ABOUT THIS BOOK

Frontiers of Screen History provides an insightful exploration into the depiction and imagination of European borders in cinema after World War II. While films have explored national and political borders, they have also attempted to identify, challenge, and imagine frontiers of another kind: social, ethnic, religious, and gendered. The book investigates all these perspectives. Its unique focus on the representation of European borders and frontiers via film is groundbreaking, opening up a new field of research and scholarly discussion. The exceptional variety of national and cultural perspectives provides a rewarding investigation of borders and frontiers.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Raita Merivirta and Kimmo Ahonen are research fellows in the Department of General History at the University of Turku, Finland, where Heta Mulari and Rami Mähkä are research fellows in the Department of Cultural History.

REVIEWS

“Vigorously written, each chapter is a piece in a kaleidoscope showing that what informs cinema and national conflict in one area can be refracted through others.”

— Tom Conley, Harvard University

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Foreword
Tom Conley

Introduction: Encounters with Borders
Kimmo Ahonen, Raita Merivirta, Heta Mulari and Rami Mähkä

Worlds Divided by the Iron Curtain

1 Imagining West Berlin: Spatiality and History in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, 1987
Hannu Salmi

2 ‘What’s Wrong with a Cowboy in Hamburg?’: New German Cinema and the German-American Cultural Frontier
Jacqui Miller

3 The Collapse of Ideaologies in Peter Kahane’s The Architects
Marco Bohr

4 How to Win the Cold War: Borders of the Free World in Guilty of Treason (1950) and Red Planet Mars (1952)
Kimmo Ahonen

Alternative Cultural Locations

5 Crossing Over: On Becoming European in Aki Kaurismäki’s Cinema
Sanna Peden

6 Looking for Alternative London: The London Nobody Knows and the Pop-Geographical Borders of the City
Kari Kallioniemi

7 The Cité’s Architectural, Linguistic and Cinematic Frontiers in L’Esquive
Jehanne-Marie Gavarini

Borders Crossed, Borders Within

8 Between Hamburg and Istanbul: Mobility, Borders and Identity in the Films of Fatih Akin
Jessica Gallagher

9 Transnational Heroines: Swedish Youth Film and Immigrant Girlhood
Heta Mulari

10 Family as Internal Border in Dogtooth
Ipek A. Celik

Post-Colonial Borders and Cultural Frontiers

11 Gendered Conflicts in Northern Ireland: Motherhood, the Male Body and Borders in Some Mother’s Son and Hunger
Raita Merivirta

12 Heartlands and Borderlands: El Dorado and the Post-Franco Spanish Cinema as a Bridgehead between Europe and Latin America
Petteri Halin

13 Subverted and Transgressed Borders: The Empire in British Comedy and Horror Films
Rami Mähkä

Notes on Contributors

Index