European Cinema and Continental Philosophy

Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media

Thomas Elsaesser's recent scholarship has examined the "mind-game film", a phenomenon in Hollywood that is broadly characterised by multi-platform storytelling, paratextual narrative feedback loops ("Cinema" 8), nonlinear storytelling, and unreliable character perspectives (Littschwager 21). While "mind-game" or "puzzle" films have become a contentious subject amongst post-cinema scholars concerned with Hollywood storytelling, what is to be said of contemporary European independent cinema? Elsaesser's timely publication, European Cinema and Continental Philosophy, examines an amalgam of politically inclined European auteurs to resolve this query. Elsaesser concedes that there exists a phenomenological confluence between the mind-game film and contemporary European cinema. For instance, both produce characters afflicted by productive pathologies, designating new socially useful forms of agency and identity. One only needs to consult the amnesiac protagonist M (Markku Peltola) in Aki Kaurismäki's The Man Without a Past (Mies vailla menneisyyttä, 2002) or, as regards Lars von Trier's cinema, Beth (Emily Watson) in Breaking the Waves (1996), Selma (Björk) in Dancer in the Dark (2000), "She" (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Antichrist (2009) or Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Nymphomaniac (2013) to evince this overlap. However, this book is more concerned with performative selfcontradictions, whereby cinema-as-enunciator is put under erasure, thus aggravating the inherent discrepancies troubling Europe today. Elsaesser, indeed, evaluates a growing general disaffection with politics, the rise of populist nationalism and far-right fringe parties, as well as an increasing population of economic migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Using filmic case studies from contemporary auteurs including Claire Denis, Fatih Akin, Aki Kaurismäki, Michael Haneke, and Lars von Trier, Elsaesser engages in a survey of filmphilosophy via twentieth-century continental theory. Interested in films that index the growth of neoliberalism in Europe since the 1990s, he uses the label "cinema of abjection" to address these crises. Elsaesser's "cinema of abjection" draws from Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror, where the abject object enacts ethical demands or political interpellation through its very presence. For Kristeva, abjection describes a kind of confrontational subjective horror, violating its own borders, either physically (sweat, vomit, faeces) or psychologically (the ego externalises the source of its suffering). The abject object exists in terms of ambiguity and uncertainty, traversing the threshold of inside/outside, as the space between desire and danger. Although Elsaesser is concerned with abject spectatorship rather than structural or aesthetic abjection, he similarly directs his attention

Revue européenne des migrations internationales

Revue européenne des migrations internationales vol. 32-n°3 et 4 | 2016 30ème anniversaire. Renouveler la question migratoire "The cinema needs the individual, and migrants need the cinema to re-emerge as an individual." Interview with Andrea Segre « Le cinéma a besoin de l'individu, les migrants ont besoin du cinéma pour redevenir des individus ». Entretien avec Andrea Segre «El cine necesita al individuo, los migrantes necesitan al cine para reconvertirse en individuos». Entrevista con Andrea Segre

Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 61.4 (2022): 215-19

2019

European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2007

Ethnic and Racial Studies

In In Permanent Crisis: Ethnicity in Contemporary European Media and Cinema, Ipek A. Celik examines the depiction of refugees, migrants and racialised 'Otherness' in contemporary European media and cinema, arguing that victimhood is still the primary lens through which such figures are given visibility. While noting a body of contemporary films that may challenge this tendency, Isolina Ballesteros nonetheless praises the book as an outstanding scholarly contribution to the field of immigration cinema studies.

Global Media and Communication, 2012

Introduction: European Cinema and Post-democracy , 2020

This is the introduction to a special issue of Studies in European Cinema on European cinema and post-democracy, guest edited by me. You can access it here: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rseu20/16/3?nav=tocList Table of Contents: Angelos Koutsourakis, Introduction: European Cinema and Post-Democracy Carmina Gustrãn Loscos, Framing the invisible hands. Work, cinema and crisis in La mano invisible (Macián 2016). Martin O‘Shaughnessy, Beyond language and the subject: machinic enslavement in contemporary European cinema. Richard Rushton, Chevalier (2015) and the rules of the European game. James Harvey, Engaged observationalism: forming publics in the gallery film. Thomas Austin, Benefaction, processing, exclusion: documentary representations of refugees and migrants in Fortress Europe. Dorota Ostrowska, “The migrant gaze” and “the migrant festive chronotope”- programming the refugee crisis at the European human rights and documentary film festivals. The case of the One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival (2016).

In the last decadc anda half, many cultural and social commentators have thcorized thc reconfis,ruration of thr geopolitical space of the Eumpran Union (EU) through the increasing prescnce of a wide variety of ethnicitics and nationalities. Tñis essay takes Dirty Prctty Things (Stcphen Frears, 2002) as a point of dcparture in ordcr to analysc how conternporary cinema captures thr ambivalent status of íllcgal ímmigrants inside thc Eumpcan global cityscape. First, it cxplains how the film rcprcscnts thc imrni::,rrants' subjcctivity in tenns of their split consciousncss between thcir homeland and their country of adoption. Second, it scrutinizes how the ímmigrant social body mayor may not function asan effective actor in the social fiel d. Thírd, it studies how Frrars utilizes a widc rangc of grneric dcviccs to situatc his film into the rcalm of popular culture. Fourth, it defines the concrpt of popular cinema and evaluatcs its role as a fonn of política! agrncy in the contcrnporary historical milieu. To conclude, this essay qucstions European cinrma asan all-encompassing concept that Jails to capture thc cultural and lini-,tUistic divrrsity of the Europear1 films that it is supposcd to define. Film scholarship is now attempting to explore the cffects on thc ways in which cinema is produced, cxhibited and consumed today in thc European KEVWORDS Frcars popular cinema European cinema immigrati(m política! film-making citizcnship