Rosalind Galt,
Redrawing the Map: The New European Cinema.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
ISBN: 0 231 13717 6
US$24.50 (pb)
352pp
(Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press)

Cartography of emotions: History, space and Identity in the New European Cinema

In The Art of the Novel Milan Kundera defines Europe not so much as a territory but as a spiritual tradition that extends beyond its geographic borders. In The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, Jacques Derrida imagines Europe in spatial terms – a space torn apart between two “contradictory imperatives” (2), a drive for unity and a reality of disunity. Kundera’s emphasis is on common cultural and intellectual kinship as the basis of any conception of Europe. By examining the drives of division underwriting European history, Derrida focuses on the relationship between space, history, and identity. Kundera’s definition is not to be found in Rosalind Galt’s Redrawing the Map: The New European Cinema while Derrida’s political philosophy is extensively referred to throughout the book. Yet, both equally shape Galt’s discussion since space and nostalgia, the intellectual, the spiritual, and the territorial, are central notions in her remapping of the recent European cinema.

Any discourse of European cinema after the 1990s is inevitably associated with shifting cultural identities and Derrida’s focus on “multiplying the borders, […] movements and margins… ” (2) indicates that the notion of Europeanness once again becomes “ a question of space”. This question reverberates equally in political philosophy, cultural studies, cinematic discourses and the concepts of identity defined by these fields. No doubt, the 1990s was a threshold in the history of Europe. From Germany, to the Soviet Union, to Yugoslavia the continent experienced radical re-mapping for the first time since World War II. Facing these dynamic realities, theory, criticism and film practice have been forced to deal with a series of new questions: the (im)possibility of a European identity, the transformation of national cinemas in regional and/or supranational systems, Europe’s internal subdivisions and hierarchies, the intellectual legacies and cultural histories of the two sides of the Wall, and so on. Each shakes established critical, theoretical and artistic discourses and demands radical rethinking and revision of existing theories and analytical practices. This is precisely where Galt situates her book; she offers a discussion of European cinema within shifting spatial, ideological, political and theoretical contexts, with consistent focus on textual analysis and on the “specific cinematic reworking of the location and meaning of ‘Europe’” (239).

Galt mentions at least two reasons for an urgent revision of European cinema: first, the fast process in the de-nationalisation of film production; and second, that critical equipment seems to lag behind film practice, the critical reactions becoming too slow, even inadequate to film practice. While film practices are more flexible in representing spatial, political and philosophical transformations, film analyses still apply most of the “Cold War” approaches to film. Redrawing the Map: The New European Cinema is an attempt to transpose the subtlety of philosophical discourse on the new Europe in the terrain of cinematic text by close analyses of film texts and their specific ability to code spatial, political and psychological transformations. Galt’s selection of representative films of 1990s includes Lars von Trier’s Zentropa(Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany/Switzerland 1991) Emir Kusturica’s Underground (France/Federal Republic of Yugoslavia/germany/Hungary 1995), and three key Italian films, Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema paradiso(Italy/France 1991), Gabriele Salvatores’s Mediterraneo (Italy 1991), and Michael Radford’s Il postino(France/Italy/Belgium 1994).

What is common to these films is that they are made in the 1990s, but contain narrative, political and stylistic references to the 1940s. The question of space was as important in the 1940s as it was in the 1990s. Whether it is a reconfiguration of the Italian landscape, the spectacular underground labyrinth of war-torn Yugoslavia, or the void of the post-war Germany, these films are preoccupied with spatial figurations in which “the narratives of romantic loss operates as part of a much wider loss” (43). The internal generic reshaping and use of landscape demand new readings, ones that suggest the perpetual crossing of textual, intertextual, cultural, historical, ideological and political borders without losing sight of the major issues – space, time, and identity. Galt’s project can be simply described as a restoration of the dignity of textual analysis within the context of cultural studies. But the simplicity of the method should not be misleading about the complexity of the analytical task, which is to discuss how politics writes these films from within.

