The concept of transnational flows and connection in cinema is not a new term – judging by film history and the increasing number of book titles that now bear its name – but the recent theoretical and paradigmatic shift raises new attention and questions.
[3] Transnational cinema’ appears to be used and applied with increasing frequency and as Higbee and Song Hwee argues, as a shorthand for an international mode of film production whose impact and reach lies beyond the bounds of the national.
The term is occasionally used in a simplified way to indicate international coproduction or partnership between e.g. the cast, crew and location without any real consideration of what the aesthetic, political or economic implications of such transnational collaboration might mean.
[11] In addition, Mette Hijort of Lingnan University in Hong Kong, coined seven modes of transnational cinematic production: cosmopolitan; affinitive; epiphanic; globalizing; milieu-building; opportunistic; and experimental.
[10] More broadly, Steven Vertovec of the Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, presented six facets of transnationalism in general which he believed to be worthy of further research.
Specifically, transnationalism as: a type of consciousness; a site of political engagement; an avenue of capital; a (re)construction of ‘place’ or locality; social morphology; and a mode of cultural reproduction.
"[13] To certain scholars it marks the moment in time when globalization began to impact the art of cinema, while to others it stretches back to the earliest days of filmmaking.
Some consider it to be “big-budget blockbuster cinema associated with the operations of global corporate capital, [and still others define it as] small-budget diasporic and exilic cinema.”[13] Dr. Zhang Yingjin, a professor of Chinese Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, goes as far as to argue that the term is obsolete due to the volume and inconsistency of its uses and definitions.
Despite these efforts, however, the “films most likely to circulate transnationally are those that are more ‘Western-friendly’” and have adopted “familiar genres, narratives, or themes.” [14] This is often done to fulfill the “desire for tasty, easily swallowed, apolitical global-cultural morsels,” craved by audiences accustomed to American Orientalism.
[15] The 2012 Oscar-nominated documentary film The Act of Killing, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer uses reenactment as a process of memory and critical thinking in the re-telling of the Indonesian genocide of 1965.