David Martin-Jones,
Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity: Narrative Time in National Contexts.
Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
ISBN: 10 0 7486 2244 6
US$85 (hb)
244pp
(Review copy supplied by Edinburgh University Press)

It was once easier to think about national cinema in clearly delineated terms. Now that major Hollywood studios are in possession of independent arms and films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Taiwan/Hong Kong/USA/China 2000) are blockbusters shown in multiplexes, the assumptions we hold about what constitutes Hollywood cinema and what is national cinema seems less secure. A shake-up of epistemological debates, then, is productive for the furthering of critical approaches to the notion of national cinema, and David Martin-Jones’ Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity is a worthy effort towards that end.

Articulating a concept of national cinema in 1989, Andrew Higson was perceptive in his observation of the discursive minefields in film studies, although he advocates one discursive approach over another:

[To explore the national] involves a shift of emphasis away from the analysis of film texts as vehicles for the articulation of nationalist sentiment and the interpellation of the implied national spectator, to an analysis of how actual audiences construct their cultural identity in relation to the various products of the national and international film and television industries, and the conditions under which this is achieved… for what is national cinema if it doesn’t have a national audience? (Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen 30(4): 45-6.)

Such rhetoric is familiar in film studies. The notion of the film spectator differs from a conception of cinema audiences because of the discursive formations that enable these terms: while the spectator is a psychoanalytically derived concept, audiences as an entity are sociologically conceived. Such a demarcation gives rise, on the one hand, to a preoccupation with analyses of film texts, and on the other, to an interest in reception studies. Given that these discursive irreconcilabilities characterise much of the discipline, Martin-Jones bridges this gap by employing Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the time-image in his analyses of various national cinemas and the contexts from which they emerge. Instead of approaching films from the perspective of either psychoanalytic imposition or sociological obligation, Deleuze’s model of film analysis begins from the premise that the relationship between images and conceptions of time, alongside historical context, is that which reveals meaning. Such a strategy frees the cinema from the discursive baggage that has in many ways encouraged obfuscation.

Following Deleuze’s model of film analysis, Martin-Jones succeeds in teasing out significant contextual understanding of certain East Asian, European, British, and independent American films without seeking to situate the case study against an “international” Hollywood cinema or other qualitatively different national cinemas. For instance, British films set in London, such as Four Weddings and a Funeral (UK 1994) and Notting Hill (UK/USA 1999), are often criticised for presenting a whitewashed version of London stripped of its cultural diversity to replicate American entertainment cinema and for export purposes. Martin-Jones, however, arrives at a more productive conclusion about London as a global city via his analysis of the presentation of time in Sliding Doors (UK/USA 1998) instead of looking for images of a recognisable British identity that previous commentators attempt. This process allows Martin-Jones to situate Sliding Doors and several other British films within the context of a Blarite England and as symptomatic of a political and economic regime that priorities the accumulation of wealth, purchasing power, and a specific urbanised middle-class lifestyle. Such an analysis is more extensive in its critique and commentary than previously performed with sociological approaches, and adds considerable political complexity to the study of cultural politics.

Deleuze’s conception of deterritorialisation (and subsequent reterritorialisation) is of particular help in Martin-Jones’ strategy, enabling political commentary through film analysis that evades the conceptual difficulties of representation. More oblique and effective an approach than seeking out representations of particular national traits and situations in films (that invariably shifts the discussion to that of social realism), Martin-Jones’ strategy involves an exclusive interest in films that spurn the classic realist or a linear representation of time; instead his examples are films that render narrative time as complex or labyrinthine. By deploying such an approach, Martin-Jones is able to argue for the manifestation of the relationship between history and memory via a particular film’s narrative time, and thus re-engage his textual analysis with the particular national cinema’s political or historical context. For example, Fellini’s 8? (Italy/France 1963) may be read as the negotiation for a modern post-war Italian national identity that celebrates the individual, a consequence being also the elevation of the Italian film director to auteurial status as a necessity of nation building. In a similar vein, Martin-Jones also shows how American films, such as The Butterfly Effect (USA 2004) and Terminator 3(USA/Germany/UK 2003), that re-write the past in different ways parallel a political critique of American politics post-9/11, where “the prevailing tendency in American cinema is to offer therapy to the survivors of this national catastrophe, but also to advocate a studied blindness to America’s role in causing the attack.” (172) Given that such a project gestures to the potential of film analysis for constructive political critique and cultural analysis, this volume posits an intervention in film studies’ discursive formation.

Sharon Lin Tay,
Middlesex University, London.

Created on: Saturday, 9 June 2007