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This book represents a radical attempt to rethink the post-war history of European cinemas. The chapters approach the subject from the perspective of television's impact on the culture of cinema's production, distribution, consumption, and reception. Thus, they indicate a new direction for the debate about the future of cinema in Europe. In every European country, television has transformed the economic, technological, and aesthetic terms in which the process of cinema production is conducted. Television's growing popularity has drastically reshaped cinema's audiences, and has forced governments to introduce policies to regulate the interaction between cinema and television in the changing and dynamic audio-visual environment. Cinematic criticism was slowest in coming to terms with the presence of television and therefore most instrumental in perpetuating the view of cinema as an isolated object of aesthetic, critical, and academic inquiry. The recognition of the impact of television upon European cinemas offers a more authentic and richer picture of cinemas in Europe, which are part of the complex audiovisual matrix including television and new media.

This book challenges the traditional use of Deleuze's philosophy to examine European art cinema, exploring how Deleuze can be used to analyse national identity across a range of different cinemas. Focusing on narrative time, it combines a Deleuzean approach with a vast range of non-traditional material. The films discussed are contemporary and popular (either financial or cult successes), and include Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Terminator 3, Memento, Saving Private Ryan, Run Lola Run, Sliding Doors, Chaos and Peppermint Candy. Each film is examined in light of a major historical event – including 9/11, German reunification, and the Asian economic crisis – and the impact it has had on individual nations. This cross-cultural approach illustrates how Deleuze's work can enhance our understanding of the construction of national identity. It also enables a critique of Deleuze's conclusions by examining his work in a variety of national contexts. The book significantly broadens the field of work on Deleuze and cinema, placing equal emphasis on understanding mainstream North American genre films, and American independent and European art films. It also examines Asian thrillers, and gangster and art films in the light of Deleuze's work on time. With Asian films increasingly crossing over into Western markets, this is a timely addition to the expanding body of work on Deleuze and film.

This is the first English-language study of internationally acclaimed Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa, examining the cultural, production and exhibition contexts of his feature films, shorts and video installations. It situates Costa’s filmmaking within the contexts of Portuguese, European and global art film, looking into his working practices alongside the impact of digital video, forms of collaborative authorship, and the intricate dialogue between modes of production and aesthetics. Considering the exhibition, circulation and reception of Costa’s creative output in settings such as film festivals, the art gallery circuit and the home video market, ReFocus: The Films of Pedro Costa provides an essential critical analysis of this major filmmaker – as well as of the multifaceted production and consumption practices that surround contemporary art cinema.

Twenty-five years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism in Eastern Europe, ten years have passed since the first formerly communist states entered the E.U. and an entire post-Wall generation has now entered adulthood. Yet scholarship on European cinema still tends to divide the continent along the old Cold War lines. This collection is the first to consider the ways in which notions such as East and West, national and transnational, central and marginal are being rethought and reframed in contemporary European cinema. The world's leading scholars in the field assemble in this volume to assess the state of post-1989 European cinema, from (co)production and reception trends to filmic depictions of migration patterns, economic transformations, and socio-political debates over the past and the present. The volume focuses on three geographic or linguistic clusters whilst suggesting that the lines are often blurred between them: French- and German-language cinemas as well as more ‘marginal’ and overlooked players in European cinema. Contributions address recent films from or about Armenia, Austria, the Balkans, Bulgaria, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Switzerland and the complex and often contradictory notions of East, West and ‘Centre’ that they employ. The volume is grouped around three sections: (1) ‘Redrawing the Lines: De/Re-centring Europe’, (2) ‘Belonging and the “Road to/from Europe”: Border Spaces, Eastern Margins and Eastern Markets’ and (3) Spectres of the East. It is the most comprehensive investigation of East/West European cinema in the early 21^st century.

