Contemporary European cinema in a transnational perspective: aftereffects of 1989

This dissertation investigates what is new about European identity in the post-Cold War era, and what is European about New European cinema. I offer an expansive reading of recent transnational films by linking cinema to current debates on historical memory, cultural identity, and neoliberal capitalism. In my analysis of the relationship between the social and political realities of Europe at present and the transnational sensibility emerging in the New European cinema, I highlight cinema’s privileged role in generating images for a changing European imaginary. With this, I uncover what is at stake institutionally, aesthetically, and critically in the creation of “European Cinema,” a category until recently perceived as the counterface of Hollywood and equated with art cinema or with specific national cinemas. I also challenge a trend in current debates on European cinema which focuses on the representation of migrants and other marginalized identities as privileged figures of authenticity, showing how, in many recent European films, the average European citizen is also rendered “marginal,” in the thrall of precarious employment and an uncertain financial future. What emerges from this transnational cinema, I argue, is a vision of Europe as a territory united not by a common culture, but rather by a set of shared economic anxieties. Crucially, I show how contemporary European films transmit memory and shape identities by evoking spectral traces from the past. These films also foreground the ways in which personal and transnational conflicts and allegiances disrupt national ones, and suggest the interrelatedness of conflicts within the nation and those between the national and the global capitalist order. These intersections have both spatial and temporal dimensions, since Europe’s past is not simply something to be unearthed or rewritten. As the films themselves propose, the past co-exists with the present, haunting contemporary Europeans with uncanny insistence. This dissertation is one of the first extended projects to interrogate the cinematic landscapes of the “new” Europe, attempting to determine how these serve both to articulate a politics of memory and cast light on the accelerated transformations of the post-Cold War era.