Meaning and Interpretation of Music in Cinema

David Neumeyer, with contributions by James Buhler
Indiana University Press

Reviewed by Aakshi Magazine

Meaning and Interpretation of Music in Cinema is a thought provoking book that addresses critical issues that come up when it comes to the relationship between music and cinema. David Neumeyer, Professor of Music at the University of Texas at Austin, expands on his earlier works where he had argued that the sound track as a whole, as opposed to only the music track, should be the focus of study when understanding music in cinema. In this book, clearly a product of years of deep engagement with music, Neumeyer adds a new and crucial argument- that narrative sound film is vococentric.

The idea of vococentric cinema recognises the hierarchy and internal dialectics built into the sound track and argues that the position of the voice is crucial in understanding the composition of the soundt track. This approach, for Neumeyer, feels best to understand film as an art form, without losing out on what music brings to it. Yet it does not focus exclusively on music at the expense of cinema. This is a sentiment reflected in an argument made by Rick Altman which Neumeyer cites in the book, saying “music in film, not music for film”. The book thus forms a part of the literature on music and cinema which bridges the gap between music theory and film studies. It does this by focussing on the voice as a place where the two meet.

The book consists of seven chapters divided into three parts. The first part has two theoretically strong chapters which elaborate on Neumeyer’s arguments. This is followed in part two by a close reading of Casablanca’s sound track, and in part three by an examination of films where Bach’s C Major Prelude is used both diegetically and as an underscore.

Neumeyer is persuasive in the theoretical chapters as he cuts through diverse literature. He admits that his interest is in the first two decades of the classical sound film. Even if the vococentric model might seem specific to this period and form, Neumeyer’s style of writing charts through many of the important debates when it comes to music in cinema and its links to narration. There is a sense of flexibility and open-ness in Neuymer’s style and arguments, for instance, when he conceptualises music “in a very broad sense” and argues that all music used in a film, as well as while film exhibition, is film music. Neumeyer’s reading of and making linkages between different theoretic ideas is admirable. He also makes clear theoretical arguments about, for instance, the hierarchies in the soundtrack, how soundtracks are composed and not just recorded, and the opposition between spectacle and synchronised realism.

In the chapters on Casablanca, Neumeyer, along with James Buhler, examines Casablanca from the perspective of its sound track. In three chapters, this close and extensive reading of the film’s soundtrack looks at the reunion scene, two confrontation scenes between Rick and Ilsa, and what Neumeyer calls the “atypically complex sound track” in the film’s finale. These examples demonstrate how vococentrism adds to our interpretation of the film’s narrative, giving strength to the arguments made in the previous chapters. The best example as Neumeyer visualises it, is when he talks of the reunion scene. The sound track here is analysed to gain an insight into the narrative of the film which one would not have if the soundtrack was not placed under observation. Thus, by analysing the sound track, Neumeyer argues against the interpretation of Casablanca as an example of a film following the conventions of film noir. Whether one agrees with this interpretation of Casablanca or not, it is a good example which demonstrates what one has to gain by using a vococentric approach.

In the third part, the last two chapters of the book look at the history of C Major Prelude and then examine its use in films where it is used in diegetic performance and as underscore. Through its persuasive and well-illustrated style, the book makes a good argument for the importance of vococentrism when understanding music and cinema. In the beginning, Neumeyer writes that this approach leads to results that are truer to film as an art form. This desire reflects in the detailed engagement and arguments of this book.

Labels and the Spaces Between

Artist-in-Residence at Cinepoetics, Freie Universität, Berlin

I arrived in Berlin to work with a new label, as “artist-in-residence”. It is a beautifully vague label that finds many different instantiations in the cross-over between art and organisations. Its core meaning is only that an artist is resident for a period of time in a particular place and makes art. The art may happen in situ or in the months and years afterwards. The art may relate directly to the place and what happens there, or it may be more loosely connected to it and influenced by it. The art project is sometimes pre-determined but more often, as with my post in the Cinepoetics centre at the Freie Universität in Berlin, is left open as a space to be filled. In my work as a professor of applied linguistics, I gained a reputation for rigorous and precise analytic work, all categories carefully defined and labelled. In my work as an artist, I love the looseness, the spaces between, and the reluctance to label. To date, the art coming out of my Cinepoetics residency is sometimes unexpectedly collaborative, intermingling words and images in new ways, and has generated a particular process of abstract painting that took six months to find its (probably temporary) label as “dynamic painting”.

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A project, like Noah. Acrylic on paper, 41 x 60 cm. Lynne Cameron, 2016.

The Space Between (and Beyond)

As an artist I am fascinated by the spaces created on canvas or paper. It’s easiest to see in a still life (the space between objects) or a portrait (the space around a head).

Still Life of Vases on a Table. Etching. Giorgio Morandi, 1931.

Still Life of Vases on a Table. Etching. Giorgio Morandi, 1931.

Child and large bird. Oil on canvas. Emil Nolde, 1912.

Child and large bird. Oil on canvas. Emil Nolde, 1912.

In abstract painting, spaces emerge between strokes and gestures.

Artists talk about these spaces between objects or shapes as ‘negative spaces’. In the physical and social world, we label objects, shapes, and people, mostly ignoring the spaces between. Labelling accompanies categorizing, the sorting of the multiplicity of the world into sets and groups, into ‘this’ and ‘that’, into ‘them’ and ‘us’. Social labels and categories change with time – looking back now from current ideas about intersectionality, it seems odd to remember how difficult it was to convince a group of teachers in the 1980s that we might think of gender as having more than two categories labelled ‘male’ and ‘female’. Back then, it was difficult to conceive of a space between those two labels. Now we find a multiplicity of spaces between and beyond, some of them labelled.

A few years ago, I painted a series of artworks which explored the idea of “the space between” and how that space encircles, outlines, creates a shape that we may label ‘a flower’.

Live near. Acrylic on paper. 25 x 35 cm. Lynne Cameron, 2014.

Live near. Acrylic on paper. 25 x 35 cm. Lynne Cameron, 2014.

Each painting began with a layer of colour that was spread across the paper, mixing and crossing somewhat randomly. A grey layer was painted on top of the colour, with some spaces left and turned into flower-like shapes, with ‘stems’ scratched through the grey layer. More layers of different greys and colour, using both wet and dry paint, produced tonal surfaces. The paintings played with the shapes that might, or might not, be flowers or leaves, that blurred or dripped or spread into neighbouring shapes. As I worked on the first few paintings, they also became about memory and dialogue, relating to my father’s dementia and the experience of losing him into the grey of his illness, about sitting with him, talking and reaching into our shared histories to find some piece of memory that might still be vivid for him. Words, and the labels that organized our shared world were gradually losing their power.

Labelling the Negative Space

Before coming to Berlin, I spent four years researching and theorizing how people do empathy in situations of violence and conflict.  A breakthrough moment occurred in the research when I took the negative space of empathy and gave it the label “dyspathy”. A label for the forces that stop people empathizing with others helped me to think in new ways and ask new questions. I could describe dyspathy, showing from my data how it takes three key forms: mental barriers that we place between ourselves and others; the tendency we have of lumping other people into groups (and often negatively labelling them); and the various ways we use to distance ourselves from others. The labelling of dyspathy enabled further thinking about how it might be dissolved and replaced with empathy.

Disrupting the Space Between

My current artwork centres around a theme I have labelled, “Undoing the Arrangement”. It began with more flowers and more disruption of labels. Travelling in New Zealand, I found a book published in the 1990s by “Woman and Home” (sic) which offered female readers ways to make “practical and easy flower arrangements”. The illustrations showed gorgeous, beautifully coloured flowers organised into containers, arranged into formal shapes, photographed in a single moment of glory. I was struck by the unacknowledged work for women that was required in the growing, gathering and arranging of the flowers. I soon realized that this was working for me as metonymically and metaphorically reflecting the broader assumptions and expectations conventionalized into  women’s social and familial roles. I ripped out the photographs, cut the flowers out of their tight arrangements, let them loose on the pages of my sketchbook, and let them lead into paintings.

A bold collection of irises and anemones will never fail to please. Collage, monoprinting, acrylic paint on canvas, 40 x 40 cm. Lynne Cameron, 2015.

A bold collection of irises and anemones will never fail to please. Collage, monoprinting, acrylic paint on canvas, 40 x 40 cm. Lynne Cameron, 2015.

Undoing the Arrangement uses space on the canvas to explore social space, the restrictions placed by conventional arrangements and what can happen if these are released and labels are loosened.

The Positive Power of a Label

I had thought that the label “Undoing the Arrangement” applied to the series of six or eight small paintings I produced before leaving the UK for Berlin. However, during my residency, as I’ve been developing my dynamic painting process, I have come to understand that it usefully points to the concerns of my work more broadly.

Now that I have this label, I notice and attend to the world in terms of arrangements, often relating to gender roles, that need questioning, disrupting, and undoing. I find these acted out or implied in the films and news reports that we watch together or analyse in Cinepoetics, and sometimes in our own modes of interaction in workshops and colloquia. The label of “Undoing the Arrangement” helps extend my work as an artist. The label of “artist-in-residence” enables me to use my art to draw attention to such arrangements, and my studio becomes a space between the academic and the visual image in which to make the work.

The temperature of commitment. Acrylic on paper. 41 x 60cm. Lynne Cameron, 2016.

The temperature of commitment. Acrylic on paper. 41 x 60cm. Lynne Cameron, 2016.

To see my paintings and read my blog about the Berlin artist residency, go to: http://lynnecameron.com

To read more about empathy and dyspathy, go to: http://empathyblog.wordpress.com


Notes on Contributor

Lynne Cameron is currently Professor Emerita at the Open University, UK, and artist-in-residence at Cinepoetics, the Center for Advanced Film Studies at Freie Universität, Berlin. She was founding Chair of the international association Researching and Applying Metaphor (RAAM) and founding co-editor of the journal Metaphor in the Social World. As an applied linguist, she has worked for many years on metaphor in spoken discourse, most recently applying this to empathy and post-conflict reconciliation.

Latin American Cinema

Stephen M. Hart
Reaktion Books, 2015

Reviewed by Isabel Seguí

In Professor Stephen M. Hart‘s words: “This book seeks to create its own knight’s move by providing a new analysis of Latin American film as seen through the looking glass of the major step-changes in film technology.” If the challenge of writing a history of Latin American cinema from 1895 to 2014 in less than 200 pages is overwhelming, the defiance of doing it avoiding what the author calls the sociological turn—“namely, tying the meaning of the films too closely to the history of human society”—is enormous.

Instead of contextualizing 120 years of filmmaking (in a very big and very diverse subcontinent) in its historical, political, and societal changes, the author therefore prefers “to contextualize these films within the history of the camera-eye”. However, reading in the list of acknowledgements names of filmmakers very much in dialogue with the historical, political, and societal changes of their respective countries such as Beatriz Palacios, Jorge Sanjinés, Julio García Espinosa, Luis Ospina or Fernando Birri, I wonder what these filmmakers would think about this endeavour of an exclusively technological approach to Latin American filmmaking. I also wonder whether something akin to this is even possible to do, taking into account that most Latin American intellectuals, including filmmakers, are as inextricably tied to their societies as their work is.

In this sense, the book struggles to achieve its main goal, especially in the second chapter, which looks at the New Latin American Cinema. In spite of its attempt to frame the analysis within a Deleuzian reading, it is unable to describe comprehensively this cinematic movement avoiding historical and political contextualization. How can one talk about the stunning theoretical developments of the time (Third Cinema by Solanas and Getino, Imperfect Cinema by García Espinosa, The Aesthetics of Hunger by Rocha, or the Cinema with the People by Sanjinés) without contextualizing them in a continental (or even tricontinental) decolonial struggle? How can one talk about the Cuban cinema or the influence of Italian neo-realism in Cuba without framing it in the process of the revolution?

Nevertheless, the book contributes some very beautifully executed analyses, which sometimes provide interesting insights about the importance of technological changes. For example, when addressing Mikhail Kalatozov’s film, Soy Cuba (1964), it shows how the use of Russian film technology (infrared photography, wide-angle convex lens) allowed a linguistic step forward. Moreover, the cameras and crane left in Cuba by the Russian director continued to be used by local filmmakers, providing wider expressive possibilities to them. However, globally, the step-changes in film technology do not seem strong enough, or important enough, to articulate the overarching narrative of the book. The author relies instead on a well-structured succession of analysis of key films. The book, consequently, is able to do its best in the tiny space the author has to tell a coherent story of Latin American Cinema, but does not entirely fulfil its initial expectations.

Affective Approaches in Academia: Reflections on Sharing and Participating in the University


I. The Proposition

When my colleague suggested that we include an exercise asking participants to bring homemade food to share in a collective lunch as part of our workshop “Working with Affect, Feelings, and Emotions in Film and Humanities Research”, I balked.[1] “That will never work,” I panicked, “people are too busy doing important things”. Not only did it challenge the ideas I had of what a conference or workshop should be, but it seemed to go against the individualistic and controlling spirit I often find in myself and the university.

My dubiousness, while highlighting my personal neurosis, also pointed to the deeper problem of how institutional structures seem to encourage rather than heal this mentality. I have been fortunate to work with a group of interesting, passionate, and giving individuals in my program, yet I cannot help but feel the continual pressure to stand out as an individual. In the end I must compete with my colleagues for a limited amount of funding and jobs where committees plough through stacks of increasingly similar applications looking for that one thing that separates this person from the pack. Apart from an academic drain, this is an emotional drain as well, making it little wonder that emotions and feelings are so casually swept to the side in research as those involved are time and again asked to keep their own emotions in check in order to get the job done. 

