The resilience of popular national cinemas in Europe (Part Two)

ABSTRACT

This the second of two articles looking at the persistence of popular national cinemas in contemporary Europe. Drawing on research undertaken for the MeCETES project, the first article (Part One) examined admissions data for domestic productions in the period 2005–2015, demonstrating that most European countries enjoy a small number of considerable national successes each year. This second article (Part Two), provides further evidence that the national has not withered away in the era of globalisation, and revisits the concept of national cinema in this context. The majority of the national successes in European countries were small-scale films, with themes, characters or subject-matter that resonated in the country of production, and few of them travelled successfully across borders. Among strategies deployed to create attractive and repeatable consumer products, the most common was genre: most domestically successful national productions were comedies set in the present. Clearly, popular national cinema is still a meaningful presence across Europe, but it provides a different version of the nation to those presented under the auspices of nation-branding. These are two variants of national cinema in the era of the neo-liberal global economy.

KEYWORDS:

• European cinema
• national
• transnational
• popular
• contemporary

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Huw D Jones for his extensive help with the research for this article, and Tim Bergfelder for his observations on an earlier version.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All data cited in this article is derived from the MeCETES database. The provenance of this database is discussed in Part One of this article in this issue.

2. In ‘correct’ English usage, the reference should be to ‘unexportable’ films, but the term ‘inexportable’ has been used since Jeancolas (1992).

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was undertaken as part of the MeCETES project, supported by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) Joint Research Programme (www.heranet.info) under Grant Number 291827. HERA is co-funded by AHRC, AKA, BMBF via PT-DLR, DASTI, ETAG, FCT, FNR, FNRS, FWF, FWO, HAZU, IRC, LMT, MHEST, NWO, NCN, RANNÍS, RCN, VR and The European Community FP7 2007-2013, under the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities programme. MeCETES was a collaboration between University of York, Københavns Universitet and Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Notes on contributors

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).