‘Paranational’ Instances in Cinema: Modes, Methods and Conditions
Mababangong Bangungot [Perfumed Nightmare, Kidlat Tahimik, 1976]. Film still. Kidlat Kulog Productions. Source: International Film Festival Rotterdam.
The very title of this research project and the summary of its theoretical and methodological aspirations entail a rather paradoxical and productive nexus. Should the efforts to look beyond the label ‘national cinema’ be pursued under a designation (‘paranational cinema’) with a similar overarching tone? To avoid precisely this pitfall, one should prefer to speak of ‘paranational in cinema.’ ‘Paranational’ ought not to be an all-encompassing term: instead of subsuming or overshadowing through homogenization, ‘paranational’ emerges, transpires, and occurs ‘from the bottom up.’ These efforts should thus be concentrated not on imposing definitions ‘from above,’ but on recognizing ‘paranational’ instances in cinema and on bringing them to the surface, through informed observation, meticulous description, and/or contextualized analysis. The unsystematic nature of these occurrences does call for a fairly fluid framework, yet such a framework could run the risk of being too vague. Initial points of reference – which will be detailed below – seem necessary for an in-depth exploration of these matters.
‘Paranational’ in cinema can be examined through three main sets of instances – modes, methods and conditions – which, for all their distinctiveness, remain inextricably linked, continuously overlapping, affecting, and altering each other.
Modes is principally concerned with the thematic (topics), ideological (discourse), and aesthetic (style) criteria. Thematically, ‘paranational’ may serve to study those aspects traditionally considered to be constitutive of a nation, such as a language, normative culture, or iconography, especially instances that hint at a destabilized, de-homogenized or deliberately bypassed conception of a uniform and immutable nation. By probing films and practices beyond national criteria, the term ‘paranational’ also defies the transnational, in particular its most visibly ‘constructed’ manifestations (for instance, ‘Europudding’ coproductions or Western notions of what an African cinema is and should be [Murphy 2006]), which arguably function as a sum of neutralized or, conversely, emphasized national or cultural attributes. Ideologically, ‘paranational’ lenses can help to discern a critique of the notion of the nation, its values, myths, defining events, emblems, historical figures and preconceptions about it. In cinema, these discourses may be vehiculated through an overt critique, a parody, a satire or different forms of détournement (Kidlat Tahimik’s Mababangong Bangungot [Perfumed Nightmare, 1976] contains many such instances). Aesthetically, ‘paranational’ seems to be a pertinent device to consider films made in reaction to dominant ‘national’ and/or ‘transnational’ tendencies (such as Cinema Novo countering the traditional Hollywood-inspired cinema in 1950s Brazil).
Beyond thematic concerns, ideological (sub)text and formal features, ‘paranational’ also allows to tackle certain methods of producing, disseminating, and presenting films, but also studying films and concomitant processes, practices and materials. ‘Paranational’ instances are likely to be found in alternative practices that eschew dominant models of production, whether ‘national’ (funding by national film institutes, nationally homogenous film crew…) or ‘transnational’ (European funds, funding by international foundations…). Similarly, the dissemination and the presentation of films can be assessed with the help of ‘paranational,’ most markedly in cases where such practices run parallel to established national distribution circuits (for instance, cinémas art et essai in France) or international institutional networks (e.g. Label Europa Cinemas). Finally, various programming, curatorial, archival, film-critical, film-historical and scholarly endeavours, which – rather than to promote or negate – seek to deconstruct or subvert the national character of films, processes, practices and materials, can also be observed through ‘paranational’ lenses.
The two aforementioned sets of instances are conditioned by a third, namely the historical, cultural, political and economic conditions in which the films are produced, disseminated, curated and received by audiences, the media and at the box office, or studied in academia. Although ‘paranational’ might inspect relatively stable national frameworks, it tends to offer a more relevant perspective on states of instability, crisis and insecurity, most notably on conditions where the nation-state the filmmakers, producers, researchers and commentators operate within is under construction, reconstruction, dissolution or re-composition (e.g. production and promotion of Dans les ruines de Baalbeck, the first talking film produced in Lebanon and today considered to be lost [Widmann 2024]). Furthermore, ‘paranational’ can be equally useful for looking at the cinematic processes occurring outside of nationally homogeneous environments, such as the work of filmmakers in diaspora or exile (some of which have been scrutinized by Laura Marks [2000] and Hamid Naficy [2001,] among others).
These three sets of instances are neither meant to represent a typology, nor should they be examined as strictly autonomous from one another, each of them remaining in constant productive tension with the others. It is at their incessantly reconfigured intersections that one should survey for ‘paranational’ instances in cinema.
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Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Duke University Press.
Murphy, David. 2006. “Africans Filming Africa: Questioning Theories of an Authentic African Cinema.” In Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, edited by Elisabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden. Routledge.
Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton University Press.
Widmann, Philip. 2024. “Encountering the Paranational Film Archive Between Lebanon and Germany.” Edited manuscript of paper presented at the Archive Trouble conference, University of Zurich, 7 June 2024.
Nikola Radić is currently writing a doctoral dissertation on landscapes and architecture in post-Yugoslav documentary and experimental cinema at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich, and working as a researcher on the project Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices. He has written extensively on post-Yugoslav cinema and has edited the volume Filmoskopija – odabrani tekstovi o savremenom srpskom filmu 2010-2023. [Filmoskopija – Selected Texts on Contemporary Serbian Cinema 2010-2023].
