Christie - Where Is National Cinema Today

Where Is National Cinema Today (and Do We Still Need It)? Author(s): Ian Christie Source: Film History, Vol.
25, No. 1-2, Inquiries, Speculations, Provocations (2013), pp. 19-30 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/filmhistory.25.1-2.19 . Accessed: 17/09/2013 06:39
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Ian Christie
Where Is National Cinema Today (and Do We Still Need It)?
Abstract: National cinema is often questioned as a category, yet persists as a way of advertising national qualities, both culturally and economically. Although a founding concept in the writing of cinema history, it has recently been stigmatized as an equivalent of the national literatures promoted by nineteenth-century bourgeois elites, and also challenged by an emphasis on the transnational, yet can be demonstrated to have an empirical basis in audience studies. Keywords: nationality, regulation, festivals, quotas, diversity, art cinema, transnational, identity, impact, audiences
I want to pose the issue of national cinema as a conundrum that sits problematically among film history, poststructural theory, and the operations of contemporary media policy. From one perspective, it is flourishing, keeping well over one hundred state, regional, and municipal agencies around the world in business. These can be seen every year at the Cannes Film Festival, where their stands cluster along the beach like medieval pavilions. Others are inside the nearby festival Palais and in hotel suites all around town, offering hospitality and screenings, and promoting their productions, festivals, and facilities. For many years, at least until the current economic crisis, such organizations have proliferated, with regions as likely to have their own stand as the national body. So, for instance, Catalunya and the Basque Country compete for attention with the cash-strapped Spanish state itself. From another perspective, it could be argued that none of this really makes much of an impression on the larger world of cinema, which remains dominated by the major studios and similar US-based companies. Whatever Slovakia, Tunisia, or South Korea do to promote their films, the world still overwhelmingly watches Harry Potter, The Dark Knight Rises, Taken, and their like. Films from the major US studios earn between 70 and 90 percent of the total film revenues in
Film History, Volume 25, Issue 12, pp. 1930, 2013. Copyright 2013 Trustees of Indiana University
20 almost every country in the world (excluding India, China, Japan, and North and South Korea). The majority of these films are produced in America, as they have been since the early 1920s.1 Europe alone may make over 1200 films per year, but relatively few people get to see them outside their country of origin. The theoretical contradictions and limitations of national cinema are well known, but the phenomenon persists.2 My question is: can screen history help us think through this issue of nationality? We know, of course, that early film programs routinely included films from different sources, often with their origins erased or disguised by titling. However, early audiences also had frequent opportunities to identify national ceremonies, especially in relation to state occasions, and films regularly referred to international conflicts from the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Anglo-Boer War of 18991902 onward. The years surrounding the outbreak of World WarI saw an unprecedented number of assertively national films, ranging from The Tercentenary of the Romanov Dynastys Accession (Russia, 1912), Sixty Years a Queen (Great Britain, 1913), and Richard Wagner (Germany, 1913) to the two key spectacles that set cinema proper on its future course, Cabiria (1914) and The Birth of a Nation (1915), which are both explicitly concerned with nation building. While Europes nations were locked in war, American producers and their closely linked distributorswhich would soon form the studioseffectively assumed control of worldwide film supply in 1916, as Kristin Thompson demonstrated in her pioneering 1985 study.3 By the time the war ended in 1918, the American film industry had effectively taken over the global business of supplying audiences with popular entertainment, with France, Italy, and Denmarkall major exporters before 1914henceforth facing severely limited outlets for their films and a drastically reduced share of their domestic exhibition market. D. W. Griffith might have declared, on his visit to Toronto in 1925, that you should have your own films and exchange them with other countries,4 but during the 1920s, Canada was in the same position as Europe, where the Film Europe movement unsuccessfully tried to unite the countries that were all suffering the same domination. Germanys economic collapse undermined the strongest of the European studios, Ufa, allowing Paramount and Metro to buy into it; and Warner Bros. gamble on synchronized sound, backed by US banks, proved to be a decisive game changer. The talkies arrived as essentially American, with other filmmakers around the world struggling for years to catch up. And although the end of the 1920s saw a burst of determinedly international films in EuropeDuponts Piccadilly and Titanic, followed by Pabsts Kameradschaft and Westfront 1918, and the Pool Groups Borderline, made in Switzerland with Paul Robesonthis all proved to be too little and too late.
