36
THE CONCEPT OF NATIONAL
CINEMA
BY ANDREW HIGSON
This article is based
on a chapter from a
PhD thesis which I
am currently
preparing. I would
like to acknowledge
the work of Thomas
Elsacsser in enabling
me to develop some of
the arguments
advanced here.
Susan Barrowclough,
'Introduction: the
dilemmas of a national
cinema', in
Barrowclough, ed,
Jean-Pierre Lefebvre:
The Quebec
Connection, BFI
Dossier no 13,1981,
p3.
A L T H O U G H T H E T E R M 'national cinema'is often used to
describe simply the films produced within a particular nation state, this
is neither the only way in which the term has been used, nor is it, I want
to argue, the most appropriate way ofusing the term. This article is not,
however, intended as an examination of any historically concrete
national cinema. It is intended instead as an exploration of some of the
implications of using the term 'national' in discourse about cinema (the
film industry, film culture), moving towards an argument that the parameters
of a national cinema should be drawn at the site of consumption
as much as at the site of production of films; an argument, in other
words, that focuses on the activity of national audiences and the conditions
under which they make sense of and use the films they watch. In
so far as reference is made to historically specific national cinemas, most
of my examples will relate to British cinema (and, of course, Hollywood),
but I would hope that much ofwhat I have to say is generalisable
to other national cinemas - at least those of Western Europe - as well.'
The concept of national cinema has been appropriated in a variety of
ways, for a variety of reasons: there is not a single universally accepted
discourse of national cinema. In general terms, one can summarise these
various mobilisations of the concept as follows. First, there is the possibility
of defining national cinema in economic terms, establishing a conceptual
correspondence between the terms 'national cinema' and 'the
domestic film industry', and therefore being concerned with such
questions as: where are these films made, and by whom? Who owns and
controls the industrial infrastructures, the production companies, the
distributors and the exhibition circuits? Second, there is the possibility
of a text-based approach to national cinema. Here the key questions
become: what are these films about? Do they share a common style or
world view? What sort of projections of the national character do they
offer? To what extent are they engaged in 'exploring, questioning and
constructing a notion of nationhood in the films themselves and in the
consciousness of the viewer'?2
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Third, there is the possibility of an exhibition-led, or consumption- — ^ ^ ^ ~ ^ ^ ^ ~ 37
based, approach to national cinema. Here the major concern has always 3
'Popular culture',
been to do with the question of which films audiences are watching, and ^ ! J ^ £°2>
particularly the number of foreign, and usually American films which ^ ^ _ ^ _ _ _ ^ _ _
have high-profile- distribution within a particular nation state - a concern
which is generally formulated in terms of an anxiety about cultural
imperialism. Fourth, there is what may be called a-criticism-led
approach to national cinema, which tends to reduce national cinema to
the terms of a quality art cinema, a culturally worthy cinema steeped in
the high-cultural and/or modernist heritage of a particular nation state,
rather than one which appeals to the desires and fantasies of the popular
audiences.
In other words, very often the concept of national cinema is used prescriptively
rather than descriptively, citing what ought to be the national
cinema, rather than describing the actual cinematic experience of popular
audiences. As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith has noted, it has always been
something of a struggle to enable 'the recognition of popular forms as a
legitimate part of national cultural life'.3
If these are some of the ways in which the term national cinema has
been used, what are the processes by which, or what are the conditions
under which, a particular mode of film practice, or a specific range of
textual practices, or a particular set of industrial practices comes to be
named a national cinema? Indeed, what is involved in calling forth the
idea of a national anything, cultural or otherwise. In other words, what
is involved in positing the idea of nationhood or national identity?
To identify a national cinema is first of all to specify a coherence and a
unity; it is to proclaim a unique identity and a stable set of meanings.
The process of identification is thus invariably a hegemonising, mythologising
process, involving both the production and assignation of a
particular set of meanings, and the attempt to contain, or prevent the
potential proliferation of other meanings. At the same time, the concept
of a national cinema has almost invariably been mobilised as a strategy of
cultural (and economic) resistance; a means of asserting national autonomy
in the face of (usually) Hollywood's international domination.
