Transnational Cinema

An Introduction

Steven Rawle

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350306677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This core teaching text provides a thorough overview of the recently emerged field of transnational film studies. Covering a range of approaches to analysing films about migrant, cross-cultural and cross-border experience, Steven Rawle demonstrates how film production has moved beyond clear national boundaries to become a product of border crossing finance and creative personnel. This comprehensive introduction brings together the key concepts and theories of transnational cinema, including genre, remakes, diasporic and exilic cinema, and the limits of thinking about cinema as a particularly national cultural artefact. It is an excellent course companion for undergraduate students of film, cinema, media and cultural studies studying transnational and global cinema, and provides both students and lovers of film alike with a strong grounding in this timely field of film studies.

CHAPTER 1

World or Transnational Cinema?

Browse any film store, in the actual or virtual world, and you’ll normally find a section, alongside genres like action, horror and science fiction, that’s devoted to ‘world cinema’. Normally, this section is very neatly or clearly laid out, or browsable, by major film-producing countries, such as France, Germany, or Japan. However, some might be more problematically labelled by area or continent, such as Africa, the Middle East, or Scandinavia. Often the simple designation of cinemas by their country of origin (usually by their predominant language) can mask the complexities of production, funding, and the reception and consumption of films, let alone their engagement with issues of identity and subjectivity. What we generally won’t find in the ‘world cinema’ section are films in the English language, from the UK, the US and Canada. These films will sit more prominently in the main section, usually arranged by genre – they won’t be designated by their nationality. They will occupy a more mainstream position, while the films from other areas are situated as more marginal, even if produced in popular genres, for their arthouse appeal.

World cinema remains a relevant category for many film viewers, despite how porous borders have become as globalisation has intensified. Alongside the growth of transnational film studies, we still see the primacy of national cinemas as categories that promote and classify films. But, in these times marked by increased global connectivity, transnational cinema comes to stand as a signifier of a world in which people, capital, ideas and technologies circulate much more freely than they have done previously. Thinking about cinema as a series of transnationally connected industries and as an artform that reflects the experience of individuals and social groups within a transnational system can help us better understand this world and how it operates. This first chapter will frame some of the core issues in the book around the shift in film studies from thinking about the ‘us’ and ‘them’ binaries of world or national cinemas to thinking in terms of the transnational. It will unpack some key discourses that define the ways in which world cinema has come to be considered under globalisation.

Why transnational cinema now?

The term ‘transnational’ has been adopted more and more by film studies recently to discuss films that can’t be explained or analysed only in relation to a single national context. As such, the term has come to be applied to cinemas dating back to the inception of cinema, as co-productions developed, individuals moved around the world to make films, or where films were distributed globally. Silent cinema was a transnational phenomenon. Films didn’t need to be dubbed or subtitled, and intertitles could easily be changed. Filmmakers were already moving around the world to make films: Alfred Hitchcock served his apprenticeship at UFA in Germany before returning to the UK to direct films like The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927). With him he took the expressionist style that had been popular in Germany in the early 1920s. Later, of course, Hitchcock produced films in the US, making him a transnational filmmaker. Some of the movements described under the term ‘transnational cinema’ are often as old as cinema itself, as is ‘transnational’, with its earliest uses dating back to the 1910s and 1920s to describe hyphenate or migrant identities: trans-nationalities.

In Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (1999), Aihwa Ong defines transnationality as a ‘condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space’, something which has been ‘intensified under late capitalism’. Transnationalism she describes as ‘the cultural specificities of global processes, tracing the multiplicity of the uses and conceptions of “culture”’ (p. 4). Ong’s definitions here help us to understand how we might refer to the transnational as a way of talking about the movement of people, capital and culture across borders in an era of globalisation, of ‘human practices and cultural logics’. Transnationality ‘alludes to the transversal, the transactional, the translational, and the transgressive aspects of contemporary behaviour and imagination that are incited, enabled and regulated by the changing logics of states and capitalism’ (p. 4). As conceptual terms, ‘transnationality’ and ‘transnationalism’ (just as we might distinguish between postmodernity and postmodernism) provide a range of means for considering how culture is affected by the changing dynamics of national boundaries, migration, economic globalisation and the flow of cultural material.

