This article aims at considering the world cinema “perspective” in contemporary film studies as an approach that adopts a cartographical rhetoric and a worldist aesthetics. This reveals a nostalgia for the geographical discourse, which has many implications and can be even considered reactionary. Indeed, being the effect of a sort of osmosis between “cartographic cinema” and “cartography of cinema,” world cinema promotes a worldview that is allegorical of the old modernist cinematic mission of making the whole world visible. By reinserting geography in contemporary film studies and in the filmic texts today, it is compensative of new anxieties about film referentiality and the difficult mappability of informal film distribution. On a broader level, a symptomatic reading of world cinema shows how its geographical/ geopolitical gaze tries to overcome a crisis of authority and of representation, and the “crisis of the cartographic reason.”
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
The Rhetoric and Aesthetics of World Cinema: Film Studies as a Place for the "Persistence of Geography" in Contemporary Cinema
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Cinéma & Cie
Giorgio Avezzù
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The Rhetoric and Aesthetics of World Cinema: Film Studies as a Place for the "Persistence of Geography" in Contemporary Cinema
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13
The Rhetoric and Aesthetics of World Cinema
Film Studies as a Place for the “Persistence of Geography”
in Contemporary Cinema
Giorgio Avezzù, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano




  Abstract
  This article aims at considering the world cinema “perspective” in contemporary film studies
  as an approach that adopts a cartographical rhetoric and a worldist aesthetics. This reveals
  a nostalgia for the geographical discourse, which has many implications and can be even
  considered reactionary. Indeed, being the effect of a sort of osmosis between “cartographic
  cinema” and “cartography of cinema,” world cinema promotes a worldview that is allegorical
  of the old modernist cinematic mission of making the whole world visible. By reinserting ge-
  ography in contemporary film studies and in the filmic texts today, it is compensative of new
  anxieties about film referentiality and the difficult mappability of informal film distribution.
  On a broader level, a symptomatic reading of world cinema shows how its geographical/
  geopolitical gaze tries to overcome a crisis of authority and of representation, and the “crisis
  of the cartographic reason.”




              I use the expression “world history” reluctantly, because it easily induces a state of
    intoxication that is at best appropriate only when world history really becomes the history of
everybody’s world. On the radio, for example, when people hear the oft-repeated announcements
   “This is Paris” or “This is London,” the mere mention of such cosmopolitan cities serves the
                                                                    same function as cheap booze.

        When all geographic hideouts have been photographed, society will have been completely
                                                                                      blinded.
                                                                                 Siegfried Kracauer1

  World cinema is a highly successful concept in contemporary film theory. It has been noted that
the fortune of the phrase may be the result of its remarkable ambiguity. World cinema, in fact, can
alternatively refer to “the cinema of the whole world,” to non-Hollywood and non-First World
cinemas, or specifically to alternative and adversarial cinematic expressions that question the
American and European political and cultural hegemony. However, world cinema is rather defined
by having a certain way of looking at cinema production, reception and film history than by its

Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIII, no. 20, Spring 2013                                                     97
Giorgio Avezzù

filmic referents. Thus, world cinema is considered to be a particular “methodological approach” to
the study of contemporary cinema, an approach demanded by the very nature of the contemporary
mediascape.2
   I suggest to consider world cinema as the expression of a gaze that produces “imaginative
geographies,” even if intentionally flexible and polycentric. Taking into account this global
overview recommended by recent film theory means to consider a particular worldist aesthetics,
conveyed through a specific rhetoric, which is ideologically not innocent. What I want to argue
here is that the fascination inspired by the notion of world cinema probably resides more than
in the particular objects it intends to designate and precisely in the term “world” and in the
geographical imagination it implies. Above all, it lies in the fact that it is an approach that reinserts
geography in film studies as well as in the filmic texts themselves, which necessarily leads to a
few considerations about the relations between geography and cinema, on the historical evolution
of that relationship, and on its deep implications. A similar theoretical approach argues for the
ability of cinema to represent the world, and it is consequently confident in its own capability, as
a literary genre, to adequately describe it as a whole (film theory as cartography). That is indeed
what geography is expected to do, according to the ancient Ptolemaic definition: to provide a view
of the whole Earth. Moreover, that is what cinema – a medium with an old cartographic vocation
– was originally supposed to do: making the whole world visible, subjected to men as an image,
and also intelligible.
   A geographical enthusiasm can be easily traced throughout the writings of those scholars and
theorists who advocate for the concept of world cinema. Although I do not intend to examine these
texts in all their complexity, a brief review of a few major arguments addressing the topic may
provide an example of the pervasiveness of this geographic discourse. Dudley Andrew in An Atlas
of World Cinema is particularly explicit:

