National Cinema

NATIONAL/TRANSNATIONAL CINEMAS: UNITED STATES, INDIA, HONG KONG

Cultural context frames an understanding of US cinema as both national and transnational. Within the United States, Hollywood produces a national cinema characterized by what Ulf Hedetoft, after Mette Hjort, describes as a thematic national "aboutness": films shot through with an American worldview (p. 281). The example par excellence of this US national cinema is, of course, the classical Hollywood western, a colonizing narrative of national becoming and belonging, a nation-building genre articulating the aggressive and perpetual US expansionism of Manifest Destiny that displaces Native Americans in films such as Stagecoach (1939), The Searchers (1956), and How the West Was Won (1962). While the Hollywood western can and has been received as a celebratory visualization of historical nation by a majority of Americans, it represents the genocidal destruction of indigenous nations for the American Indian.

Outside of the United States, Hollywood, as US transnational cinema, is a sign of US global expansion economically and ideologically. Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996), a film with a worldwide gross of more than $813 million, sees the convergence of the American national and the global through its transformation of July 4, a national holiday celebrating the birth of the American nation, into a global holiday marking a US-led world order of "liberation" from oppressive forces: this time, aliens from outer space. Such films, however, are translated into different viewing cultures by their audiences. Using the American, French, and Danish receptions of Steven Spielberg's patriotic epic Saving Private Ryan (1998) as case studies, Danish critic Ulf Hedetoft argues that "foreign" audiences reinterpret US national cinema from within their own cultural optic: "'Hollywood' (as well as other national cinemas of international reach) is constantly undergoing a (re)nationalization process, temporally and spatially, a process which does not stamp out the US flavor of these cinematic products, but which negotiates their transition into and assimilation by 'foreign' mental visions and normative understandings" (pp. 281–282).

US national/transnational cinema cannot be reduced to Hollywood product, however dominant it may be. It is also comprised of the kind of independent and regional filmmaking that often troubles dominant US understandings of gender, sexuality, race, class, and history, and that is celebrated by Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival. However, independent cinema is increasingly coopted by Hollywood, as was evidenced by the "mainstreaming" of independent producer Miramax in its 1993 sale to Disney. The potential cost of such mainstreaming of independents materialized in Disney's controversial refusal to distribute Miramax's Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Michael Moore's anti-Bush documentary, through its subsidiary Buena Vista. Hollywood itself is certainly not a bounded homogeneous entity, and has produced such nation-demythologizing films as The Parallax View (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), Missing (1982), and Good Night, and Good Luck (2005).

It is important to remember that US cinema is not the sole national cinema to extend its reach globally, to function transnationally. Indian cinema, principally Bollywood, has the second largest market share in global film distribution next to the United States. The Indian industry eclipses Hollywood in its staggering rate of production: in excess of 25,000 features since 1931. The notion of a pan-Indian national cinema centered in Bombay further complicates our understanding of the term "national cinema." Since the end of the 1980s, 90 percent of India's domestic film production has been in regional languages. In addition to the cinema of Bombay (vernacular Hindi/Urdu), Indian cinema is composed of at least eight regional cinemas: Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Assamese, Manipur, and Oriya.

India exports its cinema to global diasporic audiences, as well as taking sizeable market shares in West Africa, Egypt, Senegal, China, Russia, and other territories.

Hong Kong is in some ways a national cinema without a nation, a transnational cinema that has functioned historically as an export industry servicing a global Chinese diaspora and making successful incursions into the markets of Indonesia, Malaysia, the People's Republic of China, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. In 1993 Hong Kong was the world's third largest producer of films, surpassed only by India and the United States. Given its formation within a British colonial territory (1898–1927), Hong Kong and its cinema has long functioned as other to national Chinese cinemas produced by the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, offering conflicting visions of Chinese imagined communities.