ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|166 pages
A first dialogical cluster
chapter 1|11 pages
Post-communist nostalgia in new Bulgarian cinema as a social critique
chapter 2|10 pages
Slow Slippy
chapter 7|9 pages
New ways of looking
chapter 9|13 pages
‘Dream on princess'
chapter 14|10 pages
Noisy presences in contemporary European Cinema
part II|126 pages
A second dialogical cluster
chapter 18|11 pages
Weakened nationalism and thickened time
chapter 19|9 pages
Why small European film industries remake each other's successes
chapter 20|9 pages
European collaboration after World War Two
chapter 21|13 pages
A film ‘highly offensive to our nation'
chapter 25|9 pages
British comedy in a foreign light
chapter 26|11 pages
Corporate consolidation, artistic conservatism and the persistence of Hollywood
chapter 27|9 pages
‘Boyish' women and female soldiers
part III|156 pages
A third dialogical cluster