The term ‘Balkan cinema’ has primarily been employed by film scholars and critics to refer to two different yet interconnected discursive categories: 1) the thematic and stylistic tendencies of a group of films or filmmakers from South-East Europe, 2) the filmic output of countries that are geopolitically, historically, and culturally situated in South-East Europe.
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Paranational Cinema – Trajectories and Methods
Design: Daniela Burger
What would a map of Paranational Cinema look like? And how would such a map be made? The prefix «para-» allows to question the subsumption of the varied aspects that cinema encompasses—industry, art, and culture, object of research and historiography—into nations and nation-states, as national cinemas in an international context, and often operating transnationally. The certainty of belonging and property, of territorial and historical coherence, of political, economic, and sociocultural organization that these entities provide comes with the price of exclusion and oppression.
Cinema before or after the nation state, in opposition to or effaced by it, complicates and unsettles the certainty of easy categorization. «Para-» qualifies the relations of specific cinema practices to such entities to highlight trajectories of disruption and dispersal that also challenge the centrality of ‘the film’ for conceptions of cinema, as well as forms of community that do not coincide with geopolitical maps. While nation-building can be a prerequisite for self-determination, it is also a tool for integration in neo-colonial structures and continued dispossession, particularly in postcolonial contexts. This ambiguity suggests ways of thinking cinema practices in an incoherent, multi-faceted relation.
The two-day event at the University of Zurich and the Xenix Kino, part of the SNSF-supported project Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices, aims to bring together positions that scrutinize exactly the interface of organizing and thinking cinema in other ways: Dedication to research on practices and material that defy the easy compartmentalization of national cinema(s) also requires a consideration of how methodologies are implicated in creating entities of certainty rather than accounting for the less orderly realities of Paranational Cinema.
16 October 2025 – University of Zurich (UZH)
KO2-F-152
Karl-Schmid-Strasse 4,
8006 Zürich
including two screenings at the Xenix Kino
17 October 2025 – Xenix Kino, Kanzleistrasse 52, 8004 Zürich
With contributions by: Ignacio Albornoz, Oussama Benayad, Erica Carter, Tiago de Luca, Anaïs Farine, Ana Grgić, Assaf Gruber, Eiman Hussein, Olexii Kuchanskyi, Brigitta Kuster, Nikolaus Perneczky, Lúcia Ramos Monteiro, Ahmed Refaat, Cecilia Valenti, Clea Wanner.
Complete program is available here.
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Black Internationalism: Skip Norman and Beyond
Still from Blues People (Skip Norman, 1968), courtesy of Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek
Black filmmaking has long been relegated to the margins of film history. In recent years, with the increasing interest in ideas of decolonisation in art and culture as well as in academia, it has finally become more visible. The first part of the lecture will focus on Wiliam Reuben (“Skip”) Norman, who was part of the first cohort of students when “Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie” (DFFB) was founded in 1966. In reconstructing Skip Norman’s trajectory, the specificities of the film school context, and the special situation of Norman’s expatriate position will be highlighted. In the second part of this lecture, we will consider Norman in the larger context of Black Internationalism in film and culture in the 1960s and 1970s. Norman belonged to an ideological and mutually supportive cohort that circulated around each other in Europe, if not always directly interacting or collaborating. We might think of a filmmaker like Melvin van Peebles, or a polemicist and activist like Angela Davis, or even a man of letters like James Baldwin. Skip Norman’s position in this historical continuum has yet to be properly accounted for.
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Hörsaal SOD-1-102, University of Zurich, Deutsches Seminar, Schönberggasse 9, 8001 Zürich
Revisited! Filmgeschichte im Gespräch
Still from De cierta manera (Sara Gomez, CU 1974), courtesy of Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst
De cierta manera (Sara Gomez, CU 1974) und Kurzfilme von Skip Norman. De cierta manera (In gewisser Hinsicht) ist Sara Gómez’ erster und einziger Langfilm, sie starb 1974, ohne ihn fertigstellen zu können. Die vier Kurzfilme, die der afroamerikanische Filmemacher Wilbert Reuben ‘Skip’ Norman als Student an der "Deutschen Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin" gedreht hat, fragen nach den Möglichkeiten schwarzer Befreiung in der europäischen Diaspora. Filme rund ums Lehren und Lernen. Filme als Vorschläge, über neue und andere Gesellschaftsformen nachzudenken.
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Kino REX Schwanengasse 9 3011 Bern
At the beginning of her seminal investigation into ‘intercultural cinema,’ Laura Marks states that the diasporic experience is marked by “violent disjunctions in space and time” (2000,1). These extreme conditions are, as she continues, “the physical effects of exile, immigration, and displacement” (1). Living in the diaspora means living under two spatial and temporal regimes at the same time. Far from being just external circumstances, these ambivalences and splits also have the consequence of a divided (or multiplied) sensorium. The diasporic state affects the smell, touch, and feeling, and hence the way these senses are transformed into artistic expressions.
