1. Mapping European Cinema in the 1990s
1. Duncan Petrie, ed., Screening Europe: Image and Identity in Contemporary European Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1992).
2. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 44.
3. Mark Betz, “The Name Above the (Sub)Title: Internationalism, Coproduction, and Polyglot European Art Cinema,” Camera Obscura 16:1, no. 46 (2001): 1–44. Betz surveys a range of often conflicting historiographic work on the coproduction. Despite the difficulty of finding exact figures, he discerns trends in his statistics: coproduction is found in Italy from 1943 and in France from 1946. What is a trickle in the immediate postwar years becomes a major mode of production by the 1950s and a dominant form in the early 1960s. In France, for example, forty-seven national films were made in 1962, along with forty-one coproductions. In Italy, 13 coproductions in 1952 rose to 155 in 1964.
4. Examples could include Bhaji on the Beach (Chadha, 1993), Welcome to Sarajevo (Winterbottom, 1997), and La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995). Similar issues were discussed in sociology and politics. See, for example, Brian Jenkins and Spyros A. Sofos, eds., Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe (London: Routledge, 1996).
5. Well-known beur films are Cheb (Bouchareb, 1991) and Salut Cousin! (Allouache, 1996). Turkish German films include Head-On (Akin, 2004) and Berlin in Berlin (Çetin, 1994). Critical work that touches on these topics includes Leslie Adelson, “Touching Tales of Turks, Germans, and Jews: Cultural Alterity, Historical Narrative, and Literary Riddles for the 1990s,” New German Critique 80 (2000): 93–124; Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Film-making (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Christian Bosséno, “Immigrant Cinema: National Cinema—The Case of Beur Film,” in Popular European Cinema, ed. Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau (New York: Routledge, 1992), 47–57.
6. Derrida, Other Heading, 12–13.
7. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). In an argument that has been highly influential, Gilroy posits that while blackness is not essential, anti-essentialism leaves little room for theorizing the experience of race. His proposal of anti-anti-essentialism is not a refutation of the critique of essence, but, like Gayatri Spivak’s “strategic essentialism,” is an attempt to move beyond the stale and limiting essentialist/anti-essentialist debate. See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1987), 197–221.
8. Slavoj Žižek, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,’” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 988, and “Multiculturalism, or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” New Left Review 225 (1997): 49.
9. Etienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene (London: Verso, 2002), and We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).
10. The category of space is too broad to reference exhaustively, but key works include André Bazin, What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, 1971), and Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981).
11. Thomas Elsaesser, “Cinema—The Irresponsible Signifier or ‘The Gamble with History’: Film Theory or Cinema Theory,” New German Critique 40 (1987): 71.
12. It is open to debate whether the heritage film can be considered a genre proper or, rather, a category of film that exists across several genres. It is often discussed as if it were a genre, and my use of the term reflects this common categorization.
13. Andrew Higson, “Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film,” in Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, ed. Lester Friedman (London: University College London Press, 1993), 109–29; Antoine de Baecque, “Le Cinéma d’Europe à la recherche d’une forme,” Cahiers du Cinéma 455–456 (1992): 78–79.
14. Richard Dyer, “Feeling English,” Sight and Sound, March 1994, 17–19.
15. See the debates on popular memory in Cahiers du Cinéma 251–252, 268–269, 275, 278, particularly Michel Foucault, “Film and Popular Memory,” Cahiers du Cinéma 251–252 (1974): 25.
16. Michel Foucault, “Entretien avec Michel Foucault,” Cahiers du Cinéma 251–252 (1974): 8 (my translation).
17. Ibid., 13.
18. This historical look back was particularly fraught in France, as revisions of the “myth of the Resistance” ruffled feathers on both the Gaullist Right and the Communist Left. The commissioning and then practical abandonment by the television network Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (ORTF) of Marcel Ophüls’s epic documentary of collaboration, The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), is a key turning point in this history. See, for instance, Naomi Greene, Landscapes of Loss: The National Past in Post-War French Cinema (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), and Keith Reader, “Reconstructing the Past Through Cinema: The Occupation of France,” in Reconstructing the Past: Representations of the Fascist Era in Post-War European Culture, ed. Graham Bartram, Maureen Slawinski, and David Steel (Keele, Eng.: Keele University Press, 1996), 177–85.
19. See, for instance, John Caughie, “Progressive Television and Documentary Drama,” Screen 21, no. 3 (1980): 9–35.
20. John Caughie, “Halfway to Paradise,” Sight and Sound, May 1992, 10–13.
21. Terence Davies has continued to address historical topics that emphasize class issues and the lives of women, albeit in an American context. The House of Mirth (2000) adapts Edith Wharton’s novel in which a middle-class woman has little to fall back on without the support of wealthy men. Less art cinematic in style, it nonetheless ends on a painterly reference, with the suicidal protagonist posed in a tableau reminiscent of a painting by John Singer Sargent.
22. While the original sense of the word “nostalgia,” coined in Switzerland in the seventeenth century from the Greek nostos (return home) plus the Latin -algia (pain, longing, or suffering), was a painful desire to return home, it is the term’s more popular usage that has dominated discourses on European history films. Nostalgia is popularly perceived to be a pleasurable look back, in which the emotional engagement in the past overrides any friction evoked by historical loss. The older meaning still has force, however, as we see in examples like Davies’s films, where the look back to the past is always caught up in pain.
23. See, for instance, Sander Gilman, “Is Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah Be Funny? Some Thoughts on Recent and Older Films,” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 279–308; Imre Kertesz, “Who Owns Auschwitz?” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 267–72; and Maurizio Viano, “Life Is Beautiful: Reception, Allegory, and Holocaust Laughter,” Jewish Social Studies 5, no. 3 (1999): 47–66.
24. Michel Chion, “Quiet Revolution … and Rigid Stagnation,” October 58 (1991): 69–80.
25. Dogme itself continues to produce significant European films, including Mifune (Kragh-Jacobsen, 1999) and Italian for Beginners (Scherfig, 2000). It is also influential as a loose production center, with Lars von Trier’s Zentropa coproducing non-Dogme films in various countries, the Trollhattan studio bringing productions into Denmark, and Dogme as a movement spreading across the globe. Outside of Dogme, there have been many other significant variants on European new realisms, including the brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne in Belgium and Erick Zonca in France.
26. Dogme manifesto (available at: http://www.dogme95.dk/menu/menuset.htm).
27. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995); Miriam Hansen, “Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public Sphere,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 134–52.
28. As Priya Jaikumar argues with regard to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947), however, even the European colonial narrative can stage the breakdown of this system (“‘Place’ and the Modernist Redemption of Empire in Black Narcissus,” Cinema Journal 40, no. 2 [2001]: 57–77). Moreover, in this film the historical crisis of colonial space is staged through the spectacular mise-en-scène of Himalayan Mopu, with excessively detailed costume and production design, as well as colorful (gaudy) sets, embodying the madness that sweeps the pristine white nuns.
29. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
30. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
31. Pam Cook, Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2005), which includes an essay on In the Mood for Love.
32. Franco Moretti, “Kindergarten,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1997), 157–81.
33. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 154.
34. Ibid., 152–53.
35. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1999), 398.
36. Cited in Stephen Brockmann, “The Reunification Debate,” New German Critique 52 (1991): 4.
2. The Dialectic of Landscape in Italian Popular Melodrama
1. Martin Warnke, Political Landscape: The Art History of Nature, trans. David McLintock (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 1–2.
2. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 241.
