The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (Film and Culture
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the new european cinema Film and Culture film and culture A SERIES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS EDITED BY JOHN BELTON What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic Perception, Representation, Modernity Henry Jenkins James Lastra Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Tradition of Spectacle Cinema and Its Contexts Martin Rubin Ben Singer Projections of War: Hollywood, American Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, Culture, and World War II and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture Thomas Doherty Alison Griffiths Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Hearst Over Hollywood: Power, Passion, Horror and Comedy and Propaganda in the Movies William Paul Louis Pizzitola Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Masculine Interests: Homoerotics in Comedy of the 1950s Hollywood Film Ed Sikov Robert Lang Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder Ethnography, and Contemporary Michele Pierson Chinese Cinema Designing Women: Cinema, Art Deco, and Rey Chow the Female Form The Cinema of Max Ophuls: Magisterial Lucy Fischer Vision and the Figure of Woman Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, Susan M. White McCarthyism, and American Culture Black Women as Cultural Readers Thomas Doherty Jacqueline Bobo Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, Andrew Britton National Identity, Japanese Film Silent Film Sound Darrell William Davis Rick Altman Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Geography of Hollywood Horror Cinema Elisabeth Bronfen Rhona J. Berenstein Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Movies Became American Masculinity in the Jazz Age Peter Decherney Gaylyn Studlar Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell Hollywood and Beyond William Davis Robin Wood Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing National Cinema, and the Modern Popular Film Music Horror Film Jeff Smith Adam Lowenstein Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and China on Screen: Cinema and Nation Popular Culture Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar Michael Anderegg Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934 Thomas Doherty the new european cinema Redrawing the Map Rosalind Galt Columbia University Press New York Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the University of Iowa for the publication of this book. Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2006 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Galt, Rosalind. The new European cinema : redrawing the map / Rosalind Galt. p. cm.—(film and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-231-13716-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 0-231-13717-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 0-231-51032-2 (electronic) 1. Motion pictures—Europe. I. Title. II. Series. PN1993.5.E8G35 2006 791.43094—dc22 2005033601 I Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments vii 1. Mapping European Cinema in the 1990s 1 2. The Dialectic of Landscape in Italian Popular Melodrama 26 3. A Conspiracy of Cartographers? 88 4. Yugoslavia’s Impossible Spaces 123 5. Back-Projecting Germany 175 6. Toward a Theory of European Space 230 Notes 241 Bibliography 267 Filmography 279 Index 285 Acknowledgments Many people have helped shape this book. Mary Ann Doane, Philip Rosen, and John Caughie were invaluable readers during the early stages of the project, while Corey Creekmur and Sasha Waters Freyer offered detailed and insightful commentary on later versions. Nicole Rizzuto read drafts tirelessly and offered both editorial insight and intellectual inspiration. With Karl Schoonover, Kerry Herman, Rebecca Wingfield, Chris Cagle, and Kirsten Ostherr, I debated film the- ory, feminism, and art history. This project developed in dialogue with their work, and I hope it bears some traces of their brilliance. Friends, teachers, and colleagues who have contributed ideas, criticism, and sup- port include Neil Lazarus, Ellen Rooney, Massimo Riva, Réda Bensmaïa, Loren Noveck, Paul Haacke, Mette Hjort, Angela dalle Vacche, Dudley Andrew, Steve Ungar, Rick Altman, Louis Schwartz, Kathleen Newman, Lisa Collins, Jessica Levin, and Evelyn So. Claudia Pümmer helped with research and formatting, and Anastasia Saverino worked on the index. Chapter 2 benefited greatly from discussions with participants at the 2001 Screen Studies Conference, and chapter 5 from the anonymous readers at Cinema Journal who reviewed a shorter form of the argument. Thanks also go to the readers for Columbia University Press, who offered productive suggestions for revision. Last but by no means least, this project has gained tremendously from discussions with my stu- dents over the years. In tracking down film prints, Richard Manning at Brown University was