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Reconceptualizing national cinema/s
Stephen Crofts
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Professor in the Humanities Division, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia
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To cite this article: Stephen Crofts (1993): Reconceptualizing national cinema/s, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 14:3,
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Quar. Rev.of Film & Video, Vol.14(3), pp. 49-67 ©1993 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH
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Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s
Stephen Crofts
PART I. INTRODUCTION
1992: quincentenary of Europe's invasion of the Americas, year of Europe's
anticipated economic union, year of fierce ethnic-religious conflicts in what were
Yugoslavia and the Soviet "Union," and the year of Afro-American outrage at its
abuse by a white American judicial system. A year, then, which exposes the
exploitation of indigenous peoples, the perceived importance of supra-national
trading blocs, the imposition of nationalisms on sub-national populations, and the
violence inflicted on such groups in the name of "national unity." As a postEnlightenment
organizer of populations, the nation has recently been seriously
frayed at its edges under the pressure of ethnic, religious, democratic and other
forms of dissent, in particular consequent upon the disintegration of Soviet
Communism and Pax Americana.
Analysis of national cinemas is the more urgent in the face of other major
changes which have recently affected world cinema: the global spread of corporate
capital, the consolidation of global markets, the speed and range of electronic
communications (Hebdige 1990:v-vi). This essay seeks to theorize the global range
of national cinemas in terms of the multiple politics of their production, distribution,
and reception, their textuality, their relations with the state and with multiculturalism.
These terms and their interactions constitute the basis of a project of
disaggregating the term "national cinema" (the "national" especially should perhaps
carry mental quotation marks throughout what follows). The essay limits
itself to the feature film, and historically goes back to 1945, focusing in particular
on recent years. This reconceptualization takes as axiomatic the issues set out by
Andrew Higson as requiring address in considering national cinemas: the range of
films in circulation within a nation-state, the range of sociologically specific
audiences for different types of film, and the range of discourses circulating about
film (1989:44-45), while recognizing that the second of these is amenable only to
micro-analyses inappropriate to a synoptic essay such as this.1
PART II: VARIETIES OF NATIONAL CINEMA PRODUCTION
Especially in the West, national cinema production is usually defined against
Hollywood. This extends to such a point that in Western discussions, Hollywood is
STEPHEN CROFTS is a Professor in the Humanities Division of Griffith University in Brisbane,Australia. His
Australian Cinema as National Cinema is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.
49
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50 S.Crofts
hardly ever spoken of as a national cinema, perhaps indicating its transnational
reach. That Hollywood has dominated most world film markets since as early as
1919is weUknown (Thompson 1985;Guback 1976;Sklar 1975).Whereas in 191490%
of films shown worldwide were French, by 1928, 85% were American (Moussinac
1967 [1925]:238). And for all the formal disinvestiture secured domestically by the
1948 Paramount Decree, transnationally Hollywood still operates effectively as a
vertically integrated business organization.
Throughout most film-viewing countries outside South and Southeast Asia,
Hollywood has successfully exported and naturalized its construction of the
cinema as fictional entertainment customarily requiring narrative closure and
assuming a strong individual—usually male—hero as the necessary agent of that
closure. In anglophone markets especially, Hollywood interests have often substantially
taken control of the distribution and exhibition arms of the domestic
industry. Elsaesser can thus comment: "Hollywood can hardly be conceived. . .as
totally other, since so much of any nation's film culture is implicitly 'Holly-
wood'"(1987:166).
In the context of such unequal cultural and economic exchange, most national
cinema producers have to operate in terms of an agenda set by Hollywood—
though, as indicated by the fourth variety of national cinema listed below, some
Asian cinemas significantly maintain their own terrain. The political, economic
and cultural regimes of different nation-states license some seven varieties of
"national cinema" sequenced in rough order of decreasing familiarity to the
present readership: 1) cinemas which differ from Hollywood, but do not compete
directly, by targeting a distinct, specialist market sector; 2) those which differ, do
not compete directly but do directly critique Hollywood; 3) European and Third
World entertainment cinemas which struggle against Hollywood with limited or
no success; 4) cinemas which ignore Hollywood, an accomplishment managed by
few; 5) anglophone cinemas which try to beat Hollywood at its own game; 6)
cinemas which work within a wholly state-controlled and often substantially statesubsidized
industry; and, 7) regional or national cinemas whose culture and/or
language take their distance from the nation-states which enclose them.
It should be noted at the outset that, as in most taxonomies, these categories are
highly permeable. Not only do individual films cross-breed from between different
groups, but a given national cinema, operating different production sectors, will
often straddle these groupings. Thus French cinema operates in the first and third
fields, with exceptional forays into the second, and Australian in the fifth and first
with yet rarer excursions into the second, while Indian produces in the fourth, the
first and the second. Moreover, the export of a given text may shift its category,
most commonly recycling films of the second and sixth groupings as the first, as art
cinema. In such cases, distribution and reception criteria supplant production and
textual criteria. Part Three below will amplify the frequently depoliticizing effects
of this shift.
A. European-Model Art Cinemas
This is, to most of the present readership, the best-known form of national
cinema. Indeed, it constitutes the limits of some accounts of national cinema which
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Reconceptualizing National Cinemals 51
collapse national cinema into the European art film flourishing in the 1960s and
1970s (Neale 1981). This model aims to differentiate itself textually from Hollywood,
to assert explicitly or implicitly an indigenous product, and to reach
domestic and export markets through those specialist distribution channels and
exhibition venues usually called "arthouse." Outside Europe, the model includes,
for example, the art cinema of India exemplified by Satyajit Ray, as well as the
Australian period film.
