There have been a number of volumes in recent years that have begun to engage with the concept of World cinema in a more differentiated way than in the first decade of its use, when it largely served to describe something that wasn’t Hollywood.
When planning a new intervention into the debate on what constitutes ‘world cinema’, it was essential to think in terms of a comprehensive re-mapping of the geographical, ideological, and theoretical landscape. Luckily, there are several inspirational and influential works on World cinema already, including our own Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim’s Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics on Film (2006), which was a seminal early collection of essays on the emerging field of world cinema studies, focussing largely on theoretical issues and a range of case studies of canonical film texts.
The Routledge Companion to World Cinema is a large and comprehensive project, covering great geographical range and exploring multiple theoretical perspectives. Like Borges’ map of the world, it sometimes threatens to be as big as the world itself.
But other books have managed it. Theorizing World Cinema (2011) edited by Lucia Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah is another excellent study that offers a series of theoretical interventions on world cinema debates. Indeed, some of the contributors to this book (including Lucia) are also involved in our study, providing new reflections on their theoretical positions. Another important book is William V. Costanzo’s World Cinema Through Global Genres (2014), which offers an account of World cinema purely from the perspective of genre. This is typical of (common sense and actually doable – duh!) approaches to World cinema, which tend to focus on one theoretical perspective.
Other books we recommend and rely on include John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson’s World Cinema: Critical Approaches (2000), which addresses the subject from both a theoretical/conceptual and geographical perspective in a manner not dissimilar from our volume. However, it rather reinforces the distinction between ‘World’ and ‘Western’ cinemas that our volume critiques. And, of course, there is The Oxford History of World Cinema (1997) edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, which provides a comprehensive overview of cinema around the world, but is almost 20 years old now and does not include discussion of numerous new developments, most obviously the impact of digital technology on cinema.
Both these last two books, as Dennison and Lim point out in their introduction to Remapping World Cinemas (2005), give Hollywood cinema a central position against which all national cinemas must somehow define themselves. While respectfully disagreeing with this bias, The Routledge Companion to World Cinemas will still cover American cinema.
Or should that be cinemas?
To find out, we invited Geoff King to contribute a chapter and were delighted when he agreed (and even more so when his was the first complete chapter to be submitted!). Geoff King is Professor of Film and Television Studies and director of the Screen Media Research centre at Brunel University, London. He has published books on Hollywood and American independent cinema, film comedy and cultural constructions of reality. His main research interests are focused on the interrelations between industrial, formal and socio-cultural dimensions of recent and contemporary American cinema from the Hollywood blockbuster to the independent sector. The main focus of his current work is the indie sector, starting with American Independent Cinema (2005), followed by Indiewood, USA (2009) and Indie 2.0: Change and Continuity in Contemporary American Indie Film. He has also written books on Donnie Darko (2007) and Lost in Translation (2010) and is currently working on a new book to be titled Quality Hollywood: Markers of Distinction in Contemporary Studio Film. In other words, Geoff really knows his stuff.
This is his initial abstract.
American Indie Film and International Art Cinema: Points of Distinction and Overlap
How should we understand the relationship between American indie film and the broader realm of international art cinema? Both of these formations – each of which is a complex and often contested territory – are defined in large part in opposition to the dominant institution of Hollywood. But what do they have in common, and/or what markers of difference (in a neutral sense) or more value-laden distinction can be identified between the two? American indie film has largely been ignored in most academic accounts of art cinema, the international or global basis of which is often also marked in distinction from a US cinema sometimes seemingly conflated with Hollywood. Studies of indies have often viewed art cinema as a point of influence but the exact nature of the relationship has not been explored at any length or, I would suggest, with due acknowledgment of the multiple currents of each (art cinema is sometimes viewed as a domain that has been effectively or largely displaced or succeeded, particularly within the US market).
This chapter will examine the relationship between the two formations at two main levels, closely related: the types of films involved (and the traditions on which these draw, including those associated with broader currents such as modernism and the postmodern) and the channels through which they circulate. If indie film is sometimes located in a position somewhere between art cinema and the more commercial mainstream, the argument here will be that it often draws on qualities associated with art cinema and that the lines between the two are often significantly blurred even if some clear points of distinction can be identified and have been mobilized in certain discursive contexts.
Borges would be proud.