Compiling contributors for an edited book always reminds me of the scenes in The Magnificent Seven where Chris (Yul Brynner) recruits the titular septuplets one by one, raising his fingers to count them off every time he enrols a new one. Charles Bronson, Steve McQueen, James Coburn…I hope Antoine Fuqua’s 2016 remake does the same.
Chris had very little with which to persuade the seven to follow him but ideas of gold worked for some (Brad Dexter) and a chance to be a hero for the first (Horst Buchholz) or last time (Robert Vaughn) worked for others.
Our bait was the rationale for the book itself, which we elaborated via a frenzied e-mail exchanges. We knew that the term ‘World Cinema’ has long been underpinned by Orientalist understandings of nonwestern cultural practices and products that are consumed in the West while, at the same time, often representing resistance to Western culture. If The Routledge Companion to World Cinema were to have value it would need to challenge this definition by taking into consideration the global activities and interchange of films and filmmakers. For us, and hopefully for our contributors, it would not simply be a question of displaying an array of international or transnational subjects, nor even making broad claims for globalisation in its list of contents, but of revealing, exploring, explaining and considering commonalities and differences between the scale, engagement, strategies and anomalies of areas of filmmaking activity worldwide.
The Routledge Companion to World Cinema therefore had to offer its contributors – and therefore its eventual readers – both a survey and a profound investigation into the condition and activity of contemporary filmmaking worldwide, challenging retrograde categories and weighted and incorrect value judgements, thereby grounding and aligning the writers and readers in the remapping activity designed to prompt rethinking.
In sum, we needed to situate this volume at the vanguard of recent academic and critical writing on numerous aspects of world cinema, which has signaled a need to move away from discussion of traditional mechanisms for film production, distribution and consumption in order to identify a variety of cinemas that are resistant to the perceived cultural hegemony of western culture in general, and Hollywood in particular.
We took our cue from recent works such as Cinema at the Periphery edited by Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones and Belén Vidal (Wayne State University Press, 2010), which uncovered multiple, diverse forms of cinematic creation that set the academic sector to arguing the case for accented, interstitial, intercultural, transnational, underground, minor or small cinemas.
We noted, however, that these splintering debates have remained so divergent that the task of taking them all into account and effectively remapping world cinema as our mission. Combining an overview with close analysis of such divergence would clearly be a challenge for The Routledge Companion to World Cinema, but one that would be met by an emphasis on understanding global transformations in terms of regional tensions, and vice versa.
We thus envisaged that The Routledge Companion to World Cinema would remap dominant concepts of world cinema in order to guide the field of film studies into the future. As its title suggests, the book would be necessarily explanatory, yet its chapters would not only be historically-based and therefore backward-looking; instead, we were going to invite each contributor to respond to a shared scholarly concern about regional tensions and global transformations in the digital era related to film production, distribution and reception, and to the discipline of film studies itself, by instigating a profound and timely reexamination of prevalent conceptualizations of world cinema, while simultaneously calling into question the utility of the term through the act of remapping.
We were also clear on what we wanted to avoid. The Routledge Companion to World Cinema was not going to subscribe to the binary divide that sees other cinemas defined as non- Hollywood, a conceptualization recently noted by Lucía Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajindah Dudrah in Theorizing World Cinema (IB Tauris, 2011) as perpetuating the unhelpful and erroneous attitude which sees all other cinemas as victims; that is, purely reactive manifestations incapable of eliciting independent theory.
Instead, our rationale for The Routledge Companion to World Cinema explained that it was designed to challenge traditional ways of coordinating (and therefore limiting) thinking on its subject. We promised that it would respond, for example, to the question of whether the flood of American films in recent years has diluted or even washed away a wealth of national cinematography in Asia and Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the former Soviet states. In addition, we explained that we wanted to explore symbolic and experiential dimensions of the impact and influence of new and established film cultures worldwide as they interact, paying attention nonetheless to responsive filmmaking activities that include regional attempts to clone or counter what might be perceived as the global excess of the Hollywood brand.
We insisted that The Routledge Companion to World Cinema would not replace one hegemony with another, however. Rather, it would recognise that popular entertainment films are made and distributed the world over. The volume would therefore aim to identify and analyze worldwide trends in aesthetics, archetypes and narrative structures as well as their exceptions; and it would also seek to explore and map the filmmaking activity that, in contrast to the mainstream circuits and distribution formats and platforms, is online, elsewhere and otherwise engaged, even if sometimes these activities are merely another reflection of the power dynamics that exist in physical reality.
Finally, we explained that The Routledge Companion to World Cinema would also heeds the conclusions put forward by Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover in their Global Art Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2010), that there are serious perils in thinking in terms of a simplistic geographical engagement of an international filmmaking community that is absorbed by dominant circuits of capital, stereotype, and imperialist vision.
In sum, we suggested that with contributors help and hard work, The Routledge Companion to World Cinema could be a touchstone volume in which key thinkers pool their wisdom and experience in order to provide a survey and analysis of world cinema that would ensure relevance and significance for the volume in numerous contexts and for many years to come.
And then we drew up a wish-list of contributors, sent our many e-mails, and waited for a response.