ABSTRACT
Like most claims to authenticity, the assertion that there is now or ever was such a thing as an authentically British cinema is highly dubious, yet the fact that the volume you are now reading is premised on the notion that “British cinema” can be a discrete object of study implies that the term holds some enduring use. Certainly, concepts of nationhood have long informed the way we have understood cinema. As Andrew Higson’s work sets out, despite the transnational forces that have always coursed through it, cinema is “one of the means of narrating nations” (Higson 2011: 1). Its history gets taxonomised within national boundaries and, conversely, models of “national cinema” have helped to inform the way we think about the mediated construction of national identity. For reasons ideological, cultural, critical, economic, political, pedagogical or just plain convenient, a national imaginary haunts the idea of cinema, and we cannot effectively dispose of the “national cinema” concept outright. Indeed, Higson emphasises that “it is far too deeply engrained in critical and historical debate” (Hjort and Mackenzie 2000: 73). We can, though, reframe some of the terms of that debate by focusing on the presence of émigrés and exiles in the industry, a presence that challenges the myth of national cinematic purity. By revisiting this topic to consider those migrants working in British film studios during the 1930s and 1940s, this chapter tests how far a different vocabulary can be brought to bear: this vocabulary addresses a range of transnational, migrant, exilic and diasporic conditions and experiences, all of which have been discussed before in debates about national cinema, but it also covers the fresher concepts of globalisation and what might be considered its cultural product, cosmopolitanism.
