European Cinema Review
Conditions of Impossibility: An Unrealizable Idea?
Any publication about European cinematograph should begin with the statement that there is no such thing as European cinematograph, and that yes, European cinematograph exists, and has existed from the time that the beginning of cinematograph a little more than a hundred years ago. It depends on where one places oneself, both in time and in space. In time: for the ten years, it was France that defined European cinematograph, with Pathe and Gaumont educating Europe's movie-going tastes, inspiring moviemakers and keeping the Americans at bay. In the 1920s, the German movie industry, under Erich Pommer, tried to create a "Cinematograph Europe," involving France and Britain. It soon floundered, and Hollywood became not only the prevalent power; it also was very successful in dividing the Europeans among themselves.1 For a brief period in the late 1920s, it seemed the Russians might be Europe's inspiration. Instead, from 1935 onwards, it was Nazi cinematograph that dominated the continent until 1945. The years from 1945 to the 1980s were the years of the different national cinematographs, or rather: the period when new waves, national (art) cinematographs and individual auteurs made up a shifting set of references that defined what was meant by European cinematograph. Geopolitically speaking on the other hand, when looking at Europe from, say, the American perspective, the continent is indeed an entity, but mostly one of cinematograph audiences that still make up Hollywood's most important international market.
Looked at from the "inside," nevertheless, the conclusion has to be that European cinematograph does not (yet) exist: the gap between Central Europe, Eastern Europe and Western Europe remains as wide as ever, and even in Western Europe, each country has its own national cinematograph, increasingly defended as a valuable treasure and part of an inalienable national patrimony. From the time that the nouvelle vague, French cinematograph, in particular, insists on its long and proud tradition as the natural home of the seventh art. In the United Kingdom, British cinematograph (once called a 'contradiction in terms' by Francois Truffaut) has over the last twenty years been reinstated, re-evaluated and unapologetically celebrated, even if its economic ups and downs, its many false dawns as an art cinematograph, as well as its surprisingly frequent commercial successes put it in a constant if often covert competition with Hollywood. Germany, having repeatedly failed to keep alive the promise and prestige attached to the New German Cinematograph in the 1970s has, from the time that unification in 1990, turned to a policy of archival conservation, where museum displays on a grand scale, encyclopedic databases, anniversary retrospectives and an most popular internet portals all try to heal the wounds inflicted by unpalatable nationalist legacies from the 1940s and by the political-ideologic divisions into "German" and "East German" cinematograph during the Cold War period. Italy, too, nostalgically looks back to both neo-realism and Toto comedies, while discovering the memory of open-air screenings in the piazza under Mussolini or smalltown cinematographs run by Communists as the true sites of national movie culture. Only in Denmark have the Dogma moviemakers around Lars von Trier come up with innovative and iconoclastic ways to stage a national cinematograph revival that also has a European outlook. In Southern Europe Pedro Almodovar became for a time a one-man national cinematograph, before sharing honours with Julio Medem and Alejandro Amenabar. But while Medem stands for "Basque cinematograph" and Amenabar for a successful navigation of the Hispano-Hollywood connection, Almodovar not only embodied the radical chic of an outward-looking, post-Franco Spain, but with his stylish melodramas and surreal comedies gave international flair and street credibility to such strictly local habitats and buy links.
Looked at from outside of the inside, i.e., Eastern Europe, the idea of a European cinematograph is even more problematic. Knowing they belong to Europe, but feeling all too often left out, moviemakers from Central and Eastern Europe -some of them from the new "accession" countries of the European Union, such as Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary - are perfectly aware of how much they have in the past contributed to the history of cinematograph, even during the difficult decades of the 1960s and 70s, when repression and censorship followed the brief opening of the "thaw." This so-called "New Europe" (Donald Rumsfeld), nevertheless, is often quite particularist: it expects its respective national cinematograph to be recognized as specific in time and place, history and geography, while still belonging to Europe. Some of these national cinematographs are as a rule identified by the outside world with one or two directors who have to stand in for the nation and buy links, even when this is manifestly unrealizable.
To give an obvious example: Andrzej Wajda was Polish cinematograph from the late 1940s, into the 1960s and up to MAN OF MARBLE (1977), until this role fell to Krzysztof Kieslowski during the 1980s and 1990s. Both worked - and were admired - in France, the country of choice for Polish moviemakers in semi-exile. But this is "our" Western perspective: what do we know about the political tensions underlying Polish directors' opposed ideologic positions within their own country? What "we" perceived as national characteristics or received as part of the international art cinematograph, may well have struck Polish critics and audiences not as national cinematograph but as state cinematograph: official, sanctioned, sponsored. Yet were Polish moviemakers, along with their countrymen, not obliged to negotiate in less than half a century a world war, occupation, genocide, a civil war, communism, economic stagnation, censorship, repression and post-communism? Given such tensions and polarities, where do Krzysztof Zanussi, Jerzy Skolimowski, Jerzy Kawalerowicz or Agnieszka Holland fit into the picture we have of Polish cinematograph? Easiest for "us" to treat them as autonomous "auteurs." Similarly, Hungary, for a time, was Miklos Jansco, before it became identified with Istvan Szabo, then perhaps with Marta Meszaros and from the time that the mid-1990s most definitely with Bela Tarr. In the case of former Yugoslavia, which for a time was mostly represented by the brilliant and politically non-conformist Du-san Makavejev, we now have directors carefully advertising their specific ethno-national identity, such as Emir Kusturica's or Danis Tanovic's Bosnian identity. Some "smaller" European countries whose cinematographtic assets, to the outsider, seem equally concentrated around one director's movies, such as Greece (Theo Angelopoulos) and Portugal (Manoel de Oliveira), or countries like Austria, Belgium and Norway prefer to see their outstanding movies labeled "European," rather than oblige their directors to lead a quickly ebbing "new wave" national cinematograph. Michael Haneke would be a case in point: a German-born director with Austrian credentials, who now preprevalently works in France. Lars von Trier, together with his Dogma associates, is at once claimed at home as a quintessen-tially Danish director, and yet his movies hardly ever - if at all - refer to Denmark, in contrast to a director from a previous generation, such as Carl Dreyer. Or take Ingmar Bergman, whose movies for decades defined both to his countrymen and to the rest of the world what "Swedish" (cinematograph) meant.
