Representing Unified Europe As Film in the Age of the Euro TRANSIT Vol
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Rossman: The Currency of Europe? Representing Unified Europe as Film… The Currency of Europe? Representing Unified Europe as Film in the Age of the Euro TRANSIT vol. 10, no. 2 Sasha Rossman Introduction In 1985, the Committee for a People’s Europe produced a report proclaiming the importance of culture and information circulation for the construction of a unified “Europe” under the aegis of the (then) European Economic Community.1 The field of cultural production ought to be mobilized, the report suggested, in order to produce an “image” of Europe “in the minds of its people.”2 Even in the phase prior to currency union and the eastward and southward expansion in the following millennium, visual representation clearly already appeared to European functionaries as a key element in promoting the idea of a unified Europe. This admission belied the perception that there was a lack of visual forms that could serve as points of identification for a growing European project characterized by technocratic and fiscal integration—qualities that perhaps might be seen as resisting representation.3 How was one to construct an affective identity for a group of states united through economic channels? How was one to lend “Europe” an everyday currency, in the multiple senses of the word? This paper addresses the ways in which the struggle to find representational form for Europe continued as the EU developed in the early 2000s, a key period of European Union expansion. In particular, I examine two films from 2002 which articulate an image of a new “Europe” in the wake of the Iron Curtain’s fall. 2002 was the year in which the Euro was launched, tightening financial bonds between a rapidly growing number of member states.4 In many ways one might view this as a time of euphoric growth; borders appeared to be disappearing, paving the way for a more tightly-knit, integrated Europe characterized by an increasing circulation of goods, people, and money. Yet, the cinematic 1 Committee chair Pietro Adonnino wrote “action in the areas of culture and communication… are essential to European identity and the Community’s image in the minds of its people” and that it thus was in the field of cultural production “that support for the advancement of Europe can and must be sought.” Andonnino, cited in Cris Shore, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (London: Routledge, 2000), 46. 2 Ibid. 3 See, for example, Luisa Passerini, “Dimensions of the Symbolic in the Construction of Europeanness” in Figures d'Europe Images and Myths of Europe, Luisa Passerini, ed., (Brussels: P.I.E. Lang, 2003), 21-34 and the other essays in the collection; see also Shore, Building Europe. 4 It was also the year in which Gallileo, the EU’s satellite navigation and positioning system, was approved and the year in which the EU recommended the conclusion of membership negotiations with ten eastern and southern European states. A time line of events from the year is provided on the EU’s own website: http://europa.eu/about-eu/eu-history/2000-2009/2002/index_en.htm (accessed April 15, 2016). 1 TRANSIT, 10(2) (2016) 2 | Sasha Rossman / The Currency of Europe? representations of Europe made at this time paint a more nuanced and conflicted picture of an expanding European Union. The slapstick French romantic comedy L’Auberge Espagnole (directed by Cedric Klapisch) and the somber, Swedish socio-critical art house feature Lilya 4-ever (directed by Lukas Moodysson) appear at first glance to provide two very different images of Europe at the millennium. Yet, as different as these films are in their aesthetic-philosophical approaches and target audiences, they share several qualities that structure their narratives of contemporary “Europe.”5 Each film is concerned with the story of a young person from a broken home who travels abroad, driven by economic motivations. And in each film boundaries and borders—either crossed or closed—play key roles in articulating an image of Europe as a space of either integration or alienation, in which economics and financial transaction play a conspicuous role. Perhaps the ambiguity inherent in “the idea of Europe,” to borrow Denis de Rougement’s phrase,6 necessitates the portrayal of borders as a means of supplying edges to an entity that resists enclosure on numerous fronts, including that of representation. Certainly there is a long history of films that one can understand as ‘representing’ Europe, which all take the form of voyages in which a group of “European” individuals come together, frequently in a “non-European” setting. From Josef von Sternberg’s 1932 Shanghai Express, which featured a cast and crew of European exiles, to Jules Dassin’s 1962 farcical heist Topkapi, in which the future founder of the European Capital of Culture program Melina Mercuri appeared, films portraying “Europe” have consistently done so by exiting the continent in order to make its