What Do we Know When We Know Where Something Is? World Cinema and the Question of Spatial Ordering

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What Do we Know When We Know Where Something Is? WorldCinema and the Question of Spatial OrderingVinzenz Hediger

When the moon hits the eyeLike a big pizza pie –That’s amore.– Dean Martin

Everything is somewhere. Even Corsica is somewhere.– Nurit (age six)

The concept of World Cinema emerges in a moment when cinema, as defined by film theory and as understood infilm culture, appears to be in crisis. This crisis may be described as a problem of spatial ordering. The place ofcinema, understood as a medium, a cultural institution and a canon of films, is in doubt – a problem which theconcept of World Cinema appears to solve by proposing new modes of spatial ordering.

I Cinema as Index and Dispositif, List and MapIn the age of digital portable devices, global communication networks and intensified global trade, the moving imageis on the move. Film has left the cinema and appears to be everywhere, creating new experiential spaces and newmodes of experiencing film along the way – or rather, along its manifold new routes of circulation. For many filmtheorists, in today’s media culture with its intensified circulation of moving images, the very essence of cinema is atstake. While Francesco Casetti observes a shift from a culture of film “attendance” (a collective ritual of pubicmoviegoing) to a culture of film “performance” (a more individualised practice of customised program choices), [1]for other theorists like Raymond Bellour, the moving image on the move calls the very essence of cinema intoquestion: “Cinema is a body of memory”. [2] The experience of that body of memory, Bellour claims, is inextricablybound to the setting of film screening in a cinema. Once the moving image leaves the cinema, the body of memory islost – certainly not to be retrieved in viewings of films on digital portable and other devices. For Bellour, a KenjiMizoguchi film viewed in the movie theatre is cinema; the same film watched on a television or a mobile phone maybe a film, but it is not cinema. [3] What is at stake, then, when the moving is on the move, is cinema itself.

In the 1990s, the emergence of digital photography provoked a crisis of the index: because the data stored by a CCDchip could easily be altered, and thus the image could be easily manipulated, the bond that connected reality to thephotographic image by way of physical causation appeared to be weakened. In what may best be described as a fit ofontological anxiety, numerous film theorists concluded that that the very essence of cinema, its privileged access tophysical reality as defined by the likes of Siegfried Kracauer and André Bazin, was under threat. Now the crisis ofthe index finds a successor and a supplement in the crisis of the classical dispositif of cinema. According to film



scholar Malte Hagener, the crisis of the dispositif has shifted the focus of film theory from the old ontologicalquestion, ‘what is cinema?’, which gave way to the question ‘when is cinema?’ in the wake of the New Film Historyof the 1980s, to the topological question ‘where is cinema?’[4] However, if the crisis of the index revealed the extentto which film theory had long defined cinema by claiming a privileged bond between reality and the photographicimage, the crisis of the dispositif (and the many elegies of the experiential space of cinema that it provoked) revealedhow much cinema has always been a matter not just of space, but of place. The ontology of cinema has alwaysalready been, it seems, what German philosopher and literary scholar Peter Risthaus proposes to call an onto-topology. [5] If ‘mapping the boundaries of cinema’ (to quote the subtitle of a recent book co-edited by GertrudKoch, Volker Pantenburg and Simon Rothöhler), is now, indeed, the work of film theory, then this is because theoriesof cinema have always defined their object as much through a specific, inalienable locality as through specific,conceptually salient properties.

But cinema is more than an index and a dispositif; it is also a canon of films. To a large extent, the study of cinemaowes whatever academic legitimacy the field has to the fact that there are – and we can speak about – the ‘greatworks’ of cinema. Much like cinema according to film theory, cinema according to film culture rests on a definitionin terms of space and locality. The cinema of film culture, the cinema of great works, consists of a list and a map: alist of major auteurs; and a map of their countries of origin, the countries and cultures of which their work could beconsidered an authentic artistic expression. In the wake of the intensified circulation of the moving image, filmculture – and with it cinema” according to film culture – undergo a topological transformation in their own right. Thecrisis of the classical dispositif of cinema goes hand in hand with a crisis of the list and the map, in two ways: a crisisof authority, and a crisis of provenance.

