Screen Borders: From Calais to cinéma-monde by Michael Gott (review)

Reviewed by: Screen Borders: From Calais to cinéma-monde by Michael Gott Alison J. Murray Levine Gott, Michael. Screen Borders: From Calais to cinéma-monde. Manchester UP, 2023. ISBN 978-1-5261-6423-0. Pp. 216. This book is a welcome and wide-ranging intervention in the field of transnational film and television studies. It analyzes a diverse collection of screen media, including fiction films, documentary films, and television series, dealing with European borders and border-crossing. As Europe's largest investor in co-productions, France serves as a nerve center within a corpus that is circumscribed by the francosphère yet includes many productions outside traditional concepts of "French" or "Francophone." This porous approach to categories will be familiar to readers acquainted with Gott's previous work, for example, Michael Gott and Thibault Schilt, eds., Cinéma-monde: Decentred Perspectives on Global Filmmaking in French (Edinburgh UP, 2018) and Michael Gott, French-Language Road Cinema: Borders, Diasporas, Migration and "New Europe" (Edinburgh UP, 2016). Equally familiar, and always refreshing in Gott's work, is the fluid interweaving of film theory and formal analysis with contemporary European cultural history, media production structures, and politics. The central concern of this book is to take stock of the profusion of references to borders within contemporary European media productions, and to mine these works for a collective, multivocal narrative about European identity. All of the works in the book shed light on the question of where Europe begins and ends, why the answer matters, and to whom. The book is timely, and the stakes are high. "Fortress Europe" provokes "interest, debate, anxiety, rage, and compassion" (199). In this book, Gott argues that film and television allow exclusionary political borders, or "borderlines" to expand into "borderlands," or sites of dialogue, investigation, and exchange where a multilayered and multidirectional sense of European identity begins to take shape. Readers hungry for a crisp throughline of linear argumentation about a tightly circumscribed corpus may not find what they are looking for here. But those interested in a broad yet curated journey through a vast landscape of European film and media will be delighted by the book's range and erudition. Synthesis and connection across media types and historical spaces is a tremendous strength of the book, which will be a gold mine for individuals looking for ideas about what to watch, or teach, next. Any of the highly readable chapters could be assigned to provide historical background and spark theoretical discussion among students. Gott's long and sometimes digressive paragraphs brim with original insights, such as the comparison between the experience of traveling through a tunnel and film editing (47–48). The form may, ultimately, be part of the point. After all, the book aims to surface the cursory and deeply inaccurate notion of a border as a line on a map, and to explode it in a multiplicity of possible directions. This rhetorical move is grounded in geo-political reality, as Gott shows in his description of the seven different types of borders that comprise that "line End Page 173 on a map" for one single European nation, Spain (6). Readers embarking on this journey will emerge with a rich, complex, and nuanced vantage point on recent European media production from within and without. End Page 174 Alison J. Murray Levine University of Virginia Copyright © 2024 American Association of Teachers of French