The process of nationalist myth-making is not simply an insidious (or
celebratory) work of ideological production, but is also at the same time
a means of setting one body of images and values against another, which
will very often threaten to overwhelm the first. The search for a unique
and stable identity, the assertion of national specificity does then have
some meaning, some usefulness. It is not just an ideological sleight of
hand, although it must always also be recognised as'that. Histories of
national cinema can only therefore really be understood as histories of
crisis and conflict, of resistance and negotiation. But also, in another
way, they are histories of a business seeking a secure footing in the
market-place, enabling the maximisation of an industry's profits while
at the same time bolstering a nation's cultural standing. At this level, the
politics of national cinema can be reduced to a marketing strategy, an
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38
'Chronicle of a death
retold: hyper, retro or
counter-cinema',.
Monthly Film Bulletin,
vol54.no 641, June
1987, p 167.
New German Cinema:
A History, London,
BFI/Macmillan, 1989,
pp 6-7.
6
'Narrating the
nation', Times
Literary Supplement,
June 13,1985, p 659;
see also Benedict
Anderson, Imagined
Communities:
re/lections on the origin
and spread of
nationalism, London,
Verso, 1983.
attempt to market the diverse as, in fact, offering a coherent and singular
experience. As Thomas Elsaesser has suggested, 'internationally,
national cinemas used to have a generic function: a French, Italian or a
Swedish film sets different horizons of expectation for the general
audience-a prerequisite for marketing purposes',4
and it is this
attempt to establish a generic narrative image, a particular horizon of
expectation, which is at stake. "
There are perhaps two central methods, conceptually, of establishing
or identifying the imaginary coherence, the specificity, of a national
cinema. First, there is the method of comparing and contrasting one
cinema to another, thereby establishing varying degrees of otherness.
Second, there is what might be termed a more inward-looking process,
exploring the cinema of a nation in relation to other already existing
economies and cultures of that nation state.
The first of these means of defining a national cinema is premised
upon the semiotic principle of the production of meaning and identity
through difference. The task is to try to establish the identity of one
national cinema by its relationship to and differentiation from other
national cinemas: British cinema is what it is by virtue of what it is not American
cinema, or French cinema, or German cinema, etc... Elsaesser
again: 'Other countries try to maintain themselves on a terrain staked
out by the competition. West Germany is one example, but the implications
affect all developed countries whose sense of cultural identity is
based on a need to maintain markers - and markets - of difference vis-avis
the products of the international entertainment business.'5
To some
extent, then, the process of defining a national cinema, and thereby
establishing some sort ofunique and self-contained identity, takes meaning
in the context of a conceptual play of differences and identities. And,
as Benedict Anderson has argued, 'nations... cannot be imagined
except in the midst of an irremediable plurality of other nations'.6
Within this discourse cinema itself is almost taken for granted, and the
task becomes one of differentiating between a variety of apparently
nationally constituted modes of cinematic practice and filmically produced
signs and meanings. Such an operation becomes increasingly
problematic as cinema develops in an economy characterised by the
international ownership and circulation of images and sounds. It is
therefore necessary to examine the overdetermination of Hollywood in
the international arena. By Hollywood, I mean the international institutionalisation
of certain standards and values of cinema, in terms of both
audience expectations, professional ideologies and practices and the
establishment of infrastructures of production, distribution, exhibition,
and marketing, to accommodate, regulate and reproduce these standards
and values. While Hollywood's classical period and its studio system
may have disappeared, whatever the prophecies about the end of cinema
in the late 1970s and early 1980s, cinema - and Hollywood - are, in the
late 1980s, still very much alive and key components in the international
mass entertainment business. This is the era of the multiplex, the pack-
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age deal, the blockbuster, but also the revival of genre cinema and the
serial film, even if the site and system of delivery are no longer primarily
theatrical.
Hollywood never functions as simply one term within a system of
equally weighted differences. Hollywood is not only the most internationally
powerful cinema - it has also, of course, for many years been
an integral and naturalised part of the national culture, or the popular
imagination, of most countries in which cinema is an established entertainment
form. In other words, Hollywood has become one of those cultural
traditions which feed into the so-called national cinemas of, for
instance, the western European nations. 'Hollywood can hardly be conceived
as totally other, since so much of any nation's film culture is
implicitly "Hollywood"'.7
Being both a naturalised part of national
culture, and also, visibly different, even exotic,8
Hollywood thus
functions as a doubled mode of popular fantasy, hence its propensity to
be dismissed as escapism.
