GERM 262: European Film (HC) Spring 2012: Finding Books

This collection of essays by an acclaimed film scholar examines how independent filmmaking in Europe has been reinventing itself since the 1990s, faced by renewed competition from Hollywood and the challenges posed to national cinemas by the fall of the Wall in 1989. Elsaesser reassesses the debates and presents a broader framework for understanding the forces at work since the 1960s. These include the interface of "world cinema" and the rise of Asian cinemas, the importance of the international film festival circuit, the role of television, and the changing aesthetics of auteur cinema. New audiences have different allegiances, and new technologies enable networks to reshape identities, but European cinema still has an important function in setting critical and creative agendas, even as its economic and institutional bases are in transition.

In European Cinemas, European Societies Pierre Sorlin looks at the way the nations of Europe have expressed their cultural individuality in film. For instance, why do French films have such a distinctive style, different from the products of Hollywood, Germany, Italy and Britain? Sorlin also examines how the impact of a common evolution toward federalism can be detected in films.

A comprehensive introduction to the theory and practice of national cinemas in Europe, bringing together classic writing by key filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Buñuel and John Grierson, and critics from Andre Bazin to Peter Wollen.

Featuring in-depth case studies of films from Italy, Germany, eastern Europe, and Scandinavia, Rosalind Galt reassesses the role that nostalgia, melodrama, and spectacle play in staging history. Going beyond the conventional focus on national cinemas and heritage, Galt's transnational approach provides an account of how post-Berlin Wall European cinema inventively rethought the identities, ideologies, image, and popular memory of the continent.