6     Toward a Theory of European Space

The post-Wall moment in European history is transitory: as the events of 1989 grow more distant, politics and culture develop in new directions. However, the historical films that emerged at this time not only are significant as reflections of European identity in a particular place and time, but also bring into focus what Walter Benjamin calls a constellation—a pattern of historical, aesthetic, and critical discourses—that enables us to read history alongside the present. The particular constellation illuminated by post-Wall history films not only allows us to see European postwar histories otherwise, but, just as important, provokes new readings of contemporary cinema, of film theories, and of the politics of representation.

First, we find in these films the obverse of what is usually assumed about heritage film, or the postclassical art film. Against critiques that such films have abandoned political and aesthetic radicalism, this approach locates in them a post-Wall politics of space and time. Such a politics cannot be read along the old models of countercinematic modernisms: just as new theories of location emerged in the 1990s, so did new cinematic practices. Some of these practices have been examined in detail in the preceding chapters: the staging of nostalgia, the remapping of space, the coarticulation of the indexical and the spectacular. Taken cumulatively, these emergent forms suggest another heading for European cinema and a framework within which such a heading might be analyzed. In place of a binary of popular cinema and art cinema (or related pairs such as memory/history and nostalgic/political), we find an interpenetration of these terms that opens up a more nuanced relationship to place, space, and history. In the European context, this approach enables connections to be drawn across previously discrete categories—not only between nostalgic heritage films and difficult art films, but also between the former East and West European cinematic traditions. This work is crucial to developing an understanding of contemporary European cinema, since the old models prove decreasingly useful as Europe’s political and cultural spaces merge and transform. If we are to escape from the various hierarchies of “Europe,” we must reimagine space and history beyond West European art cinema.

This is why the articulation of cinematic space with geopolitical space is so important. We do not locate the new European cinema only in films that thematize continental politics or in those that illustrate new modes of production. Instead, we begin from the image, moving from the space of the frame to that of geography. Only by taking seriously contemporary textual practice can we unpick the post-Wall discourses of homelessness and belonging. In contrast to the vaguely symbolic images of the Euro currency, we must discern Europe in the specific, the concrete, the detail. The political question, of course, as with the money, is which detail or, rather, whose detail. But we do not need to restrict ourselves to this essentially nationalistic form of ownership discourse. Instead, we may map diverse textual cartographies, following the traces of East and West, North and South across cinematic landscapes that will frequently exceed the spaces of Europe.

In redrawing this map, we find a way out of a theoretical impasse: how to read cinematic spectacle politically today. The question of spectacle has recurred throughout this book—from the pretty pictures of the heritage film to the controversial linkage of visual excess to Serbian war crimes. But “spectacle” is a slippery term, at once foundational to many theories of cinema and yet surprisingly rarely defined or directly theorized. Laura Mulvey contends that the figure of the woman is central to visual pleasure,¹ but where else does cinematic spectacle inhere? How is spectacle itself to be defined? To analyze contemporary European film is to address this question, for both heritage film and art cinemas are largely defined in terms of a visual aesthetic. Easily categorized as spectacular (neo-gaudy, la belle image), these films demand that we consider the location of spectacle in national as well as gendered images.

One of the main disincentives to thinking anew about spectacle in contemporary cinema is the way in which, post-1970s and -1980s feminist theory, the dominant critical context for understanding spectacle has been overwhelmingly negative. While some studies have thought spectacle productive in relation to genre (horror, the musical, porn, costume drama), this line of approach has been superseded in recent years. Instead, spectacle has been understood, explicitly or implicitly, within a particular Marxist model that derives from debates on modernity and mass culture, but has been mobilized as part of the discourse on post-modernity. Thus, Fredric Jameson calls the cinematic image pornographic on the opening page of Signatures of the Visible. And thus Paul Virilio, even while criticizing Marxism, makes a strikingly similar case when he claims that the photographic image is pornographic. He goes on to chart the rise of “parasitic images” in Europe, “phatic images” like advertising, that force the subject to look and command attention without being legible. In this discourse, spectacle in film is a part of Guy Debord’s famous “society of the spectacle,” in which the oversaturation of images materializes capitalist ideology, preventing any engagement with social meaning.²

