CINEMA.

The power of cinema as a mass cultural medium in the twentieth century cannot be overstated. When the German writer Walter Benjamin wrote about the revolutionary power of cinema in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), his words were suffused with a sense of loss for the value of "original" art objects as they are replaced by their infinitely reproducible representations. Benjamin's nostalgia seems all the more prescient in light of digital technology, which obscures even the necessity for reality as the basis of cinematic representation—we no longer need to film anything real at all—when whole worlds can be created by manipulating digital images on a computer.

Moreover, when we think of the movies, we immediately think of Hollywood, its name in shining lights on a hill. Yet European filmmakers have played a crucial role in shaping the form and scope of cinematic expression from its very inception, and over the course of the twentieth century, cinema has become a centerpiece of modern artistic and popular culture around the world.

BACKGROUND TO 1914

In 1839 the first still photographs were taken by Louis Daguerre and his associate, Joseph Niépce. Within forty years, Eadweard Muybridge had found a way to do series photography with his famous studies of galloping horses. He was followed by Étienne-Jules Marey, who invented the "chronotopic gun" to record animal movements, and the development of celluloid film was not far behind. In 1891 Thomas Edison's assistant, W. K. L. Dickson, developed the kinetoscope (considered to be the world's first motion-picture camera), and by 1894 the first kinetoscope parlors had opened to the public. It was two French photographic equipment manufacturers from Lyon named Auguste and Louis Lumière, however, who invented the first widely used camera, the cinématographe, which could also be used to print and project film. The Lumière brothers thus established the standard speed for silent film (sixteen frames per second), and other versions of the kinetoscope and the cinématographe emerged almost simultaneously in Germany and Great Britain. Lumière camera operators spread out around the world, filming and exhibiting short vignettes of foreign landscapes and everyday life.

The earliest films were often referred to as actualités, since filmmakers such as the Lumières made little attempt to embellish or edit filmed scenes in any significant way. But another Frenchman, Georges Méliès, had been present at the first Lumière screenings in France and recognized the (literally) fantastic potential of the new cinematic medium. He began making narrative films, and developed many of the basic cinematographic elements that are in use today, including the fade-in/out, superimposition through double exposure, stop-motion photography, and the dissolve. As the twentieth century began, Méliès's films became more and more fantastic, including his famous Trip to the Moon (1902), as well as versions of the Arabian Nights (1905) and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1907).

European filmmakers also helped to determine the standard ("feature") length of films: four very popular foreign films, all released in the United States between 1911 and 1914 (and all between four and nine reels long), helped to stretch the attention span of the average audience member to the ninety-minute to two-hour length with which we are familiar today. This new breed of films was expansive and epic, often with prestigious literary or theatrical precedent (e.g. The Loves of Queen Elizabeth [1912], starring Sarah Bernhardt, and Quo Vadis? [1913]). Italy followed the international success of Quo Vadis? with another huge epic, Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria (1914). Unfortunately, Italy's success in the international cinema market had peaked by 1919, and its film industry had nearly collapsed by the mid-1920s.

In France, meanwhile, several filmmaking concerns made important contributions to the growing medium: a company named Pathé Frères, formed in 1896, achieved massive dominance in the international film market during the first decades of the century, while a smaller company founded by the inventor Léon Gaumont produced films made by the first female filmmaker, Alice Guy, and serial films by the director Louis Feuillade. Pathé broke new ground in several areas of the new industry, becoming one of the first companies worldwide to vertically integrate (that is, to hold a controlling interest at all levels of the business, from production to exhibition); Pathé also innovated such editing practices as hand-stenciling color onto certain release prints, a practice it continued through the early 1930s.

In Great Britain, cinema proliferated quickly, aided by the inventor R. W. Paul's widespread sale of projectors; the more films people saw, the more demand increased. The British filmmakers at the turn of the century were remarkable for their willingness to experiment with the actualité form, adding "trick" elements and other innovations in editing. The rich history of films from Scandinavian countries began before its famous proponent Ingmar Bergman was even born: films produced by Nordisk, in Denmark, were among the most popular and highly regarded of the first two decades of the twentieth century.

WORLD WAR I AND THE RISE OF NATIONAL CINEMA SYSTEMS

For all the ingenuity and growth in European cinema to 1914, the United States would come to dominate markets at home and abroad by the early 1920s, aided by the war in Europe. The onset of war in 1914 forced two of the biggest players in international cinema, France and Italy, to severely diminish their production; American firms saw their opportunity and seized it, pouring money into production values that would be recuperated in domestic and international revenues. The European film industries were crippled not only by the distraction of war but also by a closing down of borders between national cinemas, so that technical and stylistic advances no longer passed freely from one country to another. Thus did each nation begin to develop its own distinctive features and style, some strains of which would continue throughout the twentieth century.

German cinema before 1912 was fairly nonexistent due to cultural resistance to the form, which was considered derivative compared to theater and morally questionable in terms of content. The first successful movement in German cinema, then, called the Autorenfilm (the "authors' film") justified its worth by borrowing its prestige from literary and theatrical predecessors—and in that sense really was derivative, and it predictably lost steam. Germany relied heavily on imports from other countries, including Denmark, but fear of anti-German sentiment conveyed in such films provoked Germany to ban all foreign films in 1916, almost completely isolating German cinema.

Russia's film industry was also somewhat slow to develop, and during World War I became as cloistered as Germany's film system. The result of such segregation from the rest of the world for Germany and Russia would be unique qualities with which we still associate these national cinemas, though in the case of Russia, many of these innovations would have to wait until after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, which brought Russia's burgeoning film industry to a screeching halt.

From Great Britain to Russia, Europe from 1914 to 1919 had one main preoccupation: war. The effect of this period in European cinematic history should not be underestimated, not only because it forced countries into their own corners of filmmaking but also because the themes and content of films made during this period inevitably shifted toward promotion of the war effort in each particular nation. Newsreels proliferated as a form, and American films filled the screens of European playhouses. European countries such as Denmark took advantage of their politically neutral status to gain a greater share of other European markets, and innovative Swedish directors such as Victor Sjöström enjoyed widespread acclaim for complex narrative innovations and use of landscape.

DAWN OF A NEW AGE: THE 1920S AND 1930S

Following World War I, several of the twentieth century's most important filmmaking movements took shape in Europe. In Weimar Germany, most of the industry was gathered up by the government conglomerate Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA) in 1917. Such consolidation allowed for a distinctive and consistent development of film style, and the eventual result was expressionism. Yet preceding expressionism in the immediate postwar context of Germany was a spate of huge costume dramas meant to compete with Italy's epic historical films of the teens. The director Ernst Lubitsch, later known in the United States for his "Lubitsch touch," made his first films during this period in Germany.

