Space, representation, and realism in contemporary European art cinema

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes a select group of contemporary films that can generally be categorized as European art cinema by focusing on how space, representation, and realism operate within them. The study concentrates on how these films utilize cinematic space as part of a more general critique of representational realism. Contemporary, in this case, means European films made between 1990 and 2019, given that 1989 marks the fall of the Berlin Wall and thus a postrevolutionary Europe. This study, however, is not explicitly concerned with a strict periodization or chronology of (trans)national cinemas. The focus of this study falls upon formal analysis as it informs the efforts of a range of filmmakers to further shape the aesthetics of European art cinema beyond the dominant mode of verite-style realism. The films and filmmakers featured in this dissertation comprise selective examples that stage a meaningful intersection between socio-political subject matter and a resistance to realism as the aesthetic means of addressing that subject matter. The overall focus is less with examining films that have been overlooked, underappreciated, or rejected than with focusing on why and how these filmmakers consciously turn away from dominant forms of realism and socio-political messaging to interrogate significant contemporary issues within European life, which often includes issues such as decolonization, migration, poverty, and global capitalism. The case studies also embark, in part, upon relocating cinephilia within the landscape of contemporary European art cinema by teasing out throughlines that lie beneath the surface of films, almost like fault lines waiting to be activated. Cinephilia assists in the process of spatial and representational analysis by encountering those aftershocks that encompass the body of European cinema from a different vantage point, one in which identitarian logic works alongside cinematic history and theory, not in place of it.