Chapter 2: National cinema
i) The concept of national cinema
Not only is national character made; it continues to be made and re-made.
It is not made once and for all; it always remains, in its measure,
modifiable."
Sir Ernest Barker, National Character and the Factors in its Formation,
1927.1
"The cinema is today the most universal means through which national ideas
and national atmosphere can be spread and, even if those be intangible
things, surely they are among the most important influences in
civilisation."
Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, President of the Board of Trade, introducing the
Cinematograph Films Bill to the Muse of Commons, 1927.2
My concern in this chapter is threefold. Firstly, I want to generate a model for
understanding notions of 'nationhood' and 'national identity', in particular
looking at the role of language, representation and communication in producing
and reproducing the national experience in its modern sense, as both selfidentity and differentiation from others. Secondly, I want to explore some of
the implications of using the term 'national' in discourse about cinema. And
thirdly, I want to relate some of these debates to the actual structures of the
British film industry, its policies, and its relationships with Hollywood, the
state and its audiences.
Much discussion of national cinemas has proceeded with great imprecision, not
least the discussion of British cinema. Thus Raymond Durgnat suggests at the
outset of his influential account of post-war British cinema, A Mirror for
England that, in selecting the films to be discussed, "our criterion has had to
be rather arbitrary and subjective is it about Britain, about British attitudes,
or if not does it feel British?" 3 One can, of course, sympathise with Durgnat to
some extent, since national identity is a notoriously shifting phenomenon,
constantly being re-imagined, and itself a masking of internal differences and
potential and actual antagonisms. The concept of national cinema also has a
shifting identity, and it has been mobilised in different ways, by different
commentators, for different reasons. In general, one can summarise the various
mobilisations as follows.
(1) Firstly, there is the possibility of defining national cinema in economic
terms, establishing a conceptual correspondence between the terms 'national
cinema' and 'the domestic film industry', and so being concerned with such
questions as: Where are these films made, and by whom? Who owns and controls
the industrial infrastructures, the production companies, the distributors and
the exhibition circuits?4
(2) A second way of discussing national cinema is in terms of exhibition and
consumption. Here the major questions have been: Which films are audiences
watching? How many foreign films, and especially American films, are in
distribution within a particular nation-state? Such questions are generally
formulated from a position of anxiety about the dangers of cultural imperialism.
(3) Thirdly, there is a criticism-led approach to national cinema, which tends to
reduce national cinema to the terms of a quality art cinema, a culturally worthy
cinema steeped in the high-cultural and/or modernist heritage of a particular
nation-state, rather than one which appeals to the desires and fantasies of the
popular audiences. The debate about national cinema is inevitably characterised
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by a struggle to elevate one standard, one value system, at the expense of
others - and, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith has noted, it has always been something
of a struggle to enable "the recognition of popular forms as a legitimate part
of national cultural life".9
(4)
Fourthly, there is the possibility of a text-based approach to national
cinema. Here the key questions become: What are these films about? Do they
share a common style or world view? What sort of projections of the national
character do they offer? How do they dramatise the fantasies of national
identity? ' To what extent are they engaged in "exploring, questioning and
constructing a notion of nationhood in the films themselves and in the
consciousness of the viewer"?9
The nationality of a film may be conceived in terms of subject-matter, structure
of feeling, or style. British writers of the 19305, for instance, were typically
concerned that "we are not putting Britain, and British people, on the screen",
and that British films had failed to establish a "really intimate contact with
the national idiom."9 The most common version of this view of national cinema is
the argument that "a nation's films reflect
a
nation's thoughts", implying that
cinema simply reflects or expresses a pre-given national identity, consciousness
or culture. 9 This view in effect denies any specificity for film, and refuses to
accept that cinema might actively work to produce - and to naturalise - such
identities through its own textual processes and forms of engagement with the
spectator. A central tenet
in
this thesis is that national identity is precisely
constructed in and through representation: "a nation does not express itself
through its culture: it is culture that produces 'the nation'."
Whichever version of the concept of national cinema is used, the process of
Identifying a national cinema involves specifying a coherent and unique identity
and a stable set of meanings, at the expense of other possible identities and
meanings. This very often means that the interests of one particular social
group are represented as in the collective national interest. In the
international arena, on the other hand, it is clear that proclamations of
national cinema are almost invariably part of a strategy of cultural and
economic resistance, a means of asserting national autonomy, in the face of
(usually) Hollywood's international domination.
The potential coherence and unity of a national cinema consists in both its
difference from other national cinemas, and its self-identity as part of the
already existing cultural and economic traditions of a particular nation-state.