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith has attempted to account for the appeal of
American films in the British market as follows - and his account would
seem at least to be partially applicable to other national cinemas as well:
The hidden history of cinema in British culture, and in popular culture in
particular, has been the history ofAmericanfilms popular with the British
public. The strength ofAmerican cinema was neverjust economic [and]
the basic reason for Hollywood's dominance was artistic and cultural. The
American cinema set out in thefirst place to bepopular in America where it
served an extremely diverse and largely immigrant public. What made it
popular at home also helped make itpopular abroad. The ideology ofAmerican
cinema has tended to befar more democratic than that of the cinema of
other countries. This inpart reflects the actualopenness ofAmerican society,
but it is above alla rhetoricalstrategy to convince the audiences of the virtues
and pleasures of being American. Translated into the export arena, this
meant a projection ofAmerica as intensely - if distantly - appealing. When
matched against American films of the same period, their British counterparts
come across all too often as restrictive and stifling, subservient to
middle class artistic models and to middle and upper-class values.'
At times, Nowell-Smith's claims seem overstated.10
To suggest, for
instance, that 'British cinema... has never been truly popular in
Britain'" is to ignore the box-office success over the years of numerous
British stars, films, genres and cycles of films. And to argue in terms ofa
generalised, monolithic 'British public' is to ignore class, race, gender
and regional differences. Even so, Nowell-Smith's revaluation of American
films in terms of the appeal of apparently democratic aspirations
seems useful. For a start, it displaces the idea that American box-office
success in foreign markets is due solely to manipulative marketing and
aggressive economic control. Furthermore, it challenges the conventional
attacks, both conservative and radical, on American culture by
noting the way in which its integration into the British cultural formElseasser,
'Chronicle
ofadeathretold',pl66.
8
See Nowell-Smith,
Neza Formations,^
cit,p81.
'But do we need it?', in
Martin Auty and Nick
Roddick, eds, British
Cinema NOVJ, London,
Bn.1985.pl52. For
other writers advancing
a similar argument,
see also Paul Swann,
TheHollywoodFeature
Film in Post-War
Britain, London,
Croom Helm, 1987;
PaulWillemen.'In
search of an alternative
perspective: an interview
with Armand and
Michelle Mattelart',
Framework, nos 26-27,
1985, p 56; Geoffrey
Nowell-Smith,
'Gramsci and the
national-popular*,
Screen Education, no
22, Spring 1977; Don
MacPherson.'The
Labour Movement
andoppositional
Cinema: introduction',
in Traditions
ojIndependence,
London, BFI, 1980,
pp 127-128; Peter
Miles and Malcolm
Smith, Cinema,
Literature andSociety:
elite andmass culture in
inter-zcarBritain,
London, Croom
Helm, 1987, pp 170-
178; Robert Murphy,
'A rival to Hollywood?
The British film
industry in the
thirties', Screen, vol
24, nos 4-5, JulyOctober
1983.
10
SeeTonyAldgate,
'Comedy, class and
containment: the
British domestic
cinema of the 1930s',
in James Curran and
Vincent Porter, eds,
British Cinema
History, London,
Weidenfcldand
Nicholson, 1983. See
39
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40
also my 'Saturday night
or Sunday morning?
British cinema in the
fifties*, in Ideas and
Production, issueJX-X,
1989, pp 146-149.
11
Nowell-Smith, 'But
do we need it?', p 152.
'Popular culture and
hegemony in post-war
Britain', in Politics,
Ideology andPopular
Cu!ture,Unh 18 of
Open University
• Popular Culture
course (U203),p 13.
