ABSTRACT
This article revisits concepts of transnational cinema and examines cinematic trends and phenomena from the past decade or so through the lens of the transnational. The first case study interrogates the cinematic ambitions of China and their impact on the United States, and proposes a deeper engagement with the notion of soft power for the analysis of such competitive and concessional forms of transnationalism. The second case study argues that three cinematic trends – namely the new wave of slow cinema, the new genre of ecocinema, and the new ethos of poor cinema – display connections on a transnational level without recourse to national agendas or initiatives. The article theorizes from these two sets of actual cases that transnational cinema can serve as a conceptual framework that is both inescapably national and inadvertently nation-less.
