An Atlas of World Cinema

Abstract

The term world dnema is now permanently with us: in our classes, our textbooks, popular press. It names global reach of Hollywood, beginning with Jaws (Steven Spielberg, U.S.A., 1975) and Star Wars (George Lucas, U.S.A., 1977), and it names resistance to Hollywood evident in GATT debates a decade ago. Sometimes post-colonial critics mobilize term, as nations vie for recognition at festivals. replaces film, which first slipped through heavily guarded university doors in 1960s. We used to teach films as autonomous masterworks in film as art courses or as addenda to sanctioned national literatures. Today national literature departments are shrinking while number of films begging for study and places they come from increases. The old ways do justice neither to this variety, nor to international interdependence of images. The rubric that I, like so many others, employed for years, Survey of film, does an injustice to situation and to students. For a survey suggests a distant gaze, panoptically monitoring for our convenience and use. Any study of World Cinema, however, should instead be ready to travel more than to oversee, should put students inside unfamiliar conditions of viewing rather than bringing unfamiliar handily to them. This is pedagogical promise of world dnema, a manner of treating films systematically, transcending vagaries of taste; taking measure of the foreign in what is literally a freshly recognized global dimension. Such an approach examines overriding factors, then zeroes in on specific sites-provides coordinates for navigating this world of world cinema. No need to dock in every port as if on a tour du monde with some Michelin guide textbook. Displacement, not coverage, matters most; let us travel where we will so long as every local cinema is examined with an eye to its complex ecology. Why not conceive an atlas of types of maps, each providing a different orientation to unfamiliar terrain, bringing out different aspects, elements, and dimensions? Each approach, or map, models a type of view: hence, Atlas. Film festivals long ago came up with a basic map as they sought top products to be put in competition each year as in a Miss Universe contest. For a long while cognoscenti did little more than push colored pins onto a map to locate national origin of masterpieces. This appreciation of cut flowers adorned study in its first years but required a more systematic account (call it botanical or ecological) of vitality of privileged examples. What political and cultural soil nourished these films and their makers? Today's impulse-more ambitious because more dynamic and comparative-would track a process of cross-pollination that bypasses national directives. To begin to encompass all material in this confusing field of study, an historical atlas would seem a sensible first step. Yet a course or anthology looking out to world cinema should be neither a gazetteer nor an encyclopedia, futilely trying to do justice to cinematic life everywhere. Its essays and materials should instead model a set of approaches, just as an atlas of maps opens up a continent to successive views: political, demographic, linguistic, topographical, meteorological, marine, historical. I. Political Maps Pushing pins onto a spread of countries marked by borders has its uses. In high school all of us poured over successive shapes of world power: Greeks, Romans, various barbarian kingdoms, Islam's arms reaching through Africa and girdling Europe. What would a map of cinematic power show? With global feature output at around 3,000 tides a year, we might indicate filmmaking hotspots using a gray-scale of production density that could be keyed to Hollywood-a dark constant. Competitors would be variably less dark: since 1930 France has put out over 100 features a year, except during German occupation. …

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