The National and the Popular

Abstract

The national and the popular have been an intertwined and ever-thorny topic of the relationship in cinema. So what is “national cinema?” How can national character be expressed in the cinema? When looking at, for example, the history of Brazilian cinema critics rarely felt the need to the question of what constituted a “Brazilian” film; perhaps, it seemed obvious, not worth discussing. As in so many cultures in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the cinema began as something imported for many decades, something brought to the country by foreigners. Turkey also has its own problematic relationship to colonialism: the encounter with the West is not the imposition of something external, but the liberation of something that was always internal. In Chinese culture, the cinema itself was seen as a modernizing element with far less historical baggage than any of the traditional artistic disciplines. The term popular, as in popular cinema, has its true force, perhaps, in its blurred contours and cultural contradictions; in the supposed opposition of two paradigms, one based on the market, the other drawn from anthropology. One can define the popular simply by focusing on the commercial success of individual works or by studying those things that claim for themselves or are claimed to be expressions of the thoughts, values and the feelings of the “people,” however defined. Many of the formulations of popular cinema, however construed, often imagine it as a kind of alternative practice to some kind of other, official or better produced cinema—popular cinema as oppositional cinema. The films offered a free zone, a space in which “official” or promoted values could be questioned or even refused. Yet in the end, they truly do not dislodge that imposed modernization; instead, they offer examples of how one can accommodate oneself to it.