World Cinema in a Global Frame

Abstract

The “world” in film studies has been the “other” of the world’s empire, with Hollywood taking American exceptionalism. It unfolds as the stage of identity politics representing all the rest of the world as postcolonial, peripheral, or merely different than Hollywood. However, this “political” model becomes challengeable as the world’s ongoing homogenization blurs old boundaries while causing “ethical” deadlocks such as the vicious interlocking between (neo)liberal multiculturalism and fundamentalist terrorism. The notions of subjectivity and society also undergo new crises and changes permeating the entire world beyond the established national or transnational frames of the world. Against this backdrop, world cinema can be reframed not for a world tour of territorialized national cinemas or transnational deterritorialization but a critical remapping of many contemporary films reflecting global phenomena even in localized narrative space. Locality functions here less as the basis of identity, referring to a unique reality that both resists and requires the center’s endorsement, than as a contingent springboard for addressing the concrete universality of the world system, including the center. This approach brings a global frame of world cinema.