The Routledge Companion to European Cinema

Book excerpt: "This Companion's guiding vision of Europe is that of a messy place or idea that emerges from multiple images from multiple perspectives and multiple positions. To adopt Italo Calvino's phrase, European cinema is the product of a 'collection of voices' coming together as a 'multiple discovery' of various Europes and cinemas. Europe is imprecisely circumscribed, in a permanent state of transition, transformation and contestation, deployed in the service of varied interests, in shifting contexts of power, never self-same, nor reducible to something fixed, legible, or knowable. Film scholarship in and/or about Europe published in English has paid far greater attention to some issues than others. French, Italian and German cinema have been centred as Europe's core cinemas. This book is not intended to make up for this historic bias in one swoop. It is offered instead as a way of engaging with European cinema that attends to questions of European colonial, racialized and gendered power, seeks to decentre Europe itself (not merely its putative centres) and interrogate Europe's various conceptualizations from a variety of viewpoints. This Companion embraces messiness by refusing to impose any other prior interpretation on Europe or its cinema. This book asks - rather than prescribes - what European cinema tells us about Europe. This latter is understood with an open mind as the broad, complex and heterogeneous community/ies produced in and by European films. This large and flexible label takes in Kurdish, Hollywood and Singapore cinema as comfortably as the cinema of Poland, Spanish colonial films or the European gangster genre. Individual films (e.g., Vincent Deutre's Orlando Ferito, 2013), film movements (e.g., Neo-Queer Cinema), filmmakers (e.g., Fred Zinnemann), stars (e.g., Omar Sharif), scholarship (e.g., Hungarian film historiography), representations and identities (e.g., German queer of colour cinema), audiences (e.g., Bulgarian viewers of Stephan Komandarev's films), production practices (e.g., Moroccan film funding), genres (e.g., the Giallo) and much else are analysed in their context(s) so as to construct an image of Europe as it emerges from Europe's film corpus"--