트랜스내셔널 영화사 연구는 2000년대 이후 기존의 내셔널 시네마 중심의영화사 연구방법론의 한계를 인식한 소수의 학자 군에 의해서 등장했다. 이들은 내셔널 시네마의 프레임을 견지한 채 지난 수 십 년 간 영미학계에서 등장한 연구의 결과물들이 사후판단을 근거로 한 진화론적 내러티브, 문화본질주의, 정전화 된 작가와 걸작중심 서술 등으로 특징 지워 지며 이들 연구는 내셔널 시네마의 틀 속에서 읽힐 수 없는 국제공동제작, 디아스포라/익사일 영화, 국제영화제와 국제기구, 장르, 산업, 그리고 인력들의 이동과 경계를 무시하거나 혹은 억압해 왔다고 주장한다. 이에 일군의 유럽의 젊은 영화학자들은 유럽영화사의‘예술영화’ 중심, 그리고 영국, 프랑스, 독일, 이탈리아를 축으로 한 핵심국가들의 ‘시네마 유럽’ 논의가 지닌 협소한 틀을 거부하며 디아스포라 영화, 이주자 영화, 소수자 영화, 국가 간 합작영화를 영화사적, 이론적으로 접근하며 ‘트랜스내셔널 유럽영화학’ 을 주창했으며 팀 버그펠더, 마크 베츠, 알라스테어 필립스 등의 연구서들이 2005년 이후 본격적으로 등장하기 시작했다. 아시아 영화의 영역에서도 냉전기부터 시작된 아시아영화 네트워크를 치밀하게 추적한 키니아 야우, 포셱 푸, 아베 마르커스 논스, 요시모토 미쓰히로 등의 연구업적들이 짧은 시간 안에 쌓여가면서 그 자체로 독자적인 연구의 장을 형성해나가고 있다. 하지만 여전히 이들 연구는 전체를 포괄할 수 있는 이론적 프레임을 결여하고 있으며 산발적으로 흩어져있는 연구자들의 목소리들만이 간간이 들려오고 있는 것이 현실이다. 따라서본 논문은 지난 10년간의 트랜스내셔널 영화사 연구의 결과물들을 정리하고 이 연구의 세 가지 큰 카테고리를 제안하여 향후 공동/협력연구의 가능성을제시하기 위한 기초적인 이론화 작업을 시도하고자 한다. 우선, 합작영화연구는 오랫동안 내셔널 시네마 연구자들에게 두통거리로 존재해 왔었지만 오히려 같은 이유로 트랜스내셔널 영화사 연구의 ‘실험실’ 로서 작용한다. 둘째로 디아스포라/익사일 영화와 마이클 커틴이 주장한 ‘미디어 캐피탈’ 개념은 특히 아시아 영화연구에 있어서 새로운 장을 열어줄 것으로 기대된다. 아프리카와 중동의 이주자들이 생산해 내는 트랜스내셔널 영화에 주목하는 유럽 영화학계와는 달리 아시아는 식민기획과 내전들, 그리고 미국 중심으로 재편된 새로운 지역질서로 인해 발생한 망명, 이주, 이민을 통한 영화적 혼종성이 두드러지며 이를 역사적으로 재조명하는 작업들은 아직 기초연구조차 이루어지지 않았다 해도 과언이 아닐 것이다. 마지막으로 국제조직과 영화제들이 지역에 작용한 영향을 종합적으로 분석하는 연구가 트랜스내셔널 영화사의 중요한 한 축으로 작용할 것이다. 물론 트랜스내셔널 영화사는 내셔널 시네마영화사학을 대체할 새로운 개념이 아니며 오히려 상호 보완적으로 연구가 이루어질 때 더욱 그 중요성이 커지게 된다. 따라서 본 논문은 트랜스내셔널영화사 서술을 시도하고자 하는 새로운 연구자들과 성과를 공유하고 향후 공동연구를 할 수 있는 출발점으로서 자리하고자 한다.
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.