5
See eg David
Bordwell, Janet
Staiger and Kristin
Thompson, The
Classical Hollywood
Cinema, London,
RKP, 1985; Barry
Silt, Film Style and
Technology: History
andAnalysis, London,
Starword, 1983;
Kristin Thompson,
Exporting
Entertainment,
London, BFI, 1986;
Charles Barr.ed,/)//
Our Yesterdays: 90
Years ofBritish
Cinema, London,
BFI, 1986; Roy
Armes, A Critical
History ofBritish
Cinema, London,
Seeker and Warburg,
1978.
ation broadens the cultural repertoire available to audiences. As Tony
Bennett has suggested, the argument that America is involved in a form
of cultural imperialism 'although not without point misses much of
the essential ambivalence of the impact of American popular culture in
Britain which, in many respects, has been more positive, particularly in
making avaliable a repertoire of cultural styles and resources... which,
in various ways, have undercut and been consciously mobilised against
the cultural hegemony of Britain's traditional elites'.12
The rhetoric of democracy and populism is built into the formal
organisation of the American film, with its classically strong and
dynamic narrative drive towards individual achievement - although this
also points to the limitations of the rhetoric, since problems and their
resolutions are invariably articulated only in relation to the individual
within a substantially unchanged capitalist patriarchy. Further, classical
Hollywood cinema conventionally ties this narrative structure of
achievement to the romantic appeal of the formation of the heterosexual
couple, and situates the narrative both within a visual form whose miseen-scene
and organisation of spectacle and spectating has proved
intensely pleasurable, and within a physical context of film-watching
which emphasises the process of fantasising. Overall, this form has a
propensity to engage the spectator thoroughly in a complex series of
identifications, with an almost ruthless disregard of the nationality (as
well as class and gender) of the spectator, and it is often the figure of the
star which holds together these various formal strategies, narrative,
visual and identificatory.
This is not to suggest that many British films, for instance, do not also
work within the same formal system. But it is generally accepted that
American film-makers innovated, applied, and exploited this form of
film-making much earlier and more consistently than their British counterparts
who operated with a much more mixed, and so-called 'primitive',
variety of modes of representation, compared to Hollywood where
this mode of representation had become institutionalised by 1917. It is
also generally accepted that Hollywood has had the resources, which
British film producers have lacked, to exploit the potential appeals of
the institutional mode of representation.13
Thus, for instance, British
cinema has never been able to sustain a star system on the same glamorous
scale as Hollywood for long periods of time - not least since Hollywood
tends to consume British stars for its own films, thereby increasing
the stake which British audiences have in those films.
If we confine discussion to film production, it makes sense in this context
to speak of national cinemas as non-standard and marginal activities.
Part of the problem, of course, is the paradox that for a cinema to be
nationally popular it must also be international in scope. That is to say,
it must achieve the international (Hollywood) standard. For, by and
large, it is the films of the major American distributors which achieve
national box-office success, so that film-makers who aspire to this same
level of box-office popularity must attempt to reproduce the standard,
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which in practice means colluding with Hollywood's systems of funding,
production control, distribution and marketing. Any alternative
means of achieving nationalpopular success must, if it is to be economically
viable, be conceived on an international scale, which is virtually
impossible for a national film industry, unless it has a particularly large
domestic market, as in the case of the Bombay film industry. The difficulty
is to establish some sort of balance between the 'apparently incompatible
objectives of a national cinema - to be economically viable but
culturally motivated', 'to be "national" in what is essentially an international
industry'.14
Historically, at least within the Western European countries, there
has been one major solution to this problem, one central strategy for
attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable and maintain both some form
of national cultural specificity and achieve a relative degree of international
visibility and economic viability: the production of an art
cinema, a nationally-based (and in various ways state-subsidised) cinema
of quality. As Steve Neale has argued, art cinema has played a central
role 'in the attempts made by a number of European countries both to
counter American domination of their indigenous markets in film and
also to foster a film industry and a film culture of their own.'15
The
discourses of'art', 'culture' and 'quality', and of'national identity' and
'nationhood', have historically been mobilised against Hollywood's
mass entertainment film, and used to justify various nationally specific
economic systems of support and protection. But there are two further
points to note here. First, that this is yet another instance of'the peculiarity
of a national film production within an international market-
place',16
since the market for art cinema is indeed decidedly international,
as is the network of film festivals and reviewing practices, and
other means of achieving a critical reputation and both a national and an
international cultural space for such films.17
And second, that perhaps
the situation isn't quite so peculiar after all, given the increasing tendency
for international co-productions (invariably with the involvement
of one or other of the still-extant national television networks), and the
development of transnational forms of industry support and protection
within the European Community.
