Studies in International Cinema

24/09/2026

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International cinema isn’t always oppositional; it needn’t be viewed as a deliberate counterforce to American film. But when it isn’t, the filmmaker, already half working in the Hollywood idiom, gets pulled into its orbit, and usually starts working stateside. There have been many fine filmmakers that, through necessity or design, have found themselves making American films. In the 1930s and 1940s, some were escaping Naziism: Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang; in the 1960s and 1970s, others left Communist countries: Roman Polanski, Milos Forman and Ivan Passer. During the same period, Agnes Varda, Jacques Demy and Michelangelo Antonioni made films Stateside that retained perhaps a little too much of their personality for Hollywood’s liking. Later, when Paul Verhoeven left his native Netherlands for the US, his sensibility fitted right in, making Robocop and Total Recall. Heck, even his sometime cinematographer was equal to Hollywood demand, with  Jan de Bont going on to direct Speed. Numerous others have fitted in equally well, from Australia (Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi), Germany (Wolfgang Petersen; Roland Emmerich) and Sweden (Lasse Hallstrom, Tomas Alfredson).

Yet better to ignore what can easily be assimilated and concentrate on international film movements that would be finding and founding their own aesthetic principles, rather than simply defying or conforming to Hollywood demand. Looking at waves from Germany, Romania, Argentina and Turkey shows that cinema can come from anywhere, and can find, too, an audience everywhere. These audiences may be small and box-office returns slim, but they might be telling stories with more universal appeal, as one says, than many a film coming out of Hollywood. They are far from box-office proof in J. Hoberman’s formulation, where films are so exposed to the public that the viewer feels almost obliged to go, and disappointed when they come out of the cinema. “However anticlimactic, The Phantom Menace is not only critic-proof but audience resistant as well.[…] it would take the consumer equivalent of the Russian Revolution to keep The Phantom Menace from ruling the box office weeks.” (Village Voice) Whatever we may think of films by Christian Petzold, Cristi Puiu, Lucrecia Martel or Nuri Bilge Ceylan, no massive advertising budget has cajoled the viewer into cinemas. One’s disappointment will be all one’s own, a singular failure on the filmmaker’s part to engage or intrigue them. But that is the point: the failure will be singular, because no mass pressure has been applied, no feeling that when looking to see what’s on, a person discovers that a Christopher Nolan film, a superhero movie, or a Bond film is playing in several cinemas and on even more screens. A Martel or Puiu, the viewer seeks out; it doesn’t seek out the viewer.

This idea we can extend to the specifics of the work, the mode of storytelling adopted, and the formal choices made in the telling. These are not films insistently imposing their narrative upon the audience. In Puiu’s Aurora, we don’t quite know what he seems to be avenging for much of the film, as we follow a man going about his mundane life, one that incorporates the occasional murder. In Ceylan’s Once Upon Time in Anatolia, cops take a murder suspect to show them where he committed the crime, but he can’t quite remember, as the film devotes large amounts of time to the search. In Martel’s La Cianaga, there are so many characters in the families we are being introduced to that the film is more or less over just as we have worked out all the interrelations. Any story seems secondary to comprehending how the characters interact, and why there might be tensions amongst them. Has there been a tragedy in the past, or is the film moving towards a tragedy in the immediate future? One watches both baffled and trepidatious.

Interestingly, Martel says, “The great thing about the soundtrack – especially when you include the human voice as a sound – is that it demystifies language, it deconstructs the idea of dialogue, even that of music. What’s interesting about sound is that it lacks a harmonic organization, which allows the viewer to predict feelings and anticipate events.” (Talking Movies) This all depends on how it is used, and partly what makes the works under discussion unlikely to draw the viewer in as a Hollywood film might rests on a much more expansive acoustic world. If a film has cue music, it also often has cue sounds, key auditory elements that will help us navigate the narrative. Screeching tyres belong to the car chase movie as readily as the sound of a chainsaw belongs to a horror, and tap dancing to a musical. To hear a chainsaw in a musical, or a screeching tyre in a romantic comedy, would be going against the generic grain, or knowingly adopting an audio convention from one and depositing it in another for ironic effect.

By eschewing genre, films by Martel, Puiu and others can also offer a much more varied array of sounds. In Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, the director offers an extreme long shot as we see, in the distance, three cars in the night, or rather chiefly their lights. On the soundtrack, we can hear faint whistling, cicadas and the sound of the cars on the road. Later, when they stop off for tea and rest at a rural house, a young woman comes out, and we see her in the candlelight, a young beauty that suggests the central character, a doctor, is instantly besotted. The other characters seem no less so, and indeed the suspect bursts into tears when seeing her. Yet Ceylan keeps the soundtrack un-cued as we hear dogs barking in the distance, and little is made narratively of the woman’s looks. Her purpose is to signify, not to narrativise, and while one could simplify this and say she is a symbol of youth and innocence, encapsulated in her looks, this wouldn’t quite convey what the scene illuminates. Such a take would have to incorporate within it the texture of the sequence: that these are tired men, searching the country for a body, and they take a rest in some distant outpost and discover a striking woman they don’t expect. Just because an image doesn’t propel the story, this needn’t mean it compels us to read it as a symbol. What matters more is the fabric of the scene, the feeling of exhaustion meeting the presence of freshness, lit by candles and registered on the soundtrack by distant off-screen sound.

Ceylan is the best known of 21st century Turkish filmmakers, and the one most influenced by Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian director who in a series of films during the late 1980s and through the 1990s perhaps more than anyone found a way to combine ancient wisdom with filmmaking technology, as he managed to couch old philosophical questions (why live? what is reality? Who do we really feel ourselves to be?), within an enquiring aesthetic based often on people sitting in cars, walking along hills, or riding on the back of a moped.  Kiarostami understood stillness within movement, and Ceylan wonders how much stillness a film can work with, as characters in Clouds of May, Uzak, Climates, and Winter Light are essentially static figures, as Ceylan wonders what might take them out of their despondency. They aren’t quite depressed, and are often self-entitled, but they capture well figures in a nation that is both modern and wealthy, and yet rural and poor – a point directly addressed in different ways in Uzak and Winter Sleep. In the former, a country cousin comes to stay with his educated relative, and in Winter Sleep, a former actor owns a hotel in Cappadocia.