Diasporic existence subverts and transcends the category of the nation. In Marks’ words: “Nationalist discourse prevents the understanding of diasporan experience” ( 9) As a consequence, the condition of the diaspora – increasingly determining the lives of more and more people in a world of conflicts, drastic climate change, and forced migration – bears strong affinities to ‘paranational’ aspects of cinema.
A working hypothesis: Wherever a cinematic practice is motivated by diasporic experiences, it tends to become an expression of ‘paranational cinema,’ a specimen or fragment of a cinematic landscape which cannot be transformed into a Cartesian map, but questions the idea and practice of mapping itself.
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Revisited! Filmgeschichte im Gespräch
Still from De cierta manera (Sara Gomez, CU 1974), courtesy of Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst
De cierta manera (Sara Gomez, CU 1974) und Kurzfilme von Skip Norman. De cierta manera (In gewisser Hinsicht) ist Sara Gómez’ erster und einziger Langfilm, sie starb 1974, ohne ihn fertigstellen zu können. Die vier Kurzfilme, die der afroamerikanische Filmemacher Wilbert Reuben ‘Skip’ Norman als Student an der "Deutschen Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin" gedreht hat, fragen nach den Möglichkeiten schwarzer Befreiung in der europäischen Diaspora. Filme rund ums Lehren und Lernen. Filme als Vorschläge, über neue und andere Gesellschaftsformen nachzudenken.
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Kino REX Schwanengasse 9 3011 Bern
Black Internationalism: Skip Norman and Beyond
Still from Blues People (Skip Norman, 1968), courtesy of Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek
Black filmmaking has long been relegated to the margins of film history. In recent years, with the increasing interest in ideas of decolonisation in art and culture as well as in academia, it has finally become more visible. The first part of the lecture will focus on Wiliam Reuben (“Skip”) Norman, who was part of the first cohort of students when “Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie” (DFFB) was founded in 1966. In reconstructing Skip Norman’s trajectory, the specificities of the film school context, and the special situation of Norman’s expatriate position will be highlighted. In the second part of this lecture, we will consider Norman in the larger context of Black Internationalism in film and culture in the 1960s and 1970s. Norman belonged to an ideological and mutually supportive cohort that circulated around each other in Europe, if not always directly interacting or collaborating. We might think of a filmmaker like Melvin van Peebles, or a polemicist and activist like Angela Davis, or even a man of letters like James Baldwin. Skip Norman’s position in this historical continuum has yet to be properly accounted for.
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Hörsaal SOD-1-102, University of Zurich, Deutsches Seminar, Schönberggasse 9, 8001 Zürich
“Infrastructures are matter that enable the movement of other matter. Their peculiar ontology lies in the facts that they are things and also the relation between things. As things they are present to the senses, yet they are also displaced in the focus on the matter they move around.” (Larkin 2013, 329)
The projected film outshines the infrastructures which enable its movement (physical and digital distribution networks, TV, video, etc.) towards its public appearance (analog and digital projection technology, theatres, private screens, electricity, data networks). Below these more obvious infrastructures which transport filmic matter to audiences, lie those which are less material or less easily recognizable: those of professional education (schools, universities), the regulation and trade of ideas and concepts (development and writing labs, pitches, markets), of financing (public and private funding bodies, corporate capital), production (studios, film stock and equipment manufacturers, labour and the networked knowledge it generates), political control (censorship bodies, copyright, legislation), appreciation (festivals, cinémathèques, criticism) and preservation (archives, private collections).
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Fragments on the Paranational Dynamics of Cinema
1/8 [Brigitta Kuster *]
At home, with oneself – that would be the site, this geographical space: a city, a village, a region, a nation state, sealed, fortified. This has actually never been the case. In fact, in the modern age, fixation and sedentarism became a compulsion, an ideology and a myth, which was supposed to bring mobilisation under control. The historical emergence of film and cinema, in particular, has brought to the fore the paradigm of the journey, the route, the passage to be travelled or the distance to be bridged, which is not only induced by the motion of machines. Moving images. And this conjuncture has certainly not hindered the development of cinema as a business. What has been a challenge to film theory, however, is the fact that with film, we are always already heading somewhere else. Easily carried away and therefore difficult to grasp, we are completely with or even within ourselves and yet somewhere else, at the same time ici et ailleurs.
5/8 [Philip Widmann]
It is easy to criticise a “Festival of German-Language Documentary Film” for this linguistic limitation, since it only refers to one (of the) official language(s) of nationally defined territories, but not to the many other languages spoken there and in the films produced there. It is just as easy to criticise a “Festival of Documentaries from Germany, Austria and Switzerland” on the grounds that the countries of production and the locations of some of the films are not identical. In front of the screen as a membrane on which the imagined and the real can transform into their respective other, communities are formed, an imaginary “we” of the viewers, which sometimes identifies with the “they” of those being looked at and which sometimes distances itself from it. By the time it began to speak, cinema had already crossed borders and made them credible by depicting differences across the globe. With the advent of the sound film, the “we” was institutionalised in nationally organised markets, production and reception cultures, linked internationally through cooperation and competition, and selectively permeating each other. Its division into homogeneous linguistic areas is an anachronism of cinema, in which its missed opportunities latently continue to exist: other forms of perception, understanding, community.
