ABSTRACT
In the initial 2010 edition of the Transnational Cinemas journal, first Deborah Shaw and Armida de la Garza offered a schema consisting of fifteen categories and themes relevant to the transnational aspects of films: modes of production, distribution and exhibition. Cinema can be transnational by reason of its production, or of its themes, or its typical genres and aesthetics. In feature films, meanwhile, we sometimes find an aesthetic/narrative match, in feature fictions such as Traffic and the oft-cited Babel between the mobile interconnectivities implied by transnational themes, performers, and locations, as conveyed through interlaced Bordwellian “network narratives.” The range of verifiability in the case of positing a coefficient of transnationality within such parameters can vary immensely. The national test ironically points to its opposite—transculturality and transnationality within British nationality and cinema itself, only amplified in the wake of the massive multi-culturalization of the UK in the postwar period as a form of colonial karma.
