Alpine Ballade

Brothers

Fuse

Head On

Kings and Queen

Kontroll

Notre Musique

Uno

Vodka Lemon

ESSAY: "Head-On: European Cinema in Transition"

As large portions of Europe continue to confront the challenges of unification, its pros and its cons, and put the new EU constitution to the democratic test in national referendums, it is with greater frequency that we hear commentators celebrate the imminent realization of Churchill's post-war vision of a "United States of Europe" living in peace and freedom. Recent voices from this side of the Atlantic, in describing the significance of European integration, have suggested that the adoption of the euro as a single currency has taken place without a hitch and that Europe has become a borderless continent: Churchill's "European family." Certainly, the hopes for peace and tranquil coexistence that seem to animate so many views of the benefits of European integration and reconciliation are very real, and they emerge from a traumatic history but also from widely held democratic aspirations. However, history stubbornly refuses to be swept under rugs, and the challenges to reconciliation are great. As we can see in this year's line up of films from Europe, European filmmakers are confronting these issues head on.

While not all the films in this series consider the questions of European integration frontally, most all of them filter such questions through the variety of narrative and stylistic tools at the filmmakers' disposal. Several of the films, from Aksel Hennie's Uno to Arnaud Deplechin's Kings and Queen and Hiner Saleem's Vodka Lemon, focus on traditional families or extended clans struggling against forces of social and psychological disintegration – poverty, emigration, illness, addiction, and so on. Armed with a wonderfully hybridized soundtrack, Fatih Akin's Head On presents first- and second-generation Turkish-German immigrants torn between traditional customs and gender codes, on the one hand, and the competing desire for personal and sexual liberty, on the other. In Vodka Lemon, an Armenian Kurdish father reads a letter from his immigrant son, now living among the undocumented workers of France, who writes that "I am not forgetting you," as the destitute father shakes the envelope for cash with which to maintain what's left of his family.

Watching and listening to these films, the image of Europe that emerges from such lacerated communities is anything but unified and harmonious. Nevertheless, it is also such laceration that allows these filmmakers to make several strong statements about love and perseverance. It may be that only Erich Langjahr's portrait of bucolic life among cheese farmers, as found in Alpine Ballad, offers any respite from the pattern of social and familial fragmentation found in most of the film in this series, as we see and hear the human and animal worlds find magical communication in the eerie music of the yodeler calling his cows in from their mountainside pastures. Technocratic visions of a wired Europe find a useful corrective in this celebration of enduring things.

Paradisiacal images, however, are few and far between in this series, which operates mainly in the Dantesque mode. Indeed, Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique is an adaptation of Dante's Divine Comedy in which his spectators are shuttled like consumerist pilgrims through Hell and Purgatory, towards a Paradise not of mystical revelation but rather a suburban Paradise of gated communities whose fortified borders are patrolled by armed soldiers. Along the way, we are presented with members of the Sioux Nation demonstrating against genocide in Mostar. The porous border between the world of everyday life and the hidden zones of terror and violent warfare is the central focus, as well, in Susanne Bier's Brothers, Nimrod Antal's Kontroll, and Pjier Zalica's Fuse. In Brothers, the cohesion and survival of a Danish family, somehow held together by Jannick, is put to the test after his brother Michael returns from fighting the war in Afghanistan now so thoroughly traumatized that a return to normality is no longer an option.

Similarly in Fuse, the fires that are extinguished in one place seem to flare up somewhere else, and Europe appears anything but borderless. Difficult questions of war and genocide, and the chances for post-war reconciliation in the Balkans, are met head on: an ethnically cleansed Bosnian village prepares for a visit by President Clinton soon after the official end of conflict there following the signing of the Dayton Accords. The village hides evidence of atrocities and reinvents itself overnight as one big happy multi-ethnic family, in the hope of capturing the sympathy and largesse of Clinton's advance team by convincing them that all previously warring parties have reconciled. Meanwhile, refugees return to their booby-trapped homes while others bury weapons caches underground for future use or fashion themselves into bombs. In spite of the fact that fires seem never to go out, the film ends with a remarkably optimistic message regarding the opportunities for reconciliation.

Antal's Kontroll is set in the dark underworld of Budapest's Soviet-era subway system. This metaphorically rich, post-Cold War backdrop of infernal descent provides the setting for this stylistically energetic narration of an investigation of a crime, the pursuit of a masked killer terrorizing the tubes. The light of the Budapest that exists above ground remains haunted by dangerous elements that evade control in the darkness of the patrolled underground.

Presenting Notre Musique at Cannes last spring, and channeling Dante, Godard suggested that "the principle of the cinema is to go towards the light and direct it onto our night." This year's wonderful line-up of hard hitting and stylistically vibrant films shows, in the flickering intermittence of light and shadow, that the European cinema is alive and kicking, and confronting the central social and cultural dilemmas of a globalizing continent.

-Patrick Rumble, Director, Center for European Studies, UW-Madison.