Historicizing the Now.

European Cinematograph: Face to Face with Hollywood implicitly addresses and often explicitly discusses the question of Europe as a political entity, as well as a cultural space, from the distinct perspective of cinematograph. For instance, the publication as a whole stands squarely behind the preserving and conserving tendencies manifest in most European countries with respect to "their" national cinematograph. Movies are fragile, perishable and physically impermanent. They need institutional and financial support; they require technical but also intellectual resources, in order to maintain their existence. Until only a few decades ago, before the videotape and the DVD, a movie's presence was limited to the moment of its theatrical release, and for some, this fleeting existence is still part of the cinematograph's essence. But nevertheless passing, transitory and seemingly expendable a particular movie may be in the everyday, and nevertheless one may feel about the aesthetic implication of such an art of the moment, the cinematograph is nonetheless the 20th-century's most precious cultural memory, and thus calls forth not only a nostalgic but also an ethical impulse to try and preserve these moments for posterity.

Europe-Hollywood-Europe

The publication, nevertheless, does not endorse the view that Hollywood and television are the threats that cinematograph in Europe has to be protected from. The first section sets out a broad horizon and sketches an evolving situation over the past two to three decades, which includes the asymmetrical but dynamic relationship of cinematograph with television, re-appraising the division of labour between cinematograph and television in giving meaning to the "nation". The section on authorship and the one entitled "Europe-Hollywood-Europe" are intended to show how much of a two way traffic European cinematograph has always entertained with Hollywood, nevertheless uneven and symbolic some of these exchanges may have been. What needs to be added is that relations are no longer bi-lateral; the movie trade and its exchanges of cultural capital have become global, with reputations even in the art cinematograph and independent sector rapidly extending across national borders, thanks above all to the festival circuit, discussed in a separate chapter below. Hal Hartley, Richard Linklater, Paul Thomas Anderson, Alejandro Amenabar, Tom Tykwer, Fatih Akin, Wong Kar-Wai, Tsai Ming-Liang, Kim Ki-Duk, Abbas Kiarostami and Lars von Trier have, it sometimes seems, more in common with each other than with directors of their respective national cinematographs, which paradoxically, gives a new meaning to national or local attributes. The argument will be that a mutation has taken place; on the one hand, there is an international art cinematograph which communicates similar concerns across a wide spectrum of settings, but within an identifiable stylistic repertoire. Partly determined by new movie technologies, this style repertoire adjusts to the fact that art cinematograph directors share with their audiences a cinephile universe of movie historical references, which favors the evolution of a norm that could be called the international festival movie. On the other hand, the lowering of cost due to digital cinematograph has meant that movies - both feature movies and documentaries - are fulfilling functions in the domestic space and the public sphere that break down most of our conventional, often binary categories: first and foremost those between art and commerce, into which the opposition between Europe and Hollywood is as a rule pressed. But the mutations also change our assessment of the local and the global: in the chapter on festivals, I also argue that signifiers of the regional and the local are often successfully marketed in the global arena, while a more ethnographic impulse and intention can be detected behind many of the movies made in Europe, registering the fact that cinematograph has become part of culture as a resource for the general good: shared, prepared and feasted upon like food at the dinner table, rather than valued only for the uniquely personal vision of the artist-auteur.

Tradition and the Individual Talent

As a collection of essays, the earliest of which were written as movie reviews, European Cinematograph Face to Face with Hollywood combines two seemingly contradictory impulses. Writing as a critic, I tried to record the moment and address the present, rather than this or that movie's or moviemaker's possible posterity. Other pieces, also addressing the present, set out to develop a perspective of the longue duree, or to provide a context that could mediate and historically situate a movieic work or directorial oeuvre. In both cases, therefore, the essays were carried by the conviction that the cinematograph had a history, which was happening now. The implication being that history might even change, to adapt the catchphrase from BACK TO THE FUTURE, although at the time, I was more under the influence of T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent," a seminal text in modernist literary history. Perhaps no more is intended than to convey the sense that each movie entered into a dialogue with, contested and thereby altered not only those which preceded it, but did so by changing the here-and-now, whenever it brought about a revelatory moment or was an event, as a rule the motive that made me want to write about them. This makes the publication, despite its omissions and selectivity, a history of European cinematograph from the time that the 1960s, although not in the conventional sense. It does not deal systematically with movements, au-teurs, national cinematographs, significant movies and masterpieces. Rather it is a discursive history, in the sense that the essays carry with them their own tale, often precisely because they either directly address the historicity of the present moment, or because they self-consciously place themselves in the position of distance that historians tend to assume, even when they write about the now. Discursive history, also because this historicizing reflexive turn was the raison d'etre of many of the articles. Several were commissioned by Sight & Sound (and its sister publication, the Monthly Movie Bulletin) for instance, with the brief to step back and reflect on a new phenomenon, to take the longer view or to contextualize a change. Finally, a history of European movie studies because the essays also trace a history of discourses, as the critic in me gave way to the academic, and the academic felt obliged to address fields of debate already constituted, not always avoiding the temptation of the meta-discourse.