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The arguments against the cinema as a going concern seem to hold it down while long-form television administers a beating. Why waste your time and money on dreary flab like Batman versus Superman or Superman Lives or Iron Man 3 when Jessica Jones offers intelligent, original, subtle, affecting and exciting drama on tv? Why bother with hackneyed thrillers … Continue reading “Have Happened”

In all our haste to look forward with The Routledge Companion to World Cinema we sometimes forgot to look back too. Obviously new cinema movements don’t spring forth from nothing but exhibit, if only after careful dissection, the influences, legacies and reactions against other movements and examples of World cinemas. It’s no use looking at … Continue reading “Catching A Wave”

Transnationalism has replaced the comfort zone of a ‘national’ cinema with the continual temporal and spatial redesign of its evolution and current condition, while tracking its provenance has erased hegemonic historical perspectives by revealing that globalization is less a contemporary phenomenon than a longstanding tradition for some and a dark secret for others. The limited … Continue reading “Corners and Edges”

If you’re counting, we’re up to chapter 15. 15 of 40. Except chapter 15 dropped out. So we’ll jump to 16 for the moment and come back to 15 when we’ve considered our options, rethought the structure and commissioned something new. Nobody could ever predict how an edited book might turn out. Not the publishers … Continue reading “So Where Were We?”

The Screening Rights Film Festival 2016 is almost upon us – festival passes are on sale and the exciting programme is available! The Screening Rights Film Festival 2016 is a four-day programme of important and inspiring Social Justice films by award-winning and new directors from across the globe. Taking place across Birmingham, all films will … Continue reading “Meanwhile…The Screening Rights Film Festival”

One of the most obvious ways in which the revisionism and usefulness of The Routledge Companion to world Cinemas will be tested is by comparison with prevailing theories and frameworks of World cinema. Unafraid to take on Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities or the long-standing paradigm of eight concepts of national cinemas elaborated by Stephen Crofts, The … Continue reading “Revise, Rewatch, Rewrite”

In addition to countering a tendency to see World cinema in terms of its coagulation in national cinemas, The Routledge Companion to World Cinema also does battle with auteurism, that belief that the vision, input and guidance of a single creative individual (the director) is what determines the final film. It can be hard to shake … Continue reading “Another Time, An Auteur Place”

There’s this line in (I think) a Woody Allen film.  It might be said by Tony Roberts in Annie Hall. He’s in television or something and when asked what he’s working on, replies – uh, I’m paraphrasing, “I’ve got this notion and I’m trying to find the time to turn it into an idea. If … Continue reading “Reality Bites”

Back in the pre-deadline ooze, when beautiful abstracts were putting plump flesh on the bare bones of our outline, it often seemed as if The Routledge Companion to World Cinema might actually meet its own remit of uniting contributors from key areas of world cinema studies and re-uniting several of the leading authors of key works that this … Continue reading “Building Blocks”

And come they did. Abstracts for chapters in The Routledge Companion to World Cinema pinged into our inboxes from those we had initially invited. Constructing the volume would take time and a great deal of consultation but for the moment at least we were delighted to receive offers of collaboration from some expert scholars. Indeed, … Continue reading “If You Build It, They Will Come”