Through an investigation of crime as a fundamental modality of cinema worldwide, Transnational Crime Cinema establishes a genealogical method in studies of popular film within critical transnationalism. Building upon the critical orientation of transnational film studies, its chapters provide rigorous accounts of the political, economic, and historical processes entangled in the production, circulation, and reception of crime films most frequently treated through the lens of genre.

More than simply a genre or collection of genres, the association of crime and cinema has deep historical roots in cinemas throughout the world and the studies of crime and cinema in this volume present granular analyses of how, in Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim’s words, transnational cinema ‘negotiates with the national at all levels’ (2010: 12). Extending and deepening Higbee and Lim’s initial formulation of critical transnationalism, chapters in Transnational Crime Cinema investigate crime ‘within … narrative and production process, across film industries, [and] … in academia’ to interrogate how ‘filmmaking activities negotiate with the national … from cultural policy to financial sources, from the multiculturalism of difference to how [film] reconfigures the nation’s image of itself’ (Ibid.: 18).

The book joins several recent collections that seek structural interventions in cinema that go beyond interpretations of narrative or aesthetics with the aim of preserving the constellations of meaning in genre and form that so provocatively appeal to audiences internationally in the context of everyday life. These include Christopher Breu and Elizabeth A. Hatmaker’s Noir Affect, Hervé Mayer and David Roche’s Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film, as well as the earlier volume Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style (edited by Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar).

Our volume investigates the cultural politics, modes of production and aesthetic regimes of crime cinema to find in crime a primary transitive and transformative cultural field of cinema within and between nations.