Synopses & Reviews
Frontiers of Screen History provides an insightful exploration into the depiction and imagination of European borders in cinema after World War II. While films have explored national and political borders, they have also attempted to identify, challenge, and imagine frontiers of another kind: social, ethnic, religious, and gendered. The book investigates all these perspectives. Its unique focus on the representation of European borders and frontiers via film is groundbreaking, opening up a new field of research and scholarly discussion. The exceptional variety of national and cultural perspectives provides a rewarding investigation of borders and frontiers.
Review
andldquo;Vigorously written, each chapter is a piece in a kaleidoscope showing that what informs cinema and national conflict in one area can be refracted through others.andrdquo;
Synopsis
New European Cinema offers a compelling response to the changing cultural shapes of Europe, charting political, aesthetic, and historical developments through innovative readings of some of the most popular and influential European films of the 1990s. Made around the time of the revolutions of 1989 but set in post-World War II Europe, these films grapple with the reunification of Germany, the disintegration of the Balkans, and a growing sense of historical loss and disenchantment felt across the continent. They represent a period in which national borders became blurred and the events of the mid-twentieth-century began to be reinterpreted from a multinational European perspective.
Featuring in-depth case studies of films from Italy, Germany, eastern Europe, and Scandinavia, Rosalind Galt reassesses the role that nostalgia, melodrama, and spectacle play in staging history. She analyzes Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso, Michael Radford's Il Postino, Gabriele Salvatores's Mediterraneo, Emir Kusturica's Underground, and Lars von Trier's Zentropa, and contrasts them with films of the immediate postwar era, including the neorealist films of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, socialist realist cinema in Yugoslavia, Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair, and Carol Reed's The Third Man. Going beyond the conventional focus on national cinemas and heritage, Galt's transnational approach provides an account of how post-Berlin Wall European cinema inventively rethought the identities, ideologies, image, and popular memory of the continent. By connecting these films to political and philosophical debates on the future of Europe, as well as to contemporary critical and cultural theories, Galt redraws the map of European cinema.
About the Author
Raita Merivirta is a research fellow in the Department of General History at the University of Turku, Finland.
Heta Mulari is a research fellow in the Department of Cultural History at the University of Turku, Finland.
Kimmo Ahonen is a research fellow in the Department of General History at the University of Turku, Finland.
Rami Mandauml;hkandauml; is a research fellow in the Department of Cultural History at the University of Turku, Finland.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
and#160;
Foreword
Tom Conley
and#160;
Introduction: Encounters with Borders
Kimmo Ahonen, Raita Merivirta, Heta Mulari and Rami Mand#228;hkand#228;
and#160;
Worlds Divided by the Iron Curtain
and#160;
1 Imagining West Berlin: Spatiality and History in Wim Wendersand#8217; Wings of Desire, 1987
Hannu Salmi
and#160;
2 and#145;Whatand#8217;s Wrong with a Cowboy in Hamburg?and#8217;: New German Cinema and the German-American Cultural Frontier
Jacqui Miller
and#160;
3 The Collapse of Ideaologies in Peter Kahaneand#8217;s The Architects
Marco Bohr
and#160;
4 How to Win the Cold War: Borders of the Free World in Guilty of Treason (1950) and Red Planet Mars (1952)
Kimmo Ahonen
and#160;
Alternative Cultural Locations
and#160;
5 Crossing Over: On Becoming European in Aki Kaurismand#228;kiand#8217;s Cinema
Sanna Peden
and#160;
6 Looking for Alternative London: The London Nobody Knows and the Pop-Geographical Borders of the City
Kari Kallioniemi
and#160;
7 The Citand#233;and#8217;s Architectural, Linguistic and Cinematic Frontiers in Land#8217;Esquive
Jehanne-Marie Gavarini
and#160;
Borders Crossed, Borders Within
and#160;
8 Between Hamburg and Istanbul: Mobility, Borders and Identity in the Films of Fatih Akin
Jessica Gallagher
and#160;
9 Transnational Heroines: Swedish Youth Film and Immigrant Girlhood
Heta Mulari
and#160;
10 Family as Internal Border in Dogtooth
Ipek A. Celik
and#160;
Post-Colonial Borders and Cultural Frontiers
and#160;
11 Gendered Conflicts in Northern Ireland: Motherhood, the Male Body and Borders in Some Motherand#8217;s Son and Hunger
Raita Merivirta
and#160;
12 Heartlands and Borderlands: El Dorado and the Post-Franco Spanish Cinema as a Bridgehead between Europe and Latin America
Petteri Halin
and#160;
13 Subverted and Transgressed Borders: The Empire in British Comedy and Horror Films
Rami Mand#228;hkand#228;
and#160;
Notes on Contributors
and#160;
Index