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Post-Crisis
European Cinema
White Men in Off-Modern Landscapes
György Kalmár
Post-Crisis European Cinema
György Kalmár
Post-Crisis European
Cinema
White Men in Off-Modern Landscapes
György Kalmár
Inst English & American Studies
University of Debrecen
Debrecen, Hungary
ISBN 978-3-030-45034-2 ISBN 978-3-030-45035-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45035-9
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To my intellectual heroes and heroines, for whom true thinking means
risking everything we used to know for the sake of what we need to know.
Preface: Living the State of Crisis
Towards the end of 2016 several newspapers declared 2016 to be the

“worst year ever”. Apparently, every self-respecting (and less self-
respecting) newspaper and magazine, from The Guardian to The New York
Times, from The Evening Standard to The New Yorker felt the need to run
something on the subject, be those dramatic declarations, sad lists of loss,
fact-based corrections or half-joking, champagne-in-hand, end-of-the-
year pieces. Penguin even published a whole book, entitled F∗ck You 2016:
A Look Back on the Worst Year Ever, and, needless to say, social media was
teeming with memes demonstrating how terrible the year was. Just for the
record, or for the sake of those who forgot during the Tsunami of equally
terrible later years, 2016 was the year that David Bowie, Prince and
Leonard Cohen died, and (more importantly for this book) also the year
of the Brexit vote, Trump’s election, Aleppo’s siege and destruction in
Syria, an unprecedented series of terrorist attacks throughout Europe, and
the Zyka outbreak, to mention only a few. Even if one takes away the
effects of end-of-the-year-champagne-by-the-laptop journalism and
Twitter-crazes, one can sense the overall feeling of a cultural shock-wave
going through first-world societies, a general sentiment that this is not just
the usual terrible stuff, that what we are living through is bad in historical
proportions. It seems as if this feeling kept haunting us, as if we were living
through a series of terrible events that probably started with 9/11 in
2001, got even worse with the 2008 global financial crisis, led to Brexit,
Trump and who knows what else. To make things worse, the post-crisis
analyses indicated time after time that these were not mere accidents, but
rather symptoms of much wider and more fundamental issues concerning
vii
viii PREFACE: LIVING THE STATE OF CRISIS
democracy, liberalism, technology, environmental change or the late 20th

century forms of neoliberal capitalism. Thus our time is that of shock,
bewilderment, cognitive disorder, regressive escape from reality and the
painful task of readjusting one’s sense of normalcy year after year.
Oftentimes, the general sentiment is that there is something wrong with
the twenty-first century, this is not what history was meant to be, there is
something awfully off.
Though the first wave of the financial crisis seems to be behind us, and the
most catastrophic economic scenarios have been avoided so far, I would
argue (in agreement with the picture painted by most of the films to be dis-
cussed in this book) that the crisis is definitely not comfortably behind us.
Thus, when I refer to “post-crisis” Europe in this book, it should not be
understood as a period simply after the crisis, when the crisis is over, but
rather as the time when the effects of previous critical breakdowns are played
out (in a manner similar to how post-modernity stands for a peculiar form of
modernity). The chain reaction that the security and financial crises set in
motion in the first decade of the new century is still very much rolling on:
contemporary Europe is very much defined by political instability, social
inequality, polarisation and unrest—all in front of the background of an ever
more frightening global environmental crisis. At the time of finalizing this
manuscript, when the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic is still raging throughout
Europe, it is clear that there is no way of looking at this time of crisis from an
outside vantage point: we do not know where it will lead us, there is no final-
ity about this. We are in this state of crisis, living through it, living it, every day.
This state of crisis is also a time of confusion, when understanding the
world can be quite a challenge. Most of our master-plans and grand narratives
that we used to rely on for decades have been shaken or seriously damaged in
the first two decades of the new millennium. Our previous ideas about prog-
ress, liberal democracy, neoliberal capitalism, multiculturalism or our notion
of history as a gradual evolution of societies towards more and more affluence,
justice and human happiness have all been seriously questioned. We must
realise that the twenty-first century has a completely different cultural logic
than the previous one had: most of our social, ideological, political, financial
and ecological paradigms are either changing or will (or must) change soon.
As most of our critical concepts, intellectual tools and ideological frameworks
were made during the boom years of the late twentieth century, they are
clearly outdated and inadequate today. Now we cannot escape the feeling that
at some point in the past we got it really wrong, and our blindness has a high
price to pay. Suddenly we do not know where we are and where we should be
PREFACE: LIVING THE STATE OF CRISIS ix
going. Since the general cultural logic of the previous decades is changing,
which affects all aspects of life and all academic disciplines, arguably there is no
intellectually relevant academic approach in the human and social sciences
today that should not also include the critical re-examination of our inherited,
pre-crisis intellectual and ideological tool-boxes.
In this book I wish to look at how European art cinema makes sense of
our present loss of sense, what narratives it constructs out of our contem-
porary loss of grand narratives, and what identities it constructs at a time
of the dramatic realignment of opinions, social affiliations and identities.
It uses cinema and its representation of changing white masculinities to
dive into the heart of the present socio-cultural transformations, and it
analyses cinema’s responses to these “hot” issues, as well as the solutions
it may offer. What I propose to do, therefore, is thinking through cinema
in both senses of this expression: on the one hand, I try to think through
the different qualities, shifts and effects of twenty-first-century European
cinema in an effort to understand it and make critical observations about
it; and on the other hand, I try to use cinema as a critical tool itself that
allows for making observations about the world around us, as a means of
asking questions about the new century. The idea is to perform a critical
analysis of cinema’s explorations of a rapidly changing world, in which
process we do not only comprehend our world better, but also come
closer to understanding our own patterns of understanding, together,
needless to say, with its possible strengths and shortcomings, insights and
blind spots.
At this point a quick note is due on the politics of representation and
the representation of politics. From the above passages it may have already
transpired that this book will necessarily have to reflect on political issues
as well: there is simply no exploring the socio-cultural rearrangements of
the twenty-first century (on- and off-screen) without keeping the idea of
the political (in a general sense) in mind. Thus, in this book, while analys-
ing and contextualising European art films, I critically explore the implica-
tions, strengths and drawbacks of all ideological constructs that I discover
in them. And since a majority of European quality films are shaped by
Enlightenment humanism and the progressive-liberal political paradigm,
my critical remarks about these films may give readers the idea that I, like
the “bad” politicians of our time (Le Pen, Orbán, Trump) have serious
issues with twenty-first-century liberalism, democracy, the “political main-
stream” or the values and practices of the European cultural establish-
ment. Ironically, this is not so far from the truth: some of the criticism I
x PREFACE: LIVING THE STATE OF CRISIS
formulate in this book is driven by my disappointment with our cultural

and political establishment, and the way we uncritically try to rely on our
much-cherished twentieth-century ideas, ideologies and policies, and still
regard them as the last bastions of civilisation, our only protection against
resurgent barbarity. My disappointment and ensuing criticism, however,
does not stem from a deeply felt love for populism or autocracy. Quite the
contrary: it is motivated by the dismay felt over the way our cultural, finan-
cial and political establishments let the hard-earned results of the last 50
years of socio-cultural development be gradually undone.
As I will argue in more detail in the Introduction (Chap. 1), the twenty-
first-century crisis of the modern international liberal order is to a large
extent caused by its own shortcomings, mistaken assumptions, unforeseen
weaknesses, unpublicised compromises, unchecked corruption as well as
the intellectual laziness that comes so easily with decades of peace, pros-
perity and unchallenged dominance. Orbán, the AFD, the UKIP and Le
Pen are not the primary causes, but rather the symptomatic consequences
of this social, intellectual and political crisis. One of my basic assumptions
in this book is that with 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis (and a whole
number of other symptomatic events) the dominant cultural paradigm of
the last 50 years reached its tipping-point, and became counterproductive
with regards to its original goals. What used to be brave, intelligent, anti-
establishment, eye-opening, subversive and progressive in the 1970s, have
become, by the time the crisis hit, established, rigid, dogmatic, hyper-
normative, status quo, averse to self-correction, and often little more than
a bunch of empty commonplaces reiterated by professors, politicians and
journalists in the echo-chambers of their ivory towers. I think the new
century requires the renewal of this old paradigm. It is high time to take
into account everything that has gone wrong with these ideas, face their
weaknesses, hypocrisy, false assumptions or the ways they were corrupted
by those who appropriated them for the protection of the status quo. The
sooner we do it, the less painful this intellectual and political transition will
be. And the more time we waste by desperately defending them, denying
our old mistakes and the new conditions of the twenty-first century, the
more ground we give over to demagogues and autocrats, who happily take
advantage of the quick self-discrediting of the mainstream. The time of
denial should be over. It is time to rethink and sort out our intellectual,
political and artistic heritage, so as to be ready for the new challenges of
the new century.
PREFACE: LIVING THE STATE OF CRISIS xi
If one wishes to understand the true causes and nature of the present
crisis, one must look beyond the obvious symptoms, the scandals of the
day, the all-too-comfortable left wing / right wing or democratic / popu-
list dichotomies, and explore the socio-cultural field in depth. The most
important art form providing such depth of field is, I would argue, cin-
ema, especially the European arthouse kind, influenced by the aesthetics
of realism and the ethos of social responsibility. Thus, exploring the cin-
ema of these turbulent years may have ramifications beyond film history or
the studies of masculinity. Reading films is a valuable way of looking
behind the scenes, behind the spectacular symptoms, and seeing the social
matrix in its complexity. Films connect with the social conditions of their
times in a million ways. Narratives, the problems they show and the reso-
lutions they provide may reveal deeply hidden assumptions about a whole
community’s sense of history. Characters and their struggles and destinies
reveal concepts about identity, human values or gender. Films, especially
the ones shot on real locations, connect with the life-worlds of the times
and the practicalities of everyday life in countless ways. Simple cinematic
vehicles, such as setting, lighting or camera communicate the atmosphere
associated with certain situations, opinions on social issues, or value-
judgements about geographical locations or character types. Thus, cinema
simultaneously depicts social conditions, records human responses and
concepts about its challenges, and shapes our communities’ sense of
history.
Fans of European cinema will not be shocked when I claim that reading
this book may require the willing suspension of one’s beliefs, especially
one’s political and ideological beliefs. It is meant for people who are not
simply looking for an affirmation of their world-view, or ammunition to
use in the culture wars. Rather, it is meant for readers who enjoy when
cinema confronts them with difficult questions or disjoints their comfort-
able beliefs and opinions, for readers who are interested in critical think-
ing, debunking false concepts, pointing out ethical dilemmas, and
unearthing the (cognitive) patterns from which our world (and our films)
are made.
Indeed, one of the most awarding aspects of writing this book was that
I was forced to read and study outside my cognitive echo-chamber. I
wanted to carry out this work with as much intellectual honesty and criti-
cal insight as possible, therefore I had to explore all kinds of views, opin-
ions and theories, which would inevitably take me beyond the confines of
my more or less safe and comfortable academic bubble. In an attempt to
xii PREFACE: LIVING THE STATE OF CRISIS
challenge and correct my cognitive, political and academic biases, and to

get to know all that was stirred up by the current crisis, I searched and read
books from authors I never heard of before, listened to podcasts about
issues far from my usual research areas, watched public debates on
YouTube, with as little academic, political or ideological prejudice as pos-
sible. To be honest, in spite of some grim topics, it all turned out to be
joyfully and thrillingly inspiring.
I realised, for example, that in case of such a project one sure sign of
being on the right track is the ability to confuse intelligent algorithms.
When I showed my YouTube profile to my wife one night, that is, what
YouTube would recommend to me, what it thinks about my identity and
interests, she laughed so hard she had tears in her eyes. She also suggested
that I never show this to any psychiatrist if I wanted to keep my teaching
position. Besides the usual and expectable film studies and social theory
stuff, YouTube recommended Scandinavian white supremacist heavy
metal bands next to Maajid Nawaz, the British Muslim counter-extremism
activist, muscular male bodies of urban street-workout culture next to
emaciated hard-drug addicts, ContraPoints next to Jordan Peterson, pod-
casts by BBC Radio 4 and The Guardian next to the troll Sargon of Akkad,
or Christian Picciolini, the 120 kilograms full body tattooed ex-neo-Nazi
next to Yuval Noah Harari, the skinny, vegan, gay, Jewish historian.
I also made a habit of regularly asking the opinions of friends from all
sides of the political spectrum: liberals and conservatives, new Marxists
and alt-right followers, feminists and Orbán-fans, Brexiteers and remain-
ers, university professors and the last forum of old-school democratic pub-
lic discussion, the old ladies at the local flower market. These conversations
also taught me a fair amount of humility, made me understand that I can
always be (painfully) wrong, that others may always have another perspec-
tive that I could in no way foresee, taught me to listen carefully, with as
little preconception as possible, and to presume that the other has under-
stood something that I have not. I realised that this was possibly the only
good thing about the crisis, the opportunity to learn, to reconsider, to see
the world differently, and it would be silly of me to miss it. I also had the
feeling that what really distinguishes between dangerous extremists and
decent people was not that much the ideological content of their ideas,
but rather whether they were open to rational (re)considerations and
respectful dialogue or not. This strategy of respectful listening, the will to
understand differently, and to play the devil’s advocate for the sake of
more complex understanding, was a method that I could use in my work
PREFACE: LIVING THE STATE OF CRISIS xiii
with the films as well. In this respect, I owe thanks to my university stu-
dents as well for discussing these films with me at various seminars and film
club events. They are of all sorts of cultural backgrounds, identities and
opinions, but invariably people who were raised in this volatile, digital-by-
default, off-modern, post-crash world. Without them I would not have
had a chance to understand anything about the cultural logic of the
twenty-first century.
I wish to thank all these people on- and off-line, who talked to me,
lectured me, questioned my assumptions, recommended films, documen-
taries, authors. I am most thankful to those people who showed me how
to think outside one’s bubble, how to let go of beliefs for the sake of
knowledge, people who can argue and reason with the sole interest of
understanding, without any secret agenda or resentment. They are my
intellectual heroes and heroines, and I would like to dedicate this book
to them.
Finally, I wish to thank everybody who supported my research or helped
me with the preparation of this book: the János Bolyai Research Grant of
the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Research Grant of the New
National Excellency Programme of the Hungarian Ministry of Human
Resources, as well as all the great people at Palgrave Macmillan for their
continuous support and professionalism.
Debrecen, Hungary György Kalmár

