2 The National Revisited1 Paul Willemen Notions of the national and the international are inextricably linked because they define each other. But they do not do so symmetrically, because over the last three hundred /ears or so, each side of that coin has become embroiled in its own history, Meanings have shifted as they entered new sets of cultural and political constellations. As iVnv Anderson noted in a recent account of those shifts and changes: 'The meaning of internationalism lorn illy depends on some prior conception of nationalism, since it only has ninviu v as 9 ba< k construction referring to its opposite' (Anderson 2002: 5). The relation between these mutually defining opposites not only changed its class connotations.' Towards rhc end of the twentieth century it changed even more drastically: now, 'internationalism' has become equated with, as Anderson put it, a display of'limitless loyalty to another State', that is to say, to the US's 'fervent cult of the homeland or for a missionary redemption of the work!' (Anderson 2002: 15, 23—4). The often invoked international community is today simply a code word for a call to submit to the policies pursued by the American state. In the cultural realm, a similar shift has been in operation for some years: the national popular is now equated with the consumption of US cultural exports, while critiques of such export prod ucts is stigmatised as elitist. At the same time, any film that is not in English has become an example of'world cinema', something reserved for intellectuals and other culture vultures,4 These changes in meaning of the national and the international underscore that both terms delineate a symbolic field within which, today, an appeal to the national is located as a political ideology designed to achieve a specific goal: to delineate a bounded geographical space that a particular powerbloc, in this case a coalition that constitutes a national bourgeoisie, can reasonably expect to restructure to its own benefit on a long-term basts. In oilier words, nationalist bourgeoisies sought to establish a specific 'political economy' within the limits ol a bounded terrain which they could govern under conditions of relative independence autonomy, with the range of cultural and administrative institutions needed lor m this, and an army capable of defending it (Nairn 1997:133). The motivation for that sea-change and the supplier of the necessary energy to achieve « was what histonans call 'modernisation'. Ernest Gellner put it more trenchantly .., the now famous essay on nationalism in his book Thought and Change (1964). For Gellne ml ana^im; •i, m Thcoriiing Nationnl Cin f'na the par»P trase i»i,vl ded by Tom N _,„„ (Nairn 1997:1), 'Modern philosopher beUeve that they have Deennu..... inJ o(|R.r ( ,omtructions. In truth, ,11 they have- hecn ,ry,„K lo (lo js ( - ■cam engine.' Bui Nairn then points to a key implication of ner's insight: not only is ..II modern philosophy's true subject industrialisation, but Si |nii)i —l— o*d varieaated aftershock - nationahsin'. While accepting Nairn \U ^ ical ninating upon universal stand..ids, tlie Soul, God, lnfi„ • 'Hay ity (, k of the steam engine i after effects 01 n ......, , insight:..... U'"SrlV COffifre^ľľh«is, Anderson's examination oi the « onceptual pair's history extensionol w ..... ^ 0fpreoccupation with two themes characteristic oil,,,. flate re situates better the recent w_ (i|m and cultural studies paradigms: multiculturahsm and the (moď ernising modern and even modernist) concern with specificity . Briefly, I want to argUe that there is a crucial difference between nationally and a concern with the ways a particular social formation functions ... in order to change it. would like to start by making three linked suggestions. The first is that 'nationalism-is a term that should be reserved for the range of institutionalised practices seeking to define and impose a particular, reductive, politically functional identity. To oppose, criticise, subvert or otherwise challenge the kind of restrictive straitjacket which nationalism seeks to impose upon the 'subjects' of the nation-state cannot also be called nationalism, even though it plays on the very same terrain of the existing or anticipated nation-state. In such a contest, the forces seeking to define and impose a notion of identity are opposed by a concern with the complexities of that other aspect of modernisation and industrialisation: individuated subjectivity. The second suggestion is that nationalism seeks to bind people to identities. That is say, it mobilises cultural-political power and institutionalised weight primarily through the deployment ofa broad-ranging array of modes of address organised not just rhetorically, but also embodied in the very organisation and polices of institutions. It is a mode of addre carefully nurtured, reproduced and policed, ensuring that a specific cluster of assumptions written into our social hod.es from early childhood and repeated with ritualised regulari thenceforth Nationalism is a uuestion of address, no, of ongm or genes. As Tom N,rn mZ°m^on Tnm ",C ^ 111,1 11 'S thc " °f :~ *»« *e formation, imposition, and indeed * acceptance of or consent to 'a national identity- ,s to be tricked in >U aa ■ x 7» ^™,s set up and maintained to select ch % them, decreed to be our' ir luster of'differentiae', as Nam, calls