Insofar as the discourses supporting such a model of national cinema are
typically bourgeois-nationalist, they also subtend the European popular cinemas
considered below. Those of the former are more elitist and more targeted at export
markets for financial and cultural reasons. (This is not to say, of course, that
popular cinemas do not seek out foreign markets.) National pride and the assertion
at home and abroad of national cultural identity have been vital in arguing for art
cinemas. Central, too, have been arguments about national cultural and literary
traditions and quality as well as their consolidation and extension through a
national cinema; hence the frequent literary sources and tendencies in this European
model of national cinema (Elsaesser 1989:108,333).
Such arguments have issued in and maintained legislation for European cinemas
of quality as well as European popular cinemas. The most meaningful legislation
has been that for state subvention, directly via grants, loans, prizes and awards, or
indirectly through taxation (the state in the post-World War Twoperiod replaces the
private patronage which outside Russia substantially supported the art/avantgarde
cinema of the 1920s). State legislation has also been used to govern quotas
and tariffs on imported films. These various legislative and financial arrangements
allow for the establishment of what Elsaesser calls a "cultural mode of production"
(1989:41-3) as distinct from the industrial mode of Hollywood. Though it depends
on state subsidies—increasingly via television—this production mode is successful
because of a meshing, often developed over decades, between economic and
cultural interests in the country concerned. Such a mesh is less common in other
modes of national cinemas considered below. Significantly, as elucidated by Colin
Crisp, the French cinema—that most successfully nationalist of national cinemas—
became so in the post-1945 era by virtue of its cinema workers' vigorous campaign
against the post-Vichy influx of Hollywood films which obliged the government to
impose a quota on Hollywood imports as well as box-office taxes to subsidize
indigenous feature film production (forthcoming:Ch.2). A key variant affecting the
success of an art cinema is the cultural status of cinema relative to other artistic
practices in the country concerned. France rates cinema more highly than West
Germany, for instance, with Britain in between, and Australia, adopting a European
funding model, hovers near the bottom.
Textually, European-model art cinema has been typified by features such as the
psychologized characterization, narrational ambiguity and objective verisimilitude
noted by David Bordwell (1979 and 1985). And in defiance of claims that art
cinema died with Tarkovsky, such textual features survive, with the metaphysics
and the high-cultural address, in the work of Resnais, Rivette, Rohmer and
newcomers like Kieslowski and Greenaway. But Bordwell's schema is modified by
two factors. The supersession of early 1960s existentialism by later 1960s political
radicalism and subsequent apoliticisms is one, pursued later. The other is Hollywood's
development of its own art cinema. This has contributed to a blurring of
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52 S.Crofts
boundaries between specialist and entertainment market sectors in its own market
and abroad, and has weakened the assertions of independence made by other art
cinemas. The generic mixing of Hollywood from, say, the early 1960s has been
complicated by its interchange with European art cinema developments. Hollywood
has developed its own art cinema after and alongside the spaghetti Western,
Nouvelle Vague hommages to Hollywood genres and directors, Fassbinder's recasting
of Hollywood melodrama and gangster genres and the adoption by such
directors as Schlondorff, Hauff and Jodrell of Hollywood genres and modes of
character identification to deal with nationally specific, West German and Australian
issues. Penn, Altman, Schrader and Allen in the first wave all had their own
favorite European influences, while a later star such as Lynch arrives with a more
postmodernist pedigree, and Soderberg, Hartley and Stilman have more modest
projects. A principal upshot has been a blurring of national cinema differences.
Coupled with the aging market demographics of the European art film—the
babyboomers forsake the cinema for their families—this blurring leaves these
production sectors less able to differentiate their product from Hollywood's. Such
insecurity is compounded by substantial American successes at recent Cannes
festivals, long the preserve of European films.
While a politicized art cinema diverges from the metaphysical orientation of the
textual norms cited above, state subsidy does impose limitations. Elsaesser neatly
pinpoints the contradictions ensuing from state subsidy of a cultural mode of film
production: it encourages aesthetic difference from the dominant (Hollywood)
product, but discourages biting the hand that feeds it (1989:44). In the West
German instance, this tension explains the adoption of political allegory as a mode
of self-censorship, as variously seen in Artists at theTop oftheBigTop: Disoriented (as
regards state funding of film), The American Friend (American cultural influences in
West Germany) and Germany, Pale Mother (recent German history and feminist
readings of it). Left political films found their way through the liberal pluralist
interstices of such cultural funding arrangements: for example, the critical realism
of a Rosi or a Rossellini and the critical anti-realism of Kluge and Straub-Huillet.
Godard, in the heady affluent days of turn-of-the-70s New Leftism, constituted a
limit-case: on the basis of his cultural prestige as renowned art film director, he
persuaded four television stations to finance ultra-leftist films, only one of which
was then screened (Crofts 1972:37). Such explicit leftism partly borrows its discourses
from, and marks a border zone between a European art cinema and the
second mode of national cinema.
B. Third Cinema
1960s-1970s Third Cinema opposed the USA and Europe in its anti-imperialist
insistence on national liberation, and in its insistence on the development of
aesthetic models distinct from those of Hollywood and European art cinema. As
Getino and Solanas proclaimed in their famous 1969 manifesto, "Towards a Third
Cinema":
While, during the early history . . . of the cinema, it was possible to speak of a German, an
Italian or a Swedish cinema clearly differentiated from, and corresponding to, specific
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Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s 53
national characteristics, today such differences have disappeared. The borders were wiped
out along with the expansion of US imperialism and the film model that it imposed:
Hollywood movies . . . The first alternative to this type of cinema . . . arose with the socalled
"author's cinema" . . . the second cinema. This alternative signified a step forward
inasmuch as it demanded that the film-maker be free to express him/herself in non-standard
language . . .But such attempts have already reached, or are about to reach, the outer limits
of what the system permits . . . In our times it is hard to find a film within the field of
commercial cinema . . . in both the capitalist and socialist countries, that manages to avoid
the models of Hollywood pictures. (1969:20-21)
From the perspective of revolutionary, national liberation movements in Latin
American, African and Asian nations, such an identification of "first" with "second"
cinemas has an understandable basis in a critique of bourgeois individualism.