Contents
1 Introduction: Post-Crisis Europe, White Masculinity and

Art Cinema 1
The Post-Crisis and the Off-Modern 2
White Masculinity 10
Post-Crisis European Cinema 22
The Outline of the Book 27
Works Cited 31
2 Rites of Retreat and the Cinematic Resignification of

European Cultural Geography 35
The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner 43
Delta 50
Suntan 56
Conclusions: Men in Retreat 63
Works Cited 65
3 Unprocessed Pasts 67
Amen 77
Days of Glory 85
Cold War 95
Conclusions: Unprocessed Pasts 103
Works Cited 106
xv
xvi CONTENTS
4 Addiction and Escapism109

Billy Elliot 116
T2 Trainspotting 126
Kills on Wheels 136
Conclusions: Addiction and Escapism 145
Works Cited 146
5 Narratives of Migration149
Terraferma 154
Morgen 161
Jupiter’s Moon 167
Conclusions: Narratives of Migration 176
Works Cited 179
6 The Lads of the New Right183

The Wave 191
This Is England 199
July 22 206
Conclusions: Lads of the New Right 215
Works Cited 216
7 Angry Old Men219

Tyrannosaur 225
I, Daniel Blake 231
A Man Called Ove 239
Conclusions: Angry Old Men 249
Works Cited 252
8 Conclusions255
Works Cited 265
Index267
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Film still from The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around
the Corner (Stephan Komandarev 2008) 47
Fig. 2.2 Film still from The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around
the Corner (Stephan Komandarev 2008) 49
Fig. 2.3 Film still from Delta (Kornél Mundruczó 2008) 51
Fig. 2.4 Film still from Delta (Kornél Mundruczó 2008) 55
Fig. 2.5 Film still from Suntan (Argyris Papadimitropoulos 2016) 59
Fig. 2.6 Film still from Suntan (Argyris Papadimitropoulos 2016) 60
Fig. 3.1 Film still from Amen (Costa-Gavras 2002) 80
Fig. 3.2 Film still from Amen (Costa-Gavras 2002) 81
Fig. 3.3 Film still from Days of Glory (Rachid Bouchareb 2006) 88
Fig. 3.4 Film still from Days of Glory (Rachid Bouchareb 2006) 94
Fig. 3.5 Film still from Cold War (Pawel Pawlikowski 2018) 98
Fig. 3.6 Film still from Cold War (Pawel Pawlikowski 2018) 99
Fig. 4.1 Film still from Billy Elliot (Stephen Daldry 2000) 119
Fig. 4.2 Film still from Billy Elliot (Stephen Daldry 2000) 125
Fig. 4.3 Film still from T2 Trainspotting (Danny Boyle 2017) 129
Fig. 4.4 Film still from T2 Trainspotting (Danny Boyle 2017) 132
Fig. 4.5 Film still from Kills on Wheels (Attila Till 2016) 138
Fig. 4.6 Film still from Kills on Wheels (Attila Till 2016) 141
Fig. 5.1 Film still from Terraferma (Emanuele Crialese, 2011) 156
Fig. 5.5 Film still from Morgen (Marian Crisan, 2010) 164
Fig. 5.6 Film still from Morgen (Marian Crisan, 2010) 166
xvii
xviii LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 5.7 Film still from Jupiter’s Moon (Kornél Mundruczó, 2017) 169
Fig. 5.8 Film still from Jupiter’s Moon (Kornél Mundruczó, 2017) 169
Fig. 6.1 Film still from The Wave (Dennis Gansel, 2008) 192
Fig. 6.2 Film still from The Wave (Dennis Gansel, 2008) 195
Fig. 6.3 Film still from This Is England (Shane Meadows, 2006) 201
Fig. 6.4 Film still from This Is England (Shane Meadows, 2006) 203
Fig. 6.5 Film still from July 22 (Paul Greengrass, 2018) 209
Fig. 6.6 Film still from July 22 (Paul Greengrass, 2018) 210
Fig. 7.1 Film still from Tyrannosaur (Paddy Considine, 2011) 229
Fig. 7.2 Film still from Tyrannosaur (Paddy Considine, 2011) 230
Fig. 7.3 Film still from I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach, 2016) 236
Fig. 7.4 Film still from I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach, 2016) 236
Fig. 7.5 Film still from A Man Called Ove (Hannes Holm, 2015) 241
Fig. 7.6 Film still from A Man Called Ove (Hannes Holm, 2015) 245
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Post-Crisis Europe, White

Masculinity and Art Cinema
This book explores the cinematic representations of the pervasive socio-

cultural change that the twenty-first century brought to Europe and the
world. Its main assumption is that the series of crises that started with the
9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 changed some of our fundamental expecta-
tions about history, debunked some of our grand narratives, and thus
changed the cultural logic of our (thoroughly globalised) civilisation.
Thus, the book focuses on the ways cinema reflects (and interprets and
shapes) a rapidly changing world: the hot new issues of the times, the new
formations of identity and the shifts in cinematic representation. The book
mostly focuses on films featuring white heterosexual men, mostly because
I tend to agree with the statistics suggesting that the recent changes in
(typically less privileged) white male communities lie at the heart of the
new century’s most dramatic ideological and political changes. The book’s
main goal is to put these markedly gendered representations in a complex,
theoretically informed and socially committed interdisciplinary perspec-
tive that is capable of mapping the newly emerging formations of mascu-
linity at a time of rapid socio-economic transitions reshaping the continent.
Thus, this is an interdisciplinary research that combines the perspectives
and results provided by such academic fields as sociology, film studies,
masculinity studies and white studies. I am equally interested in what new
the twenty-first century brought about, most specifically to Europe and to
its white men, as in film and the cinematic responses to these socio-cultural
changes. The book is also clearly defined by its historicity, that is, by its
© The Author(s) 2020 1

G. Kalmár, Post-Crisis European Cinema,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45035-9_1
2 G. KALMÁR
locatedness at a very specific moment in time: through its discussion of

motifs and themes running through the European art cinema of the new
millennium, it explores the most burning issues of post-crisis Europe at a
time when we are still very much affected by that crisis.
In this chapter I am going to lay out some of the basic socio-cultural
conditions, key concepts and academic interests informing this book. This
will effectively contextualise the studies of films and social phenomena of
the later chapters.
Let us start with time.
The Post-Crisis and the Off-Modern

One does not need to be a social scientist to note that since the beginning
of the new millennium the developed societies of the so-called Western
World have been going through dramatic changes. These are usually
attributed to a set of crises that these societies have recently gone through.
The sweet dream of “the end of history” and the victory of global neolib-
eral capitalism seems to be over. Today it may be painfully awkward to
recall to what extent public and academic thinking as well as public poli-
cies in the 1990s were defined by Francis Fukuyama’s vision of a united,
happy global human community. In his 1992 book, The End of History
and the Last Man (which was an elaboration of an 1989 article), Fukuyama
contended that with the fall of the Eastern European communist regimes,
“liberal democracy as a system of government … conquered rival ideolo-
gies” and therefore it “may constitute the endpoint of humankind’s ideo-
logical evolution and the final form of human government” and as such
brings about “the end of history” (xi). He claimed that “the twin princi-
ples of liberty and equality” are flawless, and thus “the ideal of liberal
democracy could not be improved on” (xi). In The End of History and his
few following books, Fukuyama envisioned a future in which stable politi-
cal formations, thriving liberal democracies, uninterrupted economic and
technological progress would lead to a “posthuman future” where most
traditional causes of human suffering would be eventually overcome.
According to Fukuyama’s vision, liberal democracies are close to the mate-
rialisation of a global utopia, in which people live for centuries, artificial
intelligence and robots provide for all needs, a self-regulating neoliberal
economy runs perfectly, everybody agrees on human rights and core dem-
ocratic principles, and in the ever more integrated, happy and rich global
village there is simply no reason for war anymore.
1 INTRODUCTION: POST-CRISIS EUROPE, WHITE MASCULINITY AND ART… 3
In defence of Fukuyama, one must note that the 1990s produced sev-
eral “best years ever” of human history: not only did the Eastern European
communist dictatorships collapse, bringing about the end of the cold war
and its continuous nuclear threat, but neoliberal capitalism coupled with a
postmodern ethos seemed to produce unprecedented material and cul-
tural affluence. Such outstanding works of the decade as Arjun Appadurai’s
Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996),
Zygmunt Bauman’s Globalization: The Human Consequences (1998) and
his Liquid Modernity (1999) or Jean Baudrillard’s writing from the 1980s
and 1990s all try to make sense of this rapidly growing and globalising
world where the spread of democracy, financial affluence, technological
development, dropping violence statistics and growing social justice were
almost unquestionable elements of any vision about the future. As the
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek once noted, we were all Fukuyamaists
for a decade. The end of the twentieth century apparently made (a consid-
erable part of) humankind intoxicated by the fruits and promises of late
modernity. It seemed that for the first time in history, we were on the
brink of transcending the human condition.
This utopian tone was much in line with the general spirit of modernity.
By modernity, I refer to that long historical period which started sometime
in the Renaissance, and is characterised by a secular, rational, scientific
world-view; a future-oriented, anti-traditionalist approach; the constant
seek for the new; the pursuit of worldly happiness and material wealth;
individualism; the belief in freedom, human agency and progress; the idea
that human beings and human societies can be improved with the help of
rationality and science; and the values of Enlightenment humanism. As
this brief list may also imply, the utopian idea of transcending the present
condition (of our society or humanity in general) is a logical part of the
cultural logic of modernity as such. As the industrial revolution, the French
revolution or the communist revolutions have shown, modernity has a
weak spot for both utopia (that it regards as the natural result of progress)
and the revolutions necessary to take us there. Unfortunately, modernity
likes to imagine one clear path towards its progressive goal, and it has little
patience with those who stand in its way, thus (in spite of its fondness of
democracy and egalitarianism) it has a distinctively dogmatic and totalitar-
ian potential (Foucault 1977; Bauman 1989, 2000). As I will argue
through several socially contextualised film analyses of this book, this dog-
matic aspect of modernity, which has regularly distorted the social imple-
mentation of its own core principles, may have to do with its often
4 G. KALMÁR
unacknowledged eschatological underside: that in spite of all the rational,

enlightened and pragmatic principles, modernity can still be (and is) prac-
ticed as a secular faith-religion.
Today, of course, Fukuyama’s 1990s vision seems as utopian and naïve
(and potentially dangerous) as that of Robespierre or Marx. As Fukuyama
himself also recounts with unparalleled clarity in his 2018 book Identity:
The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, a whole series of
previously unrecognised negative processes came to fruition in the new
century, which brought about a dramatic change of the tide. The terrorist
attacks of 9/11, the ensuing wars in the Middle East and North Africa, the
2008 economic crisis, the subsequent destabilisation of political life, or the
disastrous events of 2016 enlisted in the Preface, have waken us up to the
fact that the historical causes of human suffering, which are responsible for
all the nightmares of history, cannot be erased by simply feeding people
more food, drinks, drugs and internet. To such Eastern European intel-
lectuals as Svetlana Boym (and myself), who experienced the false prom-
ises and eventual downfall of the communist version of the “end of
history” narrative, the fact that history did not have a sublime end-point
(contrary to Hegel, Marx and the early Fukuyama) did not come as much
of a surprise. Instead of Fukuyama’s markedly modern notion of a “coher-
ent development of modern societies” to “liberal democracies and techno-
logically driven capitalism” (Fukuyama 2003, xii), Boym recognised the
utopian wishful thinking underlying the project of modernity, the inevi-
table instability of the modern world, as well as the ways the human thrive
towards progress is regularly compromised by our longing for (the fantasy
of) a home outside (or before) the time of history. A key point that Boym
understood is that this phenomenon of longing (and home-sickness and
nostalgia) is inextricably intertwined with the very idea of progress: in her
view, “the sentiment (of nostalgia) … is at the very core of the modern
condition” (2001, xvi), and “nostalgic manifestations are side-effects of
the teleology of progress” (10).
Reading Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (2001) alongside with
Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future (2003) in the early years of the new
century, one could have the impression that in spite of all the well-
informed, data-based intellectual power of Fukuyama’s predictions, as well
as the intoxicating possibility of a super-human future, Boym’s analysis of
human beings’ relation to historical time “feels” more right: it is more
sensitive and observant, and it works with a more complex, less head-
heavy view of the human being. Thus, today we can safely state that after
all, it was not surprising that Boym had more predictive power too: for
once, an analysis based on cultural and art history proved better at seeing
the future than clear intellectual analysis based on discoveries from the
hard sciences. At the time of Trump’s nostalgic glorification of American
industrial past and Britain’s saying no to what, at least on paper, is sup-
posed to be the most progressive supra-national political formation of the
planet, Boym’s analysis of modern nostalgia and its consequences is as
timely as ever:
Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for

the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values; it could be a
secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, a home
that is both physical and spiritual, the edenic unity of time and space: before
entry into history. (Boym 2001, 8)
Clearly, this nostalgic longing tends to get the upper hand each time
modernity encounters a crisis and fails to deliver its glamorous objects of
desire. Arguably, that is exactly what is happening today: the crisis of secu-
rity (caused by terrorism), the financial crisis, the more and more manifest
environmental crisis are also causing an ideological crisis, a questioning of
our previous world-views, and gradually undermining the entire belief sys-
tem of modernity. According such intellectuals as Stuart Sim, this amounts
to reaching the end of modernity as such:
Financial crisis, environmental crisis: what is the combination of credit

crunch and global warming telling us about the way we live? I would con-
tend that such events signal modernity has reached its limit as a cultural
form. In consequence, we have to face up to the prospect of life ‘after
modernity’ where a very different kind of mental set than the one we have
been indoctrinated with will be required. Modernity, my argument will go,
has collapsed under the weight of its internal contradictions; the modern
world’s insatiable need for technologically driven economic progress has
finally been revealed as unsustainable and, even more importantly, poten-
tially destructive of both the planet and the socio-economic systems so
painstakingly developed over the past few centuries. We have been encour-
aged to believe that those systems would roll on into the indefinite future,
yielding ever better returns as they went; now, we shall have to think again.
(Sim 2010, ix)
6 G. KALMÁR
On basis of all these troubling twenty-first-century issues, I would

