German cinema as European cinema: Learning from film history

Abstract

A critical assessment is given of the current preoccupation in German film studies with the concept of the transnational. Greater attention to film history, the article argues, offers a productive alternative to the problematic binaries that posit the transna - tional against the national and provides the tools for a more nuanced understanding of their shared economic, political, and cultural rationales. A look at recent publications on German cinema confirms that the transnational has emerged as a key category in mapping film and media culture since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Most often, the transnational is enlisted in the reassessment, if not repudiation, of the terms that have dominated the study of German cinema as national cinema over the past decades: film authorship, art film, film style, and, most problematically, national character.1 Against the conceptual binaries of art cinema versus genre cinema, German versus foreign (i.e., Hollywood) films, and film versus the other arts (literature, theater, television) regularly evoked in conjunction with discourses of the national, the transnational is today called upon to conceptualize the cinema of migration and hybridity that emerged in the Berlin Republic and the New Europe of the 1990s, and that is defined both through multimediality and media convergence and through a rediscovery of aesthetic traditions and perspectives. At times, these new approaches are part of larger attempts to reclaim European cinema for popular culture traditions distinctly different from global Hollywood and to revive the European art film in the spirit of a simultaneously old-fashioned and cutting-edge cosmopolitanism.2 At other times, they are insep- arable from inquiries into the complex relationships among new media technolo- gies, audiovisual sensibilities, and the flows of (cultural) capital in the neoliberal world order. Central to most contributions is the desire to move beyond the