An Enlightened View of Immigration
The first position is perhaps the one most closely tied to the theme of the stranger and the migrant, and here I want to focus on what one might call the Tony Blair-Gerhard Schroeder enlightened view on immigration, that is the social-liberal one, which maintains that altogether, immigration is a good thing, and that Europe, and in particular Britain or Germany, have to honor their obligations and responsibilities of asylum. Thus, they make distinction between different kinds of immigrants,...
Auteurs and Artists
As the longevity of assignations such as neo-realism, nouvelle vague, New German Cinema, New Basque cinema proves, the diversity of national cinematic traditions within European cinema is impressive, and there is good reason to study them individually and in their particularity. But this insistence on both national specificity and the relative autonomy of film movements since 1945 in European countries nonetheless leaves several factors unaccounted for Firstly, the national movements and auteur...
Narrative Space
This theoretical-ethical point around which Persona is structured is already dramatized in the pre-credit sequence, where a boy with his hands stretched out trying to touch the projected image of a woman his mother . The image, as it becomes larger and larger is both too close to be clearly recognized and too far to be concretely grasped - it is at once immediately tactile and irredeemably unreal the boy's longing for his mother, human contact and physical commu nication remains unfulfilled,...
SubState and SupraState Allegiances
A nation is always something smaller than mankind and bigger than an ethnic group or a geographical region. It lives from drawing boundaries, recognizing borders and operating categories of inclusion and exclusion. At the same time, identifying with one's nation is increasingly experienced as at once too big and too small to mesh with one's individual sense of not belonging. This applies to the disaffected youth in the banlieu of La Haine or the drug addicts in Trainspotting as much as to the...
A Brief History of European Film Festivals
The global perspective taken here on the festival phenomenon needs to be con-textualized by a brief reference to the history of the European film festivals. They were, initially, highly political and nationalistic affairs. The Venice film festival, for instance, as has often been pointed out, was set up as a combination of a charm offensive on the part of the Italian Hotel Association and of a propaganda exercise by Benito Mussolini in 1932. So strong was the pro-fascist bias of Venice by the...
The Basis Film Verleih
A recent event at the ICA, featuring the work of a Berlin distribution and production company, the Basis Film Verleih, has again highlighted the current dilemmas of independent cinema on the Left, battling against an unfavorable cultural climate, increasing difficulties with funding, and the competition from denationalized and deregulated television markets. The history of Basis, however, also demonstrates, amidst an atmosphere of near-despondency, the position of relative strength from which...
Notes Jdd
1. R. Burnett, Johan van der Keuken, Cine-Tracts, vol. 1, no. 4.1978,14-21. 2. Interview with Max Arian, De Groene Amsterdammer, 2 February, 2000. 3. Gilles Deleuze, The Movement Image Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press, 1986 . 4. Serge Daney, Jean-Paul Fargier, Entretien avec Johan van der Keuken, Cahiers du cin ma no. 290-291 July August 1978 , 63-67 65 . 5. Fred Camper, The Way South, Chicago Reader, 6. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1983 ....
Two European Cinemas ArtHouse vs Genre Cinema ArtHouse as Genre Cinema
In the case of the French film industry, the fact remains that in the period of the nouvelle vague of the 1960s, for every Truffaut and Godard, France had to make a Borsalino a thriller with Alain Delon , or in the 1970s, co-produce a French Connection with Gene Hackman and directed by William Friedkin , and in the 1980s, for every Jacques Rivette making La Belle Noiseuse, and every Eric Rohmer making Le Rayon Vert, there had to be a Claude Berri making a Jean de Florette or a Jean Paul...
After the Historical Imaginary
As we have seen, much of the debate around national cinema is dominated by two paradigms that of essentialism versus constructivism, and the paradigm of otherness, the fact that a sense of national identity always implies drawing boundaries, and staking out the visible or invisible lines of inclusion and exclusion. However hard a semiotically inclined mind may find it to abandon the meaning-making power of binary pairs, from what has been said so far, such strict oppositions cannot be...
Notes 1
1. John Naughton, The Observer, 16 May 1992. 2. Pictures of Europe Channel Four, television program, 1992. 3. For an inversely related perspective, see Richard Pells, Not Like Us How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture Since World War II. New York Basic Books, 1997 . 4. Gian Piero Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano 1948-1980 Rome Einaudi, 1982 , p. 34. 5. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler a Psychological History of the German Cinema Princeton Princeton...
