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This chapter discusses the competitors of the American film industry. The German film industry competed most successfully with America in that its domestic productions outweighed foreign imports in the 1920s, and Britain put up a very good fight at the box office, with 1927 its annus mirabilis. However, protectionist measures would characterise a decade in which national cinemas sought to hold their own against Hollywood's incursions into other national cinemas. The American challenge to European and other cinemas was also underwritten by the federal support that the American film industry received from the US Government's Commerce Department, designed to support a developing industry. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Social Mobility and the Fantastic: German Silent Cinema’ by Thomas Elsaesser, a revisionist study that pays tribute to two classic film studies of the era — Siegfried Kracauer's sociological From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and Lotte Eisner's aesthetic study The Haunted Screen (1969). Elsaesser critiques what had become their ‘consensus’ view of the cinema of the period.

This chapter examines the scale of the national used to occupy the central attention in film studies and argues that the resulting myth of a unified national cinema in a given nation-state must be demystified. It first reconceptualizes Chinese cinema in relation to the shifting problematics of national cinema and transnational film studies in both the theoretical and historical contexts. It then considers interdisciplinarity in Chinese film studies in the West and how it benefits audience study, along with the thorny issues of piracy and cross-mediality. It also discusses film studies from a different perspective than transnationalism and speculates on what might be gained from comparative film studies, arguing that it is a subfield larger than transnational film studies. The chapter urges scholars to move beyond the national cinema paradigm and to explore the transnational and comparative frameworks of film studies.

Tracing the history of Indonesian cinema up until 1998, this chapter considers the way in which cinema was conceptualised through post-independence nationalism and later by its relationship to the authoritarian New Order regime. Often referred to as film nasional, Indonesian cinema has been subject to a nationalist interpretation which has meant the promotion of a prescriptive idea of cinema as a tool for nation building. By questioning the parameters of film nasional and the veneration of artist filmmakers like Usmar Ismail, this chapter traces the history of Indonesian cinema and the film industry as a complex network of interests and influence that cannot be reduced to the values of individual filmmakers. It shows how throughout the New Order the film industry came under state control before its decline in the 1990s and relegation to the cultural periphery. Here the failures of existing explanatory models are revealed just as the New Order would end in 1998.

The introduction establishes the book’s argument; how transnational cinema has become central to Latin American filmmaking and film industries. It briefly traces the national and global processes (neoliberalism) that have pushed these industries towards transnational modes. The introduction also explores theories of transnational cinema and how these fit within the political, postcolonial and auteurist discourses around Latin American national cinemas. It also explores how these discourses function in relation to Latin America’s art cinema resurgence. Centring on Madeinusa (Peru/Spain Claudia Llosa 2006) and La teta asustada (Peru/Spain Llosa 2009) the introduction examines their transnational (festival) funding structures and aesthetic features. The introduction concludes with an explanation of the rationale behind the structure of the book which places each transnational auteur within sections prefaced by accounts of the national industries (Mexico, Brazil and Argentina) in which they began and (in different ways) continue their filmmaking careers.

This introduction argues that Hong Kong cinema and media are best understood as a public sphere, where affects associated with Hong Kongers’ extraterritorial position of being doubly occupied and ostracised by contesting sociopolitical forces are being negotiated. It first examines why the national/transnational debate on Hong Kong cinema falls short of helping us understand the core of the sociopolitical perturbation it seeks to locate. It then expounds the term ‘extraterritoriality’ from both theoretical and historical angles. With these in mind, this chapter studies Mandarin musical Chang xiangsi [An All-Consuming Love, He Zhaozhang, 1947] as an example of an extraterritorial cinematic and musical experience. Finally, it introduces the specific topics and case studies discussed in each chapter of this book.

This chapter examines to what extent one may identify Hot Fuzz (2007) as an example of British national cinema. Hot Fuzz's use of relocated genre parody means that it addresses its audience in multiple but mutually reconcilable ways: as a ‘Hollywood’ movie that is not quite Hollywood, and as a ‘British’ movie that acknowledges the possible limitations of ‘British cinema’ as a concept. The chapter then identifies the ways in which Hot Fuzz references earlier examples of British television and cinema within its parodic references. The film makes significant narrative use of these inter-texts in ways that complicate the supposed direction of Hot Fuzz's parody towards American cinema. The chapter concludes that part of Hot Fuzz's appeal is the way it brings into focus various points of discussion about British cinema in the early twenty-first century, as well as offering an entertaining and economically viable response to these debates.

Nordic Film Cultures rethinks and reformulates the images, legacies, and impacts of Nordic cinemas within dynamic and multi-directional global contexts. The book engages with lacunae of transnational, extra-territorial history of Scandinavian and Nordic filmmaking from its early phases up to the present moment. The volume’s quest is to re-imagine Nordic cinema outside the confines of national and even regional cinema brackets to an even further new degree and in locations often least expected. Departing from what may be, to an international audience (and partially also to domestic spectators), obvious “traditions” of the Nordic region, the authors read against the grain of “the national” and reveal how significantly Scandinavian films and filmmakers transcend and transgress these national boundaries on myriad levels.

