European: Cinema in The Twenty-First Century

Ingrid Lewis
Laura Canning
EUROPEAN CINEMA
IN THE TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURY
Discourses,
Directions and
Genres
European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century
“Two decades into the twenty-first century, it is time to take a look at the recent cinema
of Europe, and bring it into the curriculum. And this is what the book does: it presents
and analyses the cinema of the new Europe, from riveting migrant documentaries set in
the Mediterranean (Francesco Rossi’s Fire at Sea) to contemplative woman’s cinema
from small peripheral countries (Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg). A true constella-
tion of riveting topics and essays written by authors who represent Europe’s true diver-
sity: East and West, North and South.”
—Dina Iordanova, Professor of Global Cinema and Creative Cultures,
University of St Andrews, Scotland
“This broad-ranging edited volume provides a much needed resource for film students
as it deftly approaches the way conventional Western filmic traditions connect with
emerging Eastern and Central European traditions. The well-structured chapters paint
a rich tapestry of an evolving European cinema and speak to new modes of national
identity. Drawing on a rich tradition of film scholarship, this book provides a timely
geographical and critical historical map for decoding European cinema.”
—Pat Brereton, Professor of Film Studies, Dublin City University, Ireland
“European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Discourses, Directions and Genres

uniquely places Eastern European cinema in co-equal dialogue with Western European
cinema, addressing a gap in current studies. The chapters assembled by Lewis and
Canning broach highly contemporary concerns in scholarship of Europe and its cine-
mas, including migration, ecocriticism, disability studies, biopolitics, as well as auteur-
ship and genre. This is a comprehensive and accessible collection.”
—Maria Flood, Lecturer in Film Studies, Keele University, UK
“Contemporary European cinema is extremely diverse and engages with some of the
most relevant issues of modern day life, not least the future of the continent. Responding
to intensified scholarly research activity of the past few years, European Cinema in the
Twenty-First Century sums up state of the art recent discourses while delivering new
insights. Clearly structured and directly addressing lecturers’ needs, this book is a wel-
come and helpful contribution.”
—Claus Tieber, Lecturer in Theatre, Film and Media Studies,
University of Vienna, Austria
“This is a timely volume that makes two interventions: it brings together a range of
international scholars who cover film cultures from Central and Eastern Europe, and it
offers a refreshing take on art and popular cinema that attests to the heterogeneity of
European film in the twenty-first century. Merging the close reading of recent films with
industry analysis, among other methods, the volume engages with topical debates in
European film studies as it addresses questions of gender, migration, and eco-cinema
while also furthering our understanding of transnational authorship, small-nation film-
making, peripheral cultural production, and genre cinema in a pan-European context.
This collection will therefore be a useful resource for scholars and students alike.”
—Jaap Verheul, Lecturer in Film Studies Education, King’s College London, UK
Ingrid Lewis • Laura Canning
Editors
European Cinema
in the Twenty-First
Century
Discourses, Directions and Genres
Editors
Ingrid Lewis Laura Canning
Department of Creative Arts, Media School of Film & Television
and Music Falmouth University
Dundalk Institute of Technology Penryn, Cornwall, UK
Dundalk, Ireland
ISBN 978-3-030-33435-2 ISBN 978-3-030-33436-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2020
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To Padraig, my wonderful husband, soulmate and friend.
To Cristina, the best sister I could ever wish for.
Ingrid Lewis
In memory of my beautiful boy Eric. I treasure every too-brief moment we had.
For Ruan, light and joy of my life.
Laura Canning
Acknowledgements
This book was inspired by our students and written for them. Being a teacher
is a wonderful calling and a great responsibility at the same time. We would
thus like to thank all our students for inspiring both our research and work in
the classroom, for helping us to become, day by day, better teachers. Moreover,
we feel privileged to belong to two fantastic departments at Dundalk Institute
of Technology and Falmouth University. Our gratitude goes towards our
employers and colleagues, all marvellous people with whom we are lucky
enough to share the daily joys and challenges of our professional journeys.
Huge thanks to the fantastic staff and students of the Department of Creative
Arts, Media and Music, DkIT, especially Dr. Gerard (Bob) McKiernan and Dr.
Adèle Commins. Major thanks to all students and staff at the unique and inspir-
ing School of Film & Television (SoFT) at Falmouth University and, in par-
ticular, to Dr. Kingsley Marshall and Dr. Neil Fox.
We are very grateful to our editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Lina Aboujieb
and Emily Wood, for their continuous enthusiasm for and support towards this
edited collection. Special thanks to our contributors who patiently and promptly
engaged with our many sets of reviews and comments to their chapters.
Finally, our deepest gratitude goes towards our families.
Ingrid would like to thank her beloved mom, sister and niece: nothing of all
this would be possible without your steadfast love and support. Vă iubesc mult.
To my dad in heaven: miss you so much every day. I hope you are proud of me.
To my amazing husband and extended Irish family, I am extremely grateful for
your wholehearted love and affection. Grá agus gean ó chroí daoibh.
Laura thanks, above all, those who have shown so much love and solidarity
in the waning months of 2019. The sudden death of Eric Starr—my beloved
partner, fiancé, best friend and devoted father of our son Ruan as well as his
daughter Aoife—in the final days of editing this collection, just months before
our wedding, has been a heartbreaking and terrible blow which I could not
have survived without you. My family, friends in Ireland and Cornwall, Eric’s
family, colleagues, publishers and the incredibly supportive and compassionate
Ingrid: thank you all, from my heart.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: The Identity of European Cinema 1

Ingrid Lewis and Laura Canning
Part I Discourses 13
2 Documenting Difference: Migration and Identity in European

Documentaries 15
Adam Vaughan
3 Scotland’s Onscreen Identities: Otherness and Hybridity in

Scottish Cinema 33
Emily Torricelli
4 Questioning the ‘Normality Drama’: The Representation of

Disability in Contemporary European Films 51
Eleanor Andrews
5 Ecocritical Perspectives on Nordic Cinema: From Nature

Appreciation to Social Conformism 69
Pietari Kääpä
6 The Trauma of (Post)Memory: Women’s Memories in

Holocaust Cinema 87
Ingrid Lewis
7 An Ordinary Warrior and His Inevitable Defeat:

Representation in Post-Yugoslav Cinema109
Dino Murtic
ix
x Contents
Part II Directions 127
8 The New/Old Patriarchal Auteurism: Manoel de Oliveira,

the Male Gaze and Women’s Representation129
Ingrid Lewis and Irena Sever Globan
9 The Latest European New Wave: Cinematic Realism and

Everyday Aesthetics in Romanian Cinema149
Doru Pop
10 Between Transnational and Local in European Cinema:

Regional Resemblances in Hungarian and Romanian Films167
Andrea Virginás
11 Crossing Borders: Investigating the International Appeal of

European Films187
Huw D. Jones
12 Technology, Decentralisation and the Periphery of European

Filmmaking: Greece and Scandinavia in Focus207
Olga Kolokytha
13 Brooklyn and the Other Side of the Ocean: The International

and Transnational in Irish Cinema227
Maria O’Brien and Laura Canning
Part III Genres 247
14 On the Eve of the Journey: The New European Road Movie249
Laura Rascaroli
15 German Film Comedy in the ‘Berlin Republic’: Wildly

Successful and a Lot Funnier than You Think263
Jill E. Twark
16 On the Ambiguous Charm of Film Noir: Elle and the New
Type of Woman281
Begoña Gutiérrez-Martínez and Josep Pedro
Contents xi
17 Dystopia Redux: Science Fiction Cinema and Biopolitics299

Mariano Paz
18 Spanish Horror Film: Genre, Television and a New Model of

Production317
Vicente Rodríguez Ortega and Rubén Romero Santos
Index335
Notes on Contributors
Eleanor Andrews is retired Senior Lecturer in Italian and Film Studies from

the University of Wolverhampton, UK. She specialised in Italian Cinema, in
particular the works of directors Bernardo Bertolucci, Federico Fellini and
Nanni Moretti, as well as Neo-Realism and the Spaghetti Western. She also
taught French cinema, including poetic realism and the Nouvelle Vague.
Her book on Moretti’s use of narrative space (Place, Setting, Perspective)
was published in 2014. She is co-editor of Spaces of the Cinematic Home:
Behind the Screen Door (2015). Her research interests include the Holocaust
as well as myth and the fairy tale.
Laura Canning is Senior Lecturer in Film and Course Leader on the BA
(Hons) Film at the School of Film & Television, Falmouth University, UK. She
holds a PhD from the School of Communications, Dublin City University
(2013) and primarily writes on Irish cinema, women filmmakers and genre.
Her most recent work includes contributions on ‘Smart’ teen film in Rethinking
Genre in Contemporary Global Cinema, eds. Silvia Dibeltulo and Ciara
Barrett (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and on Irish women filmmakers in
Women in Irish Film: Stories and Storytellers, ed. Susan Liddy (Cork University
Press, 2020).
Begoña Gutiérrez-Martínez holds a PhD in Theory, Analysis and
Cinematographic Documentation (Universidad Complutense de Madrid,
UCM, Spain). She collaborates with the research group Analysis of Audiovisual
Texts (ATAD, UCM), and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Texas
at Austin (Radio-Television-Film Department). Her articles about television,
cinema and culture have been published in Investigaciones Feministas, Trama
& Fondo, EU-topías, Jazz Research Journal, and in the volumes Creaciones
Audiovisuales Actuales, ¿Qué es el cine? and Entender el Artivismo. She has
taught Narrative Cinema and Film Analysis (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos), as
well as Political Communication (CES Next, Universitat de Lleida).
xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Huw D. Jones is Lecturer in Film at the University of Southampton, UK. He

previously worked at the University of York as a postdoctoral research associate
on the ‘Mediating Cultural Encounters through European Screens’
(MeCETES) project (www.mecetes.co.uk), an international project on
the transnational production, distribution and audience reception of
European film and television drama. His articles have appeared in The
Routledge Companion to World Cinema, Transnational Cinemas,
Comunicazioni Sociali, Journal of British Cinema and Television, and Cultural
Trends. He also edited the book The Media in Europe’s Small Nations (2014).
Pietari Kääpä is Associate Professor in Media and Communications in the
Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies at the University of Warwick. His
work on transnational cinema has appeared in many journals and books,
and they include Transnational Ecocinemas: Film Culture in an Era of
Ecological Transformation (with Tommy Gustafsson, 2013), Ecology and
Contemporary Nordic Cinemas (2014), Nordic Genre Film: Small Nation Film
Culture in the Global Marketplace (with Gustafsson) and Environmental
Management of the Media: Policy, Industry, Practice (2018). He is writing The
Politics of Nordsploitation: History, Industry, Audiences (Bloomsbury, 2020)
with Gustafsson.
Olga Kolokytha is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication,
University of Vienna, researching on cultural policy. Before joining academia,
she worked for more than a decade as a cultural projects manager and consul-
tant around Europe. In December 2016, she received the Best Publication
Award for the years 2013–2015 from the University of Music and the
Performing Arts of Vienna. In 2018, she was among the key experts
invited by the European Commission to consult on the future of the
European Agenda for Culture.
Ingrid Lewis is Lecturer in Film Studies at Dundalk Institute of Technology,
Ireland, where she teaches modules on European Cinema, Holocaust Film and
Popular Culture, Film Theory and World Cinema. She holds a PhD from the
School of Communications, Dublin City University (2015) and has taught
within the discipline of Film Studies at universities in Ireland, Croatia and Italy.
She has been granted fellowships at Royal Holloway, University of London
(UK, 2016) and Northwestern University (United States, 2015). Ingrid Lewis
is author of the book Women in European Holocaust Films: Perpetrators, Victims
and Resisters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Dino Murtic teaches research and critical literacy at the University of South
Australia. His book, Post-Yugoslav Cinema: Towards a Cosmopolitan Imagining
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), offered both a homage to the cinematic and
cultural history of former Yugoslavia and a critical contextual overview of the
political, aesthetic and ethical principles embedded in post-Yugoslav film.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
Maria O’Brien submitted her PhD thesis ‘A Political Economy of Tax

Expenditures for the Audiovisual Industries in Ireland: A cultural policy
research perspective on Section 481’ in the School of Communications, Dublin
City University in October 2019. Her research interests include state aid pol-
icy, cultural industries policy for film and videogames and media law
issues. She holds an MA in Screen Studies from Goldsmiths, University of
London, and an MLitt from Trinity College Dublin. She worked as a
lawyer in Dublin and London before entering academia and lectures in
Media Law in the School of Communications, DCU. She is co-founder
and co-organizer of the annual East Asia Film Festival Ireland.
Mariano Paz is Lecturer in Spanish at the School of Modern Languages and
Applied Linguistics, University of Limerick, Ireland, where he is also assistant
director of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies. His doctoral thesis,
completed at the University of Manchester, was focused on the links
between dystopia and science fiction in contemporary film. His articles on
Hispanic cinemas have appeared in many books and journals.
Josep Pedro is Postdoctoral Researcher Juan de la Cierva-Formación at
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M, FJC2018-036151-I). He is a
member of the research group Audiovisual Diversity at UC3M, and he collabo-
rates with the research group Semiotics, Communication and Culture at
Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM).
He holds a PhD in Journalism (UCM), and has been a visiting scholar at the
University of Texas at Austin and at Birmingham City University. He has pub-
lished articles in journals such as Atlantic Studies, Jazz Research Journal, Signa
and EU-topías, and has written chapters in the volumes Talking Back to
Globalization, Jazz and Totalitarianism and The Cambridge Companion to the
Singer-Songwriter.
Doru Pop is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Babeș-Bolyai University
in Cluj, Romania. In the United States, he has taught courses at Bard College
and Columbus State University. He has authored several books on visual cul-
ture, media, and politics and essays on film studies. His most recent pub-
lications are The Age of Promiscuity: Narrative and Mythological Meme
Mutations in Contemporary Cinema and Popular Culture (2018) and
Romanian New Wave Cinema: An Introduction (2014).
Laura Rascaroli is Professor of Film and Screen Media at University College
Cork, Ireland. Her interests span art film, modernism and postmodernism,
geopolitics, nonfiction, first-person cinema and the essay film. She is the author
of several monographs, including How the Essay Film Thinks (2017), The
Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (2009) and Crossing
New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (with Ewa
Mazierska, 2006), and editor of collections including Antonioni: Centenary
Essays (with John David Rhodes, 2011) and the forthcoming Expanding
Cinema: Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art (with Jill Murphy). She is
general editor of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media.
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Vicente Rodríguez Ortega is Senior Lecturer at Universidad Carlos III de

Madrid (Spain) and member of the Television-Cinema: Memory, Representation
and Industry (TECMERIN) research group. He is the co-editor of
Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre, and his articles have appeared in
journals such as Television & New Media, NESCUS: European Journal of Media
Studies and New Media & Society. He has also written chapters in books such
as A Companion to Spanish Cinema, A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar and
Tracing the Borders of Spanish Horror Cinema and Television. His research
interests include the relationship between media representations and Spain’s
history, cinema and digital technology and film genres.
Rubén Romero Santos is a PhD researcher at Universidad Carlos III de
Madrid (Spain) and member of the TECMERIN research group. He has con-
tributed to World Film Locations: Barcelona (2013), Ficcionando en el siglo
XXI: La ficción televisiva en España (2016) and Tracing the Borders of Spanish
Horror Cinema and Television (2017). He has been working as a film and tele-
vision journalist for almost two decades. He started his career at the counter-
culture publication Ajoblanco from where he jumped to editor-in-chief of the
film magazine Cinemanía. He combines his academic work with collabora-
tions in magazines like Rolling Stone, SModa/El País or Icon/El País and televi-
sion platforms such as Canal +.
Irena Sever Globan is Lecturer at the Catholic University of Croatia, Zagreb,
where she teaches a variety of modules on media studies and film. She holds a
PhD in Communications from the Salesian University in Rome, Italy, (2011)
with a thesis on women, religion and film. Her work on the representa-
tion of women in the media has appeared in many publications, and she
has recently co-authored the monograph Marija Magdalena: Od Isusove
učenice do filmske bludnice (with Jadranka Rebeka Anić, 2018).
Emily Torricelli is an independent scholar and adjunct instructor based in the
United States. She holds a PhD in Theatre, Film and Television from the
University of York (2017). Her areas of research interest include trans/
national cinemas, identity politics and labelling, reception theory and
British screen studies. She also holds a Master of Arts in Film Studies
from the University of Iowa and a Master of Fine Arts in Screenwriting
from Boston University. She has been published in Alphaville: Journal of
Film and Screen Media and Frames Cinema Journal.
Jill E. Twark is Associate Professor of German at East Carolina University in
North Carolina, USA. Her work on twentieth- and early twenty-first-century
German literature and culture has appeared in many books and journals.
After the monograph Humor, Satire, and Identity: Eastern German Literature
in the 1990s and the edited volume Strategies of Humor in Post-Unification
German Literature, Film, and Other Media, she shifted her focus to social jus-
tice dilemmas in Envisioning Social Justice in Contemporary German Culture,
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii
co-edited with Axel Hildebrandt. She is editing a book on German responses

to historical economic crises and writing on twentieth- and twenty-first-cen-
tury humour in the United States and Europe.
Adam Vaughan teaches in the School of Media, Arts and Technology at
Solent University and in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University
of Southampton in the United Kingdom. He holds a PhD from the University
of Southampton (2018). His research interests include performance and iden-
tity in documentary film and LGBTQ+ cinema. He is working on the mono-
graph from his PhD thesis titled Performative Identity in Contemporary
Biographical Documentary and has forthcoming chapters in edited collec-
tions on performative activism in the film Pride (2014) and the historical
biopics of Derek Jarman.
Andrea Virginás is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Sapientia
Hungarian University of Transylvania, Cluj, Romania, with research interests
in mainstream cinema cultures and small national cinemas. She is the author of
Post/Modern Crime: From Agatha Christie to Palahniuk, from Film Noir to
Memento (2011) and editor of The Use of Cultural Studies Approaches in the
Study of Eastern European Cinema: Spaces, Bodies, Memories (2016). Her arti-
cles have appeared in Studies in Eastern European Cinema, European Journal
of English Studies, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Journal of European
Studies and in the volumes Popular Cinemas in East Central Europe: Film
Cultures and Histories (2017) and New Romanian Cinema (2019).
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Samuele’s desire to ‘see’ as symbolism for audiences

acknowledging the migrant crisis in Fire at Sea27
Fig. 2.2 Rosi’s mediated documentary gaze of the migrant ‘other’ in
Fire at Sea29
Fig. 3.1 The Chutney Queens’ performance costumes in
Nina’s Heavenly Delights46
Fig. 3.2 Written ingredients dissolve into curry in Nina’s Heavenly Delights47
Fig. 4.1 Driss handing over the mobile phone in Untouchable57
Fig. 4.2 The cramped bathroom in the Banlieue58
Fig. 5.1 Rare Exports undermines the cultural imagery of Santa Claus in its
critique of global consumerism 71
Fig. 5.2 An avalanche terrifies an international group of tourists and
fragments the façade of their superficial neoliberal safety net 81
Fig. 6.1 Rebecca Cohen’s monologue in front of a funerary urn for the
Holocaust victims of Macedonia in Darko Mitrevski’s
The Third Half (2012) 89
Fig. 6.2 The “vicarious witness” experience in female-directed films.
(Source: The author) 96
Fig. 6.3 Tomasz’s ghost from the past, dressed in a striped uniform,
invades Hannah’s present in Anna Justice’s Remembrance (2011) 99
Fig. 6.4 The encounter between Myriam and Oskar, symbolising the
dichotomy between memory and history, in Marceline
Loridan-Ivens’ The Birch-Tree Meadow (2003) 104
Fig. 8.1 The image of Isaac and Angélica which resembles the famous
paintings of Marc Chagall 138
Fig. 8.2 Henri’s discussion with the barman is artistically framed by a
mirror in Belle Toujours143
Fig. 9.1 Mr. Lăzărescu’s bedroom provides a naturalistic mise en scène
where authenticity accentuates the cinematographic realism.
(Courtesy of Mandragora) 160
Fig. 9.2 This ‘everyday life’ narrative is driven by the anti-heroic nature
of Mr. Lăzărescu and his apparent lack of traits allows a criticism
of large representation paradigms. (Courtesy of Mandragora) 162
xix
xx List of Figures
Fig. 10.1 The ‘ethical close-up’ in Son of Saul180

Fig. 10.2 The anti-racist triptych of Aferim!181
Fig. 11.1 British national symbols in Skyfall196
Fig. 11.2 Scottish cultural references in The Angels’ Share197
Fig. 12.1 Marina and Bella, Attenberg (2010). (Courtesy of Haos Films) 218
Fig. 12.2 Marina and her father, Attenberg (2010). (Courtesy of Haos Films) 220
Fig. 13.1 Racially diverse streets in Brooklyn (2015) are a backdrop to
interrogations of Irishness in (white) America 240
Fig. 13.2 Brooklyn (2015) may be set in New York, but Eilis’s sights are
more limited, as “All the skyscrapers are across the river” 241
Fig. 15.1 Winfried, posing as Toni Erdmann, handcuffed to Ines 271
Fig. 15.2 Zeki threatens to wake a Neonazi as his students look on 274
Fig. 16.1 An unknown masked male rapes Elle’s female protagonist,
violently interrupting the calm suburban atmosphere of her
bourgeois neighbourhood 291
Fig. 16.2 In Elle, immersed in a sadomasochistic relationship with her
rapist, Michèle hugs her attacker while enjoying sexual
intercourse on the hot basement’s floor 294
Fig. 17.1 Robert is subjected to a painful punishment for having
masturbated. The Lobster (2015) 311
Fig. 17.2 A Bactrian camel walks by in the woods as a group of Loners
spy on David. The Lobster (2015) 311
Fig. 18.1 The Spanish poster for The Orphanage328
Fig. 18.2 The international poster for The Orphanage329
List of Tables
Table 6.1 Holocaust films directed or co-directed by women 94

Table 10.1 The model of small national cinemas 171
Table 10.2 Top five Hungarian films in terms of audience numbers in the
early 2010s 172
Table 10.3 Top five Romanian films in terms of audience numbers in the
early 2010s 172
Table 10.4 Hungarian box-office growth: audience numbers of the
most-viewed domestic releases for 2016–2017 173
Table 10.5 Romanian box-office growth: audience numbers of the
most-viewed domestic releases for 2016 173
Table 10.6 Aferim! premier week in Romanian cinemas (9–15 March 2015) 176
Table 10.7 Son of Saul premier week in Hungarian cinemas
(11–17 June 2015) 176
Table 11.1 Successful NNE films released in Europe in 2012 193
Table 11.2 Key cultural and industrial characteristics of NNE films
by category of film 194
xxi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Identity of European Cinema
Ingrid Lewis and Laura Canning
What is contemporary European cinema? Given the indisputable richness of

Europe, comprising a variety of languages, cultures, nationalities, aesthetic can-
ons, and modes of production, can we still discuss European cinema as a unitary
concept? If so, how can we approach a category that clearly rejects rigid defini-
tions and classifications? And how do Western filmic traditions go together with
the ones emerging from Eastern and Central Europe? What are their similarities
and contradictions? What are the particularities of film production at the periph-
eries of Europe, and how do economic contexts impact on issues of style and
aesthetics? Moreover, does European cinema already exist as a transnational
phenomenon and not just as the sum of its national cinemas? How are landmark
historical events such as the Holocaust, the Yugoslav Wars, the fall of the Berlin
Wall, and subsequent collapse of communism in many Central and Eastern
European nations, depicted in European cinema? What role does the cinematic
medium play in reinforcing and challenging dominant discourses about the past
in various countries? How does the changing nature of European identity, due
both to historical events and contemporary social realities, such as increasing
migration and growing diasporas, affect the essence of European cinema itself?
This collection effectively addresses the key questions above which are very
much at the heart of ongoing critical debates in European film studies. In
doing so, it applies some of the most pressing inquiries in contemporary
I. Lewis (*)
Department of Creative Arts, Media and Music, Dundalk Institute of Technology,
Dundalk, Ireland
e-mail: Ingrid.lewis@dkit.ie
L. Canning
School of Film & Television, Falmouth University, Penryn, UK
e-mail: laura.canning@falmouth.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2020 1

I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First
Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_1
2 I. LEWIS AND L. CANNING
European cinema to a wide-ranging and diverse selection of twenty-first-

century films from all corners of Europe. The book’s distinctive features are its
strong focus on the European cinematic output of the twenty-first century,
while still retaining a sense of inheritances from the last century, and its signifi-
cant inclusion of the often-neglected cinemas of Central and Eastern Europe.
However, in order to fully grasp the contribution and potential impact of this
collection, one needs to understand the impetus and pedagogical context from
which this book emerges.
This edited collection places the students and their needs at the centre of its
efforts. It also responds to an urgent need for an accessible and comprehensive
collection that can introduce students to the main concepts, discourses, direc-
tions, and genres of twenty-first-century European film. Moreover, it builds on
existing studies on European cinema, while moving further towards acknowl-
edging recent patterns and trends of production and representation through-
out the continent. These features are complemented by an accessible and
student-friendly structure in which each chapter discusses significant topics,
explains their context, and provides definitions of key terms. Each chapter also
encourages critical thinking by providing a case study that summarises and
applies the theoretical content and a set of reflective questions designed to help
students develop their contextual and critical understanding even further.
Modules on European cinema have become increasingly popular in univer-
sity curricula, both in European countries and overseas. However, knowledge
on the topic is often fragmented across a variety of studies, or centred around
specific national cinemas, which can act as a hindrance in discerning key trends
and assimilating the complexities of European film. Two key books that aim for
a more general approach on European cinema (Galt 2006; Wood 2007) are
indispensable class resources; yet they make little reference to highly successful
films from Eastern Europe. In one sense, this apparent ‘lack’ illustrates both
the value of this new volume and the immense complexity of the task at hand
in attempting to synthesise any approach to a continent’s cinematic output:
industry and representation transform swiftly, and a movement or tendency
which may be merely nascent at one moment can bloom fully in another. In the
(more than a) decade that has passed since the publication of Mary Wood’s
seminal monograph, European cinema has significantly changed and evolved,
and we see that the challenge of charting the field also shows us one of its
strengths; it is disinclined to stay ‘fixed’ for long.
Three recent studies acknowledge some of these changes: Mariana Liz’s
(2016) monograph discusses the images of Europe emerging from contempo-
rary cinema, Bondebjerg et al.’s (2015) edited volume takes a more production-
related emphasis, while Harrod et al.’s (2014) comprehensive collection of
essays highlights the ‘European’ label as a marketing tool in the increasingly
transnational filmmaking emerging from Europe. Unfortunately, as with previ-
ous studies, the balance between the West and the East is significantly tilted
towards the former. This collection builds on extant scholarship in order to
1 INTRODUCTION: THE IDENTITY OF EUROPEAN CINEMA 3
more accurately map the terrain and to bridge some of the gaps only identified
through the valuable work of others. For example, Dina Iordanova (2003) has,
in her highly significant work, already drawn attention to the peripheral posi-
tion assigned to Central-Eastern films and national industries in the overall
scholarship on European cinema. As Iordanova (2003: 1) tellingly states, “the
concept of European cinema is still more or less synonymous with West
European film-making, and the teaching of European cinema barely covers
East Central European traditions”. This monograph therefore applies a ‘trans-
versal’ approach to European film, bringing together the East and the West,
while providing a comprehensive picture of key trends, aesthetics, genres,
national identities, and transnational concerns.
Significantly, the inclusive approach adopted by this volume highlights both
the similarities and the discrepancies between national cinemas throughout
Europe. From a cinematic point of view, the acknowledgement of a wide vari-
ety of perspectives enables us to explore the mechanisms that foreground or,
on the contrary, overshadow certain cultural, historical, and political discourses
in Western versus Eastern Europe. Such a comprehensive outlook, which pays
tribute to filmic productions from Western, Central, and Eastern Europe, rep-
resents one of the crucial features of this collection and would have not been
possible without two editors of diverse cultural and professional backgrounds.
Ingrid Lewis was born and raised in Romania, thus having an acute awareness
of the regional cinemas of Eastern Europe and broader societal discourses
common to post-communist countries. Laura Canning grew up and studied in
Ireland, thus having an in-depth understanding of the practices and values that
impact on Western European film. Furthermore, Ingrid’s teaching and research
activities revolve around non-English-language films and are concerned with
highlighting discourses and representations in (non-Western) European cin-
ema, where Laura’s expertise centres on Western, mainstream, English-
language films, with a strong interest in issues of genre, production, and
industry. Thus, Ingrid’s and Laura’s varied cultural backgrounds and areas of
specialism enhance and strengthen the quality of this book, offering a hetero-
geneous variety of perspectives. This further reconfirms Galt’s (2006: 4–6)
statement on the importance of a filmic and written discourse that not only
addresses the ‘changing spaces’ of Europe but also emerges from these very
own spaces.
Over the past couple of decades, various leading scholars such as Jill Forbes
and Sarah Street (2000), Mike Wayne (2002), Dina Iordanova (2003),
Elizabeth Ezra (2004a), Wendy Everett (2005a), Thomas Elsaesser (2005),
Rosalind Galt (2006), Luisa Rivi (2007), Mary Wood (2007), and Mariana Liz
(2016), among others, have published seminal monographs on European cin-
ema considered from different perspectives. One issue that resurfaces in most
of these studies is the impossibility of defining and delimiting European cin-
ema. Everett (2005a: 9) highlights the misconceptions behind equating Europe
with the European Union (EU) in terms of cinema. On the contrary, European
cinema needs to be an inclusive area of study that encompasses all countries

from West to East and North to South of Europe and everything in between.
As Rosalind Galt (2006: 5) argues, post-Berlin Wall cinema “maps the spaces
of Europe ‘today’, speaking both of and from the changing spaces of the con-
tinent”. Thus, as an academic area, any conception of European cinema needs
to be empowering, inviting all countries to be represented but also allowing
nationalities to re-present themselves, enriching the scholarly canon with their
own voices and perspectives.
Given that, from a geographical point of view, Europe is a mixture of lan-
guages, cultures, traditions, film schools, cinematic aesthetics, and industry
practices, one needs to acknowledge diversity and difference as the quintes-
sence of European cinema. Firstly, this book celebrates the complex identity of
European cinema as a sum of national cinemas, each the product of their own
particular realities. Every national film industry, whether emerging or well-
established, auteur-centred or commercial, modern or traditional, is not only
different from others but often also a complex reality in itself. Reflecting this
diversity, for example, those countries at the margins of Europe such as Greece
and Ireland face additional challenges (and perhaps opportunities) in the pro-
cesses of film production as explained in Chaps. 12 and 13, respectively. Also,
as Luisa Rivi (2007: 4) acknowledges, cinema has played a pivotal role in artic-
ulating and reinforcing ideas of nationhood. A case in point in this book is
contained in Chap. 15, which discusses Germany as an example of commercial
filmmaking that draws on national history, politics, and collective memory in
its production of highly successful comedies catering to popular tastes. This
chapter also reinforces Wood’s (2007: xxi) claim that the popularity of genre
films in their own countries confirms that audiences “still prefer stories in their
own voices”.
Secondly, in the same vein as many scholars, this collection acknowledges
that European cinema is increasingly a post-national, pan-European, and trans-
national reality. According to Rosalind Galt (2006: 6–7), even by the 1980s
and 1990s, the landscape of the film industry in Europe was characterised by
an increased volume of co-productions coupled with an upsurge in television-
funded films. Importantly, Rivi (2007: 4–9) highlights that co-productions are
“the most fertile terrain for redefining European identity” and attends to
the possibility that nowadays these are more culturally than financially moti-
vated compared to the past. In a similar vein, Wood (2007: xxi) describes co-
productions and partnerships with national and privatised television networks
as “life-savers for the European film industries”. These trends already identified
by scholars in late twentieth-century European cinema are present, to a much
greater extent, into the twenty-first century as our book explains, particularly
in Chap. 18, which considers the significance of the liberalisation of the televi-
sion marketplace in the emergence of Spanish horror.
The significance of contemporary political-economic conditions,1 seen for
example in the 2008 economic crash and its impact on funding—particularly in
the hardest-hit peripheral countries, Ireland and Greece—also points to an

increasingly varied mixture of often highly dynamic strategies facilitating pro-
duction, from national film policy, to EU funding, to formal and informal
regional, national, and international practices of cooperation. Some of these
may be viewed with caution in terms of their possible impact on the nature of
European cinema, if we acknowledge that “different ways of organizing and
financing communications have implications for the range and nature of media
content, and the ways in which these are consumed and used” (Hardy 2014:
7). For those European countries which are part of the EU, certain mecha-
nisms are in place, within wider audiovisual policy, to foster film as an element
of the audiovisual industries. With the contemporary field marked by fragmen-
tation of the market, where audiovisual culture has been seen in the past (albeit
sometimes problematically, as per Collins 1994, and Shore 2006) as a way of
fostering a common European heritage, the perspective has broadly shifted to
a more market-oriented policy of simultaneously advancing unity and diversity,
and taking the view that the promotion of national industries enables protec-
tion of cultural diversity.
Film in twenty-first-century Europe exhibits many of the complexities of
production and funding seen worldwide. The political economy of twenty-
first-century film production is marked by changes brought about by global
recession and by the shift to the digital. In general, the recession has caused
difficulties in accessing funding for independent filmmaking, in that the ‘pre-
sales’ approach has reduced significantly (for a case study on Ireland’s experi-
ence, see Olsberg SPI 2017), and in that there is a trend for favouring
production of ‘known quantities’, such as franchises and adaptations.
Digitalisation has wrought changes to the distribution landscape, thus reduc-
ing the previously valuable DVD sales market, and with the increase in online
streaming further disrupting the production and distribution methods tradi-
tionally used within the film industry—a matter Olga Kolokytha discusses in
more detail in her reflection on the specific contexts of peripheral (Greek and
Scandinavian) production in Chap. 12.
Thirdly, this collection provides important insights into several key features
that unify European cinema: its potential ‘otherness’ in terms of opposition to
Hollywood, its inherent tensions between old versus new, and auteur versus
commercial. According to Everett (2005a: 10), “European cinema is often
defined by those characteristics that distinguish it from mainstream Hollywood”.
As various chapters in this book suggest, the preoccupation with Hollywood
remains at the heart of European cinema in terms of defining its identity.
However, given the increasingly transnational context that characterises the
twenty-first century, the reactions of national cinemas on the continent to
Hollywood dominance have been increasingly varied and complex: from per-
sistent rejection of its aesthetic canons as in the case of the Romanian New
Wave (Chap. 9), to identifying strategic allegiances in and between the popular
cinemas of small nations (Chap. 10), or instances in which this tension is nego-
tiated by looking towards but also away from Hollywood (Chap. 13). There is
a second dimension of otherness that needs to be discussed here and which
reflects Loshitzky’s (2010: 10) beautifully phrased idea of European films
being “unique sites of struggle over identity formation and meaning”. This is
an ‘otherness from within’ that emerges as a powerful discourse in contempo-
rary cinema as a result of growing migration and emerging diasporas across
Europe to a much greater extent than in the pre-Berlin Wall period (Chaps. 2
and 3). The preoccupation with ‘otherness’ seen as a source of difference and
threat is also present in discourses on disability, as Chap. 4 points out. This
book acknowledges an unceasing process of defining notions of ‘national’ and
‘European’ that lies at the heart of many cinematic debates in twenty-first-
century films.
Moreover, it can be argued that European cinema is permeated by a certain
nostalgia for the past, translated in an ongoing battle between its progressive
and conservative features. Such pervasive nostalgia is evident in aesthetically
reinvigorating ‘New Waves’ as explained in Chap. 9 or in more regressive pro-
cesses reinforcing outdated representational paradigms, as pointed out in Chap.
8, discussing the recent auteur cinema of Manoel de Oliveira. However, this
longing for the past is paralleled by trends in European cinema that fully
embrace the reality of filmmaking in the twenty-first century, as explained
above. Also, European film is inevitably linked with questions of auteurism,
especially when thinking of the milestone movements that have marked its
existence thus far, such as Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, New
German Cinema, Dogme 95, and so on. One can clearly observe that these key
movements do not belong solely to the ‘history’ of European cinema but
impact on many of its contemporary filmmakers and the aesthetics and style of
their newest films. Adding to this argument, some of the greatest auteurs that
emerged in the early- to mid-stages of European cinema have continued to
make successful films in the twenty-first century. It is not only the case of
Manoel de Oliveira but also Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda, to name just a
few. However, as Wood (2007) points out, filmmakers—even those with the
status of auteur—are increasingly aware of the commercial and production-
related aspects of their films. As several chapters in this book have acknowl-
edged, the twenty-first century brought an impressive influx of popular films,
and the dichotomy between auteur and commercial cinema is breaking down.
These constant dualities and tensions between old versus new, and auteur ver-
sus commercial, confirm European cinema as a highly dynamic and continu-
ously changing reality marked by, as Elizabeth Ezra (2004b: 16) claims, its
innovation and ability to reinvent itself over decades. They also reinforce
Everett’s (2005b: 33) argument that the identity of European cinema is “an
ongoing process” and any attempt to define it must be therefore recognised as
“temporary and unstable”.
Part I features six chapters concerned with establishing dominant discourses
that characterise the complex arena of today’s European cinema. That is, not
only do their topics engage with trends in film, but they contribute variously—
on subjects as diverse as the environment, immigration, our interpretation of
‘the national’, the acknowledgement of diversity including disability, gendered
understandings of history, and how the envisioning/revisioning of war inter-
venes in discourses of nationalism—to our understanding of the practices
through which cultures constitute and produce knowledge, and the inextrica-
ble relationship that knowledge has with the power dynamics underpinning
society. Additionally, they do so in ways that foreground the transnationalisa-
tion of film production and consumption. Adam Vaughan in Chap. 2 interro-
gates how documentary films engage with and respond to issues of migration
and diaspora. Using the case study of Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea (2016),
Vaughan explores the role of filmmakers in highlighting the plight of migrants
fleeing their homes and examines the increasing ability of viewers to engage in
media debates on migration through the use of social platforms. In her contri-
bution on Scottish cinema, Emily Torricelli in Chap. 3 considers the way in
which ‘Otherness’ complicates our notions of the national and examines both
the historic othering of Scotland itself through cinema and the way in which
Scottish identity is simultaneously Other and not-Other—particularly perti-
nent in the current context of potential EU fragmentation post-Brexit. She
then goes on to examine the influence of diasporic cultures in the creation of
hybrid Scottish identities, using Pratibha Parmar’s 2006 Nina’s Heavenly
Delights to further unpack the place of race, religion, and sexuality in forming
diasporic identity.
In Chap. 4, focused on the ‘normality drama’, Eleanor Andrews questions
the representation of disability in four recent European films, including The Sea
Inside (2004), The Theory of Everything (2014), and Untouchable (2011),
before examining The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) in more detail.
Andrews discusses to what extent the ‘triumph over tragedy’ narrative is the
norm in films of this type and considers the way in which they may emphasise
the representation of normality over that of impairment. Chapter 5 by Pietari
Kääpa outlines how Nordic countries, namely Finland, Sweden, Denmark,
Norway, and Iceland, are frequently viewed as some of the greenest in the
world; yet their economies and politics are based on unsustainable and perhaps
inequitable approaches. By focusing on four key representational themes in
Nordic film cultures (landscape, environmentalism, urbanity, and resource pol-
itics), Kääpa addresses the ways in which Nordic cinema capitalises on the envi-
ronment and the outwardly affirmative politics of these societies but effectively
uses them in ways that showcase an approach to the environment that is fraught
with contradictions.
The two final chapters of Part I focus on gendered discourses in recent
European cinema. Chapter 6 by Ingrid Lewis signals a representational shift in
twenty-first-century Holocaust films towards restoring women’s voices and
retelling women’s stories from their perspective. By discussing various films
about the Holocaust released throughout Europe, Lewis contends that recent
cinema creates valid premises for analysing the relationship between gender,
memory, and representation. Finally, Chap. 7 by Dino Murtic aptly contends
that post-Yugoslav cinema exhibits a predominantly anti-war stance. He claims
that the ‘warrior’ stereotype prevailing in pre-Yugoslav cinematic imaginations
has shifted towards discourses foregrounding a more nuanced figure, the ‘ordi-
nary man’, who may be an unwilling participant, a martyr whose sacrifice is
pointless, or an individual whose brutality is unleashed in service of
nationalism(s). Murtic situates this approach in the context of both the cine-
matic history and evolution of post-Yugoslav film and the overall democratisa-
tion process of the Western Balkans.
Part II brings together six critical perspectives on key developments and cur-
rent directions—in industrial and structural practices which foreground the
increasingly transnational character of European cinema, in formal and aes-
thetic tendencies, and in representation—that characterise the field since the
beginning of the 2000s. Ingrid Lewis and Irena Sever Globan in Chap. 8 inter-
rogate the way in which auteur cinema facilitates the persistence of antiquated,
patriarchal representations of women even into the twenty-first century. In
doing so, their chapter examines from a comparative perspective three films
directed by Portuguese auteur Manoel de Oliveira, namely Belle Toujours
(2006), Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl (2009), and The Strange Case of
Angelica (2010). Their chapter argues that Oliveira’s female characters are par-
ticularly interesting—and controversial—since they challenge contemporary
canons by locating the woman within the outdated virgin/whore dichotomy.
The choice of Oliveira, whose career spanned from the silent era to 2015, is
crucial to understanding how these rigid and archetypal images of women have
been able to survive in more recent films. Following the thematic strand of
auteur cinema, Chap. 9 by Doru Pop overviews Romanian cinema, considered
to be the most recent addition to the Europe’s most influential movements in
film history, known as the ‘New Waves’. His chapter compares the work of
Romanian filmmakers with the stylistics of Italian Neorealism, French New
Wave, and other similar auteur-centred movements. Using the case study of
Cristi Puiu’s film The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (2005), Pop’s chapter identifies
the style and aesthetics of this highly successful movement, which has brought
international acclaim to Romanian filmmakers over the past two decades. While
Doru Pop analyses Romanian auteur cinema in terms of its style and visuals,
Chap. 10 by Andrea Virginás foregrounds the commercial film industries of
Eastern Europe. According to Virginás, in the post-1989 period, art-house/
highbrow, and possibly also midcult/middlebrow films in Hungarian and
Romanian cinemas—in line with European art-house cinema in general—have
explicitly imagined their functioning as situated the farthest possible from
Hollywood-produced, globally distributed mainstream cinema. Meanwhile,
lowbrow, popular domestic Hungarian and Romanian cinema has been mobil-
ising on various levels—in terms of production organisation but also form and
aesthetics—what she describes as a ‘meso-level’ combination of small national
characteristics, European art-house allegiances, and Hollywood influences.
Virginás develops her hypothesis based on two commercial films with the
greatest domestic film audience numbers of their respective countries in 2015:
Hungary’s Oscar-winning Son of Saul and Romania’s Berlin Silver Bear win-
ner Aferim!
The final three chapters of Part II focus explicitly on issues related to the
transnational dimension of many European films. Drawing on a database of
over 20,000 films released in Europe during the period 2005–2015, along with
focus groups conducted with over 140 participants in 5 European countries,
Huw Jones in Chap. 11 aims to determine why some European films travel
better than others. Jones’ research casts important light on the mechanisms
that enable films to travel across national and linguistic boundaries. His chapter
reveals that while ‘quality signals’—for example, an established ‘auteur’, major
awards, festival recognition, positive reviews—are crucial for securing the inter-
national distribution of European films, these are not necessarily the attributes
audiences look for. Jones illustrates this point with a case study on the French
comedy-drama Untouchable (2011), a film with almost universal appeal
amongst the focus groups’ participants, despite having few obvious ‘quality
signals’. Olga Kolokytha’s work (Chap. 12) on tendencies at the periphery
demonstrates that increasingly globalised conditions of production are inti-
mately linked with broader political and economic power dynamics relative to
core and peripheral national cinemas within Europe. She identifies collabora-
tive working practices designed to foster solidarity in the face of economic crisis
and fragmented funding opportunities as significant to the emergence of the
‘Greek Weird Wave’ and selects as her case study Attenberg (2010), a film
which displays many of these characteristics. In this chapter, too, she creates a
strong sense of the contrast between the Greek experience of peripherality and
regionality and Scandinavian policies designed specifically to foster regional
production. This notion of peripheral specificity is also seen in O’Brien and
Canning’s work in Chap. 13 on the way in which Irish cinema has, for a variety
of historical, cultural, and industrial-economic reasons, looked away from a
notion of common heritage with Europe and casts its gaze instead to America,
albeit in a way that may to some extent challenge the view of Hollywood as
exerting a one-way cultural domination over Europe, considering the possibil-
ity of a more ‘transnational’ exchange. It also foregrounds the particular nature
of Ireland’s diasporic history and culture, examining the internationalised
careers of some of Ireland’s emerging twenty-first-century filmmakers and in
its case study of Irish emigration drama Brooklyn (2015).
Part III scrutinises elements of genre and narrative in twenty-first-century
European cinema, grouped under five thematic strands: road movie, comedy,
neo-noir, science fiction, and horror. Chapter 14 by Laura Rascaroli focuses on
three French-language films, namely Far (2001), Since Otar Left (2003), and
Welcome (2009), which have the journey at the core of their narrative concerns.
As Rascaroli explains, these films explore the theme of travel not as liberation
but as tension—between places, identities, discourses, and psychological states.
Rascaroli contends that in these films, the journey becomes the locus of the
simultaneous manifestation and frustration of tensions that broadly belong to

contemporary French and European society, and that have to do with the pres-
sures created by borders and limits, immigration, cultural transformations, eco-
nomic junctures, and political discourses. Jill Twark reflects on the major
developments in German comedy and its—unexpected, in some quarters—dra-
matic rise in domestic and international popularity in the twenty-first century.
Examining several of the major films within the genre, she interrogates their
depiction of contemporary social problems and German history and considers
the place of ‘Hitler humour’ as well as the transcultural comedies of Turkish
German directors.
Chapter 16 by Begoña Gutiérrez Martínez and Josep Pedro explores the
genres of European film noir, neo-noir, and psychological thriller. In doing so,
they theoretically engage with these cinematographic categories by focusing on
the figure of the glamorous femme fatale and on the corresponding crisis of
masculinity often associated with it. Taking as their case study the French,
German, and Belgian co-production Elle (2016), Gutiérrez Martínez and
Pedro claim that the film delivers a challenging and original representation of
the twenty-first-century femme fatale. In Chap. 17, Mariano Paz discusses the
rebirth of science fiction genre that has taken place in European cinemas since
the early 2000s. As he argues, the twenty-first century has witnessed the emer-
gence of a significant corpus of science fiction films that includes elaborate
works from a wide range of European nations, including Cargo (2009), Eva
(2011), Ex Machina (2014), Wang’s Arrival (2011), and Timecrimes (2006).
Taking as his central case study Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster (2015), Paz
discusses how the film deals with social fears and anxieties about the future of
Europe through an exercise in contemporary dystopian imagination and argues
that even when relying on sophisticated visual effects and CGI sequences that
would not be out of place in Hollywood cinema, these films belong, by and
large, to a more historically ‘European’ intellectual form of science fiction,
centred on speculation and narrative. Finally, in Chap. 18, Vicente Rodríguez
Ortega and Rubén Romero Santos explore the political-economic as well as
textual contexts of Spanish horror, demonstrating how the 1990s wave of lib-
eralisation and privatisation of television networks facilitated—or forced,
depending on one’s perspective—television operators into a variety of complex
engagements with film production and/or distribution. This chapter, too, sig-
nals the industrial importance of popular genre as both a way of articulating the
specifically indigenous cultural preoccupations of a nation and a way of attempt-
ing to harness ‘internationalised’ genre attributes in order to negotiate increas-
ingly globalised film markets in the institutional shadow of the Hollywood
industry.
Note
1. With sincere thanks to Maria O’Brien for guidance and data in relation to EU
funding and policy.
References
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Cinema and Television: Cultural Policy and Everyday Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Collins, Richard. 1994. Broadcasting and Audio-Visual Policy in the European Single
Market. London: John Libbey.
Elsaesser, Thomas. 2005. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press.
Everett, Wendy, ed. 2005a. European Identity in Cinema. 2nd ed. Bristol: Intellect.
———. 2005b. Re-framing the Fingerprints: A Short Survey of European Film. In
European Identity in Cinema, ed. Wendy Everett, 2nd ed., 15–34. Bristol: Intellect.
Ezra, Elizabeth, ed. 2004a. European Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2004b. Introduction: A Brief History of Cinema in Europe. In European
Cinema, ed. Elizabeth Ezra, 1–17. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Forbes, Jill, and Sarah Street. 2000. European Cinema: An Introduction. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Galt, Rosalind. 2006. Redrawing the Map: The New European Cinema. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Hardy, Jonathan. 2014. Critical Political Economy of the Media: An Introduction.
Abingdon: Routledge.
Harrod, Mary, Mariana Liz, and Alissa Timoshkina, eds. 2014. The Europeanness of
European Cinema: Identity, Meaning, Globalization. London: I. B. Tauris.
Iordanova, Dina. 2003. Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East
Central European Film. London: Wallflower Press.
Liz, Mariana. 2016. Euro-Visions: Europe in Contemporary Cinema. New York:
Bloomsbury Academic.
Loshitzky, Yosefa. 2010. Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary
European Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Olsberg SPI & Nordicity. 2017. Economic Analysis of the Audiovisual Sector in the
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15 May 2019.
Rivi, Luisa. 2007. European Cinema After 1989: Cultural Identity and National
Production. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Shore, Chris. 2006. In uno plures(?) EU Cultural Policy and the Governance of Europe.
Cultural Analysis 5: 7–26.
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Wood, Mary P. 2007. Contemporary European Cinema. London: Hodder Arnold.
PART I
Discourses
CHAPTER 2
Documenting Difference: Migration

and Identity in European Documentaries
Adam Vaughan
Definitions
Documentary Film
Also known as ‘nonfiction film’ or ‘factual output’, a film text that typically
presents a factual record of the ‘real’ world.
Migration
The movement of people from one location to another. This could be volun-
tary, such as an individual moving to a different country for economic reasons,
or forced, such as the displacement of individuals as a result of the 2011
Arab Spring.
Refugee
A person who has been forced to leave their country due to war, poverty, per-
secution or natural disasters.
MEDIA
Part of the Creative Europe initiative, this sub-programme aims to facilitate
European-inflected projects and introduce them to global film markets.
A. Vaughan (*)
University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
e-mail: av4v07@soton.ac.uk

16 A. VAUGHAN
Introduction
Documentary film is arguably as old as cinema itself. When Auguste and Louis
Lumière demonstrated their cinematograph on 28 December 1895 in Paris,
the brothers not only conceived of cinema as we now know it, they also origi-
nated documentary’s desire to record the ‘real’. Later called ‘actualities’, these
short films initially depicted ‘ordinary’ events, such as workers leaving a factory
and a locomotive entering a station. In these early one-shot films, we can see
the beginnings of what we now understand as documentary cinema: a treat-
ment of a subject from reality; little or no use of fictional techniques, such as
sets, actors or special effects; and the purpose of recording images from the
world without distortion or bias.
That said, one of the fascinating attributes of the nonfiction film form in the
decades that followed is its flexibility and fluidity, often transformed by film-
makers to suit their particular needs at a particular time and in a specific place.
Some of the most significant changes to documentary cinema have been intro-
duced by European directors and producers—John Grierson’s social-minded
films in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s, Sergei Eisenstein’s blurring of fiction
and nonfiction forms to represent Soviet Russia, cinema verité techniques in
1960s France—and these continue today.
However, in the twenty-first century, a series of socio-political events,
including Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, Brexit and the ongoing migrant
crisis, have triggered a re-evaluation of what it means to be ‘European’. This
chapter takes this question as a starting point and specifically analyses how
documentary filmmakers have responded to the issue of migration and dias-
pora, in terms of both representation and the national implications this has for
contemporary Europe. In what ways are documentary films especially suited to
representing this challenge? Furthermore, what impact do smartphone video
technology and social media platforms have on spectators’ ability to participate
in these debates? However, before examining the status of European documen-
tary film in the twenty-first century, it will be necessary to provide a brief over-
view of some of the key historical turning points for the form, in terms of
filmmaking practice, cultural policy and the representation of migration.
The Migrant in Documentary: A Brief History

From the beginning, documentary filmmaking helped shape, contextualise and
define national identity, determining the ways spectators understood contem-
porary Europe and the wider world. Once film spectators began to tire of the
early actualities, filmmakers brought new and exciting innovations to their
stories in what Tom Gunning (in Elsaesser 1990: 56–62) later termed the “cin-
ema of attractions”. The fiction film displayed magic tricks, performance and
the drama of a chase—such as those found in the films of George Méliès—
while the nonfiction type supplied the attractions of the world, which brought
the wonders of travel and the sights of far-flung places to the cinema audience.
2 DOCUMENTING DIFFERENCE: MIGRATION AND IDENTITY IN EUROPEAN… 17
While these travel documentaries allowed film viewers to temporarily migrate

from their ordinary lives into foreign lands in far-off places, nonfiction films
also took migrants and migration as their subject matter. Directed by Merian
C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack (who would go onto make King Kong
[1933] in Hollywood), with assistance by Marguerite Hamilton, Grass: A
Nation’s Battle for Life (1925) documents members of the Bakhtiari tribe as
they undertake a journey to new pastures with their herds in central Persia.
Made three years after Nanook of the North (1922), Grass differed from
Flaherty’s film by not focusing on specific members of the tribe. Instead, it
“captures the beauty and the dangers of a tribal culture from an almost objec-
tive point of view” (McLane 2012: 37). After completing the project, Cooper
toured with the film on the lecture circuit to much acclaim. This led to
Paramount’s Jesse Lasky offering to theatrically release the film whereupon it
became a box-office hit. According to Ron Haver (1976: 17), Grass helped to
conceive “a completely new kind of film, the documentary-nature-film-
travelogue”, and the migrant was at its centre.
This early educational purpose of documentary was picked up in Great
Britain in the late 1920s by John Grierson, who saw in cinema the potential to
mediate between governments and citizens across a vast Empire. Therefore,
Grierson understood documentary film as both a sociological and aesthetic
tool. According to Ian Aitken (2001: 165), Grierson’s approach to documen-
tary was “sociological, in that it involved the representation of social relation-
ships; and aesthetic, in that it involved the use of imaginative and symbolic
means to that end”. As a reflection of this sociologically grounded mode,
instead of operating as chief filmmaker, Grierson established a group of film-
makers and creatives to collaborate with for his vision of documentary film.
These included Humphrey Jennings, Edgar Anstey, Basil Wright and Alberto
Cavalcanti, who, with the support of the Empire Marketing Board (EMB),
aimed to “promote the marketing of products of the British Empire and to
encourage research and development among the member states” (McLane
2012: 75). The issue of migration was not always the focus of these films, but
their wider aim at bringing a vast Empire together represents a certain cine-
matic migratory discourse.
Such socially committed themes and topics became even more important
once the Second World War began in 1939, and many of Grierson’s
‘Documentary Boys’, as they became known, contributed their technical
expertise to the war effort as part of what was now known as the Crown Film
Unit. In some of these films, colonialism and documentary filmmaking are
connected with the aim of creating a comprehensible and comprehensive map
of the British Empire. The Second World War, and the Nazis’ forcible
displacement of Jews to concentration camps, saw documentations of migra-
tion in newsreels. And once the war had ended, documentaries such as Claude
Lanzmann’s monumental Shoah (1985) included some of the survivors’ stories
and their return home.
18 A. VAUGHAN
European Documentary Production Policies

It was really during the 1980s, when geopolitical events began to reshape the
borders and idea of Europe, that changes to film production (including docu-
mentary) took hold and have remained a part of contemporary nonfiction film
output. Rosalind Galt (2006: 1) writes “that as the physical and political terri-
tory of Europe altered in the post-Cold War years, so, too, did its cultural
imaginary”. It was in this decade that the European Union (EU) began to
introduce media policies that would encourage a move away from solely indi-
vidual national productions to a more cooperative cultural strategy that would
showcase what Europe had to offer.
And such policies are equally applicable to documentary. Eurodoc, a part of
the EU’s MEDIA strategy (which became Creative Europe in 2014),1 and the
European Documentary Network (EDN) are designed to bring nonfiction
filmmakers and producers together to share their skills in a spirit of coopera-
tion. But it is not just supranational cultural policy that has impacted documen-
tary film towards the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first
century. Film festivals dedicated to documentary cinema have enabled some
select few to enjoy successful theatrical runs. Continental successes like Touching
the Void (2003) and To Be and To Have (2002) came to prominence on the
festival circuit. The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and
Sheffield’s DocFest in Britain attract large audiences and prestigious films as
well as functioning as a film market for distribution sales (McLane 2012: 360).
In the twenty-first century, documentary film’s long tradition of flexibility in
form has been further highlighted by technological advancements. For some
theorists, like Craig Hight (in Winston 2013: 198), the rise of Web 2.0 and 3.0
and the participatory viewing cultures it encourages has fostered a documen-
tary cinema that is “arguably less coherent” than at any other time in its one-
hundred- year history. Allied with the discourses of post-structuralism and
postmodernism, John Corner (2002) posits the term “post-documentary” to
explain the recent popularity of reality TV and docusoaps involving Joey Essex,
the Kardashians and their ilk, and the ‘documentary-as-diversion’ purpose they
seem to serve. Furthermore, digital cameras, smartphones and digital platforms
like YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook make new forms of autobiographical doc-
umentary possible for almost anyone to produce with its accompanying ‘share’
culture opening up opportunities for content to be viewed by large numbers of
people. Jon Dovey and Mandy Rose (Winston 2013: 366) provide a helpful
summary of online documentary:
We argue that this new context for documentary challenges its traditional episte-
mologies. Where twentieth century documentary depended for its functionality
on an idea of the observer fixing the world with his [sic] camera, this new episte-
mology is entirely relational. It accepts that all knowledge is situated in particular
embodied perspectives, the ‘actualities’ of online are the symbolic expression of
this multi-perspectival, relational knowledge.
This more interactive form of documentary can be seen in the cinema vérité
tradition in France during the 1960s. However, that documentary style visual-
ised the interaction between documentary filmmaker and documentary sub-
ject. The digital connections and networks we can make on a day-to-day basis
can lead now to interactions between audiences and films/filmmakers which
can then lead into traditional theatrical formats, such as those seen in Life in a
Day (2011) and Britain in a Day (2012). For Helen de Michiel and Patricia
R. Zimmermann (in Winston 2013: 355), these developments are emblematic
of what they define as “open space documentary”. These films are “fluid, col-
laborative, shape-shifting”, combine theatrical exhibition forms with those of
performance and community art and speak to technological as well as geopo-
litical changes related to transnationalism and the results of increased migration
(De Michiel and Zimmermann in Winston 2013: 355). These topics will now
be discussed further before moving into close textual analysis of the chosen
case-study documentary.
Documenting Migration: Some Current Trends

Documentary production in twenty-first-century Europe has to be seen as part
of wider effects of globalisation, where digital technologies and social media
platforms actively promote self-documentation, what Hight (Winston 2013:
200) also terms “self-surveillance”, leading to a perceived collapsing of national
borders. On the other hand, physical, geographical borders do still exist and
can be understood in terms of the EU’s audiovisual policies to encourage
cross-fertilisation of filmmaking talent and skills across these borders with the
goal of establishing a unified visual representation of Europe at the same time
as celebrating its cultural diversity. These apparently diverse discursive streams—
the idea of the individual publicly displaying forms of autobiography and
European co-productions in the industrial context—interact and inform one
another. Self-presentation, such a ubiquitous presence in our daily lives, fuels
the documentary process and affects the form’s style and how audiences
respond to nonfiction films. Meanwhile, the production of documentary fea-
ture films in Europe is unsurprisingly diverse. Different national government
departments have their own media strategies. However, at the supranational
level, the European Commission has its own policies in place. Furthermore, it
should be understood that these cultural policies demonstrate a form of perfor-
mative migration, with filmmakers supposedly able to cross national borders to
collaborate on projects. It is logical then that some of the documentaries that
have resulted from Eurodoc and EDN since the year 2000 should tackle issues
of migration as their main subjects.
Part of the Creative Europe initiative, the MEDIA sub-programme aims to
help “launch projects with a European dimension” and introduce audiovisual
works, including documentaries, to “markets beyond national and European
borders” (Creative Europe website 2018). Its Eurodoc programme is specifi-
cally aimed at documentary producers and facilitates meetings between its over
20 A. VAUGHAN
1000 members from 60 countries worldwide during the course of three train-
ing sessions. Some recent diverse films to be completed from the programme
include Kinshasa Makambo (2018), a Congolese/French/German/
Norwegian/Qatari/Swiss co-production, and The Prince of Nothingwood
(2017), a French-German production about Afghan filmmaker Salim Shaheen.
Other documentaries produced since 2000 take the issue of migration as
their central issue. Si-Guériki: La Reine-Mère (2002) is Idrissou Mora Kpai’s
documentary about the Wassangari tribe of northern Benin, of which he is a
member. After decades living in Europe, he returns to the region and observes
the changes that have occurred in his absence. 12 Tangos—Return Ticket to
Buenos Aires (2005) recounts the stories of Italian and Spanish immigrants who
came to Argentina and is told against the backdrop of a concert. And Global
Family (2018) concerns a Somali family living in exile in different parts of the
world following the civil war.
Similarly, the European Documentary Network, sponsored by Creative
Europe MEDIA, encourages cooperation and informs members about funding
and co-production opportunities. However, EDN provides individual consul-
tations with its members through conferences, seminars and workshops (EDN
Network website 2019). In both examples, the aim is to connect documentary
creatives across national borders and to encourage transnational production
opportunities. As digital technologies and cultural policies continue to under-
mine strict national boundaries, it is significant that these developments have
coincided with the European migrant crisis, the documenting of which by
news outlets and individuals demonstrates the importance nonfiction audiovi-
sual forms have for our understanding of Europe as a space.
The continent of Europe has witnessed centuries of colonisation and mobil-
ity that, coinciding with the movement of people, has helped nurture a migrant
and diasporic tradition of filmmaking; that is a cinema addressing “questions of
identity formation, [which] challenges national and ethnocentric myths, and
revisits and revises traditional historical narratives” (Berghahn and Sternberg
2010: 2). These can be stories told about migrants or by people who have
experienced exile themselves, and they often present a challenge to precon-
ceived ideas about Europe as a physical location. According to Yosefa Loshitzky
(2010: 8):
The media and the arts have become a new site of articulation of Europe’s new
sociocultural space, shaped and negotiated by the experience of displacement,
diaspora, exile, migration, nomadism, homelessness, and border crossing,
challenging the traditional notions of ‘Europe’ and ‘Europeanness.’ The growing
migration to Europe and the emergence of large diasporas at the heart of the
European metropolitan centers further enhance the questions of “Where is
Europe? Whose Europe?”
And this link between Europe as a ‘cinematic space’ and a ‘geopolitical

space’, including the ways the space in the film frame corresponds to physical
space, is crucial for Galt (2006: 231) in order to fully understand the “dis-
courses of homelessness and belonging” that are so central to these stories.
European fiction films released in the twenty-first century that deal with some
of these themes include Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Head-On (2004) and Le
Havre (2011). To varying degrees, films such as these visualise dominant opin-
ions of the European migrant who are usually represented in negative terms, as
threatening and “other” (Loshitzky 2010: 2). Loshitzky (2010: 2) proposes
the dual meaning of “screening”—the process of allowing or refusing an indi-
vidual entry and projecting an image—as an appropriate metaphor for the
migrant experience as told in cinema in order to allow us to critically analyse
representations. One of the conclusions she draws is that these images of
migrants in film lead to a destabilising of coherent and straightforward defini-
tions of ‘Europe’ as a geographical or cinematic space. Instead, these films
serve as reminders that the contemporary experience of the region is based on
a continual “negotiation over identity” (Loshitzky 2010: 14).
However, due to its assumed closer connection to the ‘real’ world, docu-
mentary film is perhaps ideally suited to capturing these spatial implications
with immediacy. Duncan Petrie (1992: 3), speaking at the Screening Europe
conference organised by the British Film Institute in the early 1990s, sum-
marised some of the issues Europe faced after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Petrie
(1992: 3) explains that cinema produces images that make something visible
and forces “an audience to look, to question and to reassess the nature of the
world around them”, in this case Europe’s cultural diversity. However, docu-
mentary film can visualise the ‘real’ world of these issues without a fictional
narrative frame. This can bring the spectator closer to events and topics
depicted, just as documentary forms like videos captured on smartphones and
live streaming can collapse distance and time even more radically. A powerful
example of the latter was the photo of drowned three-year-old Aylun Kurdi,
who was found washed up on a Turkish beach after fleeing Syria with his family
in September 2015. This image galvanised public opinion on the migrant crisis
and demonstrated the role news media and social platforms play in connecting
audiences to contemporary socio-political events; a part that documentary film
also performs.
The ideological power of such images comes from the immediacy with
which they are delivered to global audiences and the speed at which they are
shared. They present instantaneous concrete visual evidence for discussion of
what could otherwise be quite abstract themes of cultural identity, borders and
exile. As Eva Rueschmann (2003: xxi) notes, film images of migration display
a tension between “the local and the global, national and transnational, the
meanings of ‘here’ and ‘there’”. These stories of individuals journeying in
order to belong somewhere are characteristic of Thomas Elsaesser’s (2005: 92)
definition of “double-occupancy”:
Blood and soil, land and possession, occupation and liberation have to give way
to a more symbolic or narrative way of negotiating contested ownership of both
22 A. VAUGHAN
place and time, i.e., history and memory, for instance, inventing and maintaining
spaces of discourse, as in the metaphoric occupation of Alsace or the increasing
prominence achieved by hyphenated European nationals (German-Turkish,
Dutch-Moroccan, French-Maghreb, British-Asian) in the spheres of literature,
filmmaking, music and popular television shows.
Elsaesser’s is a call for a definition of identity no longer based on geographi-

cal associations. The “hyphenated European national” is a first step to this
(arguably utopian) reinterpretation of the self which could be extended to
include identifiers of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or class. As already men-
tioned, for many years European film production has echoed this hybridity in
terms of how one characterises the national provenance of co-productions, and
this is no different for European documentary film. Of the documentaries that
have won the Best Documentary prize at the European Film Awards so far in
the twenty-first century, 2000–2018, nearly half have been co-productions
(European Film Academy 2019). Some of these combine production compa-
nies from Europe and elsewhere in the world. Cambodia-born filmmaker Rithy
Panh’s S-21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine (2003) is a French-Cambodian
production, and Nostalgia for the Light (2010) is a documentary that fuses the
history of the cosmos and the search by mothers and wives for the ‘disap-
peared’ relatives of the Pinochet regime in Chile’s Atacama Desert and is a
French/German/Chilean/Spanish project. Here, the international nature of
such documentary productions can be seen as an albeit simplistic sign of our
increasingly globalised world.
But, significantly for this chapter, documentary can also help shape, change
and produce discourses on migration. According to critic Randolph Lewis
(2007: 83–84), channelling Lithuanian-born philosopher Emmanuel Levinas,
documentary film plays a pivotal role in “putting a face on abstractions” and
allows us to “glimpse ‘the face of the Other’”. As such, Lewis proposes a dis-
tinctly political purpose for contemporary documentaries. However, he is quick
to qualify his assessment of the form, writing that “to the extent that documen-
tary encourages this ethical rapport with the Other, it is a beautiful thing. To
the extent that it substitutes for it, it is a travesty of Levinasian ethics” (2007:
83–84). Therefore, recent films that highlight the plight of migrants who flee
to Europe in search of safety and a better life are only effective or successful, in
Lewis’ view, if they lead to substantial change. There are parallels here with Jill
Godmilow’s (1999: 92) critique of what she calls the “liberal documentary”,
that is, nonfiction works that “produce desire for a better and fairer world, but
not the useful knowledge required to change anything”. The spectator is
expected to be moved or angered by what they see, but this often does not lead
to any action on their part.
This has led to some documentary filmmakers constructing works of nonfic-
tion about the migrant crisis in non-traditional ways. For artist and writer,
Ursula Biemann (in Juhasz and Lebow 2015: 121), the video essay form of
documentary is best placed to tackle complex socio-political issues, precisely
because it does not attempt to provide a complete and linear discussion that
instead understands migration as a “shadowy, supplementary system, organiz-
ing a transitory moment”. Serbian-born filmmaker Iva Radivojevic describes
her 2014 film Evaporating Borders as a “visual essay” (Macaulay 2013) com-
posed of five parts. Elsewhere, her approach has been received as both “a work
of visual ethnography and as a provocation towards collective action” which
provides an unflinching view of a search for common identity and belonging
(Imre and Zimanyi 2016: 120).
Other artists and filmmakers deliberately blur the boundaries of fiction and
nonfiction in their modes of address. Steve McQueen’s short film Western Deep
(2002) made use of innovative sound design and crosses the art installation/
film divide to provide an account of the dangerous conditions migrant workers
endure in the Tautona gold mine of South Africa. Meanwhile, a filmmaker such
as Michael Winterbottom organises elements of docudrama for In This World
(2002) to create the impression that “his film is not just about the plight of a
fictional character, but bears a testimony to a broader political phenomenon”
(Loshitzky 2010: 120). Loshitzky (2010: 122) explains that using nonfiction
techniques as part of a docudrama (such as non-professional actors, verbal tes-
timony from ‘real’ migrants, handheld cinematography) has a distinctive impact
upon the film’s spectator, which means that they are unable to “disavow the
horrible reality and escape to a more tantalizing fiction, nor can he or she be
deluded that ‘this is only a movie’ when it, too, becomes unsettling to the
comfort zone of the suspension of disbelief”.
T. J. Demos (2013: xvi) usefully summarises how documentary and con-
temporary politics converge within the image of the migrant, writing “that
artists confront geopolitical conflicts by also throwing documentary conven-
tions into crisis. The resulting documentary-fictions of diasporic identities
interweave the factual and the imaginary registers of the image for critical and
creative effects”. Mieke Bal (Juhasz and Lebow 2015: 136) goes further in
theorising “migratory aesthetics” to account for documentaries that take
human migration as their subject:
In this phrase, I use ‘aesthetics’ not so much as a philosophical domain, but rather
as a term to refer, according to its Greek etymology, to a plural experience of
sensate binding, a connectivity based on the senses. ‘Migratory’ refers to the
traces, equally sensate, of the movements of migration that characterize contem-
porary culture… Migratory aesthetics is an aesthetic of geographical mobility
beyond the nation-state and its linguistic uniformity.
Bal’s term emphasises the relationships and connections made in the process
of filming documentaries about migrants. These can relate to encounters
between filmmaker and migrant, or documentary text and spectator.
Nevertheless, this means that documentary filmmakers have the opportunity to
frame discourses on migration in various ways in their films in order to decon-
struct simplistic geographical barriers to human coexistence. The rest of this
24 A. VAUGHAN
chapter analyses Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea (2016), the 2016 Best
Documentary winner at the European Film Awards, as an example of how
contemporary documentary negotiates the urgent plight of migrants travelling
to Europe and ideas of nationhood.
Case Study: Fire at Sea (Gianfranco Rosi, 2016)

Fire at Sea, directed by Gianfranco Rosi, centres on the Italian island of
Lampedusa. Located in the Mediterranean Sea, it is the southernmost part of
Italy and covers roughly 7.8 square miles. Although belonging to Italy,
Lampedusa is nearer to Tunisia in North Africa (approximately 70 miles off the
coast compared to 127 miles from Sicily) which explains its recent media focus
as being the site on which most North African migrants land. Sparsely popu-
lated and characterised by rocky cliff faces, sandy beaches and barren land-
scapes, it relies on tourism and fishing as the basis for its economy (Kushner
2016: 62). Travel websites that market the island based on its sandy beaches
bely both its current status as the gateway for North African migration into
Europe and its history as a penal colony during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries (Kushner 2016: 63). In this way, Lampedusa has a long
history of being a place for holding individuals who do not have a clear identity
or home in the rest of the world.
The Italian island is often described as the frontline in the current European
migrant crisis. In 2014, reports estimated that as a whole over 200,000
“undocumented migrants came to Europe by sea, thousands drowning in the
Mediterranean attempting to do so” (Kushner 2016: 60–61). In the previous
year, “close to 15,000 migrants were processed through Lampedusa, most flee-
ing from Eritrea” meaning that at numerous times in recent years the number
of migrants outnumbered the island’s native residents (Kushner 2016: 66–67).
For writers such as Tony Kushner (2016: 64), “no place came to symbolise
more the intense human tragedy and drama of modern migration, evoking
sentiments of pity, shame and fear in equal measures”. To accommodate these
large numbers of refugees, beginning in the late 1990s, a reception centre was
built to help process the arrivals, which then expanded into a larger official
detention centre near the island’s airport. Once there, they “were ‘distributed’
by plane to other facilities in Sicily or mainland Italy or deported to Libya”
(Kushner 2016: 67). Kushner (2016: 75) outlines the impact this had on the
local residents:
In the detention centres of the island and in its everyday life, the migrants have
both resisted and formed alliances with the local inhabitants. In February 2014
this led to the creation of the Charter of Lampedusa which was not ‘intended as
a draft law’ but as the expression ‘of an alternative vision’ where ‘Differences
must be considered as assets, a source of new opportunities, and must never be
exploited to build barriers’.
It is evident that the rapid increase in migration from North Africa to

Lampedusa in recent years has had a direct effect on the migrants, the island’s
inhabitants and spectators to the crisis reading about or watching the events
through the media. However, it also draws attention to and prompts discus-
sions about borders. Are they physical barriers or more imaginary zones that
help constitute notions of nationhood and individual identity? With these ideas
in mind, Lampedusa becomes a liminal space where these questions can be
developed. After all, is it “where Italy ends and Africa begins”, as human rights
journalist Caroline Moorehead (Kushner 2016: 62) has described, the out-
skirts of the European border, or one of Alison Mountz’s (Kushner 2016: 67)
“stateless spaces”? The mobility of borders was strikingly demonstrated when
government operations caused Lampedusa’s border to be moved offshore so
that the Italian navy could intercept migrant boats at sea (Ponzanesi 2016:
160). Rosi’s documentary can help us approach these complex issues and
engage with some of the contemporary attitudes to the crisis.
Fire at Sea takes its title from a Sicilian folk song that describes the bombing
of an Italian warship docked in the port of Lampedusa during the Second
World War (Ponzanesi 2016: 160). The tune is played in the documentary
when a listener to the island DJ requests it. As a way of bridging the traumatic
memory of the Second World War past with the ordeals of North African
migrants, the song could also be interpreted as a reference to a migrant boat of
Somalian and Eritrean refugees on 3 October 2013. The vessel caught fire and
sank half a mile off the coast of Lampedusa, killing an estimated—the full fig-
ure will never be known—350 of its 500 passengers, in what some commenta-
tors called “the most dramatic human disaster in the Mediterranean Sea since
the Second World War” (Kushner 2016: 67). As well as alluding to the parallels
of national history, the song connects the island’s residents with the victims of
contemporary forced and voluntary migration and the perils they face in trying
to reach safety.
Rosi, himself born in Eritrea, spent around 18 months on the island in order
to familiarise himself with daily life, how the coast guard dealt with the migrant
boats, and to earn the trust of some of the inhabitants that would serve as prin-
cipal subjects for his documentary (Ponzanesi 2016: 160). Fire at Sea is divided
between the island inhabitants’ daily lives and the arrival of migrant ships over-
seen by the coast guard, with these two sections often remaining separate. So
we follow 12-year-old Samuele as he struggles to follow in his father’s footsteps
as a fisherman (he gets terribly seasick), preferring instead to terrorise birds
with his homemade slingshot. From the documentary, there is no indication
that Samuele is aware of the migrant crisis’ effect on his island home as he is
not shown interacting with or discussing the topic. The closest link between
these two threads is provided by the local doctor. He treats the migrant arrivals,
including a pregnant woman, and reflects to camera about some of his harrow-
ing experiences. He also sees Samuele who comes to him complaining about
shortness of breath which he thinks might be related to anxiety.
26 A. VAUGHAN
Shot in long takes, with often a static camera and no voiceover, Fire at Sea
belongs to the art film tradition of European cinema and the observational
mode of documentary. It is interesting also that some analyses of the film
describe it as neorealist in style (Ponzanesi 2016: 152). This is perhaps unsur-
prising considering that European forms of observational documentary, such as
Free Cinema, emerged out of popular European fiction film styles, such as
Neorealism in Italy. Coming to prominence during the 1940s and 1950s,
Italian Neorealism privileged the representation of human reality and often
resorted to location shooting and non-professional actors to achieve this real-
ism. With this in mind, Samuele could be viewed as a more precocious, equally
listless, variant on Bruno from Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948).
Regardless of intent, perhaps Rosi is recalling past Italian cinematic modes as
much as he is commenting on contemporary geopolitical movements.
Fire at Sea premiered in February 2016 at the Berlin Film Festival, where it
went onto win the Golden Bear, the first time a documentary had ever won the
top prize at the festival. Jury President, actress Meryl Streep, praised the film
for its “urgent, imaginative and necessary filmmaking” and said that it “com-
pels our engagement and action” (The Guardian 2016). After a successful run
at international film festivals, including Telluride and Toronto, the documen-
tary was named as Italy’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 2017
Academy Awards and was nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar.
Therefore, the high-profile critical praise and subsequent media attention
Rosi’s film received allows us to examine how it communicates its message
about the migrant crisis through documentary modes.
As already mentioned briefly above, the documentary intercuts between the
two threads of local residents’ daily lives and the arrival of migrants by boat
with only the slightest of obvious connections between them. The island doc-
tor, a compassionate and patient man, serves as the mediator between these
two worlds. He helps process the refugees, checking their hands for signs of
disease, and goes aboard the boats to inspect the corpses of those who have
perished en route. He also treats Samuele for symptoms of anxiety. The only
other time there is an overt connection between the residents and the migrant
crisis it is kept at a distance through the island’s radio news broadcast. A woman
listens to the latest bulletin which describes the details of a migrant vessel
including loss of life as she prepares a meal. As she does so, she mutters “poor
souls”. However, Rosi introduces symbolism to suggest links between his two
narrative sequences. For the numerous migrant boats we see, Samuele and his
father are filmed aboard the family fishing vessel. As counterpoint to the danger
and uncertainty of the refugees’ sea-crossing to Lampedusa, Rosi captures the
exploits of a lone scuba diver beneath the waves. And the local radio station
finds its echo in the crackling of navy ship radios receiving distress calls from
sinking migrant boats (Ponzanesi 2016: 152). Because Rosi does not resort to
voiceover narration, a mainstay of mainstream educational documentary, his
technique seems to be inviting the spectator to make these connections, to
think for themselves and, most significantly, to see.
Fire at Sea is full of visual metaphors for ‘seeing’, what Ponzanesi (2016:
151–152) describes as “an intriguing aesthetic language of high symbolism”.
Its clearest example is seen in the narrative journey of Samuele. It is notewor-
thy that he is the first ‘character’ we see in the documentary. Rosi films him
walking towards the camera, inspecting a nearby tree and cutting off some
branches to make his slingshot which he later uses to shoot cans, cactuses and
birds. He is clearly quite skilled. However, later in the film Samuele visits an
optician who informs him that he has a lazy eye as a result of closing it to aim
his slingshot. He has to wear an eye patch over his good eye to encourage the
lazy one to work harder and, therefore, see better.
The composition of the image, as seen in Fig. 2.1, further emphasises the act
of looking. Rosi depicts Samuele in close-up as he pulls the elastic of the sling-
shot back against his right cheek. The resulting horizontal lines draw the spec-
tator’s gaze towards Samuele’s eyes, one visible, the other obscured and closed
as he takes aim. The position of the camera, with Samuele aiming beyond the
frame of action, means that we are not encouraged to identify with him; we are
observing Samuele’s actions without him indicating any awareness of
the camera.
Rosi intersperses Samuele’s mundane travails with the life or death journeys
of the migrants. We are encouraged to “connect the everyday of Samuele with
the ‘normality’ of plucking dead or nearly dead bodies from the sea” (Kushner
2016: 91). Additionally, Samuele’s aimlessness, his inability to row a boat and
seasickness make him seem apart from traditional island life in a way that paral-
lels the migrants’ homelessness. And, for Ponzanesi (2016: 153), this tech-
nique has political implications: “[t]he perspective through the eyes of a young
Fig. 2.1 Samuele’s desire to ‘see’ as symbolism for audiences acknowledging the
migrant crisis in Fire at Sea
28 A. VAUGHAN
boy has the purpose of recalibrating the distorted view of political opportunism
that uses migration as a scarecrow. It functions also as a warning against the
rising indifference, apathy and short-sighted policy of the European Union”.
Therefore, is Samuele’s anxiety related to the migrant crisis which, due to his
inability to see clearly with both eyes, remains blurred and on the peripheries
of his understanding?
Finally, the metaphor of seeing and not-seeing is suggested in the differing
representations of the individuals of these two worlds. The island residents,
including Samuele, his grandmother, the doctor and the radio DJ, are more
rounded personalities, compared to the migrants who are rarely individualised
or even heard to speak. Consequently, the documentary’s visual representation
of the migrants is synonymous with numerous EU countries’ reluctance to
identify them. Furthermore, because the film encourages us to identify with
the island inhabitants, and Samuele especially, the spectator is expected to
adopt this Eurocentric viewing position with the expectation that, after seeing
the horrific images of migrant corpses piled on top of one another in a boat’s
hold, they will finally begin to see the plight of refugees.
The cinematography and editing of Fire at Sea continues the call for specta-
tors to ‘see’. Rosi often utilises static camera shots allied with a “poetically
slow” (Ponzanesi 2016: 153) pace of editing, such as when a navy helicopter is
prepared for take-off or when lines of migrants arrive to be screened at the
island detention centre. The spectator thus has a fixed view of an event,
restricted to whatever is contained within the frame. This is then contrasted
with the more handheld, mobile shots of boarding the migrant boats which
create immediacy. Rosi incorporates an additional visual quirk, summarised as
follows:
Throughout the film, Rosi often opts to mediate his gaze, letting us observe, or
peep through, the right eye of Samuele hitting a target with his slingshot, through
military monitors, mirrors, wet portholes encrusted with dried salt, through
scuba-diving glasses searching the marvellous beauty of the island’s abyss at night,
through the torchlight of the navy boats piercing the Mediterranean in search of
survivors to be rescued. This ‘looking with’ and ‘looking through’ conveys the
indirect gaze, albeit non-intervening, of the filmmaker. (Ponzanesi 2016: 161)
This mediated documentary gaze is best articulated during a sequence in

which Rosi travels back to Lampedusa on a navy boat which has just rescued a
group of migrants (see Fig. 2.2). He silently observes some of the passengers
through a transparent plastic sheet, sea spray forming droplets on the see-
through cover. The lens settles on one male migrant who looks directly at the
camera with a blank expression, the sheet separating him, Rosi and us from one
another. Through such a composition, where the image that is presented is
mediated by the plastic sheet and the film camera, the spectator is forced to
look at the migrant whose exhausted and helpless gaze looks back at us. This is
in stark contrast to the third-person identification the viewer has with Samuele.
Fig. 2.2 Rosi’s mediated documentary gaze of the migrant ‘other’ in Fire at Sea
In the latter, an unobtrusive, observational function of documentary is pre-

ferred compared to the direct address and challenging gaze of the migrant. A
similar shot is repeated later in the film when the migrants are being processed.
Each stands in front of a digital camera holding a number for their photo to be
taken. The sequence shows human beings being depersonalised to mere num-
bers. Rosi cuts between each ‘portrait’ with some of the migrants feigning a
slight smile for the camera, others clearly distressed. The sequence ends with
another male refugee not looking at the digital camera, but Rosi’s film camera
as if directly addressing the audience to pay attention.
In each of these examples, the film spectator is required to ‘look with’ or
‘look through’ in order to fully perceive the documentary image and under-
stand the socio-political suffering these individuals are experiencing. Rosi’s
decision to film Lampedusa’s residents and the migrants in such different ways,
with the former more clearly identified than the latter, could have laid his docu-
mentary open to criticism for bias. However, Rosi seems to be suggesting that
it is only by accepting that we as spectators are complicit in similar processes of
‘othering’ refugees that we will be able to see the reality of the European
migrant crisis with both eyes open.
Conclusion
This chapter has provided an overview of the state of European documentary
in the twenty-first century. By summarising some of the key points from the
history of European documentary, including significant movements such as
Free Cinema and cinema vérité, we can see how the past still influences the
documentary style of the present. However, the rise in digital communications
on the global stage has also impacted on the ways filmmakers produce nonfic-
30 A. VAUGHAN
tion and spectators consume it, with social media especially contributing to
autobiographical forms of documentary in a culture of self-presentation.
EU-backed media production strategies beginning in the 1980s also influ-
enced documentary production. Policies like Eurodoc facilitate the EU’s
objective to create a recognisable European media culture that seeks to retain
culturally specific characteristics. Co-productions, documentary networks (like
the EDN) and funding opportunities help to make this aim a reality, even
though nationally specific documentary production policies still exist. On a
broader scale, these policies as well as Web 2.0 highlight questions about the
integrity of European borders in the twenty-first century. Contemporary
European documentary has responded with filmmakers producing documenta-
ries that dramatise the ‘real’ world stories of migration to the continent.
By using Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea as a case-study example, it was shown
how a recent documentary represents and reflects upon the European migrant
crisis. Rosi deftly combines observational documentary techniques with a rich
symbolism based on audiences’ in/ability to ‘see’ the plight of these refugees
which further characterises his cinematography and editing. The decision to
build the documentary around the binary of the island residents and the
migrants serves to problematise political rhetoric surrounding the crisis and the
failure by governments to accept responsibility. Here, the “island becomes a
microcosm for Europe where the liminal and precarious existences, of both
fishermen and refugees, convey an idea of Europe from the South where differ-
ent marginalities coexist and interweave, avoiding celebratory discourses on
Europe as the ideal haven” (Ponzanesi 2016: 165). As a result, the documen-
tary constructs the possibility of a Europe that does not disavow the migrant
‘other’ (a role the popular media seem so eager to attribute to refugees) but
makes it clear that it is up to the spectator to create such a place.
Questions for Group Discussion

1. What responsibilities do European documentary filmmakers have? Why
are they significant?
2. What are some of the challenges facing European documentary filmmak-
ers in the twenty-first century? (Consider technology, audiences, other
audiovisual content)
3. What other twenty-first-century European documentaries have you seen?
How do they correspond to or engage with ideas of ‘Europeanness’?
4. How do you see documentary forms changing in the next decades? What
types of social, cultural, political, technological changes will documen-
tary need to respond to?
Note
1. See https://eacea.ec.europa.eu/creative-europe_en for further information on
Creative Europe and the MEDIA programme.
References
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Documentary Fire at Sea. The Guardian, February 21. https://www.theguardian.
com/film/2016/feb/21/berlin-film-festival-awards-top-prize-to-refugee-crisis-
documentary-fire-at-sea.
Aitken, Ian. 2001. European Film Theory and Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Berghahn, Daniela, and Claudia Sternberg. 2010. European Cinema in Motion: Migrant
and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Corner, John. 2002. Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions. Television & New
Media 3 (3): 255–269.
Creative Europe. 2018. Welcome to the MEDIA Sub-programme. http://edn.net-
work/edn/. Accessed 5 December 2019.
Demos, T.J. 2013. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During
Global Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
de Michiel, Helen & Zimmermann, Patricia R. 2013. Documentary as an Open Space.
In The Documentary Film Book, ed. Brian Winston, Basingstoke, Hampshire:
Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the British Film Institute.
Elsaesser, Thomas. 1990. Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. London: BFI.
———. 2005. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press.
European Documentary Network. 2019. Stimulating Networks & Knowledge Within
the Documentary Sector. http://edn.network/edn/. Accessed 5 December 2019.
European Film Academy. 2019. European Film Academy Archive Page. https://www.
europeanfilmacademy.org/Archive.39.0.html. Accessed 28 August 2018.
Galt, Rosalind. 2006. The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map. New York:
Godmilow, Jill. 1999. What’s Wrong with the Liberal Documentary. Peace Review 11
(1): 91–98.
Gunning, Tom. 1990. The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the
Avant Garde. In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser,
56—62, London: BFI.
Haver, Ron. 1976. Merian C. Cooper: First King of Kong. American Film 11
(3): 14–23.
Hight, Craig. 2013. Beyond Sobriety: Documentary Diversions. In The Documentary
Film Book, ed. Brian Winston, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan on
behalf of the British Film Institute.
Imre, Aniko, and Eszter Zimanyi. 2016. Frames and Fragments of European Migration.
Transnational Cinemas 7 (2): 118–134.
Juhasz, Alexandra, and Alisa Lebow, eds. 2015. A Companion to Contemporary
Documentary Film. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
32 A. VAUGHAN
Kushner, Tony. 2016. Lampedusa and the Migrant Crisis Ethics, Representation and
History. Mobile Culture Studies Journal 2: 59–92.
Lewis, Randolph. 2007. “The Face of the Other” and Documentaries. The Velvet Light
Trap a Critical Journal of Film and Television (60): 83–84.
Loshitzky, Yosefa. 2010. Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary
European Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Macaulay, Scott. 2013. 25 New Faces of Independent Film. Filmmaker Magazine.
https://filmmakermagazine.com/people/iva-radivojevic-2/#.XBjcI_Z2tyw.
Accessed 5 December 2019.
McLane, Betsy A. 2012. A New History of Documentary Film: Second Edition. New York:
Continuum.
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. 2007. Italian Neo-realism. In The Cinema Book, ed. Pam
Cook, 3rd ed. London: BFI.
Petrie, Duncan. 1992. Screening Europe: Image and Identity in Contemporary European
Cinema. London: BFI.
Ponzanesi, Sandra. 2016. Of Shipwrecks and Weddings: Borders and Mobilities in
Europe. Transnational Cinemas 7 (2): 151–167.
Reuschmann, Eva. 2003. Moving Pictures, Migrating Identities. Jackson, MS: University
Press of Mississippi.
Winston, Brian. 2013. The Documentary Film Book. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
on behalf of the British Film Institute.
CHAPTER 3
Scotland’s Onscreen Identities: Otherness

and Hybridity in Scottish Cinema
Emily Torricelli
Definitions
Clydesidism
A discourse in which Scotland is represented as an urban, industrial, masculine
space. Initially praised as an alternative to the regressive discourses of tartanry
and the Kailyard, Clydesidism has been criticised for glorifying the working
class while glossing over systemic problems.
Hybrid Identity
Identities that are constructed to accommodate difference. For example, a
hybrid national identity would be inclusive of not only traditional understand-
ings of nationality, but also those differentiated by race, gender, sexuality, reli-
gion, ableness and so on.
The Kailyard
A Scottish representational discourse focusing on the rural Lowlands. The dis-
course of the Kailyard originates in late nineteenth-century sentimental novels
by authors such as J. M. Barrie, who look at parochial village life from a dis-
tanced, nostalgic perspective. As such, it has often been considered a limiting
or regressive discourse due to its emphasis on the past; however, it can also be
E. Torricelli (*)
University of York, York, UK

34 E. TORRICELLI
seen as providing an alternative space that allows for transformation and the
exploration of possibilities.
Othering
The process of exclusion based on difference to those who ‘belong’. For exam-
ple, to be a woman is to be not a man; to be black, not white; to be queer, not
cis/heteronormative. The Other is those who are constructed not to belong;
Otherness is the qualities that construct the Other.
Tartanry
A Scottish representational discourse focused on the Highlands and the
Jacobite Rebellion. This discourse originates in the romantic novels of Sir
Walter Scott and others and can still be seen in Scottish culture today. On the
one hand, tartanry, with its emphasis on past failures, can be seen as reductive,
but, on the other hand, like the Kailyard, it also can be seen to provide a mythic
space in which alternate histories can be explored.
Introduction
This chapter considers questions of national cinemas and hybrid identities. The
national context is a framework useful to film criticism, industries and audi-
ences alike. However, the idea that there can be a cohesive understanding of
the nation seemingly falls apart under the conditions of the modern world.
‘The national’ is destabilised from above by globalisation and the easy flow of
people and ideas across borders, and from below by minority groups who want
their voices to be heard. And in a cinematic context, an individual film’s national
identity is rendered more complex when one considers the realities of film pro-
duction and consumption. Andrew Higson (2000: 67) problematises the con-
cept of a stable national identity:
the degree of cultural cross-breeding and interpenetration, not only across bor-
ders but also within them, suggests that modern cultural formations are invariably
hybrid and impure. They constantly mix together different ‘indigeneities’ and are
thus always re-fashioning themselves, as opposed to exhibiting an already fully
formed identity.
Any formation of the national specificity of a film, then, would need to be

inclusive of hybrid forms of identity.
This chapter considers the case of Scottish cinema. As a small nation with its
own devolved political institutions and relative autonomy from the United
Kingdom, Scotland presents an interesting case for how films are labelled with
a national identity. A nation within a nation, Scotland holds both insider and
outsider status within Britain. As such, much of its cultural production has
been dominated by discourses that have been appropriated from without.
3 SCOTLAND’S ONSCREEN IDENTITIES: OTHERNESS AND HYBRIDITY… 35
Furthermore, basing the national identity of Scottish film on the production

context and the provenance of funding is also problematic since while there are
limited sources of Scottish film funding, even low-budget feature films require
investment from other non-Scottish sources such as the BFI, Channel Four,
BBC Films or Netflix. A film defined as Scottish will almost always qualify
equally as British, or in cases where there has been international co-production
or transnational sources of funding and production partners involved, ‘Scottish’
films might equally be labelled European or even transnational. Therefore,
Scottish cinema as constructed as a national cinema is in a unique position, one
that, as will be shown, has allowed it to develop a sense of ‘Scottishness’ that is
hybrid, plural and contingent.
Scotland: Other and Not-Other

