Politics of Contemporary European Cinema

Mike Wayne

Description

How does contemporary European Cinema reflect the drive for political and economic integration and recent trends in globalisation, if at all? This book is a valuable excursion into the politics of European cinema and extensively addresses questions like this.

Mike Wayne identifies some key themes pertinent to a study of the contemporary cultural and political dynamics of European cinema from the mid-1980's, including the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Soviet Empire.

Throughout the book, issues are raised that question European culture and the nature of national cinema, including;

• The cultural relationship with Hollywood;
• Debates over cultural plurality and diversity;
• The disintegration of nation states along the eastern flank;
• Postcolonial travels and the hybridisation of the national formation.

Sujets

• Efficacité professionnelle
• Efficacité
• Media
• Film
• Référence
• Cultural Studies
• Business
• Accountancy
• Economics
• Politics
• Skill
• Reference
• Economie gestion
• Popular Culture
• Accounting
• Managerial
• Strategic Planning
• Skills

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841508221
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Politics of Contemporary European Cinema
Histories, Borders, Diasporas
Mike Wayne
First Published in Great Britain in Paperback in 2002 by
Intellect Books , PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK
First Published in USA in 2002 by
Intellect Books , ISBS, 5824 N.E. Hassalo St, Portland, Oregon 97213-3644, USA
Copyright 2002 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
Consulting Editor: Robin Beecroft Copy Editor: Holly Spradling Typesetting: Macstyle Ltd , Scarborough, N. Yorkshire