In her case study of Cinema paradiso, Mediterraneo and Il postino Galt introduces her approach to the treatment of space, time and identity in the chronotope of the cinematic landscape (Chapter Two). Situated between the melodrama and the heritage film, these films are seen as a series. Each one is a particular version of “male melodrama” which treats the mise-en-scene as a site of ideological and political signification to reshape both melodramatic conventions and the “national nostalgia” of heritage films (28). A critical overview of the traditional approaches to these genres points out their limitations within the shifting sands of European realities. Neither heritage films’ sentimentality and nostalgia nor melodramatic romance can adequately explain the Italian films’ specific engagement with history, their treatment of past/present connection, and their use of the national landscape as a signifier of loss. Galt argues that the dual temporal relation of the narratives to the political events of the 1940s and 1990s “is structured through a projection of politics onto romance” (38) where temporal displacements, desire and hypercathexis construct a net of lost possibilities in the past, and mourning in the present. In textual terms this means to “deploy narratives of romantic loss to imagine the post-war period in Italian cultural memory” (39), a move that Galt situates in an extended contextual framework that includes the collapse of First Republic in 1992, the reconsideration of Italian identity, the crisis of the leftist political project – events that radically restructure the Italian political and cultural landscape and subtly reverberate in the films’ text. If there are nostalgic feelings in these narratives, they function through the dialectical image which imbricates the 1940s and 1990s. “Contrary to the criticisms that accuse [them] of using nostalgia to produce a stable and hence reactionary relation to history”, these films “set up a dynamic relation between past and present, in which nostalgia subtends a historical and political critique” (42).

Galt’s argument gains additional energy with her scrutiny of the landscapes’ spectacular, indexical and auratic functions in these films. She repeatedly argues against the common critical practice of splitting the functions of narrative and image. In the post-modern theories of spectacle, image is often regarded as an antithesis to narrative dynamics: the pleasurable and beautiful images suspend the flow of narrative, “fall out” of the story, and cast doubt on historical truthfulness. Neorealism and feminist film theory are the two perspectives which, according to Galt, can help reconsider this point and revise the post-modern theory of spectacle and the function of landscape in film: neorealism, with its exclusive attention to semantically overloaded landscapes; and feminist theory, with the proposed “relations […] between historical narrative and spectacular mise-en-scene” (52). As we know, feminist theory regards image as a site of ideological contestation where visual pleasure builds a complex ideological nexus to narrative structures. Galt argues that we can apply a similar approach to landscape images and they, too, should reveal a complex ideological coding: “If the place is readable within the same structure as woman”, as neorealist practice suggests (58), then it will be possible “to resituate a film-specific feminist epistemology in taking seriously the ideological work of the spectacular image” (61). To map the directions of the ideological coding in landscape images Galt examines the notions of cinematic index, Kracauer’s theorisation of the historical on screen, and Benjamin’s concepts of the aura and the dialectical image.

Each of these detailed theoretical elaborations aims at an alternative reading of the function of landscape in film. When spectacular images are “imbricated with the social logic and political loss” they do not suspend the narrative; on the contrary, they serve as an additional semantic source extending the narrative space. If seen as dialectical image, the complex temporal implications of the landscape image (68) re-define the position of spectator. Instead of locking the spectator in a position of (passive) consumer of the beautiful and the exotic, he/she becomes “a subject in mourning” (84). At this point Galt’s argument is at its best in terms of theoretical flexibility. Existing theoretical frameworks are applied and simultaneously revised, but by resituating and re-contexualising them, she extends their reaches and/or seeks to avoid their limitations. Even though the theoretical re-conceptualisation of landscape image is central to this chapter, Galt never loses her vision of the broader implications of the project: the relations between space, time, and national identity. Italy in/and Europe, the national and the transnational, the internal politics of division and segregation (North and South), and the new Italian identity are extensively analysed, providing a useful context for the argument, bridging this discussion with the spatial ‘conspiracies’ in the next chapter.