Given this atmosphere, that has only grown more apparent to me as I become deeper embedded in academic realities that obscure my idealistic fantasies, the idea of something so intimate as a communal homemade meal in a university setting made me not only hesitant, but scared. Yet this fear, which I felt was completely rational in a university context, went against everything that the day was supposed to represent. As my co-organizer Isabel Seguí kept reminding me, and so eloquently put it in her introductory remarks to the day, we were organizing this precisely to challenge “the patriarchal and materialistic society and institutions that did not give us the tools to acknowledge the emotions and affect in our research, instead telling us to reject them as subjective and unscientific and, therefore, undesirable” and “question this false ‘rationalism’ that dominates the academy”. [2] Hence any attempt to open up this subject would take us into murky and disconcerting territories, but in order to bring this approach out of the shadows we had to be willing to travel into the shadows ourselves. In the end we agreed that despite our, and mainly my, fears, this activity had to be included in the day. Whether it succeeded or not, it would be a lesson, teaching us about how we prioritize our time, community, and emotions and how we integrate them into our academic life.

II.The Reckoning

In an environment in which it seems that nothing is ever completed, the simple pleasure of finishing a task becomes alarmingly elusive. We learn that even turning something in to a supervisor, publisher, etc. is the work just entering another phase of evolution as it presents itself to scrutiny and criticism that will reveal how sorely unfinished it is. The opportunity, then, to share something that has been crafted and completed and would be appreciated as such thus is transformed into an experience of emotional satisfaction.

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When it came time for the lunch break there was an excited bustle as tupperwares and dishes began to appear out of the bags usually burdened with laptops, library books, and crumpled papers full of half-baked ideas. Suddenly we were no longer in a conference room but in a home. The domineering faces of our academic forefathers swathed in dark robes of authority stoically stared down at us from their portraits as we discussed serious issues and excitedly awaited the pleasure of a meal that had been lovingly prepared and that would be shared amongst not colleagues, but friends.

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The colours, smells, and diversity became a point of wonder as we all gazed with animated curiosity and anticipation at a feast of pad thai, curries, pathora, tortilla, sushi, pizza, and cakes that the participants had loving prepared and now proudly shared with us. With each dish came a story of the culture, history, and experience that accompanied the food. This one was prepared by somebody’s whole family, that one was a special dessert for holidays, while the cake had been a baking experiment that had thankfully turned out right. There were also little displays of kindness and emotion; the eggs were put to the side of the pad thai in consideration of one participant’s distaste for them, several dishes were made vegan to meet the dietary restrictions of another. Far from a disaster, the whole experience had turned into exactly what we had envisioned: an emotional engagement between people who had taken the time to share something with another and who were rewarded with the appreciation and communal feeling of friendship given in return.

III. Reflection

It really could have gone either way. And even if this experiment had failed, if only the organizers had brought food and nobody else participated, I still would have written this reflection piece. In the end the activity was about more than whether or not it functioned in this one setting, but was a reflection on the values of this environment that consumes so much of my life. Is it just a narcissistic vortex of self promotion and backstabbing that, apart from the grim job prospects for young academics, makes me question more and more whether I want to devote my time and energy to being, or at least trying to be, part of this institution? Or is it a place in which there is a community value and in which collegial interactions and personal feelings and emotions can be acknowledged and encouraged?

As with most things in life, I find it somewhere in-between. However in this time of great university upheaval and changes of institutional structure, academic freedom, and the university community, it is these small reflections that allow us to question how we keep some of the values from being consumed by a burgeoning bureaucracy. For me, more than the conversations had and debates evoked in this workshop, what was important was that for one day, even one moment, we created a place in which we could allow some feeling to enter, could share something together, and in which our human position was acknowledged and embraced.


Notes on Contributor

Amber Shields is a PhD candidate in the Department of Film Studies, University of St Andrews. Her research project is entitled “Inbetween Worlds: A Fantastic Approach to Trauma” and explores fantasy as a mode of cultural trauma representation. Her main areas of interest are trauma, fantasy, cultural memories, collective identities, and storytelling. She holds a BA in Latin American Studies from Carleton College and an MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures from the University of Cambridge.

 


[1] The idea of doing a participative activity with food intrigued us on several grounds. On one hand, we saw it aligning with Charles Wright Mills’ idea of “intellectual craftsmanship” and its emphasis that academic research is also a craft and that we should be loving artisans if we want to reach results that bring something good to us and to our society (See The Sociological Imagination). It is also a practice that has precedence in community organization where sharing food and food preparation duties is a significant aspect of bringing groups together.  Further for those doing research that involves working with others, food and the sharing of food often becomes an aspect of these research projects.

[2] Isabel Seguí, “Introductory Remarks,” Presentation at the University of St Andrews, February 2016.


Bibliography

Wright Mills, Charles. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959.

Labelling a Shot

A few years ago, I was struck by a certain type of shot. A character in the frame turns his or her head to look at something and this head movement initiates a camera movement, usually a pan of one sort or another.  Sometimes it takes the form of a 360-degree pan that completes its arc by coming to rest again on the character’s face (6ixtynin9 [Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, 1999]).  Other times it is a whip-pan (Bend of the River [Anthony Mann, 1952]) or a pan combined with a tracking shot (Vertigo [Alfred Hitchcock, 1958]).  In each instance, though, the camera movement seems to be a response to a single character turning their head to redirect their gaze, and the camera moves to take in the object of the character’s attention.  Teaching courses on Latin American and Asian cinema, I noticed that this particular shot was not unique to US cinema and began compiling examples in a folder.  My provisional name for this kind of shot was the “cast gaze”.  I liked the symmetry, as well as the pun on cast; further, the camera seemed to move at times like a fishing line that has been cast, as if the character had a rod somehow attached to their head.  As a placeholder, this name worked, but it failed to address what made these shots singularly interesting– that they are both and neither objective and subjective simultaneously.

Failing to devise a more appropriate name, it occurred to me that the “Labelling” issue of Frames would be a good opportunity to explore this shot.  After collecting six examples from US, Thai, South Korean, Hong Kong and Argentine cinema (along with three further examples suggested to me), I made them accessible to the staff and students of the University of St Andrews Department of Film Studies.  I asked for volunteers to choose one of the clips, come up with a name for the shot, and justify that name in 250 or fewer words.  My thinking was that given the diversity of academic backgrounds and “home” cinemas among the possible contributors, a variety of names would be given to the shot that would reveal the contributor’s methodological and historical approaches to Film Studies.  As you will see from the entries below, my hunch proved correct.


The Free Indirect Shot
Dr Dennis Hanlon, Lecturer at University of St Andrews


In free indirect discourse in literature, while indirectly reporting a character’s speech, the language of the narrator assumes the language of a character. In “The Cinema of Poetry” (1965), Pier Paolo Pasolini argued that free indirect discourse was nearly impossible in the cinema.  In any given piece of literature, as long as there were class and cultural differences between the typical language of the narrator and that of the characters, free indirect speech was marked linguistically.  In cinema, however, there are no class or cultural distinctions in looking (a point a film theorist like Jorge Sanjinés would take issue with).  For Pasolini, free indirect discourse only existed in cinema made by middle class filmmakers about middle class subjects, i.e. the art cinema of the time, and it appears only when a character’s neurosis is made visible.  An example he gives is Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964), for instance, when Giuliana (Monica Vittti) and Zeller (Richard Harris) leave an empty apartment and encounter a fruit stand on which the fruit is all a uniform grey.

To the extent that the camera narrates to us through what it shows and how it shows it, this type of shot functions somewhat like free indirect discourse. If, as Pasolini notes, the POV shot is the cinematic equivalent of direct discourse, i.e. characters’ speech in inverted commas, this type of shot is somewhere in between.  The camera is commanded by the head movement of the character to assume his or her looking relations without recourse to POV.


The Relay Camera Movement
Chris Fujiwara, First-year PhD student

During a party at the Hadley mansion in Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956), Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack) receives from his doctor (Edward Platt) the news that he is impotent. Kyle turns to see his wife (Lauren Bacall) and his best friend (Rock Hudson) dancing together. In a kind of delegation or relay, Kyle’s movement is communicated to the camera, which pans and tracks to reframe the dancing couple.

The economy of Stack’s performance is admirable. By the same subtle shift in the distribution of body weight that conveys his intense physical reaction to what he has learned, he allows the doctor, hitherto immobilized by Kyle’s insistent gaze, to escape from the shot. Shifting his weight again at the end of his body’s turn, Stack hides his face from the camera, permitting the camera to move towards the dance.

In an example of what Deleuze, in his discussion of free indirect discourse in The Movement-Image, calls an “assemblage of enunciation”,[i] Sirk shows the dancers from a point of view that partly overlaps with but is not the same as Kyle’s. For Kyle, vision has suddenly become a trap (just as he earlier trapped the doctor with his gaze), but Sirk frees and elevates the viewer’s vision. In the image of the wife and the friend dancing, we see both the emblem of an objective truth (that the two people, linked by friendship, are somehow a couple) and the fantasy that will henceforth derange the husband (that his friend is doing what he himself can’t – having sex with his wife). The same camera movement that unites these two visions also differentiates them.


The Subjective Panorama Shot
Connor McMorran, Second-year PhD Student

In this sequence from Kim Seong-Su’s Beat (Biteu, 1997), Romi (Go So-Yeong) enters into her new apartment and the camera moves from her face into a 360-degree pan of the room in front of her. As our understanding of the environment is impacted by the facial expression or bodily gestures of the character, in my efforts to name this shot I finally arrived at the idea of the “subjective panorama. Through witnessing the character reacting to the environment, the audience gains a particular idea of how to process or interpret the visual information that follows once the camera moves away from the character and onto the source behind the character’s reaction or expression. As such, while the shot continues the audience is led into a particular reading of the landscape, figuring the character’s opinion into their understanding of the scene.

Therefore, this shot stands distinct from both the standard panorama, which creates its meaning through the shots appearing both before and after it, and the point-of-view shot, which gives full insight into how a particular character perceives something. Instead, this shot offers only an idea of how the character feels, which allows for a more open reading of the scene, albeit one undoubtedly influenced by the initial reaction of the character.


The Alienation Shot
Jinuo Diao, First-year PhD student

Generally, when the camera tracks in and comes closer to the characters, the audience can relate to the emotion of the characters more easily and a closer relationship between characters and audience can be built. However, in Fallen Angels (Wong Kar-wai, 1995), in lieu of feeling closer, audiences actually feel alienated from the characters when the camera comes closer.  This is because many of these track-in shots have been made using a wide-angle lens in order to artificially extend the physically short distance. This visually deformed distance can establish a feeling of isolation.  This technique has been used commonly in Wong Kar-wai’s works and could be termed the “alienation shot”, in which the feeling of being alienated from other people is created on purpose. The alienation can be created between the character and their surroundings, from one character to the other, as well as between the character and audience.

In this clip with Wong Chi-Ming (Leon Lai) and a ‘wild prostitute’ (Karen Mok), two shots have been taken using the moving wide-angle lens. First, in a deep focus, the camera follows the prostitute and pans to Wong, and then the circular panning shot follows Wong’s eyesight to observe the surroundings.

Subsequently, the camera tracks-in from a medium shot to a medium close-up, eventually focusing on the faces of Wong and Mok. The distance has been created between characters, even as they sit together and eat the same food. The audience can feel that despite only being a short distance away, they are poles apart.


The Radical Subjectivity Shot
Mina Radovic, Second-year undergraduate

Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels (1995) displays a piercing intuitiveness in blending perspective and perception and moment and matter through uninhibited camerawork.  It revels in the monolithic subjectivity of the individual, expressing a loneliness and the desire for human connection. I apply monolithic here as the shot focalizes with its female character in a meta-spatial sense, amplifying her physical appearance, and the ratio between body and set, moment of action and reception (by the audience). The effect is consequently ideological and ontological. The panoramic take and discontinuous editing breaks with flow and enables a fragmented vision to take shape. Anchored by jagged cuts, magnified close-ups and alignment of vision with the characters, the shot highlights its own subjectivity, radically negating the objective ideological nature of the camera and thereby re-imagining the spatio-temporal dynamics among characters, camera and spectator. This extends the diegesis of the film to recognition of the audience and the cinematic apparatus, consciously subverting the latter’s normative absence. The camera reduces its characters to objects (of voyeurism), but in this case the technical break from convention liberates them in the meta-cinematic and ontological sense, piercing into the question of being – both that of characters and spectators – and their lack of relationship to one other and the Real. The radical subjectivity of this take thus results from the conflict between ideology (convention) and ontology (liberation), as well as the “objectivity” of the apparatus and the subjectivity of its human counterparts, both on- and off-screen.


The Indirect POV-Shot
Dr Fredrik Gustafsson, PhD in Film Studies from The University of St Andrews (2013), Lecturer at Örebro University

A train station. A man is sitting on a bench reading a newspaper when a couple enters the room in the far background. The man looks up at them, and as they walk to the luggage storage he turns his head, following them with his eyes. The camera is placed behind him and turns with him so that the couple, the man’s head, and the camera all move together in one smooth joint action. It’s a kind of POV-shot, but not in the traditional sense as we are behind the person whose POV it is, yet it does still qualify, which is why I’d like to call it an “indirect POV-shot”. These can take slightly different forms. The example above, from The Undercover Man (Joseph H. Lewis 1949), is one kind. A different kind is when a shot begins as what appears to be an ordinary POV, but after a while the person whose POV it is supposed to be appears in the shot. One prominent example is in the beginning of The Man from Laramie (Anthony Mann, 1955), with James Stewart, and another is in The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975), in a shot with Jack Nicholson in the desert. The combination of the movement and the estranged POV make such scenes or shots in some way unsettling and they usually suggest either emotional upheaval or danger. Such shots also call attention to themselves, so it is no surprise that such a supreme visual stylist as Joseph H. Lewis uses them. The director’s POV is also implicated, also indirectly.