Concurrently, a new strain of German cinema was taking shape: in 1918 the Austrian artist Carl Mayer and Czech poet Hans Janowitz presented a harrowing tale of madness, murder, and abuse of power to the then independent production company Decla-Bioskop (it did not merge with UFA until 1921). At first Fritz Lang was slated to direct The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1919), but it was ultimately assigned to the filmmaker Robert Wiene. Wiene sought to render his narrator's madness in visual terms, which he accomplished by having eminent contemporary expressionist artists execute the sets. The sets were extremely stylized, with distorted shapes and lighting painted directly onto the backdrops; combined with chiaroscuro setups in the actual lighting, the total effect was haunting, filled with shadows and dark corners. Wiene thus "expresses," or makes visible, the inner darkness and hallucinatory distortion of his characters' minds.

Expressionist films would dominate German cinema over the next decade, when several of its masterpieces were made. Fritz Lang's Destiny (1921; Die Müde Tod), for example, tells the story of a young woman who bargains with Death for the life of her lover, while Lang's next film, Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922; Doktor Mabuse, Der Spieler), is one step more lurid, reverting from a journey through the ages (Destiny' s setting) to the dank underworld of the gangster. Lang made one of his last and most famous silent films, Metropolis, in 1927. This dystopic tale of a mechanized future pushed Lang's—and UFA's—resources to the limit: Lang and his team made a number of technical innovations and trick shots in order to represent the enormous scale of this future world; UFA, on the other hand, was helped to bankruptcy by the effort, and it would take many years for audiences and critics to recognize the brilliance of Lang's frightening vision.

The other key director of German expressionism is F. W. Murnau, whose film Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horrors (1922) is remarkable for the way its expressionistic elements are integrated into the acting, lighting, and cinematography rather than relying on highly stylized sets as in Lang's Metropolis or Wiene's Caligari. Murnau perfected the use of low-angle lighting to create expressive distortion of shadows cast by Nosferatu, rendering the vampire all the more menacing. Shot on location in eastern Europe, Nosferatu would cast its own shadow of influence on a wide range of filmmakers to follow, including Orson Welles and Werner Herzog (who made his own version of Nosferatu in 1979, starring Klaus Kinski and Isabelle Adjani). With The Last Laugh (1924), Murnau left expressionism largely behind, turning to a much more realistic mode, a trend in the mid-1920s known as "the new objectivity" (Die Neue Sachlichkeit). By the end of the 1920s, Murnau had immigrated to Hollywood, like so many other European directors of his vintage.

In France, parallel systems of film production materialized, divided into mainstream and more avant-garde experiments in film. A system of "cine-clubs" also began in France during the 1920s, founded by the novelist, director, and film critic Louis Delluc. Delluc believed that cinema could be studied and appreciated on a level with other art forms, and called for the formation of exhibition and viewing practices that would include lecture, discussion, and debate about contemporary films. The importance of the advent of cine-clubs in France and their proliferation around the world during the twentieth century cannot be overestimated; their support of films and film movements outside of mainstream cinematic entertainment often constituted the difference between a film's success or failure, and it helped to reinforce the concept of cinema as "the seventh art" in France.

In 1920s Europe, cine-clubs provided a venue for avant-garde artists of various modernist movements to experiment with cinematic form. There were impressionist filmmakers—not to be mistaken with the nineteenth-century group of French painters—who sought to express inner states without resorting to the stylization of the German expressionists (Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Marcel L'Herbier), abstract graphic experiments (Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling), dadaist films (Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, René Clair), early surrealist shorts (Fernand Léger, Dulac, and Antonin Artaud). Two crucial European films of the decade were made in France by Spaniards, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí: Un chien andalou (1928; An Andalusian dog) and L'age d'or (1930; The golden age—it should be noted that Dalí's role was much less in this film). Both Andalou and L'age d'or are remarkable for their disjointed narrative "structures" and juxtaposition of bizarre images to represent dream imagery; they are likewise suffused with an eroticism and antiauthoritarian spirit that continue to captivate filmmakers and viewers today.

The director Abel Gance, while certainly avant-garde (in the sense of being ahead of his time) in many respects, and though he was working at the same time in France, only skirted the edges of the various groups just mentioned. Yet his contribution to European cinema is considerable. Gance considered the American director D. W. Griffith a spiritual father and endeavored to make films of the sweep and grandeur of Griffith's Intolerance (1916). In several films of the late 1910s and early 1920s, Gance cultivated his skill at associative (metaphorical) editing (J'accuse! 1919; La roue [1922–1923; The wheel]). With Napoleon (1927), Gance uses a dizzying array of effects and techniques to render Napoleon a monumental historical figure; at several moments in the twenty-eight-reel original cut (the first of six intended parts), Gance employs a three-camera triptych process in order to enlarge the screen to three times its normal width.

Other influential directors of the 1920s and early 1930s include Danish-born Carl Dreyer, whose 1928 Passion of Joan of Arc is still considered one of the finest films in the history of cinema for its use of dramatic close-up to draw the spectator into Joan's suffering; Jean Vigo (À propos de Nice, 1930; Zero for Conduct, 1933; L'Atalante, 1934), whose early death cut short a brilliant career and partnership with the cinematographer Boris Kaufman (brother of Dziga Vertov); and René Clair, who made among the most successful transitions to sound with the musical comedies Under the Roofs of Paris (1930), The Million (1931), and the astonishingly hopeful A nous la liberté (1931), a film that depicts the plight of the industrial worker in the era of the Great Depression (it is often compared to Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times).

Finally, no discussion of the silent era in Europe would be complete without examination of one of its most (literally) revolutionary cinematic movements: along with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 came a radical new kind of filmmaking, known as Soviet "montage," so named for its emphasis on editing as the focal point for the production of meaning in cinema. In August 1919 the Russian film industry was nationalized and the State Film School was founded. Some of the Soviet era's key figures soon gathered there, including Lev Kuleshov and Vsevolod Pudovkin. During the civil war years (1918–1920), most state-sponsored filmmaking was devoted to propagandistic (often newsreel) material to be sent out and exhibited on agit-trains and other modes of transporting Lenin's message to the countryside. An agreement with Germany (the Rapallo Treaty) in 1922 effectively ended the embargo of film production materials to the USSR, and production sites were set up in numerous areas of the Soviet Union. Though a vast majority of the films exhibited in the USSR during the early 1920s were imports, the indigenous film industry slowly began making inroads.

