ABSTRACT
This essay examines the cases of two post-2008 European art films as landmark examples of crisis cinema, and of Academy Awards Best Foreign-Language Film contenders: the Greek film Dogtooth and the Polish/Danish/French/British coproduction, Ida, made by a diasporic director. Ciecko asserts that production, exhibition, distribution, and reception of post-2008 European art cinema has necessarily engaged with multiple national, continental, and global contemporary crises, including the Great Recession and the rise of right-wing populism. Dogtooth is an exemplar of a “new” Greek cinema, whose discursive emergence is contemporaneous with national debt crisis. After winning the Oscar, Ida became a lightning rod for the new right-wing Polish government, and a cause célèbre for Polish and European filmmaking organizations. This chapter discusses the ways in which both films employ “Americana” as an intertextual device, combined with strategies that assert aesthetic and narrative dimensions of austerity. Conversely, the author examines the ways in which post-2008 European crisis films are domesticated by the US market and branded by the single-nation focus of the “Best Foreign-Language Film” category. She concludes that the Academy Awards' spectacular ceremony and continued marginalization of European art cinema deflects attention from transnationalism, neocolonialism, and American involvement in global economic, political, and industrial states of crisis.
