Introduction and Scope
This section of the guide is dedicated to selected resources on individual countries and regions in Europe, with a primary focus on continental Europe. The curators of the guide recognize that geopolitical boundaries, political affiliations, and country names have changed over time, are often contested, and that any resources listed should be contextualized by date of publication, authorship, purported authority, language/translation, and evolving scholarly practice.
Attention has been paid to include equitable representation of Eastern, Central, and Western Europe. We recognize that a prioritization of Western European cinema and an uncritical elision of Soviet (approximately 15 republics) and "Russian" cinema that ignores colonialist and imperialist repression have often been disproportionally prominent in English-language scholarship. Resources listed here are not intended to be comprehensive, but rather an introduction for researchers to available books, periodicals, online sources, and films. Researchers are encouraged to explore resources beyond those listed in the guide, both at UCLA Library and beyond.
Europe
Carte Geologique De L'Europe (1875)
André Dumont, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
General European Film Histories and Studies
Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and the Cultures of Imperialism by ISBN: 0859896048Date: 2000-12-01The book integrates theoretical discussion and textual analysis with primary source historical research, particularly into film reception. The case studies question received understandings of European film history, and offer new insights into canonical films already familiar to many readers. It is the first book length study of the subject and includes new insights into Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Eisenstein's October and the Griersonian Documentary as well as 'forgotten' films of the period.
Animation in Europe by ISBN: 9781032058184Date: 2022-08-05Provides a comprehensive review of the history and current situation of animation in over 20 European countries. It features numerous interviews with artists and producers, including rare documents and firsthand accounts that illustrate the rich history of animation in Europe.
The Cinema of Central Europe by ISBN: 9781904764212Date: 2005-05-11This new volume in the Twenty-Four Frames series focuses on twenty-four key Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Polish films from the twenties to the present. Between the wars the cinemas of Hungary, Poland, and the former Czechoslovakia each claimed their pioneers of early cinema and attained significant levels of production.
Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe by ISBN: 9781474448505Date: 2020-07-22This collection of original essays considers filmmakers' engagements with pressing issues of the moment. Taking a long view of the crisis and considering geopolitical changes that took place towards the end of the 20th century, this book examines European cinema's response to the economic, political and social crises that afflict Europe in the present.
Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film by ISBN: 1903364647Date: 2004-03-17Comprehensive study of the cinematic traditions of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia from 1945 to the present day, exploring the major schools of filmmaking and the main stages of development across the region during the period of state socialism up until the end of the Cold War, as well as more recent transformations post-1989.
Conflict and Survival in Contemporary Western European Film by ISBN: 9781538158982Date: 2022-02-23John Alexander Williams and Alexandra Hagen have collected a diverse array of essays that analyze how filmmakers have portrayed forms of strife and endurance in the new century. Divided into three thematic sections-historical conflicts and national identities; migrants, natives, and battles over space; and ethical struggles in everyday life-this book offers case studies of historical context, narrative, and form in a range of significant recent films.
Contemporary European Cinema by ISBN: 9780340761366Date: 2007-07-27Whether attempting to engage with the past, explore the present or predict the future, today's European films display a verve and originality that challenges the older stereotypes. Contemporary European Cinema presents an overview of the dynamics of twenty-first century European cinema, exploring the artistic, commercial and production contexts of European cinema in order to identify the areas in which the continent's filmmakers express their national concerns and identities.
Contemporary European Cinema: Crisis Narratives and Narratives in Crisis by ISBN: 9781138564404Date: 2018-11-30This book offers a range of accounts of the state of "European Cinema" in a specific sociopolitical era: that of the global economic crisis that began in 2008 and the more recent refugee and humanitarian crisis.
Coproducing Europe: An Ethnography of Film Markets, Creativity and Identity by ISBN: 9781800739857Date: 2023-05-12By focusing on regional film markets in Thessaloniki, Sarajevo and Tbilisi, this comparative ethnography looks beyond the economic nature of film coproductions to their role in Europeanization, memories of the Cold War and preconstructed political agendas.
Desires for Reality: Radicalism and Revolution in Western European Film by ISBN: 9781785331114Date: 2016-02-28The author mounts an analysis of a contested period in which everything from the avant-garde experiments of Godard, Pasolini, Schroeter, and Fassbinder to the "low" cinematic genres of horror, pornography, and the Western reflected the cultural upheaval of youth in revolt--a cinema for the barricades.
East, West and Centre: Reframing Post-1989 European Cinema by ISBN: 9780748694150Date: 2014-12-09Scholars in the field assemble to consider the ways in which notions such as East and West, national and transnational, central and marginal are being rethought and reframed in contemporary European cinema.
European Cinema by ISBN: 9780199255719Date: 2004-02-12European Cinema is the first book to provide overviews of key movements in European film history, from the inception of the medium in 1895 to the present. This text includes accessible introductions to traditions as diverse as early Soviet cinema, German Expressionism, Surrealism, Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, Ealing Comedy, East-Central European cinema, Contemporary Spanish cinema, and much more.
