Redrawing the map of Europe: Space, history and spectacle in new European cinema

This dissertation argues that contemporary European cinema is engaged in a spatial and a temporal re-mapping, in which films rethink the geopolitical changes of the “New Europe” in relation to questions of history, ideology and spectacle. Focusing on historical films set in the 1940s and after, it challenges the idea that such films privilege nostalgia and spectacle over political engagement. Rather, it claims that these heritage and art films stage a historically acute experience of Leftist loss; one that operates precisely through spectacularity, and that connects the political moment of the films' production to the postwar context of their narratives. It theorizes this form of historicity both in relation to Walter Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image and through psychoanalytic, feminist and classical film theories, using close textual analysis to demonstrate the affective and ideological stakes of the spectacular historical image. Thus, it analyzes popular Italian romances such as Cinema Paradiso in terms of landscape, utilizing Freud's concept of mourning to link melodrama to political loss; it reads Emir Kusturica's Underground in terms of abjection and the impossibility of a European space for the former East; and considers how Lars von Trier's Europa multiplies cinematic and political spaces, connecting the horror of German history to the problem of European integration. It concludes that these films use cinematic space to refigure geopolitical space, critiquing the postwar ideologies of “Europe” at the same time as they insist upon engagement with the continent's past and present spaces.