What can film teach us about nationalism? | Little White Lies

What can film teach us about nationalism?

06 Jul 2016

Words by Amandas Ong

A black and white image of a person with a distressed facial expression, mouth wide open in an apparent scream, wearing glasses that appear to be damaged or cracked.
A black and white image of a person with a distressed facial expression, mouth wide open in an apparent scream, wearing glasses that appear to be damaged or cracked.
With nation­al­ist par­ties gain­ing ground every­where, cin­e­ma can be a valu­able tool in help­ing to under­stand the con­struc­tion of col­lec­tive identity.

It’s easy to laugh at how parochial it seems, but the joke is on us: nation­al­ism, the most remote end point from the pre­vail­ing move towards a glob­alised world with­out bor­ders, is not just alive and well but expe­ri­enc­ing a for­mi­da­ble surge in pop­u­lar­i­ty. The result of the recent UK EU ref­er­en­dum is proof of this: for an increas­ing­ly dis­en­fran­chised pop­u­la­tion, noth­ing could be more per­fect for the pro­jec­tion of its crush­ing anx­i­eties and resent­ment than the men­ac­ing, unknow­able other.

In his sem­i­nal text Imag­ined Com­mu­ni­ties’, Bene­dict Ander­son observes: the fel­low mem­bers of even the small­est nation will nev­er know most of their fel­low mem­bers, meet them, or even hear of them… com­mu­ni­ties are to be dis­tin­guished not by their fal­si­ty or gen­uine­ness, but in the style in which they are imag­ined.” How­ev­er poor­ly defined it may be, how­ev­er steeped in the prob­lem­at­ic lega­cy of impe­ri­al­ism, the notion of British­ness” has shown itself to be a pow­er­ful glue for the col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion. In the fall­out of Brex­it, as we drift towards an uncer­tain future, what lessons on nation­al­ism can we draw from cin­e­ma from around the world?

First, it’s impor­tant to dis­tin­guish between the films that explic­it­ly set out to glo­ri­fy the idea of the nation, and the ones that qual­i­fy as com­men­tary on the polit­i­cal real­i­ties of the nation – such as Alfon­so Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá Tam­bién or Wolf­gang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin! Through­out its his­to­ry, cin­e­ma has been har­nessed to tell grand tales about the fight against per­ceived threats to the cul­tur­al val­ues that are cher­ished by a com­mu­ni­ty. From the ear­li­est exam­ples of nation­al­ist film, such as DW Grif­fiths’ The Birth of a Nation and Sergei Eisenstein’s Bat­tle­ship Potemkin, we have learned that there is a spe­cif­ic tra­jec­to­ry to be fol­lowed when it comes to the con­struc­tion of nation­al iden­ti­ty. In Bat­tle­ship Potemkin, the valiant crew of the epony­mous ship leads fel­low cit­i­zens in Odessa in a his­toric mutiny against the despot­ic aris­toc­ra­cy. A mem­o­rable scene where the men refuse to eat yet anoth­er mag­got-infest­ed meal exem­pli­fies the turn­ing point where sub­servience to author­i­ty is sud­den­ly trans­formed into rebellion.

While Eisenstein’s rela­tion­ship with the Sovi­et Union was ambiva­lent, the inten­tion of this scene is clear. The aris­toc­ra­cy, which has for cen­turies been the source and sym­bol of Russ­ian pride, has become rot­ten – much like the meat that the men are being forced to eat. A new way of being and think­ing – a new under­stand­ing of what it means to be Russ­ian – must be found. For the Bol­she­vik rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies, rid­ing on a wave of civil­ian dis­con­tent, Com­mu­nism was to be that replace­ment. It is no won­der that Lenin described cin­e­ma as being the most impor­tant of all art forms in the Sovi­et Union. He was right: it is a direct call to arms, it urges the audi­ence to extend sym­pa­thy and alle­giance to a spe­cif­ic group that they are meant to iden­ti­fy with, while vil­i­fy­ing another.