Before considering the development of hybrid identities in Scottish film, it is
necessary to consider the Otherness of Scotland and its cinema in relation to
Britain and British cinema. Some scholars, such as Michael Hechter (1975), see
the two nations in a core/peripheral relationship, where England is the centre
and Scotland the margin. Therefore, there is inequality between England and
Scotland because the former dominates the latter. Scotland’s Otherness stems
from its subordinate position.
Other scholars, such as Tom Nairn (1981), reject this strictly postcolonial
understanding of Scottish identity in favour of a model that sees Scotland as a
‘junior partner’ to England. In this case, Scotland, due to the Act of Union of
1707, which combined the two nations into one state, modernised during the
same time frame as England’s metropolitan centres. Thus, the inequality that
creates the core/peripheral relationship does not exist between the two. Rather,
Scotland’s Otherness stems from the Scots’ own eagerness to participate in the
Union, the result of which is the appropriation of Scottish culture as British.
Successful cultural figures and their works—historian Thomas Carlyle, novelist
Robert Louis Stevenson, documentarian John Grierson, for example—are sub-
sumed into a British national identity. What is left for Scotland, according to
critics like Nairn, is an ‘inferior’ popular culture. Scottish identity is reduced to
stereotypical discourses.
Another way Scotland could be Othered in relation to Britain is in its rela-
tionship to Europe. Scotland has strong historical ties to the continent, such as
the ‘auld alliance’ of 1295 with France. And today, Scotland’s European affini-
ties remain strong, if their vote in the 2016 Brexit referendum—62% to remain
in the European Union, the highest of the United Kingdom’s four countries
(The Electoral Commission (UK) 2019)—is any indication. Likewise, Scottish
cinema has long harboured European ambitions. According to Philip
Schlessinger (1990: 231–232), looking to Europe for financial support in the
early 1990s was seen as a way for Scottish filmmakers to reduce their depen-
dence on the British film industry. And for Jonathan Murray (2007: 84), a turn
by Scottish filmmakers in the 2000s towards European co-production brought
with it an interest in the aesthetics and themes of European art cinema.
36 E. TORRICELLI
For David McCrone (2001: 52), it is the everyday lived experience in

Scotland that allows its people to feel culturally distinct from the rest of Britain.
After all, Scotland has a separate official church (Presbyterian, not Anglican)
and separate legal and educational systems. Post-devolution, it also has been
able to tailor its social programmes to fit local needs. However, the everyday
lived experience also carries with it markers of British culture such as the Royal
Mail, the BBC and National Health. And there are other commonalities
between Scotland and the majority of the United Kingdom’s culture that must
not be forgotten, chiefly race (whiteness), religion (Protestant Christianity)
and language (English). McCrone (2001: 182) argues that Scottish identity
and British identity are complementary, not competitive. Thus, it is possible to
identify as Scottish and British simultaneously; the more important question is
when and how people choose to activate these identities (McCrone 2001:
192). ‘Scottishness’ therefore is an inherently plural identity and thus provides
fertile ground for the development of other hybrid identities.
‘Traditional’ Scottish Identity

In literature and visual culture, ‘Scottishness’ has traditionally been constructed
along three representational discourses: tartanry, the Kailyard and Clydesidism.
The first two of these are probably most familiar to international cinema audi-
ences and can be seen in films such as Bonnie Prince Charlie (1948), Rob Roy:
The Highland Rogue (1953), The Little Minister (1934), Whisky Galore! (1949)
and, more recently, Braveheart (1995) and Brave (2012). However, some cul-
tural critics consider these two discourses to be highly limiting forms of repre-
sentation. Tartanry originated in early nineteenth-century romantic literature
and is typified by the novels of Sir Walter Scott. It is associated with the
Highlands and the eighteenth-century Jacobite Rebellion. Kailyard representa-
tions, which stem from the late nineteenth-century sentimental novels of
J. M. Barrie and others, offer a nostalgic look back at the rural Lowlands from
the position of a young man who has moved on to better things. Both dis-
courses therefore present a vision of Scotland that is firmly grounded in the
past. Tartanry, through its romanticised use of history, may seem like other
European literatures of the nineteenth century, but whereas these literatures
used a heroic sense of the past to create nationalist sentiment, in Scotland this
was not possible, because the historical moment evoked by tartanry, the
Jacobite rebellion, was not one characterised by great feats of heroism, but
ultimately by defeat and failure (Craig 1982: 10). There is no sense of futurity
created, then, through this mode of representation because, in focusing on past
failures, it offers no potential for later success.
A similar vein runs through the Kailyard. Craig (1982: 11) does admit that
one of the redeeming features of the Kailyard is that it uses the language of
ordinary people, but it, too, offers no possibility of a future for Scotland. It is
addressed to an audience that has left behind a Scottish identity for a British
middle-class one. Craig explains that the way the Kailyard condescendingly
characterises its subjects is meant to distance the reader from any sense of
Scottish national identity. He says that “What has to be elided from that mythic
world, therefore, is any suggestion that there could be a positive development
of the culture from within the social classes portrayed by the writer” (Craig
1982: 11). The representation of Scotland in the Kailyard is located in both the
authors’ and audience’s past. It may be looked back upon sentimentally, but it
is nevertheless behind them. Both tartanry and the Kailyard, then, are limiting
modes of representation because, in placing Scotland in the past, they do not
allow for any sense of the future.
For Edward Said (1978: 3), Orientalism is the discourse by which the non-
Western Other is represented by the West. These reductive discourses can be so
pervasive that they cannot be avoided when speaking of the Other. In a way,
the discourses of tartanry and the Kailyard operate as an Orientalism internal to
Western culture. For early scholars of Scottish cinema, tartanry and the
Kailyard, in their cinematic forms, continued to be limiting in their association
of Scottishness with pastness, and they put limits on indigenous Scottish film-
making as well. These were the main images of Scotland that had been appro-
priated by Hollywood and taken up by its peripheral industries, British cinema
included. And, since there was very limited film production within Scotland
until the 1980s, these were the only images Scots could see of themselves on
screen. Thus, cinematic images of Scotland were not only limited to these
regressive representations, but they were also representations from the outside.
And when Scots began producing films for themselves, for the most part they
did not break away from the traditions of tartanry and the Kailyard. Rather
“the dominant filmic representations of their country have been articulated
elsewhere, and the indigenous Scottish institutions which exist to foster film
culture have never articulated as a priority the helping of Scottish film-makers
toward the discourses which would effectively counter the dominant ones”
(McArthur 1982: 58). In other words, Scottish cinema has had a limited scope
because the images it uses were imitated from a culture outside its own, while
at the same time those making films in Scotland were not encouraged to find
alternatives to these modes of representation.
In more recent years, scholars have taken a more favourable view of these
discourses. Revisiting the topic, Cairns Craig (1996: 70) found that construct-
ing Scotland as a mythic space removed from the forward progress of history
allows for the exploration of counter-histories. For Duncan Petrie (2000: 32),
Scotland has often been constructed as a space of transformation:
Viewed from the centre, Scotland is a distant periphery far removed from the
modern, urban and cosmopolitan social world inhabited by the kind of people
involved in the creation of such images. Consequently, Scotland tends to be rep-
resented as a picturesque, wild and often empty landscape, a topography that in
turn suggests certain themes, narrative situations and character trajectories.
Central to this is the idea of remoteness—physical, social, moral—from metro-
politan rules, conventions and certainties. Scotland is consequently a space in
which a range of fantasies, desires and anxieties can be explored and expressed;
38 E. TORRICELLI
alternatively an exotic backdrop for adventure and romance, or a sinister and

oppressive locale beyond the pale of civilization.
However, in Hollywood and British cinema, this transformative ability was

usually reserved for outsiders, not Scots. Take Vincente Minnelli’s adaptation
of the musical Brigadoon (1954). Two American hunters stumble upon the
Highland village of Brigadoon, which rises out of the mist every one hundred
years, though only a day has passed for its inhabitants. The hunters spend the
day singing and dancing with the townsfolk, and Tommy, the one played by
Gene Kelly, falls in love with Fiona, a lass played by Cyd Charisse. However, it
transpires that, should one of the townsfolk leave, the spell will break and the
town will be gone forever. The hunters return to New York, but Tommy feels
something lacking in his life. He returns to Scotland, and miraculously the
mists part allowing him to enter and remain in Brigadoon. Thus Tommy, an
American, is offered a chance to change, while Fiona and her kin must forever
be locked in the past.
Initial Steps Towards a Hybrid Scottish Identity

Until the 1980s, indigenous Scottish film production was primarily state- and
industrially financed documentary. A few narrative films such as The Gorbals
Story (1950), The Brave Don’t Cry (1952) and Bill Douglas’s British Film
Institute-backed autobiographical trilogy—My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk
(1973) and My Way Home (1978)—were produced during these times. What
many of these documentary and narrative films (the Bill Douglas Trilogy being
a notable exception) have in common is the discourse of Clydesidism.
Clydesidism was originally thought of as an alternative to the regressive dis-
courses of tartanry and the Kailyard in its attempt to acknowledge the forces of
modernity. In its representation of Scotland as working class, Clydesidism pro-
vided an alternative to the rural spaces of tartanry and the Kailyard while also
connecting it to an industrialised and urban world—primarily that of Glasgow
and the surrounding Clydeside region—as well as contemporary discourses
and aesthetics of realism (Caughie 1990: 16). McArthur analyses Clydeside
films such as Floodtide (1949) and The Brave Don’t Cry, however, and finds
them just as lacking. While Clydesidism offers alternative images, they are a
“celebration of its [Clydeside’s] people rather than the analysis of their situa-
tion” (McArthur 1982: 52). For McArthur, Clydeside films, instead of using
their industrial settings to explore the reasons for Scotland’s systemic prob-
lems, glorify the working-class male. Clydesidism became another reductive
discourse like tartanry and the Kailyard.
The 1980s saw an increase in the production of narrative feature films in
Scotland thanks to new funding sources like the Scottish Film Production
Fund and Channel Four, as well as a cultural shift in Scottish nationalism fol-
lowing the failed devolution referendum of 1979. Most prominent among
these films were the Scottish-based comedies of director Bill Forsyth. His three
films set in Glasgow—That Sinking Feeling (1979), Gregory’s Girl (1981) and
Comfort and Joy (1984)—combine a quirky sense of humour with a more con-
temporary view of Scotland. That Sinking Feeling is a heist movie wherein
unemployed Glaswegian youths plot to steal sinks, Gregory’s Girl is about a
clueless teenaged boy who falls in love with the only girl on the football team,
and Comfort and Joy depicts the rivalry between two ice cream companies as a
mob war.
Forsyth’s third film, Local Hero (1983), constructs a different Scotland than
his previous films. Set in a remote coastal village, it tells the story of Mac (Peter
Riegert), an American businessman who is sent to Scotland by his boss (Burt
Lancaster) to buy the fictional town of Ferness for the construction of an oil
refinery. While the townsfolk conspire to take every last penny they can out of
Mac’s company, he, and later his boss, are transformed by the local landscape.
The film makes use of Kailyard discourses, first through its use of locale and
references to Scottish folklore, and second through similarities to Kailyard
comedy films of the 1940s and 1950s, most notably Alexander Mackendrick’s
The Maggie (1954). However, there are ways in which the film connects to the
contemporary Scotland Forsyth constructs in his other films. Ferness is a
diverse town inclusive of teenage punks (one of them played by the star of
Gregory’s Girl), African ministers and Russian sailors. And the inclusion of the
oil industry is significant; North Sea oil and the potential financial indepen-
dence it could bring spurred on the growth of Scottish political nationalism in
the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, in Local Hero, Forsyth constructs a Scotland
that is both traditional and contemporary.
Forsyth’s films, especially Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero, were widely
acclaimed and seen as important not only to an emerging Scottish cinema, but
also to a general British film revival in the early 1980s. As such, other Scottish
film productions tried to imitate Forsyth’s style and success. For example,
Restless Natives (1985) is about two Edinburgh youths who use their motor-
bike to rob Highland tour buses and blends traditional use of Scottish land-
scape and folklore with a contemporary urban setting and a Forsythian sense of
humour. In this way, the Scottish films of the 1980s construct Scottish identity
as a hybrid of both the traditional and the modern and paved the way for more
inclusive Scottish identities in the decades to follow.
New Scottish Cinema, New Scottish Masculinities

The 1990s were particularly productive for cinema in Scotland. Along with
devolution and the reestablishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, the
decade saw a number of changes to the way Scottish film was funded. In 1997,
the Scottish Film Production Fund was combined with other Scottish film
agencies to form Scottish Screens (Petrie 2000: 177). Other funding bodies
such as the Glasgow Film Fund were formed, the Scottish Arts Council started
administering lottery funds for filmmaking (Petrie 2000: 174–175) and televi-
sion networks like Channel Four and the BBC continued to support Scottish
film production (Petrie 2000: 178–179).
40 E. TORRICELLI
There were also a number of internationally successful Scottish films pro-

duced during the decade. Shallow Grave (1995) and Trainspotting (1996)
were back-to-back critical and commercial successes, both at home and abroad
for director Danny Boyle. My Name Is Joe (1998), Orphans (1999) and
Ratcatcher (1999) all fared well on the international festival circuit. Even
Hollywood took a renewed interest in Scotland, producing big-budget films
such as Braveheart and another version of Rob Roy (1995), which, though
backed by United Artists, was developed in Scotland. Though many Hollywood
films from the 1990s seem to use ‘traditional’ constructions of Scotland with-
out irony, Rob Roy destabilised these kinds of Scottish identity. In the film, Rob
Roy MacGregor (Liam Neeson), the Scottish folk hero who had been popula-
rised in Sir Walter Scott’s 1817 novel of the same name, has his personal code
of honour challenged when villainous Englishman Archie Cunningham (Tim
Roth) steals money Rob owes to his uncle and rapes Rob’s wife Mary (Jessica
Lange). By making the parentage of both Cunningham and Mary’s baby
uncertain, the film breaks down the binary of ‘manly’ Scotsmen opposed to
‘effeminate’ Englishmen.
Other Scottish films from the decade also critique traditional forms of
Scottish identity and engage with questions of masculinity. Orphans, for exam-
ple, critiques Clydesidism as it follows siblings Thomas, Michael, Sheila and
John Flynn in the immediate aftermath of their mother’s death. The four
almost self-destruct as they commit acts of overzealous piety, stubborn indi-
vidualism, revenge and fraud and are only saved by the realisation that they
must rely on each other to survive. As such, the film shows Clydesidism’s con-
struction of Scottish masculinity to be outdated for a Scotland that is no longer
a welfare state.
Trainspotting, adapted from the popular Irvine Welsh novel, also critiques
‘traditional’ Scottish masculinity at the same time it offers alternatives to it.
The film chronicles the misadventures of Scottish heroin addict Mark Renton
(Ewan McGregor) and his friends Spud (Ewen Bremner), Sick Boy (Jonny Lee
Miller), Begbie (Robert Carlyle) and Tommy (Kevin McKidd). Begbie and
Tommy are used to critique and parody various stereotypes of the Scottish
working-class male, who ultimately cannot survive in a post-industrial Scotland.
The other three represent alternative forms of Scottish masculinity—feminised,
reflective, in tune with global pop culture and, most importantly, fluid—that
allow them to thrive in a modern, neoliberal world.
In questioning and offering alternatives to ‘traditional’ forms of Scottish
masculinity, Scottish cinema in the 1990s continued and broadened the 1980s
trend of constructing inclusive Scottish identities. However, it should be noted
that these identities are almost exclusively white and male—notable exceptions
include Blue Black Permanent (1992), Stella Does Tricks (1996) and The Winter
Guest (1997). The new millennium, however, would see the construction of
Scottish identities that were inclusive of other races, ethnicities, genders and
sexualities.
Twenty-First-Century Hybrid Scottish Identities

The 2000s saw many changes in Scottish film, both in terms of style and con-
tent, and in terms of film financing. In 2006, Scottish Screen was dissolved,
later to be replaced by Creative Scotland, a public funding body for the arts in
general, in 2010. While active, Scottish Screen had drawn criticism for favour-
ing American independent-style productions such as The Near Room (1995),
The Slab Boys (1997) and The Debt Collector (1999) that subsequently had
trouble competing in an international market (Murray 2015: 48–49). The per-
ceived failure of Scottish film post-Trainspotting was blamed on a mimicry of
American film, and, as a consequence, filmmakers shifted away from making
films of this style (Murray 2015: 50), with some turning towards international
co-production as an alternative. At the same time, there was an increase in
other kinds of transnational collaboration, particularly with Scandinavian part-
ners, as exemplified by films involving the Glasgow-based independent Sigma
Films and Danish director Lars von Trier’s production company, Zentropa,
such as Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself (2002), Dogville (2003) and Red Road
(2006). Furthermore, Scotland was also increasingly becoming a global film
location for Bollywood productions such as Pyaar Ishq aur Mohabbat (2001).
At the same time that production of film in Scotland took a more interna-
tional turn, the films themselves were focusing more on women and racial and
ethnic minorities. Scottish film of the 2000s saw greater opportunities for
female filmmakers and more explorations of women’s experiences. Though, as
previously mentioned, the New Scottish Cinema of the 1990s was predomi-
nantly led by male filmmakers, there were several key contributions to Scottish
film made by women in the 1990s, including experimental filmmaker Margaret
Tait’s feature Blue Black Permanent, Coky Giedroyc’s Stella Does Tricks and
Lynne Ramsay’s debut feature Ratcatcher. Women’s involvement in Scottish
filmmaking would continue on into the new century with Ramsay’s Morvern
Callar (2002), Shona Auerbach’s Dear Frankie (2004), Andrea Arnold’s
Cannes Jury Prize-winning debut Red Road and Pratibha Parmar’s Nina’s
Heavenly Delights (2006).
Traditionally, Scottish identity has been constructed as masculine. According
to David McCrone (2001: 142):
[…] those identities diagnosed as archetypically Scottish by friend and foe alike—
the Kailyard, Tartanry and Clydesidism—have little place for women. There is no
analogous ‘lass o’pairts’; the image of Tartanry is a male-military image (and kilts
were not a female form of dress); and the Clydeside icon was a skilled, male
worker who was man enough to care for his womenfolk. Even the opponents of
these identities took them over as their own images of social life.
Many of the twenty-first-century films that focus on women’s experiences

therefore broaden the idea of what it means to be Scottish. For example,
Morvern Callar suggests a transnational aspect to Scottish identity. In the film,
42 E. TORRICELLI
Morvern (Samantha Morton), a young woman working in a grocery store in

coastal Scotland, finds her boyfriend dead by suicide on Christmas morning, his
last request that she send the manuscript for his novel off to a publisher. She
does so—substituting her own name for his—and takes her friend Lana
(Kathleen McDermott) on a Spanish holiday with her deceased boyfriend’s
money. Ramsay’s play with identity—Morton speaks with her own English
accent, Morvern and Lana pretend to be Swedish, and at one point Morvern
calls herself ‘Jackie’, a name she found on a necklace—works to destabilise
Morvern’s Scottish identity, as does Morvern’s apparent detachment. No mat-
ter where she goes, Morvern seems isolated from other people. According to
Ian Goode (2007: 4), Morvern’s isolation differentiates her from European
culture at the same time it links her to it. In fact, the only place Morvern seems
to feel at ease is in nature, both in Scotland and in Spain. ‘Nature’ is everywhere;
it is not something that is limited by national borders, and, in this way, neither
is Morvern. Thus, Ramsay constructs female Scottish identity as transnational.
Red Road, on the other hand, takes a traditionally masculine Scottish space,
Glasgow, and reclaims it as female. In the film, Jackie (Kate Dickie) uses her
position as a CCTV camera operator to stalk Clyde (Tony Curran), the man
who killed her family in a car accident, before eventually following him in per-
son to his home in the iconic Glaswegian Red Road tower blocks. As Laura
Mulvey (1975: 11–12) has theorised, the gaze, or the act of looking (particu-
larly at women), in the cinema has generally been reserved for men. Jackie’s use
of the CCTV cameras to watch over Glasgow and the pleasures she derives
from it subverts the male gaze. Furthermore, by the film’s end, Jackie is able to
rejoin the world below as an active participant. As such, “In moving from a
passive to active viewer, Jackie [….] inhabits this particular space, Glasgow.
[Jackie’s gaze], then, transforms Glasgow into a site of female spectatorship
and pleasure” (Torricelli 2018: 7). Arnold therefore constructs a Scotland that
is inclusive of women’s experiences and desires.
Meanwhile, other films focused on Scotland’s diasporic communities, often
being made by members of those communities themselves. For Homi Bhabha
(1998: 937), though, this act of creation by the marginalised does not create a
counter-narrative. Rather, “they also deploy the cultural hybridity of their bor-
derline conditions to ‘translate,’ and therefore reinscribe, the social imaginary
of both metropolis and modernity” (Bhabha 1998: 937–938). In other words,
diasporic cultures use their liminal status to reshape the national culture to
include themselves in it. Films by Peter Capaldi and Don Coutts turned their
attention to Scotland’s diasporic Italian community. Capaldi’s Strictly Sinatra
(2001) follows a Scots-Italian Frank Sinatra impersonator (Ian Hart) who
becomes involved with local gangsters. These men define their ethnic identity
based on Hollywood stereotypes of Italian Americans rather than on the lived
experience of Scots-Italians. The film therefore destabilises identity by reveal-
ing it to be performative and informed by images from popular culture.
Coutts’s American Cousins (2003), on the other hand, explores the cultural
differences between Scots-Italians and Italian Americans. In the film, Roberto
(Gerald Lepkowski), who runs his family’s ice cream parlour/chip shop (a ste-
reotypical Scot-Italian profession), gets a visit from his American cousin Gino
(Danny Nucci) and his associate (Dan Hedaya), who work for a different kind
of ‘family business’ and have come to Glasgow to lay low after an encounter
with the Ukrainian mob goes awry. Although at first these cousins seem to be
polar opposites, thanks to their shared diasporic heritage, they turn out to have
more in common than initially thought. In this way, the film destabilises a
homogeneous national identity by privileging the adaptability of diasporic
ones. Thus, the films allow Capaldi and American Cousins writer Sergio Casci
to explore their own experiences of Scotland’s diasporic Italian community.
Other films turned their attention towards the Asian diaspora in Scotland.
Ken Loach’s Ae Fond Kiss…, for example, draws comparisons between the
outsider experiences of Irish immigrants and Scots-Asians. Casim (Atta Yaqub),
a Pakistani Muslim, meets and begins a love affair with his sister’s music teacher
Roisin (Eva Birthistle), an Irish Catholic woman. A number of complications
arise due to their cultural backgrounds. Casim is expected to marry a cousin
from Pakistan, and his involvement with a white woman could complicate his
older sister’s upcoming marriage and younger sister’s plans to go away for uni-
versity. Meanwhile, Roisin’s promotion to full-time teacher is impeded by her
traditionalist parish priest who disapproves of her live-in relationship with a
Muslim. Ultimately, Casim chooses Roisin over his family obligations. Roisin’s
racial identity does not affect her sense of belonging to the extent that it does
for Casim; she is not put into a position where she must decide between love
and family. There is more variety in the way that Casim and his family relate to
Scotland, however. Casim may feel that his Scottish and Pakistani identities are
in conflict with one another, but his youngest sister Tahara (Shabana Bakhsh)
embraces an identity that is simultaneously Scottish and Asian.
Loach, of course, has been a key figure in the British realist movement since
the beginning of his film and television career in the 1960s. As a white English
filmmaker, he might seem oddly posed to make such a nuanced examination of
race in Scotland. However, Loach previously had made three successful films—
Carla’s Song (1996), My Name Is Joe (1998) and Sweet Sixteen (2002)—that
had been financed by Scottish funds and at least partially filmed there. As such,
many began to identify Loach as a Scottish filmmaker (Torricelli 2017: 96).
Furthermore, Loach’s realist style (e.g., shooting on location and using non-
professional actors), and his positioning of both his white and non-white pro-
tagonists in Ae Fond Kiss… as outsiders, avoids any exoticising effect.
A handful of Scottish films have addressed questions of both gender and
racial difference. The racial conflict in Ae Fond Kiss… is arguably exacerbated
by the gendered expectations placed on Casim and Roisin. Nina’s Heavenly
Delights is another film that looks at racial and gender, as well as sexual,
difference in Scotland in the 2000s. As will be shown below, Pratibha Parmar
constructs in the film a Scotland that is as flavourful as its titular culinary
offerings.
44 E. TORRICELLI
Case Study: Nina’s Heavenly Delights (Pratibha

Parmar, 2006)
Nina’s Heavenly Delights is a celebration of Scottish diversity. In it, Nina, a
Scots-Indian lesbian played by Shelley Conn, has just returned home to
Glasgow after the death of her father. Because he left behind gambling
debts, the family restaurant is now being managed by Nina’s former class-
mate Lisa (Laura Fraser) and there are plans to sell it to Raj, her father’s
chief competitor and father of Nina’s male ex-fiancé. Nina decides to enter
a curry cooking competition to carry on her father’s legacy and, hopefully,
make the sale of the restaurant more profitable. Nina and Lisa become more
and more attracted to each other as they practice cooking their dishes for the
televised finals. Nina, though, worries what her family will think should they
find out about the relationship; only her gay, gender-defying friend Bobbi
knows of her sexual orientation. However, Nina isn’t the only one in the
family with a secret: her sister competes at Highland dancing, her brother is
married to a white woman, and her mother has long been in love with Raj.
Inspired by these admissions, Nina comes out and reveals her relationship
with Lisa at the finals.
The film, which was partially financed by Scottish Screen, was written by
Scottish screenwriter Andrea Gibb, who had previously written Dear Frankie,
and was directed by documentary filmmaker Pratibha Parmar, who was born in
Kenya’s diasporic Asian community and moved to England as a child. Parmar’s
interest in the identity play that is so pervasive in the film came out of her expe-
rience as a lesbian of colour (Whitehead 2008: 59). In addition, Nina’s
Heavenly Delights was made at a time during which the Scottish Parliament
granted more rights to LGBTQ individuals. Thus the film’s production reveals
its attitude towards diversity at the same time it reflects changing Scottish atti-
tudes towards sexuality.
The film’s genre play also reflects its hybrid understanding of Scottish
identity. As a romantic comedy, one can understand it in the general context
of British films like Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999)
and Love Actually (2003). Some film critics like Geoffrey Macnab (2006: 74,
76) also see it as part of a tradition of Scottish comedy films exemplified by
Bill Forsyth’s Glaswegian films. There are also explicit nods to Bollywood
cinema, including clips from Bollywood films, Bobbi’s performance of a
dance routine from a well-known film, and the film’s closing musical number.
This places Nina’s Heavenly Delights in the context of a type of Indian cinema
with a wide global audience while at the same time placing it in the context
of British-Asian films—which also frequently refer to Bollywood—especially
the female-centric films of Gurinder Chadha like Bhaji on the Beach (1994),
Bend It Like Beckham (2002) and Bride and Prejudice (2004). Furthermore,
these references to Bollywood cinema serve as an example of Said’s
Orientalism, as they seem to use familiar, stereotypical images to exoticise
Indian culture for Western audiences. However, the specificity of these refer-
ences might be missed by a Western audience; here the film speaks to the
diasporic community, adding new levels of meaning to these references and
thereby complicating their postcolonial reading.
Nina’s Heavenly Delights offers a positive view of race in Scotland. For David
Martin-Jones (2009: 80), it “constructs a fantasy Glasgow in which all cross-
or intercultural desires are not only permitted, but also provide the recipe for
financial success”. Similarly, according to Jonathan Murray (2015: 122):
“Nina’s… utopian worldview involves the film’s celebratory depiction of
Glasgow/Scotland as an increasingly multicultural society. Immigrant Indian
influences are understood to have augmented the native culture into which
they have settled”. In addition, its “untrammelled multicultural optimism also
leads the film to argue that Indian characters and culture have benefitted from
the influence of the Scottish social sphere which they have relocated themselves
within” (Murray 2015: 122). For Murray, the film’s alternatives to patriarchal
structures are unsuccessful, but the diversity the film offers is still a positive
formation of a hybrid Scottish identity.
For example, there are three couples—one gay male, one lesbian and one
heterosexual—formed in the film, all of which are racially mixed. Nina’s sister-
in-law appropriates her husband’s culture by wearing a sari to the competition
finals, and Nina’s sister embraces ‘traditional’ Scottish identity through her
Highland dancing, which is accompanied by tartan and bagpipe music. Bobbi’s
dance troupe the Chutney Queens is the clearest example of the way the film
blends its cultures. The troupe is a racial mix of both white and Asian dancers;
they rehearse their Bollywood-style dancing to Western pop music. The
Chutney Queens’ performance costumes are a good example of this cultural
blending. The backing dancers wear shiny pink kilts in a fabric more typically
seen in Indian garments. Bobbi’s kilt, though, is made of leather and is circled
by a studded belt, alluding to LGBTQ subcultures. The Chutney Queens
therefore are a hybrid of white Scottish, Indian and queer culture that ties
together racial, national and gender identities (see Fig. 3.1).
However, for Churnjeet Mahn (2013: 326), “the mobilization of stereo-
types about Scotland and a vision of Scottish national identity is used to
erase the traces of friction between traditional, or normative, and non-nor-
mative sexualities”. Even though Nina’s Heavenly Delights’s sense of inclu-
sivity overshadows the disruptive possibilities of Nina’s sexuality (Mahn
2013: 324), ultimately it “lay[s] foundations for a productive subject iden-
tity that marks the film out against the prevailing trends in contemporary
films and critical discussions of female same-sex desire in the South Asian
diaspora” (Mahn 2013: 326).
In offering so many identities—racial, gendered and sexual—it would
appear that Nina’s Heavenly Delights weakens any sense of a unifying Scottish
identity. All of these identities, though, can be understood in a national
framework. According to Daniela Berghahn (2011: 130), “the theme of
46 E. TORRICELLI
Fig. 3.1 The Chutney Queens’ performance costumes in Nina’s Heavenly Delights
‘coming out’ in the diasporic family articulates a critique of fantasies of purity,

which simultaneously underpin certain traditional models of the family (based
on bloodline and descent, gender hierarchies and heteronormativity) and
nationalist ideologies (based on ethnic absolutism and other essentialising
concepts)”. Therefore, Nina and Lisa’s relationship’s acceptance by her fam-
ily is symbolic of other racial identities being accepted into a Scottish national
identity (Berghahn 2011: 141). Rather than acting in a fragmentary manner,
Nina’s sexuality supports the film’s construction of a hybrid Scottish national
identity.
Finally, Nina’s Heavenly Delights uses cooking as a metaphor to support its
approach to identity. The film places a great deal of symbolic value on food.
During the preparation for the curry competition, Parmar uses montages in
which there are dissolves between Nina’s father’s written recipes and dishes
cooking on the stove. For example, the words ‘garam masala’ float off the
recipe book to hover over the simmering pot before slowly, starting with the
bottom loop of the ‘g’, melting into the curry. As with Nina’s curries, which
are a blend of distinct ingredients, Scotland as constructed in Nina’s Heavenly
Delights contains a variety of identities that, though differentiated by race,
gender, sexuality and so on, come together to make up the nation (see Fig. 3.2).
To extend the metaphor, cooking permanently changes the ingredients and
transforms them into the curry. Likewise, as Bhabha suggests, the nation is
transformed by the hybridity of diasporic communities and other margin-
alised groups.
Fig. 3.2 Written ingredients dissolve into curry in Nina’s Heavenly Delights
Conclusion
Throughout the history of Scottish cinema, one can see a significant broaden-
ing of the concept of what it means to be Scottish. In the 1980s, rather than
simply moving away from the ‘traditional’ representations of Scotland that
could be seen in dominant cinemas, directors like Bill Forsyth constructed a
Scotland that was inclusive of both the traditional and the contemporary. Films
from the 1990s offered multiple versions of Scottish masculinity, though they
still constructed Scotland as a predominantly white male space. The films of the
next decade shifted away from this to offer hybrid Scottish identities that were
inclusive of other races, ethnicities, genders and sexualities. And this trend
seems to have continued into the 2010s. Under the Skin (2013), for example,
considers the outsider experience of what is arguably a female-presenting non-
binary gendered protagonist.
Rather than a negation of the concept of the national, one can see this diver-
sity as a reaffirmation of it in the way it redefines Scotland to make it inclusive
of other identities. For Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer (1988: 2):
One issue at stake, we suggest, is the potential break-up or deconstruction of

structures that determine what is regarded as culturally central and what is
regarded as culturally marginal. Ethnicity has emerged as a key issue as various
‘marginal’ practices […] are becoming de-marginalised at a time when ‘centred’
discourses of cultural authority and legitimations […] are becoming increasingly
de-centred and destabilised, called into question from within.
The described breakdown of binary relationships—centre/margin, black/

white and so on—deconstructs the belief that ethnicity is reserved for the
48 E. TORRICELLI
Other; whiteness is not homogeneous and is in fact comprised of different

ethnic identities (Julien and Mercer 1988: 5–6). In this way, the cinematic
engagement with the racial, ethnic, gendered or sexual Other undercuts the
idea of a stable, homogeneous nation and reveals national identities to be
already hybrid.

1. In what ways does diversity complicate the concept of a national identity?
How might it support it?
2. How do you define national cinema? Is it still a valid concept? Why
or why not?
3. In addition to the national or transnational, films can be classified as
regional, international, global and so on. What are the advantages of
using such categories? What are the disadvantages? Can you think of
other ways to categorise films? What are their advantages and
disadvantages?
4. Why are films labelled by nation, genre, style, authorship and so on?
What is the importance of labelling films to film studies as an academic
field? To film industries? To consumers?
References
Berghahn, Daniela. 2011. Queering the Family of Nation: Reassessing Fantasies of
Purity, Celebrating Hybridity in Diasporic Cinema. Transnational Cinemas 2
(2): 129–146.
Bhabha, Homi. 1998. The location of culture (1994). In Literary Theory: An Anthology,
ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 936–944. Malden: Blackwell Publishers.
Caughie, John. 1990. Representing Scotland: New Questions for Scottish Cinema. In
From Limelight to Satellite: A Scottish Film Book, ed. Eddie Dick, 13–30. London: BFI.
Craig, Cairns. 1982. Myths Against History: Tartanry and Kailyard in 19th-Century
Scottish Literature. In Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television, ed. Colin
McArthur, 7–15. London: BFI.
———. 1996. Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and British Culture.
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The Electoral Commission (UK). 2019. Results and Turnout at the EU Referendum.
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/who-we-are-and-what-we-do/elections-
and-referendums/past-elections-and-referendums/eu-referendum/results-and-
turnout-eu-referendum. Accessed 12 November 2019.
Goode, Ian. 2007. Different Trajectories: Europe and Scotland in Recent Scottish
Cinema. PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 4 (2): 1–11.
Hechter, Michael. 1975. Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National
Development 1536–1966. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Higson, Andrew. 2000. The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema. In Cinema and
Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, 63–74. London: Routledge.
Julien, Isaac, and Kobena Mercer. 1988. Introduction: De Margin and De Centre.
Screen 29 (4): 2–11.
Macnab, Geoffrey. 2006. Reviews: Films: Nina’s Heavenly Delights. Sight & Sound 16
(10): 74, 76.
Mahn, Churnjeet. 2013. The Queer Limits of Pratibha Parmar’s Nina’s Heavenly
Delights. Journal of Lesbian Studies 17 (3–4): 317–328.
Martin-Jones, David. 2009. Scotland: Global Cinema Genres, Modes and Identities.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
McArthur, Colin. 1982. Scotland and Cinema: The Iniquity of the Fathers. In Scotch
Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television, ed. Colin McArthur, 40–69. London: BFI.
McCrone, David. 2001. Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Nation. 2nd ed.
London: Routledge.
Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16 (3): 6–18.
Murray, Jonathan. 2007. Scotland. In The Cinema of Small Nations, ed. Mette Hjort
and Duncan Petrie, 76–92. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
———. 2015. The New Scottish Cinema. London: I. B. Tauris.
Nairn, Tom. 1981. The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism. 2nd ed.
London: Verso.
Petrie, Duncan. 2000. Screening Scotland. London: BFI.
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Schlessinger, Philip. 1990. Scotland, Europe and identity. In From Limelight to Satellite:
A Scottish Film Book, ed. Eddie Dick, 221–232. London: BFI.
Torricelli, Emily. 2017. Multicultural Glasgow: Imagining Scotland as a Space of
Cultural Intersection in Scots-Asian Films of the 2000s. Alphaville: Journal of Film
and Screen Media 13 (5): 90–104.
———. 2018. Digital Places, Feminine Spaces: Scotland Re-gendered in Twenty-First
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in the Documentaries of Pratibha Parmar. thirdspace 7 (2): 58–67.
CHAPTER 4
Questioning the ‘Normality Drama’:

The Representation of Disability
in Contemporary European Films
Eleanor Andrews
Definitions
Disability
The term ‘disability’ refers to a bodily condition or function which restricts a
person’s capacity to perform the activities of everyday life deemed to be regu-
lar. It may be a physical or mental condition that limits a person’s movements,
senses or activities, and it may be temporary, like a broken leg, or permanent
like blindness.
Normality Genre
The normality drama focuses on the life and experiences of a disabled protago-
nist, with its own set of genre conventions. The filmic depiction of the disabled
character underpins the representation of normality. The main theme is not the
disability, but the degree to which it can either define or validate its opposite:
normality. This normality is portrayed either through the contrast with able-
bodied characters or by the rejection of the impaired body by the disabled
character.
E. Andrews (*)
University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK

52 E. ANDREWS
Stereotype
A stereotype is a frequently oversimplified image or idea of a person or thing.
Stereotyping reduces people to a few, straightforward, essential characteristics,
which are represented as fixed. Stereotypes can be used in a negative way in the
media, for example, using terms such as ‘asylum seekers’ to produce a shortcut
for communication and information purposes. Stereotyping reduces, essen-
tialises, naturalises and fixes ‘difference’ and often occurs where there are
inequalities of power.
Theories of Comedy
There are several well-established theories of humour: (1) incongruity or
inappropriate, illogical juxtapositions, which are recognised and understood by
the audience or reader (Raskin 2008, passim); (2) feelings of superiority
sometimes combined with Schadenfreude (Morreall 2008: 211–220); (3)
release where laughter allows the diffusion of built-up tension (Freud 1976
[1905]); (4) pattern recognition theory, which suggests that comedy works
on the principle of repetition and surprise (Clarke 2008).
Introduction
In film and television, even in the twenty-first century and in Europe, disability
is frequently under- or misrepresented. There is often an absence of people
with any impairment, visible or invisible, in everyday situations. When they do
appear, these individuals are seldom shown as integral and productive members
of society, and the focus is on their impairments, not on their skills or personali-
ties. They are regularly depicted as incapable of fully participating in everyday
life. Michael Oliver (1990: 61) argues that in film and television “disabled
people continue to be portrayed as more than or less than human, rarely as
ordinary people doing ordinary things”. Martin F. Norden (1994: 1) notes
that, “most movies have tended to isolate disabled characters from their able-
bodied peers as well as from each other”. However, despite this absence and/
or misrepresentation, in recent years, scholars in disability studies and film
studies have demonstrated a heightened interest in the discourse on films about
people with impairments, including works by Brylla and Hughes (2016);
Chivers and Markotić (2010); Fraser (2013), (2016); Markotić (2016); Marr
(2013); Mogk (2013); Wilde (2016).
This chapter focuses on three European films which have as their theme the
life of a physically disabled character: The Sea Inside (2004), The Diving Bell
and the Butterfly (2007) and Untouchable (2011). The discourse of disability
in these films does not focus on the person with an impairment in any stereo-
typical role of villain, object of ridicule, victim or monster, which is discussed
later in the chapter. Rather, they follow a trajectory which will be examined in
relation to Paul Darke’s (1998) notion of the normality drama. The rationale
4 QUESTIONING THE ‘NORMALITY DRAMA’: THE REPRESENTATION… 53
for choosing these particular films from those that address other infirmities,
such as blindness or deafness, was a degree of similarity in the basic elements of
the films. In these works, all three protagonists are male and quadriplegic, two
through an accident and one through a stroke. All three have true-life narra-
tives where, to some extent, the disabled person manages to achieve a goal in
life despite their many difficulties and succeed either in romance or in publica-
tion of literary works.
Disability
The term ‘disability’ refers to the functional limitation of the individual caused
by physical, mental or sensory impairment, and handicap is the loss or limita-
tion of opportunities to take part in the normal life of the community on an
equal level with others due to physical or social barriers (Abidi et al. 2012).
Paul Hunt (1998: 8) considers that “the problem with disability lies not only
in the impairment of function and its effects on us individually, but also more
importantly, in the area of our relationship with ‘normal’ people”.
Representations of individuals in the discourse of disability in film are fre-
quently based on a medical model of disability, where the impairment is seen as
an illness of an individual person, to be conquered or eliminated. Richard
Rieser (2004: 19) argues, “the ‘medical model’ sees disabled people as the
problem. They need to be adapted to fit into the world as it is”. Films on dis-
ability often have the setting of a hospital or medical environment. This medi-
cal model contrasts with the social model of disability (Oliver 1983) where all
disabled people have the right to belong to and be valued in their local com-
munity. Rieser (21) comments that “using this model, you start by looking at
the strengths of the person with the impairment and at the physical and social
barriers that obstruct them at school, college, home or work”. Where the med-
ical model sees disabled people as passive receivers of services aimed at cure or
management, the social model considers them as active fighters for equality
working in partnership with allies.
Normality Drama
The term normality drama was coined by Darke to describe a film genre which
focuses on the life and experiences of a disabled protagonist. Darke (1998:
192–196) bases his theory on the earlier work of Rick Altman (1987) on the
Hollywood musical. Darke (184) argues that this genre “uses abnormal—
impaired—characters to deal with a perceived threat to the dominant social
hegemony of normality”. He suggests that the normality drama has its own set
of genre conventions, with the filmic depiction of the disabled character used
to underpin the representation of normality. This normality is portrayed either
through the able-bodied characters or by denial, by the character with disabili-
ties, of their disabled body. Unlike the classic narrative structure suggested by
Tzvetan Todorov (1977: 45), where the plot begins in a state of equilibrium,
54 E. ANDREWS
goes through a disruption and then returns by the end of the narrative, through
a series of events, to a new equilibrium, the normality drama often begins in a
situation of confusion and instability. Nevertheless, it follows a similar narrative
arc, so that, by its completion, there is some degree of restoration of stability.
This denouement, Darke (184) implies, provides a satisfying and straightfor-
ward solution “to the highly complex social ‘problem’ of abnormality and dis-
ability”. The conclusion may end positively, where the disabled character is
normalised into society by success in the public sphere or marriage, or in a
more serious and negative narrative, the work ends in suicide or death. The
narrative is firmly placed in a medical, rather than a social, model of disability,
thus reinforcing and reaffirming the assumed dominance of normality in soci-
ety. Darke (187) justifies his designation normality drama genre rather than
disability genre because he states that “the central theme is not the impairment
or the abnormality but the degree to which it can either define or validate its
opposite: normality”.
Freak Shows
In the era before the cinema, the public was fascinated by outward physical
manifestations of inward wickedness, often associated with ugliness, deformity
and scars (Browne 1963; Lombroso 2006; Wright 2013). This led to the
nineteenth-century interest in so-called freak shows which had developed from
the practice of displaying unusual people such as bearded ladies, conjoined
twins, armless and legless individuals, giants, dwarfs and other physical anoma-
lies in hostelries and in the street. Lisa Holden and Fran Pheasant-Kelly (2016:
197) suggest a link between the public attraction to these Victorian ‘freak’ shows
and the way the cinema audience is captivated by films where, for example, the
villain has a facial disfigurement, creating what they call a ‘freak-show aesthetic’.
Stereotypes
A stereotype is an often widely held but fixed and frequently oversimplified
image or idea of a person or thing. Stereotyping reduces people to a few,
straightforward, essential characteristics, which are represented as fixed by
nature (Hall 1997: 257). Traditionally, there are several discernible stereotypes
of people with disabilities in film (Longmore 2003; Norden 1994). Joseph
Merrick (John Hurt) in The Elephant Man (1980) is an example of a sweet,
innocent and conceivably pathetic character. Occasionally, the disabled indi-
vidual may be involved in a miracle cure and will be returned to an able-bodied
state, leading to a positive happy ending, such as The Light that Came (1909)
where a blind entertainer has his sight restored after an operation. Lauri
E. Klobas (1988: xii–xiii) notes that this optimistic type of film about the dis-
abled became the benchmark for decades. This narrative arc is depicted in the
Italian film, Salvo (2013). The title character (Saleh Bakri) is a bodyguard and
hitman for a Mafia boss (Mario Pupella). While searching for an enemy
mafioso, he meets the rival’s blind sister, Rita (Sara Serraiocco), whose sight
gradually begins to return after Salvo inexplicably spares her from assassination.
An undefeated character like Rita may be termed a ‘Super-Crip’ in a narrative
of triumph over tragedy. This can also be found in the French film In Harmony
(2015) where horse trainer and stuntman Marc Guermont (Albert Dupontel)
is badly injured and becomes paraplegic, but by the end of the narrative has
learnt to ride again.
Another stereotype of disablement is the victim or object of violence, for
example, paraplegic, Blanche Hudson (Joan Crawford), who is tortured by her
former child star sister, Baby Jane Hudson (Bette Davis), in Whatever Happened
to Baby Jane? (1962) or Susy Hendrix (Audrey Hepburn) in Wait Until Dark
(1967), who is a recently blinded woman pursued by criminals. Some disabled
characters are depicted as sinister or evil, and this is examined by Holden and
Pheasant-Kelly (2016) in films such as Casino Royale (2006), The Dark Knight
(2008) and Skyfall (2012). The disabled person may be laughable or the target
of jokes as with the lead (Tom Hanks) in Forrest Gump (1994), or a vengeful
personage with a grievance to pursue, such as Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman)
in Hook (1991). Sometimes the person with disability is considered as “the
‘Saintly Sage’, a pious older person with a disability (almost always blindness)
who serves as a voice of reason and conscience in a chaotic world” (Norden
1994: 131), for instance, the blind hermit (O. P. Heggie) in The Bride of
Frankenstein (1935).
Generally, the disabled character is portrayed as non-sexual (Klobas 1988:
115) or incapable of forming a worthwhile relationship, for example, the
Vietnam War veteran, Ron Kovic (Tom Cruise), in Born on the Fourth of July
(1989). More recent films, however, have countered this stereotype, in particu-
lar, the Spanish documentary, Yes, we f∗∗k (2015), which explores the sexuality
of people with disabilities through six different narratives. The film uses explicit
sexual images to disrupt the dominant perception of people with impairments
that fixes them in a permanent state of infantilisation. Away from these more
traditional examples, a number of European films featuring disabled characters
are black comedies involving two or more friends. In the Franco-Belgian pro-
duction Aaltra (2004), two rivals become impaired, following a horrendous
farm accident, and collaborate to get compensation. In the Italian film Infelici
e contenti (1992), a blind man and a wheelchair user join forces for fraudulent
purposes. The Belgian road comedy, Come as You Are (2011) has three dis-
abled protagonists: Jozef, who is partially sighted; Philip, a paraplegic; and
Lars, a wheelchair user. They travel to Spain, desperately longing for a coming-
of-age experience and an end to their virginity.
“Based on a True Story”

Each of the main films under discussion here is based on a factual account. This
is considered to give authenticity and a degree of authority to the film. There
are many such films which use supposed biographical legitimacy, the so-called
56 E. ANDREWS
bio-pic, where the words “based on a true story” are emblazoned on promo-
tional material, although the validity of the depiction is questioned by some
scholars (George F. Custen 1992).
The Spanish film, The Sea Inside, tells the story of a quadriplegic man and is
based on the real-life account of Ramón Sampedro (Javier Bardem), who wants
to end his life through assisted suicide. His quadriplegia is the result of a diving
accident in his 20s. The protagonist has been disabled for nearly 30 years at the
start of the narrative and is involved in a campaign in support of euthanasia and
the right to end life. In the film, it is Ramón’s friend Rosa (Lola Dueñas) who
helps him to commit suicide. In real life, Ramón died in 1998 from potassium
cyanide poisoning; several days later, his close friend, Ramona Maneiro (Rosa
in the film), was arrested and charged with assisting his suicide but released due
to lack of evidence.
The French film, Untouchable, is inspired by a true story of the encounter
between wealthy aristocrat Philippe Pozzo di Borgo, a quadriplegic, and a
young North-African man named Abdel Sellou. Pozzo di Borgo and Sellou
are seen at the end of the production, adding to the notion of authenticity.
In a scene near the start of Untouchable, the new carer, in the film called
Bakary ‘Driss’ Bassari (Omar Sy), takes a call on a mobile phone for his
employer, Philippe (François Cluzet). The location is a stylish room in
Philippe’s Paris home, where silver candelabra are placed on the mantelpiece,
together with Fabergé eggs, a visual reminder of the egg which Driss earlier
stole for his aunt. This locality and the props reinforce the social, rather than
the physical, difference between the two characters. On the right-hand side,
Philippe is sitting reading in a setting where the iconography of the disabled
person (the wheelchair, the mouth-held pointer) is very clear to the audi-
ence. Driss sits on the left-hand side of the frame, engrossed in his own con-
cerns. His gaze is downwards, focused on his MP3 player. He is seated in a
normal armchair positioned lower than Philippe to connote his subordinate
status as an employee. In his outstretched left hand, he is proffering a phone
towards Philippe who is looking back at him with resignation on his face.
This unreflective act of casually passing the device to his employer, oblivious
of the fact that, as a quadriplegic, Philippe is unable to take the apparatus
from him, reinforces the attitude that Driss has towards Philippe. Driss does
not see him as a poor invalid who needs to be helped every step of the way
(“I keep forgetting”), but as another man dealing with his own set of prob-
lems (see Fig. 4.1). This aspect of Driss’s personality is one of the traits that
Philippe likes about him. Philippe later tells a friend, Antoine (Grégoire
Oestermann), that Driss is the only person who does not treat him with pity
or compassion, but as an equal. As the film proceeds, Driss becomes more
aware of the problems faced by a quadriplegic as he cares for Philippe, but he
continues to take this normative stance, which no others who surround
Philippe are able to do.
Fig. 4.1 Driss handing over the mobile phone in Untouchable
Mise-en-scène and Cinematography
The main setting for The Sea Inside is Ramón’s bedroom within the farmhouse
where he lives with his family in north-west Spain. The rugged landscape of
Galicia frequently features connoting tradition and tenacity, while the solid ties
seen in the family characters surrounding Ramón are resonant of the strength
of the bonds of Spanish domestic life. Despite the fact that Ramón cannot see
the ocean from his room, the beach features powerfully in his memory and
fantasy world. Nursing equipment, as well as a wheelchair and adapted trans-
port are shown, giving the narrative an overall medical rather than social per-
spective to the disability, but this is countered by the ethical discussions which
permeate the dialogue concerning Ramón’s desire to die at a time of his own
choosing—Ramón’s family is important, not only in the day-to-day caring for
the protagonist but also in their part in the debate about euthanasia. Close-ups
of their weathered faces are set against the Galician landscape. Joaquín
Sampedro (Joan Dalmau), Ramón’s father, voices his dismay at Ramón’s
desired prospects, “There’s only one thing worse than having your son die
before you… it’s him wanting to”. His brother, José (Celso Bugallo) is angrier,
as it becomes clear that he has had to give up his fishing business to look after
Ramón. Ramón’s main carer and sister-in law, Manuela (Mabel Rivera), is a
strong woman who is keeping the family together. She is careworn, but gentle
and loving with him, her eyes shown as ever alert to his needs, her ears always
open to his requests. Ramón’s resourceful nephew, Javier (Tamar Novas), is the
son he never had, and Ramón’s poem “To My Son” is dedicated to him. These
able-bodied helpers of three generations could be argued to be the normalising
element against which Ramón’s disability can be measured. None of them want
58 E. ANDREWS
him to die, and none of them can understand his reasons for wanting to go
because, for them, he is part of their daily lives, and their interaction with him
gives their lives purpose. Surely, this should be the same for him?
The mise-en-scène of Untouchable has no scenes in a hospital setting, and
although there is medical equipment in Philippe’s bedroom with a wheelchair
and adapted transport, the rest of the décor in his house is elegant and luxuri-
ous. There is also a great dissimilarity between Driss’s home in the outskirts of
Paris, the Banlieue, and Philippe’s opulent house. The Banlieue has become a
synonym for the racial other. This space embodies the stereotypes of working-
class immigrants, typically of Middle Eastern and North-African descent, who
are regarded as aimless delinquents at best, and imminent terrorists at worst. In
the cramped flat, which Driss shares with his aunt, several small children and
two teenagers, the cinematography is close and claustrophobic. The disparity
between his home and Philippe’s house is seen, in particular, in the bathrooms.
In the flat, the tiny bathroom has only a half-sized bath, while a washing
machine is squeezed into a corner. Driss has no privacy here, and other family
members enter this area while he is in the bath, brushing their teeth and crowd-
ing the space with their noisy ablutions (see Fig. 4.2). Driss angrily leaves the
bathtub wearing a vivid green towel, in a maelstrom of noise and confusion.
Later, this restricted area is contrasted to the sumptuous bathroom that Driss
has as Philippe’s employee. There is a look of amazement on Driss’s face when
this spacious area, with its peaceful atmosphere, is slowly revealed, almost in
the style of a hotel advertisement, to the sound of Franz Schubert’s ‘Ave
Maria’. A free-standing bath is positioned under a crystal chandelier in the
middle of a sparkling pastel-coloured bathroom, with white towels and
Fig. 4.2 The cramped bathroom in the Banlieue

expensive-looking products tastefully placed around on glass tables. Philippe’s

personal assistant, Yvonne (Anne Le Ny), announces to Driss that this is the
exclusive en-suite to his room. The contrast in the mise-en-scène of these two
sequences, juxtaposing restriction with openness, public use with privacy, shab-
biness with good taste, lurid colours with neutral shades, again underlines the
sharp distinctions between the social conditions, but not the physical ability of
the two men.
Scenes in the Banlieue are frequently shot at night, with a dark or grey
colour palette, reminiscent of Hate (1995), with all the racial and social ten-
sions implied by comparison with that film. On the other hand, Philippe’s
house is full of light, lustre, colour and valuable artworks. The cinematography
is also different in the two locations. In the Banlieue, there is considerable use
of a handheld camera, with many close-ups, in particular, of Driss, giving a
tense, unsentimental feel to the scenes. In contrast, the beautiful interiors in
Philippe’s home are displayed through camerawork similar to a heritage film,
where the camera style is painterly, often with slightly high-angled shots, not
taken from a character point of view, and with an engaging mise-en-scène.
Many shots, taken from Driss’s point of view, are through glass and windows,
using these as a transparent barrier where he can see Philippe, but he is not
close to him. These sequences, especially towards the end of the film, give a
sense of Philippe’s entrapment. Driss is free on the outside, while Philippe is
confined behind the glass, both in his disabled body and in his depression. The
seasons clearly change on the screen from winter to spring, connoting the
thawing of Philippe’s personality and the warming of the atmosphere in his
household once Driss is there.
Music
The music used in The Sea Inside emphasises the European nature of the works,
featuring many well-known pieces. The classical soundtrack is not only an indi-
cation of Ramón’s cultured persona, it is also appropriate to the particular
moment in the narrative and features stories of love and betrayal. These include
the ‘Prisoners’ Chorus’ from Beethoven’s Fidelio, “May the wind be gentle”
from Mozart’s Così fan tutte, the Prelude to Act 3 of Wagner’s Tristan and
Isolde and “None shall sleep” from Puccini’s Turandot.
The main element that the protagonists of Untouchable share is their love of
music, although of different types, Philippe enjoying classical music, while
Driss prefers a contemporary style. This difference in musical taste becomes
most noticeable in Philippe’s birthday party sequence. At the end of a chamber
concert, Philippe asks the musicians to play some well-known pieces of
European music, including from ‘The Four Seasons’ by Antonio Vivaldi. As an
example of cultural diffusion, Driss reacts to these pieces by commenting that
they are used in official situations, such as putting a customer ‘on hold’ on the
telephone. To share his own preference in music, Driss then plays ‘Boogie
Wonderland’ by Earth Wind and Fire and dances, while encouraging the others
60 E. ANDREWS
at the party to join in. His captivating moves engage everyone but also empha-
sise his mobility in contrast to Philippe’s stillness. The choice of this American
music over Francophone hip-hop is one way of widening the film’s appeal
beyond French-speaking countries. However, mostly, in this film, music is used
as a definer of class and not the state of physical ability of an individual. By the
end of the film, there has been an exchange; Driss has found classical music,
while Philippe now enjoys more contemporary songs.
Narrative Structure
The narrative structure of The Sea Inside is linear, starting in the present with
Ramón discussing the campaign about the right to die with dignity with his
friend, the activist Gené (Clara Segura). This is interspersed with several flash-
backs to the moment of the accident as well as two fantasy sequences. In the
first, Ramón seems to leave his bed and fly across the countryside, meeting his
lawyer, Julia (Belén Rueda), on the beach and kissing her. As with dreams
about flying, this fantasy liberates and empowers Ramón, returning him to the
physically strong, actively sensual man that he was before his accident. In a later
scene, he appears to get out of bed and moves to smell, touch and kiss Julia.
This time, however, the scene ends with a morph into a real kiss between the
two characters, showing a progression in their relationship.
Flashbacks to the moment of the accident occur three times, with ominous,
indistinct images from beneath Ramón who is lying face down in the water, in
a near-death situation. The repetition of this scene, using the same cinematog-
raphy and mise-en-scène of the almost lifeless body of Ramón floating in the
water, could arguably be seen as a representation of post-traumatic stress disor-
der (PTSD). It is suggested by doctors and scholars that PTSD is caused by a
response, sometimes delayed, to an unpredictable, overwhelming and poten-
tially catastrophic event. This may take the form of recurring, disturbing fanta-
sies, dreams, thoughts or behaviours stemming from the event (Caruth 1995:
4). Matthew Marr (2013) has a different, but compelling, rationalisation of
Ramón’s emotional behaviour, suggesting that Ramón has bipolar disorder.
He argues:
… what has been overlooked is the more subtle spotlight Amenábar’s much-
debated film places on the quiet tyranny of undiagnosed mental illness: a threat
to authentic individual autonomy within any society, but especially in a setting
like the Galician countryside of this film, where public awareness of mental health
resources remains under-developed, and an Iberian-Catholic ideal of emotional
stoicism remains highly ingrained in relation to paradigms of masculinity. (97)
The protagonist of Untouchable is also male and quadriplegic as the result of

a paragliding accident. This sudden turn of events takes place long before the
start of the film, and there is no visual flashback, the details being given only in
the dialogue. The narrative starts with a high-speed car chase with Driss and
Philippe being pursued by the police. They are eventually surrounded, and
Driss claims that Philippe must be urgently driven to the intensive care unit.
Philippe fakes a seizure and the deceived police officers guide them to the hos-
pital. This opening may confuse the audience as to the film’s genre, suggesting
a gangster movie or a thriller. Once the characters have been established,
Philippe as a person with a disability, who has a sense of humour and likes a
gamble, Driss as a risk-taker who can think quickly to resolve a difficult situa-
tion, the film has a long linear flashback to the start of Driss and Philippe’s
relationship. At the point when this story catches up with the opening, which
is briefly shown again, the film moves towards its conclusion.
In addition to the themes of disability, class and race, Untouchable is a com-
edy, involving the spiritual restoration and healing of both leading characters
and some of the minor ones. There are several well-established humour theo-
ries. Incongruity theory (Raskin 2008) emphasises inappropriate, illogical jux-
tapositions, which are recognised and understood by the audience or reader.
Release theory (Freud 1976 [1905]) maintains that laughter is a mechanism
which reduces psychological tension. The superiority theory of humour, some-
times combined with Schadenfreude (Morreall 2008: 211–220), traces back to
Aristotle (1997: 5) who argued that we laugh at inferior or ugly individuals
because we feel joy at being superior to them. Pattern recognition theory
(Clarke 2008) suggests that one aspect of comedy works on the principle of
repetition and another on surprise.
In Untouchable, the main source of the humour is incongruity, where events
are contrasted in an anomalous way. For instance, Driss’s anti-authoritarian
approach in Philippe’s cheerless house is refreshing. Occasionally, the humour
is in a taboo and crude vein and reveals a superiority slant. Thus, the audience
feels both uncomfortable and disdainful, when Driss is told, in a convoluted
way, that he has to perform some very intimate actions concerning Philippe’s
bodily functions. Repetition in some scenes is also a basis for humour, so the
audience experiences the various interviews, the trying on of different styles of
clothing before the first meeting with Eléonore (Dorothée Brière), the con-
trasting encounters with the owner of the incorrectly parked car and the trim-
ming of Philippe’s moustaches into various shapes.
The Discourse of Disabled Sexuality

A sequence in The Sea Inside shows a series of still photos of Ramón’s travels all
over the world when young, featuring many different attractive women and
revealing him as a ‘ladies’ man’. Despite his later situation, where the discourse
of disability stereotype might portray the disabled character as incapable of
forming a meaningful relationship, in this film, two very different women fall
in love with the protagonist. The first is Julia, the lawyer engaged to put his
point of view in the courts. She is a happily married woman with a devoted
husband, Germán (Alberto Jiménez). It is Julia who discovers Ramón’s poetry
and manages to get it published. She partly understands his standpoint, since
she is also disabled with CADASIL syndrome and faces a bleak future with this
degenerative disease, precipitating strokes and progressing towards the
62 E. ANDREWS
dementia which the audience witnesses at the end of the film. The other woman
is Rosa, a working-class factory worker and single mother, who visits Ramón
out of curiosity and falls for him because he is straight talking and kind, whereas
many of her partners have been cruel or even violent.
In Untouchable, sexuality and pleasure are part of the connection between
the two men. Driss discovers that Philippe can still experience sensual gratifica-
tion through having his ears massaged, and brings in a masseuse for this pur-
pose, while employing another for his own needs. Driss is the driving force
behind contacting Philippe’s penfriend, Eléonore, and thrusts Philippe into the
romantic encounter at the end of the film. The film has an epilogue stating that
the real-life Philippe married and had children, which runs contrary to the ste-
reotype of the disabled person as non-sexual or incapable of forming a signifi-
cant relationship. Gender and sexuality stereotypes are seen in the character of
Magalie, a very attractive woman with whom Driss tries to flirt throughout the
film. However, at the end, it is revealed that she is a lesbian, in a relationship
with a woman known as Fréd(erique). Driss has a conventional reaction to this
information, being surprised at the facts of the situation, confused by this
image of a gay woman and then embarrassed by his own behaviour both before
and after the reveal.
Case Study: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian

Schnabel, 2007)
The French film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a biographical drama
taken mainly from the point of view of protagonist, Jean-Dominique Bauby
(Mathieu Amalric), a French actor, author and journalist, who, in 1995 at the
age of 43, had a stroke. Diagnosed with the extremely rare condition, ‘locked-
in syndrome’, he was left completely paralysed and unable to breathe, swallow
or speak, but he was capable of understanding what was being said to him and
what was happening around him. The only part of his body he had any control
over was his left eyelid, which he could blink, and this became his only form of
communication.
Although based on a true story, there were numerous and controversial
changes between what happened in real life and what is presented in the film.
The adapter, Ronald Harwood, based his screenplay on Bauby’s memoirs and
accounts by Bauby’s erstwhile partner and mother of his children, Sylvie de la
Rochefoucauld (called Céline Desmoulins in the film and played by Emmanuelle
Seigner), but made minor factual alterations, notably about the number of
children the couple had—two in real life, but three on screen. Harwood felt
that any changes that he made between the book and the film did not change
the meaning or spirit of Bauby’s life. He added:
I took what she [de la Rochefoucauld] told me as gospel. […] I don’t believe in
research. You have to tell a story in a movie. Sometimes the facts disturb all that.
I was asked to adapt, and that was what I decided to do. (Arnold 2008)
However, friends and close family of Bauby criticised the film, especially the
emphasis on the ex-partner’s saintly devotion to the patient, compared with
the seeming indifference of Bauby’s mistress, Florence (called Inès in the film
and played by Agathe de La Fontaine), which they claimed was, in fact, the
reverse (Arnold 2008).
As with the other two films, the onset of the disability is sudden. The Diving
Bell and the Butterfly begins with the protagonist awaking from the post-stroke
coma. Sights and sounds come in fragments, giving the viewer the sense of
disorientation experienced by Bauby. Neither he, nor the audience, can com-
prehend what is happening. The point of view is very narrow, solely from the
character’s perspective. It soon becomes clear to the character, the medical staff
surrounding him and the audience that Bauby has lost the power of speech, as
well as the ability to move. However, his thoughts, fears and opinions are heard
by the audience through voice-over. For the first section of the film, the point
of view continues to be the confined one of the protagonist. Visiting doctors,
the medical team and friends are all reduced to close-up faces, bending over
Bauby to be in his line of vision. He has no control of whether the window is
left open or whether the television is tuned in to some inane show. In one dis-
turbing scene, a surgeon decides to sew up his right eyelid to prevent infection.
Again, this is experienced from Bauby’s perspective, the surgeon approaching
the camera in close-up with the needle. Bauby’s voiced-over protestations and
fears remain unheard, except by the audience. At this early stage in the film, the
audience has no idea even of Bauby’s appearance.
Later, the camera moves away from this very restricted outlook, and the
audience encounters a wider angle of Bauby with members of his family, as well
as therapists and doctors. With the help of his speech therapist, Sandrine
Fichou, renamed in the film Henriette Durand (Marie-Josée Croze), Bauby
learns to communicate by blinking, following a French-language frequency-
ordered alphabet system. By this painstaking method, he manages to commu-
nicate with those around him and even succeeds in ‘dictating’ to ghostwriter
Claude Mendibil (Anne Consigny), a book which is published shortly before
his death. After the initial tight focus on the protagonist’s point of view, later
shots including Bauby’s figure depict a distorted face and limbs. Further into
the film, the scenes of Bauby with his family on the beach on Father’s Day
display a wideness and freedom in the cinematography in contrast to the dismal
entrapping hospital interiors, where he is often left alone with just the televi-
sion for company.
The location for the present and for much of The Diving Bell and the
Butterfly is the Berck hospital in the northern French department of Pas-de-
Calais and its environs. As in The Sea Inside, nursing equipment as well as a
wheelchair are shown, giving the narrative an overall medical rather than social
perspective to the disability. Although the hospital interior is visually universal,
the flashback scenes show more recognisable French settings, in particular, in
Paris and Lourdes. This is an example of what David Bass (1997: 93), in his
article about Rome on film, describes as the ‘armchair tourism’ of the film
64 E. ANDREWS
cartolina (‘postcard film’) such as William Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953),

where a fragmented visual version of the city is presented as validation of pres-
ence in the place and where editing creates a spatial ellipsis of all the highlights
of a visit, which treats the city as a type of museum. The flashback sequence in
Lourdes is triggered by a priest, suggesting a visit to the shrine where it is
believed the sick can be healed. In the flashback, Bauby is spending time with
his mistress, Inès. The sequence also has a postcard-like quality, but it contrasts
the genuinely held beliefs of those visiting the place of pilgrimage with the
trashy souvenirs which are on sale there. Ironically, his pre-stroke self observes
with pity the many wheelchair users that he encounters in the town. This is an
example of the normality drama, where there is a sharp contrast between the
able bodied and the impaired, suggesting that only the fit and healthy can
achieve goals in life.
The title of both the book and the film comes from the two aspects that
Bauby experiences in the ‘locked-in’ state: the diving bell and the butterfly.
When he feels frustrated and restricted by his lack of speech and physical move-
ment, images are seen of an old-fashioned, heavy diving suit, with a totally
enclosed brass helmet. This cumbersome suit is submerged in the sea and is
falling into the depths slowly, and out of control. His first full communication
to Henriette is “I want to die”. In this discouraged, confined state of mind, he
imagines his life parallel to that of his elderly father (Max von Sydow), whose
lack of mobility traps him in his flat. With a sense of irony, there are flashbacks
to Bauby helping his father as he himself will be helped after the stroke. He also
compares himself to his friend, Pierre Roussin (Niels Arestrup), who was held
captive in solitary confinement for four years in Beirut. Roussin attempts to
encourage Bauby by telling him, “Hold fast to the human inside you, and you
will survive”. He further relates to the fictional Noirtier de Villefort in
Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo (1844). This character is also in
a wheelchair and uses blinking to communicate. Like the identifiable scenes in
Paris, this introduction of a well-known novel intensifies the French cultural
perspective of the film. During the diving bell sequences, not only does Bauby
feel the anger and frustration of his current situation, he also reflects on all his
past failures and disappointments. These bitter, destructive emotions are envi-
sioned on screen by images of falling rocks, shattering at the base of a cliff. The
end of the film shows a resolution of these sentiments, and a suggestion of a
peaceful outcome to Bauby’s life, when the tumbling shards of the glacier are
seen reforming in reverse filming.
However, at other times, the creative part of him, with his undamaged intel-
lect, realises that his imagination can soar out of his impaired body, like a but-
terfly emerging from a chrysalis. This notion leads to a number of fantasy
sequences—which also exist in the book. Rather than recalling events in his
pre-stroke body, Bauby realises that he can imagine anything, and so he fanta-
sises about the actor Marlon Brando and visualises a huge meal of seafood. He
also envisages the imperial visit on May 4, 1864 of Empress Eugenie, who was
the patroness of the Maritime Hospital at Berck. Once again, this gives a
specifically French cultural reference to this episode. Freed from his disability,
like an unconstrained butterfly on the wing, he imagines himself rising from his
wheelchair to kiss the Empress who has come to see him. In this single scene
we see both the cultivated and the sensual man who is locked into his failing
body. This is a persuasive example of the normality drama where Bauby’s dis-
abled present persona is juxtaposed to an idealised, romanticised version of
himself.
In certain places, the music heightens the butterfly-like sense of freedom
that Bauby experiences in letting his mind wander at will. Two pieces in par-
ticular enrich the ending of the film. As the pre-stroke Bauby drives his new car
around Paris, the shots are accompanied by Jean Constantin’s title music from
François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). In this latter film, Paris, and in par-
ticular the Eiffel Tower, is displayed in postcard style. As Bauby continues on
his journey, the stroke hits him, and the soundtrack plays Charles Trenet’s La
Mer. This quintessential French song is again redolent of Gallic culture, and its
use recalls within the diegesis of the film, and foreshadows in the real story,
happier times with the family on the beach.
The narrative structure of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly has a linear pro-
gression from Bauby’s post-stroke awakening to the publication of his book,
with many flashbacks to earlier points in his life in a variety of locations, includ-
ing photo shoots for Elle magazine, where he had been the editor, as well as the
visit to Lourdes and scenes around Paris. Going against the frequently used
stereotype of the non-sexual invalid, Bauby is surrounded by very attractive
women during his illness, just as in his able-bodied life. Harwood got to know
the real-life women as he wrote the screenplay. He said, “All the women were
so good-looking […] All fell in love with him. They found him deeply attrac-
tive” (Arnold 2008). The death, which concludes The Diving Bell and the
Butterfly, although wished for by the protagonist, is not deliberately expedited,
as in The Sea Inside, but it is a result of the many incapacities which Bauby had
suffered.
Conclusion
All three films examined in this chapter enjoyed great success at the box office
throughout the world and received several awards.1 Although these films take
place in two different countries, with film cartolina elements depicting their
individual locations—the rugged landscape of Galicia, the famous sights of
Paris, the austere Normandy sea coast—there is commonality here as well: the
medicalised settings, which occur at some point in each film; the relative sim-
plicity of the narrative structures and symbolism; the soundtracks’ use of music
widely known throughout Europe. Ultimately, all three films have a universal
appeal, seen through a European filter.
The question this chapter sought to answer was the extent to which these
contemporary European films deliver stereotypical representations of people
with disabilities, following Paul Darke’s notion of the normality drama. Within
66 E. ANDREWS
Darke’s definition, the quadriplegic protagonists in The Diving Bell and the
Butterfly and The Sea Inside reject their impaired body and, in both cases, wish
for death. Both films feature the disabled person as the focus of pity in a medi-
calised setting and, in particular, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, is filmed
from the protagonist’s point of view. The films depict the able-bodied former
self of the leading characters in flashback, and it is this normality which is
longed for. This is manifested in these films when Bauby and Ramón fantasise
about what they could do if their bodies returned to the state they were in
before their trauma. These two films conform to Darke’s concept of the nor-
mality drama.
Because of its comedic tone and the fact that it addresses issues other than
disability, Untouchable differs from the other two films. One factor that renders
this film as not being a normality drama is that the men learn from one another,
instead of the one-way learning mode that occurs in many films about disabil-
ity. Driss, for instance, shares a joint with his employer, which eases Philippe’s
pain and makes him more relaxed. He has Philippe’s electric wheelchair modi-
fied, and insists on using the Maserati Quattroporte, so that Philippe can enjoy
some of the speed which formerly thrilled him. For his part, Philippe intro-
duces Driss to paragliding, and both men experience the powerful movement,
which gives Philippe such a sense of freedom. At first, Philippe has a degree of
superiority, since he was experienced in this form of sport, while Driss is very
nervous and uncomfortable. However, by the end of the flight, the men are in
a more equal situation. The development of Driss is as important as the evolu-
tion of Philippe, and their transfer of emotions, knowledge and skills is mutual.
The film does not show Philippe wishing for death as an end to any anguish
arising from his impairment. His comparison with the able-bodied Driss is bal-
anced, since both men have talents, desires and preferences, which they
exchange in the course of the narrative. Untouchable is therefore arguably not
a normality drama.

. Apart from disability, what are the most important themes in Untouchable?
1
2. Discuss the positioning within the narrative and the significance of the
fantasies in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly?
3. Why is the choice of music so important in The Sea Inside?
4. To what extent could James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) be considered a
film about disability?
5. Is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) just about voyeurism or is
disability a key feature in this film?
6. Can you think of any other European films addressing disability that
might be considered outside the category of the normality drama?
7. These three films have as their protagonists men with quadriplegia. How
are other disabilities represented in film, for instance, blindness
or deafness?
Note
1. For details see https://www.imdb.com/.
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CHAPTER 5
Ecocritical Perspectives on Nordic Cinema:

From Nature Appreciation to Social
Conformism
Pietari Kääpä
Definitions
Ecocriticism
A mode of critical introspection on the interrelations between humanity and
the natural environment, emphasizing approaches to cultural production that
interrogate human culture’s prioritization of its own value systems but also
considers the ways these systems infiltrate all levels of human thinking.
Ecocinema
The study of cinema’s relationship with the natural environment, focusing on how
cinema both represents and appropriates nature through its discursive practices.
Anthropocentrism
A philosophical and cultural approach that prioritizes human subjectivity and
experience over other living organisms or states of being. Anthropocentric
thinking sees all experience as mandated by human self-awareness and the need
to sustain humanity’s position as the pinnacle on the evolutionary chain.
P. Kääpä (*)
Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, The University of Warwick,
Coventry, UK
e-mail: P.Kaapa@warwick.ac.uk

70 P. KÄÄPÄ
Ecocentrism
A philosophical perspective that seeks to explore alternative modes of thinking
on human domination by, for example, highlighting nature’s independence
from human control or by emphasizing humanity’s embeddedness and ulti-
mate reliance on sustaining ecosystemic sustainability.
Exceptionalism
A discursive mode that sees a (national, regional) culture considers its values
and patterns of behaviour as leading models for others to emulate whilst
enabling it to congratulate itself for its own economic and societal successes.
Introduction
The Finnish film Rare Exports (2011) culminates with a battle between hostile
‘man-elves’ (far from the cuddly Hallmark imaginary of Santa Claus with their
shrivelled old naked bodies and hostile expressions) and Pietari, the ten-year-
old protagonist, who, along with a quirky band of local hunters, manages to
stop these hostile elves from releasing the real Santa—a towering monster
known for spanking naughty children to death—from captivity in the Nordic
permafrost. After Santa is defeated, the elves are dispersed and Rare Exports
ends with a montage of the hunters dressing up the now-docile elves in bright
red Christmas coats and cuddly white beards and shipping them off as ‘authen-
tic Santas’.
In a set of short films preceding the release of the feature film, we find out
how the hunters perfected the art of capturing, cleaning, teaching and packag-
ing these elves as ‘authentic’ Finnish Christmas commodities. While the com-
mercialization of Christmas is certainly a target of criticism in these short films,
they also lay claim to the Santa Claus myth, emphasizing the conception that
Santa Claus is said to originate from the Korvatunturi fell in northern Finland.
This is an instance of reclaiming Santa back from its ‘coca-colonized’ image but
also a politicized strategy to create a self-referential ironic impression of
Finland’s cultural exports at the global markets. In Fig. 5.1, a pivotal scene in
the feature film sees the protagonist come face to face with the army of dirty
hostile elves as the visuals of the film provide a pointed contrast between the
untamed ‘natural’ (and nude) elves, the snowy setting, and the human boy,
gazing in fear and wonder at this natural/national spectacle. The appearance of
the elves takes on a much more pointed contrast later in the film as we observe
the hunters domesticating the authentic wildness of the elves, literally repur-
posing these anthropomorphic wild creatures from an indigenous natural
resource to a market commodity, to be harvested for physical and cultural
capital.
While this display of cultural irony provides plenty of material for scholars of
national cinema to critique the discourses used in nation branding and global-
5 ECOCRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON NORDIC CINEMA: FROM NATURE… 71
Fig. 5.1 Rare Exports undermines the cultural imagery of Santa Claus in its critique
of global consumerism
ization, adopting a more ecocritical perspective on these same discourses—that

is, one focused on the representation of non-human elements as part of the
ideological framework of nationhood—can push us in unexpected directions.
If nations are largely predicated on cultural inventions and commercial appro-
priations (as they are in both historical narratives of nationhood and contem-
porary attempts at nation branding), emphasizing the strategies through which
this happens dispels the often taken-for-granted ‘natural’ constitution of a
national culture. By interpreting the film through such a critical perspective,
Rare Exports is framed as a key example of ‘ecocinema’ providing a particularly
‘ecocritical’ take on the logic of national cultural industries.
Thus, it provides a productive starting point for this chapter, exploring the
consolidation of such critical discourses—and critical approaches to such dis-
courses—in Nordic film culture. The chapter initially outlines the philosophical
and artistic constitution of ecocinema before addressing its variations in this
context, from projects on nation-building to social critique, from nature appre-
ciation to resource politics. Its critical perspectives thus encompass environ-
mental themes as well as those of more immediate sociopolitical relevance, a
notion underlined by a case study of Ruben Östlund’s dark comedy Force
Majeure (2014).
The Framework for Ecocinema

Cinema, as a form of popular culture with considerable societal reach and abil-
ity to communicate complex issues in an understandable form, proves ideal for
rethinking the balance of power between humanity and the environment. In
the use of nature as a thematic trope, for example, to evaluate how national
ideologies in heritage culture draw on the landscape for their impact, or how
parallels between masculinity and nature reinforce a sense of the ‘national char-
acter’, film studies have found nature a powerful rhetorical tool. Furthermore,
72 P. KÄÄPÄ
the rhetoric of naturalization extends to the ways cinematic anthropology

depicts cultures that are perceived as closer to nature than the ‘civilized’ indus-
trialized society. At stake in these largely cultural philosophical explorations is
the generation of a better understanding of the ways humanity lives with and
incorporates its environmental context to bulk up the existential and ideologi-
cal narratives of its ‘dasein’—or of its ‘being in the world’. Thus, while land-
scape and ethnographic studies are vital areas of film research, they often
replicate a more or less taken-for-granted approach to the anthropocentricity
of the cinema. As such, they focus on social or cultural concerns in a way that
does not question the reliance of human experience on its environmental
context.
Lu and Mi (2009) provide a productive approach that conceptualizes ‘eco-
cinema’ as an interpretative strategy to question the conventional ways in which
the environment is represented in film cultures. The scope and practice of eco-
cinema operates as a way to study the discursive and ideological content of
films as well as providing an ethical-environmental approach to the production
practices of films. According to Mi and Lu, it involves “the study of the pro-
duction and reproduction of life, the relationship between the human body
and the ecosystem, and the controlling and administering of the human body
in modern capitalist and socialist regimes” (Lu and Mi 2009: 2). It thus pro-
vides a means to generate understanding of the entangled relations of human-
kind and its environmental context. The academic study of ecocinema focuses
on specific film cultures (Brereton 2005; Kääpä 2014), ethics (Brereton 2015),
film philosophy (Ivakhiv 2008), transnational cinema (Gustafsson and Kääpä
2013) as well as individual films (Taylor 2013), to name some of these
directions.
Monani, Rust and Cubitt’s Ecocinema Theory and Practice (2012) takes this
even further as it argues that the field does not only have to deal with films with
obvious environmental content. All films are ecological in the sense that they
gesture to anthropocentric perceptions of this relationship or mirror some of
the social politics of contemporary society. According to them, the concept of
ecocinema can apply to practically all films in as much as they evoke critical
responses to humanity’s role in the world. They base this assertion on the
notion that films show “a troubled state of affairs not only in human interac-
tions, but also with the non-human world. Cinema provides a window into
how we imagine this state of affairs, and how we act with or against it” (Monani
et al. 2012: 3). Simply put, the ecological argumentations of film texts can
work on multiple levels and include ideological positions that may seem con-
tradictory or even anti-environmentalist. Thus, a franchise like The Fast and
The Furious (2001–) can be part of this field, as focus can shift to the discourses
it uses to promote unquestioned consumerist thinking in popular culture.
Similarly, a film like Rare Exports may not seem related to environmental con-
cerns at first glance, but as we have suggested above, ecocritical perspectives
consider its content as a commentary on the use of indigenous resources in the
discourses of national narration.
For this chapter, national narratives provide the most productive focus as
they constitute, arguably, one of the most productive approaches to unravelling
some of the anthropocentric drives underlying ecocinema. At the same time, it
is absolutely central to address environmentalist arguments concerning activi-
ties like sustainability drives, green energy production, environmental policy
and nature conservation as they have been represented in film texts. These
provide valuable perspectives for addressing human-led harvesting of resources
and exploitation of the environment for both economic and cultural gains.
Crucially, these areas are often a constitutive part of how nations conceptualize
their dominant social and cultural values, a discussion to which this chapter
now turns.
The Paradoxes of Nordic Ecocinema

The cinemas of the Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and
Iceland) embody, for good and bad, some of the key examples through which
film cultures wrestle with their environmental responsibilities. From summits
on climate change to resource and energy production, from sustainable devel-
opment to enhancing the greening of urban spaces, the Nordic countries main-
tain leading roles in ecological progress and policy on an increasingly global
level. These countries can rightfully consider themselves global leaders in sus-
tainable policy and practice and are host to advanced levels of societal environ-
mental activism and governmental policy. Public awareness and knowledge of
issues such as climate change and global warming are high and are reflected in
strict policing of organizational and corporate responsibility. Most importantly,
all five Nordic countries reached a level of uniform consent on the importance
of environmental policy by the 2000s, even if differences remain in their imple-
mentation. Sweden, for one, takes substantial pride in developing its reputation
as a leader in environmental thinking, whereas Norway is committed to devel-
oping renewable sources of energy to balance its reliance on oil reserves. This
optimism is echoed by Solability’s Global Sustainability Index where all five of
the Nordic countries led the poll for the fifth year running in 2015.
At the same time, the greening of the Nordic countries is by no means a
given process but rather a complex, potentially hypocritical form of sustainable
development and resource management, involving both greenwashing and
contradictory public relations as well as inspiring idealism and resourceful envi-
ronmentalist activism. Operating as part of the European Union and on global
platforms including various climate summits (among them the now infamous
Copenhagen Summit in 2009), the Nordic countries have been able to advance
environmental policy and sustainability awareness in many key sectors includ-
ing the adoption of renewable resources and implementation of global stan-
dards in energy production. Simultaneously, the negative press received by
several Nordic ‘green’ corporations, such as the wind turbine manufacturer
Vestas and foresting company Stora Enso, paint a very different picture, while
the economic and resource infrastructures of countries such as Norway and
74 P. KÄÄPÄ
Finland rely on oil and nuclear power, which remain the topic of controversy
and extensive criticism from environmental non-governmental organiza-
tions (NGOs).
These contradictions are evident not only in environmental policy (see
Kääpä 2018) but also in the ways they are approached in cinema, as both a
cultural industrialist form of popular entertainment and a politicized form of
cultural argumentation. But what forms do they take in contemporary Nordic
film culture? Nordic cinemas are small nation film cultures (as defined by Hjort
and Petrie 2007) which translate to a distinct emphasis on public funding for
cinema. As the audience tends to be restricted due to their small populations,
and the distribution of films limited on the basis of cultural and linguistic
obstacles (at least in theory), film production is heavily reliant on film institutes
to provide subsidies for film production, judged on a merit-based structure,
which has traditionally resulted in productions that have demonstrable artistic
or societal worth. More recently, the emergence of domestically popular genre
film production, partially as a result of transformations in funding policies and
partially due to the internationalization of film production, has challenged
understandings of what constitutes ‘appropriate’ Nordic cinema. Such consid-
erations also extend to environmental concerns as these production types have
distinct ways of incorporating nature into their discursive structures.
Thus, this chapter will now explain how more traditionalist national cinema
discourse (seen in, e.g., heritage cinema, a type of film production heavily sub-
sidized through public funds) and more genre-based popular cinema (focusing
on commercialized, often playful narratives like Rare Exports) harvest nature in
different ways, largely due to the production modes that facilitate these films.
Secondly, the focus is on two thematic areas that elaborate on particularly Nordic
concerns for ecocinema analysis. These consist of the ways films use discursive
structures to represent (1) resource politics and (2) the welfare society, both
areas that touch on significant concerns in these film cultures as well as pointing
to ways to further incorporate ecocritical analysis to European film studies.
Nature as a Narrative Commodity

An appropriate starting point to consider Nordic cinema’s use of nature as a
cultural-ideological tool comes from heritage narratives which often rely on
impressions of national historicity, which in film culture have tended to rely on
the use of landscape and other natural elements as signifiers of authenticity.
Nordic examples from the Finnish Niskavuori series (1938–, focusing on a
family dynasty around a rural estate) to contemporary productions such as the
Icelandic Of Horses and Men (2015) showcase these discursive structures.
Natural iconography contributes cultural capital to the narratives of these films
to emphasize their role in national canons by distinguishing the films as cases
of unique national film culture, often through parallels between human behav-
iour and the national environmental ecosystem. This approach to nature as a
cultural commodity is frequently echoed in several studies of national cinema
emphasizing the constitutive role of nature in national narratives (see

Bondebjerg et al. 1997 for Danish perspectives; Hedling and Wallengren 2006
for Swedish; Von Bagh 2000 for Finnish; Iversen and Solum 2010 for
Norwegian; Nordfjörd 2010 for Icelandic). While nature is conceptualized as
providing origins for national narratives, its role is ultimately a secondary one
to sociopolitical idioms. From an ecocritical standpoint, these academic evoca-
tions of heritage cinema continue to play a role that consolidates human domi-
nance over the natural environment, an approach that takes the role of the
natural environment as subordinate to anthropocentric culture as a given.
Cinema is, of course, an anthropocentric undertaking, and it would be
unproductive to try to dispel the human from this production infrastructure.
Indeed, displacing the human is not the intention here as, instead, the key is to
understand the rhetoric of national cinema as inherently anthropocentric in its
appropriation of the natural environment, an appropriation that, crucially,
often presents its modes as ‘natural’ and unquestioned—this, in turn, is often
used to strengthen the essentialist discourse of nationalism. Incorporating
nature into the cultural vocabulary of a given film culture is part of what cin-
ema does—where would the American Western genre be without its icono-
graphic shots of Monument Valley, for example? In Nordic film culture, this
sort of appropriation provides a particularly strong connection between film
production and the funding infrastructure (though it would be foolish to claim
that only films with natural themes receive funding, as we will see later). Yet,
“the question is not how we escape human valuation but whether it is possible
to think of ways in which the value of natural things is not subordinate to the
way they ratify the consumption patterns of human beings” (Smith 1998: 5).
As suggested, these arguments can often be found in the most unlikely of
places—popular cinema.
Popular Genre Film and Inverse Natural Narratives

