Geographical knowledges are very often conveyed visually, and geographers in other social science disciplines, are beginning to pay attention to the specifically visual dynamics of this process. The recent surge in the study of national cinemas, coupled with the framing of various image cultures in terms of the numerous permutations of ‘nation’ (e.g.
nationalism, multinationalism, national identity, internationalism and transnationalism) clearly suggests an intersection with the objects of analysis that geographers favor. Current attempts to articulate the national or nationalist dimensions of cinematic cultures also draw from the body of work from non-geographers like Benedict Anderson and Giuliana Bruno, who deploy geographically-informed methodologies to apprehend issues like the
recuperation of the early Italian films of Elvira Notari as correlative to cinematic nation- building (Bruno, 1993).
The cinematic representation of national identities allows the various visions of the nation – its mythologies, memories, symbols and traditions – to be viewed through a critical lens to re-affirm or challenge the ‘official’ narratives. The act of showcasing these filmic images signifies and conveys meaningful understanding to the audience. This is even more
significant when one filmmaker realizes cinema’s intentions in the depiction of certain national themes, and modes of expression that are evocative of a national identity.
This happens when a nation assumes that the portrayed cinematic signifiers are those that its citizens can identify with, or relate to. Some of the filmic output coming from other countries occasionally exaggerates the portrayals and uses national identity as a token carrying card to describe its distinctiveness and difference from others. Andrew Higson warns that “a national cinema … asserts its difference from other national cinemas . . . [and] proclaims its sense of otherness” (Higson 2000, 67). The ‘national identity’ marker is used as a type of branding whenever a discussion of distinct national cinemas arises.
The study of national cinemas indicates the need to frame various image cultures in terms of new nationalisms. Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined community defines a nation as an ‘imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (1983, 6). A nation is first imagined, and then bounded in a geographical space. He examines the creation and global spread of the ‘imagined communities’ of nationality and explores the processes that created these communities. Anderson has likewise examined how the national history has been told and recounted in postcolonial states through census,
museum, and map – what he calls the “three institutions of power” (Anderson 1983, 164- 165). He credits the cultural elite, language, “print capitalism” and educational systems as the driving force that created a network of familiarity that then facilitated a sense of community among people who may never meet in face-to-face village interaction. He imagines two people, situated in two different regions, as reading the same newspaper and being nationally constituted by their common link to their nation, without actual real-time face-to-face
his theorization, Imagined Communities has provided theoretical inspiration for film scholars to look at the concept’s applicability to national identity issues in cinema. The print media that Anderson discussed was appropriated in cinema studies as a theoretical point, to imagine a nation. The border-crossing of cinemas has allowed a nationally-produced film to be watched by fellow compatriots based abroad, thereby broadening the base of the community beyond the country where the film hails from.
Anderson’s ‘imagined community’ as a concept states that a nation is socially
constructed and ultimately imagined by the people who perceive themselves to be part of that group. Anderson falls in the ‘historicist’ or ‘modernist’ school of nationalism along with Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, in that he posits that nations and nationalism are products of modernity and have been created as cultural means to political and economic ends. Before nationalism, there existed the ‘great religiously imagined communities’ such as Christendom, based on shared languages such as Latin. With the rise of exploration,
Europeans came to realize the insularity of their conceptions of existence. Furthermore, the shared language of Latin was beginning to decline, and was replaced by the vernacular. Anderson’s modernist notion of imagined communities stands in opposition to the belief of the ‘primordialist’ school of nationalism, the belief that nations, if not nationalism, have existed since early human history. Imagined communities can be seen as a form of social constructivism parallel to Edward Said's concept of imagined geographies.9
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According to Said: “Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography” (1993, 7). The geographical orientation and distribution of people who are rooted in particular nation-states and imagined geographies, perpetuate the notion not only of how the world is perceived according to Western discourse, but how people’s identities are viewed and tied to their specific geographical
While there is general agreement with Anderson’s theory of the nation as an imagined community of people, there is also the issue of hegemony within the frames that produced such a community. For instance, is there resistance to the signs and significations that present a divergent dynamics to, for example, Filipino nation-building? This resistance can be
antithetical to the official nation that the current administration wants to build and project to the international community. I am referring not only to those with ideologically different conceptions of a Filipino nation, but also the non-Tagalog speakers in the Philippines who find affinity to the more localized variations of the hegemonic nation. In response to the multiplicity of Indian cultures within India, Indian subaltern historian Partha Chatterjee asked in 1993, “Whose imagined community?” Chatterjee challenges these Andersonian assertions by emphasizing that the nation’s “fragments” are just as important, especially in highlighting differences within a nation. While unity through an imagined community is certainly
important, with the introduction of “fragments” as a conceptual tool to understand
nationalism, a sense of ‘nation’ is also achieved. Chatterjee says that Anderson “treats the phenomenon as part of the universal history of the modern world obscuring other
nationalisms and ways of constructing community” (1993, 5). Similarly, Anderson’s
references to Asian experiences and literatures are reduced to a backdrop, because these are still integrated into the European history of the national imaginary, reducing the Asian “moments” to nodes by which to reiterate the constructedness of the nation. Anderson’s notion of imagination as a “steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity” opens up a universalized scenario that incorporates all other imaginations within its trajectory. As Chatterjee notes, “if nationalisms in the rest of the world have chosen their imagined
community from certain ‘modular forms’ were already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?” (1993, 5).
Andrew Higson likewise questions the fixed boundaries that govern the concept of ‘imagined community’. He asserts that Anderson’s concept neglects the “contingency or instability of the national” (2000, 66). Geographical boundaries are leaky rather than immutable or fixed, as evidenced by various and considerable movements that occur in nation-states that are authoritarian. The movements caused by diaspora and the possible homogeneity that is found between the homeland and the new home-spaces of the diasporic communities demonstrate this ‘contingency’ to the nation-ness with the fully formed identity that Anderson is proposing.