argue (in concord with Sim) that the cultural logic and fundamental belief
system of modernity as a cultural system have been seriously challenged in
the first decades of the new millennium. It does seem, as Bauman and
Bordoni argue in State of Crisis, that “the crisis facing the Western world
is not temporary, but the sign of a profound change that involves the
whole economic and social system and will have long-lasting effects”
(2014, vii). Though Sim’s diagnosis of a present socio-cultural rupture in
his The End of Modernity is sound and convincing, and one cannot deny
that we are living in a “state of crisis”, it is yet to be seen whether what we
are experiencing is truly “the end of modernity” as such. Perhaps, para-
doxically, it is still the cultural logic of modernity that tempts us to declare
yet another end-point, this time the end of modernity. Indeed, it may be
too early to speak of an after-modern world, where we regard the whole
project of modernity doomed and done for good. Thus, to designate the
kind of time of post-crisis, twenty-first century modernity, I will rather use
the term off-modern, initially coined by Svetlana Boym in the context of
art history.
In the twenty-first century, modernity is our antiquity. We live with its ruins,
which we incorporate into our present. Unlike the thinkers of the last fin de
siècle, we neither mourn nor celebrate the end of history or the end of art.
We have to chart a new road between unending development and nostalgia,
find an alternative logic for the contradictions of contemporary culture.
Instead of fast-changing prepositions—“post,” “anti,” “neo,” “trans,” and
“sub”—that suggest an implacable movement forward, against, or beyond,
I propose to go off: “off” as in “off the path,” or way off, off-Broadway,
off-brand, off the wall, and occasionally off-color. “Off-modern” is a detour
into the unexplored potentials of the modern project. It recovers unforeseen
pasts and ventures into the side alleys of modern history, at the margins of
error of major philosophical, economic, and technological narratives of
modernization and progress. (Boym 2017, 3)
By off-modern, appropriating Boym’s term and crucial insight, I wish

to refer to a sense that though the world (and many of its inhabitants) are
seemingly still following the modern paradigm in many respects (e.g., they
expect economic growth to rise again, take conspicuous consumption for
granted, assume to rely on ever improved technological gadgets, or to live
in increasingly more egalitarian liberal democracies), it is increasingly dif-
ficult to imagine that we are still on the forward-moving, progress-oriented
trajectory of modernity, that we have not gone off the track. It is increas-
ingly harder to ignore the feeling that something smells off with all this,
with the present state of the grand project of modernity. Thus, the off-
modern signifies more of a socio-cultural dysfunction, a disintegration of
our clear-cut concepts of time, progress and our place in a teleological
narrative, than a new era. The Zeitgeist is that we have lost our way, and
do not really know where we are. We look like a group of hikers in the
high mountains (if you have a cinematic imagination, you can picture the
story in the style of a Danny Boyle thriller), a group that has realised that
they are no longer on the nice path they had planned to walk. We are tense
and anxious, trying to keep panic under control. The more disoriented we
are, the louder we repeat our own version of which direction we should
take, and of course we keep blaming each other, desperately trying to
scapegoat someone else for all this trouble. As in Boyle’s films—at least in
Shallow Grave (1994), 28 Days Later (2002) and Sunshine (2007)—such
an unforeseen event easily lets loose the pathological, destructive under-
side of human beings, so we have to understand where we are and find the
best possible track while also wrestling with all the dirty human stuff that
was buried (in shallow graves) underneath the nice and proper surface we
maintained during the good days. Unfortunately, history is likely to follow
the narrative structure of the above films, which means that we are to go
through plenty of gory before we can reach any kind of narrative closure.
It is obvious that the early twenty-first-century version of the modern
project is a compromised, twisted, bizarre one, which includes more and
more “ghosts of the past”, smelly, obscene creatures that do not belong
here, social phenomena that simply do not fit our (often unacknowledged
but still virulent) grand narrative of modernity. Our off-modern time recy-
cles leftovers from previous eras of human civilisation that are off-sync
with the official spirit of the time, alien bodies that reveal the existence of
inclinations, emotions, social responses we thought we had passed beyond
long ago (Boym 2017, 5). As the utopian future got shattered, the old
maps got discredited, many of our bewildered fellow travellers opt for
going back to a point where we still knew who we were, what we wanted,
and where we were going. Thus, today significant groups of Western soci-
eties are caught in the regressive, distinctively off-modern recycling of
such ghosts of the past as industrial capitalism (Trump), religious funda-
mentalism (the Islamists), nationalism (conservatives, right-wing popu-
lists, the alt-right), sexism, racism, and of course more affirmative,
distinctively not politically correct masculinities. In the contemporary
8 G. KALMÁR
ideological landscape, these regressive answers (that try to go back to dif-

ferent historical or mythical times) are at war, at the culture war, with the
(increasingly more confused, irrational, dogmatic, militant and panicky)
modernist progress-beliefs. This confused and confusing, off-modern dis-
pute takes place in an institutional and legal environment that was designed
during the good days, for the good days to come (no wonder that it fails
so often and so spectacularly in times of crisis), and is mostly still run by a
political elite and its supporting technocracy and epistemocracy (journal-
ists, academics, government advisors, think-tanks) who were educated and
rose to their status during the glorious pre-crisis years.
It is easy to see the relationship between pre-crisis and crisis as that of a
simple contrast, arranged in a straightforward temporal sequence. Books
and newspaper articles abound in such metaphors: we had a beautiful
dream, but we are awake now, or we had a great party (or even an orgy—
as Bauman says), but it is over now and we have a terrible hangover. Yet,
this is only the most obvious level. At more thorough inspection, one
realises that their relationship is also that of cause and effect: it was the
boom that caused the bust, it were processes that started during “liquid
modernity” that finally washed away our castes of sand. One may also note
several troublesome post-crisis social processes (such as growing economic
inequality, the birth of the precariat or the re-tribalisation of the public
sphere) that started in the pre-crisis era, but remained hardly visible as
long as the economy was thriving. There were many social and political
processes, established economic or cultural policies even, that no one saw
the dark underside or consequences of, or no one took seriously.
Any social system has a tolerance of anomaly that it can endure without
serious systemic disturbance or loss of legitimacy. The years 2001 and
2008 did not break the system: it is more precise to say that these were
years that amplified some of the erosive processes that had been already on
the way, and produced further anomaly, which, together, reached a critical
level that actually undermined the credibility of the whole system. It needs
to be noted that this de-legitimisation happened in spite of the efforts of
many people and institutions who had an interest in maintaining the
status-quo and keeping the system going the way it did. Thus, the crisis
was also a breakthrough of information: sobering news, previously buried
stories, unpublished statistics, now came to light. Perhaps the fake news
industry could strike precisely because these “real” news had already made
us question our previously held beliefs. Thus, the pre-crisis paranoid fan-
tasies of wolves became the sobering realities of today. In this sense, the
time of post-crisis is also the time when modernity’s previously closeted

dark secrets have come to light. Ironically, our “post-truth” era has
revealed several “truths” of late twentieth-century capitalism and liberal
democracies that were effectively covered up or neglected during our
intoxicating pre-crisis dream of the end of history.
The events of the early twenty-first century also called attention to sev-
eral potential problems with the fundamental project of modernity, which
will arguably stay with us even if our economies do eventually revive. The
2008 financial crisis highlighted how much the stability of liberal democ-
racies is closely tied with, or perhaps even dependent on economic devel-
opment. Apparently, several aspects of this particular type of socio-economic
model work only with the “oiling” of affluence and the addictive promise
of even more affluence. In this sense, the financial crisis has been an impor-
tant warning, which indicates that should the world face harsher times
(because of future economic crises, Europe’s declining competitiveness,
the damaging effects of climate change, demographic issues or whatever
other reason), without its fantasmic (ideological) support of an ever better
future the stability of liberal democracies could quickly be endangered.
Thus, the off-modern is intimately connected to the state (and sense)
of crisis, which is not only financial or environmental, but (more impor-
tantly for cinema) also social, political, cultural and ideological (Bauman
and Bordoni 2014, 21–25). One of my key arguments shaping this book
is that the above discussed time of crisis, the time of the off-modern is so
disorienting for so many of us because it amounts to nothing less than
what Foucault used to call a coupure épistémologique, an epistemological
break (Foucault 1997). In other words, in the twenty-first century the
meaning of things (in the most general, radical and philosophical sense)
has changed. Democracy, progress, citizenship, free will, equality, liberal-
ism, capitalism—none of the key words of our late twentieth-century
world-view were left unaltered by this profound shift. It seems that we
have to accept that the twenty-first century brought about not only an
“age of acceleration” (Friedman 2016), when change speeded up to a
level hard to control or comprehend, but also a breaking up of previous
ideological meta-structures, a radical undermining of our core principles
about the concept of history, individual identity and agency, or liberal
democracy, to mention only a few. Things simply do not mean the same as
they did before the crisis, and probably never will. Furthermore, similar to
Gaston Bachelard’ use of the term epistemological rupture, because of
recent events, suddenly many of our pre-crisis concepts seem ideologically
10 G. KALMÁR
motivated, naïve and based on false assumptions (Fraser 2007, xvii–xviii;

Foucault 1997, 4). Thus, I would argue that the temporality of crisis is
also that of a cut, a break, a moment when the constructedness and dis-
continuity of history comes to light (Foucault 1997, 4–22; Webb 2013,
12). We are disoriented beings living the times of an epistemological rup-
ture, a profound and radical socio-cultural and political rearrangement
that Western societies have not experienced since the Second World War.
I will come to the detailed analysis of these various aspects in the indi-
vidual chapters below, in the context of the specific social phenomena and
their cinematic representations. Now it is time to turn to the other aspects
of the interdisciplinary explorations of this book: the questions concern-
ing white masculinity.
White Masculinity
This book explores the European cinematic representations of the present
state of crisis with a particular focus on how this crisis appears in the lives
of heterosexual white male characters. Following the dominant pre-crisis
cultural paradigm, this could seem like an awkward research choice: Why
white? Why men? After all, for more than two millennia, European cul-
tures were almost exclusively that of white men: produced by white men,
about the thoughts, concerns, and ideas of white men. Wouldn’t it be
more interesting to investigate something else for a change? Does not
such a book risk reaffirming the old, entrenched, retrograde hegemonies
that we have been trying so hard to loosen? At a time when right-wing
nationalism and populism are on the rise, when most of the intelligentsia
are busy defending the late twentieth-century values of liberal democracy,
isn’t it (at least) politically unwise, or (at worst) morally wrong to write
about white men and their contemporary troubles? And is such a study
feasible at all? In our heated and polarised media environment, is it possi-
ble to pursue rational, academic research in this field at all?
My answers to these objections and questions are key to the under-
standing of the intellectual relevance of this book. Throughout this vol-
ume, I will demonstrate that the study of white masculinities is of utmost
importance today, for academic, political as well as ethical reasons. I am
aware that this topic is, in many ways, as difficult and risky as timely, not
the least because of the twenty-first century resurgence of white ethno-
nationalisms, militant online political activism (on all sides of the political
spectrum), the toxic debate cultures on social media, and the click-bait,
scandal-hungry, increasingly tabloid-like tendencies of the contemporary

news media market. However, I still have the (perhaps old-fashioned)
belief that books backed by thorough research and thinking can still serve
as a platform where we can work our ways through even the most hotly
debated issues of our times. I also agree with Iman Amrani (who runs the
Guardian’s Modern Masculinity YouTube series) that “we need to have
uncomfortable conversations if things are going to move forward”
(Amrani 2019, E.01). So let us dive into some of those uneasy issues, and
let me lay out some of my reasons for focusing on such an off topic, as
films about white men.
First and probably most importantly, what seems to be an “off” topic
from one certain (pre-crisis) cultural paradigm, may be a key issue when
considered from the point of view of the new century. It is increasingly
clear that one cannot understand the key socio-cultural tendencies of the
early twenty-first century without adequate attention paid to white men.
For example, surveys indicate that political shifts among white male voters
(usually without college education) played a significant, if not decisive,
role in such historical events as the rise of right-wing populist parties in
Europe, the Brexit vote, or Trump’s presidency in the US. Also, as I have
understood during researching for my previous book about men in post-
communist Hungarian cinema (Kalmár 2017), and as some of the chap-
ters of this book will indicate, fundamental cultural or political change
often occurs when the waves of (economic, social or demographic) changes
reach the (formerly) more privileged parts of society as well. Not research-
ing the social and cultural shifts within these groups arguably leaves us
clueless about contemporary conditions. One needs to realise that there is
a potentially dangerous deficit of knowledge in this field. Apparently, there
have been a number of socio-cultural processes in the white male com-
munity that neither the competing mainstream political parties, nor pro-
fessional think tanks or social studies registered in time, or cared to
adequately respond to. These processes went unnoticed for long, before
bringing consequences that changed the face of our societies in dramatic
and unpredicted ways. Thus, there seems to be a great deal that we do not
understand about white men: there is a deficit of knowledge that needs to
be addressed (see: Beynon 2001, 143).
So as to understand the causes of this systemic blindness, the related
contemporary debates, or the newly emerging new cultures of masculinity,
one needs a bit of a historical perspective and recall some of the events and
trends of the pre-crisis era. For a start, it is important to realise that white
12 G. KALMÁR
masculinities have gone through dramatic transformations in the last half

