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Contemporary European cinema in a transnational perspective: aftereffects of 1989

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CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN CINEMA IN A TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE:
AFTEREFFECTS OF 1989

by

Alice-Mihaela Bardan

__________________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

May 2012

Copyright 2012 Alice-Mihaela Bardan

ii

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to those who helped me write this dissertation. My warmest
gratitude goes to Professor Tania Modleski, the chair of my dissertation committee, for
her insightful comments on my drafts, unwavering support, and warm friendship. I’ve
learned so much from her over the years. She has given me the unqualified support that
every graduate student desires in a mentor, and served as a role model for rigorous
scholarship. Her challenging course on Hitchcock, among the first I took as a graduate
student at USC, was truly inspiring. I feel incredibly lucky to have worked with her.
I am also very much indebted to the rest of my committee members, Akira Lippit
and David Lloyd, for their constant encouragement and constructive suggestions. This
dissertation has profited very much from our conversations, and they have both
profoundly influenced the way I think and write. Akira’s course on “The Body in
Cinema” offered me new ways to think about the project and discussions with him helped
nuance my understanding of the theoretical questions it raises. David Lloyd helped guide
the way through difficult questions, and often suggested many references to consult.
Special thanks also go to Luisa Rivi, whose lectures on international cinema and
more specifically on transnational Europe were particularly instrumental to my thinking
about theorizing European cinema. I am grateful for having had the chance to collaborate
with Aniko Imre, Katarzyna Marciniak, and Aine O’Healy. As editors of Transnational
Feminism in Film and Media, where I published a chapter from my dissertation, they
offered invaluable feedback to my work. As friends, they gave me good counsel and
iii

tremendous energy to bring my project to a finish. In 2006, Aniko invited me to
participate in a special seminar on media globalization and identity at Central
European University, which enabled me to theorize the relationship between
nationalism, media globalization and identity in Europe. Later on, our conversations on
nationhood and branding led to several co-authored publications.
I feel blessed to have been able to profit from other incredibly smart and sharing
interlocutors. Many thanks to the wonderful Judith Halberstam, whose courses on
cultural theory and queer studies have sharpened my critical sensibilities; to Viet Nguyen,
who always welcomed me with a smile to his office, gave me feedback on drafts, and
encouraged me; to Dana Polan, with whom I had great conversations during my
independent study with him; to David James, whose class on avant-garde cinema was
extremely engaging and intellectually stimulating; and to late Anne Friedberg, whose
course on narrative theory was intense and mind-opening.
I also want to thank my professors in the Department of English and those in
Critical Studies and the Visual Studies Program at University of Southern California: the
warm, welcoming atmosphere that surrounded me all these years as a graduate student
enabled me to finish my project in a very encouraging environment. The English
department and the University of Southern California supported this project with a
Mellon fellowship, an English Department Dissertation Fellowship, and several summer
and travel fellowships. I am grateful to have been entrusted with these resources of time
and money, and I hope that I have used them well. The communities of scholars that
iv

make up the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) and attend the
annual conference in a European city have also inspired and nurtured my work over the
years.
This dissertation would have simply been impossible for me to write without the
never-ending support of my dear friends Nicky Schildkraut, Lumi Docan, Ioana Uricaru,
Deniz Kuru, and John Flanagan. Whenever I hit a rough spot during the writing of the
draft, I felt comforted by the knowledge of your friendship.
Last but not least, I would like to thank my wonderful parents, who love me
unconditionally. They have encouraged me through numerous crises and celebrated my
achievements. They are, indeed, my guardian angels.

v

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii

List of Figures vii

Abstract xii

Introduction: What is New about New Europe and what is European about
European Cinema?
1

Chapter 1: From the “Crisis of Europe” to the “Crisis of European Cinema” 29
Chapter 1.1 What is –or should be (New) European Cinema? 29
Chapter 1.2 Defining the Transnational as a Category 35
Chapter 1.3 Defining Cinematic Transnationalism 38
Chapter 1.4 How to Rethink European Cinema: Problems and Changes 49
Chapter 1.5 A Supranational Framework and Co-Productions 60
Chapter 1.6 Phantom Europe 62

Chapter 2: Post-National Cinema: Translation, Identity, and Aftereffects of 1989 in
Romanian Cinema
67
Chapter 2.1 Language and Translation in the European Union 67
Chapter 2.2 The Crisis in Romanian Cinema 76
Chapter 2.3 Explaining Romanian Cinephilia 81
Chapter 2.4 Aftereffects of 1989: Post-National Cinema in Contemporary
Europe and Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006)
91
Chapter 2.5 Context: Cinematic Reconfigurations of 1989 98
Chapter 2.6 Understanding the Reception of 12:08 in Romania: Was there,
or was there not an event?
108
Chapter 2.7 The Question of Making and Saying an Event: Virtuality and
Simulacrum
111
Chapter 2.8 The Use of Language in 12:08 119
Chapter 2.9 Post-national Pastiche and Cinematic Realism 127

Chapter 3: Transnational Journeys in the New Europe 133
Chapter 3.1 “Enter Freely, and of Your Own Will”: Cinematic
Representations of Post-Socialist Transnational Journeys
133
Chapter 3.2 Last Resort: A “Post-Utopian” European Film? 137
vi

Chapter 3.3 Last Resort and Lilya 4-ever 143
Chapter 3.4 New Ways of Representing the Nation: Is the New “British”
Cinema Polish?
153
Chapter 3.5 Rejecting a “Cinema of Duty”: Situating Pawlikowski’s “Poetic
Realism” in the Context of British Cinema
155
Chapter 3.6 Issues of Class, Whiteness and Neoracism in Last Resort 159
Chapter 3.7 Welcome to Wonderland! Questioning the Authenticity of the
National Image
172

Chapter 4: Learning to Live (Together) in a Haunted Europe 176
Chapter 4.1 A “Crisis of Representation”: Performing Presence, Double-
Occupancy, and Post-Identity
176
Chapter 4.2 Post-Mortem Cinema in Contemporary Europe 181
Chapter 4.3 Whose Marginality? 217
Chapter 4.4 Welcoming Ghosts 223
Chapter 4.5 Instead of a Conclusion: Wearing the Revolution 228

Chapter 5: The New European Cinema of Precarity: A Transnational Perspective 248
Chapter 5.1 Defining Precarity 248
Chapter 5.2 Precarity as a Post-Class Discourse 254
Chapter 5.3 European Cinema of Precarity in a Transnational Perspective 260
Chapter 5.4 Contortions of Flexibility 273
Chapter 5.5 Cinema Invents New Modalities of the Visible 281
Chapter 5.6 The Precarious Generation and Generation Internship 307
Chapter 5.7 Insecurities Related to the Loss of Social Status 311
Chapter 5.8 The Balcony as a Metaphor of Transition 315
Chapter 5.9 Mobbing: Your Death, My Life 322

Conclusion 327

Bibliography 335

vii

List of Figures
Figure 1: Romanian theatre transformed into Bingo 69
Figure 2: Romanian theater in Bucharest after 1989 70
Figure 3: Romanian theater closed after 1989 70
Figure 4: Romanian theater closed after 1989 71
Figure 5: Former Romanian theater as Outlet 72
Figure 6: Prologue Frames for 12:08 East of Bucharest 95
Figure 7: Drawing at the end of Police, Adjective 97
Figure 8: Niyazi trying to make conversation 103
Figure 9: Hanna watching the Fall of the Wall on TV 104
Figure 10: Hanna watching celebrating crowds 104
Figure 11: Rita regretting the Fall of the Wall 108
Figure 12: Piscoci, Jderescu, and Manescu 124
Figure 13: The Young cameraman in 12:08 East of Bucharest 128
Figure 14: Image for “Operation Desert Storm” on Wikipedia 132
Figure 15: Searching for Marie’s birthmarks 188
Figure 16: The computer-generated image of Marie 188
Figure 17: Yella followed by Ben’s ghost 191
Figure 18: Yella and Philip during negotiations 193
Figure 19: Emma and her ritual before killing a pig 199
Figure 20: Emma’s ghost-like appearance 201
viii

Figure 21: Ioan and Michele in the same spot at the Termini Station 203
Figure 22: DVD Cover for Cover Boy 209
Figure 23: Ioan and his father 216
Figure 24: Michele’s ghost at the end of Cover Boy 217
Figure 25: Italian man asking Ioan to have sex with him and his friend 219
Figure 26: A Roma man defends his spot at an intersection 221
Figure 27: Italian man trying to pass as a Swiss 222
Figure 28: Michele asking whether he can pass as a Romanian 222
Figure 29: Michele’s shadow indicates that he has killed himself 224
Figure 30: Poster for Cover Boy 228
Figure 31: Warsaw Ghetto Boy photograph 245
Figure 32: Image from The Taxi Thief 252
Figure 33: Image from The Taxi Thief showing protests in Spain 253
Figure 34: Protests against precarity in The Taxi Thief 253
Figure 35: Looting the supermarket in The Taxi Thief 253
Figure 36: Spanish dancer without a job 262
Figure 37: Image from The Taxi Thief 263
Figure 38: The lawyer in The Taxi Thief 264
Figure 39: The Lawyer classifying people 264
Figure 40: Typing thoughts on precarity: image from The Taxi Thief 266
Figure 41: Discussing work in The Taxi Thief 268
ix

Figure 42: Trying to justify squatting 270
Figure 43: Jose justifying his fear of squatting 270
Figure 44: Being against work 271
Figure 45: Explaining the “Free Money” Campaign 273
Figure 46: Occupy Wall Street Advertisement 275
Figure 47: Poster for Euromayday 276
Figure 48: Poster for Euromayday 277
Figure 49: Poster for Euromayday 278
Figure 50: Image at the end of La Jetée 285
Figure 51: Robert Capa’s famous photograph 286
Figure 52: Images from Jean Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma 288
Figure 53: Bodies swimming together in Respiro 292
Figure 54: Image from Nuovomondo 293
Figure 55: Image from Nuovomondo 294
Figure 56: Poster for Terraferma 295
Figure 57: Image from Terraferma 295
Figure 58: Africans crying for help in Terraferma 296
Figure 59: Tourists on a boat in Terraferma 296
Figure 60: Fish thrown in front of the police station in Terraferma. 298
Figure 61: Image from GoodBye, How Are You? 298
Figure 62: Image from GoodBye, How Are You? 299
x

Figure 63: Crowds standing in line for visa in GoodBye, How Are You? 300
Figure 64: Protesting Crowds in GoodBye, How Are you? 300
Figure 65: Image of crowds in GoodBye, How Are You? 301
Figure 66: Jumping in Shallow Waters 301
Figure 67: Mural from GoodBye, How Are You? 303
Figure 68: Image from GoodBye, How Are You? 304
Figure 69: Image from GoodBye, How Are You? 304
Figure 70: Poster for the Greek film Apnea 305
Figure 71: Image from Apnea 306
Figure 72: Image from Goodbye, How Are You? 306
Figure 73: Image from Escape From The Call Center 308
Figure 74: Image from Escape from the Call Center 308
Figure 75: Poster for The Revolt of the Interns 310
Figure 76: Chris asserting his “superiority” 311
Figure 77: Chris and Gitti in Everyone Else 312
Figure 78: Valerie’s confidence returns after she tips the valet 313
Figure 79: Images from Valerie 314
Figure 80: Valerie gaining confidence 314
Figure 81: Valerie asking for cigarettes from a Muslim man 315
Figure 82: Katrin’s first interview 318
Figure 83: Katrin’s second interview 320
xi

Figure 84: Image from Summer in Berlin 321
Figure 85: Katrin takes a temporary job 322
Figure 86: Anna standing by the printer 323

xii

Abstract
This dissertation investigates what is new about European identity in the post-
Cold War era, and what is European about New European cinema. I offer an
expansive reading of recent transnational films by linking cinema to current debates
on historical memory, cultural identity, and neoliberal capitalism. In my analysis of
the relationship between the social and political realities of Europe at present and the
transnational sensibility emerging in the New European Cinema, I highlight cinema’s
privileged role in generating images for a changing European imaginary. With this, I
uncover what is at stake institutionally, aesthetically, and critically in the creation of
“European Cinema,” a category until recently perceived as the counterface of
Hollywood and equated with art cinema or with specific national cinemas. I also
challenge a trend in current debates on European cinema which focuses on the
representation of migrants and other marginalized identities as privileged figures of
authenticity, showing how, in many recent European films, the average European
citizen is also rendered “marginal,” in the thrall of precarious employment and an
uncertain financial future. What emerges from this transnational cinema, I argue, is a
vision of Europe as a territory united not by a common culture, but rather by a set of
shared economic anxieties. Crucially, I show how contemporary European films
transmit memory and shape identities by evoking spectral traces from the past. These
films also foreground the ways in which personal and transnational conflicts and
allegiances disrupt national ones, and suggest the interrelatedness of conflicts within the
xiii

nation and those between the national and the global capitalist order. These
intersections have both spatial and temporal dimensions, since Europe’s past is not
simply something to be unearthed or rewritten. As the films themselves propose, the
past co-exists with the present, haunting contemporary Europeans with uncanny
insistence. This dissertation is one of the first extended projects to interrogate the
cinematic landscapes of the “new” Europe, attempting to determine how these serve both
to articulate a politics of memory and cast light on the accelerated transformations of the
post-Cold War era.
1

Introduction
What is New about Europe and what is European about European Cinema?

“Europe” is a slippery term. With every effort made
to pin down its meaning(s), new sets of excluded
concepts, overlooked relations and forgotten
histories surface.
Dimitris Eleftheriotis

[Europe] is present everywhere and yet invisible.
Antoine Compagnon

A rhetoric of crisis, as it has always been deployed
in the tradition of European philosophy, from Hegel
to Valery, from Husserl to Heidegger, is perhaps no
longer appropriate.
Jacques Derrida

What does it mean to talk about a “New Europe” and a “New European Cinema”
after 1989? And how to approach these topics when they have been relentlessly criticized
as elusive, contradictory or phantasmatic? How has Europe tried to redefine itself after
the critical moment of 1989, a moment that Francis Fukuyama identified as “the end of
history,” proclaiming that the end of the Cold War signaled the end of the progression of
human history and at the same time introduced the universalization of Western liberal
democracy as the final form of human government? Or the moment when, in
contradistinction to Fukuyama, Jean Baudrillard asserted in The Illusion of the End that
the “end of history” is not the culmination of human culture, but the collapse of the very
idea of historicity? “We are no longer a part of the drama of alienation; we live in the
ecstasy of communication,” Baudrillard famously wrote.
2

At a time when the “post-national” and “the end of the nation state” have become
commonplace terms within academic discourses of globalization, Europe has created a
material manifestation of the new (post-Cold war) world order by gradually
strengthening its supranational system, which led to its perception (at least until the
recent economic crisis) as a “vanguard” form of post-statehood. Indeed, current
discussions in Europe underscore that a transnational European identity based on
common values, rooted in a common past, is essential to the success of the continental
union, distinguishing the continent from the rest of the world while connecting nations
with different cultures. In the wake of the now infamous French and Dutch rejections of
the European Union’s draft constitution in France and the Netherlands, politicians and
media commentators have renewed debates about European identity “in crisis” and the
search for a “European consciousness” that would hold the union together. Nowadays,
the word “crisis” seems to dominate major European headlines. In cinema, too, ideas
about national cinemas have developed to such an extent that for many critics we are now
living in a post-national world which acknowledges the need to examine cinema from
perspectives that celebrate a diversity of experiences rather than promoting an
essentialized notion of national identity.
This dissertation interrogates the structures of discourse that have been used to
talk about New European Cinema. Examining the varied ways in which the new has been
identified and labeled, by whom and from what position and perspective, I ask: what is
the critical purchase of talking about the existence (or not) of a national, transnational, or
3

supranational cinema? What kind of political imaginaries of the new Europe are currently
being formed and what elements return to haunt perceptions of Europe in cinema? What
is the relevance, if any, of Europe’s national cinemas (which, for decades, have been
deeply engaged in sustaining the national) in the age of widespread transnational co-
productions and European funding? What is the role of national language and cultural
specificity when more and more European filmmakers, from Lars von Trier, Ole
Christian Madsen, and Aki Kaurismäki to Krzysztof Kieslowski, Michael Haneke, Pawel
Pawlikowski and many others make films in languages other than their native one? Does
this relate to anxieties about a loss of national cultural specificity, and if so, what are the
implications arising from such filmmakers’ choices for the national imaginary? For
example, what does it mean that Kati Outinen, the famous Finnish actress who plays in
several films directed by Aki Kaurismäki, speaks French (with a heavy accent) in his
latest film Le Havre (2011)? The audience who came to hear their native languages at the
Los Angeles Scadinavian Film Festival in 2012 received the news with an audible gasp.
“You won’t hear even a Finnish word in this film with a French title,” the festival
director told the festival audience when he introduced the film.
To be sure, none of these questions have simple, definite answers. To talk about
“New Europe” and a “New European cinema” means looking, first and foremost, at the
discourses that have been used to discuss Europe and European cinema in the past. My
own point of entry into these frought topics is through an approach that interrogates the
very rhetoric of crisis often deployed in related discussions. Broadly speaking, therefore,
4

my project considers the ways in which Europe is always already an “imagined
community” (to use Benedict Anderson’s term) and examines what it means to talk
about Europe and European cinema “in crisis” in the post-Cold War era. Although in
some chapters I focus on specific national case studies in order to discuss these in relation
to concepts of post-national European cinema, my larger aim is to identify and articulate
trends, continuities and discontinuities in post-Cold War European cinema.
Europe, it seems, has always been “in crisis.” The concept of Europe has virtually
always been in flux, as its outer limits, or rather its structures of inclusion and exclusion,
have been debated for centuries. On May 10, 1935, in the years just prior to the Second
World War and with the memory and shadow of the First World War, Edmund Husserl
presented his by now famous Vienna lecture “Philosophy in the Crisis of European
Mankind.” He talked about the spiritual shape of Europe, and not as it is understood
geographically, as on a map, arguing that to escape from “the crisis of European
existence” Europe must be born again out of the spirit of philosophy. Husserl’s death in
1938 spared him the fate of his fellow Jews; only a few years later, Joseph Goebbels
published “The European Crisis” on February 28
th
, 1943. Speaking about “the Jewish
question,” Goebbels proclaimed that we live at the most critical period in the history of
the Occident, and that “the paralysis of Europe’s will has reached its epitome.”
For Husserl, it is not the people who live together in the territory called Europe
that may define European humanity. On the contrary,
5

In the spiritual sense, the English Dominions, the United States, etc, clearly
belong to Europe, whereas the Eskimos or Indians presented as curiosities at fairs,
or the Gypsies, who constantly wonder about Europe, do not...No matter how
hostile they may be toward one another, the European nations nevertheless have a
particular inner kinship of spirit which runs through them all, transcending
national differences...There is something here that is recognized in us all by all
other human groups, too, something that, quite apart from all considerations of
utility, becomes a motive for them to Europeanize themselves even in their
unbroken will to spiritual self-preservation; whereas we, if we understand
ourselves properly, would never Indianize ourselves, for example. (275)

Persecuted by the Nazis, Husserl became “the Good European,” profoundly concerned
with the destiny of Europe. Yet as the quotation above demonstrates, Husserl’s
meditation on Europe could not escape either the vocabulary of spirit on which modern
racism draws, or the promotion of a Eurocentrism which relies on an economy of
inclusion and exclusion, in principle willing to offer hospitality to others as long as they
deny their otherness by Europeanizing themselves.
Europe can refer to a geographical area, an abstract cultural construct, an
assemblage of nations, a supranational entity, or merely a set of political of institutions
linked to the EU. Whether the Balkans, Scandinavia, or Britain and Ireland properly
belonged within its embrace was a matter of contention up to the late nineteenth century
and beyond. Originally formed by six core countries in 1958, following the Treaty of
Rome, the European Economic Community became the European Union in 1993 and has
expanded over time to include twenty seven nation states. With the addition of more
member states since 2004, the increasing uncertainties of migration and capital flows,
Europe has undergone some of the most important changes in its history. The biggest
6

enlargement came that year when some of the former socialist countries – the Czech
Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia joined the
Union. On January 1
st
, 2007, Romania and Bulgaria became the newest members, but
they have been kept under strict labor restrictions, which were lifted by Italy alone in
January 2012. Nine other European countries have decided to keep their restrictions
against Romanian and Bulgarian workers until 2014. While “crisis-struck Italy” was
forced to recognize the value of these workers to the improvement of its economy, the
same old rhetoric of crisis and unemployment has been invoked by the remaining major
European countries to prevent Romanians and Bulgarians from exercising the same rights
as the nationals from other EU nations (Tolbaru 2012). A territory home to almost 500
million people and numerous film and media industries, the Europe of today is radically
different from the one that existed a decade or two ago.
There has never been, and arguably could never be a single definition of Europe.
Etymologically, the concept has its origins in the Greek myth of Europa, the daughter of
the king of Tyre, who was courted by Zeus in the form of a white bull, but it is uncertain
how the mythological figure of Europa came to represent the continent. For the ancient
Greeks, Europe and Asia were the two continents that set the limits to their northward sea
passage. “Europe” as a geographical term was first used by Herodotus, for whom Europe
was outside of Greece and did not resemble its current geographical perception, what we
now understand as Europe. Dimitris Eleftheriotis has emphasized the irony of this
situation. On the one hand, Europe as a geographical entity was defined during the
7

Renaissance by using a Greek term that initially had a different designation; on the other
hand, it was the revival of Greek civilization that gave Europe its first unified project and
a sense of Europeanness as shared past and destiny. This indicates that the search for
European origins of a historical, cultural, or even geographical nature is not only
“intellectually doomed,” as Eleftheriotis puts it (2), but also important because what
passes now as “European” has now became a major stake in a complex field of power
relations.
With the demise of Communism in 1989 and the end of the Cold War, there have
been countless and ongoing debates over the material and discursive geographies of the
shifting configuration of the “New Europe.” I began this dissertation with 1989 in mind
as the signifier of a “moment of crisis.” I take 1989 as the historical moment that marked
the unraveling of the binary East-West construct that had marked the European imaginary
for decades. In other words, 1989 is shorthand for a process that lasted until 1991 and
encompassed not only the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also the dismantling of the vast
Soviet Empire, bringing to an end the period historically known as the Cold War. The
accompanying shifts that occurred at the economic and socio-cultural levels have led to
the erosion of old, reassuring beliefs and narratives, making the task of talking about
Europe increasingly complex. Moreover, over the past two decades, the movement of
people, ideas, and images across what was once an impermeable divide, the ongoing
debate surrounding the possible accession of Turkey to the European Union, the surge of
immigration from Asia, North Africa, South America, and the Caribbean into Spain and
8

Italy, and from ex-colonies, African, Caribbean and Pacific into France – all meant that
notions of European identity became increasingly contested.
Staging an encounter between discourses on Europe and post-Cold War European
cinema, this dissertation considers some of the implications raised by real or imagined
crises – crises related to the proliferation of new types of social, political, and cultural
borders within various regions of Europe and within Europe’s metropolitan centers, to
questions regarding cinema’s ability to articulate and sustain the nation and the national
language, and to the recent recession in Europe, among others.
What are the stakes in talking about European cinema in crisis? My understanding
of 1989 as the signifier of a “moment of crisis” does not use cinema to discern a shift in
thinking, or image of thought, in the way that Gilles Deleuze did in his Cinema books.
For Deleuze, the World War II was a watershed that divided cinema into movement
image and time image. In particular, Deleuze identified a post-war “crisis in the action
image,” a moment in which a new cinema of “the seer” replaced the old cinema of the
agent through a general loosening of plot, a dispersion of space, and a self-consciousness
concerning clichés – all of which led to the emergence of a new type of image – the time-
image. Although he acknowleged that anticipations of pure optical and sound situations
and time-image narrative were to be found in various periods and styles of filmmaking,
Deleuze claimed that the crisis of the action-image emerged as a distinctive phenomenon
in the post-War period, beginning with Italian neo-realism (from 1948), the French
nouvelle vague (from 1958), New German Cinema (from1968), and American
9

independent film during the 1970s. In post-War European cinema, Deleuze claims, there
was no longer a “globalizing situation” that could be disclosed or transformed by
“decisive action”; rather, there were only disconnected actions or meandering plots that
loosely comprised “a dispersive set, in an open totality” (205).
The crisis of the action-image and the emergence of time-image cinema were
therefore driven by a historical dynamic, affected not only by the traumatic experience of
the war, but also by a plurality of historical factors: the scepticism towards overarching
cultural-political ideologies (revolutionary Socialism, the American vision of a
democracy of equals, shared cultural crises in meaning, new social movements, the shift
towards an image-centred culture, the crossover with modernist literature, and the crisis
in traditional Hollywood genres (Deleuze 206). In other words, it was a European crisis
but also an expression of a broader crisis, namely that of the “American Dream” with its
vision of individual liberty and fulfilment of historical destiny within a diverse
community of equals.
It is instructive to compare Deleuze’s crisis with more recent attempts to
conceptualize European cinema. For Deleuze, Italian neo-realism was the first post-War
style of cinema which responded to a historical situation in which characters confront
situations they no longer fully comprehend. More recently, Rob Stone has suggested that
one mode of reconceptualizing European identity is to map it according to the way in
which Europe’s region 2 DVD operates. Stone proposes that European cinema can
respond to the current critical situation in Europe by drawing on its revolutionary spirit,
10

that is, by fulfilling its (old and specifically European) role as agitator of social unrest and
change. In other words, he strongly believes that European cinema has a revolutionary
spirit, given its potential to bring social change. Yet to illustrate his view on the future of
a “unique” European Cinema, Stone gives the examples of auteur filmmakers such as
Michael Haneke, Pedro Almadovar, and Lukas Moodyson: an Austrian, a Spaniard, and a
Swede. Conspicuously lacking from this list of “good examples” are the young Romanian
filmmakers, for instance, whose conscious return to cinematic realism, as I elaborate in
the first two chapters, can be seen just as “revolutionary” for the renewal of European
cinema. Ironically, in the post-Cold war era, these young filmmakers resorted to realism,
one of the most stigmatized artistic trends in the former communist countries (given its
earlier application as socialist realism). For Doru Pop, this gesture is indeed
revolutionary, a direct reaction and response to the Maastricht Treaty and its demand for
the creation of a “common European character.”
As a number of critics have noted, there seems to be a tension between Deleuze’s
conceptual taxonomy of image types and his recourse to a historical account of the shift
to time-image narrative. Jacques Ranciere’s Film Fables (2006), for instance, takes issue
with Deleuze’s simplistic contrast between the creative inventiveness of Italian neo-
realism and the French nouvelle vague with the pessimistic romanticism and empty
clichés of American independent cinema. Deleuze praises Altman’s Nashville (1975) and
Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), for example, as examples of the voyage narrative, but
criticizes them for their romantic pessimism and their nihilistic and empty parody of
11

clichés. By contrast, European auteurs (filmmakers such as Godard, Truffaut, Bresson
and Rivette) are praised for their inventiveness and creativity in experimenting with new
kinds of image, character and narrative styles. In Deleuze and World Cinemas David
Martin-Jones singles out Deleuze as an important critic precisely because his work was
so influential for other film critics who sought a way to think beyond Eurocentrism. He
points to Rosi Braidotti’s work, in this respect, as a prime example of the potential that a
Deleuzian approach might offer for an understanding of what she describes as the
“becoming-minoritarian” of Europe. This notwithstanding, Martin-Jones emphasizes that
while Deleuze’s philosophy is not Eurocentric, the conclusions he draws in his Cinema
books are Eurocentric, given his ahistorical exploration of films and the universalizing
conclusions he extrapolates from his geographically limited selection of films.
It is important to foreground the ongoing importance that Europeans attach to the
affirmation of their “exemplary” tastes in cinema; this disposition has in fact been
institutionally reinforced over the past two decades. One of the most watched videos on
EuTube channel – launched in June of 2007 with the slogan “Sharing the Sights and
Sounds of Europe” – is the short video “Film Lovers Will Love This,” which to date has
been watched by eight and a half million people. This video projects a specific type of
(white) audience “coming together” to watch Europe on screen. Bringing together love
scenes from various European films, the video underscores how such films are not afraid
to tackle nudity and the full-throated expression of sexual pleasure through wordless
moans and groans. The implication is that unlike cinemas from other parts of the world,
12

European films are daring, sensual, passionate and uninhibited, offering exemplary
demonstrations of how authentic feeling can be represented artistically. Following a few
shots of a satisfied audience, the clip ends with an inscription that urges Europeans to
“come together” (pun intended) as a community of viewers to savor the jouissance of
European cinematic consumption.
Jacques Derrida’s The Other Heading (1992) is a useful point of reference here,
as it stresses how the terms in which Europe has been defined determine how the
discourse on Europe continues. Writing in 1991, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Derrida
questions whether the new Europe conjured up in 1989 was the same Europe that was
being “unified” for a second time. To think of Europe and to rethink European identity,
he cautions, one must not necessarily search for the radically new (since this was often
precisely what the Old Europe sought or claimed), but rather return to another origin of
Old Europe, an origin that could never become the object of any search or discovery.
Derrida delineates what one could call a “Europeanism of the other,” a European
“identity” or “culture” that comes from, is subverted by, and oriented towards an other,
since what is proper to a culture is that it is not identical to itself. The intention is to take
a stance beyond Eurocentrism and anti-Eurocentrism, and also beyond any form of
multiculturalism.
In order to understand the “critical” moment of “today,” the discourse on Europe
post-1989, Derrida claims that we should not make the mistake of borrowing from the
discursive schema of the traditional discourse of modernity. Reminding us how a rhetoric
13

of crisis has always been used in the tradition of European philosophy, from Hegel to
Valery and from Husserl to Heidegger, he suggests that such rhetoric is outdated and
“perhaps no longer appropriate” (31).
Recognizing that discourse is power, Derrida contends that we need to interrogate
the politics underpinning the conceptualization of Europe through the structures that have
been used to define it. One of the most important aspects of European discourse,
according to Derrida, is that it is historical. Doubting whether the designers of the new
Europe would ever notice this, he stresses that the discourse on “today” projects a
temporality of thought that is meant to separate the present from the past. The past is not
necessarily ignored but rather used as a mechanism for creating a “difference” and for
distinguishing the present. Derrida underscores that the new Europe ignores its history
and fails to define itself, albeit unintentionally. Neither distinguishing itself from its past
nor trying to determine itself through its past, the new Europe fails to acknowledge the
temporality of “today” (3, 5, 12). Moreover, the new Europe is in danger of losing track
of the “other,” as it is unsuccessful in its attempt at self-determination.
To be sure, the critical tradition in European philosophy has shown itself to be
aware of the “other,” and indeed, it has championed this fact as the essence of Europe. It
has presented itself to the other in a critically self-determinative fashion. Derrida suggests
that Europe has always protected itself as a universal that is defined by its internal
“differentness,” as an object that was different or “exemplary” in its pluralism. He
introduces the idea of exemplarity and explains that Europe has often been defined
14

through the logic of the example (“at once an undistinguished sample, and a teleological
model”): not simply as one example among others but as an essentially “good example,”
having an exemplary value for humankind. The “value of universality,” writes Derrida, is
“always linked to the value of exemplarity that inscribes the universal in the proper body
of a singularity” (xxvi). This happens, in other words, because Europe as an example is
not “offered” as an example among others, as a sample, but as one that is actually unique,
exemplary, and incomparable (126). Put differently, the singularity of Europe, what
constitutes its unique identity, is excessive and finite, occurring only as a mode of setting
an example of what remains without example. The discourse on Europe, therefore,
signals nothing other than an endlessly repeated law of exemplarity according to which
“an” example is “the” example, the exemplary instance of something else.
Paradoxically, Derrida notes, nationalism and cosmopolitanism have always gone
hand in hand. This is because, he explains, national hegemony imposes itself not in the
name of empirical superiority but rather by justifying itself in the name of a privilege in
responsibility and in the memory of the universal and the transnational (49). Thus, the
logic of national self-affirmation is, for Derrida, “I am (we are) all the more national for
being European, all the more European for being trans-European and international; no
one is more cosmopolitan and authentically universal than the one, than this ‘we’ who is
speaking to you” (48).
Let us remember, in this respect, that European film festivals have traditionally
followed a similar logic of operation. Post-World War II film festivals at Cannes, Venice,
15

Locarno and Berlin have explicitly commanded high moral ground, often positioning
themselves as “utopias where the appreciation of difference and similarity would
contribute to tolerance, coexistence, and, of course, a richer cinema” (Andrew 71). In
other words, although these festivals took pride in their cosmopolitan inclusiveness by
inviting entries from the West’s periphery which could contribute something unavailable
to those in the center, in so doing they set themselves up as the ultimate arbiters of value,
and consigned to the Parisian critics the authority and the privilege to take responsibility
for assessing the merits of all cinematic production. Serving as “a stock market where
producers and critics bought and sold ideas of cinema” (Andrew 74), European festivals
set trends and anticipated and labeled emerging “new waves.” Cinephiles all over the
world avidly followed these “new” developments in the pages of Paris’ Cahiers du
Cinéma, London’s Sight and Sound, or the festival catalogues from Cannes, Venice,
Locarno and Berlin.
As I have shown in this brief introduction, if the identity of Europe is highly
problematic, so too is that of European cinema which, throughout its history, has been
characterized by a high degree of uncertainty and by multiple debates that mirror the
complexities involved in the creation and recognition of cultural identity in general.
Given that the fragmentation and diversity that characterize European identity are also
deeply reflected across its cinema(s), the difficulty of discussing European cinema
becomes apparent. Yet having this discussion is highly important, because cinema
reflects and articulates European cultural identities while providing, at the same time,
16

vivid illustrations of the blind spots in the national and the regional in relation to the
relentless dynamic of globalization. Such a discussion also implicitly recognizes the
centrality of visual images to the formation of identity, whether personal, regional,
national or European.
Debates on European filmic cultures were focused for a long time on the
cinematic production of individual nations rather than on an attempt to forge a
transnational, pan-European view. Taking a transnational perspective, my discussion of
European cinema in this dissertation may at first appear problematical, since one may
argue that like Europe itself, the concept of European cinema is a mirage, a “phantom
cinema,” as some critics call it, a concept that has no reality outside the critical discourse
that frames it. As Wendy Everett (2005) has pointed out, we cannot speak of European
cinema in terms of a cultural monolith or static unitary identity. This notwithstanding,
and despite the general critical hesitation to tackle the question of European cinema, a
transnational perspective enables us to identify and assess trends which are visible across
different national and regional cinemas, allowing us to identify certain key characteristics
of European cinema. These characteristics include filmic, aesthetic, and other cultural
traditions or the exploration of themes and concerns (related, for instance, to issues of
exile, migration or precarity) that are of wider social and political relevance to Europe at
a given moment (Everett 8).
Recognizing that a rhetoric of crisis is at the heart of attempts to define or re-
define Europe, I am interested in the first instance in uncovering what is at stake
17

institutionally, aesthetically, and critically in the creation of “European Cinema,” a
category until recently perceived as the counterface of Hollywood and equated with
art cinema or with specific national cinemas. Second, I recognize the utility of a
transnational perspective in investigating prevalent characteristics and trends in the new
European cinema, which I link to current debates on historical memory, cultural
identity, and neoliberal capitalism.
But what exactly is the critical purchase of using the term “transnational” in an
analysis of European cinema? Broadly speaking, there have been three main approaches
to the question of the transnational in film studies (I discuss a more recent approach by
Mette Hjort in Chapter One). The first approach, suggested by Andrew Higson (2000),
adopts a national/transnational binary. Reading the national model as restrictive, it
valorizes the transnational as a subtler means of understanding cinema’s relationship to
cultural and economic formations that are rarely contained within national boundaries.
Higson’s approach raises issues linked to production, distribution and exhibition (i.e., the
movement of films and film-makers across national borders and the reception of films by
local audiences outside of their indigenous sites of production), yet it fails to properly
address imbalances of power (political, economic and ideological) in this transnational
exchange, most notably by ignoring the issue of migration and diaspora and the politics
of difference that emerge within such transnational flows.
A second approach, exemplified by Andrew Nestingen and Trevor Elkington’s
collection on transnational Nordic cinema (2005), privileges an analysis of the
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transnational as a regional phenomenon by examining film cultures/national cinemas
which invest in a shared cultural heritage and/or geo-political boundary. Finally, a third
approach to transnational cinema analyzes cinematic representations of cultural identity
in diasporic, exilic and postcolonial cinemas. It uncovers ways in which these cinemas
challenge the western (neocolonial) construct of nation and national culture and, by
extension, national cinema as stable and Eurocentric in its ideological norms and in its
narrative and aesthetic formations. Deeply aware of power relations between
centre/margin, insider/outsider, as well as the continual negotiation between the global
and local that often extends beyond the host/home binary in transnational or diasporic
cinema, this approach is influenced by theoretical paradigms emerging from cultural
studies, postcolonial theory and globalization studies (e.g., Appadurai 1990 and Gilroy
1993). Such an approach, however, risks locating diasporic or postcolonial
“transnational” cinema on the margins of dominant film cultures or the peripheries of
industrial practices, making it difficult to evaluate the impact such films might have on
mainstream or popular cinema within either a national or transnational context (Higbee
and Lim 10).
In my discussion of European cinema, I conceive of the transnational as a way of
interpreting more productively the competing, often overlapping lines between the global
and the local, the national and the transnational, seeking to avoid both a binary approach
to the national/transnational and a Eurocentric bias. In addition, I deploy the concept of a
transnational frame not merely as shorthand for a supranational mode of film production
19

whose impact and reach lies beyond the bounds of the national. Rather, my analysis
affirms the existence of the national, recognizing that it continues to exert the force of its
presence even within transnational film-making practices.
Each chapter of the dissertation is structured around different conceptualizations
of crises related to the “aftereffects” of 1989 and to contemporary economic
uncertainties. Chapter One, “From the ‘Crisis of Europe’ to the Crisis of European
Cinema” foregrounds the crisis that seems to characterize attempts to define European
cinema in the past two decades. This “crisis” is related, first of all, to the sense of
disorientation expressed by critics at an important film conference on “Screening
Europe” that took place in London in 1991. Second, it is related to a perceived “loss of
cultural specificity” (Jäckel 63) due to the fact that EU policies, such as the 1992
European Convention of Cinematic Co-production, have led many directors to make
films in languages other than their own. Third, the crisis is also linked to questions of
funding. My discussion shows how the study of European “integration” raised the
question of whether the object of such study involved the issue of difference or of
sameness (by definition, it must be the former, yet by ambition it is the latter). Similar
questions arose when European funding became a crucial element in the struggle for the
financial survival of national films (i.e., dilemmas concerning whether funding should be
offered to films asserting difference or to those relying on an assumed shared repertory of
“European” themes and values). Noting that the co-production agreements after 1989
were motivated by economic factors while they simultaneously foregrounded a
20

previously nonexistent concern with a cultural dimension, I assert that Post-Wall
European films highlight the contradictions at work in the project of a supranational
Europe.
Broadly speaking, cinema itself is perceived by many as a medium that has been
threatened over the last two decades by the rise of popular electronic media and the
process of digitization. Such technological shifts have altered patterns of production,
distribution and exhibition in unprecedented ways. With the creation of multiplexes in
shopping malls, many movie theatres disappeared, and the experience of spectatorship
was transformed in the process. But the particular “crisis” generated by the end of the
Cold War left many critics in a state of disorientation: Were they gathered to witness a
funeral or a birth, the death of old Europe or the celebration of a newly born one? Or, as
Stuart Hall wondered at the 1991 conference, if critics scrutinized the way in which
Europe is configured in the mirror of recent films, would they discern an identity in the
process of vanishing, or identify new ways of representing Europe? 1989 can also be seen
as a moment of crisis for the national if we take into consideration that the blurring of
borders between East and West led to unprecedented support for cinematographic co-
productions, the implementation of transnational technologies, and the launching of
audio-visual media policies and programs on a pan-European level.
Revisiting definitions of cinematic transnationalism and some of the main
challenges faced by European cinema today, I argue that despite some critics’ skepticism,
it is still possible to define this cinema in terms of Europe’s supranational reframing and
21

transnational modes of reception. As I show, Post-Wall European cinema reflects the
supranational reconfiguration of a Europe that is neither post-national (since specific
countries and their languages still prevail) nor based on an East-West binary.
Chapter Two, “Translation, Identity, and Aftereffects of 1989 in Romanian
Cinema,” complicates the idea of transnational (or supranational) European cinema by
focusing on Romania as a case study for the crises created by the disappearance of
theatres in Romania after 1989 and by the struggle to define and contextualize the events
of 1989 twenty years after they occurred. In the first part of the chapter, I argue that while
before 1989, cinephiliac anxieties were linked to the difficulty of accessing filmic texts,
the collapse of theatrical film exhibition in Romania in the post-Cold War period led to a
different type of anxiety: the fear of losing forever the experience of cinema going. As I
show, this has prompted crisis-mode reactions from different groups which sought to take
more or less desperate measures. For instance, in conjunction with the theatrical
distribution of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, its director, Cristian Mungiu, organized a
caravan tour to screen his film in fifteen Romanian towns across the country that no
longer have a movie theatre. In addition, the French Cultural Institute in Bucharest took
the initiative to implement a program of teaching elective classes in film appreciation at
the high-school level. This program, which has been functioning in France for years, is
currently in its pilot stage in five Romanian high schools, recruiting teachers, students,
and guest filmmakers on a voluntary basis. One of the program’s main goals is to
cultivate the students’ interest in international auteur cinema on the one hand, and, on the
22

other hand, in the very activity of movie-going. Finally, one of the most important
institutions that work to promote movie going and Romania cinema is the Transylvania
International Film Festival, which has now expanded tremendously since its first edition
in 2002.
The second part of this chapter offers an analysis of Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08
East of Bucharest (2006), a film that activates collective memory and historical
revisionism regarding the circumstances surrounding the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu’s
government in December 1989 and the significance of naming these events within a
larger historical interpretation of the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. I
take issue with Thomas Elsaesser’s view of European cinema, which draws clear-cut
lines of political distinctions between Eastern and Western Europe. I argue that 12:08 is
no different from those other post-1989 Western European films which Elsaesser calls
“post-national,” and in which irony, performativity and reflexivity are linked. At the
center of the film and of my analysis is the ambiguous spatio-temporal and
epistemological status of the Romanian Revolution of December 1989, an event whose
definition still stirs a great deal of disagreement in the Romanian public. My analysis also
points out, following George Lawson, that we should be careful about using 1989 to
divide the old from the new. Given that in many ways post-Cold War capitalist expansion
represents a return to old exploitative practices, different lines of configuration emerge in
terms of the temporality of 1989, one which embraces important continuities alongside,
and to some extent instead of, simplistic notions that “everything changed.” As the
23

conditions represented in 12:08 demonstrate, despite grandiose commemorative claims
made by television hosts that everything changed after “those dramatic days,” there are
no significant differences in the standards of living enjoyed by Romanians between the
period prior to 1989 and the present.
I also place 12.08 in the context of a larger body of films that revisit the
Romanian Revolution, discussing work not only by Romanian directors, but also by
French and German filmmakers who reconsider the symbolic weight of the television
images showing the fall of the Berlin Wall. I examine, for example, films such as Oskar
Röhler’s No Place to Go, Volker Schlondorff’s The Legend of Rita, Marcel Ophüls’
November Days, and Andreas Dresen’s Short Cut to Istanbul, which resist the
interpretation of events from a single, all-encompassing liberal democratic viewpoint. By
offering alternative viewpoints, these films contest the traditional celebratory images
shown on TV in 1989. Bringing together multiple contexts and re-contextualizations of
images, they re-scale the events of 1989 through the perspectives of different characters
who are skeptical about the post-communist future.
Chapter Three, “’Enter Freely, and of Your Own Will’: Cinematic
Representations of Post-Socialist Transnational Journeys,” examines the post-socialist
crisis created by Western Europe’s perceived “invasion” by white immigrant bodies from
the East after the opening of borders in 1989. Unlike earlier waves of immigration, the
bodies of the new immigrants were, largely speaking, undistinguishable from their
Western European counterparts, challenging older binary identifications. At the same
24

time, Eastern European migrants were shocked to discover that, despite their own
inability to see themselves as racially marked, Westerners found ways to actively
discriminate against them, withholding an expected welcome.
I take issue with the fact that the literature on what is called “transnational
feminist studies” has largely tended to ignore the post-communist Second World, despite
the fact that this region has changed most thoroughly and rapidly in association with
neoliberal globalization. In an effort to expand the scope of transnational feminist studies,
I examine contemporary cinematic representations of post-socialist journeys, pointing to
“the feminization of migration” as a distinctive feature of post-communist migration and
to issues of racial “whiteness” and “neoracism” (Étienne Balibar) as they operate in a
Post-Wall European context. In particular, I contrast Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort
(2000) to Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4-ever (2002) and argue that unlike Lylia 4 ever,
which constructs the Russian woman as a non-European Other, Last Resort gives agency
to the Russian heroine, allowing her to make the choice of leaving the man that she meets
in Britain and to envision going back to Russia. As I point out, this is not a choice
typically accorded to women from Eastern Europe in cinematic representations.
I also read these films within a larger debate regarding contemporary European
cinema and the cinematic politics of representation, arguing that Last Resort unsettles the
homogeneity of established images of national identity. I interpret this film as an example
of what Ien Ang calls “post-European” films, which contest the logic by which Europe
imagines itself as the spatial and temporal vanguard of the world. The film enables us to
25

envision a marginalized England at “the end of the world” (as one character in the film
puts it), no longer as empire but quite literally as “vampire,” an aging body collecting the
blood of refugees to invigorate itself.
Chapter Four, “Learning to Live (Together) in a Haunted Europe,” expands on my
argument in the previous chapter that the representation of migrants and other
marginalized identities in contemporary European cinema should not be seen as
privileged figures of authenticity. It further reflects on the pivotal role that cinema
might play in achieving an understanding of the present crisis of management and
communication in the European Union. More specifically, I elaborate on Elsaesser’s
assertion that the most crucial role Post-Wall cinema has played lies in its contribution to
“its own crisis of representation.” Acknowledging that notions of “hybrid” and
“diasporic” identity may not be capable of revealing anything meaningful about
European identity in particular, and aware of the risk of placing value on exilic
experience as something intrinsically creative and transformative, I expand upon
Elsaesser’s suggestion that we should adopt a “post-identity” mode of thinking capable of
accounting for a European identity that is “always-already” occupied. While Elsaesser
proposes the term “double occupancy” as a metaphor to describe the discursive and
geopolitical territories that serve as a reminder of Europe’s history of migrations,
invasions, pogroms and exclusions, I argue that European identity should be perceived as
haunted by multiple, overlapping spectral presences, rather than simply “doubly”
occupied. Following Derrida, I take this question of haunting as historical but also
26

untimely, “out of joint,” not dated. As I elaborate in this chapter, 1989 is not a moment in
a chain of “presents” when Europe began to be haunted by its ghosts, or by the ghost of
communism, for example. Rather, it is an untimely moment that gives us the opportunity
to reflect on the communist legacy and converse with its spectres.
I make a strong case for a “post-mortem” European cinema in light of Erik
Bullot’s concept of the “post-mortem figure” that is linked to the spectral nature of the
cinematic image. I argue that by blurring time frames and by allowing the future to
coexist with past and present, this cinema gives a new twist to the problematic of
negotiating Europe’s past. Deploying the trope of haunting, the films under consideration
here (such as Carmine Amoroso’s Cover Boy, Christian Petzold’s Yella, Giuseppe
Capotondi’s The Double Hour, and Sven Taddicken’s Emma’s Bliss) share a number of
stylistic and narrative features that depart from the realist tradition, revealing a concern
with how to relate to Europe’s past and how to envision its future. They suggest a
freezing of historical time, enabling the past and the future to co-exist side by side with
the present. The usual cinematic themes of returning to the past in order to uncover what
has been repressed are not rendered through a linear temporality in these films; rather,
they make different chronologies possible and problematize issues of causality. This
trend that I identify in transnational European cinema suggests common, perhaps
unconscious concerns among various filmmakers regarding the narrativization of private
and public events.
27

In Chapter Five, “The New European Cinema of Precarity: A Transnational
Perspective,” I examine how contemporary European cinema has responded to Europe’s
recent financial and social crises. These crises are due to shifts in labor practices in the
European Union, the de-standardisation of employment contracts, changes in social
security systems, and increasing uncertainty among the citizens of Europe’s most affluent
countries. In the wake of what is referred to as the casualization or precarization of
employment, the working and living conditions of millions of Europeans have changed,
making the young generation especially face existential anxieties.
The casualization of working conditions in Europe began with the extension of
agency or temporary work, fixed-term and low-paid employment, the imposition of part-
time work, dependent self-employment, and mini-jobs falling outside the scope of
collective agreements which have been promoted through social policy. Unable to secure
themselves a form of employment that would provide an acceptable level of income,
security, and prospects for the future, the youth of today’s Europe face existential anxiety
and fear falling off the social ladder. Taking a transnational perspective, I map out a body
of films that constitute a new cinema of precarity which has registered the development
of new subjectivities. The films that I examine here – such as Francesca Comencini’s Mi
piace lavorare: (Mobbing)/I like to Work: (Mobbing) (2004), Jo Sol’s El taxista ful/The
Taxi Thief (2005), Birgit Moller’s Valerie (2006), Andreas Dresen’s Sommer vorm
Balkon/Summer In Berlin (2005), Daniele Luchetti’s La Nostra Vita/Our Life (2011) –
directly engage topics such as the everyday effects of widespread unemployment, the
28

problems associated with temporary contracts, the spread of mobbing practices, and the
pressures of single parenthood. I argue that these films not only show the struggle to
maintain traditional class hierarchies in an altered economic landscape, but also offer a
deeply pessimistic perspective on neoliberal finance capitalism more generally,
producing new fantasies and identifications for Europe’s citizens. Significantly, the
cinema of precarity does not depict precarious employment as concerning only the
impoverished Europeans or immigrants; rather, as I demonstrate, it visualizes today’s
middle-class Europeans struggling with anxieties about job security similar to those
traditionally associated with the less privileged social strata.
This shift is important because until recently, European films sought to construct
Europe as an object of desire while its “others” were cast as “thieves of enjoyment.” By
focusing predominantly on the difficulties experienced by protagonists in the process of
gaining access to the promises of the capitalist system, European films have encouraged
viewers to experience a sense of indignation at their plight but also arguably sustained
their fantasies of superiority. As I demonstrate, the cinema of precarity has captured a
structure of feeling in which Europeans can recognize themselves in their shared
precariousness, and through which they can begin to dream of alternative futures and
common solutions. Ultimately, what emerges from the new films is a vision of Europe as
a territory united not by a common culture, but by set of shared economic anxieties.

