Transnational Cinematography Studies

This collection explores how the role of cinematography will evolve in an ever-increasing digitized industry in a transnational context. Contributors aim to bridge conversations about critical film studies and technical film practices while proposing that cinema has always been at the foreground of transnational culture.

This core teaching text provides a thorough overview of the recently emerged field of transnational film studies. Covering a range of approaches to analysing films about migrant, cross-cultural and cross-border experience, Steven Rawle demonstrates how film production has moved beyond clear national boundaries to become a product of border crossing finance and creative personnel. This comprehensive introduction brings together the key concepts and theories of transnational cinema, including genre, remakes, diasporic and exilic cinema, and the limits of thinking about cinema as a particularly national cultural artefact. It is an excellent course companion for undergraduate students of film, cinema, media and cultural studies studying transnational and global cinema, and provides both students and lovers of film alike with a strong grounding in this timely field of film studies.

This core teaching text provides a thorough overview of the recently emerged field of transnational film studies. Covering a range of approaches to analysing films about migrant, cross-cultural and cross-border experience, Steven Rawle demonstrates how film production has moved beyond clear national boundaries to become a product of border crossing finance and creative personnel. This comprehensive introduction brings together the key concepts and theories of transnational cinema, including genre, remakes, diasporic and exilic cinema, and the limits of thinking about cinema as a particularly national cultural artefact. It is an excellent course companion for undergraduate students of film, cinema, media and cultural studies studying transnational and global cinema, and provides both students and lovers of film alike with a strong grounding in this timely field of film studies.

This book marks the 10th anniversary of the Routledge journal Transnational Cinemas, and its renaming to Transnational Screens. The introduction reflects on the changing ways in which film is produced, distributed and consumed with the emergence of streamed content providers. Each chapter expands on previous scholarship and interrogates key areas of transnational cinema. Taken together they revisit key concepts of transnational cinema; explore the relationship between transnational and world cinema; analyse performances of cosmopolitanism; examine exoticism and nostalgia in contemporary transnational cinema; present the ‘rooted transnationalism’ of Moroccan diasporic filmmakers; reflect on how films from around the world convey ‘foreignness’; consider cross border solidarity and collaboration behind transnational talent development; explore transnational film eco-criticism from the perspectives of governance and aesthetics; and reflect on the changing nature of transnational screen studies through the concept of second phase transnationalism. Written by leading scholars, this book looks at the key developments in the field of transnational film and screen studies. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Transnational Screens.

Increasingly, as the production, distribution and audience of films cross national boundaries, film scholars have begun to think in terms of ‘transnational’ rather than national cinema. This book is positioned within the emerging field of transnational cinema, and offers a groundbreaking study of the relationship between transnational cinema and ideology. The book focuses in particular on the complex ways in which religion, identity and cultural myths interact in specific cinematic representations of ideology. Author Milja Radovic approaches the selected films as national, regional products, and then moves on to comparative analysis and discussion of their transnational aspects. This book also addresses the question of whether transnationalism reinforces the nation or not; one of the possible answers to this question may be given through the exploration of the cinema of national states and its transnational aspects. Radovic illustrates the ways in which these issues, represented and framed by films, are transmitted beyond their nation-state borders and local ideologies in which they originated – and questions whether therefore one can have an understanding of transnational cinema as a platform for political dialogue.

In tandem with a postnational imaginary which is nurtured by the ever-present promise of deterritorialized mobility and burgeoning migratory fluxes, walls and fences separating nation-states multiply. This is a burning issue: even though nation states at the centre of the global order increasingly present themselves as postnational, calls for tighter border security undermine utopian notions of both a borderless New Europe and the USA as the Promised Land. This collection investigates the urgent issue of borderscapes and the cinematic imaginary by bringing together a range of new approaches in the field of film and media studies, crossing over into sociology, migration studies and artistic research. The contributions focus on the interrelated motifs of borderscapes as they are represented and used in transnational cinematographies, from Palestine to Sweden, Spain, Finland, Italy, Iran, Iraq, France, the UK and US, and as constituting premises of cinematic production. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Transnational Cinemas journal.

This collection of essays offers a pioneering analysis of the political and conceptual complexities of teaching transnational cinema in university classrooms around the world. In their exploration of a wide range of films from different national and regional contexts, contributors reflect on the practical and pedagogical challenges of teaching about immigrant identities, transnational encounters, foreignness, cosmopolitanism and citizenship, terrorism, border politics, legality and race. Probing the value of cinema in interdisciplinary academic study and the changing strategies and philosophies of teaching in the university, this volume positions itself at the cutting edge of transnational film studies.

This collection of interdisciplinary essays examines current cinematic and media landscapes from the perspective of transnational feminist practices and methodologies. Focusing on film, media art, and video essays, the contributors chart innovative strategies for exploring contemporary visual cultures.