nhentance by those social groups or power blocs who seek ,<> erpetuate their dominance. The third suggestion is that there is a diametrical opposition between identity anc su tivity. The former, being what die institutionally orchestrated practices of address see pose, constitutes a never-quite-fitting straitjacket; the latter is an ambiguous term desig ating individuals as the crossroads or condensation points of multiple sets of institutional rganised discursive practices. As such, subjectivity delineates a 'space' where the plethor f grammatical subjects activated in language fold into and over each other to form what y of us might call Ins or her 'subjective world'. Subjecoviry always exceeds identity, since icntuv formation consists of trying to pin '—* US t0 a sPecn5c, selected sub-set of the many The National R «• \ , », ( ,| diverse clusters ot discourses we traverse ,,, 0> i screes. Subjectivity, then. rehn.....„lllt ' •J™* uul *»« ■* k * N to trying our" sexuality, kimhip relations,..... understand! 7 £? m 'T 'rr*,r,u"" through (self Vducation. work experience .uU, " 1 be occupied or hijacked h> ,1.....M.....S^JSTJ^^l^ dimensions Within our sense ofM,h,,„v,. „ 1 2 ^ '- uiennn- straitjacket. "ul.vnnuhty that escape «„d exceed any such The -st of this essay seeks to explore the ratification, ofth«« drs..........., f01 „, ~P mwh,ch "j j"?-" ' ^omhip, betwee......wm („„„.,, ,„........., such as cinema and the always pre -existing I,,,. „.... . . ,. 1 Msung, nut never fixed, institutionally Organised i......1 formations we inhabit. In each soao-ailtur.il formation, the tensions between the national ami the international as well as those between identity and subjectivity mm.. bv definition, be played 0U1 In dlffei ent ways. But the terms in which these tensions are presented will have a family rese.n blance. Nevertheless, the issues of the national and the international, and indeed of the colom.il and the imperial, are present in film studies in specific ways thai arc different froi those adopted, for instance, in anthropology or in comparative literature, film ami medi;i studies have responded to the wave of massive population migrations that resulted from tin accelerated circulation of Anglo-American and Japanese finance capital, by adding cross-cul-rural or multicultural flavours to its standard menu. But both the terms doss cultural' an< "multicultural* already point to the first problem, in the sense that they suggest the existence of discrete, bounded cultural zones separated by borders winch can be crossed. The ten 'multicultural' also suggests that cultural zones continue to exist within a given country small, self-contained pockets or islands, miniature replicas of an alleged community's allegedly original national culture, as repositories of some cultural authenticity to be lound elsewhere in time and space. In Ukania - Tom Nairn's suggestive term for the ossified, incompletely modernised monarchical state known as the United Kingdom (Nairn ll)HS) -one hears references to, say, the Bangladeshi, or the Irish or indeed the Asian communities, as if a given 'ethnic' community had simply transposed a national culture from 'there' to here'. This transposition can then be narrativised in terms of contamination and disease, as it is in Ukama today m the light of'foreigners' seeking to escape from economic and/or political distress, or! as it was a decade or so ago, as the development of a 'multicultural society' that is ever so 'tolerant' of'others'. This multicultural ideology has some positive, but also some exceedingly negative consequences for a country's cultural life and policies. One very negative result is that 'ethnic' groups will be imprisoned, by arts funding bodies and local government practices, within a restnetive and fossilised notion of culture. In tins way. such groups are condemned to repeat the rituals of ethnic authenticity, regardless oi how uncomfortable many members of those so-called communities may lee with them. One of the political effects of such policies is that administrators and local pohUCians tend to recognise 'community' spokespeople who represent the more conservative and nostalgically traditionalist' sectors of'the communities' in question. A further consequence Theorising National r- P«haPS !,on,Cally- 10 effor which those cultural forms were shaped and, ,n so doing 1 social conditions by anC ^ ^ being [n t|)is rcspe^ fetishise the separateness o ^ ^ of cu]turaJ apartheid. By insisting on the discreteness, end up ^ host cuiture conspires with the conservativ the separatenes* - ^ .^.