Popular European Cinema examines the reasons why films that are most popular with audiences in any one European countha are seldom successful eslewhere. Audiences themselves represent diverse class, gender and ethnic identities that complicate th equestoin of national cinema, not least with recent developments in formerly communist Eastern Europe and post-colonialist Western Europe. THrough their individual studies, the contribuitots ehr oven up a new area of study, using the medium of film to fucus a wider discussion of popular European culture.

West German cinema of the 1960s is frequently associated with the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers, collectively known by the 1970s as the "New German Cinema." Yet for domestic and international audiences at the time, German cinema primarily meant popular genres such as exotic adventure films, Gothic crime thrillers, westerns, and sex films, which were dismissed by German filmmakers and critics of the 1970s as "Daddy's Cinema." International Adventures provides the first comprehensive account of these genres, and charts the history of the West German film industry and its main protagonists from the immediate post-war years to its boom period in the 1950s and 1960s. By analyzing film genres in the context of industrial practices, literary traditions, biographical trajectories, and wider cultural and social developments, this book uncovers a forgotten period of German filmmaking that merits reassessment. International Adventures firmly locates its case studies within the wider dynamic of European cinema. In its study of West German cinema's links and co-operations with other countries including Britain, France, and Italy, the book addresses what is perhaps the most striking phenomenon of 1960s popular film genres: the dispersal and disappearance of markers of national identity in increasingly international narratives and modes of production.

Presenting new and diverse scholarship, this wide-ranging collection of 43 original chapters asks what European cinema tells us about Europe. The book engages with European cinema that attends to questions of European colonial, racialized and gendered power; seeks to decentre Europe itself (not merely its putative centres); and interrogate Europe’s various conceptualizations from a variety of viewpoints. It explores the broad, complex and heterogeneous community/ies produced in and by European films, taking in Kurdish, Hollywood and Singapore cinema as comfortably as the cinema of Poland, Spanish colonial films or the European gangster genre. Chapters cover numerous topics, including individual films, film movements, filmmakers, stars, scholarship, representations and identities, audiences, production practices, genres and more, all analysed in their context(s) so as to construct an image of Europe as it emerges from Europe’s film corpus. The Companion opens the study of European cinema to a broad readership and is ideal for students and scholars in film, European studies, queer studies and cultural studies, as well as historians with an interest in audio-visual culture, nationalism and transnationalism, and those working in language-based area studies.

This comprehensive introduction to national cinemas in Europe brings together classic writings by key filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Buñuel and John Grierson, and critics from Andre Bazin to Peter Wollen.

The survival of cinema in Europe and the analysis of its heritage are key issues for the new century. This book asks how we can define European cinema and how it should be studied. It provides an overview of the problems, traditions and key questions that have informed the study of European cinema, investigating the links and tensions between Europe and Hollywood and exploring the different experiences of national identities within a common European framework. Twelve case studies of individual European films ranging from The Battleship Potemkin and The Lodger, to La Haine and Trainspotting, illustrate the distinctiveness and variety of cinema in Europe as well as the various critical methods by which it can be studied. With its detailed analysis of films from several European countries including Britain and Russia, the book encourages a comparative approach and raises urgent questions about the future of European cinema in the context of globalization. It will be of interest to students in Film Studies, European Studies and Modern European Languages and Cultures.

European Cinema is the first book to provide overviews of key movements in European film history, from the inception of the medium in 1895 to the present. This text includes accessible introductions to traditions as diverse as early Soviet cinema, German Expressionism, Surrealism, Italian Neoralism, the French New Wave, Ealing Comedy, East-Central European cinema, Contemporary Spanish cinema, and much more. Top international scholars specially commissioned for this volume examine artistic developments in their industrial and more broadly historical context. The book is divided chronologically into three sections, making it ideal for use in university film courses, and includes an invaluable glossary (comprising historical and foreign-language terms as well as technical terminology).

Rosalind Galt offers innovative readings of some of the most popular and influential European films of the 1990s, including Emir Kusturica's 'Underground', Lars Von Trier's 'Zentropa', and Giuseppe Tornatore's 'Cinema Paradiso'.