The Circuit Pan Shot
Shorna Pal, Second-year PhD student

In The Man From Laramie (Anthony Mann, 1955), Will Lockhart (James Stewart) comes across evidence of an Apache attack on a cavalry unit. A pan initiated by Lockhart’s head movement becomes an animated reflection of his mind and extension of his gaze.

The Pan at the outset embodies Lockhart’s persona and lives through him as an entity (hence the capital letter). It begins relatively loyal to the character’s gaze and disposition towards what he beholds. As it continues, however, the Pan is no longer subordinate to Lockhart’s body, but seamlessly floats out along its own orbit, eventually sneaking up behind him, crossing the line and coming to a stop just parallel to his left, gazing at a one quarter angle of Lockhart’s face, whose own gaze is no longer in sync with the Pan.  The overall effect is accentuated through the Cinemascope lens, which generates a tidal sense of discovery in the Pan’s wake.

In being drawn as spectator into the filmic space as a searcher, it is with surprise and reluctance that we face the Pan’s abrupt termination and find that we are no longer aligned with Lockhart’s gaze, but rather are occupying an unknown gaze that has stolen up on him. There is an interesting interplay of the character and the Pan, much as a person’s shadow may step out or stalk, returning to hover not far from the person it belongs to, always closing the circuit, which leads me to my choice of name for this type of shot.


The Point-of-Feeling Shot
Dr Lucy Donaldson, Lecturer at University of St Andrews

The moment in Vertigo when Scottie (James Stewart) first encounters Madeleine (Kim Novak), offers a striking example of what I want to term the “point-of-feeling shot”. While this isn’t exactly a point-of-view shot, it remains linked to Scottie’s subjectivity, inviting us to understand and share in his experience of falling for Madeleine.[ii] This is achieved through the continuation of the camera movement, and, perhaps more importantly, the particular qualities of this movement.

This evokes the point-of-view shot, so that even as the camera moves across the space, the connection between Scottie and what we see remains. While a cut here would have separated us from Scottie, thus detaching us from an experience of his space, the continuation of the shot maintains and expands upon our connection with him and his response to what he sees. The slow, smooth motion of the camera evokes the feelings that accompany his look, his sensory impression of the space and this person. The gliding quality of its motion further intimates the sensuality of these dynamics. In this way, the shot goes further than a typical point-of-view shot, describing, and perhaps explicating, Scottie’s absorption in Madeleine’s enigmatic qualities and immediate attraction to her.

This movement enacts a balance of simultaneous separation and continuation that could work in a number of ways. The attention drawn to camera movement in reference to a character’s gaze allowed by moments like this indicates the manner in which camera movement itself can describe and express feeling.

 

Notes on Contributor

Dr Dennis Hanlon is a lecturer in Films Studies at The University of St Andrews, Scotland. His main research areas are: political cinemas (both documentary and fiction) of the 1960s-70s and the transnational articulations among them; Indian cinemas, with a particular focus on their relationship with Latin American cinema; the transnational movement of genres throughout East and South Asia; and World Systems Theory as a way of exploring the relationship between economic crises and the gangster genre. He currently supervises six PhD students writing dissertations on Indian, South Korean and Andean cinema.


[i] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1986), 73.

[ii]My understanding of this moment is indebted to the process of teaching it for many years in a row – an experience which highlighted the consistency of its sensory appeal – and to the seminar notes given to me by Douglas Pye which framed the camera movement as “not S’s literal pov, but …?”.

From the Crisis of Cinema to the Cinema of Crisis: A “Weird” Label for Contemporary Greek Cinema

On Friday 23 April, 2010, the television screens of every household in Greece turned to the live transmission of the official announcement of Prime Minister Yorgos Papandreou as he announced the full extent of the government-debt crisis in actual figures and proclaimed the initiation of an EU “support mechanism”. This consisted of the signing of a memorandum and the implementation of bailout packages, structural reforms and austerity measures. The severity of this speech was ironically counterbalanced by the serenity of the natural background of the picture – the coast of a  remote Greek island, which could have emerged from a whimsical storyboard drawn by a professional production designer. Paraphrasing the well-known song of Gil Scott-Heron (“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, 1971), the evolution of the crisis would not be just televised: From that moment in time it was something  divertingly cinematic in its groundings.

Former Greek Prime Minister Yorgos Papandreou announces the signing of the Memorandum

On the very same day, Dogtooth, the awarded Greek film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos that won the Un Certain regard prize at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film earlier that year, was officially released into the European distribution circuit with its premiere in London.[1] The story of a dysfunctional family, a micro-society confined within the borders of a cryptic language and  sterile twisted environment, could not escape its ubiquitous reading as a parable for the political and economic cul-de-sac of the Greek state of affairs. In Lydia Papadimitriou’s words:

Despite the lack of direct causality between the Greek financial crisis and the production and acclaim of Dogtooth, there is no doubt that the former […] turned ‘Greece’ into a keyword that made people who would not otherwise have taken notice of Greek cinema, do so. [2]

The popularization of the term “Greek crisis” in international media discourse coincided with the wide diffusion of a cultural product that in the previous years was renowned for its introversion. Over the course of the last six years, contemporary art-house Greek films have managed to accumulate dozens of awards and distinctions in film festivals. Despite the times of radical recession,[3] Greek film production expanded its distribution network in unexplored territories and ensured significant revenues. In addition to the above, even independent institutions for the research and promotion of Greek film cultures were launched. [4] Yet despite this struggle for visibility, the most prominent feature of Greek films when presented abroad was the label of the cinema of “crisis”, which was attached to every exportable cultural product in the field. In this six-year-period, contemporary Greek cinema was alternatively labelled as the “weird wave”, [5] arguably because it showcased a great number of on-screen characters who are social misfits that move awkwardly in dysfunctional environments.[6] However, as the attribute of “weird” sounds more fitting to human behaviour than to an emerging film genre, the linkage between the “weird”, the crisis, and the aesthetic and cultural specificity of a (trans)national cinema, facilely reads as beneficial for the network of production, creation, presentation, distribution, consumption and perception of contemporary Greek film.

Drawing on this observation, this article aims at revealing the problematics of associating the aesthetic expressions of a given sample of recent film production in Greece with an overarching concept that defines the social, economic and political conditions in the country. Moreover, it aspires to prove that this association obfuscates the content of this sample and homogenizes a body of films that stand out for their diversity. Official critique has been indulgent to this matter: film critics often defend the argument that “in itself the need for the creation of a label indicative of the quality and of the outward outlook and appeal of the recent national film production can only be positive”. [7] Greek film scholars often embrace the conviction that these films are the local response to capitalism as they “enable us to understand the crisis more clearly by highlighting the disappointments and disenfranchisements of the neo-liberal era.” [8] However, their analyses  all too often revolve around an “us-versus-them model” of the contested Other and recycle recursive dichotomies (mainstream and art-house, the European and the Greek national art-house, the Greek mainstream and the Greek art-house, the South of Europe and the North of Europe,[9] centre and periphery). Under these circumstances, how plausible is the breaking of this label? How important is it to reveal the West’s “uncritical embracing and recycling in both the foreign and domestic press of a label that exoticises Greek cinema as a an-Other national cinema”. [10] How difficult is it for Greek cinema to become what Maria Chalkou defines as “Cinema of Emancipation”, free “from deep-rooted conventions in the domestic film culture and from international stereotypes of Greek film”? [11]

This is not the first time that a “wave” has burst out in Greek Cinema in the shape of an epiphany. Between 1950 and 1970, during the age of growth of the Greek economy, Greek film production ascended and reached what is now remembered as a “golden age”. Organized studios flourished; popular genre films – comedies, musicals and melodramas – were produced in large numbers; a local star system rose; the perception of the country, as depicted in these films, was one of an emerging modern society, prosperous and steady, economically growing yet grounded by middle class morals. Not surprisingly, the first new wave of “New Greek Cinema”, widely known as NEK,[12] was more or less synchronized to other new waves in world cinema (Nouvelle Vague in France, Free Cinema in Great Britain, Cinema Novo in Brazil etc.) emerged as another aspect of European modernization – but maintained a couleur locale. Younger filmmakers, following the model of auteurism, dealt with politically sensitive subject matters and neglected any possible commercial potential of the medium. The list of filmmakers and their groundbreaking work is long and full of landmarks: Pantelis Voulgaris shot his sophomore film Happy Day (1976), based on a novel by Greek writer Andreas Franghias, with a tiny crew on an island that served as an exile place for the leftists after the Civil War; To Vary Peponi (1977) by Pavlos Tassios comments on the desolation of Greek countryside in the age of modernization in the ‘60s and the hardships of the lower working class in the urban environment that lead to the formulation of syndicates; Nikos Koundouros, who was an active member of the left-wing resistance movement EAM-ELAS during the war, shot a series of allegorical films (Mikres Afrodites/Young Aphrodites [1963], Vortex: The Face of Medusa [1967], 1922 [1978], Brothel [1984]) and documentaries To Tragoudi tis Fotias/Song of Fire (1975)], aiming at presenting a non-linear timeline of Greek history; and, of course, Theodoros Angelopoulos was the cornerstone of the wave of the “New Greek Cinema”, no matter if his fame exceeded the limits of his country of origin. The dominant aesthetic influence to this new wave came from the field of literature, the “Generation of the 30s”: the group of writers envisioning the ideal of a transgression of Hellenism through the centuries and adapting Greek symbols, themes and motifs to avant-garde techniques of symbolism. Thus, modernization in the first new wave had to be achieved through nationalization and a certain use of Greek language was crucial to that direction.

In several Greek films of the late 20th century, scripts are either based on novels or bear the signature of Greek writers – filled with extensive pieces of prose or extracts of monumental works of Greek literature woven into the narrative in the form of long-period sentences, blends of lyrical style and allegories. Departing from this dark, almost cryptic language, the heroes of the “Greek Weird Wave” appear self-conscious of the performative aspect of language and its functionality. The appearance of a new, hybrid spoken language is found in the dialogue script, consisting of word plays, metaphorical schemes, elliptical sentences, loanwords and made-up words. Further the concept of role-playing is central for narrative and character development.

Once again, examples from recent Greek productions are numerous and illuminating. For instance, the main character of Athina Tsangari’s film Attenberg (2010) is a 23-year-old woman who lives in a small town built on the fringe of an aluminum plant. Born to a French mother, she speaks broken Greek andhen she is alone, she murmurs lyrics from songs by French pop artists and by her favorite post-punk band, Suicide. Whenever she has to take care of her terminally ill father, she repeatedly plays with him their favorite word game, exchanging words that sound the same in Greek (eg. lima-kyma-timavima, and so on). In a central scene of the film, these games evolve into an imitation game, as the random sounds turn into funny shrieks, and the two characters start pretending they are monkeys – just like the ones they enjoy watching in the documentaries of their favorite filmmaker David Attenborough. Evenly spread over the film’s narrative, the scenes where the protagonist experiments with words and her voice inflection become milestones in her coming-of-age process.

Playing games with bodies and language in Attenberg (2010)

Respectively, in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Alps (2011) the title refers to a group that offers families who have lost loved ones an unorthodox service: they impersonate the deceased. The names of the group’s members remain unknown to us as they use monikers instead. The group is named “Alps” for two important reasons. First, it doesn’t indicate the group’s action, and second, the mountains of the Alps can never be substituted as “any substitute would be smaller and less imposing.” Thus in this context language is used as a means to conceal action and obscure the characters’ identity. Furthermore, in Hora Proelefsis/Homeland (Syllas Tzoumerkas, 2010), the scene of a primary school teacher repeating verses of the Greek national anthem in front of her students in the mode of a refrain functions as a leitmotif bringing together different scenes from the life of a large dysfunctional family. In this case, this absurd spoken word becomes a reminder (perhaps an educational tool) of someone’s origin and social role.

The transition from the first new wave in Greek cinema to the latest one, as a shift between labels according to a rigid classification system, can reflect the transition from one conception of cultural identity to another – what Stuart Hall describes as the passage from the sociological subject to the postmodern subject.[13] According to Hall, the notion of the sociological subject reflects the growing complexity of the modern world and the awareness that this inner core of the subject is not autonomous and self-sufficient, but is formed in relation to “significant Others” who mediate to the subject the values, meanings, and symbols – the culture – of the worlds he/she inhabited. The post-modern subject, instead, is conceptualized as having no fixed, essential, or permanent identity. Identity becomes a movable feast – formed and transformed continuously in relation to the ways we are represented or addressed in the cultural systems which surround us, reluctant to narrow down to a ready-made taxonomy. In the last five years, Greek society has been destined to negotiate the thin boundaries between the “inside” and the “outside”, between personal and public worlds, while the attribution of labels as an internalised “external” necessity homogenized contradictory elements that changed the mode in which Greeks perceive identifications and representations of themselves.