29

Chapter 1
From The “Crisis of Europe” to the Crisis of European Cinema

There is no such thing as European cinema.
Thomas Elsaesser

European cinema does not exist beyond the borders
of the critical discourse that created it.
Catherine Fowler

In the late 1950s, the idea that something called
European Cinema existed seemed incontrovertible.
Mary P. Wood

A supranational or transnational European cinema does not exist.
Vinzenz Hedig

1.1 What is – or should be – the (New) European Cinema?

At about the same time that Derrida was writing about the political and ethical
responsibility of a unified Europe after 1989, an important conference on “Screening
Europe” took place in 1991. The book that emerged from it, edited by Duncan Petrie, is
premised on the idea that in 1989 Europe faced an identity and cultural crisis. Echoing
Derrida, Philip Dodd diagnosed the 1989 moment as an ambiguous one which
confounded many who did not how to respond to it. Interrogating the type of moment that
Europe was witnessing at the time, he asked, “Are we at a funeral or at a birth? . . . Are
we talking about the death of the old kind of Europe, or the birth of a new one?” (20). In
the same vein, Stuart Hall mused: “If we look at how Europe is figured in the ‘mirror’ of
the films… do we see an old identity on the wane or is Europe on the threshold of new
ways of representing itself?” (45). Ang suggested that what Europe needed was to learn
30

how to marginalize itself. In her view, European films had to be able to rethink political
space and thus become, in a sense, “post-Utopian” or “post-European” films. Europe
must stop relating to others by taking itself as the standard and instead learn how to
marginalize itself, Ang proposed. It must see its limitedness and its culture as relative and
permeable.
If 1989 reflected a (yet another) crisis in the way Europe saw itself, both national
cinemas in Europe and European cinema were equally discussed as being in a state of
crisis “evident on many levels, from the critical-theoretical to the economic,” as Dimitris
Eleftheriotis contends (2000, 93). First of all, European cinema faced (and still faces) a
crisis of definition. If it is hard to define what Europe means, the task of defining
European cinema becomes even harder. Invested in the study of European integration,
Ian Ward, Professor of Law specializing in European legal studies, questions the meaning
of “integration.” Is it a study of differentness or of sameness, he asks, since by definition
it must be the former, yet by ambition it is surely the latter (321)? In other words, Ward
laments, the concept of European integration is “itself a paradox, suggesting as it does
integration towards a vanishing point of disintegration, or complete assimilation” (321).
Speaking of European cinema, Eleftheriotis points out that it was faced with a similar
dilemma when European funding was at stake in the struggle for financial survival of the
national films. The crisis in European cinema, he notes, exposes the contradictions in
national and European policy and raises dilemmas of criteria regarding whether funding
31

should be offered to films asserting difference or to those relying on an assumed shared
repertory of “European” themes and values (2000 93). Eleftheriotis comments elsewhere:
The crucial contradiction articulated on the level of both the nation-state and pan-
European organizations is between the liberal demand to recognize and celebrate
diversity and the essentialist need to hold on to an imaginary center, the shared
experience of historical processes and the consensual acceptance of common
moral, political and cultural values. (2011 47)

The identity of European cinema has often been loosely associated with a certain
“European sensibility,” a fleeting yet recognizable European “structure of feeling”
defined as a mix of nostalgia and narcissism, melancholy and complacency. Some critics
have diagnosed a fundamental ambivalence at the core of European consciousness, a
“typically European sense of morbid ennui or spleen” (Compagnon 111); others, such as
John Compagnon, speak of a certain “European sensibility,” the noble name of “ironic
imagination” which manifests itself through oxymorons such as “serious playfulness,”
“intimate distance,” or “passionate detachment” (Compagnon 41).
In her introduction to the European Cinema Reader, Catherine Fowler notes that
European cinema is a discipline created outside Europe and that it does not exist beyond
the borders of the critical discourse that created it. In the process of defining the identity
of European cinema, various scholars have focused on individual movements or moments
(such as Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave), and generally neglected Eastern
Europe. European cinema has variously been equated with art cinema, or auteur cinema
in terms of aesthetics, it has been identified as mostly state-subsidized and addressing a
small audience. Ultimately, it has been defined as what Hollywood is not. After the fall of
32

the Berlin Wall blurred the borders between East and West, audio-visual media policies
and programs were launched for the first time at a pan-European level, transnational
technologies were introduced, and cinematographic co-productions received
unprecedented support (Fowler 1-10).
“There is no such thing as European cinema,” Thomas Elsaesser asserts in his
book European Cinema Face to Face with Hollywood (13). He acknowledges, however,
that “European cinema” has existed since the beginning of cinema. Yet it does not exist,
he laments, because there is still a gap between Eastern and Western Europe and because
each Western country still defends its own national cinema. Elsaesser takes issue with
Eastern European cinema for being, as he puts it, “often quite particularist: it expects its
respective national cinema to be recognized as specific in time and place, history and
geography, while still belonging to Europe” (14). Although less recognized, such an
attitude is not restricted to Eastern Europe, but is inextricably tied to how Western
Europe has always attempted to define itself.
Mary P. Wood also begins her book on Contemporary European Cinema (2007)
with the specification that “in the late 1950s, the idea that something called European
Cinema existed seemed incontrovertible. There were great directors, great national
movements and a territory for study which stretched from Ireland to the Urals” (xi), but
not “European cinema” as we “know” it today. After 1956, when Western and Eastern
Europe were separated, European cinema simply meant the cinema of Western Europe.
Wood identifies a moment of crisis in 1989, in the aftermath of the fall of state socialism
33

in Eastern Central Europe, when “changes in the film industries and their political, social,
and cultural context accelerated” (xi). These changes had to do with the fact that film
production in the region suddenly faced the same problems in raising funds as their
capitalist counterparts. Once the trade restrictions were lifted, they also had to compete
with American films.
Whereas Elsaesser contends that both the label European cinema and the
individual national cinemas have a minimal impact on the world’s audiences, Vinzenz
Hediger goes a step further and claims that a supranational or transnational European
cinema does not exist. A European cinema, Hediger reasons, had it existed, would have
contributed, through a process of supranational projection, to the creation of a
supranational affiliation able at least to prevent the failure of the European constitution.
Echoing Javed Akthar’s suggestion that Hindi/Bollywood cinema could be seen as
India’s 17
th
member state, a suitable formula able to incorporate many cultural
differences without favoring a specific trait of cultural traits, and thus in a “post-colonial,
not-quite national, condition” (103), Hediger argues that a similar imaginary extra-
European member state has failed to emerge up to the present.
In “Politique des archives: European Cinema and the Invention of Tradition in the
Digital Age,” Hediger recognizes an exemplarist logic (as Derrida would say) at work in
the way, for instance, in which educational film director Jean Benoit-Levy described in
France one of Jean Renoir’s films that was financed, produced, and marketed by a major
American studio (when Renoir went to Hollywood). Benoit-Levy writes,
34

Ce film est français par le fait qu’il repose tout entier notre conception de l’art
cinematographique qui consiste à choisir une Idée -force et à mettre à son service
toutes les resources du talent de l’auteur. Il est français parcequ’étant l’oeuvre
d’un seul et non le fruit d’un collaboration anonyme, il est l’expression de l’âme
de l’auteur de films.” (qtd. in Hediger 116)

In this way, Hediger notes, Benoit-Levy assigns an origin to the concept of
“auteur” cinema by aligning it with “French national” cinema and he appropriates an
American film as a genuine example of the great French national cinema. Note the
capitalization of “Idée,” so close to the universal spirit, Derrida would say. Later on,
Hediger argues, the Cahiers critics applied the same strategy to a select body of
Hollywood films, extending the notion of auteur to directors who were not of French
origin. Ultimately, they used the auteur concept to “appropriate a non-European
cinematic past in an attempt to invent a tradition and create a usable past that would
allow them to act as directors on the European stage” (118, my emphasis). Hediger
interprets this strategy as an example of the “chronopolitics” of European cinema: a
strategy of organizing time that goes hand in hand with that of organizing territory,
imperial geopolitics.
Hediger sets up a contrast between a politics of auteurs (politique des auteurs),
and a politics of archives (politique des archives), suggesting that the auteur concept is
not forceful enough to make a significant contribution to a supranational or transnational
European cinema which does not (yet) exist. Echoing Thomas Elsaesser, who
underscores that both the label European cinema and the individual national cinemas still
have a minimal impact on the world’s audiences, Hediger reminds us that Europe is still
35

overwhelmingly dominated by Hollywood and its ability to unify the global market with
culturally-neutral products.
We must not forget, however, that even as they are watching culturally-neutral
American films, Europeans still think of themselves as “good Europeans.” Bringing the
failure of the European constitution into the equation here fails to provide a consequential
link with the inexistence of a transnational European cinema. Hediger does not mention
that the treaty establishing a constitution for Europe was ratified by eighteen member
states, which included referenda in Luxemburg and Spain favoring its endorsement. It
was only the rejection of the document by French and Dutch voters in May and June
2005 that brought the ratification process to an end.
1.2 Defining the Transnational as a Category
What is Transnationalism? Is it the same thing as globalization? As
internationalism? Is neoliberalism a particular period in the history of the political
economy of transnationalism, or something else? Within academia, transnationalism is
discussed in diverse fields, but those working in these fields are not engaged in mutual
conversation. Bruce Cumings, Aihwa Ong, and Andrew Ross point out how in the
aftermath of the Cold War, increasingly cash-strapped academics, universities, and area
studies were all invited to map the transnational. Cumings directs attention to two
specific incidents in the United States: the National Security Education Act (NSEA) in
the first half of the 1990s, providing funding for graduate and undergraduate students for
post–Cold War area studies research, organized through the Defense Intelligence Agency,
36

requiring that those students serve an intelligence agency after receiving a grant; and, at
the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), a restructuring plan for academic funding
that includes “a desire to move away from fixed regional identities given that
globalization has made the “areas” more porous. Cumings argues therefore that academic
transnationalism has often served the goals of the U.S. government or business. Nonini
and Ong are critical of the cultural studies approach “that treats transnationalism as a set
of abstracted, dematerialized cultural flows, giving scant attention either to the concrete,
everyday changes in people’s lives or to the structural reconfiguration that accompany
global capitalism” (13).
In their review of transnationalism as a category, Laura Briggs, Gladys
McCormick and J. T. Way argue that transnationalism is a radical intervention with roots
in anti-imperialist writers reaching back to Fanon and Wallerstein and stretching forward
to the sharpest critics of neoliberalism. The authors suggest that transnationalism does not
need to be a concept that obviates our ability to think borders, walls, and militaries, but
that it is precisely the conceptual apparatus that allows us to locate objects like the border
wall in relation to transnational currents of globalization and its discontents. Moreover,
they note that the very aspects that some critics find inadequate about transnationalism as
a paradigm (its inability to think about the force of nationalism, say, or imperialist
aggression), others see as precisely its strength (nationalism and imperialism as above all
transnational processes, for example) (633).
37

From the Post-Cold War perspective of the “Asian Tiger” markets, Aihwa Ong
develops two of the most influential accounts of recent forms of transnationalism:
Giorgio Agamben’s (particularly in Homo Sacer) and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s
(in Empire and Multitude) – in her brilliant Neoliberalism as Exception. Ong suggests
that Agamben’s view of a Europe overwhelmed by refugees and migrants conceptualizes
only two simplistic categories, the citizen and the exception. In this respect, Ong
underscores that there are multiple kinds and qualities of dispossession, and that even
those who are not citizens are not necessarily reduced to the status of “bare life,” as
Agamben suggests, but rather have many kinds of claims on states. Moreover, Ong
suggests that the conditions of labor (and labor’s forms of resistance) are vastly more
differentiated than Hardt and Negri’s account of a global multitude allows for. In her
view, neoliberalism is producing sovereignty, citizenship, public cultures, and forms of
labor which are striated across multiple “zones” that are not nations, but which articulate
with nations and with other, transnational forces.
Another intervention worth mentioning in this brief review is the feminist and
queer-inflected account of the ways publics and desiring subjects are produced in
relationship to nationalisms and transnationalism. Inderpal Grewal’s Transnational
America renders “America” as a consumer culture, bought and produced in many places
(India and the United States interest her in this work), through a particularly female
instantiation of the consumer. Lisa Rofel’s Desiring China notes how for China and its
citizens, the production of desiring subjects are mobilized in specifically national ways,
38

on behalf of China’s neoliberal experiments. Jasbir Puar’s Terrorists Assemblages asks
against what others are LGBTQ subjects being recognized and incorporated into the U.S.
nation.
1.3 Defining Cinematic Transnationalism
Anikó Imre, Katarzyna Marciniak, Áine O’Healy argue for the need to resituate
the consideration of “transnational feminist practices” beyond the current critiques which
continue to be rendered along the First/Third World axis. Believing in the urgency of
forging polycentric transnational coalitions, collaborations, and feminist allegiances as
alternatives to much-critiqued ideas of “global sisterhood” and “global feminism,” the
collection edited by these writers, titled Transnational Feminism in Film and Media,
presents transnational feminist analyses that open up cross-cultural alliances. Moreover,
their exploration of the transnational not only departs from the “national-cinema”
approach but also from the restrictive frameworks of monocultures such as the one
pioneered by Hamid Naficy’s An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking
(2001).
Transnational Feminism in Film and Media underscores several diverse
experiential and methodological factors, which are also crucial to the discussions in this
dissertation: the increasing shift from “immigrant” to “transmigrant” identities; the
opening up of new frontiers of migrations that involve people from previous socialist
communities; and the need to approach heterogeneous representations of “foreign” and
“border identities” in non-colonizing ways that do not domesticate difference.
39

Mette Hjort notes that given the ubiquity of transnational arrangements in the
world of contemporary filmmaking, and the undeniable transnational dimensions of
earlier periods of cinematic production, the use of the term “transnational” (to describe
production or distribution practices, sources of funding, casting decisions, thematic
concerns, or the complex identities of various film professionals among others) often has
an aura of indisputable legitimacy. Lamenting that the label “transnational” often
functions as shorthand for a series of assumptions about the networked and globalized
realities, she argues nonetheless that the “transnational turn” in film studies has an
important contribution to make (13).
Hjort suggests several ways in which we can approach the transnational. First,
film scholars could distinguish between strong or weak forms of transnationality.
According to this model, a given cinematic case would qualify as strongly transnational,
if it could be shown to involve a number of specific transnational elements related to
levels of production, distribution, reception, and the cinematic work itself. Thus, a film
could be seen as strongly transnational, for instance, when its transnationality is operative
on several levels at once: a coproduction involving several countries, when its
distribution is supported by bodies such as the Global Film Initiative, when the director's
identity is defined by what Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal identifies as “postnational
citizenship” (Hjort 13), when two or more languages are spoken in the film, and when a
complex sense of belonging shaped by multiple national cultures is a core component of a
film’s thematics.
40

Second, critics may make a distinction between marked and unmarked
transnationality. From this perspective, a film might be classified as an instance of
marked transnationality if the agents who collectively constitute its author (typically
directors, cinematographers, editors, actors, and producers) intentionally foreground
various transnational properties that encourage thinking about transnationality. This
process may entail placing emphasis on certain elements through camerawork or editing,
or an intensive use of those narrative techniques and devices that allow certain ideas to be
constituted as fully developed themes. Hjort insists that there is no necessary connection
between strong forms of transnational filmmaking and marked transnationality, as there
are many examples of films with transnational themes, made within a purely national
framework of production and oriented towards an audience defined in national terms.
Another important point that Hjort adumbrates is that some forms of cinematic
transnationalism are invisible and can be brought to light only through contextualizing
research focused, for example, on issues of production. Transnationality, for instance, is
not a marked element in the case of a film like Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (2006). The
film’s status as an instance of a strong form of transnational filmmaking becomes
apparent, Hjort suggests, only once attention is directed towards the production context,
which is characterized by an active commitment to transnational collaboration. Moreover,
in some cases films are unintentionally transnational as the result of transnational
arrangements in the context of production. In this respect, “Euro-pudding” is a derogative
term which references a chaotic transnational mix that was never meant to be relevant
41

but which intrudes on the viewer’s awareness as a result of a failure to contain
transnationality on the level of production. Intention, therefore, is a helpful tool when
trying to sort through what does and does not count as genuinely transnational
filmmaking.
Some of the most valuable forms of cinematic transnationalism entail at least two
qualities, according to Hjort: a resistance to globalization as cultural homogenization and
a commitment to ensuring that certain economic realities associated with filmmaking do
not obscure the quest for aesthetic, artistic, social, and political values (15). Given that
here are a number of different types of cinematic transnationalism that combine genuine
hybridity, traceable to distinct national elements, with norms such as solidarity,
friendship, innovation, or social and political progress, Hjort suggests that these types of
transnationalism warrant description and analysis.
In order to understand the underlying orientations of various cinematic
transnationalisms, Hjort proposes a typology which includes epiphanic transnationalism,
affinitive transnationalism, milieu-building transnationalism, opportunistic
transnationalism, cosmopolitan transnationalism, globalizing transnationalism, auteurist
transnationalism, modernizing transnationalism, and experimental transnationalism.
In epiphanic transnationalism, the emphasis is on the cinematic articulation of
those elements of deep national belonging that overlap with aspects of other national
identities to produce something resembling deep transnational belonging. One example in
this respect is the Nordic Film and TV fund which was created in 1990 by the Nordic
42

Council to promote narratives that would strengthen various Nordic commonalities and
Nordic co-productions.
Underwriting the model of affinitive transnationalism is a concept of ethnic,
linguistic, and cultural affinity, which can also arise in connection with shared problems
or commitments (for instance, an affinity that arises from a sense of mutual awareness
regarding problems that concern many small-nation contexts and minor cinemas).
Milieu-building transnationalism refers to a model of transnational cooperation
(such as the one between the Scottish company Sigma Films and Lars von Trier’s Dogma
95 initiative) construed as a philosophical principle with particular relevance for small
nation film practitioners. This model aims at jointly developing solutions to particular
problems that face efforts to develop thriving film milieus.
Opportunistic transnationalism involves responding to available economic
opportunities at a given time, giving priority to economic issues which will ultimately
influence the selection of partners beyond national borders. Peter Garde’s comments as
director of finance for Zentropa are illustrative in this respect: “We traipse about Europe
like gypsies and set up camp wherever we happen to find financing opportunities and the
best locations” (qtd. in Hjort 20).
Cosmopolitan transnationalism is similar to what Hamid Naficy calls “exilic.”
More precisely, the term is intended to substitute for what Naficy calls “accented”
transnational cinema. While it also refers to a filmmaker’s multiple belonging, rather than
emphasizing “the accent,” the term “cosmopolitan” gives the filmmaker more agency
43

and freedom to move back and forth between different sites. One illustrative example is
the case of Evans Chan, a New York based filmmaker, born in mainland China, brought
up in Macao, and educated in Hong Kong and America.
The film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wo hu cang long, 2000) is a perfect
example of globalizing transnationalism, which operates under the premise that
filmmaking must be extremely expensive in order to have a transnational appeal.
Auteurist transnationalism is similar to cosmopolitan transnationalism, but
whereas the latter emerges as the effect of the filmmaker’s lived experience of the limits
of national belonging and citizenship, the former occurs when a filmmaker engages in
collaborative projects beyond national borders.
Modernizing transnationalism occurs when a significantly transnationalized film
culture becomes a means of fueling, but also signifying, the mechanisms of
modernization within a given society. This may entail, for instance, decisions intended to
revive a film culture, which look beyond the framework of the purely national in order to
reflect and forge transnational connections. From this perspective, modernization should
be understood – in Asian contexts for instance – not only as a matter of securing
prosperity, but also in terms of international recognition for noteworthy contributions in
the areas of culture, broadly construed. The South Korean film industry, in this respect,
can be said to have witnessed an unprecedented modernization in the 1990s as a result of
government-based initiatives wanted to see Korea at the cutting edge of international film
culture.
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Finally, a film such as The Five Obstructions (2003), a transnational experiment
involving Lars von Trier and his former mentor, Jorgen Leth, can be seen as a perfect
example of experimental transnationalism. The film is produced by Zentropa Real,
Wijnbrosse Production, Yeslam bin Laden’s Almaz Film Production and Panic
Productions, with support from the Danish Film Institute, DR Drama, the Nordic Film
and TV Fund, the Swedish Film Institute, Channel 4 and Canal +. In this case, the
collaboration is not meant to contribute to lasting networks, to articulate shared culture,
or to cater to the global cinemagoer. Rather, it is the experiment and the constraints
conceived by von Trier that provide the rationale for the choice of collaborators. As
Hjort emphasizes, the collaborative experiments staged by a filmmaker such as von Trier
are clever marketing strategies and effective tools of self-promotion not only with clear
pay-offs in the economy of exchange, but also in order to enhance the visibility of a small
nation committed to film culture. In light of Hjort’s proposed typology, one can see how
cinematic transnationalism can manifest itself in a variety of forms which emphasize
various economic, artistic, cultural, social or political values. Ultimately, it is “’an open’
phenomenon with the potential to develop in many different directions” (Hjort 30) rather
than being reduced to a single, globalizing type (Hjort 30).
Hjort’s discussion of cinematic transnationalism, however, does not fully address
the role of language. The category of cosmopolitan transnationalism, for instance, is
similar to Hamid Naficy’s notion of exilic or accented cinema, but the emphasis is on the
filmmaker’s multiple belonging rather than his accent. Auteurist cosmopolitanism occurs
45

when a filmmakers engages in collaborative projects beyond national borders. It is
important to underscore, however, the fact that many contemporary European directors
do not merely engage in transnational collaborations, but often decide to make films in a
foreign language (most often English or French) which is not their native tongue. The
importance of such a choice should not be underestimated if we consider the problems it
poses for national cinema and national specificity.
As I pointed out in the introduction, filmmakers such as Lars von Trier, Krzysztof
Kieslowski, Pawel Pawlikowski, Michael Haneke, Francois Ozon, Aki Kaurismäki, Ole
Christian Madsen – to name just a few – have all used English or French in their films
rather than the language of their native language. While this is not necessarily a new
phenomenon, in the past the majority of European films made in English were big budget
productions, and were able not only to attract American and British investment but were
also intended for a mainstream American market. In addition, some of these productions
(such as Jean-Jacques Arnaud’s L’Ours/The Bear (1988), Luc Besson’s Le Grand
Bleu/The Big Blue (1988), Fifth Element (1997) were very much a result of French
producers’ desire to be recognized as global players in the film industry (Ostrowska 56).
By contrast, filmmakers such as Kaurismäki or von Trier have small budgets in
comparison, even though they equally want their films to be able to reach a wider
audience that is not just Danish or Finnish speaking.
More often than not, the decision to make a film in English is linked to the fact
that the choice guarantees support from European film financiers (especially banks), who
46

deem their investment more secure if a film has the potential to reach the English
speaking market (Jackel 61). However, French is also a major language of choice (as, for
instance, in the case of Michael Haneke’s Code Inconnu/Code Unknown (2000), La
Pianiste/The Piano Teacher (2001), and Caché/Hidden (2005), Krzysztof Kieslowski’s
La Double Vie de Veronique/The Double Life of Veronique (1991) and The Three Colors
trilogy (1993-1994), or Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre (2011). The French system of film
subsidies is the only one in Europe, apart from the Italian one, that makes the language a
criterion for foreign producers to access aid (Ostrowska 56).
When critics such as Naficy discuss accented transnational filmmaking, they
emphasize how accented filmmakers foreground issues of migration, loss and
displacement that lead to identities in flux and challenge the concept of the national.
However, one of the potential limitations of such an approach is that it places diasporic or
postcolonial cinemas on the margins of dominant film cultures, making it difficult to
evaluate the impact such films might have on mainstream cinema within either a national
or a transnational context (Higbee and Lim 13). Directors such as Pawlikowski, Haneke,
von Trier or Kaurismäki, however, are not directors who are in exile from their country
or prevented from making films in their own countries. Despite the language choices in
their recent films, a filmmaker such as Haneke is still considered Austrian, Lars von Trier
is still talked about as a Danish filmmaker, and Kaurismäki is still Finnish. Michael
Haneke’s Caché/Hidden (2005) was submitted as a French film at the Cannes film
festival in 2005 and won the best directing prize. The same film was disqualified,
47

however, as the Austrian entry for the 2006 Oscars based on the fact that the film “had
not been predominantly shot in the official language of the submitting country.” In
response, an angry Haneke commented that “the Academy’s reasoning would mean that
Lars von Trier’s Manderlay with its US actors and American location would be
considered an American film” (qtd. in Ostrowska 57). Haneke’s assertion suggests that
he considers himself an Austrian filmmaker, just as Kaurismäki remains a Finnish one.
As I discuss in chapter 3, filmmakers such as Pawel Pawlikowski see themselves as
neither British nor Polish, turning his attention either to the British or the Russian culture
in his films.
The use of a different language than his/her native one by a filmmaker raises the
question of what it means to be European while remaining rooted in one’s culture of
origin. As Ostrowska has pointed out, such a question has a particular urgency in the case
of filmmakers coming from countries with a relatively small number of native language
speakers (59). There was an audible gasp in the audience when the director of the 2012
Los Angeles Scandinavian film festival announced that the following films that they were
about to watch were in French and Spanish. The first one, Kaurismäki’s Le Havre (2011)
was set in France and features Kati Outinen, a very recognizable Finnish actress who has
had a long-standing relationship with Kaurismäki, speaking in French. The second one,
SuperClasico (2011) by Ole Christian Madsen, is set in Buenos Aires, where Paprika
Steen, a famous Danish actress, has started a new life with local star football player Juan
Diaz.
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Speaking of the “foreignness” in the films by Von Trier that use actors who are
often non-native speakers of English and do not hide their heavy accents (such as
Dogville, for instance, or the English-speaking Europa, shot in 1991 in Poland),
Ostrowska suggests that it has the effect of displacement or erasure of location. Von
Trier’s films thus appropriate English in order to challenge and question American
culture while remaining firmly rooted within his culture. For Ostrowska, Von Trier
“reverses the established hierarchy in which American culture dominates and
overwhelms European culture. It is through his use of language that Von Trier
emphasizes the strangeness and unfamiliarity of things American for Europeans and
widens the gap between European and American cultures” (59). His films, in other
words, become exercises in violating the linguistic, moral, and cinematic norms.
For a filmmaker such as Haneke, however, the use of French in his films is
related, first of all, to the subsidies provided by the French government on condition that
French is the language used in the film. Language, therefore, is an important criterion that
cannot be easily dismissed, since it takes precedence over box-office profit (which one
would assume should come first). After all, The Piano Teacher (2001) may be set in
Vienna, but the characters in this film speak French.
The discourse about identity is for Haneke “a debate about the identity of cinema
first and foremost” (Ostrowska 61). Cinema is, as it well known, part of cultural heritage
in France. A film such as Hidden, which is about the killing of Algerians by French
troops, seems to destabilize the national image of French history: Ostorowska comments:
49

And if any particular context is relevant to [Haneke]’s reflection, it is the French
one because of the importance French cinema has had in shaping European art
house filmography. The images in crisis [from the film Hidden] throw into
question the foundations of the post-war French national project, especially with
regard to the policy of integrating foreigners into French society. (62, my
emphasis).
1.4 How to Rethink European Cinema: Problems and Changes
The crisis of the European cinema in the 1990s can be addressed
by problematizing what can be “shared” in the European
community.
Thomas Elsaesser
Critics such as Thomas Elsaesser have warned that Europe as a union of nation-
states may have to face a long, painful process of dis-articulating and realigning key
aspects of the traditional congruence between nation and state, and that one can no longer
draw a too direct parallel between the question of national cinema on the one hand and
the nation on the other. One could say that cinema, in contrast to television, has had a
more minor role in the public debates around vital issues in which the nation state is
renegotiating with the European Union questions of sovereignty. Nonetheless, as
Elsaesser and others rightly comment, “it is remarkable how cinema has become the most
prominent medium of self-representation and symbolic action that the hyphenated
citizens of Europe’s nation states have made their own” (119). Indeed, films by Turkish
German directors, by French beur directors, by Asian directors in Britain have won major
prizes and come to prominence within Europe
1
; for instance, a filmmaker such as Pawel

1
A by now famous article by Tuncay Kulaoglu in a 1999 issue of Filmforum is
significantly titled “The New ‘German’ Cinema is ‘Turkish’? A New Generation
Rejuvenates the Film Landscape.”
50

Pawlikowski, who emigrated to England from Poland as a teenager is viewed these days
as one of the most important British directors. In addition, the increasingly globalized
film markets unsettle questions of authenticity and what constitutes national cinema. As
Elkington and Nestingen point out, “international success of a given director decenters
both national and auteuristic distinctions” (20), prompting us to look beyond the auteur
concept (which is so much the case with Nordic film) and study the deterritorialized
appeal of the films. For instance, the success of Lars von Trier as an auteur who
promoted Danish film has little to do with him as a nationally specific filmmaker. His
Dancer in the Dark (ostensibly set in the U.S.A., but filmed in Sweden with Bjork
playing a young Czech woman and Catherine Deneuve playing “Kathy”), for example,
has narratively little to do with the Nordic region.
So where is European cinema going? What is “wrong” with it and what are the
main challenges that it faces nowadays? Even as the disconnection between the idea of
nation and national cinema has been clearly established, Tim Bergfelder laments in a
recent article titled “National, Transnational, or Supranational cinema? Rethinking
European Film Studies” that research on European cinema continues to focus on discrete
national cinemas (315). As European films are mostly treated as discrete cultural
phenomena, he calls for more analyses of transnational modes of reception. Pointing to
how cultural interactions between directors of a specific nation and émigrés irrevocably
change but also ultimately contribute to the continuing evolution of national cultures, he
takes European film studies to task for remaining steeped in a rhetoric of cultural
51

protectionism and fear of globalization (321) which still perpetuate the illusion of ‘pure’
and stable national cultures. An alternative history of European cinema would, in his
view, circumvent narratives and discourses of containment, so that these can be replaced
with “critical travelogues” documenting “the fluidity of identities,” or tracing the
encounters between films and shifting audience formations (329). While these comments
are a bit vague, Bergfelder gets more specific when he suggests that
One might reconceptualize a history of ‘European’ cinema rather than a history of
‘cinemas in Europe.’ European cinema is more than just the sum total of separate
and divergent national film styles. . . Like the European idea on a larger scale,
European cinema as a concept is defined by the simultaneous agencies of
dispersal and recentering, which perpetually challenge easy solutions to the
questions of identity and “home.” (329)

The fact that critics have overlooked the transnational provenance of many
European films is also underscored by Randall Halle, who comments that “the
transnationalization of capital in the EU coincides with the transnationalisation of
culture” (7). Halle makes an interesting observation when he notes that, just as the
emergence of print-culture facilitated the emerging of the nation-state, contemporary
communications media are facilitating the current transnational shift. In this process, he
argues, “film is the most significant maker of the simultaneous economic and cultural
transformations” (7). What is important to recognize in these discussions, however, is
that in considering transnational film, the question of national cinema is still relevant (as
was the case with the idea of “nation-state”), and should not be dismissed. One has to
acknowledge that, even if the nation is an imagined community, this community is not an
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imaginary one, but continues to act as a significant form of political and cultural
affiliation (Halle 10).
At the same time, however, I believe that Elsaesser makes a legitimate point when
he argues that it is “impossible, though, to affirm a single national or ethnic identity
through the cinema: it is more a question of how a country can speak to itself, how it is
“spoken” by others, and how the others “inside” speak themselves or ask to be
represented” (55). “The crisis of the European cinema in the 1990s,” Elsaesser contends,
can be addressed by problematizing what can be “shared” in the European community
(55). This notwithstanding, he also envisions, alongside similar arguments made by
critics such as Rosalind Galt or Ien Ang, a (future European) cinema that has the capacity
“to tell stories that may not amount to collective mythologies, but that are nonetheless
capable of resonating beyond national boundaries and linguistic borders” (55).
A problematic aspect of the majority of books written on European cinema is that
they operate by the logic of compartmentalization, offering chapters on French Cinema,
Spanish Cinema, Italian Cinema and so on. Most considerations of something called
“European Cinema” thus seem to be driven by a desire to avoid the gaps between
linguistically determined national cinemas. In this respect, Rob Stone (unlike Randall
Halle) underscores that in order to understand the current and future state of European
Cinema, ideas of national cinemas must be dissolved. One way of re-conceptualizing
European identity, he proposes, is to map it according to the way in which Europe’s
region 2 DVD operates.
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Drawing on the language used by the European Union website on “Languages –
Europe’s Asset,” Stone notes that the EU promotes a policy of “official multiculturalism
as a deliberate tool of government that is unique in the world” (qtd. in Stone 8).
Moreover, according to the way in which the EU promotes itself, “the use of its citizens’
languages [is] one of the factors which make it more transparent, more legitimate and
more efficient. At the level of culture […], the EU works actively to promote the wider
knowledge and use of all its official languages throughout the Union” (qtd. in Stone 8).
From this perspective, Stone suggests that in relation to film, one may assume that
the ability of DVDs to make available a multiplicity of subtitles could potentially make
them a perfect vehicle for the “official multilingualism” championed by the rhetoric of
the EU. While acknowledging that access to foreign films has become almost unlimited
due to new technologies such as DVD, digital video and editing programs for home
computers (which, in turn, suggests that film production and distribution has the potential
to bypass the traditional film industry), Stone contends that the freedom and flux within
the European film market, at least in DVD, “is not as transparent, legitimate and
efficient” (8) as the EU wishes it and itself to be. Pointing out that even if these new
technologies offer the potential for a pan-European arena for European films and their
concomitant European ideas, he suggests that the problem lies in new restrictions on
these new technologies, such as region coding on DVDs, which impose a new concept of
collective identity by reintroducing the obstructions of statehood in what should be a free
market economy. This is because region coding on DVD makes players and discs suitable
54

for operation within a specific geographical region and unworkable in others. Ironically,
even a multi-forming product like film, which, with all the subtitled and dubbed versions
of a single DVD, could somehow symbolize the dream of European unity, is ultimately
regulated and defined by regions –and not by continents.
There currently exist 6 region codes, but the reasons governing their distribution
are clearly neither linguistic nor cultural:
Region 1: USA, Canada.
Region 2: Japan, Europe, South Africa, Middle East, Greenland
Region 3: South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, parts of South East Asia
Region 4: Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, Mexico
Region 5: Eastern Europe, Russia, India, Africa
Region 6: China
Region 1 dominates by the mere fact of being called 1, and region 6 has an explicit
political origin in its designation due to China’s strict censorship policies. Region 5
resembles a “post-colonial” market of Eastern Europe, India and Africa. Stone explains
that price fixing of DVDs may account for region coding, which has prompted a thriving
European market for code-free DVD players in which the region coding function has
been disabled. Yet this practice has, in turn, led to new mechanisms of control, such as
the implementation of another layer of coding on DVDs called RCE (regional code
enhancement) that makes, for example, Region 1 discs only playable on region 1 players
regardless of any enhancement or special wiring.
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The battle between consumers and the film industries as a borderless network of
market decisions coincides with the proud ideal of European cinema as a borderless
network of filmmakers in which countless individuals make decisions that energize a
borderless market (Stone 12). For a critic such as Stone, the practice of defining national
cinemas in Europe by a strict delineation of geographical borders should have been
eliminated by now and replaced by a thriving beyond the chains of statehood. The reality,
he notes, is that there is an increasing stratification of the inhabitants of the EU, divided
into economic layers that are united by pan-European technologies. According to Stone,
Today’s Europeans are linked and limited by their computers and mobile phones
rather than by roads and tolls. New technologies have created a new spatial
concept of a Europe whose geographical identity has been replaced by it being
located firmly in region 2 of the new reality of the global market. . . Lenin once
sent trains to educate the masses; now he could just send a text. (10)

This is a pertinent observation, and it is undeniable that in a Europe defined more by
economic relationship than by monarchic, political or secular ones, there is a growing
awareness that the usual definitions of nation and identity are outdated. I would like to
add, however, that there is a tendency to idealize Western Europeans or economically
stable citizens who have the luxury of technology. There is a general assumption that
mere access to and power to buy expensive computer programs makes “Western” citizens
adept at using sophisticated technology by default.
Living in the Unites States and travelling extensively in both Eastern and Western
Europe, I notice that contrary to Stone’s observation, economically disadvantaged young
people in Europe actively seek out European films and find ways to watch them, sharing
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pirated versions or subtitles. As I show in chapter two in my examination of Romanian
cinephilia, when they do not have the appropriate technology to obtain specific films,
young Romanians find ways to network with each other, sharing priceless collections of
films or organizing collective viewings at each other’s homes. They teach each other
which (pirated) programs to use, how to add subtitles, and where to search for pirated
films.
2

Stone contends that defining Europeans by their region code represents “a way of
creating an adequate new identity” (13). For him, the earlier ideal of a national cinema
within Europe was historically introverted (being based on traditional subjects and
themes), commercially extrovert (being designed to turn a profit), production-exclusive
(being the product of protective measures and funding policies) and audience-inclusive
(being made with an eye to international markets and distribution). To save itself from its
“crisis” - so to speak - Stone proposes that European cinema “may have to fulfill a role as
agitator of social unrest and even change” (14). In other words, he strongly believes that
European cinema has a revolutionary spirit, given its potential to bring social change.

2
Moreover, as Italian filmmaker Emanuele Crialese pointed out at a recent discussion on
his film Terraferma (2011) (set against the background of the influx of African boat
people on the tiny Italian islands of Lampedusa and Linosa), even the most disadvantaged
African migrants have a cell phone. They may not have any food or money, but they
make sure to call back home and stay in contact with their families. Having met and
collaborated with many of these people, Crialese noticed that they refrain from
complaining about their conditions. The message that they send back home is that they
are safe and that they have found work.
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The most interesting examples of European cinema, Stone asserts, are already
revealing themselves as contrary agents and agitators, just as movements such as the
Nouvelle Vague, Dogme 95, New German Cinema and dissident Cine Metaforico
(metaphorical cinema) in Spain under Franco have all matched creativity with a
revolutionary spirit. Stone comments:
Even now, the aesthetics and techniques frequently associated with contemporary
European “art” cinema, such as long takes, hand held cameras, and fractal
narratives, are the tools of those like Haneke, Almadovar, Medem and
Moodysson, who perform the role of auteur as a riposte to the factory line
production of most films. The future of their committed and idiosyncratic, even
unique European cinema is tied to the development of European citizenship and
the idea of a cinema based on personhood instead of states and nations…Thus,
finding ourselves relocated, reclassified and restricted as citizens of Region 2, it is
right and timely that we should set about exploring, documenting and developing
this new world together on film. (14, my emphasis)

Much of this quotation resonates with the issues I discussed earlier in this chapter.
On the one hand, the idea that European cinema must be born again out of its (always
already) revolutionary spirit recalls Husserl’s comments from my introduction that to
escape from “the crisis of European existence” Europe must be born again out of the
spirit of philosophy. On the other hand, the discourse of the unique, the exceptional, and
the timely recalls Derrida’s observations. From the examples of filmmakers mentioned by
Stone – one from Austria, two from Spain, and one from Sweden – it is quite clear what
kind of European cinema he envisions and what kind of revolutionary potential he has in
mind. As I show in Chapter 2, the recent gesture of the newly emerged auteurs in
Romanian cinema of redeeming realism can be just as “revolutionary” as Haneke’s
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cinema. Ironically, in the post-Cold War era, these young filmmakers resorted to realism,
one of the most stigmatized artistic trends in former communist countries, due to its
earlier application as socialist realism. And this investment in realism was as passionate
as that of their masters and forebears who strove hard to undermine it through encoded
meanings, undertones, and philosophical speculation. As Doru Pop writes on defense of a
“new wave” in the Romanian cinema, its existence can be justified simply by taking into
consideration that “it is fundamentally a European Wave, one that partake in the
invention of the “new Europe” with cinematic mechanisms. These new directors
obviously respond and react to the concept in the Maastricht Treaty, defined as the
creation of “a common European character” (Pop 25).
The logic of cartography proposed by Stone also resonates in Rosalind Galt’s
work, which is an attempt to rethink Post-Wall Cinema. Galt argues that film studies
must cast the question of Europe as a matter of space and of time. Drawing on Derrida,
Galt insightfully comments that
If we are to take seriously the post-Wall European subject’s impossible
responsibility, we cannot stop with a comfortably liberal celebration of the Other.
To adapt Paul Gilroy’s notion of anti-anti essentialism, any theoretical revision of
European cinema needs to articulate an anti-anti-Eurocentrism (3).

In other words, Galt laments that Post-Wall public discourses on European identity
tended to use precisely the binary forms of Europe/Other that were problematized by
Derrida in The Other Heading. She decries the fact that recent films “narrate the Other of
Europe” too directly and articulate an anti-Eurocentric hybridity too transparently (3),
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suggesting that an anti-anti-Eurocentric consideration of European cinema should not, as
it has been so often the case, speak “only of coproductions, of European Union funding,
and of national heritage; neither must it speak only of the diasporic, the hybrid, and the
radical. Rather, it must “take a logic of cartography” (4), an enunciative structure that
maps the spaces of the New Europe.
Vinzenz Hediger, another critic who writes on European Cinema, is responding to
the crisis of memory (so to speak) brought by the “industrialization of memory” through
the creation of online digital film archives. Given that archive and power are usually
interconnected (as Derrida has shown us), the role of the archivist, the question of writing
film histories, of making selections, of organizing such an important “capital” of
European culture, raise important questions/tensions for film historians and archivists.
And these questions are, as Derrida stresses in The Other Heading, also interrelated to
questions of economic capital and marketing campaigns.
As I pointed out earlier, for Derrida the theme of European “identity” is linked to
the question of la capitale and le capital. He insists that we have the responsibility,
perhaps an almost “impossible task” (44), a duty to respond to the call of European
memory and to re-identify Europe (76). Crucially, he points to the need for a new culture
which, he argues, “would invent another way of reading and analyzing Capital, both
Marx’s book and capital in general (56).” In the difficult task of doing so, however, “we
must be suspicious of both repetitive memory…and the completely other of the
absolutely new; of both anamnestic capitalization and the amnesic exposure to what
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would no longer be identifiable at all (Derrida 19). In other words, we must beware of
the demagogy of the “new” if it relies on old rhetoric and repeats itself without
difference. Since, “self-difference” structures every identity, “there is no culture or
cultural identity without this difference with itself.” Every invocation of an identity (e.g,
the identity of democracy, of a nation state, of a language, and so on) has to occlude the
fact that identity is never identical to ‘itself.’ There are so many ways to be “European” –
just as there are many ways of being masculine and feminine, and so on. These way,
these differences, constitute identity in terms not of a “gathering” (the new) but of a
“divergence” (Derrida 10).
1.5 A Supranational Framework and Co-Productions
Film historian Mark Betz, among others, has noted that films made in Europe
have frequently been coproduced by two or more countries at least since World War II,
and that the idea of “pure” national film cultures is a myth. According to this historical
revision, “Italian” or “French” art films are always already European. The European
Union has created a supranational structure that can now accommodate opposing
phenomena of localism, micro- and macro-regionalism, and the new nation states that
joined after 1989. As Luisa Rivi points out, these supranational enterprises mark a shift
from the bipolar configuration established after World War II to a polycentric one, where
multiple powers at the local, national, and global levels coexist within, as well as create, a
supranational framework (5).
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The new cinematographic coproductions, Rivi underscores, reflect the peculiar
mixture of heterogeneous political configurations and overlapping spheres of belonging.
They not only bring into question the principles and contradictions at work in the project
of a supranational Europe, but also use the needs of corporate capitalism, global
distribution, and consumption, exposing how European cultural identity is being
reshaped. Rivi shows that there has been a profound shift in the way co-productions have
been realized over the years. Dating back to 1946 (a result of bilateral treaties between
Italy and France) coproduction agreements are certainly not new, reached their peak in
the 1960s, at the time of the economic boom, and declined by the 1970s because of a
drop in attendance and changing viewing habits, only to be revived and reshaped
primarily as broadcasting organizations during the 1980s (Rivi 3).
The new co-productions, however, are obviously motivated by economic
concerns, but they also foreground a previously nonexistent cultural dimension. Indeed,
the new treaties and the new so-called “co-financial agreements” are required to be in
alignment with the objectives of a supranational Europe. The specifically created
European Convention on Cinematographic Co-Production, established by the Council of
Europe in 1992, was designed to encourage the expression of cultural diversity while also
promoting the ideals and principles of a common heritage. For Rivi, the cinematographic
coproductions of the 1990s are the most productive terrains for redefining European
identity, as they present a tangible threat to the existence of national cinemas. The
discourse around coproduced films in a post–Cold War Europe, articulates the impasse
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which lies at the core of the new Europeanism: the tension between a supranational
framework and the individual national identities that underlies the project of a different
Europeanness.
1.6 Phantom Europe
So begins my discontinuous series of reflections on a
cinematic Phantom Europe: a landscape I decipher,
geographically, from the outside (with all the gaps, blind
spots and misunderstandings that will no doubt bring); but
simultaneously from the inside of my own fantasy
projection, where everything can have a fullness and
richness of its own invention, “as need be.”
Adrian Martin

In an insightful essay titled “Phantom Europe: European Cinema from the Other
Side” – a title which alludes to Chantal Acherman’s From the Other Side (2002) –
Adrian Martin argues that to grasp how European cinema is seen and understood outside
Europe is to ask what films are distributed and screened and what exactly manages to
“travel.” The answer to what can translate across cultures, he suggests, is inextricably
linked to the question of power within the cultural industry. That is, who gets to decide
“what translates” and, hence, what will be chosen to travel? Martin asks us to pay
attention to contemporary cinema in relation to the culture of international film festivals,
where various alliances between filmmakers from all parts of the globe are formed and
co-productions spanning several continents are planned. Over the past two decades, a
global family of filmmakers “who now partake of a shared, somewhat spaced-out
fantasy: the world is crossed in a speedy, technology-driven blur of abstraction,
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languages multiply and are mixed, a very trendy and glamorous form of cosmopolitanism
is offered under the alibi of an equally trendy ‘critique of globalization’” (4). For a long
time, Martin comments, the greatest contemporary Asian filmmakers seemed to remain
structurally aloof from the pan-European cosmopolitan cinema. In recent years, however,
filmmakers such as Hou Hsiao-hsien or Tsai Ming-liang, have been drawn into European
co-productions (like Hou’s Le Ballon rouge with Juliette Binoche), continuing the line of
unlikely “cultural conversions” that occurred in international cinema over the past twenty
years. Such cultural conversions include, among others, “
…Kieslowski swapping his Polish realism for European fantasy-mysticism, or the
seemingly intractable Suwa Nobuhiro becoming a highly ‘French’ intimist
filmmaker in A Perfect Couple (2005), or, – strangest path of all – Michael
Haneke transforming himself, after his hard-edge Austrian beginnings, first into a
chronicler of French bourgeois malaise (in The Piano Teacher and Caché) and
now remaking his own Funny Games in the US …(4).

Crucially, Martin stresses that despite the recent attention paid to the question of film
festivals, their role and significance are, to a certain extent, exaggerated. In many
countries, the major festivals attract a sophisticated audience, but this audience remains
quite small. The vast middle-class art-house cinema-going audience does not, as a general
rule, attend these Festivals. Rather, this larger audience for European cinema tends to
attend smaller “event” festivals that tour the country and appear in the art-house chains
that organise them. These events are mainly devoted to national cinemas – Greek, French,
Russian, German, Spanish, Polish, or Romanian, although there are also several “special
interest” festivals for specific constituencies (such as Queer Cinema, Animation, and
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Short Films). Always marketing themselves under the label of a “festival,” these events
are the main source, in many countries, of what constitutes the general image of what
“European cinema” is today. These films, in turn, end up constituting the pool for the
selection of the few films (usually only one or two from each of the countries on which a
festival focuses) which get further, individual distribution.
The majority of European films that get selected (Brides from Greece, advertised
with Scorsese’s name as Executive Producer, The Lives of Others from Germany, Volver
from Spain, and so on), is, to be sure, quite conservative. The selections will likely never
make room for a Guerín or a Grandrieux, a Schroeter or a Dwoskin, a Gitai or a Farocki,
a Nanouk Leopold (Wolfsbergen, Netherlands, 2007) or a Kornél Mundruczó (Johanna,
Hungary, 2005), Martin laments (7). In other words, some of the most challenging and
innovative new films get relegated to the pool of Film Festivals, where a small audience
that actively seeks these films gets to see them. By contrast, the smaller festivals seek to
please the crowd constituting their own audiences and often lack aesthetic ambition.
Thus, when conventional, mainstream film critics/reviewers pronounce, in their surveys
of the cinematic globe, that “nothing much is happening in Italy” or that “Greek cinema
is moribund,” they refer to a “Phantom Europe” that is just as elusive as our own
understanding of it (Martin 7).
From this perspective, the way in which European cinema ends up being seen
abroad is determined by sales agents, and national promotional bodies such as Unifrance.
The locally-based event programmers (who are often lowly staff members within
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arthouse distribution empires), in various countries, who quickly want to gather their
“representative sample” of marketable foreign films, have their access to – and
knowledge of – these national cinemas “filtered” through the decisions of promoters and
agents.
Like Thomas Elsaesser and Nicole Brenez, Martin comes to reject the idea that
the most appropriate gesture for cinema today is to simply film or present the “evidence”
of reality, no matter the intensity or eloquence of the director’s regard. A revolutionary
potential for European cinema – if any – is to be found, according to Martin, in the digital
filming of Heddy Honigman’s A Good Husband, A Dear Son (2001), a documentary
about survivors in Bosnia. As Elsaesser suggests, such a film demonstrates a new
possibility for cinematic “evidence,” its redefinition in a medium of ghostly artifice, and
in the context of a post-postmodern reality that has created another kind of Phantom
Europe, shifting in and out of focus and solidity right before our eyes and under our feet.
Elsaesser comments:
This is what the future of the past, the future of memory, is going to be all about:
to mark the sites, but now no longer in their pristineness, but precisely in their
layeredness – only sites that are ‘archaeological’ will be perceived as authentic,
remediated sites if you like, multiply inscribed, like video-overlay, or multiply
occupied, like land claimed by several owners. An authentic historical building
will be seen as a fake, where a ruin, with bullet-holes and shot to pieces will strike
us as authentic, because it is a material representation of its multiple existences,
its realities as well as its virtualities. (378)

This reading of Europe as a spatial and temporal figure and of European cinema as
marking a doubly –occupied, layered territory, is very much at the heart of this
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dissertation. I argue, in effect, that by evoking spectral traces of the past, recent films
from several countries across Europe facilitate the transmission of memory and the
shaping of identities. The films I analyze in later chapters foreground the ways in which
personal and transnational conflicts and allegiances disrupt national ones, pointing to the
interrelatedness of conflicts within the nation and those between the national and the
global capitalist order.

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Chapter 2
Translation, Identity, and Aftereffects of 1989 in Romanian Cinema

2.1 Language and Translation in the European Union
How do you know when an era is finished and another begins?
Gilles Jacob

We only ever speak one language […] We never speak only one language.
Jacques Derrida

The language called maternal is never purely natural, nor proper, nor inhabitable.
Jacque Derrida

I would like to return in this chapter to the issue of language and cinema in
Europe that Rob Stone began to problematize in his discussion of region codes for DVDs
in relation to the active promotion by the European Union of all its official languages
throughout the Union. Stone’s assertion that there is an increasing stratification of the
inhabitants of the EU, divided into economic layers that are united by pan-European
technologies seems to imply a binary opposition between rich Western European viewers
and poor ones, especially those in Eastern Europe ones, neatly situated at the “margins”
of Europe. Indeed, Eastern Europeans are generally believed to be less technologically
advanced and less likely to be able to have access to a wide range of European films that
use various languages than people living in “the West.” Without the purchasing power to
buy either professional DVDs with subtitles or region free DVDs, they are thought to be
less likely able to understand European diversity than people living in the West.
Moreover, the fact that they ultimately lack a sophisticated understanding of European
film culture may seem to account for the reason why a supranational or transnational
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European cinema does not exist. Put differently, a transnational European cinema seems
to be “in crisis” because the stratification of the inhabitants of the EU living at the
margins and their inability to watch European films make them unable to perform
supranational projections. Critics such as Vinzenz Hediger have argued, in this respect,
that the lack of a supranational projection led to the failure of the European constitution.
On the surface, the Romanian case seems not only a perfect example that
illustrates Hediger’s assertion, but also an example for the moment of “crisis” triggered
by the gradual disappearance of theatres since 1989. In Romania, domestic theatrical
attendance remains low compared to other European countries and the box office figures
of Romanian productions are much higher in France or the US than at home. Critics
usually place the blame for this low attendance on the small number and poor condition
of Romanian theatres and on the lack of interest in the film spectacle in this postsocialist
country. However, as I argue in this chapter, Romanian cinephilia is vigorously present
and rife with complex social and cultural implications. It is also inextricably linked to
progressively emerging technologies such as the DVD player and the Internet. As I
further show, today’s passionately active online and file-sharing communities are rooted
in the pre-1989 practice of “underground,” home-based, collective and largely interactive
viewing of videocassettes – a practice that shaped the behavior and taste of Romanian
film viewers. Two contemporary online communities reveal the complicated relationship
between spectatorship and participation characteristic of Romanian film viewership.
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Fig 1: Romanian theatre transformed into Bingo
Cinemagia.ro is a site for cinephiles in the broad sense, with a dynamic and heavily
invested community of contributors that includes leading film critics and filmmakers.
Titrari.ro is a website dedicated entirely to the support and production of subtitled
translations of foreign media – mostly feature films and TV shows. Both of these online
venues reveal the presence of a vibrant, highly motivated and enthusiastic core of film
viewers who are bent on publicizing and even proselytizing their love of cinema. At the
same time, they highlight other potential reasons for the low figures of theatrical
attendance: dissatisfaction with the content offer, contempt for the quality of translations,
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and preference for the low-cost, instant and permanent accessibility of downloadable
content.

Fig. 2 Romanian theater in Bucharest after 1989

Fig. 3 Romanian theater closed after 1989
71

Fig. 4 Romanian theater closed after 1989

72

Fig. 5 Former Romanian theater as Outlet
Before I get to the discussion on the importance of translation of foreign feature
films in Romania, I wish to explore to a greater extent the European ideology of
plurilingualism. This ideology, as it is well known, is based on the idea of a plurality of
neatly defined and preconstituted language communities. The official EU ideology of
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translation prides itself on a plurilingualism which pretends that it can do without
translation. For example, according to Article IV-41 of the constitution, “[e]very person
may write to the Institutions of the Union in one of the languages of the Constitution and
must have an answer in the same language.” The very text of the Constitution is drawn in
twenty-one European languages, yet despite the obvious difference in wording, there is
no such thing as a master copy or an original text that would serve as a final point of
reference. Rather, as it is said in the constitution (the English version for instance), “the
texts in each of these languages” are “equally authentic.” This implies, as Oliver
Marchart points out, that the meaning of these twenty-one versions is already pre-
established and not subject to any further translation between these versions. The
drawback of this universalist approach is that if there is quarrel over the interpretation of
certain concepts or expressions in different languages, it will not be possible to refer to
the definitive version of a specific language, because all twenty-one versions are definite
(85). According to the logic entertained by the EU, having twenty-one versions of the
constitution which are equally authentic and therefore do not have to be translated into
each other reflects a “community of translation,” an (ontological) pluralism without
borders. Yet of course, the EU does have borders, both external, to prevent outsiders from
getting in, and internal or social borders. Turkish, which is the language spoken of a large
number of people living within the EU, is not an official language of the EU. Marchant
comments in this respect:
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To entertain an ideology of undistorted translatability implies, and this is what
makes it an ideology, the forced construction of ignorance towards those forms of
exclusion. Together with the assumption of a constitutive pluralism there comes a
constitutive repression or disavowal even of all forms of distortion and exclusion.
[…] This ideology of total translatability within an undistorted space […]
necessarily leads to the neutralization of conflict and the erasure of all traces of
power, subordination, and suppression (86).