However, the various international art cinemas have rarely achieved a
national popular success, partly because of their modes of address, and
partly because of the international hegemony of Hollywood at the level
of distribution, exhibition and marketing. Indeed, in the case ofthe British
film industry at least, the distribution and exhibition arms of that
industry have primarily been organised to foster, extend and consolidate
the domination of the British market by American popular films. Thus
for some time the major American studios have had their own distribution
companies operating in Britain, while the major British companies
have built up close relationships with American producers and distributors,
who often also have substantial financial interests in British
companies. British companies have found this sort of co-operation
Elseasser, New
German Cinema, p 3
and p 39.
15
'An cinema as
institution', Screen,
vol22,no 1,1981,
p l l .
1
Elseasser, Next
German Cinema, p 49.
See Neale, op cit,
pp 34-35.
41
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42
See chapters on the
film industry in
Curran and Porter,
eds, op cit, and Barr,
ed, op cit; and
Aiargaret Dickinson
and~Sarah Street,
Cinema andState,
London, BFI, 1985.
necessary, since, in capitalist terms, the American film industry was
much better organised before the British film industry, and was able to
pursue imperialist policies with some vigour,;
undercutting the charges
of local distributors, since they could go into the British market in the
knowledge that costs had already been recovered from the huge American
domestic market.18
In other words, the influehce of Hollywood on domestic markets is
always much more than simply a question of the poverty or elitism of
domestic film-making. This suggests that national cinema needs to be
explored not only in relation to production, but also in relation to the
questions of distribution and exhibition, audiences and consumption,
within each nation-state. The idea that Hollywood - and now, of course,
television - has become a part of the popular imagination of British
cinema audiences needs to be taken seriously.
As such, it becomes insufficient to define national cinema solely by
contrasting one national cinema to another, and we need also to take into
account the other key way of defining a national cinema - what I have
suggested is a more inward-looking means, constituting a national
cinema not so much in terms of its difference from other cinemas, but in
terms of its relationship to an already existing national political, economic
and cultural identity (in so far as a single coherent identity can be
established) and set of traditions. In this way, British cinema would be
defined in terms of already established discourses of Britishness, by
turning in on itself, on its own history and cultural formation, and the
defining ideologies of national identity and nationhood, rather than by
reference to other national cinemas - bearing in mind always that Hollywood
may itself be an integral part of that cultural formation.
At one level, in terms of political economy, a national cinema is a particular
industrial structure; a particular pattern of ownership and control
of plant, real estate, human resources and capital, and a system of
state legislation which circumscribes the nationality of that ownership primarily
in relation to production. The relative economic power of a
national film industry will depend upon the degree to which production,
distribution and exhibition are integrated, regulated, technically
equipped and capitalised] the size of the home market and the degree of
penetration of overseas markets. At the level of production, we need to
take into account both the means and modes of production employed
(the organisation of work, in terms of systems of management, division
of labour, professional organisations and ideologies, availability of technology,
etc) and the access that producers have to both domestic and
overseas markets. It is important to recognise also that even the domestic
market is not homogeneous, and that production companies often
deliberately limit themselves to specific areas of exploitation, especially
when faced with the mainstream box-office supremacy of the major
American distributors overseas. These limited areas of exploitation will,
in many cases, be areas considered marginal (that is, marginally profitable)
by Hollywood (low-budget films, B movies, films made primarily
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for the domestic market rather than for export, art cinema, and so on). 43
It is worth underlining again the role of the state, and the terms of its
intervention in the practices of a film industry, in determining the parameters
and possibilities of a national cinema (as both an economically
viable and a culturally motivated institution) - at least since the mid
1910s, when governments began to recognise the potential ideological
power of cinema, and cinema itself could seem to be something like a
national cultural form, an institution with a nationalising function. But
it is also important to recognise that the state intervenes only when there
is a felt fear of the potential power of a foreign cinema, and particularly
when the products - and therefore the ideologies and values - of a
foreign cinema are widely circulated within a nation state, and assumed
• to be having also a detrimental effect on that nation state's economy. In
j other words, while it is conceptually useful to isolate a single national
j cinema, it is necessary also that it is seen in relation to other cinemas.