Labelling Greek cinema as a cinema of crisis presents crisis as an epiphany – both as a sign of rupture between time and present (hence a natural border), and as a surface (as the etymology of the word implies) that separates or mirrors, serving as a tabula rasa where everyone can write his/her own story, or as a metaphor for superficiality as opposed to profoundness. Breaking the label of “weird”, strongly associated to “crisis” in cinema and society is the ultimate act of emancipation for audiences that comprise of active citizens neglecting the idea of governance through classification, especially when it is superimposed in the cinema world. If, in the social reality of the gradually receding civil liberties, crisis is used as a flattening term to diminish the right to differ and to extinguish alternation in the artistic realm, the rendering of aesthetic values to the semantics of crisis weirdly calls for a radical reconceptualization of an-Other way to watch beyond the mirroring image.


Notes on Contributor

Geli Mademli is a Ph.D. candidate at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, working in the intersection of media studies, archival studies and film museology. She studied Journalism and Mass Media (BA), Film Theory (MA) and Cultural Studies (MA). For the last few years, she has been working for the Thessaloniki Int’l Film Festival as a program assistant, catalogue coordinator and editor of its annual publications, and she is as a freelance journalist, specializing in film and media. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Greek Film Studies FilmIcon.

 


[1]    “Dogtooth: Interview with Yorgos Lanthimos,” Electric Sheep, April 5, 2010. Accessed January 31, 2016.

[2]    Lydia Papadimitriou, “Locating Contemporary Greek Film Cultures: Past, Present, Future and the Crisis,” FILMICON: Journal of Greek Film Studies, Number 2, September 2014, 2.

[3]    Brady Link, “Greek Cinema: The Inconspicuous Hope for Recovery,” Euroviews, April 22, 2015. Accessed January 31, 2016.

[4]    See Contemporary Greek Film Cultures. Accessed January 31, 2016. Hellenic Filmbox Berlin. Accessed January 31, 2016.

[5]    Steve Rose, “Attenberg, Dogtooth and the Weird Wave of Greek Cinema,” The Guardian, August 27, 2011. Accessed January 31, 2016.

[6]  Rose highlights these characters in film like Attenberg (Athina Tsangari, 2010), L (Babis Makridis,2011), Boy Eating the Bird’s Food (Ektoras Lygizos, 2012), and Knifer (Yannis Economidis, 2010).

[7]    Kostis Theodossopoulos, “Elliniko Cinema 2013: I Anaskopisi,” Cinema, Number 29, December 2013, 72.

[8]    Alex Lykidis, “Crisis of Sovereignty in Recent Greek Cinema,” Journal of Greek Media & Culture, Number 1, 2015, 10.

[9]    Boyd van Hoeij points out that “[t]hough much of southern Europe especially is going through a deep economical crisis and governments are severely pruning their culture budgets, the outbursts of creativity, from places such as Spain, Portugal and, especially, Greece, are not only noteworthy but arguably even a result of the crisis.” Boyd van Hoeij, “The Greek New Wave,” E-Dossier, Number 47, May-June 2013, 106.

[10]  Olga Kourelou, Mariana Liz and Belén Vidal, “Crisis and Creativity: The New Cinemas of Portugal, Greece and Spain,” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, Number 12, 141.

[11]  Maria Chalkou, “A New Cinema of ‘Emancipation’: Tendencies of Independence in Greek Cinema of the 2000s,” Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, 3:2, 259.

[12]  For more information on the history of modern Greek cinema see Vrasidas Karalis, A History of Greek Cinema, (London: Continuum, 2012), especially “The Formalist Moment: The Inward Gaze: 1971-1995,” 143–191.

[13]  Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by J. Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart; 1990), 390.


Bibliography
 

Chalkou, Maria. “A New Cinema of ‘Emancipation’: Tendencies of Independence in Greek cinema of the 2000s.” Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 3: 2, 243–61.

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. by J. Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart; 1990.

van Hoeij, Boyd. “The Greek New Wave,” E-Dossier 47 (2013), 106–107.

Karalis, Vrasidas. A History of Greek Cinema. London: Continuum, 2012.

Kourelou, Olga, Mariana Liz, and Belén Vidal, “Crisis and Creativity: The New Cinemas of Portugal, Greece and Spain.” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 12, 133–15.

Lanthimos, Yorgos. “Dogtooth: Interview with Yorgos Lanthimos.” Electric Sheep, April 5, 2010. Accessed 31 January 2016. http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/features/2010/04/05/dogtooth-interview-with-giorgos-lanthimos/.

Link, Brady. “Greek Cinema: The Inconspicuous Hope for Recovery.” Euroviews, April 22, 2015. Accessed January 31, 2016. http://euroviews.eu/?p=1361.

Lykidis, Alex. “Crisis of Sovereignty in Recent Greek Cinema.” Journal of Greek Media & Culture 1 (2015), 9–27.

Papadimitriou, Lydia. “Locating Contemporary Greek Film Cultures: Past, Present, Future and the Crisis.” FILMICON: Journal of Greek Film Studies 2 (2014), 1–19.

Rose, Steve. “Attenberg, Dogtooth and the Weird Wave of Greek Cinema.” The Guardian, August 27, 2011. Accessed January 31, 2016. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/aug/27/attenberg-dogtooth-greece-cinema.

Theodossopoulos, Kostis. “Elliniko Cinema 2013: I Anaskopisi.” Cinema 29 (2013).

 

Transnational Cinemas: A Critical Roundtable

In November 2012, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) approved our proposal to form a new scholarly interest group devoted to “Transnational Cinemas”. One of our primary goals in setting up the group was to address the problem, raised by Mette Hjort in 2009, that “to date the discourse of cinematic transnationalism has been characterized less by competing theories and approaches than by a tendency to use the term ‘transnational’ as a largely self-evident qualifier requiring only minimal conceptual clarification”.[1] With the recent proliferation of research being published on the transnational dimensions of cinema, we felt that it was high time for us to come together as scholars to reflect upon what we mean by “transnational cinemas” and to discuss the most productive ways forward for this emerging sub-discipline.

We wanted this to be an inclusive and broad-ranging grouping that could bring together researchers who might otherwise be working primarily within other frameworks such as national cinemas or area studies. Indeed, while we initially secured support from 36 SCMS members to launch, our grouping has subsequently grown to over 380 scholars and it has become clear that our membership approaches the topic of the “transnational” from a dizzying array of methodological perspectives.

Furthermore, while there have been a number of significant publications and conferences devoted to theoretical and historical research on transnational cinemas, we also wanted to use the group to help interrogate the pedagogical implications of this scholarship. There has been a long tradition of teaching classes on “world cinema”, with each session generally focused on individual national cinemas, yet the recent shift towards considerations of the transnational has meant that many scholars are grappling with how best to address this in designing their syllabi and preparing their classes.

Raising these various issues, our group has organised specialist workshops on such topics as “Researching Transnational Cinemas”, “Teaching Transnational Cinemas” and “Transnational Cinemas Studies: Future Directions” and these have helped move forward the scholarly discourse. Nevertheless, while it is evident that the field is growing and developing in significant new ways, we have found that a number of questions repeatedly emerge that would benefit from further clarification and debate.

For this roundtable, therefore, we approached a number of leading scholars who have published on the topic and invited them to answer five questions that speak to the current discourses on cinematic transnationalism. We hope that this intervention might help us move beyond the theoretical impasse that Hjort identified above, and, ultimately, help produce more rigorous and nuanced scholarship on transnational cinemas, as well as generating a valuable resource for teaching in the field.

Questions

  1. What is your definition of “transnational cinema”?
  2. What research methodologies do you find are most useful in interrogating the transnational dimensions of cinema?
  3. What implications does the shift from a national to a transnational framework have for your teaching?
  4. One of the criticisms of the transnational turn within film scholarship is that it appears to have displaced other (arguably more political) approaches such as postcolonialism. For you, what are the politics underpinning an engagement with the transnational?
  5. Is “transnational” the most appropriate term for discussing this topic? What do you think of alternatives such as “transcultural cinema”, “cosmopolitan cinema” or “world cinema”?

Contributors

Tim Bergfelder

Robert Burgoyne

Elizabeth Ezra

Rosalind Galt

Will Higbee

Andrew Higson

Lucy Mazdon

Lúcia Nagib

Kathleen Newman

Deborah Shaw


Tim Bergfelder

Professor of Film, University of Southampton

  1. What is your definition of “transnational cinema”?

I don’t think it is productive to conceive of a single definition or a core essence of the term “transnational cinema”. It is more productive to consider it as an umbrella that encompasses a range of historically mutable activities and movements between national cinemas and also between nations. These can, among other things, include economic exchanges, movement of labour, co-production practices, instances of cross-national distribution and reception, cross-national aesthetic influences in terms of imitations, adaptations, and transformations of visual style and narrative (genre); and finally the on-screen representation of actual transnational processes and experiences of migration and exile. I believe the term works best when it has a concrete case study at hand; I also believe it is at its most interesting where it is used to question and if necessary debunk some of the exclusionary narratives and historical practices that underscore the majority of national film histories.

  1. What research methodologies do you find are most useful in interrogating the transnational dimensions of cinema?

The multiplicity of dimensions of transnational cinema as described under question 1 inevitably necessitates a multiplicity of methodological approaches. If the focus is on the textual qualities of individual films or categories of films (narrative, genre, representation etc.), then textual analysis is likely to be the most sensible way to go ahead. If the emphasis is on industrial, economic, or institutional aspects, then it is important to understand them with the appropriate interpretative tools.

  1. What implications does the shift from a national to a transnational framework have for your teaching?

Transnational cinema remains difficult to teach for a variety of reasons. For once, there is still a paucity of textbooks and teaching material (including films), compared with the sheer endless resources on national cinemas. This corresponds to the way many University curricula organise their programs around “national” teaching blocks. Teaching transnational cinema also puts higher demands on students because it forces them to negotiate at least two different cultures (if not languages). Constructing courses around themes and genres can be a productive way of avoiding national categorisations, and opens up the possibility for a more comparative approach.

  1. One of the criticisms of the transnational turn within film scholarship is that it appears to have displaced other (arguably more political) approaches such as postcolonialism. For you, what are the politics underpinning an engagement with the transnational?

I don’t think that the “transnational turn” has necessarily displaced postcolonialism as an approach, nor do I think that the transnational has to be a less political framework. Where the transnational is used to homogenise different practices and experiences into “universal” or “global” patterns, there is indeed the chance that it becomes meaningless and bland. However, at its most politically probing, it can and indeed should be used to interrogate and challenge myths of national exceptionalism, “purity” and “containment”, and that seems to me to be an important political task today more than ever. At their best, transnational approaches are anti-essentialist, and champion fluidity between cultures and identities over and above demarcations. I think that concepts of transnational cinema and postcolonial methodology can overlap and sometimes share common ground in their political aims and motivations. But in some instances they may also diverge – after all postcolonialism has historically been a by-product of postcolonial processes of national liberation, reconstruction and  (re)legitimation, whereas transnational methodologies often aim to delegitimise the primacy of the nation. I also think postcolonialism as a critical approach can sometimes reach its limits in explaining encounters and experiences where there is no direct link to a colonial past.

  1. Is “transnational” the most appropriate term for discussing this topic? What do you think of alternatives such as “transcultural cinema”, “cosmopolitan cinema” or “world cinema”?

These are all common terms, but I don’t think they work as exact synonyms for what the term transnational encompasses. “World Cinema” has frequently been employed (especially as a marketing term in the field of distribution) as basically anything that is not Hollywood (or at least Anglophone), and as such can have rather derogatory or at least homogenising connotations. In its economic sense, “world cinema” is valued more for its exotic otherness, or for its educational potential in understanding foreign cultures, than for its aesthetic merit or entertainment value. “Transcultural Cinema” does not need to be transnational, because different cultures can exist in the same national space, but like the transnational it can be a productive term to interrogate and question boundaries and distinctions between supposedly contained cultures. “Cosmopolitanism”, on the other hand, is essentially an idea and an ideal, less a social phenomenon or a specific cultural practice, and more an individual attitude and personal outlook. Cosmopolitanism can infuse transnational practices and motivate filmmakers and audiences, but in certain instances it does not. Like nationalism, cosmopolitanism is essentially an ideology and needs to be carefully understood in its historical lineages.


Robert Burgoyne

Professor of Film Studies, University of St Andrews

  1. What is your definition of “transnational cinema”?

I’ve thought a lot about this question since coming to St Andrews six years ago. When I was first asked this question at my job interview, I did a quick intellectual shuffle and said that I thought it was a term of art – a critical term that was mainly useful for critical theory, rather than for defining or demarcating an existing body of work. Today, I think my answer was better than I knew at the time. In the view of my colleague Dennis Hanlon – who has investigated this question in a focused way – the category of transnational film encompasses more films than it excludes. He argues that film, from its inception, has been transnational in its technological development, in its migrations of talent, in its distribution and marketing, and in the cross fertilisation of concepts of genre, cinematic style, and even subject matter. I am tempted to go even further, and say that “transnational film” might be a tautology, and that the only cinemas that are not transnational are the local, popular cinema forms that are made specifically for an ethnic, national, or regional audience. Essentially, I think it is a matter of critical perspective: we can view a great many films as examples of transnational cinema depending on the angle we take. Maybe we should drop the term “transnational,” and presume that this is the default position of films that are not otherwise defined as specifically national, ethnic, or heritage films.

That said, some types of film travel better than others, and some productions are geared more explicitly to international audiences than others. And as someone who works on Hollywood film, although not exclusively, I am aware that the migration of talent, for example, is pretty much in a single direction, and that the international cultural dominance of US filmmaking is limiting in many, many ways.

Ultimately, I would say that the idea of “transnational film”, while not giving much definitional clarity, has created a critical climate where different cinemas, a “world of cinemas” to use David Martin Jones’ phrase, can be considered in a productive intellectual framework that highlights the lines of connection. The concept is useful for critical practice, as I do believe it changes the way we look at films. I think it might best be seen as a term of art, which has produced a very productive scholarly development.

  1. What research methodologies do you find are most useful in interrogating the transnational dimensions of cinema?

In my view, it’s more a question of critical perspective rather than methodology. But then I’ve been hesitant to label any critical work I do as a methodology. Methodology is a pretty loose term in our field, and I don’t think it means much, although we are required to cite and defend it for the grant proposals we write. From my perspective, the only rigorous methodology I’ve encountered in Film Studies is narrative analysis. Narratology, I would say, is a genuine methodology, and it is one I have practiced and admire. It gives us concrete categories of narrative structure and discrete methods for asking questions about a text. Narrative analysis has been enhanced and to some extent diminished by the rise of digital approaches in the humanities, as the practice of the methodology requires a great deal of subtlety, which is sometimes lost in contemporary studies. But outside of narrative analysis, which I once considered to be my specialty, there is not much in our field that qualifies, in my view, as a methodology.

That said, our critical perspectives have changed, and this is a salutary development catalysed by the discovery or invention of the concept of the transnational, a term which has a great deal of rhetorical power and changes the way we look at texts.

  1. What implications does the shift from a national to a transnational framework have for your teaching?

Teaching is where the rubber meets the road, as they say in the States. If there is a form that we can call transnational – and again, Dennis Hanlon has begun to theorise the forms and conventions of the transnational film – then it should certainly manifest itself in our teaching. If it is a critical perspective rather than a body of films or a style of filmmaking, as I suggest above, then this should also manifest itself in our teaching. In my case, I have been increasingly aware of the need to go outside the Western canon in my teaching, something that the students in my classes have asked for as well. But the cultural tourism that a superficial approach entails is as flawed and limiting as a nation centric approach.

When I taught and wrote on Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, for example, I had no particular interest in exploring the transnational aspects of this pioneering film; for me, it was a fine and brilliant exploration of the politics of the image, and the ways that the emperor Pu Yi was constructed as an image of god-like authority by the traditional Chinese and as an image of abjection and monstrosity by the communist Chinese. I did not attend fully to the remarkable international cast and crew, nor to the occasion of the film’s being shot in the Eternal City, the first time a Western film crew was allowed in. Today, this would take central focus, and its ramifications for future film projects would be of great interest. Some of this is covered in the interesting volume edited by Bruce Sklarew on the film.[2] I would look at the film differently now, although the psychoanalytic / Marxist reading I gave in an earlier treatment still holds up, I believe.

  1. One of the criticisms of the transnational turn within film scholarship is that it appears to have displaced other (arguably more political) approaches such as postcolonialism. For you, what are the politics underpinning an engagement with the transnational?

This is a very good question. But I don’t feel I have sufficient grounding in the literature to speak with any real insight. I will have to take this question under consideration, and I look forward to reading the other participants’ views on this important question.

  1. Is “transnational” the most appropriate term for discussing this topic? What do you think of alternatives such as “transcultural cinema”, “cosmopolitan cinema” or “world cinema”?

This is another interesting question. I think each of these terms can be seen as different lenses with which to view the same object of analysis. In many ways, I prefer “transnational” as the term of art. By preserving the word “national” within itself, the term gains an implicit polemical force. It suggests the tension of working against the old idea of the “national” as the source of cinematic art. “Cosmopolitan”, or “world cinema”, do not communicate a sense of tensions or even that something has changed. “Transnational” implies a perspective that is in contrast or perhaps opposition to older forms of analysis. I think that’s a good thing.


Elizabeth Ezra

Professor of Cinema and Culture, University of Stirling

  1. What is your definition of “transnational cinema”?

As Terry Rowden and I have written, “the concept of transnationalism enables us to better understand the changing ways in which the contemporary world is being imagined by an increasing number of filmmakers across genres as a global system rather than as a collection of more or less autonomous nations”.[3] Transnational cinema is cinema that acknowledges this global system in one way or another, though this acknowledgment is often expressed through interactions between characters from different countries. Transnational films are often co-productions, but I don’t feel that this is an absolute requirement.

  1. What research methodologies do you find are most useful in interrogating the transnational dimensions of cinema?

I wouldn’t presume to prescribe a methodology because I know there are many approaches to the study of cinema. I personally favour what media studies people call “textual” analysis (and what everyone else calls “close analysis”), but that is merely a predilection and not a prescription.

  1. What implications does the shift from a national to a transnational framework have for your teaching?

The shift from a national to a transnational framework has opened up my teaching to a wider range of students. I started out in French cinema, and interest among undergraduates in particular was primarily limited to people studying French, but transnational cinema seems to appeal to a wider cross-section of students.

  1. One of the criticisms of the transnational turn within film scholarship is that it appears to have displaced other (arguably more political) approaches such as postcolonialism. For you, what are the politics underpinning an engagement with the transnational?

The transnational is actually analogous to the postcolonial: as the postcolonial bears the traces of the colonial, so the transnational bears the traces of the national. In both cases, the past haunts the present. As we become more historically distant from colonial empires, postcolonialism as an explanatory narrative becomes no less valid, but it has to make room for other narratives that can help us understand the history of social inequality on a global scale. The transnational is a step on the road to globalisation, a stage at which national borders are still, at the very least, recognised. Globalisation is presented as the end of this road, expressing as it does the will to erase national borders altogether. Yet, as I argue in my forthcoming book, The Cinema of Things, “[t]he term ‘globalization’ expresses the aporia of a constant movement toward an imaginary wholeness and plenitude (a unified ‘globe’), an endless supplementation that strives for wholeness at the same time that it undermines the very possibility of wholeness.” Then again, with the development of space travel and the potential viability of habitable spaces “outside” what is currently the global, I’m guessing that sooner or later we will be speaking of transglobalism…

  1. Is “transnational” the most appropriate term for discussing this topic? What do you think of alternatives such as “transcultural cinema”, “cosmopolitan cinema” or “world cinema”?

“Transcultural cinema” is a potentially useful term for discussing encounters between different cultural groups. It overlaps with the term “transnational cinema”, but it may depict, for example, second- or third-generation immigrants, and it does not place as much emphasis on national identity as on issues associated with acceptance and legitimacy within a culture deemed not to be one’s “own”. I am slightly concerned that the term “cosmopolitan” does not do the kind of work that “transnational” and “transcultural” do, because, to my mind, it has not managed to shake off its associations with the jet-setting elite. “World cinema” is still a potentially useful term if used properly: it is important to include American cinema within this category, but unfortunately, more often than not, the term is used to reinforce the outdated and largely inaccurate dichotomy between “Hollywood” films and “all the rest”. I would also include another term in this lineup, “global cinema”, which I would define as the body of films with a large global circulation (which includes almost all Hollywood blockbusters, but also films from other parts of the world that are aimed at a global audience).


Rosalind Galt

Professor in Film Studies, King’s College London

  1. What is your definition of “transnational cinema”?

I tend to retain “transnational” to think of objects of study that, in themselves, move between or among nations. In this regard, the transnational might be a narrower category than “world cinema”, less interested in films that speak to or about their place in the world and more interested in the specific ways in which films recode the world through transits, circuits, and flows. Of course, these transits might speak to funding, modes of production, shooting locations, talent, or to distribution, exhibition, or audiences, or to textuality, themes, and narrative. Since cinema has always been a global phenomenon, it’s easy to see any film or other cinematic object of study as transnational, and I suspect this plasticity is at once the appeal and the difficulty in the term. Nonetheless, there’s a value to bringing these relationships into critical focus, and at its best, transnational cinema studies leverages this focus to make connections among these various levels (institutional, industrial, textual etc.). There’s also something to be said about the “trans” in transnational: it’s not merely a bridge between more than one traditional national approaches but rather it finds something quite different in that transition. The transnational promises to transform the object of cinema. By shifting our attention to the mode of movement between things, the transnational asks us to look at cinema in terms of processes and transits, rather than objects and states.

  1. What research methodologies do you find are most useful in interrogating the transnational dimensions of cinema?

The transnational does often require tracking down particular archives: I’ve often found myself tracing exhibition histories across different national markets, following a film around the world via film festival screenings and marketing materials, release dates and box office figures, theatre adverts and reviews. In thinking the relationships between cinema and geopolitics, it’s always helpful to be able to argue institutionally. More importantly, though, I’m committed to the theoretical implications of the transnational, and so central for me are transnational feminist and queer theories, Marxist, postcolonial and anti-imperialist thought, and critical accounts of globalisation.

  1. What implications does the shift from a national to a transnational framework have for your teaching?

My teaching has always been worldly: I tend to teach topic-based and comparative classes in which I encourage students to think issues across a range of national cinemas and cultural contexts. The transnational turn makes it easier to ask structural questions that enable students to make links across what might otherwise have seemed like isolated national examples. In a module on Contemporary European Cinema, for instance, we address issues of migration and Fortress Europe by discussing postcolonial theories, European Union histories, old and new media representations, and co-production mechanisms, as well as using close textual analysis of films made across several countries. Here, the transnational nature of the topic is clear, but we can equally use these methods to place apparently more “national” films in a cross-cultural context.

I’ve also found it pedagogically incredibly helpful to draw on the transnational nature of the student body to map out what we mean when we think of “world cinema” and what currents and flows might be at stake for audience members differently emplaced in cinema’s world. I’ve used interactive maps to capture what kinds of films students have seen – and what regions’ films they have had little access to. Asking students to participate in defining what transnational cinema means to them (and what hierarchies might be at play in these flows) has often opened up discussion in productive ways. The transnational supports my pedagogic goals of helping students to critique Eurocentric modes of thought and to decentre dominant maps of the world.

  1. One of the criticisms of the transnational turn within film scholarship is that it appears to have displaced other (arguably more political) approaches such as postcolonialism. For you, what are the politics underpinning an engagement with the transnational?

I think this is a valid criticism insofar as there certainly are some strands in transnational film scholarship that are precisely not engaged in thinking the postcolonial, the political, or the work of structural critique. The question becomes whether the transnational structurally excludes these questions or whether it rather describes a contiguous or intersecting set of issues. For me, the transnational is always political because it demands that we think about the relationships of cinema and geopolitics through, between, and beyond the state. Categories such as the postcolonial have been critiqued in the humanities more broadly, and it may be that in film studies, the transnational has, along with “world cinema”, become the presiding conceptual rubric for negotiating problems of world systems, cultural representation, and power. That said, my own engagement with the transnational has closely focused on problematics of geopolitical power: for instance, I’ve written about how the cross-cultural transits of the arabesque depend on Orientalist histories of aesthetic encounter between Europe and the Middle East, and how colonialist attitudes toward the primitive suffuse both classical and contemporary film theory. For me, the transnational is useful to the extent that it opens up ways of thinking cinema’s complex location in world systems, and more so, that it enables a political model with multiple centres, attentive to existing hierarchies without reifying core-periphery reading practices.

  1. Is “transnational” the most appropriate term for discussing this topic? What do you think of alternatives such as “transcultural cinema”, “cosmopolitan cinema” or “world cinema”?

I am probably more affiliated with “world cinema” or the “global” as categories than with the transnational, but it seems to me that we need a complex ecology of concepts with which to think cinema’s transits and localities. In our introduction to Global Art Cinema, Karl Schoonover and I argued for the inherent difficulty of choosing among these imperfect terms.[4] “Global” sounds too corporate; “world cinema” opens out to all the debates in world literature, not to mention the rather appropriative implication of world music; and “cosmopolitan” similarly evokes the flaws of cosmopolitanism as a world-view that has found it hard to escape accusations of privilege. If we accept that no ideal term exists, each of these concepts has its advantages in drawing something particular to the surface about the relationship between cinema and the world.


Will Higbee

Professor of Film Studies, University of Exeter

  1. What is your definition of “transnational cinema”?

To simply label a particular film “transnational” as if it satisfies a list of criteria (such as being classed an international co-production, involving a multi-national cast and crew) or refers to a universal cinematic phenomenon, in my opinion defeats the object of employing this term as a distinctive way of thinking about cinema. I agree with Mette Hjort’s assertion that transnationalism does little to advance our thinking about important issues if it can mean anything and everything that the occasion demands. Rather, I view transnational cinema as an approach to studying the global circulation of film as a cultural and industrial art form in terms of production, distribution and exhibition / reception. I also see the term as incorporating films that deal, either in their production or thematically, with notions (or experiences) of migration, exile or diaspora. I think it is still very much a scholarly term. What’s interesting is that when you speak to filmmakers as opposed to academics about “transnational cinema” you’re usually met with a blank expression. In that respect, I think there’s more that we as academics could do to bridge the gap with film practitioners. That’s certainly the aim of the new AHRC-funded research project that I am working on in relation to transnational Moroccan cinemas, where the emphasis is on how thinking in terms of the transnational can open up a better understanding of how the global reach of this “small” national cinema from the Maghreb functions in relation to filmmakers of the Moroccan diaspora, the role of festivals and international co-productions, as well as the place of Moroccan cinema’s local and global audiences in the age of digital disruption.

  1. What research methodologies do you find are most useful in interrogating the transnational dimensions of cinema?

Beyond the work of other film scholars, I personally find the research of sociologists, political philosophers as well as those working in the fields of postcolonial theory and diaspora criticism most useful; though I suspect that says more about my own interests in postcolonial, immigrant and accented cinema than it does about what research methodology might be the most appropriate for thinking about cinema “transnationally”.