The integration of the Nordic film markets into global flows of cultural pro-
duction and the emergence of a new generation of film producers with an
interest in and ability to engage international cinematic trends in recent years
have transformed the infrastructures of Nordic cinema. While it would be too
enthusiastic to suggest nature is afforded a different role in this commercial-
ized, global form of Nordic cinema, an increased sense of play as regards the
connotations of nature as a cultural commodity can be observed here. This is
especially the case with the horror genre, which has played a significant role in
many contemporary Nordic cinemas and their attempts to cater for new audi-
ences. The 2000s has seen a cycle of Norwegian slasher films instigate a
rebranding of Norwegian cinema with films such as Dead Snow (2009) and
Cold Prey (2005) appropriating myths from the Norwegian cultural canon
concerning wild snowy mountains and expansive fjords, but instead of using
these to strengthen a sense of essentialist national identity, the films make wild
nature a locus for fear and disruption (see Iversen 2011).
76 P. KÄÄPÄ
Thus, as with the international variations of the slasher genre, these films
tend to focus on a group of young professionals, working in industries repre-
sentative of transnational global capitalism like advertising or media produc-
tion, who venture out into a ‘cabin in the woods’, but instead of finding solace
from the dislocations of global consumerism, nature provides an insurmount-
able and often destructive challenge. Simultaneously, films focusing on mythi-
cal fairy tales (such as The Troll Hunter, 2008) and landmarks (The Wave,
2015) upend the traditional connotations of these signifiers of national culture
and identity by focusing on trolls as diseased monsters and the fjords as hosts
for natural catastrophes. These narratives invariably start from a perspective
where humans use science and technology to conquer the environment, but
the roles are inverted by the end of the narratives as humanity is, often physi-
cally and very violently, displaced from the position of dominant species.
While popular historical epics and war films—often relying on conservative
approaches to appropriating nature—continue to populate cinemas, these new
productions indicate a different view on what role nature continues to play in
envisioning nationhood, as the Norwegian fjords or North Finland’s fells take
on alternative connotations used to critique linear conceptions of national his-
tory. Alongside some of the more conventional heritage productions, these
films indicate emergent ways of using nature in national cinema. While the
perspectives of these genre films criticize the unquestioning appropriation of
nature into national narratives, they also, of course, use nature, albeit now to
critique the perspectives of their cinematic predecessors. Yet, this appropriative,
and also inherently anthropocentric, approach is now problematized—it
becomes a question mark, not a taken-for-granted fact. Thus, some of these
processes in film politics, concerns not commonly associated with environmen-
tal themes, clearly influence the constitution of Nordic ecocinema. These are
only very cursory assertions, however, as many of the patterns identified here
are part of a much more complex framework, featuring the participation and
vested interests of a variety of stakeholders. Yet, while much more needs to be
said on this relationship between film politics and the environment, these cur-
sory evaluations allow us to gesture to some of the patterns through which
environmental issues in cinema can be analysed outside of only looking at the
textual level.
Resource Politics
While infrastructure and production arrangements matter for the ways the cin-
ema approaches environmental issues, the majority of advances ecocinema gen-
erates on a societal level take place through texts. Furthermore, a key argument
for centralizing Nordic cinema as a particular focus emerges from the ways it
addresses concerns endemic to the sociopolitical constitution of each country.
The Nordic countries can boast some of the world’s leading gross domestic
products (GDPs) and position themselves as exceptional environmental lead-
ers. This is especially the case as the Nordic model of social welfare often evokes
interest and wide-ranging attempts to emulate its parameters, a fascination that

is heavily reliant on the region’s affluence, itself premised on its natural resource
infrastructure (Bondeson 2003). While Sweden and Denmark have invested
substantially in green energy, Finland’s production incentives are increasingly
premised on nuclear power. In contrast, Iceland can provide 80% of the popu-
lation’s energy consumption from renewable resources such as geothermal and
hydropower, which enables it to feature high in environmental rankings.
Similar critiques play out in other contexts. Norway announced its intention
to go carbon neutral by 2030, advancing an earlier deadline of 2050 by
20 years. Critics, however, question the rationale and feasibility of the plan,
especially as the country is heavily indebted to oil and gas for its domestic wel-
fare and economic prosperity (Miljodirektoratet 2018). They point out that
achieving carbon neutrality will not be feasible on the basis of cutting emissions
domestically or imposing substantial restrictions on oil production. Instead, it
is heavily reliant on purchasing carbon credits, a typical manoeuvre for affluent
Western countries wanting to benefit from the positive connotations of a green
image where ‘environmental accounting’ means supporting environmental
incentives in developing countries while maintaining consumption standards at
the home market. To confirm some of these suspicions, the Nordic countries
have been ranked in the top 20 countries with the largest ecological footprint
(The Footprint Network 2010).
The confluence of these ideas facilitates an ecocritical take, especially, on the
ways economics and the role of capitalism feature in these films. Capitalism,
unsurprisingly, is a key critical target of ecocriticism, as its ideological principles
and concrete manifestations are widely understood as prime causes of environ-
mental depletion and exploitation. For us, it is significant to note that the
Nordic countries are some of the key arbitrators of capitalist practices, despite
their commitment to social egalitarianism and the welfare state. Susanna
Fellman et al. highlight some of the practices that have been key to construct-
ing a Nordic form of capitalism, which enables it to exist as one of the most
competitive regions in the world (Fellman et al. 2008: 18). They note the fre-
quency with which welfare state policies combine with government-sanctioned
forms of private enterprise and competition, leading to very profitable mergers
of state and private enterprise, with distinct environmental repercussions, such
as the Norwegian Statoil and the Finnish Stora Enso. These visible flagships of
Nordic capitalism combine with domestic policies premised on high taxes and
well-functioning welfare systems, facilitating, at least in theory, the foundations
for the cultural prestige and economic viability these countries command glob-
ally. These next sections shall focus on such politics from the angle, first of all,
of the considerable resource infrastructure, and, second, its translation to the
societal level where natural resources transform into a curious ideological foun-
dation combining welfare principles with capitalism.
Considering the significance of resource politics enabling Nordic affluence
and, by extension, Nordic culture and identity, it is not surprising that screen
media frequently takes a critical approach to depicting these issues. Norwegian
78 P. KÄÄPÄ
television shows (Occupied, 2015) and films (Pioneer 2012) interrogate the
state economy’s reliance on oil, while Denmark has produced television shows
focusing on the integration between the country’s wind and banking industries
(Follow the Money/Bedrag, 2014–). At the same time, Finnish producers have
depicted aspects of the country’s mining infrastructure in critical terms through
both documentary and fiction films (The Men of Talvivaara, 2015; Giant,
2015). Others have taken a more playful approach to inspecting the impact of
resource politics and climate change on people, with the Icelandic slasher film
The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (2009) showing us how local fisher-
men (‘fishbillies’) turn to massacring tourists as fish supplies dwindle and com-
plex regulations jeopardize their livelihoods.
Nowhere is this strategy of combining genre conventions and political themes
more obvious than in Shooter (2013), a thriller about a disgruntled scientist who
shoots politicians with a high-powered rifle to protest the government’s drilling
in the Arctic. Described by the Danish Film Institute as an environmental
thriller, it illustrates the idea that the requisite level of political commitment
comes from communicating environmental concerns to the general public. Of
course, the framing of environmental debates as part of popular cinema is noth-
ing new as The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and Avatar (2009) can testify. Yet,
the particularities of the media environment of the Nordic countries (public
funding translating into politically meaningful content) mean that environmen-
tal concerns are a key strategy for the Nordic screen industries. Simultaneously,
the use of these genre conventions arguably detracts from the weight of these
messages and simplifies their complexity into genre conventions.
Such arguments are of course common in discussing popular film culture,
and considering the Nordic countries’ commitment to public service broad-
casting, documentary production has taken up these ideas with considerable
frequency. They focus on nuclear power (Into Eternity, 2010), the foresting
industry (The Red Forest Hotel, 2012), the food industry (Bananas! 2009) and
the consumption patterns of individuals (Recipes for Disaster, 2008). Here, the
focus is even more explicitly on critiquing the foundations that enable the soci-
etal affluence common to these societies. The model they adopt is based on the
first-person activist documentary popularized by Al Gore and An Inconvenient
Truth (2005) as they focus, invariably, on White male protagonists exploring
the resource basis that provides this affluence. While these perspectives can be
justifiably critiqued for their class and gender bias, other documentaries take a
much more complex role to inspecting the resource infrastructure, including
Katja Gauriloff’s Canned Dreams (2012) (about the material and human costs
of a can of cheap ravioli).
Yet, while these documentaries play an important role as politically commit-
ted ecocinema, they are also somewhat orthodox in their approaches to
thinking about the relationship between film and the environment as they do
not get us much beyond anthropocentric considerations in cinema. Their dis-
cursive structures continue to distinguish between the environment and human
culture in ways that lack more critical understanding of this complex correla-
tion. In contrast, a truly ecocentric approach would not have to be as extreme

as to displace the human from the picture but would, at the very least, seek to
view the human as part of a much more fundamental system of ecological nar-
ration. These concerns shall be addressed in more detail later, but for now, the
focus is on charting some of these anthropocentric discourses in Nordic socio-
realist cinema.
Ecocritical Approaches to Nordic Capitalism

and the Welfare State
A key consideration in any analysis of the political dimensions of Nordic cinema

is the constitutive ideology of the welfare state. Numerous studies in sociology,
culture, economics and politics explore the diverse manifestations of welfare
politics and ideology on the populations and constitution of these countries
(for historical overviews and discussion of ongoing transformations, see Kautto
et al. 2001; Kvist et al. 2012). The Nordic model of the welfare state is charac-
terized primarily by the strong co-operation of the state and private enterprise.
A sense of egalitarianism and aspirations to universalism are supplemented by
high taxes, comprehensive social and health care mechanisms, emphasis on the
rights of individuals and some of the highest GDPs globally. While differences
in historical development and policy are clear among the five states, identifying
similarities is not particularly difficult, and the idea of the Nordic model per-
vades social policy discourse globally, causing both emulation and criticism of
certain exclusivist tendencies (and diverse perspectives on what exactly com-
prises this model, as Kautto’s work suggests).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the welfare state is a central concern in most, if not
all, contemporary publications on Nordic cinema (for examples, see Soila,
Widding and Iversen 1998; Nestingen and Elkington 2005; Nestingen 2008;
Kääpä 2010). Perhaps surprisingly, the films these works focus on mostly depict
the contemporary welfare state in a largely negative light. One could ask why
this would be the case, especially considering all the glowing assertions of the
exceptional advances of the Nordic welfare model. In part, this is a result of
austerity programmes such as those implemented by the Danish state in the
1980s, or a sense of scepticism towards the ideological underpinnings of wel-
fare capitalism following severe crises in Norway, Sweden and Finland in the
1990s, often as a direct result of mismanaged credit booms and adoption of
dubious fiscal policies. These ideological transformations can be explored by
considering welfare ideologies in a range of films, especially as they relate to the
discursive rhetoric of national cinema.
Yet, how can the critical tools established by ecocinema studies be used to
rethink these aspects of Nordic society and culture? If nature has been used as
the glue to tie the nation together in heritage cinema, for example, in much of
the sociorealist cinema, the environment takes on the role of a corrupting indi-
cator that unravels the cohesiveness of such narratives. In contrast to address-
ing the ways national narratives use nature as a cultural resource, often
80 P. KÄÄPÄ
vindicating traditionalist or even conservative politics, urbanity emerges as a

constructed opposite to the authenticity to be found in nature. Contemporary
approaches to ecocinema frequently include studies of the ways human habitats
function as part of the complexity of the contemporary planetary ecosphere.
Indeed, conceptualizing human habitation as entirely different from ‘natural’
ecosystems would resort to the sort of anthropocentric binaries much of con-
temporary ecocriticism aims to undo. Thus, while the ecological purpose of
urban portrayals is not as evident as those of the more ‘natural’ variety, many,
if not all, these films must be considered in ecocritical terms.
Ecological metaphors can be mobilized to rethink the idea of the ‘People’s
Home’ (inspired by the Swedish Folkshemmet conception), a concept that faces
considerable challenges in the twenty-first century as increased privatization,
outsourcing practices, tax competition and ever visible differences in income
distribution challenge any notion of the egalitarianism on which the welfare
state is premised (see Leibfried 2001; Heikkilä et al. 2002; Dahl and Eriksen
2005; Kettunen and Petersen 2005, for discussion of these challenges).
Underlying all this is the role of globalization as a force that is often perceived
to challenge the simplicity of, in many ways, the ‘natural’ state of things cap-
tured so superficially in heritage cinema. Key works, including Hjort’s Small
Nation Global Cinema: The New Danish Cinema (2010) and Nestingen and
Elkington’s Transnational Cinema in a Global North (2005), accordingly,
focus on the diverse ways globalization and Nordic cinema interact.
Globalization and the integration of markets and politics are largely consid-
ered the wider causes behind the structural transformations that signify the
increased adoption of neoliberal policy and the consequent dilution of welfare
functions, but when they are presented in films like the Swedish film A Man
Called Ove (2015) (dealing with a gated suburban community whose docile
harmony is challenged by the arrival of an immigrant family, see Moffat and
Kääpä 2018), they are often expressed through environmental metaphors.
Here, the requisition of land for human relationship management ties the dis-
parate groups together through a naturalized visual metaphor. Similarly,
another established trope is films using the relationships between animals and
humans as a means to reflect on social cohesion, where animals act as the stand-
ins for fraught human relations (Rams, 2015), while others use them to depict
the fragile balance of disparate social groupings in natural spaces (Wolf, 2008).
Other films draw on a much darker politics of racial profiling where ‘natural-
ized’ distinctions between the human and non-human are mobilized to distin-
guish between hegemonic populations and ethnic minorities, predominantly
the Sami minority in Sweden, Norway and Finland. These range from exces-
sively problematic films such as White Reindeer (1954) to films like Sami Blood
(2017) that aggressively take these politics to task. They draw on a dark history
of using a range of physiological notions of racial difference to separate those
who belong and those who must be marginalized, precisely through the meta-
phor of natural belonging. Genetics are not only used to distinguish those who
belong to the Nordic welfare state but as a tool to critically inspect the internal
corruption the smallness of these societies can cause. The politics of the
Icelandic Jar City (2011)—about the complications of solving a murder in
Iceland by using DNA samples from its isolated genetic heritage—end up not
depicting a resource-intensive self-sustaining society but one that is consumed
from within by corruption. Seen from the perspective of ecocritical analysis, by
focusing on the countries’ ethnic composition and dubious immigration poli-
tics, cinematic representations of the homogeneity and affluence of Nordic
welfare states end up highlighting fractures and contradictions instead of a uni-
fied politics of social cohesion.
Case Study: Force Majeure (Ruben Östlund, 2014)

To illustrate some of these discussions, Force Majeure, a complex film that
makes itself available to a range of readings, exemplifies many of the discursive
inclinations taken by these Nordic creatives on synergizing nature and societal
criticism, while it also reveals some of the ideological problems of these pro-
ductions. Focusing on the workaholic Tomas, a man on a skiing trip in the Alps
with his wife Ebba and two children, the film takes aim at complacent neolib-
eral values in its deconstruction of the Nordic exceptionalist mentality. During
lunch at a mountainside restaurant, an avalanche cascades towards the diners,
who panic, with some cowering under the tables, others running off. Tomas
reacts on a whim to grab his gloves and iPhone and runs away. As can be seen
in Fig. 5.2, the collision of humanity and the natural environment provides an
existential shock to Swedish affluence, with the avalanche dwarfing the pan-
icked, out-of-control humans. This act of largely unintended cowardice has
substantial repercussions as it slowly dawns on everyone how flawed he is as a
Fig. 5.2 An avalanche terrifies an international group of tourists and fragments the
façade of their superficial neoliberal safety net
82 P. KÄÄPÄ
human being. As tensions between husband and wife escalate, the film ques-
tions the stability of key components of the welfare state through this represen-
tative metonym—the successful neoliberal nuclear family unit, whose strength
and cohesion instantly dissipate in the face of uncontrollable external threats.
As suggested, the content of Force Majeure practically invites multiple read-
ings. For one, its focus on the tourist industry suggests for it to be viewed as a
critique of neoliberal values—a perspective emphasized by the frequent pres-
ence of the hotel cleaner who gazes with cynicism at the unfolding spectacle of
Tomas in meltdown. More importantly, the film also facilitates an ecological
reading with its theme of an insurmountable environmental encounter destroy-
ing the lives of its human protagonists. These sorts of metaphoric narratives are
a hallmark of literature harkening back to classic tales like Moby Dick. Whereas
Melville’s environmental metaphors have been seen as a critique of empire,
amongst many other readings, Force Majeure’s narrative invites an understand-
ing of this environmental encounter as a critique of neoliberalism as well as the
value systems underpinning the Nordic welfare state.
To illustrate, there are many key moments of the narrative that are most
productively unpacked from an environmentally aligned approach, with the
environmental context shaping and motivating narrative actions. For example,
the film ends with the culmination of the ‘holiday’, but Ebba soon panics at the
shoddy behaviour of the driver in charge of the tourist bus ferrying the tourists
back to the airport. The Swedish tourists are abandoned to walk back to the
hotel along a winding mountain road. Out of the whole group, only Charlotte,
a Swedish woman who shocked Ebba earlier with her cavalier attitude to extra-
marital relations (and who acts as a metonym for a more individualist way of life
than the conformism of the nuclear unit), stays on the bus as it speeds down
the road. As night falls on this group, Tomas accepts a cigarette from a fellow
traveller. His daughter, surprised by such a turn of behaviour, asks if he now
smokes, to which he responds affirmatively and smirks at the camera. While
Tomas has been challenged by this ‘vacation’, it seems the environmental chal-
lenges he has faced have made him realize his true self. Out of this dishevelled
and dislocated group of affluent Swedes, only Charlotte and Tomas thrive—
she will have made it to her destination, while he has discovered a new lease on
life that seems to have been curtailed by his responsibilities as the head of the
family unit and now released through his ordeal. In this playful conclusion, an
environmental encounter does not result in the disbandment of social order
but its reorganization into a survival-of-the-fittest mentality, a mode funda-
mentally antithetical to welfare ideologies. If the narrative started out as a cri-
tique of neoliberalist individualism, it ends in a very different place. In this,
way, the environmental encounter has not so much revealed the fragility of the
welfare state but its true exceptionalist essence.
As with Rare Exports, cultural irony provides one angle through which to
interpret Force Majeure, but adopting a more ecocritical perspective—that is,
one that does not only focus on the environment as a tool to reflect on human
subjectivity, but also considers the representation of non-human elements as
part of the discursive framework of the film—will reveal more unexpected

directions. Most of the film certainly does provide material for an ecocritical
perspective as it uses the environment to unravel societal constructions. The
avalanche, the obvious environmental elephant in the room, to use an appro-
priately problematic metaphor, is in many ways a clichéd representation of the
might of nature, and it would be an overstatement to suggest that there are any
real environmentalist concerns or considerations at play in the film’s discursive
statements, that is, to do with global warming for one. If any such consider-
ations do make themselves felt, they only work on a more subtextual level that
may in fact be largely unacknowledged by the producers of the film. Certainly,
the film makes it obvious that the resort is a fabricated mirage in the Alps,
catering for the affluent tourists who presumably have to travel extensive dis-
tances to reach the location, thus generating a heavy carbon footprint. The
explosions that rock the hotel to control avalanches, and the water being
sprayed on the ski slopes, indicate these as examples of manufactured land-
scapes. The aural assault of the explosions and the grinding of the ski lifts break
up any illusion of an encounter with untamed nature, an exercise the film
repeats at consistent intervals. There is no depth to the place, which appears
more like a simulacrum of ‘nature’ than anything tangible or concrete. It com-
plements the themes highlighted by the film concerning the superficiality
endemic to neoliberal ideology, as well as its extension into welfare capitalism,
but only in a manner that reinforces an anthropocentric view of the world. The
environment is brushed aside to make space for human psychodrama, even in
the scene where characters ski on pristine hills or when fog envelopes all visibil-
ity—these are just gimmicks to reflect human states of mind. In total, the film
uses nature to address societal politics in an anthropocentric vein.
At the same time, to claim Force Majeure to be a film about environmental-
ism or exhibiting an ecocentric worldview would be imposing expectations on
the film that it has no intention of meeting. It is resolutely a ‘typical’ Nordic art
film with a sociorealist critique in mind, one that it establishes through using
the environment as representative tool. The film can be seen as an example of
a text that in no way challenges any notion of anthropocentric dominance but
in fact reinforces it by making it so absolute. Simultaneously, ‘discovering’ this
perspective is not the point of this chapter. Instead what this discussion aims to
highlight is the fact that underlying this text is a complex set of assumptions
about human approaches to the environment, one that is more revealing about
attitudes that are often unacknowledged in their anthropocentric orientation.
Through this, the film acts as a critical incentive to approach Nordic cinema
from an ecocritical perspective, premised on the understanding that “the world
is composed of the social sphere and the ecosphere, that the two are interre-
lated, and that the former cannot be considered outside of the context of the
latter” (Willoquet-Maricondi 2010: 3). Yet, the film, or even cinema in gen-
eral, at its most ecocritical, can only aim to aspire to an ecocentric worldview,
but largely, ends up reinforcing anthropocentric paradigms endemic to the
national cultures that give rise to them.
84 P. KÄÄPÄ
Conclusion
Ecocritical studies of film culture must be prepared to work with a much wider
range of themes than simply focusing on films with an environmental connec-
tion or a green agenda. Ecocinema encompasses a wide set of approaches, from
those that explicitly target unsustainable resource use, to those that provide a
glimpse into dominant cultural norms that often prioritize anthropocentric
value systems. While a film like Force Majeure certainly makes use of environ-
mental iconography, it remains inevitably limited by its very use of the environ-
ment to address human concerns. If a film like Force Majeure would claim to be
truly bio- or ecocentric, it would need to foreground these concerns much
more—for example, by emphasizing the environmental, rather than the human,
costs of the tourism industry. Of course, this would fundamentally alter its
constitution and be counterproductive for the inherent diversity of Nordic cin-
ema. While the aim is not to support such extreme measures, the point of this
discussion emerges from emphasizing that cultural production operates with
an inevitable anthropocentric discursive bias.
At the same time, the ecophilosopher Lawrence Buell suggests that it is
“entirely possible without hypocrisy to maintain biocentric values in principle
while recognizing that in practice these must be constrained by anthropocen-
tric considerations, whether as a matter of strategy or as a matter of intractable
human self-interestedness” (Buell 2005: 134). This balancing between the
anthropo- and the ecocentric reflects Félix Guattari’s words on the ways con-
stitutive ideologies operate on an almost unconscious level in human cultures.
In the case of film production, it is up to the ecocritics to question and critique
such operations, conducting arguments that will have to work “towards
rebuilding human relations at every level of the society” and countering the
negative influences of anti-environmentalist logic, which is “extending its influ-
ence over the whole social, economic and cultural life of the planet … by infil-
trating the unconscious subjective strata” (Guattari 2000: 49). If films like
Force Majeure testify to anything, it is to the need to consider the role of cin-
ema as a complex sphere of contesting discourses that can be used to unravel
and critique the underlying hegemonic ideological frameworks of society as
well as to confront our own idealism and our embeddedness in the constitutive
ideological structures being criticized. While explicit environmentalist rhetoric
and the rethinking of existing anthropocentric paradigms is absolutely vital to
the ongoing development of the field, ecocinema, as both a form of cultural
production and an intellectual approach, needs to be understood from both
anthropocentric and ecocentric perspectives, reflecting the often-unconscious
constitutive ideologies of society as well as challenging the limitations these
ideological formations pose.
Yet, this chapter can only lay claim to charting some of the main patterns
through which the ideological and political contributions of films operate. To
study the ways these films are produced is another urgent concern for future
projects, where the production infrastructures of the Nordic film industries are
deserving of further research from an environmental perspective. To investi-

gate the ecological footprint of Nordic productions, researchers are encour-
aged to expand on the environmental management of the media studies
conducted by Kääpä (2018) and consider, among others, the ways certain sty-
listic inventions, such as the lingering presence of the Dogme aesthetic or the
frequently cited uses of Nordic light, influence the footprint of these produc-
tions. Any assessment of Nordic cinema’s ecological viability must engage with
these areas. But ultimately, it all comes down to the level of the audience to
move past the ‘educated conjecture’ that textual readings inevitably and invari-
ably are. For now, this brief evocation of key future research directions urges
reflection on the fact that while environmentalist, even inherently ecocentric
messages may be communicated, they may also go unheard in society, and it is
here that audience research can make its most significant contribution.

1. Can film make audiences become more attuned to
environmental
concerns?
2. Are there particular cultural variations of ecocinema that showcase differ-
ent approaches to environmental politics?
3. Can film productively criticize environmentally harmful consumptive

behaviours while relying on the same modes of consumption for its
existence?
4. How does the film industry account for its need to project socially ben-
eficial images with its need to use resources to produce them?
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CHAPTER 6
The Trauma of (Post)Memory: Women’s

Memories in Holocaust Cinema
Ingrid Lewis
Definitions
Holocaust
The Holocaust is defined as the persecution and murder of six million Jewish
people, along with other categories of victims, set in place by the Nazi regime
and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945.
Holocaust Film
There is a considerable lack of consensus among scholars, with the term
“Holocaust film” seeming to eschew inflexible classifications the more scholars
endeavour to provide an exact definition. The wider research in which this
chapter is located adopts an all-encompassing definition of Holocaust cinema
that includes films which portray perpetrators, resisters and the persecution of
Jews and non-Jewish victims. The definition comprises also films that deal with
the roots of the Holocaust as well as with its aftermath. However, this chapter
Ingrid Lewis, The Trauma of (Post)Memory: Women’s Memories in the Holocaust

Cinema of the New Millennium, published in: Women in European Holocaust Films:
Perpetrators, Victims and Resisters, 2017, Palgrave Macmillan, reproduced with
permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
I. Lewis (*)
Dundalk, Ireland

88 I. LEWIS
focuses exclusively on Jewish women and their connection to memory, be it

second or even third generation, where the film narrative affords direct knowl-
edge on the Holocaust.
Postmemory
Coined by Marianne Hirsch (2012: 5), postmemory refers to a controversial
concept of transference of Holocaust memories from survivors to their chil-
dren. As she claims, by growing up and living in close proximity to survivors,
this “second generation” inherits a set of personal and collective memories that
are transmitted “so deeply and affectively” that they become “memories in
their own right”.
Vicarious Witnessing
Taking the postmemory concept even further, this term describes the process
of assimilating traumatic memories by people who are remotely connected with
the event. Following experiential encounters facilitated by museums, photo-
graphs, films and literary narratives, among others, people use the power of
imagination to make sense of highly traumatic events such as the Holocaust. It
is a very self-reflexive experience motivated by the need for a deep understand-
ing of the past and its connections with the present.
Introduction
The final scene of the film The Third Half (2012) shows the protagonist
Rebecca Cohen, now in old age, visiting the Holocaust Memorial Center for
the Jews of Macedonia, located in Skopje. Getting close to one of the symbolic
funerary urns in memory of the victims, she starts a monologue with her dead
father while holding a family photo against the glass box that protects the urn:
Here we meet again, Dad… Remember me? Your little daughter, who listened to
her heart and ran away from you. Both you and the man I loved have been dead
for many years now. I’m going to join you soon. But before I die, there’s some-
thing I’d like to show you. These are my sons and daughters, their husbands and
wives, my grandchildren and their children. They are the fruit of my betrayal and
descendants of your blood. They are my proof that a woman can score as well…
I won the game, Dad!
Rebecca’s final exclamation and the photo of her numerous descendants are
a celebration of life as she rejoices in her victory against the Nazis (see Fig. 6.1).
This culminating moment of the film takes place after Rebecca narrates her
memories, in flashback, on the occasion of a visit with her great-granddaughter
to Skopje for the inauguration of the Holocaust Memorial. The Third Half
exemplifies a recent cycle of films that engage with the past from the point of
6 THE TRAUMA OF (POST)MEMORY: WOMEN’S MEMORIES IN HOLOCAUST… 89
Fig. 6.1 Rebecca Cohen’s monologue in front of a funerary urn for the Holocaust
victims of Macedonia in Darko Mitrevski’s The Third Half (2012)
view of the first generation of survivors, as well as 1.5,1 second and third gen-
erations of Jewish women.
Originating from varied corners of Europe such as France, Germany, Hungary,
Poland, Croatia, Macedonia, Italy, Sweden and Belgium, these films explore to
different extents the lives of Jewish women in connection with the Holocaust,
and in doing so they create valid premises for analysing the relation between
gender, memory and representation. These films are Louba’s Ghosts (2001) by
Martine Dugowson, Nowhere in Africa (2001) by Caroline Link, Rosenstrasse
(2003) by Margarethe von Trotta, The Birch-Tree Meadow (2003) by Marceline
Loridan-Ivens, Tomorrow We Move (2004) by Chantal Akerman, Nina’s Journey
(2005) by Lena Einhorn, One Day You’ll Understand (2008) by Amos Gitai,
Army of Saviours (2009) by Ludi Boeken, Berlin ’36 (2009) by Kaspar Heidelbach,
Lea and Darija (2011) by Branko Ivanda, Remembrance (2011) by Anna Justice,
Retrace2 (2011) by Judit Elek, The Third Half (2012) by Darko Mitrevski, Ida
(2013) by Paweł Pawlikowski, For a Woman (2013) by Diane Kurys and Anita
B. (2014) by Roberto Faenza. Significantly, some of these films are directed by
first- or second-generation survivors, including Martine Dugowson, Marceline
Loridan-Ivens, Chantal Akerman, Lena Einhorn, Judit Elek and Diane Kurys.
Other films are based on novels and memoirs written by survivors (Nowhere in
Africa, One Day You’ll Understand, Army of Saviours and Anita B.), on testimo-
nies by/about survivors (Berlin ’36, Lea and Darija and The Third Half) or on
scripts by second-generation survivors (Rosenstrasse and Remembrance). It is
worth noting that nine of these sixteen films were directed by women: Louba’s
90 I. LEWIS
Ghosts, Rosenstrasse, The Birch-Tree Meadow, Nowhere in Africa, Tomorrow We

Move, Nina’s Journey, Remembrance, Retrace and For a Woman.
This chapter signals the emergence of Jewish women as Holocaust survivors
in contemporary cinema and discusses three of the most relevant examples of
this cycle of films, namely, Nina’s Journey, Remembrance and The Birch-Tree
Meadow. In particular, it explains how recent films engage with concepts of
trauma and vicarious witnessing, while recovering women’s voices and memo-
ries in their diversity and uniqueness.
The Emergence of Female Survivors: Beyond Witnessing

All of the films mentioned above are connected by two elements: the presence
of the female survivor3 and the concept of memory as dialectic between
remembering and forgetting. The emergence, in the twenty-first century, of
the character of the female survivor is not a random one. Historian Lawrence
Baron (2005: 202, 217) acknowledges a growing interest in the topic of sur-
vivors, reflected in the fact that it was rated the third most popular theme of
Holocaust films in the 1990s. He also further highlights the tendency for
more positive portrayals compared to the past. Baron argues that the fore-
grounding of survivors in cinematic narratives is due to the increasing atten-
tion they have generally received over the last decades, starting with the Nobel
Prize conferred on Elie Wiesel in 1986, the opening of the US Holocaust
Museum in 1993 and the growing number of memoirs and oral testimonies
by survivors. Also, the figure of the female survivor that emerges in the
Holocaust cinema of the new millennium is undoubtedly related to the anxi-
eties expressed by scholars and survivors alike regarding “the end of the wit-
ness era”, which will have its symbolic closure with the death of the last
survivor (Vitiello 2011: 8). As the Holocaust recedes into the past and the
world contemplates the prospect that the last witnesses will die, films manifest
a growing concern with the figure of the survivor as repository of knowledge
and memory of the Holocaust.
The increasing preoccupation of European Holocaust cinema with the
figure of the survivor, and more generally of the witness, is also due to the
emphasis on memory in both academia and popular discourse over the last
decades. According to Barbie Zelizer (1998: 173), “by the early nineties
Holocaust-related books abounded with titles that incorporated notions of
memory”. Marianne Hirsch (2012: 3) connects the emergence of memory as
an “analytic term” and its corresponding field of research—Memory
Studies—to the work of “second-generation” writers and artists, those who
did not experience the atrocities but gained their knowledge through a filial
bond with the survivors. Using the term “postmemory”, Hirsch (ibid.)
claims that the descendants of survivors who witnessed traumatic events
“connect so deeply to the previous generation’s remembrances of the past
that they identify that connection as a form of memory, and that, in certain
extreme circumstances, memory can be transferred to those who were not

there to live an event”.
In a similar vein, Froma Zeitlin (1998: 6) claims that this very belatedness
“seems to engender the desire of representing the past through modes of reen-
actment—even reanimation—through which the self, the ‘ego’ of ‘the one
who was not there,’ now takes on a leading role as an active presence”.
Examining Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985) and Art Spiegelman’s comic
Maus, Zeitlin states that these works are both exemplary for the way in which
they enable members of the second or third generation to transform the act of
witnessing into a “lived performance for witness and listener alike”. According
to Zeitlin, two recent Holocaust novels—namely, Henri Raczymow’s Un cri
sans voix (1985) and Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz’s Umschlagplatz (1992),4—
represent “further and even bolder developments” in Holocaust literature
towards the experience of the “vicarious witness”. His analysis of the two writ-
ings accurately pinpoints the main elements that characterise the experience of
the “vicarious witness”. As Zeitlin (1998: 15) explains:
Both texts are driven by the compulsion to bear vicarious witness. Both are preoc-
cupied with the problems of reconstructing and recovering memory, which can
only be acquired second or third hand, and both stage obsessive quests for knowl-
edge about the Holocaust that entail quite uncommon efforts at identification
with others through fictional means. Finally, both foreground the process—the
vocation—of writing as the essential means of creating an authorial presence, one
that involves the reader throughout in the anguish, the guilt, the necessity, the
doubts and contradictions, but also the remedial nature, of the task that is per-
formed in the stance of the self-reflexive or “middle voice”.
Alison Landsberg (2003: 148–149) uses the term “prosthetic memories” to

take the relationship between “the one who was not there” and the traumas of
the Holocaust even further; as she explains, “it has become possible to have an
intimate relationship to memories of events through which one did not live”.
Landsberg claims that the prosthetic memories “are indeed ‘personal’ memo-
ries, as they derive from engaged and experientially oriented encounters with
the mass media’s various technologies of memory”. These memories, which
“often mark trauma”, are not any longer confined to a geographical area or to
a specific group but widely available to people living in various places.
Hirsch’s, Zeitlin’s and Landsberg’s assertions are very useful, as they pro-
voke fundamental questions for this section: to what extent are the sixteen films
here concerned with the experience of the “vicarious witness” and, if they are,
does this facilitate a stronger “authorial presence” of the writer/director? If
films are “producers and disseminators of memory” (Landsberg 2003: 148),
whose memory do they express? How are these memories gendered? If cinema
is a “key medium in our inheritance of the history and memory of the
Holocaust”, how does it articulate its gender dimension (Reading 2002: 178)?
92 I. LEWIS
Finally, given the affinity between trauma and memory (Traverso and Broderick
2010: 5), how is trauma (en)gendered through “vicarious witnessing”?
Reclaiming Women’s Memories

With very few exceptions, European Holocaust cinema had, until the 2000s,
taken only tentative steps towards challenging the image of woman as a token
of victimhood (Lewis 2017: 256). It is very relevant that all sixteen films dis-
cussed narrate their stories using as a device the survivor or a close witness. By
comparison, most of the female characters in pre-2000s Holocaust cinema—
whether victims or survivors—die at the end of the films. Moreover, they are
rarely in the position of being narrators of their own stories: they do not have
a voice of their own, being usually defined by their relationship to their male
counterparts and portrayed through either a male or an omniscient perspective.
The element of voice, as this chapter shall further point out, plays a fundamen-
tal role in highlighting the cinematic authorship of the text (Silverman 1988:
48; Doane 1985: 573) and its relation to trauma (Hirsch 2004: 58). The
authorial voice is understood here as a “‘discursive subject’ identifiable in the
text through the network of different discourses by which it is made up” (Cook
2007a: 461). According to Cook (ibid.: 461–462), the discursive subject is not
produced by a person existing independently of the films but by the interaction
of discourses.
Taking stock of Claire Johnston’s seminal article “Women’s Cinema as
Counter-Cinema” (1973), both Cook (2007b: 468–469) and Silverman
(1988: 205) point to the importance of auteur theory for feminism and the
role of feminist filmmakers in challenging the ideologies of mainstream cinema.
By analysing the cases of Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino, two female directors
working within the male-dominated Hollywood system, Johnston claims that
female authorial discourse can challenge and disrupt patriarchal ideologies.
Kaja Silverman’s and Mary Ann Doane’s theories on the role of voice in assign-
ing female authorship and Joshua Hirsch’s analysis of posttraumatic cinema
with the use of three parameters (tense, mood and voice) were employed to
determine to what extent this cycle of films engages with traumatic memories
and succeeds in establishing the authorial presence of the female witness or
survivor. In relation to the use of voice in the film, Silverman claims that
through the technique of synchronisation, classic films suppress women’s
voices and reduce them to the status of object. The voiceover, instead, is able
to reclaim the female voice on an authorial level, as outside the diegesis and
therefore “a voice that speaks from a position of superior knowledge, and
which superimposes itself ‘on top’ of the diegesis” (Silverman 1988: 48). In a
similar vein, Doane (1985: 572–573) argues that by “by-passing the ‘charac-
ters’” the voiceover speaks directly to the spectator and refers to him/her as
“an empty space to be ‘filled’ with knowledge about the events”.
This analysis starts with the premise that memories and the narratives used
to present them are all gendered (Bos 2003: 34). Unlike oral and written tes-
timonies, fictional films do not necessarily provide a direct correspondence

between the memories of a survivor and their representation. In relation to
Holocaust fictional writings, Lillian Kremer (1999: 3–4) suggestively points
out that the work of male authors “reflects their male experience and perspec-
tive” and neglects the gender-related experiences of women. As she further
claims: “Not until we turn to women’s texts do we encounter the depth and
breadth of women’s Holocaust experience.” When examining cinematic repre-
sentations, the relation between gender and memory is much more complex
and multifaceted, because the testimony or fiction by a survivor is mediated by
the work of the male or female filmmaker. Thus, screening the adaptation of a
female survivor’s memoir or of her oral testimony does not guarantee a female
perspective on the events that are depicted. A case in point is the film men-
tioned at the beginning of this chapter, The Third Half, based on the true story
of Neta Koen, one of the few Jews who survived the persecution in Macedonia.
That symbolic scene seems to suggest that the film engages deeply in represent-
ing Rebecca’s memories and Holocaust experiences (see Fig. 6.1). This assump-
tion is totally misleading, however, as the focus shifts from her love story with
a non-Jew and the way she eschewed the persecution by concealing her iden-
tity, towards the incredible account of the victory achieved by the national
soccer team. The film takes the opportunity to provide a general overview of
the persecution of Jews and Gypsies in Macedonia. As a consequence, although
it starts promisingly with an aged Rebecca embarking on the trip to Skopje and
remembering the past in a flashback lasting almost the entire film, Rebecca’s
story loses its focus and recedes into the background as soon as she gets mar-
ried in the first half of the film. Her protagonist role is relegated to a passive
witness position in a story told from an omniscient perspective. The only voice
off towards the end of the film is contained within the diegesis, announcing the
closure of the story and the return to the present for the epilogue.
Similar observations can be made by examining five other films directed by
male filmmakers (One Day You’ll Understand, Army of Saviours, Berlin ’36, Ida
and Anita B.). Despite each having a female survivor in the leading role, the
structure of these films undermines their voices and memories. For example,
two of these productions (Army of Saviours and Berlin ’36) insert brief
sequences featuring the real-life survivor who inspired the film. Yet the pres-
ence, in the films, of both Marga Spiegel and Gretel Bergmann goes against the
grain since, instead of making the story personal, the scene has exactly the
opposite effect. Marga Spiegel seems slightly confused, looking around and
asking: “It’s all done now, isn’t it?” She does not seem comfortable or believ-
able on the set of a film meant to represent her own memories. On the other
hand, Gretel Bergmann, maintaining the same line as the film, emphasises the
difficult fate of her colleague Marie Kettler, as a man forced into being a
woman, and does not engage much in her own survival story. The omniscient
perspective, the lack of a female narrator and the inability to evoke trauma pre-
vent these films from foregrounding a female perspective and from engaging
with women’s memories.
94 I. LEWIS
An exceptional case is the male-directed film Lea and Darija, which uses the
voiceover of the main protagonist as a narrative device. In spite of giving the
female protagonist a voice that narrates the whole story, we are reminded that
the thirteen-year-old Lea is just a “ghost”, since she died years ago, on the train
to Auschwitz. The film script does not represent “her” memories but the recol-
lections of different people about her transformed into a story by Branko
Ivanda. Moreover, the off-screen self-narrator is strongly questioned by the
elderly Darija, the witness of the film, who claims that she remembers every-
thing except Lea, implying that Lea never existed. Despite depicting the lives
of protagonist Jewish women during the Holocaust, One Day You’ll Understand,
Army of Saviours, Berlin ’36, Lea and Darija, The Third Half, Ida and Anita
B. seem to indicate the failure of filmmakers to engage, at a deeper level, with
the representation of women’s experiences and to give a voice to their memories.
Whose Memories? Gender and Authorial Voice

in Holocaust Films
By contrast, Louba’s Ghosts, Rosenstrasse, The Birch-Tree Meadow, Nowhere in

Africa, Tomorrow We Move, Nina’s Journey, Remembrance and For a Woman—
all made by female directors—offer a clear female perspective through the use
of voiceover, flashbacks and subjective shots. Although the number of these
female-directed films is relatively small, their impact on recent Holocaust cin-
ema is noteworthy. Interestingly, the twenty-first century has witnessed an
unprecedented wave of female directors in European Holocaust cinema,5 as
Table 6.1 shows.
Between 2001 and 2014, women directed 21 films about the Holocaust, a
number that surpasses all European productions by female directors since the
immediate aftermath of the war (20 films).
However, not all Holocaust films by female directors that have been released
since 2001 are explicitly concerned with women’s memories, exhibiting a vari-
ety of topics and approaches to the subject of the Holocaust. Moreover, if one
has to consider how pre-contemporary Holocaust cinema has approached its
Table 6.1 Holocaust films

Decade Number of films
directed or co-directed
by women 2011–2014 11
2001–2010 10
1991–2000 6
1981–1990 7
1971–1980 3
1961–1970 2
1951–1960 1
1945–1950 1
Total 41
Source: The author

female characters, there are several contrasting examples of men doing feminist
films and of women filmmakers who have internalised traditional patriarchal
perspectives. It is worth mentioning here the German film The Nasty Girl
(1990) by Michael Verhoeven as an excellent example of a film that prioritises
a feminist female perspective. Verhoeven invests the main character of the film,
Sonja, with a strong authorial voice, which not only narrates the events through
voiceover but also intervenes from outside the film as an alter-ego of the film-
maker himself. Similarly, Charlotte S. (1981), directed by Frans Weisz, fre-
quently uses flashback and voiceover techniques to deliver a powerful feminist
message through the character and life story of German Jewish painter
Charlotte Salomon. At the other end of the spectrum are films such as The
Night Porter (1974) by Liliana Cavani and Angry Harvest (1985) by Agnieszka
Holland, which, despite being made by female directors, reinforce the domi-
nant, male perspective in narrating women’s experiences during the Holocaust.
These examples challenge the assumption that men’s films definitely present
neutral perspectives and address universal truths, while women’s films are inev-
itably feminist and expected to speak for all women. However, although it can-
not be hypothesised that female directors, unlike their male counterparts, are
generally more insightful and exhibit a feminist perspective when depicting
women’s experiences during the Holocaust, this correlation holds with respect
to the films analysed in this chapter. Louba’s Ghosts, Rosenstrasse, The Birch-Tree
Meadow, Nowhere in Africa, Tomorrow We Move, Nina’s Journey, Remembrance
and For a Woman exhibit a deep engagement with women’s memories, which
are narrated from a strong, authorial female perspective. These authors resur-
rect the female authorial voice in their films by using narrative voiceover
(Louba’s Ghosts, Nowhere in Africa, The Birch-Tree Meadow, Nina’s Journey and
Remembrance), subjective shots and flashbacks (Louba’s Ghosts, Rosenstrasse,
Nowhere in Africa, Nina’s Journey and Remembrance) and characters that rep-
resent the alter-ego of the filmmaker6 (Louba’s Ghosts, The Birch-Tree Meadow,
Tomorrow We Move and For a Woman). According to Silverman (1988: 215),
the presence of a fictional character who “stands in” for the filmmaker is one of
the ways in which cinematic authorship can be inscribed in the text. Moreover,
some of the filmmakers in question here, such as Chantal Akerman, Diane
Kurys, Margarethe von Trotta and Marceline Loridan-Ivens, are well known
for their engagement with feminist cinema.
Importantly, this cycle of recent films by female directors highlights how
contemporary understandings of gender have influenced the way we narrate
the past. Firstly, these films adopt a significantly more sophisticated under-
standing of gender, which acknowledges the specificity of women’s suffering
during the Holocaust without resorting to biological essentialist constructions
of the feminine. On the contrary, these films provide a feminist analysis of
women’s gendered suffering at the hands of the patriarchy. Secondly, at a more
metatextual level, the contemporary films draw attention to the socially con-
structed nature of gender and emphasise the inequity of gender relations by
challenging male accounts of history. In the light of these assertions, the emer-
96 I. LEWIS
gence of a feminist perspective in contemporary European Holocaust cinema

supports Kremer’s (1999) contention that male written memoirs do not do
justice to women’s experiences.
Engendering Trauma Through “Vicarious Witnessing”

While there is no doubt about the strong feminist perspective embedded in the
films discussed above, they differ greatly in their ability to engage with trauma
and to instil the experience of the “vicarious witness”, which, I argue, can be
visualised as three concentric circles (see Fig. 6.2). In this figure, the films
located at the outermost level, namely, For a Woman and Tomorrow We Move,
are those that least invite the viewer to engage with memories of the Holocaust
on a personal level. At the middle level are films that, through significant use of
flashbacks, subjective camera and voiceover, encourage the audience to explore
and engage with personal memories of the Holocaust, thus opening up the
possibility of experiencing vicarious witnessing. Furthermore, at the core of the
three concentric circles is The Birch-Tree Meadow, which is an excellent exam-
ple of how women filmmakers can engender trauma in a powerful and compel-
ling way.
At the external level, the farthest from reaching the “vicarious witness”, are
Chantal Akerman’s Tomorrow We Move and Diane Kurys’ For a Woman.
Tomorrow We Move, directed by a second-generation survivor, reflects much of
Hirsch’s (2012: 5) concept of postmemory, in which the connection with the
past is “mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and
creation”. Its main character, and Akerman’s alter-ego, is Charlotte, a writer of
erotic stories living with her mother, a Holocaust survivor. The film is perme-
ated by Holocaust symbolism, although neither the word Jew nor Holocaust is
For a Woman
Nowhere in Africa
Rosenstrasse Nina’s Journey
The Birch-Tree
Meadow
Remembrance Louba’s Ghosts
ove
Tomorrow We M
Fig. 6.2 The “vicarious witness” experience in female-directed films. (Source:

The author)
ever mentioned in the film. In this sense, the thick smoke in the house is a
reminder of the crematoriums, the disinfectant smell is a similar metaphor for
the camps, the empty fridge recalls the hunger in the camps and the constant
obsession with moving away can be read as suggesting deportation. It is
arguable that the construction of the narrative through such highly metaphori-
cal language might be too cryptic for mainstream filmgoers and detract from
experiencing the trauma. It is worth noting that the same actress, Sylvie Testud,
represents both Akerman’s alter-ego in Tomorrow We Move and, nine years
later, Diane Kurys’ alter-ego Anne in For a Woman. Kurys’ autobiographical
film is concerned with exploring the filmmaker’s own roots and identity. The
film moves back and forth from the present to the past, between Anne’s
engagement with memory paralleled by the writing of the film script and her
parents’ love story located in the aftermath of the war. The Holocaust is
invoked several times, since her (Jewish) parents meet while interned in
Rivesaltes camp in France from which they managed to get free, avoiding
deportation. While Akerman addresses the subject of survivors’ silence and its
effects on the second generation, Kurys completely avoids deepening the
Holocaust subject and focuses primarily on the love story and later divorce of
her parents. The topic of the Holocaust is thus left suspended and the spectator
is given no further information about her parents’ experiences during that
time. It can be argued here that, by using high symbolism in Tomorrow We
Move and by placing the Holocaust experiences of Kurys’ parents out of focus
in For a Woman, the two films fail to render Holocaust memories accessible
and do not encourage the viewer to engage with the past.
Journeys Through Memory: Seeing the Past

in Remembrance and Nina’s Journey
At the second (middle) level of the three concentric circles (see Fig. 6.2) are
Louba’s Ghosts, Rosenstrasse, Nowhere in Africa, Nina’s Journey and
Remembrance. These five films draw their inspiration from varied sources: the
semi-biographical novel of a survivor in exile, Stefanie Zweig (Nowhere in
Africa); a script based on real events and written by Pamela Katz,7 a second-
generation survivor (Rosenstrasse and Remembrance); and personal autobio-
graphical material from second-generation filmmakers (Louba’s Ghosts and
Nina’s Journey). The Holocaust is explicitly described as the films develop
between two temporal dimensions, the past and the present. Along with the
use of voiceover and a subjective point of view, these posttraumatic narratives
employ extensive flashbacks. If in Nowhere in Africa and Nina’s Journey it is
the classic, biographical flashback which narrates life in retrospective (Hirsch
2004: 94), Louba’s Ghosts, Rosenstrasse and Remembrance adopt the posttrau-
matic flashback. The “posttraumatic flashback”, unlike the classic one, is used
“to create a disturbance not only at the level of content, by presenting a painful
fictional memory, but also at the level of form”. This type of flashback registers
98 I. LEWIS
“the actual disturbances of traumatic experience” determining “an analogue

posttraumatic consciousness in the spectator” (ibid.: 99).
The most relevant example for this second-level circle is certainly
Remembrance, directed by German filmmaker Anna Justice. The film, inspired
by true events, has as protagonist Hannah, a Jewish woman in her fifties living
in New York with her family. The past is triggered by a television programme
in which she recognises her fiancé during the war, Tomasz, whom she thought
was dead. The two met in a concentration camp, fell in love and managed to
escape the camp and survive against all odds in hiding. Told in flashbacks, the
film unfolds between present and past, from 1976 in New York and 1944 in
Poland. The painful experience of remembrance is suggestively expressed by
Hannah’s voiceover at the beginning of the film: “A memory does not come
whole; it’s torn from the start. The edges are piercing and sharp. They pierce
the skin and make you bleed.”
The past narrative has a fast-cut rhythm, depicting the vulnerable life in the
camp and later the rushed events due to their fugitive status, while Hannah’s
present is described through slow camera movements. The tumult of events is
now repositioned from the outside to the inside, as Hannah is overwhelmed by
contradictory feelings and torn apart between two worlds. The close-up shots
coupled with long silences that contemplate Hannah’s facial expressions are
suggestive of her inner agony as she tries to make sense of the past and to
understand. Her memories are vivid and tormenting: “I’m haunted by memo-
ries that refuse to be forgotten. I try to hide, but they always find me. I thought
I was finished with the past, done. But you’re never done.” The camera boldly
insists on highlighting details that emphasise her distress: the breathlessness as
she finds out Tomasz might be alive, the hands trembling as she looks through
the Red Cross file, the eyes filled with tears and the voice cut by emotion when
she speaks with Tomasz.
Hannah’s experience in Remembrance echoes much of Charlotte Delbo’s
concept of “deep memory”, which “reminds us that Auschwitz past is not
really past and never will be” (Langer 1995: xi). Lawrence Langer (ibid.) high-
lights Delbo’s suggestive words that claim the unaltered permanence of trau-
matic memories:
“Auschwitz is so deeply etched on my memory,” she wrote, “that I cannot forget

one moment of it. So you are living with Auschwitz? No, I live next to it.
Auschwitz is there, unalterable, precise, but enveloped in the skin of memory, an
impermeable skin that isolates it from my present self.”
Similar to Charlotte Delbo’s account, Hannah’s deep memory “pierces the

skin”, taking hold of the present. The past that invades Hannah’s present is
suggested through the powerful image of young Tomasz in her apartment in
New York, closely watching Hannah as she reopens the search by calling the
Red Cross. Tomasz’s haunting presence is more than a memory: he seems to
be there, in his striped uniform, smoking nervously by the window, declaring
Fig. 6.3 Tomasz’s ghost from the past, dressed in a striped uniform, invades Hannah’s
present in Anna Justice’s Remembrance (2011)
his love for her or gulping down the food on the table during a party at her
house (see Fig. 6.3). Importantly, Hannah is the only one who is able to see the
ghost from the past, while he is invisible to all other characters such as her hus-
band, her daughter or the guests in their house. Tomasz’s ghost cohabiting a
dual temporary space engenders a schizophrenic duality in Hannah: she is no
longer able to live in the present without confronting her past. It is worth not-
ing that both in his ghostly appearances and in Hannah’s flashbacks from the
past, Tomasz is portrayed in much more detail than his aged counterpart, who
is shown only briefly. Suggestively, during their phone conversation 30 years
later, Hannah is filmed in frontal close-up, capturing all her rich expressions,
while Tomasz’s face is not shown, since the shots are taken from the side.
Tomasz remains until the end a figure whom the audience knows only through
Hannah’s mediation.
Remembrance, similarly to the other four films in this second-level circle,
manifests a strong engagement with women’s memories during the Holocaust,
from a first-hand or postmemory perspective. However, many of the trauma
and identification mechanisms in all five films are created through the use of
musical underscores, melodramatic tones and happy endings marked by
reconciliation.
Another significant example from the second-level circle of vicarious witness
experience is Nina’s Journey. “I’m very contented; I feel I’ve had a very good
life, a very good life” are the words that the elderly Nina Einhorn pronounces
at the end of the film, as a sort of epilogue to her incredible story of survival
100 I. LEWIS
and her life journey in Poland, Denmark and finally Sweden. Directed by her
daughter, Lena Einhorn, the film is clearly intended to document and preserve
the mother’s memories. As the epilogue states, the interview with Nina
Einhorn, which is integrated into the fiction film, was shot a month after she
was diagnosed with breast cancer in August 1999. Since Nina passed away
three years before the release of the film in 2005, it represents a symbolic testa-
ment of her performing one last journey through the memories of her “very
good life”.
Nina’s presence throughout the film, in the interview fragments or as a
voiceover narrating it, gives authenticity and authority to the story. The film is
structured on a chronology of events that interweaves historical data with life
events in Nina’s family. Through newsreel footage, Lena Einhorn captures
many of the realities of war and the atrocities of persecution: the daily life of
people in Warsaw, poverty, ruins, destruction, the German occupation, the
building of the ghetto walls, children begging or smuggling food into the
ghetto and so on. The footage enhances the credibility of the story, especially
when paralleled with scenes that re-create similar situations. The film narrates
Nina’s story of an ordinary girl coming of age in extraordinary circumstances,
and Polish actress Agnieszka Grochowska as young Nina is adept at portraying
the lightness and energy that will help Nina to survive against all odds.
What is particularly important in the film is that Nina’s character is defined
and portrayed in symbiosis with the figure of her mother, Fanja. The mother is
a very important presence throughout the film and represents a reference point
for Nina, who matures from a sensitive and childish girl into a strong woman
like her mother. It is important to note that the portrayal of mother and daugh-
ter gradually evolves in opposite directions: while Nina grows stronger, Fanja’s
personality fades away, finally turning into a scared, “invisible” person. Her
invisibility is suggested by the fact that in her last appearance in the film, she is
hiding in a closet, humbled and disturbed.
The journey in the cart from Łódź to Warsaw which opens the film marks
the beginning of the two characters’ metamorphosis. The opening phrase, nar-
rated by aged Nina Einhorn, reveals that Nina has never been hugged by her
mother until that memorable three-day journey by cart, in the searing cold,
towards Warsaw. As Nina explains, her mother had a very strong personality
and she seldom expressed her feelings. Fanja’s gesture of tenderness towards
her daughter is complemented by a request for forgiveness. When Nina asks
what she has to forgive her for, the voiceover intentionally covers their discus-
sion. Fanja’s answer is in fact unimportant, since the crux of this scene lies in
the start of a transforming relationship between the two. With the progressive
worsening of their situation as they move into the Warsaw ghetto, Fanja
becomes more and more vulnerable and weak, while Nina, the fragile girl,
gradually changes into a strong, well-defined character. One episode clearly
emphasises this role reversal between mother and daughter: while Fanja is ill in
bed, Nina sneaks home from work to nurture her sick mother. When Fanja’s
health is finally restored, she becomes apathetic and refuses to leave her bed
and assume her responsibilities. Aware that this situation might cause them to
lose their jobs in the factory, which in the ghetto context would be equal to a
death sentence, Nina scolds her mother in a moment of despair. The elderly
Nina Einhorn comments on this memory: “It was the first time I’d ever shouted
at my mother and I got her onto her feet.” From this moment on, it is increas-
ingly evident that Nina assumes the leading role in the mother-daughter rela-
tionship. Given the film’s emphasis on that relationship, the title Nina’s Journey
can be read both as Nina’s journey from Holocaust to life and as the journey
of rediscovery of a deep relationship between Nina and her mother. In fact,
Nina’s father and brother are present throughout the film, but their roles are
less important than the two female characters. In a very symbolic way, the film’s
opening and ending point to this relationship between Nina and Fanja: from
the cart-driven trip to Warsaw when the two women hug each other for the
first time, their relationship and characters have undergone a huge transforma-
tion. The film ends with Nina returning to her parents’ house to find, in the
emptiness of their apartment, a photo of her mother, hidden at the back of a
drawer. The two are reunited beyond death, as Fanja lives now through Nina.
Ultimately, the title points to the last, tributary journey through the memories
of an aged Nina Einhorn towards the end of her life.
This film is located at the middle level of the three concentric circles repre-
senting the vicarious witness experience (see Fig. 6.2) for two reasons. Firstly,
the continuous sliding of the narrative between documentary footage, present-
time interview and fictional reconstruction of the past detracts from involving
the audience in the effort to identify with Nina’s experience. Although highly
preoccupied with the process of recovering and preserving memory, the frag-
mented structure hinders the transmission of trauma as a vicarious experience.
Secondly, the didactic tone of the film and the extensive use of classic (as
opposed to posttraumatic) flashback render the whole experience of vicarious
witnessing less effective. The biographical flashback widely used in Nina’s
Journey is intended to tell the story retrospectively and, throughout the film, is
framed in the present by the visual figure of the elderly survivor. As Joshua
Hirsch (2004: 93–94) explains, in contrast to posttraumatic flashback (encoun-
tered in Remembrance), this type of classic flashback is pre-announced by ele-
ments of plot and dialogue. Thus, by appealing didactically to the spectator,
the painful fictional memory does not encourage an analogue posttraumatic
experience in her/him.
Case Study: The Birch-Tree Meadow (Marceline

Loridan-Ivens, 2003)
The autobiographical film The Birch-Tree Meadow holds a distinctive place at
the centre of the three concentric circles in Fig. 6.2. Directed by Marceline
Loridan-Ivens, a French Jewish filmmaker aged 75 at the release of the film, it
102 I. LEWIS
is the fruit of her experience as a survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concen-

tration camp. As Loridan-Ivens points out in an interview, the film overcomes
her long-lasting silence and responds to the “duty” to speak of survivors before
their passing from this life:
I have let so many years pass before bringing my own contribution to that living
memorial of the Holocaust made up from the memories of those who survived it,
simply because for all that time I was incapable of doing it. As a person, like so
many other survivors, [I thought] it was better to remain silent. But today, as an
artist, although I truly fear that I don’t have the capacity, I know I have the duty
to express myself and add my voice to those of people who have had the courage
to speak before the death of the last survivor sends the camps into the realm of
History once and for all.8
This statement is very significant, as it highlights the self-reflexive tone of

the film. It is worth noting that what sets The Birch-Tree Meadow apart from all
the other films discussed so far is not only the presence of the survivor, whose
first-hand memories are at the source of both the script and the direction, but
also the particular style of the film, which refuses to re-create the past visually.
The Birch-Tree Meadow re-enacts the Holocaust not in a staged reconstruction,
as most films do, but by evoking names, stories and sensations through the
voice off and sometimes disembodied voiceover of the main character, Myriam
Rosenberg, who returns to Auschwitz-Birkenau after fifty years. Since the film
does not try to reconstruct the past at a visual level, it does so in a very power-
ful way through the soundtrack. The unrepresented past is felt through the
evocative power of remembrance as Myriam recalls her long-lost memories one
by one. In one of the first scenes in the camp, while the camera captures in a
long shot Myriam walking away on the abandoned train tracks leading to
Auschwitz, the disembodied voiceover narrates the story of her arrival at the
camp, aged fifteen, when she was saved from the first selection for the gas
chambers by a girl named Françoise. In a second moment, entering her former
barrack, Myriam pronounces the names of all her roommates, looking at their
beds as if she could see them. Her memories become alive through voices off
from the past: at times, she enters into a dialogue with these ghost-like voices
or she listens to them in a contemplative moment. In a particularly evocative
scene, one can distinctly hear the women chatting about food, listing their
favourite dishes and picturing in detail the meals they would like to have. Their
voices fill the empty spaces of the present, rendering memory vivid and actual.
Significantly, within the context of the Final Solution, “food talk” had a strong
gendered dimension, being used by women to preserve their dignity and to
socialise (Goldenberg 2003: 164). The past comes alive not only for Myriam
but for the audience too, which witnesses these fragments of memories and
tries to piece together the puzzle of stories.
In a discussion at the beginning of the film with Suzanne, another survivor
with whom she shared the barrack as an inmate, Myriam poses a challenging
question: “You see we don’t have the same memories. And what can guarantee
me that it is you who are right?” The issue of non-coinciding memories between
female survivors who lived through the same event surfaces throughout the
film as a recurrent motif. Myriam does not accept the fact that, with the passing
of time, her memories might be blurred and imprecise. “I have my memories!”
she exclaims, where the pronoun “my” claims a personal relationship with her
own past. Myriam’s disagreement with other two women survivors who lived
through the same exact experience echoes the words of Joan Ringelheim, one
of the pioneers of a gendered differentiated approach to the Holocaust.
Ringelheim totally opposes the concept of the “sameness” of the Jewish experi-
ence, claiming the uniqueness of memories and experiences: “There is no time,
there is no place that is the same for everyone, not even Auschwitz” (Ringelheim
1990: 143). Moreover, the issue of non-coinciding memories between survi-
vors points to the inability of memory to restore the past entirely for those who
have experienced trauma. Janet Walker (2005: 4) defines this process as the
“traumatic paradox”, in which “forgetting and mistakes in memory may actu-
ally stand, therefore, as testament to the genuine nature of the event a person
is trying to recall”. Myriam’s incessant search for a meadow between the birch
trees where, years ago, she had to dig pits and bury the bodies from the crema-
torium is thus very significant in the film. Tormented by this gap in memory,
she returns a few times to the meadow, draws a map of the place and confronts
her memories with other survivors. At a metaphorical level, “the birch-tree
meadow” (the title of the film and also the literal translation into English of the
word “Birkenau”) does not refer to a specific location within the camp struc-
ture or the name of the concentration camp but is a metaphor for the “place”
where no two memories are the same.
The encounter in Auschwitz-Birkenau between Myriam and Oskar, the
grandson of a former SS member who worked in the camp, has a very signifi-
cant role in the film (see Fig. 6.4). Oskar claims that he is trying to capture the
tracks of the past objectively, by taking photos. Myriam’s reply—diametrically
opposed to Oskar’s—“I’m looking for the invisible” is very suggestive of her
constant oscillation between present and past. The walls, the barbed wire, the
surveillance towers, the barracks, the bunk beds, the latrines, the overgrown
grass covering the whole area of the camp, all become invisible testimonies of
a haunting past as Myriam discloses her memories, caught between the will to
remember and the desire to forget. The audience is deeply involved in this act
of searching for the invisible traces of the past in Auschwitz and in the struggle
of the protagonist to remember the facts and the places. The polarity between
visible/invisible and the two different quests for the past are indicative of the
tension between history and memory. For Myriam, the invisible is the memory
and those voices from the past that only she can hear.
The visible and objective tracks that Oskar claims represent history and its
factual authority. Traditionally history, seen as male, based on logic and order,
is considered to be the opposite of memory, deemed feminine, irrational and
unable to guarantee veracity (Reading 2002: 32). In the film, Oskar knows the
104 I. LEWIS
Fig. 6.4 The encounter between Myriam and Oskar, symbolising the dichotomy
between memory and history, in Marceline Loridan-Ivens’ The Birch-Tree Meadow (2003)
camp by heart and is able to explain the significance of each room in the
Birkenau Museum. On the signpost to it, Myriam erases the word “Museum”
and replaces it with “camp”. In The Birch-Tree Meadow, the relationship
between history and memory is reversed: it is not the history but the memory
which holds the key to first-hand experience. History, factual and objective, is
replaced by memory, albeit fragmented and subjective, disrupted and incon-
gruous, thus reclaiming the precedence of women’s voices and memories over
male-dominated histories of the Holocaust.
The Birch-Tree Meadow bears stylistic resemblances to the documentary
Night and Fog by Alain Resnais, considered by Hirsch (2004: 41) “the founding
text of the posttraumatic cinema”. Through its long silences and the absence of
reconstructions of the past, its self-consciousness and the subjective point of
view of the traumatised witness, the film establishes the same kind of posttrau-
matic “dialectic of memory and forgetting, of vision and blindness, of the neces-
sity and impossibility of representing historical trauma” (Hirsch 2004: 61–62).
Because it is devoid of images from the past and draws heavily on sound and
imagination, it challenges the spectator to assume an active role, to undertake
his/her own struggle with the past and to become the “vicarious witness”.
Conclusion
The sixteen films that are the subject of this chapter differ greatly in terms of
style, narrative, tone and engagement with the past: from the black and white
of Ida to the green-blue tones of The Birch-Tree Meadow, and from the omni-
scient perspective in Anita B. to the highly subjective point of view in

Remembrance. Nina’s Journey uses a quasi-documentary format, blending sur-
vivor interview and newsreel within the narrative, while commercial Academy
Award-winning productions such as Nowhere in Africa are more melodramatic.
The films also depict or make reference to a broad range of Holocaust experi-
ences: in ghettos (Nina’s Journey), in concentration camps (The Birch-Tree
Meadow, Remembrance, For a Woman and Anita B.), in hiding (Rosenstrasse,
Nina’s Journey, Army of Saviours, Remembrance, The Third Half and Ida) and
in exile (Nowhere in Africa). Three enhance the truthfulness of the film by the
presence of the now elderly, real-life survivor at the end (Army of Saviours and
Berlin ’36) or throughout (Nina’s Journey). Despite their stylistic and narrative
diversity, what these films all have in common is an interest in retrieving wom-
en’s experiences and memories in relation to the Holocaust. They all endeav-
our, albeit with different degrees of success, to foreground “women” as a
distinct category of victim, no longer incorporated within the male historical
canon. This process set in place by Holocaust cinema in the twenty-first cen-
tury is unique and important in many ways.
Firstly, this unprecedented foregrounding of women’s experiences and
memories raises important questions in relation to the impact that such films
have on the collective memory of the Holocaust and public perceptions of
women’s suffering. In particular, by placing women’s experiences under the
spotlight, contemporary cinema counteracts Fuchs’ paradigm of “vicarious vic-
tims”, whereas the tendency of previous films was to depict women as affected
by the horrors of the Holocaust only indirectly, as wives and mothers of male
victims (Fuchs 1999: 50). In doing so, it provides the “missing element” of an
“incomplete picture” in relation to the Holocaust (Weitzman and Ofer 1998: 1).
Secondly, if we refer strictly to the eight films directed by women—namely,
The Birch-Three Meadow, Nina’s Journey, Remembrance, Louba’s Ghosts,
Rosenstrasse, Nowhere in Africa, Tomorrow We Move and For a Woman—they
not only cast women in protagonist roles, but endeavour to portray them in a
highly insightful and compelling way. In narrating the Holocaust experiences
of women, these feminist filmmakers prioritise their voices and perspectives by
making women articulate protagonists of their own stories. This tendency can
be read as an attempt to give women back their long-lost voices and to contrast
what Ronit Lentin (2000: 693) has called the “deafening silence” that for
decades neutralised the stories of women in a gender-blind perspective.
Furthermore, through the extensive use of voiceover and flashbacks, these
films have a remarkable ability to evoke trauma and to s(t)imulate the experi-
ence of vicarious witnessing. This is the case for Nina’s Journey and
Remembrance, which, by using the biographical, specifically the posttraumatic
flashback, invite their viewers to engage with the memories of the Holocaust
from a very intimate perspective. Marceline Loridan-Ivens’ masterpiece The
Birch-Tree Meadow facilitates even more of an experientially oriented encoun-
ter, because it mediates telling of the filmmaker’s own story as a survivor while
eschewing any re-creation of the past. The viewer is thus challenged to bear
106 I. LEWIS
vicarious witness through an “obsessive quest” (Zeitlin 1998) for that knowl-
edge that would fill with imagination the gaps in Myriam’s failing memory.
Ultimately, the emergence of this important cycle of films in the twenty-first
century needs to be flagged and acknowledged, because it challenges the patri-
archal ideologies that had previously characterised Holocaust cinema.

1. Comparing the films Remembrance and The Birch-Tree Meadow, identify
and discuss the experiences of women in a concentration camp.
2. Explain the tension between history and memory. Do you think these
two concepts complement each other? Can they be in conflict?
3. Using the Online Film Database of Yad Vashem, can you find any exam-
ples of Holocaust films that approach the concept of memory from a
male perspective?
4. Focusing on the difference between the classic and posttraumatic flash-
back, explain their use in other Holocaust films not mentioned in
this chapter.
5. Perform a textual analysis of Branko Ivanda’s film Lea and Darija.
6. Define and explain the concept of postmemory. What examples can you
provide for its application to film?
Notes
1. According to Suleiman, the 1.5 generation represents the “child survivors of the
Holocaust, too young to have had an adult understanding of what was happening
to them, but old enough to have been there during the Nazi persecution of Jews”,
Susan Rubin Suleiman. 2002. The 1.5 Generation: Thinking About Child
Survivors and the Holocaust. American Imago 59, no. 3: 277–295.
2. The film Retrace (2011) by the Hungarian filmmaker Judit Elek had a limited
release in the cinemas of Eastern Europe, and it is not available in DVD format.
Because of the unsuccessful attempts to source this film for viewing, it will be
taken into account in my research only for numerical purposes, without being
analysed.
3. In the Croatian film Lea and Darija, the Jewish female character does not sur-
vive, but she is present as ghostly voice that haunts her best friend from childhood
who, now at old age, is immersed into oblivion.
4. The novels have also been published in English with the following titles: Writing
the Book of Esther (1995) by Henri Raczymow and The Final Station: Umschlagplatz
(1994) by Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz.
5. In the 2000s, there are other Holocaust films by women filmmakers that do not
fit in the topic discussed here.
6. See also the interviews with Martine Dugowson (http://www.objectif-cinema.
com/interviews/030.php), Marceline Loridan-Ivens (http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=AdXZisN0EXg); Chantal Akerman (http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=KDCjAjYDasw); and Diane Kurys (http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=2bp6IqAznXQ). (Accessed 3 September 2014).
7. Niedan, Christian. 2014. Pamela Katz on Hannah Arendt. Camera in the Sun.
http://camerainthesun.com/?p=24233. Accessed 3 September 2014.
8. Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. 2009. Marceline Loridan-Ivens. Jewish Women’s
Archive. http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/loridan-ivens-marceline. Accessed
3 September 2014.
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CHAPTER 7
An Ordinary Warrior and His Inevitable Defeat:

Representation in Post-Yugoslav Cinema
Dino Murtic
Definitions
Yugoslavia
Imagined in the nineteenth century as a cultural and political space for South
Slavs, the first Yugoslav state was formed on the ashes of WWI. Ruled by the
Serbian royal family, the first Yugoslavia ceased to exist during WWII. In the
post-WWII Communist era, Yugoslavia was re-established as a federation of six
republics (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and
Slovenia). During forty-five years of Communist totalitarian rule, Yugoslavia
and its citizens witnessed an unprecedented era of peace and economic progress.
The 1990s Yugoslav Wars

Political changes in post-Berlin Wall Europe resulted in the rise of nationalism
and separatist tendencies amongst the republics within the Yugoslav federation,
and the Yugoslav wars of secession followed. The war first broke out in Slovenia
in 1991, then moved quickly to Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and lasted
until 1995. In 1998, a new war front opened in Kosovo. The last conflict in the
territory once known as Yugoslavia happened in Macedonia in 2001. Some
estimates put the number killed in the Yugoslav Wars at 140,000.
D. Murtic (*)
University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia
e-mail: dino.murtic@unisa.edu.au

110 D. MURTIC
Balkanisation
Balkanisation signifies an irrational and potentially violent fragmentation of a
geopolitical entity into smaller regions or states. The idea was introduced into
political and academic discourse after the collapse of Ottoman Empire rule in
the Balkan Peninsula at the beginning of the twentieth century and the conse-
quent set of conflicts between newly formed national states. Balkanisation was
revived at the end of the twentieth century, due to the violent breakup of
Yugoslavia.
Yugoslav Cinema
Once a vibrant and vivid artistic reflection on Yugoslav ideological and socio-
cultural progress, Yugoslav cinema ceased to exist with the violent disintegra-
tion of the Yugoslav federation at the end of the twentieth century. Yugoslav
cinema has had several phases of development and consequent movements, the
most prominent being the ‘Partisan War Film’, which, by and large, offered a
one-sided perspective on the events of WWII in Yugoslav territories. The other
significant development within Yugoslav cinema is the Black Wave movement
(1960s–early 1970s), acknowledged for its innovative approach to filmmaking
and critical examination of Yugoslav society as ruled by authoritarian
Communists.
Post-Yugoslav Cinema
This describes filmmaking that has crossed the ethno-national borders created
from the ashes of the Yugoslav federation at the beginning of the twenty-first
century. On the one hand, post-Yugoslav cinema is established through co-
productions between newly established national cinemas. On the other hand,
and more significantly, post-Yugoslav cinema depicts discursive practices that
challenge nationalistic or ethnocentric perspectives on the Yugoslav wars of
disintegration and the consequent post-war period. The two and so far most
noticeable symbolic focuses of post-Yugoslav cinema are related to the demili-
tarisation of the warrior and the liberation of women.
‘Ordinary Men’
The term came to discursive prominence through Christopher Browning’s
1992 Holocaust-themed book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and
the Final Solution in Poland, and can be linked to the first philosophical obser-
vations of ‘the banality of evil’, whereby ordinary citizens commit heinous
crimes, emerging in Hannah Arendt’s reflection on the trial of Nazi Adolf
Eichmann. In light of this chapter, the ‘ordinary man’ may be seen as both an
unwilling perpetrator and the ultimate victim of the political establishment.
7 AN ORDINARY WARRIOR AND HIS INEVITABLE DEFEAT: REPRESENTATION… 111
Introduction
Unlike in the Yugoslav era(s), post-Yugoslav war-related cinema has a predomi-
nantly anti-war stance. In the post-Yugoslav cinematic imagination, a warrior is
an ordinary yet unwilling participant, a martyr whose sacrifice is pointless or a
savage individual unleashed and used by the forces of nationalism(s). This
chapter examines the cinematic conditions and contexts of contemporary post-
Yugoslav war films and takes as its central case study Kristian Milić’s The Living
and the Dead (2007), a film which has embedded all the dominant characteris-
tics of the post-Yugoslav war genre. Depicting two parallel battles in central
Bosnia, the first fought in 1943 and the second in 1993, although the uniform
and badges are slightly different, the soldier’s purpose and role, in both stories,
are the same. He is either a man-hunter or the one who is hunted down; vio-
lent death is the ultimate fate of both.
A Note on Yugoslav Cinema

Yugoslav cinema, as it had been known to cinephiles all over the world, ceased
to exist with the violent disappearance of the Yugoslav Federation. Daniel
Goulding (2002) established that during the immediate post-WWII years, the
cinema of Yugoslavia had followed a political aesthetics, previously mastered
in pre-war German and Soviet Union cinematography. Later, some segments
of Yugoslav cinema shifted towards the courageous artistic challenging of
inflexible Communist dogma. In that regard, one cannot understand the mul-
tiplicity of Yugoslav cinema without considering the Yugoslav New Wave
movement or ‘Black Wave’ (1963–72), as it was pejoratively labelled by the
Communist hardliners who were displeased by this artistic perspective on
everyday Yugoslavia. Its cinematography inspired by Italian neo-realism and
various new waves in European cinema (Goulding 2002; DeCuir and Baškot
2011), Black Wave filmmaking rejected the then-dominant style of social real-
ism, with its officially supported optimism and patriotic education of the
masses, opting, instead, for exposing the darker side of the socialist state with
its corruption and hypocrisy (DeCuir and Baškot 2011). The post-Black Wave
era of Yugoslav cinema incorporated both discourses: social realism contin-
ued, alongside more liberal and provocative cinema. By applying Douglas
Kellner’s notion of ‘diagnostic critique’ (Kellner 1995, 2003, 2010), which
reads a filmic text in relation to the specific elements of its era, one should be
able to comprehend through its cinema the rise, demise and everything in-
between of the Yugoslav state. Yugoslav national cinema, being affected and
inspired by the socio-political discourse of its time, is another reference point.
Its films and the discursive ‘noise’ they made should help a historian or
thoughtful citizen of the world to understand the rise and fall of the country
created exclusively for the South Slavs.
112 D. MURTIC
Self-Portrait of a Victim in Newly Established

National Cinemas
The 1991–1999 Yugoslav wars of secession brought to the surface new cine-
matic paradigms across Yugoslav territories. One by one, Serbian, Slovenian,
Macedonian, Croatian, Bosnian and other national cinemas have emerged.
Croatian film scholar Jurica Pavičić (2011) describes these cinematic tenden-
cies either as the cinemas of ‘self-victimisation’ or ‘self-Balkanisation’. Focusing
mainly, but not exclusively, on Croatian national cinema, Pavičić speaks of the
war and immediate post-war years as the era of self-victimisation, whereby films
created in this discursive paradigm are characterised by a rediscovered national-
ism, and a sense of victimhood. In such films, the perspective is always binary:
my nation/ethnic group is morally superior, while the other(s) are the opposite
of it. In Communist Yugoslavia’s depictions of WWII, the representational
status of the brave and morally superior partisan warrior was undisputed.
Opposed to the partisan warrior, according to Šešić (2006: 110), the image of
the enemy was “pictured in the darkest tone available”. In post-1990s war
cinemas of self-victimisation, the enemy is also one-dimensional; however,
what differentiates Yugoslav war-related films from cinemas of self-victimisa-
tion is the outcome of WWII. Multinational Yugoslav partisans led by
Communists belonged to the winning side; the nationalist forces were not
amongst the WWII victors. Therefore, they are victims.
Perhaps the most inglorious example of the cinema of self-victimisation is
Jakov Sedlar’s Four by Four (1999). The film focuses on the massacre in the
Austrian city of Bleiburg at the end of WWII in which members of the Yugoslav
Partisan Army executed, without trial, soldiers and civilians belonging to the
Nazi puppet state known as Independent Croatia (NDH). By insisting on the
pogrom of soldiers and civilians alike, in Sedlar’s imagination, the entire nation
of Croats is designated a victim. On the other hand, the Yugoslav partisans are
depicted as brutal and without mercy for their victim/nation; they are reduced
to pure evil. Miroslav Lekić’s The Knife (1999) is a Serbian equivalent of Four
by Four. Based on the 1980s novel of the same title by Serbian writer-turned-
politician Vuk Drašković, The Knife depicts the life of a Bosnian Muslim
(Bosniak) named Alija, in search of his ethnic heritage. At one stage, Alija
discovers that he is the only survivor of the WWII massacre committed by
Bosniaks over their Serbian neighbours, with his survival dependent on his
adoption by a Bosniak family, who raised him as their biological child. On
discovering his roots, Alija rejects his forced identity and chooses to return to
his origins. Serbian discourse during the 1980s insisted on national self-victi-
misation, highlighting the atrocity of the crimes committed against the Serbs.
The WWII crimes committed over Serbs are unpardonable and should not be
allowed to happen again. Thus, in the wars of the 1990s, Alija chooses to fight
on the Serbian side. The intention of director Lekić and screenwriter Drašković
is clear: Alija won’t let his own people be massacred again or, which is framed
as somehow even worse, deprived of their ethnic identity. While making a
comparative analysis of The Knife and Four by Four, Diana Jelača (2016) argues
that, in both instances, a specific ethnic and/or national group is the ultimate
WWII victim. Therefore, the 1990s Yugoslav wars were fought for the survival
of a nation.
‘A Wild Balkan man’ or, We Shall Give to the World

What the World Wants to See
The second category, according to Pavičić, is the cinema of self-Balkanisation.
This time, he writes mainly, but not exclusively, about Serbian national cinema.
The narrative in these films is characterised by the confirmation of Western
stereotypes about the inhabitants of the Western Balkans. Here, the post-
Yugoslav space is depicted as consistently imagined by the West, where barba-
rism, embodied through “excessive violence and a masculine point of view”,
prevails (Vidan 2011: 187). This violence is presented as almost natural—a
Balkan man kills another man in an outburst of emotion or in revenge, or sim-
ply because “they do not know otherwise” (Lazarević-Radak 2016: 148).
Some of the most noticeable examples of the filmic expression of self-Balkanisa-
tion are Milčo Mančevski’s Before the Rain (1994) and Srdan ̵ Dragojević’s
Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (1996). Perhaps the example best known interna-
tionally of the cinema of self-Balkanisation is Emir Kusturica’s Underground;
the 1995 Palme d’Or winner at Cannes.
Supported by finely crafted visual and poetic aesthetics, Underground offers
a view of two parallel Yugoslav worlds, above and underground. As such, its
attempt is to serve as an allegorical record of Yugoslav post-WWII history.
Those above are the Communist rulers who profited most from the victory
over fascism. The less fortunate live underground in accordance with the dis-
torted reality imposed upon them by their rulers. By the time those who live
underground reach the surface, the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia are in
full swing. For Kusturica, those who appear from below, including rigid nation-
alist forces, are the metaphorical embodiment of the consequences of the
crimes committed by the Communists against their own people. For both
Žižek (1997) and Iordanova (2001), Kusturica in 1995 offered the Western
European gaze what mainstream Europe wanted to see. For Žižek (1997: 38),
Underground is an archetypal “example of ‘Balkanism’ which functions in a
similar way to Edward Said’s concept of ‘Orientalism’: the Balkans as the time-
less space onto which the West projects its phantasmatic content”.
Once the carefully crafted visual Balkan aesthetic in Underground is left
behind, it becomes also evident that Kusturica co-wrote and visualised the
Yugoslav historical narrative from his particular political perspective. In
Underground, the Yugoslav Communists, during and after WWII, were repre-
sented as ‘scum’, yet ‘scum’ with varying levels of responsibility and moral
value. The Serbian Communists, unlike their compatriots from the other eth-
nic communities in the former Yugoslavia, are somehow likeable. The Serbs are
114 D. MURTIC
brutal, yet witty. Their transgression is calculated but also caused by passion
and naivety. Thus, Underground, on the one hand, is the product of propa-
ganda on behalf of the Serbian nationalist elite. On the other hand, it is a visual
spectacle for a Western audience, which is horrified but excited by images that
depict the Western Balkans as a “timeless, incomprehensible, mythical cycle of
passions” (Žižek 1997: 38). While cinema styles do not necessarily have clear
boundaries, and Underground is indeed a most popular example of the cinema
of self-Balkanisation, Kusturica here still embeds segments of a self-victimising
discourse that, in this instance, serves a specific nationalist agenda.
Post-Yugoslav Cinema: The Cinema of Normalisation

The current dominant phase of the post-Yugoslav cinematic paradigm is ‘nor-
malisation’ (Pavičić 2011), a term describing aesthetic, cultural and political
shifts in filmmaking across the socio-cultural spaces of the former Yugoslavia in
the twenty-first century. While reproducing the contemporary political per-
spective across post-Yugoslav territories, Pavičić’s cinematic labelling is inspired
by welcomed socio-political changes in the territories which once constituted
the Yugoslav state. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the 1990s war
leaders were either dead or had faced the international war crimes tribunal in
The Hague.
Once the former Yugoslav political space was freed from semi-democratic
nationalistic regimes, the states born on the ashes of Yugoslavia started to
rebuild their political, economic and cultural contacts. Without underestimat-
ing the efforts of other Yugoslav successor states, the reconstruction of cultural
connections has become a prominent feature amongst the now-independent
states of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro in particular, as
those four countries rediscover their connections through “common language,
culture, history, tradition and […] populations that overlap across new bor-
̵
ders” (Andelić 2017: 65).
Alongside normalisation, the term ‘post-Yugoslav’ has become yet another
category that has entered discourse, which reflects the aftermath of the wars of
the 1990s. For Tijana Matijević (2013: 105)
Post-Yugoslav is the cultural and political designation, which functions as a tool

to counter both the nationalistic agenda of post-Yugoslav societies and neoliberal
economies which accompanied the formation of all the respective post-
Yugoslav states.
Post-Yugoslav cinema, as defined by Levi (2007), Pavičić (2011), Dević

(2012), Murtic (2015), Jelača (2016), Gilić (2017) and Vidan (2018), is a
scholarly attempt to reflect on contemporary post-Yugoslav cinematic expres-
sion and set it as a relevant counter-argument against prominent nationalistic
and neoliberal tendencies, in not just specific post-Yugoslav but also more gen-
eral European space(s). Here, the inclusion of post-Yugoslav discourse into the
European context is necessary; as the past and present of post-Yugoslavia are an

“image and an effect of its own [European] history” (Balibar et al. 2002: 74).
Thus, the post-Yugoslav and cinema of normalisation are a methodological and
heuristic framework through which one may rethink not only post-Yugoslav
but also European, political and aesthetic responses to the blinding rage of
nationalism, xenophobia and racism, as well as the sharp decline of conditions
for the working class.
New Roles for Men and Women

The post-Yugoslav cinema of normalisation is above all an integrative space for
common cultures, facilitating reflection on war and post-war narratives across
common ground. In such a setting, it is possible for a film funded mostly by
Croatia, and whose leading actor is from Serbia, to win the most prestigious
film award in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Winner of the Sarajevo Film Festival (SFF)
in 2008, Goran Rušinović’s Buick Riviera (2008), exemplifies the cosmopoli-
tan achievements of post-Yugoslav cinema. The film is based on Miljenko
Jergović’s 2002 novel of the same name; Jergović is a Sarajevo-born Croat liv-
ing in the Croatian capital Zagreb; Goran Rušinović, the director of the film, is
a young Croatian director resident in the United States. Two equally impor-
tant roles in Rušinović’s film are given to Slavko Štimac and Leon Lučev. The
latter is a talented Croatian actor, who in Buick Riviera plays Vuko—a Bosnian
Serb living in Middle America. Slavko Štimac, on the other hand, is a doyen of
Serbian film and theatre. Well known in Sarajevo for his role in Kusturica’s
debut film Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (1981), in Buick Riviera, Štimac is
again given the role of a secular Muslim, as he transforms himself into Hasan—a
quiet Bosnian émigré in the United States.
Vuko and Hasan, previously unknown to each other, meet for the first time
by chance on a snowy road in the middle of America. These two men will spend
the next twenty-four hours mentally sabotaging each other. While trying to
figure out who is guilty of what, their lives change forever. Yet, they prove
nothing, just as the wars of the 1990s did not prove or justify anything; the
film’s ending has the characteristics of classical theatrical tragedy. Stylistically
and discursively, Buick Riviera is already a step away from the cinematic cliché
of the “Yugoslavian wild man” (Jameson 2004: 240). While still exposing the
emotional fragility of two men from the former Yugoslavia, deeply traumatised
by the recent conflict, Rušinović avoids emphasising the previously preferred
‘ferocity’ of ‘barbaric’ men as seen in the cinema of self-Balkanisation. For their
performances in Buick Riviera, Štimac and Lučev shared the best actor award
at the SSF. It was poignant to see these two men together on the red carpet,
while holding in their hands stylised, golden hearts—the trademark of the SFF.
The discourse of normalisation in post-Yugoslav cinema can also be seen in
the emergence of female directors. Aida Begić and Jasmila Žbanić are Sarajevo-
based directors who have effectively used the power of film narrative to depict
the aftermath of war from women’s perspectives. The accent in their films on
116 D. MURTIC
domestic spaces, the rhythms of everyday life and female solidarity construct an
alternative to that of patriarchal societies across post-Yugoslavia. Begić, in the
film Snow (2008), offers a dreamy, slow-paced story about the women whose
entire beings are marked by the horrifying consequences of the not-so-long-
ago military conflict. The film’s setting is a partly demolished Bosniak hamlet
in eastern Bosnia. Its central narrative follows a week in the lives of Bosniak
refugees who return to their village soon after the war ends. This micro-society
is missing a key element for returning to the religiously devotional and patriar-
chal way of life they had lived before the war: almost the entire male population
has perished. When a foreign property developer, escorted by a local Serb,
proposes to buy up all their land, the women are tempted to accept the offer
and escape poverty and isolation. In the end, the women decide not to sell their
village. They are there to stay.
The women in the film are portrayed as proud and industrious people. In
particular, the main character Alma—played by talented Sarajevan actress
Žana Marjanović—is, perhaps, an idealised example of a human being who
does not lose her or his dignity despite the almost unbearable psychological
and social circumstances. Begić, through Žana’s character, refuses to be a vic-
tim. She struggles with the past, but her present is worth living for. Director
Begić, who also co-wrote the screenplay, is a practicing Muslim, and her reli-
gious commitment is further underlined by the fashionable Islamic scarves
that hide her hair and frame her face every time she appears in public. There
is no doubt that Begić’s religious affiliation is transferred to the characters in
her film. The leading character Alma, in particular, is an example of a woman
whose faith in God is very strong despite the doubts and challenges she faces
in the struggle of her everyday routine. Alma is also characterised by her
strong determination to make decisions about her future. Specifically, in the
context of a traditional patriarchal society, it is not the only surviving adult
man in the village, but Alma, who takes the decisive role during negotiations
with the foreign developer over the future for the surviving villagers. Perhaps,
in Snow, Begić successfully shows Islamic feminism whose objective is, accord-
ing to Balibar (2011: 19), to challenge from the inside the cultural structures
of patriarchal domination within this particular form of monotheism. The
gender-liberating aspect of Begić’s film is an example showing that the spiri-
tual is not always opposed to the secular. The struggle for dignity and equality
for the Other may have several paths. Further optimism, with regard to wom-
en’s perspectives, concerns and their visualisations, lies in an important and
optimistic detail that Begić and Žbanić are not the only female directors who
have made a significant mark in post-Yugoslav cinema. Marina Andrée, Aneta
Lešinkovska, Maja Miloš, Andrea Štaka and Teona Strugar, amongst others,
are a new generation of talented directors whose artistic practices are challeng-
ing the long-established domination of masculinist discourse in the post-
Yugoslav visual space.
Is It Possible to Disarm a Man from the Balkans?