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Electronic ISBN 1-84150-822-5 / ISBN 1-84150-059-3
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Preface
1 European Cinema: In The Shadow of Hollywood
2 National Cinema/International Markets
3 Pan-European Cinema
4 After The Fall: Cinema and Central and Eastern Europe
5 Diasporan Travels: British Asian Cinema
Conclusion
Index
Dedication
For Wolf and Beryl, travellers both.
Acknowledgements
Parts of this book had an earlier incarnation as a research thesis. This gives me an opportunity to thank my supervisor Barry Curtis for his help, enthusiasm and intellectual engagement with my Ph.D. I would also like to thank Artificial Eye and Parallax Pictures for generously donating, gratis , a still from Land and Freedom .
Preface
This book is about contemporary European cinema dated from around the mid-1980s onwards. It was during this period that large scale historical transformations were gathering pace within Europe. This decade saw the beginnings of the internal restructuring of national relations into a borderless Europe that are still working themselves out today, with profound political, economic and cultural implications. Not the least of these will be the political and cultural relationship of Europe to the rest of the world and to America in particular. The year 1989 saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and in 1991 the subsequent collapse of the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. All histories of film tacitly gesture towards some larger historical narrative. If some have read such momentous changes as the triumph of free market capitalism, this book will construct a rather different narrative. But this is the dramatic and traumatic macro-historical context within which we have to place contemporary European cinema.
Of course, this book is not remotely a definitive account of European cinema. Instead, filtered through a British perspective, it is organised around certain themes, events and theoretical debates. One theme is the importance of history, both as a latent force shaping events and as the mise-en-scene of many European films. If Europe has a shared history, it is one composed of numerous histories. While multiple, these histories often share a certain logic with each other, playing out similar tensions and triumphs (class conflict and industrialisation, for example), working in analogous ways (the importance of history in national identities) and impacting directly on one another (such as with wars and revolutions). If Europe exists as anything other than a vague ideal, it is presumably because its multiple histories have some relationship to a shared history. One reason, of course, that Europe and European cinema seems to be a category with little content, is because the national borders within Europe have historically been the prime mode in which social, economic, political and cultural life has been organised. Working from within such national parameters, thought, knowledge, culture, have often struggled to transcend them. Just as European cinema has been primarily understood in terms of national cinemas, so the multiple histories of Europe are usually understood as national histories. Yet at the same time, the moves towards political and economic integration, a dynamic driven by corporate capitalism s need to access ever larger markets with fewer legal discrepancies between them, forces us to think of the relations between these national histories and the increasingly porous borders which contain them. This book has been organised to weave such links and comparisons, often reading films for what they can tell us about such cross-border similarities and differences.
This book is not just concerned with the politics of contemporary European cinema, but also with the politics of contemporary cultural theory that has influenced critical writing of the cinema and, in some instances such as Black and Asian British cinema, European films themselves. The great theme or motif which runs through so much contemporary cultural theory is precisely the idea that borders, whether cultural, social, national or pan-national, are becoming increasingly porous. Because the formation of so many borders and divisions has historically been the product of dominant institutions and official politics, the concept of porosity and the notion of border-crossings, has acquired a certain radical cache.
Against the fixity and rigidity of many conceptions of identity (just think of the fixed and exclusive identity implicit in the telling of many national histories) contemporary cultural theory emphasises the transitional, improvisational and shifting nature of identity, national or otherwise. This is the obverse side of the homogenising effects of the transnational culture industries. The movement of people and cultures - particularly as the latter are made through small producers - provides some significant counter to the corporate centres of cultural control on the one hand and the cultural insularity of nation-states on the other. On the latter, Paul Gilroy questions whether cultures always flow into patterns congruent with the borders of essentially homogenous nation states. 1 Gilroy wants to develop a transnational and intercultural perspective 2 on Black culture and politics and quadrangulates Black identity between America, Britain, the Caribbean and Africa (the four points of the slave trade).
This book shares this interest in thinking about transnational histories and cultures and the changes and shifts they undergo. But too often such considerations of culture have become uncoupled from material life, the real divisions and conflicts, the real pressures and constraints, the real forces and counter forces that shape all culture, but particularly an industrial and co-operative one such as cinema. This is why the first chapter will begin by exploring the economic and institutional determinants at work on European cinema. One of the key debates turns on whether there should be state intervention and regulation of the market and, if so, what its objectives should be. For some, European cinema is in a parlous condition because it is overly protected from the rigours of the market. For others, it is precisely the industry s exposure to current market conditions and organisation that is responsible for the industry s fragility. This chapter explores Eurimages, Europe s largest public subsidy for production funds that has invested in a number of high profile European co-productions since its inception. How far has Eurimages encouraged the production of films, which address aspects of European culture, history and identity? What kind of cultural identity should European films articulate and how might these be affected by the industrial strategies pursued?
Chapter two develops a model for thinking about how (British) national cinema operates within an international market for images of, in this case, Britishness, and how this interlocks with a dominant/official internal history which narrows the range of representations of the past circulating within and about Britain. This contrasts with a case study of recent French national cinema, which seeks out the unofficial histories of the nation, producing in effect what I call an anti-national, national cinema. Chapter three explores the emerging sense of Europe as a shared context and determining presence within a number of European films and again returns to the question of the politics of identity, culture and society which these film work over. Chapter four continues the pan-European theme exploring cinematic representations of Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Empire, as well as the implosion of Yugoslavia and the subsequent wars in the Balkans. Since the rise of virulent nationalism in the former Yugoslavia constitutes the nightmare antithesis of the liberal multiculturalism which underpins much cultural theory today, the Balkans functions as something of a test case for the politics and adequacy of such theory as well as examining the cinematic representations of these events. The final chapter returns to the question of British national identity and culture as it has been reconfigured by the cross-border flows of people and culture evidenced in Black British, but particularly British Asian, films. Again the debate will be structured around the tensions between culture as transient and perpetually mutable and the obdurate material determinants on life which it is necessary to recognise in order to formulate a politics dedicated to substantive change.
References
1 P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, Modernity and Double Consciousness , Verso, London, 1993, p. 5.
2 P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic , p. 15.
1 European Cinema: In The Shadow of Hollywood
This chapter begins by mapping out the economic reasons for Hollywood s global domination and explores the UK film industry s subordinate position within that hegemony. I will situate the European film industry and film policy within the contemporary and contradictory drive towards economic and political union. The European Community has implemented a number of strategies designed to help sustain the European film indus