Search Results

Conclusion: Place and the Politics of Nation Branding

Dennis Lo

in The Authorship of Place: A Cultural Geography of the New Chinese Cinemas

This chapter interrogates the geopolitical implications of a contemporary development in the region’s media industries — the institutionalization of location shooting into modes of nation branding ... More

This chapter interrogates the geopolitical implications of a contemporary development in the region’s media industries — the institutionalization of location shooting into modes of nation branding that commoditize cultural signs in line with the states’ soft power objectives. Drawing from examples of recent location-shot film and media, including En Chen’s Island Etude, Chi Po-lin’s Beyond Beauty, and Zhejiang TV's Keep Running, I demonstrate how location shooting since Taiwan’s membership in the WTO has been institutionalized within the discursive contours of the “Love Taiwan” movement, a process which can be compared with the PRC’s marketing of the “Chinese Dream” to domestic tourists via convergent and place-based film and televisual media. While the resulting national brands could not appear more different, these discourses operate on the shared assumption that for place identities to be readily consumable and exportable, they must be coherent within a global “experience economy” that circulates images of distinctive yet fixed cultural identities. This reduction of place into readily consumable cultural signs can be contrasted with the enigmatic representation of Shanghai found in Jia Zhangke's I Wish I Knew, which fashions on-screen Doreen Massey’s notion of the “progressive place,” a poststructuralist reinterpretation of place that focuses on conflicting sociocultural processes that imbue spaces with richly layered meanings. Building on Massey's concept of the progressive place, this chapter argues that location-shot film and media in China and Taiwan, more than offering diversely themed experiences, have untapped potential in cultivating alternative public cultures through reflexive, minor, and performative modes of place making.Less

The Second World War, Soviet Sports and Furious Space Walks: Soft Power and Nation Branding in the Putin 2.0 Era

Stephen M. Norris

in Cinema and Soft Power: Configuring the National and Transnational in Geo-politics

This chapter analyzes recent Russian popular historical movies in the era of Vladimir Medinskii as Minister of Culture and Vladimir Putin’s return to the Russian presidency (2012-present). Following ... More

This chapter analyzes recent Russian popular historical movies in the era of Vladimir Medinskii as Minister of Culture and Vladimir Putin’s return to the Russian presidency (2012-present). Following Keith Dinnie, Melissa Aronczyk, and Robert Saunders, I see attempts to “brand” a nation, even for domestic audiences, as a crucial component of soft power and as a form of public diplomacy. Medinskii in particular has helped to promote a patriotic culture centered on the Second World War, Soviet sports achievements, and the Soviet space program. Developing this patriotic brand, however, has come with some costs. The branding of a Russian nation as advertised onscreen since 2012, in short, has produced a mixed bag of results in terms of soft power success.Less

The South African Soft Power Narrative, Cinema and Participatory Video

Paul Cooke

in Cinema and Soft Power: Configuring the National and Transnational in Geo-politics

This chapter explores the gap between the way South Africa is experienced internally by some parts of the nation and the continued power of the story of the nation’s transition to democracy under ... More

This chapter explores the gap between the way South Africa is experienced internally by some parts of the nation and the continued power of the story of the nation’s transition to democracy under Mandela internationally, a story which remains a remarkably resilient factor in the nation’s soft power offering. The chapter focuses on the less frequently explored internal dimension of soft power narratives and how they can be used to construct an imagined (national) community. It looks in particular at how community-level filmmaking has been used to contest the national soft-power narrative of the inclusive “rainbow nation”Less

Soft Power and National Cinema: James Bond, ‘GREAT’ Britain and Brexit

Andrew Higson

in Cinema and Soft Power: Configuring the National and Transnational in Geo-politics

The UK’s departure from the EU is a major geo-political development by any definition. This chapter reflects on James Bond’s role in this development. The apparent ease with which the Daniel Craig ... More

The UK’s departure from the EU is a major geo-political development by any definition. This chapter reflects on James Bond’s role in this development. The apparent ease with which the Daniel Craig incarnation of Bond both asserts a British identity and moves around the world has been repeatedly invoked in recent political debates in and about the UK. The 2014 Monocle report and 2015 Portland report on soft power identified the UK as one of the world’s leading soft powers, both citing the Bond films as contributors to that status. Around the same time, the Bond films were also roped into VisitBritain’s promotional campaign to make Britain seem an attractive place to visit, with the slogan ‘Bond is GREAT Britain’. This chapter explores how the nation-branding at stake here coincided with the visions of the Brexiteers. Ironically, the soft power and commercial nationalism captured in this vision of the UK depends on multi-national inward investment in UK’s cultural economy. The chapter argues that this is the plight of national cinema in a neoliberal, globalised world.Less

Conclusion

in Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity

This chapter considers three dominant social imaginaries that have taken hold in the contemporary setting. One is built around a particular fantasy of recognition, in which the bases of legitimacy of ... More

This chapter considers three dominant social imaginaries that have taken hold in the contemporary setting. One is built around a particular fantasy of recognition, in which the bases of legitimacy of national space are predicated on the conditions of transnational finance capital. A second builds on an elite understanding of processes of neoliberalization as inherently experimental, uneven, and “variegated”—an understanding designed to admit economic crisis or market failure as an integral part of long-term political-economic transformation rather than an aberration. The third imaginary relies on the magical qualities attributed to brand management by its practitioners, advocates, and the general public. The chapter proposes that the mundane practices of nation branding do perpetuate the nation form, because they perpetuate a conversation about what the nation is for in a global context and about what it means to be a national citizen amid cosmopolitan conceptualizations. However, the form of recognition that nation branding offers is deeply problematic. Although nation branding promotes “wealth” in finance-capital-intensive, attention-intensive, and knowledge- or experience-intensive economies, other forms of collective wealth may be lost in the process.Less

We are a Little Land: Informational Film and Small-nation Cinema

C. Claire Thomson

in Short Films from a Small Nation: Danish Informational Cinema 1935-1965

Et lille land’ - a little land - is a trope of Danish identity which recurs in many of the short informational films about Denmark made from the 1930s to the 1960s. This chapter outlines why the ... More

Et lille land’ - a little land - is a trope of Danish identity which recurs in many of the short informational films about Denmark made from the 1930s to the 1960s. This chapter outlines why the notion of Denmark as a small country has historically been fundamental to the nation’s self-understanding as an imagined community, and how and why it has been employed in informational films made for domestic and foreign consumption. The chapter discusses the role of film in the national imagination, and the importance of medium-specific qualities in that process of imagining: for the purposes of this book, such qualities include the films’ shortness, which impacts on narrative as well as distribution and exhibition. The chapter then discusses recent scholarship on ‘small-nation’ cinema, especially in the Nordic region, and the place of informational filmmaking within the small-nation context. A final chapter section outlines a further body of scholarship on cultural diplomacy, soft power, and nation-branding in the Nordic region as a framework for understanding how images (including informational films) move across borders and re-negotiate auto- and xenostereotypes.Less