Europe, Hollywood and "The Rest": The Ties that Bind and that Divide

The essays between the opening section and the conclusion follow to a large extent the trajectory thus charted, examining landmark figures of European authorship, the ever-present and much-resented impact of Hollywood, Europe's own others, and the post-colonial, post-historical legacies. Thus, the section which follows the re-appraisal of national cinematograph and the emergence of a European cinematographtic space turns its attention to the Europe-Hollywood-Europe divide, emphasizing the extent to which this as a rule binary relation of buried antagonisms and resentment actually functions not only as a two-way-traffic, but acts as an asymmetrical dynamic of exchange, whose intention it is to stabilize the system by making both sides benefit from each other, paradoxically by making-believe that their regular and ritual stand-offs are based on incompatible antagonisms. As in politics so in matters cinematograph: what unites Europe and America is more than what divides them, not least of all because each needs the other: the insistence on the division often strengthens the underlying dynamism of the system of alliances.

This macro-study is followed by a more micro-analysis of a range of movies and moviemakers who could be called independents, if the term still had much meaning, but whom I have grouped together as "movies without a passport"-state-less, in-between, one-offs, happy accidents or near disasters, forming new spaces of collectivity and solidarity, and thus symptomatic for the "margins" and the different kinds of metabolism they invoke for the circulation and consumption of European movie culture. The movies named and discussed in the first sub-section about West European moviemakers and emigres have to stand for a myriad of others, so that the selection is indeed more arbitrary than what is suggested by my claim of a deeper underlying representativeness. The second sub-section, dealing with movies from Eastern Europe, wants to give a sampling of the possible ways in which East European movie history may eventually be written together with and as an integral part of West European movie history, without simply "adding" names, titles, styles and countries. Instead, their "accession" is a further motive why the entire landscape of European cinematograph has to be re-mapped. This evidently cannot be done in this collection, although the essays on festivals, on site, space and place have hopefully suggested some conceptual tools that might make it possible. To the three more recent essays on Konrad Wolf, Slavoj Zizek and on movies that have come out of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, I have added an older essay on the unjustly neglected Dusan Makavejev, one of the more prescient Yugoslavian directors who acutely sensed both the strains within the Federation when most in the West had little sense of the disasters to come, and of the Western eyes already then felt to be upon the directors from Central Europe.