To what extent has online film and video created a culture of transnationality?
Introduction
The arrival of the Internet has made the world a much smaller place. With sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Myspace, people all around the world are able to keep in touch easily and showcase their talents in areas such as film and music. The Internet also allows professional films such as Hollywood or small national studio films to reach a wider audience by getting more publicity and being available to more people through DVD shipment and illegal downloading or streaming. The film industry itself has also become more transnational, employing cast and crew from all over the world to work on their films. This website will look closely at the relationship between the internet and transnationality to discover whether or not the Internet has made the world transnational or if nationality is still important.
Firstly, what is nationality?
Nationality encompasses all of the signifiers that show what nation a person is a part of. Nationality includes heritage and history of one's country, cultural aspects, food, fashion, architecture and even the way we speak or communicate. When speaking of nationality in regards to the film industry, it could also mean how a story is told or even what type of story is being told. Rick Altman beliefs that nationality plays an important part in film and how films of one culture are perceived by another. He states that:
"however much non-American critics may understand ‘the context and meaning’ of a movie such as Singin’ in the Rain (1952), they will inevitably lack the familiarity with American culture that equips them to translate the movie’s ‘raw thematic material into…the culture’s master themes’, which ‘are not actually in the text, yet the text is produced in such a way as to evoke them for a particular interpretive community.’" (cited by Richard Maltby, 2004, p. 2)
Here, Altman is saying that although someone from a differing nation/culture to American would be able to understand a film such as Singin in the Rain (1952), they would perhaps not fully understand it because the world portrayed within the film, such as the fascination with stars and movies, the filming process of the 1920s and even the nature of the musical may not be familiar to those from another nation. Therefore nationality is an important variable in the film industry.
So...what is transnationality?
Transnationality describes how our world is today. The UK for instance is no longer populated just by white anglo-saxons. Today there is a mixture of people from India, Norway, Africa, Nepal, Greece, Poland, Australia, America...the list goes on. A similar mix of nationalities can be found in most countries because people are able to travel easily and workforces now employ people from all over the world to run different branches of their businesses. The same can be said for the film industry. Film executives can now use production teams from the UK while filming in Poland, hiring a director from Mexico and an international cast. This ability to mix cultures has created a more transnational film industry, which the Internet has aided greatly. However, could the Internet also help to keep nationality in film evident? Over the next few pages I will look closely at how important a role the Internet plays in transnational film and video, as well as in national film, and will also examine whether or not the Internet is really the reason why so many films nowerdays can be branded 'transnational'.
