A Beginner’s Guide to Understanding “World Cinema”
“Foreign”, “international”, “world”, “global”. At some point in your life, you’ve heard at least one of these words attached to the word “cinema”. Today, I finally answer some of the burning questions you might have about what it all means, why is it important, and how one can better understand it.
A recommended reading
“Towards a Positive Definition of World Cinema” is the second chapter of Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film and is written by Lúcia Nagib. The writing is premised on the idea that in recent times, cinema has been mistakenly perceived as a recyclable phenomenon. For instance, according to Nagib, one associates the words “rethinking”, “unthinking”, “reinventing” or “reconstructing” with the academic study of film in the modern age and cites numerous studies which exemplify this such as Shohat and Stam 1994, Bordwell and Carroll 1996 as well as Gledhill and Williams 2000.
So how does one define “World Cinema”?
Nagib comments on the commonality of the phrase “world cinema” in present times but also criticizes its erroneous connotation. In her own words, the term “world cinema” is not “usually employed to mean cinema worldwide. On the contrary, the usual way of defining it is restrictive and negative, as ‘non-Hollywood cinema’.” According to…
