An Impossible Project

Any book about European cinema should start with the statement that there is no such thing as European cinema, and that yes, European cinema exists, and has existed since the beginning of cinema a little more than a hundred years ago. It depends on where one places oneself, both in time and in space. In time: for the first fifteen years, it was France that defined European cinema, with Pathé and Gaumont educating Europe's film-going tastes, inspiring filmmakers and keeping the Americans at bay. In the 1920s, the German film industry, under Erich Pommer, tried to create a “Cinema Europe,” involving France and Britain. It soon floundered, and Hollywood became not only the dominant force; it also was very successful in dividing the Europeans among themselves. For a brief period in the late 1920s, it seemed the Russians might be Europe's inspiration. Instead, from 1935 onwards, it was Nazi cinema that dominated the continent until 1945. The years from 1945 to the 1980s were the years of the different national cinemas, or rather: the period when new waves, national (art) cinemas and individual auteurs made up a shifting set of references that defined what was meant by European cinema. Geopolitically speaking on the other hand, when looking at Europe from, say, the American perspective, the continent is indeed an entity, but mostly one of cinema audiences that still make up Hollywood's most important foreign market.

Looked at from the “inside,” however, the conclusion has to be that European cinema does not (yet) exist: the gap between Central/Eastern Europe and Western Europe remains as wide as ever, and even in Western Europe, each country has its own national cinema, increasingly defended as a valuable treasure and part of an inalienable national patrimony. Since the nouvelle vague, French cinema, in particular, insists on its long and proud tradition as the natural home of the seventh art. In the United Kingdom, British cinema (once called a ‘contradiction in terms’ by François Truffaut) has over the last twenty years been reinstated, re-evaluated and unapologetically celebrated, even if its economic ups and downs, its many false dawns as an art cinema, as well as its surprisingly frequent commercial successes put it in a constant if often covert competition with Hollywood.