While Ceylan’s films are often contemplative, with a hint of low-key self-laceration, Zemi Demirkibuz absorbs melodrama into his, and this rests partly on the Dostoyevskian dimension in his films, as opposed to the Chekhovian inflections in Ceylan’s. In possibly Demirkibuz’s greatest film, Destiny, a young man falls for a woman working in a shop, who is also a nightclub singer, and he will destroy his life over his obsession. Yet this isn’t a film about a stalker, but someone seeking, a monomaniac who finds simultaneously love and a curse, a desire he cannot consummate, but cannot deny. In The Confession, a husband wants his wife to admit to an affair, but struggles to deal with the consequences, as the obsessiveness in Destiny becomes domestically infernal. Other Turkish directors Tayfun Pirselimogu (Hair, I Am Not Him), and Semih Kaplanoglu (Egg, Milk, and Honey) are less modern than Ceylan and Demerkibuz, less inclined to play up the shift in culture amongst the middle-classes and the urban working class. Part of the pleasure of Kaplanoglu is the sense of tradition, which needn’t make him a conservative. These are directors not so much doing their own thing, as finding ways to examine Turkish culture.

While emigre directors Fatih Akin and Ferzan Ozpetek have increasingly absorbed genre into their work, as though always working in an idiom that was influenced by mainstream forces, during the early 2000s, for at least a decade, Turkish film possessed a quality that put its cinema on the map, quite distinct from possessing a talent that travels where it needs to go. When Schepsi and Weir left Australia, they showed a remarkable adeptness in Hollywood, but they were no longer reflecting the culture they were from; they were proving their skills were culturally transferable. However, this may rest on filmmakers who believe that after a film or two they have exhausted their own land and must look at new possibilities. Though it could just as readily reflect a sense of ambition greater than a sense of observation. One of the risks in possessing what we might call a Hollywood sensibility is the skill in reducing stories to a handful of components, often generically tied together for maximum hyperbole. But if observation is at least equal to narration, then the exaggerated can recede and the specific become pronounced. The difference between Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and Witness is that between locational intrigue and a narrational environment. In the former film, Weir seeks to comprehend the vastness of a landscape one really can get lost within. In the latter, the Amish community in Pennsylvania, where the cop hides out, is a hook to hang the story on and gives novelty to the fish-out-of-water theme. It doesn’t quite become enigmatic, while films of the Australian Wave possessed this quality, and it is one we often find evident in Turkish cinema. When the cop, the doctor and others are searching for the body in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Ceylan’s relationship with it isn’t very different from Weir’s and Schepsi’s. Shots that in American film might seem overly stretched become deliberately extended, asking us to observe the singularity of space.

Yet not all national waves want to put their nations on the map visually. The brilliance of recent Romanian cinema has been chiefly societal, exploring the collapse of Ceausescu’s regime, its lingering presence, and a post-communist belligerent self-interest. Some of the films are set within the orbit of the dictator’s governance, like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, The Autobiography of Nicolas Ceausescu, and 12:08 East of Bucharest. Others examine the moral turpitude, incompetence and indifference of the present: The Death of Mr Lazarescu, Graduation, Police, Adjective, Child’s Pose and The Happiest Girl in the World. The more recent work of Radu Jude (including Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, and Kontinental ‘25) pushes the coruscating into the essayistic, as if absorbing all the contempt the other films have expressed, and shaping it into Godardian critique.

But what is important to note in many Romanian films is that self-interest isn’t the same as self-agency. Much of the time, people pursue their own ends within clear institutional frameworks. In 4 Months…, an abortionist makes good money from performing them in a country where they are illegal, and where he can extort whatever he wants from those in desperate need. (Including sex.) In Child’s Pose, a mother will do anything she can to avoid her grown-up son being held responsible for a hit-and-run. In Graduation, a dad persuades those with power to help his daughter cheat in an exam, after she is assaulted and sprains her wrist. What they all have in common is low-key corruption, and this is where self-interest erodes society rather than produces individuals who can transcend it. The latter is closer to a Hollywood model, where often self-interest and corruption are distinct, with the self-interested individual determined to make the best of themselves, and who will often reject the society that hampers them. Americans are inclined to see this as protecting democracy, rather than undermining it, and this is perhaps partly rooted in De Tocqueville’s claim on Democracy in America: “The principle of self-interest rightly understood produces no great acts of self-sacrifice, but it suggests daily small acts of self-denial. By itself it cannot suffice to make a man virtuous; but it disciplines a number of persons in habits of regularity, temperance, moderation, foresight, self- command; and if it does not lead men straight to virtue by the will, it gradually draws them in that direction by their habits.” Self-interest is consistent with self-reliance, and if self-reliance is undermined, better to look after number one.

But in the Romanian films, looking after yourself is a sure way to weaken an already tenuous social fabric. The abortionist in 4 Months..., the mother in Child’s Pose and the dad in Graduation are all looking out for themselves or their family, and while the abortionist is surely far worse than the mother, who is far worse than the dad in Graduation, all contribute to state erosion. In US cinema, self-interest is frequently seen as incorruptible, as an individual takes on, takes down, or rejects an institution, from Julia Roberts in The Pelican Brief to Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. To take the law into one’s own hands, even if one happens to be a lawyer or a cop, is to take it out of the hands of the corrupt. In Romanian film, the point isn’t to go it alone, but to find those who can facilitate your self-interest – the fellow corrupt. Yet Romanian film does offer characters who aren’t so much incorruptible (in the Hollywood sense), but willing to sacrifice self-interest for the interests of others – like Otilia in 4 Months..., who puts her pregnant mate’s interests above her own, or the young cop in Police, Adjective, who can see no benefit in arresting a casual pot smoker and argues thus with his superiors. But while in conventional film, the cop, the lawyer, the whistleblower strengthens the social contract, in Romanian film, the erosion of that contract is so strong that the individual’s attempt at a good deed can seem powerless next to it.

