In Search of

NATIONAL CINEMAS

Where is homeland?

Four excerpts from my undergraduate thesis.

What do I miss?
I ask myself sometimes—

The sheer volume of works characterised by cultural flows has granted a sort of artistic—and by extent social—normalcy to the state of human displacement. There is a noticeable shift of interest from the cultural, national and environmental catastrophes that have forced people to immigrate, to the tragedies of adjustment in the western no-place. A study of the endemic demands and assemblages of national cinema will illuminate the ways in which diasporic narratives converse with the traumatic temporal/topographic absence of the nation.

The validity of the post/colonial condition must be questioned. The prefix ‘post’ suggests that we are now positioned in the ‘after’ of a concluded situation. And yet, the developed/underdeveloped dichotomy lingers as our compass in understanding the post/colonial world. Here, I borrow the term post/colonialism from historian and cultural critic, Hamid Dabashi, to represent the awareness one needs to maintain about ‘our actual condition and our potential emancipation’ (152), the metamorphic slash (‘/’) representing the necessary opposition to continued—not quite ‘post’—colonial forms and dynamics of globalisation.

I seek to exemplify how national identity itself, is complex and contradictory. Specifically, what I shall refer to as the ‘democratic national,’ contains within itself multitudes of conflicting assemblages, precisely because democracy is the only political system that is established on diversity and defined by the potential of its destruction. National consciousness does not exist as a crystallisation of semantics, but as a mode of addressing, negotiating and reconstructing itself. Within this undetermined flexible state and amongst the imminent threat of rupture, national identities emerge organically from the open processes of debate and discussion that invite all social subjects to participate. Rather than only ‘protecting the present sense of national identity’ (Miller 129), egalitarian accounts construct a responsive imaginary that lends itself to a potential re-vision and re-modification by their audience.

The dramatisation of a nation’s significant dilemmas and traumas provides intersubjective intimacy across participators and spectators. During a film, new social ideas and relations might be rehearsed onto the public sphere of the screen. Jill Dolan, in discussing performances that provide a stage for communal hope, argues that contemporary theatre still has the potential to become a plain of critical civic engagement, where audiences feel themselves allied with each other as a public (91). As Dolan states: ‘Perhaps, in fact, performance is an act of public dreaming’ (92).

And who is the friend?
And whom do I miss?

[ Esmail Kho’i ]

Works Cited

Dabashi, Hamid. ‘Dead Certainties: The Early Makhmalbaf’ in The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, ed. Richard Tapper. I.B.Tauris (2002): 117–153.

Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. University of Michigan Press, 2010.

Miller, David. On Nationality. Clarendon Press, 1995.

Last Update: September 2024