Journal of European Popular Culture - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012

When the extreme-right, populist Freedom Party (FPÖ) and the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) formed a coalition government in February 2000 there was wide-spread international outcry, with the European Union placing sanctions on its co-member country pending an investigation into the party and its practices. In Austria itself, protest manifested itself in acts of regular street demonstrations and public debates, but artists, too, expressed their resistance to the new coalition government in a variety of forms. This article discusses a dozen short films from the series, 'Die Kunst der Stunde ist Widerstand'/'The Art of the Day is Resistance' and explores the range of different aesthetic responses by film-makers in the series. The series offers far more than simply documents of the unrest. Instead, it provides extensive and innovative stimulus for critical engagement.

This article provides information covering the results of a photography-archaeology trip I took to Bulgaria to shoot late medieval frescoes, made possible by a Fulbright grant and the Balkan Heritage Field School (BHFS). The purpose of the expedition was to record frescoes for preservation and restoration while creating public awareness, an important aspect, as these treasures are crumbling into ruin with every rainfall. Regional styles in visual culture were evident within the orthodox iconography, such as unusual depictions of female martyrs. The monasteries and churches that house the frescoes were built during the Ottoman era when Muslim forces oppressed Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Therefore, the structures are small and often located in remote regions. Access to the sites has been restricted due to the communist regime (1944–1989), and at times due to the challenging terrain. As part of public awareness, this work has been integrated with European popular culture through different avenues. One path taken by a generation of enterprising professionals, many who came into adulthood after communism fell, was to embrace new freedoms afforded them since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Through university associations, a group of young archaeologists and art historians came together and formed the BHFS to help preserve Bulgaria's vast treasury of artefacts, dating back to the Thracians, the founders of European culture. With these colleagues, I was able to connect with contemporary Eastern European culture first-hand, and was enriched by combinations of old and new in unique and surprising ways.

The representation of the 1992–1995 Bosnian war in both news media and popular cultural forms has received remarkably little scholarly attention. Drawing upon the recent work of radical historians and critics, this article begins with a reassessment of the dominant western news media narrative of the Bosnian conflict. It then proceeds to consider some popular representations of the conflict, focusing on Leigh Jackson and Peter Kosminsky's unduly neglected BBC two-part television drama Warriors. By comparison with United States and United Kingdom news media coverage of the conflict and other popular screen representations of the Bosnian war, Warriors offers one of the most sensitive and sophisticated accounts of the conflict. Nevertheless, the drama reproduces many of the fundamental western news media biases and implicitly endorses the discourse of humanitarian interventionism that has been used, particularly since the 1990s, to justify western military imperialism. That Kosminsky, who is known for making dramas that question dominant political paradigms, should have adopted an interventionist line in Warriors may suggest something of the potency and reach of western news media propaganda throughout the 1990s on behalf of what Noam Chomsky has called 'humanitarian imperialism'.

Attention has been drawn to German music's inspirational role in the 'birth' of techno and house in the United States, as well as to Germany's pre-eminent place in the recent development of electronic dance music. Some even suggest that techno might be inherently German. Yet whilst electronica seems to offer materials with which to imagine Germanness, an alternative reading is available. This article specifically examines how discourses about electronica and (post-)national identity intersect in Thomas Meinecke's recent musical oeuvre with Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle (FSK), which has for some years been involved in its own adaptations of electronica, and in his later novels, especially Hellblau. Both advance a celebratory reading of the international spread of electronica – and of the productive 'transatlantic feedback' between Germany and the United States – which is consistent not only with a long-standing German trope associated with African American forms of music (especially jazz), but also with more recent, postmodern approaches to identity.

With the question of the so-called European nature – the unitas multiplex – of our cinema in mind, we turn to the European identity of Turkish movies, at a time when the possible integration of Turkey into the European Union looms large over EU-27 parliamentary elections. We propose two approaches, one economic and the other semiotic. For the first approach, we present the economic history of the Turkish popular feature film industry and show the role it has played in the production of contemporary Turkish auteur cinema. We also demonstrate how the emergent generation of film-makers relies on European funding. For the second approach, we propose an analysis of the main characteristics of the movies shot by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, an important representative of this new generation, which have much in common with European classical movies. Our study reveals how his work rests on European cultural references and a deeply European way of making movies. According to the director himself, this un-Hollywoodian approach makes it possible to explore the inner self of his characters. We conclude that, if we can establish the presence of obvious convergences between Ceylan's cinema and the European culture, the hypothesis that financing strongly influences aesthetic issues is not validated.

Hedy Lamarr. The Most Beautiful Woman in Film, Ruth Barton (2010) Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 281 pp., ISBN 978-0-8131-2604-3, h/bk, $ 29.95

Destination Dictatorship, Justin cumbaugh (2009) Albany: State University of New York Press, 173 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4384-2665-5 (hbk) ($US70.00), 978-1-4384-2666-2 (pbk), $US23.95