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- Volume 18, Issue 1, 2020
Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook - Volume 18, Issue 1, 2020
Volume 18, Issue 1, 2020
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European cinema: Between Mit-sein, Da-sein and Nah-sein
More LessAbstractThis article expands on some of the polemical theses the author proposes in his book European Cinema and Continental Philosophy (2018), focusing on the idea of European cinema as 'thought experiment', the notion of 'double occupancy', which the author now articulates in terms of a 'cinema of abjection' and the idea of 'mutual interference', which is now re-examined as part of a broader re-assessment of the core Enlightenment values of 'liberty-equality-fraternity' viewed under present-day conditions of asymmetry, but also in light of their 'antagonistic mutuality'. These concepts, taken together, are an attempt to put forward a change of both model and method when studying European cinema, one based neither on the 'Europe-Hollywood' binaries, nor on an ever-elusive identity, but rather on Europe's self-understanding as a 'work-in-progress', as well as on its position in a globalized world, in which it is no longer the central player. Elsaesser proposes to 'enlarge the context' – a phrase coined by the European politician, diplomat and thinker Jean Monnet: if you cannot solve a problem, enlarge the context. Enlarging the context means taking a step back and focusing not on cinema, but on what in this period of intense internal and external crises we mean by 'Europe', before evaluating some of the ways in which certain films and filmmakers have positioned themselves in light of the challenges that are in play today.
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Crossing the European boundary: The conjoined figures of colonizer and migrant in Zama (Martel, 2017) and The Other Side of Hope (Kaurismäki, 2017)
Authors: Ali Rıza Taşkale and Erdoğan H. ŞimaAbstractCaught between the seemingly contradictory imageries of particularity and universality, 'European identity' could in fact be presumed but as a shorthand for ontological anxiety. The ('euro-') centric ontology that it denotes is marked by an ongoing ambivalence that both recoils from and accepts the superfluousness of boundaries. The obverse of this ambivalent concern with boundaries, we suggest, are the narrative efforts to consign it to the singular agency of the 'impossible' boundary crossing. Cinematographically speaking, the otherwise mute ontological anxiety is contained in the precariousness of the figures of colonizer and migrant. The way a 'European' cinema relates to these figures becomes all the more significant where 'Europe' denotes a challenging relationship, and not a 'thing'. It is in view of the ways in which they respond to this challenge that we examine Zama (Martel, 2017) and The Other Side of Hope (Kaurismäki, 2017). The focus, in other words, is on what nevertheless escapes their efforts: while Zama's out-of-place 'colonizer' obscures the inherent placelessness of colonial agency, Hope's symbiotic relationship between the self and the other withholds the reversibility of the 'self/other' dualism. In the instrumental visibility of their singular figures, we hope to show, both films contribute to the incidental visibility of the 'European' claim to transcend its own dualisms. The figures of colonizer and migrant are in fact the relatively visible symptoms of a cinematic labour whose ambivalences remain otherwise invisible.
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Universality, spectrality, proximity: The cinematic faces of Europe's other
By Boris PantevAbstractFor a number of scholars, the crisis of European identity is a result of the asymmetry between Europe's universal normative claims and its particular ethnic, cultural and racial contexts. This asymmetry is epitomized by the EU's failure to ratify its legally binding constitution. For others, the same asymmetry constitutes the very condition of being a European. Those envision Europeanness beyond its regulative idea as the ethical injunction of a promise to 'the other'. This article probes the validity of each of these arguments by juxtaposing two groups of films. Gianfraco Rosi's Fire at Sea (2016) and Ai Weiwei's Human Flow (2017) remain committed to the idea of human rights as a universal norm, an idea whose most prominent advocate is Jürgen Habermas. As an alternative to this view, Guido Hendrikx's Stranger in Paradise (2016) and Christian Petzold's Transit (2018) are taken to demonstrate what Jacques Derrida describes as 'hospitality' and 'spectrality'. Based on this analysis, the paper finds both models inadequate to hold together the irreconcilable modalities of the political and the ethical. To address this deficiency, it revisits Levinas' account of 'justice beyond the face' to propose an extension of the ethical view of Europeanness into the spheres of international law and public institutions.
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From 'face-to-face' to 'side-by-side': The abject neighbour in European cinema
More LessAbstractThe Dardenne brothers' The Promise (1996) and Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven (2007) depict non-western migrants in western Europe as the social 'abject' in the background of multicultural conflicts between global (Christian) Europe and its (Islamic) periphery. Also, both share a motif based on the Abraham–Isaac story. Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac epitomizes one's singular relationship with God beyond community (Kierkegaard, Marion, Derrida), but the Abraham figures in the films give themselves to the abject Isaac figures through self-abjection. This becoming-abject as an existential gift breaks the father–son identity in the global regime, forming solidarity among the abject as strangers. Such an abject is, I claim, a 'faceless' third. For Levinas, the 'face of the other' leads one to divine infinity beyond totality, but this self-other unit is destabilized with the other's place taken (repeatedly) by the faceless third. Neither friend nor enemy, this new other should be called 'neighbour' in the context of ethical philosophy. The sovereign-subject-abject hierarchy is dismantled into the equality of the neighbours who share abjectness beyond cultural mediation or identity and walk side by side rather than face to face. I reframe Levinansian infinity in this network of neighbouring on the edge of the global system.
