WC-00-p.qxd 21/5/09 13:16 Page i WORLD CINEMAS, TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES 1ST PROOFS - NOT FOR PUBLICATION WC-00-p.qxd 21/5/09 13:16 Page ii Previously published in the AFI Film Readers series Edited by Charles Wolfe and Edward Branigan Landscape and Film Martin Lefebvre East European Cinemas Anikó Imre New Media Anna Everett and John T. Caldwell Authorship and Film David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger Westerns Janet Walker Masculinity Peter Lehman Violence and American Cinema J. David Slocum The Persistence of History Vivian Sobchack Home, Exile, Homeland Hamid Naficy Black Women Film and Video Artists Jacqueline Bobo The Revolution Wasn’t Televised Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin Classical Hollywood Comedy Henry Jenkins and Kristine Brunovska Karnick Disney Discourse Eric Smoodin Black American Cinema Manthia Diawara Film Theory Goes to the Movies Jim Collins, Ava Preacher Collins, and Hilary Radner Theorizing Documentary Michael Renov Sound Theory/Sound Practice Rick Altman Fabrications Jane M. Gaines and Charlotte Herzog Psychoanalysis and Cinema E. Ann Kaplan European Film Theory Temenuga Trifonova Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies Warren Buckland 1ST PROOFS - NOT FOR PUBLICATION WC-00-p.qxd 21/5/09 13:16 Page iii WORLD CINEMAS, TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES EDITED BY NATASˇA DUROVIˇ CˇOVÁ AND KATHLEEN NEWMAN 1ST PROOFS - NOT FOR PUBLICATION WC-00-p.qxd 21/5/09 13:16 Page iv First published 2009 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, 2 Park Square, New York, NY 10016 Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN © 2009 Taylor & Francis Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Typeset in Spectrum by Keystroke, High Street, Tettenhall, Wolverhampton Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by TO FOLLOW All rights reserved. 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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN 10: 0-415-97653-7 (hbk) ISBN 10: 0-415-97654-5 (pbk) ISBN 10: 0-203-88279-2 (ebk) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-97653-4 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-97654-1 (pbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-203-88279-5 (ebk) 1ST PROOFS - NOT FOR PUBLICATION WC-00-p.qxd 21/5/09 13:16 Page v 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 For Jean Newman 9 0 and 11 12 for Garrett Stewart 13 sine qua non . 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 1ST PROOFS - NOT FOR PUBLICATION WC-00-p.qxd 21/5/09 13:16 Page vi 1ST PROOFS - NOT FOR PUBLICATION WC-00-p.qxd 21/5/09 13:16 Page vii 1 2 3 4 5 6 contents 7 8 9 preface ix 0 natasˇa dˇurovicˇová 11 acknowledgments xvi 12 13 part one: the geopolitical imaginary of cinema studies 1 14 15 1. notes on transnational film theory: decentered 16 subjectivity, decentered capitalism 3 17 kathleen newman 18 2. on the plurality of cinematic transnationalism 12 19 mette hjort 20 21 3. tracking “global media” in the outposts of globalization 34 22 bhaskar sarkar 23 24 4. time zones and jetlag: the flows and phases of 25 world cinema 59 26 dudley andrew 27 5. vector, flow, zone: towards a history of 28 cinematic translatio 90 29 natasˇa dˇurovicˇová 30 31 part two: cinema as transnational exchange 121 32 6. chinese cinema and transnational film studies 123 33 yingjin zhang 34 35 7. national cinema abroad: the new international 36 division of cultural labor, from production to viewing 137 37 toby miller 38 39 8. aural identity, genealogies of sound technologies, 40 and hispanic transnationality on screen 160 41 marvin d’lugo 42 9. how movies move (between hong kong and 43 bulawayo, between screen and stage . .) 185 44 lesley stern 1ST PROOFS - NOT FOR PUBLICATION WC-00-p.qxd 21/5/09 13:16 Page viii 10. the new paradoxes of black africa’s cinemas 216 1 olivier barlet 2 3 11. the transnational other: street kids in contemporary brazilian cinema 225 4 joão luiz vieira 5 6 part three: comparative perspectives 243 7 8 s t n 12. fantasy in action 245 9 e t n paul willemen 0 o c 11 13. vernacular modernism: tracking cinema on a global scale 285 12 miriam hansen 13 14 14. globalization and hybridization 313 15 fredric jameson 16 17 15. from playtime to the world: the expansion and depletion of space within global economies 318 18 jonathan rosenbaum 19 20 bibliography 324 21 22 contributors 352 23 index 000 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 viii 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 