Introduction

Abstract

There are manifest similarities in the ways that nations and national film cultures are born and develop. Both are protean and volatile, and elude reductive teleological interpretations and categorization, and both are at the mercy of the vicissitudes of sociological, political, hegemonic, global, historical and economic events and eventualities. Even in cases where certain structural trends of film output are historically identifiable in different international contexts, specificities that are characteristic of given national and national film culture contexts can bear remarkable similarities across geographical borders. It is hardly a coincidence, for example, that the Hollywood and Bollywood mechanisms — in such cantonized, multicultural demographies — have produced cinematic cultures consistently designed around clearly recognizable generic structures (distinctly maintained film categories in the former, and imbricated and amalgamated within individual films in the latter). This diachronic peculiarity contrasts radically with the more synchronic national cinema movements that are often subsumed under a broader ‘European film’ epithet, but are nevertheless still identified discursively by titles such as ‘German Expressionism’, ‘Italian NeoRealism’, the ‘French Nouvelle Vague’, ‘British Social Realism’ or the ‘Danish Dogme95 Project’, all of which are consigned to precise temporal moments as categories of film history.