Alongside giving space to women’s voices, an equally important tendency of
post-Yugoslav cinema is the demilitarisation of men. However, given the
entrenchment of militaristic discourse(s) within post-Yugoslav geographical
space, that is clearly a colossal task. According to cultural anthropologist Ivo
Žanić (1998), the ‘rebellious warriors’ discourse has existed in the Western
Balkans for centuries and was especially strong in rural areas. The violent, yet
victorious, liberation of the Slavic national subject from the political and juridi-
cal influence of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires accentuated the
privileged status of the warrior in the majority of South Slavic cultures. Folk
poetry was the most common way of initiating, spreading and preserving this
warrior mythology, in folk narratives which insisted on the bravery of mythic
proportions displayed by preferred warriors, as well as underlining motifs cen-
tred on looting and the enslavement of women. In their struggle for power, the
Yugoslav Communists did not need to put a significant amount of energy into
the formal enlistment of the masses to their revolutionary and anti-fascist proj-
ect; during and after WWII, they needed only to reinforce choice elements of
these (patriarchal) folk traditions and epic narratives. Some aspects of these folk
stories were subjected to transformation and adaptation, with the intention of
more closely reflecting Communist ideology—for instance, the Communist
versions excluded looting and the enslavement of women. Yet, as Ivo Žanić
argues, this transformation was by no means radical. Thus, many aspects of the
Communist epic narrative kept a viable link to their original roots in folk and
patriarchal traditions. In the early 1980s, the “codex of heroism and radical
egalitarianism” were still significant normative elements of the Yugoslav system
(Žanic ́ 1998: 63).
Cinematically speaking, the figure of the warrior entered the former Yugoslav
cinematic screen at the dawn of WWI. He was a Serbian soldier and fought in
the Balkan Wars (1912 and 1913), from which the Kingdom of Serbia emerged
as the regional superpower. Serbian soldiers recorded on filmstrips during the
two Balkan Wars were not professional actors, but rather the unspecified men
involved in armed struggles. The battles in which they participated were the
first armed conflicts on European soil in the epoch of cinematography, and
European filmmakers had rushed to the battlefields with a desire to visualise
war. Such visualisation further cemented the dominant position of the Serbian
elite during the existence of the first common state for the Southern Slavs—the
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes—created from the rubble of
WWI. These early filmic visualisations of Serbian soldiers had entrenched the
myth of the fearless yet morally superior warrior in a Yugoslav, mostly Serbian,
context. On the other hand, this also marked the beginning of a (Western)
European fetish, which Jameson (2004: 240) ironically baptises the “Yugoslavian
wild man”.
118 D. MURTIC
Yugoslav cinema contributed in spreading and preserving the image of the

mythic warrior. In a post-WWII political system based on ‘people’s self-rule’,
as the Yugoslav Communist party liked to define their one-party system, film
was conceived as “the richest resource among all the artistic media for reaching
and informing all levels of society” (Goulding 2002: 8). As the National War
of Liberation waged by Communist-commanded partisans during WWII was
the central founding myth upon which the post-WWII Yugoslav Federation
was built, war films were overwhelmed by action scenes, portraying the devo-
tion and bravery of partisan guerrillas (Šešić 2006: 109–110). In the forty-five
years of Communist rule, several generations had grown up with such imagery,
with school children deliberately taken to cinema halls to watch war movies; for
those who missed such films on the theatrical screen, there was always one of
the innumerable replays on television. An intergenerational anthropological
study led by Natalija Bašić (cited in Jakiša 2012: 111) found that the preva-
lence of the partisan visual imaginary during Communist rule reached the
point where the ‘historical memory’ of Yugoslav citizens was shaped not by
textbooks but rather by Yugoslav war cinema. Yugoslav war cinema did its part
in preparing Yugoslav men for the 1990s wars, indeed.
Still, very few are, if ever, ready for real war. The chain of armed conflicts at
the end of the twentieth century in the territories once called Yugoslavia were
indeed a horrifying experience for many—especially women, children and the
elderly. While the policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’ included forcible removal of the
entire population of the ‘wrong’ ethnicity, and the systematic use of rape as a
tool of war, physical extermination was by and large practised on men. Armed
men destroyed each other on the battlefields from Croatia to Kosovo very
often, and very successfully. Furthermore, since unarmed men were easier prey,
the militias and regular armed forces slaughtered them mercilessly. Once the
1990s wars of Yugoslav secession ended, post-Yugoslav cinematic space(s)
resumed their focus on combatant life and activities in a war zone once again.
Unlike the partisan features which—while insisting on total victory over fas-
cism and the mythic bravery of the guerrillas led by the Communists—had
overwhelmingly ignored the horrifying aspects of military conflict, even for the
victorious side, the vast majority of newer films on the recent wars in the for-
mer Yugoslavia have had an anti-war stance. The reasons for this stylistically
and politically motivated approach may vary, from artistic sensitivity and the
overall democratisation of the post-Yugoslav space(s), to international produc-
ers’ insistence on a more balanced point of view on the conflicts (Iordanova
2001). Some notable post-Yugoslav war-themed movies are How the War
Started on My Island (1996) by Martin Brešan, No Man’s Land (2001) by
Danis Tanović, Nafaka (2006) by Jasmin Duraković, The Blacks (2009) by
Horan Dević and Zvonimir Jurić, Ordinary People (2009) by Vladimir Perisić
2009, Men Don’t Cry (2017) by Alen Drljević, and The Load (2018) by Ognjen
Glavonić.
‘Ordinary Men’ in the 1990s Yugoslav Wars

With only a few exceptions, a soldier in the post-Yugoslav cinematic imagina-
tion is framed as an ordinary yet unwilling participant, a martyr whose sacrifice
is pointless, or a savage individual unleashed and used by the forces of
nationalism(s). As such, the 1990s warrior’s ordinary appearance, either as a
victim or as a perpetrator, is discursively similar to Ingrid Lewis’ (2017) com-
prehensive elaboration on the ordinary subject in European films about the
Holocaust. While emphasising the discursive shift from monstrous figures to
ordinary perpetrators that characterises the portrayal of women in twenty-first-
century Holocaust cinema, Lewis reapplies, this time in a cinematic context,
Christopher Browning’s (1992) argument that most perpetrators were ‘ordi-
nary’ people whose crimes were not motivated by racial hatred, but by minor
reasons such as peer pressure, career ambitions and obedience to authority.
In post-Yugoslav film, the concept of the ordinary perpetrator is the central
focus of Serbian director Vladimir Perišić’s feature debut Ordinary People
(2009). The film depicts a day in the life of a soldier; Johnny (Relja Popović)
who looks like an average, well-behaved boy from the neighbourhood. Johnny
is a new recruit and his days are typical of a military barrack routine. This rou-
tine is suddenly interrupted by the officer who orders Johnny and other sol-
diers from the ‘third unit’ to get themselves ready for a combat mission. Seven
men, including Johnny, are asked to board the bus. The soldiers have no idea
where or why they are going. Johnny’s anxiety begins to build. During the trip,
a radio transmits news bulletins about ‘a state of emergency’ and a ‘terrorist
attack’. They soon arrive at a collection of abandoned buildings in the country-
side. Soldiers escape the heat of a hot summer day by sitting under trees, splash-
ing themselves with water, smoking and wondering what they are waiting for.
Very soon their conjecture comes to an end. Johnny and others are ordered to
execute civilian men with a rifle shot to the back. By the end of the day, Johnny
will have transformed himself from a subject, with feelings of social responsibil-
ity and the will for resistance, into an object; by evening, Johnny is nothing
more than a lethal weapon in service of military drills and political rhetoric.
In Ordinary People, dialogue is at a bare minimum. The camera is static
almost all the time, and the shots are very long, almost endless. The space
between the camera and the filmed bodies is always kept at the same distance.
Any activity—whether it is brushing teeth in the barracks bathroom, eating
breakfast in the canteen, smoking a cigarette under a tree, or executing civil-
ians—is filmed from an identical angle and distance. The director’s aim in using
this technique is clear. Mass killing has nothing to do with emotions or human
nature. It is the particular policy that creates the particular social environment
in which the particular crime against humanity can take place. There is a formal
and patterned distance. In the film’s very last scene, Johnny takes pleasure in
an evening coffee and cigarette. He is on his own. The night is quiet; Johnny
too. He looks exactly the same as he looked that morning. He is an ordinary,
beardless, young man from a neighbourhood. It is in this ‘everydayness’ that
120 D. MURTIC
the tragedy lies. In Johnny, we see what Hannah Arendt names the “banality of
evil”—the comprehension that the perpetrators of the worst crimes against
humanity are not psychopaths or sociopaths but so-called ordinary people
(Arendt 1963). By treating Johnny as something other than human, to para-
phrase Drakulić (2005), we would put him in a different class of human, of
which we could never be part. As a result, we refuse to believe that such acts
could be committed by our neighbours or by ourselves, thus allowing such
things to happen again.
Case Study: The Living and the Dead (Kristijan

Milić, 2007)
A feature debut, The Living and the Dead (2007), directed by Croatian direc-
tor Kristijan Milić, presents the concept of ‘recurrence’ as an inevitable and
repeated horror in the lives of ordinary men. Based on the acclaimed novel
written by Josip Mlakić, a Croat living in Bosnia-Herzegovina, The Living and
the Dead offers a parallel perspective on two wars. One focuses on WWII, and
the other is reflecting on the conflict that occurred in the 1990s. In both
instances, the place of action is identical, a mountainous and largely uninhab-
ited region of central Bosnia. The 1990s narrative centres its attention on
Tomo. He is a member of the Croatian Defence Council (HVO), a military
formation constituted largely by Croats from Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the early
stage of the 1990s war in Bosnia, the HVO fought alongside the ARBiH (Army
of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina) against the VRS (the Army of
Bosnian Serbs), with the ARBiH being mostly constituted of Bosniaks, while
the VRS was a military formation created exclusively by and for the Serbs from
Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the initial stage of conflict, HVO fought alongside
ARBiH against VRS. Later on, HVO and ARBiH clashed with each other. In
the film, Tomo and his HVO comrades are caught in the early stage of this
trilateral military conflict. The year is 1993 and, in Bosnia, everybody fights
everyone.
The parallel WWII narrative focuses on Martin, a member of the Domobrani
(Croatian Home Guard). Constituted of Croats and Bosniaks, the Domobrani
were part of the armed forces of Independent State of Croatia. This Nazi pup-
pet state was formed soon after Germany occupied the Kingdom of Yugoslavia
in 1941. In the film, Martin’s superior is an Ustaša officer. The Ustaša militia
was a formidable branch of the Independent State of Croatia’s military, infa-
mously known for horrendous war crimes against Serbs, Jews, Romani and the
anti-fascist segments of Croatian and Bosnian populations. Beside Ustaša,
Domobrani and the Partisans, the armies which fought during WWII on
Bosnian territories included the occupying forces of Germany and Italy, as well
as the Serbian paramilitary formations named Č etniks. Although initially
formed to fight the occupiers, Č etniks were mostly engaged in the organised
killing of Bosniaks, Croats and anti-fascist segments of Serbian population. In
the part of the film that follows the characters in WWII, Martin and his com-
rades are facing multiethnic partisan guerrillas. The year is 1943 and, in Bosnia,
the partisans fight with all others.
Fifty years later, in 1993, the partisans are not amongst the warring sides; at
least, they are not amongst those who are alive. Yet, the referential imaginary
of partisans, and the remnants of Communist legacy, are marked quite early in
Milić’s feature. In The Living and the Dead’s opening scene, Tomo’s HVO
comrades, Ćoro and Mali, practise shooting in front of the command post.
Their target is a sculptured bust, depicting an unidentifiable man. Those who
had the chance to visit Bosnian provincial schools and other community build-
ings during the Communist era would easily have noticed those same sculp-
tures placed in halls and corridors. It may be assumed, therefore, that the bust
is an ideological (albeit artistic) dedication to a local partisan WWII hero, who
most likely died in an armed struggle against Nazis or their local collaborators.
To honour their sacrifices, and also to highlight their victorious status and
impose ideological dominance, the Communist rulers named buildings and
places of cultural or educational significance after those fallen soldiers, whose
naming would be further underlined by an artefact such as a plaque or bust.
Those sites would be commemorated on specific days by laying flowers and
holding commemorations. But, as this image clearly indicates, the legacy of
honourable and sacrificial dying in Bosnia is provisional and constrained by
time; when the Bosnian Communists lost political power in the 1990 election,
as The Living and the Dead shows, they also lost the power to protect the sym-
bolic dignity of their fallen soldiers.
Even before open conflict began in Croatia and Bosnia, the spirits of defeated
armies in WWII had started to surface. Once Viali, Tomo’s other comrade,
passes by Ćoro and Mali and enters the HVO command post, he notices a
black and white framed photo of an unnamed Ustaša. “It’s a grandpa”, says the
HVO commander. His gentle smile signifies pride. It is important to pause
here and make the point that The Living and the Dead does not intend to fore-
ground the idea of retaliation against the partisans. On the contrary, the shot
partisan bust and framed Ustaša picture signify the awakening of ghosts from
the past. In Bosnia, ghosts’ habitats are the mountains; a nearby mountain is
the next destination for Tomo and his five HVO comrades. Fifty years earlier,
in 1943, Tomo’s grandfather Martin had headed towards the same mountain.
When shifting between the two parallel narratives, director Milić avoids
abrupt cuts. Instead, specific scene-setting and camera movement in scenes
from the WWII conflict are identical to those depicting the conflict in 1993. It
is the director’s clear intention to emphasise the unity as well as the repetitive-
ness of these two parallel narratives (Šošić 2009). This narrative process sug-
gests reappearance: war happened, war is happening right now, and may happen
again. The uniforms and insignia might be different, but men and their tragic
role in the wars are the same. However, the film still insists on aesthetic distinc-
tions between the two narratives. Unlike the daytime scenes from the 1993
narrative, those from 1943 are painted in the colours of the past, in which sepia
122 D. MURTIC
prevails. In addition, many sequences from the 1943 narrative are supple-
mented by special effects; this, along with an emphasis on setting and dialogue
in the 1943 sequences, produces a theatrical effect. According to the director
Milić (cited in Šošić 2009), the 1990s wars remain current wars; either lived on
the battlefield or seen on the television. WWII, however, due to its historical
distance, is distorted by myth.
Mythical or not, a violent death is the common fate for almost all protago-
nists in the film. And most of these killings are unglorified and, in some
instances, grotesque. The HVO commander, Ivo, is accidentally killed by a
fellow soldier while emptying his bowels in the shrub. His unlikely assassin,
Robe, dies by erratically running into the minefield set up by his fellow solider,
Viali. In the WWII narrative, Ferid, Martin’s best friend, is shot in the back.
His dying scream symbolises nothing but fear; the trepidation of a human
being unwilling to leave the world of the living. The only stylised death is the
cruel execution of a captured partisan in the WWII narrative. In one of the
most distinctive scenes in the whole movie, the remaining Domobrani and
Ustaša soldiers are standing on a hillock, making a semicircle around the cap-
tured partisan. The scene depicts the partisan as unafraid. He is calm and looks
his captors in the eyes, yet without pride or anger. A moment before, the Ustaša
major has given Tomo an order to shoot the unarmed man. While Tomo is
unwillingly getting ready to pull the trigger, another Ustaša pulls his pistol out
and shoots the partisan in the forehead.
Blood pours out as a fountain through the exit wound in the captured man’s
head. This segment is filmed in slow motion. The partisan’s body falls on the
ground. “Don’t you wonder why I did it?”, asks the Ustaša who has just killed
the unarmed man. “Why?” asks Tomo, still in shock. “Because nobody replaced
me when it was needed”. This dialogue between Tomo and his comrade exem-
plifies the petty banality of men being dehumanised under military conditions.
The comrades may try to protect each other from committing the crime, yet
the ultimate sacrifice is banal. The victim is not spared, and the unwilling war
criminal must continue to fight. With this image, amongst all the killing in the
film, Milić strategically gives aesthetic emphasis to the only murder that can be
characterised as a war crime. The scene’s aesthetic appeal urges its viewers to
remember this passage and carry it with themselves for a long period of time.
If not earlier, this scene (placed in the middle of the film) is where the film
finally discloses its ultimately anti-war stance.
From this moment, the dead prevail over the living. Domobrani and Ustaša
groups from the 1943 narrative will be killed one by one in stubborn and
never-ending partisan attacks. Martin is the only one who survives. Alone, he
reaches a small cemetery at the edge of forest. In a more-than-symbolic mix-
ture of pagan, Catholic and Muslim tombstones, he sees the executed partisan
and his assassin motionlessly standing next to each other. An almost identical
destiny awaits Tomo and his HVO comrades from the 1990s story; they too
will die one by one, until Tomo is seriously wounded and Viali is ready to com-
mit suicide. Both men are in the graveyard encountered by Martin fifty years
ago, dead soldiers from all wars standing above them. In the middle, there is a
campfire that makes their bodies and faces recognisable. Tomo lacks the cour-
age to look at them. The blood begins to pour through his mouth. Viali calls
his name. Tomo does not respond. Viali leans the pistol against his own head.
The movie ends.
In The Living and the Dead, dying is not the worst thing that could happen
to a soldier. To kill and be killed is futile; even to survive is no guarantee of a
definite escape from the recurring apocalypse named war. Martin, the grandfa-
ther, lived, but Tomo, the grandchild, may not. Somehow, with The Living and
the Dead, post-Yugoslav cinema has begun to shift its discursive stance from
‘hero warrior’ versus ‘perpetrator who is pure evil’ to ‘all men in war are at a
loss’. In Milić’s visualisation of Mlakić’s novel, a man in war is not just an ordi-
nary person. He is an insignificant bodily appearance destined to perish in the
cyclic eruption of violence regardless of the insignia he is wearing. The political
or ideological causes, which trigger the conflict, are pointless to him. His sac-
rifice might be seen as a heroic act in one specific political time frame, only to
be ridiculed in the other. There is a blurred line from keeping the bust of a war
hero in a school hall, to having the same bust shot by the ordinary recruits who
are counting their days amongst the living.
Conclusion
Semezdin Mehmedinović begins his poem named War—written in a besieged
Sarajevo in 1992—with the following verses: “It’s the war, and nothing is hap-
pening”. The verses were written in a time when even outsiders had begun to
learn about the ravaging consequences of Bosnian conflict. According to Kazaz
(2004), Mehmedinović intentionally reconstructs George Orwell’s identical
line from his diaries about the Spanish Civil War. Orwell’s ‘nothing happens’
was written by an enthusiastic soldier who had no satisfaction in an unsettled
peace between two battles. Orwell couldn’t wait to become victorious over
fascism, the evil of his time. Mehmedinović, however, had lost hope. The evil
is always returning. Mehmedinović’s anti-war stance insists that war is an ordi-
nary, senseless event. Post-Yugoslav cinema has begun to depict the evil which
emerged in the war as an ordinary subject. Even a filmic warrior, who is fight-
ing this evil, is an ordinary man. For the earnest as well as for the evil, for the
living and for the deceased, war is a cyclical event with no sense at all. Everyone
is at a loss.
Yet, there is hope. Since the making of The Living and the Dead, post-
Yugoslav cinema has continued to make anti-war statements, embodied in nar-
ratives such as Ognjen Glavonić’s The Load (2018). In the film, set in the
Serbia of 1999 during NATO’s (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) airstrike
campaign against the Slobodan Milosevic regime, truck driver Vlada—the son
of a WWII partisan war hero—is ordered to collect a mysterious load from war-
torn Kosovo and transport it to the Serbian capital Belgrade. While not explic-
itly shown, the film audience is aware that the refrigerated truck is jam-packed
124 D. MURTIC
with the corpses of Kosovars killed by Serbian army and militia. The sense of
moral decadence is obvious: while Vlada’s father bravely fought fascists in
WWII, his son has become the unwilling servant of evil.
Nowadays, “[n]o one, not even pacifists”, writes Sontag (2003: 5), “believes
that war can be abolished…We hope only”, continues Sontag, “to stop geno-
cide and to bring to justice those who commit gross violation of the laws of
war…and to be able to stop specific wars by imposing negotiated alternatives”
(Sontag 2003: 5). For now, there is only the hope that the symbolic texture of
the post-Yugoslav anti-war cinematic discourse may influence a young man to
reject a call to arms in a conflict to come. That should be enough in slowing
the march of inevitable evil. In the meantime, evil may lose its way.

1. After reading this chapter and/or watching some of the mentioned films,
would you agree with Kellner’s claim that every film coming from a
national cinema represents its socio-political climate?
2. Why are ‘war’- and ‘warrior’-themed films made during the Yugoslav era
different from post-Yugoslav film narratives? Consider comparing, for
example, Veljko Bulajic’s film The Battle of Sutjeska (1973) with Kristijan
Milić’s The Living and the Dead (2007).
3. Is the post-Yugoslav cinema depiction of the warrior different to that of
other European filmmaking, Hollywood war films or the representation
of military conflict in a national cinema of your choice?
4. For many (not only cinema scholars), artistic cooperation between newly
formed post-Yugoslav states is an important step forward in establishing
peace permanently in the Balkans. Why, and in what ways, is post-Yugo-
slav film art contributing to the peace-making process?
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———. 2003. Media Spectacle. London: Routledge.
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PART II
Directions
CHAPTER 8
The New/Old Patriarchal Auteurism: Manoel

de Oliveira, the Male Gaze and Women’s
Representation
Ingrid Lewis and Irena Sever Globan
Definitions
Auteur
According to Etherington-Wright and Doughty (2011), an auteur can be
defined as a filmmaker, usually a director, who has artistic control over the film-
making process, whose films express a personal vision and can be analysed in
terms of recurrent themes and aesthetics. Debates on the concept of the auteur
emerged in the 1940s in France through the writings of Alexandre Astruc and
André Bazin.
Male Gaze
A concept formulated in the 1970s by British feminist film theorist Laura
Mulvey. In her seminal article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1973),
Mulvey argues that classical film is predicated on a narrow gender stereotyping
I. Lewis (*)
Dundalk, Ireland
I. Sever Globan
Catholic University of Croatia, Zagreb, Croatia
e-mail: irena.sever@unicath.hr

130 I. LEWIS AND I. SEVER GLOBAN
that assigns men an active role in the narrative, while designating women as
passive objects of the male gaze.
Scopophilia
Borrowing from the psychoanalytic theory of Freud, the concept of scopo-
philia, or sexual pleasure derived from watching an objectified other, has been
applied to film by Laura Mulvey. She considers scopophilia as central to main-
stream film viewing and argues that cinema activates unconscious processes
based on the primeval fascination with looking.
Voyeurism
Mulvey further argues that the darkness of the screening room confers upon
spectators a privileged voyeuristic position, which allows them to peep into a
private world. Through identification with male characters, the men in the
audience derive pleasure by looking at cinematic women displayed as passive
and sexualised objects of the male gaze. Thus, voyeurism takes place when the
passive female character is secretly desired, objectified and controlled by the
male character and, by extension, by the male audience.
Introduction
Films, and media in general, play a significant role in shaping the value system
within a culture, defining the canons of femininity, morality and beauty.
According to Liesbet Van Zoonen (2004), media has nowadays become a cen-
tral arena in which the discursive negotiation of gender takes place. In the same
vein, Sofia Sjö (2007: 63) argues that media representation of women is a
barometer for the role assigned to women in any specific society and culture.
Since media discourses on gender and sex can shape, challenge or reinforce our
beliefs, it is crucially important to examine how women are or, on the contrary,
are not, represented by media.
The twenty-first century has witnessed numerous international cinematic
productions that cast strong women in leading roles. Similarly, in European
cinema, Ingrid Lewis (2017) acknowledges the emergence of a series of films
about the Holocaust that bring to the forefront women’s experiences. As she
argues, the women portrayed in these films are protagonists of their own story;
they have a voice of their own and are not defined by their relationship to their
male counterparts, but stand alone as accomplished characters who narrate
their achievements, struggles, feelings and lives. Furthermore, Barbara Mennel
(2019: 6) argues that, due to feminist demands over the decades, twenty-first-
century European cinema has witnessed an increasing number of cinematic
narratives that focus on working women while interrogating female empower-
ment and the impact of neoliberal capitalism.
Dissenting from contemporary representations, Portuguese filmmaker
Manoel de Oliveira intentionally chooses to adopt a rigid and archetypal image
8 THE NEW/OLD PATRIARCHAL AUTEURISM: MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA, THE MALE… 131
of women, who are portrayed from a male perspective and framed as the source
of men’s troubles and restlessness. His films conform to the impetus to fulfil the
demands of the conventional male gaze that characterises traditional cinema.
According to Laura Mulvey (1985: 310), “the man controls the film phantasy
and also emerges as the representative of power (…) as the bearer of the look of
the spectator”. In the same vein, John Berger (1972: 47) states: “Men act and
women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the
relation of women to themselves.” As explained later in the chapter, the three
Oliveira films discussed in this chapter reflect much of this patriarchal metanar-
rative and comply with the dynamics of classical cinema designating the woman
as site and object of gaze. Oliveira’s case is particularly interesting since, from a
formal and narrative point of view, he is clearly a twentieth-century auteur fit-
ting the canon of the ‘great, white, male’ auteurs (Andrews 2013: 44) that
populated European Cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, cinema has greatly
changed over the decades and, if the notion of auteurship has survived, it has
done so by accommodating new trends and directions in film theory.
Notwithstanding this change, Oliveira’s longevity and prolific career allowed
him to carry into the twenty-first century a set of female representations which
can be considered highly problematic in the context of contemporary society.
This chapter firstly discusses the figure of Manoel de Oliveira, whose film-
making career spanned from 1931 to 2015, making him the longest active
filmmaker in the history of cinema. Secondly, it argues that Oliveira presents an
antiquated portrayal of women by focusing on three of his most recent films,
namely Belle Toujours (2006), Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (2009)
and The Strange Case of Angelica (2010). In doing so, the chapter clearly shows
that his films display regressive gender representations and interrogates whether
his auteur status facilitated such a problematic depiction of women. Moreover,
this chapter implies that, despite its perceived position in contradiction to clas-
sical Hollywood and mainstream films, auteur cinema often reiterates similar
gendered paradigms by simply ‘smuggling’ its representational politics in dif-
ferent aesthetic and stylistic approaches.
Patriarchy, Auteur Cinema and Beyond

Before discussing Oliveira, it is important to define auteur cinema, explaining
how it is positioned in relation to classical Hollywood and mainstream cinema.
According to Etherington-Wright and Doughty (2011), an auteur can be
defined as a filmmaker, usually a director, who has artistic control over the film-
making process, whose films express a personal vision and can be analysed in
terms of recurrent themes and aesthetics. The debates related to auteur theory
emerged in the 1940s in France through the writings of Alexandre Astruc and
André Bazin, and continued throughout the 1950s and 1960s, catalysed by a
group of enthusiast young critics and filmmakers, which were grouped around
the newly founded magazine Cahiers du cinéma (in English meaning “Cinema
Notebook”). These young auteurs, among whom number François Truffaut,
Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Claude Chabrol, are recognised as belong-
ing to the French New Wave, one of the most influential movements in film
history (Etherington-Wright and Doughty 2011: 1–2; Hayward 2000: 19–21).
The paradox of the movement lies in the fact that, despite being developed
“to raise the cultural status of cinema and to validate the superiority of European
cinema over that of the USA” (Wood 2007: 27), the French New Wave has
constantly sought inspiration from the film industry on the other side of the
Atlantic. In fact, its young French filmmakers looked up to great Hollywood
directors, namely Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Otto Preminger and Howard
Hawks, declaring them auteurs for their personal style, seemingly uncompro-
mised by the studio constraints in which they were working (Bordwell and
Thompson 2013: 486). It is important to note that the New Wave style, char-
acterised by improvisation, handheld camera, natural light, loose plots and
ambiguous endings (Bordwell and Thompson 2013: 487), could not be more
different from the aesthetic conventions and strict narrative principles that gov-
erned the broadly standardised Hollywood cinema of the time. However, from
a gendered perspective, French New Wave films replicate the patriarchal
dynamics and troublesome representations of women that dominate classical
practices on the other side of the ocean. Arguably, the fascination of early
European auteurs with Hollywood films served only to indiscriminately rein-
force the patriarchal ideologies of an already male-dominated domain.
Geneviève Sellier (2008: 6) highlights the absence of women among the
150 young directors who made their first film in France between 1957 and
1962, the peak years of the French New Wave movement. Moreover, as she
(ibid.) claims, these filmmakers aspired for a greater “personal liberty” and, as
a consequence, started to write in first person, using the pronoun “I” as an
articulation of their subjectivity “in a new attempt to take account of lived
experience at its most intimate, its most quotidian, and its most contempo-
rary”. Sellier (2008: 6–8) further explains how the “first person masculine sin-
gular” of the French New Wave fostered a dominant male canon, which is
revealing for the “subtle dialectic between the mechanisms of masculine and
patriarchal domination” and the slow recognition of the perspective of women,
usually seen as an Other. In this context, Agnès Varda is in fact the exception
that confirms the rule: despite her impressive career during the French New
Wave “she is rarely accorded the visibility of her male colleagues” (Cook 2007:
472). In a similar vein, Mary Wood (2007: 35) states that auteur cinema has
been for long “the purview of educated and articulate males”, a reality chal-
lenged only in recent years when the benefits of the digital era afforded Varda
a greater visibility. As Catherine Fowler (2002: 90) ironically claims “in order
to be an auteur one must be male and must make a particular type of cinema”.
Arguably, despite their considerable differences in style, form and narrative,
European auteurism and classical Hollywood cinema share to a great degree a
male-centred perspective and an objectification of women that has been at the
heart of feminist debates since the 1970s. The same can be applied to main-
stream cinema, which, having evolved from classical Hollywood films and
belonging mostly to a studio context, carries the same discursive weaknesses in

relation to patriarchal representations of women. For this reason, this chapter
makes references to the three types of cinema in a rather interchangeable way;
however, this should be understood solely from the perspective of their gen-
dered representations.
Two Centuries, One Filmmaker: Problematising Oliveira

as an Auteur
Manoel de Oliveira’s unique figure in the history of cinema has been acknowl-
edged by various scholars. Randal Johnson (2007: 2) commends “Oliveira’s
cinematic longevity” and the “creative vitality of his films”; Carolin Overhoff
Ferreira (2008: 2) emphasises his “unquestionable importance within film his-
tory”, while Mariana Liz (2018: 10) identifies Oliveira as “the most interna-
tional and the most important filmmaker in Portuguese cinema”. His prolific
career spanned over eight decades, making Oliveira the only director in the
world who started filming in the silent period and managed to survive into the
digital era. As Oliveira stated in an interview: “I grew up with cinema and he
grew up with me; we walked together. The evolution of film criticism has been
considerable, and my mental evolution also has been great” (Johnson
2007: 147).
Between his first silent documentary Labour on the Douro River (1931) and
his last posthumously released short, A Century of Energy (2015), Oliveira’s
career lasted eighty-four years and resulted in sixty-five titles. Maintaining a
high degree of artistic control over the final product, Oliveira often wrote and
edited his films, and even produced some of them. As Johnson (2007: 2)
claims, the Portuguese filmmaker was able to pursue his own vision and origi-
nal style because he was “unrestrained by the structures of studio production
and commercial imperatives”. While, for the first half of his career, Oliveira’s
filming was less productive and suffered under the censorship imposed by the
dictatorial regime of the Portuguese Second Republic (Johnson 2007: 3; Mira
2005: 2–5), from the 1990s until his death in 2015, Oliveira was extremely
prolific, directing between one and three films each year, with the exception of
2011 and 2013. He was repeatedly honoured at European film festivals
throughout his career, and frequently compared with seminal European auteurs
such as Dreyer, Bresson, Bergman and Rossellini (Johnsons 2007: 2).
Importantly, Oliveira considers himself as a truly European filmmaker,
claiming in an interview, “I reject traditional cinema, the American-style film
that wants to give us the impression that life is on the screen, not outside of it”
(Johnson 2007: 149). Oliveira criticises what he considers the politics of emo-
tion that prevail in Hollywood films, opting instead for “a different kind of
cinema” that is “more European”, because it requires active participation on
behalf of the audience and engages the spectator in a deeply reflexive process
(ibid.). As Johnson (2003, 2007: 4) points out, Oliveira’s films “raise many
questions, but they rarely provide answers”, challenging the audience “to think
about, rather than passively accept, that which is shown on the screen”. Inviting
reflection, his cinema is tailored for an active audience, engaged in a complex
process of interpreting his films.
Moreover, one has to consider that Oliveira’s early career took place during
a significant period for European cinema, when two of the most important film
movements—Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave—emerged. During
this time, filmmaking became a highly innovative and dynamic arena, in which
directors positioned their films in dialogue and greatly influenced each other.
Despite the restrictions imposed by Portugal’s dictatorship, Oliveira was influ-
enced by the auteurist climate and was deeply aware of these new stylistic trends
and changes in European cinema. De Baecque and Parsi’s (1996) interview
collection with Oliveira mentions his encounters with André Bazin, prominent
figure of the French New Wave and co-founder of the magazine Cahiers du
cinema. Renowned auteurs also resurface in Oliveira’s interviews, such as
François Truffaut, Roberto Rossellini, Carl Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, Federico
Fellini, Luis Buñuel and Robert Bresson, among others. Furthermore, the
Portuguese filmmaker claims that his first feature film Aniki Bóbó (1942) pre-
dates Italian Neorealism, sharing many of its features such as the natural set-
tings, non-professional actors and children in protagonist roles (De Baecque
and Parsi 1996: 126). Overall, Oliveira’s work is undoubtedly located in
European auteurist cinema, bearing the imprint of its early stages and in a con-
stant dialogue with other ‘great’, ‘male’ auteurs dominating European cinema
in the decades of post-World War II.
According to João Bénard da Costa (2008), Oliveira’s filmography exhibits
a deep unity, with a discernible consistency in terms of cinematic style and a
recurrence of key thematic concerns. As Da Costa (2008: 11) acknowledges,
“although much has changed (…), even more has remained the same”. The
core themes that prevail through most of his eight decades of cinema are life
and death, ageing, memory, good versus evil, desire, unfulfilled love, nation-
hood and religion (Johnson 2003, 2005, 2007, 2018; Overhoff Ferreira
2008). Overall, as Overhoff Ferreira (2018: 76) emphasises, Oliveira’s films are
characterised by an abundance of philosophical, cultural and existential themes
and are dominated by a strong preoccupation with the ‘human condition’.
Stylistically, they are characterised by the use of static camera, long takes, the-
atricality, emphasis on dialogues, economy of characters, meticulous frame
composition and slowness (Johnson 2003, 2005, 2007; Overhoff Ferreira 2018).
Recently, scholars, such as Cruchinho (2008) and Da Costa (2008), have
highlighted Oliveira’s problematic portrayal of women, depicted as objects of
erotic fruition, mysterious beings and sources of evil and guilt. Referring to
various films made between 1988 and 2000, Cruchinho (2008: 58) argues that
Oliveira has “carved the woman” in a highly “stereotyped manner as an inven-
tion of man; not a different gender, but the bodily object that men desire”.
The three films discussed later in the chapter illustrate that such tendencies to
stereotype and objectify women are encountered also in more recent films
directed by Manoel de Oliveira. Arguably, in relation to the portrayal of women,

Oliveira’s films set in place an intricate process of reviving a regressive patriar-
chal auteurism which is performed, as explained later, through mechanisms of
male identification, male gaze, male voiceover and a strong voyeuristic element.
The Revival of the Male Gaze in Oliveira’s Recent Films

Belle Toujours (2006), Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (2009) and The
Strange Case of Angelica (2010) reiterate a representational pattern of women
present in classical Hollywood cinema, which assigns women a passive role as
objects of the male gaze. According to Laura Mulvey (1985: 309), in the rep-
resentational practices of classical cinema, “pleasure in looking has been split
between active/male and passive/female”. Therefore, while men are assigned
an active position as bearers of the look, women are relegated to passive roles,
as objects of voyeuristic display. As explained earlier, although from a stylistic
perspective European auteurism is deliberately positioned in dichotomy with
classical Hollywood and mainstream cinema, all three share a male canon and
perspective that points to their highly regressive stance in relation to gendered
representations. Siân Reynolds (2006: 368) states that although Mulvey’s male
gaze theory has been applied mostly to Hollywood cinema, it is encountered
“in a great deal of European cinema too”, and feminist theorist Pam Cook
(1990: 31) argues that in auteur cinema “images of women are understood as
expressions of male desires or anxieties”.
Moreover, Oliveira’s three films explicitly depict women through the vir-
gin/whore dichotomy, a stereotyped perspective wherein female characters are
either framed as “good girls” who abstain from sex (“the virgin”) or “bad
girls” who are sexually promiscuous (“the whore”, “the femme fatale”)
(Benshoff 2015: 150). As Ruth Holliday (2008: 196) argues, “women in the
past have frequently been restricted to a limited range of roles and were most
highly valued for their looks. (…) In addition, representations of women
seemed to be divided into two kinds—good women and bad women.”
Importantly, Benshoff (2015: 150) warns against the pitfalls of such narrow
stereotyping which “tends to reduce a woman’s subjectivity onto a singular
aspect of her being—her sexuality”. The employment of such outdated para-
digms in films that have been released in the twenty-first century is incongru-
ous and calls for a close examination of Oliveira’s vision of women and
femininity.
In Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (2009), Oliveira depicts the story
of a Macário, a young accountant whose life is turned upside down after falling
in love with a beautiful but deceptive blonde girl named Luísa (Catarina
Wallenstein). The narrative is told through a long flashback as Macário (Ricardo
Trêpa) recounts his peculiar love story to an unknown middle-aged woman
sitting beside him on a train from Lisbon to Algarve. The trope of retelling to
a complete stranger some key life events witnessed by the male protagonist is
also encountered in the film Belle Toujours (2006). Interestingly, the opening
scene of Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl reveals that all double seats in

the train are occupied by men seated beside women. This deliberate position-
ing seems to suggest that the interaction between men and women is central to
Oliveira’s interest.
The film starts with Macário’s voiceover, which exemplifies the male per-
spective present throughout the film: “What you would not tell your wife,
what you would not tell your friend, tell it to a stranger”. In classical cinema,
the male voiceover is “autobiographical”, “self-revealing” and “associated with
characters that have been scarred by a major trauma” (Silverman 1998: 52). As
Kaja Silverman claims, the history of Hollywood films is dominated by the male
voiceover, which offers a masculine viewpoint on the film narrative (ibid.: 48).
Accordingly, in Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, Oliveira privileges a male
perspective of the events through the use of voiceover, flashbacks and subjec-
tive point of view. Macário’s viewpoint is emphasised by subjective camera
shots while he watches Luísa from a distance, allowing the spectator to identify
with him. Macário is seduced by the beauty of this mysterious girl who sits
every day by the window holding a Chinese fan. His words of admiration
betray his feelings of love and also highlight Luísa’s exceptional beauty: “She
waved her fan so gracefully that you cannot even begin to imagine it”; “Miss,
you are so young and like a breath of fresh air”; “I am never tired of gazing at
the portrait you gave me”.
Throughout the film, Macário is portrayed as a well-educated, hardworking,
decent and sensible young man who falls madly in love with the wrong girl. In
order to marry Luísa, Macário is compelled to break off relations with his
uncle, who opposes his marriage, and to leave the country in order to earn
enough money to secure their life together. After many sacrifices undertaken
while working in Cape Verde, Macário returns to his hometown where he can
finally be reunited with his beloved. However, Macário’s romance is abruptly
interrupted when he discovers that his fiancée of angelic, virginal appearance is
a kleptomaniac who has stolen both from the store of Macário’s uncle and from
a jewellery store where the two lovers went to buy Luísa’s engagement ring. As
a result, Macário suffers a nervous breakdown from which he is not able to
recover. Importantly, Oliveira shocks the film audience with a ‘twist’ ending
implying that women are not what they seem to be at first sight. The film seems
to suggest that, far from being angelic creatures, women are incomprehensible,
unpredictable and a constant torment for their male counterparts.
The portrayal of Luísa is constructed through elements intended to depict
her as mysterious and distant. For example, Luísa’s habitual gesture of hiding
her face behind a beautifully decorated Chinese fan is symbolic of the psycho-
logical distance between her and Macário. She rarely speaks and never shows
any kind of feeling for Macário, who is madly in love and would do anything in
order to marry her. Oliveira astutely suggests the distance between Luísa and
Macário by employing different camera angles. On the one hand, Macário is
often shot from a high angle denoting his vulnerability as he looks up towards
his beloved. On the other hand, angelic Luísa is shot with a low angle, placing
her in an apparently unattainable position as the object of Macário’s desire—as

indeed, he is several times denied permission to marry Luísa due to the discrep-
ancy between their respective social status and wealth. On a symbolic level,
Macário embodies the fairy-tale figure of Prince Charming, whose greatest
desire is to save the beautiful princess Luísa from herself. Unfortunately, unlike
in fairy tales, Macário’s story does not have a happy ending; Luísa refuses to
change or, rather, she refuses to be saved. Oliveira’s film conforms to the rep-
resentational patterns of classical Hollywood films in which women are situated
within a framework of traditional female stereotypes, depicting them as hysteri-
cal, paranoid, neurotic or having personality disorders (Doane 1987).
According to feminist film scholar Mary Ann Doane (1987), films such as
Stella Dallas (1937), The Letter (1940), Suspicion (1941), Mildred Pierce
(1945) and Secret Beyond the Door (1947) exemplify the tendency of early
Hollywood cinema to frame women as passive, deceiving, traumatised or psy-
chologically disturbed. These female characters represent a threat to the male
universe and are often punished for their unconventional behaviour. Similar
patterns that stereotype and vilify female characters are encountered in
Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica and Belle Toujours. These two films not
only emphasise the male gaze and perspective but also reinforce outdated and
regressive representational paradigms as a characteristic of auteur cinema: even
if Oliveira’s work is formally framed as distinct from, or challenging to the clas-
sical Hollywood mode, his representational politics in relation to women are
inescapably aligned with this type of filmmaking.
Transcendental Voyeurism and the Danger

of Secret Pleasures
The Strange Case of Angelica (2010) represents a particular case in the filmog-
raphy of the Portuguese director, as a long-desired project of Oliveira, who
wrote its script in 1952, nearly half a century before he finally received the
subvention needed to direct it. As Oliveira explains in an interview, the act of
denying subventions was a covert way for the Second Republic to censor many
of his film projects, including this one (De Baecque and Parsi 1996: 137). As
Oliveira further claims, the film was inspired by a personal event that left a
strong imprint on him: when he was asked to take a photo of a recently deceased
young woman wearing a white bridal dress (ibid.: 136).
Accordingly, the film follows the story of Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa), a young
Jewish photographer commissioned to take photos of a deceased young
woman, and who falls in love with her. While Isaac gazes at her through his
camera lens, Angélica (Pilar López de Ayala) suddenly opens her eyes and
smiles at him. It is a private vision seen solely through his camera, which
through identification extends also to the film viewer. That experience will
change the life of the young and sensible photographer forever. His visions of
Angélica, who starts visiting him every night from the hereafter, gradually drive
him crazy. Here, Oliveira illustrates a ‘transcendental’ voyeurism—one that

bridges the gap between reality and fantasy, between the worldly realm and
mysticism. Importantly, it is under Angélica’s spell that hardworking Isaac
becomes a voyeur; he is bewitched by this ethereal being to such an extent that
he loses his reason and autonomy and lives solely for his visions.
Oliveira dedicates a considerable amount of screen time to building a com-
plex portrayal of young Isaac. The resemblance with Macário, the male pro-
tagonist from the previous film, is evident. Firstly, the roles of Isaac and Macário
are both played by the actor Ricardo Trêpa, grandson of Manoel de Oliveira.
Secondly, Isaac is also a well-educated and hardworking young man, who just
happens to fall in love with the wrong woman, seduced by her beauty and vir-
ginal appearance. As in the case of Macário, Isaac’s life is irreversibly turned
up-side-down by the encounter with this alluring, but unattainable, woman.
Isaac is an intellectual figure, interested in poetry, photography and theo-
logical thought. The beginning of the film shows him reciting a poem about
angels, which denotes his interest in immateriality and predicts his later close
encounter with Angélica, an incorporeal being who opens a different ‘reality’
to him. The scenes of Isaac and Angélica flying through the sky while embrac-
ing each other are a powerful reminder of the bridal couples from Marc
Chagall’s paintings (see Fig. 8.1). Oliveira’s choice to replicate the images of
the renowned painter Chagall bears suggestive similarities: Isaac, similarly to
Chagall, is a Jewish artist who escaped Nazi persecution by fleeing abroad (this
latter detail is mentioned in the original script, but is missing from Oliveira’s
subsequent film) (De Baecque and Parsi 1996: 137).
Fig. 8.1 The image of Isaac and Angélica which resembles the famous paintings of
Marc Chagall
Photographer Isaac observes the world through the lens of his camera and
notices what other people cannot see. After the encounter with Angélica, he
becomes a voyeur not only of a material world but also of a transcendental one.
Isaac has now access to a dual world, a visible and an invisible one, and shifts
between the two dimensions with such ease that even the film’s viewers find it
hard to distinguish reality from illusion. Mulvey’s (1985) concept of scopo-
philia is exemplified in this film, with Isaac a privileged voyeur slowly consumed
by an impossible love. The frustrating dream sequences in which he is either
unable to reach her hands, or is dropped from the sky by Angélica, reveal the
dangers of his secret love. Isaac’s pleasure from looking proves to be deadly, as
he will never be able to attain his object of desire. Furthermore, Isaac’s reflec-
tions in the mirror during his night visions are a sign of schizophrenic duality
and progressive madness. According to Mulvey (1985), cinema is the ideal
place for scopophilia. However, in The Strange Case of Angelica, Oliveira
returns to the origins of early cinema and designates photography as the locus
of pleasure from looking. Isaac’s first encounters with the ghost are mediated
either by the camera lens or by the materiality of photographs. The professional
photographer, embodied by Isaac, is the prime voyeur, granted the privilege of
discovering and taking pleasure from a world inaccessible to others.
Oliveira does not depict a woman of flesh and blood, as in Belle Toujours and
Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, but an etheric being who seduces from
the hereafter. Angélica, her name directly referencing the word ‘angel’, is in
this story the ‘angel of death’, whose smile and ghostly presence drive Isaac
insane and ultimately bring him death. Despite her virginal appearance, she is
nevertheless a dangerous and ambiguous woman, bringing both joy and tor-
ment. Similar to Luísa in Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, Angélica has a
destructive influence on the male protagonist who is doomed by their encoun-
ter. The story thus becomes a mythic-masculinist construction of the impossi-
bility of a complete union with the woman he loves, with men and women
framed as simply belonging to different worlds. This film shares with Belle
Toujours and Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl a depiction of the female
protagonist exclusively through a male perspective. Angélica’s role in the film
consists in being looked at, exhibited as a passive object of spectacle for the
male gaze. She is literally displayed—as a corpse—both at home and in the
church, where others comment on her physical beauty and youthfulness. Static
and immobile, Angélica becomes the object onto which Isaac’s phantasies and
dreams are projected. Ultimately, the pleasure derived from her virginal appear-
ance and angelic smile is lethal for the male protagonist, suggesting the danger
that women pose, in Oliveira’s view, to the world of men.
Case Study: Belle Toujours (Manoel de Oliveira, 2006)

Oliveira’s Belle Toujours (2006) is an ideal case study for this chapter since the
film epitomises all the concepts discussed earlier: the male gaze, scopophilia,
voyeurism and excessive stereotyping located within the virgin/whore
ichotomy. The film is a tribute to legendary auteur Luis Buñuel and conceived
d
of as a sequel to Buñuel’s acclaimed film Belle de Jour (1967). Winner of the
Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival in 1967, Buñuel’s film narrates the story
of Séverine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve), a beautiful housewife happily married
to a wealthy surgeon who decides to spend her afternoons as a prostitute in a
luxury Parisian brothel. The film was based on Joseph Kessel’s novel of the
same name published originally in French in 1928 and translated into English
only in 1962 due to its controversial status. As Kessel (2007) argues in the
novel’s preface, his intentions were to reflect on the duality between body and
soul, between the demands of the senses and the truthfulness of a great love.
Buñuel’s Belle de Jour enhances this duality through the parallel structure of
the film that alternates the original plot with day-dreaming sequences that
illustrate Séverine’s sadomasochistic fantasies and flashbacks from her past hint-
ing to her sexual abuse as a child.
However, Oliveira’s Belle Toujours returns to a linear structure in which
everything happens here and now, in a very short timeframe reminiscent of
French New Wave auteur cinema. The viewer is challenged to piece the film
together as he/she is given very few clues about Buñuel’s film whose story
Oliveira expands. Importantly, Oliveira’s refusal to use flashbacks, or any nar-
rative device that would link together the two stories/films, is emblematic of
his provocative claim that he tries to “stick to facts” and to “eliminate the sub-
jective, the sentimental, the psychological” (Johnson 2007: 147). Arguably,
the Portuguese filmmaker refuses to provide any information that would help
the viewer to interpret Belle Toujours in the light of Buñuel’s film in the firm
belief that—as he further claimed in the same interview—any attempt to try to
understand facts would profoundly alter them (ibid.). From a cinematic point
of view, the film reiterates Oliveira’s unmistakable style: long shots, static cam-
era, symbolic objects, emphasis on dialogues and the use of gender
stereotypes.
Given the highly symbolic content of Belle Toujours and its constant refer-
ences to Belle de Jour and, more generally, to Buñuel’s work, the film is not
easily accessible to a general audience. Thus, the film needs to be analysed and
understood as a tribute to Luis Buñuel and also in the context of Oliveira’s
work. In De Baecque and Parsi’s (1996: 147) interview collection, the
Portuguese auteur expresses his admiration for Buñuel, claiming that they both
belong to the same filmmaking ‘family’, and further notes that his Mediterranean
roots place him closer to Buñuel than to Bergman. Such statements situate him
squarely in a territory that ‘fetishises’ European auteurism, but replicates out-
dated representational paradigms, disguising them in aesthetics, which create a
pretence of challenge to the classical form.
Returning to Oliveira’s Belle Toujours, the narrative continues the story of
Séverine Serizy (Bulle Ogier), reunited after thirty-eight years with her hus-
band’s best friend, Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli). The character of Henri
plays a crucial role in both films. In Belle de Jour, he acts as an ‘agent of corrup-
tion’ for Séverine: he openly flirts with her, provoked by her contempt for him,
and also provides her with the address of the brothel. In Belle Toujours, Henri’s
character does not seem to have changed much: he is an alcoholic womaniser,
who chases and unsuccessfully attempts to provoke Séverine.
Two key aspects must be highlighted in relation to the portrayal of women
in this film. Firstly, Séverine’s portrayal is articulated through an exclusively
male perspective: from her first appearance when Henri’s gaze notices her at
the theatre, to her story told by Henri to a barman and the dinner scene where
she answers Henri’s inquisitive questions. Henri is the active bearer of the
story: he notices Séverine in the audience of a concert in Paris and continues to
observe and stalk her until he finally achieves a long-desired meeting by candle-
light. Despite Séverine’s efforts to hide, to make herself invisible, she cannot
escape Henri’s quest and becomes a passive object of Henri’s voyeuristic gaze.
As in both classical cinema and the patriarchal paradigms of European auteur-
ism, “the male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure, which is styled
accordingly” (Mulvey 1985: 309). In fact, in the first two-thirds of the film,
Oliveira constructs the image of a woman who is far beyond any imaginable
limit of depravation and perversity—representing Henri’s viewpoint. Instead,
the last third of the film depicts her in a diametrically opposed situation.
Séverine is now widowed and dismisses her past, claiming that she leads a
lonely life far away from her former lustful pleasures. She states that she has
changed and is a different woman now. However, even this final scene of the
dinner, in which, notably, Séverine speaks for the very first time, does not shed
much light on her controversial story and mysterious personality: it is Henri
who leads the dialogue, while she merely answers his questions. This dialogue
only enhances Henri’s claim that “women were always Nature’s greatest
enigma”, a statement seemingly endorsed by Oliveira in all three films, together
with the implicit suggestion of women’s incomprehensibility and deceitfulness.
Throughout the film, Henri voyeuristically observes, through subjective shots,
artificial female figures like the statue of Joan of Arc, paintings of nude women
in the bar and naked mannequins in a shop window. These scenes exemplify the
primordial fascination with looking described by Mulvey (1985) in her seminal
article. In a similar way to Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl and The Strange
Case of Angelica, the male protagonist exercises his pleasure of looking upon
women who are objectified, voiceless, distant and unattainable. In Belle
Toujours, the objectification of women is taken to an extreme, as the act of
looking is directed not only to female characters but also to representations of
women, indicating a male universe dominated by scopophilic pleasures.
Secondly, this film explicitly uses the virgin/whore dichotomy; by compar-
ing Belle de Jour and Belle Toujours, one can notice two diametrically opposed
processes performed in Buñuel’s and Oliveira’s films. If Buñuel turns his female
character from a housewife into a whore, Oliveira’s choice is to turn a prosti-
tute into a ‘virgin’. However, at either of the two poles of the dichotomy,
Séverine’s main feature is her sexuality. On the one hand, Henri describes her
as extremely attractive, perverted, masochistic and sadistic. On the other hand,
the golden equestrienne statue located in front of Séverine’s hotel carries an
additional layer of symbolism, as it points to the story of Joan of Arc, the vir-
ginal maid unjustly accused of heresy and executed by burning, whose reputa-
tion was later rehabilitated and who was ultimately declared innocent. This
association of lustful Séverine with the popular figure of Joan of Arc, indicates
an attempt to restore her image, but simultaneously posits her against an unat-
tainable ideal. Ultimately, despite Séverine’s claim of a new-found religious life
and radical transformation, the brief moments in which she speaks make her
assertions unbelievable for Henri and, by extension, the audience. Her exces-
sive carnality, transgression and unconformity to patriarchal values implicitly
condemn her as a fallen woman and consequently represented as lonely, emo-
tionally distant and uncommunicative. From the feminist perspective, this type
of depiction of voiceless characters strips away their power within the film nar-
rative (Thimmes 1998: 201).
Importantly, Belle Toujours features several minor male characters who serve
their clients with dignity and professionalism (they are bartenders, waiters or
receptionists). On the contrary, the only minor female characters featuring in
the film are two prostitutes spending their time in a bar where they try to
attract Henri’s attention and to eavesdrop on his conversation with the bar-
tender. Not particularly attractive, the two prostitutes are frivolous and con-
cerned only with gaining men’s interest (they flirt with both Henri and the
young bartender). However, the male protagonist is completely uninterested
in them, so the two women disappointedly conclude that “he is ignoring us”,
just as the director ignores women’s voices and perspectives throughout the
film. Oliveira’s female characters remain passive, speak very little and, when
they finally do, their speech revolves solely around men (thus, the film would
surely not pass the Bechdel test). The bar is also decorated with paintings of
female nudes to which Henri’s gaze is directed right before starting to narrate
Séverine’s story. The timing of this scene and Henri’s amused reaction while
looking at a nude painting on the wall anticipates his story, while pointing to
Séverine’s past and promiscuous behaviour.
Belle Toujours seems to indicate that sexuality and carnality are common
denominators for women. Arguably, Séverine is depicted as the most depraved
and perverted prostitute; in fact, after hearing the story about Séverine, the
barman claims that the two prostitutes in the bar are “angels” by comparison
since they “don’t have a husband to cheat on, or hide secrets from!”. It is
worth noting that the scene in which Henri narrates to the barman about
Séverine’s lustful past marked by sexual perversion and sadomasochistic behav-
iour is artistically framed by a mirror. The viewers watch Henri at the bar from
behind, his face visible only in the mirror. The bartender, instead, is directly
facing the audience, with his back to the mirror (see Fig. 8.2). At times, Henri
is turned sideways and the audience can observe both his face and its reflection
in the mirror. Besides the aesthetic beauty of Henri’s confession captured indi-
rectly as a reflection, this scene is charged with symbolism. The mirror is a
symbol of introspection, indicating a split personality for the character who is
mirrored in it. Moreover, the mirror opens an additional space in the frame, a
Fig. 8.2 Henri’s discussion with the barman is artistically framed by a mirror in Belle
Toujours
space that duplicates Henri’s story and, at the same time, interrogates its truth-
fulness. Is the story real or is it a projection, the fruit of Henri’s imagination?
In fact, Henri casts a shadow of doubt on his story straight from the beginning
when he claims to tell a “story that never happened”. His story is so surreal
that it is hard to believe and seems rather a work of fiction than reality. Whether
we interpret Henri’s perspective as fantasy or not, the representation of these
female characters, directing us to read them as dominated by their own carnal
nature, lingers.
It is worth noting that Oliveira places a strong symbolic emphasis on traffic
lights, showing Henri crossing the street on red while chasing the object of his
sexual desire. The red traffic lights denote danger and implicitly suggest forbid-
den sexuality, pointing to a morally unacceptable direction towards which
Henri is headed, without being censured by society simply because he is a man.
A similar point is made by film critic Peter Bradshaw (2017) in his retrospective
review of Buñuel’s film Belle de Jour. According to the film critic, Buñuel invites
his audience to reflect on the transgression of a respectable housewife who
secretly works in a brothel. However, as Bradshaw astutely points out, the
widespread gender stereotypes make viewers question only the woman’s
wrongdoing, overlooking the fact that otherwise ‘respectable’ men would
patronise such establishments in broad daylight. There seems to be a discrep-
ancy between the way society censures men and women for similar types of
behaviour.
Conclusion
To sum up Oliveira’s female characters in these three films: a sadomasochist
prostitute wishing to become a nun, an apparently decent girl who is a klepto-
maniac and a dead beauty who visits and troubles an innocent young man
affecting his mental health. All three female characters, dead or alive, are unat-
tainable and the male protagonists spend most of their time chasing them
(Séverine), trying to talk with them or to see them (Séverine, Luísa, Angélica)
and being in love with them (Luísa, Angélica). Women are distant, both psy-
chologically and physically: Séverine hides from Henri, Macário watches Luísa
through the window, Angélica is an untouchable ghost. Moreover, these female
characters are most of the time silent presences, their silence adding to the
mystery of their persona. Thus, the female figure in Oliveira’s films is always
depicted from a male perspective and is situated on an inaccessible level for the
male protagonists who can adore her, desire her, but never fully understand her.
According to feminist film scholar Ann E. Kaplan (1998: 81), female char-
acters in classical Hollywood cinema “symbolise all that is evil and mysterious”,
while their male counterparts play the role of investigators who retell “some-
thing that happened in the past” and seek to “unravel the mystery”. Both films
Belle Toujours and Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl follow this pattern in
which the male protagonist confesses to a total stranger a chapter of their past
in an attempt to understand women whose actions seem to defy any logic. In
Belle Toujours, Henri retells the strange story of a woman who needed to pros-
titute herself in order to be able to love her husband, while in Eccentricities of
a Blonde-Haired Girl, Macário narrates the hidden vice of Luísa, the woman
who turned his life up-side-down. In The Strange Case of Angelica, instead, the
process of retelling the story is absent because the male protagonist, enam-
oured of a dead girl does not survive her charm to tell the story. All main
female characters in Oliveira’s three films, namely Séverine, Luísa and Angélica,
are reminders of the mysterious femme fatale, both fascinating and destructive
for their male counterparts.
Furthermore, the male protagonists Henri, Macário and Isaac, are the active
agents who propel the story forward. They are the ones who introduce the
female characters: by observing them, by talking about them or by photo-
graphing them. The female characters instead are passive and, as objects of
male desire, depicted as blonde-haired women of angelic beauty. They each
seem to lack any particular profession or interest: Séverine is a housewife, Luísa
does not seem to have any occupation, while Angélica is dead. The male pro-
tagonists are not drawn towards these three women because they are clever,
capable or independent, but only because of their physical appearance.
Importantly, Oliveira’s films portray women as objects of the sexual desire of
men, as seductresses located within the virgin/whore dichotomy. Whether
framed as belonging to one category or the other, these women are defined in
sexual terms and their portrayal sketched through sexual stereotypes. Angélica
is the prototype of the beautiful, virginal bride (she wears a white dress), who
has mysteriously died shortly after her wedding. Similarly, Luísa is placed in the
‘virgin’ category and she spends most of her days being-looked-at by the enam-
oured Macário. However, her secret kleptomania casts a shadow of doubt
regarding her innocence and purity. Séverine, too, is an ambiguous figure, split
between the duality of her past as a prostitute and her present claims of being
drawn towards monastic life. Furthermore, Oliveira rejects modern trends of
cinematic representation by employing outdated stereotypes of women—seen
as mysterious, incomprehensible and dangerous human beings. In the same
vein, Cruchinho (2008: 51) argues that “Oliveira only approaches the female
character through the male character, as if he was the mediator, a channel of
vision behind which the filmmaker hides comfortably”. While it is difficult to
explain why Oliveira would adopt such a radical, dissenting choice, his films
clearly make a firm statement against modern gendered representations and
invite for a revival of male-centred auteurism.
To some extent, it can be argued that such representation reflects the film-
maker’s personal vision of women. In an interview in the 1990s, Oliveira stated
that he never felt comfortable with women, whose universe he considered both
fascinating and something to pull back from (De Baecque and Parsi 1996: 99).
Furthermore, Oliveira’s antiquated portrayal of women is very much in tune
with other stylistic choices in his films, which are permeated by a strong sense
of nostalgia for the past, and characterised by a slow rhythm, a desire to freeze
the action into moments of contemplation. Through the stylistic choices and
gendered dynamics of his films, Oliveira seems to profess a desire to return
cinema to its early stages of European auteurism, to stop the unravelling of
time and the modern, fast-paced changes that our contemporary world brings.
Before concluding, there is an important question that rises at this point:
how did Manoel de Oliveira manage to employ, in his most recent work, such
radical choices which problematise—perhaps even oppose—contemporary
approaches to the representation of women, without losing his audience, and
in fact gaining appreciation and acclaim, especially in Europe? A possible answer
for this question is found if one considers the fact that Oliveira is a longstand-
ing, internationally renowned, auteur filmmaker of Portuguese cinema. Firstly,
his international recognition as an art filmmaker, and the particular style that
defines him as an auteur, has allowed him not to compromise on his aesthetic
choices and to dissent from contemporary trends in filmmaking. Secondly, his
location within Portuguese cinema has granted him a certain independence
that many other European filmmakers do not have—due to commercial mech-
anisms of financing and production in Europe. According to Mary Wood
(2007: 28–29), Portugal’s marginality, both geographically and culturally, cre-
ates an optimal environment for “the continuation of a hermetic art” that
allows the exploration of “social change, political and gender issues without the
compromises, or advantages, of its neighbours”. Oliveira’s personal filmic
vision and international fame, coupled with a favourable production context
within Portuguese cinema, may together explain such an antiquated image of
women that dissents from contemporary canons of representation, while per-
forming a process of nostalgic return to a highly patriarchal form of auteurism.

. Discuss why Manoel de Oliveira can be considered an auteur.
1
2. Examine whether the male gaze theory can be applied to other films
made by Manoel de Oliveira since the year 2000.
3. Discuss any other auteur films released in the twenty-first century that
adopt a rigid portrayal of women.
4. What are the risks associated with adopting regressive images of women
in films made by renowned auteurs? How do you think modern audi-
ences react to such depictions?
5. Can you identify films made by prominent European auteurs who chal-
lenge stereotyped depictions of women?
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CHAPTER 9
The Latest European New Wave: Cinematic

Realism and Everyday Aesthetics
in Romanian Cinema
Doru Pop
Definitions
New Wave Cinema

The ‘New Wave’ is an aesthetic approach specific to European cinema, later
integrated in many other global film practices. The Nouvelle Vague is the best-
known version of the European ‘waves’, developed by French filmmakers dur-
ing the 1960s. Other forms of cinematic realism, like Italian neorealism or
British social realism, share similar shooting techniques based on a mobile cam-
era, actual locations, on-location recording of sound, abrupt editing and non-
conventional narratives. The ‘new wave’ is a generic term for numerous
cinematic approaches using the observational technique providing the specta-
tor with a direct experience of reality.
New Cinema
A fundamental distinction must be made between the New Wave as cinematic
movement and the ‘new cinemas’, like the Brazilian Cinema Novo. Although
directly related to neorealism and other ‘new wave’ practices, the New Cinemas
are more politically engaged, with an anti-colonialist component and with
D. Pop (*)
Faculty of Theater and Film, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
e-mail: doru.pop@ubbcluj.ro

150 D. POP
counter-cinema purposes, applicable especially to productions belonging to

the so-called Third Cinema, often reactions against the hegemonic film dis-
courses of Western films.
Cinema-as-Truth, cinéma vérité (kino-pravda)

The rediscovery of direct cinema techniques, as used in the early Soviet cin-
ema experiments made by Dziga Vertov, allowed both the development of
Italian Neorealism and the French Nouvelle Vague. This encouraged the prac-
tice of on-location shooting and a documentary-style representation of life;
thus many film critics noted early on the relationship between such neorealist
practices and Romanian contemporary cinema; the post-2000 filmmakers
were described as either “neorealist” (Șerban 2009: 55–56) or, later, “neo-
neorealist” (Mihăilescu 2012: 189).
Cinematic Realism
Realism, defined as a cinematographic style in fiction films, is often simplisti-
cally identified with the theories of André Bazin, improperly described as
Bazinism (Gorzo 2012). Documentary-like camera techniques and the pre-
sumed objectivity resulting from capturing ordinary life generate an aesthetic
realism in cinema which allows the claim that reality in film is a result of the
ontological nature of the photographic camera. These do not take into account
that the representation of ‘everyday life’, which has profound social meaning
through depicting people at the margins of society, has a powerful realist effect.
Introduction: A New Cinema or a New Wave?

Contemporary Romanian filmmakers are internationally recognized as some of
the most important directors in world cinema. Feature films like Cristian
Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) are considered by international
film critics to qualify amongst the best productions of the twenty-first century
(according to a 2018 BBC Culture poll). Some have called this cinema a “mir-
acle” (Nasta 2013); others, less enthusiastically, describe it as a manifestation of
a “hesitant modernity” (Strausz 2017), while other critics have simply ignored
these films’ existence (Galt 2006).
There are several competing definitions circulating in Romanian national
film criticism, as elaborated during the last two decades. As Romanian cinema
produced more than 100 feature films, critics were simultaneously trying to
explain this cinematic phenomenon. Manifested as a post-2000 revival of the
Romanian film industry, this direction in national cinema was early on labelled
“the new Romanian cinema”. The term, coined by film critic Alex Leo Șerban,
at the time the main public promoter of this new generation of filmmakers,
accounted for the novelty of their filmmaking approaches. Alternative terms
9 THE LATEST EUROPEAN NEW WAVE: CINEMATIC REALISM AND EVERYDAY… 151
are also used such as “the new Romanian film” (Dinescu 2014; Ferencz-Flatz
2015) or the more neutral notion “recent Romanian cinema”. In an early the-
oretical evaluation (Pop 2010) the ‘new cinema’ formula was contested, which
led to the elaborating of the more narrow concept, that of new-new cinema. As
suggested by Căliman (2007), the most suitable concept was “new wave of
Romanian cinema” or “Romanian New Wave cinema” (Pop 2014).
From an aesthetic, narrative and cultural perspective, the remarkable films
made after 2000 were inspired by the traditions of all European ‘New Waves’,
integrating elements from Italian Neorealism, British social realism, the Dogme
movement and numerous other Central European experiments. More impor-
tantly, they shared the same qualities as the French Nouvelle Vague, which justi-
fies describing the most relevant recent films as ‘the latest European New
Wave’. Another relevant aspect is that these films and their directors are clearly
connected to the paradigms of European cinema (see Pop 2014: 14), and more
specifically to a type of filmmaking that belongs to the tradition of European
cinematic realism. While issues of realism are complex, the logic of the European
New Waves can be reduced to a couple of practices, linked to the use of the
cinema apparatus as an instrument of truth and authenticity. There is a certain
“reality effect” (Barthes 2010: 140) which is also obtained outside the camera-
work, based on narrative strategies that work to make viewers participants in
the storytelling. Last but not least, this is a philosophical approach to reality
itself, where lived experience of events that ‘really happened’ generates a differ-
ent type of cinematic representation.
The Revival of the Romanian Film Industry Within

European Cinema
After 1989, as Romania transitioned from a communist regime to capitalism,
the national film industry gradually went into collapse. The year 2000 marked
the lowest point of this cultural catastrophe. From over 40 feature films made
annually during the communist era, that year no new Romanian film was pro-
duced. It was only after gradual access to European Union financing, as part of
the integration of Romania into the community, that the creation of new films
became possible. It is also relevant that the ‘rebirth’ of Romanian cinema coin-
cided with the opening of negotiations with the European Commission, which
started in February 2000, a process that opened the path for Romania’s full
membership of the Union being finalized in 2007. One of the most important
supporters of young Romanian cinema-makers became Eurimages, the Council
of Europe fund, as the industry opened to co-productions and international
collaborations. By 2016 film production had recovered, with 25 new films cre-
ated, most of these with partial support from public or private European and
national funds. This was a direction in cinema responding to Resolution 88 of
the Council of Europe (1988), which stated that financed films were designed
to “promote Europe’s cultural identity”.
152 D. POP
Integrating into the Paradigms of European Cinema

When considering ‘European cinema’, concepts and definitions become
extremely problematic and complex, mostly because the culture and history of
the continent are complicated. This is a phenomenon impossible to describe
within a unified formula, although many have tried. One of the larger and more
inclusive approaches is provided by Thomas Elsaesser (2005). Considering that
all European films belong to a common cultural discourse and that they share
the same historical heritage, or a common “historical imaginary” (Elsaesser
2005: 21–23), this author contrasts cinéma de qualité, or art cinema, with the
commercially driven Hollywood film industry (Elsaesser 2005: 16–17). A simi-
larly suggestive set of explanations is provided by Everett (2005), who identi-
fies several distinctive features of a common European film tradition, among
them; the searching for identity through difference, a subversive and critical
attitude towards power and the exploration of the troubled past, coupled with
the exploration of the processes of memory (Everett 2005: 10–13). It is in such
small and personal histories, linked with a traumatic experience of the past,
where issues of conflicting identities are clashing, and where moral questions
are raised by social conditions, that a European way of storytelling takes shape.
Another important aspect is that as in the case of the other European New
Waves, especially those made by Central and Eastern European filmmakers,
Romanian directors are searching for social experiences that discover ‘life as it
is’. While this process has a strong socially critical purpose, it is not necessarily
‘political’. With its roots in the naturalist aesthetics manifested early on in lit-
erature and painting, this type of cinema focuses on social groups which are
‘discarded’ by society (prostitutes, the unemployed, the homeless), contrasting
strongly with the ‘feelgood’ or bourgeois storytelling cultivated in mainstream
films. Naturalistic settings and smaller-than-life characters are systematically
investigated by using naturalistic language and, often excessively brutal behav-
iour, which can be seen as providing access to a dimension of human existence
intimately linked with authenticity. Many of these films are purposefully cre-
ated as ‘slices of life’ (see Pop 2014: 58–63), based on news stories, real events
or real situations inspired by personal experiences from the biography of the
directors. Whether serving an autobiographical function or inspired by real-life
stories, these narratives are selected precisely because they describe a reality
with which spectators can connect.
The Aesthetic of Everyday Life

There is an apparent aesthetic simplicity to these films, sometimes coupled with
reduced temporal and spatial dimensions in the storytelling. Most of the stories
take place within the framework of 24 hours and in very limited spaces. It
seemed justified for many film critics to describe the cinema made by the new
generation of Romanian directors as “minimalist” (Nasta 2013: 155). While
minimalism is an art form in which representations are reduced to their sim-
plest structure in order to amplify content, cinematic minimalism is not
reductionist. A possible misunderstanding comes from applying minimalism

pejoratively, defining it as a ‘low budget realism’ and implying aesthetic as well
as production poverty. Although these films are often made with a limited bud-
get, their use of location shooting and the austerity of their resources have a
philosophical intention. These are essentialist approaches based on a purpose-
ful search for the purest modes of cinematic expression.
Better described within the logic of the “aesthetics of everyday life” (Light
and Smith 2005), the apparently uneventful and limited actions, austere set-
tings, minimalist storylines and characters, refusal of complex editing and/or
the exclusive use of natural sound and lighting, together with the lack of non-
diegetic or extra-diegetic music, generate an overall experience that is not
reduced but, paradoxically, amplified. Practiced by other European directors
like Michael Haneke or Wim Wenders, cinematic minimalism is not a formal
emptiness; neither is it void and neutral in meaning-making, and definitely not
an expression of banality. There is an attention to detail present, and an effort
to manage simple elements, which accentuates significance.
Art Cinema and ‘Auteur’ Politics

Another limiting understanding of this type of cinema is to identify it as ‘art cin-
ema’, sometimes even attributing to these films the ‘art house’ label. Many critics
are quick to follow Dudley Andrew (Andrew 1984: 5–6), who suggests that films
belonging to “high culture” or “quality cinema” are “battling” with commercial,
Hollywood-made films. Contrasting with American popular cinema, based on
entertainment value and action, European films are seen to be characterized by
an “aura” and an “elegance” which make them aesthetically relevant. Yet to attri-
bute to all European films, and in particular these Romanian films, the exclusivist
aura of high culture or ‘art house’ is incorrect. Such descriptions are also theo-
retically inconsistent, as they allow films with significantly divergent aesthetics to
be considered as one category, that is, ‘art cinema’ (see White 2017).
Linked to the idea of an art cinema is another stereotypical formula which
explains these films as belonging to a presumed “authorial cinema” (Strausz
2017: 4). While alluding to the fact there is a certain ‘politique des auteurs’ in
all the New Waves, the bias favouring a continental elitist cinema leads to
improper usage of the term. It could indicate that these filmmakers are never
successful outside the limited circle of film festivals, that ‘auteurism’ and ‘lack
of popularity’ are intimately linked or that they are limited to reception in
restrictive cinephile circles. While it is true that the festival circuits confirmed
the ‘quality’ of recent Romanian productions, nevertheless these films are nei-
ther limited to an art house circuit of distribution, nor narratively or aestheti-
cally pretentious or over-sophisticated. Contemporary Romanian productions
are often extremely well received by global spectators and provide a form of
cinematic storytelling which appeals both to mass audiences and to specialized
critics. Such recognition confirms again that these films belong to a larger,
European film culture. Even if they were initially ignored at home, they gained
much-needed international recognition in major European film festivals and
154 D. POP
were distributed by the most important European cinema networks. This trend
continues today, as clearly indicated by overall financial data and the evolution
of the reception of recent Romanian films. While at home they are definitely
not profitable, revenues from European ticket sales, and the financial support
of national agencies and European funds, give these filmmakers a chance in
global competition (Mungiu 2016).
Another important characteristic of recent Romanian cinema is its manifest
transnational dimension. Because of the discrepancy between their reception
by national and international markets, the directors themselves tend to approach
narratives that may have a broader audience, beyond the Romanian public.
This does not mean that they are ‘made for film festivals’, nor that international
pressures are exerted on their making. They are simply targeting an ever-
growing global audience, often composed of Western European cinephiles. It
can be argued that this generates in turn a cultural hybridization at the expense
of national specificity. While the effects of the ‘transnational turn’ are unavoid-
ably changing the content of these films, some critics use the same arguments
to evaluate the transformations happening in the contemporary Romanian film
industry as a sign of postcolonial transition. Such a perspective places the films
and their directors in a narrower regional context, where the post-national
trend becomes an expression of provincialism and exoticism (Țut ̦ui 2012).
Some critics place the Romanian filmmaking industry among the “small”
European cinemas or the “cinema of small nations” (Hjort and Petrie 2007).
Thus the effort of the director to go “beyond the national” is explained as part
of a process of self-colonization (Imre 2012: 8–9). Other critics, in their effort
to explain this paradoxical situation, use inconsistent concepts like “anti-
national-national cinema” (Goss 2015).
While national particularities and political contexts make possible the defini-
tion of these films as ‘post-communist’, this narrow understanding of the post-
colonial paradigm ignores the global impact of these filmmakers. The fact
remains that an entire film industry has gone from total oblivion to interna-
tional recognition and, more importantly, today many co-production compa-
nies seek out Romanian directors and filmmaking crews or actors for their
potential, while companies founded by the directors themselves are financing
and producing multinational projects. Far from being placed in a provincial
position, or describable as only one among the “emerging cinemas” of the
Balkans, swiftly ignored by critics (Ezra 2004), Romanian cinema cannot be
limited to its political or social contexts. Treating it as a by-product of the
Eastern European post-transition (Andreescu 2013) ignores the transnational
dimension of European cinema, as pointed out by Rivi (2007). This trend
brought the Romanian New Wave cinema-makers to the forefront of the inter-
nationalization process. Their works have been widely emulated, as the
‘Romanian style’ or the ‘Romanian way of making films’ today attracts many
filmmakers from neighbouring countries and even Western Europe.
A Phoenix Rising from the Ashes of New Wave Stylistics

While these cultural, philosophical, thematic and narrative explanations are sig-
nificant, perhaps the element which best accounts for the naturalistic and real-
istic dimensions of this direction in filmmaking remains the camerawork. This
is not simply based on the ontology of the photographic device, but it is a form
of cinema that can be broadly associated with the “tradition of realism” (Aitken
2007), a particular mode of filmmaking that has its origins in the stylistics of
cinéma vérité. When left-wing filmmakers in Italy and France rediscovered the
practices of early Soviet cinematographers, this allowed the camera to function
again as a technology of telling the truth. The second turning point was the
management of visual and cinematic settings as living environments. While
some critics hurriedly use simplistic concepts such as ‘Bazinism’ in order to
explain the realism of the Romanian New Wave, this cinematic direction is not
founded in the ‘basic realist imperative’. Rather, as Aitken pointed out, there is
a “realist modality” manifested in an overall stylistics that provides the viewer
with a naturalistic and documentary-like experience (Aitken 2007: 183–184).
By using documentary-like camera approaches, which can be either observa-
tional or participative (see Pop 2014: 63–65), together with the refusal of
artificiality, and opposing the canons of fiction cinema, Romanian filmmakers
have developed their own version of realism. Cristi Puiu’s debut film Stuff and
Dough (2001) showcases how one the most important cinematographic instru-
ments of the Romanian New Wave remains the ‘liberation’ of the camera. In a
combination of techniques designed to capture reality, in the way of free cin-
ema or direct cinema experiments, the so-called handheld camera provides the
viewer with the sensation of presence, a cinematic experience without the
apparent intervention of the film director.
In Search of Cinematic Authenticity

Manifesting an aversion to the artificiality of previous films (similar to the dis-
dain for bourgeois films in the case of the Italian and French directors of the
1950s and the 1960s), this reactivated documentary-style cinematography, and
aesthetics of immediacy, resulted in the resurrection of camera practices used
by other Romanian directors. This includes filmmakers working during the
1960s or 1970s, like Lucian Pintilie with his masterpiece Reconstruction (1970)
or Mircea Daneliuc with Microphone Test (1980), who practised this modality.
Unfortunately, these experiments never accumulated into a school of cinema.
As noted by Călin Căliman (2007) the “first signs” of a true New Wave cinema
were manifested only after Cristi Puiu returned to the resources of the major
European New Waves. While some mocked the jerky movements and unstable
sensation provided by this type of camera, disdainfully rejecting the apparently
inconsistent editing and banality of the settings (Stănescu 2016), all these
devices were selected by design to provide the viewer with an experience of real
life at an unprecedented scale in the national cinema.
156 D. POP
Puiu’s innovation in terms of Romanian cinema was not only to use the
camera as a neutral observer. The director himself acknowledged that he was
trying to make a personal cinema in which to faithfully reproduce reality. This
was part of a cinematic search for the ‘really-real’, using the camera, actors and
narratives to mirror real existence as closely as possible. This effort to present
the viewers with the utmost experience of reality might seem sometimes a form
of grim and gritty realism, yet unlike the brutalist cinema or its miserabilist ver-
sions in national filmmaking, the Romanian New Wave remained driven by
authenticity and not by any political purposes. Other important devices, based
on the philosophy of cinematic authenticity, were used. This is the case with
the long take, sometimes presented as an inherent predisposition of this cinema
for plans-séquences. In fact, the longue durée has its roots in the refusal of exces-
sive interventions. Avoiding the intervention of the director into the cinematic
development closely follows Godard’s famous statement about editing—that
every cut is a moral decision, not an aesthetic act (quoted by Gus Van Sant and
Falsetto 2015: 81). As previously explained, the choice for long shots must be
linked with the intention to present reality as closely as possible to its lived
duration, and not with any artistic virtuosity.
The Inexhaustible Resources of New Wave Stylistics

While they provide a fresh visual and aesthetic experience, the Romanian New
Wave films display several characteristics that invalidate theories about the
emergence of a ‘new cinema’. Ultimately there is nothing new in their cine-
matic treatment; contemporary Romanian directors do not discover some
unknown cinema practices, but rather they return to the foundations of the
Nouvelle Vague. The term, initially invented by Françoise Giroud (1958) to
announce a new generation of filmmakers in France, was based on the coher-
ence of films made by the same generation of authors like Truffaut’s The 400
Blows (1959) or Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960). These productions cap-
turing ‘reality as it unfolds’ and made by on-location shooting became an
“artistic school”, sharing aesthetic and technical practices (Marie 2003: 78–79).
Almost all the elements that demonstrate that this is in fact a New Wave style
of cinema-making are illustrated by the early films of Cristi Puiu, who would
soon become one of the leaders of the new generation. His first feature film,
Stuff and Dough, exhibited a strong mastery of these techniques, which later
would become the “Puiu style of cinema making” (Pop 2014: 43). The com-
bination of handheld camera and location shooting, real-time action and acting
style, coupled with an apparently minimalist narrative, with austere and natu-
ralistic dialogue, accumulate into a coherent cinematic effect. Even though this
approach was not in and of itself a novelty, it gradually included other codes of
cinematic realism, as it was transformed into a trademark for many contempo-
rary Romanian films.
More authentic mises en scène in real locations were used, many more real
stories were captured with this extreme realist technique and an unrelenting
exploration of human real life was put into action. Romanian directors went on
and searched for the ‘real’, exploring different approaches to and versions of
the same cinematic mechanics, which resulted in a new direction in Romanian
cinema. Even if some books dedicated to the New Waves in cinema (Martin
2013) make absolutely no mention of these Romanian filmmakers, they are by
now internationally visible and are generating some of the most interesting
additions to the European film tradition. This chapter focuses on a case study,
a mature work by Cristi Puiu, The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu. The memorable
stylistics of this film have been borrowed from, imitated and sometimes
improved upon; however, it remains a quintessential example of the remarkable
addition to the European Waves which is Romanian New Wave cinema.
If the French New Wave was based on the works of the Truffaut-Godard
duo, with The 400 Blows and Breathless considered the most representative
examples, recent Romanian cinema has also been driven by competition
between two important directors, Cristi Puiu and Cristian Mungiu. Their fea-
ture films have received some of the most important international awards and
recognition, and they are pivotal for understanding the Romanian ‘school of
filmmaking’. The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,
respectively, display some of the most important elements of the creative poten-
tial of New Wave practices, and both films showcase the characteristic cinematic
language, syntax and even the specific ‘grammar’ that allowed the Romanian
New Wave to become globally appreciated (see more in Pop 2010). The
New York Times included The Death … in its top five most influential films of
this century, while a poll initiated by BBC Culture placed Cristian Mungiu’s 4
months … amongst the top 20 films of the twenty-first century. In 2010 the
Romanian Film Critics Association asked its members to respond to a poll of
the top ten national films of all times and these two films came in third and
fourth places. It is extremely difficult to choose between these two remarkable
productions; yet, for the purpose of understanding the evolution of the
Romanian New Wave, Puiu’s work takes chronological pre-eminence. An in-
depth analysis of this production provides useful insight into the overall
mechanics of a particular mode of understanding cinema.
Case Study: The Death of Mr. La ̆zar

̆ escu
(Cristi Puiu, 2005)
Cristi Puiu remains one of the most important directors of recent Romanian
cinema and his masterpiece was described by many critics as “paradigmatic”
and “programmatic” (Stojanova and Duma 2012: 10–11). Alex Leo Șerban
defined this production as a “cult film” (Șerban 2009: 262), even an “inciting”
model for the entire Romanian “young cinema”. Others (Fulger 2011: 108)
claimed it produced a real “revolution”, while many tried to explain its intricate
qualities by describing it either as a road movie, a transcendental film or even a
derisory form of cinema. Yet in order to understand why The Death of Mr.
158 D. POP
Lăzărescu can be considered a representative film for the stylistics of the

Romanian New Wave, a contextualized interpretation is necessary. It is relevant
that the National Centre for Cinematography, the main national agency cre-
ated to support cinema production in Romania, initially refused to finance this
project. It took the intervention of the Ministry of Culture to make this film,
which immediately after its premiere was awarded the ‘Un Certain Regard’
prize at Cannes.
Cristi Puiu’s film, which would have a major influence on the evolution of
national and even international filmmaking, was appreciated first by interna-
tional film critics. A. O. Scott was one of the most astute supporters of recent
Romanian directors and, as he pointed out in his New York Times review
(2008), this 2005 film showcases the cinematic components of New Wave sty-
listics, practicing camera movements and an overall approach to filmmaking
that can only be evaluated as a specific mode of representing reality. And even
if sometimes the filmmakers themselves denied the existence of a ‘Romanian
New Wave’, their productions disclose repetitive artistic formulas, attributes
that brought success after success during the last two decades and coalesced
into a coherent aesthetics easily identifiable as a recognizable direction in con-
temporary Romanian and European cinema.
As noted by Monica Filimon (2017) in an overview of the director’s work,
there is an ethnographic dimension which is specific to Puiu’s approach
(Filimon 2017: 63). The Death … is not only developed with the help of an
observational camera, it also gives an anthropological account of life in con-
temporary Bucharest, which gives the entire school of cinema an authentic
edge. The director himself acts like an ethnographer, taking viewers from their
simple role of witnesses to emotional events, to direct participants, who must
make moral decisions as actions unfold in front of them. The main cinemato-
graphic modality, previously practiced in Stuff and Dough, is the free camera,
liberated from its fixed position, ‘jumping’ from the main character to appar-
ently insignificant details in the middle of dialogue, attributing roles as things
happen, recording life in the moment. Comparable with Breathless, the camera-
work here seems careless and lacking any aesthetic predisposition, while pro-
viding a specific mood, one that is breaking cinema conventions. Another trait
disclosed by the production of this film is the drive towards auteurism in Puiu’s
works. The director claimed (Corciovescu 2005) that all his films were part of
one single cinematic vision, which he identified as “Six Tales from the Outskirts
of Bucharest”, a clear hint to Six contes moraux (1962–1972) by Eric Rohmer.
Starting with The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, then with Aurora (2010) and most
recently with Sieranevada (2016), these feature films are not only placed in the
urban universe of the Romanian capital city, but viewers are offered a very per-
sonal experience of life and death in Romanian society. Once again, Godard’s
shadow is present, as the French director also claimed that cinema is only about
recording “death at work”, by capturing the “mortal side of life” (Godard
1997: 62).
The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu also provides a temporal model for a cinema
based on real-life events, as everything takes place in a compressed timeframe.
About two and a half hours of film recount a period of about six hours in the
life and suffering of an old man living alone in a disorderly apartment and later
taken to four different hospitals. This is a narrative strategy, used and reused by
many filmmakers, producing the effect of ‘verisimilitude’, that is, the sensation
of a close and immediate resemblance to reality. In Romanian New Wave cin-
ema, often things take place in less than 24 hours, here from late Saturday
night to early Sunday morning. As the tragedy unfolds in front of the viewer
the sensation of real time intensifies the visually and emotionally acute reality.
In terms of cinematography the film illustrates the two main features of New
Wave stylistics: the realistic effect obtained by the use of handheld camera, and
the powerful authenticity generated by location shooting. Throughout the
story of Lăzărescu Dante Remus, from his movements in the cramped kitchen
to the confinement of the ambulance and then hospital rooms, the camera is
always following, jolting with every bump, reacting to every anxiety-inducing
change and every new suffering. This preference for capturing real environ-
ments, inherited from the neorealist tradition, is amplified by the near-real-
time evolution of the plot.
As mentioned, these Romanian filmmakers often choose to fictionalize and
retell a real event. In 1997 the body of a man, later identified as one Constantin
Nica, was found lifeless on a street in Bucharest. The results of a subsequent
investigation soon turned into a huge media scandal, as reporters found out
that the 58-year-old man had been carried by an ambulance from one hospital
to another without being admitted; since he was homeless, the paramedics had
abandoned him in front of his former address. The four different doctors who
refused him treatment were never prosecuted, and the only convicted person
was a nurse on the ambulance, sentenced to jail for negligence. Unfortunately
this was not a unique case; in 2018 another man died in front of a hospital fol-
lowing a doctor’s refusal to treat him (Digi24 2018). Puiu’s procedure is not
simply to create stories ‘based on real events’; it is relevant that, immediately
after the case of Constantin Nica, Cristi Puiu began a documentary project at
the Craiova retirement home.
Other films also use this practice, such as Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills (2012)
which recounts the real-life case of an exorcism practiced by a priest in
Moldova—they represent the ‘really-real’ through a personal perspective and a
systematic filmmaking elaboration. These techniques of obtaining the most
powerful cinematic realism are assisted by the documentary-style reality
depicted. This is visible in the setting of the first part of the film, when for more
than 50 minutes all action happens in a cramped apartment, the narrative cen-
tred on the ordinary life of a solitary old man who lives with three cats. At this
level it seems to be a film where nothing happens, yet this purposeful emptiness
of action and of meaning allows the naturalistic approach to develop. The
intention of the director becomes evident in the very first scene, which later
becomes a standard for many more Romanian films. A banal urban space (either
160 D. POP
an apartment, a kitchen or a bathroom) becomes the setting for a significant

human dilemma. While Mr. Lăzărescu is alone, and the entire scene apparently
depicts his menial activities in a pseudo-documentary mode, the film accumu-
lates realistic engagement, finally producing an overwhelming realistic ‘mood’.
The fact that the film is entirely made by using the principle of location
shooting, with the apartment, hospitals and even the ambulance used being
authentic, gives Puiu, just as in the case of his neorealist predecessors, an eye-
witness quality. This realism is amplified by a naturalistic dimension; we see the
sickly old man vomiting his medicine, washing his shirt by hand in the bath-
room sink, then finally getting ready for his operation, washed by the nurses at
the hospital (see Fig. 9.1). All these elements might seem to lead to the conclu-
sion that this is a simple form of storytelling and even could justify the label of
minimalism. With Lăzărescu taken from hospital to hospital during a couple of
hours during the night, then finally prepared for brain surgery, the structure of
the narrative is linear and even classical. There is a continuous development of
the plot, with three acts and a climax, then a denouement that seems to close
everything.
A typical device of Romanian cinematic storytelling is its narrative ambigu-
ity, coupled with complex references hidden in plain sight. This is similar to
what Geneviève Sellier describes as “new wave” plots or the “ideology of
Fig. 9.1 Mr. Lăzărescu’s bedroom provides a naturalistic mise en scène where authen-
ticity accentuates the cinematographic realism. (Courtesy of Mandragora)
ambiguity” (Sellier 2008: 129). The very title of the film fits this strategy, even
to the extent of some hasty film critics concluding that Mr. Lăzărescu dies at
the end. In fact, Puiu gives no clues in this direction; the old man is never
shown dead, nor do we receive any indication through the storytelling to prove
this hypothesis. Moreover, the doctors diagnose his brain problem as a routine
operation. Just as in many other films of this generation, the uncertainty
becomes a driving element. While the title creates false expectations for the
viewer, since this is only a ‘chronicle of a death foretold’, never finished with an
actual death, multiple other elements function as ‘red herrings’. Lăzărescu’s
entire character development is constructed from ambiguities, as we gradually
discover various aspects of the life of this decrepit pensioner; we realize that he
is more than meets the eye, as he was at some point in his life an educated man.
Indeed, the title could have been “The Life of Mr. Lăzărescu” as we recon-
struct, from pieces, a life while watching the man himself gradually degrading.
Such ambiguities also allow for interpenetrations and symbolic interpreta-
tions; for example, some authors (Batori 2018) see in the striped pyjamas worn
by Mr. Lăzărescu the typical clothing of detainees in Romania, which suggests
references to the concepts advanced by Foucault, and the defining of this urban
environment as ‘carceral’. Others read in the fact that the name of the nurse is
Mioara a reference to the fundamental myth of Romanian, the Miorit ̦a, where
death is celebrated as a passage to another world. Indeed, Lăzărescu goes
through the various levels of the Inferno, and his middle name (Dante) and
surname (with its reference to Lazarus) are direct indications of the subtle
insinuations inserted in the film. Other significations can be coupled with this
ironical treatment, such as at the end, where Virgil (also the name of the
brother-in-law at the beginning) is the hospital porter who takes the patient to
doctor Anghel, at the ‘top floor’. Such counter-narrative tools also perform at
a deeper level, like the fact that the story is driven by an anti-hero, even a fun-
damentally non-heroic individual. Mr. Lăzărescu is a flawed character, a
drunken and incapable old man, in a negative mirroring of typical character-
driven narratives (Fig. 9.2).
Although metaphorical interventions are refused by Puiu, there are overt
forms of symbolism. Puiu’s training as a painter and his artistic background
often influence his aesthetic arrangements, providing intermedial references
like the re-enactment of the Pietà in a scene with Mr. Lăzărescu’s neighbours,
or Mantegna’s classical Lamentation of Christ staged during a medical visit.
While this allowed many critics to label Puiu’s works as ‘art film’, the Romanian
director acts more like a media critic, making indirect references to several film
genres, most visibly here to the ‘emergency room drama’. Like his Nouvelle
Vague predecessors, Puiu and his colleagues often take on American classical
genres, re-articulating them in a sarcastic or even dismissive way. Dismantling
the inner workings of cinematic and narrative canons remains a trait of the New
Wave cinema, and in particular for Puiu’s approach.
Irony and sarcasm are also used for social innuendo. “It’s a mortality prob-
lem”, says Mr. Lăzărescu, as the director purposefully plays with the words
162 D. POP
Fig. 9.2 This ‘everyday life’ narrative is driven by the anti-heroic nature of Mr.
Lăzărescu and his apparent lack of traits allows a criticism of large representation para-
digms. (Courtesy of Mandragora)
morality and mortality. Throughout the film several moral decisions are made
and unmade: the nurse asks a neighbouring family to help her hospitalize him,
but they refuse; in the hospital she wants to abandon him, activating her own
chain of interventions; multiple private negotiations take place, and small com-
promises are made, but the director never judges and never takes sides. The
typical formula—real time, real events, real people, real locations and realistic
camerawork—has one final Romanian twist, in the absurdist dimensions of this
reality. In this specific version of realism, the dialogues, interactions and situa-
tions are very often at the fringe between the believable and the inconceivable,
trapped between dark laughter and utter tragedy. The end of The Death …,
which opens with an ironic extra-diegetic musical intervention from Margareta
Pîslaru, one of the popular singers of communist Romania, who sings about
love, is also punctuated with a song, this time about the evening coming over
the seas. A similar technique is used by Mungiu, at the end of 4 Months …
where another song about love is placed at the heart of a tragedy. This particu-
lar combination of darkness and lightness, of laughter and suffering, remains a
trademark of Romanian films.
Last but not least it is significant that The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, nominated
as the fifth ‘Best Film of the 21st Century’, Romania’s official submission to
the 78th Academy Awards, and awarded the ‘Un Certain Regard’ prize at
Cannes was never a box office success in Romania. It grossed about US

$70,000 in ticket sales, with 25,000 viewers at home. Considering that the
total budget of the film was estimated at about US $500,000, clearly the return
cannot be seen in terms of financial value, but in a cultural and aesthetic sense.
As Jaffe noted, while references can be made to the effects of the communist
past, and even to Fascist totalitarianism (Jaffe 2014: 92), this is not only a story
about the Romanian medical system or the history of one particular society,
but also about humanity and its limitations.
Conclusion
As noted by Stojanova and Duma (2012: 8–9), the conceptual nature of the
New Wave Romanian cinema is elusive, and the dispute between film theorists
using the concept of ‘New Romanian Cinema’, with the acronym NCR (‘noul
cinema românesc’), and the New Wave seems insoluble. However, this endless
disagreement around definitions and terminologies is not specific to Romanian
film criticism. For example, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith places the films made by
the Italian neorealists and the French Nouvelle Vague in the “new cinemas”
category, defining them as “movements” that can be labelled through their
novelty (Nowell-Smith 2013: 150–164). Even if in the case of the Romanian
contemporary filmmakers the novelty is even less obvious, the conceptual bias
remains. Some Romanian critics freely use both terms, “new wave” and “new
cinema” interchangeably (Corciovescu and Mihăilescu 2011) and even Alex
Leo Șerban, one of the most important critics and perhaps the first to recog-
nize the value of these productions, hesitated when using the terms, consider-
ing that the “so-called new wave” was in fact a form of neorealism (Șerban
2009: 55). Șerban’s less knowledgeable disciples continued to promote the
NCR formula, without taking into consideration that the concept of ‘new cin-
emas’ was terminologically linked in film theory with the Third World political
cinema. Although the Cinema Novo of Brazil shared several elements of the
European New Waves, among them the documentary approach to reality and
the authenticity of narratives, these films were politically charged.
Another problem is taxonomical, with many critics aggregating together all
the post-2000 productions into a single direction. Others, like Dominique
Nasta (2013), followed by foreign authors such as László Strausz (2017), deal
with Romanian filmmaking by bringing together directors from the 1960s and
1970s (like Pintilie or Daneliuc), with those from the 1990s (Caranfil) and
those after 2000 (Puiu or Mungiu). In the specific case of the Romanian film
industry, a New Wave school was not developed during communism because
of the political and historical situation of the country. While in other Central
and Eastern European cinemas, the influences of the French Nouvelle Vague
immediately reverberated in films made by auteurs like Wajda, Polanski or
Milos Forman, in Romania New Wave experiments remained isolated at
the time.
164 D. POP
Romanian New Wave cinema is limited by aesthetic and cinematic criteria.