  This is the pedagogical promise of world cinema, a manner of treating foreign films systematically, tran-
  scending the vagaries of taste; taking the measure of “the foreign” in what is literally a freshly recog-
  nized global dimension. Such an approach examines overriding factors, then zeroes in on specific “cin-
  ema sites” – provides coordinates for navigating this world of world cinema. […] Why not conceive an
  atlas of types of maps, each providing a different orientation to unfamiliar terrain, bringing out different
  aspects, elements and dimensions? Each approach, or map, models a type of view: hence, the Atlas.3

   Thus, political maps should describe the “cinematic power” of each nation in terms of feature
films output (e.g. Abbas Kiarostami put Iran “on the map” in Cannes). Chromatic demographic
maps should represent “the availability of images region by region” (“demographic studies serve as
military maps in strategy sessions in the boardrooms of CEOs and cultural ministers”). Linguistic
maps should account for the different cinematic vocabularies and grammars “set against one
universally recognized language of the movies, Classical Hollywood’s Latin.” Orientation maps
should consider “the film as map – cognitive map – while placing the film on the map,” examining
its specific geo-political orientation. Furthermore topographical maps should try to represent “that
which is hidden,” or radically different, “deeply foreign” films.4
   This cartographic concern recalls the powerful modernist project which obsessively strived to
cover and to enframe the world in its entirety.


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                                                          The Rhetoric and Aesthetics of World Cinema

  Is there a “nomadic” cinema that can refuse to be mapped? Andrew notes that the recent
availability of Nigerian video films that were previously considered “unmentionable, unviewable,
unmappable” seems to contest this claim. Consequently, film scholars should

  look for a different cinema, whether in the hope that a purer vision may be available, or a purer people.
  Many of us will be racing to examine this vibrant phenomenon, to be the first to tell our peers about it,
  the first to explore its (hopefully idiosyncratic) use of the medium, its special cultural function – in short
  the first to map it.5

  No region of the world is condemned to be obscured by clouds forever, and sooner or later all
the blank spaces on the world cinema map will be filled.
  Such is the “larger vision”6 of world cinema, which is defined, in the words of Lúcia Nagib,
as “a positive, inclusive, democratic concept” that insists on the interconnected character
of cinematic productions from all over the globe, with an “all-encompassing,” and again,
“democratic vocation.”7 This approach, while advocating to defend all cultural specificities,
actually overlooks the possibility of existence of a true cinematic otherness that is unattainable
to the scholar, sacrificing it to the cause of global evidence and interconnectedness: “World
cinema is simply the cinema of the world. It has no centre. It is not the other, but it is us. It has no
beginning and no end, but is a global process. World cinema, as the world itself, is circulation.”8
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith too affirms, in similar terms, the virtues of the theoretical approach I
am considering:

  […] this is a history of world cinema. This is a fact of which I am particularly proud […]. On the one
  hand the book tells the history of the cinema as a single global phenomenon […]. But it also, on the
  other hand, tells the history of many different cinemas, growing in different parts of the world.9

  However, given the size of the task, a sort of caution is typical of this kind of discourse. Many
scholars maintain that world cinema requires a polycentric approach, a multitude of perspectives:

  The sheer diversity of world cinema, the number of films made (many of which do not circulate outside
  national borders), and the variety of cultural and political contexts in which the world’s cinemas have
  emerged, means that it would be foolish or arrogant, or both, for any one person to attempt to encom-
  pass the entire history of cinema single-handed. This is not just a question of knowledge but also of
  perspective.

  This is why Nowell-Smith requested for a team of specialists, particularly for narrating cinemas
“known in the west only in the most partial, fragmentary, and unhistorical fashion.”10 The scholar
fears the hybris of his own gaze, like Andrew explains:

  The rubric that I, like so many others, employed for years, ‘Survey of film’, does an injustice to the sit-
  uation and to students. For a ‘survey’ suggests a distant gaze, panoptically monitoring the foreign for
  our convenience and use. Any study of World Cinema, however, should instead be ready to travel more
  than to oversee.11


