In 2004 Visions of Europe, a compilation of twenty-five shorts by selected filmmakers, one from each member country of the European Union, was released. Each director had been given a budget of $41,000 and asked to ‘make a film featuring a personal vision of current or future life in the EU’. Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr's entry, Prologue, is a wordless black-and-white film comprised of a single shot in medium close-up, tracking across people waiting in line outside a brick building. The camera glides past the more or less impassive faces of scores of men and some women, predominantly middle-aged or older. Entropy is a recurring phenomenon in Tarr's work, an inexorable force gradually gathering pace in films such as Sátántangó (1994) and The Turin Horse (2011). But in Prologue the entropic process is already long developed; we witness it at a relatively late moment. Although the short is deliberately elliptical, it is most readable as a figuration of systemic de-industrialisation. The silent, docile bodies queuing patiently retain the somatic discipline of a workforce, internalised in their corporeal carriage. But this is not the start or end of a shift. Instead they are waiting to collect a small handout of a drink and a snack (whether from a charity or the vestiges of state provision is unclear). These are not workers leaving the factory but ex-workers whose factories, shut down or relocated, have left them.

Since 1989 de-industrialisation has taken on a particular inflection in the formerly state socialist countries of the Eastern bloc (of which more below), but it can also be seen as part of a wider process of economic restructuring, outsourcing and increased financialisation across the global North. As such it is one of a series of interlinked trends and shorter-term shocks that have shaped economies, polities and societies in Europe and elsewhere in the last three decades. We adumbrate them here, alongside an introduction to cinematic responses to these upheavals. The chapters gathered in this book investigate the output of selected European film-makers, encompassing established auteurs and lesser-known directors working in diverse formats (including fiction films, documentaries and videos posted on YouTube), and drawn from not only the dominant, central nations of Europe but also those on its peripheries. Our contributors combine aesthetic, thematic and political analyses in order to explore how films have offered various mediations, understandings and commentaries, both explicit and indirect, on this lengthy period of instability.