Transnational Cinemas, 2015 Vol. 6, No. 1, 84–96, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20403526.2014.981036
REVIEW ARTICLE Review of Transnational Cinema/Media Studies conference NYUAD Institute, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 11–13 May 2014 Dale Hudson*
Downloaded by [New York University] at 14:30 25 May 2015
Film and New Media, New York University, Abu Dhabi, UAE
I. Convened by Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, the Transnational Cinema/Media Studies conference at the New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Institute brought together more than 30 scholars to think through ‘the transnational’ as a method of cultural and social analysis. The conference’s goal was to ‘multiply the perspectives, the viewing stations, the cross-cultural and vantage points from which transnational cinema/media studies might be viewed’, thereby engaging a ‘collaborative conversation between neighbouring and distant fields’. Topics ranged from philosophical reflections on the term ‘transnational’ to theoretical reflections on the role of pedagogy in film schools; from the role of commercial film festivals in sustaining colonial prejudices to emerging political economies in allowing for an explosion of Turkish soap operas and a paucity of Barbadian films; from what can be learned from the transnational circuits of indigenous media to the Nollywood model of rejecting the tripartite division of past generations into First, Second and Third Cinemas. The conference thus explored terms of comparison that allowed participants ‘to reflect on the basic terms and methodologies of the debate, and on the tacit cultural and discursive grids undergirding the discussion’. Broadly speaking, the transnational ‘turn’ in critical theory/philosophy extends earlier turns – feminist, postcolonial, visual – as a means of recovering histories that have previously been overlooked and rethinking ones that might have been overstated. The conference expanded the critical examinations of the field in anthologies published over the last decade that theorize national, regional, world and global cinemas and otherwise ‘de-westernize’ film studies and some of its key terms, such as auteur, genre and star.1 More significantly, the conference offered an occasion to reconsider broader frameworks, such as the division of the world into a series of purportedly equivalent nationstates, that have determined categories used in film studies, evident in ‘film history’ or ‘film theory and criticism’, as they have conventionally been written. By reframing questions about art and culture through a transnational lens, practices that have often been marginalized, ignored or invalidated come into view, as do film studies’ potential complicities with what Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira (2014) have termed ‘the imperial university’.2 The conference looked to the transnational neither as a purely emancipatory concept nor as an oppressive ‘new universalism’ but rather as a productive knot to untangle. By *Email:
[email protected] © 2014 Taylor & Francis
Downloaded by [New York University] at 14:30 25 May 2015
Transnational Cinemas
Figure 1. Institute.
85
Delegation of conference participants at opening panel. Photo courtesy the NYUAD
disentangling threads of knowledge, new epistemological connections become possible. One thread examined implications of intellectual movements away from area-studies models towards transnational ones in response to post-World Trade Organization (WTO) globalization. Another thread concerned needs to pursue further anti-colonial and postcolonial critique of the nation-state-based concept of ‘national cinemas’, particularly where difference (e.g., gender, religion, sexuality, race/ethnicity, language) exceeds dominant models scaled from the particular example of European countries before mass immigration from the former colonies diversified their populations and cultures. Still another thread took up the question of how and whether terms like ‘cosmopolitan’ can be applied in a transnational context. In addition to the academic conference, there was a public panel, where curators, programmers and filmmakers addressed the conference themes and responded to questions. The conference’s organization departed from the convention of adopting nation-state and area-studies divisions of scholarship into states or regions: African, Chinese, East European, French, German, Indian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin American, Middle Eastern, North American, Russian and so forth. A transnational lens allows for understanding ways in which national and regional cinemas were partly shaped by transnational histories. In the case of French national cinema, for example, the arrival of Russian émigrés helped to establish a film industry during the 1910s and the implementation of unfair trade policies by the United States resulted in the destabilization of the industry during the 1940s. Outside the narrowly defined space of film history, France’s colonial empire helped finance the arts and culture, so that French film can at times scarcely be called ‘national’ even when it was nationalist. Comparably, critical area studies has argued that regional divisions often proscribe affiliations and networks where they were either not present or have been interrupted by external agents to the point of antagonism. Foreign impositions of regional identities silenced and erased long histories of interconnections and interdependences that predate European and East Asian
Downloaded by [New York University] at 14:30 25 May 2015
86
D. Hudson
Figure 2. Public panel on ‘The Cinema, the Middle East, and the Transnational’. Photo courtesy the NYUAD Institute.
