British Film 2000–2010: Crossing Borders, Transferring Cultures University of Mainz at Germersheim, 19–21 February 2010

Abstract

A host of British academics crossed the German border in February to gather in the small town of Germersheim (situated on the Rhine near the ancient city of Speyer and not far from Heidelberg) for what must have been the most high-profile conference on British film in Germany for a long time: the list of keynote speakers included Andrew Higson, John Hill, Sarah Street, James Chapman and Nick James, and was supplemented by more than a dozen established and young scholars mainly from England. The organiser Klaus Peter Muller must be congratulated on making this unlikely event possible with the help of the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). The contemporary focus and concentrated format of the conference (with more than twenty papers in two and a half days) allowed for an intensive investigation of some of the key themes and problems of British film during the past decade. It was interesting to see several central issues recurring and approached from various perspectives, among them the current state of the British film industry (not much optimism here, unsurprisingly), the question of national identity, the impact of new media and technologies, or the evolution of various genres. Regrettably, there was not much cultural transfer from the German side: several eminent experts on British film (Peter Drexler, Barbara Korte, Eckart Voigts-Virchow) were only acting as chairs rather than contributors, and two of the three German contributions, though interesting, were only marginally connected to the central themes of the conference (this does not include the one German-British