What is transnational film history? At one level, the term denotes a history of transnational cinema which designates histories of exilic, diasporas, interstitial, and intercultural cinema.2) Indeed, the concept of transnational cinema has been widely circulated since the late 1990s, posited itself in the pantheon of ‘catch-all’ terms like globalization, and rapidly worn out as an academic cliché that almost every single new publication, whether the study engages with the concept or not, contains ‘transnational’ in its title. However, like globalization, film studies and the discourse of the transnational has neither been rigorously theorized nor appropriately defined until very recently. In the first collective effort of this kind,
As a response, several academic activities, including conferences, journals, and single-volume monographs and anthologies, emerged in recent years. Above all, the launch of a new journal, which is exclusively dedicated to the study of the subject,
As transnational cinema studies has now entered a new vista, transnational film history begins from a certain group of film scholars’ collective discontents that the previous accounts of the dominant national cinema historiography-its
1)The idea of ‘laboratory’ came from a recent anthology on Ukrainian Historiography. See Georgiy Kasianov and Phillip Ther, eds. A Laboratory of Transnational History: Ukraine and Recent Ukranian Historiography, Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2009. 2)If we use the definitions of media economics, communication, and film industry studies, then this history easily merges to the history or historical condition of Hollywood’s global domination, i.e. the history of cinematic globalization from the beginning to the current state. 3)Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, eds. Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, London and New York: BFI Publishing, 2006, p. 1. 4)Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Critical Transnationalism in Film Studies,” Transnational Cinemas, No. 1, Vol. 1, 2010, p. 8. 5)Lim and Higbee, Ibid, p. 9. 6)Tim Bergfelder argues that European cinema had been portrayed and researched as discrete national cinemas which had their own national culture and specificities. In addition, as a seeming ‘protector’ of art cinema, European cinema has always been portrayed as a history of art films and filmmakers. However, since the 1990s, the notion of art cinema as the master trope of European cinema has been gradually eroding. Bergfelder sees that European cinema, from its inception, has been transnational, and diasporas and migrated filmmakers and films in fact constructed the imagined concept of European cinema, therefore, it is time to transform to, Bergfelder argues, the study of “transnational European film history.” See Tim Bergfelder, “National, Transnational or Supranational Cinema? Rethinking European Film Studies,” Media, Culture and Society, No. 27, Vol. 3, 2005, pp. 320-21. 7)Lim and Higbee, op. cit., pp. 9-10. Hamid Naficy is arguably the most representative figure in this category. In his seminal study An Accented Cinema, Naficy proposed a new analytical term ‘accented cinema’ which is a concept that is concerned with the films that postcolonial, Third World filmmakers have made in their Western sojourn since the 1960s, and there are three types of films that constitute it: exilic, diasporic, and ethnic. Naficy and his theory is, however, in the end inadequate to represent the concept of transnational cinema since postcolonial, interstitial, intercultural, exilic, and diasporic all can be subsumed to the wider term transnational cinema, and are not necessarily limited to their uses. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 4-11. 8)for more about comparative film studies, see Yingjin Zhang’s new study on the subject. Yingjin Zhang, “Space of Scholarship: Trans/National and Comparative Studies,” Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China, Manoa: University of Hawaii Press, 2010, pp. 16-41.
