ABSTRACT
In 1989, I published an essay about national cinema in Screen (Higson 1989).1 Ten years on, much of what I wrote still seems valid, but there are also some issues I would want to reconsider. One of the problems with that essay is that I was very much extrapolating from my knowledge of just one national cinema (British cinema). As Stephen Crofts has suggested, scholarly work on national cinema often operates from a very limited knowledge of the immense diversity of world cinemas (Crofts 1993:60-1). In my case, there is undeniably a danger that my essay transformed a historically specific Eurocentric, even Anglocentric version of what a national cinema might be into an ideal category, a theory of national cinema in the abstract that is assumed to be applicable in all contexts.
