National cinema

Usually defined by subject or origin: films about a country, made by its people, in its languages. That definition is easy to satisfy and explains almost nothing.

This course uses a harder one. A national cinema is a chain with four links. Somebody makes the film, somebody moves it, somebody shows it, somebody watches it. The question is not whether the films are national. It is how many links of the chain the country controls.

By that measure Philippine cinema has held the first link and the last one since 1919 and has never held the two in the middle. That is why prestige and industry health came apart here, and why a Filipino film can win at Cannes and never reach a Filipino in Davao.

Source: Course frame. It is built from Nick Deocampo’s argument that cinema was eventually appropriated as national culture by native forces, in his Frames Cinema Journal interview, and from the dated sequence of early Philippine exhibition and distribution. The four-link formulation is the course’s own and is not a quotation from any scholar. Patrick Campos’s The End of National Cinema (UP Press) is the standing Philippine treatment of the term as a concept and is named here as unread.

First used in: 3.1 · The movies got here before we did