Transnational Cinema History

Since my project focuses on one film and one play, but my short essay did not include much on the transnational study of these mediums, I thought I would research the move to a transnational study of cinema. This move comes from the growing discontent with the way we have studied history in general. As early as 1993, Marsha Kinda posited a need to “read national cinema against the local/global interface”.[1] Since then, various developments in concepts of transnational cinema have developed, with different historians paving their own ways in the field. 

But why do we need a transnational history of cinema? By moving away from the limiting national boundaries, we can understand the complex relationships between the film, and the wider cultural and economic movements that existed unconfined by national boundaries. By viewing a film such as Omkara, the Bollywood adaptation of Othello which I will discuss in my project, as a postcolonial reaction, rather than a self-contained film, we can gain a greater understanding of the global cultural and economic climates within which it was produced, and which it was a reaction to. 

In addition, scholars such as Naficy and Marks have argued that transnational cinema history, by analysing cinematic representation of cultural identity, can challenge the western narrative, and its construction of cinema as a Eurocentric phenomenon.[2] Here, power-relations between global and local, or insider and outsider, as in the case of Omkara, are crucial to gaining a greater understanding of the film’s cultural backdrop. This is an avenue I would like to explore in my project, as I seek to understand how Omkara uses this distinction to point to problems in the colonial India past, and to call out and challenge Shakespeare’s hegemonic status.  

Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim have highlighted an issue which we seem to have encountered frequently in this module. This is the danger that the national becomes negated in this specifically transnational analysis of cinema. We must not assume, they argue, that the transnational model does not bring with it its own boundaries and limitations.[3] Thus, we must analyse transnationally not only in the conceptual space, but we should also “examine its deployment in the concrete-specific so that the power dynamic in each case can be fully explored and exposed”.[4] So, it seems we are at the conclusion again that what is crucial to transnational study is that the nation is not completely forgotten or written over, but that it is removed as the sole method of understanding. I hope that, while discussing Omkara and the power dynamics exemplified within it, my project will consider this limitation in order to produce a transnational film history which delves deeper into the environment within which it was produced. 

[1] Kinder, Marsha (1993), Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain, Berkeley, California: University of California Press. p. 7. 

[2] See Naficy, Hamid (2001), An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, and Marks, Laura (2000), The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

[3] Will Higbee & Song Hwee Lim (2010) Concepts of transnational cinema: towards a critical transnationalism in film studies, Transnational Cinemas, 1:1, pp. 7-21. 

[4] Will Higbee & Song Hwee Lim (2010) Concepts of transnational cinema: towards a critical transnationalism in film studies, Transnational Cinemas, 1:1, 7-21, p. 10.