Internal Contradictions: On the Coloniality of the Global Film Industries

This article offers a broad selection of intersecting frames of coloniality, in various global film industry examples. I mobilise Priya Jaikumar's claims about ‘the internal contradictions of a modernised language of empire’ (Jaikumar. 2006. Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India, 8–9. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press) in Indian film history, as a way of understanding continuing coloniality, which permeates and largely determines structures across the global film industries today. The article engages historical transnational and examples (including postcolonial India, postcolonial Nigeria, and postcolonial Latin American cinema) and discourses of imperial nationhood (in the US and UK contexts), as a way of pronouncing insistent forms of imperial power. Turning finally to a case study from the centre of the European film industry–the Berlinale World Cinema Fund–the article considers to what extent decolonial work might be conceivable within the context of the post-imperial film industries.