colonialism. The very location of the conference on the Arabian Peninsula evoked ties with modern East Africa, Iran, South Asia, Southeast Asia and predominantly Arab spaces, such as the Levant, Mashriq and Maghreb. A transnational lens complicates the notion of national cinema by focusing attention on how film studies often assumes the nation-state as a valid and desirable form of social and political organization with little attention to ‘subnational’ perspectives that are lost within the slippages between nation and state. At the height of faith in the nation-state, film studies, along with international film festivals and film distributors, celebrated difference, though it was largely reduced to non-minoritized (middle-class, male, non-racialized, secular) perspectives that could be seen by audiences as nationally specific yet ‘universally humanist’. Filmmakers were imagined as part of an international community that functioned like the United Nations: some countries had veto power, whereas others were deprived of the power to advocate for small compensations for centuries of exploitation and dispossession. For film studies, the problem of not questioning the nation-state as natural or inevitable resulted in conceptualizations of national, regional and world cinema that were often extensions of forms of cinephilia from the 1960s and 1970s. Such canons often ignored theoretical and historiographical debates of the time in favour of connoisseurship, film appreciation and hagiographies that excluded even white women. Like the terms ‘world history’, ‘world literature’ and ‘world music’, the term ‘world cinema’ is fraught with contradictions. It has become a cliché to mention that world cinema reinforces Hollywood hegemony or exceptionalism and reduces non-Hollywood films to a ragbag of alternative practices, organized according to national or regional ‘traditions’. Scholarship in the field has corrected such understanding by pointing out that Hollywood’s global recognition as a brand may have been less a result of ‘American ingenuity’ or ‘universal appeal’ – fantasies once championed ad nauseam by industry lobbyists Will Hayes and Jack Valenti – than a result of unfair business practices
Downloaded by [New York University] at 14:30 25 May 2015
Transnational Cinemas
87
amplified under unfair international policies. Work on the political economy of global Hollywood uncovers ways in which private industry benefits from public support and monies, so that the ‘free market’ comes to signify a highly protected ‘home market’ of the United States and Canada (Miller et al. 2001). Adjusting from a Hollywood-centric model to a transnational lens, the myth that the world ‘loves’ Hollywood because its films are ‘exceptional’ is challenged by historical accounts of audiences in South Asia, especially India, dismissing Hollywood films as dull and unimaginative during the 1950s (Thomas 1985). More recently, Nigerian video-films have demonstrated that Hollywood’s world-class production values and professional standards are less important to audiences than stories that are locally relevant and meaningful. Nollywood now vies with Kollywood as the world’s largest producer of films, suggesting that more people love cinemas other than Hollywood. In India alone, there are also the Bollywood and Tollywood industries, so conceptions of Hollywood as exceptional within world cinema seem arbitrary and perhaps nostalgic.3 Although such colloquial names can reinscribe Hollywood as a global model by casting them as derivatives of its brand, they reflect a very different moment. Rather than being labelled by belittling epithets like ‘Hollywood on the Nile’ or ‘Hollywood of the East’ devised in Los Angeles or New York, these industries and the fans of their films consciously rework Hollywood’s brand name – and not necessarily its industrial structure or narrative conventions and styles – in a transnational practice that evokes the propensity in 1930s Shanghai and 1940s Calcutta to name ‘everything in sight’ modern, which Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar describes as ‘not unaware of its Western origins, its colonial designs, its capitalist logic, and its global reach’ but instead ‘exercising one of the few privileges that accrue the latecomer: license to play with form and refigure function according to the exigencies of the situation’ (Gaonkar 2001, 21).4 Bollywood, rather than Hollywood, is sometimes the source for the new colloquial name. Drawing upon Shohat and Stam’s (1994) work in ‘unthinking’ colonial habits of knowledge production, the conference grouped papers according to theoretical and historiographical approaches that unsettled thinking in terms of exceptional nation-states or regions composed of unexceptional nation-states. Panels explored the transnational as a method of analysis in relation to other methods, such as the national (rather than nationstatist-as-national), the postcolonial and the global. Subsequent panels examined the transnational as projection, an implicit contrast to Jean-Michel Frodon’s (1998) concept of ‘national projection’. Later panels examined the transnational in relation to the precarious space of the national under colonialism and occupation, to the role of film festivals and film schools, and digital media and distributed networks. The conference concluded by asking participants to de-provincialize the transnational. II. The conference’s first panel, ‘Between the National and the Transnational’, discussed the role of audiences, markets and exchanges in producing assumptions about ‘the national’ within transnational flows driven by capitalism. Inderpal Grewal examined neoliberalism by focusing on the example of protests against the Indian state’s indifference to rape, which had again recently dominated the news. For her, the current popularity of Sony Entertainment’s television series Crime Patrol (2003–2006, 2010–present) marks a very different moment than the popularity of the ‘angry young man’ films of the 1970s, such as Zanjeer (Mehra, 1973) and Deewaar (Chopra, 1975). Whereas Bollywood produced Amitabh Bachchan as one of its most memorable ‘five-year-plan
