The Europeanness of European Cinema: Identity, Meaning, Globalization 9780755694822, 9781780769295

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List of Illustrations, Table and Graph Illustrations 0.1 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 3.1 4.1

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Erasmus students in C´edric Klapisch’s Pot Luck. © Cinefile. The White Ribbon: enlarging the European problem . . . . . . while exercising creative constraint. © Artificial Eye. Irreverent parody in Der Wixxer. © Universumfilm. Recreating the world of James Bond: 1960s pastiche in OSS 117: Lost in Rio. © ICA Films. Dreaming of crossing the English Channel in Welcome. © Mars Distribution. Merry Christmas: French, German and Scottish soldiers play football on Christmas Day after a truce is declared at the trenches. © Artificial Eye. The Father of My Children: during a family holiday Gr´egoire and the children contemplate a fresco of ‘God the Father’. © Artificial Eye. Cl´emence lights a candle. © Artificial Eye. The rural squalor of Sombor in The Feather Collectors. © Jugoslovenska kinoteka. A young Roma girl in Belgrade ‘can either walk the streets or clean them’. © Jugoslovenska kinoteka. Daniel Craig as James Bond in Casino Royale: a British star or a global brand? © Sony Pictures Releasing.

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7.2 and 7.3 Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney cement their star status in the Write the Future campaign. © Nike. 8.1 Binoche combines drabness with subdued melancholy in Hidden. © Artificial Eye. 8.2 Binoche blends in with her sophisticated surroundings in Certified Copy. © Artificial Eye. 9.1 William Hurt as Henry needs a dose of his own ‘talking cure’ in A Couch in New York. © Aventi Distribution. 9.2 Franglais is a marker of cool in LOL. © Path´e. 10.1 M. Hulot gets an earful in Playtime. © BFI Film Distribution. 10.2 Multilingualism as performative gesture: Pablo’s elemental mime in The Adventures of Picasso. © Svenska Klassiker. 12.1 The Old World and the New: Jean-Claude (Olivier Rabourdin) runs into Bryan (Liam Neeson) in Taken. © EuropaCorp. 12.2 Local pleasures: Charlie Wax ( John Travolta) and James Reese ( Jonathan Rhys Myers) enjoy a ‘Royale with cheese’ in From Paris with Love. © EuropaCorp. 13.1 Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) in a distinctly Scandinavian landscape in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. © Sony Pictures Releasing. 14.1 Post-heritage aesthetics: Vel´azquez-inspired mise-en-sc`ene and impressive costume design by Francesca Sartori in Alatriste. © Arrows Film Distribution. 15.1 Shlykov as the embodiment of the outdated Soviet lifestyle in Taxi Blues. © Koch Lorber Films. 15.2 Pride and panic on the part of post-Soviet youth in Luna Park. © Northern Arts Entertainment.

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Table 4.1 Defining the Euro-pudding

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Graph 11.1 Films shot in English in nine European countries from 1990 to 2010

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Acknowledgements The idea for this volume arose from a conference on European cinema organized by the editors at King’s College London in 2010. This event had the kind and generous support of UACES (the University Association for Contemporary European Studies), as well as King’s College’s Roberts Fund and Film Studies Department. This entire project would not have been possible without the invaluable help of Professor Ginette Vincendeau, who supported it from its inception through to its completion and to whom we are especially grateful. We would like to thank I.B.Tauris for expressing interest in our proposal and particularly Philippa Brewster and Anna Coatman for overseeing its coming to fruition. Of course this book would not have been possible without the input and hard work of our contributors, who shared their stimulating ideas on the Europeanness of European cinema, making the creation of this volume an enlightening process. An additional special thank-you goes to Bel´en Vidal and Olga Kourelou for their insightful advice and helpful feedback at various stages of our work. Finally, we would each like to thank our co-editors for their tireless patience, understanding and support. A famous fable by Ivan Krylov depicts the futile attempt of a swan, a pike and a crab to haul a cartload; thankfully, this was far from being the case here.

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Contributors Neil Archer is Lecturer in Film Studies at Keele University. He is the author of The French Road Movie: Space, Mobility, Identity (2013) and Studying The Bourne Ultimatum (2012), and has published numerous articles and book chapters on European cinema. His most recent work considers aesthetic strategies and dialogues with Hollywood in recent Scandinavian cinema. Tim Bergfelder is Professor of Film at the University of Southampton. He is an editor of Screen and has published widely on aspects of European and international film history, including International Adventures: German Popular Cinema and European Co-Productions in the 1960s (2005) and Destination ´ London: German-Speaking Emigr´ es and British Cinema 1925–1950 (2008). Greg De Cuir Jr. is the managing editor of NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies (Amsterdam University Press). His book Yugoslav Black Wave was nominated for Edition of the Year at the 2011 Belgrade International Book Fair. Thomas Elsaesser is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Media and Culture of the University of Amsterdam. From 2006 to 2012 he was Visiting Professor at Yale University, and he now teaches part-time at Columbia University, New York. Among his most recent books are: Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (Routledge, 2010, with Malte Hagener), The Persistence of Hollywood (Routledge, 2012) and German Cinema – Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory Since 1945 (Routledge, 2013).

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Sally Faulkner is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Film at the University of Exeter, where she is also Director of the Centre for Translating Cultures. She has published widely on Spanish film, literature and cultural studies, and is the author of Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema (Tamesis, 2004), A Cinema of Contradiction: Spanish Film in the 1960s (Edinburgh University Press, 2006) and A History of Spanish Film: Cinema and Society 1910–2010 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). In 2012 she held an Arts and Humanities Research Council fellowship. Mary Harrod is Assistant Professor in French Studies at the University of Warwick. She has published on European and US cinemas in Screen and Studies in French Cinema and her monograph From France With Love: Gender and Identity in French Romantic Comedy will be published by I.B.Tauris in early 2015. Olof Hedling teaches film studies at Lund University, Sweden. He has published extensively on European film policy and regional film and television production. Recently, he has been the co-author and co-editor of A Historical Dictionary of Scandinavian Cinema (2012). Anne J¨ackel is the author of European Film Industries (BFI, 2003) and numerous book chapters and journal articles on cinematographic co-productions, European cinemas and film policy. La¨etitia Kulyk is a freelance researcher. She received a Licentiate (predoctoral degree) from the University of Jyv¨askyl¨a, Finland, for her research on Nordic film policies in a European and global context. She teaches at Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris and is involved in a research project concerning the history of film theatres in France. Mariana Liz received a PhD in film studies from King’s College London in 2012. She is a lecturer at the Centre for World Cinemas, University of Leeds. Her monograph Euro-Visions: Europe in Contemporary Cinema will be published by Bloomsbury in 2015. Lucy Mazdon is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Southampton. She has published widely in the field of film and television. Her books include Encore Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema (BFI, 2000), France on Film:

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CONTRIBUTORS

Reflections on Popular French Cinema (Wallflower, 2001), Je t’aime, moi non plus: Franco-British Cinematic Relations and French Cinema in Britain: Sex, Art and Cinephilia (Berghahn: 2010 and 2013, both with Catherine Wheatley). Alison Smith is subject head of Film Studies at the University of Liverpool. She has published widely on French and European cinema, including monographs on Agn`es Varda and, with Douglas Morrey, on Jacques Rivette, and several articles on language use in European cinema. Alissa Timoshkina completed her PhD at the Film Studies Department, King’s College London. Her research focuses on representations of the Holocaust in Soviet cinema. Ginette Vincendeau is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. She has written widely on popular French and European cinema. She is the editor of The Encyclopaedia of European Cinema (BFI/Cassell, 1995) and Film/Literature/Heritage (BFI, 2001), and co-editor of French Film: Texts and Contexts (Routledge, 1990 and 2000), Journeys of Desire, European Actors in Hollywood (BFI, 2006), The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks (BFI, 2009) and A Companion to Jean Renoir (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). She is the author of P´ep´e le Moko (BFI, 1998), Stars and Stardom in French Cinema (Continuum, 2000 and 2004; published in French by L’Harmattan in 2009), Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris (BFI, 2003), La Haine (I.B.Tauris, 2005) and Brigitte Bardot (BFI/Palgrave/Macmillan, 2013). Catherine Wheatley is a lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College, London. Her books include Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image (Berghahn, 2009), Cach´e (BFI Film Classics, 2011) and Sex, Art and Cinephilia: Anglo-French Relations since 1930 (Berghahn, 2011), co-written with Lucy Mazdon. She is currently working on a monograph on Christianity in post 9/11 cinema.

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THE EUROPEANNESS OF EUROPEAN CINEMA: AN OVERVIEW Mary Harrod, Mariana Liz and Alissa Timoshkina

The cover illustration for this collection is likely to be recognized by all its readers. In 2011 a film was produced by an internationally all but unknown French director and mostly French crew, starring in its lead parts French actors famous only at home. The otherwise mixed French and US cast’s almost exclusively wordless performances were accompanied by intertitles in English. A homage to late silent and early sound era Hollywood at the same time as it showcased the considerable talents of its European cast and crew, The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, France/Belgium/USA) won rapturous praise from critics dazzled by the stylistic verve of its loving pastiche and, subsequently, the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2011; it grossed $44.7 million at the international box office (or rather, in European territories and the USA, to which its release was limited). This was a triumph of an unforeseen magnitude for this largely Gallic-grown, if transnationally ambitious, $15 million budget nostalgia piece. The success story that The Artist represents offers a useful vantage point from which to begin approaching many of the questions that are central to this collection. In addition to its cinephilic preoccupation with form – and specifically Hollywood style, in a clear echo of French New Wave concerns – Hazanavicius’s film shares many themes with academic and popular discourse about European cinema: the meaning of artistry in a massproduced medium, the place of traditional values amid rapid technological 1

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change and, of course, the ‘problem’ of linguistic and cultural specificity in transnational exchanges. The film is also typical of certain currents in contemporary European filmmaking that are a key concern of this volume. In particular, The Artist exemplifies the ability European cinema has in recent decades demonstrated to reinvent itself in ingenious ways as a commercial force to be reckoned with – without necessarily compromising a ‘quality’ image. One only has to look further down the list of Academy Awards of the last five years to find other examples of such a tendency from Britain in the shape of Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan, UK, 2008) and The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, UK/USA/Australia, 2010), while further salient French examples of the trend are provided by the recent boom in successfully exported romantic comedies like Le Fabuleux destin d’Am´elie Poulain/Amelie ( Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France/Germany, 2001) and L’Arnacoeur/Heartbreaker (Pascal Chaumeil, France/Monaco, 2010). In other words, mimicking George Valentin’s ( Jean Dujardin) ultimate adaptation to sound cinema despite his French accent through the genre of the musical in The Artist, European cinema is finding ways to play to its strengths in the global film marketplace. It might be noted, too, that this is occurring at a time when Europe itself as an economic powerhouse – indeed as a geo-political entity altogether – is arguably less sure of itself than at any time since the European integration process began. We shall return to Europe itself shortly. However, for now it is as well to point out that the above list of hit films also provides a relatively fair overview of European cinema’s recent parameters for self-definition, both external and internal. In the first case, it would appear that Hollywood remains the primary ‘other’ for European cinematic identity, in a relationship that has always gone in both directions. Hollywood is not, though, European cinema’s only geo-conceptual other – for instance Slumdog Millionaire was based on an Indian novel and filmed mostly in India and partly in Hindi, starring Indian and British-Asian actors. The hyphenation of the latter identity reminds us of the complex nature of the otherness at stake here (cf. Elsaesser 2005). Other identities are moreover as much about challenging perceptions of what is specific to Europe as they are about shaping those perceptions. The flipside of a celebration of both artistry and tradition in Hazanavicius’s film is a masochistic strain given thematic expression by Valentin’s period of increasing self-loathing. It is tempting to read this aspect of the film in relation to a significant trend for self-definition through negative representations of Europe in its cinema in several chapters in this collection.

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THE EUROPEANNESS OF EUROPEAN CINEMA: AN OVERVIEW

As hinted, nor does The Artist simply problematize outdated notions of European cinema as art cinema, but instead – characteristically for much European cinema today – it questions the very viability of such categories as art film, auteur cinema and commercial moviemaking. In this it epitomizes another drive on the part of this collection, to look beyond pre-existing frameworks for understanding European cinema, be they geographical, cultural or temporal. Despite mobilizing the generic tropes of both melodrama and comedy and indeed despite its popular success, this is a film replete with references to classical cinema, peppered with cinephilic winks and in-jokes aimed at cine-literate viewers and critics, from a montage borrowed from Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, USA, 1941) to a more esoteric reference to the disintegrating love affair between John Gilbert and Greta Garbo (through female lead Peppy’s line ‘I want to be alone’). As suggested, the film is also noteworthy for its mannered stylistic precision and virtuosity, hardly the hallmarks of Hollywood blockbusters. The nostalgia facilitated by such a cinephilic approach here mirrors, too, a negotiation of historical versus contemporary values engaged in by numerous European films of all kinds examined in these pages. Equally, the chapters gathered here themselves reproduce the conviction of The Artist and other films that the past is relevant to the here and now, through their own trans-historical focus. The collection thus includes analyses of recent periods in European cinema (Greg De Cuir Jr., Alison Smith and Sally Faulkner’s chapters partly or wholly look back to the 1960s and 1970s) alongside those more focused on highly contemporary developments in European cinema. The pertinence of these questions is best understood in the context of certain developments in the status of Europe and Europeanness as geo-cultural concepts, as well as in European filmmaking and scholarly analyses of it, in recent years.

From Celebration to Disintegration: Europeanness into the Twenty-First Century If the enormous transnational prominence of European cinema makes the publication of a book on the nature and status of that cinema germane, the focus of this collection on European-ness perhaps warrants further attention. For the title we are indebted to Ginette Vincendeau’s (2010) essay on ‘The Frenchness of French Cinema’, where she in turn borrows from Alan Scott’s claim that Frenchness ‘is embodied in a hallmark set of resonances, attitudes and gestures rooted in the everyday fabric of French society [and 3

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given distinctive form in a continually evolving tradition of cinematic art]’ (2000: 24).1 Clearly any ‘set of resonances, attitudes and gestures rooted in the everyday fabric’ of European society is even more elusive than its French avatar. To pinpoint some of the traditional characteristics of Europeanness, one might begin by looking back to the continent’s founding philosophical and religious traditions, including Hellenism and Roman law, Christianity and the Enlightenment (Garc´ıa 1993; Pagden 2002). Europeanness is here defined in relation to the concepts of city and citizenship, democracy and participation, as well as rationalism, universality and cosmopolitanism. Many of these have been transferred to the political idea of Europe emerging in the 1960s, following the birth of what is today known as the European Union (EU). Whereas political upheavals of the early- to mid-twentieth century, namely the playing out of two world wars largely on European soil, in addition to the gradual loss of colonial empires, associated Europeanness with turmoil, self-destruction and decline as a world power, since the 1960s the EU has become the focal point for a conception of Europeanness as an identity shared between nations. Having as its original goal the maintenance of peace between European nations, the EU evolved into an organization aiming not only for political but also economic and cultural integration. Marks of a more unified Europe were particularly visible in the 1990s, after the signing of three important documents: the 1985 Schengen Agreements (which effectively created a borderless Europe), the 1987 Single European Act (which strengthened the single market) and the 1992 Maastricht Treaty (which reinvigorated talks of a European Monetary Union). At the same time, initiatives such as the MEDIA Programme (introduced in 1991 and paralleled by the Council of Europe’s Eurimages) launched a new support mechanism for the European film industry, testifying to a real political engagement in the cultural sector. Further and more recent evidence that some of the broad cultural goals of the Union are being realized can be found, for instance, in the success of the Erasmus programme, probably the EU’s best-known initiative (including through its depiction in C´edric Klapisch’s L’Auberge espagnole/Pot Luck [France/Spain, 2002]) and one that has, since 1987, allowed over two million students to engage in a funded learning experience in another European country. However, at precisely the historical moment when a sense of cultural Europeanness is flourishing, matters take a turn for the worse. When research began for this book in 2010, low participation in the European parliamentary

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THE EUROPEANNESS OF EUROPEAN CINEMA: AN OVERVIEW

0.1 Erasmus students in C´edric Klapisch’s Pot Luck.

elections and the start of debt crises in the Euro-zone introduced a discordant note into the recent European narrative of self-realization and celebration. Just three years later, at the time of completing the book in 2013, the situation is altogether bleaker, with the near-collapse of the euro following the bankruptcy of not only Greece but also Ireland, Portugal and Spain, and those nations’ (in the Spanish case, banks’) subsequent bailouts by wealthier EU members prompting an atmosphere of panic, resentment and pessimism. Meanwhile, the widely publicized loss of sovereign power to technocrats in Brussels continues. From a UK perspective, notwithstanding the nation’s traditional Euro-scepticism, such an attitude has been enshrined in a law passed in May 2013 forcing future Conservative governments to conduct a public referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU. But elsewhere in Europe, too, public support for the EU is at its lowest ever (Traynor 2013). The vocabulary of decay and decline is rampant in media discourse about Europe: while the international press feed panic about debt ‘contagion’, the findings of a survey by the Pew Research Foundation published in May 2013 pronounce the EU itself to be Europe’s new ‘sick man’.2 While Europe is not of course coterminous with the EU, these political developments and their ubiquitous presence in the (European) media nonetheless demonstrate and contribute to the recently consolidated phenomenon of felt Europeanness. However they also speak to the immense contradictions that underlie the concept and its consequently ambivalent nature: Europe is more visible than ever, but its image is also more negative than ever. The 5

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fact that these contradictions are likely to be ‘given distinctive form in a continually evolving tradition of cinematic art’ makes this collection all the more timely.

Reappraising European Cinema While the main focus of this collection is the ‘distinctive form’ of European cinema, it is important to consider first the latter’s ‘evolving tradition’. As was the case with European integration, scholarly interest in European cinema as an entity in its own right emerged around 1990. Since then, publications have looked at the history of European cinema, examining its major directors, films and stars (Vincendeau 1995) as well as key movements (Forbes & Street 2000; Ezra 2004). Leaving behind the attention to national cinemas and specific auteurs that has dominated film criticism since the 1950s – and that may in part explain the bias studies of European cinema generally adopt towards art cinema – the emergence of new studies of European cinema coincided not only with the expansion of the European integration process, but also with crucial developments in Europe’s film industry. It is unsurprising that the economic and industrial aspects of European cinema were a major focus of writings emerging in the early 1990s (Petrie 1992; Dale 1992; Finney 1996). In addition to new funding mechanisms launched by the European Union and the Council of Europe, the negotiations around the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that took place in Uruguay in 1993, and during which France famously opposed the USA’s request for audiovisual products to be treated as all other commodities (citing the ‘cultural exception’), marked the understanding of European cinema in subsequent years. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, scholarly work considered not only the industrial aspects of European film ( J¨ackel 2003), particularly the renaissance of co-productions (Rivi 2007), but also its relationship with national and transnational identities (Wayne 2002; Everett 2005b). These different writings and approaches have in common the acceptance that the two major issues characterizing European cinema at the time of the 1993 GATT negotiations, and – as this collection will explore – up until today, are the dichotomy between art and commerce on the one hand, and the opposition to Hollywood cinema on the other. The importance of the latter issue is reaffirmed by the title of what is perhaps the most important book on European cinema to emerge in

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recent years: Thomas Elsaesser’s European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, published in 2005. In addition to coining key expressions such as ‘double occupancy’, Elsaesser here makes the far-reaching claim that European cinema should today be seen as just another strand of world cinema. This is an argument that echoes significant changes not only in film studies (for instance the increasing attention accorded to transnational, as well as to world, cinema) but also, and of particular importance for this collection, in the perception of Europe – now seen as weakened and diffuse, as discussed above. Despite Elsaesser’s argument, however, European cinema has not become irrelevant: in 2010, three conferences were organized on this topic in the UK and Ireland alone, in Cork, London and Exeter; a professorship in European Film at the University of Birmingham was inaugurated in 2012; and the annual conference organized by the Film Studies section of leading research network ECREA in 2013 was devoted to ‘European Film Cultures’ (Lund University, Sweden). Moreover, European cinema’s history and contemporary importance make it an obvious topic for the study of transnational policies, cooperation and films. But, just as has happened with the idea of Europe, European cinema is often approached from a rather negative outlook; for instance the 2010 Exeter conference questioned the latter’s very existence in its title ‘Is There Such a Thing as European Cinema?’ This collection argues that such a sense of crisis and lack of identity cues us as scholars to interrogate what forces may hold European cinema conceptually together, as well as how it reacts to wider changes in film and society more generally. As the above analysis of The Artist has suggested: is Hollywood in fact still European cinema’s meaningful other? And is the traditional opposition of art versus mainstream relevant for the contemporary identity of European film? The aim of The Europeanness of European Cinema is to revisit the issue of the significance of European cinema as a category in the wake of the recent acceleration in transnational filmmaking and globalization as a whole. To this end, it covers aspects of the production, distribution and reception of European cinema, linked by an approach explicitly focused on identity and definition, at the same time as it constitutes a meta-commentary on the designation’s cultural understanding in recent years. Indeed, the book is concerned not only with those filmic contents and practices which define European cinema, but also with the discourses, both academic and journalistic, that shape and come to constitute the study and cultural notion of European cinema itself.

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Locating Europeanness in Film The book is divided into three sections. As with any such collection, these sub-divisions are intended as an organizing rather than a paradigmatic framework. Section 1 is focused on key definitions of Europe and European cinema, and Thomas Elsaesser begins it by positioning the latter in the context of world cinema. Presenting what he calls the ‘narrative of collapse’ of the idea of Europe in recent years, Elsaesser explores European cinema’s newly found freedom to be marginal. This possible dilution of European cinema is also the starting point for Tim Bergfelder’s chapter. However, unlike Elsaesser, who uses the films of auteur Michael Haneke as a case study, Bergfelder is particularly concerned with popular European cinema. He thus signals the emergence of a middlebrow European film that, while close to the traditional attachment to quality and prestige, is able to attract national and transnational audiences through a combined use of humour and nostalgia, parody and pastiche. The idea of European cinema is also addressed in Section 1 in industrial terms. Anne J¨ackel looks at the recent history of sponsored European coproductions to question the extent to which funding mechanisms have become a defining feature of European cinema. Closely examining some of the films that have received the LUX prize, awarded by the European Parliament since 2007, J¨ackel argues that while these help to construct a European identity ironically they also foreground cultural difference. J¨ackel’s notion of ‘anti-European European cinema’ is developed in Mariana Liz’s chapter on the meaning of the expression ‘Euro-pudding’. Here, Liz argues the Euro-pudding has been used by critics as a way to distinguish between ‘good’ auteur films and ‘bad’ European co-productions, but it is now being rehabilitated by filmmakers and audiences across Europe – echoing Bergfelder’s argument about the emergence of a quality, but simultaneously well-liked, universal European cinema. The remaining chapters in this section explore the idea of Europe itself, hinting at its nebulous borders. Catherine Wheatley examines the place of Christianity in contemporary European society, European cinema and film criticism. Contrasting her focus with the North American context, Wheatley notes that in Europe Christianity appears as a form of ‘curiosity’, not ‘conviction’ – a curiosity strengthened by the current cultural crisis, responsible for a search of new sources and forms of meaning. If Christianity is positioned against Islam, one of Europe’s historical others, the final chapter

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in Section 1, by Greg De Cuir Jr., highlights the significance of the other within, namely the Roma people, through an analysis of Skupljaˇci perja/The Feather Collectors (Aleksandar Petrovi´c, Yugoslavia, 1967). Section 2 is focused on analysing the transnationalization of European filmmaking practices through the concepts of genre, stardom and language. It begins by examining the contentious issue of the possibility of European film stardom. While European stardom as a whole has traditionally been considered an oxymoron, Olof Hedling demonstrates that stardom in another European generic domain, that of football, is in rude health. For Hedling this broadly ongoing difference can be attributed first and foremost to European film policy, where national funding bodies have continued to dominate production financing and the so-called cultural exception has preserved European cinema’s status outside global market forces. A contrario, Ginette Vincendeau’s chapter on Juliette Binoche argues that, in one case at least, global stardom has been achieved by a European star, trading specifically on her identity, both on and off screen, as such. However, Vincendeau’s recognition of the limiting of that stardom to art-house fare – as well as reminding us of European art cinema’s own generic status – bears out the point that truly mass popularity and fame for a recognizably European film star may remain ‘impossible’ (Hedling 2009). Vincendeau’s acknowledgement that Binoche’s fame has increased with her bilingualism in English, like Hedling’s passing allusion to the global stardom of European pop stars who sing in that language, implicitly offers another explanation for the difficulties that beset European stardom. Filmic ‘products’ marked by speech (and sometimes even accents) that are foreign to its consumers have always been a tough sell transnationally. This issue comes under discussion in the next three chapters in the section. Both La¨etitia Kulyk’s survey of the increasing use of the English language in European feature films and Mary Harrod’s references to recent silent European successes with intertitles (either in English in the original or easily subtitled) The Artist and Blancanieves/Snow White (Pablo Berger, Spain/France/Belgium, 2012) suggest a drive on the part of European films, especially since 2000, to circumvent the linguistic limitations faced by their stars when it comes to transnational ambition, seemingly with a degree of homogenization as their by-product. At the same time, Alison Smith’s analysis of French and Swedish comedies of earlier decades identifies a trend for putting linguistic foreignness itself to entertaining comic effect, in a positive and celebratory – rather than xenophobic – fashion. Such a possibility is borne out by Harrod’s discussion of some contemporary French film comedies’ use

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of English and Franglais, even as she argues that such use mediates anxiety about globalization. The subject of phobia and anxiety opens Section 3, dedicated to the circulation of the ‘European’ label across national and continental borders. Both Neil Archer and Lucy Mazdon consider the transatlantic relationship between Hollywood and Europe. Archer’s piece explores the idea of Europhobia, constructed in three of Luc Besson’s productions. Connecting the films’ dystopian depictions of Paris to traditions in European cinema and culture while simultaneously highlighting their generic and stylistic affinity with Hollywood, the chapter collapses the prevailing Hollywood versus Europe binary distinction. The relationship between film aesthetics and genre is also vital to Mazdon’s analysis. While Archer discusses the Hollywood traits of French films, Mazdon examines Hollywood remakes of European cinema, focusing on the example of the Scandinavian Neo-Noir and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher, USA/Sweden/Norway, 2011) in particular. She emphasizes the figure of the US auteur, Fincher, in relation to the film’s critical and box office success. The complex relationship between auteurism and Europeanness underpins Sally Faulkner’s exploration of the Spanish heritage film. Looking at films produced in the 1960s, 1980s and 2000s, Faulkner analyses the connection between Spanish national literary heritage and films’ aesthetic and narrative affinity with European (namely British and French) cinema. The idea of stylistic and narrative similarities across European cinema is equally central to Alissa Timoshkina’s discussion of Pavel Lungin’s work, where she also considers Europe’s relation to its Asian neighbour Russia, accounting for Eurasian features of Russian identity. For Timoshkina, the process of negative representation of the national self as a means of transcending geographic borders, raised in Archer’s piece, is essential to the way Lungin’s films, condemned by Russian critics, gained acclaim at the Cannes film festival, thereby acquiring a European status. Like Faulkner’s, this chapter thus acknowledges the role of the leading European film festival in generating and circulating the label of ‘European’ cinema. A few key observations need to be made from the outset of this collection, arising from the broad themes and trends that emerge from a cursory appraisal of contributions. One is the fact that while Hollywood remains a key referent for European cinema’s self-construction, we should not downplay the role of additional others in that process. Others for filmic self-construction may be external (as in Timoshkina’s discussion of Russian filmmakers’ complex

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THE EUROPEANNESS OF EUROPEAN CINEMA: AN OVERVIEW

attitudes to Europeanness) or more internal (as in Faulkner’s discussion of the late- to post-dictatorship repudiation of theoretically national modes in favour of European heritage tropes in a Spain politically cut off from the rest of Europe). It goes without saying that the other within is a category with a historical lineage (reflected in De Cuir Jr.’s chapter discussing ethnic minorities) as well as ongoing relevance (again underlined by Timoshkina’s piece, which considers the cosmopolitan otherness of Europeanized Russians). That contemporary pertinence takes on an interesting twist in several analyses in the collection that suggest Europe itself may at times be the principal other in European cinema. While both Elsaesser’s and J¨ackel’s contributions paint diluted pictures of European identity in film, in terms of values and formal criteria for defining a film’s national affiliations respectively, Elsaesser himself as well as Liz and Archer go further, foregrounding negative perceptions of Europe – even Europhobia in Archer’s case – as central to the Europeanness of European cinema, in films as varied as Das Weiße Band/The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, Germany/Austria/France/Italy, 2009) and Taken (Pierre Morel, France/USA/UK, 2008). Self-deprecation is in such cases a strategy signalling knowingness and therefore a kind of perverse superiority, and this idea also informs the analyses of comedy offered by Bergfelder discussing (nostalgic) pastiche and parody in series like the French OSS117 spoof spy adventures and the German Wixxer films and by both Smith and Harrod discussing cosmopolitan forms of linguistic border-crossing in European comedies, ranging from 1960s and 1970s films by comic auteurs like Jacques Tati and the Swedish duo known as Hasse˚atage to contemporary French mainstream fare. There is a sense that even when Europeanness might appear to be being swallowed up by either multiplicity or indeed homogenization – notably in Kulyk’s contribution – what Elsaesser has dubbed a position of ‘strategic weakness’ is its cinema’s strength. At the same time, however, the notion of cosmopolitanism calls into question the very viability of the term ‘otherness’ in the discussion of European cinema. It has been suggested that in the contemporary era questions of commonality and sameness may be at least as pertinent as those of cultural difference and otherness (see for example Badiou 2001: 25). Certainly in this collection distinctions become blurred at every turn; ‘hospitality’ might appear a more appropriate word than ‘otherness’ to describe relations between Europeanness and other identities in several instances. J¨ackel’s analysis demonstrates this is sometimes the case with production financing – although for Hedling European mechanisms still remain essentially separate

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from those elsewhere. Finding common ground with the notionally other applies even more frequently here to the concepts of both language and especially genre in European filmmaking. And where, we might ask, does the latter development leave the old ‘art versus popular cinema’ divide so crucial to appraisals of European cinema and its distinction? While recent analyses have complicated the traditional idea of European cinema as art cinema (Dyer & Vincendeau 1992; Mazdon 2001; L´azaro Reboll & Willis 2004; Soila 2009), this is still an influential paradigm for scholars here and in other publications (Betz 2009; Galt & Schoonover 2010). Indeed, this old association of the continent’s cinema surely explains in part the remarkable frequency of analyses of French filmmaking in this collection (along with French films’ numerical preponderance in the European context) – although of course the idea of French cinema as dominated by art-house fare is itself a myth that is implicitly exposed as such by several chapters here. But French films’ perceived status as epitomizing the Europeanness of European cinema dates back to the New Wave and is sustained by that movement’s auteurist legacy, as reflected in Vincendeau’s chapter and the fact that the only pan-European star proposed in these pages is French. It goes without saying that the prominence of French cinema in the volume speaks to its concern with the concept or brand of European cinema. At the same time, however, both Liz’s and Mazdon’s chapters underscore the uprooting of the concept of the auteur from European contexts – with reference to US heavyweights Quentin Tarantino and David Fincher respectively – and thus the diminution in the potency of this aspect of European cinema to assert its value as superior to other cinemas. With the stamp of North American auteurs counting for more than films’ formal, or notionally formal, European status in film reviews, and in Mazdon’s chapter forms of (ersatz?) Europeanness appearing in US filmmaking (in Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [USA/Sweden/Norway, 2011]), it is apparent that the still powerful perceived opposition between art and popular modes is in the twenty-first century being gradually reimagined along axes of taste released from geographical bearings, conceived as much in terms of class and education (Europeanness giving way to global cosmopolitanism) as of geo-cultural belonging. Such a shift bears interesting comparison with tendencies in the consumption and display of contemporary art, with former regionalist approaches giving way to a trend for curators to draw out connections between ethnic identities across different regions in the organization of exhibitions3 – an idea also present in De Cuir Jr.’s chapter

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Notes 1 2 3

Vincendeau adds language to Scott’s list of attributes of Frenchness (2010: 341). http://www.pewglobal.org/european-union-the-latest-casualty-of-the-eurocrisis/ (accessed 11 September 2013). This trend was acknowledged during the ‘Global Citizenship’ series of talks at Tate Modern ( June 2013).

THE EUROPEANNESS OF EUROPEAN CINEMA: AN OVERVIEW

through the identification of the Roma people with African-American culture in Yugoslav Black Wave films. This de-privileging of geo-cultural categories in favour of newly transnational forms of identity is the raison d’ˆetre of this collection, which asserts that the Europeanness of European cinema remains an important cultural and analytical concept, but one that demands re-imagining along trans-geographical lines.

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1 European Cinema into the Twenty-First Century: Enlarging the Context? Thomas Elsaesser

One of the most familiar but increasingly obsolete ways of asserting the identity of European cinema is to define it in opposition to Hollywood. As the ‘good’ other, it is a self-ascription, where European directors and national cinemas are lined up in binary pairs, such as ‘art versus commerce’, ‘auteur versus star’, ‘critical prestige versus box office’, ‘realism versus dream factory’ or – more recently – ‘the movement image versus the time image’ (Deleuze 1986; 1989). These and many similar constructions of identity through difference tend to disguise the fact that the major changes – technological, political and demographic – which have affected how films are being produced, distributed, viewed and used have left especially the national cinemas of Europe in a crisis of identity: they no longer quite know what they are, and whether their directors feel allegiance to a national project, to authorial representativeness or to diffuse audiences at festivals, on television and in the dwindling DVD market (see also Elsaesser 2005). As in other areas of economic and cultural life, the de-centring of Europe as a consequence of globalization has also led to a loss of prestige for art and auteur cinema. Traditionally strong filmmaking countries like France, Italy and Germany may still boast world-class festivals in Cannes, Venice and Berlin, but the films showcased and winning prizes often come from outside Europe. And looked at from outside (including from the USA), films made in 17

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Europe now share the generic label ‘world cinema’, where they compete with those from Turkey and Thailand, Iran and Mexico. This apparent ‘demotion’ of European cinema to ‘world cinema’ status (in sharp contrast to the rise of Asian cinema, notably that of South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and now mainland China as commercial rivals to Hollywood, as well as artistic rivals to Europe) might be regretted or lamented, but it is a fact, just as the prefix ‘Euro’ is now more often linked to cheapness and embarrassment, not wealth or welfare: Euro-trash, Euro-pudding, Euro-shopper, Euro-crisis. Provided we can acknowledge the realities of these trans-valuations of our idea of ‘Europe’ – so my argument runs – this also represents an opportunity: first to let the label ‘Europe’ find its own fluctuating ‘value’ on the stock-exchange of cultural capital, and second to rethink what is or could be specific about Europe, not just in matters concerned with cinema – maybe even leading to a new ‘political’ understanding of cinema, as part of some larger, common European project. Being part of ‘world cinema’ highlights how films come about in contemporary Europe: they are financed via co-productions and television money, and distributed mainly through the film festival circuit, which acts as filter and gatekeeper and bestows cultural capital on the handful of films it greenlights through awards and prizes every year. At these festivals, such films are classified, categorized and valorized more than ever through the auteur-asartist value attribution, and more rarely through the ‘new national cinema’ label. The rest of the world’s productions are exotic flora and fauna that are exhibited and discussed at specialized – often ‘themed’ – retrospectives, at travelling festivals on the EU folklore circuit of ‘capitals of Europe’ or at nationally inflected art events, book fairs and academic conferences. What might a cinema be like that knew it was no longer a competitor to Hollywood in the classic self-other construction? One that, furthermore, tried to think past the kind of self-exoticism, or auto-ethnography, which is the perpetual temptation of such a co-produced, multi-platform ‘national cinema as world cinema’, where films and directors represent themselves to the (big) Other as they imagine the other imagines them? These may be unanswerable questions, because too narrowly phrased or still haunted by the need to define identity through either ‘essence’ and ‘being’ or ‘difference’ and ‘distinction’. Perhaps what is at issue is a much more momentous change in how we think about cinema: definitions commensurate with the digital age, with social networks and the ubiquity of moving image displays in art and design, advertising and politics.

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The view of cinema described above might imply a change of metaphor, and a new philosophy of film: no longer thinking of the screen as either a ‘window-on-the-world’ or a ‘mirror-of-the-self ’, the two abiding – even though apparently diametrically opposed – aesthetics as well as epistemologies of modern European cinema. Since the end of World War II and the revival of European art cinema, the metaphor of the ‘window’ has stood for the aesthetics of transparency and realism, as exemplified by neo-realism and the theories of Andr´e Bazin (1967–71) and Siegfried Kracauer (1960), while the ‘mirror’ came to signify the European auteurs’ modernist turn to self-reference, reflexivity and techniques of spectatorial distanciation, as exemplified by Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Jean Luc Godard, and theorized as apparatus theory, suture and mise-en-abyme by Christian Metz (1982) and Jean Louis Baudry (1974) and in Jacques Lacan’s mirror phase (1968). Following on from earlier attempts to describe the hybrid states and hyphenated identities of European cinema by introducing the concept of ‘double occupancy’ and ‘mutual interference’ (Elsaesser 2005) – locutions meant to address multi-cultural aspirations and anxieties by making the connection with ‘hospitality’, for example, of how to accommodate the stranger, the intruder, the guest, both from without and already within – I now want to extend this enquiry into mutuality beyond the complex dynamics of self and other that are invariably associated with the cinema when its guiding metaphors are either ‘window’ or ‘mirror’.1 Understanding the epithet ‘European’ across a different dynamic of antagonism and mutuality means accepting at face value the judgement of others, as well as Europe’s selfimage. It involves taking seriously the characteristic I alluded to in the beginning: the new ‘marginality’ of Europe, which, when applied to the cinema, I see as an opportunity as much as an occasion for regret. At first glance, the negative qualifications associable with European cinema seem overwhelming: artificially kept alive with government subsidies, Council of Europe directives (see Anne J¨ackel’s piece in this collection) and cheap television co-production deals; bolstered by being co-opted for cultural tourism and city branding; speaking on behalf of no constituency, and for the most part, speaking to no public other than festival audiences, loyal cinephiles and university students. Looking more closely, these apparently fatal weaknesses might yet be turned to advantage. Precisely because they exist at the margins, in a sphere of

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European Cinema beyond Ontology and Alterity

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dis-investment and disinterest, European films have a special kind of freedom, which is also a power and a strength: having ‘lost’ the (illusory) status of paragon of virtue, integrity and victimhood vis a` vis Hollywood, they have little or nothing else to lose. Their inconsequentiality either in economic or ideological terms frees them from the burden of being ‘representative’ and allows them to develop a new kind of autonomy and a different kind of critical reflexivity. In contrast to Hollywood films, European cinema does not have to prove that it is ‘post-9/11’ or ‘post-racial’, that it has global audience appeal or plays equally well as a gripping story and a video-game, that it holds up to repeated viewing on a DVD, or that it will still be remembered when it is time to sell the television rights to cable and the syndicated networks. Not having to ‘reflect’ specific values, and therefore not being answerable to the kinds of critique to which Hollywood films are routinely subject – by way of any of the many hermeneutics of suspicion that nowadays make a mainstream film symptomatic of this or that trend or tendency, guilty of this or that mis-representation, or an allegory of this or that political event – represents a special kind of privilege and freedom. European cinema can, as a consequence, more easily transcend or ignore the geometry of window and mirror, indeed any kind of fixed spatial coordinates, which make such critiques ontologically possible in the first place, because of the mimeticrepresentational correspondences they imply about the relation of cinematic realism (however stylized) to physical reality (however ideological). Therefore, in order to come to another way of classifying European cinema, I dispense with the usual taxonomies, not only by ignoring individual national cinemas, but also leaving aside the interpretative schemata of a) classical film theory (ideological critique) and b) cultural studies (the politics of representation and identity), while also excusing myself for not adopting the Deleuzian toolbox of crystal image, minor literature and sensory-motor schema, which has become the customary consequence of rejecting both a) and b). Instead, I want to invoke three readily available narratives that try to explain this collapse of relevance within the geopolitical context of Europe’s new marginality. First, we encounter the narrative of globalization and the end of the Cold War. Europe from 1945 until 1990 had a unique strategic value for the USA as its buffer zone and front-line with the Soviet Union; since the 1990s, however, Europe has lost much of its political significance for the USA,

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which is now turned to China, Asia and the Middle East. Globalization has decisively shifted the epicentres of power, and the bi-polar face-to-face of Europe is over, either in relation to the USA or in confrontation with the USSR. We witness here the downsides to the upsides of the EU: in a few brief decades, it has established partnership between nations that used to be arch-enemies, notably France and Germany, Britain and France, Germany and Britain, and it has healed or at least re-arranged the East–West divisions brought about by the Cold War. It has brought prosperity to Europe’s impoverished periphery, notably to countries like Spain, Portugal, Greece and Ireland – even though we only now realize the price that will have to be paid for this sudden wealth. Secondly, Europe, based as it has been on its nation-states, with their firm borders, distinct peoples, languages and territories, has gradually lost these markers of identity which differentiated one from the other. Within the EU, there are hardly any borders: Europe has absorbed millions of ‘foreign’ nationals (from within or from outside the EU), it has become multinational, multi-religious and multi-ethnic, and there has been an unprecedented mobility of goods, labour, people and property. The self–other therefore no longer applies as the Gestalt model regulating self-perception, except as populist ressentiment, mostly on the extreme right of the political spectrum. In short, Europe no longer has a heroic narrative of self-identity and selfcreation. The French and American Revolution, Rousseau and Hobbes’s social contract leading to democracy, the critical hermeneutics of the Enlightenment, which established empirical knowledge, technological improvement of life and the prospect of unlimited progress: all these represented European narratives of heroic-collective self-creation and self-realization. But now that we know how much this heroic narrative was also based on imperialism, slavery and colonialism, on exploitation and exclusion, we are no longer quite so proud of it. Central and Eastern Europe – as a consequence of its freedom from totalitarianism – has seen a resurgence of nationalism, but it is one born out of fear and resentment, clinging to the remnants of the heroic narrative in distinctly un-heroic times of corruption and cronyism. In other words, the post-national condition has led neither to a credible post-heroic narrative (whatever this might turn out to be), nor to a wholehearted embrace of globalization, other than in the form of tourism, leisure and consumption. Instead, Europe is turned obsessively inward, towards the past, towards commemoration and collective nostalgia.

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The third narrative maintains that Europe has undermined itself philosophically through secularization, scepticism, nihilism, critical theory, epistemic relativism and deconstruction. It has systematically cast doubt on its own moral, epistemological and ontological foundations, most notably by challenging from within the universality of the values of Enlightenment humanism, and in the process has embraced a form of social constructivism and relativist multiculturalism that ends up distrusting the legitimacy of its political institutions, undermining civic pride and breeding both cynicism and apathy. This third narrative would, then, be about the supposedly corrosive effect of post-metaphysical philosophy and deconstructivism, the dominant intellectual trends from the 1950s to the 1990s, taking in existentialism, structuralism, anti-humanism and deconstruction. Rejection or overcoming this anti-foundationalism and anti-universalism is what unites an otherwise very disparate group of philosophers currently also in vogue in film studies: Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Ranci`ere, Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Emmanuel Levinas.2

Contemporary European Traumas on Screen My argument, with respect to the Europeanness of European cinema, would then be that these different philosophical takes on the European malaise might also provide something like a cognitive map for positioning European cinema in and for the twenty-first century. The subtitle of this chapter, ‘enlarging the context’, is meant to invoke a famous saying by Jean Monnet, one of the intellectual and political founders of the EU: ‘If you have a problem that you cannot solve, enlarge the context’. In my case, the ‘problem’ would be European cinema’s loss of status and apparent marginality, while ‘enlarging the context’ would be my suggestion to use it as an act of liberation, rather than denying it or arguing it away. But enlarging the context can also mean placing ‘marginality’ within a broader political and philosophical context: the crisis of European governance and sovereignty. The broader context in turn coincides with what could be called the three traumas of Europe. These partly overlap with the narratives invoked earlier, by which Europe’s decline is seen from the ‘outside’, except that this time they are focused on the anxieties experienced ‘from within’. First, consider the trauma of Europe’s bio- and body-politics, for example, the adverse demographics of ageing and lack of reproduction, the obsession 22

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with wellness and health-care, but also the new cult of childhood, with the attendant anxieties of ‘abuse’; the anxious but ambivalent concern about the environment, about genetically manipulated foods, and the palliative, selftherapizing effects of being a ‘green consumer’; and the debates over euthanasia and over who has the right over one’s body: the individual or the state. Second, it is impossible to ignore the ‘trauma’ of the Holocaust, and its paradoxically foundational role for Europe as a civilizing project. A major shift has taken place in our understanding of the twentieth century, and in particular World War II, whose most remembered reference point since the 1970s has been the Holocaust. As the memory of the Holocaust has become Europeanized, its political function and afterlife have changed. Once a monstrous crime committed by the Germans as a people and a nation, it has become a moral catastrophe and humanitarian disaster in which all Europe has a share of blame and guilt, so that its remembrance and memorialization now form the rallying point for a specifically ‘European’ moral and cultural unity. Finally, Europe faces the trauma of confrontation and accommodation with Islam. More than a thousand years of contact, of hostilities, conquest and alliances, around Turkey and the Ottoman Empire (for Germany, Austria and the Balkans), with Arabs and Mediterranean Islam (for Spain and France) and with Islam in the former colonies (for Britain, France and the Netherlands), are now being revived and relived under different signs: of immigration rather than military conquest; of co-existence rather than crusade; of human trafficking, drugs and prostitution, rather than spices, silk and ceramics; of homegrown diaspora radicalism rather than exotic tourist ‘Orientalism’. All three contemporary traumas, I believe, can be related to tendencies in European cinema. First, bio-politics and the body are very much present in French cinema, notably in the work of women directors such as Catherine Breillat and Claire Denis; children, or the death of children, is almost the defining theme of Italian cinema, from Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, Italy/France, 1988), La Vita e` Bella/Life’s Beautiful (Roberto Begnini, Italy, 1997) and La Stanza del Figlio/The Son’s Room (Nanni Moretti, Italy/France, 2001), to the 2010 Cannes entry La Nostra Vita/Our Life (Daniele Luchetti, Italy/France, 2010). Sexuality and old age has been a theme in recent German films (for instance, Andreas Dresen’s Wolke 9/Cloud 9, 2008), and this politics of the body is matched by a near universal turn in film analysis to embodied forms of spectatorship, of a ‘cinema of touch’, of ‘skins and screens’ or ‘haptic modes of vision’.

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Second, the role of the cinema in helping to create the iconography and cultural memory of the Holocaust in and for European cinema can hardly be overestimated: by now, there have even been several ‘waves’ within this genre alone: the mode r´etro in France, from Lacombe Lucien (Louis Malle, France/West Germany/Italy, 1974) and Au revoir les enfants (Louis Malle, France/West Germany/Italy, 1987) to Le Dernier m´etro/The Last Metro (Franc¸ois Truffaut, France, 1980), followed by the German ‘Hitler-wave’ of films by Hans-J¨urgen Syberberg, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Edgar Reitz, Margarethe von Trotta and Helma Sander-Brahms, then the anti-retro tendency of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (France, 1985) or Harun Farocki’s Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges/Images of the World and the Inscription of War (West Germany, 1989), itself succeeded by films featuring Jewish protagonists of the subsequent generation – Aim´ee & Jaguar (Max F¨arberb¨ock, Germany, 1999), Abraham’s Gold (J¨org Graser, Germany, 1990), Rosenstrasse (Margarethe von Trotta, Germany/Netherlands, 2003), and finally films showing the perpetrators as victims, such as Der Untergang/Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, Germany/Austria/Italy, 2004) or The Reader (Stephen Daldry, USA/Germany, 2008). Finally, the challenge of Islam and migration, of multi-culturalism more generally and especially the gap across the generations, has in each country of Western Europe produced its own genre or sub-genre of films that either renew traditions of neo-realism with closely observed faces and everyday lives, in the semi-documentary idiom of Michael Winterbottom’s In this World (UK, 2002), Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort (UK, 2000) or Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4-Ever (Sweden/Denmark, 2002), or have found a new fusion between youth cultures, drug cultures and music, as in the films that followed the classic of the genre, Mathieu Kassowitz’s ‘black-blanc-beur’ La Haine/Hate (France, 1995). Most remarked upon, however, has been the emergence of so many hyphenated filmmakers in Europe: Turkish-German, British-Asian, MaghrebFrench, Albanian-Italian, as if the cinema, for these mostly second-generation immigrants, had proved the ideal mode of expression in which to be affirmative about living conditions and personal circumstances which, from a strictly sociological point of view, would have made them marginal and outcasts. Here, festival cinema, across the more level playing field of ‘world cinema’, allows the hyphenated Europeans deftly to affirm multiple allegiances and to embody credibly different kinds of authenticity, once the Europe–Hollywood asymmetries no longer determine the respective

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self-image, of either wanting to ‘become American’ or defining oneself against Hollywood. I would suggest that in each case Europe’s ‘traumas’, insofar as they serve as a resource for European cinema, should indeed be seen as the basis for a liberating move, rather than a handicap. Here, the new marginality of European cinema reveals itself as a potential strength. While I cannot argue this in detail for each of the three traumas, I would like to illustrate the general point by referring to one understanding of ‘freedom’ – not in the French sense, which asserts that everything is permitted so long as it does not harm another, nor the freedom that artists usually claim for themselves when insisting that their work is responsible to none other than their desire for self-expression. Not ‘freedom from’ nor ‘freedom, in order to’, but another (Kantian) model, which is also that of Kafka, or Herman Melville’s Bartleby: ‘the freedom to choose not to’. This I shall interpret not as ‘resistance’ and ‘refusal’ (paradigms of critique and opposition that would refer us back to the binaries of Europe–Hollywood), but as the freedom to impose on oneself certain constraints or limits: a stance for which I might have chosen a number of prominent European directors, such as Krzysztof Kieslowski, Lars von Trier or Tom Tykwer, but where a more unlikely candidate – Michael Haneke – may also serve as an example.

The Freedom to be Marginal: Michael Haneke’s Creative Constraints In particular, I want to claim that European cinema’s general condition of marginality and irrelevance raises precisely the issue of freedom, in the sense of requiring a filmmaker to think of the kind of self-imposed limits that can make this freedom from either box office or social accountability aesthetically and ethically meaningful. Jon Elster, a social philosopher, has spoken of creative constraints as a key to innovative thinking not just in the arts but also in business and management, and he has argued that creative people ‘self-bind’ themselves to arbitrary sets of constraints when there is insufficient constraint present in their environment or if the problem at hand is not yet defined clearly enough. One of the examples Elster provides for an arbitrary creative constraint happens to be the ‘film director (who) decides to shoot in black and white so as not to be tempted by the facile charms of colour photography’ (2000: 2) – a reference which would seem to fit perfectly the case of Michael Haneke’s Das Weiße Band/The White Ribbon (Germany/Austria/France/Italy, 2009), if it had not been written some ten years before the film was made. 25

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1.1 The White Ribbon: enlarging the European problem . . .

In Haneke, creative constraints are finely balanced with enabling conditions. These include his decision, as a German by birth, to be an ‘Austrian’ director, some of whose major films have a distinctly ‘French’ identity. They also comprise a carefully calibrated relation to European cinema’s fatherfigures – an Oedipal ‘anxiety of influence’ matched by ‘elective paternity’ – even more complexly figured than that of Fassbinder (Douglas Sirk), Wenders (Nicholas Ray) and Herzog (F W Murnau). Restricting myself to only the French-language films, there are Ingmar Bergman in Le Temps du loup/Time of the Wolf (France/Austria/Germany, 2003), and – by choosing actresses like Isabelle Huppert, Juliette Binoche and Annie Girardot – Claude Chabrol, Franc¸ois Truffaut and Andr´e T´echin´e. More generally, Haneke inscribes himself in a particular French tradition of ‘bourgeois’ cinema (with a cruel twist in the tail), a tradition which includes other illustrious foreign directors working in France, such as Luis Bu˜nuel, Roman Polanski and Krzysztof Kieslowski. In The White Ribbon, apparently ‘returning’ to Germany, the ‘freely chosen paternal constraint’ (besides the photographer August Sander and the novelist Theodor Fontane) is once more Ingmar Bergman, who looms large. Not many critics seem to have noticed that in The White Ribbon the doctor’s vicious verbal assault on his housekeeper and mistress is taken from Bergman’s Nattvardsg¨asterna/Winter Light (Sweden, 1963), where Gunnar Bj¨ornstrand as the pastor who has lost his faith tongue-lashes his last and most loyal parishioner, the bespectacled Ingrid Thulin, because he cannot bear her love for him. 26

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1.2 . . . while exercising creative constraint.