2/8 [BK]
The prefix “para” can refer to locality, and thus to being close but slightly off-centre, somewhat removed. As a temporal marker it corresponds to the simultaneity of a difference, while in a figurative sense it indicates an opposition or a comparison. Paranational: to do something that is contrary to the great things that Ernest Renan thought a nation would look back on or aspire to in the future. In film, it is above all the producing countries, the financiers, who inscribe a nationality on a film. And the entire national infrastructure of the film industry, from film funding to censorship and archiving, can be understood as a protectionist policy against international competition and the transnational flooding of markets, especially from the USA since the 1930s. An example from France: the Centre national de la cinématographie, the central institution for the subsidisation and governance of national cinema, emerged from an institution founded during the Vichy government. However, the COIC (Comité d’organisation de l’industrie cinématographique), founded in 1940, was not concerned with Hollywood, but with counterbalancing Goebbels’s Continental Film. The model was also exported to the colonies, where it was replicated by the CCM, founded in Morocco in 1944. In film history, many prefer to focus on films and authors, and less often on the history of the cinema industry.
6/8 [PW]
The realistic image of the intersection between production and reception culture consists not only of what is produced and seen, but also of what is not produced and thus remains unseen. A good forty years after its publication in West Germany, Claudia Lenssen’s Liste des Unverfilmten (List of the Unfilmed) is still a highly topical text, despite all the changes that have taken place since then. The entries in the list insist on difference and its momentum to destabilise homogenised media and material spheres of life, rather than the option for a consumability of diversity that maintains the status quo. A large number of brief descriptions of situations and constellations, “ordinary and bottomless,” which can hardly be reproduced in a short quotation. A critical mass of material for a “prospect of films in which history enters in a different way than it has to date.” It is not a lament about losses due to structural conditions, but rather a view of the future that implies changing structures and thus becomes a matter of shared responsibility between producers and recipients. Learning to perceive the unrepresented and the non-representable in order to show and see differently requires the ability to understand oneself as another. This responsibility cannot be transferred to institutions, nor can it be organised by public authorities.
3/8 [BK]
Personally, I came to film history from the margins, for example with questions about the representation of migrants in cinema, and together with queer-feminist protagonists of film practices that, from the 1960s onwards, saw themselves as part of a force that wanted to transform the grand narratives of what was considered to be (socially) changeable. – CinémAction: the name of the film magazine founded at the end of the 1970s was programmatic: close to social movements and struggles, cinéma militant, emancipatory, anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist cinema, direct, collective, lighter equipment, small teams, flexible, agile, sur le vif. Since the beginning of the 2000s, I have been working as a cultural producer, mostly in networks and groups and as part of a milieu on entanglements and translations – on a DissemiNation. Our aim was to promote a post-migrant society in Central and Western Europe as a cultural and social consequence of migration processes. We also wanted to connect to a post-colonial perspective as a contact zone of our own history that we felt needs to be questioned anew, with all its asymmetries that need to be criticised and with forms of porosity, that do not come without power differential, but include exchange, hybridisation, renewal, and violence. In this context, it was always important to look over one’s shoulder, not least with regard to processes of exploitation and accumulation as well as the opening up and uncertainty of articulated categories such as gender, which often go hand in hand with all of this. We’ve learned transnationally, and it seems we have not done such a bad job of partially instituting these post- and transnational perspectives on difference. But both the reflexive (post-) and the trans-formative moment have meanwhile proven to be blocked in terms of their constituent power and co-opted in many ways; they have been exhausted in the redistribution of resources and the reallocation of positions. Exactly at these points they are currently being attacked by conservative, even restorative, identitarian-authoritarian programmes. Defending what has been achieved is an inadequate tactic, not least in view of the urgency of fostering a process of radically reshaping our sensibilities as earthly beings and extending the more-than-social to a planetary aesthetic.
7/8 [PW]
Learning to ignore existing images in order to recognise those which they obscure; adopting the knowledge associated with them in order to rebuild fragmented solidarities. Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s text What I Do Not Yet Recognize, Now at This Very Moment deals with the effort to unlearn the epistemic ignorance conveyed by established images and thus to interrupt the structural violence of a mode of perception sanctioned by the nation state. Her text refers to the inability, perpetuated by German state authorities and public discourse, to recognise the NSU murders and their trial, years of misguided inquiries and a persistently inadequate investigation as the continuity of a racist structure. Strategic cluelessness as an anaesthetised perception from which migrant, situated knowledges and experiences of difference simply roll off. One could imagine the Federal Republic of Germany as a fog field, increasingly sealed off inwards and outwards. Under the title “Reason of State,” the fog would become a projection screen for the supposed unambiguities that are driving the rapid erosion of solidarity and self-centredness in the majority society. In the light of these projections, suffering is judged by unequal standards, knowledge is discredited, repression and violations of the law are normalised. Phenomena in the fog remain without scale: distances cannot be defined, connections are obscured, sounds are muffled and difficult to locate, even one’s own extremities become “phantom limbs” (Michel Serres).