2. Transnational Film History: Theory and Practice
Since Ian Tyrrell’s paradigm-shift article “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History” was first published in
However, if transnational history is solely defined as the study of movements and forces that “cut across national boundaries,”14) as an international history practitioner Akira Iriye states, and applied the designation to this study, transnational film history should be defined as the history of film movements, technology, organizations, people, and industries that are not bounded in a single nation-state. Yet it should not employ a comparative history method, coined by Marc Bloch in 1925 (translated into English in 1953), which compares two or three nation-states. Comparative history is essentially “a tool for dealing with problems of explanation.”15) What does it mean if a historian “compares”? Bloch writes, “He (the historian) selects two or more phenomena which appear at first sight to be analogous and which occur in one or more social milieus. He finds out how these phenomena resemble or differ from one another, traces their evolution, and, as far as possible, explains the similarities and differences.”16) The most obvious pitfalls of the method is, however, the tendency to compare whole countries and to take for granted the primacy of the national unit of analysis, therefore, the method is in the end reifying national exceptionalism.17) Moreover, as Bloch himself acknowledges, comparative history as a method is exceedingly onerous to conduct, and comparisons are rich only when “they are based upon factual studies which are detailed, critical, and well-documented,”18) and therefore the method can only be achieved by a small group of historians, like Bloch and other
Transnational film history is, if I may repeat, not an exclusive but rather an inclusive and resilient concept. I do not claim that the national cinema is an obsolete and therefore vanishing model. It is still there and functions its own right. However, as many of us-film historians-have agreed, the previous national cinema model is particularly vulnerable to and suspicious of boundary-crossing ideas, institutions, and people. Transnational film history, instead, is justly powerful when its research tasks are associated with the above subjects. And, indeed, some historians in the field of European cinema and Asian cinema have already done significant studies that are fairly appropriate for my definition of transnational film history. Their studies are varied. But if I may categorize them, the previous studies that fit well under the method are manifold: the historical study of cinematic coproduction, exile, diasporas, and migrant film workers and their inter-cultural influences, and non-governmental organizations and the role and impact of the international film festivals. To provide more concrete and comprehensible ideas of transnational film history, therefore, I will demonstrate three instances of recent scholarly works done by those new film historians. First, in the following section, cinematic coproduction studies will be discussed.
1) Cinematic Coproduction: A Laboratory of Transnational Film History
Cinematic coproduction is, indeed, a notoriously dubious entity to most nation-based film historians. Susan Hayward, while discussing France-Italy co-productions during the 1950s and 1960s, refers to co-productions as a ‘murky area’ and a ‘thorny problem,’20) and in a similar vein, Roy Armes denounces the co-production films as being “designed for an anonymous international audience and with pretensions which were commercial rather than artistic.”21) Why has cinematic co-production constantly been considered to be a “problem”? British film scholar Mark Betz’s account many be a guide to solving the puzzle. He argues that “co-productions are a problem for national cinema, and that problem is connected with Americanization and cultural imperialism.”22) Since for most Euro-American film scholars, popular cinema has been a synonym for Hollywood cinema, and to protect and distinguish Europe’s ‘highbrow’ culture from Hollywood’s ‘lowbrow’ mass entertainment, European art films, for them, had to be studied in terms of aesthetics and national-cultural elements, not economics. Thus, popularity signifies a commercial betrayal of national tradition, and such genre films as spaghetti westerns, horror, and sex films in Italy, and ‘Tradition of Quality’ in France were despised and often ignored by most scholars in European cinema (Nowell-Smith and Ricci, 1998; Bergfelder, 2005 and 2006; Betz, 2001; Jackel, 2003, Elsaesser, 2006).