The same of course is true when we come to examine the cultural
j identity of a particular national cinema. The areas that need to be
examined here are, first, the content or subject matter of a particular
body of films - that which is represented (and particularly the cbnstrucj
tion of 'the national character'), the dominant narrative discourses and
I dramatic themes, and the narrative traditions and other source material
on which they draw (and particularly the degree to which they draw on
what has been constructed as the national heritage, literary, theatrical or
otherwise) - in other words, the ways in which cinema inserts itself
alongside other cultural practices, and the ways in which it draws on the
existing cultural histories and cultural traditions of the producing
nation, reformulating them in cinematic terms, appropriating them to
build up its own generic conventions. Second, there is the question of
the sensibility, or structure of feeling, or world-view expressed in those
films. And third, there is the area of the style of those films, their formal
systems of representation (the forms of narration and motivation which
they employ, their construction of space and staging of action, the ways
in which they structure narrative and time, the modes of performance
which they employ and the types of visual pleasure, spectacle and display
with which they engage), and their modes of address and constructions
of subjectivity (and particularly the degree to which they engage in
the construction of fantasy and the regulation of audience knowledge).
In considering cinema in terms of cultural identity, it is necessary also
to pay attention to the processes by which cultural hegemony is
achieved within each nation-state; to examine the internal relations of
diversification and unification, and the power to institute one particular
aspect of a pluralistic cultural formation as politically dominant and to
standardise or naturalise it. Historical accounts ofnational cinemas have
too often been premised on unproblematised notions of nationhood and
its production. The search for a stable and coherent national identity
can only be successful at the expense of repressing internal differences,
tensions and contradictions - differences of class, race, gender, region,
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44
See eg Eugene
Kamenka, 'Political
nationalism: the
evolution of the idea',
in Kamenka, ed,
Nationalism, London,
Edwar"d Arnold, 1976,
pp 3-20; and Tom
Nairn, The Break-up
of Britain, London,
Verso, 1981, pp 329-
341.
op cit, p 659.
'Questions of
property: film and
nationhood', Cinetracts
vol I,no4,
Spring/Summer 1978,
plO.
' Op cit, p 659.
23
See Paul Willemen,
'Remarks on Screen:
introductory notes for
a history of contexts',
Southern Review, vol
16 no 2, July 1983,
p296.
etc. It is important also to pay attention to historical shifts in the construction
of nationhood and national identity: nationhood is always an
image constructed under particular conditions, and indeed nationalism
itself, as a concept in the modern sense, can only be traced back to the
late 18th century.19
'History', as Benedict Anderson puts it, 'is the
necessary basis of the national narrative.'20
As Stephen Heath has suggested, 'nationhood is not a given, it is
always something to be gained'21
- and cinema needs to be understood
as one of the means by which it is 'gained'. Thus, definitions of British
cinema, for instance, almost always involve, on the one hand, the construction
of an imaginary homogeneity of identity and culture, an
already achieved national identity, apparently shared by all British subjects;
and on the other hand, the valorisation of a very particular conception
of'British cinema', which involves ignoring whole areas of British
cinema history. In each case, a process of inclusion and exclusion is
enacted, a process whereby one thing is centralised, at the same time
necessarily marginalising another, a process wherein the interests of one
particular social group are represented as in the collective or national
interest, producing what Anderson has called 'the imagined community
of the nation'.22
Proclamations of national cinema are thus in part one form of'internal
cultural colonialism': it is, of course, the function of institutions - and in
this case national cinemas - to pull together diverse and contradictory
discourses, to articulate a contradictory unity, to play a part in the hegemonic
process of achieving consensus, and containing difference and
contradiction.23
It is this state of contradictoriness which must always
be borne in mind in any discussion of national cinema. Cinema never
simply reflects or expresses an already fully formed and homogeneous
national culture and identity, as if it were the undeniable property of all
national subjects; certainly, it privileges only a limited range of subject
positions which thereby become naturalised or reproduced as the only
legitimate positions of the national subject. But it needs also to be seen
as actively working to construct subjectivity as well as simply expressing
a pre-given identity.