Fil m History | Volume 25.12
21 It was also during the 1920s that the concept of national cinema became an accepted way of thinking about the history and progress of the medium. Terry Ramsayes A Million and One Nights (1926) was understandably written by this industry insider from an essentially American perspective.5 But Paul Rothas The Film Till Now (1930), an ambitious survey by a young English critic, was organized in national chapters: three on The American Film were followed by highly opinionated surveys of Soviet, German, French, and British production, with a final roundup of films from other countries. Most later histories would follow this pattern, treating cinema like literature or fine art and comparing the relative strength of different national schools. But American cinema was not merely one among many: it had already become the mainstreamthe moviesagainst which others were and continue to be defined by their localness or national identity. State film regulation, mostly aimed at protecting local production from US domination, also appeared in Europe in the 1920s and would continue in the following decade, with the totalitarian states eventually shutting out virtually all imports. Legal and political definitions of films nationality were now established, and yet there seems to have been little comparative analysis of the effect of such exclusions and market interventions. However, while it was once considered axiomatic that quotas had more negative than positive results, there has been growing scholarly support for a reassessment.6 Certainly, the quota scheme in Britain, which took effect from 1929, allowed a new generation of filmmakers to gain experience; justified modernizing studios and building some new ones; and produced new kinds of local vernacular filmscomedies, musicals, and films about remote regionsall of which laid the foundations for important future genres and careers. World War II had a wide range of effects, not only on production but on film circulation and consumption, which have been little studied. The attention paid to a rather small number of war-related and propaganda films has obscured many other phenomena, such as the revival of silent-era classics for 16mm screenings and a temporary increase in access to allies previously unseen films. But after the war, there was an eerie replay of the 1920s scenario, with European countries scrambling to reassert and rediscover their identity through film, while America used its economic muscle to enforce an open market for one of its most important exports. In France, the highly contentious Blum-Byrnes agreement of 1946 guaranteed French cinemas just one week per month for screening French films,7 while in Britain, an attempt to levy higher taxes on American box-office earnings in 194748 provoked a Hollywood boycott, which led to capitulation after eight months.8
Ian Christie | Where Is National Cinem a Today
22
Fig. 1: US Secretary of State James Byrnes and ex-premier Lon Blum negotiating the 1948 agreement that gave France large loans in exchange for American films gaining greater access to French cinemas.
Such strong-arm tactics succeeded in maintaining the open market that the studios wanted, but by the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was clearly a rising demand for self-expression by younger filmmakers. This was not confined to Western Europe; if anything, it was stronger in the Eastern bloc, no doubt in reaction to the recently imposed local Communist regimes. Polish, Russian, Czech, Hungarian, and Yugoslav filmmakers all created international reputations, alongside the leaders of the western new waves in France, Italy, and Britain; in addition, Swedish cinema, internationally recognized in the silent era, returned to world screens. Many other nations, previously unknown as exporters, began to appear in the 1960s panorama of art cinema, as it came to be known. Whether or not we accept the term art cinema, with its built-in implication of elitism, the 1960s clearly saw a huge diversification in the range of films circulating and the growth of an appetite for films that spoke of national and regional cultures. Film festivals lost something of their earlier quasi-diplomatic structure and became dynamic, unpredictable hubs of a late-modernist film culture, closely allied with new developments in publishing, music, and television. New festivals, new distributors, and new outlets all challenged a culture of routinized consumption that the studios had assiduously nourished. And, of course, Hollywood itself began