Frontiers of Screen History: Imagining European Borders in Cinema, 1945-2010

摘要

This collection of 13 well-argued essays has developed from the research project Cinematic Cartographies of European History 1945-2000, funded by the Academy of Finland (2009-2013). The common denominator of these essays is that they are all addressing how matters of 'religious and national identity, migration, transnationalism, and cultural and psychic frontiers mark eleven nations in the European ambit' (Foreword: ⅸ) by looking at European cinema as a geopolitical medium and a framing device: cinema shapes, challenges or alters our collective imagination by displaying or leaving out particular images and, thus, plays a prominent role in the 'dialectics of cognitive mapping' (Jameson 1992). The films studied in this volume are illustrative examples of mostly European cinema focusing on themes of borders, immigration, inclusion and exclusion. They are all situated in the post-WWII era, post-Wende or post-9/11. The authors predominantly discuss the selected films as either addressing the 'geopolitics of locales or, to the contrary, they are seen skittering away from them. In both instances the spectator has the task of sorting through the relations they establish between their politics and their aesthetics' (ⅹⅰ).