The first centralized distribution entity of the Soviet era, Gosinko, was largely replaced by another organization, Sovinko, when the former proved unsuccessful at reviving the flagging film industry during the early 1920s. Yet in 1925 it was Gosinko that produced one of the most influential films in cinema history: Sergei Eisenstein's Potemkin, which is an epic rendering of a popular uprising that took place on the battleship Potemkin in 1905. Its denouement on the steps of Odessa is cut in an extraordinary rhythm that captures both the suspense and the relentless onslaught of the massacre it depicts. Eisenstein went on to have a long and varied career in Soviet film, ranging in style and content from Strike (1925), depicting a factory strike in tsarist Russia (filmed on location with actual workers in place of actors), to Ivan the Terrible, Parts 1 and 2 (1944, 1958), a massively scaled biography of Ivan IV.

One of the USSR's other key filmmakers also originated during the revolutionary and civil war period: Dziga Vertov (né Denis Kaufman) began by working on agitprop documentaries during the late 1910s and early 1920s, developing a theory and approach to documentary filmmaking that would result in Kino-Eye (1924), Man with a Movie Camera (1929), and an astounding, sprawling work about the first Soviet Five-Year Plan called A Sixth of the World (1926).

1930 TO WORLD WAR II

In "Evolution of the Language of Cinema," the French film critic and cofounder of the journal Cahiers du cinema, André Bazin, argues that sound inherently nudged cinematic style toward realism, since it is less "flexible" than the visual image—that is, its syntax cannot as easily be changed. As national cinemas around the world made the transition to sound, transformations occurred on every level of production, from business infrastructure to style. Sound required new shooting setups for cameras suddenly immobilized by cumbersome devices for muffling the sound of their operation; exhibition spaces had to be outfitted with technology to project sound in theaters. In the early sound era, several versions were made of each film, but this proved too costly to be a sustainable solution. Then dubbing became quite common (and is still commercially accepted today by Italian audiences, for example), whereas in the Netherlands and Scandinavia films were (and are) almost always shown in their original version.

As the United States moved to sound technology between 1928 and 1932, several American companies set their sights on the European market as well. While RCA and General Electric were largely successful in Great Britain, industry forces based in Germany banded together to develop competing sound technology and to sue American companies in European courts for copyright infringement. The resulting corporate battle would not be resolved until 1930, when all of the international industry players met in Paris to negotiate which areas of Europe (and the world) would be controlled by whom. The agreement proved to be fragile, finally collapsing in 1939 as World War II loomed, but the net result for Europe was significant: the resistance to American dominion over sound technology prevented Hollywood from completely overwhelming the European film industry during the 1930s.

In Great Britain, several strains of filmmaking took advantage of the new dimension of cinematic representation: Alfred Hitchcock's films, for instance, only became better once sound was added. One of his early classics, Blackmail (1929), was even promoted as Britain's first full-length sound film, though that claim is still disputed.

In Blackmail, the lingering influence of expressionism is clearly present (in a trade agreement, Hitchcock had made his first two films in the 1920s as a contract director in Germany). During his British period, Hitchcock made several innovations, including the use of sound to reflect a character's stream of consciousness.

Another important development in 1930s Britain was a move toward social realism, an approach to and an ethics of filmmaking exemplified by the Scottish filmmaker John Grierson. Grierson founded the British documentary movement and has been credited with coining the term documentary. Profoundly influenced by predecessors Robert Flaherty and Sergei Eisenstein, Grierson sought to reveal the inherent drama in the struggles of everyday working people. He started the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit (and in 1933 the GPO Film Unit), gathering a group of bright young filmmakers around him, and together they produced such films as Drifters (1929), Industrial Britain (1933), Granton Trawler (1934), Song of Ceylon (1934), and Night Mail (1936). He was eventually appointed Canadian film commissioner and founded the National Film Board of Canada.

Instead of turning to nonfiction to represent the difficult social realities of the 1930s, French filmmakers infused narrative fiction film with harsher themes and stylistic techniques, an inclination known as poetic realism. The directors Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, Jacques Feyder, Julien Duvivier, and Pierre Chenal all made films in this mode. Several of the most influential films of the period starred Jean Gabin (Pépé le Moko, 1937; The Lower Depths, 1936; and Daybreak, 1939) and Michel Simon (Boudu Saved from Drowning, 1932; The Last Turn, 1939), and both men starred in Carné's Port of Shadows (1938; Quai des brumes). While rendered differently by each director, films associated with poetic realism tend to deal with societal outsiders, petty criminals, and poor working-class people. Both Gabin and Simon use their bodies and facial expressions to convey deep humanity despite the heaviness and pessimism of the era. The atmosphere of these films is dank and foreboding, though Renoir's films sometimes bucked the inclination toward fatalism expressed by other filmmakers of the 1930s (for instance, Boudu maintains a somewhat comic tone, while The Lower Depths retains a much darker tone and message).

Indeed, Jean Renoir was the most significant and influential talent to emerge from France during the pre–World War II period. His films from the 1930s constitute their own pantheon of touchstones for generations of filmmakers to follow: such future luminaries as Luchino Visconti and Satyajit Ray (considered the "father" of modern Indian cinema) worked as his assistants over the years, and an entire generation of new-wave filmmakers consciously integrated aspects of his style. Several months before the premiere of Renoir's film The Rules of the Game in July 1939, the director was asked what "the rule" of the game in the title was. He answered that he sought "to show that for every game, there is a rule. If one plays otherwise, one loses the game." Rules of the Game recounts the story of a group of Parisians who gather at a marquis's country home for the weekend. With astonishing sympathy and skill, Renoir wanted to show what it was like to be "dancing on a volcano"—that is, how a fading class of people try to live on the eve of another world war. The film was somewhat misunderstood at first (due in part to the shortened version that was released in 1939), but it has since become one of the world's most beloved films. In the British film periodical Sight & Sound's 2002 decennial survey of the "Ten Greatest Films of All Time," The Rules of the Game was once again prominently featured, extolled for its ability to "cast a spell over you." In 2000 the French educational system used The Rules of the Game as one of its main subjects for the baccalaureat, the exam that all French students take to graduate from high school.

It was also during the 1930s that Henri Langlois, George Franju, and Jean Mitry founded the Cinémathèque Française, an organization dedicated to the preservation and exhibition of film. The Cinémathèque would prove to be instrumental in French film culture, as it not only saved fragile celluloid films from being discarded or lost but also served as a purveyor of taste (primarily Langlois's), as well as providing a physical and intellectual space in which young cinephiles could come together to watch and discuss films.

