The increased mobility of people within Europe has shaken up the sociogeographical fixity of a continent of nation states, creating new modes of transnational culture and becoming a recurrent subject in what Luisa Rivi calls ‘declined national cinema’ (Rivi). Rivi appropriates Gianni Vattimo's notion of ‘weak’ or ‘declined’ thought – pensiero debole – and transfers it to the debate on national cinema. The notion of pensiero debole refers to the exhaustion – but not the vanishing – of the project of modernity (the belief in reason, progress, history, the nation state, etc.). In The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, Vattimo argues that the postmodern is ‘not only […] something new in relation to the modern, but also […] a dissolution of the category of the new – in other words […] an experience of “the end of history” rather than … the appearance of a different stage of history’ (4). Vattimo does not read the postmodern dehistoricisation of experience nostalgically or pessimistically. Rather, he argues that the ideas of Nietzsche and Heidegger

Heidegger's term Verwindung seeks to describe the overcoming of modernity and metaphysics, ‘a going-beyond that is both an acceptance and a deepening’ (Vattimo, 172). Analysing the etymology of the term Verwindung, Vattimo underscores the connotation of ‘convalescence’ (to be healed, cured of an illness), also linked to resignation, and the connotation of distortion (to turn, to twist).