3. A typical example is John Lyttle’s review: “‘The English Patient’ Has 12 Oscar and 13 BAFTA Nominations. But, Asks John Lyttle, Why All This Fuss over a Dressed-up Costume Drama with Nowhere to Go?” Independent, February 27, 1997, 10.
4. Other examples could be Belle Epoque (Trueba, 1992), La Reine Margot (Chéreau, 1994), Hedd Wyn (Turner, 1992), and Europa Europa (Holland, 1990).
5. Andrew Higson, “The Heritage Film and British Cinema,” in Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, ed. Andrew Higson (London: Cassell, 1996), 233.
6. Andrew Higson, “Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film,” in Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, ed. Lester Friedman (London: University College London Press, 1993), 109–29.
7. Sue Harper, Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film (London: British Film Institute, 1994).
8. Peter Aspden, “Nuovo Cinema Paradiso,” Sight and Sound, February 1994, 62.
9. Julian Graffy, “Il Postino,” Sight and Sound, November 1995, 49.
10. Peter Aspden, “Mediterraneo,” Sight and Sound, April 1991, 50.
11. Vincent Canby, “‘Cinema Paradiso’: Memories of Movies in a Movie,” New York Times, February 2, 1990, 15, and “Roundelay of Love on an Isle in Wartime,” New York Times, March 22, 1992, 48; Jean A Gili, “Le Facteur: Un poète amateur contre l’injustice du monde,” Positif 423 (1996): 58.
12. I am interested in the closeness of scholarly to journalistic criticisms, because it seems that their similarity speaks of the apparent obviousness of this genre, and of the perception that the accusations of melodrama and unhistoricality do not require any further interrogation. Perhaps because these films are not exactly melodramas in the sense of women’s pictures, the body of feminist theory that has insisted on a more ideologically complex reading of melodramatic structures is rarely brought to bear on these films, which can be safely dismissed as reactionary to the extent that they are sentimental or nonrealist.
13. Susannah Radstone, “Cinema/Memory/History,” Screen 36, no. 1 (1995): 34–47.
14. Quoted in ibid., 34. See also Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995).
15. Radstone, “Cinema/Memory/History,” 41.
16. Ibid., 37. A different interpretation is offered in Millicent Marcus, After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 201. She argues that the film’s use of old movie clips does indeed contain political friction, whereas La terra trema fails to raise the social consciousness of the Giancaldo audience.
17. Radstone, “Cinema/Memory/History,” 43. For Benjamin, experience could be categorized as either Erlebnis or Erfahrung. Erlebnis is typical of experience in modernity and consists of fragmentary sensations that never form a coherent whole. Examples might be the mass media, the shocks and jolts of the crowd, and factory labor. Erlebnis is simply lived through, without meaningful interaction. Erfahrung, by contrast, names a more authentic process of experience, in which meaning is transmitted and maintained. An example would be the tradition of storytelling. Radstone’s connection of Erfahrung and storytelling to discours and Erlebnis and the novel to histoire is certainly neat, but within the context of cinema this linkage seems to leave room for only the most unclassical texts to be progressive; any text that does not eschew realism altogether will inevitably produce a historical metadiscourse and so, by her standards, slide into histoire and preclude Erfahrung.
18. Richard Dyer, “Feeling English,” Sight and Sound, March 1994, 17–19; Higson, “Re-presenting the National Past.”
19. Higson, “Re-presenting the National Past,” 109.
20. While connecting heritage films to the rise of a right-wing version of national heritage in the 1980s undeniably has a good measure of truth to it (at least in the United Kingdom), Higson’s next step is inadequate. Criticizing nonrealist films for not being realist is as unhelpful as the claim that realism is the only way to produce a more politically engaged film culture. A counterexample might be Dogme ’95, which is concerned with realism and authenticity but does not appear to tie them to any political radicalism.
21. Higson, “Re-presenting the National Past,” 119.
22. Dyer, “Feeling English,” 18.
23. Higson, “Re-presenting the National Past,” 113.
24. Ibid., 120.
25. Aspden, “Nuovo Cinema Paradiso,” 62.
26. It is instructive in this regard to compare Italian cinema and its reception with German films. While much New German Cinema dealt directly with Nazism, German films have also dealt with the aftermath of Hitler and have considered German history and identity in the postwar years. Perhaps because German history is better known, or is always already politicized, it would be rare for a German historical film to be criticized as apolitical purely for dealing with the postwar years. It is also telling that Aspden feels a British film would inevitably carry the baggage of colonialism while an Italian film could claim no such weight.
27. Palmiro Togliatti’s famous svolta di Salerno (Salerno turn) generated a great deal of discussion among those on the Left as to whether it was too great a compromise to work with the discredited government of Pietro Badoglio, which had collaborated with the Fascists, or whether it was more important to push for a republic or to compromise and concentrate on forming a government. Certainly, though, the creation of the Partito Nuovo enabled the Communist Party to become the major left-wing opposition party in Italy in the postwar years, comparable less to other Communist Parties than to the Socialist, Social Democratic, and Labour Parties in the rest of Western Europe. See Lawrence Gray, “From Gramsci to Togliatti: The Partito Nuovo and the Mass Basis of Italian Communism,” in The Italian Communist Party: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, ed. Simon Serfaty and Lawrence Gray (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 21–36.
28. Elizabeth Wiskemann, Italy Since 1945 (London: Macmillan, 1971), 136.
29. Spencer M. Di Scala, Italy: From Revolution to Republic, 1700 to the Present (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998); Gray, “From Gramsci to Togliatti”; Muriel Grindrod, Italy (New York: Praeger, 1968); Norman Kogan, A Political History of Postwar Italy (New York: Praeger, 1981); S. J. Woolf, ed., The Rebirth of Italy, 1943–50 (New York: Humanities Press, 1972).
30. Di Scala, Italy, 273.
31. Quoted in P. Adams Sitney, Vital Crises in Italian Cinema: Iconography, Stylistics, Politics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 2. This summary is not quite as paranoid as it may appear: recently released government documents have revealed the extent of U.S. covert operations in Italy, which because of its geographic position and strong Communist Party was felt to be a particular danger during the Cold War. Anti-PCI propaganda was paid for by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and during the 1970s, terrorist acts were engineered in order to destroy support for the radical Left. See Vittorio Bufacchi and Simon Burgess, Italy Since 1989: Events and Interpretations (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). For a sophisticated interpretation of the relationship between Pasolini’s films and the political structures of postwar Italy, see Angelo Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).
32. Mark Gilbert, The Italian Revolution: The End of Politics, Italian Style? (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995), 6.
33. Volodia Teitelboim, Neruda: An Intimate Biography, trans. Beverly J. DeLong-Tonelli (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 332.
34. Cinema Paradiso was released in 1989, Mediterraneo in 1991, and Il Postino in 1994. The fact that two of these films were released before the emergence of the mani pulite crisis prevents them from being read simply as a displaced reaction to political events. Rather, their narrativization of a need to look back to the postwar years functions as part of the cultural shift that led up to the collapse of the First Republic and, indeed, set the conditions within which the breakdown could become possible.
35. Sarah Waters, “‘Tangentopoli’ and the Emergence of a New Political Order in Italy,” West European Politics 17, no. 1 (1994): 169–82.
36. The PCI was far from following Moscow policy directives, and for much of this period it was closer to the French Socialists than to the Eastern bloc.
