Customer Reviews

The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (Film and Culture Series)

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An interesting and intelligent read, aimed at academia but with much to offer the informed layman, Galt's book addresses an area of film theory that so far seems to have merited little discussion. While focusing on films of the 90s, the book's ideas remain topical, and will have you looking at some old favourites with a fresh and newly-informed perspective.

Galt gives us a strange double perspective in her analysis of European films. These were mostly made around 1990, as communism collapsed in eastern Europe. And they were mostly made by people in those countries. But the settings of the films tended to be in World War 2 or in the immediate aftermath. The doubleness of the analysis is given by her book being written presumably shortly before the book was published in 2006. This 15 year lapse gives another temporal distance, that aids in the objectivity of the analysis.

What we see in the movies is that they were made in a time that was consciously aware of its historic significance. As a transition between eras. Between the Cold War and whatever would come after it. Hence, Galt choose to look at the movies set at the end of World War 2. She reads in them a subtext that just as those were at the end of another era, so too was this used as a thematic vehicle for the hopes (and fears) of 1990.