In other words, this ideology leaves no traces of the untranslatable. The idea of pluralism
implies the assumption of an undistorted space that would accommodate all possible
competing claims. Put differently, the European Union’s new model is premised upon a
plurality of disconnected entities which are always already pre-constituted within a non-
distorted space. This discourse suggests that the European Union is a space of pre-
constituted multicultural identities, cultures, nations, or “races.” It assumes the existence
of identities which are not subject to political construction but seemingly express their
self-identity in a direct and immediate way. The notion of untranslatability, therefore,
refers to “a world of private languages” (Marchart 82), to the fact that entities are not in
need of connection, as they find their principle of existence within themselves.
Jacques Derrida’s concept of a “monolinguism of the other,” his assertion that
“On ne parle jamais qu’une seule langue. […]On ne parle jamais une seule langue”/ “We
only ever speak one language […] We never speak only one language” (21) can be useful
to this discussion, as it presents a viable alternative to the European ideology of
plurilingualism. In the first sentence, the singularity of language, monolingualism, is
affirmed, and in the second, this singularity is denied. But this does not mean that Derrida
affirms plurality in a positive sense, but that he expresses in this antinomy a peculiar form
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of monolingualism, based on a negative ground: a monolingualism of the other.
According to Derrida, we always only speak a single language and, at the same time,
never speak a single language – the language we speak is not our own language, but the
language of an other, or the other: “the language called maternal is never purely natural,
nor proper, nor inhabitable” (58), he reminds us. The language that we speak is never in
our full possession, but it comes from the other and it remains guarded by the other.
Following this logic, “translation must not be conceived as a translation between a
plurality of different languages but as one within a single language that is always
subverted from within by its other. […] There is translation because our own language is
already the language of the other” (Marchart 83). Derrida therefore posits difference as
difference, non self-identity, as more originary than plurality.
In chapter one, I engaged in a discussion on the “crisis” produced by filmmakers
who make films in a language other than their native one, on the effect of displacement
created by “the homelessness of the language” (Ostrowska 59) in films such as Lars Von
Trier’s Dogville, and on the importance of language for the film culture in France and
Italy, countries that make language a criterion for foreign producers to access foreign aid.
The focus on visuals in relation to discussions on the identity of European cinema has left
questions of language use in a very uncertain position, mainly because there hasn’t been a
general agreement on the best way of conveying the audio layer of films. Historically,
Nordic countries, the Netherlands, and the UK have opted for subtitles, while Germany,
Italy, and most of the former communist countries (with the exception of Romania) have
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favored dubbing. The importance of language, I contend, should not be overestimated. If
national cinemas are responsible for “imagining the nation” and sustaining forms of
nationalism, national languages, insofar as they are also imaginary (following Derrida),
are also complicit in perpetuating fantasies about specific (national) imagined
communities. What happens, however, when a national cinema which uses a specific
national language to sustain an imagined community and its “unique” characteristics is no
longer able to reach its audience? In what follows I will discuss what happened in
Romania after 1989, when theatres across the country have been demolished or
transformed into venues for playing bingo or clothing outlets.
2.2 The Crisis in Romanian Cinema
In the opening remarks of the official press conference announcing last year’s
Cannes film festival lineup, Gilles Jacob commented that there is an emerging trend from
some corners – the Anglo-Saxon one, notably – to claim that auteur cinema is already
dead and that only the object-film exists. “The center of cinema is in permanent
movement,” he reminded his world-wide audience. “You have to go to Bucharest to catch
a glimpse of a new wave, to Tel Aviv for a reference to Jacques Becker, to Hong-Kong or
Seoul for thrillers reborn with a sense of poetry, realism and fireworks,” Jacob remarked.
Questioning the future of the festival, Jacob implicitly questioned the future of auteur
cinema, which some proclaim dead or on the verge of extinction. “How do you know
when an era is finished and another begins?” asked Jacob, to which he answered:
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But maybe we should get used to the idea that, on the contrary, cinema doesn’t
exist at all yet, at least, not in its definitive form (that it will never get to), and not
in its future form either, and that the time of rediscovering creative sensations is
not yet with us. Or, if it is coming soon, it will not be announced by the gong of
the Rank of an Old England, but by one of an Eastern country. Near or Far.
(2009)

One of the things that Jacob was referring to was the generation of remarkably talented
young Romanian directors who have recently produced an impressive body of films
which have garnered critical and commercial success. While Jacob pointed towards
Romania as a place of hopefulness endowed with generative power that could change the
dynamic revival of World Cinema, other critics paradoxically viewed this same place as a
dead-end.
In 2000, Anne Jäckel anticipated the potential birth of a New Romanian Cinema,
but announced it as “Too Late,” before its actual “arrival.” Her article, titled “Too Late?
Recent Developments in Romanian Cinema,” ended with a warning that if the new
generation of filmmakers was not given a chance to emerge soon, Romanians might find
themselves “without images of their own” (109). Such predictions, however, betrayed a
profound pessimism on Jäckel’s part, as her article documented the clinical death of the
Romanian film industry in 2000. As she put it, “Romanian cinemas are closing,
Romanian production is down, and the new National Film Office is struggling to reform
the film industry on free market principles” (108).
By tracing the historical roots of non-theatrical film spectatorship and taking a
closer look at the contemporary online communities, I hope to highlight and explicate the
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ways in which Romanian audiences have been relating to the film text, making use of
available technologies to enhance, define, but also paradoxically undermine their beloved
medium.
It is important to emphasize that the major “break” in Romanian cinema did not
come in the 1990s, as one would have expected, but in 2001 (ten years after the 1989
revolution), with the release of Stuff and Dough, a film written, produced and directed by
Cristi Puiu. Since no film was produced in Romania in 2000, this year became the “year
zero” in the new Romanian cinema. One explanation for the filmmakers’ sudden
emergence lies in the fact that the majority of features produced in Romania came from
the new state support system, the National Center for Cinema (CNC). CNC was set up in
the early 2000 and functions in a similar way to the Centre National de la
Cinematographie in France. Every year, CNC holds 2 screening competitions, and the
winning entries (roughly 20-25 features, shorts, and docs per year) end up receiving up to
50% of their budget. The remaining 50% comes from private investment, co-production,
bartering for film services or from an additional rebate from the CNC generated from
taxing media companies on advertising space. This financial system worked better
because it allowed first-time directors to make their debut and maintained a sense of
competition which gave film-makers the desire to make a better film than the person
before him/her. All Romanian directors are their own producers, and this gives them the
freedom to make the films they want –if they get selected by the CNC in the first place.
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Ironically, although Romanian cinema is recognized and praised abroad for its
vitality, at home it is as good as dead, since the mass audience is unfamiliar with it.
Although the media hype around the filmmakers’ success gives Romanians a boost in
national pride, it does not translate however into an active interest in national cinema
through the purchase of tickets and physical presence in theatres. The reason for this
absence is not limited to the love-hate relationship that Romanian audiences have
traditionally had with their national cinema, but has to be understood in the context of the
sharp decline in cinema attendance in general after 1989. The low attendance has led to
the closing of the majority of theaters in Romania, as they became increasingly hard to
maintain (ticket sales could not cover even the most basic expenses such as heating and
electricity). If in 1938 Romania had 372 cinemas and in the late 1980s (during
Ceausescu’s regime) 450 cinemas, today only 62 have remained. The unprofitable
theatres were either sold off or turned into nightclubs, bingo halls, casinos, discos, or
storage houses. The shortage of screens means that the potential for domestic commercial
returns is small, and therefore it is hard to attract substantial private investment, either
from within Romania or from outside the country. And the scarcity of theatres makes
exhibition quotas - which other countries use to protect their film industries from being
overwhelmed by Hollywood - untenable.
When Jacob ended his speech for last year’s Cannes festival, he directly
addressed the relationship between cinema and new technologies, surprisingly
acknowledging the reality of the shifting paradigms of spectatorship: “Let’s hope Internet
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users everywhere will drop their games and be tempted to rush to their nearest theatre to
find out what happens next.” Jacob commented. He added:
Let’s hope so, for the sake of the artists. We make no distinction between their
films. They are all there, somewhere, in the atmosphere that surrounds us all.
They are all there and available, chemically, digitally, electronically, in binary, in
VOD, virtually, we can feel them, they surround us. They are looking out for us.
Let’s not abandon them.

Jacob’s anxiety that theatre goers are disappearing recalls other similar anxieties
expressed by critics such Susan Sontag, who in 1996 famously regretted “the decay of
cinema,” by which she actually meant the decay of cinephilia. Her intervention, Thomas
Elsaesser emphasizes, brought to the fore one of cinephilia’s original characteristics,
namely that “it has always been a gesture towards cinema framed by nostalgia and other
retroactive temporalities, pleasures tinged with regret even as they register as pleasures”
(34). In other words, cinephiles are always ready to give in to the anxiety of possible loss,
to mourn the once sensuous sensory plenitude of the celluloid image and to insist on the
irrecoverably fleeting nature of a film’s experience. Cinephilia should be understood not
simply a love of cinema, but always already caught in all kinds of deferral –a detour in a
place and space, a shift in register and a delay in time.
Elsaesser makes a distinction between two phases of cinephilia: take one and take
two: Cinephilia take one was identified with the means of holding its object in place, with
the uniqueness of the moment, as well as with the singularity of sacred space, because it
valued the film almost as much for the effort it took to catch it on its first release or its
single showing at a retrospective as for the spiritual revelation, the sheer aesthetic
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pleasure or somatic engagement it promised at such a screening. Cinephilia take two
refers to the “fan cult” of the collector aided by new technologies which doesn’t locate its
pleasures in the “theatrical” experience where audiences are gathered in the collective
trance of a film performance. This type of cinephilia involves “a crisis of memory,”
causing a new anxiety of having to live in a state of permanent tension - not so much
about missing the unique moment of a screening but about how to cope with the
unlimited archive of our media memory, that is, with the excess of availability caused by
the new technologies. Out there, Elsaesser says, the love that never lies (cinephilia as
love of the original, of authenticity, of the indexicality of time, where each film
performance is a unique event), now competes with the love that never dies, where
cinephilia feeds on nostalgia and repetition, is revived by fandom and cult classics, and
demands the video copy and now the DVD or the download (41). Cinephilia, in other
words, has reincarnated itself by dis-embodying itself.
2.3 Explaining Romanian Cinephilia
3

Before -1989, the main expression of Romanian cinephilia was already mediated
by technologies such as the VCR and, in some cases, satellite antennas. Although largely
an urban phenomenon, the introduction of VCRs in many Romanian households had a
huge impact on the population. As it happens, the structures of desire mobilized by this
deferred and delayed way of accessing the filmic text created a very specific form of

3
I would like to thank my colleague, Ioana Uricaru, for her insightful feedback in our
discussions about this topic.
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Romanian cinephilia: While still maintaining the rituals of take one by valuing the
uniqueness of the moment and the singularity of sacred space, this cinephilia
circumvented the movie theatre and relied on teachniques of re-mastering and re-
purposing that are characteristic of take two cinephilia.
People who owned VCRs would organize viewing nights, usually in the living
room of their apartment. Those invited would pay a fee and spend the entire night
watching six or seven films in a row. The black-market translation of films was usually
made with a single voice-over recorded on the videotape’s second channel of audio. The
numerous layers of language difference evident in these tapes testify to the complicated,
circuitous nature of global piracy routes. For instance, a Hollywood film pirated from
German television would initially be dubbed in German with a Romanian voice-over then
added on top. Ironically, those tapes that bore a copyright infringement warning at their
start were extremely valuable – the warning itself became a measure of quality,
signifying that the dub had been made with little to no tampering. Often, spectators would
test a film by watching the first five to fifteen minutes and then deciding whether to
continue watching, fast forwarding over “boring” parts or replaying selected scenes.
In this context, the “bad” translation and degraded sound and picture typical of
pirate media came to signify a different kind of quality: that of uncensored content. The
misunderstandings, transformations, and obscurations that occurred were relatively
unimportant. What mattered was the underground viewing context itself. The artisan
quality, whiff of the clandestine, social interaction, and vague connotation of resistance
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were as much a part of the signifying experience as the content itself. Thus, the failures
and limitations of pirate media did not so much undermine the experience as enhance it,
acting as signifiers of the “authentic” – as distinct from the censored, subtitled offerings
of the Communist regime.
In this sense, the secondary, supplementary nature of the piracy industry marked it
as an oppositional discourse not just in terms of ideology and legality but also in regard to
its reevaluation of apparently positive, primary terms such as “quality,” “professional,”
and “correct.” As a sideline or by-product of censorship, piracy assumed a new
legitimacy, providing modes of access and empowerment for disenfranchised subjects.
Here, the deleterious, viral image of the pirate proliferated by global media corporations
(with current DVD warnings sporting huge fines for individuals and corporations) was
somewhat undone.
If before 1989 the cinephiliac anxiety was linked to difficulty of accessing the
filmic text, post-1989 the collapse of theatrical film exhibition led to a different type of
anxiety: the fear of losing forever the experience of cinema going. This has prompted
crisis-mode reactions from different groups which sought to take more or less desperate
measures. For instance, in conjunction with the theatrical distribution of 4 Months, 3
Weeks, and 2 Days, director Cristian Mungiu organized a caravan tour to screen his film
in places which no longer have a movie theatre. The caravan was accompanied by two
projectionists from Hamburg and a team of documentary filmmakers. The tour lasted
thirty days, and included fifteen Romanian towns.
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Another example is the initiative taken by the French Cultural Institute in
Bucharest to implement a program of teaching elective classes in film appreciation at
high school level. This program, which has been functioning in France for years, is
currently at its pilot stage in five Romanian high-schools, recruiting teachers, students,
and guest filmmakers on a voluntary basis. One of the program’s main goals is to
cultivate the students’ interest in international auteur cinema on the one hand, and, on the
other hand, in the very activity of movie-going.
But one of the most important institutions that work to promote movie going and
Romania cinema is the Transylvania International Film Festival, which has now
expanded tremendously since its first edition in 2002. TIFF basically means ten days of
films from all over the world, films brought directly from Cannes (Von Trier’s Antichrist,
for example), movie theaters packed with viewers, around 200 volunteers, and
international guests (Julie Delpy, Vanessa Redgrave, Catherine Deneuve –to name just a
few). The festival took conscious steps to revive the movie going experience in
Romania: first, it started a public awareness campaign for saving the biggest movie
theatre in Cluj, the festival’s host city. Second, the festival co-opted the city of Sibiu as a
co-host in 2007, when Sibiu was declared European Capital of Culture. Since Sibiu only
had one movie theatre left, The TIFF organizers built an open-air cinema. In 2009, they
prefaced the festival with a film caravan throughout Romania (inspired by Mungiu’s
initiative two years earlier) and continued their series of festival drive-in screenings on an
unfinished segment of the Cluj-Turda Highway.
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Henry Jenkins argues that “convergence culture” represents a shift in the way we
think about our relations to media, and that we are making the shift first through our
relations with popular culture. The skills we acquire through play, Jenkins contends, may
have implications for how we learn, work, participate in the political process, and connect
with other people around the world. In what follows I will focus on two contemporary
online communities that reveal the complicated relationship between the concepts of
media convergence, participatory culture (the idea that media spectatorship is not
passive) and collective intelligence (the idea consumption has become a collective
process), a relationship foregrounded by Henry Jenkins.
Cinemagia.ro is a site for cinephiles in the broad sense, with a dynamic and
heavily invested community of contributors that includes leading film critics and
filmmakers. Titrari.ro is a website dedicated entirely to the support and production of
subtitled translations of foreign media – mostly feature films and TV shows. Both of
these online venues reveal the presence of a vibrant, highly motivated and enthusiastic
core of film viewers who are bent on publicizing and even proselytizing their love of
cinema. At the same time, they highlight other potential reasons for the low figures of
theatrical attendance: dissatisfaction with the content offer, contempt for the quality of
translations, and preference for the low-cost, instant and permanent accessibility of
downloadable content.
Cinemagia.ro is a website affiliated with the Cinemagia magazine, a publication
aimed at a broad audience which includes film reviews, interviews, but also gossip about
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Hollywood celebrities. The website’s online forum is the main online venue for
commenting and debating issues pertaining to cinema, similar to the online forums of
other global publications (such as the one for The New York Times, analyzed by Melis
Behlil). It currently has 14,803 threads, 261,484 posts, and 29,069 Members. In order to
understand what these numbers really mean, I should point out that a Romanian film
rarely supersedes 15,000 cinema entries; the most successful Romanian film of the past
decade had around 80,000 entries.
The Romanian specificity of this forum can be noted in discussion threads that
discuss how to label the new Romanian cinema and its future. The forumites
problematize the reception of Romania abroad (negative or positive), investing an
incredible amount of time and energy to articulate various critiques about what types of
films Romanians should be doing. The contributors, which include noted Romanian film
critics and film-makers alongside regular audience members and film students, are not
merely passive commentators on various film subjects. To be sure, the members of the
online community behave as if what they post had a direct implication on decisions the
Romanian film-making community. Their comments, for instance, often betray a sense
of urgency, especially in connection with the results of the CNC bi-annual fund-granting
competitions.
When, in January 2009, Cristian Mungiu published an open letter exposing some
of the irregularities of the competition regulations and actual decision-making process,
the Cinemagia Forum started a signature list in his support. Many of the forum
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contributors are directly invested in the funding mechanisms, as they are practicing or
aspiring screenwriters or filmmakers; the small size of the Romanian film community
gives even to an ordinary audience member the feeling of being intimately involved with
the process by contributing to the online community. The Forum displays a thread called
“The screenwriting workshop,” where members brainstorm ideas, post fragments or even
full screenplays, seek and receive advice from other members who are more experienced
screenwriters. Another set of threads documents the activity of the Romanian
Cinematheque and cineclubs, and some moderators are practicing professionals, either
film critics, film makers or film educators.
The forum serves as a bulletin board for upcoming screening events in Bucharest
and sometimes other Romanian cities, and also as a meeting point where the members
gather virtually to discuss and sometimes debate the film they have just seen. Not long
ago, the moderators inaugurated a new feature that they hope to turn into a regular
occurrence – a live online discussion with one of the most popular young Romanian
directors, Corneliu Porumboiu. Some threads are dedicated to the recovery of old texts,
mostly Romanian films from the 1970s and 1980s, as well as to the personal reminiscing
about the experience of movie going before 1989: the long ticket lines, the censored
scenes, the atmosphere of particular theatres that don’t exist anymore.
The sense of community is therefore built around “real life” activities such as
movie attendance, past and present, and yet the contributors have no qualms about
sharing electronic content (movie files) through the forum boards, and they don’t seem
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picky about the way in which they access content. While lamenting the death of cinema
exhibition in Romania and the difficulty in finding foreign and art films to watch, the
cinemagia online community keeps alive a kind of cinephilia that, on the heels of pre-
1989 viewing practices, uses the technologies of the moment to provide life support to a
seemingly threatened modality of film-making and film-viewing (due to the industrial
business models and new technology trends – 3D cinema, motion-capture).
One of the liveliest debates on the site refers precisely to the true “value” of the
New Romanian Cinema, which some deem as the most valuable cultural product of the
country while others attack on the grounds of its supposed irrelevance in the context of
global cinema – their argument being that, while Romanian films have been collecting
important festival awards, they fail to bring sizeable audiences into the movie theatres
and therefore will eventually prove to be nothing but a passing trend. While this type of
attitude seems to be contrary to the description of cinephilia (Romanian recent films
being practically textbook examples of cinephiliac objects themselves), I would argue
that the very existence of a debate over the role, meaning and relevance of cinema as an
industry and as an artistic object testifies to the sophistication of these online contributors
who have surpassed the status of mere film fans.
Another online community that displays a rather unique and surprising form of
love of cinema is the website Titrari.ro, dedicated to the translation of foreign media.
This is an online, voluntary, nonprofit group of foreign media translators with a Web site
that sports the tagline “Nr. 1 in România—Cele mai bune titrari” or “The Best Subtitles.”
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The website was started by four students using their own funds and now includes
approximately 70 translators, of which around 75 % are active. It is strictly
noncommercial, providing links and banners for free to “friend” sites only, and,
according to its administrator and guru (site nickname: Patronu), if anybody tried to buy
it or turn it for-profit (YouTube and MySpace-style), the entirely voluntary community of
translators would cease to offer their services. He states:
This is a project of pure passion for film and desire to assist those who don’t have
the necessary knowledge of foreign languages. At the end of 2007, we had about
19.000 visitors daily and about 5 million visitors throughout the year. About1–1.2
million translations are downloaded from our site every month. We have a set of
rules so that the translators’ labor is respected, and we are well organized—we
know who is translating what, so we minimize redundancy. Many times our
translations are better and are published in advance of the official TV or theatrical
versions, so actually it happened more than once that DVD distributors and TV
stations shamelessly plagiarized our translations. (Patronu, “Întrebari”).

The site offers free downloads of software necessary for using the Romanian-language
subtitles on either a personal computer or a DiVX player and for adding the subtitles to
legally purchased DVDs not intended for the Romanian market. Due to DVD region
coding regulations, this practice normally also requires some form of “region hacking” of
the DVD player.
The titrari community takes an active role in improving the quality of translations
by running an Internet forum where questions can be asked and versions compared,
providing free training for beginner translators, and awarding a yearly prize for the best
subtitles. When asked whether their work facilitates piracy, the group’s administrator
points out that this is not their intention (as noted, their subtitles can be used with legally
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purchased DVDs or as an alternative form of translation). However, the translations they
provide can be downloaded via file-sharing technologies and used for the purposes of
piracy. What is certain is that this enterprise of huge commercial potential prides itself on
the quality of its accurate, detailed, thoughtful work and a disinterested approach that
rejects monetary gain, plagiarism, hidden advertisements of any kind, appropriation of
another translator’s work, and grammatical mistakes—hardly characteristics generally
associated with piracy. The titrari.ro community values film translation as education,
access-provider, community-building activity and symbol of a niche-type ideal of
fairness and nonmaterial values, and this attitude can be traced back to the strong
Romanian tradition of subtitling: While the majority of European countries practice
dubbed translations almost exclusively, in Romania foreign media has always been
subtitled, with dubbing being employed only in exceptional circumstances. Removing the
original actors’ voices for the sake of translation is still considered an uncivilized,
blasphemous butchering of the text.
The two websites that I discussed above reveal processes of media convergence at
work in manifestations of take two cinephilia. As Henry Jenkins has pointed out,
convergence does not imply a mere use of media appliances, but rather occurs within the
brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others.
Consumers are learning how to use different media technologies to bring the flow of
media more fully under their control and to interact with other consumers. The promises
of this new media environment raise expectations of a freer flow of ideas and content.
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Inspired by those ideals, consumers are fighting for the right to participate more fully in
their culture.
2.4 Aftereffects of 1989: Post-National Cinema in Contemporary Europe and
Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006)

Echoing Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, the title of Corneliu Porumboiu’s film A fost sau
n-a fost? (2006) translates as “Was there, or was there not?” This playful title went
through a series of successive stages until it finally pleased the filmmaker: Was There or
Was There Not a Revolution in Our Town? (namely, Vaslui, a small city with 70,000
inhabitants in Eastern Romania), which mirrors the title of the real TV show that inspired
Porumboiu to make his film, sounded too much like a tabloid headline to the filmmaker.
The one that made the second cut, Was There or Was There Not a Revolution, had a
comical, historical-philosophical flavor. Was There or Was There Not, the ultimate
version, seems mischievous and slyly teasing. For Romanian filmmaker Lucian Pintilie, it
has the effect of a “time dilation,” sending the film towards a “playfully metaphysical and
oneiric space.” It registers, he says, a moment of panic and a void that Romania cinema
has hardly ever seen. This is a film about people in transition, wandering, lost: about
“ghostly people… walking through vertical cemeteries. Is it a dream or not? Was there,
or was there not? But why is it funny? Because nothing is funnier than unhappiness, says
Beckett…’Il n’y a rien de plus drôle que le malheur’” (Pintilie 2006).
The film’s English title, however, is radically different than the Romanian one: 12:08
East of Bucharest sends us both to a specific time, “12:08,” and to a vague location,
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somewhere East of “East,” with Bucharest as a capital already coded as a marginal space,
“somewhere East of Europe,” East of a city often mistaken for Budapest, Hungary’
capital. We learn, in the second half of the film, that “12:08” refers to the exact moment
when, on December 22, 1989, Romania’s dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu fled his palace via
helicopter, as protesters and the entire nation watched on TV.
Despite their obvious dissimilarity, the two titles (Romanian and English) index a
similar indeterminacy, a similar “time dilation” effect: while the Romanian one registers
a nameless apparition or event – was there, or was there not – the English variation
switches from an anguished state of questioning to a somewhat stubborn affirmation: not
signaling a date, it raises one’s curiosity about the event it tries to name. It could have
been 1989, 12:08, East of Bucharest. Or 12/22 (standing for December 22). But the
missing year and month give the event the film tries to encode a special mode of
temporalization, a timeless, suspended temporality: it could refer to any given day or
year, eight minutes after noon, somewhere, East of Bucharest. The nameless event, the
Romanian “revolution” is designated through a code, “12:08,” which, for many critics,
became the shorthand reference to the film.
Let us take a detour for a moment to think about another “impossible name,” the
one which came to be known as 9/11. Jacques Derrida asserts that to mark a date in
history presupposes that “’something’ comes or happens for the first and last time,
‘something’ that we do not yet really know how to identify, determine, recognize, or
analyze” (2004, 86). Speaking about 9/11, Derrida points out that the place and meaning
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of this “event” remain indescribable, unique, “like an intuition without concept,” an event
we could not find a language to describe. Instead, Derrida remarks, we keep pronouncing
a date mechanically, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring
poem, journalistic formula or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it is
talking about. The telegraphic, concise and short appellation (September 11, 9/11),
Derrida notes, does not only come from an economical or rhetorical necessity. Rather,
“this metonymy - a name, a number,” also reveals our inability to recognize or
understand how to qualify what happened” (2004, 86).
4

Drawing on Derrida, Akira Lippit also comments on the numerical designation of
9/11 as a numerical event named in a code that defers the designation of the event. For
Lippit, this numerical euphemism seems borrowed from another dialect, invoking the
Asian mode of designating (historical) events by abbreviating and collapsing the dates
into clusters of numbers. This indeterminacy, he observes, signals the quality of an event
that escapes naming and even descriptive language itself (143), as if the date could serve

4
For W. T. Mitchell, 911 does not name the event, but day One of an event whose days
are indefinite, unnumbered. It stands for an “emergency in which the emergent order has
yet to make itself clear” (568). Akira Lippit, citing Noam Chomsky among others, points
out on the other hand that September 11, 2001 is the second 911, as it comes after
September 11, 1973, when a United States-backed coup-d’état overthrew the government
of democratically elected president Salvador Allende Gossens and installed the Pinochet
dictatorship. Lippit comments: “Two 911s, each singular, although the first one has
received its name posthumously after the second 911, after the fact and as an aftereffect
of the second 911, underscoring the first 911 as an event that has not reached its end
(144).

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as a numeral in place of the name, as a code which could substitute a historical idiom not
yet available in and as language. Lippit points out that in many Asian instances,
significant historical events are designated by numerical codes extracted from dates.
Moreover, since the numbers are read separately as distinct digits (“Two hundred and
twenty-six,” for example, is read “two two six”), such events are “unnamed, described by
numbers, and reassigned numbers: designated, designed, designified (Lippit, 2008: 131).
12:08 East of Bucharest similarly functions as a numerical euphemism for an
event named in code, whose naming is postponed, delaying the arrival of the end, its
finitude. By foregrounding the characters’ efforts to probe the question of “the event,” to
describe it, de-signify it and designate its importance, the film makes visible the
discursive practices used to understand and negotiate historical events. Throughout the
film, “12:08” becomes a mechanical date, a conjuration, a refrain that recognizes
people’s inability to understand what happened to them in 1989. In trying to discover the
authenticity and true nature of the “event,” the film foregrounds the struggle to frame and
control the meaning of “the events of 1989” in Romania as a revolution. In other words, it
asks: How is an event produced, made through interpretations, selections, and filtering?
How does a political event acquire an identity? What is the relevance of history as
collective remembering? How are revolutions made?
An elaborate economy of signs prefigures the film, as its prologue draws attention
to numerical codes. During the opening credits, we see a departures board. The type of
train, the time of departure, and the destination all change quickly. Some trains are “Inter
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City” or “Inter-City Express,” meant for routes between major cities, others are
“Accelerat” and “Rapid” – slower, but which also stop between major towns and cities.
Others are in “Revizie,” that is, scheduled for technical repair.

Fig. 6 Prologue Frames for 12:08 East of Bucharest
Gradually disappearing one by one, the numbers indicating the departure time and
the types of train give way to the film production company’s logo, 42. KM Film (i.e., “42
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Kilometers Film,” which was set up by Porumboiu in 2004). When the logo appears, all
the remaining listed trains listed below it are the ones called “Persoane,” highlighted in
blue to stand out from the rest. Cheap, slow and stopping at numerous stations,
“Personal” trains usually have open wagons, and no compartments. 12:08 therefore
announces itself as a film about personal matters, about a “revision” of history from
below that will explore dilemmas of representation without falling into pre-established
compartmentalization. For some of these trains, the time is indeed “dilated”: One is
supposed to leave at “45:83,” which, of course, does not make sense.
Porumboiu is a filmmaker obsessed with definitions and signs. Both 12:08 and his
second film, Police, Adjective (2009), he tells us, stem from his own obsession with
words and their interpretation from different points of view. If 12:08 is a collage of
definitions of the word “revolution,” Police, Adjective tries to define the word
“conscience” (Peranson). In Porumboiu’s own words, Police, Adjective is moreover
“about the sign as a mode of representation,” ending as it does not only with a key scene
which involves a policeman’s argument with his captain over the dictionary definitions of
the words “conscience” and “justice,” but also with a drawing full of signs for the staging
of an event. The main protagonist of the film, a young policeman, sketches on a
blackboard the street plan of an impending drug bust of some children, with exits,
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everyone’s positions, and arrows indicating the course of action. “Pay attention to these
signs,”
5
Porumboiu tells us in an interview with Horia Roman Patapievici.
6

Fig. 7 Drawing at the end of Police, Adjective
For Porumboiu, “the philosophy behind a language influences both a culture and
its way of being” (qtd. in Harris 2010). At the heart of 12:08 is not only a question of

5
The interview can be watched in Romanian at :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64RU43lTQ8s&NR=1. It is part of a television show
called “Inapoi la Argument” [“Back to Argument”] that aired on the Romanian TV
station TVR Cultural in February 2010.
6
Politist, Adjective, translated in English as Police, Adjective is also a strange title. In
English, “police” exists only as a noun and as a verb, whereas in Romanian “police” can
be an adjective as well. If a policeman does not function as a noun, as an adjective this
means that he is not standing by himself, that he is “dependent.” An adjective describes a
noun, is merely an attribution, it does not stand on its own. The Oxford English
Dictionary defines “adjective” as that which cannot stand alone; a dependent; an
accessory.” The example OED gives to illustrate the word “adjective” is from Thomas
Fuller’s Holy War (1639) and quite illustrative: “Subjects should be adjectives, not able
to stand without their prince.”

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language and of naming an event, but also of characters being trapped by language
structures, who often rely on cliché-ridden vocabulary to find their way out of an
impasse. That is, the film reveals, on the one hand, the role of collective remembering
and the modalities of “saying and making an event” (Derrida 2007, 445), and, on the
other hand, how the values of Romanian culture are implied in the language that people
speak, and how these values pervade all their exchanges.
2.5 Context: Cinematic Reconfigurations of 1989
The fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 marked the beginning of a
process of collective remembering and reckoning with the communist past which
involves a variety of complex relationships between active agents and the narrative tools
they use. The case of Romania is especially significant in this respect, as there is no
general consensus as to what really happened in December 1989 and what name should
be given to the political event that opened the way for democracy in Romania. In fiction
film, the topic of the “revolution” was not fully addressed by Romanian filmmakers until
2006, when not one but three films on the topic were released. Although all these films
won awards at important film festivals, 12:08 East of Bucharest stood out from the rest
when it won the Camera D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006. The directors were
teenagers at the time of the revolution, and therefore are reluctant to associate their work
with it (all of them emphasize that their films are not about the revolution). Their turn to
the past, however, activates the memory of the revolutionary upheaval that swept away
the Ceausescu dictatorship.
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Catalin Mitulescu’s Cum mi-am petrecut sfirsitul lumii/The Way I Spent the End
of the World (2006) and Radu Muntean’s Hirtia va fi albastrã/This Paper Will Be Blue
(2006) follow the destiny of young, inexperienced characters whose coming of age is
linked to radical historical changes. Mitulescu’s film chronicles the last few months of
1989 as they are seen through the lives of one family in a poor neighbourhood in
Bucharest. Set during the final days of the Ceausescu regime, Muntean’s work comes
closer to the revolution, taking viewers back to the moment riots filled the streets. By
recreating the confusion that followed the departure of the Ceausescus, the recreates a
time when it was unclear who were the so-called terrorists, who was the enemy, and who
was firing at whom.
12:08 should also be placed in the context of a larger body of films that revisit the
events of 1989 with the aim of changing historical consciousness or of exposing the way
in which these events are transmitted to us. These films restage and replay to new effect
the “image-event” (Manghani 2008: 32) of the fall of communism in Romania, renewing
our experience of what happened. Bringing together multiple contexts and
recontextualizations of images, they seek to re-scale the events of 1989, furnishing them
with new critical opportunities. In other words, they afford a space within which it is
possible to reflect on the complexity of the events.
Chris Marker’s eight minute video piece Detour: Ceausescu (1990), in which the
filmmaker reedits taped television footage into a sardonic commentary on the French
Television coverage of the trial and execution of Ceausescu and his wife, is one of the
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first attempts to see the Romanian events in a new light. Marker inserts into the grim
reportage snippets of cheerful television commercials and a montage advocating new
uses for kitchen paper and laundry detergent to deal with the bloody aftermath of the
execution. His aim is to highlight how the claim to neutrality often made by commercial
television news reportage is mediated and compromised by its role in selling products.
Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica’s Videogrammes of a Revolution (1992) is another
televisual analysis of the fall of Ceausescu. The authors edit together found archival
footage from collected video footage produced by many citizens’ camcorders as well as
the cameras in the besieged television studio that broadcast continuously for 120 hours
the 1989 Revolution. At times, the footage is stopped and replayed, with a voice-over
commentator explaining what happens in these images, drawing our attention to the style
and position of the camera. Farocki and Ujica ultimately show how the demonstrators
who occupied the television station in Bucharest established a new historical site for
revolution: the television studio.
The ludic approach to the past in 12:08 also reminds one of Marcel Ophüls’
November Days (1990), an essay film (dubbed by the director as a musical comedy)
composed mainly of interviews with East German citizens. Ophüls shows BBC television
coverage of November 1989 in East Germany and then, through detective work, tracks
down the people who, on November the 9
th
, stood in front of the cameras ecstatic about
their liberation.The new interviews put to test the original understanding of the events,
revealing how, in retrospect, these people interpret the same events differently (since they
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have no jobs and are sceptical of their future). By setting the action in a provincial town,
12:08 also recalls Andreas Dresen’s Silent Country (1992), a film which portrays the
struggles of a provincial theater group attempting to stage Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for
Godot in the weeks directly preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall. Silent Country features
a young, idealistic director who, newly arrived in a provincial town, attempts to convince
the actors to act seriously in his rewriting of Vladimir and Estragon as an old couple
waiting for a change that isn’t going to come. He is driven to exasperation, however, as
the cast is ignorant and barely listens to him. In the midst of all the preparations, they
hear about what happens in Berlin and gather around a TV set to watch the historical
events.
Andreas Dresen’s Short Cut to Istanbul (1990) presents us with another
perspective on how the fall of the Wall is received by the main character with great
disappointment. Although it was made in 1990, the film is prefaced by the caption “Long,
long ago, three weeks ago-Berlin spring 1990.” Short Cut to Istanbul begins with a till
machine at the supermarket checking out a big mac and a coke. The main protagonist
introduces himself: “That’s me, Niyazi,” and we soon realize that he is a German-Turkish
young man who is bored with his job at McDonalds. We learn from voiceover that if
Niyazi had a choice, he would have left Germany a long time ago. Before the fall of the
Wall, he devised a plan to go back to Istanbul by talking a shortcut through East Berlin,
where he thought he could save money since “for one West German mark you get a lot of
East German ones.”
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To save money on the rent, Niyazi plots to live in East Berlin but work in West
Berlin, where he can get paid in a better currency. Given that before 1989 West Berliners
like him were forbidden to have apartments in East Berlin, his plan is to find a woman
with an apartment in the East to whom he can leave his Western marks for safekeeping.
“Only millionaires can afford a clean conscience anyway,” he comments, in order to
justify his unethical approach.
As it turns out, the fall of the Wall ruins Niyazi’s plans. For the most part, the film
centers on Niyazi’s efforts to date East German Klara, who seems shy and inhibited.
When the border opens, we are made to empathize with Niyazi’s sense of disappointment
and his feeling that living in West Berlin only makes him a victim. The last images show
Nyiazi on the train to East Berlin, listening to music on his Walkman and complaining
about his job:
My boss is very strict about working hours. You can’t punch your card when you
show up, but only when you’re changed and ready for work. It’s the same after
work: first you punch your card, then you change. Your time is stolen twice. I’d
have quit by now, if only I knew how to earn some damn money some other way.
But at this rate, I’ll never be a rich man.

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Fig. 8 Niyazi trying to make conversation
Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin! (2003), in which the events of the fall of the
Wall are retold as an “what if” story, offers another alternative viewpoint to the
traditional celebratory reading of images shown on TV in 1989. In this humorous re-
visioning of history, the fall is depicted as an overt fiction, told through a series of fake
news broadcasts which imagine that The Wall fell because the West Germans wanted to
escape from their economic and political context.
In Oskar Röhler’s No Place to Go (2000), Hanna, a West German idealistic writer
whose market is mainly East Germany, watches the televisual images of euphoria at the
fall of the Berlin Wall with skepticism. In an interview with a young journalist, she
bitterly remarks, visibly distraught by the celebrations she sees on TV: “Consumer
society is eating us all up… It makes me sick to see these clones all over, it nauseates me
how they rummage through the underwear, grabbing stuff.”
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Fig. 9 Hanna watching the Fall of the Wall on TV with disappointment

Fig. 10 Hanna watching celebrating crowds
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Tracing Hanna’s story from the fall of the Berlin Wall till her suicide in the early days of
1990s, the central theme of the film is the process of German unification and the
integration of the East and West. What is different about Roehler’s story, however, is that
unlike in the case of other filmmakers, it presents the unification from a West German
point of view. Moreover, as Paul Cooke notes, No Place to Go “explores the extent to
which the end of German division has given rise to a sense of crisis in the West,
particularly within the sphere of West German culture, engendering an apparently
Western nostalgic longing for the old FRG” (34).
The inspiration for the film’s narrative comes from the life of Roehler’s mother,
the Marxist writer Gisela Elsner who gained success on both sides of the Berlin Wall in
1964 with her first novel about the “obscene consumer culture” endemic to Western
patriarchal bourgeois society. Hanna’s attack on consumer society in the film seems to be
hypocritical, given that we see her spend a fortune on a Christian Dior coat. As the film
reveals, she has always constructed the East as an exotic utopian other, through which she
defined her dissident position within the FRG and which gave her a point of orientation
for her critique of capitalism. Now that the Eastern ‘other’ has become real, it refuses to
act in accordance with her wishes. Hanna’s loss of self, which eventually leads to her
suicide, indicates a crisis that faced much of the West German cultural landscape. Paul
Cooke comments in this respect that this crisis has been constructed by critics in terms of
the generational shift in which the political values of the 68ers have been replaced by the
pop sensibilities of the 89ers.
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While Roehler clearly questions Hanna’s world view, ultimately he does not
reject it completely. On the contrary, at times he seems to attempt to recuperate it. As the
heroine wanders through East Berlin, her utopian dreams appear to be fulfilled to some
extent. There is clearly a far stronger sense of community here than in the West.
Realizing that she is troubled, a woman welcomes her into her home, where she and some
friends celebrate the news. Although she is treated as family, the group cannot understand
why Hanna is so unsettled by the fall of communism, and when Hanna suggests that she
has greatly suffered under capitalism, she becomes alienated within the group. Within the
context of the film, Hanna’s statements seem insensitive, given that the family she is
staying with is celebrating their new found freedom. The spectators, on the other hand,
realize that many of Hanna’s statements were soon after spoken by the East Germans
themselves. When Hanna confesses to a group of celebrating East Germans that “she has
greatly suffered under capitalism,” she appears, in the context of the drama, quite
unstable. However, spectators realize that many of Hanna’s statements were spoken by
East Germans themselves soon after 1989.
A similar type of realization is prompted by a discussion towards the end of
Volker Schlondorff’s The Legend of Rita (2000), a film in which the director asks what
happens when a West German voluntarily becomes integrated into East German society
and culture. The eponymous character, Rita Vogt, modeled in part on the Red Army
Faction terrorist Inge Viett, is aided by the East German secret police to begin a new life
as a textile-factory worker in the East. While the usual cliché is that after the
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Wende/unification the East Germans foolishly fell prey to Western advertisements, in this
film Rita represents the inverse of the Ossi stereotype, as she is seduced by the lack of
fancy packaging. When, at the end of the film, Rita learns about the end of Communism,
she is just as distraught as Roehler’s Hanna. “You may never have it so good again,” she
tells her coworkers. “You can’t be thrown out of your job or home. You have no idea
what’s coming. What you will lose.” As her friends accuse her of insanity for saying such
things, she continues: “This country was a revolution. Stupidity made a mess of it, but
you were part of history. We set our sights on values other than money. Why did you lose
faith in yourselves?”
Like Roehler, Schloendorff clearly reveals that his heroine’s idealism is
exaggerated. Unlike the majority of Post-Wall films which depict the East Germans as
naïve, The Legend of Rita profiles a naïve West German who hangs on to her idealism
about the possibilities for socialism in practice, while the experienced GDR citizens
around her know better. Both Schlondorff and Roehler thus acknowledge in their films
the sincere elation felt by people of both sides during the brief period of optimism after
the fall of the Wall. However, they do so with a critical eye towards the Western media in
particular, with its television and tabloids that highlighted mainly the consumerist
benefits for East Germany. Ultimately, they open out and maintain a greater complexity
and architecture of the event, reinvigorating and challenging public debate about the fall
of the Wall.
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Fig. 11 Rita regretting the Fall of the Wall
2.6 Understanding the Reception of 12:08 East of Bucharest in Romania: Was there,
or was there not an event?
Reviewing the film in The Guardian, Philip French asserts that for him, 12:08
was a disappointment. He contends that “The characters are neatly located in their sad
domestic and professional contexts. But the core of the film, the live TV discussion,
raises the old dramatic issue of how to make tedious people interesting, boring occasions
exciting, and embarrassment funny. The film is at best mildly amusing, at worst
unconvincing and dreary” (2007). Few Romanians, however, would find the film
unconvincing or dreary. In a Romanian context, the way in which the film activates
collective memory and historical revisionism holds a special significance. It reverberates
with endless debates on what exactly happened in 1989, despite the live coverage of the
December events on television. To this day, the exact nature of the events of December
1989 in Romania remains an issue of deep controversy among scholars, politicians and
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lay people. All sorts of revisionist theories still circulate, penetrating the collective
imagination to such an extent that the original understanding of these events has become
difficult to remember. In what follows I will track some of the debates around the
question of whether from a theoretical point of view, what happened in Romania in 1989
could be justifiably named a revolution.
Richard Andrew Hall, a specialist on the historiography of the Romanian
revolution, has shown that the historiography of the December events presents a
“dizzying array of theories” about what happened and why. Hall notes that, although at
the time when they were taking place the events of the dictator’s overthrow were viewed
as clear and uncontroversial, almost universally understood as a revolution, today many
analysts suggest that the December events were in reality a coup d’état or a “stolen
revolution” (505). In a recent article significantly titled “What is a ‘revolution’?”
Cristian Tileaga also points out that various authors referred to the Romanian revolution
as a “quasi-revolution” or an “unfinished revolution.” Still others, he notes, have argued
that the events left an ideological void that was previously filled by the political
imaginary of the Ceausescu regime (363). In addition, a number of critics have also
traced diverse interpretations of the revolution in the public sphere of the elites. These
interpretations dealt with the idea of a “pure” revolution, as well as a “plot” hypothesis
(internal/external) and the “hybrid” revolution (revolution + coup d’état) (Tileaga 364).
In a brilliant study of the way in which the 1989 moment was commemorated in the
Romanian parliament (especially by former Romanian president, Ion Iliescu), Tileaga
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analyzes not only how the “facts” were described in order to authorize a specific
perspective for explaining and representing the events, but also how the discursive
procedures used ensured “the recognition of the Romanian ‘revolution’ as revolution, and
therefore, as a true and meaningful ‘object’ of commemoration” (365). Through detailed
discourse analysis, Tileaga demonstrates how various commemorative discourses were
used to produce a dominant version of the revolution as “‘authentic,’ foundational and a
turning point in the nation’s history” (364).
In 1999, Sergiu Nicolaescu, a movie director and independent senator, started an
immense scandal in the Romanian senate. He was outraged to discover that the events of
December 1989 were presented in the twelfth grade high school history books as a
popular rebellion followed by a coup d’état, and not as a revolution. Other senators
joined Nicolaescu in his demand for a public burning of the books, accusing their young
authors of having insulted Romanian national dignity. The scandal generated intense
discussions in the media, especially in the most popular political talk shows, such as the
“Marius Tuca Show” on Antena 1. Moreover, as Dan Pavel documents, the “crusade
against the new textbooks” (Pavel 187) “held centre stage in the political, intellectual,
media and public arena” for more than two months (Pavel 182). It led Dan Berindei,
president of the History and Archaeology Department of the Romanian Academy, to
publish a declaration in October 2000 in which he expressed his conviction that students
should not learn from textbooks things that would make them “ashamed of being a
Romanian” (Pavel 186).
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Another major incident that undermined the Romanians’ sense of agency in their
own history was sparked by the airing in 2004 of Susanne Brandstätter’s documentary
Checkmate: Strategy of a Revolution on the French-German Channel Arte. Since its main
thesis is that the revolution was orchestrated from outside Romania, and mostly by the
intelligence agencies of Western countries, the documentary invited further questions and
revisions of history. When the Romanian daily newspaper Jurnalul National reported on
Checkmate, the news provoked a national debate in Romania about the elusiveness of
historical truth.
7

In light of these considerations, the talk show in 12:08 acquires greater
significance, as it mirrors, on a micro-level, real life debates in Romanian media. The
coup d’état appellation was not accepted by many officials, because the new self-
proclaimed authority that seized power after the Ceausescus left wanted to get credit for
and legitimacy from defending the anti-Communist revolution, and did not welcome
inquiries into the swift, summary trial and execution of the Ceausescus. As Siani-Davies
rightly points out, “both coups and revolutions are extra-legal take-overs of power, but
compared with a revolution, a coup has a certain ring of illegality and is perceived as
conspiratorial rather than ‘open’ and ‘spontaneous’” (1996: 458). Today, the history
manuals generally avoid using the word “revolution” to describe the events of 1989. The
words “rebellion” and “revolt” are sometimes used, but “because they conjure up images

7
For an analysis of this documentary, see Rohringer 2009, pp. 199-219.

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of the pre-modern period, the more contemporary sounding phrase ‘popular uprising’ is
preferred” (Siani-Davies 460).
2.7 The Question of Making and Saying an Event: Virtuality and Simulacrum
Derrida comments that there are two ways of determining the “saying” of an
event: an utterance that is constantive, a theoretical speech that consists in saying what is;
and an utterance that is performative, that does in speaking.
8
Saying the event is a saying
of knowledge, saying what happens, what comes to pass. It refers to an enunciation that
says something about something. But there is also a “saying that does in saying, a saying
that does, that enacts,” which refers to the way events are produced. The “saying of the
event” as a description is always problematic (Derrida 2007, 446). Its “structure of
saying” always comes after the event and its structure of language is bound to iterability
and repeatability, its generality always missing the singularity of the event. The event as
such is absolutely singular, it comes unforeseeably. The “live” coverage of events relies
on mechanisms of selection, intervention, interpretation, filtering or framing: “what is
shown to us live,” Derrida insists, “is already not a saying or showing of the event but its
production” (2007: 447, my emphasis). It is performative, it functions as an interpretation
that does what it says. Even if it pretends to simply state, show and inform, in reality it
produces. Derrida urges political vigilance in examining the mechanisms that hold out
the appearance of saying the event when in reality it is a question of making the event, a

8
For more discussion of this theme, see Alain Badiou, Being and Event.
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saying of the event which is passed off as a saying of the event in an unavowed and
undeclared way (2007: 447).
Speaking about the Romanian Revolution of 1989, which achieved notoriety as
the first televised revolution, Giorgio Agamben suggests in Means without End that this
occasion marked “a new turn in world politics,” where the true political function of the
media was revealed through a staged event that “Nazism had not even dared to imagine”
(80). As he famously put it, “In the same way in which it has been said that after
Auschwitz it is impossible to write and think as before, after Timisoara [the town in
which it all started] it will no longer be possible to watch television in the same way”
(82). What Agamben underscores is that the legitimization of the new regime claiming
power in Romania in December 1989 seemed to register with precision the mise-en-scène
script predicted by Guy Debord in his The Society of the Spectacle and the subsequent
Commentaries, published just a year earlier in 1988. As it happens, what the entire world
was watching as a real truth in a December 23 broadcast was entirely staged to confirm
the reported rumors that the death toll was in the thousands. A number of relatively few
numbers of bodies were dug out of graves and lined in a ghastly layout to authenticate for
the press that atrocities had taken place. Thinking about Debord’s inheritance in the age
of the complete triumph of the spectacle, Agamben notes, “in this way, truth and falsity
became indistinguishable from each other and the spectacle legitimized itself solely
through the spectacle” (82).
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A similar view is expressed by Jean Baudrillard who, writing about “The
Timisoara Massacre” in The Illusion of the End, laments that “[With Timisoara] we were
able to say ‘It’s just TV!’” (55). Baudrillard argues that we can take the Romanian
revolution as an “invisible,” virtual event that happened in the television studio. In this
case, the street became a virtual space, “a non-site of the event,” an extension of the
studio. Because they were mystified TV viewers, Baudrillard explains, the Romanians
experienced the revolution as “touristic spectators of a virtual history” (56), in a “parody
of history” (55) where the screen became an empty space of representation.
For Derrida, the question of “Is saying the event possible?” is also “a question of
virtuality, what is a virtual event?” (2007, 454). But for him, the virtualization of an
event must be understood differently. He disagrees with Baudrillard when the latter says,
for instance, with heavy postmodern irony, that events such as the Gulf War “did not take
place” (460). What happened during the Gulf War, which was reported live, could
neither be reduced to interpretative information, what Derrida calls “trans-information,”
nor to a simulacrum. The event, if there is one, says Derrida, resists reappropriation, it is
singular, each and every time, and no utterance of knowledge or information could
reduce or neutralize: “The event that is ultimately irreducible to media appropriation and
digestion is that thousands of people died” (Derrida 2007, 460).
But what does Derrida mean by virtuality, then? In the seminar titled “Dire
l’événement,” where he addresses the question of “what does it mean to say the event?”
he comments that in the event of the seminar, unforeseeable and improvised to a large
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extent, something is being said through this event and of this event. But ‘who says the
event?’, he asks, noting the rhetoric of the title and the infinitive of the verb form dire.
The infinitive of the verb indicates that there is no one present and no subject of
enunciation to say the event. This means, therefore, that the question of the saying of the
event is no longer either constative (descriptive) or performative but “symptomatic,” that
is, beyond the telling of the truth or the performativity that produces the event. Moreover,
whenever the event resists being turned into information, resists being known or made
known, “a secret is at work in the story” and “an event is always secret…like giving or
forgiving it must remain a secret” (Derrida 2007, 456).
When Derrida says that the secret belongs to the structure of the event, he does
not refer to something hidden or private, but to that which does not appear, a symptom
which signifies an event but over which nobody has control, that no conscious subject
can appropriate.
There is symptom in what is happening here [in the seminar], for instance: each of
us interpreting, foreseeing, anticipating, and feeling overwhelmed and surprised
by what can be called events. Beyond the meaning that each of us can read into
these events, if not enunciate, there is the symptom. Even the effect of truth or the
search for truth is symptomatic in nature. (Derrida 2007, 457)

Derrida understands the symptom in a way similar to Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of
it, that is, in a philosophically-informed way, not in its clinical or psychoanalytical sense,
as a code that needs to be deciphered. “Psychoanalysis is so reductive in the secrets it
pursues, so reductive of signs and symptoms,” Deleuze reminds us (143). Symptom, in
this case, is to be understood as “meaning that no theorem can exhaust” (Derrida 2007,
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457), and that is why Derrida links it with the concept of verticality: “A symptom is
something that falls. It’s what befalls us. What falls vertically on us is what makes a
symptom” (Derrida 2007, 457).
The meaning of the symptom in Deleuze’s understanding of “the clinical” is
neither related to etiology (the search for causes) nor to therapy (the development and
application of treatment), but to symptomatology, that is, the study of signs (132).
9
When
Derrida says that in every event there is secrecy and symptomatology, and that discourse
that corresponds to the quality of eventfulness is always symptomal or
symptomatological, he refers to a discourse on the unique and the exceptional. An event
is an exception to the rule, but there are no rules, norms, or criteria to evaluate it. The
singularity of the exception without rules can only bring about symptoms, says Derrida.
But if the secret or the symptom does appear and we are not talking about etiology or
therapy, this does not mean that we should give up knowing. This is not something
negative or paralyzing for philosophical knowledge, but a promising aporia which,
Derrida explains, in Nietzsche takes the form of the “possible-impossible,” what
Nietzsche called the modality of the “maybe.” The difficulty, Derrida says, is to find a

9
For Deleuze, using a symtomatological method involves taking apart certain symptoms
and grouping together other symptoms which were previously disconnected. As a
consequence of such reconfigurations of relations between symptoms, new syndromes
are created, but not in the sense of creating or inventing an illness, but of recognizing a
symptomatological table in order to individuate the signs of an illness in different, more
refined ways.