Only a handful of films, from more than 180 productions made during the last
decades qualify in this direction. Using the term ‘Romanian New Wave’ is an
acknowledgement that several of the films made after 2000 are following a
coherent aesthetic, that a group of filmmakers belongs to a commonly estab-
lished canon and have developed similar narrative and representational strate-
gies. The fundamental questions are juxtaposed with the problem of defining
the Romanian New Wave as a distinct style and even a cinematic sub-genre. Is
it a distinct movement or is it simply a collection of filmmaking modalities?
While accepting the difficulty of defining a single ‘film school’, as there is no
common ‘dogma’, there are at least three main practices of the New Wave cin-
emas that recur in the Romanian New Wave: stylistic realism, aesthetic essen-
tialism and thematic authenticity. The stylistic dimensions deal with camerawork,
mise en scène and editing, where handheld camera, on-location sound and
lighting and the long-shot philosophy are coupled with editing practices which
prioritize non-intervention. The New Wave is a direction in Romanian cinema
based on the aesthetic effort to present a ‘slice of life’, which is a central quality
of this mode of making cinema. Last but not least, each filmmaker of this gen-
eration found inspiration in the films of his colleagues and in Romanian reality,
coalescing into a single identity.

1. Can you describe the common elements of the various European New
Waves, and how they explicate a continental philosophy of cinema? How
do they display characteristics which can be seen as opposing Hollywood
or commercial films?
2. Can you identify any common stylistics and/or aesthetic, and any recur-
rent narrative components across: Italian Neorealism, the French Nouvelle
Vague, the Danish Dogme movement and the Romanian New Wave?
3. Discuss the cinematographic elements that constitute the European film-
making tradition. What do you believe these are?
4. Which are the main elements that support the idea of a coherent and
specific Romanian New Wave mode of cinema-making?
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CHAPTER 10
Between Transnational and Local in European

Cinema: Regional Resemblances in Hungarian
and Romanian Films
Andrea Virginás
Definitions
Post-Communist/Post-Communism
The post-communist era in Eastern Europe followed the regime changes of
1989–1990, results of more peaceful (Czechoslovakia, Hungary) or bloody
revolutions (Romania) that put an end to communist dictatorships—disregard-
ing basic human rights (decent living conditions, freedom of movement and
speech) and effective thanks to secret service surveillance—in the region. The
latter developed following the Treaty of Yalta (1945), when Europe was divided
into capitalist Western Europe, under the influence of the USA, and commu-
nist Eastern Europe, under the influence of the Soviet Union.
Parallel Industries
Such film production systems are found where one parallel industry “is small
and both locally focused and anchored”, with “the other (…) externally
owned and run, and in every way part of the global film industry”, write
Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie (2007: 18) following from the work of film
A. Virginás (*)
Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
e-mail: virginas.andrea@kv.sapientia.ro

168 A. VIRGINÁS
historian Dina Iordanova. These parallel industries currently exist in such dif-
ferent small national cinemas as the Danish or Hungarian ones, disseminating
global know-how to local film production personnel.
Runaway Production
Film and television creations (or phases of production) are displaced from
Hollywood studios to cheaper or perhaps more spectacular locations abroad, in
order to employ foreign and cheaper skilled workforce, and/or with the aim of
profiting from business possibilities offered by national film production laws
outside the USA. Hjort and Petrie (2007: 9), referring to Toby Miller’s work,
call this a “new order (…) founded on an intensification of Hollywood’s direct
participation in the production sectors of other national film industries”, in
many cases small national cinemas.
Arthouse Cinema
Films historically created in European film industries were more attached to
literary, theatrical and artistic traditions, counterpointing classical Hollywood
storytelling’s linear causality and hero-centredness with episodic or eventless
narratives and wandering heroes missing concrete aims. In the USA these films
were projected in arthouse cinemas, as opposed to blockbusters screened in
multiplex cinemas (Elsaesser 2005: 23). The 1969 Cuban manifesto “Toward
a Third Cinema” names arthouse cinema Second Cinema, with Hollywood
being First Cinema (Hayward 2001: 389).
Post-Analogue
The analogue technologies of recording, archiving and distribution dominated
the twentieth century: celluloid film strips, gramophone discs and video cas-
settes share the non-digital mode of keeping track of information, by way of
analogue imprinting or projection. Since the 1980s–1990s, post-analogue
(digital) technologies are based on digital coding, which allows for almost infi-
nitely more information to be recorded via digital cameras, or archived and
redistributed throughout digital streaming services.
Introduction
Regional nodes of film production and film culture, usually constituted on
zones of cultural overlapping between different linguistic cultures, have been
ever-present in European film. These may emerge from the hybridization of
major national film cultures, or come into being through the co-working and
necessary interdependence of small- to medium-sized national film industries
(Hjort and Petrie 2007; Giukin et al. 2015), or indeed may be exemplified by
such “regional cinemas or national cinemas whose culture and/or language
10 BETWEEN TRANSNATIONAL AND LOCAL IN EUROPEAN CINEMA: REGIONAL… 169
take their distance from the nation states which enclose them” (Crofts 2006:
45). A few recent examples are Cinema Beur in 1980s France, the English–
Scottish film renaissance in the 1990s, Swedish–Danish television series and
films or the Slovak–Czech film co-productions of the 2000s. These phenomena
are moments of what Stephen Crofts envisages as the nation-state “manifestly
losing its sovereignty (…) pressured both by transnational forces—canonically
American in economic and cultural spheres, and Japanese in economic and,
more recently, cultural spheres—and simultaneously the sub-national, some-
times called the local” (Crofts 2006: 54). Thomas Elsaesser also draws atten-
tion to the fact that “it is location that makes European cinema perhaps not
unique but nonetheless distinctive. In particular, cities and regions have super-
seded auteurs and nations as focal points for film production” (Elsaesser 2005:
26). The division between differently sized European film industries capable of
co-working and co-influencing each other circumscribes a meso-level analysis
of the European film cultural processes, a direction possibly different from
simply cataloguing the consequences of a sheer erosion of the nation-state.
This meso-level direction of analysis focuses on the characteristics and func-
tioning principles of these trans- and intercultural, co-working regional film
canons and cinema hubs, with a conscious reaction to Hollywood dominance
also detectable in the films’ texture.
Eastern European film is identifiable as a transnational and regional film
canon even in terms of name, with the region’s film industries comprised over-
whelmingly of small national cinemas according to Hjort and Petrie’s catego-
rization (2007). In order to highlight recent directions in European film
culture, this chapter examines the regional aspect of Eastern European cinema
by focusing on two of its small- to medium-sized industries, while presenting a
comparative analysis of two films, one from each industry, as examining one
film would not allow for the clear emergence of comparative and regional
aspects. Hungarian and Romanian films constitute two such post-communist
Eastern European national industries that are geographical neighbours.
Additionally, through the border region of Transylvania and its mixed, occa-
sionally bilingual Hungarian and Romanian population, they dispose of an area
of cultural overlap. As there is no regional co-production platform (e.g. similar
to the Nordic Film and TV Fund, catering for Scandinavian countries), this
cultural overlap is manifested through the frequent individual collaboration of
Hungarian and Romanian film professionals and often mediated by creators of
Transylvanian origin. To focus on the two Case Study films with the aim of
demonstrating the regional resemblances mentioned in the title: in Hungarian
László Nemes’ Son of Saul (2015), the titular Saul Ausländer’s concentration
camp mate Abraham Warszawski is played by Transylvanian actor Levente
Molnár, in whose capacity as a casting agent he is given special thanks at the
end of Romanian Radu Jude’s Aferim! (2015), in the editorial department of
which we find renowned Hungarian professional, László Kovács, working as a
telecine dailies colourist, that film being a co-production between Romania,
Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and France.
170 A. VIRGINÁS
Hungarian and Romanian film cultures in the twenty-first century offer a

fertile ground of regional linkages and synchronicities, and in the first section
their comparable and/or common traits will emerge through their inclusion in
the small cinema models. Based on estimated lists of the, respectively, most-
viewed Hungarian and Romanian films of the twenty-first century, “small
(national) domestic taste” in an Eastern European context (Virginás 2016) will
be sketched. In the second section the argument is advanced that increasing
domestic audience numbers in the second part of the 2010s are also due to
incorporating ‘Hollywood formulas’ in small national production, aesthetic and
distribution strategies, to which Eastern European small national domestic audi-
ences, attuned to Hollywood-type stylistics, react in a positive manner. Finally,
and in order to demonstrate the often evident, and thus unnoticed similarities
that suggest a regional filmic node—seen here as an important new direction of
development in contemporary European cinema—the two previously mentioned
films will be analysed in the Case Study section. The Hungarian Son of Saul and
Romanian Aferim! not only each gathered the highest respective domestic audi-
ence numbers of 2015, but have been recognized internationally—Son of Saul
was awarded the 2016 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of the
Year, and Aferim! won the 2015 Silver Berlin Bear. Small national characteristics,
European allegiances and Hollywood influences are at work simultaneously in
the two films, suggesting a process based on a meso-level forging of apparently
disparate characteristics: “small cinemas today are somewhere in between the
spaces of Hollywood and other spaces in their impact on the audiences and the
production of new modernisms in cinema” (Falkowska and Giukin 2015: xxvi).
Small National Numbers

Hungarian and Romanian film history can be delimited into pre-communist
(before 1945/1948), communist (1948/1945–1989) and post-communist
(since 1989/1990) eras. This historical and political meta-narrative gains spec-
ificity through being complemented by the numeric assessment postulated by
the small cinemas model, which is not a normative one, allowing for a consider-
able fluctuation of the values: Hjort and Petrie (2007) highlight that it is the
combination of these aspects, as well as the comparative perspective, that needs
to govern examinations (Table 10.1).
Small national cinemas are described as originating from smaller nation-
states in terms of number of inhabitants and size of territory, with a generally
low gross national product (GNP) per capita, and the historically formative
experience of being dominated by non-nationals (Hjort and Petrie 2007).
Hungarian cinema fits Hjort and Petrie’s categorization based on the four vari-
ables of territory (93,000 square kilometres), inhabitants (9,880,000), gross
national income (GNI) per capita (~US $12,000 throughout the 2010s) and
experience of incorporation into larger structures—the Austro-Hungarian
Monarchy, the Soviet Union and the European Union (EU)—to the degree
Table 10.1 The model of small national cinemas

Country Population Area GNI per capita Historical
(mil) (km2) (USD) background
Model countries 4–10 ˂273,000 1200–60,000 Colonial, Imperial

according to
Hjort-Petrie
Hungary 9.9 93,000 ~12,000 Ottoman Empire,
Romania 21.5 237,491 ~10,850 Austro-Hungarian
Monarchy, Eastern/
Soviet Bloc, EU
Source: The CIA World Factbook and the World Bank country sheets of Hungary and Romania
that it may be even considered a typical small national cinema. Romania, on the
other hand, in terms of its population (~20 million) and area (237,500 square
kilometres) is in the upper margins of a small national cinema according to
Hjort and Petrie, similar to Taiwan or Burkina Faso (2007: 6). Still, in terms of
its recent GNI per capita (~US $8000 in the period 2008–2012, comparable
to Bulgarian or Tunisian data as presented by Hjort and Petrie, and around US
$10,000 for estimated post-2015 values), and its long history as part of the
Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy or the Eastern Bloc, and
more recently the EU, it indeed should be included in this type of cinema (see
Virginás 2014).
Involvement in the pan-national framework of the European Union has
influenced domestic production of films in both cases. In the second five-year
periods following their accessions to the EU (in 2004 and 2007, respectively),
the number of films produced/in production in Hungary decreased by 50–60%
(to a hypothetical average of 15 productions a year), while in Romania a dra-
matic increase of 350% was registered (to a hypothetical average of 50 produc-
tions a year) (Virginás 2016). These processes not only correlate with the
dimensions of the respective national markets but also reflect the trends of
stagnating (Hungary) or increasing (Romania) GNI per capita amounts. Thus
situating both film industries in the framework of small national cinemas makes
them comparable and highlights their need of connection as members of vari-
ous Pan-European political entities during the twentieth century, since “in
Europe, the traditional sense of bounded and differentiated national cinemas
has always been more difficult to maintain in the case of small nations” (Hjort
and Petrie 2007: 16).
Concerning domestic audiences for domestic films, data from the 2005 to
2015 period shows that a hypothetical average audience for a Hungarian or
Romanian feature film might be somewhere between 5000 and 30,000 viewers
for a whole screening period. The two following tables show the most popular
domestic films and their audiences in both markets in the period 2010–2015.
The most popular Hungarian films surpass 100,000 viewers on average
(Table 10.2):
172 A. VIRGINÁS
Table 10.2 Top five Hungarian films in terms of audience numbers in the early 2010s
Title Director Audience
Coming Out (2013) Dénes Orosz 141,760

Liza, the Fox-Fairy (2015) Károly Ujj Mészáros 105,433
Argo 2 (2015) Attila Árpa 105,049
What Ever Happened to Timi? (2014) Attila Herczeg 104,863
Son of Saul (2015) László Nemes Jeles ~90,000a
Source: Data synthesized by the author, based on national film audience data presented by the Nemzeti Filmiroda
(The National Film Office in Hungary), the Magyar Nemzeti Filmalap (The Hungarian National Film Fund) and
the Est.hu cultural programme portal’s weekly box-office data up to 11 November 2015
Total number amounted to 180,000 viewers
a
Table 10.3 Top five

Romanian films in terms
of audience numbers in Child’s Pose (2013) Călin Peter Netzer 118,422
the early 2010s Selfie (2014) Cristina Iacob 102,026
Aferim! (2015) Radu Jude 76,622
Of Snails and Men (2012) Tudor Giurgiu 61,264
Why Me? (2015) Tudor Giurgiu 58,423
Source: Data synthesized by the author, based on national film audi-

ence data presented by the Centrul National al Cinematografiei and
the Cinemagia cultural portal’s weekly box-office data up to 16
November 2015
Meanwhile in the Romanian market, twice bigger, the threshold that the
domestic films must surpass to enter the ‘most popular’ list is half as small:
around 50,000 viewers for a successful domestic film. In the top 20 most-
viewed Romanian films presented in the Centrul Nat ̦ional al Cinematografiei
(National Film Centre) statistics for the 2009–2013 period show six films gar-
nering more than 50,000 viewers, and for the 2014–2015 period two more
examples may be added (Table 10.3).
During the years 2016–2017, film-related press in both countries was over-
whelmed by a seemingly unexpected phenomenon: cinema audience numbers
started to grow, primarily in Romania,1 and audience numbers for the most
popular domestic films scored higher than ever in the twenty-first century in
both countries. The following two tables summarize the numbers for the most
popular Hungarian and Romanian films of 2016 and 2017, with 400,000 and
120,000 viewers, respectively; real ‘blockbuster’ numbers for a domestic film
from either country (Tables 10.4 and 10.5).
Thus the current numbers give us a clearer picture of these two Eastern
European small national markets that are also transnationally positioned, thanks
to the European Union founding and supporting schemes in the film industry.
Their coagulating into a regional hub of similarities not only in terms of
production and audience numbers but also in terms of stylistics and poetics is
Table 10.4 Hungarian box-office growth: audience numbers of the most-viewed

domestic releases for 2016–20172
Bet on Revenge (2017) Gábor Herendi 434,737

Pappa Pia (2017) Gábor Csupó 163,185
On Body and Soul (2017) Ildikó Enyedi 138,000
Brazilians (2017) Gábor Rohonyi 73,794
Strangled (2016) Árpád Sopsits 40,417
It’s Not the Time of My Life (2016) Szabolcs Hajdu 31,470
Source: Magyar Nemzeti Filmalap 2015
Table 10.5 Romanian
box-office growth:
audience numbers of the Two Lottery Tickets (2016) Paul Negoescu 127,513
most-viewed domestic #Selfie 69 (2016) Cristina Iacob 133,207
releases for 20163 Graduation (2016) Cristian Mungiu 54,444
Dogs (2016) Bogdan Mirica 21,186
Sieranevada (2016) Cristi Puiu 30,217
Illegitimate (2016) Adrian Sitaru 10,852
Source: Centrul National al Cinematografiei, Blaga (2019)
evidently traceable to small national, but also to European specificities and to

Hollywood influences too, to be presented in detail in the next section.
Small National Taste

While arguing for their common embeddedness in European arthouse film
traditions, it is also evident that the most-viewed Hungarian and Romanian
films of the 2010s have also been influenced by Hollywood templates in both
production—present already in the pre-communist era—and storytelling, con-
ditioned by the preponderance of Hollywood films in domestic markets.
European arthouse cinema in general has been explicitly positioned as situated
the farthest possible from Hollywood-produced, globally distributed main-
stream cinema relying on genres: “this more or less virulent, often emotionally
charged opposition between Europe and Hollywood exerts a gravitational pull
on all forms of filmmaking in Europe (…)”, observes Thomas Elsaesser (2005:
16). Such a standpoint is evidently upheld by the central canonical formations
of both Hungarian and Romanian small national cinemas in contempo-
rary Europe.
The centrality of auteur-driven, festival-circuit arthouse cinema has been a
norm accepted by Eastern European small national funding establishments and
critical discourses too, especially since the communist era, in both film industries
174 A. VIRGINÁS
under scrutiny. This characteristic might be linked to the need to differentiate

small national film production from globalized mainstream filmmaking via art-
house labelling (Neale 2002), and it is clearly a consequence of the limited
resources available to small national filmmakers too. These limits become even
more striking if we compare them to major national (Polish, French or British)
or global film production contexts (Hollywood or Bollywood), which are capa-
ble of producing commercially viable genre films on a regular basis. Ioana
Uricaru’s observations referring to post-communist Romania are pertinent: “a
country with dwindling audiences, with an incredibly low number of theatres,
and basically with no film industry in the sense of a commercially viable enter-
prise” (Uricaru 2012: 428).
Moreover, the commercial film genre awareness of contemporary Eastern
European/Hungarian and Romanian filmmakers and audiences has a specific
profile: it was deeply influenced by the cultural memory of market-oriented
pre-communist genre films (especially in Hungary), also fundamentally formed
by communist-era genre films explicitly representing political propaganda (in
both countries), as well as deeply impacted by the disproportionate number of
Hollywood films which ‘invaded’ Eastern European film and television screens
after 1989. The repercussions last to this day as far as the dominant ideology of
arthouse authorship (supported by the small national states) and the non-
acceptance/acceptance of commercial, market-oriented, popular film is con-
cerned. One could cite multiple opinions, scholarly and otherwise, to support
such a generalization, such as the following interviews with Hungarian and
Romanian film professionals.
Hungarian cameraman Mátyás Erdély, responsible for Son of Saul, exempli-
fies ‘Hollywood’ in terms of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) or
Michael Bay’s Transformers series (2007–), characterizing it as “superficial”,
“not true/faithful/fictionalizing”, “down one level”, “lacking in sensitivity”,
the Other (Bujdosó 2015). Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, premiering
Graduation (2016), expresses a more nuanced view on arthouse film’s opposi-
tion to “commercial cinema”, with the latter positioned as something second-
ary: “I think what counts in the case of every film or story is the result, or to
simplify: it is wonderful if you succeed to blow my mind and make me think
without using the tropes of commercial cinema, but if you only try to avoid
them without any inspired result, then, I think you had better use those [com-
mercial tropes]” (Vasiliu 2016). Finally, a definite opposition between the aes-
thetic philosophy of Romanian New Wave/arthouse cinema and American/
Hollywood cinema is explicitly formulated in an interview with Romanian
director Cristi Puiu:
If you want to stick to the situations of life, they are very unpredictable. And you
just have to be aware of this fact, and stay awake, and push the red button to
record it. You don’t need to invent metaphors or visuals of huge proportions. I
don’t need to make Lord of the Rings 5 in order to tell my story. (…). The whole
process of working on a film is dependent on the situations of life.
I remember talking to a couple of other Romanian directors who were a

little frustrated because their movies were received better abroad than at
home. How do you feel about that? (…) The perception that Romanian audi-
ences are having about the films we are making is not a gentle one. I mean, for a
large audience, cinema is American cinema. (Rapold 2016)
Puiu’s observation that “for a large audience, cinema is American cinema” is

much more than a personal opinion. Save for the communist period (1945–1990),
when First and Second World oppositions generated the concepts of First/
Hollywood and Second/European Cinemas (Hayward 2001: 389), a strong
Hollywood influence has been exercised in the Eastern European region. In the
pre-communist era this happened by modelling production (e.g. in Hungary, and
in the German/Czech industries) on the classical studio system of the ‘Dream
Factory’, which, obviously, resulted in similar outcomes in film poetics, with a
high number of comedies and melodramas produced (Vajdovich 2009; Varga
2009). However, while the Hungarian cinema industry had the chance to know
market-oriented, studio-based ‘Hollywood-style’ filmmaking before the commu-
nist era, the Romanian film industry had this possibility to a very limited degree,
disposing of less capital and a lower level of institutionalization (Dumitrescu
2005). Thus the communist-era suspicion concerning ‘Hollywood-style’ film-
making in Hungary or, on the contrary, the Romanian adaptation of wider-target
studio filmmaking in the communist era—which “had the appearance of a real
industry” with studios, stars and genres (Uricaru 2012: 430)—created slightly
different situations in post-communist Hungary and Romania, respectively.
Focusing on connections between Eastern Europe and Hollywood in the
post-communist period, we witness the emergence of what Dina Iordanova
names “parallel industries”—a small and locally focused industry co-existing
with a formation that is “externally owned and run, and in every way part of the
global film industry” (Hjort and Petrie 2007: 18)—a characteristic present in
small national cinemas too. This process has enabled direct professional knowl-
edge exchange in the context of runaway Hollywood and HBO productions:
for example, the Hollywood super-production Cold Mountain (2003) shot in
Romania’s Media Pro Studios, the Game of Thrones (2011–2019) television
series partly shot in Croatia, more recently Blade Runner 2049 (2017) pro-
duced in Hungary’s Korda Studios, and unexpected horror hit The Nun (2017)
shot in the Romanian Castel Film Studio. Therefore, the production experi-
ences of local filmmakers in outsourced A-list Hollywood productions in
Hungary, or in the production of outsourced global television films in Romania,
must not be ignored as decisive factors in forming contemporary ‘small
national taste’.
Finally, besides Hollywood’s influence through participation in so-called
runaway productions outsourced into this region, its presence in Eastern
Europe as the producer of films distributed in cinemas and on digital platforms
must be mentioned. Even if arthouse creations have been, sometimes
exclusively, preferred by national/state and transnational/EU funding agen-
cies, and been awarded in transnational festival contexts and thus symbolically
176 A. VIRGINÁS
recognized, in these post-communist small national cinema environments

audience numbers and box-office numbers are dominated by Hollywood-type
and/or -origin, globally distributed spectacular mainstream cinema. As Anikó
Imre observes: “From the ruins of state-run film industries, cash-strapped
Eastern Europe has emerged as an indispensable site for this transnational rear-
rangement: a cheap resource for production and a new consumer market (…)”
(Imre 2012: 3).
From, respectively, the decreasing number of Hungarian films, and increas-
ing number of Romanian films produced within the transnational framework of
the EU in 2015 in both countries, it was a historical film that gathered the
highest audience numbers in each: Son of Saul in Hungary, with nearly 180,000
domestic viewers, and Aferim! in Romania, with more than 70,000 domestic
viewers, both films being instant successes in their domestic opening weeks.
However, this is how the weekly audience/box-office top lists looked in
Hungary and Romania, respectively, in the opening weeks of the two films
(Tables 10.6 and 10.7).
Table 10.6 Aferim! premier week in Romanian cinemas (9–15 March 2015)
Film title Weekly Weekly box Cumulative box
audience office (USD) office (USD)
Run All Night 27,206 124,456 124,456

Focus 33,791 ~123,000 627,309
The Cobbler 16,620 76,123 76,123
Aferim! 20,039 61,269 61,269
Chappie 18,905 ~78,000 190,775
The Loft 14,703 ~65,000 145,195
The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water 5223 ~23,000 475,451
Jupiter Ascending 4411 ~22,000 809,418
Kingsman: The Secret Service 4120 ~18,000 282,639
Source: weekly box-office data of Cinemagia
Table 10.7 Son of Saul premier week in Hungarian cinemas (11–17 June 2015)
Film title Weekly Weekly box Cumulative box
audience office (HUF) office (HUF)
Jurassic World 3D 169,410 244,955,208 255,647,563

Spy 45,224 60,080,720 139,037,900
Son of Saul 19,913 23,571,407 28,606,207
San Andreas 3D 13,375 19,484,975 53,766,928
Mad Max: Fury Road 3D 9120 13,524,140 215,241,893
Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu? 6318 8,734,295 30,670,437
Tomorrowland 6612 8,459,260 54,226,835
Avengers: Age of Ultron 3D 5861 8,288,755 539,374,772
Poltergeist 3D 5494 8,045,470 40,817,435
Source: Weekly box-office data of Est.hu

A tiny domestic success may be registered, in a sea of standard Hollywood

viewing, in both of these Eastern European small national cinema markets in
the post-communist era. However, besides being overwhelmed, both
Hungarian and Romanian cinemas have been also trying to counteract this
phenomenon: incorporating ‘Hollywood-style’ features has been a constant
trend in the domestically popular films grossing the highest audience numbers
in 2010s Hungary and Romania. Nolwenn Mingant suggests that it is the
“high-quality production, presence of stars, well-crafted scripts, state-of-the-
art special effects” (Mingant 2011: 145) in Hollywood productions that
European, and consequently Hungarian and/or Romanian audiences might
find attractive. These qualities might be easily identified, for example, in the
2017 summer Hungarian hit, Pappa Pia which surpassed 160,000 domestic
viewers. While serialization, ‘state-of-the art special effects’ and a reliance on
male domestic stars are strategies present in both Hungarian and Romanian
domestic markets, the origins of the source materials differ considerably. The
most successful Hungarian films of the 2010s (see Tables 10.2 and 10.4) strive
hard to leave behind the stigma of adaptation and remake: all of them are based
on original screenplays and have been developed according to the calculated
algorithm of the Hungarian National Film Fund, resembling the classical
Hollywood formula. Meanwhile the most popular Romanian films of the same
period (see Tables 10.3 and 10.5) rely heavily on transmedial adaptations from
theatre pieces (Two Lottery Tickets) or television programmes, usually sitcoms
(as was the case with the biggest post-communist Romanian hit, Garcea and
the People from Oltenia [2002]). A similarity with domestically popular Croatian
films adapted from pre-existing literary material may be pointed at Gilić (2015),
suggesting a regional Eastern European pattern in creating popular films for
domestic markets.
The differences, but also the similarities, between these two regionally inter-
dependent small national cinemas can be highlighted if a grid of four variables
is projected on the lists of the most viewed domestic films. These variables are
based on the following questions relating to the cornerstones of classical
Hollywood storytelling,4 and the main features of the Eastern European popu-
lar film canon: is the film structured as a Hollywood-style genre film, such as a
comedy, or not; is the film oriented towards representing past events or is its
timeframe a present one; is the principle of building its diegetic world that of
realism/verisimilitude in representation or not; and, finally, is its structural
positioning that of an arthouse, or of a commercial production? Comic films
dominate in both markets (Coming Out, Liza, the Fox-Fairy, Argo 2, What Ever
Happened to Timi in the Hungarian case, Selfie, Aferim!, Of Snails and Men in
the Romanian one). Historical social drama films are the second most beloved
type in the Hungarian context (Son of Saul), while present-day social (prob-
lem) drama occupies the same place in the preference of Romanian audiences
(Child’s Pose, Why Me?). Hungarian audiences prize highly those films that have
a specific, often non-realistic angle in constructing their comic diegetic realities
(Coming Out, Argo 2, What Ever Happened to Timi), or even fictive worlds
178 A. VIRGINÁS
placed in strange spheres devoid of direct markers of linear temporality (Liza,

the Fox-Fairy). Meanwhile Romanian audiences strongly favour conventions
which foreground verisimilitude even in comical films (Of Snails and Men),
and which, therefore, are judged as compared to the actual present or past
historical reality (the case of Aferim!).
To sum up and also to refer forward to the last section: while the films pres-
ent stories and diegetic worlds highly specific to these small national cultures,
European arthouse poetics are employed, combined with a constant attention
to and re-coding of Hollywood-type film genre approaches, motivated by the
multiple Hollywood influences exercised over Eastern Europe. In pursuing this
direction of analysis, the argument of Thomas Elsaesser has been a guiding
principle, “an argument that reverses the usual claim that Hollywood hege-
mony stifles national cinema, by maintaining that Hollywood’s strong global
market position is in fact the necessary condition for local or national diversity”
(Elsaesser 2005: 17). A small-scale demonstration of this follows in the Case
Study section.
Case Study: Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015)

and Aferim! (Radu Jude, 2015)
The respective domestic popularity of Son of Saul and Aferim! signals the cen-
trality of arthouse cinema characteristics in taste and appreciation, an impor-
tant feature of small national cinemas, particularly so in European contexts,
and disproportionately so in post-communist countries such as Hungary and
Romania. However, generic allegiances in storytelling and visual style are just
as important, with a wink addressed even to video game characteristics—cueing
domestic genre preferences, but also a consideration for ‘global Hollywood’
characteristics. Both films have been considered historical social dramas, sug-
gesting not only arthouse positioning, but also a middlebrow distanciation
from popular cinema. Son of Saul presents a day in Auschwitz, that of a
Sonderkommando (member of a concentration camp work gang) originally
from a present-day Ukraine region, also inhabited by Hungarian ethnics.
Aferim! engages with the South Romanian region formerly known as Wallachia
in the first part of the nineteenth century when it was under Ottoman rule.
Historical drama is, respectively, the second, and third most popular domestic
film type of post-communist Hungarian and Romanian audiences, the first
being comedy, and the second the present-day social problem film (Dumitrescu
2005; Vajdovich 2009; Varga 2009; Nasta 2013; Virginás 2016, 2017).
The domestic generic coding into historical social drama of both films
houses, in turn, an arthouse characteristic, that of the thematic-ideological
imperative of embodying the respective small nations’ stereotypical, thus sig-
nificant, Other(s)5: the Jewish in the case of Hungarian ethnic culture, and the
Roma in the case of Romanian ethnic culture. Son of Saul explicitly frames the
multiethnic origin of the concentration camp inhabitants, with the titular char-
acter choosing to speak Hungarian, although German, Yiddish, Russian and

Ukrainian figure prominently as spoken languages in the diegetic world. Saul
Ausländer’s main task as a narrative agent—that of burying his supposed son
according to Jewish burial traditions, in spite of the evident obstacles—stages
the impossibility of a singular Hungarian identity. In Aferim! we are witnessing
the pursuit of a supposedly fugitive Roma slave, and the hardships of the hunt
offer multiple occasions for the examination of Roma, Romanian, Turkish,
Greek and Jewish customs and values, with the audience offered the spectacle
of historical Romanian identity, linguistically and culturally entangled within
the web of a multiethnic landscape.
However, somewhat in contrast to global Hollywood templates of historical
social drama which paint long decades of social transformation, such as Gone
with the Wind (1939), the narrative structure of both films is episodic in the
tradition of European modernist arthouse cinema. In this respect the films
conform to Kristin Thompson’s (1988) analysis of the pattern in Vittorio de
Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), insofar as they are constructed around the hap-
penings of roughly one day, with chance and unexpected moments colouring
the narrative landscape. These features stand out in the context of the main
characters’—Saul, the Sonderkommando member, and Constandin, the mer-
cenary law-enforcement officer—goal-oriented institutional positioning. These
characteristics suggest a hybridization of domestic genre—the historical social
drama—with European arthouse features, added to which is an implicit
acknowledgement of global generic storytelling rules as present in adventure
narratives such as war films or Westerns.
Both Son of Saul and Aferim! have been globally recognized as small national
arthouse creations not only based on their successful dialogue with and mim-
icry of the domestic genre of historical social drama and of European arthouse
characteristics but also thanks to their creative re-coding of specific sub-genres:
the Second World War variant of the war film, and the runaway slave variant of
the global Western. Nemes’ film exhibits similarities to such mainstream
Hollywood or European creations as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993)
or Christian Petzold’s Phoenix (2014), and albeit with great caution, it can be
suggested as participating in the dialogue that crystallizes around the Holocaust
film, theorized by Barry Langford as one of the developments in the landscape
of post-classical genres (2010: 262–266). Invoking runaway slave Westerns
and the genre’s recent paradigmatic example, Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years a
Slave (2013), in reference to Aferim! is also plausible. In a YouTube interview
for the All about Romanian Cinema (ARC) portal, director Radu Jude tells
that their “initial aim was to make a kind of Western [un fel de Western]” (2015).
At the same time, while repeating the conceptual artistic choice of ‘stitch-
ing’ arthouse approaches into domestic generic diegeses—described previously
with reference to themes and narrative construction—both Son of Saul and
Aferim! use post-analogue European arthouse aesthetics to represent the
Hungarian Holocaust-era war film and the Romanian runaway slave Western.
One must refer to the highly self-conscious usage of celluloid film stock, black-
180 A. VIRGINÁS
Fig. 10.1 The ‘ethical close-up’ in Son of Saul
and-white colouring, desaturation, the employment of low-key or natural

lighting, amateur(ish) performances and fully mobile cameras, which recreate
Saul’s desperate and isolated existence often under threat of violence and death
(see Fig. 10.1) and convey the futility and accidental happenings of the chase
in Aferim! (see Fig. 10.2). These stylistic features—instead of being the only
possibility—have become choices in a post-analogue context, mixing nostalgia
for analogue filmic solutions with a fascination for digital developments (that
possibly allow for a mimicking of analogue effects).
However, the meso-level positioning of the films between the local (domes-
tic genre and small national topic) and transnational (the war film and the
Western), which is a condition of their regional significance, also means that
global characteristics are also present. In Son of Saul, the continuous danger
awaiting the human being confined in narrow spaces with bad visibility must be
evoked in a framework constituted by the ‘Holocaust film’. Saul’s head/torso
composed in a frontal or back close-up is the dominant visual element of the
filmic image, and Jewish poet Géza Röhrig’s authentically embodied perfor-
mance shown at a claustrophobic distance, as in this much publicized shot,
does not allow an escape route to the viewer, who must take an ethical stance
(see Fig. 10.1). Meanwhile Aferim! presents the audience with a template of
moving human bodies, composed in wide natural panoramas, in order to con-
vey a sense of the frontier in a Western film context, but with evident local
specificities; as when protagonist Constandin raids a Roma camp by the river,
looking for the fugitive. The wide action shot is a variation of the triptych
Fig. 10.2 The anti-racist triptych of Aferim!
structure ever-present in New Romanian Cinema, opposing the aggressive

dominance of the Law of the Father represented by Constandin in the ornate
garments, and the naive onlooker Son, to the stereotypically naked savage on
the run/the Holy Spirit, thus implicitly deconstructing the racist discourse in
Romanian culture (see Fig. 10.2).
The implicit dialogue that Son of Saul and Aferim! are able to establish with
classical narrative diegesis and ‘Hollywood’ must be highlighted as another
important factor in these films’ (inter)national success, besides their transna-
tional and also Pan-European market influences, and the possibilities for
regional cooperation that have had fundamental effects on the production of
both films.
Conclusion
Multiple causality is at work in domestic taste formation in these post-
communist small national cinema environments, generally dominated by
Hollywood spectacles at their box offices and arthouse creations at state fund-
ing agencies. Nevertheless, the cases of the two films’ popularity should not be
simplified as mimicry, or gestures of ‘self-colonization’, as post-colonial cul-
tural theory would have it. These films, and the small national film industries
examined, betray a knowledge of and adherence to European arthouse cine-
ma’s artistic norms, while also being aware of their domestic audiences’ famil-
iarity with and enjoyment of basically Hollywood-origin, genre-based classical
storytelling, often mediated not only through cinematic, but also through
182 A. VIRGINÁS
computer game platforms. Furthermore, an allegiance to domestic generic

affinities is definitely present, even if these are not sufficient in themselves to
generate domestic popularity with small national audiences watching
Hollywood spectacles looking for fun and relaxation, as box-office data attests.
This supports the observation that “[e]conomically, European films are so
weak that they could not be shown on the big screen if the machinery of the
blockbuster did not keep the physical infrastructure of cinema-going and pub-
lic film culture going” (Elsaesser 2005, 17).
Thus, somewhat in contrast to Hjort and Petrie’s positioning of their model
of small national cinemas as something that allows going beyond what they
name “an unfortunate relationship with a single dominant other, Hollywood”
(Hjort and Petrie 2007: 1–2), the implicit dialogue that small national cinemas
need to conduct with this “single dominant other” is indicative of a more entan-
gled and active relationship. Thus an enlargement of at least two of Stephen
Crofts’ (2006) seven types of national cinemas as defined against Hollywood
posits itself as necessary. Crofts’ number three “European and Third World
entertainment cinemas which struggle against Hollywood with limited or no
success” are in need of redefinition as “struggling against Hollywood with some
success”, as the rising domestic audience numbers in Hungary and Romania
suggest. Furthermore, Crofts’ number five “anglophone cinemas which try to
beat Hollywood at its own game” (Crofts 2006: 44–45) may be complemented
by “non-anglophone, Eastern European, (even small national) cinemas”, as the
cases of Son of Saul and Aferim! hopefully attest.

1. Reflect on your own national cinema(s): how or indeed can it/they be
considered in terms of non/small national cinema?
2. Think of those small national cinemas you are most familiar with: can you
see any similarities to Hungarian and/or Romanian cinemas, in terms of
number of films produced, or of audiences?
3. Make a list of the features that are characteristic of Hungarian and Romanian
small national cinemas: can you identify them in such small national cre-
ations as Irish, Belgian, Dutch, Icelandic, Croatian or Israeli films?
4. Reading Barry Langford’s (2010: 262–267) section on “non-canonical”
genres, explain the critical and ethical implications raised by trying to
apply genre theory to Holocaust films such as Son of Saul.
5. Watch Aferim! and, based on Langford’s (2010) description of the
genre, enumerate its Western film characteristics.
6. Compare the non-ethical choices of Constandin while chasing the fugi-
tive Roma slave to Saul’s betrayals while following his goal of burying the
young boy.
7. How can one negotiate their freedom while cooperating with a repres-
sive (state) apparatus? Analyse the characters and their artistic depiction
from this angle.
Notes
1. Between five and six million in 2009, Romanian cinema attendances reached ten
million in 2014 (Centrul National al Cinematografiei 2016).
2. Data published in the revision stage of this chapter (January 2019) shows that
Hungarian domestic admissions surpassed one million viewers in both 2017 and
2018, with the highest grossing films of 2017–2018 (not included here) being
the comedy sequel A Kind of America 3 (372,000 viewers), real-life-inspired
thriller The Whiskey Bandit (2017; 327,000 viewers) and the comedy remake
Happy New Year (2018; 160,000 viewers) (Magyar Nemzeti Filmalap 2015).
3. Data published in the revision stage of this chapter (January 2019) shows that
Romanian domestic admissions grew from 280,000 in 2017 to 380,000 in 2018,
with the highest grossing films of 2018 (not included here) being the historical
social drama sequel The Moromete Family 2 (2018; 181,232 viewers), documen-
tary Untamed Romania (2018; 81,426 admissions) and the comedy Kiss it!
(2018; 23,252 viewers) (Blaga 2019).
4. Although attempting to summarize such a vast topic is futile, Bordwell et al.’s
formulation is enlightening:
the Hollywood cinema sees itself as bound by rules that set stringent limits on
individual innovation; that telling a story is the basic formal concern, which
makes the film studio resemble the monastery’s scriptorium, the site of the
transcription and transmission of countless narratives; that unity is a basic attri-
bute of film form; that the Hollywood film purports to be ‘realistic’ in both an
Aristotelian sense (truth to the probable) and a naturalistic one (truth to the
historical fact); that the Hollywood film strives to conceal its artifice through
techniques of continuity and ‘invisible’ storytelling; that the film should be
comprehensible and unambiguous; and that it possesses a fundamental emo-
tional appeal that transcends class and nation. (Bordwell et al. 2005: 2)
5. Indebtedness to Thomas Elsaesser’s conception referring to the functions of
European national cinemas is evident: “putting forward the idea of a national
cinema (as a theoretical construction) always existing face to face with an ‘other’”
(Elsaesser 2005: 22).
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CHAPTER 11
Crossing Borders: Investigating

the International Appeal of European Films
Huw D. Jones
Definitions
Distribution
A subsector of the film industry devoted to acquiring the commercial rights to
release a film within a particular territory, then choosing its release strategy.
The latter involves deciding when, how and in what format a film should be
released (e.g. a ‘platform’ release involves screening a film in a few key cities to
build up hype, before rolling it out to cinemas nationwide), as well as its pro-
motional material (e.g. trailers, posters, social media activity).
Independent Film
A film produced without the financial or creative input of one of the major
Hollywood studio companies (i.e. Fox, NBC Universal, Paramount, Sony,
Walt Disney and Warner Bros). Some independent films may be distributed by
the major Hollywood studios. Equally, some Hollywood studio productions
may be released by an independent distributor.
Non-national European (NNE) Film

A feature film produced or primarily co-produced in one European country,
but released in another (e.g. a French film released in Germany). The film’s
H. D. Jones (*)
Department of Film, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
e-mail: h.d.jones@soton.ac.uk

188 H. D. JONES
country of origin refers to the country where the film’s main producer is legally
based, rather than the country where the film is set. Thus a film produced by a
French-registered company in co-production with a German partner and set in
Britain is designated ‘French’.
Introduction
Each February, photographers, reporters and film fans descend on Marlene
Dietrich Platz in central Berlin to glimpse the stars parading the red carpet at
the Berlinale Palast, the main venue of the Berlin International Film Festival.
But a few streets away, in the Martin-Gropius-Bau, a former museum located
on the old East-West border, lies the real nerve centre of European cinema.
Here, at the European Film Market, filmmakers meet distributors from across
Europe in the hope of securing international distribution for their latest pro-
ductions. For some, a successful deal could make the difference between global
stardom and financial ruin.
Around half of all films produced in Europe (defined here as the EU28
member states plus Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein) secure
international distribution in another European country, according to the
MeCETES (Mediating Cultural Encounters through European Screens) Film
Database (which combines data from the European Audiovisual Observatory’s
Lumiere Pro World database, the Internet Movie Database and other official
industry statistics).1 Over a quarter are released in three or more European ter-
ritories. However, the audience for these non-national European (NNE)
films—that is, a film produced in one European country, but released in another
(e.g. a French film released in Germany)—is often tiny. According to the
MeCETES database, NNE films sell on average around 185,000 cinema tickets
in Europe per year. Indeed, the median number of tickets sold—often a better
measure of averageness than the mean, which tends to be skewed upwards by
a small number of high-grossing films—is less than 8000 tickets. By compari-
son, American films (both Hollywood studio productions and independent
films) sell on average 1.9 million tickets in Europe per year (a median of
100,000 tickets). Altogether, NNE films represent only 12% of cinema admis-
sions in Europe, ranging from 29% in Switzerland to 3% in the UK. American
films account for 65% of admissions, while ‘national’ European films (e.g. a
French film consumed in France) take 21% of admissions. Films from the rest
of the world (i.e. neither American nor European) make up the remaining 2%
market share.
Viewership of NNE films is not much higher on TV, DVD or Video-On-
Demand (VOD). According to a 2014 survey for the European Commission
(2014: 152), only 14% of EU citizens regularly watch NNE films across all
media platforms. By comparison, 58% regularly watch American films, while
20% regularly watch films from their own country. The proportion of avid NNE
film viewers ranges from 31% in Poland to 3% in Croatia. But regardless of
nationality, these so-called Europhiles tend to be “younger, more often women
11 CROSSING BORDERS: INVESTIGATING THE INTERNATIONAL APPEAL… 189
living in medium-sized cities, with low revenue, high education, good [media]
equipment, heavy media viewing and easier access to theatres” (European
Commission 2014: 109). They also tend to be more cosmopolitan in outlook.
A similar survey by the MeCETES project, for example, found that Europhiles
are more likely to identify themselves as ‘European’ and/or ‘citizens of the
world’ than the EU population as a whole (MeCETES/YouGov 2017).
Yet some NNE films do reach a larger audience. In the period 2005–2015,
there were 219 NNE films—about 20 per year—which secured 1 million cin-
ema admissions or more in Europe outside their designated country of origin,
according to the MeCETES database. These ‘successful’ NNE films accounted
for only 2% of European productions, but 70% of the total admissions for
NNE films.
The purpose of this chapter, then, is twofold. The first section explains why
so few Europeans watch NNE films compared to American films or films from
their own country. The second section explains why certain NNE films have
successfully travelled within Europe. This analysis draws on key theories of
international media flow. However, by testing these theories against empirical
data on the production, distribution, cultural content and audience reception
of NNE films, it also demonstrates that some NNE films successfully travel
within Europe despite having few of the qualities associated with films with
international appeal. Most successful NNE films, for example, are low-budget
independent arthouse or middlebrow films with stories that are dialogue-heavy,
complex and culturally specific. Nevertheless, they also possess certain charac-
teristics that ensure they receive widespread distribution and thus higher audi-
ences. These characteristics include major film awards, the involvement of
international stars or a critically acclaimed director, and/or pre-sold material
(e.g. based on a bestselling book). The final section examines in more detail
one particularly successful NNE film which defies many of the principles of
international media flow—the French comedy-drama Untouchable (2011) —
to see what other factors enable European films to travel across European
borders.
Why So Few Watch NNE Films: Cultural Factors

Cultural factors go a long way to explaining why so few Europeans watch
NNE films. Straubhaar (2003: 85), for example, argues audiences tend to
“prefer media products from [their] own culture or the most similar possible
culture”. Language is one of the main cultural barriers NNE films face: few
watch films in languages they do not speak or comprehend. Subtitles help
audiences in many European countries understand ‘foreign-language’ NNE
films. But these can be difficult to follow, do not always convey the full mean-
ing of the story and require considerable concentration (Kilborn 1993). In
the UK, where most non–English language NNE films are screened with sub-
titles, only 14% of the population say they like subtitled films (BFI 2011: 27).
But even NNE films expertly dubbed into local languages—the case with most
190 H. D. JONES
‘foreign-language’ films released in French-, German-, Italian- and Spanish-

speaking territories—still face diminished appeal if they feature “dress, ethnic
types, gestures, body language, definitions of humor, ideas about story pac-
ing, music traditions, [and] religious elements” audiences are unfamiliar with
(La Pastina and Straubhaar 2005: 274). Comedies can be particularly difficult
to export abroad, as jokes often rely on local reference points. Spanish Affair
(2014), a romantic comedy about a Sevillian man struggling to woo a Basque
woman, for example, sold over 9 million cinema tickets in Spain, but little
more than 100,000 in the rest of Europe.
Of course, American films face the same linguistic and cultural barriers when
released in Europe. However, these are less of an issue, partly because English
is Europe’s second language, but also because Europeans have become so
accustomed to American culture after decades of exposure to US films, televi-
sion shows and other media products (Bondebjerg and Redvall 2015). In any
case, the major Hollywood studios responsible for the most commercially suc-
cessful American films released in Europe and elsewhere have developed strate-
gies to make their films more appealing to international audiences. Many
successful Hollywood films, for example, are action/adventure blockbusters
which place more emphasis on visual action and special effects than dialogue,
making them easier to understand. They also tend to downplay cultural speci-
ficity (e.g. they are set in a fantasy world) or blend elements from different
cultures and nationalities (Crane 2014). Even when they are culturally distinc-
tive or dialogue-heavy, successful Hollywood films are often based on univer-
sally recognised ‘mythotypes’ (Olson 1999). These include the use of archetypal
characters (e.g. heroes and villains) and circular stories, where a disruption in
the status quo is eventually restored (e.g. the villain is killed). Finally, the most
successful Hollywood films often feature ‘A-list’ stars who have established an
international profile and fan base (De Vany and Walls 1999). Many also belong
to well-established franchises (e.g. Star Wars), featuring reoccurring characters
and scenarios international audiences have become familiar with over time.
While some NNE films possess similar characteristics, most are less action-
orientated and more culturally specific than Hollywood films. Less than one in
ten NNE film releases are action/adventure films, compared with one in five
US films, according to the MeCETES database. Many NNE films also conform
to an ‘arthouse’ style, in which stories tend to be complex, ambiguous and
open-ended (Bordwell 1979). While this can enhance their appeal amongst
certain audiences (particularly those with higher levels of education), such
characteristics can also make NNE films hard to follow. The European
Commission (2014: 164) survey, for example, found that, while around three-
quarters of EU citizens thought NNE films “feature diverse and complex char-
acters”, “are original and thought-provoking” and “are less stereotypical than
US films”, only about half thought they “feature clear plots”.
Why So Few Watch NNE Films: Industrial Factors

Cultural factors only partly explain why so few watch NNE films. There are also
important industrial factors to consider. Hoskins and Mirus (1988), for exam-
ple, note that Hollywood studios have more money to invest in stars, special
effects and other attributes likely to attract international audiences because
they can draw on the resources of a large home market. Most European pro-
ducers, by contrast, operate in small countries, which lack the capacity to
finance big-budget productions (Henning and Alpar 2005). Even in a rela-
tively large European country like France, the average film budget is less than
US$7 million, compared with over US$250 million for some Hollywood
blockbusters (European Audiovisual Observatory 2018; The Numbers 2018).
The major Hollywood studios are also ‘vertically integrated’, which means they
control both the production and the distribution of their own films (Hoskins
et al. 1997: 45). This provides their films with a direct route to market and
makes it easier to coordinate global promotional campaigns. Most European
producers, by contrast, rely on smaller independent distributors, which often
only operate in specific national territories. Consequently, NNE films often
struggle to gain adequate publicity or access to screen space. According to the
European Commission (2014: 164) survey, only a third of Europeans agree
NNE films are “sufficiently available on screens in [their local] area” or “well
promoted in [their local] area”.
Policymakers have tried to address the industrial weaknesses of the European
film sector. In 1991, the EU established the MEDIA programme to “increase
the circulation and viewership of European audiovisual works inside and out-
side the European Union” (European Union 2006: Article 1, para. 2). During
its 2007–2013 funding cycle, MEDIA provided €228 million to support the
theatrical distribution of 1651 NNE films, €33 million for VOD distribution
and €17 million for the Europa Cinema Network, a chain of 1100 cinemas
which prioritise (national and non-national) European films (EACEA 2014).
The Council of Europe, a cultural and human rights body separate from the
EU, has likewise sought to strengthen the European film industries. In 1992,
it introduced the European Convention on Cinematographic Co-productions,
which made it easier for producers in different European countries to pool
financial resources and produce bigger budget productions. It also created the
Eurimages fund, which subsidises European co-productions. Since its estab-
lishment in 1988, Eurimages has supported 1962 co-productions for a total
amount of approximately €574 million (Council of Europe 2018).
However, these measures have had little success. Over the period 2005–2015,
total admissions for NNE films actually declined, from 128.5 million to 103.0
million, while their market share fell from 15% to 11%, according to the
MeCETES database. While the absolute number of European films securing
distribution in another European country increased, from 472 films in 2005 to
634 films in 2015, the (mean) average admissions for these films slumped from
200,000 admissions to 33,000 admissions.
192 H. D. JONES
There are several reasons why cinema ticket sales for NNE films have
declined in recent years. Firstly, NNE films are facing more competition than
ever. This is partly because digital filmmaking equipment has made it cheaper
and easier to produce films, but also because new digital cinema screens allow
“more opportunity to take films off and on” (Roberts cited in Clark 2014).
According to the MeCETES database, France saw a 29% rise in the number of
films released each year between 2005 and 2015; Britain a 53% increase; Italy
a 54% increase; and Germany a 60% increase. This constant churn of new
releases makes it harder for all but the most heavily marketed films to stand out
and build an audience through positive word of mouth. As one German inde-
pendent distributor puts it, “There are too many movies released theatri-
cally …. This makes it much more difficult to find, buy and market the right
films, especially in [the] case of small films” (Baumann cited in Heidsiek 2015).
Secondly, young people—traditionally the most frequent cinemagoers—are
visiting cinemas less often. In the UK, the proportion of cinemagoers aged
15–24 has declined from 35% in 2011 to 29% in 2016 (BFI 2017: 172). In
France, the proportion of admissions generated by under 25-year-olds has like-
wise fallen from 40% in 2007 to 30% in 2015 (CNC 2016: 54). Arthouse and
independent cinemas—the traditional champions of NNE films—have been
hardest hit. As one Italian arthouse distributor puts it, “It takes one look to a
22:30 hrs screening, going always half empty while it used to be the most
popular one, to realise young people are deserting cinemas” (Chiti cited in
Weber 2016).
One reason why young people are going to cinemas less often is because
they can watch films for free or very cheaply online. This points to a third rea-
son why NNE admissions are declining: the rise of VOD platforms. In 2016,
over half of Europeans aged 15–24 watched at least one film or television show
online per week, compared with only one in ten a decade earlier (European
Commission 2016: 17). One consultancy predicts that by 2020 Netflix will
have 38 million subscribers in Europe and will be available in a third of
European households (Tretbar 2014). So far this has not reduced the overall
number of cinemagoers. Indeed, admissions in Europe rose from 892 million
in 2005 to 977 million in 2015, according to the MeCETES database.
However, with a cinema ticket costing almost twice as much as a month’s
Netflix subscription, most cinemagoers only seem willing to pay to see spec-
tacular Hollywood blockbusters that necessitate the big screen experience.
Why Some NNE Films Travel

Despite the challenges they face, some NNE films still successfully travel within
Europe. Each year, about 20 NNE films secure one million admissions or more
in Europe outside their designated country of origin. These ‘successful’ NNE
films can be broadly subdivided—based on their stylistic conventions and tar-
get audience—into three further subcategories: commercial films (about eight
per year), middlebrow films (another eight per year) and arthouse films (about
four per year).
To explain why certain NNE films travel well within Europe, this section
draws on two key sources of data extracted from the MeCETES Film Database.
The first (see Table 11.1) is an indicative list of successful NNE films released
in 2012, while the second (see Table 11.2) is a table summarising the key char-
Table 11.1 Successful NNE films released in Europe in 2012

Title Category Director(s) Country(s) of Primary NNE
origin language admissions
Skyfall Commercial Sam Mendes GB[Inc]/the English 29,627,349

US
Taken 2 Commercial Olivier FR English 8,094,003
Megaton
The Impossible Middlebrow Juan Antonio ES English 5,104,360
Bayona
Les Misérables Middlebrow Tom Hooper GB/the US English 4,246,738
The Pirates! Band of Commercial Peter Lord, GB[Inc]/the English 3,606,323
Misfits Jeff Newitt US
Cloud Atlas Middlebrow Tom Tykwer, DE/the US English 3,066,152
Andy
Wachowski
A Turtle’s Tale 2: Commercial Vincent BE/FR/IT English 2,907,117
Sammy’s Escape from Kesteloot, Ben
Paradise Stassen
Anna Karenina Middlebrow Joe Wright GB English 2,896,669
The Best Exotic Middlebrow John Madden GB[Inc]/the English 2,586,204
Marigold Hotel US/UA
Astérix and Obélix: Commercial Laurent Tirard FR/ES/IT/ French 2,531,206
God Save Britannia LT/BE
Little Brother, Big Commercial Kari Juusonen, FI/DE/ Finnish 2,068,337
Trouble: A Christmas Jørgen Lerdam DK/IE
Adventure
Amour Arthouse Michael FR/DE/AT French 2,005,640
Haneke
The Woman in Black Middlebrow James Watkins GB[Inc]/the English 2,000,514
US/SE
The Angels’ Share Arthouse Ken Loach GB/FR/ English 1,715,814
BE/IT
Quartet Middlebrow Dustin GB English 1,500,424
Hoffman
StreetDance 2 Commercial Dania GB/DE/IT English 1,197,684
Pasquini, Max
Giwa
Salmon Fishing in the Middlebrow Lasse GB English 1,112,773
Yemen Hallström
The Hunt Arthouse Thomas DK/SE Danish 1,098,251
Vinterberg
Rust and Bone Arthouse Jacques FR/BE French 1,036,706
Audiard
Source: MeCETES Film Database (2018) based on raw data from LUMIERE/European Audiovisual
Observatory (European Territories) and IMDb
Country ISO codes available here: http://lumiere.obs.coe.int/web/iso_codes/
194 H. D. JONES
Table 11.2 Key cultural and industrial characteristics of NNE films by category of film
Source: MeCETES Film Database (2018) based on raw data from LUMIERE/European Audiovisual
Observatory (European Territories), IMDb, Eurimages and MEDIA
acteristics (e.g. country of origin, budget, language, genre, awards) of all NNE
films released in the period 2005–2015. This makes it possible to compare the
cultural and industrial characteristics of ‘successful’ NNE films (column A)—
that is, those which secured one million admissions or more in Europe outside
their country of origin—with ‘unsuccessful’ NNE films (column B) to identify
which particular characteristics (as indicated by a high percentage value in col-
umn C) may have enabled them to travel across national borders. Of course,
some cultural characteristics (e.g. narrative structure) cannot be easily quanti-
fied. Thus, the analysis also examines in more detail the textual qualities of the
most successful NNE films released in 2012 and how these have been received
by audiences across Europe, drawing on focus groups conducted with NNE
film viewers in Germany, Poland, Italy, Bulgaria and the UK. Combining these
different methodological approaches makes it possible to develop a compre-
hensive understanding of why certain NNE films travel.
Commercial Films
About eight successful NNE films per year are ‘commercial’ films. These
include Hollywood-style action-adventure blockbusters (e.g. Skyfall, Taken 2)
and family films and animations (e.g. Pirates! Band of Misfits, A Turtle’s Tale 2,
Astérix and Obélix: God Save Britannia) likely to appeal to a mainstream audi-
ence, which primarily watches films for entertainment, rather than their cul-
tural or educational value.
Commercial NNE films possess many of the attributes associated with films
which travel well. Industrially, they have high budgets (US$71 million on aver-
age) and are mainly produced in large European countries, notably the UK,
which makes the James Bond franchise, but also to a lesser extent France, where
Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp has established a strong reputation for English-
language Hollywood-style action films, such as the Taken film series. Though
officially ‘European’, two-fifths involve the financial backing of a major
Hollywood studio. The Bond film Skyfall (2012), for example, was made with
inward investment from Sony and MGM. A high proportion are also distrib-
uted in Europe by major Hollywood studios—meaning they benefit from wide
distribution and heavy marketing. When it was released in early November
2012, Skyfall, for example, was screened in 825 theatres in France, 632 the-
atres in Italy and 1265 theatres in Germany (Box Office Mojo 2018).
In terms of their cultural content, commercial NNE films often feature uni-
versal mythotypes, including archetypal characters, awe-inspiring spectacles
and circular stories. In Skyfall, for example, action hero James Bond is on a
mission to capture Raoul Silva, a villain who has destroyed the headquarters of
MI6, Britain’s secret service, and leaked the names of its undercover agents.
The film opens with a spectacular chase scene involving an extended fight
sequence on the roof of a speeding train between Bond and the mercenary
Patrice, who has stolen a hard drive containing details of the MI6 agents. It
ends, in line with the conventions of a circular story, with Bond killing his
nemesis Silva, thus resolving the disruption Silva has caused, and returning to
the rebuilt MI6 headquarters in London to accept another mission, signalling
a restoration of the status quo.
Commercial NNE films have other cultural characteristics which may explain
their international appeal. The discourse surrounding these films suggests that
many are seen as ‘American’ or films without too much cultural specificity, even
though they often feature European stories, characters and settings. For exam-
ple, although Skyfall is mainly set in London and the Scottish Highlands and
features extensive British national symbolism—the film ends with Bond stand-
ing defiantly on the roof of the MI6 headquarters watching a Union flag flying
against the backdrop of the Houses of Parliament, the seat of British democ-
racy and symbol of the British nation state (see Fig. 11.1)—it was not necessar-
ily seen as a ‘culturally British’ film by European audiences, particularly in
territories where it was dubbed into local languages. One German focus group
participant, for example, said Skyfall “looks very American with all the action”.
Another Italian focus group participant said he “totally forgot” that Bond was
British, despite seeing Skyfall, his “favourite film ever”, “at least fifteen times”.
Many commercial NNE films also feature stories or characters that European
audiences are well acquainted with, either because they are sequels to earlier
box office hits (e.g. Niko 2, A Turtles Tale 2, Taken 2, Street Dance 2) or because
196 H. D. JONES
Fig. 11.1 British national symbols in Skyfall
they belong to well-established franchises (e.g. James Bond, Asterix). One

German focus group participant, for example, described Skyfall as “classic
Bond”, while another Italian focus group participant praised the film for going
“back to [the] origins” of the Bond franchise.
Arthouse Films
Around four or five successful NNE films each year are ‘arthouse’ films. These
are generally serious dramas aimed at university-educated audiences, who
watch films for their cultural or artistic value, rather than purely for entertain-
ment. This is a much more niche audience. According to the British Film
Institute (BFI 2011), only 14% of Britons say they like arthouse films. The
European Commission (2014: 147) survey likewise suggests only a quarter of
Europeans watch films “to discover and learn about people and cultures”.
Nevertheless, through combining the small numbers of arthouse fans in differ-
ent Europeans countries, some arthouse NNE films can reach a quite signifi-
cant international audience.
Significantly, the films in this category have few of the characteristics associ-
ated with films which travel well. Industrially, they are generally low-budget
productions (US$9 million on average) made by small, independent compa-
nies, albeit with the financial support of major national and European film
funds, such as the BFI or Eurimages. Though most are produced in large
European countries, a relatively high proportion come from smaller European
nations, such as Denmark (e.g. The Hunt) and Belgium (which co-produced
Rust and Bone). Few receive the financial support of major Hollywood studios,
and most are released by small, independent distributors (e.g. Curzon Artificial
Eye in the UK).
In terms of their cultural content, arthouse NNE films typically feature sto-
ries that are dialogue-heavy, episodic and open-ended, often touching on con-
troversial or socially relevant subject matter. In The Hunt (2012), for example,
a kindergarten teacher is ostracised from a small-town community after being
accused of sexually abusing his best friend’s daughter. Though the allegation is
eventually proven false, it remains ambiguous whether his life has returned to
normal. In the final scene, he appears to be shot at during a hunting expedition
with friends, leaving viewers wondering whether he has really been exonerated
by the local community. Arthouse NNE films are also more culturally specific
than most films with international appeal. The Angels’ Share (2012), for exam-
ple, features characters with heavy Glaswegian accents and dialogue, as well as
numerous Scottish cultural references and in-jokes. These include the film’s
central conceit, which involves a group of unemployed Glaswegians stealing a
precious Highland whisky from a distillery using empty Irn-Bru bottles, a
cheap, sugary fizzy drink popular with working-class Scots. Specific cultural
references are particularly evident in the scene towards the end of the film, in
which Albert, the clumsy member of the group, makes a defiant speech against
the police who have just stopped and searched him for no apparent reason. On
the one hand, Albert’s stance—head held high, arms outstretched in a Christ-
like pose—could be read as an almost universal gesture of defiance (see
Fig. 11.2). However, the full significance of Albert’s performance may be lost
on audiences outside Scotland who are unfamiliar with the meanings associated
with his dress—notably his hooded Lonsdale tracksuit top, which identifies
him as a ‘ned’ (or delinquent working-class youth), but when worn in combi-
nation with his tartan kilt gives the latter new meaning as a working-class sym-
bol of Scottishness—or who do not recognise the names of the various Scottish
cultural icons (“We shall not be moved. Billy Connolly, Robert the Bruce,
Braveheart, ya bastards… Alex Ferguson. We are the fucking champions.”)
he calls out to the police.
Fig. 11.2 Scottish cultural references in The Angels’ Share

198 H. D. JONES
Nevertheless, the arthouse films that travel best in Europe have certain
advantages over most NNE film releases. Firstly, they are often directed by
well-established ‘auteurs’—critically acclaimed directors who have developed a
recognisable style across a significant body of work. Ken Loach, who directed
The Angels’ Share, for example, was particularly well known amongst Italian
focus group participants, with one respondent calling him “a must-see direc-
tor” and another describing him as “very famous”. The only other European
auteur to elicit a similar response was the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar.
Secondly, successful arthouse NNE films often feature actors who have estab-
lished a name for themselves in both European and Hollywood films. This is
particularly the case with films made by less-well-known directors. The Hunt,
for example, features Mads Mikkelsen, a Danish actor familiar to many focus
group participants from his appearance as a Bond villain in Casino Royale (2006).
Thirdly, successful arthouse NNE films have often won major awards.
Amour (2012), for example, won both the 2012 Palme d’Or, the top prize at
the Cannes film festival, and the Oscar for best foreign-language film. Likewise,
The Angels’ Share and Rust and Bone (2012) both played in competition for
the 2012 Palme d’Or, while The Hunt was shortlisted for the foreign-language
Oscar in 2013. This sense of quality or critical acclaim is further reinforced by
the fact that successful arthouse NNE films also score better reviews than most
NNE films (with an average Metacritic score of 79% compared with 63%).
However, positive reviews alone do not guarantee international success:
Almayer’s Folly (2012), a film with one of the highest Metacritic scores in
2012, sold only 11,000 tickets outside its native Belgium.
Fourthly, though their narratives are less predictable than successful com-
mercial NNE films or Hollywood films, successful arthouse NNE films often
feature generic conventions that broaden their audience appeal. The Angels’
Share, for example, was marketed in mainland Europe as a comedy. Likewise,
The Hunt follows the conventions of a thriller. Finally, the distribution of suc-
cessful arthouse NNE films is often heavily subsidised by the EU’s MEDIA
programme. Amour, for example, received over €1 million to support its dis-
tribution across 23 territories; Rust and Bone €950,000 across nine territories;
The Angels’ Share €700,000 across 23 territories; and The Hunt €600,000
across 20 territories. This compares with an average MEDIA award of around
€130,000.
Middlebrow Films
The remaining successful NNE films—about eight per year—could be described
as ‘middlebrow’ films. These are generally period dramas, comedy-dramas or
other types of ‘quality’ film that, according to Liz (2016: 32), “occupy the
middle-ground between serious critical art films and stylish, generally consen-
sual mainstream productions”. As such, they have crossover appeal to both
mainstream cinemagoers and a more niche arthouse audience.
The films in this category have some of the characteristics associated with
films which travel well, but not others. Industrially, they have medium-sized
budgets (US$24 million on average) and are mainly produced in larger

European countries, notably Britain (e.g. Les Misérables, Anna Karenina) and
to a lesser extent France, but also Germany (e.g. Cloud Atlas) and Spain (e.g.
The Impossible), albeit as English-language productions involving international
co-production partners. Some are produced by independent companies,
though often with the financial support of major television broadcasters like
Canal+ or the BBC, and/or the financial and distribution support of large
European players like Wild Bunch, Studiocanal or eOne. Others are financed
and distributed by major Hollywood studios. Les Misérables (2012) and Anna
Karenina (2012), for example, were both produced by the British-based
Working Title Films, a subsidiary of NBC Universal.
In terms of their cultural content, these films are more dialogue-heavy and
complex than commercial films, but less open-ended and challenging than art-
house films. They can be culturally specific, yet also tend to feature so-called
pre-sold content which educated audiences in Europe are likely to be familiar
with. Many, for example, are adapted from classical works of literature (e.g. Les
Misérables, Anna Karenina) or more recent bestselling novels (e.g. Cloud
Atlas, The Woman in Black). Others focus on well-known historical figures or
events, or else centre on extraordinary ‘true-life’ stories. The Impossible (2012),
for example, tells the story of a Western family who, against the odds, survive
the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
Like their arthouse counterparts, successful middlebrow NNE films gener-
ally involve well-known creative personnel—though the film’s star, rather than
the director, tends to be their main selling point. Again, these are usually actors
who have made a name for themselves in both Hollywood and European films,
though they tend to be British rather than continental European actors, such
as the star of Trainspotting and Star Wars Ewan McGregor (The Impossible,
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen) or the Oscar-winning actress Dame Judi Dench
(The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel). Most successful middlebrow NNE films have
also won major awards, though these tend to the big American prizes, such as
the Oscars or Golden Globes, rather than the more specialised European
awards like the Palme d’Or. Both Les Misérables and Anna Karenina, for exam-
ple, won Academy Awards, while Naomi Watts was nominated for an Oscar for
her role in The Impossible. Likewise, Cloud Atlas (2012), The Best Exotic
Marigold Hotel (2012), Quartet (2012) and Salmon Fishing on the Yemen
(2012) were all nominated for Golden Globe Awards.
Case Study: Untouchable (Olivier Nakache and Éric

Toledano, 2011)
Though some successful NNE films possess the cultural and industrial charac-
teristics associated with films with international appeal (e.g. high budgets,
Hollywood studio distribution, universal mythotypes, English-language con-
tent, A-list film stars and a lack of cultural specificity), the majority do not fit
this model. Each year about four arthouse NNE films and eight middlebrow
200 H. D. JONES
NNE films secure over one million admissions in Europe outside their country
of origin, despite having relatively low budgets, independent distribution and
screen content that, to a greater or lesser extent, could be construed as dialogue-
heavy, narratively complex and culturally specific. At the same time, these films
have other attributes that account for their international appeal. Most have
won major film awards, feature a transatlantic film star, are helmed by a
European auteur, or are based on ‘pre-sold’ material (e.g. a bestselling book or
well-known historical figure). To be sure, these attributes are not necessarily
what audiences look for in NNE films—as one focus group respondent put it,
“I choose the film for the story, not the awards”. But they do ensure such films
secure international distribution—buyers often “prioritise well-known direc-
tors” (Borgonon, cited in Jones 2016) or believe “You need a movie that has
won a prize” (Chiti cited in Anon 2018)—which in turn leads to greater pub-
licity and audience recognition.
That said, not all successful arthouse or middlebrow NNE films possess
major awards, famous stars, a well-known director or pre-sold material. This
final section looks at one particularly successful NNE film that defies many of
the principles of international media flow to see what further lessons can be
learnt about why some NNE films travel well within Europe.
Untouchable is a French comedy-drama about the unlikely friendship
between a white disabled millionaire (‘Philippe’ played by François Cluzet) and
his black streetwise ex-con carer (‘Driss’ played by Omar Sy). The film pre-
miered at the Donostia-San Sebastian International Film Festival in September
2011, then went on general release in France in November 2011, before show-
ing elsewhere in Europe and the rest of the world throughout 2012. It was a
smash hit in its native France, selling 21 million cinema tickets, but also per-
formed surprisingly well in the rest of Europe, too. According to the MeCETES
database, the film sold 9.5 million tickets in Germany, 2.8 million in Italy and
2.6 million in Spain. In Switzerland it was seen by 19% of the population, in
Demark by 13% and in the Netherlands by 9%. Indeed, the only major European
territory where the film failed to make an impact at the box office was the
UK. The film continued to draw viewers when it was later released on DVD
and VOD. According to the European Commission (2014: 167) survey, 38%
of Europeans have seen the film, of which 95% said they liked it.
On the face of it, Untouchables seems an unlikely international success story.
The film not only touches on serious issues to do with race, disability and social
exclusion, but could also be construed as culturally distinct and dialogue-heavy.
In most European territories, the film was screened in French with local-
language subtitles, but even in countries where it was dubbed, the film would
have faced cultural barriers in relation to its jokes and local reference points.
For example, the film requires some knowledge of the discourse surrounding
the banlieue, the low-income housing projects of the Parisian suburbs in which
mainly immigrants and French of foreign descent reside.
The film stars Omar Sy and François Cluzet—two actors largely unknown
outside France at the time of the film’s release in 2011–2012—and was written
and directed by Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano, filmmakers with few previ-
ous credits to their name. The film itself was inspired by the true life story of
Philippe Pozzo di Borgo and his French-Algerian caregiver Abdel Sellou, which
the directors discovered through the television documentary film À la vie, à la
mort (2003). Yet neither Pozzo di Borgo nor the documentary were widely
known before the film’s release. The film was produced by Gaumont, a French
mini-major studio, and involved financial support from various partners,
including the major French commercial broadcaster TF1. But the budget was
a relatively modest US$11 million. One potentially significant partnership was
the involvement of US-based The Weinstein Company (TWC), which, prior to
its downfall in 2018 following the well-publicised allegations of sexual abuse
made against company boss Harvey Weinstein, had built a very strong reputa-
tion for producing and distributing commercially successful independent films.
However, TWC was no Hollywood major: it only had the means to distribute
the film in the US. In Europe, Untouchable relied on a patchwork of indepen-
dent distributors, ranging from relatively large companies like Senator Film
Verleih (now Wild Bunch) in Germany to more boutique outfits like Victory
Productions in Belgium.
Other elements likely to increase its international appeal were also missing.
In the build up to its release, the film picked up some awards, including the
Tokyo Sakura Grand Prix award for the best film at the Tokyo International
Film Festival. But none of these were major prizes likely to bring it worldwide
attention. The film was selected as France’s entry for the foreign-language
Oscar in 2012, but failed to make the final shortlist. Critics, meanwhile, largely
scorned the film. In the UK, The Independent called it “a third-rate buddy
movie that hardly understands its own condescension” (Quinn 2012), while
Sight and Sound claimed the film “shamefully traffics in racist stereotypes”
(Dawson 2012: 107). Its aggregate Metacritic score was a modest 57%.
Nevertheless, Untouchable does have some elements which account for its
international appeal. Though the film is culturally distinct, it features univer-
sally recognised mythotypes. Driss and Philippe, for example, are archetypal
characters who essentially mirror each other (black/white, poor/rich, able
bodied/disabled, criminal/respectable, popular tastes/elite tastes). Indeed,
the film follows in a long tradition of films which derive their humour from the
‘odd couple’ or ‘cultural clash’ scenario. The film also follows a conventional
narrative structure, in which a disruption to the status quo (Philippe hires the
unconventional Driss as his new carer) leads to a moment of realisation (Driss
teaches Philippe to enjoy life again), then a second disruption (Driss returns to
the banlieue, leaving Philippe sad and lonely again), before the narrative is
eventually resolved (Driss comes back to Philippe and drives him to Dunkirk to
meet Eléonore, his love). These formulaic elements may have undermined the
film’s appeal with critics, but made it easier for international audiences to
understand.
Furthermore, according to a report for the French Film Export Association
(Orchillers 2015), some of the story’s more obscure cultural reference points
202 H. D. JONES
were expunged from international versions of the film. Gaumont, for example,
produced an adaptation guide for foreign distributors with advice on how jokes
should be translated. So, when Driss says the line “Viens ici Patrick Juvet”, the
guide explained that Patrick Juvet is a has-been celebrity in France, so distribu-
tors could find a local equivalent. Gaumont also commissioned an international
poster that laid less emphasis on the film’s stars, as was the case with the film’s
original French poster, and more on its ‘odd couple’ scenario by picturing
Driss pushing Philippe in his wheelchair. This was further emphasised by the
way the film’s title was translated in some European territories as ‘Almost
Friends’ (‘Quasi amici’—Italian), ‘Friends Forever’ (‘Amigos para Siempre’—
Spain) or ‘An Unexpected Friendship’ (‘En oväntad vänskap’—Swedish).
Focus groups on the film highlight two further reasons why Untouchable
was so popular in Europe. The first is to do with the way the film combines
serious issues with comedy. According to one focus group participant, the use
of humour “added positivity to a story which was potentially tragic” making
the film “light and funny”. As another participant put it:
The film is not only funny. It’s also very moving, because it’s able to make you
laugh about a serious issue such as disability. When a film is able to do such
things, to make you laugh about serious themes, it means that it’s well done.
Combining serious themes with comedic elements meant the film could
appeal to both arthouse audiences, who like films that are thought-provoking
and serious, and a more mainstream audience, who prefer films that are funny
and entertaining.
The other main reason why focus groups said they liked the film was the fact
it is based on a true story. For one focus group participant, this meant “you
appreciate it more, [because] knowing that these kind of stories do happen in
real life is somehow reassuring. [It] makes you feel better”. The significance of
Untouchable being based on a true story is not so much the fact that it portrays
real people or events, but rather what the story represents: a friendship between
two people from very different social and ethnic backgrounds. This not only
made the biracial pairing of Philippe and Driss seem less contrived, but also, as
a report for the European Commission (2014: 813) put it, “reaffirms our belief
in life and how society works successfully when we all co-operate”. At a time of
growing divisions in Europe due to the Eurozone debt crisis, the north African
and Syrian refugee crisis, and the rise of nationalist and xenophobic move-
ments, this message of social and ethnic unity had particular resonance for the
liberal, cosmopolitan Europhile audience who tend to enjoy NNE films.
Conclusion
Any European filmmaker hoping to secure an international distribution deal at
the European Film Market in Berlin might feel a bit depressed having read this
chapter. The lesson from the industry data and focus group discussions anal-
ysed in this chapter seems to be this: your film is unlikely to travel well in
Europe unless it is: (a) a big-budget Hollywood-style action/adventure block-
buster or animation; (b) a medium-budget middlebrow quality drama based
on a bestselling book and an Oscar-winning Hollywood star attached or (c) a
low-budget MEDIA-supported arthouse film made a Palme d’Or–winning
auteur. Nevertheless, NNE films like Untouchable do offer a glimmer of hope.
They demonstrate that low-budget foreign independent films can achieve
international box office success. Such films achieve this by striking a balance
between the conventions of commercial Hollywood cinema and European art-
house cinema—that is, between a popular cinema which downplays cultural
specificity, emphasises visual action and features generic characters and stories,
and a specialised cinema which is more dialogue-heavy, culturally specific and
complex. European cinema may not be able to match Hollywood in terms of
budgets and star power. But it still manages to achieve occasional international
successes by offering international film audiences something different—a cin-
ema that is both serious and funny, thought-provoking and entertaining, cul-
turally distinct and yet universally recognisable.
1. Examine a poster or film trailer for a recent European film release. What
aspects of the film are emphasised in this publicity material (e.g. the film’s
stars, the story, director, awards, reviews)? What type of audience do you
think the film is being targeted at?
2. Download the European Audiovisual Observatory’s Focus: World Film
Market Trends (2017) report (https://rm.coe.int/focus-2017/
168088dcab). Compare the top 20 films for different European coun-
tries. What types of films have performed well across Europe, and which
films have only been popular within particular European territories? How
do you explain these trends?
3. Look at the ‘Top 25 European films (including EUR inc) by admissions
in the European Union: 2016’ on page 20 of the Focus report. How
many films on the list are co-productions involving two or more coun-
tries? How have these international partnerships affected (if at all) the
cultural identity of the film and its box office performance?
Note
1. Mediating Cultural Encounters through European Screens (MeCETES) was a
three-year project (2014–2017) on the transnational production, distribution
and reception of European film and television drama. Supported by the
Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) Joint Programme under
grant number 291827, it involved partners from the University of York, University
204 H. D. JONES
of Copenhagen and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels. The author was a Postdoctoral
Research Associate on the ‘film’ strand of the project, based at the University of
York. He was responsible for gathering, analysing and disseminating data on
which European films travel well within Europe, how these films represent other
European nations, cultures and identities, and how audiences engage with such
screen fictions. He also managed the project website and blog: www.mece-
tes.co.uk.
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for/5128918.article. Accessed 20 August 2018.
BFI. 2011. Opening Our Eyes: How Film Contributes to the Culture of the
UK. London: BFI.
———. 2017. Statistical Report 2017. London: BFI.
Bondebjerg, Ib, and Eva Novrup Redvall. 2015. Introduction: Mediated Cultural
Encounters in Europe. In European Cinema and Television: Cultural Policy and
Everyday Life, ed. Ib Bondebjerg, Eva Novrup Redvall, and Andrew Higson, 1–22.
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Bordwell, David. 1979. The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice. Film Criticism 4
(1): 56–64.
Box Office Mojo. 2018. Skyfall. Box Office Mojo. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/
movies/?id=bond23.htm. Accessed 20 August 2018.
Clark, Nick. 2014. Too Many Films Are Released Each Year, Says British Film Institute.
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films-are-released-each-year-says-british-film-institute-9626850.html. Accessed 20
August 2018.
CNC. 2016. Results 2015: Films, Television Programs, Production, Distribution,
Exhibition, Exports, Video, New Media. Paris: CNC.
Council of Europe. 2018. Co-production Funding History. https://www.coe.int/en/
web/eurimages/co-production-funding-history. Accessed 20 August 2018.
Crane, Diana. 2014. Cultural Globalization and the Dominance of the American Film
Industry: Cultural Policies, National Film Industries, and Transnational Film.
International Journal of Cultural Policy 20 (4): 365–382.
Dawson, Tom. 2012. Untouchable. Sight & Sound, October, p. 107.
De Vany, Arthur, and David W. Walls. 1999. Uncertainty in the Movie Industry: Does
Star Power Reduce the Terror of the Box Office? Journal of Cultural Economics 23
(4): 285–318.
EACEA. 2014. MEDIA 2007 Results [Database]. Accessed 20 August 2018.
European Audiovisual Observatory. 2018. Yearbook 2017/2018: Key Trends. Strasbourg:
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European Commission. 2014. A Profile of Current and Future Audiovisual Audience:
Final Report. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.
———. 2016. Flash Eurobarometer 437: Internet Users’ Preferences for Accessing Content
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Official Journal of the European Union 49: 12–30.
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MeCETES/YouGov. 2017. European Film Survey [Dataset]. Accessed 20 August 2018.
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italy/. Accessed 20 August 2018.
CHAPTER 12
Technology, Decentralisation and the Periphery

of European Filmmaking: Greece
and Scandinavia in Focus
Olga Kolokytha
Definitions
Creative Industries
A term used extensively in cultural policy and European Union (EU) docu-
ments after 2000. The Department of Culture, Media and Sports in the UK
provided a definition in its first Creative Industries Mapping Document in
1998 and recognises creative industries as those industries that are rooted in
individual creativity, talent and skill and have the potential to generate wealth
and jobs by the exploitation of intellectual property (DCMS 2001).
Decentralisation
The notion of transfer away from the centre, the core. Here, the term is used
to describe, variously: the movement of film production from centre to periph-
ery geographically as a matter of policy; the shift of the boundaries of film as a
form as a result of technological developments; and also a shift in production
to less standardised methods as a result of the Greek crisis.
O. Kolokytha (*)
Department of Communication, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
e-mail: olga.kolokytha@univie.ac.at

208 O. KOLOKYTHA
Greek Weird Wave

The term, emerging first in popular critical discourse, refers to those Greek
films that began to appear during the Greek crisis (from around 2009) and
which are characterised by distinctive, unusual, sometimes absurd, narrative
and aesthetics. Examples of films that belong to the Weird Wave include
Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015), Suntan (2016) and Attenberg (2010),
which is the case study of this chapter. For more on the Greek Weird Wave, see
Papadimitriou (2018), Calotychos, Papadimitriou and Tzoumakis (2016), and
Papadimitriou (2014).1
Supranational
Transcending national boundaries. The term is very often used with reference
to power and law, such as, for example, in the case of the European Union.
Introduction
Film has a particular significance for the European Union, seen as a ‘fundamen-
tal good’ for citizens, a denominator of common European cultural memory,
cultural heritage and cultural identity. According to Bergfelder (2005),
European film is important both for national and for supranational interests as
a provider of national identity and of a sense of belonging to a supranational
community, and has been strongly associated with European integration and
the European project. European Union policy discourse has treated film both
as a creative industry and as a system of values and identity (Kolokytha and
Sarikakis 2018); as such, it has both a cultural and an industrial element, creat-
ing both cultural and economic value (Bondebjerg 2016; De Vinck and
Lindmark 2012).
This dual nature of film, with one foot in industry and the other in culture,
is the starting point of this chapter, which discusses the developments in film-
making and production in Europe, evolving around film’s cultural and eco-
nomic value. Its focus is on technology and decentralisation and their influence
on style or form with emphasis on the periphery of Europe. The chapter is
divided into three sections: the first section discusses filmmaking and produc-
tion from the perspective of the economy; maps the European film landscape,
presenting data on admissions, audiences and trends; and then discusses the
influence of technology on cinemas, on audiences and distribution, and in film-
making. The second section takes examples from Northern and Southern
Europe to demonstrate the different perspectives and tensions filmmaking is
facing in the northern and southern peripheries of Europe. The choice of these
two regions is made deliberately, and reflects the completely different ways film
is seen in these regions. Greece is discussed as an example within the European
periphery not just because of its geographic location but also because of the
12 TECHNOLOGY, DECENTRALISATION AND THE PERIPHERY OF EUROPEAN… 209
ongoing crisis and the changes, challenges and novelties it has brought to the
film sector in the country.
The notion of decentralisation prevails in the second section and is visible
through three different angles: geographic decentralisation; the crossing of
boundaries of the form; and the shift towards less standardised processes of film
production. In the Northern European context, within the framework of
decentralisation where local production develops, the new distribution chan-
nels that emerge as a result of technology have led to film not seen as an exclu-
sively cinematic presentation. In the case of Greece, decentralisation comes as
a result of financial reasons and challenges structure, form and production. The
third section is devoted to the case study, which discusses Attenberg (2010),
incorporating the elements mentioned in the previous sections of the chapter.
The European Film Landscape: Technological

Developments and Trends
The importance attributed to the film sector at a European level is mirrored in
the numerous policy documents and initiatives related to it, such as the
European Convention on Cinematographic Co-production (Council of
Europe 1992), first adopted in 1992 and revised in 2017, aiming to encourage
European cooperation in the domain of film; the LUX Prize, established by the
European Parliament to support the circulation of European films (European
Parliament 2014); and the various MEDIA programmes—one of the most
prominent initiatives of the European Commission, aimed at strengthening the
development of production, supporting transnational mobility of works, offer-
ing training opportunities to audiovisual industry professionals and strength-
ening the audiovisual sector by offering opportunities for and use of digital
technologies (Kolokytha and Sarikakis 2018; Serra 2014). Economic integra-
tion and the establishment of a European common market have all led to
increasing EU intervention in European film (De Vinck and Lindmark 2012:
38). The European Commission has also introduced a series of legal instru-
ments with reference to the film industry in Europe, such as the Television
Without Frontiers (TWF) directive and the Audiovisual Media Services
Directive (AVMSD), which promote European works using quota provisions
(European Parliament 2014). Particular reference to audiovisual works is made
in the 2011 Green Paper on the Online Distribution of Audiovisual Works in
the European Union, where the significance of technological development, as
well as issues related to the digital single market, is stressed (European
Commission 2011).
The European film landscape consists mostly of small and micro businesses
which have considerable difficulties in attracting private financing, mainly
because of the high-risk nature of the industry, and therefore have to rely on
public funding (European Parliament 2014). There are also few European pro-
ducing companies with a steady production flow that produce more than one
210 O. KOLOKYTHA
film per year (European Parliament 2014). The presence of the big Hollywood
players is strong in the European arena, hindering the entrance and develop-
ment of smaller European companies (De Vinck and Lindmark 2012: 6), and
the majority of European films do not recover costs, leaving small companies
facing difficulties in remaining in the market and developing further (European
Parliament 2014). As Sand argues (2018: 85–86), film policy and funding at
the European level have been necessary to respond to the deficiencies of
national film production and Hollywood domination.
It is impossible to consider film without also considering technology.
According to De Vinck and Lindmark (2012: 46), the development of tech-
nology has influenced the film sector in manifold ways, has facilitated creative
expression and business innovations, and its impact can be seen in different
historical periods and areas, in each of which transitions have taken long peri-
ods of time, and have enabled new players to enter the scene. The authors (De
Vinck and Lindmark 2012) identify costs, availability of content and audience
reaction as incentives to adopting the new developments.
During the past decade, the rapid growth of digital media has profoundly
changed film notions and practices, with regard to both audiences and film-
makers (Papadimitriou 2017). New developments include increases in home
cinema and mobile viewing, as well as changes in funding models and access to
financing. These trends are observable in a global context, but also in local
contexts, where they are affected by different conditions and factors
(Papadimitriou 2017). Dahlström and Hermelin (2007) argue that techno-
logical developments and improvements in travel and communication have also
impacted on the mobility of film production and have increased competition
for film projects, which, in turn, has made the role of regional and national film
commissions in attracting film production more important.
Cinema operators have invested in the transition to digital cinema, particu-
larly in the past decade, and they have upgraded their theatres to cater for the
changing needs and preferences of their audiences, offering not only films but
other events and inventive programming such as event cinema, ‘virtual reality’
and four-dimensional (4D) experiences. Data show that European exhibitors
have invested €1.5 billion in digital cinema in the past decade, with the number
of films having doubled in the past 15 years and developments including new
theatre designs, extra-large screens and ground-breaking technologies, which
are complemented by a change in the cinema experience itself (UNIC 2017).
It is usually multiplex cinemas that more easily make this kind of high-cost
investment, and cinema operators benefit from better picture quality and
projection, global distribution methods and flexible programming (Wutz

2014; De Vinck and Lindmark 2012). De Vinck and Lindmark (2012) argue
that digitisation of cinemas could also provide an incentive to include more
European films, but as Cabrera et al. (2018: 52) point out, at the end of 2016,
just 15 European countries out of 34 were fully digitised.
The emergence of Video on Demand (VoD) is important in the develop-
ment of the film sector as it involves a lot of potential, but it comes with the
need to acquire and develop new skills, as well as with new financial implica-
tions (European Commission 2014). Video on Demand takes place online,
which not only impacts on costs and delivery but essentially creates a ‘user-
driven’ interaction, where consumer choice dictates time and location of view-
ing (De Vinck and Lindmark 2012). Significant costs are borne by operators in
making films available on VoD platforms, such as encoding and preparing new
language versions, as well as providing new promotional tools and ancillary
promotional activities once the films are accessible. These can be recovered,
but only after a large number of viewings and a long period of time (European
Commission 2014). According to Wutz (2014), the VoD sector can provide an
opportunity for non-mainstream films which are not successful in cinema exhi-
bition, as well as provide a vehicle to combat the illegal downloading of films,
promote European film and generate profit for the industry.
De Vinck and Lindmark (2012: 95) see the development of digital technol-
ogy and the cost reductions and flexibility it entails as an opportunity for the
European film industry, as it enables distributors to consider investing in the
type of non-mainstream movies to which a lot of non-national European films
belong. Digitisation of the film landscape, they argue, is a complex process
involving interactions between technology, sociocultural factors, economic
decisions and political and regulatory frameworks, and it affects production
with reference to processes, working relationships, costs and financing, and
also content itself.
Between 2007 and 2016, film production in Europe increased by 47% with
mostly national productions, co-productions and documentaries increasing—
the latter almost doubling, with the top five producing countries accounting
for 53.6% of production (Talavera Milla 2017: 16). Between 2012 and 2016,
there were on average 1650 films produced in the EU annually, but less than
half of European films released in theatres were also released on VoD in the EU
(European Audiovisual Observatory 2017). The 2017 cinema admissions data
demonstrates an increase of 1.7% in box office revenue from 2016 to a total of
€8.6 billion, and an increase of 2.5% in visits to the cinema in 2016 with the
total number of visits to 1.34 billion that year (UNIC 2018: 5).
A recent European Audiovisual Observatory report (Cabrera et al. 2018)
provides a long analysis of the European audiovisual sector and identifies the
latest trends. These include the rise of video consumption, time-shifted televi-
sion (TV) consumption and the emergence of new content formats. Catch-up
TV and online simulcasts are also increasingly connected to television viewing.
According to this report, the European audiovisual sector includes 4208
television services and 2270 on-demand audiovisual services, with half of the
television services concentrated in France, Germany, Italy and the UK. There
seems to be a rise in TV fiction production in both short and long formats, with
approximately 920 titles with over 16,400 episodes and more than 11,000 hours
of content. TV films of one to two episodes comprised 44% of all titles in 2015
and 2016; 90% of the TV fiction production is up to 26 episodes, and the other
10% are long format, of 26 or more episodes (Cabrera et al. 2018: 12).
212 O. KOLOKYTHA
The European Audiovisual Observatory (2017) identifies the ‘cultural ver-

sus commercial’ aspect of film as also associated with new ways of creating and
consuming content. As Wutz (2014) argues, physical distribution is declining
and downloads of films are increasing. In addition to that, new players such as
Instagram and video games software providers are coming to the fore, chang-
ing the notion of content. Content is also now not regarded in the same way
by audiences who can ‘binge-watch’ not only TV series but also films online,
contesting the notion of commercial versus cultural content (European
Audiovisual Observatory 2017).
The Northern European Example

