The Resilience of Popular National Cinemas in Europe Seminar

Abstract

The national has by no means withered away in the era of globalisation, and national cinemas still persist in various ways, even in the smallest nations. Drawing on data collected for the MeCETES project, this article examines the evidence of popular national cinemas in contemporary Europe (2005-2015). It looks at admissions data for domestic productions, nation by nation, and demonstrates that most European countries enjoy a small number of considerable national successes each year. In 2011, for instance, the French production, Intouchables (Nakache & Toledano, 2011), topped France’s admissions chart (and also did extraordinarily well across Europe). National productions also outranked all other films, including multi-million-dollar Hollywood blockbusters, in Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, Poland and the Czech Republic. The majority of these national successes were small-scale films, with themes, characters or subject-matter that resonated in the country of production. Few of them were co-productions and few travelled successfully across borders. Among the strategies deployed to create attractive and repeatable consumer products, the most common was genre: the majority of domestically successful national productions were comedies set in the present-day. National audiences showed a remarkable commitment to such films, demonstrating that popular national cinema is still a meaningful presence across Europe.