Crossover Cinema

Cross-Cultural Film from Production to Reception

Sukhmani Khorana

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138243255
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136221750
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

Cinematic products in the twenty-first century increasingly emerge from, engage with, and are consumed in cross-cultural settings. While there have been a number of terms used to describe cinematic forms that do not bear allegiance to a single nation in terms of conceptualization, content, finance and/or viewership, this volume contends that "crossover cinema" is the most apt contemporary description for those aspects of contemporary cinema on which it focuses. This contention is provoked by an appreciation of the cross-cultural reality of our post-globalization twenty-first century world.

This volume both outlines the history of usage of the term and grounds it theoretically in ways that emphasize the personal/poetic in addition to the political. Each of the three sections of the volume then considers crossover film from one of three perspectives: production, the texts themselves, and distribution and consumption.

Part I
Producing a Hybrid Grammar

1
Crossover Cinema

A Genealogical and Conceptual Overview

Sukhmani Khorana

In this collection, the term crossover cinema is used to encapsulate an emerging form of cinema that crosses cultural borders at the stage of conceptualization and production and hence manifests a hybrid cinematic grammar at the textual level, as well as crossing over in terms of its distribution and reception. It argues for the importance of distinguishing between crossover cinema and transnational cinema. While the latter label has been important in enabling the recognition and consideration of the impact of post–World War II migration and globalization on film practice and scholarship, and while it constituted a significant advance on the term with which is so often conflated, world cinema, this chapter argues for a repositioning of the former term as more definitive of the contemporary cultural epoch. The extension of scope in this manner more accurately reflects the highly contingent ways in which global flows in both production and consumption have shaped cinema—not only in the locations of so-called Third Cinema but also in the West. Such a repositioning enables us to think of cross-culturally conceptualized cinema as lying beyond the exclusive art house category that often restricts (a) its reading by film scholars and critics; (b) its publicity discourses and availability in mainstream cinemas; and (c) its reception by various audience communities. There is also an appropriate political objective in the adoption of the term crossover to describe cross-culturally conceptualized cinema. This is because with an extended scope, it joins forces with the broader project of internationalizing cultural studies, that is, to keep the competing forces of cultural indigenization and capitalist internationalization from becoming synonymous with globalization (see Abbas and Erni 2005).

In reviewing and reconceptualizing crossover cinema, this chapter attempts to locate it so that on the one hand, it is appropriately specific, while on the other hand emphasizing that it is both situated and global by virtue of its ability to transgress genre, audience, and cultural borders. Such an approach foregrounds the production contexts within which crossover cinema is generated and also argues that the notion of “crossing over” best describes the personal/poetic and political border crossings being constantly undertaken and negotiated by filmmakers with cross-cultural affiliations and influences, and thereby manifested in the hybrid content and form, as well as the distribution and reception, of the films themselves.

I will demonstrate that since the nature of global flows, and ways of defining and associating with home and host cultures, has been transformed in the wake of globalization, it has become imperative to examine the new breed of transnational creative practitioners and their cinematic practices as crossover rather than as simply understood through their national/ethnic origins or identities. Importantly, the potential of such cinema to cross over implies not simply another passing cinematic fad, but a major structural shift in global media industries on one level, while at another level it acknowledges new kinds of creative collaborations that are holistic and replete with the promise of awakening us to the essentialism that persists in certain cultural processes and products.

Crossover Cinema: From Jargon to Jagaran (Hindi for “Awakening”)

