For three decades now, the term ‘transnational cinema’ has served as a prism to observe cinemas of different territories, categories and genres, most notably Hollywood and East Asian big-budget productions on the one side, and the work of diasporic and exilic filmmakers on the other. However, transnational cinema has mostly been defined negatively, either in tension with or against concurrent or concomitant notions such as national, international and global cinema.

If cinema has been transnational from its very beginnings (Ezra and Rowden 2006; Berry 2010), through the cross-border circulation of films, talent and equipment, the transnational forces have solidified and grown in the contemporary globalized economic, technological and cultural order, which has caused a “decline of national sovereignty as a regulatory force in global coexistence” (Ezra and Rowden 2006, 1). As “[t]he transnational at once transcends the national and presupposes it” (4), scholars inquiring into the transnational have been obliged to return to the national to address the transnational (Berry 2010, 112).

The long-standing term ‘international’ has prompted yet another series of negative definitions of the transnational. The first formalized differentiation between the two dates back to the 1960s, when international relations scholars distinguished between ‘transnational relations’ (non-governmental interactions across national borders) and ‘international relations’ (interstate relations) (Dellmann and Kessler 2016). Understood in the light of contemporary film studies and practices, the international arguably concerns a “sphere where actors representing national entities meet,” while the transnational leans towards “more informal, non-institutionalized” dynamics and encounters. Furthermore, not only does transnational indicate “a questioning of supposed certainties about national origins and identities” (126), but “the realm of the transnational may consist of entities that are less stable and cut across established boundaries” (127).

Beyond its intricate relation with the nation and the international, the transnational also “seems to serve as a kind of benevolent counterpart to the perceived evil of globalization” (Christie 2013). The all-encompassing term ‘globalization’ also misses on the variances implied by the transnational (Bergfelder 2005). Thus, the transnational is “often a more adequate label for phenomena which can be of quite variable scale and distribution, even when they do share the characteristic of not being contained within a state” (Bergfelder 2005, 321). Similarly ‘globalization’ can be understood as “as part of the ideological rhetoric of globalism,” and the ‘transnational’ as a term referring to specific ‘transborder projects’ (Tsing 2000, as quoted in Berry 2010, 122).

The necessity and the productivity of the term ‘transnational’ for film studies remain contested. There seems to be a need for a ‘critical transnationalism,’ which would account for the tensions between the national and the transnational, while also grasping “the potential for local, regional and diasporic film cultures to affect, subvert and transform national and transnational cinemas” (Higbee and Lim 2010, 18).