Socially and politically conscious filmmaking was also prevalent in certain Scandinavian countries and Belgium during the 1930s. As in France, cine-clubs served as vital informal conservatories for directors such as Joris Ivens (the Netherlands), Charles Dekeukeleire, and Henri Storck (Belgium). All made films that were prescient in their warnings about fascism in Europe. In Sweden, on the other hand, the film industry foundered both commercially and creatively during this period, losing considerable talent to Hollywood (Victor Sjöström, Mauritz Stiller, and Greta Garbo, among others).

Like Murnau, Lubitsch, and Erich von Stroheim before him, Fritz Lang would also eventually make the move to Hollywood, but not before directing two of the most important films of the early sound era: M (1930), a film written by his wife, Thea von Harbou, and based on a series of actual child murders in Germany; and The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse (1933). The latter film was banned by the newly elected National Socialists for its supposed subversive content. The Nazis recognized the power of cinema to shape the masses, though their focus was on state-sponsored documentary film rather than on narrative fiction film. Two state-sponsored documentaries of monumental scale were made with virtually unlimited resources by Leni Riefenstahl during the 1930s: the first, Triumph of the Will (1935), depicts the 1934 Nazi Party rally at Nuremburg, while the two-part Olympia (1938) amplifies the 1936 Olympics held in Berlin. The German film industry was controlled from 1933 to 1945 by the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, but it was not formally nationalized until 1942.

Though Benito Mussolini came to power in 1922, Italy was also somewhat slow to exploit the mass propagandistic potential of cinema. The 1920s and 1930s were relatively fallow decades creatively in Italy, as the industry continued to adjust to the loss of the prestigious position it held internationally during the pre–World War I era of historical epics. Apart from LUCE (L'Unione Cinematogràfica Educativa), a governmental body formed in 1924 to oversee the production of newsreels, Mussolini did not attempt to nationalize Italy's film industry during the 1920s. This is not to say that Mussolini underestimated the power of film; he just held a long-term view for the redevelopment of Italian cinema. In 1935 a centralized governmental agency was formed to supervise the distribution and exhibition levels of the industry, the ENIC (Ente Nazionale Industrie Cinematorafiche), and in the mid-1930s Mussolini authorized the establishment of two entities that continue to affect Italian cinema today: a national film school (Centro Sperimentale di Cinematogràfia) and the Cinecittà studios in Rome.

It would take several years, however, before such infrastructural changes would transform the quality and diversity of cinematic output in Italy. The 1920s and 1930s were dominated by melodramas and telefono bianco (white telephone) comedies—so named for the inevitable appearance of a white telephone in nearly every film, symbolic of middle-class affluence. At the newly formed Centro Sperimentale, the film school director Luigi Chiarini gathered together students such as Roberto Rossellini, Giuseppe De Santis, and Michelangelo Antonioni, all of whom would become key figures in Italian cinema after World War II. Several important film journals also cropped up during the 1930s, including Black and White (which remains a forceful voice in Italian cinema today) and Cinema, which was run by Benito Mussolini's son, Vittorio Mussolini. As in so many other European countries during the period, Mussolini also enforced strict quotas on foreign films, banning American films completely in 1940, as the world once again went to war.

The effort to stem the dominance of Hollywood has been a persistent dilemma throughout the history of European cinema. As in Italy, protectionist measures were periodically put in place by European countries, primarily by way of quotas on the number of American films that could be shown in relation to indigenous cinematic production; national subsidization of film industries has also proven to be effective in countering the economic power conferred by Hollywood studios. Europe has also suffered from a drain of talent to the United States at various moments of the twentieth century, most often due to the double contingencies of economic and political exile. As a result, though, the influence of European directors, cinematographers, editors, and actors on the medium of cinema as a whole is undeniably vast. Without attempting to be exhaustive, European directors who transformed the face of Hollywood include Lubitsch, von Stroheim, Murnau, Lang, Sjöström, Hitchcock, Mihaly Kertesz (Michael Curtiz), Billy Wilder, Jean Renoir, Detlef Sierck (Douglas Sirk), Max Reinhardt, Max Ophüls, Robert Siodmak, Otto Preminger, and Fred Zinnemann.

During World War II in Europe, some cinematic production was curtailed, as might be expected where resources were scarce and populations were living under siege. European films made during wartime were mostly funded by governments for their escapist or propagandistic value. The Italian director Roberto Rossellini, for instance, directed three films between 1940 and 1943 (The White Ship, 1941; A Pilot Returns, 1942; Man of the Cross, 1943) with the support of Mussolini's Fascist regime. Rossellini, who would go on to make some of cinema history's most acclaimed humanistic films immediately following the war, "contorted" himself (his word) to fit the demands of wartime Italy. Interestingly, 1942 and 1943 were among the most commercially successful years ever for Italian film. According to the film scholar Tag Gallagher, the total number of films produced had increased sixfold since the mid-1930s, and audience numbers nearly doubled.

In occupied France, on the other hand, film production was completely halted at first. German films were given the most screen time, but French audiences did not respond enthusiastically, driving attendance downward during the first years of the occupation. In May 1941, Germany reauthorized French film production, and since American films were prohibited and Germans poured money into productions, the French film industry became more commercially successful than ever. At the same time, filmmakers involved in the Resistance continued to pool their energy and resources to make films, forming the Comité de Libération du Cinéma Français (Committee for the Liberation of French Cinema) in 1943. The committee members, including Jean Grémillion and Jacques Becker, were among the many Resistance fighters who filmed the liberation of Paris in August 1944. By then, Allied bombing had destroyed much of the crucial infrastructure of the French film industry: five studios, including warehouses storing films, and over three hundred theaters were destroyed.

POSTWAR EUROPE

The Vichy government centralized systems of production and controlled distribution and exhibition by barring films with objectionable content during the war. As in Italy, however, fascist control resulted in the foundation of a French national film school (the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques) in 1943. Many other outlets for cinematic culture went underground during the war, including several film journals and the Cinémathèque Française.