Downloaded by [New York University] at 14:30 25 May 2015
88
D. Hudson
heroes’, who challenged bureaucratic corruption, transnational media corporations like Sony tend to produce crime television that does not necessarily evoke the same sense of social responsibility. Crime Patrol and other series garner primarily male audiences, whose responses range from panic to pleasure. For Minoo Moallem, high and popular forms of art, rural and urban audiences, come together in carpets as a sign of Iranianness. Situated within the context of a pressure to look at ‘all things Persian’ after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the modernist gaze turned inward towards the Pahlavi dynasty; situated in a transnational context, the carpet becomes an object of orientalia, notably as a flying form of transportation in classical Hollywood’s orientalist fantasies. The value of carpet exceeds capitalist exchange value and moves beyond the scopic economies into tactile ones through memories of touch. Working within the nexus of world systems, world memory and worlds of cinema, David Martin-Jones asked whether transnational memories are negotiated through film. To propose an answer, he drew upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Enrique Dussel as a means of thinking about transnational histories operating according to different temporalities rather than the singular unifying events of a master history. The question of film’s relationship to history was extended in the second panel, ‘Between the Postcolonial and the Transnational’, which investigated movements of people that are partially determined by colonial encounters between the United States and Latin America, Europe and Africa, and Britain and India. Shohini Chaudhuri considered ways in which films encourage audiences to identify with foreign memories. She examined the role of ‘disappearing’ in recent Argentinian and Chilean cinema. The practice of making political opponents disappear can be linked historically to European colonial and US imperial control, and this is the topic of films such as Missing (Costa-Gavras, 1982), discussed by Chaudhuri. For her, recent films like Crónica de una fuga/Chronicle of an Escape (Caetano, 2006) and Nostalgia de la luz/Nostalgia for the Light (Guzmán, 2010) convey ways that film can remember the past through multiple frames. Sandra Ponzanesi examined a postcolonial Europe written from the South in which old migrations have merged with programmes of expulsion and austerity. By comparing the documentary Mare chiuso (Segre and Liberti, 2012) and narrative feature Terraferma (Crialese, 2011), she traced transnational affiliations between fishermen in southern Italy (il mezzogiorno) and refugees (i clandestini) from Africa as their experiences overlap. Sheetal Majithia considered the persistence of the postcolonial in transnational exchanges, suggesting that unevenness is apparent in contradictory understandings of secular and sacred due to their colonial origins. She argued that Hollywood films from The Darjeeling Limited (Anderson, 2007) and Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle, 2008) to Eat, Pray, Love (Murphy, 2010) and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Madden, 2011) overwhelmingly conflate Indian religious tradition with Hinduism, eclipsing South Asian Muslims and ignoring Hindutva (Hindu nationalism). Such representations collude with majoritarian and Hindu nationalist representations. By looking at Brick Lane (Gavron, 2007) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Nair, 2013), which engage the transnational complexities of South Asia’s Muslim communities from Pakistan and Bangladesh into the diasporas, Majithia examined the role of religion in ways that contradict Islamophobic essentialism. The third panel, ‘Mapping the Cinematic Transnational’, returned to meta-categories of comparison. Thomas Elsaesser questioned the notion that regional concepts could even define small contiguous places often uncritically accepted as meaningful, as in the concept of ‘European cinema’. He expanded his work (2005) on ‘double occupancies’
Downloaded by [New York University] at 14:30 25 May 2015
Transnational Cinemas
89
