Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal

Une goutte d’eau, une goutte d’étoiles. Microcinématographie et avant-garde dans les années 1920

Maria Ida Bernabei — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A long-standing link exists between avant-garde and scientific cinema. In the 1920s, in fact, the former contributed to the construction of the latter: on the one hand, by its systematic inclusion in film clubs’ and film societies’ screening programs; on the other hand, by catalyzing the theoretical debate on the medium specificity because of the specific techniques it develops. Through the texts by philosophers, film makers and theorists of the time (Walter Benjamin, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Émile Vuillermoz, László Moholy-Nagy among others), this essay examines the role of microscope films in the construction of 1920s film theory, discussing several tropes and key concepts such as pure cinema, cinégraphie integrale, rhythm theory and optical “unconscious”.

Neoliberalism and the Mutations of Social Realism in Contemporary European Cinema

Temenuga Trifonova — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last couple of decades film scholars have begun building a critical vocabulary to theorize the new kinds of social relations depicted in the new European cinema of precarity, from “flexible solidarity” and “precarious intimacies” to “the gift economy” and “cruel optimism”. Although the European cinema of precarity continues the legacy of older film traditions like French poetic realism, Italian neorealism and British kitchen sink realism, thus inscribing itself within a well-established European tradition of social realism, the realism of precarity films is often refracted through specific genre tropes or filmic devices—e.g., allegory, experimental cinema techniques, black comedy, cinema verité cinematography etc.—as though social realism is no longer able to render visual the hidden pathologies of neoliberalism or to capture the complexity of Europe’s current political, economic, and moral crisis.

Theatrical Release Windows: A Playground for “Cultural Exception” Policies?

Mariagrazia Fanchi, Massimo Locatelli — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In recent years, cinema culture in Europe has undergone a substantial reorganization of production models and a profound change of public intervention in favor of the film industry. This article aims to reconstruct the different combinations between protectionist and liberalist policies through a comparative analysis of the contemporary European national cinema aids, identifying differences and shared trends and verifying the existence of a “continental” cinema support model. Therefore the article will analyze public support policies on cinema production, distribution, and exhibition in the EU and in several of its member states (including France, Germany, England, Spain, and Italy) from 2018 to 2022. Focusing on theatrical release windows, this essay will attempt to answer the following main questions: is there a “European” mark in policies in favor of cinema? Can we speak of a “European” model (even outside the European Union) of support for the cinema? What are the elements and actions that define it? What are the sectors of the industry in which it is most fully expressed (production, distribution, exhibition)? And what are the themes and areas in which, on the contrary, national differences (sometimes driven by resurgent nationalisms) are most marked?

Cinema Co-production, Film Distribution in Multiple Languages and Inequality in the Global Language System: A Call for Robust Public Data

Alan Shipman, Ann Vogel — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Language has proven to be an important factor in film performance models, film finance considerations, and festival program selections. This essay uses multi-year global data sets (UN and supplementary databases) to analyse the relationship between the languages in which a film is produced and offered to cinemagoers on the one hand, and the co-production activities and dynamics which engender these patterns on the other hand. While European Commission policies, underlining the peculiar “linguistic polity”of the European Union, have been influential in the making of multilingual cinema productions motivated by subsidy rules, taxation and grant schemes, the pattern is rather global, reflecting uptake of cinematic product in many “territories” and the mobilization of film across national and regional language divides. The analysis shows that Europeanization has much wider implications beyond Europeans’ cultural consumption and identity construction, with Europe’s co-production policies casting a wider net of cultural resistance to Global Hollywood and its majority of English-language blockbusters as well as attending to language preservation in the European neighborhood in addition to Europe, where local and regional heritage policies are well instituted. The study examines the results against Abram de Swaan’s theory of the Global Language System, examining the Q-value theory to the language patterns emerging from film productions with multiple languages, which must be assessed in its relation to cultural consumption that may not follow from formal schooling and habitus formation.

Audience Impact of European Co-production: The Case of Quo Vadis, Aida?