1ST PROOFS - NOT FOR PUBLICATION WC-00-p.qxd 21/5/09 13:16 Page ix 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 preface 9 0 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 natasˇa dˇ urovicˇová 26 27 28 The impulse for this volume came from the pairing of a pedagogic 29 dissatisfaction with a historiographic question. Given the rapid and pervasive 30 changes in moving image economies and technologies, the backdrop against 31 which any represented geopolitical entity now appears is the scale of the 32 whole—“the world.” Yet the dominant strategy that teaching world cinema 33 most commonly takes is the format of an aggregate of discrete units of 34 national cinemas arranged in a sequence of peak moments, even while 35 presenting them “under erasure” so as to acknowledge the limits of the 36 nation-state paradigm as the basic film-historical unit. How then should 37 the geopolitical imaginary of the discipline of film studies be upgraded to a 38 transnational perspective, broadly conceived as above the level of the 39 national but below the level of the global? 40 The term “transnational” has since the late 1980s evolved from signaling 41 the generalized permeability of borders to the current usage in which it 42 has taken on, as well, what had been previously meant by the adjective 43 “international.” In contradistinction to “global,” a concept bound up with 44 the philosophical category of totality, and in contrast to “international,” 1ST PROOFS - NOT FOR PUBLICATION WC-00-p.qxd 21/5/09 13:16 Page x predicated on political systems in a latent relationship of parity, as signaled 1 by the prefix “inter-,” the intermediate and open term “transnational” 2 acknowledges the persistent agency of the state, in a varying but funda- 3 mentally legitimizing relationship to the scale of “the nation.” At the same 4 time, the prefix “trans-” implies relations of unevenness and mobility. It is 5 this relative openness to modalities of geopolitical forms, social relations and 6 especially to the variant scale on which relations in film history have 7 occurred that gives this key term its dynamic force, and its utility as a frame 8 á v o for hypotheses about emergent forms. 9 ˇ c i v Gathered in three overlapping parts, the contributions vary in scope, 0 o r u ranging from conceptual inquires in the discipline, through reconsiderations 11 ˇ d a s ˇ of well-established research questions to shorter, focused analyses departing 12 a t a from the textual level. Chapters in Part One, “The Geopolitical Imaginary 13 n of Cinema Studies,” take on the current configuration of world cinema, and 14 the geopolitics of the international film history, that is, the institutional 15 patterns of production, distribution, and exhibition on the scale of the 16 national, the regional and the global; Part Two, “Cinema as Transnational 17 Exchange,” gathers specific approaches to the representability and/or 18 intelligibility of the global via the cinema; the contributions in Part Three, 19 “Comparative Perspectives,” foreground methodological pathways for 20 comparative approaches to the historical study of films in the context of 21 globalization. 22 Across this threefold thematic clustering, two broad strategies for locating 23 “the transnational” can be discerned. First, there are those approaches in 24 which the formation identified as transnational is a fundamentally spatial 25 construct, reflects a relatively contemporary development within the 26 unfolding process of globalization, and presents itself as directly political. The 27 differential line of this space can range from that comprising a cross-border 28 geography to a fault-line of compression, across which incompatible or 29 incongruent spatial formations are brought into one another’s sphere of 30 influence (what in cultural geography would be referred to as “scale 31 jumping”). A second strategy among the chapters foregrounds an agenda 32 that is oriented critically, and diachronically. Methodologically varied, they 33 sketch out revisions of historiographic narratives that would accommodate 34 the scale of “below-global/above-national.” 35 Sketching first out elements of an intellectual genealogy for the con- 36 x version point between “the temporal” and “the spatial” turn in humanities 37 in general and in film studies in particular, Kathleen Newman outlines 38 several theoretical nodal points between theories of power and theories of 39 spatiality, singling out the concept of scale, and tracks the consequences of 40 this disciplinary intersection for film studies.