^ to'draw hnes around those 'other' cultural practice' upholders of an iraKe the practice of a 'traditional' culture separated fro,n the atencssofthe 'other cuitu imagined 'ethnicity AnH in that way, the host culture can reaffirm its own imaginary uni ghettoising thel"- And;;;"aecnlnYess and authenticity. * and ££3^ * ^that cultural zones areffrora umflefd; h7°" spa< • ^^d not lead us to deny or unduly relativise the existence of borders Jhe existence horde, is very real, and although their meaning and function are changeable, their effec I ness has not diminished in the least. At one level, it does indeed make sense to try t0 construct a notion of national culture by way of a spatial commutation test. The culture would then be defined in terms of the things that change in 'the whole way of life', to use Raymond Williams' phrase, when a national frontier is crossed. For instance, abortion may be legal on one side of a border and not on the other; or legal and other institutional arrangements, such as those relating to film and television finance and censorship, may be vasdy&different. In federal structures such as India, the United States, the former USSR or Australia, there are different inflections to this problem because of the imbrication o national and state institutions, but the problem of the nation-state's borders remains, as demonstrated by the importance of passports for bestowing a national identity upon individuals, with the consequent legal regulation of immigration, the search for asylum under a network of governmental institutions 'elsewhere' and the whole panoply of issues implied by the notion of citizenship. On the other hand, the construction of a cultural matrix in such a geo-structural wa~ does not account for the sense of temporal continuity that is attributed to national cultural formations. The comparative study of, say, independent Bntish cinema in the 1930s and in the 1970s would not be regarded as a form of cross-cultural studies. The intervention o World War II, and of a host of other socio-political and economic changes, apparently do not constitute a sufficient temporal boundary for us to be able to talk of different cultural formations. Perhaps we should begin by becoming more aware of the complicity between penodi-TaIIv^Z t °r ^ Cr°SSmg °f BWapKcal boundanes. The invasio W T^e tend ^ P6n°d' 1S on* one «™^ ^ CO- ^^^^^ ^ » Ae — of !066 is another, as is the tend- -gnificant temporal ^t^JlfZ^^ °f ^ ™V " ^ the war is mdeed a very slRnifica tWentieth «ntury. It would be foolish to deny th ^pects, such as, for instance th^ ^ ^ °f reSPects" The Point 15 that in othe ^ficant a marker at all The hamd^0^10*1 °f CapitaHsm> World War II is not that sig fifty years, and the consolidation" f ^ f mneteenth-century absolutist empires took ove the mid-1950s and the late 60s ^Tu ^ * &oh* SCale opened sometime betwee c DUS> while the trinmnl, m triumph of finance capital over industrial capit I I,,. N ;i I i <> n a I H <* visile ,1 lo„k rvrn longer ;,nd, although accelerating in the earlv 1Q7n „,.. 80.. With luck, son,, of the gigantic WiaJ Lu^W^ around the turn oi the rnillenn....... ,„ I, „ the ,l(, at havLe comc to Pubhc attentlon ■mp and Loan fraud, and the US LT^ SZ ^ * ^ port . worth n,k,„g to show that there are temporal rhythms and periods which, although unpluatcc. m and affected by geographic changes, do not coincide with them. The S doomed? <>f geographical and temporal periods at work in most national histories has to be produced at some cost: the loss of perspective on the very forces that construct the vicissitudes of'the national' m the era of international dependency. The notion of Cultural specificity that may be deployed against the universahsing eth-nocentnaty at work tn film studies operates at the level of this geo-temporal construction of the national. The question of cultural specificity can be posed on other social community levels and these may themselves be transnational, as are some constructions of gender- and class-based politics. But in film studies, the issue of specificity is primarily a national one: the boundaries of cultural specificity in cinema are established by governmental actions implemented through institutions such as the legal framework of censorship, industrial and financial measures on the economic level, the gearing of training institutions towards employment in national media structures, systems of licensing governed by aspects of corporate law, and so on. For the purposes of film culture, 'specificity' is a term derived from the vocabulary of modernism applied in the realm of political economy. Specificity thus becomes a territorial-institutional matter, and coincides with the boundaries of the nation-state, that is to say, it designates cultural practices and industries on the terrain governed by the writ of a particular state. As a rule, the effectiveness with which national socio-cultural formations, that is to say, state-bound unities, determine particular signifying practices and regimes, is not addressed. This is a problem for a number of reasons. One result is that it encourages confusion between, on the one hand, the discourses of nationalism as objects of study or as a political project, and, on the other hand, /he issue of national specificity. Compared to Afro-American films made in the US, black British films are strikingly British, and yet in no way can they be construed as nationalistic. They are part of a British specificity, but not of a British nationalism: especially not if we remember that British nationalism is in fact an imperial identification, rather than an identification with the British state. To complicate matters further, an identification with the British state is, in fact, an English nationalism, as opposed to Welsh, Cornish or Scottish nationalisms, which relate not to a state but to i ui i »k«ir Hpmand for autonomous governments, even if that unions, and are recognisable by their demand ior autonym B autonomy may be qualified in various ways. A second «. of confas.on is the relation between a concern with nanonal .denary and the specificity of., cultural formation. For instance, the concern^ th nooons of Australian and with national .denary was a temporary component of the>*~~*«g« „, to decline after the so-called bicen- of Australian cultural specificity. That concern started to d tennial celebrations and resurfaced, in a different form, in the early 1990s, around notions of rep uhlu .m' an ana morí in i famous!