The aim of this anthology is not so much to be geographically representative, but to provide a glimpse of the kind of cinema (and ways of making meaning from its textual and extratextual elements) that is cross-culturally conceived, yet not relegated to the margins of mainstream public culture by virtue of its ability to cross over. Unlike “world cinema” or “transnational cinema,” for instance, there is no argument to be made about the inclusion of crossover cinema in mainstream cinema culture. In reconceptualizing crossover cinema, I am appropriating a term that has so far had a very particular location, but also simultaneously a very unattached resonance. As a moniker hitherto applied to films associated with or emerging from the Indian subcontinent that are able to appeal to Western audiences, crossover cinema has a rather rooted history, albeit with little explication of its content or the setting out of its practice-based parameters. Similarly, Ranjit Keval Kumar’s (2011) PhD thesis on crossover and makeover trends in new Indian cinema also acknowledges the muddling of the terms Bollywood, Indian, and crossover film and argues that crossover is an emerging genre in its own right. In a similar vein, American distributor Miramax attempted a model crossover hit in the 1990s by reediting Hong Kong films to create a balance between distinctiveness and accessibility (Dombrowski 2008). This shows a similar rooted yet outward tendency, drawing on the South Asian usage of the term, but again it remains ambiguously defined and poorly executed.

I argue that despite the above limitations, crossover cinema as a conceptual term and as an indicator of an emerging form is ripe for usage in the contemporary cinematic context. However, it must be emphasized that unlike the South Asian or Hong Kong use of the term, crossover cinema in this collection of chapters does not derive its primary point of difference from other kinds of cinemas through its crossover in audience terms alone. Instead, it is the site of cross-cultural conceptualization and production that is taken as the principal foundation and that then leads to textual hybridity and wide-ranging audience appeal. This is not done to privilege an auteurist account of such cinema, but rather to highlight the process of creating a film that is not conventionally grounded in a single national/cultural/generic source.

The first usage of the term in South Asia can be traced back to the early years of the twenty-first century with the border-crossing popularity of films made by Indian diasporic directors (such as Gurinder Chadha’s [2002] Bend It Like Beckham and Mira Nair’s [2001] Monsoon Wedding) and English-language films by India-based filmmakers (like Nagesh Kukunoor’s [2003] Bollywood Calling and Rahul Bose’s [2001] Everybody Says I’m Fine). At the same time, the nation’s most prolific commercial film industry, Mumbai-based Bollywood, borrowed the term soon after and began using it to describe its own global, neoliberal outreach. Not surprisingly, this led to widespread confusion and an opinion piece in the Times of India dubbed the trend “Crassover Cinema” (Nair 2003). However, ambivalence toward the term continues into the present within Indian film and media circles; Bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan recently declared, “It disturbs me that all Indian filmmakers are chasing an elusive dream of crossover cinema” (cited in Mid-Day 2011).

The previous comment implies not that Indian filmmakers are chasing a supposed genre called crossover cinema, but rather that, according to Khan, their search for a Western audience may not come to fruition. In other words, there is a conflation of the term with a particular segment of the global audience, and a particular marketing strategy, and this has gone relatively unquestioned in film scholarship. For instance, when discussing the globalization of Bollywood, renowned film scholar Daya Kishan Thussu (2008, 106–7) distinguishes between diasporic and Indian films but still defines crossover primarily as Bollywood’s attempted foray into traditional Hollywood territory. Such usage needs to be qualified. Bollywood has a long history of transnational appeal in nations as diverse as Malaysia and the former Soviet Union (see Iordanova 2006), and the crossover cinema is by no means defined by its attempt to make it into Hollywood. Further, it is worth noting that such formulations implicitly defer to Hollywood as a media center; the global reach of Hollywood is hardly ever described as a crossover. What I am suggesting here is that being cross-cultural in terms of the text, the intertext and the extratext is intrinsic to a crossover film. Such a film does not assume a Western audience at the outset but rather is forged from multiple cultural affiliations and eventually appeals to a range of viewing communities among whom the Western audience is only one possibility.

What, then, exemplifies a crossover film? And, is it opening up cinematic and discursive spaces that are based on a cross-cultural, cross-platform paradigm? I would like to begin your journey through the anthology with the previous questions, while also offering the suggestion that Danny Boyle’s (2008) Slumdog Millionaire is a possible, if arguably contested, template. Although Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Lee 2000) was widely lauded as a crossover phenomenon after Miramax’s initial unsuccessful attempts to generate a Hong Kong–based worldwide hit, it still only made it to the Best Foreign Film category of the Academy Awards. Slumdog Millionaire, on the other hand, literally crossed over to the main (nonforeign) group. This is not to suggest that the Academy Awards is an objective barometer of crossover success, or that it is transparently representative of the best of global cinema. However, it is crucial that the latter film’s cross-cultural affiliations no longer rendered it foreign, and this is an important indicator of its crossover production, content, and appeal.