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symptomatical procedure, a discourse for structures that constitute so many challenges to
traditional logic. In other words, the category of “maybe” (that is, of the possible-
impossible, the unique as substitutable, singularity as reiterable), belongs to the same
configuration as that of the symptom or the secret.
Was the Romanian revolution an exception to the rule? Stephen Kotkin argues
that, contrary to the general impression, Romania in 1989 was not an exception, but part
of a continuum that includes East Germany as well as most other cases concerning the
fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. It was Communist-era Poland, usually taken as
paradigmatic, that proved to be the grand exception, he claims, since only Poland had a
fully articulated alternative to the regime. Significantly, Kotkin begins his book on 1989,
Uncivil Society, with a description of 12:08 East of Bucharest as an example of his thesis.
Noting that the film examines whether a revolution can take place if no one risks
anything – at least in the small provincial town of Vaslui – the historian suggests that
Romania “offers a fine example of what could be called nonorganized mobilization,
which in 1989 was actually the norm across Eastern Europe” (2009 6). There was no civil
society in Eastern Europe in 1989, Kotkin convincingly argues. On the contrary, it was
the establishment (the majority of party and state officials, the army officers, the police,
who controlled everything, worked and lived together, and had their own clubs, shops
and resorts) – the uncivil society – that brought down its own system (Kotkin 7). If civil
society, the slogan most used by scholars, means that people take responsibility for
themselves and are able to self-organize by having recourse to state institutions to defend
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associations, civil liberties, and private property, the lack of such institutions under
Soviet-style systems means that in 1989 such a society could not be labeled civil. Kotkin
concludes: “Romania’s 1989 revolution seems highly distinct – each country’s was, in its
own way, yet Romania, too, fits a pattern of uncivil-society paralysis and non-organized
mass mobilization” (71). This summarizes, in a way, the thesis put forth by one of the
characters in 12:08: “One makes whatever revolution one can, each in their own way.” In
other words, the Romanian revolution was indeed a singularity and an exceptional case,
but this does not signify that it was “an exception to the rule.” Indeed, as George Lawson
rightly argues in his introduction to The Global 1989, we should be careful about using
1989 as a barometer of old and new (2). Given that in many ways post-Cold War
capitalist expansion represents a return to old exploitative practices, “a complex picture
emerges in terms of the temporality of 1989, one which embraces important continuities
alongside, and to some extent instead of, simple notions of ‘all change’” (3).
The question posed by the television host in 12:08 implies that violence and
revolution are co-determinous. If there is no violence, then there is no revolution, he
concludes at the end. Yet violence is most often used to suppress rather than instigate
change, stemming from battles after the initial takeover of state power, and Hannah
Arendt (1963) has shown how the apparent close link between revolution and violence is
a relatively modern connection (Lawson 8). If we are to follow Derrida’s urge to find
“symptomatic procedures,” 1989 marked neither a distinct end nor a distinct beginning in
world historical time. The thorny question of timing posed, tongue in cheek, in 12:08
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(Did people go out in the streets before 12:08 on December 22, or after?) is important,
but this does not mean that it should be taken literally, just as the question of 1989 should
not be asked in terms of when exactly the border between Hungary and Austria opened in
September 1989. Indeed, as Lawson rightly underscores, if we take the temporal frame of
1945-89, the events of 1989 may appear to signal the end of the Cold War. But if we
follow Eric Hobsbawn (1994) and see the twentieth century as “short,” wedged between
1914 and 1989, we get a second, more bird’s-eye view on what happened. If we go back
to 1848 which, like 1989, also saw the mobilizing force of nationalism and the apparently
spontaneous eruption of protests in major European cities, we get a different structure. If
we go back to 1789, which François Furet reads as the final burial of the modern
revolutionary geist – or illusion – first witnessed in France, we see yet another pattern. If
we take 1648 as a starting point, as some politicians do, 1989 marks the end of an era of
state sovereignty first inaugurated by the Peace of Westphalia. Still yet another
perspective can be reached if we consider how the Cold War operated in the Middle East,
with its reasoning and modus operandi distinct from the European ones (Lawson 11).
Certainly, much is at stake in terms of when observers start counting and when they
choose to stop doing so.
2.8 The Use of Language in 12:08
The protagonists of 12:08 remind us of Samuel Beckett’s heroes, as they
continuously resurrect the past but ultimately fail to communicate, getting lost in nuances
or details that prohibit the discernment of meaning. Influenced by Romanian comic
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writers and by authors such as Beckett, Joyce, Chekhov, Kafka and Ionesco who deal
with the absurdity of daily life (Porton 2), Porumboiu depicts a society in which
characters “live in an intermediate world” (qtd. in Porton 3), lacking concern for co-
operative social intercourse. The director evokes a universe in which people either
rebuke or scoff at each other, impatient, disrespectful, raising objections, constantly
interrupting and undermining each other. As if stuck in a perpetual loop which does not
allow proper closure, most characters squabble over trivial matters, deviating from or
delaying “proper” communication. Reflecting on the post-communist transition, the film
ultimately exposes a debt-ridden society, poor and disillusioned, proving that the
“revolutionary changes” acclaimed by the protagonists are mere empty words. In an
interview for Observatorul, Porumboiu asserts that “ultimately, 12:08 is a film about the
transition, not about the Revolution. If one thinks from the perspective of each character,
these people don’t even lie about their past, they merely try to justify their existence after
the fall of communism” (2006). “I wanted to make a movie about people who distorted
history in order to survive. It’s human” (qtd. in Porton 3).
Was there or was there not a revolution in the town of Vaslui (Porumboiu’s
hometown, unnamed in the filmed) on December 22, 1989? Obsessed with this question,
the host of the local TV station, called Virgil Jderescu, plans a “commemoration,” a live
discussion about the “revolution” on his daily talk show “Issue of the Day.” It is the
sixteenth anniversary of Romania’s 1989 revolution, December 22, 2005, and so he
wants to “celebrate the heroes of the Romanian liberation” and to “pay them tribute.”
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After some potential panelists turn out to be unavailable, Jderescu invites, out of
desperation, a lonely, retired man named Emanoil Piscoci and Tiberiu Mănescu, a debt-
ridden, high-school history teacher who likes to drink at the local bar. The film is divided
into two sections. While the first section introduces us to the small lives and routines of
the three main protagonists, the second section, filmed in real time, focuses on the TV
show itself, with the characters and callers trying to figure out what happened sixteen
years ago in their town. If they went out in the street before 12:08, after Ceausescu’s
impromptu flight from the capital, this means that they had a revolution, according to
Jderescu. If they went after, then there is no history, they were all cowards. Speaking in
earnest, the host begins the show confidently, smiling towards the camera:
Today, as we all know, is a very important day for our country. Sixteen years ago,
on December 1989, the revolution broke out in Bucharest. A new era dawned in
Romanian history, so let’s turn our looks towards those events in order to examine
whether we, the citizens of this town, took part in this moment in history.

But before he can even announce the question, old man Piscoci interrupts the rhythm of
his speech by stretching his neck towards him to ensure that he is not left out of the
frame. When Piscoci hears that the host will announce the question of the day, he takes a
piece of paper from the table, “steals” the pen from Jderescu’s hand, writes down the
question with pursed lips and then circles it as if to meditate on its importance. When
Jderescu introduces him, he is quick to correct him by insisting that his name is Emanoil,
not Emil. He literally “knocks on wood” when the host announces that what happened
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after Communism might be much more dangerous and scary than the darkness of
Communism.
Lacking professionalism, Jderescu, a former textile engineer turned journalist,
adopts solemn poses and creates a theatrical discourse filled with quotations from
Heraclitus. Before the show, he consults the dictionary of mythology to spice up his
flamboyant rhetoric. As soon as he is done with the introductory phrases about his
responsibility as a journalist to revisit history, he loses his confidence, hesitates, and
starts improvising:
Many of you may wonder why we still have a talk show about such a topic after
such a long time. Eh, to be honest, I think that…in accordance to…well, as in
Plato’s Myth of the Cave, when people mistook a small fire for the sun, well…I
think that it is my duty as a journalist to ask whether we left the cave so that we
may enter an even bigger cave… and if we, in turn, are not mistaking a straw fire
for the sun…I think there is no present without the past and no future without the
present. That is why, the more transparent the past is, the more transparent the
present, I mean, the future, will be.

Thus, “for the sake of truth and a better future,” he invites his guests and the audience to
tell him what they did at noon on December 22, 1989. Acknowledging the elusiveness of
historical truth, the host anticipates that his show may be a futile endeavor anyway, since,
“as Heraclitus once said, ‘one cannot step into the same river twice.’”
Unable to answer Jderescu’s question in a straightforward manner, Manescu, the
first interlocutor, declares that he and two other colleagues went to the main square in
front of the Town Hall before noon on December 22, 1989. They all shouted “Down with
Ceausescu!” in order to “put an end, once and for all, to the communist nightmare,” he
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claims. Clearing his throat, he solemnly begins by thanking Jderescu for giving him the
opportunity to talk about what happened “on those dramatic days.” Circling around the
answer, Manescu relies on language patterns almost out of reflex, especially when he
feels pressed to respond to the callers’ heckling comments. Like Jderescu, he searches for
metaphors: “It took one spark to make this nightmare be taken off our country’s map.
And this spark came, of course, from the very heart of our country, Bucharest.” When,
impatient, Jderescu interrupts him repeatedly: “Well, was it, or was it not?” “Just tell us:
how did you spend December 22, 1989?” Manescu agrees to answer, but immediately
circumvents the host’s question yet again, delaying a straightforward response with
comments beside the point: “Sure, I will answer. But first of all, I would like to add that,
you know, as time goes by, people forget and it’s a shame, a great shame.”
As soon as callers start to debunk Manescu’s version of events, the show devolves
into a live confrontation based on blame and shame. Called a liar, a drunkard, and a
slanderer, the teacher desperately defends himself, retreating into humiliated resignation
yet sticking to his account of events until the end, even as he signals defeat in the slump
of his shoulders. The first caller, a woman with vitriolic voice, dismisses any hypothesis
for the existence of a revolution, claiming that the teacher and his friends merely drank
their way through the revolution at the local bar. A second one asserts that since at the
time he was working as a guardian for the town hall, he can testify that nobody was in the
square before Ceausescu’s departure. Yet another one claims that a tire of his “personal”
car went flat in front of the Town Hall that day, and, while waiting to get help, he noticed
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that nobody was in the square at 12:03, when he checked the big clock on top of the
Town Hall. The conversation becomes even more absurd when old man Piscoci
challenges everybody else’s version of events in order to insert himself in the dialogue
through his rationale. According to his theory, the guardian in the sentry box could not
have possibly seen the teacher protesting because the latter was in front of the statue in
the square, and thus outside his field of vision.

Fig. 12 Piscoci, Jderescu, and Manescu
When the guardian admits to having left the sentry box in order to run some errands,
Manescu starts interrogating him, resolved to reckon the exact time during which he was
gone by adding up all the minutes on a piece of paper. “What did you buy at the farmer’s
market?” “Did you walk there, and if so, how long did it take you?” “If you bought the
Christmas tree, did you carry it home, or did you bring it with you to the Town Hall?”
Instead of talking about the subject they set out to discuss, the characters thus “lose
themselves” in pointless, endless calculations. Rather than figuring out, by public
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deliberation, what exactly happened in their town on the day when Ceausescu left, they
re-stage the image of the event, renewing their experience of it from their fragmented
vantage points.
Piscoci reasons that they are all splitting hairs over nonsense, yet he cannot help
intervening in the heated discussion. Like most people on the show, he loses his temper
easily and even swears, although he feels deeply offended when asked by Jderescu to
promise not use bad language in his show. “God forgive me for my swearing language at
this holy time before Christmas, but ever since they hung it up on the town hall, that
clock has kept running slow,” he explodes at one point, as if a few minutes would have
made a difference for a “revolution” with only a couple of people. Speaking about
metalinguistic acts in Beckett, one critic draws attention to the “self-thematising of
language which constantly questions and exercises its potential; characters announce that
it is their turn to speak, check on the remarks of other people, seek to clarify the
illocutionary force of other people’s remarks, correct each other’s pronunciation or
vocabulary or their own, assess or comment on their own utterances” (York 244). This
is exactly what happens in 12:08. While the conversation wanders off every time a new
character intervenes, often verging on the ridiculous, most protagonists have a desire to
go on speaking, sometimes even after they realize that this may be in vain. Piscoci not
only corrects Jderescu’s pronunciation of his name (“Emanoil is my correct name, [not
Emil]!”), but also announces that it is his turn to speak. “I am boring you, am I not?”
Piscoci asks when he realizes that his impassioned description of what he did on
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December 22, 1989 may sound irrelevant. Such concern for explicitness and lucidity
required of dramatic language reveals, as in Beckett, “a rather anxious spectacle: concern
for correctness, for clear communication, implies an embarrassing recognition of existing
not just in one’s own desires or conceptions but as an object for (real or imagined) other
people to judge” (York 244).
With minute details, Piscoci recounts how on that special day he woke up at 7:00
am. Then he corrects himself that this is not true, for in those days he actually used to
wake up at 6:30. When the revolution hit, he was busy trying to win back the affection of
his wife by offering her “three splendid magnolias” plucked from the botanical garden. It
was his way to apologize for his fits of jealousy, but his wife pretended to be upset.
Suddenly, the Laurel and Hardy episode on TV was interrupted by a besieged Ceausescu
promising an insignificant wage increase, which made Piscoci naively hope that he could
now use the money on a trip to the seaside with his wife. With great honesty, the old man
confesses that the revolution actually frustrated him, ruining his plans of vacation. When
he did join the protesters in the street, after Ceausescu fled his palace, he did it so that his
wife can see that he is a hero, too. “One makes whatever revolution one can, each in their
own way,” Piscoci proclaims in a forgiving tone tinged with sympathy rather than scorn.
Striking a chord of poignant reconciliation for the show, he expounds on his own theory
of how revolutions are made. The revolution, he surmises, spread from Timisoara and
Bucharest to the rest of the country just as the string of Christmas street lights turn on in
sequence, one after the other, moving outwards from the center to the most marginal
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streets. “Old man Piscoci, excuse me, but you’re just full of nonsense sometimes,”
Manescu interrupts him. “We all know that the Christmas streetlights turn on at the same
time!”
In the end, however, the old man’s theory that history is never instantaneous
proves right, poetically framing the narrative. The film’s final series of dusky
compositions trace the town’s streetlights turning back on, echoing the opening which
followed the same lights turning off through the awakening town at dawn. Watching the
last light at the periphery turn on for the night, Jderescu’s cameraman confirms in
voiceover that the old man’s theory is true. This is also the voice of the director, who in
several interviews has declared that he aligns himself with the much-derided cameramen
of the show, berated repeatedly by Jderescu for his awkward shots, clumsy zoom-ins,
wide angles, and overall faulty camerawork. As Porumboiu explains, after seeing the
local TV show which inspired him, he first became interested in the subject, then amused,
and then angry to the point that he turned the TV off. “I tried to communicate all these
feelings through an implicit commentary, suggested by the style of filming,” the director
tells us. Since the first part of the film is told using the third person, Porumboiu chose an
almost theatrical mise-en- scène with a fixed camera, perpendicular on the set, which
created realistic pictures of the characters. The second part is told in the first person,
through the eyes of the cameraman, which, according to the director, at first “tries to find
the truth in all the different versions of the story he is given, then he lets the camera fall,
and at the very end he doesn’t know what to think anymore” (qtd. in Rossini 2009).
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2.9 Post-national Pastiche and Cinematic Realism
Thomas Elsaesser asserts that after 1989, “the national” acquired a different meaning
in cinema, which is no longer either essentialist (i.e., cinema’s ability to reflect something
specific about a country) or constructivist (when the nation is constructed as an imagined
community), but “’post-national,” reintroduced for external use while suspended within
the European Union” (70). Although various national stereotypes are indeed reinvented
or re-launched, contemporary European films have developed a formula that
accommodates various or contradictory signifiers of nationhood. It is pointless to call
such processes of re-assignation of the nation constructed, Elsaesser contends, because
these films (such as Run Lola Run, The Full Mounty, Brassed Off, The Remains of the
Day) self-consciously use parody to define identity.

Fig. 13 The Young cameraman in 12:08 East of Bucharest
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The use of parody to define one’s identity and is reserved, unfortunately, only for
Western Europe, as Elsaesser puts Eastern Europe in its (usual) place, noting that the
post-Communist states in the 1990s have not only “asserted their nationalism as a motor
for cultural identity” but also have “come to the fore with a renewed concern for a
national cinema” (70). Unlike the auteur cinema of the 1970s, post-national (Western)
European films of the 1990s, Elsaesser contends, “now address themselves to world
audiences,” no longer asserting their national or regional identity in difference, but
presenting themselves “as the impersoNation of ‘difference’” (72). The difference
between old-style and “retroactive” nationalism (71), Elsaesser explains, can be summed
up if we think of the difference between Wim Wenders’ famous assertion as a German
auteur in Kings of the Road that “the Yanks have colonized or subconscious” and the
famous scene in Trainspotting where Renton despairs being Scottish: “We’re the lowest
of the fucking low… Some people hate the English, but I don’t. They’re just wankers.
We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers.” The Trainspotting example indicates
that its “self-loathing is also a double take on national identity,” Elsaesser claims,
marking an instance of “post-national Scottishness” (72) and, on a larger scale, indicating
a more fluid understanding of European identity which appeals to audiences receptive to
films from Britain, France, Germany or Spain (72).
It is my contention here that such clear cut distinctions between post-1989
Western and Eastern European cinema cannot be sustained, and 12:08 is a case in point.
To be sure, the film’s irony, performativity, and reflexivity highlight the fact that
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contemporary Romanian cinema is also part of “retroactive nationalism,” asserting its
status as projected impersoNation. “What are you doing there, filming like that?” asks an
exasperated Jderescu at one point in the film, when he sees his amateur cameraman
filming a small musical ensemble with a jittery hand-held camera. “Ah, boss, but this is
the latest trend!” the latter replies, echoing Porumboiu’s initial desire to “find the truth of
the characters” by letting reality edit itself and reflecting the fact that he is consciously
addressing a world audience alert to new cinemas and cinematic trends. Put differently,
Porumboiu is aware of both expectations to “represent the nation” as a filmmaker and of
the fashionable indie and Danish Dogme style arthouse hits whose use of high definition
cameras and digital technologies has been enthusiastically embraced by some as “kind of
a revolution” (qtd. in Martin 2006). In an insightful article on low-budget digital cinema,
Adrian Martin cautions, much like Porumboiu, that “this is an area in which filmmakers
need to tread carefully. Despite the admirable adoption of artistic slogans such as
‘creativity comes from constraint’…there is already an abundance of clichés bearing
down upon this field of production” (2006).
Rodica Ieta finds it fascinating that the newly emerged auteurs in Romanian
cinema resorted to realism, one of the most stigmatized artistic trends in former
communist countries, due to its original application as socialist realism. Emphasizing that
the young directors turned to realism with the same passion that their masters and
forebears (important names in Romanian cinema such as Lucian Pintilie, Dan Pita,
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Mircea Veroiu, and Mircea Daneliuc) showed in undermining realism through encoded
meanings, undertones, and philosophical speculations, Ieta suggests that
Perhaps repeating under new circumstances the radical gesture of the French New
Wave school, the Romanian New Wave looks back in anger and from that anger
weaves, unpretentiously, the texture of a new kind of cinema, which redeems
socialism on the basis of its revolutionary potential, proving that realism at its best
does establish a relation between experience and memory (23).

In other words, what Porumboiu and his colleagues do should be interpreted as a
conscious effort to reinvent realism for a twenty-first century understanding of the
ambiguous revolutions of recent history.
The turn to the difference between image and symbol, and to the definitions of
what “conscience” and “police” mean in Police, Adjective, also demonstrates
Porumboiu’s concern for the type of “abstract” imagery that “audiences around the
world,” pace Elsaesser, can fill in with their own experiences. Contemporary Western
audiences may, for instance, be prompted to reflect on their disavowal of their role as
witness as they substitute abstract images (much like the policeman making the drawing
at the end of the film) to atrocities of war structured by media coverage which is
“increasingly produced as distant, abstract, and uncertain” (Parks 606).
Lisa Parks reminds us, for instance, that during the US war against Iraq in 1991,
US military and media collaborated in order to make citizen/viewers accept the US
military undertakings and thwart their possible opposition. Instead of focusing on Iraqi
casualties and devastation, the commercial television networks created euphemistic catch
phrases for the war such as “Operation Desert Storm,” “Showdown in the Gulf,” and
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“collateral damage” (598). Reminding us that the circulation US satellite images “was
calculated and strategic” in the tele-visual coverage of the 1995 war in Bosnia, Parks
moreover underscores that these images’ “remoteness, emptiness and abstraction
privilege the panoramic and the territorial over that of the close-up and the bodily” (Parks
593).

Fig. 14 Image for “Operation Desert Storm” on Wikipedia’s page for the Gulf War
Ultimately, examples such as the ones given above reveal that in Porumboiu’s
films, the national loses its primacy and ultimately accedes to political universality. In
other words, insofar as they are neither essentialist nor constructivist, one may very well
call them “post-national.”
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Chapter 3
Transnational Journeys in the New Europe
10

3.1 “’Enter Freely, and of Your Own Will’: Cinematic Representations of Post-
Socialist Transnational Journeys

The current literature on what is now called “transnational feminist studies” has
recently been taken to task by some critics, who point out how its “politics of location”
operate primarily within the first/third world axis. Indeed, as Katarzyna Marciniak
comments, this literature has little to say about the post-Communist Second World, “as if
the Second World, as a conceptual category and an actual geopolitical region, did not
exist, despite the fact that the second world has changed the most thoroughly and the
most rapidly in association with neoliberal globalization” (xv). In light of this concern,
this chapter seeks to respond to Marciniak’s invitation to expand the scope of
transnational feminist studies, so that “the voices and perspectives from the Second
World may find their way into the field that many consider a radical and indispensable
direction for feminist studies” (4). To do this, I propose an examination of contemporary
cinematic representations of three post-socialist journeys. Although my focus here will
also be primarily on Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort (U.K., 2000), in this chapter I
analyze the critical reception and spectatorial investments of this film by comparing it to
Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4-ever (Sweden, 2002) and by aligning its representational
practices with those of Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown (France, 2000). I place these

10
Different parts of this chapter have appeared in the edited collection Transnational
Feminism in Film and Media (2007) and in New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary
European Cinema (2008).
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films in a larger debate regarding contemporary European cinema and cinematic politics
of representation, arguing that Last Resort unsettles the homogeneity of established
images of national identity that imagine a “we” of one blood fixed and unchanged by
other cultures. Ultimately, Last Resort can be taken as an example of what Ien Ang calls
“post-Utopian” European films, a film that encourages a rethinking of political space.
What emerges out of this rethinking is a relativization of concepts of center and margin,
whereby England is viewed through the eyes of the refugees as an imprisoning space “at
the end of the world” or “the armpit of the universe.”
The main characters in the films I discuss are women who embark on journeys to
the West either alone or with only a child as company. Through the transnational
experiences of its female protagonist, each film foregrounds three problematic aspects of
contemporary Europe: the influx of immigrants, refugees or asylum-seekers, the
trafficking in women from Eastern Europe, and the illegal border-crossing of Eastern
Europeans who do not have a temporary working permit. Pawlikowski’s Tanya travels
from Russia to England to meet Mark, her fiancé, but when he does not show up at the
airport, she applies for political asylum and becomes a bogus refugee. She and her son
Artyom are sent to Stonehaven, a remote and desolate resort where asylum seekers are
detained. Alfie, an Englishman who runs the local bingo evenings and manages the
amusement arcade “Dreamland” falls in love with her, and helps her and Artyom to
escape Stonehaven on a boat.
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Moodysson’s Lilya is a teenager from “somewhere that was once the Soviet
Union.” After her mother leaves home to join a Russian man living in America, the girl
barely manages to survive. She stops going to school, is raped by some boys from her
neighborhood, and is tricked into believing that her new boyfriend will take her to
Sweden, where he claims to have found her a job as an agricultural worker. Invoking an
excuse at the last minute, he remains behind, and Lilya is kidnapped by a pimp upon
arriving at the airport in Sweden. She is then locked into an apartment, brutalized by her
captor, and finally forced into prostitution. While Tanya and Lilya are young, traveling
primarily for individual reasons, Maria from Code Unknown is a much older woman, part
of the recent mass labor migration from Eastern Europe. As a Romanian, she is allowed
to work in France only if she holds a temporary permit. Not being able to obtain one, she
becomes a clandestine migrant, ending up as a beggar in the streets of Paris.
The subject of immigration is a much debated topic in Western European media,
in which many accounts of the recent migratory movements construct an imaginary,
dangerous invasion of immigrants and asylum seekers who take away people’s jobs or
take advantage of social benefits. Imogen Tyler notes that the term asylum-seeker gained
political and popular currency in the UK in the early 1990s, and was used by the British
Government “as a way to maneuver around the rights of the refugee as prescribed by
international law” (189). A “refugee” is someone whose official status is recognized
under the terms of the Geneva Convention; an “asylum seeker” is seeking asylum on the
basis of his or her claim to be a refugee. Asylum seekers are usually not able to work and
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have to wait while their case is being considered (Bloch 75). Although the rhetoric of
novelty regarding migration flows in contemporary Europe has been challenged by some
scholars, who argue that it should be contextualized and read as a continuation or
consolidation of previous patterns, what is increasingly recognized as new about post-
communist migration is the emergence of a more distinct migratory regime, what
Mazierska and Rascaroli call the “feminization of migration” (140). Whereas in the past
men were the ones who first ventured to foreign countries in search of better paid work,
nowadays an increasing number of women travel alone, leaving their families behind.
Many of these women migrate in response to new demands in the service sector, hoping
to work as agricultural laborers, nannies, maids, or as providers of care for the elderly or
the disabled. Others, however, are enticed by offers to become the brides of men in other
countries or fall prey to prostitution.
An increasing body of work has addressed these issues; yet there seems to be a
disconnection between analyses of social, political, and economic patterns and cinematic
representations of them (Kofman 2005; Malloch 2005; Tyler 2006). As I argue here,
films such as Last Resort and Code Unknown complicate easy understandings of the
transnational journeys undertaken by women from the Second World. Through their
original style and self-reflexive mode, they invite us to question our assumptions about
these women and the extent to which we can gain access to an “authentic” representation
of their world. Whereas Lilya 4-ever strives to portray clear causes and effects that allow
us an easy access to Lilya’s experience, Last Resort and Code Unknown present us with a
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type of realism that captures the ambiguity and ambivalence of lived experience. The
filmmakers use a modernist, fragmented style that disrupts narrative closure and the
notion of a linear, fully comprehensible national or individual destiny (Kligman and
Limoncelli 2005). They do not convey the experience of displacement and exile through
the spectacle of the migrants’ suffering. Rather than presenting us with narrative
structures that reach a crescendo through an accumulation of violent acts, Last Resort and
Code Unknown seek to portray violence without explicitly showing it. Intimate
confessions, muffled whimpers, or meditative, looks emphasize the effects of violence,
forcing the audience to reflect on its causes.
3.2 Last Resort: A “Post-Utopian” European Film?
I begin my discussion of Last Resort by placing it in the context of European
cinema and, more specifically, in relation to British cinema. Made by a Polish immigrant
to the UK, the film has an “accented” style, which Hamid Naficy describes as
“interstitial,” simultaneously global and local, resonating against the prevailing cinematic
productions while benefiting from them at the same time (4). Reflecting his own
experience of migration between cultures and national identities, Pawlikowski’s bold
evocations of contemporary Britain attest to his own positionality as an outsider in
contemporary “British” cinema. Although attuned to the tensions of marginality and
difference, he avoids however exploiting narratives based on predictable notions of
victims and victimizers.
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Reflecting on the future of European cinema studies, Rosalind Galt argues that “if
we are to take seriously the post-Wall European subject’s impossible responsibility, we
cannot stop with a comfortably liberal celebration of the Other” (4). She proposes that
film studies needs to form the question of Europe as a matter of space and time, which
implies a contestation of “the logic by which Europe imagines itself as a spatial and
temporal advance-guard for the world” (4). In a similar vein, Ien Ang has also suggested
that Europe has to begin with an altered sense of self, with a Europe that no longer views
itself as the center and norm of human civilization putting other cultures and peoples in a
relation of subordination to itself. “The task of Europe,” in Ang’s view, is to become
“post-Utopian,” “post-European.” This means Europe must “stop relating to others by
taking itself as the standard,” “learn how to marginalize itself,” “see its limitedness” and
“its culture as relative and permeable” (25-30). It is from such a stance that I begin
problematizing Last Resort, which I read as an example of the post-Utopian films Ang
anticipated. It enables us to envision a marginalized England at “the end of the world,” as
Artyom, Tanya’s son, puts it, no longer as empire but quite literally as “vampire,” an
aging body collecting blood from refugees to invigorate itself.
Like many real-life asylum seekers who do not have the right to work in the UK,
Tanya has to go through a Kafkaesque nightmare, having to wait for an official decision
that will take her “between twelve and sixteenth months, depending on the case.”
Unsuccessful in her attempt to sell a fur collar she has brought from Russia, she faces a
conundrum: she can either obtain money by “donating” blood to a makeshift donation
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center for refugees, or accept an offer to prostitute herself in front of a web cam. The film
dwells on her ambivalence towards what to choose. Soon, however, we see her lying
supine on a bed, looking sideways as her blood is transferred from her body to a
collection bag. Its slow ascent through a tube mirrors the backward movement of the
airport shuttle that drags Tania from light to dark at the beginning of the film and from
dark to light at the end. The exchange of blood for money creates an especially poignant
scene, stylized by Pawlikowski through the distortion of the voices of the refugees
waiting in line for their turn. While their conversations are rendered indistinguishable, the
babble of their voices slowly acquires the rhythm of a prayer.
Drawing on Didier Bigo’s contention that “the securitization of immigration” is
grounded in the idea of the nation-state as a body that needs to be protected, Imogen
Tyler calls attention to the fact that the consensus necessary to legitimize the detention of
asylum seekers is mainly generated through the construction of the nation-state as “a
body” under threat (192). From this perspective, I suggest that Last Resort encourages us
to perceive, on a symbolic level, England’s “body” as “weak,” needing the blood of
migrants to sustain its existence. Moreover, as Tyler further comments, “the mobilization
of the asylum-seeker as ‘our’ national hate figure bestows ‘us’ with a collective identity”
which “grants ‘us’ the pleasure of secure identification: we are British, we have a way of
life, we must protect it” (192). The asylum seekers are identified as “not refugees,” thus
instantly “recognized” as always already “unwelcome.” They are needed to
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reinforce the homogeneous imagined community of the nation-state, but are also
perceived as a real threat and therefore placed in detention. The film questions this
“normative” procedure in the scene in which Artyom angrily protests when he sees his
mother undergoing the same procedures used for suspected criminals: she is assigned an
ID number, and her face and profile are photographed.
The shutters of Alfie’s arcade (a place where voices may echo each other) rising
gradually as immigrants wait outside, may remind one of the slowly drawing back doors
to Dracula’s castle in Bram Stoker’s famous novel. “Dreamland Welcomes You,” the
advertisement for the desolate amusement park outside the tower where the refugees are
kept, echoes Dracula’s famous line, “Welcome to my house. Enter freely and of your
own will.” The discrepancy between the deceptive message and what awaits one “inside”
serves as a sardonic commentary on the apparent dissolution of borders in Europe. Tanya
and her son are able to enter the UK freely, since apparently the borders that used to
separate East and West have crumbled after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Maria, the
Romanian from Code Unknown can also enter France, but without money or a permit to
work, she is certainly going to have a miserable time there. Lilya traverses the border
with a fake passport procured by her boyfriend. After she manages to escape her pimp,
her fake identity contributes to her fear of contacting a policewoman she sees at a gas
station.
In We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, Étienne
Balibar argues that nowadays it is the system of identity verifications allowing the triage
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of travelers who are allowed to enter a given national territory that constitutes the most
decisive borders. Borders, therefore, are no longer conceived primarily as “lines”
marking the edge of a given national territory, but more as “detention zones” and
“filtering systems.” As the poor are systematically regulated at points of entry, borders
have become essential institutions in the constitution of social conditions on a global
scale, where “the passport functions as a systematic criterion” (Balibar 113). Tanya’s
passport instantly alerts the immigration officer, who interrogates her about the duration
of her stay and how much money she has in her possession. When she naively admits that
she only has eighty-five dollars, and is unsure about how long she might stay in England,
her passport and ticket are confiscated. While her luggage is searched for “any documents
that may pertain to her stay whilst in the UK,” she is asked whether she is “intending to
solicit work whilst in the UK.” Faced with the possibility of having to go back to Russia
immediately, the only solution she finds to gain enough time to locate her fiancé is to
“trick the system” by demanding political asylum. Unaware of what this entails, she soon
finds herself trapped in a remote resort whose high fences and surveillance cameras
prevent escape. When she gives up, admitting to a false claim, she learns that she has to
wait for another “three to six months” until her application is processed.
We have long been accustomed to films in which the East is configured as a space
where individuals feel trapped, subject to a state of uncertain waiting, or as a space from
which they are desperately trying to escape. In Last Resort, it is England that is cast in
this role. The emphasis does not rest upon the construction of an idealized Western place,
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strongly desired by outsiders who perceive the West as a magic gateway to happiness.
The fact that we don’t see London is also politically relevant here, a gesture which
Charlotte Brunsdon, in an article on London in film, deems to be in itself “an engagement
with stories of national becoming” (43). A reversal of conventional mechanisms is played
out in Last Resort, where rather than Westerners trying to escape the East, we see
someone from the East desiring to escape the West. The scene in which Tanya and her
son go to a local train station hoping to get away from the area where the refugees are
kept echoes a similar situation in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (USA, 1938), where a
number of foreigners are stuck in Bandrika, a fictional country in Eastern Europe. With
the same urgency in her voice as Hitchcock’s anxious characters display, Tanya asks a
station guard where she can buy tickets. “There’s no train until further notice, sorry,” she
is told by the distracted worker, rather like Hitchcock’s Boris, the innkeeper in the
mountainous Bandrikan region, who tells his customers that “the train is a little bit
uphold.” Due to an avalanche in the region, these travelers also have to stay put until
further notice.
It is evident that Last Resort showcases neither the “heritage” version of British
national identity nor the “Cool Britannia” of the late 1990s, with its focus on a New
British identity fixated on youth, cool, and a metropolitan culture (Monk 34). The
imagined community from Notting Hill or Bridget Jones’s Diary, in which, as Claire
Monk emphasizes, “everybody is already a winner – educated, articulate, affluent by
birth if not by occupation” (35), is replaced here with the image of what society has
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rejected: the elderly and the “fucked up” people like Alfie. A few scenes in the film focus
on elderly British citizens playing bingo, and Alfie points out that this is one of the few
things that can still excite them. Just like Spielberg’s E.T., who can scour the pages of a
book in seconds, rapidly moving his eyes and fingers across the page, they have
developed an almost other-worldly hand-eye coordination when reading the numbers on
the bingo card. E.T. is also evoked when Artyom reads from a guide book, “Show me
the way home, please,” and the film seems to suggest that, alongside immigrants, those
“socially cleansed” (to use Monk’s expression) from British society, are as “Other” to us
as aliens.
3.3 Last Resort and Lilya 4-ever
Last Resort secured itself a generally positive reception with critics as well as
audiences, despite the fact that its portrayal of asylum seekers blatantly betrays one’s
immediate expectations. After all, the film’s protagonist is a bogus refugee, who is given
food vouchers, as well as a free apartment to stay in until her application is processed. As
such, Tanya is hardly the victim one would expect from a narrative designed to secure
certain responses from the audience. From the very beginning, she gets help from a
handsome, likeable Englishman, who subsequently falls in love with her. She is not
forced, but willingly goes to see Les, the man who offered to hire her as a performer in
his cyberporn business. Les proves to be very gentle with her, patient, and respectful.
When he is directing her on how to act in front of the camera, he even makes Tanya
laugh. By contrast, Lilya 4-ever is a typically earnest and tragic tale of a sexually
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exploited young girl. Beautiful and vulnerable, she is beaten up by her pimp and coerced
into having sexual relationships with much older and repulsive men. Trapped in an
apartment from which there seems to be no escape, she rebels at first by cutting her hair
at random and covering herself with excessive make-up to render herself unattractive.
When she finally manages to escape, however, she realizes that she is alone, with no
documents in a country whose language she cannot speak. Frightened and emotionally
distressed, she commits suicide by jumping off a bridge.
The specific alignment of Last Resort and Lilya 4-ever has already been made by
a number of critics who juxtaposed them in order to reflect on politics of cinematic
representation. To a certain extent, the two films stage a similar discrepancy between the
young heroines’ high expectations of a better life abroad and their betrayed hopes. The
trope of imprisonment is pursued to explore Tanya’s attempts to escape the “designated
holding area” in Stonehaven as well as Lilya’s constant desire to leave Russia or to break
free from her captivity in the Swedish apartment.
In Sight and Sound, Julian Graffy links Lilya 4-ever with Last Resort, praising
Lilya 4-ever for its “authentic” depiction of Russia’s drabness as well as its “suffocating
tedium of provincial life.” Since Lilya 4-ever was actually filmed in Estonia, one could
also “recognize” Pawlikowski’s “Stonehaven” as “authentically Russian.” But who has
the authority to decide what an “authentic” depiction means?
Ironically, Margate, the real name of the town where Last Resort was filmed, is a
famous British resort praised by many artists, the place where T.S. Eliot went to
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recuperate after mental exhaustion and began writing The Waste Land. Given that a
significant part of Lilya 4-ever takes place in a Russian “wasteland,” where the fall-out of
state Communism, we are shown, has left everything in a depressing, post-apocalyptic
state, the “unbridgeable gap” between East and West is effectively underscored. For
viewers who know little about Russia and Eastern Europe, films such as Lilya 4-ever may
bear a reassuring message, convincing them that they are just terribly lucky to have been
born in the West. The contrast between the affluent West and the bleak East runs the risk
of merely perpetuating the abjection of the post-communist space. Given its reputation in
the Western imaginary, this space needs to be probed through cinematic techniques that
avoid giving spectators the illusion of authenticity through the usual Manichean
opposition.
Peter Bradshaw, writing in The Guardian, also compares the two films, but
criticizes films like Last Resort for having “softened the blow and sugared the pill with
grace notes of compassion and hope.” At stake seems to be an issue of representation, of
who can “better” present the audience with “the Other’s plight,” in this case the
experience of two women from post-socialist societies. When Bradshaw suggests that a
film like Last Resort “sugars the pill,” he seems to imply that it fails to represent Tanya’s
taken for granted victimization. The all too often implication is, I suspect, that stories
about women from Eastern Europe must be tragic, as if “by default.” When this is not the
case, in a “celebration of the Other” mode, they are bound to end with the successful
consummation of heterosexual love, in which the heroine from the Second World is
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positioned as the lucky one. For instance, Isabelle Mergault’s Je vous trouve très beau
(You are So Beautiful, France, 2005) dramatizes the story of a French balding farmer who
“saves” a girl from scrubbing floors in Romania. After his wife dies, he contacts a
matrimonial agency where he is advised to go to Romania, where, as the DVD cover puts
it, “girls are ready to do anything to escape their misery.”
While Lilya 4-ever attempts to put the viewer in Lilya’s position, so that, as
Moodysson says, one can understand “how it feels to be lying beneath these men with
their sweat and smell and big presence” (qtd. in Noh 3), Last Resort is more cautious
about the limits of representation. Moodysson once declared that he made Lilya 4-ever as
a reaction to Swedish filmmaker Pal Hollender’s controversial Buy Bye Beauty (2001), a
documentary in which he set out to demonstrate that Latvia is a country where most
women are prostitutes.