As such, historicizing the cinematic coproduction has not produced enough eminent researches yet, and it is still in its infant phase. Anne Jackel, a UK-based cine-economist, has been constantly exploring this issue, and her more recent book
If we turn our attention to another vista of the atlas, East Asia, cinematic coproduction is still a rarely studied, if not utterly ignored, subject except for a few studies done mostly by Hong Kong film historians (Yau 2000; Fu and Desser 2001; Law and Bren 2005; Fu 2008). Kinnia Yau Shuk-ting, a Hong Kong-based film historian, is, however, by far the only scholar who has been studying the issue extensively. Her imposingly researched
2) Exile, Diasporas, and ‘Media Capital’
Exiled, diasporic, and migrant film workers, including directors, cinematographers, and performers, have been rarely studied especially for those newly emerged national cinema histories. In European cinema studies, for the last few years, these ‘cultural travelers’ who did not necessarily work in Hollywood after their departures but in other parts of Europe, particularly London and Paris, have been celebrated, and wielded a significant number of academic outcomes. Jean Christopher Horak, in 1993, expressed the difficulties histories of cinema have had in situating émigré activities within national borders. He writes:
Horak claims to take account of emigre filmmakers and their films into the boundary of German national cinema, and his assertion has its own value because, by the time he was writing the piece, German film historians had attempted to keep emigre film workers out of its national frame. However, emigre, exiled, and diaspora film workers are crucially important actors in transnational film history and should not be bounded in or brought back to the national cinema. Instead, I suggest shifting the frame toward transnational ground where films, people, movements, collaborations, and spaces are not restricted and caged in the nation-state. Therefore, we can examine how film directors and cinematographers “absorbed contemporary ideas and practices in the visual and decorative arts, and in architecture and urban design, and reworked and disseminated these recurring visions, themes, styles and motifs to a wider public”31) during the interwar period Europe, and the role of the cities in the period’s Europe, i.e. Berlin, London, and Paris where “definitions of the era’s cinematic production became determined”32) as Alastair Phillips traced the emigre filmmakers in Paris in
3) Non-Governmental Organizations, Inter-State Institutions, and Film Festivals
Finally, and no less significant than the previous factors, non-governmental film organizations, institutions, and international film festivals have not been historicized seriously as well. Indeed, nation-centered film history has no place to discuss such issues. ECAFE (Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East), UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), ASEAN (The Association of Southeast Asian Nations), APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), and, more recently, AFIN (Asian Film Industry Network), based in Korea, should be rigorously studied in terms of their roles to generate regional funds for education, training, and grants for young film directors that are never less important than the single nation-state’s support and regulation for domestic film industry but have hardly been studied thus far. Those studies should be incorporated with postwar America’s hegemony over Asia and Europe, and the 1950s and 1960s cold war cultural policy that had influenced every sensorial aspect of semi-colonized, periphery nation-states’ popular cultures. For instance, international film festivals have been the battlefield of regional power politics and international relations, and they are directly related to the local governments’ cultural economies including tourisms and leisure, local media industries, and even job creations. George Yudice’s term ‘expediency of culture’ is, in this regard, the right tool to comprehend the current film festival economy.37) Yudice argues that “art has completely folded into an expanded conception of culture that can solve problems, including job creation... culture is no longer experienced, valued, or understood as transcendent.”38) Culture now performs a function that enhances education, reduces racial prejudice, and brings cultural tourism as well as creates jobs and even makes a profit which completely transformed to what Yudice calls ‘cultural economy’ or ‘cultural capitalism’ as Jeremy Rifkin terms.
As a matter of fact, we are witnessing the burgeoning of film festivals studies in the cinema studies discipline. University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, has been publishing its annual
