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Modern European cinema and love examines the work of nine European directors working from the 1950s onwards whose films contain stories about and reflections on romantic love and marriage. The directors are: Ingmar Bergman, Alain Resnais, Michelangelo Antonioni, Agnès Varda, François Truffaut, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer. There is also an opening chapter on Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game. The book is informed by theories on love and marriage proposed by American philosopher Stanley Cavell. Two of Cavell’s main concepts, acknowledgment and remarriage, play key roles in the book. Cavell envisions, especially in his writings on cinema, a notion of marriage that is based on love and mutual equality between the members of a romantic couple. The argument of Modern European cinema and love is that some of the key filmmakers of European cinema after 1950 make themes of acknowledgment and remarriage central to their concerns. The book also engages in extended discussions of Leo Bersani’s writings on Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and others in terms of what Bersani calls connectedness. While the book is ultimately critical of Bersani’s theories, his work nevertheless allows the full scope of the material in Modern European cinema and love to achieve its aims.
This book aims to provide an overview of the history and development of film noir and neo-noir in five major European cinemas, France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy, written by leading authorities in their respective fields. It contains a bibliography and extensive filmography. The book describes the distinctiveness of film noir or neo-noir within its respective national cinema at particular moments, but also discusses its interaction with American film noir and neo-noir. It commences with a reflection on the significant similarities and differences that emerge in these accounts of the various European film noirs, and on the nature of this dialogue, which suggests the need to understand film noir as a transnational cultural phenomenon. The problems of defining film noir and the reasons why it has almost always been regarded solely as an American form are discussed. Because British film noir had never received critical recognition, Andrew Spicer argues that British neo-noir had to reinvent itself anew, with little, if any, explicit continuity with its predecessors. The book also explores the changes in the French polar after 1968: the paranoia of the political thriller and the violence of the postmodern and naturalistic thriller. That new noir sensibility is different enough, and dark enough, from what preceded it, for us to call it 'hyper-noir'. British neo-noirs are highly intertextual and allusive, both thematically and visually. The book also discusses German neo-noir, Spanish film noir and neo-noir, and the Italian film noir.
In a European country like Britain you would normally expect the most interesting films to be produced within the area of art cinema. Alan Lovell 1 Art cinema, as a significant historical element of a national film culture and a counterbalance to the international power of the American cinema, has a secure place, established very firmly in the 1920s, in the histories of the major European cinemas, and represented, in particular, by the films of France
That All There Is? (1992), Anderson included the occasional ‘ Sequence touch’, not least in his initial quotation from the Free Cinema manifesto, ‘Perfection is not an aim’. As to the upshot of Anderson’s mission, Sequence was possibly more influential on film-makers and critics than Anderson himself. Auteurism and art cinema, for good and for bad, came to dominate the European cinema after the
economic experts as the best way of overcoming the crisis of European cinema. Seen by most film critics as the most Americanised filmmaker of his generation, Besson learned the rules of the contemporary film market with his own films, and applies them to the promotion of projects aimed at the international market. The production and distribution strategies of Besson’s companies reflect the coherence of a
throughout this book, are crucial for understanding what was at stake in modern European cinema. I modestly claim, at any rate, that these themes are crucial for a small group of filmmakers in France, Italy and Sweden. Thus, Modern European Cinema and Love examines discourses of love and marriage in a range of European filmmakers who were active from the 1950s onwards. I suggested in the Introduction that, theoretically, my discussions are guided on the one hand by the defence of romantic discourses advanced by Stanley Cavell, and
By 1958 British production houses were becoming increasingly conscious of the importance of continental as well as American markets. Woman in a Dressing Gown and Ice Cold in Alex had both been premiered with striking success at the Berlin Film Festival, and Rank had begun to use German stars to ease its product into European cinemas. The One that Got Away , with Hardy Krueger playing the
this New Novelist’s initial active engagement with the third art in writing the script for Alain Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad , asking to what extent this icon of avant-garde European cinema may be considered a ‘Robbe-Grillet’ film, and how it prepared him for the rest of his film-making career. This, therefore, will be the subject of Chapter 1 . 41 References
Introduction Spanish cinema is known for producing more explicit images (of both sex and violence) than most other contemporary European cinemas. On the wider international circuit, this reputation has been fuelled by legal and media controversies surrounding the US release of films such as Vicente Aranda’s Amantes (1991) as well as Pedro
This chapter shows Asquith's contribution to the British film industry. In a career lasting from the 1920s to the 1960s, Asquith directed thirty-five feature films and also worked in a variety of capacities on other films: foreign-version direction, screenwriting, and second unit work. He made a number of short films; some were documentary drama films made for the Ministry of Information during the Second World War, others were made for charities such as the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association and St Dunstan's, a centre for the blind. During Asquith's career, the industry went through numerous changes, responding to the challenge of Hollywood, to the example of European cinema and to major events such as the Second World War, constructing a body of films that prompted both despair and enthusiastic endorsement by critics at various times. The twenty or so titles chosen from the thirty-five features that Asquith directed reflect a number of things, not least of which is ease of availability. However, the selection represents a diverse career in which art cinema, middlebrow culture and popular art are reflected, although the films chosen are not intended to indicate any particular ranking in Asquith's career as a whole.