boundaries visible as part of an international comparison.7 Most obviously, sets of visual and behavioral clues in these films unite the “European” group of protagonists in contrast to their cinematic “others”; geographic border crossing becomes a means of establishing new cultural boundaries. My analysis of the films made in 2002 aims to show, however, that although both directors follow the timeworn trope of the voyage as a means of visualizing Europe, their films register and respond in new ways to the particular sets of contradictions inherent in the structure of the European Union: specifically the tension between political and economic forces as agents of contemporary European integration. For while the films orchestrate visions of Europe as constituted through border crossings, the borders to which the directors draw the viewer’s attention are not simply cartographic, or ‘cultural.’8 Rather, 5 I am deliberately conflating “Europe” here with the European Union not only because both directors are EU nationals (and the films take place, by and large, either in the EU or in relationship to it), but because their films seem to uncannily prefigure the specific frictions that have erupted so violently in the EU lately, more than a decade after the films were made. 6 Denis de Rougement, The Idea of Europe (New York: Macmillan, 1966). 7 The tension between comparison and cosmopolitanism also informs the administrative pan-European projects that began in the 1920s with organizations like Film Europe. Seeking to construct a cosmopolitan “European” visual culture that defined itself in contrast to Hollywood, Film Europe and similar later funding and production schemes frequently met with issues of linguistic and cultural difference as well as protectionist legal structures aimed at stimulating domestic film industries in individual nations. On Film Europe see, for instance, Andrew Higson, “For love or money: transnational developments in European Cinema in the 1920s” in Europe and Love in Cinema, ed. by Luisa Passerini, Jo Labanyi, and Karen Diehl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 43-59. 8 On the problem of defining the cultural, here in the sense of intercultural conflict that would posit one nation as a culture vs. another, see Rosemary J. Coombe, “Contingent Articulations” in Law in the Domains of Culture, ed. by A Sarat and T. Kearns (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 21-64. Rossman: The Currency of Europe? Representing Unified Europe as Film… Transit 10.2 / 2016 | 3 I argue that both films symptomatically deal with the ways in which political and economic bodies compete with one another for dominance in contemporary Europe as dramatized recently in the “Grexit,” “Brexit,” and refugee crises.9 The metaphor of political and economic “bodies” becomes literal in these cinematic mediations of Europe. Substituting individual human bodies for these entities serves to lend an elusive notion of “Europe” a graspable representational form along the lines of that which European functionaries perceived, as previously mentioned, to be lacking—albeit in unexpected ways. Specifically, this representational form enables us to trace the otherwise visually elusive role that economics plays as a driving factor in European integration.10 In these narratives of contemporary Europe, finance is a silent ‘actor’ that finds embodiment in the gendered coming-of-age stories of the films’ young protagonists; money and its exchange thereby appear as foundational to the production of “European” subjectivity as depicted in the films—enabling its expansion but also drawing limits. The preoccupation with the relationship between economics and border crossing, my interpretation suggests, makes sense when seen in the context of the introduction of the Euro in the very year the films were released. The question of the relationship between money and embodied integration had been the subject of an expansive EU information campaign in the years leading up to the realization of a common currency, and further questions over symbolic embodiment also played a significant role in the development of official visual symbols devised to represent the EU as a cultural and political entity. Before proceeding to an analysis of the films, I briefly lay out what I mean by the conflict between economic and political authority in Europe. In this context, I investigate the formal attributes of the EU’s own official visual language: the Euro, the EU flag and promotional EU films. I then analyze the films in relation to these official representations of Europe. My leading question throughout is neither what, nor where is Europe. Instead, I suggest that these visual representations encourage us to ask how Europe is, as a structure. Because this structure is elusive, visual representations, I argue, can offer a rich and underutilized possibility for considering the respective “characters” of finance and politics in contemporary Europe which can be usefully elucidated through visual analysis.