ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the development of the concept of transnational cinema in Film Studies, paying particular attention to the ways in which the discipline has responded to developments in the social sciences. It describes the four key areas of focus in the first phase of transnational cinema studies: migration and cinema and exilic and diasporic filmmaking; transnationalising readings of national and regional cinema; historical readings of transnational cinema; and film festival studies. The chapter considers the expanded reach of the transnational to the many fields that make up the discipline of Film Studies and the many approaches to World Cinema in particular. The concept of the transnational was clearly transdisciplinary at a time when Film Studies was reacting to the transnational turn in a range of fields from the late 1980s and 1990s in response to technological developments, global flows of finance and people, and resulting social, political and cultural transformations.
