"No Place for a White Man" : United Artists' Far East Department, 1922-1929. Issue 2 (1st November 1995) - Walsh, Michael
It has become a common practice to preface any remarks about the cinema of a culture of which one is not a member with the reminder that one speaks as an outsider with all the limitations that that implies. My task will be slightly different in that it will be an attempt to reconstruct the position of the outsider, to explain the strategic and tactical considerations of U.S. film distribution in Asia.The recognition, within film studies, of the complexity involved in delimiting the national has gone hand in hand with an emergent emphasis on globalization as an increasingly important way in which production and distribution are organized in what Ernest Mandel has dubbed "late capitalism." 2 However the film industry has been heavily reliant on an international organization of its markets from the time of the Lumières onward. If we are to understand the current influences of transnationalism on both the film industry and, more broadly, on cultural production within the contemporary nation-state, we need to contextualize this recent transnationalism within a historical perspective and understand it not as a sudden discontinuous lurch, but as part of an on-going historical process.