The Nation and Transnational Film Theory

In the mid-1990s, Appadurai suggested that modernity at large means, perhaps, the end of the nation state. (1) But this idea seems less likely today. Chris Berry writes in his article “From National Cinema to Cinema and the National,” in Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen’s edited volume Theorising National Cinema: “However, if the idea of the territorial nation-state as a transcendent and exclusive ideal form is no longer tenable, that does not mean either that the form of issues of the national disappear.”(2)

Indeed, a careful consideration of the role of global capitalism and its interrelationship with, rather than its subjugation of, the nation is essential for filmic analysis. (3) In Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam argue that to “float ‘above’ petty nationalist concerns” is to ignore the real structure of power that the nation employs as it “facilitates the making and the dissemination” of films. (4) This observation is as persuasive for the filmmaker, as Shohat and Stam imply, as it is for the cultural theorist.

Works Cited
(1) Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 23.
(2) Berry, “From National Cinema to Cinema and the National,” in Theorising National Cinema, 154.
(3) Dissanayake: “Globalization and the Experience of Culture: The Resilience of Nationhood,” in Globalization, Cultural identities, and Media Representations, 39.
(4) Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, 285.