The Resilience of Popular National Cinemas in Europe (Part Two)

This the second of two articles looking at the persistence of popular national cinemas in contemporary Europe. Drawing on research undertaken for the MeCETES project, the first article (Part One) examined admissions data for domestic productions in the period 2005-2015, demonstrating that most European countries enjoy a small number of considerable national successes each year. This second article (Part Two), provides further evidence that the national has not withered away in the era of globalisation, and revisits the concept of national cinema in this context. The majority of the national successes in European countries were small-scale films, with themes, characters or subject-matter that resonated in the country of production, and few of them travelled successfully across borders. Among strategies deployed to create attractive and repeatable consumer products, the most common was genre: most domestically successful national productions were comedies set in the present. Clearly, popular national cinema is still a meaningful presence across Europe, but it provides a different version of the nation to those presented under the auspices of nation-branding. These are two variants of national cinema in the era of the neo-liberal global economy.