Shifting the Discourses and Re-aligning the Paradigms

The more the essays reach into the new century, the more they take reflexive as well as retrospective turns. Not because of any disappointment in the state of European cinematograph or a nostalgic sense of regretting past glories. There is much to love and admire about the movies being made by European directors. With talents as diverse and controversial as Pedro Almodovar, Lars von Trier, Mike Leigh, Agnes Varda, Danny Boyle, Roberto Benigni, Catherine Breillat, Nanni Moretti, Emir Kusturica, Tom Tykwer, Fatih Akin, Claire Denis, and Jean Pierre Jeu-net (to name just a few), the last twenty years cannot but strike one as a period where it is exciting to be a working critic. But as my task changed from reviewing movies to assuming the role of teacher at a university, establishing movie studies degree and research programs, certain constraints imposed themselves about whom one is addressing also when writing, and to what pedagogical end and intention. Some of the later essays had their origins in lecture notes and position papers, others were given at conferences, and some emerged out of discussions with colleagues and graduate students. Especially crucial were the last three years, when I headed a research group on "Cinematograph Europe" of about a dozen members, where the issues of German cinematograph were intensely discussed, sometimes taking a shorthand form, in order to quicker reach a new insight or perspective.

Parallel to this work on German cinematograph, and in some cases preceding it, I published essays analyzing what in retrospect now appear as similar sets of mirror-relations and over-identifications in France ("Two Weeks in Another Country - Hollywood and French Cinephilia", 1972) and Britain ("Images for Sale", 1984), as well as other essays on new waves, "national identity" and the national self-image. In two more recent contributions, one on "German Cinematograph, Face to Face with Hollywood: Looking into a Two-Way Mirror" (written in 2002), as well as one about movies from the Balkans (from 2003) the same trope appears, differently contextualized and further developed: putting forward the idea of a national cinematograph (as a theoretical construction) always existing face to face with an "other". Although initially developed in response to a "demand" coming from the "other," namely universities in the United States asking me to lecture on these subjects,6 I should perhaps mention that much of this work on Weimar cinematograph and the New German cinematograph was done while I was teaching at the University of East Anglia, where I had the pleasure of discussing my publication on New German Cinematograph with my then colleague Andrew Higson, who went on to write his own essay on national cinematograph, "The Concept of National Cinematograph" (1989), which soon became the standard point of reference for all subsequent contributions to this debate.7

My own involvement in the national cinematograph debate, as well as my conscious, but often also unconscious adherence to the trope of the "historical imaginary" and its theoretical configuration, have thus largely determined the selection of the present essays and may explain some of the more glaring omissions, such as a discussion of Jean-Luc Godard, possibly the most "European" director working continuously over the whole of the historical period here considered. The sequence and the structure of the different sections of the publication are not chronological. They partly retrace the formation and repercussions of the three prevalent discourses that have until recently defined European cinematograph in the academic realm: "national cinematograph", "auteur cinematograph", "art cinematograph". One could call these the paradigms of autonomy: National cinematograph (the choice of making an auteur cinematograph represent the nation, rather than the stars-and-genre commercial cinematograph of a given country). Most national cinematographs are (re-) defined as a consequence of self-declared movements or schools (the "new waves", which in Europe begined in Italy with neo-realism of the late 1940s, includes Britain's kitchen sink movies of the 1950s, the French nouvelle vague and other "new" cinematographs throughout the 1960s and early 70s in Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic). Auteur cinematograph (the director as autonomous artist and representative of his country) as a rule goes hand in hand with art cinematograph (the formal, stylistic and narratological parameters which distinguish art cinematograph from classical i.e., Hollywood narrative, but also the institutional contexts, insofar as art cinematograph is made up of those movies normally programmed in "art houses", a term more at home in the US and in Britain than in continental Europe, where cinematographtheques, "art et essai" cinematographs or the so-called "Programmkinos" fulfil a similar function). The second half of the collection re-centres and de-centres these paradigms of autonomy. "Europe-Hollywood-Europe" shows how productively dependent the national cinematographs of France, Britain and Germany have been on their implied other, while "Central Europe looking West" tries to give some indication of what acts of looking and being looked at have been excluded when defining "European cinematograph" in terms of its Western nations. "Europe haunted by History and Empire" de-centers "auteur" and "nation" by re-centering them around history and memory, as Europe's colonial past, political debts and troubled ethical legacy are gradually being transformed by the cinematograph into cultural capital: commodified, according to some into a "heritage industry", comprehensive of creating new kinds of identity, according to others. In either case, by dwelling so insistently on the (recent) past, European cinematograph distinguishes itself from Hollywood and Asian cinematographs. In the essays brought together under this heading, the origins of the new discourse on history in the cinematograph are traced back to the 1970s and 80s. The section on "Border-Crossings: Moviemakers without a Passport" further de-centers "national cinematograph" without abandoning the "auteur" by highlighting the efforts - not always successful or recognized - of individuals who have tried to make movies either in Europe or addressed to European audiences, from transitional and transnational spaces, including explicitly political spaces. Notably the essays on Latin American moviemakers or on European directors using Latin American topics and settings lead to the final chapter, which traces some of the intersections of European cinematograph with Third Cinematograph and World Cinematograph.