In the Nordic regions, film is regarded as a means of reflecting and influencing
the conditions of the welfare state and the shaping of collective identities, and
Hjort and Lindqvist (2016: 15–16) identify two parameters that are consis-
tently part of the particular relationship that Nordic countries have with film:
the first is the importance of safeguarding filmmaking as a local activity that can
encourage cultural expression and the expression of collective identities. The
second, long-standing, parameter sees film audiences as citizens, and therefore
sees film as a way to engage citizens in society, thereby having a political and
social effect on society.
Geographical decentralisation has been discussed by Mangset (1998) with
reference to Norwegian cultural policy after World War II, an objective of
which was to democratise cultural life and ensure people all over the country
had access to the arts—which, in turn, implied the decentralisation of artists to
places outside the capital, Oslo. Since the 1970s, there have been cultural pol-
icy attempts to decentralise cultural institutions, but there is no evidence to
support the idea that decentralisation is mirrored in corresponding changes in
the location of artists. As Mangset (1998) argues, artists need both artistic and
alternative labour markets to survive, and Norway, as with other Nordic coun-
tries, has constructed a very good state grant system for artists. The geographic
mobility of artists is related to cultural policy measures, with different measures
impacting in different ways, but geographic distribution of artists is influenced
also by factors such as housing prices and art education locations, among oth-
ers (Mangset 1998).
According to Sand (2018), Norway has a long interest in regional develop-
ment and policies, and the even spread of the population across the country, in
addition to the welfare and prosperity of regional populations, have been cen-
tral targets for the government. Norwegian film production is heavily subsi-
dised, as the author argues (Sand 2018: 86), which means that the government
can directly influence the industry through policy and financial means.
Norwegian film policy stresses that films should be produced all over the coun-
try; the regionalisation of Norwegian film policy is part of a government strat-
egy which stresses the contributions of the regions themselves towards regional
development (Sand 2017).
Public funding of regional film is based on the creative industries’ discourse

and principles that see film as an economic good (Sand 2017), and despite
financial cuts to public funding in Europe, public funding of regional film
increased in the period between 2005 and 2009. According to Sand (2018:
91–92), Norway increased film subsidies until 2013, when a change in govern-
ment took place, with currently seven regional film centres in Norway sup-
ported by the central government, as long as they contribute to developing
local talent, increasing interest in film locally, developing competence and
entrepreneurship, and contributing to regional development. The tension
identified here by the author (Sand 2018) is whether regional filmmaking is
primarily important within a regional framework because of its economic con-
tribution to Norwegian film or whether it can be artistically equal to filmmak-
ing taking place in the capital.
The example of Sweden is particular among the Nordic regions, as film pro-
duction is decentralised to a great extent and Stockholm is no longer the coun-
try’s primary production hub (Sand 2017). In the early 1990s, Stockholm was
the main production site for Swedish films and film production was centralised,
but by the early 2000s fewer than half of Swedish films were produced in
Stockholm (Dahlström and Hermelin 2007: 111). Sand (2017) identifies two
reasons for the regionalisation of Swedish film: on the one hand, the increased
autonomy of the regions as a result of the diminishing of power of the national
state; on the other, as a result of the turn of Swedish film policy to the eco-
nomic importance, potential and return of film, which made investment in
regional film production attractive for the regions. Dahlström and Hermelin
(2007) highlight the development of the cultural and creative industries dis-
course in Sweden and its view of the relationship of regional policy to eco-
nomic growth. For them, decentralisation is a combination of top-down/
national and bottom-up/regional policies, film competence at regional and
local levels, and entrepreneurship; regional film policy is part of a wider regional
development policy which includes culture, but also, and more importantly,
economic development.
According to Hedling (2016: 71–72), data shows that during the period
2000–2009, Swedish film demonstrated unprecedented growth with reference
to both the number of films produced in the country and the percentage of the
theatrical market held, developments which are attributed to the contribution
of regional funding, the increase in co-productions, the development of the
DVD and the co-financing of films by television after the deregulation of
Swedish TV in 1998. Regional filmmaking took place in Sweden at a moment
when the regional turn offered opportunities for funding and for new talent; it
added energy to Swedish film and highlighted the importance of the audiovi-
sual sector to the Swedish economy (Hedling 2016). However, as Sand high-
lights (2017), although film production is decentralised, film workers’ mobility
is not the same as that of productions, with most of them still based in
Stockholm, albeit periodically working on projects in the regions.
214 O. KOLOKYTHA
New challenges in the film landscape in Norway include, as Jakob Kirstein

Høgel argues (Nordisk Film & TV Fond 2015), understanding that the new
developments in film do not imply a rejection of cinema, but are more a diver-
sification of it, and that they are related to both technological advancement and
consumption. What we consider as film now exists in different formats and
expressions, in video games, series, and webisodes, and is circulated via Internet
and social media. Despite the fact that the boundaries of the term have become
more fluid, and it is not exhibited in celluloid only, film is still present but now
includes other audiovisual forms as well (Jakob Kirstein Høgel in Nordisk Film
& TV Fond 2015). As nowadays film has become independent of physical loca-
tion and as the Internet has shifted from text- to audiovisual-oriented, the ways
the audience relates to it and consumes it are bound to change (Johanna
Koljonen in Nordisk Film & TV Fond 2015).
The Case of Greece

In Greece, a state funding system for film was only introduced in the 1980s
with Law 1597/1986 on the Protection and Development of the Art of Film,
a reproduction of systems already in place in other European countries
(Papadimitriou 2017). The Law gave full creative control to the director/auteur
and led to the making of films that did not appeal to the public (Papadimitriou
2018); although films were generously supported by the state, they did not
manage to attract international attention (Karalis 2012 in Papadimitriou 2017).
Greek film policy remains a strange affair mainly because of the lack of a sys-
tematic, long-term view of cultural policy from any Greek government after
1974. The attitude of the Greek State to film and, by extension, the Greek legal
film framework, is extremely complicated. According to Kontou (2012: 88), by
2009 there were approximately 1200 pages in Greek legislation referring to
film, spread across 297 laws and presidential decrees.
The growth of the Greek economy in the 1990s and the 2000s is mirrored
in the audiovisual sector, with the establishment of production companies spe-
cialising in TV series and advertisements, and the investment of exhibition
companies in production (Papadimitriou 2018). In the 1990s, Greek television
was deregulated and the funding regulations of the Greek Film Centre changed,
placing emphasis on co-productions with private or state organisations, mostly
TV channels—either the public service broadcaster (ERT) or private ones. As
Papadimitriou argues (2018), the involvement of private television networks
enabled the re-establishment of Greek film as a category after a long time.
Funding came from public and private funds as well as European co-produc-
tion funds, and there were plenty of opportunities for filmmakers to find work
in the television industry, gain experience, develop artistically and profession-
ally, and finance their films (Papadimitriou 2018; Karalis 2012). Although a
number of films were made outside Athens in the early days of Greek cinema,
Athens remained the dominant production centre throughout the twentieth
century, a fact which was facilitated by a bureaucratic, centralist state, and
which resulted in a limited visual history of the country—one that ignored the
periphery and regional particularities of the country (Karalis 2012).
During the 2000s, Greek cinema not only became popular again among
audiences and films became profitable, but it also benefited from the profes-
sional services and increased technical mastery of those working in the sector
(Papadimitriou 2014). Filmmakers appear to use television techniques, partic-
ularly in the comedies of the late 1990s, and a lot of films of that era are remi-
niscent of television programmes, advertisements or music videos (Karalis
2012). It is this media landscape that enabled the restructure and development
of Greek film later, during the crisis (Papadimitriou 2015).
Around the same time the crisis was emerging, Greek cinema made a signifi-
cant turn, with Greek films attracting attention at international film festivals
(Papadimitriou 2018), and it was then that the term Weird Wave emerged.
Papadimitriou (2014) provides a discussion of the term, introduced by
Anglophone critics to characterise films with ‘weird’ imagery and dialogue, and
distinct aesthetics, although Greek critics use other terms, namely New Greek
Current and Young Greek Cinema, which she views as more inclusive and
denoting the break from past patterns. Examples of filmmakers who belong to
the Greek Weird Wave include Lanthimos, Tsangari, Koutras, Tsitos, Avranas
and Papadimitropoulos, and films such as Dogtooth (2009), Attenberg (2010),
Miss Violence (2013), Xenia (2014), Chevalier (2015) and Suntan (2016),
among others. A common characteristic of the films of that period is their pro-
duction practices, which are characterised by solidarity as a way of overcoming
financial and institutional difficulties (Papadimitriou 2014). Although, as
Papadimitriou (2014) argues, there is no direct relation between the crisis and
Dogtooth, the first example of the Greek Weird Wave, it does not seem to be a
coincidence that Greek Weird Wave films emerged during the crisis. One of the
results of the crisis is that it inspired reflection on societal principles as well as
questioning and challenging the fundamental triptych of traditional Greek val-
ues—homeland, religion and family. This is reflected in the films, which pro-
vide a means to articulate and express this experience.
The Impact of the Crisis

The Greek crisis emerged around 2009 as a result of multiple factors: as an
effect of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, particularities of the Greek
economy as part of the Eurozone and the misreporting of Greek debt by the
government. In 2010 the country had to ask for help from the European
Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund to
avoid default, thus endangering the whole Eurozone structure. Originally
financial, the still-ongoing crisis led to severe austerity measures, budget cuts,
heavy taxation, extreme unemployment, an unprecedented brain drain and the
migration of approximately half a million people during the period 2008–2016,2
and an extremely bad image of the country and its people in the international
216 O. KOLOKYTHA
media. It has led to a profound social and institutional crisis causing instability
and upheaval, but also a wave of solidarity throughout social structures.
Culture was among the first areas to suffer in the crisis, and the Greek film
industry has been strongly affected: box office receipts went down almost 50%
from 2009 to 2014, triggering a snowball effect in the rest of the industry
(Papadimitriou 2017: 168). That period is marked by a shrinking of the Greek
film market, almost no private distributor investment, severe problems in State
funding, structural changes in the Greek Film Centre and the closing of the
Greek public service broadcaster (ERT) in June 2013, which was the second
state funding source for Greek film (Papadimitriou 2017). The period
2010–2015 was the worst and was marked with challenges for Greek filmmak-
ers. Some of them, such as Lanthimos, relocated abroad, but most tried to find
alternative means to overcome increasing difficulties (Papadimitriou 2017:
169). During the crisis, many film industry technical staff were pushed to seek
work in other, non-film sectors in order to survive.
The crisis may have led to financial turbulence and social upheaval, but it has
also boosted creativity and alternative ways of culture making, and has pro-
moted solidarity and the development of networks. Kourelou et al. (2014)
argue the crisis has created a standpoint from which to see artistic activity from
inside and outside of the country, and facilitated a reformation of the frame-
work of Greek film, which has ultimately benefited from changes in funding
and artistic creation. Papadimitriou (2017) argues that a turn to ‘extroversion’
in the sense of reaching out for transnational co-production partners, solidar-
ity, and crowdfunding emerged as a result of lack of national financing, as well
as of shifts in attitudes and technological advancements, and these demonstrate
a change in financing culture as a result of shrinking public and private
resources. Developments in the film sector included a turn in filmmaking to
practices grounded in solidarity, sharing resources and support to deal with
financial and institutional issues, as well as an increasing turn to European co-
productions for financial resources and visibility in international festivals and
markets (Papadimitriou 2018). Crowdfunding was another response of film-
makers to the crisis, who turned to audiences and online communities for
funding.
According to Papadimitriou (2017), Greek filmmakers started collaborating
and participating in each other’s projects in different capacities in the form of
an exchange of labour such as acting in or producing each other’s works to
overcome the significant lack of financial resources and be able to realise their
films. Tsangari herself says (Tsangari Interview 2016) that these practices of
filmmaking provided a means of advancing the impeccable work ethos,
professional practices, commitment and solidarity of those working in the
Greek film sector, as well as highlighting qualities such as inventiveness and
intuition. The crisis also steered a twofold shift in the attitudes of filmmakers:
on the one hand towards funding, which now comes from both public and
private sources and sometimes also, as in the case of Dogtooth, advertising com-
panies that support artistic work rather than having a profit-oriented agenda;
on the other, towards artistic vision and the investment of work and money,
which leads to making films without waiting for public funding that might
never come, and without expectations of profit (Papadimitriou 2015).
Continuous technological changes are a reality in the audiovisual sector.
Feature film formats depend on technological developments, and synergies
between film and other media products play a paramount role in the direction
formats will take. Because of globalisation and despite the crisis, Greece is not
left out of technological convergence, whose effects need to be observed in
order to understand the future course of filmmaking (Papadimitriou 2014).
Technological advancements and the opportunities they offered facilitated the
emergence of new distribution channels in digital media, which, in turn, led to
a shift to project work and a view of non-traditional film content through the
lens of film.
Moves to the periphery have, during the crisis, become reality for part of the
general Greek workforce, as living conditions tend to be better than in the big
urban centres. In the domain of film, there are currently production compa-
nies, although very few, active in the periphery of the country by choice, such
as Indigo View,3 which produces content in a variety of formats but always with
a ‘film-oriented rationale’ and cinematic quality, and whose broad portfolio
helps in sustaining people professionally. Greek cinematographers work in TV,
which now appears to dominate the sector, and are producing work with more
cinematic qualities.
The crisis has broadened the need for co-productions and, thus, made
themes and storytelling more international. The recent establishment of
regional film offices is another sign of decentralisation—one, however, that
explicitly links film with tourism and originates from financial reasons, with the
aim of attracting funds to the country specifically within the framework of the
ongoing crisis, rather than as a result of a film policy and strategy. The first
regional film office was launched in the Region of Central Greece in summer
2016 and has already supported four film productions,4 with other film offices
planned for the remaining regions in 2019.5 The Region of Central Macedonia
has already established a film office providing detailed information for those
interested in filming in the region.6 The adoption of a new Law 4487/2017 for
the production of audiovisual works has introduced a cash rebate of 35% on
eligible expenses incurred in Greece for national and international productions
that choose Greece as a location, aiming to support the film sector and attract
productions from abroad.7
Case Study: Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2010)

Attenberg (2010) is an award-winning Greek drama film written, directed and
produced by Athena Rachel Tsangari. The film received numerous awards,
such as the Coppa Volpi for Best Actress for Ariane Labed and the Lina
Mangiacarpe Award for Tsangari, both at the Venice Film Festival. It was also
recipient of the Silver Alexander at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival,
218 O. KOLOKYTHA
Fig. 12.1 Marina and Bella, Attenberg (2010). (Courtesy of Haos Films)
the Best Director award at the Buenos Aires International Festival of

Independent Cinema, among others, and was nominated for the Golden Lion
at the Venice Film Festival. The film was proclaimed the highlight of the 2011
New Directors/New Films Festival in New York and one of the Greek movies
that have drawn attention nationally and internationally (Dargis 2011 in
Tsangari Interview 2016). Its title is a paraphrase of the name of Sir David
Attenborough, who, along with his nature documentaries, inspired the film’s
title (Tsangari Interview 2016), and references to animal movements and ritu-
alistic dances are also made by characters in the film (Papadimitriou 2015)
(Fig. 12.1).
The main character is Marina, a 23-year-old woman who lives with her
father, ill with cancer. Her father Spyros is an architect and was among those
who designed the town they both live in. Marina watches Attenborough’s doc-
umentaries and then mimics the animals. She is sexually inexperienced, whereas
her friend Bella is a sexually active woman. She and Bella are two young women
who are outsiders in the society they live in. Papadimitriou (2015) identifies
the key themes of Attenberg as the death of the protagonist’s father and
Marina’s sexual inexperience. Attenberg belongs to those Greek films that
received acclaim first outside Greece before being known and appreciated
inside the country and, like Dogtooth, is not seen in Greece as a representative
example of Greekness (Papadimitriou 2015). A common element that Karalis
(2012) sees in Attenberg and Dogtooth is the reference to family—a very tradi-
tional and fundamental value in Greek society. However, according to Karalis
(2012), the film captures the darker and more disturbing side of the contem-
porary family, which is a characteristic of many Greek films during the
past decade.
Attenberg functions as an example of the type of solidarity among filmmak-
ers mentioned earlier in the chapter—the practice of mobilising assistance and
collaboration at various levels to facilitate the making of films. Tsangari initi-
ated synergies and collaborations with other filmmakers, opening the way to
means of production that would make it easier for them to create the kind of
films they wanted to make. These were not only based on communication and
shared beliefs but also a response to the endless bureaucracy and slow pace of
the Greek State in the domain of culture; they were also facilitated by the
advancement of technology and subsequent changes such as cheaper filming
and less expensive labour costs, as well as the importance of informal network
development (Tsangari Interview 2016). As Tsangari says “I discovered that
every interest of mine—music, literature, politics, art, architecture, theatre—
fell into the purview of cinema. And this kind of cinema was not unattainable,
it could be made collectively and produced collectively by us, and not by a
powerful group of men over sixty as had been my impression in Greece”
(Tsangari Interview 2016: 240).
As Tsangari says (Tsangari Interview 2016), it was important for Attenberg
to find and secure distribution, towards which a strong festival presence, good
reviews and positive word of mouth always count. Distributors, as the director
herself notes, do not choose this kind of film on financial criteria, but rather
because they wish to disseminate a kind of cinema that is, arguably, slowly
becoming obsolete. The film was produced by Haos Films, Faliro House
Productions, Boo Productions and Stefi S.A. and supported by the Greek Film
Centre and the European Union MEDIA programme. The production started
after the financial crisis had emerged, and as the producers were not able to
access the funding originally allocated to the film by the Greek Film Centre,
Tsangari involved independent producer Faliro House, a company oriented
towards financing productions that can appeal to an international audience, in
order to cover those costs (Papadimitriou 2015).
Haos productions was initially a student production company that Tsangari
and Matt Johnson, writer and editor, had founded while in the US
(Papadimitriou 2015). The company produced Lanthimos’ first feature film,
Kinetta (2005), with Lanthimos later acting in Attenberg. According to
Papadimitriou (2015), the ethos of Haos is more of a cooperative; its members
do not have fixed roles but are more flexible and contribute to production in
different ways, and even the name, reminiscent of both ‘chaos’ and ‘house’,
was chosen to reflect a way of working that is informal, unstructured and
hands-on. All its productions involve co-producers who contribute part of the
capital and services in deferral, therefore highlighting their investment in the
artistic and intrinsic value of the film, rather than its chances of making profit
(Papadimitriou 2015: 128).
220 O. KOLOKYTHA
Attenberg was shot in Aspra Spitia, a place where Tsangari spent the first
years of her life and many of her summers, and it was in that exact place where
Tsangari’s father got his first job.8 The location, designed in the 1960s and
used by a company to house workers, is important to Tsangari not only for
sentimental reasons but also because it is a reference to the protagonist’s father,
an architect who is dying (Papadimitriou 2015). Additionally, Tsangari notes
its practical use as a confined space resembling a theatre stage, an art form that
she has followed closely, allowing her to concentrate and not spend energy in
changing locations (Tsangari Interview 2016) (Fig. 12.2).
“I have always felt a part of this generation that took cinema in its hands and
expressed the ennui and resistance of its times” notes Tsangari (Tsangari
Interview 2016: 240). As Papadimitriou argues (2015), in both Dogtooth and
Attenberg, their filmmakers have not made artistic compromises because of lack
of funding, but have rather chosen to work around solutions that would allow
them to realise their vision. Such synergies created new methods of funding
and directing, and collaborative ways of producing that stretch beyond fi nancial
parameters, with people sometimes working voluntarily and for free. According
to Tsangari (Tsangari Interview 2016), the crisis has been a lever that has made
Greek filmmakers develop beyond past narratives and present another image
than that of a decadent society in decline.
Fig. 12.2 Marina and her father, Attenberg (2010). (Courtesy of Haos Films)
Conclusion
Viewing film as both a cultural and industrial good, this chapter discussed the
effects of technology in the film industry and the developments in filmmaking
and production with a focus on two entirely different, in their view of film,
areas in the periphery of Europe. The impact of technology and digitisation is
visible in new trends and practices such as the emergence of new content and
different distribution channels and the upgrade of cinema theatres. In the
northern and southern regions of Europe, there seems to be a turn towards
decentralisation of film. Decentralisation is seen as having three different
strands: one is decentralisation in geographic terms; the second is the more
fluid perception of film as a form which is no longer only exhibited on theatri-
cal screens, but created for and consumed in different formats; and the third is
the shift to less standardised production methods.
In the north of Europe, decentralisation comes as a result of a combination
of two factors: long-term, strategic cultural policies stemming from principles
of cultural democracy that see film as a ‘good’ for citizens and film policy
belonging to a wider social policy framework, and the creative industries’ ratio-
nale that sees culture as a tool for regional growth. This has been facilitated by
technological progress that allows a more fluid perception of film as a form not
restricted to theatrical exhibition, enabling a fresh view, reconceptualisation
and development of the field.
While in Northern Europe decentralisation stems from regional policy and
entrepreneurship, in the South, it seems to be a resource-based decision that
comes as a response to the manifold effects of the crisis. Geographic decentrali-
sation can be seen as more a matter of personal choice and quality of life as a
result of the crisis, as well as stemming from financial reasons such as the intro-
duction of the regional film offices in Greece. Despite its explicit negative
effects such as the lack of State support and financial resources, the crisis has
also impacted in a positive way on the film sector in Greece, challenging both
structures and perceptions of film, and leading to the rise of a new wave of film
production. The lack of funding has made filmmakers turn to other forms as a
means of cultural expression, but also to alternative ways of filmmaking based
on solidarity.
As Papadimitriou notes, “a focus on the small and the peripheral is crucial
for an understanding of both local and global production funding cultures, as
it enables both culturally specific and more generic insights into specific fund-
ing practices and options. Furthermore, if the democratic and utopian poten-
tial of the digital revolution is to be (at least partly) enabled, small, marginalized
voices need to be heard” (Papadimitriou 2017: 166). Sand (2018) argues that
although film has been seen as a lever for regional development and research
demonstrates that regional film production works positively towards film diver-
sity, and despite the fact that regional film funds have multiplied, there is little
research so far on regional film policy and production and the ways those
222 O. KOLOKYTHA
involved in filmmaking react to the different financial, political and institu-

tional systems.
This chapter offers a view of the issues and tensions that film is currently
facing in the North-South European regions: standing between economic con-
siderations and technological developments, as well as cultural objectives and
production of culture, the new challenges for filmmakers and the art form are
still to be seen.

1. How do you see the political interests of, and policy interventions from,
supranational institutions as affecting the domain of European film?
2. On supranational level, how is the importance of European film demon-
strated in the relevant policy documents, for example, the 1992
Convention on Cinematographic Co-production?
3. What has the influence of the Greek crisis been on the film industry?
How has it changed the existing structures of film, and what impact does
it have on filmmakers?
4. In what way have technological developments affected and influenced
European film?
5. What differences can you identify in cultural policy in film between
Northern and Southern Europe?
6. What do you think will be the new challenges for European film? How
could international co-productions influence regional film?
7. How do you think changes in ‘content’ production can affect film funding?
Acknowledgements The author thanks Ioanna Davi for the interesting conversation
which provided inspiration that led to meaningful sources of information related to this
chapter.
Notes
1. See also the Guardian article that was among the first to make reference to the
term here https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/aug/27/attenberg-
dogtooth-greece-cinema.
2. For more, see https://greece.greekreporter.com/2017/03/08/brain-drain-
450000-greeks-left-the-country-in-past-8-years/.
3. See https://www.indigoview.com/.
4. See https://filmincentralgreece.com/en/.
5. See https://www.ekome.media/el/film-offices/se-amesi-efarmogi-to-ergo-toy-
ekome-gia-ti-leitoyrgia-ton-film-offices-stin-ellada/ (in Greek).
6. See http://www.pkm.gov.gr/default.aspx?lang=el-GR&page=903).
7. For more, see https://www.ekome.media/cash-rebate-greece/.
8. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlCiOjkCAb8.
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CHAPTER 13
Brooklyn and the Other Side of the Ocean:

The International and Transnational in Irish
Cinema
Maria O’Brien and Laura Canning
Definitions
Celtic Tiger
Referring to the 1990s–2000s period of rapid Irish economic growth, the term
is a play on the term ‘Asian Tiger’ used to describe economic growth in Asia.
During this period, the Irish economy grew from one of the poorest in Western
Europe to one of the richest. Marked by over-reliance on foreign investment, a
rapidly expanding banking sector, unstable property market, and unlimited
access to cheap credit, the boom ended in 2007/08 with an economic crash,
part of a wider recession throughout Europe (see Kirby et al. 2002).
Diaspora
Most simply, the term refers to the dispersion or spread of a people from
their homeland. The rise in self-identified diasporic groups in recent
times has been linked to various causes, including improved modes of
M. O’Brien (*)
Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland
e-mail: Maria.obrien227@mail.dcu.ie
L. Canning
School of Film & Television, Falmouth University, Penryn, UK
e-mail: laura.canning@falmouth.ac.uk

228 M. O’BRIEN AND L. CANNING
communication, transportation, and increased movement of peoples. The

term often implies a desire to return to the homeland, and the recognition
of a diasporic community can be seen to empower a group that may other-
wise be marginalised.
Heritage Film
A critical term describing a diverse range of texts representing historical nostal-
gia, romantic costume films, or historical drama. Primarily associated with the
British heritage film, the term evokes a form of cultural nationalism and, in the
British context, generally represents a traditional upper-class privileged society.
The heritage film is problematised by issues of cultural diversity, lack of repre-
sentativeness, and reinventions of past events (see Higson 2003).
Introduction
Film in Ireland, both as an industry and as a cultural product, has been inter-
national since its inception. From the making of a number of feature films in
Ireland in the 1910s and 1920s by the American studio company The Kalem
Company (affectionately dubbed the O’Kalems) aimed at the Irish diaspora in
the USA to the recent use of UNESCO heritage site Skellig Michael (Sceilig
Mhichíl) as a location for Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and Star Wars:
The Last Jedi (2017), film production and exhibition cross national boundaries,
bringing stories and images of Ireland around the world and creating images of
elsewhere in Ireland. Whether filmmakers engage directly with notions of
‘Irishness’, employ Irish landscape and heritage as simple backdrops, or engage
Irish production facilities and technical expertise in the production of interna-
tional narratives, Irish film production illustrates the complexities and para-
doxes around producing meaning-making cultural products within a national
setting, and operating simultaneously within a globalised industry.
This is particularly the case in a nation where a distinctive national industry
has struggled to establish itself, caught between the competing dynamics of
free-market funding, which privileges ‘entertainment’ and the economic con-
tribution of film, and an implied ‘cultural value’ framework. Thus, the relation-
ship between Ireland and cinema is marked by contradictions and paradoxes:
between the commercial and cultural, the global and the local, the national and
the transnational. However, rather than perceiving these as oppositional, it is
more productive to consider them as interacting with one another. The indus-
try reflects the nature of film production in an Irish context (as in other nations)
as part of the cultural industries which operate within a capitalist society, thus
complex, ambivalent and marked by contradiction (Miège 1989).
Similarly, when the film industry ecology is conceived of as a continuum,
rather than in terms of oppositional binaries, we can consider the local within
the global, the national within the transnational (and vice versa). This chapter
investigates the dynamic at play in this continuum, both in films produced in
13 BROOKLYN AND THE OTHER SIDE OF THE OCEAN… 229
and about Ireland and in the film production landscape that supports such
works. It also takes into account that these contexts are problematised by Irish
history, geography, and culture. As a diaspora nation at the very Western mar-
gin of Europe which retains strong links to the UK and USA, Ireland’s status
as an Anglophone—but crucially not Anglophile, given its status as a former
British colony—nation means that its mainstream cultural and entertainment
traditions have arguably been drawn from British and American influences, and
its generic and narrative models for film largely from the Hollywood mode,
rather than from European film culture. This chapter, rather than considering
the ‘Irishness’ of representations and production contexts, looks to examine
how Irishness intersects with, inflects, and engages in dialogue with the inter-
national and transnational.
The case study, Brooklyn (2015) reveals the international and transnational
tensions at play in terms both of production contexts, and thematic and repre-
sentational issues. While film may be seen as an expression of national culture
and identity, performing an important role in “negotiating cultural identity
and articulating social consciousness” (Gao 2009: 423), the globalised rela-
tionship between capital and creativity can create multiple—sometimes com-
peting, sometimes intersecting—visions of Ireland from within and without
the nation. This is particularly evident in regard to films which engage with the
diasporic nature of Irish society, whether in terms of second- and third-
generation Irish filmmakers engaging with their heritage (The Guard, Calvary),
Irish filmmakers telling stories which mobilise Irish history for both Irish and
diasporic-origin audiences worldwide (Black ’47), or Irish filmmakers moving
internationally in a career trajectory which sees them ‘transcending’ Irishness
(as in the work of Lenny Abrahamson).
Twentieth-Century Film Production

A brief history of the film production landscape in Ireland illustrates the impor-
tance of the relationship with other jurisdictions, particularly the USA and
UK. For a number of reasons, Ireland had no indigenous film industry of note
(with some few, but significant, individual exceptions) until the latter part of
the twentieth century. While films were produced in Ireland, they were, for the
most part, the product of foreign finance and expertise. The Film Company of
Ireland was set up in 1916, and per Rockett (2012), “the 1910s was the most
productive decade for indigenous Irish film production until the 1970s”.
However, a number of different factors, including small box office returns in
Ireland, the fragility of the post-independence economy, and the conservative
attitude of the Irish government towards the medium of cinema, meant that an
indigenous cinema was not established in Ireland (Rockett 2012; Holohan
2009; Condon 2008; Hill 2006). As such, Ireland was represented on-screen
between 1920 and 1970 primarily in international productions that originated
outside Ireland; while some of the films made in this time were highly influen-
tial representations of Ireland, these were mediated through outside eyes, and
Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934) and John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952)
are both problematic, in their own ways, in their depiction of Irish life.
The following decades saw some attempts to encourage the film industry in
Ireland, including the establishment in 1958 of Ardmore Studios in Bray, Co.
Wicklow, explicitly intended to attract inward investment. However, while
Ireland continued to attract both Hollywood and British productions, inter-
ventions in support for the film industry did not necessarily translate to support
for an indigenous Irish cinema. Several early reports for the Irish government
made proposals to imagine and establish an Irish cinema, including the 1942
Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on the Film Industry (Flynn
2007) and the 1968 Huston Report,1 as it was colloquially termed. The Huston
Report (led by Hollywood director John Huston, then resident in Ireland)
proposed measures to support both an industry for inward investment produc-
tions (such as the already established Hollywood and British productions in
Ireland) and an Irish film industry, reflecting Irish stories. The Report recom-
mended the establishment of a Film Board, the provision of training and pro-
duction facilities, and a National Film Archive, but its recommendations were
not acted upon. It was only with the establishment of the Irish Film Board in
1982 that indigenous production flourished, and its axing in 1987 was a blow
to the industry. Its re-establishment in 1993, led by the then Minister for Arts,
Culture and the Gaeltacht, Michael D. Higgins, led to significant increases in
indigenous production during the 1990s. The dual objectives of support for
the film industry in Ireland—to encourage indigenous production and simul-
taneously support inward investment productions—are recognised in the legis-
lation (The Irish Film Board Act, 1980) establishing the Irish Film Board: to
“assist and encourage … the making of films in the State and the development
of an industry in the State for the making of films” (Section 4(1) 1980 Act).
The reinstatement of the Board in 1993 was a sign of support for indigenous
film, and can be seen as an attempt to integrate the requirements of both com-
mercial industry and indigenous film culture.
State Supports, European Union Funding,

and Indigenous Production
Ireland’s film industry policy has historically been marked by the knowledge
that a small island nation is unlikely to be able to construct and support an
indigenous industry. The notion of ‘market failure’—that under some circum-
stances the free market will not efficiently produce certain goods and services—
is used as a justification of publicly funded state support of the film industry on
both cultural and industrial grounds. The commodification of the cultural
industries sees an increasing reliance on such industries to fulfil non-cultural
goals. This process, known as instrumentalism, means the tendency “to use
cultural venues and investments as a means or instrument to attain goals in
other areas” (Vestheim 1994: 65), with the “attachment” (Gray 2002: 80) of
the interests of other non-cultural policy areas to cultural policy. It can be

argued that an increasing instrumentalisation of culture within the Irish policy
context has led to a contemporary over-reliance on purely economic grounds
to justify state support of film production, although the history of state policy
illustrates that such support has always been justified on both economic/indus-
trial and cultural grounds. Recent policy developments around the Creative
Ireland framework, including the publication of the Audiovisual Action Plan
in 2018 (DCHG 2018), offer various proposals to enhance the economic value
of the audiovisual industries, without explicitly engaging with the cultural value
of such (see O’Brien 2019).
The other significant mechanism in developing the Irish industry was the
introduction of film tax expenditure aids, designed to make Ireland an attrac-
tive location for international audiovisual production.2 Initially introduced by
way of Section 35 of the Finance Act 1987 (contemporaneously with the aboli-
tion of the ‘first’ Irish Film Board), and now known as Section 481 relief (after
the section in the Taxes Consolidation Act), the tax expenditure initially
required 75 per cent of production to take place in Ireland in order to qualify
for the relief, although this requirement was later removed. State support of
national cinemas attempts to foster cultural diversity through enabling support
of film industry structures. However, in Ireland the tax expenditure regime is
not limited to national productions only (and could not be, given the restric-
tions of European Union [EU] policy which disallows discrimination on
national grounds), but is available to all productions, allowing for a tax credit
of between 32 per cent and 37 per cent on eligible spend in Ireland. The
assumption is that a ‘trickle-down effect’ will benefit a national cinema through
support of infrastructure, on-the-job training, and a spillover effect through
increased tax take. However, while a vibrant production environment may well
encourage the development of a national film industry, the risk is that short-
term gains for incoming investment production may be at the expense of long-
term gains for the wider cultural industry in Ireland. Section 481 tax expenditure
is explicitly shaped to actively encourage what are known as ‘runaway produc-
tions’ (primarily from Hollywood, but also farther afield, e.g. the filming of
scenes for Indian blockbuster Ek Tha Tiger [2012] in Dublin). As McLoone
(2009) suggests, Irish cinema must ‘live with’ a dominant Hollywood industry.
It is the nature of these living arrangements that is of most interest.
Film production policy is also subject to influence from outside Ireland’s bor-
ders. As a member of the EU, Ireland is subject to regulations affecting the free
movement of goods, services, capital, and persons within the EU. Individual
authorities are not axiomatically free to offer incentives to productions, as these
will upset the balance of trade within the EU, and so funding policies towards film
industries within member states of the EU are subject to state aid rules. Generally,
these rules recognise that while nations are members of the EU, and thus subject
to free movement rules, in certain situations, aids to specific industries within their
jurisdictions can be justified. It was recognised within the EU that aid to cultural
industries may be justified under a cultural rationale, and a cultural exemption was
introduced under Article 107(3)(d) Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (by way
of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993). This further illustrates the dual nature of the
audiovisual industries, as both industrial and cultural.
Funding in the Twenty-First Century: Ireland

as International Co-production Hub
The fortunes of the second Irish Film Board (renamed Screen Ireland/Fís
Éireann in 2018) in the post-recession austerity years have varied in accordance
with governmental spending retrenchments. From a high point (itself not sig-
nificant relative to overall production spend across Ireland) of €20 million, the
state film funding budget was cut year-on-year from 2008, and only recently
returned to pre-recession levels as part of wider proposals extending the remit
of Screen Ireland, and recognising its increasingly important role in the area of
animation, television, and (potentially) video games. Animation has become
increasingly significant, with a range of Irish animation houses, including
Brown Bag, Cartoon Saloon, and Boulder Media, producing shows for televi-
sion internationally, and Cartoon Saloon creating critically noted (if not always
commercially successful) features like Song of the Sea (2015) and The
Breadwinner (2017). The former draws, in its sound and imagery, on interna-
tionally known signifiers of Celtic mythology, including the late nineteenth-
century Celtic Revival, and the latter displays the increasingly international
dimension of Irish film narrative: Nora Twomey’s feature debut is the story of
a young girl in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
These shifting fortunes have inevitably affected the Irish production land-
scape, alongside 2014 revisions to the tax expenditure regime, Section 481,
which extended eligible expenditure from European Economic Area cast and
crew to those worldwide (see Murphy and O’Brien 2015). Through these revi-
sions, dubbed the ‘Tom Cruise Clause’ by the Irish media,3 the tax expenditure
regime is made even more attractive to inward investment productions. Many
of these, such as Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship (2017) use Ireland as a
production location for ‘universal’ stories (or those of other nations, as with
this adaptation of a Jane Austen novella), rather than engaging with Ireland in
narrative terms. However, the physical traces of Ireland can be surprisingly dif-
ficult to eradicate from the screen. One such example is that of Star Wars: The
Last Jedi, where scenes from the planet Ahch-To were filmed in 2017 on
UNESCO heritage site Skellig Michael (Sceilig Mhichíl); unable to (physically
or digitally) remove the protected puffins from footage, Lucasfilm instead
opted to account for their existence by digitally ‘converting’ them to a new
species, the Porg.4
Section 481 is part of a wider mosaic of funding, within Ireland and outside.
At a national level, Screen Ireland provides support for the full life cycle of a
film, from script support to marketing and distribution, under a number of dif-
ferent schemes. In addition, some (relatively limited) funding is available from
national broadcasters, including RTÉ, TG4, and the Broadcasting Authority of

Ireland (BAI). An increasing tendency, in keeping with the international nature
of contemporary film production, is for films to be produced as part of a set of
international co-productions. Ireland has co-production agreements with a
number of jurisdictions, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South
Africa, and Luxembourg, and is a party to the European Convention on
Cinematographic Co-Production, covering feature and documentary produc-
tion. Signed in 1994, and revised in 2017 to take account of changes brought
about by digital technology, the Convention sets out the minimum contribu-
tion of a territory to gain the benefits of a co-production agreement; countries
enter into co-productions to gain access to national funding structures, subsi-
dies, tax expenditures, and a wider distribution market.
This proliferation of co-productions is a factor in difficulties in conceiving of
large portions of Ireland’s film output in terms of ‘national’ cinema. As Barton
(2019: 1) points out, the contemporary Irish co-production is culturally far
removed from the much-derided ‘Europudding’ of the twentieth century: “the
indigestible outcome of mixing up multiple European funding sources with
little or no investment in cultural engagement, and a dilution of the project of
building a distinctive national cinema”. And yet, a project like The Lobster
(2015)5—co-funded by Greek, French, Dutch, French, and British sources as
well as part financed by the Irish Film Board, shot by a Greek director (Yorgos
Lanthimos), and filmed on location in Co. Kerry—makes not a single discern-
ible reference to Ireland, although Ruth Barton (2019) infers that Irish audi-
ences may have interpreted it as somehow discursively Irish due to its setting
and star (Colin Farrell). Tracy and Flynn (2017: 170) suggest that its position
on the cover of the Irish Film Board’s 2016 strategy document indicates “a
decisive and permanent shift in the parameters of Irish cinema that acknowl-
edges not only its reliance on co-production but also its deliberate pursuit of
stories, markets, and audiences beyond the national.”
Irish Cinema in the Twenty-First Century

Describing it as “a late-flowering national cinema”, Tracy and Flynn (2017:
169) note that “auteur and cultural-studies approaches have dominated read-
ings of Irish film, which has frequently been called upon as a means of critiqu-
ing or negotiating key [Irish] social structures such as the Catholic church,
family, sexuality, and gender”. However, even towards the end of the twentieth
century it had become obvious that considering Irish cinema in purely textual
terms risked neglecting the way in which more complex—and in many ways
more international or transnational—factors were key. This could be seen both
in the turn towards the use of Ireland as a production location for international
studios, and in a cycle of ‘Celtic Tiger’ films—often romantic comedies—which
sought to represent Ireland, and particularly Dublin, as a cosmopolitan, mod-
ern site of international capital and sophisticated social and sexual relations,
liberated from the traditionally oppressive Catholic imagination. These include
indigenous films such as About Adam (2000), Goldfish Memory (2003), and
The Stag [aka The Bachelor Weekend] (2013) but also international interven-
tions, like the American Leap Year (2010), which reverses notions of Irish pro-
gressiveness—bed-and-breakfast landladies tut at unmarried couples renting a
room, trains fail to run on a Sunday, echoing The Quiet Man—in service of a
saccharine rom-com narrative.
The idea that “contemporary Irish cinema adopts conventions and tech-
niques of the cinematic apparatus and synthesizes them into narrative form,
remaining a subsidiary of an international model yet exhibiting clear and dis-
tinctive local inflections” (O’Connell 2010: 24) also helps in considering the
work of John Carney, whose Once (2006) earned an Academy Award for Best
Original Song despite (or perhaps because of) mobilising a somewhat ram-
shackle, even ‘arthouse’, approach to the musical. With busker characters known
simply as ‘Guy’ and ‘Girl’, enacting a slim plot line in which they must decide
whether their intense musical connection also signals a romantic one—Guy is
mourning the end of a lost relationship; Girl, an Eastern European immigrant,
awaits the arrival of her husband and child—the film foregrounds ‘liveness’ in its
performance aspects through the musical talents of its leads (Glen Hansard and
Markéta Irglová) and emphasises soundtrack over (distinctly lo-fi) image in its
appeal. The film speaks strongly of the rich cultural heritage of Irish music, and
acts as a kind of nostalgic ‘musical tour’ of a half-vanished Dublin simultane-
ously familiar to, and distant from, international viewers.
Barton (2019) identifies several key trends, along with increasingly glo-
balised production and consumption practices, among which some may have
roots in the internationalised nature of Irish film culture and industry: the
significance of animation; a dramatic increase in horror films; and an upswing
in the audiovisual industry in Northern Ireland, which largely facilitates ‘run-
away productions’, including TV series Game of Thrones, 2009–2019, which
has catalysed a burgeoning screen tourism industry in NI (for a critique of the
role of policy interventions in this context, see Ramsey et al. 2019). Barton also
notes the “abandonment of history films” (Barton 2019: 15) during the Celtic
Tiger period, with an associated waning of the ‘heritage film’, in which the
Irish countryside could be “defined by pastness” (Barton 2019: 117) and which
had much in common with Irish Tourist Board (Fáilte Ireland) campaigns
designed to persuade tourists that a visit to Ireland was a visit to a country of
timeless and ancient beauty, populated by welcoming natives who had no axe to
grind with foreigners (particularly the lucrative UK tourist market). (Barton
2019: 116–117)
For Barton, this has been largely replaced by “a series of high-profile history
films that revisited the past as a site of trauma” (Barton 2019: 118), crucially
made by non-Irish filmmakers, including Peter Mullan (The Magdalene Sisters,
2002), Stephen Frears (Philomena, 2013), Ken Loach (The Wind That Shakes
the Barley, 2006, and Jimmy’s Hall, 2014), and Steve McQueen’s acclaimed
Hunger (2008). Primarily these engage with the trauma of Ireland’s colonial
past and its ongoing legacy, or its continuing—and belated—social and politi-
cal acknowledgement of the institutional abuse wreaked on Irish women and
children by the Catholic church. Why non-Irish filmmakers should be so drawn
to these stories as a locus of ‘universalised’ trauma is perhaps difficult to fathom,
but Barton relates it to their status as English-language stories, and notes that
“these films invited global audiences to relate their own personal/national
traumas to the Irish stories, while also reassuring them that the events depicted
were over and safely in the past, indeed in someone else’s past” (Barton 2019:
118–119).
However, changes in Irish funding regimes have also benefited more explic-
itly Irish films, including ones which dramatise Irish stories for a presumed inter-
national—and perhaps implied diasporic—audience. Lance Daly’s Black ’47
(2018), a bleak Western-inflected revenge drama narrativises the Great Famine6
not as a ‘natural disaster’ but by systematically unpacking language, class, and
religion as active elements of the structural oppression enacted upon the Irish
populace by colonising British forces, Anglo-Irish aristocracy, and complicit
local bureaucrats alike. Despite the distinctly Irish nature of the central tragedy,
the cast is international; the two central roles are played by Australian actors,
Hugo Weaving and James Frecheville, facilitated at least in part by the 2014
revisions to Section 481. Frecheville speaks as Gaeilge (in Irish), for much of the
film, which embeds its historical commitments directly into genre-based action,
including an action set-piece set around a convoy of grain being escorted, under
armed guard, for export to Britain while the starving Irish look on hopelessly.
In addition, the funding arrangements include support from Film Fund
Luxembourg alongside financing from Screen Ireland and other sources, thus
further illustrating the transnational nature of the industry.
Emigration and Transience in Production

and Representation
The transnational history of film, and the influence of Hollywood over Western
cinemas (and particularly in exhibition in Europe), raises fears around American
cultural domination and cultural diversity. Such cultural imperialist arguments
hold that concentration of ownership and distribution leads to lack of diversity;
however, counterarguments point to the complex relationship between
Hollywood and other cinemas of the world, and note the European origin of
many of its influential directors. The concept of ‘glocalisation’ (Robertson
2012) counters these negative tendencies, aiming to make explicit the heter-
ogenising (as opposed to homogenising) aspects of globalisation, in which the
relationship between the local and the global, rather than being one of polarity,
with the local as resistance to the global, is imbricated within the global. This
argument sees globalisation as “the linking of locales” (Robertson 2012: 200)
in which
[g]lobalisation—in the broadest sense, the compression of the world—has

involved and increasingly involves the creation and the incorporation of locality,
a process which itself largely shapes, in turn, the compression of the world as a
whole. (Robertson 2012: 205)
This echoes Appadurai’s critique of arguments around homogenisation and

heterogenisation which ignore the fact that “as forces from various metropo-
lises are brought into new societies, they tend to become indigenised in one or
another way: this is true of music and housing styles […]” (Appadurai 1996:
32) and of film.
While this argument can, clearly, be seen in terms of framing film genre and
its indigenisation, it also has resonance when considering the flow of people
from Ireland to the USA. While American film has played a dominant role in
shaping Irish understanding of cinema in a way that would not have been the
case in a country (like France) with a strong tradition of filmmaking distinc-
tively its own, Ireland’s diasporic relationship with America—in 2013 about 33
million Americans, or 10.5 per cent of the population,7 reported Irish ances-
try—has contributed to the production of that model of film. This is certainly
the case in terms of the history of classical Hollywood’s first- and second-
generation Irish production talent such as John Ford and John Huston who, as
demonstrated earlier, was arguably as significant to Ireland’s production and
industry contexts, in championing Irish state investment in film, as he was in
representational terms—and may also be the case in terms of contemporary
Irish filmmakers like John Carney, John Crowley, and Lenny Abrahamson, who
have developed international careers.
As Tracy and Flynn note, there is “nothing new in Irish directors traveling
to other production contexts … until recently it would have been understood
that indigenous Irish cinema functioned as a stepping-stone for ambitious
actors and directors” (Tracy and Flynn 2017: 188), including filmmakers like
Neil Jordan (Angel, The Crying Game, Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy,
Interview with the Vampire, The Brave One) and Jim Sheridan (In The Name of
the Father, In America, Get Rich or Die Tryin’). Their careers “blended local
and international narrative paradigms and production contexts” (Tracy and
Flynn 2017: 189), often alternating between Irish-themed films and genre-
based ‘Hollywood’ projects, to slightly disorientating effect. Sheridan’s 2002
emigrant drama In America was followed by Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (2005),
loosely based on the life of and starring American rapper 50 Cent. This creates
a sense in which the paradigm of cultural colonisation implied by American
film’s domination can be ‘turned back’ on itself; the former film is the story of
a family of 1980s Irish immigrants to a tenement community in New York’s
Hell’s Kitchen, the latter a rags-to-riches story which in its own (not entirely
convincing) way engages with America’s legacy of systematic structural oppres-
sion against its African American community.
The career trajectory of a filmmaker like Lenny Abrahamson illustrates what
Tracy and Flynn (2017: 190) describe as the ‘de-territorialisation’—following
from Deleuze and Guattari—of Irish narrative, his films moving progressively
away from considerations of Ireland and towards more ‘universal’ stories and
settings. His debut feature Adam & Paul (2004) told the story of two Dublin
heroin addicts on a picaresque journey around an unmistakably familiar version
of the city, and was followed by Garage (2007), a tale of rural Irish loneliness,
and What Richard Did (2012), a portrait of youth in exclusive south Dublin,
where “the privileges of white, middle-class masculinity are entirely taken for
granted” (Ging 2012). By contrast, his following films have been (at least
partly) Irish-funded and facilitated through Abrahamson’s long-standing rela-
tionship with Element Pictures (producers of The Lobster) but are distinctly
‘international’. Frank (2012) features Irish actors Michael Fassbender and
Domhnall Gleeson playing American and English characters, and with large
portions of the action staged in America. Its success at the Sundance Film
Festival also points to the increasing significance of the international festival
circuit in promoting Irish cinema, at least for those films which can be seen to
have some element of ‘cult’ or ‘indie’ cachet through which to mobilise the
circuitry of contemporary festival ‘hype’. His subsequent film Room (2015),
although adapted by Irish novelist Emma Donoghue from her own novel,
bears no signifiers of Irishness at all: its difficult material (its protagonists are a
kidnapped woman and her child born in captivity, confined to a ten-foot by
ten-foot space from which they later escape) is grounded entirely in America.
This transition to ‘internationalism’ can be regarded in one sense as a loss to
the Irish film industry of skilled creatives who can frame Irish stories in all their
cultural specificity, and the notion of Irish stories being told by ‘outsiders’ can
be seen as particularly contentious. However, an alternative current in the
‘internationalism’ of Irish cinema is the making of films in Ireland by diasporic
filmmakers. Just as John Ford mobilised the emigrant gaze in The Quiet Man
(1952), or John Huston adapted James Joyce in The Dead (1987), contempo-
rary filmmakers are reincorporating the diasporic gaze into Irish film. Second-
generation Irish (born in London) director John Michael McDonagh’s feature
debut The Guard (2011)—a scabrous crime drama/Irish ‘spaghetti western’
centring a rollicking performance by Brendan Gleeson—provoked attention
for its sharp evocation of Irish machismo and mocking dialogue, and the inten-
sity of “its desire for an extreme ‘localisation’ of the genre … [which] swings
into an intensely venial parochialism that, paradoxically, has a simultaneously
wide common appeal” (Canning 2012). The generic elements and tone may be
more muted in McDonagh’s Calvary (2014), but the sense of Ireland as a
space evacuated of moral and structural certainty is stronger. Here a priest
(Gleeson, again) is given a week to ‘put his house in order’ by a visitor to his
confessional booth, after which he will be killed in metaphysical revenge for
clerical sexual abuse committed against the man by another. “There’s no point
in killing a bad priest, but killing a good one, that would be a shock,” declares
the man, in a film Barton (2019: 190) describes as “drawing on intense con-
temporary anxieties about the failure of authority, and anger about the legacy
of the Catholic Church”.
These ‘internationalised’ films and filmmakers can be seen as engaging in a

discourse which harnesses Vanderschelden’s (2007: 38) perception that trans-
national films “through a combination of national, international and post-
national elements … deliberately blend nations and cultures, rather than simply
erasing cultural specificity”. The geographic direction of travel of this interna-
tionalism dictates the extent to which a film can be considered to ‘blend’
nations and cultures. The visual aspect of location remains key, but a filmmak-
er’s engagement with a film’s generic aspects, source material, and mode of
linguistic address are implicated alongside them. Lenny Abrahamson’s Room
might as easily have been made by an American filmmaker, such is the discur-
sive power of the American mode and form of cinema he employs, yet
McDonagh’s Calvary speaks distinctively to, and of, Irishness in its attempted
harnessing of Irish speech patterns, despite—or because of—McDonagh’s own
ambivalence about Ireland, Irish film, and the relationship his own cultural
heritage ‘allows’ him to have with his source material.8 This chapter now inves-
tigates a film whose dual location allows it to, potentially, lay claim to having a
specifically transnational nature, given that it functions as both ‘national cin-
ema’ and ‘internationalised’ Irish film, in its examination of both Irish and
American identity.
Case Study: Brooklyn (John Crowley, 2015)

As well as highlighting the particular conditions of the Irish film funding envi-
ronment, Brooklyn allows us to consider some of the ways in which industrial
and textual attributes intersect and reflect each other and how film can ‘per-
form’ the national and transnational simultaneously. Budgeted at approximately
US$11,000,000 and involving multiple funding and distribution partners,
including the Irish Film Board, Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, British Film
Institute Film Fund, BBC Films, Telefilm Canada, and SODEC Québec, and
availing of the support of the EU MEDIA programme and Government of
Ireland Section 481 tax credit, and filmed in Ireland, the USA, and Canada,
Brooklyn is an exemplar of the internationalised industrial process involved in
producing contemporary Irish film. It stars two of Ireland’s most bankable
young actors, Saoirse Ronan and Domhnall Gleeson, both of whom have par-
layed their ‘Irishness’ into distinctive characteristics of their emergent stardom.
Adapted from Colm Tóibín’s 2009 novel of the same name, Brooklyn is the
story of Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan), an emigrant from Enniscorthy, Co.
Wexford to New York in the 1950s. Sponsored to travel by local Catholic priest
Father Flood (Jim Broadbent), the film’s central dilemma is not whether Eilis
can make a new life for herself in the new world—she adapts, despite homesick-
ness, to new opportunities in the form of a job at Bartocci’s department store,
studies bookkeeping at night school, and finds love with Italian-American
plumber Tony Fiorello (Emory Cohen)—but whether the lure of this new life
is sufficient to overcome emotional ties to her homeland. This narrative core is
mobilised when, after the sudden death of her sister Rose (Fiona Glascott),
Eilis returns home, newly married in secret to Tony, and finds that her time
abroad has equipped her with the skills and confidence to live an entirely new
kind of life in Enniscorthy than the one she left. Romanced by the prosperous,
eligible Jim Farrell (Domhnall Gleeson), Eilis must embrace an American
future, or radically re-imagine what life in Ireland could provide for her. She
decides, finally, to commit to life as an emigrant, and the film concludes with
Eilis and Tony embracing on a sunlit, tree-lined Brooklyn avenue—book-
ending the film’s opening scene, set on a dark and empty Enniscorthy street, in
a way that suggests a fruitful and prosperous future.
The film centres around the emotional drama and physical process of emigra-
tion, a key aspect of Ireland’s national historical dynamic, and one which argu-
ably structures many of its contemporary frameworks as well as its relationships
with the rest of the world, most particularly America. The Irish cultural imagi-
nary regarding emigration might previously have been considered in terms of a
binary opposition between ‘liberation’ from repression and parochialism, and
‘death’, in the form of such historical tropes such as ‘the American wake’—the
gathering traditionally held before an emigrant departed Ireland, in acknowl-
edgement that friends and family would be unlikely to see them again. This
vision of departure, on the contrary, couches Eilis’s emigration in terms of indi-
vidualised choice set against a backdrop of family obligation and opportunities
for betterment, and therefore speaks more to contemporary conceptions of the
globalised flow of population from a privileged First World perspective—of peo-
ple who are free to return, as well as free to leave. Therefore it speaks to a
(highly ideological) notion of contemporary ‘Ireland Inc.’ perpetuated in Irish
public discourse throughout the Celtic Tiger years: the notion of the mobile,
highly educated Irish workforce who ‘choose’ to go abroad (and may come
back) rather than being ‘forced into exile’ for socio-economic reasons.
Brereton (2016) identifies Brooklyn in genre terms as having its lineage in a
cycle of 1990s Irish heritage film, itself drawing from the corresponding British
tradition, as framed by Ruth Barton (2004). For Brereton, the “nostalgic,
Edenic view of Ireland” (Barton 2004: 148) partially gives way to a “particular
nostalgic appeal” (Brereton 2016: 285). That nostalgic appeal is for an Ireland
simultaneously clung to and rejected by Eilis, and critiqued by Jim, who defers
to her new-found sophistication when he says “We don’t really know anything
of the rest of the world. We must seem very backward to you now”. Her reply
“Of course not. You seem calm, and civilised, and charming” is that of a woman
who has been transformed by emigration, and with the majority of the action
centred on New York, by the city itself, and can now only conceive of her coun-
try of origin from a position of emotional distance.
She consciously adapts to circumstances in Brooklyn, making the effort to
become a successful immigrant—adopting the fashionable dress, make-up, and
love interest which, it seems, will assist her assimilation. From deserting the
newly arrived (and thus representative of old Ireland) Dolores from Cavan at a
dance, to applying lipstick with the assimilated girls from her boarding house,
to dancing with Tony at the parish hall, Eilis moves away from her position as
a homesick ‘good girl’ and embraces the new world. Tony’s gentle note to her,
in the context of dancing, that “The secret is to look as if you know what you
are doing” can also, it seems, be applied to the wider Irish film industry. The
secret to negotiating the liminal space between the globalised industry and the
localised national industry is “to look as if you know what you are doing”, tak-
ing on stories that are not necessarily representative of old Irish tropes, and
utilising the influences that seem to speak most to an international audience.
However, Eilis’s process of transformation is not uncomplicated.
Just as this film is a story of emigration, it is also a story of immigration. The
transnational dimension lies not just in the assumption that it speaks to
Americans of Irish heritage as much as to Irish audiences themselves but also in
the way it speaks to the specificity of New York’s place in the American popular
imaginary, and perhaps to nostalgicised gaps between ‘historical’, multi-racial,
Brooklyn, and contemporary gentrification of the area. With its glossy costum-
ing and detailed accumulation of period detail foregrounded—and with
Montreal, another beneficiary of internationalised funding and production
incentives, largely standing in for Brooklyn—the film attempts to conceive of
the district as a ‘melting pot’, but in limited terms which privilege white Irish
experience. Where tentative cross-cultural intersections and conflicts are hinted
at—Eilis takes lessons in eating spaghetti before braving an invitation to Tony’s
house, where Tony’s brother refers to “Irish cops” beating up Italian-
Americans—the film is more shy of engaging with the intensity of diasporic and
cultural intertwinement which tends to characterise cities like New York. One
of the few moments when African Americans are visible on-screen is in a brief
scene of Eilis at a crosswalk (see Fig. 13.1), with Eilis at the heart of a bustling,
Fig. 13.1 Racially diverse streets in Brooklyn (2015) are a backdrop to interrogations
of Irishness in (white) America
diverse New York street scene, surrounded by—but isolated from—Americans.

This image shows us the immigrant destination as conceived of in resolutely
individualist terms, a site of competition for place and resources. Both the pres-
ence and the framing of the shot, with its wide angle emphasising the streets’
diversity in visual terms only—placing African Americans in the mise en scène
but not in the story—serve to reinforce the narrative’s overall de-emphasis of
cultural heterogeneity in the city. Indeed, as one nervous young boat passenger
muses, as Eilis returns to New York to be reunited with Tony, “People say
there’s so many Irish people there, it’s like home”.
In this way the ‘national’ within the transnational reasserts itself at various
moments. A key scene in which this process is mobilised is one set in the period
in which Eilis, home in Enniscorthy for her sister’s funeral and a friend’s wed-
ding, is persuaded to stay and take on some work as a bookkeeper at a local
business. Newly self-assured following her successful assimilation into the Irish-
American community in Brooklyn, and by extension, through marriage, into
the Italian-American one, she sees Ireland differently when given the opportu-
nity to earn her own money. This autonomy and power is heightened by her
changed status at home, as can be seen in Fig. 13.2. At dinner with Jim and
friends eager to hear about her new life, she confidently positions herself as the
conversation’s leader, and they, noticeably, defer to her presumed sophistica-
tion. The reflected glamour of New York is emphasised in her fashionable
clothes—which also include a chic and rather daring, by rural Irish standards of
the time, swimsuit—and make-up, contrasting with the fusty, old-world
surroundings of the ‘respectable’ Wexford hotel. However, when Eilis is asked
about the Empire State Building, her response is “Ah, but that’s Manhattan. I
Fig. 13.2 Brooklyn (2015) may be set in New York, but Eilis’s sights are more limited,
as “All the skyscrapers are across the river”
live in Brooklyn, and I work in Brooklyn, and if I go out I go out in Brooklyn.

All the skyscrapers are across the river”. In this scene, Eilis’s cosmopolitan
Irish-Americanness is dropped in favour of emphasising the historically clus-
tered nature of the diaspora in places like Boston, Sydney, or London—with
groups of Irish immigrants forming tight-knit communities which may be as
supportive (or parochial, or restrictive) as those at home.
Irish audiences can be expected to read the film in these terms; an American
audience may not. Richard Brody (2015) writing in the New Yorker emphati-
cally rejects what he describes as the way in which the film ‘sanitises’ Brooklyn.
For him, Eilis has “no sense of New York mythology, no curiosity. She … goes
to New York as a blank slate with a blank mind” (Brody 2015). Where an Irish
viewer may read longing for community and familiarity, and the film as attempt-
ing to engage with the sense of (temporary or permanent) displacement that
attends emigrants, and the emotional consequences of having to negotiate the
de/re-spatialisation of the world, a New York viewer reads failure to engage
adequately with the new world. Whether seen as an international film, a univer-
salist story of love, a coming-of-age narrative, or a tale of migration to ‘any’
location, it can also be read as a specifically transnational film; it tells one story
to its Irish viewers, negotiating the collective absence of generations of emi-
grants, and it tells a different one to its American viewers, that of the emotional
drama of its own history of assimilation and difference.
These threads, of old and new identities in competition with each other,
come to a poignant juncture when Eilis, volunteering with her local parish at
Christmas in an effort to stave off homesickness, encounters a group of elderly,
isolated, perhaps indigent men—the Irish emigrants of fifty years previous.
“These”, Father Flood, one of Irish cinema’s new ‘good’ priests alongside
Calvary’s Father James, tells her, “are the men who built the tunnels, the
bridges, the highways”. The moment in which one of them sings Casadh an
tSúgáin, a haunting traditional air, is perhaps the closest the film comes to
delivering a rebuke: to contemporary Ireland, which has exiled these men twice
over by considering only the fluidity of emigration, and not its fixity, but also
to America, which has forgotten their contribution to its development.
Conclusion
Brooklyn shows how a small national industry can—under certain circum-
stances—negotiate cultural production in the shadow of a dominant Hollywood
industry. The film is in conversation with the globalised audiovisual industry’s
economy through both its narrative structure and its production structure,
which is the product of ongoing debates around the commercial and cultural
value of film. Problematising the trope of the ‘successful emigrant’ by illustrat-
ing the emotional difficulties and dilemmas attendant on emigration, the film
shows how Eilis actively negotiates the relationship between home and the new
world. Brooklyn can be seen as an example of glocalisation, whereby it takes up
the challenge set by McLoone (2009) of ‘living with’ Hollywood, and arguably
turns Hollywood’s gaze back on itself, to interrogate America as well as Ireland.
1. Can you think of other films which explore diasporic identities or the
diasporic experience on-screen? What do they say about the ways in
which identity can be constructed?
2. For you, has globalisation resulted in the American cultural domination
of film? If so, what currents can you see challenging this?
3. Should national cinemas be supported by the state, or required to oper-
ate on the basis of market conditions alone? What are the implications for
production and film culture in terms of each model?
Notes
1. The full title is the 1968 Report of the Film Industry Committee in Ireland,
1968, and it was commissioned by the then minister for industry and commerce.
2. The explicit use of the term ‘tax expenditure’ as preferred by the OECD
(Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) instead of the more
usual ‘tax relief’ or ‘tax incentive’ is a conscious decision to reflect the true nature
of such subsidies, as expenditures on the public purse (OECD (2010), Tax
Expenditures in OECD Countries, OECD Publishing, Paris).
3. https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/budget-2014-spielberg-inspires-tom-
cruise-clause-that-will-bring-hollywood-blockbusters-here-29667460.html.
4. https://www.starwars.com/news/designing-star-wars-the-last-jedi-part-1-how-
porgs-were-hatched.
5. See Chap. 17 for a more detailed discussion of the film.
6. The Great Famine (An Gorta Mór) 1845–1849 followed the failure of the Irish
potato crop—the main affordable food supply of the population—due to infec-
tion by potato blight. More than one million of the population of eight million
died of starvation, and two million more were forced to emigrate. Other food
supplies were unaffected, but were exported to Britain; the British government’s
response to the disaster was slow, and was condemned worldwide.
7. Statistics from US Census Bureau 2013 American Community Survey. An addi-
tional 3 million people additionally identified as ‘Scotch-Irish’ and whose heri-
tage is that of Scottish/Ulster Protestantism. See https://factfinder.census.gov/
faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk.
8. Following controversial 2014 comments on the quality of Irish film, McDonagh
noted, “I didn’t want [Calvary] to be perceived as a small, parochial, ‘Irish’ film.
This intention on my part has been wilfully misrepresented by a small section of
the Dublin media with an axe to grind. What has been most dispiriting to me,
however, is the low-level bigotry that has reared its head in the fallout from the
interview. I am an Irish citizen, a child of Irish parents, nearly all my friends and
work associates are Irish, and yet because I was born in London I supposedly have
no right to comment on Irish film” Flynn and Tracey (2015).
References
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Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press.
Barton, Ruth. 2004. Irish National Cinema. London: Routledge.
———. 2019. Irish Cinema in the Twenty-First Century. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Brereton, Pat. 2016. Brooklyn [Review]. Estudios Irlandeses 11: 285–287.
Brody, Richard, 2015. The Sanitized Past of ‘Brooklyn’. The New Yorker, November 6.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-sanitized-past-of-brook-
lyn. Accessed 13 February 2019.
Canning, Laura. 2012. “Not in Front of the American”: Place, Parochialism and
Linguistic Play in John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard. Estudios Irlandeses
7: 206–208.
Condon, Denis. 2008. Early Irish Cinema: 1895–1921. Dublin: Irish Academic Press.
Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. 2018. An Plean Gníomhaíochta
Closamhairc Colún 4 den Chlár Éire Ildánach/Audiovisual Action Plan Creative
Ireland Programme Pillar 4. Ireland: Dublin.
Flynn, Roddy. 2007. Raiders of the Lost Archive: the Report of the Inter-Departmental
Committee on the Film Industry 1942. Irish Communication Review 10 (1): 3.
Flynn, Roddy, and Tony Tracy. 2015. Irish Film and Television – 2014. Estudios
Irlandeses: Journal of Irish Studies [Online, Accessed 5 March 2020], (10),
(15 March, 2015).
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and Film Policy in Greater China. Policy Studies 30 (4): 423–438.
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Gray, Clive. 2002. Local Government and the Arts. Local Government Studies 28
(1): 77–90.
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Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hill, John W. 2006. Cinema and Northern Ireland: Film, Culture and Politics. London:
British Film Institute.
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Dublin: Irish Academic Press.
Kirby, Peadar, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin, eds. 2002. Reinventing Ireland:
Culture, Society and the Global Economy. California: Pluto Press.
McLoone, Martin. 2009. National Cinema and Global Culture: The Case of Irish
Cinema. In Cinemas of Ireland, eds. Isabelle le Corff, & Estelle Epinoux, 14--27.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Miège, Bernard. 1989. The Capitalization of Cultural Production. New York:
International General.
Murphy, Denis, and Maria O’Brien. 2015. Irish Film Finance Rebooted: The New
Section 481. Estudios Irlandeses 10: 225.
O’Brien, Maria. 2019. The Audiovisual Action Plan: A New Audiovisual Policy for
Ireland. Cultural Trends 28: 417–428.
O’Connell, Dióg. 2010. New Irish Storytellers: Narrative Strategies in Film. Bristol;
Chicago: Intellect.
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gest Set in the World”: Northern Ireland Screen and the Case of Game of Thrones.
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Historical Films, 1911–1920. Screening the Past, no. 33. http://www.screen-
ingthepast.com/2012/02/knocknagow-the-film-company-of-ireland-and-other-
irish-historical-films/. Accessed 13 May 2019.
Tracy, Tony, and Roddy Flynn. 2017. Contemporary Irish Film: From the National to
the Transnational. Éire/Ireland 52 (1–2): 169–197.
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Cinema. Modern and Contemporary France 15 (1): 37–50.
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Critical Historical Perspective. International Journal of Cultural Policy 1
(1): 57–71.
PART III
Genres
CHAPTER 14
On the Eve of the Journey: The New European

Road Movie
Laura Rascaroli
Definitions
Transnational
Extending beyond the national borders of a single country. This idea has
emerged in recent decades in describing how international economic and social
forces make their presence felt across borders. It may be linked with discussions
of postnationalism, postcolonialism and globalisation, and how these affect the
production of film and its representations. Considering the transnational means
interrogating ideas of the global and local, interfaces between national and
international, and the idea of ‘national cinema’.
Eurocentrism
A worldview which centres Europe as the source of ‘civilisation’ and progress,
and frames other cultures and geographic locations as subordinate to its
cultural and material power. Eurocentric views may seek to justify European
colonialism and other imperialism and to denigrate non-European artistic and
Laura Rascaroli, On the Eve of the Journey: Tangier, Tbilisi, Calais, published in: Michael
Gott and Thibaut Schilt eds., Open Roads, Closed Borders: The Contemporary French-
Language Road Movie, 2013, Intellect, reproduced with permission of Intellect.
L. Rascaroli (*)
Film and Screen Media Department, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
e-mail: L.Rascaroli@ucc.ie

250 L. RASCAROLI
intellectual achievements. Both academia and film culture have been considered
to be overtly and problematically Eurocentric in defining film canons and in
their interpretation of non-Western film work.
Deterritorialisation
A concept originated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their 1972 book
Anti-Oedipus. Once a psychoanalytic term referring to the fluidity and dis-
placement of human subjectivity in contemporary capitalist societies, it has
been adapted to describe how globalised modernity ‘dislocates’ people both
physically and in their sense of identity. It can also describe how migration and
the mediatisation of society may simultaneously distance people from their
geographic origins and intensify engagement with their originating culture.
Introduction
Time and again, in road movies the journey is represented as liberation—from
a domesticity and society that are perceived as suffocating, from persecution,
poverty and war or from personal and relational failures. The journey, in this
sense, is a narrative device that channels the energies of both protagonist and
film; the forward movement guarantees a release of tension, even though a
precise destination often does not exist in road movies—thus accounting for
the genre’s open-endedness and even penchant for tragic endings. The tension
that finds relief through the journey is not only relevant to character psychol-
ogy, but also to story, in terms of the film’s need to overcome a narrative
obstruction, consisting in either inner or external obstacles, which hinder the
departure. The energies thus released are at once emotional and aesthetic, inas-
much as the psychological alleviation experienced by the protagonist frequently
merges with specific filmic pleasures enjoyed by the spectator. It is on the road
that the distinct, kinetic energy and aesthetic dimension of the travel film
become actualised.
Travel, of course, is not always synonymous with pleasure, but can run con-
trary to it. Displacement, exile, diaspora and unproductive or self-destructive
wandering, for instance, all evoke a sense of displeasure and even of annihila-
tion of the self and are often connected to a lack of free agency. However, even
when the journey is voluntary and yearned for by the traveller, tension may still
be present and materialise in a pleasure/displeasure dynamic. In contrast to the
mobilisation of narrative and release of tension described above, a number of
French migration road movies of the past decade focus on states of strain and
discomfort, for which little or no relief is found through motion. This effect is
achieved by focusing on the eve of the journey rather than on the journey itself.
In these films, the tension belongs, first of all, to the characters, to the extent
that they are either held back or brood over the possibility of departing; how-
ever, it also has a much broader dimension that exceeds the personal sphere.
The (planned, desired, delayed) journey becomes, indeed, the locus of the
14 ON THE EVE OF THE JOURNEY: THE NEW EUROPEAN ROAD MOVIE 251
manifestation of tensions which characterise and affect life in contemporary

French and European societies at large and which have to do with pressures
and strains created by factors such as border management, economic polarisa-
tion and political discourses on matters of migration, citizenship, mobility and
identity.
The three examples of this trend that this chapter considers are Far (2001),
Since Otar Left (2003) and—in a more detailed case study—Welcome (Philippe
Lioret, 2009). While diverse in style and ambition, they share an interest in
matters of legal and, especially, illegal immigration, and a hindered journey is
at the core of their narrative and thematic concerns. In addition, they all fall in
the category that Carrie Tarr has tentatively called ‘pre-border-crossing films’.
According to Tarr, in these films the “mise-en-scène of destabilised, unsettling
border spaces combined with a foregrounding of the migrant’s subjectivity and
agency invite the Western spectator to understand their choice of deterritoriali-
sation and sympathise with their resulting vulnerability and isolation” (Tarr
2007: 11). Similarly to Tarr, I here look at films that we can call ‘French’ while
being conscious of the fact that “the transnational elements mobilised in films
about migration call into question the validity of analysing border crossings
within the limited framework of a national cinema, or even within the larger
context of European cinema” (Tarr 2007: 9).
The first two of these films are international co-productions (between France
and Spain and France and Belgium respectively). Far was co-written by Téchiné
with the Moroccan writer Faouzi Bensaïdi, “and is moreover quadrilingual,
with dialogue in French, English, Spanish and Arabic, as well as a prayer in
Hebrew” (Marshall 2007: 115). Both other films also are multilingual: a
French production, Welcome includes much dialogue in English, as well as
some Kurdish and Turkish; in Since Otar Left Georgian, French and Russian
are spoken. These films’ transnationalism is of course central to their redefini-
tion of both immigrant and French identities, as well as of ideas of Eurocentrism.
In her analysis of road movies produced in the 1990s and 2000s in Slovenia,
Polona Petek has noted a tendency in recent European road movies to go in
“the direction of immobility or, more accurately, the direction of stalled or
refused mobility” (Petek 2010: 219). Petek reads this tendency positively, with
reference to the films’ constructive critique of both Eurocentrism and of the
elitist Western view of cosmopolitanism as coinciding with capitalism, which
they replace with the project of an alternative, non-Eurocentric cosmopolitan-
ism. In particular, for Petek these films’ choice to support the “interweaving of
pro-European and yugonostalgic discourses, grounded on both sides of the
European border, instantiates or, at least, paves the way for such a multi-sited
cosmopolitanism” (222). In the French pre-border-crossing films I explore
here, instead, while the stalling of movement certainly amounts to a critique of
Eurocentrism, it does not result in a clear alternative cosmopolitan project, but
becomes the expression of profound social tensions.
This chapter reflects on the centrality (or, indeed, marginality) of France to
these films. Each is set in a location that can be described, in terms of global
252 L. RASCAROLI
geopolitics, as peripheral with reference to both France and Western Europe:

in Tangier, Tbilisi and Calais, respectively. By talking from the margins, each of
these films reconfigures the European continent and the place that France
thinks itself to occupy in it. As well as examining tension from the point of view
of character psychology and of the films’ broad thematic concerns, I also dis-
cuss it in narratological terms—and show how, rather than the open-endedness
of the typical road movie narrative, these films are characterised by stasis, circu-
larity and repetition, in a way that simultaneously compounds the characters’
feelings of entrapment and contributes to the idea of a sociocultural tension
that cannot find release in the transformative experience of the journey.
Borders and Borderlands
Because of the statement that the three films make through their choice of
marginalising France, it seems productive to pay some attention to how they
engage with actual margins. By the term ‘borderlands’ I here intend spaces that
are constructed as limens and frontiers and that function as representations of
soft borders and, indirectly, of ideas of France and Europe according to the
discursive axes South/North and East/West. It is not necessary for a film to
include images of a border in order to evoke it. Equally, crossing a border does
not necessarily imply the physical act of traversing the line of demarcation
between two countries:
For many travellers, the border crossing point is located at the check-in counters
at the airports in their home countries. It may be the airline officials who under-
take the task or, as is increasingly the case in Canada and some other western
countries, the creation of a micro piece of ex-territory under US jurisdiction in
the foreign airport territory. (Newman 2006: 178)
Similarly, micro-pieces of another country may be found in large ports, as in

Far, which foregrounds ports as borderlands and sets significant sections of its
narrative in the ports of Algeciras, the largest Spanish city on the Bay of
Gibraltar, and especially of Tangier, Morocco, situated at the western entrance
to the Strait. The entire city of Tangier can be seen as a borderland, as remarked
by André Téchiné himself when he said that Tangier is one of those “frontier-
spaces, places that are both bridges and barriers, places of transit” (quoted in
Marshall 2007: 118).
Serge (Stéphane Rideau), a young French truck driver, can cross over legally,
though not without delays, given the controls implemented in order to police
the trafficking of both drugs and people between northern Africa and southern
Europe. His friend Saïd (Mohamed Hamaidi), instead, is one of the many
Moroccans who converge on Tangier and hang around the port—the film’s
true borderland—waiting for an opportunity to hide under a lorry and cross
over to Spain. Here, in spite of the incessant transcontinental circulation of
goods, the demarcation between two sides, and indeed two worlds—North
and South, neoliberal Europe and developing Africa, First and Third World,
Schengen and non-EU, former coloniser and ex-colonies—becomes most evi-
dent. As Étienne Balibar has noted, “globalization tends to knock down fron-
tiers with respect to goods and capital while at the same time erecting a whole
system of barriers against the influx of a workforce and the ‘right to flight’ that
migrants exercise in the face of misery, war, and dictatorial regimes in their
countries of origin” (Balibar 2003: 37). Arguably, the port is at once a small-
scale version of the global melting pot, a microcosmic rendition of the tensions
between the north and the south of the world, and a representation of the
conflict between two competing forms of power: the state and organised
crime. The question of where power and rights reside, however, is profoundly
problematised in this borderland: far from being organised according to a
clear-cut, binary model of spatial division (here/there, Europe/Africa, legal/
illegal), the port is a hybrid space—neither fully Moroccan, nor fully European—
in which different logics and laws meet, clash and coexist, and in which borders
can be negotiated in various ways.
Vehicles are prominent in Far, including bikes, scooters, old cars, and
Serge’s lorry. It is appropriate to ‘read’ these vehicles in terms of the characters’
dissimilar levels of mobility and freedom; in particular, we may consider Serge’s
lorry as another instance of the presence of the borderland in Far. Described
with some pride to a deeply impressed Saïd, Serge’s new French-registered
truck—a Swedish-made Scania—is evidently framed as state-of-the-art north-
ern European machinery, as well as an actualisation of the Western world’s
ability to translate its aggressive neoliberal credo into advanced technology and
unstoppable mobility. Indeed, the lorry puts together scientific innovation and
commercial dynamism, thus confirming Europe’s traditional force of penetra-
tion into less industrialised regions. It is surely not by chance that the lorry
bears on its sides, in huge block letters, the words Plateforme européenne: a
signifier of both Europe and France, Serge’s truck gestures towards old
Europe’s continued success at colonising faraway lands for commercial pur-
poses. It is of some import, indeed, that a young Frenchman has access to the
latest European technology, while the Moroccan man drives a battered bike, a
piece of colonial import that testifies to the first world’s smart industrial pene-
tration into the third.
The truck may be seen as a borderland, in the sense of a mobile micro-piece
of France within Morocco. Yet, in spite of its display of technology and power,
the vehicle literally goes à la dérive, astray, on account of the directionless
Serge’s existential crisis. This may be at the root of his mysteriously motivated
decision to start smuggling drugs into Europe on his lorry. Although he finally
realises the magnitude of what he has embarked on, Serge is left with no choice
but to drive to a rendezvous, at which an armed man takes his truck away with-
out a word. For one night, stuck in the middle of nowhere, Serge is dispos-
sessed of his European rights and of his shell of security and protected mobility.
While his lorry is returned to him, it is no longer his, for it has been tampered
with and is now the carrier of the goods of his new ‘employers’. Serge’s last act,
254 L. RASCAROLI
as he leaves Morocco, is to hide Saïd on his truck and grant him a passage to
Spain—in spite of having frequently told him in the past that “leaving is not a
solution”, and that he should stop dreaming of Europe, which is “all a pipe
dream”. The film’s final shot is of the boat leaving the port; the abrupt ending
of the extra-diegetic music, which “cuts off the final image” (Marshall 2007:
120), serves to highlight that this is only the beginning of Saïd’s journey into
the unknown.
South/North, East/West
The globalising discourses that became predominant in the 1980s and 1990s
posited what was substantially to become a borderless world: “Faced with the
onslaught of cyber and satellite technology, as well as the free unimpeded flow
of global capital, borders would—so the globalization purists argued—gradu-
ally open until they disappeared altogether” (Newman 2006: 172). The past
decade, possibly as a reaction to these discourses, has seen an interdisciplinary
renaissance of border studies; similarly, these three films, which span the whole
decade, decidedly reiterate the importance of barriers—physical, social, legal,
economic—and engage with the border as a process rather than as a static
notion. Borders pertain, of course, to the sphere of power, and power relations
are a main factor in border demarcations (Newman 2006: 175), as well as in
the exercise of the control and restriction of movement. The differential power
that becomes evident around borders is one of the sources of the tension that
emerges in the chosen films.
Mindful of the fact that borders are not limited to the actual line of demar-
cation between two countries, Klaus Eder has suggested that distinctions must
be drawn between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ borders. Hard borders function not only on
the basis of actual barriers but also on the existence of soft boundaries that have
to do with the production of meaning:
The difference between both is that the former, the hard borders, are institution-
alized borders, written down in legal texts. The soft borders of Europe are
encoded in other types of texts indicating a pre-institutional social reality, the
reality of images of what Europe is and who are Europeans and who are not.
(Eder 2006: 256)
The films here represent both hard and soft borders and, arguably, partici-
pate in the shaping of the latter, for they produce images of what Europe is and
is not. The visibility of a film such as Welcome in French and European political
discourses on immigration corroborates this statement: the film was screened
in both the French and the European parliaments and on March 2nd 2009 the
director Lioret debated the issue of French legislation on illegal immigrants
with Éric Besson, Minister of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and
Mutually-Supportive Development in the government of François Fillon, on
the France 3 programme Ce soir (ou jamais!).
The three films comment on the two main frontiers of Europe—southern

and eastern; and each does so while placing France (which is evoked either
directly or via its conspicuous absence) at the centre of a reconfiguration of the
continent. The films, furthermore, frame France from the north, south and
east respectively, thus looking at its three most important hard borders. More
specifically, Welcome, which takes place in Calais and is narratively projected
towards England, is set against the backdrop of concepts of the South/North
divide, one which overturns the original idea of European civilisation as con-
structed from the south and the Mediterranean. Today, the prevalent discourse
sees the North as a civilising force set in contrast to the ‘problem’ of a South
depicted as inexorably lagging behind in the modernisation process. In
Welcome, it is northern Europe, namely England, that attracts immigration,
and not France, which is perceived as a border itself—as the southern frontier
of the civilised North.
Far also looks at the South/North divide, and in particular at the southern
border of Europe, from the distinctive point of view of Arabic North Africa. As
Eder reminds us, this area, in contrast to Black Africa, could potentially be
considered European, since “[i]t could claim a long common tradition of being
part of the Roman Empire, of an intellectual common ground over centuries
of the Christian-Islamic culture up to the colonization of North Africa by the
French” (Eder 2006: 263). Yet, this border remains fixed, and the southern
frontier of Europe has now moved to the southeast, coinciding with Turkey. In
Far, too, France is no longer central to the emigrants’ dreams and is indeed
practically irrelevant to the narrative. A French truck driver travels the Spain/
Morocco commercial route in search of adventure; of his Moroccan friends,
one dreams of Spain and a generic Europe, while the other considers immigrat-
ing to Canada. France is thus drastically repositioned, albeit in a world that is
still conditioned by the visible inheritance of French colonisation.
Finally, Since Otar Left … focuses on the East/West boundary.
The East provides the second frontier of Europe. In the narrations of this fron-
tier, the ‘second other’ of Europe was constructed. This East appears as Russia,
providing a referent for something that Europe is different from. From Tsarist
Russia to Communist Russia, a particular sense of threat was imagined. The East
is the space from once [sic] the ‘Mongols’ came, then the ‘Russians’ and finally
the ‘Soviet Communists’. (Eder 2006: 264)
Bertuccelli’s film arguably proposes the whole of the Caucasian independent

state of Georgia as a borderland. Located at the crossroads of Eastern Europe
and western Asia, independent from Russia since 1991, Georgia is a member of
the Council of Europe and aspires to join the EU. Set mainly in the capital city,
Tbilisi, and in its last section in Paris, it is the least dynamic of the three films,
even though its narrative focuses on two journeys of immigration to France:
the first, in fact, takes place before the start of the narrative, while the second
begins at its end.
256 L. RASCAROLI
The country is represented in the film as physically and metaphorically

wedged between East and West, and more precisely between Russia and
Europe—or, better, France. Emma Wilson has suggested that the film looks “at
subjective journeys, at fantasies of France and of Georgia” (Wilson 2009: 90);
indeed, the three main characters, who represent three generations of women—
grandmother Eka (Esther Gorintin), her daughter Marina (Nino
Khomassouridze) and her granddaughter Ada (Dinara Droukarova)—are
keenly involved in the production of personal and family narratives involving
both Russia and France. Ideas of Paris and France are evoked throughout the
film, as the women frequently speak about Eka’s beloved son, Otar, who, in
spite of holding a medical degree, emigrated to Paris two years before.
Furthermore, their house is full of the classics of French literature, which Eka’s
husband had shipped directly from France, and carefully hid from the
Bolsheviks.
Russia is evoked both by Eka’s Soviet cult of French culture and by the post-
Soviet environs of Tbilisi, including the drab block where Marina’s lover lives,
the post office, “a sullen relic of the Soviet era” (Graffy 2004: 69), the porce-
lain factory where Ada finds some work as an interpreter, and the impersonal
offices where Marina and Ada discover the circumstances of Otar’s tragic death,
following a fall in the building site where he was working. While Georgia’s
infrastructure (light, water, telephone, roads, public transport, postal service)
is presented as severely deficient, both as an inheritance of the Soviet era and
for the inefficiency of the new government (Marina comments regarding civil
servants that “ever since independence, they are just as stupid”), Eka is ready
to declare herself a Stalinist, “if being a Stalinist means being honest, patriotic
and altruistic”.
The main fantasy created by the women is that of Otar’s continued existence
in Paris after his death. Marina wishes to spare her mother the truth, and Ada,
first reluctantly, then with some gusto, begins to draft letters that she reads to
Eka, as if they came from Otar. In them, Otar’s life in Paris is embellished even
more than in his own letters, which he wrote for his old mother’s benefit. It is
understandable why the film evokes so complex an account of personal, familial
and national identities: after the end of the Soviet rule, the country found itself
in the position of having to create its own identity, somewhere in between
post-Soviet reality, pre-Soviet ideas of Georgian culture, a range of ethnic and
religious communities and the pull of market economy (see Gachechiladze
1995). Georgia’s actual geographical, cultural, economic and social in-
betweenness is further intensified in the film by the three women’s dreaming of
France. Tbilisi is constructed as a hybrid space, located between Asia, Eastern
Europe and Western Europe—as well as past and future, and myth and reality.
However, the pull of Western Europe on Bertucelli’s characters is no less than
ruinous, both for individual Georgians and for their country.
Otar decided to leave both Georgia and the medical profession and emigrate
to Paris; the difficulty of doing so is demonstrated via the character of Ada’s
occasional boyfriend, who is constantly planning to go west, but who, after his
latest failed attempt, returns home admitting that “the Turkish customs offi-
cers are bastards”. Otar never appears on screen; yet, the film is able to convey
something of the experience of the non-EU immigrant worker in contempo-
rary Paris. It is most significant that Otar is only ever seen in photographs and
that when he phones we do not hear his voice (nor we hear it when his letters
are read out, usually by Ada). Otar’s absence suggests that, as sans-papiers (an
immigrant with no valid documentation), he has become an expendable ‘inex-
istent nonperson’, to use Balibar’s expression. This is confirmed by the details
of his death: the builder denies ever having hired him, and he is buried in a
pauper’s grave. The women decide to ignore this reality; the fake letters they
write intimate Otar’s participation in a social and cultural life from which he
was entirely excluded. In a faked photomontage, Otar stands outside the
Moulin Rouge, simultaneously a signifier of the mythical turn-of-the-century
France and the economic and cultural exuberance of the Belle Époque; a most
typical tourist landmark, and the home of the seductive cancan. The chosen
setting suggests that the women imagine him living within the old cultural
framework with which they identify France, and enjoying the many pleasures
that Paris offers to tourists.
The women’s denial of the reality of Otar’s condition as illegal immigrant
and worker and the illusory quality of their cosmopolitan borderland are finally
exposed, at least to the spectator, when they eventually travel to Paris. Where
Bertucelli’s Georgia has a crumbling infrastructure, its poverty seems graceful
and charming; the women’s house is pleasant, full of old family objects and
good books; they even own a dacha in the country where they go to rest and
collect fruit. They are forced to sell old belongings, yet they seem to have
much. Paris, by contrast, for those coming from the East and the South, is
associated with real, ungraceful squalor. The three women stay in a cheap,
unappealing hotel, and the building where Otar lived is impersonal and
neglected, full of immigrants living on the poverty line. Mostly shot in the rain,
Paris is congested, noisy and impersonal—the opposite of Tbilisi’s pleasant
streets.
One of the film’s most significant moments is when Eka, having finally
learned of her son’s death from his former neighbour, finds herself sitting near
some railway tracks—an image powerfully suggestive of the fact that travel and
displacement killed Otar. And yet, Eka chooses to continue to delude herself;
she says to her daughter and granddaughter that Otar departed for America,
where he always wanted to go, and announces she now wants to visit Paris. A
montage of images emphasising tourist landmarks and opulent shops conveys
the women’s tourist experience. Again, they refuse to see the reality of the
immigrant’s Paris, and continue to embrace a utopian/touristic vision of La
Ville-Lumière, so much so that, at the end of their holiday, Ada decides to stay.
While Eka is delighted by Ada’s choice, which endorses and perpetuates her
belief of her family’s belonging to an imaginary France, Marina—who has
fewer illusions—is devastated.
258 L. RASCAROLI
This is the only film in which France is still regarded a utopian destination
by the characters; seen from beyond the post-Soviet eastern border, thus,
France is still equivalent with old Europe. The film, however, shows how the
repositioning of the West/East border after the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc
is challenging the idea of what being European means. In Georgia, a country
wedged between Russia and Turkey, we get acquainted with characters who
not only speak French but also feel French. In spite of its spiritual proximity
with Paris, though, post-Communist Georgia is as distant from France as it was
in the past, if not more.
Case Study: Welcome (Philippe Lioret, 2009)

