Mapping Traditions

The concept of national cinemas is a familiar, if not uncontentious, one in the academic study of film. It represents the proposition that certain bodies of film can speak for, as well as to, a national population and so help to invent that population as a nation, to articulate an identity for a mass of people that is always in fact extraordinarily diverse and more often than not characterized by internal tensions and antagonisms.

The chapters in this section of the Handbook address a related but less explored set of issues. One is simply to ask whether the history of the emergence of Film Studies as a distinct academic discipline, an intellectual field or at least a familiar title in university timetables is similar in all geographical and cultural circumstances. Without giving the story away, we can say that it is not. This then leads to the question of what socially and historically specific factors have shaped the development of cinema cultures, systematic thinking about film as an aesthetic form and cinema as an economic and cultural institution (commonly known as ‘film theory’) and the formal study of film through research and teaching. What emerges is not only an indication of the intriguing differences between the various national and regional traditions surveyed here but also a sense of the very different ways in which – and the reasons why – the phenomenon of cinema has been taken seriously.

Our sense is that these various reflections on where we as Film scholars came from and how we got to where we are pick up on a broader consensus that Film Studies has reached a stage of maturity in its development that makes such reflective institutional histories timely, not least to ensure the knowledge and memories of those involved in them at first hand are available for future generations of researchers.

It is important to be quite clear about two points.

First, and to repeat, this section offers not an overview of national or regional cinemas, but rather a synoptic survey of different histories of Film Studies and of the traditions of thinking about cinema from which they emerged. The question of whether there are any hypotheses to be proposed or conclusions to be drawn about possible links between the ethos, orientation and style of national cinemas, national film cultures and the emergence of formal Film Studies in national educational systems is left open for speculation and further research.

Second, these case-studies in the genealogy of Film Studies are intended to be indicative rather than comprehensive. As the chapters presented here represent – so far as we know – the first attempt at this kind of mapping, it will be no surprise if some readers feel that the cases included may not be the right ones in terms of global significance [Page 8][Page 9]or personal interest, that some cases not included may be sufficiently compelling to merit inclusion, or that in some instances we may have drawn the boundaries too broadly, too narrowly, or simply in the wrong place. As the bodies of work addressed

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