Colonization, Self-Colonization and Significant Others.

What could in the 1990s, be at stake in renewing a debate about national cinematograph? If the struggle over "realism" (the social and political stakes in "representation," whether individual or collective, or the importance of documentation as record and reference) has moved to television, then it is there that the "national" (in the sense I defined it above as exclusion and inclusion, appropriation and consensus) is now being negotiated. As a consequence, the "national cinematographs" task may well be to set themselves off even more decisively from their realist traditions, and engage the Americans at their own level: weightlifting onto the screens the mythologies of two-and-a-half thousand years of European civilization, bringing to the surface the collective unconscious of individual nations at particular points in their history (which is what one of the pioneers of the study of national cinematograph, Siegfried Kracauer, in From Caligari to Hitler,5 was claiming that the Weimar cinematograph did for Germany in the period between the world wars), or giving expression to the more delicate pressure points of communal life in times of transition, crisis and renewal (as the new waves from neo-realism to the New German Cinematograph were doing from the late 1940s to the early 1980s). In Wim Wenders' KINGS OF THE ROAD, perhaps the

finest of movies from the 1970s to meditate about a "national cinematograph," one of the protagonists, contemplating the barbed-wire fence then still separating East and West, half-jokingly, half-re-gretfully agrees that "The Yanks have colonized our sub-conscious." We can take this perhaps by now over-used phrase in two directions: we can turn it around and say, yes, the national, even in Europe, has become a "colonial" term. Only a state that can admit to and make room for the multi-cultural, the multi-layered within its own hybridities can henceforth claim to be a nation, and therefore only movies that are prepared to explore hybridities, in-between states, the self-in-the-other can be in the running for a national cinematograph. This may finally give a chance to those moviemaking nations at the margins of cultures by which they feel colonized. For instance, the Australian and New Zealand cinematograph, which in the 1990s has, with CROCODILE DUNDEE on the one hand, and AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE or THE PIANO on the other, quite successfully portrayed the comic and the poignant sides of its angst as colonized (cinematograph) cultures.

The second thought that occurs, when hearing that "The Yanks have colonized our unconscious" is the example of directors like Wenders himself, who was only identified in his own country as a moviemaker with typically German subjects after he had been recognized by his "American friends." But it is not all on the side of the colonizers. If one takes, for instance, Black Cinematograph in the US in the figure of the moviemaker Spike Lee, or even Italo-American directors like Francis Ford Coppola, one might well be tempted to regard their emphasis on ethnicity as a new national cinematograph inside the international cinematograph. Nevertheless, as Spike Lee has remarked: "If Hollywood has a color problem, it's neither white nor black nor yellow, it's green - the color of the dollar." What he presumably also meant by this jibe is that the chances of blacks making movies in Hollywood depend neither on their color, nor their talent, nor even on the size of the black audience: Hollywood's huge budgets have made it so dependent on its exports that for the first time in its history, it can no longer amortize its movies on the home market. Yet in its export markets (the largest of which are Great Britain, Italy, France, Germany, along with Japan, Australia and Canada) audiences are apparently very resistant to non-white heroes. Thus, Hollywood has itself been "colonized" by its "European" or "national" audiences, except that Hollywood's dependency on its exports is a fact not exploited by those audiences to put pressure on Hollywood, from the time that they have in common nothing except that they are Hollywood's export markets.

On the face of it, then, national cinematograph can no longer be thought of in the traditional terms, but only in the context of these place-shifts and time-shifts, the cultural palimpsests that connect the ever-expanding, constantly self-differentiating field of media representations which is the contemporary everyday of movies, television, advertising. In this situation, national cinematograph becomes a doubly displaced category. It is at best a retrospective effect, so to speak, one that only posterity can confer, as it sifts through the nation's active and passive image bank, hoping to discover the shape of its superego or its id. But national cinematograph is also a displaced category, insofar as this is a shape, whether monstrous, pleasing or only mildly disfigured, that can only be recognized from without. The label national cinematograph has to be conferred on movies by others, either by other national or "international" audiences, or by national audiences, but at another point in time. Defined by other critics, by other audiences, these mirror images are tokens of a national or personal identity only if this other is, as the phrase goes, a "significant other." Given the mutual dependencies just sketched, Europe (standing in the field of cinematograph metonymically for European movie festivals and the critical or theoretical discourses these produce) is as much a significant other for Hollywood or Asia, as the United States is a significant other for European audiences.