Browsing by Subject "cinema"

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    American Cultural Diplomacy, the Cinema, and the Cold War in Central Europe
    (University of Minnesota, Center for Austrian Studies, 1992-04) Wagnleitner, Reinhold
    In this paper I will not only try to analyze the impact of US-Cultural diplomacy in Germany and Austria during the Allied occupation after 1945, but I want to discuss the important political, social and economic role of this cultural transformation, a massive change achieved through the means of cultural penetration. In a wider context I want to substantiate the following thesis: the so-called Americanization of European culture was not a by-product of the political, military and economic successes of the United States in Cold War Europe but was actually at the center of that process. In a Europe that had been devastated, the USA became synonymous with modernity. By virtually representing the codes of modernity and material abundance, America signified the defeat of the old, the traditional, the small, the narrow--and the poor. To use semiotic terms: America became the sign of the new and the signifier of modernity.
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    A North Wind: The New Realism of the French-Walloon Cinéma du Nord
    (2013-11) Niessen, Niels
    This project explains the reinvention of earlier realist practices of depicting everyday lives of ordinary people for the globalized digital era. The cinéma du Nord is an exemplary instantiation of this global new realist tendency. I coin the cinéma du Nord as a transnational regional cinema rooted in the French North and the Belgian South. Once industrial centers, these regions suffered severe crises since the 1950s, when their coal mines were depleted and their industries superannuated. The cinéma du Nord should be understood in the context of the transition from an industrial economy to a postindustrial economy in which existence has become precarious for many. I argue that films such as Rosetta (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 1999) and L'humanité (Bruno Dumont, 1999) have emerged from the endeavor of Wallonia and the French North to reimagine themselves as European centers after decades of recession. Ultimately, I locate the cinéma du Nord within a wider wave of global new realism (e.g., the films of Jia Zhangke and Kelly Reichardt). I argue that in its most compelling forms the new realist humanism renders intelligible the question, "what is a life in the face of the waning power of traditional and modern institutions?"