For the existentialist-influenced "universal" humanism of much 1960s art cinema
(canonically Bergman, Antonioni, Resnais) shares a Western individualism with
the achieving heroes of Hollywood who resolve plots within the global-capitalist
terms of a US world view.
Third Cinema has proven to be one of the more elastic signifiers in the cinematic
lexicon. Some writers have tried to homogenize the enoimously diverse range of
Third World film production under its rubric (see Burton 1985:6-10 and Willemen
1987:21-23 discussing Gabriel 1982), while others have sought to build on the 1960s
liberationist political moment of Getino and Solanas's manifesto, a moment extending
well into the 1980sin ex-Portuguese colonies in Africa. Insofar as Third Cinema
distinguishes itself politically and largely aesthetically from Hollywood and European
art cinema models, its history has been a fitful one. In its concern with "a
historically analytic yet culturally specific mode of cinematic discourse" (Willemen
1987:8), its radical edge distinguished it also from the bulk of Third World
production, primarily devoted to comedies, action genres, musicals and varieties of
melodrama/romance/titillation. Especially in the 1960s, such radicalism rendered
Third Cinema liable to ferocious censorship. More recently, Third Cinema abuts
and overlaps with art film's textual norms and, its militant underground audience
lost, seeks out art cinema's international distribution-exhibition channels. Names
such as those of Solanas, Mrinal Sen, Tahimik, Sembene and Cisse serve notice of
the ongoing importance of Third Cinema as a cinema of political and aesthetic
opposition.
It follows from its political oppositionality and Third World "national [cultural]
powerlessness" (Stam, 1991:227) that funding for such cinema is highly unreliable.
In the instance of films from impoverished, black African one-party states with few
cinemas and minimal film culture, film subsidy is easier found in France, in
Switzerland, or from the UK's Channel 4 and BBC2. Such production conditions
give Third Cinema a more urgent intensity than the political allegories of West
German cinema and raise vital questions about the cultural role played by First
World financing of Third World cinemas. Rod Stoneman of Channel Four sounds
an appropriate warning note on international co-productions: "Vital though the
input of hard currency from European television may be, it is important that it
does not distort the direction of African cinema" (quoted in Leahy 1991:65).
Discourses on Third Cinema undo many First World notions of national cinema,
perhaps most strikingly the notion of national cultural sovereignty. As polemically
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54 S. Crofts
adopted by the 1986 Edinburgh Film Festival Special Event on the topic, Third
Cinema offered a particular reconceptualization of national cinema. It became a
means of disaggregating the congealed stolidity of a British film culture unwilling
to recognize in its midst a plethora of ethnic, gender, class and regional differences
(Pines and Willemen 1989). The Event extended the definition of Third Cinema to
take in, for instance, black British cinema. Another conceptual dividend of Third
Cinema is its decisive refutation of the easy Western assumption of the coincidence
of ethnic background and home. Pinochet's military dictatorship in Chile, for
example, produced a diasporic cinema. As Zuzana Pick notes: "The dispersal of
filmmakers [ . . . ] made problematic their identification within the Chilean
national and cultural formation" (1987:41). Similarly exiled have been such erstwhile
Fifth Generation Chinese filmmakers as Wu Tianming, Chen Kiage, Huang
Jianxin and Zhang Yimou, whose JuDou, co-produced with a Japanese company,
is still banned in China, probably for its allegorical resonances of the 1960s-1989
period as well as for the expressed concern that it is a "foreign expose" of a
"backward China." And within their "own" countries filmmakers such as Paradjanov
and Yilmaz Guney have been exiled and/or imprisoned. Such troublings of
First World homogenizing concepts of nation will be pursued later.
C. Third World and European Commercial Cinemas
Art cinema and Third Cinema, the two best known reactions to Hollywood, do
not exhaust the field. Both Europe and the Third World produce commercial
cinemas which compete, with varying degrees of success, with Hollywood product
in domestic markets. These cinemas, and all those considered henceforth, are
less well-known than the first two because they are less exported to the European
and anglophone film cultures which largely define the critical terms of national
cinemas.
Much Third World production, as distinct from Third Cinema, aims, like
European art cinema, to compete with Hollywood in indigenous markets—or, in
Africa, with Indian cinema too—but it differs from European art cinema in being
populist. This may be explained, in part, by lesser degrees of American cultural
influence (that is, there is more screen space) and by the fact that local cultural elites
outside Latin America are weaker and little concerned with cinema, thus encouraging
lesser art cinemas. (Third World cinema here excludes China and Russia,
considered later.)
European commercial cinema, however, should be treated here. It targets a
market sector somewhat distinct from European-model art cinema, and thus vies
more directly with Hollywood for box-office. Its most successful country has been
France, where until 1986 indigenous cinema won out over Hollywood at the local
box-office. French production, it might be noted, has partly dissolved the
industrial/cultural distinction by successfully promoting auteurswithin an industrial
context. Other European commercial/art cinemas such as Holland's and
Ireland's, based on small language communities, have a much more parlous
existence, with production levels often tailing off to zero per year and with few
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Reconceptualizing National Cinemals 55
exports. Typical genres of a European commercial cinema include the thriller,
comedy and, especially in the 1960s, soft-core.