There are endless examples of this notion of spectacle in recent film studies. Michael Rogin claims that “spectacle is the cultural form for amnesiac representation, for spectacular displays are superficial and sensately intensified, short lived and repeatable.”³ In a more extended analysis, Wheeler Winston Dixon’s book The Transparency of Spectacle explicitly updates Debord in a polemic against spectacular film of all kinds and in favor of computer images and the “directness” of Third World cinemas. Of European cinema, he says, “The few foreign films that attain moderately wide release in the United States are lavish costume spectacles,” going on to say that these kinds of viewing experiences enable people not to think but to be “coddled” and “tranquilized.”⁴ And it is not only recent films that are critiqued: in a discussion of 1950s German war films, Anton Kaes argues that despite the films’ claim to be antiwar, “the images [of battle] overpower any critical intentions; moral messages evaporate when up against visual pleasure and spectacle.”⁵ So dominant, so taken for granted, is this understanding of spectacle, that few critics question its use.

But there is a problem here, and it lies in a slippage between the Marxist concept of spectacle and the specifically cinematic one implied by the term “visual pleasure.” For the spectacle criticized by Debord, or, indeed, circulated in earlier debates around mass culture and modernity, is not specifically cinematic—not even necessarily visual. Debord uses the image as a trope that allows him to identify a much broader social regime, and the debates of the Frankfurt School around mass culture are by no means simply condemnatory. It is not that these theorists are useless for film studies but that the concept of spectacle employed by them is not the same as cinematic spectacle, and the differences are important. Moreover, ignoring the differences will produce an implicitly gendered theory, for what gets elided in these critiques of spectacle is exactly the feminist insistence on the meaningfulness of visual pleasure.

Thus, while spectacle for Mulvey does remove distance, it no more tranquilizes than does narrative. As a central mode of spectatorial engagement with the film text, what it differs from is narrative identification, not disengaged critique. Hence, within feminist theory, spectacle cannot be a bad object in this simple manner and may, in fact, be positive insofar as it breaks down, or temporarily suspends, the patriarchal sadistic narrative. The power of the image for feminist theory is, after all, the power of the woman in the image. It is suggestive that while Mulvey is fairly even-handed in her dissection of both narrative’s and spectacle’s patriarchal functions, more recent critics have reverted to a knee-jerk opposition to spectacle that recalls the anti-imagistic strain in Marxism even when it does not come from a Marxist perspective. It is somewhat depressing for feminism that even when a topic other than gender is under discussion, ideological value must be couched in the gendered terms of spectacle = bad, narrative = good.

The gap between these theoretical models opens up a space for critique. A feminist method can read spectacle as productive of meaning and can interrogate its ideological valences without falling prey to the implicit sexism of antispectacular approaches. For this theoretical heading, contemporary European cinema forms a revealing case study. It is only within the current field of cinematic possibility (where spectacle connotes at once art-cinematic merit, Hollywood emptiness, and post-modern style) that national cinemas could mobilize the spectacular in quite the ways that they do. Films like Mediterraneo connect women’s bodies to the national landscape in a way familiar from many national cinemas, but they also reinscribe this figure in the landscapes of post-classical global cinema and post–Cold War politics. When we consider the textual strategies at play in European films, it becomes clear that spectacle, far from being empty, structures complex negotiations of space, place, and history. To reevaluate theories of spectacle is also to rethink conventional wisdom about much contemporary cinema. But, equally, the practices of post-Wall films enable a new assessment of spectacle and its theoretical significance.

And this theoretical mapping is a historical work in itself: film theory’s engagement with spectacle, with the relationship of aesthetics to politics, forms part of the same historical map of Europe that the films engage. Benjamin’s influential account of the aestheticization of politics derives from his experience of Nazism, of course. Equally, postwar European critical engagements with the politics of the image can be read through the histories of the Cold War, West European Marxisms, and a primarily British and French relationship to capitalist film culture. That new theoretical models should emerge in relation to the end of the Cold War and the invention of the “new Europe” should not surprise us. Such intellectual developments are part of the same historical process that produced new cinematic movements and new political groupings.

