World cinema

 Cinema distinguished itself as the twentieth
century’s genuinely international medium.
 The apparatus called as cinematographe,
invented by the Lumiere brothers, was carried
on the backs of operators from region to region
where people gazed at pictures of themselves
and their surroundings taken just maybe a few
days ago.
 Then this footage was taken to Paris, which
functioned as a depot in 1900.

 To understand the concept of world cinema,
the author categorizes it in two ways.
 First, the patterns whereby a certain set
emerged that distributors, critics, scholars
and cinephiles consider to belong to the
class of world cinema, should be identified.
Second, we can note distinct phases of
world cinema that reveal the aesthetic
criteria employed to define this quite varied
set of films which seem to speak to
audiences everywhere.

 The certain films travel out of phase, the
cinema is out of phase with itself. The critic,
the scholar, the cinephile can find
themselves repositioned by certain films that
rework their understanding of what the
cinema holds out, what it represents, to
whom.

 The author proposes 5 phases that periodize
world cinema history;
 Cosmopolitan These phases often
 National overlap and coexist
 Federated
 World
 Global

 The author makes a comparison between
television and the cinema. He says the film
image leaps from present to past, since what is
edited and shown was filmed at least days,
weeks or months earlier. This separates
filmmaker from spectator and this condition
constitutes cinema’s difference from television.
Films display traces of what is past, where
television feels present.
 Television is sold as a furniture. It is a part of
our daily life. However, we leave our house to
go to the movies. The author relates this to
jetlag. It is like we are taken on a flight.

 There is also a comparison between Hollywood
and East Asia cinemas’ development.
Continous narrative with Hollywood’s norms is
seen as the body of a tree and mainly European
alternatives are branches and forks.
 However, East Asia cinema was not able to
develop like that. Neither the Chinese nor the
Koreans could see a Japanese film for decades
after World War II, for example.
 Nevertheless, Asian cinema has many
cosmopolitan and local forms and negotiation of
these forms may be the key of current energy of
Asian cinema.

 Then, he returns to the beginning with an
Asian point of view. Lumiere’s
cinematographe was thought to complete the
mission of open up Japan.
 Images of Mount Fuji, The Emperor’s Palace
and Japanese beauties in kimonos were
being seized by the camera and shipped to
the West
 At the same time, this technology brought
images of Western customs, values and
commodities to Japan.
 This tempted some Japanese to cast their
allegiance with a cosmopolitan community.

 The author mentions Junichiro Tanizaki and
his fantastic tale called Jinmenso. In the
story, the very face of Japan, Utagawa Yurie,
is kidnapped to Hollywood where she serves
to producers. This actress returns to Japan
in vengeance to suck the soul from anyone
who dares to watch this film alone at night. It
is like a prototype of Ringu.

 In its opening passage, Jinmenso imagines
an international comradeship of enthusiasts,
adventurous men in Tokyo, Shangai and
colonial outposts in the South Seas, all on
the lookout for dangerous amusements
issuing from Los Angeles, and purveyed by a
company named Globe Films.
 The interplay of the national and the
international forces evident in the business
pratices of both the fictional Globe Films and
the genuine Lumiere brothers, encourages
the adoption of another cognate, the
transnational.

 The word means geographical extension,
proposing not just a field to survey but also a
process to understand.
 Successive historical phases alter the
process of cinema’s transnationality.
 Multiple notions of cinema always coexist but
new notions can be seen emerging to color
each phase.

 Interwar years drew the attention and most
often the allegiance of many intellectuals back
to their separate lands and traditions.
 Sound supported the cinema’s nationalist turn
by immediately anchoring every film to a
linguistic community and its literature.
Everywhere foreign actors were replaced by
performers from the national theater because
thed have the national speech patterns and
physical gestures and this evoked a feeling of
familiarity.

 This is how many cinemas managed to flourish
unders the shadow of Hollywood, which has
indefinite resources in technology, financing and
marketing.
 Serials during the age of broadcast television,
the routine of genres and the routines of actors
kept audiences of the interwar years mainly
tuned in their respective homelands.
 The author also refers to Benedict Anderson.
Cinema extends Anderson’s assertion that
national was made possible with the advent of
daily newspapers linking readers across the
land simultaneously.

 The victory of the Allies over the fascist state
didn’t bring an end to the reality of nations.
New entities and new rivalries were placed
on the world chessboard. Like East
Germany, North Korea, Israel.
 The realities of cinema like those of politics
were hardly overturned all at once. The
USSR, for instance, persisted in its jingoistic
socialist realism, produced by an unchanged
cultural bureaucracy.