Excluding the booming economies of East Asia, the dependent capitalist status
of most Third World countries, with stop-go economies and vulnerability to
military dictatorships with short cultural briefs, rarely provides the continuous
infrastructural support which nurtures indigenous cinemas. Economic dependency
and hesitant cultural commitment typically promote private over public
forms of investment which further weaken indigenous film production. John King
notes the common failure in Latin America to bite the bullet for import quotas:
[I]n general the state has been more successful in stimulating production than in altering
distribution and exhibition circuits. The transnational and local monopolies have strongly
resisted any measures to restrict the free entry of foreign films and have grudgingly obeyed,
or even ignored, laws which purport to guarantee screen time to national products . . . [T]he
logic of state investment was largely economic: to protect the profits of dominantly private
investors. There are fewer examples of what Thomas Elsaesser calls a "cultural mode of
production". (1990:248-9)
Throughout the Third World, with exceptions noted below, foreign (mainly
Hollywood) films dominate local screens. Even in Turkey, where "film production
was [ . . . ] neither dominated by foreign companies nor supported or tightly
controlled by the state [ . . . ] the market was still dominated by the four or five
hundred imported films (mostly Hollywood movies)" (Armes 1987:195-6).
Uruguay represents an extreme instance, insofar as it has a dynamic film culture
and almost no local production (King 1990:97). Yet that same film culture afforded
more admissions to Solanas's Tangos: El Exiliode Gardel than to Rambo(Solanas
1990:115). Slightly differently, Tunisia has since 1966 hosted the significant Carthage
Film Festival while having only some seventy film theaters, insufficient to
sustain regular local production. In francophone black Africa, only recently has the
French distribution duopoly been displaced, allowing the screening of more
African films on African screens (Armes 1987:212, 223).
Countries of the East Asian economic boom clearly differ. While Japan is
Hollywood's largest overseas market, in 1988 domestic product retained 49.7% of
box-office (Lent 1990:47), specializing largely in softcore and adolescent melodramas
(Yoichi 1990:110). And South Korea in the same year battled the MPEAA to
reduce Hollywood imports to roughly five per year (Lent 1990:122-3). As such, it
broaches the category of "Ignoring Hollywood."
D. Ignoring Hollywood
In Paul Willemen's gloss, "some countries (especially in Asia) have managed to
prevent Hollywood from destroying their local film industry" (1987:25).This option
is open only to nation-states with large domestic markets and/or effective trade
barriers, such as India and Hong Kong (there are some similarities between these
countries and totalitarian cinemas considered below). In these Asian countries,
culturally specific cinemas can arise and flourish. In Hong Kong, the national
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56 S.Crofts
cinema outsells Hollywood by a factor of four to one. And in India the national
cinema sells four times as many tickets per year as does Hollywood in the US. In
1988, a typical year, the Indian industry produced 773 films, 262 more than
Hollywood. That Indian features are produced in some 20 languages for local
consumption protects Indian films very ably from foreign competition (Lent
1991:230-1). And in the Hollywood vein—if less expansively—Bombay exports its
product to Indian communities worldwide, just as Hong Kong exports through
East Asia, dominating the Taiwan market, for instance, and to Chinatowns
throughout the Western world. Furthermore, Indian cinema long colonized Ceylon
(now Sri Lanka). All Sinhalese films prior to 1956 were made in South India, and
"local actors were decked out as Indian heroes and heroines who mouthed
Sinhalese" (Coorey and Jayatilaka 1974:303).
E. Imitating Hollywood
Some sectors of some national cinemas have sought to beat Hollywood at its own
game—and overwhelmingly failed. Such aspirations have emanated largely from
anglophone countries: Britain, Canada, Australia. In the memorable dictum of
British producer, Leon Clore, "If the United States spoke Spanish, we would have a
film industry" (quoted by Roddick 1985:5). State investment in the countries' film
industries has secured relatively stable production levels, but has not guaranteed a
culturally nationalist product. Anglophony has encouraged these nations to target
the West's largest, most lucrative—and well-protected—market, that of the US.But
these national cinemas have already had their indigenous cultural bases modified,
if not undercut, by the substantial inroads made into domestic distribution and
exhibition by Hollywood interests and product. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith's provocative
remarks on British cinema are yet more pertinent to Canada and Australia:
"British cinema is in the invidious position of having to compete with an American
cinema which, paradoxical as this may seem, is by now far more deeply rooted in
British cultural life than is the native product" (1985:152). Already weaker than
those of major European countries, the local film cultures of these anglophone
nations have been further weakened through the 1980s by the unequal economic
exchanges which have locked British, Canadian and Australian film production
increasingly into dependence on the US market through pre-sales and distribution
guarantees. For each success story like A FishCalled Wanda and Crocodile Dundee
which have drawn on some local cultural values, there have been hundreds of films
made in these lesser-player countries which, in trying to second-guess the desires
of the USmarket, have produced pallid imitations. An index of the price exacted for
the American/world distribution of Crocodile Dundee can be seen in the re-editing
required by Paramount, which quickened the narrative pace and made the film
look more like a wholesome family entertainment (Crofts 1990). A fantasy of a
foreign market can, then, exercise an inordinate influence over "national"
product.