4/8 [BK]
Besides, on the margins of and against the organic national enclosure, the action of a movement image does not lead from a given to an altered situation, but to a paranational body corporate without organs. It perforates the panoramic view, wears it down with its symptoms and its disconcerting gestures. Not before and after, but something else besides – it skews the tenacity of the seemingly irrevocable forms of the territorial nation-state system, together with its seconds, the supranational organs, which do not accidentally coincide with the triumph of cinema before and before. It has always been there, or it suddenly materialises, shot out of an immense off-screen, through the centre to the front and in your face. Too early, too late, its persistence is tremendous and its appearance like a flashing cameo. Achille Mbembe argues for reparative thinking based on the figure of the passer-by: a non-enduring and arbitrary presence, mortal and perishing in passing, the paradigmatic figure of anonymity in urban modernity, passing on the way to somewhere else, just like film.
8/8 [PW]
To reawaken sensibility would require a sense of one’s own implicit involvement in forms of obfuscation instead of trying to locate their origins elsewhere. Tolerance of ambiguity – the competence to deal constructively with the unclear and the contradictory, rather than seeking to straighten it out for the sake of supposed certainty – is also claimed where it is not practised. When used as a tool to accuse others of incompetence, it is deployed to defend a Eurocentric concept of universalism, wrapped in a poisoned willingness to engage in dialogue. In this way, the supposedly cosmopolitan spectrum of “international” (at film festivals and elsewhere) easily turns into a protective claim for a national mindset drifting into the isolation of authoritarianism. The use of the prefix “inter” may mean that in Germany one no longer dares to venture into interstitial spaces, but rather emphasises the national as a moral essence. The prefix “para” stands in the way, as a thinking-besides of films like nations under the condition of their potential non-existence. Not settling for laurels means repeatedly returning to such zero points in order to interrupt continuities and suspend the certainties formulated by national (state) structures. Paranational cinema, in German and other languages, is a sporadic phenomenon without an established location. Where does it become visible?
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* Thanks to: Nanna Heidenreich | Gilles Deleuze | Homi Bhabha | Madeleine Bernstorff | Moïse Merlin Mabouna | Marie-Hélène Gutberlet | Fred Moten | Sir, Alfred Mehran
A German version of this text was published in the catalogue for the 2024 edition of Duisburger Filmwoche, “the festival for documentary films from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.”
Brigitta Kuster is a cultural researcher and artist, primarily interested in visual and film studies, (post)colonialism, and migration and border studies. Currently she works as a junior professor for cultural theory and film studies with a particular focus on gender studies at the Humboldt University zu Berlin. Recent publications include Grenze filmen. Eine kulturwissenschaftliche Analyse audiovisueller Produktionen an den Grenzen Europas (2018) and Choix d’un passé. Transnationale Vergegenwärtigungen kolonialer Hinterlassenschaften (2016).
Philip Widmann is postdoctoral researcher in the project Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices at the University of Zurich. He has recently edited Film Undone – Elements of a Latent Cinema (Archive Books 2024).
On the Function of the Term ‘Paranational’
A cinematic recentering of the nation. Still from Imphy, capitale de la France (Luc Moullet, 1994)
The prefix ‘para-’ comes from the Ancient Greek παρά (pará, “beside; next to, near, from; against, contrary to”). Its meaning in English encompasses, among others: parallel (beside, alongside), adjacent to, opposite of, across, beyond, unrecognized, unsanctioned, avoidant. In these prepositional and exclusionary functions, ‘para-’ indicates an aberrant relation within a wider normative context. Added to the adjective ‘national,’ ‘para-’ can help to describe and interpret practices, modes of existence, or attitudes which are beside, transversal or in opposition to constituent norms of a nation or a nation-state. These aberrations can be actively chosen or ascribed by external powers. Hence, ‘paranational’ can be used to refer to what is unrecognized or considered digressive within normative criteria and can similarly refer to an active dissensus with these criteria or a non-recognition of nation and nation-state as a concept and a functional reality.
The differentiation between nation and state as concepts and as globally pervasive political, bureaucratic, economic, and sociocultural realities – which affect even those who do not consider themselves nationals, who do not have or would prefer to renounce nationality if they could – appears to be key when trying to ascertain the potential of the prefix ‘para-’ in an inquiry of ‘the national.’ In its more active aspects, it could be conceived of as a critical intervention into the imaginary foundations of the nation as community (Anderson 2006), the discrepancies between nation and state, their mythical histories and projected futures (Balibar 1996), and the structural and representational forms they afford, for instance in the cinema (Willemen 2006).
The conceptual and mundane dimensions of the nation, whether it assumes the function of a state or not, are part of a reciprocal dynamic. The wide scope of meanings of ‘para-’ listed above indicates potential crossovers between these dimensions: For example, if opposition to conceptual notions of the nation leads to alternative practices, these may run into conflict with the institutions of a specific nation-state. Similarly, practices referring to the nation as a conceptual idea(l) in a quest to constitute it as a reality may lead to conflict with already existing national entities, as in the case of movements of liberation, independence, and decolonization. One example would be the necessity for militant film practices to establish alternative infrastructures of production and dissemination.
These crossovers could help to distinguish what can be considered ‘paranational’ from that which has been defined as inter-, trans-, or supranational. These latter terms are used to place nations and nation-states in a spatial (or other) relation to each other in order to describe exchanges and convergences of goods, people, ideas, etc. They presuppose a world divided into nation-states as a functional reality and validate the concept of the nation. Yet, ‘paranational’ can also involve a temporal relation, of the before (‘pre-,’ ‘proto-’) and after (‘post-’) of a nation or nation-state. Part of this temporal aspect are utopian thought, aspirations towards eventual self-determination as a national entity, and imaginations of the creation, change, but also the demise of a nation-state.