While Turkish cinema often relies on the long take that will absorb the locale, and gives to many of the works a pictorial elegance, even beauty, Romanian cinema is visually crabbed, the camera hovering over events rather than deliberately capturing them. The style can look almost amateurish, as though taking further the Dogma films of the late 1990s, and suggesting this is cinema caught on the hoof, reframing at a moment’s notice, or failing to take in what matters if taking place offscreen. Obviously, there is nothing amateur about the style at all, and instead forces upon the viewer an awareness that space shown is narrower than space designated. What does this mean? Usually, a film shows us what is dramatically pertinent, and cuts to new information when necessary. It can allow the space to be narratively manageable, leaving offscreen space irrelevant. Many a great a work of international cinema will expand that space acoustically, and we noted it in the barking dogs in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, but what about the sound of a ball hitting a car in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days?

The central character is waiting in the car while the abortionist goes off and speaks to his mother in the middle distance, outside her flat. The camera stays with Otilia and she listens in to the conversation to her right, as we too strain to hear what is being said, and the tone in which the reprimanding son is speaking to his mother. It doesn’t augur well that this man is responsible for the abortion, and we sense her fear not in the conversation that she attends to, but in the ball that hits the car and makes her jump. This isn’t quite a jump scare, but it works with a dimension of it – deflection. The viewer attends to one event, while the filmmaker suddenly asks us to attend to another. However, while the horror film usually focuses on the untoward (the anomalous aspect of a character’s life as they end up in the woods, a haunted house, or taken hostage), Cristian Mungiu makes clear this is a mundane detail, not a false shock. He shows 1980s Bucharest as a careful culture where everyone seems wary of everyone else, and this is only exacerbated in this instance by the illegal abortion Otilia is aiding her friend with. In what we will call anomalous films (where the exceptional exemplifies the healthy norm), the situation doesn’t exacerbate a character’s situation; it usually transforms it, and this can cover anything from a character finding themselves in a haunted house, or a Hitchcock figure realising they are caught within a mistaken identity. But in Romanian cinema, while the event is usually important enough to be narratively significant (an abortion here, a demise in The Death of Mr Lazarescu, an arrest in Police, Adjective, a hit-and-run in Child’s Pose), it fits smoothly into the social malaise that the incident exemplifies. The anomalous needn’t tell us very much about society; the exacerbating incident in Romanian cinema very much does.

While many countries have skeletons in their historical cupboards, this doesn’t mean they will become overriding preoccupations in the culture, or in the art the country produces. If Britain and the US have been viewed as democratic countries with incorruptible governments (at least until recently), this might partly rest on high levels of democratic accountability, and no instances of dictatorial control. But it will also rest on the overriding narratives of the nation that cannot quite countenance a moral malaise. There have been exceptions to this (the paranoid American thrillers of the seventies, which absorbed the string of political assassinations in the sixties), but the killing of the Kennedy brothers, for example, isn’t quite the same thing as having a dictator for decades. France has had to acknowledge the Vichy regime in a number of works, but it hasn’t quite become an overriding assumption about the nation, nor have atrocities in the Algerian war.

But what about Germany and Argentina? In German films of what has been called the Berlin School, we find the relative absence of the conventionally political, and with few nods to Nazi Germany. This is partly because New German Cinema of the 1970s examined in immense detail the links between Naziism and the post-war economic miracle (especially in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s work) and in the 2000s, the historicising of Nazi Germany became more mainstream: Sophie Scholl and Downfall, for example. It left the Berlin School exploring the minutiae of people’s lives, even when dramatic elements were activated. Probably the best-known figure is Christian Petzold, whose films include Yella, Barbara, Jerichow, and Phoenix, but there is also Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec, Valeska Grisebach, and Ramon Zurchler. Petzold is usually more narratively focused than the rest, with his plots hinging on something: an escape from East Germany in Barbara, a woman hoping to bump off her husband in Jerichow, a young lady hooking up with a scammer in Yella. Phoenix is about as close to The Berlin School gets to addressing categorical German history: a woman who has survived the concentration camps and has her face reconstructed after a bullet in the face. But while Petzold creates stories with dramatic emphasis, he films them in a sober style that usually eschews non-diegetic music and emphasises watchful observation over histrionic action. In Jerichow, the husband, Ali, wife, Laura, and his driver, Thomas, have a picnic on the beach. Ali, gets drunk, dances to Turkish music playing from a ghetto blaster, and then goes up to the top of the cliff and appears like he might fall off. Thomas saves him, but it looks like Laura would prefer he fell, and complicity develops between the wife and the driver, both white, working class Germans, while Ali is a go-getting Turkish emigre. When Ali hangs from the cliff, this is literally a cliffhanger, but Petzold is less interested in the suspense, than in the broader dynamics. As Ali walks off to climb up, Thomas and Laura dance. Thomas kisses her, and she responds with momentary passion, before she pushes him away. “Some friend you are”, she says. When Thomas goes up to the cliff, we see him in the distance looking down at Laura; she looks in the distance up at him. They could let him fall, but Thomas runs to the rescue.

Ali has acted like an idiot, and it is understandable the wife is drawn to Thomas over Ali; Thomas is calmer, better looking, and his desire for Laura is naked; not clothed in the garb of wealth that makes Laura Ali’s property. (Ali paid off her debts from before they met.) But it isn’t chiefly the story of murder that matters, but of power and one contained by a broader ethos. Could Thomas and Laura love each other if they killed Ali, and thus couldn’t quite love themselves? They need to kill him to be happy, but will be unhappy if they kill him. They aren’t quite the self-serving characters of noir that the film invokes, and this creates the double bind. Petzold’s purpose is to observe how such a bind unfolds, and contains it in an ironic ending, which gives the characters what they want, but on terms that will probably doom their own love affair.