Just as before the occupation, the postwar French film production system was dominated by smaller firms; though the two vertically integrated companies, Pathé and Gaumont, survived the war, capital was scarce in France after the war for all players. To make matters worse, the French government relaxed quotas on American films in 1946, further reducing the potential box office take (and thus investment capital into French film projects). During the same year, however, the French government also established the CNC (the Centre National de la Cinématographie), an entity dedicated to industry regulation, including government subsidization of French films. The result was an increased recognition and support of artistic and even documentary filmmaking, instead of allowing the market to be flooded with strictly conventional commercial fare. By 1948–1949, the French had restored protectionist measures, including quotas on American films, and founded the governmental publicity agency Unifrance to bolster their efforts at promoting cinema as the "seventh art": Unifrance's charter was to promote French film abroad, including the coordination of films to be exhibited at film festivals around the world. Testament to France's cultural commitment to cinema is the fact that the CNC, Unifrance, and the Cinémathèque Française (discussed earlier) all continue to exist today.

French film of the late 1940s and 1950s has been called "cinema of quality" (cinéma de qualité), a term that refers to the reliance in the postwar period on literary adaptations with high production values filmed on studio sets. It would be this impulse of "quality," of finely honed scripts and careful symbolization, against which the new-wave filmmakers would later set themselves. Important French filmmakers of the period include Marcel CarnéandJacquesPrévert (Children of Paradise, 1945); Claude Autant-Lara, with the assistance of the screenwriting duo Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost (Devil in the Flesh, 1947); and RenéClement (Forbidden Games, 1952; also written by Aurenche and Bost). Three directors who do not quite fit into the "quality" mold but are nonetheless of note are Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, and Henri-Georges Clouzot, whose films (Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne [1945] and Diary of a Country Priest [1950]; Beauty and the Beast [1945] and Orpheus [1950]; Le corbeau [1943; The raven], and Les diaboliques [1955], respectively) influenced both the new wave to come and innumerable directors working beyond the boundaries of France. Jacques Becker, who was an assistant to Renoir during the 1930s, also made his masterpiece, Casque d'or (1952; The golden coach), during this period. Finally, toward the end of the 1950s, two more key players in French cinematic culture made films with lasting impact: Georges Franju's The Keepers (1958), his first feature, which was a quasi-documentary story of a man confined in an insane asylum, and Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le flambeur (1955), a kind of muted, French version of noir filmmaking. France of the 1950s even spawned a comic genius: though he only made a few films, Jacques Tati's Holiday (1949), Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953), and My Uncle (1958) are still considered among the most inspired comedies of all time, expertly combining the physical comedy of Chaplin with a tender satire that is unique to Tati.

For other European countries, the postwar period was not nearly as varied. Sweden and Denmark made a quick recovery from the war and began to specialize in art films, for which both national cinemas remain known today. The British film industry, for its part, was whittled down to a few vertically integrated companies (the most powerful was the Rank Organisation). As in France, many postwar British films consisted of "prestige" literary adaptations, including works by Laurence Olivier (Hamlet, 1948; Richard III, 1955), Gabriel Pascal (Caesar and Cleopatra, 1946), and newcomer David Lean, whose Dickens adaptations serve as an instructive prelude to his epic period pictures of the 1960s, Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965).

In the newly divided Germany, an interesting situation developed in the capital, Berlin. While East and West had completely separate spheres of film production, distribution, and exhibition, strange pockets of cross-influence developed. As the film scholar Katie Trumpener explains, "border" movie theaters in West Berlin during the postwar period were often populated by East Berliners who would sneak across the city divide in order to see Western (during the Allied occupation, primarily American) films. American films totally dominated the West German market from 1945 to 1949—a prerogative of American occupation that also took place in Japan during the same period—and American financial interests also "occupied" the emerging West German production system by replacing the old centralized UFA system with numerous smaller firms. These new film companies focused their attention on the domestic market, generating primarily light entertainment fare, including Heimat (homeland) films that consisted primarily of domestic dramas of German village life.

The dominance of American films in postwar Germany is an extreme example of the proliferation of American cinema throughout the European market after 1945; American companies saw an opportunity as Europe rebuilt and reorganized, and took it. By 1948 several countries had reinstated (or increased) protectionist measures initiated during the 1930s: France, for example, put strict limits on American imports in 1948 and required that French films be shown a minimum of twenty weeks a year in all theaters. Britain and Italy passed similar laws in 1948–1949, also opting for a combination of quotas and minimum required screen time for domestic output. In the early 1950s European film companies also began combining resources to form larger European coproductions, a practice that continues today in an attempt to counter American blockbuster films.

In the USSR and Soviet bloc countries, Soviet political control ran deep into its various national film industries, and production funds were relatively scarce. The cultural policy permitting only socialist realist art was reinstated and enforced even more vigorously than before World War II. The first epic production of the postwar period in the Soviet Union, Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, Part 2 was banned for its depiction of a ruthless authoritarian regime. Most of the important filmmakers from the interwar period—Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, and Pudovkin included—only made one or two films after 1945. Little of interest was made during Stalin's final years of life, until the "thaw" that began in 1953 when Stalin died. From 1953 to 1958, until Nikita Khrushchev came to power, Soviet film production increased and censorship was somewhat relaxed.

Nonetheless, the most interesting films made in Eastern Europe during the Cold War came from outside the Soviet Union: during the 1950s and 1960s, the ?ód? Film Academy in Poland (which was founded in 1948 to churn out Stalinist propaganda) turned out some of the most important filmmakers of the twentieth century. Andrzej Munk (Man on the Tracks, 1956; Eroica, 1957) and Andrzej Wajda (A Generation, 1954; Kanal, 1957; Ashes and Diamonds, 1958) have influenced generations of filmmakers in Poland and beyond. Both took a hard, deromanticized look at the lost illusions of the postwar period. Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds, for instance, tells the story of a noncommunist resistance fighter who must assassinate a Communist Party official. Though the resistance fighter, Maciek, seems to die with a futility equal to his own murderous act, he transfixed audiences, subverting the overt pro-Communist message. A young film student named Roman Polanski also attended the ?ód? Film Academy and acted in Wajda's A Generation. His first feature, A Knife in the Water (1962), made him both famous and infamous (a dialectic that would plague his entire career): it was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign film in 1963 and earned a place on the cover of Time magazine, but in Poland it was cited by the governing Gomulka regime as one of the reasons to shut down the ?ód? Film Academy altogether, which it did in the early 1960s. Other Soviet bloc countries, including Czechoslovakia and Hungary, also denounced the "subversive" content of Polish cinema during the late 1950s, effectively silencing their own freedom of expression.