a century (Beynon 2001, 119). Arguably, one could hardly pick any other
historical period of peace when our concepts, expectations, normative ide-
als of white masculinity changed so much during such a short span of
time. This rapid change was partly due to a set of social movements that
aimed at creating more egalitarian societies, and partly due to the domi-
nant intellectual paradigm of the second half of the twentieth century.
Since the great counter-cultural, anti-establishment, democratic political
movements of the late 1960s, intellectual life and social egalitarian move-
ments have been going hand in hand, closely connected, transforming
politics, journalism and the humanities.
These “post-sixties liberationalist discourses” (Robinson 2000, 4) pro-
duced a number of (more or less) new academic disciplines, such as post-
colonial criticism, feminist criticism, black studies, LGBTQ studies, which
revealed much of the cruelty and exploitation that the white man’s culture
historically involved. Facing the previously often concealed dark side of
Western civilisation, these discourses did not only aim at the deconstruc-
tion of the grand narratives of our cultural heritage (á la Lyotard or
Derrida), but, in order to create more egalitarian and democratic societies,
they also wished to undermine and undo the social, political and psycho-
logical causes of exploitation. Most political, sociological or philosophical
schools of this era saw white men in general as privileged by definition,
heirs to the so-called patriarchal tradition, a contentious cultural, political
and historical legacy. This was a time of reckoning, which brought about
a set of new and revelatory insights, revolutionary perspectives, formerly
buried narratives, as well as new ethical standards which made developed
societies much more democratic than ever before. Since the late 1960s,
especially in the human and social sciences, the new norm was that any
kind of credible, ethically sound intellectual or political position had to
necessarily include acknowledging the dubious historical heritage of the
white men’s culture, and the unambiguous disavowal of the colonialist,
racist and sexist trends of our past.
Since the great social movements of the 1960s, intellectual trends were
accompanied by a new set of social policies. Late twentieth-century first-
world societies attempted to amend historical injustices and inequalities by
various means: through legislative measures (making human rights univer-
sal, granting women and people of colour the right to own and inherit
property, vote, work and study), through a new set of social policies (cre-
ating the welfare state, and the positive discrimination of minorities in
certain fields of social life), and through the regulation of public discourse,
most specifically by the culture of political correctness. While these mea-
sures and policies proved productive in several fields of social, cultural and
political life, the kind of identity politics practised in it also produced some
unfortunate extremities, such as presenting white men as by definition
“malicious and jealous protectors of the status quo” (Robinson 2000, 5),
or making the expression of hate felt about white men socially acceptable
(or even fashionable). One of the problematic long-term side effects of
these trends was that issues of whiteness and masculinity were pushed to
the margins of “proper” public and academic discourse, and were often
regarded as ideologically and even morally suspicious (Robinson
2000, 6–7).
One effect of these trends was the cultural resignification of white
masculinity. During most of the last 500 years of Western expansion and
globalisation white men enjoyed “the privilege of inhabiting an unmarked
body” (Robinson 2000, 1): heterosexual white masculinity was seen as
the unmarked norm, an almost invisible standard against which all forms
of sexual, gendered and racial differences were measured. While these
various forms of otherness were marked by their difference from the
assumedly superior white masculinity by discourses of sexism and racism,
whiteness was a taken for granted cultural ideal, seldom questioned but
well-protected together with the status quo that it was intertwined with.
The above-mentioned decades of historical reckoning, however, marked
white masculinity with its dubious historical heritage (Robinson 2000,
2). When the previously marginalised voices (women, people of colour,
sexual minorities) could finally appear with their own accounts of his-
tory, white masculinity became resignified, newly meaningful, “marked”,
tainted with the horrors of centuries of racial and sexual exploitation,
and loaded with derogative meaning in somewhat similar ways as “black”
or “Jew” were (and are) in racist discourses. Perhaps for the very first
time in known history, white masculinity became visible, and white male
identity became de-idealised, troubled, contested, a challenge, some-
thing to-be-worked-through.
The post-1960s socio-cultural changes were driven by the politics of
subversion and reversal: as the first stage of challenging the old oppressive
discourses, it produced an over-arching counter-narrative (not less “grand”
as the previous one that it replaced), which was widely accepted not neces-
sarily because it was historically absolutely accurate, but because it was
necessary for the desired social changes, and because its acceptance became
14 G. KALMÁR
the new norm in our quickly transforming cultural institutions. Thus,

what the post-1960s’ era achieved is not so much the production of a
complex and unbiased account of social history, but rather the inversion of
the well-known old trends: replacing white pride by white guilt, replacing
the inherently sexist and racist “old proper” language by the strictly
policed, normative, “new proper” linguistic regime of political correct-
ness, turning the glorious history of white man into the infamous story of
patriarchal tyranny, and turning white masculinity from an object of pride
into something shameful and potentially toxic by default. One of the ques-
tions post-crisis intellectuals may ask themselves is how the long-term
counter-productivity of such a strategy (let alone its necessary destructive-
ness concerning social cohesion and solidarity) could be disregarded for so
long. At this point it is worth recalling that Jacques Derrida, arguably one
of the most influential figures of this post-1960s trend, insisted through-
out his oeuvre that such strategies of subversion and inversion usually cre-
ate very similar power structures that they replace, and thus, in the process
of intellectual or social progress they should be thought of only as tempo-
rary solutions, during a necessarily inadequate first step (Newman
2007, 86–87).
This postmodern culture of difference simultaneously fuelled the rapid
transformation of white masculinities, “marked” them as the perpetrators
of a horrible history of global exploitation, while also turning academic,
journalistic and artistic attention towards historically marginalised groups.
The key insight to grasp here is that this post-1960s cultural shift coin-
cided with a major economic transformation of most of the developed
world. Globalisation, deindustrialisation, the new service economy, the
tech-boom and the implementation of neoliberal economic principles may
have made our societies more affluent on the whole, but they also radically
increased social inequality, and robbed whole segments of society from
both decent livelihood as well as the feeling of social worth and dignity
(Fukuyama 2019). I would argue that it was the combination of these
intimately interlinked processes that created the above mentioned danger-
ous deficit of knowledge: these processes redrew the lines and causes of
social inequality (education becoming the number one factor), and they
made white masculinities underresearched, their transformations
uncharted, their problems underrepresented, and their frustrations
untended for. Possibly, this was one of the systemic blind spots of the late
twentieth-century culture of difference and diversity, which largely con-
tributed to the present social, political and ideological crisis.
The early twenty-first century crisis, as it becomes more and more obvi-
ous, brought about the gradual collapse of this cultural logic, pulling out
some of its fundamental pillars (Trenz et al. 2015; Bauman and Bordoni
2014; Fukuyama 2019; Assmann 2016, 126), which had significant con-
sequences regarding white men as well, both on and off the silver screen.
Historically, such meltdowns of the political centre, such fundamental
rearrangements of power and ideology are usually due to the simultaneous
presence of both external pressures and the system’s integral malfunctions.
This pattern is definitely recognisable in this case too.
First, the 2001 terrorist attacks undermined the “end of history” nar-
rative and the vision of a happily globalising, ever more democratic world.
9/11 as well as the general resurgence of religious fundamentalism in first
world societies clearly indicated that the late twentieth-century model of
consumerist capitalism and liberal democracy was in no way an uncon-
tested ideological system. The resurgence of terrorism in first world societ-
ies and the general feeling of being under threat rebooted more combatant
versions of masculinity, resulted in new anti-terrorist legislation and the
curtailing of individual human rights in both the US and the EU (in the
name of public security), it led to the birth of the digital surveillance state,
the rapid decline of trust and tolerance, the resurgence of white ethno-
nationalisms and the deepening of a new political tribalism. On the social
theory best-selling lists, Fukuyama’s The End of History was quickly
replaced by the new editions of Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations
(first published in 1996), and later by Douglas Murray’s The Strange
Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017). Another major
blow to the old cultural logic was the dismantling of the welfare state. This
was already well on the way by the time the crisis hit, but the 2008 finan-
cial crisis led to further, exceptionally drastic cuts in public spending (the
so-called policy of austerity), which inevitably hit the poorest the hardest
(Smith 2015, 26–27). The way the crisis was handled had severe conse-
quences with regards to the credibility and ethical soundness of the finan-
cial, intellectual and political elites. While homes and jobs and welfare
benefits were lost, banks were rescued with taxpayer money. And while
social inequality was rapidly rising, and the gap between the (so-called)
winners and losers of globalisation was growing faster than ever, most
decision-makers, policy-makers and opinion-formers seemed to be at a
loss as to what was happening and what was to be done about it, and no
reassuring new solution was on the offer.
16 G. KALMÁR
One of the crucial points of this dark chronicle was the fact that the
political, financial and intellectual establishments never seriously admitted
to their responsibility in the crisis, did not start systematically questioning
the old policies and ideologies, and also did not recognise that these radi-
cal socio-cultural transformations required new approaches, new policies
and a whole new political discourse. This was probably most striking
among the “epistemocracy”, at universities and many mainstream media
outlets, where the crisis usually did not bring about the questioning of
former assumptions, but rather the repetition of the old (and now threat-
ened) arguments in more militarised, dogmatic and irrational forms.
It was at this point that it became clear how rigid and normative our
dominant socio-political discourses became in the decades since the 1960s.
As Aleida Assmann notes, the victory of the so-called ’68-ers amounted to
their defeat (2016, 95): when this originally subversive, emancipatory,
anti-establishment discourse became the new (and only) “proper” way of
talking and thinking, when it became part of the status quo, and when the
new generation of intellectuals, who started out as subversive, creative
thinkers got older and comfortable in their institutional positions, this
intellectual trend lost its vitality, freshness, became increasingly normative,
regulative, and thus incapable of responding to new social challenges
(Assmann 2016 95, 126; Fukuyama 2019; Bruckner 2010; Schlink 2009,
23–31). In other words, by the time the crisis hit, our post-1960s domi-
nant intellectual paradigm, which used to liberate thinking from the for-
mer, essentialist order of “the proper” (la propre, as the early Derrida used
to call it), has become a new regulatory regime, once again connecting
proper, property and propriety (see: Derrida 1982, 4). In the decades
before the crisis, this system of thought did not only claim to be intellectu-
ally superior, more progressive and democratic than its competitors, but
regrettably also canonised itself as morally superior, the only “correct”,
ethically sound approach. As a result, as Assmann concludes in her critical
evaluation of political correctness, the dominant culture of the 1990s and
2000s was characterised more by pious moralising than real critical think-
ing (2016, 119). This system’s firm belief in its continuing progressive-
ness, its successful camouflage of the status quo as productive subversiveness,
its strictly regulated vocabulary and obsession with hyper-correctness, its
institutionalisation and ensuing loss of its critical edge, as well as the resul-
tant generation of increasingly conformist politicians and intellectuals
made this discourse disastrously ill-fitted to handle the new realities and
challenges of the new century.
Thus, one could claim that one cause of the ensuing political and ideo-
logical crisis was the ways the political and cultural establishment became
hostage to its former victory and dominance. In academia and mainstream
journalism white men remained an off topic (similarly to everything that
smelled off according to the late twentieth-century orthodoxy), which also
contributed to a widening gap between the political establishment and the
recently reshaped underprivileged groups. This was a severe deficit of
(political and media) representation, which, as we see all too clearly now,
played right into the hands of Euro-sceptics, populists, new nationalists,
protest parties and previously marginal public intellectuals, who were
more than eager to fill this representational void, state all the obvious
things that no one bound by the rules of the old episteme would dare say,
and step up as the voices of the underrepresented. The more reluctant the
old establishment was to question its old positions, the more ill-fitted it
seemed in the eyes of the electorate to solve the problems of the new cen-
tury, and thus the more opportunities it gave to those new leaders who
often had little interest in preserving the true benefits of the pre-crisis era.
The series of economic, political and intellectual crises produced new
discourses on both whiteness and masculinity. The popularity of these dis-
courses suggests widespread demand for new modes of discussing mascu-
linity, ones that break with the ideological confines of the pre-crisis
paradigm. Some of these are simply driven by resentment, some can be
clearly described as part of a power-struggle, usually a backlash against
second-wave feminism, but some of these discourses accurately pinpoint
weaknesses, self-contradictions or potentially damaging concepts in our
pre-crisis paradigms, and some point towards less over-politicised, psycho-
logically more accurate (and thus healthier) conceptualisations of gender
relations. The complexity of this situation is well indicated by the fact that
the most popular publication of these trends, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules
for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (which was the best selling book in the US,
Canada and the UK in 2018) takes the form of a self-help book, aiming to
help disoriented men live better lives, and (in light of all the political scan-
dals around him) deals surprisingly little with politics. Indeed, one of the
interesting characteristics of these new discourses on masculinity (and per-
haps the most surprising one for many readers) is that they cannot be as
easily associated with any clear-cut political strands as one would think.
Though right-wing political movements tend to have quite conservative
views of masculinity, our current countercultural discourses cannot be
conflated with or reduced to such movements as the alt-right or the far
18 G. KALMÁR
right (as it often happens in sloppy journalistic accounts). These discourses