                                                                                                               99
Giorgio Avezzù

  Nevertheless, the approach reveals its subtle schizophrenia: “Giving space to multiple
perspectives is one thing. It is also important to be able to bring them all together and to give a
sense of the interlocking character of the many aspects of cinema in different places and at different
times.” So, as editor, Nowell-Smith tried “to show how different perspectives can be related,
rather than imposing a single all-encompassing point of view.”12 Similarly, Andrew affirms:

  While the idea of the atlas aspires to totality through an accretion of multiple yet differentiated maps that
  apportion objects and views, even an immense sum of maps does not afford that captious, final perspec-
  tive one relishes when spinning a globe at arm’s length. Still, the atlas’ thwarted totalization encourages
  a dialectical understanding of culture and of one’s place in it.13

  World cinema does and does not aspire to totality at the same time; it consists of different,
multiple perspectives, but it brings them together, conciliating them in a single one, in a single
book.
  Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim suggest instead to think about world cinema “as a
discipline, a methodology and a perspective” – it is “the world as viewed from the West.” Their
introduction of Remapping World Cinema raises several important questions:

  From whence do we view, visualize and theorise world cinema, and what impact does this have on
  cinematic discourses and practices around the world? How does one’s perspective limit one’s view, and
  is it possible to develop a multifarious perspective that takes into account concerns of our own as well
  as that of the others? […] Why theorise, problematise, or even promote World Cinema as a theoretical
  concept?14

  That perspective (along with its gaze) carries the problem of its own legitimacy, as Annette
Kuhn and Catherine Grant argue. It is a methodology “that is informed by a ‘world systems’
theory,” and

  [t]his may seem uncontroversial today; and indeed neither Andrew nor Chaudhuri see any need to de-
  fend such global (or ‘globalized’) perspectives in their work. And yet, in the 1980s – before the end of the
  Cold War and before the prominence of discourses of globalization – the world systems approach was
  among the sites of fierce polemic concerning the study, in the West, of ‘marginal or ‘non mainstream’
  cinemas.15

   In their reader they include on purpose the polemical articles by Julianne Burton and Teshome
Gabriel on Third Cinema that were published on Screen in the mid 1980s. The first author asserted
the necessity for Third World films “to rely on a mediating agency – an advocate in the guise of
a film critic, historian, scholar, or other certified ‘expert’ with media access,”16 while the other
blamed the Western obsession for the “worldview,” one of colonialism’s arrogant legacies: “What
is culturally specific is viewed as a phenomenon engulfing the globe. Even when noble causes
with good intentions and positive results are involved, with implication far greater than cultural
specificity, global annexation is obvious.”17
   Although accusations of colonialism may appear disproportionate today, Gabriel’s protest


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against Western criticism and theory usefully exposes the situated and discoursive nature of the
same “worldview” that is now promoted by world cinema. On closer inspection, Nowell-Smith
too, while trying to present “a picture of world cinema in all its complexity,” cannot erase all
the enunciative traces from his work, despite his own caution. It is interesting to note that in his
History of World Cinema “[t]he American [Hollywood] cinema […] occupies a central position
throughout the ‘general’ sections of the book, and there is no separate consideration of American
cinema as a ‘national cinema’ along with the French, Japanese, Soviet and other cinemas.”18 For
instance, Iranian silent films are not (“pedantically”) assigned to the general silent cinema section,
but they are confined “to a single, coherent,” and separated, “essay on Iran.”19
   It is as if the “orientalist subject,” that Said discussed, was replaced by a new “worldist” one in
film studies too, whose aim is to represent the whole world. Adopting Said’s framework, it can
be said that the world itself, just as much as the Orient (and the Occident), “is not an inert fact
of nature. It is not merely there,” but it is “an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought,
imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence.”20 Even considering briefly how
the image of the globe was rhetorically exploited in the West in the last century can be telling.
In a sense, the “larger vision” of world cinema corresponds to the “larger view” of the Earth
provided by the first global photographs.21 According to the cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove,
since the second half of the XX century, the whole Earth images and the Apollo space program
photographs in particular have shaped two different discourses at the same time. A “one-world”
rhetoric “concentrates on the global surface, on circulation, connectivity and communication. It
is a universalist, progressive, and mobile discourse in which the image of the globe signifies the
potential, if not actual, equality of all locations networked across frictionless space,” it “signifies
secular mastery of the world through spatial control.” On the other hand, a “less synoptic and
distanced” “whole-earth” rhetoric “stresses the globe’s organic unity and matters of life, dwelling,
and rootedness. […] Such a discourse has to confront the globe’s islandness in the oxymoron
of global localism” and emphasizes “a quasi spiritual interconnectedness and the vulnerability
of terrestrial life.” It advocates the necessity of planetary stewardship “best practiced from an
insider’s localist position,” and therefore it promotes a “rhetoric of localism” which appeals
to “the visceral bonds between land and life (individual, family, community), bonds that have
traditionally been localized, frequently as mystical ties of blood and soil.”22 World cinema seems
to combine both these rhetorics: the “quasi-spirituality” of the “whole-earth” discourse on the
one hand, celebrating the fragile local cinematic and cultural differences as globally framed and
interconnected, and the powerful “one-world” paradigm of the all-encompassing vision (the
“map,” the “atlas,” the “picture of world cinema”) and global circulation (“world cinema, as the
world itself, is circulation”), on the other hand.
   Cosgrove examines global discourses, the origin of which lies in a particular iconography,
and it may seem questionable to assign the same rhetorics to world cinema literature, which
despite its enthusiasm for maps and atlases remains essentially verbal. However, world
cinema methodology not only conveys a complex rhetoric, but it also has an aesthetics in the
strictly visual sense of the term. The cartographical and worldist aesthetics of world cinema is
iconographically synopsized by the logo displayed in the books of the Tauris World Cinema
Series edited by Lúcia Nagib (on the back cover and before the title page), which is, in fact, a
world map (fig. 1).


