An Atlas of World Cinema-Andrew

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Framework: Te Journal of Cinema and Media

Volume 45 | Issue 2 Article 2

1-9-2013

An Atlas of World CinemaDudley AndrewYale University

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Recommended CitationAndrew, Dudley (2004) "An Atlas of World Cinema," Framework: Te Journal of Cinema and Media: Vol. 45: Iss. 2, Article 2.Available at: hp://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/framework/vol45/iss2/2
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The term world cinemais now permanently with us: in our classes, our text-books, the popular press. It names the global reach of Hollywood, begin-ning with Jaws (Steven Spielberg, U.S.A., 1975) and Star Wars (GeorgeLucas, U.S.A., 1977), and it names the resistance to Hollywood evident inthe GATT debates a decade ago. Sometimes post-colonial critics mobilize

the term, as nations vie for recognition at film festivals. World cinemareplaces the foreign art film, which first slipped through heavily guardeduniversity doors in the 1960s. We used to teach foreign films as autonomousmasterworks in film as art courses or as addenda to the sanctionednational literatures. Today national literature departments are shrinkingwhile the number of films begging for study and the places they come fromincreases. The old ways do justice neither to this variety, nor to the inter-national interdependence of images. The rubric that I, like so many others,employed for years, Survey of film, does an injustice to the situation and

to students. For a survey suggests a distant gaze, panoptically monitoringthe foreign for our convenience and use.

Any study of World Cinema, however, should instead be ready to travelmore than to oversee, should put students inside unfamiliar conditions ofviewing rather than bringing the unfamiliar handily to them. This is thepedagogical promise of world cinema, a manner of treating foreign films sys-tematically, transcending the vagaries of taste; taking the measure of theforeign in what is literally a freshly recognized global dimension. Such anapproach examines overriding factors, then zeroes in on specific cinema

sitesprovides coordinates for navigating this world of world cinema. No

An Atlas of World CinemaDudley Andrew

Framework45, No. 2, Fall 2004, pp. 923Copyright 2004 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309


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need to dock in every port as if on a tour du mondewith some Michelinguide textbook. Displacement, not coverage, matters most; let us travelwhere we will so long as every local cinema is examined with an eye to its

complex ecology.Why not conceive an atlas of types of maps, each providing a differentorientation to unfamiliar terrain, bringing out different aspects, elements,and dimensions? Each approach, or map, models a type of view: hence, theAtlas. Film festivals long ago came up with a basic map as they sought topproducts to be put in competition each year as in a Miss Universe contest.For a long while the cognoscenti did little more than push colored pinsonto a map to locate the national origin of masterpieces. This appreciationof cut flowers adorned film study in its first years but required a more sys-

tematic account (call it botanical or ecological) of the vitality of privilegedexamples. What political and cultural soil nourished these films and theirmakers? Todays impulsemore ambitious because more dynamic andcomparativewould track a process of cross-pollination that bypassesnational directives. To begin to encompass all the material in this confus-ing field of study, an historical atlas would seem a sensible first step. Yet acourse or anthology looking out to world cinema should be neither agazetteer nor an encyclopedia, futilely trying to do justice to cinematic lifeeverywhere. Its essays and materials should instead model a set of

approaches, just as an atlas of maps opens up a continent to successiveviews: political, demographic, linguistic, topographical, meteorological,marine, historical.

I. Political Maps

Pushing pins onto a spread of countries marked by borders has its uses. Inhigh school all of us poured over successive shapes of world power: theGreeks, the Romans, various barbarian kingdoms, Islams arms reaching

through Africa and girdling Europe. What would a map of cinematic powershow? With global feature film output at around 3,000 titles a year, wemight indicate filmmaking hotspots using a gray-scale of production den-sity that could be keyed to Hollywooda dark constant. Competitorswould be variably less dark: since 1930 France has put out over 100 featuresa year, except during the German occupation. Japan, more like 300. AndIndia, at least since the 1950s, has increased from 300 to its current 800.The surprise would be Egypt, Turkey, and Greece, all making hundreds offilms each year after WWII until television undercut them in the eighties.

