After the Historical Imaginary.

As we have seen, much of the debate around national cinematograph is dominated by two paradigms: that of essentialism versus constructivism, and the paradigm of "otherness," the fact that a sense of (national) identity always implies drawing boundaries, and staking out the visible or invisible lines of inclusion and exclusion. Nevertheless hard a semiotically inclined mind may find it to abandon the meaning-making power of binary pairs, from what has been said so far, such strict oppositions cannot be maintained without some modification. While the idea of the historical imaginary - which as indicated, runs through most of the essays in the collection - is already an attempt to allow for the shifts and reversals in the relation of self to other, it is evident that this term, too, is dependent on some version of identity as a relation to otherness (at the time intended to combat essentialism, while not yielding to full-blown and ahistorical constructivism). I have tried to include a certain historical dynamic and asymmetry in the power relations at work in the self-other relation, reflected in the section titles, such as "border crossings,""without passport," or the way I trace the relation of art cinematograph to counter-cinematograph to Hollywood via the detour of an imaginary Third Cinematograph of neo-realism as magic realism.

Yet insofar as the essays do have a consistent conceptual-metaphoric basis, it is indeed grounded in this self-other relationship, the cinematographtic look, the mirror metaphor and the different affective, psychic and political architectures built on it. As already explained in the introduction, the (two-way) mirror is something like the master trope in my thinking about national cinematograph (Germany, Britain, the Balkans) in relation to Hollywood or the West, but it is equally in evidence in essays such as the one on Bergman and in "Women Moviemakers in the 1980s." While I am therefore not disowning either the underlying assumptions or the analyses thus obtained, I do want to signal that the historical situation of cinematograph in Europe has changed from the time that the 1990s, or rather, that the questions we put to this cinematograph have changed, and that in pleading for a new approach I am also revis(it)ing positions put forward elsewhere in the present collection. I began by looking at the sort of distinctions that are as a rule made about how the national functions within the body politic (ranging from patriotism, to chauvinism, to racism) and in the media, sports, leisure, and popular culture (print, television, cinematograph, popular music, football, food, tourism), where signifiers of the national are constantly put in circulation in modes that range from the exotic and the nostalgic, to the patronizing and the provocative. My central question, thus, was to ask what the relation might be between the resurgence of political nationalism in its contradictory, but also very modern or contemporary character, and the increasing ubiquity and political power of audiovisual media, notably television (and to a much lesser extent, the cinematograph).

The conclusion reached in this chapter has only answered the question above, insofar as it has pointed to the difficulties of moving from national cinematograph to European cinematograph with the concepts provided by the discipline of Movie Studies. The chapter appears to end on a negative note, suggesting that the debate around national cinematograph may have exhausted its usefulness for the study of contemporary cinematograph in Europe. But this also contains the hope that both the es-sentialist and the constructivist notion of national cinematograph can be superseded by a new cognitive mapping of the hitherto central categories such as "nation", "state", "identity" and "otherness" without either resorting to the formal-meta-phoric level of in-between-ness and hybridity, or the generalized label of postmodernism. If the premise of the present chapter is correct, namely that the relations between nation and state are, within Europe, shifting in particularly paradoxical and countervailing ways, then the concepts of subjectivity and identity, of history and temporality - with which the European cinematograph has been identified at least from the time that 1945 - are also changing. Such reflections provide more motives why it may be necessary to revise the concept of the historical imaginary, based as it was on identification and address, and centered on the geometries and architecture of the look, rather than on irony and voice, appropriation and impersonation, painted faces and American accents. The New Cinematograph Europe, if such an entity exists, cannot be defined as either essentialist or constructed in relation to nation and state, but neither will the mirroring effects of self and other be sufficient to determine its identity. Indeed, the very concept of identity, with respect to self, nation and Europe may no longer be apposite. The hope is that new terms will emerge that can think cinematograph and Europe, independent of nation and state while still maintaining a political agenda and an ethical imperative. For the former, I shall look at the supra-national organization of the European movie business as manifested in the movie festival circuit, and the nodes that determine its functioning as a network; for the latter, I will choose a sub-national perspective - above the individual and below the state - to explore how specific movies locate their protagonists and narratives in different forms of intersubjectivity and mutual interdependence, while still speaking of inclusion and exclusion. The central concepts will be those of occupancy rather than identity, of interference rather than mirroring. In both these respects - the festival network as a determining factor of contemporary cinematograph and multiple identities as a determining factor of belonging - European movies are not unique, for these are characteristics that they share with movies from Asia and the US. Maybe the best motive for calling movies European in the global context would finally be their awareness not of what makes them different, but their reflexivity about what makes them able to participate and communicate in the world's cinematograph cultures.