Abstract
Since the early 1990s, European coproductions have reconfigured several of the economic, technological, and historical changes that occurred in the wake of the Cold War: specifically, the globalized market and the revival of Europeanism as formalized by the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. If these historical phenomena have prompted the reappraisal and transformation of such practices, they have allowed envisioning Europe in new ways. As agreements of cooperation among multiple partners, post-1989 coproductions present and replicate issues pertaining to the constitution of a supranational enterprise; as such they throw new light on a supranational Europe and move to redefine and reconfigure Europe differently. As specifically articulated texts, coproduced films offer the starting point for an inquiry into the existence of a “European” cinema.1
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Notes
See Catherine Fowler, “Introduction,” in The European Cinema Reader, ed. Catherine Fowler (London: Routledge, 2002 ), 1.
See Mira Liehm, Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984 ), 183.
Susan Hayward, French National Cinema ( London: Routledge, 1993 ), 37.
Jean-Claude BatzContribution à une politique commune de la cinématographie dans le marché commun (Brussels: Institut de Sociologie de l’Universite’ Libre de Bruxelles, 1968), 111. In Batz’s call to arms, in the use of concepts like “the proper genus of a nation [de chaque peuple]” and “authenticity,” the nationalistic strand is again invoked to protect national film industries without, however, any conceptualization of a European communal dimension.
Barbara Corsi refers to the idea of a “European cinematographic unification” articulated by Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli in the Manifesto of Ventotene of 1941. See Barbara Corsi, “L’utopia dell’unione cinematografica europea,” in Storia del cinema mondiale, vol. 1, L’Europa, ed. Gian Piero Brunetta (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), 725
These categories are Andrew Higson’s. See Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen, 30, no. 4 (Autumn 1989): 36–37. I indicate my utilization of Higson’s categories through the employment of quotation marks.
See Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History ( New York: Rutgers University Press, 1989 ).
For a discussion of R. W. Fassbinder, see Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema.For a discussion of the Spanish cinema of the 1950s, see Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993 ).
See the seminal work of Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism ( London: Verso, 1983 ).
John Hill, “The Issue of National Cinema and British Film Production,” in New Questions of British Cinema, ed. Duncan Petrie (London: BFI, 1992 ), 10–21.
Philip Schlesinger, “The Sociological Scope of ‘National Cinema,’” in Cinema and Nation, eds. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (New York: Routledge, 2000 ), 27.
I am summarizing a widely held opinion through the words of one of its most convinced spokespersons: Dina Iordanova, East Europe’s Cinema Industries since 1989: Financing Structure and Studios, http://www.javnost-thepublic.org/media/datoteke/1999–2-iordanova.pdf, Repr. from Public 6.2 (1999), 45–60.
Tim Bergfelder, “The Nation Vanishes: European Co-productions and Popular Genre Formula in the 1950s and 1960s,” in Cinema & Nation, eds. Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie (London: Routledge, 2000 ), 139–52.
Peter Lev, The Euro-American Cinema ( Austin: University of Texas, 1993 ).
Lange and Renaud, The Future of the European Audiovisual Industry (Manchester: European Institute for the Media, 1988), 67. See in particular the 1998 Audiovisual Policy of the European Union for an extensive view into the directive and the directive’s specific agenda.
Philip Schlesinger, Media, State, and Nation: Political Violence and Collective Identities ( London: SAGE Publications, 1991 ), 141.
Alberto Melucci, L’invenzione del presente: movimenti sociali nelle societa’ complesse ( Bologna: Il Mulino, 1982 ).
See Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History, ( New York: Rutgers University Press, 1989 ).
A margin of error has to be considered when using these dates, since different sources tend to indicate slightly different years for the implementation of the new mechanisms. When the actual documents were not available, I mainly referred to André Lange and Jean-Luc Renaud, The Future of the European Audiovisual Industry ( Manchester: European Institute for the Media, 1988 );
Karen Siune and Wolfang Truetzschler, eds. Dynamics of Media Politics: Broadcast and Electronic Media in Western Europe ( London: Sage, 1992 );
and Jürgen Becker and Manfred Rehbinder, eds. La Coproduction Europeénne de Cinéma et de Télévision, ( Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1990 ).
See Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood ( Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006 ), 103–4.
European Audiovisual Observatory, Public Support for the International Promotion of European Films, February 2006, 10.
Jaromil Jires, Eurimages News 14 (April 1997): 5.
See Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell and Ting Wang, Global Hollywood 2 ( London: BFI, 2005 ), 187.
Council of Europe, “Guide: Support for the Co-Production of Full Lenght Feature Films, Animation, and Documentaries,” Eurimages, 2000, 9.
Council of Europe, European Convention on Cinematographic Co-Production ( Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1992 ), 2.
Council of Europe, Explanatory Report on the European Convention on Cinematographic Co-Productions, Strasbourg, May 18, 1992, 5.
Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood ( Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005 ), 73.
Peter Bradshaw, “No Man’s Land,” The Guardian, May 17, 2002.
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© 2007 Luisa Rivi
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Rivi, L. (2007). The Return of the Repressed. In: European Cinema after 1989. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609280_3
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