} .iiiMiin 1 the N.K "I pohli, ,,| ,,,, which Holp ■i m I UK ic to ww tu-in has v ma ih.u sens* retug* -os. ,hcc the Aust This simj .ih.in V >vei nincii i's current, murderously 11111, | He hi OSS :ilv means d over t Ih last deca< le ani tl)l| ,|u. sptvitu ity of the Australian i nli,i,,| novv generates othei moiits and discount the concert wi ih so< 10 :ultural spe< tin i tv is different from identity sc m In ificiO ot .» i cultural formation may he marked hy the presem c biu ,K( «■ In •nul .,1 identity. '»< leed, rrs^^::......„,,,,,. nu„e which, if any, notions ^ ^ addressing or comprising national specificity So. me discourses ot don or thc ,nalys.s of a specific cultural forrnatu* t^^^^- --.St bourses for, e and extend themselves to cover, hy repressive homogenising a complex^ nationally specific formation. Thankfully, they are also doomed to keep falling short ol that carpet In that sense, nationalism is die shadow s,de of imperialism: it IS an teleology generated by imperialism as its own counter-body, and it is in some ways even more represstvely homogenising than that of the empire it seeks to undo - perhaps necessarily so. At the same time, in art and media studies, insufficient attention is paid to the determining effects of the geographically hounded state-unity, and this encourages a kind of promiscuous or random form of alleged internationalism, which 1 would prefer to call evasive cosmopolitanism masking (US) imperial aspirations. Another, more polemical \ of putting this is to say that the discourse of universalist humanism is in fact an imperial a colonising strategy in the service of US national(ist) policies. If we accept that nation boundaries have a significant structuring impact on national socio-cultural formations (please note that I have written 'a significant impact' and not that these boundaries are the only determinations, nor necessarily the most important ones in all circumstances: merely that they are real and significant), this has to be accounted for in the way we approach and deal with cultural practices from 'elsewhere'. Otherw.se, reading a Japanese film from within a Bntish film studies framework may in tact be more like a cultural cross-border raid, or ZZT^0 I"" t an°ther CUkUre ln 3 Subordinate Position by requiring it to cot sTp:ti::f ™ ^ ^ and wmLl 1995 101J - 4 This expan^nTac^emn"? * ^ ^ of non-Western cou PPorturuties. The result is that^H V field creates job and departmental growth «f*°ry are rushlng tQ . brined within the paradigm of Euro-American fib" ln*Un film Indies. In that respect7 °n *e ^ of, for lnstance, Chinese, Japanese or 3AdVent °f 3 ^uinely compar;tIVe ^ *h " ™d departments are actively delaying the ^ film and aesthetPc - ^-dies by trying to lmpose ^ J ^ e^er are marglnallsed J^^*™"" of specific socto-cultural formations assumed um The National Revisited The second reason for film theoretical malprac.ee can 1, found ,n the m vemhty of film language. This ^ „ promoted to ignore the specific k......ledge, ,.,.u may be at work m a text such as shorthand references to particular. historical! I.....d modes of making sense (often referred to as cultural traditions). As an example we migh remember the controversy generated by Antonioni's use of the close shot ,n his film or Ch.na (Rohdie 1990), or the different ways m which notions of realism are deployed m relation to various types of melodrama in Asia. Further example, can be found ,n films which engage with the connotations generated by particular landscapes or cityscape, within particular cultures, or with the differing meanings attached to. for instance, images Oi Indus tnahsation. It is regarding this set of issues that notions of Third Cinema can most productively be deployed. Similarly, since the Hollywood model of character narration is accepted as the norm in Euro-American film studies, the modes of studying Hollywood narrative and its counter-cinemas have been presented as equally universal and normative, duplicating and confirming the position of the economic power enjoyed by Hollywood. The third reason is the forced, as well as the elective, internationalism of film industries themselves. The capital intensive nature of film production, and of its necessary industrial, administrative and technological infrastructures, requires a fairly large market in which to amortise production costs, not to mention the generation of surplus for investment or profit. This means that a film industry — any film industry — must either address an international market or a very large domestic one. If the latter is available, then cinema requires large potential audience groups, with the inevitable homogenising effects that follow from this, creating an industrial logic which, if played out at a national level, will benefit from the equally homogenising project of nationalism. The economic facts of cinematic life dictate that an industrially viable cinema shall be multinational or, alternatively, that every citizen shall be made to contribute to the national film industry - mosdy by way of tax and or subsidy