Towards a positive Definition of World Cinema

[ Film analysis ]

In this essay, which is actually a chapter of the book Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, Lúcia Nagib puts forward the idea that 1) using the term “world cinema” as the Other from Hollywood is reductive and wrong, and 2) tries to reclaim the term “world cinema” to actually mean the world.

Notes

Personal notes written in italics

Film theory is recent history has tried 'rethink', 'unthink', etc. itself because film theorists are too focused on Hollywood, which has exhausted the intellectual value of current film theory (which has weird psychoanalytic roots).

Many film classes and theorists have put work into non Hollywood films, under the moniker “World Cinema”, but really they mean non-Hollywood film, not the world. I.e. world cinema is just the complement of Hollywood. Framing one set as the complement of another makes it seem like it's on periphery of the other.

Why the dominance of Hollywood? Box-office numbers? Film production?
France invented film (Lumiere brothers)
Japan was the film powerhouse in the 1950's
India creates the most numerous films currently

Some theorists view world cinema as a sort of counter culture to American cinema – a rejection of Hollywood film imperialism. Problem: Still frames American cinema as some sort of “standard evaluation metric”.

But are they truly? A lot of national cinema is doing it's best to create stories and enforce their storytelling traditions, which their own ideas. Hollywood has little to add in understanding.

In counter to the idea that national cinemas are defensive formations in competition and resistance to Hollywood, Nagib says

Does this mean that many national cinemas would not have existed if it were not for the overwhelming presence of Hollywood? Whatever the case, the fact remains that seeing Hollywood, with all its stars and stripes, as the only really international cinematic current denies a positive existence to all other world cinemas, which are thus made incapable of originating independent theory. (27)

What we view as “breaking all the rules” and such can be hegemonic in the country of origin, and breaking Hollywood rules is the least of the director's worries. Citation: Yasujiro Ozu.

Because we are bombarded with Hollywood, and film theorists are anglophone, Hollywood's influence is overstated.

Some foreign cinema is considered to have very "modern" features but why is "modernity" a western concept? Are people mistaking Universal Culture for Western Culture?

The belief of a centre, of ‘us’ and the ‘other’, ‘centre and periphery’, ‘the West and the Rest’ is a mythic quest for origins, when in reality film has existed for a very long time. (Reminded of the famous quote "To make an apple pie from scratch, you just have to make the universe").

What is cinema? Is it not story? Nagib say she agrees with the german filmmaker Alexender Kluge who said

‘cinema has existed for over ten thousand years in the minds of human beings’ in the form of ‘associative currents, daydreams, sensual experiences and streams of consciousness. The technical discovery only made it reproducible’ (1975: 208) (30)

Real film started when we drew on cave walls.

Therefore, Nagib proposes that Film is centerless and originless. (I find Nagib's idea of film very zen and oneness-y. In Category - Meditation you are told there is no center, and it frees you.)

Hollywood is included in the originless centerless version of Film, and is only brought up when necessary and not as a constant irrelevant mirror to all analysis.

So how do we define periods of film? We can use cinematic waves, which have peaks, troughs, and propogate.

We should also strive to study individual films, which are a confluence of various forces, instead of doing "distant readings". (Not sure what they mean by placing the film on a map - cognitive map? What?)

In conclusion, world cinema is centerless, originless, and films do not have the binary perspective. We need to create flexible geography. (I am reminded by the Khalil Gibran quote Your children are not your children, they are life's longing for itself. Film is not American/Hollywood/Art film, its stories longing for themselves. Film is simply a movement of story, using people as hosts.)

The difficult part about developing new models of cinema is learning other cultures. This is why the best thoeries come from linguists – they're good at studying other cultures! We must learn foreign languages and escape the trap of binarism.

Can I summarize the meaning of this text in my own words?

In the western film analysis sphere, cinema has often been viewed as Hollywood and non-Hollywood, but this is a reductionist view. Are we really saying foreign cinema wouldn't have developped without Hollywood? Silly. Instead, film is originless and centerless, and our definition of world cinema should be the true world, including Hollywood, not in terms of hollywood.

Can I explain it in the simplest terms?

People have been saying stories for thousands of years, and film is one iteration of that. Hollywood is just our closest film house and we think of other films to compare to Hollywood, but really films are their own art.

What are the gaps in my knowledge?

Cognitive map portion.

Can I connect the core ideas to other core ideas I do understand?

Lot of parallels to oneness of films, reminds me of Khalil Gibran's The Prophet with the originless centerless aspects of film, learnt more about the analogy of cinematic waves.

Any atomic notes? Anything to densely interlink the wiki some more?
Atomic ideas: cinema is centerless and originless

See also The importance of studying cinema in a global context