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

"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.