National Turbulence and the Turbos of the World Cinema System

Abstract

From the outset cinema was metropolitan. Producers needed access to financing, pools of talent, specialized equipment, and laboratories that one could only find in urban centers. In certain cinema-cities (Berlin, Paris, Buenos Aires, Mumbai, Taipei, etc.) reside ambitious writers, producers, and filmmakers who were driven to outdo, or modify, or simply copy what they saw, employing their own culture’s raw material. Thus, the Jameson-Moretti law applies: local content, pertinent to each nation, was poured into forms that were adopted, with strategic alterations, from Hollywood. Where are today’s hotspots? Where does cinema seem crucial and talked about? Let’s abandon the map (where necessarily one region stands front and center), and instead let’s spin the globe. As it whirls, our eye intermittently catches glimpses of the shapes of the most sizeable nations. Today China and Nigeria stand out prominently alongside India and Russia. So dense are they with film activity that the globe is distended and wobbles out of true. Only sixty years ago China and Nigeria were places that had no place in World Cinema; they gained recognition only when a few promising art films found their way to the European festivals that served as image exchange centers. Today that promise has been fulfilled beyond, indeed against, expectations. Recapitulating Hollywood in its heyday Nollywood and China (Beijing/Shanghai/Qingdao) have become thoroughly corporate and market-savvy, turning out standardized and predictable products. If fresh images are to renew World Cinema, it will hardly be from the urban image-centers. On our globalized globe, novelty should be sought on the periphery of these former peripheral nations. And indeed, exciting new work has been bubbling beyond the dense cultural centers of these nations. Independent art films and documentaries have emerged from dark corners of both places thanks to the network of festivals around the globe, but increasingly and paradoxically thanks to the rival medium of the internet, with its networks of informal distribution and what used to be called “word of mouth.”