and ‘mutual interferences’, arguing that national cinema, auteur cinema and art cinema have given way to post-national cinema, creative labour and film festivals by examining what he defines as a self-exoticizing tendency within film festivals, Hollywood’s dependency on overseas audiences, and accumulations of cultural capital through online communities. Dudley Andrew’s paper compared the transnational flows of films from South Korea with ones from western and central Africa. His analysis of South Korean cinema drew upon Jungbong Choi’s (2012) concept of the ‘transnational-Korean cinematrix’. By looking at work by filmmakers like Abderrahmane Sissako and Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, alongside work from Nollywood, Andrew proposed a difference between the ‘cosmopolitan’ and the ‘transnational’. Such transnational comparisons reveal differences in the political economies of filmmaking. South Korea’s post-1992 globalization (segyehwa) policies differ from waves of structural adjustments demanded by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, along with cultural adjustments through the Francophonie, imposed upon African states.5 Seung-hoon Jeong proposed taxonomies of national, transnational and global for world cinema by applying concepts from Giorgio Agamben (bare life) and Julia Kristeva (the abject). He identified different audiences across a North–South axis (North Korea, northern China and Russia) and an East–West axis (Japan, southern China and Southeast Asia) to analyse the place of refugees from China and North Korea in South Korean cinema. Elsaesser’s comments on the role of film festivals anticipated comments by Viola Shafik at a public panel, titled ‘The Cinema, the Middle East, and the Transnational’, during which she described the exoticizing tendency by which international film festivals tend only to notice Arab, Iranian and Turkish films that deal with ‘hot topics’ such as terrorism, poverty, the oppression of women and religion. Non-violent and nonoppressive subjects are ostensibly considered unmarketable since foreign audiences are presumed to be more interested in violent and oppressive confrontations than in quotidian events in everyday life, which are ultimately not so different from family life at ‘home’. Shafik’s insights apply to awards shows, such as Hollywood’s foreign-language Oscar, which has only recognized Arab filmmaking when the filmmakers live and work ‘inside’ France or Israel and thus within predominantly European stylistic and cultural conventions. Comparably, producer Talal Al-Muhanna described the contemporary film scene in Kuwait, which during the 1970s saw the production of Khalid Al Siddiq’s Bas ya Bahar/Cruel Sea (1972) and Urs al-Zayn/The Wedding of Zein (1976), as well as contributed to Moustapha Akkad’s Al Risala/The Message (1977). By 2008, when he returned to Kuwait, he found a vibrant but informal filmmaking community that wanted to produce new films with local interest. Rasha Salti questioned a shared poetics for ‘Arab cinema’ in light of the infrequency with which Arab films other than commercial ones from Egypt or Lebanon are seen by Arab audiences. Historically, film schools in Rome and Moscow were places where Arab filmmakers trained and met one another. Salti described alternative art centres as sites where ideas often flow more freely between Arab and Persian video artists and writers during the 1980s than at many film festivals today. She noted the role of festivals, such as Festival Timitar Agadir in Morocco, along with the ones in Abu Dhabi, Doha and Dubai, as providing a site for such conversations. Richard Peña closed the panel by highlighting ways in which categories affect how we think, offering examples from his long career as programme director for the Film Society of Lincoln Center in the United States. Working with Salti, Peña described the complex questions that the two discussed when selecting films for ‘Lens on Syria: Thirty Years of Contemporary Cinema’, an exhibition that opened in May 2006 which included a screening of
Downloaded by [New York University] at 14:30 25 May 2015
90
D. Hudson
Egyptian filmmaker Tewfik Saleh’s Al-makhdu’un/The Dupes (1973), an adaptation of Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani’s 1962 novella Rijāl fīsh-Shams/Men in the Sun about Palestinian refugees of the Nakba attempting to migrate illegally into Kuwait, as well as the US première of Omar Amiralay’s Al-Hayat al-Yaomiyyah fi Qaryah Suriyyah/Everyday Life in a Syrian Village (1974), which remains banned in Syria. The two films alone describe some of the transnational contours of thinking about ‘Syrian film’. The public panel, thus, opened discussion to the complexities of transnational formulations such as ‘Arab cinema’ and ‘the Middle East’. The second day of the conference began with a panel on ‘National Cinema in Transnational Perspectives’, which offered insights into how filmmakers from Hong Kong, Brazil and Nigeria negotiate ‘nation’ through transnational financing and intellectual formations. Gina Marchetti examined Hong Kong women filmmakers, noting their negotiations of Chinese Marxist discourse, a variety of transnational Chinese and international feminist discourses, and European Enlightenment discourse, particularly cosmopolitanism despite its anti-feminist underpinnings, to make claims for the universal rights of migrants and refugees. Her paper generated discussion on ways in which feminisms situate themselves differently across histories, cultures and generations. Jaõa Luiz Viera discussed co-productions as one of the most visible indicators of postcolonial globalization in Latin American filmmaking and television. He examined O Sonho Bollywoodiano/Bollywood Dream (Seigner, 2010) in which three unemployed female actors from Brazil attempt to break into Bollywood as dancers. Despite the production company’s description of ‘contrast between the East and the West, the ancient and the contemporary values’, the film represents the first Indian-Brazilian co-production, suggesting how the emerging BRICS countries might alter the international film market.6 Jean-Paul Colleyn discussed the global networks at work in Nollywood, which stretch from Lagos and London to around the