to change, with European-style independents emerging on the edge of the studio system. All of these trends belong to a familiar narrative of the story of cinema, but the impact of such developments can easily be overstated, as it often has been in histories that understandably focus on innovation and the distinctively local. In fact, the Hollywood studios continued to supply the bulk of what was shown weekly in a now-diminishing number of cinemas, while national industries still mostly produced undemanding fare for domestic consumption. However, the spectrum of film content and style had been irreversibly widened, and a minority of films broke old taboos and broached new subjects, even if many were judged unsuitable for the young or the easily bored. National and local specificity became
23
Fig. 2: Lawrence of Arabia(1962), produced by Sam Spiegel (center, with Omar Sharif and Peter OToole) for Columbia, was largely made by UK personnel, but barely qualified as British for quota purposes.
an important component of the new forms of cultural impact that film was having during the 1960s, especially the extent to which it was reshaping peoples awareness of the world, both at home and internationally. For this is surely key to understanding why so many states launched or revamped schemes to promote native filmmaking, alongside whatever industrial quotas or incentives they had maintained since the prewar period. Within the postwar world order, national film had been given a special status. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) of 1947 allowed states to operate quotas for films of national origin. And defining this concept opened a can of worms, especially for the nation most closely linked to Hollywood. One historic example is Sam Spiegels production of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) for Columbia Pictures, often celebrated as a triumph of renascent British filmmaking, which barely managed to qualify as British for subsidy purposes under the prevailing criteria.9 Today, Warners Harry Potter adaptations are defined in Britain as inward investment films, although not counted as British or European by the European Union (EU) MEDIA Programme.10 The Canadian campaigner for cultural diversity, Peter Grant, has offered a typology of national film promotion and protection schemes and the criteria of identity that they use.11 Grant observes that the World Trade Organizations 1994 rules of origin for cultural goods are difficult to apply to film as a complex hybrid object, and he points to an underlying tension that runs through states attempts to define national identity for film. Some of their criteria are industrial, relating to place of production, national employment quota, and registration of companies involved. Others seek to guarantee the cultural identity of the work, by requiring some proportion of its creative personnel to be nationals, on the assumption that this will make the work ipso facto nationaleven though there is no guarantee that, for instance, a French team will not make a facsimile of a US thriller, as in the case of Luc Bessons productions Taken and Taken 2. The later Harry Potter adaptations were similarly made by a majority
24 of British nationals, but as Warner productions, they are considered American by the rest of Europe. It is easy to question and even ridicule such criteria, with points awarded for the nationality of director, writer, composer, and the like. But the provision of substantial tax concessions and subsidies clearly requires objective criteria.12 The questions we need to consider are about what these criteria are seeking to promote. What are the various national agencies represented in Cannes saying? a) Come and see our latest films as expressions of national talent and culture. b) Come and shoot your next film in our spectacular landscape/ well-equipped studio, and benefit from our economic incentives, while also benefitting our workforce. But there is perhaps also a third, more complex message, especially from smaller countries: c) We belong to a wider production and exhibition community, which is resisting the bland global culture delivered everywhere in multiplexes. And to do so, we assert local specificity, while entering into coproduction treaties and participating in such multinational initiatives as the MEDIA Programme and Eurimages.13 The economic instruments of national promotion and supranational support may seem relatively crude or sometimes redundant, but the concerns and ambitions are real enough. And indeed many film historians have effectively contributed over the decades to defining national cinemasalmost invariably understood in terms of a highly selective account of domestic productionin what was one of the earliest genres of film publishing (books on the cinema of x). Yet there are also academic countercurrents that question the value or validity of national cinema. Thomas Elsaesser has written of a map of misreadings in the way that European art cinema is perceived, both in the United States and also in Europe itself outside a films country of origin.14 Comparing the invention of national cinema with the bourgeois elites of Europe inventing national literatures to bolster their sense of nationhood in the early twentieth century, he has also argued that how and where such films are seen matters as much as their formal or thematic aspects (or, indeed, their authorship), since they represent a genre constituted by who sees them and in what context. Another challenge to the essentialist concept of national cinema is growing academic enthusiasm for the transnationala concept that seems to serve as a kind of benevolent counterpart to the perceived evil of globalization.15 The