  1. What implications does the shift from a national to a transnational framework have for your teaching?

The first thing to say is that the national doesn’t simply disappear and we shouldn’t forget that in our enthusiasm for the transnational turn. I think that it is just as important to consider the relationship between the national and the transnational (and indeed the regional and the local) when presenting the transnational to our students as an analytical framework or theoretical approach. The key advantage for me is that the transnational opens up this possibility of a perspective that is at once theoretical, historical and industrial as a means of destabilising given ideas of the nation in national cinema. Of course, part of the challenge now is how we approach the term “transnational” in the classroom, as it has moved away from being a new way to consider the global reach of cinema to, arguably, an integrated part of the syllabus for film studies (in the UK at least). I remember when I started teaching a first year undergraduate module on transnational cinema over ten years ago, it seemed like we were offering a new perspective to our students. Now, as it becomes a more established term in film studies, it feels as if we need to do more to justify the continued relevance of the transnational.

  1. One of the criticisms of the transnational turn within film scholarship is that it appears to have displaced other (arguably more political) approaches such as postcolonialism. For you, what are the politics underpinning an engagement with the transnational?

The transnational only eschews or elides questions of politics and (imbalances of) power if we let it. I still maintain the same position as the one I took in the piece published a few years ago with Song Hwee Lim.[5] We defined “critical transnationalism” as an approach that doesn’t ghettoise transnational filmmaking on the margins of global film industries but is, equally, attentive to questions of postcoloniality, politics and power, scrutinises the tensions and dialogic relationship between national and transnational whilst simultaneously promoting the potential for local, regional and diasporic film cultures to affect, subvert and transform (politically speaking) national and transnational cinemas.

  1. Is “transnational” the most appropriate term for discussing this topic? What do you think of alternatives such as “transcultural cinema”, “cosmopolitan cinema” or “world cinema”?

I suppose that it’s almost an occupational hazard for academics to want to introduce a critical neologism to distinguish their work (!). I do think though that the transnational, for all its potential problems and pitfalls, does offer a productive and enduring framework within which to analyse the dynamics of film as a global, industrial art form.


Andrew Higson

Professor of Film and Television, University of York

  1. What is your definition of “transnational cinema”?

For me, the term “transnational cinema” is a useful way of describing and highlighting a number of features of both much, if not all, contemporary cinema and various historical cinemas. First, “transnational cinema” can describe the ways in which film production, distribution and exhibition often take place across national boundaries. Secondly, the term can indicate the involvement in film production or distribution of personnel or companies from more than one country, people who are therefore in some ways part of a network of economic migrants. Thirdly, the term can describe the ways in which films often narrate the journeys of characters across national boundaries, where the characters may also be from more than one country, and thereby encounter people from other cultures and nations. Fourthly, it may speak of the ways in which such films will occasionally draw attention to the social and political implications of such journeys and encounters. Fifthly, it can draw attention to the ways in which films draw on cultural traditions, genres and formal conventions associated with different countries. Finally, the term can signify the ways in which audiences in different national contexts engage with and make sense of the films they watch. To focus on the transnational is thus a way of challenging the national bias in much film scholarship, which often assumes that the national is a self-contained entity when the evidence is often to the contrary.

  1. What research methodologies do you find are most useful in interrogating the transnational dimensions of cinema?

What I’m interested in are the empirical dimensions of transnational activity, so the research methods I favour are empirical. To find out about the transnational dimensions of production and funding, it’s necessary to gather and analyse data about production, and especially co-production; to look at the record of particular production companies and filmmakers; and to identify and follow up the funding sources for such films, both public and private. It is important in this context to access official national and regional databases, consult the trade press and equivalent online sources, interview key agents, and analyse the composition and biographies of production teams, cast and crew. The same sorts of approaches apply for investigating distribution, marketing and theatrical and online exhibition, DVD / Blu-ray availability and television screenings.

Then there are the questions of policy, at the national and local level, at the regional level (e.g. Scandinavian or Nordic regional policies) and at the supranational level (e.g. EU policies). What incentives do such policies create, for instance, for co-production, and foreign distribution and exhibition? In all these cases, there is also work to be done to determine why transnational arrangements have been adopted in any particular instance. Is it about prioritising economic decision-making to exploit specific funding or market opportunities, or about responding to specific creative needs or opportunities? Is it the result of contingent pragmatism and the seizing of opportunities as they present themselves, or the result of careful advance planning and long-term strategy? And so on?

Textual analysis is necessary to provide evidence of transnational dimensions at the level of form, theme and content. To what extent do films draw on a range of culturally specific film traditions? To what extent do they tell stories about transnational movement, migration and interaction? To what extent are characters marked by and engaged in such activity? To what extent do films self-consciously address the implications of transnational activity?

Finally, it is necessary to understand the nature and composition of audiences for particular films and types of film, and the extent to which those audiences exist in a variety of countries and engage with films differently depending on their circumstances. This involves examining box-office data and other quantitative evidence of film-viewing, but also undertaking qualitative research with audiences in different countries and in different socio-economic and cultural situations, through surveys, focus groups, interviews, analysis of online user comments and social media, and so on. It’s also important to analyse critical reception across national boundaries.

Most of these approaches can be used for the analysis of both contemporary and historical developments.

  1. What implications does the shift from a national to a transnational framework have for your teaching?

First, it is important to focus on transnational activity, to note its existence and importance, and to challenge an exclusively national approach. Secondly, the shift from a national to a transnational framework encourages the development of courses about “national” cinemas that engage with the transnational dimensions of those cinemas. And thirdly, it encourages courses that focus on transnational trends (e.g. Nordic noir) or on trends across a range of world cinemas.

  1. One of the criticisms of the transnational turn within film scholarship is that it appears to have displaced other (arguably more political) approaches such as postcolonialism. For you, what are the politics underpinning an engagement with the transnational?

There is surely no necessary reason why attention to transnational developments cannot go hand in hand with postcolonial theories and analysis. One can look at postcolonial problems and strategies just as easily and productively in relation to transnational as to national contexts. If the transnational is defined empirically as I do above, I’m not sure there is a necessary politics underpinning an engagement with the transnational. But I do think it is important to recognise the evidence of transnational developments, relationships and narratives in cinema, both historically and in the present. Inevitably, this challenges those who define the national in terms of purity, exclusivity and self-containedness.

  1. Is “transnational” the most appropriate term for discussing this topic? What do you think of alternatives such as “transcultural cinema”, “cosmopolitan cinema” or “world cinema”?

I find the term “transnational” very useful for describing cross-border cultural and/or economic activity. It’s not an exclusive term, however, and shouldn’t be defined too rigorously; nor does it in my opinion need to be heavily theorised. Other terms such as “transcultural”, “intercultural” and “cosmopolitan” also work well, but for me they focus more on the cultural aspects of cinema (form, content, personal biography), and tend to overlook the industrial dimensions of production, distribution and exhibition and the issue of policy; perhaps they also overlook the dimension of reception, the nature and composition of audiences and how they make sense of particular films.


Lucy Mazdon

Professor of Film Studies, University of Southampton

  1. What is your definition of “transnational cinema”?

I would argue that transnational cinema cannot be defined in any straightforward way. Indeed on-going debates about the term, not least this collection, are testimony to its complexity. Transnational cinema should not be reduced to international co-productions or an accumulation of national cinemas. Understanding cinema as transnational means being aware of its porosity, its intersections with others (including the national), its indeterminacy and its contingency. Cinema can and should be perceived as transnational at the level of production (industry), text, circulation and reception which of course means that all cinema could simply be defined as transnational. Nevertheless I would urge caution as this runs the risk of reducing the term to a self-evident qualifier and emptying it of all critical force. With this in mind it seems to me vital that we retain a critical and discursive engagement with the transnational and its applicability to film research. Perhaps most productive is an understanding of transnational cinema as an approach, a methodology, a way of thinking about cinema rather than simply an object of study.

  1. What research methodologies do you find are most useful in interrogating the transnational dimensions of cinema?

A number of methodologies lend themselves well to an interrogation of the transnational dimensions of cinema: textual analysis; industry studies; film historiography. Of particular value I think is a reception studies approach. Analysis of the circulation of film, its consumption and the responses it provokes in audiences are particularly revealing. My own research on remakes and on the UK distribution and reception of French cinema for example revealed the ways in which a film’s identity could be altered radically through its journey from one cultural context to another. To some extent British audiences’ reception of French film meant an underwriting of the national as a film would be perceived and consumed primarily as “French”. Nevertheless, despite this foregrounding of the national, it seems to me that this in fact provides evidence of the transnationalism of film, its indeterminacy. As the film moves from one culture to another so it becomes something different to new audiences. It is unfinished, incomplete, porous, and a focus on transnational reception enables us to reveal and analyse this.

  1. What implications does the shift from a national to a transnational framework have for your teaching?

Overall I have found the shift from a national to a transnational framework extremely beneficial from a teaching point of view. My sense is that students are increasingly less interested in focusing on a single national cinema (including Hollywood cinema). They appear to be much more attracted by questions of genre, stars, technologies and so on. All of this can, I believe, be explored and taught much more fruitfully and much more interestingly within a transnational framework. When teaching “national” cinemas (for a number of years I taught a module on 1930s French cinema) I found an engagement with its transnational dimensions and connections extremely productive, provoking a much more thoughtful and sophisticated engagement from the students.

  1. One of the criticisms of the transnational turn within film scholarship is that it appears to have displaced other (arguably more political) approaches such as postcolonialism. For you, what are the politics underpinning an engagement with the transnational?

Rather than sharing anxieties about the transnational turn’s displacement of other approaches, I would argue for the vital necessity of an approach to cinema and other cultural forms which questions and problematises nations and nationalism. As we approach the EU referendum in the UK and Donald Trump with his calls for a wall between the US and Mexico makes significant headway in his bid to be the Republican candidate for the US presidency, so an engagement with the transnational, underpinned by an interrogation of the discourse and ideologies of nationalism, seems ever more imperative.

  1. Is “transnational” the most appropriate term for discussing this topic? What do you think of alternatives such as “transcultural cinema”, “cosmopolitan cinema” or “world cinema”?

I do have some slight reservations about the term “transnational”. As I have already mentioned, a transnational approach should be much more than an acknowledgement of multiple nations or national signifiers. While it should engage with the national and nationalism, it must go beyond this to examine the contingency of cinema and cinema audiences in all their complexity. In using the term “transnational” we perhaps run the risk of ignoring this and reducing the critical force of this approach. However alternative terms are not without their own limitations so I would tend to favour retention of the transnational with the proviso that the term and the methodology should be always subject to critical engagement and potential rethinking.


Lúcia Nagib

Professor in Film, University of Reading

  1. What is your definition of “transnational cinema”?

Theoretically, a “transnational film” should be the one funded by a pool of multinational producers. But this is not exactly what is usually meant by being “transnational”. The desire to transcend the nation has evolved in the wake of the defence of hybridity ushered in by structuralist and post-structuralist theory, and very much in tune with cultural studies’ championing of minorities of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity. There was also an understanding that the “national” project, in cinema, which was at the core of the Third Cinema movements of the 1960s as a reaction to and resistance to global capitalism, had achieved their historical aims and needed to move forward towards closing ranks with movements of resistance across the world.

  1. What research methodologies do you find are most useful in interrogating the transnational dimensions of cinema?

Within my polycentric approach to film studies, I tend to organise world cinema according to “creative peaks” and look at them through recurrent tropes. For example, in New Waves and New Cinema movements, one can observe an attempt at engaging physically with the world, as a means to take possession of a land and its culture. For example, I have studied the figure of the runner on foot across a number of inaugural films, such as The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959) (in France), Black God, White Devil (Glauber Rocha, 1964) (in Brazil), Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner (Zacharias Kunuk, 2001) (among the Inuit) and Yaaba (Idrissa Ouedraogo, 1989) (in Burkina Faso). Though strongly connected with a region, a nation and a culture, these films connect across borders through the act of physically engaging with their land.

  1. What implications does the shift from a national to a transnational framework have for your teaching?

Processes of nation building are historical and become particularly urgent when the nation is under threat. There have been excellent studies of “cinemas of small nations” (Hjort & Petrie’s for example)[6] that demonstrate how the borders of a nation become crucial, when the country is, for example, Scotland that has a fraught relationship with the United Kingdom, or Bulgaria or Finland or Taiwan, whose bigger neighbours project a shadow on their claim for a distinctive national identity. To answer your question, the focus on issues of the national or the transnational depends on the subject I am teaching and does not cause any particular “problems”.

  1. One of the criticisms of the transnational turn within film scholarship is that it appears to have displaced other (arguably more political) approaches such as postcolonialism. For you, what are the politics underpinning an engagement with the transnational?

I don’t think I have ever resorted to “postcolonial” theory to approach any cinemas, because this necessarily defines the perspective adopted as Eurocentric. Countries, nations and cultures existed before, during and after the European Imperialism, but postcolonial theories tend to erase and forget about what they were before the arrival of the European. At the same time, “transnationalism” is not my religion. If anything, it’s a means, not an end. If thinking about the transnational factors that cause a film to be what it is – for example, a Brazilian film needs to have a German actor due to an imposition of the German funders – then it would be silly to disregard these factors in the analysis of this particular film.

  1. Is “transnational” the most appropriate term for discussing this topic? What do you think of alternatives such as “transcultural cinema”, “cosmopolitan cinema” or “world cinema”?

