Europe Imagined

1 - 30 December

Introduction by Geoff Andrew

In exploring how filmmakers have tackled issues of European identity, the third part of our season marking the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall takes a more oblique and slightly more light-hearted approach than its predecessors. While still looking at ideas about what it means to be 'European', this final instalment focuses more closely on metaphorical or fantastic accounts of the continent and its cultural traditions.

It highlights how Europe has been portrayed from the outside - albeit, in some cases, by ex-patriates - and so touches on Europe's relationship with the rest of the world. But it also looks at Europe as an intellectual/emotional construct: as a dreamworld longed for by outsiders, as a symbol of home for exiles, as a cultural phenomenon that may be exported, and as a nightmarish realm of savage international violence. In short, it examines how Europe has been depicted when consigned to the role of an Other.

The selection of films here therefore takes a leap into the realm of the imagination. Many of the movies were not made in Europe - though many, again, were certainly made with the benefit (or otherwise) of first-hand memory. In This Land Is Mine Jean Renoir tried to explain to the world exactly what might be lost to the Nazis; likewise, Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner paid fond tribute to the Old World he'd left behind.

In very different ways, the transforming influence of art lies at the heart of the European civilisation evoked in Perceval le Gallois, An American in Paris, The Rebel and Fitzcarraldo. In the last, Werner Herzog shows the attempted introduction of a European cultural tradition to the Brazilian jungle; conversely, Walter Salles' Foreign Land depicts the experiences of young Brazilians in Europe. In Waiting for Happiness, Europe is 'merely' a looming off-screen presence, a dream of escape much like the one that fuels Journey of Hope - though who, one might ask, would want to start life afresh in a continent as bruised by brutality as the one in Ulmer's The Black Cat or as prone to warmongering as the society presided over by Groucho Marx in Duck Soup? Very few - though a certain Gregory Arkadin might be among them.