world. Nollywood films sell extremely well on DVD, which producers prefer since the format makes piracy more difficult than VHS or VCD. Nollywood’s global reach is evident in its penetration of broad and narrow casting platforms throughout the continent, whether South African-based M-Net’s Africa Magic, Africa Magic Yoruba and Africa Magic Hausa or YouTube channels where the films can be streamed for free. The ‘Projecting the Transnational’ panel opened with Lena Jayyusi’s paper, which situated notoriously racist Hollywood films within the context of US foreign policy as a way to identify different colonial modalities that operate transnationally. For her, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Spielberg, 1984) suggests western invasion and plunder; Rules of Engagement (Friedkin, 2000), a fixation of US foreign policy on the Middle East, where distinctions between civilians and combatants become mutable; and World War Z (Foster, 2013), a condition of exception in response to the fantasy of a sudden and total attack by flesh-eating zombies, which uses a ‘security suture’ to position US audiences to identify with Israelis who succumb to a zombie invasion after allowing Palestinian refugees to cross the ‘separation wall’ into occupied Jerusalem. Since Nollywood has radically redefined expectations about film since the 1990s, Onookome Okome argued that its films cannot be easily folded into a monolithic ‘Nigerian cinema’ according to master narratives of national cinemas adapted from models used by very small and relatively homogenous ‘nations’. He noted that Nollywood troubles the idea of the national by connecting transnationally even within ‘nation’. He traced tensions between national and transnational in three films – Living in Bondage (Rapu, 1992), Osuphia in London (Ogoro, 2003) and The Figurine (Afolayan, 2009) – that move from video-film with a local focus on morality, distributed via ‘wheel barrows
Downloaded by [New York University] at 14:30 25 May 2015
Transnational Cinemas
91
in the street’, to a theatrical film for international exhibition, resonating differently with different audiences. Shouleh Vatanabadi’s analysis of Turkish soap operas, now broadcast in more than 70 countries, opened discussion to heterogeneous responses to commercial media. Gümüș (2005–2007), for example, became a sensation in Arabicspeaking markets. Translated as Noor, the series was dubbed into Syrian dialect rather than classical Arabic (al-fusha), as is the custom for Arabic-language dubbing of telenovelas from México and Brazil. The social impact of Turkish soap operas from Greece and the Balkans down the Arabian Peninsula and over to the Maghreb is documented in Al-Jazeera’s Kismit: How Soap Operas Changed the World (Paschalidou, 2013), which opens with images of an Emirati woman walking through the courtyard of the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque near the conference venue. Edward Akintola Hubbard opened the next panel, ‘Uneven Transnationalities’, by considering two recent films from the anglophone Caribbean – the feature A Hand Full of Dirt (Watson, 2010) and the short Auntie (Harewood, 2013) – which he described as ‘anti-diasporic, anti-nationalist, and anti-globalist’. The former shows the transformation of a plantation into a tourist site; the latter, a family exposed to the vulnerabilities of neocolonial economics. For Hubbard, the films offer a critique both of the Caribbean as a region and the concept of diaspora. Whereas Hubbard’s paper examined the question of existence-as-resistance in relation to Barbados in its diaspora, Helga Tawil-Souri’s examined the question of Palestine’s existence in relation to Israel’s reversal of diaspora into nation. Using the expression ‘Tora Bora’ to describe moving around checkpoints rather than crossing a border, she described an approach to filmmaking adopted by immobile filmmakers that is impulsive, passionate and often characterized by relatively low production values. Tawil-Souri examined films such as Crossing Kalandia (Al Zobaidi, 2002), A Space Exodus (Sansour, 2009) and Omar (Abu-Assad, 2013). Much like the diasporic spaces described by Hubbard in Barbadian cinema, Tawil-Souri suggested that those in Israel/Palestine are confining but can also be cosmopolitan and pluralistic. Film becomes a place to collect identity, which is suspended and subverted, in a pan-de-territorialization. Arvind Rajagopal examined the historical connections between popular film, independence movements and realist forms of representation in South Asian visual culture, such as illustration on soap and dye packages. He identifies ‘secular realism’ as a retrospective form of knowledge to understand the past in a postsecular moment, specifically not a way of seeing the world as secular but of seeing the world as the state saw itself as secular. He examines the role of song in Jai Bhim Comrade (Patwardhan, 2012) about Dalits (disparagingly, ‘untouchables’) who celebrate the poetry and politics of Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the Dalit author of the Indian Constitution in 1947, and Vilas Ghogre, a leftist poet who hung himself in protest of the desecration of a Dalit colony in 1997, through song and performance. The panel ‘Transnational Circulations’ examined the roles of festivals and film schools. Nezar Andary considered the ‘burdens’ of Arab documentary, particularly those of defining ‘Arab’, exhibiting through film festivals, and responding to expectations about the so-called Arab Spring of 2011. To oppose the impulse to commodify political resistance into film festival fare, he looked to the work of Syrian documentarian Amiralay. His analysis looked to Patricia Zimmermann and John Hess’s ‘Transnational Documentary: A Manifesto’ (1997) as a landmark in thinking transnationally about documentary. Dina Iordanova discussed examples from the era of the British Empire when filmmakers from Thailand and Malaysia were brought to England. Her research recovers these filmmakers and challenges impressions that the history of European film festivals begins with the Venice Film Festival by recovering some of the explicitly colonial