“Welcome to the European Family!” is the banner under which East European countries joined the European Union following the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989. This book offers an analysis of the imbrication of the ensuing imagined European kinship with its corollary: the traffic in women. The book revisits Claude Lévi-Strauss concept of kinship, as well as its re-articulation by second-wave feminists, Gayle Rubin most prominently, in order to remind the reader that kinship has been traditionally anchored in the traffic in women. This is not the traffic in women invoked by the media to refer to sex trafficking per se, but a broad anthropological concept that describes the circulation of women between kinship groups, traditionally through marriage. Reading recent cinematic texts that critically frame the European traffic in women, the book shows that, in today’s Europe, racialized East European migrant women are “exchanged” so they can engage in labor traditionally performed by wives within the institution of marriage. Following a pattern of what the book calls Americanization, East European migrant women, alongside women from the global South, become responsible for the biopolitical labor of reproduction, whether they work as domestics, nannies, nurses, sex workers, or wives. A feminist intervention in the heated debate on the making and unmaking of Europe, the book argues that the critical project of pluralizing post-1989 Europe needs to account for the Europe brought together through the traffic in East European women.

This collection of essays explores intermediality as a new perspective in the interpretation of the cinemas that have emerged after the collapse of the former Eastern Bloc. As an aesthetic based on a productive interaction of media and highlighting cinema's relationship with the other arts, intermediality always implies a state of in-betweenness which is capable of registering tensions and ambivalences that go beyond the realm of media. The comparative analyses of films from Hungary, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Russia demonstrate that intermediality can be employed in this way as a form of introspection dealing with complex issues of art and society. Appearing in a variety of sensuous or intellectual modes, intermediality can become an effective poetic strategy to communicate how the cultures of the region are caught in-between East and West, past and present, emotional turmoil and more detached self-awareness. Through different theoretical approaches and thematic focuses, the book attempts to contribute to the understanding of intermedial phenomena in contemporary cinema as a whole by mapping meaningful areas of in-betweenness including the intermedial and interart relations in-between cinema, music, theatre, photography, painting, sculpture, literature, language and the new, digital technologies of the moving image.

Why have films with diasporic family narratives increased in popularity in recent years? How do representations of the diasporic family differ from those of more dominant social groups? How does diasporic cinema negotiate the conventions of film genres commonly associated with the representation of the family? In the age of globalisation, diasporic and other types of transnational family are increasingly represented in films such as East is East, The Grand Tour (Le Grand Voyage), Almanya - Welcome to Germany (Almanya - Willkommen in Deutschland), Immigrant Memories (Mémoires d'immigrés: l'héritage maghrébin), Couscous (La graine et le mulet), When We Leave (Die Fremde), Monsoon Wedding and My Big Fat Greek Wedding. While there is a significant body of scholarship on the family in Hollywood cinema, this is the first book to analyse the representation of families with an immigration background from a comparative transnational perspective. It focuses on Europe's most established transnational film cultures, Black and Asian British, Maghrebi French (or ‘beur’) and Turkish German cinema, and analyses key trends from the mid-1980s to the present. Drawing on critical concepts from diaspora studies, cultural anthropology, socio-historical research on diasporic families and the burgeoning field of transnational film studies, this book offers original critical perspectives to scholars and students who are researching families and issues of race and ethnicity in cinema, the media and visual culture.

Vito and the Others (1991), Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician (1992) and Libera (1993), the debuts of three young Neapolitan filmmakers, stood out dramatically from the landscape of Italian cinema in the early 1990s. On the back of their critical success, over the next decade and a half, Naples became a thriving centre for film production. This study of one of the most vital and stimulating currents in contemporary European cinema provides a detailed study of this distinct regional tradition. In tracing the movement's relationship with the popular musical melodramas previously produced in Naples, the book reveals how contemporary Neapolitan filmmakers have interrogated, subverted and reconfigured cinematic convention as part of a through-going re-examination of Neapolitan identity. The book analyses more than 45 contemporary Italian films, including Paolo Sorrentino's The Consequences of Love, Mario Martone's L'amore molesto, Antonio Capuano's Pianese Nunzio: 14 in May, and Vincenzo Marra's Sailing Home.