37. A good example of the way in which partitocrazia was quite naturalized in Italian culture is the structure of the RAI television network, in which the three state channels were allocated to a party each, according to relative importance. In this lottizazione (allocation), RAI Uno, the main entertainment and news channel, was controlled by the DC; RAI Due, a similar but less popular channel, was controlled by the PSI; and the PCI was given the consolation prize of RAI Tre, the arts and education channel, which, of course, had substantially lower ratings. This system affected budget, editorial, and programming decisions, as well as employment, because only those with the correct party membership could expect to be hired at each channel.
38. Bufacchi and Burgess, Italy Since 1989; Martin Bull and Martin Rhodes, “Between Crisis and Transition: Italian Politics in the 1990s,” West European Politics 20, no. 1 (1997): 1–13; Donald Sassoon, “Tangentopoli or the Democratization of Corruption: Considerations on the End of Italy’s First Republic,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 1, no. 1 (1995): 124–43; Alexander Stille, “Badfellas,” New Republic, August 10, 1992, 12–13.
39. Tangenti are common bribes or kickbacks, and as Milan was uncovered to run on a system of corruption, it was nicknamed Tangentopoli, or Kickback City.
40. Stille, “Badfellas,” 12.
41. “‘Clean Hands’: Who’s Next?” Business Week, March 8, 1993, 57.
42. Andrew Phillips, “Decline and Fall,” Maclean’s, March 22, 1993, 22–24.
43. Bettino Craxi was convicted in absentia and died in exile in Tunisia, while Giulio Andreotti was acquitted of both sets of charges after two lengthy trials in Milan and Palermo.
44. Giuseppe Turani and Cinzia Sasso, quoted in Stille, “Badfellas,” 12.
45. Sassoon, “Tangentopoli,” 126.
46. Pier Paolo Giglioni, “Political Corruption and the Media: The Tangentopoli Affair,” International Social Science Journal 48, no. 3 (1996): 381–94; Patrick McCarthy, “Italy at a Turning Point,” Current History 96, no. 608 (1997): 111–15; Carol Mershon and Gianfranco Pasquino, eds., Italian Politics: Ending the First Republic (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995).
47. Phillips, “Decline and Fall,” 22.
48. Stille, for instance, makes this case in “Badfellas.”
49. Bull and Rhodes, “Between Crisis and Transition.” See also Michael Braun, L’Italia da Andreotti a Berlusconi: Rivolgimenti e prospettive politiche in un paese a rischio, trans. from German by Carlo Mainoldi (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1995).
50. Stille, “Badfellas,” 12.
51. Quoted in Bufacchi and Burgess, Italy Since 1989, 1 n.12.
52. Quoted in Michael Sheridan, “Revolution Italian-Style,” Vanity Fair, July 1993, 48.
53. Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 43–69. See also, in the same anthology, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Minnelli and Melodrama,” 70–74, and Laura Mulvey, “Notes on Sirk and Melodrama,” 75–79, who discuss the genre in both psychoanalytic and ideological terms.
54. Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury,” 64.
55. Steve Neale, “Melodrama and Tears,” Screen 27, no. 6 (1986): 6–22.
56. Franco Moretti, “Kindergarten,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1997), 157–81.
57. Ibid., 160.
58. Neale, “Melodrama and Tears,” 12.
59. Ibid., 9–12.
60. Moretti, “Kindergarten,” 160.
61. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), 56–80.
62. Neale, “Melodrama and Tears,” 19.
63. Ibid., 21.
64. Radstone, “Cinema/Memory/History,” 45.
65. Higson, “Heritage Film,” 238.
66. Quoted in Pierre Sorlin, Italian National Cinema, 1896–1996 (London: Routledge, 1996), 75.
67. Higson, “Re-presenting the National Past,” 115.
68. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 14:235–58.
69. Ibid., 245. For Freud, hypercathexis describes the process by which the mourning subject reviews each memory of the lost object and withdraws the psychic charge or link, the cathexis, that connects them. Successful mourning requires a painful process of hypercathexis, and melancholia will occur without it.
70. And, to a lesser extent, those involving familial patterns: Totò and Alfredo, Mario and Neruda, and Farina and the lieutenant.
71. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 249.
72. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987).
73. Linda Williams, “‘Something Else Besides a Mother’: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is, ed. Gledhill, 299–325.
74. Indeed, one of Radstone’s more convincing readings relates to the family romance in which Alfredo stands in as a father for Totò. While I might disagree that this structure is as reactionary as Radstone’s analysis claims, it is certainly the case that this narrative model can be found in all the films I am discussing. In Il Postino, Pablo Neruda becomes a surrogate father for Mario (and, indeed, is played by the same actor who plays Alfredo), and in Mediterraneo the captain can be seen as a kind of father to the orphaned Farina.
75. Higson, “Re-presenting the National Past,” 117.
76. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.
77. Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View,” Art Journal 42, no. 4 (1982): 311–19.
78. Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Transparency of Spectacle: Meditations on the Moving Image (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).
79. See, for example, Ellen Strain, “Exotic Bodies, Distant Landscapes: Touristic Viewing and Popularized Anthropology in the Nineteenth Century,” Wide Angle 18, no. 2 (1996): 70–100.
80. Mira Liehm, Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 78.
81. Giuseppe De Santis, “Per un paesaggio italiano,” Cinema 116 (1941): 71–75.
82. Quoted in David Overbey, ed., Springtime in Italy: A Reader in Neorealism (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1979), 78.
83. Mario Cannella, “Ideology and Aesthetic Hypotheses in the Criticism of Neo-Realism,” Screen 14, no. 4 (1974): 5–60.
84. Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
85. Of course, the landscape image is indirectly gendered as feminine—both by the well-worn connection of woman to nature and by the opposition of horizontal landscape to vertical, phallic cityscape.
86. André Bazin, What Is Cinema? vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
87. An important exception here is the work of Krauss, who uses Bazin’s theory of cinematic specificity to theorize the photographic index in terms of the chemical trace.
88. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
89. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).
90. André Bazin, What Is Cinema? vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).
91. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997).
92. Ibid., 35.
93. Ibid., 77.
94. Ibid., 81.
95. Ibid., 71.
96. Miriam Hansen, introduction to Kracauer, Theory of Film, xxv.
97. Radstone refers briefly to the aura in her reading of Cinema Paradiso, where she mobilizes Benjamin’s terms Erfahrung and Erlebnis to characterize the difference between those historical films that engage in memory work and those that fall into a narcissistic nostalgia (“Cinema/Memory/History,” 43–44). Given that her ultimate aim is to critique Cinema Paradiso’s lack of engagement with history and lived culture, it is not surprising that she cites the aura only in terms of its absence, as an instance of how the film structures experience not as Erfahrung but as Erlebnis. While I disagree with this reading, I think Radstone’s turn to Benjamin to think about historically based films is a crucial move, and I believe that the notion of the aura presents a connection among history, temporality, and the image that needs to be teased out in relation to the issues at stake in these films.
98. Benjamin, “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 222.
99. Ibid., 221.
100. Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,’” New German Critique 40 (1987): 179–224.
101. Ibid., 186.
102. Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1985), 240–57.
103. Ibid., 243.
104. Ibid., 250.
105. Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience,” 212.
106. Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” trans. Lloyd Spencer, New German Critique 34 (1985): 41.
107. Cited in Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience,” 212.
108. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 257.
109. Thomas Elsaesser, “Cinema—The Irresponsible Signifier or ‘The Gamble with History’: Film Theory or Cinema Theory,” New German Critique 40 (1987): 76.
110. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 462–63.
