Cinema of Crisis
Film and Contemporary Europe
Edited by Thomas Austin, Angelos Koutsourakis
- Offers the first book-length investigation of European cinema’s response to the economic crisis
- Provides a survey of cinemas that have not received much critical attention from scholarship. In other words, this is one of the few books on European cinema that features many essays on Eastern European films and filmmakers
- Explores a long view of the crisis that can offer a better understanding of questions of politics and representation in contemporary European Cinema
- Watch a video of Thomas Austin discussing Cinema of Crisis
Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe explores the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking across a continent in flux. This urgent and necessary collection brings together scholars from Spain to Estonia, Hungary to Britain, in order to trace European filmmakers’ diverse responses to the interlinked upheavals and emergencies of the past three decades. Covering topics such as the collapse of the eastern bloc; deindustrialisation; the 2008 crash and the eurozone debt crisis; austerity and neoliberalism, as well as ‘Fortress Europe’ and the ‘refugee crisis’, this book investigates a range of audiovisual forms, including documentaries, the work of arthouse auteurs, and videos posted on YouTube. It engages in highly topical debates in political and aesthetic spheres, and explores key interfaces between the two.
ContributorsIntroduction, by Thomas Austin and Angelos Koutsourakis1. Aesthetics of crisis: art cinema and neoliberalism, by Alex Lykidis 2. Beyond Neoliberalism? Gift Economies in the Films of the Dardenne Brothers, by Martin O’Shaugnessy3. The resurgence of Modernism and its critique of liberalism in the cinema of crisis, by Angelos Koutsourakis4. Post-Fordism in Active Life, Industrial Revolution, and The Nothing Factory, by Patricia Sequeira Brás5. Re-evaluating Crisis Politics in the Work of Aku Louhimies, by Kate Moffat6. Crisis of cinema / cinema of crisis: the car crash and the Berlin School, by Olivia Landry7. Representing and escaping the crises of neoliberalism: Veiko Õunpuu’s films and methods, by Eva Näripea8. The Future is Past, the Present cannot be fixed: Ken Loach and the crisis, by Martin Hall9. It could happen to you: characters as places of enunciation in Iberian austerity cinema, by Iván Villarmea Álvarez10. The Double Form of Neoliberal Subjugation: Crisis on Eastern European Screen, by Anna Batori11. Housing Problems: Britain’s Housing Crisis and Documentary, by Anna Viola Sborgi12. Miserable journeys, symbolic rescues: refugees and migrants in the cinema of Fortress Europe, by Thomas Austin13. Frontlines: migrants in Hungarian documentaries in the 2010s, by Lóránt Stőhr14. Mongrel attunement in White God, by Rosalind Galt15. Labour and exploitation by displacement in recent European film, by Constantin Parvulescu16. A hushed crisis: the visual narratives of (Eastern) Europe’s antiziganism, by Dina Iordanova Bibliography
The essays collected by Thomas Austin and Angelos Koutsourakis in their volume Cinema of Crisis. Film and Contemporary Europe are therefore a timely and welcome attempt to explore filmic approaches to crisis in countries across Europe, from Greece and the Iberian Peninsula to the UK, Estonia and Finland.
The essays collected by Thomas Austin and Angelos Koutsourakis in their volume Cinema of Crisis. Film and Contemporary Europe are therefore a timely and welcome attempt to explore filmic approaches to crisis in countries across Europe, from Greece and the Iberian Peninsula to the UK, Estonia and Finland.
The book Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe is a rich collection of essays that offers an impressive number of different perspectives on contemporary cinema’s thematic and aesthetic approach and on their political analysis of the constant crisis we are enduring.
The book Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe is a rich collection of essays that offers an impressive number of different perspectives on contemporary cinema’s thematic and aesthetic approach and on their political analysis of the constant crisis we are enduring.
A timely contribution to important debates arising in Europe and contemporary film about intersectional forms of marginality and discrimination [...] this book is a welcome addition to the scholarship about the complexity of contemporary film.
This timely collection showcases how contemporary European filmmakers have used film’s unique capacity to grasp the permanent economic and political crisis that animates neoliberal capitalism in its most intimate, emotional dimensions. Going beyond the lively film readings that lend themselves to teaching European genre films, auteur cinema and documentary today, the book gives us a cinematic diagnosis of a shared structural condition of global anxiety.
This timely collection showcases how contemporary European filmmakers have used film’s unique capacity to grasp the permanent economic and political crisis that animates neoliberal capitalism in its most intimate, emotional dimensions. Going beyond the lively film readings that lend themselves to teaching European genre films, auteur cinema and documentary today, the book gives us a cinematic diagnosis of a shared structural condition of global anxiety.