The term transnational has been described by Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg as ‘a generic category that comprises different aspects of film production, distribution and consumption which transcend national film cultures’ (2010, p. 22; emphasis added). This is an important argument in that transnational cinema does not replace thinking about national cinemas, but supplements it. National cinemas remain an important and relevant emphasis in film cultures, as our example of the film store evidences, but the ‘trans-’ prefix denotes thinking about how cinema crosses and transcends national boundaries, just as individuals, capital, films and culture do. As Sonia Livingstone has remarked, it ‘has become imperative to examine the transnational flows of media technologies, formats and specific texts, the rise of powerful institutional networks and media conglomerates and the practices of interpretative communities within and across national borders’ (2013, p. 417). Hence the study of transnational cinema grapples with a range of both hegemonic, culturally dominant forms and counter-hegemonic, marginal ones.

In the introduction to their collection Transnational Cinema: A Film Reader (2006), Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden state that:

The global circulation of money, commodities, information, and human beings is giving rise to films whose aesthetic and narrative dynamics, and even the modes of emotional identification they elicit, reflect the impact of advanced capitalism and new media technologies as components of an increasingly interconnected world-system. The transnational comprises both globalization – in cinematic terms, Hollywood’s domination of world film markets – and the counterhegemonic responses of filmmakers from former colonial and Third World countries. (p. 1)

While Hollywood has always had a stronghold on most of the world’s media markets, aside from a few, like India or South Korea, its dominance has often been considered a form of cultural imperialism where its outside influence is considered a threat to the local film culture. Andrew Higson, however, has viewed this as limiting, the national seen only in a binary opposition between ‘them’ and ‘us’:

The movement of films across borders may introduce exotic elements to the ‘indigenous’ culture. One response to this is the anxious concern about the effects of cultural imperialism, a concern that the local culture will be infected, even destroyed by the foreign invader. A contrary response is that the introduction of exotic elements may well have a liberating or democratising effect on the local culture, expanding the cultural repertoire. A third possibility is that the foreign commodity will not be treated as exotic by the local audience, but will be interpreted according to an ‘indigenous’ frame of reference; that is, it will be metaphorically translated into a local idiom. (2006, p. 19)

The ‘foreign’ influence therefore may not be seen simply as an ‘invader’ but subject to localisation. In terms of cultural expression, films can be remade locally, as they routinely have been in Turkey, India and Hong Kong, as discussed in Chapter 7, or appropriated and re-read subject to local customs and subjectivities. As Koichi Iwabuchi has noted in his book Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (2002), Japanese and Taiwanese youngsters are likely to see an American brand like McDonald’s through their own indigenous frame, and not as ‘American’; in this sense transnational commodities can often take on a culturally odourless quality which makes them more likely to be subsumed by a process of localisation (p. 46). Hence they become integrated into a local frame of reference, even though they are transnational products, or even products seen as representing a strong sense of national specificity such as the hamburger (infused with a strong American odour, yet named after a town in Germany).

However, to see transnational flows of culture in these terms can be problematic. Such flows are often uneven and hierarchised. As Iwabuchi argues, Japan can see itself as part of Asia, albeit superior to it, but also subject to strong cultural influence from the US. Likewise, many American films and television programmes are often shot across national boundaries; sometimes these films use international locations to stand in for American ones, such as Toronto with its strong resemblance to several cities in the US. This is frequently a consequence of budgetary necessity, since filmmaking in Canada is often cheaper than in the US, and favourable tax incentives exist to encourage filmmakers to shoot outside the US. Other films, such as the Bourne or Bond films, are shot around the world, something which brings investment to the countries featured, but their content is generally rooted in typically American or western hegemonic concerns about terrorism or cold war politics. However, although these films bring investment into other countries, this is often at the expense of local forms of expression and subjectivity, as the focus of the narrative remains the white male protagonist, with some local characters provided only for supporting purposes. Consequently, these flows tend to return to the top of their respective hierarchies.

In the introduction to the first edition of the Transnational Cinemas journal, Deborah Shaw and Armida De La Garza (2010) articulated 15 different categories or themes relating to the study of cinema’s transnationalism, each of which we will explore at different points throughout this book:

1.Modes of production, distribution and exhibition

2.Co-productions and collaborative networks

3.New technologies and changing patterns of consumption

4.Transnational film theories

5.Migration, journeying and other forms of border-crossing

6.Exilic and diasporic film-making

7.Film and language

8.Questions of authorship and stardom

9.Cross-fertilization and cultural exchange

10.Indigenous cinema and video and the cinemas of ethnic minorities

11.Cultural policy

12.The ethics of transnationalism

13.Historical transnational practices

14.Interrelationships between local, national and the global

15.Transnational and postcolonial politics (2010, p. 4).