                                                                                                   101
Giorgio Avezzù




                   Fig. 1 – The I.B. Tauris World Cinema Series logo (2007 – present).

   This is the Arno Peters projection, which has become very popular (while very controversial inside
the discipline of geography) since the early 1970s, because it was conceived as an “egalitarian”
map, giving equal area representation to all countries, and replacing the Mercator “distorted” and
“Eurocentric” map.23 The Peters projection, like the Apollo space program photographs analyzed
by Cosgrove, stretches some regions (like Africa) that usually appear relatively smaller on world
maps, “and so correspondingly insignificant in Western geographical consciousness.”24 Despite
its progressivism, the Peters projection – like every map of the world – is false, political and
embedded in a knowledge and power discourse, and just like all the contemporary global thinking
and imagery it belongs to an old and multifaceted globalist tradition, made of a repertoire of
images with “sacred and secular, colonial and imperial meanings.”25 According to Nagib, the
implicit “democratic” vocation of the all-encompassing view is actually at odds with the entire
“cartographic genealogy of the Earth in the western imagination.”
   Having pointed out a precise worldist aesthetics in world cinema theory, it is perhaps not too
far-fetched to draw a parallel between world cinema as a methodological approach, which is what
I have been taking into account until now, and world cinema as a specific film genre. Even if this
sense of the phrase is rarely taken into consideration, according to Martin Roberts world cinema
can also refer to films that share, literally, “an awareness of globalization” 26 on a stylistic and
iconographic level. As a matter of fact, world cinema as a film genre has grown consistently since
1998, when Robert’s article was published; namely, as a trend of films that put the image of the
whole earth as their main aesthetic (and ethical27) reference point (fig. 2), which the author calls
“the ultimate panorama.”28 In spite of their own carnivalesque aspect, ironic cosmopolitism or new
age humanism, mondo movies, international auteur films and global documentaries respectively
perpetuate “global mythologies: ideological discourses about the world and humanity’s relationship
to it.”29 Roberts maintains that world cinema genre seeks, possibly unconsciously, “to reassert
control over the new multicultural realities of the postcolonial world order:”

  In a postcolonial world order in which First World societies have found themselves increasingly frag-
  mented by Third World immigration, their cultural homogeneity destabilized and contested by the cul-
  tures of their former colonies, the global vision of Baraka [Ron Fricke, 1992] can be seen as a reaction
  to the threat such a world poses to Euro-American cultural authority, which, in reinscribing the world
  within the reassuring field of a Euro-American gaze, seeks to reimpose a neocolonial order on a world
  slipping increasingly beyond its control.30

  Again, allegations of neocolonialism may seem disproportionate. However, Roberts’ argument
exposes the partiality of a gaze and of a cinematic aesthetics that pretend to be innocent and

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disinterested. Can Roberts’ reasoning on world cinema genre be referred to world cinema
theory as well, considering the fact that they both seem to share a similar globalist imagery?
I believe that world cinema makes it possible to point out a sort of osmosis between cinema
as a geographical medium and film theory as cartography. With the term “osmosis” I mean the
overlap of two contiguous discourses, one of which – that of cinema as a geographical medium –
becomes metaphorically and unconsciously implicated by the other – which considers film theory
as cartography.