‘A conspiracy of cartographers?’ (Chapter Three) has more to do with the project’s central preoccupation with space rather than a case study of a particular film. While presenting a selection of European films, this chapter addresses different aspects of the theoretical debate on space: reading space; mapping and re-mapping European territory; cinematic cities and nations; the renewed relations between inter-, supra- and trans-national space; and spectacular politics. As a guide among these multidimensional topics, Galt introduces the key concepts of spatial theory in the writings of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Edward Soja, Charles Jencks, Victor Burgin, Irit Rogoff, etc. Even when these writers may seem distant from the specific cinematic thematic, their theories have been often adapted to deepen the understanding of cinematic spaces. Perhaps spatial theories come closest to film analysis with Burgin’s insistence on the role of fantasy and desire in the construction of social spaces (In/different Spaces, 1996) and with Giuliana Bruno’s ‘architecture of emotions’ and ‘intimate geographies’ (Atlas of Emotions: Journey in Art, Architecture and Film, 2002). If there is anything that could connect the textual analysis of films as diverse as Bhaji on the Beach (Chadha, 1993), The Adventures of Felix (Ducastel and Martineau, 2000), The Tit and the Moon (Bigas Luna, 1994), Berlin.killer.doc(Ellerkamp and Heitman, 1999), Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Medem, 1998), Underground (Kusturica, 1995), Zentropa (von Trier, 1991) and Les amants du Pont-Neuf (Carax, 1991) it might be the way they mobilise the cinematic space in order to articulate notions of the political, social, cultural, and psychological. Applied to cinematic texts, spatial theories have become an instrument for an intimate cartography of the emotional and political landscape, for mapping the national and for tracing the trajectories of its fluctuating transformation in the context of shifting European borders. Coming from different national cinemas, these films outline a new cinematic map of the continent in which people and spaces acquire “double consciousness, a mutual inhabitation” (Rogoff, Terra Infirma, 2000:108). The fragmented post-modern space and intractable identity of the other within the project of a united Europe is foregrounded in the films’ emotional geography. Here the notion of the border (visible and invisible, new and old, literal and virtual, etc.) becomes central and inevitably generates a series of questions about imagining new Europe as ‘borderless space’ at the time when it faces the difficult reality of ‘impossible spatial cases’, such as Germany and Yugoslavia. Situated almost entirely in the terrain of post-war art cinema, the chapter explores the unpredictable direction in which European art cinema is now moving and this is another chance for Galt to remind us of the urgent necessity of remapping film theory itself.

Kusturica’s Underground, the only case study of a film from the ‘Other Europe’, introduces a key Eastern European cinematic text of the 1990s (Chapter Four). With its multiple textual ambiguities and increasingly unclear political and ideological mapping, Underground proved to be a difficult cinematic text with a long history of heated debates. Outlining briefly the critical battle over it, Galt discusses writers such as Dina Iordanova, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Finkelkraut, Maria Todorova, Stanko Cerovic, Milica Bakic-Hayden and Robert Hayden, David Norris and Jacques Derrida in a search for a more balanced view of the region’s history and its cinematic representations. Even though Galt touches on the question of dominant stereotypes (such as the “innate Balkan violence”, 136) as a common explanation of the region’s turbulent history, her survey of the critical debate functions as more than a reminder of the controversies surrounding the perception of Underground, the Balkans and the West’s involvement in the region’s political history. Rather, Galt re-situates these interpretations within the context of spatial theory, the concepts of mourning, melancholia, and nostalgia, and the dual temporality of post-war Europe. What makes her task particularly challenging is Underground’s deliberate strategy to articulate the region’s historical ambivalence as narrative ambiguity and excessive spectacle. The film’s convoluted narrative, “fantasmatic locations” (129), and personal take on Yugoslavia’s past are often interpreted as another pronouncement of ‘Balkanism’ in film terms. Galt rightly feels that Underground’s treatment of history and the film’s staggering imagery somehow resist the common range of critical instruments applied to it. For instance, neither Zizek’s arguable political interpretations of Kusturica’s spectacle as “’depoliticised’ aesthetist attitude” to disguise overt political “tendentiousness”, nor Iordanova’s readings of the frivolous treatment of events as a diversion from realism (132), could really account for the film’s strategic refusal to articulate a singular center of gravity within its heterogeneous textual field. Seeking alternative critical approaches, Galt focuses on a “co-articulation” of the cinematic text and the historical context, a gesture aimed to “reconcile the demands of post-structural theory and film history.” (25)

