Popular European Cinema

by Dyer,Richard; Dyer,Richard

• ISBN13: 9780415068024
• ISBN10: 0415068029
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1992-12-22
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Through their individual studies, the contributors open up a new area of study, using the medium of film to focus on and celebrate the diversities of popular European culture.European Cinema is not just 'art' cinema, but nor is popular cinema in Europe just Hollywood in foreign dress. In fact, the styles, stars and genres of popular European cinema - Swedish melodramas, Italian horror movies, French musicals - all have their own conventions, superficially similar to Hollywood and yet certainly distinct from it.The popular cinema of Europe has been surprisingly little studied either as art or social document. Popular European Cinema seeks to fill this gap while illuminating two compelling contemporary issues: the nature of the 'popular' and the new Europe.Films that are very popular with audiences in, say, Finland and Spain, are seldom successful elsewhere. This book examines this paradox which is further complicated by the fact that Europe itself is not a unified phenomenon, not least in the light of recent developments in Easterm Europe and post-colonial Western Europe. Through their individual studies, the contributors open up a new area of study, using the medium of film to focus on and celebrate the diversities of popular European culture.

Table of Contents

List of plates
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction	p. 1
Family diversions: French popular cinema and the music hall	p. 15
La ley del deseo: a gay seduction	p. 31
Immigrant Cinema: national cinema - the case of beur film	p. 47
Images of 'Provence': ethnotypes and stereotypes of the south in French cinema	p. 58
Author, actor, showman: Reinhold Schunzel and Hallo Caesar!	p. 72
'We were born to turn a fairy-tale into reality': Svetlyi put and the Soviet musical of the 1930s and 1940s	p. 87
Studying popular taste: British historical films in the 1930s	p. 101
Was the cinema fairground entertainment? The birth and role of Popular cinema in the Polish territories up to 1908	p. 112
The Finn-between: Uuno Turhapuro, Finland's greatest star	p. 126
The inexportable: the case of French cinema and radio in the 1950s	p. 141
The other face of death: Barbara Steele and La maschera del demonio	p. 149
Popular taste: the peplum	p. 163
National romanticism and Norwegian silent cinema	p. 181
The Atlantic divide	p. 194
Early German cinema - melodrama: social drama	p. 206
'Film stars do not shine in the sky over Poland': the absence of popular cinema in Poland	p. 220
Valborgsmassoafton: melodrama and gender politics in Swedish cinema	p. 232
A forkful of westerns: industry audiences and the Italian western	p. 245
Index	p. 263
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.