are more connected by their critiques of the official gender politics of our
political and cultural establishments than by their ideological affiliations.
Let me refer at this point to two influential and informative takes on
contemporary masculinities from two sides of the political spectrum: first,
Peterson’s ideas in the above mentioned book and in various lectures, and
second, those of the Guardian journalist Iman Amrani’s Modern
Masculinity documentary series (2019). Peterson’s basic argument is that
our culture systematically (and probably deliberately) produces disori-
ented and dysfunctional men, who are therefore in much need of psycho-
logical coaching and encouragement. His more theoretical points include
a rejection of the idea that gender is a purely cultural construct unshaped
by biological and evolutionary heritage and thus infinitely malleable by
top-down social engineering; concern about the psychological effects of
discourses about “toxic masculinity”, “white guilt” and “patriarchal tyr-
anny”, and therefore a rejection of purely negative definitions of either
masculinity or whiteness; a critique of victimhood-culture and emphasis
on self-responsibility and self-reliance; a critique of postmodernist moral
relativism; a critique of the contemporary culture of political correctness
and the support of truthfulness; a critique of lad cultures shaped by con-
sumerism and hedonism; the idea that the approach of identity politics
somewhere got it really wrong, and its obsession with categories of iden-
tity causes more problems than it solves; the denunciation of gender quo-
tas; the affirmation of equality of opportunity, but the rejection of the goal
of equality of outcome. When it comes to more practical ideas about the
upbringing and behaviour of boys and men, he warns against the overpro-
tection (and spoiling) of boys; encourages men to be more responsible,
truthful, better listeners, reliable and caring in relationships, and be better
fathers and better husbands; he insists that men should resist infantilising
and emasculating cultural forces, and to grow up, face life’s challenges, be
more responsible and productive members of society. However, he also
encourages men to indulge in small acts of kindness, such as petting a cat
in the street. His messages are often summarised in as simple imperatives
as “toughen up”, “get real” and “get your shit together” (Peterson 2018).
Peterson’s most important novelty is that he moves the debate about
gender (and masculinity in particular) into an entirely new phase. In this
history of gender trouble, the post-1960s “liberationist” movements con-
stitute the first phase. These, as I have noted above, have been emphasis-
ing the underprivileged, disempowered and victimised qualities of minority
groups in their plea for equality. Inadvertently, through their half a cen-
tury lifespan, these movements created a sort of identity politics that
entailed the brewing of a controversial “victimhood-culture” (Campbell
and Manning 2018) together with the not any less problematic “politics
of resentment” (Fukuyama 2019), practised by antagonistic and increas-
ingly polarised identity groups. The next chapter in this story is when,
since the late 1970s, white men established their own versions of identity
politics, started voicing their problems, established the men’s rights move-
ment and started narrating their own stories of disempowerment and vic-
timisation. It is in this historical perspective that Peterson’s novelty and
popular appeal becomes visible: as opposed to the usual approach of men’s
right movements, he rejects the whole approach of identity politics,
together with its tendencies of self-victimisation. When he calls on men to
reject resentment and the role of the victim, and take responsibility for
their own lives, he arguably steps out of the dominant pre-crisis cultural
logic, and establishes a new discourse (with old roots) for one’s negotia-
tions of identity and power.
Iman Amrani’s findings in her Modern Masculinity documentary series
(2019) are perhaps less theoretical and less generalising, as episodes are
built on encounters with real people, yet the series gives a fairly compre-
hensive picture of contemporary European urban masculinities. The first
and probably most important idea that Amrani and the spectator learn
about is that contemporary masculinities are much more varied, layered
and interesting than the stereotypes of media-representations suggest.
When visiting one of Jordan Peterson’s lectures in Birmingham, Amrani
realises something closely related to what I referred to as a deficit of
knowledge: it becomes clear that Peterson fills a lack in our cultural dis-
courses on masculinity. To her surprise, she realises that Peterson’s lectures
are attended by a great number of women, socialists and liberals too, who
enjoy Peterson’s arguments even if they do not agree with everything. The
next surprise is that her most interesting and eloquent post-lecture inter-
viewee is a big, bold, muscular white guy covered in tattoos, who turns
out to be a fairly creative and successful businessman who got his life
straight with the help of Peterson’s advices. The series also highlights sev-
eral key issues about the challenges men face today. One is fatherhood: the
interviews suggest that good fathers are hard to find, and missing fathers
or bad father-son relationships may damage whole generations. Another
such point concerns the negative effects of media: media representations
(and the stereotypes and expectations one picks up from them) put a lot
20 G. KALMÁR
of pressure on boys and lads, cause anxiety as well as behavioural anoma-

lies. Disavowing these often seems to be a crucial step towards a healthy
masculinity. The most general conclusions with most far-reaching conse-
quences in the whole series is probably that a lot of problems that men face
(and which may lead them to aggression or criminality) are due to funda-
mental socio-cultural characteristics of contemporary societies, which lead
to disintegration, alienation, emotional disconnection and the lack of
healthy communities. This suggests that there is a kind of systemic destruc-
tiveness in the way our modern, individualistic, post-industrial societies
are organised, which cannot be amended by all the government-paid
counselling services, therapy groups or pious lectures in the world.
One of the common themes running through the two takes on con-
temporary men and masculinities is this very recognition of a cultural dys-
function systematically causing all sorts of psychological issues for men.
This is also what I referred to as the ethical dimension of researching men
and masculinities at the beginning of this part of this chapter. The present
crisis gave a new meaning and social significance to the concept of “the
crisis of masculinity”. As a number of psychological studies indicate, the
years following the economic crisis saw a dramatic increase in suicides
among men. The number of “economic suicides” in Europe are in the
thousands, and “the increase was four times higher in men than women”
(Haiken 2014, 5). This newly revealed vulnerability, as I will repeatedly
demonstrate in this book, is part and parcel of the very social privilege that
white men traditionally enjoy: as recent studies indicate, it is mostly
“because men feel greater pressure and shame when faced with financial
failure, and are less likely to seek psychiatric care” (Haiken 2014, 5).
This vulnerability of men (that proud men, overly devoted feminists
and corporate leaders had an equal interest in overseeing) is well docu-
mented by studies in biology, psychology and sociology. In his seminal
study of suicide, Elime Durkheim had already pointed out the intimate
connection between masculinity, social expectations and vulnerability:
If therefore industrial or financial crises increase suicides, this is not because

they cause poverty, since crises of prosperity have the same result; it is
because they are crises, that is, disturbances of the collective order. Every
disturbance of equilibrium, even though it achieves greater comfort and a
heightening of general vitality, is an impulse to voluntary death. Whenever
serious readjustments take place in the social order, whether or not due to a
sudden growth or to an unexpected catastrophe, men are more inclined to

self-destruction. (Durkhein 1952, 206–207)
Thus, what we can comprehend only now, after these dramatic ideo-
logical and political shifts of the last two decades is that masculinities are
much more fragile than they seem. Due to their traditional association
with the public sphere, power, knowledge and financial productivity, mas-
culinities are especially vulnerable with regards to social, economic or epis-
temic transformations. In other words, hegemonic masculinities tend to
be grounded in and depend on specific socio-cultural orders, the changes
of which necessarily lead to the rapid demise of the grounds of hegemony
together with the sense of self-esteem and social worth.
The feminist critique of all that tends to go wrong in patriarchal societ-
ies can easily make one overlook that fact that masculinity is not only con-
nected to spectacular dominance and success, but also with equally
spectacular vulnerability, failure and underachievement. Most contempo-
rary, data-based sociological studies seem to agree that masculinity in the
Western world is not only associated with power, dominance, assertive-
ness, better paying jobs, or higher positions in high-prestige social posi-
tions, but also with shorter life-spans, a more fragile biological constitution
designed for spectacular but short-term success, a body more vulnerable
to almost all common diseases, as well as higher rates in terms of alcohol-
ism, dropping out of school, unemployment, homelessness, violence,
crime and suicide. Thus, I would argue that the much-referred to “crisis
of masculinity” is no mere whining over lost privileges: it is connected
with plenty of real human suffering.
Contemporary European cinema regularly calls attention to the strain
between traditional social expectations and the fragile human beings who
are expected to conform to them. Even in cases when one lives up to these
cultural expectations, even when films show successful, powerful men,
closer looks may reveal a great deal of fragility and anxiety behind the sur-
face (for recent examples, see Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure and The
Square). The affluence of post-war societies has also taught us that the
lives associated with fame and fortune, the lives most envied in our societ-
ies, which more and more women and people of colour can share, come
with psychological challenges most human beings are simply not too well-
equipped to handle.
22 G. KALMÁR
Post-Crisis European Cinema

At times when large segments of European societies feel disaffected and
abandoned by the cultural and political establishments, cinema’s ability to
show sympathy for the troubles of the losers of the times and tell stories of
people in crisis is of crucial cultural importance. In their editorial intro-
duction to a recent issue of Studies in Eastern European Cinema on
Europeanisation, Constantin Parvulescu and Claudiu Turcus recall a simi-
lar situation from the past, the role of cinema in Eastern Europe during
state socialism. They argue that at a time of political and ideological antag-
onism between East and West, between state socialist regimes and liberal
capitalist democracies, auteur cinema was one of the ways Eastern
European citizens could connect with (an ideal) of pan-European (high)
culture. With reference to Randalle Halle’s The Europeanization of
Cinema, they argue that
in a variety of ways that escape state control, cinema produces European

transnational creative and reception experiences. Thus, the traditional
understanding of cinema as a window to the world, and spectatorship as the
act of looking through this window, gains an extra connotation in the social-
ist context. European identity is articulated in relationship to this window.
One belongs to Europe if one owns the gaze of looking through it. One
exists as artist and consumer of art (and entertainment) in a European space
as long as one has such windows at his/her disposal. (2018, 5)
Politically or ideologically oriented accounts of the cold war era often

fail to mention how the two parts of Europe were connected by cultural
products, and later generations would probably be surprised by the fact
that during most of its history Eastern European state socialist regimes did
not ban Western European art films, on the contrary: the culture of attend-
ing art cinemas, watching and discussing the latest work of Europe’s great
directors was an integral part of cultural life. This state-socialist experi-
ence, which many post-communist films scholars share (including myself),
is an apt example of the way cinema is capable of effectively creating a
sense of pan-European cultural belonging, shared values in spite of ideo-
logical antagonisms. Apparently, in a deeply divided post-crisis Europe,
this role of cinema is as important as it was during the cold war. As several
analyses of films in this book will indicate, European quality cinema, fol-
lowing its long-established tradition of social commitment and empathy
for the marginalised, achieved a lot in terms of filling the above-discussed
deficit of representation produced by the blind spots of mainstream poli-

tics. In the new millennium, European filmmakers produced a number of
important and sensitive works about people wresting with the newly arisen
problems, films depicting a life after the collapse of old social and ideologi-
cal formations, works symptomatic of our new, off-modern Europe. In
many ways, during the time of growing political dissent and a global com-
mercial culture effacing true local differences, these films keep contribut-
ing to the production of Europe as an identifiable cultural space.
In European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (2005), Thomas
Elsaesser also highlights this aspect of European cinema, when he regards
it as “the space of a certain mythology, the only one in a secular world”
(Elsaesser 2005, 50). Though Elsaesser recognises the current crisis as a
force moving towards cultural fragmentation and re-tribalisation (2005,
54), his book also bears witness to a “cautiously optimistic” recognition
that “there is a common heritage of story types and myths, of deep struc-
tures of feeling, genres of symbolic action and narrative trajectories that
create recognizably European protagonists and destinies” (2005, 24–25).
Strangely enough, this function of forging shared mythologies supportive
of shared value systems and identities suffered most during the boom years
of the 1990s. Apparently, the end of history, the global victory of neolib-
eral capitalism, ever growing affluence, or the commercialisation of cul-
ture do not constitute the best conditions for cinematic mythmaking, for
producing narratives of lasting value for long-term identification. In this
respect, the twenty-first century crisis may bring a new era of European art
cinema, a time when quality film can regain its social function, address the
issues of the time on a level of complexity that most media-representations
fail to, and thus work as an important cultural glue.
After all, European cinema still forms a well-recognisable cultural tradi-
tion, which may have become somewhat marginalised in the larger context
of world cinema (Elsaesser 2019, 2), but still maintains its cultural identity
due to a number of distinctive characteristics. Among the long list of such
features, one finds European art cinema’s traditional opposition to com-
mercial (mostly American) genre film, the auteur tradition (which includes
a post-romantic concept of the director, and thus connects to centuries of
European literary history), its roots in Enlightenment humanism, liberal-
ism and individualism, its profound interest in the non-normative, the
marginal and the excluded (which, however, have the capacity of figura-
tively standing for the human in general), its openness to “political as well
as aesthetic renewal” (Elsaesser 2005, 9), its slower pace allowing for
24 G. KALMÁR
self-consciousness and reflection, its resistance to the idea of unambiguous

narrative closure, and last but not least, the above mentioned idea of social
engagement, which also makes this kind of cinema capable of imaging the
most pressing issues of the times, thus also functioning as a cultural glue
holding together politically divided societies (Elsaesser 2005; Galt 2006;
Wayne 2002, 20).
Thus, this book only deals with feature films of this above outlined
“auteur” or “quality film” tradition (disregarding profit-oriented cultural
commodities) in order to explore the narratives and identity-formations
through which post-crisis Europeanness and white masculinity are cur-
rently understood. The auteur film enjoys quite a unique status in
European cultural life and media policy. It is one of the most protected
cultural treasures of the EU, whose financial and relative cultural auton-
omy, active engagement with issues of identity, as well as policies of diver-
sity are guaranteed by the exemption rule for cultural goods within the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and such EU programs
as MEDIA and EURIMAGES (Parvulescu and Turcus 2018; Sarikakis
2014, 58; Wayne 2002, 12–13). Under the current regulations, European
art cinema’s relative independence from the harsh realities of market capi-
talism is achieved at the price of soft but detectable ideological streamlin-
ing. As the so-called Euro-pudding phenomenon and some of the close
readings of this book point out, such pressure to promote the values of the
EU’s current ideological strands may sometimes lead to aesthetic compro-
mises, predictable narratives, failures in authenticity, “a somewhat affirma-
tive, consensual, and uncritical cinema” (Wayne 2002, 20), or even worse,
a clearly “confused end product” (Wayne 2002, 17). The point to keep in
mind in this respect is that even if the official declarations of the EU’s film-
funding bodies may sound laudable (as they usually do), one should be
suspicious of any ideological influence, especially in an artistic tradition
that traditionally privileges authenticity, non-conformism and anti-
hegemonic critical attitudes. When films are funded by a very limited
number of sources (with transparent expectations), and their evaluation
mostly happens through the juries of established film festivals (with, again,
quite predictable tastes and preferences), such challenges of echo-chamber-
trapped conformism and predictability are not to be disregarded among
the “perennial temptations of festival films” (Elsaesser 2019, 3).
One motif running through this book is the concept of a victory that
amounts to defeat (Assmann 2016, 95) or, to put it more moderately, a
victory that comes with several unforeseen collateral dangers and
damaging effects. This is one of the key themes of my explorations of

