European Cinema is the first book to provide overviews of key movements in European film history, from the inception of the medium in 1895 to the present. This text includes accessible introductions to traditions as diverse as early Soviet cinema, German Expressionism, Surrealism, Italian Neoralism, the French New Wave, Ealing Comedy, East-Central European cinema, Contemporary Spanish cinema, and much more. Top international scholars specially commissioned for this volume examine artistic developments in their industrial and more broadly historical context. The book is divided chronologically into three sections, making it ideal for use in university film courses, and includes an invaluable glossary (comprising historical and foreign-language terms as well as technical terminology).

Presenting new and diverse scholarship, this wide-ranging collection of 43 original chapters asks what European cinema tells us about Europe. The book engages with European cinema that attends to questions of European colonial, racialized and gendered power; seeks to decentre Europe itself (not merely its putative centres); and interrogate Europe’s various conceptualizations from a variety of viewpoints. It explores the broad, complex and heterogeneous community/ies produced in and by European films, taking in Kurdish, Hollywood and Singapore cinema as comfortably as the cinema of Poland, Spanish colonial films or the European gangster genre. Chapters cover numerous topics, including individual films, film movements, filmmakers, stars, scholarship, representations and identities, audiences, production practices, genres and more, all analysed in their context(s) so as to construct an image of Europe as it emerges from Europe’s film corpus. The Companion opens the study of European cinema to a broad readership and is ideal for students and scholars in film, European studies, queer studies and cultural studies, as well as historians with an interest in audio-visual culture, nationalism and transnationalism, and those working in language-based area studies.

From hairdressers and caregivers to reproductive workers and power-suited executives, images of women's labor have powered a fascinating new movement within twenty-first-century European cinema. Social realist dramas capture precarious working conditions. Comedies exaggerate the habits of the global managerial class. Stories from countries battered by the global financial crisis emphasize the patriarchal family, debt, and unemployment. Barbara Mennel delves into the ways these films about female labor capture the tension between feminist advances and their appropriation by capitalism in a time of ongoing transformation. Looking at independent and genre films from a cross-section of European nations, Mennel sees a focus on economics and work adapted to the continent's varied kinds of capitalism and influenced by concepts in second-wave feminism. More than ever, narratives of work put female characters front and center--and female directors behind the camera. Yet her analysis shows that each film remains a complex mix of progressive and retrogressive dynamics as it addresses the changing nature of work in Europe.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, transnational European cinema has risen, not only in terms of production but also in terms of a growing focus on multiethnic themes within the European context. This shift from national to trans-European filmmaking has been profoundly influenced by such historical developments as the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent ongoing enlargement of the European Union. In European Cinema after the Wall: Screening East–West Mobility, Leen Engelen and Kris Van Heuckelom have brought together essays that critically examine representations of post-1989 migration from the former Eastern Bloc to Western Europe, uncovering an array of common tropes and narrative devices that characterize the influences and portrayals of immigration. Featuring essays by contributors from backgrounds as divergent as film studies, Slavic and Russian studies, comparative literature, sociology, contemporary history, and communication and media studies, this volume will appeal to scholars of film, European history, and those interested in the impact of migration, diaspora, and the global flow of cinematic culture.

'European Cinema in Crisis' examines the conflicting terminologies that have dominated the discussion of the future of European film-making. It takes a fresh look at the ideological agendas, from 'avante-garde cinema' to the high/low culture debate and the fate of popular European cinema.

Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film is a comprehensive study of the cinematic traditions of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia from 1945 to the present day, exploring the major schools of filmmaking and the main stages of development across the region during the period of state socialism up until the end of the Cold War, as well as more recent transformations post-1989. In encouraging a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of European cinema, much needed for the new unified Europe `enlarged' towards its Eastern periphery, this book maps out the interactions, key concerns, thematic spheres and stylistic particularities that make the cinema of East Central Europe a vital part of European film tradition. Cinema of the Other Europe is thus a timely appraisal of Film Studies debates ranging from the representation of history and memory, the reassessment of political content, ethics and society, the rehabilitation of popular cinema, and the rethinking of national and regional cinemas in the context of globalisation.

The survival of cinema in Europe and the analysis of its heritage are key issues for the new century. This book asks how we can define European cinema and how it should be studied. It provides an overview of the problems, traditions and key questions that have informed the study of European cinema, investigating the links and tensions between Europe and Hollywood and exploring the different experiences of national identities within a common European framework. Twelve case studies of individual European films ranging from The Battleship Potemkin and The Lodger, to La Haine and Trainspotting, illustrate the distinctiveness and variety of cinema in Europe as well as the various critical methods by which it can be studied. With its detailed analysis of films from several European countries including Britain and Russia, the book encourages a comparative approach and raises urgent questions about the future of European cinema in the context of globalization. It will be of interest to students in Film Studies, European Studies and Modern European Languages and Cultures.