However, there isn’t much difference between Hollender’s
depiction of Latvian women as prostitutes and Moodysson’s portrayal of Lilya as a
helpless victim. It is not enough to substitute a bad representation with an uncomplicated
“celebratory” one. In an interview about the movie posted on his website
(http://www.hollender.se/texts.html#bbbinterview), Hollender comments that in his
documentary (sponsored, rather surprisingly, by the Swedish Film institute) he
“deliberately played with numbers” to make the claim that “half of all the women in Riga
between the age of 13-45 at least once has performed a sexual service in return for money
or other benefits.”
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The emphasis does not fall on what may shock us, or on giving us the impression
that we understand “what it must be like” to be a refugee in Fortress Europe.
Pawlikowski’s film, I contend, gestures more towards the violence implicit in our
visualizing strategies, highlighting our complicity as spectators in objectifying the visual
field. The director works primarily in an allegorical mode, suggesting rather than
showing things. A carefully chosen framing makes us aware of how we see and treat
refugees. The image of refugees lined up for inspection by guards with big, howling
dogs, has rich connotative powers, recalling representations of the Holocaust in
particular. In an interview with Richard Porton, Pawlikowski comments that he doesn’t
see his film as one about refugees (8). Indeed, as a “false documentary” (as Alain Resnais
promoted his 1959 film, Hiroshima Mon Amour), it resists becoming “just another film”
about them, foregrounding certain ethical implications pertaining to the limits of
representation. By choosing to portray Tanya’s experiences as an asylum seeker in a
narrative that does not end in victimization, Pawlikowski eschews appropriating the
figure of the other in ways that blur distinctions between different experiences of being
displaced from home. In a critique of Giorgio Agamben’s fetishization of the refugee, a
gesture that risks universalizing the condition of displacement as something we all
experience, Imogen Tyler warns that we must be aware of the extent to which the
mobilization of the figure of the refugee as “our own,” may “offer ‘us’ resources with
which to imagine how ‘we,’ the already included, might reimagine ‘ourselves’” (198).
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Moreover, this mobilization is precarious when it serves to point to our “similar” erosion
of civil liberties (198).
Like Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown (2000) and Hidden (2006), Last Resort
also directs its spectators towards issues of guilt and its repression. In Code Unknown the
idea of violence, of what constitutes a traumatic experience for immigrants, is not
conveyed through explicit scenes of abuse meant to shock us. The whole narrative
unfolds around the apparently minor gesture of a boy who discards a sandwich paper into
the hands of the begging Maria who happens to be sitting on a street corner. For most of
us, an incident like this might appear inconsequential. Potentially, however, for an
immigrant like Maria, this is a traumatic experience, as it might add to her overall feeling
of alienation and displacement. In a later scene, she tells a friend how a Frenchman once
offered her money, yet was reluctant to touch her. This, in turn, recalled a time when she
had done the same thing in trying to help a gypsy woman. Finding herself in the same
position was, we learn, deeply humiliating to her. Her dignity wounded, she hid in an
attic and cried by herself for the rest of that afternoon. Refraining from positioning Maria
solely as victim, Haneke more realistically underscores through this incident how easily
one’s positionality may shift from subject to abject. Maria experiences her encounter with
the Frenchman as his unwillingness, out of fear, disgust, or repulsion, to engage in any
bodily contact with her, as if touching the other would contaminate him. As a poor
immigrant, irrespective of her skin color, she is coded as dirty and polluted. Yet Maria’s
story about not wanting to touch the gypsy woman reveals that the abject should not be
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romanticized, as she herself is not free from prejudice. The hardships endured in France
are kept secret by Maria when she is asked by another villager in Romania whether she
was able to find a job. Ashamed to admit the truth, she lies, saying that she had managed
to get a good job in a school, but had given it up because she missed her family. When
he, in turn, informs her that his wife, Mirela, is happily working as a nanny in a doctor’s
house, one is uncertain whether to believe his story. Later on, we find that a woman
named Mirela has just bought, from a woman who left France, the “yellow card” (perhaps
an allusion to the yellow star the Jews were once required to wear) required in order to
work legally.
As with Haneke’s benevolent Frenchman, Pawlikowski’s “bad guys” are not the
usual villains, either. If in Lilya 4-ever spectators are more likely to distance themselves
from the action, filled with indignation at the evildoers “out there,” in Last Resort it is
harder to place the blame on somebody else since everyone is generally polite, even the
internet pornographer. Rather than indulging in open didacticism, the film constrains one
to realize the illogical aspect of a perfectly rationalized system that quietly follows its
routine. The director puts an accent precisely on the normality of its logic, whereby the
“wrongdoers” disavow the negative effects of their actions. In the very act of rummaging
through Tanya’s suitcase, the airport officer denies what he is doing: “I’m just looking
for any documents that might pertain to your stay whilst you are here in the U.K; I’m not
interested in what you might have.”
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Pawlikowski stages a discrepancy between reality and the way it is perceived by
the “fortress Europe” ideology. The security guards are not “as frustrated by the system
as those to whom it applies,” as Amy Sargeant argues in a recent book on British cinema
(349), but rather regard themselves as benefactors. As one immigration officer puts it,
“anyone caught trying to escape from a designated holding area will be returned. If you
attempted a second time, there will be no more nice flats, no more vouchers; it would be
a prison cell.” Immune to the alienation that people suffer for having almost no agency in
determining the course of their lives, the prevailing discourse mobilized by the authorities
differentiates between prisons and a “designated holding area,” as if the two were
significantly different. In reality, the system denies the applicants the ability to be
meaningfully active without breaking the law: cash benefits are replaced by vouchers
which can only be used for food, and when their value is not used up to the value of the
purchase, change in cash is forbidden.
Reminiscent of documentaries such as Safe Haven: the United Nations and the
Betrayal of Srebrenica (dir. Ilan Ziv, 1996), “Stonehaven” is a loaded term that alludes to
issues of guilt regarding promised protection. The policy of “safe areas” or “havens” was
developed in the early 1990s in an effort to restrict displaced people within the borders of
their state of origin. In Bosnia, for instance, several havens established by the UN not
only became “death zones,” but also held people wishing to flee to safety. As Philip
Marfleet scathingly comments, these “detention centers” were created “in order that they
should not become refugees, because a formal claim upon potential host-states was
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undesirable” (203). A similarly specious logic of safety is also underscored through “Mr.
Stonehaven,” the pornographer who, in a perfectly polite tone, tries to convince Tanya
that cyberprostitution is just “the ultimate safe-sex.” While the film captures Tanya’s
breakdown into tears after posing with a lollipop and teddy bear according to web
instructions, the online global audience enjoys “the crying schoolgirl act,” demanding to
see more of it. Samantha Lay points out, in this respect, that Last Resort is the first
British realist film to address “the new, privatized world of cyberporn, a social problem
for the twenty-first century” (121).
In their analysis of Code Unknown and Last Resort, Eva Mazierska and Laura
Rascaroli argue that these films propose a challenge to the twentieth century concept of
citizenship based on the once prevalent experience of rootedness. In the case of Last
Resort, they interpret the first and last scenes showing the two characters traveling in the
same direction as conveying the impression of repetition rather than return or
homecoming, typifying them as “travelers,” since they have no home to go back to.
Tanya’s decision to return thus “reveals the opposite of what she affirms,” “as if she
knew that ‘home’ is a utopia that cannot be achieved in our times” (148). While the film
is open to such an interpretation, I suggest that the circularity of the first and last scene
can also be taken as emphasizing the natural fluidity of movement while subverting
established perceptions of center and margin. The nation-state is no longer represented as
a fixed container whose borders are transgressed from East or South. In this respect,
Regina Römhild has pointed out how the logic of the nation-state as unifying a
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population, a culture, and a territory conceptualizes the world as static. Nation-states
therefore figure as “territorial containers” into which the immigrants bring their cultures
as a sort of luggage. In this view, the world is perceived as compartmentalized into stable
arrangements of containers, with sedentary individuals and cultures bound by their own
territory. Human and cultural mobility across the borders of the container-states are thus
identified as exceptions to the rule, “deemed an irregular, transitory moment that has to
come to an end either in terms of return to the original home or in terms of a new
settlement in another territory and culture” (Römhild 5).
Tanya’s decision to go back, I suggest, indicates that she has finally had the
courage to stop dreaming. She wants to resume her life back in Russia so that she does
not repeat the mistake of “marrying the wrong guy” for her. She could stay with Alfie,
who could be a caring father, and whom Artyom already loves. The fact that she doesn’t
choose to do so is her private decision on what to do with her life. It is rare that a
character coming from “the second world” is given this sort of agency and dignity by a
filmmaker. In an article about young cinema from Central and Eastern Europe, Christina
Stojanova suggests that the main characters embark on serendipitous quests not to learn
about the world or themselves but to flee from the responsibility that comes with such
knowledge, deliberately avoiding situations where they are forced to make choices.
Pawlikowski’s film marks a shift in this tendency, and the fact that Tanya is able to make
a choice and envision “going back” is important here. More often than not, this is not a
luxury typical of filmic representations of women from Eastern Europe. Tanya could
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have been Ada from Julie Bertuccelli’s Since Otar Left (2003), who also grew up only
with her mother and grandmother. But once in Paris, Ada does not want to return to
Georgia, despite her uncertain future in France and the wonderful relationship she has
with the two women. The last image with Ada saying good-bye to them at the airport
reinforces the idea that no matter how risky life in the West may be, one is still better off
there.
At this point in the chapter, I would like to invoke a scene from Last Orders (dir.
Fred Schepisi, UK, 2001), an adaptation of Graham Swift’s novel whose title has, like
that of Pawlikowski’s film, a double meaning. It is a play on the “last orders” taken by a
bartender in the pub and on the last wishes of an old man that his friends scatter his ashes
at Margate. When, at the end of the film, the friends finally reach the resort, they see the
pier, the sea, the Dreamland amusement arcade. Here, again, is the Margate of
Pawlikowski’s film: cold and windy, a bleak prospect. “Not good scattering weather,” as
one character describes it. “Well,” replies his friend, “it depends on how you look at it.”
3.4 New Ways of Representing the Nation: Is the New “British” Cinema Polish?
According to film critic Steve Blandford, “the purest essence of Englishness in
contemporary cinema” may be found in the work of “a British director with an outsider’s
sensibility” (42). The cinema of Pawel Pawlikowski (especially his film My Summer of
Love, 2004), in his view, is able to “defy monolithic definitions of the English” and
capture “the essence of our English identity” which “actually resides not at the
metropolitan center, but in the diverse manifestations of English regionalism” (20).
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Blandford, therefore, situates Pawlikowski in the context of an ‘English’ cinema with
distinctive characteristics within British Cinema. While recognizing that for most people,
“British” means “English,” he points out that although there is a growing recognition of
the emergence of a cinema that could be defined as Scottish or Welsh, there is little
academic discussion on how filmmakers respond to the problematics of Englishness in
the age of devolution in Britain (19). Notwithstanding Blandford’s remarks, however, I
believe that Thomas Elsaesser makes a fine observation when he notes that ‘it is
impossible…to affirm a single national or ethnic identity through the cinema: it is more a
question of how a country can speak to itself, how it is “spoken” by others, and how the
others “inside’ speak themselves or ask to be represented” (55). With this in mind, in
what follows I first explain Pawlikowki’s positionality as a film-maker and explore his
status as an “outsider” in British cinema through a brief comparison to the German
director Fatih Akin. In the second part, I focus on Pawlikowski’s Last Resort (UK, 2000)
to extend my analysis from part I of this chapter and assess the movie’s portrayal of
refugees. In part one, I argued that rather than relying on open didacticism,
Pawlikowski’s representation of asylum-seekers defies the established conventions of the
genre. By portraying them neither as despairing victims without agency nor as virtuous
“heroes” (as if by default), the director eschews their “celebration” and exposes instead
the “banality of evil” in the way they are treated. I also address the fact that the focus on a
Russian woman’s narrative brings to the fore a new set of questions about class,
whiteness and neoracism. Moreover, given that a majority of movies portray Britain as a
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utopian land strongly desired by migrants, Pawlikowski’s significant intervention is that
he presents it as a “counter-utopia,” a space from which one wishes to escape. Since
Pawlikowki’s “poetic realism” has been aligned with that of Michael Winterbottom’s, the
last part of the chapter is dedicated to an analysis of Last Resort in conjunction with
Winterbottom’s Wonderland (UK, 1999).
3.5 Rejecting a “Cinema of Duty”: Situating Pawlikowski’s “Poetic Realism” in the
Context of British Cinema
It is unlikely that one would go as far as to ask, “Is the New British Cinema
Polish?”, as if echoing Tunçay Kulaoglu’s by now famous article, “Is the New German
Cinema Turkish?” (1999). Nor would one even describe the films of Pawel Pawlikowski
as British-Polish. However, when addressing Pawlikowski’s status in British cinema, a
brief comparison to the reception and positionality of a film-maker like Fatih Akin in
Germany may not be too far-fetched. They are both young, audacious directors who have
moved relatively quickly and successfully from margin to mainstream. Tackling issues of
marginalized groups in society through a distinctive approach, their work has marked a
significant difference in the national cinemas in which they are working. As Thomas
Elsaesser puts it in his book on European cinema, “it is remarkable how cinema has
become the most prominent medium of self-representation and symbolic action that the
hyphenated citizen of Europe’s nation-states have made their own” (119).
Both Pawlikowski and Akin are displaced film-makers, distinguished by an
“accented” style which Hamid Naficy describes as “interstitial,” simultaneously global
and local, resonating against the prevailing cinematic productions while benefiting from
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them at the same time (4). A similar attitude of rebellion against established conventions
of representation is overtly expressed by both directors. In an article dedicated to Akin,
Daniela Berghahn points out that the film-maker rejects the cinema of his forbearers
(141-42). In this case, the rebellion is directed against the first generation of Turkish-
German film-makers as well as other German ones who have produced what critics such
as Malik now call a “cinema of the affected” or a “cinema of duty.” According to Deniz
Göktürk, these films belonging to the “cinema of duty” of the Turkish-German directors
of the 1980s replicated the New German Cinema’s strategies of victimization in their
representation of minority subjects (67). The problem with such movies, Angelica Fenner
points out, is that “they address a hegemonic viewership by evoking the viewers” pity
and sympathy, emotions which essentially affirm and perpetuate the static Manichean
configuration of oppressor and oppressed” (116). Although Akin usually rejects the label
of hyphenated identity film-maker, the fact that his films address “the migrant’s
experience of rootlessness, of culture clash, and of living between or in two worlds”
(143) has led critics to call him an “accented film-maker.” This means, above all, that his
work reflects a “double consciousness” (Berghahn 145) resulting from the director’s
investment in two backgrounds (in this case Turkish and German).
Similarly, Pawel Pawlikowski is a rebel of sorts on the British cinema scene, also
engaging with themes that probe the immigrant’s experience of travel, displacement, and
isolation. Whereas Akin was born in Germany, Pawlikowski came to Britain from Poland
as a teenager. He positions himself as an outsider in contemporary British cinema,
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fearlessly criticizing contemporary British realist films for “drowning in sociology… how
people speak, everyone is so self-conscious” (qtd. in Foley). In other words, one could
say that Pawlikowski has expressed his own dissatisfaction with the “cinema of the
affected” in a British context. Few contemporary British films appeal to the director’s
tastes. Rather, he prefers the British cinema of the 1960s, with which he became
acquainted as a child when his mother, a lecturer in English at Warsaw University at the
time, took him to the British Council to watch films in a language he barely understood.
In an interview with Les Roberts, he deplores the fact that contemporary British
directors “either idealize the working classes” or use “gangsters to do something
interesting” (96). Indeed, Pawlikowski openly critiques films that misrepresent the
problems of marginalized groups in society by presenting characters as types. The
problem with many films about refugees, he emphasizes, is that they present the
characters as victims who lack individual autonomy. Dismissive of genre categorizations
that reduce his films to labels such as ‘refugee films’ or, as in the case of My Summer of
Love, “lesbian” or “coming out” films, Pawlikowski believes that the mere fact of making
a film “where the characters are not stooges is in itself a political gesture” (Porton 41).
Aware of his reception as a film-maker, he ironically notes: ‘Some call me a gritty realist;
others accuse me of poetry and vagueness. And then there’s my background to further
muddy the waters: while the Brits can’t help intuiting gloomy Polish fatalism in
everything I touch, the Poles are tickled by my supposedly very British sense of irony’
(“My Summer of Love”). Beyond this impulse to reject being pigeonholed one way or
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another, Pawlikowski openly acknowledges that he has always seen himself as an
outsider. The fact that he lived in foreign countries as a child instilled in him “a certain
tendency to stare and observe – a kind of documentary obsession” (qtd. in Porton 37).
Whereas Akin describes himself as having been influenced by American hip-hop
culture’s “sampling” techniques (Berghah 144), Pawlikowski prefers to stress instead his
literary and philosophy background, declaring an interest in existential rather than
sociological questions. “In landscape as well as actors,” Pawlikowski maintains, “I’m
always looking for something contradictory that reminds me both of my past and of
literature” (qtd. in Porton 38). Like Fatih Akin, he has never been properly trained in
documentary or feature filmmaking, but more importantly, like Akin, he develops his
own scripts, working with actors while constructing his stories. Akin started his career as
an actor, and began making films because he no longer wanted to play the “stereotype
Turk” in films where “migrants could only appear in one guise: as a problem” (qtd. in
Berghahn 143). A former literature and philosophy student, Pawlikowski got interested in
film-making after taking a film workshop at Oxford University. In the early eighties,
when he sometimes watched “eight films a day” during the major European film
festivals, he not only had the opportunity to interview major directors such as Wenders
and Fassbinder, but also to publish articles about European cinema in a small magazine
titled Stills (Pulver 266). In 2004, Pawlikowski’s position as a Research Fellow at Oxford
Brookes University has given him the opportunity to teach students about the realist
genres of contemporary film-making in Britain.
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In order to describe Pawlikowski’s “unique” style, Dorota Ostrowska suggests
that we should understand his features and dramas through his previous work on
television documentaries as well as his background in photography (148). Speaking of
Last Resort, Ostrowska argues that its images are neither purely televisual nor purely
cinematic (157). Instead, they are “kinesthetic,” resulting from an “osmosis” rather than a
mere hybridization of televisual and cinematic elements (Ostrowska 156). To distinguish
Pawlikowski’s realism from the more didactic “critical realism” of a film-maker like Ken
Loach or from the “heightened realism” (Lay 89) or “modernist realism” (Porton 164) of
Mike Leigh, Samantha Lay calls it “poetic” (110). When describing his own work,
Pawlikowski has revealed his intention to create a “mythic British realism” (qtd. in
Adams 2). In Last Resort, he tells us, he sought to build a slightly abstract stage for a
drama that is stylized to the point where the real world is “real but not real” (qtd. in
Roberts 97), like a dream whose effect in reality manages to remain powerful because it
is hard to forget. Andrew Burke argues, in this respect, that Pawlikowski revitalizes a
form of realism that is able to uncover the fictional aspect of reality precisely because its
narrative has unreal dimensions and almost ”veers into the abstract” (184).
3.6 Issues of Class, Whiteness and Neoracism in Last Resort
At the beginning of her article ‘“Welcome to Britain’: The Cultural Politics of
Asylum,” Imogen Tyler draws attention to the way in which the British Government’s
official tourist website (www.visitbritain.com) deploys a certain discourse to create an
ideological image of Britain and establish the profile of what the ideal visitor looks like:
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Right now Britain is one of the most exciting places on the planet, a world in one
island. You will find a country of fascinating history and heritage, a country busy
reinventing itself with confidence and style, influenced by the hundreds of
nationalities who now call Britain home. . .The beauty of Britain will blow you
away…Come and experience it for yourself now!
(‘Welcome to Britain Now!’ 2007)
Tyler explains how the site’s homepage greets visitors with the “Welcome to Britain”
banner, inviting one to choose one’s country of origin from a given list of thirty-four
countries. We learn that all African nations (except South Africa) and all Eastern
European countries (except Poland) – that is, all the countries from which most asylum-
seekers and economic migrants originate – are excluded from this list. Despite its
emphasis on policies of inclusion and diversity, Tyler maintains, this site makes it clear
that hospitality is not offered to all foreigners, foreclosing a number of possible
identifications (186).
This discrepancy between the official projected image of Britain and the
exclusions through which it actually operates is made evident in Pawlikowki’s film Last
Resort. Originally conceived as a TV production for BBC Films, Last Resort managed to
enter cinema distribution networks and won a few important awards. The refugee theme
brought the movie to the critics’ attention, and their response has been overwhelmingly
positive. Recognized for its ability to offer a new cinematic vision of what usually
remains invisible in contemporary Britain, Last Resort has paradoxically succeeded to
please both those concerned with the plight of refugees and those who adopted defensive
attitudes towards “outsiders” as a result of the media’s insistence on a “refugee crisis.”
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While recognizing the film’s qualities, some critics, such as Yosefa Loshitzky,
voice concern that the movie only questions the inhospitality of the authorities, and not
that of the ordinary British people, who are presented as “decent and welcoming” (752).
As she comments, “Tanya, the damsel in distress locked in the tower of detention, is
eventually freed by Alfie, the gentle working-class hero” (752). Pawlikowski, however,
falters when discussing the refugee theme of his movie. For him, Last Resort should be
understood primarily as an exploration of the mother-son relationship.
Irrespective of the director’s intention, however, his “real but not real” world
creates a realistic effect that is hard not to take at face value. In other words, one is at
pains to dissociate the mother-and-son narrative from the fact that the main characters are
subjected to a special treatment by the authorities. Moreover, given that Tanya and
Artyom come from Russia, I argue that one may critically approach Last Resort by
addressing the “whiteness question” in a European context rather than an American one,
in which whiteness theory was developed.
The “whiteness” theory stems from an American history approach which argues
that whiteness gets forged during the early twentieth century as various different
European ethnic groups, who otherwise have little or nothing in common in Europe, “turn
themselves white” against the contrast of people of color. Whiteness, in this sense, has to
be understood as a racial designation despite the fact that it is usually neutral, not visible,
unmarked. “To trace the process by which Celts or Slavs became Caucasians,” Matthew
Frye Jacobson asserts, “is to recognize race as ideological” (14). Racial whiteness,
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Jacobson argues, has been a contestable notion as a number of groups (Jewish, Irish,
Armenian, Polish, Greek, Sicilian, Finnish, and many others) faced challenges with
respect to their racial lineage when they first came to the United States. They only
became Caucasians over time, through a selective and filtering process. What the
growing scholarship on “whiteness” emphasizes is that the process of being “assigned”
whiteness has proved to be “a process intertwined with the ever-changing perceptions of
race and ethnicity” (Marciniak 2006b 40). Thus, whiteness has to be read critically, rather
than simply assumed as a fact of life.
From this perspective, one could argue that whiteness is at the foreground in Last
Resort and that it becomes a site of subjectivity. This this does not mean that whiteness
has to be taken necessarily as something negative, that is, as positioned in contrast to
people of color. Indeed, the refugees of color do recede into the background in the movie,
but the potential problematic aspect comes not from the fact that the distance between
white people and refugees of color makes the romance between Tanya and Alfie possible,
as one might think. Rather, it comes from the fact that this distance, the treatment of
refugees as background, makes the foregrounding of white subjectivity possible.
Whiteness, in this sense, should not be taken in a monolithic sense: what happens with
the foreground/background effect is that “a certain possibility of whiteness as racial
commonality over whiteness understood as ethnic difference is made possible in the
movie” (Nguyen 2007). In her article “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Sara Ahmed
explains that whiteness is not reducible to white skin or to something one can be or
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possess. Rather, it is lived as background to experience, as it involves a form of
orientation in the world. It is a “category of experience that disappears as a category
through experience,” so that “this disappearance makes whiteness ‘worldly”’ (Ahmed
150). From this perspective, whiteness has to be understood in terms of a “repetition of
the passing by of some bodies and not others” (159), a repetition that involves replicating
“a very style of embodiment, a way of inhabiting space, which claims space by the
accumulation of gestures of sinking into that space” (159). When she speaks of
institutions as being white, Ahmed is drawing attention to their spaces “are shaped by the
proximity of some bodies and not others: white bodies gather, and cohere to form the
edges of such spaces” (157).
When non-white bodies learn to fade into the background, they become invisible
and therefore we perceive space as white. When they do not pass, non-white bodies
become hypervisible in a “white space.” For Ahmed, likeness is an effect of the
proximity of shared residence. Just as two different peas in a pod come to be seen “alike”
as an effect of their contiguity, bodies come to be seen as “alike,” as for instance “sharing
whiteness” as a “characteristic,” as an effect of such proximities (155). Ultimately,
Ahmed understands whiteness as “a social and bodily orientation given that some bodies
will be more at home in a world that is oriented around whiteness” (160).
Pawlikowski’s use of a white asylum seeker provides the means to open up a
discussion on whiteness in a European context. Just as immigrants have learned how not
to be black as a way of becoming American, many East Europeans learn how to
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distinguish themselves from groups less white than themselves or less “cultured” in the
appropriate fashion, as a way to aid their own assimilation. It is interesting to note how in
Last Resort Alfie, speaking from the privileged position of the dominant culture,
impresses Tanya by demonstrating his knowledge of Indian food. He explains to her the
difference between chicken tikka masala and vindaloo, pila rice, and Bombay sag
potatoes. “If you throw up, it’s all on my head. Naan bread to soak it up” he tells her,
anticipating her association of “ethnic” food with abjection. Tanya, however, does not
“fancy” soaking the bread with her fingers. “We have no spoons,” she innocently tells
Alfie, who surprises her by quickly drawing two spoons from his pocket. In another
scene, we see Tanya sitting stiff and eating properly at the table, using both fork and
knife to put some meat on Artyom’s plate.
In the determination to prove themselves “European,” East Europeans have often
capitalized on their whiteness. Eastern European nations’ unspoken insistence on their
whiteness, Anikó Imre rightly observes, “is one of the most effective and least recognized
means of asserting their Europeanness” (82). Depending on circumstances, East
Europeans have adopted or been ascribed subject positions that are rarely brought under
scrutiny. When it was possible to obtain the privileges afforded by claiming a
Gypsy/Romani subject position, some East Europeans posed as Gypsies to obtain refugee
status (Imre 86). For the most part, however, they prefer to assert their ‘racial purity’
especially by disavowing any similarities with the Gypsy Other. Widespread frustration
over the Westerners’ conflation of East Europeans with Gypsies has led to numerous
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public outcries, especially in a country like Romania. Fearing that Romania has come to
be seen as “Rromania” in the eyes of outsiders, popular Romanian discourses have
contested the Western Europeans’ ‘misrecognition’ that purportedly identifies them as
ethnic Roms/Romanies. To be sure, Romanians prefer to stress their descent from the
Romans and the fact that they speak a Romance language. Although for many American
eyes the Romani look white, for a majority of Europeans they appear “colored.” “Rom,”
“Romani” or “Rromani” are ethnonyms chosen by Gypsy groups as a way of avoiding
other pejorative appellations such as “Tigani,” “Gitano,” or “zigeuner” (just as “jidan” is
used as a slur for “Jew”). However, as Aniko Imre has noted, this does not automatically
entail an easy erasure of prejudice (97).
It is important to recognize that unlike other directors who portray immigrants in
England, Pawlikowski has chosen a Russian actress to play Tanya. In Stephen Frears’
much acclaimed Dirty Pretty Things (UK, 2002) for instance, the main characters, two
illegal immigrants in London, are played by a London-born actor of Nigerian descent and
the widely recognizable French actress Audrey Tatou. Ultimately unconvincing, these
characters, “heroes by default,” represent what Katarzyna Marciniak calls a “palatable
foreignness” (193), that is, a safe encounter with otherness. Tatou, who poses as a
Muslim Turkish woman named Senay, appears bare-shouldered on the DVD cover,
enticing us to a readily accessible spectatorial visual consumption. With a little effort,
Senay is “just like us.” As Marciniak comments referencing a famous line from Joel
Zwick’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding (USA, 2002), “in the end, we all fruit” (given that
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“Miller” and “Portokalos,” the names of the American and the Greek families, derive
from the Greek words for apple and orange), films run the risk of erasing differences by
“toning them down” to accommodate Western spectatorial acceptance. In this respect, the
idea that despite cultural differences we are all the same “sells a particular version of
multiculturalism, one based on the logic of homogeneity and sameness,” functioning “as
a safe panacea rather than an actual, risky engagement with difference” (Marciniak 197).
One important aspect Last Resort brings to the fore is that while Fortress Europe
views white people from former communist countries as second class citizens, in their
turn, these second world citizens often keep a distance from people of color, from whom
they often dissociate themselves. The film makes it possible to gauge this through subtle
details, such as when Artyom defensively tells a woman of color at the airport “What are
you looking at?” At the beginning of Last Resort we see a fight between a white woman
and a woman of color whose children witness an exchange of reproaches: “It’s your
fault,” “No, it’s your fault.” Alfie comes to put a stop to this, and his comment that he is
“sick of this” suggests that such exchanges happen frequently. In another scene, when
Tania and Alfie walk back to the refugee tower from the bingo hall, they notice a violent
fight not far away from them. “You don’t want to see that,” Alfie tells her, and the couple
speeds up as he protectively pats her on her back.
To be sure, Tanya and Artyom find themselves stuck in a place traditionally
reserved for Third World refugees. Part of Tanya’s frustration with the way in which she
is treated may stem from the fact that, during the Cold War, those few East European
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asylum seekers that managed to escape to the West were received with compassion, as
both authorities and public opinion sympathized with them. By being urged to expose the
appalling conditions behind the Iron Curtain, they were often exploited by Western media
to confirm the superiority of the Western world.
At this point I would like to bring into this discussion Étienne Balibar’s term
“neoracism,” which describes a racism that relies not on biological differences but which
functions by insisting on cultural differences as a way of sustaining political and
economical inequality (Balibar 21). “Neoracism” serves here as a useful way to describe
representations of white Eastern Europeans in Fortress Europe, who, as one critic put it,
may become “safely ‘Orientalizable’ while seemingly racially unmarked” (Forrester 10).
Neoracism goes hand in hand with class discrimination, and as I argue further, this is
rendered visible in Last Resort.
The movie begins with Tanya and Artyom’s arrival at the airport as they are being
carried backwards in the airport transit shuttle. The two passengers seem relieved that the
long flight is finally over, aimlessly glancing sideways as the small glass cabin carries
them through a dark tunnel towards the bright light of a sunny morning. Next, we see the
two protagonists waiting in line for passport control, clueless about what awaits them.
The few scenes that follow are paradigmatic for the way in which the modern airport
functions. “As institutions,” Robert Miles observes, airports “embody in their existence
and operation the process of globalization,” having “a significant role in the organization
of ethnicity and the confirmation and transcendence of nationalism” (161). Space is
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organized in a way that reinforces class differentiation, classifying and differentiating
between nationals and aliens, regulating movement as a site of national frontier. Indeed,
as Marfleet points out, the notions of nation and alien form a “dualism at the heart of
modern political power,” they are “opposite and complementary” because “changes in the
character of one must affect the other” (264).
Katarzina Marciniak, who has noted how specific U.S. immigration laws and
restrictions have traditionally privileged Western Europeans over Eastern and Southern
Europeans or non-white newcomers, comments that:
…sorting of desirable immigrants does not simply operate along the binarized
lines of whiteness/nonwhiteness, where whiteness is a universally preferred racial
marker. Rather, “whiteness” needs to be understood as a selective metacategory
that, working through “filtering,” privileges only the most “appropriate” of the
white bodies. (2006b: 40)

In this respect, Last Resort brings to our attention the way in which bodies are
filtered in the UK. In his detailed analysis of airports in Britain, Miles contends that the
UK immigration legislation and policy has been shaped not only by racism and sexism,
but also by class discrimination (164). Thus, not all arrivals are checked with the same
degree of rigor, as international passengers arriving at British ports are organized into
separate channels for EU and non-EU nationals. The non-EU lines take longer, as
passengers are asked a series of questions about the purpose and length of their intended
stay in the UK. According to the official directives, the decision to grant “leave of entry”
is “largely instinctive and based on experience” (Miles 173). But “instinct,” Miles rightly
notes, is socially constructed (173). Thus, an “instinctive” exercise of power allows
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racialized, sexualized but also class-based cultural discourses to come into play through
the supposedly common sense of the immigration officers. In the UK, the Immigration
Service at the airport has the power to detain any suspected person in ‘secure
accommodation’ detention centers (Miles 175). Since 2000, the same year when Last
Resort came out, a new policy of dispersing asylum seekers to provincial centers was put
into practice in Britain (Garner 46).
What one immediately notices in the airport scene in Last Resort is that Tanya is
waiting, together with a few other darker-skinned passengers, in a separate, special line
meant for Others. According to the airport rules, Tanya is asked about her intended stay
in the UK and how much money she has in her possession. When she admits that she
only has eighty-five dollars, and is unsure about how long she might stay in Britain, her
passport and ticket are confiscated. While her luggage is searched for “any documents
that may pertain to her stay whilst in the UK,” she is further interrogated as to whether
she is “intending to solicit work whilst in the UK.” Faced with the possibility of having to
go back to Russia immediately, the only solution she finds to gain enough time to locate
her fiancé is to “trick the system” by demanding political asylum. Unaware of what this
entails, she soon finds herself trapped in a remote resort whose high fences and
surveillance cameras prevent escape. When she gives up, admitting to a false claim, she
learns that she has to wait for another ‘three to six months’ until her application is
processed. Tania is not granted a refugee status, that is, she is not given a legal status but
finds herself labeled as an asylum-seeker. As Imogen Tyler has noted, the shift in
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terminology occurred in the early 1990s, when ‘asylum-seeker’ started being used in the
UK as a way “to maneuver around the rights of the refugees prescribed by international
law” (189).
By choosing to make a film on a bogus refugee, Pawlikowski offers us less a
bitter indictment of the British society, than a meditation on the “banality of evil” and our
complicity in it. Last Resort underscores, through the example of a “refugee by accident,”
the vulnerable position in which a woman and her son may inhabit simply because they
come from Russia and happen to have a small budget. It is a movie that critiques
precisely the socially constructed common sense of the immigration officers, their polite
yet patronizing attitude, the very “discourse concerning the supposed threat posed to Our
culture and way of life by the migration of “culturally distinct’ people” (Miles 179).
One important lesson that the viewer is able to learn from Last Resort is that the
enthusiastic discourse about the objective of freedom and movement in the UK contrasts
sharply with what happens in reality. The movie exposes how issues of class and
nationality, besides those or race and gender, still matter considerably. Tanya comes to
Britain looking for love, but in the eyes of the immigrant officer she is a second-class
citizen, a problem. Contrary to her expectations, she discovers that her lack of money is a
major obstacle to being allowed into the country. Money is not of primary concern for
her, as she asks Artyom about the exact amount in their possession. In his turn, Artyom
curiously watches as his mother is being photographed like a criminal and vehemently
protests when police officers accompanied by dogs try to shove them into a police car.
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Until his mother shouts at him to calm down, explaining that she has applied for political
asylum, he kicks his feet shouting, “What do they want from us?”
Bruce Benner and Imogen Tyler have recently brought to attention the fact the
films run the risk of fetishizing or romanticizing the figure of the refugee so that we as
spectators can be granted easy access to their sufferance, safely consuming their
experience as “border tourists” (28). Talking about “the complex dialectic of gazes” in
Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (UK, 2003), Yosefa Loshitzky alerts us to a
similar problematic, arguing that the spectator “is placed in a ‘moral dilemma’ whether
he or she is entitled to derive pleasure from the other’s suffering” (753). However, I
contend that In This World is less successful in creating a moral dilemma for spectators
than Last Resort because it fails to engage its audience in a self-reflective analysis.
Presenting us with the various misfortunes of the Afghan refugees outside of Britain, the
movie channels one’s blame towards irresponsible smugglers and ignorant border guards.
Last Resort is a “false documentary” on asylum-seekers, but let us remember that this is
how Alain Resnais promoted his 1959 film, Hiroshima Mon Amour. The movie resists
becoming ‘just another film’ about them, foregrounding certain ethical implications
pertaining to the limits of representation. By choosing to portray Tanya’s experiences as
an asylum-seeker in a narrative that does not end in victimization, Pawlikowski eschews
appropriating the figure of the ‘other’ in ways that blur distinctions between different
experiences of being displaced from home. As he comments, “Most outsiders in British
cinema are sinister, comic, or victims to be pitied. I wouldn’t dream of making a film
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about the Arab, Iranian or Chinese experience. I have no idea how the world looks from
their perspective” (qtd. in Kellaway 10). Given Pawlikowski’s critique of Michael
Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo (UK/USA 1997), one might take Last Resort,
which came out immediately after Wonderland, as a sort of response to Winterbottom’s
much-praised “authentic” vision of London. Irrespective of his intentions though, by
discussing Last Resort in conjunction with Michael Winterbottom’s movie I argue here
that Last Resort can be taken as a counter-utopia to the celebratory vision of Wonderland.
3.7 Welcome to Wonderland! Questioning the Authenticity of the National Image
The big, ironic graffiti from a building in Winterbottom’s film Welcome to
Sarajevo (UK/USA, 1997), “Welcome to Sarajevo, Help Bosnia Now!” is echoed with a
twist in Last Resort, where a large advertisement from an amusement park greets the
asylum-seekers with the sign “Welcome to Dreamland.” In Winterbottom’s movie, the
graffiti represents an ironic invitation to a carnivalesque feast, an enticement to death and
hell in ‘”Wasteland” Sarajevo. A similar sardonic effect is achieved in Last Resort, where
the welcome banner signals a betrayal of expectations by appealing to film viewers’
duplicity in recognizing the futility of the welcoming gesture. The empty amusement
park called Dreamland marks a disjuncture between reality and the allure of Britain as
“one of the most exciting places on the planet.”
Samantha Lay points out, following John Hill, that one can identify two specific
approaches in contemporary socialist realist texts that articulate a “weakening of the
ideologies of masculinity: failure and utopianism” (104). Clearly, Alfie experiences a
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crisis of masculinity in the face of economic adversity, but Pawlikowski does not
accentuate either his failure or a fantasy resolution that would “save him from the brink
of crisis” (Lay 104). The fact that Alfie engages in fights and that when he is by himself
he rehearses boxing moves in front of the mirror suggests that he desires to be seen as
tough and in control of things. After Tania leaves him, we can only infer that nothing
much will change for him in the near future.
In the introduction to the second edition of The British Cinema Book, Robert
Murphy contends that the appeal of a movie like Wonderland and a few other “modest
films” such as Last Resort and The Low Down (Jamie Thraves 2001) “lies in its visually
adept revelation of contemporary life in Britain” (3). Drawing on John Berger’s comment
that “realism can never be defined as a style,” he praises Winterbottom’s movie as ‘”a
bridge to the underclass films” and the director’s style for its “poetic realism” (3). The
realism of Wonderland, Murthy maintains, comes especially from the director’s
insistence on filming in real locations.
It is my contention that pairing Wonderland with Last Resort, that is, the realism
of “Wonderland” and “Wasteland,” is problematic. When read in conjunction with
several scenes from Last Resort, Wonderland’s evocation – or indeed “revelation” as
Murphy puts it – of “contemporary life in Britain” is deceptive. Despite Winterbottom’s
efforts to “celebrate” a multicultural British society and depict some working-class
housing, his portrayal of London almost achieves a postcard status. Although
Wonderland figures urban life as isolating, the overwhelming effect that the film projects
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is that London is an almost “otherly” world, where things happen at full speed. One is left
with the impression that Britain is, as the “Welcome to Britain” website promises, truly
the most exciting place on the planet. As such, it perpetuates a “cool Britannia” that
inscribes itself into the spectators’ minds. While Winterbottom has underlined his efforts
to achieve a visual parallel to Wong Kar-Wai’s Hong Kong (Jeffries 1), some critics have
especially stressed the director’s portrayal of “a London that you might actually
recognize,” not a “touristic confection” (Jeffries 1). Even though Wonderland portrays
the indifference and solitude that people can feel in a big city, it never ceases to
emphasize a London full of skyscrapers, celebrated by fireworks, happy children, and
new born Alice’s. Quite intriguingly, people of color show up, but predominantly
intruding and interrupting white people’s lives: a Black woman tries to seduce a white
woman’s husband, her son spies on their daughter, and a black boy in the metro stops
people “for a penny.” They may all go to bingo together, but not to church. Ultimately, a
powerful spirit of an exclusively white community comes together at sports events.
With these things in mind, if we are to remember Pawlikowski’s comments that
when shooting in London “it’s all like cultural wallpaper …and yet it feels like things are
happening and things are really exciting: a kind of conspiracy the British film seems to
promote” (qtd. in Roberts 96), we may take Last Resort as a sort of “anti-conspiracy”
gesture. He too, shows another stylized Britain, but at least not the utopian version of
Wonderland, which dominates the spectators’ fantasy of Britain. Given that so many
scenes in Last Resort resonate with similar ones in Wonderland (the mother and son
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theme, the amusement park, the bingo scenes with a bingo-caller, feeling lonely and
looking outside of one’s window, watching Planet Earth documentaries on TV), it seems
as if Pawlikowski comments on them visually and aesthetically, as if flipping postcards
on the other side to show the same image “naked.” If anything, this aesthetic deconstructs
and undermines a fantasy of established iconographies, helping spectators let hold of
their guard when they voyeuristically inspect immigrants’ lives.
It remains unclear whether Tanya’s homecoming journey is going to be
redemptive. What is evident, however, is that her desire to return does not stem from a
yearning for a mythic place, as is the case with many films portraying exilic or diasporic
experiences. Ultimately, the new start back home is neither linked with a liberating self-
discovery, nor glamorized. Going “home,” in Pawlikowski’s account, becomes just one
option among possible others.

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Chapter 4
Learning to Live (Together) in a Haunted Europe

4.1 A “Crisis of Representation”: Performing Presence, Double-Occupancy, and
Post-Identity

To learn to live: a strange watchword. Who would
learn? From whom? To teach to live, but to whom?
Will we ever know? Will we ever know how to live
and first of all what “to learn to live” means? And
why “finally”?
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

[New European Cinema] can contribute to its own crisis of representation.
Thomas Elsaesser

“Europe today is doubly-occupied, indeed haunted” (18) by its recent history of
the Holocaust, the failure of Socialism, and the consequences of (neo) colonialism among
others, comments Thomas Elsaesser in a recent article on European cinema. Not only is
Europe haunted, but now it also operates under the principle of transnational sovereignty
brought by the political changes in the European Union. Consequently, the European
Union agreements have led to new ways of thinking about nationhood and “the right of
mutual interference in the internal affairs of the other” (Elsaesser 22), which implies that
the Community can control how a member state may have to change its specific national
practices or national values. Although many times contested, this principle allows
however for a new social contract that can mediate between parties with grievances
against each other. Regarding the pivotal role that cinema can have in this new thinking
about conflict management and communication, as well as to its contribution to a new
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understanding of the present crisis in the European Union, Elsaesser argues that cinema
“can contribute to its own crisis of representation,” a crisis that many would associate
with the transition to the post-photographic or digital image and the loss of indexicality of
the photographic image (Elsaesser 23). The critic does not necessarily deplore such a
move, but challenges the matter of perspective: instead of understanding this crisis in
terms of a shift from (European traditional) realism to illusionism (simulacrum), he sees
it a (positive) change from “claiming the real” to “performing presence” (24). What this
triggers is “a new spectatorial contract: a renegotiation of belief and the suspension of
disbelief…a different way of thinking about the cinema’s relation to fiction, to the mode
of the ‘as if’” (24). Furthermore, given the decline in criticism about national cinemas
and auteurism, Elsaesser notes, European cinema and media have been predominantly
discussed in terms of cultural identity and struggles over issues of ethnic, gender, class,
or religious identity.
As a result of this tendency in film criticism, the debate on European cinema has
recently shifted from asking the question,”what is the identity of European cinema?” (i.e.,
how does it differ from other cinemas, particularly from Hollywood) to the question,
“what is European identity in cinema?” and, more specifically, “what identities are
represented in European cinema?” (Trifonova 1). In other words, the New European
Cinema is currently examined primarily in terms of the different identities in Europe it
represents and the common experiences these identities share. That is, rather than being
analyzed in terms of shared formal or stylistic features, European films are now defined
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according to their subject matter, which mainly revolves around stories of
marginalization and displacement.
To address this shift in the analysis of New European films, film critics have
employed terms such as “diversity,” “liminality,” “in-betweeness” “hybridization,”
“multiculturalism,” or “Creolization.” However, a review of recent scholarly writing on
European cinema suggests that the ultimate relevance of these terms is increasingly
contested. Hamid Dabashi, for instance, takes issue with the notions of hybridity and
liminality, calling them “bourgeois suppositions” (42) and lamenting that, as a result of
widespread critical attention to these terms, “more pertinent problems as renewed forms
of racism, sexism, unemployment, social unrest, and normative dissonance between the
disenfranchised poor and the globalized civil society remain largely dismissed and
entirely under-theorized” (40). Dabashi’s claims seem to be rather exaggerated, yet they
point nonetheless to a crisis of representation where the unnamed new forms of racism
and sexism (still) remain unaccounted for. Graham Murdoch also bemoans that we need
new forms of representation which allow people to recognize and understand themselves
and others because, in his view, the politics of cultural diversity and hybridity can no
longer be accommodated within the economics of audiovisual industry. Echoing Dabashi,
Murdoch claims that we need a politics of difference that may be able to assist and
promote acts of citizenship in a hybrid society. To address the “crisis of representation,”
Murdoch points to cultural forms as a means of displaying difference and sameness in
their complexity (107).
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In The Politics of Contemporary European Cinema: Histories, Borders,
Diasporas, Mike Wayne suggests that the notion of hybrid identities is problematic
because while it “tends to downplay history, as it promotes the possibility of remaking
oneself,” it also risks “presenting history as inescapable fate and the self as permanently
fixed by the past” (88). This endorsement of a postmodern “hybrid” and “polycentric”
identity and its ultimate relevance is also questioned by Temenuga Trifonova, who
doubts whether these notions may be able to reveal anything meaningful about European
identity in particular. Even as the notion of hybrid and diasporic identity may be more
apt to describe the present realities of border-crossing in Europe than the old essentialist
notion of identity, the problem with this way of describing identity is that it is
inextricably bound up with the troubles inherent in the postmodern fascination with the
continuous shifting proliferation of meanings and identities (Trifonova 18).
Drawing on criticis such as Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, Anne
McClintock, and Maxim Silverman, Ali Behdad similarly contends that the current
language of postcolonial theory (expressed in terms such as “power,” “opposition,”
“hegemony,” “resistance,” “exile,” and “strategies of resistance” among others) entails a
grammar of opposition that can be replicated in all imperial and post-imperial situations.
This implies that opposition to a dominant culture unifies all post-colonial relations,
ignoring situated examples or specific historical contexts of cultural capital. In other
words, “celebratory theories of diaspora fail to acknowledge that location is still an
important category that influences the specific manifestations of transnational
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formations” (Behdad 226). In the European context, Behdad specifically points to
theorists such a Stuart Hall and Homi K. Bhabha, who often invoke diaspora identities
and deterritorialized subjects in their writings yet they not only do not “historicize the
particular predicaments of racial ‘othering’ in various cosmopolitan contexts,” but also
“mystify the redemptive qualities and oppositional possibilities of exilic consciousness”
(226). For Behdad, the very ideas of exile and displacement are therefore problematic
and should be used carefully, since they place value on an experience that is primarily
painful and hardly ever redemptive. To view exilic consciousness as somehow being
intrinsically creative and transformative falsely celebrates an experience, writing out
individual experiences in a discourse that pays little attention to “specific manifestations
of transnational formations” (231-32).
Less as a solution than a provocative place holder, Elsaesser’s term “double
occupancy” offers, I believe, one of the most appropriate models for addressing the post-
1989 crisis of representation in Europe and discussing “identity,” whether individual,
cultural, or national. Since one can argue (as Elsaesser in fact does) that in a sense we can
consider everyone in Europe today as diasporic and displaced in relation to some marker
of ethnic, regional, religious, or linguistic difference, Elsaesser suggests that we should
adopt a “post-identity” mode of thinking capable of accounting for a the state of
“always-already” occupation (23) . “Double-occupancy” is, in other words, a better suited
metaphor able to describe the European discursive and geopolitical territories as “always-
already occupied.” Unlike the “dry” terms previously used, “double-occupancy” not only
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signals issues of power and politics, but also serves as a reminder of Europe’s history of
migrations, invasions, pogroms and expulsions. While terms such as “multiculturalism”
and “diversity” seem to underestimate asymmetrical power structures in play, “double-
occupancy” draws attention to conflict and contestation.
4.2 Post-Mortem Cinema in Contemporary Europe
The post-mortem condition manages to invent new regimes
of fiction between mourning and metamorphosis. We
cannot but be surprised by the number of recent films
which develop this theme… The post-mortem seems more
alive today than it has ever been until now. How shall we
interpret this sign? Is it a symptom of survival, of
renaissance, or of melancholia?
Erik Bullot, “The Cinema is a Post-mortem Invention,”

In what follows I will consider the ways in which New European Cinema can
contribute to the way Europe sees itself and engages with others by drawing on
Elsaesser’s conceptualization of terms such as “double-occupancy,” “post-mortem” (as
opposed to “post-modern”), “post-identity” and “performativity.” I propose to examine
in this chapter a group of recent European films which, taken together, may be said to
constitute a “post-mortem cinema.” This cinema calls into question the temporal
continuity intimated by hegemonic interpretations of Europe’s past, revealing anxieties
related to the loss of grand narratives and binary distinctions which operated in a pre-
1989 world.
The films that I analyze here share a number of stylistic and narrative features
which depart from the realist tradition, revealing a concern with how to relate to Europe’s
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past and how to envision the future. Crucially, they seem to introduce a temporality that
blurs the distinction between past and present, to the effect that flashbacks no longer offer
a turn to a past that is excavated and explained – rather, these films create an overlapping
texture in which the past seems to coexist with the present, not “behind” us, as something
to which we consciously return. Moreover, the transition from the past to the present is
no longer clearly marked. These films work through the trope of haunting whose
temporal disjunction is left ambivalent. In these films, historical time seems to freeze,
making it unclear whether it is the past that haunts the present or the present that haunts
the past. The “continuity editing” characteristic of realist historical narratives is fractured
by temporal interruptions to the unfolding of the plot, posing hermeneutic challenges to
the spectator and character alike.
Before I begin my analysis of films, I will first explain the various theoretical
approaches to such temporal disjunctions in cinema. According to Elsaesser, the notion of
“post-mortem” cinema describes the way in which European films enact a cinematic form
of performativity by giving “intractable social conflicts” or “missed encounters in
history” a space for a dialogue that might otherwise be impossible (28). In this
understanding of the specific role that cinema may have in voicing and representing
complex historical relationships that otherwise could not be foregrounded, the notion of
performativity refers to the ways in which filmmakers perform rather than represent
complex and ambivalent historical relationships. Elsaesser argues that film has a
particular relation to trauma in that it is being able to go beyond the recording of
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historical events and instantiate ways of apprehending obliquely histories that can’t be
told but whose traces might be felt. In his view, the notion of performativity refers to “an
often allegorical way of enacting failure and futility” (26). For instance, the difficult
relationship between Germans and Jews after Auschwitz came to be translated (rather
than represented), in an allegorical way through cinematic failed attempts such as that of
Werner Herzog’s famous character Fitzcarraldo, whose absurd quest is to build an opera
house in the Amazon forest.
“Post-mortem” films involve protagonists who are there and not there, who are
already dead, or people with debilitating pathologies such as amnesia or paranoia. It is
through belief and fantasy, argues Elsaesser, that these characters enter the real of the
symbolic, that is, they sustain their own modes of being by relying on the belief of the
others to confirm their existence. Fatih Akin’s Head-On, Elsaesser suggests, can be
taken as a “post-mortem” film especially if we consider its first part, when the two main
characters meet after having attempted to commit suicide, each excluded from their
respective social symbolic. The contract which they enter (that they do not love each
other) to sustain their mutual fantasy-frames, exposes “what intersubjectivity beyond
identity might look like: a very dangerous, but also potentially liberating state, which
unravels precisely when one takes the fantasy for a reality and the mutually sustaining
fiction collapses” (Elsaesser 30).
Erik Bullot also theorizes the existence of a “post-mortem cinema” in a seminal essay
titled “Cinema is a post-mortem invention” (“Le cinéma est une invention post-mortem”).
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Bullot understands the post-mortem (la figure du post-mortem) as a figure that “troubles”
(inquète) contemporary cinema. According to him, recent European films often begin
with a scene in which there is either an accident or an imminent death – announced by a
doctor, for instance – as a pretext for exploring a peculiar temporality very much linked
to the future perfect tense (conjuguée au futur antérieur). Yet the inaugural spectacle of
death in many of contemporary films, Bullot points out, does not unleash a series of
flashbacks in order to elucidate the particular circumstances of one’s death; on the
contrary, it opens up a flashback towards the future (un flash-back vers le futur), an
anticipation without memory, since the surviving person is often amnesiac after the
catastrophe. Moreover, the dead figure present in many contemporary films mixes up the
time of the living with that of the dead, thwarting each of their identities. From this
perspective, time can be understood as reversible not in terms of duration but somehow
“similar to a glove.” Time seems to split, to become torn, to open up for letting different
temporal dimensions coexist, Bullot contends (5).
Crucially, the critic distinguishes the post-mortem figure from the usual ghostly
figures common in numerous films that we are all too familiar with, noting that its
characteristic attribute is that it cannot be circumscribed to a point of origin. The regular
ghost, so to speak, usually has a very defined place in cinema, and it has a right to be
summoned. By contrast, the post-mortem figure is not satisfied only with inventing new,
fictional temporalities –it also moves the boundaries between genres, contaminating them
like a virus.
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The reason why cinema develops in excess the secrets of this temporal figure,
reasons Bullot, is because the latter happily encounters the history of cinema itself. “The
cinema is already dead,” he insists; the double televisual constraint of live transmission
and delayed transmission keeps creating a lapse in which the post-mortem troubles the
spectral nature of images.
11
Cinema itself therefore seems to confront the following
dilemma: to die, finally, to disappear, to find the way out of the labyrinth of time, or, on
the contrary, to transform itself totally in the process of passing, of becoming something
else, cutting the umbilical cord that attaches it to its history (Bullot 5). This alternative
engages the future of the medium. The post-mortem figure invents a contradictory
temporality that manages to mobilize both disappearance and transformation, amnesia as
well as reminiscence, mourning and survival. As such, it exposes a labile state of the
cinema, marking a bifurcation between two difficulties – on the one hand, its strict
conservation, as in a museum which follows cinephiliac desires, and, on the other hand,
its abolition in the name of a “post-modernism” which would no longer maintain a
dialectical relation with its history (Bullot 7).
“The post-mortem condition manages to invent new regimes of fiction between
mourning and metamorphosis,” Bullot speculates. By opening with an execution, an
accident, or a plunge into a coma, contemporary films no longer make death appear as an
off-screen space (hors-champ) that structures the mise-en- scène, but as one that on the

11
In French: “La double contrainte télévisuelle du direct et du différé ne cesse de creuser
un laps où le post-mortem s’engouffre.”
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contrary, opens up the space of representation to its repetition, rewriting (sa reprise).
The out-of-time (le hors-temps) that represents the post-mortem, a form of partial or
parallel achrony has now replaced the off-screen space (hors-champ), according to
Bullot.
Ghost-like spaces and largely invisible people pervade especially Christian
Petzold’s “Ghost trilogy:” Ghosts (Gespenster, 2005), Yella (2007), and The State I am In
(Die innere Sicherheit, 2000). In all these films, most characters have no real stake in the
world, as they seem to exist in an in-between world. In The State I Am In, we encounter a
pair of former Red Faction Terrorists and their teenage daughter, Jeanne, who wonder
from place to place as spectral remains of the German left. They spend their lives
constantly on the run, leaving a hidden life in abandoned houses and hotel rooms. What is
interesting is that they seem to be haunted themselves by other ghosts – in one scene, the
father gets out of the car at an intersection and raises his hands up, thinking that the other
cars stopped there had been following him.
The film ends with a car crash, from which only the daughter survives, looking
like an amnesiac. It is unclear, at this point, whether Jeanne remembers her past with her
parents: as she begins to distance herself from the car, the end credits roll down
accompanied by Tim Hardin’s plaintive 1967 song “How can we hold on to a dream?”,
the very question confronted by the family throughout the film.
In Ghosts, the viewer follows two young women without a real past or future in
their respective attempts to find the narrative thread of their lives. Nina and Toni, both
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without any familial connections, form a fragile friendship and drift arbitrarily through
the urban spaces of post-unification Berlin, driven by their longing for normality but
hampered by their lack of agency and unable to participate in and connect with their
surroundings. The film stages a failure of recognition and stresses a double identity:
throughout the film, we see what appears to be Nina’s lost mother, Françoise, in search
for her daughter. Françoise lives in her own world, obsessed by the loss of Marie, her
daughter who was kidnapped in front of a supermarket in Berlin when she was three. By
pure chance, Françoise runs into Nina, who seems to have all the birthmarks that would
identify her as the legitimate daughter: a mole between her shoulder blades and a scar on
her left ankle. Françoise takes her to her luxurious hotel and buys her food, yet when her
husband, Pierre, arrives, he tells Nina that Françoise is ill and that Marie is actually dead.
His intervention implies, for Nina and the viewer, that Françoise, in a desperate fantasy
of maternal redemption, has chosen a series of teen-age girls as “surrogate Maries.”
Shocked, Nina insists that she happens to have the exact bodily markings which
Françoise was looking for. Visibly disappointed by Pierre’s treatment of her, Nina refuses
to take his money and leaves the hotel. In the final sequence, Nina discovers Françoise’s
wallet, which her friend Toni had stolen and then discarded earlier in the film. In it, she
finds a computer generated image of how Marie would look like years after her
kidnapping. Like a painting by Gerhard Richter, one of Petzold’s favorite artists, the
series of blurry panels obscures the line between the reality (of the lost child) and fantasy
(of finding her again).
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Fig. 15 Searching for Marie’s birthmarks

Fig. 16 The computer-generated image of Marie
Yella begins in a small East German town where the title heroine (named after
Yella Rottländer, the actress who played Alice in Wim Wenders’ Alice in the Cities) lives
with her father and is stalked by her ex-husband, Ben. She finds a job in Hannover (the
former West Germany), but when she arrives there, she discovers that the company she
was supposed to work for went bankrupt. At the hotel where she is staying, she meets
Philip, a young businessman, who takes her with him to do business transactions and who
teaches her some insights into venture capitalism. The film is organized around a false
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flashback – a flashback into the future as Bullot would put it: it begins with a car accident
when the bankrupt Ben, unable to deal emotionally with her departure from the town,
drives off the bridge into a river. From this moment on, the film seems to freeze time:
Yella miraculously survives, and, like a specter, manages to catch the train to the
promised land of the West.
Yella is a perfect example that illustrates Bullot’s conception of post-modern
cinema: it allows the viewers to witness the temporality of an “as if” (i.e. what would
have happened if Yella survived the accident), it invents a “contradictory temporality”
which mobilizes, at the same time, disappearance and transformation, amnesia and
reminiscence, mourning and survival. When she wakes up after the shock of the accident,
time seems to open up as Yella starts to hear sounds unnoticed by anyone else. The
diegetic sound of crows cawing, which makes her open her eyes and pull herself from the
water, becomes a leitmotif in the film. The swaying of trees in the wind and a foreboding
sound of running water, serve as reminders of Yella’s spectral existence. This is
particularly effective in situations when Yella is doing business negotiations as Philip’s
associate. The boundary between life and death is not clearly marked in the film – neither
dead nor alive, Yella’s specter seems to be free of time and unaware of its transiency. The
flashback after Yella’s accident and death does not serve to elucidate what led to the
accident, but opens up to reveal the future as it coexists with the present. Although the
film gives subtle clues about Yella’s spectrality, we realize only at the end of the film that
she was dead from the beginning. When she becomes entangled in the sticky question of
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how business and ethics are interrelated in venture capitalism, she discovers the price to
be paid for personal happiness. She transforms into a woman who takes charge of her fate
and “works on her dreams” (Abel 2008), only to realize that her death is inevitable in
both East and West Germany.
By making her East German husband and her West German lover almost
indistinguishable (doppelgängers), the film blurs the distinction between Yella’s past and
prsent, between her identity as a woman who grew up in East Germany, and her newly
discovered self as a successful team player in the game of venture capitalism. In other
words, the film’s linear temporality is distorted: ultimately, it remains unclear whether it
is the past that haunts the present (Yella’s past and the memory of a politically divided
Germany haunting the present reunified nation), or whether it is the present of venture
capitalism that haunts the past, revealing, from the impersonal point of view of
globalization, how irrelevant the divisions between West and East have become. The
West/East political division is translated in the film through a temporal division between
the present/future of venture capitalism and the communist past. Since the future,
identified with Philip and with Western capitalism, is presented as uncannily similar to
the past and Yella’s ex-husband, the film implies that paradoxically, it is both the past
and the future that keep haunting Yella. The ghostly Yella is haunted throughout the film
by the ghost of her ex-husband, who seems to continue to stalk her at her hotel. In one
scene, she becomes so frightened by Ben that she begins to run through the brightly-lit
empty hallways of the hotel until she finally reaches Philip’s door. When Philip finally
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opens the door, Yella throws herself into his arms and gently kisses him. The following
shot, from Philip’s point of view, reveals an empty hallway. Ben, the film suggests, is
also a ghostly figure that has survived the accident.