In another register of self-binding or creative constraints, Haneke is one of those European directors in a productively ambivalent dialogue with the different versions of Christianity, often choosing to adopt the faith that is adversarial or in tension with that of their upbringing: Bresson, Rohmer and Rivette are the French cinema’s most Jansenist Catholics, just as Kieslowski is Catholic Poland’s most Protestant director. Tom Tykwer, the German Protestant, explores in Lola Rennt/Run Lola Run (Germany, 1998) and Der Krieger und die Kaiserin/The Princess and the Warrior (Germany, 2000) ‘grace’, as if he was a Catholic. And Lars von Trier, born Jewish (while claiming to ‘understand Hitler’)3 , makes a Presbyterian film in Breaking the Waves (Spain/Denmark/Sweden/France/Netherlands/Norway/Iceland, 1996) and a Catholic one in Dogville (Denmark/Sweden/UK/France/ Germany/Netherlands/Norway/Finland/Italy, 2003), whose female protagonist is called Grace. In a similar fashion, the Catholic Michael Haneke examines in The White Ribbon the most severe version of Northern Protestantism, after having given us more Jansenist moral anguish, guilt without absolution or redemption in his French films, notably in Code inconnu/ Code Unknown (France/Germany/Romania, 2000), La Pianiste/The Piano Teacher (Austria/France/Germany, 2001) and Cach´e/Hidden (France/Austria/ Germany/Italy/USA, 2005). In Amour (France/Austria/Germany, 2012) he seems to go so far as to advocate euthanasia, while once more resolutely refusing redemption, other than through a love that can face up to its own conflicted impulses of mutually sustained violence. 27

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With Haneke, creative constraints have taken on quite another level of severity: they become what I have called ‘performative self-contradictions’ (Elsaesser 2010: 53). This idea reflects the gravity of the situation European filmmakers find themselves in, one marked by all manner of contradictions, and yet offering all kinds of freedom. I return to Elster’s definition of the prerequisite conditions for arbitrary self-constraints, namely when there is not sufficient constraint present in individuals’ environment or if the problem at hand is not yet defined clearly enough. In support of the first condition (insufficient constraint present in the environment), one could argue that because European filmmakers receive much, if not all, the funding for their films from non-commercial sources, and mostly via the taxpayer, they are deprived of the constraints of the box office. Added to this is the fact that national representativeness (and the constraints that come with it) has always been more of a side-effect of the film festival circuit, rather than an indigenous expression of the nation, and is nowadays mainly reserved for filmmakers coming from the emerging nations of Asia, the Far East or Africa. Finally, this problem of representativeness is compounded by the peculiar asymmetry which makes the cinema in Europe a highly-valued cultural asset (heritage, ‘patrimony’, our ‘living memory’), but a negligible economic factor (‘a cottage industry’), which not only creates contradictions at the heart of the Brussels bureaucracy over the status of cinema, but may well demand some kind of boundary or resistance from the medium, the material or the maker. This is the situation that Haneke finds himself in: studying the credits of The White Ribbon, for instance, one finds no fewer than five different production companies from four different countries (X-Filme Creative Pool, Hamburg; Wega Film, Vienna; Les Films du Losange, Paris; Lucky Red, London; and Canal+, Paris). In addition, Haneke was financially supported by the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, the Mitteldeutsche Medienf¨orderung, Leipzig, the German Federal Film Board, the Mini-Trait´e Franco-Canadien, the Deutsche Filmf¨orderfonds (DFFF), the Austrian Film Institute, the Vienna Film Financing Fund, the French Minist`ere de la Culture et de la Communication and Eurimages. This suggests another reason why films that advertise themselves as ‘national’ – eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (a German children’s story): in Gothic script, no less – do so invariably in a gesture that is both performatively national and post-national. Performing the nation rather than representing it, Haneke responds, in The White Ribbon, to two other crises, and in each case with creative constraints

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that reveal themselves as acts of liberation. One set of constraints answers to the crisis that European cinema is no longer ‘cinema’, other than in constant and constantly self-defeating differentiation from television. Haneke has gone all out in his denunciations of television, both in his films and in interviews, but given that most of the films were produced and financed by television one must regard this stance as a performative self-contradiction, rather than merely seeing it as yet another case of an artist biting the hand that feeds him: the performativity helps to underline, and bring to the fore, the structural contradictions inherent in European filmmaking, which wants ‘cinema’ but can only afford ‘television’. The second crisis acknowledges that this cinema’s primary source of aesthetic value is realism, but that such realism is in jeopardy, at least as traditionally understood, once cinema has become a digital medium. In the debate over the so-called death of cinema, the loss of photographic indexicality brought about by the digital image means that there can be no essential contact between physical reality and the image, one of the defining features of cinema. But there can also be no friction or resistance emanating from the real, and thus no more encounter, no more disclosure of being, as envisaged by the aesthetics of realism in the spirit of Andr´e Bazin. In other words, the choice is either to consent to the death of cinema and stop making films, or to accept digital cinema as something other than a contradiction in terms and cease claiming realism as your aesthetics: a difficult decision for European filmmaking, which – it will be recalled – has always defined itself against Hollywood on the basis of its greater realism. Whether one thinks of Italian neo-realism, the French Nouvelle Vague’s semi-documentary cin´ema v´erit´e, or Ingmar Bergman’s clinically probing psychological realism, our notions of non-Hollywood filmmaking are generally tied to some version of a realist aesthetics. Here, too, Haneke has tackled the issue of digital realism head on. The White Ribbon was shot digitally and in colour, before being remastered in post-production to a point where it appears as the most pristine of silver emulsion black and white. An underhand fake, or a gesture of performative self-contradiction? Haneke’s self-constraint, in Elster’s terms, would thus have flipped over from arbitrariness to necessity: the consequence not of the environment offering insufficient constraints, but of the problem at hand (in this case, ‘digital realism’) not yet being defined clearly enough. The White Ribbon, finally, is also an important contribution at the story level to the political and philosophical narrative I began with: the re-assessment

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of the legacy of the Enlightenment across a different kind of antifoundationalism and new universalism. The film might show a parochial, self-enclosed world, imminently threatened with internal implosion, as well as external destruction, by the chaos and upheavals of World War I, but Haneke has also set it up as a laboratory situation, where many of the postures and forces that have shaped Europe over the past 200 years are once more pitted against each other. As a parable about the origins of Western values, re-examining the Enlightenment heritage, The White Ribbon once more unfolds the classic ‘bourgeois’ triad of pastor, doctor and schoolteacher, across whose positions a good deal of nineteenth-century fiction tried to work through and resolve the tensions between Church authority, lay-secularism and modern science and technology. Rather than being about the origins of fascism, The White Ribbon is more pertinently about the origins of the nationstate and national identity, through the conflictual interplay of schoolteacher, State Church, feudal master and medical doctor, each standing for aspects of both the costs and the benefits of progress and modernity winning out over tradition and authority. Into this classical schema, Haneke introduces a significant revision and a twist, in that it is the representative of science and progress, the doctor, who seems to have lost faith rather than the pastor, while the schoolteacher – along with his bride to be – is and remains the outsider (gentle and compassionate, but when it matters passive and reactive). It is as if the old (literary, Enlightenment) oppositions of pastor versus doctor, religion versus science and socialism (equality-democracy) versus authoritarianism (obedience in exchange for feudal benevolence) are now revealed as two sides of the same coin, in that neither can claim legitimacy or provide the moral grounds for exercising authority and sovereignty. We see the sins of the fathers visited upon the children, who visit them on (each) other(s) in their turn, in a circuit where crime and punishment are not reciprocal, even if there may be eventual justice – though not through the institutions present here.

Conclusion I have been combining some reflections on European political and philosophical thought in the era of the post-nation state with thinking European cinema beyond the self–other divide of the old Europe–Hollywood opposition, as well as the tendency of self-exoticism in world cinema, that is to say, beyond cinema as window and cinema as mirror. What mutuality and antagonism 30

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are for the deadlocks of national interest and transnational sovereignty on the way to a new universalism, then, creative constraints and performative selfcontradiction might be for an auteur cinema on the way to reimagining the ubiquity of cinema in the digital age. To put it in more polemical terms: just as the EU is both promoted and demoted by the rest of the world, held up as a commendable example of some of the most progressive thinking in matters of sovereignty, statehood, solidarity and human rights, while being also reviled for its bureaucratic muddles, waste, petty chicanery, arcane regulations and endless deferrals, so European cinema is both praised for having given the world the film auteur with the status of sovereign artist, enjoying seemingly unlimited freedom, and dismissed as otherworldly, inward-looking and unambitious. Against this binary stalemate, I have argued that the discrepancy between the way European cinema is seen from without – as part of the exotic-ethnographic mix going by the name of world cinema – and how it sees itself from within – as the stronghold of cinema as autonomous art – might be overcome by making its marginality, seeming irrelevance and unaccountability the starting point for a new way of recasting the political legacy of Europe across different kinds of foundationalism, universalism and voluntary constraints on freedom. In other words, my claim is that European cinema is working on something after all: reworking a legacy – the values and political ideals of the Enlightenment – albeit in a different key, since it not only reworks them for the twenty-first century, but does so from a position of tactical weakness: freedom as the freedom to choose one’s own limits and contradictions. It may not seem much, but as a project it re-affirms the Europeanness of European cinema as part of what it is, rather than against what it cannot be.

Notes 1

2

For a more extended argument about cinematic metaphors as ontologies, see Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2010), especially chapters one and three. Each of the philosophers named could be said to rethink the ‘foundations’ of European ‘identity’: Gilles Deleuze and ‘multiplicities’ (repetition and difference’, rather than identity, negativity and difference), Jacques Ranci`ere and ‘radical equality’ (how to renew the social contract), Alain Badiou and ‘the event’ (how to revitalize European universalism), Jean-Luc Nancy and ‘being singular plural’ ˇ zek (how to redefine community and togetherness). Some – notably Badiou, Ziˇ

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and Agamben – also ask themselves how to build a new politics on the dissenting energies of the Christian religion. Exploring the cinematic implications of such a new politics is part of another project. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/may/18/lars-von-trier-cannes-2011nazi-comments (accessed 1 October 2013).

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2 Popular European Cinema in the 2000s: Cinephilia, Genre and Heritage1 Tim Bergfelder

The twenty-first century has witnessed a reinvigorated championing of auteurism in European cinema, centred on directors – many of them established veterans from previous decades – such as Pedro Costa, the Dardenne brothers, Michael Haneke, Cristian Mungiu, Christian Petzold, Alexander Sokurov, B´ela Tarr and Lars von Trier. This renewed orientation towards art cinema practices (e.g. ‘slow’ cinema, new forms of cinematic realism) and particular channels of circulation (especially the festival circuit) is nowadays articulated within a globally expanded framework (see Galt & Schoonover 2010) that circumvents the Eurocentrism of previous understandings of art cinema. As early as 2005, Thomas Elsaesser noted that European art cinema had irrevocably lost its special status as an aesthetic blueprint and point of reference, becoming one facet within a decentred, post-national and polylocal, new global network of world cinemas (2005: 485–513). At a more fundamental level, European cinema and cinema as a medium itself have undergone radical transformations as a result of a proliferation of media platforms, the technological shift from analogue to digital and new modes of circulation and consumption (cf. Bordwell 2012). Set against these broader contexts and influences, I want to explore in this chapter what, if anything, the concept of ‘popular’ European cinema still signifies today, in terms of this 33

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being a productive category for academic enquiry, as a viable form of cinema and as an object of cinephilic attention. ‘Popular European cinema’ was a thriving academic interest in the 1990s and early 2000s, at least in the anglophone context, triggered by the publication of Ginette Vincendeau’s and Richard Dyer’s eponymous collection (1992). Although too diverse to generalize about, this scholarship had as a central aim identifying the concrete use, value and function of certain films for specific audiences. While earlier surveys had dismissed indigenous popular genres as derivative imitations of the Hollywood system, new scholars embraced domestic popular genres as a key to the national imaginary, local identities and horizons of expectation, as well as social practices. In recent years, this approach appears to have mostly abandoned its comparative focus (notable recent exceptions include Wimmer 2009 and Mazdon, Wheatley 2010 and 2013). Meanwhile, new conceptual frameworks, such as ‘transnational cinema’, have shifted the focus from the consideration of cinema as a socio-historical collective imaginary (which could be seen as one definition of the ‘popular’) towards the formation of interstitial forms of existential experience (exile, diaspora, migration, mobility more generally), marginal or decentralized modes of production, the study of circulatory hubs and fluid exhibition networks, as well as questions of affect (Ezra & Rowden ˇ 2006; Duroviˇ cov´a & Newman 2010; Higbee & Lim 2010; Bergfelder 2012). However, the transnational remains a useful critical tool through which to understand and read the dynamic of current and past instances of popular cinema in Europe (an exemplary analysis in this respect is provided by Eleftheriotis 2001). The central aim of this chapter is to suggest that in order to fully understand the dynamics of European cinema in the new millennium, one needs to maintain a clear understanding of the cultural hierarchies and generic traditions that dominate cinemas in Europe. In mapping this field, I consider this chapter as part of a renewed commitment to the notion of popular European cinema that I have explored in previous work (Bergfelder 2005b).

Popular European Cinema in the 2000s: Continuities and Trends As Andrew Higson noted nearly 25 years ago, a national cinema, and for that matter a broader European cinema, consists of more than locally produced texts and filmmakers (1989); it extends to networks of distribution, exhibition, consumption and reception, and it is precisely in these areas that 34

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the attempt to fix a definition within clear boundaries often comes unstuck. Higson argued that national cinema also exists as a discourse, or what Thomas Elsaesser referred to as a national cinema’s ‘image and idea’ (1995). One of the problems in the historiography of European cinema has been precisely the gap between the desire by critics (or national institutions) to promote a particular ‘image and idea’ on one hand and the historical and/or economic realities that militate against it. Although audiences are routinely implied in ‘image and idea’ conceptualizations of national cinemas in Europe, they tend to be primarily envisaged as an abstract entity. As a result, nowhere has the discrepancy between the ‘image and idea’ of European cinema and its reality been more blatantly obvious throughout film history than in the area of audience preferences. Thus, for decades the dominant type of film in circulation across Europe has been Hollywood, and this situation has indeed remained unchanged in the twenty-first century. As scholars such as Higson and Elsaesser have emphasized, Hollywood has always been an integral part of European cinema, and vice versa. What is less often acknowledged is what contemporary European cinema entails if one takes Hollywood out of the equation in terms of audience preferences (see tables at the end of this chapter). How does this kind of European cinema compare with the image and idea that is usually acknowledged in academic discourse and promoted through national and supra-national prizes? In the following pages I intend to map this popular, but academically largely neglected, European cinema, both at a supra-national level and going into more detail in a number of more localized case studies. ‘Popular cinema’ in Europe in the 2000s comprised a complex and highly stratified set of different types of film. In terms of production, it ran the gamut from big-budget transatlantic co-productions (e.g. Bridget Jones’s Diary, 2001; the Harry Potter films, 2001–11; Alexander, 2004; the Resident Evil franchise, 2002–; Quantum of Solace, 2008) to high-budget pan-European coproductions (e.g. Oliver Twist, 2005; The Queen, 2006; Das Parfum/Perfume, 2006; Ast´erix aux jeux olympiques/Asterix at the Olympic Games, 2008), to more exclusively national productions. These, once again, sub-divided into sizeable productions (e.g. Der Untergang/Downfall, 2004; Agora, 2009) clearly designed for export, and medium- to low-budget productions which aimed to reach in the main a domestic market (7 Zwerge, 2006; Camping, 2006; Hot Fuzz, 2007). This corpus also comprises a range of different genres, including documentaries (La Marche de l’empereur/March of the Penguins, 2005; Earth, 2008; Oceans, 2010).

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In terms of generic stratification, the first trend to note is the overwhelming dominance of comedy across Europe. This is neither a surprising nor a new phenomenon – comedy has been the mainstay of European cinema for most of its history. Over the past decade, comedy has frequently been the genre that achieved the biggest box office successes for both single films and film series in Europe. Among the most prominent examples in this respect are the productions by Michael Herbig in Germany, Der Schuh des Manitu/ Manitou’s Shoe (2001), a parody of the 1960s German Karl May Western, and (T)raumschiff Surprise – Periode 1/Starship Surprise (2004), a spoof of both the original 1960s TV series Star Trek and the German version of the 1970s US series The Love Boat. These were not only the most successful domestic films of the decade, but indeed the most financially lucrative German releases of all time. Meanwhile in France, Dany Boon’s Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis/Welcome to the Sticks (2008), poking fun at the rivalries between French regions, not only broke the all-time French box office record previously held by the World War II farce La Grande vadrouille (1966), but also inspired a successful Italian remake (Benvenuti al Sud/Welcome to the South, 2010). Similar patterns can be observed in Central and Eastern European cinemas: one of the most popular ˇ je muˇskarac bez Croatian films of the decade was the romantic comedy Sto brkova?/What is a Man without a Moustache? (2005), while the gay-themed Serbian Parada/The Parade (2011) garnered significant box office success across all parts of the former Yugoslavia. European comic actors to have had a significant impact on box office performance in the 2000s include Franck Dubosc (Camping, 2006; Camping 2, 2010), Rowan Atkinson in his Mr. Bean and Johnny English personae, Benoˆıt Poelvoorde (Rien a` d´eclarer/Nothing To Declare, 2010) from Belgium and Santiago Segura (starring since 1998 in four films to date about the corrupt cop Torrente) from Spain. Perhaps the most internationally publicized breakthrough of a European film comedian in the 2000s has been the Academy Award-winning success of Jean Dujardin with The Artist (2011). This film may have been his introduction to many filmgoers in America and the UK, but Dujardin had been a considerable box office draw in France for most of the preceding decade, first on French television and subsequently as a surfer dude in Brice de Nice (2005), as a Gallic James Bond in the spoof of the 1960s OSS117 series (more on this later) and as a saturnine cowboy in the comic book adaptation Lucky Luke (2009). This last film illustrates another major popular European trend of the 2000s, namely live-action adaptations of classic comic books, very often (but not exclusively) of the Franco-Belgian, or bande

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dessin´ee, variety. An even more substantial part of a pan-European popular heritage is the Asterix the Gaul series, which resulted in four co-produced live-action feature films between 1999 and 2012. Adaptations of comic books and other children’s literature, including animated films such as Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Deux fr`eres/Two Brothers (2004) and Luc Besson’s Arthur et les minimoys/Arthur and the Invisibles (2007), demonstrate a clear determination by contemporary European film producers and distributors to target the family market and youth audiences. Comingof-age stories such as The Inbetweeners Movie (2011) and films that tap into the comedic potential of summer holidays, such as the French Camping series, are equally indicative of this focus. To some extent, producers are responding here to a significant change in audience demographics. While, for example, in the 2000s the 20–9 age group remained by far the strongest contingent among German audiences (Berauer 2012: 49), the decade was nonetheless characterized by an ageing process: numbers in the 20–9 and 30–9 age group declined by a third to almost half, while attendance in the 40+ age groups has been rising. On the other hand, the 10–19 year-old group has witnessed less of a decline than some of the other younger groups, which may suggest an increase in the ‘family market’, for example, 40+ film fans taking their children to the cinema. However, beyond purely economic factors, narratives of cherished childhood and teenage memories are part of a broader nostalgic tendency that pervades popular European cinema in the 2000s. A particular focus over the past decade has been the 1960s and 1970s, revived and worked through cinematically in a number of different ways. Thus, in the French Les Bronz´es 3: Amis pour la vie/Friends Forever (2006), the most successful non-Hollywood film of 2006 across Europe in terms of cinema attendance, director Patrice Leconte offered a sequel to his ‘sex on holiday’ comedy hit from 1978 (and the latter’s sequel from 1979), with the youthful protagonists (and actors) from the original film now in their mid-fifties. If the rom-com was the defining sub-genre of the 1990s, perhaps the most notable comedy type of the 2000s was the genre parody and/or pastiche, in part a belated continental response to Hollywood precedents such as Airplane! (1980), The Naked Gun (1988) or the Austin Powers film series (1997– 2002), but also drawing on the fake documentary-style format and caricatured impersonations popularized by the decade’s arguably most famous European comic export, Sacha Baron Cohen. As a legacy of the Austin Powers films, the decade has frequently witnessed the explicit quotation, pastiche or parody

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of specific European films or film series of the 1960s – these include the previously mentioned OSS117 films from France, German parodies of Edgar Wallace, Karl May and Jerry Cotton films, as well as the obvious James Bond template of Rowan Atkinson’s Johnny English.

Two Kinds of Genre Parodies In order to explore further these popular formulae and nostalgic appropriations, I shall look now in more detail at two examples, one from Germany, the other from France. While not quite in the top league of German box office hits of the decade, Der Wixxer (2004) and Neues vom Wixxer (2007) were nonetheless financially successful and they illustrate perfectly the popular genre patterns mapped above. The films draw nostalgically on a fondly remembered ‘classic’ from the 1960s, and are more generally informed by a wide-ranging literacy in (international) film and television trivia. Their main reference point, however, is the German Edgar Wallace phenomenon, a series of crime and horror films produced from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, and among the most successful productions of their time (cf. Bergfelder 2005b). Although cosmopolitan in outlook and content, and ostensibly adaptations of classic British crime novels, the original Edgar Wallace films were a distinctly German creation, imagining a Gothic fantasy Britain that nonetheless had at least some cross-national influence, in particular on its more violent Italian genre variant, the giallo. Like his contemporaries in other European contexts, Oliver Kalkofe, the writer and star of Der Wixxer, made his name initially in radio and television before branching out into the cinema, also working in dubbing. His professional background in stand-up, sitcom or sketch formats is clearly evident in the films, which often feel less like sustained narratives and more like a series of set pieces. Although parody is commonly understood to be breaking, undermining and making fun of conventions and rules (generic or otherwise), Dan Harries has argued very convincingly that film parody relies on its own conventions, which marks it out as a quasi-genre of its own, creating its own anti-canon (Harries 2000). Der Wixxer and other recent European comedies bear out this argument. In terms of narrative structure, the films cite the originals’ standard opening where a suspenseful pre-credit sequence is interrupted by the metallic disembodied voice saying, ‘Here is Edgar Wallace’, followed

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2.1 Irreverent parody in Der Wixxer.

by the sound of gunshots; only here the opening line is, ‘Here is Edgar Wallace’s neighbour’. The main setting of the first Wixxer film is ‘Blackwhite Castle’, the latter being both a reference to the original series which featured Blackwood Castle, and at the same time a literalization insofar as the castle is continuously shot in black and white (as in the case of at least some of the original series), whereas the surrounding countryside and other locations are shot in colour. Spoofing the Byzantine narrative twists of the original series, Blackwhite Castle is a respectable home for the breeding of pug dogs, but it also harbours a white slavery network that kidnaps young women to transform them into girl groups through X Factor-type auditions. Inverting the clean-cut, virile and smart heroes of the 1960s series, Kalkofe plays the central hero as a chubby, hard-boiled, hard-drinking gumshoe in the film noir tradition, with a homoerotic attachment to his murdered ex-colleague. Puns and puerile, sometimes sexist, innuendoes over the characters’ names abound – the main villain is called Der Wixxer, which is both a homophonic reference to the original Wallace film Der Hexer/The Wizard (1965) and also a vulgar expression in German for someone masturbating. The policemen are called Very Long, Even Longer and Rather Short, while other characters include Miss Minipony, the Earl of Cockwood and Freddy Fartface. There is a Hitler-lookalike butler named Hatler, while actor Lars Rudolph offers a passable imitation of the mannerisms of Klaus Kinski, one of the recurring contributors to the original series. Meanwhile, various individuals associated with the 1960s Wallace films (the actress Grit B¨ottcher; the assistant director Eva Ebner; and in the sequel Neues vom Wixxer one of the original series’ 39

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main stars, Joachim Fuchsberger) appear in cameo roles, as do a number of German celebrities, such as the host of the German version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and the folk music duo Die Wildecker Herzbuben. Other films and cultural references cited include Airplane!, The Silence of The Lambs (1991), Matrix-style martial arts scenes in slow- and stop-motion, iconic scenes from Spielberg’s E.T. (1982), Edvard Munch’s The Scream, David Hasselhoff ’s German hit ‘Looking For Freedom’ and The Muppet Show. The sequel, which offers more of the same, adds allusions to the TV series 24 and the Czech children’s TV classic Pan Tau (another piece of 1970s nostalgia), as well as featuring an appearance by the 1980s British pop group Madness. Yet despite all this frantic display of international cine- and popular culture literacy, the two German Wixxer films have remained a resolutely domestic German phenomenon; neither of the two films has had much international distribution and they remain available solely on DVD, without subtitles. In this respect, it may be productive to compare the two Wixxer films not so much with their antecedents in the 1960s or even with other German films from the 2000s, but instead with two French films that were released about the same time. OSS 117: Le Caire, nid d’espions/OSS 117: Cairo: Nest of Spies (2006) and its sequel OSS 117: Rio ne r´epond plus/OSS 117: Lost in Rio (2009) spoof – like the two Wixxer films – a popular French film series from the 1960s, a quasi-James Bond cycle focusing on a suave French secret agent embroiled in Cold War intrigues and global travel. The original OSS117 films were based on the novels by French pulp novelist Jean Bruce (1921–63), which predated Ian Fleming’s invention of James Bond by several years. Nevertheless the 1960s film adaptations were clearly modelled on the early Bond films, and usually starred non-French actors, such as Kerwin Matthews, John Gavin and Frederick Stafford. Directed by Michel Hazanavicius and starring Jean Dujardin, and predating The Artist, the two OSS117 parodies enjoyed limited but notable international dissemination. They garnered acclaim from well-known critics (such as Roger Ebert in the USA, but also domestically from the venerable Cahiers du Cin´ema) and are readily available in subtitled DVD copies. One of the main reasons for the transnational success of the OSS films may be that they function less like parodies than – or at least not in the same sense as – Der Wixxer. Hazanavicius’s homage to the 1960s does not require prior knowledge or familiarity with the originals. His various references

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2.2 Recreating the world of James Bond: 1960s pastiche in OSS 117: Lost in Rio.

and quotations, which include nods to masked Mexican wrestlers (lucha libre) and to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), can be picked up by the cult film connoisseur, while other jokes (especially puns) will only be understood by French-speaking viewers, though neither expertise is essential for the films’ overall intelligibility. The texts work primarily at the level of pastiche and ‘retro-chic’, conveying an idea of what 1960s cinema, and particularly cosmopolitan European genre co-productions, looked like. The films display a careful cinephilic attention to detail: they recreate perfectly the colour scheme and the crispy texture of the image, the costumes feel authentic and the images revel in techniques associated with the period in a much more subtle and effective way than similar elements in the Wixxer films. Christine Sprengler (2009: 86) has identified this form of approach in contemporary cinema as ‘deliberate archaism’, recreating ‘not only the look and feel of the period in question, but also the appearance of art from that [. . . ] time’. The OSS117 films exhibit a similar sensibility to that which informs Quentin Tarantino’s postmodern nods to popular European traditions in Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012). But they also invite comparisons with the more formalist approaches towards contemporary pastiche one finds in the work of auteurs such as Todd Haynes – for instance, his homage to Sirkian melodrama and 1950s aesthetics in Far From Heaven (2002). As with Haynes, there is more at stake in Hazanavicius’s films than merely the parading of cinematic references. The films elicit their laughter not only through their clever citations, but also by critiquing those social 41

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norms and conventions that the original narratives, despite their own sense of parody and bonhomie, took for granted, in other words, the ubiquitous sexism, racism, homosexual panic and imperialism that lurked behind the original films’ ostensibly cosmopolitan fac¸ade. And yet, the anxieties and issues being worked through are at the same time entirely pertinent today. This is particularly evident in the first of the two films, with its Muslim fundamentalist threat and eerie anticipation of the Arab Spring that in this form would never have featured in the 1960s. All of this makes the update of a 1960s template not only very current, but also internationally marketable. In this respect, the OSS117 series may represent one version of how popular European cinema, in its triangulated relationship with the national, the European and the global, can still work today. In contrast, the German Wallace spoofs cannot fully transcend their national roots. In order to partake in the film’s half-nostalgic, half-mocking project, the audience has to be familiar with the original series and its nationally specific cultural context. Despite its plethora of global cultural references, and despite the keenly felt cosmopolitan aspirations of the filmmakers, many jokes are lost on a non-German viewer and, although the film imitates at least in part the visual style of its antecedents, it lacks the precision in style, miseen-sc`ene and cinephilic affection to capture the earlier aesthetic convincingly. In addition, the profanity of some of the jokes and puns notwithstanding (the impact on German viewers incidentally is likely to be deflected by the use of English for the most profane terms), the ‘humour’ in the Wixxer films remains safe and harmless. Since the jokes are exclusively self-referential rather than targeted at social taboos or political contexts, issues or anxieties, the Wixxer films, unlike the OSS117 pastiches, ultimately offend no one. In the early 1990s, Fredric Jameson famously referred to pastiche as the post-modern manifestation of a ‘blank parody’ (1991: 16), but comparing the parody of the Wixxer films and the pastiche of the OSS117 films might suggest that in contemporary cinema it is parody itself that has become blank, while pastiche can still hold the potential to innovate, critique and elicit affect (cf. Dyer 2006).

Mapping Concepts: Nostalgia and Cinephilia, Heritage and the Middlebrow European cinema’s nostalgic and cinephilic turn since the 1990s has not gone unnoticed, and it is a feature that transcends any perceived or existing divide 42

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between art cinema and the popular. In the 2000s, many popular European films are set in the past, most prominently exemplified by prestige literary adaptations such as Oliver Twist (2005), Pride and Prejudice (2005), Perfume and Atonement (2007). Apart from the 1960s and 1970s invoked in the genre spoofs discussed earlier, the historical periods covered in European cinema in the 2000s range from antiquity (Alexander) to World War I (Un long dimanche de fianc¸ailles/A Very Long Engagement, 2004) and World War II (Downfall) and to the postwar years (e.g. Les Choristes/The Chorus, 2004). The approach and focus with which scholars have engaged with historical narratives and themes such as these varies. Ewa Mazierska has argued that ‘historical film should concern itself with events which are of importance to large groups of people’ and should focus on ‘history and memory (individual and collective) and their mutual relationship’ (2011: 17). For Randall Halle, a distinct ‘historical genre’ is identified as part of a broader transnational and post-modern aesthetic, and read precisely as a symptom for a broken relationship between history and memory, marking a ‘post-ideological’ and de-politicized departure in contemporary cinema (2008: 89–128). Rosalind Galt (2006) and Bel´en Vidal (2012a, 2012b) in contrast have stressed the affective qualities and critical potential of the melodramatic mode and alternatively mannerist or spectacular style that underpins recent historical films. While these scholars raise important points in the debate about the politics of representing history in contemporary cinema, my concern in this chapter is more to understand where the ‘historical film’ fits into the wider spectrum of popular European filmmaking practices. In this context, it is impossible to avoid a prominent critical term over the past decades, which is the ‘heritage film’ (for a concise summary of the emergence of the term and related discourse to date, see Vidal 2012a). ‘Heritage’ has in recent years become a catch-all category applied to both European and non-European films. In its perhaps most problematic application, it has been employed to interpret German cinematic representations of the Third Reich since the 1990s, and to denounce their inherent conservatism and historical revisionism (Koepnick 2002). Sabine Hake has pointed out that these (German) films ‘function in fundamentally different ways from the triumphs and defeats of empire in the British films’, and that ‘it might be more productive to focus not on what the films mean – or fail to mean, according to their critics – but on how they contribute to the changing public debate on Nazism’ (2012: 241).

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Mindful of Hake’s intervention, I am increasingly unconvinced that the ‘heritage film’ as a concept can be easily severed or exported from its original British context and references (as mapped, for example, by Higson 2003 and Monk 2011). Indeed, if used too broadly, for example, in the sense of a ‘transnational genre’, or where it is a mere synonym for a period film, the term leads to arbitrariness rather than clarification. Often, what is meant by ‘heritage’ refers less to the films’ relationship to a particular historical legacy (national or otherwise), and denotes more a type of ‘quality’ or ‘prestige’ production, characterized by classical modes of story-telling and narration (e.g. character-driven, goal-oriented etc.), in most cases a ‘serious’ subject matter or theme, ‘tasteful’ and/or luxurious mise-en-sc`ene and ‘authentic’ locations, as well as a strong emphasis on ‘good’ acting. Whether a film is set in the past or in the present is to some extent of secondary importance. Quality and prestige thus might be more useful terms in approximating what audiences would associate with such films, and allow for a greater flexibility in assessing their ideological content than the more diffuse concept of ‘heritage’. More importantly, prestige and quality encompass aspirations relating both to the films themselves and to their audiences, and these aspirations are crucial in creating hierarchies of value and maintaining regimes of taste. A number of recent scholarly interventions have therefore attempted to revive a terminology that may prove more productive in mapping this conjunction of aspirations, values and aesthetics under the heading of the ‘middlebrow’ (Cagle 2007, Napper 2009). ‘Middlebrow’ echoes some of the characteristics of Eric Rentschler’s concept of a ‘cinema of consensus’, defined as the antithesis of a cinema that was oppositional and critical, a cinema that was ‘resolutely stylish’ without expressing a ‘distinctive style’ (Rentschler 2000: 275). To some extent, Rentschler’s critique still holds for some of the cinema of the 2000s, as my reading above of the Wixxer films suggests. At the same time, a simple dichotomy between a critical, oppositional cinema and a homogenous popular genre cinema is too blunt to acknowledge the fluid borders between different modes of production and regimes of cultural value. In terms of the differentiation of popular European cinema, the middlebrow film can often be seen to occupy an ambivalent or hybrid position, indeed a middle ground, between the ‘image and idea’ end of the national cinema spectrum on one side and the purely commercial but critically despised end on the other; as such, it also marks the intersection between

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art-house and mainstream. At least formally speaking, many of these films are what Thomas Elsaesser has referred to as ‘art cinema “light”’ (2005: 509), largely avoiding radical experimentation in terms of content, narration or visual composition, but also distinguishing themselves from too obviously generic, low-brow or mass-cultural associations. Films like Mar Adentro/The Sea Inside (2004), Das Leben der Anderen/The Lives of Others (2006), The King’s Speech (2010) and The Queen (2006) have managed to be both popular and receive critical accolades and prizes. Moreover, formally as well as in terms of value and prestige, these films have more in common with each other across national borders than, say, The Queen has with Hot Fuzz, or The Lives of Others has with Der Wixxer. While quality and prestige may not necessarily mean the same across different countries, and while middlebrow films may not always be as popular in their own domestic context as the competition from ‘less aspirational’ cinema (as the success of Dany Boon, Oliver Kalkofe or Simon Pegg proves), it is noticeable that the middlebrow tends to circulate more and export better internationally, and in this respect may be regarded as more ‘European’. It is perhaps not too surprising that European funding bodies have often championed middlebrow projects, precisely for their perceived ability to promote and elicit a broader sense of Europeanness. In conclusion, what I aimed to demonstrate in this chapter is that, despite occasionally elegiac and apocalyptic pronouncements regarding the death of cinema in recent years, European popular cinema over the past decade has in fact thrived. Irrespective of whether this kind of cinema is to one’s personal taste, it continues to play a fundamental part in consolidating national film cultures in Europe, and indeed in fostering a transnational European film culture through co-productions and exports. However, it is important to maintain that popular cinema cannot be reduced to a uniform type of film, but instead sub-divides into a range of different generic strategies and modes of spectatorial address. In middlebrow productions, the borderline between art-house and mainstream is kept permeable, while not totally erased. Equally crucially, European popular cinemas can (and should) not only be grasped in relation to their immediate cultural (i.e. national, but also regional and local) contexts, but also seen in a wider relation to developments elsewhere in Europe, Hollywood and, increasingly, beyond. It is only in these comparisons that patterns and themes can become visible and concrete.

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Top European Productions (Including Co-Productions) in European Cinemas and European Film Awards 2004–20112 2004: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (UK/US/France/Ireland/D) Les Choristes (France/Switzerland/D) (T)raumschiff Surprise – Periode 1 (D) 7 Zwerge – M¨anner allein im Wald (D) Cold Mountain (US/UK) Deux fr`eres (France/UK) Un long dimanche de fianc¸ailles (F/US) Der Untergang (D) Podium (France/Belgium) Mar adentro (Spain)

European Film Award 2004: Gegen die Wand (D, Fatih Akin) 2005: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Alexander (UK/US/France/Netherlands) Pride and Prejudice (UK/France/US) Brice de Nice (France) La Marche de l’empereur (France) Der Untergang (D) Oliver Twist (France/Czech Republic/UK) Torrente 3: El Protector (Spain) Nanny McPhee (UK/US/France) Les Poup´ees russes (France/UK) Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (UK/US/France/Ireland/D)

European Film Award 2005: Cach´e (France/Austria/D/Italy, Michael Haneke) 2006: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 46

Les Bronz´es 3: amis pour la vie (France) Das Parfum (D/France/Spain) Volver (Spain) Camping (France) Kurtlar Vadisi – Irak (Turkey) 7 Zwerge – Der Wald ist nicht genug (D)

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Deutschland – ein Sommerm¨archen (D) Prˆete-moi ta main (France) Je vous trouve tr`es beau (France) The Queen (UK/France/Italy)

European Film Award 2006: Das Leben der Anderen (D, Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck) 2007: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Mr Bean’s Holiday (UK/France/D/US) La Mˆome (France/UK/Czech Republic) Taxi 4 (France) Hot Fuzz (UK/France/US) Das Leben der Anderen (D) Ensemble, c’est tout (France) Manuale d’amore (Italy) Natale in crociera (Italy) Atonement (UK/France/US) Arthur et les Minimoys (France/US)

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7. 8. 9. 10.

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European Film Award 2007: 4 luni, 3 saptamˆani si 2 zile (Romania, Cristian Mungiu) 2008: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Quantum of Solace (UK/US) Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (France) Ast´erix aux Jeux olympiques (France/D/Spain/Italy) Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (UK/US) Keinohrhasen (D) Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (US/UK) Earth (UK/US/D) Die Welle (D) The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (UK) Taken (France/US)

European Film Award 2008: Gomorra (Italy, Matteo Garrone) 2009: 1. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (US/UK) 2. Slumdog Millionaire (UK) 47

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3. M¨an som hatar (Sweden/Denmark/D) 4. Le Petit Nicolas (France/UK) 5. Wickie und die starken M¨anner (D) 6. Arthur et la vengeance de Maltazard (France) 7. LOL (Laughing out loud) (France) 8. Zweiohrk¨uken (D) 9. Agora (Spain) 10. Los abrazos rotos (Spain) European Film Award 2009: Das weiße Band (D/Austria/France/Italy, Michael Haneke) 2010: 1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 1(UK/US) 2. Robin Hood (UK/US) 3. Les Petits mouchoirs (France) 4. Resident Evil: Afterlife (D/France/UK/US) 5. Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang (UK/US/France) 6. Benvenuti al Sud (Italy) 7. Camping 2 (France) 8. L’Arnacoeur (France/Monaco) 9. Oceans (France) 10. StreetDance 3D (UK) European Film Award 2010: The Ghost Writer (France/D/UK, Roman Polanski) 2011: 1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2 (UK/US) 2. The King’s Speech (UK/US) 3. Intouchables (France) 4. Rien a` declarer (France) 5. Johnny English – Reborn (UK/France/US) 6. The Inbetweeners Movie (UK) 7. Che bella giornata (Italy) 8. Arthur Christmas (UK/US) 9. Kokow¨aa¨ h (D) 10. The Three Musketeers (UK/D/France/US) European Film Award 2011: Melancholia (Denmark/Sweden/France/D, Lars von Trier)

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Der Schuh des Manitu (2001, Michael Herbig) (T)raumschiff Surprise – Periode 1 (2004, Michael Herbig) 7 Zwerge – M¨anner allein im Wald (2004, Sven Unterwaldt) Goodbye Lenin! (2003, Wolfgang Becker) Das Parfum (D/Spain/France, 2006, Tom Tykwer) Wickie und die starken M¨anner (2009, Michael Herbig) Der Untergang (2004, Oliver Hirschbiegel) Kokow¨aa¨ h (2011, Til Schweiger) Deutschland – ein Sommerm¨archen (2006, S¨onke Wortmann) Earth (UK/US/D, 2007, Alastair Fothergill) 7 Zwerge – Der Wald ist nicht genug (2006, Sven Unterwaldt) Zweiohrk¨uken (2009, Til Schweiger) Das Wunder von Bern (2003, S¨onke Wortmann) Die Welle (2008, Dennis Gansel) Die wilden Kerle 4 (2007, Joachim Massanek) Der kleine Eisb¨ar (2001, Piet de Rycker, Thilo Graf Rothkirch, Kris van Alphen) Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex (2008, Uli Edel) Luther (D/US/UK, 2003, Eric Till) Die P¨apstin (D/Italy/Spain, 2009, S¨onke Wortmann) Lissi und der wilde Kaiser (2007, Michael Herbig)

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Top 20 Best-Performing German Films (Including Co-Productions) in German Cinemas 2000–2011:

German Film Production (in bold) and Box Office 2000–20113 2000: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

American Pie (US; 6.124.630 tickets sold) Mission Impossible 2 (US) American Beauty (US) Gladiator (US) Pokemon (US/Japan) Scary Movie (US) Toy Story 2 (US) Erin Brockovich (US) Dinosaur (US) Road Trip (US) 49

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Top-grossing German films: 14: Anatomie (2,013,931 tickets sold); 26: Harte Jungs; 27: Crazy; 32: Erkan und Stefan; 38: Otto der Katastrofenfilm. Deutscher Filmpreis: Die Unber¨uhrbare (Gold); Absolute Giganten (Silver); Sonnenallee (Silver). German feature films: 75; documentaries: 19 Co-productions: 28 9.4 per-cent distribution market share Total distribution revenue: 692.9 million DM Total video/DVD revenue: 934 million No. of cinema screens: 4,783 2001: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Der Schuh des Manitu (D; 10.526.676 tickets sold) Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone (US/UK) What Women Want (US) American Pie 2 (US) The Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (US) Castaway (US) Pearl Harbor (US) Bridget Jones’s Diary (US/UK) The Mummy Returns (US) Shrek (US)

Top-grossing German films: 1: Der Schuh des Manitu; 18: Der kleine Eisb¨ar; 21: M¨adchen, M¨adchen; 24: Emil und die Detektive; 25: Das Experiment; 26: Das Sams. Deutscher Filmpreis: Die innere Sicherheit (Gold); Crazy (Silver); Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (Silver). German feature films: 83; documentaries: 24 Co-productions: 26 15.7 per-cent market share Total distribution revenue: 389.2 million Total video/DVD revenue: 1.15 billion No. of cinema screens: 4,792 2002: 1. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (US; 8.767.962 tickets sold) 2. Ice Age (US) 50

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The Lord of the Rings – The Two Towers (US) Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones (US) Spider-Man (US) Men in Black 2 (US) Ocean’s Eleven (US) James Bond – Die Another Day (US/UK) Monsters Inc. (US) Minority Report (US)

Top-grossing German films: 16: Bibi Blocksberg (2.050.214 tickets sold); 36: Knallharte Jungs; 40: Resident Evil –Genesis (US/D/UK).

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

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Deutscher Filmpreis: Nirgendwo in Afrika (Gold); Halbe Treppe (Silver), Heaven (Silver). German feature films: 84; documentaries: 33 German co-productions: 45 9.5 per-cent market share Total distribution revenue: 420 million Total video/DVD revenue: 1.4 billion No. of cinema screens: 4.868 2003: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Finding Nemo (US; 7.656.947 tickets sold) The Lord of the Rings – Return of The King (US) Goodbye Lenin! (D; 6.439.777 tickets sold) Pirates of the Caribbean (US) Matrix Reloaded (US) Catch Me if you Can (US) Johnny English (UK) Bruce Almighty (US) Das Wunder von Bern (D; 3.253.216 tickets sold) Terminator 3: Rise of The Machines (US)

Top-grossing German films: 3: Goodbye Lenin!; 9: Das Wunder von Bern; 15: Luther (D/US/UK); 20: Das fliegende Klassenzimmer; 33: Werner – Gekotzt wird sp¨ater; 40: Die wilden Kerle; 49: Herr Lehmann. Deutscher Filmpreis: Goodbye Lenin! (Gold); Lichter (Silver); Nackt (Silver). German feature films: 80; documentaries: 27 German co-productions: 26 51

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16.7 per-cent market share Total distribution revenue: 384.1 million Total video/DVD revenue: 1.56 billion No. of cinema screens: 4.868 2004: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

(T)raumschiff Surprise – Periode 1 (D; 9.137.506 tickets sold) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (US/UK) 7 Zwerge – M¨anner allein im Wald (D; 6.486.540 tickets sold) Shrek 2 (US) Der Untergang (D; 4.521.903 tickets sold) Troy (US) The Day After Tomorrow (US) Brother Bear (US) Spider-Man 2 (US) Something’s Gotta Give (US)

Top-grossing German Films: 1: (T)raumschiff Surprise – Periode 1; 3: 7 Zwerge – M¨anner allein im Wald: 5: Der Untergang; 17: Der Wixxer; 31: Lauras Stern; 32: Bibi Blocksberg und das Geheimnis der blauen Eulen. Deutscher Filmpreis: Gegen die Wand (Gold), Kroko (Silver); Das Wunder von Bern (Silver). German feature films: 87; documentaries: 34 German co-productions: 27 20.8 per-cent market share Total distribution revenue: 410.4 million Total video/DVD revenue: 1.75 billion No. of cinema screens: 4.870 2005: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 52

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (US; 7.563.181 tickets sold) Madagascar (US) Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith (US) Hitch (US) Mr. and Mrs. Smith (US) Meet The Fockers (US) War of the Worlds (US) The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (US)

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Top-grossing German Films: 9: Die weiße Massai; 14: Die wilden Kerle 2; 15: Barfuss; 17: Der kleine Eisb¨ar 2; 18: Siegfried; 22: Felix – Ein Hase auf Weltreise; 29: Sophie Scholl – Die letzten Tage; 30: Es ist ein Elch entsprungen; 33: Alles auf Zucker. Deutscher Filmpreis: Alles auf Zucker (Gold); Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (Silver); Sophie Scholl – Die letzten Tage (Silver). German feature films: 103; documentaries: 43 German co-productions: 43 13.9 per-cent market share Total distribution revenue: 327.9 million Total video/DVD revenue: 1.69 billion No. of cinema screens: 4.889

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9. Die weiße Massai (D; 2.156.934 tickets sold) 10. Kingdom of Heaven (US/UK)

2006: 1. Ice Age 2 (US; 8.732.937 tickets sold) 2. Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest (US) 3. The Da Vinci Code (US) 4. Das Parfum (D/Spain/France; 5.480.675 tickets sold) 5. Casino Royale (US/UK) 6. Deutschland – ein Sommerm¨archen (D; 3.991.913 tickets sold) 7. 7 Zwerge – Der Wald ist nicht genug (D; 3.509.341 tickets sold) 8. Over The Hedge (US) 9. The Devil Wears Prada (US) 10. Cars (US) Top-grossing German Films: 4: Das Parfum (Co-P); 6: Deutschland – ein Sommerm¨archen; 7: 7 Zwerge – Der Wald ist nicht genug; 11: Die wilden Kerle 3; 12: Hui Buh das Schlossgespenst; 14: Das Leben der Anderen; 23: Wer fr¨uher stirbt, ist l¨anger tot; 26: Die wilden H¨uhner; 32: Sommer vorm Balkon; 36: The Thief Lord (UK/D/Lux). Deutscher Filmpreis: Das Leben der Anderen (Gold); Knallhart (Silver); Requiem (Silver). German feature films: 122; documentaries: 52 Co-productions: 44 21.5 per-cent market share 53

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Total distribution revenue: 362.4 million Total video/DVD revenue: 1.59 billion No. of cinema screens: 4.848 2007: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (US; 7.076.615 tickets sold) Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End (US) Ratatouille (US) The Simpsons (US) Shrek 3 (US) Mr Bean’s Holiday (UK) Spider-Man 3 (US) Die Hard 4.0 (US) Die wilden Kerle 4 (D; 2.454.325 tickets sold) Lissi und der wilde Kaiser (D; 2.273.804 tickets sold)

Top-grossing German Films: 9: Die wilden Kerle 4; 10: Lissi und der wilde Kaiser; 20: Kleinohrhasen; 25: Die wilden H¨uhner und die Liebe; 27: Warum M¨anner nicht zuh¨oren und Frauen schlecht einparken; 29: Neues vom Wixxer; 32: Die drei; 34: Vollidiot; 35: Mein F¨uhrer – Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit u¨ ber Adolf Hitler; 40: H¨ande weg vom Mississippi. Deutscher Filmpreis: Vier Minuten (Gold); Wer fr¨uher stirbt, ist l¨anger tot (Silver); Das Parfum (Silver). German feature films: 122; documentaries: 50 Co-productions: 45 15.1 per-cent market share Total distribution revenue: 307.2 million Total video/DVD revenue: 1.61 billion No. of cinema screens: 4.832 2008: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 54

Madagascar 2 (US; 4.774.478 tickets sold) Quantum of Solace (US/UK) Mamma Mia! (UK/US) Hancock (US) Earth (UK/US/D; 3.765.230 tickets sold) Wall-E (US) Kung Fu Panda (US)

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Top-grossing German Films: 5: Earth (UK/US/D); 10: Die Welle; 13: Der BaderMeinhof Komplex; 19: Die wilden Kerle 5 – Hinter dem Horizont; 21: Ast´erix aux Jeux Olympiques (France/D/Italy/Spain); 22: Krabat; 27. Kirschbl¨uten – Hanami; 28: 11/2 Ritter – Auf der Suche nach der hinreißenden Herzelinde; 29: Freche M¨adchen; 30: Sommer; 34: Die Geschichte vom Brandner Kasper; 38: Tintenherz/Inkheart (UK/D/US).

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8. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (US) 9. The Dark Knight (US) 10. Die Welle (D; 2.635.264 tickets sold)

Deutscher Filmpreis: Auf der anderen Seite (Gold), Kirschbl¨uten (Silver); Die Welle (Bronze). German feature films: 125, documentaries: 60 Co-productions: 44 21 per cent market share Total distribution revenue: 317.5 million Total video/DVD revenue: 1.55 billion No. of cinema screens: 4.810 2009: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Ice Age 3 (US; 8.705.891 tickets sold) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (US) Wickie und die starken M¨anner (D; 4.891.161 tickets sold) Angels and Demons (US) Avatar (US) Zweiohrk¨uken (D; 3.340.379 tickets sold) The Twilight Saga – New Moon (US) 2012 (US) Up (US) Twilight (US

Top-grossing German Films: 3: Wickie und die starken M¨anner; 6: Zweiohrk¨uken; 12: Die P¨apstin (D/Italy/Spain); 13: The Reader (US/D); 16: M¨annerherzen; 21: M¨annersache; 29: Horst Schl¨ammer – isch kandidiere; 32: Maria, ihm schmeckt’s nicht (D/Italy); 35: Hexe Lili – Der Drache und das magische Buch (D/Austria/Spain/Italy); 39: W¨ustenblume/Desert Flower (D/Austria/France). Deutscher Filmpreis: John Rabe (Gold); Im Winter ein Jahr (Silver), Wolke 9 (Silver). 55

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German feature films: 150; documentaries: 70 Co-productions: 63 21 per cent market share Total distribution revenue: 411.3 million Total video/DVD revenue: 1.63 billion No. of cinema screens: 4.734 2010: 1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 (US/UK: 5.187.790 tickets sold) 2. The Twilight Saga – Eclipse (US) 3. Inception (US/UK) 4. Alice in Wonderland (US) 5. Tangled (US) 6. Sex and the City 2 (US) 7. Despicable Me (US) 8. Shrek Forever After (US) 9. Grown-Ups (US) 10. Sherlock Holmes (US) Top-grossing German Films: 13: Friendship! (D/US; 1.597.193 tickets sold); 18: Die Konferenz der Tiere; 23: Resident Evil – Afterlife (D/UK/US); 28: Vincent will Meer; 36: Hanni und Nanni. Deutscher Filmpreis: Das weiße Band/The White Ribbon (Gold); Sturm (Silver); Die Fremde (Bronze). German feature films: 119; documentaries: 74 Co-productions: 58 15,6 per-cent market share Total distribution revenue: 398.5 million Total video/DVD revenue: 1.67 billion No. of cinema screens: 4.699 2011: 1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (US/UK; 6.468.501 tickets sold) 2. Pirates of the Caribbean – On Stranger Tides (US) 3. Kokow¨aa¨ h (D; 4.317.017 tickets sold) 4. Hangover 2 (US)

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The Smurfs (US) Transformers 3 (US) Fast Five (US) The King’s Speech (UK/US) Black Swan (US) Puss in Boots (US)

Top-grossing German Films: 3: Kokow¨aa¨ h; 15: What A Man!; 17: Wickie auf großer Fahrt; 19: Almanya – Willkommen in Deutschland; 20: M¨annerherzen und die ganz, ganz große Liebe; 23: The Three Musketeers (US/ UK/France/D); 27: Rubbeldikatz; 29: Eine ganz heiße Nummer; 36: Vorstadtkrokodile.

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

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Deutscher Filmpreis: Vincent will Meer (Gold); Almanya – Willkommen in Deutschland (Silver); Wer wenn nicht wir (Bronze). German feature films: 123; Documentaries: 82 Co-productions: 60 17,9 per-cent market share Total distribution revenue: 395.3 million Total video/DVD revenue: 1.69 billion No. of cinema screens: 4.640

Notes 1

2

3

I have developed the ideas and arguments in this chapter over a few years, and have benefited from presenting them on various occasions, receiving invaluable feedback at, among other places, the Universities of Exeter, Liverpool John Moores and Mainz. Some parts of this chapter have been previously published, in ‘Transnational Genre Hybridity: Between Vernacular Modernism and Postmodern Parody’, in Ivo Ritzer and Peter Schultze (2013) (eds), Genre Hybridisation: Global Cinematic Flows, Marburg: Sch¨uren. Box office figures extracted from the European Audiovisual Observatory (http://www.obs.coe.int/index.html) (accessed 3 June 2013) and from the annual Filmstatistisches Jahrbuch der Spitzenorganisation der Filmwirtschaft, Baden-Baden: Nomos. For lists of the European Film Awards, see http://www.imdb.com/ event/ev0000230/ (accessed 3 June 2013) and the website of the European Film Academy: http://www.europeanfilmacademy.org (accessed 3 June 2013) All information compiled is taken from the annual data set published by SPIO, the German film industry’s umbrella organization: Filmstatistisches Jahrbuch (2001–12), Baden-Baden: Nomos.

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3 Changing the Image of Europe? The Role of European Co-Productions, Funds and Film Awards ¨ Anne Jackel

After a brief review of some of the past and present trends in co-productions made in Europe under the terms of co-production agreements, this chapter explores the extent to which European funding mechanisms for those films are increasingly seen as defining features of European cinema. It also examines how, today, co-productions are susceptible to readings that offer a particular take on the constructs of Europe and ‘Europeanness’. Finally, it uses the LUX Prize and the films selected by a European panel of film professionals as a case study to explore the extent to which European filmmakers’ creative and critical agendas may contribute to a new image of Europe.

