For the study of European cinema, the 1980s are a particularly significant decade, because they saw the final demise of the commercial film industry in all but one country, France. By contrast, Britain, Germany and Italy, each in very particular ways, found that it no longer had a domestic market that could sustain indigenous feature film production on the Hollywood model. Films continued to be made, but on a different economic basis, with different institutional partners or commercial participation, and for a different public. The 1980s signaled the fact that cinema in Europe could no longer be looked at or studied in isolation. Decline has to be seen in the context of a shift, an opening up, a re-alignment: for the decade also witnessed a radical transformation in the overall media landscape: the deregulation of state-owned broadcast television, the arrival of video and the VCR, the rise of the Hollywood event movie or “blockbuster,” and the weakening of “new wave” art, avant-garde, and counter-cinemas, pushed further to the margins.

How these transformations and shifts could best be studied was a major preoccupation for academic media studies from the mid-1980s onwards, which saw the emergence of television studies and cultural studies, at the expense, some would argue, of film theory and film history. Under the label of “postmodernism” a new agenda for critical engagement arose which also implied a shift: from an emphasis on aesthetic, hermeneutic and historical questions, to an intense debate about the value, relevance and function of popular culture, a foregrounding of identity politics (gender, class, ethnicity) within the social formation, in place of a politics of radical action against society, and perhaps most momentous of all, a fresh evaluation of consumerism and the culture industries. In these moves, television – and television studies – became paradigmatic for studying all media, including the cinema, which had indeed found in television its greatest ally and life-saver, rather than its arch-enemy, as it had been seen in the 1960s and 1970s.