Were one to graph world output at ten-year intervals, significant pulsationswould appear: Brazilian production, for instance, phases in and out withshifts in government; Hong Kong emerges with Run Run Shaws operationin the fifties, then dominates East Asia after the seventies; and of course

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there is Iran. Like Mali and Burkina Faso in West Africa, Iran in the 1980ssurges ahead of surrounding nations.

Iran and Burkina Faso remind us, however, that national prestige in

cinema comes more by way of critical assessment and festival performancethan by sheer quantity of titles. It was Abbas Kiarostami and Idrissa Oue-draogo who put these nations on the map at Cannes. Similarly Edward Yangand Hou Hsiao-Hsien raised Taiwan to a par with Hong Kong (they receiveequal space in theEncyclopedia of Chinese Filmand in The Oxford History ofWorld Cinema) despite Taiwans lesser output and popularity. Nor can weforget Denmark, which this past decade has become a European colossuscompared to Germany despite being out-produced annually by a factor ofthree. As a first, clarifying step, we need to analyze production and prestige

across the century, with particular attention to the years since 1975, whenworld cinemacame to attention as such.

II. Demographic Maps

Apportioning the worlds 3,000 annual feature films by place of originmakes the globe appear to spin more smoothly than it really does. For Hol-lywoods lopsided economic mass (bags of box office receipts returning toit from nearly everywhere but India) pulls it out of true. Such domination

of distribution includes both theatrical exhibition and video dissemination(except for the black market economy rampant particularly in Africa,China, and the Slavic countries). To represent not the production, but theavailability of images region by region, the grayscale no longer suffices.These displays must be chromatic: red daubs for Hollywood films playingin theaters and taking up space on video shelves, blue for indigenousimages. Speckles of yellow and green would suggest diversityyellow forimages imported from neighboring countries, green for those comingfrom afar. Take Ireland, a European country with very high per capita

attendance. Lately Hollywood has colonized some 76% of its screen spaceand time; local productions (over 20 films a year) never garner more than4%. The rest of the films come mainly from the UK (15%) and other com-mon market countries. Now in France, Hollywood has lately dipped to 50%(and briefly below that figure) for the first time in two decades. The Frenchhave a taste for Italian and Asian films, but mainly their own products pre-vail, set up by intensive promotions and economic incentives.

Since the real film wars have been waged less over production thanover competition for audiences (i.e. distribution), demographic studies

serve as military maps in strategy sessions in the boardrooms of CEOs andcultural ministers. Nation-states have frequently protected their workforceand the minds of their citizens from carefully calculated foreign invasion.Unlike literary fiction where the native product has been provisionally

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secure behind the Great Wall of the native language, films from the outsetwere primed to invade foreign screens. The Lumire brothers dispatchedcamera crews around the world before their invention was two years old,

showing films shot in one place to audiences in another. And Path, asRichard Abel has shown, was a feared imperial image power by 1913, withoffices everywhere.1 Taken to be an international concern, Path provokedlocal competitors to call upon loyalty to national cinema. Critics wereenlisted to invent and uphold something newly baptized, the Americancinema, the Japanese cinema, etc. By 1920 Hollywood had replacedFrance as the Empire of Images. The tables now turned, the Parisian pressof the 1920s invented a national tradition of French cinema that demanded(as it does today) the support of the government and of citizen-spectators.

Nationalists imagine a simple competition between our images andtheirs. However, following Fredric Jameson, we should be alert to a dialecticthat often produces a synthetic form combining both.2 For example, thename of the key compromise form in France of the twenties is narrativeavant-garde. Narrative signals the common shape given to films every-where by Griffith and Ince, while avant-garde announces the native aes-thetic impulse that made France the center of successive movements in fic-tion and the fine arts from impressionism to symbolism, cubism, andbeyond. The overall study of French cinema of the twenties, then, should

take imports into account because Hollywood films constituted 50% of theimages occupying the countrys screens; that is, occupying the minds ofthose who made and watched films. It should also consider other importsGerman expressionism, in this casethat provided the French an alterna-tive model to that of Hollywood. By triangulating French cinema in relationto America and Germany, the presumed singularity of a national move-ment can be much more accurately plotted.