Fig. 17 Yella followed by Ben’s ghost
The film complicates the past division within the nation along a binary axis East–West,
superimposing on it the conflict between an uncomplicated past which promised a stable
sense of identity (in the East) and a mobile, deterritorialized present/future, linked to the
nomadic life of globalization, anonymous looking corporate cities, and empty hotel
rooms. Petzold underscores the increasing unimportance of the political distinctions that
defined the past in the face of the impersonal allegiances demanded by the global
capitalist order. Pressing questions related to national history no longer matter in this
film. Relegating them to the background, Petzold rather underscores the larger problem
of the effects of ruthless capitalism and globalization on personal relationships. Indeed,
Yella uses the division within German national identity to dramatize and emphasize
another, more important division within the film, between the national as such (the
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division East/West) and the transnational, global order of the present, in which belonging
to a successful global corporate outweighs belonging to a particular nation. Philip teaches
Yella the means of getting access to the world of high finance and various corporate
tricks and “broker poses.” In the negotiations which they undertake, she turns out to be a
skilled, ruthless businesswoman who understands the rules of venture capitalism and how
much it depends on gestures, attitudes, poses, surfaces, and games orchestrated by power
structures (Abel 2008).
Petzold based his portrayal of the world of high finance on Harun Farocki’s
documentary Nothing Ventured (Nicht ohne Risiko, 2004). As a former teacher, Farocki
influenced Petzhold and collaborated with him on several projects, co-writing most of the
scripts for Petzold’s films. To make Nothing Ventured, Farocki filmed three days of
private equity negotiations from an anthropological perspective, without a preconceived
notion of their inherent qualities. This documentary, which is made available as a bonus
feature on the DVD for Yella, served as a model when Petzhold developed his script.
Some of the dialogue from the documentary that used in the business negotiations is
reproduced word by word in Yella. In the Pressbook released in connection with the film,
Petzold explains that he and the actors viewed and discussed Farocki’s film during pre-
production.
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Fig. 18 Yella and Philip during negotiations
Farocki and Petzold share the realization that, apart from a few attempts where
people involved in international finance appeared as caricatures, cinema has not managed
to show how postcapitalist undertakings in the early twenty-century really operate: “In
cinema, capitalism is still being imaged as Charles Chaplin did in Modern Times (1936)”
(Petzold qtd. in Abel). As a sort of counterpart to Nothing Ventured, Yella is one of the
first aesthetic attempts to render visible the processes of venture capitalism and the
people involved in them. Moreover, by making visible the architectural manifestations of
the global culture of commerce though chains of standardized hotels and office buildings,
Petzold underscores how national spatial configurations have increasingly lost their local
specificity and have increasingly become standardized as a result of globalization.
Giuseppe Capotondi’s The Double Hour (La doppia ora, 2009) dramatizes the
mental breakdown of the a lonely, half-Slovenian Sonia, who works as a hotel maid in
Turin, after her boyfriend Guido, an ex-policeman working as a security-guard boyfriend,
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is seemingly killed in an armed robbery. The film is structured around instances of odd
slippages and convergences of time, making it hard both for the viewer and the main
character, Sonia, to distinguish between what is real and what is imaginary. The title
refers to the supposedly lucky, yet uncanny, temporal coincidence of hour and minute
(such as seven seven), and as such destabilizes notions of progressive historical time. As
with Yella, time freezes and opens up for an alternative, parallel unfolding of (future)
events.The film is organized around three parts which are prefaced by an apparently
unmotivated scene at the hotel where Sonia works. While cleaning the bathroom of a
hotel room, the young woman living there remarks that Sonia’s hair looks better when
she wears it loose. Shortly after, Sonia hears a sharp noise coming from the bedroom,
and shen she looks out of the window, she sees the young woman dead in a pool of blood
on the sidewalk. The scene seems to create an ominus atmosphere, setting up a feeling of
uncertainty over narrative causality that permeates the remainder of the film.
The following sections depict the speed-dating event at which Sonia and Guido
first meet. Since Guido knows the owner, we are led to believe that he attends such
events regularly. Sonia, however, is there for the first time. Their mutual chemistry is
apparent, and they establish a bond with each other in a short period of time. Sonia learns
that Guido’s wife has been dead for three years and the film suggests that his mourning
for her may have led to the loss of his job as a policeman. One day, Guido takes Sonia to
the estate he oversees and shows her the surveillance and alarm systems he has designed
for the weathy proprietars whose house he’s employed to safeguard. When Guido takes
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Sonia out into the wood and temporarily leaves the house unprotected, armed assailants
subdue them all of a sudden and begin stealing the art objects from the house. The section
concludes with an ambiguous gunshot in which the leader of the thieves struggles with
Guido and a gun goes off. The spectators remain unsure about what has happened to the
couple and who died.
As in Yella, time seems to freeze. The first section of the film opens a flashback to
a future in which Sonia survives and Guido dies. The narrative begins to lose its
emotional realism when Sonia receives a photograph of her and Guido in Buenos Aires.
Since they barely knew each other, let alone travel together, Sonia is visibly disturbed by
the photo and gradually becomes paranoid about strange things that happen to her. She
sees Guido’s face through a security camera in the hotel, but when she replays the
recordings she cannot find any trace of him.
Sounds also hold a special significance. When she’s taking a bath, Sonia is
haunted by the sound of The Cure’s suggestively titled “In Between Days,” a song Guido
had played for her in his car. As she slides down under the water, she is brought back to
the surface by a phone call from the supposedly dead Guido. Her apartment is then
without electricity, which increases Sonia’s state of anxiety. Her improvised lamplight
illuminates the figure of Guido standing at the end of the corridor, making Sonia gasp
with fear. Dante, a policeman who used to work with Guido, keeps following Sonia,
insinuating that that she was the one who orchestrated the robbery and Guido’s killing.
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Confirming Dante’s suspicions, Sonia drives to a truck stop where she slaps but the
kisses one of thieves.
When Sonia and some friends go out, her friend, Margherita, comments that
Sonia’s hair looks better down. Later that night, Margherita commits suicide by throwing
herself out of a window. The similarity between what happens earlier in the film with the
hotel guest and the reiteration of the same comment about her hair unsettle Sonia even
more. At the funeral, she hears her own name read out as the priest lowers her friend’s
body into the grave. Led away by a client from the hotel who gives her drugs and tries to
assault her, Sonia finds herself in big plastic bag which zips over her head and prevents
her from breathing. By miracle, when she opens her eyes she sees Guido’s concerned
face in close-up. As it turns out, everything we saw after the accident was Sonia’s
projection into the future, her nightmare-dream at the hospital.
Yet the narrative order does not resume after this point. Subsequent flashbacks to
the dream reveal that Sonia is still haunted by the version of the past that was merely a
coma-induced experience. Her memory flashes of the dream contain anticipations of what
will turn out to be the future. We are unsure, however, whether the dream was real or not.
While elements such as Guido’s death prove factually incorrect, intimations of a truer,
but as yet unknown, past emerge. The piecing together of these elements into some kind
of a persuasive narrative challenges the spectator’s sense of historical understanding, and
relates to the question of Sonia’s identity that comes to occupy insistently the film’s final
section.
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In a scene reminiscent of Benjamin Heisenberg’s Sleeper (Schläfer, 2005), Dante
hands Guido a police file on Sonia asking: “Are you sure you don’t want to find out?” but
Dante refuses to take the file. Sleeper dramatizes a triangle love story in which one of the
male protagonists, German scientist Johannes, is asked by an agent of the current German
Secret Service to file reports on Farid, his Arab colleague, whom the secret service
suspects of being part of a currently dormant terrorist cell. At first, Johannes refuses any
collaboration with the Secret Service. Gradually, however, he begins to spy on Farid. As
Marco Abel rightly points out in his review of the film, Sleeper compellingly postrays the
affective, “viral,” quality inherent in the act of denunciation. The film’s point is not to
make us wonder whether Farid is guilty of the bomb attack that eventually occurs. If the
film posits the question of guilt at all, Abel emphasizes, the point seems to be quite
clearly that it is Johannes whom we are supposed to consider guilty because of the way
he takes advantage of the power that’s been given to him. Thus, it is Johannes’ refusal to
provide Farid with what would seem to have been a genuine alibi at the end of the film
(when he is questioned again by the police) that makes Johannes the film’s real sleeper,
not Farid.
In The Double Hour, Sonia is a liminal figure. She speaks perfect Italian and her
father is Italian, but her mother is Slovenian. When she goes to a speed dating event, a
man detects something “off” about her. When he guesses that she’s Hungarian, Sonia
tells him that she is from Ljubljana. The film suggests that Sonia might have defrauded
her Italian father at an earlier stage in her life before the met Guido. Guido is reluctant to
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investigate the matter, although he clearly has begun to realize that Sonia was involved in
the robbery and that he had been set up. Unsure about her identity, he follows Sonia to a
car park where she meets Riccardo, her actual boyfriend and the main actor in the
robbery. As they leave, Sonia sees Guido watching them. He calls Dante but hangs up
immediately, watching as the two lovers escape. Sonia boards a flight for Argentina using
a dead woman’s identity.
The film concludes with shots of Guido working as a security guard in a
supermarket and Sonia and Riccardo in Buenos Aires posing for a photograph in front of
the famous bridge. The image recreates the picture of Sonia and Guido that now assumes
the status of an unrealized future memory. Although the film still manages to make the
half-Slovenian Sonia a betraying, double figure whose criminal inclinations one should
suspect, the temporal disjunction of the film suggests that Sonia’s betrayal might just as
well be the future projection and desires of the dead Guido. The film thus destabilizes and
invalidates clear notions of historical time: in The Double Hour, what matters is whose
dream is unfolding and over what ghosts this dream (or rather nightmare) superimposes
itself. We are left to wonder: is the film a projection of Sonia’s desires after her death, are
we watching Guido’s phantasy post-mortem projection onto Sonia, or are they both dead,
haunting each other in an imaginary future, as the photo with the two of them in
Argentina suggests? Ultimately, the film illuminates what Jacques Derrida would call a
“constellation of haunting,” which “has no certain border, but which only blinks and
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sparkles” (Specters 219), in which characters give back speech to their own specters, to
the specters in the others, in the ones haunting their own specters.
In Sven Taddicker’s Emma’s Bliss (Emma’s Glück, 2005), the eponymous
character lives on a farm with her animals on her own, but because she can no longer
afford to pay the bills, she is threatened with eviction. Emma has a special relationship
with her animals, especially her pigs, which she treats as if they were her own pets. Every
time she is supposed to slaughter them, she brings them under a special, old tree, and
whispers stories to them full of tenderness so that they may have an easier, less traumatic
death. At the same time that a pig is killed, Max Bien, a car dealer, is shown going slowly
through an MRI machine. Subsequently, he learns from the doctor that he has an
incurable stomach cancer from which he will die very soon.

Fig. 19 Emma and her ritual before killing a pig
Gripped by fears of imminent death, Max leaves his job, steals some hidden money from
his boss, and drives off at high speed in a fancy Jaguar from the car dealership. At one
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point, the car goes off road, landing on Emma’s farm and awakening her from her sleep.
Emma brings Max inside her house, takes the money that he had hidden in his pocket,
and burns the car to erase any trace of the money.
The officer bailiff Henner brings Emma a foreclosure notice, but, as he seems to
like her very much, he offers her the opportunity to live with him and his mother in their
house. Emma takes her shotgun and threatens him, while his mother overlooks the scene
from his car. He comes back after the accident, suspicious about what happened during
the accident. Emma hides Max in her attic and brings him back on his feet, showing him
the farm. The bailiff returns to her farm a few more times to accuse her, along with the
local veterinarian, for the fact that she sacrifices her pigs without anesthetics, as they
cannot detect any needle mark on their skin. While Emma argues with the officer, Max
discovers his money into one of Emma’s drawers and later confronts her about it. As
with Sonia, Emma at first appears to be a thief. When Max begins to feel worse and
worse because of his stomach problems, he is determined to leave the farm on his own,
but eventually comes back. The following segments show the police warning Emma,
outside of her house, that all her animals as well as the farm will be auctioned in a month
and a half. Since she is away for the moment, Max pays off Emma’s debt, the significant
sum of 77, 635 Euro, and the bailiff realizes that he is the mysterious lover which made
Emma wear dresses and shine again. Now that the debt is paid off, the electricity comes
back on, which makes Emma extremely happy. She soon realizes that he is dying, but
they end up getting married anyway. However, Max tells Emma that he has made a deal
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with Death: if he can make love to her one more time, he will die an easier death. The
following morning, Emma takes him under the same tree where she kills her pigs, but
she cannot bring herself to kill him. After Max insists, she starts whispering a story into
his ear, and, when he seems distracted, she cuts one of his arteries and lets him bleed to
death.
In the last scenes, we clearly see a funeral car taking Max away, but also, after
Emma gets back home, how Max came back to the farm, mending the fence as if nothing
ever happened.

Fig. 20 Emma’s ghost-like appearance
This post-mortem ending leaves the viewer to wonder who sees whom as a ghost:
Is it Emma who appears in Max’s post-mortem fantasy projection (as one of the scenes
with Emma looking out of the window into Max’s room suggests) or is it Max who
became a specter for Emma after his death or is it Emma’s suffocating fears of
impending eviction from her house that lead her to dream that a stranger with love and
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money will come from the sky and save her? They protagonists seem to be both real and
unreal, living in the world of their projected desires for the future at the moment when
they are approaching death (Emma’s death is symbolic here, since without her farm and
animals she might as well live as a ghost).
Powerfully engaging with the theme of migration, Cesare Amoroso’s Cover Boy
(2007) is another film that re-works the theme of double-occupancy. This film rethinks
the relationship between equally poor migrant workers and young Italians by
contextualizing it through the framework of male friendship and queer desire. As it
places the main characters in a contract of “mutual interference in the internal affairs of
the other,” Cover Boy suggests that they can overcome their difficulties if both of them
rely on the belief of the other in order to keep the faith themselves (Elsaesser 28).
The film focuses on the friendship between a Romanian and an Italian, Ioan and
Michele, who find themselves in similar desperate situations to make ends meet,
ultimately suggesting that their positionalities can become at times interchangeable. This
configuration is clearly indicated by Amoroso when the correspondence between two
scenes where we see Ioan and Michele “stuck” in the same spot at the Termini Station
becomes unmistakable. Thus, in two overhead shots, we watch the two sitting helpless in
the “non-place” of the train station, trying to figure out a way out of the invisibility of
their existence. Their trajectories are no longer shown as parallel or intersecting, as in
Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown, for instance. Rather, a relation of substitution is
foregrounded here, whereby the native is allowed to be just as vulnerable as the migrant,
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literally “in his place.” As in Head-On, the two main protagonists of the film are not
“dead,” but “invisible,” marginal characters in society seeking recognition of their
identity. Ioan comes from Romania, reluctantly convinced by a friend to work with him
in Italy.

Fig.21 Ioan and Michele in the same spot at the Termini Station
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On the train, his friend is hauled off by immigration officers, and Ioan arrives in Rome’s
Termini station alone. Although his papers allow him a three-month stay in Italy (the film
was shot in 2005, before Romania’s entry into the European Union in 2007), his
prospects of finding a job are slim and the little money he has does not afford him even
the cheapest hotels or pensions. He eventually befriends Michele, an Italian janitor in the
train station, who offers him rent for only eight Euro a night.
By showcasing the “contract” in which the two protagonists enter as roommates
(but not friends), Cover Boy foregrounds the problem of “living together” in today’s
Europe. Like Sibel and Cahit in Akin’s film, Michele and Ioan live in a “formal
marriage” as roommates with separate private lives. That is, they start from the premise
that although they “have to” contend with this new situation, it should be clear to Ioan,
the newcomer, that Michele will not make room for a meaningful relationship between
them. From the very beginning, Michele insists on his privacy. Either patronizing Ioan or
completely ignoring him while they live together in the same house, Michele is
preoccupied at first with marking a boundary between him and his roommate. Even as he
is late with his rent and lives in poor conditions in an apartment where neither the shower
nor the TV work, Michele refuses to acknowledge his precarious condition and uses Ioan
to sustain a better image of himself. When Ioan asks for a screwdriver to repair the
shower, Michele defensively tells him that he doesn’t know if he has one: “I prefer to
study, to think, to understand,” he insists, treating him with an overbearing attitude. Even
after Ioan repairs the TV in the house, Michele warns him that this gesture should not
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make Ioan think that he would eventually be excluded from the rent payment. “If you go
to a hotel and watch TV, you even have to pay more, it comes as an extra option,” he
adds. One day, Michele urges Ioan to eat from the pasta he has just cooked, but he
specifies that this time the food is free, an exception to the established rules.
Asked by Ioan why he came to Rome from Abruzzo, a region in Italy were his
grandparents used to own a restaurant, Michele reveals that his initial dream was to study.
Caught in the trammels of present-day Rome, where one needs help from parents and a
stable job to survive, he has now given up his plans and concentrates mainly on his
survival. To be sure, he now sees now sees himself as a stranger in his own country,
aligning himself with the immigrants’ state of precariousness. As he finally admits to
Ioan over the shared meal, there is no difference between “the wretched immigrant,” “lo
straniero,” and temp-worker Italians like him.
From the very beginning, Michele is attracted to Ioan but he never dares to come
out. Although many scenes evoke Michele’s fixation with Ioan’s body and his
homoerotic feelings are clearly visible to us, the film remains ambiguous about the extent
to which Ioan is aware of this. Gradually, the two become friends and begin spending
time together outside of their apartment, fantasizing about opening a restaurant in the
Romanian Danube Delta, “the most beautiful place in the world.” Their friendship is put
to test, however, when Ioan finds out that Michele hid his lay off from him. Frustrated, he
packs his bags and leaves, only to be brought back home a few hours later by Michele,
who searches for him. In an effort to exculpate himself, Michele tells Ioan that “some
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things in life are private.” Reluctant to admit that they have entered “a contract of mutual
interference,” Michele learns nonetheless that to regain Ioan’s friendship he must give up
pretense and treat him on equal terms.
Cover Boy performs a materialist critique of “the cultural turn” in the humanities
and social sciences (Wayne104, Trifonova 2), with its emphasis on “difference” within
the discourse of multiculturalism.
12
Such a predilection, Trifonova rightly points out, has
attempted to obscure the distinction between “realistic” cinema and “representative”
cinema, a type of cinema defined by the assumption that certain identities in Europe are
in need of being represented. To compensate for the weakening of grand narratives about
“national cinema” or “national identity,” which, some argue, have gradually lost purchase
in present-day Europe, “the representative cinema” – as Trifonova calls it – elevates
marginalized identities into a “criterion” of film realism. As a result, the marginal is
invested with the potential to give us access to the real and consequently the real itself

12
Wayne takes issue with the orientation towards the centrality of culture advocated by
critics such as Stuart Hall. In his view, the focus on culture, that is, on the belief that
every social practice has a discursive character, has resulted on a tendency to downplay
the material world “with the effect that [cultural] theory fails to identify, indeed actively
represses…the socio-economic relations of life within capitalism” (106). If the 1960s
had their “linguistic turn,” the 1980s the “cultural turn” and the 1990s the “memory turn,”
in recent years an increasing number of scholars have suggested that the humanities and
the social sciences are undergoing either an “affective turn” or a “spectral turn.” See, for
instance, Patricia Clough’s introduction to The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social,
Roger Luckhurst, “The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the “Spectral
Turn,” and Julian Holloway and James Kneale, “Locating Haunting: A Ghost-Hunter’s
Guide.”

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comes to be “defined by its degree of unfamiliarity and Otherness, in a word by its
difference” (Trifonova 1).
As a corrective to this tendency, the materialist critique stresses that what the New
European cinemas share is, as John Hill suggests, “a set of common problems and needs
rather than a common culture” (qtd. in Wayne 27; Trifonova 1). In other words, the fate
of all European countries is determined by the flow of capital as a common denominator.
Discussing the relationship between migrants and the precariat of European Western
nations, Antonio Negri seems to share a similar view. In GoodBye, Mr. Socialism he
ponders, “what is the common terrain between the precariat and the migrants? At the
limit, they can represent two opposed points: the migrant is the hero of spatial mobility,
while the precarious worker is the hero of temporal flexibility. But what brought them
together is capital” (101-102). If one agrees with Hill and Wayne that European cinemas
share not only a haunted space but also a set of common problems (rather than a common
culture), this implies that the cinemas of European countries may be able to constitute
audiences transnationally, “horizontally,” across national boundaries. Such
“constellations in social space, rooted in the specificities of a particular time and place”
(Wayne 28) could provide, as Cover Boy does, links between two destitute conditions of
life in different European countries. European films such as Cover Boy, therefore, could
thus “help percolate through into a wider collective consciousness and provide…fuel for
utopian desire, without which…there will be no progressive change” (Wayne 28).
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Advertised with the line Amore et Rabbia di una Generazione Precaria (The
Love and Anger of a Precarious Generation),
13
Cover Boy does not explore social
alienation simply in terms of exhibiting in front of the viewer’s gaze the struggle of
disempowered immigrants at the mercy of privileged victimizers who look down upon
them. On the contrary, even though Amoroso acknowledges Michele’s reluctance to
accept outsiders, he suggests that the Italian man shares with Ioan the same fears and
dreams about securing himself a better life. As such, the film attempts to obviate the
boundary between Eastern European migrant workers and young Italians, operating as an
alternative to films that perpetuate the assumption that only immigrants live under
pressure to find work. For instance, this assumption that “demonizes” migrants by
relegating them to a perpetual state of despair is foregrounded in films such as The Rest
of the Night (Franceso Munzi, 2008), which despite its reliance on hierarchical binary
oppositions was well received at Cannes in 2008. Coming back from the opera one
evening, a rich Italian couple is suddenly forced to deal with an explosion of violence
caused by a team of Romanian burglars and an Italian drug-addict. One of them is their
former Romanian maid, thrown out of the house because she stole a pair of diamond

13
As a literature student, Carmine Amoroso wrote his thesis on Pasolini, whose 1963 film
La Rabbia (The Rage), a collage of documentary footage, might have influenced him in
his making of Cover Boy. Writing about this film, Maurizio Viano argues that this is “the
political and aesthetic manifesto of Pasolini” (117), a work which permits him “to verify
the potential that images have to convey a meaning which exceeds verbal and logical
discourse” (115). Amore e Rabbia (Love and Anger) is also the title of a Franco-Italian
film made in 1969 which was directed, among others, by Pasolini, Godard, and
Bertolucci.

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earrings. With nowhere to go and desperate, she rejoins her ex fresh-out-of jail boyfriend,
a stereotypical “Balkan” man, very tall, wide-shouldered, with hair grown shoulder-
length. The contrast between the rich, highly cultured Italians and the ghetto immigrants
raises hackles: as the film makes it obviously clear, there is no question of
communication between the two.

Fig. 22 DVD Cover for Cover Boy
Despite the fact that The Rest of the Night claims to expose the Italians as uptight and
neurotic, the film ultimately conveys a sense that immigrants should by default be
associated with dingy housing, dejection, and criminality.
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Whereas a film such as The Rest of the Night makes ample use of the concept of
“Otherness,” Cover Boy attempts to de-emphasize it, pointing to its possible dangers and
limitations. Since it is premised on a complex dynamic whereby those who are
subordinated economically and politically internalize and reproduce the stereotypes that
the more powerful ones have of them, “Otherness” may become, as Wayne underlines, “a
condition in which the dominated are absolutely different from the dominant, a difference
frequently guaranteed by locating the Other as being outside historical change” (106). To
be sure, Cover Boy exposes the belief that some immigrants internalize vis-à-vis their
perception in a foreign country. In a poignant scene, Ioan’s Romanian friend, whom he
meets again by chance in Piazza della Repubblica, tells him to “wake up” and realize that
as an immigrant he will always be despised, viewed as an abject, worthless piece of meat.
“Here only money counts,” the Romanian friend proclaims in a supercilious tone:
If you don’t have it, you are just a piece of cloth good only to wipe the floors. If
you want a piece of advice from me, wash your balls, talk a lot, and smile. Do as I
do. If they see you sad, they don’t like you. You’ll get less pay and they’ll not
want to see you again.

Ioan, however, resists this attitude and holds on to the belief that despite Michele’s
arrogant attitude, he respects him and cares about him. By refusing to adopt a submissive
attitude as a way to “market” himself (as his friend puts it as a substitute for “prostitute”)
and his body, Ioan holds on to his dignity at a moment when the lack of money and peer-
pressure could easily lead to male prostitution. Ultimately, therefore, the importance of a
film like Cover Boy comes from the fact that it refuses to deploy a theory in which the
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dominant and the dominated “feed back into each other in a perpetual loop” (Wayne 106)
by downplaying the idea that the dominant are intrinsically different from the dominated.
Moreover, it is the fantasy-frame of a good friendship that binds Michele and
Ioan, even as the two dream of going to Romania and opening a restaurant together.
When Ioan leaves for Milan, Michele finds it harder and harder to sustain the image of
himself that he has created for Ioan. He loses his job once again and undergoes a series of
humiliations which eventually lead him to despair. A striking image of his outstretched
hand of pendants with the Pope’s face to sell tourists at the Vatican underscores his role
as a destitute beggar. Then, watching a televised speech with Silvio Berlusconi from
March 18, 2006 becomes the catalyst for his desperation and eventual suicide. The
images of consumerist abundance that serve as part of the backdrop for the rest of the
narrative, which is set in present-day Italy, are similarly exposed in all their hollowness,
even as a television broadcast featuring the intervention of Prime Minister Berlusconi is
heard on the soundtrack vehemently disavowing evidence of economic mismanagement
and decline. The film thus suggests that the potentiality for revolution has disappeared in
a landscape of empty simulacra, just as the opportunity for human connection is
vanquished by the lure of consumerist glamour.
In his speech, Berlusconi vehemently denies that there is an economic crisis in
process and blames the left wing for spreading such a lie.
14
As he puts it,

14
Carmine Amoroso comments in an interview that even though the theme of precarious
workers has always existed, nowadays it has become “a sort of brand or logo.”
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La crisi sta solo nella volontà della sinistra con i suoi giornali di inventarsi un
declino per andare al potere. Ma sappiate che quando andranno al potere per loro
le imprese sono macchine che consentono lo sfruttamento dell'uomo sull'uomo,
che il profitto è lo sterco del diavolo e che il risparmio non è una virtu come per
noi, ma qualcosa da tassare e da penalizzare. (dall’intervento al convegno di
Confindustria, Vicenza, 18 marzo 2006)

The crisis exists only in the will of the Left, which uses its newspapers to invent a
decline [in the economy] in order to attain power. But you should know that when
they attain power they will regard corporations as machines that enable the
exploitation of people by other people; they will regard profit as the devil’s shit
and will believe that putting money aside is not a virtue, as it is for us, but
something that should be taxed and penalized.

Although the film intimates that Michele’s breakdown is caused by the feeling of having

been betrayed by Ioan and even by a sense of envy at his success, it equally places the

blame on Berlusconi’s speech, as Michele senses his social stigmatization as a citizen

trapped in a political configuration from which he sees no escape.

If one considers the majority of films about migration, the structure of Cover Boy
is an unusual one, betraying our usual expectations. To be sure, one has to recognize that
Amoroso’s film seems to be just another variation on a theme, in line with so many other
films about migration that present us with ingenuous, vulnerable characters whose
pristine gaze discovers the wonders of the Western world. Think of Lukas Moodysson’s
Lylia from Lilya 4 ever (2002), who stares at the perfume bottles in the Swedish airport

Depending on the definition of long-term contract, statistics indicate that there are either
2, 282, 000 (that is, 13.2 percent of the work force) or somewhere between 3.5 million
and ten million workers without contract in Italy. These numbers fall within the European
Union average, which, according to data provided by the Eurostat in 2006, is 16.8
percent. Spain is the European country with the most temp workers, which make up 34
percent of the labor force (Povoledo 12).

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without even daring to touch them, or of her intense look at the clothes in the store where
her pimp takes her. Such tendencies continue to persist even in some of the most recent
productions, and Katia’s Sister (2008) by Mijke de Jong’s is an illustrative example. In it,
Katia, a ten-year old Russian girl who arrives in the Netherlands appears to be so
fascinated by a Dutch woman’s blond hair that she cannot help touching it, marveling at
its texture. In a similar fashion, many scenes in Cover Boy feature an introvert Ioan as a
curious observer of the new world around him in Rome and Milan. Diffident and
withdrawn in his own world, Ioan stands in stark contrast to the other dauntless models
on the catwalk.
Despite such continuities with other films in the genre, however, Cover Boy must
be credited on the other hand for the way it offers us an innovative perspective, which I
will explain below. One day Ioan is “discovered” by photographer Laura, who, driving
through Rome in her car, realizes that he has the face she was looking for for a long time.
Laura takes Ioan to Milan, makes him a fashion model, arranges for his paperwork, and
eventually becomes his lover. As Ioan’s life changes dramatically overnight, he becomes
an “immigrant survivor,” successfully rescued as if he were a character in a fairytale or
slapstick comedy. This “trope of the accidental” echoes Kracauer’s conviction that film
has an inherent affinity for chance meetings and “haphazard contingencies” (62) and as
such subjects the viewer to encounters with contingency. For Kracauer, chance is a
historical category, a concept which “emerges as a historicophilosophical alternative to a
closed dramaturgy of fate or destiny” (22), as Miriam Hansen comments in her
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introduction to his Theory of Film. Moreover, films that employ the accidental or “last
minute rescue” have for Kracauer the ability to “riddle fictions of an integral, identical
subject” (Hansen 22), casting doubt on individual agency and intentionality. They
demonstrate “the solidarity of the universe” (Kracauer, Theory 64) by allowing accidents
to “supersede destiny” and unpredictable circumstances to “foreshadow doom”
(Kracauer, Theory 62).
15

Contrasting circus productions to film comedy, Kracauer notes that the latter does
not highlight the performer’s courage in front of death or the ability to overcome
impossible difficulties. Rather, it “minimizes his accomplishments in a constant effort to
present successful rescues as the outcome of sheer chance” (Theory 62). What this
entails for the viewers is the possibility of “reimagining the conditions of experience,
memory, and interaction” which defy “protocols of narrative development and closure”
(Hansen 22). Like a character in a slapstick comedy, therefore, Ioan is saved not because
he does something in particular, because of his skills as a “model immigrant able to
integrate,” but by the sheer chance of being in the right place at the right time. While an
overwhelming number of films about immigrants seem to follow “a closed dramaturgy of
fate,” as Kracauer would put it, Cover Boy eschews such rehearsed trajectories by relying
on the trope of the accidental which minimizes Ioan’s undertakings or exceptional

15
As Miriam Hansen points out, Kracauer’s work is informed by a historical
understanding which positions him as a writer from the perspective of a survivor, both in
the literal sense of having survived his friend Benjamin’s suicide and in a more prophetic
sense of having to confront life after the Holocaust (“With Skin and Hair” 444).

215

abilities. Therefore, Ioan is not a hero in the traditional sense, but, on the contrary, an
anti-hero. Unlike his Romanian friend who has learned to smile and exploit his social
skills to survive, he remains quite sullen throughout the film, refusing to make any
particular effort to please the others around him.
While it is true that Ioan is ultimately made to look as an outsider who doesn’t fit
in with the crowd, the film also highlights the aggressive gaze of the camera zooming in
to photograph him, as well as his vulnerability as a model obeying the photographer’s
directions. This notwithstanding, the film also shows how the roles of the (foreigner)
victim and the (national) victimizer are blurred and at times reversed. Rather than
watching immigrants call home to assure their family that they are safe in the new
country, in Cover Boy we observe the Italian Michele getting calls from his worried
mother in Abruzzo, whom he has to lie about the possibility of getting a full-time
contract. Whereas a majority of films about migration presents us with characters in
angered or pleading expressions, in this case it is the immigrant Ioan who keeps his calm
throughout the film and Michele the native who is the weaker one, always on the verge of
an emotional breakdown. When Michele arrogantly tells Ioan that he may provide him
with papers by hiring him as his assistant for an import-export business, the latter puts
him in a vulnerable position. An especially gripping tone prevails in this scene, as Ioan
reminds Michele that he is just a cleaning man who cannot have assistants. In a dramatic
twist of genre scenarios, it is the Italian Michele who dreams of going to Romania as a
way to escape poverty and to save himself though a new business opportunity.
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Problematizing the simplistic geographic trajectory “East goes West with
materialistic dreams,” Amoroso seeks to reinscribe it, showing its accompanying parallel
track in the constantly shifting landscape of global economy: “West goes East to invest in
property or exploit the labor market.” Moreover, the film deterritorializes even such a
simplistic notion of border-crossing. Given that “Easterners” are frequently coded as
“always already” trapped in a space from which they wish to escape, Cover Boy shows
that a similar “entrapment” and desire to leave for a better place is also shared by those
living in “the West.” In Amoroso’s film the desired place is no longer implicitly better
but a fantasy space, an abstraction that has the characteristics of a dream.

Fig. 23 Ioan and his father
Ioan and Michele’s yearning to go to the Danube Delta is not due to the place’s
“real qualities,” since neither of them has actually seen it. Rather, they long to go there
because Ioan’s father once told him that there, “on the other side,” one could find “the
most beautiful place in the world.” At the end, when Ioan finally reaches the place and
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Michele’s ghost confirms that they are indeed “in the most beautiful place in the world,”
the landscape becomes dreamy and abstract, painted in subdued color schemes which are
dominated by cool blues and shades of gray.

Fig. 24 Michele’s ghost at the end of Cover Boy
4.3 Whose Marginality?
The theme of marginality is, as Rob Shields points out, a central theme in
Western culture and thought (276). For critics such as De Certeau, “marginality is today
no longer limited to minority groups” but rather “massive and pervasive,” “becoming
universal” (qtd. in Shields 276). In light of this perspective, the question remains to what
extent the figure of Ioan as a marginal character is used in this film. Are we dealing here
with a case of “modern liberal pluralism” which “incorporates the margin into a de
politicizing framework that co-opts it,” which uses the margin to create one’s own
subversive potential (Shields 277)? In other words, is Amoroso’s use of Ioan’s
marginality entwined with a desire to emphasize Michele’s vulnerability, “his loss,” as a
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character who has now become marginal, both in terms of his queerness and as a
representative of the young Italian precariat? Can we interpret Cover Boy in the same
framework in which Bram Stoker’s Dracula has been read, as a novel where Dracula’s
“hovering interest” over Jonathan Harker is tied to a “homosexual threat [that ] is
constantly displaced and disguised,” and “whose real meaning is to be found in relations
between men” (Kane 15)?
Michael Kane contends that in Dracula “the threat of invasion appears to be
equated with a threat of polymorphous perversity, a confusion of the sexual identity”
(20). By analogy, one could argue that it is the appearance of the “exotic other,” the
Eastern European Ioan that unleashes homoerotic fantasies in Michele, confusing his
sexual identity and making him suffer from homosexual yearning. From this perspective,
Cover Boy may reveal the glimmering anxieties underlying the post 1989 “invasion” of
Eastern Europeans in Italy and elsewhere in Western Europe as hypervirile margins who
lend themselves easily available to the “knowing” gaze of the (privileged) “center” - as
the case of Ioan’s Romanian friend demonstrates. Is this a case betraying a situation
similar to the “titillation of the West in Orientalist literature and thepromotion of the East
as a destination for sexual tourism” (Kane 17)?
16
One could make a case for reading
Cover Boy as a film that promotes a fantasy of surrender and a cheaper, readily available
Eastern European (male) body whose exoticism takes precedence on the Western gay

16
Kane is drawing on an influential article by Joseph A. Boone, “Vacation Cruises, or,
The Homoerotics of Orientalism.”
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market. In one of the deleted scenes featuring a rich Italian man who invites Ioan to join
him and his Romanian friend for sex, the two are told that “you Romanians have
problems with the hygiene. If you washed yourselves, you’d get paid a lot more.” By
interpellating the Romanians as abject subalterns, the Italian man finds an excuse for
paying them less. What this scene reveals is that Ioan’s friend doesn’t make much money
from male prostitution, as he would like Ioan to believe.

Fig 25 Italian man asking Ioan to have sex with him and his friend
Problematic is also the way Amoroso invests Ioan with an innocence that is
unable to detect the homoerotic pulsations fueling Michele. In a revealing scene, he
impulsively takes his clothes off when they reach the sea and invites Michele to enter the
water naked with him. As they frolic in the water, Michele seizes the opportunity to teach
Ioan how to swim, carrying him in a floating position. Suddenly, he lets go of him, so
that in the confusion he may touch him under the water. The scene thus outlines a curious
juxtaposition, whereby the viewers identify with Michele as subjects who “are supposed
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to know” while Ioan emerges as an uninitiated, “primitive,” uninhibited character who
doesn’t know what is going on.
Despite such drawbacks, however, I believe it is more apposite to read Cover Boy
as a film that stages a missed opportunity of “living together” in today’s Europe. It offers,
as Elsaesser would put it, another instance of a “missed encounter.” At the end of the film
there is a sense that something went terribly wrong in this fragmented and volatile
alliance, that Ioan and Michele should have been together as a gay couple, and that their
dreams should have been fulfilled, albeit in a country where “wood is cheap” (as Ioan
puts it to convince Ioan that going to Romania might be profitable). Ultimately, the film
neither acknowledges the postcard-type geography of Rome that has been inscribed
though many filmic representations, nor idealizes the margin. Rather, Cover Boy exceeds
prevalent ideas about how nationals and migrants fundamentally differ from each other
and exposes instead how “margins create their own margins” and therefore should not be
romanticized. As Trifonova rightly points out in her investigation of migrant and
diasporic films following the post-Cold War period, one can notice a shift in that the
focus is no longer solely on the most visible conflicts between center and periphery, most
likely between foreigners and nationals, but also on the conflicts at the periphery itself.
These films, she suggests, “deterritorialize nationality by deterritorializing the notion of
the ‘border’ not by opening up borders but by redrawing them along transnational, social,
class, gender, political and generational lines” (5). In this respect, Cover Boy dramatizes
the shifting detteritorialization of borders in Europe’s metropolis in a number of instances
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when Ioan has to give up his sleeping place in the street because other marginal
characters create their own borders by claiming the (public) space that he occupies. For
example, when he first arrives in Rome, Ioan has to hide from the janitor Michele in the
restroom at the Termini station lest the latter sees him and chases him away. When he is
asleep on the grass by the Colosseum, a Gladiator impersonator wakes him up, telling
him that he is not allowed to sleep there. In another scene, Ioan’s attempts to wipe
people’s windshields at an intersection are undermined by a Gypsy man, most likely an
immigrant like him. Claiming the intersection as his own working space, the man
aggressively pushes Ioan out of “his” territory. With great skill, Amoroso therefore
reveals the constantly shifting public space configurations, in this case the real monopoly
of windshield washing in Rome, where gangs control heavy intersections by assigning
cleaning slots and deterring outsiders who try to squeeze in.

Fig. 26 A Roma man defends his spot at an intersection
In line with a series of reversals that I mentioned above, Cover Boy also signals a
shift in representations of racial passing and thus engages questions of racial and national
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domination. While in a film such as Franco Brusati’s Pane e cioccolata (1973), an Italian
guest worker living in Switzerland dyes his hair blond in a desperate attempt to pass as a
(“more beautiful”) Swiss, in Cover Boy Michele tries to pass as a Romanian in order to
increase his chances of getting a low-paid job in a professional car washing place. “As
long as you don’t speak, you can pass,” Ioan reassures Michele, who is worried he might
be recognized as an Italian.

Fig. 27 Italian man trying to pass as a Swiss

Fig. 28 Michele asking whether he can pass as a Romanian
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The scene is ambiguous however, powerfully exposing how race is an ideological
construct: Michele either fears that with his tan, he might not appear as white as Ioan is,
or, considering that many Italians conflate “Romanians” with “Roma” or “Romanies” in
Italy, Michele might as well fear that he would not pass for a (“darker-skinned”)
Roma/Gypsy man. When he does indeed pass, an impatient Italian chides him for the
“laziness” in the way he washes his car.
17

4.4 Welcoming Ghosts
One of the characteristics of post-mortem films is that they do not signal the
difference in register between those who are dead and those who are alive, the real
companions or partners and the imagined ones, those who know about their post-mortem
status and those who do not (Elsaesser 29). Instead of the usual techniques such as
flashback or superimposition that typically designate such transitions, the diegetic space
in these films often remains unmarked. This is exactly what happens in Cover Boy, where
Michele’s hanged body appears only as a barely distinguishable shadow for a brief
moment, easily missed at a first viewing. At the end of the film, Michele appears as a real
companion talking to Ioan while they are driving to Romania, and then disappears and
reappears again when they are on the ferry to the Danube Delta. As a post-mortem film,
therefore, Cover Boy is, as Elsaesser elaborates,

17
For more on racial passing in film, see Mark Winokur’s article “Black Is White/White
is Black: “Passing” as a Strategy of Racial Compatibility in Contemporary Hollywood
Comedy.”
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symptomatic of the new post-realist ontologies, performing presence as
post-mortem, and thematizing the consequences – positive and negative –
of mutually interfering with, mutually sustaining and mutually
authenticating each other, as both “ghosts” and “real,” both actual and
virtual at the same time. ..[Cinema can thus] contribute to redefining the
conditions of being European, that is to say politically and socially
responsible for each other, by constantly renewing that I would now call
the felicity conditions of belief and trust, that is: of being each other’s
other: not mirroring the other in mis-cognition and endless deferrals of
self-identity, but enabling the other to interfere in my own mirror image.
That…is the best but almost perhaps the most difficult way of living our
hyphenated and always-already occupied identities. (31, my emphasis)

Fig. 29 Michele’s shadow indicates that he has killed himself
Elsaesser’s reflection on how cinema can address the problematic of “living together” in
the New Europe echoes Specters of Marx, a book where Jacques Derrida ponders the
spectral dynamics implicit in works that teach us how we might “learn to live.” But
learning how to live is, for Derrida, a question of haunting and inheritance. Therefore,
any discussion of “ourselves” is spectrally determined, especially when it is unconscious
or disavowed: “To learn to live: a strange watchword. Who [that is “we” Europeans?]
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would learn? From whom? [who are our ghosts?] To teach to live, but to whom? Will we
ever know? Will we ever know how to live and first of all what ‘to learn to live’ means?”
(Specters XVI).
Derrida coins the word “hantologie,” “hauntology,” as a substitute for its near-
homonym, ontology, thus replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of
the ghost as that which is neither presence nor absence, neither dead nor alive. To learn to
live, argues Derrida, we must have death because it is “only through the other and by
death” that we come into configuration as “ourselves.” We must learn how to live with
ghosts, in their companionship, and above all to learn how to talk to them and how to
give them back speech, Derrida urges us, “even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other
in oneself” (Specters 221). To learn to live with ghosts does not merely mean, however, a
being-with them, but also “a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations”
(Specters XVIII). In other words, to learn to live with the ghosts is to rethink ourselves
through the dead, or rather, through the return of the dead and thus through haunting. To
ask “Who would learn” and “from whom?” is, for Derrida, to draw attention to phantom
structures of subjectivity and therefore to investigate the undecidability of “identity.”
18

But what does this generic undecidability of identity and hauntology have to do
with European identity post-1989 in particular and with cinema, one might ask. First of

18
Derrida refers here to the last sentence in Michel Henry’s books about Marx, which
states that “Marx’s thought places us before the abyssal question, ‘What is life?’” For
more on this see Specters of Marx, pp. 234-35, note 7. In French, “apprendre a vivre”
means both “to teach how to live” and “to learn how to live.”

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all, it is to address precisely how politics of memory and inheritance are reflected in
European films today, when communism is pronounced dead and Marx disavowed.
According to Derrida, Marx’s work may be thought of as a virtual space of spectrality
which stages “a dramaturgy of modern Europe” (Specters 3) in terms of haunting. We are
all heirs to Marx, Derrida asserts – to his obsessions with ghosts, spirits and specters –
and so we have to assume the responsibility to sift through this inheritance: the possible
legacies that come to us in a certain spirit of Marxism (s). As heirs to the ghost of the
now pronounced dead Marx, we must come to terms with it, but a ghost both is and is
not. Hence, learning to live, Derrida implies, requires getting beyond Hamlet’s
“existential” opposition of being and not-being, life and death. This indeterminacy has
both personal/ethical and political/historical implications. As that which is and is not, the
specter represents temporalities that cannot be grasped adequately in terms of present
time, because they include a past that has not yet passed as well as a future that breaks
with the present.
Secondly, one needs to specify: while the question of haunting is historical, it is
also untimely, “out-of-joint,” not dated. It does not come in a chain of presents, it does
not follow a calendar. Derrida explains:
…it does not come to, it does not happen to, it does not befall, one day,
Europe, as if the latter, at a certain moment of history, had begun to suffer
from a certain evil, to let itself be inhabited in its inside, that is, haunted
by a foreign guest. Not that that guest is any less a stranger for having
always occupied the domesticity of Europe. But there was no inside, there
was nothing inside before it…[Haunting] would open the space [of
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Europe] and the relation to self of what is called by this name, at least
since the Middle Ages. (Specters 3)

It is, after all, a question of the palimpsest. Not only of Marx’s ghosts and ours, of
transgenerational haunting, but also because, as Derrida tells us, “memories no longer
recognize such borders; by definition, they pass through walls, these revenants, day and
night, they trick consciousness and skip generations” (Specters 36).
4.5 Instead of a Conclusion: Wearing the Revolution
Let us blacken still more the picture of this wearing down
beyond wear.”
“Wears and Tears” Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

The phrase “Exile. Wear the Revolution” from the advertisement in Cover Boy
draws attention to a structure of concealment, requiring us to speculate on its meaning. It
“calls” to us in a performative way, as a text predicated upon encryption and
undecidability, one that simultaneously encourages and resists transcendent reading. By
alerting us to the economy of a crypt, to a reincarnation performed through the
substitution of the body of a man who died in the Romanian revolution with Ioan’s body,
a body that returns, the phrase is amenable to a great variety of invocations, functioning
as a “contract” (to wear) of a ghostly inheritance which takes the form of a concealed
promise. It enjoins us to “dress” this promise in a meaning, ad-dress it, and perhaps re-
dress it through a performative act (but not a “performance,” as Derrida insists in “Marx
and Sons” (230) of “depoliticization” and “repoliticization” (“Marx and Sons” 221). In
what follows I suggest a reading of the “advertisement” for a new fall/winter collection in
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Cover Boy by drawing on and explicating Derrida’s Specters of Marx and “Marx and
Sons,” his attempts to formulate a social critique adequate to the post-1989 world.
Derrida’s important and theoretical intervention in this book and the essay that followed
it delineates the contours of a critique of post-1989 discourses that called for a
fundamental break with the present. Through a complex theoretical strategy, Derrida
claims that an adequate critique of the world today must positively appropriate Marx and
yet also fundamentally criticize him. He does so by separating “a certain spirit of Marx”
from what he calls the ontologizing and dogmatic aspects of Marxism.

Fig. 30 Poster for Cover Boy
I would like to begin my inquiry in the spirit of advertisements, which in French
are called réclames, and reflect upon its multivalent dictionary definitions. While the
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noun réclame refers to publicity and advertizing, the verb réclamer is used in the context
of making a demand, of claiming or reclaiming something. It means “to ask for” (a
person, thing, or money), to call for (a reform, an inquiry), or to claim (a compensation).
As a reflexive verb, se réclamer means “to claim to be representative of.” Therefore, a
réclame can be used to refer both to a reclamation, in the sense of performing a protest,
and to a re-claim, which carries connotations of “recalling,” or of calling back. It is in the
spirit of this double sense of “reclame” that I propose to take Derrida’s “performative
gesture.” Derrida himself uses the phrase “je me réclame de Marx,” thus invoking his
authority, his attempt to speak for him but at the same time against him (“Marx and
Sons” 230-31).
Nowadays, post-1989, says Derrida, “one can sense a coming fashion or
stylishness” (Specters 37, my emphasis), especially in the university, to depoliticize the
Marxist reference “by putting on a tolerant face,” “by enervating a corpus,” “by silencing
in it the revolt,” by reading Marx as a philosopher like any other. Given this situation,
Derrida asks: “And what is there to worry about here?” (Specters 38). Indeed, what is
there to “Wear?” one might say.
To “wear the revolution” requires both a compliance (to wear, to follow a trend)
and a performative gesture of revolt. As such, it is “contradictorily binding.” For Derrida,
Specters of Marx is a book about inheritance, “about what ‘inherit’ can, not mean
[vouloir dire] in an unequivocal way, but, perhaps, enjoin, in a way that is contradictory
230

and contradictorily binding. How to respond to, how to feel responsible for a heritage that
hands you down contradictory orders?” (“Marx & Sons” 219).
As Derrida explains in “Marx and Sons,” his response to the post-1989 crisis is a
“gesture of thinking” (221, my emphasis) that takes up a responsibility by “committing
oneself in a performative fashion” (219). This gesture presents a hypothesis which, to
continue with the fashion analogy here, “strikes a pose” if we may say so by “taking a
position” (219), by presenting a thesis that “poses itself” (218, my emphasis) without
manifesto. His position is “a ‘supposition,’ that is, the ‘responsibility’ thus assumed as a
transformation, and therefore as a heterodox or paradoxical transposition of the 11
th
of
the Theses of Feuerbach” (219), which states that the philosophers have only interpreted
the world, but the point is to change it.
Derrida’s gesture involves “a question of the question,” that is, of putting into
question of the question, of casting doubt on the rhetoric of the question. This question is
that of the specter or spirit, says Derrida. Questioning the urgency of the question “wither
Marxism?,” or, in other words, “what is to be said about philosophy as ontology in the
inheritance left to us by Marx” (214), “how are the words ‘philosophy’ and ‘political’ to
be thought from now on?; “Is Marx’s thought essentially a philosophy?” (215), Derrida
adds: “One question is not yet posed. Not as such. It is hidden by the philosophical, we
will say more precisely ontological response of Marx himself” (“Marx and Sons” 221).
That is, Derrida critiques the reading of Marx as a philosopher and Marx’s “ontological
response” not only to the spectral question of the specter (and the question of spectrality
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lies beyond any ontological determination) but also to an injunction (of the question) that
would be older (plus vieille) than the question (the rhetorical question, the question-form
of discourse), as if it were the eve of that question (comme sa veille même). Marx’s
response is for Derrida ontological because he “sutures” the question, reducing or
denying the abyss of the question (“Marx and Sons” 263).
In an essay titled “The Question of Justice,” Peggy Kamuf explains that Derrida
constantly reminds us that inheritance from the past always implies the question of justice
as responsibility as well as a sifting among multiple and conflicting legacies. In fact, he
takes up the question of justice in its form as question, a question that is posed to the
ghost. In other words, “what is one doing when one questions a specter? Is such a
question at the same time a suspension of the very mode of the question? (Kamuf 277).
In line with his earlier essay Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, (which
questions the privilege Heidegger seems to grant to questioning as a mode of thought),
Specters makes an appeal “to question questioning itself” (Kamuf 271) while realizing at
the same time that this would eventually come down to “repeating its conjuring
stratagems” (Kamuf 279) and wagering that thinking has always been accompanied by a
conjuring impulse. In a way, Kamuf explains, the question would be something like a
mirror held up before the ghost, a mirror-question in which the ghost is absent because it
does not have a reflection. Instead, it gives back the questioner his or her own image,
which is what happened to Hamlet when he had to ask himself whether the ghost speaks
truly and if has to obey it (282).
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Derrida “re-members the revolution” by mobilizing “the specter haunting
Europe,” the specter of revolution from the first sentence of Marx’s The Communist
Manifesto as well as the ghost of the King in Hamlet to give figuration to the hauntings of
history, the traces of the past that persist to question the present. Just as the King calls for
a revision of the past, for a re-envisioning of his death as a murder, the specter summons
the living to rethink the traces of the past. This re-membering represents, for Derrida, a
“becoming-body,” an impossible incorporation: as a revenant, the ghost has no
beginning, only repetitions.
For Derrida, we are/exist insofar as we inherit (Specters 68), and therefore our
responsibility is that of an heir. In the post-Cold war so-called democratic Europe of
today, Derrida speculates, “entire regiments of ghosts,” “armies from every age” have
returned (Specters 100). Conflicts of culture and religion, of renewed racism and
xenophobia, have blackened the picture of a “wearing down beyond wear” (Specters
100). “Wear the revolution,” therefore, could also be taken to mean, following the
Derridean logic of spectrality, “where the revolution?” and indeed “whither the
revolution?”
According to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s theory of the crypt, on which
Derrida draws, the subject is produced (if ever) as a response given to a constitutive
rupture or discontinuity. Abraham and Torok distinguish between “incorporation” and
“introjection,” concepts which do not exist in Freud’s writing. While introjection refers to
a successful articulation of the lost object of desire in speech (as in “real mourning”),
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incorporation is a refusal to mourn, as it denies the very fact of having had a loss (129).
Refusing to reclaim as our own the part of ourselves that we placed in what we lost,
through incorporation we ingest the love-object we miss (127). The inaccessible object of
desire is incorporated as a “fantasy” within the body and hidden by the ego in a “crypt”
from which it returns to haunt either through words that hide (such as homophones) or
through somatic symptoms that can be read as the literalization of a figure of speech.
Incorporation refers to a “swallowing of words” as opposed to their articulation and
results in the formation of a crypt in the unconscious so that the other can be maintained.
As the authors put it: “in order not to have to ‘swallow’ a loss, we fantasize swallowing
(or having swallowed) that which has been lost” (126). Incorporation refers to the
material aspect of words, to their chains of sounds that have relationships among
themselves other than meaning.
Wear the Revolution. Swear the Revolution. Were the Revolution. Where the
Revolution? What will be the future after “the last revolution,” today, when the dominant
consensus, following Kojève and Fukuyama, is that the collapse of communist regimes is
supposed to mean humanity’s arrival at a final stage, at “the end of History?” When the
euphoria of liberal-democrat capitalism pronounces Marxism dead? As Derrida puts it,
with Hamlet’s words to the Ghost (“Whither will thou lead me?”) in mind: “The question
is indeed ‘whither?’ Not only whence comes the ghost but first of all is it going to come
back? Is it not beginning to arrive and where is it going? What of the future? The future
can only be for ghosts. And the past” (Specters 45). In other words, where is Marxism
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going? What are we going to do with it? What does it mean to follow the ghost? Where,
whither?
“Whither” suggests a phantasmatic inscription of the scene, a spectral logic,
implying mobility but also immobility, an undecidability similar to Hamlet’s, a dis-
orientation. But undecidability here should not be understood as the opposite of decision,
but, following the Derridean logic, as a “condition of decision wherever decision cannot
be deduced from an existing body of knowledge [un savoir] as it would be by a
calculating machine” (“Marx and Sons” 240). It is because “analysis must begin anew
every day everywhere, without ever being guaranteed by prior knowledge” (“Marx and
Sons” 240). This is Derrida’s injunction, his “critical inheritance” from Marx: being
suspicious, for instance, of a simple opposition of forces of conflict, of dominant and
dominated, of preestablished hierarchies, of the idea that force is always stronger than
weakness.
One of the meanings of the verb “to wear” refers to spatial movement, “to go,
proceed, advance” in slow or gradual movement. The ghost of Marxism is “beginning to
arrive” but in a sense it was always there, and we must turn to it, towards it, to ad-dress it,
because “we must learn to talk to it” (Specters 221). We are proclaiming the end of
Marxism and a freedom from its shackles but Marxism is yet to come, a venir. We are
dis-oriented. The ghost looks at us but we cannot see it. We are looked at, judged by it,
but we don’t have any recourse of looking back, we have to obey to its law, what Derrida
calls “the visor effect on the basis of which we inherit from the law” (Specters 6). We
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have opened an account with it and now we have to pay the debt, the interest that has
accrued. The nature of the debt can be appreciated in light of the word revenant, which
brings to mind the theme of one returned from the dead and all that this implies as well as
the fact that the theme is bound to a certain economy, as it shares an affinity with revenue
and with revenir from the French – to come back or to amount to and thus to the notion
of (financial) return (s). What returns is, however, always linked to desire. The economic
function of a crypt, like a vault, is to keep, to save, to keep safe that which would return
from it to act, often in our place. The topic of revenance and desire cannot be separated
from that of ghostly inheritance, whether in the sense of what is received by succession or
what returns in the form of a phantom. Whether we like it or not, whether we are aware
of it or not, Derrida insists, “we cannot not be” the inheritors of Marx’s promise. As
inheritors, we are called to a responsibility, because an inheritance is always a
reaffirmation to a debt. But how will the dead recover a debt? One cannot establish the
state of a debt, because the inheritance will always keep its secret (116), a secret “exiled”
to the unconscious, cryptic.
One pays the debt in a performative manner, making oneself accountable “by an
engagement that selects, interprets and orients,” by “a decision that begins by getting
caught up… in the snares of an injunction that is always multiple, heterogeneous,
contradictory, divided” (Specters 116). A certain doubling is at stake here, and the word
speculate “returns” here, to take the scepter of the specter. Says Derrida: “A specular
reflection endlessly sends the simulacrum away, that is, defers up to the abyss the
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encounter with a living body, with the revolution itself, the revolution properly speaking,
in person” (Specters 147, my emphasis). To speculate suggests a task of engaging in
thought or reflection but also, as it derives from the Latin specula, a look-out, a watch-
tower and specere, to see and to look.
19
Moreover, to speculate is also used to refer to
one’s involvement in a business transaction of a risky nature. As Jodey Castricano rightly
points out, the word specular also draws attention to Lacan’s conception of the mirror
stage, which denotes the formation of the function of the “I.” It points to a
misrecognition, to the spectral nature of the I in terms of ghostly inheritance (10). In
another passage, Derrida comments that the process of identification is of paramount
importance in Specters of Marx:
Who is entitled to say ‘we’ here? We ‘Marxists? We readers, etc.? Does
not everything in my book come down to problematizing, precisely, every
process of identification, or, even, of determination in general
(identification of the other, or with the other, or with oneself: X is Y, I am
the other, I am I, we are we, etc.)? – all questions which come under the
general heading I have been emphasizing from the beginning of this
response: ontology or not, spectrality and difference, and so on (“Marx
and Sons” 227).