      Fig. 2 – A recent example from the world cinema genre: Home (Yahn Arthus-Bertrand, 2009).

   The world cinema genre appears to be nostalgic about the world and about a certain way of
looking at it, for instance the geographical gaze of early cinema, epitomized by the whole earth
image. Many scholars noted the primitive geographical penchant of the medium and its mapping
impulse.31 Indeed, cinema emerged in a century that geographically extended “the field of the
visible and the representable,”32 and it established itself “within a context of feverish production
of views of the world, an obsessive labor to process the world as a series of images.”33 This also
played a part in the colonial enterprise: “The cinema’s ability to ‘fly’ spectators around the globe”
flattered “the imperial subject as superior and invulnerable observer.”34 Cinema’s concern was the
transformation of “the obscure mappa mundi into a familiar, knowable world.”35 Cinema used
to function like an atlas, by virtue of a “strong visual and rhetorical connection between cinema
and cartography.”36 World cinema genre, just like – I argue – world cinema theory, is probably
nostalgic for that old link between the medium and cartography, nostalgic for a cartographic
cinema and, in general, for modern cartography.
   A typical feature of the writings that deal with geography and cinema consists in considering
this relationship on two different levels, which are precisely the ones taken in into account here.
For the economy of this paper, the question could be simplified by saying that, first, cinema is
geographical because of its realism and its ability to represent the (whole) world, since every
film contributes for its part to the great archive of the visible, to the cinematic description of the
Earth. Second, cinema is geographical because of its peculiar regional and national production
and distribution; in other words, because of its possibility of being represented as the world
by film history and criticism. These two aspects are sometimes intermingled, and the second
one is possibly a consequence of the first. One can trace them even in Kino und Erdkunde by


                                                                                                  103
Giorgio Avezzù

Hermann Häfker (1914), which is probably the first book on the subject: films are geographical
because of their photographic basis, but they are able to provide the necessary view of the whole
world (Weltblick) only when inserted in a global framework by the scholar.37 This amphiboly
of the connection between cinema and geography is also evident in the two seminal series of
articles edited by British Film Academy Director Roger Manvell, published in The Geographical
Magazine of the Royal Geographical Society since 1953. While the first series consists of several
articles on national cinemas (i.e. cinema as the object of cartography), the second series analyzes
the way documentary film has been used to describe the British Commonwealth territories and the
United States (i.e. cinema as the subject of cartography, and the world as the object of cinematic
cartography).38
   The same two aspects can be found in recent books that collect both articles promoting a large
transnational analytical perspective on contemporary cinema and articles hoping for the emergence
of new global documentaries able to visually map “new social and aesthetic spaces” and so to
account for the “new world (image) order.”39 It is possible to trace this continuous rhetorical and
aesthetic correspondence, or osmosis, between cartography of cinema and cartographic cinema
also in the recent volume Theorizing World Cinema. The theoretical frame is the worldist one
examined before, but it is interesting how the theme of film realism is particularly highlighted
among the collected essays, like in the article in which Tiago de Luca considers a new “realist
tendency [that] has surfaced on the world cinema map,” spanning from Iran to Thailand, Mexico,
Hungary, Taiwan, Argentina, China, Russia, USA, Portugal, Turkey and Spain.40
   My point is that the fascination for world cinema, even if it cannot be labeled as neocolonialist,
shows some reactionary traits. First, it attempts to conduct a single (but “fluid”) discourse on the
whole Earth, mostly from the vantage point of Western academia. While in a very prudent manner,
it fails to acknowledge the crisis of authority of that global kind of gaze – the same gaze that,
for example, postmodernist anthropology dismisses: “There is no longer any place of overview
(mountaintop) from which to map human ways of life, no Archimedian point from which to
represent the world.”41 Second, it reaffirms the belief in a privileged geographical relationship
between the cinema and the world, in both the cases we have discussed, as if the medium was
still supposed to give a “nouvelle connaissance du monde”42 like many decades ago. A similar
cartographic preoccupation can be explained by considering that digital production can pose – or
be perceived as – a threat to the referentiality of cinema, just like informal digital distribution can
threaten the mappability of film circulation. On close examination, this is indeed what resonates in
Andrew’s words: “Today, amidst digital confections tempting filmmakers and audiences to escape
into the air of the virtual, world cinema brings us back to the earth, this earth on which many
worlds are lived and perceived concurrently.”43
   Moreover, insistently and unproblematically resorting to a cartographic language, world
cinema theory reveals a nostalgia for geography in general. This precisely happens in an epoch
when the geographical discipline, which was at the core of the idea of modernity, is undergoing
major transformations. Critical geography has been deconstructing the cartographical discourse
since the 1980s, showing its fallacious and non-objective character, and its systematic and inevitable
complicity in knowledge and power issues.44 Basically, geography is always geopolitics for all intents
and purposes, or as Yves Lacoste said, a strategic discipline. Geopolitik, as Franco Farinelli maintains,
was just the first form of geography openly addressed to the political control of the world.45


