Introduction: Post-Crisis Europe, White Masculinity and Art Cinema

This chapter lays out some of the basic socio-cultural conditions, key concepts and academic interests informing this book, in order to contextualise the studies of films and social phenomena in the later chapters. Its main assumption is that the series of crises that started with the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 changed some of our fundamental assumptions about history, debunked some of our grand narratives and thus changed the cultural logic of our (thoroughly globalised) civilisation. The introduction explains the way the book explores European cinema’s complex role in our rapidly changing world. It focuses on three major issues that inform the book’s interdisciplinary investigations: (1) the state of crisis and the off-modern condition, (2) the importance and resignification of white masculinities (on- and off-screen) and (3) the state and trends of European quality cinema in the first decades of the new millennium.