ABSTRACT
For the study of European cinema, the 1980s are a particularly significant decade, because they saw the final demise of the commercial film industry in all but one country, France. By contrast, Britain, Germany and Italy, each in very particular ways, found that it no longer had a domestic market that could sustain indigenous feature film production on the Hollywood model. Films continued to be made, but on a different economic basis, with different institutional partners or commercial participation, and for a different public. The 1980s signaled the fact that cinema in Europe could no longer be looked at or studied in isolation. Decline has to be seen in the context of a shift, an opening up, a re-alignment: for the decade also witnessed a radical transformation in the overall media landscape: the deregulation of state-owned broadcast television, the arrival of video and the VCR, the rise of the Hollywood event movie or “blockbuster,” and the weakening of “new wave” art, avant-garde, and counter-cinemas, pushed further to the margins.