The introductory chapter clarifies the goal of the book, which is to question the monolithic understanding of wartime film and to focus on the complexities and contradictions of national identity formation of cultural texts in this period. The chapter begins by providing a brief summary of the era’s film industry. Then, it introduces the state of research of wartime Japanese film studies through an examination of the definition of ‘national policy film’ or kokusaku eiga. Finally, it underlines the significance of interdisciplinary and relational approaches to wartime Japanese film by discussing the methodologies and narratives of other national film histories that have informed this project. (105 words)

This chapter examines the concept of transnationalism in contemporary Japanese cinema. The term “transnational cinema” has been posed as a substitute for “national cinema,” which has long been criticized for various reasons. While nationalism has been repeatedly invented in popular culture, national borders have become increasingly permeable. Global exchanges have noticeably accelerated with the development of communication technologies. In the case of film studies, the expansion of multinational finance and the diversified distribution beyond theatrical release has put the present framework of national cinema in a tenuous position. This chapter tackles the issue of the paradigm shift on the levels both of the critical discourses regarding Chinese-language and Nordic cinemas and the film texts, with particular emphasis on contemporary transnational films from the East Asian region. It also discusses global localization or glocalization as exemplified by the film Initial D. Finally, it considers what benefit, if any, the framework of transnational cinema brings us over that of national cinema through an analysis of the Japanese film, The Hotel Venus (2004, Takahata Hideta).

This chapter looks into the varied efforts of filmmakers to develop Joseon film culture and to define what constituted Joseon film from the early 1920s up to the late 1930s. Specifically, it explores filmmakers’ endeavours to find a way to develop cinematic aesthetics that reflected something uniquely Korean but at the same time integrated Joseon’s colonial status into their filmic representation of the colony Joseon. The inquiry begins with a discussion of the cinematic tropes and aesthetics developed by the 1926 film Arirang that laid the foundation for Joseon film production. The author discusses the film’s role in the discursive formation of Joseon cinema and cinematic representation of Joseon. Then the chapter analyses a wide variety of films, recurring stylistic patterns, and critical questions Joseon filmmakers considered when they tried to cinematize their respective versions of a Joseon image.

As a small and relatively peripheral nation, Ireland's film industry is largely state-funded with additional support from European sources and co-production deals with the commercial industry. It produces between 10 and 15 feature films per year as well as a range of shorts, documentaries and animation films. Ireland is also a popular location for large-scale American and British film and television productions, which bring additional economic and training benefits to the local indigenous industry. Although this industry only emerged relatively recently in the 1980s/1990s, Ireland has had a presence in the American and British film industries since the earliest days of filmmaking and a range of dominant tropes has emerged in the representation of Ireland and the Irish. Much indigenous filmmaking is a response to these traditions of representation as well as a response to the rapid economic and social changes that have characterised Ireland since the 1980s. Indeed, Irish cinema has played a key role in tracking and representing these transformations so that, despite the low profile of Irish cinema internationally (with the exception of Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan) the indigenous cinema has played a key role in the cultural re-imagining of Ireland and the Irish at home.

This article identifies and explores a central paradox which beset Scottish cinema of the early 2000s. On one hand, that period continued and confirmed the notable achievements of the late 1990s: enhanced levels of indigenous feature production were sustained into the new century and significant new directorial voices (such as David MacKenzie and Richard Jobson) continued to emerge. Yet on the other, many figures active within twenty-first-century Scottish film culture understood the post-2000 period to be one of collective disappointment and unfulfilled expectation. With a particular focus on two central trends – a decline in average feature production budget sizes and an increase in feature co-production activity between Scottish and European (especially Scandinavian) partners – this article argues that the 2000s were in fact a period of significant consolidation for Scottish cinema. As well as seeking to understand the means by which that consolidation took place, the arguments presented here also speculate on the possible consequences of that fact for academic criticism of Scottish film, arguing that a traditional critical focus of questions of national identity and representation has become harder to sustain in the face of increasingly diverse filmmaking practices emerging from Scotland.

Television in Germany represents an especially interesting case within Europe due to the country's division after 1949 into two sovereign nations, with radically different trajectories concerning the role of the arts. After World War II, developments in television commenced in the Federal Republic of Germany and resulted in the establishment of the first public broadcasting station, the NWDR, in 1952, and two years later, the ARD. In the 1950s and early 1960s, initial attempts to establish a productive relationship between cinema and television were underway and feature films began to be broadcast on TV. However, these cross-media experiments were not well received by critics or the public and were given the derogatory label ‘Pantoffelkino’ (slipper cinema). Furthermore, many within the film industry blamed the dramatic decrease in cinema spectatorship on the emergence of television, tainting the reputation of the latter. It was not until the 1970s that television began to play an important role in the development of a German national cinema.

This chapter asks, with specific reference to Hong Kong, whether a national cinema can be produced in the absence of a nation-state. Comparisons with Palestinian cinema, which is disconnected from an independent nation state, help to shed light on the specificities of the New Hong Kong Cinema and its relation to the phenomenon of national cinema. Films by Wong Kar-wai, Ann Hui, Fruit Chan, Alan Mak and Andrew Lau are shown to reflect thoughtfully on Hong Kong's re-inscription into China following the Handover in 1997.

The introduction presents the main conceptual framework and historiographical methods of the book, detailing the author’s efforts to redefine the concept of the cinema of colonial Korea or “Joseon (colonial Korea) cinema.”