So a theoretical framework is beginning to take shape here – around Appadurai’s “transnational constructions of imaginary landscapes”, with their construction now understood more precisely as depending on the intersection of scapes, which in turn render any perspective on national cinema as exactly that – a perspective. These can be considered in terms of stakeholder interests and the practices that express those interests, which can be looked to for examples of the banal flagging of the national, as can ‘national’ films themselves. This formulation for understanding the ‘national’ in national needs however to take into account the significance of the practices which are being argued here as central. It is helpful to consider this gap in the emerging framework in light of Couldry’s theory of media ritual (2005).
Couldry argues that engagement with the media often takes the form of concrete, repetitive practices he terms ‘media rituals’. These are often habitual actions which involve engagement with media, not only at the site of consumption, but throughout the range of media processes, from production to fan activity, and it is through such actions, he claims, that we believe we are able to access and share an imaginary social ‘core’ or common ground. 33 In short:
… media rituals are formalised actions organised around key media-related categories and boundaries, whose performance frames, or suggests a connection with, wider media-related values. (Couldry, 2003, p. 29)
What is particularly pertinent in this context is Couldry’s acknowledgement not only of the signs and symbols of this core (with which Billig’s work is
33 It is important to note that, while Couldry discusses widespread belief in this core, he does not consider a ‘core’ to exist.
concerned), but also of the processes of engagement that people pursue in order to connect themselves ritually with the imaginary ‘core’.
Drawing on a range of theoretical and empirical material, including Dayan and Katz’s work on media events and the ideas of Durkheim (ibid., p.
285), Couldry seeks to move the concept of ritual beyond its usual religious framework. He argues:
...we need to rethink ‘ritual’, including ‘media ritual’, and Durkheim’s model of the social significance of ritual, to make room for new connections: between the power of contemporary media institutions and modern forms of government… (ibid., p. 4)
Although he does not use the word, there is something distinctly banal about Couldry’s rituals – and yet in this very banality resides a power (including political power). Couldry’s formulation involves “the opposite of isolating particular moments and elevating them to special, even ‘magical’ significance”
(ibid., p. 13) but, rather, the everyday patterns, actions and processes facilitated by the media, the moments, behaviours and performances enacted within what Couldry terms the “ritual space of the media” (ibid.). Couldry’s insistence that these actions and activities are not always profound, but are typically ordinary, adds depth to Billig’s conception of banal maintenance of the nation, for example through its flagging via ‘national’ cinema. Media rituals in this banal sense include everything from talking about celebrities to behaving in certain ways around media technologies and the ways we use film in specific niches in our lives. In most, if not all, of these instances, our actions imply an interest in connecting with others around a common or shared practice.
Crucially, Couldry’s rituals are linked to the idea of “the myth of the mediated centre” (ibid., p. 2), through which “we act out, indeed naturalise, the myth of the media’s social centrality” (ibid.). Couldry’s use of the concept of
‘liveness’ is similar to Anderson’s concept of simultaneous belonging, and involves ‘an assumption of togetherness that the media work hard to construct’ (ibid., p. 286). Thus celebrity gossip triggers a shallow but discernible sense of togetherness, of media’s centrality to our lives. Leaving the television on in the corner and talking over the top of it maintains that
electronic umbilical cord back to a shared world. Taking the family to the big Christmas blockbuster at the multiplex may have more to do with the event than with the film itself. The question building here is whether the cinematic national is ritually constructed and maintained in much the same way – involving an ‘assumption of togetherness’ but on a different level? And does this construction exist in several different modes? And is it constructed in only one mode, or in a multiplicity of ways (and, echoing Appadurai, across multiple scapes)?
This model of media ritual may, therefore, be viewed as intersecting with the processes of production, distribution, exhibition and reception of cinema to create national cinema in a variety of ways. A range of media rituals may be occurring here – for example within the recognition as ‘national’ of particular films, the attributes or the textual ‘flags’ within those films. It is at this level that Billig’s ‘flagging’ becomes useful in terms not only of textual analysis, but also of the wider processes involved in conflating those flags with the national and, by extension, in interpreting those films as incidences of national cinema. Further, media rituals must include those involved with financing, particularly in terms of state funding and support of cinema production, whereby the acts of attempting to procure funding and the application of funding criteria may both be seen as media rituals helping to produce national cinema. This occurs in the sense that specific evocations of the national are involved and that certain procedures are themselves customary. Film workers may ‘ritually’ believe – and express their belief – that their labour sustains a national cinema. Similarly, audience perception of national cinema may involve ‘ritual’ reception, and this is perhaps no more the case than when the recognition of certain symbols or narratives of the national is involved (as with the protracted presence of The World’s Fastest Indian on Air New Zealand’s international in-flight entertainment system). What these national cinema ‘rituals’ have in common is a common ground of nation, access to which (symbolically or otherwise) may be ‘performed’ or achieved through familiar and repetitive action.