Co-Productions: Past and Present Trends Collaboration between film professionals from various countries is almost as old as cinema itself. After the setting up of public institutions responsible for state support in the aftermath of World War II, co-productions flourished in Europe under the aegis of inter-governmental co-production agreements. Despite the many drawbacks of such arrangements (higher production costs, red tape, unequal power relationships, financial, cultural and creative compromises etc.), more agreements – bilateral and multilateral – continued to be signed. Even though co-productions helped considerably 59

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to rebuild national film industries in the postwar period ( J¨ackel 2003), critics have usually dismissed them as concoctions of little interest. However, scholarly reassessment of films made in the 1950s and 1960s reveals that those co-productions were far less conservative and more ‘European’ than ‘wholly national’ films. Patricia Lacombe’s study of the French-Italian coproductions of the early 1950s, for example, provides interesting markers of ‘Europeanness’, for example, resistance to and criticism of both national and American ‘ways of life and of thinking’, as well as ‘openness to others’ (Lacombe 1993: 51). In his study of 1960s West German popular cinema, Tim Bergfelder (2005b) also talks of the dispersal and disappearance of markers of national identity in increasingly international narratives and modes of production. That an emergent ‘Europe of images’ did not develop into a more successful form of cross-cultural exchange and perhaps accelerate the process of European cultural unification wished for by Jean Monnet, one of the founding fathers of the European Community, has probably much to do with the competition of television and the strategies of the Motion Pictures Export Association ( J¨ackel 2003). Nevertheless, pan-European1 film industrial initiatives proceeded in parallel with the economic and governmental establishment of the European Economic Community, along with inter-governmental co-production agreements. Today, most European countries have such agreements with each other as well as with other countries around the world. Co-productions account for the majority of the output from Belgium, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries, and in the last 20 years for at least half the films produced in Eastern Europe. Without them, many small countries would not have a film industry. Transnational by definition, European co-productions are well-placed to respond to the challenges posed by conflicting demands within Europe on the one hand and globalization trends on the other, and in recent years Europeans have been particularly active in developing co-production strategies to face these challenges. Co-production agreements have become more flexible and, while European producers are increasing their links with partners around the globe, small regional funds are also establishing links with each other across borders. Almost everywhere in Europe, new co-production initiatives have emerged, several of them developed at grassroots level at Europe’s growing number of international film festivals. Along with global economic and technological factors linked to changes in the production of films and television shows (including increased demand as

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European Funds, European Identity and European Markers for Film While the EU’s MEDIA (Measures to Encourage the Development of the Audiovisual Industries) programme focuses on pre- and post-production initiatives, it is the Council of Europe (CoE)’s fund Eurimages that is most concerned with co-productions. Eurimages was developed within the CoE’s cultural programme with a remit to support the production and distribution of ‘works which uphold the values that are part and parcel of the European identity’ (Eurimages News 1990). Eurimages support is a selective aid in the form of an interest-free loan. Since the beginning of its operation in January 1989, Eurimages has supported the co-production of 1,420 feature films and documentaries (CoE website 2012). Decisions are taken by the board on a case by case basis. In selecting projects, Eurimages takes into account the filmmaking capacity of the country from which the project originates. Filmmakers from the smaller countries of Europe (Iceland, Denmark, Greece, Turkey) have been the major beneficiaries as well as those from countries in the former Eastern bloc, most of which became members of Eurimages in the 1990s. Over the years, rules have changed and become more flexible, including those governing the European Convention on Cinematographic Co-productions. Set up to harmonize multilateral relations between member states when they decide to co-produce a film, the Convention came into force in 1994. Today, all projects submitted for Eurimages funding must have at least two co-producers from different member states, and support can be granted to films for which one co-producer is only a financial partner. Since 2010, Eurimages no longer considers the ‘European origin’ of a project as a criterion of eligibility but continues to assess the ‘European character’ of the project according to the point system stipulated in the regulations (1.6.3) of the Convention. Even though Eurimages regularly amends its rules, it has always made it clear that it aims to support film as both an art form and an industry, as well as to promote European identity. While over the years the EU programmes have remained rather evasive about European markers for European culture in general and European cinema in particular, the Council of Europe’s fund has gone a long way

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a result of a greater number of channels and delivery systems), the European programmes initiated in the late 1980s to stimulate cross-border projects are also responsible for the increase in the number of co-productions.

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towards identifying the ‘European character’ of European cinema in its objective statements, and it is precisely the latter that have come under attack for their stance on art, their assertion of ‘a single culture’ and identity and, arguably, their rhetoric for a unified Europe. Discussing Eurimages’ cultural objective, Randall Halle, for example, contends that ‘through Eurimages, Europe – or the idea of Europe – is given a “civilizing” mission and the main asset of a film abides in its ability to imagine Europe as a whole’. He also argues that ‘the productions funded by Eurimages [. . . ] are distributed as art films’ (Halle 2002: 34). Halle’s criticisms are unfair on several counts: if there is some concern on the part of the CoE’s fund about the representation of ‘Europe as a whole’, the Europe in question has been characterized by continuous enlargement and the embrace of a large variety of languages and cultures. The fund is continuously extending its support. For example, since January 2012 co-production projects with non-European directors are considered eligible. That being said, Halle’s criticisms of the fund and the films it supports provide useful markers of ‘Europeanness’ for a European cinema deemed worthy of support by a public funding institution at pan-European level. In the best auteur tradition, the names of almost all the great European directors of contemporary cinema appear in the credits of the films supported by Eurimages, among them the Dardenne brothers (Belgium), Jeri Menzel (Czech Republic), Lars von Trier (Denmark), Theo Angelopoulos (Greece) and Emir Kusturica (Serbia). The fund has also given an opportunity to a new generation of talent to find financing for their films, particularly but not exclusively in the East (Radu Mihaileanu, Ademir Kenovic, Danis Tanovic and Jasmila Zbanic). This in itself is a considerable achievement. Unlike many of the – usually large budget – international films made to be screened in multiplexes with a promotion budget to match, many of the films supported by the CoE’s fund offer a certain idea of European cinema that is not necessarily profitable. A great majority of them are distributed and critically reviewed as art cinema. This commitment to auteur and/or art cinema in Europe continues to be reflected at award ceremonies and film festivals, as well as in public discourse. Within the wider framework of the Council of Europe, Eurimages aims to promulgate ‘European values’ and ‘identity’. While it is true that there has been no attempt to define the latter beyond diversity and common cultural heritage, a large number of co-productions made since the creation of the pan-European fund appear to fulfil the CoE’s mandate ‘to strengthen human rights, racial tolerance and multicultural acceptance’ (CoE 1991: 9). Many

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of them have also received the support of ARTE and been shown on the Franco-German cultural channel. This is not coincidental, since the two organizations share a deep concern for humanitarian issues and this is reflected in the films they help finance. One of the first co-productions to receive Eurimages funding was Reise der Hoffnung/Journey of Hope (Xavier Koller, Switzerland/Turkey/UK, 1991). The film depicts the tragic efforts of a family of illegal immigrants to reach ‘Paradise somewhere in Europe’. Despite the topicality of his film, Koller was criticized for failing to portray his protagonists accurately (the dialogue is in Turkish when the family on which the story is based is Kurdish) and to address the political issues raised by the narrative. In his defence, Koller claimed that Journey of Hope was more concerned with the reactions immigrants inspired in their host countries than with migrants themselves. As he explained: Millions of people are on the move today, looking for a future somewhere else in the world. [. . . ]. I wanted the audience to ask themselves: ‘How am I affected by these people? How do I relate to them?’ I wanted to talk to them through their hearts rather than through arguments. (Kermode 1991: 21)

Eurimages funding has also gone to narratives dealing with the exploitation of immigrants trying to secure – sometimes through dubious means – a livelihood in Europe. Examples include films by the so-called ‘liberal humanist European directors’ such as Gianni Amelio’s Lamerica (Italy/France/ Switzerland, 1994), the Dardenne brothers’ La Promesse/The Promise (Belgium/France/Luxembourg, 1996) and Le Silence de Lorna/Lorna’s Silence (Belgium/France/Italy, 2008), Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu/Code Unknown (France/Germany/Romania, 2001) and Stephen Frears’s Dirty, Pretty Things (UK, 2002). In Lamerica, the Italian director (who won his third European Film Academy [EFA] award for Best Film) uses migration as a means of exploring Italy’s (and metaphorically Europe’s) past history and colonial expansion, and its current socio-political situation. Shot in post-communist Albania, the country is shown as a hopeless land, ripe for exploitation, and Italy as potentially corrupt, unwelcoming and hooked on the trivialities of Berlusconi’s television. The plot centres on the relationship between young aspiring businessman Gino and the elderly Spiro. Gino has come to Albania to open a fraudulent company with another unscrupulous Italian businessman, Spiro, who has been confined to Albania for so long that he is thought by the 63

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two Italians to be Albanian and becomes a pawn in their shady deal. After a series of events, Gino loses his belongings and his passport is impounded. The final sequence shows a cargo of destitute Albanians – with on board two undistinguishable Italians (Gino and Spiro) – desperate to reach Italy. In a Cineaste interview, Amelio pointed out that, by focusing on the haunting faces of the nameless passengers, he ‘was trying to show [. . . ] that, in a symbolic sense, we’re all Albanians’ (quoted in Crowdus and Georgakas 2002: 200). A deeply political and humanist film, Lamerica illustrates the conflicting conceptions of nation and nationality in Europe. Migration has inevitably been a favourite theme in many of the coproductions made by those directors Thomas Elsaesser aptly calls ‘doubleoccupancy filmmakers’ (1999), whether they are exiled or migrant and diasporic filmmakers such as the Albanian Fatmir Koc¸i, the Maghrebi-French Mahmoud Zemmouri and the Turkish-German Fatih Akin. Fatmir Koc¸i claimed he shot his second feature Tirana, ann´ee z´ero/Tirana Year Zero, a French-Albanian co-production (2002), in his native Albania as ‘a call to the Albanian people not to abandon their native land’ (quoted in Horton 2001). With a script based on anecdotes heard and events witnessed by the director, the film takes place in 1997 and documents how, in a country in a state of chaos, corruption and lawlessness, Klara, an aspiring young model, and her odd-job boyfriend Niku reflect on the pros and cons of emigrating. Koc¸i’s film is unsparing both in its depiction of Albania as a land unable to escape the patriarchy of the past and the rough and drab reality of the present, and of his protagonists’ reasons for wanting to leave. Even though Koc¸i’s portrayal of foreigners (a free-spirited French journalist and a neo-hippy German tourist) plays against stereotypical representations of Westerners who come to the Balkans to find their ‘true selves’, neither of them can provide Niku with answers. Tirana Year Zero received international critical acclaim but the reactions of Albanian audiences were negative both at home and abroad, where Koc¸i was accused by Albanian e´ migr´es of ‘blackening the name of his country’ (Horton 2001). At the 2001 Thessaloniki Film Festival, where he received the main prize, an unrepentant Koc¸i described his nation as ‘a multicultural and multi-denominational country with a rich cultural heritage’ and referred to its role as ‘a bridge between East and West’. Cross-border disputes and the effect of conflicts between various communities are other issues tackled by many Eurimages-supported co-productions made by filmmakers from Eastern Europe and the Balkan region. Examples include films about the conflict in the former Yugoslavia such as No Man’s

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Land (Danis Tanovic, France/Belgium/Bosnia Herzegovina/Italy/Slovenia/ UK, 2001), the story of two soldiers from opposing sides (a Bosnian and a Serb) trapped in no man’s land while a third soldier has become a living booby trap, and Grbavica ( Jasmila Zbanic, Bosnia Herzegovina/Austria/Germany/ Croatia, 2006). Also known under the titles The Land of My Dreams and Esma’s Secret, Grbavica is a film that charts the emotional toll the war inflicts on a mother and her 12-year-old daughter. Far from attempting to establish a ‘closed European ensemble’ (Halle 2002: 31), the pan-European fund has not only fostered co-productions between Western and Eastern European countries when the latter needed them most, but also, in helping filmmakers from nations of contested status or with disputed borders and displaced peoples, whether from Palestine, Lebanon or the former Yugoslavia, Eurimages has made a significant contribution to the development of a truly transnational cinema ( J¨ackel 2007). Far from being the bland products that co-productions have often been dismissed as, the above-mentioned films offer outstanding examples of transnational films, works with a strong identity addressing cultural diversity and the socio-economic problems faced by Europe today. They certainly show that cultural specificity and cultural plurality are not incompatible. Within the framework of public funding and its ‘cultural mission’ remit, Eurimages has helped to open up spaces for exploring differences and articulating ‘otherness’ in the sense of ‘minority views’, whether expressed in terms of socio-economic background or of ethnicity. The huge number of films supported by Eurimages over the last 20 years (and their lack of visibility) makes the task of assessing their ‘Europeanness’, and/or bias on the part of the Eurimages Board of Management selecting the projects towards films showing common roots as ‘evidence of a single culture’, almost impossible. Whereas a brief look at the co-productions selected at the various international film festivals and/or awarded various prizes over the last two decades points towards a certain preference for particular subject matter (im/emigration, social inequalities, the effects of ethnic conflicts on individuals), it does not point to a particularly homogenous ‘European’ bias in their ideological viewpoint. Indeed, it is ironic that a pan-European fund with a mandate to ‘promote European identity’ with references to ‘a single culture’ often gives its support to films that foreground rather than obliterate cultural differences. Given the wide membership of Eurimages, this may not be as surprising as it originally appears. What is more compelling is that, dealing with issues of migration and displacement,

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language and culture in the way they do, many Eurimages-supported films actually challenge the very notions of cultural, national and even European identity. Today, there is no single accepted discourse of European cinema. That this applies to films supported by the CoE’s fund despite the latter’s rhetoric about ‘a [single] European identity’ does not necessarily mean that those films do not connote a certain – real or imagined – construct of ‘Europe as a whole’, as the following readings of a number of European Film Academy award-winning films illustrate. Echoing Halle in her review of Fatih Akin’s Gegen die Wand/Head-on (Germany/Turkey, 2004), Deniz G¨okt¨urk contends that ‘institutions such as public broadcasting channels and film funding boards have tended to promote patronizing disdain and victim talk in the representation of migrants, relying on preset assumptions of cultural difference, tradition and authenticity’. Yet, her choice of Akin’s film to illustrate how the convergence of musical traditions and ‘the celebration of sonic hybridity’ challenges any nation-based interpretation of music, film and culture leads her to conclude that Head-on is a ‘film that imagines Europe as a space of proximities and entanglements, transcending territory-bound conceptions of national (German and Turkish) identities’ (G¨okt¨urk 2010: 231). In the same vein, Dorota Ostrowska, in an article on the choice of ‘European art directors’ to make their film(s) in a language other than their native tongue, convincingly argues that: Haneke’s Cach´e (2005), Von Trier’s American trilogy (Dogville [2003], Manderlay [2005] and Dancer in the Dark [2001]) [. . . ] and Kieslowski’s French features (Double Life of V´eronique and the Three Colours trilogy) reveal how the language of the film, when different from the native tongue of the director, is tied up with issues of national identity, European identity and the identity of the images in ways which do not compromise the directors’ cultural allegiances (national or European) but strengthen and enrich them. (Ostrowska 2007: 58)

Co-productions, like European public funding policies and European film awards, are controversial and open to question. So are readings of film, and those of transnational films such as co-productions are no exception. Yet it is striking that two scholars – using very different approaches – reach similar conclusions on the ‘Europeanness’ of the EFA award-winners they choose to 66

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analyse, as they demonstrate that, while helping us experience difference or ‘otherness’ through culture (i.e. music and language), at the same time the films breach that difference through images. Curiously, it is not ‘Europe as a whole’ but an emergent Southern European identity that Dina Iordanova celebrates in her reading of Lamerica: focusing on the fact that Gino and Spiro are Italian Southerners, she concludes her analysis of the film by saying that ‘[t]he bonding between dispossessed Albanians and cast-out Italian Southerners charts new fault lines suggesting that the East and the West of Europe’s South are becoming compatible in a new configuration of power affiliations’ (Iordanova 2008). What may be wishful thinking on the part of an outspoken critic of Eurimages policy (Iordanova 2002) nonetheless provides another example of how co-productions can offer a particular take on the construct of Europe and Europeanness. Like many other co-productions supported by European public funds, the films examined so far constitute a site where not only are national identities being scrutinized and contested but also where European identity is being formulated, explored, questioned and – more arguably – realized. In this respect, they represent one of the most creative trends in contemporary European cinema.

The LUX Prize: A New EU Award Even though, in the late 1980s, Europe’s film and audiovisual sector was seen as decisive in achieving European unification by, among others, the President of the European Community, Jacques Delors, it is only in recent years that EU policy-makers have concerned themselves positively with the role film can play in promoting the image of Europe. This is nowhere more evident than in the creation of the LUX Prize in 2007. The prize was introduced ‘to illuminate the public debate on European integration and to facilitate the diffusion of European films in the European Union’ (European Parliament News 2007). In order to qualify for selection, the LUX Prize contender must ‘illustrate or question the founding values of our European identity, illustrate the diversity of European traditions and/or provide insights into the debate on the EU integration process’ (European Parliament website 2010). A panel of cinema experts proposes ten films each year and selects three contenders. Members of the European Parliament have the opportunity to watch the three films and vote for their favourite in order to designate the winner, who 67

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receives parliament support for subtitling into the EU’s 24 official languages, an adaptation for the visually- or hearing-impaired and the production of a 35mm copy for each EU member state. In June 2009, the EU initiative received a boost from the EFA: invited to the EFA’s think tank ‘The Image of Europe’, the President of the European Commission Jos´e Manuel Barroso suggested ‘concentrat[ing] on the emotional side of Europe’ in order to change the negative image of the EU (EFA 2009). His words were taken up by a number of filmmakers known for their advocacy of a more visible European cinema, notably Wim Wenders. Pointing out the current Euro-scepticism and the ‘emotional deficit’ in the reception of Europe, a ‘Europe perceived by its citizens mainly as a political-technical-bureaucratic structure’, Wenders suggested focusing on cinema and film literacy as solutions to these problems. ‘Movies helped to invent and to perpetuate the American dream’, he said; ‘they can do wonders for the image of Europe’ (Wenders 2010). True to its statement of objectives, the LUX Prize has been awarded to ‘films that go to the very heart of the European public debate’, films that give ‘a glimpse of Europeans, their lives, their convictions and doubts, and their quest for identity’ (Luxprize 2010a). Since its inception, the EU prize has been awarded to Auf der anderen Seite/ The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin, Germany/Turkey/Italy) in 2007, The Silence of Lorna in 2008, Welcome, the French-Belgian film by Philippe Lioret in 2009, Feo Aladag’s Die Fremde/When we Leave (Germany) in 2010, Robert Gu´ediguian’s Les Neiges du Kilimandjaro/The Snows of Kilimanjaro (France) in 2011 and, in 2012, Andrea Serge’s Io Sono Li/Shun Li and the Poet (France/Italy). The films shortlisted cover social, cultural and political issues such as violence against women, incest, abortion, conflicts within families and close-knit communities, poverty, youth disenfranchisement, the hopes, delusions and exploitation of immigrants, neo-Nazi violence and the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal. Many of these films involve a variety of languages. To date, the selected films reflect Europe’s values (individual freedom, political liberty, freedom of expression and respect for human rights), and ‘air different views on some of the main social and political issues’ (Luxprize 2010a). By selecting these films, the panels of experts seem to have opted for a European cinema that seeks out the unofficial histories of the European nations, producing what Mike Wayne calls ‘an anti-national national cinema’ (2002: viii), verging at times on an anti-European European cinema. It is therefore

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3.1 Dreaming of crossing the English Channel in Welcome.

not surprising that a number of those films have attracted controversy, none more so than the 2009 LUX Prize winner Welcome. The film describes the unsuccessful attempt by a young Kurdish migrant to swim across the Channel. It was strongly criticized by, among others, council chiefs in Calais, who found that the MEPs’ choice of a film that made likeable an immigrant trying to side-step customs and security went against everything border patrols were trying to achieve. In Welcome, the lifeguard who teaches the young migrant to swim is charged and imprisoned for helping him. The French director defended his film on the grounds that its aim was to criticize a French law that makes it a crime to help illegal immigrants. He saw the EU award as ‘a sign of support for the values which the film defends: commitment, solidarity and open-mindedness’ (quoted in Sparks 2009). The following year, when she received the LUX Prize for When we Leave, a film about the attempt of a young Turkish mother to build a life outside the cultural norms of her community, which partly deals with honour killings, Feo Aladag also said her work was about ‘overcoming intolerance’ and described the Prize as ‘an essential bridge between national identities’ (Luxprize 2010b). The directors’ genuine concerns for and commitment to ‘a cinema of social conscience’ (Crowdus & Georgakas 2002: 197) in Europe are not in doubt but their public statements may well be used to reinforce the argument of those who believe their films are made to satisfy the criteria of Europe’s funds and/or ‘aim to address [their audience] as good Europeans’ (Halle 2002: 36). Nevertheless, given the present economic recession and the resurgence of nationalisms in Europe, the current trend in ‘humanistic 69

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filmmaking’ is to be celebrated and so is an EU prize which rewards films that are ‘critical, interrogative, challenging assumed priorities and social, cultural orders’ (Wayne 2002: 140).

Conclusion Far from bearing the stigma attached to the old European cinema (narcissist/ elitist), a large number of European co-productions supported by panEuropean programmes and/or awarded European prizes are essentially concerned with social and moral issues. As such, they constitute a major part of ‘a European cinema that shares a recognition of the importance of cinema in articulating complex issues of contemporary life and shaping our imaginative, emotional as well as intellectual understanding of these issues’ (Everett 2005a: 104). The concept of the European Union is based on collaboration and identity. In an enlarged and non-exclusive Europe, co-productions are, arguably, the most appropriate form through which to meditate on identity. By engaging with different cultures and finding new ways of dealing with differences that arise, they play a symbolic role in the creation of a new image of Europe. While this may not be enough to identify an emergent Europeanism as desired by European policy-makers, it certainly shows that filmmakers in Europe today take their role of setting creative and critical agendas seriously. That those films are partly a product of European funds designed to foster a certain idea of Europe and of European identity does not make them less significant in a world where identities are constantly reshaped and allegiances increasingly determined by networks accountable to no one. To the question ‘can cinema change the world?’ Luc Dardenne replied: You can try to change some pictures of the world. [. . . ] More than ever before, we nowadays look at the world through images that the media (television, magazines . . . ) present us. Perhaps cinema has the possibility to break through those images. Cinema can play the role of the iconoclast against all those media pictures which, in our perception, finally replace the real world. (Belgian DOC 2000: 3)

At the same time, given how much the current financial crisis and economic recession are affecting Europe’s image both from within and outside, the extent to which co-productions and/or award-winners may be successful in 70

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Note 1

‘Pan-European’ rather than ‘European’ is used to describe funds that include states outside the EU or beyond the generally accepted European borders (e.g. Turkey and Georgia).

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generating a feeling of ‘Europeanness’ and, as Wenders puts it, ‘improving the emotional deficit in the reception of Europe’ among Europeans remains to be seen.

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4 From European Co-Productions to the Euro-Pudding Mariana Liz

Despite being a relatively familiar phenomenon, co-productions between different European countries have been growing significantly in number since the 1990s, partly as a result of pan-European funding initiatives and partly as a trend within the globalization of film production. But while transnational cinema is increasingly an approved critical term signifying the loosening of ‘old-fashioned’ national boundaries, certain European co-productions are negatively branded ‘Euro-puddings’. There is no systematic study on the meaning of Euro-pudding; yet, this is a key concept in contemporary European cinema. This chapter pinpoints its meaning and connotations by considering the ways in which the term is employed by film critics and scholars within and outside Europe, and exploring its appropriation by audiences and filmmakers. First, it offers a historical overview of the Europudding, investigating how the expression has been used from the 1990s to today. Second, it focuses on three European films – L’Auberge espagnole/Pot Luck (C´edric Klapisch, France/Spain, 2002), Joyeux No¨el/Merry Christmas (Christian Carion, France/Germany/Belgium/UK/Romania, 2005) and Auf der anderen Seite/The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin, Germany/Turkey/Italy, 2007) – to examine the changes that have occurred in the use of the expression in recent years. Multilingual international co-productions, these are examples of popular (the first two) and art films (the third), successful to different degrees with audiences and critics. They highlight the ongoing 73

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association of Europe and its cinema with notions of quality and prestige, at the same time as, released in countries across the continent and beyond, they help to trace the continuing cinematic opposition between Europe and the USA. This chapter thus analyses not only the changes occurring in the use of the expression ‘Euro-pudding’, but also in the meaning of European cinema more generally.

The Euro-pudding Recipe In order to define the Euro-pudding and understand how it relates to coproductions, it is important to distinguish between the financial and creative aspects of such films. For Dimitris Eleftheriotis, Euro-pudding is ‘a term used to describe a co-production that is determined by the necessities of funding rather than the desire of the makers to work together’ (2001:12). As this chapter will demonstrate, the word Euro-pudding does not critique the need to attract funding from different sources (such as television channels) and nations per se; rather, the target of its disapproval is the artistic implications of such processes. As Angus Finney observes, ‘stories that have been deliberately designed to work in different countries have invariably failed’ (1996: 94). In opposition to those co-productions necessary to sustain the European film industry, the Euro-pudding becomes a perversion of the system, forcing filmmakers to alter their projects (for instance through the inclusion of location shoots, multiple languages or international stars) in order to maximize their chances of gaining access to state subsidies. The table overleaf lists a number of criteria for defining the Euro-pudding. It combines data from an article published in a British film journal (Fisher 1990) with a piece on transnational German cinema (Halle 2002), a chapter from a Spanish anthology on contemporary European film (Monterde 2007) and notes from a debate held during the 2009 NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies) conference in Sweden. These unconnected references are brought together in an attempt to consolidate the meaning of this term, but also to historicize it. The emergence of the Euro-pudding occurred after 1989, concurrent with the resurgence of co-productions in European cinema (Rivi 2007), but the expression is still widely used today. For William Fisher, the culinary term is appropriate, as this type of film follows a ‘recipe’ with set ingredients. As he argues, to create a Europudding, one should choose ‘a story that crosses the borders of two or more member states in the European Community’, adding ‘a writer and director

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Funding

Fisher 1990 Numerous application forms in English and French

Cast

Crew

Halle 2002

Monterde 2007 Co-production between different European countries; support from European institutions, e.g. the EU’s MEDIA programme

NECS 2009

International cast with the highest star quality available

From different European countries

Presence of international film stars to attract audiences

A writer and director from different EU member states

From different European countries

Language

Subject

Preferably historical subjects

Little hope for broad social or political resonance

Scope

A story that crosses the borders of two or more member states of the European Community

Films with ‘the lowest common denominator of cultured interest’; trans-European audiences

Shot in English

Use of English language as norm

Themes of supposed ‘supranational’ interest and appealing to a European audience

Stories of universal appeal; difficulties in locating the national

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Table 4.1 Defining the Euro-pudding

from those same member states, then gently solicit[ing] investment from their domestic television networks’ (1990: 224). In addition to sketching the main conditions for the production of such films, Fisher highlights the prominence of historical themes, citing as examples Vincent and Theo (Robert Altman, Netherlands/UK/France/Italy/Germany, 1990), a film portraying the life of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, and the bilingual (French and English) feature film La R´evolution franc¸aise/The French Revolution (Robert Enrico and Richard T. Heffron, France/Italy/West Germany/Canada/UK, 1989). Although Fisher further notes the Euro-pudding’s transnational scope, the narratives of the films he cites are strongly rooted in national contexts, 75

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especially in the case of The French Revolution. Hence, the cross-border appeal of the stories featured in such co-productions does not lie in their themes so much as in the way these are produced and subsequently presented, namely by using an international crew (including, in these two films, US filmmakers) and cast (Tim Roth, Jane Seymour and Claudia Cardinale, among others). History is also the subject of the Euro-puddings cited by Randall Halle: La Putain du roi/The King’s Whore (Axel Corti, UK/Austria/France/Italy, 1990), Homo Faber/Voyager (Volker Schl¨ondorff, France/Germany/Greece/UK, 1991) and Der Unhold/The Ogre (Volker Schl¨ondorff, France/Germany/UK, 1996) – a costume drama, a literary adaptation and a World War II film. The transnationality of the topics represented on screen is more obvious in the examples cited here, with their plots being based on battles between nations, international travel and cross-cultural encounters, and their narratives featuring prominently universal themes such as love and humanism. As in the examples offered by Fisher, these films cast a number of international stars, including Timothy Dalton, Valeria Golino, Julie Delpy and John Malkovich. The presence of stars is also noticeable in the films listed by Jos´e Enrique Monterde in his piece on the European film industry: The House of the Spirits (Bille August, Portugal/Germany/Denmark/USA, 1993), Der Name der Rose/The Name of the Rose ( Jean-Jacques Annaud, France/Italy/West Germany, 1986) and 1492 – Conquest of Paradise (Ridley Scott, France/Spain, 1992), which feature Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep, Sean Connery and Christian Slater, and G´erard Depardieu and Sigourney Weaver, respectively. The significant number of US actors in these examples raises questions about the relationship between the film industries of Europe and Hollywood – one at the root of the understanding of European cinema (Elsaesser 2005), also addressed below. Other films mentioned by Monterde show the term Euro-pudding is used to define films made more recently, including Goya’s Ghosts (Milos Forman, USA/Spain, 2006), Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Tom Tykwer, Germany/ France/Spain/USA, 2006) and Goodbye Bafana (Bille August, Germany/ France/Belgium/UK/Italy/South Africa, 2006). Monterde further raises the issue of language, claiming that Euro-puddings are generally spoken in English. Whereas co-productions of the 1950s were often shot in multilingual versions and then dubbed (Betz 2009), in the examples Monterde cites the English language predominates. It is also used by non-native speakers (such as Javier Bardem in Goya’s Ghosts), with implications for the perceived authenticity of the characters on screen. The fact that English is spoken by

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all actors regardless of their nationality was also put forward as a defining feature of the Euro-pudding at the 2009 NECS annual conference in Lund. During one of the discussions following the presentation of research papers, participants in the audience listed as the main features of this type of coproduction the inclusion of stories of universal appeal and the difficulty of locating the national character of the issues represented on screen, as well as the presence of international film stars. The key example discussed was The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, USA/UK, 1996), which features Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott Thomas and Juliette Binoche. Too loose to be seen as a genre in its own right, the Euro-pudding is defined through a number of significant criteria, including financing and cast and crew, as well as themes and language. But these sources also testify to different usages of the term. In Fisher’s article, entitled ‘Let them eat Europudding’, the expression is used to criticize the makers of such films for producing a second-rate cinema, as well as their audiences and the latter’s poor taste. A derogatory view is also expressed by Halle, for whom ‘the “Euro-pudding” arose as a term to denounce such productions whose good intentions so often yielded such bland results. Even if the films aspired to art film status, they appealed to the lowest common denominator of cultured interest with little hope for broad social or political resonance’ (2002: 28). Perhaps paradoxically, when one considers their inherently transnational character, European co-productions have promoted the development of smaller national cinemas ( J¨ackel 2003: 16), as well as films by key European directors (see Thomas Elsaesser’s discussion of Michael Haneke in this volume). But for these critics, only those co-productions that guarantee the survival of specific film industries or the career of European auteurs are given a positive value. In direct opposition to a cinema of alleged superiority, the Euro-pudding emerges as a synonym for a specific type of co-production (the ‘bad’ type). Additionally, discussions of the Euro-pudding phenomenon offer insight into the positioning of contemporary European cinema. Firstly, whereas ‘good’ European films are held up in opposition to the USA through the notion of quality, judging from the examples listed here, Euro-puddings are those co-productions that have ties with Hollywood, either through the adoption of stories of universal appeal or because of the stars featured. But Hollywood is also used as a simile when no actual links are established with the European films discussed. For Fisher, the Euro-pudding ‘is the Continent’s answer to the Hollywood package, where the finest art involved is the art of

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the deal’ (1990: 227). All co-productions involve business transactions, but the stress on the Euro-pudding’s financial aspects is here used to dismiss those films that, supposedly like those produced in Hollywood, are conceived as commodities rather than artistic expressions, in line with the traditional view of European cinema as art cinema. Secondly, the use of the term Euro-pudding invites reflection on the geo-political affiliations at play in Europe and its cinema. For Halle, Europuddings ‘sought a trans-European audience by relying on scripts that removed cultural considerations and avoided national conflicts’ (2002: 33). Such an erasure of national marks, replaced in Euro-puddings by amorphous representations of Europe, has led to a critical re-appraisal of indigenous depictions of regional cultures. However, while stressing European identity could also be seen as a departure from forced nationalisms, the authenticity of that identity is equally questioned. Monterde sees the Euro-pudding as a means of fabricating identities, claiming this is a process orchestrated by the EU, whose film policy is in turn dismissed. For him, Euro-puddings look ‘like a lab product, something to which the well-intentioned but nonetheless lethal initiatives from the MEDIA programme strongly contribute’ (2007: 114). In reality, MEDIA does not award funds for the production of films; this statement therefore illustrates a common prejudice against European institutions emerging in the work of film critics and scholars. So far, I have been considering the criteria used by critics and scholars to define Euro-puddings. The next section zooms in on three films (Pot Luck, Merry Christmas and The Edge of Heaven) to examine how this expression is used in the marketing, distribution and reception of recent European cinema. At the same time as it performs a temporal shift, moving my investigation from the 1990s to today, this section stresses the fact that in contemporary European cinema the term Euro-pudding is not exclusively used by critics and scholars, but has been appropriated by filmmakers and audiences. The consequences of this change are also analysed.

From the Euro-pudding That Wasn’t to ‘Natural Co-Productions’ Pot Luck tells the story of Xavier, a young student from Paris. After graduating, Xavier is interviewed for a job at the French Ministry of Finance. To increase his chances of being hired, he is advised to spend some time in Spain, to study the country’s economy. Offered a place on the Erasmus student exchange programme, he moves to Barcelona, where he finds 78

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a room in a shared flat with young people from Spain, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Denmark and the UK. Pot Luck stars actors from different European countries, including France (Romain Duris and Audrey Tautou), Spain (Cristina Brondo) and the UK (Kelly Reilly and Kevin Bishop). French, Spanish, English, German, Italian, Danish and Catalan are some of the languages spoken, as the film attempts to maintain an authentic feel in its depiction of the cultural encounters taking place between people from different backgrounds. In Pot Luck, language plays an important role in the exploration of stereotypes, at the same time as it highlights cultural clashes. When Xavier is on the phone to his girlfriend in France, his flatmates in Barcelona shout ‘Je t’aime, mon amour’, mimicking a French accent and gesturing towards the clich´ed view of French as the language of love. At the university, students ask one of their lecturers to speak ‘Spanish’ (Castilian) because they cannot understand Catalan, but he refuses, arguing for the defence of his regional identity. In a later scene in a caf´e, however, people from different nationalities discuss (significantly, in English) whether it makes sense to defend Catalonia’s independence, as well as regional identities more generally, at a time when the European integration process is well underway and moving forward. Although it alludes to regional and national identities, as an Erasmus film, Pot Luck’s main theme is in fact Europe. It is because of ‘new European directives’ that Xavier is encouraged to move to Spain. When he visits the ministry for his interview, we hear the European Broadcasting Union theme (Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s ‘Prelude to Te Deum’) – a song associated with Europe since it played over the credits of TV shows like Jeux sans fronti`eres and the Eurovision Song Contest. But despite being the main theme of the film, Europe is not always portrayed positively in Pot Luck. The enthusiasm Xavier’s potential employer in the ministry shows when describing European initiatives such as the Erasmus programme and the possibilities they afford contrasts sharply with Xavier’s own experience of the bureaucracy of European institutions, which he describes as an ‘unspeakable mess’. Equally, the film’s distribution and reception contexts testify to an ambivalent view of Europe. Pot Luck was almost given the international title of Euro-pudding at the suggestion of its director but, as noted by a critic, ‘the distributors worried that this might be construed as too negative’ (Brooks 2003). An internet search for ‘Euro-pudding’ in fact reveals that it is still one of the titles by which the film is known. This demonstrates

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4.1 Merry Christmas: French, German and Scottish soldiers play football on Christmas Day after a truce is declared at the trenches.

the popularity of the term, no longer exclusively confined to the realm of film criticism, but rather used by audiences and, self-reflexively, by film professionals. Reviewers attacked the film for its lack of authenticity, namely in relation to the portrayal of Barcelona (Ezra & S´anchez 2005), as well as the stereotypical depiction of national cultures and the rose-tinted, ‘postcardfriendly compositions’ of European unity (Walters 2003: 55). But Pot Luck, a co-production with an international cast and crew and a story of clear universal appeal, was not described as a Euro-pudding in any of these reviews. Merry Christmas is another film portraying the coming together of European nations that faced a similarly negative reception. It also illustrates and contributes to a reinvention of the term Euro-pudding, this time used by critics (and not film professionals and audiences as above), although with a different meaning from the one offered in the first half of this chapter. Merry Christmas tells the story of the 1914 Christmas Truce, which took place during World War I, when French, Scottish and German soldiers left their trenches to sing, eat and celebrate mass with their enemies. It is a French, German, Belgian, British and Romanian co-production, filmed in three different countries with actors from many different backgrounds, including stars Daniel Br¨uhl, Diane Kr¨uger, Guillaume Canet and Gary Lewis. Written and directed by French filmmaker Christian Carion, Merry Christmas is spoken in three languages (French, German and English). As with Pot Luck, its focus is clearly European; the memory it evokes is transnational, and so is the identity it helps to construct. 80

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The film depicts national clich´es such as French champagne and Scottish bagpipes, while signs on the trenches read ‘Rosbif Land’ and ‘Froggy Land’. In this sense, Merry Christmas illustrates Luisa Rivi’s argument about the persistence of the nation-state in co-productions, which for her is precisely what ‘shape[s] and sustain[s] such a supranational enterprise’ (2007: 3). While functioning as landmarks within the narrative and fulfilling the role of situating potential international audiences, the symbols mentioned above single out the nations represented individually but are then what constitute the basis for a truly transnational communication. The soldiers’ ‘Frenchness’, ‘Germanness’ or ‘Scottishness’ is what allows them to communicate with each other, as they identify in the ‘other’ familiar cultural traits. Only then do they realize they have much in common: pictures and stories about their wives and families, a desire for peace, music, sport and religion. Meanwhile, the insistence on the nonsensical nature of war, the underlying appeal for peace and the suggestion that all men are alike constitute the film’s humanitarian message. By replacing nationalism with humanism, Merry Christmas rewrites European history. Depicting the war not as a moment of conflict but as an opportunity for concord, the film legitimizes the European integration process, widely challenged in the year of the film’s release (2005) after the rejection of the EU’s constitution. Despite this, a reviewer in the French cinephile journal Positif criticizes Merry Christmas for turning the war into spectacle, describing the film as ‘a high-budget European co-production with no epic or artistic value whatsoever’, and concluding that it is ‘beautiful like a constitutional treaty’ (Thabourey 2005: 59). This reading echoes a common disapproval of the heritage genre, often dismissed by critics for ‘celebrat[ing] the past without investigating it’ (Vincendeau 2001: xx). But the ironic reference to the constitutional treaty suggests the EU is also being critiqued. Just as Monterde had suggested that fabricated identities are orchestrated by the EU, so is Merry Christmas disparaged for mirroring European integration. Overall, reviewers saw the film as ‘a bit of a Euro-pudding’ (Crook 2006: 57), pairing a derision of Europe with a negative view of its transnational cinema. The fact that the film is, for critics, a Euro-pudding only to a certain extent is meaningful, as it indicates that this is a dated term and that European co-productions (even ‘bad’ ones) have also changed. On the other hand, if Euro-puddings can be seen as the most American of European co-productions, an interesting comparison can be drawn between the

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critical reception of Merry Christmas and that of Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, USA/Germany, 2009). Also a war film, although this time set during World War II, for British critic Geoffrey Macnab, the latter: [i]s a film shot in Germany and made in many different languages: everyone speaks in their own tongue. Usually, this would be the surest route to Europudding flatulence. However, Tarantino makes a virtue of what must have appeared an enormous hindrance, moving lithely between languages and generating humour from cultural and linguistic differences between Brits, Germans, Yanks, Italians and the French. (2009)

Even though Inglourious Basterds shares with Merry Christmas a number of the main features of the Euro-pudding identified earlier (its historical theme and international cast and crew), the former is distinguished as a ‘good’ co-production thanks to its director, an internationally recognized auteur. There are also differences in the way European and US critics react to coproductions. Dismissed, as a Variety critic suggests, by ‘cynics’, the message conveyed by Merry Christmas was perceived in that publication as having ‘multiple resonances for the current world’ (Nesselson 2005: 32). Released in more than 20 countries around the globe, the film was particularly well received in the USA, where it grossed over a million dollars and was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe. For another critic writing in the same publication, Merry Christmas is an example of what he calls ‘natural co-productions’. Contemporary films that reinvent the format of Europuddings, these are defined as ‘genuine multinational stories told in multiple language with multiple subtitling’ (Kirschbaum 2005: 23). In addition to creating a new designation for co-productions, in an article appearing two years later, Variety notes the emergence of innovative Europuddings. For this publication, ‘a new generation of European filmmakers is creating a more organic flavour of Euro-pudding’ (supposedly in opposition to the films of the 1980s and 1990s, such as the ones listed in the first half of this chapter), and ‘making films that tackle the growing interconnectivity of European society’ ( Jaafar 2007). The Edge of Heaven, by Fatih Akin, offers a particularly relevant example of how these new co-productions relate to the ideas of Europe and European cinema. The film tells the story of three pairs of characters: Ali (a Turkish Gastarbeiter) and his son Nejat (a professor at Hamburg University); Yeter 82

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(a Turkish prostitute in Bremen) and her daughter Ayten (a member of a Turkish Communist resistance group); and Lotte (a student in Hamburg) and her mother Susanne (played by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s muse Hanna Schygulla). Stressing the family ties that connect its protagonists, The Edge of Heaven also speaks of transnational cultural interchanges. The German or Turkish identities of different spaces, characters and customs is emphasized through dialogue, for instance when Lotte shows Ayten ‘typical German food’. However, as in Merry Christmas, these differences are little more than pretexts for a celebration of the transnational. Depicting the lives of both Turkish migrants in Germany and German expatriates in Turkey, as well as a romance between a Turk and a German woman and several scenes of international travel, The Edge of Heaven attempts to draw out similarities between different cultures. For instance, Hamburg, initially presented as the university city where Nejat works, is structurally matched in the second half of the film by a bookshop that he visits and later buys in Istanbul. And just as Ayten finds refuge in the university when she travels to Hamburg looking for Yeter, so the characters travelling in the opposite direction find solace in the bookshop. The cosmopolitan centres of Hamburg and Istanbul are united by two institutions of high culture that are thus attributed a sense of universality. The film’s transnational outlook can also be read in relation to the European sphere. Europe often features thematically in Akin’s films and The Edge of Heaven is no exception, with characters discussing Turkey’s accession to the EU, which they dismiss as an imperialist organization. This criticism of the European integration process is in line with Akin’s own problematic relationship with Europe. Of Turkish descent, the director was born and has lived most of his life in Hamburg, and has been appropriated by promoters of both Turkish and German cinema, as well as often hailed as the most successful German-Turkish filmmaker – a label he has rejected vehemently (Elsaesser 2005: 498). In addition to being seen as a European filmmaker because of his presence at prestigious international festivals – The Edge of Heaven was in competition for the Palme d’Or and won the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes, while Akin’s previous film, Gegen die Wand/Head-On (German/Turkey, 2004), was awarded the FIPRESCI prize and the Golden Bear in Berlin – Akin is also one of the most studied ‘migrant’ directors (cf. Berghahn 2006; Berghahn & Sternberg 2010). Literature on migrant European cinema is also relevant for the study of the Euro-pudding. The following quotation provides a clear example of

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how the expression is used as a means of distinction in the face of ‘good’ and ‘serious’ transnational films. As Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg argue: [w]hile ‘Euro-Puddings’ and certain international co-productions downplay issues of national, ethnic and cultural identity in an attempt to capitalize on (a perhaps synthetic) Europeanness, migrant and diasporic cinema resists homogenizing tendencies and focuses on issues of identity and identity politics, making the experience of minority social groups and individuals its prime concern. (2010: 22)

Issues of national, ethnic and cultural identity are also present in the two previous films analysed. Pot Luck reflects on the role of language in establishing forms of identification, while Merry Christmas explores the importance of stereotypes in cultural exchanges, at the same time as it focuses on the soldiers as a minority group, punished for high treason at the end of the film. Significantly though, only The Edge of Heaven is praised as a good coproduction. Drawing on Mike Wayne’s concept of ‘anti-national national films’ (2002: 45), Anne J¨ackel has pointed out in her chapter in this collection how a number of films awarded the LUX prize can be seen as examples of an ‘antiEuropean European cinema’. This is also the case with The Edge of Heaven, a film praised by most critics for its social and political content, particularly its deconstruction of Europe. For Variety, The Edge of Heaven could be seen as a Euro-pudding, albeit an ‘organic’ (sophisticated, high quality) one. But rather than rehabilitating the term, the publication seems to use it because of its marketable nature – which is in line with Variety’s usual sensationalist tabloid slant. When considering the majority of scholarship on this topic, anti-European European films (precisely those like The Edge of Heaven) are attributed greater value than mainstream co-productions (Euro-puddings). This confirms the historical dismissal of popular European cinema and the idea of Europe more generally – especially by European critics, in a form of Euro-scepticism from within.

Conclusion Unlike traditional Euro-puddings, the co-productions analysed in the second half of this chapter cast actors from different backgrounds but, aiming to offer 84

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a faithful depiction of the cultures represented, these are European (not American) and each speaks his or her own language. By exploring the significance of the Euro-pudding, this chapter has highlighted some of the key issues involved in understanding the ‘transnational’ as an analytical tool. Significantly, the value scholars attribute to transnationality is directly linked to the understanding of Europe and its cinema. US publications tend to appreciate the universality of contemporary co-productions, but most European critics adopt a disparaging tone. Rather than being objective (and therefore neutral), the term Euro-pudding is used to express a value judgement, which provides another reason why it cannot function as a generic category. As European cinema is traditionally associated with art cinema, and many critics in Europe seem interested in preserving an ‘arty’ image of its cinema, popular co-productions are disparaged for falling outside the canon. In order to distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’ transnational films, the issue of quality arises in relation to these films’ context (for instance, the awards received, with the festivals of Cannes and Berlin emerging in direct contrast to the Oscars and the Golden Globes). Style is rarely mentioned in contemporary readings of the Euro-pudding (perhaps precisely because, as high value productions, these films could not be criticized in those terms); rather, the term almost always alludes to narrative themes, with Pot Luck and Merry Christmas being dismissed for depicting Europe and its history and The Edge of Heaven praised for deconstructing Europe’s ‘imperialist’ outlook. In all these examples, Europe could also be read as a synecdoche for the EU, which suggests that the European integration process is being equally critiqued. In addition to perpetuating the image of European cinema as art cinema, the (existence of the) label Euro-pudding thus highlights the existence of a selfdeprecating view of Europe on the part of European critics.

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5 Christianity and European Film Catherine Wheatley

‘The cinema has always been interested in God’ (Andr´e Bazin 1951)

Cultural historian Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights is one of several recently published works to examine relations between East and West through the artistic interchange of images and stories. In it, Warner argues that what Bruno Latour (2002) has called the ‘iconoclash’ between the two cultures reveals two important insights into how they understood one another. Firstly she states that Western art’s engagement with the Middle East was, in the 1400s and 1500s, primarily concerned with power and business, both financial and military. Secondly, she argues that during this period the Muslim religion did not present a defining distinction between East and West: ‘faith was not of paramount importance in invoking the other culture [. . . ] The mosque and the madrasa, as well as the church and the synagogue, come in later’ (2011: 174). Today, the relationship between the Middle East and the West is once more the dominant political issue of our time. Aside from dominating news media, since the attacks of 11 September 2001 it has served as a plot premise for a huge number of novels, television series and films.1 But while certain conflicts may have arisen from matters to do with power and business, the defining distinction between the cultures is nowadays very clearly one of faith and religion. The 9/11 attacks, and the resultant fear of terrorism, 87

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have placed religion at the centre of the West’s collective consciousness. Films as varied as Chris Morris’s contemporary British satire Four Lions (UK/ France, 2010), Michael Haneke’s opaque meditation on guilt, history and its consequences, Cach´e/Hidden (France/Italy/Germany/Austria, 2005) and Rachid Bouchareb’s historical study of Algerian resistance Hors la loi/Outside the Law (France/Algeria/Belgium/Tunisia/Italy, 2009) have examined – implicitly or explicitly – the psychology of religiously motivated terrorists.2 In tandem with the increase in cinematic representations of Muslims, recent years have seen a flourishing of scholarly work that – via a range of approaches – raises questions about Islam and cinema. Iranian and other Middle Eastern cinemas have emerged as popular subjects for critical consideration, while transnational directors such as the Franco-Algerian Bouchareb, Turkish-German Fatih Akin or Franco-Tunisian Abdellatif Kechiche have acquired fashionable status. Equally significant is the body of written work that has followed Jack Shaheen’s Reel Bad Arabs (published in 2001), and which is concerned with the representation of Islam in Western cinema.3 To a certain extent, Islam has become the latest in a long line of categories – women, the working classes, homosexuals, non-white people (including the ethnic category of Jews) – to be identified as groups defined, in Richard Dyer’s words, as ‘oppressed, marginal or subordinate’ (1988: 44), and thus the subject of work which exposes how Western media representations contribute to their oppression, marginalization or subordination. This chapter takes inspiration from Warner’s work in turning to a particular culture’s art forms as part of an attempt to understand something about its social and religious attitudes. But rather than rehashing arguments over the depiction of Islam in the Western media, I want here to look at the depiction of Christianity. For while Islam is consistently discussed as, to borrow Edward Said’s term, the Western world’s ‘Other’, there has been almost no discussion of what it is ‘other’ than. This is despite the fact that we are occupying a historical moment when issues of secularism and religion are being discussed with increasing fervour across Europe. In France, la¨ıcit´e – the legally-enforced segregation of private religious belief from the strictly agnostic sphere of public life – has in recent years given way to tensions and claims that secularity has become a ‘civil religion’ (Crumley 2010). Meanwhile, following the Conservative chair Baroness Sayeeda Hussain Warsi’s warnings of a culture

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of ‘militant secularism’ in February 2012, British politicians, clergymen, philosophers and cultural commentators are engaged in often bitter and nasty debates over the meanings of Christianity, atheism and secularism and their place within society. If we are living in a secular Europe, it is nonetheless a Christian secular Europe: one need only look to our public holidays (Easter, Christmas) to recognize that Christianity is the privileged faith in Western society and culture. As Dyer explains in his seminal study White: If Christianity as observance and belief has been in decline over the past halfcentury, its ways of thinking and feeling are none the less still constitutive of both European culture and consciousness and the colonies and ex-colonies (notably the USA) that it has spawned. Many of the fundamentals of all levels of Western culture – the forms of parenting, especially motherhood, and sex, the value of suffering, guilt, the shock of post-enlightenment materialism – come to us from Christianity, whether or not we know the Bible story or recognize the specific items of Christian iconography. (1997: 15)

Following Dyer’s work on race and whiteness, the present chapter therefore aims to make visible a norm of European cinematic culture that has long gone unarticulated. In what follows, I examine the place of Christianity in contemporary European cinema, asking what it can tell us about this cinema’s specific Europeanness vis-`a-vis North American film in particular. I also ask what the implications of cinematic allusions to Christian myth, narrative and iconography might be for contemporary European culture and identity more widely and, perhaps more significantly, what they might mean for us in terms of our responsibilities as critics and scholars.

Christianity and European Film: A Historical Overview The association between Christianity and European film is by no means new; indeed it begins with cinema’s very inventors. As early as 1898, only three years after the first public screening for a paying audience, Louis Lumi`ere directed (alongside George Hatot), La Vie et la passion de J´esus-Christ/The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ (France). According to S. Brent Plate (2008: viii), amongst others, Thomas Edison may also have produced a short film 89

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about the life of Christ during the same period. From this point onwards, we can divide much of European cinema’s historical engagement with Christianity into three traditions. The first category of films is that described by the Catholic writer Andr´e Bazin in his 1951 chapter ‘Cinema and Theology’. Bazin discusses film’s early engagement with the Bible, writing that: The Gospel and The Acts of the Apostles were the first best sellers on the screen, and the Passions of the Christ were hits in France as well as in America. At the same time in Italy, the Rome of the first Christians provided filmmakers with subjects that required gigantic crowd scenes, which were later seized upon by Hollywood and are still present today in films like Fabiola (Alessandro Blasetti, 1948) and Quo Vadis (Mervyn LeRoy, 1951). (Bazin 1997: 61)

Bazin condemns this ‘immense catechism-in-pictures’ – along with hagiographies and what he dubs ‘the priest’s or nun’s story’ – for their concern ‘with the most spectacular aspects of the history of Christianity [. . .] the exterior, the ornamental, liturgical, sacramental, hagiographic and miraculous’ (1997: 65).4 Nonetheless, this kind of religious filmmaking remained the dominant paradigm in cinematic representations of Christianity in Europe throughout most of the century. In addition, a second category of films emerged at a slightly later moment, as censorship laws pertaining to the depiction of religion loosened. These films reflect discontent and even fierce anger with Europe’s religious traditions and institutions (cf. Biltereyst 2010). European directors who have cast a sceptical eye on religious institutions include the Italian Pier Paolo Pasolini (La Ricotta, Italy/France, 1963); the Greek-born Costa-Gavras (Amen, France/Germany/Romania, 2002) and the Belgian Jean-Luc Godard ( Je vous salue, Marie/Hail Mary, France, 1985). The most prolific member of this group is the Spanish director Luis Bu˜nuel, whose films consistently present Christianity as a rigorous system abused by the powerful to subdue the masses. Bazin delineates one final category of films, the religious sense of which lies not in the implication of a priori ideas (‘not even the idea of God’), but in the implication of faith in God (1956: 64). Such films take a cinematic approach to the sacred that discloses not its surface appearance, but its inner strivings. Although Bazin only makes passing reference to him in this particular article, 90

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the quintessential filmmaker within this category is the French director Robert Bresson. While several of Bresson’s films make explicit or implicit reference to Christianity, it is not through the films’ narratives alone that Christian faith is evoked, but rather through their austere style – referred to by Paul Schrader as ‘the transcendental style’ (1972) and itself inspired by the Protestant filmmaking of Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer. These are not films about Christianity, but Christian films.