Perhaps the most influential innovation of European cinema in the postwar period emerged not from the production phase of filmmaking at all but from its distribution and exhibition practices: international film festivals such as Cannes, Venice, and Berlin would serve as crucial proving grounds for a select stratum of the international cinema market. Festivals also insisted on the recuperation of cinema as an art, and not simply or principally a commercial product. Festivals also reinforced national identity and prestige in a fragile, healing postwar European culture. The Venice, Cannes, Locarno (Switzerland), and Karlovy Vary (Czechoslovakia) film festivals were all restored in 1946, and Berlin (1951), San Sebastian (Spain, 1954), London (1957), Barcelona (1959), and Moscow (1959) followed over the next decade.

Like a handful of other European directors, the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman gained worldwide renown after World War II through the international art film festival circuit. Bergman's deeply personal and often existential films appealed intensely to this highly educated, cosmopolitan audience. Though many critics consider his first masterpiece to be Summer Interlude (1951), Bergman gained international recognition with his highly allegorical tale The Seventh Seal (1957), in which a medieval knight plays a game of chess with Death during the plague. The Seventh Seal won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1957, tied with Andrzej Wajda's Kanal. In Bergman's next film, Wild Strawberries (also 1957), another character confronts death, but this time the journey is much more contemporary and personal, expressed in dreams and flashbacks. From his 1966 film Persona to his 2003 feature, Sarabande, Bergman has continued to probe the larger human questions of identity, familial and romantic relationships, and, of course, mortality.

International film festivals also helped to "discover" an emerging movement in Italian postwar cinema that would come to be known as Italian neorealism. Directors and screenwriters associated with Italian neorealism include Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Giuseppe De Santis, and Cesare Zavattini (who coined the term). Neorealist filmmakers wanted to move away from the artifice of the classical Hollywood style; instead they shot on location, used primarily nonprofessional actors, and sought to expose the drama they saw in everyday life. Zavattini wrote that"the ideal film would be ninety minutes of the life of a man to whom nothing happens" (Cook, p. 367). Yet we should not assume that neorealist filmmakers did not construct their films very carefully, or that neorealist films are devoid of melodrama or pathos. In many ways, Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) consists of a conventional melodramatic plot; likewise, De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948), which is often held up as the epitome of neorealist cinema, is composed of painstakingly controlled shots, many of which use a method of shooting called depth of focus, which refers to shots filmed with fast lenses that allow both the foreground and the background to remain in focus, creating the illusion of depth in the visual field.

The critic André Bazin hailed depth of focus as a revolutionary technique in the 1930s and 1940s, since, he argued, it draws spectators into a relation with the image closer to that which we enjoy with reality. Bazin claimed that such closeness invites a more active mental attitude on the part of the spectator, as "it is from his attention and his will that the meaning of the image in part derives" (Bazin, vol. 1, p. 36). Bazin also asserted that depth of focus reintroduces the fundamental ambiguity of meaning in reality: "[t]he uncertainty in which we find ourselves as to the spiritual key or the interpretation we should put on the film is built into the very design of the image" (vol. 1, p. 36). Bazin believed that the problem with Hollywood's tendency toward invisible editing is that classical continuity, which makes action appear to be smooth and continuous, relies on abstract mental logic or time rather than real time. Moreover, he asserted, photographic media actually add to or transform reality instead of acting as reality's substitute: so we should understand the force of neorealism to be in assisting the creation of reality (a "new" reality) rather than the perfect representation of it. Neorealism's divergence from the prevalent idea that filmmaking (and its attendant technologies) will and should move progressively toward "a total and complete representation of reality" is the movement's most radical—and most crucial—quality, according to Bazin (vol. 1, p. 20). In a revision to Zavattini's original summation of neorealism as "ninety minutes of the life of a man to whom nothing happens," Bazin describes De Sica's Bicycle Thieves in the following sentence: "a man is walking along the street and the onlooker is amazed at the beauty of the man walking" (Bazin, vol. 2, p. 67). In the film, we see that De Sica is not so much optimistic about the world as he is tender and sympathetic toward its inhabitants.

We should not forget that Europe was devastated both physically and psychically following World War II. In England, air raids had destroyed close to 25 percent of the country's film theaters, while Germany lost almost 60 percent of its film production infrastructure. The 1950s would also bring a competing technology in the form of television, as well as a sharp increase in leisure activities that drew audiences out of dark theaters and into national sport (athletic) centers—as well as outdoors—throughout Europe. Just as in the United States, European film concerns worked to develop new technologies that would regain movie spectators' attention. Innovations in wide-screen and improved color and sound were all intended to compete with American films and to attract larger audiences. Many European countries focused on "prestige" pictures, and several older directors who had fled Europe during the war returned to make films in their home countries during the 1950s (Renoir, Ophüls, Dreyer, Lang, etc.). British cinema during the 1950s consisted of such strains as literary adaptations ("prestige" films) by David Lean, international art house films by Carol Reed, and beautifully rendered extravaganzas by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

1960S EUROPE

In 1960 Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning announced the beginning of yet another strain in British film, which would come to be known as "new cinema" or social realism. Directors associated with "new cinema" took their inspiration from Italian neorealists, the British Free Cinema movement of the 1950s, and from a brand-new movement brewing on the other side of the English Channel. Tony Richardson (A Taste of Honey, 1961; The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, 1962), John Schlesinger (A Kind of Loving, 1962; Billy Liar, 1963), and Lindsay Anderson (This Sporting Life, 1963) all made films in this mode during the early 1960s. The films usually took place in the Midlands of England, depicting the struggles—and speaking in the language—of working people. Unlike the saturated colors of Powell and Pressburger's films just a few years earlier, blacks and gray tones dominate the color palette of British social realist cinema.

Also on the eve of the 1960s, a more exuberant revolution was launched in French cinema: a group of young film-critics-turned-filmmakers, who would come to be known as the "new wave" (la nouvelle vague), made their first feature-length films (Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer all made first features between 1958 and 1962). This loose affiliation of directors emerged from their association writing for the film journal Cahiers du cinema in the 1950s. Many of their films, particularly those of Godard, have a more intellectualized or "thought-out" quality as a result. Some film scholars point to Chabrol's Le beau serge (1958) as the first new-wave film, since it contains many of the qualities later associated with the movement, but two films that premiered between 1959 and 1960 truly inaugurated the political authorship (politique des auteurs) of the new wave.

First, in 1959, François Truffaut's 400 Blows premiered. 400 Blows is the story of a young boy, Antoine Doinel, making his way through a difficult childhood. His working-class parents are too preoccupied with their own unhappiness to pay much attention to Antoine; the cramped shots of the small apartment the three share are sharply contrasted by the high crane shots and light music that give a sense of openness and possibility to Antoine the moment he steps outside into the street. The film ends with a freeze frame of the young teen as he runs away from reform school and toward the liminal space at the ocean's edge on a barren stretch of beach; we share his profound uncertainty as to where he will go next. Luckily for us and for him, Truffaut went on to make three more films centering on the life of Antoine, all played by the same actor (Jean-Pierre Léaud). We see Antoine through romance, marriage, a child, divorce—and throughout, Truffaut films his subject with a remarkable combination of honesty and compassion.