There is a preoccupation, in much of the literature dealing with ritual and media, with mass media and the ritual of participation by large audiences (for example, see Liebes and Curran, 1998; Moore and Myerhoff, 1977).
There are also strategic aspects of interests, and different degrees of emotional engagement, for different participants. A crucial strength of Couldry’s work is that it also encourages application to the small detail, the seemingly insignificant action: for instance, pressing the in-flight remote to watch The World’s Fastest Indian on an international flight into Auckland is an act that produces a sense of the national, just as the public brouhaha around the latest blockbuster film with its well-publicised or even televised premiere, produces a sense of a coherent (and interested) audience. It is all too easy to ascribe ritual qualities to publicly-acknowledged ‘mass’ action, leaving other activities unacknowledged as rituals, which is reflective of an absence of concern with the ‘small’, taken-for-granted, banal actions which many national cinema stakeholders routinely engage in.
Couldry makes this important point:
…your action of turning round, and staying turned around, when a media person enters the room, is not yet a media ritual, but it is an action organised on a principle (media people are special, therefore worthy of special attention) that can be played out in formalised action, for example in the highly organised spaces of the television studio.
(Couldry, 2003, p. 51)
So pressing that in-flight remote control to trigger a reassuringly familiar experience of New Zealandness is not yet a ritual – but is an action
‘organised on a principle’ (that ‘national’ cinema exists) and the combination of action and principle constitutes the ritual. This brings us some considerable way towards explaining the emphasis on action signposted at the start of this chapter: the equation is action + principle = ritual. Thus visiting the Hobbiton location at Matamata (action) + belief in ‘The Shire’ as an imaginary landscape (principle) = ritual; in this case the shared ritual revisiting of iconic
‘national’ achievement in cinema (even though the reality is simply a sheep farm outside the small town of Matamata). The ritual element of any action of this sort, therefore, is here found in the belief in its ability to connect the actor to some common ground, including the supposed common ground of the national.
Engaging a sense of the national when viewing films (whether of one’s own nation or others’) may be an example of ritualised ‘actions which ... stand
in for wider values and frameworks of understanding’ (Couldry, 2003, p. 35) – values and frameworks involved in ritualising the creation and observation of supposedly core values of the national as they are performed on the cinema screen. Equally media rituals may go deeper into the institutional sites of film, for example through the discourses (of government, of other media) that underline the ‘national’ quality of certain films. In this way, Couldry’s work invites us to consider the collective imagining and enacting of national cinema. Indeed, it could be argued that the whole concept of national cinema is premised on acts of ritual – the ritual inclusion of certain signifiers, certain banalities, notions, ideas, practices within filmic texts, and the reading of these both publicly (in the media, publicity, news reports and features, award ceremonies and in conversations among audience members) and privately (as individual audience members, in knowingly engaging with a filmic text as the expression of the national). These are acts of national practice, as well as an national imagining. Further, these ideas of media ritual include government actions that encourage the identification of a film or films as ‘national’ in, for example, legislation and funding provision. Even dissent, derision or questioning of the ‘national’ quality of a film may be seen as another component in the ritual of constructing and maintaining the idea of national cinema.
It may be through mediated ritualised practices – going to or discussing a film, the knowledge that is ostensibly available about the ‘national’ character of the story, the theme, the crew’s origins, applying for funding, granting funding, writing about and critiquing films with their ‘national’ characteristics in mind, and so on – that national cinema exists. When these practices involve a belief in a film’s nationality, so to speak, they are participating in media ritual that can be linked to the concept of national cinema. Here, the media ritual intersects most clearly with the notion of the stakeholder, in the actions undertaken by stakeholders in relation to national cinema. But it is here, too, that this thesis needs to elaborate the notion of stakeholder, not least because Couldry’s own work is so heavily focused on audience behaviours rather than stakeholder interests more generally (since the former are really a subset of the latter). This is especially important when discussing the stakeholder interests around specific films. Here, the concept of media ritual will be
applied to the widest possible range of actions as performed by those identified as stakeholders in the idea of national cinema, including policymakers, audiences, film workers and so on, as they engage with the concept of the national on the multiple levels at which it operates. This engagement will include the production and recognition of Billig’s banal flaggings of the national, not just whatever more substantive or profound expressions of the national may exist in relation to cinema.