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  On a broader scale, it has to be noted that world cinema emerges as a theoretical approach in
an era of “crisis of the cartographic reason,” that is when the foundations on which Westerners
used to think about and to understand themselves and the Earth – which according to Farinelli are
cartographic – are shaking. The model of the map would not be useful anymore to comprehend
the functioning of the world, because the world itself, that is every social, economical, political,
cultural relation, has recently slipped into an area of unmappable invisibility.46 Perhaps, this very
crisis may be discovered even in some filmic texts: it is possible to spot some contemporary films
that critically represent maps, which could be considered as symbols of the “cartographic reason
of cinema,” and others that challenge the “god’s trick” of aerial view, which was a “cartographic
shape” of cinema according to Teresa Castro.47
  The world cinema “perspective” has a symptomatic and compensative quality in contemporary
culture. Promoting a cartographic view on cinema from all over the globe through a specific
rhetoric and aesthetics, it allegorizes the geographical gaze of cinema and its modernist mission
of making the whole world visible and comprehensible, of conceiving it as an image and “as
exhibition.”48 By putting “the world before you”49 once again, world cinema tries to overcome a
crisis of authority and of representation, at the very moment when, to quote Heidegger’s words,
contemporary world “withdraws into a space beyond representation.”50




1   Siegfried Kracauer, “The Biography as an Art Form of the New Bourgeoisie,” in Id., The Mass Ornament:
    Weimar Essays, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA)-London, 1995, pp. 101-102, originally in
    Frankfurter Zeitung, 29 June 1930. And Id., “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies,” in Id., The Mass
    Ornament, cit., pp. 291-304, p. 299, originally in Frankfurter Zeitung, 11-19 March 1927. The second
    quotation echoes in Kracauer’s criticism of Walter Ruttmann’s Melodie der Welt (1929): “His ‘world
    melody’ is void of content, because his concern with the whole of the world leads him to disregard the
    specific content of each of the assembled melodies.” See Id., From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological
    History of the German Film, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1947, p. 209. However, his opinion
    about the role of cinema in representing the whole world and the “family of man” seems notably changed
    in Id., Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, Oxford University Press, London-New York
    1960.
2   On world cinema as a “methodology,” see, e.g., Lúcia Nagib, “Towards a Positive Definition of World
    Cinema,” in Stephanie Dennison, Song Hwee Lim (eds.), Remapping World Cinema, Wallflower, London
    2006, p. 35; Id., “Situating World Cinema as a Theoretical Problem,” in Id. (eds.), Remapping World
    Cinema, cit., p. 6; Annette Kuhn, Catherine Grant, “Screening World Cinema,” in Id. (eds.), Screening
    World Cinema: The Screen Reader, Routledge, Abingdon-New York 2006, p. 2. About its adequacy
    to a new “enormous multinational system,” see for example Shohini Chaudhuri, Contemporary World
    Cinema: Europe, The Middle East, East Asia and South Asia, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh
    2005, p. 2. On the “geopolitical imaginary of cinema studies” and on the relation between transnational
    film theory and capitalist world-economy, see Nataša Ďurovičová, Kathleen Newman (eds.), World
    Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, Routledge, New York-Abingdon 2010.
3   Dudley Andrew, “An Atlas of World Cinema,” in Framework, vol. 45, no. 2, Fall 2004, pp. 9-10.
4   Idem, pp. 10-19
5   Idem, pp. 18-19.
6   Idem, p. 19.
7   Lúcia Nagib, “Towards a Positive Definition of World Cinema,” cit., p. 35.
8   Ibidem.

