Contemporary European Cinema: Crisis Narratives and Narratives in Crisis

Betty Kaklamanidou · Ana Corbalán

Dec 2018 · Routledge

About this ebook

This book offers a range of accounts of the state of "European Cinema" in a specific sociopolitical era: that of the global economic crisis that began in 2008 and the more recent refugee and humanitarian crisis. With the recession having become a popular theme of economic, demographic, and sociological research in recent years, this volume examines representations of the crisis and its attendant market instability and mistrust of neoliberal political systems in film. It thus sheds light on the mediation, reimagination, and reformulation of recent history in the depiction of personal, cultural, and political memories, and raises new questions about crisis narratives in European film, asking whether the theoretical notion of "national" cinema is less or more powerful during moments of sociopolitical turbulence, and investigating the kinds of cultural representations and themes that characterize the narratives of European documentary and fictional films from both small and large national markets.

About the author

Betty Kaklamanidou is a Fulbright Scholar and Assistant Professor in Film and Television Theory & History at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She is the author of Easy A: The End of the High-School Teen Comedy?, The "Disguised" Political Film in Contemporary Hollywood, and Genre, Gender and the Effects of Neoliberalism. She is the co-editor of Politics and Politicians in Contemporary U.S. Television, The Millennials on Film and Television, HBO’s "Girls," and The 21st Century Superhero.

Ana Corbalán is Professor of Spanish at the University of Alabama, USA. She is the author of El cuerpo transgresor en la narrativa española contemporánea and Memorias Fragmentadas: Una mirada transatlántica a la resistencia femenina contra las dictaduras. She is also the co-editor of Toward a Multicultural Configuration of Spain: Local Cities, Global Spaces, The Dynamics of Masculinity in Contemporary Spanish Culture, and Hacia una redefinición del feminismo en el siglo XXI.