ABSTRACT
In recent years, the body of critical works which examine national cinemas has expanded greatly. However, far less attention has been paid to whether the category of ‘national cinema’ can be as easily applied to minor, third, alternative or aboriginal cinemas.1 There are many reasons for this. One of the key descriptive categories to emerge from both industrialisation and colonialism is that of ‘nation’ and certainly, one of the tensions underlying the notion of the ‘national’ is its historical trajectory as a first-world concept intrinsically tied to colonialism and Euro-centrism. That said, a growing number of groups within cultures that are not typically considered ‘nations’ now invoke ‘nationhood’ in order both to address and challenge the dominant public sphere. Here I am thinking of ‘first nations’, ‘aboriginal nations’, or ‘queer nations’, all of which fall outside the modernist vision of the nation-state. I am also thinking of the growing number of critiques which point to the fact that discourses of ‘nationhood’ often elide questions of gender and sexuality (Bruce 1999; Hall 1999; Waugh 1999). Because of these exclusions, hierarchies and elisions, the invocation of ‘nationhood’ on the part of alternative and minority groups often functions as an inverted mirror-image of the structure of typical, late-modernist nationhood.2 This mirror-like, mimetic image of the ‘nation’ is often appropriated by minority groups to challenge the precepts of the dominant public sphere. In this light, what I wish to explore in the following pages is the efficacy of applying categories such as ‘national identity’ or ‘national cinema’ to ethnographic film and video production, specifically in West Africa (Ghana), Latin America (Brazil) and-in order to provide a first-world example of a nation which often invokes the discourses of (post-) colonialism-Québec.