While this is much more dramatic than many a Berlin school film, which often unfolds with no key incident, or at least no dramatic element that could allow for easy summary: a person staying all season in Berlin in Schanelac’s Passing Summer, or the casual unfolding of a person’s Berlin life in Arslan’s A Fine Day after she breaks up with a boyfriend. In Grisebach’s Western, a German man takes a job labouring in Bulgaria, working for a German company. What matters more in many of the films is observing the details of people’s lives, as if drama would risk turning the observational into the narratively specific, leaving the frame too focused on some details, and others as merely background necessity. Petzold is interesting partly because he wants the tension of plot, but he doesn’t quite want to bury the incidental so completely that we are no longer observing behaviour, except motivationally. This is one of the risks of narrative cinema: each scene pushes into the next and the viewer follows the story over perceiving the overall screen space and the nuance of interaction. We don’t have a broader milieu, but a narrower mise en scene, and we don’t have the subtlety of interaction, but the motivational forces behind action. Typical screenwriting advice says, “We often focus so much on protagonists that the antagonist becomes an afterthought. But remember: no conflict, no story.” (Write+Co) Sure, we can see in Jerichow that Ali could be deemed the antagonist, and Thomas and Laura the protagonists who want a better life for themselves, and that Ali is in the way. But if this semi-remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice is interesting, it rests on the retreat from the premise that what matters most is that they eradicate the husband before turning on each other. Here they don’t kill the husband; he kills himself, and while they are still left with blood on their hands, it comes from impotence rather than potency. It is as if their desire to kill him is weak next to their desire to see decency in each other, and yet before taking his own life (going over the cliff in a car, from the cliff that he had earlier dangled from), he rails against Thomas and Laura. He calls them pigs. They do not answer him back; what can they say? Instead, they walk off, and the film cuts between Ali getting in the car and back to Thomas and Laura, then back to Ali as the car disappears from view. Laura runs towards the cliff top and says, quietly, even lovingly, “Ali.”

But how does this relate to our remarks about screen space and the nuances of interaction? If we have protagonists who want one thing, and antagonists who wish to stop them getting it, or vice versa, we have the central conflict much loved by Hollywood. But we also might merely need to watch the conflict unfolding. Yet if characters contain within themselves conflicts as great, if not greater, than the external one, then we can look for other forces within them beyond ready motivation. If Laura loves Ali, she might never quite realise this because it hasn’t quite been central to the marriage contract between them. She is bound to him by a debt that he paid off, and were she to leave him, it would still have to be paid. Now she is free of the debt, but she is also free of Ali, and it would be at this moment that she can choose to love him or not – at the moment he is no longer alive to be loved. If this reading has any validity, and it is simply a hypothesis based on that closing line, then we may choose to look for other moments where care or consideration for Ali is evident. Petzold might often choose stronger narratives than most of his Berlin School colleagues, but that needn’t mean he wants us to see as secondary anything in the story that doesn’t propel it in a clearly motivated way.

We can keep in mind this question of a complicated mise en scene and the subtlety of motive, and return a little to the political, when thinking of recent Argentinean film, and especially Lucrecia Martel. Argentinean cinema has been rich and varied for much of the 21st century, with Liverpool, La Cianaga, The Headless Woman, La Libertdad, Nine Queens, The Delinquents, Le Flor, The Secrets In Their Eyes, Trenque Lauquen, Wild Tales, The Clan, and Extraordinary Stories. It has been a mix of high-end art house (directors like Martel and Lisandro Alonso), commercial successes  (The Secrets In Their Eyes and Nine Queens), and a self-defining cinema movement: El Pampero Cine, described by Hamed Sarrafi as “an Argentine collective, formed by Laura Citarella, Mariano Llinas, Agustín Mendilaharzu, and Alejo Moguillansky, [which] has been honing its unique cinematic voice for 22 years,” (Senses of Cinema) their films include Llinas’s Extraordinary Stories and Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen.

Of all the directors, Martel isn’t only now internationally the best known; she might be the one most pertinently trying to understand Argentina as a nation, comprehending both its bourgeois history, and its colonial past.  Yet whether it is the former or the latter, whether in La Cienaga and The Headless Woman or Zama, she conveys a rich sense of lethargy. This ranges from the family members getting drunk by the stagnant pool in La Cienaga, the lazy complicity of Vero’s family in The Headless Woman as they protect her from taking responsibility for what may have been the death of an indigenous servant, to Zama, where the central character is a magistrate, hoping to move from his dull outpost, to what he believes will be a more exciting project. Yet the film emphasises the waiting, the tedious, gnawing nothingness of protecting a distant nation while occupying another. This is a colonialism shot through with a bit of Beckett and Kafka, a combination of Waiting for Godot and ‘Before the Law’, and based on a book by Antonio di Benedetto. Yet what matters is that Martel allows for us to read her work several ways, while at the same time registering an unequivocal take on the Argentinean nation, one closer to the condemnatory tone of a Fassbinder than the quieter ethos of a Petzold. As she says, Argentina is “a country predicated on the myth that the enemy was the colony, while in fact some of the most atrocious colonial crimes were committed by Argentinians against their own people.” (Filmmaker Magazine) She also says, “The generation that was around in the 1970s was really involved in politics. They had a strong sense that their actions could change the world. After the dictatorship and the 1980s, there was this horrible individualism in our culture. It was exactly the opposite of this notion that you are an actor in the history of your culture and your time. In a way, for me, to make cinema is very public. It is like a public speech. It is my way of belonging to history.” (Reverse Shot) Martel may not examine specifically those involved in ‘70s politics who disappeared, often drugged and thrown out of planes. But her work is part of a broader lassitude that shows people’s willing complicity.

Like Fassbinder in Germany, and Mungiu and others in Romania more recently, this needn’t mean the filmmaker has political affiliations, nor even causes they might feel obliged to push. What they all insist upon, though, is that a nation with a suspect history needs a reckoning, and cinema can be central to that process. It is surely what Martel means when she says film can be like a public speech. Her work isn’t trying to define a national consciousness, of course, and say this is what Argentinean people are like – as in most nations, they will be many things. But one of the things they are, allowed a dictatorship to be put in place, and many all but ignored the atrocities that were done in its name, just as Romania for decades had a dictator that inevitably reflected and shaped the national consciousness.