19
Derrida says that “Marx always runs the risk of going after...his own ghost: a specter at
once speculative and specular” (Specters 177-78). “Speculation always speculates on
some specter, it speculates in the mirror of what it produces, on the spectacle that it gives
itself to see” (Specters 183). Derrida sees Marx as a critic who tried to explain the origin
of the “history of the ghosts” by drawing on Feuerbach’s distinction between ordinary
theology (which believes in the ghosts of sensuous imagination) and speculative theology
(which believes in the ghosts of non-sensuous abstraction). Derrida wants to complicate
Marx’s belief that “All the ‘specters’ that have filed before us were representations” (qtd.
in Specters 183).
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Furthermore, “wear the revolution” can also be taken to mean “we ARE the
revolution.” In a revolving, dis-jointed time, not Marxists, but heirs to “a certain spirit of
Marxism.” “I am not a Marxist,” says Derrida, reminding us that Marx himself is
supposed to have confided to Engels, “What is certain is that I am not a Marxist” (qtd. in
Specters 42). “Must we still cite Marx as an authority in order to say “I am not a
Marxist”?, asks Derrida. “What is the distinguishing trait of a Marxist statement? And
who can still say “I am a Marxist?” (110). “We are the revolution,” therefore, means that
we are responsible for “keeping the faith” to a certain spirit of the revolution, a spirit of
“radical critique, namely a procedure ready to undertake its self-critique,” “explicitly
open to its open transformation, re-evaluation, self-reinterpretation” (Specters 110).
Replicating the very big Emporio Armani advertisements covering the walls of
the Termini train station in Rome (which, in a very uncanny way, echo “the Roman
Empire”), the poster of Cover Boy announces at the bottom of the image the international
character of the “new style” to be worn in “Paris, Florence, London, Los Angeles, Milan,
San Petersburg, Madrid, Singapore, Rome, Berlin, Moscow, New York, Tokyo.” It
announces, one could speculate, in the spirit of Derrida, a “New International,” a ”certain
spirit of Marx” which should be distinguished from other spirits of Marxism, “those that
rivet it to the body of Marxist doctrine” (Specters110). This spirit, Derrida proclaims, “is
more than a style, even though it is also a style” (Specters 110, my emphasis). It is a
promise born out of a gesture of fidelity to the project of a “deconstructive fashion”
(Specters 113). Communism, Derrida reminds us, was essentially distinguished from
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other labor movements by its international character, a political movement that for the
first time in the history of humanity presented itself as geopolitical (Specters 47). What
characterizes Derrida’s “New International” is that it is without fixed forms such as
organization, party, state, national community, or common class membership. That is, it
is a movement beyond presence, inspired by one of the spirits of Marx (i.e, the legacy of
Marx that affirms spectrality) while abjuring the institutional framework and dogmatics
of classical Marxism. “We are the revolution” because our being is tied and indebted the
inheritances of a messianic promise which “remains at work” (Spcters 115). Says
Derrida,
Whether they wish it, or know it, or not, all men and women, all over the earth,
are today to a certain extent the heirs of Marx and Marxism. That is,…they are
heirs of the absolute singularity of a project – or of a promise – promise which has
a philosophical and scientific form. This form is in principle non-religious, in the
sense of a positive religion; it is not mythological; it is therefore not national – for
beyond even the alliance with a chosen people, there is no nationality or
nationalism that is not religious or mythological, let us say “mystical” in the broad
sense. (113)

For Derrida, all free men, wherever they may live, are “exiles,” that is, citizens of “a
community without community” (as Balibar would put it), of a community “that barely
deserves the name community” (Specters 113) and heirs to the singularity of a project
[the revolution]. To wear the revolution, therefore, suggests to follow the promise of a
unique project, “at once singular, total, and uneffaceable except by a denegation and in
the course of a work of mourning that can only displace, without effacing, the effect of a
trauma” (Specters 113). To wear it as a political gesture while recognizing that by doing
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so we “follow the example of Marx” (and an example always carries beyond itself,
opening up a testamentary dimension) and inherit especially “through him if not from
him” (Specters 41), the experience that Marx himself had with his ghosts, the difficulty
that he had “living with the disjunction of the injunctions within him,” untranslatable into
each other (Specters 42). Ultimately, it is to “learn how to live” through the (impossible)
radical experience of the perhaps.
Speaking of exiles, at the end of Specters Derrida surmises that because Marx has
not yet been received, he remains a clandestine immigrant figure, “an immigrant chez
nous,” as he was all his life:
Marx belongs to a time of disjunction, to that “time out of joint” in which is
inaugurated, laboriously, painfully, tragically, a new thinking of borders, a new
experience of the house, the home, and the economy. …One should not rush to
make the clandestine immigrant an illegal alien or, what always risks coming
down to the same thing, to domesticate him. To neutralize him through
naturalization. To assimilate him so as to stop frightening oneself (making oneself
fear) with him. He is not part of the family, but one should not send him back,
once again, him too, to the border. (Specters 219)

Moreover, at the end of “Marx and Sons,” Derrida advances the hypothesis that one could
also think of Marx as a Marrano, a Hispano-Portuguese disguised as a German Jew who
only pretended to have converted to Protestanism:
We might add that the sons of Karl himself knew nothing of the affair. And that
his daughters didn’t either. And now the supreme twist, the abyssal upping of the
ante, the ultimate surplus-value: they would have been Marranos who were so
well disguised, so perfectly encrypted, that they themselves never suspected that
that’s what they were! – or else they had forgotten that they were Marranos,
repressed it, denied it, disavowed it. It is well known that this sometimes happens
to ‘real’ Marranos as well, to those who, though they are really, presently,
currently, effectively, ontologically Marranos, no longer even know it themselves.
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….There are still sons- and daughters – who, unbeknownst to themselves,
incarnate or metempsychosize the ventriloquist specters of their ancestors.
(“Marx and Sons” 262).

Derrida refers here to the concept of transgenerational haunting which was developed by
Abraham and Torok and which denotes to the way in which the undisclosed traumas of
previous generations, their “buried speech,” are able to disturb the lives of their
descendents even and especially if they know nothing about their distant causes. The two
psychoanalysts elaborated a theory of “the phantom” which is the presence of a dead
ancestor’s shameful secrets in the living Ego. Phantoms are not the spirits of the dead but
the gaps (les lacunes, “the unspeakable”) left in us by the secrets of others. The phantom
is sustained by secreted words in the unconscious and usually passes from the parent’s
unconscious to the child’s and works like a ventriloquist within the subject’s mental
topography (173). The diverse manifestations of the phantom, which the authors call
“haunting,” should not be confused however with the return of the repressed (181). The
phantom does not return from the dead to reveal something hidden or forgotten. On the
contrary, its effects are designed to mislead the haunted subject and to ensure that its
secret remains shrouded in mystery. “Phantomogenic words” become “travesties” and
can be expressed in phobias or obsessions (176). Abraham and Torok believe that “the
phantom effect” gradually fades from one generation to the next until it finally disappears
(176). However, this is not the case when “shared phantoms… find a way of being
established as social practices along the lines of staged words” (176).
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Derrida’s specters should be distinguished from Abraham and Torok’s phantoms.
The specter is envisioned by Derrida as a deconstructive figure hovering between life and
death, presence and absence. It does not belong to the order of knowledge, but one must
let it speak, speak of it, about it, and with it, not in the expectation that it will reveal some
secret but so that it may open us to the experience of secrecy as such. As Nicholas Royle
underscores, Derrida’s conception of ghosts, revenants, spirits and phantoms is bound up
with an experience of language as an experience of the impossible. Moreover, Derrida’s
“phantom effect” is not teleological and does not operate from one generation to the
other, but “skips generations,” breaks up the family and interrupts the logic of the linear.
Unlike Abraham and Torok’s phantom, the temporality of Derrida’s specter is linked not
only to the past but to the future as well. It never dies, but remains to come and to come-
back (Royle 285-86). Moreover, the secrets of Derrida’s specters are neither puzzles to be
solved nor unspeakable because of a taboo or an initial act of shame and prohibition. On
the contrary, one has to converse with ghosts “to encounter what is strange, other, about
the ghost” (Davis 378). As Davis explains, “It is the structural openness or address
directed towards the living by the voices of the past or the net yet formulated possibilities
of the future (379).
Coming back to the caption “Exile. Wear the Revolution,” perhaps we should
keep in mind that “to wear” carries some additional connotations than the ones I
mentioned before: in a figurative sense, it means “to carry about with one in one’s heart,
mind, or memory,” (“Give me that man/That is not Passion’s slave, and I will wear him/
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in my heart’s core,” says Hamlet) “to have as a quality or attribute; to bear (a name,
title),” “to possess and enjoy as one’s own, as in the phrase “to win and wear,” ”to put up
with, accept a proposal, etc, as in “I won’t wear it,” ”to instill (a view or opinion)
gradually into the mind.”
“To wear the revolution” therefore, may involve, in a Derridian sense, to accept
the critic’s proposal (to inherit from Marx if not through him), to re-member it
(“Remember me,” says Hamlet’s Ghost), to carry it in one’s heart, to lay claim to it as
one’s own, to accept the memory and the inheritance of Marx, to “bear its name.” Not the
proper name, the name “Marx” or, within the economy of the advertisement-photograph,
not the proper name of a fashion name, say Armani, but because we owe “an ineffaceable
debt toward one of the spirits inscribed in historical memory under the proper names of
Marx and Marxism” (Specters 115).
20
We inherit in a spectral, transgenerational way,
even where the inheritance is not acknowledged, “even where it remains unconscious or
disavowed” (Specters 115), because an inheritance is always heterogeneous, because “a
heritage is never natural, one may inherit more than once” (Specters 211), and because
“the proper of a proper name will always remain to come. And secret” (Specters 19).
Furthermore, “to wear” derives from veer; which describes a turning around, as
for instance with reference to a ship that “comes round on the other tack by turning the

20
The preposition “without” does not necessarily indicate negativity. Derrida uses it in
connection with Maurice Blanchot’s paradoxical usage of it, which exploits the range of
meanings of the same word in expressions such as “le mort sans mort,” “le rapport sans
rapport” (“death without death”).
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head away from the wind.” According to Oxford English Dictionary, one of the meanings
of the word “revolution” also involves a “whirling round,” “a turn or twist” or “the return
or recurrence of a point or period of time” (Oxford English Dictionary). “Were the
revolution” would send one to the meanings associated with “were,” which, according to
the Oxford English Dictionary, involves “a state of uncertainty or instability,”
“apprehension, fear,” “perplexity; confusion of mind; doubt or uncertainty how to act or
regard one’s position,” “a (subjective) state of doubt or uncertainty with regard to the
truth or reality of anything.”
It is important to emphasize that Derrida does not mean heritage in a literal sense.
As he points out in “Marx and Sons,” an essay written as response to a series of criticisms
against Specters of Marx, “everything I say makes the expression ‘true heir’ irrelevant to
the point of caricature” (232). “Preoccupation with legitimate descent is a feeling that I
do not find within myself,” and the title “’Marx and Sons’ is anything but a joke” (258).
What Derrida attempts to do is to analyze and question the fantasy of legitimate descent,
to “throw it into crisis” (233) by embarking on a “critique of the genealogical principle,
of a certain fraternalism, of the brother/brother as much as the father/son couple” (233).
Derrida points out that he invests the word “revolution” with a positive,
affirmative value. As he explains, his conceptualization of a “messianicity without
messianism” does not presuppose a state of passivity or a turn to the past. Rather, the
messianic “apprehension” involves an experience “strained forward toward the event”
and is at the same time “a waiting without expectation [une attente sans attente] (an
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active preparation, anticipation against the backdrop of a horizon, but also exposure
without horizon, and therefore an irreducible amalgam of desire and anguish, affirmation
and fear, promise and threat” (“Marx and Sons” 249). It is a structure of existence that
does not refer to any messianistic tradition, to the religious tradition, or to Benjamin’s
“weak messianic power,” but that involves a “waiting without waiting,” a waiting
“punctured by the event” (which is waited for without being awaited). The preposition
“without,” in this case, should be understood not as designating negativity but in the
sense that Maurice Blanchot uses it (in phrases such as la mort sans mort, le rapport sans
report), as effecting a certain abstraction of “there is,” of the abstraction that “there is.”
(“Marx and Sons” 251). The messianic, including its revolutionary forms (and the
messianic is always revolutionary, it has to be), would be urgency, imminence but,
irreducible paradox, a waiting without horizon of expectation. If one could count on what
is coming, hope would be a calculation of a program, that is, it would remain bound to
presentism (Specters 32). Instead of chasing away the ghosts, as Marx did, one should
grant them the right to return.
This is a condition of justice, of a form of life fundamentally different from
present existence. Hamlet, proclaiming time to be out of joint, cursed his mission to do
justice, notes Derrida. But right or law stem from vengeance, and as such, they are
expressions of a system of equivalences that can only reproduce the present (Specters
25).
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The “Exile. Wear the Revolution” image may be understood through its “spectral
effect,” as a revenant that marks a “certain frequentation.” Derrida uses the term
revenant, which means “that which comes back.” As a specter, the image always returns,
“even before it has come.” Its coming is a returning, its future always performed before
as a past. The image comes back, so to speak, for the first time, to demand of us to do the
work of mourning and bear witness to the trauma inflicted upon us by the Holocaust.
Indeed, by bringing us into a disquieting proximity to a specific gesture of the hands
raised in surrender, the photograph “remembers” one of the most famous images
bequeathed to us by the Holocaust era, commonly called the “Warsaw Ghetto Boy.”

Fig. 31 Warsaw Ghetto Boy photograph
The specter, in Derrida’s understanding, is “the frequency of a certain visibility”
the visibility of the invisible. It is what one images, what one thinks one sees and which
one projects on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see. The specter first of all
sees us. It sees us during a visit (Il nous rend visite), it returns to see us. From the other
side of the eye, visor effect, it looks at us even before we see it. It (re) pays us a visit.
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Visitare is frequentative of visere (see, examine, contempleate). It does not always
mark the moment of a generous apparition or a friendly vision. For Derrida, the ghost
“remains that which gives one the most to think about.” The notion of the spectral is
complicated by Derrida, who sees the spectral in terms of untimeliness and disajustment,
anachronistic, not of this, or any other time. The time(s) of the specter is always –already
multiple, not discernable as a moment in time. The specter has several times, and no one
can be sure if by returning it testifies for a living past or for a living future. If it demands
us to do a work of mourning, this mourning is an interminable task and therefore a work
in progress. Mourning always follows a trauma, a trauma which is “endlessly denied by
the very movement through which one tries to cushion it, to assimilate it, to interiorize or
incorporate it” (Specters 122). The “work” involves a delicate balance of remembering
and forgetting, situated somewhere “between introjection and incorporation” (Specters
12). Derrida points to the necessity of letting the dead to work, and asks us to follow a
logic of trauma and a “topology of mourning” (Specters 121) so that the specters of the
dead come to work on us. This is, on our part, an ineluctable ethical response to the
revenant.
In Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s theory of the crypt, introjection refers to a
successful articulation of the lost object of desire in speech (as in “real mourning”). By
contrast, incorporation is a refusal to mourn, as it denies the very fact of having had a loss
(129). By refusing to reclaim as our own the part of ourselves that we placed in what we
lost, through incorporation we ingest the love-object we miss, they claim (127). The
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inaccessible object of desire is incorporated as a “fantasy” within the body and hidden by
the ego in a “crypt” from which it returns to haunt either through words that hide (such as
homophones) or through somatic symptoms that can be read as the literalization of a
figure of speech.
Thus, incorporation refers to a “swallowing of words” as opposed to their articulation
and results in the formation of a crypt in the unconscious so that the other can be
maintained. As the authors put it: “in order not to have to ‘swallow’ a loss, we fantasize
swallowing (or having swallowed) that which has been lost” (126). “The phantom effect”
refers to the material aspect of words, to their chains of sounds that have relationships
among themselves other than meaning (Wear swear where? were whither we are).
Yet unlike Abraham and Torok’s phantom, the temporality of Derrida’s specter is
linked not only to the past but to the future as well. It never dies, but remains to come and
to come-back. The secrets of Derrida’s specters are neither puzzles to be solved nor
unspeakable because of a taboo or an initial act of shame and prohibition. On the
contrary, one has to converse with ghosts, to encounter what is strange, other, about the
ghost. It is the structural openness or address directed towards the living by the voices of
the past or the net yet formulated possibilities of the future.

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Chapter 5:
The New European Cinema of Precarity: A Transnational Perspective

The fact that part-timers cannot organize themselves because they can be
fired is, in fact, wage discrimination (with a union discrimination
attached). We could also build into this claim a demand for a European
minimum wage, ten euros per hour, all across the union. These are the
staples – the building blocks of a more advanced, solidarious, less
Darwinist society – that could become the “European model” as opposed
to the neoliberal model or to the Chinese or the nationalist capitalist
model. Fuck it! I did not choose precarity for myself as a destiny. But I
think that out of that condition, our generation – the Post-Cold war
generation – can fight for a socially progressive shift.
Alex Foti
5.1 Defining Precarity
In his book on European Cinema, Thomas Elsaesser observes that although
Hollywood’s “national” agenda has always been framed as universal (democracy,
freedom, open exchange of people, goods and services) and has served America well,
European values of solidarity, pacifism, the welfare state and the preservation of the past
have led to little recognition for European cinema, which still pales in comparison to
Hollywood in terms of its influence. Elsaesser asks: How useful is cinema as a tool for
re-branding a nation, compared to the re-branding that can be accomplished through the
visual arts, winning the World Cup, or hosting the Olympic Games? Why do we still
have specific national images (Germany and Nazism, France and erotic passion, Britain
and dysfunctional masculinity), which are criticized as stereotypes when used in the press
and television, but are recycled successfully in cinema? (4). How decisive are the media
in soliciting audiences’ identification with the nation and in shaping national identity?
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Are not other social structures (such as the family), geography, or a particular religious
faith far more significant? (7-8).
In what follows I will challenge Elsaesser’s view that European cinema has
merely become a tool for rebranding the nation, making the case for a transnational
European cinema of precarity that evokes new European realities that defy stereotypical
images of European nations. Moreover, in my analysis of some recent films from EU
countries, I will show that a shift has occurred in the kind of conflicts that they
foreground. Some critics argue that recent European films, such as Michael Haneke’s
Code Unknown, have displayed a tendency to focus on encounters between people who
have nothing in common (between privileged self-absorbed, middle-class Western
Europeans and lower-class immigrants, for example), supposedly because “it is precisely
such conflicts that force people to question accepted ideas of ‘community’” (Trifonova
4). In contrast to this position, I argue here that European cinema no longer focuses on
the clash between various social strata or on the conflicts between immigrants and
European citizens. Instead, many recent European films highlight the struggle to maintain
traditional class hierarchies in an altered economic landscape, underscoring the
precarious conditions of average Europeans. Up to a short time ago, European films
depicted the fears of refugees, migrants, or asylum seekers; they are now as likely to
present scenes in which middle-class Europeans are gripped by fear and anguish.
Moreover, by presenting characters who undergo psychological breakdown in the
neoliberal workplace, some of these films may serve to warn worker citizens to become
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increasingly vigilant of its dangers. Such films provide viewers with a set of images that
challenge Europe’s imaginary, invoking the contemporary transformation of labor
regimes while suggesting its psychic and affective dysfunctions.
At the outset, I would like to acknowledge Lauren Berlant as one of the first
critics to identify the emergence of a “cinema of precarity.” Berlant, however, postulates
the existence of what she calls, “The French New Cinema of Precarity,” on the basis of
just three films: two by Laurent Cantet, Human Resources (Ressources Humaines,1999 )
and Time Out (L’emplois du temps, 2001), and one by Agnes Varda (The Gleaners and I,
2000) which dramatize issues of employment and unemployment, of work, survival and
self-employment. In this chapter, I wish to expand Berlant’s theorizations in order to
argue for the existence of a transnational cinema of precarity. In a critique of Berlant’s
otherwise insightful analysis, Adrian Martin notes that her examples are rather easy
choices upon which to build an argument, already discussed by numerous commentators
and blessed by international art house distribution. Martin comments:
“is this really what we should choose to call “a new cinema of precarity” (French
or otherwise)? These comfortable, well treated feature films, now on the shelves
of every DVD store with due aspirations to culture? […] And surely, if there is to
be something to be labeled a new cinema of precarity (not so new, after all) –
superimposing the general associations of what Berlant called “the precarious
present” upon strict economic precarity, [Ken] Jacobs would be its shining star”
(227).

In a series of lectures and in her recent book Cruel Optimism, Berlant identifies an
emerging “sense of crisis” around conventional notions of the good life, and investigates
what is happening to fantasies of “good life” that prevailed in times of social democracy,
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upward mobility, and meritocracy. In other words, she asks what happens to optimism
when the future has become uncertain and an increasing number of people desire only to
get through life. Suggesting new modes of temporality that characterize the present,
Berlant argues that the “cinema of precarity” reflects the eroding power of the fantasy of
the good life and the ways that crisis has become ordinary. Given this “crisis
ordinariness,” Berlant argues that trauma theory, which focuses on the intense and
extraordinary, is not well suited to explaining the impasse of present.
Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, question, however, this idea of crisis, suggesting
that to understand precarity as a political concept, it is necessary to go beyond
economistic approaches that envision social conditions as determined by the mode of
production. Such a move requires us to see Fordism as exception and precarity as the
norm. The two critics note that in 2003, the concept of precarity emerged as the central
organizing platform for a series of social struggles that would soon spread across Europe.
“Precarity” is a socio-economic concept that refers to the fundamental insecurity of
income and livelihood that affects a variety of social groups: from artists to academics,
from unskilled workers to those working in the much celebrated “creative industries.” In
recent years, “mobility,” “employability,” “self-entrepreneurship,” “flexicurity,” and
similar expressions have become widely used catchphrases. In opposition to the jargon of
policy makers, a growing number of artists, theorists and activists have proposed a
critical reading of precarity as a key notion in understanding contemporary society and
culture.
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The neologism “precarity” has already generated intense intellectual debate,
especially in online, open access publications such as Mute, Fibreculture Journal and
ephemera: theory & politics in organization (Neilson and Rossiter 52). At first, critics
were interested in identifying or theorizing the precarious, contingent or flexible workers
as a new kind of political subject, replete with its own forms of collective organization
and modes of expression. This involved an effort to mobilize youth with little political
experience through striking works of graphic and web design as well as publicity stunts at
fashion parades, in supermarkets, and so on. Such tactics are evoked, for instance, in a
film such as Jo Sol’s The Taxi Thief (El taxista ful, 2005), which I will discuss below.

Fig. 32 Image from The Taxi Thief (2005)
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Fig. 33 Image from The Taxi Thief showing protests against precarity in Spain

Fig. 34 Protests against precarity in The Taxi Thief (2005)

Fig. 35 Looting the supermarket in The Taxi Thief (2005)
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Before long, however, critics started using the term precarity not only with regard to the
condition of precarious workers, but also in order to theorize it as a more general
existential state. In other words, the concept was invoked in connection with the
disappearance of stable jobs and eventually around issues of housing, debt, welfare
provision and the availability of time for building affective personal relations (Neilson
and Rossiter 52).
5.2 Precarity as a Post-Class Discourse
Over the past few years, several new laws and tax measures were passed in the EU
which have transformed the workplace both qualitatively and quantitatively, particularly
through the proliferation of temporary agencies and new types of short-term contracts, a
move that reflects the much broader transformation of labor relations that characterizes
global capitalism in the post-Fordist era. To be sure, Europe today is undergoing
unprecedented changes in the labor market as increasing numbers of workers in its most
affluent societies are engaged in insecure or irregular labor. This is due, of course, to the
various transformations in advanced capitalism, the expansion of the European Union, to
the impact of globalization, developments in information and communication
technologies, and changing modes of political and economic governance. While capitalist
labor has always been characterized by intermittent employment for lower paid and lower
skilled workers, what has recently changed is the increasing inclusion of well-paid and
high status workers into the group of precarious workers. In the past few years, critics
have attempted to explain and describe the commonly experienced yet largely
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undocumented transformations within working life through discussions of shifts relating
to “post-Fordism,” “post-industrialization,” “network society,” “liquid modernity,”
“information society,” “new economy,” “ new capitalism” and “risk society.” In addition,
they have developed a number of terms that appear to speak directly to such shifts, for
instance notions such as “creative labor,” “network labor,” “cognitive labor,” “affective
labor” and “immaterial labor.” While these terms are not reducible to each other, their
very proliferation points to the significance of contemporary transformations, signaling
that a profound shift is taking place.
In recent years, cinema has responded to changes in labor practices in the
European Union, reflecting the fact that the number of workers employed in various
forms of insecure labor in Europe’s richest countries has been on the rise. In what follows
I take a transnational perspective to map out a body of contemporary European films that
constitute a new cinema of precarity. While the theme of precarity is not entirely new,
and, as Martin notes about Berlant’s crititique, these films are to some extent “safe for
analysis,” what I wish to argue here is that the contemporary cinema of precarity has
contributed to a changed European imaginary. This renewed imaginary visualizes the
frustrations of Europeans with their unstable conditions and ultimately energizes their
mobilization and revolt. The looting scenes from what later came to be known as “the
London Riots” very much resembled images from the Spanish film The Taxi Thief
(2005).

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Some critics argue that a supranational or transnational European cinema does not
exist because Europeans do not engage in processes of supranational projections: “No
one blamed cinema when the [European] constitution failed!” Vinzenz Hediger points
out. In the same vein, I would add that in the wake of the London Riots and the “Occupy”
movements, few looked at European cinema for an explanation of what is going on today.
The films that I analyze here directly engage topics such as the everyday effects of
widespread unemployment, the problems associated with temporary contracts, the spread
of mobbing practices, the pressures of single parenthood, and even the desire for the
games of capitalism itself. I argue that these films not only show the struggle to maintain
traditional class hierarchies in an altered economic landscape, but also offer a deeply
pessimistic perspective on neoliberal finance capitalism more generally. Significantly,
the cinema of precarity does not depict precarious employment as a matter concerning
only impoverished Europeans or immigrants; rather, as I argue, it suggests that today’s
middle-class Europeans face anxieties about job security similar to those traditionally
associated with the less privileged social strata. The body of films that I analyze
demonstrates how precarity can be understood as a marker of profound social and
cultural changes. Individually and collectively, these films problematize whether the
issue of precarity can be taken as a symptom of shifting socio-economic and power
strategies that have a profound effect on culture. They also seem to ask: How can we
think precarious subjects? What kinds of resistance to precarity are emerging? Can new
forms of engagement be found in cultural and critical work related to precarity? To what
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extent is culture instrumentalized in contemporary practices of governing and even
championed as a model? How is precarity claimed as an identity in contemporary culture
as well as social movements? Ultimately, what emerges from these films is a vision of
Europe as a territory united not by a common culture, but by set of shared economic
anxieties.
For the “precarious generation” (“génération précaire”), as Pierre Bourdieu
called it in the late 1990s, risk is taken for granted and uncertainty is a given, since the
younger generation of today’s Europe has become used to forgoing career expectations
and future prospects. Moreover, for this generation precariousness impacts not only the
material conditions of life, but also the quality of work and life. More specifically,
precariousness refers to the peculiar way in which professional and personal knowledge
increasingly overlap, as do work and leisure times. If work can be done in non-standard
hours, it becomes difficult to stop working at all. The spaces dedicated to work
dangerously blur the boundaries between the office and the home, so that nowadays it is
possible to work both inside and outside of the office space. Ultimately, the demarcation
between life and work and private and public spaces becomes less and less visible,
forcing the precarious worker to lose any ability to distinguish between the labor market,
self-improvement and social life.
The distinction between work-time and leisure-time became formalized with
Fordism. As Angela Mitropoulos points out, Fordism created a certain temporal rhythm,
distinguished by a proportionality and particular division of times, as in the eight hour
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day and the five day week. Under Fordism, leisure-time was substantively a time of not-
work, the trade-off for the mind-numbing tedium of the assembly line and a time meant
for rejuvenation, and as temporary respite from the mind-body split that line-work
enforces. By contrast, the post-Fordist worker is enjoined to be continually available for
work and to regard life outside waged work as a time of preparation for and readiness to
work. Put differently, whereas Fordism sought to sever the brains of workers from their
bodies, post-Fordist capitalism can be characterized in Foucault’s terms as the
imprisonment of the body by the soul (Mitropoulos).
No longer rejecting outright the condition of precarity, young activists throughout
Europe have recently come to agree that the concept of existential precarity is applicable
not only to working conditions at almost all levels of the contemporary labor market, but
also to the meaning of their lives more generally. Their position is based on the growing
awareness that public and private spheres have to a large extent merged with each other,
and that traditional structures of support have been profoundly altered. Professional life
and private life are less distinct than they used to be, as the space, time, and attention of
working people have been increasingly co-opted in the service of neoliberal capitalism.
Similarly, with the advent of the new class of cognitariat – digital and information
workers – it is no longer easy to distinguish between activities voluntarily performed
without the expectation of payment and the phenomenon of exploited, unpaid labor.
Alex Foti, a former member of the Italian flexwork syndicate ChainWorkers,
explains in an interview that in the radical left nowadays there are two major
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interpretations of the concept of precarity: existential precarity and the condition of being
unable to predict one’s fate or having some degree of predictability on which to build
social relations and feelings of affection. Existential precarity refers to the fact that in
times of global war, life has become precarious. (Either you are a body subject to bombs
and military conflict or you are a prisoner whose habeas corpus is violated in Abu Ghraib
or some other Western prison). The spread of intermittent work and the concomitant
attacks on the welfare state have resulted in a widespread increase of existential precarity
across Europe, Foti points out. Moreover, in Europe working hours have recently
increased. If previously only a small percentage of the workforce was involved in
working during the weekend and at random hours, his number is larger today (Foto 21).
Foti emphasizes that precarity is defined negatively, as a situation marked by the
absence of “jobs for life.” The term itself, he explains, should be understood as a post-
class discourse. If previously we were used to making visible distinctions between blue-
collar and white-collar work, nowadays we can speak of a transition to a more unstable
social configuration based on service and knowledge labor. Since creative workers no
longer perceive themselves as workers, the reversal of the new economy exposed the
myth that talented people would be protected forever from market fluctuations.
Commenting on Europe at the juncture of a global crisis of neoliberalism, Foti
optimistically suggests that
The basic human rights are being written right now and we want basic rights for
temps, part timers and migrant laborers to be included on the European continent
[…].I think that now that the cold war is officially over on the European
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continent, we can merge Libertarian, anti-Racist, and Transgender social activism
together to create new radical identities that can bring Eastern European and
Western brothers and sisters into a new political project capable of opposing
fascist Bushism. (22-23)
5.3 European Cinema of Precarity in a Transnational Perspective

One of the first issues addressed by the cinema of precarity is the question of how
to embody critique today, given that many people feel that there is little that they can do
to bring about significant change. As Marina Garcés points out, if critique was used
traditionally to combat darkness, today it must combat a feeling of impotence. This issue
is clearly reflected in (Jordi Solé)’s film The Taxi Thief (El taxista ful, 2005), which was
born out of a protracted, collective initiative dealing with the critical consequences of
precarity.
21
Influenced by a project Espai en Blanc (“Blank Space” in Catalan), which
was created in Barcelona in 2002, the film became an example of how “all critique is
done with and on our very body, with and on our own life, especially when our life is
understood as a common problem” (Garces 208). Linked to the antagonistic practices
occurring in the city over the past few years, “Blank Space” sought to create a space
where critical thought could circulate outside of the spaces of specialists through the
input of the protagonists of real movements, movements that are often characterized by
intermittence and anonymity.
At the center of the film is an assembly called Dinero Gratis (Free Money), which
set out to investigate the possibility of refusing to work in our age, when the factory and

21
For more on recent examples of collective initiatives, see Pikner 2011.
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stable jobs are very hard to find. Dinero Gratis undertook a series of campaigns, actions
and writing projects to draw attention to the problems that arise from our relations with
money, both individual and collective. It is important to emphasize that The Taxi Thief
was not conceived as some sort of documentary about a political movement or a social
problem. Rather, as Garcés indicates, the idea that motivated the filmmaker was how to
use film to interrogate the assembly’s own practices while engaging the spectator’s
consciousness at the same level (208). Jo Sol and the members of Blank Space worked
without actors and without a written script, placing themselves as both subject and object
in the process of creating this film. They took the story of a man who, desperate to work,
steals taxis in order to work as a cabdriver during the night. In the morning, he returns
them to the owner or to a place where they can be retrieved. The people involved with the
project took the concrete case of someone who was in desperate need to work, and tried
to anticipate how such a man would relate to the type of work that they do. Although they
did not claim to have a solution to the problem of money or the violence of work, the
director and his team conceived the film as a story of friendship between the non-actor
Pepe Rovira, who plays the taxi thief, and a young activist (Garcés 208).
Both transnationality and a national collective are indexed from the very
beginning of the film. Over a series of black screens, the taxi thief’s voiceover explains
that Jose and his family came to Barcelona when he was twelve in order to escape
poverty in another part of Spain. “Today, when people speak of immigration,” Jose notes,
“I think to myself that it’s the same thing. All that changes is the people. Whether they
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come from one country or another doesn’t really matter.” As he goes on recounting his
life, Jose emphasizes that his story is part of a collective history involving people from
Extremadura, Galicia, or Andalusia, who came to Barcelona or other cities in Spain or to
places abroad during the period of the economic “miracle.” At first, he shared a flat with
twenty other people and started working hard, until one day he asked himself whether
there is more to life than the life that he had.

Fig. 36 Spanish dancer without a job
The first scenes of the movie foreground issues of precarity and disillusionment by
showing people talking to Jose in the taxi about their lives. We hear excerpts from these
conversations; one woman derides a friend who remarked that a friend of hers had said
that Spain is the richest country in Europe; a young American man recounts his first
impression of Barcelona on the phone and claims that “Spain isn’t what it used to be, or
at least not what I expected it to be.” A young woman laments that she is stuck in her
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administrative job. A middle aged woman, a professional dancer, tells Jose that although
she has danced in theatres all over the world, she cannot get a job.
As the film unfolds, we realize that subject positions and ideologies are constantly
being questioned. Indeed, the activists keep casting doubt on themselves and on what
they do by testing their ideas on Jose’s case. In other words, the film stages a continuous
conflict between ideal critique and embodied critique, as Jose challenges the activists’
arguments and demands that they consider his case from his own perspective. After Jose
is caught by police, an activist lawyer, who is part of the Free Money assembly, wants to
defend him by making a case that Jose’s actions were political, as he reacted against a
system that did not allow him to find work and sustain himself. Jose, however, resists the
idea from the very beginning. He doesn’t want to claim “political criminal” status in
order to justify his dignity.

Fig. 37 Image from The Taxi Thief
An activist explains to Jose that his “stealing” of taxis was a radical and
provocative gesture (“we could almost say it’s a Dadaist gesture” he adds) an absurd act
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necessitated by the absurdity of society itself. Jose insists, however, that he does not see
his gesture as a deliberate, radical intervention. Although he understands that the
activists want to help him, he stubbornly affirms that his position and theirs are
“opposites, but so much so that we can meet.”

Fig. 38 The lawyer in The Taxi Thief

Fig. 39 The lawyer classifying people
When the young activist wants to appeal the court’s decision that Jose should attend a
psychiatric hospital and run a small campaign to draw attention to precarious
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employment, Jose hesitates, wondering whether this would be the right way to approach
his case. He explains that the idea of using stolen taxis to ferry people at nighttime was
his own idea, not society’s, and that all that he wanted was to have a decent life and
support his family. In other words, Jose isn’t interested to position himself politically –as
a motivated agent of change. Rather, he firmly asserts, his actions were the result of
profound shame at the fact that he has lost his wife and son’s respect due to his inability
to earn money.
The activists believe that the problem with Jose is that he still believes in society,
while they criticize work without any belief in society and its meaning. How can one talk
in terms of finding a solution for society, when one does not really believe in society,
they argue. In a number of scenes, we see Jose’s activist friend, Mar, typing out on his
computer his conceptualization of precarity. Mar considers the issue of unemployment as
an industry (that is, as a powerful machine used to move and accumulate capital), and as
a cultural product that mobilizes thousands of workers into occupational training, taking
courses that depend on European funding, temping agencies, and so on. From this
perspective, the issue of unemployment becomes the instrument of a new work ideology,
channeling the fear produced by the unemployment itself.
Mar concludes:
Our politicians are forced into hypocritical discourse and still insist on selling
unemployment as a transitory curse which we will escape once economic
measures have been taken. All for the modest price of a bit of an effort through
precarious employment itself. It’s a case of something like, “full employment
through precarious employment. Unemployment is, above all, a tool for social
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control, through which capital shows us all possible routes. Requirements:
obedience, resignation, submission or death.

Fig. 40 Mar’s thoughts on precarity: image from The Taxi Thief
This perspective echoes the position of activist Foti, a prominent organizer of
EuroMayDay protests in recent years. When asked whether he believed that when the
current economic crisis ends politicians will be able to put more money into circulation
and increase salaries, Foti responded that for him, the problem was structural. Looking at
the last twenty years, he points out, Manuel Castells understood the precarization of one
quarter to one third of the labor force in advanced capitalist countries as a structural
feature that is unlikely to disappear in the future, since the pool of precarious workers
keeps getting bigger and bigger. If, in late 1980s, for instance, a country like Italy started
with ten percent of precarious workers and a million and a half black market workers,
nowadays the number has increased to seven million precarious workers (contingent,
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freelance and temp) and four million black market workers, which represents almost half
of the total workforce (Foti 2004).
The Taxi Thief also engages the concepts of existential precarity and flexicurity.
Such issues are depicted, for instance, though conversations between Jose and two
activists debate the significance of work for each of them. While Jose asserts that there is
no alternative to working, and that for him going to work would translate into a “quiet
life,” the activists express their dissatisfaction with contemporary work conditions. By
rejecting both precarious employment and the drudgery of an eight hour work schedule,
they disclose they desire for flexicurity, a concept which was widely used in manifesto
that circulated throughout EuroMayDay demonstrations in Europe in recent years.
22

These demonstrations were first conceived by Chainworkers, a collective in Milan that
merged labor activism with media activism. As Alex Foti, one of its members, explains,

22
EuroMayDay is a transnational demonstration of precarious and migrant people held on May
First in more than a dozen European cities. The first MayDay Parade was held in Milan in 2001
(it now gathers 100,000 people), and since 2004 the process has spread all over Europe.
EuroMayDay has been promoted as an attempt to ”update” the traditional May Day by focusing
on flex and temp workers, migrants and other precarious people living in Europe. In 2005, the
EuroMayDay network used the slogan “Precarious people of the world, let’s unite and strike 4 a
free, open, radical Europe.”
According to Pikner (2011), the groups demonstrating at EuroMayDay constitute a kind of
European “diasporic collective,” in which the whole of Europe is figured as a “problem area” in
which unemployment, displacement, and (possibly) destitution threaten millions of lives. In this
emerging “glocality,” there is a common and urgent need to overcome the boundaries of
exclusion. Here, the proposed collective body (EuroMayDay) is described as a process for action,
thus inviting translocal public participation. The body has active nodes in (Western) Europe
(Bremen, Dortmund, Geneva, Hamburg, Hanau, Lisbon, Lausanne, Malaga, Milan, Palermo,
Tabingen, Zarich) and beyond (Tokyo, Toronto, Tsukuba).
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the collective started agitating in the year 2000 and drew its inspiration from the Seattle
movement and Naomi Klein’s anti-corporatist book No Logo. The intention was to
reclaim the original anarcho-syndicalist meaning of Mayday, the meaning it had before
World War I, when it was a day of revolutionary activity and of anti-capitalist
celebration.
23
The first parade, organized in 2001, was “a rallying cry against precarity,
against flexiploitation, the persecution and discrimination of young migrants and
migrants in general” (Foti 2010).

Fig. 41 Discussing work in The Taxi Thief
The expression, “flexicurity,” which combines the words flexibility and security,
refers to the idea that nowadays some young people do not want to go back to a “job for
life,” the system of the previous generation. They accept the flexibility inherent in the
computer-based mode of production, but they want to disassociate from the precarity that
is implicit in this forced (Faustian) bargain (Foti 2004). Flexicurity is in the process of

23
This interview is available at: http://www.wsm.ie/c/mayday-interview-alex-foti.
269

being adopted as European policy, yet there is neither an official definition nor an
unambiguous concept of the term (Tangian 2007). The Netherlands and Denmark, where
the notion is thought to have originated, are countries recognized as “good-practice
examples,” which have recently inspired an international debate on the issue. In the
Netherlands, for instance, the law prohibits discrimination between a part-time worker
and a full-time worker in terms of the hourly wage paid. Proponents of flexicurity want to
extend principles such as this one throughout the EU. As Antoniades points out,
flexicurity therefore refers to a set of working arrangements that promote at the same
time flexibility in the labor market and a high degree of employment and income
security. As such, it should be understood as an economic strategy that lays less emphasis
on the protection of jobs, and more emphasis on the protection of people and their ability
to plan their lives and careers (2).
The Taxi Thief also foregrounds a debate about squatting, which refers to the
practice of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied space or building that the squatter
does not own, rent, or otherwise has permission to use. The film dramatizes Jose’s
coming to terms with living in a squat, and the fears that he faces at the prospect of
changing his lifestyle. From the perspective of his activist friend, squatting is a desirable
solution for Jose’s problem. From Jose’s point of view, however, the activist thinks too
schematically, forgetting that the anonymity of the squat can be terrifying. “You forget
that you are talking to a person that has never squatted before,” Jose exclaims. “A person
who has fought and lived, and who has suffered and still does.” Gradually, however, Jose
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accepts his newly improvised home and, with the aid of his activist friend, learns how to
adapt to the new conditions. This involves, for instance, getting water from public
squares and asking for “food to recycle” from the farmers’ market. The film mixes
images of Jose’s new flat with recent squatting activities by European youth and images
featuring the international squatters’ symbol.

Fig. 42 Trying to justify squatting

Fig. 43 Jose justifying his fear of squatting
Finally, the film challenges its viewers to consider, alongside Jose, the philosophy
of questioning the validity of money and of reclaiming goods and services for free as an
explicit political practice which was recently used among many European groups linked
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to the precarity struggles. In a discussion between Jose and the organizers of the Dinero
Gratis campaign, an activist explains to Jose that the slogan “Free Money” is a paradox
that is meant to propose an anti-consumerist lifestyle, subverting common sense and
sabotaging the dominant order.

Fig. 44 Being against work
By featuring images of collective actions to obtain goods from supermarket chains and
malls, The Taxi Thief makes a direct connection between precarity and the notion of
gratuity. Although the film features primarily the Dinero Gratis campaign in Barcelona,
it is important to emphasize that such practices had a transnational characteristic. Similar
campaigns occurred in several European cities before the looting associated with the
2011 London riots drew wide-spread attention to this phenomenon.
Some scholars, such as Jack Halberstam, argue that the London Rioters were not,
as Zygmunt Bauman described them, “defective and disqualified consumers,” gratifying
their “longing” to be part of the system, but “snatchers, defying the terms of appropriate
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accumulation” (Halberstam 2011). Neither were they, Halberstam asserts, the expression
of an impotent rage and despair masked as a display of force or envy masked as
triumphant carnival, as Slavoj Zizek suggested (Zizek 2011). Halberstam traces the
London Riots to new theorizations of political protest which emerged after the riots in the
French banlieu in 2005. However, one needs to emphasize the transnational element of
these practices, and the fact that they should be linked to the ones initiated in 2003 by
members of the larger radical left Fels – (Für eine linke Strömung) (For a Left Current)
movement in Berlin, which, according to Anja Kanngeiser, was the first to emerge as a
campaign which created a “culture of everyday resistance” in response to the discourse of
economic rationalism and privatization issued by the Berlin state government (6).
The Umsonst campaigns, which were most prominent between 2003 -2006,
consisted predominantly of gatherings composed of undefined activists and the public
collectively, playfully and performatively engaging in illegal acts (trespassing and theft)
in the social realm. Asking the question: “why should we be denied ‘luxuries’ just
because we don’t have the financial resources required to take part?” the campaigners
used slogan “Alles für alle, und zwar Umsonst!” (everything for everyone, and for free
too!), gradually managing to infiltrate other activist networks. The Umsonst format
quickly spread to other German cities. Kanngeiser observes that unlike many of the
current German alternative movements, the Umsonst campaigns followed a socially
directed methodology which attempted to discover imbrications between public
resentment against state-imposed regulations and micropolitical, often individual, covert
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acts of appropriation based on anti-capitalist sentiment. These actions included, for
instance, train or tram fare evasions, illegally entering pools and public buildings,
sneaking into cinemas, petty theft, etc.
24
According to the initiators, these individual
tactics were politicized through a visible, collective presence in an attempt to establish
everyday practices of resistance.

Fig. 45 Explaining the “Free Money” Campaign
5.4 Contortions of Flexibility
Finally, one also needs to make a connection between EuroMayDay
advertisements for protests about precarity and flexicurity in Europe and some of the
most prominent advertisements for the Occupy Wall Street movement. Moreover, it is

24
On the morning of the 28
th
of April 2006, for instance, around 30 Umsonst activists
from Hamburg dressed as superheros and invaded a “Frische Paradies” gourmet
supermarket. The activists escaped with significant amounts of stolen champagne, luxury
meats and other delicacies, which they then redistributed amongst local poorly paid or
unpaid internees and other below minimum wage earners.

274

important to underscore that this format of collaborative appropriation is not unique to
these campaigns. Rather, it draws on and reinvents an ongoing tradition which used this
type of autonomous resistance in Germany throughout the 1980s, and in Italy in the
1970s, where people collectively lowered their rent or bargained lower prices in the
supermarket (Kannjeiser 6). Another major movement similar to Umsonst that can help
us understand the connections between precarity and the notion of gratuity is
“Yomango,” a shoplifting movement which originated in Barcelona in 2002. The name
alludes to Mango, one of the main corporate clothing chains in Spain. In colloquial slang,
it means “I steal.”
25

Critics such as Halberstam make a good point when they stress the whiteness of
the ballerina dancing on a bull featured on one of the Occupy Wall Street Advertisements
with slogan “What is Our One Demand”? “Who is this poster meant to speak to,
exactly?” Halbertam asks. “A frail, pale ballerina, en pointe atop a raging bull, my god,
Adbusters, you couldn’t get much whiter” (2011).

25
For more information on Yomango as a way of life, see their website at:
http://www.yomango.net/node/126. Here’s an excerpt of how the movement is defined:
“Yomango is a gesture which provides you with everything advertising promises–
which the reality of capitalism prevents you from having: the prospect of
adventure, self-fulfillment, creativity, sharing, community. Yomango is a
transformative act of magic. It does not recognize the laws of physics nor does it
acknowledge definitions such as legal or illegal. It does not recognize borders or
security arcs. […] These conceptual tools have in common the idea of gratuity.
Taking money out of the picture is a potent way to surf precarity. And “surfing” it
is. Living for free is practically illegal. These Yomango practices do not stabilize
one’s life. These are precarious practices designed to cope with precarity. They
don’t provide you with the assurance of food, housing, healthcare, leisure or
transportation in the future.”
275

Fig. 46 Occupy Wall Street Advertisement
However, I argue here that the image of the ballet dancer trying to keep her pose
and posture (in arabesque) on a running bull needs to be seen in a larger historical
imaginary, more specifically in the context of EuroMayDay manifestations and their
circulations of images. The image suggests flexibility, movement, and freedom. A
ballerina’s posture requires that the vertebral column is stretched and lengthened, and that
the back is not slouched from the routine of sitting in a cubicle or in front of a computer.
The ballerina’s back of the neck is long, her gaze focused and her shoulders are tension
free. To be sure, the image sets up a contrast between stability and unsteadiness, as the
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running bull may throw the ballerina off-balance at any time. I suggest that this image
bears an uncanny resemblance with many posters and flyers for EuroMayDay campaigns.

Fig.47 Poster for Euromayday
The images of these campaigns feature athletes caught in movement, assuming a posture
required for diving from high altitude into water, women whose legs are contorted to
demonstrate flexibility or who perform acrobatic exercises such as ground tumbling. In
other words, these images highlight the gestural character of action and risk, since in
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many of the assumed positions, there is always the danger of a “bad landing” and of an
unfortunate fall.

Fig. 48 Poster for Euromayday

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Fig. 49 Poster for Euromayday
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The manifesto for the 2004 EuroMayDay in Barcelona makes a direct connection
between the movement and the idea of finding one’s balance under precarious conditions:
We are the precarious, the flexible, the temporary, the mobile. We’re the people
that live on a tightrope, in a precarious balance, we’re the restructured and
outsourced, those who lack a stable job, and those who are overexploited; those
who pay a mortgage or a rent that strangle us. We’re forced to buy and sell our
ability to love and care. We’re just like you: contortionists of flexibility.

(“Mayday, Mayday! Les precàries i precaris es rebel.len, ”: Manifiesto
convocatoria Barcelona EuroMayDay 004, my emphasis)
26

When one considers the poster images as a whole, one may notice that they
suspend gesture (and its dimensions of expression and movement), emphasizing
concentration and movement. Taken as such, in a larger pictorial structure, the whiteness
of the ballerina does not matter too much. What I have in mind here is the mode of
analysis that Giorgio Agamben identifies as operating through the reduction of works to
the sphere of gesture, a sphere which lies “beyond interpretation”; in other words, a level
of analysis that cuts across signification or iconographic meaning, while at the same time
tracing the emergence of cultural forms, the dynamics of which are constituted within the
image.
When describing Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon’s film Zidane: A Portrait
of the Twenty-First Century (2006), a film in which seventeen synchronized cameras
follow the trajectory of famous soccer player Zinédine Zidane’s body in motion, breaking
into details, Jill Bennett notes the film offers a study of a “man at work, an ouvrier”

26
This manifesto is available at http://www.euromayday.org/barcelona/textos_ct.html.
280

(441). Work, in this instance, is described through interaction and response, concentration
and scrutiny. Bennett comments:
If (as Agamben suggests) gesture registers a tension or dialectic between the
solitary and the communicative, such that it expresses precisely the expression of
“being in” an interaction rather than simply the articulated communication – then
Zidane is poised exactly at this interface (441).