While nation­al­ism can be about many things, the most suc­cess­ful films on the sub­ject tend to focus on the fight for free­dom and self-deter­mi­na­tion. Wal­ter Salles’ The Motor­cy­cle Diaries, although not about any one coun­try in par­tic­u­lar, cap­tures Che Guevara’s pas­sage towards Marx­ism and the zeit­geist of 1950s Latin Amer­i­ca. Remem­ber the famous scene in Casablan­ca where the crowd breaks into a rous­ing ren­di­tion of La Mar­seil­laise’, drown­ing out the Nazi offi­cers’ attempt to sing Die Wacht am Rhein’? These are all very attrac­tive sto­ries about the war against oppres­sion that are valu­able in their own ways, but they also define the search for nation­al iden­ti­ty as a pri­mar­i­ly mas­cu­line project with a mil­i­tary char­ac­ter. If film is to gen­uine­ly goad us towards a bold­er, more thought­ful vision of what the con­tem­po­rary nation state is and can be, we must begin priv­i­leg­ing sto­ries that are less reductive.

Already, cin­e­ma is mak­ing the encour­ag­ing shift towards a less mono­lith­ic, more frag­ment­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tion of nation­hood. Take Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten, for exam­ple, which doc­u­ments the con­ver­sa­tions between a female dri­ver and her var­i­ous pas­sen­gers as she dri­ves around Tehran. Their casu­al small talk may not amount to much on the sur­face of things, but these con­ver­sa­tions reveal plen­ty about every­thing that com­pris­es Iran­ian pol­i­tics: gen­der rela­tions, reli­gion, the thorny rela­tion­ship between the will of the body politic and the will of the state.

Abder­rah­mane Sissako’s Tim­buk­tu explores how the city’s res­i­dents dealt with occu­pa­tion by the extrem­ist group Ansar Dine, with­out ever veer­ing off into point­less hys­te­ria in its depic­tion of resis­tance. In one scene that is at once humor­ous and wrench­ing, a group of young boys sim­u­late a foot­ball game with an imag­i­nary ball, skirt­ing around new­ly-imposed laws that ban all balls from the city. Else­where, Céline Sciamma’s Girl­hood rejects pop­u­lar depic­tions of the French ban­lieue that focus main­ly on antag­o­nis­tic, alien­at­ed young men, choos­ing instead to look at the lives of non-white French girls grow­ing up in a coun­try that has been slow to address their trou­bled predicament.

Cer­tain­ly, these films con­tin­ue to depict the vic­tim-aggres­sor rela­tion­ship between var­i­ous sub­jects, but they don’t do it in a sim­plis­tic way. The explo­ration of nation­al iden­ti­ty is a tough one that brings about ten­sion and suf­fer­ing, but it doesn’t always have to be con­fined to vignettes of rev­o­lu­tionised men with guns or spies dying for their coun­tries. There are infi­nite­ly more mean­ing­ful ways to describe how one is French, or Iran­ian, or Malian, or a cit­i­zen of any oth­er coun­try in the world.

At its gen­e­sis, nation­al­ism neces­si­tat­ed a pecu­liar type of homo­gene­ity, an absolute sense of belong­ing that has now become impos­si­ble giv­en the flu­id­i­ty of peo­ple and places. Only through cin­e­ma could these fan­tasies be ful­ly realised, and so film can be under­stood as the ulti­mate nation­al­ist project. Yet real­i­ty is far less con­ve­nient than the hero­ic seizure of pow­er from tyrants into the deserv­ing hands of the mass­es. These sweep­ing nar­ra­tives sub­merge any nuanced attempt at under­stand­ing the mod­ern com­plex­i­ties of nation­hood out­side of a false dichoto­my that pits the rul­ing elite against the peo­ple. There are oth­er messy rela­tion­ships that we must unpick and oth­er impor­tant sto­ries about ordi­nary lives that must be told: these are often rich­er, more inter­est­ing, and just as overt­ly political.

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