No study of French cinema, my own on the 1930s included,3 hasattended to imports in this way. To use Franco Morettis analogy, national

cinema studies have by and large been genealogical trees, one tree percountry.4 Their elaborate root and branch structures are seldom shown asintermingled. A world systems approach, on the other hand, demands a dif-ferent analogy, that of waves, which roll through adjacent cultures whoseproximity to one another promotes propagation that not even triangula-tion can adequately measure. Morettis term attracts one of World Cin-emas best examples: for the New Wavethat buoyed French film in 1959rolled around the world, affecting in different ways and under dissimilarcircumstances the cinema cultures of Britain, Japan, Cuba, Brazil,

Argentina, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and later Taiwan. As weknow, its so-called original undulation in Paris owed much to the Holly-wood films that came ashore behind the Normandy invasion of 1944, liter-ally overwhelming and then rejuvenating a tired French culture. The NewWave passed first through youth fads in fashion, design, and the novel


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before cresting at Cannes in 1959, where its effects were patently interna-tional.

Demographic studies of box office and video-store statistics can devolve

quickly into assessments of audience predilection. Important for somequestions, such sheer sociology generally results in predictable stereotypes.In a survey of 46 countries called Planet Hollywood, Moretti finds what wewould expect: that Asians are drawn to action films, that wealthier nationswatch a lot of childrens films, that comedies are more often homegrown,etc.5 Overviews like this do not begin to give us the feel for the varieties ofcinematic cultures on the planet; one might as well study breakfast cereals.Fortunately, Moretti, a brilliant literary historian, has invented far moreintricate maps.

III. Linguistic Maps

In his Atlas of the European Noveland his five-volume history of the WorldNovel,6 Moretti explicitly puts into play a Darwinian hypothesis that shouldapply to feature films as well. To map the growth and withering of novelis-tic trends around the globe, he employs a law Fredric Jameson also discov-ered in his forays outside Western literature: in cultures that belong to the

periphery of the literary system, the modern novel first arises not as anautonomous development but as a compromise between a western formalinfluence (usually French or English) and local materials.7 Moretti tracksthe itinerary of translations and booksellers from an English/French powersource to literary hotspots springing up later in Russia, India, and so on.This dialectical law nicely accounts for Hollywoods dominance of the formof films made everywhere, especially after Moretti rightly complicates thiscrude form/content binary with a third factor, indigenous local narra-tion.8 For novelists and filmmakers may have learned a successful formula

from Dickens or Griffith, but they adapt it to their cultures experience ina homegrown manner. This manner may well inflect the standard formwith the register of traditional oral or theatrical storytelling. In WestAfrican film, in the Korean hit Chunhyang, in Mizoguchis long-take the-atrical mise-en-scne, the cinema grafts rather than mulches cultural roots.The cohabitation of this (European) medium and local traditions pro-duces compromise film forms that are often as hybrid and ambivalent asthe subjects that such movies represent.

For obvious reasons, Morettis hypothesis about the novel retraces the

colonialist map of cinema as well, a map that Robert Stam and Ella Shohatwork to alter in Unthinking Eurocentrism.9 This first and crucial world cin-ema textbook alerted us to cultural wars fought by underdog peoples withthe guerrilla weapons of cinematic style and theme. Stam and Shohat high-light a set of smart films that have courageously stood up against Eurocen-


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tric global media forces. This political approach, though admirable from amoral perspective, considers alternative productions without addressing ina systematic way the facets of distribution and exhibition that make up cin-

ema culture. Any evolutionary map must account for a wide range of filmscoming from one or another region. In addition to substantial criticalworks, popular genres and failed heritage films must be tallied as well.

