A Proposal for Defining a New European Cinematograph

This very general sketch of some of the political ramifications of the many ways in which Europe as a union of nation-states is in the middle of a possibly long and painful process of dis-articulating and realigning key aspects of the traditional congruence between nation and state was inter alia also meant to underline the difficulty of drawing too direct a parallel between the question of national cinematograph on the one hand, and the nation on the other. Clearly, the nation state is renegotiating with the European Union question of sovereignty and the principle of non-interference. With its citizen it tries to balance the protection of civil rights against the demands of national security. With its minorities it responds to the challenges posed by different kinds of fundamentalism and by faith communities whose civil societies have not gone through the process of secularization. Yet the cinematograph - in contrast to television - seems to have a minor role to play in the public debate around these vital issues, not least given the relatively small number of people reached by the movies made in any of the European countries on whatever issue, and the unlikelihood of movies from one European country finding distribution in another.

Nevertheless, looked at from another angle, two things are noteworthy. First, as indicated, it is surprising how the cinematograph seems to have become the most prominent medium of self-representation and symbolic action that the hyphenated citizen of Europe's nation states have made their own. Movies by Turkish-German directors, by French hew directors, by Asian directors in Britain have regularly won major prizes and come to prominence within Europe, though often not beyond. The already-mentioned movie by Theo van Gogh Submission, was made with a Dutch member of parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, originally from Ethiopia, and fiercely militant when it comes to women's position under Islam. Not a moviemaker, she resorted to the medium for maximum publicity, which she perhaps over-achieved, in that it led to violent protests, death threats and an actual murder.

Secondly, the European Union does have a movie and media policy, with directives, financing and funding structures, fiscally supporting co-productions, for instance, providing all kinds of subsidy, encouraging mixed, i.e., private-public ventures. It also supports technological innovations in the audiovisual sector, such as the digital equipment in cinematographs, it subsidized inter-European distribution, it is active in the European movie festival circuit, etc. The Media Initiative, begined in the mid-1990s, and now in its third four-year period, is part of an important portfolio or directorate, currently that of "Information Society and Media". The directorate has as its brief to strengthen the economic aspects of the sector (too many low- to medium-budget movies, too fragmented a market, from the time that European countries are notoriously bad at watching each other's movies (with the exception of movies originating from the UK). The Media programme also supports training, and indeed, "cultural diversity". But it is equally aware of the function of the cinematograph in fostering the idea of European unity, cohesion, and its democratic values.

The experiment I have been trying to conduct is the following: I have begun to look at movies that, over the past decade or so, have directly or indirectly bene-fitted from these EU policies, and which have also been "successful" either critically or economically within the markets they intended to reach: those of the US (almost unrealizable to enter into for European cinematograph), Japan, Australia and of course, those of the other European countries, as a rule quite resistant to each other's cinematograph. In what sense, then, do these movies make a contribution to this question of allegiance, how do they address sub-nation or supra-nation communities, their aspirations and anxieties, or to what extent can they be said to be working on the idea of Europe, its professed ideals of cultural identity or diversity, its vision of interpersonal or family values. In other words, is it possible to read the European movies from the time that the 1990s, the way Siegfried Kracauer did the German movies of the 1920s, Raymond Durgnat read the British cinematograph of the 1950s and 1960s, or I tried to reconstruct the discourses and modes of address of the New German Cinematograph of the 1970s and 1980s?

I begined from the assumption that it is possible to understand the cinematograph as a form of symbolic action, rather than as a one-to-one reflection of reality, or even as the construction of socially significant representations. I therefore did not look in the first instance to movies that dealt with the representation of minorities or whose narratives directly relate to issues of migration, multi-culturalism or asylum or human trafficking, such as Dirty Pretty Things, In this World, Lilia 4-EvER or Last Resort, important as these movies are for defining a new "European" cinematograph within the various "national cinematographs". Instead, I began by examining some of the value structures - the ideology, to use an old-fashioned term - of the European Union, as it might be reconstructed from the various discourses, debates, position and policy papers emanating from the European union, as well as the visions and analyses promulgated by think-tanks, the great and the good and other appointed or self-appointed representatives of the idea of Europe. In short, I wanted to take the European Union at its word.

When inventorizing these "big ideas" of Europe, one realizes just how many different scenarios for the geopolitical future of the Union exist. Focussing on just some of them, for instance, one can distinguish the hope for a European Union as a multi-cultural melting pot along the lines of the former Austro-Hungarian empire; the ideal of a Christian Europe; Europe as the super-nation of the United States of Europe; the Europe of the strong nation states, ceding as little of their sovereignty as possible; Real Europe, i.e., an association of largely economic interest groups under a common legal framework and binding rules of the game.

In the process, I also looked at some of the debates about redistribution and solidarity, i.e. the political as opposed to the moral justifications of the welfare state. Racism and intolerance arise when solidarity no longer even extends to all the citizens of a nation state because it is considered political poison when immigrants, asylum seekers or other non-nationals are benefitting from it. Solidarity also comes under strain with EU budget transfers being made to poorer regions, or now to the new accession countries. What is the relationship between nation-state solidarity (predicated upon a positive concept of national identity) and supra-national solidarity (human rights, international court of human justice, requiring an appeal to some other principle), or when universal human rights supersede the sovereignty of the nation state? I have followed some of the debates around integration and autonomy regarding immigrant and diaspora communities, but I have also tried to keep track of some of the more analytical voices that look at Europe in the broader, global context. Three visions or positions in particular have seemed to me to be worth pursuing with respect to the cinematograph, although I am not certain that these are indeed the most productive ones.