111. The term “image” in Benjamin is, of course, not specifically pictorial, but neither is it actively antipictorial. He uses the term in its literary theoretical context, which is less weighted than its placement in a film-theoretical argument might suggest.
112. Walter Benjamin, “Konvolut N” [Theoretics of Knowledge; Theory of Progress], trans. Leigh Hafrey and Richard Sieburth, Philosophical Forum 15, nos. 1–2 (1983–1984): 18.
113. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 388.
114. Francesco Casetti, “Le Néoréalisme italien: Le cinéma comme reconquête de réel,” CinémAction 60 (1991): 70–78; Liehm, Passion and Defiance; Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986).
115. Liehm, Passion and Defiance, 80.
116. Giuseppe De Santis, “Italie: Ruralité et néoréalisme,” CinémAction 36 (1986): 60–61.
117. Marcus, Italian Film.
118. An example would be Maurizio Nichetti’s popular comedy Icicle Thief (1989), a pun on The Bicycle Thief (U.S. title; released as Bicycle Thieves in Great Britain; in Italian, Ladri di saponette and Ladri di biciclette).
119. Bazin, What Is Cinema? 2: 64–65.
120. We can trace the contours of this difference in the characters also. Mario’s simple man refers clearly to ‘Ntoni in La terra trema, but whereas ‘Ntoni’s simplicity stands for a humanity and political idealism, Mario’s innocence seems unusual, even within the narrative.
121. Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 103.
122. Quoted in ibid., 98.
123. Roland Schneider, “1944–1951: Le néoréalisme italien,” CinémAction 55 (1989): 48 (my translation).
124. Marcus, Italian Film, xiv.
125. Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present (New York: Ungar, 1983).
126. See, for example, Bull and Rhodes, “Between Crisis and Transition,” and Grindrod, Italy.
127. Bernard Wall, Italian Art, Life and Landscape (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1956), 202–3.
128. Quoted in Bufacchi and Burgess, Italy Since 1989, 21.
129. Sassoon, “Tangentopoli,” 130–32.
130. Bull and Rhodes, “Between Crisis and Transition.”
131. Gilbert, Italian Revolution; Paul Ginsborg, “Explaining Italy’s Crisis,” in The New Italian Republic: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to Berlusconi, ed. Stephen Gundle and Simon Parker (London: Routledge, 1996), 19–39.
132. Quoted in Ginsborg, “Explaining Italy’s Crisis,” 22.
133. Sorlin, Italian National Cinema, 87.
134. Bondanella, Italian Cinema, 36.
135. Stille, “Badfellas,” 13.
3. A Conspiracy of Cartographers?
1. J. B. Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” Cartographica 26, no. 2 (1989): 1–20. Harley is the major figure in critical cartography. Barbara Belyea compares him with Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault in developing a theory of maps as discursive texts that are inextricably linked to systems of power (“Images of Power: Derrida/Foucault/Harley,” Cartographica 29, no. 2 [1992]: 1–9). Although Belyea criticizes Harley’s work for retaining an underlying positivism, his importance in articulating the imbrications of power and textuality in maps cannot be overstated.
2. The film is also a literary adaptation in the sense that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was a play before it was a film. And it is quite possible to read playwright and director Tom Stoppard in terms of cultural capital, where an authorial discourse could place him as part of Britain’s contemporary literary heritage.
3. Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1–42.
4. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995).
5. Ibid., 50–51.
6. We may note here the discrepancy between England and the United Kingdom: while heritage films are typically concerned with a culturally exportable version of a narrowly English history, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern suggests a broader Britishness by dint of casting the Scottish actor Iain Glen as Hamlet.
7. Jameson, Postmodernism, 52.
8. Anthony Vidler, “Agoraphobia: Spatial Estrangement in Georg Simmel and Siegfried Kracauer,” New German Critique 54 (1991): 32–33.
9. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (London: Blackwell, 1989); Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989); Charles Jencks, The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Postmodernism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002).
10. Victor Burgin, In/different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).
11. Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2000), 8.
12. Ibid., 3.
13. Andreas Huyssen, “The Voids of Berlin,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (1997): 57–81.
14. We may read here a hint of Fritz Lang’s M (1931), another film about the nature of a killer in Berlin, and one that represents maps frequently.
15. Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New York: Verso, 2002). See also Bruno, “Ramble City: Postmodernism and Blade Runner,” October 41 (1987): 61–74.
16. Stephen Barber, Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space (London: Reaktion Books, 2002). See also Linda Krause and Patrice Petro, eds., Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
17. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion, 3.
18. The film has also been read in terms of South Asian diasporic cinema, as in Jigna Desai, Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (London: Routledge, 2004). While it is undoubtedly important to place the film in a diasporic context, this categorization does not detract from the necessity of reading Black British film as part of European cinema.
19. Paul Julian Smith, The Moderns: Space, Time and Subjectivity in Contemporary Spanish Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). See also Dimitris Eleftheriotis, Popular Cinemas of Europe: Studies of Texts, Concepts and Frameworks (London: Continuum, 2001).
20. Burgin, In/different Spaces.
21. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (New York: Verso, 1999).
22. Rogoff, Terra Infirma, 108.
23. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). For examples of how the idea of national cinema has been reexamined and expanded in the post-Wall age, see Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie, eds., Cinema and Nation (New York: Routledge, 2000).
24. Paul Hainsworth, “Politics, Culture and Cinema in the New Europe,” in Border Crossing: Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe, ed. John Hill, Martin McLoone, and Paul Hainsworth (Belfast: University of Ulster/British Film Institute, 1994), 8–33.
25. An example of this kind of coproduction would be Calendar (Egoyan, 1993; Canada/Armenia/Germany). Solely within Asia, see, for example, Autumn Moon (Law, 1992; Hong Kong/Japan).
26. Steve Neale, “Melodrama and Tears,” Screen 27, no. 6 (1986): 30.
27. John Hill, “The Future of European Cinema: The Economics and Culture of Pan-European Strategies,” in Border Crossing, ed. Hill, McLoone, and Hainsworth, 53–80.
28. Angus Finney, The State of European Cinema: A New Dose of Reality (London: Cassell, 1996), 92.
29. Terry Ilott, Budgets and Markets: A Study of the Budgeting of European Film (London: Routledge, 1996), 137.
30. Hill, “Future of European Cinema,” 54, 68.
31. Antoine de Baecque, “Le Cinéma d’Europe à la recherche d’une forme,” Cahiers du Cinéma 455–456 (1992): 78–79.
32. I suspect the Europudding of being more of a sound bite than a helpful descriptive term, and research reveals many more discussions of the concept than examples of its application.
33. Serge Toubiana, “L’Europe! l’europe! l’europe!” Cahiers du Cinéma 455–456 (1992): 38.
34. Quoted in Duncan Petrie, ed., Screening Europe: Image and Identity in Contemporary European Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1992), 67.
35. Examples of national identities abound in European politics, from right-wing nationalisms in France, Germany, and Russia, to the sometimes more liberal rhetoric of Scottish and Catalan nationalism, and, of course, to ethnonationalisms in the Balkans. The increase of European identities, or attempts to produce them, is evidenced in television programming such as MTV (Music Television) Europe, or in the increased media interest in cultural events such as European cities of culture and international festivals. Tellingly, I was surveyed in 1992 by a national polling organization, which wanted to know if I felt more Scottish, more British, or more European.