Jean-Luc Godard's first film, Breathless, appeared just one year after 400 Blows and was inspired by a script idea Truffaut gave to Godard about a petty thief who inadvertently kills a police officer and returns to Paris to collect money and to convince his American girlfriend to join him on the run. The resulting film is a dazzling feat of visual jazz: it follows its own unexpected rhythm, slowing down to endless takes when you least expect it, and then speeding up and cutting out action when it seems most essential (when the protagonist kills the policeman, for example). One of the techniques Godard used to shorten or create ellipses in the narrative action is called a "jump cut," a cut from one shot to another in which an action does not quite match up with the previous image, calling our attention to the constructed nature of film. It is much more widely used in films today due to Godard's considerable influence.

Other filmmakers of the new wave, including Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, would also develop distinct signature, or authorial, styles over the years. With the exception of Truffaut, who died in 1984 at the age of fifty-two, all of the original French new-wave directors have continued to make films in to the twenty-first century. Other filmmakers who were more tangentially associated with the new wave, such as Alain Resnais (Night and Fog, 1955; Hiroshima mon amour, 1959; Last Year at Marienbad, 1961), Chris Marker (La Jetée [1962; The pier], Le joli mai [1963; The lovely month of May], Sans soleil [1982; Sunless]), and Agnès Varda (Cleo from 5 to 7, 1961; Far from Vietnam, 1967; Vagabond, 1985), have also continued to make films into the twenty-first century.

Italian film after neorealism also struck out in new political and aesthetic directions. An important figure of neorealism, Luchino Visconti, embodies the transformation: after inaugurating neorealism with his 1943 film Ossessione and creating one of its crowning achievements in 1948 with La terra trema (The earth trembles), Visconti turned to increasingly sumptuous and dissolute subjects, including a story set during the Austrian occupation of Italy in the mid-nineteenth century (Senso, 1954) and another nineteenth-century study of decadence and the loss of power, set in Sicily during the Risorgimento (unification) of Italy (The Leopard, 1963). In both films, Visconti explores the beauty of the decaying aristocratic class structure in which he was born while simultaneously damning it (Visconti was a committed, if complicated, Marxist).

Federico Fellini likewise began his career firmly rooted in the idealism and aesthetics of neorealism, where he began as a screenwriter on Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945), and Paisà (1946). His first directorial efforts, The Young and the Passionate (1953) and La strada (1954), strongly reflect his neorealist background. But by 1959, when he found huge commercial and critical success with La dolce vita, Fellini had already moved toward the world of the magical and the absurd. In 8½ (1963), his eighth-and-a-half film, Fellini weaves together an epic tapestry of one man's life, Guido, as he struggles to make a big-budget film. Through a series of flashbacks, fantasies, and dreams, we are transported into Guido's interior world, culminating in a long celluloid parade of every character in his life (and the film) at the end.

Michelangelo Antonioni, on the other hand, moved from neorealist tendencies in Il grido (1957; The cry) to a much more minimalist, abstract, architectural form of filmmaking. More than any other European director in the postwar period, Antonioni learned to exploit the newer widescreen techniques for the purposes of art rather than mere spectacle, and the resulting films are breathtaking in their vastness and evocation of existential emptiness (L'avventura [1961; The adventure], La notte [1961; The night], L'eclisse [1962; Eclipse], Il deserto rosso [1964; The red desert].

Pier Paolo Pasolini was no less philosophical than Antonioni, but his filmmaking was much more visceral and radically politicized: Pasolini was a well-known writer before he ever became a director, and his first two films, Accattone! (1960) and Mamma Roma (1962), are based in the Roman slums he had previously depicted in novels. A committed Marxist, Pasolini used the film medium to attack the authority of the Catholic Church and the state with increasing vehemence during the 1960s and early 1970s (La ricotta, 1963; The Gospel According to Matthew, 1964; Hawks and Sparrows, 1966; Salò or the Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, 1975). In 1975, shortly before the release of his brutal and highly controversial film Salò, Pasolini was murdered, cutting short one of the most luminous and provocative cinematic oeuvres of the twentieth century.

Bernardo Bertolucci worked as an assistant director on Pasolini's first film, Accattone! and has often referred to Pasolini, along with Jean-Luc Godard, as a cinematic father figure. Bertolucci's second feature, Before the Revolution (1964), is the story of Fabrizio, who is trying to decide whether to commit to his radical political beliefs or to retreat to the familiar comfort of his bourgeois milieu. Over and over again, Bertolucci presents us with characters who must choose between a tough moral-political stance and the ease of conformity, as exemplified in his most famous and most recent films, respectively—The Conformist (1970) and The Dreamers (2003).

With the exception of Luis Buñuel (who spent relatively little time making films in Spain over his fifty-year career), Spanish cinema was not well known outside of Spain until the 1960s. Until then, films were generated by monopolistic entities, directors from the national film school IIEC (Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematográficas), and the Spanish government's newsreel service. In 1962 a new director general of cinema was named, who reorganized the national film school (and gave it a new acronym, EOC) and created greater opportunities for governmental subsidization of new film productions. The result was a string of formidable feature pictures in the 1960s made by directors such as Luis Garcia Berlanga, Carlos Saura, Miguel Picazo, and Basilio Martín Patino. However, true "opening" of Spanish cinema would not occur until the "soft dictatorship" period in the two years preceding Franco's death in 1975.

1970S TO THE 2000S

Unlike in France and Italy (but perhaps more like in Spain), cinema in the new West German state sputtered in fits and starts during the 1960s, and even with support from a group organized at the Oberhausen Film Festival in 1962—that called for a "new" German cinema and successfully petitioned the West German government to fund young filmmakers—German cinema would not capture the world's attention until the early 1970s.