The work of selecting the films and directors who figure on the original list and map was carried out by a relativelylimited network of institutions and actors: in particular, the cinémathèques or film museums, which first emerged inthe late 1920s; [6] the film festivals, an innovation of the ‘30s; [7] and the film critics, who had been around for along time but only emerged as a true force in film culture in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Film museums collected, archived andexhibited the work of canonical film directors; film festivals showcased the work of directors who had already madeit onto the list or were about to do so by virtue of having been selected for one of the major festivals (i.e., Venice,Cannes, Berlin); while critics helped sort out the good films from the bad by providing public justifications forinclusion or exclusion of a body of work in the canons of cinema. Much of the work of the canonisation of filmculture was done in France, by the Cinémathèque française, the Cannes film festival and the Parisian film critics –according to a logic which the philosopher Raymond Aron (speaking about philosophy rather than film culture in themid-twentieth-century, but it is still pertinent) summed up like this: “The French discussed this in a typically Frenchmatter, giving themselves the illusion that their debates were about nothing less than universal values and theuniverse itself.” [8] One could call this the Catholic phase of film culture in which Paris is Rome, the director of theCinémathèque is the Pope and the critics his Council of Cardinals.

In concert – but not without the highly sophisticated intellectual contre-temps and conflicts that we know from thehistory of Catholic dogma – they create the auteur/nation canon of films that the faithful across the globe, the latestissue of Cahiers du cinéma in hand for guidance, dutifully revere. Continuing the analogy, one could argue that, inthe age of the moving image on the move, of the intensified global circulation of moving images, we have entered theProtestant phase of film culture in which new modes of access to films provide the means to everyone interested tocreate their own lists and maps. Much like the invention of printing and the translation into vernacular paved the wayfor multiple, divergent readings of Scripture – thus undermining the dogmatic authority of Rome – digital access andthe seemingly endless extension of the list of available films encourage cinephile heresy, leading to the emergence ofmultiple divergent lists and maps. Rome is no more or, rather, has re-located, at least potentially, into the conscienceand heart of every cinephile with digital access to films.

In addition to the crisis of authority, however, there is a crisis of provenance. Following Andrew Higson’s influential1989 essay “The Concept of National Cinema“, national cinema may be described in terms of: the location ofproduction; the film culture of a given nation state or territory; and a supposed essence of national culture asexpressed in the films of significant directors with a given national origin. [9] Originally, the cinema of film culturewas, in Jean-Michel Frodon’s apt phrase (which in turn he lifted from Régis Débray) predominantly a “nationalprojection”: An expression of a given national culture in the works of its most important film directors. [10] Theconcept of the nation as a territorial, linguistic and cultural entity, first proposed by German philosophers such asJohann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, served as the conceptual cornerstone of 19th century nationalism.



In his famous 1882 speech “What is a Nation?”, Ernest Renan offered a sharp critique of this concept and redefinedthe modern nation as a “daily plebiscit”, an expression of a will to collective political action by a group of people notnecessarily tied by bonds of language, blood or accidents of geography. It may be a ruse of reason, or an irony ofhistory, that the concept of nation to which Frodon subscribes in his book is much closer to Fichte’s than to Renan’s;but it may also be significant that the Netherlands and Switzerland – the two culturally diverse modern national statesthat Renan takes as his paradigms of the nation as daily plebiscit – have no strong traditions of national cinema, andvery few entries in the list-and-map canon of classical cinephilia.

While Renan’s concept of the nation as a daily plebiscit may appear to be sounder politically in the light of theexcesses of political violence in the twentieth-century (particularly the last great eruption of violence based onnotions of cultural identity and the accidents of geography: the Balkan wars of the ‘90s), it is the more essentialistnotion of the nation as a cultural entity based on language and territory that appears to be operative in cinema culture.This reading is certainly not contradicted by the fact that the institution of the film festival was pioneered in 1932 asan extension of the Venice Biennale, which may be described as the Olympic games of art – where the great artistsof the great nations compete for prizes – and that the invention of the film festival was part and parcel of the culturalpolicy of the Italian Fascist government. [11]

The increased global circulation of moving images has revealed both the essentialist nature and what (in the parlanceof post-structuralist and post-colonial theory) must be called the inherent Eurocentrism of film culture’s concept ofnational cinema and the list-and-map film canon. Notions of cultural specificity in film studies work, as PaulWillemen and Valentina Vitali note, at the level of a “geo-temporal construction of the national.” [12] Any conceptof national cinema that implies an understanding of the nation as a coherent entity composed of a territory, a politicalstructure, a national language and a national culture cannot do justice – and may even do violence – to themultiplicity of cinemas in India and China (or rather in the People’s Republic of China CH, including Hong Kong,and Taiwan). [13] Hindi cinema may claim to be the national cinema of India, but despite the fact that there are morethan four hundred million Hindi speakers in India, and that Hindi films produced in Bombay are distributednationally as well as to a global audience (with a particular focus on Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia),Bollywood remains one among a multitude of regional film industries in India.