36. Philip Rosen, “The Concept of National Cinema in the ‘New’ Media Era,” in Historia general del cine: El cine en la era del audiovisual, ed. Manuel Palacio and Santos Zonzunegui (Madrid: Catedra, 1995), 12:25.
37. See, for example, Harlan Kennedy, “Go Deeper,” Film Comment 27, no. 4 (1991): 68–71. Kennedy argues that “Europa is a film so extravagantly playful that it seems like a fire-sale of postmodernist tropes.” He reads this play as productive not of meaning but only of self-referential in-jokes, citing Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Richard Wagner, and Franz Kafka.
38. A similar excavation could be done on Underground’s references, although, as later sections will expand, its relationship to European cultural history is more strained.
39. Steve Neale, “Art Cinema as Institution,” Screen 22, no. 1 (1981): 13.
40. Thomas Elsaesser, “Putting on a Show: The European Art Movie,” Sight and Sound, April 1994, 26.
41. Michael Chion, “Quiet Revolution … and Rigid Stagnation,” October, no. 58 (1991): 75.
42. Andrew Higson, “Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film,” in Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, ed. Lester Friedman (London: University College London Press, 1993), 109–29.
43. Stanko Cerović, “Canned Lies,” 1995, Bosnia Report (available at: http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/bosnia/caned.html [accessed April 6, 2000]).
44. This was undoubtedly a fair point, as many critics discussed Underground as though it were a Bosnian film, and one British newspaper referred to the film’s setting as Slavonia, a geographic term that, in this context, sounds willfully archaic.
45. See various issues of Libération and Le Monde during the summer and fall of 1995, especially Alain Finkielkraut, “L’Imposture Kusturica,” Le Monde, June 2, 1995, 28.
46. Serge Regourd, “Alain Finkielkraut et Jdanov,” Le Monde, June 9, 1995, 16 (my translation). For a lengthier defense of Kusturica, see Goran Gocić, Notes from the Underground: The Cinema of Emir Kusturica (London: Wallflower Press, 2001).
47. Dina Iordanova, “‘Underground’: Historical Allegory or Propaganda?” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19, no. 1 (1999): 69–86. Iordanova has also written on the topic in her books Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media (London: British Film Institute, 2001) and Emir Kusturica (London: British Film Institute, 2002)
48. Iordanova, “Underground,” 69.
49. Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” New Left Review 225 (1997): 37.
50. Žižek claims that “[Kusturica] thereby unknowingly provides the libidinal economy of the ethnic slaughter in Bosnia: the pseudo-Bataillean trance of excessive expenditure, the continuous and mad rhythm of drinking-eating-singing-fornicating. And, therein consists the ’dream’ of the ethinic cleansers, therein resides the answer to the question ’How were they able to do it?’” (ibid., 39–40).
51. Although Jameson would probably agree with him on principle, he might not thank me for the comparison with Finkielkraut’s hyperbolic rhetoric.
52. Finkielkraut, “L’Imposture Kusturica,” 28 (my translation).
53. Cerović, “Canned Lies.”
54. Iordanova, “Underground,” 76–77.
55. Quoted in Regourd, “Alain Finkielkraut et Jdanov,” 16.
56. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
57. A similar rhetorical move, although on the surface it might seem to contradict the idea of an end to history, was the trope of a return to history that attended the fall of state Communism across Eastern Europe. In this discourse, Western Europe became equated with history itself, and the years of Communism were seen as a suspension out of time. For East European countries, the space of “Europe” itself is here defined as being in history, and the return to some conceptual space of “Europe” becomes the same thing as a return to historical time.
58. André Bazin, What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 1:160–61.
59. For a discussion of Svankmejer’s Czech surrealism and the histories involved in his aesthetics, see Michael O’Pray, “Jan Svankmejer: A Mannerist Surrealist,” in Dark Alchemy: The Films of Jan Svankmejer, ed. Peter Hames (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995), 48–77.
60. For the sake of conciseness, I will refer simply to Yugoslavia, unless it is necessary to specify the years after 1992, when I will indicate either the former Yugoslav republics that I am referring to or the region as a whole. Likewise, I will refer simply to Germany unless it is clearly important to specify the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) or the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany).
61. Quoted in Iordanova, “Underground,” 81.
62. John B. Allcock, “Borders, States, Citizenship: Unscrambling Yugoslavia,” in The Changing Shape of the Balkans, ed. F. W. Carter and H. T. Norris (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1986), 63–80; William Carr, A History of Germany, 1815–1990 (London: Arnold, 1991); Slavoj Žižek, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,’” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 988–1009.
63. Joseph Rothschild and Nancy M. Wingfield contend that a logic of spatial expansion constantly underwrote Nazi racial rhetoric: “Indeed, the capacity for … spatial expansion was defined as the test and measure of racial vitality” (Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe Since World War II, 3d ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000], 3).
64. V. R. Berghahn, Modern Germany: Society, Economy and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Carr, History of Germany.
65. Allcock, “Borders, States, Citizenship,” 67.
66. Ibid., 66.
4. Yugoslavia’s Impossible Spaces
1. Joseph Rothschild and Nancy M. Wingfield, Return to Diversity: A Political History of Eastern Central Europe Since World War II, 3d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 263.
2. See, for example, Phyllis Auty, “Yugoslavia,” in Central and South East Europe, 1945–1948, ed. R. R. Betts (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1950), 52–94; L. S. Stavrianos, The Balkans Since 1453 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1958); and Rothschild and Wingfield, Return to Diversity.
3. Auty, “Yugoslavia,” 55.
4. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in Collected Papers, vol. 4, Papers on Metapsychology, trans. Joan Rivière (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 154.
5. Ivo Banac, “Political Change and National Diversity,” Daedalus 119, no. 1 (1990): 141–59.
6. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 155 (my emphasis).
7. Susannah Radstone, “Cinema/Memory/History,” Screen 36, no. 1 (1995): 34–47. While Radstone’s equation of mourning with the social and melancholia with a refusal of the social is perfectly plausible, I read Freud somewhat differently. I argue that while melancholia demonstrates a certain stoppage or problematization of the structure of mourning, it also presumes a relationship with the social. This relationship may be difficult, indirect, or illogical, but it is nonetheless an engagement with the social realm—and one that is crucial to Underground.
8. Dina Iordanova, “‘Underground’: Historical Allegory or Propaganda?” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19, no. 1 (1999): 76. For Iordanova, “Yugo-nostalgia” is a problem endemic to intellectuals who live in the West and have the luxury of claiming not to take sides. She sees this position as tenable only in the West, for, as in Northern Ireland, it becomes impossible not to take up an ethnic identity when one returns. This seems to be a plausible reading, especially given the historical relationship between nostalgia and geographic distance. However, in reading Underground’s textual logic, I am less convinced that this nostalgia can be simply dismissed as politically reactionary. The film displays a nostalgia not for Communism but for a more psychically complex notion of a “before.”
9. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
10. Jacques Derrida, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,” trans. Barbara Johnson, in ibid., xvi.
11. Ibid., xvii.
12. Ibid. It is important to note that Derrida ultimately complicates this argument, claiming that there is no difference between introjection and incorporation.
13. Ibid., xiv.
14. Iordanova, “Underground,” 75.
15. Mark Wheeler, “Not so Black as It’s Painted: The Balkan Political Heritage,” in The Changing Shape of the Balkans, ed. F. W. Carter and H. T. Norris (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), 8.
16. David A. Norris, In the Wake of the Balkan Myth: Questions of Identity and Modernity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).
17. Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” New Left Review 225 (1997): 28–51.
18. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1999), xiii.
19. Timothy Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (New York: Random House, 1989), 179.
20. Leslie H. Gelb, quoted in Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism After the Fall of Socialism (London: Routledge, 1994), 13.
21. Iordanova, “Underground,” 80.
22. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979).
23. Žižek, “Multiculturalism,” 38.
24. Norris, In the Wake of the Balkan Myth, 7.
25. Milica Bakić-Hayden and Robert M. Hayden, “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans’: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics,” Slavic Review 51, no. 1 (1992): 2.
26. Maria Todorova, “The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 453. In an appropriation of postcolonial language, Bosnian writer Dzevad Karahesan speaks as an “Indian,” comparing Bosnians and Yugoslavs in general with colonized peoples in their relationship with western Europe (“Europe’s Wild East, or What Europe’s Failure to Understand Bosnia Says About Europe” [available at: http://www.barnsdle.demon.uk/bosnia/wildes.html]). In addition to the East/West logics of Orientalism and of the Cold War, Balkanism involves a North/South binary that echoes both that of the postcolonial order and that of an earlier organization of European cultural space. As Robert Bideleux argues in relation to eastern Europe in the 1990s: “The almost universal demise of highly centralized communist rule and command economies has cleared the way for a simpler North-South division of the world into ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’ as the more successful East European and East Asian states are gradually joining the rank of the rich North, while the poorer or less successful post-communist states are becoming part of the impoverished South” (“In Lieu of a Conclusion: East Meets West?” in European Integration and Disintegration, ed. Robert Bideleux and Richard Taylor [London: Routledge, 1996], 294). Bakić-Hayden and Hayden add: “This modern economic geography of the world reflects and continues an older European political geography in which ‘undisciplined’ ‘passionate’ peoples of southern Europe (e.g. Italy, Spain, Greece) were contrasted to the industrious, rational cultures of the north” (“Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans,’” 4). As with Orientalism, so with the post-Communist order, the Balkans fit into a cultural space that can be adduced as less civilized, less truly European.
27. Todorova, “The Balkans,” 455. Todorova expands this argument in her book-length study of Balkanism, Imagining the Balkans (London: Oxford University Press, 1997).
28. Norris, In the Wake of the Balkan Myth, 5.
29. Todorova, “The Balkans,” 476.
30. Bideleux, “In Lieu of a Conclusion,” 290.
31. Wheeler, “Not so Black as It’s Painted,” 3.
32. Rothschild and Wingfield, Return to Diversity, 184.
33. Bakić-Hayden and Hayden, “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans,’” 1.
34. Ibid., 5.
35. Taras Kermauner, quoted in ibid., 8.
36. Marko Barisić, quoted in ibid., 9.
37. Ibid., 12.
38. Quoted in Todorova, “The Balkans,” 478.
39. Iordanova, “Underground,” 80.
40. Žižek, “Multiculturalism,” 39.
41. Ibid., 38.
42. Said, Orientalism, 325.
43. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
44. Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2000); Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New York: Verso, 2002).
45. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8.
46. To a lesser extent, this structure mirrors that of the Italian films, in which the south of Italy also signifies a less modern, less progressive space and is, for that exact reason, more able to confront and dislodge the national stereotypes with which the films play.
47. Žižek, “Multiculturalism,” 40–44. Not to mention the Western liberalism that first applauded the breakup of Yugoslavia and then wrung its hands and did nothing while Sarajevo was destroyed.
48. Salecl, Spoils of Freedom, 134. Salecl claims that most of the Western news pictures showing Bosnian Muslim women in headscarves were set up and that the women wear the scarves only on religious occasions or when asked to by Western journalists. The journalists, in Salecl’s analysis, wanted to produce the image of exotic and primitive difference, which would reassure viewers at home that the people of the Balkans were not like them.
49. Todorova, “The Balkans,” 460.
50. Žižek, “Multiculturalism,” 38.
51. This is the sequence that Stanko Cerović particularly objects to, on the grounds that Kusturica singled out Slovene and Croat towns as welcoming to the Nazis (“Canned Lies,” 1995, Bosnia Report [available at: http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/bosnia/caned.html (accessed April 6, 2000)]). Alain Finkielkraut also cites it as evidence of Kusturica’s anti-Slovene bias (“L’Imposture Kusturica,” Le Monde, June 2, 1995, 28).
52. These sequences also point to the practice, particularly in Soviet photographs, of doctoring images to remove those who had been edited out of official history. The mendacity of official Communist Party media is also parodied in the film within the film.
53. Norris, In the Wake of the Balkan Myth, 165.
54. This sequence mocks Communist Party revisionism, as well as any notion of historical realism: when Blacky kills the actor playing Frantz, the confused director applauds his belated expression of realism.
55. Pascal Bonitzer, “Partial Vision, Film and the Labyrinth,” Wide Angle 4, no. 4 (1981): 56–63.
56. Ibid., 63.
57. Norris, In the Wake of the Balkan Myth, 155.
58. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 253–64.
59. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 463.
60. Ibid., 475.
61. Quoted in Derrida, “Fors,” xxi n.13.
62. Charles Najman, “Surimpressions,” Cinématographe 89 (1983): 34–35 (my translation).
63. Daniel J. Goulding, Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 3.
64. In this context, it is instructive to recall Timothy Garton Ash’s description of his conversations with Croats and Serbs in the mid-1990s (History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the 1990s [London: Penguin, 2000], 192). He realized that the phrase “before the war” meant something entirely different to former Yugoslavs than it does to west Europeans. “The War,” meaning the important war, the one that does not require a specific name, remains World War II for those in the West, but in Yugoslavia it now denotes the war of the 1990s.
65. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 474.
66. Here it is useful to distinguish what remains of Yugoslavia—that is, Serbia and Montenegro—from former Yugoslav republics such as Slovenia and Croatia, which by the late 1990s had a stable postwar order.
67. Miriam Hansen, introduction to Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), xxv.
68. Only Besmrtna mladost [Immortal Youth] (Nanović, 1948) takes place in occupied Belgrade.
69. Quoted in Goulding, Liberated Cinema, 8.
70. Ibid., xiv.
71. Ibid., 8.
72. Mira Liehm and Antonin J. Liehm, The Most Important Art: Soviet and Eastern European Film After 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 126.
73. Goulding, Liberated Cinema, 21.
74. Ibid., 19.
75. Liehm and Liehm, Most Important Art, 125.
76. This entwining of the national landscape with the figure of the woman was clearly effective: not only was Slavica enormously successful on its release, but in the years that followed, Slavica became a popular girls’ name in the country.
77. Goulding, Liberated Cinema, 19–20.
78. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 391.
5. Back-Projecting Germany
1. Quoted in Françoise Audé, “Le Point de vue du noyé,” Positif 369 (1991): 40.
2. Il Postino, to take one example, was directed by a British director, Michael Radford, but it is easily considered an Italian film because of its Italian location, narrative, and star (Massimo Troisi).
3. Terry Ilott, Budgets and Markets: A Study of the Budgeting of European Film (London: Routledge, 1996), 108.
4. Bo Christensen, quoted in ibid., 112.
5. Pierre Sorlin, European Cinemas, European Societies, 1939–1990 (London: Routledge, 1991).
6. There are exceptions, of course. In recent years, Land and Freedom deals with the Spanish Civil War, albeit from the narrative perspective of a British volunteer. And many Hollywood films have depicted non-American histories, although some of these would be better thought of as biopics or epics than as history films proper.
