MA FSM 2019-20

FX6017 Film and Screen Cultures and Industries

EUFA Strand - Assignment

What is Europeanness?

The Double Perspective

As part of my research I used two films set in Paris to examine the term ‘Double Perspective,'

which Elsaesser introduces in European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood when determining

‘Europeanness’ as contrived from outside Europe, and experienced from within. Woody Allen’s

Midnight in Paris (2011) and Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995) consolidate the argument that

from outside Europe specifically America films romanticise Europe’s cities, high-culture and

history while cinema made within addresses the more nuanced aspects of political, social and

economic realities of a post-colonial, post-communist, geo-political dynamic Europe.

This is perhaps a simplistic dichotomy and as Elsaesser declares, “these definitions are…no

longer either adequate or particularly useful” (35) in respect of globalisation however, by observing

the films in EUFA there can be no doubt that there continues to be an agency for European

cinema that is determined to examine what he calls “the struggle to overcome difference” in an

effort “to grow together… to tolerate diversity while recognizing in the common past the possible

promise of a common “destiny.” (35) Indeed, to determine Europeanness as the striving for

identity and meaning through societal rebellion, political competition and transnational

cooperation.

What is not European(ness)?

In an effort to define Europeanness, it is important to examine those intrinsic characteristics that,

in general define European cinema compared to other film industries. The machine-like, tried and

tested methodologies of mainstream industries, such as Hollywood or Bollywood implement a

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factory-assembly process to filmmaking. The prescriptive use of big stars, big studios and big

budgets drive a film’s placing in a commercial arena that is expecting the next instalment from

said actor, director or film franchise. In comparison, there is a distinct lack of commerciality with

the films of the EUFA award. Most employed largely unknown actors, were void of noticeably

large production budgets, absent of lavish set design and were funded by either independent

producers or a conglomeration of multi-national European production houses, likely obtaining

financial assistance from arts institutions.

Simply, Europe produces a more multi-cultural output, not solely in terms of actual language for

instance but a diverse force from layers of society that intend to challenge the status quo. The

prosaic nature of mainstream cinema urges the European cinematic voice; it’s Europeanness, to

respond to the onslaught of saccharine or simplistic homogenised behemoths with realist

depictions of people struggling with issues such as societal injustices and identity representation.

Cultural value versus entertainment

One of the overriding elements of Hollywood’s output is the formulaic narrative structures and

themes that films are built upon. When comparing Europe and Hollywood, Elsaesser invokes

Greek mythologies to analyse the prescriptive nature of plots employed by Hollywood, calling it

‘relentlessly, obsessively oedipal cinema’ (49) and thus, claiming that American films always have

both an adventure plot and a romantic (heterosexual) plot. Not that European cinema doesn’t

have such archetypes but as is evident from films in EUFA such as Portrait of a Girl on Fire (2019)

and And Then We Danced (2019), the adventure plot is more likely to be a journey of educative

probing and the romance plot often extricates from, rather than reinforces the logics of societal or

religious conservatism.

With European films the audience expects to be challenged, philosophically. Indeed, it is these

different ‘voices’, whether they are the post-colonial strains of male identity from the impoverished

streets of Parisian suburbs or the individual cries against historic state oppression in the ex-

communist ‘new’ countries, that compete with each other reflecting European political discourse.
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This competitiveness is the critical cultural essence that, as is argued in The Europeanness of

European Cinema; Identity, Meaning, Globalisation (6-8) when, to counter the point in Face to

Face with Hollywood that European cinema should be categorised as World Cinema, creates a

Europeanness that scrutinises and evaluates itself in the face of globalised culture.

Hollywood produces entertainment on a scale that few other film industries can claim to, not to

say that British, French and other European productions do not pertain to the masses. However, it

can be argued that America produces so much entertainment that is consumed so readily by

Europeans that Europe is obliged to produce an ‘other’ type of film, historically under the guise of

‘art-house’ film but now as diasporic or migrant cinema analysing specific topics. For instance, Ie

film de banlieue (cinema of the hood) that Hamid Naficy (95-99) refers to a movement born from

second generation French filmmakers producing small-budget films on issues specific to their

social environments. If America gives us action, thriller and rom-com genres to munch popcorn in

front of then Europe responds to, and competes with this passiveness by producing realistic

cinema concerning itself with educating and encouraging the audience to critically question the

non-fictional subjects and concerns of a film. The EUFA nominations are particularly relevant

given their subject matter such as System Crasher (2019) which depicts the harrowing

inefficiencies of the German healthcare system in relation to vulnerable children.

Europeanness as ‘Otherness’.

In the Swedish/Georgian co-production And Then We Danced (2019) the plot tells of a young male

dancer in the National Georgian Ensemble, whose burgeoning sexuality is exposed by the arrival

of another dancer who becomes a rival and an object of desire. The film is set against a backdrop

of a traditional masculinity which is punctured by the arrival of this outsider, and was made as a

reaction to actual homophobic attacks in the ex-Soviet capital, to which the films Swedish-born

director of Georgian heritage suggested is “likely to be seen as EU propaganda in Russia”(Cannes

2019, Directors Fortnight). The country continues to battle with its conservative and political

history leading to the film acting as a diasporic ‘outsider’ critique, reflected in the films plot.

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To extrapolate Foucaultian theory from the films ‘outsider’ elements that can be identified as both

corrupter of, and liberator from the status quo is to see the film as a reductive thesis of the

xenophobic outsider or non-European ‘other’ (in this case a former Soviet bloc state) versus

‘progressive’ European attitudes. However, and especially cinema from the emerging democracies

of New Europe can offer an insight into the aspirational Europeanness that tells the stories of who

Trifonova calls idealogical citizens of Europe rather than, the more bureaucratically implied

European citizens (Code Unknown 4).

This notion of double occupancy, (in the case of And Then We Danced, the dual-heritage of the

director as well as the production companies) can result in transnationalistic, dogmatic reflections

that diasporic cinema can generate, of which Elsaesser describes when writing about films made

by second generation Europeans as ‘films without passports’ (78).

Word Count - 1,100

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 Work Cited

Elsaesser, Thomas. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam University Press, 2005.

Harrod, Mary, Mariana Liz, and Alissa Timoshkina (eds), The Europeanness of European Cinema: Identity,

Meaning, Globalization. I.B. Tauris, 2015.

Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema; Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton University Press, 2001.

Trifonova, Temenuga. Code Unknown; European Identity in Cinema, University of New Brunswick, Canada,

2005. www.nottingham.ac.uk/scope/documents/2007/may-2007/trifonova.pdf

Lumholdt, Jan. “Cannes 2019 Directors Fortnight, Levin Akin - Director of And Then We Danced”.

Cineuropa. 18/05/2019, cineuropa.org/en/interview/372683, Accessed 05 Nov. 2019.