Cinema’s purpose is not to be political. But neither is its purpose to deny the socio-historical circumstances. To do the latter would be to create works that don’t reflect a people but merely coddle them with abstract notions of heroes and villains, the morally good and the morally bad. Cinema can be a lot murkier than that, just as it can absorb far more space than it needs to tell is story, as it shows the country’s landscapes, or indicates the troubling world on the edge of the frame. To understand these aspects, we can do worse than view films in the 21st century from Turkey, Romania, Germany and Argentina.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Studies in International Cinema

International cinema isn’t always oppositional; it needn’t be viewed as a deliberate counterforce to American film. But when it isn’t, the filmmaker, already half working in the Hollywood idiom, gets pulled into its orbit, and usually starts working stateside. There have been many fine filmmakers that, through necessity or design, have found themselves making American films. In the 1930s and 1940s, some were escaping Naziism: Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang; in the 1960s and 1970s, others left Communist countries: Roman Polanski, Milos Forman and Ivan Passer. During the same period, Agnes Varda, Jacques Demy and Michelangelo Antonioni made films Stateside that retained perhaps a little too much of their personality for Hollywood’s liking. Later, when Paul Verhoeven left his native Netherlands for the US, his sensibility fitted right in, making Robocop and Total Recall. Heck, even his sometime cinematographer was equal to Hollywood demand, with  Jan de Bont going on to direct Speed. Numerous others have fitted in equally well, from Australia (Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi), Germany (Wolfgang Petersen; Roland Emmerich) and Sweden (Lasse Hallstrom, Tomas Alfredson).

Yet better to ignore what can easily be assimilated and concentrate on international film movements that would be finding and founding their own aesthetic principles, rather than simply defying or conforming to Hollywood demand. Looking at waves from Germany, Romania, Argentina and Turkey shows that cinema can come from anywhere, and can find, too, an audience everywhere. These audiences may be small and box-office returns slim, but they might be telling stories with more universal appeal, as one says, than many a film coming out of Hollywood. They are far from box-office proof in J. Hoberman’s formulation, where films are so exposed to the public that the viewer feels almost obliged to go, and disappointed when they come out of the cinema. “However anticlimactic, The Phantom Menace is not only critic-proof but audience resistant as well.[…] it would take the consumer equivalent of the Russian Revolution to keep The Phantom Menace from ruling the box office weeks.” (Village Voice) Whatever we may think of films by Christian Petzold, Cristi Puiu, Lucrecia Martel or Nuri Bilge Ceylan, no massive advertising budget has cajoled the viewer into cinemas. One’s disappointment will be all one’s own, a singular failure on the filmmaker’s part to engage or intrigue them. But that is the point: the failure will be singular, because no mass pressure has been applied, no feeling that when looking to see what’s on, a person discovers that a Christopher Nolan film, a superhero movie, or a Bond film is playing in several cinemas and on even more screens. A Martel or Puiu, the viewer seeks out; it doesn’t seek out the viewer.

This idea we can extend to the specifics of the work, the mode of storytelling adopted, and the formal choices made in the telling. These are not films insistently imposing their narrative upon the audience. In Puiu’s Aurora, we don’t quite know what he seems to be avenging for much of the film, as we follow a man going about his mundane life, one that incorporates the occasional murder. In Ceylan’s Once Upon Time in Anatolia, cops take a murder suspect to show them where he committed the crime, but he can’t quite remember, as the film devotes large amounts of time to the search. In Martel’s La Cianaga, there are so many characters in the families we are being introduced to that the film is more or less over just as we have worked out all the interrelations. Any story seems secondary to comprehending how the characters interact, and why there might be tensions amongst them. Has there been a tragedy in the past, or is the film moving towards a tragedy in the immediate future? One watches both baffled and trepidatious.

Interestingly, Martel says, “The great thing about the soundtrack – especially when you include the human voice as a sound – is that it demystifies language, it deconstructs the idea of dialogue, even that of music. What’s interesting about sound is that it lacks a harmonic organization, which allows the viewer to predict feelings and anticipate events.” (Talking Movies) This all depends on how it is used, and partly what makes the works under discussion unlikely to draw the viewer in as a Hollywood film might rests on a much more expansive acoustic world. If a film has cue music, it also often has cue sounds, key auditory elements that will help us navigate the narrative. Screeching tyres belong to the car chase movie as readily as the sound of a chainsaw belongs to a horror, and tap dancing to a musical. To hear a chainsaw in a musical, or a screeching tyre in a romantic comedy, would be going against the generic grain, or knowingly adopting an audio convention from one and depositing it in another for ironic effect.

By eschewing genre, films by Martel, Puiu and others can also offer a much more varied array of sounds. In Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, the director offers an extreme long shot as we see, in the distance, three cars in the night, or rather chiefly their lights. On the soundtrack, we can hear faint whistling, cicadas and the sound of the cars on the road. Later, when they stop off for tea and rest at a rural house, a young woman comes out, and we see her in the candlelight, a young beauty that suggests the central character, a doctor, is instantly besotted. The other characters seem no less so, and indeed the suspect bursts into tears when seeing her. Yet Ceylan keeps the soundtrack un-cued as we hear dogs barking in the distance, and little is made narratively of the woman’s looks. Her purpose is to signify, not to narrativise, and while one could simplify this and say she is a symbol of youth and innocence, encapsulated in her looks, this wouldn’t quite convey what the scene illuminates. Such a take would have to incorporate within it the texture of the sequence: that these are tired men, searching the country for a body, and they take a rest in some distant outpost and discover a striking woman they don’t expect. Just because an image doesn’t propel the story, this needn’t mean it compels us to read it as a symbol. What matters more is the fabric of the scene, the feeling of exhaustion meeting the presence of freshness, lit by candles and registered on the soundtrack by distant off-screen sound.

Ceylan is the best known of 21st century Turkish filmmakers, and the one most influenced by Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian director who in a series of films during the late 1980s and through the 1990s perhaps more than anyone found a way to combine ancient wisdom with filmmaking technology, as he managed to couch old philosophical questions (why live? what is reality? Who do we really feel ourselves to be?), within an enquiring aesthetic based often on people sitting in cars, walking along hills, or riding on the back of a moped.  Kiarostami understood stillness within movement, and Ceylan wonders how much stillness a film can work with, as characters in Clouds of May, Uzak, Climates, and Winter Light are essentially static figures, as Ceylan wonders what might take them out of their despondency. They aren’t quite depressed, and are often self-entitled, but they capture well figures in a nation that is both modern and wealthy, and yet rural and poor – a point directly addressed in different ways in Uzak and Winter Sleep. In the former, a country cousin comes to stay with his educated relative, and in Winter Sleep, a former actor owns a hotel in Cappadocia.

