National Cinematograph.

It has often been remarked that in order to talk about a "national cinematograph" at all, one always tries to conjure up a certain coherence, in the first instance, that of the Nation. In this respect, it is quite clearly a notion with a lot of historical and even more so, ideologic ballast. A nation, especially when used in a context that suggests cultural identity, must repress differences of class, gender, race, religion, and history in order to assert its coherence, and is thus another name for internal colonization. Nationhood and national identity are not given, but gained, not inherited, but paid for. They exist in a field of power of inclusion and exclusion, as well as resistance and appropriation.

National cinematograph also functions largely by more or less appropriate analogy. If we take the economic definition, it is like the "gross national product" or the "national debt." But it is also like the "national railway system" or the "national monuments": in the first instance a descriptive or taxonomical category. With the last analogy, nevertheless, another meaning comes into view. Like the national opera company, or the national ballet, national cinematograph as a rule means that it is or wants to be also an institution (officially, or at least semi-officially), enjoying state patronage and, when defined as culture, often receiving substantial state support. Thus it implies an economic relationship, and indeed, historically, the cinematographs of Europe have been part of their nations' political economy ever from the time that the middle of the First World War, when the moving pictures' propaganda value was first seen in action. From the time that then, governmental measures, encompassing taxation and tariffs, censorship and city ordinances have legalized but also legitimized the public sphere that is national cinematograph, making both the concept and the state's relation to it oscillate between an industrial and a cultural definition. That this definition has come under pressure from the time that the 1970s is evident: the dismantling of welfare states, privatization, deregulation and the transformation of the media and communication networks under commercial and market principles have been the single most important factors that have put the idea of a national cinematograph in crisis.