Transnational Film
Slumdog Millionaire (dir. Boyle, 2008)
The Academy Award winning masterpiece Slumdog Millionaire is a fantastic example of a transnational film. As the picture shows, the film centres around a teenage boy appearing on the Indian version of 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire' and goes on to explain how he knows the answers to all the questions. This already makes it a transnational film because the gameshow is a Western gameshow that has become popular in Asia. The cast and crew also add to the transnationality of the film. Director Danny Boyle is English, as are the writer, producer and the leading actor Dev Patel. Many of the other cast members are Indian and a lot of the crew are Western.
The Asia Pacific Arts Website notes that:
As Variety writers Nick Vivarelli and Ali Jaafar have noted, films like Slumdog Millionaire interact more with and give more cinematic space to the locals, locales, and/or their languages in a way that signifies more than ever filmmaking's global, transnational, cross-cultural (or whatever you want to call it) impulses. Vivarelli and Jaafar rightly contrast the ever increasing practice of an interaction of languages, locations, and stories from the so-called "euro-puddings" of previous decades, which were international co-productions consisting of an international cast, but whose "internationalism" was lined by Hollywood-speak, making for some awkward posturing in the name of the "transnational." (APA Staff, 2008)
Here, Vivarelli and Jaafar criticise films such as Casino Royale (d. Campbell, 2006) using the term "euro-pudding", meaning that though the film has used an international cast and filmed all over the world it is still very much a Hollywood production which only uses such locations and foreign actors for exoticism and glamour, as supported by Said's argument on orientalism.
Slumdog Millionaire, then, could be applied to Spivak's 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' because the film allows those living in the Indian slums to express themselves and tell their life stories. Also, the nature of the game show is to allow anyone to compete, even the subaltern, meaning that Slumdog Millionaire could be considered to be a more transnational film than Hollywood productions such as Casino Royale.
Below is a clip from Slumdog Millionaire showing the central character appearing on 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire'.
Below are both versions of the song.