Downloaded by [New York University] at 14:30 25 May 2015
92
D. Hudson
underpinnings of festivals as institutions. Taking up a topic rarely discussed in film studies, Zoe Graham examined the role of transnational and relational pedagogy in film schools, film training and the overlapping of these two modes in places where they were never distinct, as they tend to be in places across the North Atlantic. She traced aspects of relationality based on Paulo Freire’s model of education through the kind of filmmaking and instruction that emerged from Jean Rouch’s experience running documentary workshops in Mozambique in the late 1970s. Afterwards, Rouch was inspired to establish Ateliers Varan, which continues to run workshops across the globe. Graham’s research investigates transnational exchanges that move from the Instituto Nacional de Cinema in Mozambique and the Escuela de Cine y Televisión in Cuba to one of the most recent workshops by Ateliers Varan in Afghanistan. For the ‘Transnational Digitalia’ panel, Amalia Córdova presented a paper by Faye Ginsburg, who could not attend the conference in person, on indigenous media at the Australian Broadcasting Company. Neither sentimental nor overtly political, Redfern Now (2012–present) is the first television series produced with indigenous control and thus continues the unfinished business of decolonization in Ginsburg’s reading. Less optimistically, Shafik described disappointments with pan-Arabism and transnational Arab media, such as Al-Jazeera. Beginning with a clip from Férid Boughedir’s Caméra arabe (1987), she traced ways in which early scholarship often placed Egyptian popular cinema at the centre with all other Arab cinemas at the margins. Current debates, she suggested, have shifted with digital filmmaking, so that the GCC states have begun to assert an important presence in redefining Arab identity.7 For my paper, I examined a reworking of science fiction to convey everyday effects of an uneven and unequal transnational in digitization. Les Saignantes (Bekolo, 2005), John and Jane (Ahluwalia, 2005), Sleep Dealer (Rivera, 2008), Bedwin Hacker (El Fani, 2002) and various ‘interactive’ web-based media and locative media propose different meanings and accesses to understandings of globalization to reorient screen studies. Zhen Zhang opened the closing panel, ‘Deprovincializing the Transnational’, with a paper on the role of educational institutions in producing frameworks to think about film transnationally. Tracing a variety of institutionalizing categories for East Asian film and cultural studies – ‘Asian cinema’, ‘trans-Asian cinemas’, ‘inter-Asia cultural studies’ – she drew upon Kuan-Hsing Chen’s (2010) work to decolonize East Asian studies from Cold War paradigms. Armida de la Garza examined Bolívar soy yo!/Bolivar Is Me (Triana, 2002) to discuss the pan-nationalism that Bolívar proposed, and the film recontextualizes, as a kind of transnationalism from an alternative perspective. The film concerns an actor who performs the role of historical figure of Simón Bolívar in a soap opera but refuses to allow the producer to let the character die. The late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s policy of barter rather than trade as a means to avoid neoliberal networks suggests a contemporary variation of ‘performing Bolívar’. Unlike the commercially driven international film festivals in Europe, North America and East Asia, indigenous media festivals are explicitly politically conscious, as examined by Córdova. While commercial festivals reassert the primacy of singular auteurs, those at indigenous media festivals are community oriented, drawing upon traditions established in indigenous radio such as the writing of a manifesto. Unlike festivals awarding to ‘best’ filmmakers, actors and technicians, indigenous media festivals award social commitment and include ‘undocumented videos’ produced for the community alone. Finally, Awam Amkpa discussed efforts to create a nation in Nigeria from colonial structures of three administrative units for more than 250 ethnic groups, particularly after the civil war that followed the development of an oil export industry. Television, he argued,
Transnational Cinemas
93
provided grammars of visual storytelling that would later fold into Nollywood; moreover, television constructed audiences who developed a sense of belonging in the world. If forms of cultural citizenship were derived from literacy in the codes and conventions of Hindi and Hong Kong films, photography provided an outlet for individuals to express themselves in a defiance of a proscriptive national belonging, much like Nollywood evokes what Amkpa calls a ‘surrealistic signifying system’ that is very different from predominantly realist signifying systems in francophone African film that have not always consistently ‘produced’ African audiences in the sense of generating publics for the films.
