Abstract

“World Cinema”, Dudley Andrew remarks, is now “permanently with us” (Andrew 2004: 9). ¹ The term’s current centrality in Film Studies signals a substantial shift in thinking: a previously influential “foreign art film” category is no longer seen as adequate to the task of doing justice to moving images produced in a host of sites around the globe; once the object of survey-style discussions undertaken from afar, these images now prompt a deeper and more systematic engagement with the cultures from which they arise. Indeed, as Andrew sees it, the role of the World Cinema scholar is to “zero in” on specific “cinema sites”, to provide “coordinates for navigating” the “world of World Cinema” (Andrew 2004: 9). Consistent with Andrew’s proposal is Lúcia Nagib’s positive definition of “World Cinema” as “cinema worldwide”, as compared with “non-Hollywood” cinema. Advocating a polycentric approach that is at once democratic and inclusive, Nagib foregrounds the need to give due attention to “peaks of creation in different times and periods” throughout the world (Nagib 2006: 30). In this equalizing model, Hollywood becomes one centre among others, ceasing thereby to be the standard against which varieties of moving image production elsewhere must be measured.