European Cinema: Face to Face With Hollywood by ISBN: 9789053566022Date: 2005-10-01Has European cinema, in the age of globalization, lost contact not only with the world at large, but with its own audiences? Between the thriving festival circuit and the obligatory late-night television slot, is there still a public or a public sphere for European films? Can the cinema be the appropriate medium for a multicultural Europe and its migrating multitudes?Elsaesser reassesses the debates and presents a broader framework for understanding the forces at work since the 1960s.
European Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century: Discourses, Directions, and Genres by ISBN: 9783030334352Date: 2020-05-24This book rethinks the study of European Cinema in a way that centres on students and their needs, in a comprehensive volume introducing undergraduates to the main discourses, directions and genres of twenty-first-century European film. Importantly, this collection is the first of its kind to apply a transversal approach to European Cinema, bringing together the East and the West, while providing a broad picture of key trends, aesthetics, genres, national identities, and transnational concerns.
European Cinema Reader by ISBN: 0415240921Date: 2002-07-18Contributors explore attempts to define European film culture and examine key issues of auteurism and the art house film, national cinemas, the relationship between European film and Hollywood, and issues of funding and distribution.
European Film and Media Culture by ISBN: 9788763504270Date: 2006-04-21The book deals with media politics, media technology and the cultural and aesthetics dimensions of European film and television. Through a number of case studies different media cultures of Europe are explored: Turkey, East Central Europe, Germany, England, Netherlands and Denmark.
European Film and Television Co-Production by ISBN: 9783319971568Date: 2019-02-07This volume offers an up-to-date analysis of film and television co-production in Europe. It brings together the voices of policy professionals, industry practitioners and media industry scholars to trace the contours of a complex practice that is of increasing significance in the global media landscape. Analysis of the latest production statistics sits alongside interviews with producers and the critical evaluation of public film policies.
European Film Industries by ISBN: 9780851709482Date: 2004-01-27Exploring trends in production, distribution and exhibition, this book considers a range of national and pan-regional developments. Key areas of critical debate are highlighted, including private and public financing, co-production, film policy, links between the film and television industries, and the threats to "art cinema" from within and without Europe.
European Film Music by ISBN: 9780754636595Date: 2006-09-28Miguel Mera and David Burnand present a volume that explores specific European filmic texts, composers and approaches to film scoring that have hitherto been neglected. Films involving British, French, German, Greek, Irish, Italian, Polish and Spanish composers are considered in detail.
European Film Remakes by ISBN: 9781474460644Date: 2021-03-16Bringing together a range of international scholars, European Film Remakes discusses for the first time the textual, socio-cultural, political, and industrial mechanisms and singularities of the film remake in a European context. Offering a variety of historical, theoretical, and methodological approaches, the book is illustrated by a wide range of case studies from across Europe.
European Film Theory by ISBN: 9780415960434Date: 2008-10-28European Film Theory explores the 'Europeanness' of European film theory, its philosophical origins, the 'culture wars' between 'Continental' and 'Analytical' film theory and philosophy, the major discursive and epistemological shifts in the history of Continental film theory, the relationship between Continental philosophy of art and philosophy of history and European film theory.
European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction by ISBN: 9780748611683Date: 2001An exploration of the major film theories and cinema movements within European cinema from the 1920s onwards. The content of the book is organized around the twin paradigms of realism and modernism, and covers areas of European cinema such as Soviet montage cinema, French impressionism, German expressionism, Italian neo-realism, the French and German new waves, and issues around realism and modernism within contemporary cinema.
The Europeanization of Cinema: Interzones and Imaginative Communities by ISBN: 9780252038457Date: 2014-06-10In this innovative study, German and film studies scholar Randall Halle advances the concept of "interzones"--geographical and ideational spaces of transit, interaction, transformation, and contested diversity--as a mechanism for analyzing European cinema.
The Europeanness of European Cinema by ISBN: 9781780769295Date: 2014-12-18This book identifies the distinctive character of European cinema, both in films and as a critical concept, asking: what place does European cinema have in an increasingly globalized world? Including in-depth analyses of production and reception contexts, as well as original readings of key European films from leading experts in the field, it re-negotiates traditional categories such as auteurism, art cinema and national cinemas.
Film Distribution Companies in Europe by ISBN: 9789287160201Date: 2007Key topics discussed include analysis of the film distribution sector in Europe, market overviews, key players, and market shares. Individual company profiles include contact details, strategies, European films distributed and admissions between 2000 and 2005, and financial situations.
Filming in European Cities: The Labor of Location by ISBN: 9781501779978Date: 2025-03-15Celik Rappas highlights the pivotal role crew members play in transforming cities and locations into functional screen settings. Examining five European media capitals--Athens, Belfast, Berlin, Istanbul, and Paris--the book delves into the overlooked aspects of location-related screen labor and its ability to generate production value.