9)Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review No. 96, Vol. 4, 1991, p. 1033. 10)David Thelen, “The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History,” The Journal of American History No. 86, Vol. 3, December 1999, p. 967. 11)“AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review No. 111, Vol. 5, December 2006, p. 1443. 12)Akira Iriye, “Transnational History,” Contemporary European History, No. 13, Vol. 2, 2004, p. 213. 13)Erik Van Der Vleuten, “Toward a Transnational History of Technology,” Technology and Culture, No. 49, Vol. 4, October 2008, pp. 978-82. 14)Iriye, op. cit., pp. 213-14. 15)William H. Sewell, jr., “Marc Block and the Logic of Comparative History,” History and Theory, No. 6, Vol. 2, 1967, p. 208. 16)Marc Bloch, “Toward a Comparative History of European Societies,” Enterprise and Secular Change: Reading in Economic History, ed. Frederic C. Lane, Illinois: Richard D. Irwin, 1953, p. 496. 17)Tyrrell, op. cit., p. 1035. 18)Bloch, op. cit., p, 518. 19)The idea of ‘laboratory’ came from a recent anthology on Ukrainian Historiography. See Georgiy Kasianov and Phillip Ther, eds. A Laboratory of Transnational History: Ukraine and Recent Ukranian Historiography, Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2009. 20)Susan Hayward, French National Cinema, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993, p. 9. 21)Roy Armes. French Cinema, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 148. 22)Mark Betz, “The Name Above the (Sub)Title: Internationalism, Coproduction, and Polyglot European Art Cinema,” Camera Obscura No. 46, 2001, p. 15. 23)Anne Jackel, “Dual Nationality Film Productions in Europe after 1945,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, No. 23, Vol. 3, 2003, pp. 231-43. For more studies related to this issue, see Anne Jackel, European Film Industries, London and New York: British Film Institute, 2003; Mark Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009; Peter Lev, Euro-American Cinema, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1993. 24)Marc Silverman, “Learning from the Enemy: DEFA-French Co-Productions of the 1950s,” Film History: An International Journal, No. 18, Vol. 1, 2006, pp. 21-45 25)Tamala L. Falicov, “U.S.-Argentine Co-productions, 1982-1990: Roger Corman, Aries Productions, “Sclockbuster” Movies, and the International Market,” Film and History, No. 34, Vol. 1, 2004, pp. 31-38. For her more recent work, see Tamala L. Falicov, The Cinematic Tango: Contemporary Argentine Film, London: Wallflower Press, 2007. 26)Tim Bergfelder, International Adventures: German Popular Cinema and European Co-Productions in the 1960s, New York and Oxford: Berghan Books, 2005. 27)Kinnia Yau Shuk-ting, Japanese and Hong Kong Film Industries: Understanding the Origins of East Asian Film Networks, London and New York: Routledge, 2010. 28)Kinnia Yau Shuk-ting, “The Early Development of East Asian Cinema in a Regional Context,” Asian Studies Review, No. 33, Vol. 2, June 2009, pp. 161-173. 29)Hong Kong action cinema’s influence over Indian cinema was researched by a group of Indian film historians. See S. V. Srinivas, “Hong Kong Action Film and the Career of the Telugu Mass Hero,” and Valentina Vitali, “Hong Kong, Hollywood, Bombay: On the Function of ‘Martial Art’ in the Hindi Action Cinema,” in Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema, eds. Meaghan Morris, Siu Leung Li, and Stephen Chan Ching-kiu. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005, pp. 111-124, and 125-150. 30)Jean-Christopher Horak, “Exilfilm, 1933-1945,” cited in Tim Bergfelder, “Introduction,” Destination London: German-speaking Emigres and British Cinema, 1925-1950, ed. Tim Bergfelder, London: Berghan Books, 2008, p. 9. 31)Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris, and Sarah Street, Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007, p. 28. 32)Alastair Phillips, City of Darkness, City of Light: Emigre Filmmakers in Paris, 1929-1939, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004, p. 16. 33)Michael Curtin, “Media Capital: Toward the Study of Spatial Flows,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, No. 6, Vol. 2, 2003, p. 203. 34)Curtin, ibid, p. 205. 35)Herbert I. Schiller, Communication and Cultural Domination, New York: International Arts and Sciences Press, inc., 1976, pp. 5-6. 36)Poshek Fu, “The Shaw Brothers Diasporic Cinema,” in China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema, ed. Poshek Fu, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008, p. 15. 37)See Sue Beeton, Film-Induced Tourism, Clevdon, UK: Channel View Publications, 2005. 38)George Yudice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003, p. 14. 39)See for example, Dina Iordanova and Regan Rhyne, eds. Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit, St. Andrews University press, 2009; Dina Iordanova and Ruby Cheung, eds. Film Festival Yearbook 2: Film Festivals and Imagined Communities, St. Andrews University Press, 2010; Dina Iordanova and Ruby Cheung, eds. Film Festival Yearbook 3: Film Festivals and East Asia, St Andrews: St Andrews University Press, 2011. Another important anthology is Richard Porton, ed. Dekalog 3: On Film Festivals, London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2009. 40)Thomas Elsaesser, “Film Festival Networks: The New Topographies of Cinema in Europe,” in European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005, pp. 89-90. 41)Dudley Andrew, “Waves of New Waves and the International Film Festival,” ASIA/CINEMA/NETWORK: Industry, Technology, and Film Culture, the Tenth Busan International Film Festival Symposium Programme Booklet, Busan: Korea, 2005, p. 256. 42)For more about the Asian Film Festival, see Sangjoon Lee, “The Emergence of the Asian Film Festival: Postwar Asian Film Industry and Japan‘s Reentrance in the Regional Market in the 1950s,” in Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema, ed. Miyao Daisuke, Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2012; Sangjoon Lee, “It’s ‘Oscar’ Time in Asia!: The Rise and Demise of the Asia-Pacific Film Festival, 1954-1972,” Coming Soon to a Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff, St. Andrews: St. Andrews University Press, forthcoming 2012.
