New Studies in European Cinema – serie

Self-portraiture is a singular form within the broad field of first-person film and video – not so much an account of the filmmaker’s intimate life as a representation of the artist at a given instant. With deep roots in the Western tradition of painting and literature, self-portraiture in the moving image can be considered to be a hybrid practice, not fitting into the traditional definition of documentary or fiction, as it breaks the boundaries of both genres.The investigative and self-reflexive stance of the self-portrait raises questions about intimacy, the appearance and corporeality of the subject and, more importantly, the medium itself. Today the understanding and definition of this practice is being challenged by the emergence of new forms of self-portraiture brought about by digital media, such as the selfie phenomenon. Against this backdrop, this book reassesses the significance of the self-portrait in the moving image and new media by exploring a varied and international body of works.

«A significant and astute contribution whose insights across film studies, philosophy, and feminism demonstrate the ongoing relevance of Left Bank filmmakers Varda, Resnais and Marker.»(Steven Ungar, Professor Emeritus, Department of Cinematic Arts, University of Iowa)Engaging with contemporary film-philosophical research, this book investigates the effects of a haunting presence of death in life. It considers moments in which the films of Agnès Varda, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais and theories of intersubjectivity, gender and mortality in contemporaneous works by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty coalesce around this ethical epicentre, the equality enacted by death on every mortal. Challenging hierarchical divisions between subjects constructed around geo-political, gendered or spectatorial difference, it establishes a paradigm in which intersubjective interactions, especially through the gaze, are instead ethical and egalitarian. Haunting the Left Bank identifies and explores the presence of mortality in these directors’ cinematic images, revealing how they indicate ways of connecting with other subjects and speaking to a recognition of equality and difference.

This book offers a new reading of the work of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa. It provides a formal and detailed analysis of his films to suggest that Costa’s formal procedures generate a contingency of meaning. The book proposes that Costa’s films suggest a critical thinking posited through the materiality of the cinematic medium that is capable of exposing the limits of filmic representation itself. In addition, the author argues that Costa’s political gesture derives from the articulation of the intrinsic elements of the filmic medium rather than the depiction of a social reality.

During the last three decades, Europe has undergone numerous periods of economic and political instability. The process of European integration, once hailed as a beacon of a peaceful co-operation between many, if not all, European nations appears to be stagnating, giving rise to notoriously more frequent manifestations of xenophobic violence, nationalism and right-wing fundamentalism. This book evaluates the portrayal of the migrant Other in selected examples of contemporary French and German cinema from the period 1989–2020 in the context of the ongoing debate about European identity and its socio-political significance. It focuses on the films of some of Europe’s most prolific contemporary filmmakers, such as Michael Haneke, Claire Denis and Fatih Akin. It examines cinema’s importance not only in reference to various theoretical evaluations of the concept of European identity, but also many notable events that have taken place in Europe in the last thirty years, such as the collapse of the ‘Iron Curtain’ in 1989, the historical expansion of the European Union in 2004, the migration ‘crisis’ of 2015, ‘Brexit’ and the war in Ukraine.

«This is an excellent and innovative study of one of the most crucial topics of today. Using gender, sexuality, and race as theoretical frameworks, The New Italian Cinema of Precarity brilliantly enlivens the study of precarity and unemployment as portrayed in contemporary Italian cinema. A must-have for both students and scholars.»(Dr. Paolo Chirumbolo, Louisiana State University)The book provides one of the first explorations of contemporary Italian cinematic depictions of precarity. In 2008, the world faced a significant financial crisis, leading to the emergence of the socio-economic phenomenon known as precarity. In Italy, precarity is a national issue, primarily referring to the widespread prevalence of temporary work, impacting the lifestyles of many minorities due to Italian legislation. Precarity has consequently become a recurring theme in contemporary Italian cinema, portraying characters with precarious lives marked by unpredictability, lack of job security, and material or psychological well-being, thereby becoming existential precarious characters.This book analyses seventeen popular Italian contemporary films, revealing their complex interplay between cinema and society. This interplay challenges traditional notions of Italianness in cinema and illustrates how characters’ precarity intersects with other issues such as gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, bringing further nuance to contemporary Italian identities, which are heterogeneous and plural.