a stellar resource and a gonzo movie god. Also helpful were the staff at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Film Study Center, the New York viii acknowledgments Public Library, the Donnell Library, and the British Film Institute. Staff at the University of Iowa’s library provided technical and research assis- tance. Some films proved difficult to locate, and here I received help from Ellen Elias-Bursac, Radmila Gorup, and Vitaly Chernetsky. Misha Nedeljkovic´ kindly sent me tapes of some rare Yugoslav films and in addition offered readings, advice, and historical perspective. Thanks also to filmmakers Bettina Ellerkamp and Jörg Heitman, who graciously shared their work with me. Thanks also go to all at Columbia University Press, especially Irene Pavitt, Cynthia Garver, and Juree Sondker. Parts of chapter 2 were published as “Italy’s Landscapes of Loss: His- torical Mourning and the Dialectical Image in Cinema Paradiso, Mediterraneo, and Il Postino,” Screen 43, no. 2 (2002). Parts of chapter 5 were published as “Back Projection: Visualizing Past and Present Europe in Lars von Trier’s Zentropa,” Cinema Journal 45, no. 2 (2005). Finally, I want to thank those closest to me for their love and support: Adrian Goycoolea, who, in addition to sharing my life, spent countless hours on this project preparing frame stills; my mother, who was my first role model as a feminist and cultural critic; and my late father. My father instilled in me a love of Italian landscape and culture, with which came a foundational narrative of leftist loss. He served in Italy in World War II and returned with our family year after year as a tourist and stu- dent of Italian. I could not have formulated my reading of the Italian political landscape without his memory. the new european cinema 1Mapping European Cinema in the 1990s In the early 1990s, Europe became, as if it had not been so before, a question of space. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the break- up of the Soviet Union, the break-down of Yugoslavia, and the unifica- tion of Germany produced radical upheavals in every aspect of European life, but most urgently, they made a collective demand on an idea of Europe as a psychic, cultural, or geopolitical location. For the first time since the end of World War II, the borders of Europe were disconcert- ingly unstable. Through the 1990s, this traumatic overturning of spatial categories was augmented with a more gradual, although by no means painless, redefinition: the expansion of the European Union to include members and potential members as far apart as Finland, Bulgaria, and Turkey. It is clear that as the physical and political territory of Europe altered in the post–Cold War years, so, too, did its cultural imaginary. What is less clear is how we can read these changes cinematically: how European cinema represented revisions of European space narratively, formally, and stylistically, and, indeed, how the terrain of “European cin- ema” itself was acted on by the forces that were reshaping the continent. Rethinking Post-Wall Europe This question of Europe has grown in stature over the years since 1989, in cinema studies no less than in political philosophy. While Jacques Derrida’s 1991 essay The Other Heading inaugurated an impor- tant philosophical discourse on the “new Europe,” the British Film Insti- 2 mapping european cinema in the 1990s tute’s 1990 conference “Screening Europe” had already asserted a com- parable inquiry into the new European cinema and where it might be heading. For the conference participants, as for Derrida, the possibility of European identity formed a central, and often troubling, problematic. Filmmaker Chantal Akerman claimed that there is no such thing as a European film, while critic John Caughie described the difficult process of becoming European.1 Derrida pinpoints the difficult nature of this identity: the half-constructed European subject is caught between the devil of nationalistic dispersion and the deep blue sea of Eurocrat homog- enization. Thus, “the injunction seems double and contradictory for whoever is concerned about European cultural identity: if it is necessary to make sure that a centralizing hegemony (the capital) not be reconsti- tuted, it is also necessary, for all that, not to multiply the borders, i.e. the movements and margins....Responsibility seems to consist today in renouncing neither of these two contradictory imperatives.”2 For an ethics of Europe, Derrida argues, this bind demands an impossible duty in which the European subject must respond, simultaneously, to two con- tradictory laws. European cinema, it seems, experiences a similar struc- tural dilemma: how to become European—as opposed to simply contin- uing an older model of national cinemas—without degenerating into the filmic correlative of Brussels bureaucracy, the Europudding. As film historian Mark Betz has noted, this debate obscures at least as much about European cinema as it illuminates.