Describing and interpreting non-accordant and divergent practices as ‘paranational’ refracts notions of nation as concept and reality. This prismatic effect entails a displacement of perspective, as it enables an inquiry of nation and nation-state without presupposing them as given or inevitable. It can thus also facilitate a much-needed erosion of the ontological assertiveness that the nation-state has gained, for example, in the writing of film histories (Christie 2013). Therefore, the term ‘paranational’ can be understood as a heuristic device to discern and create visibility for various film practices which have been eclipsed within or by national criteria. Accordingly, ‘paranational cinema’ appears to be paradoxical only insofar as ‘the cinema’ is understood to be largely homogeneous and coherent. The term is thus best used in its adjectival form to qualify particular ‘paranational’ instances, rather than its substantival form, which could lead to the creation of categorial entities such as ‘the paranational’ or ‘paranationality’.
The term ‘paranational’ does not promise a radical turnaround by recentering a discipline on a hitherto less common category of inquiry and insight (such as the various “turns” within the humanities). Its potential to formulate an academic paradigm shift is positively minimal as its area of inquiry is at the micro- rather than the macro-level. The function of the term ‘paranational’ could, however, be understood in analogy the original Greek composition of ‘paradigma’: a “pattern, example, sample,” derived from παρά (pará) “beside, beyond” and δείκνυμι (deiknumi) “to show, to point out”. To point beside implies keeping the central, conventional form in the corner of the eye. Focusing on ‘paranational’ instances means that the nation is always present; its current existence cannot easily be ignored, negated or eradicated, but that is not a reason to affirm it.
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Anderson, Benedict R. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso.
Balibar, Étienne. 1996. “The Nation Form.” In Becoming National: A Reader, edited by Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny. Oxford University Press.
Christie, Ian. 2013. “Where Is National Cinema Today (and Do We Still Need It)?.” Film History 25 (1–2): 19–30.
Willemen, Paul. 2006. “The National Revisited.” In Theorising National Cinema, edited by Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen. BFI.
Philip Widmann is postdoctoral researcher in the project Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices at the University of Zurich. He has recently edited Film Undone – Elements of a Latent Cinema (Archive Books 2024).
Encountering the Paranational Film Archive
Montage of newspaper headlines from Al Bachir (27 February 1937), Al Ahrar (19 February 1937) and L’Orient (19 & 20 February 1937)
The first talking film made in Lebanon, Dans les ruines de Baalbeck, was produced during the 1930s by a German woman who had established a production company in Beirut which operated its own laboratory and sound stage. A rare case of independence from European film facilities, years before the end of French Mandate rule. The film is today considered to be lost. The film archive that could potentially have preserved it does not exist in Lebanon. In Germany, the film and its producer have remained unknown, its archives hold almost no records related to them.
The absence of what was advertised as “a first national film” within and without the archive has prompted a research approach which looks for the ‘encounter’ with contextual fragments rather than the ‘discovery’ of a singular object to be preserved and historicised. Between locations and languages, the film can be situated as a ‘cultural object’ across contexts that are not cinematic but condition the cinema and are to some extent conditioned by it. Materials relating to the competition and cooperation between parallel national(ist) projects at the time could constitute another type of ‘archive’ in which the absent film attains presence.
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Territories of Paranational Cinema I
Still from Nuestra voz de tierra, memoria y futuro (Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva, 1981), courtesy of Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst
This seminar will depart from three main questions that are articulated throughout Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva’s film Nuestra voz de tierra, memoria y futuro, while drawing parallels to other films. The question of land back, central to the film, will constitute the main part of our discussion. It will unfold in relation to how cinematic temporality captures the struggle for land, the act of reclaiming land and working it, as well as the question of “trespassing” private property. All of these issues will be looked at from a filmic perspective, in the way they are translated into filmic tools and how the filmic in its turn sits in land struggles. A selection of film excerpts will be discussed in this framework.
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23 October 2024, 16:30–18:00
Atelier Art Education / Curatorial Studies, 4.T39
ZHdK, Toni-Areal, Pfingstweidstrasse 96, 8005 Zürich
Marwa Arsanios’ practice tackles structural questions using different devices, forms, and strategies. She tries to look at questions of property, law, economy and ecology from specific plots of land. The main protagonists become these lands and the people who work them. In her practice, film becomes a space for connecting struggles in the way that images refer to each other.
Territories of Paranational Cinema is a cooperation between Kulturwissenschaftliche Filmforschung at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the SNSF-funded research project Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices at the Department of Film Studies, University of Zurich. The program has been organized by Brigitta Kuster (HU) and Philip Widmann (UZH) and is supported by a strategic partnership grant from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Voiceless Bodies, Bodiless Voices: Politics of Dissociation in Post-Yugoslav Documentary and Experimental Film
Still from A Record of Landscape without Prehistory (doplgenger, 2020), courtesy of Boško Prostran and Isidora Ilić
Examining two sets of contemporary documentary and experimental films from the former Yugoslav region, this paper outlines two mirror-like relations between the onscreen presence or absence, and the voice or the voicelessness. In the first (works by Ognjen Glavonić, Tea Lukač, Kumjana Novakova, doplgenger), the voice-over is projected onto landscapes and buildings, without the speakers ever being shown on the screen, whereas in the second (films by Ivan Marković, Bruno Pavić, Ivan Ramljak), the protagonists are deprived of their voice.