This is precisely what Miriam Hansen has proposed in a far-reachingarticle called Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism.10 Classical Hol-lywood, the dominant and dominating force in the entertainment worldfrom WWI at least through the Korean conflict, was always both interna-tional and vernacular in promoting a modernist sensibility that derivedfrom popular rather than official or elite origins. All films minted in Holly-

wood have been ubiquitously accepted as legal currency, stamped with thelogo of Universal Pictures or of Paramounts mountain (which dissolvedinto the Andes in the first frames of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom(Steven Spielberg, U.S.A., 1984)). That currency underwrites a stock mar-ket of stars and a narrative economy that the entire world has apparentlybought into, aside from the fringe markets where Shohat and Stams alter-native films trade. But buying into Classical cinema does not mean digest-ing its values whole, for its universal language breaks apart on national orregional shorelines into a Babel of varied receptions.

I am inclined to take Hansens vocabulary rather more literally thanshe does. Classical cinema would thus be the mediums classical language,that is, Latin. By 1920 Hollywood was, first of all, unapologetically imperial,literally colonizing countries and continents and setting up administrativeinstitutions to govern these. Latin preceded vernacular languages that wereformed through its contact with local ways of speaking, including residualtribal languages. In a similar way, and as Moretti has noted, most nationalcinemas came into existence through a process of differentiation from analready well situated Classical Hollywood. Hansen would call Mexican cin-

ema of the forties, in addition to Shanghai melodramas of the thirties,dialects of a universal vernacular modernism whose cinematic center wasHollywood.11 Because I have my eye on more recent developments, specif-ically on the achievement of putatively homegrown cinemas after 1975 inplaces like West Africa, Ireland, and Mainland China, I am inclined to callthem actual vernaculars, related to, but set against the one universally rec-ognized language of the movies, Classical Hollywoods Latin; no longerspoken purely today in the post-Classical age, but still fondly remembered.

Hansen properly inflates the importance of Hollywood as vernacular

modernism, since this allies it to the power of the high modernism ofProust, Joyce, Picasso, and Le Corbusier, while trumping all these throughits popular appeal. Uncredited, Hollywood participated in the momentumwe attribute to the privileged discourses of art, and it did so internationallyas metropolitan peoples around the globe responded immediately to its


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attractions: speed, narrative disjunction, primacy of the visual, surveillance,excessive stimulation, negotiated ethics, and more. Hollywood, more thanthe intellectual pioneers we always adulate, brought modernism into the

world. But Morettis study of the novel alerts us to watch for the way eachcountry both read and rewrote (in their own productions) this classicalform. A close analysis of key films from any locale should reveal a conflictedcinematic vocabulary and grammar, as an examination of, say, East Asiancinemas today instantly makes clear. Where Hansen insists on a dyadic pat-tern involving Hollywood with each of innumerable peripheral cinemas, Iwould complicate the map by tracing the regional interaction that is par-ticularly visible when storytelling traditions are in focus. Thus a descriptionof Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinema today must include not just their

obvious ways of adopting and transforming Hollywood; it must account forthe presence of various Asian characters in their plots and of Chinese andJapanese theatrical forms in their style. Vernaculars alter each other. Justlook at Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon(Ang Lee, Taiwan, 2000). Better still,look at it from the perspective of Mainland Chinese audiences who had thepleasure or annoyance of rectifying three distinct acting styles and accents;for those of us ignorant of Chinese, the films linguistic friction is obliter-ated in the films true language, subtitled English.12

IV. Orientation Maps

While the idea of the atlas aspires to totality through an accretion of multi-ple yet differentiated maps that apportion objects and views, even animmense sum of maps does not afford that captious, final perspective onerelishes when spinning a globe at arms length. Still, the atlas thwartedtotalization encourages a dialectical understanding of culture and of onesplace in it. This makes historicity possible, according to Jameson, since

every view is local and thereby partial; and an acknowledgement of partial-ity underwrites the historical struggle over the territory one inhabits.Moretti gave us just the ocular tool needed when he added indigenous nar-ration to Jamesons dialectical process of hegemonic form meeting localmaterial. For isnt narration precisely the mechanism by which totality isimagined and managed from such and such a place? In cinema, somethingas technical as point of view asserts an ideological and political claim, lit-erally orienting a culture to a surrounding world.

