Europe’s irresolvable messiness

Abstract

In a recent discussion with students about what European cinema might look like, it was striking how the descriptions that emerged seemed to focus principally on what French cinema was perceived to be, which was then transposed onto cinema production across the continent as a whole. When pressed to provide examples of films to help flesh out the debate, a core of students offered up a selection of greats from the French New Wave. Les Quatre Cents Coups/The Four Hundred Blows (Truffaut, 1959) and A Bout de Souffle/ Breathless (Godard, 1960) were uppermost in their thinking, therefore, which no doubt bespeaks the way film studies has tended to fall back on a certain canon, which in turn has been cemented by curricula over many years. Matthieu Kassovitz’s La Haine/Hate (1995) also made an appearance, not unexpectedly either in view of its apparent ubiquity on A-level syllabi, but it was the mention of Portrait de la jeune fille en feu/Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Sciamma, 2019) that was the most pleasing and encouraging. As a recent film, its high profile and appeal to, and influence on, a contemporary student audience is very gratifying. Indeed, it has already cropped up regularly in a number of student presentations since its release. Nevertheless, these are still all French films. Where are the Rossellini, Bergman, Tarkovsky or Fassbinder films? What about Haneke, Almodóvar, Hogg or Akin? Why are they seemingly so overlooked? Why is it that French cinema seems to remain synonymous with European film as a whole for so many? These are the questions that linger. When pressed a little more about other European films they might be familiar with, it was telling that a number of films available on Netflix were cited by the same group of students. El hoyo/The Platform (Gaztelu-Urrutia, 2019), for example, was cited and sparked an interesting conversation about Spanish horror films of recent times, many of which students began to remember and list with no little enthusiasm. Most strikingly of all, Edward Berger’s Im Westen nichts Neues/All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), the first German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s powerful anti-war novel, was also mentioned, unsurprisingly perhaps in view of the recent publicity surrounding its significant BAFTA awards and Oscar nominations. However, because these were seen specifically as genre films the students seemed to ascribe them to popular cinema more generally, as opposed to European cinema per se. Maybe their distribution on Netflix rather than to a more typical art cinema setting contributed to that perception, their accessibility also perhaps removing something of that arty mystique the students appeared to associate with European films such as those produced by the auteurs of the French New Wave. There is no doubt that that label – auteur – continues to colour the perception of what constitutes European cinema more than anything else, and that is perhaps the fault of film courses everywhere. It might simply have something to do with the way Netflix often defaults to dubbed versions of films, potentially seducing audiences into believing that the STUDIES IN EUROPEAN CINEMA 2023, VOL. 20, NO. 1, 1–3 https://doi.org/10.1080/17411548.2023.2181568