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.

chapter |12 pages

Introduction

part I|166 pages

A first dialogical cluster

chapter 1|11 pages

Post-communist nostalgia in new Bulgarian cinema as a social critique

Mediated post-communist nostalgia

chapter 2|10 pages

Slow Slippy

Still shite being Scottish? T2: Trainspotting and the ‘Scottish European'

chapter 7|9 pages

New ways of looking

The case of Maren Ade, Valeska Grisebach and Małgorzata Szumowska

chapter 9|13 pages

‘Dream on princess'

Cultural value, gender politics and the Hungarian film canon through the documentary Pretty Girls

chapter 11|12 pages

Following the flâneur Hulot in Playtime

Soundscape of the new Paris

chapter 12|10 pages

Ágata's (filmmaking) girlfriends

The new wave of women directors in Catalonia

chapter 13|10 pages

The Bourne multiplicity

Quantum Europeanness in the Bourne films (2002–2016)

chapter 14|10 pages

Noisy presences in contemporary European Cinema

Paris est une fête: un film en 18 vagues

part II|126 pages

A second dialogical cluster

chapter 17|9 pages

Omar Sharif

A European Middle Eastern star

chapter 18|11 pages

Weakened nationalism and thickened time

Interrogating the position of Kurdish cinema within European cinema discussions

chapter 20|9 pages

European collaboration after World War Two

A Tale of Five Cities (M. Tully, R. Marcellini, W. Staudte, G. von Cziffra, E. E. Reinert, 1948–1951)

chapter 21|13 pages

A film ‘highly offensive to our nation'

Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957), censorship and militaristic representations of post-war Europe

chapter 22|11 pages

Europe comes to Hollywood

The silent era, 1912–1927

chapter 24|13 pages

The (cultural) politics of international co-production

Morocco and Europe

chapter 25|9 pages

British comedy in a foreign light

looking at the trope of British comedy through the lens of émigré filmmakers

chapter 26|11 pages

Corporate consolidation, artistic conservatism and the persistence of Hollywood

The European film industry, 2006–2020

chapter 27|9 pages

‘Boyish' women and female soldiers

British gender disguise comedies between the world wars

chapter 28|11 pages

Fred Zinnemann

A Hollywood director who never leaves Europe

part III|156 pages

A third dialogical cluster

chapter 30|10 pages

Gangster films reloaded

European values and the criminal spectre of late modernity

chapter 32|10 pages

Two-speed economic systems and bipolarity in the European Union

Frontier spaces in Valeska Grisebach's Western

chapter 33|12 pages

Film topography and national belonging

Hungarian Jewishness and the high mountains

chapter 35|9 pages

Accented silences

The aesthetics of displacement in diasporic post-Yugoslav cinema

chapter 36|11 pages

Resisting the traps of hegemony

Variation in contemporary German queer of color cinema

chapter 37|9 pages

Lisbon on film, 1980–2020

Locating Europe

chapter 38|10 pages

‘We live like swine and die like swine, because we mean nothing to each other'

The little person, the state and nationhood in contemporary Russian film

chapter 39|11 pages

Family, memories and borders

Europe in the films of Stephan Komandarev

chapter 40|13 pages

Neoliberal authorship

Auteur theory and European art cinema in 2021 – The example of Paweł Pawlikowski

chapter 41|9 pages

Queer bodies and the death drive

Gender and sexuality in Italian giallo

chapter 42|13 pages

Political discourse and rhetoric

Challenging twenty-first-century populism in Chez nous/This Is Our Land

chapter 43|11 pages

Recovering memory, reasserting Europeanness

Modern Convivencia and Hispanotropicalism in Palm Trees in the Snow (2015) and Neckan (2014)