Fine Cuts: Interviews on the Practice of European Film Editing by ISBN: 1315475111Date: 2018-05-20In the expanded second edition of Fine Cuts, Roger Crittenden reveals the experiences of the greatest European film editors through his warm and perceptive interviews. This new edition builds on the foundations laid out in 2005, including interviews with the editors of films such as Day for Night, The Sacrifice, The Kid with a Bike, and Fanny and Alexander; new interviews with editors of such films as Tyrannosaur and The Other Side of Hope; and editors from a wider range of countries, including Austria, Belgium, Finland, Portugal, and Russia.
Making Worlds: Affect and Collectivity in Contemporary European Cinema by ISBN: 0231550693Date: 2020The twenty-first century has witnessed a resurgence of economic inequality, racial exclusion, and political hatred, causing questions of collective identity and belonging to assume urgency. In this book, the author argues that contemporary European cinema provides ways of thinking about and feeling collectivity that can challenge these political trends. The author offers nuanced readings of major contemporary films such as Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Biutiful, Fatih Akın's The Edge of Heaven, Asghar Farhadi's A Separation, and Aki Kaurismäki's refugee trilogy, as well as works by Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919-1939 by ISBN: 9789053569610Date: 2007-09-15Arguing that a European perspective is the only way to understand the transnational movement, the book also pioneers a new approach to the alternative cinema network that sustained the avant-garde, paying particular attention to the emergence of film culture as visible in screening clubs, film festivals, and archives.
Nationalism in Contemporary Western European Cinema by ISBN: 9783319736662Date: 2018-07-10This book investigates screen representations of 21st century nationalism--arguably the most urgent and apparent phenomenon in the Western world today. The chapters explore recurrent thematic and stylistic features of 21st century western European cinema, and analyse the ways in which film responds to contemporary developments of mounting tensions and increasing hostilities to difference.
Non-Fiction Cinema in Postwar Europe: Visual Culture and the Reconstruction of Public Space by ISBN: 9789463725583Date: 2024-10-21This edited volume explores the multiple ways nonfiction cinema reconfigured public spaces, collective participation, democratisation, and governmentality between 1944 and 1956. Looking back at it through a transnational perspective and the critical category of spatiality, nonfiction cinema appears in a new light.
100 Years of European Cinema: Entertainment or Ideology? by ISBN: 0719058716Date: 2001-03-01Cinema provides entertainment, but it also, inevitably, communicates a set of values, a vision of the world or an ideology. From its beginnings more than a century ago, European cinema has dealt in a variety of ways with the tension between these two functions: at the extremes, dictatorial regimes have sweetened the pill of ideology with the sugar of entertainment.
Precarious Intimacies: The Politics of Touch in Contemporary Western European Cinema by ISBN: 9780810142114Date: 2020-08-15Twenty-first-century Europe is undergoing dramatic political and economic transformations that produce new forms of transnational contact as well as new regimes of exclusion and economic precarity. These political and economic shifts both circumscribe and enable new possibilities for intimacy. Many European films of the last two decades depict experiences of political and economic vulnerability in narratives of precarious intimacies.
The Routledge Companion to European Cinema by ISBN: 9781000512298Date: 2021-12-29The book engages with European cinema that attends to questions of European colonial, racialized and gendered power; seeks to decentre Europe itself (not merely its putative centres); and interrogate Europe's various conceptualizations from a variety of viewpoints. It explores the broad, complex and heterogeneous community/ies produced in and by European films, taking in Kurdish, Hollywood and Singapore cinema as comfortably as the cinema of Poland, Spanish colonial films or the European gangster genre.
Screening European Heritage: Creating and Consuming History on Film by ISBN: 9781137522795Date: 2016-09-20This book provides a unique examination of the way Europe's past is represented on contemporary screens and what this says about contemporary cultural attitudes to history. How do historical dramas come to TV and cinema screens across Europe? How is this shaped by the policies and practices of cultural institutions, from media funding boards to tourist agencies and heritage sites? Who watches these productions and how are they consumed in cinemas, on TV and online?
Thresholds: Interwar Lens Media Cultures, 1919-1939 by ISBN: 9783753300009Date: 2021-11-09This collection of 18 new essays by leading scholars examines the interwar entanglement of film and photography through case studies and reflections on concepts such as "the New Vision" and the uncanny, as well as imagery ranging from aerial views to microphotography, geopolitical mappings to racial typologies, surrealist montage to didactic films.
Transnational Cinema in Europe by ISBN: 9783643904782Date: 2013-12-28Transnational Cinema in Europe is the result of a collaboration of two research groups in Madrid and Vienna. The book consists of articles by members of both research groups, as well as by several other experts.
Women at Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema by ISBN: 9780252042225Date: 2019-01-30From hairdressers and caregivers to reproductive workers and power-suited executives, images of women's labor have powered a fascinating new movement within twenty-first-century European cinema. Barbara Mennel delves into the ways these films about female labor capture the tension between feminist advances and their appropriation by capitalism in a time of ongoing transformation. Looking at independent and genre films from a cross-section of European nations, Mennel sees a focus on economics and work adapted to the continent's varied kinds of capitalism and influenced by concepts in second-wave feminism.
