SELCS

Cinema and Nation


Course code: ELCS6056
Tutor: Dr C Thomson
Level: Intermediate
Mode of Assessment: 2 assessed essays of 2000 words each
Term: taught in term 1

Course Description:
Histories of cinema (and film studies modules) tend to be organised around national contexts. This module examines concepts of the nation, as a basis for understanding cinema’s role in constructing, reflecting, negotiating and selling the nation-state and national identities. The module focuses on European cinemas of the last two decades (roughly since the fall of the Berlin Wall), a period which has witnessed radical challenges to the nation-state as political actor and imagined community. The module is designed to complement and consolidate students’ understanding of particular cultural and cinematic traditions, while sharpening their appreciation of the historicity and cultural contingency of socio-cultural formations and their artistic expressions. Close attention will be paid to conflicting theories and practices of nationhood and its corollaries, and to how these play out and develop on screen: for example, state versus ethnie, postnational versus transnational, ‘imagined’ versus ‘imaginary’ belonging, multiculturalism versus interculturality, canonical versus subaltern, centre versus periphery. Fundamental to the module is a sense of the complexity of cinema’s relationship to the nation: films are discussed as texts, as processes, as products, and as artefacts in circulation.

The course is structured into two parts. The first five weeks cover a range of approaches to the relationship between cinema and nation. The second part of the course consists of weekly case studies in national cinemas, taught by specialists in the relevant national cinema (examples include Finnish cinema, the cinema of the Irish Diaspora, Greek Cypriot cinema, Hyphenated Identities in German Cinema). Each week, the film selected for screening provides a case study for close textual analysis, allowing us to examine how different visions of the nation are reflected and negotiated in many different ways in image and narrative. In the circumstances of its production and circulation, each film screened also illustrates how cinema as a medium consolidates, subverts and/or re-works national economies and canons, and experiences its own afterlife as a transnational object.

Primary Texts:

  • Русский ковчег/Russian Ark, dir A. Sokurov, Russia, 2002
  • Heimat III, ep 1, dir. Edgar Reitz, Germany, 2004
  • Caro diario/Dear Diary, dir. Nanni Moretti, Italy, 1993
  • Movern Callar, dir. Lynne Ramsay, Scotland, 2003
  • La graine et le mulet/Couscous, dir Abdel Kechiche, France, 2007

Initial Secondary Bibliography:

  • Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (revised edition) (London: Verso, 1991)
  • Eley, Geoff and RG Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford UP, 1996)
  • Hjort, Mette and Scott MacKenzie, eds., Cinema and Nation (London: Routledge, 2000)
  • Hjort, Mette and Duncan Petrie, eds., The Cinema of Small Nations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007)
  • Naficy, Hamid, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001)
  • Willemen, Paul & Valentina Vitali, eds., Theorising National Cinema (London: BFI, 2006)