25 history of migrations during the last 150 years makes it easy to recognize the transnational as an intrinsic dynamic of modern culture, while digital technologies support a virtual transnationality in addition to the material and corporeal versions that were evident in the era of cinema-bound film. One cause (or perhaps consequence) of this phenomenon is our contemporary preoccupation with identity, which, as Zygmunt Bauman has noted, may be precisely because it seems to be disappearing in the stew of globalization.16 This has bred a renewed appetite for the local, the specific, and the original in many areas of consumption, encouraging us also to value cultural works that trace origins, show the local surviving against modern odds, or take us to exotically unfamiliar lands and cultures. Arguably, such a trend was already evident in the wide popularity of Flahertys essays in popular ethnography during the interwar years and also in many of the localist films that became cornerstones of various national cinemas, such as Outskirts (Boris Barnet, USSR, 1933), Turn of the Tide (Norman Walker, UK, 1935), and La Terra Trema (Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1948), and equally in the canonization of Frances poetic realism of the 1930s and Britains postwar Ealing comedies. Intriguingly, a renewed appetite for such localism can be traced in the Cannes Festivals succession of recent Palme dOr winners: The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach, Ireland/UK, 2006), 4Months, 3Weeks, and 2Days (Cristian Mungiu, Romania, 2007), The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, Austria, 2009), and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand, 2010). All of these films have portrayed small or hitherto underrepresented countries to a wide international audience, fulfilling the ambassadorial role of 1960s art cinema. Films can also become national in the sense of speaking for and to the nation at moments of political crisis and liberation. Obvious examples would be Rossellinis Rome, Open City and Pais in 194546; Wajdas World WarII trilogy (A Generation, Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds, 195558) and his later films about unrest in Communist Poland, Man of Marble (1977) and Man of Iron (1981); or the long tradition of Soviet films stretching from The Battleship Potemkin (1925) to The Cranes Are Flying (1958), Repentance (198487), and The Commissar (Askoldov, 1967/1988), all widely interpreted as emblematic of defining moments in the Soviet state. But films can also come to speak for nations in less obviously historic ways. The competition between Renoirs La Rgle du jeu and Carns Les Enfants du Paradis as elaborate fictionalized self-portraits of French society before and during World WarII offers an intriguing insight into how Frenchness has been constructed and reconstructed.17 Similar case studies could be developed around how films such as Easy Rider (1969) and Bowling for Columbine (2002) reflect perplexity about American identity, and how Britain sees its values expressed by such diverse films as Chariots of Fire (1981) and The Kings Speech (2010).
26 Faced with the totality of films that could be taken to constitute even a small nations national cinema, the crucial issue is clearly the criterion of selection. Most historical narratives of national cinema draw heavily, if not exclusively, on films that enjoy some international reputation: effectively, they display national production at its most exportable, with a bias toward films that have won awards or gained critical esteem. Implicitly, they ignore both the national reception of imported films and what may have been the most commercially successful among domestic productions. In doing so, they are, of course, merely following the traditions of identifying the national in other arts and media, but at a time when other cultural historians are questioning such self-confirming selectivity, it seems highly desirable to question the conceptual basis of national cinema. One way of doing so is to use quantitative methods.18 For a recent study of the British cinema between 1946 and 2006, Stories We Tell Ourselves, a database was created of all British features produced in this period, from which two samples were selected