The logic of such blithe bleaching-out of domestic cultural specificity can have
two further consequences: the country may become an offshore production base for
Hollywood—witness Britain, Canada, and Australia's branch of Warner Brothers'
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Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s 57
"Hollywood on the Gold Coast"—or Hollywood may exercise its longstanding
vampirism of foreign talent (Predal 1990). In the Australian case, all the major
name directors of the 1980s have now moved to Hollywood, most without returning
to Australia: the two George Millers, Peter Weir, Gillian Armstrong, Fred
Schepisi, Bruce Beresford, Phil Noyce, Carl Schultz, Simon Wincer. Four leading
Australian actors have now made the Hollywood grade: Mel Gibson, Judy Davis,
Bryan Brown, Colin Freils. Even that stalwart of Australian cultural nationalism,
playwright and scriptwriter David Williamson, has been writing a script in
Hollywood. Similarly Bangladeshi & Indian.
F. Totalitarian Cinemas
Sixthly, there is the national cinema of the totalitarian state: Fascist Germany and
Italy, Chinese cinema between 1949and the mid-1980s, and, of course, the Stalinist
regimes of the Soviet bloc. By far the predominant mode of the Communist brand
of such national cinemas has been socialist realism, which sought to convince
viewers of the virtues of the existing political order (Crofts 1976). Peripheral to this
core production has been the often political art cinema of Tarkovsky, Jancso,
Makaveyev, Wajda, various proponents of the Cuban and Czech New Waves, and
Chinese Fifth Generation cinema. Such peripheral production has been conditional
upon the liberalism or otherwise of national policies at the time, both as regards
cultural production and the cultural diplomacy of products exported. A further
aspect of any analysis of this mode of national cinema might seek to disentangle
cultural specificities from the homogenizing fictions of nationalism. As Chris Berry
notes in surveying Fifth Generation departures from the Han Chinese norm, there
are "56 races in the People's Republic" (Berry 1992:47). The undoubted popularity
of such Communist and also fascist cinemas might need to be mapped against the
discursive regimes and the range of other entertainment, within and outside the
home, offered by such nation-states.
G. Regional/Ethnic Cinemas
Given the historical recency of the disintegration of the nation-state and its
forcefully homogenizing discourses and political sanctions, it is not surprising
that ethnic and linguistic minorities have generally lacked the funds and infrastructure
to support regional cinemas or national cinemas distinct from the nation-states
which enclose them. Marvin D'Lugo has written of Catalan cinema as "something
like a national cinema" (1991:131), but perhaps the best-known regional cinema,
the Quebecois, has benefitted from cultural and political support strong enough to
propel its major name director, Denys Arcand, into international fame. Cinemas
such as the Welsh have not achieved such prominence nor, within settler societies,
have Aboriginal, Maori or Native American cinemas, nor indeed, within an
immigrant society, has Chicano cinema, though Afro-American cinema reaches
back to Oscar Micheaux and has broken into the mainstream with Spike Lee and
others.
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58 S. Crofts
PART III: MARKETING OPTIONS FOR NATIONAL CINEMAS
I separate out this topic from production to counter the still widespread tendency
of film histories and theories to gloss over what for almost all cinema
producers is a vital, if not the paramount factor in their calculations: namely,
markets. While some sectors of national cinema production do not seek export—
witness the German arbeiterfilm, most Chinese film and most "poor cinema"—a
great deal of national cinema is produced for export as well as domestic consumption.
National cinemas thus compete in export markets with each other and with
the big other of Hollywood.
A. Exporting National Cinemas
Whereas Hollywood markets itself through well-established transnational networks
and with relatively standardized market pitches of star, genre and production
values, the export operations of (other) national cinemas are far more hit-andmiss
affairs. Their three principal modes of marketing or product differentiation
are by the nation of production, with different national labels serving a sub-generic
function; by authorship; and for portions of art cinema, by less censored representations
of sexuality, especially in the Bardot days of the 1950s and 1960s, but still
now, as witness Almodovar. All three modes of differentiation were, and remain,
defined against Hollywood, promising varieties of authenticity and frisson which
Hollywood rarely offered. As Hollywood sets the terms of national cinemas' selfmarketing,
so too does its market power and pervasive ideology of entertainment
limit the circulation of national cinemas. In foreign, if not also in their domestic
markets, national cinemas are limited to specialist exhibition circuits traditionally
distinct from those of Hollywood product. These comprise arthouse cinemas—
themselves recently increasingly blurred with mainstream outlets—film festivals,
specialist television slots addressing middle- to high-brow viewers, and minority
video and laser-disc product, not to mention other, rarer exhibition modes such as
community, workplace and campus screenings.
Even for as grand a player as Hollywood, export markets can impose some
limitations. Roger Ebert reports that Hollywood's persisting reluctance to figure
non-white heroes is attributed within the business to the fact that export markets—
despite often being less white than the domestic one—lag behind the temper of
the US market (1990). So much the worse, then, for the export aspirations of
culturally specific national cinema product. Few states substantially underwrite
their export market operations. (The operations of, say, SovExportFilm until 1989
would repay detailed attention.) Distributor take-up of foreign film material for
arthouse circulation frequently excludes the culturally specific. Thus New German
Cinema is exported largely without Schroeter or Kluge, and Australian cinema
almost entirely without the social realist film. Such exclusions can enable the
resultant cultural constructions of the exporting country in terms of the sun-tinted
spectacles of armchair tourism. At film festivals, a major meeting point of national
cinema product and potential foreign buyers, the dominant film-critical discourse
is the depoliticizing one of an essentialist humanism ("the human condition")
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Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s 59
complemented by a tokenist culturalism ("very French") and an aestheticizing of
the culturally specific ("a poetic account of local life") (Boehringer and Crofts 1980).