And yet Moretti backs away from the analysis of point-of-view in texts,

backs away from texts altogether, retreating to the distance demanded bythe protocols of social science.13 How odd when he has in front of himJamesons plea for cognitive mapping.14 Should not the next shift in thedialectic take him from the sociological perspective to precisely the per-spective ofperspective, that is, to the interior map that the text itself can be


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said to draw? All films by definitionand ambitious works by designcon-tain and dramatically coordinate the various forces that the social scientistplots on graphs. Why not examine the film asmapcognitive mapwhile

placing the film onthe map. How does a fictional universe from anotherpart of the world orient its viewers to their global situation?Every film implies a geo-political orientation, even if some Hollywood

films assume that this question is obviated by their putatively universal per-spective. But in other placesin Dublin, for instance, or Taipeiorienta-tion is exactly what is at stake in representation. To account for thelocal/global transfocusthat so many Irish films employ, I have invented theterm demi-emigration,15 trying to point to the complex way in which aculture can be itself without turning in on itself. Whether or not Irish films

deal explicitly with global issues, the place of the culture in the world standsout in images and sounds. Look at the recent film Mapmaker(Johnny Gro-gen, 2001), set at Irelands interior border, separating off the six northerncounties. In fact it concerns a single county, Leitrum, which, with itsdivided populace, becomes a figure of the nation. At whatever level, theborder literally contains the forces that mount up against and amongst oneanother under the centripetal pressure borders naturally exert. Thoseforces and pressures may often be uncomfortable, even repressive, andtoday they may be (or seem) arbitrary and dismissible, but borders provide

constant orientation. For most citizens within them, they are like the wallsof a house, reassuring rather than confining. You can usually open a win-dow or walk out the door in times of stress.

Most important, the mere extension of an otherwise unlimited spacebecomes depth through the continuity and definition provided by bor-ders. In Irish atlases that mark distinctive features, county by county, districtby district, natural and manmade marks atop the landscape are treated asopenings that allow local people and historians to tunnel into a past, in


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The Mapmaker (d. Johnny Grogen, Ireland, 2001)


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what amounts to an historical dictionary of the earth.16 The same holdstrue for manners of speech and behavior; restricted in space for genera-tions, these ingrained habits absorb history in each performance of them,

lending weight to the everyday. Natural borders, such as the sea-girdle sur-rounding the two Irelands, make this obvious; historical borders, like theone betweenthose Irelands are only marginally different. The fact is thatevery citizen knows what it feels like to arrive on the other side of passportcontrol coming back from a trip. The sense of freedom abroad, the obser-vations of differences and similarities, recede as we sink again into beingback home, with all the conflicts included. We can recognize the habits ofhome as a cultural habitus, appreciating or mocking its peculiarities,understanding its connection to time and place. Films make palpable col-

lective habits and a collective sensibility. In their inclusions and exclusions,and through their scope and style, films project cognitive maps by which cit-izens understand both their bordered worlds and the world at large.

V. Topographical Maps

What do we do with the nomadic refusal of maps? The Nomad, at least asGilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have famously figured him, snaps thetether tied to the tree of history and skips along the surface toward a fluc-

tuating horizon.17 Protean and quick, he evades the mapping prowess ofthe colonialist, the tax collector, and the academic researcher who wouldposition him; he loses himself in unmappable terrains, a force outside rep-resentation. Raised on postwar art cinema, Deleuze prized deeply foreignfilms for these qualities, for resisting the imperial administration of audio-visual entertainment that goes under the flag of Hollywood.