The national cinematographs discussed are those of Britain, Germany and to a lesser extent, France. One might object that this hardly justifies the words "European cinematograph" in the title. And even if I responded by pointing out that there are essays about the Swedish Ingmar Bergman, the Serbian Dusan Makavejev, the Italian Ettore Scola and Francesco Rosi, the Chilean Raoul Ruiz, the Argentinian Edgardo Cozarinsky, the Mozambiquian Ruy Guerra, and that I had to drop my essays on Renoir, Truffaut, Godard, Welles, Bunuel, Chabrol, Pasolini, Fellini, Bertolucci, Visconti and Polanski, one might immediately point out that these essays deal with movies from the 1970s and 1980s. Where are the movies and moviemakers that I claim necessitate the revision of the paradigms of auteur and new wave, of national cinematograph and art cinematograph?

In some cases the chapters do not pretend to be anything other than what they are: essays written under different circumstances, for different occasions and spread over 35 years. From the time that they were not intended to "fit" the categories they find themselves in here, it is evident that even less so, they are able to "fill" them.8 Yet when making a selection of my writing on the subject of European cinematograph, these categories made more sense than serving mere taxonomic convenience. They are in each case suggestions of how the study of European cinematograph from the time that 1945 might be conducted, that is to say, revised, revitalised, recontextua-lised.

In order to underline the point, the first section was specifically written for this publication, as was the concluding chapter. Together, they want to provide an extended introduction, open up another perspective on the material that follows, as well as outline a follow-up for the current phase of European cinematograph in the global context. The essay on "European Culture, National Cinematograph, the Auteur and Hollywood" recapitulates some of the standard positions on Europe as a collection of national cinematographs. It puts special emphasis on their common love-hate, parasite-host relationship with Hollywood, showing how many intriguing and occasionally even illuminating insights the passion over Hollywood on both sides of the divide can yield, but also how restricted, even narcissistic and self-complacent the "face to face with Hollywood" debate can appear when the horizon is opened a little, and "we" West Europeans either face the other way, or let ourselves be faced and addressed by the East (or the South). In this way the chapter speculates on what basis, other than bureaucratic and economic, a European cinematograph might build a sense of identity that was neither merely the sum of its parts nor the result of new lines of exclusion and "other"-ing. Might it be time to abandon the search for "identity" altogether, and look for more sovereign markers of European selfhood, such as in-tercultural competence or the virtues of the family quarrel, interference and dissent? First sketched under the impact of the break-up of Yugoslavia, and the difficulties encountered in even thinking about how to integrate not just the movie histories of the former communist states of central Europe, but the memories of its citizens, the chapter is nonetheless cautiously optimistic that there is a common heritage of story types and myths, of deep structures of feeling, genres of symbolic action and narrative trajectories that create recognizably European protagonists and destinies.