While Ceylan’s films are often contemplative, with a hint of low-key self-laceration, Zemi Demirkibuz absorbs melodrama into his, and this rests partly on the Dostoyevskian dimension in his films, as opposed to the Chekhovian inflections in Ceylan’s. In possibly Demirkibuz’s greatest film, Destiny, a young man falls for a woman working in a shop, who is also a nightclub singer, and he will destroy his life over his obsession. Yet this isn’t a film about a stalker, but someone seeking, a monomaniac who finds simultaneously love and a curse, a desire he cannot consummate, but cannot deny. In The Confession, a husband wants his wife to admit to an affair, but struggles to deal with the consequences, as the obsessiveness in Destiny becomes domestically infernal. Other Turkish directors Tayfun Pirselimogu (Hair, I Am Not Him), and Semih Kaplanoglu (Egg, Milk, and Honey) are less modern than Ceylan and Demerkibuz, less inclined to play up the shift in culture amongst the middle-classes and the urban working class. Part of the pleasure of Kaplanoglu is the sense of tradition, which needn’t make him a conservative. These are directors not so much doing their own thing, as finding ways to examine Turkish culture.

While emigre directors Fatih Akin and Ferzan Ozpetek have increasingly absorbed genre into their work, as though always working in an idiom that was influenced by mainstream forces, during the early 2000s, for at least a decade, Turkish film possessed a quality that put its cinema on the map, quite distinct from possessing a talent that travels where it needs to go. When Schepsi and Weir left Australia, they showed a remarkable adeptness in Hollywood, but they were no longer reflecting the culture they were from; they were proving their skills were culturally transferable. However, this may rest on filmmakers who believe that after a film or two they have exhausted their own land and must look at new possibilities. Though it could just as readily reflect a sense of ambition greater than a sense of observation. One of the risks in possessing what we might call a Hollywood sensibility is the skill in reducing stories to a handful of components, often generically tied together for maximum hyperbole. But if observation is at least equal to narration, then the exaggerated can recede and the specific become pronounced. The difference between Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and Witness is that between locational intrigue and a narrational environment. In the former film, Weir seeks to comprehend the vastness of a landscape one really can get lost within. In the latter, the Amish community in Pennsylvania, where the cop hides out, is a hook to hang the story on and gives novelty to the fish-out-of-water theme. It doesn’t quite become enigmatic, while films of the Australian Wave possessed this quality, and it is one we often find evident in Turkish cinema. When the cop, the doctor and others are searching for the body in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Ceylan’s relationship with it isn’t very different from Weir’s and Schepsi’s. Shots that in American film might seem overly stretched become deliberately extended, asking us to observe the singularity of space.

Yet not all national waves want to put their nations on the map visually. The brilliance of recent Romanian cinema has been chiefly societal, exploring the collapse of Ceausescu’s regime, its lingering presence, and a post-communist belligerent self-interest. Some of the films are set within the orbit of the dictator’s governance, like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, The Autobiography of Nicolas Ceausescu, and 12:08 East of Bucharest. Others examine the moral turpitude, incompetence and indifference of the present: The Death of Mr Lazarescu, Graduation, Police, Adjective, Child’s Pose and The Happiest Girl in the World. The more recent work of Radu Jude (including Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, and Kontinental ‘25) pushes the coruscating into the essayistic, as if absorbing all the contempt the other films have expressed, and shaping it into Godardian critique.

But what is important to note in many Romanian films is that self-interest isn’t the same as self-agency. Much of the time, people pursue their own ends within clear institutional frameworks. In 4 Months…, an abortionist makes good money from performing them in a country where they are illegal, and where he can extort whatever he wants from those in desperate need. (Including sex.) In Child’s Pose, a mother will do anything she can to avoid her grown-up son being held responsible for a hit-and-run. In Graduation, a dad persuades those with power to help his daughter cheat in an exam, after she is assaulted and sprains her wrist. What they all have in common is low-key corruption, and this is where self-interest erodes society rather than produces individuals who can transcend it. The latter is closer to a Hollywood model, where often self-interest and corruption are distinct, with the self-interested individual determined to make the best of themselves, and who will often reject the society that hampers them. Americans are inclined to see this as protecting democracy, rather than undermining it, and this is perhaps partly rooted in De Tocqueville’s claim on Democracy in America: “The principle of self-interest rightly understood produces no great acts of self-sacrifice, but it suggests daily small acts of self-denial. By itself it cannot suffice to make a man virtuous; but it disciplines a number of persons in habits of regularity, temperance, moderation, foresight, self- command; and if it does not lead men straight to virtue by the will, it gradually draws them in that direction by their habits.” Self-interest is consistent with self-reliance, and if self-reliance is undermined, better to look after number one.

But in the Romanian films, looking after yourself is a sure way to weaken an already tenuous social fabric. The abortionist in 4 Months..., the mother in Child’s Pose and the dad in Graduation are all looking out for themselves or their family, and while the abortionist is surely far worse than the mother, who is far worse than the dad in Graduation, all contribute to state erosion. In US cinema, self-interest is frequently seen as incorruptible, as an individual takes on, takes down, or rejects an institution, from Julia Roberts in The Pelican Brief to Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. To take the law into one’s own hands, even if one happens to be a lawyer or a cop, is to take it out of the hands of the corrupt. In Romanian film, the point isn’t to go it alone, but to find those who can facilitate your self-interest – the fellow corrupt. Yet Romanian film does offer characters who aren’t so much incorruptible (in the Hollywood sense), but willing to sacrifice self-interest for the interests of others – like Otilia in 4 Months..., who puts her pregnant mate’s interests above her own, or the young cop in Police, Adjective, who can see no benefit in arresting a casual pot smoker and argues thus with his superiors. But while in conventional film, the cop, the lawyer, the whistleblower strengthens the social contract, in Romanian film, the erosion of that contract is so strong that the individual’s attempt at a good deed can seem powerless next to it.