National cinema is, then, a complex issue, and I would argue that it is
inadequate to reduce the study of national cinemas only to consideration
of the films produced by and within a particular nation state. It is
important to take into account the film culture as a whole, and the overall
institution of cinema, and to address the following issues:
• the range of films in circulation within a nation state - including
American and other foreign films - and how they are taken up at the
level of exhibition; in the present era, of course, films are 'in circulation'
and 'exhibited' or on display.in a variety of ways, and not just to be
physically projected at cinemas (multiplexes, city-centre cinemas, arthouse
cinemas, etc): they are available on video and via the various
forms of broadcast and cable television asfilms, but they are also present
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and re-cycled in popular culture intertextually, as icons, reference " ^ ^ ^ ~ ^ ^ ^ ~ ~ 45
points. Standards and pastiches; 24
See Douglas Gomery,
• the range of sociologically specific audiences for different types of J*^"SfSn/
film, and how these audiences use these films in particular exhibition Macmiiian, 1986.
circumstances; that is to say, we need to take into account not only the — — ^ — ^ — —
historically constituted reading practices and modes of spectatorship
and subjectivity, the mental machinery and relative cultural power or
readerly competences of different audiences - but also the experience of
cinema(s) in a more general cultural sense: the role of marketing and
audience expectation, the reasons why particular audiences go to the
cinema, the pleasures they derive from this activity, the specific nature
of the shared social and communal experience of cinema-going, differentiated
according to class, race, gender, age, etc, the role of television
(and video) in mediating and tranforming the experience of cinema, the
different experiences offered by the various types of theatrical exhibition
spaces. It is worth remembering that, from the point of view of economic
historians such as Douglas Gomery, film industries marked by a
high degree of horizontal and vertical integration can be seen as no more
nor less than highly diversified cinema circuits, where production is a
necessary high-risk service industry, and where cinemas are as much
luxurious sites for the consumption of or advertising for commodities
other than films, as they are sites for the fantasy experience of watching
films;24
• the range of and relation between discourses about film circulating
within that cultural and social formation, and their relative accessibility
to different audiences. Crucial among these discourses is the tension
between, on the one hand, those intellectual discourses which insist that
a proper national cinema must be one which aspires to the status of art
(and therefore adheres to the current dominant definitions of cinema as
an art form), discourses which, from a particular class perspective, dismiss
Hollywood's popular cinema as culturally debilitating; and on the
other hand, those more populist discourses where, in effect, the idea of
'good entertainment' overrides questions of'art' or 'nationality'. This
latter discourse suggests that a cinema can only be national, and command
a national-popular audience if it is a mass-production genre
cinema, capable of constructing, reproducing, and re-cycling popular
myths on a broad scale, with an elaborate, well capitalised and well
resourced system of market exploitation. Again, the role of television
must be taken into account as one of agents which generates, sustains
and regulates film cultures and renders discourses about the cinema
more or less accessible.
To explore national cinema in these terms means laying much greater
stress on the point of consumption, and on the use of films (sounds,
images, narratives, fantasies), than on the point of production. It
involves a shift in emphasis away from the analysis of film texts as
vehicles for the articulation of nationalist sentiment and the interpellation
of the implied national spectator, to an analysis of how actual
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46 — ^ — — ^ audiences construct their cultural identity in relation to the various pro-
25
opcit. ducts of the national and international film and television industries,
- ^ — - ^ ^ — and the conditions under which this is achieved.
The current state of film studies is characterised by a tension between
those who are working on the political economies of cinema and those
who analyse and investigate textuality and the putative spectator, and by
the corresponding absence of much work on actual audiences, beyond
the examination of critical discourses. Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson
have proposed the most acceptable form of relationship or mediation
between political economy and textuality in terms of a sort of sociology
of organisations and professional ideologies.25
Clearly, this is something
that could be fruitfully explored in relation to other national cinemas.
But it doesn't at present help to bridge the gap between textual analysis,
the analysis of critical discourses in print-form, and the vast continent of
the popular audiences for film - and the question of audiences has to be
crucial for the study of national cinemas. For what is a national cinema if
is doesn't have a national audience?
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