The term World Cinema vibrates with this nomadic energy; many ofus sidle close, curious, tempted to try it out. Usually we demand the bestfilms brought to us conveniently. Metropolitan connoisseurs, we cultivate

alluring, sometimes aggressively dangerous species of exotic films. How togive back to such films the force to disturb us? Can films refuse to bemapped, refuse representation in the way nomads are said to do? Can filmsstill strike with the force of the unexpected the way Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray,and Jerzy Kawalerovicz did in the fifties? Relief maps suggest uneven con-tours on the globe, including layers. When we add to these the geologicaland marine dimension, topographical maps represent the struggle to rep-resent depth, that which is hidden. Deleuzes notions of smooth nomadicspace founder when one looks at deeply rooted cultures, including those

that have escaped our attention.Since 1990 hundreds of Nigerian scripts (over 500 last year) have been

shot direct-to-video in Yoruba and Ibo; VHS tapes (their sole mode of exis-tence) are traded in the urban market, then bicycled along old trading


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routes to villages throughout the country. No festivals feature these films;no critics review them. Their reputation travels by word of mouth, and

within national, often tribal borders. This, the most successful image mar-ket on the entire African continent, has been invisible to us . . . unrepre-sented on our screens and until a couple years ago unmentioned in ourscholarly literature. One of the only viable non-subsidized image industriesin the world, Nigerian video films are off the map. They have not soughtour interest, not yet at least; however, they must concern anyone who scansscreens for a different vision of the world or a different function of themedium. Not long ago, I concluded a long discussion of African cinemaand its rapport with Deleuzes nomadalogy by mentioning these films as

precisely unmentionable, unviewable, unmappable.18 I saw this phenome-non as the proper but self-negating conclusion of Deleuzes flight ofthought, a limit that contested his ideas. But that was before copies of suchvideos began to appear in London and Toronto where diasporic commu-nities hungered for them, and before Nigerian scholars touted their indige-nous success. Now California Newsreel, an enterprising distributor in theU.S.A., has picked one example, Thunderbolt, the most complex they couldfind, of course. They expect to market it to professors of African Studiesand anthropology and to those film scholars ever on the lookout for a dif-

ferent cinema, whether in the hope that a purer vision may be available, ora purer people. Many of us will be racing to examine this vibrant phenom-enon, to be the first to tell our peers about it, the first to explore its (hope-


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Thunderbolt(d. Tunde Kelani, Nigeria, 2000)


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fully idiosyncratic) use of the medium, its special cultural functioninshort, the first to map it.

Conclusion

Let me not be coy. We still parse the world by nations. Film festivals iden-tify entries by country, college courses are labeled Japanese Cinema,French Film, and textbooks are coming off the presses with titles such asScreening Ireland, Screening China, Italian National Cinema. But a wider con-ception of national image culture is around the corner, prophesied byphrases like rooted cosmopolitanism and critical regionalism.19 Suchterms insist upon the centrifugal dynamic of images, yet without surren-

dering the special cohesion that films bring to specific cultures.In the push-pull between the local and the world evident in all films, I

emphasize the latter, certain that American students are primed to cele-brate local identity far too uncritically, applauding its certitudes whereverthey may be found as a guarantee for that most important identity: theirown, as Americans. Behind the acclamation accorded recently exportedIndian films, for example, you can hear overtones of relief from critics andspectators who welcome the chance to cheer for the local, even the famil-ial. Music, genre, dance, and custom pull us into a whirlpool of excitement,

made more exciting still by the certainty that these things are celebrated byhundreds of millions of people far from the clutches of Hollywood. Yet,given the treatment of the British in Lagaan(Ashutosh Gowariker, India,2001) and of those not belonging to the brides family in Monsoon Wedding(Mira Nair, India, 2001), the Bollywood nation appears dangerously exclu-sive. A larger globe may surround these dramas, but it does so nefariouslywicked England in the first case, immoral America in the second. Proprietyremains with family, to which one belongs by birth and to which one owesallegiance. Without dismissing the communal feeling such films foster,

should we empathize with the way they bask, so self-satisfied, in thisunapologetic promotion of self-identity? A larger vision would place com-munal allegiance within a social and geographical landscape accessible toother points of view. Take the legendary, though hotly debated Sholay(Ramesh Sippy, India, 1975) or the more legendary Mother India(MehboobKhan, India, 1957), which uses song and ritual to build community from aspectrum of villagers, bandits, and government officials, even foreigners.20

In Sholay, and even more certainly in Mother India, the India one belongs tois more inclusive than that of Lagaan; its characters relate to each other less

as family members than as fellow citizens. Their negotiations, compro-mises, and even juridical conflicts represent a self-differentiated India towhich all characters feel conflicted allegiance, but allegiance all the same.


