ABSTRACT
Transnationalism is a paradigm in film studies that has emerged in the context of cultural globalization. Film history in the Americas has always been a history of transnational cultural entanglements. While the general picture is of profoundly unequal cultural flows, it is also true that the dynamics of entanglements in film culture are far more complex. The extraordinary stability of US film exports to the region has a long history: the US film industry began to build up a distribution chain in Latin America as early as the late 1910s and has controlled distribution and exhibition there ever since. While Hollywood asserts itself in Latin America and Canada through direct intervention or, in recent times, by lobbying for the aggressive enforcement of intellectual copyright policy, it must be acknowledged that the internationalization of US film production also contributes to the hybridization of mainstream cinema.
