Identity in a notion of the Eastern and Western European cinema

摘要

If there is a distinctive trait of European cinema, it could be seen within an attitude towards the category of identity in most representative and intellectually challenging feature films. The very notion of identity opens a field where we encounter a number of relevant meanings as far as films are concerned. The paper argues that there are common features between different approaches to identity in the European cinema in different periods. The notion of identity concerns a number of its enunciations that touch upon philosophical subjectivity, psychological subject, an ethnic entity, the political agent, and so forth. All these different aspects of identity, which naturally are, in most cases (but not necessarily so) inscribed in characters, are manifested in films from different periods of European cinema. Modernist movements of the 1960s and 1970s both in Western Europe (as in the French 'new wave' or young German cinema) and Eastern Central Europe (especially Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia) addressed the theme of identity in a manner that could be read as ideologically subversive. After the political turmoil in 1989, that changed the map of Europe, the theme of identity emerges in a new context.