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Such an India operates and cooperates more dexterously and critically in ahighly differentiated world than would a unified and self-satisfied nation-family.

Or take Amlie( Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France, 2001), which has endeareditself to the public and to so many critics. The comfort it undeniably offersis the comfort of the known. No foreigners muddy the ethnically cleansedParis of Montmartre and of the quintessential corner caf, whose little peo-

ple enjoy their distinctive French likes and dislikes. By contrast,Jules et Jim(Francois Truffaut, France, 1961) directly cited in Amlie, announces a ten-sion in its very title. Its classic love story has a geopolitical dimension.Catherine has an English mother, we are told, and grew up in Denmark.WWI splits its action in half, while Austria and France comprise its two epi-centers. Indicatively, the dtente that Jules, Jim, and Catherine havebrought forward from la belle epochecomes to end once all three characterswatch a newsreel of Germans celebrating national unity by burning books,cleansing the dirt of difference.

Permit me one final look back at Irish cinema, where you can readilycalculate the extent to which each product turns inward or outward. Home-coming films likeFar and Away(Ron Howard, U.S.A., 1992) or This is MyFather(Paul Quinn, 1998) figure Mother Ireland as a tribe if not a family.On the other hand, The Crying Game(Neil Jordan, U.K., 1993), no matter


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Mother India (Mehboob Khan, India, 1957)


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what one thinks of it, can claim to look out from a distinct Irish view ontoa multi-dimensional world, a world troubled by class, religion, sexuality,and national obsession. Neil Jordan is a demi-emigrant, Irish but worldly.

My preferences are clear: American students need continually to bealerted to the international dimension implied in, or smothered by, thefilms they are shown from abroad. The same may not be true for spectator-citizens from those foreign countries. Citizens of India, France, and Irelandinstead may need to maintain a focus on the distinctiveness (that is, thenationality) of the international perspective implied by films made withintheir borders. Borders are thresholds as much as walls. National cinemastudies should take account of what borders make possible, as well as howfilms enter and exit. Hence Irelands border, like the glass of a hothouse,

retains the heat of all films projected and discussed within the island, mostof which have entered from outside. Indigenous productions may take onlya small percentage of the box office, but the critical attention they receivein addressing local issues increases their heat coefficient to a potentiallyincendiary level. Even so, such a thing as Irish national cinema, whetherstudied in the U.S.A. or in Irish universities, must be seen from a geo-polit-ical perspective that takes in not just Hollywood and Britain but Continen-tal Europe as well . . . not to mention Asia. For images trade in a global cur-rency even when they represent a restricted neighborhood of characters

and situations, like Cathal Blacks drama set in the early 1950s in a Done-gal village, whose odd title, Korea(1995), gestures to something distant butdisturbingly, frighteningly relevant, and scarcely visible until the coffin ofan emigrant draped with a bright American flag slowly floats on a boatacross a lake in the lush green of Ireland. Under the pressure of nationalborders, strong films reach toward and respond to an international gaze.Such is the dialectic of cinema these days, and I would argue such it hasalways been.

Brian Friels rich play Translations(1980) names in its title and models

in its plot just this give and take. It is set in Ireland in1833, when for reasonsof taxation and military security the British commissioned the very firstcomplete land survey ever undertaken. The dialogue between British sur-veyors and Irish citizens over what constitutes a place, a name, a geologicalfeature, a boundary, or a value, directly dramatizes many of the questionsthat concern world cinema: the struggle over language, education, land,religion, literal surveillance, and identity. Friels play effectively maps atti-tudes toward mapping, and in a highly contested space. As in Mapmaker,which derives from it, both parties knew the territory differently.