There is no reason, for instance, why the Tamil film industry, which caters to an audience of more than eighty millionnative Tamil speakers (roughly equivalent to the population of Germany), and finds an international audience in EastAsia, should not be treated as a national film industry on its own terms, according to the established understanding ofwhat constitutes a national cinema. To the extent that China has defined itself as a nation state in the modern,European sense rather than as an empire, the term zhonghua minzu – the concept of the Chinese nation which wasintroduced in the late nineteeth-century and is thus “a relatively recent creation of seasoned Chinese intellectuals”[14] – always referred to the Han Chinese and the four other nationalities or ‘races’ (the Man or Manchus, the Mengor Mongolians, the Hui, the Islamic Chinese in northwestern China, and the Zang, the Tibetans) that constituted the“Chinese People”. Even before the political differences between Taiwan, Hongkong and the People’s Republic comeinto play in any assessment of what Chinese national cinema could be there is the basic fact of the multi-lingual andmulti-ethnic composition of the Chinese population. New aggregations of territories under rubrics such as “NewAsian Cinema” cannot sufficiently address the cultural and territorial complexities at work here. [15]

Similarly, the concept of national cinema has been called into question by such cultural hybrids as Cinéma Beur,German-Turkish migrant cinema, Caribbean cinema, [16] or the fact that Canada’s most significant auteur mayplausibly described, in terms of cultural identity, as an Armenian. [17]

What is more, much of what the festival circuit has been celebrating as authentic national cinema from Africa andAsia over the last thirty years has increasingly become the product of a national projection of a different kind. Manyof the non-Western films shown in Western festival programs are now, and have long been, financed by Europeangovernment sources – to the extent that political scientist and film scholar Teresa Hoefert de Turegano couldjustifiably coin the formula “European Money, African Films” a few years ago, to describe the system that producedmany of the African films circulating on the international festival circuit. This tendency has only been exacerbated byfilm festivals such as Rotterdam assuming a new role as producers, providing financing in exchange for the worldpremiere rights of films. [18]

National cinemas based on a nineteenth-century European understanding of national culture, then, continue to



flourish, at least in part thanks to an hors-sol production system – to borrow a metaphor from industrialisedagriculture, referring to a technique that was pioneered (like the festival-as-producer) by the Dutch: namely,vegetables grown in beds of coconut fibres and stone wool stacked on top of each other in greenhouses, in order tocontrol environmental factors such as rain and sunshine, save space, and generate a higher yield per square metre.Festivals-as-producers in league with European production and co-production companies, many of which are locatedin Paris and centered in the Eighth Arrondissement, [19] continue to project the concept of national cinema onto aworld map of cinema that has many other layers and possible readings and is, moreover, rapidly changing.

Furthermore, at least in academic film study, the term “cinema” has been expanded in the last few years to includedecidedly non-canonical films, such as industrial, science, educational and other utility films. [20] What cinema iscan thus no longer be defined just by an enumeration of artistic achievements hailing from specific places of culturalorigin. The list and the map are in crisis, both in terms of authority and provenance.

One could argue, then, that both on a level of theory and of discourse, i.e., on a level of cinema as the object of filmstudies and the object of film culture, we live in age of topological turmoil. I would like to argue that the concept ofWorld Cinema may be read as a symptom of this topological turmoil. As far as I can see, there are three possiblemeanings to the term. The first meaning would be “all of cinema”, which is so broad as to be non-specific. Morespecific is the second meaning, “everything else”, that is “everything that we have so far neglected to put on the listand the map or failed to classify in other categories such as genre”. This is the concept of World Cinema employed,for instance, by Emirates airlines to classify their in-flight entertainment. The Gulf states have been investing inairlines based on a projection of rapid growth in air travel in the next decades, and on the fact that two-thirds of theearth’s population live within an eight-hour flight radius of Dubai, making the gulf city-states natural hubs in the newworld order of global airline traffic. [21] The in-flight entertainment selections reflect Emirates’ purported audience.At least on a recent trip to Australia, the film program consisted of more than four hundred films which wereclassified according to the following categories: new Hollywood films, Oscar Winners, Disney Classics, BollywoodFilms, Arabic language films, and “World Cinema” – a category which contained everything from Bengali films toRussian and Philippine action movies and, at the very top of the “World Cinema” list, French films. One can saymany things about this understanding of World Cinema, but Eurocentric in the established sense of the term it is not.