In her review of Slumdog Millionaire, which locates it in the viewership context of post–financial crisis America, Kavoori (2009) refers to the film as “a classic crossover text,” adding that it uses “the specifics of Indian locale to speak to wider (global) concerns of personal responsibility in a heartless world; the need for agency in an alienated society and perhaps most critically, the renewal of ‘love’ as a category for understanding the self” (260). Not only is this reading demonstrative of the situated knowledge theorized as being critical to a holistic consideration of crossover cinema, but it also shows that transnational appeal needs to be both globally and locally dispersed rather than invested in an elite Western milieu. This collection is merely the beginning of an endeavor to free up the term so that it can have multiple cinematic roots and routes. The word crossover refers to more than an arbitrary attempt to join discrete entities; in this context, the term indicates cross-cultural affinities that both travel and stay.

Personal/Poetic and Political: Theorizing Crossover Cinematic Practice

In order to free up the term crossover, it is crucial that its usage in film theory and practice is understood as a manifestation of cross-cultural affinities that are not merely political but also personal/poetic. The aim of this and the following section, then, is to first articulate such a theoretical framework and, subsequently, enact all the dimensions of a conversation about crossover cinema that itself crosses over disciplinary and methodological boundaries.

In an essay titled “Ethnicity in an Age of Diaspora,” diasporic Indian scholar R. Radhakrishnan (2003, 119) begins with a personal scenario in which his eleven-year-old son asks him whether he is Indian or American. Terming the scenario “both filial and pedagogic,” Radhakrishnan tells his son that he is both (122) and embarks on a polemical journey about identity and the shifting contours of its relationship with ethnicity and location. Such an autobiographical, yet contextually relevant, beginning is an apt metaphor for this chapter due to both its personal particularity and its wider political implications. It also leads us to question the use of the personal/poetic anecdote as a springboard for reflections on the cross-cultural condition that otherwise adhere to conventional academic discourse.

The answer to the previous question lies in the nature of contemporary transnational formations, which, like Radhakrishnan’s filial-pedagogic scenario, are both experiential and theoretical. For this reason, Sunil Bhatia and Anjali Ram (2001) recommend a process-oriented approach to acculturation research “where the focus is on understanding how immigrants living in hybrid cultures and diasporic locations are constantly negotiating their multiple, and often conflicting histories and subject positions” (3). Similarly, in the introduction to an edited volume titled Theorizing Diaspora, Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (2003) call for a need to move beyond the construction and consolidation of cross-cultural identities to ask how these identities are “practised, lived, and experienced” (9). Therefore, as Radhakrishnan’s story illustrates, I contend that for a well-rounded understanding of crossover cinematic practice, it is crucial to examine the ongoing performativity of the creative self.

In addition to considering the personal through its performativity, it is important to remember that the transnational selves that are performed display affiliations to two or more cultures or nations. The politics of these belongings are deeply intertwined with the performativity of the personal. Gina Wisker (2007) notes this entanglement of the personal and the political in her commentary on the identities of diasporic writers: “As they dialogue with the adoptive homeland, they change themselves, the new homeland, and their versions and memories of the other homelands, and as they dialogue with the other homelands they renegotiate meaning in their minds and actions” (29).

Migrant scholar Ien Ang (2001) theorizes her own identity through a similar consideration of performativity and context when she notes, “If I am inescapably Chinese by descent, I am only sometimes Chinese by consent. When and how is a matter of politics” (51). While the postcolonial notion of “negotiated belonging” and the postmodern conceptuali...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• PART I Producing a Hybrid Grammar
• PART II Reading outside the Canon
• PART III Watching Other Worlds
• Contributors
• Index