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Conference presentation by Nikola Radić
Nuestra voz de tierra, memoria y futuro (Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva, 1981)
Still from Nuestra voz de tierra, memoria y futuro (Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva, 1981), courtesy of Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst
Nuestra voz de tierra, memoria y futuro documents the first years of the Cauca Regional Indigenous Council (CRIC) and its struggle to reclaim ancestral territories, reflecting on the centuries-long oppression of farmers and indigenous peoples in Colombia. Fusing straightforward documentation and fantastical visualization, the film mingles myth, poetry, and popular memory while capturing a defining moment in the modern indigenous rights movement.
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Nuestra voz de tierra, memoria y futuro (Our Voice of Earth, Memory and Future, Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva, 1981, 108’, b/w, Spanish with English subtitles)
Introduced by Marwa Arsanios
Kino Toni
ZHdK, Toni-Areal, Pfingstweidstrasse 96, 8005 Zürich
Marwa Arsanios’ practice tackles structural questions using different devices, forms, and strategies. She tries to look at questions of property, law, economy and ecology from specific plots of land. The main protagonists become these lands and the people who work them. In her practice, film becomes a space for connecting struggles in the way that images refer to each other.
Territories of Paranational Cinema is a cooperation between Kulturwissenschaftliche Filmforschung at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the SNSF-funded research project Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices at the Department of Film Studies, University of Zurich. The program has been organized by Brigitta Kuster (HU) and Philip Widmann (UZH) and is supported by a strategic partnership grant from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Postcard from Brittany
Locquirec – historic postcard, found on the website “HipPostcard.com”
Dear Comrades,
I imagine that this is how René Vautier might have started a postcard to his friends and colleagues. He was born in 1928 in Camaret-sur-mer, Departement Finistère, Brittany, and he died in Cancale in 2015, also in Brittany. His film Afrique 50, an anti-colonialist manifesto realised in Mali and the Ivory Coast, was confiscated. He had reason to promote himself as the “most censured” French filmmaker. Many of his films side with the Algerian liberation movement.
A and B, Algeria and Brittany: A nation struggling violently against French Colonialism; a region which lost its independence more than 400 years ago but is marked by a sense of resistance and reservations against the nation state until today. Driving along the coast around Locquirec, the easternmost city of Finistère, we notice that many villages have their town signs turned upside down – a symbolic protest by the farmers against regulation and working conditions.
Vautier’s Brittany films have been published recently as a DVD box with the title “Rouge Bretagne.” Let’s find a moment to watch them and see what they might contribute to our idea of paranational filmmaking. His short comedy Les Ajoncs from 1970 is nice. An immigrant trying to sell gorse gets into a conflict with a French policeman, but a group of women, workers leaving the factory, come to his rescue.
See you back in Zurich, all best,
Volker.
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Volker Pantenburg is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Zurich, where he directs the SNSF project Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices. In 2015, he co-founded the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin.
The idea of newness haunts cinema more than any other art form or media. Film emerges as the 'new,' modern medium par excellence, with its technological otherness vividly captured in early-cinema’s commentaries and film theory (see Marcus 2003). Although its novelty eventually subsides, across its history, cinema continually finds ways to renew the allure of its images and sounds. This is most evident in the phenomenon of “new waves” and “new cinemas” sprouting up across the globe since the late 1950s.
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Paranational Cinema – Trajectories and Methods
Design: Daniela Burger
What would a map of Paranational Cinema look like? And how would such a map be made? The prefix «para-» allows to question the subsumption of the varied aspects that cinema encompasses—industry, art, and culture, object of research and historiography—into nations and nation-states, as national cinemas in an international context, and often operating transnationally. The certainty of belonging and property, of territorial and historical coherence, of political, economic, and sociocultural organization that these entities provide comes with the price of exclusion and oppression.
Cinema before or after the nation state, in opposition to or effaced by it, complicates and unsettles the certainty of easy categorization. «Para-» qualifies the relations of specific cinema practices to such entities to highlight trajectories of disruption and dispersal that also challenge the centrality of ‘the film’ for conceptions of cinema, as well as forms of community that do not coincide with geopolitical maps. While nation-building can be a prerequisite for self-determination, it is also a tool for integration in neo-colonial structures and continued dispossession, particularly in postcolonial contexts. This ambiguity suggests ways of thinking cinema practices in an incoherent, multi-faceted relation.
The two-day event at the University of Zurich and the Xenix Kino, part of the SNSF-supported project Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices, aims to bring together positions that scrutinize exactly the interface of organizing and thinking cinema in other ways: Dedication to research on practices and material that defy the easy compartmentalization of national cinema(s) also requires a consideration of how methodologies are implicated in creating entities of certainty rather than accounting for the less orderly realities of Paranational Cinema.