Thus, the ways in which post-Wall films renegotiate European history and cinematic spectacle are not separable. When Benjamin discusses the dialectical image, his point is to reimagine the work of historiography and the political necessity of thinking about both past and present. In a letter to Theodor Adorno, he writes that he hopes he will have a firm position in the Marxist debate, “if only because the decisive question of the historical image will here be fully developed for the first time.”⁶ The constellation illuminated by these films compels us to rethink the historical image after Cold War Marxism. It makes clear that the recurrence of a relationship between 1945 and 1989 is not coincidental but articulates significant changes in the construction of European history, politics, and the image. We must reflect on the meaning of these changes for European film theory as much as for film history.

Stephen Barber argues that contemporary European cinemas tend to move beyond Europe, citing such postcolonial narratives as Claire Denis’s Beau Travail as exemplary.⁷ Encounters with the postcolonial Other are certainly a common theme, but we can also interpret this impetus as a critical warning: we must read for European and cinematic specificity, and yet we must always look outward, resisting essentializing logics. In this spirit, then, I would like to end with two examples that in some way stand outside the limits of “European cinema.” One is a non-European film, and the other is European, but not a film. These texts might point to pathways among disparate histories and cultural forms, or they might demand other headings entirely, unassimilable by the institutions of “Europe” or “cinema.” In either case, they will signal borders to this map of European cinema, leaving open to question the border’s value.

The first example is a Taiwanese film, The Hole, directed by Tsai Ming-Liang in 1999. The film is typical of a certain kind of postclassical transnationalism: it was made as part of French distributor Haut et Court and German-French television network Arte’s “2000 as seen by …” series of films, in which well-known filmmakers from around the world were asked to make films about the impending millennium. Thus, the film was a coproduction (Taiwan and France) and was made with global distribution in mind. The series included films by Abderrahmane Sissako, Walter Salles, and Hal Hartley, placing Tsai’s film squarely within a commercial logic of international art house auteurs. But the “2000 as seen by …” series was also a work of mapping, an attempt to limn its own constellation of cinematic geography: New York, Rio de Janeiro, Mali, Belgium, Taipei. The global system in fragments, frozen in time.

If the film series reminds us of Jameson’s geopolitical aesthetic, compulsively aping the late capitalist global system through its alienated spaces and transnational flow, then The Hole condenses these paranoid networks into one building in Taipei. The film takes place on the eve of the millennium, in an apocalyptic Taipei that has been evacuated because of a mystery contagion that, we are told, makes people scuttle and hide like cockroaches. Few inhabitants remain in the rain-soaked housing projects, but the unnamed protagonists are among the stragglers. The man lives in one apartment; the woman, in the flat directly downstairs. Because of the constant rain, water begins to leak into the downstairs apartment. A botched plumbing job leaves a hole in the floor. Soon, the man expands the hole and begins penetrating the space below with eyes, legs, and umbrellas. Like Underground, The Hole turns everyday spaces into uncanny and fantasmatic ones, with the trope of the hole simultaneously staging alienation and the disturbing scene of its rupture.

There are other suggestive points of comparison. Unable to be fully national, combining Chinese Communism with an industrial center of global capitalism, Taiwan in the 1990s also troubles regional and national spaces. The film’s spatial logic seems at first to describe the labyrinthine impossibility of postmodern Taiwan. Like the films of Edward Yang, or indeed Tsai’s earlier works, The Hole presents Taipei’s space as incoherent, desolate, and bleakly commodified.⁸ The man visits his old store in a deserted mall, leaving out accumulating tins of food for a solitary cat. Back in the apartment, commercials for noodles mix with news stories about the millennial disease. The hole in the floor seems to reiterate this economic breakdown at the domestic level. The man makes misguided attempts at bodily connection through the hole, while the woman begins to demonstrate disturbing symptoms of infection.