Contemporary European Cinema Up to the beginning of the twenty-first century, there were thus three dominant modes of European cinematic engagement with Christianity: the Christian narrative, the anti-Christian film and the Christian aesthetic. The theologically-inclined critics Bert Cardullo (2002), Brett Bowles (2004), and David Sterritt and Mikita Brottman (2005) are amongst several scholars who see at least some aspects of this tradition as continuing into contemporary European cinema, citing Bruno Dumont and the Dardenne brothers as examples of filmmakers whose work shows overlaps with Robert Bresson and thus suggests a shared worldview. Sterritt and Brottman, for example, place Dumont in a line of descent which begins with the theologian Blaise Pascal, arguing that the filmmaker’s work is concerned with relationships between ‘reason, emotion and divine’ and aims to ‘instil religion into our minds with reasoned arguments and into our hearts with grace’ (2005: 223). The difficulty with readings such as Sterritt and Brottman’s is that, in seeking to situate Dumont’s work in a vertical history of Christianity and film, they fail to take into account the horizontal context – socio-historical and cinematic – within which these films are being made. In fact the contemporary European auteur cinema of which Dumont’s is a part is replete with unresolved visual and narrative references to Christianity of varying degrees of explicitness. The title of Austrian director Michael Haneke’s Das Weiße Band/The White Ribbon (Germany/Austria/France/Italy, 2009), for example, is a reference to the band that children of the period just before World War I were forced to wear around their arms as a mark of their ‘sin’. Within the film itself, the man who forces it upon his children is a pastor. Haneke explains that he chose the northern German setting precisely ‘because of a particular form of Lutheran Protestantism that’s there’. While admitting 91

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that ‘here in Catholic Austria, there have also been terrible things done’, he draws connections between the Nazi psyche and this form of Protestantism, as well as the terrorist acts of the Baader Meinhof gang in the 1970s (Andrew 2009: 15). Haneke’s compatriot Ulrich Seidl, meanwhile, renounced a career as a priest to become a filmmaker, and explains the panoply of minute references to Catholicism in his films in terms of ‘a certain very basic Christian attitude [that has] stayed with me’ (quoted in Wheatley 2008: 47). Other directors allow the Christian allusions within their films to speak for themselves. Revanche (Austria, 2008), directed by another Austrian, G¨otz Spielmann, features a number of Christian characters who find solace in their beliefs, but biblical imagery resonates beyond this throughout the film: in the proliferation of apples offered, refused and accepted; in the recurring image of a crucifix, which appears both as a statue and a piece of jewellery around the necks of the two female leads; and most poignantly, perhaps, in the recurring questions of guilt, grief, responsibility and forgiveness that the film opens up onto. Mia Hansen-Løve’s Le P`ere de mes enfants/The Father of My Children (France/Germany, 2009), meanwhile, sees its central family of five (a father, mother and their three young daughters) visit not one but two Christian buildings. In the first, a Templar chapel, the father, Gr´egoire, explains the history of the Templars and the Crusades to his children, telling them that ‘[t]o go to heaven, the Templars wanted to capture the Holy Land. Back then the Holy Land was occupied by Muslims. But the Templars got their way: they created the Holy Land and seized control of commerce between the Middle East and Europe’. Later, during a family holiday, the group visits a church, where Gr´egoire chides his charges about running and giggling in the holy building, encouraging them instead to pay attention to the details of a fresco. In the softly lit sanctuary of the transept, the camera takes in the details of the painting: lilies, sheep, St. Peter, St. John and St. James, St. Apollinaire and the prophets Moses and Eli. Finally it comes to rest on a hand, which Gr´egoire tells them is ‘God. The Father. God the Father’. The girls light a candle before leaving. These two moments mark the extent of the film’s references to Christianity – surprising perhaps in a work that places suicide at its centre. Yet the care with which they are captured, the warmth with which the spaces are portrayed and the joy that the family expresses within them suggest that their inclusion is not haphazard. Catherine Breillat incorporates an unexpected vein of Christian imagery into her adaption of Charles Perrault’s Barbe-bleue/Bluebeard (France, 2009),

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CHRISTIANITY AND EUROPEAN FILM 5.1 The Father of My Children: during a family holiday Gr´egoire and the children contemplate a fresco of ‘God the Father’.

opening the film with an unprecedented prologue, set in a convent school. The film’s plot is set in motion when the sisters who will compete for Bluebeard’s affections are ejected from a convent after the loss of their father (and the income which pays their school fees). The depiction of the callous nuns here suggests a rather cynical view of the church, but subsequent references – visual evocations of Salome, John the Baptist and the Last Supper,

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as well as the centrality of eggs as a motif – complicate such a reading. The director herself makes reference to the myth of the Fall in her commentary on the film: ‘In the Torah’, she states, ‘Eve gives Adam the apple and gives him the opportunity to commit original sin. In my version of the story, Bluebeard is Eve, and Marie-Catherine is Adam’ (Wheatley 2010: 42). Christian imagery is unmistakably present within Revanche, The Father of My Children and Bluebeard, but crucially it resists interpretation: the references circulate, but do not resolve into a coherent picture. Such a resistance continues through other recent films which flirt with Christian myth and iconography, including Eug`ene Green’s existential drama A Religiosa Portuguesa/The Portuguese Nun (Portugal/France, 2009), Christian Alvart’s horror Antik¨orper/ Antibodies (Germany, 2006), Pascale Bailly’s rom-com Dieu est grand, je suis toute petite/God is Great and I’m Not (France, 2001) and Dumont’s quiet thriller Hors Satan/Outside Satan (France, 2011). There is no pattern to the surfacing of Christian myth and iconography in contemporary European cinema, nor are there any discernible trends in its use. And that is precisely the point that I want to make through this enumeration of examples: that to read these contemporary works – including those of Dumont – as films ‘about Christianity’ or even as ‘Christian films’, in the sense that we might speak of Bresson’s films, would be reductive at best, and at worst straight-forwardly wrong.

Ambiguous Perspectives What I hope the above survey has demonstrated is that it is difficult to read these films individually or collectively as a coherent or unified perspective on religion, faith and in particular on Christianity. So why, one might ask, do they merit attention? To answer that question, we must turn to the wider place of Christianity within Europe. Sociologists Peter Berger, Grace Davie and Effie Fokas delineate the contemporary state of religion in Europe with reference to survey data: Both Catholic and Protestant churches are in deep trouble in Europe. Attendance at services has declined sharply for many years, there is a shortage of clergy because of lagging recruitment, finances are in bad shape, and the churches have largely lost their former importance in public life. When people are asked about 94

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in their lives. (Berger et al 2008: 11)

In the book’s introductory chapter, Berger admits that there are differences within Europe but argues that, ‘it is fair to say that western and central Europe is the most secularized area in the world’, and this has become so much part of European culture that the term ‘Eurosecularity’ has been coined to describe it. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that the degree to which a country is integrated into Europe corresponds directly to the level of secularity determined amongst its government and inhabitants (Berger et al 2008: 12). He draws explicit comparisons with the situation in the USA, revealing that the North American picture differs sharply from the European one. Both behavioural and opinion indicators are much more robustly religious here. At least since the middle of the twentieth century, there has been what Berger refers to as an ‘American intelligentsia’, who are much more secular than the rest of the population. This intelligentsia is heavily associated with the Democrat party, whereas the Republican Party has a strong Christian bent. Between these two poles of devotion and secularity lie the majority of North Americans, who tend to profess what Nancy Ammerman, an American sociologist, has called ‘golden-rule Christianity’ – a somewhat vague and broadly tolerant form of religion – but who nonetheless have to ally themselves politically with one form of secularity or with one religion (Ammerman 2005: 3). If, in the USA, Christianity has come to be associated with the political right, the response of filmmakers has been to produce a politically-inflected body of work that reflects this state of affairs. Since the turn of the century there has been a surge in evangelical Christian filmmaking, ranging from big budget productions such as Mel Gibson’s notorious The Passion of the Christ (USA, 2004) and the Christian production company Walden Media’s cinematic adaptations of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series, to the grassroots melodramas directed by pastor Alex Kendrick, namely Flywheel (USA, 2003), Fireproof (USA, 2008) and Courageous (USA, 2011). At the same time independent documentaries such as Rachel Ewing’s Jesus Camp (USA, 2006) and Amy Berg and Frank Donner’s Deliver Us from Evil (USA, 2006) have castigated right-wing Catholic groups and evangelicals for their hypocrisy.

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their beliefs – such as in God, life after death, the role of Jesus Christ as redeemer – the scores are low both in comparison with the past and with other parts of the world. The same is the case when people are asked whether religion is important

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Interestingly, both the polarized, heavily politicized US films and the more ambiguous European ones may be understood as the products of religious pluralism. Throughout most of history, the majority of human beings have lived in communities characterized by a high degree of homogeneity in their beliefs and values. Modernity undermines such homogeneity: through migration and urbanization, by which people with very different beliefs and values are made to rub up against each other; through mass education and mass literacy, which opens up cognitive horizons unknown to most individuals in pre-modern societies; and through the modern media of mass communication. Modernity has had this effect for a long time, but it is being rapidly diffused and intensified by globalization. In both America and Europe, pluralism has had a powerful effect on religion. Institutionally, today both Catholic and Protestant churches (in addition to other faiths) must operate as voluntary associations. That is, religious institutions must now recognize the right of other competing institutions, including Islam, to exist. The loss of taken-for-granted status in the consciousness of individuals means they are forced to make choices – that is, to exercise their ‘religious preference’. As Berger underlines, very significantly, ‘on the level of consciousness, this means that religion [. . . ] becomes the object of reflection and decision’ (Berger et al 2008: 13). However, according to Berger, there is a vital difference between European and American responses to religious pluralism. Europeans tend to experiment across a variety of religions and denominations, while Americans, with their deep cultural propensity to form associations, are more likely to experiment within a given religious organization (Berger et al 2008: 15). The increasing pluralism of European cinema’s religious imagery – by which I mean, of course, the growing visual prominence of an Islamic ‘Other’ and the ubiquity of the Middle East and Islam in our various media forms – seems to have had a parallel effect on its filmmakers, prompting a return to, and questioning of, the self. A return to Christianity is implicit within this. But while North American cinema looks at specific iterations of Christianity, European auteurs, as we have seen, ‘do their tinkering in an unorganized manner’. It is therefore the very ambiguity of Christian myth, narrative and iconography in the films described above that situates them as contemporary European film works. The lack of a system, of an ability to be coherently read, is evocative of their Europeanness at this moment in time. They are characterized by curiosity, but not by conviction.

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Church–state relations and pluralist competition are just two of the explanations that have been offered for the difference between the place of religion in the USA and in Europe. Despite their centrality to my argument, it should be noted that one of Berger, Davie and Fokas’s key aims in their book is to problematize the centrality of these factors in accounts of contemporary religion, and to delineate the longer list of factors that should be taken into account. While this list is too lengthy to examine in its entirety here, there are two factors in particular I would like draw attention to in my conclusion to this chapter. The first of these factors stems from the eighteenth century, when two different versions of the Enlightenment developed in Europe and America. In France, for example, the Enlightenment was sharply anti-clerical, in parts openly anti-Christian. The authors and politicians of the American Enlightenment were not, on the other hand, anti-clerical – far from it. Their version of enlightenment expressed a ‘politics of liberty’, in contrast to the French ‘ideology of reason’ (Berger et al 2008: 18). These varying versions of the Enlightenment lead us on to the second factor, which has to do with the forms that the intelligentsia of the two continents takes: secularizing in Europe, not so in the USA. Since intellectuals define what is and what is not ‘high culture’, European intellectuals have created a strongly secular high culture. Thus in Europe being modern has come to mean being secular. This has not historically been the case in the USA (Berger et al 2008: 19). In both the American and European contexts, therefore, the study of religion must involve reflection upon its intelligentsia and cultural elites. More precisely, as Grace Davie puts it, we ‘must look carefully at the ways in which these sections of society (the opinion-formers) respond, or fail to respond, to religious issues’ (Berger et al 2008: 56). In the context of film studies, this means looking to how we as scholars tackle questions of religion. To date, few film theorists or historians have made any sustained attempt at engaging with questions of Christianity and cinema. This is not to say that film theory and criticism avoids the subject entirely, of course: rather that Christianity tends to be posited as a subordinate feature or category in the study of other areas of interest. In colonial and post-colonial approaches to film, Christianity more often than not becomes synonymous with Western

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A Final Note on the Critic’s Role

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imperialism. In studies of (trans)national cinema it can be an implicit feature of the national psyche, and in auteur theory a facet of the director’s self-expression. For feminist critics, Christianity is another feature of the patriarchal society; for Marxists, it is configured as one of many various conservative, right-wing forces – the Church being, in Althusser’s terms, an ideological state apparatus. Christianity is thus present in almost all areas of cinematic criticism, yet it remains un-emphasized. It has been my contention in this chapter that semantic and symbolic elements of Christianity can be found in contemporary European films, and my hope is that this increase in representation will find its reflection in a more thorough-going engagement with Christianity from film studies scholars. But I have also stated that such imagery is not deployed to clear ends. These films incorporate Christianity; they do not appropriate it. Just so, it is the task of critics and scholars to take a similar approach: avoiding the use of Christian iconography, style or stories in service of a ‘reading’, but nevertheless recognizing its presence. There is much work still to be done on the myriad ways in which our Christian history has shaped European cinema’s stories, its visual codes and representational strategies. It is important, too, to move beyond the Euro-American focus of this chapter to look at how Christianity has shaped films and filmmaking from areas such as Latin America, Russia, Africa and India. But before doing so we must look closer to home; to recognize how Christianity structures our own ways of thinking and writing about film, and to think about ourselves as rigorously as we think about others.

Notes 1

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To name them all would be a Sisyphean task, but one might think, for example, of Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamish Hamilton,2007), the television series 24 (Fox, 2001-2010) or Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (USA/ UK/France, 2006). For a broad discussion of post 9/11 art see: http://www. bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14682741 (accessed 1 May 2013). It is worth noting that in all three of these films, the ‘other’ is visually marked as non-white (and sonically by a difference in accent). But this is not always the case: ‘Muslim-ness’ and ‘Christian-ness’ are not necessarily visual terms in the same way that ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ are. Amongst other works, this list includes: Martin Barker’s A ‘Toxic Genre’: The Iraq War Films; Stephen Prince’s Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism;

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Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America and Shaheen’s own Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs after 9/11. Amongst the European films that Bazin mentions here are Golgotha ( Julien Duvivier, France, 1935), Monsieur Vincent (Maurice Cloche, France, 1947), Heaven over the Marshes (Augusto Genina, Italy, 1949), My Priest among the Rich (Henri Diamant-Berger, France, 1952) and Clochemerle (Pierre Chenal, France, 1947).

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6 The Feather Collectors : Erased Identity and Invisible Representations of the Roma in Yugoslav Cinema Greg De Cuir Jr.

In an chapter entitled ‘Europe Invents the Gypsies’, scholar Klaus-Michael Bogdal asks: ‘Might not the history of the Roma, a group marginalized like none other, reveal a less auspicious aspect of Europe’s grand narrative of modernity?’ (2012). In this chapter I am concerned with socialist Yugoslavia’s grand narrative of modernity, and in particular with how Yugoslavia has invented (or imagined) the Roma on film. Yugoslavia is an interesting case study because when it existed it functioned as a not-quite-European ‘other’ within the continent, perched between East and West. Not coincidentally, Yugoslav (and post-Yugoslav) cinema is something of an unknown quantity, an ‘other’ within the realm of European film history. In this chapter, special attention will be paid to Skupljaˇci perja/The Feather Collectors1 (Aleksandar Petrovi´c, Yugoslavia, 1967), one of the most significant works of what was called the Yugoslav ‘Black Wave’. Petrovi´c was something of an ambassador for Yugoslav cinema, with his films playing at the largest international festivals in Europe and also being nominated for the Academy Awards in Hollywood. Having won the Grand Jury Prize and a FIPRESCI award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1967, The Feather Collectors stands as one of the more noteworthy 101

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films in the modern history of European screen representations of the Roma – indeed, it was the first film to depict a Roma point of view with Roma actors speaking their own language. As such, Petrovi´c’s film is of consequence in considering the treatment of Roma as marginalized ethnic ‘others’ and the resulting implications for Europe’s grand narrative.

Feathers and Linen Petrovi´c is particularly interesting as an example of a transnational European director. He was born in Paris in 1929 and began his studies in film directing in 1947 at the newly formed FAMU (Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts) in Prague. In the context of Eastern European cinema, he serves as a historiographical bookend of sorts: he initiated the era of Yugoslav New Film, with his 1961 production Dvoje/The Couple (Yugoslavia) and concluded the brief life of the Black Wave in the early 1970s, to a certain degree because of his controversial film adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Majstor i Margarita/The Master and Margarita (Yugoslavia/Italy, 1972). The Feather Collectors tells the story of ‘Beli’ Bora (played by Bekim Fehmiu). Bora is a gypsy (more appropriately, Roma)2 who lives in the small town of Sombor (Serbia) and survives by buying and selling goose feathers. It is a film about the everyday lives of Romani people. It is commonly thought that in the history of Yugoslav cinema, perhaps even in European cinema as a whole, a complex and accurate picture of the Roma appears for the first time in The Feather Collectors. While it is true that this is the first film to make extensive use of the Roma language, as well as the first film shot on location in a Roma ghetto with a large number of actual Roma as actors, The Feather Collectors follows a line of earlier Yugoslav films depicting the Roma lifestyle, such as Jatagan mala/Jatagan Slums (Duˇsan Makavejev, Yugoslavia, 1953), an early amateur film shot in a Roma ghetto in Belgrade, Ciganka/Gypsy Girl (Vojislav Nanovi´c, Yugoslavia, 1953), a nineteenth-century melodrama set in a small town in Serbia, and Hanka (Slavko Vorkapi´c, Yugoslavia, 1955), a nineteenth-century melodrama set in a small town in Bosnia Herzegovina. However, The Feather Collectors can be seen as one of the first modern urban depictions of gypsy life. The Roma have traditionally existed as an ethnic other in Europe (and in other parts of the world), as well as an ‘invisible other’. They are invisible in

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6.1 The rural squalor of Sombor in The Feather Collectors.

6.2 A young Roma girl in Belgrade ‘can either walk the streets or clean them’. 103

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the sense that mainstream society often does not wish to engage with them and because the Roma themselves often actively resist facile categorization and classification. For Bogdal, indeed, they ‘have left almost no historical accounts of themselves’ (2012). This early hesitancy to define their own history and propagate their own information is one of the reasons why their identity can be erased so easily. Such resistance towards an autobiographical tendency means that representations of the Roma have largely emanated from those who encounter them as others (those same people who would also dominate and marginalize them). In the contemporary era of European cinema, there are now Roma film directors who record their own stories, such as the French-Algerian filmmaker Tony Gatlif or the Serbian artist Zoran Tairovi´c. In this chapter, however, the focus will be limited to those imaginative depictions of the Roma offered by outsiders, with which the Roma have had to contend over the years in their struggle for representation. Bogdal notes that ‘[t]he extraneous cultural depictions of the Roma [. . . ] have created heterogeneous units of “erased” identity and cultural attributes’ (2012). The Roma, like many ethnic others, offer a tabula rasa on to which presumptions can be inscribed by those who would engage myth rather than reality when encountering them. This mythical fantasy usually takes the form of the ‘beautiful gypsy’, which is among the most potent (and destructive) images in the European cultural imagination and which has origins in Aleksandr Pushkin’s influential narrative poem of 1827 The Gypsies. The poem influenced Prosper M´erim´ee to write the novella Carmen, published in 1845, about his encounter with a beautiful gypsy woman of the same name, and which was adapted by Georges Bizet as the opera Carmen. These artistic images paved the way for a litany of supporting characters in films and books that tend to adhere to stereotypical notions of the Roma. In The Feather Collectors, Petrovi´c rejects the characterization of the mythic beautiful gypsy and instead presents a vision of this particular ethnic other as one who lives an unromantic reality amidst the brutal nature of European modernity. He depicts the Roma as ‘those who were not there from the beginning, who were not expected and who therefore had to disappear again’ (Bogdal 2012). Petrovi´c’s deployment of the visual and narrative trope of disappearance expresses the blind spots of Yugoslav self-managing socialism and the place of the Roma within it. Yugoslavia’s grand narrative of modernity was written by President Josip Broz Tito and his legislators, and was based on the widespread idea of ‘unity

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and brotherhood’. This was the defining theme of the new socialist republic after World War II, the basis of which was used to equalize men and confirm their belief in an ideal higher than personal or national interests: communism. However, this theoretical brotherhood was not extended in practice to all men. The Roma remained invisible in this new socialist order and continued to suffer from discrimination. ‘There are only two things you can do with a gypsy,’ says a policeman in The Feather Collectors, ‘either drink with them or throw them in jail.’ Of course, Europe needs the Roma. As Anik´o Imre writes in her chapter ‘Screen Gypsies’, ‘[t]he nation itself relies on gypsies as the symbolic representatives of the “other”, the embodiment of difference’ (2003: 17). In this sense, the erasure of gypsy identity acts as a siphon and can be measured in inverse proportion to the inflation of nationalistic suppositions. In other words, nationalism thrives by suppressing or even robbing the identities of others. Imre’s project aims to ‘interpret gypsy images as metaphorical screens themselves, on to which the East Central European nation projects its own repudiated or idealized images’ (2003: 16). Here, gypsies are like vessels waiting to be filled. Screens are often blank, so they serve as a useful metaphor for theorizing the cinematic gypsy. It is important to note that Imre has offered the notion of screen gypsies with a double meaning. The phrase itself is related to a Hungarian coinage by Erzs´ebet Bori that can be translated as ‘linen gypsies’ or ‘gypsies of a certain class or economic standing, who could afford to wear linen’ (Imre 2003: 15). In Hungarian the word ‘linen’ can also signify ‘screen’. The Romani character ‘Beli’ Bora in the film The Feather Collectors would at first glance appear to be one of these linen gypsies. He trades goose feathers for a living and derives his nickname ‘Beli’ (or ‘white’ in Serbian) from the fact that he is always seen in a white linen suit. This whiteness takes on an ironic charge when viewed in the context of the ‘white’ mainstream society that the Roma must navigate and define themselves in relation to, and specifically since linen gypsies dress themselves up in order to transcend their class and ethnic boundaries. In fact, Bora lives in poverty with his wife and a house full of children. He is no linen gypsy, though the film suggests he would like to project the image of being one, with his gold rings and valuable Swiss watch. Despite these lavish accoutrements, which the disenfranchised often use to be noticed and render themselves consequential, Bora remains an invisible man in the context of the film. Despite his clean white linens, he remains a ‘dirty gypsy’, as he is called

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by the young gypsy girl Tisa (played by the actual gypsy Gordana Jovanovi´c, who in turn is called ‘dirty’ by Bora in a sarcastic counter-attack). This white linen suit symbolizes the erased identity of the Roma. It is an opaque screen into which it is implied that Bora would wish to subsume himself. Bora projects numerous identities onto this screen throughout the course of the film: commodities trader, husband, father, lover and criminal. The white suit is therefore not just a screen, but also a mask. As the philosopher Vil´em Flusser argues, ‘[c]ulture and civilisation are a masquerade, a danse macabre . . . there is no one who lays on a mask to identify himself but rather, . . . these masks secrete those wearing them’ (2002: 174). In this sense, Bora’s white suit transmits a programme that he is ultimately not the author of, while the film visualizes this danse macabre of civilization. In other words, the white suit, or white screen, broadcasts meanings determined by societal factors. Flusser elaborates on ethnic identity as a relation of the gaze. On being Jewish, he states: ‘I am only what I am by this function of another gazing at me’ (cited in Finger et al 2011: xxv). He calls this particular interdependence ‘intersubjectivity’, arguing that we define each other, rather than defining ourselves. This is a ruinous situation when considering the empty stares directed at the Roma and which render them invisible. Flusser feels that ‘we can experience ourselves as embedded in a concrete relationship, as the Other of an Other’ (in Finger et al 2011: 73). For Flusser, the lot of man is to exist as an eternal other or eternally other within an inescapable concrete barrier. This also ultimately means that we are responsible for each other, bound together in an ethical relationship.

Invisible Aesthetics For Imre, screen gypsies ‘live in picturesque and photogenic poverty, and survive on the surface of ice’ (2003: 16). The glacial metaphor has another meaning in the original Hungarian, where the expression refers to people who make do with very little. The danse macabre that the Roma enact is staged on a brittle surface. The Feather Collectors evades the photogenic and the picturesque, as it is not over aestheticized, often presenting itself in a restrained form of documentary realism. Petrovi´c’s film is shot on location in the small towns and villages in which it takes place. Visualizing these locations unmasks the real poverty that small-town Roma endure, with its layers of mud, piles 106

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of detritus and overcrowded homes. The Feather Collectors is a dirty film (with regards to setting) and Bora’s white linen suit becomes increasingly soiled as the film progresses. In this sense the screen is coated, tangibly (if messily), with a more accurate depiction of Roma than can be seen in films that precede it. The real locations on display in the film meanwhile offer authentic visions of local Roma citizens. The Feather Collectors is populated by a chorus of diverse faces that together weave the fabric of Roma identity. Nevena Dakovi´c has proposed that the film ‘should also be seen as a documentary with rich ethnological dimensions and implications’ (2003: 106). This nonfiction aesthetic culminates in the closing sequence, which approaches a documentary mode of expression through a montage of direct to-camera addresses featuring a m´elange of professional actors and real Roma. This collective public body testifies to the disappearance of Bora; in effect, the Roma erase his identity from their town just as Petrovi´c erases him from the body of the film. As Bogdal states, regarding the European cultural imagination in relation to the Roma, ‘[t]he narrative arc of their lives generally ends prematurely: either they die at the hands of their jealous lover or they wither and fade in the civilisation that they experience as captivity’ (2012). As will be illustrated shortly, this fading away characterizes the conclusion of the film. If screen gypsies ‘survive on the surface of ice’, in The Feather Collectors they also die on that same ice. When Bora kills the rival gypsy dealer Mirta ˇ (played by Bata Zivojinovi´ c, a popular Serbian actor), he drags his body out on a frozen lake and tries to submerge him in a hole. This scene has religious significance, as it relates to the opening of the film, which quotes the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 8, Verses 32 and 33 on the devils inside man being ejected into a lake and perishing. The icy lake is a burial site in both of these instances. The Feather Collectors is a film steeped in sacred iconography and themes – though at the same time, it is very critical of institutionalized religion.3 Perhaps this critique ties into the Christian roots of a dominant European identity that must be countered by the Roma (see Catherine Wheatley’s chapter in this volume). In Vlastimir Sudar’s doctoral dissertation on Aleksandar Petrovi´c, entitled A Portrait of the Artist as a Political Dissident, his chapter on The Feather Collectors contains the sub-heading ‘Petrovi´c Focuses on the “Invisible”’ (2007: 121). In concurrence with this designation, an opportunity arises to read the

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Roma through the prism of the African-American experience, particularly as recounted in Ralph Ellison’s book Invisible Man (1952). Sudar quotes from Petrovi´c’s autobiography on the occasion of his first visit to Los Angeles, where he emphasizes his shock at seeing the ghettos where African-Americans lived, but also how they remind him of the gypsy ghettos in Yugoslavia (2007: 124). Roma can be seen as part of the ‘Black European’ experience – a European minority, as they are categorized by the European Parliament. In Imre’s numerous chapters on Roma hip-hop and other forms of popular music, she outlines how Roma appropriate the signifiers of hip-hop culture, as well as celebrate a ghetto existence, to express solidarity with black Americans. Imre cites the song ‘Watch Out’ by L.L. Junior, whose lyrics contain the following: ‘The Gypsies are the blacks of Europe, they will rule the district!’ (2006: 668). Although Europe counts many actual blacks from Africa among its residents, with social problems not unlike those faced by the Roma (or indeed by black Americans), the metaphorical point of the lyric sustains itself, though perhaps gypsies are mistreated more than blacks, because they are even less visible. However, the rule that L.L. Junior speaks of is merely a cultural one, mitigated by an underlying impotence. No-one wants to imagine themselves as Roma (whether they rap or not, and regardless of the stereotypical sexually alluring Roma woman who populates European male-driven narrative fantasies), unlike the case of black Americans, who normally exist as fetishized objects in matters of global entertainment. Gypsy cultural rule through hip-hop is a soft power – worse still, an invisible one, and perhaps inherently ineffectual. In the prologue to Invisible Man, Ellison writes that ‘[w]hen they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything and anything except me’ (1952). This hampered vision is symbolized in the opening images of The Feather Collectors, which fail to offer a coherent picture of Bora, instead presenting his point-of-view from the back seat of a taxi. Bora’s surroundings are emphasized along with his disembodied voice, rendering him an invisible man from the outset. In this opening sequence he is frequently framed within mirrors – both the rearview and side mirrors of the taxi. This evokes the idea that people actually see themselves when looking at invisible Roma. Framing Bora in these mirrors also shifts the point of view to that of the taxi driver, which then stands for the imaginary gaze that the dominant European community would fasten on Bora, or a mirroring gaze in which a strange fragmentary reflection confronts this dominant view.

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Ellison writes that ‘[i]nvisibility [. . . ] gives one a slightly different sense of time’. On the subject of music he states that ‘[i]nstead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around’. For Ellison then, it would seem that invisible beings have the ability to sense and see – even touch – invisible rhythms. Like Africans, the Roma have traditionally been linked with an innate musical talent, which adds to their romanticized personality. Music plays a key role in The Feather Collectors, in particular during a scene when time (embodied by the flow of music) becomes palpable and collides with the gypsies. Lenˇce (Serbian actress Olivera Vuˇco)4 , a beautiful gypsy singer and an object of desire for all who set eyes on her, performs Djelem, djelem as the emotional theme song of the film during a wild scene of hedonistic pleasures. Djelem, djelem, which translates from the Roma language as ‘travelling’, is a song that with time has come to signify the Roma en masse – even being adopted as the official Roma anthem at the First World Romani Congress in London in 1971. The lyrics detail travelling over long roads and encountering both fortunate and unfortunate Roma. The song also encourages Roma to stand up and strive for success in this hostile world. The people listening in the bar scene seem to be acutely attuned to the melancholy notes of the music, their lascivious mood climaxing as the song does and when they begin to break numerous glasses and bottles. Carried away by the searing passion of the music, they also begin inflicting physical pain on themselves – one man repeatedly slams his head into a table. This heightened emotional state and these destructive actions set to music are an arcane cultural specificity in the Balkans that some have labelled ‘sevdah’, which has its origins in the Turkish word ‘sevda’, meaning ‘love’. The name specifically describes a traditional genre of Bosnian folk music marked by the passion and melancholy it exhibits and provokes. The Turkish word ‘sevda’ itself is derived from the Arabic word ‘sawda’, which means ‘black’ or ‘black bile’ – a substance that doctors in earlier times used to control human feelings and emotions. Sevdah music in the modern Balkan context is intended to have the opposite effect, to heighten human feelings and emotions. The result is an almost trance-like state where physical harm is either not felt or ignored, becoming solid evidence of the transformative power of the music. In The Feather Collectors, the Roma take part in this ritual tradition as a way to rebel against the hopelessness of the life in which they are mired, to strike out at the depression they feel, a depression reflected in the sevdah music.

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Bora, possessed by the music, cracks two glasses in half and then slams his open hands into their jagged edges, cutting himself deeply on the palms as a result. His particular act of self-mutilation has further religious connotations. When Bora holds his bloody hands up in the air triumphantly, the spectator is prompted to recall the crucifixion, in which Jesus had his hands punctured by nails. Or perhaps we are invited to believe that, at this moment, Bora and his fellow revellers are possessed by the devils that are spoken of in the Gospel of Luke. If so, this moment exemplifies the danse macabre mentioned above. Here, Bora is linked with the visceral sensations around him, including temporal ones. He does not slip into the breaks in the music but instead creates those very literal breaks himself and lands right on them – in effect, suturing himself into the music.5 As Ellison writes, ‘I not only entered the music but descended, like Dante, into its depths’ (1952). These depths are commonly plumbed in sevdah music, as a Bakhtinian chronotope6 is created and one is made ‘aware of the nodes’. Ellison invests the invisible man with this otherworldly power and ability, the ability to hear ‘not only in time but in space as well’ (1952). The character Mirta also becomes literally invisible at various points in the film, camouflaged by the white feathers he trades. The first time we see him, he is buried in a huge pile of feathers with only his face and hands visible. This surreal image links him with his line of work in a grotesque manner. Mirta exits the narrative the same way in which he entered it. After a knife fight with Bora in which he is fatally stabbed, he slowly sinks into his huge pile of feathers, until they swallow him up completely. This disappearance as his life is extinguished represents a Dante-esque descent into an infernal depth, the likes of which Ellison described. ‘Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility;’ writes Ellison, ‘any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?’ (1952). Here, invisibility is associated with criminality or a general lack of morality. Certainly the Roma are coded as criminal outcasts, but the question remains: to whom can they (or should they) be responsible? This question depends on whose rules they must abide by, when the dominant order is built to exclude them from societal norms. In The Feather Collectors, many of the Roma live outside the law. They run illegal gambling houses, they deal in stolen furniture and antiques, they assault others with deadly weapons and in Bora’s case they resort to murder. As George,

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one of the gypsy dealers, states when confronted by ‘upstanding’ members of the socialist order, who want to buy his ill-gotten goods: ‘Crooked gypsy, crooked communist, what’s the difference?’ If the gypsies live an imperfect lifestyle, it is because the balance of society is uneven. The conclusion of the film depicts Bora erasing himself from existence because of his irresponsibility and culpability as a murderer. While watching television with his family he quietly gets up without a word, grabs his hat and coat and slips out into the night. No one seems to notice him go – either that, or they refuse to see him. Bora renders himself invisible, to materialize at another place and time. This moment also speaks to the nomadic nature of the Roma as they have been stereotyped. However, as past events in France have shown, they often suffer forced migration. The nomadic lifestyle of the Roma is self-effacing. As Pushkin wrote in The Gypsies: ‘In the first rays of the morning, your free traces will be quite lost’. Bora’s disappearance (or flight) serves as a metaphor for the lot of the Roma in European society. During that early morning when the police search for Bora’s traces throughout the Sombor ghetto, his fellow citizens refuse to acknowledge his presence or reveal his location. This final sequence is constructed as a documentary-style d´ecoupage of real gypsies, something of an ethnographic portrait, but one that literally refuses to speak meaningful content. Bora’s wife says he disappeared – directly before she curses the police for always harassing her people. Local children say he has been gone for a long time. Tisa says she does not want to see him. After this fruitless investigation into Bora’s whereabouts, Petrovi´c cuts to another series of empty and disjointed shots of wandering roads leading nowhere. These images mirror the opening of the film, bringing it full circle. Now the weather is bleak and the images are misty, streaked by rain and fog. This blurry, imperfect vision may be read as a directorial statement about the cultural and ethnic identity of the Roma and their representation as part of the grand narrative of Yugoslav and European modernity.

Conclusion Due to various controversies and accusations about crime and sordid living conditions, in the summer of 2010 the French government began deporting some 700 Roma from within their borders to Romania and Bulgaria. These destination countries were once ‘transitional’ (read: post-socialist/developing) 111

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member states of the EU, as are other Balkan nations, including ex-Yugoslav republics. This followed the similar deportations of more than 11,000 Roma in 2009 and more than 8,000 in 2008 – actions that have been decried by critics within and outside France.7 It seems all too convenient that Romania and Bulgaria are used as Balkan dumping grounds for the Roma, when considering the region’s status as ‘other’ to the EU. It would be worthwhile to consider the implications of this banishment and the perceived danger of the Roma – and for that matter, all the citizens of the Balkans – as they render themselves visible, in effect claiming their Europeanness in the face of a society that would like to consider them anything but.

Notes 1

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The film was released internationally under the title I Even Met Happy Gypsies, a reference to the lyrics in its theme song. I have opted for a more literal translation of the title in my discussion of the film because I feel it to be more accurately descriptive. It should be noted that this international title carries an ironic undercurrent, speaking to the social situation of gypsies worldwide and the fact that it may be difficult for them to achieve a pleasant or satisfactory existence. ‘Gypsy’ was originally a derogatory term that derived from an early European belief that the Roma were from Egypt because of their dark-skinned features. The term still carries derogatory connotations, even though many Roma freely label themselves as such. Roma originated from the Indian subcontinent, before emigrating in the eleventh century. They are widely-dispersed around the world today, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. Religion was tolerated, but not favoured in socialist Yugoslavia. Socialist dogma is typically critical of religion, if not outright hostile to it. None of the principal roles in this film are performed by actual Roma. However, as an actor of Albanian origin, Bekim Fehmiu as Bora stands in well for the idea of an ethnic other. Albanians were an ethnic minority in Yugoslavia and often treated as outsiders. A musical ‘break’ is known as a section in a song (typically at the halfway point) that deviates from the structured pattern, usually riffing on the main rhythm and melody in an oblique manner. ‘Breaks’ are important passages in African-American culture, as these are preferred moments when people lose themselves in the emotional charge of the music.

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7

The notion of the ‘chronotope’ as developed by Mikhail Bakhtin is an ‘intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’ (1981: 84). See http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2010/0901/ France-and-its-deportation-of-Roma-Gypsies-echoes-of-the-US (accessed 20 November 2010).

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7 The Trouble with Stars: Vernacular versus Global Stardom in Two Forms of European Popular Culture Olof Hedling

During a recent visit to Rome I made my way out to Cinecitt`a studios. At the otherwise sealed-off complex, a temporary exhibition entitled Cinecitt`a si Mostra (‘Cinecitt`a on Show’) had been mounted.1 One of the features was housed in a screening-room and consisted of a showreel of some 50 screen tests of various actors. Most were Italian, though several other nationalities were represented. The common denominator was obviously that they had all appeared in films and other kinds of productions made at the studios. The showreel must have been more than half an hour long, with individual clips often lasting less than a minute. As I sat down and watched, the young, famous and familiar faces of Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Stefania Sandrelli and Terence Hill (real name Mario Girotti) were among those that flickered by on the screen. However, since the reel was cut together chronologically, I also became aware that I was progressively ceasing to identify the faces on the screen – in fact, the most recent performer whom I was sure I had seen in a movie or a television show was Valeria Golino, the female lead in Barry Levinson’s Oscar-winning Rain Man (USA, 1988). After that it was all a series of pretty, charming but to me unrecognizable faces. On the one hand, this inability to place a number of younger, mostly Italian actors may of course be ascribed to my personal circumstances, as a Swede living in distant Scandinavia, or perhaps simply to the fact that I have 117

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lost touch with certain strands of contemporary popular film and television culture. On the other hand, my failure could also perhaps be put down to another circumstance particular to contemporary European cinema: namely, the industry’s inability, from a pan-European perspective, to recognize ‘the importance of stars and well-known actors as key selling points and, as such, inescapable elements in building a competitive industry’ (Hedling 2009: 258). In what follows, I will consider how transnational stardom in European film – in the sense of particular star actors constituting a genuine draw for audiences in European countries other than that of the film’s origin – appears a rare phenomenon. This state of affairs will be contrasted with what has developed within the popular cultural form that is European football – here, something resembling an authentic transnational star system is thriving. Furthermore, the culture appears financially flourishing, at least judging from reported salaries, the huge sums television companies spend on broadcasting rights and the vast number of global followers. As a brief conclusion, I will attempt to point out some possible explanations of the very different paths the two forms of culture in question have taken with respect to transnational stardom. This exercise will be undertaken within a discourse inspired by certain elements in recent theories of globalization and in sports scholarship, as well as by some of the more significant global politico-economic trajectories discernible over the last few decades.

Vernacular Stardom and European Film More than a decade ago the business journalist and film executive Angus Finney remarked that ‘Europe’s feature films seem clogged with an array of domestically renowned actors, many of them struggling to win vague recognition from neighbouring countries, let alone international fame’ (1996: 53). To Finney, this condition was part of the difficulty experienced by European cinemas competing against Hollywood within their own markets, especially during the 1980s and 1990s. Since that period, conditions have improved, and in a more recent commentary Finney observes: For all its inherent and current problems, the European film project finds itself in a stronger place than 15 years ago. That there has emerged a strong range of directors, producers, writers and vibrant filmmaking companies is unquestionable. Many are clearly focused on reaching audiences in a manner that sharply contrasts with the dark days of the 1980s and early 1990s. (2010: 80) 118

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Here, while a number of affirmative developments are listed, it is striking that the terms ‘actors’ and ‘stars’ are omitted. European cinema seems to have remained predominantly associated with what (in a suggestive formulation) has been termed ‘vernacular stardom’: ‘a regionally specific form of drawing power [from] film actors dependent upon a variety of factors such as language, genre, role, and [the] interaction and coordination of cinema with other mass media’. Moreover, vernacular stars ‘lack the dimension of the global reach of Hollywood stars. Rather, they articulate specific regional concerns within a strictly regional context, but by temporarily inserting themselves into the realm of stardom that is usually reserved for stars with wider reach’ (Schneider & Hediger 2009: 64). Although this is not spelt out by Schneider and Hediger, a further and related aspect of this present form of regional or national European film stardom appears to be that it is particularly marked by what has been referred to as ‘cultural discount’, defined by how a media artefact: rooted in one culture, and thus attractive in that environment, will have a diminished appeal elsewhere as viewers find it difficult to identify with the style, values, beliefs, institutions and behavioural patterns of the material in question. Included in the cultural discount are reductions in appreciation due to dubbing or subtitling. (Hoskins & Mirus 1988: 500)

In other words, most of these vernacular stars do not ‘travel’ well, since their appeal is neither pan-European nor global. Rather, their popularity is nearly always limited to a single territory or, in Schneider and Hediger’s formulation, a region. This condition is hardly new in the annals of European cinema. As early as the silent era, specific patterns seem to have prohibited European national stardom from being effortlessly exported. With regard to the two British 1920s screen stars Ivor Novello and Betty Balfour, for instance, it has been observed that ‘[b]oth stars shared at least one unenviable trait. They were never able to match their British success abroad’ (Macnab 2000: 55). In a sense, renowned German producer Erich Pommer’s often quoted cry from the 1920s, ‘[i]t is necessary to create “European” films which would no longer be French, English, Italian or German films; entirely “continental” films, expanding out into all of Europe’ (Williams 2005: 89), can be partly understood as an early lament on the territorially limited appeal of European stars. 119

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Nonetheless, one might argue that there have been periods of exception. Especially during the decades after World War II, certain European actors seemed to enjoy wide popularity, as for example with some of the faces I identified without difficulty at Cinecitt`a. To that group one could add contemporaries like Louis de Fun`es, Alain Delon, Brigitte Bardot, Dirk Bogarde and Romy Schneider, to name a few. As an indication of that specific historical situation, the Swedish scholar Leif Furhammar, for instance, has pointed to Swedish youth audiences’ remarkable attraction to non-Hollywood stars around 1960 (2003: 250). A few decades on, however, a change seems gradually to have occurred and, as Finney has also remarked, ‘somewhere along the line European cinema culture stopped wanting to create a cinematic version of the boy or the girl of the year’ (1996: 56). Even if this verdict was delivered some time ago and the same critic has, as mentioned, somewhat revised his prediction about the condition of European film, a developing transnational culture of stars was accordingly not regarded as part of the process. This may perhaps seem surprising, since there is in fact a European institutional setup which indicates a mounting consciousness about the importance of home-grown stars with wider appeal. Introduced at the Berlin Film Festival in 1998 and backed by film support agencies across Europe as well as MEDIA, the initiative is called ‘Shooting Stars’. According to the promotional material for this annual event, Shooting Stars is explicitly aimed at creating a European ‘star system’ and ‘bring[ing] young actors and actresses directly into the promotional process’ (EFP 2012: 35). But, despite the fact that established British stars like Daniel Craig and Carey Mulligan have been among those chosen for attention, the relative accomplishments of the initiative can be questioned in several ways. First, are Craig and Mulligan genuine European stars, selling European films in European countries other than that of the film’s origin? Or is it more reasonable to see them as further examples in the extended historical trajectory of British and Irish actors being promoted by an increasingly integrated Anglo-American film cluster which is arguably best seen as a part of global Hollywood? If that is so, furthermore, should these performers’ fame be ascribed to Shooting Stars rather than to their appeal to Hollywood? Second, what about the more than 200 non-native English-speaking actors from Italy, Sweden, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and so on who have also been associated with the programme through its years of existence? Are these actors currently selling predominantly

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7.1 Daniel Craig as James Bond in Casino Royale: a British star or a global brand?

European films in countries other than that of the film’s origin or have they remained ‘domestically renowned actors, [. . . ] struggling to win vague recognition from neighbouring countries’? Looking through the long lists of selected names from various parts of the Continent, the impression lingers that the overwhelming majority have not exactly developed into household names. Shooting Stars appears an honourable venture. However, for various reasons it still seems as if the programme – which admits to the difficulty of the endeavour by stating that ‘in Europe, we don’t speak about stars’ – is some way from altering a situation where the predominant form of European film stardom is the vernacular variety (EFP: 37). Reasons for this situation can of course be found, including what might be termed the ‘official’ auteurism of the continent, the issue of cultural discount already mentioned, the relative devaluation of stars by public funding bodies, the European propensity for under-funding, the occasionally noticeable tendency to ‘mistreat’ stars and particular European views on equality (Hedling 2009: 259). Besides these, there are the often cited cultural – and notably linguistic – divisions between different regions on the Continent, as well as the adoption of an anti-star culture conceived simply as a way of opposing the traditions of Tinseltown. Moreover, certain commentators on European film, such as the German director Wim Wenders, have even referred to a sort of collective consciousness that permeates the Continent’s cultural life. Supposedly, this pattern portrays and criticizes individual success as unworthy and inappropriate: 121

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We need to have people who want to be stars. You cannot only make them. [. . . ] It’s incredibly hard work to be a star and you have to be ready to do that work. That’s so much more of an American tradition. A lot of European actors who mostly have a theatre background are not ready to do that work. And you cannot blame them because some of that work is destructive. Success is almost a reason to be punished in some European countries, where stars get overly criticized and hurt, and then withdraw [. . . ]. In that atmosphere, it’s difficult to become a star. (Quoted in Finney 1996: 59)

However, that Wenders’s diagnosis is (somewhat) questionable and valueladen, and that ways in fact exist to encourage the creation and cultivation of transnational stardom, is illustrated by developments within another form of European popular culture: contemporary football, which, in addition to promoting an established and advanced transnational star culture, has one further characteristic that warrants mention in comparison with current European film. That is, global football appears very much centred on Europe, on its ‘Big 5’ national leagues – in England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France – and on the various international competitions taking place within the continent among national as well as club sides.

Football and Global Stardom During the second half of May 2010 the American sportswear and equipment supplier Nike released a short film called Write the Future. Besides being an advertisement promoting an assortment of the company’s products, the three-minute piece was designed to celebrate the 19th FIFA World Cup, which was about to take place in South Africa throughout June and July. The film was a collaboration between Nike’s regular advertisement agency (the multinational Wieden+Kennedy) and the acclaimed Mexican auteur Alejandro Gonz´alez I˜na´ rritu. Besides the ‘long’ version referred to above, various edited-down spot adaptations exist, using the same footage. These were extensively aired during commercial breaks in television broadcasts around the globe, as well as made available on internet platforms such as YouTube at the time of the tournament.2 The extended version of the film contains performances by a string of top football players from Europe, Africa and both North and South America. They include Didier Drogba, Wayne Rooney, Franck Rib´ery, Ronaldinho, Cristiano Ronaldo, Fabio Cannavaro, Andr´es Iniesta, Cesc F`abregas and 122

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THE TROUBLE WITH STARS 7.2 and 7.3 Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney cement their star status in the Write the Future campaign.

Landon Donovan. To broaden the advertisement’s appeal beyond the world of football as well as in territories where football is not the major sport – for instance the USA, China and India – non-football athletes like tennis ace Roger Federer and basketball player Kobe Bryant also make cameos. Additionally, brief appearances by the cartoon character Homer Simpson, as well as the actor and longstanding I˜na´ rritu collaborator Gael Garc´ıa Bernal, are included. Besides showing a number of spectacular situations in fictitious football matches in which the various players go head to head on a global stage – supposedly looking ahead to events likely to occur during the forthcoming tournament – the film, by various means, also connects the players to 123

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somewhat clich´ed and nostalgia-tinged emblematic settings within the national and local background from which they originally came. Italy’s captain Cannavaro, for instance, is briefly shown on the set of a lavish Berlusconi-style television show. Here he is seen smiling, surrounded by acrobatic, scantilyclad chorus girls as well as a middle-aged crooner, singing a canzone-style popular song. Similarly, Wayne Rooney is portrayed in a sunless, northern, allegedly British post-industrial environment, where he is living in a modest caravan. Such details are, evidently, intended to evoke both the area in which he mainly plays, Manchester, and his humble origins in suburban Liverpool. Corresponding strategies are used in a concluding sequence towards the end of the short film. Here the element of celebrity and the elevated cultural positions of certain footballers in local, national and global contexts are even more explicitly foregrounded. Simultaneously, the convergence of football and film and the two popular cultural forms’ respective focuses, as well as their reliance on stars, are ingeniously suggested. Thus the individual brilliance of Portuguese winger Cristiano Ronaldo is shown in a number of brief shots on the field. The sequence gradually builds to leave viewers hanging at the adrenaline-filled moment before a penalty kick. This is interspersed with shots of the player in a series of situations that testify to his star status. We see him cutting a red ribbon at the inauguration of a large stadium honouring his legacy through its name, ‘Est´adio Cristiano Ronaldo’. He appears in an episode of The Simpsons where he kicks a ball between the legs of an astounded Homer. The player, furthermore, attends the premiere of a biopic, Ronaldo: The Movie, of which we see a few snippets, including the credit ‘starring Gael Garc´ıa Bernal as Ronaldo’ (which appears as we see the actor sliding across the pitch in front of the camera). The gala premiere is staged in front of Madrid’s classic Art-Deco theatre Cine Capitol where oversized banners promoting the film hang behind the starlit Portuguese. Here it is noteworthy that the lettering, taglines and credits are all in English, suggesting the transnational and perhaps global appeal of the Portuguese player, the Mexican actor and the imagined production. In a last pair of shots we finally see the unveiling of a giant statue of Ronaldo, once again in the city where the club he currently represents, Real Madrid, is based, but now at the Plaza de Ramales. Nonetheless, the familiar red and green of the Portuguese flag is visible, waved by fans watching the event. Together with the fact that Ronaldo wears the national team’s kit, rather than Madrid’s, in the staged field moments, these various shot combinations suggest that the

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film thus simultaneously accentuates the star’s significance in relation to both the local/regional (Madrid) and the national (Portugal), as well as the the global level (the upcoming World Cup/the biopic). Within the growing academic discourse on football, most writers agree about certain players being perceived as stars of a sort fairly early on in the game’s development over the last 100 years (Goldblatt 2006: 205; Giulianotti & Robertson 2009: 9). This process has since accelerated as ‘a small pool of outstanding players (superstars) was pursued assiduously by many football institutions, from clubs to merchandise corporations and other [transnational corporations]. [. . . ] From Pel´e onwards, greater numbers of players experienced a status transmogrification, from hero to star, from sportspecific athlete to global signifier’ (Giulianotti & Robertson 2009: 16, 23). Echoing comments on film stars made by the film scholar Paul McDonald, following Richard Dyer and Richard DeCordova, the enhanced visibility and cultural purchase of these star footballers are also a function of the escalating circulation of various types of knowledge about them. This change can be understood in terms of a widening of the discourse around stars, which today includes information and speculation about an individual’s personality, romantic attachments, home, leisure activities and, last but not least, any scandals surrounding them (Dyer 1998: 177–178). Moreover, information of this kind is distributed on a daily, transnational basis via various forms of printed media as well as, most importantly, on the internet. The player’s celebrity status is hence disseminated through a broader field of media culture. Overall, this widening of the discourse obviously suggests something about the means of communication, the contextual background and the performers in Write the Future. A set of international players – whom audiences in some cases are also familiar with outside their achievements on the pitch – are, on the one hand, placed in a series of spectacular sporting circumstances, and on the other in more locally rooted surroundings. This is done within the generic format of the television advertisement, a form that is simultaneously expanded beyond its usual boundaries. Moreover, this particular format has of course acquired further resonance and widespread popularity through the ‘substantial crossover effect’ of the internet and especially platforms such as YouTube (Elsaesser 2009: 171). By exploiting widespread anticipation of a major global event, Nike in this way sought to achieve extravagant exposure of its brand through the synergy of the international impact of the game itself and its leading ‘global signifiers’. Together with other means of mediation

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by which the player’s celebrity status is broadened, a short film like Write the Future serves as testament to contemporary football’s association with a highly developed transnational and global star culture.

Eurocentric Football As already hinted, the footballers performing in Write the Future have all been prominently associated with European clubs and appearances in European national as well international competitions, despite many of them having their origins in other parts of the world. This is a consequence of the comparative financial strength of the Continent’s ‘Big 5’ national leagues. Global football is accordingly very much centred on Europe. Although the mobility of international players was highly uneven for many decades, the trend over the last few decades has increasingly been towards liberalized player ‘labour’ markets. In Europe this is a result of ‘EU pressure upon football’s governing bodies to observe European law, which guarantees the free movement of labour’ (Giulianotti & Robertson 2009: 64). When it comes to non-EU players, the situation is rather more varied. However, once established in the EU, non-EU players receive the same legal status as their European team-mates. Assessing the high numbers of non-EU players in European football, it is apparent that EU restrictions are also set aside through various national ‘naturalization’ schemes, enabling players from outside the continent to enter (Giulianotti & Robertson 2009: 170). In general this means that the transnational tendency of the game has become increasingly manifest and perhaps even more so among the highest echelons. At the time of writing, the brightest star at the top French club Paris Saint-Germain is probably the Swede Zlatan Ibrahimovi´c, while at Barcelona it is the Argentinian Lionel Messi. A kind of ‘free market in elite labour’ has in this way developed, even if it is not uncontested (Giulianotti & Robertson 2009: 91). Moreover, and to underline the parallels with as well as the differences from the film industry, the European club circuit of the ‘Big 5’ appears to act in a way that bears comparison with the Hollywood studios of old in their continuous global outlook (see Phillips & Vincendeau 2006: 8). For example, top clubs employ networks of international scouts in continuous talent-spotting and the possible recruitment of future players/stars from all over the world. In addition, they often have agreements with clubs in a variety of international locations. In part this of course has the aim of attempting to secure the best and most promising global talent. However,

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and analogous to the film industry, another important incentive behind the process is the assimilation of foreign populations as prospective fans, as an audience for the team’s broadcast matches and as buyers of merchandise, to disperse and increasingly globalize the club’s brand. The recruitment of star players, furthermore, forms part of the intense competition between clubs and leagues. For prospective players from around the world – in close parallel with the situation of e´ migr´e actors and filmmakers who have historically gathered in California – the socio-economic rewards and the increasingly global recognition that plying their trade in Europe brings serve as motivation to obtain a contract with one of the Continent’s clubs. To some extent, the position of European football and its present star culture resembles the role of Hollywood and its ability to recruit worldwide talent and attract global audiences.