16 October 2025 – University of Zurich (UZH)
KO2-F-152
Karl-Schmid-Strasse 4,
8006 Zürich
including two screenings at the Xenix Kino
17 October 2025 – Xenix Kino, Kanzleistrasse 52, 8004 Zürich
With contributions by: Ignacio Albornoz, Oussama Benayad, Erica Carter, Tiago de Luca, Anaïs Farine, Ana Grgić, Assaf Gruber, Eiman Hussein, Olexii Kuchanskyi, Brigitta Kuster, Nikolaus Perneczky, Lúcia Ramos Monteiro, Ahmed Refaat, Cecilia Valenti, Clea Wanner.
Complete program is available here.
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A paranational perspective on audiovisual restitution would begin from the insight that displaced film heritage cannot always be adequately understood through the twin coordinates of national ownership and interstate return. Rather than seeking to resolve complex archival histories into a single rightful place of origin, it attends to the uneven networks of extraction, circulation, and technological dependence through which moving images have been produced, transmitted, and preserved.
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Paranational Cinema – Archives and Restitution
In the last few years, restitution has become an urgent topic for museums, politics, and academia. In disciplines like ethnography, art history, and history, the legacy of looting and, more generally, colonial injustice and violence has finally led to a sensitivity for the inequalities between nations and the necessities of repair. While the debate is mostly concerned with material artefacts like statues, paintings, historical sources, and documents, the specificities of audiovisual media have not been at the center of attention.
In a workshop with Nikolaus Perneczky (London), we hope to open up an interdisciplinary discussion about the contexts, stakes, and perspectives of the restitution debate when it is approached from the particular requirements of audiovisual media. Responding to the premise that "rethinking restitution through the medium-specific affordances and operations of the moving image compels a reconceptualization of that paradigm" (Perneczky and Valenti), current fellows of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Global dis:connect are invited to share their experiences, questions, and propositions.
Participants: Nikolaus Perneczky (London), Hadeel Abdelhameed, Sarah Smith, Toby Yuen-Gen Liang, Katy Deepwell (global dis:connect fellows), Fabienne Liptay (University of Zurich, global dis:connect alumna), Burcu Dogramaci (director global dis:connect)
Organized by Volker Pantenburg, Philip Widmann, and Nikola Radic in cooperation with global dis:connect as part of the research project Paranational Cinema — Legacies and Practices at the University of Zurich, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Free admission, please register here.
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Thursday, 4 December 2025
09:30 to 16:30
global dis:connect
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
Maria-Theresia-Straße 21
81675 Munich
Paranational Cinema – Trajectories and Methods
Design: Daniela Burger
What would a map of Paranational Cinema look like? And how would such a map be made? The prefix «para-» allows to question the subsumption of the varied aspects that cinema encompasses—industry, art, and culture, object of research and historiography—into nations and nation-states, as national cinemas in an international context, and often operating transnationally. The certainty of belonging and property, of territorial and historical coherence, of political, economic, and sociocultural organization that these entities provide comes with the price of exclusion and oppression.
Cinema before or after the nation state, in opposition to or effaced by it, complicates and unsettles the certainty of easy categorization. «Para-» qualifies the relations of specific cinema practices to such entities to highlight trajectories of disruption and dispersal that also challenge the centrality of ‘the film’ for conceptions of cinema, as well as forms of community that do not coincide with geopolitical maps. While nation-building can be a prerequisite for self-determination, it is also a tool for integration in neo-colonial structures and continued dispossession, particularly in postcolonial contexts. This ambiguity suggests ways of thinking cinema practices in an incoherent, multi-faceted relation.
The two-day event at the University of Zurich and the Xenix Kino, part of the SNSF-supported project Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices, aims to bring together positions that scrutinize exactly the interface of organizing and thinking cinema in other ways: Dedication to research on practices and material that defy the easy compartmentalization of national cinema(s) also requires a consideration of how methodologies are implicated in creating entities of certainty rather than accounting for the less orderly realities of Paranational Cinema.
16 October 2025 – University of Zurich (UZH)
KO2-F-152
Karl-Schmid-Strasse 4,
8006 Zürich
including two screenings at the Xenix Kino
17 October 2025 – Xenix Kino, Kanzleistrasse 52, 8004 Zürich
With contributions by: Ignacio Albornoz, Oussama Benayad, Erica Carter, Tiago de Luca, Anaïs Farine, Ana Grgić, Assaf Gruber, Eiman Hussein, Olexii Kuchanskyi, Brigitta Kuster, Nikolaus Perneczky, Lúcia Ramos Monteiro, Ahmed Refaat, Cecilia Valenti, Clea Wanner.
Complete program is available here.
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“Consider what the ruin has meant, or might mean today: a reminder of the universal reality of collapse and rot; a warning from the past […]
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Voiceless Bodies, Bodiless Voices: Politics of Dissociation in Post-Yugoslav Documentary and Experimental Film
Still from A Record of Landscape without Prehistory (doplgenger, 2020), courtesy of Boško Prostran and Isidora Ilić
Examining two sets of contemporary documentary and experimental films from the former Yugoslav region, this paper outlines two mirror-like relations between the onscreen presence or absence, and the voice or the voicelessness. In the first (works by Ognjen Glavonić, Tea Lukač, Kumjana Novakova, doplgenger), the voice-over is projected onto landscapes and buildings, without the speakers ever being shown on the screen, whereas in the second (films by Ivan Marković, Bruno Pavić, Ivan Ramljak), the protagonists are deprived of their voice.
Read More
Conference presentation by Nikola Radić
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).
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