The essay film – ‘a form that thinks’ – serves to create a self-reflexive space for contemporary society by challenging expectations and demanding the creative involvement of the spectator. Using film to provoke thought has never been more important than now, when non-fiction films are gaining in popularity and playing a growing part in debates about culture and politics. This timely publication argues that the appeal of the essay film lies primarily in the dialogic engagement with the spectator and the richness of the intellectual and artistic debate it stimulates.The book focuses on the work of three key European film directors associated with the essay film: Chris Marker, Harun Farocki and José Luis Guerín. It provides a detailed analysis of several films by each director, exploring the relationship between dialogism and essayism in their work and placing this in the wider context of debates on the cinematic essay as a genre. Central aspects of essayistic filmmaking are explored, including its radical approach to knowledge, its distinctive patterns of subjectivity, its challenging of the formal representation of reality, and its contribution to new understandings of spectatorship. Written with clarity and perception, this volume offers new insights into the rise of the non-fiction film and the essay film, in particular.

This book explores the cinematic representation of the city in British film from 1895 to 1914, featuring depictions of London, Glasgow, Dublin, Delhi and other British colonial cities. The author argues that the films are not only an invaluable record of the economic, social and cultural life of these cities but also that the spatial organization of these urban areas, and the cinematic representations of them, were shaped by the ideology and activity of imperialism. The pioneer camera operators who made these early films often put forward an imperialist ideology by paying particular attention to the cinematic representation of monumental and ceremonial spaces, modern communication and transport within the city and between the city and the empire. Of Empire and the City establishes connections between these cities and their cinematic representation by means of continuous motifs and themes, including modernity, Orientalism, spectatorship and the imperial subject. The book makes a unique contribution to studies of early film, British urban history and the history of the British Empire.«This is a highly original and genuinely groundbreaking piece of scholarship on early British cinema. Very little work on this subject to date has sought to contextualise films of the 1890s and 1900s within the broader field of the history of imperialism. Cinquegrani's book systematically corrects this ‘blind spot’, and in its use of a wide range of ideas and methodologies […] it offers a compelling new model for future scholarship on British cinema of the silent era.» (Dr Jon Burrows, Associate Professor, Department of Film and Television Studies, University of Warwick)

From Brigitte Bardot in her bikini at the Cannes Film Festival, to François Ozon’s intimate portrayals of grief and loss, some of the most iconic and challenging moments in French cinema are associated with the beach. Cinema at the Shore argues that the Parisian cityscape is not the only significant definition of space in French cinema and instead explores the industrial, aesthetic and thematic relations of French cinema to the beach. Examining a range of films from the 1950s to the present day – including popular comedies by Jacques Tati and Patrice Leconte, the lively and ruminative documentaries of Agnès Varda, the classicism of Eric Rohmer, and the provocations of Catherine Breillat – this book showcases the dynamism and importance of the beach as a site for the reconfiguration of French cinematic identity itself. The beach offers a unique crystallization of our attitudes towards nature, culture, the body, space and time. In its constant mobility, its close, yet distinctive, relationship with nature, and its paradoxical centrality in the French cultural imaginary as a site of relaxation and holidays, the beachscape, re-framed and re-imaged by the camera, offers new ways of conceiving of the spatial politics of French cinema.

Since the late 1990s, German cinema has gone through a period of astonishing productivity and success that has made it the focus of scholarly analysis once more. What can contemporary German cinema tell us about current German society and its problems? What are the distinguishing features of filmmaking in Germany today?This book analyses the representation of individual and collective behaviour in post-unification German cinema. It looks at performances of gender, ethnicity and nationality in a wide range of contemporary German films. Using Performance Theory as a framework, the book discusses how modern German identities are presented as conformist, liberating or subversive responses to external challenges. Theoretical considerations regarding the efficacy of performance and the dialectical relationship between transgression, resistance and normalization form the background for an analysis that investigates contemporary German films in terms of their function within the restructuring of post-unification German society.

Why does the 1974 war in Cyprus remain so dominant in Greek-Cypriot cinema? How has this event shaped the imagination of contemporary filmmakers, and how might one define the new national cinema that has emerged as a result? This book explores such questions by analysing a range of Greek-Cypriot films that have hitherto received little or no critical discussion.The book adopts a predominantly conceptual approach, situating contemporary Greek-Cypriot cinema within a specific cultural and national context. Drawing on the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and particularly his theories of time and space, the author explores ways in which Greek-Cypriot directors invent new forms of imagery as a way of dealing with the crisis of history, the burden of memory and the dislocation of the island’s abandoned spaces.

