CULTURAL TRAUMAS IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN SMALL NATIONAL CINEMAS

Presentation

Abstract of the project: The comparative analysis of European small national cinemas within the context of collectively and culturally traumatic events in recent European history is still a relatively uncharted territory. While cinematic representations’ powers of mediating collective and cultural traumas has been a fruitful research field in trauma and memory studies, and European small national cinemas also elicit constant attention, the combination of these two perspectives within a systematic comparative framework may be categorized a novel approach. The urgency of such a conception and a corresponding research project – especially with reference to the dissolution of the „strong, caring” communist or welfare state – may be easily seen: the creators, films and audiences still share common memories of this latest collective trauma that they’ve transformed into a culturally mediated one. Referring to the critically most acclaimed, and the domestically most popular Romanian, Hungarian, Danish, Swedish, Irish and Scottish films of the 1990-2020 period, and using a combined qualitative-quantitative methodology of production studies, textual-formal analysis and reception studies, the target is a 21st century overview of the contemporary film history of European small national cinemas and their best creative practices that enable them to co-exist with better funded and more influential major national or global-reach cinemas while processing collective traumas into cultural ones.

Objectives of the project: his project proposes to devise a combined methodology for charting the common creative methods that several European small national cinemas have devised – not independently of the employment of film genre panels – while working through successive collective and cultural traumas in the recent past. The loose timeframe of the research corpus is set by the two major collective traumas that may be linked to a contemporary European film historical context: the 1989-1990 dismantling of the Eastern Bloc and the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic, two such experiences that are closely related to various stages of digitalization within the film industry too. We propose to comparatively examine the six small national cinemas – Romanian cinema, Hungarian cinema (standing for the Eastern European canon), Danish and Swedish cinemas (as representatives of the Northern European film canon), and Irish and Scottish cinema that index the Western European film canon – and the related cinematic trends – the Romanian New Wave/New Romanian Cinema (NRC), New Hungarian Cinema (NHC), Danish Dogma (DD) and the New Scottish Cinema (NSC) – as mediated articulations of collective cultural traumas, with a well circumscribed methodology. The 24-month group research is modelled on Shannon and Weaver’s classical communication model, as we are firmly convinced that in order to understand the extraordinary emergence and long-term effect of the posttraumatic cultural articulations that the RNW, the NHC, DD and NSC are, one needs to analyse the sender (in this specific case: the film industry and the production context of specific sample films), the message (the structure and poetic functioning of the specific sample films within the context of the cinematic trends that articulate the collective cultural traumas), and the receiver (in this case: the distribution and reception of the specific sample films, in professional and non-professional contexts too), in order to convincingly demonstrate their power of articulating culturally and medially the researched cultural traumas, among them the safe and caring state’s (abrupt) ending.