National Cinema

DIASPORIC CINEMAS

The myth of the nation as a homogeneous, bounded, unitary, static, and stable entity is exploded in what Rosen would term its antinational cinema or the cinema of its others as this can be located in queer cinema such as Canada's Zero Patience (1993), and diasporic cinema such as the United Kingdom's Khush (1991), a film that combines sexual difference from the British mainstream with the racial and cultural differences of the South Asian diaspora living in England. Cinema of the diaspora disrupts and re-visions the national cinema along lines of heterogeneity and plurality by representing those others to the nation who have been dispersed from their home-lands through economic migrancy and the legacies of colonial imperialism.

For example, Gurinder Chadha's documentary I'm British But … (1989) challenges essentialist notions of Britishness and its constituent elements—Englishness, Irishness, Scottishness, and Welshness—by tracking the lives of four Brits of Asian heritage living in the United Kingdom's four countries. When these people of color speak their identifications with the countries in which they live, they do so in the distinct dialects of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, thus inhabiting what had, historically, been over determined as a white linguistic space. Chadha's subsequent film Bhaji on the Beach (1993) further inhabits the symbolic order of British national space by inserting Indo-English women into Blackpool, Britain's archetypal holiday space, and in Bend It Like Beckham (2002) football (soccer), Britain's national game, historically a white patriarchal preserve, is played by a South Asian girl. Not unlike Khush or Zero Patience and their queering of the national, Bend It Like Beckham also grapples with sexual difference through both South Asian and white middle-class British responses to homosexuality. This example of a diversified British screen has been embraced by both British and international audiences, making it one of British cinema's most commercially successful films.

In Canada questions of belonging, racism, and inter-generational and cultural conflicts shape Mina Shum's exploration of the Chinese-Canadian community in Vancouver in Double Happiness (1994). Not unlike Khush , Richard Fung's tape Orientations (1984) challenges any notion of a homogeneous diaspora in his interviews with Asian lesbians and gay men living in Toronto. Srinivas Krishna's satirical Masala (1991) circles around the question of home for the diasporic Indo-Canadian community in the wake of the 1985 Air India bombing by exploring the failures of official multiculturalism and their ramifications for two families. Krishna's film challenges historically fossilized understandings of Canada as a white nation by combining a diverse range of cultural materials including Bombay cinema, music video, Hollywood cinema, Canadian hockey, and Canadian state apparatuses. Deepa Mehta complicates further these blurred lines of national cinema identity with Sam and Me (1991) and Bollywood/Hollywood (2002), films about racial and cultural difference set in multicultural Canada, as well as Canadian-produced films set in India and Pakistan. For example, Mehta charts the painful and violent birthing of India and Pakistan nations through her representation of the 1947 partition in Earth (1998), while Fire (1996) explores a claustrophobic, regulatory heterosexuality for-bidding sexual intimacy between two Hindu women. Mehta's queering of the Hindu nation, of "Mother India," resulted in Hindu fundamentalists setting fire to cinemas in India projecting the film. Production on the third film in Mehta's "elemental" trilogy, Water , was shut down in 2000 by Hindu extremists anxious about this Indo-Canadian's representation of the Indian nation.

National cinema, then, is clearly a multifaceted and conflicted object of study. National cinema refers to a group of films produced in a specific national territory, and also serves as a descriptor for the intellectual work of academics who attempt to read and write a critique of national cinema as a field of inquiry given that the nation is less unitary than heterogenous.