Nation and Anti-Nation: Concepts of National Cinema in the "New" Media Era

Diaspora 5:3 1996 Nation and Anti-Nation: Concepts of National Cinema in the "New" Media Era Philip Rosen Brown University [AUTHOR'S NOTE: The original version ofthis article, "El concepto de cinema nacional en la « nueva » era « mass mediática » " was conceived and published as a chapter in a multivolume history of cinema: Historia Generale del Cine, vol. 12: El cine en la era del audiovisual, eds. Manuel Palacio and Santos Zunzunegui (Madrid: Ed. Cátedra, 1995). Some ofits particular references are marked by its moment of composition (early-1994) and original purpose, and there has already been a large amount of new scholarship and theory not only on the concept ofnational cinemas but on media and transnationality. But the general argument still seems pertinent to me, and I have only made changes for purposes of clarification, without attempting an update or any substantive revision.] [M]y knowledge of movies, pictures, or the idea of movie-making, was strongly linked to the identity of a nation. That's why there is no French television, or Italian, or British, or American television. There can be only one television because it's not related to nation. It's related to finance or commerce. Movie-making at the beginning was related to the identity of the nation and there have been very few "national" cinemas. In my opinion there is no Swedish cinema but there are Swedish movie-makers—some very good ones, such as Stiller and Bergman. There have been only a handful of cinemas: Italian, German, American and Russian. This is because when countries were inventing and using motion pictures, they needed an image of themselves. The Russian cinema arrived at a time when they needed a new image. And in the case of Germany, they had lost a war and were completely corrupted and needed a new idea of Germany. At the time the new Italian cinema emerged Italy was completely lost—it was the only country which fought with the Germans, then against the Germans. They strongly needed to see a new reality and this was provided by neo-realism. Today, if you put all these people in one so-called "Eurocountry," you have nothing; since television is television, you only have America. (Jean-Luc Godard in conversation with Colin MacCabe [Pétrie 98]) 375 376 Diaspora 5:3 1996 1. Cinema Versus Television: A New Situation for National Cinemas? The cinematic institution has never been a completely stable entity. The shift to continuous scheduled theatrical exhibition in the first decade of the century, the conversion to sound in the 1920s and 1930s, and the onset ofbroadcast television in the 1950s should remind us that technological adjustments trumpeted as unprecedented change are highly precedented in the history of cinema. Godard summarizes the most current large-scale transformation by the term "television." Of course there is much more to it than television, which has been a major sociocultural presence for decades. But in Godard's pronouncement, made at a 1991 conference on European unity, nationality, and cinema, television is a figure of speech for another "new" situation in film history. This essay is concerned with the general view of the situation exemplified in his remarks in relation to understandings of identity in general and the nation in particular. Godard here formulates an opposition which can be taken as one of the controlling tropes affecting understandings of cinema in the 1990s: cinema versus television/video. Of course, television has represented new issues for film industries and artists at least since the end ofWorld War II. But nowadays the opposition between television and film not only connotes economic strategies and relations but also a more general historic conjuncture. However, the figure suggests a technological ground for this more general conjuncture, and, more particularly, implies that developments in mass-media technologies supply that ground. This idea is widespread among academic intellectuals, journalists , and policy makers. Vast shifts are occurring in the mass media of representation, shifts that are intertwined with supposedly radical—indeed, unprecedented—technological, economic, social, cultural, and political change. On the level of "technology," for example, there appear a set ofdevelopments sometimes summed up as economic and sociocultural convergences or...