The film surprises, however: into this dark and crumbling diegesis emerges the spectacular and utopian space of the musical. While the man’s fantasy involves penetrating the hole to his neighbor’s flat, this narrative is interspersed with musical numbers that represent the woman’s fantasy. In these scenes, bright lighting and colorful costumes transform the building into the stage of a glamorous 1950s romantic musical. As with the traditional musical, these spectacular production numbers “fall out” of the narrative, creating a striking contrast with the dramatic storyline. But they also use spectacle in a way similar to that of the European films: to map geopolitical space differently and to rework a dominant politics of representation. The inclusion of the musical scenes creates a series of binaries that complicate the logic of urban alienation: upstairs/downstairs, male/female, reality/fantasy, narrative/production number, apocalypse/utopia. In juxtaposing the apocalyptic space of the abandoned city with the utopian space of the musical romance, the film suggests another form of dialectical image.

And, like the European films, this staging of spectacle is also historical. The Hole’s musical scenes feature songs by Grace Chang (also called Ge Lan), a popular Chinese film star of the 1950s and 1960s. Chang’s films, including Mambo Girl (Yi, 1957) and Air Hostess (Yi, 1959), speak of a significant moment of transnational influence in Chinese modernity. For example, The Wild, Wild Rose (Wang, 1959) features Chang singing Bizet’s Carmen in Mandarin, and both the film’s musical numbers and its modernist production design combine Chinese, European, and South American styles. Air Hostess thematizes the glamour of air travel in the 1950s, with Chang playing the eponymous heroine. Set in various Asian tourist locations (Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore), the film uses the travel narrative to connect transnational musical styles (for example, the song “Oh Calypso”) to touristic film spectacle (for example, sequences of Chang visiting temples and waterfalls). Chang’s career peaked in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and her star persona draws heavily from this moment of cross-cultural pollination. Her vocal style and dancing seamlessly mesh Chinese and Western popular song. In addition, she almost always played the good girl, domesticating foreign culture within a traditional model of Chinese womanhood. Thus, for The Hole to refer to her films is to look back at a period of emergent globalization and to recall that period’s most optimistic self-image.

Thus, although The Hole is far removed from the histories of European film, we can trace connections across the global networks of contemporary film culture. Both industrially and aesthetically, the film makes us question the ways that disparate places engage with their national, regional, and global histories. While we cannot simply transpose European structures to Asia, we must be aware of how film histories, no less than capital, ebb and flow beyond the borders of Europe.

The second example returns to Europe but is a television program rather than a film. In 1996, British television screened a nine-part miniseries called Our Friends in the North (Jones, James, and Urban), a drama narrating the history of the British Left from the 1960s to the present through the travails of a group of friends from the northern English city of Newcastle. Each episode takes place a few years after the previous one, and most are set in the year of a general election. The episodic structure of televisual narrative presents a significant difference between this text and European films of the same period; for one thing, the program’s nine seventy-minute episodes enabled a level of political and historical detail that would be hard to fit into a feature-length film. We could compare Our Friends with Underground, but without the breakneck pace, or with Cinema Paradiso, but filling in the historical blanks. One result of its televisual form, then, is a more gradual narrative of political decline, as week by week, national politics intersects with the lives of the four protagonists.

British television has a long history of this kind of political drama, and the debates it has engendered are not unrelated to the European history film. The 1970s Ken Loach and Tony Garnett series Days of Hope opened up popular memory debates in the United Kingdom, and the television film The Ploughman’s Lunch (Eyre, 1983) became a canonical text for discussions of postmodern history films. Similar issues of realism, memory, and political engagement have influenced filmic and televisual histories; moreover, there is a great deal of overlap in the industries. Loach, who wrote Days of Hope, went on to make political history films like Land and Freedom, while television companies like the BBC and FilmFour produced many of the most influential British films of the 1980s and 1990s. Like The Hole, though, Our Friends is interesting not only for its production context. In its textual processes, too, the series suggests a relationship to the spatial and historical concerns of European cinema.

