The European cinema – that of auteurs, national styles and new waves – has traditionally been identified with a dual cultural legacy: that of the 19th novel and of the 20th century artistic avant-gardes. It helped draw a boundary between the work of the great directors, representing the nation, and domestic star and genre cinema, entertaining the masses, while also helping to set off the ‘Europe’ of film art against the ‘Hollywood’ of commerce.
It is a commonplace to note that these legacies and distinctions have proven increasingly untenable over the past decades. But what has replaced the European art- and auteur-cinema, what has become of independent cinema, and how can we best discuss these changes? Is European cinema now part of world cinema in the age of globalisation? Between the festival circuit and late-night television, is there an audience for European films? Has it become a cinema of cities: Paris, Berlin, London, Warsaw, Madrid, Rome, Marseille? Is it the medium for a multicultural Europe and its migrating Multitudes? A cinema of history, place and memory? Cinema in Europe: Networks in Progress aims to explore the new connections, network and nodal points that have emerged in the wake of boundaries overcome and hierarchies overturned. But every re-drawing of the map delineates new divides and demarcations.
The cinema is a global phenomenon. As an entertainment form and an art of self-expression it attracts some of the most gifted individuals in every country. As a complex industry and a powerful means of communication and persuasion it deeply affects every new generation. Yet the power-relations that sustain it are a-symmetrical, the international dynamics that spotlight a film, a country or a director are cyclical, and its overall cultural significance is a delicate web of political urgency, passing fashion, and eternal verities. If the last twenty years have seen the cinema’s popularity grow all over the world, Europe, too, has benefited from the trend, if not quite in the same way as Asian cinema or even the popular cinema of the Indian sub-continent. Hence the shifts that have de-centred the old ‘national’ cinemas are as much external as internal to the cinema and its institutional contexts. Internal factors are the technological changes in production, spearheaded by the digital revolution and underpinned by the various national, trans-European and even regional film financing systems, existing in parallel to the box-office and television sales.
Exhibition has become dependent on a factor often overlooked: the increasing importance of film festivals. They have become the network nodes for distribution, the interfaces of European talents and world cinema, for they generate and help circulate the cultural capital that gives a film media attention and exposure.
External factors for the changing media landscape shaping European cinema include the contested nature of the contemporary nation state, the emergence of a ‘Europe of the regions and the capitals’, the expansion of the European Union eastwards, and the demographic transformation of Europe’s populations into multi-ethnic and multi-cultural communities. Taken together, these factors are a work-in-progress on the very definition of Europe in respect to its geopolitical position, economically still one of the epicentres of the global economy, but now also often seen to be at the margins of major cultural and political developments. Cautious and conservative, European citizens have on the whole been slow in responding to the often virulent identity-politics of populations elsewhere, yet as so often, the cinema has been a sensitive and acute barometer. The new demographics, re-centering Europe around the Mediterranean and the East, is also putting pressure on the cinema through its audiences, who demand new media representations, new identities and self-definitions.
Cinema in Europe: Networks in Progress will look at the consequences of these changes by rethinking the habitual notions of nationally specific film cultures and their distinct authorial or stylistic signatures. Participants are encouraged to suggest new conceptual tools, propose new maps of the cinematic terrain – mainstream, avant-garde and independent – and establish new links within European media-scapes and media-spaces, as well as between European and world cinema.
The conference takes place over three days and is organised by the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA), in cooperation with the Department of Media and Culture, University of Amsterdam. Possible topics and panels include:
· New authorship studies
· National Cinemas and New Waves
· Cinephilia: Classics, Cults, Markets
· European Animation Film
· Re-Mapping the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Europe: Central and Eastern European Cinema after 1989
· Americanising Europe or Europeanising Hollywood?
· Memory, Heritage, Literature and European Cinema
· Festivals, Film Financing, Media Policy
· European Stars and Genre Cinema
· Puttnam, Eichinger, Zentropa, Canal +: More Power to Producers?
· Documentary Europe
· Digital Europe
· Diaspora Cinema and the New Cosmopolitans
· European Cinema, the Museum and the Avant-garde
· Theologies in Film
· Europe’s Cinematic Cities
Proposals for 25-30 minutes papers should be submitted as a 200 words abstract by 31 December, 2004 either to Prof. Thomas Elsaesser (elsaesser@ uva.nl) or Dr Eloe Kingma (asca-fgw@uva.nl).