European cinema’s account of history in “Chap. 3: Unprocessed Pasts”;
this pattern can be recognised in the untended vulnerabilities of seemingly
privileged white men discussed above; and perhaps a similar paradoxical
logic can be identified in the way European cinema’s continuous cultural
prestige and stable funding does not abate its sense of crisis. Indeed, as
Elsaesser notes, “such a crisis situation is a given in the Europe of the
twenty-first century, both artistically and politically” (2019, 2), which is
closely connected to “the downsides to the upsides of the European
Union” (Elsaesser 2019, 9).
The new century’s turmoil also affected European cinema’s approaches
to identity, and to masculinity in particular. The question of identity, of
course, has been one of the key concerns of European cinema for several
decades now, and it is probably also the aspect that makes cinema so
important for EU institutions. Unsurprisingly, identity and the ways it is
presented and understood have also become one of the most hotly debated
issues of post-crisis Europe. Outlining the debates around the theories and
methods of identity politics, as well as its role in the socio-cultural changes
of the past decades would exceed the limitations of this introduction.
What needs to be pointed out, however, is the specific historical situation
in which we find twenty-first-century European cinema in this respect.
The most significant trend from the point of view of the representation of
white men is that “Europe no longer has a heroic narrative of self-identity
and self-creation” (Elsaesser 2019, 10). Due to the era of post-1960s’
historical reckoning, which I described in the previous part of this intro-
duction, heroic narratives became uncomfortably associated with those
parts of the European past (e.g., colonialisation, imperialism or slavery)
that most of us are not so proud of anymore (Elsaesser 2019, 10).
Thus, heroic men (and the kind of spectacular narratives one can tell
about them) have become scarce in European quality cinema. However,
complicating Elsaesser’s above account, I would argue that some sort of
heroism has remained an integral part of European identity and European
cinema. To put it shortly, this unacknowledged, clandestine, paradoxical
heroism can be traced in Europe’s heroic renunciation of heroic narra-
tives, by which excelling in heroic deeds was successfully inverted (or sub-
limated) into excelling in despising heroic narratives. This operation,
which lies at the heart of the concept of the European Union itself (see
Chap. 3), can be often recognised when European politicians or public
intellectuals pompously denounce cultural products of heroic narratives:
26 G. KALMÁR
whenever these denouncing statements are paired with the air of moral
superiority and a thinly veiled disgust for such examples of cultural inferi-
ority, one can feel the energy of these repressed and tempting heroic ide-
als. According to the well-known principles of repression, the more
feelings of disgust and moral superiority we can sense, the more sacrifice
the speaker had to make to get rid of what he or she condemns today.
Thus, it often seems that Europe (and European cinema) would still like
to lead the world, but this time this heroism of leadership takes the form
of the rejection, repression and renunciation of former, compromised
manifestations of heroism. My point is that, despite appearances, we have
in no way reached a post-heroic condition. Furthermore, times of crisis
(when we are once again caught up in fights with very real stakes) are likely
to pose unusual challenges for our repressions, and easily lead to a return
of heroic ideals.
Let me turn now to European cinema’s role in the EU’s media policies.
In “Identity and Diversity in European Media Policy” Katherina Sarikakis
argues that in the present European context, identity is articulated in three
specific ways:
There are largely three interconnected dimensions in the debate of identity

and its role in media policies in European media policies. These are (i) the
construction or preservation of existing cultural identities, understood to
derive from existing national bases of member states; (ii) the construction of
an additional layer or dimension of identity, the European identity, which is
seen as a vehicle for legitimation of the EU integration project; and (iii) the
level of identity as a personal choice and experience and a state of being that
might be considered of relevance to media policies regulating the terms and
conditions of media production and distribution, but also occasionally con-
tent regulation in terms of representation. (Sarikakis 2014, 59)
This complex system creates a playfield of expectations, representa-

tional strategies and interpretive approaches that influence the various
players of the film and cultural industry. These three dimensions of iden-
tity, as outlined by Sarikakis, also call attention to the importance the EU
attributes to film’s role in the production of European identities.
These dimensions, one may argue, reflect the social-national, supranational

and micro/individual contexts of identity formation and representation.
They have preoccupied the EU policy-makers in various legal and other
official documentation by way of aspiration (how to become European),
‘soul searching’ (what it means to be ‘European’) and cultural policy (rep-

resentation of cultures and identities) throughout the historical develop-
ment of media policies. They demonstrate at the same time the struggle for
clarity and direction within the cultural, symbolic domain of a public sphere
in construction, the EU sphere. (Sarikakis 2014, 59)
These roles enlisted by Sarikakis, which cinema plays in contemporary

Europe, do not only highlight its cultural importance, but also point out
the reasons why they can be a useful object of study for projects (such as
mine) that are interested in both cinema and the socio-cultural changes
that it is part of. It may have been these very reasons that led Elsaesser in
his latest (and sadly last) monograph, to regard European films as thought
experiments through which one can dig into some of the fundamental
issues of contemporary Europeannes. According to Elsaesser, one way to
think of cinema is to regard it
as a space that confronts us with our “being in the world”, welcoming cin-
ema as an ever surprising or startling encounter, one that touches us in our
ethics and politics, that challenges not just specific ideas or beliefs, but entire
value systems, maybe even proposing quite radical insights into how life can
be lived and imagined—as individuals, as social beings, as part of human-
ity. (Elsaesser 2019, 5)
Elsaesser’s words, as well as the approach to films that his words indi-
cate, may serve as a motto for my explorations on the following pages.
Indeed, while working with these films and working through the issues
they present, the chapters attempt to maintain both the openness and the
sharp, critical eyes that one needs in encounters that may question one’s
most fundamental beliefs about our ways of being in the world.
The Outline of the Book

Thus, the book focuses on films, all made in the new millennium, which
feature white (and mostly heterosexual) men, arguably the majority in
European societies. These men, in theory, belong to the privileged social
caste, they are white, they speak the local language, most of them are legal
citizens with social security numbers and full political rights, yet, for vari-
ous reasons they find themselves losers of contemporary social transforma-
tions, and thus feel marginalised, neglected or explicitly exploited. Almost
none of my analyses focuses on representations of successful, hegemonic
28 G. KALMÁR
masculinities of the new century, not the least because these kinds are
hardly ever represented in European arthouse cinema. In other words,
both these films and I are more concerned with the ways our contempo-
rary ideological fantasies fail to materialise in some men’s lives, than in the
fantasies themselves. Therefore, the book explores films about men who
do not live the (ideological) dream, who did not make it, who cannot
incorporate the dominant fantasies. For both European art cinema and
this book, they function as dark mirrors in which our world can be con-
templated, reimagined and explored. The films I wish to analyse in detail
fulfil complex roles: they comment on contemporary social issues, repre-
sent the shifts in gender roles, and they also often say farewell (or pay
homage) to life-worlds, livelihoods and masculinities that are disappearing
in today’s globalised, “advanced” capitalism.
The book identifies and outlines a number of social issues or “discursive
themes” that I recognise as distinguishable concerns of contemporary
European cinema, issues symptomatic of twenty-first-century socio-
cultural shifts, “hot” topics salient in the identity politics of (some) white
European men. Each chapter outlines the theoretical and historical con-
text of one of these issues, and groups together a handful of films about it,
so as to explore the changes in cultural logic, the shifting ethical and aes-
thetic paradigms of art cinema, as well as the formations of white mascu-
linity. My choices of films were informed by several goals. Besides the
obvious aim to choose films that represent such a social issue in meaning-
ful and complex ways, within each chapter I placed more well-known films
side by side with less renowned titles. Furthermore, it was my aim to
include examples from different regions (or national film cultures) of
Europe. This way, the similarities of key concerns can be contrasted by the
different approaches resulting from local geopolitical situatedness, socio-
political specificities, cultural heritage or the individual films’ aesthetic
approaches. In line with this, my aim was also to contrast the films’ differ-
ent cinematic, aesthetic or ethical approaches.
The chapter following this introduction, Chap. 2, entitled “Rites of
Retreat and the Cinematic Resignification of European Cultural
Geography” explores some meaningful shifts in the cultural geography of
twenty-first-century European cinema: changes in cinematic journeys that
reveal a resignification of such terms as East, West, margin and centre. On
basis of three European films of the last decade, The World Is Big and
Salvation Lurks Around the Corner (Stephan Komandarev, 2008), Delta
(Kornél Mundruczó, 2008) and Suntan (Argyris Papadimitropoulos,
2016), the chapter investigates a special sub-category of so-called return

films, one that I will call retreat films. In these films returns become ritual-
istic retreats with masculinities on regressive journeys. Their spatial trajec-
tories may typically lead from Western cultural centres to Eastern
homelands, from cities to the countryside, from the public sphere to the
private, sometimes symbolically from the future to the past, and often
from the realm of desire to that of Thanatos. The men of these films tend
to struggle to find places of their own on the margins of society, away
from public spaces: what they seem to have in mind is a place to hide,
somewhere to retreat.
Chapter 3 deals with Europe’s unprocessed pasts. It explores the fierce
disputes and post-crisis realignments in Europe’s memory politics. Here
I argue that the twenty-first century has brought about profound shifts in
this field as well: as our prospects of the future have changed (from the
sweet utopia of the end of history to the gloomy, off-modern dystopia of
our post-9/11 and post-crash age), our narratives of the past also started
to change rapidly. Due to the series of crisis that serves as the backdrop to
this book’s explorations, a widespread sentiment of unease and discon-
tent arose about the European culture and politics of memory, resulting
in the systematic questioning of Europe’s pre-crisis historical narratives.
Chapter 3 endeavours to outline Europe’s post-war history of memory,
its pre-crisis dominant paradigm of remembering, the role of historical
memory in the formation of the European Union and its official identity
politics, as well as some lines of criticism that this official memory-politics
faces today. I focus on three films, Amen (Costa-Gavras 2002), Days of
Glory (Rachid Bouchareb 2006) and Cold War (Pawel Pawlikowski
2018). All three explore different parts of Europe’s troubled historical
heritage, but while the first two can be regarded as variations of Europe’s
official memory politics (together with its shortcomings), the third reveals
a different model, and thus also sheds light on the cultural differences
between Eastern and Western Europe.
Chapter 4 explores films about addiction and other escapist practices.
In my opinion, including a chapter on addiction-related films in this book
is not only important because of the well-known severity of substance
abuse problems, the astonishing destruction it leaves behind, or the preva-
lence of males in the grim stories drug abuse produces. This chapter is
essential for this book because addiction, I believe, is not only a result of
individual psychopathology, bad genes or moral weakness, as many people
and public institutions would hold. More importantly, addiction can be
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as we count sleep, but it is awake at last and its every
member is tingling with Chinese feeling—'China for the
Chinese and out with the foreigners!'
"The Boxer movement is doubtless the product of official

inspiration, but it has taken hold of the popular imagination
and will spread like wildfire all over the length and breadth
of the country: it is, in short, a purely patriotic volunteer
movement, and its object is to strengthen China—and for a
Chinese programme. Its first experience has not been
altogether a success as regards the attainment through
strength of proposed ends,—the rooting up of foreign cults and
the ejection of foreigners, but it is not a failure in respect of
the feeler it put out—will volunteering work?—or as an
experiment that would test ways and means and guide future
choice: it has proved how to a man the people will respond to
the call, and it has further demonstrated that the swords and
spears to which the prudent official mind confined the
initiated will not suffice, but must be supplemented or
replaced by Mauser rifles and Krupp guns: the Boxer patriot of
the future will possess the best weapons money can buy, and
then the 'Yellow Peril' will be beyond ignoring."
Robert Hart,
The Peking Legations
(Fortnightly Review, November, 1900).
{109}
CHINA: A. D. 1900 (March-April).

Proposed joint naval demonstration of the Powers
in Chinese waters.
On receipt of the telegram from Peking (March 10) recommending

a joint naval demonstration in North Chinese waters, the
British Ambassador at Paris was directed to consult the
Government of France on the subject, and did so. On the 13th,
he reported M. Delcassé, the French Minister for Foreign
Affairs, as saying that "he could not, of course, without
reflection and without consulting his colleagues, say what the
decision of the French Government would be as to taking part
in a naval demonstration, but at first sight it seemed to him
that it would be difficult to avoid acting upon a suggestion
which the Representatives of Five Powers, who ought to be good
judges, considered advisable." On the 16th, he wrote to Lord
Salisbury: "M. Delcassé informed me the day before yesterday
that he had telegraphed to Peking for more precise
information. I told him that I was glad to hear that no
precipitate action was going to be taken by France, and that I
believed that he would find that the United States' Government
would be disinclined to associate themselves with any joint
naval demonstration. I added that, although I had no
instructions to say so, I expected that Her Majesty's
Government would also adhere to their usual policy of
proceeding with great caution, and would be in no hurry to
take a step which only urgent necessity would render
advisable."
On the 23d of March, Sir Claude MacDonald telegraphed to Lord

Salisbury: "I learn that the Government of the United States
have ordered one ship-of-war to go to Taku for the purpose of
protecting American interests, that the Italian Minister has
been given the disposal of two ships, and the German Minister
has the use of the squadron at Kiao-chau for the same purpose.
With a view to protect British missionary as well as other
interests, which are far in excess of those of other Powers, I
would respectfully request that two of Her Majesty's ships be
sent to Taku."
On the 3d of April, the Tsung-li Yamên communicated to the

British Ambassador the following information, as to the
punishment of the murderers of Mr. Brooks, and of the
officials responsible for neglect to protect him: "Of several
arrests that had been made of persons accused of having been
the perpetrators of the crime or otherwise concerned in its
committal, two have been brought to justice and, at a trial at
which a British Consul was present, found guilty and sentenced
to be decapitated—a sentence which has already been carried
into effect. Besides this, the Magistrate of Feichen, and some
of the police authorities of the district, accounted to have
been guilty of culpable negligence in the protection of Mr.
Brooks, have been cashiered, or had other punishments awarded
them of different degrees of severity."
For some weeks after this the Boxer movement appears to have
been under constraint. Further outrages were not reported and
no expressions of anxiety appear in the despatches from
Peking. The proposal of a joint naval demonstration in the
waters of Northern China was not pressed.
Great Britain, Papers by Command:

China, Number 3, 1900, pages 6-17.
CHINA: A. D. 1900 (May-June).

