Studies in World Cinema: A Critical Journal

Abstract

What if we are deprived of all content in the most post-apocalyptic manner? What if one starts writing about all the existing content at a time when there is no more of it to be produced – a moment of silence, of no more. Would we be happy with what we got so far or would we be able to find other ways of expressing the burning creative urge in ourselves through other media or forms? Such a moment that can come with the end of the digital media as we know it may seem to extinguish our options. Yet where, when, and how did storytelling start? Did it start the moment that humankind started speaking, uttering words? Or did it predate language and was purely visual? Did the cave paintings predate language or were they the dawning of the language itself? Perhaps it is impossible to answer such questions, but the thinking of the language is of expressing ourselves. Regardless of how it started, the urge to express, that creative impulse that exists, has been a driving force. Two years ago, when this journal project started, the world, as we knew it, was as anticipated and apprehended as possible. Even during friendly discussions among some who think they are bombarded by arguably repetitive content, which was still there. If the content is out there, if there is more to be added to the existing body of it, and if the anticipation exists, all seemed fine. At such a point, the world signified something else. It was put simply as an adjective before a multitude of creative practices (including cinema, art, music, literature, and theater) and, as such, it signified either such practices traveling outside of their country of origin or such practices that belong to the non-English speaking and/or non-western countries. In both senses, despite the world, as a word, encompassed the entirety of the earth, it was rendered in a limited scope and in a relation to a variety of other words commonly used in relation to cinema, such as foreign, the other, subtitled, migrant, transnational, and the Third World. However, as an epidemic that started at the end of 2019 turned into a pandemic in 2020, and the growing sense of anxiety and contempt, the lockdowns and curfews altered the sense(s) of the world. While the first half of 2020 reminded us that the “world” was a single entirety, the last quarter of 2020 once again reminded us that the world is no longer a single entity – but one divided by those who have the vaccine and who have not, the global North and others.