Imagined cinemas: Europe, identity, the transnational and postnational in European cinema.

摘要

This dissertation examines the concurrent development of the European Cinema and the European public sphere. This dissertation focuses on delineating a mainstream European Cinema as addressing a specific 'European subjectivity' rather than a purely 'national subject.' I track this mode of address through the linking of 'old Europe' and an aesthetic mode of filmmaking in early narrative cinema, tying this to the legitimating functions of the bourgeois public sphere that were subsumed into the public spheres of production. This connection allowed cinema to legitimate itself as an art form, and also established a certain subject position for the art house film. I then examine films from Fatih Akin and other directors to show the points of interface between the specifically 'European' public sphere and the mainstream European cinema. This allows me to outline the formation of borders for Europe that are, in many ways, the reflection of internal, social, political and cultural borders to the periphery. At the same time I identify particular cinematic strategies in the films of Laurent Cantet, Michael Haneke and other European filmmakers that go against a mainstream representation by both questioning the concept of an idealized European subjectivity and opening gaps in the supposed historical and cultural continuity of Europe.