Film architecture and the transnational imagination: set design in 1930s European cinema

Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination presents for the first time a comparative study of European film set design in the late 1920s and 1930s; based on a wealth of designers' drawings, film stills and archival documents, the book offers a new insight into the development and significance of trans-national artistic collaboration during this period. European cinema from the late 1920s to the late 1930s is famous for its attention to detail in terms of set design and visual effect. Focusing on developments in Britain, France, and Germany, Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema provides a comprehensive analysis of the practices, styles, and function of cinematic production design during this period, and its influence on subsequent filmmaking patterns

International films and international markets: the globalisation of Hollywood entertainment, c.1921-1951

The international appeal of Hollywood films through the twentieth century has been a subject of interest to economic and film historians alike. This paper employs some of the methods of the economic historian to evaluate key arguments within the film history literature explaining the global success of American films. Through careful analysis of both existing and newly constructed data sets, the paper examines the extent to which Hollywood's foreign earnings were affected by: film production costs; the extent of global distribution networks; and also the international orientation of the films themselves. The paper finds that these factors influenced foreign earnings in quite distinct ways, and that their relative importance changed over time. The evidence presented here suggests a degree of interaction between the production and distribution arms of the major US film companies in their pursuit of foreign markets that would benefit from further archival-based investigation

Popular European cinema in the 2000s: cinephilia, genre and heritage

The twenty-first century has witnessed a reinvigorated championing of auteurism in European cinema, centred on directors – many of them established veterans from previous decades – such as Pedro Costa, the Dardenne brothers, Michael Haneke, Cristian Mungiu, Christian Petzold, Alexander Sokurov, Béla Tarr and Lars von Trier. This renewed orientation towards art cinema practices (e.g. ‘slow’ cinema, new forms of cinematic realism) and particular channels of circulation (especially the festival circuit) is nowadays articulated within a globally expanded framework (see Galt & Schoonover 2010) that circumvents the Eurocentrism of previous understandings of art cinema. As early as 2005, Thomas Elsaesser noted that European art cinema had irrevocably lost its special status as an aesthetic blueprint and point of reference, becoming one facet within a decentred, post-national and polylocal, new global network of world cinemas (2005: 485–513). At a more fundamental level, European cinema and cinema as a medium itself have undergone radical transformations as a result of a proliferation of media platforms, the technological shift from analogue to digital and new modes of circulation and consumption (cf. Bordwell 2012). Set against these broader contexts and influences, I want to explore in this chapter what, if anything, the concept of ‘popular’ European cinema still signifies today, in terms of this being a productive category for academic enquiry, as a viable form of cinema and as an object of cinephilic attention