legislation - regardless of whether they consume its films or not. These aspects of the film industry and of the cultural sector(s) corresponding to tha industry's production processes raise two important issues, one concerning the national, on concerning cinema itself. I will return to the problem of cinema itself at the close of this essay in the form of a caveat. As to cinema's industrial nature, that means that if the question of national specificity is posed in its proper context, the issue must be addressed at th level of national and governmental institutions, since these are the only ones in a positio to inflect legislation and to redistribute tax revenues. That fact has unavoidable consequence for the social power relations that govern the kind of cinema thus enabled. Consequently a cinema which seeks to engage with the questions of national specificity from a critical, non- or counter-hegemonic position is by definition a minority and a poor cinema, dependent on the existence of a larger multinational or nationalised industrial sector (most national cinemas operate a mixed economic regime, but that does not alter the argument: it merely creates a little more breathing space for film-makers). This is a cinema that has to work 'i .1 , c , « „„„„ dimensions of which can and do change depend the interstices of the industry, an area the dimensions uiw o i rr ■ c i i rimnaims5 It is, of course, true that industn mg on the effectiveness of cultural-political campaigns. "> . . n . i -,r work in the 'national configuration , bu ally made films always must register the pressures at worK in me B Theorising National Cin 1 t seeks to address the issues that constitute and mo that is not at all the same as a onema.t ^ ^ somewhat paradoxically, a c„,,na , _ ..w^nal' configuration, oy « ■ non-nationalistic, since the more it;,. the 'national' config at least non-nationalistic, since the more u addressing national speafiC^ -ing proJect, the less it will be able to engage critU compl.ct with nationals s no ^ multidirectional tensions that characterise and caUy with the complex, ™ltl« P^ents him/her5eif as the mouthp.ece n hr;e,SPt*"18 fi0m •*» *aTTme so" fa» ™* *e other's vo.ces - xt„: :thstud,es *wa ^-^rrspace-The ^ - ^^ expensive onl " S° taum"ised by hi so T "$ ** °(thc ™ddle-class intellectual communions technology £ ^° H" ^eged education and access to S comPeUed to abdicate from intellec- I,Niiii"11'1' Ko visit.-.I (U1, responMb.ht.es and to pretend to b« , ,„,,, hollow vess.-l ,1,, , , . the oppressed, the voice ofthe people, resonates, The ,„„„,,' '' w'hc v,,"<' <>< of whether those other people art defined In terms oi . Ian ' d™ "'" ""' nationality, community or whatever, Ventriloquism la tl ' '"y' r'^on« :—rowsW,u,,,ou'..............^^^T^g^: u does not appmpmte the ot^ersd,......,, „ ,,,,s ,„„ s......nlinatetolftoL....... anmo and neuher pretend to be fitted with it. Witl.........,.„,,„,.....third practice is described with the Bakhtiman phrase: the dialogic mode, Unfortunately ,!„■ ,s , complete misunderstanding oi Bakhtin's notion of dialogism, which is in fact an inherent characteristic of .ill language and of all communication. In other wordi, it is completely meaningless to try to distinguish one practice Iron, another by oiling one dialogic and the other, presumably, monologu. It is worth pointing out that Bakhtin revised his work on Dostoevsky in the light of this insight into the social nature of language itself, and tried to distinguish between the ways in winch texts activated then inherently dialogic aspects. More useful is the notion of creative understanding and the crucial concept of altcrity, of otherness, which he introduces into his theories. To clarify this point, I would like to repeat the quote from Bakhtin on creative understanding, or, .is Raymond Williams called it. diagnostic understanding: There exists a yen strong, but one-sided and thus untrustworthy idea that in order better to understand a foreign culture, one must enter into it, forgetting one's own, and view the world through the eyes of this foreign culture [ this is what 1 called ventriloquist identifn ation|. Of course, the possibility of seeing the world through its eyes is a necessary part of die process of understanding it: but if this were the only aspect, |i|l would merely be a duplication and would not entail anything enriching. Creative understanding does not renounce itself, its own place and time, its own culture: it forgets nothing. In order to understand, it is immensely important [t]o be located outside the object of creative understanding, in tune, in space, in culture. In the realm of culture, outsideness is a most powerful factor in understanding. [WJe raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones it did not raise for itself; we seek answers to our questions in it; and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to us its new aspects and semantic depths. Without one's own questions, one cannot creatively understand anything other or foreign. Such a dialogic encounter of two cultures does not result in merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are both enriched. (Bakhtin 1986: 6-7) ust b My own conclusion from Bakhtin's discussion of creative understanding «that one mu. 'other' oneself if anything is to be learned about the meanings ol other cultures, ot ano culture's limit,, the effectiveness of us borders, ofthe area, where, "'^ I V-.intense and pr,.....