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ABSTRACT
This article examines what the process of founding and chairing the SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) ‘Transnational Cinemas’ scholarly interest group revealed to the authors about the evolution of the field. Charting a progression in the group’s activities from workshops around disciplinary definition to more practical sessions addressing teaching and research methodologies, the article maps out key shifts that took place within the period 2013–2017. It also appraises the authors’ efforts to create lasting, tangible resources for future researchers and teachers. The limitations of such a group’s influence are balanced against its capacity to bring scholars from diverse disciplines into dialogue with each other, thereby offering insight into the breadth and depth of the ‘transnational cinemas’ field.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Deborah Shaw has since made a similar case, in the process providing a more rigorous evidence base to corroborate our somewhat subjective observation: ‘In addition to migration and its influence on European cinemas, many scholars since the mid-2000s have applied a transnational framework to their research on regional or national cinemas throughout the world. This includes studies of East Asian cinemas (Hunt and Leung Citation2008; Morris et al. Citation2006; Berry Citation2010), Bollywood (Kaur and Sinha Citation2005; Dudrah Citation2012), Irish film (McIlroy Citation2007), Nordic Cinema (Nestingen and Elkington 2005), African cinemas (Krings and Okome Citation2013), Polish cinema (Mazierska and Goddard Citation2014), Hispanic Cinema (Dennison Citation2013) and Asian and Australian cinema (Khoo et al. Citation2013)’ (Shaw Citation2017, 292).
2. It is, therefore, to be regretted that an unintended consequence of SCMS’s (in many other ways entirely justified) decision to allow each member to participate in only one panel or workshop at the conference has seen the decline of the valuable workshop format. The 2019 programme includes only seven such sessions out of several hundred. The recent introduction of ‘seminars’ on the Sunday morning has perhaps mitigated this, however.
3. Katarzyna Marciniak and Bruce Bennett’s collection Teaching Transnational Cinema would not be published until 2016. This volume affirms the value of this workshop by mentioning our SIG as evidence for the increasing willingness of film scholars to engage with ‘philosophical debates about the strategies, methodologies, politics, and conceptual underpinnings of using transnational cinema in the classroom’ (Marciniak and Bennett Citation2016, 13).
4. We selected the four panellists to capture a range of experiences in teaching modules on cinematic transnationalism – from early career researchers such as Chelsea Wessels (Cornell University) and Mathew Holtmeier (Ithaca College) who were attempting to introduce transnational cinema topics into established world cinema curricula, through to more established scholars such as Mark Gallagher (University of Nottingham) who has extensive experience teaching a module on ‘Transnational Media’ that explores transnationalism across a range of screen-media.
5. These panellists were chosen for the fact that each had recently used video essay work to explore the relationships between films from diverse cultural backgrounds, and the extent to which audiovisual scholarship might be able to traverse the linguistic barriers between them.
6. Mittell would subsequently be instrumental to the founding of SCMS’s ‘Digital Humanities and Videographic Criticism’ SIG: an undertaking that again affirms the timeliness of this workshop.
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Notes on contributors
Austin Fisher
Austin Fisher is Principal Academic in Media Production at Bournemouth University. He is author of Blood in the Streets: Histories of Violence in Italian Crime Cinema (EUP, 2019) and Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western (I.B. Tauris, 2011), and editor of Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads (EUP, 2016). He is also co-editor (with Johnny Walker) of both Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Bloomsbury’s ‘Global Exploitation Cinemas’ book series.
Iain Robert Smith
Iain Robert Smith is Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London. He is author of The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema (EUP, 2016) and co-editor of the collections Transnational Film Remakes (with Constantine Verevis, EUP, 2017) and Media Across Borders (with Andrea Esser and Miguel Bernal-Merino, Routledge, 2016). In 2018, he was selected as an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker.