ABSTRACT
Discourses on European cinema have traditionally focused less on the inclusive or crosscultural aspects the term ‘European’ might imply, but on notions of national specificities, cultural authenticity and indigenous production contexts. In order to establish a national identity for a particular film culture, features which transcend or contradict these identity formations have been either neglected or marginalised, but also viewed as threatening. The globalisation of media industries and the concurrent blurring of cultural and national identities have frequently been perceived in apocalyptic terms, and as a marker of fairly recent, ‘postmodern’ developments against which a largely mythical film culture of the past, self-contained and part of an equally homogeneous nation, is imagined.
