White and Violent: Political Violence in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema

The chapter explores the representation of whiteness and violence in the European art cinema of the new millennium. It argues that the series of recent (economic, political, cultural, demographic, military) crises transforming European societies have also made social and political life more polarised, militant and violent in general, which has already started to transform European art cinema's established approaches to violence. Such films as This is England (Shane Meadows, 2006) and The Wave (Dennis Gansel, 2008) attempt to represent and come to terms with these political shifts in their complexity, thus putting contemporary political changes, newly emerging formations of identity and the ethics of cinematic representation in one context.