The chapter called "ImpersoNations" examines in more detail the fate of the concept of national cinematograph within movie studies, showing how it is structured by successive theoretical assumptions such as essentialism, constructivism and hy-bridity that characterise the humanities discourse commonly, at the intersection and border-crossing of paradigms that run from semiology, cultural studies to post-colonial theory. The debates around national cinematograph and the conflicting fields of essentialism and cultural constructivism also highlight differences in Europe between cinematograph and television, popular cinematograph and auteur cinematograph, including the difference between imaginary communities and historical imagin-aries of post-colonialism and multi-culturalism already touched upon. In all these areas, the idea of the nation and the emotions associated with nationalism have gained new currency from the time that 1989 and the end of the Cold War, without thereby imposing themselves in the manner of the 19th century nation state, or its critique by classical Marxism. On the contrary, it is the crisis of the nation state, transforming itself within the new political framework of the European Union, and being transformed by the demographic and de-territorialising powers of globalisation, that demands a re-assessment of the kinds of loyalties, affiliations but also the conflicting allegiances that bind individuals to their community, territory, region, language and culture, including movie culture. A closer look at the idea of the state and the nation, as circulating in the political and historical realm, indicates that the weakened allegiance towards the nation state, so often perceived in the overall context of a lamented loss of civic virtue and refusal of solidarity, is a very contradictory phenomenon, because it is in fact underpinned by new imaginaries of belonging. In this context, the adjective "national" functions both as a catch-all and a temporary place holder, showing its porous fabric in the very gesture of being invoked. But like the family, the nation is a constant battlefield of contending claims and urgent calls for change, yet shows itself remarkably resilient, indispensable even, because questions of identity, allegiance, solidarity and belonging just do not go away.

The obvious question of the role of the media in these changes is posed, but only pursued insofar as it affects the cinematograph, its place in the new identity politics, but also its self-differentiation vis-a-vis television. From the cinematograph television took over the social function of addressing its audiences as the nation, a role which in turn drastically changed in the 1980s and 1990s, leaving both cinematograph and television to redefine their respective modes of address and social ima-ginaries. The essay on "British Television through the Looking Glass" registers the culture shock of a medium adapting itself from a public service remit to a mainly commercial service provider with, as I claim, decisive changes for our notion of society and the nation. The conclusion reached is that the "national" in European cinematograph functions from the time that the 1980s at best as a second-order reference, and might well need to be redefined if not replaced altogether. With it, the concept of the "historical imaginary" may also have to be abandoned, less on methodological grounds, but because of the altered socio-historical context (consumer-culture) and media intertext (the increasing dependence of European cinematograph on public service television). They had made questionable the idea of the nation to which "national cinematograph" owed its theoretical articulation.

The third chapter draws the consequences of this insight, retaining the focus on national cinematograph and the auteur as second-order categories. It shifts perspective, nevertheless, by suggesting that these labels, and the practices they name, have for too long been abstracted from the historical ground on which they have grown, flourished and in the present conjuncture, re-aligned themselves. This historical ground, I argue, are the European movie festivals. Notably those of Venice, Cannes, Berlin, and Rotterdam (at least until the 1990s, from the time that when they are joined by other festivals, such as those of Toronto, Pusan, Sydney and Sundance) have between them been responsible for virtually all of the new waves, most of the auteurs and new national cinematographs that scholars often assiduously try to define in essentialist, constructivist or relational terms, though rarely pointing out the particular logic of site, place and network embodied in the festival circuit, which so often gave them the necessary currency to begin with.