Downloaded by [New York University] at 14:30 25 May 2015
III. Collectively, the panels revealed that ‘the transnational’ carries associations with both colonial and anti-colonial schemes. If acts of ‘benevolent’ colonialism imposed the ‘universal’ values of Shakespeare and Confucius, then the anti-colonial struggles often countered the dehumanization of colonial subjects by universalisms. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s concept of Third Cinema (1969) mobilized tri-continental affinities within the postcolonial condition for recently decolonized states in opposition to the postcolonial condition for the former colonizers that emerged in various ‘new waves’.8 Third Cinema also included perspectives of internally colonized indigenous nations living with semi-autonomy or no autonomy within postcolonies, evident in the Grupo Cine Liberación’s La hora de la hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), which offered a radically different notion of film that unequivocally rejected elitist notions of ‘cinema’ and ‘film as art’, which were seen as serving colonial exploitation. It decentred studios and auteurs as privileged ‘makers’ of meaning, thereby suggesting that it embodies a history that merits recovery as an anchoring point rather than as a supplement.9 Dialogues that took place during the 1960s and 1970s between filmmakers and intellectuals from Africa, Asia and Latin America – and also racially minoritized filmmakers living in the European settler colonies of Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand and the United States – allowed for sustained transnational discussions and debates on issues such as structural inequalities as they were being further entrenched and institutionalized through supranational organizations like the World Bank and to some extent the United Nations. In response to this transnational ‘from above’, a transnational ‘from below’ examined the potential for national-popular cultures to reclaim and reconstitute after the devastating effects of colonial policies imposed by the North Atlantic powers from the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) to the Monroe Doctrine (1823), the Berlin Conference (1884–1885) and comparable policies by East Asian colonial empires. Education was often a key site in such discussions. Solanas and Getino’s manifesto argued that everyone should be trained in filmmaking, so as to decolonize both the medium of film and the apparatus of cinema. Repression of and amnesia over such transnational modes have contributed to the structures developed for the institutionalization of film, particularly at universities in the North Atlantic where courses on film were offered through language, literature, anthropology and area-studies departments and programmes. The conference offered different insights into approaching film/media transnationally, so as to recalibrate the field’s theories and methodologies. Thinking transnationally helps clarify what it meant for past generations to think internationally. International auteurs were mostly European men, such as Jean Renoir and Roberto Rossellini, and eventually offered admission to ‘nonwestern’ men, such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Youssef Chahine, Kurosawa Akira, Ozu
Downloaded by [New York University] at 14:30 25 May 2015
94
D. Hudson
Yasujiro, Satjayit Ray and others. Over the past few decades, however, filmmakers like Hany Abu-Assad, Ang Lee, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Abdellatif Kechiche, Abbas Kiarostami, Guillermo del Toro and Wong Kar-wai have made Hollywood and European films that partly destabilize expectations of exotic national or regional cultures in favour of the banality of an everyday transnational. Some of these films make transnational critiques of the racial and religious stratifications that sustain the nation-state’s model of homogenous and self-contained cultures, much like previous generations of filmmakers who were not as eagerly embraced by festivals and distributors, such as Ritwik Ghatak, Ruy Guerra, Dariush Mehrju’i and Nelson Pereira dos Santos. Minoritized filmmakers, particularly women, contest the nation-state, evident in the work of South Asian diasporic filmmakers, such as Gurinder Chadha, Deepa Mehta and Mira Nair, who work between expectations for the complexity of social critique and the popularity of recognizable forms, styles and stars.10 Although they earn critical acclaim and mainstream distribution in Europe and North America, they are flattened into a ‘Bhanji Brigade’ (Dore 2014) rather than distinguished as singular auteurs. Thinking transnationally thus can also bring into focus festival and distributor complicity with neoliberal policies that undermine the work of grassroots struggles in anti-colonial, civil rights, women’s rights and environmentalist movements. The conference extended theoretical and historiographical inquiries initiated by such models. The conference looked to connections between conventional film studies and the role of education in consolidating power that Chatterjee and Maira describe, along with military and culture, as an outcome of the imperial university. In addition to refusing the priority of nation-state-based or area-studies-derived concepts, the papers at the conference refused to accept arbitrary distinctions by medium (e.g., film, video, television, videogames, new media) that tend to limit thinking in terms of production values and fixed categories that produce terms like ‘hybrid documentary fiction’ to reinforce the industrial frameworks of economies of scale and Taylorism, which still make their way into film school and even university curricula. The conference offered an urgently needed alternative to the ways in which film/media is institutionalized in higher education and academic scholarship. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
6. 7. 8. 9.