In the 1970s, though, German film collectives made up for lost time: members of the Author's Film Publishing Group included Rainer Werner Fassbinder (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, 1972; Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974; The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1979), Alexander Kluge, and Wim Wenders, while Werner Herzog (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, 1972; Stroszek, 1977; Nosferatu, 1979) received funds to make his first film from the Young German Film Board that came out of the Oberhausen initiative in the mid-1960s. The husband-wife team of Volker Schlöndorff (The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach, 1974; Coup de grâce, 1976; The Tin Drum, 1979) and Margarethe von Trotta (Summer Lightning/A Free Woman, 1972; The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, 1975) also contributed some of the most important films of the period. The tone of the New German Cinema is somewhat pessimistic, expressing disenchantment with Germany's past and uncertainty about its future. It also represents a generation very much "infiltrated" by American culture since the occupation, maintaining an uneasy relationship with America's cultural imperialism. The New German "character" is embodied by the protagonist in Wim Wenders's Kings of the Road (1976): a young film projector mechanic named Bruno wanders along the East German border maintaining old, broken-down projectors in old, broken-down movie theaters. Bruno is laconic, his face impenetrable; long minutes tick by with no words at all. He meets another young man, nicknamed "Kamikaze" for a failed suicide attempt that brings about the first encounter between them, and they decide to travel together, American road-movie style. Yet the film contains an ambivalent relationship to America throughout: the commercialization of film is wrecking small-town German movie theaters, while American rock and roll and constant homage to American films and filmmakers by way of visual quotations provide energy and momentum to the film.

Just two years later, Helke Sander's Redupers, The All-Around Reduced Personality (1978) would blend fiction and documentary to tell the story of Edda (played by Sander herself), a single mother and photographer who joins a women's photography collective in West Berlin. The collective has just received a grant to document West Berlin from a feminist perspective, but instead of seeing differences between West and East through her camera, Edda/Helke only sees parallels. She does not fit in anywhere and wanders the city not unlike Wenders's Bruno, and the film refuses to grant its protagonist—or the audience—answers about the future.

The 1970s proved to be a catalyzing decade across Europe for artistic innovation in film. In post-Franco Spain, Carlos Saura, Juan Bardem, and Luis Berlanga continued to make politically oriented films of various kinds (symbolic, satire, thriller), and Victor Bice directed the internationally lauded masterpiece Spirit of the Beehive (1973), in which a traveling projectionist shows Frankenstein in a small town, activating the imagination of two young girls. By the end of the 1970s, the director Pilar Miró would test the boundaries of censorship in post-Franco Spain with his film The Cuenca Crime (1979), for which Miró was charged with defamation. When Miró was exonerated and the film was finally released, it broke all domestic box office records.

It was also during the 1970s that Pedro Almodóvar began making films with a Super-8 camera and screening them in Madrid's underground clubs. With an exuberant feel for the perversions and manias that drive us, Almodóvar has become Spain's most consistently successful and provocative filmmaker. Though his films are populated with surprisingly lovable drug-addicted nuns, prostitutes, and transvestites, Almodóvar has been showered with nominations and awards from all over the world since his breakout film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in 1987. He has been nominated for a number of Academy Awards, Césars (France's Oscar), BAFTAs (the U.K.'s Oscar), and European Film Awards. He has also won Oscars for All About My Mother (1999) and Talk to Her (2002), and multiple European awards and prizes.

Before Almodóvar, relatively few directors in the sound era found that they could cross national borders as easily as those in the silent era; many of those who did have been mentioned over the course of this essay. This was in part a problem of language, as previously discussed. The filmmakers who had international success gained it primarily through festivals and the international art house circuit. Yet Almodóvar and other filmmakers at the turn of the twenty-first century face a major paradigm shift at the level of both markets and audiences to a global economy and culture. The importance of this shift to the present and future of cinema should not be underestimated.

For very strong national film cultures such as France, globalization provides more possible venues for coproduction and distribution. Yet the infrastructure that remains in place maintains distinct national features that exist nowhere else in the world. France still produces over two hundred films a year, a remarkable number for a country of its size; France also has more major female film directors than any other country in the world (Chantal Akerman, Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Diane Kurys, Colline Serreau, Agnès Varda, to name just a few). The French government also continues to subsidize and regulate the contemporary film industry through a tax on every movie ticket sold. Other countries in Europe have struggled more to find a place in global film culture: with the exception of Tom Twyker (Run Lola Run, 1998; Winter Sleepers, 1997; Heaven, 2002), Germany has not regained the prominence—domestically or globally—that it enjoyed during the 1970s.

Since the 1990s, there has also been a marked increase in "crossover" directors: filmmakers who seem to work easily in more than one country or language. The brilliant Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski, for instance, began his career at the ?ód? Film Academy and initially made documentaries and shorter works meant for Polish television (Camera Buff, 1979; The Decalogue, 1988). In the 1990s Kieslowski made four films in France, the last three of which formed a trilogy called Three Colors (1993–1994). The trilogy is a meditation on the "postmodern condition," on parallel lives and chance intersections. In Kieslowski's films, characters take tiny, awkward steps toward connection in another wise alienating world. His actors are often shot as small figures against a vast background.

At the beginning of a new century, European cinema has become more complex—and more vital—than ever. In the British director Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things (2003), the main characters are Nigerian and Turkish immigrants, played by a British-Nigerian and a French actor, respectively (Chiwetel Ejiofor and Audrey Tautou). The cast also includes actors from Croatia, Spain, and China; the two primary languages spoken in the film are English and Somali.Dirty Pretty Things is a thriller about, among other things, the global trafficking of human organs, and the daily struggle of immigrants to survive in West London. How do we classify such a film? Is it British? Is it international, as its distribution credits would suggest? Is it "global," based on its cast and content?

The story of European cinema in the twentieth century would tell us that it is all three, and more: European cinema is both transformed by culture and transformative in its proliferation and mass appeal. Released in 2001, the British film Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was seen by 59,032,893 spectators in Europe alone. It calls to mind the description of Jean Renoir's 1939 film The Rules of the Game: astonishing for its ability to cast a spell over us all.

See alsoAlmodóvar, Pedro; Bardot, Brigitte; Buñuel, Luis; Chaplin, Charlie; Cocteau, Jean; De Sica, Vittorio; Dietrich, Marlene; Fellini, Federico; Film (Documentary); French New Wave; Godard, Jean-Luc; Kracauer, Siegfried; Lang, Fritz; Ophüls, Marcel; Pabst, Georg Wilhelm; Pasolini, Pier Paolo; Propaganda; Riefensthal, Leni; Rossellini, Roberto; Tarkovsky, Andrei; Wajda, Andrzej; Wenders, Wim.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? Translated by Hugh Gray. 2 vols. Berkeley, Calif., 2005.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn, 217–251. New York, 1968.

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Bordwell, David, and Thompson Kristin. Film History: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Boston, 2003.

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Gallagher, Tag. The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini. New York, 1998.

Anne M. Kern