While Turkish cinema often relies on the long take that will absorb the locale, and gives to many of the works a pictorial elegance, even beauty, Romanian cinema is visually crabbed, the camera hovering over events rather than deliberately capturing them. The style can look almost amateurish, as though taking further the Dogma films of the late 1990s, and suggesting this is cinema caught on the hoof, reframing at a moment’s notice, or failing to take in what matters if taking place offscreen. Obviously, there is nothing amateur about the style at all, and instead forces upon the viewer an awareness that space shown is narrower than space designated. What does this mean? Usually, a film shows us what is dramatically pertinent, and cuts to new information when necessary. It can allow the space to be narratively manageable, leaving offscreen space irrelevant. Many a great a work of international cinema will expand that space acoustically, and we noted it in the barking dogs in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, but what about the sound of a ball hitting a car in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days?

The central character is waiting in the car while the abortionist goes off and speaks to his mother in the middle distance, outside her flat. The camera stays with Otilia and she listens in to the conversation to her right, as we too strain to hear what is being said, and the tone in which the reprimanding son is speaking to his mother. It doesn’t augur well that this man is responsible for the abortion, and we sense her fear not in the conversation that she attends to, but in the ball that hits the car and makes her jump. This isn’t quite a jump scare, but it works with a dimension of it – deflection. The viewer attends to one event, while the filmmaker suddenly asks us to attend to another. However, while the horror film usually focuses on the untoward (the anomalous aspect of a character’s life as they end up in the woods, a haunted house, or taken hostage), Cristian Mungiu makes clear this is a mundane detail, not a false shock. He shows 1980s Bucharest as a careful culture where everyone seems wary of everyone else, and this is only exacerbated in this instance by the illegal abortion Otilia is aiding her friend with. In what we will call anomalous films (where the exceptional exemplifies the healthy norm), the situation doesn’t exacerbate a character’s situation; it usually transforms it, and this can cover anything from a character finding themselves in a haunted house, or a Hitchcock figure realising they are caught within a mistaken identity. But in Romanian cinema, while the event is usually important enough to be narratively significant (an abortion here, a demise in The Death of Mr Lazarescu, an arrest in Police, Adjective, a hit-and-run in Child’s Pose), it fits smoothly into the social malaise that the incident exemplifies. The anomalous needn’t tell us very much about society; the exacerbating incident in Romanian cinema very much does.

While many countries have skeletons in their historical cupboards, this doesn’t mean they will become overriding preoccupations in the culture, or in the art the country produces. If Britain and the US have been viewed as democratic countries with incorruptible governments (at least until recently), this might partly rest on high levels of democratic accountability, and no instances of dictatorial control. But it will also rest on the overriding narratives of the nation that cannot quite countenance a moral malaise. There have been exceptions to this (the paranoid American thrillers of the seventies, which absorbed the string of political assassinations in the sixties), but the killing of the Kennedy brothers, for example, isn’t quite the same thing as having a dictator for decades. France has had to acknowledge the Vichy regime in a number of works, but it hasn’t quite become an overriding assumption about the nation, nor have atrocities in the Algerian war.

But what about Germany and Argentina? In German films of what has been called the Berlin School, we find the relative absence of the conventionally political, and with few nods to Nazi Germany. This is partly because New German Cinema of the 1970s examined in immense detail the links between Naziism and the post-war economic miracle (especially in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s work) and in the 2000s, the historicising of Nazi Germany became more mainstream: Sophie Scholl and Downfall, for example. It left the Berlin School exploring the minutiae of people’s lives, even when dramatic elements were activated. Probably the best-known figure is Christian Petzold, whose films include Yella, Barbara, Jerichow, and Phoenix, but there is also Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec, Valeska Grisebach, and Ramon Zurchler. Petzold is usually more narratively focused than the rest, with his plots hinging on something: an escape from East Germany in Barbara, a woman hoping to bump off her husband in Jerichow, a young lady hooking up with a scammer in Yella. Phoenix is about as close to The Berlin School gets to addressing categorical German history: a woman who has survived the concentration camps and has her face reconstructed after a bullet in the face. But while Petzold creates stories with dramatic emphasis, he films them in a sober style that usually eschews non-diegetic music and emphasises watchful observation over histrionic action. In Jerichow, the husband, Ali, wife, Laura, and his driver, Thomas, have a picnic on the beach. Ali, gets drunk, dances to Turkish music playing from a ghetto blaster, and then goes up to the top of the cliff and appears like he might fall off. Thomas saves him, but it looks like Laura would prefer he fell, and complicity develops between the wife and the driver, both white, working class Germans, while Ali is a go-getting Turkish emigre. When Ali hangs from the cliff, this is literally a cliffhanger, but Petzold is less interested in the suspense, than in the broader dynamics. As Ali walks off to climb up, Thomas and Laura dance. Thomas kisses her, and she responds with momentary passion, before she pushes him away. “Some friend you are”, she says. When Thomas goes up to the cliff, we see him in the distance looking down at Laura; she looks in the distance up at him. They could let him fall, but Thomas runs to the rescue.

Ali has acted like an idiot, and it is understandable the wife is drawn to Thomas over Ali; Thomas is calmer, better looking, and his desire for Laura is naked; not clothed in the garb of wealth that makes Laura Ali’s property. (Ali paid off her debts from before they met.) But it isn’t chiefly the story of murder that matters, but of power and one contained by a broader ethos. Could Thomas and Laura love each other if they killed Ali, and thus couldn’t quite love themselves? They need to kill him to be happy, but will be unhappy if they kill him. They aren’t quite the self-serving characters of noir that the film invokes, and this creates the double bind. Petzold’s purpose is to observe how such a bind unfolds, and contains it in an ironic ending, which gives the characters what they want, but on terms that will probably doom their own love affair.

