"In Europe and beyond, the moving image serves to imagine community and to instantiate a communal communicative space. These spaces do not not derive from harmonious but rather conflictual social configurations. To describe this space, Randall Halle presents the concept of interzone as a geographic and cultural space that develops through border crossings in the broadest sense, a place of transit, interaction, transformation, contentious and contested diveristy. To explore the communal communicative space made possible by cinema, Halle looks at cinematic relationships, especially European but also outside these borders. While treating German cinema as central, he also sweeps film production throughout central Europe, from the Baltic to the Sea of Marmara into the Mediterranean. In addition, Halle opens up a historical dimension that reaches from the pre-cinematic to contemporary post-film experiments with the moving image, from imperial Prussia to the role of European funding for contemporary films in Africa and Asia. Concentrating on the European Union's culture instead of its politics or economy, he combines analyses of films with their conditions of production, questions of both film aesthetics and financing. In this detailed investigation of cinematic space and place, Halle's themes come together to show cinema's ability to express multiple interzones in Europe and beyond"--