The third meaning of World Cinema, which is the probably the most theoretically sound, has a distinctly Europeanpedigree and roots in the early nineteenth-century. World Cinema in this sense can mean an ensemble of films thatmay or may not be the product of a national culture but that transcend their parochial national origins and becomepart of something larger – a transnational communication through art. This meaning of World Cinema, proposedamong others by Dudley Andrew, [22] is modeled on the notion of Weltliteratur which first appeared in an essay byChristoph Martin Wieland, but is generally attributed to the late work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. [23] ForWieland, “world literature” described literature for the Weltmann – a cosmopolitan reader. Goethe’s reinterpretationof the term occurs in the context of the project of a “literature comparée” (comparative literature), which meant thestudy of national literatures in comparison, but also the production of a literature that transcended the boundaries ofnational cultures. [24] Considering that “literature” in the modern sense, and philology as the study of nationallanguages and literature, only emerge in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century – in the period variouslycharacterised as the Sattelzeit by Reinhart Koselleck, and as the period of the transition from the classical to themodern episteme by Michel Foucault – Weltliteratur may be said to be largely coeval with the emergence of thesystem of national literatures, related to it in a dialectical fashion.

Similarly World Cinema as the Weltliteratur of cinema – i.e., a body of films that contribute to a transnationalcommunication through art – can both mean cinema as an object of study in a transnational comparative perspective(an approach proposed among others by Paul Willemen), [25] and cinema as an art form that both aims to transcendthe system of national cinemas and continues to relate to it. Much like the classical canon of film culture, WorldCinema as the world literature of cinema implies a canon of works that deserve to be preserved, studied and knownbeyond the culture of their origin. To the extent that it is not merely a new label for the classical canon of filmculture, the difference between the cinema of classical cinephile film culture and World Cinema is a matter ofaccentuation. While the classical cinephile canon more or less adheres to a notion of great works of art as expressionsof what is good and great about a national culture that can ultimately be traced back to Johann Gottfried Herder andGerman Romanticism, World Cinema, in the neo-Goethean sense, stresses commonality and universality rather thandiversity and idiosyncrasy.



In the context of the topological turmoil of film theory and film culture, the category of World Cinema may beunderstood in terms of an attempt to retain, or regain, the lost unity of the object “cinema”. The concept of WorldCinema contributes to the work of redrawing the maps of cinema, of cinema as an experiential space, of cinema as anobject of affect and perception, and of cinema as a cultural object. Whether we discuss the crisis of the dispositif orthe various topographies and topologies of cinema, we are engaged in what Gaston Bachelard in his 1934 book Laformation de l’esprit scientifique calls “a task of geometrisation”, a task of ordering the phenomenon under analysisin a spatial representation, and thus in creating new taxonomies for our object of study, the cinema. But, as GillesDeleuze once said, “Taxonomies are fun, but they are only the first step towards the actual work of thinking” and, asBachelard wrote, the work of geometrisation or spatial ordering is only an intermediate stage, the “abstract-concretestage”, on the way to the truly abstract stage, the stage of scientific thought which allows for a reframing of theproblem at hand by asking productive questions. “We feel, more and more, an urge to work, so to speak, beneath thespace, at the level of essential relations that sustain the space and phenomena.” [26] So, probably the real question isnot so much “Where is cinema?” or “What is the place of cinema, and which places constitute ‘cinema’?”, but rather,“What comes next?”, i.e., “What do we know when we know where cinema is, and where do we go from there?”

In my following sections, I propose a kind of prolegomenon towards the question of what comes after the topologicalturmoil of cinema, by asking what we actually know when we know where cinema is. I would like to address thisquestion by shifting the focus away from the travails of onto-topology, and the work of the institutions of canon-building, to spectators and audiences – while retaining an epistemological framework. More specifically, I will firstdiscuss markets and cinema as an object of trade and choice; before moving on to cinema as an object of perceptionand affect. My point will be that what is at stake on both levels is the precarious unity of cinema as object, and thatwhat we are witnessing right now – whether in film theory or in the debates about world cinema – is indeed astruggle for the unity of what has become known as, and what was formerly known as, cinema.

II On Becoming One with EverythingSome time in mid-2011, Australian television presenter Karl Stefanovic conducted an interview with the Dalai Lama.He took advantage of the opportunity to tell the Dalai Lama a joke. The joke went nowhere:

“The Dalai Lama goes into a pizza place and says: Make me one with everything.” When I tried this joke out on myfriends and colleagues, the only one who got it right away was a German Professor of philosophy. Versed in the art ofdecoding multiple layers of meaning, and equipped with more than a fleeting acquaintance with the history ofreligion, he understood the joke, but did not think it was funny. My other informants, being of German extraction,were not sufficiently versed in Anglo-American pizza culture (where “one with everything” is a standard turn ofphrase), and the Anglo vocabulary of post-hippie pop spirituality, to understand the mechanics of the joke. Or, to putit differently, “The Dalai Lama goes into a pizza place and says: Make me one with everything” is a joke involvingtwo iconic elements of contemporary global culture, i.e., pizza and the Dalai Lama, that nonetheless remains a joke oflimited geographical reach – a distinctly regional, parochial joke.



