ABSTRACT
As an industry, an institution, and a set of practices cinema has evolved, adjusted, adapted, adopted, assimilated, and grown vertically and horizontally. It has taken over, has been taken over, and has been privatized, nationalized, divested, diversified, and synergistically converged in myriad ways. In what might be considered as a great operational example of Gramsci’s theorization of hegemony, it has changed in order to remain the same-cinema. And as a medium, film has remained not only relevant but has also proliferated widely and deeply by a process that Marshall McLuhan astutely identified decades ago. He said that old media survived by becoming the contents of newer media: “The ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium” (1964, 23). Today we are apt to talk about this under the rubric of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 2000). Since 1958 when John Tuky coined the word “software” and the Ampex color videotape recorder and 3M videotape came on to the market, turning television from a live and ephemeral medium into a recorded and lasting medium, and since other technological developments which transformed it from an analog medium into a digital one, film has become the indispensable software feeding all the newer electronic media and delivery systems. An important source of its continual revitalization has been this adaptability and shape-shifting capacity of cinema and its product. This chapter explores the emergence of a new mainstream cinema in the USA and Europe in our current moment of post-diasporic, post-internet, postmodern neoliberal globalization, a cinema I call multiplex cinema. I appropriate the concept of “multiplex” from the site of film exhibition where multiple movies are screened in one complex and apply it to the films which are increasingly imbued with multiplicities of various sorts. This nomenclature is based on an analogy with electronics, in which multiplexing refers to a process whereby multiple analog signals or digital data streams are combined into one signal. Two seemingly contradictory global movements intersecting each other are driving this textual multiplexing. One involves the increasing national fragmentation and physical displacement of peoples across the globe, while the
other conversely entails a consolidation of the global media, involving “media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence” (Jenkins 2006, 2). The presence of large numbers of displaced and globalized populationsasylee, exilic, diasporic, ethnic, transnational, and cosmopolitan-as both spectators and producers of movies is an important additional factor in the emergence of this multiplex cinema as well as this cinema’s historical debt to “accented cinema,” produced by them. Media convergence studies, however, tend to discount contributions of such populations. Although physically displaced, accented filmmakers are not without a place. In fact, they are “situated but universal” figures working in the interstices of social formations and cinematic practices, which are highly potent places of creativity and criticism (Naficy 2001). By and large they operate independently, outside the studio system or mainstream film industries, using alternative production modes-interstitial and collective-that critique those systems and industries and are partly responsible for their films’ peculiar accent. These filmmakers form a transnational, cosmopolitan, and multicultural population whose members often have more in common with each other than with their national compatriots. It is from this group that creators of both accented films and multiplex films have arisen. While they share displacement and modes of production, the very existence of tensions and differences among them prevents accented filmmakers from becoming a homogeneous bloc or a film movement, and their films from becoming enslaved to linear narratives and traditional genres. Nevertheless, their films share certain stylistic attributes in terms of patterned uses of miseen-scène, filming, narration, themes, characters, and structures of feeling. These common attributes also contribute to the accent, which signifies deterritorialization at the same time that they serve to reterritorialize them as auteur filmmakers. Specifically, mise-en-scène and filming are alternately claustrophobic or immense; time is fragmented and retrospective; space and place are split among a lost home, an uncertain elsewhere, and transitional places in between; narrative is broken up by journey, memory, nostalgia, and past; characters are not whole, they are haunted, absent, doubled, or divided; the intrusion of other languages threatens the integrity of language. In short, multiplicity and fragmentation are dominant in accented films. The adoption of some of these strategies has led to the emergence of multiplex films, helping to rejuvenate mainstream cinema and giving it a multiplex accent. This is not to claim a cause-and-effect relationship between accented cinema and multiplex cinema, but to say that their textual similarities are products of the same exigencies of displacement, media convergence, and globalization. Such multiplexing as described here in all its industrial, technological, authorial, linguistic, textual, and spectatorial formations has major con-
sequences for film and media scholarship. One of these involves cultural and linguistic competencies needed for such scholarship. Would studying multilingual, multicultural, and multisited movies require multilingual and multicultural media scholars, or will it encourage increasingly atomized and narrowly defined “niche studies”? Alternatively, will it encourage collaboration among media scholars with specialized cultural and linguistic knowledge, the kind of collaboration not customary in humanities and film and TV studies but de rigueur in film and media productions and in sciences and medical fields? The various minority caucuses within Society for Cinema and Media Studies point to the cultural multiplexing that is already at work within our discipline. A second major consequence involves the technical competencies needed to study multidevice, multimedia, multiplatform productions and receptions of multiplex movies, competencies that far exceed both single device familiarity and traditional separation of film production from film studies. As each of us has personally realized, increasingly film and media studies and production areas are also merging, paralleling the structural convergence within the global media industries. Increasingly job descriptions for new hires in film and media include preference for scholars competent in both critical studies and production, but this brings its own problems of focus and rigor. Finally, digitization is facilitating “device agnosticism” and competency across media (Denby 2007, 55), providing a lingua franca at the technical level that will not be duplicated for actual human languages, which will fortunately remain multitudinous. Our discipline is already responding to this situation too.
