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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Preface
Text.Serial.Journal
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Introduction
2013-03-01
2021-09-06
2013-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Tim Bergfelder
2013/03/01
University of Southampton
2036-461X
20
en
Preface
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16266/14486
13
PREFACE
Tim Bergfelder, University of Southampton




   Following the psychoanalytic and poststructuralist debates of the 1970s, and the New Film
History of the 1980s and early 1990s, one of the key concerns in the study of film over the past
fifteen years has been what one may call the geopolitical or the topographical turn. Instead of
attempting to define the essence of film (according to the old medium specificity paradigms), the
more important problem to solve has become how to locate the space, or rather the spaces, of
cinema.1 In order to answer that question, one needs, in the first instance, to engage with the multiple
consequences of the proliferation of media platforms, of new modes of production, circulation,
distribution and consumption since the end of the 20th century. While digital moving images are
seemingly everywhere, from iPhones to YouTube and Netflix to in-flight entertainment, cinema
in the traditional sense of a fixed space of theatrical exhibition has become an ancillary function.
Film studies methodology has adapted to these changes, branching out into research investigating
developments and new practices of production in an expanded field of creative industries, as
well as studies into distribution and consumption in the digital age. Topics include areas such as
production research, film policy at national and supranational levels, investigations into the rise
and fall and rise of 3D, the ubiquity of film festivals, the prevalence of piracy and other forms
of informal distribution,2 the reading strategies of audiences, and the creative activities of virtual
cinephile and fan communities.
   Apart from untying itself from an exclusive bind to the cinema, what Francesco Casetti has
referred to as the medium’s “relocation,”3 film studies in the past fifteen years has attempted
to unmoor itself from other spatial paradigms, especially where these map onto pre-conceived
differences in aesthetics, politics and cultural value. Thus, old hierarchical categorizations and
schematic divisions such as Hollywood/mainstream cinema, European/art cinema, and Third
Cinema/political resistance have become increasingly problematized and challenged. Instead,
the last decade has seen a championing of the cinema at the periphery,4 the cinema of small,
and often hitherto overlooked nations and regions,5 and more generally a call to de-Westernize
our understanding of film.6 But apart from such simultaneously de-centring and localizing
strategies and practices, there have also been attempts to understand more interactive and more
global, but less clearly bounded, processes. These have been grouped under a range of contested
categories, of which “world cinema”7 and “transnational cinema”8 have arguably become the most
ubiquitous. The former category, in particular, has been employed in variety of contradictory and
often mutually incompatible ways: from designating a cinematic version of the old Enlightenment
ideal of a universal cultural reference point (i.e. the idea of Weltliteratur) to meaning anything that

Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIII, no. 20, Spring 2013                                                         11
Tim Bergfelder