In other words, we should interpret the film as a study of the dynamics of movement and
gesture – gesture being conceived, as in Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne atlas, less as subject
matter than as method. On the morning of filming the match with Zidane, the film crew
went to the Prado Museum in Madrid to look at the portraits of Goya and Velazquez. As
Bennett points out, they did not study the paintings as models for the creation of the
portrait of the twenty-first century, as direct reference, but in order to reflect on and
identify a transhistorical relationship – a mode of visual thinking that Mieke Bal
describes in her book Quoting Caravaggio. Put differently, they served as a way of
identifying “the gestural elements of a portrait, conceived in terms of its emergence in the
modern arena, forged from a conflation of representational codes, and designed and
executed by the subject in collusion with the film-makers” (Bennett 442).
In an insightful article on Jang Sun-woo’s film Timeless, Bottomless, Bad Movie
(1998), Nicole Brenez argues that the director uses “an existential economy” of
representing the fragility of a precarious moment. Jung Sun-woo, she argues, invents a
“plasticity of precarity.” As the critic puts it, “in the face of what it depicts – misery,
death, loss, cruelty, youth wasted in pure loss, the film elaborates this demand: that
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cinema either go mad from anguish, or crazy with energy” (2009). The film depicts both
the young and the old protagonists as aware that they have no future, whether they vanish
all of a sudden or remain stuck in the immobility that prevents them from fighting for
survival. For Brenez, Timeless, Bottomless Bad Movie ingenuously “centres itself on
gesture, no longer using the scene as its narrative unit for action, but human movement
itself. This is evident, for instance, when the film, in the course of a bowling scene,
leaves behind the players (who still play the game, albeit with no respect for the rules), in
order to concentrate on the female spectators “who are happy to simply move about
anarchically, without purpose or reason, in pure corporeal wastefulness.” The film thus
shows simultaneously the precarious, ephemeral present and its unavoidable destruction,
“turning its entire formal energy to the aim of rendering what is noisy, volatile, useless”
(Brenez 2009).
5.5 Cinema Invents New Modalities of the Visible
To understand “the crisis of the new economy” we need to
reflect on the psychic and emotional state of the millions of
cognitive workers who animated the scene of business,
culture and the imaginary during the decade of the 1990s.
The individual psychic depression of a single cognitive
worker is not a consequence of the economic crisis but its
cause.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi

I would make a whole film for the sake of a gesture.
Roberto Rossellini

I would like to begin this section in my chapter with Chris Marker’s film La Jetée
(1962), a cine-roman or film-novel composed almost exclusively of still images, with a
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story told in voiceover. This is a film of “a man marked by an image from his childhood”
which opens with a replay of his childhood moment. A child witnesses his own death as a
man, defying the premise of chronological time. We are told that the child sees the man
(his future self) fall to the ground. Later on, we discover that La Jetée is the story of a
man who travels through time to secure the future of humanity in a post-apocalyptic
context. The potency of images from his childhood helps the man to move through time
zones, but his strength of imagining contain the seeds of his own demise. The images of
childhood that compel him turn out to be the scene of his own violent death. Choosing to
return to the past, drawn to a woman waiting there, he is shot down on an airport
observation pier in the final sequence of the film, reliving the scene he has once
glimpsed.
In an insightful article suggestively titled “The Memory of the Image in Chris
Marker’s La Jetée,” Patrick Ffrench suggests that what this film proposes is that the
image remembers and in its remembering it realizes itself upon the protagonists. As he
puts it, “It explores the memory of the image itself, as though the image had a memory
beyond its insertion into a subjective history, as if our subjective histories were thus
determined by the memory-life of the image itself, carrying and expressing history” (33).
The thesis that the image has a memory, Ffrench reminds us, has been the focus of recent
work by Georges Didi-Huberman, particularly on art historian Aby Warburg. Didi-
Huberman’s L’image survivante explores in particular “la mémoire à l’oeuvre dans les
images de la culture” (“the memory at work in cultural images”), according to a thesis
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which suggests that historicity or memory is inscribed in the image in complex ways for
which standard modes of art-historical enquiry fail to account. Didi-Huberman revives
Warburg’s concept of the “surviving image” and proposes that images have an “afterlife”
(Nachleben), a power to adhere
27
and to haunt. The surviving image, therefore, is an
image that has lost its original meaning and use value, but which comes back nonetheless
like a ghost, at a particular historical moment, a moment of “crisis” (as Didi-Huberman
puts it), when it demonstrates its latency.
In trying to break free from teleological and evolutionary schemata by bringing
together images that otherwise would have not been placed side by side, Warburg
managed to create a certain excess which the critic finds “symptomatic” and dangerous,
disruptive and unsettling as symptoms usually are. Symptoms, Huberman explains, must
be understood in this case as “movement in bodies” and “their temporalities, their clusters
of instants and durations, their mysterious survivals, presuppose something like an
unconscious memory” (Didi-Huberman 16).
A similar idea, but with a different orientation, is broached in Giorgio Agamben’s
essay “Notes on Gesture.” Agamben proposes that it is wrong to confine Warburg’s
enquiries to the dimension of the image. What is at stake is an attention to the dynamism
the image contains, a dialectic between fixity and movement crystallized around gesture

27
Didi-Huberman uses the word dybbuk, which refers to a ghost, from an old Jewish tale.
The dybbuk is characterized by two characteristics in particular: it has a power to rise
again, to effect a psychic haunting and to defy all chronological laws of before and after,
of old and new; and it has a power of adhesion, being able to defy all topological laws of
inside and outside, of near and far (xxii).
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(French 34). Following Deleuze, Agamben contends that if the classical approach to the
image sees it as a pose, according to a Platonic notion of immobile form as the expression
of the Idea, Warburg’s perspective sees the image as being at the same time the negation
and the conservation of an inherent dynamism. Understood in this way, the image
conserves within it a dynamic temporality which, in an implicit reference to Proust,
Agamben relates to involuntary memory. Cinema realizes the dynamism inherent in the
image and leads images back into the homeland of gesture, the critic proposes.
Agamben also considers the vast project began by Warburg, to which he gave the
name Mnemosyne, a montage of photographs of different derivations representing gesture
frozen in the image. This montage proposes a history in terms of human gesture – in
Warburg’s own terms, it allows the vision of pathological symptoms of an archaic level
of human history and culture. The Mnemosyne project is thus a montage of
photogrammatic images (still images withdrawn from a larger sequence) in which a
dynamic historicity is visible. The image here, argues Agamben, functions as a “crystal of
historical memory” (Agamben) independently of individual volition, of an individual
consciousness or of individual unconscious. In other words, the atlas Mnemosyne –
consisting of almost a thousand photographs – is not an immovable repertoire of images
but rather a representation in virtual movement of Western humanity’s gestures from
classical Greece to Fascism. Agamben argues that inside each section, the single images
should be considered more as film stills than as autonomous realities (at least in the same
way in which Benjamin once compared the dialectical image to those little books,
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forerunners of cinematography, that gave the impression of movement when the pages
were turned over rapidly).
Ffrench argues that the montage of La Jetée is effected not only syntagmatically,
in terms of the horizontal sequence of images, but also paradigmatically, in terms of their
imagined superimposition on a vertical level on images of the historical real. Ffrench
calls this a “paradigmatic montage” (36), which he exemplifies by drawing attention to
the fact that the last image of La Jetée “is as if superimposed on a photographic instance
of the historical real” (36). Thus, the image of the death of the protagonist of La Jetée is
modeled on Robert Capa’s famous photograph of the Spanish Loyalist Federico Borrell
Garcia at the moment of his death.

Fig. 50 Image at the end of La Jetée

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Fig. 51 Robert Capa’s famous photograph
Since the “childhood” image which marked the protagonist of La Jetée itself
“remembers” this historical image of the “last instant,” this means, according to Ffrench,
that the hero’s encounter with his own death is also an encounter with the history which
would have marked the childhood of many viewers of the film in 1962 and 1963 (36).
The particular quality of both images is to capture the movement of the body, “ce corps
qui bascule” as it falls, as the arm is flung out either as a reflex or as a last gesture of
defiance or resistance (36). In other words, the critic suggests, the photo captures not
death but life, “a life” in the terms elaborated by Deleuze in his final article “Immanence:
A Life,” a life that is at the threshold between life and death, or a bare life that belongs to
no subject in particular but is an affection in pure state. This immanent life is found by
Agamben in gesture. If the image presents gesture in an exemplary manner, it is because
this life is revealed therein as a pure potentiality to act, before any specification.
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Such considerations lead Ffrench to suggest that for the post-Holocaust generation
(the generation for whom, Agamben writes elsewhere, bare life is revealed as the primary
object of political power), Marker’s film proposes the recovery of a memory which
resides in the image. This memory is not that of specific events, nor that of a specific
subject; it is both a transhistorical memory of the gestural life inherent to humanity and a
fictive vision of the potential annihilation of that life by the rigidity of a politics of
totality.
In Images in Spite of All, Didi-Huberman claims that in Histoire(s) du cinéma,
Jean Luc Godard chooses to show cinema itself and its own reminiscence through a
montage organized around the economy of the symptom: accidents, shocks, images
collapsing one on top of the other allow something to escape that is not seen in any
fragment of film but appears, differentially, with the force of a generalized haunting
memory. Each image “is not a just image (une image juste), it is just an image [juste une
image],” as Godard said in a famous phrase. But it allows one “to speak less and better
say” or, rather, to better speak of it without having to say it.
For Didi-Huberman, Godard seems always to have situated his reflection on the
power and the limits of cinema “in the systole and diastole of the image itself,” that is, in
its essentially defective nature alternating with its capacity to become, suddenly,
excessive. It is a pulsation – our “dual system” of the image – where the limit is able to
become transgression, that is, the power to give more than what is expected, to disrupt the
gaze, to tear the veil (my emphasis). Moreover, for Didi-Huberman the gesture of the
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image constitutes the object of montage par excellence according to Godard (Images in
Spite of All, 156).

Fig. 52 Images from Jean Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma
In this reading of Godard’s film, to make a montage of images, animated with the
other – for example Hitler’s hands, the dive bombing, and the flight of civilians – is not
only to create an abstract synthesis of the totalitarian process: it is also to produce a
gesture as complex as it is concrete, an “unsummarizable” gesture. In this sense, Godard
is indeed the (conscious) heir of Nietzsche and Eisenstein, the (unconscious) heir of
Burckhardt and Warburg: his reflection on history delivers an energetics that Jacques
Aumont appropriately called a “new Pathosformel.” As in Warburg’s work, indeed, the
gesture is understood (and produced) by Godard as a symptom, that is, as a montage of
heterogeneous times in which representation is “surprised,” “suspended,” even
“prohibited” – in Jean-Luc Nancy’s sense – insofar as its proliferation outlines something
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less like an iconography than a seismograph of history. This is also what interested
Kracauer in the work of René Clair and Jean Vigo: “the logic of the dream” grafted onto
the logic of the Real (Didi-Huberman 174).
In The Art of the Moving picture (1915), Vachel Lindsay (1915) advances the
thesis that the cinema invents new modalities of the visible. Lindsay’s fundamentally
moral idea of a cinema with the power of political perspective and figural responsibility
anticipated today’s reflections on the cinema by critics such as Deleuze, Daney, Schefer,
Straub or Godard, Brenez points out. Lindsay’s film theory thinks of films in terms of
splendor and speed, suggesting that the cinema reformulates the world by means of light
and rhythmic effects. The critic thought of the cinema not as a simple reflection, the
redoubling of something that already existed, but as the emergence of a visionary critical
activity. Ultimately, the cinema was for him “that art which renders images first of all
capable of detecting the structure of the present (Brenez 1997, my emphasis).
Images, Brenez explains, can anticipate phenomena to come, which figurative
analysis brings into the immediate present. In this understanding of cinema proposed by
Lidsay, cinema is much more than an heuristically high-powered technology, Brenez
explains: it is a mode of thought, thought based on visual (splendor) and temporal (speed)
properties, which produces humanity. Theoreticians, like cineastes, base a part of their
meditation (written or filmed) on two common premises which Lindsay argued at the
edge of cinema theory: the idea that film, because it does not imitate a referent but allows
it to come forth from the real, can eventually provide the world; and the corollary that an
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image is not a plastic phantom but a dynamic principle endowed with powers that
demand to be deployed and reflected (my emphasis).
It is this understanding of cinema, Brenez underscores, that influenced three of the
most significant axes of theorization in the past decade: work on the powers of the image,
on the figurability of the subject, and on the thinkable relations between the
cinematograph and history. Looking at Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema and Jean-Luc Godard’s
Histoire(s) du cinéma (1989), Brenez takes the major idea that traverses these works and
reflects on their main assertion, that cinema offers the possibility of a body. Both Deleuze
and Godard ask: how does a figure inhabit its body, how does the body concentrate itself
or open itself out as a result of its gesture, how does the gesture splice or not splice space
and time?
Brenez points out that in Deleuze’s Cinema 1 and 2, the most important argument
is that the image (its regime, the economy of its sequencing and its cutting) is charged
with formulating an ontological proposition, in a mode of thought where being does not
necessarily precede its figuration where, as well, being is not necessarily oriented towards
figuration. Similarly, one of the most recurring motifs in Godard is the one concerning
the retrieving of a body, which helps one to understand Godard’s assertion that “If I make
cinema it is already a resurrection.” To understand this conceptualization, Brenez
explains, one needs to take into account Godard’s belief that the cinema enters into a
particular rapport with history: “it proves that people have a memory, a predictive
memory to boot, it interrogates the idea of having a history, reattributing an experimental
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character to the very notion of history – here Godard invents a concept of his own: that of
History By Itself [Histoire seule].” As he put it, “this kind of history unreels by itself, like
the history of the stars. History is independent, in a certain way, of characters. Novelists
know this perfectly well: this history is by itself.” This means also that it unreels between
people, between temporalities, between images, in that interval which exceeds the human
and which only the work of montage is able to put into question, Brenez explains.
The great analyses of the last years have looked into the ways in which film
presupposes, elaborates, gives or abstracts a body, without being afraid to pose again and
again simple questions:
What texture is it (flesh, marble, plaster, affect, doxa)? What is its framework
(skeleton, semblance, becoming, a structure of formlessness [plastiques de
l'informe])? What destroys it (the other, history, deforming its contours)? What
kind of community do its gestures allow it to envision (people, collectivity
[collection], alignment with the same)? To what regime of the visible has it
submitted (apparition, extinction, haunting)? What is its story really (an
adventure, a description, a panoply)? What creature is it at bottom (an organism,
an effigy, a cadaver)? In sum, they have explored the ways in which a film
invents a figurative logic. (Brenez 1997).

From this theoretical perspective, I suggest that one way of conceptualizing a
European cinema of precarity is to think about the ways in which cinema has translated
the precariousness of the post-1989 historical period, its specific structure of feeling, by
submitting to certain regimes of the visible and by foregrounding certain gestures of the
body that allow viewers to envision solitary moments and collectivities in renewed ways.
In Emanuele Crialese’s films Respiro (2002), Nuovomondo (2006), and
Terraferma (2011) the dynamism of human movement is rendered through arresting
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scenes of bodies swimming together or independently.
28
The end of Respiro, a film about
the grim realities on the tiny Lampedusa island, registers, from below the surface of the
water, bodies of people swimming together, very close to each other, as if they were part
of the same entity, part of the same body. This underwater, trance-like and mysterious
scene showing feet wading on the bottom of the sea lasts for several minutes, and is
likely to stay with the viewers for a long time after they have watched the film.
Commenting on this ending, the director explained that he wanted to show the idea of a
community coming together – in this case, the whole village gets to be together as people
slowly gather around the body of a (supposedly) drowning woman and bring her to the
surface. This image of the paddling feet becomes gestural – as Crialese seems to
highlight the gestural character of the action and the dynamic of interaction between
people.
29

Figure 53 Bodies swimming together in Respiro

28
The director once explained that he does not like to use the word “immigration” in
connection with his films, as critics often do. Rather, he seeks to portray human
movement.

29
This final scene from the film can be watched on youtube at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQkgaxWNQFg
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Brilliantly capturing the anticipation, despair, and innocence of the immigrants who come
to a foreign place in hopes of a better life, Nuovomondo features several times scenes in
which the protagonists swim through rivers of milk (and honey, as the saying goes). In
some scenes, they attempt to stay afloat by holding on to giant floating carrots. The
ending is less optimistic than in Respiro, however. In the last scenes, the characters are
still swimming together in a sea of milk, but each one is on their own.

Fig. 54 Image from Nuovomondo
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Fig. 55 Image from Nuovomondo
Terraferma (2011) – which literally means “solid land” is a powerful drama that
organizes a systematic parallel montage between two groups of people: the celebrating
tourists vacationing on the beautiful Sicilian island of Linosa who suddenly jump from a
boat, almost at the same time, into the water; and a raft full of illegal African people who
jump into the sea when they notice an approaching small boat. The film follows a certain
economy of representation set in train by the tension between the significations of two
sets gestures: the waving of hands of the immigrants drawing attention to their existence
in the water and asking for help and the waving of tourists on the boat, dancing with their
hands in the air. By orchestrating these two sets of gestures (embodying an expression of
freedom and individual happiness and the waving of hands as a sign of despair) as they
respond to each other, the film seems to register a failure of communication between two
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parties that can no longer engage with each other through established codes of
signification.

Fig.56 Poster for Terraferma

Fig. 57 Image from Terraferma
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The same feeling of impotence is rendered in the prologue and an epilogue featuring
deaf-mute children acting out emotions in Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown (2000). Like
an audience watching actors on a screen, their classmates try to interpret the mimes. In
the prologue, a young girl acts out her fears. The children guess that she is “alone,” “in a
hiding place,” “ sad,” “imprisoned,” but cannot decode or interpret the complex emotions
that the girl represents.
A similar inability is evident in Boris Mitic’s Goodbye, How Are You (2009),
where the narrator tells us that until recently, one would insult someone and he would
have to accept a duel. As we watch images of people throwing bags of garbage at the UN
headquarters in former Yugoslavia, the voice-over commentary is that “nowadays, some
people are impossible to insult, let alone to challenge to a duel.” A UN representative
makes the V sign of peace with his fingers, and all the other soldiers stand still.

Fig. 58 Africans crying for help in Terraferma

Fig. 59 Tourists on a boat in Terraferma

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Terraferma follows the tribulations of a struggling family of fishermen who, upon
realizing that they can no longer sustain themselves with fishing, decide to offer their
house for tourists and move into the garage. The troubles begin when they lose their boat
for having saved some of the immigrants who dared to detach themselves from it and
jump into the water. As “the law of the sea” requires him to take aboard anyone drowning
in the ocean, the old fisherman finds it impossible to turn his back on the drowning and
exhausted refugees struggling hard to board his boat. Forbidden by law to have any
contact with the boat people and obliged to report any sightings to the Italian Coast
Guard, the community is forced to make difficult choices, as they stand to lose the little
that they have left to survive. The most modern of the fisherman’s sons argues that a
beach full of exhausted or dead immigrants will scare vacationers and make them leave.
The older fishermen, however, insist on their right to save the shipwrecked, and stage
complaints against the police. While the film does not show images of the immigrants’
dead bodies carried ashore by the sea – as it is the case in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s
film Biutiful (2010) – their “ bad landing,” so to speak, is rendered cinematically through
images of fish thrown by protesters in front of the police station.
30

Boris Mitic’s Goodbye, How Are You? (2009) renders the themes of risk,
plunging into the abyss of the unknown and of existential precarity through a montage in
which the image of a man ready to jump into a pool is juxtaposed with the image of an

30
The trailer for the film is available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZTDrojDutM.
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empty pool. The narrator comments that he is “just a bad survivor” in a world in which
people are neither dead nor alive:

Fig. 60 Fish thrown by protesters in front of the police station in Terraferma.
“It is true that we didn’t die,” the narrator comments, “but it’s a lie that we are still
alive.”

Fig. 61 Image from Goodbye, How Are You?

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Fig. 62 Image from Goodbye, How Are You?
Mitic’s essay film, which he describes as “satirical verité” or a “visual anthology of
applied aphorisms,” is based on unusual juxtapositions of poetic, metaphorical, or absurd
images which he gathered across the countries that make up former Yugoslavia. On the
website for the film, Mitic writes that Goodbye, How Are You is neither a film about
Serbia nor about literature – it is about a universal journey into a specific, soothing state
of mind which we can enter through the power of words, and, in this case through a
specific type of images that weave together a tragi-comical and potentially healing x-ray
of our times. As he puts it, “they capture and emphasize the satirical nature of our lives,
loading them with new meaning. The connotations that arise are further multiplied by
subjective audience reading, by the sequential juxtaposition of images, and by their
teasing connection to their narration.”
31

31
These comments are available under “Director’s Note” on Boris Mitic’s website,
http://www.dribblingpictures.com/flash_eng/drbbpct.htm.
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Like Crialese, Mitic visualizes the energy and vitality of bodily movement and the
excitement associated with being part of a whole, the intensities of bodies being together,
praying, waiting in lines, swimming, or protesting, gathering or dispersing.

Fig. 63 Crowds standing in line for visa in Goodbye, How Are You?

Fig. 64 Protesting crowds in Goodbye, How Are you?
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Fig. 65 Image of crowds in Goodbye, How Are You?

Fig. 66 Jumping in shallow waters
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As with Godard’s History(s) of cinema, the stylistic structure of Mitic’s film
operates through a slowing down of images and a speeding up of the montage. Such short
alternating superimpositions constitute Godard’s videographic figure, the living beat that
makes the images palpitate by destroying the very principle of the shot as a unity and
making it “so that an image is first an ensemble being [être-ensemble], the overlapping of
two motifs, of two procedures, of the image achieved with that which remains to be
achieved, the triumphant image and the scratched photogramme” (Brenez 1997).
According to Godard’s History(s) of cinema, an image presents itself at once as a
temporal atom that must be split by the sheer force of slowing it or by conflicting it; an
ensemble being that which has always already a rapport with its other, with what is
editable [montable] - and a proposition, a hypothesis, an opening to sense which is able to
authenticate itself by this warrant as unacceptable or as inaudible, the way all thought is
(Brenez 1997).
From this perspective, the image of a (Serbian) winged ballet dancer dressed in
traditional folk costume who is trying to keep his balance on one foot over the water
surface which is featured as a mural on a building in Serbia – appears spectral, producing
a dynamic tension between the past and the present, condensing the conflicting forces
arising from the desire to move forward and the weight of nationalistic ideologies which
makes the possibility of the flight only virtual (the “fake” angel of history appears only
on a screen).
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Fig. 67 Mural from GoodBye, How Are You?
“I am afraid that we will have a stormy past even in the future,” says the narrator
of Goodbye, How Are You? “But relax, we are not facing ANY Future,” he adds, as we
see the image of a children’s playing ground right next to the dangerous borders which
demarcate the waters of swollen river. Mitic’s film visualizes through powerful images
the current crisis of subjectivation
32
associated with precarity and the fear that precarity
generates. One such image is translated through a form of address to an imaginary other,
“we, the undersigned, are sinking deeper and deeper,” juxtaposed over an image that
features the dark-red skies of a sunset. The image of the sun sinking over the water into
the horizon suggests here the idea of collective drowning.

32
Subjectivation (or subjectification) is a philosophical concept coined by Michel
Foucault and discussed more at length by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It refers to
the fact that subjectivity is not given: the subject is always under construction. For
subjectivation in relation to labor, see Franco Berardi Bifo, “Cognitarian Subjectivation.”
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Fig. 68 Image from Goodbye, How Are You?

Fig. 69 Image from Goodbye, How Are You?
Perhaps not by chance, other recent European films about precarious subjects also
visualize coping experiences of breathing under the water. In this respect, we can think of
films such as Karl Markovics’ Breathing (Austria, 2011) or Ari Bafalouka’s Apnea
(“apnea” means suspension of breathing-Greece, 2010), which features a young man
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undergoing training for the national swimming team. Dimitris can hold his breath
underwater longer than others, and finds solace when his body and mind are in a state of
suspension. In an article about precarity and the negotiation between the informal and
formal modes of address associated with it (for instance, a job applicant’s loss of an
informal mode of address among equals working together), Brigitta Kuster and Vassilis
Tsianos write that
we could grasp precarity as an “outrageous indeterminacy,” as the wavering of the
affection between the familiar, informal addressee of a possible pleasure in the
future and/or past of equals, and a pain, always brought about through this same
past or anticipated future, over the formal mode of address as a moment of fear
that grips the one informally addressed (94).

Fig. 70 Poster for the Greek film Apnea
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Fig. 71 Image from Apnea

Fig. 72 Image from Goodbye, How Are You?
What is indeterminate about precarity, the authors note, is linked with a politics of
pain and fear, which reveals itself as the debate about security. They point out that, taking
recourse to the distinctions between fear and anguish in Kant and Heidegger’s works,
Paolo Virno developed the thesis that the difference proposed by these authors between a
specific, socially immanent fear of something and an absolute anguish that accompanies
being-in-the-world is currently vanishing, because experience in post-Fordism is
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combined with a changed dialectic of fear and security. Virno identifies indicators of this
transformation in the fusion of fear and anguish into a fear that “is always anguish-
ridden” and in a life that now assumes “many of the traits which formerly belonged to the
kind of terror one feels outside the walls of the community” (qtd. in Kuster and Tsianos
95).
5.6 The Precarious Generation and Generation Internship
The absurdity of the world of call centers is featured in recent films such as Paolo
Virzi’s All Your Life Ahead of You (Tutta la vita davanti, 2008) and Federico Rizzo’s
Escape from the Call Center (Fuga dal call center, 2009), which made call centers the
symbol of Italian distortions related to temporary employment. All Your Life Ahead of
You dramatizes the vicissitudes of girl is thrown in the universe of the precarious work
after her college graduation. After she successfully defends her thesis on Martin
Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, Marta gradually realizes that unless she takes the first
position available, she is unable to support herself. She responds at first to an ad in a bus
for a babysitting job, and soon after she ends up working with the girl’s mother in an
underpaid job in a multinational call center. The title refers to a comment made by
Marta’s mother that she has “her whole life ahead of her,” yet this assured confidence in
the future is contrasted to Martha’s loss of illusions as she becomes caught up in the web
of corporate propaganda. The film paints a sinister image of corporate lingo, labor
exploitation, motivational dance, corporate rewarding and celebration of “success,”
corporate punishment and repentance. The motivational dances performed by all
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employees at the beginning of each day become more and more grotesque as the
company owner urges everybody through her microphone to “say good morning to yet
another splendid day,” because they are special and they are doing “a special type of
work.”

Fig. 73 Image from Escape From The Call Center

Fig. 74 Image from Escape from the Call Center
The film sharply criticizes the fictional company’s extensive and elaborate
practices to alienate its workers. Not only does it put extreme pressure on them, but those
who do not manage to increase sales are also admonished and ridiculed in front of
everybody.
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Escape from The Call Center examines the life and love affairs of Gianfranco, an
insecure young man who has just graduated with honors in Volcanology but has ended up
working in a call center. Meanwhile, Marco’s girlfriend is forced to work as an operator
for an erotic telephone service to finance their studies and share the cost of living with
Gianfranco. The contrast between expectation and reality of life ultimately creeps into
their relationship.
Jonas Grosch’s romantic comedy Resist -The Interns’ Rebellion (Résiste –
Aufstand der Praktikanten, 2009) dramatizes the lives of a series of interns stuck in a
spiral of internships. One day, after his ninth boss coldly dismisses him, Till, the main
character, comes up with an ingenious plan of earning money. Along with two fellow
interns, he decides to found his own agency, “Pakt,” which will function as the first intern
advice bureau. Around the same time, his childhood sweetheart, Sydelia, comes to Berlin
to start a permanent job with “a serious left-wing magazine,” but the job turns out to be a
concealed – and surely unpaid – internship. The idealistic, half French Sydelia, however,
does not take the blow easily. Appalled at the way in which companies use young
people’s labor for free, she plans to instigate a small revolution for the fair treatment of
“generation internship.” When she meets Till in Berlin, the latter has to decide, before the
interns’ first general strike, whether he should stick with his business plans or with his
newly awakened sense of idealism stirred by Sydelia’s influence on him.
Despite the well-chosen, timely topic, the film fails to become a biting satire on
the world of internships, opting, as it does, in favor of a contrived love story. When the
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German government denies the interns the right to strike in the film, it seems as if the
interns’ will to strike dies gradually.

Fig. 75 Poster for The Revolt of the Interns
At the same time, however, the film also foregrounds the reluctance of young
people to break the law even as they are desperate to get a job. Even if the film doesn’t
end with the abolition of the slavery of interns, it nonetheless underscores that the
problem of internship must be dealt with more aggressively. In the film, the chancellor
only appears to deal with the interns’ problems: while he establishes an official
government ministry for interns, it is unclear how this ministry would actually deal with
the interns’ needs.

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5.7 Insecurities Related to the Loss of Social Status
Maren Ade’s Everyone Else (2009) foregrounds the tension between the two
protagonists, Chris, a promising architect, and his girlfriend, Gitti, a music publicist.
Coming from a wealthy family, Chris treats Gitti with a sense of superiority, an attitude
that the film reveals through subtle details. In one scene, he asks her to stop bothering
him and let him concentrate. Later on, he criticizes her for her impulsive, confrontational
ways: “Just watch how other people act,” he tells her. “But I don’t want to act like
everyone else,” she replies. When he goes on vacation with her to his mother’s house in
Sardinia, he catches Gitti watching Italian television. “You don’t even understand
anything,” he snaps, reminding her that she does not speak Italian.

Fig. 76 Chris asserting his “superiority”
Yet Chris too faces a crisis of masculinity, as he is rejected by various
architecture contests and excluded from projects. His insecurities are linked to his
employment status, and he can’t bring himself to tell Gitti that his project failed to win a
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particular architectural competition. Chris relentlessly compares himself to his fellow
architect, Hans, who is evidently more successful and confident than he is. Sana, Hans’
girlfriend, is also a successful fashion designer, always eager to please Hans and
approving everything that he does. The film registers not only Chris’ insecurity and
creative failure, his sense that he is becoming a faceless member of the bourgeoisie, but
also Gitti’s fight to get Chris to like her for who she is. “Sometimes, I want so badly to be
different for you,” she tells him one night, wondering if perhaps she should be more
glamorous to please him.

Fig. 77 Chris and Gitti in Everyone Else

In contrast to Everyone Else, Birgit Moller’s Valerie (2003) painfully illustrates
the efforts of a once successful international female model to keep up appearances after
she has run out of money. More than anything, the film underscores in a very palpable
way what happens when someone who used to enjoy considerable privileges and mingle
with rich people has to face the cruel reality of being broke and without prospects. For a
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few days, Valerie still has a room at the exclusive Hyatt Hotel in Berlin’s Potsdamer
Platz, but when her credit card fails to go through, she is politely asked to leave. With no
place to go, her only choice for the moment is to sleep in her car, still parked in the
hotel’s basement garage. The film sensitively tracks those small, ephemeral moments of
regained power and confidence, as for instance when, after Valerie gets three hundred
euro from a friend, she enters the hotel through the front gate and tips the hotel porter
who had helped her earlier.

Fig.78 Valerie’s confidence returns for a moment when she tips the valet
If Everyone Else reveals Chris’s subtle ways of putting down his girlfriend for not
being as conversant in Italian or not as “reserved” as he his, Valerie shows the tense
relationship between the eponymous character and the parking lot guard, Andre, who
feels dominated by her even as she is the vulnerable one. In many ways, Valerie’s
interaction with Andre helps her to temporarily cope with the shock of being rejected. In
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the end, Valerie finds it hard to deal with her tragic new situation, and, naturally, tries to
hide it from her friend and from her boss at the agency. She begins a double life,
spending the nights in her car and living like a stowaway in the world of the rich and
beautiful. At times, she sneaks into hotel rooms to take showers, confidently convincing
the cleaning ladies that she has just forgotten her key in the car. What is interesting about
this film is that it no longer relegates immigrant characters to the inevitable status of
outsiders. Rather, it portrays them as always already transnational.

Fig. 79 Images from Valerie

Fig. 80 Valerie gaining confidence
When, on Christmas morning, Valerie asks a small shop owner to give her a pack
of cigarettes for free since he doesn’t take credit cards in his small shop, the latter resists
her charm, firmly replying that he cannot do so because he is a Muslim (and therefore he
does not celebrate Christmas). In other words, the film reveals the changed face of
Europe where the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society is presented as already in
existence rather than something in the process of being achieved.
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Fig. 81 Valerie asking for cigarettes from a Muslim man
5.8 The Balcony as a Metaphor of Transition

Andreas Dresen’s film Summer in Berlin (Sommer vorm Balcon, 2005) is an
illustrative case of a creative intervention into the tradition of German films made in the
second decade after unification. Unlike other films, such as Run Lola Run, where people
seem to be detached from their environments (and which, as Elsaesser reminds us,
functions as a perfect branding tool for Germany as it makes Berlin recognizable for its
significant landmarks), Dresen’s film portrays a de-romanticized city where characters
are firmly rooted within a particular neighborhood off the city center in Prenzlauer Berg.
Like Bettina Blumner, whose Prinzessinnenbad (Pool of Princesses, 2007) explores what
it means to grow up in Kreuzberg, Berlin’s famous multicultural district, Dresen
transforms the city periphery into a site of authenticity by revealing what it looks like
from below, within a living environment. Unlike Pool of Princesses, however, which
articulates a new cinematic vision of Kreuzberg by detaching the neighborhood from
previous negative representations, Summer in Berlin focuses primarily on depicting an
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urban environment in which the characters’ trajectories are defined by banality, routine,
and the search for labor. The film refrains from overt political commentary, steering clear
of clichés associated with the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood.
According to the director, Summer in Berlin is just a “cheerful film about
loneliness.” Yet despite its lack of blatant political themes, the film is very much about
unification and its aftermath, even though it does not address the topic specifically.
Dresen, who was born in East Germany in 1963, reverses the standard post-unification
formula in which the Easterners are the losers and the Westerners are the successful new
colonialists. In this film, it is the East German woman and native Berliner, Nike, who is
relatively successful in life and stable in her economic situation. She works for a social
agency as a caregiver for the elderly, and manages to have a relationship and remain
optimistic. By contrast, her best friend Katrin, who comes from West Germany, is much
more distressed: divorced, out of luck and money, she harbors resentment for her ex-
husband and is prone to depression. Günter Reisch, Dresen’s fellow filmmaker,
accurately reads the film as a description of a transition from social ideals to
individualism and from the welfare state to a state where everyone is expected to take
care of oneself in order to survive. As Christoph Dieckmann comments in his Sign and
Sound review of the film “The Many Names of Loneliness,” Summer in Berlin describes
an “attendant sense of apprehension” which eschews any moralizing: “The ideological
neurotransmitters kick in on the ride home to Berlin’s Pankow district through real-life
Prenzlauer Berg, in the dirt of the tram, in the cold and weary faces, in the bawling of the
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children. What we have right now is winter in Berlin.” Indeed, despite the film’s light-
hearted tone ostensibly revolving around themes of love, Summer in Berlin can be taken
as an implicit criticism of capitalism.
The film’s narrative is framed by the image of the balcony, which stands as a
metaphor for the characters’ state of in-betweenness: neither inside, nor outside, the
balcony functions as a spatial equivalent for an uncertain present in which the two main
characters, Katrin and Nike, find themselves drifting aimlessly. Throughout the film,
Katrin, a middle aged single mother living with her teenage son Max, routinely goes up
to her best friend Nike’s apartment on the fourth floor. They sit together for hours on
Nike’s balcony overlooking a street corner, drink wine or vodka with cola, and find
themselves caught in various webs of desires. Although the women’s favorite topics are
men and their everyday problems, their conversations gradually reveal their yearning to
have a stable job as well as their anxieties about the future.
The film begins with Katrin answering questions in the course of an interview for
a job as a window dresser. She tells her interviewer that she was trained in Karstadt,
where she gained experience decorating display windows in all departments and for all
seasons. When her potential employer takes his glasses off and asks her, with an
inquisitive stare, how she would approach her job “today,” she gets a bit lost, answering
almost out of reflex that she is a team player. “And what does a team player mean to
you?” she is asked again by the self-assured employer. After a moment of hesitation, she
reassures him that she has always gotten along well with her colleagues. “Being a team
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player doesn’t mean everybody’s nice to each other,” he replies with a smirk: “It means
you can cope with conflicts and find solutions.” When Katrin replies that she knows how
to do all that, the tension is already settling in the room, leading one to believe that most
probably she will not get the job. We quickly realize, however, that what we have just
witnessed was a mock interview, set up by a company specializing in training people how
to be competitive on the job market and boost their chances of getting a job.

Fig. 82 Katrin’s first interview
When the camera pans to the right, we see a room full of low and middle-class
people in a classroom setting. As the interview coach asks them to comment on what they
have just seen, it becomes clear that Katrin did everything she was not supposed to do.
One by one, the trainees start criticizing her, highlighting her total failure in the mock-
interview: her attitude and body language were not quite right, and she looked too
nervous. She sat towards the edge of the chair, as if she was about to slide off. She was
quite unsure of herself, and she didn’t sell herself enough. “She flunked as a team player,
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she doesn’t even know what it means,” one job seeker adds to the complaints, wagging
his finger in indignation.
Katrin’s filmed interview subsequently becomes the point of departure for further
discussion on how not to sabotage one’s interview. Rewinding the scene, the coach, an
amateur actor whom Dresen chose from his real-life work environment, draws attention
to Katrin’s failure to organize her strengths in order to promote herself. Scared and
disillusioned, she listens with surprise to what she could learn from her misapprehension:
she should have used the whole chair in order to avoid squirming about. She should have
crossed her legs. It was a good move to turn down a glass of cognac offered by the
employer “to loosen up,” but she shouldn’t have accepted the coffee either, as it is a trick
often used by employers to detect people who are nervous. “The interview begins before
you even enter, you could run into somebody by the elevator!” the coach tells everybody
in earnest, as the camera lingers on the faces of the unemployed. The class clearly reflects
Germany’s multicultural society (including a Muslin woman whose head is covered with
a scarf and an African man standing next to her), yet this is no longer a film about
migrants desperate to get jobs or taking classes to learn the new country’s language.
Significantly, Germans and “migrants” (whether they are a second or third generation)
are placed side by side in the same context, anxious about landing a job and equally
unprepared for the tough realities of an increasingly competitive job market. In other
words, the film stresses that even Germany’s young men and women need to reinvent
themselves in order to “sell themselves” in a new economy that seems tougher and
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tougher. The interview coach keeps emphasizing that they should look the employer in
the eyes to avoid betraying their insecurity. And indeed, judging by everyone’s
expressions, they all need self-confidence to face the realities of post-unification.

Fig. 83 Katrin’s second interview
In the second interview that Kristin undergoes, she remembers to cross her legs
but forgets the coach’s advice and accepts a cup of coffee. She is asked whether she
could work away from Berlin for days at a time, and she gladly accepts the option, even
if she has her son Max to take care of. “Why are you staring at me, do I scare you?” the
potential employer asks her, proving that whatever she learned from the coach does not
translate that easily into a real-life situation. “I am looking forward to working with you,”
Kristin assures her interlocutor. As she learns that she has to dress the naked dummies for
a department store, paint their lips, glue on eyelashes, put on wigs, and create new types
so that the customers can actually see themselves in the mannequins, she keeps moving in
her chair to find the correct position, yet ends up betraying her nervousness. The
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employer explains that the current trend requires women without heads. Especially for
expensive clothes, customers prefer mannequins without a particular face or expression.
Yet this trend will pass, he adds, because normal women want to see themselves reflected
and want to know if the clothes would look good on them. When he urges her to observe
the mannequins for herself, Dresen seems to invite us too to reflect on the various images
of the naked dummies.

Fig. 84 Image from Summer in Berlin
Like the victims of Pompeii, whose bodies created hollows in the layers of ash
that covered them, and were subsequently given form through a special technique of
injecting plaster, the naked bodies in the store are paralyzed in various positions. In a
way, they stand for the citizens of the new Germany, who must put on new masks in
order to “sell” themselves. “I would give you the job now, but I have another stack of
applications to look at,” the employer concludes. The following shots, showing Kristin
cleaning after a party, reveal that she didn’t get the job. Desperate to pay her bills, she
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ends up taking up temporary jobs, cleaning, loading and unloading boxes and engaging in
hard physical labor.

Fig. 85 Katrin takes a temporary job
5. 9 Mobbing: Your Death, My Life
In Francesca Comencini’s Mobbing: I like to Work (2004), Anna, played by
Nicoletta Braschi, the accountant protagonist of the film, becomes the haunted face of
casualized labor regimes and mobbing. Like Kristin, she is a single mother, but the
problem here is that she is working long hours, with barely enough time to spend with her
family. Anna finds the difficulties in her life multiplied when the company she works for
is taken over by a multinational corporation. She is then subjected to a series of
humiliating acts at the hands of her manager and colleagues: her account book is stolen to
undermine her credibility; her colleague appropriates her desk, leaving her to wander the
halls; her manager has her meticulously monitor every transaction at the photocopier.
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Fig. 86 Anna standing by the printer
Anna begins to doubt all of her colleagues, many of whom gradually start to avoid
and isolate her. The film solicits workers to be wary of betrayal by trusted colleagues,
and it informs them of the effects of what is seen as neoliberalism’s capacity for
destruction. In one scene, a union representative warns:
The company that has brought us has a very precise philosophy, total flexibility:
the complete availability of all employees. They’re not interested in your personal
problems, family burdens, everyday fatigue: they count for nothing. Total
flexibility. It means availability 24 hours out of 24 […] People are fragile things,
they break easily, the harassment they will carry out against you might be
extremely violent. Remember that violence doesn’t mean that they physically
assault you. It’s enough that they leave you with nothing to do. They can take
away the dignity of any one of you. Any of you.

The company becomes a microcosm of the Italian economy, with the new management
representing an embodiment of neoliberalism: new labor policies have been taken on and
are henceforth imposed by employees. The psychic destruction unleashed by the shift is
understood as dehumanizing, indiscriminate and debilitating, and therefore capable of
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striking at the human core, destroying the individual’s sense of self-worth. Combatting
these effects, then, requires acute social surveillance. Early on, Anna says to a colleague:
“It seems as if everyone’s against me, seriously, everyone.” Finally, Anna is pushed too
far but manages to fight back by subverting the company culture with the help of the
Trade Unionists.
Mobbing refers to a form of psychological work harassment that has been a mass
and highly visible phenomenon in Italy since the mid-1990s. Noelle J. Molé points out
that the definition of the term
...comes from the English to mob (group assault) and from the Latin mobile
vulgus (riotous crowd), aggression or violence or persecution in the workplace
perpetuated with a certain systematic and repetitious manner by one’s
manager…or colleagues, using behaviors able to harm, discriminate or
progressively marginalize a determined worker in order to estrange him,
marginalize him, and eventually induce him to resign…[and] in extreme cases,
[to cause a] propensity for suicide from the absence and self-realization in work
and the lack of normal gratification in social relationships at work. (39)

Mobbing, therefore, leads to estrangement from labor and deep psychic turmoil. Experts
on this phenomenon distinguish between vertical (between management and employee)
and horizontal (among same level employees) types of mobbing, exposing an ongoing
reformulation of a disturbed worker-citizenship relation and an emergent theory of
human baseness. Reflecting on such changes, an Italian trade-union activist made the
following comments in 2004 about Italian citizenship, reiterating widely circulating left-
wing discourses within the anti-precariousness movement:
The fact is that they are no longer citizens; people are goods –they are objects. We
live in a working class society; if you lose work, or when your work becomes
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precarious, then we enter into a precarious society of uncertainty and insecurity.
There is no longer global citizenship. You are alone, you are autonomous […].
Depriving me of work means depriving me of citizenship. (qtd. in Molé 2010:
44).

Precariousness is discussed here in terms of how it furthers processes of
individualization and isolation. While bossing and mobbing have always existed to a
certain extent, the activist in the film notes that there is an increased evidence of
horizontal mobbing (between colleagues). In this instance, mobbing is understood
through a rhetoric of self-defense, following the logic “mors tua, vita mia” “your death,
my life.” In other words, colleagues attack like a “mob” behind someone’s back,
following a logic of survival.
As I hope to have demonstrated in this chapter, the films discussed here present a
Europe in which national identity is no longer the main focus – rather, this body of films
registers and foregrounds the links between capitalism and subjectivity, labor regimes,
and how Europe’s young generation is affected by the fear of an uncertain future. This
cinema visualizes a variety of experiences of vulnerability, whether they are related to
corporate harassment, a loss of status in society, or a loss of one’s possessions. After
seeing Cesare Amoroso’s film about the precarious conditions in today’s Italy, Cover
Boy, many young Italians uploaded on youtube small videos about how much they
identified with the characters in the film and its theme of precarity.
33
This reveals a

33
See, for instance, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWknvTEeYvo&feature=related;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvZ8Swz7YOE&feature=related.

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direct, positive influence that such a film had on audiences. It empowered them to speak
about their own transnational experiences as temporary workers in European countries
other than the one where they were born. More than anything, it made them aware that
they were not alone in their shared experienced of precarity.

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Conclusion

By examining how conceptions of Europe and Europeanness inform the discourse
on European cinema, this dissertation has sought to interrogate the cinematic landscapes
of the “new” Europe, attempting to determine how these serve both to articulate a politics
of memory and cast light on the accelerated transformations of the post-Cold War
era. The films that emerged in Europe after the post-Wall moment are not only
significant as reflections of European identity in a particular place and time, but also
bring into focus what Walter Benjamin calls a constellation – a pattern of historical,
aesthetic and critical discourses – that enables us to read history alongside the present.
The particular constellation illuminated by post-Wall films allows us to see the
changing nature of Europe over the years. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked
a new era, in which West-East divisions have not disappeared. However, this era was
marked by a transformation inflected by a new historical asset and the outbreak of
globalization. Since the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which established the European
Union, the European project has sought to institute legal provisions and a new cultural
politics geared towards the integration of its nation-states, its fractured economies,
and its people. Europe has sought to present itself as a supranational entity that can
meet the challenge of the new globalized world that started to take shape at the end of
the 80s. The agents of globalization – new border technologies, labor migration,
people’s mobility, independent markets and multinational capital, have blurred
borders. Europe has addressed such agents as a supranational entity mindful of its
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multiple and varied member states and seeking to mediate on their behalf for mutual
benefit.
The insistence of the Maastricht Treaty on a “common European character” has
become a catalyst for a renewed post-1989 Europeanism. The audiovisual media and
cinema in particular have become privileged sites for envisioning this new Europeanness,
given its ability to construct and disseminate ideas of nationhood and identity at the
national, supranational and global, levels. In this respect, the MEDIA program, the
Euroimages fund, the Convention on Cinematographic Co-Production, the establishment
of the European Film Academy, the EFA Awards, the Europa Cinemas network have
converged in an attempt to design one common European space and advance a European
consciousness. In 2007, the Annual European Parliament Lux competition (in Latin, Lux
means “light”) was established for films that celebrate diversity in the continent. Despite
all the programs mentioned above, this competition was created as yet another “tangible
symbol of the European Parliament’s commitment to European cinema and its creative
endeavors.” The competition was designed to help increase the visibility of European
films, celebrate the universal reach of “European values and diversity of European
traditions, and provide insights into the creation of a unified Europe.” The winner is
chosen by a Euro MP and benefits from financial support to produce subtitled prints in all
twenty-three of the official EU languages, a version of the original for visually or
hearing-impaired people, and a 35 mm print or a digital cinema package per EU member
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state.
34
Moreover, cinematographic coproductions have been at the forefront of the
post-1989 Europeanism, as they articulate the strategies and goals of
supranationalism. They not only translate the workings of the supranational initiative
as they comprise multiple sources of funding from different countries, but also
maintain the national identities of the originating countries while simultaneously
expressing a supranational, European belonging.
And yet despite these massive institutional efforts, much of the 1990s and the
early 2000s seem to have been dominated by films and filmmakers that challenge and
subvert the very concept of Europeanness. In many ways, however, they also sustain a
sense of Europe as a place always already desired by “outsiders within” or by those
wishing to get access beyond its borders. As migrants are entering Europe in
unprecedented numbers, an increasing number of European films have brought into
question the ideology reinforced by a less glamorous, unwelcoming Fortress Europe.
Given the fact that the post-communist Second World has been largely ignored in
academic studies (despite the fact that this region has changed most thoroughly and
rapidly in association with neoliberal globalization), this project has paid particular
attention to contemporary cinematic representations of post-socialist journeys. In this
respect, the films under consideration here, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort, Lukas
Moodysson’s Lilya 4-ever, and Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown, foreground three

34
For more information, see http://www.luxprize.eu/v1/european-parliament-lux-film-
prize-2011-ten-films-competing-unveiled.html.
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problematic aspects of contemporary Europe: the influx of immigrants, refugees or
asylum-seekers, the trafficking in women from Eastern Europe, and the illegal border-
crossing of Eastern Europeans who do not have a temporary working permit. I emphasize
“the feminization of migration” as a distinctive feature of post-communist migration and
analyze how issues of racial “whiteness” and “neoracism” (Étienne Balibar) operate in a
Post-Wall European context, as the “new Europeans” often feel like and are treated as
second class citizens.
The creation of the European Union has also generated academic discussions
around the idea of a “post-national” cinema in Europe. I engage, in particular, with
Elsaesser’s assertion that after 1989, “the national” acquired a different meaning in
cinema, which is no longer either essentialist (able to reflect something specific about
a country) or constructivist (constructing the nation as an imagined community).
From this perspective, contemporary European films are seen as having developed a
formula which is able to accommodate different signifiers of nationhood. Even
though these films re-use or re-invent national stereotypes, they no longer seek to
construct the nation, but use parody to self-consciously define identity. The post-1989
European cinema is for Elsaesser specifically a global cinema, as it addresses and is
very much aware of a world audience. The national, in this view, is a mere
impersonation of difference for branding purposes, reflecting a fluid understanding of
European identity which is able to appeal to many different audiences. The Second
World and its cinema, however, is not part of this privileged, ironic sense of distance
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to the national construction of identity, what Elsaesser calls “retroactive nationalism.”
In my analysis of Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12: 08 East of Bucharest, I show that the
film’s irony and performativity also reflect the director’s awareness of national
“impersoNation,” and the fact that he is addressing a national but also a world
audience as well.
Those responsible for promoting European cultural policies have also
recognized the increasing global framework within which they operate. Programs
such as MEDIA which support the European audiovisual sector have capitalized on
the need to further a European cultural identity but have equally recognized the need
to cross the borders of Europe and “compete globally.” This global orientation was
made explicit by the slogan “European films go global,” used by the audiovisual
ministers of the European Union at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006.
In the early 2000, films such as Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown stressed the
fundamental differences between cultures and types of experiences. I show that in the
latter part of the decade, however, more and more European films foreground
protagonists who learn to translate and accept each other. The Europe of today is, like the
Europe of 1989, a Europe “in crisis,” “too big to fail, too big to bail,” as newspaper
headlines proclaim. Not long ago, headlines underscored that European culture was born
in Greece and that the entire superstratum of European culture has roots in ancient
Greece: the arts, epic poetry, Greek drama and Greek architecture. Greek philosophy and
philology shaped European thought and are the foundation of modern science, they
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pointed out. These days, the Greek crisis, some argue, may be the very cause of the
destruction of the EU ideal. In any case, it certainly puts the ideal of a united Europe to
test.
The introduction of precarity as a concept from which to think, live and do battle
in certain European movements has led to a repoliticization of current conditions, the
creation of a common language, and a distinct subjectivity – especially among young
people. I identify in this dissertation a cluster of recent European films which capture a
structure of feeling in which young Europeans can recognize themselves and their shared
precariousness, and through which they can begin to dream of alternative futures and
common solutions. European films rooted in the recognition of economic insecurity have
circulated across borders, enabling a sense of awareness that is transnational and shaping
a common European imaginary. European television, by contrast, has not provided a
parallel sense of transnational recognition. This is because European television programs
do not circulate as films do: they do not follow the same cinephiliac circuit, the same
subtitling procedures, or the same institutional structures of distribution.
In Daniele Luchetti’s La Nostra Vita/Our Life (2010), the Romanian character
Gabriela is shown not so much as an extracommunitaria but as a European citizen who is
fully integrated into Italian society. One of the main characters, the handsome (and
famous) Italian actor Raoul Bova, falls in love with her, and by the end of the film they
are happily holding hands. This portrayal of Romanians in Italy marks a shift in the
filmmakers’ attitude towards immigrants. Only two years earlier, in Francesco Munzi’s Il
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resto della note/The Rest of the Night, the Romanian maid is shown stealing a pair of
earrings from a rich Italian family’s house. Thrown out of the house, she reunites with
her fresh out of jail ex-boyfriend, and by the end of the film, her former Italian employer
is killed by a band of thieves in a robbery orchestrated by her delinquent Romanian
boyfriend.
In Federico Bondi’s Mar Nero/Black Sea (2008), Gemma, an elderly widow
living in Florence, gradually befriends her Romanian caregiver, Angela. When the latter
wants to leave for Romania to search for her vanished husband, Gemma realizes how
much she depends on Angela’s friendship, and decides to accompany her. In an “on the
road” adventure against time, the two women find themselves in Romania at the mouth of
the Danube River, each searching for her own truth. In Carmine Amoroso’s Cover Boy,
the Italian Michele dreams of going to Romania to open a restaurant with his Romanian
friend Ioan. Although he commits suicide after watching a televised speech by Berlusconi
in which the premier denies the existence of an economic crisis and blames the left wing
for spreading such a lie, at the end of the film he reappears post-mortem next to Ioan,
overlooking the Danube River.
Such films foreground how banal practices of the everyday create transnational
fantasies of a happier future and a common dream of overcoming the harshness of the
present. They often fantasize a journey to the national space of the other (from Italy to
Romania, for instance), where a citizen from a European country can experience again,
in the national space of another European country, the simple joys of everyday life,
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shared food, and unstressful living away from the pressures of late modernity. Many of
the films which I identify as being part of “a cinema of precarity” operate as utopias or
restorative fantasies by highlighting transnational bonds of fraternity. More and more
European films, in other words, are aimed at an increasing global audience and market,
but they also constantly redefine the notion of what in fact constitutes “Europeanness.”
And if this notion still remains a problematic, ambiguous term, contemporary
European cinema has in recent years rendered the average European citizen as a
“marginal” figure, in the thrall of precarious employment and an uncertain financial
future.
Europe, in this vision, is no longer defined by what “others” are not. Rather, it
is as a territory united not by a common European identity, but by a shared experience
of structural uncertaintly about the future. The consolidation of a neoliberal model of
economic policies and economic globalization has contributed to a generalization of
financial, as well as emotional and cultural precarity. It is this prevailing feeling of
precarity which is so radically different from the moment of 1989 – that makes
Europeans see themselves less as “agents of civilization” and more as part of the
global debates concerning the changing nature of work and, crucially, the nature of
contemporary capitalism.

335

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Asset Metadata

Creator Bardan, Alice-Mihaela (author)

Core Title Contemporary European cinema in a transnational perspective: aftereffects of 1989

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 05/02/2014

Defense Date 12/05/2011

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1989,eastern Europe,European cinema,OAI-PMH Harvest,post-communism,transnational

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Modleski, Tania (committee chair), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member), Lloyd, David C. (committee member)

Creator Email abardan@gmail.com,bardan@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-24991

Unique identifier UC11289903

Identifier usctheses-c3-24991 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-BardanAlic-726.pdf

Dmrecord 24991

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Bardan, Alice-Mihaela

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA