Panning from the Past to the Present: The Climate, Context and Concept of Bangladeshi National Cinema

This paper aims to outline the historical and regional context of Bangladeshi cinema, exploring its different integral aspects, such as production value, style, cultural content, representation, nation state policies, distribution and exhibition practices, transnational connections and other industrial factors. At the same time, this paper examines the role of film in the formation of Bangladeshi national culture and the analytical approaches and complexities revolving around the concept of national cinema in Bangladesh. The concept of ‘national cinema’ has been commonly linked to the sociological thinking of the nation and its national identity, and it is also rooted within the geopolitical and cultural boundaries of a nation state. Again the idea of national cinema is not perennial like the idea of nation. National cinema has been a negotiated and changing concept, shaped by both the inward contemporary cultural specificity of a nation state and the outward cultural influence gained through its transnational encounter. Therefore, in order to study the concept of national cinema of Bangladesh in this paper, I address and discuss a series of issues: the concept of Bangladeshi nationalism, its relation to Bangladeshi film culture, a brief context and the conditions of contemporary film industry, the transnational affects and effects of rapidly changing mediascape on Bangladeshi film culture.