Images

Regular readers of this blog (hello? echo!) will recall that prior to embarking upon The Routledge Companion to World Cinema Paul Cooke and I set about Screening European Heritage too. This was one of the main outputs of the AHRC funded project that we ran on which Paul was PI (private investigator), I was CI (central … Continue reading “Here’s One We Prepared Earlier”

One consequence of co-editing The Routledge Companion to World Cinema is that one’s horizons are continually expanding, as is one’s ‘to watch’ (i.e. to buy) list as fascinating films are described in chapters like restaurant reviews offering haptic descriptions of great meals. The problem is that when I find time to do my day job, … Continue reading “Don’t Give Up The Day Job”

The organic nature of an edited book means that no matter how thorough your planning nor how strict your e-mails, it will throw up anomalies, left turns (when you want go right) and alternative universes. You want blue?  It turns out I can’t do blue.  Here’s a yellow one instead. 6000 apples is all you … Continue reading “Adapt and Overcome”

I finished my chapter. Or at least the first draft of it. It’s too long but I don’t know what to cut and it’s gone off to external review in the hope that someone will tell me. It’s something of a culmination of theories that I’ve been following and developing since 2004, when I first … Continue reading “Finished! (My Chapter, Not The Book)”

Staying with Crofts’ problematic view that Australian and Canadian cinemas are “imitations of US cinema” brings us to our abstract on Canadian cinema(s) from Christopher E. Gittings (note the optional s). This chapter was a big ask. Canadian cinemas are complex, multifarious and very little known outside of the art house and horror genre. This chapter … Continue reading “Interconnections”

If any chapter was going to hit home how volatile is World Cinema and how incredibly difficult is the task of its remapping, it would have to be the one on British cinema. We invited James Chapman to do the remapping of it pre-referendum, but the chapter came in post-it. James is Professor of Film Studies … Continue reading “Betwixt and Between Brexit”

It often seems as if some areas of the world have declared open season on cartographers, to the extent that no amount of remapping can keep pace with the changes taking place. Shifts in territories and the emergence of new cosmopolitan areas can have a dramatic effect on the cinemas of the region and, indeed, complicate … Continue reading “Shifting Sands”

“Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all,” wrote Julian Barnes in Flaubert’s Parrot. Thanks to Mariana Liz, who is Lecturer in Film Studies in the Centre for World Cinemas in the University of Leeds, co-editor of The Europeanness of European Cinema (2014) and author of Euro-Visions: Europe in European Cinema (2015), for providing this concise … Continue reading “Short and Sweet”

Working from the outside in, if ‘World Cinema’ denotes the periphery containing all films made on this planet, then perhaps it is a perfunctory categorisation rendered so by its omnitude. It suggests a tight-knit patchwork of national cinemas covering the planet, when the reality is rather more ragged. As we have already seen, American, African … Continue reading “World Cinema or World Cinemas?”

Thank you so much. That’s so nice. Isn’t that great? Asking me to…coming on here and – and I have to tell you I’m here, and very strongly here, because I have great respect for World cinema and everybody, and tremendous respect for it. So much. World cinema doesn’t get a fair press; it doesn’t … Continue reading “The Trump Companion to World Cinema”