for further analysis.19 One of these, the intuitive sample, contained two hundred titles that have appeared in a number of best of British polls. The other, created as a control, contained two hundred titles chosen randomly from the total corpus. Both samples were coded according to certain criteria, such as genre, regional, and period setting, and according to a set of British values that had been proposed for discussion by the then Labour government. One aim of this exercise was to interrogate assumptions about British cinema, often regarded as preoccupied with period themes and with World WarII. Contemporary subjects and settings proved to be predominant in both samples, with the war represented in only nine random and fourteen intuitive films. More interesting, perhaps, was the discovery that a majority of films chosen randomly could be described as endorsing or promoting traditional British values, while a majority of the intuitively chosen and therefore critically endorsed films tended to challenge or satirize these values. Such forms of analysis can only be tentative at this stage, but they point to possible ways of escaping from the hall of mirrors that studies of national cinema have arguably become as well as to the potential value of the many new kinds of data now available. The main focus of Stories We Tell Ourselves was in fact defining and assessing the cultural impact of British film both domestically and internationally, with special emphasis on the increased importance of digital access to and discourse about film. Counting such indicators as votes cast on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) website and numbers of YouTube extracts, as well as citations in other media and evidence of impacts on behavior, the study showed how the long tail of film accessibility is creating new opportunities for older and even commercially unsuccessful films to gain a new following. One chapter carried this methodology into the field of national cinema as perceived abroad,
27 outlining an empirical assessment of the perception and impact of Britishness abroad through UK films.20 Following Stories We Tell Ourselves, a second survey was commissioned by the UK Film Council and British Film Institute to gather objective evidence about the place that film occupies in British cultural life. Opening Our Eyes was carefully designed to avoid bias in favor of film enthusiasts or toward a preferred way of accessing film, and it provided a wealth of information about current attitudes to film across many platforms.21 One key finding was that, among those who chose the same film as personally significant, there was no unanimity as to what it offered or meant. Reasons for choosing blockbusters such as Avatar and Inception ranged from the political and environmental to the metaphysical and aesthetic. In a section devoted to the place of British film within overall film experience, respondents were asked to choose a film they considered to have had a significant effect on society or attitudes in the UK. Perhaps surprisingly, Trainspotting was the most frequent choice, with nearly twice as many respondents as The Full Monty, followed by two more social dramas with regional settings, East is East and Billy Elliot.22 These confirmed the view expressed by one respondent that British films tend to be realistic, honest and display a dark, unique sense of humour.23 The national canon need not be homogeneous; it may include the anarchic (Trainspotting) or countercultural (like Derek Jarmans Jubilee, another increasingly popular choice to stand for England), but there is also evidence of a continued attachment to traditional institutions of nationhood. In Britains case, this has long revolved around monarchy, and it is striking that the same inquiry which identified Trainspotting and The Full Monty as emblematic of British qualities also confirmed overwhelming support for The Kings Speech as a film personally significant for respondents.24 Following similar levels of regard for The Queen, it is clear that fascination with an intimate view of monarchy remains strong, not only within the United Kingdom, but also internationally. The field of academic film studies has long been attached to concepts of reading films for ideological and iconographic import and to debates about misreadings, as if there might be a correct or authorized reading of a text. Film studies has traditionally stood aloof from both the commercial imperatives of production and exhibition and the ultimately political concerns of film subsidy and regulation. Yet the recent emergence of production studies, together with growing academic interest in film festivals and in histories of distribution and exhibition, all point toward a belated recognition that films are not primarily immaterial texts, but are indeed Grants complex hybrid objects that media law and governments struggle to define and continue to support. The final stage of this methodological revolution may be to recognize empirical audience studies,