While this is much more dramatic than many a Berlin school film, which often unfolds with no key incident, or at least no dramatic element that could allow for easy summary: a person staying all season in Berlin in Schanelac’s Passing Summer, or the casual unfolding of a person’s Berlin life in Arslan’s A Fine Day after she breaks up with a boyfriend. In Grisebach’s Western, a German man takes a job labouring in Bulgaria, working for a German company. What matters more in many of the films is observing the details of people’s lives, as if drama would risk turning the observational into the narratively specific, leaving the frame too focused on some details, and others as merely background necessity. Petzold is interesting partly because he wants the tension of plot, but he doesn’t quite want to bury the incidental so completely that we are no longer observing behaviour, except motivationally. This is one of the risks of narrative cinema: each scene pushes into the next and the viewer follows the story over perceiving the overall screen space and the nuance of interaction. We don’t have a broader milieu, but a narrower mise en scene, and we don’t have the subtlety of interaction, but the motivational forces behind action. Typical screenwriting advice says, “We often focus so much on protagonists that the antagonist becomes an afterthought. But remember: no conflict, no story.” (Write+Co) Sure, we can see in Jerichow that Ali could be deemed the antagonist, and Thomas and Laura the protagonists who want a better life for themselves, and that Ali is in the way. But if this semi-remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice is interesting, it rests on the retreat from the premise that what matters most is that they eradicate the husband before turning on each other. Here they don’t kill the husband; he kills himself, and while they are still left with blood on their hands, it comes from impotence rather than potency. It is as if their desire to kill him is weak next to their desire to see decency in each other, and yet before taking his own life (going over the cliff in a car, from the cliff that he had earlier dangled from), he rails against Thomas and Laura. He calls them pigs. They do not answer him back; what can they say? Instead, they walk off, and the film cuts between Ali getting in the car and back to Thomas and Laura, then back to Ali as the car disappears from view. Laura runs towards the cliff top and says, quietly, even lovingly, “Ali.”

But how does this relate to our remarks about screen space and the nuances of interaction? If we have protagonists who want one thing, and antagonists who wish to stop them getting it, or vice versa, we have the central conflict much loved by Hollywood. But we also might merely need to watch the conflict unfolding. Yet if characters contain within themselves conflicts as great, if not greater, than the external one, then we can look for other forces within them beyond ready motivation. If Laura loves Ali, she might never quite realise this because it hasn’t quite been central to the marriage contract between them. She is bound to him by a debt that he paid off, and were she to leave him, it would still have to be paid. Now she is free of the debt, but she is also free of Ali, and it would be at this moment that she can choose to love him or not – at the moment he is no longer alive to be loved. If this reading has any validity, and it is simply a hypothesis based on that closing line, then we may choose to look for other moments where care or consideration for Ali is evident. Petzold might often choose stronger narratives than most of his Berlin School colleagues, but that needn’t mean he wants us to see as secondary anything in the story that doesn’t propel it in a clearly motivated way.

We can keep in mind this question of a complicated mise en scene and the subtlety of motive, and return a little to the political, when thinking of recent Argentinean film, and especially Lucrecia Martel. Argentinean cinema has been rich and varied for much of the 21st century, with Liverpool, La Cianaga, The Headless Woman, La Libertdad, Nine Queens, The Delinquents, Le Flor, The Secrets In Their Eyes, Trenque Lauquen, Wild Tales, The Clan, and Extraordinary Stories. It has been a mix of high-end art house (directors like Martel and Lisandro Alonso), commercial successes  (The Secrets In Their Eyes and Nine Queens), and a self-defining cinema movement: El Pampero Cine, described by Hamed Sarrafi as “an Argentine collective, formed by Laura Citarella, Mariano Llinas, Agustín Mendilaharzu, and Alejo Moguillansky, [which] has been honing its unique cinematic voice for 22 years,” (Senses of Cinema) their films include Llinas’s Extraordinary Stories and Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen.

Of all the directors, Martel isn’t only now internationally the best known; she might be the one most pertinently trying to understand Argentina as a nation, comprehending both its bourgeois history, and its colonial past.  Yet whether it is the former or the latter, whether in La Cienaga and The Headless Woman or Zama, she conveys a rich sense of lethargy. This ranges from the family members getting drunk by the stagnant pool in La Cienaga, the lazy complicity of Vero’s family in The Headless Woman as they protect her from taking responsibility for what may have been the death of an indigenous servant, to Zama, where the central character is a magistrate, hoping to move from his dull outpost, to what he believes will be a more exciting project. Yet the film emphasises the waiting, the tedious, gnawing nothingness of protecting a distant nation while occupying another. This is a colonialism shot through with a bit of Beckett and Kafka, a combination of Waiting for Godot and ‘Before the Law’, and based on a book by Antonio di Benedetto. Yet what matters is that Martel allows for us to read her work several ways, while at the same time registering an unequivocal take on the Argentinean nation, one closer to the condemnatory tone of a Fassbinder than the quieter ethos of a Petzold. As she says, Argentina is “a country predicated on the myth that the enemy was the colony, while in fact some of the most atrocious colonial crimes were committed by Argentinians against their own people.” (Filmmaker Magazine) She also says, “The generation that was around in the 1970s was really involved in politics. They had a strong sense that their actions could change the world. After the dictatorship and the 1980s, there was this horrible individualism in our culture. It was exactly the opposite of this notion that you are an actor in the history of your culture and your time. In a way, for me, to make cinema is very public. It is like a public speech. It is my way of belonging to history.” (Reverse Shot) Martel may not examine specifically those involved in ‘70s politics who disappeared, often drugged and thrown out of planes. But her work is part of a broader lassitude that shows people’s willing complicity.

Like Fassbinder in Germany, and Mungiu and others in Romania more recently, this needn’t mean the filmmaker has political affiliations, nor even causes they might feel obliged to push. What they all insist upon, though, is that a nation with a suspect history needs a reckoning, and cinema can be central to that process. It is surely what Martel means when she says film can be like a public speech. Her work isn’t trying to define a national consciousness, of course, and say this is what Argentinean people are like – as in most nations, they will be many things. But one of the things they are, allowed a dictatorship to be put in place, and many all but ignored the atrocities that were done in its name, just as Romania for decades had a dictator that inevitably reflected and shaped the national consciousness.

Cinema’s purpose is not to be political. But neither is its purpose to deny the socio-historical circumstances. To do the latter would be to create works that don’t reflect a people but merely coddle them with abstract notions of heroes and villains, the morally good and the morally bad. Cinema can be a lot murkier than that, just as it can absorb far more space than it needs to tell is story, as it shows the country’s landscapes, or indicates the troubling world on the edge of the frame. To understand these aspects, we can do worse than view films in the 21st century from Turkey, Romania, Germany and Argentina.


© Tony McKibbin