EUROPEAN CINEMA IN THE POST-1989 COMMUNITY POLICY ERA

Academic and populist attempts at defining European cinema encounter such similar problems to political economists and politicians when delineating the extent and remit of the European Union that the application of social, economic and political theory to European film studies might be worth a go. Basing itself upon a suggestive correlation between the European Union as a community of sentiment and the region coding of its DVDs, this article assesses the impact of new screen technologies and the rebranding of the European Union on European film-makers and audiences. Building on links with recent events in Europe and the USA and the dislocation and disempowerment of protagonists in recent European and American cinema, this article develops an idea of the pan-European stratification of persons based on economic criteria and access to technology that has consequences for the future of European film.

2014

This book offers comparative studies of the production, content, distribution and reception of film and television drama in Europe. The collection brings together scholars from the humanities and social sciences to focus on how new developments are shaped by national and European policies and practices, and on the role of film and television in our everyday lives. The chapters explore main trends in transnational European film and television fiction, addressing issues of co-production and collaboration, and of how cultural products circulate across national borders. The chapters investigate how watching film and television from neighbouring countries can be regarded as a special kind of cultural encounter with the possibility of facilitating reflections on national differences within Europe and negotiations of what characterises a national or a European identity respectively.

Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: japes, Amsterdam isbn     (paperback) isbn     (hardcover) nur 

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2015

European Film and Media Studies is a series dedicated to historical and contemporary studies of film and media in a European context and to the study of the role of film and media in European societies and cultures. Books in the series deal with media content and media genres, with national and transnational aspects of film and media policy, with the sociology of media as institutions and with the impact of film and media on everyday life, culture and society. In an era of increased European integration and globalization there is a need to move away from the single nation study focus and the single discipline study of Europe. The series accordingly takes a comparative, European perspective based in interdisciplinary research that moves beyond a traditional nation state perspective.

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2015

Comunicazioni Sociali, 2018

While more than a thousand films are made in Europe each year, only around 20 actually circulate in any meaningful way outside their own national market but within Europe. Despite the processes of globalisation and digitisation, we are clearly still some way from a film industry that knows no borders. This paper analyses the sorts of European productions that do travel successfully within Europe, and why. It draws on research undertaken for the MeCETES project (Mediating Cultural Encounters Through European Screens, 2013-2016), and especially the extensive database of films released in Europe between 2005 and 2015 put together by Huw D. Jones. The key factors affecting the ability of European films to travel successfully in nonnational European markets include the size of the budget, whether one of the major American studios was involved as producer or distributor, whether the lead producing nation was one of the Western European big five, the language in which the film was shot, critical acclaim, and the way in which the film tells its story. Five categories of European films, their production circumstances and their market performance, emerge from this analysis. First there are large-scale, big-budget blockbusters, many of them inward investment films backed by the Hollywood majors, which tend to travel well within Europe and enjoy equivalent success online. Secondly, there are small-scale, director-led, art-house films that command significant critical attention and travel to cosmopolitan audiences across Europe. Thirdly, there are feel-good, middlebrow films that occupy the middle-ground between these two extremes: modestly budgeted films that occasionally achieve crossover success and travel well within Europe. The other two categories describe films that travel very little, if at all, outside their domestic market. The fourth category is modest to low budget films with a strong national appeal, which may be successful in their own domestic market but rarely travel well beyond that market, whether theatrically or online. Fifthly, there are a great many European productions that fail to secure significant national admissions, let alone admissions in non-national markets. In many cases, this is indeed about failure. The dominance of the European film market by a small number of powerful American, British and French companies, and to a lesser extent, German, Spanish and Italian companies, indicates a lack of diversity within the films that circulate. And while some European films do circulate successfully outside their main producing nation, the vast majority do not. National film cultures within Europe are also surprisingly resilient in this era of globalised, digital storytelling and a surprising amount of national film-making is still enjoyed by national audiences. The challenge to policy-makers thus remains to find more effective ways of enabling a greater degree of cultural exchange, openness and inclusivity, within and beyond Europe.

realism and everyday life  Cosmopolitanism -an element entering everyday life in the new, reflexive, global modernity with blurring boundaries, both as "banal cosmopolitanism" and as introverted aggressive nationalism reacting to globalization  Constitutive elements of cosmopolitanism -both pointing to normative positions and to empirical, sociological dimensions of reality: