Screening Europe

(Curtis, 2003) On the 2 nd of May 1997, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair was elected as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and spearheaded the New Labour political agenda. After years of the Conservative party in power under the reign of Margret Thatcher and John Major, Blair’s election signified a period of change for the country and a change in the Labour philosophy to sustain its future (Collins, 2005, pp. 41). These systemic changes had a major impact upon the UK film industry as they now began to adopt the policy of ‘The Third Way’. One prime example of a filmmaker utilising this new ideology is Richard Curtis, writer of films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, yet it was in 2003 in which he made, arguably, one of the most prolific British films in recent memory; Love Actually . (Curtis, 2003) The main priority for films of the Third Way was to appeal to a wider audience, especially to international markets. In 1998, Chris Smith, the First...

(Becker, 2003) When the Berlin Wall fell on the 9 th of November in 1989, it signified the re-unification of Germany, a state that had been split apart since the culmination of the Second World War. Russia had relinquished their grip on East Germany meaning that Germany could form once again and celebrate their freedom as a union. Scholars criticise German film in this period at how they gloss over their past and rewrite it for themselves (Engur, 2015, pp. 145). The film in which this blog post will focus on is Wolfgang Becker’s ‘ Good Bye Lenin’ and how his motion picture addresses the changes Germany underwent soon after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. (Becker, 2003)  ‘ Good Bye Lenin’ centres around the reunification of Germany choosing to focus on a son who has to hide the truth from his mother whom has recently come out of a coma. In his film, Becker suggests that the reunification of Germany resulted in cultures merging and ways of life altering for good....

(Kassovitz, 1995) Liberty. Equality. Fraternity. Those are the three pledges that the tricolour flag of France promises their citizens. In the 1990’s, a period of substantial migration from previously colonised French nations, these pledges were challenged due to riots and unrest across France. These riots came from the Banlieue districts, specifically the youth who were being victimised by their government and law enforcement. Due to this chaos swamping much of French culture, filmmakers took a stand to voice their anger at this inequality. It was the shooting of a Maghrebian boy, Makome M’Bowole, by a police officer, that inspired Mathieu Kassovitz to write his tale of inequality and unrest across France (Vincendeau, 2012), La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995). The aim for this post is to study Kassovitz’s text and discover how it relates to the civil disorder, how the promise of the French Flag lied to them and how the Banlieue acted almost as a substitute country. (Kassovitz, 1995...