First, there is the strange rhetorical slippage of its title. While the reference to “the north” at first seems to denote Newcastle, the northern English hometown of the protagonists, it is in fact a reference to political corruption in Africa. The quotation is from a secret memo sent from Shell to British Petroleum in the 1960s, discussing the need to protect the oil industry against the effects of decolonization: the “friends in the north” are here the colonial Rhodesian government. This context is never referred to within the program’s narrative, which takes place during the time period of African decolonization, but which focuses almost entirely on domestic political corruption. This slippage offers at once an analogy of British and colonial power relations and a neat doubling of the terms of geopolitical advantage. The British North, like the colonial South, is historically peripheral, its working-class protagonists making their way to the metropolis in order to advance. Thus, the title maps a colonial space onto a national one, overwriting a British history of working-class realism with a postcolonial logic.

Second, Our Friends structures history through a narrative of mourning. Along with the European heritage film, it contends that political histories and national spaces exert an emotional pressure that can be textualized only through the temporality of loss. The political mood of the United Kingdom in the mid-1990s was similar to that in many other European countries, where the end of state Communism had produced confusion for the Left and the promise of the “new Europe” seemed uncertain. As with the Italian films, Our Friends looks back to a moment when change seemed genuinely possible—in this case, through the radicalization of party politics in the 1960s. By gradually outlining the corruption and decline of this movement, the program’s serial narrative stages this history differently from films about the period, using viewers’ memories of the previous episodes as a central temporal mechanism rather than flashbacks or temporal elisions. Nonetheless, the final episode concludes with a demand on the nostalgic memories of the spectator, as all four characters meet again for the first time since the first episode, forcing spectatorial awareness of all that has changed in the intervening years. Political losses are compressed into the melodramatic structure of personal losses, and a moving effect occurs as the end credit music begins.

Each episode had ended with a song that was in the charts the year in which the episode takes place—already a powerful index of popular memory and nostalgic investment in the recent past—and the final episode ends with the Oasis song “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” While this sentiment more or less matches the half-reconciliation of the protagonists, it stands as a direct counterpoint to the apparent logic of the historical narrative, in which the failure of the leftist project seems to demand precisely a reaction of anger. But, of course, the song itself is a historical reference, citing John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (also filmed by Tony Richardson in 1958), the ur-text of postwar British working-class culture. And the cultural shift from Look Back in Anger to “Don’t Look Back in Anger” describes the political losses incurred between the 1960s and the 1990s. In negating the title, the song performs the impossibility of Osborne-esque indignation in the cultural climate of the 1990s. And yet, insofar as it mourns that loss, it undermines it, producing at the very least a melancholic desire for political anger. The impossibility of the song’s demand, alongside its narrative necessity, is what provokes the viewer to tears, collapsing melodramatic affect with political mourning.

Our Friends, then, implies that the logic of post-Wall European cinema finds echoes in other cultural forms. Among television, theater, and popular music there are also textual flows, and in mapping the cultural spaces of the new Europe, it may be necessary to negotiate between cinematic specificity and interdisciplinary passages.

This concatenation of textual effects characterizes post-Wall European cinema—a desire for history, tinged with a double-edged nostalgia for the political losses of that same history, and an investment in the spectacular image as the place where an ambivalent relationship to the past can be expressed. European cinema in the 1990s may be negotiating a form of historiophilia, a somewhat masochistic pleasure in the distance of the historical other, of that which has been lost. But this pleasure is never solely nostalgic, for its investment in history is always at the same time an engagement in the present, and its use of spectacle is a simultaneous mapping of political space. Textual reiterations of postwar history form a central strand in a cinematic reworking of the location and meaning of “Europe,” at the time of its political transformation.

For Europe, the early 1990s provided a unique moment of potential for change, even as they demanded mourning for the losses of the previous fifty years. It is in the particular form of this in-between moment, what Berlin.killer.doc calls “the interim,” that we can trace a thread among these diverse films. Speaking of the post–Cold War chasm between east and west Europeans, Slavoj Žižek suggests that “perhaps, however, this double disappointment, this double failed encounter between the ex-communist dissidents and Western liberal democrats is crucial for the identity of Europe; perhaps what transpires in the gap that separates the two perspectives is a glimpse of a Europe worth fighting for.”⁹ In constructing relationships between past and present in terms of spectacle, space, and history, European cinema crystallizes the potential of this moment, forming a constellation that enables us to think both backward and forward to a different Europe.