National cinema
Encyclopedia
Like other film theory or film criticism terms (e.g., "art film
"), the term "national cinema" is hard to define, and its meaning is debated by film scholars and critics. National cinema is a term sometimes used in film theory
and film criticism
to describe the films associated with a specific country. Although there is little relatively written on theories of national cinema it has an irrefutably important role in globalization
. Film provides a unique window to other cultures, particularly where the output of a nation or region is high. Countries like South Korea, Russia and Iran that are not major tourist destinations (from the west at least) have over the years produced a large body of critically acclaimed films. Regardless of the stories or styles of filmmaking the medium inherently contains a dense wealth of information about people and places through which audiences gain knowledge.
A film may be considered to be part of the "national cinema" of a country based on a number of factors, such as the country that provided the financing for the film, the language spoken in the film, the nationalities or dress of the characters, and the setting, music, or cultural elements present in the film. To define a national cinema, some scholars emphasize the structure of the film industry and the roles played by "...market forces, government support, and cultural transfers..."
(1983) or Death Ship
(1980). Other critics have defined Canadian national cinema as a "...reflection of Canadian life and culture." Some critics argue that there are "two traditions of filmmaking in Canada." The "documentary realist tradition" espoused by the federal government's National Film Board and avant-garde films.
Scott MacKenzie argues that by the late 1990s, if Canada did have a popular cinema with both avant-garde and experimental elements, that was influenced by European filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard
and Wim Wenders
. MacKenzie argues that Canadian cinema has a "...self-conscious concern with the incorporation of cinematic and televisual images", and as examples, he cites films such as David Cronenberg
's Videodrome
(1983), Atom Egoyan
's Family Viewing
(1987), Robert Lepage
's Le Confessional
(1995) and Srinivas Krishna's Masala
(1991).
filmmakers and with a variety of specific movements. Avant-garde filmmakers include Germaine Dulac
, Marie and Jean Epstein
. Poetic Realism
filmmakers include Jean Renoir
and Marcel Carné
. The French New Wave
filmmakers include Jean-Luc Godard
and François Truffaut
. The 1990s and 2000s "postmodern
cinema" of France includes filmmakers such as Jean-Jacques Beinex, Luc Besson
and Coline Serreau
.
, German national cinema was influenced by silent and sound "Bergfilm" (this translates to "mountain film"). During 1920s and early 1930s, German national cinema was known for the progressive and artistic approaches to filmmaking with "shifted conventional cinematic vocabulary" and which gave actresses a much larger range of character-types. During the Nazi era, the major film studio UFA was controlled by Propaganda Minister Goebbels
. UFA produced "Hetzfilm" (anti-Semitic hate films) and films which emphasized the "theme of heroic death." Other film genres produced by UFA during the Nazi era included historical and biographical dramas that emphasized the achievements in German history, comedy films, and propaganda films.
During the Cold War
from the 1950s through the 1980s, there were West German films and East German films. Film historians and film scholars do not agree whether the films from the different parts of Cold War-era Germany can be considered to be a single "German national cinema." Some West German films were about the "immediate past in sociopolitical thought and in literature". East German films were often Soviet-funded "socially critical" films. Some East German films examined Germany's Nazi past, such as Wolfgang Staudte's Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us).
The New German Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s included films by directors such as Fassbinder, Herzog
, and Wim Wenders
. While these directors made films with "many ideological and cinematic messages", they all shared the common element of providing an "aesthetic alternativ(e) to Hollywood" films and "a break with the cultural and political traditions associated with the Third Reich"(159).
, Kazimierz Kutz
, Andrzej Munk and Andrzej Wajda
. According to film scholar Marek Haltof, the Polish School of directors made films which can be described as the "Cinema of Distrust." In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Wajda, Krzysztof Zanussi and Barbara Sass made influential films which garnered interest outside of Poland. However, even though Western countries became increasingly interested in Polish cinema during this period, the country's film infrastructure and market was disintegrating.
Hake, Sabine. German National Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
Art film
An art film is the result of filmmaking which is typically a serious, independent film aimed at a niche market rather than a mass market audience...
"), the term "national cinema" is hard to define, and its meaning is debated by film scholars and critics. National cinema is a term sometimes used in film theory
Film theory
Film theory is an academic discipline that aims to explore the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large...
and film criticism
Film criticism
Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of films, individually and collectively. In general, this can be divided into journalistic criticism that appears regularly in newspapers, and other popular, mass-media outlets and academic criticism by film scholars that is informed by film theory and...
to describe the films associated with a specific country. Although there is little relatively written on theories of national cinema it has an irrefutably important role in globalization
Globalization
Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...
