While reading this week’s texts and attempting to formulate my own understanding of transnational cinema, I found myself returning to the discussions we had at the beginning of the semester, specifically the hyphenated terminology. Even though “transnationalism” isn’t technically hyphenated, I feel that one can imagine of what the hyphenated space would be comprised. Thinking back to the first brainstorming session and the subsequent classes where we tried to define “transnationalism” as a concept, we questioned the hyphenated terms in relation to Appadurai and Bhabha’s texts. With Appadurai, we concluded that the “— scapes” showed how these different “landscapes” were changing, whereas Bhabha related to “the beyond,” or more appropriately, “the in-between,” which highlighted the unification or point of department of two seemingly distinct entities. Given this week’s readings and film, I would like to speculate on the hyphen that creates trans-national cinema. Is it comprised of thematic content which distinguishes national films from the transnational or rather the “behind the scenes” material which guides the filming process?

This semester, the Spanish Film Club has presented its 3^rd annual film festival sponsored by Pragda showcasing highly acclaimed or up-and-coming talents from Spain and Latin America. Apart from the documentary, ¿Qué culpa tiene el tomate?, which is a cross-cultural comparison of the respective countries’ produce markets, the other films portray a nationally or culturally specific narrative. Therefore, I can’t help but wonder how one defines transnational cinema. Is it transnational if the cinematic content crosses borders, as in the aforementioned documentary? Or, does an ethnically/culturally/linguistically diverse cast and crew lend itself to a transnational category? Finally, how does the viewer impact transnational cinema? I find myself questioning how festivals promoting independent films, or those being produced on a smaller budget, have impacted national or international reception; therefore, I think the audience plays just as much a role in establishing a transnational cinema due to the ability to access films at the click of a button, whether on our tablets, smartphones, or laptops. Within our own academic setting, we can show films via Netflix or YouTube to our students, which is a vital component in opening the classroom to authentic texts; or rather, we expand the borders of our classrooms as we travel alongside Julio and Tenoch in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también or becoming four Mexican teenagers’ accomplice in robbing a movie theater, as in Iria Gómez Concheiro’s Asalto al cine.

As the prompt suggests, cinema is a collaborative effort not only in terms of the aesthetic and artistic qualities but also in terms of financing and producing capital. Even though the majority of their text is focused on Mexico, Baer and Long point out that “the international co-productions in the 1990s and 2000s are emblematic products of globalization: financed by global capital, featuring international casts, shot in several countries and often several languages, and foregrounding the hybrid status of their production contexts in both their formal construction and narrative content” (150). Following this line of thought, it would seem that transnational cinema is equally impacted by the interaction of on- and off-screen international influences. In their critical text, Ezra and Rowden suggest that “cinema has from its inception been transnational, circulating more or less freely across borders and utilizing international personnel” (2). However, keeping this in mind and returning to my original question of the hyphenated space, they argue that “because transnational cinema is most ‘at-home’ in the in-between spaces of culture, in other words, between the local and the global, it decisively problematizes the investment in cultural purity or separatism” (4). They acknowledge that the in-between is what constitutes the transnational.

This “in-between” is often materialized, as they discuss, when films are no longer shot on-location, which complicates the transnational classification. For example, in Peter Berg’s 2013 Lone Survivor “Marcus Luttrell and his team set out on a mission to capture or kill notorious Taliban leader Ahmad Shah, in late June 2005. Marcus and his team are left to fight for their lives in one of the most valiant efforts of modern warfare” (IMDB) in Afghanistan. However, it was shot entirely in New Mexico; therefore, is Lone Survivor a transnational film? To what extent does the filming location occupy the hyphenated space?

Another complication emerges when literary texts are translated into feature films. For example, in Love the Hard Way (2001), director Peter Sehr moves the narrative to New York City, where the movie is filmed in its entirety, even though it is based on Chinese author Wang Shuo’s novel Yi Ban Shi Huo Yan, Yi Ban Shi Hai Shui. In this case, one should question the artistic licensing available to re-write or re-interpret a text to such a degree that the setting is relocated. Additionally, Love the Hard Way is classified as an “Eastern European – Foreign Film” on Netflix, even though it is filmed in English in New York based on a Chinese novel.

While trying to address how transnational cinema should be analyzed, I am unable to identify a single, definitive response. As Andrew Higson notes, in regards to transnational cinema, “The experience of border crossing takes place at two broad levels. First there is the level of production and the activities of the film-makers. […] The second way [is] in terms of the distribution and reception of films” (19). Ultimately, I think the imagined hyphenation or “in-between” in the trans-national consists of spontaneous and organic interactions between the following components: the specificity of the production team, including the actors, directors, crew, etc., the financial backing, the filming location, the thematic/cinematic content, viewing location (theater, festival, university classroom, or internet), use of subtitles and reliability of translations, among others.