Ebook: Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe

Investigates contemporary European cinema’s response to the challenges posed to Europe by economic/political crises

• Offers the first book-length investigation of European cinema’s response to the economic crisis
• Provides a survey of cinemas that have not received much critical attention from scholarship. In other words, this is one of the few books on European cinema that features many essays on Eastern European films and filmmakers
• Explores a long view of the crisis that can offer a better understanding of questions of politics and representation in contemporary European Cinema
• Watch a video of Thomas Austin discussingCinema of Crisis

Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe explores the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking across a continent in flux. This urgent and necessary collection brings together scholars from Spain to Estonia, Hungary to Britain, in order to trace European filmmakers’ diverse responses to the interlinked upheavals and emergencies of the past three decades. Covering topics such as the collapse of the eastern bloc; deindustrialisation; the 2008 crash and the eurozone debt crisis; austerity and neoliberalism, as well as ‘Fortress Europe’ and the ‘refugee crisis’, this book investigates a range of audiovisual forms, including documentaries, the work of arthouse auteurs, and videos posted on YouTube. It engages in highly topical debates in political and aesthetic spheres, and explores key interfaces between the two.