Europe: The Double Perspective

From these two quotations one might derive a somewhat fanciful proposition. What if – at the end of the 19th century – Europe had been discovered by America rather than America being “discovered” by the Europeans at the end of the 15th century? Counterfactual as this may seem, in a sense this is exactly what did happen, because with Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Gertrud Stein, Josephine Baker and so many other US American writers, musicians, and artists exiling themselves temporarily or permanently in “Europe,” they gave a name to something that before was France, Britain, Germany, Spain, or Italy.

So, there is a double perspective on Europe today: One from without (mainly American), where diversity of geography, language, culture tends to be subsumed under a single notion, itself layered with connotations of history, artworks, the monuments of civilization and the sites of high culture, but also of food and wine, of tourism and the life style of leisure (dolce far niente, luxe, calme et volupté). The other perspective is the one from within (often, at least until a few years ago, synonymous with Western Europe, the Common Market countries): the struggle to overcome difference, to grow together, to harmonize, to tolerate diversity while recognizing in the common past the possible promise of a common “destiny.” There is a sense that with the foundation, consolidation and gradual enlargement of the European Union, these definitions, even in their double perspective, are no longer either adequate or particularly useful. Hence the importance of once more thematizing European culture, European cinema, and European identity at the turn of the millennium, which in view of US world hegemony, globalization, and the end of the bipolar world model, may well come to be seen as the only “European” millennium of world history.

The cinema, which celebrates its centenary, is both a French (Lumiere) and an American (Edison) invention. A hundred years later, these two countries – as the GATT accords (or discords) have shown – are still locked in a struggle as to the definition of cinema – a cultural good and national heritage or a commodity that should be freely traded and open to competition.