This project being carried out by Prof. Susan Ingram analyzes a specific strand of post-1989 European cinema: grungy, yet stylish, youth-oriented urban films that have achieved more than a modicum of global popularity in no small part due to their protagonists, who are depicted as somehow managing to cope with being positioned as part of the growing underclass needed to service new forms of disorganized global finance capitalism. In order to investigate these films, whose stylistic savvy and commercial popularity have tended to distract attention from their political sophistication, this project introduces the concept of  “Cosmotrash,” a play on the term “Eurotrash” that infuses it with cosmopolitical theory. Anticipated outcomes for the project are an open source database, conference papers, refereed journal articles, and a book with a major Canadian university press.

This project seeks to correctly identify Cosmotrash films by delineating them against other post-1989 tendencies in European cinema. According to Prof. Ingram, “What distinguishes Cosmotrash films is that they appeal to and harness creative and political energies at a level where globalism interfaces with the urban.”

Prof. Ingram’s work on “Cosmotrash: A New Generation in European Film” is generously supported by the Standard Research Grant program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Research Director: Susan Ingram, Humanities
Email: singram@yorku.ca