Markers of Provenance, Strategies of Access

In the previous chapter, I argued that the “national” in European cinema has become a second-order concept (“post-national”), in that it is now generally mediated through the legislative and economic measures taken by the European Union to stimulate the audiovisual industries and promote their role in the preservation of its heritage and patrimony. In the films themselves, references to the nation, the region and the local have also become second-order realities, whenever they function as self-advertisements for (the memorializable parts of) the past, for lifestyle choices or for (tourist) locations. Films made in Europe (and indeed in other smaller, film-producing nations) tend to display the markers of their provenance quite self-consciously. The emphasis on region, neighborhoods and the local in recent successes such as THE FULL MONTY, BILLY ELLIOT, WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, CINEMA PARADISO, GOODBYE LENIN, AMÉLIE, provides access-points for the international and global cinema markets, which includes the national audience, thoroughly internationalized through the films on offer in cineplexes and videotheques. The films’ attention to recognizable geographical places and stereotypical historical periods thus begin to echo Hollywood's ability to produce “open” texts that speak to a diversity of publics, while broadly adhering to the format of classical narrative.

Two further genres could be called post-national, but for opposite reasons. One are films that appeal to a broad audience, but whose references are not to place or region, nor to the national past. They locate themselves in the hermetic media space of recycled genre formulas from 1960s commercial cinema and 1970s television, spoofed and satirized by television personalities who are popular with domestic audiences but difficult to export across the national or language borders: the French TAXI films or LES VISITEURS would be examples, paralleled in Germany and Austria by the “Bully” Herbig films (DER SCHUH DES MANITU, UNSER TRAUMSCHIFF). The other post-national tendency would be the cinéma du look, adopting the style norms of design and fashion.