Cinema of Crisis

Thomas Austin is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. He is the editor of ReFocus: The Films of Steve McQueen (2023); and co-editor of Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe (2020). Angelos Koutsourakis is Professor in Film and Cultural Studies at the Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures, University of Leeds. He is the author of Kafkaesque Cinema (2024), Rethinking Brechtian Film Theory and Cinema (2018), Politics as Form in Lars von Trier (2013) and the co-editor of Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe (2020), and The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos (2015).

The essays collected by Thomas Austin and Angelos Koutsourakis in their volume Cinema of Crisis. Film and Contemporary Europe are therefore a timely and welcome attempt to explore filmic approaches to crisis in countries across Europe, from Greece and the Iberian Peninsula to the UK, Estonia and Finland.

• ContributorsIntroduction, by Thomas Austin and Angelos Koutsourakis1. Aesthetics of crisis: art cinema and neoliberalism, by Alex Lykidis 2. Beyond Neoliberalism? Gift Economies in the Films of the Dardenne Brothers, by Martin O’Shaugnessy3. The resurgence of Modernism and its critique of liberalism in the cinema of crisis, by Angelos Koutsourakis4. Post-Fordism in Active Life, Industrial Revolution, and The Nothing Factory, by Patricia Sequeira Brás5. Re-evaluating Crisis Politics in the Work of Aku Louhimies, by Kate Moffat6. Crisis of cinema / cinema of crisis: the car crash and the Berlin School, by Olivia Landry7. Representing and escaping the crises of neoliberalism: Veiko Õunpuu’s films and methods, by Eva Näripea8. The Future is Past, the Present cannot be fixed: Ken Loach and the crisis, by Martin Hall9. It could happen to you: characters as places of enunciation in Iberian austerity cinema, by Iván Villarmea Álvarez10. The Double Form of Neoliberal Subjugation: Crisis on Eastern European Screen, by Anna Batori11. Housing Problems: Britain’s Housing Crisis and Documentary, by Anna Viola Sborgi12. Miserable journeys, symbolic rescues: refugees and migrants in the cinema of Fortress Europe, by Thomas Austin13. Frontlines: migrants in Hungarian documentaries in the 2010s, by Lóránt Stőhr14. Mongrel attunement in White God, by Rosalind Galt15. Labour and exploitation by displacement in recent European film, by Constantin Parvulescu16. A hushed crisis: the visual narratives of (Eastern) Europe’s antiziganism, by Dina Iordanova Bibliography