7. A series of transnational-themed films in Europe in the 1990s have addressed questions of immigration, ethnicity, and nation. Examples include Beautiful People (Dizdar, 1999) and Steam: The Turkish Bath (Ozpetek, 1997). However, these films are overwhelmingly contemporary in setting and narrative, seeking to document recent cultural change rather than to reread the past.
8. A politically delicate version of this problem beset the designers of the Euro banknotes. They discovered that the original plan of using drawings of actual European landmarks on the notes was controversial, for whichever country’s buildings were represented on the lower denominations would be sure to feel slighted. The solution was to abandon the use of actual places and, rather, design generic castles and public buildings that could connote European styles of architecture without referring to specific countries.
9. Timothy Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (New York: Random House, 1989), 179.
10. Thierry Jousse, “Zentropa,” Cahiers du Cinéma 445 (1991): 35.
11. Andreas Huyssen, “The Voids of Berlin,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (1997): 62. In Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), Huyssen traces connections among many sites of cultural memory, locating Berlin’s voids as part of a contemporary Western crisis of memory and city space that includes the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the Memory Park in Buenos Aires, as well as the site of the World Trade Center in New York.
12. Huyssen, “Voids of Berlin,” 64–65.
13. There is even a minor character in the film named Kessler.
14. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945–1948, trans. Kelly Barry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Schivelbusch argues that while there are other examples of the total destruction of cities—Guernica, Hiroshima—none of those were important big cities beforehand. Berlin was the first annihilation of a previously well known city. Zentropa does not concentrate on Berlin, but the idea of impossible spaces, gaps, and losses connects postwar Germany with the argument I have been making about European spaces more generally.
15. This genre became a frequent reference point in postwar German cinema, especially when New German Cinema began to disinter the legacy of war and to return to the questions of guilt and innocence. Many New German Cinema films repeated the gesture of the ruin film, but in a more politicized fashion: Germany, Pale Mother (Sanders-Brahms, 1980) and The Marriage of Maria Braun (Fassbinder, 1979) are examples of this move.
16. Thomas Elsaesser, “The German Cinema as Image and Idea,” in Encyclopedia of European Cinema, ed. Ginette Vincendeau (London: British Film Institute, 1995), 174.
17. Thierry Jousse, “Europe: L’autre état,” Cahiers du Cinéma 455–456 (1992): 58 (my translation).
18. Michel Celemenski, “Le Mur des lamentations,” Cinématographe 89 (1983): 9–10 (my translation). Celemenski does see disparities in the extent to which the films’ narratives endorse the redemptive power of destruction—he adds that Billy Wilder and Robert Siodmak do not believe in it but more cynically see Berlin returning as soon as possible to how it was before. Nonetheless, the basic structure of his argument places the real spaces of destruction as the locus of this ideology of redemption.
19. Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 247.
20. See, for example, V. R. Berghahn, Modern Germany: Society, Economy and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); William Carr, A History of Germany, 1815–1990 (London: Arnold, 1991); and A. J. Ryder, Twentieth-Century Germany: From Bismarck to Brandt (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973). For a broad view of modern German political history, see Gordon Craig, Germany, 1866–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
21. Elsaesser, New German Cinema, 250.
22. Ibid., 253. It is interesting to compare this criticism with those made against Kusturica that he also depicted the wars in former Yugoslavia to be natural disasters rather than political acts.
23. Jousse, “Zentropa,” 35–36 (my translation).
24. Nicholas Pronay, “‘To Stamp Out the Whole Tradition …,’” in The Political Re-education of Germany and Her Allies After World War II, ed. Nicholas Pronay and Keith Wilson (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble Books, 1985), 1–36. The questionnaires are also discussed in Berghahn, Modern Germany; Carr, History of Germany; and Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1999).
25. For a canonical consideration of mourning in postwar Germany, see Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, trans. Beverley R. Placzek (New York: Grove Press, 1975). The topic has also been addressed in relation to film in Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), and has been important to histories of German cinema and to critical discourse on trauma. See, for instance, Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
26. For the best-known version of this argument, see Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997).
27. Mary Ann Doane, “Dark Continents: Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema,” in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, ed. Mary Ann Doane (New York: Routledge, 1991), 209.
28. In American cinema history, this logic is one predominantly of black and white, an economy in which, as Doane argues in “Dark Continents,” visible racial difference is both a problem and a necessity. In terms of Zentropa, this discourse must be rethought to involve an embodiment of ethnic difference, where the lack of visible difference is exactly the issue.
29. Mazower, Dark Continent, xiii.
30. Amina Danton, “Léo et les loups,” Cahiers du Cinéma 449 (1991): 33–35.
31. For discussions of film noir in Denmark, see Peter Cowie, Françoise Buquet, Risto-Mikael Pitkänen, and Godfried Talboom, Le Cinema des pays nordiques, trans. Giovanna Minelli (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1990); Uffe Stormgaard and Sören Dyssegaard, eds., Danish Films (Copenhagen: Danish Film Institute, 1973); Forsyth Hardy, Scandinavian Film (London: Falcon Press, 1952); Ebbe Neergaard, The Story of Danish Film, trans. Elsa Gress (Copenhagen: Det Danske Selskab, 1962); Morten Piil, “Warmth and Irony, Solidarity and Satire,” trans. David Hohnen, in Danish Films, ed. Stormgaard and Dyssegaard, 2–29; and Astrid Søderbergh Widding, “Denmark,” in Nordic National Cinemas, ed. Tytti Soila, Astrid Søderbergh Widding, and Gunnar Iversen (London: Routledge, 1998), 7–30. While I do not have space to analyze the Danish postwar films in detail, it is clear that the postwar dramas form another set of intertexts for Zentropa.
32. Janey Place, “Women in Film Noir,” in Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London: British Film Institute, 1980), 35–67.
33. Pam Cook, “Duplicity in Mildred Pierce,” in Women in Film Noir, ed. Kaplan, 68–69.
34. This unrepresented past can be thought also in terms of the psychoanalytic structure of the return of the repressed, a trope frequent in the gothic horror narrative that Zentropa also uses. Here, the figure of the Jew stands in for what is repressed by the historical parameters of the narrative and, moreover, what is repressed unsuccessfully by the text. The film does not thematize the Holocaust explicitly—or, indeed, any of the historical realities of Nazism—and it is only in these momentary eruptions of the past into the body of the film that this absence can become a textual presence.
35. Psychoanalysis is a common narrative trope in American film noir, and we often find psychoanalysts working on protagonists in an attempt to bring the past to light. Examples from the 1940s include Spellbound (Hitchcock, 1945) and Whirlpool (Preminger, 1949).
36. Pascal Bonitzer, “Partial Vision, Film and the Labyrinth,” Wide Angle 4, no. 4 (1981): 56–63.
37. Elizabeth Cowie, “Film Noir and Women,” in Shades of Noir: A Reader, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1996), 122.
38. Marc Vernet, “The Filmic Transaction: On the Openings of Films Noirs,” Velvet Light Trap 20 (1983): 8. This neat structure is precisely a part of Zentropa’s referential relationship to the history of noir: the clarity of the correspondence is what signifies in this mannered redoubling of history.
39. Doane, “Dark Continents,” 1.
40. In the East, the spectator fills in her own primitivism, seeing the East as automatically primitive, and thus Underground can make its point without special effort, but in the West, the idea of primitive space must be produced—hence werewolves and vampires, signifiers of the archaic, the gothic, the dangerous.
