National Cinema

NATIONAL CINEMA, POLITICAL ECONOMY, AND IDEOLOGY

National cinema frequently takes on the responsibility of representing the nation to its citizens for the purpose of communicating what constitutes national identity in the context of an overwhelming flow of cinematic images from a globally aggressive Hollywood industry. In 1993, a year in which all the major Hollywood distributors earned more theatrical revenues offshore than domestically, some prominent European filmmakers insisted that the new General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) treaty include national film-importation quotas. This was not the first time quotas have been implemented to protect fragile national film cultures from the most financially successful film producer on the planet. The United Kingdom, for instance, attempted to protect British and British empire filmmakers from Hollywood with the Cinematograph Films Acts of 1927, 1938, and 1948. One of the most extreme examples of Hollywood's monopolistic incursions into foreign markets is Canada, which the US industry views as part of its domestic market and where less than 2 percent of all screen time is given over to Canadian film. In the interests of nation building and maintaining national cultures, countries such as Canada (National Film Board of Canada, Telefilm Canada), Australia (Australian Film Development Corporation), Britain (National Film Finance Corporation), France (Centre nationale de la cinématographique), and Italy (National Association for the Cinema and Similar Industries) have created various state institutions to fund and produce national cinemas. This suggests that these states see cinema beyond its commodity value, as, after Fredric Jameson, a socially symbolic act where "the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal 'solutions' to unresolvable social contradictions" ( The Political Unconscious , p. 79).

The idea that Hollywood is somehow alien to the film cultures of most nations is troubled, however, by a number of prominent film studies scholars such as Thomas Elsaesser, Stephen Crofts, and Andrew Higson. Elsaesser argues that Hollywood is a major component of most national film cultures where audience expectations shaped largely by Hollywood are exploited by domestic producers. Many national cinemas translate Hollywood genres into their own national contexts, or, as Tom O'Regan writes, "indigenize" them (p. 1). Perhaps the most obvious and well-known examples of indigenizing genres are the Italian "spaghetti" westerns of Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci starring Clint Eastwood. Canadian and Australian directors have also adapted the western to narrativize national cultural materials in The Grey Fox (1982, Canada) and Road to Saddle River (1993, Canada) and, more famously, Crocodile Dundee (1986, Australia). Another highly successful Australian indigenization of Hollywood genre is the Mad Max series (1979, 1981, 1985, Australia) and its reconfiguration of the road movie in a postapocalyptic antipodean context.

One of the more critically and commercially successful practitioners of genre indigenization is France's Luc Besson. Besson first ventured into Hollywood territory with Nikita (1990), a made-in-France variation on the American action film. Following the international box-office success of Nikita , Besson took on the American film industry by shooting The Professional (1994), a French version of the Hollywood gangster drama, in English on location in New York, with French lead Jean Reno. The film went on to gross more than $19 million in the US market alone. Besson's subsequent film, The Fifth Element (1997), was a $90 million science-fiction epic starring Hollywood actor Bruce Willis. With the involvement of US distributors Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Entertainment, The Fifth Element opened widely, on 2,500 American screens in its first weekend of release. These shifts in setting from Paris to New York, to a futuristic New York and, finally, to outer space, beg the question of whether or not the term "French national cinema" is a useful or adequate descriptor to apply to these two films, for in what ways may they be said to represent the nation space of France?

A similar problem is raised by the work of Australian director Baz Luhrmann, who played with American genre and capital when his production company coproduced Moulin Rouge (2001) with Twentieth Century Fox. Although the film is shot on a Sydney soundstage with Australian lead Nicole Kidman and a largely Australian production team, the film is not set in the nation space of Australia, but the mythical, digitally generated space of fin de siècle Paris as seen through the lens of the Hollywood musical as reimagined by an Australian auteur. An Australia/United States co-production, Moulin Rouge ruptures the "stable set of meanings" or codes that Higson associates with conventional understandings of the term "national cinema" (Higson, 1989, p. 37). Moulin Rouge , not unlike Besson's The Professional and The Fifth Element in their ambiguous relationship to France, steps outside of an easily recognizable Australian nation space. Commenting on what he views as the limiting imagination of "national cinema," Higson argues that "when describing a national cinema, there is a tendency to focus only on those films that narrate the nation as just this finite, limited space, inhabited by a tightly coherent and unified community closed off to other identities besides national identity" (Higson, 2000, p. 66). Besson's films and Moulin Rouge are what Higson would term "transnational" on the bases of their production and distribution; but just as importantly for Higson, their variant receptions globally as these are inflected by cultural context (pp. 68–69). This difference in cultural context exists not only outside of nations, but also within them.