Witnessing Women: Quo Vadis, Cinema?

The essay explores how two women filmmakers, each deploying her unique vision through the perspective of a female protagonist, stage a transformative encounter with the act of bearing witness to genocide. The Diary of Diana B. (Dnevnik Diane Budisavljević, 2019, Croatia) directed by Dana Budisavljević, and Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020, Bosnia-Herzegovina), directed by Jasmila Žbanić, both compel us to bear witness to mass atrocities while avoiding the pitfalls of turning suffering into a spectacle, and by sidestepping the predictable cinematic conventions of redemption and closure, both formally and narratively. In my analysis of the films as anti-spectacles through the framework of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s ‘speaking nearby’, I argue for the concept of ‘women’s world cinema’, a kind of cinema that is made by women, speaks to women’s experiences, and/or addresses the spectator as female while also speaking nearby instead of about its subjects in ways that eschew conventional spectatorial alignments and co-optations of traumatic experience.

Certain Women Directors: US Independent Filmmakers in the World

This article analyzes the work of Chloé Zhao and its reception in order to explore the role of female auteurs in 21st century world cinema. By comparing Zhao to Kelly Reichardt, another US director acclaimed internationally for distinctive works of US regional realism, the essay argues that US independent women directors critique American cultural hegemony and the global dominance of Hollywood both through the subject matter and formal structures of their films and through their positioning within the discourse of world cinema auteurism. After analyzing the authorial personae of both directors as constructed in their films and press reception, the essay offers close readings of Reichardt’s Certain Women and Zhao’s The Rider, both set in the US West, with specific attention to the perspectives of central Native American characters. The readings demonstrate how the filmmakers use realism to locate a singular, gendered authorial perspective on the world.

Where in the World are Chinese Women Filmmakers? Transnational China and World Cinema in the Twenty-First Century

Transnational Chinese women filmmakers reflect the enormous changes happening in the global film industry as well as political, economic, technological, social, and cultural transformations taking place in the region since the beginning of the millennium. An analysis of Hong Kong writer-director Aubrey Lam’s Anna & Anna (2007) uncovers how this film explores the divided psyche of a woman torn between “two systems” that model femininity for women in Singapore and Shanghai in the 21st century. Lam’s narrative touches on issues central to the work of many women working across the Chinese-speaking world including migration, labor relations, postcolonial and postsocialist identities, commodification of female bodies in consumer culture, cross-border sexualities, female desire and domesticity.

Worlding Cinema

Against the narrowly commercial and homogenising term ‘world cinema’ that lumps together a diversity of ‘foreign’ films as a category, the notion of ‘the local’ relativizes the idea of the ‘national’ as a singular entity. It suggests the pivoting around each other of ‘there’ and ‘here,’ thereby avoiding precisely fixed locations and calling on the dynamism of their relationship. The local, captures not only particular geo-political locations but historical relationships, which, interacting with changing conditions, produce the shifting frameworks of thinking, feeling, experience, and aesthetic perception that shape local practices, traditions, and cultural forms. However, this specificity is often called on to endorse an authenticity uncontaminated by metropolitan sophistication or global uniformity, enabling local products to travel to an elsewhere beyond national boundaries. The value of ‘world’ over ‘global’ lies in its call on the space shared by many different nationals, whereas ‘global’ suggests the homogenisation enforced by multi-national corporate and neo-colonial Western powers. As an alternative concept, ‘trans-national’ applied to cinema has the virtue of acknowledging the existence of nationally defined geo-historical and cultural differences as well as the reality of cross-border migration of personnel, technologies, and films, along with the complexity of international co-production. However, if the term keeps the idea of the ‘national’ in place, the boundaries it marks are neither natural nor fixed. If local film genres and narrative forms function as public sites in which aesthetic histories, cultural frames of reference and social experiences feed and negotiate with each other, the question arises how far the trans-national intensification of this activity now produces a new space for an emergent ‘world imaginary’: the idea of a shared ‘world’.

Answers

The answers below touch on three different meanings of world cinema. First, world cinema is the acknowledgement of an existing cinema originated in the diversity of geographical and cultural contexts from all over the globe and expresses the rise of multiple local cinemas on a common international scene. Second, world cinema denotes to the films that proved to be recognizable as artistically valuable through these channels (festivals, critics, niche distributors) and conveys the idea that only certain types of films would be accepted on the international scene. And third, world cinema relates to a more specific type of films, that are not so many but gives a particular visibility to an immensely vast phenomenon with films that are either “without borders”, or mixing various origins and references. By keeping these in mind, the research on world cinema should be issue based, acknowledging de vast rainbow of various ways to make cinema, related with socio-economical and cultural contexts, political environment, inscription in various aspects of history of cinema aesthetics and other artistic and cultural means of expressions, local, regional and global. The films of world cinema are, or at least should be objects of research, objects of thinking, but also if not primarily objects of love.

World Cinema Will not Work

In this essay, I engage with the concept of ‘world cinema,’ identifying ways in which the term ‘world’ might always already come loaded with masculine and, in particular, white connotations, such that a turn to ‘world cinema’ runs the risk of reaffirming the centrality of masculinity and whiteness—at a time when, perhaps it is of utmost importance, for the sake of the continuation of human and other life, to challenge and perhaps even to negate that centrality. What applies to ‘world’ (which may be a shorthand for white masculinity) may also apply to cinema, and so it is that cinema and white masculinity alike that must be abandoned for human life on Earth to progress. To propose a turn to world cinema may thus not ‘work’ as a means to develop film studies in an ethical, more inclusive direction, since both world and cinema are by nature exclusive, rather than inclusive.

Putting the World Back into World Cinema

The world envisioned by the idea of world cinema is often tied to a conception of the planet in terms of the global circulation of films and networks of production, consumption and distribution. This article argues for the need to confront the world as a representational and aesthetic category in and of itself.

World Cinema, vod Platforms and the Western Demand

The article explores the concept of world cinema as an other to global cinema from a marketing perspective. Special attention is given to the way the world cinema universe is presented on video-on-demand platforms in Western markets. To demonstrate that the stories, scope and concerns of this universe vary according to marketing objectives, the article compares presentations on three platforms with contrasting business models and marketing algorithms: Netflix, Filmin, and FilmDoo. This leads to an important conclustion: presentations on platforms with an apparently more ethical business model are not necessarily more progressive and more advantageous to world cinema in terms of avoiding its “genre-fication”.