Visual Anthropology in Sardinia explores the technique, style and methodology of documentary films about Sardinia, investigating how such films construct different experiences and identities, and reflecting on the advantages of the medium of documentary film over written ethnographic texts.Following a discussion of theoretical developments in the area of visual anthropology in the twentieth century, the author turns to case studies of documentary filmmaking related to Sardinia from the fascist era onwards, offering a survey of the particular and somewhat peculiar filmic ethnographic discourse established in relation to Sardinia, which has been constructed to a large extent as an ‘Other’ to peninsular Italy. The subject is a complex one, ranging across the fields of film studies, anthropology, literary and cultural studies and, to some extent, philosophy. The book enriches scholarship not only on the cultural construction of Sardinia in the popular, political and intellectual imaginary and in its relation to Italy, but also on visual epistemologies and the ethics and practice of ethnographic filmmaking.

As perhaps the most studied film movement in cinematic history, the French New Wave has been analysed and criticised, romanticised and mythologised, raising the question of whether it is possible to write anything new about this period. Yet there are still gaps in the scholarship, and the study of music in New Wave films is one of the most striking.Listening to the French New Wave offers the first detailed study of the music and composers of French New Wave cinema, arguing for the need to re-hear and thus reassess this important period in film history. Combining an ethnographic approach with textual and score-based analysis, the author challenges the idea of the New Wave as revolutionary in all its facets by revealing traditional approaches to music in many canonical New Wave films. However, musical innovation does have its place in the New Wave, particularly in the films of the marginalised Left Bank group. The author ultimately brings to light those few collaborations that engaged with the ideology of adopting contemporary music practices for a contemporary medium. Drawing on archival material and interviews with New Wave composers, this book re-tells the story of the French New Wave from the perspective of its music.

The swimming pool frequently appears in film not merely as a setting but as a dynamic site where social, political, cultural and aesthetic forces converge. What is it about this space that has so fascinated filmmakers and what kinds of cinematic investigations does it encourage? This collection features essays by an eclectic, international range of film researchers. Amongst the works analysed are classics such as The Cameraman (1928), The Philadelphia Story (1940) and La Piscine (1969); cult hits such as The Swimmer (1968) and Deep End (1970); and more recent representations of the pool in Water Lilies (2007), Sea Point Days (2009) and Ausente (2011). The pool is considered as a realm where artifice meets nature, where public meets private, where sexualities morph and blend; and as a space that reconfigures the relationship between architecture and narrative, in which themes of pollution, spectacle and reflexivity find unique expression. Approaching the swimming pool from a wide range of methodological perspectives, the essays in this collection stake a claim for the enduring significance of this exciting cinematic space.

Mapping Cinematic Norths presents an international range of research and enquiry into the significance, representation and manipulation of depictions of the ‘North’ in cinema and television. Northern landscapes, soundscapes, characters and narratives are defined and recognized as distinctive image-spaces within film and television. However, the ‘North’ is portrayed, exploited and interpreted in divergent ways by filmmakers and film audiences worldwide, and this volume sheds new light on these varying perspectives.Bringing together the work of established and emerging academics as well as practising filmmakers, this collection offers new critical insights into the coalescence of North-ness on screen, exploring examples from Britain, Scandinavia, continental Europe, Australia and the United States. With contextual consideration and close readings, these essays investigate concepts of the North on film from generic, national, aesthetic, theoretical, institutional and archival perspectives, charting and challenging the representations and preconceptions of the idea of North-ness across cultural and cinematic heritages.

This collection of new writing on contemporary Greek cinema builds and expands on existing work in the field, providing a coherent analysis of films which, despite their international importance, have so far received limited critical attention. The volume maps key trends in Greek cinema since the 1990s within the wider context of production and consumption at both national and international levels. It offers a wide range of critical analyses of documentary and avant-garde filmmaking, art house and popular cinema, and the work of established and new directors as well as deliberations on teaching methodologies and marketing strategies. The book seeks to highlight the continuities, mutual influences and common contexts that inform, shape and inspire filmmaking in Greece today.