41. Bonitzer, “Partial Vision,” 56–63. Bonitzer discusses Jaws (Spielberg, 1975), in which the spectator knows there is a shark but for much of the film is unable to see it. The other use of off-screen space is in a film like Cat People, where we are uncertain as to whether Irena is a monster or whether there is some other, rational explanation for the disturbing events of the narrative.
42. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 417–18.
43. On this point, it is useful to note that Jacques Tourneur directed Cat People and Berlin Express, both of which find repeated reference in Zentropa.
44. John Berks, “What Alice Does: Looking Otherwise at The Cat People,” Cinema Journal 32, no. 1 (1992): 26–42; Robin Wood, “The Shadow Worlds of Jacques Tourneur,” Film Comment 8, no. 2 (1972): 64–70; Tom Gunning, “‘Like unto a Leopard’: Figurative Discourse in Cat People and Todorov’s The Fantastic,” Wide Angle 10, no 3 (1988): 30–39. The relationship of this sexuality to a discourse of foreignness is taken up in several readings. Wood, for example, describes the film in terms of “honest, upright, uncomplicated Americans … who are impinged upon by outside ‘foreign’ forces at once sinister, mysterious and fascinating” (“Shadow Worlds,” 65–66). And in “What Alice Does,” Berks makes a case for historical analysis, reading the film, like film noir, in the context of postwar anxieties about women in the workplace.
45. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 49.
46. Or, more correctly, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.
47. Cat People is another film to narrate the failure of psychoanalysis: the analyst attempts to cure Irena’s sexual neurosis but is thwarted by the reality of her monstrosity.
48. Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Werewolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition (New York: Causeway Books, 1973); Perry Biddiscombe, Werwolf! The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944–1946 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998); Adam Douglas, The Beast Within (London: Chapmans, 1992).
49. Douglas, Beast Within, 26.
50. Biddescombe, Werwolf! 6.
51. “Two Neo-Nazis in Russia Receive Prison Terms,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 31, 1996, 6E.
52. See, for example, Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993).
53. In addition to these monsters that are un-European within Europe, there are also those that situate horror elsewhere, such as the Orientalist mummy.
54. Petiot himself is not a Nazi, and he appears to select Jews merely because they are easy targets. But there is an obvious metaphor at work in his mass murders: this is clearest in the scene where the furnace in which he burns his victims’ bodies is discovered at work. This element of the text seems less interesting than the uses of the vampire, and it is certainly more direct.
55. Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: Penguin, 1993), 28. For context on Dracula’s colonial logic, see Stephen D. Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,” Victorian Studies 33, no. 4 (1990): 621–45.
56. Outside Europe, we can find related examples of films that use the horror genre to trope a racialized ideological reversal. In the South African film Pure Blood (Kaplan, 2000), the white racists of South Africa’s apartheid regime are vampires, whose desire for racial purity manifests itself in a literal blood lust. This film is also an art film, although it more extensively takes on the forms of the splatter horror picture.
57. Quoted in Harlan Kennedy, “Go Deeper,” Film Comment 27, no. 4 (1991): 69.
58. Marc Vernet, Figures de l’absence (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile, 1988). Vernet takes the concept of superimposition at its most broad to mean a doubled layering of the image, covering a variety of technological effects. The French word surimpression gives a slightly different meaning than the English “superimposition,” a distinction that does not alter our understanding of Vernet’s argument but does allow for a more inclusive sense of the doubled image.
59. This nonmatching of scale, where two different-size objects coexist within the frame, also appears in the mise-en-scène in the manner of a visual joke. One example of this is the train set, where Katharina and Leo lying among the tiny trains repeats the visual logic of superimposition. Another is the scene in which Leo is weighed on giant, out-of-proportion scales, a choice of object that is itself a visual pun.
60. Vernet, Figures de l’absence, 63 (my translation).
61. Stephen Heath, “Narrative Space,” Screen 17, no. 3 (1976): 52.
62. Andrew Higson, “Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film,” in Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, ed. Lester Friedman (London: University College London Press, 1993), 109–29; Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.
63. Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 89.
64. Ibid., 88.
65. Christian Metz, L’Énonciation impersonelle, ou, le site du film (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1991).
66. Vernet, Figures de l’absence, 64.
67. Ibid., 60.
68. Sean Cubitt, “Le réel, c’est l’impossible: The Sublime Time of Special Effects,” Screen 40, no. 2 (1999): 123.
69. There are many examples of this effect: another is when Leo stands outside the church, where the projected background is extremely distorted.
70. Jousse, “Zentropa,” 35.
71. Stephen Brockmann, “The Reunification Debate,” New German Critique 52 (1991): 3–30.
72. Gareth Pritchard, “National Identity in a United and Divided Germany,” in European Integration and Disintegration, ed. Robert Bideleux and Richard Taylor (London: Routledge, 1996), 166.
73. Quoted in Brockmann, “Reunification Debate,” 4.
74. Andreas Huyssen, “After the Wall: The Failure of German Intellectuals,” New German Critique 52 (1991): 109–43; quoted in Brockmann, “Reunification Debate,” 27.
75. For another expression of this idea, see Sander Gilman, “German Reunification and the Jews,” New German Critique 52 (1991): 173–91. For Gilman, the Berlin Wall appeared as a scar on the German body politic, signifying not the Cold War but guilt and punishment for the Holocaust. What is particularly interesting is the repetition of this discourse of borders as traumatic and the way in which spatial signifiers double back on historical ones.
76. Ron Pryce, “The Maastricht Treaty and the New Europe,” in Maastricht and Beyond: Building the European Union, ed. John Pinder, Andrew Duff, and Roy Pryce (London: Routledge, 1994), 3–18. The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was the first stage toward building European economic cooperation and is widely seen as the beginnings of what would become the European Economic Community. See also Desmond Dinan, Ever Closer Union? An Introduction to the European Community (Boulder, Colo.: Rienner, 1994).
77. Dinan, Ever Closer Union? 184.
78. We can constrast Zentropa with another film that uses back projections to stage German history: Hitler: A Film from Germany (Syberberg, 1978). Here projection is used as part of an explicitly national discourse on the experience of German identity and engagement with the past. For readings on this question, see Timothy Corrigan, New German Film: The Displaced Image (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 154; Elsaesser, New German Cinema, 264–67; and Corey K. Creekmur, “The Cinematic Photograph and the Possibility of Mourning,” Wide Angle 9, no. 1 (1987): 41–49.
79. The European subject may not exist, but the ability to propose such a thing meaningfully is readable as a specifically west European point of view. While Underground’s attempt to include an eastern country within Europe meets with the impossibility of abjection, a west European film has more access to the discourses of international unity.
80. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 462–63.
81. Ibid., 388.
6. Toward a Theory of European Space
1. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.
2. Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1990); Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (London: British Film Institute, 1994); Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983).
3. Michael Rogin, “‘Make My Day!’: Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial Politics,” Representations 29 (1990): 106.
4. Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Transparency of Spectacle: Meditations on the Moving Image (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 5.
5. Anton Kaes, From Hitler to “Heimat”: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 16.
6. Quoted in Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 202.
7. Stephen Barber, Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space (London: Reaktion Books, 2002).
8. Edward Yang’s films include Taipei Story (1985), The Terrorizer (1986), and A Brighter Summer Day (1991). Tsai Ming-Liang’s earlier films include Rebels of the Neon God (1992) and Vive l’amour (1994), both of which outline an alienated, bleakly spectacular Taipei.
9. Slavoj Žižek, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,’” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 1004.