The breadth of themes in the list outlined by Shaw and De La Garza demonstrate the complexities in the study of transnational cinemas, where a singular approach, they argue, would fall into ‘an essentialist trap’ in which complexity is elided in favour of ‘flattened’ and ‘over-simplified answers’ (p. 3). There is no single condition of transnationalism for cinema. Shaw later revisited this list in an article entitled ‘Deconstructing and Reconstructing “Transnational Cinema”’ (2013) in which she revises some of the terminol-ogy, but also introduces some new categories (these are italicised):

1.Transnational modes of production, distribution and exhibition

2.Transnational modes of narration

3.Cinema of globalisation

4.Films with multiple locations

5.Exilic and diasporic filmmaking

6.Film and cultural exchange

7.Transnational influences

8.Transnational critical approaches

9.Transnational viewing practices

10.Transregional/transcommunity films

11.Transnational stars

12.Transnational directors

13.The ethics of transnationalism

14.Transnational collaborative networks

15.National films (p. 52).

Perhaps most interestingly, Shaw adds ‘national films’ to this list. This final category emphasises the continuing relevance of national cinema for a transnational frame of interpretation and study, that the national retains its prominence in terms of cultural policy, identity, economics and ideology. The imagined communities of nation-states remain prominent in ideologically constructed discourses around immigration, national identity, religion and regional politics. The UK’s relationship with the European Union has repeatedly engaged with conceptions of nationhood and sovereignty, especially in media reporting about the relationship, its renegotiation or its end, and those discourses continue to have a relationship with cinema that is reflected on the screen.

All of the categories mentioned by Shaw and De La Garza span the range of themes and practices that engage with the flow of individuals (exilic and diasporic filmmaking; transnational stars and directors; questions of authorship and stardom), the circulation of texts and their influences (cultural exchange; transnational influences; modes of production, distribution and exhibition), and texts that engage with the condition of living in a transnationally interconnected world (the cinema of globalisation; stories of migration, journeying and other forms of border-crossing; and the transnational modes of narration that express the condition of living as a transnational subject). These two lists therefore give us a broad set of core concepts through which we can explore the range of expressions, on industrial, individual and political levels, that span the field of transnational film studies.

Challenging the centrist model

World cinema has been a problematic term, one that continues to circulate in film cultures. The national cinemas it describes can be transnational in nature, although that doesn’t necessarily mean that transnational cinema is considered the same thing. Indeed, as Chris Berry has pointed out, for ‘“transnational cinema”… to have any value, it needs to be more than just another way of saying “international cinema” or “world cinema”’ (2010, p. 112), and there needs to be clear difference in what those terms articulate. World cinema is often seen through a lens of Otherness. The term often relates to cinemas not in the English language, and therefore generally subtitled. It has also often been used as a term to refer to a cinema characterised by humanist realism, such as that of Italian Neorealist films following the Second World War, or those from Iran or Senegal. What is often not included in the term ‘world cinema’ is Hollywood, against which all world cinemas are considered to struggle, resist and/or oppose. While Hollywood might be highly transnational, border-crossing in practice and in its influences, it has traditionally been posited as outside, even above, world cinema, and as such has been the way in which value is assigned to world cinemas. This constructs a binary opposition between Hollywood and the rest of the world, a dominant centre against a struggling Othered periphery.

This viewpoint has been challenged. In her book chapter, ‘Towards a Positive Definition of World Cinema,’ Lúcia Nagib problematises the binaristic conception of world cinema as split between the cinema of Hollywood and all other cinemas; while world cinema might seem an ‘all-encompassing, democratic vocation’, its conceptualisation has tended to be ‘restrictive and negative, as “non-Hollywood cinema”’ (2006, p. 30). Consequently, Nagib argues, the dominant form of Hollywood cinema has been conceived as a method of assessing the value of a world cinema that sees Hollywood as a means of ‘viewing world cinema as “alternative” and “different”’ (p. 31). ‘A truly encompassing and democratic approach,’ she concludes, ‘has to get rid of the binary system as a whole’ (p. 33), escaping the them-and-Other approach to the understanding, categorisation and evaluation of world cinemas as a homogenised block. She proposes ‘a method in which Hollywood and the West would cease to be the centre of film history … [so that] once the idea of a single centre is eliminated, nothing needs to be excluded from the world cinema map, not even Hollywood’ (p. 34). This inclusive approac...