Thomas Elsaesser,
European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood.
Amsterdam University Press, 2005.
ISBN: 978 90 5356 594 0 (pb) US$32.50
ISBN: 978 90 5356 602 2 (hb) US$80.50
566pp
(Review copy supplied by Amsterdam University Press)
A book on European cinema by Thomas Elsaesser would be an exciting prospect indeed, but unfortunately this is not it. This is an assemblage of articles published by Elsaesser in the course of the last forty years on topics related to films and film theory ‘made in Europe,’ together with a series of introductory essays and a conclusion aiming to integrate them into a coherent argument about the nature of the European cinema. For many people this will still represent an extremely useful publication.
The framing essays cannot of course entirely succeed in overcoming the disparate nature of the original articles, written for different publications over four decades, for the most part without any consideration of overall European practices and procedures. An attempt at coherence is made by grouping the articles into notional sub-categories – ‘Auteurs and art cinemas,’ ‘Central Europe looking West,’ ‘Europe haunted by history and empire,’ etc, but there is little consistency of argument or content within each sub-category. What does emerge from the original articles, however, if you mentally re-assemble them into chronological order, is some evidence of an evolution in Elsaesser’s own thinking and interests. The early ones – 1968-1986 – are mostly short, concise, lucid, and auteurist, focusing on ‘personal style’ – that is, on films produced by ‘artists’, and demonstrating the coherence and continuity of that artist’s techniques and preoccupations as evidenced in his/her prior output. This auteurism is always self-aware and enlightened, qualified by reference to emerging trends common to several film-makers and by institutional or sociological considerations. By the 1980s his articles are tending to see auteurs more as representative of national tendencies and preoccupations, while an essay from the 1990s begins by wondering wryly if there are still any auteurists alive out there. In effect Elsaesser’s theoretical baggage has become much more complex, taking account of feminism, Lacan and Baudrillard, and the expression is therefore less forceful. Nothing is any longer as simple as it had once seemed, so that a 2002 essay on ‘The Balkanist gaze,’ for instance, begins by making a series of abstract and rather obscure claims in a convoluted style, with numerous qualifications in the form of parentheses and quotation marks, adducing at best fragmentary evidence in support of the claims.
Right from the start, however, the essays were well-informed and intelligent, emphasizing the necessity of film theory to inform film criticism and film practice. As the years pass they tend to draw on a wider and wider range of cultural references, focusing on film-makers who themselves are influenced by painting, theatre, architecture, and modernism in all its forms; but also on television and popular culture. A number of the essays involve overviews of the social conditions of production – New German cinema, Cinema Novo, Thatcher’s Britain. Indeed, as well as providing an overview of Elsaesser’s own developing interests, the essays incidentally provide an overview of the evolution of film movements and styles since the 1960s – the various New Waves in Italy, France, Brazil, Britain and Germany, as well as explorations of political film-making in its various forms. Certain strengths and weaknesses show through. Elsaesser is notoriously strong on Germany and on Britain, and also I find on South Americans in Europe. He is, however, less strong on the Mediterranean areas such as Italy and France, where spelling problems have not always been edited out and the occasional error of attribution is apparent. More generally, the book would have benefited from a more rigorous editing of the English expression, which occasionally complicates understanding, and from the omission of the irritating little marginal images from films mentioned in the essays – images which are poorly printed, too small to be useful, and at best tangential to the argument.
The framing essays specify very clearly the fundamental factors in the various essays which Elsaesser wishes us to focus on, namely the validity of the basic opposition generally and rather unthinkingly adduced to contrast Europe and Hollywood, where Europe is characterized as a patchwork of nations governed by widely variant conditions of production and exhibition, and where each national system is dominated at any one time by one or very few ‘high-brow’ director-artists, whilst on the other hand Hollywood is characterized by ‘low-brow’ generic productions marketed with ruthless efficiency so as to swamp European production even in its home markets. Factors that have complicated that opposition recur in nearly all the essays. One particular such factor is infra- and supra-national film-making, as influenced by ethnic and regional factors, and by the development of the European Union, but amongst others one might note co-productions, the Cahiers revaluation of Hollywood in authorial terms, ‘mis-readings’ of a nation’s production when exported to America, the fluctuating fortunes of Hollywood itself, the evolution of the festival network, and the effects of globalization.
In fact ultimately there are so many qualifications and complicating factors introduced into every attempt to define ‘a European Cinema’ that the arguments lose their force. Probably the greatest weakness of the volume is the attempt by the framing essays to pull together the various threads of Elsaesser’s forty years of critical writing: these essays, which ought to have been the key element of the book read all too often like an unwelcome commissioned chore – honorable and densely argued, but a bit tedious and not terribly convincing. Quite often, on the other hand, in the essays themselves we come across observations that are genuinely illuminating. I noted amongst others the remark in the essay on Syberberg about the continuity between fascism and capitalism, on Losey about his prefiguration of a common European cultural identity, on Greenaway, Boorman, Potter and Davies about the exorcising of male childhood traumas. And even in the framing essays some wonderful generalizations stood out, about the distinction between ‘problems’ in Hollywood films and ‘dilemmas’ in European films; about the need for nations to exercise a form of internal colonization, repressing differences of class, gender, race religion and history; and about the different forms of ‘double narrative’ in European and Hollywood films. These moments alone would make the book worth reading. At the very least having all these intelligent essays readily to hand in one volume is a real pleasure.
Colin Crisp,
Australia.
Created on: Saturday, 2 June 2007