Back to the future: The European film studies agenda today

As a critical category, “European cinema” is anything but a recent invention; film history books, indeed, have always included central and substantial sections devoted to it. Of course, this tradition in itself does not presuppose the existence of a continental cinema as a coherent whole or organised structure, or even of an aesthetics that could be described as European, but only that of an interpretative discourse based on the study of a set of historically and geographically contiguous national histories, whose intersections in truth have been rarely foregrounded and investigated (a noteworthy exception being the New Waves of the 1960s and 1970s, which have always been described as an interconnected, transnational phenomenon).