What is the use of defending one concept to the detriment of another? What determines my methodology is the object under scrutiny. Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948) is a film about Germany, so one needs to know something about this country at that particular time in order to produce a valid analysis. At the same time, Germany Year Zero was directed by an Italian who was spearheading a revolutionary cinema movement, called neorealism, that changed the way cinema was made in Europe and in the rest of the world, so here knowing German history alone would not be enough. Many concepts are themselves determined by the perspective of those who invented them. The concept of world cinema, for example, only makes sense in the Anglophone world, where “cinema” means American cinema, and “world cinema” means “the rest of the world”. In France, in Brazil, in Germany and most of the other countries in the world there isn’t world cinema, but simply cinema. As for the cosmopolitan turn, that emerged in cultural studies in the 1990s, I find it an important and helpful branch of theory, as it accounts for the extraordinary urban developments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that inflected all the artistic outputs coming from these centres.


Kathleen Newman

Associate Professor of Cinema and Spanish, The University of Iowa

  1. What is your definition of “transnational cinema”? and 5. Is “transnational” the most appropriate term for discussing this topic? What do you think of alternatives such as “transcultural cinema”, “cosmopolitan cinema” or “world cinema”?

Given that cinema is part of the (complex, dynamic, multidirectional) global circulation of narratives (operating at multiple scales), I think the adjective “transnational”, rather than describing a category of cinema, is most useful for describing our area of theoretical inquiry, that is, transnational film theory. We have seen, over the last quarter century or so, a significant geopolitical decentring of the discipline of Film Studies. Whereas European and US cinemas were considered core and all other cinemas were treated as derivative, we can now think of world cinema as the core category, subsuming European and US cinemas, and all cinemas, be they regional or national or defined by another geopolitical scale, as part of world cinema. The general deployment of the term transnational cinema is evidence of this ongoing disciplinary decentring, but I am not sure if it is a sufficiently capacious term to signal all of the current theoretical and analytical stakes. In this same quarter century, the debates of the relation of art and politics have recognised the complexity of the spatial and temporal registers of film narrative and scholars now hold themselves responsible in their analyses for accounting for the ways in which multiple geopolitical scales operate textually. Yet, the question of how film texts serve as evidence of historical transformations and how cinema contributes to social transformation (one and the same thing) is not resolved. The transnational circulation of cinema, because it is always present in the cultural repertoire from which film derives meaning and in which film is meaningful, requires film scholars to examine the geopolitics of all film address.

  1. What research methodologies do you find are most useful in interrogating the transnational dimensions of cinema?

Formalism – as old-fashioned as possible – mixed with as complete attention as humanly possible to the trajectories of (a) the ongoing interdisciplinary debates between the humanities and social sciences on the relation between nature of print and audiovisual representation and the multiple determinants of social transformation and structuration and (b) the current work on screen cultures and new media.

  1. What implications does the shift from a national to a transnational framework have for your teaching?

My research and teaching concerns Latin American cinema and so my classes often address how Latin American filmmakers have dealt with questions of authoritarianism and social inequality in their many forms. There is a very clear distinction between the assumptions of Latin American filmmakers during the short twentieth century (mid-1910s to the early 1990s) regarding uneven power relations, how they are instantiated and how they can be changed, and current Latin American filmmakers, particularly the producers and directors of the various “new cinemas” that emerged in the 1990s (a post-authoritarian period for some Latin American nations). The politics of these new cinemas, in opposition to previous generations, can be seen at the level of story in the characters’ shared distrust of collective undertakings and a much-needed sharp eye for deception and self-deception. The geopolitical imaginary of most of these films is global in reach even when the focus is local (and at times seemingly non-political), and the filmmakers, like most of their audience, seem highly aware of the positive and negative implications of the mobility of people and messages in our times.

  1. One of the criticisms of the transnational turn within film scholarship is that it appears to have displaced other (arguably more political) approaches such as postcolonialism. For you, what are the politics underpinning an engagement with the transnational?

A transnational perspective obliges one to take a stance on the nature of capitalism and various social and political-economic relations assigned within the category called globalisation, which leads, in turn, to the ongoing theorisation of the relation of art and society. Transnational studies and postcolonial studies within the discipline of Film Studies share many of the same, longstanding – very political – concerns: what can the study of cinema tell us about how to make the world a better place?


Deborah Shaw

Reader in Film, University of Portsmouth

  1. What is your definition of “transnational cinema”?

The first stage in any young field of study is definitional and there have been scholars who have attempted to nail down the “what is transnational cinema?” question.[7] A number of us have argued that the application of the term was too loose and that we needed to specify which aspects of cinema we were referring to. In a chapter on the subject, I outlined a series of 15 inter-connecting and overlapping categories which would allow us to clarify our focus.[8] These included: transnational modes of production, distribution and exhibition; transnational modes of narration; exilic and diasporic filmmaking; transnational influences; transnational critical approaches; transnational viewing practices; transregional / transcommunity films; transnational stars; transnational directors; transnational collaborative networks. These can be tinkered with, added to, adapted or disagreed with, but the point is that there is no single definition for transnational cinema. This does not mean that the transnational does not provide a useful theoretical framework for film studies, rather that we need to know what we are talking about for it to have meaningful application. I would argue that following the early definitional stages, we can now focus on applications, effects and functions.

  1. What research methodologies do you find are most useful in interrogating the transnational dimensions of cinema?

I would argue that we have to approach this from the bottom up; that is to say, the answer to this depends on the focus of the study. Following on from my response to the previous question, I would argue against a single methodology applicable to all studies.A quick scan through a selection of the most recent articles accepted for publication in the journal Transnational Cinemas (7:1, 2016) is a good example of the focus on applications, effects and functions of transnational cinema, and reveals the diverse methodologies and theoretical approaches employed.

In order to “compare a large number of films and identify broad trends and categories” Huw Jones analyses quantitative data from public databases for his article “The Cultural and Economic Implications of UK / European Co-production”. These include two databases, the BFI database of films produced in the UK (2003-2013) and the European Audiovisual Observatory’s LUMIERE. In addition he “uses the BFI’s ‘Cultural Test’ for film to quantify how much European creative input goes into UK/European co-productions”.[9] Anna Cooper’s article “Colonizing Europe: Widescreen Aesthetics in the 1950s American Travel Film” takes a more theoretical approach and “uses textual methodologies adapted from postcolonial studies to explore the colonialist aesthetics of mid-century American cinema”.[10] Arezou Zalipour turns to Hamid Naficy’s concept of “accented cinema”[11] for her study of “Interstitial and Collective Filmmaking in New Zealand: The Case of Asian New Zealand Film”.[12] I could go on but word space and respect for readers prevents me. The point is, I hope, clear: the focus of the study and the knowledge base of the researcher will determine the methodology and theoretical framework. Each is valid and each sheds new light on a different aspect of the transnational in film, whether that be historical research, an approach that relies on data collection or interviews, or readings that engage with some of the key theoretical interventions in the field.

  1. What implications does the shift from a national to a transnational framework have for your teaching?

The shift to a transnational framework has greatly impacted film studies as a discipline. A recent SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) study, “The State of the Field of Film and Media Studies”, demonstrated that there are 179 departments / programs that teach modules on “global or transnational cinema and/or television”.[13] This study was limited to the US and there are similar courses in most institutions that teach film studies. I have written more about a shared and personal experience of teaching a course “World and Transnational Cinemas” in a chapter co-authored with Ruth Doughty for an edited book, Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy.[14]

In addition, a transnational framework will be applied to other courses without the “T” word in their title. As a recent scan of the SCMS panels sponsored by the “Transnational Cinemas” Scholarly Interest Group run by Austin Fisher and Iain Smith reveals, transnational frameworks are now applied to scholarship in many areas. These include: early cinema, star studies, remakes / adaptations, feminist film theory, fan studies, exploitation cinema, genre studies, experimental film, the growing area of video essays, sound studies, readings of race, regional / national studies, the business / economics of film, and audience studies, among others. A transnational approach is thus informing film studies beyond the obvious courses dedicated to the subject.

  1. One of the criticisms of the transnational turn within film scholarship is that it appears to have displaced other (arguably more political) approaches such as postcolonialism. For you, what are the politics underpinning an engagement with the transnational?

The transnational is as political as we make it, and the transnational is an intrinsic part of postcolonialism; it does not present an oppositional approach or displace it. By way of illustration, the editors of Transnational Cinemas (Armida de la Garza, Ruth Doughty and I) have recently accepted a proposal for a special issue of the journal co-edited by Sandra Ponzanesi and Verena Berger: “Postcolonial Cinemas in Europe: Migration, Identity and Spatiality in Film Genres” (forthcoming 2017). To reference the journal again, in their article for the inaugural issue Will Higbee and Song Wee Lim put paid to the criticism that transnationalism may be less concerned with politics or less interested in postcolonial power relations. In it they call for a critical transnationalism that will explore relations of “postcoloniality, politics and power” that are at the root of the cross-border activities and transactions that make up transnational cinema in all its manifestations.[15]

  1. Is “transnational” the most appropriate term for discussing this topic? What do you think of alternatives such as “transcultural cinema”, “cosmopolitan cinema” or “world cinema”?

There is not a competition as to which is the best term – they co-exist, and have different meanings according to the contexts in which they are used. The key point is that we should use terminology carefully and define our terms of reference critically. We should ensure that we show an awareness of the definitional work that has taken place in film studies and other disciplines, rather than using terms lazily as catch-alls.

Notes on Contributors

Austin Fisher is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Bournemouth University. He is author of Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western (IB Tauris, 2011), editor of Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Bloomsbury’s Global Exploitation Cinemas book series. He is also co-chair of the SCMS ‘Transnational Cinemas’ Scholarly Interest Group, and serves on the Editorial Boards of the [in]Transition and Transnational Cinemas journals.

Iain Robert Smith is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Roehampton, London. He is author of The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema (EUP, 2016) and co-editor of the collections Transnational Film Remakes (with Con Verevis, EUP, 2017) and Media Across Borders (with Andrea Esser and Miguel A. Bernal Merino, Routledge, 2016). He is co-chair of the SCMS Transnational Cinemas Scholarly Interest Group and co-investigator on the AHRC-funded research network Media Across Borders.


Notes

[1] Mette Hjort, “On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism”, in World Cinema, Transnational Perspectives, edited by Nataša Durovicová and Kathleen Newman (London: Routledge/American Film Institute Reader, 2010), 12-13.

[2] Bruce H. Sklarew, Bonnie S. Kaufman, Ellen Handler Spitz and Diane Borden (eds), Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor: Multiple Takes (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998).

[3] Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, “General Introduction: What is Transnational Cinema?,” in Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, eds Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (London: Routledge, 2006), 1.

[4] Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, “Introduction: The Impurity of Art Cinema,” in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, eds Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

[5] Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Critical Transnationalism in Film Studies,” Transnational Cinemas 1:1 (2010).

[6] Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie (eds), The Cinema of Small Nations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).

[7] See Ezra and Rowden, Transnational Cinema; Hjort, “On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism”; Higbee and Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema”; Chris Berry, “What is Transnational Cinema? Thinking from the Chinese Situation,” Transnational Cinemas 1:2 (2010).

[8] Deborah Shaw, “Deconstructing and Reconstructing ‘Transnational Cinema’,” in Contemporary Hispanic Cinema: Interrogating the Transnational in Spanish and Latin American Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2013).

[9] Huw D. Jones, “The Cultural and Economic Implications of UK / European Co-production,” Transnational Cinemas 7:1 (2016).

[10] Anna Cooper, “Colonizing Europe: Widescreen Aesthetics in the 1950s American Travel Film,” Transnational Cinemas, 7:1 (2016).

[11] Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

[12] Arezou Zalipour, “Interstitial and Collective Filmmaking in New Zealand: The Case of Asian New Zealand Film,” Transnational Cinemas, 7:1 (2016).

[13] Aviva Dove-Viebahn, “The State of Film and Media Studies,” accessed March 11th, 2016, http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.cmstudies.org/resource/resmgr/SCMS_StateoftheField2015.pdf.

[14] Deborah Shaw and Ruth Doughty, “Teaching the ‘World’ through Film,” in Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy, eds Katarzyna Marciniak and Bruce Bennett (London: Routledge / AFI Film Readers, 2016).

[15] Higbee and Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema,” 18.

Bibliography

Berry, Chris. “What is Transnational Cinema? Thinking from the Chinese Situation.” Transnational Cinemas 1:2 (2010), 111-127.

Cooper, Anna. “Colonizing Europe: Widescreen Aesthetics in the 1950s American Travel Film.” Transnational Cinemas, 7:1 (2016).

Dove-Viebahn, Aviva. “The State of Film and Media Studies.” Accessed March 11th, 2016. http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.cmstudies.org/resource/resmgr/SCMS_StateoftheField2015.pdf.

Ezra, Elizabeth and Terry Rowden (eds). Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. London: Routledge, 2006.

Ezra, Elizabeth and Terry Rowden. “General Introduction: What is Transnational Cinema?” In Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, edited by Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, 1-12. London: Routledge, 2006.

Galt, Rosalind and Karl Schoonover. “Introduction: The Impurity of Art Cinema.” In Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, edited by Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, 3-30. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Hjort, Mette and Duncan Petrie (eds). The Cinema of Small Nations. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

Hjort, Mette. “On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism.” In World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, edited by Nataša Durovicová and Kathleen Newman, 12-33. London: Routledge / American Film Institute Reader, 2010.

Higbee, Will and Song Hwee Lim. “Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Critical Transnationalism in Film Studies.” Transnational Cinemas 1:1 (2010): 7-21.

