‘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].
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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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.
Read More
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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“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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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.
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
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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