World Cinema should let us know the territory differently, whatever terri-tory it is that a film comes from or concerns. Today, amidst digital confec-tions tempting filmmakers and audiences to escape into the air of the vir-tual, world cinema brings us back precisely to the earth, this earth on whichmany worlds are lived and perceived concurrently. A certain cinema con-


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tinues to remind us of the intricate rapport, both tactile and relational, thatmakes up Life on Earth, the title, as it happens, of a beautiful and astuteAfrican film (Cheick Oumar Sissako, Mali, 1998) that might worthily initi-

ate, conclude, or even replace an overview of world cinema like the one Ihave offered here.

Dudley Andrew is the Director of Graduate Studies in the Film Studies Program atYale University. He is the author of The Major Film Theories, Concepts ofFilm Theory, Andre Bazin, Film in the Aura of Art, a source book onMizoguchi, a presentation of Breathless, a BFI classic on Mizoguchis SanshoDayu, Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film, andThe Image in Dispute. A co-authored volume, Popular Front Paris and the

Poetics of Culture, is forthcoming from Harvard. Andrew has programmed filmsfor The Guggenheim museum and served as a film festival judge. He is the recipientof the Guggenheim and several NEH fellowships and was named Chevalier dans lor-dre des arts et des lettres.

This essay appears courtesy of Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim, eds.Remapping World Cinemas: Identity, Culture and Politics on Film. London:Wallflower Press, 2005.

Notes

1 Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare(Berkeley: University of California Press,1999), chapter 5.

2 Fredric Jameson, In the Mirror of Alternate Modernities, in Karatani Kojin,Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press,1993), xiii.

3 Dudley Andrew, Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

4 Franco Moretti, Conjectures on World Literature, New Left Review 1

(MayJune 2000), 67.5 Moretti, Planet Hollywood, New Left Review9 (May 2001).6 Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel(London: Verso, 1999), and Il Romanzo in five

volumes, ed. F. Moretti (Turin: Einaudi, 20012003).7 Moretti, Conjectures, 58.8 Moretti, Conjectures, esp. footnote 25 relating to African oral traditions.9 Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the

Media(New York: Routledge, 1994).10 Miriam Hansen, Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism, in Linda

Williams and Gledhill, Reinventing Film Studies(London: Arnold, 2000).

11 M. Hansen, Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Filmas Vernacular Modernism,Film Quarterly54, no 1 (Fall 2000): 1022.12 Chia-chi Wu, Crouching Tigeris not a Chinese film in The Spectator(2003).


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13 Moretti calls for distant reading as a necessary and desirable concomitantattitude that his sociological mapping project brings about. See Conjectures,56.

14 Frederic Jameson, Cognitive Mapping, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Gross-

berg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture(Urbana: University of IllinoisPress, 1988), 347357.

15 Dudley Andrew, The Theater of Irish Cinema, in Yale Journal of Criticism15,1 Spring 2002: 2358.

16 See for example, F.H.A. Aalen, Kevin Whelan, Matthew Stout, eds.,Atlas of theIrish rural landscape(Cork: Cork University Press, 1997).

17 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A treatise on Nomadology comprises sec-tion 12 of A Thousand Plateaus(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1987).

18 See my The Roots of the Nomadic: Gilles Deleuze and the Cinema of West

Africa, in Gregory Flaxman, ed., The Brain is the Screen(Minneapolis: Univer-sity of Minnesota Press, 2000), 215252.19 Andrew, The Theater of Irish Cinema.20 Even when this film occasions animosity, the terms of the debate are large. See

Z. Saddar, Dilip Kumar made me do it in A. Nandy, ed., Secret Politics of OurDesires: Innocence, Culpability, and Indian Popular Cinema(New York: Zed Books,1998).


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An Atlas of World Cinema-Andrew

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