lies outside the traditional duality of Hollywood mainstream and European art cinema, and thus
precisely not being part of the (established) canon.
   In a similar way, transnational cinema has been seen by some scholars as a means to challenge
the very essence of the concept of national cinema itself and by extension to critique the
discourses of identity and exclusivity that give rise to national(ist) narratives. In this reading of
the transnational, then, hybrid and/or cosmopolitan identities, perspectives, and cultural practices
are championed for their transformative progressive potential. For other scholars these very same
transformations are seen as paving the way towards cultural homogenization and in the service of
capitalist and neo-imperialist globalization, which can only be resisted through bolstering national
defense mechanisms. In a different reading of the term, the transnational is being employed as
a more circumscribed strategy to identify types of film and filmmakers that cannot otherwise
be contained by ordinary national criteria (and thereby maintaining the normativity of national
formations) – for example, the cinemas of (or featuring) migrants, diasporic communities, and
ethnic minorities.
   As these complex debates attest, the question of where cinema is located is inherently political,
as Fredric Jameson already noted in what must now be regarded as one the pioneering studies in
the field,9 but it is also always, as Michael J. Shapiro has insisted on, a question of aesthetics.10
All the contributors to this special issue of Cinéma & Cie maintain a focus on the politics of
aesthetics, while also illuminating the specific contexts of new forms of production, circulation
and consumption. Delphine Wehrli, Jakob Nilsson, and Giorgio Avezzù offer more general
theoretical reflections on the nature of cinema’s geopolitics. In bringing into dialogue the work
of Jameson and György Lukács in her essay, and arguing how the former’s understanding of
the term “totality” can be employed to make sense of postcolonial film practices, Wehrli’s essay
reminds us that much of our current assumptions about the function and uses of cinema (and
art more generally) can be traced back to earlier theoretical arguments. Avezzù’s contribution,
meanwhile, usefully elucidates how much the rhetoric and aesthetics of world cinema remains
indebted to the conceptual and metaphorical insights from classic cartography, carrying with it
the legacy of colonialism and imperialism. In a similar vein, Jakob Nilsson employs Jameson’s
famous notion of cognitive mapping to re-envision and re-contextualise the history of “third
cinema”. In many of the articles, specific local case studies are brought into contact with broader
global concerns. Dudley Andrew’s essay on the extraordinary trajectory of Korean cinema from
being a film culture barely known outside its borders for most of its history to becoming, almost
overnight, a central plank of a new “world cinema canon” draws attention to the ambivalent
consequences of this supposed “success,” where a greater visibility in the global arena might
coincide with a weakened ability of a national cinema to reflect, in a political sense, on its own
local context. As a both domestically and increasingly internationally successful form of non-
Hollywood popular mainstream cinema, Bollywood has frequently been an anomaly in traditional
cartographies of world cinema. Alexandra Schneider’s essay articulates these problems by drawing
on Franco Moretti’s intervention in redefining a contemporary notion of the Enlightenment ideal
of Weltliteratur, adopting a method of comparative film analysis that relies on the insights from
both the social sciences and the humanities. Angela Prysthon’s contribution about the renaissance
of regional filmmaking movements in Brazil highlights the doubly peripheral nature of these
endeavours, while demonstrating that these practices nevertheless are unthinkable without a


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                                                                                              PREFACE

dialogue that connects them to broader trends in global filmmaking. Moving from strictly national
parameters to the importance of regional networks, Natalie Boehler’s essay offers insights on
how contemporary Southeast Asian independent filmmakers navigate national, regional, and
supranational opportunities, in order to promote their often anti-imperialist or otherwise politically
engaged cinematic visions. Finally, Valerio Coladonato and Ilaria De Pascalis’s contributions
chart the transnational dimensions in European and North American cinema, respectively.
Taken together, this special issue of Cinéma & Cie not only manifests the multiple centrifugal
and centripetal forces that drive global filmmaking practices, but also illustrates the complex
theoretical and methodological approaches that can be brought to bear on their understanding.



1  See also Vinzenz Hediger, “What Do We Know When We Know Where Something Is? World
   Cinema and the Question of Spatial Ordering,” Screening the Past, no. 37, October 2013, http://www.
   screeningthepast.com/2013/10/what-do-we-know-when-we-know-where-something-is-world-cinema-
   and-the-question-of-spatial-ordering/, last visit 24 November 2013.
2 Ramon Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution, Palgrave
   Macmillan, London 2012.
3 Francesco Casetti, “The Relocation of Cinema,” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, no. 2,
   Autumn 2012, http://www.necsus-ejms.org/the-relocation-of-cinema/, last visit 24 November 2013.
4 Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones, Belén Vidal (eds.), Cinema at the Periphery, Wayne State
   University Press, Detroit 2010.
5 Mette Hjort, Duncan Petrie (eds.), The Cinema of Small Nations, Indiana University Press, Bloomington
   2008.
6 Saër Maty Bâ, Will Higbee (eds.), De-Westernizing Film Studies, Routledge, Abingdon-New York 2012.
   See also: Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media,
   Routledge, London-New York 1994.
7 Stephanie Dennison, Song Hwee Lim (eds.), Remapping World Cinemas: Identity Culture and Politics in
   Film, Wallflower, London-New York 2006.
8 See, e.g., Elizabeth Ezra, Terry Towden (eds.), Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, Routledge,
   Abingdon-New York 2005; Patricia Pisters, Wim Staat (eds.), Shooting The Family: Transnational
   Media and Intercultural Values, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2005; Katarzyna Marciniak,
   Anikó Imre, Áine O’Healy (eds.), Transnational Feminism in Film and Media, Palgrave Macmillan, New
   York 2008; Nataša Ďurovičová, Kathleen Newman (eds.), World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives,
   Routledge, London-New York 2010.
9 Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, Indiana University
   Press, Bloomington 1992.
10 Michael J. Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics, Routledge, London-New York 2009.




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