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Giorgio Avezzù

9     Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “General Introduction,” in Id. (ed.), The Oxford History of World Cinema,
      Oxford University Press, Oxford-New York 1997, p. xx.
10    Ibidem. The emphasis on polycentrism in the world cinema approach descends from Ella Shohat, Robert
      Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, Routledge, London-New York 1994,
      pp. 46-49.
11    Dudley Andrew, “An Atlas of World Cinema,” cit., p. 9.
12    Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “General Introduction,” cit., p. xx.
13    Dudley Andrew, “An Atlas of World Cinema,” cit., 15.
14    Stephanie Dennison, Song Hwee Lim, “Situating World Cinema as a Theoretical Problem,” cit., p. 1 and
      p. 9.
15    Annette Kuhn, Catherine Grant, “Screening World Cinema,” cit., pp. 2-3.
16    Julianne Burton-Carvajal, “Marginal Cinemas and Mainstream Critical Theory,” in Annette Kuhn,
      Catherine Grant (eds.), Screening World Cinema, cit., p. 19, originally in Screen, vol. 26, nos. 3-4, 1985,
      pp. 2-21.
17    Teshome H. Gabriel, “Colonialism and ‘Law and Order’ Criticism,” in Annette Kuhn, Catherine Grant,
      (eds.), Screening World Cinema, cit., p. 36, originally in Screen, vol. 27, nos. 3-4, 1986, pp. 140-147.
18    Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “General Introduction,” cit., p. xxi.
19    Ibidem.
20    Edward W. Said, Orientalism, Vintage Books, New York 1978, pp. 4-5.
21    Time selected the Apollo 8 crew as “men of the year,” in 1968, “not only for the dazzling technology
      of their achievement, but for the lager view of our planet and the fundamental unity of man,” in Denis
      Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space Photographs,” in
      Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 84, no. 2, 1994, p. 284.
22    Idem, p. 287. And Id., Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in Western Imagination, The
      Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2001, p. 263.
23    Jeremy Crampton, “Cartography’s Defining Moment: The Peters Projection Controversy, 1974-1990,” in
      Cartographica, vol. 31, no. 4, 1994, pp. 16-32.
24    Denis Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions,” cit., p. 278.
25    Idem, p. 270. See also Id., Apollo’s Eye, cit.
26    Martin Roberts, “Baraka: World Cinema and the Global Culture Industry,” in Cinema Journal, vol. 37,
      no. 3, Spring 1998, p. 63. Actually, Roberts sketches a comparison between world cinema genre and
      world cinema literature (namely the BFI book World Cinema: Diary of a Day) in the last chapter of his
      article, pp. 76-77.
27    On this aspect, see also how Peter Singer resorts to the whole Earth imagery in Id., One World: The
      Ethics of Globalization, Yale University Press, New Haven-London 2002, on the front cover and in his
      conclusions, p. 201: “The twentieth century’s conquest of space made it possible for a human being to
      look at our planet from a point not on it, and so to see it, literally, as one world.”
28    Martin Roberts, “Baraka: World Cinema and the Global Culture Industry,” cit., p. 75.
29    Idem, p. 62.
30    Idem, p. 78.
31    Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, Verso, London-New
      York 2002, p. 241; Teresa Castro, “Cinema’s Mapping Impulse: Questioning Visual Culture,” in The
      Cartographic Journal, vol. 46, no. 1, 2009, pp. 9-15.
32    Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in Teresa de Lauretis, Stephen Heat (eds.), The Cinematic
      Apparatus, St. Martin’s, New York 1980, p. 122.
33    Tom Gunning, “‘The Whole World within Reach’: Travel Images without Borders,” in Jeffrey Ruoff (ed.),
      Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, Duke University Press, Durham-London, p. 32, previously in Roland
      Cosandey, Francois Albera (eds.), Cinéma sans frontières, 1896-1918. Aspects de l’internationalité dans
      le cinéma mondial: représentations, marchés, influences et reception, Payot-Nuit Blanche, Lausanne-
      Québec 1995, pp. 21-36.
34    Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, cit., p. 104.


