The Europeanization of Cinema

About the Book

Halle explicates this innovative concept by reinvigorating the theory of the cinematic apparatus, exploring anew the relationships between cinema and the social order. Focusing especially on films about borders, borderlands, and cultural zones, he shows how interzones have manifested in distinct periods of cinema history.

Early Central European cinema, he argues, builds interzones by exploring the tensions and points of connection between German, Russian, and Turkish imperialism on the one hand and nation building on the other. Following World War II and the Cold War, the focus shifts to moments of "first contact" between former antagonists: Germany and Poland, East and West Germany, and the like. Documentaries of these moments, Halle asserts, literally envision relationships that prefigure today's interzonal Europe.

That Europe emerges in twenty-first-century cinema, which uses handheld cameras, digitization, and other technological advancements to probe questions of spatial relations, migration, globalization, and transnationalism. The interzones of European films distributed overseas, and of African and Asian films co-sponsored with European funds, raise equally important issues of neocolonialism and cultural imperialism.

Ultimately, Halle argues that today's cinema both produces and reflects imaginative communities. He demonstrates how, rather than simply erasing boundaries, the European Union has instead fostered the cognitive (as opposed to geopolitical) mapping of points of distinction and of solidarity. The result is a network of cultural interzones, depicted in and engendered by films that explore the new Europe's processes and limits of connectivity, tolerance, and cooperation.