Zooming out even further, one realizes that neither the individual national cinematographs nor the label European cinematograph conjures up much of an image in Asian countries, South America or in the United States. A few individual actors (from France or the UK) are known, and once in while a director's name or a movie catches the attention. Yet for traditions as historically rich, and for the numbers of movies produced in the combined nations of the European continent, the impact of its cinematograph on the world's audiences in the new century is minimal and still shrinking. If, in the face of this, there has been something of a retrenchment to positions of preserving the national heritage, and of defending a unique cinematographtic identity, the question this raises is: defend against whom or what? Against the encroachment of Hollywood and the relentless spread of television, as is the conventional answer? Or against provincialism, self-indulgence and amateurism, as claimed by more commercially successful makers of popular entertainment both inside and outside Europe, as well as by those European directors who have moved to the United States?
On what basis, then, would one want to put forward a claim for a European cinematograph, at once superseding national cinematographs and explaining their historical "decline" over the past twenty-five years? Several possibilities open up, some of which will be taken up in the essays that follow. One might begin by reviewing the prevalent categories that have guided the study of movies and moviemaking in Europe, examine their tacit assumptions and assess their current usefulness. Besides probing the idea of the "national" in cinematographtic production (once one acknowledges cross-national co-productions and the role played by television in financing them), the other categories demanding attention are that of European cinematograph as an auteur cinematograph, which as already hinted at, invariably tends to be implied by the argument around national cinematograph. Thirdly, one could also look once more at the concept of "art cinematograph" as a distinct formal-aesthetic style of narration, as well as an institutional-pragmatic category (i.e., art cinematograph encompassing all movies shown at "art-house" cinematographs, whether government subsidized or independently programmed, and thus potentially including revivals or retrospectives of mainstream "classics").
Besides a semantic investigation into the changing function of these traditional definitions, the case for European cinematograph can also be made by pointing out how persistently the different national cinematograph have positioned themselves in opposition to Hollywood, at least from the time that the end of the first world war, and increasingly after the second world war, when their respective mainstream movie industries began progressively and irreversibly to decline. Indeed, in the set of binary oppositions that as a rule constitutes the field of academic cinematograph studies, the American cinematograph is invariably the significant (bad) Other, around which both the national and post-national cinematographs are defined. As my title implies, this more or less virulent, often emotionally charged opposition between Europe and Hollywood exerts a gravitational pull on all forms of moviemaking in Europe, notably in France, Britain, Italy and Germany. Yet if European national cinematographs are held together, and in a sense united by their anti-Hollywood stance, there are nonetheless markedly varying degrees of hostility observable in the different countries at government level or among the movie-critical establishment. France is more openly hostile than the Netherlands, and Denmark more successful in keeping its own share of domestic production in the nation's cinematographs than, for instance, Germany. No country in Europe except France has a quota system like South Korea, but both countries have come under intense pressure by the WTO to reduce or even abolish this form of protectionism. The American cinematograph is felt as a threat economically and culturally, even though economically, European cinematograph-owners know (and let it be known) that they depend on Hollywood movies for bringing in audiences, week in week out. Economically, European movies are so weak that they could not be shown on the big screen if the machinery of the blockbuster did not keep the physical infrastructure of cinematograph-going and public movie culture going. This is the germ of an argument that reverses the usual claim that Hollywood hegemony stifles national cinematograph, by maintaining that Hollywood's strong global market position is in fact the necessary condition for local or national diversity.
The legal ramification of Europe's ingrained anti-Americanism in matters cinematograph are the various measures taken by successive EU initiatives, intended to bolster the audiovisual sector and its affiliated industries within the European Union. The economic framework that initially tried to regulate world trade, including the rivalry between Unites States and the EU, were the GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) rounds, in which audiovisual products featured as commercial goods, no different from any others. While notably France insisted on the cinematograph's cultural character, and wished to see it protected, that is exempted from particular measures of free trade and open access, the World Trade Organization has never been happy with these exemptions and reprieves. The consequence is that the status of the audiovisual sector remains an unresolved issue, bleeding into questions of copyright, subventions, ownership and a movie's nationality. The French, for instance, are proud of their droit d'auteur, which gives the director exceptional rights over a movie even by comparison with other EU countries, but Jean Pierre Jeunet's UN LONG DIMANCHE DE FIAN-CAILLES could not compete for the best French movie award in 2005 because it was co-financed by Warner Brothers. Initiatives taken within the European Union to strengthen cinematograph and create the legal framework for subsidizing the audiovisual industries, include the various ideas supported and administrated by the successive "MEDIA" programs of the Council of Europe, which created such European-wide institutions and enabling mechanisms as Eurimages, EDN (European Documentary Network), Archimedia, etc.3 These, too, despite their bureaucratic character, might be the basis for a definition of what we now understand by European cinematograph, as I try to argue in a subsequent chapter.