French film design throughout the 1930s was not just descriptive, but also expressive: sets were not merely part of the background, but were vital components of a film’s overall atmosphere, impact and critical afterlife. This was a period when sets were ‘ripped open’, as painted backdrops were replaced by three-dimensional constructions to ensure greater proximity to reality. Accomplished set designers such as Alexandre Trauner, Jacques Krauss and Eugène Lourié crafted a series of designs both realist and expressionistic that brought out the underlying themes of a film’s narrative and helped create an exportable vision of ‘Frenchness’ that influenced other European and American film design practices.This book details the elaborate paraphrasing tendencies of French film design in the 1930s. The author explores the crucial role of the set designer in the film’s evolutionary process and charts how the rapid development of studio practices enabled designers to become progressively more ambitious. The book examines key films such as Quatorze juillet (1932), Un Carnet de bal (1937), La Grande illusion (1937) and Le Jour se lève (1939) to demonstrate how set design works at establishing time and place, generating audience familiarity and recognition and underpinning each film’s visual style.

Pictures of the Mind is the first integrated study of Surrealist photography and film, assessing the impact of early experimental practice and theoretical discourse on prominent post-war trends in art house cinema. Roland Barthes’s interpretation of the photographic image, alongside Jacques Derrida’s concepts of spectrality and trace, underscore an exploration of the recurrent references to the phantomatic aspect of photography and film in Surrealist theoretical writings and practice. The analysis uses Derrida’s account of the uncanny to shed light on the Surrealist conception of photographic and film images as mental constructs, or pictures of the mind, rather than mere visual representations. This leads to a consideration of the similarities between the Surrealist conception of beauty as fixed-explosive and Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the time-image as applied to Luis Buñuel’s films. Ultimately, the impact of Surrealism on post-war cinema is assessed as part of a wider consideration of the status of photographic and filmic images in the age of digital cinema. The elaboration of an aesthetics of spectrality in early Surrealism is shown to have had lasting implications for a range of post-war filmmakers such as Chris Marker, Maya Deren, Nelly Kaplan, Federico Fellini, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jan Svankmajer, Akira Kurosawa, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Guillermo del Toro, Guy Maddin, Terry Gilliam and David Lynch.

This book examines Duras’s contribution to contemporary cinema. The ‘dark room’ in the collection’s title refers to one of Duras’s metaphors for the writing process, la chambre noire, as the solitary space of literary creation, the place where she struggles to project her ‘internal shadow’ onto the blank page. The dark room is also a metaphor for the film theater and, by extension, for the filmic experience. Duras rejected conventional forms of cinematic address that encourage the spectator to develop a positive identification with the film’s diegesis and narrative. Her films create unusual rapports between image and sound, diegetic and extra-diegetic elements, and textual and intertextual dimensions of cinematic representation. In doing so, they allow the film spectator to establish new connections with the screen.This collection focuses on the aesthetic, conceptual, and political challenges involved in Duras’s innovative approach to cinematic representation, from an interdisciplinar perspective including film and literary theory, psychoanalytic analysis, music theory, gender studies, and post-colonial criticism. The book opens with a theoretical introduction to Duras’s cinematic practice and its peculiar position in contemporary cinema and contemporary film theory and is divided into five parts, each one devoted to a specific aspect of Duras’s films: the interaction between literature and cinema (Part One); the reconfiguration of the cinematic gaze (Part Two) and of the image/sound relation (Part Three); the representation of history and memory (Part Four) and of cultural identity (Part Five).

This book is the first ever full-length study of the reception of British cinema in post-war France, challenging François Truffaut’s infamous dismissal of British cinema as ‘a contradiction in terms’, a comment which has been, and still is, widely reproduced, yet has until now remained critically unexplored.A historical account, the book gathers together well-known episodes (such as Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s) and critics (André Bazin, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard), along with original new material, and thus throws new light on a topic which, given the influential nature of French film criticism and cinephilia, continues to be at the core of film culture.

More than twenty years after its collapse in 1989, the Berlin Wall remains a symbol of the vigour with which communist East Germany kept out the ‘corrupting influences’ of neighbouring West Germany. However, despite the restrictions, a surprising number of artistic works, including international films, did ‘cross the Wall’ and reach audiences in the wide network of cinemas in East Germany.This book takes a fresh look at cinema as a social and cultural phenomenon in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and analyses the transnational film relations between East Germany and the rest of the world. Drawing on a range of new archival material, the author explores which films were imported from the West, what criteria were applied in their selection, how they were received by the national press and film audiences, and how these imports related to DEFA (East German) cinema. The author places DEFA films alongside the international films exhibited in the GDR and argues that film in East Germany was actually more transnational in character than previously thought.