Petar Mitrić, Tamara Kolarić — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

European co-productions are usually the most ambitious European films, combining multiple sources of financing and targeting both transnational audiences and critical acclaim. However, their success with audiences is often quite limited in terms of admissions. In this article, we investigate the sources of this audience challenge for European co-productions adopting the perspective centered on audience design. We look at what we define as “ideal European co-productions”—films of high artistic value with festival visibility, an “ideal script” and clear socio-cultural and political value. We identify, drawing primarily on literature in theatre studies, four different groups of target audiences for these films—average spectators, emancipated spectators, spect-actors and emancipated spect-actors—and offer a framework for understanding what mobilizes these audience groups to seek out and view films. We then use Quo Vadis, Aida?, a 2020 film by Jasmila Žbanić, as an in-depth case study to show how, in practice, a lack of strategy at both production and distribution stage can result in failing to reach the target audiences even for films that show significant audience potential and have well-defined socio-political goals. We end the study pointing to the limitations of our work as well as offering suggestions for further research and policy development.

Decentering Nations: The Role of National Institutes for Culture in the Promotion and Circulation of European Cinema

Annalisa Pellino — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When considering the circulation of European films across Europe within a post-national framework, an investigation on the role of national institutes for culture could offer a particular take on the “Europeanisation” (Carpentier 2021) process through cinema-related initiatives. If they were conceived to promote national heritage and values, they have found themselves in the ambivalent position of pursuing their main goal within a changing institutional and cultural context that requires more integrated approaches, since the beginning of the 1990s, namely after the end of the Cold War. Notably, since the creation of the European National Institutes for Culture network (hereafter EUNIC) in 2006, they have been asked to cooperate and to valorise the heterogeneity and multiplicity of European subjectivities and communities, according to the motto “unity in diversity” (Liz 2016; Bondebjerg, Novrup Redvall, and Higson 2014). In particular, this research concentrates on the circulation, among European and Italian institutes for culture, of films that deal with European issues, and has reflected on how they affect the construction of a transnational European identity by addressing sensitive topics.

Popular European Cinema in the Platform Era: Circulation Cultures on YouTube

Valerio Coladonato, Dom Holdaway, Arianna Vietina — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last two decades, the platformization of viewing practices has transformed patterns of circulation, multiplying the possibilities for engagement with cinema: not only new viewing spaces themselves but also vast amounts of readily accessible related content (trailers, publicity, clips, etc.). The aim of this essay is to consider how these changes have impacted the potential for popular European cinema—which has historically strayed little from each national domestic market—to travel abroad and outside of “traditional” contexts of consumption. We shed some light on this question by examining how content related to a handful of highly successful European films is used on YouTube, the most widespread and accessible repository of online videos. Following a discussion of the changes in the digital distribution sphere, we identify the most lucrative European films from the five largest film markets of the continent—France, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain—since the launch of YouTube. Isolating seven examples, we then trace out their presence on the platform, questioning what kind of content relating to the films is available; engagement rates with these videos; indicators of local and global consumption; and what these results can tell us about the spectatorship habits of European cinema today.

La collecte statistique sur le commerce cinématographique entre les États-Unis et l’Europe: une esquisse historique

André Lange — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article provides a history of the implementation, in the United States and Europe, of collection processes on cinema attendance, on the results obtained by films in terms of admissions or box-office receipts, and on the international trade of films. The contribution shows how the US industry was already from the 1910s concerned with obtaining a statistical portrait of European markets while efforts to set up an integrated European statistical tool, imagined in the 1920s, did not come to fruition. This was only achieved in the 1990s with the creation of the European Audiovisual Observatory and its LUMIERE database.

Quo Vadis, Cinema Europaeum? Reflections on European Cinema in Digital Times

Daniel Biltereyst, Elena Gipponi, Andrea Miconi — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Michael Gott, Screen Borders. From Calais to cinéma-monde, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023, pp. 216

Massimiliano Coviello — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Precarity in European Film: Depictions and Discourses, Edited by Elisa Cuter, Guido Kirsten, and Hanna Prenzel, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022, pp. 374

Eduard Cuelenaere — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Jussi Parikka, Operational Images: From the Visual to the Unvisual, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023, pp. 296

Barbara Grespi — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Horizon 2020 – EUMEPLAT – European Media Platforms: Assessing Negative and Positive Externalities for European Culture

Andrea Miconi — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

ABSTRACT PRIN 2017 – Italian Na(rra)tives: The International Circulation of “Brand Italy” in the Media

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

ABSTRACT PRIN 2017 – DaMA – Drawing a Map of Italian Actresses in Writing

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

ABSTRACT PRIN 2017 – Modes, Memories and Cultures of Italian Film Production 1949–1976

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

ABSTRACT PRIN 2017 – Free-range chicken. Cinema and the New Culture of Consumption in Italy (1950–1973)

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000