The major challenge that most commentators face is Underground’s key chronotope and core metaphor: the cellar, a Balkan nether land, with its inverted logic of vertical hierarchy (aboveground/underground). For Galt, as with the most commentators, the cellar is a polysemantic space. Its readings range from an encryption of loss, to an allegory of the oppressive and over-controlling system of communism, to a visualisation of the melancholia generated by the impossibility to imagine “the time or the nation before the history of war” (131). Kristeva’s notion of the abject, Bruno’s intimate geographies, Bonitzer’s model of labyrinthine narrative and Benjamin’s dialectical image, are brought together to scrutinise Kusturica’s unorthodox construction of historical time(s) and the space(s) of war. Trying not to miss any significant detail, Galt’s account is a brilliant analytical dance across the dense net of indexes and figurations. Her close reading of the film offers multiple insights in affective identifications, the (im)possible positions of enunciation, and the economy of desire coded in the film’s dialectical images. Underground’s epic topography of Balkan history is articulated in two seemingly opposite but synchronised textual gestures, through an “outward move – the examination of the past and of Europe – and the inward turn by means of the myopic enclosure of the cellar” (173). What is most often perceived as a “gargantuan metaphor of the messy state of the Balkan affairs” (Iordanova, Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media, 2001:117) is translated in spatial vocabulary; Underground articulates an impossible space on the new European map – a non-place, a non-existing country. The film’s imagery emphasises multiple absences and discontinuities, coded – paradoxically – in visual excesses through the lack of “a singular affective encounter with the real” (159), no real ‘before’ as an object of melancholy, and the incomplete awakening of the nation in the time of historical gambit. More pessimistic than the analysis suggests, Galt concludes that the film’s “spectacular historicity is not a productive tension but a vicious circle” (174).

With all the attention to the finest details in Underground’s micro-textuality, the critical accounts discussed by Galt, including her own, seem to overlook the film’s most fundamental macro-strategy of organising the text through the carnivalesque. Occasionally implied by adjectives such as ‘neo-gaudi’ or ‘baroque’ in some reviews, the theory of carnival has not been applied to account for the ideological ambivalence, political ambiguity and the visual excesses in Kusturica’s reconstruction of the Balkan and European history. Although parody is a key strategy in Kusturica’s work, it is mentioned only once in Galt’s discussion and never discussed as a core instrument in the director’s treatment of Balkan realities. Galt’s conceptualisation of melancholia and mourning finds perfectly adequate support in the iconography of the Italian films; however, in Kusturica’s inverted universe and playful logic of grotesque subversion, these notions can make more sense if they are refracted through the carnivalesque strategy of ‘ludicrous tragedy’. This strategy intensifies the historical content, reshapes the entire pictography of the genre of the historical epic and consistently refracts it through the optics of parody.

In ‘The Origin of Parody’ O.M. Freidenberg discusses parody’s archaic kinship to tragedy and identifies duality as its basic structural configuration. The principle of duality, the concept of ‘second aspect’ – seminal in both carnival grammar and in parody – “requires the creation of two conceptions (the tragic and the comic), two story-lines, two courses of events, and two types of personages” because “without chiaroscuro, without something to be contrasted to something else, it does not exist.”(In Baran, H., ed., Semiotics and Structuralism: Readings from Soviet Union, 1977, p. 278-9) Underground’s structural duality is a fundamental narrative and stylistic tool. The plot revolves around two central characters, (mirroring and opposing each other); two (political, social, historical) realities (under- and above- ground; Europe and Yugoslavia); two war times (1940s and 1990s, a duality on which Galt elaborates extensively); two nuptial events, (mirroring andopposing each other); two concepts of realism (Underground’s grotesque realism and the postwar partisan epics’ socialist realism); two approaches to pro-filmic reality (documentary and fiction); and even two film texts, ‘a parody within the parody’, which multiplies the diegetic space of parody (the ‘film within a film’ storyline). Within, and between, these double articulations, Underground deliberately constructs history as a series of grotesques and builds a typical carnivalesque ambiguity deeply rooted in the basic syncretism of sexuality and death.
The carnivalesque textuality proliferates in a series of structural dyads throughout the film: high and low, laughter and sorrow, praise and blasphemy, noise and silence, play and life (Kristeva). The carnivalesque defines life as both existence (being) and performance (fiction, stage, game). In the carnival space acting is living and living is acting. The party-like life style in Underground, the characters’ moral and political ambiguity, the lack of border between the real and the performative, the disordered, subversive, hedonistic and eroticised world that the characters inhabit, construct a series of non-exclusive opposites which are accommodated within the inverted logic of the film’s spatial metaphor. The vocabulary of blasphemy, and (a comic version of) bestiality and savagery, are key elements in the carnival’s grammar, the roots of which can be traced back to the ancient tradition of Dionysian rituals. Bakhtin has taught us to penetrate the ‘vulgar’ face of the carnivalesque to decode the key proposition of its textual field, its dialogical logic where the ambivalence of word and action flourishes.