A Closing Comparison In the light of this analysis, Wim Wenders’s remark about a hidden collective structure preventing the emergence of star cultures in Europe seems contestable, at least with the present state of football in mind. Popular music, where Britain but also continental Europe and Scandinavia have for decades produced global luminaries, provides another field where stars have been consciously and successfully nurtured through competitive practices, such as singing in English, the occasional anglicization of names and the close monitoring of trends on the international scene so as to diminish the cultural discount. By way of conclusion, I wish to hazard a brief comparison at the intersection point of recent politico-economic history and the fieldspecific regulations governing football and film respectively, in an attempt to illuminate one of many possible structural dilemmas that constitute an impediment to a star system within the present European filmmaking system. According to Giulianotti and Robertson, some of the most significant global politico-economic processes to have influenced both the world in general and football’s development during the last few decades are the sometimes colliding forces of neo-liberalism, neo-mercantilism and the rise of international governance (2009: 96). Neo-liberalism here refers to the powers that advocate the creation of a global market, withdrawing state programmes and regulations and so facilitating the transnational circulation of goods, services, capital and investment. Discussing neo-mercantilism, the authors point to policies intended partly to satisfy transnational aspiration, 127

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hence making national borders and regulations less imperative, but also to contain the separatist impulses of corporations and peoples largely under the jurisdiction of state-centric societal units. The rise of international governance, finally, refers to the complex ways in which powerful international governing bodies – EU, WTO, in football FIFA and UEFA – have come to play an increasing role, in societal matters in general as well as football in particular. Moreover, the same sociologists point to the ways in which contemporary football has been transformed by the tensions, systemic pressure and competition that frequently erupt between these processes. Accordingly, it is through such forces that individual clubs have evolved into a certain type of transnational profit-maximizing companies. At the same time, these tensions and pressures have presented football players with increased industrial freedom – their individual standing in relation to clubs has improved, their mobility across borders has been made easier and regulations like salary caps no longer apply. Concurrently these forces are also propelling the increasing importance of transnational tournaments such as the World Cup and the Champions League, the latter being ‘at the epicentre of political struggles between neo-mercantile, neo-liberal and international governmental forces’ (Giulianotti & Robertson 2009: 117). In all probability it is also as a consequence of these competing forces that the far-reaching transnational star system has developed. European film and its associated industries have to an extent been subject to the same global politico-economic processes. This cinema has existed within an increasingly active EU, while films have been exhibited at film festivals all over the world. It has also been the subject of initiatives such as the European Commission’s assortment of MEDIA programmes (1991–) as well as the Council of Europe’s Eurimages fund (1989–). This has certainly brought internationalized training and the promotion of actors at festivals, as well as increasing the circulation of European audiovisual works and the promotion of co-production initiatives – even if it is surprisingly rare for such schemes to produce films that are theatrical successes in several countries (Bondebjerg & Novrup Redvall 2011: 53). However, European film has also actively withstood or been protected from at least some of the consequences of the processes discussed above. I will point to two examples of this resistance, which I believe are both of central importance to understanding a situation whereby European film has continued to consist largely of films from different nations with, at best,

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vernacular stars; or, as it has been put in relation to the production sector: ‘Despite Europeanization and globalization, production structures still to a large degree remain national’ (Bondebjerg & Novrup Redvall 2011: 54). First, as European film has since the 1960s come to rely more heavily on public support, funding has become increasingly tied to the national sphere (Neumann & Appelgren 2007: 96). This has meant that filmmakers have had to adhere to the stipulations which are often attached to such support, perhaps including restrictions about language as well as relevant subject matter and genres, regulations on cast and crew’s citizenship affiliations and different forms of localization clauses. These policies have most likely prevented the transnational developments seen, for example, in football during the last few decades. Secondly, the cultural exception, the outcome of the ‘titanic struggle’ between the USA and France in particular during the last GATT negotiations ending in 1993, could in a sense be understood as European film saying no to globalization (Williams 2005: 95). In a way, the global forces I have described, which have had an immense influence on world affairs in general and on particular areas like football, were not deemed desirable within the sphere of European film. A large number of other factors still need to be investigated in connection with the field of European film and its continuing attempts to be more widely seen and distributed. Nevertheless, it is my belief that these two factors, the primarily national character of the support mechanisms for European cinema coupled with the cultural exception, are essential in understanding why it is that a transnational European star system remains a prospect as opposed to a fact of existence.

Notes 1 2

The exhibition opened on 29 April 2011. The three minutes and four seconds version I am considering here is available on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSggaxXUS8k. (Accessed 4 April 2012).

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8 Juliette Binoche: The Perfect European Star Ginette Vincendeau

‘Please can you explain to me what the secret of this actress is meant to be?’ (G´erard Depardieu 2010)

Few European stars reach beyond their own national borders. When they do, they tend to be seen as representatives of their country. For example, Hugh Grant, Catherine Deneuve and Pen´elope Cruz, to name three of the most famous, are strongly associated, respectively, with Britain, France and Spain. What is more unusual, and for scholars such as Olof Hedling (2009: 254) practically impossible, is the idea of pan-European stardom. Juliette Binoche, however, would appear to buck this trend, not only by starring in a remarkable range of European films over almost three decades, but also by projecting a vision of Europeanness beyond her French image both in her career choices and in her screen persona. Throughout her prolific career, Binoche has received an impressive array of prizes and almost universal admiration but also, notoriously, the ire of fellow star G´erard Depardieu. His much reported outburst to the Austrian magazine Profil in August 2010 was offensive: he accused her of being ‘nothing’ compared with Isabelle Adjani and Fanny Ardant, whom he considered respectively ‘a genius’ and ‘grandiose’. Yet, in pondering ‘why she has been so esteemed for so many years’, in his own unsubtle way, Depardieu pinpointed a key feature of her stardom, the fact that she seems to generate quasi-universal approval (Depardieu 2010). As a Guardian journalist put it, ‘It’s 131

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almost impossible to find a bad word said about her. If critics pan something she’s in, the reviews usually conclude that Binoche is the only good thing about it’ (Barnett 2011). Even though, as we will see, cracks are appearing in the consensus, especially in France, the chorus of praise and the awards continue. Clearly, pace Depardieu, such a consensus derives from Binoche’s exceptional acting skills. Yet, as Jean-Michel Frodon put it, there is ‘talent, of course, physical beauty, naturally, and a little more . . . but what?’ (Frodon 2007a: 9). Significantly, Binoche’s image and its reception are intricately connected to the values she projects, which are predominantly associated with European culture. This chapter thus explores the ways in which Binoche’s career choices, public image, film roles and performance style, in short her star persona, construct and convey a sense of ‘Europeanness’ and how she may, as a result, be regarded as the perfect European star.

A Model European Career Juliette Binoche, born in 1964, emerged in the mid-1980s. After training for the stage and playing a few small parts in popular films and on television, she forged her career almost immediately at the high end of the French-European art cinema spectrum. In 1985, a marginal role in Je vous salue, Marie/Hail Mary ( Jean-Luc Godard, France/Switzerland) and the lead in Rendez-vous (Andr´e T´echin´e, France) set her on her path. Apart from the status and reputation of the filmmakers she worked with, from the beginning Binoche also significantly developed an identity as a cinephile star. Such an orientation was strongly influenced by her formative personal and professional relationship with Leos Carax, explicitly modelled on Pygmalion and his muse over two films, Mauvais sang/The Night is Young (France, 1986) and Les Amants du Pont-Neuf /The Lovers on the Bridge (France, 1991). Binoche was physically transformed, in particular through weight loss, but the change was also cultural. Carax introduced her to landmarks in film history (Frodon 2007b: 14), and he explicitly fashioned her in the mould of a New Wave star, with the partnership between Godard and Anna Karina as reference point. Comparing the Binoche-Carax pair with Karina-Godard (as well as with Brigitte Bardot and Roger Vadim), Nicoleta Bazgan (2011) rightly argues that Binoche as female muse was more equal to her male ‘creator’ than was the case for the earlier couples, as her own powers of creativity were acknowledged. For instance, her paintings were used in The 132

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JULIETTE BINOCHE: THE PERFECT EUROPEAN STAR

Lovers on the Bridge and she designed its poster. This aspect of her persona was then enshrined in cinephile culture with Cahiers du cin´ema devoting an issue to the film, including images of her art work (Cahiers du cin´ema 1991). Notwithstanding its more equal nature, the Binoche-Carax couple and its visibility thus served to embed Binoche within a recognized pattern in European art cinema. Subsequently, as well as continuing to work with established French auteurs such as Olivier Assayas, Chantal Akerman, Andr´e T´echin´e and Arnaud Despleschin, she appeared in a series of films made by major pan-European figures, notably Krzysztof Kieslowski (Trois couleurs: bleu/Three Colours: Blue, France/Poland/Switzerland, 1993) and Michael Haneke (Code inconnu/Code Unknown, France/Germany/Romania, 1999; and Cach´e/Hidden, France/Austria/Germany/Italy/USA, 2004) as well as newcomers such as Malgoska Szumowska (Elles, France/Poland/Germany, 2010). The European reach of these films, and of their star, was implicitly recognized by the European festivals at which they were awarded prizes: Berlin, Venice, Cannes, Cabourg and London among others, as well as three European film awards. Binoche’s European identity is not, however, confined to films by European auteurs, as her career includes a range of international productions. Nonetheless, rather than going for Hollywood blockbusters like Emmanuelle B´eart in Mission Impossible (Brian de Palma, USA, 1996) or Marion Cotillard in Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, USA/United Arab Emirates, 2011), she has privileged European settings, personnel and cultural cachet. First and foremost, she is associated with international art films that emphasize European locations – Czechoslovakia in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Philip Kaufman, USA, 1988), England in Damage (Louis Malle, UK/France, 1992), Wuthering Heights (Peter Kominsky, UK/USA, 1992) and Breaking and Entering (Anthony Minghella, UK/USA, 2006), Spain in Alice et Martin (Andr´e T´echin´e, France/Spain, 1998), Italy in The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, USA/UK, 1996), Quelques jours en septembre/A Few Days in September (Santiago Amigorena, Italy/France/Portugal, 2006) and Copie conforme/Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, France/Italy/Belgium, 2010), and of course Paris in many films, including Paris, je t’aime (France/Liechtenstein/Switzerland/Germany, 2005), where she appears in Nobuhiro Suwa’s episode ‘Place des Victoires’, and Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Le Voyage du ballon rouge/Flight of the Red Balloon (France/Taiwan, 2007). In international productions, as often happens to e´ migr´e European actors (see Phillips & Vincendeau 2006), her identity, signalled by her accent, acquires a

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kind of fleeting European flavour – thus in addition to her many French roles, she is, for instance, Czech in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Bosnian in Breaking and Entering (2005), while in Dan in Real Life (Peter Hedges, USA, 2007) her sophistication signals a vague cosmopolitan Europeanness. Significantly, Binoche’s rare forays into popular genres also fall within the European ‘quality’ territory, in two ways. On the one hand are romantic comedies such as Un divan a` New York/A Couch in New York (Chantal Akerman, France/Germany/Belgium, 1995), D´ecalage horaire/Jet Lag (Dani`ele Thompson, 2001, France/UK) and Dan in Real Life. On the other are heritage films like Le Hussard sur le toit/The Horseman on the Roof ( Jean-Paul Rappeneau, France, 1994), Les Enfants du si`ecle/The Children of the Century (Diane Kurys, France, 1998) and La Veuve de Saint-Pierre/The Widow of SaintPierre (Patrice Leconte, France/Canada, 1999), based on classics of European literature and/or representing major figures in European culture. Even the decidedly populist Chocolat (Lasse Hallstr¨om, UK/USA, 2000), adapted from the novel by the British writer Joanne Harris, retains an aura of European quality through its use of ‘vintage’ heritage film aesthetics and because besides Johnny Depp the cast includes prestigious European stage and film performers such as Judi Dench, Lena Olin and Leslie Caron. Of this film she could have said, as she did of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, ‘The film was shot in Europe. There were, of course, Americans in the crew, but it was more like a European enterprise’ (Baurez 2013: 64). These career moves illustrate how Binoche has succeeded in gaining an international screen presence while remaining identified with European art cinema, her name in the cast acting as a badge of cultural quality. A contrario, at the time of completing this chapter, the news that Binoche is to appear in the 2014 version of Godzilla (Gareth Edwards, USA, 2014) has been received as a shocking departure from her established star persona. Gently mocking her ‘intellectual’ image, the gossip magazine Voici wondered, ‘Is it to break with this image that Juliette wants to join the cast of a feature film situated, let’s say, far from her universe?’ (Anon 2013). This last citation reflects Binoche’s inability to escape the media spotlight that goes with her level of fame. However, rather than co-opting her into celebrity culture, her off-screen activities have, remarkably, further contributed to her embodiment of idealized European values. To be sure, her public appearances are photographed, her clothes, figure and hairstyles scrutinized. She herself feeds the media by advertizing cosmetics and fashion and promoting her films. She remains aloof, though, where her private life

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is concerned, behaving in this respect like stars such as Catherine Deneuve, who fiercely defend their privacy. Searches on the internet yield no pictures of her children (unlike the case of, say, Angelina Jolie) and, except for her past relationships with actors Olivier Martinez and Benoˆıt Magimel, her other partners have been shielded from publicity. The most public aspect of her private life remains her relationship with Leos Carax, and this concerns their professional partnership – specifically the long and difficult shoot of The Lovers on the Bridge – more than their liaison. Indeed, where Binoche is willing to go public is in her artistic endeavours. In this respect, a television documentary directed by her sister and entitled Juliette Binoche: dans les yeux/Juliette Binoche: Sketches for a Portrait (Marion Stalens, France, 2009) is exemplary: apart from selected aspects of her film career, the documentary stresses Binoche’s three major extra-cinematic activities: theatre, painting and dance. Mentions of her private life are confined to a couple of photographs of her parents. Binoche comes from a family of actors and started acting at school in the late 1970s, moving to classes at the Paris Conservatoire. Her rapid success in film meant that her early stage career was curtailed. In recent years, though, she has followed the trend of well-known (usually middle-aged) film stars coming back to the stage. Here too she has opted for classics of European theatre such as Luigi Pirandello’s Naked at the Almeida Theatre in London in 1998, Harold Pinter’s Betrayal at the American Airlines Theatre in New York in 2000 and August Strindberg’s Miss Julie at the Barbican in London in September 2012 (and other venues, including Avignon and Paris). Since the time of The Lovers on the Bridge she has continued to paint and has produced a series of striking portraits of the directors she has worked with, as well as of her own characters in the films. Prominently featured in Stalens’s documentary, these have been exhibited and published in a lavishly produced, bilingual (French/English) book entitled Portraits In-Eyes, which also includes her poems – some of them printed in a facsimile of her large, almost childish handwriting, as if to emphasize their innocence and authenticity (Binoche 2008). Despite having no previous training, Binoche also ventured into dance with the British-based Pakistani avant-garde choreographer Akram Khan. They produced a show entitled In-I in London in 2008, her performance being saluted as ‘courageous’ (rather than successful) by the press. Such artistic activities have become integral to Binoche’s star persona, accompanied by a passionate and at times esoteric discourse that does not always avoid falling into pretentiousness. For instance, in Juliette Binoche: Sketches for a Portrait, she declares, ‘I inhabit the realm of felt experience’

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(Stalens 2009); to the newspaper Lib´eration she said, ‘[artistic] creation is the meeting of matter and light’ (Santucci 2012: 52). Positioning herself as an artist rather than ‘just’ a star has met with the approval of cinephiles – in his preface to Portraits In-Eyes, the Cahiers du cin´ema critic Frodon writes approvingly that ‘It takes a lot of courage for an actress to venture there where [sic] her reputation won’t protect her’ (Binoche 2008: 15) – as well as that of the foreign media. But it has produced a backlash in France, epitomized implicitly by Depardieu’s attack, and explicitly by a satirical short film directed by and starring the comedienne Val´erie Lemercier, shown at the 2010 C´esar ceremony. The film parodies a trailer for a Binoche biopic, with a mockAmerican male voice-over inviting viewers to: ‘Discover the life, the true life, of Juliette Binoche’. This is followed by images of ‘Binoche’ (Lemercier) illustrating these pronouncements: ‘she acts’ (we see her emoting), ‘she paints’ (she frantically hurls paint on a pane of glass), ‘she cooks’ (she vigorously kneads dough and throws flour in the air), ‘she dances’ (she and comedian Gad Elmaleh, made up to look like Khan, perform a parody of modern ballet) and ‘she cosmetics’ [sic] (we see a fashion photo shoot). The parody hit a nerve, and Binoche made her annoyance known. As a result Lemercier was subsequently barred from presenting the C´esar ceremony (see Lemercier 2012). As if to demonstrate Binoche’s continued currency in cinephile circles, though, a month later the poster for the 2010 Cannes film festival showed her, barefoot and dressed in glamorous black, holding a paintbrush and tracing the word ‘Cannes’ in strokes of light.

The Ultimate Art Cinema Star Persona Binoche’s filmic and extra-filmic activities described above are remarkably congruent with her on-screen image, to which I now turn. Here I will briefly recall her film persona as it emerged in the 1980s and 1990s (see Vincendeau 2000) but concentrate on its more recent incarnations. In particular, I will look at how her star image is made up of three interconnected sets of values that have a particular relationship to European culture – romantic love, melancholy and art – before focusing on Certified Copy, a film particularly emblematic of her Europeanness. In her first starring role in Rendez-vous, Binoche plays an aspiring young actress who triumphs as Shakespeare’s Juliet. While her youth and vitality connote sensuality, her cultural point of reference is a European literary tradition of romantic love. The Unbearable Lightness of Being continued this 136

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8.1 Binoche combines drabness with subdued melancholy in Hidden.

theme. Her character, Tereza, is sensual and innocent, but interestingly presented in the light of European literature: one of the first things we are told about her is that she reads Anna Karenina. Time and again films portray Binoche’s characters as consumed by romantic passion. Even when her roles require nudity and explicit sexuality (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Damage, Elles), she exudes a sublimated, ethereal quality, romantic love rather than sex. This characterization is served by a performance style that combines intensity – in the tradition of Method acting – and sensitivity. Her looks and cinematography contribute to this too. The transparency and luminosity of her skin, the harmonious oval of her face, her fine features, rather than her body, are the focus of the camera. The Night is Young for instance, as discussed by Jacques Aumont (1992: 151), is notable for its formal exploration of the female face. Three Colours: Blue begins and ends on her face in extreme closeup, to emphasize her beauty, interiority and sensitivity. Most of her films, including Certified Copy, subsume her characters within an idea (and ideal) of romantic love. In French cinema, this aligns her with New Wave actresses such as Jeanne Moreau and Emmanuelle Riva. In a wider cultural arena, it also connects her to notions of courtly love that have historically been linked to a literary tradition originating in medieval Europe. Idealized versions of love are evidently not confined to Europe, yet courtly love, with its connotations of high literature and refinement, is seen as ‘a feature distinguishing European civilization from [other] cultures’ (Passerini, Labanyi & Diehl 2012: 5). 137

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This romantic identity included from the start a layer of seriousness as well as fragility and melancholy established through the melodramatic and demanding nature of early films such as La Vie de famille/Family Life ( Jacques Doillon, France, 1985), The Lovers on the Bridge, Three Colours: Blue and others to the point of stereotyping, signified by the high quota of scenes in which we see her cry or with tears welling up in her eyes. In interviews she has repeatedly indicated that she would have liked to alter this but that her directors, for instance Jean-Paul Rappeneau on the shooting of The Horseman on the Roof, would not let her, forbidding her to smile (Ch´erer 1995: 87). Unsurprisingly her rare comedies, such as Jet Lag, have been seen as working against type. Perhaps to counter this typecasting, Binoche has developed a habit on and off screen of suddenly bursting out laughing. But, just as Jean Gabin’s minimalist performance style was underlined by his sudden eruptions of anger, Binoche’s resounding laugh only serves to reinforce her basically serious persona. Its incongruity has recently been criticized: Lib´eration talks of ‘her famous booming laugh, which sounds forced’ (Santucci 2012: 50), while Les Inrockuptibles accuses her of ‘indulging without restraint in her favourite tics, the worst being her sonorous laugh in the middle of a conversation’ (Morain 2012). With middle age, Binoche’s fragile, romanticmelodramatic image has taken two tangential routes. On the one hand, she increasingly plays anxious or neurotic women from the Parisian intellectual bourgeoisie – in films such as Code Unknown and Hidden as well as Flight of the Red Balloon, L’Heure d’´et´e/Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, France, 2008) and Elles. In these roles, this identity is visually signified by ostensibly less glamorous clothes and make-up and dishevelled hair. On the other hand, while not going for the graphically shocking parts played by Isabelle Huppert, B´eatrice Dalle or Charlotte Gainsbourg, Binoche has taken on a few roles that stress intense, troubled passion in the tradition of extreme, mostly European, cinema (see Horeck & Kendall 2011). This involves sexuality, as in Elles, where a long take shows her masturbating, or Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, France/Italy, 2012), in which her cameo consists of having vigorous sex with the hero (Robert Pattinson) in his car. In Camille Claudel, 1915 (Bruno Dumont, France, 2013), her embodiment of the eponymous sculptress forcibly incarcerated in a mental asylum concentrates these features. Her agreeing to act among real-life mentally ill patients stresses her much vaunted willingness to take risks and underlines the authenticity of her performance. The tragic aspect of the part, in which Claudel tries in vain

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to convince her brother to have her released, calls for the star to give long tearful monologues, while her appearance is, by necessity, particularly unglamorous. Finally, throughout her career, Binoche’s characters have been repeatedly associated with (European) art. She is an actress in Rendez-vous and in Mary (Abel Ferrara, Italy/France/USA, 2005), a photographer in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a painter in The Lovers on the Bridge, a puppeteer in Flight of the Red Balloon. In Damage, Summer Hours, Certified Copy and Cosmopolis, she works in art, in Cach´e in publishing, in Three Colours: Blue and Alice et Martin in music. She has played great European heroines, fictional and historical: Cathy Linton in Wuthering Heights and Shakespeare’s Juliet, George Sand and Camille Claudel. This core feature of her persona evidently echoes her extracinematic artistic activities discussed above. On screen, it has the effect of simultaneously detaching her from material contingencies, while stressing the romantic, sensitive and passionate (or tortured) aspects of her personality. The art connection also reinforces by analogy her identification with art cinema by stressing her empathy with the world of the films and their directors. The linkage between Binoche’s persona, art and Europeanness is perhaps most evident in Certified Copy, a film that represented a new landmark in her prize-studded career. Directed by revered Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, it garnered awards and nominations, among which Binoche received the Best Acting prize at Cannes in 2010 – the very festival on whose poster she featured. Certified Copy is a pan-European production that in a more popular context might earn the label of ‘Europudding’, applied for instance to Chocolat (see Vidal 2012a: 136). Kiarostami’s film is a French-Italian-Belgian coproduction, with a mixed crew (mostly Italian, Iranian and French), mixed cast (primarily French, British and Italian) and dialogue in English, French and Italian. It was shot on location in Tuscany, particularly in Lucignano, one of the best-preserved hilltop mediaeval villages in the region. The film depicts a day-long encounter between English writer James Miller (William Shimell) and an unnamed French gallery owner played by Binoche (whom I will call ‘Elle’), as they drive to Lucignano and spend the day there. We see them have coffee, visit a museum, amble through the narrow streets of the village, have an aborted meal in a restaurant, enter the church and end up in a hotel – all the while talking and arguing. The film playfully maintains mystery about their relationship: at first apparently strangers, they gradually reveal that they

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have been married for 15 years, though this too may be an elaborate game. At the end we do not know whether the couple will stay together. After Elle (from the bed) asks Miller to stay, despite his stated plan to leave that night, he goes to the bathroom, looks at himself in the mirror and leaves the frame. We are left with an open window showing rooftops and church bells ringing. Here, Kiarostami’s authorial mark of deliberate withholding of information meshes perfectly with the European art cinema genre. Another illustration of this point is the long car drive at the beginning, a Kiarostami signature trope, but also the moment when the characters are at their most opaque. In addition to displaying the beauty of the Tuscan village, with long mobile takes following the couple meandering through the streets (in which few modern artefacts intrude, apart from mobile phones and the odd car), Certified Copy is replete with images of, and allusions to, art. It starts in nearby Arezzo with Miller giving a talk on his new book about originals and copies, and with a scene in Elle’s gallery where the couple discuss statues. In Lucignano, Elle shows Miller a Roman painting, ‘La Toscana’, a famous case of forgery, and later the couple spend time at a local attraction, l’albero della vita (the tree of life), a gilded Renaissance reliquary popular with newly-weds. A young couple asks to be photographed in front of it with Miller and Elle, which Miller resists, thinking it would be a sham. Thus the film cleverly conjoins the problems of coupledom with art, in particular the preoccupation with originality and fakery. This theme has generated much critical commentary, as have the similarities of the plot with Roberto Rossellini’s 1954 Viaggio in Italia/Journey to Italy. What interests me here, rather, is the way Certified Copy uses Binoche’s performance and star persona to display art and emotion within a specifically European context. That Binoche is key to the appeal (and marketing) of Certified Copy is evident, besides the Cannes award, in the many critical reiterations of her excellence, summed up in a quote used in the film’s trailer: ‘Binoche drives the movie [. . . ] earning her Cannes best actress status with every second of screen-time’ (Leyland 2010). She was in fact central to the film from the beginning, as Kiarostami – who had used her in his 2008 film Shirin – has repeatedly said that it was ‘born of Juliette, of my vision of her’ (see Rouchy 2010). According to him, she ‘became’ the character during the shoot, which the star declared ‘an exceptional and delightful experience’ (Binoche 2010). Even factoring in the promotional bias of such statements, there is, on screen, a remarkable equation between Binoche’s star persona and Elle, eloquently illustrating the diverse aspects of her image developed over her entire career:

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romantic love, melancholy in a middle-class context, the connection with art, Europeanness. Elle’s identity is highly emotional; she is a woman with a strong stake in love. At various points she opposes her emotions to Miller’s intellect, notably in lengthy discussions of a statue in the village square. The casting of the cool British Shimell opposite Binoche enhances the contrast between them, in a similar Franco-British pairing to that of Binoche and Jeremy Irons in Damage. A key conversation with an Italian woman in a caf´e places the couple within a universalizing notion of gender relations: men are invested in work, women in love. While there is evidence that Binoche in real life does not share these patriarchal views (Binoche 2010), they nevertheless accord with her screen image. Thus numerous long static shots show her alternatively loving, warm, funny – as in her mini comic rant, impressively delivered in Italian, against Miller’s reluctance to shave, or with occasional eruptions of the famous laugh – or conversely, and more often, with tears in her eyes, for instance when Miller tells her a story of a mother and son, which may or not refer to her. On more than one occasion, she credibly cries and smiles at the same time. Binoche thus deploys her subtle yet wide-ranging performance style to translate nuances of female emotional volatility that the film codes as ‘universal’. However, the social milieu of the characters, the d´ecor and her appearance all place her firmly within a chic cosmopolitan European elite. Against the faded grandeur of the Tuscan village, which for Kiarostami is ‘not just a place, but a character’ (Levieux 2010), in the museum or the elegant restaurant, juxtaposed with statues or paintings, Elle wears an apparently simple dress in a fashionable ‘nude’ beige colour. It is nevertheless a couture dress by Lanvin, made of rich-looking fabric with a faint silk-like sheen. To the dress are added a black jacket, black high-heeled sandals, a black bag and one fine gold pendant in the shape of a dragonfly, while Binoche’s hair is artfully distressed. This is an outfit that proclaims wealth and understated chic, in harmony with the location, the protagonists’ jobs and the star’s persona – similar to her appearance in the ‘monied but not flashy’ world of Cach´e (Wheatley 2012: 39). In a no doubt deliberate irony, the most famous image for Certified Copy, seen on the poster and the DVD cover, shows Binoche wearing bright red lipstick and putting on a huge, garish red earring, possibly made of plastic. While part of the declension of the theme of ‘real’ and ‘fake’, the image underlines by default the normally classy identity of both star and character – later, after her overt bid for

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8.2 Binoche blends in with her sophisticated surroundings in Certified Copy.

seduction with the make-up and earring have apparently failed, she pointedly tells Miller that she has removed the lipstick, thus returning to her ‘natural’ state. Certified Copy is evidently, perhaps too evidently, about art, insofar as Elle is a gallery owner and she and Miller are mouthpieces for art appreciation. In a classic anti-tourist gesture, the film gently pokes fun at a woman visitor who says naively that ‘Italy is an open-air museum’, yet its treatment of the village does not avoid cultural tourism. The unnamed Elle herself becomes an art object: in the early scene in her gallery, a carefully composed shot shows her reflected in a mirror, between two statues – a mise-en-abyme of the way the film, through Binoche, articulates a complex discourse equating European art and history with romantic passion and authenticity.

The Embodiment of European Art Cinema Binoche’s artistic leanings and career choices show discrimination while perpetuating the myth of freedom from the market that characterizes European art cinema. Critics and journalists note with approval that her theatrical ventures are comparatively poorly paid, and her motivation therefore not financial, and that she is ‘famous for two types of roles: those she played and those, innumerable, she rejected’ (Norton 1998: 16). They mention 142

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appreciatively that her ‘perfect trajectory’ is ‘based only on artistic choices’ (Toscan du Plantier 1999) and ‘courageous choices’ (Frodon 2007a:9), such as supporting art cinema projects with poor box office potential or films by first-time directors. On the whole the same critics refrain from commenting on her ‘commercial’ choices – leaving this to satirists or gossip magazines like Voici. In any case it is true that Binoche’s dominant identity as an actress is, as Frodon puts it, ‘born of the politique des auteurs, and for ever marked by it’ (2007a: 10), and that her romantic persona and the subtlety of her performance, as we have seen, blend perfectly with the refined and/or challenging values of such films. It is not surprising, in this light, that her artistic ventures receive the official endorsement of European cultural institutions such as Cahiers du cin´ema, the BFI, Unifrance and the National Theatre among others, or that Portraits In-Eyes is supported by Culturesfrance, a state-sponsored organization designed to promote French culture abroad. Equally significant to Binoche’s place within European art cinema and culture is what appears as a growing rift between her identity as a French star on the one hand and her identity as an international star on the other. Revisiting the criticisms levelled at her, it is clear that the hostility she has generated is related, beyond her manifold activities, to a backlash against what a French journalist called ‘her adopting the attitude of an international star [. . . ] no longer content with the Hexagon’ (Lorrain 2010). In 2000, following the disappointing French reception of some of her films (including Alice et Martin and Code Unknown) Binoche made derogatory comments about French cinema while in New York to perform Betrayal: ‘I felt like getting away from France [. . . ] Bizarrely I no longer feel wanted there’ (Campion 2010). The huge international success of Chocolat compared with its critical demolition and poor box office in France, as well as Binoche’s increased bilingualism and appearance in English-language productions, have arguably deepened the rift; as a result, some have argued that ‘she is better loved abroad than in France’ (Lorrain 2010). Recasting these developments in a positive light, it is more useful to see Binoche as inhabiting an international and especially European cultural space. Her French detractors perhaps fail to see the important role that she is playing for French cinema. As a figure on screen, Binoche represents European culture, surrounded by glamorous European backgrounds; as a star in transnational film she acts as ambassador for French and European cinema (in this respect superseding Deneuve). Her choice of roles also serves one of

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French cinema’s main survival strategies on the international scene – attracting European and international filmmakers to come and work in France. On and off screen Binoche, in fact, has become the very embodiment of European art cinema, explaining why, to Depardieu’s and others’ irritation, she has been ‘esteemed for so many years’.

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9 Franglais, Anglais and Contemporary French Comedy Mary Harrod

France has a long official history of defending its language as superior in the face of unwelcome infiltration by foreign tongues. As early as 1635 Cardinal Richelieu founded the Acad´emie Franc¸aise, the authority on the French language, to fight the invasion of Italian. Since then, this body has spearheaded efforts to protect French from ‘impurities’. The spread since the mid-1900s of North American hegemony in global media and culture has meant that in recent years it is the English language that has most often come under fire. The linguistic facet of a strong French strain of anti-American nationalism was perhaps most stridently voiced by the publication of the Sorbonne professor ´ Ren´e Etiemble’s vitriolic attack on the spread of Americanisms in the French media, Parlez-vous franglais? (1964), the book that coined the popular term used in the title of this chapter. Interestingly, a widely used online dictionary defines Franglais as ‘French spoken with a large mixture of English words, especially those of American origin’ [my emphasis].1 More recently, the USA’s place at the forefront of the technological and information revolutions has only increased the use of English and spread of anglicisms, so that today French uneasiness about English has become a cultural commonplace, even outside France. In the UK, for instance, French linguistic protectionism is often a focal point for ridicule by the British press. Such attitudes in historical rivals foreground the essential relationship of language with national culture – as does the Franglais debate in the first place. More interestingly, such 145

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mockery simultaneously underlines language’s status as a locus of humour arising from questions of identity and difference. In this chapter I first briefly expand on the relations between language and comedy. I then examine how certain English-influenced uses of language by characters in popular French film comedies released since the mid-1990s mediate French ambivalence about the globalization of national culture. The analysis suggests how these films negotiate certain equally complex and sometimes contradictory attitudes towards Europeanness versus Americanization. This chapter forms part of a small but growing body of work situated at the interface between the disciplines of film studies and sociolinguistics. In France, an important exception to the general dearth of studies of language in cinema is Michel Chion’s analysis of dialogue across the board in French cinema. Chion ascribes a vogue for setting comedies in what he calls ‘ethnic micro-milieux’ in the 1980s and 1990s to an attempt to reinvigorate French dialogue with new words and people who play with language (2008: 103). One of the underlying claims of this chapter is that the use of English and Franglais constitutes another, related means by which the language of French film comedy in recent years has been enlivened. Beyond the delight linguistic play can afford, however, film comedy recommends itself for sociolinguistic analysis because of the close relationship between the linguistic codes exploited by a text and the latter’s spectatorial address. In any mass text linguistic differences in character construction can point to both the audience’s (perceived) assumptions about particular social categories and the filmmaker’s response to these (cf. Bell 1984). Susan Purdie (1993: 7) has further argued that the very ‘[presentation] of action as a species of discursive exchange’ is a particular feature of comedy. That is, comedy involves a ‘speaker’ and an audience; humour depends for its functioning on the accuracy of its address. Because comedy is then already an inherently discursive act of communication, I contend that it has the potential to reflect in a particularly acute way on questions of language. Accordingly, French comedies’ forays into foreign discourse – by which is meant locutions that remain recognizably English-influenced, often with an anglophone referential flavour – mediate a variety of attitudes towards linguistic borrowing. The films’ various stances on the use of English in a French context correlate to some extent with both different comic sub-genres and different periods. First, I shall examine a pair of relatively conservative romantic comedies from the 1990s to early 2000s that reveal an attitude of ‘sour grapes’ when it comes to proficiency in English: a pretence of disdain

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towards the external language, and to the US culture associated with it by the films, which demands to be seen as a symptom of exclusion anxiety. Second, I will analyse three ‘fish-out-of-water’ narratives spanning the 2000s that suggest a gradual and only semi-willing turn towards an embrace of anglophone language and culture, initially through the use of English marked as British and not American. Finally, I will scrutinize three youth-oriented comedies released since 2005 that emphatically embrace North American influence at a linguistic level principally through the use of Franglais. Within these subdivisions, I shall focus on how language interacts with generic tropes and in turn with questions of gender and sometimes stardom in order to construct spectators’ ideas about Europeanization and especially globalization in France, in filmmaking and beyond.

´ In this section I consider two films whose standpoint is closest to Etiemble’s traditionalist position, betraying overt anxiety about and even hostility towards the English language and Anglo-American culture: Un divan a` New York/A Couch in New York (Chantal Akerman, France/Germany/Belgium, 1996) and D´ecalage horaire/Jet Lag (Dani`ele Thompson, France/UK, 2002). While the earlier film was a critical and commercial flop made by a wellknown feminist art cinema director and the latter a box office success (including to some extent in the USA) directed by a resolutely popular filmmaker, they have in common their status as romantic comedies and also as star vehicles for Juliette Binoche. Such details foreground several rather paradoxical features of (French) rom-coms. As a genre centred on a heterosexual marriage plot, the rom-com is routinely seen as narratively conservative. At the same time, it is the Hollywood genre that has most often given female actresses scope to attain comic stardom, prominently in screwball comedies but also today. The broad absence of the rom-com (as it is typically understood, via Hollywood cinema) in French filmmaking before the 1990s is both cause and effect of a reduced framework for female stardom in comedy there. Only in the late 1990s and 2000s does the genre flourish in France, with the two films in question forming part of the vanguard. Consequently, at the time they were released the films would have been generically marked as indebted to a North American tradition. As if reflecting on their own generic dual nationality, these early French rom-coms dramatize forms of transatlantic love affairs featuring Binoche, a 147

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9.1 William Hurt as Henry needs a dose of his own ‘talking cure’ in A Couch in New York.

star whose Frenchness – and secondarily Europeanness (see Vincendeau’s chapter in this volume) – is axiomatic, opposite male characters aligned in one way or another with US culture: in the first an American played by William Hurt and in the second a French e´ migr´e to the USA played by Jean Reno, in an obvious comment on the Hollywood actor’s star persona. Chion (2008: 5) claims that in French cinema linguistic prowess often goes with failure in other aspects of life, paradigmatically romance. In these films, however, the male characters are initially defined by romantic and linguistic failure – a failure moreover identified with the English language and contrasted with the French one. A Couch in New York gives us Henry, a repressed psychoanalyst afflicted with aphasia, the inability to speak almost at all. In Jet Lag, near silence is in Reno’s F´elix exchanged for logorrhea: nervous, uncontrollable chatter. As Brigitte Rollet (2008: 100) notes in her analysis of this film, a major symptom of the cultural disorientation apparent in F´elix’s characterization, as a French chef who has sold out to an American frozen foods conglomerate, is the angry Franglais that he constantly spouts. F´elix imports not just words but entire phrases with marked frequency – and often phrases with a particular and at times rather negative cultural significance as American, such as ‘les happy ends c’est du bullshit’ (‘happy endings are bullshit’). The contrast with the greater linguistic and existential ease demonstrated by Binoche’s French-speaking character is apparent in both cases. Thus in A Couch in New York her character B´eatrice, who swaps apartments with Henry and falls in love with him initially in absentia, is likened to the eloquent Cyrano de Bergerac by a climactic scene when she communicates romantic feelings for Henry from across the visual barrier of a divide between two balconies. By 148

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the end of the film, Henry has found happiness by permanently decamping from his sterile ultra-modern New York apartment to live with B´eatrice in the chaotic Parisian loft he initially hated, and the narrative closes with the melodious sound of the couple’s now easy chatter off-screen. In Jet Lag, Binoche’s character Rose is noteworthy for her ‘Gallic’ frankness. The plot sees her forced to share a hotel room, when the two are victims of cancelled flights, with nervy F´elix, prone to panic attacks and, like Henry, neurotic about cleanliness. Stuck in close proximity with a stranger, Rose interrogates him about his personal life and invites him to do the same to her – etiquette need not be respected as they will never see one another again. When he accuses her of leaving her abusive ex-boyfriend (whom she is fleeing for a job in Mexico) in a cowardly way and specifically of having pretended to enjoy sex with a man she no longer loves, she refines his simplistic pronouncement with the more subtle rejoinder (in French): ‘I’ve been pretending to enjoy sex for years with a man whom I still love’.2 This concise but multilayered, taboo-busting phrase, the antithesis of F´elix’s endless but empty verbiage, contributes to her character’s alluring construction as down-toearth – a French national stereotype in sexual matters as elsewhere. As the narrative develops, F´elix’s growing love for Rose is constructed in terms of his recuperation by France, as he returns to cooking French recipes himself and is reconciled with his estranged father in rural Burgundy, awaiting Rose’s imminent return from the abandoned job abroad. In both A Couch in New York and Jet Lag, then, female linguistic mastery of French, alongside male linguistic dysfunction partly or wholly in English, is a crucial element of an overall trajectory in which the men are ‘healed’ by the women through values seen to be French. Illustrating Susan Hayward’s (2000) and others’ stress on the centrality of the feminine in discourses of nationhood, in each case the man finds happiness on French turf and terms. Both star power and comic positioning are keys to the effectiveness of the reactionary stance adopted by the films. Binoche’s popularity clearly helps to pre-sell her character’s values to a French and secondarily transnational audience. The same can be said of Reno, with his return to French values acting as catharsis for viewers alarmed about the erosion of local cultural capital. At the same time, Reno’s entrenchment in Hollywood presumably offset the relatively open America-bashing in which the film engages for US audiences, while his Anglo-French linguistic contortions could amuse on both sides of the Atlantic. Humour is a crucial mechanism in the dual address implied by F´elix’s character arc: the ‘get-out clause’ that makes him likeable even as

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he is distanced from us (cf. Neale & Krutnik 1990: 149) and allows openly backward views to be expressed without immediately alienating even those amenable to globalization.

Fishes Out of Water In this section I examine three box office successes from across the 2000s, Le Goˆut des autres/The Taste of Others (Agn`es Jaoui, France, 2001), Ma Femme est une actrice/My Wife is an Actress (Yvan Attal, France, 2001) and Tout ce qui brille/All That Glitters (Herv´e Mimran and G´eraldine Nakache, France, 2010). These films mark a shift from the discourse analysed in the rom-coms in suggesting mastery of the English language may be desirable for French people. However, the exploration of this idea is still marked by hesitation and reluctance, as well as considerable anxiety about the process of linguistic change itself. In the first two films, an interesting distinction is also made between British and US English, from which can be discerned certain differences in attitude towards European and neo-globalized American culture across some sections of French society. Both The Taste of Others and My Wife is an Actress are popular auteur films aimed at a broadly middle-class audience. This is particularly important in the former case since, as Sarah Leahy (2007) has shown, ‘the relationship between taste and cultural hierarchies’ is apparent in the film. The narrative focuses on a circumscribed bourgeois milieu, within which nonetheless subtle differences of identity separate figures such as snooty classical actress and English teacher Clara from nouveau riche businessman Jean-Jacques Castella (played by co-writer Jean-Pierre Bacri), who becomes her pupil as he is attracted to her. The couple’s linguistic and other differences are mined for comedy. During one memorable English lesson, the Frenchman declares his love via a rudimentary poem in English, littered with errors and miscalculated phrases. Despite the presence of subtitles, the full horror of Castella’s mistakes is likely to be more keenly felt by an English-speaker, although only a medium level of proficiency is required to appreciate the cringe-making quality of the inappropriately jaunty couplet, ‘I was alone in the rain / And there was clouds in my brain’ (not to mention Clara correcting ‘was’ to ‘were’), or the formally correct but excessively literal and poetically null, ‘When I look at this woman my heart gets a tan’. The ideal spectator here is an educated French person who speaks English to a certain level (the film performed modestly in Englishspeaking territories by comparison with huge success at home, where it took a

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record-breaking over two million entries in three weeks [Leahy 2007: 116]). An enduring feature of this highly popular French film is, then, a discourse about the relationship between cultural capital and the ability to speak English, in which those excluded from the club are laughable. Humour is heightened by the juxtaposition of these statements about Clara’s warmth with her frosty, po-faced reaction to finding herself his muse. She is as buttoned-up as the English tea-shop in which their assignation takes place, confirming her alignment with British as opposed to US English and culture. There are several points to make about the British character of this English. It is unsurprising that in circles that define themselves through what Pierre Bourdieu has called ‘academic capital’ (see Leahy 2007: 122), European culture holds a high status. Prominent examples of this in the film include classical music and theatre, notably the tragic dramas in which Clara appears, written by the likes of Racine and Ibsen. Indeed part of the humour of Castella’s poem is the relation of incongruity in which it stands to the English poetic canon. Exclusion anxiety about fluency in English is here ultimately at least as much a question of class as of national identity. All sense of the overlap between British and American English (or identity) is absent and the ghost of Britain exists only as a positive European value. The situation is rather different in My Wife is an Actress. In this film, the directorial debut of actor Yvan Attal and a reasonable box office success in France, the boundaries between British and American English are more blurred and the level of anxiety about exclusion accordingly higher. The film appears on one level to dramatize Attal’s real-life and well-known romantic partnership with starring actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, who is famously halfEnglish. The narrative deals specifically with Yvan’s (Attal) insecurities about his famous actress wife Charlotte (Gainsbourg) being more successful than him, a sports journalist. This fear of female professionalism is then displaced into a paranoid discourse about female adultery that is equally nationalistically inflected. Thus we follow Yvan during Charlotte’s sojourn in London on a shoot, as he becomes increasingly anxious about her acting opposite an older but much lusted after British actor, John, played by 1960s icon Terence Stamp. Yvan’s obvious insecurities about his wife’s success as an international star are played out substantially through cultural and linguistic jokes arising from his status as a Frenchman who speaks little English and is therefore unable to participate in her interactions with John. One scene stands out. Following Yvan’s sudden arrival in London, prompted by paranoia about John’s

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heartthrob reputation, the trio converse awkwardly in the restaurant trailer on the shoot. Yvan is unfriendly to John and monosyllabic, claiming when pressed that the language barrier is stopping him from saying more. There follows a banal passage in which John compliments Yvan on his English but mispronounces his name as the woman’s name Yvonne, eliciting an immediate correction. Shortly afterwards, as talk turns to matters Gallic, it is the Frenchman’s turn to get his own back, looking blank when faced with John’s mediocre but passable pronunciation of French proper names before correcting them with gusto. What is interesting here is the way in which Frenchness is emasculated by John, through the feminized label Yvonne, prompting the petty display in which Yvan regains the linguistic high ground for a moment – although later scenes, including a fantasy of shoving a giant (French) cheese into John’s face, confirm that feelings of inferiority have not been assuaged. The ridiculous nature of this fantasy speaks to Attal’s complex audience positioning vis-`a-vis his character. Like Woody Allen (to whose Manhattan [USA, 1979] My Wife is an Actress dedicates an opening homage), Attal aligns audiences with his persona through amusing self-deprecation. It is particularly significant too that although Charlotte and John do not have an affair, several narrative details (including his rou´e behaviour in flirting with a young crew member when Charlotte is unavailable) suggest Yvan was right to fear him as a rival. This endorses his paranoia about the anglophone other. To elaborate on that otherness, the roles inhabited by both Gainsbourg and Stamp represent various versions of Anglo-American culture. Gainsbourg is the daughter of quintessentially English star Jane Birkin (known in France for her ‘sexy’ British accent). She has featured in Hollywood films but is much better known in Europe, and in the film her character is associated with Englishness. Stamp is obviously English too and most of the fears about otherness aired by the film are focalized through Britain, as in repeated Eurostar journeys and a recognizably British-accented soundtrack, prominently featuring ‘London Calling’ by The Clash. However, there is a subtle slippage between Englishness and a conception of anglophone culture coloured by popular ideas about the USA. For all Stamp’s clipped speech and ‘European’ cultural pretension, John has something of California and the Hollywood movie-star about him, through his penchant for Tai Chi before breakfast. It is no accident that it is precisely this activity in which he is engaged when Yvan (in his dream) assaults him with the cheese. Even as Attal borrows overtly from Hollywood genre filmmaking, through the Allen references, it is clear that it is the Americanized aspects of John that Yvan particularly dislikes and fears.

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This partial conflation of Britishness and American values is one frequently to be seen in French discourse. Here the two cultures are often lumped together under the label ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and by extension Britain is seen as culturally distinct from France and indeed the rest of Europe. The degree to which this is an issue of language is apparent in a comparable elision in the 2010 film All That Glitters. This film does not betray an attitude of straightforward admiration or condemnation towards either British or American culture like those on display in earlier examples. This is partly a function of its different positioning, as a light-hearted comedy aimed at a fairly young audience, devoid of cinephilic references betraying a pretension to auteur status. The narrative deals with a period of time spent by banlieue girls Ely (co-director Nakache) and Lila among the Parisian glitterati – as in the title – when one of them especially, Lila, masquerades as belonging to this class. The girls’ social aspirations are hinted at in an opening scene where they play a childish game of pretending to be a chat-show host (Ely) and a celebrity (Lila). What is striking about this scene is the fact that, because she does not speak English, Lila simply parrots phrases she has picked up from television interviews. The result is an acoustic approximation of the sound of English, a nonsense pastiche that foregrounds language’s status as meaningful beyond any specific referential operation. Later in the film, when the girls are playing cosmopolitan, upper middle-class roles the need to avoid speaking English in elite social situations becomes a source of humour, at social events where they are forced to avoid conversing at any length at all with anyone, giving a new vacuity to the idea of small talk. It is revealing that at one point ignorance of English is explicitly linked to a lack of education, when Ely conjectures that a flier for an exclusive party dubbed in English rather enigmatically ‘Hard-Discount party’ may be ‘a porno thing’, and one of her friends comments ungenerously: ‘You can tell you never got your Bac[calaureat]’. As in the English lessons in The Taste of Others, here British English is invoked a priori, given that this is the variety taught in French schools. However, during their earlier games of mimicry, both prosody and context suggest that the English of the celebrity and host impersonated by the girls is American. In this film the culture from which the girls are excluded is therefore conceived simply as a unified Anglo-American one. Ten years after The Taste of Others and My Wife is an Actress, in a commercially positioned film that drew nearly 1.5 million spectators to the French box office, the acquisition of American language and culture is now set up as equally desirable as that of the British versions. However, the ending is out of tune with the

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film’s comic sequences, appearing somewhat to undermine the suggestion that dialogue with the other is desirable at all. Despite the girls’ brief success in mimicking anglophone-accented sophistication, All That Glitters finally implies that pretending to be something you are not leads only to selfimplosion, as Lila temporarily sacrifices family commitments and her lifeenhancing friendship with Ely to pursue a man who remains ultimately out of her league. The final resolution suggests a return to working class values, female friendship and Frenchness (albeit a hybrid version, since Lila is of North African origin). It is left to films whose address is more truly youthoriented to embrace globalized American English in a wholly positive fashion, and through Franglais as opposed to English itself.

Youth Comedy This section examines three youth-oriented films from the second half of the 2000s that celebrate English-language borrowings or influence in French: Brice de Nice/The Brice Man (James Huth, France, 2005), LOL (Laughing Out Loud) (Lisa Azuelos, France 2008) and La Vie au ranch/Chicks (Sophie Letourneur, France, 2009). The attitude promulgated by their narratives recalls that of Franglais scholar N.C.W. Spence (1987), who compared himself to Voltaire’s Pangloss (from the Greek meaning literally ‘all talk’), not because of naive optimism but because he saw the spread of anglicisms in French as an unambiguously positive enrichment of the language. It is important to clarify the relation between characters’ point of view and the overall stance of the narrative in the context of The Brice Man, the tale of a narcissistic fantasist who believes he is a champion surfer despite being unable to surf. Comic star Jean Dujardin’s eponymous Brice (pronounced to rhyme with Nice the place, Brisse) appropriates English in a highly restricted way: he is obsessed with the cult Hollywood surfing film Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, USA/Japan, 1991), and Chion (2008: 169–70) has shown how his speech betrays a similar ‘Americamania’. For example he mimics patterns of emphasis that have come to French through dubbed American films, and most obviously pronounces his own name ‘wrongly’, in the English way so it must rhyme with ‘nice’ – a running joke since the wannabe rebel hero fails to realize the anodyne associations of this word in English. Although Brice is constructed as a cretin as anxious about French identity as Yvan of My Wife is an Actress, the film shares with its loveably gregarious protagonist a delight in the pleasures of inter-linguistic play. Catchphrases like the hero’s 154

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neologistic free-floating positive interjection ‘Kass´e!’ (from ‘casser’, primarily ‘to break’ but with a number of secondary slang uses; also note the rather anglicized preference for k ) were even appropriated by the public following its release (Anon 2008). The film and many of its spectators seem to revel in inter-linguistic hybridization. My final two examples, LOL and Chicks, feature a similar linguistic interpenetration, this time within a privileged feminized youth milieu. In both cases the directors describe the influence of teen actors’ real speech on the film’s dialogue (Anon 2009; Anon 2010), and in each the result is linguistic eclecticism, in which English and ostentatious anglicisms are combined with other neologisms, Verlan (French reverse slang) and slang in general. In LOL, the self-consciously cool schoolgirls on whom the film principally focuses routinely insert single English words into statements in a seemingly unmarked context, with referential global associations, usually where a French word would have done just as well (for example, ‘Je suis dead’ [not crev´ee] ‘I am exhausted/dead’ or ‘Elle va passer la meilleure soir´ee de sa life’ [not vie]/‘She’ll have the night of her life’). More predictably, virtual communication via text and online messaging is also a major mode of interaction here, peppered with anglicisms – as acknowledged by the title’s quotation of an acronym originating in this arena. It is the prominence of this sphere of communication, too, that most clearly advertises the broadly American origins of the English animating this film. Indeed, LOL’s construction of Britain, through a school trip sequence that has attained cult status (Frois 2009), is contrastingly derisory, as pupils descend from the coach amid deluging, charcoal skies and are greeted by a selection of wildly eccentric characters who mostly constitute dated national stereotypes (obsession with Princess Diana, fondness for extremely bland food). There is a certain irony to the fact that it is through ‘silly old’ Blighty that these teenagers consolidate the linguistic skills needed to widen their access to the Aladdin’s cave of ultramodern global culture. The more ostentatiously unconventional Chicks embraces an unstructured, pseudo-documentary take focused exclusively on a group of contemporary young female students ‘uncovered’ – interested only in friends, romance and getting drunk. This boundary-smashing ethos is particularly apparent in a memorable scene in which main protagonist Pamela, in a conversation with a pair of German boys outside a nightspot, laughingly explains (in French) that ‘I’m organising a pipiroom party [untranslated] between two crates, fancy it?’, before she and a friend proceed to find a spot to empty their bladders. The

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9.2 Franglais is a marker of cool in LOL.

phrase pipiroom party is a prime example of a Franglais invention that means nothing in English; but its anglicization makes it humorous for lending an inapposite touch of cosmopolitan sophistication to the already incongruous pairing of the ideas of a party and urination. The status of the phrase as definitively not English is also what allows Pamela to use it in front of the Germans, who speak English, and be confident that their lack of fluency in French will exclude them from the scatological joke. The latter detail underlines the chasm separating English from the French anglicisms that are becoming a regular feature of youth films, especially since the mid-2000s. Indeed the difficulties of translating the dialogue may well lie behind the fact that the films in this section – as well as All That Glitters – have barely exported at all, despite being substantial local hits (with the exception of the more cultish ultra-low budget, star-free Chicks). Instead, LOL has been entirely remade in Hollywood. This fact highlights the inextricability of comedy’s notoriously local referential flavour and the importance of language to the genre, as a source of playful humour. It also makes well the point that, regardless of their origins, additions to a language (in this case Franglais) directly enrich that particular idiom (here French).

From Anxiety to Invention: Globalizing Europeanness This survey of uses of English in French comedies since the mid-1990s bears out the suggestion that pandering to anxieties about the erosion of the French language and French culture through Anglo-American incursions can 156

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play well to French audiences. Whether such pandering consists primarily in stimulating or allaying those anxieties oscillates within single narratives, which rarely have a monolinear address. Nonetheless there is also a pattern of evolution in the kinds of attitudes towards anglophone influence most frequently interpellated by films that can be linked to the spread of globalization. The mid-1990s and early 2000s produced a pair of rom-coms that trade in denigrating globalized English (language) and mostly US culture, and championing French speech and values. The early 2000s saw the release of fish-out-of-water comedies that mediate feelings of disorientation in French culture faced with the anglophone other, also implying somewhat greater openness to that otherness, initially mediated by British English and culture constructed in terms of Old European values – a potentially less intimidating bridge to the extreme modernity of US culture. Since the target audience for such a strategy is an educated one, it is appropriate that both the films carrying out this sleight of hand are auteur pieces. Towards the end of the 2000s, in more truly mainstream films the distinction between Britain and the USA, sometimes blurred earlier, tends either to be lost (All That Glitters) or to give way to a focus on US values viewed as desirable by French characters within narratives (Brice de Nice, LOL, Chicks). These characters are at least intermittently figures of identification for audiences, while the narratives use the hybridization of English and French to elicit amusement from the spectator. We can thus trace a broad trajectory over the last 15 or so years from anxiety to invention when it comes to the spread of English and Franglais in French film comedy. Nor does the story end there. Leaving aside the issue of French films shot primarily in spoken English (see Kulyk’s chapter in this collection), deserving of a mention en route to concluding this analysis is a film whose novelty is alluded to at the start of the introduction to this collection, the French/Belgian/US co-production The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius 2011). This film looked back to silent era comedy to all but remove spoken dialogue from its score, allowing its French stars to ‘speak’ English – as befitted the Hollywood setting – through intertitles (and finally actual speech). This not only helped The Artist to win an Oscar, it also showed a new, more inclusive, approach to English – a trend arguably being continued by another feted silent European film, with minimal, easily-translateable Spanish intertitles, Blancanieves/Snow White (Pablo Berger, Spain/France/Belgium, 2012). What does all this reveal about the Europeanness of European cinema? First, it is apparent that the spread of globalization has driven French popular

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films to seek to consolidate their identity. That identity is French foremost, and so (some might say quint-)essentially European, yet both narratively and in terms of audience address it takes in new elements from across the Atlantic, in a fundamental and inextricable way. In some cases, it is apparent that financial imperatives partly motivate filmmakers to eschew aspects of European identity that might alienate broad global audiences, including language. At the same time, however – to continue the linguistic theme – it is fair to say that global values derived primarily from the USA, not least through Hollywood, are today more than ever woven into the very syntax and morphology of European identity, in cinema and beyond.

