Shifting ground. Unstable ground. Earthquakes, subterranean shifts, hidden abysses. The title already sounds like the title of a film, and it immediately reminded me of Kathleen Collins’ semi-autobiographical drama Losing Ground from 1982, in which the protagonist’s hidden currents of desire begin to surface. She feels out of control and on shaky ground – a stark contrast to her usually steady, composed and contemplative nature. And she begins to lose herself to herself. Allow me to linger in this metaphor of grounding for a moment: What if the notion of the paranational cinema opens up a new dimension of ecstasy within film studies itself? A literal stepping-out of the discipline from its stasis – potentially reconnecting core film-theoretical concepts with cinematic histories and the concerns of adequate and inadequate cinematic experiences alike? With the messiness of incommensurable difference? Thus, a film studies conceived as cinema studies, as Heide Schlüpmann (2006; 2004) demanded – not merely referring to the historical institution of the cinema, but also invoking the power of cinema, its excess. Schlüpmann invoked the power of cinema to articulate society’s dark sides – the offstage of dominant history, its anachronisms – and to bring forth a multitude of experiences relating to origins and belonging, age, sexualities, genders, class, and (everyday) cultures ... This encompasses reverberations beyond the films themselves, transcending genres and standards, technical and material constraints, and the disciplinary apparatuses and dispositifs of scholarly inquiry and classification. Schlüpmann insisted that we embrace cinema’s emancipatory potential as a dynamic force in motion. To do so, we must resist limiting ourselves exclusively to the institutional framework of academia. Instead, we are called to act within the historical lifeworld – with situatedness, commitment, and partisanship.

I believe I am not mistaken in stating that, over the past decades, we have witnessed a growing differentiation of questions surrounding nationhood, migration, transnationality, and globalization, both within film historical frameworks and in aesthetic and theoretical engagements with cinema. This could be understood as a “dissemi/nation” of film history, to borrow a term from Homi Bhabha. The concepts of Third Cinema and its recent recirculation alongside World Cinema, Accented Cinema, postcolonial and transnational cinema, as well as diverse narrative forms of migration cinema and Fourth Cinema concepts – all constitute an unmistakable cinematography of movement, networking, and globalization.

Such a “dissemi/nation” also affects the only seemingly stable object of study itself – “film” – as manifested in its different copies, versions, and language editions. It certainly also impacts the archive as our primary point of reference. The archive reveals itself to be fragmented and splintered, yet also unpredictable in terms of its materials – what constitutes a film archive, after all? It can be absent, incomplete, and even dislocated. I am certainly not alone in having become far more involved in recent years in identifying the repositories of film negatives and different copies with regard to postcolonial film histories, or, to an increasing extent, with documents bearing witness to cinematic events and screenings.

It seems to me that the aim of paranational cinema is to question and contest the dominant (national) genealogies and hegemonic aesthetic discourses in film history and cinematic cultures. Furthermore, paranational cinema appears to involve attempts at recontextualization against the backdrop of contemporary problems and questions. In this sense, paranational cinema can certainly be regarded as a situated, heuristic, and grounded analytical practice – despite, or precisely because of the ungrounding shifts and unrests beneath the surface. Paranational cinema asks: How do we distinguish between what ‘we’ would qualify as ‘our’ film history and what we attribute to ‘others’? On what grounds, and in search of what common ground? Consequently, paranational cinema presents itself, not least, as an endeavor involving film exhibitions and screenings.

I hope it is not presumptuous to claim that those interested in investing such a term like the paranational cinema are all engaged in a kind of double historical enterprise, an “histoire de l’histoire,” to borrow Foucault’s term. That is to say, while each engages with a specific case study and corpus of films, they are also concerned with a reflection at a meta-level: how deciphering the source itself gives rise to a particular conception of history (in Foucault’s case: archaeology, the rules of discourse, genealogy, and the emergence of concepts).

In the sense of such a history of histories, I have formulated three questions, each focusing on a different aspect, with the aim to open up a discussion on the challenges we face, both methodologically and methodically, as well as with regards to the uncertainties and contingencies we navigate in our respective work.

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My first question concerns the fundamental instability and mobility of film. Film is always already on its way elsewhere – it slips away the moment you try to pin it down; it unfolds in durée. Yet this inner movement also corresponds to an outer one; a material and physical mobility rooted in reproduction and circulation – which, following Benjamin, might be seen as the source of its political potential. How do these aspects figure in research? Where and when do shifting grounds emerge – instances in which the questions, objects, and contexts of film studies themselves begin to move?

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On the one hand, we may today see more clearly how the forces of globalization are at work, forces that make it impossible to analyze film production ideologically, culturally, economically, and in some ways politically, solely at the level of nations or within their borders. On the other hand, we can invert this “no longer” and emphasize that the character of national film industries has historically always needed to be read as an ideological defensive response and a form of nation-state protectionism against the private economic forces of global capital. In other words, we can show that national film historiographies have always been shaped through the lens of a pre-framed ideological discourse that demands critical scrutiny.

In research about emigration, exile, subalternization, and marginalization; about searching in the ruins of empires or in peripheral and border zones, something new begins to emerge. The question is whether such newness or otherness is prior to or subsequent to the order of nations. Another question is whether and how spatial and temporal dimensions intertwine in the “para.” Do the cinematic materials shift away from paradigms such as the transnational, the interstitial, or the international, toward the transitional, or the “before and before,” as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten would describe a spatial and temporal anteriority of capitalist enclosure? It seems that we have increasingly lost “internationalism” as a horizon for political analysis over the course of the 20th century. And some of us may try to compensate for this gap with the concept of the terrestrial.

How can research contribute to the identification and critique of such axiomatic structures in film studies and their prevailing perspectives? How can it continue in questioning the mononational gaze and methodological nationalism and which new paths can be sketched from there?

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My third question focuses on archival orders – on how what counts as a source is organized. How can we navigate the given, pre-existing structures of the archive – very much in the spirit of Michel de Certeau’s idea of acting on another’s terrain as outlined in The Practice of Everyday Life?

The philosopher V.Y. Mudimbe (1988) has shown, for instance, how the history of knowledge in and about Africa often appears distorted and fragmented, and that the reason for this lies in its own formation. As with other histories, we are confronted with what Paul Veyne termed the illusion of integral reconstruction, that is, the fact that the very documents that provide us with answers also frame the questions we can ask, Mudimbe states. Building on this observation, I would like to ask: What are methods for bringing events and cinematographic experiences to life that lie dormant in the archives?