Jones, Huw D. “The Cultural and Economic Implications of UK / European Co-production”, Transnational Cinemas 7:1 (2016).

Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Shaw, Deborah. “Deconstructing and Reconstructing ‘Transnational Cinema’.” In Contemporary Hispanic Cinema: Interrogating the Transnational in Spanish and Latin American Film, edited by Stephanie Dennison, 47-65. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2013.

Shaw, Deborah and Ruth Doughty. “Teaching the ‘World’ through Film.” In Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy, edited by Katarzyna Marciniak and Bruce Bennett. London: Routledge / AFI Film Readers, 2016.

Sklarew, Bruce H., Bonnie S. Kaufman, Ellen Handler Spitz and Diane Borden (eds). Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor: Multiple Takes. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998.

Zalipour, Arezou. “Interstitial and Collective Filmmaking in New Zealand: The Case of Asian New Zealand Film.” Transnational Cinemas, 7:1 (2016).

Letter from the Editors

One thing that we have enjoyed while working on Frames is the collaborative venues that a small online publication has allowed us to pursue. With no set agenda and a flexible frame of reference that is not hindered by traditions but is rather adept to exploring new ideas, we have had the opportunity to change between issues and be open to working with contributors who have approached us with ideas of subjects they would like to explore.  This issue of Frames is one such example, and we could not go any further in our introduction letter without thanking Austin Fisher and Iain Robert Smith for their inspiring ideas and hard work that played a large part in the production of the issue.

Looking back, we saw how the act of collaboration had come to influence the shape of this issue in unforeseeable ways, reflecting not only its origins but its theme. Talking about labels cannot be a lone venture, as the labels we use are created and shaped by a larger collective that willingly or unwillingly perpetuates and yet also changes them through discourse. This is a process we saw enacted through the “Roundtable on Transnational Cinema” as compiled by Fisher and Smith, in which they questioned the use of the term “transnational” and invited others to contribute to this discussion. The dialogue, we can happily say, was as illuminating as it was thought-provoking: In their individual takes on the validity and definition of the label “transnational cinema”, ten international scholars largely agreed on the fact that fixing a core essence of the term would be counterproductive given its theoretical and practical potential. As a fruitful approach, “transnational” characterizes a global system of film production, distribution and reception as much as it influences and enhances teaching and academic thinking. It facilitates the conception of film as a cross-cultural medium, and of academia as its institutional agent in communicating and sharing experiences across borders—a strong point made by Dina Iordanova in her essay “Choosing the Transnational”. Reading through these diverse responses, the “transnational” label became not a closing off of dialogue imposed by rigid definitions, but rather a point of exchange that to us reflects not only the productions that fall under this label, but cinema in general as a collaborative art.

An endeavour similar to Smith and Fisher’s has been made with Dennis Hanlon’s collaborative piece, “Labelling a Shot”, for which he asked colleagues and students to come up with a name and a short definition for a specific type of film shot. What Hanlon’s experimental project shows is that anyone’s attempt to describe a cinematic phenomenon within an academic framework both challenges and affirms their respective theoretical and methodological backgrounds. And what it exposes is the diversity of analytical perspectives as well as the extent to which we as media scholars are bound to existing theorems, even when we want to redefine or negate them. Not only does this concern the study of film but also the intrinsic connections between popular culture and media-political strategies: As Geli Mademli points out in her POV article, public discourse and media coverage of Greece’s recent economic crisis have led to the questionable reputation of contemporary Greek cinema as a so-called “weird wave”, a cinema of crisis.

Working against a label inevitably implies working with and through it—a situation artist and scholar Lynne Cameron also finds herself in, as she explains in her contribution on “the spaces between”. Here she makes the point that a shift in perspective can enable us to see the unlabelled, negative spaces that in turn shape the labels we use. As such established categories, terms, and words lose their power, while the new labels we use to undo the old ones can develop a dynamic, positive force.

Through these discussions, we found this issue becoming one not just about labels, and less so about breaking them, but more about how and where they are created, discussed, and transformed. Above all, we were interested in the methods that inspire the conversation about terms we take for granted, using or dismissing them in our everyday contexts but no longer giving the time to reflect on the labels themselves and the changes happening within and around them.

This provoked new reflections for our team as we worked on this issue; not only did we debate how to discuss this topic, a point our contributors graciously answered themselves through their propositions of collaborative and POV pieces, but we also went through a period of self-reflection about our own label of Frames. As a young, free, online journal run by a group of enthusiastic PhD students, we have all the possibilities to explore new avenues of communication that this format can offer us. And yet at times we seem to hinder ourselves by seeking to fit into the recognized labels of the academic universe that we are a part of yet still apart from.

Perhaps the proposed title of our issue, “Breaking Labels”, reflected our own frustration in feeling both the urge to fit into labels of what an academic journal should be and at the same time break those to find something new. And what we have found in our tenure as editors is that this impetus to do something new is perhaps the best prospect for our journal and for our hopes that it becomes a creative space where we can explore rather than follow. Which, in other words, is where we take a bow and entrust our journal to equally determined successors, but not without thanking our colleagues for their passionate work and support in the past two years, and not without expressing our gratitude to the Department of Film Studies at St Andrews for encouraging our bold ambitions as they grew with Frames (and so did we).

We do not know in what direction the journal will go, or what it will look like when we leave (alas, realizations of what one should do in a situation always seem to come at the end when there is finally time to pause and look back), but we are looking to open ourselves up to further opportunities of collaboration and critical inquiry—One pursuit we would like to follow is working with institutions within and beyond academia; responding in our own way to what we see as an interesting development in the increase of PhDs with practical components especially in the field of media and the arts. As changes like these bring about new conversations in academia, we hope to be at the forefront of these dialogues, bringing together scholars, practitioners, and students. Who knows if these hopes will be realized, but in order to make an omelette, one must break a few labels.

Choosing the Transnational

Dear Dina,
I hope we get a chance to lock horns (in friendly fashion!) at some point
about this whole issue of transnational versus the study of national
culture. While I am in sympathy with the intellectual ambition of
transnational approaches and while the study of national cultures can
seem, intellectually and methodologically, an insular ghetto, it is
sometimes the case that the former approach suffers from insufficient
attention to particularities and relies on outdated or superficial
accounts of local or national conditions.

Dear Alan,
I think you are operating out of assumptions that need clarifying,
as I absolutely do not feel we have any battles — neither actual
nor putative. So hopefully when we meet some day it will not be
necessary to lock horns, be it in a friendly or belligerent manner:)

This whole issue is about what you want to see and the respective
selection of a vantage point. If you anchor yourself within one nation —
which is a valid position — you see one type of things; if you anchor
yourself supranationally, you see different things — that is all. My life has
been such that I have felt more attracted to watching across borders and
seeing those things that evolve above and beyond the nation. I have got
many friends who have chosen to anchor themselves differently.

This literal rendering of an exchange with a colleague who has opted to fashion himself as a national cinema specialist took place on 11 December 2014. It alerted me to the fact that the transnational approach to film studies had now gained such currency that it was considered to be “mainstream film studies” and, as his e-mail went on, that it had become a trendy one, so much so that it lead to frustration among those who, like him, came to feel that their national cinema work had come to be “consistently ignored, dismissed or patronised”. Who would think we would be at such a juncture so soon, whilst most of the writers in this journal still ponder how to enter the transnational teaching into what appears a citadel of time-honoured national cinema framework?

Besides providing for a good anecdote, this exchange made me realize that teaching transnational cinema, for me, is not so much about identifying and working with a specific body of films and conceptual frameworks for the analysis of these films, that it is not so much about “introducing transnational cinema into the curriculum” as something distinct from what one would otherwise engage with, but it is about allowing oneself to make some simple choices and accepting oneself, as a teacher, as well as the students, as transnational subjects.

More often than not it is about choosing to recognize a stance that reflects one’s own experience of being transnational. Teachers who engage with the transnational have, in most cases, undergone some life experience that has opened them to the itinerant and sometimes mischievous back-and-forth that comes through realizing the potency of liminality.  It is no wonder that most of the authors contributing to this collection belong to the growing ranks of “transplanted’” and “hyphenated” people, each one in their own way, following a personal trajectory.

For me it was about validating my migratory path in scholarly behaviour. Adopting a transnational approach, at first without reflecting much on it and later on more consciously, enabled me to identify problems that were not particularly noticed, name them, and pursue them. What troubled me and touched me was all happening along with the fluctuation in social landscapes that were at the limits of the national; it was much better felt when one sees it from outside, in flux. I watched, from a distance, the emotionally draining disbanding of supranational political blocks in the aftermath of communism and the imploding dissolution of various doctrinally constructed multicultural “nations”. Cinema was one of the few contemporary art forms that was capable of showing the consequences of whatever was wrong with humankind, and of taking the concern to wider audiences, far beyond those immediately affected. The era that I feel I lived in was somehow not about the nation… All I was doing was choosing to follow my instinct.

Teaching transnationally, however, was also about recognizing the life trajectories and the generational positioning of the students. The people I see in the classroom today are increasingly resettled, mobile, conscious of migrations, and at ease with other cultures. They talk to friends from around the world on a daily basis, and learn how to be in a pluralistic environment, be it in the context of their games, or on Whatsapp and Viber, or on Facebook.

And then, it is about recognizing that teaching transnational cinema comes down to making several choices.

First, about making the choice to emancipate from the prescriptive national paradigm. It is a choice that involves overcoming fear and insecurity.

There is virtue in exploring national identities and studying film as it reflects a national discourse. But this is not the study of film, it is the study of national culture as seen through film, and to me this is a different discipline. Indeed, at many Universities film studies first sprang from (and still dwell in) the language departments that started introducing film in the curriculum as a device for the study of national traditions. In such places, the emergent transnationally slanted approach finds it tough to slot itself, as all those obstinate identities that do not fit and stay barred or marginalized are hard to integrate into the respected storyline. Still, many make the choice to emancipate from the national by changing the vantage point of the inquiry. There is no need to dispense of the nation; the emancipation may express itself in choosing to embrace and uphold a point of view where nations and borders exist yet function differently, not protectively to close off and keep one in, but loosely, to be broken through and superseded.

It is often a matter of self-esteem, of overcoming the simple fear of lacking proficiencies. One may have been trained in the national paradigm, one may have existing competences. One may not want to be challenged for not knowing full details about the unfamiliar cultures that one would venture into. Isn’t the “teacher” one who is supposed to not be an ignoramus? Thus, many stay with the safe bet of the national model and bear with its discomforts. It comes down to challenging the politics of academia, of subverting ingrained fields and embracing interdisciplinarity. Of feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

Second, contemporary cinema’s way of being is transnational – from how it is conceived to how it travels, from how it is made to how it is seen.  We can choose to look at films in the complexity of this context. It means to suspend the close scrutiny of film as text for the sake of bringing in awareness of the multiple other dimensions of film culture. One can choose to position the film transnationally by embracing the diverse and complex knowledge of the environment — how film is produced, how it circulates, how it is received in different places. In that, exploring the setting of global film piracy or the festival circuit, and showing how a fluctuating context redefines the way in which cinema is received is as much a part of the transnational film studies agenda as it is the scrutiny of a specific “transnational” film.

Third, teaching transnationally is a matter of political commitment. It comes down to making the choice to watching across borders, to continuously seeing films not from only one tradition, but from elsewhere as well, and mainly films that, in some way, comment or undermine the established narratives. Teaching and learning to watch across borders means preparedness to imagine and allow multiple points of view. This is not about the material itself, it is about the viewing position one takes from the outset.

For watching across borders to take place, it matters who are the teachers and how they hold themselves in the world politically. But it also matters who are the students and how open they can be to acknowledging the multi-dimensionality of human experience reflected in films. Watching across borders would mean, then, to opt to go beyond the confines of any fixed national identity and problematize it as a multi-faceted and ever-changing dynamic phenomenon. It would mean to leave behind entrenched tropes and evaluations and acknowledge that relativizing the premises can bring about new insights. It is often manifested in challenging and exposing oneself to alternative narratives of one’s own nation past and current conflicts, be it as an aggressor or as a victim.

And, there is one last choice to be made: to celebrate the transnational.

Academic work is at its most vital when life experience informs its emphases and concerns. Our lives have been such that we have come to seeing things across borders. We have made our choices. And so, we can own up to the sorrow and yet choose to bring the joy of migration to the classroom – because it is the atmosphere and the tonality of the pitch that the students will take away, not so much the factual commentary. It is a matter of emotional learning.

When we come to share our experiences, we can choose to keep going on about feeling exiled, excluded and foreign, or we can choose to celebrate the cosmopolitan versus the parochial and take pride in our position of privileged outsiders. Whilst acknowledging the diversity of possible attitudes, the teacher can choose to be a happy trespasser over an abject alien.

Indeed, these were the choices and the approach to teaching we tried to engage with at the program I set up at the University of St Andrews about a decade ago. There was no existing portfolio of degrees that needed adjusting or breaking into; it was possible to do it from the vantage point of a tabula rasa. It was possible to structure the general curriculum around certain principles, and go the same way in the individual course design and in the choice of topics for individual sessions. It was reflected in the way we developed the library collection, and in the viewing recommendations we were making, in and out of class, day in and day out. And it worked for a while. But it did not last long. As we moved on, some reverted to the comfort zone of close up textual analysis; others snuggled up in the national template. Keeping up the transnational still requires hard work, to nourish and sustain.


Notes on Contributor

Dina Iordanova is a Professor of Globla Cinema and Creative Culture at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She has published extensively on matters of transnational cinema and maintains that one of the most important things in film studies is to “watch across borders”.