8 The Problem with World Cinema

First of all, there’s no problem with world cinema. World cinema is great.

The problem is the term. What is world cinema, and what makes it different from plain old cinema? There’s no such thing as non-world cinema, so why do we need or use the adjective world?

World as an adjective is used in a few creative contexts. World music, for example, signifies popular or contemporary music from non-English countries or performed in non-English languages. The term was used as early as 1906 to indicate “exotic influences in classical music,” and in the 1980s was popularized by music promoters and record labels trying to awaken interest in Europe and North America for African music. Since then its use has been extended to encompass indigenous music, some forms of folk music, and music from Latin American and Asia in addition to Africa.

The origins of the term “world cinema” are a little murkier. It’s often used in the marketing of films basically as a shorthand to indicate that this isn’t your usual multiplex fare. But it also has some purchase in the academic study of film to describe film that is produced outside of the dominant mainstream American studios and distribution system – Hollywood for short. In this way it can overlap with independent film, another squishy term in the cinema universe. Often the term really just signifies films from other countries that have been released in the United States, usually in a language other than English, though a quirky, small, independent film from Ireland or Australia would likely be grouped in with films from Nigeria, India, or elsewhere.

But as I’m living and writing in Canada, I try to avoid being American-centric in my view of culture and cultural production. As Lúcia Nagib points out in her essay “Towards a Positive Definition of World Cinema,” the term world cinema as it is generally used is “restrictive and negative” – it is cinema that is “non-Hollywood.” The point here is that thinking in terms of world cinema still places Hollywood at the centre of the film universe, forcing us to always measure “non-Hollywood” film against Hollywood film. This results in us not understanding films in their own right, but only in their relationship to Hollywood (and whatever we understand “Hollywood” to mean).

Nagib goes on to make the very insightful comment that world cinema is simply “the cinema of the world. It has no centre. It is not the other, but it is us.” If you wanted to be even more simplistic about it, you could simply say that all cinema is world cinema. (As I said at the beginning of this chapter, there is no such thing as non-world cinema.) When we study (world) cinema, it’s not our job to compare a film to some sort of standard or yardstick, but rather to understand that film within both the cinematic discourse and the particular social/local/national context in which it is participating. A film, be it from Berlin or Benin, will share with all films certain forms and modes of expression that are a product of how film works. It will also share with films from other countries similar interests in the human condition. The differences between films will emerge from the cultural contexts of those films, since culture and society can colour and mould how ideas are expressed.

Where the term world cinema comes in most handy is in university and college film programs. It forces instructors and students to think more broadly, and more inclusively, when studying film. Just calling a course World Cinema (as opposed to Cinema or Introduction to Film, for example), breaks the dependence on using Hollywood classics to explain how film works within modern societies. Most film programs still rely on American film history to illustrate the development of cinema and all that it can do, with perhaps a few French, Italian, or Soviet Russian classics thrown in for good measure. This book you’re reading right now does that as well: almost all of the example clips in the chapters on formal and stylistic elements are drawn from the American canon. Thinking of cinema as a world enterprise can start to change that.

Pedagogically, however, there is a saving grace to world cinema. It shifts the focus away from large-scale global commercial cinema, and in so doing reminds students that cinema can be both local and global at the same time. Cinema is an art form, and like any art form, functions within two contexts: the context of its making, and the context of its reception. Sometimes those contexts overlap substantially, and at other times they diverge markedly from each other. Bringing this to the attention of students equips them with a more sophisticated understanding of cinema, and encourages them to explore visual culture with a more critical lens.