Final Review Flashcards
Genres (significance of + common European genres)
Genres = bread and butter of Euro film industry. Italian sword-and-sand epics, Adventure/swashbuckler films, historical romances, Homeland film, Westerns, Spy films, SciFi, Musicals, Detective films, Horror
European vs. American film
European films often bound to domestic market by language barriers, Hollywood films make lots of money domestically and can sell cheaply internationally.
European films don’t really emerge in American market until small arthouse cinemas pick up post-WWII, but today most of those cinemas are gone.
American film industry has a lot of capital at its disposal, European film has smaller producers, distributors, and budgets.
European director-focused, American producer and star-centric.
American cinema generally constructs a “naturalized space” (Hollywood realism), European films construct “conceptual space” which makes the artifice visible.
Spain (history)
Fascism (Franco Spain) from 1930s-70s, constitutional monarchy in 1975 –> More international success, exports to Latin market
Spain (key filmmakers)
Luis Buñuel (started in 1920s, exiled for making films with anti-Catholic symbolism)
Pedro Almodovar (mostly comedies featuring over-the-top sexual relations, bright colors, queer perspective)
Italy (types of films/important movements)
Antiquity/Rome films, Sword and sandal epics (pre-WWI and 1950s), Diva films, White Telephone films (1930s/40s, imitate American comedies), Italian futurism (abstract, modern, embracing city, speed and rhythm of modern life), Neorealism (shooting outside studio, using amateur actors, focus on poverty and social problems in postwar Italy)
Italy (history)
Fascism - Mussolini takes interest in film as propaganda in 1930s, subsidizes film and builds studios, but less state control of industry than Nazi Germany (more artistic freedom in Italy)
Rise of Hitler and Third Reich
UFA purchased by right wing mogul, Jewish filmmakers and film financiers flee Germany as Nazis rise, fighting between left and right wing groups, Hitler named Chancellor in 1933, Nazis burn films of Jewish filmmakers, Film comes under control of propaganda ministry headed by Goebbels, UFA fires every Jewish employee, Communist and Socialist Democrat parties banned, UFA makes propaganda films, Hitler prepares for anther war (readying public through film), Goebbels emulates Hollywood style and increases budgets, Germans lose, Germany, deNazification begins in 1945 (too many Nazis to be effective, Nazis stay in German film industry), Germany split into zones in 1949 (West - Federal Republic of Germany, East - German Democratic Republic)
What is unique about German film lineage?
More than many other European nations, German’s film history is strongly influenced by its political history and the changing parties in power. Pre-WWII was German expressionism (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920) inspired by the trauma of WWI, then propaganda films during war, then DEFA (formerly UFA) in Soviet-occupied East Germany makes Socialist Realist films, former Nazis remain in film industry in 1950s West Germany, leading to New German Cinema movement, reunification in 1990 with fall of Berlin Wall –> communist regime ends, Head On and cultural assimilation
What films were being made in Nazi Germany?
Mostly propaganda, but also entertainment films. Followed Hollywood style, tried to conceal propagandistic aspects covertly in narratives (like how American film is)
How was this impacted by American film?
Hollywood style, covert propaganda
French New Wave
Reaction against Cinema of Quality movement in 1950s France. Godard a key figure in this movement, critics admired American B-films. Modern, loose narratives, formally loose (shot on site, handheld camera, jump cuts) and consciously artistic, drawing attention to film form.
Highly experimental, about subjectivity.
Resnais, Truffaut, and Varda are other key New Wave directors.
Czech New Wave
Period: 1960s/70s
Key directors: Chytilová (Daisies, 1966), Milos Forman (Fireman’s Ball, 1968)
Features: Surrealist, dreamlike, mystical and magical elements, critique Czech society and authority
European filmmakers of color
Ladj Ly - ethnically Mali, French-born director. Made Les Miserables (2019), which depicts the overcrowding and lack of resources in the Paris banlieues. Shows police corruption. Race and religion.
Fatih Akin - ethnically Turkish, German-born director. Made Head On (2004), which depicts the difficulties of cultural displacement and assimilation, neither fitting in in your parents’ country or the one you were born in. Immigration and cultural assimilation, tradition, new generations, and German vs. Turkish identity. Race and religion.
What is socialist realism? Where was it used?
Socialist Realism is the official, state-enforced film aesthetic of the Soviet Union. It imitates Hollywood realism, but has opposite ideology. In Socialist realism, the heroes are blue collar workers, typically helped out by a communist party member. These films had simple morality and linear stories, as films that were too “artsy” and inaccessible were considered bourgeois.
War films are allowed.
Poland, Czech Republic/Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Soviet Union, etc.
Cinema in Russia - Soviet Theorists
After Russian Revolution, period of super influential experimentation in 1920s Soviet Union
Filmmakers trained with ajitprop, Lenin big believer in using film to communicate to the masses (low literacy)
Key theorists: Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky, montage editing based on Kuleshov experiments)
Pudovkin (uses montage to communicate meaning)
Vertov (starts Kino Eye newsreel, says fiction film is bourgeois, documentary is the true communist film style, Man With the Movie Camera is key modernist work about perception)
