The popularization and institutionalization of cinema since the late 19th century took place in a co-evolution with the modern nation-state. Film was instrumental in shaping national industries, taste profiles, and a viewership, which from the introduction of sound film in the late 1920s increasingly matched ideas of a linguistically – and thus culturally – homogeneous public sphere of the nation. As a global phenomenon, cinema contributed to the naturalization of the nation (state) through its infrastructures and institutions, defining the nation's boundaries within an international setting as well as the level of their permeability through subtitling and dubbing, distribution quotas, coproduction agreements, international festivals, congresses or treaties. With the nation structurally manifesting itself in film production, distribution, reception, and archiving, histories of film and cinema have largely tended to confirm the national character of cinema, transforming a supposedly descriptive into an epistemic category. The numerous critiques of “national cinema” and the identification of transnational, diasporic or accented cinemas notwithstanding, this “zombie category” (Beck 2007) continues to shape the formation of the objects, subjects and methods of film-related scholarship.

Drawing on my research on Dans les ruines de Baalbeck (1937), the first sound film entirely produced in Lebanon, advertised as the “first national film” several years before independence from French mandate rule and considered to be lost today, I will propose paratactical approaches against “methodological nationalism”. One of them consists in actively tending to the paranational aspects of making, watching, preserving, and researching film. As a heuristic lens for discerning fragmentary relations before, below, and beyond those established within and between nation states, Paranational Cinema does not form its own coherent category or methodology, but rather informs the development of situated methods that can account for what has been obliterated in nationalized frameworks.

Who is ‘everyone’? Analyzing media practices of (national) belonging
International Workshop
12–13 November 2026
University of Applied Arts Vienna