The key thesis of this chapter is that there has been a resurgence of modernism in the European cinema of crisis. This revival of a movement that had been declared passé by the majority of contemporary film scholars has to be understood against the backdrop of social crises whose symptoms resemble the crises experienced by modern societies in the first half of the twentieth century. These crises need to be seen in the context of modern societies’ separation between the private and public sphere, as well as their inability to generate conditions of economic/social stability and prosperity on account of their vulnerability to economic shocks and pressures. Henri Lefebvre's argument formulated in the 1960s that modernity generates more crises in its ‘fruitless attempt to achieve structure and coherence’ (1995: 187) is equally applicable to the contemporary experience of late modernity and neoliberal capitalism. As such, to understand the current crisis in Europe, we need to expand its historical parameters and see it not as the exception, but as a systemic reality that has characterised modern societies since the entrenchment of neoliberalism in the post-1989 world.

I am not the first to suggest this. Lauren Berlant famously contended that crisis is part and parcel of a society structured around economic rationalisation and deregulation. For Berlant, the crisis needs to be understood as a systemic reality, a ‘crisis ordinariness’ (2011: 10), which is part and parcel of the historical experience of late modernity. In a more idiosyncratic way, Teresa Brennan describes the present historical state as exhausting modernity. She contends that neoliberal capitalism exhausts energy resources from nature without replenishing them, while at the same time it imposes exhausting conditions of life on individuals, including those who are materially privileged. Exhaustion is not just a physical symptom of overwork, but the mental status quo of an era unable to envisage and imagine alternatives: ‘There is a terrible tiredness around, a sense of having no energy, or of energy departing’ (Brennan 2000: 12).

These points can help us understand the crisis as a key constituent of Western societies following the consolidation of neoliberalism.