 Hollywood films rolled behind American troops to
reinforce its unchallenged claim to overseas
distribution.
 The military vocabulary often associated with big
business (tactics, strategies, marketing offensives,
trade wars, and treaties), plus the maintenance of
personnel in outposts abroad, remind us that as an
‘idea of cinema’ nationalism was hardly broken by
World War II. Neverthelss, another idea rose to
challenge it, signaled by the world ‘federation.’
 He mentiones Europe, that it looked up Switzerland
for political idea because Switzerland successfully
balanced the partial independence of its many
cantons and several linguistic groups.

 Die Letzte Chance, a social realist allegory
of refugees who struggle to cross into the
safety zone of Switzerland won the prize in
Cannes. This award also means the promise
that film from anywhere could speak as they
might choose and be given a chance to
make a diffeence culturally and politically.

 He mentiones De Rougemont and his idea
about the nation. The problem with it is that it
had become an abstraction that cost
individuals their freedom and communities,
their distinctive characters. The federal
model, however, encourages cooperation,
since its primary unit is the local community
where people are more likely to trust each
other. For needs that trascend the local, De
Rougemont suggests a regional linkage of
‘united communities.’

 The federation model fosters both equality and
difference in artistic expression. For example, a
minor Swiss film could be taken just as
seriously as a Hollywood product.
 Resisting large theater chains, federalism
promotes local control over exhibition and it
encourages alliances among neighboring
locals.
 This federal idea incubated most successfully in
war-raged Europe where it served as a
defensive strategy to ward off imperial threats
from the U.S and USSR. The moral force of film
festivals, for instance, lay precisely in their
egalitarian pan-nationalism.

 From the perspective of the West, the 1970’s,
this decade when film studies took root in the
U.S was utterly unremarkable. Except for the
New German director and the new American
cinema of Scorsese, Coppola and Malick. And
except for what was then termed the Third
Cinema of Brazilian cinema novo, nuevo cine
argentino, and Cuban cinema. All three of these
movements were taken to be new waves with
directly political, rather than cultural ambitions.
Their fates depended on the vicissitudes of
state politics.

 Festivals played a crucial role in the
transition of becoming ‘world’ rather than
‘international’ events. Scanning the first 25
years of festival submissions, one is struck
that no major festival screened East Asian
titles except Japanese. Indeed few titles
come from anywhere outside Europe. After
1968, however, the major festivals under
strong leaders actively shaped their own
lineup, opening up to for more films.

 When the Italian public service broadcaster
RAI stopped sponsoring films in the late
1970’s, the blood was drained from
European art cinema. So, it was left to film
festivals to present alternative possibilities,
that increasingly were being taken up in the
elsewhere.
 Films from places never before thought of as
cinematically interesting, surprised Western
cinephiles. As for Europe, the most vibrant
works can be expected now from its edges,
from Yugoslavia on one side and from
Ireland on the other.

 By 1990, the striking films from Taiwan and
the PRC had already drawn so much
attention from both the West and from their
respective government that it would be
disingenous to speak of the natural
development of these movements as if films
were being mined or harvested from the
land.

 World systems imply transnational
operations and negotiations that encourage
the spread and interchange of images,
ideas, and capital across and throughout a
vast but differentiated cultural geography.

 As late as the 1960’s, exported movies
traveled by ship, leaving an interlude of
weeks between production and reception.
 But after 1990, video has come to
supplement memory, and films spread
massively and swiftly.

 Hybridity today, in the world of DNA code
and of genetic modification and
manipulation, is a very different matter. The
very idea of hybridityhas becoma a
postmodern concept.
 In this new postmodern process what
happens is that a single characteristic
fragment is selected from one gene and
inserted into another one.

 In his article, Frederic Jameson, mentions the relationship
between globalization and hybridization. He refers to two
films, Dust and Happy Together. He points out the global
hybridization effects on these films. In the first film, he
indicates that the American protagonists, the classic
Western frontier cowboys, are inserted into the cell of the
Balkan landscape and society like a virus inserted into the
host gene. As
 For Happy Together, the most important fact he suggests,
is the exclusion of any reference to the United States. It is
left out of the film. It is an unusual situation because on the
stereotypical global system, everything passes through the
United States. Happy Together breaks this stereotype and
shows a connection between cultures which falls outside
of the conventional scheme.

 Both the articles explore the globalist
characteristics of the cinema and its shift
from modernist views to postmodernist
notion. According to Zygmunt Bauman,
nationalism, therefore fascism, is a result of
modernism. Modernism doesn’t tolerate
diversity. It is no surprise that nationalist
phase occurred during the Modernist era.
With postmodernism, however, thanks to the
developments within the society, the world
and also the cinema goes through a
postmodern, global phase which celebrates
the diversity.

World cinema

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World cinema