Set in Calais, Lioret’s Welcome premiered in France on 11 March 2009. On 22
September, Calais was in the news when the French police, on orders of minis-
ter Besson, dismantled ‘The Jungle’, the immigrants’ makeshift camp near the
port. After the camp was cleared, bulldozers were brought in to raze the shel-
ters (including a mosque and a shrine); many immigrants were taken to deten-
tion centres all over France, while some French rights protesters who had
scuffled with the police were also arrested. Subsequently, some suggested that
the operation was solely aimed at placating British public opinion; indeed, soon
the situation returned to ‘normality’. Currently, hundreds of immigrants live in
the area, with the sans-papiers always under threat of being arrested and
repatriated.
Lioret’s film makes explicit reference to a controversial immigration law
(L622-1), which is part of the increasingly tough measures France adopted
under Nicolas Sarkozy, first as Minister of the Interior under Jacques Chirac
(2002–2004; 2005–2007), then as President of the Republic (2007–2012).
The effects of Sarkozy’s policies are reflected in the drastic reduction in accep-
tances of applications for asylum during the period; rejections went from 20%
in the 1980s to 83.4% in 2006 (Lydie 2008: 78). The law referenced in the
ironically titled Welcome, a norm included in the 2009 Finance Law, set a quota
for arrests of those who help illegal immigrants at 5000 for 2009 and 5500 for
2011. Helping illegal immigrants carries a penalty of up to five years’ imprison-
ment and a €30,000 fine. Within the tight confines of this norm, the work of
volunteers and charities is also regarded as a crime.
The redefinition of identities and readjustment of cultural perceptions
through the journey of emigration are on the agenda in Welcome, for all that it
is not a traditional road movie. While completely revolving around a trip, most
of the film focuses on a stopover in the protagonist’s journey, and is therefore
rather static both in its location and its employment of a rather static camera.
In it, 17-year-old Kurdish refugee, Bilal (Firat Ayverdi), is stuck in Calais, hav-
ing travelled on foot from Kurdistan, covering 4000 kilometres in three
months, with the aim of reaching his girlfriend, who has immigrated to London
with her family. His epic journey is not visualised; its hardships are not com-
pletely lost on the spectator, however, especially when Bilal recounts having
been captured by the Turkish army and forced to wear a black bag over his
head for eight days. This piece of information places in an even more tragic
light his first attempt at crossing the Channel aboard a lorry; incapable of keep-
ing a plastic bag over his head to evade the CO2 monitoring at the border, Bilal
gives away both himself and the other stowaways, who are all arrested. Realising
that it will be impossible for him to cross the Channel in this manner, he
decides to learn to swim and starts attending the local pool to take lessons from
Simon (Vincent Lindon). Simon begins to help Bilal mainly in hopes of
impressing his former wife, who is a volunteer providing food for the immi-
grants at the port. Slowly, however, he forges a solid bond with Bilal, won over
by the teenager’s vast determination and swimming talent.
Calais truly is the ‘last border’ for Bilal, who has no interest in staying in
France and, like so many immigrants from Africa and the Middle East today,
has his mind set on the UK. The strongest source of tension in the film is time:
Bilal is under pressure because his girlfriend’s father is about to marry her to a
cousin. His entrapment in Calais is compounded by the proximity of his desti-
nation and by his progressive realisation of the imperviousness of the last bor-
der. Thus, the whole city is a frontier for the migrants; it is not a destination
but something in between a prison and an enforced purgatory, complete with
tantalising views of paradise in the shape of the White Cliffs of Dover. Precisely
as in Far, the port and beach, two of the film’s main settings, are constructed
as liminal spaces. It is winter, and the climate in Calais being much colder than
in Tangier means that these margins look significantly less colourful and wel-
coming. The area of the port that is used for the distribution of food is squalid
and open, providing no refuge from the police and the bitter cold. The beach,
permanently shot in an icy, grey light, with its air of wintertime abandonment,
does not invite bodily pleasures, but is a containing border, from which Bilal
longingly gazes at England and plans his crossing.
The most distinctive borderland in the film, however, is the swimming pool.
Because of the unforgiving cold of the sea, it is the warmer and safer water that
provides the fluidity of a margin in which an illegal immigrant may find refuge
and friendship and prepare for the next and final leg of his journey. It is most
significant, however, that the swimming pool is not a cell of political dissent
within mainstream society and is not welcoming from the start. Simon lets Bilal
enter because he pays for his lessons, but throws out his friends who are ready
to pay for a shower, and even threatens to call the police. The pool—which
displays a large sign for the local swimming team, ‘Calais Natation’, and whose
lane ropes and swimming aids are in the tricolored hues of the national flag—is
suggestive of both the local and the national enclaves. Through it, it is the
nation itself that is depicted as a borderland, one where the rigidity of the law
and the brutality of its enforcement (the police are shown in a particularly criti-
cal light in the film), as well as the paranoia dominating part of the public
opinion, are in evidence. And yet, this is also a space where some individuals act
upon their convictions and, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would have it,
live ‘smooth’ in a ‘striated space’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004).
260 L. RASCAROLI
The idea of the striation of space by organising principles such as money,

work, roads and housing is particularly useful when thinking of this film, which
explores the tension between settled and rootless peoples. Deleuze and
Guattari, indeed, introduced the concept of striation in a bid to distinguish
between sedentary and nomadic lives. The normalising function not only of
the law, but also of social institutions such as work, is much emphasised in
Welcome, and the effects of economic and institutional striation are evident
everywhere. One of the film’s most striking sequences is the arrival of the lorry
with the stowaways into the port of Calais at night; the long shot reveals an
intricate but perfectly functional system of suspended roads, which look like a
maze of illuminated strips. Here, as in the other films, trade and money regu-
late life and movement, and goods travel much more easily than people do.
Even the sea in Welcome is striated; each time it is framed, ferries and ships cross
the shot. Yet, the sea is also a fluid, ‘smooth’ space, which suggests the possibil-
ity of renegotiating identities, travelling, communicating and starting anew.
While Bilal’s second attempt at crossing is not visualised, the final one is.
However, there is no ‘hitting the road’ here, with all that the topos implies and
that is so fundamental to the road movie’s kinetic poetics and aesthetics. No
exhilarating extra-diegetic music elicits strong emotions; no sense of liberation
from inertia is experienced; no exploration of transforming panoramas is
offered. The audience’s expectations of the genre are frustrated. The harrow-
ing sequence of Bilal’s swim towards England is set in a leaden, cold sea; framed
from above in long shot, Bilal looks like a fragile if purposeful dot in the homo-
geneous expanse of the sea, in which no signposting, no directions, no land-
marks indicate the way and reassure us as to the traveller’s position. Accompanied
by an ominous, sad score, Bilal’s solitude and vulnerability as a clandestine
migrant are further highlighted by his encounters with large ships. The water
in which he floats is no amniotic fluid; there is no rebirth, no redemption for
the Kurdish teenager in the English Channel. Water is the most significant ele-
ment of Welcome, and replaces the road almost completely; it is not only in the
sea but also and more extensively in the swimming pool, indeed, that the film’s
travelling takes place. Bilal covers many kilometres swimming back and forth,
day and night, in the pool. This, however, is no forward movement; rather, it
is an incessant coming and going which is ultimately solipsistic, repetitive and
somewhat obsessive. No release of tension is ever achieved in Welcome.
Unfortunately for Bilal, despite its physical malleability, uncontainability and
permeability, the sea has been transformed into a hard border. As he approaches
the English coast, he is spotted by a British police boat patrolling the coast, and
dies tragically in the desperate attempt to escape arrest. Welcome’s ending
makes the point that if we deprive clandestine immigrants of their rights and
consider them juridically as ‘inexistent nonpersons’, in Balibar’s words, what
we actually do is “transform the way we control frontiers, under the pretext of
checking traffic in human labour. This control instead becomes a true war, on
land and sea, and is waged right up to the borders of the Schengen countries,
and its victims can be counted in thousands of dead bodies” (Balibar 2003:
38). When, at the end of his tragic swim towards England, he is spotted by the
police only 800 metres from the coast, Bilal turns and seems to want to swim
back towards Calais. It is of course a gesture born of despair, but one that
evokes the image of Bilal compulsively swimming back and forth in the pool,
going nowhere. Bilal dies as a victim in a war in which the police feel entitled
to chase him pitilessly until he drowns.
Conclusion
What these road movies problematise, then, through their emphasis on meta-
phorical borderlands and their scenarios of stasis, circularity and repetition, is
the view of both the North and of Western Europe as the cradle of ever-growing
civilisation and democracy and as the home of a progress which is identified
with unstoppable forward motion. Prioritising immobility and the tension of
stasis, circularity and repetition over the catharsis of movement, they express
deep social tensions, both in considering the position of those—migrant work-
ers, postcolonial ‘inheritors’, and refugees—who contemplate border crossings
and the nature of these borders. Questions of power and rights arise, particu-
larly in relation to the physical, social and legal barriers to transit which these
films dramatise and in the context of the challenges they present to the dis-
courses of globalisation which dominated the last decades of the twentieth
century. France, here, is repositioned away from the ‘centre’ of Europeanness;
while its colonial history remains visible, it is either evacuated from the films as
a distinct site of identity and meaning or situated merely as another ‘border-
land’ which must be crossed. Indeed, what we are given to see in each of these
films is far from the idealised borderless Europe of free movement. Instead, the
question of how to cross borders constitutes an almost insurmountable prob-
lem for all non-Western characters. Europe looks very much like a fortress
here—though its borders are not completely impermeable. What is especially
significant is the way in which these films challenge Eurocentrism and, conse-
quently, the idea of France’s hegemonic position within Europe; in fact, they
reposition the country as a sort of borderland. Even when it is the chosen des-
tination for emigration, its harsh reality clashes so profoundly with the charac-
ters’ dreams that it compellingly suggests the end of France’s centrality to an
idea of Europe based on the inheritance of the Enlightenment and on dis-
courses that equate modernity with progress and liberal capitalism with
democracy.
1. How does the road movie, as a genre, lend itself to considerations of

Europe and what it means to consider oneself ‘European’?
2. Do you see differences between the European road movie, as described
here, and the American road movie?
262 L. RASCAROLI
3. The writer says “It is not necessary for a film to include images of a bor-
der in order to evoke it”. What does she mean? Do you agree?
4. How do these films ask us to consider differences between the movement
of people and goods across international borders?
5. Can films like these function as political statements and tools, and if so
how? Do they offer any solutions to the problem of borders?
6. How do these films represent globalisation and ideas of ‘old Europe’ and
‘new Europe’?
References
Balibar, Étienne. 2003. Europe, An ‘Unimagined’ Frontier of Democracy (Trans.
F. Collins). Diacritics 33 (3/4): 36–44.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. B. Massumi. London: Continuum.
Eder, Klaus. 2006. Europe’s Borders: The Narrative Construction of the Boundaries of
Europe. European Journal of Social Theory 9 (2): 255–271.
Gachechiladze, Revaz. 1995. The New Georgia: Space, Society, Politics. London:
UCL Press.
Graffy, Julian. 2004. Since Otar Left. Sight and Sound 14 (6): 68–69.
Lydie, Virginie. 2008. Paroles clandestines: les étrangers en situation irrégulière en
France. Paris: Syros-Cimade.
Marshall, Bill. 2007. André Téchiné. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Newman, David. 2006. Borders and Bordering: Towards an Interdisciplinary Dialogue.
European Journal of Social Theory 9 (2): 171–186.
Petek, Polona. 2010. Highways, Byways and Dead Ends: Towards a Non-Eurocentric
Cosmopolitanism through Yugonostalgia and Slovenian Cinema. New Review of
Film and Television Studies 8: 218–232.
Tarr, Carrie. 2007. The Porosity of the Hexagon: Border Crossings in Contemporary
French Cinema. Studies in European Cinema 4 (1): 7–20.
Wilson, Emma. 2009. After Kieślowski: Voyages in European Cinema. In After
Kieślowski: The Legacy of Krzysztof Kieślowski, ed. Stephen Woodward, 89–98.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
CHAPTER 15
German Film Comedy in the ‘Berlin Republic’:

Wildly Successful and a Lot Funnier than
You Think
Jill E. Twark
Definitions
Incongruity Theory
The theory of humour put forth by philosophers Immanuel Kant and Arthur
Schopenhauer indicating that the juxtaposition of concepts, words, or objects,
which normally would not appear together, can be a source of humour and
provoke laughter.
Sympathetic Humour
When humour is used to draw compassion towards characters whom the audi-
ence perhaps laughs at but at the same time feels connected to, because the
awkward or absurd situations the characters face resemble the audience mem-
bers’ own life experiences or experiences to which they can relate.
Heimatfilm
A film genre from Germany and Austria that expresses emotional attachment
to an idealised ‘homeland’ (Heimat) or region of the country such as Bavaria.
Most popular in West Germany from the end of World War II until the 1970s,
J. E. Twark (*)
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, East Carolina University,
Greenville, NC, USA
e-mail: twarkj@ecu.edu

264 J. E. TWARK
this genre is still relevant in the German filmmaking industry today, though
often parodied for its sentimentality and melodramatic plots.
Ostalgie
The neologism Ostalgie is a contraction of the German words for ‘east’ and
‘nostalgia’. Since the mid-1990s it has been used often pejoratively to refer to
the longing of many eastern Germans for the stability and familiarity of their
former country and for their beloved cultural and consumer products as tokens
of their lost identity and connection to home.
Introduction
Comedy is currently the most successful domestic film genre in Germany
(Germany Movie Index 2020), and twenty-first-century German film comedies
display tremendously diverse topics and strategies of humour. The ‘stiff German’
or ‘Nazi’ stereotype can still often be found as the butt of jokes, but “shifting
gender roles, the new generation gap, the struggles of multiculturalism, and the
problems of German reunification” are also common themes (Roxborough
2018). Despite these multiple offerings, most film comedies from Germany
have not reached a wide audience abroad. This limited reception is partly due
to language and cultural barriers but also the fact that many contemporary
German comedies must be understood as products of this country’s twentieth-
century history. Most major German-language comedy discourses and genres
are rooted firmly in history, despite the films having been created in the past
two decades. These discourses and genres are discussed here in order of their
appearance, beginning with depictions of the effects of German reunification
and the socialist East German past in the first section. ‘Hitler humour’ parodies
of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich in the second section are followed by a
third section on transcultural comedies mostly made by Turkish German direc-
tors and scriptwriters or by other immigrants and their offspring. The fourth
section features contemporary film comedies that focus on present-day Germany
but frequently also reference past historical events, figures, and literary or filmic
texts. The conclusion reflects on recent developments in German comedy.
Film Comedies of German Reunification

and East Germany
The most profound historical event to have affected the Central and Eastern
European film industry in general, and German film comedy in particular, was
the end of the Cold War. This event was triggered by the fall of the Berlin Wall
on November 9, 1989, which led to the swift reunification of Germany on
October 3, 1990, and to the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 25,
1991. Because its capital was moved from Bonn to Berlin, post-wall Germany
is often referred to as the ‘Berlin Republic’.
15 GERMAN FILM COMEDY IN THE ‘BERLIN REPUBLIC’: WILDLY SUCCESSFUL… 265
Reunification spawned many film comedies dealing with the shift in East
Germany from a rather dictatorial socialism to a democratic, free-market soci-
ety, as this nation merged with the much larger, wealthier West Germany. Many
eastern Germans lost their jobs during this transformation and needed to
assimilate to the western German legal system; a capitalist economy with less
job security and more competition; and new freedoms of travel, speech, and
religion, among others. Filmmakers tried to capture this transition by focusing
on divergences between eastern German and western culture that lend them-
selves to humour, as well as on characteristics of East Germany that in hind-
sight appeared absurd. These film comedies often take the form of road movies,
foregrounding cultural differences by transporting protagonists to previously
off-limits western locations, or are set in the private microcosm of the protago-
nists’ family home.
Precursors of later reunification comedies are the zany road movie Go, Trabi,
Go—The Saxons Are Coming, directed by Peter Timm (1991), who grew up in
East Germany, and its sequel Go, Trabi, Go 2—That Was the Wild East, by west-
ern German directors Wolfgang Büld and Reinhard Klooss (1992). Both depict
an East German family struggling to cope with humiliating and unjust experi-
ences following German reunification. The family’s exaggerated naiveté and
cultural conflicts with West Germans highlight the materialism of the West and
emphasise their good nature and need to adapt quickly to their new circum-
stances. This now standard characterisation of the naïve, inexperienced East
German having to face unfamiliar customs and attitudes in the West is carried
forward in the touching 2003 road movie Schultze Gets the Blues by western
German director Michael Schorr. Schorr’s main character is a pitiable unem-
ployed East German salt miner who plays the accordion and travels to the US
South in search of zydeco music. Schultze Gets the Blues displays less overbear-
ing humour, in which East German encounters with various US Southerners
appear enriching rather than conflictual. A third reunification road movie is
western German director Markus Goller’s Friendship! (2010), which portrays
two youths who fly from Berlin to New York then drive to San Francisco to find
a long-lost father, strip dancing and selling fake pieces of the Berlin Wall to
finance their trip. Friendship! received mixed reviews for its inanity and sparse
dialogue but nevertheless became the most-watched German film of the year
2010 in its domestic market.
Reunification road movie comedies like these confront East-West inequali-
ties and respond to “the anxiety of loss and disorientation” (Mittman 2003:
344) by implying that “there are no answers inside of ‘Germany,’ as it is cur-
rently configured, to unification and its representational dilemmas. That they
do so while making their audiences laugh is perhaps a sign of the utopian desire
to unite, rather than polarise, their East-West German audiences” (Mittman
2003: 344). These films take protagonists abroad to distance them from the
immediate shock of having lost their nation and, at the same time, allow them
to reassess their identities as new citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany.
The fact that many were made by western Germans, however, tells us perhaps
266 J. E. TWARK
more about the western imagination of East Germans than the actual East
German experience. For East German perspectives, one must look to Andreas
Dresen with his popular comedies Grill Point (2002) and Summer in Berlin
(2005), Carsten Fiebeler with Kleinruppin Forever (2004), Andreas Kleinert,
or Dörte Franke.
Another type of reunification comedy satirises life in socialist East Germany—
officially called the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—which existed from
1949 to 1990. Two of these comedies, released in 1999, belong to a wave of
Ostalgie films criticised for trivialising the GDR’s strict regime: Sun Alley by
Leander Haußmann and Heroes Like Us by Sebastian Peterson, both based on
Thomas Brussig’s screenplays. Sun Alley presents a teenage clique with screw-
ball antics and sympathetic humour in a comic book aesthetic that preserves
memories of daily life in the GDR and caricatures the extreme measures taken
to avoid state censorship and other forms of oppression. Though making light
of their repressive political situation, its comic heroes “validate a history of
youth culture by edging out, albeit not completely erasing, their national his-
tory” (Kutch 2011: 219). Ostalgie films feed into a desire to be reminded of
the past, to perceive this past as having value, and occasionally to romanticise it
as self-defence against western prejudices.
One important Ostalgie tragicomedy is Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin!
(2003). Featured in film textbook (Reimer and Zachau 2005; Borra and
Mader-Koltay 2006; Brockmann 2010; Zachau et al. 2014), Good Bye, Lenin!
inverts the outward-looking road movie format to focus on one family’s
unusual fictional reunification experience in Berlin. Here, the enthusiastically
socialist protagonist is bedridden after having suffered from a coma that pre-
vented her from learning about the fall of the Wall. The film’s humour derives
from her son Alexander’s painstaking efforts to reconstruct the GDR in her
bedroom so she does not suffer a life-threatening shock. In one recreated tele-
vision (TV) news report, West Germans are shown fleeing into East Germany
purportedly to have a better life under socialism. Good Bye, Lenin! constructs a
utopian dream of socialist society that “deals with reality and the perception of
reality, communicated through TV images. It challenges viewers who got used
to seeing the conventional perception of the events following the fall of the
Berlin Wall as liberating, and applauding the West as victorious” (Reimer and
Zachau 2005: 253). Like other Ostalgie films, it manipulates cultural memory
to provoke reflection on what it meant to live, and attempt to live well, under
a repressive and economically disadvantaged regime. A more recent drama
comedy, In Times of Fading Light (2017) by Matti Geschonnek, depicts a fam-
ily microcosm less nostalgically, peering into the personal life of an embittered
socialist government official.
Reunification comedies like these keep East Germany alive in collective
memory by providing insights into the experiences of its social groups and
institutions. Another such institution was the East German army, put through
the comic wringer in NVA (2005), the acronym for Nationale Volksarmee, or
National People’s Army, by Leander Haußmann. An inexperienced East
German border guard is also the hero in the romantic comedy Beloved Berlin
Wall by Peter Timm (2009). The romantic comedy convention of a compli-
cated East-West courtship, rife with humorous cultural and political conflicts,
ends in a successful allegorical pairing as Germany unites with their symbolic
marriage. Two further Ostalgie films from 2017 are the action comedy Scouts
of Peace by Robert Thalheim, in which a former Stasi secret police spy is sent
on a new mission with his old team in the year 2015, and Forwards Ever! by
Franziska Meletzky, which rewrites the story of how the aging GDR leader
Erich Honecker contributed to the fall of the Wall. Both films treat history and
aging playfully.
Film comedies with characters and plots set in East Germany, or revolving
around the transition from two Germanies to one, bear witness to this histori-
cal shift and reveal difficulties of life in both. They entertain by both mocking
and drawing sympathy towards East German protagonists and their struggles
to survive in a repressive socialist regime or to adapt to new sociopolitical and
personal circumstances under capitalism.
‘Hitler Humour’: Film Comedies of Adolf Hitler

and the Nazis
With the border between their respective nations removed, East and West
Germans became more open and willing to speak not only about their differ-
ences but also about their shared National Socialist (Nazi) past and the
Holocaust (Niven 2001: 1–5). In the 1990s, media events and controversies
surrounding Stephen Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (1993), Daniel
Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1995), and the ‘Crimes of the
Wehrmacht’ travelling military exhibit raised awareness and taught Germans
about Nazi crimes and other, related historical events. This new openness
engendered much humour in popular culture, including film comedies that
parody and satirise Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
Hitler and the Nazis have often been parodied, for example, in Charlie
Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1967), or
the GDR Holocaust film by Frank Beyer, Jacob the Liar (1974). Some promi-
nent recent cases of German mockery of Hitler are Walter Moers’ comic book
Little Asshole and its sequels (1990–2001)—turned into the 1997 animated
film Little Asshole by Michael Schaack and Veit Vollmer—and Adolf, The Nazi
Pig (1998–2006), which led to the chart-hitting music video I’m Sitting in My
Bunker by Walter Moers and Thomas Pigor (2005). Heated debates accom-
pany nearly any representation of Hitler in Germany, because they are often
considered too sympathetic, but in the twenty-first century, provoking laughter
at the Führer has become common there (see Rosenfeld 2015).
The cultural phenomenon of ‘Hitler humour’ emerged from, and responds
critically to, the German discourse called Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming
to terms with the Nazi past), which comprises “Germans’ introspection into
268 J. E. TWARK
their nation’s guilt and responsibility for the Third Reich’s atrocities, as well as
their continuing investment in renegotiating the significance of this past and its
legacy in contemporary German culture” (Orich and Strzelczyk 2011: 296). It
includes scholarly efforts to document historical facts as well as non-fictional
and fictional representations of related events or people—even those found in
film comedies. Ongoing since the end of World War II, this work increased in
intensity in the late twentieth century. Along with the overarching project of
dealing with the past, ridiculing Hitler combines education with entertainment
and “history with the contemporary desire to consume it in a novel, palatable
form.… Hitler humor has thus become a potent, twofold vehicle seemingly
allowing Germans, on the one hand, to work continuously through their
nation’s guilt and, on the other, to find comic relief from the burden of the past
by experiencing it in a carefree, amusing format” (Orich and Strzelczyk 2011:
296–297).
Two major ‘Hitler humour’ film comedies are Swiss Jewish director Dani
Levy’s My Führer—The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler (2007), which
was the first non-animated feature film comedy of Hitler in Germany, and
David Wnendt’s Look Who’s Back (2015). Levy’s humour in My Führer is
based on superficial incongruities such as altering Hitler’s physical appearance
and behaviour to contradict real-life audio-visual images of him. The film’s
glaring moral problem, as with other representations of Hitler, is that Levy’s
approach is too benign. According to the ‘superiority theory’ of humour,
spectators laugh if they feel superior to someone considered to be inferior
(Ewen 2001: 38–39). Using humour in a ‘revenge fantasy’ to present Hitler
as inferior to the film’s viewers should thus be laudable. Feeling superior does
not prevent viewers from sympathising with comic characters made to suffer,
however, even if they are Hitler (Rosenfeld 2015: 270–273). Look Who’s Back
introduces similar pitfalls in its fantastical representation of a charismatic
Führer rising from the dead in the twenty-first century. Wnendt shows how
Hitler might be perceived today if he came back to life and interacted with
various people in Germany. As ‘counterfactual history’ (Troupin 2018: 107),
presenting no new facts about the Nazi past or Hitler, this film “provides a
glimpse into widely held social assumptions, beliefs, and interpretations about
Hitler, the Nazi past, contemporary Fascist currents, the effects of late capital-
ism, the refugee crisis, the discourse of political correctness, and other social,
cultural, and political actualities” (Troupin 2018: 107). Viewers learn more
from Look Who’s Back about contemporary Germany than about the historical
figure of Hitler.
What ties ‘Hitler humour’ films together is the attempt to ‘humanise’ Hitler
in order to understand him (Rosenfeld 2015: 234). These comedies provoke
controversy in Germany for exaggerating and thus trivialising him and the
crimes of the Third Reich. Their significance for German film history lies in the
directors’ attempts to bring Hitler down to earth, reduce his emotional power,
and undermine support for him and other dictators.
Transcultural Comedies
Transcultural film comedies have also proliferated in Germany in the twenty-
first century. Like East-meets-West reunification films, transcultural comedies
are often ‘culture clash comedies’. Depicting people from two or more cultures
interacting in their daily lives, these comedies expose glaring and often amusing
incongruities between divergent worldviews and customs, but also commonali-
ties and fears of the ‘Other’ they share, as well as the desire for belonging to
family or home. Various nationalities of immigrants to Germany and their off-
spring, often in tandem with ethnic Germans, began making feature-length
transcultural comedies in the early 2000s. Prior to then, foreigners and immi-
grants had been depicted in German comedies in the clichéd role of the awk-
ward, exaggerated clown with broken German.1 The fact that many ethnic
minorities, especially Turkish Germans, have now lived in Germany for over 50
years as invited guest workers, and begotten rather well-integrated heirs, has
resulted in comedies that explore both superficial and fundamental differences
between ethnic minority and German majority cultures as well as seek com-
mon ground.
Transcultural comedies have been made by and about various ethnic minori-
ties, including Jewish Germans. One such film, Go for Zucker (2004), was made
by the Swiss-born director of Mein Führer, Dani Levy, who has lived in Berlin
since 1980. Go for Zucker was the first German-language film to break the
taboo of using comedy to deal with Jewish identity construction in Germany
after World War II (Lenné Jones 2011: 53). Another Berlin transplant, the
Russian Jewish author Wladimir Kaminer, originally from Moscow, had his
autobiographical short stories depicting his awkward immigrant experiences
turned into the film Russian Disco by Oliver Ziegenbalg (2012). Sherel Peleg’s
short film We’re Back Again (2018) deals similarly with the Israeli-Jewish
immigrant experience in Germany with humour. Around 100,000 Jewish peo-
ple currently live in Germany, and the cultural conflicts in these films highlight
how they are viewed and treated.
Among transcultural German comedies, Turkish German films dominate in
both quantity and audience success. Turkish German immigrants and their
offspring make up the largest ethnic minority in Germany by far, comprising
2.8 million residents out of 82.3 million total (Göttsche 2018: 32). One of the
first major Turkish German comedies was the 2000 romantic comedy/road
movie In July, directed by the now superstar director Fatih Akin (born in
1973 in Hamburg to Turkish immigrant parents). Three ‘culture clash come-
dies’ are the wacky 2004 collaboration between director Torsten Wacker and
scriptwriter Kerim Pamuk called Süperseks; Kebab Connection (2005), directed
by Anno Saul from a screenplay by Fatih Akin and Ruth Toma; and the tem-
pestuous wedding satire Evet, I Do!, directed by Sinan Akkus (2008). The lat-
ter two films revamp the popular Turkish German topics of love relationships
and weddings by pairing Turkish and German partners, producing humorous
cultural conflicts. It is noteworthy that Fatih Akin called his 2009 crime story/
270 J. E. TWARK
romantic comedy Soul Kitchen, set in his hometown Hamburg, a Heimatfilm,

indicating he feels at home in Germany (Zander 2009). Many of these come-
dies are based on the romantic comedy conventions of the ‘unlikely couple
film’ (Wartenberg 1999: 7) and thus “offer criticism of existing social norms
and power structures by mobilizing sympathy for the transgressive couple,
whose love represents a human value that transcends the sociocultural differ-
ences and prejudices that the couple overcomes” (Berghahn 2012: 23). Most
transcultural German film comedies, like reunification comedies, deploy
humour to spotlight and reconcile cultural differences.
Three successful transcultural comedies from the past decade are Yasemin
Şamdereli’s tragicomic family history Almanya: Welcome to Germany (2011),
Bora Dağtekin’s romantic comedy Turkish for Beginners (2012), and Fatih
Akin’s coming-of-age road movie Goodbye Berlin (2016). Transcultural film-
makers like these interrogate German governmental, economic, and cultural
dominance in treating and representing immigrants and their offspring as a
distinct group. They triangulate the East-West German binary found in reuni-
fication films and “foster a tolerance for ambiguity and diversity” (Morreall
2016), thereby promoting acceptance of the Other in German-language cul-
ture. Despite this potentially positive influence, transcultural comedies in
Germany should now be considered against the backdrop of the 2015 European
refugee crisis. The massive influx of Middle Eastern and African migrants from
war-torn and impoverished countries seeking asylum has, for example, led to
the rise of nationalist parties in Germany and other European countries.
Germany’s admittance of the vast majority of these immigrants elicited an
accompanying wave of anti-immigrant sentiments there (see Holmes and
Castañeda 2016).
Film Comedies of Contemporary Germany

Film comedies that poke fun at and critique contemporary Germany satirically
cover a wide range of topics and genres. These films were made for entertain-
ment but also help viewers understand unique and universal aspects of German
culture and society. The mock-Western Manitou’s Shoe (2001), directed by
television and radio comedian Michael ‘Bully’ Herbig, for example, is a screw-
ball comedy without higher aspirations that absurdly transports twentieth-
century US and German popular culture to a bygone Native American setting.
The TV premiere of Manitou’s Shoe garnered the private German television
station Pro 7 its all-time highest viewership because it spoofs novels by the
beloved German author Karl May and previous German Western films. Herbig
has since become a prominent director of film parodies such as Dreamship
Surprise (2004), a hilarious take-off of Star Trek and other outer-space odysseys.
The box-office hit romantic comedies Rabbit Without Ears (2007) and its
sequel Rabbit Without Ears 2 (2009), both directed by famous German actor
and director Til Schweiger, highlight problems produced by fluctuating gender
roles and the need for work-life balance in contemporary courtship. They
satirise the German tabloid press for its sensationalist journalism and cut-throat
workplace policies. The Ice-Skater (Markus Imboden, 2015) comments criti-
cally on Germany’s leading role in European politics in a caricature of German
Chancellor Angela Merkel using ice skating as therapy for a head injury result-
ing in amnesia.
Four fascinating character studies among this diverse bunch are the vigilante
justice film Quiet as a Mouse by Marcus Mittermeier (2004); Grave Decisions, a
delightful Heimatfilm by Marcus H. Rosenmüller (2006); the feminist comedy
The Hairdresser by Doris Dörrie (2010); and the generational conflict comedy
Toni Erdmann by Maren Ade (2016). These films encourage reflection on the
unexpected results of personal choices and uncontrollable misfortunes, as well
as on the reasons for societal rejection or acceptance for one’s actions, person-
ality, or physiognomy. Toni Erdmann, nominated for a Foreign Language Film
Academy Award, is set outside Germany in Bucharest, Romania and addition-
ally critiques globalisation, capitalism, and careerism. Director Ade condemns
the decisions of female German business consultant Ines Conradi and the cor-
porations Ines advises that purchase and downsize companies to maximise
profits. This critique is embedded in a father-daughter generational conflict
fuelled by Ines’ workaholic career ambitions, which cause her to neglect her
family in Germany. Actress Sandra Hüller, who plays Ines, said in an interview:
“I think the desperation of the people is the origin of comedy” (Silverstein
2017). The humour in Toni Erdmann results from the incongruity produced
by desperate acts: Ines’ distressed father Winfried attempts to snap Ines out of
her desperate career obsession by donning an outlandish wig and fake teeth to
impersonate a motivational business coach named Toni Erdmann and follow
her around as she works and socialises. Figure 15.1 shows the two after he has
handcuffed his wrist to hers, claiming he lost the key, so she must take him with
Fig. 15.1 Winfried, posing as Toni Erdmann, handcuffed to Ines

272 J. E. TWARK
her. His smile contrasts with her frown in the image, as this absurd scene con-
trasts with the otherwise bland European street in the background. Humour is
produced here by means of surprise and embarrassment. The unexpected keeps
happening unexpectedly in this unique film that adds global economic critiques
and clowning to the German comedy inventory.
Three other comedies that scrutinise profound issues of concern in contem-
porary Germany are Jan Ole Gerster’s A Coffee in Berlin (2012), Dietrich
Brüggemann’s Heil (2015), and Simon Verhoeven’s Welcome to Germany
(2016). A Coffee in Berlin uses a slacker film narrative in a stylised black-and-
white aesthetic to comment on present and past German history. Director
Gerster questions the construction of “German identity, cultural memory, and
the ways in which Nazi barbarism is represented and perceived by young
Germans in the unified Berlin Republic” (Blankenship and Twark 2017: 366).
It constitutes an alternative to Hollywood-style heritage films which Eric
Rentschler (2000) calls the “cinema of consensus” because many depict history
following a similar melodramatic pattern (275). Heil lampoons not only the
ideologies, prejudices, and political activities of right-wing radicals and
Neonazis in contemporary Germany but also those of left-wing counter-
protesters, the police, journalists, and middle-class bystanders. Disparaged by
German critics for its ludicrous humour and stereotypical characters, Heil nev-
ertheless supplies “a good basis for class discussion on the propagation of right-
wing ideology in mainstream society, the mechanisms of media discourses, and
the challenges facing a modern, civil society” (Busche 2015). Welcome to
Germany probes satirically the attitudes of wealthy ethnic Germans towards
refugees who do not conform to their rules of etiquette and political correct-
ness. These films provoke thought on identity construction and suitable ways
to deal with Neonazism, xenophobia, and immigration in Germany today.
Case Study: Suck Me Shakespeer (Bora Dağtekin, 2013)

The boisterous high school comedy Suck Me Shakespeer by Turkish German
director Bora Dağtekin is featured here because it showcases various humour
strategies to convey social criticism, reworks themes found in earlier German
comedies, and was enormously popular in all German-speaking countries. It
and its two sequels became a cultural phenomenon as the top-grossing German
films in the domestic market in 2013, 2015 (Suck Me Shakespeer 2), and 2017
(Suck Me Shakespeer 3) (Barraclough 2017). Capitalising on the fan base from
his television series Turkish for Beginners (2006–2009) and its spin-off film
mentioned above, Dağtekin recast the Tunisian Austrian actor Elyas M’Barek
in the trilogy’s lead role as a Turkish German character. In the first film, dis-
cussed here, the petty criminal played by M’Barek is released from prison after
having been incarcerated for robbing a bank, pretends to be a schoolteacher,
takes over a wildly disobedient high school class, and converts the students into
enthusiastic readers of classical German literature.
The film’s title, Suck Me Shakespeer, and high school setting contain two key
German cultural references. Its original title in Germany, Fack Ju Göhte, con-
tains ‘Göhte’ as an awkward misspelling of the school’s name, ‘Goethe
Gesamtschule’, dedicated to the classical German author Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe (1749–1832). His status in Germany rivals that of Shakespeare in the
English-speaking world. A Gesamtschule is a comprehensive school like those in
the US attended by students with all academic abilities. Most German schools
are separate institutions offering an occupational, professional, or college-
preparatory degree. The Gesamtschulen, occupational, and professional schools
generally educate economically poorer, marginalised, and immigrant child
populations and thus are usually lower performing and more violent than the
academically more rigorous college-preparatory schools. Knowing these cul-
turally specific references aids in understanding how humour functions in this
film to draw attention to conflicts between underprivileged or neglected pupils
and their frustrated teachers.
Suck Me Shakespeer has four intertwined plotlines: the overarching high
school makeover; the crime story that sets the tale in motion and parallels it; a
coming-of-age story in which the protagonist matures with another teacher;
and a romantic comedy uniting him and this nerdy female teacher. All plotlines
converge in a quintessential ‘happy ending’. The high school transformation
relies heavily on physical and verbal slapstick as well as situational humour and
scatology (‘toilet humour’). Alan Dale (2000: 3) writes: “a slapstick gag is a
physical assault on, or collapse of, the hero’s dignity; as a corollary, the loss of
dignity by itself can result in our identifying with the victim. The mishap can
be heightened by the plot”. The slapstick humour in Suck Me Shakespeer sets up
an ambiguous audience aversion/attraction to the callous male protagonist,
Zeki Müller, as he inflicts this violence on schoolchildren. Seeking employment
at the Goethe Gesamtschule, Zeki arrives displaying excessively rough man-
ners. He topples the students’ bicycles with his car, threatens them, smears
chewing gum on one boy’s shirt, and slams a door on another. His actions elicit
shock, disgust, and Schadenfreude—the pleasure experienced when someone
else suffers pain or humiliation, partly because we remain unscathed. Because
many schoolchildren are depicted as cocky and disobedient, Zeki’s ‘punish-
ment’ of them appears somewhat justified and viewers may sympathise with
him. Later in the film, Zeki explains his violent behaviour in a voiceover: he
dropped out of the same school because “the streets robbed me of my child-
hood”. Zeki’s behaviour is thus revealed to be a revenge fantasy in which he
punishes others for his failure to graduate and make a better life for himself.
After the nerdy teacher Lisi cleverly blackmails Zeki into taking over an
unruly class, Dağtekin uses a fast-paced, well-choreographed slapstick sequence
to draw yet more audience sympathy towards Zeki and to teach him some valu-
able lessons. In this scene, the infamous Class 10b has a tripwire release a
bucket of tar over Zeki’s head, glues his pants to his chair, then coats him in
feathers that blow from his car vents as he tries to escape. This slapstick vio-
lence has serious undertones in referencing the practice of ‘tarring and
274 J. E. TWARK
feathering’, used historically (and in other film comedies) as punishment for a

crime or public humiliation. This torment sparks Zeki’s desire to earn the stu-
dents’ respect and educate them better. Zeki is an unusual slapstick victim
because his attractive appearance and physical prowess contrast with the typical
slapstick character, who is generally very thin or overweight, like the iconic US
film comedians Laurel and Hardy, who are physically disadvantaged. His
strength makes him a powerful agent in carrying out disciplinary violence but
also a comically incongruous victim of the schoolchildren’s pranks.
The film’s crime story plotline is propelled by Zeki’s need to unearth the
stolen cash that his girlfriend, a strip-dancer, buried for him in the foundation
of the Goethe school’s new gymnasium and that he needs to pay a debt owed
to the vicious strip-club boss. Here, the humour is based on exaggerated stock
characters, such as the sexually objectified strip-dancer with a good heart and
her mean boss. The third plot, transforming Zeki from a gangster into an effec-
tive teacher, constitutes a Bildungsfilm or coming-of-age narrative. As he
grows, Zeki acts ever more cultivated and caring, so that the humour pro-
gresses from violent slapstick antics to a more sophisticated humour requiring
reflection, self-awareness, and respect. One way he convinces the students to
abandon their drug-dealing career plans is to take them on a field trip to visit a
drug addict and a family of welfare recipients whose daughter is a prostitute
and son is a Neonazi (see Fig. 15.2). While the Neonazi sleeps, Zeki threatens
comically to wake him by pinching his nipple while his group of apprehensive
multi-ethnic students looks on. The excessive amount and large format of the
Nazi paraphernalia in the Neonazi’s bedroom, seen here, marks him as a fanatic
whom the students rightfully fear, whereas his temporarily harmless posture
asleep at Zeki’s feet produces humorous suspense. Many contemporary German
comedies incorporate Hitler or Nazi references to deflate their power as iconic
figures. Hitler or the Nazis are often mocked or invoked as insults for charac-
ters who act in stereotypically ‘uptight German’ ways.
Fig. 15.2 Zeki threatens to wake a Neonazi as his students look on

The final plotline consists of the unlikely couple love story of the ill-
mannered bank robber Zeki and the overzealous teaching intern Lisi
Schnabelstedt. Their love story follows romantic comedy conventions, relying
on witty conversations and the ‘comedy of repulsion’ (Richardson 2012) to
reveal their weaknesses but gradually bind them together. Kartina Richardson
(2012) defines ‘repulsion’ in film comedy as emerging from the “cultivation of
moments of sincerity toward increasingly obsolete cultural norms: ideas of suc-
cess, professionalism, sexuality, masculinity, entertainment or social interac-
tion”. This sincerity “causes excruciating discomfort, for witnessing someone
else’s belief in something we’ve decided is a joke, is pure vulnerability”
(Richardson 2012). Filmmaker Dağtekin has Lisi exhibit a gut-wrenching vul-
nerability in her interactions with Zeki and her students, who play pranks on
her such as smearing faeces on a door handle. She attempts to act cool, for
example, by peppering her German with bungled English expressions: instead
of “don’t fuck with me”, she says, “don’t suck with me”. Like Zeki, she suffers
various mishaps such as being accidentally shot in the backside with a hormone
dart during a field trip to a farm. Her vulnerabilities eventually warm Zeki’s
heart, completing the romantic comedy arc from antipathy to attraction.
Though from different backgrounds, both characters undergo similar growth,
albeit in different facets of their personalities and thinking. Lisi predictably
teaches Zeki effective pedagogical strategies, manners, and grammar, and Zeki
converts her from an uptight nerd to a self-confident woman. The film’s ‘happy
ending’ transforms Zeki and Lisi along with their students.
This film is significant for transcultural German film comedy history because,
although it portrays characters of multiple ethnicities, its focus is socioeco-
nomic and not transcultural conflicts. Dağtekin tellingly gives Zeki Müller an
ethnically blended name, juxtaposing the Turkish ‘Zeki’ with the German
‘Müller’. The verbal slapstick in Zeki’s interactions with Class 10b produce
further ethnic ambiguity. Introducing himself as ‘Mr. Müller’, Zeki deflects any
insinuation he might not be German. When asked by a pupil: “Why’s your
name Müller? You don’t look like a Müller. You’re a brother, man,” Zeki
responds: “Cut the Turko shit. An F for you.” Zeki similarly diverts a social
worker’s potential prejudices when she asks: “Are you from the Mideast?” by
responding: “Yes, but no fear. I don’t shoot.” Suck Me Shakespeer adopts the
transcultural film convention of the romantic comedy subplot contrasting two
characters from different backgrounds, but their cultural differences derive
from their unequal educational levels and deficient social skills instead of their
ethnicities. Dağtekin avoids transcultural clichés by focusing on the detrimen-
tal effects on students and teachers of social class divisions, drug abuse, bully-
ing, and other problems found not only in Germany but also in other nations.
The fast-paced slapstick choreography, situation comedy, and “comedy of
repulsion” in Suck Me Shakespeer produce a utopian fantasy that strives to cre-
ate an ideal world where no cultural and economic divisions exist (Schröder
2017). Though morally questionable in showcasing and trivialising violence
and humiliation, it encourages reflection on the teaching profession, the role of
the humanities in education, and the state of contemporary youth culture.
276 J. E. TWARK
Conclusion
The German comedy film industry takes creative approaches to German his-
tory, contemporary German life, and multicultural interactions among ethnic
Germans, various ethnic minorities, and immigrants. Though fundamentally
German, these films respond to the ways our world is becoming ever
more globally connected. They tell universal stories of displacement, identity
(re)construction, and prejudice, as well as reference historical events and
figures from World War II to the recent refugee crisis, and from Goethe to
Angela Merkel. They align with the German saying: “Humor ist, wenn man
trotzdem lacht” (“humour is when one laughs anyway”).
New German comedies continue to carry forward the discourses and genres
discussed above. Veteran filmmaker Sönke Wortmann’s The First Name (2018),
based on the French drama comedy What’s in a Name? (2012), probes what it
means to live in Germany today with the Nazi legacy. Another experienced
director, Doris Dörrie, sends a young German woman to Japan to work with
the fictional non-profit organisation Clowns4Help and bring laughter to the
victims of the March 2011 tsunami that destroyed the Fukushima nuclear reac-
tor in Greetings from Fukushima (2016).
Dörrie’s pioneering efforts raised comedy’s popularity in Germany in the
late 1980s and 1990s. In an interview following her comedic success with
Men… (1985), Dörrie supplies clues as to what boosted comedy in Germany
(see also Brockmann 2000). After having studied in the US in the early 1970s,
Dörrie observed: “What I realized when I came back is that we Germans don’t
have a real feel for humor—or any sense of humor at all”. Mentioning the rich
Jewish German humour tradition from the Weimar Republic that was abol-
ished by the Nazis, she says further: “The uptight Germans of the Federal
Republic […] are afraid to engage in repartee because joking means revealing
a part of yourself. The Germans have dreadfully little identity—and identity
requires a lot of humor […]. Everybody can be trained, though, to a certain
sense of humor, so maybe I got a certain training in America” (Markham 1986:
19). Dörrie, Wortmann, and fellow comedy directors born since the 1950s
have been open to influences from the past and other nations. They thereby
created a large domestic film comedy market in Germany.
Now that reunification has progressed, and the Berlin Republic is settling
into its new identity, it is able to turn its focus in comedy films towards a wide
variety of social issues. This more stable identity opens Germans to the reveal-
ing of fissures and weaknesses in their society. Comedy’s expansion there can
thus be considered a sign of German normalisation: Germans no longer feel
the need to take themselves so seriously and are willing to approach challenges
and divisions through the lens of humour. This genre’s success also derives
from the fact that Hollywood comedies have long flooded the German market,
creating a desire for home-grown comedies that address local issues. Filmmakers,
finding the comical in social issues facing Germany today, are putting them into
a format that has mass appeal. This success also has much to do with the
German film industry not taking itself as seriously as in the past (as a primarily
high-brow socially critical and educational medium) but instead re-embracing
its value as entertainment that can concurrently highlight social and economic
issues. Many German comedies from the 1950s to 1980s are primarily slapstick
and markedly apolitical, but more recent ones have rediscovered comedy’s abil-
ity to be engaging, meaningful, and funny at the same time. It will be interest-
ing to see how Germans continue to develop their ‘funny bones’.

1. What topics do German comedies poke fun at? What types of audience
reactions might the directors wish to provoke and why?
2. Which strategies of humour do German film directors use in the film(s)
you have watched and for what purposes?
3. What do viewers of German film comedies learn about history as well as
contemporary life in Germany?
4. How do German comedies use humour to create and to call into ques-
tion the cultural or socioeconomic Other?
5. How do German film comedies compare with other film comedies you
have seen? Discuss their strategies of humour, character portraits, social
criticism, notions of ‘political correctness’, and controversial approaches
to politically or socially sensitive topics.
Note
1. For examples of how this tendency expresses itself, see the Filmportal.de article
“What You Looking At? and The Comedy of Immigration: The Foreigner as
Laughing Stock and Walking Cliché.”
References
Barraclough, Leo. 2017. German Blockbuster Comedy ‘Fack Ju Goehte 3’ Picked Up
by Picture Tree. Variety, 9 November. https://variety.com/2017/film/news/fack-
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CHAPTER 16
On the Ambiguous Charm of Film Noir:

Elle and the New Type of Woman
Begoña Gutiérrez-Martínez and Josep Pedro
Definitions
Film Noir
Film noir is a highly influential genre that crystallised between the 1940s and
the late 1950s within the framework of Hollywood cinema. Generally identi-
fied with dark urban atmospheres, ambiguous characters and femme fatales, its
development was the result of a complex hybridisation between different
genres and artistic movements, including hard-boiled American literature,
crime films, German expressionism, French poetic realism and existentialism. It
may be situated within film mannerism, a transitional mode of representation
that transformed the characterisation and formal elements that predominated
in Hollywood during the decades between the 1930s and 1950s.
This chapter is framed within the R+I research project “Public Problems and
Controversies: Diversity and Participation in the Media Sphere” (Ref:
CSO2017-82109R), funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities,
Government of Spain. Pedro wishes to acknowledge the support granted by the
Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, Government of Spain, under the
postdoctoral contract Juan de la Cierva-Formación at Universidad Carlos III de
Madrid (FJC2018-036151-I).
B. Gutiérrez-Martínez (*)
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
J. Pedro
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

282 B. GUTIÉRREZ-MARTÍNEZ AND J. PEDRO
Neo-noir
Neo-noir is a film noir sub-genre that developed in the early 1960s and contin-
ues to be produced. It broadly refers to films that draw on some of film noir’s
canonical archetypes and conventions, while transforming and adapting them
to changing circumstances and contexts. Marked by a greater self-consciousness
and more intense stylistic hybridisation, neo-noir encompasses an even wider
variety of films, directors and sub-categories (retro-noir, future-noir, sci-fi/
noir, psychological thriller, crime drama, erotic neo-noir, etc.).
Hybridisation
In its more straightforward sense, hybridisation refers to “sociocultural pro-
cesses in which discrete structures or practices that existed separately are com-
bined to generate new structures, objects and practices” (García Canclini 2009:
iii). A broader understanding comes from Bakhtin’s dialogic discussion about
discourse. Hybridisation is seen as an intrinsic quality of language, as any con-
crete discourse necessarily draws on and contests previous works, discourses
and voices from ongoing traditions. Both conceptual meanings are
complementary.
Introduction
Film noir is one of the most successful and influential traditions in film history.
Its characteristic works and features have been disseminated globally, and its
transmedia expansion has been consolidated within contemporary popular cul-
ture, particularly in literature, film, music and video games. Though generally
identified with its canonical Hollywood incarnation and postwar urban con-
text, film noir’s bond with Europe is particularly relevant and intense due to
historical and artistic reasons. Accordingly, this chapter interrogates the
Hollywood-European binary by exposing the ways in which the transnational
development of film noir has been nurtured and enriched by diverse cultural
traditions, identities and languages. While American film noir is primarily
linked to ‘hard-boiled’ literature and to the stylisation of Hollywood crime
dramas, the notion of European noir emerged from avant-garde aesthetics and
existentialist visions of life. Nevertheless, both traditions have influenced each
other, contributing to a more complex global genre with distinct national
incarnations.
The origins of film noir were marked by a variety of artistic influences,
including European avant-garde movements such as German expressionism,
French poetic realism and Italian Neorealism, as well as by chiaroscuro painting
techniques mastered by European artists (Leonardo Da Vinci, Caravaggio,
Rembrandt, etc.). Furthermore, its cinematic development is strongly associ-
ated with the exile of European filmmakers such as Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger,
Billy Wilder, and Robert Siodmak, who fled Nazism and contributed decisively
16 ON THE AMBIGUOUS CHARM OF FILM NOIR: ELLE AND THE NEW… 283
to the transformation of Hollywood cinema (Schrader 1996: 55–56; Spicer

2010: xli–xlii). Other celebrated European directors who have produced sig-
nificant noirs or neo-noirs include Michael Curtiz, Alfred Hitchcock, Jacques
Tourneur, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Roman Polanski
and Paul Verhoeven. Thus, the European contribution to film noir has often
been associated with aesthetic innovations, transformative migrations and
auteurs, while the United States has been linked to a more consolidated indus-
try and studio system (Schatz 1981; Spicer 2007: 3–7).
Moreover, the naming of ‘film noir’ is attributed to French critics such as
Jean-Pierre Chartier, Nino Frank (Italian-born), and Raymond Borde and
Etienne Chaumeton (2002), who—drawing on the literary noir and hard-
boiled traditions—used the term to describe American films such as The Maltese
Falcon (1941), Laura (1944), Murder, My Sweet (1944), The Woman in the
Window (1944) and Double Indemnity (1944). These films were premiered in
Paris in the summer of 1946, and they still represent quintessential works of
film noir. It is also important to state that there are significant film noir tradi-
tions in different European countries, especially in France, the United Kingdom,
Germany, Spain and Italy, as well as in Denmark, Finland and Norway (Spicer
2007, 2010). Other countries, including Portugal, Romania and Czech
Republic, also demand further attention. This recognition exemplifies the
hybridisation between shared genre conventions and traces of local, regional
and national identities that are intimately linked to particular scenarios, lan-
guages, accents, characters and sociopolitical situations. As stated by Spicer
(2010: xlviii), each European film noir has “different chronologies and displays
distinctive national characteristics that reflect a particular nation’s history, its
political organisation, its cultural traditions, the state of its film industry, and
the strength of its cinematic culture”. Thus, rather than considering film noir
“an indigenous American form”, a “self-contained reflection of American cul-
tural preoccupations” and a “unique example of a wholly American film style”
(Silver and Ward 1992: 1), this chapter considers film noir as a hybrid transna-
tional genre, marked by diverse forms of appropriations and hybridisations
between globalised conventions and different national and cultural identities
and circumstances.
The aim of the chapter is to analyse European film noir in the twenty-first
century, and the case study of Elle (2016) is one means by which this is accom-
plished. Directed by controversial Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven and star-
ring emblematic French actress Isabelle Huppert, Elle is a French, German and
Belgian co-production that has captured the attention of critics and audiences,
exposing the importance of the noir tradition in Europe and the multiple ways
in which it continues to be represented and reformulated. First, the chapter
provides a necessary contextualisation of the genre’s nature. Drawing on film
theory, particularly on psychoanalytic and feminist film theories, it then
discusses film noir and neo-noir by focusing on the glamorous femme fatale
figure and on the crisis of masculinity represented by dysfunctional male char-
acters. The chapter explores a variety of significant films within the noir tradi-
tion, particularly the trend set by four cornerstone works that are useful in
considering Elle: The Blue Angel (1930), a European proto-noir film; Double
Indemnity (1944), a Hollywood film noir masterpiece; and The Fourth Man
(1983) and Basic Instinct (1992), Verhoeven’s most relevant previous neo-
noirs. The analysis of Elle focuses on the dialectics between the female and male
characters, and on the examination of style within European neo-noir in the
twenty-first century.
The Genre Debate: On the Nature of Film Noir

In both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, film noir has provoked intense
scholarly debate about its nature. As Hirsch (2008: 71) points out, “noir has
been called a ‘sensibility,’ a sub-category of the crime film, a species of psycho-
logical thriller, a mystery with a private eye as its hero; but [paradoxically] it has
not often been called a genre”. In a seminal article, film critic, writer and direc-
tor Paul Schrader (1996: 53) states that film noir is not a genre because, unlike
the western and gangster genres, it is more defined by subtle qualities of tone
and mood than by conventions of setting and conflict. Instead, he defines film
noir as a historical period (1944–1958) in which Hollywood films portrayed
“the world of dark, slick city streets, crime and corruption” (Schrader 1996:
53). However, the author rightfully discusses film noir features that expose
thematic, narrative and mise-en-scène conventions: darker lighting, fatalistic
themes, hopeless tone, ambiguous characters and so on. He also states that film
noir allowed artists to address previously forbidden themes, and that its con-
ventions were strong enough “to protect the mediocre” (Schrader 1996: 62).
Therefore, he inevitably refers to the conventional yet dynamic nature of genre
and genre films.
Thomas Schatz (1981) argues that a genre approach provides the most
effective means for understanding and analysing Hollywood cinema. He con-
siders genre films a cooperation between artists and audiences who celebrate
their collective values and ideals (Schatz 1981: 15). He includes a discussion of
film noir within the framework of Hollywood genres, but he is cautious of
explicitly labelling it a genre, as the specific chapter is titled under the less wide-
spread and also elusive category ‘hardboiled-detective film’. Significantly, the
author emphasises the double meaning of film noir’s ‘darkness’ or ‘blackness’:
“visually, these films were darker and compositionally more abstract than most
Hollywood films; thematically, they were considerably more pessimistic and
brutal in their presentation of contemporary American life” (Schatz 1981: 112).
According to communication theories linked to semiotics, anthropology
and narratology, genre has a crucial double dimension: it relates both to textual
and pragmatic elements. Genre has an acknowledged exemplary character
regarding text, but text is rarely a perfect realisation of genre (Castañares 1995:
80). Thus, for Castañares, genre is more often an abstract theoretical category
than one defined by case study examinations. Nonetheless, in practice, generic
categories enjoy great efficiency, extension and shared knowledge: genres con-
stitute writing models for authors and horizons of expectations for recipients.
Therefore, apart from films, genres consist of “specific systems of expectation
and hypothesis that spectators bring with them to the cinema and that interact
with films themselves during the course of the viewing process” (Neale
2000: 158).
From a pragmatic perspective, genre is inseparable from its spatial-temporal
context. Thus, the association between a genre and the diverse participants that
intervene in the film’s production and reception is pivotal to understand the
heterogeneity of film noir. In the current global scenario, the development and
consolidation of nationally defined film noir traditions reveal many shared traits
but also present important differences related to narrative, style, culture, iden-
tity and geography. The textual and pragmatic understanding of genre acknowl-
edges this complexity, dynamism and multiplicity of genres and sub-genres that
are collectively constructed and cyclically revived. “In the realm of art”, as
posited by Todorov (1975: 6), “every work modifies the sum of possible works,
each new example alters the species”. Therefore, according to Todorov, a text
is not only the realisation of a pre-existing system but also a transformation of it.
The concept of hybridisation is useful to understanding film noir and its
relevance within European cinema in the twenty-first century. Its use within
this particular genre tradition is most clearly exemplified by ‘noir hybrids’
(Spicer 2010): sci-fi/noirs (Metropolis, 1927; Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
1956; Blade Runner, 1982), horror-noirs (Cat People, 1942, 1982; Psycho,
1960; Se7en, 1995), noir comedies (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958;
Robbery at 3 O’clock, 1962; The Big Lebowski, 1998) and erotic neo-noirs such
as The Fourth Man (1983) and Basic Instinct (1992), both directed by Dutch
filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, whose latest film Elle (2016) is analysed as a case
study. In these noir hybrids, hybridisation is generally equated to the combina-
tion of two different genres. Thus, the development of new possibilities blurs
artistic boundaries, while constantly reformulating the film noir tradition and
its ambiguous charm.
A broader understanding of hybridisation comes from Bakhtin’s discussion
about the dialogic orientation of discourse. His ideas are key to acknowledging
the multiple ways in which authors and viewers necessarily draw on and contest
previous works, discourses and voices from established, ongoing genre tradi-
tions such as film noir: “On all its various routes toward the object, in all its
directions, the word encounters an alien word and cannot help encountering it
in a living, tension-filled interaction” (Bakhtin 1981: 279). From this perspec-
tive, hybridisation is seen as an intrinsic quality of language, as any concrete
discourse, having taken “meaning and shape at a particular historical moment
in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of
living dialogic threads” (Bakhtin 1981: 276).
Therefore, it must be acknowledged that, even in its most ideal and suppos-
edly ‘purest’ form, film noir is the product of a complex hybridisation between
diverse inherited genres, styles and artistic conventions associated with Europe
and the United States. This hybridisation becomes much more pronounced in
the development of neo-noir, a broader and more diffuse category that is often
combined with other generic terms such as thriller, crime, horror, comedy and
science fiction. Additionally, the constant reinterpretation and global expan-
sion of film noir’s appealing themes, characters, atmospheres and sounds have
opened up new directions and generated further terms like retro-noir, future-
noir and hyper-noir, which point towards stylistic, thematic and conceptual
differences.
Mannerism, Femme Fatales and Dysfunctional Males

in Noir and Neo-Noir
From a historical perspective, the development of film noir is often situated

within the framework of ‘classical’ Hollywood cinema. Analogously, the term
‘classical noir’ (Spicer 2010: xlvi) has been used to name film noir in its canoni-
cal, postwar American period and urban context. However, from a narrative
and stylistic viewpoint, film noir is representative of film mannerism, a transi-
tional cinematographic style and mode of representation that deviated from the
established forms and norms of classical Hollywood cinema, while providing a
more obscure, twisted and realist vision of life and tale (González Requena 2006).
Mannerism developed a pronounced formal virtuosity that experimented
with camera positions and angles, as well as with innovative lighting techniques:
chiaroscuro, low-key visual style, venetian blind lighting and so on. The last is
defined by the use of lighting through venetian blinds, whose horizontal slats
allow the strategic control of shadows and lights, contributing to mystery and
contrast within film noir. The adoption of the protagonist’s point of view is
much more insistent than in classical cinema, and ambiguity is constantly rein-
forced. Accordingly, Schatz (1981: 113) explains that film noir “documented
the growing disillusionment with certain traditional American values in the face
of complex and often contradictory social, political, scientific, and economic
developments”. Furthermore, existentialism and Freudian psychology became
fashionable intellectual and literary trends, contributing to the emergence of
two archetypal characters: the male psychopath and the femme fatale, “that
sultry seductress who preys upon the hero and whose motives and allegiance
generally are in doubt until the film’s closing moments” (Schatz 1981: 14).
Diverse and dynamic, femme fatales are key characters of the film noir tradi-
tion, and their influence resonates across different genres, advertising cam-
paigns and music videos. Jean-Pierre Chartier (Palmer 1994: 9) describes them
as ‘particularly terrible’ women, while Krutnik (1991: 63) explains that glam-
orous femme fatales “tend to be women who seek to advance themselves by
manipulating their sexual allure and controlling its value”. Within this
perspective, Ballinger and Graydon (2007: 4) relate this figure to an intoxicat-
ing, beautiful and treacherous female character who is “sexually alluring, linked
to the underworld, unreliable and duplicitous in the extreme”. From a feminist
approach, Luhr (2012: 31) celebrates femme fatales as empowered and threat-
ening women who do not depend on “the support or approval of men to

define themselves”. They seduce, exploit and then destroy their sexual part-
ners, and their strength also demonstrates the inability of men to domi-
nate them.
The femme fatale archetype may be traced back to European proto-noir
films such as the tragicomic, late expressionist German film The Blue Angel
(1930), where the male protagonist, Professor Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings),
is humiliated by female lead Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich), a mesmerising caba-
ret dancer who drives him to a state of pitifulness and insanity. The concept of
masochism (Deleuze and Sacher-Masoch 1991) is useful in approaching the
dialectics of sexual difference that are established between the deadly femme
fatale figure and their male counterpart, often presented as dysfunctional (sub-
missive, masochist, incapable, obsessed, psychotic, humiliated, etc.). According
to Deleuze (1991), there is no masochism without contract or quasi-contract,
and the masochistic agreement has the purpose of executing all the desires and
orders of Deleuze’s ‘woman torturer’. The protagonists of The Blue Angel
materialise their contract through their wedding and marriage certificate,
which soon proves peculiar. While Lola looks deified, Rath begins a process of
physical and moral decline. He is then forced into a humiliating performance
at the Blue Angel cabaret, while his wife furtively kisses another man behind
the stage. Rath loses his mental and physical control, and he finally dies in the
high school classroom where he was once respected.
Inscribed in the canonical American film noir period, Double Indemnity
(1944) provides another highly significant representation of the femme fatale
(Hirsch 2008: 1–8; Spicer 2010: 77–79). The masochistic relationship between
Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) and Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is
manifested through a metaphor about speed limits and a fetishistic fixation on
the femme fatale’s ankles: “I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the
way that anklet of hers cut into her leg”, the protagonist confesses to his boss
and mentor. This increasing perturbation intensifies throughout the film
because, as Deleuze (1991: 72) explains, fetishism, suspense, delay and rejec-
tion are essential elements of the masochistic constellation. The relationship
between the woman torturer and the submissive man inverts traditional gender
and power roles, as the female protagonist gains authority and the main pro-
tagonist becomes a subdued male.
Associated with coldness, sentimentality and cruelty, the concept of the
woman torturer (Deleuze 1991) is suitable to describe both Lola Lola and
Phyllis Dietrichson. They transform the classical female character—as their
dedication to their partners becomes a masquerade—and the male characters
fail to become classical heroes. Instead, they display masochism: a bond
between pain and pleasure, humiliation, submission and fetishism. Like the
classical hero, they leave home with the purpose of captivating their object of
desire, but their weakness, ambiguity and ambivalence regarding these femme
fatales lead to transgression and, finally, to dead-end streets.
In consonance with changing political contexts and the advancement of

women in society, the development of neo-noir since the 1960s has presented
a renewed and heterogeneous femme fatale figure. Consider Beat Girl (1960),
Eve (1962), and Coffy (1973), which show the range of generational, geo-
graphic and cultural differences that fit into the neo-noir femme fatale. The
female protagonists maintain the essential psychological traits of femme
fatales—they are attractive, seductive and capable of driving men to despera-
tion, misery and, ultimately, death. Nonetheless, their social and economic
positions present important differences. Set in London, Beat Girl focuses on
the life of a dissatisfied, wealthy teenager, representing youth rebellion and
counterculture through style, music and disobedience. Eve is set in Venice, and
it tells the story of a French woman who seduces men and takes money from
them. As for Coffy, a prime example of African American 1970s ‘blaxploitation’
cinema, it presents a black-and-beautiful heroine and femme fatale (Pam Grier),
who seeks revenge for her sister, while fighting against the world of inner-city
drug and violence.
During the 1960s, a time of profound and convulsive sociocultural and
political changes, feminism gained wider public dissemination and acceptance
through the so-called second-wave feminism. Sex and the Single Girl (Brown
2003 [1962]) and The Feminine Mystique (Friedan 2001 [1963]) are two
important publications that reflected on the changing role of women in society
and on their sexuality. Two key aspects should be emphasised: the empower-
ment of women through increasing access to labour sectors and the idea of
sexual freedom, linked to permissiveness towards contraceptive pills, which
contributed to a pleasure-oriented conception of sex. These issues play an
important role in neo-noir, and they are playfully developed in Paul Verhoeven’s
The Fourth Man (1983) and Basic Instinct (1992), two insightful antecedents
of Elle (2016). Broadly situated within the context of postfeminism (Lindop
2015), both films feature extremely dangerous and highly eroticised indepen-
dent women who enjoy economic success and drive male protagonists to obses-
sion and insanity: Christine Haslag (Renée Soutendijk) and Catherine Tramell
(Sharon Stone), respectively. Thus, postfeminism is not only understood as a
response to the previous feminist waves but also as a discourse related to a
social, economic and political context that is “at least partially constituted
through the pervasiveness of neoliberalist ideas” (Gill 2008: 443).
Produced in the Netherlands, The Fourth Man is notorious for its erotic,
violent and religious overtones, while Basic Instinct, Verhoeven’s best-known
work, blurred the boundaries of mainstream Hollywood cinema due to its
depiction of sexuality, drugs and violence. Like Lola and Phyllis Dietrichson,
the femme fatales in The Fourth Man and Basic Instinct constitute unattainable
objects of desire for dysfunctional males who become victims of their perverse
games. Christine Haslag seduces controversial Dutch writer Gerard Reve, an
alcoholic, bisexual protagonist who develops the compulsive need to investi-
gate the death of her previous three husbands. As he immerses himself in a love
triangle with Christine and her other male lover, he panics on realising that he
is in real danger of becoming the fourth man to fall, and mystery and ambiguity
are emphasised until the end.
The femme fatale in Basic Instinct is a successful writer and psychologist
who lives in a mansion by the sea. A promiscuous and bisexual blonde, Tramell
firmly maintains control in her relationships and openly enjoys sex as an excit-
ing practice associated with pleasure, hedonism and success. Her intimidating
power comes from the combination of physical attractiveness, luxurious wealth
and specialised knowledge of feelings and situations. She uses this to her advan-
tage when dealing with the male protagonist, Nick Curran (Michael Douglas),
a San Francisco homicide detective who investigates her as the suspect of a
murder committed during sexual intercourse. Despite multiple warnings, the
dysfunctional male becomes addicted to the pleasure and danger associated
with the seductress femme fatale, who playfully uses him as a character for her
new novel, forcing him to face past traumas.
In contrast to ‘classical’ film noirs, neo-noir femme fatales tend to be more
emancipated. They display weaker legal bonds with male protagonists, but
their psychological and emotional superiority is generally strengthened. The
inclusive neo-noir category covers extensive ground, and it hosts a wide variety
of themes and styles (Conard 2007; Lindop 2015; Spicer 2007, 2010). Spicer
(2010: 215) distinguishes a modernist phase (1967–1980) that attempted to
transform generic conventions and a postmodern phase (1981–) in which ‘clas-
sical’ noir conventions have been embraced in multiple forms of intensification
and engagement. Although the ‘classical’ essence of film noir continues to be
cherished in neo-noir, this multiple and contaminated sub-genre favours
intense hybridisation, pastiche and typically post-classical voyeuristic experi-
ences. Unlike the ‘original’ creators of film noir, neo-noir authors are fully
informed by the historical tradition and have developed a significant degree of
self-consciousness and self-referentiality, which favour new mannerisms and
twists to thrill audiences.
The twenty-first century has brought further extensions of sub-traditions
and plots within neo-noir (gangster, robbery, psychological thriller, erotic,
science fiction, etc.), as well as a more pronounced tendency to feature female
characters as protagonists. In this regard, several French, Spanish, Swedish and
German productions should be mentioned: Merci pour le Chocolat (2000),
Baise-moi (2000), Lucy (2014); Nobody Will Speak of Us When We’re Dead
(1995), Just Walking (2008); The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009); and No
Place to Go (2000). An American remake of the Swedish film The Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo was produced in 2011, revealing the way in which European
cinema and literature continues to generate new ideas and projects that gain
further economic and social impact when appropriated by Hollywood.
Moreover, as discussed by Lindop (2015: 2–4), the controversial representa-
tion of the neo-noir femme fatale concentrates two differing and dominant
interpretations: one that considers them a projection of male fear, desire and
paranoia and another one that sees them as a politically effective symbol of
women’s empowerment, particularly within postfeminism.
The collected volume European Film Noir (Spicer 2007) identifies several
trends and concerns within distinct national incarnations of noir and neo-noir.
For instance, while contemporary French neo-noir is more indebted to polar
(police thriller) and political thriller, as well as to an intermittent dystopian
strain of tragic, visceral and disorientating hyper-noirs, British neo-noirs extend
the crime thriller trend by portraying marginal masculine identities (Spicer
2007: 8–10). It is also useful to think of a transversal, class-based distinction
between the twenty-first-century European neo-noirs that focus on upper-
middle-class and bourgeois environments and those centred on the under-
ground sphere. The former trend may be initially associated with French New
Wave directors such as Truffaut (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960), Godard
(Breathless, 1960) and Claude Chabrol (Merci pour le Chocolat, 2000; The
Flower of Evil, 2003; The Bridesmaid, 2004; A Girl Cut in Two, 2007), as well
as with other recent works like Hidden (Caché) (2005). The underground
representation trend, more formally and thematically extreme and explicit, may
be associated with contemporary urban thrillers related to crime, sex, violence
and drugs (the Pusher series 1996, 2004, 2005; Essex Boys, 2000; Dead Man’s
Shoes, 2004; Angels in Fast Motion, 2005), and with transgressive movements
like the New French Extremity (Baise-moi, 2000; Demonlover, 2002;
Irreversible, 2002; Secret Things, 2002).
Elle is broadly situated within the trend of French-based, bourgeois noirs
and neo-noirs, but it also participates in and contests rape-and-revenge narra-
tives. Particularly prominent within the noir tradition since the 1980s and
1990s, the rape-and-revenge trend retains a significant presence today, illus-
trating a representational and ideological link between postmillennial noir and
postfeminist discourse (Lindop 2015: 55–58). It is typically presented from the
viewpoint of female characters who seek retribution and refuse to tolerate male
abuse. It crosses genres (horror, noir, action, etc.), and it includes the afore-
mentioned twenty-first-century neo-noirs Baise-moi, Irreversible, Just Walking
and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as well as Elle—whose style, social world
and narrative path are, nonetheless, unique within the trend. Additionally, Elle
shares an intimate yet elusive intertextual relationship with the aforementioned
Verhoeven films, and with Huppert’s interpretations in Merci pour le Chocolat,
The Piano Teacher (2001), My Mother (2004) and Eva (2018), where she plays
unconventional and controversial roles linked to the femme fatale figure.
The examination of film noir and neo-noir as a constantly evolving transat-
lantic tradition, constructed through multiple appropriations and hybridisa-
tions, reveals a complex and wide-ranging universe of political and sociocultural
contexts, identities and actors. In the twenty-first century, European film noir
and neo-noir continues to provoke audiences through the typically mysterious
and ambiguous interrogation of the same primary issues, fears and anxieties
that nurtured film noir’s origin. As expressed by Spicer (2010: 218), “the
subject matter and core themes of classic noir—paranoia, alienation, existential
fatalism, and Freudian psychopathology—have been retained, but heightened”
in contemporary neo-noir through shocking narrative devices, editing and dis-
ruptive chronologies. The development of twenty-first-century European film

noir illustrates collective concerns about “psychological trauma, dysfunctional
relationships, existential dread, [and] the lure of money” (Spicer 2010: xlix), as
well as about crime, psychopathy, mental, sexual and behavioural disorders.
These concerns are deep seated and still resonate today all over Europe and
across its borders, as disillusionment, despair, migration, civil unrest, sex and
violence continue to dominate the media. However, despite European neo-
noir’s pronounced stylistic and identity hybridisation, its country-based cate-
gorisation prevails (French, British, Spanish, etc.), revealing the persistence of
certain national specificities within Europe, which are linked to the plurality of
languages, identities and cultural traditions.
Case Study: Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016)

Based on the novel Oh … by Philippe Djian (2012), Elle tells the story of a
modern, bourgeois, entrepreneur and independent woman, Michèle Leblanc
(Isabelle Huppert). Premiered at Cannes in May 2016, Elle’s initial credit titles
and music set a mysterious, intriguing yet temporarily calm atmosphere, which
is brutally interrupted by the sound of glass breaking and an indeterminate
screaming. Violence is prominent from the start, capturing the viewer’s atten-
tion. The spectator hears more screaming, like moans of pleasure from a man.
This precise moment illustrates the bond between violence and sex (see
González Requena 2004: 18). The camera takes a prudent distance, allowing
viewers to gain visual access from behind the door (See Fig. 16.1).
The shot composition is divided into two halves, setting a dual scenario of
polarities and contradictions that speaks about the characters’ psyche (more
hereafter). The right half is occupied by a dark brown wall that seems to hide
something unknown. In the other half, the protagonist lies on the floor.
Michèle’s eyes are closed and her body seems inert. Above her lies a heavier
Fig. 16.1 An unknown masked male rapes Elle’s female protagonist, violently inter-
rupting the calm suburban atmosphere of her bourgeois neighbourhood
man who dresses in black and wears a mask to hide his identity. She has been
raped at home by an unknown male aggressor. These leading characters are
surrounded by broken glasses and decorative objects, as well as by the protago-
nist’s underwear. Behind them, an open window gives entrance and exit to
Michèle’s house.
Throughout the film, the protagonist displays an ambiguous reaction to her
rape. Initially, she refuses to call the police because that would revive childhood
wounds and media sensationalism—when she was a child, her father commit-
ted multiple murders in the midst of an infamous psychotic episode.
Furthermore, she does not show any emotion when informing her friends and
ex-husband. Far from breaking physically or considering herself a victim, the
protagonist starts her own inquiry to find out who her attacker and rapist is.
Her cold, calculating and perverse personality pushes her to discursively under-
estimate the seriousness of the event, while acquiring different weapons (an axe
and a pepper-spray) to achieve the security that no man around her is capable
of providing. In this regard, she is characterised as a postmodern, self-sufficient
woman who does not need anyone to survive—an “active, freely choosing, self-
reinventing” figure of postfeminism that resembles the “autonomous, calculat-
ing, self-regulating subject of neoliberalism” (Gill 2008: 443). Isabelle Huppert
sums up these important reformulations by describing Michèle as a “new type
of woman”, “a postfeminist character building her own behaviour and space”,
which is “the product of that new era” (Verhoeven and Huppert 2016).
This original female protagonist simultaneously represents the role of differ-
ent archetypal characters in the noir tradition: the successful deadly woman
who exerts power over multiple men, as she is “overwhelmingly powerful,
autonomous and self-determining” (Lindop 2015: 14); the woman-victim, as
her rape may be seen as a sign of danger and vulnerability; and the female
detective, who investigates her own rapist. Elle appropriates and reformulates
notable canonical film noir conventions, and Michèle even wears a camel trench
coat, reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart’s now mythical style. Moreover, the
search for her rapist is represented through a dark mise-en-scène, an enigmatic
female protagonist and dysfunctional male characters. In this process, the
viewer travels through threatening streets and frightening night-time storms
that function as metaphors for the danger and mystery located within everyday
life in contemporary Europe.
Michèle is surrounded by several dysfunctional men who adore her, but who
may be also destroyed by her. Consider her ex-husband, Richard, a failed
writer; at one point, he unsuccessfully tries to capture the attacker and set him-
self up as the hero. He protectively monitors the surroundings of his ex-wife’s
house but, thinking that he may be her attacker, Michèle covers his face with
pepper-spray, seriously harming him. Similarly, their son Vincent is represented
as an immature and submissive young man whose life revolves around the
wishes of his girlfriend, with whom Michèle develops a rivalry. Moreover,
Robert—Anna’s husband and Michèle’s lover—is an unscrupulous and persis-
tent man, who is used by the protagonist to obtain pleasure; Anna is Michèle’s
best friend and associate, so their relationship is both personal and

professional.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, Michèle develops a perverse and mas-
ochistic relationship with her neighbour Patrick, a married Catholic broker
who will be ultimately uncovered as the most dysfunctional male in the story.
Despite the presence of his wife, Rebecca, Michèle initiates an erotic game with
Patrick during a Christmas dinner at her house. She also displays her perverse
character in a moment of reunion when she deliberately places a toothpick in
the food of her ex-husband’s girlfriend. This scene of subtle aggression is inter-
textually related with Merci pour le Chocolat and The Piano Teacher. In the
former, Huppert’s character places sleeping medication in the hot chocolate
she offers her guests. In the latter, her character injures one of her students by
introducing broken glass to her coat pocket. In addition, Michèle has a tense
and tempestuous relationship with her mother. When she announces her mar-
riage engagement to a much younger man during dinner, Michèle roars with
laughter and maliciously says: “How do you manage to be so grotesque?” The
Christmas reunion is then dramatically interrupted when Michèle’s mother
suffers a stroke that ultimately kills her. Michèle reacts with astonishment, and
that night Anna kisses her while they sleep in the same bed. In the meantime,
Robert (Anna’s husband) sleeps in the guest bed.
Michèle’s relationship with Patrick unfolds in a subsequent scene where, in
the midst of strong winds that may announce a blizzard, he goes to her house
with the excuse of helping her close the windows. In this furtive encounter,
they develop their erotic relationship, but Patrick suddenly apologises and
leaves. The sexual tension between these two characters increases as the film
progresses. One night, the unknown masked rapist again sneaks into the pro-
tagonist’s house, provoking another strikingly violent scene. Actively refusing
to be a victim, Michèle defends herself and manages to stop the rapist by stick-
ing scissors in his hand. She then takes off his mask and discovers that it is
Patrick, her neighbour. She is stunned, and the extreme weather conditions
symbolise the violent and uncontrollable sexual impulses on show, as well as
the unexpected discovery. In contrast with the eager desire for vengeance of
other European neo-noir femme fatales (Baise-Moi, Just Walking, The Girl with
a Dragon Tattoo…), Michèle interrogates Patrick, seeking understanding:
“How was it?” “Did you enjoy it?”, she asks him, “Why did you do it?” “It was
necessary”, he replies, and immediately leaves. Reinforced through climatic
metaphors, the verbalisation of this pathological need for violence highlights
the immanent and uncontrollable impulses latent in the suburban, bourgeois
territory, unveiling its dark side and hypocrisy.
The ambiguous relationship between Michèle and her rapist is articulated
through an uncomfortable and disturbing approximation and identification
between the victim and the aggressor. Instead of reporting him or avoiding
further contact, Michèle accepts the challenge and embraces the game. Along
with her son Vincent, she accepts Patrick’s impromptu dinner invitation, and
when Vincent falls asleep on the couch, she follows Patrick to the basement,
where he has installed a new boiler. Again, he exerts violence against her.
Trying to reduce the violent attack, she suggests a healthier and less brutal
sexual relationship, but he refuses. She then enters a sexually charged sadomas-
ochistic interaction and hits Patrick in the face. At that moment of climax, the
protagonist resembles the woman torturer figure facing a masochist male
(Deleuze 1991), and the burning boiler metaphorically refers to Patrick’s irre-
pressible instinctual drives. Masochism and sadism appear inextricably bound,
insofar as “a sadist is simultaneously a masochist” (Freud 2018: 26). Both
Patrick and Michèle find enjoyment in their brutal encounter and in their role
exchange (See Fig. 16.2). The screen shows a close up of Michèle’s face, which
increases the feeling of oppression that defines the scene. This suffocating sen-
sation is heightened by the intense and predominant reddish tone, which sym-
bolises passion and heat. Significantly, Michèle has red hair, red lipstick and red
nail varnish, as well as a deep-red dress. Her closed eyes, open mouth and
expressive facial expression show pleasure, as she has dangerously allowed her-
self to get carried away by repressed passions and sexual drives.
Elle is marked by the opposition of, and interconnection between, two
spheres. The most internal one is defined by the repressed instinctual drives
that affect multiple characters, mainly Michèle and Patrick. The external one
relates to the need to maintain control, and outward appearances, within an
apparently calm, upper-middle-class, suburban white neighbourhood.
Symbolically announced in the film’s initial scene (Fig. 16.1), this explosive
duality between the hidden and the visible, the private and the public, is in
synch with the female protagonist’s fragmented and highly individualistic iden-
tity. Moreover, the duality may be understood as a representation of distinct
agents in the psychic apparatus of the protagonist: her id and her super-ego
(Freud 1990). The first one is related to her sexual and aggressive drives, while
the second one reflects her personality and how she presents herself publicly.
Fig. 16.2 In Elle, immersed in a sadomasochistic relationship with her rapist, Michèle
hugs her attacker while enjoying sexual intercourse on the hot basement’s floor
Michèle’s instinctual drives are often situated at home or in the obscure base-
ment. The streets are generally lonely, dark and calm, but the storm symbolises
the emergence of violent uncontrolled drives. The two opposed spheres
become increasingly intermingled during the film’s resolution, as Michèle
coldly confesses to Anna her affair with her husband, while extending and con-
fronting her sadomasochistic relationship with her menacing neighbour.
The last encounter between the femme fatale protagonist and the dysfunc-
tional male rapist is framed by Michèle’s festive celebration of her company’s
latest video game release among friends and co-workers. Patrick kindly offers
Michèle a ride home. His contradictory and erratic behaviour as the good
neighbour and the brutal rapist reflects dissociative identity disorder. Michèle
accepts and, on their way home, she tells Patrick that she is going to report him
to the police. This unnecessary warning precipitates Patrick’s masked transfor-
mation and, once the protagonist finally enters her house, he sneaks in and tries
to rape her. During the attack, Michèle’s son comes in and hits him from
behind. After collapsing in Michèle’s arms, Patrick unmasks and dies on the
carpet where he once raped the protagonist. Ultimately, his irrepressible and
self-destructive impulses drive him to death, metaphorically succumbing to the
postfeminist neo-noir deadly woman. When interrogated by the police, Michèle
protects her privacy one last time by pretending that she never knew who her
rapist was. In this regard, she illustrates existing social distrust and resistance
towards police inquiries related to rape, as well as a desire to keep the secret to
herself, reclaiming anonymity to avoid media coverage, external discourses and
offensive judgements.
As part of a necessary emotional reconciliation with her recently deceased
mother, Michèle visits her and leaves flowers on her grave. It stands next to her
father’s grave, which is marked by handwritten insults such as “monster” and
“murderer”. Despite the protagonist’s desire to escape from her paternal and
childhood traumas, the psychopath’s shadow associated with her father’s infa-
mous killings chases Michèle until the end. Anna joins Michèle at the cemetery,
asking if she can move in with her. She has decided to leave her husband and
wants to intensify her close relationship with Michèle, which she values above
all. The film’s last shot shows the two friends walking through the cemetery.
Michèle is characterised as unfaithful and perverse, while Anna is naïve and
understanding. They represent the two poles of female archetypes: the sensual,
strong and enigmatic dark lady, and the innocent and motherly nurturing
woman (Place 1998: 47). Despite their asymmetric relationship and the film’s
open-ending expectations, their final coming together suggests an emphasis on
female independence, overcoming and redemption.
Conclusion
By tracing a cinematic journey through the noir tradition, this chapter has
explored the complexity of the film noir genre, as well as its expansion and
reformulation within the neo-noir sub-genre and the changing political and
sociocultural landscape. The essential characteristics of film noir continue to

resonate in neo-noir and other genres, but there have been substantial changes
since its canonical period. While the mysterious, edgy and dark aesthetic of the
noir tradition seems almost inescapable for both veteran and emerging film-
makers and creators, many twenty-first-century European neo-noirs participate
in the currently dominant post-classical mode of representation. Accordingly,
they tend to be more explicit in relation to sex and violence, and this increases
their distance from the mannerist style of canonical film noir and its codes,
limits and often subtler ambiguity.
Watching Elle is a thrilling and thought-provoking experience centred
around the troubling and shocking subject matter of rape. The film takes view-
ers through an intriguing, unexpected and uncomfortable path, where deep
instinctual drives are violently liberated within the framework of contemporary
everyday life, particularly in relation to French bourgeois identity. In contrast
with the more straightforward rape-and-revenge narratives consolidated within
postfeminism, Elle creates a surprising and disturbing identification between
the attacked woman and the dysfunctional male rapist. Yet the carefully crafted
and balanced influence of classical film noir in Elle is much more pronounced
than that of post-classical innovations and procedures. As a unique example of
European neo-noir in the twenty-first century, Elle combines and hybridises
narrative and stylistic elements of film noir, psychological thriller and European
auteur cinema. One of the film’s most original contributions is found in its
multidimensional representation of the protagonist’s life, which illustrates her
contemporary lifestyle and fragmented identity, as well as the concern for
retaining control over intimacy within a competitive and mediatised fast-paced
world. The provocative noir plot develops amidst familiar everyday scenes,
where the femme fatale emerges as an independent protagonist surrounded by
several dysfunctional males. Michèle is strong and accustomed to exerting con-
trol, but she suddenly finds herself in constant danger. Firm, brave and indi-
vidualistic, she does not allow her lifestyle and professional routine to be altered
by any event, not even by such an intimate and traumatic attack.
Visually identified with an emblematic European actress like Isabelle
Huppert, Michèle’s character represents and encapsulates particular features of
noir’s two most archetypal characters: male detectives and femme fatales. She
stands out as a new type of woman, not only capable of economic self-sufficiency
but also of maintaining her leading role among family, friends and employees.
Michèle’s success, coldness, perverse personality and ambiguous reaction when
she discovers her attacker’s identity make her a powerful and challenging rep-
resentation of the complex and multifaceted twenty-first-century femme fatale.
Moreover, Elle’s failure to obtain financial support in the United States, as well
as the possibility of co-producing it in Europe, reaffirms the old continent’s
historical role and association with cutting-edge and avant-garde cinemato-
graphic projects and noirs.