^f^^^L -essed that for Bakhtin, creative.....lemandmg...........< ,. > l ...... .,„, two cultural spheres. It is not simply i matter ol engaging a ■ b Theorising National Cine understanding of another cultural practice to ^ cure's products, but of using one - at the same time^ If the critical study t) ^ve and rethink one's own cutarf « ^ at modifying our Euro-American actio say, Chinese « cultural practices at all? Simple curiosity does not sou* uL'Tpersuasive answer. ^ practlces can be neatly illustrated by Bakhtufs three waysi of rela g^ for instance, the Hindi cinema. The first and thc way in which many bim cr of Bakhtin's first type of interpretation: pro_ most widespread approach is a amUsement at Indian commercial cinema, mar. jecrive identification.^ ^j^.^ of an inteUectually underdeveloped mass audience I^ned3 with ^^A%l^ZLr^ invariably erect a mid-twentieth-cen- by a film industry that matches its quaintly simple-minded , iustifv such a discourse invariably erect a mid-twentieth-cen-nalVet, The criteria used to ^ ^ ^ ^ ^rr:S^ degree of civilisation. Increasingly, a variant of this approach can be found in the writings of advocates of the postmodernist persuasion, who project the modalities of finance capital's corporate cultural forms (corporate raiding and short-term investments in diversified portfolios for quick profits), operative in some large urban conurbations, onto 'the global culture' in general. The second approach mirrors this process of projective identification, but simply operates an ethical inversion of the terms. Anglo-American notions of popular culture are projected onto the Indian cinema and, suddenly, the products of the Hindi film industry become examples of'the people's culture' in exactly the same way that, for instance, Hollywood is said to be a site of the people's culture in the West. That is ventriloquist identification. It validates the Hindi cinema by pointing to the vast box-office takings of its more lucrative products. Something that such large numbers of people want to pay for must be popular culture. To dismiss the cultural products involved is to dismiss those who derive pleasure from them. On the other hand, to validate the products is to identify with the downtrodden people who enjoy them. An unfailing characteristic of this populist position is the constant reference to pleasure in its discourses. In fact, such a position equates units of pleasure with units of the local currency as they appear on the balance sheet of a business enterprise. It also fails to distinguish between the various types of pleasure that can be derived from cultural practices or objects: the pleasures of mastery, of submission, of repe- TdY he ' h rdSSiS? S° C°nse«, the populist position is also TJoZlZ f ^^"-onomic practices seek to bind specific pleas- ^r^^EE ^rUng rpieasures °ut-in or stigmatised by JZ^^Z « -dy always outlawed P^ase deployed as a kind ^^^T; ^ ^ ^ * Indeed, in nearly all Hollywood's films th 1 * ^ exPlanatory value" as forms of psychosis likely to turn '" 6 P UreS °f understanding are simply dismissed writes books, the one with an intere" * ^ ^ ±C character who reads °V 'entertainment', and you W1n haw 1™??°™* f°rm of culture other than television or ^ f°Und ^ of the story. The odd sentimentalised ne National Revisited Iris (Richard Eyre, 2001) hagiography of a canonised artist merely confirms that this is the rule (s< i Richard Eyre's banal Iris, US/UK, 2001). Before going on to talk about necessary outsideness, a tr.msitiou.il sub< ategory has to h taken into account. This subcategory corresponds to the traditional si holaify approai htotfa history of cinema in India, chronicling trends and formulating historical narratives, while avoiding, to some extent at least, legitimising or instrumentalising positions, The value 11 this approach depends on the quality of the historiographic skills deployed. Admittedly, these narratives are often riddled with elements of both the populist and the projectivisl tender cies, which does not make life any easier for the reader who has to unravel the useful leads from a hopelessly tangled discursive web. However, this scholarly approach is still to be wel corned for its efforts to provide much-needed information, even though us narratives musl be treated with extreme caution. This is a transitional moment in the pro* ess ol engagemen with otherness, because it still maps the familiar Western reductive paradigms onto, fo] instance, the development of the Indian film industry. But to the extenl thai the effort i genuinely scholarly, this type of historiography is also bound to registei areas ol differed e where the object of study resists the interpretative framework projected upon ll Barnouw and Krishnaswamy's history of the Indian Cinema (1963; re" Uwis Jacobs' The Rise of the American Film (1939) as its main model, offers a standard romantic version of the way in which the industry destroys mdmdual , (Chaplin, Stroheim, Welles), Barnouw and Krishnaswamy «J ........