Cinema, Propaganda, and Networks of Experience: Exhibiting Chongqing Cinema in New York

Abstract

The recent rise in transnational fi lm studies has brought forth several key issues in need of critical consideration. The predominant focus on global Hollywood, given the American fi lm industry’s worldwide hegemony from the 1920s onwards, has eclipsed attention to other forms of transnational cinema and historical counter-fl ows such as fascist and leftist cinema, art and experimental cinema, educational and military cinema, travelogues, and home movies. Underlying this emphasis on Hollywood’s global reach and its diverse local infl ections is the logic of capital, which tends to privilege commercial cinema. The outfl ow of Hollywood cinema is posited as a given right and an autonomous process without questioning the institutional and discursive practices that frame such fl ows. 1 The logic of capital similarly serves to rigidify the distinction between national and transnational cinema, often posed as diametric oppositions evolving around value-laden binaries such as containment versus excess, purity versus hybridity, homogeneity versus heterogeneity, stasis versus movement, hegemony versus counter-hegemony. The national is often seen as a series of institutional and ideological obstacles to the legitimacy and necessity of unfettered global circulation, the ideological and material underpinnings of which are rarely tackled. Contributing to the myth of the free fl ow of cinema across borders is the translatability and circularity of aesthetic form in terms of genre, style, and mode of spectatorial address.