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In permanent crisis: ethnicity in contemporary European media and cinema, by Ipek A. Celik, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2015, 136 pp., £36.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780472052721

In Permanent Crisis: Ethnicity in Contemporary European Media and Cinema joins a growing number of publications about European cinema in the twenty-first century. Ipek A. Celik’s discussion of filmic ethnicity expands the scope of existing scholarship on minorities in European national cinemas and updates previous studies that analyse migration, ethnicity, human trafficking and mobility in European cinema. With impressive theoretical sophistication, Celik’s book demonstrates how films respond to a post-9/11 public discourse that frames migrants and refugees primarily as terrorists or victims. Celik proposes a current ‘temporality of crisis’ that articulates ‘ethnic and racial difference in today’s Europe’ (3). She situates her readings of four films – Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (USA/UK/Japan, 2006), Michael Haneke’s Caché/Hidden (France/Austria/Germany/Italy, 2005), Constantinos Giannaris’s Omiros/Hostage (Greece/Turkey/Austria, 2004) and Fatih Akın’s Gegen die Wand/Head-On (Germany/Turkey, 2004) – in relationship to political events and public discourses about ethnic minorities. European mainstream news, she emphasises, depict refugees, migrants and ethnic minorities in ‘relation to emergency situations,’ including as victims of human trafficking, suspects of terrorism and asylum seekers who pose a threat (3). This ‘catastrophism,’ produces a ‘language of crisis,’ particularly in the twenty-first century (3). Celik’s book supersedes the binary of art versus popular film with which scholars of European cinema continue to grapple. Instead she focuses on generic conventions in auteur films, because of the ‘excess of generic tropes through which minorities appear in the media’ (20). She argues that the representation of ethnic minorities is overdetermined in the dominant media, which in turn finds its way into auteur cinema, but that, in this process, the filmmakers revise these tropes to question their meaning. This approach enables Celik to pay attention to an ‘embodied and multisensory relationship to image,’ overcoming the juxtaposition of rational reflection versus emotional immersion (24). Her methodology moves beyond employing identity to prescribe political aesthetics in migrant or minority cinema, as studies that focus solely on films by directors of ‘migrant origin or descent’ (24) tend to do. As the book covers four relatively well-known films, Celik’s in-depth discussions impress with new information and original approaches that reflect her expertise about the political and social circumstances of the individual films, while attending to the overarching European and theoretical context. Knowledge of the diverse cultures and languages of the different European countries and regions presents a continuous challenge for scholars of European cinema. Thus, Celik’s erudition precedes the selection of films not only from different countries and regions but also addresses different bilateral relationships, such as those between Greece and Albania, and Germany and Turkey. Celik’s move beyond familiar arguments is most exciting because it expands our understanding of these otherwise widely considered films. Children of Men has been widely discussed in scholarship regarding the politics that it articulates. For Celik, however, the film exemplifies her claim that a ‘political urgency’ attends to the current ‘historical crises’ (32) that the film expresses through its use of genre, including science fiction, disaster and action. Celik relates the social-political context of refugee crises in Europe to the biopolitics that the film captures. 264 BOOK REVIEWS