Images of Europe, European Images: Postwar European Cinema and Television Culture

The audio-visual culture of Europe right after 1945 was a culture in ashes in a Europe soon to be divided into east and west under the Cold War. It was a Europe where nation-states had to reconstruct and revitalise a cinema culture damaged by war, and where television did not emerge until the 1950s, or in some countries even later. Already during the 1980s, a cultural policy and a policy for film and media was starting to develop, and both the MEDIA programmes (from 1987) and the EURIMAGE programme (from 1988) represented the institutionalisation of support for the diversity of film and media culture in Europe as a whole. This article explores European images in cinema and television culture during the postwar period. It also discusses fascism and new wave cinema in Southern Europe, new wave cinema in Scandinavia and the rise of a modern welfare culture, European media culture and the Communist ‘Ice Age’, European art television and national fiction series, the transnational power of television, documentary film and television, and digital television and film in European perspective.