In contrast to most post-modern theories, Freidenberg regards the presence of parody as a sign of vitality and vigilant hope rather than a symptom of postmodern decline, aesthetic exhaustion and artistic impotence. Insisting on a re-definition of parody, Freidenberg argues that it is not simply “a term for imitation in which a sublime form is filled with a paltry content” (267) (something that Underground explicitly does). Viewed in the light of its genealogical connection to the tragic, parody appears as a fundamental artistic strategy to articulate duality, inner parallelisms, and underlying essences (something that Underground does consistently through the principle of structural duality, the core metaphor and its multiple derivations on both narrative and stylistic levels).

Kristeva’s general typology of European cultural texts (based on Bakhtin’s theory) echoes Freidenberg’s key points. In “Word, Dialogue and Novel” she wrote: “The epic and the carnivalesque are the two major currents that formed European narrative, one taking precedent over the other according to the times and the writer”. In Kristeva’s typology, the epic is monological, prohibitive, hierarchical, “causal”, “theological”, historical and transparently linear, emphasising the “wholeness of a god or community” (Moi, T., ed., The Kristeva Reader, 1986, 50). On the other hand, the carnivalesque corresponds to subversive discourse – the ‘fissures’ that disturb and disrupt unity and erase the homogeneous, the noble, the harmonious and the sacred. Underground’s carnivalesque rewriting of the genre of historical epic situates the film in this tradition of radical subversion where negation is also a strategy of regeneration, gesturing to new assertions.

By overlooking the central shaping strategy of the film’s textuality, Underground is somehow taken out of its proper textual framework, which is a consistent reworking of the epic through the carnivalesque. In terms of intertextuality it belongs to a broad Eastern European tradition of various treatments of the carnivalesque in literature and cinema, including the depiction of war(s), post-war, post-Cold war and post-Wall Europe: Hasek’s ‘comedy’, The Good Soldier Schweik, Menzel’s subversive war humor in Closely Observed Trains (1966), the recent ‘ludicrous tragedies’ No Man’s Land (Danis Tanovic, 2001) and Beautiful People (Jasmin Dizdar, 1999), Makavejev’s radical debasement of cultural and political icons, and Svankmajer’s surrealistic grotesques. Underground was, as was Kusturica himself, “born at this extremely painful border between East and West” where “the influence of Chekhov and Gogol” and the cinema, the artistic tradition and the theoretical discourse of Western Europe meet on equal ground (Kusturica, cited in Iordanova, Cinema of Flames, 115). The leaps from Gogol to Underground, and then to Rabelaisian carnivalesque are not as big as they may seem. Bakhtin initiated them in his comparative study ‘The Art of the Word and the Culture of Folk Humor (Rabelais and Gogol)’. If Underground“worked on the difficult connection between that national space to the [literal] larger space of Europe” (175), its text moves freely within a broad European legacy encompassing both Eastern and Western discourses. Kusturica’s implied definition of Europe is much like Kundera’s, who conceives it in terms of Husserl, not so much as a space but as a ‘spiritual identity’. It is worth remembering, that the destroyed national space that Underground mourns – the former Yugoslav Federation – was by definition a multiethnic, multicultural, and heteroglossic formation, a mini-model prefiguring the present project of a ‘borderless Europe’, condensing all the tensions, advantages and disadvantages of its realisation.

Former Yugoslavia and future Europe as mirroring political projects are parodied in Underground in the representation of both Yugoslav and European spaces as mirroring systems of underground communications. It is – to continue paraphrasing Kundera – only through tracing the supranational intertextuality of Underground that the value and the meaning of the film can be fully seen and understood. Spatial, conceptual, intellectual, discursive and historical connections are all represented in Kusturica’s peculiar reading of the dialectics of past and present as a spiral of reversal movements. Benjamin’s auratic effect, to mention just one of the multiple conceptual transmutations in Underground, appears here not only as an instant “irruption of the past within the present” (66), but as the unfolding of a certain temporal synchrony mirrored by double spatiality, which constructs the heterogeneous time and space of the Balkans.

