https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4659-6757
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ABSTRACT
The national has not withered away in the era of globalisation, and national cinemas still persist in various ways, even in the smallest nations. Using data collected for the MeCETES project, this article (the first of two looking at these issues) examines the evidence of popular national cinemas in contemporary Europe (2005–2015). It looks at admissions data for domestic productions, nation by nation, demonstrating that most European countries enjoy a small number of considerable national successes each year. In 2011, for instance, the French production, Intouchables, topped France’s admissions chart (and also did extraordinarily well across Europe). National productions also outranked all other films, including multi-million-dollar Hollywood blockbusters, in Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, Poland and the Czech Republic. The majority of these national successes were small-scale films, with themes, characters or subject-matter that resonated in the country of production. Few of them were co-productions and few travelled successfully across borders. National audiences showed a remarkable commitment to such films, demonstrating that popular national cinema is still a meaningful presence across Europe. The second article (Part Two) will look at some of the strategies deployed to create attractive and repeatable consumer products, the most common being genre. It will then re-visit the concept of national cinema, asking what role it plays in the era of globalisation.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Huw D Jones for his extensive help with the research for this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. For other analyses of statistical data about national production and box-office share in European and other film industries, see Crane (Citation2014), Bergfelder (Citation2015) and Alaveras, Gomez-Herrera, and Martens (Citation2018).
2. http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/europe-population/ (accessed 1.3.19), drawing on United Nations data.
3. These countries are Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Iceland and Liechtenstein.
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Andrew Higson
Andrew Higson is Greg Dyke Professor of Film and Television at the University of York. He has published widely on British cinema history and on ideas of national, transnational and European cinema. His books include Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford University Press, 1995), English Heritage, English Cinema: The Costume Drama Since 1980 (Oxford University Press, 2003), and Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking Since the 1990s (I.B. Tauris, 2011). He has edited three surveys of British cinema history, Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (Cassell, 1996/Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), British Cinema, Past and Present (with Justine Ashby; Routledge, 2000), and Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain, 1896–1930 (University of Exeter Press, 2002). He has also co-edited two books on European cinema: ‘Film Europe’ and ‘Film America’: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange, 1920–1939 (with Richard Maltby; University of Exeter Press, 1999), and European Cinema and Television: Cultural Policy and Everyday Life (with Ib Bondebjerg and Eva Novrup Redvall; Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). The latter book is one of many publications arising from the HERA-funded research project he led from 2013–2016, Mediating Cultural Encounters Through Europeans Screens (www.mecetes.co.uk). He is currently Director of the Screen Industries Growth Network (screen-network.org.uk).