Over the past two decades road cinema has become an increasingly popular form of expression for European directors. Focusing on a corpus of films from France, Belgium and Switzerland, including works by Ismaël Ferroukhi, Bouli Lanners, Aki Kaurismäki and Jacqueline Audry amongst many others, French-language Road Cinema contends that nowhere is the impulse to remap the spaces and identities of ‘New Europe’ more evident than in French-language cinema. Drawing on mobility studies, cultural geography and film theory, this innovative work sketches out the flexible yet distinctive parameters of contemporary French-language road cinema, and argues for an understanding of the ‘road movie’ not as a genre but as a thematic and formal template that crosses cinematic categories to bring together a wide array of films that narrate the movements of migrants, tourists and business executives.

The first inclusive collection to examine post-2008 developments in Balkan cinema, this book brings together a number of international scholars working within and beyond the region to explore its industrial contexts and textual dimensions. Exploring both mainstream and arthouse cinemas, the authors identify patterns, trends and common characteristics in the subject matter and aesthetics of films produced and distributed since the global economic crisis. With a focus on transnational links, global networks and cross-cultural exchanges, the book addresses the role of national and supranational institutions as well as film festival networks in supporting film production, distribution and reception. Through critical and comprehensive profiles of the cinematic output in each Balkan country, and with an equal focus on smaller and underrepresented cinemas from Montenegro, Kosovo, North Macedonia and Albania, the collection argues for the continuing relevance of the concept of ‘Balkan cinema’. This study conceptualizes Contemporary Balkan Cinema as a hybrid, trans-national encounter that offers multifarious responses to political and social challenges in the region: gravitation and/or disillusionment toward the European Union; migration; political and social instability; and economic recession.

Explosive images of sex and violence in films by directors such as Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé, Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier have attracted media attention for the ways in which they seek to shock and provoke the spectator into powerful affective and visceral responses. This book, devoted to the new extremism in contemporary European cinema, critically interrogates this highly contentious body of work and demonstrates that these films and the controversies they engender are indispensable to the critical task of rethinking the terms of spectatorship. Through critical discussions of key films and directors, it sheds new light on cutting-edge debates in film studies regarding sexuality, violence and spectatorship; affect and ethic; and the political dimensions of extreme cinema.

Extreme violence in contemporary European art cinema is generally interpreted for its affective potential, but what about the significance of the everyday that so often frames and forms the majority of these films? Why do the sudden moments of violence that punctuate films like Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl (2001), Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (2002) and Markus Schleinzer’s Michael (2011) seem so reliant on everyday routines and settings for their impact? Addressing these questions through a series of case studies, and considering notorious films in their historical and philosophical context, Troubled Everyday offers the first detailed examination of the relationship between violence and the everyday in European art cinema. It calls for a re-evaluation of what gives these films such affective force and such a prolonged grip on our imagination.

This innovative study advances the concept of “interzones”—geographical and ideational spaces of transit, interaction, transformation, and contested diversity—as a mechanism for analyzing European cinema. The book focuses especially on films about borders, borderlands, and cultural zones as it traces the development of interzones from the inception of central European cinema to the avant-garde films of today. Throughout, it shows how cinema both reflects and engenders interzones that explore the important questions of Europe's social order: imperialism and nation-building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; “first contact” between former adversaries (such as East and West Germany) following World War II and the Cold War; and migration, neo-colonialism, and cultural imperialism in the twenty-first century. Ultimately, the book argues that today's cinema both produces and reflects imaginative communities. It demonstrates how, rather than simply erasing boundaries, the European Union instead fosters a network of cultural interzones that encourage cinematic exploration of the new Europe's processes and limits of connectivity, tolerance, and cooperation.