> vidual geniuses in the Western mould (until Satyajit Ray). Consequent y, vised ectn 1980) uses I model. But whereas Jacobs Theorising National Cinenia - d' iduals of genius: genius-entrepreneurs, rather powerful actors and studio ■^^difBcllltjr assessing the value of-GuruiDutt 0r of than genius-artist,. In this way, they ^ ^ commercia] and (already industri- Ritwik Ghatak, since both operated ally inflected) traditional aesthetic p ^ ^ beginmng to be attempted in the form of Bakhtin's third type of^""^ . re]ationship between historiography economic arguments around the mutual y e formulated in the context of debate around and cultural analyses. On^SUC3aPt^1980s and early 1990s (Willemen 1994: 175-205; notions of Third Cinema in t e a e concentrates on the need to understand the SKobataud Stana ,994). I.«anapP- w^bc ^ ^ dynana.cs of a partacular nl.nra Practce ^ ^ as ^ social formation is simultaneously taKen as a J; sinnation rather than a given essence hiding deep within the national soul, n this way, the analyst's own socio-cultural formation is brought into focus as a historical construct, eouallv in need of transformation. The engagement with other cultural practices can (and m my view must) thus be geared towards the unblocking, or the transformation, of aspects of the analyst's own cultural situation. In a way, we are talking here about a double outsi-deness: the analyst must relate to ms or her own situation as an other, refusing simple identifications with pre-given, essentialised socio-cultural categories. At the same time, such identifications with group identities 'elsewhere' must be resisted as well, since the object of study is precisely the intricate, dynamic interconnections of processes which combine to form a socio-cultural constellation (a Benjaminian notion quoted in Buck-Morss 1981: 57). Some of the forces at work in such a constellation will tend towards the containment of elements likely to challenge its fragile and always provisional cohesion; others will tend towards the consolidation of unequal balances of power; still others will promote collusion with, or resistance to, the reigning balance of power. Identities, whether individuated or group ones, are nven as well as constituted by such tensions. Indeed, identities are the names we give to the more or less stable figures of condensation located at the intersection of psycho-social processes It is, then, perfectly possible to ask questions outlawed by populist 7~oZ " " bY Pr°JrdV1St • In *e case of Indian cL mas, it allows us to address questions regarding the mohilUarirm nf ~ ,. ■ , i* W« anb-nupertabs, tendenL alag Z^Zl^Z^ ^ f ^ atave drfferences between central and regional caD1 ak H ****** ab°Ut ** aPproachaUowsnStoe„vISagedaepossibr* f S° ^ ^ °f trends may bave a greater elclpi^p^ " ~«s, bourgeots cultural to an ideabsed fantasy of pre-colorual innocence ^'^^ °n« wh,ch hark back More othe importantly, the outsidene ■"practices as potentiafly ^^,^,'1^'°^reCluires us to conceptualise texts and -Pects of a text may pull ln one «Lc^„ Z-i ^ ^ COntrad-tory strands: some WUh y,Ct °th- -erring pressure ln ^t u ° " PuU * * to^y different one, --al perspective, the ^me^T ^ T** ^ *»■ ^ > historical this particular bundle of dis—- t0 ask of a film answersto,ha^--^i;:t;;r;a -viewers °r ^ is: in which direction does ;rs or readers? Obviously, context-dependent, that is to say, Xhe National Revisit »d h these questions and answers are dependent on the < ontexi w ithin whic degree of productivity. Finally, two caveats may be in order. The first one is th ov CO meant i o M IlleVC estern intellectuals to address, lor Instance, the ','"'! Mu^U " b ,Ul— to *■ iiii. iiit ||| I i 11 | | | \V|f| vvn situation, their other eve must reman, focused on »1, " ■ , °'U" l'V° °" t,U,,r ........ n,...........„„;,:,;....................... -ourscs within the absolutely vital if western intellectuals, however well ross-eye.l „,ode of operatioi 1 IS 'Mentioned, are to avoul ob Dsoructing Usmmean that the power relations the work of Indian allies. The unfortunate tacts ot imperial] between Indian and Western intellectuals are still uneven. ThkTd^h^Z^Z instance, from the tact that Indian film-makers can secure production finance u [ea« Lk 0I1 the strength ot their reputation m the West. Consequently, in then effort, to draw tion to particular aspects ot cultural practices in India hkelv to assist dcs.r.ihle developments in Western cultural practices, Western intellectuals must he careful no, to lend inadvertent support to work which, in India, obstructs the very positions they are trying to support. I inferences between, say, Ireland and Britain, or Korea and Japan, require a similar approach. If this cross-eyed dialectic is forgotten, the term 'specificity' loses any morning and any notion of creative or diagnostic understanding. That would be unfortunate, since a positio of double outsideness, that is to say, of in-between-ness, is the precondition tor uiv useful engagement with 'the national' in film culture. The second caveat concerns cinema itself as a so-called medium and as an industry. 