. Film provides a unique window to other cultures, particularly where the output of a nation or region is high. Countries like South Korea, Russia and Iran that are not major tourist destinations (from the west at least) have over the years produced a large body of critically acclaimed films. Regardless of the stories or styles of filmmaking the medium inherently contains a dense wealth of information about people and places through which audiences gain knowledge.
A film may be considered to be part of the "national cinema" of a country based on a number of factors, such as the country that provided the financing for the film, the language spoken in the film, the nationalities or dress of the characters, and the setting, music, or cultural elements present in the film. To define a national cinema, some scholars emphasize the structure of the film industry and the roles played by "...market forces, government support, and cultural transfers..."
Canadian national cinema
Canadian cultural and film critics have long debated how Canadian national cinema can be defined, or whether there is a Canadian national cinema. Most of the films shown on Canadian movie screens are US imports. If "Canadian national cinema" is defined as the films made in Canada, then the canon of Canadian cinema would have to include lightweight teen-oriented fare such as Meatballs(1979), Porky'sPorky's
Porky's is a 1982 comedy film about the escapades of teenagers at the fictional Angel Beach High School in Florida in 1954. It was released in the United States in 1982, and spawned two sequels: Porky's II: The Next Day and Porky's Revenge! and influenced many writers in the teen film genre...
(1983) or Death Ship
Death Ship (1980 film)
Death Ship is a 1980 horror film directed by Alvin Rakoff. The cast includes Academy Award winner George Kennedy, Richard Crenna, Sally Ann Howes, and Black Christmas actor Nick Mancuso.-Plot:...
(1980). Other critics have defined Canadian national cinema as a "...reflection of Canadian life and culture." Some critics argue that there are "two traditions of filmmaking in Canada." The "documentary realist tradition" espoused by the federal government's National Film Board and avant-garde films.
Scott MacKenzie argues that by the late 1990s, if Canada did have a popular cinema with both avant-garde and experimental elements, that was influenced by European filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
and Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders
Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders is a German film director, playwright, author, photographer and producer.-Early life:Wenders was born in Düsseldorf. He graduated from high school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area. He then studied medicine and philosophy in Freiburg and Düsseldorf...
. MacKenzie argues that Canadian cinema has a "...self-conscious concern with the incorporation of cinematic and televisual images", and as examples, he cites films such as David Cronenberg
David Cronenberg
David Paul Cronenberg, OC, FRSC is a Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter and actor. He is one of the principal originators of what is commonly known as the body horror or venereal horror genre. This style of filmmaking explores people's fears of bodily transformation and infection. In his films, the...
's Videodrome
Videodrome
Videodrome is a 1983 Canadian science fiction body horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg, starring James Woods, Sonja Smits, and singer Deborah Harry. Set in Toronto during the early 1980s, it follows the CEO of a small cable station who stumbles upon a broadcast signal featuring...
(1983), Atom Egoyan
Atom Egoyan
Atom Egoyan, OC is a critically acclaimed Armenian-Canadian stage director and film director. Egoyan made his career breakthrough with Exotica...
's Family Viewing
Family Viewing
- Plot :Van's father, Stan , is fond of video, always taping scenes of daily family life. But he does not take care of Van's grandmother, Armen . Although he could afford having her at home, she is spending her days watching TV in an old people's home. Van often visits her. He meets Aline , whose...
(1987), Robert Lepage
Robert Lepage
Robert Lepage, is a playwright, actor, film director, and stage director from Québec City, Québec, and is one of Canada's most honoured theatre artists.- Life and work :...
's Le Confessional
Le Confessional
The Confessional is a 1994 mystery / drama film directed by Robert Lepage.The film is set in Quebec City, in two distinct time periods. In the present day, Pierre Lamontagne searches for his brother Marc to help unravel a family mystery...
(1995) and Srinivas Krishna's Masala
Masala
Masala or massala is a term used in South Asian cuisines to mostly describe a mixture of spices. A masala can either be a combination of dried spices, or a paste made from a mixture of spices and other ingredients—often garlic, ginger, onions and chilli paste...
(1991).
French national cinema
France's national cinema includes both popular cinema and "avant-garde" films. French national cinema is associated with the auteurAuteur theory
In film criticism, auteur theory holds that a director's film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as if they were the primary "auteur"...
filmmakers and with a variety of specific movements. Avant-garde filmmakers include Germaine Dulac
Germaine Dulac
Germaine Dulac was a French filmmaker, film theorist, journalist and critic. She was born in Amiens and moved to Paris in early childhood. A few years after her marriage she embarked on a journalistic career in a feminist magazine, and later became interested in film...
