Worlding Cinema

Abstract

Against the narrowly commercial and homogenising term ‘world cinema’ that lumps together a diversity of ‘foreign’ films as a category, the notion of ‘the local’ relativizes the idea of the ‘national’ as a singular entity. It suggests the pivoting around each other of ‘there’ and ‘here,’ thereby avoiding precisely fixed locations and calling on the dynamism of their relationship. The local, captures not only particular geo-political locations but historical relationships, which, interacting with changing conditions, produce the shifting frameworks of thinking, feeling, experience, and aesthetic perception that shape local practices, traditions, and cultural forms. However, this specificity is often called on to endorse an authenticity uncontaminated by metropolitan sophistication or global uniformity, enabling local products to travel to an elsewhere beyond national boundaries. The value of ‘world’ over ‘global’ lies in its call on the space shared by many different nationals, whereas ‘global’ suggests the homogenisation enforced by multi-national corporate and neo-colonial Western powers. As an alternative concept, ‘trans-national’ applied to cinema has the virtue of acknowledging the existence of nationally defined geo-historical and cultural differences as well as the reality of cross-border migration of personnel, technologies, and films, along with the complexity of international co-production. However, if the term keeps the idea of the ‘national’ in place, the boundaries it marks are neither natural nor fixed. If local film genres and narrative forms function as public sites in which aesthetic histories, cultural frames of reference and social experiences feed and negotiate with each other, the question arises how far the trans-national intensification of this activity now produces a new space for an emergent ‘world imaginary’: the idea of a shared ‘world’.