Table of Contents for World Cinema: A Critical Introduction

The term ‘world cinema’ merely names an indisputable reality of the experiences of film practitioners, viewers, critics, students, teachers, and scholars

Chapter 1 offers a conceptual framework that navigates existing and emerging ideas in the field of world cinema, situated firmly in the context of its world literature and world music precedents.

Chapter 2 traces different, and unevenly developed, practices and habits of watching films around the world

Chapter 3 offers an account of the main production models around the world

Chapter 4 addresses the most salient feature of world cinema after the 1980s: the global boom and influence of international film festivals, which have become one of the biggest growth industries.

For nearly four decades, Indian cinema has been a strong presence on the world stage largely due to the strength of its numbers alone.

Nollywood, the video-film industry from Nigeria, emerged on the scene in the early 1990s, when film industries around the world were going through major transformations of economy, production, and ideology.

Multiple cinemas of Asian countries–China, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and other East Asian countries–are often discussed in film studies under the rubric of ‘Asian cinema.’

The transformative effect of globalization has radically redefined the status of the nation as a relevant economic, political, and cultural unit instead giving currency to the terms ‘world,’ ‘global,’ and ‘transnational’ in descriptions of the current geopolitical map

Cinema has been a transnational medium from the very beginning, from immigrant talent in Hollywood to cross-border influences of directors on one another.

The final chapter, on polyvalence, is an equally significant step in a course on world cinema

The growing Visual Center of Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, hopes to one day offer a platform for films in its extensive library of 12,000 videos and films to be viewed online globally.

Sarajevo’s CineLink Selects 10 Projects for Work in Progress Showcase

The US subscription-based cinema tickets had to get an emergency loan of $5m just to continue offering the service

Five UK virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) projects have been awarded funding through CreativeXR, an initiative from Digital Catapult and Arts Council England.

The Walt Disney Company and 21st Century Fox announced on Friday that stockholders of both companies have separately approved the proposed acquisition by Disney of the latter’s entertainment assets.

Vanessa Redgrave has called for the international film community to support a change in visa requirements for Kosovan citizens to travel abroad, describing the current situation as “absurdly wrong”.

The European Film Academy is planning a vigil for detained Ukrainian director Oleg Sentsov opposite the Russian Embassy in Berlin on Tuesday (July 10)

Netflix has announced its first European production hub in Madrid.

As the shock of Sunday’s fatal city shootings hung in the air, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) hierarchy cancelled Tuesday’s opening press conference in favour of a more modest platform to unveil a Galas and Special Presentations line-up that includes world premieres for Steve McQueen’s thriller Widows and Claire Denis’ first English-language film, High Life.

The adoption of streaming sites in home entertainment spend by Chinese consumers is significantly ahead of the international market and by 2022 will reach around $8.3bn, nearly three times as much as the next highest country.

The following playlist and three videos contains clips of moviegoing within Cinema Paradiso.

The following playlist celebrates the presence of moviegoing within films.

Karlovy Vary commissions festival trailers featuring prominent filmmakers and actors. The following YouTube playlist contains 34 videos of such trailers from the 29th annual film festival to the 52th.

Zhang Yimou plays with the idea of a village coming together around cinema, which works both as a metaphor about the Chinese film industry as well as speaks to the experience of going to the movies.

“Atom Egoyan’s short film Artaud Double Bill from the anthology Chacun son cinéma has become one of the most eloquent articulations of the fast-changing state of film exhibition and viewership in our times.

In celebration of the 70th edition of the Venice International Film Festival the Biennale di Venezia has created the special project, Venezia 70 – Future Reloaded.

The creation of new technologies has enabled the reorientation of individuals’ relationships to screens. Indeed, “films and screens on which they are viewed have become elastic, malleable, and ready to be relocated from film theaters” (Despande and Mazaj 38).

Nollywood is a product of a complex dialectic between external and internal forces–the history of colonialism, the global economy, local arts, traditions, religious diversity, economic and social conditions–the context of which provides useful pathways to understand the particularity of Nollywood’s aesthetics, narrative forms, and its popularity in the continent.

Helpful links to better understand World Cinema

Came across this little gem on Scroll website. My hearty thanks to Nandita Dutta from DearCinema for graciously translating the brief chat. Here it is, with a couple of micro-changes from me.  The gentle idealism of his vision pervades here.

Watching Gitanjali Rao’s Tomorrow My Love (2021) is like watching an iceberg of complex emotions and states-of-mind about life, death, and the sense of goodbyes.

The festival catalogue mentions Yudhijit Basu’s Kalsubai (India; Grand Online Prize of the City of Oberhausen) as an ethnographic film, which turns out to be a ruse for this intensely political film.

There is an inane and tragic irony in the tendency to change the names of the cities in India. Bombay changed to Mumbai and Madras to Chennai, presumably to return to the ‘native’ names while shedding off the colonial connotations of the older titles.

Sex is the driver of both the conscious and the unconscious realms of the social field. Think of Bollywood. Prudish and censorious of any explicit sexuality in its images, the industry relishes the opportunity to expose a woman’s body in its “item numbers” and women’s costumes.

The name of the city indicates a past, tainted in part because of its colonial history, and soaked in part with memories of generations of inhabitants. Mrinal Sen called Calcutta his “El Dorado,” a treasure-house of contrasts that brought him pain and joy.

Sexual assault, unfortunately, has been with us. What has changed is the way we respond to it. The “me-too” movement changed the currency of the topic and in some ways, made it global, marking commonality shared by women across cultures.

Dighu is traveling to a town in Konkan area to his grandparents’ place with his sister Durga and his mother. It becomes apparent that his father has suddenly left the family and they must find a home and a life.

The image of Laila (Navjot Randhawa), facing directly at the camera appears early in the film, the colorful print dress of the nomadic Gujjar-Bakwarwali tribe to which she belongs, against the backdrop of the forest behind her.

The kinetic energy of walks that Ganapathy (Karuththadaiyan) takes in P. S. Vinothraj’s debut feature film, Pebbles (2021) is palpable from start to finish.