well as reflecting a strong interest in an area of study currently being developed in university departments and at the British Film Institute. Winner Prix Jean Mitry 2000

From as scholar of mass communications, an international study of the influence of Hollywood movies on twentieth-century European art films. With McDonalds in Moscow and Disneyland in Paris and Tokyo, American popular culture is spreading around the globe. Regional, national, and ethnic cultures are being powerfully affected by competition from American values and American popular forms. This literate and lively study explores the spread of American culture into international cinema as reflected by the collision and partial merger of two important styles of filmmaking: the Hollywood style of stars, genres, and action, and the European art film style of ambiguity, authorial commentary, and borrowings from other arts. Peter Lev departs from the traditional approach of national cinema histories and discusses some of the blends, overlaps, and hegemonies that are typical of the world film industry of recent years. In Part One, he gives a historical and theoretical overview of what he terms the “Euro-American art film,” which is characterized by prominent use of the English language, a European art film director, cast and crew from at least two countries, and a stylistic mixing of European art film and American entertainment. The second part of Lev’s study examines in detail five examples of the Euro-American art film: Contempt (1963), Blow-Up (1966), The Canterbury Tales (1972), Paris, Texas (1983), and The Last Emperor (1987). These case studies reveal that the European art film has had a strong influence on world cinema and that many Euro-American films are truly cultural blends rather than abject takeovers by Hollywood cinema.

Between the two world wars, a distinct and vibrant film culture emerged in Europe. Film festivals and schools were established; film theory and history was written that took cinema seriously as an art form; and critical writing that created the film canon flourished. This scene was decidedly transnational and creative, overcoming traditional boundaries between theory and practice, and between national and linguistic borders. This new European film culture established film as a valid form of social expression, as an art form, and as a political force to be reckoned with. By examining the extraordinarily rich and creative uses of cinema in the interwar period, we can examine the roots of film culture as we know it today.

'European Cinema in Crisis' examines the conflicting terminologies that have dominated the discussion of the future of European film-making. It takes a fresh look at the ideological agendas, from 'avante-garde cinema' to the high/low culture debate and the fate of popular European cinema.

From their very inception, European cinemas undertook collaborative ventures in an attempt to cultivate a transnational “Film-Europe.” In the postwar era, it was DEFA, the state cinema of East Germany, that emerged as a key site for cooperative practices. Despite the significant challenges that the Cold War created for collaboration, DEFA sought international prestige through various initiatives. These ranged from film exchange in occupied Germany to partnerships with Western producers, and from coproductions with Eastern European studios to strategies for film co-authorship. Uniquely positioned between East and West, DEFA proved a crucial mediator among European cinemas during a period of profound political division.

This comprehensive introduction to national cinemas in Europe brings together classic writings by key filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Buñuel and John Grierson, and critics from Andre Bazin to Peter Wollen.

It is based on hitherto unstudied documents from these institutions. While European film production was at a standstill after World War I, Hollywood companies flooded the European market with hundreds of films at very low prices."--BOOK JACKET.

Diploma Thesis from the year 2004 in the subject Film Science, grade: 3, Liverpool John Moores University, language: English, abstract: The genesis of the Hollywood Renaissance in the late 1960s was the by-product of a synthesis of factors related to social, cultural, institutional, and technological shifts that had been taking place in the United States since the late 1940s. Within this context, the role of European cinema was crucial. It has become a critical commonplace that the films of the Hollywood Renaissance embody a significant aesthetic kinship with the cinematic new waves that had emerged in Europe during the post-war period. This study aims this position further by demonstrating that post-war European new waves at once constituted aesthetic models for Hollywood Renaissance films and shaped key areas of the context that allowed this movement to emerge in the first place. As far as European cinema is concerned, the emphasis here is placed on films of the French New Wave, Italian Neorealism, and New Italian Cinema. Through an extensive use of textual and contextual evidence, this thesis investigates the origins, nature, and extent of the formal impact that post-war European cinema movements had on American filmmaking. It is argued that, inspired by their European counterparts, Hollywood Renaissance filmmakers experimented with all the components of a film: mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, sound, and narrative style – often aiming to create in their pictures the acute sense of realism that European post-war films conveyed. A more frank approach towards traditionally ‘taboo’ subjects was also employed. Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) – the film that, according to critics at large, articulated an aesthetic ‘break’ with the classical tradition and signaled the beginning of the Hollywood Renaissance – is employed as a case study, as it epitomises the European influence in social, cultural, and institutional terms. This study also considers the continuing influence of European cinema on American cinema post Bonnie and Clyde, arguing that in recent years, several American directors have re-discovered the pioneers of post-war European cinema movements and have attempted to recreate the spirit of new wave films in their own pictures.