The New European Cinema

Rosalind Galt offers innovative readings of some of the most popular and influential European films of the 1990s, including Emir Kusturica's 'Underground', Lars Von Trier's 'Zentropa', and Giuseppe Tornatore's 'Cinema Paradiso'.

This volume presents varied approaches concerning the relation between cinema and politics which focus on policies, eras, countries, mainstream and art cinema productions, transnational examples, changing narratives and identities. Both cinema and politics have actors and directors for their scenes, and in this sense their discourses intermingle. The performances of the “actors/actresses” in both arenas attract particular attention. The actors, directors, and producers with ‘hyphenated/creolised/hybrid identities’ such as German-Turks, directors of Balkan cinema, or Italian filmmakers of Turkish origin give a wide and refreshing perspective to the discussion of Europe in the media. What these ‘mediated identities’ represent goes beyond the limits of the old Europe, towards the different sensitivity of the New Europe. Scholars and advanced students of Film Studies, European Studies, Identity Politics, Migration / Emigration and Gender Studies will find this volume of integral importance to their work.

The survival of cinema in Europe and the analysis of its heritage are key issues for the new century. This book asks how we can define European cinema and how it should be studied. It provides an overview of the problems, traditions and key questions that have informed the study of European cinema, investigating the links and tensions between Europe and Hollywood and exploring the different experiences of national identities within a common European framework. Twelve case studies of individual European films ranging from The Battleship Potemkin and The Lodger, to La Haine and Trainspotting, illustrate the distinctiveness and variety of cinema in Europe as well as the various critical methods by which it can be studied. With its detailed analysis of films from several European countries including Britain and Russia, the book encourages a comparative approach and raises urgent questions about the future of European cinema in the context of globalization. It will be of interest to students in Film Studies, European Studies and Modern European Languages and Cultures.

The State of European Cinema offers a critical review of the state of the industry at the close of the twentieth century. Finney spent two years researching and carrying out interviews with more than a hundred top film professionals. His findings offer dynamic and fresh perspectives on Europe's film industry and include a detailed analysis of Europe's public subsidy funds, co-production trends and cinema distribution systems, as well as practical information on screenplay development and training and an examination of Europe's declining film-star system.

Presenting new and diverse scholarship, this wide-ranging collection of 43 original chapters asks what European cinema tells us about Europe. The book engages with European cinema that attends to questions of European colonial, racialized and gendered power; seeks to decentre Europe itself (not merely its putative centres); and interrogate Europe’s various conceptualizations from a variety of viewpoints. It explores the broad, complex and heterogeneous community/ies produced in and by European films, taking in Kurdish, Hollywood and Singapore cinema as comfortably as the cinema of Poland, Spanish colonial films or the European gangster genre. Chapters cover numerous topics, including individual films, film movements, filmmakers, stars, scholarship, representations and identities, audiences, production practices, genres and more, all analysed in their context(s) so as to construct an image of Europe as it emerges from Europe’s film corpus. The Companion opens the study of European cinema to a broad readership and is ideal for students and scholars in film, European studies, queer studies and cultural studies, as well as historians with an interest in audio-visual culture, nationalism and transnationalism, and those working in language-based area studies.

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 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.

Although a long-established and influential genre, this is the first comprehensive study of the European road cinema. Crossing New Europe investigates this tradition, its relationship with the American road movie and its aesthetic forms. This movement examines such crucial issues as individual and national identity crises, and phenomena such as displacement, diaspora, exile, migration, nomadism, and tourism in postmodern, post-Berlin Wall Europe. Drawing on the work of Said, Hall, Shields, Urry, Bauman, Deleuze and Guattari and other critical theorists, Crossing New Europe adopts a broad interpretation of "Europe" and discusses directors and films who have long been associated with the road movie, such as Wim Wenders (Alice in the Cities, Lisbon Story) and Aki Kaurismäki (Leningrad Cowboys Go America!), and other more recent contributions such as Run Lola Run, Dear Diary and The Last Resort.