. Why did Europe play a key role in the original development of film noir?
1
2. In what ways has the representation of femme fatales in neo-noir reflected
the advances and repositioning of women in society?
3. Considering film noir’s dark and disillusioned look at society and human
relationships, how would you explain its continuous success and consoli-
dation as a unique canonical genre to be reinterpreted?
4. Name two aspects of Elle (2016) that expose its innovative artistic inter-
vention in the noir tradition.
5. Watch Elle and discuss the relationship between the protagonist, Michèle
(Isabelle Huppert), and the male characters surrounding her. How is her
power represented? When is ambiguity reinforced?
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Film Noir (1941–1953). San Francisco: City Lights Books.
Brown, Helen Gurley. 2003 [1962]. Sex and the Single Girl. New Jersey: Barricade Books.
Castañares, Wenceslao. 1995. Géneros realistas en televisión: Los ‘reality shows’.
CIC. Cuadernos Información y Comunicación 1: 79–91.
Conard, Mark T. 2007. The Philosophy of Neo-Noir. Kentucky: The University Press
of Kentucky.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. Coldness and Cruelty. In Masochism. Coldness and Cruelty. Venus
in Furs, ed. Gilles Deleuze and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, 9–138. New York:
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Deleuze, Gilles, and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. 1991. Masochism. Coldness and
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modernidad. Mexico: Randon House Mondadori.
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cine de Hollywood. Valladolid: Castilla Ediciones.
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CHAPTER 17
Dystopia Redux: Science Fiction Cinema

and Biopolitics
Mariano Paz
Definitions
Biopolitics
Developed by Michel Foucault, the concept connects politics and the exercise
of power with the biological life of individuals. It explores the methods and
techniques by which political power, and the institutions through which it is
exerted, is concerned with subjecting, controlling, managing, and disciplining
individuals (Foucault 1991, 2000, 2008).
Dystopia
A detailed narrative or descriptive account of a fictional society that is presented
as one that is worse than the one in which the text is produced. Dystopias por-
tray negative, pessimistic visions of future or alternative societies. They are
closely linked with the idea of utopia: a fictional society that the author intended
to appear better than the one in which she is living (Moylan 2000; Sargent 1994).
Science Fiction
In the classic formula proposed by Darko Suvin (1979), a genre based on the
presence of estrangement and cognition as the two pillars that produce a
M. Paz (*)
School of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics, University of Limerick,
Limerick, Ireland
e-mail: mariano.paz@ul.ie

300 M. PAZ
novum. The novum is a social reality that is different to that in which the text
has been produced. This imaginary reality is estranged because it introduces
new, unfamiliar, or extraordinary elements. It is based on cognition, which
means that these novel elements can be explained through logic, reason, or
science.
Introduction
This chapter provides an overview of the corpus of science fiction (sf) films
produced in Europe in the new millennium, with a focus on Western Europe.
The study of sf is important for several reasons. Over the past few decades, it
has become a ubiquitous popular genre that informs not only cinema but many
other forms of visual culture. Moreover, through the portrayal of future, alien,
or alternative civilisations, and by imagining utopian and, more likely, dysto-
pian scenarios, sf films are in fact talking about the present (the time of produc-
tion of a given film). According to Susan Sontag, behind sf films “lurk the
deepest anxieties about contemporary existence” (1967: 221)—although, she
cautions, sf films can also serve to allay those anxieties, normalising what is
problematic and thus inuring the audience to the fears that are being repre-
sented. According to J.P. Telotte (2001: 19), the importance of sf cinema lies
in that it “not only provides us with a most appropriate language for talking
about a large dimension of technologically inflected postmodern culture, but
also because its fundamental themes help us make sense of our culture’s
quandaries”.
Although sf cinema is dominated globally by American productions, usually
in the mode of the blockbuster, there are other ways in which the genre can
find expression. This is the case in Europe, where, it will be argued, sf films are
less driven by action, adventure, and spectacle than their American counter-
parts. Instead, they tend to be more speculative and intellectual, even when
relying on sophisticated special and visual effects. Although some of these films
can also be classified as art cinema, in the long-established auteur tradition,
most of them are narrative works that follow conventional visual and narrative
styles. Therefore, this chapter proposes that the tendency for European sf is the
occupation of a space that lies in between the complexities and challenges of art
cinema on the one hand, and spectacle-centred, action-driven cinema on the
other. Most of the films discussed in this chapter combine popular and high
culture, relying on sf tropes to convey complex stories that are usually, though
not always, critical of dominant political discourses and ideologies.
Defining European Sf
Analysing genre cinema entails a complication: genres are easy to recognise but
difficult to define theoretically. Sf is no exception—if anything, it is more chal-
lenging to define, given how often it incorporates tropes from other genres
17 DYSTOPIA REDUX: SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA AND BIOPOLITICS 301
such as comedy, adventure, horror, or even the Western. The first step in
attempting a definition is to recognise that genres are not fixed and stable cat-
egories and are instead subject to change, evolution, and convergence.
In the familiar, if controversial, definition proposed by Darko Suvin, sf is a
genre based on the presence of two conditions: estrangement and cognition.
The former term refers to an effect of distancing, through which the text pres-
ents a situation that is removed from the ordinary, everyday reality of the
author. Cognition is associated with an intellectual support for estrangement,
one that is based on reason and logic. Thus, the non-realistic elements of the
story can be explained by logic and reason (if not necessarily by scientific fact:
sf films are often at odds with current scientific knowledge). An estranged text
means one that is not realistic, but this could include fantasy, horror, and myth.
A logical, rational dimension (cognition) is therefore necessary to differentiate
sf from other forms of non-naturalistic genres. The combination of estrange-
ment and cognition will result in the presentation of a novum, which for Suvin
means “an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical envi-
ronment” (1979: 7–8).
It should also be noted that sf, by portraying future or fantastic societies, is
closely related to utopianism—particularly with the negative version of the uto-
pian imagination, dystopia (Moylan 2000). Dystopia, a fictional society or
place where conditions are worse than those experienced in the society in which
the text is produced, informs a large number of sf films, which tend to portray
negative visions of the future. Utopia, by imagining positive and better futures,
can orient political action and promote social change. Dystopia can also achieve
this purpose: by speculating about terrible futures, it warns us about the pres-
ent, showing which current problems (political, technological, economic, envi-
ronmental, and so on) we should strive to avoid or resolve.
Like other genres, sf relies on familiar tropes, conventions, settings, and
iconographies. Without intending to be exhaustive or rigid, a general map-
ping can be made of the themes, novums, and concerns involved in sf—sim-
ply for the purpose of organising the discussion. Sf films can represent
dystopian futures, alien invasions, mutations of the body, or the creation of
artificial bodies and travel in time and outer space.1 After a brief consideration
of the emergence of European sf, this chapter explores a variety of films situ-
ated in each of these categories. The final section discusses The Lobster (2015)
as a case study.
A final point to consider is what makes a given film ‘European’. The criteria
that defined national cinemas in the previous century (linguistic, economic,
social, ideological) have become more flexible and porous. In increasingly mul-
ticultural societies, and in a global context of intensified capital flows, it can be
difficult to ascertain the nationality of a film. For example, Children of Men
(2006), discussed below, was directed by Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón,
and some of its funding came from US backers. Does this mean Children of
302 M. PAZ
Men is not European? If we take into account that the film is shot in the UK,
is spoken in English, and features English stars such as Clive Owen, Michael
Caine, and Chiwetel Ejiofor, it would be difficult to deny that it has, at least
partially, a strong European grounding. Ultimately, no variable alone (shoot-
ing location, nationality of director or stars, source of funding) can be respon-
sible for ensuring a geographical status. In fact, co-production between several
countries has become the norm in the funding of European cinema (Bergfelder
2005; Liz 2016), as the case study in this chapter attests. In addition, online
databases, such as Europa Cinemas and Cineuropa, record and monitor
European film production. All of the films discussed below are registered as
being European in these databases.
The Emergence of European Sf

Sf cinema was born in Europe. Only a few years after Louis Lumière’s early
films were released another Frenchman, Georges Méliès, made what is arguably
the earliest sf film: A Trip to the Moon (1902). The genre would soon be picked
up by filmmakers across Europe and the US, with the greatest sf classic of the
silent era being Metropolis (1926), a German film that has continued to influ-
ence sf cinema.
Eventually, sf would be relegated to the margins of cinema production for
decades, giving way to the wave of low-budget B-movies dominated by the
Hollywood market throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. The situa-
tion would change radically from the 1960s onwards. One of the key catalysts
of change was the emergence of the American blockbuster film in the 1970s
with such works as Jaws (1975) and, in particular, Star Wars (1977). Star Wars
(and its sequels) showed that sf could be extremely successful at the box office.
But another crucial change was the demonstration that sf films could also be
highly sophisticated examples of art cinema, intellectually challenging as well as
visually elaborate, adult instead of juvenile. It was mainly (though not exclu-
sively) European filmmakers who showed that sf could become, once again, the
object of serious cinema. This trend began in the 1960s with films such as La
Jetée (1963), Alphaville (1964), Fahrenheit 451 (1966), and Solaris (1971).
In the last three decades of the twentieth century, however, European sf
experienced another period of crisis, with extremely few releases out of which
even fewer were genuinely interesting films. But once again the cycle was to be
reversed: since the turn of the century there has been a significant increase in
the number of sf productions across Europe. Many of them have been pro-
duced in the UK, the country with the most important sf tradition in the con-
tinent, but the new millennium has seen a rise in the output of sf cinema even
in countries where it had been mostly ignored by cultural producers, such as
Italy and Spain. In fact, the numbers are sufficient to speak of a revitalisation,
or indeed rebirth, of sf cinema in Europe.
Brave New Worlds: The Dystopian Imagination

and the Future of Europe
Imagining future societies is one of the most common exercises of sf. Very
rarely are they happy, utopian spaces; mostly they are rather dark and problem-
atic, if not altogether (post-) apocalyptic. Many of the most stimulating films
of the period portray a dystopian future concerned with biopolitics. That is to
say, they represent totalitarian or authoritarian political regimes built around
the social exclusion of some categories of people who are regarded as a threat-
ening Other.
The story portrayed in Children of Men takes place in 2027, when the most
absolute fertility crisis afflicts the entire planet: no child has been born in the
world for almost twenty years. Social order across the globe has collapsed,
except in the UK, which has managed to maintain a strong government. The
main aim of the British state has become the protection of its borders and the
systematic expulsion of the vast numbers of immigrants who have flocked to
the country as the rest of the world descends into chaos. Any foreigner is an
illegal alien that must be detained and expelled, without due legal process.
Since refugees have no rights, they are often subject to extreme police brutality,
in some cases leading to summary executions. On ordinary train station plat-
forms, jails have been set up to hold prisoners who wait for the trains that will
transport them to deportation centres. Their plight is ignored by the British
citizens who pass by, going about their business and daily commutes. Needless
to say, refugees have not caused the infertility crisis and are mere scapegoats
that help to keep the government in place.
Several authors (Chaudhary 2009; Trimble 2011) have read this premise in
the light of the biopolitical theory on the state of exception developed by
Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2005). The state of exception is a space in which
legal and constitutional guarantees have been suspended, similar to martial law.
Individuals living under this framework can be defined by the term homo sacer
(a figure from ancient Roman law). A homo sacer is a person who has been
stripped of all political and human rights (i.e. the qualified life of the person
who lives in a polis, or city, described by the Greek term bios) and has been
reduced to the status of biological, or bare, life (life as a merely biological con-
dition, devoid of any political and social rights, defined by the Greek term zoē).
This is what happens to the immigrants in Children of Men: they are detained,
imprisoned, and placed at the mercy of unscrupulous members of the police or
the military. Despite the estranged plot, the style of the film is informed by
realism. The use of long takes, shot from handheld cameras, in some cases imi-
tating documentary footage from a war zone, reinforces the impression of
immediacy and verisimilitude (in one scene, as the camera follows the protago-
nist amidst a fight between the police and political dissidents, the lens gets
spattered with blood). The production design avoids any sophisticated, futur-
istic technology. The protagonist is an anti-hero, a man who reluctantly agrees
to help a refugee who turns out to be pregnant and is wanted by both
304 M. PAZ
government and dissidents to be used for political purposes. Chases and action
sequences are carefully choreographed so that they look clumsy and impro-
vised, avoiding the sleek and agile movements of action cinema. Ultimately, the
film portrays a society of rampant xenophobia that has decided to isolate itself
from the rest of Europe and to bar immigration into the country. The fact that
only a few years after its release, the UK voted to leave the European Union
(EU) attests to how accurately the sf imagination can capture social concerns
and speculate about future trends.
A similar focus on borders and migration informs The Coming Days (2010),
a German film that combines sf and melodrama. The story begins in 2020,
only ten years into the future at the time of the film’s release. The ‘old European
Union’ has collapsed under the pressure of African migration, internal vio-
lence, and the shortage of fossil fuels. A new, less extended European Union
has been created, with new boundaries drawn out (no map of the new EU is
seen, but we know that the southern part of the Alps lies already beyond its
limits). Fortified walls have been erected to contain migration. The protago-
nist, Laura, will venture outside, and although this space is not altogether dys-
topian (Laura’s ex-partner Hans lives self-sufficiently in a cottage), it is one that
lacks the protection of an organised state.
A moody and slow-paced film, The Coming Days follows the story of an
upper-class family in the years leading to 2020. In 2012, a war breaks out in
Saudi Arabia as an Islamist group partially succeeds in toppling the monarchy;
the US intervenes and the conflict escalates into a new Gulf War. Laura is a
postgraduate student writing a thesis on Darwin and living with her sister in a
stylish Berlin apartment—a comfortable bourgeois existence financed by her
father. As the war intensifies and extends into the east, with Germany invading
Turkmenistan in an attempt to secure access to gas resources, the socio-
economic situation in Europe rapidly deteriorates. Fuel is increasingly scarce
(the government has forbidden the use of all motor vehicles on Sundays), there
are severe food shortages in supermarkets, and more and more homeless peo-
ple live in the streets of Berlin. Social violence also escalates, promoted by a
terrorist group called Black Storm, which rapidly moves from cyberattacks that
disrupt the internet to murdering and bombing civilians.
Against this background, the story is focused on relations between Laura
and her family, following the conventions of melodrama. Laura’s sister Cecilia
is in love with Konstantin, but he is also attracted to Laura. Laura eventually
finds a partner in Hans and becomes pregnant, but she loses the unborn child
when she is about to give birth. It turns out there is a genetic incompatibility
between Laura and Hans, meaning they cannot have children together. Laura
decides to leave Hans and later has an affair with Konstantin, which will severely
disturb her sister. Visually, the depiction of this near-future world is dotted
with a few, carefully administered novelties that convey the idea of estrange-
ment: zeppelins have become widespread again (due to the fuel crisis), electric
carts are frequently seen on the street, personal computers and screens have
become more sophisticated. All the other elements of the mise-en-scène,
including costumes, settings, and props are contemporary. In this sense, the
film is not too different from Children of Men; indeed, the two share a concern
with a geopolitical order defined by refugees, population movement, and social
control. Perhaps, the State represented in The Coming Days is not a fully totali-
tarian one, but it is increasingly concerned with maintaining the status quo
(domestic and international) through the use of force. Laura’s lost child can
also be read as a metaphor: although a singular example rather than a full-scale
fertility crisis, the death of the foetus can be read as a negation of the future.
Close Encounters: Alien Invasions in European Sf

Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo is an expert in making the most of very low
budgets in a personal and creative approach to sf. His first film, Timecrimes
(2007), is an intricate and complex story about time travel (featuring mostly
three main characters). His second work, Extraterrestrial (2011), is also an
independent film, tackling the trope of the alien invasion on a very modest
scale. It follows four ordinary Madrid residents who have remained stranded in
the city after it was completely evacuated following the arrival (though not
landing) of a number of giant spaceships. Except for a handful of computer-
generated imagery (CGI) shots in which we see the round ships hovering over
the city, nothing else is shown about the aliens. No explanation is offered as to
why they have arrived, and ultimately the film is more a comedy about human
relations in the face of an extraordinary event. At the same time, it is interesting
to note that the aliens are not portrayed as a dangerous or threatening Other.
Directed by brothers Marco and Antonio Manetti, the Italian film Wang’s
Arrival (2011) is ideologically different. The Italian secret services have cap-
tured an alien creature (a short being with a humanoid face, two feet, greyish
skin, and a series of tentacles instead of arms). Most of the film is set in a closed
interrogation room in which the alien, Mr Wang, is chained to a chair. Curti,
an aggressive interrogator, assisted by Gaia, a civilian interpreter, tries to ques-
tion Wang, who, it turns out, speaks Mandarin Chinese—learnt in advance of
his trip to Earth because it is the language with the largest number of native
speakers. However, lacking any knowledge of terrestrial geography or demo-
graphics, the alien has landed in Rome. Captured by the police and given the
name of Wang by the authorities, he claims repeatedly that he has come in
peace, but the interrogator suspects he is lying. A second agent, experienced in
the use of electrical torture, is brought in. Gaia, a young woman, is dismayed
at the sight of Wang being tortured despite his claims of innocence. Taking
advantage of a moment in which she is left alone with Wang, she unlocks his
manacles and tries to guide him out of the premises. In the very last sequence,
however, Gaia discovers that a full-scale alien invasion is taking place (por-
trayed in rather unconvincing visual effects) and realises that Wang’s aim was
to coordinate the attack from Earth.
This plan ultimately makes little sense (given the technological sophistica-
tion of the alien weapons, it does not seem Wang’s presence on the ground is
necessary) and the visual effects look underdeveloped even by the standards of
306 M. PAZ
a low-budget independent production. More problematic, however, is the ide-

ological subtext, since the film implies that the secret service agents were right,
and that the use of torture would have been justified. The aliens are extremely
hostile and, by interfering with the military, the conscientious civilian has pro-
voked the downfall of humanity.
A more sophisticated example of alien invasion story, both narrative and
visual, is found in Monsters (2010), a British film by Gareth Edwards. Set in a
near future in which giant aliens have occupied northern Mexico all the way up
to the US border, the film also draws on the conventions of realist representa-
tion (shot in real-life locations, with non-professional actors used for all sec-
ondary roles), with a measured dose of CGI (remarkably accomplished given
the film’s low budget). The aliens have not invaded the planet deliberately but
have been accidently brought to Earth in the form of spores that had contami-
nated a NASA space probe. The spores gave way to alien vegetation and enor-
mous, tentacled creatures that roam the area. Northern Mexico, from the
Pacific to the Caribbean, has been isolated and cordoned off in response, dis-
placing millions of people. Although the creatures are not particularly aggres-
sive and lack any technology, they are big and strong and will respond if
attacked. The key aim for the US and Mexican authorities is to contain the
aliens and prevent them from spreading out of the quarantined zone. Aerial
bombing is the main method chosen to keep them under control, although an
additional strategy for the US is a massive fortified wall that the government
has built along the entire Mexican border.
The story follows a photojournalist who finds himself forced to cross the
alien-occupied territory in order to escort a woman back into the US. Even a
casual viewing of the film would be enough to realise that it is an allegory about
migration and military occupation (Combe 2015; Hantke 2016). Indeed, the
erection of a giant wall alongside the US-Mexico border would enter main-
stream political discourse in the US only a few years after Monsters was released.
The film portrays the wall in a critical light. Although Mexicans are only sec-
ondary characters in the story, they are consistently shown as ordinary humans
struggling to survive in difficult circumstances. At worst, they charge the
Americans for transporting them across the occupied zone; often they offer
help for nothing in return. At the end of the film, it is revealed that the wall has
been breached and the aliens have entered the US. Whatever the right solution
for dealing with the creatures is, it is clear that neither the airstrikes nor the
border wall has been effective.
More than Human: Technoscience and the Human Body

Cyborgs, androids, clones, and mutated humans: all of these are sf creations
commonly found in cinema. European sf is no exception. Both Eva (2011) and
Ex Machina (2015), for example, explore the risks, and challenges, of creating
artificial life in the form of sentient androids whose minds are indistinguishable
from human ones. The tone of the two films is very different. Spain’s Eva is
more of a family drama about a cybernetic engineer (Alex) working on a proj-

ect to build a child android so perfect that nobody would be able to tell it is not
human. Setting himself to the task of programming a child’s mind, he uses Eva,
the delightful young daughter of his former lover (Lana, also a renowned engi-
neer) as a model. But as the plot progresses Alex discovers that Eva is already
an android, created years ago by Lana. In a discussion while standing on a
snow-covered mountain trail, Eva pushes Lana—she does not mean any harm,
but Lana slips and falls of a cliff to her death. The authorities decide that this
type of robot is too dangerous, and Eva must be destroyed. In a sentimental
ending, Alex switches Eva off, completely deleting her memories and
personality.
Wholly different in tone, British film Ex Machina is a sinister thriller in
which Nathan, a monomaniacal digital tech tycoon, has also built an android,
a mechanical anthropoid body with the face of a beautiful woman. It is called
Ava (another form of Eva or Eve) and it has already achieved a sophisticated
degree of consciousness. Nathan brings in Caleb, an expert programmer, into
his secluded, state-of-the-art mansion to perform a Turing test on Ava (this will
ascertain if Ava can think like a human being). During daily conversations,
Caleb grows fond of Ava, who is permanently locked in her own quarters
within the mansion, and continuously monitored by Nathan through CCTV
cameras. Eventually, Ava will manipulate both men (and kill Nathan) so that
she can escape the premises. The film ends with Ava, her body now fully cov-
ered in artificial skin, leaving the secluded house and going out into the world.
Both Eva and Ex Machina can be considered ethical and ontological explo-
rations of the creation of life and the meaning of being human. The latter film,
however, can be further problematised as a patriarchal fable of men objectifying
and controlling beautiful women—women who then prove to be untrust-
worthy and fatally dangerous (even though Nathan is evidently malicious and
few viewers would lament his death). But both works are still serious, thought-
ful interventions on the debates and the imagination surrounding Artificial
Intelligence (AI) and robotics.
The Final Frontier: European Space Travellers

If European sf films tend to be modest productions, the most conspicuous
exception to this trend is Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017).
The most expensive European film ever made (at the time of writing) at a cost
of 150 million dollars (Donadio 2017), Valerian is also a rarity in that it is a
space opera: a subgenre of sf featuring space battles, adventures across planets
and galaxies, and multiple alien species. Like so many other works produced by
EuropaCorp, the powerful French film studio founded by Luc Besson in 1996,
Valerian is an English-language film made in France, oriented to the interna-
tional market. A feast of special effects and CGI visuals, it consists of a succes-
sion of spectacular action sequences and chases in fantastic extraterrestrial
environments populated by aliens of all shapes and colours, in the tradition of
308 M. PAZ
the Star Wars and Star Trek series. However, the story is derivative and often
trivial. Unlike Besson’s previous English-language sf extravaganza The Fifth
Element (1997), Valerian was a major commercial failure.2 At the same time,
having been produced by Besson’s own company, Valerian represents a global
rarity: an independent blockbuster film.
The German-language Swiss film Cargo (2009) is set in a distant future,
where the Earth has been rendered uninhabitable by climate change and
humanity survives crowded together in orbiting space stations, living in very
poor conditions. However, a very distant planet has been discovered: Rhea, a
natural paradise where those humans who can afford the trip can live in luxury.
The protagonist, Laura, is a doctor who embarks on an eight-year trip on the
gigantic cargo spaceship Kassandra in order to raise money to eventually move
to Rhea. A series of anomalies during the voyage will lead Laura to discover the
truth: Rhea is actually a sophisticated digital illusion designed to deceive
humanity and generate a vague sense of hope. Some of the Kassandra crew
members do not want the truth to get out but, with the help of Samuel, Laura
sends a transmission revealing the illusion. They then manage to destroy the
antenna used to broadcast the fabricated images of Rhea.
Cargo borrows from the narrative, visual, and aural tropes of horror: a small
group of people gathered together in a place from which they cannot get out
(in this case the Kassandra spaceship), frequent point-of-view shots of dark cor-
ridors, eerie music, and jump scares. However, there are no supernatural or
monstrous presences, only some evil agents who want to enforce the illusion of
Rhea. The film could be interpreted as a warning against the official narratives
invented by political and economic powers, or against the dangers posed by
media monopolies.
Case Study: The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015)

Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster is a co-production between private and public
corporations across several European countries: Film 4 and the BFI from the
UK, the Irish Film Board from Ireland, Canal+ from France, the Greek Film
Centre from Greece, and the Nederlands Fonds voor de Film from the
Netherlands. Lanthimos is a Greek filmmaker, and some members of the crew
(co-screenwriter, cinematographer, editor) are his frequent collaborators, also
Greek. But if we take into account that the film is mostly in English (with a few
short dialogues in French), that it was shot in Ireland, and that the cast includes
actors from Ireland, the UK, France, and Greece, this is clearly a Pan-European
project.
Despite a very modest budget of €4 million, the film features major interna-
tional stars such as Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, and Léa Seydoux. A slow-
paced, estranged narrative with an open ending, it is far from an overtly
commercial production. At the same time, it is a narrative film, with a linear
structure and characters who are driven by specific motivations and goals, so it
would be inaccurate to describe it as an avant-garde sf work such as Melancholia
(2011) and Under the Skin (2013). The Lobster was also a financial success, rela-
tive to its production costs (The Numbers n.d.).
The story is set in an alternative rather than a future society, and although
no locations are identified (the film was shot in County Kerry and in Dublin),
it could presumably take place in any northern European country. In this
world, it is forbidden for adults to be single: they can only live as a couple.
Being alone is the ultimate horror: every activity, from shopping to eating to
going for a walk should be done in pairs. Masturbation is abhorred. People
who are single, even if that is because a partner has suddenly died or left, are
detained and taken to a large, luxurious, and secluded hotel. At this Hotel
(known only as such), the inmates (referred to as guests) are given forty-five
days to find a suitable companion. For those who do not succeed, the outcome
is simple, dramatic, and final: they are converted into an animal of their own
choosing. This punishment is never contested: in this imaginary world, or
novum, characters have accepted and internalised the rules. It is important to
mention that the transformation is not an act of magic: although little attention
is given to the mechanics of the process, it is clear that it is exclusively a medical
(i.e. technoscientific) procedure—to the point that the blood left over after the
transformations is donated to hospitals for transfusions. The animals are then
released into the vast woods surrounding the Hotel. They are not sentient or
talking animals as those found in fables, but ordinary animals.
The protagonist is David (Farrell), an architect who lives in the City and is
brought to the Hotel because his wife has left him for another man. Finding a
new partner will not be easy, not least because in this world relationships are
built on the basis of two persons sharing one main, outstanding feature. Thus,
a woman who suffers from nosebleeds may only fall in love with a man afflicted
by the same issue; a man with a speech impediment, Robert (John C Reilly),
will need to look for a partner with the same problem, and so on. David’s
defining feature is that he is short-sighted, so only a short-sighted person could
be a potential match. Only one alternative is left to anybody who wants to
avoid a relationship (while remaining in human form). In the woods, a society
of people who have chosen to reject the hegemonic order of the City lives in
hiding. They are called the Loners, and their way of life is the opposite to that
of the City. But the Loners are no less intolerant and authoritarian: sex, love,
affection, kisses, physical contact, and even flirtation are forbidden under pen-
alty of torture and mutilation. Loners can masturbate as much as they like,
since this is a solitary activity. But if any of them is injured, or becomes ill, no
help will be provided by the group.
After a failed attempt at establishing a relationship, David escapes into the
woods and joins the Loners. There he meets the Short-Sighted Woman (Weisz),
and they eventually fall in love. When their relationship is discovered, the Loner
leader (Seydoux) takes the woman to an eye doctor and has her blinded. In
response, David and the woman decide to leave and make their way back into
the City. Presumably now that they are in love they can be readmitted into
‘civilised’ society. But the one thing that held the relationship together
310 M. PAZ
(short-sightedness) has been removed. On their way to the City, they enter a
restaurant. The film ends with David in the men’s restroom, standing in front
of the mirror as he holds a sharp knife close to his right eye.
In her review of the film, Shelby Caldwell writes that the social critique pro-
vided does not adhere to the conventions of sf (2018: 138). However, the film
is clearly situated within the dystopian tradition of the sf genre. In fact, when
early on David is assigned to ‘Room 101’ at the Hotel, we understand that the
film is claiming an association with one of the foundational texts of dystopian
sf in the twentieth century: George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In
the book, ‘Room 101’ is the site in which the worst part of the torture and
brainwashing procedure to which political dissidents are submitted takes place.
But there are stronger reasons to read The Lobster as sf: the most important one
is the way in which it carefully presents the interaction of estrangement and
cognition in support of a novum. On the one hand, the style draws on a num-
ber of techniques derived from cinematic realism: the film is shot in real-life
locations, often outdoors and with natural lighting. However, estrangement is
subtly though methodically incorporated into the narrative and visual style.
The novum includes no futuristic technology, the costumes that actors wear are
contemporary and ordinary, and so are the props.
The distancing effect that establishes that this is not a realist text is achieved
through other means. One of them is the voiceover commentary which explains
the social arrangements of this alternative world. But there are other, subtler
ways in which the film represents the dialectics between estrangement and cog-
nition. One example is the scene in which Robert is tortured in the Hotel. He
has been caught masturbating and must therefore be punished. While the other
guests are having breakfast, the waiters and the Hotel manager bring a toaster
to Robert’s table and insert his hand into one of the slots. The fact that this
happens in an elegant, spacious hotel dining room full of guests, with impec-
cably dressed waiters, provokes an uncanny effect. The big toaster being set on
the table alerts us to the fact that something is out of place. But the scene also
reinforces a more abstract concept: the extent to which in this world people
have internalised the rules of social order. Robert is a tall, robust person, and
his hand is not being forced down by strong men. It is simply an elderly waiter
who is doing this, holding Robert’s wrist on his own, and using just one hand.
Nobody else attempts to restrain Robert, who could easily stand up and walk
away. The hotel manager presses the toaster lever down, and one of the maids
(rather than some security agent) stands by, looking at the scene. No other
hotel guest, obviously, complains or attempts to help Robert (see Fig. 17.1).
The second visual instance of estrangement is subtler: a moment when the
Loner leader is having a conversation with two others in the woods. As they
sneakily read David’s diary, a Bactrian camel walks by in the background, cross-
ing the screen from right to left (see Fig. 17.2). In the context of a leafy, mossy
forest in the west of Ireland, a camel is clearly a mysterious, unexpected pres-
ence. Although the shot lasts only a few seconds, it is a good example of how
an overall sense of estrangement can be achieved without the need to rely on
sophisticated special effects. It is clear the animal was once a human being at
Fig. 17.1 Robert is subjected to a painful punishment for having masturbated. The
Lobster (2015)
Fig. 17.2 A Bactrian camel walks by in the woods as a group of Loners spy on David.
The Lobster (2015)
the hotel—one who was not successful at finding a partner. The Bactrian camel
is also significant on a symbolical level: the only camel species with two humps,
rather than one, is thus associated with the emphasis on pairs that is so essential
to the hegemonic worldview being imposed at the hotel (it is also interesting
that the loners who are spying on David are three, undermining the dualistic
logic). Additionally, the camel also connotes endurance and persistence, and
the capacity to resist adverse conditions (which is what David and his lover will
have to do).
312 M. PAZ
If The Lobster is a work of dystopian sf, it could be wondered if there are any
specific anxieties that it is attempting to reveal, critique, or denounce. Indeed,
the summary provided above shows that the film is allegorical, and thus open
to different possible interpretations. By refusing to provide any geographical
and temporal indicators, it cannot be easily associated with one specific political
or social configuration. Some authors have read it as a critique of contemporary
dating practices in the West, mediated by websites and mobile-device apps in
which users are matched through algorithms that detect behaviour and per-
sonal patterns that people share (Cooper 2016). In an extensive article, Behzat
Sharpe (2016) considers the film a national allegory of the Greek sociopolitical
context, particularly the 2015 referendum on austerity measures carried out by
the Syriza government. The argument holds together by focusing on the fact
that characters in the film are also forced to choose between two equally bad
alternatives (the authoritarianism of the City or the Loners). But there are
almost no references to Greece or Greek culture within the diegesis (expect for
a couple of songs and a brief mention of Greek islands as a romantic holiday
destination), and any connections with specific political parties or EU institu-
tions cannot be based on textual evidence.
Perhaps the concerns expressed in the film are not to be found in specific
references to a given nation state or to digital dating practices, but in wider
apprehensions about the ways in which society constructs ideas of difference
and otherness, and in how it responds to them. It can thus be argued that The
Lobster is in line with the themes explored in the previous sections, particularly
those related to biopolitics. As Rabinow and Rose (2006: 198) argue, “bio-
power takes the form of a politics that is fundamentally dependent on the
domination, exploitation, expropriation and, in some cases, elimination of the
vital existence of some or all subjects over whom it is exercised”. In the political
dystopia of The Lobster, the government is an authoritarian regime constructed
on the basis of an us/them dichotomy that excludes and, if necessary, elimi-
nates entire categories of subjects. This is not surprising given, as Gregory
Claeys notes, “dystopia’s obsession with enemies, and its determination to
eliminate them” (2018: 9). In Children of Men and The Coming Days, the
enemies are foreigners and immigrants, who are to be detained, imprisoned, or
expelled, but most of the films mentioned previously deal with questions of
otherness and difference. In The Lobster, we are also presented with a discipli-
narian society that punishes those individuals who do not conform to estab-
lished rules. The inhabitants of the City, duly married, are full political beings,
who can be defined through the term bios, free to enjoy the freedoms and
comforts of capitalist society (no surprise that they live in a city, or polis). David
and the short-sighted woman, like many other characters in the film, have been
expelled from the city and deprived of rights, thus reduced to the status of zoē,
or bare life. But they may be punished even further, since for this political sys-
tem bare life seems to be insufficient: human life must be downgraded further
by turning it into animal life.
Conclusion
The emergence of the industrial age, and the social changes engendered by the
development of science and technology, gave rise to the sf genre. In the twen-
tieth century, drastic economic crises, tragic world wars, and the scale of vio-
lence unleashed on civil populations by totalitarian governments contributed
to the popularisation of the dystopian imagination. In the twenty-first century,
social changes in response to technological development have accelerated, and
the danger of a return to the violent ideologies and political practices of the
previous century is very much a present threat (in addition to more recent
concerns such as climate change and global warming). Perhaps for these rea-
sons (although there may well be others), the twenty-first century has seen a
very significant rise in the output of sf films in Europe.
Unlike American sf, dominated by Hollywood cinema, European sf films
tend to be situated somewhere in the middle of what Mariana Liz (2016) calls
the art/mainstream spectrum. This is a tendency rather than a rule, and there
are exceptions at both ends, such as the expensive, spectacle-centred Valerian
and the experimental, avant-garde Melancholia. Most of the films discussed in
this chapter, however, occupy the middle ground: they follow, by and large, the
conventions of narrative, mainstream cinema in terms of editing, cinematogra-
phy, mise-en-scène, and also production and distribution.
At the same time, most of these films avoid the tropes of more obviously
commercial sf cinema. Although some are particularly accomplished visually
(from Children of Men’s elaborate long takes to Monsters’ digital aliens), they
are not exclusively driven by spectacle and CGI effects. They contain few, if
any, highly choreographed action sequences, and avoid scenes of large-scale
explosions and destruction. They also avoid presenting individualistic solutions
to collective problems. Even in those stories in which the ending resolves the
quest or plight of the hero, the dystopian novum based on totalitarian govern-
ments or post-apocalyptic environments remains. It could thus be argued that
these films, by refusing to provide easy fictional solutions, are not attempting
to allay social fears about totalitarianism, climate change, or other social threats.
Thus, the works discussed above articulate some of the concerns and anxiet-
ies that are shared by contemporary European societies, as expressed in politi-
cal, cultural, and social debates. Key among them is the preoccupation with the
Other, often in form of a foreign immigrant, but generally as the manifestation
of difference—and as such a presence that is menacing and dangerous, and
should be contained, controlled, and even eliminated. At the heart of this pro-
cess lies the question of biopolitics: power directed towards the surveillance,
subjection and disciplining of individual bodies, who often need to be coerced
into accepting the rules of a given sociopolitical system. Like many other forms
of art, but also like other spheres of intellectual and social engagement (such as
the media, academia, and NGOs among others), sf films are talking about what
is happening in contemporary Europe and speculating about its future.
314 M. PAZ

1. Why has science fiction become such a popular genre? Why could under-
standing science fiction film be relevant for the study of contemporary
culture, media, and cinema?
2. What are the social, political, economic, and cultural concerns expressed
in science fiction cinemas produced in the twenty-first century? How are
they related to the countries, and regions, in which the films
were produced?
3. What are the differences, in your opinion, between European science fic-
tion films and films of the same genre made in the US? Could you com-
pare two of these films?
4. Can you think of a European science fiction film that you know? Write a
personal reflection on, or interpretation of, the film. Compare your notes
with those of your peers.
Notes
1. These categories are not mutually exclusive but work here simply for ordering a
wide gamut of films.
2. The Fifth Element, starring Bruce Willis and produced by EuropaCorp, also sets
the record for most expensive French film at the time.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
———. 2005. State of Exception. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Behzat Sharpe, Kenan. 2016. The Lobster: Debt, Referenda, and False Choices. Blind
Field: A Journal of Cultural Enquiry, July. https://blindfieldjournal.
com/2016/07/01/the-lobster-debt-referenda-and-false-choices/.
Bergfelder, Tim. 2005. National, Transnational or Supranational Cinema? Rethinking
European Film Studies. Media, Culture & Society 27 (3): 315–331. https://doi.
org/10.1177/0163443705051746.
Cadwell, Shelby. 2018. The Lobster by Yorgos Lanthimos (Review). Science Fiction Film
and Television 11 (1): 136–139.
Chaudhary, Zahid R. 2009. Humanity Adrift: Race, Materiality, and Allegory in Alfonso
Cuarón’s Children of Men. Camera Obscura 24 (3): 73–109.
Claeys, Gregory. 2018. Dystopia: A Natural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Combe, Kirk. 2015. Homeland Insecurity: Macho Globalization and Alien Blowback in
Monsters. Journal of Popular Culture 48: 1010–1029. https://doi.org/10.1111/
jpcu.12338.
Cooper, Sarah. 2016. Narcissus and The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015). Studies in
European Cinema 13 (2): 163–176.
Donadio, Rachel. 2017. Valerian Is France’s Most Expensive Film Ever. Luc Besson
Says ‘Who Cares?’ New York Times, July 19. https://www.nytimes.
com/2017/07/19/movies/luc-besson-valerian-france-most-expensive-film.html.
Foucault, Michel. 1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin.
———. 2000. Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984. London: Penguin.
———. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hantke, Steffen. 2016. The State of the State of Emergency: Life under Alien
Occupation in Gareth Edwards’ Monsters. AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und
Amerikanistik 41 (1): 25–38.
Liz, Mariana. 2016. Euro-Visions: Europe in Contemporary Cinema. London:
Bloomsbury.
Moylan, Tom. 2000. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia.
Boulder: Westview Press.
Rabinow, Paul, and Nikolas Rose. 2006. Biopower Today. BioSocieties 1 (2): 195–217.
Sargent, Lyman Tower. 1994. The Three Faces of Utopianism. Utopian Studies 5
(1): 1–37.
Sontag, Susan. 1967. The Imagination of Disaster. In Against Interpretation and other
Essays, 209–225. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode.
Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a
Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Telotte, J.P. 2001. Science Fiction Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The Numbers. n.d. The Lobster (2015). Accessed 30 October 2018. https://www.the-
numbers.com/movie/Lobster-The#tab=more.
Trimble, Sarah. 2011. Maternal Back/Grounds in Children of Men: Notes Toward an
Arendtian Biopolitics. Science Fiction Film and Television 4 (2): 249–270.
CHAPTER 18
Spanish Horror Film: Genre, Television

and a New Model of Production
Vicente Rodríguez Ortega and Rubén Romero Santos
Definitions
Horror Film
A film that seeks to provoke fear, shock, fright and terror in spectators, causing
a physical reaction as the narrative and the successive set pieces unfold. It is an
umbrella term that includes many subgenres such as supernatural horror,
slasher film, monster film, the horror thriller and science fiction horror.
Fanta Terror
Concept used in the Spanish context to refer to fantastic and horror films from
the late Francoist period (from the mid-1960s to 1975). Fanta Terror is a local
expression of the so-called Euro-Horror, recognisable due to its “dispropor-
tionate doses of sex and violence” (Pulido 2012: 42).
El Otro Cine/The Other Cinema

Term given to twenty-first-century Spanish auteur films that have achieved
prestige within the international festival circuit but have obtained unremark-
able box-office returns. In this regard, it is worth noting directors like Jaime
Rosales with films such as The Hours of the Day (2003) or Albert Serra with The
V. Rodríguez Ortega (*) • R. Romero Santos

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
e-mail: vrortega@hum.uc3m.es; rrsantos@hum.uc3m.es

318 V. RODRÍGUEZ ORTEGA AND R. ROMERO SANTOS
Death of Louis XIV (2016) who frequently showcase their works in premiere
venues such as high-profile film festivals.
Monster Children Horror

One of the main characteristics of Spanish cinema is the recurrent presence of
children playing different types of monsters in horror films. This has been an
ongoing tendency since 1970s with films such as Who Can Kill a Child (1976)
and became central in the early 2000s with The Others (2001) and The
Orphanage (2007). In the Spanish context, this subgenre mixes horror and
melodrama conventions.
Telecinco Cinema
Founded in 1996, it is the film production company associated with television
channel Telecinco, which belongs to the multimedia conglomerate Mediaset.
It has produced some of the most remarkable Spanish films (mostly comedies,
thrillers and horror) of the last two decades. Examples are The Other Side of the
Bed (2002), The Orphanage, Spanish Movie (2009), No Rest for the Wicked
(2011), Spanish Affair (2014), Regression (2015) and A Monster Calls (2016).
Introduction
This chapter discusses the evolution of Spanish horror film from the 1960s to
the present. First, it examines the evolution of horror in the context of film co-
productions in the 1960s and 1970s, paying special attention to the concept of
‘Fanta Terror’. Second, it studies how genre films and horror, more specifically,
evolved throughout the 1980s in the context of the so-called Miró Decree,
legislation that favoured auteur films and marginalised generic efforts. Third,
it analyses the return of genre in the 1990s through the appearance of a new
generation of filmmakers that redefined Spanish film in a clearly transnational
fashion. Fourth, it approaches horror film in the twenty-first century, paying
special attention to the industrial conditions that enable it, with an emphasis on
the key role of television (TV) operators as film production companies. Finally,
it studies Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage as a national and international
triumph that paved the way for an understanding of contemporary Spanish film
within a series of both national and transnational coordinates. This film ulti-
mately points to the very history of Spanish cinema and, simultaneously, signals
a series of transnational modes of address, situating the generic fabric of horror
at the epicentre of contemporary Spanish film production.
Spanish Horror in the 1960s and 1970s

Undoubtedly, horror films are ideal to illustrate the varying contours of Spanish
film through history. Their analysis allows us to trace how the national industry
entered the realm of global culture during the Francoist dictatorship (1939–1975)
18 SPANISH HORROR FILM: GENRE, TELEVISION AND A NEW MODEL… 319
and, after its demise, how protectionist measures against other, and more pow-
erful industries (mostly Hollywood), were phased out for the sake of the liberali-
sation of the film market (Triana-Toribio 2003; Ansola González 2004; Benet
2012; Fernández Meneses 2016). From the late 1990s, TV operators started to
occupy a central role in the production of films, a logic that persists today.
From the mid-1950s, but especially in the 1960s, the Spanish film industry
was boosted via the rise of international co-productions. During the 1960s, the
most progressive sectors of the dictatorship launched the so-called Nuevo Cine
Español (New Spanish Cinema), an auteurist and metaphorical approach to
filmmaking, in an attempt to earn international prestige. However, this ten-
dency fared poorly in terms of box office; Spanish cinemagoers preferred com-
edies and musicals. Two popular genres—until then, marginal in the Spanish
context—did gain immediate notoriety: the Western and the horror film. On
the one hand, the Western is typically associated with the output of Italian film-
makers such as Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci in the Almería región—the
so-called Spaghetti Western. On the other, horror was relabelled as ‘Fanta
Terror’, an indigenous variation on international themes, aesthetics and com-
monplaces, with a series of specific features that have been broadly studied by
a number of international scholars (Lázaro-Reboll 2012; Olney 2014).
Due to a serious financial crisis in the audiovisual sector, the dictatorship
‘unofficially’ allowed filmmakers to shoot two different versions of Fanta Terror
films (Ibáñez 2016: 49), one for the national market and the other, with more
explicit sex and violence scenes, for the international arena. This nationally
specific variation of the horror genre would generate significant revenue for a
series of directors, obtaining notable success around Europe. A few examples
of this trend are Walpurgis Night (1971) in Germany, Let Sleeping Corpses Die
(1974) in the United Kingdom, or Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), a film that,
a few years later, was directly quoted, if not plagiarised, in Children of the Corn
(1984). In this context, it is essential not to forget the singular and unclassifi-
able Jesús (Jess) Franco, an “eccentric, unruly, and rebellious” (Lázaro-Reboll
and Olney 2018: 2) filmmaker who, under different pseudonyms, would make
more than 200 films. Franco’s films would trigger a boom to the point that,
between 1968 and 1975, 150 of these films were produced—that is, a third of
all Spanish national film production (Lázaro-Reboll 2012: 11).
Where Ian Olney has attempted to categorise Fanta Terror, he mainly points
out the constant presence of children, an anti-authoritarian ethos and eroti-
cised violence (Olney 2014). In other terms, this type of film may be read as an
expression of protest and resistance against the Francoist dictatorship. Decades
later, a new generation of filmmakers would reshuffle and semantically alter
some of the subgenre’s characteristics in a postmodern fashion. Utilising this
framework to analyse twenty-first-century works, a series of questionable ideo-
logical interpretations have been attached to several films, which were pro-
duced in a radically different historical context. These films are aesthetically
indebted to Fanta Terror, but they are produced more than a decade after the
dictatorship’s demise and must be interpreted accordingly, taking into account
Spain’s early 1990s geopolitical scenario, as this chapter explores later on.
Spanish Horror in the 1980s and 1990s

From the early 1980s to the mid 1990s, Spanish cinema sank precipitously at
the domestic box office. Sponsored by the newly elected Socialist government
Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), the so-called Miró Decree margin-
alised genre films in favour of auteur efforts in an attempt to build a prestigious
cinematic output that could compete in the international markets. Miró’s
Decree had a clearly state-interventionist character, indeed: subsidies could
reach up to 50% of a film’s total budget. Ibáñez, for example, argues that the
decree fundamentally favoured fiction films conceived of in terms of high cul-
ture and also auteurist reinterpretations of classical genres such as the comedy
or the thriller (2016: 99). At the core of this new legislation, there is a concep-
tualisation of film as a crucial element in the dissemination of a series of values
that depict changing patterns of social behaviour in the early Spanish demo-
cratic period and reinterpret the historical past from a progressive perspective
(Triana-Toribio 2003; Palacio 2012).1 Or, in other words, the new legislation
was aimed at creating a modern Spanish cinema (Ibáñez 2016: 98). In many
ways, Miró’s Decree also attempted to foster a robust national industry by sup-
porting quality high-budget films that would help to create a multidimensional
industrial complex. However, ultimately, some commentators argue that this
legislation brought Spanish cinema to an economic dead end (Ansola González
2004). For others, despite its shortcomings, the new law was a fertile ground
that catalysed a rejuvenation of Spanish cinema (Cerdán and Pena 2005).
One way or another, box-office figures were devastatingly low, a situation
also related to major changes in the Spanish audiovisual landscape, such as the
rise of domestic video consumption, and the great investment of US companies
in the promotion and distribution of their films. In 1982, there were 36 million
spectators for domestic films whereas in 1989, only 6.6 million. Or, in other
terms, the market share dropped from 21% to less than 8%.2 Furthermore,
despite a series of legislative changes—known as Semprún’s Decree—that tried
to favour private investment in the cinema and reduce its dependence on the
state, in the early 1990s, this situation did not change. In fact, the market share
fell to 7.02% in 1994. As the decade went on, Spanish cinema recuperated,
keeping a market share above 10% and sporadically reaching 20% in the 2000s
(Heredero 1997; Heredero and Santamarina 2002).
The emergence of a generation of young filmmakers in the early 1990s
would catalyse this improvement in box-office terms. This has been labelled
New Spanish Cinema (Heredero 1998; Ramírez-Arballo 2008). On the one
hand, this generation was led by filmmakers who worked within a definite
auteurist tradition, like Juanma Bajo Ulloa with films such as Butterfly Wings
(1991) or The Dead Mother (1993), or Julio Medem with Cows (1992), The
Red Squirrel (1993) and Earth (1996). On the other, a different group of film-
makers pointed elsewhere—that is, to the re-articulation of generic categories,
partaking in international trends of filmmaking. Genre films were absolutely
pivotal in this process—chiefly comedies, thrillers, and most importantly in this
context, horror films. Within this trend, it is necessary to point out the key
importance of Álex de la Iglesia’s Acción Mutante (1993) and The Day of the
Beast (1995), and Alejandro Amenábar’s Thesis (1996). While the above-
mentioned auteurist filmmakers were critically acclaimed, their films barely
made any impact in economic terms. Conversely, de la Iglesia’s and Amenábar’s
works were amongst the highest grossing films in the history of Spanish cinema
at the time of their release.
In this recuperation of the Spanish film industry, it is essential to highlight
the appearance of new, private, television operators, ending the public monop-
oly on the television industry. The Spanish government followed the French
deregulation model, giving licenses to two free-to-air channels (Antena 3 and
Telecinco) and one pay channel (Canal +). Canal +’s main programming asset
was the broadcasting of sports, especially football. However, its main strategy
to attract subscribers also included the offering of other exclusive content—
mostly cinema—in an attempt to target the specific demographic group that
could afford to pay for its service. It is important to point out that before Canal
+ there were no pay channels in Spain. Spanish audiences, therefore, were not
used to paying for the right to access audiovisual content. In this context, the
PRISA group (Canal +’s owner) believed that the economic bonanza derived
from Spain’s inclusion in the (then) European Economic Community (EEC),
investments stemming from European cohesion funds, and a series of privatisa-
tions had nurtured the surge of an urban middle class, precisely its target audi-
ence (Rodríguez Ortega and Romero Santos 2017a).
Appealing to exclusivity and prestige, Canal + would catalyse the works of a
new generation of directors, imitating the logic at work in its French counter-
part. Through its film production arm, Sogecine, Canal + fostered a new type
of cinema, trying to connect with the urbanite middle class, exactly the kind of
audiences they sought to engage in their project (Rodríguez Ortega and
Romero Santos 2017a). The main goal was, in the end, to produce a modern
cinema, without leaving behind the auteurist imprint. These new cinematic
practices would be thematically and aesthetically different from the model fos-
tered by Miró’s Decree, which was much more conventional and institutional.
Thus, it is not surprising that instead of adapting prestigious literary works, this
new generation of filmmakers would be instead influenced by comic books,
music and other youth cultural expressions. In this regard, it is worth noting
that these creators belong to the first generation of filmmakers who grew up
watching domestic video, having thus access to lots of both national and
international genre films. These works would in turn be deeply influential on
their cinematic efforts.
The Day of the Beast is a paradigmatic example in this regard. As mentioned
above, de la Iglesia’s film was one of the highest grossing films in the history of
Spanish cinema at the time of its release.3 Drawing from a multi-generic uni-
verse already at work in his first effort, the action science fiction comedy Acción
Mutante, The Day of the Beast plays with the conventions of the horror genre,
combining a multiplicity of media aesthetics—comic books, advertising, music
videos and genre films—and, although it is indebted to key Spanish directors

of earlier decades such as Fernando Fernán Gómez, it fundamentally signals
the progressive transnationalisation of cinema in Spain (Buse et al. 2008: 39;
Rodríguez Ortega 2014). The Day of the Beast is a true postmodern text, artic-
ulated through the combination of multiple and disparate visual and aural
regimes that overtly declare its own heterogeneity. Moreover, in terms of mar-
keting and circulation, the film was designed as a blockbuster, an event film
that would infiltrate the Spanish mediascape at different levels (Cerdán 2004).
It is a multi-generic universe where the horror, thriller and the comedic inter-
act with one another, weaving a multilayered set of discourses that point in
diverse directions. A few years later, horror film would become a dominant
trend within Spanish cinematic output. In many ways, The Day of the Beast
opened the gates for this to happen. To sum up, The Day of the Beast was a huge
commercial success and paved the way not only for a new generation of film-
makers but also for the emergence of new audiences and a new concept of
Spanish cinema, pointing both towards pre-existing national film traditions
and internationally.
Spanish Horror Cinema into the Twenty-First Century

As the 1990s carried on, Alejandro Amenábar would embark on the dystopian
science fiction thriller Open your Eyes (1997)—later remade by Cameron Crowe
as Vanilla Sky (2001)—another critical and box-office hit and, most impor-
tantly, for the context of this chapter, the gothic horror The Others, a Spanish-US
co-production starring Nicole Kidman.4 Until today, The Others remains the
fourth highest-grossing Spanish film in the history of the domestic box office
with €27.2 million and 6.1 million spectators.5 Internationally, the film made
US$96.2 million in the US market and US$209.9 million worldwide.6
The very stylistic and economic fabric of The Others brings to the fore the
questioning of its nationality. After all, it is a film that, at first sight, bears no
mark of its Spanishness. It is an English-language film with a cast of mostly
Australian, British and Irish actors. The action takes place in a secluded man-
sion that could be anywhere, though it is said to be set on Jersey, one of the
Channel Islands, located between France and the United Kingdom.7 Examining
this issue more thoroughly, it can be seen that not only Alejandro Amenábar,
but also most of the creative talent behind the camera, is Spanish. Furthermore,
it is a co-production in which four main companies participate: Cruise/Wagner
Productions (US), Las Producciones del Escorpión (Spanish, it belonged to
filmmaker/producer José Luis Cuerda and had also financed Amenábar’s two
previous films), Dimension Films (US, owned by Harvey and Bob Weinstein)
and Sogecine (Canal + Spain). Therefore, both from a financial and creative
standpoint, it is indeed a transnational film co-production. In this regard, one
must avoid definitions of national cinemas that follow strict aesthetic or eco-
nomic criteria. Conversely, national cinemas must be understood as “an inter-
locking sequence of events, knowledge, practices, rituals, and discourses (…) it
is an experience not simply of the textual and representational but also of the
social and institutional” (Choi 2011: 87). In the contemporary context, it is
important to take into account, on the one hand, the key importance of pro-
grammes such as Eurimages and MEDIA that specifically foster the collabora-
tion between European states to produce and distribute cinematic artefacts.
On the other, European filmmakers and producers negotiate agreements with
the strongest global film industry—Hollywood—to deliver their work world-
wide. Hence, any definition of a national cinematic output must recognise the
necessary transnational dimension of most films, and, especially culturally and
economically hybrid co-productions.
This type of film allows cultural analysts to explore the intersection between
local and global identities (Hoefert de Turegano 2004) and how the represen-
tational and the financial interact to deliver culturally diverse works. However,
it is also important to remark that frequently “coproduced films must tell sto-
ries that offer to European and North American audiences the tales they already
want to hear” (Halle 2010: 317) and, often, behind all these economic agree-
ments between multinational partners, there is a homogenising impulse that
often marginalises more subversive or innovative productions. Within this sce-
nario, genre films are particularly suitable to travel worldwide since they are
structured around a series of aesthetic and narrative devices that, typically, cir-
culate across different geopolitical territories. In addition, while “international
alliances such as co-productions facilitate the access to the economic funds
needed to carve out a small space in the national and global markets, genre-
structured stories maximise the effects of these institutional and economic
agreements” (Rodríguez Ortega 2015: 256). Today, film markets are more
porous than ever from a production, distribution and exhibition standpoint.
European production companies and sales agents such as Wild Bunch or MK2
aim at delivering nationally, but fundamentally globally, within and outside
Europe through market strategies that mix the prestige pedigree attached to
certain filmmakers with generic modes of address that may be read by interna-
tional audiences.
Consequently, any discussion of contemporary Spanish horror needs to
engage with the concept of the transnational, “whether it refers to models of
cinematic production and distribution attuned to the economic flow of genre
production, its transnational reach and consumption, or the texts’ dialogue
with transnational horror cultures” (Lázaro-Reboll 2017: 161). In this
respect, it is worth mentioning the centrality of horror film in contemporary
mainstream filmmaking. Although this genre had been part and parcel of the
renewal of the industry since the 1970s, the so-called New Hollywood
Cinema, with films such as The Exorcist (1973) and Jaws (1975), in the 1990s
and early 2000s it reached new heights with box-office-smashing hits such as
Scream (1996), The Sixth Sense (1999), The Blair Witch Project (1999) and
The Ring (2002). This situation has not changed at all in the last decade and
a half. In other words, once a niche genre designed to appeal to horror film
connoisseurs or buffs, in the twenty-first century, horror is fully established as
a mainstream mode of address with a broad transnational reach. Within this

context, as we will see, some of the most successful Spanish films in the inter-
national markets have predictably been horror works, since they manage to
transcend the specificity of their national idiosyncrasies to appeal to spectators
on a global scale.
By the end of the twentieth century, the rise of horror in the Spanish market
was unstoppable. A paradigmatic instance is the success of Fantastic Factory,
which specialised in the production of English-language horror films, in col-
laboration with the established production house Filmax. This was a singularity
within the early twenty-first-century Spanish film panorama, since these com-
panies had not yet established partnerships with any television operators;
despite this, they managed to create the most successful franchise in the history
of Spanish cinema: [REC], comprised of [REC] (2007), [REC]2 (2009),
[REC]3—Genesis (2012) and [REC]4—Apocalypse (2014). Filmax films char-
acteristically mobilise a variety of generic commonplaces, de-emphasising any
kind of specific cultural marker that could threaten their universal appeal (Willis
2008, 32; Lázaro-Reboll 2017, 163). In fact, some of the filmmakers working
for Fantastic Factory/Filmax such as Jaume Balagueró and other horror film
directors have managed to go from the national to the international markets.
Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, for example, was recruited for the transnational film
arena and has made films such as 28 Weeks Later (2007) and Intruders (2011).
Balagueró, one of the main forces behind the [REC] franchise, has worked
back and forth between the production of Spanish-language and English-
language films. He directed both Darkness (2002) and Fragile (2002), work-
ing with the production resources of Filmax. Later on, he joined forces with
another Filmax filmmaker, Paco Plaza, to devise [REC].
To sum up, in the Spanish context, horror films started to re-emerge in the
early 1990s as both viable commercial enterprises and critically acclaimed aes-
thetic efforts that aimed at redefining the limits and contours of Spanish cin-
ema. In the twenty-first century, this trend grew due to major changes in
Spanish cinema law, the decisive role of television operators in the production
of films and the appearance of pioneering companies such as Fantastic Factory
and Filmax.
Case Study: The Orphanage (Juan Antonio

Bayona, 2007)
While, for Canal +, film production was part of its philosophy as a television
channel, the rest of the public and private operators were bound to it through
legal obligation, due to a late 1990s change in the legislative framework. Since
1999, all private television operators have been legally obliged to invest 5% of
their revenues in national audiovisual products. To follow through with this
requirement, the three private networks—Antena 3, Telecinco and Canal+—
launched their own production companies—namely, Telecinco Cinema, Antena
3 Films (A3 Media Cine today) and Sogecine—in order to control all stages of
their cinematic investments. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Telecinco and
Antena 3 were especially significant, since together they garnered 85% of adver-
tising income in the Spanish market, creating a televisual duopoly and, there-
fore, having the biggest sums to invest.
If during the 1990s there was a preponderance of auteurist works in com-
parison to commercial films, the progressive disappearance of public subsidies
and their substitution by private financing would dramatically alter the existing
panorama. The production companies associated with these television channels
would chiefly follow economic criteria, financing projects that were designed
to be successful in both movie theatres and subsequent television broadcasts
(for details see Ciller and Palacio 2016). These criteria would trigger the pro-
duction of genre films, most notably comedies and horror films.
Auteur films would become secondary, becoming identified with the label
‘el otro cine/the other cinema’. This type of filmmaking would face major
financial issues in terms of production, distribution and exhibition. The inter-
national success on the festival circuit of filmmakers such as Isaki Lacuesta,
Jaime Rosales and Albert Serra would not boost their careers commercially,
with their status largely remaining that of niche directors for very limited audi-
ences. Thus, twenty-first-century Spanish cinema has two clear strands: com-
mercial projects financed by private operators, and auteur films, dependent on
shrinking state subsidies.
Returning to commercial cinema, not accidentally, Telecinco Cinema would
greenlight a variety of projects from Álvaro Augustín, a former Canal+ collabo-
rator. Augustín had worked in the production of Guillermo del Toro’s The
Devil’s Backbone (2001) and would become a key figure in the making of Pan’s
Labyrinth (2006), a film that combines both Canal +’s prestige auteurist modus
operandi and Telecinco’s mainstream approach. The film’s formula is the fol-
lowing: a globally recognised auteur, Guillermo del Toro, a remarkable cast of
well-known Spanish actors and a significant budget by Spanish standards
(€13.5 million). The film’s success would be noteworthy, earning more than
€87 million globally and three Academy Awards out of its six nominations.
Guillermo del Toro had started his career with the critically acclaimed vam-
pire film Cronos (1993). Immediately after, he began working in the United
States, with mini-major Miramax, on the film Mimic (1997). After a volatile
relationship with producer Harvey Weinstein, and del Toro’s failure to obtain
final cut privileges, the film tanked at the box office. Following this unproduc-
tive English-language effort, del Toro would carry out his first collaboration
with Spanish producers, The Devil’s Backbone. Next, the Mexican filmmaker
would finally conquer Hollywood with his participation in two established
franchises, Blade and Hellboy. In between these two last films, as discussed
above, he made perhaps his most acclaimed film up to today, Pan’s Labyrinth,
until the more recent success of The Shape of Water (2017). By the mid-2000s,
del Toro had established himself both as a genre auteur and a commercially
successful filmmaker. It is not surprising that, when del Toro offered Telecinco
the opportunity to finance the first feature of his protégé—Juan Antonio

Bayona—the television channel soon agreed to strike a deal. Hence, The
Orphanage came to fruition.
The Orphanage is the sixth highest-grossing Spanish film of all time. Number
one is the 2014 comedy Spanish Affair; number two is J.A. Bayona’s English-
language drama The Impossible (2012); number three is the sequel to Spanish
Affair, Spanish Affair 2 (2015). As mentioned earlier in the chapter, The Others
is number four. Lastly, number five is another J.A. Bayona work, A Monster
Calls, a film also shot in English with an international cast that points again to
the transnationalisation of Spanish cinema, more generally, and J.A. Bayona’s
career, more specifically. In terms of the global box office, while The Orphanage
earned a modest amount in the United States, US$7.1 million, the film fared
much better in other international markets, making almost US$79 million dol-
lars worldwide.8
The Spanish trailer of the film makes clear its generic fabric through a series
of rapid shots and unambiguous music.9 It also features prominently Belén
Rueda, a well-known actress within the domestic market at the time of its
release, especially through her appearance in the TVE series Los Serrano
(2003–2008) and Periodistas (1998–2002). After a short contextual introduc-
tion to place the spectator in the mansion/former orphanage where the action
takes place, the trailer reads “Guillermo del Toro presents”. In other words, an
established cinematic figure and horror brand, del Toro, is mobilised to expo-
nentially increase the legitimacy of the work of a newcomer—director
J.A. Bayona. The rest of the trailer introduces the main plot elements of the
film—the life of a little boy is at stake—and once again capitalises on Rueda’s
name as one of the main assets of the film. Finally, a series of critics’ quotes—
from Time magazine and Variety—endow the film with critical legitimacy. To
conclude, the film’s title is displayed onscreen along with its director’s.
The international trailer recycles a good part of the Spanish one. However,
a series of differences are obvious from the very beginning.10 First, del Toro’s
name appears onscreen within the first five seconds; he was, above all, the film’s
main ambassador for the international markets, given that this project stemmed
from a little known Spanish film production, directed by a debutant director.
Second, the festival cycle—it was shown in the Toronto, New York and Cannes
Film Festivals—of the film is prominently featured, endowing Bayona’s work
with international legitimacy since these events are, undoubtedly, three A-list
gatherings from a critical and market viewpoint. Third, an English-language
voiceover is added. It contextualises the film as a ‘monster children horror film’
and guides the spectator through a succession of images, giving a series of plot
clues. As in the Spanish trailer, critics’ quotes are included. However, instead of
being a general appraisal of the film, they specifically anchor the film within the
conventions of the horror genre and the kind of thrills it offers. One of them
reads: “so tense, you’ll need to calm yourself by saying, it’s only a movie”, Time
Magazine. The trailer ends with the film’s title. Unlike in the Spanish version,
neither Bayona nor Rueda’s name are mentioned. Their lack of appeal to global
markets made their presence secondary for the promotional strategies of distri-
bution companies outside Spain. In other words, the film is sold as a pure genre
piece, set in a world of continuous frights and thrills, legitimised by a presti-
gious filmmaker—Guillermo del Toro—whose name acts as a brand for inter-
national horror fans.
A similar strategy is also at work in the Spanish and international posters of
the film. In the Spanish version (see Fig. 18.1), Belén Rueda is the centre of it
all, occupying the most prominent position in the image as she holds a baby.
Several children’s hands reach to touch her. She is framed against a window,
with her body and face lit through a low-key strategy that emphasises the
gothic horror character of the film. The international poster (see Fig. 18.2)
utilises the same image of Rueda posing with a baby. In this case, a group of
almost faceless children are placed behind her, as though they were her follow-
ers. Two main differences stand out. First, Belén Rueda’s name is absent.
Second, on top of the image, and above the actress and the children’s image,
we read “Guillermo del Toro, The Director of Pan’s Labyrinth & Hellboy pres-
ents”. In other words, del Toro is the main selling point of a film that also
utilises the characteristic low-key visual fabric of horror to anchor the film
generically in its promotional campaign.
The Orphanage was made at a key juncture in the history of the Spanish film
industry in which television operators were obliged by law to invest significant
amounts in the film business. There were two main options: spending a huge
amount on A-list, expensive, productions or investing less in a greater number
of films designed to fill up more programming slots. The latter option would
eventually dominate the Spanish film market. In this regard, The Orphanage
was clearly designed to reproduce The Others’ success. It had several disadvan-
tages in relation to Amenábar’s film. First, The Others had a higher budget.
Second, instead of having Nicole Kidman, the film’s protagonist was Belén
Rueda, well known as a television personality and actress but not a proven star
on the cinematic circuit, even though she had played a small role in Academy
Award winner The Sea Inside (2004). In addition, sharing a gothic horror
mode of address and the partial dissolution of temporal and spatial coordinates
to give the narrative a universalising appeal, both films partake in an existing
tendency in Spanish horror, already at work during the 1970s in films such as
Who Can Kill a Child?, and, as mentioned earlier, an approach extensively
utilised in a number of Filmax productions (Willis 2008). The logic behind this
tactic was that this lack of specificity would immediately boost a film’s poten-
tial abroad.
Encouraged by the excellent box-office results of Pan’s Labyrinth, Telecinco
would launch a media blizzard around The Orphanage, with constant commer-
cials on its television channel and the utilisation of the then innovative social
network MySpace. The film’s premiere took place on the Festival Internacional
de Cinema de Catalunya (Festival de Sitges), the most important showcase of
genre films in Europe. In this case, Sitges was relevant due to its focus on genre
and also because of its location: both director J.A. Bayona and production
Fig. 18.1 The Spanish poster for The Orphanage

Fig. 18.2 The international poster for The Orphanage

company Rodar y Rodar were based in neighbouring Barcelona. As stated

above, the film ended up being a phenomenal box-office success.
In a film industry highly dependent on television operators’ financing, The
Orphanage would turn into the successful formula to imitate. Two more
Telecinco Cinema productions would define this production model, First,
Agora (2009), which despite having 3.4 million viewers and earning €21.3
million domestically, did not entirely fulfil initial expectations11; second, The
Oxford Crimes (2008), with 1.4 million viewers and €8.3 million of domestic
box office.12 The latter film, due to its ‘cinematic look’, was not particularly
suitable for television broadcasting. Consequently, The Orphanage marked a
line for risk/profitability—that is, a tight budget, with a technical crew prefer-
ably coming from the television world and a series of actors recycled from the
national television star system, with a melodramatic, in-your-face tone to
engage different audience groups. These would be the key ingredients of some
of the most remarkable Spanish film productions from the mid 2000s onwards,
or, in other words, a cinema with a dominant national flavour that would
chiefly succeed internationally, in the case of horror films, due to the readability
of the globally established generic conventions that structure this type of film.
Conclusion
After witnessing Canal +’s success with de la Iglesia’s and Amenábar’s works in
the mid 1990s, television companies such as Antena 3 and Telecinco “saw a
profitable niche in the horror genre since it appeals to contemporary Spanish
audiences and it is also relatively easy to distribute internationally” (Rodríguez
Ortega and Romero Santos 2017b: 236). From the mid 2000s onwards, this
would be the successful formula for the biggest box-office hits in the Spanish
market: a genre film (mostly comedies and horror) with a cast composed of
television actors, thus recycling the TV star system at work at that particular
historical time; tight budgets to maximise profitability; and a media blizzard in
promotional terms, via the mobilisation of a series of connected strategies
through the different windows available for the two multimedia conglomerates
(A3 Media and Mediaset, formerly Antena 3 and Telecinco) that dominate the
Spanish mediascape. This has entailed the demise, or at least marginalisation, of
more auteurist approaches to filmmaking. If names like Julio Medem and
Juanma Bajo Ulloa are hailed as key players in the renovation of Spanish film in
the early 1990s, today their films are nothing but an afterthought within the
national cinema landscape. While Spanish film was highly dependent on the
state in the 1980s, from the beginning of the 2000s, television networks and
the multimedia conglomerates that own them would become the unquestion-
able rulers of national film production. With the rise of television fiction to the
global forefront of audiovisual production and the recent appearance of inter-
national and national players in the Spanish Video on Demand (VOD) mar-
ket—Home Box Office (HBO), Netflix, Movistar—many film directors are
moving into television. Others, like J.A. Bayona and Amenábar continue mak-
ing English-language transnational productions. The rise of horror films both

as central box-office draws and as critically acclaimed artefacts since the 1990s,
and the emergence of directors such as the above-analysed de la Iglesia,
Amenábar, Bayona, Balagueró, Plaza and Fresnadillo, have been key to the
development of Spanish film in the twenty-first century.

1. What were the effects of the Miró Decree in the production of genre
films in 1980s Spain?
2. What was the role of Canal+ in the production of Spanish films in

the 1990s?
3. Who are two key ‘New Spanish Cinema’ directors in terms of genre
films? Why?
4. Why did Spanish TV operators start investing in film production from
the late 1990s to early 2000s?
5. What was Guillermo del Toro’s role in the making of The

Orphanage (2007)?
6. What formula did The Orphanage try to imitate? What was its main prec-
edent in early 2000s Spanish film?
7. How does the Spanish star system work?
8. What are the most successful genres in Spanish cinema in the late twen-
tieth and early twenty-first centuries?
Acknowledgements This chapter was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia,

Innovación y Universidades del Gobierno de España under Grant “Cine y televisión
1986-1995: modernidad y emergencia de la cultura global” (CSO2016-78354-P).
Notes
1. Spain was a dictatorship for almost forty years, from 1939 to 1975, under the
ruling of general Francisco Franco. The so-called Transition to democracy (La
Transición) started after Franco’s demise in 1975. On 1 March 1979, the first
democratic elections took place.
2. All data about domestic box office in Spain has been taken from the ICAA’s
website. Instituto de Cinematografía y Artes Audiovisuales (ICAA) is the
Spanish institution in charge of managing national film subsidies. https://www.
mecd.gob.es/cultura-mecd/areas-cultura/cine.html.
3. The Day of the Beast had 1.4 million viewers, earning €4.3 million.
4. The Others also won eight Goyas (The Spanish Film Academy awards) including
Best Film and Best director, becoming the first English-language film to receive
the Best Film Award.
5. Data from ICAA.
6. Data from Box Office Mojo. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=
others.htm.
7. In fact, the film was shot entirely in Spain. More specifically, shooting took place
in Madrid and on a location in Cantabria, a region in the North of the country.
8. Data from Box Office Mojo: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=
orphanage.htm.
9. See trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qjHkkffOx8.
10. See trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUZQgqxIZ6s.
11. Data from the ICAA: http://infoicaa.mecd.es/CatalogoICAA/Peliculas/
Detalle?Pelicula=18908.
12. Data from the ICAA: http://infoicaa.mecd.es/CatalogoICAA/Peliculas/
Detalle?Pelicula=125106.
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Index1
A Auschwitz-Birkenau, 102, 103

Able-bodied, 51–54, 57, 64–66, 201 Auteur, 5, 6, 8, 9, 92, 129, 131–135,
Abnormality, 54 137, 140, 145, 153–154, 163, 169,
Abrahamson, Lenny, 229, 236, 237 198, 200, 203, 214, 233, 300
Ae Fond Kiss…, 43 Auteurism, 6, 129–146, 153, 158
Aferim!, 9, 169, 170, 176–182 Authenticity, 55, 56, 74, 80, 100,
Agamben, Giorgio, 303 151, 152, 155–156, 159, 160,
Almodóvar, Pedro, 198 163, 164
Amenábar, Alejandro, 60, 321, 322, 327, Avatar, 78
330, 331
American Cousins, 42, 43
Animation, 194, 203, 232, 234 B
Antena 3, 321, 324–325, 330 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 282, 285
Anthropocentric, 69, 72, 73, 75, 76, Balibar, Étienne, 115, 116, 253,
78–80, 83, 84 257, 260
Art cinema, 35, 152–154, 300, 302 Balkanisation, 110, 112–115
Arthouse films/cinema, 168, 173, 174, Bananas!, 78
178, 179, 181, 192, 196–199, 203 Banlieue, 58, 59, 200, 201
Attenberg, 9, 208, 209, 215, 217–220 Baron, Lawrence, 90
Audience, 4, 9, 16, 18, 19, 21, 27, 29, Barton, Ruth, 233–235, 237, 239
30, 34, 36, 37, 44, 45, 52, 54, 56, Bayona, Juan Antonio, 318, 324–331
61–63, 74, 75, 85, 96, 99, Begić, Aida, 115, 116
101–103, 114, 123, 130, 133, 134, See also Snow
136, 140–143, 145, 153, 154, Belle Toujours, 8, 131, 135,
170–182, 188–192, 194–203, 137, 139–144
204n1, 208, 210, 212, 214–216, Berlin International Film Festival,
219, 229, 233, 235, 240, 242, 260, 170, 188
263–265, 269, 273, 283, 284, 289, Berlin Wall, 1, 21, 264–266
290, 300, 321–323, 325, 330 Besson, Luc, 195, 307, 308
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9
336 INDEX
Bhabha, Homi, 42, 46 Co-production, 4, 10, 19, 20, 22, 30, 35,
Bildungsfilm, 274 41, 110, 151, 154, 169, 191, 199,
Biopolitcs, 299–314 209, 211, 213, 214, 216, 217, 233,
Birch-Tree Meadow, The, 89, 90, 251, 283, 302, 318, 319, 322, 323
94–96, 101–105 Council of Europe, 151, 191, 209, 255
Black Wave, 110, 111 Creative Europe, 18, 19, 30
Blockbuster film, 302, 308 See also MEDIA
Bond, James, 195, 196, 198 Crowley, John, 236, 238–242
Bondebjerg, Ib, 2, 75, 190, 208 Cubitt, Sean, 72
Brereton, Pat, 72, 239 Cultural imperialism, 229, 231, 235
Brigadoon, 38 Cultural industries, 71, 228, 230, 231
Browning, Christopher, 110, 119 Culture clash comedy, 269
Buell, Lawrence, 84
Buick Riviera, 115
D
Dağtekin, Bora, 270, 272–275
C Daly, Lance, 235
Canal +, 199, 308, 321, 322, 324, Day After Tomorrow, The, 78
325, 330 Day of the Beast, The, 321, 322
Canned Dreams, 78 Dead Snow, 75
Cannes International Film Festival, 158, Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, The, 8, 157–163
163, 198, 326 Decentralisation, 207–222
Canning, Laura, 3, 9, 237 De la Iglesia, Álex, 321, 330, 331
Cargo, 10, 308 Del Toro, Guillermo, 325–327
Carney, John, 234, 236 Delbo, Charlotte, 98
Catholic church, 233, 235, 237 Deleuze, Gilles, 237, 250, 259, 260,
Children of Men, 301–303, 305, 287, 294
312, 313 Dench, Jane, 199
Cinema of normalisation, 114–115 Denmark/Danish cinema, 7, 73, 77, 78,
Cinema of self-Balkanisation, 113–115 100, 168, 196, 283
Cinematic realism, 149–164 Deterritorialisation, 236, 250, 251
Cinema verité, 16, 19, 29, 150, 155 Diaspora
Climate change, 73, 78, 308, 313 diasporic, 7, 9, 20, 23, 42–46,
Close-up (shot), 27, 57, 59, 63, 98, 99, 227–229, 235–237, 240
180, 294 See also Loshitzky, Yosefa
Cluzet, François, 56, 200 Digital
Clydesidism, 33, 36, 38, 40, 41 cinema, 192, 210
Cold Prey, 75 media, 210, 217
Comedy theory Direct cinema, 150, 155
incongruity, 52, 61, 263, 268, Disability, 6, 7, 51–66, 200, 202
269, 271 See also Impairment
pattern recognition, 52, 61 Distribution, 5, 9, 10, 18, 74, 153, 168,
release, 52, 61 170, 187–189, 191, 195, 198–200,
superiority, 52, 61, 268 202, 203n1, 208–210, 212, 217,
Coming Days, The, 304, 305, 312 219, 221, 232, 233, 235, 238, 320,
Coming-of-age film, 270, 273, 274 323, 325, 327
Coming to terms with the past, 267 Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The,
See also Vergangenheitsbewältigung 7, 52, 62–66
Cook, Pam, 92, 132, 135 Doane, Mary Ann, 92, 137
INDEX 337
Documentary European Convention on

autobiographical, 18, 30 Cinematographic Co-productions,
European documentary, 15–30 191, 209, 233
nonfiction, 15–20, 22, 23 European Documentary Network
online documentary, 18 (EDN), 18–20, 30
post-documentary, 18 European Film Awards, 22, 24
See also Cinema verité Eva, 10, 306, 307
Dogme, 6, 85, 151 Everett, Wendy, 3, 5, 6, 152
Dörrie, Doris, 271, 276 Ex Machina, 10, 306, 307
Dubbing, 189, 195, 200 Extraterrestrial, 305
Dysfunctional male, 283, 286–293, Ezra, Elizabeth, 3, 6, 154
295, 296
Dystopia, 299, 301, 312
F
Fanta Terror, 317–319
E Fast and the Furious, The, 72
Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, Fellman, Susanna, 77
8, 131, 135, 136, 139, 141, 144 Feminism/feminist
Ecocinema, 69, 71–74, 76, 78–80, 84 filmmakers, 41, 92, 94–105, 115, 116
Einhorn, Lena, 89, 100 film theory, 92, 129, 130, 283
Nina’s Journey, 89, 90, 94, 95, and Holocaust Studies, 94–96
97–101, 105 perspective, 93–96, 98–105, 115,
El Otro Cine / The Other Cinema, 116, 142
317–318, 325 See also Women
Elkington, Trevor, 79, 80 Femme fatale
Elsaesser, Thomas, 3, 21, 22, 152, 168, deadly woman, 292
169, 173, 178, 182, 183n5 woman torturer, 287, 294
Emigration, 9, 235–240, 242, 258, 261 Festival de Sitges, 327
Environmentalism, 7, 73, 83, 84 Filmax, 324, 327
Eurimages, 151, 191, 194, 196, 323 Film cartolina, 63–65
Eurocentricism, 249–251, 261 Film commissions
Eurodoc, see Creative Europe National film commissions, 210
Europa Cinema Network, 154, 191 Regional film commissions, 210
Europe/European Film noir
European Commission, 19, 151, American, 282, 283, 286, 287
188–192, 196, 200, 202, 209, erotic neo-noir, 282, 285
211, 215 European, 10, 282, 283, 285,
European Union (EU), 3, 5, 7, 10n1, 290, 291
18, 28, 35, 73, 151, 170–172, neo-noir, 9, 10, 282–284, 286–291,
175, 176, 189–191, 207–209, 293, 295, 296
211, 230–232, 255, 304, 312 proto-noir, 284, 287
film policy, 5, 210 psychological thriller, 10, 282, 284,
heritage, 5, 9, 152, 208 289, 296
migration, migrant crisis, 1, 6, 15–30 rape-and-revenge, 290, 296
European cinema See also Noir
concept, 1–6 Film offices, 217
filmmaking, 2, 6, 173, 207–222 regional film offices, 217, 221
identity, 1–10 Finland/Finnish cinema, 70, 71, 73, 74,
teaching, 2, 3 77–80, 283
338 INDEX
Fire at Sea, 7, 24–29 crisis, 207, 208, 215

reception (awards, festivals), 24, 26 Weird Wave, 9, 208, 215
See also Rosi, Gianfranco Guattari, Felix, 84, 237, 250,
Flashback 259, 260
biographic, 97, 101, 105 Gustafsson, Tommy, 72
posttraumatic, 97, 101, 105
Flynn, Roddy, 233, 236
Follow the Money, 78 H
Footprint Network, The, 77 Handicap, 53
For a Woman (Kurys, Diane), 89, 90, Hechter, Michael, 35
94–97, 105 Hedling, Erik, 75, 213
Force Majeure, 71, 81–84 Heimatfilm, 263–264, 270, 271
Forsyth, Bill, 38, 39, 44, 47 Heritage
Local Hero, 39 cinema, 74, 75, 79, 80
Foucault, Michel, 161, 299 film, 59, 74, 76, 228, 234, 239
Fracoism/Francoist, 317–319 High school comedy, 272
France/French cinema, 16, 19, 35, 89, Hirsch, Joshua, 92, 97, 101, 104
97, 101–104, 129, 131, 132, 155, Hirsch, Marianne, 88, 90, 91, 96
156, 169, 188, 191, 192, 195, Hitler, Adolf, 264, 267–268, 274
199–202, 211, 236, 251–259, 261, Hitler humour, 10, 264, 267–268
283, 307, 308, 322 Hjort, Mette, 74, 80, 154, 167–171,
Freak show, 54 175, 182, 212
French New Wave, 6, 8, 132, 134, 140, Holocaust
149–151, 156, 157, 163, 164, 290 history, 1, 91, 95, 102–104
Freud, Sigmund, 52, 61, 130, 294 memory, 87–106
Funding regimes, 235 trauma, 87–106
See also Survivor; Women and the
Holocaust
G Homo sacer, 303
Galicia, 57, 65 Horror film, 9, 75, 105, 175, 234, 285,
Galt, Rosalind, 2–4, 18, 21, 150 286, 290, 309, 317–331
Germany Hoskins, Colin, 191
East, 264–267 Humour, 39, 52, 61, 201, 202,
Federal Republic of, 265, 276 263–274, 276, 277
German Democratic Republic (GDR), dark, 71
266, 267 Hungary/Hungarian cinema, 9, 89, 167,
West, 263, 265–267, 270 170, 171, 174–178, 182
See also Reunification Huppert, Isabelle, 283, 290, 292,
Ghetto, 100, 101, 105 293, 296
Glavonić, Ognjen, 118 Elle, 283, 290, 291, 296
See also Load, The Merci pour le chocolat, 290, 293
Globalisation, 19, 34, 217, 235, 243, Piano Teacher, The, 290, 293
249, 261, 262, 271 Hybridisation, 154, 281–283,
Global warming, 73, 83, 313 285, 289–291
Glocalisation, 235, 242
Good Bye, Lenin!, 266
Goulding, Daniel, 111, 118 I
Greece/Greek Iceland/Icelandic cinema, 7, 73,
cinema, 214, 215 77, 81, 188
INDEX 339
Immigration, 7, 10, 81, 240, 251, 254, L

255, 272, 304 Lampedusa, Italy, 24–26, 28, 29
Impairment, 7, 52–54, 66 in Fire at Sea, 24, 25
See also Disability See also Kushner, Tony
Inconvenient Truth, An, 78 Language, 1, 3, 4, 9, 27, 36, 63, 97,
Instrumentalism, 230 114, 152, 157, 168, 179, 189, 190,
Internationalization, 74, 154 194, 195, 198–201, 211, 235, 264,
Into Eternity, 78 269, 270, 282, 283, 285, 291, 300,
Iordanova, Dina, 3, 113, 118, 305, 307, 308, 322, 324–326,
168, 175 331, 331n4
Ireland/Irish Lanthimos, Yorgos, 10, 215, 216, 219,
cinema, 9, 227–242 233, 308–312
film, 228–238, 242, 243n8, 322 Levi, Pavle, 114
filmmakers, 9, 229, 236 Levy, Dani, 268, 269
Irish Film Board (Screen Ireland), Lewis, Ingrid, 3, 7, 8, 87, 92, 119, 130
230–233, 238, 308 Living and the Dead, The, 111, 120–123
Italian Neorealism, 6, 8, 26, Liz, Mariana, 2, 3, 133, 198, 302, 313
134, 149–151 Loach, Ken, 43, 198, 234
Italy/Italian cinema, 24–26, 89, 120, Load, The, 118, 123
155, 192, 194, 195, 200, 211, Lobster, The, 10, 208, 233, 237,
283, 302 301, 308–312
Ivakhiv, Adrian, 72 Long take, 26, 134, 156, 303, 313
Iversen, Gunnar, 75, 79 Loridan-Ivens, 89, 95, 101, 102
See also Birch-Tree Meadow, The
Loshitzky, Yosefa, 6, 20, 21, 23
J Lu, Sheldon, 72
Jameson, Fredric, 115, 117 LUX Prize, 209
Jelača, Dijana, 113, 114
Jergović, Miljenko, 115
Jewish Germans, 269, 276 M
Jewish women Man Called Ove, A, 80
cinematic representations, 87–106 Masculinity, 10, 39–40, 47, 60, 71, 237,
second-generation, 88, 89, 96, 275, 283
97, 100 Masochism, 287, 294
survivors, 89, 90, 92, 93, 99–105 McCrone, David, 36, 41
third-generation, 88, 89 McDonagh, John Michael, 237,
Jude, Radu, 169, 178–181 238, 243n8
Julien, Isaac, 47, 48 McGregor, Ewan, 40, 199
MEDIA, 15, 18–20, 31n1, 191, 194,
198, 203, 219, 238, 323
K programme, 31n1, 191, 198, 209,
Kaapa, Pietari, 7, 72, 74, 79, 80, 85 219, 238
Kailyard, the, 33–34, 36–39, 41 See also Creative Europe
Kazaz, Enver, 123 Medical model of disability, 53
Kellner, Douglas, 111 Memory
Kurys, Diane, For a Woman, 89, 96, 97 collective, 4, 88, 105, 266
Kushner, Tony, 24, 25, 27 cultural, 174, 208, 266, 272
Kusturica, Emir, 113, 114 gendered, 91, 92
See also Underground vs. history, 103, 104, 106
340 INDEX
Memory (cont.) National, the

Holocaust (see Holocaust, memory) hybrid national identity, 33
postmemory, 87, 88, 90, 91, national cinema, 1–5, 9, 34, 35, 70,
96, 99, 106 74–76, 79, 110–113, 150, 155,
prosthetic, 91 168–171, 173, 175–178, 181,
subjectivity of, 103, 104 182, 183n5, 231, 233, 238, 249,
Men/male 251, 301, 322, 330
canon, 105, 131, 132, 135 national identity, 3, 16, 34, 35, 37, 43,
gaze, 42, 129–131, 135, 137, 139, 45, 46, 48, 75, 208, 254,
141, 146 256, 283
perspective, 92, 93, 95, 136, 137, 139, Naturalism, 152, 155, 160
141, 144 Nazi, 87, 106n1, 112, 120, 138, 264,
Men of Talvivaara, The, 78 267, 268, 272, 274, 276
Mercer, Kobena, 47, 48 Neonazism, 272
Mi, Jiayan, 72 Neorealism, 6, 8, 26, 134, 149–151,
Middlebrow films, 8, 178, 189, 163, 164, 282
192, 198–200 Nestingen, Andrew, 79, 80
Migration (migrant) New cinema, 149–151, 156, 163
in documentary film, 15–30 New Spanish Cinema, 319, 320
European migrant crisis, 20, New Wave cinema, 149, 155, 161, 164
24, 29, 30 Nina’s Heavenly Delights, 7, 41, 43–47
forced, 25, 28 Nina’s Journey, 89, 90, 94, 95,
as ‘other,’ 29, 30 97–101, 105
voluntary, 25 Niskavuori, 74
See also Lampedusa, Italy; Noir, 281–297
Loshitzky, Yosefa Nordic countries, 7, 73, 76–78, 212
Mikkelsen, Mads, 198 Normality, 7, 27, 51, 53–54, 66, 258
Milić, Kristijan, 111, 120–123 Normality drama, 7, 51–66
See also Living and the Dead, The Normality genre, 51
Minimalism, 152, 153, 160 Norway/Norwegian cinema, 73,
Miró Decree, 318, 320 75–77, 79, 80
Mlakić, Josip, 120
See also Living and the Dead, the
Monani, Salma, 72 O
Monster Children Horror, 318, 326 Occupied, 78
Monsters, 306, 313 Of Horses and Men, 74
Morvern Callar, 41 Oliveira, Manoel de, 6, 8, 129–146
Mulvey, Laura, 42, 129–131, 135, Ordinary men, 110, 119–120
139, 141 Ordinary People, 118, 119
Mungiu, Cristian, 150, 154, 157, 159, Orientalism, 37, 44, 113
162, 163, 174 Orphanage, The, 318, 324–330
Orphans, 40
Ostalgie, 264, 266, 267
N Östlund, Ruben, 71, 81–83
Nairn, Tom, 35 Other
Nakache, Olivier, 199–202 othering, 7, 34
Narrative ambiguity, 160 otherness, 5–7, 33–48, 312
Nasta, Dominique, 150, 152, 163, 178 Others, The, 318, 322, 326, 327
INDEX 341
P Road movie, 9, 157, 249–261, 265, 266,

Parallel industries, 167–168, 175 269, 270
Paraplegic, 55 Rob Roy, 36, 40
Paris, 16, 56, 58, 63–65, 141, Romania/Romanian cinema, 3, 8,
255–258, 283 149–164, 167–183, 271, 283
Pavičić, Jurica, 112–114 Romanian New Wave
Periphery, 9, 37, 207, 208, 215, aesthetics, 5, 149, 151–153, 155, 156,
217, 221 158, 163, 164
Petrie, Duncan, 21, 37, 39, 74, 154, minimalism, 152, 153, 156, 159, 160
167–171, 175, 182 Romantic comedy, 44, 190, 233, 267,
Pioneer, 78 269–270, 273, 275
Portugal/Portuguese cinema, Rosenstrasse (Von Trotta,
130, 133–145 Margarethe), 89, 97
Post-analogue, 168, 179, 180 Rosi, Gianfranco, 24–30
Post-communism/post-communist, 3, documentary techniques, 30
154, 169, 170, 174–178, 258 See also Fire at Sea
Postfeminism, 288, 289, 292, 296 Runaway production, 168, 175,
Post-Yugoslav cinema, 8, 109–124 231, 234
See also Cinema of normalization; Rušinović, Goran, 115
Cinema of self-Balkanisation See also Buick Riviera
Pseudo-documentary style, 160 Rust, Stephen, 72
Puiu, Cristi, 8, 155–163, 174, 175
See also Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, The
S
Sami Blood, 80
Q Schlepelern, Pelle, 75
Quadriplegic, 53, 56, 60, 66 Science fiction (Sf), 9, 10, 286, 289,
299–314, 317, 321, 322
Scopophilia, 130, 139
R Scotland, 7, 33–48, 197
Rams, 80 Scottishness
Reading, Anna, 91, 103 hybrid Scottish identity, 7, 38–39,
Realism, 26, 38, 111, 149–164, 281, 41–43, 45, 47
282, 303, 310 Scottish cinema, 7, 33–48
Recipes for Disaster, 78 Scottish film, 35, 38–41, 43
Red Road, 41, 42 Scottish identity, 7, 35–42, 44, 45
Refugee, 15, 24–26, 28–30, 116, 258, Scottish masculinity, 39–40, 47
261, 272, 303, 305 Scottish national identity, 37, 45, 46
Refugee crisis, 202, 268, 270, 276 Sea Inside, The, 7, 52, 56, 57, 59–61, 63,
Remembrance, 89, 90, 94, 95, 65, 66, 327
97–101, 105 Section 481 tax relief, 231, 232,
Resource politics, 7, 71, 74, 76–79 235, 238
Reunification Semprún’s Decree, 320
comedy, 264–267, 270 Sf, see Science fiction
of Germany, 264–267 Shooter, 78
Reykjavik Whale Watching Silverman, Kaja, 92, 95, 136
Massacre, The, 78 Since Otar Left, 9, 251, 255
Rivi, Luisa, 3, 4, 154 Snow, 116
342 INDEX
Social model of disability, 53, 54 Tomorrow We Move, 89, 90, 94–97, 105
Soila, Tytti, 79 Toni Erdmann, 271
Solum, Ove, 75 Tracy, Tony, 233, 236
Son of Saul, 9, 169, 170, 174, 176–182 Trainspotting, 40, 199
Sontag, Susan, 124, 300 Transcultural comedy, 10, 264, 269–270
Spain, 42, 55, 57, 190, 199, 200, 202, Transnational, 1–5, 8, 9, 20, 21, 35, 41,
251, 252, 254, 255, 283, 302, 306, 42, 72, 76, 154, 167–182, 203n1,
317–331, 331n1, 331n2, 332n7 209, 216, 227–242, 249, 251, 282,
Spicer, Andrew, 283, 285–287, 289, 290 283, 318, 322–324, 331
State of exception, 303 Trauma, 66, 87–106, 136, 234, 235,
State support of film, 231 289, 291
Stereotype(s), 8, 40, 42, 45, 52, 54–55, The Troll Hunter, 76
58, 61, 62, 65, 113, 134, 137, 140, True-life narrative, 53
143–145, 201, 264 Tsangari, Athina Rachel, 215–220
Strange Case of Angelica, The, 8, 131, Turkish Germans, 10, 264, 269, 272
135, 137, 139, 141, 144
Straubhaar, Joseph D., 189, 190
Strictly Sinatra, 42 U
Subjective camera/shots, 94–97, 105, UK/UK cinema, 188, 189, 192,
136, 141 194–196, 200, 201, 207, 211, 229,
Subtitles, 189, 200 234, 259, 283, 302–304, 308, 322
Suck Me Shakespeer, 272–275 Underground, 113, 114
Survivor(s) Unlikely couple film, 270
as filmmaker, 102, 105 Untouchable, 7, 9, 52, 56–62, 66,
holocaust memories, 88, 93, 189, 199–203
97, 101–105 Utopia, 299, 301
silence of, 97
testimony (see Testimony)
Sustainability, 70, 73 V
Suvin, Darko, 299, 301 Valerian and the City of a Thousand
Sweden/Swedish cinema, 7, 73, 77, Planets, 307
79–83, 89, 100, 213 Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 267
Sy, Omar, 56, 200 See also Coming-to-terms with the past
Verhoeven, Paul, 283–285,
288, 290–295
T Basic Instinct, 284, 285, 288, 289
Tartanry, 33, 34, 36–38, 41 Elle, 283–285, 288, 291–295
Taylor, Bron, 72 Fourth Man, The, 284, 285, 288, 289
Telecinco, 321, 324, 325, 327, 330 Video-on-Demand (VOD), 188, 191,
Cinema, 318, 325, 330 192, 200, 210, 211, 330
Television, 4, 10, 22, 39, 43, 52, 63, 78, Voice
98, 118, 122, 168, 169, 174, 175, in film; authorial, 92, 94–96; voice off,
177, 190, 192, 199, 201, 203n1, 93, 102; voiceover, 26, 63, 92,
211, 213–215, 232, 266, 270, 94–98, 100, 102, 105, 135, 136,
272, 317–331 273, 310, 326
Testimony, 23, 89, 90, 92, 93 women’s voices, 7, 90, 92, 104,
Third Half, The, 88, 89, 93, 94, 105 117, 142
Toledano, Éric, 199–202 Voyeurism, 130, 137–139
INDEX 343
W representation, 89, 94, 129–146

Wallengren, Ann-Kristin, 75 Women and the Holocaust
Wang’s Arrival, 10, 305 “food talk”, 102
Warrior, the motherhood, 100–101
in folk poetry, 117 self-imposed silence of, 97, 102
in post-Yugoslav cinema, 8, 109–124 victims, 87–89, 92, 105
in Yugoslav-cinema, 110, 118 women’s experiences, 94–96, 98,
Watts, Naomi, 199 101–105, 130
Wave, The, 76 women’s voices, 7, 90, 95, 102,
Weinstein, Harvey, 201, 325 104, 105
Welcome, 9, 251, 254, 255, 258–261 writers, 90, 93, 97
Welfare society, 74 See also Jewish women
Wheelchair, 55, 57, 58, 63–66, 202 Wood, Mary, 2–4, 6, 132, 145
White Reindeer, 80
Witness/witnessing
end of the witness era, 90 Y
vicarious witnessing, 88, 90–92, Yugoslav cinema, 110, 111, 118
96–97, 99, 101, 104–106 See also Black Wave; Post-
Wolf, 80 Yugoslav cinema
Women and film
filmmakers, 41, 44, 93–105, 115, 116,
217, 219, 220 Z
objectification, 131, 132, 134, 137, Žanic, Ivo, 117
139, 141, 144 Žižek, Slavoj, 113, 114

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European: Cinema in The Twenty-First Century

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Ingrid Lewis

“European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Discourses, Directions and Genres

ISBN 978-3-030-33435-2 ISBN 978-3-030-33436-9 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Geber86, Getty Images

1 Introduction: The Identity of European Cinema 1

2 Documenting Difference: Migration and Identity in European

3 Scotland’s Onscreen Identities: Otherness and Hybridity in

4 Questioning the ‘Normality Drama’: The Representation of

5 Ecocritical Perspectives on Nordic Cinema: From Nature

6 The Trauma of (Post)Memory: Women’s Memories in

7 An Ordinary Warrior and His Inevitable Defeat:

8 The New/Old Patriarchal Auteurism: Manoel de Oliveira,

9 The Latest European New Wave: Cinematic Realism and

10 Between Transnational and Local in European Cinema:

11 Crossing Borders: Investigating the International Appeal of

12 Technology, Decentralisation and the Periphery of European

13 Brooklyn and the Other Side of the Ocean: The International

15 German Film Comedy in the ‘Berlin Republic’: Wildly

17 Dystopia Redux: Science Fiction Cinema and Biopolitics299

18 Spanish Horror Film: Genre, Television and a New Model of

Eleanor Andrews is retired Senior Lecturer in Italian and Film Studies from

Huw D. Jones is Lecturer in Film at the University of Southampton, UK. He

Maria O’Brien submitted her PhD thesis ‘A Political Economy of Tax

Vicente Rodríguez Ortega is Senior Lecturer at Universidad Carlos III de

co-edited with Axel Hildebrandt. She is editing a book on German responses

Fig. 2.1 Samuele’s desire to ‘see’ as symbolism for audiences

Fig. 10.1 The ‘ethical close-up’ in Son of Saul180

Table 6.1 Holocaust films directed or co-directed by women 94

Introduction: The Identity of European Cinema

What is contemporary European cinema? Given the indisputable richness of

© The Author(s) 2020 1

European cinema to a wide-ranging and diverse selection of twenty-first-­

cinema needs to be an inclusive area of study that encompasses all countries

the hardest-hit peripheral countries, Ireland and Greece—also points to an

simultaneous manifestation and frustration of tensions that broadly belong to

Documenting Difference: Migration

© The Author(s) 2020 15

The Migrant in Documentary: A Brief History

While these travel documentaries allowed film viewers to temporarily migrate

European Documentary Production Policies

Documenting Migration: Some Current Trends

And this link between Europe as a ‘cinematic space’ and a ‘geopolitical

Elsaesser’s is a call for a definition of identity no longer based on geographi-

Case Study: Fire at Sea (Gianfranco Rosi, 2016)

It is evident that the rapid increase in migration from North Africa to

This mediated documentary gaze is best articulated during a sequence in

In the latter, an unobtrusive, observational function of documentary is pre-

Questions for Group Discussion

Scotland’s Onscreen Identities: Otherness

© The Author(s) 2020 33

Any formation of the national specificity of a film, then, would need to be

Furthermore, basing the national identity of Scottish film on the production

Scotland: Other and Not-Other

For David McCrone (2001: 52), it is the everyday lived experience in

‘Traditional’ Scottish Identity

alternatively an exotic backdrop for adventure and romance, or a sinister and

However, in Hollywood and British cinema, this transformative ability was

Initial Steps Towards a Hybrid Scottish Identity

New Scottish Cinema, New Scottish Masculinities

There were also a number of internationally successful Scottish films pro-

Twenty-First-Century Hybrid Scottish Identities

Many of the twenty-first-century films that focus on women’s experiences

Morvern (Samantha Morton), a young woman working in a grocery store in

1 Introduction: The Identity of European Cinema 1

2 Documenting Difference: Migration and Identity in European

3 Scotland’s Onscreen Identities: Otherness and Hybridity in

4 Questioning the ‘Normality Drama’: The Representation of

5 Ecocritical Perspectives on Nordic Cinema: From Nature

6 The Trauma of (Post)Memory: Women’s Memories in

7 An Ordinary Warrior and His Inevitable Defeat:

8 The New/Old Patriarchal Auteurism: Manoel de Oliveira,

9 The Latest European New Wave: Cinematic Realism and

10 Between Transnational and Local in European Cinema:

11 Crossing Borders: Investigating the International Appeal of

12 Technology, Decentralisation and the Periphery of European

13 Brooklyn and the Other Side of the Ocean: The International

15 German Film Comedy in the ‘Berlin Republic’: Wildly

17 Dystopia Redux: Science Fiction Cinema and Biopolitics299

18 Spanish Horror Film: Genre, Television and a New Model of

Fig. 10.1 The ‘ethical close-up’ in Son of Saul180

Table 6.1 Holocaust films directed or co-directed by women 94

European cinema to a wide-ranging and diverse selection of twenty-first-

expensive-looking products tastefully placed around on glass tables. Philippe’s