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Gifts of welcome: Precarity, intimacy and the gift in Die Farbe des Ozeans (Peren, 2011) and Welcome (Lioret, 2009)
Authors: Maria Stehle and Beverly WeberAbstractThis article examines the role of Europe as gift in Lioret's Welcome (2009) and Peren's Die Farbe des Ozeans (2011) by focusing on gestures of welcome extended by white European characters to undocumented migrants. In both films, these gestures include gifts, in the form of money, shelter or skills taught, that play an important narrative role, but subordinate refugee characters' lives and stories to the emotional needs of white European 'givers'. In this way gifts of welcome become violent acts that reinforce European assumptions about European political and epistemological superiority, and paper over the existence of colonial and racist violence that continues to produce precarious lives.
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From postnational mobility to posthuman fluidity: Unfixed identities and social responsibilities in Personal Shopper (Assayas, 2016) and Happy End (Haneke, 2017)
By Mary HarrodAbstractThis article approaches contemporary European cinema as transnational cinema from an angle informed by gender and sexuality studies. It is underpinned by a fluid conception of identity, which it identifies with its objects of study, in terms of production context, market positioning and also form and theme. Specifically, I approach comparatively the embrace of postnational textual identity alongside posthuman – especially post-gender – characterization by two of the most visible recent European auteur films, Olivier Assayas' Personal Shopper (2016) and Michael Haneke's Happy End (2017). I consider the ideological implications of the narratives' explorations of immorality in a contemporary western context marked in both films by the breakdown of communication and a related failure of ethical responsibility, often constellated in relation to technological advancement. The article draws on the Continental theories of Slavoj Žižek and to a lesser extent Jean Baudrillard and Zygmunt Bauman to illuminate the extent to which these films' subtle and conflicted yet tenaciously enduring nostalgia for earlier ideals of European community is discernible via or inseparable from regret at the loss of an imagined 'natural' mode of embodiment, including more traditional gender roles. It finally reflects briefly on the related question of the attitudes towards European cinema itself, as well as cinemas associated with the past more generally, which these films display and invite the audience to share.
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Out of bounds: The spatial politics of civility in The Square (Östlund, 2017) and Happy End (Haneke, 2017)
More LessAbstractRuben Östlund's The Square and Michael Haneke's Happy End, both released in 2017, skirt around the edges of immigration in Europe. Both address the question of who belongs and who does not in terms of boundaries – not only the boundaries that determine where one country ends and another begins but also (and especially) those that determine who is a member of civil society. These films explore how the bounds of what is considered appropriate are breached in specific spatial contexts, questioning the meaning of 'civility' in both a social and a political sense, and prompting us to contemplate the various meanings of hospitality.
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Europe, spectrality and 'post-mortem cinema': The haunting of history in Christian Petzold's Transit (2018) and Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre (2011)
By Alice BardanAbstractThis article considers the ways in which contemporary filmmakers such as Christian Petzold (Transit, 2018) and Aki Kaurismäki (Le Havre, 2011) experiment with narrative and stylistic strategies to tell their own story about a haunted Europe caught, yet again, in a paranoid policing of borders, and marked by an increasingly tense political climate that gave rise to nationalistic anxieties and exclusionary practices. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx ([1993] 2006), and on Érik Bullot's and Thomas Elsaesser's concept of 'post-mortem' cinema, I argue that by blurring time frames and by allowing the future to coexist with past and present, films such as Transit and Le Havre give a new twist to the problematic of negotiating Europe's past. Deploying the trope of haunting, both films mobilize a critical attitude towards the complacency of our own times, alerting viewers to the imagined futures and dreams of various figures from the past and to their capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live.
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Thinking Europe from the margins and through marginal cinema: The case of The Nothing Factory (Pinho, 2017)
By Mariana LizAbstractA Fábrica de Nada (The Nothing Factory) (Pinho, 2017) tells the story of a group of workers struggling to keep their jobs at a lift factory in Portugal about to be relocated. Awarded the FIPRESCI prize at the 2017 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, the film was received by critics as a 'compelling oddity', an 'enigmatic epic' and 'something genuinely new in cinema'. Almost three hours in length, and a mix of fiction and documentary, drama and musical, The Nothing Factory rehearses, also through its style and production history, the uncertainty that characterizes contemporary European society. As it depicts austerity in Portugal through a post-national lens, what does The Nothing Factory tell us about European identity? This article examines the contradictions of globalization and neo-liberalism, in tandem with the difficulties in sustaining narratives and creating meaning in contemporary European film. The Nothing Factory is a prime example of the cinema of small nations currently produced in Portugal, and a consideration of marginal and peripheral cinemas such as this one is crucial for the understanding of what is left of European identity, in geographical, political and cultural terms.
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Age, generation and the media
Authors: Göran Bolin and Eli Skogerbø
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