In the final analysis, it is the process of differentation which is the most
powerful, since identity can never be understood objectively as fixed and
immutable: it is itself constantly being re-negotiated in a system of
differences.
Benedict Anderson has argued that the experience of nationhood, the sense of
belonging to a nation, is a question of feeling part of an imagined community."
He sees four key elements to this mythic experience of nationhood: 12 the sense
of community, "a deep, horizontal comradeship" 2 (as opposed to, for example,
antagonism, and regardless of inequalities and exploitation); the inherently
limited nature of that community as it is imagined, the sense of territorial
boundaries to the cultural space of the nation; the sense of sovereignty, of
both pre-eminence and independence; and finally of course the process of
imagining itself. The process of imagining must be able. to resolve the actual
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history of conflict and negotiation in the experience of community - which, as I
will hope to show, becomes a very powerful figure in the imagination of British
films and the discourse about them. It must be able to hold in place - or
specifically exclude - any number of other experiences of belonging, whether to
a particular class, a race, a gender, a region - or another nation. The extent to
which these different social experiences can be transformed into the singular
experience of a coherent national community, with boundaries clearly demarcating
the 'inside' from the 'outside', is evidence of the power of national sentiment or rather of the narratives and apparatuses which mobilise it.
The language of national identity implies not only the sense of a collective
identity but also the existence of a common culture, a collective memory of an
undisputed national past, a culture which can somehow overcome difference. As
Sean Cubitt has suggested
"the national is a process of remembering, a pulling together and
reassemblage of its members - both citizens and organs - into a novel
whole. It is a continuing process, incomplete, presenting itself none the
less as eternal even as it attempts over and again to ossify history into
tradition."14
Cultural practices, values and hierarchies of difference which have been
developed or invented under specific historical conditions are transformed in
the "corporate imagination's of a nation into authentic, timeless and uncontestable national traditions. This produces a rich paradox, for, to the
historian's eye, nations are decidedly modern, products of the period since the
late eighteenth century, whereas the mentality of nationalism is imbued with a
sense of the antiquity of nations and their traditions.'
It is these
imaginative processes which are constitutive of national identity, and which
render a heterogeneous mass public as a knowable self-contained communiW7
For Anderson, it is primarily ideological work, rather than militaristic
intervention, which secures the imagined community of the nation. Nations - and
the shift from achieved local communities to imagined national communities are forged through systems of language, education and socialisation, not through
blood, he argues, such that one can be 'invited into' the imagined community.
Communities are imagined and become knowable through language and
communication. The mass communications systems of the twentieth century must
clearly play a major role in this process of interpellating a national community
- although, surprisingly, Anderson does not address this issue. Cinema, as one of
these systems, constructs imaginary bonds which hold the peoples of a nation
together as a community, by dramatising its current fears, anxieties, conceits,
pleasures and aspirations. The apparatus of cinema is one of the means by which
the public sphere is constructed on a national scale: it presents the nation to
itself as a nation, it 'invites' a diverse and often antagonistic group of
peoples to recognise themselves as a singular body with a common past. As
Stephen Heath has suggested, "nationhood is not a given, it is always something
to be gained" 19 - and cinema is one of the processes by which it is 'gained'.
Imagining a national community is in part a question of establishing limits and
marking boundaries - and cinema and the other media play a crucial role in this
process of "communicative boundary maintenance". 19 The film industry has
developed within a capitalist economy, however, such that certain sectors of the
industry, in seeking to maximise their market potential, have attempted to
address
international
audiences, so imagining the social on an
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international
scale. The maintenance of national boundaries is thus increasingly at odds with
the potential of the mass media to cross national boundaries, and create new
multi-national, even global, imaginative territories and cultural spaces. This of
course has been the experience of Hollywood.
Anderson's argument has been developed in a very useful way by James Donald,
who suggests
"a ... slightly different, three-way distinction between, first, specific
nationalist ideologies (whether imperialist, isolationist, or liberationist);
second, a communality figured as a narrative of nationhood (Anderson's
Imagined community); and third, the apparatus of discourses, technologies,
and institutions (print capitalism, education, mass media, and so forth)
which produces what is generally recognised as the 'national culture'."2°
This thesis is concerned to a great extent with the content of Donald's latter
two distinctions: firstly, communality figured as a narrative of nationhood,
specifically in filmic narratives; and secondly the apparatus of cinema itself,
Its discourses and its institutions. In both cases, however, it will be necessary
always to see the question of national cinema in the context of the
international film industry, and to take note of Hollywood's place within that
industry.