European Cinema : Face to Face with Hollywood (Film Culture in Transition)
Thomas Elsaesser
Language: English
Pages: 568
ISBN: B005SQFDTO
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In the face of renewed competition from Hollywood since the early 1980s and the challenges posed to Europe’s national cinemas by the fall of the Wall in 1989, independent filmmaking in Europe has begun to re-invent itself. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood re-assesses the different debates and presents a broader framework for understanding the forces at work since the 1960s. These include the interface of “world cinema” and the rise of Asian cinemas, the importance of the international film festival circuit, the role of television, as well as the changing aesthetics of auteur cinema. New audiences have different allegiances, and new technologies enable networks to reshape identities, but European cinema still has an important function in setting critical and creative agendas, even as its economic and institutional bases are in transition.
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the Yuppie stockbrokers living in London’s Dockland or the Home Counties. Is the “national cinema” question then, more than a figment of someone’s (the critics’) imagination, or a promotion ploy of doubtful use for products not marketed by way of genre or star? The unclassifiability of a production range drawn from television drama, film/TV co-productions, commercial feature films, and ex- film school debuts is self-evident. But it is equally self-evident that the mid- s “Renaissance”
very heart of ideology (were the Verbotsfilme not evidence “of a society longing for change”?) What is certain is that such easy passages from difference to indifference, from rejection to appropriation cannot and should not satisfy historians of the German cinema. But what are the alternatives? What perspectives or options can current film historiography put at our disposal? Our initial appeal was to the so-called New Film History, in order to speak of the former East and West German
fingerprints, he makes his way out of the deserted building. In Florence, he meets up with Sarah who is horrified when she hears what happened in Hamburg. David leaves her, and the next morning, another Friday, sees him, by himself and not answering the phone, closing the shutters of the windows in the otherwise deserted farmhouse. “Einmal dem Fehlläuten der Nachtglocke gefolgt – es ist niemals gutzumachen” (Following a false alarm even once, it can never be undone). With this quotation, from
prostitute by the “cafajeste” who takes her home in his car and then throws her out at a.m., so that she gets picked up by the police. Again, the central scene in the film is the humiliation of the girl when the “cafajeste” takes her to the beach, and after seducing her, takes away her clothes, so that they photograph her in the nude and use the pictures for blackmail. In what sense does she feel degraded by this? She is being humiliated, but not because she’s being photographed in the nude.
not only aware of the seal of excellence that its Palme d’Or bestows on a film thus distinguished. It also carefully controls the use of its logo in image and print, down to typeface, angle, color coding and the number of leaves in its palm branch oval. To vary the meta- phor yet again: a festival is an apparatus that breathes oxygen into an indivi- dual film and the reputation of its director as potential auteur, but at the same time it breathes oxygen into the system of festivals as a