28 which invariably show that there are many possible responses to the same film, just as there are many reasons for viewing choices. Film history clearly has little to fear from such an expansion of its techniques and could indeed gain greatly in standing by addressing some of the major issues that film places on the global agendaethical, environmental, and political. Further, as new modes of access and delivery for film reshape taste and awareness and help overcome the restrictions of conventional film exhibition, there are implications for the ways that critics and scholars have grouped films as expressions of national cinema. Building on the insight by Elsaesser and others that the national is intrinsically relationaldependent on who and where the observer is and on the institutions involvedthe study of national film should cease to be a display of taste and connoisseurship (in the tradition of Rotha) and engage instead with the wealth of empirical studies of audience preference. Nor need this be confined to the present. Scholars such as John Sedgwick, Clara Pafort-Overduin, Karel Dibbets, Robert Allen, and Gregory Waller have shown how historic audiences can be understood in their particularity.25 What remains in the audience turn that film studies has taken is to devise and apply similar techniques to discovering how cinema has populated the imagined communities of nations26not confining ourselves solely to national production, but alert to the transnational potential of film constantly being appropriated for purposes of local self-definition, as in the instances of Scots responding distinctively to Mel Gibsons Braveheart or indeed Palestinians to Avatar.27 So, to answer my opening question: we do need national cinema histories that are grounded in the study of diverse audiences and reception within the nations that are still our primary frames of reference; and these should also give due weight to indigenous production where and when this is significant, as well as factoring in the prevailing economic and political framework. Any offers? Notes
1. Percentages of the national market taken by indigenous production vary widely, but the average across all EU member states in 2010 was 25.3 percent according to the European Audiovisual Observatory report FOCUS 2011: World Film Market Trends (Strasbourg: European Audiovisual Observatory, 2011), 19. 2. See, for instance, Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen, eds., Theorizing National Cinema (London, British Film Institute, 2006); Andrew Higson, The Concept of National Cinema, Screen 30, no. 4 (1989): 3647; and subsequent writings on the theme. 3. Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market 19071934 (London: British Film Institute,1985). See online edition, with new preface (2010), at http://www.davidbordwell.net/books/exporting.php.
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4. Peter Morris, Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 18951939 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1978), 92. This article is partly based on the first Peter Morris Memorial Lecture, given at York University, Toronto, in 2011, which provided a congenial opportunity to raise and discuss issues of national cinema. 5. Terry Ramsaye (18851954) was a journalist before becoming a producer and editor in the 1920s, when he published A Million and One Nights, subtitled A History of the Motion Picture through 1925, which set the pattern for many subsequent synoptic histories. He later became editor of the trade journal Motion Picture Herald. 6. This reassessment may be dated from contributions to Jeffrey Richardss collection, The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, 19291939 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998), especially Mark Glancys chapter Hollywood and Britain: MGM and the British Quota Legislation. 7. On the history of Franco-US film and media relations, see Bill Grantham, Some Big Bourgeois Brothel: Contexts for Frances Culture Wars with Hollywood (Luton: University of Luton Press, 2000), especially 5965; also see Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, Blum-Byrnes, larrangement, 19451948, in 1895, no. 13 (1993): 349. 8. On what became known in Britain as the Bogart or bacon debate, see Geoffrey Macnab, J.Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry (London: Routledge, 1993), 16287. 9. The British Film Production Fund, commonly known as the Eady Levy, was introduced in the aftermath of the 1948 settlement on film revenues between Britain and America, setting tests for a production qualifying as British. On the subterfuge required to meet these tests for Lawrence, see Jonathan Stubbs, The Eady Levy: A Runaway Bribe? Hollywood Production and British Subsidy in the Early 1960s, Journal of British Cinema and Television 6, no. 1 (2009): 812. 