Popular European cinema in the 2000s: cinephilia, genre and heritage

Abstract

The twenty-first century has witnessed a reinvigorated championing of auteurism in European cinema, centred on directors – many of them established veterans from previous decades – such as Pedro Costa, the Dardenne brothers, Michael Haneke, Cristian Mungiu, Christian Petzold, Alexander Sokurov, Béla Tarr and Lars von Trier. This renewed orientation towards art cinema practices (e.g. ‘slow’ cinema, new forms of cinematic realism) and particular channels of circulation (especially the festival circuit) is nowadays articulated within a globally expanded framework (see Galt & Schoonover 2010) that circumvents the Eurocentrism of previous understandings of art cinema. As early as 2005, Thomas Elsaesser noted that European art cinema had irrevocably lost its special status as an aesthetic blueprint and point of reference, becoming one facet within a decentred, post-national and polylocal, new global network of world cinemas (2005: 485–513). At a more fundamental level, European cinema and cinema as a medium itself have undergone radical transformations as a result of a proliferation of media platforms, the technological shift from analogue to digital and new modes of circulation and consumption (cf. Bordwell 2012). Set against these broader contexts and influences, I want to explore in this chapter what, if anything, the concept of ‘popular’ European cinema still signifies today, in terms of this being a productive category for academic enquiry, as a viable form of cinema and as an object of cinephilic attention.

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ORCID for Tim Bergfelder: orcid.org/0000-0001-6585-6123

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