Notes 1 2

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http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/franglais?s=t (accessed 13 June 2013). This moment also updates in a ‘sophisticated’ dialogue-focused way Meg Ryan’s famous orgasm-faking scene in When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, USA, 1989), a reference underlined by similar mise-en-sc`ene; for a fuller discussion of this comparison – and of Jet Lag from a gender studies perspective – see Harrod (2012: 230–1).

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10 Laughing in Tongues: Polygot Comedy in Europe Alison Smith

In recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest in films in more than one language: ‘multilingual’, ‘plurilingual’ or ‘polyglot’. Scholars have looked at the possible reasons for a phenomenon unanimously perceived as increasing, as well as at the functions of multiple languages in films, the roles of each respective language and the problems of translation.1 From such studies a pattern of consensus is discernible regarding the polyglot corpus: it is generally agreed, for example, that although this phenomenon is not new its prevalence and significance have increased massively in the last 20 years. There also seems to be a consensus that polyglossia is not a comical matter. Chris Wahl’s ‘subgenres’ of the polyglot film are all, without exception, ‘serious’ (Wahl 2005, 2008). Lukas Bleichenbacher’s discussion of multilingual discourse in comedy forms a major part of his theory of ‘linguicism’, or endemic linguistic prejudice: ‘the notion of multilingual discourse being comical as such can easily be traced to monolingual mindsets fuelled by the “desire for pure languages and traditions”’ (2008: 29). Bleichenbacher’s reflections on multilingualism and humour give much space to the superiority theory described by Dirk Eitzen in 1999 (quoted in Bleichenbacher 2008: 29), which holds that humour is, essentially, ‘ego affirmation’. In Bleichenbacher’s description, multilingual comedy is framed as an affirmation of a ‘majority’ or ‘standard’ culture’s superiority through mockery of those who may speak its language imperfectly. In his subsequent close analysis of a corpus 159

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of exclusively Hollywood films, Bleichenbacher nuances this conclusion somewhat, only to observe that where comedy comes in multilingualism often goes out: ‘Cases where L1 speakers of other languages are ridiculed for comic effect are rare (though not inexistent), but so are humorous dialogues that are exclusively in other languages; in the movies, humor is a largely monolingual English affair’ (Bleichenbacher 2008: 221). It must be said however that Bleichenbacher’s selection of films contains an inbuilt bias against most comic genres through the parti pris of realism which he adopted. Insistence on realism reflects another regular constant of recent work on polyglot film: the privilege accorded to what Carol O’Sullivan (2011: 20, quoting Sternberg 1981) calls ‘vehicular matching’ (that is ‘matching the languages of the characters in the story world’ for purposes of realism) as a motive for polyglossia. Wahl considers a realist approach practically a requirement for the genre (2008: 335). However the absurdity that popular comedy revels in sits uneasily with realism. This choice of criterion seems to confirm suspicion that theorists of multilingualism tend to be serious-minded, and, following Eitzen at least in spirit, distrust comedy. In this chapter we look at examples of comic films that, while operating a kind of ‘vehicular matching’, belie all three of the assumptions mentioned above. They are comedies, and popular comedies at that; they are not recent; and their linguistic strategy is not, or not principally, determined by realism. I want, in short, to look at the ways in which European polylingualism was orchestrated for fun, at the end of the 1960s and 1970s, by Jacques Tati (extremely well-known) and Tage Danielsson and Hans Alfredsson (a Swedish duo, usually known collectively as Hasse˚atage, who have near-cult status in Scandinavia but are much too little known elsewhere). It is not difficult to find examples of polyglot, or at least bilingual, situations providing comedy fare. Examples of situations where an ‘interpretative scenario’ gives rise to comedy of misunderstanding (see O’Sullivan 2011: 91) can be found in comedies made well before the current presumed golden age of cinematic polyglossia. Moreover linguistic incompetence need not always be on the side of the ‘foreign’ speakers to be funny. Some of the linguistic strategies used effectively against the Americans in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (USA/Germany, 2009) (which may not exactly be a comedy, but which undoubtedly uses its linguistic complexities for comic effect) had already been tried and tested by G´erard Oury in the phenomenally popular 1966 French comedy La Grande vadrouille (France/UK), where the French and British characters’ inability to pass as German reflects their

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inappropriateness to the resistance drama they are involved in, and where French and English are mutually mangled, mixed and mimicked as the two groups try to communicate. Linguistically, La Grande vadrouille is more broadminded and imaginative than the majority of serious war dramas of the mid-twentieth century. Rather than mocking the English or the Germans for their incompetence in French, or ignoring this incompetence in favour of making humour ‘a largely monolingual affair’, or even providing comic mistranslations, it is a film that seems actively to enjoy the challenges that code-switching poses its characters, as well as the distinctive aural profiles of the languages involved. These include both anglicized French (as spoken by Terry-Thomas) and gallicized English (by Bourvil). The languages interact and bounce off each other. When Lefort (Louis de Fun`es) mimics Sir Reginald (Terry-Thomas), or when Lefort and Augustin Bouvet (Bourvil) successfully manage to pose for a few minutes as Germans in conversation with each other, comprehension is no longer even in question: they merely make sounds, which mean nothing, and yet are recognizable as being English and German respectively. This attention to the sound of linguistic diversity is an unusual and refreshing source of linguistic comedy, perhaps most usefully conceptualized in Michel Abecassis’ concept of polyphony (2012: 33), where languages are ‘comparable to various melodies which are at the same time independent and harmoniously linked’. The pleasures of polyphony, I will argue, are fundamental to any accessible celebration of language diversity, and essential to the comedies of Tati and Hasse˚atage, which develop it much further than does the mainstream La Grande vadrouille. Abecassis presents polyphony in an interlingual context, but his principal interest soon diverges towards intralingual variation: ‘Polyphony does not necessarily imply people are using the same language, but the emphasis is more on the harmonious interweaving of voices than on the many languages that are spoken’ (2012: 33). Of course, since polyphonic use of the linguistic mix gives a particularly high priority to sound, the distinction between the intra- and the inter-linguistic is even more fluid than usual. In Tati and Hasse˚atage, however, polyphony is unambiguously polyglot. Priority is given to ‘harmonious interweaving’ rather than to any form of the ‘superiority principle’, but the emphasis is firmly on the European language mix and its implications in terms of national and cultural difference in a multinational narrative context. These are films in which the dominant or source language tends to be subsumed in the linguistic mix, giving rise to a celebratory

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orchestration of Babel. The proliferation of languages is proposed as a simple, largely unmediated aural pleasure for the audience, which subtitles cannot and even need not transmit – although, as we shall see, the pleasure is enhanced for those willing to listen carefully and able to access a little of the meaning. These, in fact, are comedies which actively encourage their audience’s linguistic abilities. The result is to negotiate a space within popular culture which is transnational – specifically, European – without being ‘globalized’ in the homogenizing sense in which this word is often understood. Here we have the outlines of a popular cinema which flaunts the pleasures of distinctiveness while questioning boundaries and borders.

Tati: Lost in Babel Jacques Tati, it seems, has become a byword for someone whose work can transcend European boundaries. In an article on the legal aspects of broadcasting quotas in the EU, Richard Collins quotes an unnamed UK official’s response to the issue of European protectionism and the possible introduction of quotas for European material on national TV: ‘We can’t expect them to screen Jacques Tati films the whole time’ (1992: 369, 379). Collins considers this quote so vivid that he repeats it twice, as well as using it as the title for his article, and, presumably, he sees it as part of a potential response to the question he raises in his conclusion: ‘do modern societies hold together better on the basis of an acceptance of diversity and loose pluralism, or on a strong normative unity?’ (1992: 385). Yet he never precisely says what point on the spectrum he believes Tati to represent, perhaps because the question is indeed inherent in Tati’s work. One might suggest that Tati’s films, particularly through their linguistic mix, construct a position of ‘strong normative diversity’. To look at how this functions, we will here consider Playtime (France/Italy, 1967), the film that is perhaps Tati’s masterpiece – although admittedly not a great popular success on release – since it is here that his linguistic play reaches its most sophisticated effect. Jacques Tatischeff came relatively late in life to the entertainment world, after trying various occupations with varying success. His biographer David Bellos observes that ‘by descent . . . he was a European cocktail, part Italian, part Russian, part Dutch and part French’ but that he spoke no Russian, at most a little Dutch, and that ‘throughout his life . . . [he] seemed to others and to himself as French as garlic sausage’ (1999: 5). Perhaps so, but as Bellos also observes, interviewers and critics often emphasized the ‘Russian origins’ 162

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of Tati’s name, so some interested others at least were eager to see him as transcending the borders of France. And while the persona he created for himself does indeed often seem a concentration of traditional French values, his films tell a more complex story in which his awkward, largely silent character bumbles engagingly (and with engagement) through a multitude of varied voices and influences. If Tati’s alter ego Hulot is a national figure, his world is multinational; and if he represents ‘normative unity’, it is the better to set off the context of ‘diversity and loose pluralism’ that, despite his puzzlement, he welcomes for the unexpected encounters it can offer him. This European ensemble is already brought into play around Hulot in Les Vacances de M. Hulot/Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (France, 1953), set on the coast of northern France, traditionally a melting-pot for cosmopolitan privileged leisure. In Playtime, however, the babble of Babel has become more clearly contemporary, the background to the business of consumer society. According to Michel Chion, ‘Even from its choice of title the film declares the total internationalization of a world where English rules as the universal language of exchange and commerce’ (1987: 47), but while English is indeed one of the principal languages present in the hypermodern Tativille, it is only one among many. Out of the ambient buzz there surface English and French, but also German, Italian and Japanese, as well as language mixtures, utterances whose lexical and phonological content conflict, and so on. For Chion, the effect of this mingling of languages is to homogenize the whole into a sort of nondescript Ur-language: ‘[ . . . ] languages mutually cancel each other out: language seems to be merely a contingency [ . . . ] there are just scraps, shards of a lost original language, incomparably more universal’ (1987: 47). One should, however, be wary of assuming that in Tati’s work individual details can ever be subsumed. This hyper-French cosmopolitan is both fascinated by and deeply suspicious of the homogeneous and the universal, and the ‘strong normative unity’ he presents is always ready to fragment into ‘diversity and loose pluralism’, in which small unities each play their singular part. We would argue that it is not true, even within the diegesis, that language is pure contingency or that individual changes are frictionless. Tati’s sound tactic, well-known and comparable to his visual style, is to present a highly orchestrated apparent chaos which forces the audience to pay close attention and guarantees in return that this attention will be rewarded. The closer you look and listen, the more ready you are to extract details from the general ebb and flow of movement and sound, and the richer and more varied, not to mention funnier, the film-world seems.

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Consider the episode of the door salesmen in Playtime. Monsieur Hulot, exploring the Ideal Home exhibition, is mistaken for another idler who has just stolen some papers from a stall selling doors, whose (aural) gimmick is that they can be slammed silently. The German stall manager is determined to take his suspect to task, so he pounces on the uncomprehending Hulot, sits him down and subjects him to an ironic and irate sales-talk as a preliminary to calling him a thief. In this little cell of the vast exhibition space three languages meet: the salesmen speak spontaneously in German, mixing it with French when necessary, their customers speak French, while the stall itself presides over them with English-language signage. Around them the vast swirl of the exhibition throws out ‘shards’ of English (American and British varieties), Japanese and French. It is left very much to the audience’s discretion how much of all this they take the trouble to hear: the most useful information tends to be given in French, but gesture is more vital yet, and from a purely pragmatic narrative viewpoint, assuming minimal visual attention, one might argue that none of it is essential: viewers might be content to hear merely a babble and to watch the expressive gestures. However, much of the enjoyment of the situation comes from paying attention to the orchestration of that babble, the particularly effective crescendo of annoyance expressed by the stallholder’s rapid switching between German and French, the murmuring French and exclamatory RP English in the booth next door, the polite puzzlement registered by M. Hulot when caught in an unpredictable tangle of sounds only some of which offer him signposts to appropriate reactions. The fact of language mix is important, as we are informed by Hulot’s perplexity, or by the passage of an advertising slogan from written English to spoken French. The sound of language mix is important, contributing tone and depth and ironically undermining the pretensions of this firm whose proudest claim is to have ‘studied silence’. And, inevitably, the more the audience pays attention the more chance they have of picking up a gag, like the irate manager’s parting shot, ‘Dummkopf! (Fathead!)’ as he slams his silent door in Hulot’s face. This is apparently as inaudible to Hulot as is the door itself, but hopefully not so to the attentive audience, whose willingness to listen to the man’s Germench is thus rewarded with a word whose very sound is funny and whose meaning is obvious. This kind of ‘hidden reward’ is a characteristic of Tati’s style, visual as well as aural; in this case, however, the spectator is rewarded not merely for paying attention, but for successfully negotiating a language boundary. If this does perhaps, in its small way, offer the audience the pleasure of

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10.1 M. Hulot gets an earful in Playtime.

‘ego affirmation’ as described by Bleichenbacher, it is not the affirmation of the superiority of the ‘standard culture’ (here presumably French) over the foreign, nor of a surreptitiously tipped-off audience encouraged by the prompting of subtitles to laugh at a character who has to manage without them. Instead, the sense of affirmation comes from having successfully slipped below the universal surface of the exhibition’s business-talk and captured the mischief in its diversity. If we had already stopped listening closely to the sound of German – a minority language in the film, without content significant enough to be subtitled – we wouldn’t have heard that. Of course, this wouldn’t have mattered unduly – there is no corresponding displeasure in missing individual gags. But, once we know that there is fun to be had in German, we might just keep our ears open in future. This example indicates how Tati’s multilingual soundtrack provides the audience with incentives to engage with its diversity with open minds and open ears, as well as an alertness to language. We may suspect, on this evidence, that if we spoke a little more German than ‘Dummkopf ’, we might catch more quirky remarks in this background language. An English-speaking audience may derive pleasure from the connotations attached to the ‘posh’ English accent of the customer on the neighbouring stall and interpret his reactions accordingly. Just as we soon learn to watch closely the large number of characters moving across the screen at any given moment, as even the most insignificant may do something amusing, so we should be alert for the 165

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energizing sharpness of some of those language ‘shards’ which tear the fabric of universal communication.

˚ Hasseatage: Putting Sweden into Europe Jacques Tati, of course, is one of the most innovative sound designers in European cinema and an exception: it may well be true that no-one has pushed experiment in the sounds of languages quite so far. However, he is not the only ‘national’ comedian to experiment with the celebratory use of language in an international context in the 1960s and 1970s. In the second part of this chapter I discuss Picassos Aventyr/The Adventures of Picasso (Sweden, 1978), the last film made by Hasse˚atage. Household names in Scandinavia, this duo seem practically unknown elsewhere. I have yet to find any serious analysis of their work in English, and apparently even in Swedish little is available (Larsson and Marklund 2010: 11).2 Yet their films regularly attracted over a million spectators at home, while quotations from Danielsson can be found introducing all sorts of Scandinavian-sourced scholarly articles on topics from linguistics to molecular biology. Their careers began as broadcasters on Swedish television and radio and their production company was significantly called ‘Swedish Words’ (Svenska Ord). Their brand of film comedy arguably has some affiliation with Tati’s, in that it combines dialogue with sight-gags and gestural comedy, so that it is possible to follow, and laugh at, their Swedish work even without understanding the dialogue; but in addition they regularly play with language and accents. In general, it is within the Scandinavian ambit that their linguistic jokes play out, although in 1965 they exported a shortened version of their variety show, translated into English, to the Montreux Jazz Festival, including a number of sketches dealing directly with translation and with the difficulty of being Swedish in an international context, or vice versa. Some of these sketches, for example the ‘Oh Sweet Dream’ sequence, available on YouTube, are still challenging today and belie their rather consensual reputation (Soila 1992: 224).3 The Adventures of Picasso represents a much more sustained bid for a European profile: made with an eye on the export market and distributed across Europe and in the USA, it remains the most likely of Hasse˚atage’s titles to be recognized outside Scandinavia. It offers an exceptionally imaginative response to the problem of exporting national comedy from a ‘peripheral’ area – cinematically, geographically, politically, but most of all linguistically – and of negotiating its place in a broad continental culture without either

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resorting to exaggerated regional peculiarity or simply submitting to a different hegemonic cultural space. Picasso is a European film, but one that constantly reminds us that its Europe is a performance. First, Hasse˚atage adopt a European subject, a famous and instantly recognizable figure whose life involved persistent border-crossing. Without leaving Sweden – indeed, barely leaving the small town of Tomelilla, where Danielsson and Alfredsson, like Tati, maintained their own studios and constructed all their sets – the film recounts, through a series of sketches, a version of Picasso’s life from his youth in Spain to his death in the South of France, spanning his travels in Spain, France and the USA, his life in France across two world wars, and his encounters with a wide variety of international characters including Gertrude Stein, Sergei Diaghilev, the Douanier Rousseau and Salvador Dal´ı, not to mention an affair with a Finnish singer. The tone of these sketches is surreal and accurate biography is not the aim of the exercise – although they remain surprisingly true to perceptions of the era and to Picasso’s art. The choice of subject places the film firmly within a European cultural framework. However, given the stationary film-set, Europeanness becomes a theatrical representation of Europe (and, indeed, America), in which Sweden, the source of the film, the site of filming, but no part of Picasso’s adventures, remains constantly both visible and invisible, always masquerading as another place and time. The masquerade is constructed using a vast visual vocabulary of referents: for our purposes, however, it is of particular interest that it extends to the soundtrack, in which languages, with their distinctive sounds, play a central role. In all, the sketches in the film make use of seven, the vast majority unsubtitled (in the ‘English version’, there are no subtitles at all): Spanish, French, English, German, Italian, Finnish and Latin. (There is also a passage of pseudo-Russian, entirely dependent on phonetic illusion.) The source-language, Swedish, is not spoken in the ‘film-world’. Apart from the languages spoken by the characters, though, the film is held together by an off-screen narrator, who provides a frame-story, explanations and sarcastic comments on the action. This narrator is also a character in the story, invariably a woman played by a male actor, and his/her identity and language vary according to which film one is watching, for five versions were produced in different languages. Thus, for a Swedish audience, the distinguished actor Toivo Pawlo narrates under the guise of the author and illustrator Elsa Beskow. Pawlo/Beskow does not appear in the film, but in the English version Bernard Cribbins plays Gertrude Stein both on screen

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and as the narrator, suggesting that this was planned as the most significant exportable version. (The English dialogue is also the only intradiegetic language given subtitles in other versions.) Although I can only find evidence of five narration-tracks recorded, in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, English and French, in theory the system could have been extended to any country where the film’s likely distribution seemed to warrant it. The verbal narrative content of the film – everything that it is essential to know – is provided by the narrator, who will therefore probably be assumed by audiences to be the representative of the film’s source-culture, further hiding its Swedishness outside Sweden. The narrators, however, are so ostentatiously part of a masquerade that their language is unlikely to be received as hegemonic or ‘superior’ to others: they are merely mediators. In Picasso’s world, by contrast, it is the linguistic diversity of Europe that we hear. The languages are first of all sound-signs, illustrations of the aural variability of the continent. With the exception of some exchanges in the American section – subtitled for Swedish audiences – it is not narratively necessary to understand them. Nonetheless one ploy used by the authors is to reduce a language to a few fairly simple words and phrases which are likely to be familiar to the audience, giving a pleasurable illusion of understanding. This is the strategy adopted in the first, Spanish, sections of the film, where the audience are fed easily digestible morsels of Spanish, rather like students at our first beginners’ Spanish class. ‘Yo, Pap´a!’, cries Pablo’s delighted father (Hans Alfredsson) at his birth; when the boy first shows signs of artistic talent, ‘Pablo, eres un genio!’ rejoices his parent. By the time Pablo leaves for France, the sentences have got a little longer and the situation a little crazier, and we’re still following the gist. Pablo’s first ‘adventure’ in Paris jokes about this strategy, as he resorts to ever more desperate mimes to try to explain to a prospective French landlady what ‘agua’ is (and find out if it’s available in her barren attic room): only after all uses of water have been energetically represented does light eventually dawn and the landlady say with a broad smile ‘Oh – agua! . . . Non’. Subsequently, the film’s games become more complex. Simple phrases continue to appear, but not always in straightforwardly relevant ways. The French are given to exclaiming ‘Sacr´e coeur!’, for example – which sounds like a plausible French exclamation to those with limited French proficiency, but slightly funnier if you know it is not quite right. Sentences become more elaborate. Puns begin to make their appearance, accessible only to speakers of the language in question even if it is subtitled. Thus although English is

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10.2 Multilingualism as performative gesture: Pablo’s elemental mime in The Adventures of Picasso.

generally subtitled for Swedes, Cribbins/Stein’s putdown to her companion, ‘Alice, be talkless’, is left to the audience to catch; it nonetheless became one of the film’s best-known phrases in Scandinavia. Words and sounds are mixed up, reflecting the characters’ uprootedness: Gertrude Stein peppers her English with inaccurate Franglais – again, unsubtitled for Swedes – while Picasso and, even more prominently, his father at times speak ‘all languages and none’, like Salvatore in The Name of the Rose, highlighting thereby principally their adaptability and resourcefulness. The mixtures give rise to bilingual puns: the Swedish audience, starved of their own language in the official narration, were thus delighted to hear Picasso senior, temporarily in the guise of a German officer (Alfredsson’s father-figure is a loveable rogue who adapts to all circumstances) shout ‘Halvliter! (Half-litre)’ in place of ‘Heil Hitler!’, winking to an audience able to catch the joke, subverting his current role and, once again, signalling masquerade. There are thus any number of variants of fairly simple linguistic interventions decipherable as jokes in different ways to an alert audience with an ear for language. Not all such interludes are brief or simple, however. There are cases of substantial, unsubtitled passages, albeit in the kind of specific circumstances where many mainstream films will countenance the appearance of secondary languages. At a funeral, for example, the priest gives a Latin oration; and, when Picasso becomes smitten with an exotic Finnish nightclub singer, we hear her song in extenso, indeed, eventually ad nauseam. Does it matter whether we understand or not? Catholic priests at funerals speak Latin, night-club singers sing; the sounds, with their slightly exotic 169

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ring, contribute to the aura of their particular circumstances and are often unsubtitled in films. They provide pleasure in the fact of language. But a classically educated listener can, eventually, detect that the priest is reciting Ovid, and at that point a further incongruity is added to the already peculiar situation. If you know that the Finnish girl’s erotic song is a recipe for fish pie – or after somebody’s told you – the pleasure is certainly greater, and it adds further amusement to the young lady’s insistence on singing it in all circumstances, until it becomes, literally, indigestible. These in-jokes are decidedly inaccessible, except to very select audiences: but the sequences in which they appear are visually funny anyway, so there is no serious deprivation involved. If anything, the suspicion that there may be an extra layer of linguistic humour hidden in such passages may prod one into further investigation. In other words, the film, like Playtime, provides a variety of small rewards to those who know something of its languages while never leaving those who do not feeling left out of the fun. The more you listen to languages you half-know – the case, I assume, for many viewers faced with the English here – the more chance you have of catching the puns and the mistranslations: thus in the American section the Swedish version offers Swedes with some ear for Brooklyn English bilingual amusement by ‘translating’ a prosecutor’s hard-boiled profanities into a mild Swedish reproach. Both Jacques Tati and Hasse˚atage thus work a multilingual environment into their comedy as a means to undermine rather than to reinforce hierarchies and homogenization. The crossing languages of Tativille offer a network of cracks in the smooth globalized surface of the city, the kind of cracks which let the light in; the more we fragment, the more fun we can have. The Adventures of Picasso makes the pitfalls and pratfalls of language negotiation fun, for audience, actors and characters, and revels in the rich variation the languages of Europe afford. Neither film gives any ostentatious preference to a ‘source-language’; indeed, Hasse˚atage’s narration strategy always makes the source language merely mediatory, and removes it outside Sweden. Neither film demands linguistic ability as a condition for finding them funny. The rich visual humour, and the care taken to ensure that narration is clear, mean the pleasure of polyglossia is first of all aural and accessible to all. On the other hand, though, both films transmit their evident love of language play by giving clear clues as to how enriching every small widening of one’s linguistic horizons may be.

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1 2

3

See for example Wahl (2005, 2008), Bleichenbacher (2008), Sanaker (2008), O’Sullivan (2011), Berger & Komori (2012). The author would like to thank Alissa Timoshkina for her generous attempts to decipher ‘Diaghilev’s babble’. For information on Hasse˚atage’s significance in Scandinavia and pointers to some of their television work on YouTube, I am indebted to Waldemar Hepstein, whose enthusiasm for multilingual laughter also provided welcome encouragement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgSt3pSkup4 (accessed 4 September 2013).

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Notes

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11 The Use of English in European Feature Films: Unity in Diversity? La¨etitia Kulyk

Contemporary debates about cultural diversity versus homogenization are reflected in cinema, where the use of the English language in non-anglophone contexts can be considered symptomatic of the move towards greater uniformity in Europe. The following study seeks to examine to what extent English language usage is in fact becoming more standardized in European feature films.

Methodology The assessment of the increasing use of English in feature films is based on a quantitative analysis summarizing film production and distribution between 1990 and 2010 inclusive in Nordic and a selection of ‘control’ countries, such as France, Greece, the Netherlands and Spain. These markets were chosen because they have been deemed to represent a relatively fair comparative basis with respect to their levels of production, their situation in Europe, their structural similarities and differences1 and/or their citizens’ average degree of proficiency in English. Sources used to draw the comparison mainly derive from national film institutes, the European Audiovisual Observatory and Mediasalles, which provide comprehensive statistics about cinema in Europe. Figures for nations’ total feature film production are drawn from those organizations’ databases. I then used the IMDb database to determine the language(s) in which films were shot. The reliability of this source is not 173

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absolute as the database is updated by users; however, it has the advantage of detailing a broad range of films, even those with limited distribution. Another variable to take into account in the data is my decision to award films one point if they are filmed entirely in English and 0.5 points if English and another one or more language(s) are spoken. The total number of films in English per year thus encompasses various types of films, either completely or partly shot in English. Equally important is the fact that, within a single country, films may figure in a particular year’s annual tally whether they were or were not produced or released in that year. If both sources were available, film release has been preferred, as a superior measure of public circulation in a given year. In France, for instance, film production figures were used till 2003, after which year detailed release dates became available. Finally, the number of films that were analysed has been recorded as ‘total films’ on the graph. Official figures published by Mediasalles or national film institutes might be higher. This is the case for my earlier cited example: Mediasalles announced a total production of 213 for France in 2003, while the total number of films found and analyzed was 171. The same is true that year for Spain: although Mediasalles announced a total of 110 films, my research turned up only 91. This is no doubt due to the recognition in the Mediasalles figures of films other than full-length features films (i.e. shorts), which were not taken into account in this study.

The Data Graph 11.1 shows the results of my study. The bars corresponding to the left-hand scale indicate the number of films in English produced by particular countries, while the line sitting mostly above these and corresponding to the right-hand scale shows the total films produced by all the countries included in the study. The survey shows a clear increase in the use of the English language, especially striking from 2003 onwards. The increase was minimal until 2002 since the markets underwent a parallel increase in production. The drop in film production in 2003, coupled with the stable number of films in English in relation to the beginning of the 2000s, increased the ratio of films in English to overall production.2 Production both in total and in English then went up again in 2004.3 From a comparatively stable base of below 30 per year the number of English films suddenly rose to above 30 in 2006 and 174

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600

45 500 40

35 400

25

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20

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Films in English

30

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200 15

10 100 5

0

0 1990

1992 1994 1996 1998 Finnish Films in English Swedish Films in English Spanish Films in English Dutch Films in English French Films in English

2000

2002

2004 2006 2008 2010 Norwegian Films in English Icelandic Films in English Greek Films in English Danish Films in English Total Production

Graph 11.1 Films shot in English in nine European countries from 1990 to 2010 (Sources: Mediasalles, National film institutes and film databases)

to above 45 in 2008, a rise that was maintained up until the end of the period of study in 2010. At the beginning of the 1990s, the use of English seemed to be centred on only a few countries (mainly Spain, the Netherlands and Greece), before the trend expanded in the following years to encompass many more territories. This change was matched by a rise in the proportion of English being used in individual nations’ productions. At the beginning of the 1990s, six or fewer countries produced films in English; by the 2000s, six had become 175

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a minimum. Also remarkable is the growth in English-production in Nordic countries from the mid-1990s. Up until then, only one or two films per year were from a Nordic country, mostly from Iceland, Denmark or Sweden. Afterwards their number increased: up to seven in Sweden in 2006, up to four in Denmark in 2008. Even more remarkable is the fact that most countries had at least one title per year – indeed, from 2008 to 2010 the five Nordic countries all produced at least one film in English. Equally striking is the trend that sees small countries increasingly use English as regularly as larger ones. Taken as a proportion of their overall production, this phenomenon is more indicative of a shift. Indeed, in small countries4 (the Nordic nations plus Greece and the Netherlands) the total proportion of films in English fluctuated between 1.14 per cent (in 1990) and 10.71 per cent (in 2002), while in larger countries this same proportion was between 1.14 per cent (in 1991) and 11.78 per cent (in 2005). What is also apparent is that these proportions increased drastically during the 2000s. In the 1990s, the proportion of English-language production was on average 4 per cent in small countries and 3.97 per cent in larger ones; the maximum reached in the 1990s was 6.14 per cent (1999) and 7.33 per cent (1996) respectively. In the 2000s, on average, small countries produced 8.86 per cent of their films in English and other nations 8.31 per cent. The percentage figures have thus more or less doubled in both cases. What also used to be a maximum in the 1990s became close to a minimum in the 2000s, with minimum proportions of films in English in small countries 5.73 per cent (2000) and 4.75 per cent in big ones (2002). In the last ten years, the increase in films in English has mostly occurred in Spain, France and the Netherlands, roughly in proportion to their yearly production.5 At the end of the 2000s, Iceland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain and France dominate in offering a substantial proportion of films in English. Overall, Graph 11.1 reveals two trends: there has indeed been an increase in the use of English in European feature films, especially in the 2000s. This is all the more noticeable given that the total number of films produced or released dropped in 2003. The increase is nevertheless divided across two groups of countries: first, major film-producing nations, which in the 1990s were already producing films in English and whose share of films in English is, as I will shortly demonstate, more likely to correspond to higher budget films; and secondly, small countries, which it may be surmised exploit English in order to broaden their potential markets, in the absence of the draw offered by higher production values.

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I will now look in more detail at the question of what types of film are being made in English in different European countries. If we look more specifically at the titles of films shot 100 per cent in English, it is apparent that most tend to be high-budget fare, conceived for mass audiences, and that often they are co-productions. One of the characteristics of co-productions is that they are considered national productions by all participating nations and consequently benefit from local incentives in all partners’ territories. In small film-producing nations, then, English has tended to be used either because of its status as a lingua franca, for the practical purpose of co-production between multilingual groups of nations, or with a view to globalizing the potential reach of an already successful director or initiative.6 Regarding the latter impetus, in Denmark, for example, this has occurred especially from around the late 1990s. In the 1990s, only a few films were shot in English, among them The House of Spirits (Bille August, Germany/Denmark/Portugal/ United States, 1993), Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier, Denmark/Sweden/ France/Netherlands, 1996) and Øen i fuglegaden/The Island on Bird Street (Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, Denmark/Germany/Great Britain, 1997). Bille August’s multinational co-production was directed off the back of the success of Pelle erobreren/Pelle the Conqueror (Denmark/Sweden, 1987), which had won a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1988. Von Trier and Kragh-Jacobsen also started to enjoy worldwide visibility with these early films and their following involvement in the Dogme movement. Unlike The House of Spirits, their films were not conceived for global release or an international career. They nevertheless signalled the beginning of a fashion for using English in co-productions involving many of the same territories much more regularly in the 2000s.7 Considering from a similar perspective English-language films produced in Iceland, these are again generally made by directors who have already experienced success abroad or are generally operating within the framework of co-production agreements. This is the case for Fririk Þo´ r Fririksson, who attained visibility thanks to his second feature, B¨orn n´att´urunnar/Children of Nature (Iceland/Germany/Norway, 1991), nominated as the best foreign language film at the Oscars (1991), and Dagur K´ari, whose N´oi alb´ın´oi/Noi the Albino (Iceland/Germany/Great Britain/Denmark, 2003) was an international arthouse hit.8 Countries with high levels of yearly production (for instance Spain and France, where annual totals are over 100 and 150 titles respectively)

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enjoy more flexibility, in the sense that they are able to maintain a highly national production sector, to produce films in national or regional languages alongside films in English. Titles thus reflect different categories of films, among which the most visible are high-budget genre films, conceived as blockbusters intended for an international market (Le cinqui`eme e´l´ement/The Fifth Element [Luc Besson, France, 1997], Jeanne d’Arc/Joan of Arc [Luc Besson, France, 1999] and Oliver Twist [Roman Polanski, France/Czech Republic/Great Britain, 2005] for France or The Others [Alejandro Amen´abar, Spain/United States, 2001] and Darkness [ Jaume Balaguer´o, Spain, 2002] for Spain). The use of English in French films is most prevalent in a specific section of film production. In an article on European co-production strategies, Anne J¨ackel quotes an official for Unifrance (the agency promoting French cinema abroad) who claimed at the end of the 1980s that films in English such as L’Ours/The Bear ( Jean-Jacques Annaud, France, 1988) or Le Grand bleu/ The Big Blue (Luc Besson, France, 1988) seemed ‘to bear out the logic of France producing a handful of costly international pictures a year’ ( J¨ackel 1996: 88–9). Today, most of those films are co-productions: indeed, the majority of French films shot 100 per cent in English during 2009 and 2010 were co-produced (The Tree [ Julie Bertuccelli, France/Australia, 2010], Miral [ Julian Schnabel, France/Israel/Italy/India, 2010], The Ghost-Writer [Roman Polanski, France/Germany/Great Britain 2010], The Good Heart [Dagur K´ari, France/Iceland/Germany/Denmark/United States, 2009] and In the Electric Mist [Bertrand Tavernier, France/United States, 2009]). The success of the films cited may indeed be linked to language but it no doubt also depends on the type of film in question. Most Englishlanguage French features are action films, starring international actors. The ‘added value’ of English in these circumstances is difficult to determine. Does English really contribute to success or is it only part of the stereotyped idea of what a blockbuster should be? Counter-examples of French-language success stories complicate the picture only somewhat. For example, Le Fabuleux destin d’Am´elie Poulain/Amelie ( Jean-Pierre Jeunet 2001), despite being a comedy shot in French, was released succesfully in most European territories and in the United States, where it attracted more than 5.9 million to cinemas. The two chapters of the action films Mesrine (Mesrine, l’instinct de mort/Mesrine: Killer Instinct, Jean-Franc¸ois Richet, France/Canada/Italy, 2007, and L’ennemi public n◦ 1/Mesrine: Part 2 – Public Enemy #1, Jean-Franc¸ois Richet, France/Canada,

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2008), meanwhile, achieved more than 4.3 million admissions in Europe, but were only released in the United States through a few film festivals. It is instructive to compare these with Luc Besson’s action films The Fifth Element and Joan of Arc, both shot in English, which achieved more than 13.6 and 2.7 million admissions respectively at the US box office.9 Box office takings for films in English are in general higher than for films in national languages. A national hit shot in the national language and distributed overseas can be successful but its market penetration is generally inferior to that of Englishlanguage films. What this reveals is that, even if it is not a direct guarantee of success overseas, English generally boosts a film’s international career in cases where the film has already proven its commercial potential locally. Results show, in sum, a clear distinction between major and minor territories. In the latter, films in English are intended for wider distribution than domestic and rely on the existing success of a particular director or movement. Their budgets are generally lower than those of films produced by large territories; however, they rank at the top of national budgets. For instance, Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, Denmark/France/Sweden/Germany/Norway/Netherlands/Iceland, 2000), with an international cast, was one of the most expensive films ever shot in Denmark. In France and Spain, English is used in more than one category of films, either blockbusters or smaller productions. However, there remains a clear emphasis on the production of high-budget films in English for the international market. In both large and small countries films intended for the international market are in general co-productions.

Conclusion The results of this study clearly question the idea of diversity that both national and European policies are committed to promoting. The countries investigated here fit into the ambivalent scheme of globalization: on the one hand, they respond to their national film policies and conform to the definition of what a national film should be, while on the other they contribute to the homogenization of filmic output by producing films in English that also often emulate mainstream models. This survey represents a first step in what is potentially a considerably wider enquiry. For example, studying more countries would enable clearer 179

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profiles of the types of countries using English to be drawn; there is space for a linguistic analysis of the types of English used by the films in question, as well as for an audience reception analysis of those films; questions remain about the best criteria by which to judge whether a film is principally in English; and the impact of the use of English on films’ international distribution could also be investigated. These questions become more pressing as the trend for using English in European feature films looks set to continue.

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Structural similarities and differences include the ways in which film production and distribution are organized in each country, through specific institutes which are more or less independent from ministries of culture and education, but also the level of importance attached to cinema by different nations. For example, due to low admissions, government policy in Greece, the Netherlands and some Nordic countries places little emphasis on cinema. The drop in production in 2003 is probably connected to a decrease in low and medium budget films and a possible diversification of types of films. It also appears exaggerated because of my decision to switch to surveying films released rather than films produced in France, but nonetheless there has definitely been a general drop in film production in the countries investigated. From that year, films released rather than those produced in France were surveyed, representing between 30 and 50 films more per year. This difference may arise from the fact that co-productions might not always be listed as French initiatives as early as at the production stage. ‘Small countries’ refers both to population and to the fact that these nations are responsible for a small proportion of European film production. Scrutinizing French production and relying on official releases may partly account for the large increase in that territory: films in English represented six out of 167 films produced in 2004, while films released in English represented 22 out of 194 titles in the same year; the same trend continues in 2005 (3.5 out of 143 films produced and 20.5 out of 194 released) and subsequent years. A study carried out by the European Audiovisual Observatory in 2008 shows, unsurprisingly, that the release of films outside their national markets bears directly on international admissions and all the more so for co-productions. These include Dancer in the Dark, The King is Alive (Kristian Levring, Denmark/ Sweden/USA, 2000), Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself (Lone Scherfig, Denmark/Great Britain, 2002), It’s All About Love (Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark/USA/Sweden/ Great Britain/Japan/Germany/Netherlands, 2003), Dogville (Lars von Trier,

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Denmark/France/Sweden/Netherlands/Germany/Norway/Great Britain, 2003), Dear Wendy (Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark/France/Germany/Great Britain, 2005), Antichrist (Lars vonTrier, Denmark/Germany/France/Sweden/Italy, 2009) and Valhalla Rising (Nicolas Winding Refn, Denmark/Great Britain, 2010). They have subsequently directed two films in English to date: Næsland/ Niceland (Fririk Þo´ r Fririksson, Iceland/Germany/Denmark/Great Britain, 2004) and The Good Heart (Dagur K´ari, France/Iceland/Germany/Denmark/USA, 2009). European Audiovisual Observatory, Lumi`ere database.

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12 Paris je t’aime (plus) : Europhobia as Europeanness in Luc Besson and Pierre Morel’s Dystopia Trilogy Neil Archer

This chapter focuses on three films produced and co-written by Luc Besson and directed by Pierre Morel: Banlieue 13/District 13 (France, 2004), Taken (France/USA, 2008) and From Paris with Love (France/USA, 2010). The films, fairly expensive by European standards,1 and targeted for international distribution, were produced by Besson’s company Europacorp, and largely set and filmed in Paris. This took place during a period – the first decade of the present century – in which the French capital, already one of the world’s most filmed cities, was enjoying a resurgence of interest within European cinema. Recent Paris-set films, many of them co-productions, have frequently emphasized the city’s signifying status within global film production and consumption, as indicated by the presence of the city’s name in various titles: Paris je t’aime (Olivier Assayas et al, France, 2006), Dans Paris/ In Paris (Christophe Honor´e, France/Portugal, 2006), 2 Days in Paris ( Julie Delpy, France/Germany, 2007), Paris (C´edric Klapisch, France, 2008) and Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, Spain/USA, 2011). To a large extent, these films bring an ironic and sometimes parodic view to bear on the tourist imaginary of the city: one that sees Paris as a cinematic site of romance, renewal and inspiration. This critical view is nevertheless inseparable from the affection these films re-inscribe, in the sense that the 185

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city’s complexity and tension are what make it romantic and alluring for their protagonists (Archer 2011). On the face of it, neither critical irony nor affection have much place in the Besson-Morel films: as Sue Harris notes in her review of From Paris with Love, in place of the romanticized Paris, Besson and Morel offer ‘an adrenaline-fuelled dystopia run by shady foreign interests’ (2010: 55). All of human life is present in these films, provided we accept that life, in this instance, is nasty, brutish and short. This is also an apt description of the films themselves, none of which exceed 90 minutes. All are shot with a predominance of action sequences, while the scant dialogue, rapid editing and restless camera exemplify modern Hollywood’s ‘intensified continuity’ style (Bordwell 2006: 121–38). By virtue of their funding sources, filming location and production personnel, these are European films. But what does ‘European’ mean when such productions appear to rely on traditionally nonEuropean aesthetic modes? And more specifically, how do we understand the Europeanness of these films when, as I will argue in this chapter, their content is apparently Europhobic? In approaching this question, it is important to note the points of contact between these films and other cinematic tendencies. A recent strain of horror cinema, both American and European, has focused on the experience of American or other anglophone travellers subjected to terror and violence abroad: for example, Hostel (Eli Roth, USA, 2005), Severance (Christopher Smith, UK/Germany, 2006) and 28 Weeks Later ( Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, UK/Spain, 2007). The narratives of these films frequently evoke xenophobic anxieties about foreign spaces and their inhabitants (Newman 2009). Such productions suggest the global viability of an imaginary wherein New Europe, a ruptured continent rife with terrorists, mafias and unstable nuclear technology, is no longer the inspirational Old World, but rather a demonized repository for Hollywood’s fears. At the same time, the focus in the Besson-Morel films on the peripheral zones of Parisian space and the associations of these spaces with (often immigrant) criminality connect the films to the representational history of French film noir (cf. Vincendeau 2007, 2009). Interestingly for the present study, Ginette Vincendeau ends her survey of French film noir with the assertion that, in specific contrast to ‘the aesthetic glamour [ . . . ] of American film noirs’, the French version offered ‘a dystopian, sometimes “hellish” vision’ (2007: 46). The Besson-Morel films, significantly, give us a supporting cast of quasi-futuristic drug gangs (District 13), Albanian sex-traffickers and their billionaire clients bidding for human flesh at auction (Taken), or triad

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drug dealers and suicide bombers (From Paris). This is a paranoid vision of the New Europe of porous borders, overcrowded metropolises and ethnic tensions. Old World values, and the domestic forces of law and order in particular, are conspicuously absent in the Paris of these films, or at best they are presented as a corrupt object of derision. To consider such representations as inherently ‘Europhobic’ would be to ignore the point that the ‘Europe’ implied within Europhobia is just one possible conception; or indeed, that it is the very possibility of rejection, especially of dominant or fixed notions of identity, that connotes a European idea (or even ideal). Europe, in other words, may be affirmed within the same negative process of its own condemnation. The numerous books, films and television shows associated with contemporary ‘Nordic noir’, to take one example (see Forshaw 2012), frequently explode romanticized, utopian conceptions of Scandinavian nation-states, but the effect here may be as much to redefine the nation state model as simply to reject it. The same may be said for contemporary French noir. Jacques Audiard’s recent films in particular – De battre mon coeur s’est arrˆet´e/The Beat That My Heart Skipped (France, 2005) and especially Un proph`ete/A Prophet (France, 2009) – chronicle the troubled, violent journeys of marginal or ethnically differentiated protagonists towards some form of social insertion within the French Republic. Given the complex issue of multiculturalism in modern France, it is not hard to see these works as socially-committed fables for modern French society. Their specificity as such constitutes much of their appeal for international audiences. The situation is very different, however, when a film is less clearly integrated within the discursive boundaries of national cinema. Though credited as European, both Taken and From Paris are filmed almost entirely in English, with American protagonists played by well-known Hollywoodbased actors (Liam Neeson and John Travolta respectively). Both films, moreover, are distributed internationally by Hollywood corporations, 20th Century Fox (Taken) and Warner Bros (From Paris). In both films, while the main action takes place in Paris, the protagonists fly back to America once their work is done. As David Martin-Jones puts it, Europa Corp ‘is extremely adept at making European action films that can easily be mistaken for Hollywood products’ (2012) – a fact to which he ascribes the general lack of critical interest they engender. In contrast to the examples of recent French noir mentioned above, these films seem to have no real sense of place, and hence no sense of social engagement – unless it be with the ideology of Europhobia.

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Notably, when Besson’s more commercial ventures have generated a critical response, their European representational value is in effect rejected. Isabelle Vanderschelden (2008) makes the important point that Europa Corp’s lower budget productions are sustained by the more commercially viable films, though this argument would suggest that Besson’s big budget productions have no real value beyond their economic function, or that the filmmakers are merely genuflecting to what Martine Danan (2002) calls the ‘post-national’ logic of the global market. A similar issue arises when interest focuses exclusively on the films’ economic impact. Taken garnered $145 million at the American box office and a further $82 million worldwide, a considerable return for a European film and a fact not entirely lost on the French media (see Berretta 2009; Cuyer 2009). Any celebration of this commercial success is by its own nature a celebration of French or European success. Yet this once more begs the question of what ‘French’ or ‘European’ means, beyond mere economic regional protectionism, if the subject of representation simply replicates dominant global (Hollywood) norms.2 This is especially pertinent when, in the case of Taken, the film performed quite modestly in its ‘home’ country, in relation to its budget (one million entries). In response to these issues, I agree with Martin-Jones’ point that a limited or reductive consideration of these films blinds many writers to the more complex signification at work in them (Martin-Jones 2012). Both the style of these films and their Europhobic aspect seem to court a wider global and predominantly American audience at Europe’s expense. Yet there is a broader dialogue between Hollywood, Europe and the transnational movement of cinematic representation in these films, which are often knowingly playful about the use of their Parisian settings. It is through this dialogue that a sense of Europeanness, even in its apparent negation, can be discerned.

Escape from Paris District 13, a loose reworking of John Carpenter’s cult film Escape from New York (USA, 1981), is set in a vision of the near-future (in the film’s case, 2010). The city’s most notorious district, outside the Parisian periphery, has become a walled prison, a semi-feudal zone of un-policed rival drug gangs. A young man, Le¨ıto, is imprisoned after killing the police officer who arrested him on false charges (part of a deal the officer cut with a local druglord, Taha). Six months later, we learn that Taha has acquired a government-owned nuclear weapon. Police Captain Tomaso, going undercover as a convict, is then 188

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‘accidentally’ released into District 13 along with Le¨ıto, in the hope that the latter, with his proven capacity to negotiate the urban jungle, will lead him to the stolen bomb. David Belle, who plays Le¨ıto, was at the time already famous as a specialist of parkour: a sport with its origins in the French suburbs, in which the practitioner negotiates urban space through a series of dexterous jumps, vaults and climbs. Comparisons with Carpenter’s earlier film are interesting in terms of the specific political inflections Besson and Morel bring to their adaptation. For Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, the dystopian city in Escape from New York represents ‘a conservative nightmare of minorities and criminals rampant [ . . . ] Only a tough, conservative, martial arts, military hero [ . . . ] can save the day’ (1990: 258); the film is in this sense a paranoid, authoritarian response to contemporary urban decay. The comparison between the New York of 1981 and the Paris of 2004 may be a pointed one; given that the period of civil unrest that hit French cities in 2005 had as its focal point peripheral banlieues, Besson and Morel’s walled district anticipates both an authoritarian’s nightmare and its fantasy solution. Where Carpenter’s politics were fuzzy (his New York is one of unrestrained libertarianism, but his gun-toting president is the film’s real buffoon), Besson and Morel’s only obvious villain is the Minister of Defence: the man responsible for sending in Tomaso and Le¨ıto, but also – it transpires – for planting the bomb in the first place. Tomaso and Le¨ıto, in fact, were sent in not to disarm the bomb, but unknowingly to detonate it, thus ridding the government of the nightmare district once and for all. Only Le¨ıto’s last-minute intuition prevents the detonation, enabling him and Tomaso to return to Paris, where they turn the tables on the minister. Secretly filming the encounter and disseminating it via pirate broadcast, the politician declares his desire to sweep away ‘cette racaille’ (‘that rabble’), the same epithet, coincidentally, uttered on camera by then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy a year later. The film’s nightmare version of governmental policies implies by extension a spatial rejection of the historic centre of Paris, the seat of government. This suggests that we view its main space of representation, District 13, as a desirable alternative, though the ambiguities of this space need to be considered. The CGI-enhanced opening credit sequence, in which the camera appears to probe and burrow its way through the district’s perimeter wall and dilapidated high-rise blocks, immerses the viewer in its murky, penned-in space. The emphasis here is on the porosity of impoverished public housing, in which both privacy and private property are at a premium. This, in other words, is

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a compressed dystopian imaging of the Parisian periphery as a failed project, a no-go zone of over-population and seeming lawlessness. Yet the end – in which Tomaso hints at a future move to Le¨ıto’s ‘less dangerous’ district – points toward a reconciliation with, or even preference for, this zone. Besson’s much-publicized interest in the Parisian banlieue as a site of creativity and potential filmmaking is worth noting here (cf. Bronner 2008), though arguably the sense of a genuine representational stake in the Parisian periphery is absent – in contrast, for example, to Matthieu Kassovitz’s La Haine/Hate (France, 1995), which unlike District 13 (shot mostly in Romania) was filmed on location. Yet the future-visions of urban dystopia, by their very nature, work by comparatively evoking present-day perceptions and past memories. Thus the dystopia always connects us affectively, and even affectionately, to the urban present it displaces. As Edward Dimendberg has argued, dystopian representation may also be utopian by virtue of its ‘unsentimental illumination’ of urban space (2004: 4). For Dimendberg, discussing American film noir of the 1940s and 1950s, such films open late capitalism up to critique. But in intimately exploring the city’s dark and dangerous sites, such films also provide the perceptual pleasure of re-exploring the city, which in turn reacquaints viewers (in some cases, nostalgically) with urban spaces subject to homogenization, fragmentation and eradication (2004: 6–7). Dimendberg’s view is significant for the way it moves beyond social-reflectionist readings of noir films, which cannot adequately account for the often counter-intuitive pleasure such films provide. For our purposes, it also sheds light on the way Europhobic representations – in this instance, the concrete purgatory of District 13 – are in some sense a return to the very spaces from which they supposedly retreat. My point, then, is that the ‘Europeanness’ of the Besson-Morel films emerges as a by-product of its notional opposite, ‘Europhobia’. As I have suggested here, and as the rest of this chapter will explore, Europeanness is conveyed through these films’ often self-conscious stylization and excess. As we will see, though, this process is under some strain in the next two films of the trilogy, given the extent to which their ‘unsentimental illumination’ of the modern city may be over-determined by the requirements of genre.

