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about the national cinema film series

The National Cinema Film Series (NCFS) was developed by Joseph Palis in Fall 2005 to provide a venue for discussion of international film cultures in their various scalar dimensions. Together he and GAGS president Christine Erlien applied for and received grant funding to support the film series from the Student Opportunities Fund made available by the UNC Division for Student Affairs, and the Graduate and Professional Student Federation (GPSF). Co-sponsorship for specific films in the series comes from ScreenArts, Southeast Asia Interest Association (SEAIA) and the INTS 92 (National Cinema) class handled by Joseph Palis in the spring semester 2006.

NCFS was conceived to discuss the cinematic representation of national identities and how it makes apparent the vision of the nation, and its mythologies, memories, symbols and traditions. The unfolding of these filmic visions and images carry a wider range of meanings and emotions as cinema attempts to show the ways in which certain national themes and modes of expression evoke and portray aspects of national identity.

The need to study national cinemas indicates the need to frame various image cultures in terms of new nationalisms.

Scholars like Andrew Higson want us to reconsider the production of national cinemas because "histories of national cinema can only be understood as histories of crisis and conflict, of resistance and negotiation" (Higson 1989). This conception demolishes traditional thinking that views national cinema as a seamless totality that accurately expresses, describes and itemizes the salient concerns and features of a given national culture. That this line of argument involves certain political commitments is underscored by Christopher Faulkner, who claims that any attempt "to construct the history of a nation or national cinema as coherent, unified, homogeneous, is to lend support to its erasure of difference and to the maintenance of a centrist and neo-conservative cultural politics" (Faulkner 1994).

National cinema, understood this way, becomes a site of conflict. It appears that films do not simply express national culture in its stable features but are themselves the focus of debates about a nation's history, memory, tradition and heritage.

The NCFS will screen films of nation-specific significance and it will continue to invite resource speakers whose relevant research and publications on a film or that particular film's country of origins hope to generate discussions that will make us rethink our common notions of the "national" in national cinemas.

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