With its emphasis on "originality" and "creativity," it is this discourse of art cinema
which can facilitate the representation of political film in the tamer terms of art
cinema (Crofts and Ros 1977:52-4). As indicated above in "Imitating Hollywood,"
national cinema producers often cautiously bank on their foreign markets' imputed
uninterest in the culturally specific. Without cross-cultural contextualization—a
broadly educational project—foreign distribution of national cinemas,
then, will tend to erase the culturally specific. One shrewd and successful
strategy has been the combination of cultural universals (family madness, artistic
ambition, rape) with specific local inflections effected by several Australian films
of the last few years—Sweetie, Shame,High Tideand Celia—which successfully
target European film and TV markets.
B. Reading Foreign National Cinemas
The foregoing comments on the cultural selectivity of distributors' choices of
films to import point to various possibilities of cross-cultural reception. Three
features will be noted here: blank incomprehension; misreadings, usually projected
appropriations; and the responses of producing countries to foreign praise.
Firstly, some local cultures can remain impervious to outside readings because
producer and consumer share few or no cultural knowledges. A striking instance is
the films made by the Navajo Indians with the anthropologists Sol Worth and John
Adair (Worth and Adair 1960). Unexposed to film and television, the Navajos'
innocence of close-ups gave non-indigenous American viewers no understanding
of the need to focus on, say, a saddle blanket in the middle distance of a long-shot,
while non-indigenous viewers' ignorance of the blanket's cultural significance gave
them no purchase on the scene's Navajo meaning. Other examples include the rich
cultural mythology of Latin American or Chinese films, religious emblems in
Algerian or Iranian Muslim cinema, dance customs in Indonesian cinema, the
cultural density of local reference in Kluge, or indeed the knowledge of African
colonial French which enables one to know that the title of the film, Chocolat, is
slang for both "black" and "screwing."
The second feature has been well characterized in Elsaesser's and Rentschler's
analyses of the US appropriation of the New German Cinema (Elsaesser 1980:80;
Rentschler 1982). Rentschler, for example, remarks on the tripartite process of US
reviewers' ignoring both the cultural specificities and the production processes of
the texts concerned, together with their corollary elevation of the author as prime
source of meaning. As I have noted elsewhere, Crocodile Dundeeoffered its US
viewers a new set on which to inscribe American frontier myths and to re-discover
an age of innocence (Crofts 1992).
Finally, the third feature can be illustrated by two samples of producing countries'
responses to foreign praise of their product. When a 1980 Cannes Prize for
Supporting Actor was awarded to Jack Thompson for his role in Breaker Morant, the
film was re-released, after an indifferent run in Australia, to unanimous critical
praise, and went on to scoop 11of 15 Australian Film Institute Awards that year
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60 S.Crofts
(Crofts 1980). RedSorghum's winning of the 1988Berlin Film Festival's Golden Bear
gave a fillip to its wide popularity with Chinese students and youth (Tian 1989).
Foreign constructions of nations will be crucially affected by national cinematic
representations—alongside those of cuisines, football teams and so on. In line
with Benedict Anderson, Philip Rosen has observed that "identifying the . . .
coherences [of] a 'national cinema' [and] of a nation . . . will always require
sensitivity to the countervailing, dispersive forces underlying them" (Rosen
1984:71). The nation can subsume into a fictional entity all manner of differences,
across axes of class, gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, cultural capital, religion,
and so on. Discourses of national cinema reception tend to effect similar homogenizations,
if only insofar as each film is seen as representative of the producing
nation (desolate sunburnt landscape as a prime marker of Australian-ness, melancholic
engagement with a traumatic history as index of German-ness, etc.). Such
reductive national-cultural symbolizations crowd out more complex articulations of
national identity. This tendency is challenged only at limit-case points where a
politicized cinema explores differences of class, gender, ethnicity, region, etc.,
within say, the "United" Kingdom.
PART IV: CONCLUSIONS
Several film-historiographical and film-theoretical conclusions can be developed
from the foregoing. In general, this essay seeks to enable a consideration of
national cinemas in non-First World terms. This firstly requires acknowledging a
wider range of national cinemas than is regularly treated under that rubric. Film
scholars' mental maps of world film production are often less than global. Even as
assiduously encyclopedic an historian as George Sadoul devotes more pages of his
Histoire du Cinema to the Brighton School and the beginnings of Pathe than he does
to the whole of Latin American cinema between 1900 and 1962 (1962: 43-64, 421-
37). As Edward Said magisterially demonstrates with reference to "Orientalism" as
academic discipline and world-view, so the world-views of different national film
cultures are substantially informed by their country's relations—military, economic,
diplomatic, cultural, ethnic—with other parts of the globe (1985). Thus
Sadoul, informed by French colonialism, knows more of African cinema than of
Latin American, while an American scholar, informed by the US imperium and
substantial Hispanic immigration, knows more of Latin American than African
cinema, and a British scholar, informed by European and American cultural
influences, may not see much outside that transatlantic axis. At the other end of the
East-West axis, a hybrid, non-Eurocentric film culture such as the Thai—even if it
does not as yet support substantial film scholarship—draws substantially on both
Hong Kong and Hollywood sources as well as local production. Annette Hamilton
thus remarks that "the average viewer in Thailand or Singapore has been exposed
to a much wider range of visual material in style, genre, and cultural code that is
the case for any 'average Western viewer'" (1992:91).
Such skewed world views will demonstrably influence canon formation in the
country concerned. And given that Third World production—for that is the prime
excluded category—is more plentiful than European and North American by a
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Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s 61
factor of more than 2to 1(Sadoul1962:530-1), Luis Bunuel's trenchant comments on
the canon of world literature could justly apply to that of world cinema:
It seems clear to me that without the enormous influence of the canon of American culture,
Steinbeck would bean unknown, aswould DosPassosand Hemingway. If they'd beenborn
in Paraguay orTurkey, no onewould ever haveread them, which suggests the alarming fact
that the greatness of awriter isin direct proportion to the power of his/her country. Galdos,
for instance, is often as remarkable as Dostoevski, but who outside Spain ever reads him?
