COML592 - 20th C Lit & Theory: New World Cinema

This class will be an exploration of numerous issues at the core of the “turn to the world” in global film culture and film studies, and the rising popularity and growth of the discipline of World Cinema. As film has become a part of an enormous transnational media system since the 1980s, the concept of “world cinema” has become both a necessary and controversial way to account for cross-border and cross-cultural relations. Is it a useful term, or a slippery signifier, signifying at once too much and too little? Is it productive in realizing its aspiration of unsettling Eurocentric foundations of film studies, or does it merely rebrand existing institutionalized methods under the politically accurate banner of “the world”? Is it the most effective way of describing transnational modes of production, circulation, as well as reading/viewing practices? By tracing both dominant and peripheral cinematic flows and cinemas (from the Korean blockbusters, European art cinema, Bollywood, to small national cinemas such Palestinian cinema) as well as its interpretive frameworks (transnational, national, diasporic, women’s cinema, etc.), we will examine what it means to place a film on the map, not as a gesture of inclusion but as a method of accounting for structural (in)equality to reveal gendered, racial, ethnic, economic and political nature of transnational processes in world cinema.