Re-framing the fingerprints: a short survey of European film

Wendy Everett

Europe is a patchwork of contrasting cultural and linguistic identities, and nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in its various national cinemas. It follows that any definition of European cinema is problematic since diversity and contrast must be recognised as fundamental. As was explained in the introduction, questions of identity are approached in this book as a series of 'fingerprints' or traces, in essays which focus on specific directors, genres, themes or national concerns, in the belief that from these detailed studies certain common characteristics may provide further indications of the identity of European cinema. Since such an approach must essentially be partial, the following brief survey of the contemporary status of film in Europe, concentrating in particular on areas such as funding, production, and distribution, as well as on linguistic and national difference, aims to provide a wider context in which to situate individual contributions.

History and Film

One of the reasons why Europe feels a privileged affinity with cinema is the seminal role it played in its invention, and it is undoubtedly the case that much of the talent that helped to develop and sustain the Hollywood system actually originated in Europe. The majority of the genres that characterise contemporary film (including comedy, romance, costume dramas, thrillers, and science fiction, for example) were developed in Europe in the first decade of the twentieth century, and in the work of pioneer directors such as Georges Méliès the seeds of today's camera techniques and special effects can be found. In the years leading up to the First World War, European cinema entirely dominated international markets, a position illustrated by the fact that between 1906 and 1913, a single studio in France (Pathé) was responsible for one third of the world's entire film output, for which it owned the means of production, distribution, and exhibition (Sadoul 1947: 221). Moreover, its closest competitors were other European nations, primarily Italy and Denmark. Ironically, Pathé's largest market at that time was the United States where, in the decade preceding the First World War only about one third of the films that were screened were American (Nowell-Smith 1996: 24). (It may be salutary to compare this with today's position in which the American film industry accounts for 74 per cent of worldwide film production investment, see Wayne 2002: 6).

However, by the time that the war had ended, much of Europe lay in ruins, and its film industry had largely been decimated. In the meantime, Hollywood had set about creating an economically efficient method of film production, based on a highly developed studio system and conceived, from the first, as a profit-making industry, and from this period onward, its films would increasingly dominate European screens. Nevertheless, cinema continued to play a central role in European life, offering, in turn, escape and entertainment, intellectual and artistic challenge and, vitally, a means of interrogating and expressing identity and memory, and constructing and deconstructing national myths. Film has provided solace in times of hardship, has served as both political tool and subversive weapon, has been exploited as propaganda, and silenced by censorship. Film-going reached its apogee in many European countries in the grim aftermath of the Second World War, when audience numbers soared and cinemas provided an important community focus and social function, whilst the films so fervently viewed offered audiences a shared set of images of the world. Of course, the source of the majority of these images was Hollywood, hence Sorlin's comment that 'we Europeans create images of the world through Hollywood's lenses' (1991: 1); nevertheless European films were still being made, and by the late 1950s the explosion of talent signalled by the French New Wave heralded new creative vitality right across Europe and beyond. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, the importance of cinema appeared to be in decline, in many ways, and for a number of reasons. However, despite the gloomy prognostications for its future, European cinema has survived, and currently could even be described as flourishing, even if not everywhere, and one could argue that the need for film as exploration of difference, as expression of new, fluid concepts of identity, and shifting centres and peripheries has never seemed greater.

An industry in decline?

For a good many years, prognostications concerning the future of European cinema have been poor. The number of cinemas in Europe declined steadily from the 1950s until the end of the century as audiences numbers decreased and public enthusiasm for cinema seemed to have been replaced by television and other forms of entertainment. While the reasons for this decline were multiple, its consequences for Europe were aggravated by Hollywood's increasing domination of the European market. In 1993–94, for instance, research for the first edition of this book revealed that Jurassic Park was at the top of box-office charts in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovakia, Spain and the UK, that is to say, in all but three of the countries whose statistics I was, at that time, able to access. It is true that there were some exceptions: France, Switzerland, and Sweden relegated Jurassic Park to second position, but since this was after Aladdin in France and Switzerland, and after Sister Act in Sweden, these exceptions did offer much consolation.

As the final decade of the twentieth century drew to its close, the situation showed no signs of improving. Titanic, at the time the biggest box-office success in the whole of film history, amassed receipts totalling 2,056 million Euros by the end of 2000, decimating admissions to European films, and by 2002 the top ten films (by box-office admissions) in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Switzerland and the UK were all wholly or partly US funded (EAO 2003). Once again, there were a few exceptions: Spain had a Spanish film in ninth position: El otro lado de la cama (The Other Side of the Bed, Emilio Martínez-Lázaro) which, although not a huge achievement, was at least a minor victory. France...