(1984[1982]:222).
Topursue the question of canon formation in relation to national cinemas demands
examination not only of historically changing international relations of the kinds
set out above, and of the force of such institutions as SovExportFilm and the
European Film Development Office in cultural diplomacy, but also of the tastebrokering
functions of film festivals and film criticism.
The ongoing critical tendency to hypostatize the "national" of national cinema
must also be questioned in non-First World terms. Not only do regional and
diasporic cinema production challenge notions of national cinemas as would-be
autonomous cultural businesses. So, too, Hollywood's domination of world film
markets renders most national cinemas profoundly unstable market entities,
marginalized in most domestic and all export markets, and thus readily susceptible,
interalia,to projected appropriations of their indigenous cultural meanings.
Witness the discursive (re)constructions of national cinemas in the process of their
being exported. Ahead of India and Hong Kong, Hollywood remains the big(est)
other, the world's only film producer to have anything like transnational vertical
integration of its industry. Study of any national cinema should include distribution
and exhibition as well as production within the nation-state.
The nation-state itself has for a while been manifestly losing its sovereignty. It
has been pressured both by transnational forces—canonically American in economic
and cultural spheres, and Japanese in economic, and more recently, cultural
spheres—and simultaneously by the sub-national, sometimes called the local. The
multiculturalism, the cultural hybridity of the nation-state has increasingly to be
recognized. Recent instances of assertion of ethnicity, for instance, center on
linguistic rights and cultural protection: from the Spanish regular in public notices
in American cities to people from the Iberian Peninsula who describe themselves
as Basque or Catalan rather than Spanish; from the nationalism of Quebecois
cinema and Welsh programs for S4C in the UK to the substantial Greek video
markets throughout Australia, especially in Melbourne, the third largest Greek
city in the world. Minorities or majorities defined by political dissent, class,
ethnicity, gender, religion or region are the everyday stuff of many people's lives:
witness the five nations, three religions, four languages and two alphabets which
went to constitute the "nation" Yugoslavia. Recall, also, from a 1962 essay by Leroi
Jones (later Amira Baraka) called "'Black' is a Country": "[T]he Africans, Asians,
and Latin Americans who are news today because of their nationalism [ . . . ] are
exactly the examples the black man [sic] in this country should use in his struggle
for independence. (1968(1962]:84). Alongside such sub- and supra-national emphases,
however, it is vital to recognize the political significance in other contexts,
especially in developing countries, of rhetorics of nation and nationalism as means
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62 S.Crofts
of fighting for independence from imperialist powers. Recall here the dominant
genre of Vietnamese cinema, anti-imperialist propaganda.
Politics, in other words, is a matter of unequal distributions of power across axes
of nation as well as of class, gender, ethnicity, etc. The political engagements that
people do (or do not) make will vary with their social and political contexts, and
their readings of those contexts. In considering national cinemas, this implies the
importance of a politicalflexibilityable, in some contexts, to challenge the fictional
homogenizations of much discourse on national cinema, and in others to support
them. And it would be foolhardy to underestimate the continuing power of the
nation-state. To acknowledge these powers, by the same token, is not to disavow
the cultural hybridity of nation-states; nor to unconditionally promote national
identities over those of ethnicity, class, gender, religion, and the other axes of social
division which contribute to those identities; nor, finally, to buy into originary
fantasies of irrecoverable cultural roots, or into the unitary, teleological and usually
masculinist fantasies in which nationalisms display themselves. That said, the
struggle of many national cinemas has been one for cultural, if not also economic,
self-definition against Hollywood or Indian product.
While cultural specificity, then, is by no means defined exclusively by the
boundaries of that recent Western political construct, the nation-state, at certain
historical moments—often moments when nationalism connects closely with
genuinely populist movements, often nation-building moments (Hinde 1981)—
national developments can occasion specifically national filmic manifestations
which can claim a cultural authenticity or rootedness. Examples include some of
the best known cinema "movements." Italian Neo-Realism, Latin American Third
Cinema and Fifth Generation Chinese Cinema all arose on the crest of waves of
national-popular resurgence. The French Nouvelle Vague marked a national
intellectual-cultural recovery in the making since the late 1940s, whereas the events
of May 1968 were more nationally divisive, leaving a clear political imprint in the
works of Marker, Karmitz and Godard and Gorin markedly absent from the films
of Rohmer or Malle. New German Cinema drew much of its strength, as Elsaesser
has shown, from a 1960-1970s student audience and an allied concern to make
sense of the traumas of recent German history (1989). The Australian feature film
revival took off on a surge of cultural nationalism developing through the 1960s
(Crofts forthcoming). Interestingly, such cinema "movements" occupy a key position
in convefttional histories of world cinema, whose historiography is not only
nationalist but also elitist in its search for the "best" films, themselves often the
product of such vital politico-cultural moments. As such, these are the films most
frequently exported, and thus often occlude critical attention to films which may
well be more popular.
In the context of the relations of unequal economic and cultural exchange
obtaining between Hollywood and (other) national cinemas, the generation and/or
survival of indigenous genres is a gauge of the strength and dynamism of a
national cinema. Outstanding instances in non-Hollywood post-1945 cinema
would be the Hong Kong martial arts film, the French (stylish) thriller of Chabrol,
Beneix, and others, and in Britain, the Gothic horror film and the Ealing comedy.
