1st Edition
The Routledge Companion to European Cinema
Presenting new and diverse scholarship, this wide-ranging collection of 43 original chapters asks what European cinema tells us about Europe.
The book engages with European cinema that attends to questions of European colonial, racialized and gendered power; seeks to decentre Europe itself (not merely its putative centres); and interrogate Europe’s various conceptualizations from a variety of viewpoints. It explores the broad, complex and heterogeneous community/ies produced in and by European films, taking in Kurdish, Hollywood and Singapore cinema as comfortably as the cinema of Poland, Spanish colonial films or the European gangster genre. Chapters cover numerous topics, including individual films, film movements, filmmakers, stars, scholarship, representations and identities, audiences, production practices, genres and more, all analysed in their context(s) so as to construct an image of Europe as it emerges from Europe’s film corpus.
The Companion opens the study of European cinema to a broad readership and is ideal for students and scholars in film, European studies, queer studies and cultural studies, as well as historians with an interest in audio-visual culture, nationalism and transnationalism, and those working in language-based area studies.
Introduction
Part I: A first dialogical cluster: European cinema speaking about Europe: Through explorations of sexualities, identities, migration and the crisis of modernity
1. Antonina Anisimovich — Post-communist nostalgia in new Bulgarian cinema as a social critique: Mediated post-communist nostalgia
2. Kyle Barrett — Slow Slippy: Still shite being Scottish? T2: Trainspotting and the ‘Scottish European’
3. Louis Bayman — Beauty and historical understanding in Suspiria and Cold War
4. Cordula Böcking — ‘Europe was built on blood’: Christian Petzold as a European filmmaker
5. Tom Cuthbertson — Europe wounded? Politics of hope and resistance in Vincent Dieutre’s Orlando Ferito (2013)
6. MaoHui Deng — Lilting and the entangled temporalities of Europe(an cinema)
7. Owen Evans — New ways of looking: The case of Maren Ade, Valeska Grisebach and Małgorzata Szumowska
8. Fiona Handyside and Danielle Hipkins — The ebbs and flows of girlhood experience across European cinema
9. Julia Havas — ‘Dream on princess’: Cultural value, gender politics and the Hungarian film canon through the documentary Pretty Girls
10. Susan Hayward — European ecology-documentaries as performative exchange
11. Seda Öz — Following the flâneur Hulot in Playtime: Soundscape of the new Paris
12. Cristina Ruiz-Poveda Vera — Ágata’s (filmmaking) girlfriends: The new wave of women directors in Catalonia
13. Rob Stone — The Bourne multiplicity: Quantum Europeanness in the Bourne films (2002-2016)
14. Emilija Talijan — Noisy presences in contemporary European cinema: Paris est une fête: un film en 18 vagues
15. Connor Winterton — Gay male sex, carnal knowledge and realism in contemporary French cinema
16. Cecilia Zoppelletto — Eden is West, Europe as a magic trick
Part II: A second dialogical cluster: Cinema and its industry, national transnationalisms: Actors, studios and cross-overs
17. Samar Abdel-Rahman — Omar Sharif: A European Middle Eastern star
18. Özgür Çiçek — Weakened nationalism and thickened time: Interrogating the position of Kurdish cinema within European cinema discussions
19. Eduard Cuelenaere, Stijn Joye and Gertjan Willems — Why small European film industries remake each other’s successes: The case of the Low Countries
20. Hanja Dämon — European collaboration after World War Two: A Tale of Five Cities (M. Tully, R. Marcellini, W. Staudte, G. von Cziffra, E. E. Reinert, 1948-1951)
21. James Fenwick — A film ‘highly offensive to our nation’: Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), censorship, and militaristic representations of post-war Europe
22. Agata Frymus — Europe comes to Hollywood: The silent era, 1912—1927
23. Miguel Gaggiotti — The non-professional actor in European cinema
24. Will Higbee — The (cultural) politics of international co-production: Morocco and Europe
25. Anna Mártonfi — British comedy in a foreign light: Looking at the trope of British comedy through the lens of émigré filmmakers
26. Christopher Meir — Corporate consolidation, artistic conservatism and the persistence of Hollywood: The European film industry, 2006-2020
27. Chris O’Rourke — ‘Boyish’ women and female soldiers: British gender disguise comedies between the world wars
28. John White — Fred Zinnemann: A Hollywood director who never leaves Europe
Part III: A third dialogical cluster: European cinema and the myth of a unifying and pluralist Europe: Through explorations of borders, genres and histories
29. Kaya Davies Hayon — Framing fundamentalism in contemporary European film
30. Giuseppe Fidotta — Gangster films reloaded: European values and the criminal spectre of late modernity
31. Alex Forbes — Films at the intersection of Europe, the Balkans and transgender visibility: A sketch map
32. Luis Freijo — Two-speed economic systems and bipolarity in the European Union: Frontier spaces in Valeska Grisebach’s Western
33. Gábor Gergely — Film topography and national belonging: Hungarian Jewishness and the high mountains
34. Tamsin Graves — Identity and belonging in the bordered spaces of Gatlif’s Indignados (2012) and Geronimo (2014)
35. Igor Krstić — Accented silences: The aesthetics of displacement in diasporic post-Yugoslav cinema
36. Priscilla Layne and Ervin Malakaj — Resisting the traps of hegemony: Variation in contemporary German queer of color cinema
37. Mariana Liz — Lisbon on film 1980-2020: Locating Europe
38. Adelaide McGinity-Peebles — ‘We live like swine and die like swine, because we mean nothing to each other’: The little person, the state and nationhood in contemporary Russian film
39. Maya Nedyalkova — Family, memories and borders: Europe in the films of Stephan Komandarev
40. Joanna Rydzewska — Neoliberal authorship: Auteur theory and European art cinema in 2021 — The example of Paweł Pawlikowski
41. Daniel Sheppard and Giuseppe Previtali — Queer bodies and the death drive: Gender and sexuality in Italian giallo
42. Jamie Nicholas Steele — Political discourse and rhetoric: Challenging twenty-first century populism in Chez nous/This Is Our Land
43. Marta F. Suarez — Recovering memory, reasserting Europeanness. Modern Convivencia and Hispanotropicalism in Palm Trees in the Snow (2015) and Neckan (2014)
Biography
Gábor Gergely is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Lincoln, UK. He has published on Hungarian, French and Italian cinema, on European actors in Hollywood and he is the editor of the Stardom special issue of Studies in Eastern European Cinema.
Susan Hayward is Emerita Professor of Cinema Studies at Exeter University, UK. She is the author of several books on French cinema and Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (now in its sixth edition).