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35 Idem, p. 106.
36 Teresa Castro, “Cinema’s Mapping Impulse,” cit., p. 10. See also Eadem, La Pensée cartographiques des
   images. Cinéma et culture visuelle, Aléas, Lyon 2011. On the relationship between cinema and the atlas
   see pp. 157-211.
37 See Hermann Häfker, Kino und Erdkunde, Volksvereins-Verlag, München-Gladbach 1914. Even if
   Häfker does not cite Ptolemy’s work, he believes in the Ptolemaic idea of geography as the description of
   the whole Earth, p. 10: “Erdkunde ist ja nicht das Wissen von einem Teil der Erde als solchem, sondern
   von ihrer Ganzheit.”
38 The first series (1953-55) with articles on French, British, American, Scandinavian, Italian, German,
   Soviet, Indian and Japanese cinemas is presented by Roger Manvell, “The Geography of Film-making,”
   in The Geographical Magazine, vol. 25, no. 12, April 1953, pp. 640-650. The second series (1956-58)
   with articles on “documentary films” shot in Australia, Canada, United States and in the British Overseas
   Territories, is presented by Id., “Geography and the Documentary Film,” in The Geographical Magazine,
   vol. 29, no. 9, pp. 417-422.
39 John Hess, Patricia R. Zimmermann, “Transnational Documentaries: A Manifesto,” in Elizabeth Ezra,
   Terry Rowden (eds.), Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, Routledge, Abingdon-New York 2006, p.
   97, previously in Afterimage, vol. 24, no. 4, 1997, pp. 10-14. The authors quote Jameson’s work, in the
   belief that cinema can map the global social totality of late capitalism. However, they intend this in a very
   literal (and not allegorical) sense and, above all, they seem to ignore the essential impossibility of this
   task and the unrepresentability of the world system postulated by Jameson himself. See Fredric Jameson,
   Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, Durham 1991, and
   Id., The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, Indiana University Press-BFI,
   Bloomington-Indianapolis-London 1992.
40 Tiago de Luca, “Realism of the Senses: A Tendency in Contemporary World Cinema,” in Lúcia Nagib,
   Chris Perriam, Rajinder Dudrah (eds.), Theorizing World Cinema, I.B. Tauris, London-New York 2012,
   pp. 183-205.
41 James Clifford, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in James Clifford, George E. Marcus (eds.), Writing
   Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, University of California Press, Berkeley-Los Angeles-
   London 1986, p. 22.
42 Pierre Leprohon, L’Exotisme et le cinéma. Les “chasseurs d’images” à la conquête du monde…, J.
   Susse, Paris 1945, p. 281-298.
43 Dudley Andrew, “An Atlas of World Cinema,” cit., p. 21. Left aside the extensive question of referentiality,
   on the informal distribution, see Ramon Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film
   Distribution, Palgrave Macmillan-British Film Institute, London 2012.
44 See, e.g., Brian Harley’s essays posthumously collected in John Brian Harley, The New Nature of Maps:
   Essays in the History of Cartography, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2001; Denis
   Wood, The Power of Maps, The Guilford Press, New York-London 1992; John Pickles, A History of
   Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World, Routledge, London-New York 2004.
   And also Derek Gregory’s chapter on “Geography and the Cartographic Anxiety,” in Id., Geographical
   Imaginations, Blackwell, Cambridge (Mass.)-Oxford 1994, pp. 70-205.
45 See Franco Farinelli, I segni del mondo. Immagine cartografica e discorso geografico in età moderna, La
   Nuova Italia, Firenze 2000, p. 249.
46 See Franco Farinelli, Geografia. Un’introduzione ai modelli del mondo, Einaudi, Torino 2003, and Id.,
   La crisi della ragione cartografica, Einaudi, Torino 2009.
47 I have tried to address these topics in Giorgio Avezzù, “Sulla crisi della ragione cartografica del cinema,”
   in Fata Morgana, no. 19, 2013 159-168, and Id., “La diserzione dello sguardo. Appunti sulla sorte
   dell’immagine aerea nel cinema contemporaneo,” in Annali online dell’Università di Ferrara. Sezione
   Lettere, vol. 6, nos. 1-2, 2011, pp. 262-295. On the aerial view as a “cartographic shape of cinema,” see
   Teresa Castro, La Pensée cartographiques des images, cit., pp. 95-155.
48 See Timothy Mitchell, “The World as Exhibition,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol.
   31, no. 2, 1989, pp. 217-236. See, e.g., p. 227: “The experience of the world as a picture set up before a


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   subject is linked to the unusual conception of the world as an enframed totality, something that forms a
   structure or system.” See also D. Gregory’s chapter on “Geography and the world-as-exhibition,” in Id.,
   Geographical Imaginations, cit., pp. 15-69. On cinema and the “world as exhibition”, see Ella Shohat,
   Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, cit., p. 108.
49 The motto “We Put the World Before You” of the Charles Urban Company, often cited as emblematic of
   the cartographic reason of cinema by Teresa Castro, fascinated also Hermann Häfker: see Id. Kino und
   Erdkunde, cit., p. 16.
50 Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Id., Off the Beaten Track, Cambridge University
   Press, Cambridge-New York 2002 (1950), p. 71.




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