Reconceptualizing National Cinematographs.

The other extreme of the "post-national" national cinematograph would be a commercial producer's perspective, who like many a European entrepreneur, will utilize to the full the EU provisions for subsidies, tax-breaks and other community measures designed to minimize his business risk, in this case, of making movies for an unpredictable internal market and with few export sales opportunities other than into the world's niche markets, namely art houses, public service television, and DVD-sales. Movies produced in this way, i.e., European in their legal status, insofar as they enjoyed forms of subsidy and are bound to the contractual obligations that flow from them, would normally be co-productions, and have the country codes of several states in their production credits. Lars von Trier's EUROPA, for instance, has five of these (Denmark, Sweden, Germany, France, Switzerland), Kieslowski's THREE COLOURS: BLUE has three (France, Poland, Switzerland), and CHOCOLAT, set in France and directed by a Swede is a UK/US co-production, with no French input. In other words, such movies would still have to declare their nationality in all kinds of other ways: for instance, by their stars, their settings and story. For audiences, finally, the criteria of choice are different still: they might recognize the name of a star, say Juliette Binoche, and think of BLUE and CHOCOLAT as French movies, belonging together because of Binoche. EUROPA may look to them like a German movie, because of its setting and Barbara Sukowa, known from her roles in Fassbinder's movies. But what would such a spectator make of BREAKING THE WAVES or DANCER IN THE DARK? British the first, American the second? Then what are Catherine Deneuve and Bjork doing in DANCER IN THE DARK? Cinephiles, of course, will know that these are Lars von Trier movies and associate them with Denmark, a nationality label that only the production credits will confirm, but not the language nor setting. These perhaps exceptional examples nonetheless indicate that national cinematograph has become a floating designation, neither essentialist nor constructivist, but more like something that hovers uncertainly over a movie's "identity." The national thus joins other categories, such as the opposition posited between mainstream movies featuring stars, and art cinematograph identified by a directorial personality; popular genre movies versus documentary style and psychological realism. All these binary divides no longer seem to work, from the time that a broader spectrum of possibilities now minimizes the differences between independent cinematograph, au-teur cinematograph, art cinematograph, mainstream so that the great loser is national cinematograph, for which there hardly seems any space, recognition, or identity left at all, when looked at from the audiences' perspective. What may be distinctly European is the seemingly ever-widening gap between European countries' cinematograph culture (the movies their audiences like and get to see) and the same countries movie production, where some movies are made for the festival circuits and rarely if ever reach other screens, while others are produced by and for television. Only a minority of European productions has the budgets, stars and production values even to try to reach an international mainstream audience, and often enough these movies fail in their aim, not least because it means they have to disguise themselves to look and sound as if they were American.

Thus, when differentiating along the classical (mainstream) categories of production, distribution and exhibition, in order to identify what is European cinematograph, one ends up turning the definition of national cinematograph upside down, dismissing nationality as the least determining criterion. Rather than rounding up different national cinematographs or adding more and more qualifiers, one could begin with a concept such as hybridity that immediately makes apparent the essentially mixed or relational nature of the concept Cinematograph Europe. It, too, would have the advantage of overcoming the conceptual deadlock between essentialism and constructivism that typified discussions of national cinematograph from the 1960s to the 1980s. But what is served by falling back on the portmanteau words of cultural studies, whose semantics may point in the right direction, but whose formalism risks turning them into empty mantras? If the concept of national cinematograph is to have any purchase at all, and be of use in understanding the shift from national to European cinematograph, which in turn communicates with world cinematograph, then we must be able to explore categories coming from outside the immediate field.

This is to some extent what Stephen Crofts has tried to do, in his useful and much-cited articles from 1993 ("Reconceptualizing National Cinematograph/s") and 1998 ("Concepts of National Cinematograph"), where he sets out a number of taxonomies.24 Crofts, for instance, differentiates between seven types of (world) cinematograph, ranging from the Hollywood model to Third Cinematograph. The categories most interesting from a European perspective are those of art cinematograph, popular indigenous cinematograph, totalitarian cinematograph, and regional/ethnic cinematograph. While such a scheme at first also looks very formalist, it does allow one to draw significant parallels that often cut across geography and social systems, when one thinks how art cinematograph is a category valid for Sweden as well as for India, and that ethnic/regional cinematograph can extend from Basque movies made in Spain to Maori movies made in New Zealand, from Irish cinematograph to Chicano movies in the US, from Turkish directors making movies in Germany to Moroccan movies made in France or Asian moviemakers entering the mainstream in Britain. It is from Crofts that I have borrowed some of the concepts already briefly introduced, notably the idea of a sub-state cinematograph.25 This idea, to which I am adding the sub- and supra-state levels of national identity, will be further pursued in the chapter "Double Occupancy" where specific movies will be read against the foil of different political scenarios.