For example, see Ezra and Rowden (2006), Vitali and Willemen (2008), Ďurovičová and Newman (2010), Nagib, Perriam, and Dudrah (2012) and Bâ and Higbee (2012). ‘Intellectuals and scholarship’, they explain, ‘play an important role – directly or indirectly, willingly or unwittingly – in legitimizing American exceptionalism and rationalizing US expansionism and repression, domestically and globally’ (6–7). Kollywood is the colloquial name for the Tamil-language industry in the Kodambakkan district of Chennai; Tollywood, for the Telugu-language industry in Hyderabad. For a discussion of appropriation in this regard, see also Hudson and Zimmermann (2009, 138–139). For discussions of South Korean cinema in the context of globalization, see Shin and Stringer (2005). For discussions of western and central African cinema, see Diawara (1992) and Harrow (2013), for example. For discussions of Nollywood in a global context, see King and Okome (2013). BRICS refers to Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. For an analysis of the effect of the manifesto on film theory and criticism, see Stam (2000). Alternative aesthetics matched the revolutionary politics in modes of filmmaking that were transnationally and indigenously informed, such as Glauber Rocha’s ‘cinema of hunger’
Transnational Cinemas
95
(1965) and Julio García Espinosa’s ‘imperfect cinema’ (1969), which refused relationships of dependency in favour of ‘decolonizing the mind’. For responses to these manifestos, see Grant and Kuhn (2006), particularly essays by Julianne Burton-Carvajal and Teshome H. Gabriel. 10. See Desai (2003) and Majithia (in press).
Notes on contributor
Downloaded by [New York University] at 14:30 25 May 2015
Dale Hudson teaches Film and New Media Studies at NYU Abu Dhabi. His research examines film and new media through transnational and postcolonial frameworks, appearing in journals such as Afterimage, American Quarterly, Cinema Journal, French Cultural Studies, and Screen. He is co-author with Patricia R. Zimmermann of Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (in press).
References Bâ, Saër Maty, and Will Higbee, eds. 2012. De-westernizing Film Studies. London and New York: Routledge. Chatterjee, Piya, and Sunaina Maira. 2014. “Introduction: The Imperial University: Race, War, and the Nation-State.” In The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, edited by Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira, 1–50. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Chen, Kuan-Hsing. 2010. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Choi, Jungbong. 2012. “Introduction: On Transnational-Korean Cinematrix.” Transnational Cinema 3 (1): 3–18. Desai, Jigna. 2003. Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film. London and New York: Routledge. Diawara, Manthia. 1992. African Cinema: Politics and Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Dore, Shalini. 2014. “Gurinder Chadha to Be Honored at New York Indian Film Festival.” Variety, March 12. http://variety.com/2014/film/news/gurinder-chadha-to-be-honored-at-new-yorkindian-film-festival-1201130239/ Ďurovičová, Nataša, and Kathleen Newman, eds. 2010. World Cinema, Transnational Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2005. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Ezra, Elizabeth, and Terry Rowden, eds. 2006. Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Frodon, Jean-Michel. 1998. La Projection nationale: cinéma et nation. Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob. Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar. 2001. “On Alternative Modernities.” in Alternative Modernities, edited by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, 1–23. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. García Espinosa, Julio. 1969. “For an Imperfect Cinema.” Translated by Julianne Burton. In 25 Years of the New Latin American Cinema (1983), edited by Michael Chanan, 28–33. London: British Film Institute. Grant, Catherine, and Annette Kuhn, eds. 2006. Screening World Cinema: A Screen Reader. London: Routledge. Harrow, Kenneth W. 2013. Trash: African Cinema from Below. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Hudson, Dale, and Patricia R. Zimmermann. 2009. “Cinephilia, Technophilia, and Collaborative Remix Zones.” Screen 50 (1): 135–146. King, Matthias, and Onookome Okome, eds. 2013. Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimension of an African Video Film Industry. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Majithia Sheetal. in press. “Transnational Melodrama and the Aesthetics of ‘Failure’ in Deepa Mehta’s Earth.” Modern Drama 58 (1).
Downloaded by [New York University] at 14:30 25 May 2015
96
D. Hudson
Miller, Toby, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, and Richard Maxwell. 2001. Global Hollywood. London: British Film Institute. Nagib, Lúcia, Chris Perriam, and Rajinder Dudrah, eds. 2012. Theorizing World Cinema. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Rocha, Glauber. 1965. “Cinema of Hunger.” Translated by Burnes Hollyman and Randal Johnson In 25 Years of the New Latin American Cinema (1983), edited by Michael Chanan, 13–14. London: British Film Institute. Shin, Chi-Yun, and Julian Stringer, eds. 2005. New Korean Cinema. New York: New York University Press. Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, 1994. New York and London: Routledge. Solanas, Fernando, and Octavio Getino. 1969. “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences from the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World.” Translated by Julianne Burton and Michael Chanan. In 25 Years of the New Latin American Cinema (1983), edited by Michael Chanan, 17–28. London: British Film Institute. Stam, Robert. 2000. Film Theory: An Introduction. Malden: Blackwell. Thomas, Rosie. 1985. “Indian Cinema: Pleasure and Popularity: An Introduction.” Screen 26 (3–4): 116–131. Vitali, Valentina, and Paul Willemen, eds. 2008. Theorising National Cinema. London: British Film Institute. Zimmermann, Patricia R., and John Hess. 1997. “Transnational Documentary: A Manifesto.” Afterimage 24 (4): 10–14.