In addition, the carnivalesque defines not only this film, but shapes almost the director’s entire authorship in one or other respect. In this sense, Kristeva’s reading of Bakhtin seems more relevant to an examination of Underground’s construction of space and time than her notion of abjection. In fact, Underground’s text invites us to do even more interesting critical operations by opening questions like these: How can the notion of abjection be accommodated within the framework of carnival theory – where do they meet, overlap, or contradict? How does the carnivalesque (with its kinship to tragedy) reconceptualise the other key notions in Galt’s discussion: melancholia, nostalgia, history, the position of enunciation of the Balkan subject, and the integration of landscape into a political discourse of loss? How should landscape’s spectacular function be reconsidered in such an oxymoronic, ‘anarchic’ aesthetics where genres, styles and national traditions are in a dynamic dialogue? Is not Underground’s sardonic parody a site where Freud’s concept of melancholia (with its emphasis on loss and powerlessness) meets his theory of wit and humor (with the emphasis on their liberating power and capacity to release psychic tension)? What is Kusturica’s particular contribution to the post-modern theory of spectacle if Underground’s diegetic world is constructed after the excessive logic of gramatica jocosa(‘laughing grammar’) as an articulation of ‘ludicrous tragedy’? In what sense does Underground’s heterogeneous text mirror Yugoslavia’s chaotic national historiography? How does it ‘marry the not-serious and the dreadful’ which is, according to Kundera, precisely what Rabelais does in his paradigmatic carnivalesque novel? What does an Eastern European director have to say about the crisis of the leftist project if his position of enunciation is from the other side of the Wall, where there are also decades of authentic experience of the leftist practice?

Underground’s multiple satiric and ironic figurations refer to the gap between Eastern European and Western European interpretations of the leftist project, to which Galt refers (in the conclusive chapter) by citing Zizek’s famous remark about the “post-Cold war chasm between east and west Europeans” and “the double failed encounter between the ex-communist dissidents and Western liberal democrats” which is ”crucial for the identity of Europe” (239). The ‘chasm’ is even more devastating if it is considered as a form of intellectual segregation. During the ‘dark ages’ of the Cold War a huge body of texts and theories was created above and underground in Eastern Europe which largely remains either unfamiliar to, or disregarded by, the Western intellectuals. The ‘missing half’ is visible in Galt’s case study of Underground. As heterogeneous and heteromorphic as it is, the film asks for unorthodox and more flexible theoretical approaches, perhaps ones that will combine incompatible refracting optics and will refer to the intellectual and artistic legacies from both East and West Europe.

If Underground’s potential to resist Galt’s theoretical framework leaves multiple open questions about the approaches to reading a text from Eastern Europe, Lars von Trier’s Zentropa (Chapter Five) presents a similar, although disguised, challenge. The narrative focuses on post-war Germany but implies an encrypted Eastern space in the 1990s in which Europeanness is staged “as a textual problem, constructing a relationship between the spectacular and the geopolitical” (176). Zentropa resembles Underground’s politics of displacing the spatial and constructing multiple temporalities, although its emphasis is more on the slippery borders, and on the uncertainty of the very notion of the national within the European context. Through a series of metonymies and textual ellipses, Zentropa articulates German space as a void (Huyssen, The Void of Berlin, 1997), a space that “does not really exist” (181). Like Underground’s cellar, the train in Zentropa metonymically articulates the impossibility of German space, a notion that reverberates in Huyssen’s trope of the void and refers to the post-war vacuum – the time lapse of the ‘year zero’. In a complex engagement with the past, Zentropa’s text constructs historicity as a tense oscillation between excessive vision and ‘what cannot be seen’ (“too horrific to be seen”, 183). Co-articulating parallel representations of post-war Germany in a number of international films, in the German genre Trümmerfilm (ruin film) and in Zentropa’s recurring technique of surimpression(superimposion), Galt identifies a series of absences: the invisible post-war ruins; the text’s strategic refusal to visualize Germany as a national landscape; and the elusive temporality of the year zero. The focus on interiority, which becomes a defining visual trope in Zentropa, “works against any mobilisation of nation, effectively bracketing the mise-en-scene as a spectacle that refuses authenticity, a cinematic space outside the discourse of place” (189). With the technique of superimposition the problem of geopolitical space becomes a problem of cinematic space. Truth becomes a matter of visibility; historical reality is defined “as one hard to see” or to be articulated in the text (213). Represented through a disembodied voice, Europe becomes an immaterial, intangible, unreal presence. The aural and visual effects destroy further the coherence of the diegetic space and produce a non-space “that is narratively meaningful and yet unlocatable, refusing to cohere into a singular form” (215).