Taken and the Possibility of a European Action Movie In Taken, American teenager Kim travels to Paris against the wishes of her estranged father, Bryan Mills (Neeson). Mills embodies American isolationism 190

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and distrust. A retired intelligence operative, his experience of the wider world tells him that it is a terrifying place, ready to prey on girls like his daughter. He is proven correct when Kim is kidnapped by a gang of Albanian sex-traffickers within hours of her arrival in France, a narrative turn similar to that in recent horror cinema referred to previously. The rest of the film gives Mills the chance to save and reconnect with his daughter, within a pre-established 96-minutes time-frame. Despite its narrative context, the film makes a rather cursory nod to the subject of sex-trafficking. Taken deals mainly with trafficking’s least likely targets (economically privileged Americans) and largely ignores both its main victims (financially disadvantaged non-Westerners) and the forces underpinning sex slavery itself (global disparities of wealth and opportunity). The film also schematizes ethnic and social distinctions in its opposing settings and characters: Mills’s lush West Coast suburbia and white family on one side, filmed in rich sunlit hues, and on the other the dank urban lower depths of Paris and its mixed ethnicities. To this extent, the film echoes right-wing motifs of Hollywood ‘vigilante’ films such as Death Wish (Michael Winner, USA, 1974): the authoritarian nightmare of unfettered immigration, and the fetishization of ‘nature’ and ‘sepulchral femininity’ (Ryan & Kellner 1990: 90). Indeed, the plot of Taken places particular emphasis on Kim’s virginity, as her ‘purity’ becomes a selling point for the wealthy purchasers of female flesh Mills discovers in his hunt. If Taken is evasive about its context, such evasiveness is in accordance with generic demands, notably the need to ensure that the film’s ‘expression and satisfaction of desire’ is maintained within ‘the safe space of licensed public fantasy’ (Maltby 2003: 487). Eschewing more familiar, everyday spaces for its action, Mills’ first encounter with the Albanian traffickers, by contrast, takes place in what appears to be a quarry: a hellish lunar landscape with a shuffling line of immigrant workers at the makeshift brothel door and its drugged female bodies inside. The excess of stylization here, its distance from the banal, preserves the fantasy space and helps stave off the interruption of reality, allowing Taken to function successfully as an action thriller. An implication of this aesthetic approach, though, is that representations within genre cinema are not taken as literally as some theorists, adopting a strictly ideological perspective, might assume (on this topic see Neale 2000: 226–8). It may be possible from this viewpoint to read Taken, and the trilogy more generally, within the terms of what Thomas Elsaesser calls ‘impersoNation’, defined as a form of ‘“self-othering” [through] the

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12.1 The Old World and the New: Jean-Claude (Olivier Rabourdin) runs into Bryan (Liam Neeson) in Taken.

self-conscious, ironic or self-mocking display of clich´es and prejudices’ (2005: 61). As Elsaesser argues, such representational practices have a ritualistic function in articulating, but also parodying and exorcizing, the anxiety towards ‘otherness’ in ‘ethnically mixed metropolitan communities’ (2005: 57), as well as promoting a self-parodying vision for global audiences in which stereotypes and clich´es are made discursively visible (2005: 71–2). Taken’s identification within the codes of Hollywood film, however, fosters the sense that these stereotypes and clich´es are imposed from without, which on the face of it complicates a reading in the impersoNation vein. Mills imposes his unswerving will and uncompromising politics on European soil with disregard for local values or due process of law. While the film hints at past allegiances – between Mills and Jean-Claude, the former colleague to whom he turns for help – these are seen to be eroded, cooperation replaced by laissez faire policies and even criminal complicity on the part of the French. This is underscored at the level of plot, by the French authorities’ apparent collusion with the trafficking gang (the auction in which Kim appears is held at the town house of a French dignitary). It is also emphasized through the visual codes of character and mise-en-sc`ene. Mills and Jean-Claude’s initial meeting on the Champs Elys´ees indicates the physical disparity between the American, dressed for action in a black leather jacket, and the bureaucratic puniness of the Frenchman, dressed for the office in suit and tie. These visual markers over-determine the film’s conflict through characterization: the French bureaucrat’s note of acquiescence versus the American agent’s determination to tear down all barriers – even the Eiffel Tower, as he puts it – in order to find Kim’s captors. The tensions evoked in 192

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this sequence echo the ideological rupture between France and America in the light of the US ‘war on terror’ and the invasion of Iraq in particular. As the conservative American commentator Robert Kagan argues, this rupture signified fundamentally opposing ways of understanding world order and action: Kagan’s thesis is that the European belief in soft power and economic solutions is bad faith, a failure to admit European insufficiency when it comes to global problem solving (2003: 31, 37). From this perspective, the European ‘distrust’ of aggressive American action disavows Europe’s own physical inability to deal with such problems (2003: 31). These arguments would seem to indicate that Taken is little more than an advert for Bush-era foreign policy. Yet Martin-Jones, despite his reservations about the film, suggests that it represents a more legitimate political criticism (and thus, according to the logic outlined previously, a productive redefinition) of Europe than it may at first appear. As he observes, the film retains political value in its insistence that sex-trafficking is Europe’s problem and responsibility, being partly a result of the post-Cold War freeing of trade barriers (Martin-Jones 2012). The film’s resolution, with a legally immune Mills rescuing Kim and returning home, at one level reiterates moral closure. Yet from the point of view of Europe, the ending of Taken merely avoids the problem, displacing it geographically (in fact, the use of a French protagonist and family would have more obviously emphasized the action genre’s conservatism). In this instance, the film’s apparent subservience to Hollywood norms (ideological and moral closure) allows an oppositional or at least critical practice (the absence of proper closure) to seep through its cracks. This is the ‘unsentimental illumination’ discussed by Dimendberg: cynicism and pessimism, in other words, are structured into the film, which in their opposition to classical Hollywood values, if nothing else, can be construed in terms of ‘Europeanness’. We may therefore see the Europeanness of Taken, paradoxically, as a corollary of its extreme negativity, its desire to lay bare the urban spaces of Europe within globalization. One key question remains to be addressed, though, which relates more specifically to aesthetics. In this film, the rejection of a traditionally ‘European’ form of response finds its narrative equivalent in the over-determined narrative drive of the action movie, with its clear objectives and against-the-clock structure.3 The action movie in this sense takes classical Hollywood narrative economy (Bordwell 1985) to its logical extreme. If this is the case, though, where and how can we identify ‘Europeanness’ in such a narrative style?

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12.2 Local pleasures: Charlie Wax ( John Travolta) and James Reese ( Jonathan Rhys Myers) enjoy a ‘Royale with cheese’ in From Paris with Love.

Midnights in Paris Halfway through From Paris with Love, Charlie Wax (Travolta) – a US special agent sent to France to trail a Pakistani terrorist cell – sits down by the Seine to enjoy a ‘Royale with cheese’. This sequence jokily refers to Travolta’s dialogue in Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, USA, 1994), but it also invites us to consider the nature and identity of products across national contexts. If the Royal Cheese (to give it the correct name) is a quarter-pounder in all but name, how is the French burger different? For Travolta’s hitman in Pulp Fiction, describing his recent trip to Europe, it is ‘the little differences’ that count: in this instance, the simple fact that a familiar object is given another name. In From Paris with Love, similarly, the film’s meaning and effect lie not so much in its form, structure or narrative, but rather in the way these aspects are trans-contexualized. If the film is constructed on the generic foundations of the buddy action movie, then, with the unorthodox Wax teaming up with a more conventional CIA operative and ambassadorial aide named Reese, we need to consider what this genre signifies within a European setting. As in Taken, this Paris is a breeding ground for security threats and violent ethnic gangs; but the Europhobia in the film is more obviously ambiguous. Wax seems annoyed to have arrived in Paris, but he nevertheless seems quite at home while he is there, whether enjoying the ‘local’ food (not just McDonalds, but also egg foo-yung), women (rowdy stand-up sex with a prostitute during a stakeout) or taking in a variety of sights (from the red light district around the old Rue Saint-Denis, to the poorer multi-ethnic 194

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estates beyond the periphery). Wax, in fact, while acting at points with the contemptuous disregard of the imperialist, is still able, as it were, to ‘go native’. Moreover, while in terms of space and action the film counters the Europhile motifs of the transnational rom-com or holiday movie, at another level it parallels them. From Paris with Love shares with a film like Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (in which a vacationing Hollywood screenwriter looks to the city for inspiration) the idea that Paris is a revitalizing but by nature transitional and parenthetical site for the visiting American. The holiday destination – and we might also say cinema itself, with its qualities of virtual space- and time-travel – promises that which is ‘ “sensuously other” to everyday routines and places’ (Urry & Larsen 2011: 22). The ‘little differences’, from this point of view, reveal nothing authentic or essential about Paris itself, but they do indicate the appeal of the transition from one locale to the other. Even if Wax does go native, his tastes at least point to a cinematic reconfiguration of regional characteristics, in which objects of New European anxiety are at the forefront of the tourist experience. Where Taken closed off this aspect of the city, its successor opens up a particular Parisian underworld as the generator of illicit thrills – a fact that brings the film closer to the atmosphere and imaginary reconciliations of District 13. Thus, the film begins where Taken’s Parisian section left off, on the banks of the Seine: while Taken used Paris’ riverside roads to stage its high-velocity night-time car chase, its successor reveals the dawn traffic and the city’s riverside sights through dazzling, hazy light and a juddery, kinetic camera, accompanied by a relaxed jazz tune. But these are also visual attempts to reconfigure the old city around the Seine. It is notable that the film looks here to re-introduce to a global audience aspects of Paris that already fuse the Old and New European worlds (such as the Rue Saint-Denis), or those outside the more obviously exportable touristic parts of the city. To return briefly to my previous point about dystopia and film noir, it is also significant that this film’s immersion in (what some might call) the less salubrious urban zones is essentially nostalgic. It is after all the Parisian ‘lower depths’ that both fed into the emerging and influential form of French poetic realism, and the wider traditions of the French polar (police or detective narrative) in literature and film (Gorrara 2003; Vincendeau 2007). Not only that, but these practices of earlier French cinema have also had a significant impact on the development, in Hollywood and elsewhere, of film noir more broadly (Vincendeau 1993 and 2007). Consequently, if films such as these

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turn to the old city or its poorer districts, such a move in part returns to and repackages, in global derivatives of film noir such as the urban action thriller, aspects of European space that have been gradually absorbed into global film culture.

Conclusion My discussion suggests that Besson and Morel’s trilogy, contrary to initial superficial appearances, are not Hollywood films ‘made in Europe’. As films seeking a global audience, they are clearly motivated by a commercial imperative which, within a global cinematic market still dominated by Hollywood, demands that wide-export European cinemas accommodate dominant cinematic norms. The distinction, as Mary Wood has pointed out, is that this process involves a clear manipulation of national characteristics (2007: 75–82) which retains or even re-defines forms of national identity within globalized modes of production. From the viewpoint of contemporary Europe as a locus for global anxieties (uncontrolled immigration, declining economic power, terrorism, impotence of law and order), these films confirm what is obviously a viable imaginary of Europe – one dominated by the idea of the underworld and criminality, but also of counter-authoritarian practices and style such as parkour or gangster chic. Significantly, they operate within a mode of excess, intentionally pushing representation beyond the limits of either political correctness or verisimilitude. In this sense, for all their recourse to paranoid imagery, these films are not necessarily bound within a paradigm that would see their Europe merely as one side of an ideological binary, the terrifying other to the rest of the world’s – or more specifically, America’s – notional haven. Indeed, in their condition as European productions they take to the furthest length possible those self-critical and dystopian tropes already noted within French cinematic practices and the reception of a certain kind of French cinema. To rework Marc Vernet’s much-quoted opinion of Hollywood film noir (1993: 6), then, these films exploit our worst fears about Europe, only so we might love it all over again – in the cinema, at least.

Notes 1

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3

The comment links to Berretta’s and Cuyer’s articles indicate to what extent the ‘Frenchness’ of Besson’s productions remains a keenly debated issue. Though rarely noted in reviews, an obvious reference point for Taken is the 20th Century Fox TV show 24 (2001–10). The show’s race-against-time structure by definition makes moral debate or reflection subservient to narrative drive.

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13 Hollywood and Europe: Remaking The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Lucy Mazdon

As the chapters of this book so clearly demonstrate, there is no single, straightforward definition of ‘European’ cinema or indeed of ‘Europeanness’. Ongoing debates about the nature and role of the European Union, exacerbated of course by the financial crisis, reveal only too well that what we understand by ‘Europe’ is always already in flux. European cinemas, like national cinemas, are inherently unstable and incoherent, identified as much by difference as by shared attributes. In this chapter I shall discuss an American remake (David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, USA, 2011) of a Swedish/Danish co-production, M¨an som hatar kvinnor/The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Niels Arden Oplev, Sweden/Denmark, 2009). In many ways the remake crystallizes a number of the discourses and tensions that underlie dominant constructions of European cinema. As Thomas Elsaesser notes, European cinema(s) have long been defined by an ‘emotionally charged opposition to Hollywood’ (2005: 16). Elsaesser is careful to point out the various ways in which different national cinemas and indeed different types of European cinema interact with Hollywood, displaying ‘varying degrees of hostility’ (2005: 16). Tim Bergfelder goes beyond Elsaesser’s nuancing, condemning the ‘apocalyptic narrative’, which consistently opposes a vulnerable Europe to a ‘predatory’ Hollywood (2005a: 321). Yet such nuancing typically vanishes in the face of the remake, as it is held up as clear evidence of both the Hollywood threat and the art/commerce, quality/debased entertainment binaries, which distinguish European production from its American other. 199

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However, as this chapter demonstrates, the remake can also play a more interesting role, revealing in fact the very instability of what constitutes ‘European’ cinema or indeed cinema of any kind. Remaking, like all forms of reproduction, destabilizes film, making visible its inconsistencies and gaps. As we shall see, in attempting to reproduce the otherness of Scandinavian cinema in Hollywood, David Fincher both perpetuates Europe–Hollywood oppositions and fundamentally destabilizes the very definitions upon which such oppositions repose.

Remakes and Remaking Writing in the Daily Telegraph at the end of 2012, the critic Nick Allen warned readers of the onslaught of sequels, prequels and remakes scheduled to emerge from Hollywood in 2013. Allen thought that a series of costly box office flops had made studio executives reluctant to take risks on original projects. Instead they were turning towards tried and tested concepts that they hoped would offer some degree of security. There is nothing new in Allen’s combination of anxiety and pessimism. The remake, along with the sequel and other forms of cinematic rebooting, has been a staple of Hollywood production since the very early days of cinema. Critical condemnation of this practice, along with claims regarding its roots in financial uncertainty and/or paucity of original ideas, has an equally long history. It is of course true that the remake cannot be disentangled from the financial imperatives that drive Hollywood. As I have argued elsewhere, the rise, fall and re-emergence of American reworkings of French movies can be broadly linked to wider initiatives within the US industry and, to some degree, to corresponding developments in France (Mazdon 2000: 13– 27). The remake is not simple proof of the inherent quality of the source material (an argument which, as we shall see, is frequently advanced by critics of Hollywood remakes of European film) but rather the result of specific developments in industrial and indeed aesthetic practices within Hollywood. Moreover, the various factors which have influenced the decision to remake at specific junctures and the selection of films that will be subject to the practice are echoed in the diversity of remakes and remaking methods. The remake is not a homogenous artefact and should rather be perceived in terms of diversity and difference: sound remakes of silent films, ‘auto-remakes’ or those films made twice by the same director, remakes based on sources from the indigenous cinematic culture (Hollywood remakes of earlier Hollywood

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films) and those based on foreign sources (Hollywood remakes of European films, for example). However, it is striking that much critical discourse on the remake, and in particular on Hollywood remakes of foreign cinema, fails utterly to recognize this potential for diversity in favour of a blanket condemnation of the debasing impact of what is ultimately described as no more than an ‘attempt to make an easy buck’. A one-way, vertical trajectory is established between the ‘art’ and ‘value’ of the non-English language ‘original’ to the crass commercialism of the American ‘copy’. As noted above, this condemnation of the remake rests on a number of pervasive binary oppositions: European high culture versus American popular entertainment; the value and tradition of European art versus Hollywood commerce; the authenticity of the European ‘original’ versus the superficiality of the American ‘copy’. Such oppositions and the linked retention of an ‘original’ source text, whole and worthy of protection, are a common trope in much discussion of adaptation and translation of all kinds. Adaptation is seen to decentre the source text, to threaten its identity and that of the author/creator. The higher the perceived cultural status of the work to be adapted the greater this anxiety will tend to be. In the case of the cinematic remake, this anxiety is exacerbated. As Thomas Leitch explains, remakes compete directly with other products of the same aesthetic medium without necessarily providing adequate economic or legal compensation (2002: 38). Rather than creating new audiences for their source films, remakes typically seek to overshadow or even efface them. Leitch concludes somewhat pessimistically that if a remake does invoke its source it is simply to entice spectators into the movie theatre, only to deny this relationship once the film begins (2002: 43). In another article from the Telegraph, this time a review of Let Me In (Matt Reeves USA, 2010), an American remake of Tomas Alfredson’s Swedish vampire movie L˚at den r¨atte komma in/Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden, 2008), Sukhdev Sandhu states: What’s missing is the alluring otherness of Let the Right One In. That film’s brittle textures and haunted ambience seemed in some strange way to have sprung organically from the nation in which it was set. This remake, by contrast, smells of boardrooms and calculating machines. (2010)

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valuable European source. It seems that in Sandhu’s eyes this Hollywood vampire reboot was actually doing little more than ‘vampirizing’ its Swedish predecessor, and this is indeed an apt metaphor for so much critical discussion of the remake. The remake ‘sucks the life blood’ of European cinema, threatens its presence and its survival and replaces it with little more than a pallid imitation. Despite Sandhu’s evident reservations, Let Me In is actually a rare example of a remake not accorded the uniform hostility so often meted out to Hollywood reworkings of European film. While it is guilty of ‘Americanizing’ the source film (the action moves from a downbeat 1980s Stockholm suburb to Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the same era), it arguably retains an aesthetic and a narrative ambiguity which in some ways feels rather more European than Hollywood. Visual style creates a look very similar to the Swedish film while suggestions of parental child abuse and the failure to flesh out supporting characters eschew the tendency to moral clarity which typifies so many Hollywood reworkings.We could argue that this is then the exception that proves the rule: a lone example of a remake that does not entirely efface the ‘otherness’ or ‘Europeanness’ of the source film. Another recent reproduction of a Swedish source, David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, also largely escaped the condemnation routinely afforded to remakes despite initial consternation at the film’s relationship to, and impact on, its Scandinavian cinematic counterpart. Fincher himself was keenly aware of these concerns, explaining: I know we are playing into the European, and certainly the Swedish, predisposition that this is a giant monetary land grab. You’re co-opting a phenomenon. Now, there are plenty of reasons to believe we can make it equally entertaining a movie. But the resentment is already engendered, in a weird way. It’s bizarre. (Hoad 2011)

While some Scandinavian commentators, including the Danish director of the source film, Niels Arden Oplev, did remain hostile to the existence of Fincher’s version, many critics praised the film. Indeed, writing in the Guardian film blog, Phil Hoad goes so far as to describe Fincher’s film as ‘the new, culturally enlightened face of US remakes’ (2011). The reason for his enthusiasm? The American The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo’s ‘foreignness’, which signals ‘a new school of remakes’ and replaces ‘Hollywood’s normal 202

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way during the noughties, [which] was more like what Salander does to her guardian with a dildo’ (2011). Of course the phenomenon which most provokes Fincher’s anxiety is not the Swedish/Danish film but rather the novels which are the avowed source of both cinematic versions. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, first published in Sweden between 2005 and 2007, proved a global publishing phenomenon, selling over 65 million copies worldwide by 2011. While the USA typically represents a relatively limited market for literature in translation, Larsson’s novels were to prove immensely popular and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the third in the series, became the most sold book in the USA in 2010. As the producer of Oplev’s Swedish/Danish film – the first cinematic adaption of Larsson’s work – Soren Staermose, explained in his commentary for the UK-released DVD, he purchased the rights to the books before their publication, without having any sense of the vast international readership they would enjoy. As the first novel’s popularity became apparent, so the budget and the scope of the film were increased, Staermose cannily realizing that the film’s chances of success were likely to be extended by the success of the novel. In a similar fashion, Momentum, the UK distributors of the Swedish/Danish trilogy, acquired the films at Cannes in 2009. At this stage the books were proving immensely successful in Sweden but had yet to make an impression in the UK. By Christmas 2009, however, the books were topping the British bestsellers chart and Momentum found itself with a rather different type of cinematic product. As sales manager Hamish Moseley explained, foreign language films which had seemed ‘a bit of a risk’ now had a very real chance of success in the UK market and the film’s marketing campaign was extended accordingly, targeting in particular readers of the novels (Gant 2010). Discussing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, David Fincher and writer Steven Zaillian were very clear that their film was not a remake but a new adaptation of Larsson’s novel which, by the time of the film’s production, was enjoying significant success in the USA. This disavowal of remake status and claim to a direct relationship with a source novel are not of course uncommon. Indeed the denial of the cinematic predecessor is a key element of the process of effacement described by Leitch (2002). While it does seem very likely that Fincher and Zaillian returned to Larsson’s novel (notably, Zaillian’s script keeps rather more faithfully to the written source than did its predecessor), to deny entirely the influence of the earlier film seems at

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best disingenuous. Unlike many remakes based on source films unknown to American audiences (often through the active efforts of the remake’s producers to block the original film’s release), the Swedish/Danish film had enjoyed some success on the US market. Writing about Fincher’s version in Variety Justin Chang remarks, ‘that this English lingo adaptation is arriving not long after a widely seen Swedish version (which grossed $104 million worldwide and an impressive $10 million in the US last year) could hinder its international prospects to some degree’ (2011: 18). For Fincher and Zaillian to deny a relationship between their film and Oplev’s version is then particularly problematic given the latter’s relative international success: this is a film with which they and many of their audiences would certainly have been familiar and which surely influenced to some degree both production and reception of the American adaptation. Nevertheless the film was positioned and marketed as an adaptation, as a reworking of a novel rather than a new version of a film. As Fincher reveals in his comments cited above, this was not without its problems, as the very popularity of the Swedish literary source meant that some readers felt protective towards the novel and potentially hostile towards any attempt to reproduce it, particularly within an American context. However by positioning the film as an adaptation, the filmmakers and the distributors also set out to mitigate the hostility a simple remake would be likely to receive. They positioned The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo not as a remake of a Scandinavian film but rather as a new and original version of a highly popular novel. Of course this could still provoke the inevitable anxieties aroused by adaptation, as Fincher realized, but it would not, in Leitch’s terms, set out to efface Oplev’s film. It would exist alongside it, a new and unrelated film. Arguably, it was this promotion of the film as an adaptation rather than a remake (a strategy also employed by the makers of Let Me In) that helped the film to avoid the critical hostility so often directed towards the remake.

Nordic Noir and Scandi Success It is worth noting at this stage the much broader Scandinavian success story within which the Larsson novels are located. Indeed the popularity of the Millennium trilogy is just one, albeit eminently successful, instance of the so-called ‘Nordic noir’ or ‘Nordicana’ phenomenon. Also reaching vast readerships both within Scandinavia and much further afield are Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels, the first of which was published in 1991, and 204

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Jo Nesbø’s Norwegian crime fiction. Popular Swedish and British television adaptations of Wallander (Sveriges Television, Sweden, 1997–2007; Yellow Bird, Sweden, 2005–9; and Yellow Bird/UK, UK/Sweden, 2008–10) extended the novels’ reach, while other Scandinavian dramas including Forbrydelsen/The Killing (Danmarks Radio, Denmark, 2007–12), Borgen (Danmarks Radio, Denmark, 2010–13) and Bron/Broen/The Bridge (Danmarks Radio/Sveriges Television, Denmark/Sweden, 2011) also proved successful both at home and overseas. While the emergence of these novels and television dramas of course reveals much about the Scandinavian cultural industries, what is particularly notable here is their international appeal. Not only did they attract readers and viewers well beyond their national borders, they were also seized upon by US producers as sources for American versions of their narratives. A three-series American remake of The Killing was produced between 2010 and 2013, while a Hollywood remake of the Norwegian cinematic adaptation of Jo Nesbø’s Headhunters/Hodejegerne (Morten Tyldum, Norway/Germany, 2011) is currently slated for production. This global taste for all things Scandinavian perhaps lies at the heart of Fincher’s decision to make an American remake that in many ways appears resolutely un-American. Much of the film was shot in Sweden using a local crew and initially Fincher worked with a Swedish cinematographer with the very clear intention of creating what he perceived as a Swedish, rather than an American, aesthetic. Fincher remarked: It was an aesthetic choice. We wanted it to look and feel like a Swedish film, and I think it does. We were already getting flak for doing a Hollywood version of the story, so we made a commitment to doing as much of the movie as possible in Sweden, with a Swedish crew. (Holben 2012: 32)

While the cinematographer was eventually replaced by Fincher’s longtime collaborator, Jeff Cronenweth, the film arguably retains the Swedish aesthetic Fincher describes. Notable is the emphasis put on location and the harshness of the weather. Interestingly, both filmic adaptations include a shot of a train travelling through the Swedish landscape carrying Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist in the source film, Daniel Craig in the remake) to the Vanger family’s island home. In the American version, and in contrast to its Swedish counterpart, the landscape is covered in thick snow and this depiction of extreme cold is emphasized repeatedly as Blomkvist spends time on the island. As cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth remarks: 205

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13.1 Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) in a distinctly Scandinavian landscape in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. We set out to embrace the Swedish winter. It’s a strong element in the story, almost a character of its own, and we spent a lot of time out in the snow with those very unique light tonalities. We embraced all of the idiosyncrasies of the locations. (Holben 2012: 36)

Similarly, on Blomkvist’s arrival at the island, Fincher emphasizes his inability to receive any mobile phone signal because of his location. Here again the extremity of the geographical location is underlined, an extremity which Fincher perceives as singularly Scandinavian: The notion of these horrors, these particularly evil doings, taking place in an environment that’s icy, snowy and somewhat inhospitable just seemed right to me. I couldn’t see setting the story anywhere else. In Northern Europe, you’re cut off from the rest of the world a good portion of the year in a very unique place. The people are hearty, and the winters are very hard. I’m happy we didn’t transpose the story to Seattle or Montreal or, worse, play Montreal for Sweden. (Holben 2011: 34)

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and as such are an effective device in an attempt to make the film look and feel Swedish. This is furthered by Fincher’s choice of cast, which for the most part features British actors speaking with slight Swedish accents, as well as Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgˆard in the key role of Martin Vanger.1 To some extent, it is perhaps the Swedishness of Fincher’s film, more than its professed status as an adaptation, which helped to protect it from critical condemnation. As with the British version of Wallander, here was a remake which in many ways looked and felt more ‘Swedish’ than its Swedish source. The film was co-produced by the Swedish company and producers of the original version of the film, Yellow Bird. Moreover, it is striking that both Fincher and Cronenweth reference Sven Nykvist, the Swedish cinematographer famous for his collaboration with Ingmar Bergman, in their discussion of the film (Holben 2011). Both The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the British Wallander at times emulate the very particular soft light which typified Nykvist’s work and which was largely inspired by that of his far northern home town. Unlike so many of its predecessors, Fincher’s remake appears to embrace the Europeanness of its cinematic and written sources. It is to some degree that rare thing, the ‘foreignizing’ translation which makes no attempt to conceal its status as translation (Venuti 1995). The foreign source text remains visible or present within the adaptation as the new film recreates its otherness. As the critic Phil Hoad comments: [Fincher’s] Dragon Tattoo, spritzed with its light fragrance of Scandinavian malaise, is clearly a step towards a new kind of remake for the era of [the] international box office. Audiences are better travelled than they used to be and more ready to sample culture in a foreign language. [. . . ] So foreignness can be a selling point for a remake now. (2011)

Interestingly the national identity of Oplev’s version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is equally fluid. In its mobilization of elements of the action/ crime thriller genres, the film is arguably far more ‘American’ than the slow-paced, broody dramas stereotypically associated with Scandinavian production (recall once more the works of Bergman). Moreover, the film was marketed in the English-speaking world in a manner which deliberately disguised its ‘foreign’ origins and constructed it as a Hollywood-style product. The British distributors Momentum were very clear that they did not want the film to be constrained by its foreignness. The head of marketing, Jamie 207

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Schwartz, explained, ‘Our approach was: what would we do if it was a blockbuster? If this was The Da Vinci Code?’ (Gant 2010). The film was thus treated as a major event with poster campaigns both on the London Underground and on trains in the Southern commuter belt (targeting, as we have seen, readers of the source novels), and a front page announcement in the free newspaper Metro (widely read by Londoners) of the launch of the trailer online. In cinemas the film was promoted via a trailer which bore no trace whatsoever of the film’s foreign language, effectively selling it as an English-language film to those not in the know. An initial roll-out at 114 cinemas was an impressive opening weekend for a subtitled film from a littleknown director. It is also worth noting that the dubbed print of the film was given a limited release in the UK market alongside the subtitled print. This is far from common practice in Britain and suggests the hope that here was a film which could break free from the typical market for ‘foreign cinema’ and achieve broader appeal.

Embracing Otherness? So should we agree with Phil Hoad and see in the two versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a ‘new culturally enlightened’ remake process? Is this evidence of a productive and positive remaking, one which does not do away with the difference and the otherness of foreign/European cinema but rather embraces it and in so doing enriches the cinema of Hollywood? Does the marketing and relative success of the Swedish/Danish film indeed suggest an audience ‘more ready to sample culture in a foreign language’ (Hoad 2011)? I am not so sure. A brief exit poll carried out on behalf of Momentum Pictures and the now defunct UK Film Council on Saturday 13 March 2010 sheds some interesting light on the dual release of dubbed and subtitled prints of Oplev’s film. The film was shown at the Curzon in London’s Mayfair (a cinema which has a long history of screening foreign films), and two mainstream circuit cinemas, the Odeon Printworks in Manchester and the Vue Cinema in Hull. In London only the subtitled version was shown, in Hull only the dubbed print and in Manchester both versions. The poll’s results revealed that the dubbed version attracted more mainstream cinema-goers, those more likely to have seen recent Hollywood hits. The audience for the subtitled version, especially in London, showed a much stronger preference 208

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for foreign/art-house films and were significantly more likely (65 per cent versus 34 per cent) to watch foreign films ‘a lot’ or ‘occasionally’. Those seeing the subtitled version of the film were also significantly more likely (45 per cent versus 26 per cent) to rate the film ‘excellent’ than those seeing the dubbed print. This was perhaps partly due to the film itself which, despite its imitation of certain Hollywood conventions, is not as ‘Hollywood’ as the marketing campaign seemed to suggest. However, it is also likely that reduced enthusiasm for the film was provoked by the dubbing. One in six respondents mentioned that this was low quality and around half of those watching the dubbed version would have preferred to see the subtitled version, as opposed to only 14 per cent of the subtitled audience expressing a preference for the dubbed film. The report concludes that dubbed prints are more effective in attracting a mainstream audience for foreign film. However, it also reveals a longstanding suspicion about the quality of dubbed prints which problematizes any attempt to extend this type of release. Indeed British (and American) distributors find themselves in something of a double bind: to release a foreign language film with subtitles immediately renders it ‘specialist’ and limits its audience. To release a dubbed version risks alienating existing audiences for the foreign. It seems to me that this report largely gives the lie to Hoad’s optimistic assessment of contemporary audiences, open to foreign language culture. While Oplev’s film was successful on the international market, it was successful for a foreign language film and, to some extent, because it emulated the conventions of Hollywood. The United Kingdom gross for Oplev’s film was $2,342,433, a respectable achievement. However, when we compare this with the UK gross for Fincher’s version, $18,796,728, we can see the huge challenges still facing non-English language cinema in English-speaking markets. As long as this imbalance persists, Hollywood will continue to remake – whatever the critics may say. It is perhaps worth noting at this point that both director Oplev and his female star Noomi Rapace have recently followed their European success with a Hollywood crime thriller, Dead Man Down (Niels Arden Oplev, USA, 2013). Just as European films face enormous challenges in the search for global success, so a move to Hollywood seems a necessary staging post for European personnel in search of global fame. While Fincher’s film is an interesting and often beautiful piece of cinema, the limitations of its ‘foreignizing’ strategies are evident and in many ways it absorbs its Swedish predecessor just as fully as many far less prestigious

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remakes. Interestingly, many of the film’s reviews discussed it via the tropes of auteurism. Writing in Sight and Sound, Anton Bitel describes the film as ‘a finely honed genre thriller, but it also continues Fincher’s preoccupation with the persistence of age-old urges in the modern world’ (2012: 64). Justin Chang describes the film as ‘David Fincher’s much-anticipated return to serial killer territory’ and notes the way in which it: telegraphs its exceptional production values and acrid tone with one of Fincher’s typically arresting credits sequences: a rapid-fire frenzy of images variously evoking sex, violence, birth, technology and immolation, set to a furious cover of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Immigrant Song’ featuring Karen O. (2011: 19)

Indeed, in many ways this highly stylized credit sequence recalls that of a James Bond film, a reference of course extended by the presence of Craig in a central role. This combination of associations with Fincher’s oeuvre and intertextual references to other examples of English-language genre cinema clearly problematizes and limits the ‘foreignizing’ process described above. Yes, this is a remake which attempts to retain the European identity of its sources and consequently it is perhaps to be commended. Yet above all it is a major Hollywood production and a ‘David Fincher movie’. The mobilization of the auteur as a means of distinguishing European cinema from the mass production of Hollywood has been much discussed. So it is perhaps somewhat paradoxical that, over and above its professed status as adaptation and its retention of Europeanness, it was almost certainly the badge of quality provided by the name of its American auteur that protected this remake from immediate critical hostility. The ‘author function’ (Foucault 1977: 113–38) afforded by the direction of Fincher informed spectators and critics alike that, in contrast to so many remakes, this was a film which was not to be immediately consumed and forgotten, a film which was so much more than an attempt to make an easy buck. As I suggested in my opening remarks, the remake with its Hollywood ‘vampirization’ of European culture seems to reveal only too clearly the oppositions which underwrite so many constructions of European cinema. Yet the very act of remaking, the revelation of the iterability of the source film, simultaneously renders visible the incoherence, indeed the impossibility of a stable textual whole. As Fincher’s film trounced its Scandinavian inspiration at the global box office, while at the same time embracing the otherness of its source and the marketing and critical potential of an author 210

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function long used to distinguish European cinema from Hollywood, so clear oppositions between Hollywood and Europe arguably seem more impossible than ever.

This is of course somewhat undermined by the presence of Daniel Craig, best known as the very British James Bond and speaking with a very British accent.

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14 Spanish Heritage Cinema Sally Faulkner

Should we locate the ‘Europeanness’ of European cinema in production, distribution or exhibition? ‘European’ clearly has a powerful meaning in the marketing and distribution of cinema produced in the territory to audiences outside it, like the USA, where the term is often coupled with ‘auteur’ or ‘indie’ to signal that a film is an alternative to mainstream or Hollywood fare, to take the US case again. The key Spanish example from the contemporary era would be Pedro Almod´ovar, named ‘the only remaining European auteur’ by Stephen Maddison in 2000. One problem with the slippage between ‘European’ and ‘auteurist’ is that it may erase the complex dialogue with domestic popular culture that occurs when considering films within national contexts or, to follow my example, Almod´ovar’s films in Spain. One response to this problem would be a purist insistence on national specificity, but this ignores the transnational reality of contemporary cinema, usefully summarized by Shohini Chaudhuri in 2005: ‘film now belongs to an enormous multinational system consisting of TV networks, new technologies of production and international co-production’ (2). A more useful response is to interrogate terms, as Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau did in 1992, by questioning the slippage between ‘European’ and ‘auteurist’: ‘to put together “popular” and “European” rattles the security with which we use these terms’ (1–2). This chapter offers an alternative approach to Europeanness by considering first the creative decisions taken in production. It explores the conscious – even self-conscious – desire of film practitioners, especially directors and 213

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cinematographers, to make ‘European’ cinema in Spain. It also considers audience responses to these various bids for Europeanness through selected press reviews, critical awards and attendance figures. As Spain is part of Europe both geographically and politically (it joined the then European Economic Community [EEC] in 1986, but lobbied to do so from the 1960s onwards), the assertion that ‘Spanish’ cinema is ‘European’ cinema may seem self-evident. I will show that the apparently neutral descriptions ‘cine espa˜nol’ (Spanish cinema) and ‘cine europeo’ (European cinema) are in fact politically loaded by considering what these terms may mean in three significant moments of Spanish cinema in the modern era. I do not take this era to begin with the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 (in power since the end of the Civil War of 1936–9). By economic and cultural – if not political – measures, Spanish modernity began in the 1960s rather than the 1970s. The political transition of the second half of the 1970s (the democratic constitution was signed in 1978) was only possible thanks to this 1960s economic and cultural transition, when living standards soared and qualified freedoms were exercised in cultural life. I therefore begin with an examination of how ‘Europeanness’ and ‘modernity’ were inextricable in the Spanish art cinema of the 1960s. The cultural longing for a politically still unreachable Europe is expressed particularly well in Nueve cartas a Berta/Nine Letters to Bertha (Basilio Mart´ın Patino, Spain, 1965). Next, I argue that directors in the 1980s articulated Spain’s new democratic identity through adaptations that drew on Spanish literary originals but simultaneously formed a qualified part of the contemporary European heritage. Here I take as an example Mario Camus’s Los santos inocentes/The Holy Innocents (Spain, 1984), which was based on the popular work of a novelist particularly associated with the portrayal of rural Spain, Miguel Delibes. And third, I address the 2000s, when European post-heritage films made in Spain, like Agust´ın D´ıaz Yanes’s 2006 Alatriste (also based on a much-loved series of historical novels by contemporary author Arturo P´erezReverte) proved popular locally, but failed to travel outside the country. The main section of the chapter thus argues that Europeanness in Spanish cinema of the post-Franco period has been particularly contested through the quintessentially European genre of heritage film. First, in the early 1980s a newly democratic nation articulated its Spanish identity through films that were self-consciously European in their aesthetics, especially via a domestic version of the contemporary boom in transnational heritage cinema, which

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had emerged from Britain and France in particular.1 A number of these Spanish versions, including The Holy Innocents, were commercially successful both in Spain and abroad, but they aroused almost blanket critical opprobrium. Second, in the early- to mid-2000s, the Spanish heritage film – or more properly post-heritage film – returned to prominence with examples like Juana la loca/Mad Love (Vicente Aranda, France/Portugal/Spain, 2001) and Alatriste, which won enthusiastic commercial and mixed critical receptions in Spain, but flopped internationally. The chapter is thus concerned throughout with cross-cultural translatability. What was understood by cinematic ‘Europeanness’ in Spain in the 1960s, 1980s and 2000s? How did ‘heritage’ and ‘post-heritage’ translate into Spanish contexts in the 1980s and 2000s, when the term is not used in Spain, and has no direct linguistic equivalent? 2

The 1960s: ‘Not that One, it’s Spanish’ The 1960s anti-Franco films produced by the group of directors trained at Spain’s state film school in Madrid in the 1950s and 1960s known as the ‘Nuevo Cine Espa˜nol’ (NCE) (New Spanish Cinema) are crucial for understanding the ideological baggage carried by the terms ‘cine espa˜nol’ ´ and ‘cine europeo’ in Spain. Although Jos´e Angel Rodero estimated that the NCE directors amounted to 46, and their films numbered 86 (1981: 68), and although the group included Spain’s foremost political auteur of both dictatorship and democracy, Carlos Saura, critical interest in the NCE waned as scholars focused on Spain’s democratic cinema after the death of the dictator. Additionally, many of the directors themselves dismissed their 1960s work as naive once democracy arrived (Graham and Labanyi 1995: 4), citing their limited knowledge of literature, theory and cinema beyond Franco’s Spain as a particular problem.3 Symptomatic of this is Basilio Mart´ın Patino’s criticism in 2003 of his first film Nine Letters to Bertha as a work of ‘limitations and scars’ (Torreiro 2003: 312). While he takes responsibility for the ‘limitations’, the metaphor of the body implied by ‘scars’ refers to the damage done to the film by the censors’ cuts (cf. Faulkner 2006: 142). Furthermore, a mistrust of popular culture was written into the DNA of a generation of cineastes that witnessed the Franco dictatorship’s co-option of practices like bull-fighting, football and commercial film (Labanyi 2002: 7). 215

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The film conference organized by Patino himself when a Salamanca university student, the 1955 Conversations of Salamanca, has become infamous for the outburst against Spanish popular film voiced by leading figure of the antiFranco, Marxist intelligentsia, Juan Antonio Bardem. He condemned it as worthless in every sense – political, social, intellectual and aesthetic (Faulkner 2006: 8). This was a depressing episode of Spanish film practitioners enacting a version of Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son (‘Black Paintings’, 1819–23). The hostility towards popular culture made their work unattractive to subsequent generations of film scholars interested in popular film, who have stressed the multiple values of the derided popular cinema of the dictatorship. For example, Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi’s pioneering Gramscian reading of Spanish popular culture pointed out the potential for subversion contained in conservative texts. (1995: 4–6) (I have suggested its use as a source of consolation [2013: 41–80].) Nonetheless, the work of the NCE is crucial to understand what we might term Spain’s long Transition from dictatorship to democracy, and the self-conscious bid for ‘Europeanness’ forms a vital part of this. Rather than beginning and ending with the dictator’s death, the modernity of NCE films shows that the transition began at least in the 1960s and, arguably, has still not ended. The desire for Spanish filmmakers to make European films in this period is an example of Spanish cultural life predicting subsequent political events, for Spain would join the EEC in 1986. The subheading for this section is a quote from Marxist intellectual Eduardo Haro Tecglen’s memories of going to the cinema during the dictatorship: in response to the choice of films on offer many would avoid Spanish films for the reasons Bardem articulated in 1955, and, in particular, their assumed association with Francoist ideology: ‘a e´ sa no, que es espa˜nola’ (not that one, it’s Spanish) (2004). This encapsulates the desire felt by anti-Franco, left-wing sympathizers to distance themselves from ‘cine espa˜nol’. The supposed association between pro-Francoism and Spanishness in the cinema couldn’t be clearer than through the use of the derisive term ‘espa˜nolada’ to describe folkloric musicals that were enormously popular until the 1950s (in fact, they had been popular in Spanish cinema from its outset, as in the silent era the audience provided the ‘soundtrack’ for films by singing well-known songs). Patino graduated in 1960 from the Madrid film school, which gave students limited access to European art film, and five years later made Nine Letters to Bertha, a sort of ‘manifesto-compendium’ film of the NCE (Torreiro 1995: 318). It is an autobiographical film about the disillusionment of Salamanca

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university student Lorenzo, played by Emilio Guti´errez Caba in an earlycareer-defining role for the young actor. Lorenzo returns from a culturally and romantically inspirational visit to England, to a Spain represented through a city (Salamanca with its Renaissance architecture), a religion (the Catholicism on which the modernizing reforms of Vatican II were having little impact) and a girlfriend (whose aching predictability is stressed by the fact that she is never given a proper name) which eventually crush his spirit and imprison him in conformity. The film’s ‘Europeanness’ lies, first, in Patino and his team’s efforts to replicate the formal innovations of the European (particularly French) New Wave cinemas to which they had had limited exposure by being able to watch films and attend foreign film festivals as filmschool graduates. Jump cuts and a disjuncture between sound and image, for example, inspired by films like A bout de souffle/Breathless ( Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1959) and Les quatre cents coups/The 400 Blows (Franc¸ois Truffaut, France, 1959), are re-deployed effectively to convey the conflicts between tradition and modernity in contemporary Spain. Second, the narrative of the lost illusions of an ‘Angry Young Man’ offers a Spanish inflection of then-contemporary British cinema, with 23-year-old Guti´errez Caba’s performance as Lorenzo offering a youthful, sulky equivalent to Richard Burton’s volatile Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, UK, 1959). Third, the film was a success with Spanish audiences,4 who, we may speculate, enjoyed that European form and content – starved as they were of such cinema until the establishment of art-house cinemas (Cines de Arte y Ensayo) in 1967.5 Finally Nine Letters to Bertha was also European as it was intended to be a festival film, and toured these over 1966 and 1967, though it only won awards in Spain: the 1966 Silver Shell at San Sebasti´an and the 1967 awarded for Best Screenplay by the Spanish Cinema Writers Circle. Is this, then, a Spanish film whose form and content were enjoyed as European – the possible response of domestic audiences? Or is it a European picture that happened to be made in Spain – a logical description of a film that the government funded so it would represent a supposedly liberal nation at film festivals to the Europe that it wanted to join?6 The Europeanness of this Spanish film or Spanishness of this European film is contained in the title: ‘Bertha’ is the name of Lorenzo’s love interest who lives in England to whom he writes the nine letters. Never heard in voice-over, never seen on screen, this unattainable English girl (she is the daughter of a Spanish Republican exile) is the absence that is forever present, a cipher for the Europeanness for which 1960s Spanish art cinema betrays a longing.

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The 1980s: ‘Spanish cinema starts to want to be European’ Fast-forward to the 1980s and we might imagine that that longing had become reality. The subheading for this section is taken from Carlos Losilla’s description of the transition government’s royal decree that abolished film censorship in 1977, just two years after Franco’s death: ‘Spanish cinema starts to want to be European’ (1989: 35). What’s more, when the socialist government entered office, former members of the anti-Franco opposition took on influential roles that shaped cultural policy (Labanyi 2002: 11), like Pilar Mir´o, who became Director General of Cinema (1982–6). It is this experience of Europeanness as longing when oppositional directors made films under dictatorship that explains the apparent paradox that when filmmakers understandably sought to explore Spanish identity in the new democracy, many chose to do so through European aesthetics. (Almod´ovar, who did not attend the film school, and made his first feature Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del mont´on/Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap [Spain, 1980] after work from his day job with the Spanish Telecommunications company Telef´onica is the exception that proves the rule.) Exemplary of the European aesthetic tendency is Carlos Saura’s Carmen (Spain, 1983). Saura’s approach to the clich´ed myth of the Spanish seductress is to ‘rescue’ it from the espa˜nolada – a process we can only understand in the context of anti-Franco cultural activities in the last decades of the dictatorship. ‘Certain opposition filmmakers’, N´uria Triana-Toribio writes more generally of Marxist intellectuals like Saura, ‘took it upon themselves to “cleanse” the folkloric musical cinema of the music which they considered had been hijacked by the regime through the espa˜nolada’ (2003: 125). Thus the resulting film Carmen, far from a folkloric musical, brings Spanish flamenco into dialogue with the European sources of the myth, especially Prosper M´erim´ee’s novella Carmen (1845), which it partially adapts, Gustave Dor´e’s illustrations of that text, to which the credits roll, and Georges Bizet’s eponymous opera (1875), which influences the soundtrack. This interweaving of intertextual references amounts to what Robin Fiddian and Peter Evans name a ‘Europeanization’ of the myth (1988: 83–94). If Saura addressed Spanish identity via European texts, a more general cinematic tendency in the 1980s was to turn to Spanish texts through literary adaptations. Nonetheless the European stress remains: not through the choice of literary originals, but through choices in film form. If Patino turned to the aesthetics of European art cinemas in the 1960s, in the 1980s we see

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similar external inspiration, but this time in the middlebrow characteristics of European heritage. An important distinction with the Spanish version of heritage in the 1980s was that while European examples often recreated less problematic periods of history, like the pre-war Edwardian period in Britain, Spanish directors like Vicente Aranda, Francesc Betriu, Mario Camus and Saura adapted highly political works of fiction. These included the plays of Federico Garc´ıa Lorca (shot by the Nationalists at the start of the Civil War) in Bodas de sangre/Blood Wedding (Saura, 1981) and La casa de Bernarda Alba/The House of Bernarda Alba (Camus, 1987), as well as the key anti-Franco novels written during the Civil War and dictatorship like Ram´on J. Sender’s R´equiem por un campesino espa˜nol/Requiem for a Spanish Peasant, adapted by Betriu in 1985, Camilo Jos´e Cela’s La colmena/The Beehive, of which Camus made a film version in 1982 and Luis Mart´ın-Santos’s Tiempo de silencio/Time of Silence, screened by Aranda in 1986. The subject matter of these films was in every sense national – located in mostly recognizable Spanish urban and rural settings (for instance the postwar Madrid of The Beehive, with its trams and street-sellers), set during historical periods of twentieth-century Spain that are clearly signposted for the viewer (such as through the plainclothed Francoist policeman in the same film), and based on the literary works of Spain’s most famous twentieth-century authors, an aspect stressed in publicity materials and press reviews. Manuel Palacio’s observation that Spanish television of the period was didactic, aiming to teach a newly-free nation democratic values, is clearly applicable here as the list of original texts on which films were based appears to be an ideal reading list for Spain’s new democratic citizens (2001: 153). However, the Europeanness of the films is contained in aesthetic choices, particularly in cinematography and mise-en-sc`ene. For example, the work of Hans Burmann as cinematographer of Camus’s 1984 adaptation of Delibes’s novel The Holy Innocents plays a curious role in the film. Both novel and film are unambiguous critiques of authoritarianism and inequality in deprived rural Extremadura (one of the most impoverished areas in Spain) in the 1960s. The film condemns the poor living conditions of one family of peasants, whose third child is severely disabled and whose care is shouldered by the parents with no support from the welfare state or the Catholic Church that supposedly performed this role under the dictatorship. This hardship is contrasted with the pointless pursuits of an aloof, criminal and adulterous aristocracy. However, Burmann’s portrayal of the Extremaduran landscape via lingering shots at dawn and sunset jar

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with the hardship experienced within it. His cinematography is indebted to middlebrow heritage sources like British Granada Television’s Brideshead Revisited (Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay-Hogg, UK, 1981), but he deploys it to portray downtrodden peasants, not Oxbridge dandies. Cinema attendance figures and national prizes awarded reveal that domestic audiences and critics loved The Holy Innocents, while success at Cannes in 1984 demonstrates the legibility of the film to European viewers and prizeawarding bodies outside Spain. In Spain its success drew on the popularity of Delibes with readers and of favourite actors with filmgoers, including Alfredo Landa, Terele P´avez and Francisco Rabal. It was the most commerciallysuccessful domestic picture in 1984, and won the Spanish Cinema Writers Circle prize for best film in 1985. Outside Spain it was especially successful at Cannes, with Best Actors prizes for Landa and Rabal, a Special Mention by the Ecumenical jury for Camus and a nomination for the Palme d’Or for the film. While the fusion of national content and European aesthetics was ideally judged for these domestic and foreign audiences, it was dismissed as misconceived by Spanish film historians, both inside (Company Ram´on 1989: 85–6) and outside (Hopewell 1986: 226–8) Spain. John Hopewell, for instance, condemned that fusion, which for him is one of ‘Spanish themes with American production values’ (1986: 227) – though I would argue that these production values are those of European heritage, rather than ‘American’ cinema. He pithily dismissed it as ‘the tendency to be visually pleasing at any cost’ (1986: 227). Writing on these criticisms of 1980s Spanish literary adaptations in 2004, I interpreted their hostility as a response to the fact that many of the films were funded by the generous subsidy system set up by Mir´o in 1983 (known as the Mir´o law or decree). Paradoxically, however, although Alm´odovar received large subsidies from the same source, this fact passes largely without criticism. ( Jos´e Arroyo, for example, notes that the director ‘greatly benefited’ from the subsidy system, because his work was ‘perfect raw material’, without questioning the rights or wrongs of that system [1992: 35–6]). I would propose now that the critical hostility to 1980s Spanish heritage cinema arises from the fusion that films like The Holy Innocents stage. Like the heritage genre in general, the film is too in-between, a middlebrow hybrid that is part political art cinema in its denunciation, and part popular cinema in its uncomplicated mode of address. Its nationality is too in-between also, simultaneously Spanish in its literary source yet European in its heritage aesthetics.

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The 1980s literary adaptations thus constitute a qualified Spanish manifestation of European heritage. They display some of its characteristics, notably pictorialist aesthetics, and the criticism they attracted for being nostalgic was identical to that levelled, for example, at British versions of the genre. Andrew Higson’s observation in 1993 about British heritage could easily describe the Spanish version: ‘the past is displayed as visually spectacular pastiche, inviting a nostalgic gaze that resists the ironies and social critiques so often suggested narratively’ (2006 [1993]: 91). However, the adaptation of the highly political texts of anti-Franco literature in Spanish heritage marks a key difference from the use of safe intertexts like E.M. Forster, to continue the British comparison. Duncan Wheeler (2014) has pointed out that another difference is the historical proximity of the eras depicted in the Spanish case (only 20 years separate the 1960s late Francoism of The Holy Innocents to the date of release, 1984) – though I see the films as a qualified inclusion within, rather than Wheeler’s ‘(wilful?) exclusion’ from, European heritage. In the 22-year period that intervenes before my next case study, Alatriste, ample evidence may be found for the Spanish audience’s increased appetite for heritage. Non-Spanish, European examples of the genre were very successful at the Spanish box office – though one aspect of their internationalism would have been erased by dubbing. Paul Julian Smith and Wheeler note the success of Cyrano de Bergerac ( Jean-Paul Rappeneau, France/Hungary, 1990), Much Ado about Nothing (Kenneth Branagh, USA, 1993), La Reine Margot (Patrice Ch´ereau, France/Germany/USA, 1994) (Wheeler 2014) and Elizabeth (Shekhar Kapur, UK/USA, 1998) (Smith 2006: 106), as well as stressing the boom in domestic heritage tourism, like visiting historic sites, in the same period (Smith 2006: 101–14; Wheeler 2012: 207–15). There had also been the odd domestic heritage success, like Pilar Mir´o’s 1997 adaptation of Lope de Vega’s 1614 El perro del hortelano/The Dog in a Manger (Spain). The 2000s therefore constituted fertile terrain to plant European heritage in Spain with films that adopted its aesthetics, as in the 1980s, but also, unlike that decade, reached back to temporally distant periods of the Spanish past, like the Golden Age. Spanish cinema was also particularly receptive to ‘post-heritage trends’. While Charles Barr coined ‘heritage’ to refer to 1940s British cinema in 1986 (1986: 12), the term was widely used from the 1980s onwards to describe pictorialist period dramas like the productions of

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Ismail Merchant and James Ivory. Claire Monk added the prefix to underline the ways the ‘post-heritage’ films had more recently self-consciously stressed sex and violence to mark a difference with ‘heritage’ (1995). While the terms ‘heritage’ and ‘post-heritage’ are currently used in neither journalistic nor academic discourse in Spain, the elastic ‘cine hist´orico’ (historical film) could clearly describe both tendencies (Losilla 2006). Sexually explicit content was successfully represented in Spanish post-heritage by domestic heritage stars, like Pilar L´opez de Ayala, who were admired for the eroticism of their performances in Mad Love. The post-heritage stress on violence also particularly suited Spanish filmmakers for domestic reasons. Wheeler shows that the explicit depiction of the violence of Spain’s Black Legend in pictures set in the Golden Age was a welcome means by which directors could distance their films from the 1940s Francoist historical pictures set in the same period that shied away from such elements (2012: 188). It follows, then, that a number of Spanish versions of the European heritage genre have been successful at the domestic box office, like The Dog in the Manger, Mad Love and Alatriste. D´ıaz Yanes’s film managed to counter the superlatives stressed by the media pre-release about it being the most expensive Spanish film ever made with a superlative of its own: it was the Spanish film that attracted the highest number of domestic viewers in 2006. Were these films only intended for the domestic market, they would have therefore been commercial successes, but, as Wheeler points out, it is ‘virtually impossible to recoup the investment in historical films without international distribution’ (2014: 216). While The Dog in the Manger, Mad Love and Alatriste were screened and distributed in markets outside Spain they still failed according to this measure as none made substantial box office returns. A curious case therefore emerges whereby films that could be described as European, especially in their adherence to the heritage genre, are successful in Spain, yet when screened for foreign audiences from whose cinemas their aesthetic inspiration springs, they fail. Alatriste exhibits all the characteristics of European post-heritage films. It is set in the seventeenth century, beloved of British Shakespeare adaptations and biopics, employs gritty realism in its reasonably violent battle and brawl scenes – its hero Alatriste is a penniless soldier and mercenary – and favours a pictorial, indeed painterly aesthetic for its interiors. What’s more, the protagonist is played by a non-Spanish (though Spanish-speaking) star, Viggo Mortensen. Audience figures suggest

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SPANISH HERITAGE CINEMA 14.1 Post-heritage aesthetics: Vel´azquez-inspired mise-en-sc`ene and impressive costume design by Francesca Sartori in Alatriste.

that the Spanish viewing public enjoyed the fusion of cultures, enthusiastically summarized by the Spanish daily ABC reviewer Federico Mart´ın Bell´on as a film with ‘a foreign air about it’, yet one that is ‘Spanish through and through’ (2006). Unsympathetic reviewers have cited the film’s weaknesses in script to explain its failure to achieve distribution outside Spain, a position that draws on the considerable scepticism about the project aired in the press and on the Internet by viewers and journalists prior to release.7 However, the failure of other Spanish heritage projects points to a wider problem of illegibility. Smith is right to note that Spanish early-modern heritage pictures in the US market suffer from unfamiliarity, whereas British heritage films that often draw on contemporary drama may ‘rely on the familiarity of Masterpiece Theatre to pre-sell costume drama to select US audiences familiar with and friendly towards English actors, themes, and locations’ (2006: 110). But what of the European market? It seems that the Spanish films are lost in the cultural translation. This is not the more obvious case of a failure of translation from source culture to target culture (according to this scenario, Elizabeth would have failed in Spain), but the more complex case of source culture to target culture, then back to source culture (so Alatriste to British audiences). Better scripts are one thing,8 but unless Spanish heritage cinema can overcome this curious illegibility outside Spain, it may cease to exist. 223

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However, if we lament this demise of the trend we are perhaps being guilty of retaining an outmoded attachment to the silver screen. 2000s Spanish heritage may just be a victim of timing. As Wheeler points out in connection with Golden Age adaptations (2014), television versions, with lower production costs and less pressure to sell outside Spain, are the logical home for Spain’s version of European heritage. Indeed, six months prior to the time of writing – and some seven years since the domestic commercial success of Alatriste that seemed oddly to lead nowhere – Spanish commercial broadcasting group Mediaset Espa˜na announced its production of a 13-segment spin-off eponymous television series (Hopewell 2013). That this is a coproduction with German company Beta reveals the intention to share costs and reach out to the international markets (Hopewell 2013). In television, then, it is hoped that the translatability that eluded the feature film may be achieved.