3. Conclusion: Rescuing Film History from the Nation
Borrowing from Prasanjit Duara, we need to ‘rescue’ film history from the nation. Duara, a historian of modern China, provokes the modern History and its close tie to the nation-state that are fundamentally inseparable. Nations, he writes, “emerge as the subject of History just as History emerges as the ground, the mode of being, of the nation.” In the end, nations are not “born full-brown out of nothing.”43) Most History projects of modern capitalist nation-states, what he termed “the production of national histories,” glorify the ancient or eternal character of the nation, i.e. the myth of the origin, and often ended to project modern future, by overcoming a “dark middle age of disunity and foreign contamination.”44) Coupled with this, Eric Cazdyn argues that the writing of any national film history is “inextricably tied to the larger history of the nation itself” and, as a Japanese film historian, almost every history of Japanese cinema has used “the history of the nation to chart its course.”45) In the end, national cinema historiography is a by-product of the history of the nation. National cinema historiography no longer solves the problem despite its effectiveness in college educations. We use the textbooks although we all acknowledge the false universe of them. Though I do not negate the value of college education, it needs to be done without a doubt, and film history, as an academic discipline, should reach out beyond this purpose.
In this study, consequently, I suggested a new sub-field of cinema studies-transnational film history. Certainly, transnational film history is not new at all inasmuch as transnational cinema studies itself has its own lineage for at least a decade, but it has not, if I am not completely wrong, been consistently and rigorously defined and/or theorized. As I repeatedly claimed, transnational film history is an open category. Any historical research that is not bounded in a single nation-state can claim its transnational quality of study. For the last few years, we have witnessed the burgeoning of film histories that have significantly turned their attentions toward the transnational. Transnational film history is indeed very difficult to achieve. Any transnational film history practitioner should perform considerable sites-specific researches that are not limited to a single nation-state. Therefore, although he/she is not required to speak multiple languages, to be a transnational film historian, one should acquire substantial knowledge on two or more national cinemas as a prerequisite quality. Transnational film history is not the ultimate solution, nor a catch-for-all term. However, it will function as an alternative model to the previous national-centered film historiography. As a mutually-beneficial method, transnational film history is not yet fully defined, and it needs further refinements and collaborations with fellow film historians. Under the multiway authorship, the ‘thorny’ national cinema model will finally overcome at stake many problems, I believe.
43)Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 27. By tracing Chinese historians engagement with the enlightenment mode of writing a national history in the early twentieth century, Duara claims that the modern History (capital ‘H’ to distinguish history from enlightenment History) emerged under the spiritual logic of Hegel and the late nineteenth century’s social Darwinism that justified the imperial business of the superior race (European) and solicited the enlightenment history which is the record of progress of the superior races. Under this logic, the stagnant and backward races, Chinese in this context, have no right to have history and nationality. 44)Prasenjit Duara, “The Global and Regional Constitution of Nations: The View from East Asia,” Nations and Nationalism, No. 14, Vol. 2, 2008, p. 332. 45)Eric Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan, Durham: Duke University Press, 2002, p. 52.