Notes
1. Erich Pommer's Cinema Europe effort effectively ended with the negotiation of the Parufamet agreement, which however, proved disastrous for Ufa, the company he headed as production chief. As Tom Saunders has pointed out, creating a united front against the Americans was in any case impossible, seeing how much European cinemas depended on American films For companies like Ufa which had partnerships with American firms, friendliness toward Hollywood had very concrete dimensions they were not...
Notes Ghr
1. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Ach Europa Frankfurt am Main Suhrkamp, 1987 , 2. Even the sociological question, whether televised sports, ethnic restaurants or mass tourism have - through overexposure and caricature - taken the sting out of the clich s about the national character somehow misses the point. 3. The phrase is from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities Reflection on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism London Verso, 1993 , p. 4. 4. Respectively, in the United States and Russia in...
Notes Uwl
1. For a definition of classical narrative, see David Bordwell, Narration and the Fiction Film Madison University of Wisconsin Press, 1985 , 156-204. 2. These were some of the possibilities explored in our Cinema Europe study group, 2004-2005. My appreciation to Marijke de Valck, Malte Hagener, Floris Paalman, Ria Thanouli, Gerwin van der Pol, Martijn de Waal, Ward Rennen, Tarja Laine and Melis Behlil for their presentations. 3. Hans Mommaas, Cultural Clusters and the Post-industrial City...
Colonization SelfColonization and Significant Others
What could in the 1990s, be at stake in renewing a debate about national cinema If the struggle over realism the social and political stakes in representation, whether individual or collective, or the importance of documentation as record and reference has moved to television, then it is there that the national in the sense I defined it above as exclusion and inclusion, appropriation and consensus is now being negotiated. As a consequence, the national cinemas task may well be to set themselves...
Reconceptualizing National Cinemas
The other extreme of the post-national national cinema would be a commercial producer's perspective, who like many a European entrepreneur, will utilize to the full the EU provisions for subsidies, tax-breaks and other community measures designed to minimize his business risk, in this case, of making films for an unpredictable internal market and with few export sales opportunities other than into the world's niche markets, namely art houses, public service television, and DVD-sales. Films...
PostNational Cinema Europe
Do these small-scale production units amount to a new post-national basis of European cinema Certainly not by themselves, since many of these units have a national base and are as likely to cooperate with US firms or Asian directors as with other European partners, but they nonetheless constitute one crucial element in the jigsaw puzzle or network system. The other key ingredient is the film festival circuit, discussed in the following chapter, which is indeed transnational and international....
Table of Contents
European Cinema Conditions of Impossibility 2005 13 National Cinema Re-Definitions and New Directions European Culture, National Cinema, the Auteur and Hollywood 1994 35 ImpersoNations National Cinema, Historical Imaginaries 2005 57 Film Festival Networks the New Topographies of Cinema in Double Occupancy and Small Adjustments Space, Place and Policy in the New European Cinema since the 1990s 2005 108 Auteurs and Art Cinemas Modernism and Self-Reference, Installation Art and Autobiography...
Lucebert 1
call the body as perceptual surface. I am referring by this, first of all, to a powerful sense that in the past twenty years the cinema of whatever provenance - mainstream, avant-garde or art house, as well as the art world that has finally found in the moving image one of its main resources for renewal and self-reflection - has made a pre-occupation with the body its central concern. From action spectaculars with Bruce Willis or Sylvester Stallone, to sexually explicit, semi-pornographic...
Shifting the Discourses and Realigning the Paradigms
The more the essays reach into the new century, the more they take reflexive as well as retrospective turns. Not because of any disappointment in the state of European cinema or a nostalgic sense of regretting past glories. There is much to love and admire about the films being made by European directors. With talents as diverse and controversial as Pedro Almodovar, Lars von Trier, Mike Leigh, Agn s Varda, Danny Boyle, Roberto Benigni, Catherine Breillat, Nanni Moretti, Emir Kusturica, Tom...
ZDFs Das Kleine Fernsehspiel
As far as the European cinema goes, the 1970s belonged to Germany, or more exactly, to the New German Cinema. Breaking through the commercial and critical twilight of the post-war period, a handful of internationally well-exposed star directors - mainly Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders and Syberberg -briefly illuminated a notoriously bleak filmmaking landscape. Looking back, however, one realizes that this blaze of light left much territory underexposed, not least by obscuring the ground on which...
How Do Festivals Work
Given the degree of standardization in the overall feel of film festivals, and the organizational patterns that regulate how films enter this network, it is tempting to ask what general rules govern the system as a whole. Can one, for instance, understand the film festival circuit by comparing it to the mega art exhibitions that now tour the world's major museums Or does it behave more like a very specialized UPS postal service Are festivals the logical extension of the artisanal model of...