ABSTRACT
A glance at the holdings of any cinema library or bookshelf of texts on a specific country’s cinema will reveal a predominant tendency to address the national cinema almost exclusively as those films which have been canonised by critics and historians of film. A perusal of these texts will also reveal that the term national will have been taken for granted, taken as read. However, this term cannot be assumed as unproblematic and does require examination. How does one enunciate the ‘national’ of a country’s cinema? When is a cinema ‘national’? What does possessing a national identity imply? Equally important, what constitutes a nation’s cinema? To be more specific still, what is meant by a nation? Is it defined by its geography, its history, its politics? These seemingly innocent questions raise the whole problematic of addressing the issue of a national cinema, an issue that this chapter will attempt to unravel in an endeavour to chart possible ways of writing the ‘national’ of national cinema.1