Renewed activity of the "Boxers" and increasing gravity of
the situation at Peking.
Return of Legation guards.
Call upon the fleets at Taku for reinforcement and rescue.
About the middle of May the activity of the "Boxers" was

renewed, and a state of disorder far more threatening than
before was speedily made known. The rapid succession of
startling events during the next few weeks may be traced in
the following series of telegrams from the British Minister at
Peking to his chief:
"May 17.
The French Minister called to-day to inform me that the Boxers
have destroyed three villages and killed 61 Roman Catholic
Christian converts at a place 90 miles from Peking, near
Paoting-fu. The French Bishop informs me that in that
district, and around Tien-tsin and Peking generally, much
disorder prevails."
"May 18.
There was a report yesterday, which has been confirmed to-day,
that the Boxers have destroyed the London Mission chapel at
Kung-tsun, and killed the Chinese preacher. Kung-tsun is about
40 miles south-west of Peking."
"May 19.
At the Yamên, yesterday, I reminded the Ministers how I had
unceasingly warned them during the last six months how
dangerous it was not to take adequate measures in suppression
of the Boxer Societies. I said that the result of the apathy
of the Chinese Government was that now a Mission chapel, a few
miles distant from the capital, had been destroyed. The
Ministers admitted that the danger of the Boxer movement had
not previously appeared to them so urgent, but that now they
fully saw how serious it was. On the previous day an Imperial
Decree had been issued, whereby specified metropolitan and
provincial authorities were directed to adopt stringent
measures to suppress the Boxers. This, they believed, would
not fail to have the desired effect."
"May 21.
All eleven foreign Representatives attended a meeting of the
Diplomatic Body held yesterday afternoon, at the instance of
the French Minister. The doyen was empowered to write, in the
name of all the foreign Representatives, a note to the Yamên
to the effect that the Diplomatic Body, basing their demands
on the Decrees already issued by the Palace denunciatory of
the Boxers, requested that all persons who should print,
publish, or disseminate placards which menaced foreigners, all
individuals aiding and abetting, all owners of houses or
temples now used as meeting places for Boxers, should be
arrested. They also demanded that those guilty of arson,
murder, outrages, &c., together with those affording support
or direction to Boxers while committing such outrages, should
be executed. Finally, the publication of a Decree in Peking
and the Northern Provinces setting forth the above. The
foreign Representatives decided at their meeting to take
further measures if the disturbances still continued, or if a
favorable answer was not received to their note within five
days. The meeting did not decide what measures should be
taken, but the Representatives were generally averse to
bringing guards to Peking, and, what found most favour, was as
follows:—
With the exception of Holland, which has no ships in Chinese

waters, it was proposed that all the Maritime Powers
represented should make a naval demonstration either at
Shanhaikuan, or at the new port, Ching-wangtao, while, in case
of necessity, guards were to be held ready on board ship. My
colleagues will, I think, send these proposals as they stand
to their governments. As the Chinese Government themselves
seem to be sufficiently alarmed, I do not think that the above
measure will be necessary, but, should the occasion arise, I
trust that Her Majesty's Government will see fit to support
it. … I had a private interview with my Russian colleague, who
came to see me before the matter reached its acute stages. M. de
Giers said that there were only two countries with serious
interests in China: England and Russia. He thought that both
landing guards and naval demonstrations were to be
discouraged, as they give rise to unknown eventualities.
However, since the 18th instant, he admits that matters are
grave, and agreed at once to the joint note."
{110}
"May 24.
Her Majesty's Consul at Tien-tsin reported by telegraph
yesterday that a Colonel in charge of a party of the Viceroy's
cavalry was caught, on the 22nd instant, in an ambuscade near
Lai-shui, which is about 50 miles south-west of Peking. The
party were destroyed."
"May 25.
Tsung-li Yamên have replied to the note sent by the doyen of
the Corps Diplomatique, reported in my telegram of the 21st
May. They state that the main lines of the measures already in
force agree with those required by the foreign
Representatives, and add that a further Decree, which will
direct efficacious action, is being asked for. The above does
not even promise efficacious action, and, in my personal
opinion, is unsatisfactory."
"May 27.
At the meeting of the Corps Diplomatique, which took place
yesterday evening, we were informed by the French Minister
that all his information led him to believe that a serious
outbreak, which would endanger the lives of all European
residents in Peking, was on the point of breaking out. The
Italian Minister confirmed the information received by M.
Pichon. The Russian Minister agreed with his Italian and
French colleagues in considering the latest reply of the Yamên
to be unsatisfactory, adding that, in his opinion, the Chinese
Government was now about to adopt effective measures. That the
danger was imminent he doubted, but said that it was not
possible to disregard the evidence adduced by the French
Minister. We all agreed with this last remark. M. Pichon then
urged that if the Chinese Government did not at once take
action guards should at once be brought up by the foreign
Representatives. Some discussion then ensued, after which it
was determined that a precise statement should be demanded
from the Yamên as to the measures they had taken, also that
the terms of the Edict mentioned by them should be
communicated to the foreign Representatives. Failing a reply
from the Yamên of a satisfactory nature by this afternoon, it
was resolved that guards should be sent for. Baron von
Ketteler, the German Minister, declared that he considered the
Chinese Government was crumbling to pieces, and that he did
not believe that any action based on the assumption of their
stability could be efficacious. The French Minister is, I am
certain, genuinely convinced that the danger is real, and
owing to his means of information he is well qualified to
judge. … I had an interview with Prince Ch'ing and the Yamên
Ministers this afternoon. Energetic measures are now being
taken against the Boxers by the Government, whom the progress
of the Boxer movement has, at last, thoroughly alarmed. The
Corps Diplomatique, who met in the course of the day, have
decided to wait another twenty-four hours for further
developments."
"May 29.
Some stations on the line, among others Yengtai, 6 miles from
Peking, together with machine sheds and European houses, were
burnt yesterday by the Boxers. The line has also been torn up
in places. Trains between this and Tien-tsin have stopped
running, and traffic has not been resumed yet. The situation
here is serious, and so far the Imperial troops have done
nothing. It was unanimously decided, at a meeting of foreign
Representatives yesterday, to send for guards for the
Legations, in view of the apathy of the Chinese Government and
the gravity of the situation. Before the meeting assembled,
the French Minister had already sent for his."
"May 30.
Permission for the guards to come to Peking has been refused
by the Yamên. I think, however, that they may not persist in
their refusal. The situation in the meantime is one of extreme
gravity. The people are very excited, and the soldiers
mutinous. Without doubt it is now a question of European life
and property being in danger here. The French and Russians are
landing 100 men each. French, Russian, and United States'
Ministers, and myself, were deputed to-day at a meeting of the
foreign Representatives to declare to the Tsung-li Yamên that
the foreign Representatives must immediately bring up guards
for the protection of the lives of Europeans in Peking in view
of the serious situation and untrustworthiness of the Chinese
troops. That the number would be small if facilities were
granted, but it must be augmented should they be refused, and
serious consequences might result for the Chinese Government
in the latter event. In reply, the Yamên stated that no
definite reply could be given until to-morrow afternoon, as
the Prince was at the Summer Palace. As the Summer Palace is
within an hour's ride we refused to admit the impossibility of
prompt communication and decision, and repeated the warning
already given of the serious consequences which would result
if the Viceroy at Tien-tsin did not receive instructions this
evening in order that the guards might be enabled to arrive
here to-morrow. The danger will be greatest on Friday, which
is a Chinese festival."
"May 31.
Provided that the number does not exceed that of thirty for
each Legation, as on the last occasion, the Yamên have given
their consent to the guards coming to Peking. … It was decided
this morning, at a meeting of the foreign Representatives, to
at once bring up the guards that are ready. These probably
include the British, American, Italian, and Japanese."
"June 1.
British, American, Italian, Russian, French and Japanese
guards arrived yesterday. Facilities were given, and there
were no disturbances. Our detachment consists of three
officers and seventy-five men, and a machine gun."
"June 2.
The city is comparatively quiet, but murders of Christian
converts and the destruction of missionary property in
outlying districts occur every day, and the situation still
remains serious. The situation at the Palace is, I learn from
a reliable authority, very strained. The Empress-Dowager does
not dare to put down the Boxers, although wishing to do so, on
account of the support given them by Prince Tuan, father of
the hereditary Prince, and other conservative Manchus, and
also because of their numbers. Thirty Europeans, most of whom
were Belgians, fled from Paoting-fu via the river to
Tien-tsin. About 20 miles from Tien-tsin they were attacked by
Boxers.
{111}
A party of Europeans having gone to their rescue from
Tien-tsin severe fighting ensued, in which a large number of
Boxers were killed. Nine of the party are still missing,
including one lady. The rest have been brought into Tien-tsin.
The Russian Minister, who came to see me to-day, said he
thought it most imperative that the foreign Representatives
should be prepared for all eventualities, though he had no
news confirming the above report. He said he had been
authorized by his Government to support any Chinese authority
at Peking which was able and willing to maintain order in case
the Government collapsed."
"June 4.
I am informed by a Chinese courier who arrived to-day from
Yung-Ching, 40 miles south of Peking, that on the 1st June the
Church of England Mission at that place was attacked by the
Boxers. He states that one missionary, Mr. Robinson, was
murdered, and that he saw his body, and that another, Mr.
Norman, was carried off by the Boxers. I am insisting on the
Chinese authorities taking immediate measures to effect his
rescue. Present situation at Peking is such that we may at any
time be besieged here with the railway and telegraph lines
cut. In the event of this occurring, I beg your Lordship will
cause urgent instructions to be sent to Admiral Seymour to
consult with the officers commanding the other foreign
squadrons now at Taku to take concerted measures for our
relief. The above was agreed to at a meeting held to-day by
the foreign Representatives, and a similar telegram was sent
to their respective Governments by the Ministers of Austria,
Italy, Germany, France, Japan, Russia, and the United States,
all of whom have ships at Taku and guards here. The telegram
was proposed by the French Minister and carried unanimously.
It is difficult to say whether the situation is as grave as
the latter supposes, but the apathy of the Chinese Government
makes it very serious."
"June 5.
I went this afternoon to the Yamên to inquire of the Ministers
personally what steps the Chinese Government proposed to take
to effect the punishment of Mr. Robinson's murderers and the
release of Mr. Norman. I was informed by the Ministers that
the Viceroy was the responsible person, that they had
telegraphed to him to send troops to the spot, and that that
was all they were able to do in the matter. They did not
express regret or show the least anxiety to effect the relief
of the imprisoned man, and they displayed the greatest
indifference during the interview. I informed them that the
Chinese Government would be held responsible by Her Majesty's
Government for the criminal apathy which had brought about
this disgraceful state of affairs. I then demanded an
interview with Prince Ching, which is fixed for to-morrow, as
I found it useless to discuss the matter with the Yamên. This
afternoon I had an interview with the Prince and Ministers of
the Yamên. They expressed much regret at the murder of Messrs.
Robinson and Norman, and their tone was fully satisfactory in
this respect. … No attempt was made by the Prince to defend
the Chinese Government, nor to deny what I had said. He could
say nothing to reassure me as to the safety of the city, and
admitted that the Government was reluctant to deal harshly
with the movement, which, owing to its anti-foreign character,
was popular. He stated that they were bringing 6,000 soldiers
from near Tien-tsin for the protection of the railway, but it
was evident that he doubted whether they would be allowed to
fire on the Boxers except in the defence of Government
property, or if authorized whether they would obey. He gave me
to understand, without saying so directly, that he has
entirely failed to induce the Court to accept his own views as
to the danger of inaction. It was clear, in fact, that the Yamên
wished me to understand that the situation was most serious,
and that, owing to the influence of ignorant advisers with the
Empress-Dowager, they were powerless to remedy it."
"June 6.
Since the interview with the Yamên reported in my preceding
telegram I have seen several of my colleagues. I find they all
agree that, owing to the now evident sympathy of the
Empress-Dowager and the more conservative of her advisers with
the anti-foreign movement, the situation is rapidly growing
more serious. Should there be no change in the attitude of the
Empress, a rising in the city, ending in anarchy, which may
produce rebellion in the provinces, will be the result,
'failing an armed occupation of Peking by one or more of the
Powers.' Our ordinary means of pressure on the Chinese
Government fail, as the Yamên is, by general consent, and
their own admission, powerless to persuade the Court to take
serious measures of repression. Direct representations to the
Emperor and Dowager-Empress from the Corps Diplomatique at a
special audience seems to be the only remaining chance of
impressing the Court."
"June 7.
There is a long Decree in the 'Gazette' which ascribes the
recent trouble to the favour shown to converts in law suits
and the admission to their ranks of bad characters. It states
that the Boxers, who are the objects of the Throne's sympathy
equally with the converts, have made use of the anti-Christian
feeling aroused by these causes, and that bad characters among
them have destroyed chapels and railways which are the
property of the State. Unless the ringleaders among such bad
characters are now surrendered by the Boxers they will be
dealt with as disloyal subjects, and will be exterminated.
Authorization will be given to the Generals to effect arrests,
exercising discrimination between leaders and their followers.
It is probable that the above Decree represents a compromise
between the conflicting opinions which exist at Court. The
general tone is most unsatisfactory, though the effect may be
good if severe measures are actually taken. The general
lenient tone, the absence of reference to the murder of
missionaries, and the justification of the proceedings of the
Boxers by the misconduct of Christian converts are all
dangerous factors in the case."
"June 8.
A very bad effect has been produced by the Decree reported in
my immediately preceding telegram. There is no prohibition of
the Boxers drilling, which they now openly do in the houses of
the Manchu nobility and in the temples. This Legation is full
of British refugees, mostly women and children, and the London
and Church of England Missions have been abandoned. I trust
that the instructions requested in my telegrams of the 4th and
5th instant have been sent to the Admiral. I have received the
following telegram, dated noon to-day, from Her Majesty's Consul
at Tien-tsin:
{112}
'By now the Boxers must be near Yang-tsun. Last night the
bridge, which is outside that station, was seen to be on fire.
General Nieh's forces are being withdrawn to Lutai, and 1,500
of them have already passed through by railway. There are now
at Yang-tsun an engine and trucks ready to take 2,000 more
men.' Lutai lies on the other side of Tien-tsin, and at some
distance. Should this information be correct, it means that an
attempt to protect Peking has been abandoned by the only force
on which the Yamên profess to place any reliance. The 6,000
men mentioned in my telegram
of the 5th instant were commanded by General Nieh."
"Tong-ku, June 10.

Vice-Admiral Sir E. Seymour to Admiralty.
Following telegram received from Minister at Peking:
'Situation extremely grave. Unless arrangements are made for
immediate advance to Peking it will be too late.'
"In consequence of above, I am landing at once with all

available men, and have asked foreign officers' co-operation."
Great Britain, Papers by Command:
China, Number 3, 1900, pages 26-45.
CHINA: A. D. 1900 (June 10-26).

