Thomas Elsaesser
Exploring the dialectics of place, space, and memory in recent European cinema, Rosalind Galt keeps a commendably tight focus on the conjunction of history and spectacle, without privileging either one at the expense of the other, as so often happens when films dealing with Europe's troubled past are disqualified as nostalgic retro-chic or celebrated as part of the heritage genre. In her robust, sensitive, and sophisticated defense of films such as Europa, Cinema Paradiso, Underground and The English Patient, Galt deconstructs the very terms of these debates and imparts new purpose to our understanding of the cinema's role in the cultural identity formations of post-WWll Europe. To my knowledge, there has not been a book that succeeds so well in joining the philosophical discourses around the current state of Europe with an in-depth reading of its cinema.
— Thomas Elsaesser, University of Amsterdam, author of EuropeanCinema - Face to Face with Hollywood
Dudley Andrew
Happily, after a period of neglect, European cinema has been brought back to our attention. Rosalind Galt's intricate book, with its confident range and brave argument, reminds us that Europe regularly produces complex, resonant, and consequential films which in turn have inspired profound writing. The half-dozen films she pores over and the dozens she adroitly references refuse to be written off as filling a national need or a box office niche in the world market. Galt puts these probing continental films in dialogue with theory and finds that they hold their own. Historical spectacle is neither superfluous nor distracting. Turning the tables on much cultural theory, controversial works like Underground and Zentropa speak back to political and aesthetic clichés in the language of spectacle. Galt listens (and looks) attentively and makes us do so as well.
— Dudley Andrew, Yale University