10. The MEDIA Programme of the European Commission, first launched in 1995, defines the nationality of films for various subsidy schemes, directed toward development, distribution, and exhibition. See the MEDIA Programme website, accessed January 6, 2013, http://ec.europa.eu/culture/media/index_en.htm. 11. Peter S. Grant and Chris Wood, Blockbusters and Trade Wars: Popular Culture in a Globalized World (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2004). 12. For a sympathetic discussion of such criteria, see William Uricchio, We Europeans?: Media, Representations, Identities (London: Intellect, 2009), 18990. 13. Eurimages is a coproduction scheme established by the Council of Europe, which currently has thirty-six member states. See its website, accessed January 6, 2013, at http://www .coe.int/t/dg4/eurimages/support/supportcoprod_EN.asp. 14. Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 46. The phrase map of misreadings is borrowed from the American literary critic Harold Bloom. 15. See, among many essays and books, two collections: Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, eds., Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2006); and Nataa Durovicov and Kathleen E. Newman, eds., World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2009). 16. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 8687, passim. 17. On the French paradox, see Jean-Michel Frodon, La Projection nationale: cinma et nation (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998), 81101.
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18. Like John Sedgwicks methods for exploring film choice and preference, or William St. Clairs methods for analyzing choice among a nineteenth-century readership. 19. Narval Media, Stories We Tell Ourselves: The Cultural Impact of UK Film, 19462006 (London: UK Film Council, 2009). The study is accessible at http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org .uk/files/downloads/bfi-opening-our-eyes-stories-we-tell-ourselves-report-2006.pdf. 20. Narval Media, Stories We Tell Ourselves, 6472. The findings of Stories were debated around the United Kingdom in a series of public seminars during 200910, provoking lively debate about regional and national identity and representation. They were also discussed at the European Parliament, and in Ireland and Spain, at a time when the hegemony of the nation-state was under renewed scrutiny, together with the European project itself. 21. Opening Our Eyes: How Film Contributes to the Culture of the UK (London: British Film Institute, 2011), accessed January 6, 2013, http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/ downloads/bfi-opening-our-eyes-2011-07.pdf. 22. Trainspotting was chosen by 189 respondents, The Full Monty by 102, East is East by 82, and Billy Elliot by 52 (ibid., 45). 23. Ibid., 8. 24. The Kings Speech had been heavily promoted during the run-up to the 2011 Academy Awards, which coincided with the Opening Our Eyes poll in February 2011, and probably influenced its choice by one hundred respondents as significant, compared with seventy-five choosing Schindlers List and forty-five choosing Avatar. 25. See, for instance, John Sedgwick and Clara Pafort-Overduin, Understanding Audience Behavior through Statistical Evidence: London and Amsterdam in the Mid-1930s, in Audiences, ed. Ian Christie (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012); Karel Dibbets,Cinema Context and the Genes of Film History, New Review of Film and Television Studies 8, no. 3(2010): 33142; RobertC. Allen, Motion Picture Exhibition in Manhattan, 19061912: Beyond the Nickelodeon, Cinema Journal 18, no. 2 (1979): 215; and Gregory A. Waller, Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 18961930 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995). 26. The oft-quoted phrase that Benedict Anderson introduced in his book Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983) seems particularly suited to evoking how film audiences relate to imagined narratives of nationhood, irrespective of how these correspond to their own realities. 27. Braveheart is widely believed to have played a significant part in boosting the 75 percent referendum vote for a Scottish parliament in 1997. On political responses to Avatar, see Richard Huleatts interview with Yosefa Loshitzky, Avatar in the Palestinian (Imagi)nation, Real/Reel Journal, April 26, 2012, http://realreeljournal.com/2012/04/ 26/avatar/.

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Where Is National Cinema Today (and Do We Still Need It)? Author(s): Ian Christie Source: Film History, Vol.

Where Is National Cinema Today (and Do We Still Need It)?

Fil m History | Volume 25.12

Ian Christie | Where Is National Cinem a Today

Fil m History | Volume 25.12

Ian Christie | Where Is National Cinem a Today

Fil m History | Volume 25.12

Ian Christie | Where Is National Cinem a Today

Fil m History | Volume 25.12

Ian Christie | Where Is National Cinem a Today

Fil m History | Volume 25.12

Ian Christie | Where Is National Cinem a Today

Fil m History | Volume 25.12

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