Popular European Cinema (Hardcover)

While popular European cinema is strongly linked with the dominant American version of popular film, it cannot be read simply as Hollywood in foreign dress. The styles, stars and genres of popular European cinema - Swedish melodramas, Italian horror movies, French musicals - all have their own conventions, superfically similar to Hollywood and yet certainly distinct from it. The popular cinema of Europe has been surprisingly little studied as both art and social document. "Popular European Cinema" seeks to fill this gap and to illuminate two compelling contemporary issues: the nature of the "popular" and the "new Europe". The book examines the reasons why films that are most popular with audiences in any one European country are seldom successful elsewhere. Audiences themselves represent diverse class, gender and ethnic identities that complicate the question of national cinema, not least with recent developments in formerly communist Eastern Europe and post-colonialist Western Europe. This book should be of interest to undergraduates in film and cultural studies courses.