From National Cinematograph to Cinematograph in Europe

The changing function of television with respect to national self-representation might nonetheless be a useful pointer, when trying to understand the move from national cinematograph to European cinematograph. For once one accepts that "European cinematograph" cannot merely be either the historically conventionalized accumulation of national cinematographs (most of which have been in commercial decline from the time that the early 1980s) or the equally conventionalized enumeration of outstanding directors (nevertheless crucial moviemakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, Pedro Almodovar, Lars von Trier, Peter Greenaway or Krzysztof Kieslowski are in connoting "Europe," above and beyond their national identity) then the criteria for what is meant by "European" have yet to be found and defined. The question is the one that already lay at the heart of the national cinematograph debate. How representative are movies produced in the various countries of Europe for either the idea of nation or state? Alternatively, what role can the cinematograph play in furthering social goals or political ideals such as European integration, multicultural tolerance and a sense of "European" identity that is supra-national but nonetheless committed to common civic values? If the former risks being tautological - for what is a "representative" European movie? - the latter may also receive a disappointing answer.

Philip Schlesinger, for instance, has claimed that the cultural argument so often put forward at GATT or WTO meetings about the need to defend the dis-tinctiveness of European audiovisual production against the demand for free trade and liberalized markets, lacks empirical proof and is short on factual evidence. According to him, it is a fallacy to assume that just because the electronic media - notably television - are ubiquitous, they necessarily have an impact on a population's attitudes and behavior. And yet, the "power of the media" has become such a deeply entrenched notion when discussing the future of liberal democracies, the existence of a public sphere, multiculturalism, religion or any other issue of social, political or humanitarian concern, that it poses the question if it is not television that is the barely acknowledged but structuring absence of national cinematograph, as it loses its representational role. Any future thinking about cinematograph in Europe would then also have to "face up to" the electronic and digital media, rather than stay "face to face" with the blockbuster, as the constantly invoked "threat" to European cultural identity and national diversity.

More simply put, privileging (national) television as the interface of European cinematograph in the 1990s suggests a more modest agenda than that implied by the post-1945 national cinematographs of auteurs and new waves. But it has the advantage of taking account of the actual nature of movie production, even in countries that have or have had a viable indigenous movie industry. At least from the time that the 1970s, movies in most European countries have been financed by pooling very mixed sources, arranged under diverse co-production agreements, with television playing the key role as both producer and exhibitor of feature movies. Channel Four in Britain, ZDF's Das Kleine Fernsehspiel in Germany,18 the VPRO in the Netherlands, and Canal + in France have nurtured a European cinematograph in the absence of a national movie industry, allowing such television-produced movies the chance of a theatrical release before being broadcast. This model, dependent as it was on the existence of either publicly funded television or on commercial broadcasters with a public service or arts programming remit, proved to be both highly successful if one thinks of the movies it made possible, and transitional, if looked at from the increasing pressure from ratings that the remnants of public service television came under in the latter half of the decade. As a consequence, all the bodies just named have drastically scaled back their involvement in feature movie production in the new century. Movie production in Europe has had to re-orient itself, by looking for another economic model. As will be argued more fully in the next chapter, a different structure of financing, production, distribution and exhibition has become the norm in Europe from that which obtained during the first phase of the new waves, where national and transnational producers such as Pierre Braunberger and Carlo Ponti were able to finance auteurs' movies alongside more directly commercial ideas. But the current model also differs from the 'cultural mode of production' as it emerged in the 1970s and 80s, when national governments, especially in Germany and France, substantially funded an auteur cinematograph either by direct subsidies, prizes and grants, or indirectly, via state-controlled television. The new model, for which one could coin the term 'European post-Fordism', to indicate the salient elements: small-scale production units, cooperating with television as well as commercial partners, and made up of creative teams around a producer and a director (as in the case of Figment Movies, founded by Andrew and Kevin Macdonald, who teamed up with Danny Boyle to make SHALLOW GRAVE and TRAINSPOTTING, or Zentropa, the company founded by Peter Aalbaeck Jensen and Lars von Trier), originated in Britain in the 1980s, with Palace Pictures (Nik Powell, Paul Webster, Steve Woolley and director Neil Jordan)19 perhaps the best-known of this brand of high-risk ventures. From the time that then, similar units have emerged around all the major European directors, such as Tom Tykwer (X-Movie Creative Pool, Berlin), Fatih Akin (Wuste-Movie, Hamburg) or ex-director Marin Karmitz's MK Productions in Paris.