A reference to Elsaesser’s powerful discussion on Germany’s year zero in New German Cinema locates the discussion of Zentropa in the center of a difficult debate – the past/present relationship in German history. Elsaesser’s detailed analyses of the ambiguous ideological imperatives of ruin film “as redemption”, and as “a fictional break” implying a new “non-Nazi German subject” (191), are correlated to Zentropa’s radical refusal to follow the paradoxical optimism of ruin films. Instead, the film represents “German space being overlaid with the uncanny space of “’Europa’ and its time – spreading outward, bleeding back into Nazism and forward into the Cold War” (192). As a result, the film’s complex spatial and temporal architectonics and its consistent textual strategy of dematerialisation and denationalisation can be read as another trope for Europeanness: a “metonymic relation in which the spaces of Germany and Europe, 1945 and 1991, must be seen as continuous and mutually determining” (193). Although the historical records and cinematic articulations are systematically correlated in Galt’s argument, the political references in the film are more a work of complex projections rather than directly articulated political engagements.

To contextualise Zentropa’s construction of Europe as a dark continent, Galt resorts to film noir and horror, two genres which have developed a paradigmatic iconicity of darkness, mystery and violence. Through the conventions of film noir, Zentropa relates German history to femininity and fatality and pronounces Europe as “a dangerous, uncertain and above all, duplicitous” space (203). Through horror mythology Zentropa uncovers the primitive beneath the civilised, another reference to Europe’s dark underside of uncontrollable violence. Thus, Zentropa’s intertextual generic formula reverses dominant ideological stereotypes. Even when, in the context of German reunification, the East again becomes explicitly a “site of difference” and “relies implicitly on abjecting discourses of civilisation”, it is “Europe and not its other” that “must be seen as monstrous and primitive” (212-3).

As an effect of these textual operations, Zentropa’s spectacle works consistently towards a radical deconstruction of a series of notions: European unity, the national, the idea of progress, the leftist project, the sense of real and the possibility of truth. Being an historical spectacle of absence and void, the film visualizes disappearance in the multiplicity of doubled, projected or superimposed images. The discourse of reunification and the engulfment of GDR into West Germany, inevitably entails an experience of loss and ambivalence for the European Left. Yet, Galt reiterates Benjamin’s message coded in his description of dialectical image when she states that the imbrications of the past and present “[go] beyond a nostalgic or a horrified relation to the past, and beyond the political melancholy of the present”. What dialectical image demands instead is an operation of figuration, of building a new trope, a new vision of spaces, histories and identities. More optimistic than her conclusion on Underground, Galt reads Zentropa’s temporality, in the spirit of Benjamin, as “open to reversals” (229). It is through the claustrophobic textual strategy of projections, reiterations and the circle of historical analogies that the film articulates its hope for a radical change in the post-Wall West.

Galt’s last point is a sketch of a new theory of European space (Chapter Six), which logically brings together all the issues, concepts and theories discussed throughout the book. Paradoxically, the contour of the new European cinematic map is outlined by a Taiwanese film The Hole (Tsai Ming-Liang, 1999) and the British television series, Our Friends in the North (Jones, James, and Urban, 1996). For Galt these films’ “leave open the question of border’s value” (234). While the Taiwanese film “traces the global network of European art film”, the British series “echoes the logic of post-Wall European cinema” in another media. At this point Galt moves closer to Husserl’s and Kundera’s vision of Europe as a spiritual reality extended beyond its geographic borders. Yet, despite the global impact of its art, Europe still has to deal with its multiple internal borders, gaps, and chasms: East/West, North/South, and the voids left by the new reunifications and disintegrations. As Zizek has noted, however, what “transpires in the gap that separates” all multiple perspectives, projects and visions “is a glimpse of a Europe worth fighting for” (239).

The value of Redrawing the Map: The New European Cinema is as much in its argument as it is in the spirit of path-finding, its search for new conceptions and the multiple questions it generates in the process. In redrawing the map of European cinema, Galt does not just revise the common practices of close analysis of a film text. What makes the book such useful and illuminating reading is its inventive approach to history, spectacle and the generic conventions beyond the framework of the concept of national cinema. Situating the textual analyses in the context of a multinational perspective, Galt reestablishes the centrality of the film text and discovers new potentials in the practice of close readings, while attuning our senses to the most “subtle vocalities of the post-Wall European cultures” (25). At this historical moment, when the messages that constitute the image of contemporary Europe are confusing and contradictory, the critical craft of ‘high fidelity’ and sophisticated theoretical sensibility that Galt offers is what we need most.

Violetta Petrova,
Victoria University, New Zealand.

Created on: Tuesday, 5 June 2007