Rites of Retreat and the Cinematic Resignification of European Cultural Geography

Abstract

This chapter explores some meaningful shifts in the cultural geography of twenty-first-century European cinema: changes in cinematic journeys that reveal a resignification of such terms as East, West, margin and centre. On the basis of three European films of the last decade, The World is Big and Salvation Lurks around the Corner (Stephan Komandarev, 2008), Delta (Kornél Mundruczó, 2008) and Suntan (Argyris Papadimitropoulos, 2016), I am going to investigate a special sub-category of so-called return films, one that I will hypothetically call retreat films. In these films returns become ritualistic retreats with masculinities on regressive journeys. Their spatial trajectories may typically lead from Western cultural centres to Eastern homelands, from cities to the countryside, from the public sphere to the private, sometimes symbolically from the future to the past and often from the realm of desire to that of Thanatos. The men of these films tend to struggle to find places of their own on the margins of society, away from public spaces: what they seem to have in mind is a place to hide, somewhere to retreat, that is, a closet of their own.