The transnational film unit in our course prompted me to think about the ways in which foreign film industries, products, and consumers are not only multinational, but also transnational. As a student of literary and cultural studies, I feel that our course readings, especially the introduction to Transnational Cinema, The Film Reader by by Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, have allowed me to rethink how the Western culture industry (i.e. Hollywood) might be a globalizing industry, but also a glocalizing one. I would argue that, while the American culture industry has expanded its reach around the globe, the glocalizing efforts of Nollywood film producers are challenging the assumed role of cultural production as a primarily profit-driven industry to placate and market to consumers.
In “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (1944), Marxist critics Adorno and Horkheimer criticize film and radio productions (among other industries) for their creation of artless, homogenous, and deceptive cultural products, referencing specific examples of popular film, television, and music in their analysis. They claim that “the whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry” (56), but our class discussions on transnationalism have prompted me to ask how the culture industry is filtered in other parts of the world in the current era of globalization.
Near the beginning of their introduction, Ezra and Rowden explain how the Hollywood entertainment industry, much like Adorno and Horkheimer claimed, “has succeeded in maintaining its hegemonic influence in large part by imagining the global audience as a world of sensation-starved children” (2). Put another way, the target audience is the democratic audience, and the Hollywood industry considers all possible approaches to a story so that no work can really be considered unique or challenging.
However, what Adorno and Horheimer perhaps did not anticipate, and what Ezra and Rowden draw attention to, is the emergence of parallel culture industries in non-Western nations. The lower cost and greater accessibility of filmmaking equipment allow individuals from around the world to create their own films without any expectations of network studios, corporate funding, or a theater release and then DVD distribution system. According to Ezra and Rowden, this new, accepted, and even celebrated standard of filmmaking “has facilitated the rise of a culture of access that functions as a delegitimizing shadow of the official film cultures of most nation-states as they have been determined by the processes of screening, censorship, rating, and critique” (6). With this idea in mind, I’d like to think about two alternative national cultural industries that, while capturing national issues in many of their films, demonstrate how the new “cine-literacy,” or storytelling through film, can lead to transnational moments.
Bollywood has become one of the largest film industries in the world; Indian producers borrow their action, comedy, romance, drama, and musical genres from the West, and many of their plotlines revolve around typical themes of love and power. Adorno might say this reveals how the tool of the “technically enforced ubiquity of stereotypes” (60) is applicable in any society. Nonetheless, what Bollywood has done differently from Hollywood is integrate uniquely Indian struggles and customs into their films. For example, the 2011 Indian film Aarakshan caused a lot of controversy because of its direct attempt to critique the caste system and other aspects of traditional Indian society. The film features several well-known Bollywood actors, and the movie posters, seen below, draw particular attention to social issues that are specific to India. The film drew mediocre box office sales, partially because of the fact that the film was banned in three states.
Movie poster for “Aarakshan”
Despite borrowing the styles and tools popularized by Hollywood cinema, Bollywood films may be distinguished from Hollywood films because of their attempts to address specific national social and cultural issues. Because of these distinctions, it was Bollywood film, rather than Hollywood film, that had a profound impact on audiences within the Hausa culture of northern Nigeria. Nigerians were not an audience that Bollywood producers had in mind when they created their films, but anthropologist Brian Larkin indicates that Indian films became popularized in Nigeria because they presented a “parallel modernity” that Hausa men and women could identify with. He claims that Indian film offered Nigerians “an alternative world, similar to their own, from which they may imagine other forms of fashion, beauty, love, romance, coloniality and postcoloniality” (351). This unique moment reveals how a national cinema had an unexpected affect when read by a completely different national and regional audience.
Although the industry is seldom acknowledged outside of Africa, Nollywood has become a highly successful cultural entity that produces 2,000 films per year. What places the Nollywood phenomenon at the greatest contrast to Adorno’s culture industry conception is the fact that Nigerian producers are not as evidently focused on the market value of their products. The film narratives mostly stem not from capitalist ideology or redundant Hollywood plot lines, but rather from newspaper rumors and local folklore (McCall 2007: 96). Further, most Nigerian films are shot in about a week with cheap digital devices, and are distributed as direct-to-CD products that are often pirated. In this sense, those who truly benefit from Nollywood are not the producers or elites, but rather the viewers from Nigeria and many other parts of Africa, who have finally found a medium that highlights local ideas rather than Western ones.
Subtitled screenshot from the low-budget Nollywood film, “Ajum Akwam Iko”
In short, what I have learned from the transnational film unit is that Western film industries are not necessarily homogenizing, infantilizing forces. Although emerging “Third Cinema,” or non-Western, film industries may parallel Hollywood film in some ways, it is evident that the film narratives and economies of production differ greatly from traditional styles and methods. While a lot of foreign films continue to reflect national and local issues, it is interesting to see how the films are consumed and appreciated by multinational audiences. I think the parallel modernities, or alternative culture industries, that are constantly developing will be worthwhile subjects for students of cultural studies to explore further.