Less stable indigenous genres include the Heimatfilm in West Germany and the
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Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s 63
period film and social-realist film in Australia. A vital research area concerns the
intersections between given genres and the national. A range of questions present
themselves. For example: Under what conditions do culturally specific genres
arise? How do imported (usually Hollywood) genres affect the generic range of a
given national production sector? Does Chinese production even have genres?
The production category which most obviously confounds any attempts at a neat
parcelling of "national" cinemas is of course the international co-production. This
is more likely than not—and regularly so at the upper end of the budget range—to
encourage the culturally bland. Nowell-Smith cites LastTango in Paris as one of "a
number of recent major films [that] have had no nationality in a meaningful sense
at all" (1985:154). And Rentschler develops a pointed comparison between The Tin
Drum's easy generalities and the more demanding cultural specificities of The
Patriot (1984:58-9).
Gloomy prognostications for a "Europudding" future of European co-production
may well be exaggerated. For alongside directors such as Annaud, Besson,
and Wenders, who, in Variety-speak are "a chosen few Euro helmers able to finesse
international pics" (Williams 1992:31), there are to be reckoned the strong successes
of such culturally specific product (co-produced or not) as Totole Hems and The
Commitments. While countries with smaller local markets will often use coproduction
agreements to recoup costs, in the lower and middle budget ranges this
need not necessarily work against culturally specific interests. Co-productions are
actively encouraged by the European Film Development Office's promotional
support for films financed from three or more member countries, and the Office
argues its respect for national cultural specificities (Schneider 1992). And international
co-productions do positively facilitate the treatment of such supra-national
ethnic/religious issues as are dealt with in Europa, Europa. The mesh, or conflict,
between economic and culturally specific interests will vary with the interests
concerned at a given point in time.
Latent in preceding sections of this essay have been some key theoretical
assumptions, and this is the third respect in which cinemas need to be thought of
less in First World terms. Gabriel and Stam have both critiqued the imperialist
donnees of center/periphery theories as applied to film theory (Gabriel 1986; Stam
1991)—though it has to be said that, provided multiple centers be recognized, such
theories are still crucial to understanding global economic Realpolitik.
Underpinning First World approaches to national cinemas is the master antinomy
of self/other (the linguistic sexism, as will be seen, is adopted advisedly). This
essay suggests the inappropriateness, in theorizing differences of nations and
national cinemas, of what Homi Bhabha calls the "exclusionary imperialist ideologies
of self and other" (1989:111). National cinematic self-definition, like national
self-definition, likes to pride itself on its distinctiveness, on its standing apart from
other(s). Such a transcendental concept of an ego repressing its other(s) urges
abandonment of the self/other model as an adequate means of thinking national
cinemas. For this dualist model authorizes only two political stances: imperial
aggression and defiant national chauvinism. It can account neither for Third
Cinema's move beyond what Solanas calls its "experimental" phase, nor for the
existence of such projects as those of "Imitating Hollywood." Still less can it make
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64 S. Crofts
sense of the hybridity of national cultures, including those of the notionally most
pristine imperial centers. Trinh T. Minh-ha well characterizes the fluid, labile,
hybrid nature of cultural identities:
[Difference in this context undermines opposition as well as separatism. Neither a claim for
special treatment, nor a return to an authentic core (the "unspoiled" Real Other), it
acknowledges in each of its moves, the coming together and drifting apart both within and
between identity/identities. What is at stake is not only the hegemony of Western cultures,
but also their identities as unified cultures; in other words, the realization that there is a
Third World in every First World, and vice-versa. The master is made to recognize that His
Culture is not as homogeneous, not as monolithic as He once believed it to be; He discovers,
often with much reluctance, that He is just an other among others. (1987:3)
With the recognition of ethnic-cultural hybridity, Bhabha notes, "the threat of
cultural difference is no longer a problem of other people. It becomes a question of
the otherness of the people-as-one." (1990:301).
Along these lines, Rey Chow has made explicit the feminization of the oriental
other which was implicit in Said (Chow 1991; Said 1985:6,309). And from her work
around YellowEarth it is possible to elaborate a kind of hierarchy of othering
processes which affect a Western reading of this film's Chinese 1930s female
peasant protagonist: Western over Chinese, male over female, urban over peasant,
present over past (1990:84). Such work offers sophisticated methodological counters
to the projected appropriateness of most taste-brokers of foreign cinemas, who
usually promote individual artistic creativity, and at a different discursive level, of
Fredric Jameson's blithe determination that "all third world texts are necessarily
. . . to be read as . . . national allegories," which elides not only individual
creativity but also almost all local cultural specificities (1986:69).
NOTES
1. As regards the advisability of placing film within the "mediascape" of audio-visual provision in given
countries, it should be said that the variety of such provision is enormous. While it may be relatively
straightforward to map the cinema/television/video nexus in Western Europe—television being
increasingly the primary producer and exhibitor of European-model art cinemas, with video as
supplementary to theatrical screenings of a range of types of other films—other countries operate
within quite different and less stable co-ordinates. Witness the rarity of broadcast television in poorer
Asian, Pacific, and African countries, or the flourishing videotheques in Pakistan, Taiwan, Burma,
Kampuchea and Vietnam which screen black market videos of films smuggled out of Thailand.
These and subsequent examples point to very considerable national "mediascape" variations, but the
scholarship which would support a fuller questioning here of the "cinema" in "national cinemas" is
both too massive and too dispersed for the present project. I would like to acknowledge Thomas
Elsaesser's raising of this issue when I presented an earlier version of this essay at his kind invitation
at the University of Amsterdam, 16 January 1992.
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