Bombardment and capture of Taku forts by the allied fleets.
Failure of first relief expedition started for Peking.
The following is from an official report by Rear-Admiral

Bruce of the British Navy, dated at Taku June 17, 1900:
"On my arrival here on the 11th inst. I found a large fleet,

consisting of Russian, German, French, Austrian, Italian,
Japanese, and British ships. In consequence of an urgent
telegram from Her Majesty's Minister at Peking, Vice-Admiral
Sir Edward H. Seymour, K. C. B., Commander-in-Chief, had
started at 3 o'clock the previous morning (10th June), taking
with him a force of 1,375 of all ranks, being reinforced by
men from the allied ships as they arrived, until he commanded
not less than 2,000 men. At a distance of some 20 to 30 miles
from Tientsin—but it is very difficult to locate the place, as
no authentic record has come in—he found the railway destroyed
and sleepers burned, &c., and every impediment made by
supposed Boxers to his advance. Then his difficulties began,
and it is supposed that the Boxers, probably assisted by
Chinese troops, closed in on his rear, destroyed
railway-lines, bridges, &c., and nothing since the 13th inst.
has passed from Commander-in-Chief and his relief force and
Tientsin, nor vice versa up to this date. …
"During the night of the 14th inst. news was received that all
railway-carriages and other rolling stock had been ordered to
be sent up the line for the purpose of bringing down a Chinese
army to Tong-ku. On receipt of this serious information a
council of Admirals was summoned by Vice-Admiral Hiltebrandt,
Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Squadron, and the German,
French, United States Admirals, myself, and the Senior
Officers of Italy, Austria, and Japan attended; and it was
decided to send immediate orders to the captains of the allied
vessels in the Peiho River (three Russian, two German, one
United States, one Japanese, one British—'Algerine') to
prevent any railway plant being taken away from Tong-ku, or
the Chinese army reaching that place, which would cut off our
communication with Tientsin; and in the event of either being
attempted they were to use force to prevent it, and to destroy
the Taku Forts. By the evening, and during the night of 15th
inst., information arrived that the mouth of the Peiho River
was being protected by electric mines. On receipt of this,
another council composed of the same naval officers was held
in the forenoon of 16th June on board the 'Rossia,' and in
consequence of the gravity of the situation, and information
having also arrived that the forts were being provisioned and
reinforced, immediate notice was sent to the Viceroy of Chili
at Tientsin and the commandant of the forts that, in
consequence of the danger to our forces up the river, at
Tientsin, and on the march to Peking by the action of the
Chinese authorities, we proposed to temporarily occupy the
Taku Forts, with or without their good will, at 2 a.m. on the
17th inst." Early on Sunday, 17th June, "the Taku Forts opened
fire on the allied ships in the Peiho River, which continued
almost without intermission until 6.30 a.m., when all firing
had practically ceased and the Taku Forts were stormed and in
the hands of the Allied Powers, allowing of free communication
with Tientsin by water, and rail when the latter is repaired."
The American Admiral took no part in this attack on the forts

at Taku, "on the ground that we were not at war with China and
that a hostile demonstration might consolidate the
anti-foreign elements and strengthen the Boxers to oppose the
relieving column."
From the point to which the allied expedition led by Admiral

Seymour fought its way, and at which it was stopped by the
increasing numbers that opposed it, it fell back to a position
near Hsiku, on the right bank of the Peiho. There the allies
drove the Chinese forces from an imperial armory and took
possession of the buildings, which gave them a strong
defensive position, with a large store of rice for food, and
enabled them to hold their ground until help came to them from
Tientsin, on the 25th. They were encumbered with no less than 230
wounded men, which made it impossible for them, in the
circumstances, to fight their way back without aid; though the
distance was so short that the return march was accomplished, on
the 26th, between 3 o'clock and 9 of the same morning. In his
report made the following day Admiral Seymour says: "The
number of enemy engaged against us in the march from Yungtsin
to the Armoury near Hsiku cannot be even estimated; the
country alongside the river banks is quite flat, and consisted
of a succession of villages of mud huts, those on the
out-skirts having enclosures made of dried reeds; outside,
high reeds were generally growing in patches near the village,
and although trees are very scarce away from the River,
alongside it they are very numerous; these with the graves,
embankments for irrigation and against flood, afforded cover
to the enemy from which they seldom exposed themselves,
withdrawing on our near approach. Had their fire not been
generally high it would have been much more destructive than
it was. The number of the enemy certainly increased gradually
until the Armoury near Hsiku was reached, when General Nieh's
troops and the Boxers both joined in the attack. In the early
part of the expedition the Boxers were mostly armed with
swords and spears, and not with many firearms; at the
engagement at Langfang on 18th, and afterwards, they were
armed with rifles of late pattern; this together with banners
captured and uniform worn, shows that they had either the
active or covert support of the Chinese Government, or some of
its high officials."
{113}
CHINA: A. D. 1900 (June 11-29).

Chinese Imperial Edicts.
"On June 11 Mr. Sugiyama, the Chancellor of the Japanese

Legation, was brutally murdered [in Peking] by the soldiers of
General Tung-fuh-siang. Two days later the following Imperial
edict was published in the 'Peking Gazette': 'On June 11 the
Japanese Chancellor was murdered by brigands outside the
Yung-ting Mên. On hearing this intelligence we were
exceedingly grieved. Officials of neighbouring nations
stationed in Peking ought to be protected in every possible
way, and now, especially, extra diligence ought to be
displayed to prevent such occurrences when banditti are as
numerous as bees. We have repeatedly commanded the local
officials to ensure the most efficient protection in their
districts, yet, in spite of our frequent orders, we have this
case of the murder of the Japanese Chancellor occurring in the
very capital of the Empire. The civil and military officials
have assuredly been remiss in not clearing their districts of
bad characters, or immediately arresting such persons, and we
hereby order every Yamên concerned to set a limit of time for
the arrest of the criminals, that they may suffer the extreme
penalty. Should the time expire without any arrest being
effected, the severest punishment will assuredly be inflicted
upon the responsible persons.' It is needless to add that the
'criminals' were never arrested and the 'responsible persons'
were never punished. In the same 'Gazette' another decree
condemns the 'Boxer brigands' who have recently been causing
trouble in the neighbourhood of the capital, who have been
committing arson and murder and revenging themselves upon the
native converts. Soldiers and 'Boxers,' it says, have leagued
together to commit acts of murder and arson, and have vied
with one another in disgraceful acts of looting and robbery.
The 'Boxers' are to disband, desperadoes are to be arrested,
ringleaders are to be seized, but the followers may be allowed
to disband.
"Similar decrees on the 14th and 15th show alarm at the result
of the 'Boxer' agitation and lawlessness within the city.
Nothing so strong against the 'Boxers' had previously been
published. Fires were approaching too Closely to the Imperial
Palace. No steps had been taken by the Court to prevent the
massacre and burning of Christians and their property in the
country, but on the 16th the great Chien Mên gate fronting the
Palace had been burned and the smoke had swept over the
Imperial Courts. Yet even in these decrees leniency is shown
to the 'Boxers,' for they are not to be fired upon, but are,
if guilty, to be arrested and executed. On June 17th the edict
expresses the belief of the Throne that:—'All foreign
Ministers ought to be really protected. If the Ministers and
their families wish to go for a time to Tien-tsin, they must
be protected on the way. But the railroad is not now in
working order. If they go by the cart road it will be
difficult, and there is fear that perfect protection cannot be
offered. They would do better, therefore, to abide here in
peace as heretofore and wait till the railroad is repaired,
and then act as circumstances render expedient.'
"Two days later an ultimatum was sent to the Ministers

ordering them to leave Peking within 24 hours. On the 20th
Baron von Ketteler was murdered and on June 21 China
published, having entered upon war against the whole world,
her Apologia:—
'Ever since the foundation of the Dynasty, foreigners coming

to China have been kindly treated. In the reigns Tao Kuang,
and Hsien Feng, they were allowed to trade and they also asked
leave to propagate their religion, a request that the Throne
reluctantly granted. At first they were amenable to Chinese
control, but for the past 30 years they have taken advantage
of China's forbearance to encroach on China's territory and
trample on Chinese people and to demand China's wealth. Every
concession made by China increased their reliance on violence.
They oppressed peaceful citizens and insulted the gods and
holy men, exciting the most burning indignation among the
people. Hence the burning of chapels and slaughter of converts
by the patriotic braves. The Throne was anxious to avoid war, and
issued edicts enjoining the protection of Legations and pity
to the converts. The decrees declaring 'Boxers' and converts
to be equally the children of the State were issued in the
hope of removing the old feud between people and converts.
Extreme kindness was shown to the strangers from afar. But
these people knew no gratitude and increased their pressure. A
despatch was yesterday sent by Du Chaylard, calling us to
deliver up the Ta-ku Forts into their keeping, otherwise they
would be taken by force. These threats showed their aggressive
intention. In all matters relating to international
intercourse, we have never been wanting in courtesies to them,
but they, while styling themselves civilized States, have acted
without regard for right, relying solely on their military
force. We have now reigned nearly 30 years, and have treated
the people as our children, the people honouring us as their
deity, and in the midst of our reign we have been the
recipients of the gracious favour of the Empress-Dowager.
Furthermore, our ancestors have come to our aid, and the gods
have answered our call, and never has there been so universal
a manifestation of loyalty and patriotism. With tears have we
announced war in the ancestral shrines. Better to enter on the
struggle and do our utmost than seek some measures of
self-preservation involving eternal disgrace. All our
officials, high and low, are of one mind, and there have
assembled without official summons several hundred thousand
patriotic soldiers (I Ping "Boxers"). Even children carrying
spears in the service of the State. Those others relying on
crafty schemes, our trust is in Heaven's justice. They depend
on violence, we on humanity. Not to speak of the righteousness
of our cause, our provinces number more than 20, our people over
400,000,000, and it will not be difficult to vindicate the
dignity of our country.' The decree concludes by promising
heavy rewards to those who distinguish themselves in battle or
subscribe funds, and threatening punishment to those who show
cowardice or act treacherously.
"In the same 'Gazette' Yü Lu reports acts of war on the part
of the foreigners, when, after some days' fighting, he was
victorious. 'Perusal of his memorial has given us great
comfort,' says the Throne. Warm praise is given to the
'Boxers,' 'who have done great service without any assistance
either of men or money from the State. Marked favour will be
shown them later on, and they must continue to show their
devotion.' On the 24th presents of rice are sent to the
'Boxers.' Leaders of the 'Boxers' are appointed by the
Throne—namely, Prince Chuang, and the Assistant Grand
Secretary Kang-Yi to be in chief command, and Ying Nien and
Duke Lan (the brother of Prince Tuan, the father of the Crown
Prince) to act in cooperation with them, while another high
post is given to Wen Jui."
London Times, October 16, 1900

(Peking Correspondence).
{114}
Very different in tone to the imperial decree of June 21,

quoted above, was one issued a week later (June 29), and sent
to the diplomatic representatives of the Chinese government in
Europe and America. As published by Minister Wu Ting-fang, at
Washington, on the 11th of July, it was in the following
words:
"The circumstances which led to the commencement of fighting

between Chinese and foreigners were of such a complex,
confusing and unfortunate character as to be entirely
unexpected. Our diplomatic representatives abroad, owing to
their distance from the scene of action, have had no means of
knowing the true state of things, and accordingly cannot lay
the views of the government before the ministers for foreign
affairs of the respective Powers to which they are accredited.
Now we take this opportunity of going fully into the matter

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Post-Crisis European Cinema: White

Men in Off-Modern Landscapes 1st ed.

ISBN 978-3-030-45034-2 ISBN 978-3-030-45035-9 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Philippe Gerber, Getty Images

Towards the end of 2016 several newspapers declared 2016 to be the

democracy, liberalism, technology, environmental change or the late 20th

formulate in this book is driven by my disappointment with our cultural

challenge and correct my cognitive, political and academic biases, and to

Debrecen, Hungary György Kalmár

1 Introduction: Post-Crisis Europe, White Masculinity and

2 Rites of Retreat and the Cinematic Resignification of

4 Addiction and Escapism109

6 The Lads of the New Right183

7 Angry Old Men219

Introduction: Post-Crisis Europe, White

This book explores the cinematic representations of the pervasive socio-­

© The Author(s) 2020 1

locatedness at a very specific moment in time: through its discussion of

The Post-Crisis and the Off-Modern

unacknowledged eschatological underside: that in spite of all the rational,

Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for

Financial crisis, environmental crisis: what is the combination of credit

On basis of all these troubling twenty-first-century issues, I would

By off-modern, appropriating Boym’s term and crucial insight, I wish

ideological landscape, these regressive answers (that try to go back to dif-

time of post-crisis is also the time when modernity’s previously closeted

motivated, naïve and based on false assumptions (Fraser 2007, xvii–xviii;

scandal-hungry, increasingly tabloid-like tendencies of the contemporary

masculinities have gone through dramatic transformations in the last half

the new norm in our quickly transforming cultural institutions. Thus,

right (as it often happens in sloppy journalistic accounts). These discourses

of pressure on boys and lads, cause anxiety as well as behavioural anoma-

If therefore industrial or financial crises increase suicides, this is not because

sudden growth or to an unexpected catastrophe, men are more inclined to

Post-Crisis European Cinema

in a variety of ways that escape state control, cinema produces European

Politically or ideologically oriented accounts of the cold war era often

deficit of representation produced by the blind spots of mainstream poli-

self-consciousness and reflection, its resistance to the idea of unambiguous

damaging effects. This is one of the key themes of my explorations of

There are largely three interconnected dimensions in the debate of identity

This complex system creates a playfield of expectations, representa-

These dimensions, one may argue, reflect the social-national, supranational

‘soul searching’ (what it means to be ‘European’) and cultural policy (rep-

These roles enlisted by Sarikakis, which cinema plays in contemporary

The Outline of the Book

2016), the chapter investigates a special sub-category of so-called return

"The Boxer movement is doubtless the product of official

CHINA: A. D. 1900 (March-April).

On receipt of the telegram from Peking (March 10) recommending

On the 23d of March, Sir Claude MacDonald telegraphed to Lord

On the 3d of April, the Tsung-li Yamên communicated to the

Great Britain, Papers by Command:

CHINA: A. D. 1900 (May-June).

About the middle of May the activity of the "Boxers" was

With the exception of Holland, which has no ships in Chinese

"Tong-ku, June 10.

"In consequence of above, I am landing at once with all

CHINA: A. D. 1900 (June 10-26).

The following is from an official report by Rear-Admiral

"On my arrival here on the 11th inst. I found a large fleet,

The American Admiral took no part in this attack on the forts

From the point to which the allied expedition led by Admiral

Debrecen, Hungary György Kalmár

1 Introduction: Post-Crisis Europe, White Masculinity and

2 Rites of Retreat and the Cinematic Resignification of

4 Addiction and Escapism109

6 The Lads of the New Right183

7 Angry Old Men219

This book explores the cinematic representations of the pervasive socio-