The Europeanization of Cinema: Interzones and Imaginative Communities by Randall Halle, and: European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Disaporic Film in Contemporary Europe ed. by Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg (review)

The Europeanization of Cinema: Interzones and Imaginative Communities, authored by Randall Halle, and European Cinema in Motion, edited by Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg, make valuable contributions to European, diaspora, migration and film studies.

Randall Halle’s The Europeanization of Cinema proposes the notions of interzones and of ideational (or imaginative communities) and puts them into conversation with studies of Europe, migration, and film. His volume inquires into what the very notion of what “Europe” might mean: spatially, temporally, historically, politically, economically, and cinematographically. At the heart of Halle’s study lie questions about both the real and ideational space(s) of Europe. While Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined community” considered nation building during the late nineteenth-century context of colonialism and imperialism, Halle argues that it manifests anew in early twenty-first-century European imaginative communities marked by migration, neocolonialism and cultural imperialism.

Halle’s book considers how films engage with borders, borderlands, and interzones. Halle states he is less interested in the metaphor of the bridge or the in-between, as Leslie Adelson also argued in “Against Between” (The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature, 2005), delimiting as it is, for having arrived neither here nor there, being nowhere or in no land; rather, he is curious about the interzone—a space that is at once real and ideational, in constant negotiation and renegotiation. The author concentrates on interzonal spaces in Germany, Poland, and Turkey. These interzonal spaces reveal that Europe, Halle argues, has not superseded the nation state, contrary to what many scholars and public intellectuals, such as Habermas or Derrida argue, who maintain, in Halle’s estimation, a neo-Hegelian position (11, 16, 183–187). “Europe,” he states, “is not a union at all,” but rather “a terrain of possibilities connected as interzones” (13).

Halle focuses on cinema, examining not only “the surface of the screen” but also the conjunction of “technology, politics and economics” (23), that is the film industry, and recent developments in film funding, coproductions and distribution. He opens the volume with a reconsideration of apparatus theory, from its genesis as a Marxist concept in Althusser’s work to its development in film studies in\ the 1970s to German scholarship published in the past decade. Halle draws on it to examine the factors that play a role in structuring contemporary European economic, political, and cultural union.

Then, he returns to “the end of the imperial era … because the contemporary period of transnational arrangements revives certain forms of governance present in [it]” (58). Halle highlights the “polylingual, multiethnic, multireligious complexity of the imperial and international world” (57), focusing on four moments of this early era. First, he revisits Max and Emil Skladanoswky’s 1895 Bioscop, with which narratives about German film history often begin, but underscores their heritage as Polish Prussians or Prussian Poles, at a time when the Polish kingdom was “partitioned between the German, Russian and Austrian kingdoms” (60), allowing for a rereading of the origin of “German” cinema as belonging to Poles in diaspora. Second, he discusses the challenges of reading national cinemas during this era, as Polish cinema was an ideational or cultural place, not a geographic or political entity. He then engages Posen/Poznan as an interzone, located on the border, “a region of ethnic, linguistic and religious pluralism” (63). Lastly, he considers Ottoman cinema from the turn of the last century, and the challenges it, too, poses for discussing a Turkish cinema when there was as yet no Turkish state.

Subsequently, Halle discusses the German-Polish border and documentary cinema. While the early 1990s witnessed the decline of the Polish film industry...