The other transformation that the chapter on movie festivals tries to name extends the emphasis on site, place and network to include movie production. Parallel to the festival site as the place for the discovery of new moviemakers and the moment where individual movies acquire their cultural capital also for general audiences, it is location that makes European cinematograph perhaps not unique but nonetheless distinctive. In particular, cities and regions have superseded au-teurs and nations as focal points for movie production. Madrid, Marseille, Berlin, Glasgow, Edinburgh, but also the Ruhr Valley in Germany, the Midlands in Britain or the Danish village of Hvidovre have become peculiar post-industrial moviemaking hubs.9 New media industries have played a key role in enabling certain regions to renew their economic base and reinvent themselves, by moving from traditional industries of producing goods to providing services. Areas once known for shipping, mining or steel production now advertise themselves as skill and enterprise centres for media industries. Cities market themselves on the strength of their photogenic locations or historical skylines, combining hightech facilities with picturesque waterfront urban decay. Thus, another way of making a case for a distinct European cinematograph would be on the basis of such "location advantages", in the double sense of the word, as the conjunction of different forms of EU-funded urban redevelopment and new movie financing schemes, coupled with a policy of using specific locations which have changed their economic character and their historical associations. Here, too, I present in outline some of the reference points that indicate interesting if also quite contradictory adjustments to globalisation which typify Europe without necessarily distinguishing it radically from other parts of the world.

The final chapter in this section draws some of the consequences for a definition of European cinematograph from the fact that Europe is as a rule considered as a special kind of topographic, geopolitical but also demographic space. (Western) Europe's wealth and prosperity over the past fifty years sometimes masks the degree to which it has always been made up of distinct regions, different ethnicities and tribes, many of whom have only relatively recently been brought together into nation-states. These in turn have for 150 years made war with each other, before deciding after yet another catastrophe in 1945 and once more from the time that 1989, to forge the institutions that allow these different regions, languages, cultures, convictions and ethnicities to live in peace. Yet all the while, new demographic movements, at first from the former colonies, then from Southern Europe as cheap labor and finally as refugees, migrants or sans papiers, often persecuted at home, or looking for a better life of opportunity and prosperity, added to the mix that called itself the European Union, but which in fact began turning itself into a Fortress Europe. While the first generation of immigrants were mostly too engrossed in the struggle for survival, their children - the second generation - often took to more specifically cultural, symbolic and aesthetic forms of expression and affirmation of identity. Those marginalized or disenfranchised among the ethnic minority groups tend to give expression to their sense of exclusion by resorting to the symbolic language of violence, destruction and self-destruction. But others have also turned to the arts and voiced their aspirations and sense of identity-in-difference as musicians, writers and artists, with a substantial number among them taking up moviemaking. France, Britain and Germany in particular, have seen a veritable moviemaking renaissance thanks to second and third-generation directors from "minority" ethnic backgrounds: names such as Abdel Kechiche and Karim Dridi, Udayan Prasad and Gurinder Chadha, Fatih Akin and Thomas Arslan can stand for a much wider movie-making as well as movie-viewing community that crosses cultural and hyphenates ethnic borders. In "Double Occupancy" this particular configuration of multi-cultural moviemaking is regarded as typical for the new Europe, at least in the way it can be located at the fault-lines of a very specific European history of colonialism, re-settlement and migration. Nevertheless, the chapter also sets out to delineate a concept that is intended, at least provisionally, to succeed that of the "historical imaginary", by suggesting that the mirror-relations and forms of "othering" typical of a previous period may be in the process of being superseded, as identity politics through boundary-drawing gives way to general recognition of co-habitation, mutual interference and mutual responsibility as necessary forms of a new solidarity and sense of co-existence. Here, many of the movies that have had public success or received critical attention in recent years show themselves in advance of the political repertoire of ideas about European unity, by offering sometimes remarkably astute, moving and often also very witty comments on post-nation subjectivities and communities. In other words, while movies such as AMELIE, DOGVILLE, TALK TO HER, RUN LOLA RUN, TRAINSPOTTING, HEAD ON or GooDbyE LENIN may seem too auteurist, too commercial or too typical for a given national cinematograph to count as "European", there is, I am suggesting, another way of reading them as precisely, "New European", in light of certain political scenarios and economic strategies actively pursued by the European Union, its politicians, pragmatists, visionaries but also its critics. They give a new urgency to moviemaking in Europe, which distinguishes it from television, as well as making it part also of world cinematograph - a perspective taken up in the concluding chapter of the collection.