The rhetoric of the transnational: interpretation and identity in Gla and Temur Babluani's L'Hritage/Legacy (2006)

Abstract

The Franco-Georgian film L'Hritage/Legacy (2006), which focuses on a group of French tourists travelling through Georgia, exemplifies both in its content and in its production circumstances qualities frequently regarded as transnational. Recognized as having an increasingly vital currency in contemporary cinema, with its emphasis on the movement of people and capital across borders, the transnational nevertheless remains a disputed category. In Legacy, an idea of the transnational in terms of the encounter between cultures is explored and questioned. Focusing on interpretation and intelligibility as a problem, the film seeks to move beyond the touristic binaries of the travel film, using the encounter with the foreign other as a form of rhetoric. Playing with the gaps in comprehension for its (mainly) Western viewers, the film therefore brings into play the unstable, transitional space in between cultural identities. In this sense, the film inscribes its own resistance to categorization within national cinema terms.