Conclusion This Spanish case study shows that ‘Europeanness’ may be particularly meaningful in production, especially when practitioners made cinema in the politically-intense moments of Spain’s late dictatorship (1960s) and early democracy (1980s). The adaptation of a transnational genre like heritage to Spain in the 1980s, which I suggest is ‘European’ owing first and foremost to its strong association with British television and film, articulated a simultaneous desire to affirm a new democratic identity (lost with the defeat of the Second Republic in 1939) and to stress a modern European one, later confirmed by accession to the EEC. The films also offer an example of the exploration in the cultural field of preoccupations that later dominate political life. While Felipe Gonz´alez’s 1980s socialist government funded many of the heritage films that addressed the Civil War and Francoism, Jos´e Luis Rodr´ıguez Zapatero’s 2000s socialist government would address that same legacy in legislation through the 2007 ‘Law of Historical Memory’, which sought to give limited reparation to the victims of Civil War and Francoism. In the 2000s heritage continued to provide a European forum through which to work through Spanish questions, and as recent discussions about Spain’s continued, or ‘second’ transition suggest (De la Dehesa 2013), it would be wrong to assume that these questions are no longer political. The violence of post-heritage cinema, for example, is not simply copied by Spanish directors, 224

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but deployed to differentiate Golden Age films of the 2000s from those of the Francoist 1940s. If Spanish membership of 1980s European heritage cinema was apparently confirmed by the success of some of the films outside Spain, the fact that 2000s attempts have failed on these terms should not necessarily lead to the conclusion that 2000s post-heritage cinema does not exist in Spain, or is inferior to transnationally successful examples. The failure concerns the changing media landscape, rather than the films themselves. The forthcoming TV version of Alatriste, which draws on earlier film to television cross-over ´ successes like TV series Aguila roja/Red Eagle (Globo Media, Spain, 2009–) ´ and the feature film Aguila roja, la pel´ıcula/Red Eagle ( Jos´e Ram´on Ayerra, Spain, 2011), seems to prove that what we are currently witnessing is a moment of migration in heritage, one from large to small screen. The Spanish audio-visual sector, with a modest but not insignificant number of heritage films produced since the 1980s, and successes in television heritage that date back to the 1970s,9 is in an excellent position to benefit from this.

Notes 1 2

3

4 5

6 7

See Bel´en Vidal’s reflections on the use of a term developed in debates about British cinema in wider European contexts (2012a: 52–90). See Paul Julian Smith’s discussion of the absence of an equivalent of ‘heritage’ in Spanish-language film circles, both journalistic and academic, where the very broad term cine hist´orico is used (2006, 101–14). Internet searches for ‘heritage’ in Spanish broadsheets confirm that Smith’s observations in 2006 still hold in 2013. This generation underwent cultural formation in the context of Franco’s proCatholic, pro-Nationalist and anti-democratic censorship (1936–77). NCE directors benefitted from the partial relaxation of censorship in 1963, when explicit rules were published, as it enabled them to produce mildly critical art films. The film attracted 418,000 spectators http://www.mcu.es (7 September 2013). Selected reviews of the film in the pro-NCE Journal Nuestro Cine, in which many of the directors wrote, confirm this (e.g. Bilbat´ua and Rodr´ıguez Sanz 1966), though admittedly this is a slanted sample of audience response. For more details on the contradictions of an anti-Franco art cinema funded by the Francoist government, see Faulkner 2006. The User Reviews on the International Movie Database for the film give a flavour of some of this traffic http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0395119/reviews?ref =tt ql 8 (accessed 5 September 2013).

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Wheeler also points out weaknesses in other examples, like the ‘lack of thought’ that went into Tirante lo blanco/The Maidens’ Conspiracy (Vicente Aranda, Italy/ Spain/UK, 2006) (2014). I would like to thank Duncan for sending me his chapter in advance of its publication. For example, Mario Camus’s Fortunata y Jactina/Fortunata and Jacinta (Spain, 1979– 80).

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15 From Russia to Europe and Back: East Meets West in the Films of Pavel Lungin Alissa Timoshkina

In the opening chapter of Insiders and Outsiders of Russian Cinema, Stephen Norris invokes lurii Lotman’s observation that Russian national identity and culture have historically revolved around a set of oppositions: holy versus sinful, insider versus outsider, East versus West (Norris and Torlone 2008: xiv). It is worth adding that the binary division of East versus West, with the latter symbolizing progress and the former backwardness, is inherent not only to Russia’s external but also its internal relations, which Nancy Condee describes in terms of a ‘gulf between the educated, Europeanized and largely urban elite and the rural, uneducated or illiterate, largely nonEuropeanized masses’ (2009: 17). Following this logic, Alexander Etkind applies the concept of otherness to this internal relation, observing a split between the Westernized metropolitan ‘self ’ and the mainland Eastern ‘other’ (2002). Situated on the European periphery and occupying a large Asian territory, Russia finds itself in a state of in-betweenness in relation to both its internal and its external borders. The question of European versus Asiatic character in Russian identity became particularly prominent in the Russian philosophical and literary works of the eighteenth century, while the advent of cinema in the early 1900s created another cultural means for negotiating the meaning of Russianness (Norris and Torlone 2008: xiv). Although the subsequent anti-Western Soviet regime produced a new concept of an 227

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autonomous Soviet identity, Soviet cinema remained connected to the West both economically (using, for instance, equipment for elite co-productions) and symbolically (when we consider the prestige of Soviet success at European film festivals) (George Faraday 2000: 136). Thus, while Russia’s belonging to Europe remains ambiguous, the question of Europeanness has always been central to Russian cultural and cinematic discourses (Roberts 2000: 178–87). Becoming particularly common in the late 1980s through a boom in European co-productions, the Soviet cinematic relation with Europe is crystallized in the films of a Russian-Jewish director, Pavel Lungin. Concerned with the question of Russia versus the West at the level both of context and of narrative, these works present a fruitful case study for this chapter. With his debut work, Taksi Bliuz/Taxi Blues (France/USSR, 1990), about the decline of the Soviet era, Lungin received immediate recognition at the Cannes Film Festival that same year, winning the Best Director prize. Following his European success, he moved to France, directing five more films there before returning to Russia in 2005. The focus of Lungin’s films on Russian identity, history and culture has often elicited critical appreciation in Europe, but has evoked a negative response in his home country. This paradox testifies to the ongoing complexity of the Russian–European cinematic relation and consequently raises the question of the national affiliation of Lungin’s films. Identifying a trajectory of initial alienation from and subsequent reconciliation with the Russian cinematic context in four of his European co-productions – Taxi Blues, Luna Park (France/Russia, 1992), Svad’ba/The Wedding (France/ Germany/Russia, 2000) and Bednye rodstvenniki/Roots (France/Russia, 2005) – this chapter analyses the notions of Europeanness and Russianness in Lungin’s work.

A Stranger at Home, at Home Amongst Strangers: Taxi Blues and Luna Park The question of Russia’s rapport with the West lies at the heart of Taxi Blues, where it is figured through a homosocial/erotic relationship between an alcoholic Jewish saxophone player, Aleksei Seliverstov, and a nationalistic taxi driver, Ivan Shlykov. A chance meeting between the two during a nocturnal taxi ride through Moscow leads to the formation of an unconventional friendship. Feeling a mixture of hatred, fascination and responsibility towards 228

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the degraded yet free-spirited musician, Shlykov is determined to mould Seliverstov into a decent Soviet working man. However, his outdated values fail to resonate with the eccentric musician, whose erratic way of life in fact challenges Shlykov’s own ‘solid’ principles. One day Seliverstov is discovered by a well-known saxophonist from the USA and is invited on an international tour. Some time later, he returns to Moscow as a successful and wealthy musician. Having followed and rejoiced at Seliverstov’s success, Shlykov anticipates with pleasure the encounter with his old friend. However, his hopes of a reunion are shattered, as the Westernized musician is reluctant to reconnect with the old Soviet lifestyle embodied by the taxi driver. Made during the penultimate year of the Soviet era, Taxi Blues can be appreciated as a document of a collapsing society, with the two protagonists representing the conflict between different social, cultural and ethnic groups. Shlykov cannot relate to Seliverstov’s bohemian nature and repeatedly accentuates the musician’s Jewish origin in various anti-Semitic remarks. The ambiguous bond between Shlykov and Seliverstov thus encapsulates the state of the late-Soviet nation, torn between the desire for Westernization (symbolized by Seliverstov’s virtuoso jazz performances and his escape to the West) and the anxiety to let go of the Soviet past (represented in the character of the taxi driver). The feeling of pride and panic that Yana Hashamova (2007) identifies as key to Russia’s (cinematic) relation with the West equally defines Shlykov’s response to the emergence of Western qualities in the collapsing Soviet world captured in Taxi Blues. For example, in the scene depicting his fight with a group of teenage hipsters, the taxi driver grabs hold of a long-haired young man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with an American flag and, in a symbolic gesture, rips off the US symbol, shouting: ‘You have sold yourself, scum!’ Costume is also essential to depicting conflicting Western and Soviet values in the penultimate scene of the film, which dramatizes the failed encounter between Seliverstov (the West) and Shlykov (Soviet Union) in the taxi driver’s communal flat. Anticipating the arrival of his friend, Shlykov puts on his best suit and lays out a traditional Soviet spread, which includes a bottle of sweet sparkling wine, known as ‘Soviet champagne’, several bottles of vodka and a selection of simple salads. Seliverstov arrives much later surrounded by a semi-drunk euphoric entourage of admirers. Wearing masks and hats, the group resembles a bizarre carnival procession which storms around the room

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15.1 Shlykov as the embodiment of the outdated Soviet lifestyle in Taxi Blues.

preventing the two men from exchanging even a few words. Laughing and chattering, they dress Shlykov in a red silk bathrobe and a top hat, present him with an inflatable sex doll, take a few pictures and disappear. Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli (2003: 146) interpret this scene in terms of a deliberate attempt at mockery by Seliverstov; however, it is also possible to read it as epitomizing a failed encounter between the ‘Soviet’ and the ‘Western’, with the tragi-comic image of Shlykov visually figuring the inability to marry the two oppositions. Taxi Blues explores the dichotomy between Sovietness and Westernization not only through the relationship between the two men but also through the representation of Moscow. While Ekaterina Istomina (1997: 64) analyses the duality of the capital’s representation in terms of the city’s national landscape, for example, high and low Soviet culture, Mazierska and Rascaroli (2003) position Lungin’s Moscow on a European cinematic map. The city figures as a site where the past struggles to give way to the present. This urban transformation takes place in conjunction with the development of the relationship between the central protagonists, where two scenes in particular, marking the turning points in the relationship between Seliverstov and Shlykov, are simultaneously indicative of Moscow’s shift from late-Soviet capital to European city. The first depicts the taxi driver rescuing the musician from one of his drinking binges. The breakdown of the Jewish character is 230

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externalized through the scene’s setting: Shlykov finds Seliverstov at a black market in the backstreets of Moscow, where social outcasts like the homeless and alcoholics indulge in the consumption of cheap alcohol. Shot with a hand-held camera on location, the scene captures the derelict grey spaces inhabited by the disintegrating characters and thus underscores the urban and social decay of the capital. The second scene, signifying the shift in power from Shlykov to Seliverstov, is tellingly relocated from the backstreets to the centre of the city. As Shlykov drives along a main road, a huge screen showing Seliverstov’s performance in the West grabs his attention and he gets out of the car. Captured in a long shot, the musician’s face on the billboard becomes the focal point of this nocturnal urban setting, while Shlykov’s small figure stands mesmerized by the onscreen image. Representative of the appearance of Western images in the Soviet capital, the billboard also highlights the duality of desire and irreconcilability that defines both the relationship between the two men and the historical context the relationship embodies. Released at the same time as a larger wave of socially critical films, Taxi Blues could be identified as chernukha, a typical late-Soviet type of film exposing the social maladies of the failing regime (Hashamova 2007: 16). However, its aesthetic affinity with European cinema precludes such clearcut categorization. Andrei Plakhov comments on this ambiguity: Taxi Blues is an exceptional Soviet film [. . . ] one can clearly sense Lungin’s interest in American independent cinema, for example in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver; however this narrative is presented with a certain subtlety typical of a French aesthetic [. . . ] At the same time the subject matter of the film is our home-grown chernukha. (1990)

Moreover, the dual European/Soviet identity of the film is established by its sources of funding: French ASK Eurofilm, MK2 Productions, La Sept and the Soviet Lenfilm. Interestingly, while the film was conceived as part of the wave of Soviet-European co-productions of the late 1980s, originally Lungin’s project failed to gain the support of the Soviet film studios. It was thanks to his family’s acquaintances in France that Lungin was able to send the script directly to Europe, where it attracted the attention of the renowned producer Marin Karmitz. The hostility expressed by the Soviets towards the film at the development stage equally defines their reception of the completed work. Despite the 231

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crucial role of European film festivals in boosting the international prestige of Soviet cinema, Lungin’s success at Cannes was not a source of national pride. On the contrary, it was interpreted as the director’s attempt to sell himself to the West – a consensus that ironically echoes the very words of Ivan Shlykov from the film. While many Soviet films were presented at the festival that year both in and outside the competition, Taxi Blues resonated the most with the European press and public, consequently creating the most controversy in the Soviet milieu. The general reaction of the Soviet film press is encapsulated in the response of one journalist, who accuses Lungin of having pragmatically calculated the formula for success, consisting of ‘Soviet everyday life + American genre + European atmosphere’, and of having deliberately targeted Western distributors (cited in Arkus et al 2004: 308). The film’s success at one of the key European film festivals thus marked the beginning of Lungin’s alienation from the Russian/Soviet context, simultaneously kick-starting his career in France. While physically moving away from Russia, the director remained connected to and preoccupied with the country in his following film Luna Park, which continued to explore the perpetual question of Russian identity in relation to the West. Thematically, the film is very similar to Lungin’s debut work. Like Taxi Blues, Luna Park depicts the inherent sense of Russia’s inbetweenness through the landscapes of Moscow, which emphasize the contrast between Russia’s Soviet past and its new post-Soviet reality. Moreover, the European quality of Russian identity is figured in the film through another pair of unlikely friends: an ageing bohemian Jewish musician, Naum Kheifits, and a young member of a Russian nationalist group, Andrei, who discovers that Naum might be his father. The idea of Russia’s anxiety and fear in relation to the West, highlighted by Hashamova, is conveyed in the film’s opening sequence: a gang of skinheads crush a can of Coca Cola, while waving a new Russian flag and chanting that their mission is to ‘cleanse Russia’. Mazierska and Rascaroli are right to view the scene’s setting as Luna Park’s means of drawing parallels between the Stalinist past and a new post-Soviet era (2003: 152). However, it is not only the relationship between the national past and present but also the tension between the Russian and foreign elements that the scene highlights; a Coke can, a Russian flag and the group’s chanting point to the hybridity of the new post-Soviet identity, weighed down by the Soviet past and marked by anxiety about contemporary Western influence. The primary setting of the film, Luna Park, can be viewed as another liminal space connecting the Soviet past to

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15.2 Pride and panic on the part of post-Soviet youth in Luna Park.

the Russian present. The outdated equipment and the derelict spaces of the skinheads’ headquarters in the amusement park are a fitting backdrop for the characters’ ignorant discussions of supposedly authentic Russian history and culture, of the nation’s relation to the West and of the long-standing question of Russia’s ethnic minorities. By placing the problem of Russian anti-Semitism at the heart of its narrative, the film comments on a wider socio-cultural phenomenon of the late-Soviet and early post-Soviet period, for, as Faraday observes, one of the reactions to the Westernization of late-Soviet society was the resurgence of ethnic chauvinism (2000: 180). Since the creation of the state of Israel (1948), which contributed to the emergence of Cold War ideology, official Soviet rhetoric discriminated against the Soviet Jews as the ‘lackeys of the West’, consequently re-awakening the long-standing sense of distrust and hostility towards them. The remnants of this ideology are exposed through the skinhead characters. While they see Naum’s association with the West as a threat to the purity of the Russian nation, the film itself depicts Naum’s association with Europe in a positive light, through the subject of classical music, figuring him as a bearer of cultural legacies. The film thus sets the two protagonists apart not only ethnically but also culturally: Naum’s knowledge of European literature and classical music stands in sharp contrast to Andrei’s complete ignorance of European high and popular culture. The narrow-mindedness of the skinheads is humorously exposed in the scene 233

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where the gang comes up with a story to ‘Russify’ their idol, Arnold Schwarzenegger. However, as their relationship develops, Naum’s ethnic and cultural otherness begins to fascinate Andrei, and it is his encounter with classical music through Naum that prompts the skinhead’s respect and admiration for the Jewish character. The turning point in their relationship, as well as in Andrei’s personal belief system, is represented in a scene where Naum performs Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata for him. The camera emphasizes the importance of this moment to the transformation of the character by slowly zooming in on Andrei’s face, as he listens to the music. By depicting the constructive effect of European classical music on Andrei, Luna Park aligns itself with an existing tendency in European cinema to portray positively both classical musicians and classical music at large (Halfyard 2006: 73-85). Indeed the relationship with Naum and the European cultural heritage that he embodies changes Andrei to the point where he blows up the actual headquarters of the skinhead gang in Luna Park, marking in this dramatic gesture a departure from the old ideology and his willingness to embrace the Western values he originally fought against. Soviet and Russian anti-Semitism is a subject that had long been officially elided in the Soviet Union. However, towards the end of the 1980s there appeared a major group of new films confronting the previously marginalized subject of ethnic intolerance. Thus, while Luna Park was not unique in its subject matter, the prominence that it was accorded in Europe, premiering in competition at Cannes, again evoked a strong negative reaction from Russian critics. Arguably, despite being ready to face the problem of anti-Semitism within the national context, Russian film critics objected to this subject being aired publicly on the European festival circuit. As previously, Lungin was accused of selling a negative image of his home country, this time highlighting the subject of anti-Semitism to fit the French stereotypical vision of Russia (cited in Arkus et al 2004: 51). Although the film did not receive high acclaim in Cannes either, it nevertheless continued to secure Lungin’s position as an insider within the French film industry and to alienate him further from the Russian cinematic milieu. In the following eight years, Lungin directed three French productions – a segment in the portmanteau film A` propos de Nice (1995), an episode in the TV series Lumi`ere sur un massacre/Spotlight on a Massacre (1996) and a feature film, Ligne de vie/Line of Life, (1996) which received little or no attention in

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A Return to Roots: The Wedding and Roots One of the reviewers of The Wedding commented on the initial distrust with which Russians met the news of Lungin’s new film about the Russian provinces. The ‘Parisian guest’ who was expected to mock ordinary Russian people managed to surprise his hostile audiences. As that critic put it, while the director injected a dose of Soviet clich´es into the film, he managed to polish them with the flair of a French jeweller (cited in Arkus et al 2004:581). If European finance and aesthetics still play a major part in both The Wedding and Roots, the contrast between ‘good European’ and ‘bad Soviet’, as well as the critical tone of the earlier films, give way to a nostalgic and largely uncritical representation of the post-Soviet provinces in both films. Whereas Taxi Blues and Luna Park are set in the capital, the narratives of The Wedding and Roots are removed from the city to a rural area. Made in the period after the country’s transition from the Soviet Union to New Russia, the choice of the setting plays an important role in these films, for, if Soviet legacies have been gradually flushed out by the New (Westernized) Russian lifestyle in the city, they still remain intact in rural spaces. Moreover, the inherent division between the metropolitan and the rural Russians, acknowledged earlier, lies at the heart of both films. A German, French and Russian co-production, The Wedding is set in the small mining town of Lipki, founded during the Soviet period. It tells the story of beautiful Tania, who abandons her extravagant life in Moscow and returns to her place of origin. While in the previous films the theme of the SovietWestern relationship was explored through the presence of the foreign, it is the Muscovite Tania who represents Western values in The Wedding. Here we can see the reversal of Etkind’s theory, with the cosmopolitan, European Tania figuring as the other for the provincial Russians. Her otherness in the rural setting is exposed in the opening sequence: travelling in an old Soviet bus with the local villagers, Tania looks around with fascination and joy. She is set apart from the rest not only through individual close-ups, but also through her costume and props – a pair of diamond earrings, a Samsonite suitcase and an extravagant mink coat.

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Russia. However, the release of The Wedding in 2000 was a turning point, marking the beginning of Lungin’s reconciliation with the Russian national context.

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Visiting a local disco and meeting her old friends, Tania dares her school sweetheart Misha to marry her on the spur of the moment. Na¨ıve and still in love with her, Misha faints after accepting her proposal. The rest of the narrative is set on the day of the wedding and depicts the struggle of Misha’s poor family to organize a ‘respectable’ celebration. The division between the urban and the rural, figured through Tania’s physical otherness in a derelict post-Soviet environment, is also brought out through the contrast of moral corruption and innocence. Throughout the film, Misha’s relatives lament his union with an experienced, to their minds immoral woman and contrast her alleged sexual promiscuity in Moscow to Misha’s modest and innocent lifestyle in Lipki. Indeed, it is revealed later that Tania has an illegitimate child and the wedding itself is nothing but an act of revenge on her married lover. The question of European cinematic aesthetics, highlighted by Plakhov in relation to Taxi Blues, is equally relevant to The Wedding. Shot on location with a hand-held camera and employing natural lighting, the film features predominantly non-professional actors (apart from the main cast) and is comprised of continuous long takes often edited together via jump cuts. These formal qualities connect The Wedding to several movements in European cinema, such as Italian Neo-Realism, the French New Wave and the Danish-born Dogme 95 movement. A review in the leading Russian film journal Iskusstvo Kino praises the film’s ability to relate a contemporary Russian story with the accents of European cinema and coins the term ‘Russian Dogme’ to describe the unique aesthetic quality of The Wedding (Sirivlia 2001). The transformation of the Russian/European relation mentioned earlier is evident in the positive reception of the film in both Europe and Russia. Although the film exposes a series of problematic issues in contemporary Russian society, such as alcoholism and unemployment, Russian critics for the first time rejoiced at Lungin’s success at Cannes (The Wedding won an award for the best ensemble of actors) and praised the film’s humour and stylistic flair. While this may signal Russia’s willingness to present its less than perfect image to the European festival circuit, it is important to reaccentuate the change of tone in Lungin’s portrayal of the perpetual flaws of the Russian character. If previously it was the cultured or intellectually liberal Europeanized protagonists who had a transformative effect on the backward Soviet characters, this paradigm is reversed in The Wedding. Towards the end of the film, Tania is deeply moved by Misha’s willingness to accept her

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FROM RUSSIA TO EUROPE AND BACK

illegitimate child and develops a genuine affection for him. In this way, the film highlights a change not only in Russian–European relations but also in the very meaning of Europeanness portrayed in Lungin’s work. European values, embodied in Tania, now bear negative connotations, being associated with moral corruption and sexual promiscuity, and it is the marriage to an innocent and kind hearted provincial character that redeems her. The last French co-production directed by Lungin, Roots reflects the director’s (re)turn to Russian audiences right from the opening credits. If previous films clearly aligned themselves with the European market by presenting their credits in French, Roots tellingly uses both Russian and French. The theme of ‘returning to one’s roots’, discernible in The Wedding, is also explored in Roots, an absurdist black comedy about a charming charlatan, Edik, who starts up a bogus company to reunite French, Israeli, Canadian and American nationals with their long-lost Soviet (Russian, Jewish and Ukrainian) relatives, all living in the same provincial town of Golotvin (Ukraine). The province is depicted as a run-down, backwards place, while its inhabitants bear various supposedly inherent Russian vices: corruption, represented in the character of Golotvin’s mayor, as well as alcoholism and domestic violence, figured in a grotesque local drunk and wife-beater, Iakov. Moreover, the film hints at a particularly problematic chapter in Soviet history – the Nazi occupation of Ukraine (1941–3), through the characters of a Ukrainian farmer, suspected of collaboration, and an old Jewish lady, Esther, who lost her relatives in the Holocaust. Despite the seriousness of the social and historical issues raised in the narrative, Roots is not a critical film. The nostalgic tone of The Wedding is also evident here not only thematically but also stylistically. The overarching idea of longing for one’s roots (and one’s past) is explored in the film via the narratives of the Westerners’ return to their historical homeland and visualized through the setting, comprised of picturesque rural expanses and derelict Soviet spaces, shot in warm bright colours. The digitally enhanced images in general create the effect of an old postcard. The film’s thematic and stylistic return to the past thus aligns it with the European cinematic tradition of ‘retro mode’, described by Thomas Elsaesser in this publication. The idea of an innocent and honest province standing in contrast to the morally ambiguous capital, represented in The Wedding, is dramatized in Roots via the interaction between the inhabitants of Golotvin and their

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Western relatives. The endearing character of Esther, played by an 80year-old debutante actress, is serenity and kindness personified, while the Ukrainian farmer’s family receives their Canadian relative with hospitality on a scale previously unknown to the Westerner. The foreign guests, in turn, bring questionable values to the post-Soviet province. Marc-Yves, the French teenager, whom Edik convinces of the fact that the local single mother and her teenage son, Sasha, are his distant family, appears to be a conventionally bad influence. He teaches Sasha to smoke and at one point the distressed mother suspects a homosexual relationship between the two, something that is condemned in Putin’s Russia. Just as the innocent and honest Misha redeems the ‘morally corrupt’ Tania so the provincial relatives demonstrate more genuine and somehow more authentic ways of living to their Western kin. This idea of the redeeming provinces thus echoes a larger cultural phenomenon discussed by Condee with references to Russian writers, like Aleksandr Pushkin or Lev Tolstoi, yearning for interaction with the peasantry (2009: 32). While Lungin’s provincial characters are not peasants, they do represent the simplicity and apparent authenticity of the Russian rural area, which is lost and therefore desirable to those from the Western world. The emphasis on the positive traits of the provincial characters arguably contributes to the film’s great success in Russia. The transformation of the filmmaker from ‘Parisian guest’ to acclaimed national director is clear from the film’s success at the prestigious domestic film festival Kinotavr, where it received the Best Film award in 2005.

Conclusion Since 2005 Lungin has made Moscow his main residence and the seat of his film company ‘Pavel Lungin Studio’, through which he directs and produces nationally acclaimed films, such as Ostrov/The Island (Russia, 2006), Tsar (Russia, 2009) and Conductor/Dirizher (Russian, 2012). The question of Russia’s relation to Europe and the West, prominent in his earlier career, has been replaced by explorations of Russian spirituality, religion and monarchic power in his more recent works, which have confirmed his status as a widely known and esteemed national director. Lungin makes frequent appearances on national television and radio, commenting on a wide range of Russian current affairs; he headed the jury of the Moscow International Film Festival in 2009; and since 2010 he has presided over the Andrei Tarkovskii International Film Festival (Ivanovo, Russia). 238

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So what does such a trajectory indicate about Russian–European cinematic relations, as well as about the meaning of Europeanness and Russianness in Lungin’s films? Bearing in mind the context of the films’ production and reception, a dramatic change in the Russian historical situation is undeniably apparent. Beginning his directorial career during the collapse of the Soviet Union (and of the larger socialist bloc in Europe), Lungin responded to the rapidly changing context by producing topical films that captured the demise of the (myth of the) Soviet Empire. Although Cold War ideology was already declining, the antagonism that characterized late-Soviet/early postSoviet with the West can be seen as one factor in determining the hostility of Russian film critics to Lungin’s European achievements. The success of The Wedding in both Russia and Europe, by contrast, testifies to a shift in Russian–European relations. Indeed, the general Westernization of the Russian metropolises and the (apparent) dissolution of Cold War ideology by the 2000s contribute to the formation of a new cinematic relation between Russia and Europe. The success of Russian films at European film festivals is seen as essential to the country’s prestige and a series of government-supported initiatives (the first Russian pavilion at the March´e du Film in Cannes in 2008 and an international film industry forum, The Red Square Screenings, held in Moscow in 2012) signal the desire of Russian national cinema to infiltrate European production and distribution circuits. While these changes have occurred at the level of films’ contexts, there is also a certain transformation in the ideas of Europeanness and Russianness visible within Lungin’s films, which contributes to the alienation/homecoming trajectory. Initially associating the West with intellectual freedom and cultural insight, while aligning late-Soviet/early post-Soviet Russia with narrowmindedness and ignorance, Lungin’s later films highlight the redemptive power of the honest and simple Russian provinces in relation to the morally ambiguous and spiritually lost West. As such, the theme of alienation and homecoming that this chapter has chosen as its overarching concept is indicative of the changes not only in Lungin’s work, but also of the very meaning of Europeanness. The crisis of European identity and the accompanying shift from positive to negative connotations of the prefix ‘Euro’, observed in this publication, is mirrored in the transformation of Lungin’s Western(ized) characters. While indicative of the formation of a cultural consensus about the spiritual and moral decline of the West, these films simultaneously underline Russia’s desire to welcome such an understanding of its external other, as

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signalled by the shift in the critical appreciation of Lungin’s later, more antiEuropean films. This study thus demonstrates both the fluctuating nature of the meaning of Europeanness and also Russia’s fundamental inability to define itself within that context, where it remains torn between a desire for Europeanization and anxiety about the preservation of its national autonomy.

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Index 2 Days in Paris, 185 7 Zwerge, 35, 46, 49, 52, 53 28 Weeks Later, 186 400 Blows, The (Les quatre cents coups), 217 1492 – Conquest of Paradise, 76 A propos de Nice, 234 Abraham’s Gold, 24 Adjani, Isabelle, 131 Agora, 35, 48 Aim´ee & Jaguar, 24 Airplane!, 37, 40 Akerman, Chantal, 133, 134, 147 Akin, Fatih, 46, 64, 66, 68, 73, 82, 88 Aladag, Feo, 68, 69 Alatriste, viii, 214, 215, 221–224, 225 Alexander, 35, 43, 46 Alfredson, Tomas, 201 Alfredsson, Hans, 160, 168 Alice et Martin, 133, 139, 143 All that Glitters (Tout ce qui brille), 150, 153, 154–157 Allen, Woody, 152, 185, 195 Almod´ovar, Pedro, 213 Altman, Robert, 75 Alvart, Christian, 94 Amelie (Le Fabuleux destin d’Am´elie Poulain), 2, 178 Amelio, Gianni, 63 Amour, 27

Angelopolous, Theo, 62 Annaud, Jean-Jacques, 37, 76, 178 Antibodies (Antik¨orper), 94 Aranda, Vicente, 215, 219 Ardant, Fanny, 131 ARTE, 63 Arthur and the Invisibles (Arthur et lest Minimoys), 37 Artist, The, 1–3, 7, 9, 36, 40, 157 ASK Eurofilm (film company), 231 Assayas, Olivier, 133, 138, 185 Asterix at the Olympic Games (Ast´erix aux jeux olympiques), 35 Atkinson, Rowan, 36, 38 Atonement, 43, 47 Attal, Yvan, 150, 151 Au revoir les enfants, 24 Audiard, Jacques, 187 August, Bille, 76, 177 Badiou, Alain, 22, 31 Bailly, Pascale, 94 Balaguer´o, Jaume, 178 Balfour, Betty, 199 Bardem, Javier, 76 Bardem, Juan Antonio, 216 Barr, Charles, 221 Barroso, Jos´e Manuel, 68 Baudry, Jean Louis, 19 Bazin, Andr´e, 19, 29, 87, 90

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Bear, The (L’Ours), 178 B´eart, Emmanuelle, 133 Beat That My Heart Skipped, The (De battre mon coeur s’est arrˆet´e), 187 Beehive, The, (La colmena), 219 Belle, David, 138, 189 Benigni, Roberto, 23 Bergman, Ingmar, 19, 26, 29, 207 Berlin Film Festival, 17, 83, 85, 120, 133 Bernal, Gael Garcia, 123–124 Betrayal, 135, 143 Betriu, Francesc, 219 Big Blue, The (Le Grande bleu), 178 Bigelow, Kathryn, 154 Binoche, Juliette, 9, 26, 77, 131–144, 147 Birkin, Jane, 152 Bizet, Georges, 104, 218 Bj¨ornstrand, Gunnar, 26 Blood Wedding (Bodas de sangre), 219 Bluebeard (Barbe-bleue), 92–94 Bond, James (character), 36, 38, 40, 41, 51, 121, 210 Boon, Dany, 36, 45 Borgen, 205 Bouchareb, Rachid, 88 Bourvil, 161 Boyle, Danny, 2 Branagh, Kenneth, 221 Breaking and Entering, 133, 134 Breaking the Waves, 27, 177 Breathless (A bout de souffle), 217 Breillat, Catherine, 23, 92 Bresson, Robert, 91 Brice Man, The (Brice de Nice), 36, 46, 154 Brideshead Revisited, 220 Bridge, The (Bron/Broen), 205 Bridget Jones’s Diary, 35, 50 Brondo, Cristina, 79 Broz Tito, Josip, 104 Br¨uhl, Daniel, 80 Bryant, Kobe, 123 Bu˜nuel, Luis, 26, 90 Burton, Richard, 217

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Caba, Emilio Guti´errez, 217 Camille Claudel, 1915, 138–139 Camping, 35, 36, 37, 46 Canal + (production company), 28 Canet, Guillaume, 80 Cannavaro, Fabio, 122 Cannes Film Festival, 10, 17, 23, 83, 85, 101, 133, 136, 139, 140, 177, 203, 220, 228, 232, 234, 236, 239 Carax, Leos, 132, 135 Cardinale, Claudia, 76, 117 Carion, Christian, 73, 80 Carmen (opera); (novel); (film), 104, 218 Caron, Leslie, 134 Carpenter, John, 188 Cela, Camilo Jos´e, 219 Certified Copy (Copie coforme), 133, 136, 137, 139–142 Chabrol, Claude, 26 Chaudhuri, Shohini, 213 Chicks (La Vie au ranch), 154, 155–157 Children of Nature (B¨orn n´att´urunnar), 177 Chocolat, 134, 139, 143 Cinecitt`a studios, 117 Cinema Paradiso, 23 Citizen Kane, 3 Charpentier, Marc-Antoine, 79 Chaumeil, Pascal, 2 Children of the Century, The (Les Enfants du si`ecle), 134 Chorus, The (Les Choristes), 43 Cloud 9 (Wolke 9), 23 Code Unknown (Code Inconnu), 27, 63, 133, 138, 143 Conductor (Dirizher), 238 Connery, Sean, 76 Contagion, 133 Corti, Axel, 76 Cosmopolis, 138, 139 Cotillard, Marion, 133 Couch in New York, A (Un Divan a` New York), 134, 147–150 Council of Europe, 4, 6, 19, 61, 62, 128 Couple, The (Dvoje), 102

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Daldry, Stephen, 24 Dalton, Timothy, 76 Damage, 133, 137, 139, 141 Dan in Real Life, 134 Danan, Martine, 188 Dancer in the Dark, 66, 179 Danielsson, Tage, 160, 166–167 Dardenne brothers, 33, 62, 63, 91 Darkness, 178 De Fun`es, Louis, 120, 161 De Vega, Lope, 221 Dead Man Down, 209 Death Wish, 191 Deleuze, Gilles, 22 Delibes, Miguel, 214 Deliver Us from Evil, 95 Delors, Jacques, 67 Delpy, Julie, 76, 185 Deneuve, Catherine, 131, 134 Denis, Claire, 23 Depardieu, G´erard, 76, 131, 123, 136, 144 Depp, Johnny, 134 Der Wixxer, 11, 38–42, 44, 45, 52, 54 Despleschin, Arnaud, 133 Dimendberg, Edward, 190 Dirty, Pretty Things, 63 District 13 (Banlieue 13), 185, 186, 188–190, 195 Django Unchained, 41 Dog in a Manger, The (El perro del hortelano), 221, 222 Dogville, 27, 66 Doillon, Jacques, 138, Donovan, Landon, 123 Dor´e, Gustav, 218 Downfall (Der Untergang), 24, 35, 43

Dresen, Andreas, 23 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 91 Drogba, Didier, 122 Dubosc, Franck, 36 Dujardin, Jean, 2, 36, 40, 154 Dumont, Bruno, 91, 138 Duris, Romain, 79 Dyer, Richard, 88, 125, 213

INDEX

Courageous, 95 Craig, Daniel, 120, 205 Cribbins, Bernard, 167 Cronenberg, David, 138 Cronenweth, Jeff, 205 Cruz, Pen´elope, 131 Cyrano de Bergerac, 148, 221

12:33

Earth, 35, 47, 49, 54, 55, 146 Edge of Heaven, The (Auf der anderen Seite), 68, 73, 78, 82–85 Edison, Thomas, 89 Elizabeth, 221, 223 Elles,133, 137–138 English Patient, The, 77, 133 Enrico, Robert, 75 Escape from New York, 134, 188, 189 E.T., 40 Eurimages, 4, 28, 61–67, 128 Europacorp (film company), 185, 187, 188 European Audiovisual Observatory, 173 European Economic Community, 60, 214 European Film Academy, 63, 66, 101 European Union, 4, 6, 67, 70, 199 Europeanness, 3, 4–13, 22, 31, 45, 59, 60, 62, 66, 67, 71, 84, 89, 96, 112, 131, 132, 134, 136, 139, 141, 146, 148, 156, 157, 167, 186, 188, 190, 193, 202, 207, 210, 213, 214, 215, 216–219, 224, 228, 237, 239, 240 Europhobia, 10, 11, 187, 190, 194 Euro-pudding, 8, 18, 73, 74–85 F`abregas, Cesc, 122 Family Life (La Vie de famille), 138 Far From Heaven, 41 Farocki, Harun, 24 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 24, 83 Father of my Children, The (Le P`ere de mes enfants), 92–94 Feather Collector, The (Skupljaˇci perja), 9, 101–113 Federer, Roger, 123

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Fehmiu, Bekim, 102 Fellini, Federico, 19 Few Days in September, A(Quelques jours en septembre), 133 Fiddian, Robin, 218 Fiennes, Ralph, 77 Fifth Element, The (Le cinqui`eme element), 178 Fincher, David, 10, 12, 199–210 Fireproof, 96 Flight of the Red Balloon (Le Voyage du ballon rouge), 133, 138, 139 Flywheel, 95 Fontane, Theodor, 26 Forman, Milos, 76 Four Lions, 88 Franco, Francisco, 214, 216 Franglais, 10, 145–148 Frears, Stephen, 63 French New Wave, 1, 12, 132, 137, 217, 236 French Revolution, The (La R´evolution franc¸aise), 21, 76 Friends Forever (Les Bronz´es 3: Amis pour la vie), 37 From Paris with Love, 185, 186, 194–196 Gabin, Jean, 138 Gainsbourg, Charlotte, 138, 151 Garbo, Greta, 3 Gatlif, Tony, 104 GATT, 6, 129 Gavin, John, 40 Ghost-Writer, The, 48, 178 Gibson, Mel, 95 Gilbert, John, 3 Girardot, Annie, 26 Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The (David Fincher), 10, 12, 199–211 Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The (M¨an som hatar kvinnor), 199 God is Great and I’m Not (Dieu est grand, je suis toute petite), 94 Godard, Jean-Luc, 19, 90, 132, 217

262

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Godzilla, 134 Golden Globe (award), 82, 85 Golino, Valeria, 76, 117 Good Heart, The, 178 Goodbye Bafana, 76 Goya, Francisco, 216 Goya’s Ghosts, 76 Grande vadrouille, La, 36, 160, 161 Grant, Hugh, 131 Grbavica (The Land of My Dreams), 65 Green, Eug`ene, 94 Gypsies, The (poem), 104 Gypsy Girl (Ciganka), 102 Hail Mary ( Je vous salue, Marie), 90, 132 Hallstr¨om, Lasse, 134 Haneke, Michael, 8, 11, 25, 27, 33, 46, 48, 63, 77, 88, 91, 133 Hanka, 102 Hansen-Løve, Mia, 92 Harris, Joanne, 134 Hasse˚atage, 11, 160, 161, 166, 167, 170 Hate (La Haine), 24, 190 Hatot, Georges, 89 Hazanavicius, Michel, 1, 40, 157 Headhunters (Hodejegerne), 205 Head-on (Gegen die Wand ), 66, 83, Heartbreaker (L’Arnacoeur), 2 Herbig, Michael, 32, 49 Hidden (Cach´e ), 27, 88, 133, 138 Hirschbiegel, Oliver, 24, 49 Holy Innocents, The (Los santos inocentes), 214, 215, 219–221 Honor´e, Christophe, 185 Horseman on the Roof, The (Le Hussard sur le toit), 134, 138 Hostel, 186 Hot Fuzz, 35, 45, 47 House of Bernarda Alba, The (La casa de Bernarda Alba), 219 House of the Spirits, The, 76, 177 Hsiao-Hsien, Hou, 133 Huppert, Isabelle, 26, 138 Hurt, William, 148 Huth, James, 154

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Jaoui, Agn`es, 150 Jatagan Slums ( Jatagan mala), 102 Jesus Camp, 95 Jet Lag (D´ecalage horaire), 134, 147 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre, 2, 178 Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc), 178 Journey of Hope (Reise der Hoffnung), 63 Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia), 140 Jovanovi´c, Gordana, 106 Juliette Binoche: Sketches for a Portrait (Juliette Binoche: dans les yeux), 135 Kalkofe, Oliver, 38, 39, 45 K´ari, Dagur, 177, 178 Karina, Anna, 132 Karmitz, Marin, 231 Kassowitz, Mathieu, 24 Kechiche, Abdellatif, 88 Kendrick, Alex, 95 Kenovic, Ademir, 62 Khan, Akram, 135 Kiarostami, Abbas, 133, 139 Kieslowski, Krzysztof, 25, 26, 133 Killing, The (Forbrydelsen), 205 King’s Speech, The, 2, 45, 48, 57 King’s Whore, The (La Putain du roi ), 76 Kinotavr (film festival), 238

Kinski, Klaus, 39 Klapisch, C´edric, 4, 73, 185 Koc¸i, Fatmir, 64 Koller, Xavier, 63 Kominsky, Peter, 133 Kracauer, Siegfried, 19 Kragh-Jacobsen, Søren, 177 Kr¨uger, Diane, 80 Kusturica, Emir, 62

INDEX

Ibrahimovi´c, Zlatan, 126 Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges), 24 In Paris (Dans Paris), 185 In the Electric Mist, 178 In this World, 24 I˜na´ rritu, Alejandro Gonz´alez, 122 Inbetweeners Movie, The, 37, 48 Inglorious Basterds, 41, 82 Iniesta, Andr´es, 122 Irons, Jeremy, 76, 141 Island, The (Ostrov), 238 Island on Bird Street, The (Øen i fuglegaden), 177 Ivory, James, 222

12:33

La Reine Margot, 221 La Sept (film company), 231 Lacan, Jacques, 19 Lacombe Lucien, 24 Lamerica, 63, 64, 67 Landa, Alfredo, 220 Lanzmann, Claude, 24 Larsson, Stieg, 203 Last Metro, The (Le Dernier metro), 24 Last Resort, 24 Leconte, Patrice, 37, 134 Lemercier, Val´erie, 136 Lenfilm (film studio), 231 LeRoy, Mervyn, 90 Let Me In, 201 Let the Right One In (L˚at den r¨atte komma in), 201 Letourneur, Sophie, 157 Levinas, Emmanuel, 22 Lewis, Gary, 90 Life and Passion of Jesus Christ, The (La Vie et la passion de J´esus-Christ), 89 Life is Beautiful (La Vita e` bella), 23 Lilya 4-Ever, 24 Lindsay-Hogg, Michael, 220 Line of Life (Ligne de vie), 234 Lives of Others, The (Das Leben der Anderen), 45 Look Back in Anger, 217 LOL (Laughing Out Loud ), 154, 155, 157 L`opez de Ayala, Pilar, 222 Lorca, Federico Garc´ıa, 219 Lorna’s Silence (Le Silence de Lorna), 63, 68 Love Boat, The, 36

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Lovers on the Bridge, The (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf ), 132 Luchetti, Daniele, 23 Lucky Luke, 36 Lumi`ere, Louis, 89 Luna Park, 228, 232–235 Lungin, Pavel, 10, 228, 238 LUX Prize, 8, 53, 59, 67–69, 84 Maastricht Treaty, 4 Mad Love ( Juana la loca), 215, 222 Magimel, Benoˆıt, 135 Makavejev, Duˇsan, 201 Malkovich, John, 76 Malle, Louis, 24, 133 Manhattan, 152 Manitou’s Shoe (Der Schuh des Manitu), 36, 49, 50 Mankell, Henning, 204 March of the Penguins (La Marche de l’empereur), 35 Martinez, Olivier, 135 Mart´ın-Santos, Luis, 219 Mary, 139 Master and Margarita, The (Majstor i Margarita), 102 Matthews, Kerwin, 40 MEDIA, 4, 61, 75, 78, 120, 128 Menzel, Jeri, 62 Merchant, Ismail, 222 M´erim´ee, Prosper, 104, 218 Merry Christmas ( Joyeux No¨el ), 73 Mesrine, 178 Messi, Lionel, 126 Metz, Christian, 19 Midnight in Paris, 185, 195 Mihaileanu, Radu, 62 Millennium trilogy (Stieg Larssen), 203, 204 Mimran, Herv´e, 150 Minghella, Anthony, 77, 133 Miral, 178 Mir´o, 218, 221 Miss Julie, 135 Mission Impossible, 49, 133 MK2 Productions (film company), 231

12:33

Momentum Pictures (film company), 203, 207, 208 Monnet, Jean, 22, 60 Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (Les Vacances de M. Hulot), 163 Moodysson, Lukas, 24 Morel, Pierre, 11, 185 Moretti, Nanni, 23 Morris, Chris, 88 Mortensen, Viggo, 222 Moscow International Film Festival, 238 Much Ado About Nothing, 221 Mulligan, Carey, 120 Murnau, F. W., 26 My Wife is an Actress (Ma Femme est une actrice), 150–154 Nakache, G´eraldine, 150, 153 Naked Gun, 37 Name of the Rose, The (Der Name der Rose), 76, 169 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 22, 31 Nanovi´c, Vojislav, 102 Neeson, Liam, 187, 190, 192 Nesbø, Jo, 205 Neues vom Wixxer, 38, 39, 54 Night is Young, The (Mauvais sang), 132, 137 Nine Letters to Bertha (Nueve cartas a Berta), 214–217 No Man’s Land, 64, 65 Noi the Albino, (Noi alb´ın`oii), 177 Nothing to Declare (Rien a` declarer), 36 Novello, Ivor, 119 Nykvist, Sven, 207 Oceans, 35, 48 Ogre, The (Der Unhold ), 79 Olin, Lena, 134 Oliver Twist, 35, 43, 46, 178 Oplev, Niels Arden, 199, 202, 209 OSS117, 111, 36, 38, 40–42 Our Life (La Nostra Vita), 23 Oury, G´erard, 160 Outside Satan (Hors Satan), 94 Outside the Law (Hors la loi ), 88

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Quantum of Solace, 35, 47, 54 Queen, The, 35, 45, 47 Quo Vadis, 90 Rabal, Francisco, 220 Rain Man, 117 Ranci`ere, Jacques, 22, 31, Rappeneau, Jean-Paul, 134, 138, 221 Ray, Nicholas, 26

Reader, The, 24, 55 ´ Red Eagle (Aguila roja), 225 Reeves, Matt, 201 Reilly, Kelly, 79 Reitz, Edgar, 24 Rendez-vous, 132, 136, 139 Reno, Jean, 148–149 Requiem for a Spanish Peasant (R´equiem por un campesino espa˜nol ), 219 Resident Evil, 35, 48, 51, 56 Revanche, 92 Rib´ery, Franck, 122 Richardson, Tony, 217 Richet, Jean-Franc¸ois, 178 ´ Rodero, Jos´e Angel, 215 Roma (gypsy), 9, 13, 101–112 Ronaldinho, 122 Ronaldo, Cristiano, 122–124 Rooney, Wayne, 122, 124 Roots (Bednye rodstvenniki ), 228 Rosenstrasse, 24 Rossellini, Roberto, 140 Roth, Tim, 76 Rudolph, Lars, 39 Run Lola Run (Lola Rent), 27

INDEX

Passion of the Christ, The, 89, 90, 95 Parade, The (Parada), 36 Paris, 185 Paris je t’aime, 133, 185 Patino, Basilio Mart´ın, 214, 215 P´avez, Terele, 220 Pawlikowski, Pawel, 24 Pawlo, Toivo, 167 Pegg, Simon, 45 Pelle the Conqueror (Pelle erobreren), 177 Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del mont´on), 218 P´erez-Reverte, Arturo, 214 Perfume (Das Parfum), 35 Petrovi´c, Aleksandar, 9, 101, 107 Piano Teacher, The (La Pianiste), 27 Playtime, 167, 163–165, 170 Poelvoorde, Benoˆıt, 36 Point Break, 154 Polanski, Roman, 26, 48, 178 Pommer, Erich, 119 Portraits In-Eyes, 135–136, 143 Portuguese Nun, The (A Religiosa Portuguesa), 94 Post-Heritage cinema, 214–215, 221–222, 224–225 Pot Luck (L’Auberge Espagnole), 4, 73 Pride and Prejudice, 43, 46 Princess and the Warrior, The (Der Krieger und die Kaiserin), 27 Promise, The (La Promesse), 63 Prophet, A(Un proph`ete), 187 Pulp Fiction, 194 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 104, 238

12:33

Said, Edward, 88 San Sebasti´an (film festival), 217 Sander, August, 26 Sander-Brahms, Helma, 24 Saura, Carlos, 215, 218, 219 Schengen Agreement, 4 Schl¨ondorff, Volker, 76 Schnabel, Julian, 178 Scott, Alan, 3 Scott, Ridley, 76 Scott Thomas, Kristin, 77 Sea Inside, The (Mar Adentro), 45, 46 Segura, Santiago, 36 Sender, Ram´on J., 219 Severance, 186 Seymour, Jane, 76 Shimell, William, 139 Shirin, 140 Shoah, 24

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Shun Li and the Poet (Io Sono Li), 68 Silence of the Lambs, The, 40 Sirk, Douglas, 26 Skarsgˆard, Stellan, 207 Slater, Christian, 76 Slumdog Millionaire, 2, 47 Snow White (Blancanieves), 9, 157 Snows of Kilimanjaro, The (Les Neiges du Kilimandjaro), 68 Son’s Room, The (La Stanza del figlio), 23 Spielmann, G¨otz, 92 Spotlight on a Massacre (Lumi`ere sur un massacre), 234 Staermose, Soren, 203 Stafford, Frederick, 40 Stalens, Marion, 135 Stamp, Terence, 151 Starship Surprise ((T)raumschiff Surprise – Periode 1), 36 Streep, Meryl, 76 Strindberg, August, 135 Sturridge, Charles, 220 Summer Hours (L’Heure d’´et´e), 138 Suwa, Nobuhiro, 133 Syberberg, Hans-J¨urgen, 24 Szumowska, Malgoska, 133 Tairovi´c, Zoran, 104 Taken, 11, 47, 185, 186, 188, 190–193 Tanovic, Danis, 62, 65 Tarantino, Quentin, 12, 41, 82, 160, 194 Taste of Others, The (Le Goˆut des autres), 45, 150, 153 Tati, Jacques, 11, 160, 162, 166, 170 Tautou, Audrey, 79 Tavernier, Bertrand, 178 Taxi Blues (Taksi Bliuz), 228–232, 235, 236 Tecglen, Eduardo Haro, 216 T´echin´e, Andr´e, 133 Terry-Thomas, 161 Thessaloniki Film Festival, 64 Thompson, Dani`ele, 134, 147 Three Colours: Blue (Trois couleurs: bleu), 133

266

12:33

Thulin, Ingrid, 26 Time of Silence (Tiempo de silencio), 219 Time of the Wolf (Le Temps du Loup), 26 Tirana Year Zero (Tirana, ann´ee zero), 64 Tolstoi, Lev, 238 Tornatore, Giuseppe, 23 Travolta, John, 187, 194 Trier, Lars, von, 25, 27, 33, 48, 62, 66, 177, 179, 180 Trotta, Margarethe, von, 24 Truffaut, Franc¸ois, 24, 26, 217 Tsar, 238 Two Brothers (Deux fr`eres), 37 Tykwer, Tom, 25, 27, 49, 76 Tyldum, Morten, 205 Unbearable Lightness of Being, The, 133, 134, 136–137, 139 Vertigo, 41 Very Long Engagement, A(Un long dimanche de fianc¸ailles), 43 Vorkapi´c, Slavko, 201 Voyager (Homo Faber), 76 Vuˇco, Olivera, 109 Wallander, 204, 205, 207 Wedding, The (Svad’ba), 228 Wega Film (production company), 28 Welcome, 68 Welcome to the South (Benvenuti al Sud), 36 Welcome to the Sticks (Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis), 36 Welles, Orson, 3 Wenders, Wim, 68, 71, 121, 122, 127 ˇ je What is a Man Without a Moustache? (Sto muˇskarac bez brkova?), 36 When we Leave (Die Fremde), 56, 68 Widow of Saint-Pierre, The (La Veuve de Saint-Pierre), 134 Winter Light (Nattvardsg¨asterna), 26 Winterbottom, Michael, 24 Wizard, The (Der Hexer), 39 Write the Future, 122–126

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Yanes, Agust´ın D´ıaz, 214, 222 Yugoslav Black Wave, 13, 101

Zaillian, Steven, 203–204 Zapatero, Jos´e Luis Rodr´ıguez, 224 Zbanic, Jasmila, 62, 65 Zemmouri, Mahmoud, 64 ˇ Zivojinovi´ c, Bata, 107

INDEX

X-Filme Creative Poole (production company), 28

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12:33