1 many respects, the very unitarian, homogenising notions of'the' nation and ot the' cine are complicit with each other: each demands its own histoncising narratives, founding o onginary moments, Linear string of periodisations, and so on. And just .is national hound aries are both a fact and a process — making the 'national' emerge in the process of addressing the compexities, failures and effectiveness of a geographically bounded network of institutions that constitutes any given 'state' - so are the boundaries of cinema itself as 'a medium', both a fact and a process. The fact of cinema is bounded by the network ofindu trial institutions which govern and define specific ways of producing and circulating specif objects: films. These institutions are most commonly identified as studios, productio companies, distnbutors, exhibitors and the like. The histories of these companies may b narrated as regional sub-sets or sectors of a national industry. To ignore the effective wa in which a particular film industry is stitched into a state's institutional network amounts | depriving oneself of the means to understand the dynamics which, although rarely govern ing the film industry directly, at least decisively shape its options, procedures, and thus > Products. At the same time, cinema is a process the boundaries of which are not reducibl t° those of any national industry. Different temporalities and histor.es ot perception Aythms of modernisation and technology, trade routes, not to mention the equally transna aonal dimensions of adjacent cultural industries such as publishing, theatre 01 *e functioning of any given cinema. All of these facto,, arc c^^J dynamics of industrialisation and in its consequent versions ot CUi • ^ ^ Cmema itself emerges as an object in the same way that the ^ P^cess of addressing the specific dynamics underpinning and regulat Theorising National Cine between a nd within institutional ne utionai networks. That process is never neutral; as a process . ■ navicular direction, towards an arrangement of power-rebtion, always seeks to move; in a P ^ somewhere along the continuum between absolute that is to be ^f**1 1uthontananism. In the same way that 'the nation' is configured democracy and *&s0 md consequences of a particular system of cohes.o in the process of addr^ of insdtudons, so is 'cinema' only an 'object' " 3 l0°Sdy mdUStml SCCt0r ^ ^ complex relauons to a 'national' institutional configuration. Consequently, what may be cinema in one country may not be so in another one, conclusion that must have some implications for film theory as well as for film history. prominent example of such a problem is presented by the notaon of cinema in Britai Having tned to foster a 'national' cinema in the aftermath of World War II by means of quota legislation, the British government found itself being frowned upon by Washington and quickly took steps to reassure the USA of its submission. Having allowed British cine - to become a colony of Hollywood, the British government sought to regain some mear of cultural hegemony within its own territory by way of television. As the history of, a; the debates around, both censorship and production in Britain demonstrate, the domesti film industry was subordinated to, and controlled via, an adjacent industry: television. On of the peculiar results of this development is that British cinema went from being a pro ise to being a ruin without ever having become anything much in its own right, except pe haps in the decade from the late 1930s to the late 1940s and, subsequendy, only in areas th escaped television's reach - for instance, the exploitation cinema practised by Hammer o Amicus, or by the avant-garde and independent cinema sectors prior to their (voluntary subordination to television from the early 1980s onwards. In other countries, film industri were caught within, and defined by, different kinds of institutional dynamics. In France o to some extent in the US, it would be absurd to write a history of cinematic productio dominated by telefilms, whereas in Bntain, it has become impossible to do otherwise. Wha rm?n;Ztit ariing to th:dymimcs at w°* b—en n^ai and gov ~ :~ ~ ™:does not entide us to *™—~ -1 caUy (institution) ZZl^ f "^h^T^ ^ " * *** besetting and charactensing a national'coS^f ^ ^ ** ^ Notes 1 • Parts of this essay were first give National- in Willemen 1994- 20J19 ^ * m9)' ^ PubUshed as 'The Mer 1945' internationalism migrated fr u * °f ^ — begemomc bourg;XrhSPh;re °f ^ working-class polmcs to 'dependence movements, while socilTl •' " * and - most of the decoloring ~, political rhet0nc. ^ ^ * emphasise a national, even In 2004, the Northern I h pubiK- -■«™ Fam c°™* —y ™ - 116 neCded to be mentally in top condition to 2. Afte 3. , tll. Níiďimi RtvUtttd Iv ..bio to deal with subtitle*, »nd tlui ilus * " '"" ,w"< thlní thm tht I IK Mm i .....n ■ Itl i tm s,v. toi mst.un e. the prolitevatton ..i , uttti umu < , ,l, v,,,, ,| ,,, ^ (o nwmuMt many oi the < ontrlbutloni pubttihtd In {Um |ournn] uiuodu, Umy' books on IU>H I um Aiucit, ,m , m,.,| |n, ,|, ,, [, * ^ted to .1,1« sine* i» „•„,„ WMtoMtti tathtmaj.....Y....., .....il i mílii m liliu Umlti i in 1'Mt'i '» or^unim i i ampulku l"i change capable ot persuading a significant tuiiuhei >>i Kuropran guvemmrnts tu i liangi tlx n policies and representatives in the secretive media i onunitlces tin ked away, with lavish funding in the recesses ot the European Union's labyrinthine sum tin.'. References B.ikhnn. Mikhail M. (ll>$o). .s>r<7i ( .cmrex aiul Other Utť lissays, liinerson, Caryl ami Molqui Michael teds), translated by Vein W. McCee. Austin: University ol Texas l'i™ Buck-Morss, Susan (1l>81). "Walter Ueujainin Revolutionary Writer, Pi I', N,v /.<•/' 1 ' 57. Gellner. Ernest (1%4). Vmighl and Change, I ondon: Woidenlcld ft Nicolson N.um. Tom (l^SS). 77<, Enchanted ('.lass: Britain and its Monanhy, London: Radius Rohdie. Sam (1990), Antonioni, London: HI I.