Annual-Report-2019

ON THE RUINS AND MARGINS OF EUROPEAN
IDENTITY IN CINEMA: EUROPEAN IDENTITY IN THE
ERA OF THE GLOBAL
Human & Social Sciences 2019
102
Prof. Temenuga
Trifonova
LE STUDIUM Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Research Fellow
Smart Loire Valley General Programme
From: York University - CA
In residence at: Interactions, Transferts,
Ruptures artistiques et culturelles (InTRu) -
Tours
Nationality: Bulgarian
Dates: June 2018 to May 2019
Temenuga Trifonova is an Associate Professor
of Cinema and Media Studies at York University
in Toronto. She is the author of the monographs
Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology
(Amsterdam UP, 2014) and The Image in French
Philosophy (Rodopi, 2007), and editor and
contributor of the collections Contemporary Visual
Culture and the Sublime (Routledge, 2017) and
European Film Theory (Routledge, 2008). She has
been a visiting fellow and/or artist at the Waseda
Institute for Advanced Studies in Tokyo (2019),
the New York University Center for European
and Mediterranean Studies (2017), the American
Academy in Rome (2015), the Brown Foundation
at the Dora Maar House (2013), Fondation des
Treilles (2013) and Pushkinskaya 10 Art Centre, St.
Petersburg (2013). She is also a published novelist
(Tourist, 2018 and Rewrite, 2014) and awardwinning
filmmaker.
Dr Raphaële Bertho
Host scientist
Raphaële Bertho is Assistant professor of Arts
and History of photography at Tours University
and director of Intru laboratory. Her research
focuses on the institutional, artistic, professional
and vernacular uses of photography and visual
representations of the territory since 1945
in resonance with political philosophy. She
collaborate since 2012 with the French group
of photographers France(s) Liquid Territory,
which questions the possibility of representing
a national territory at the time of the European
construction and in an international context.
She was the curator in 2017 of two exhibitions
with the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Her
work focuses on public commission of artistic
photography in Western societies from the
1970s on, in particular in the United States, East
Germany and Italy. Her analyses consider as
much the images as the conditions of creation
and reception.
The history of the idea of ‘European identity’ can be described as a constant
oscillation between two poles, one instrumental or pragmatic, the other
affective and, on the other hand, as a continuous and unresolved conflict
between the belief in some ineffable European ‘ethos’ and the outright
rejection of the very idea of ‘European identity’. Over the last several
decades the increased mobility of large groups of people has influenced the
socio-geographical fixity of a continent of nation-states, putting in question
both the concepts of ‘national identity’ and ‘European identity’.
Europe has seen a trend of populist right-wing parties, riding on the wave
of multicultural backlash across Europe, gaining widespread support
with slogans purporting to save ethno-nationalist culture from the threat
of immigrants. The Brexit referendum, following a prolonged political
campaign of heightened anxiety over border control and anti-immigrant
hostility, was simply the most dramatic expression of the crisis of European
identity.
The degree to which the migrant crisis represents a significant challenge
to European identity and its core Enlightenment values, including liberty,
justice, citizenship and hospitality, can be gauged by considering the
ongoing debates around national identity and nationalism, the failure of
multiculturalism, European integration, borders and bordering, the Other,
and cosmopolitanism as a potential way of rethinking of European identity.
The film scholarship exploring the increasingly prominent place of
migration in European cinema, and the ways in which the figure of the
migrant (and that of the refugee) has challenged established notions of
‘European identity’, is rapidly growing.
In my research project I aim to demonstrate two things. First, in
contemporary European cinema it is becoming increasingly difficult to
separate stories about migration from stories exploring life under the
conditions of neoliberalism in general. Second, the fact that recent films
frame the refugee crisis as a primarily
1. socioeconomic,
2. racial, or
3. ethical issue suggests the continued relevance of Europe’s core
Enlightenment legacy embodied in the values of liberty, equality, hospitality,
fraternity etc. and, further, and at the same time points to migration as an
“ever-deferred confrontation with the European Question as a problem of
race and “postcoloniality” (Nicolas de Genova).