, Marie and Jean Epstein
Jean Epstein
Jean Epstein was a French filmmaker, film theorist, literary critic, and novelist. Although he is remembered today primarily for his adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, Epstein directed three dozen films and was an influential critic of literature and film from the...
. Poetic Realism
Poetic realism
Poetic realism was a film movement in France of the 1930s and through the war years. More a tendency than a movement, Poetic Realism is not strongly unified like Soviet Montage or French Impressionism. Its leading filmmakers were Jean Renoir, Pierre Chenal, Jean Vigo, Julien Duvivier, and Marcel...
filmmakers include Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s...
and Marcel Carné
Marcel Carné
-Biography:Born in Paris, France, the son of a cabinet maker whose wife died when their son was five, Carné began his career as a film critic, becoming editor of the weekly publication, Hebdo-Films, and working for Cinémagazine and Cinémonde between 1929 and 1933. In the same period he worked in...
. The French New Wave
French New Wave
The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of...
filmmakers include Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
and François Truffaut
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five...
. The 1990s and 2000s "postmodern
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
cinema" of France includes filmmakers such as Jean-Jacques Beinex, Luc Besson
Luc Besson
Luc Besson is a French film director, writer, and producer. He is the creator of EuropaCorp film company. He has been involved with over 50 films, spanning 26 years, as writer, director, and/or producer.-Early life:...
and Coline Serreau
Coline Serreau
Coline Serreau is a French actress, film director and writer.-Early life and education:She was born in Paris, France.In Paris, Serreau studied literature, music and theatre as well as the circus.-Career:...
.
German national cinema
During the German Weimar RepublicWeimar Republic
The Weimar Republic is the name given by historians to the parliamentary republic established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government...
, German national cinema was influenced by silent and sound "Bergfilm" (this translates to "mountain film"). During 1920s and early 1930s, German national cinema was known for the progressive and artistic approaches to filmmaking with "shifted conventional cinematic vocabulary" and which gave actresses a much larger range of character-types. During the Nazi era, the major film studio UFA was controlled by Propaganda Minister Goebbels
Goebbels
Goebbels, alternatively Göbbels, is a common surname in the western areas of Germany. It is probably derived from the Old Low German word gibbler, meaning brewer...
. UFA produced "Hetzfilm" (anti-Semitic hate films) and films which emphasized the "theme of heroic death." Other film genres produced by UFA during the Nazi era included historical and biographical dramas that emphasized the achievements in German history, comedy films, and propaganda films.
During the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
from the 1950s through the 1980s, there were West German films and East German films. Film historians and film scholars do not agree whether the films from the different parts of Cold War-era Germany can be considered to be a single "German national cinema." Some West German films were about the "immediate past in sociopolitical thought and in literature". East German films were often Soviet-funded "socially critical" films. Some East German films examined Germany's Nazi past, such as Wolfgang Staudte's Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us).
The New German Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s included films by directors such as Fassbinder, Herzog
Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog Stipetić , known as Werner Herzog, is a German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor, and opera director.He is often considered as one of the greatest figures of the New German Cinema, along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Werner...
, and Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders
Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders is a German film director, playwright, author, photographer and producer.-Early life:Wenders was born in Düsseldorf. He graduated from high school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area. He then studied medicine and philosophy in Freiburg and Düsseldorf...
. While these directors made films with "many ideological and cinematic messages", they all shared the common element of providing an "aesthetic alternativ(e) to Hollywood" films and "a break with the cultural and political traditions associated with the Third Reich"(159).
Polish national cinema
After World War II, the Lódz Film School was founded in 1948. During the 1950s and 1960s, a "Polish School" of filmmakers developed, such as Wojciech HasWojciech Has
Wojciech Jerzy Has was a Polish film director, screenwriter and film producer.-Early Life & Studies:...
, Kazimierz Kutz
Kazimierz Kutz
Kazimierz Julian Kutz is a Polish film director, author, journalist and politician, one of the representatives of the Polish Film School and a deputy speaker of the Senate of Poland.- Biography :...
, Andrzej Munk and Andrzej Wajda
Andrzej Wajda
Andrzej Wajda is a Polish film director. Recipient of an honorary Oscar, he is possibly the most prominent member of the unofficial "Polish Film School"...
. According to film scholar Marek Haltof, the Polish School of directors made films which can be described as the "Cinema of Distrust." In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Wajda, Krzysztof Zanussi and Barbara Sass made influential films which garnered interest outside of Poland. However, even though Western countries became increasingly interested in Polish cinema during this period, the country's film infrastructure and market was disintegrating.
Further reading
Theorising National Cinema. Edited by Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen. June 2006.Hake, Sabine. German National Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.