The logic of the joke, however, is not necessarily parochial. It is obviously based on a riotiously carnivalesqueinversion of the interior and the exterior, of the spiritual and the pedestrian, of spiritual longing and plain hunger. Toput it more technically: in the universe of the joke, there is a market substitute that allows the Dalai Lama to reframehis spiritual quest as a matter of choice. The joke is reminiscent of a Charles M. Schultz cartoon, an installment of thePeanuts series in which Lucy listens to Schroeder playing Beethoven, and then informs him that there is now an easytechnological substitute for his travails: “Beethoven now comes in spray cans”. [27]

In Freudian terms, both the option of making oneself ‘one with everything’ and the availability of Beethoven in spraycans – the market substitute and the technological substitute for what are essentially spiritual endeavours – representa major Aufwandersparnis, a saving in terms of psychic energy. According to Freud’s theory of the joke, the releaseof the surplus energy triggers laughter. Substituting a market solution for the long and hard work of the spiritual questwould certainly represent such an Aufwandersparnis. Assuming that he understands irony and is self-ironic enough tolaugh about himself on occasion, it is hard to see (from a Freudian point of view) why the Dalai Lama is notlaughing.

One could argue that both in its structure and in its failure to translate beyond the confines of Australia (or the realmof Anglo pizza culture), the Dalai Lama joke points to a deeper problem – one that would be worthy even of theattention of my German colleague from the philosophy department. Both in its structure and in its failure tocommunicate, the joke plays on a tension between unity and diversity, between ‘one’ and ‘everything’, framed interms of choice. In his influential 1990 essay, ”Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy“, ArjunAppadurai wrote that the “central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between culturalhomogeniziation and cultural heterogenization“. [28] Similiarly, the American economist Tyler Cowen wrote in his2002 book Creative Destruction: ”Trade, even when it supports choice and diverse achievement, homogenizesculture in the following sense: it gives individuals, regardless of their country, a similarly rich set of consumptionopportunities.“ Globalised trade, particularly in the age of computerised container shipping, may have manydownsides, but it does provide for more choice. To quote Cowen again: “Trade liberates difference from the



constraints of space“.

Yet the trend towards homogeneity, which was at the centre of the Frankfurt School’s critique of commercialisedculture, remains in place: more diversity often means the same kind of diversity everywhere we go. Back in the1980s, when the Soviet Union was still alive and well, Andy Warhol said that the most beautiful thing about Paris,Florence, Rome and London was McDonald’s, while Moscow and Beijing did not have anything beautiful yet. Evenbefore the advent of McDonald’s in Moscow and Beijing, most major cities in the world had their choice of Chinese,Italian, Greek and other ‘ethnic’ restaurants that served a similar menu of “typical” dishes everywhere. At the sametime, as the critique of the cultural homogenisation wrought by global trade became commonplace, McDonald’s hadto adapt and acquire some local flair in the process, adapting their menus to local preferences or dietary rules. “Theygot the same shit over there that we’ve got here, but it’s the little differences that matter”, says John Travolta asVincent Vega in Pulp Fiction (1994); but the little differences now go beyond re-labelling a quarter-pounder withcheese as a Royale with Cheese to replacing the standard cheese with local cheese varieties, as in the Netherlands orSwitzerland, or doing away with the main ingredient of the hamburger sandwich, i.e., beef, as in India.

Trade, then, not only liberates difference from the constraints of space but, through what we might call the dialecticsof homogenisation and heterogenisation, reinforces and, to a certain extent, even produces local or regionalspecificity. Globalised markets, then, are indeed making us one with everything, through a multi-layered dialectics ofhomogenisation and differentiation. However, where the spiritual quest of becoming one with everything holds thepromise of inner peace through a loss of self, the processes of homogenisation and differentiation of global culturaltrade induce anxiety – not least through a perceived threat of loss of self. One way of defining identity, and culturalidentity in particular, is in fact through the absence of choice: I am what I cannot not be; the residue or core of myidentity is that which I cannot chose to be, but am. At the same time, that which I cannot chose to be may become anobject of choice for others. Commodifying identity is, in fact, one of the keys to success in the trade in culturalgoods: trade liberates difference from the constraints of space, but to a large extent difference becomes transferableand tradable to the extent that it is perceived as a desirable trait of cultural specificity, and thus a form of identity byothers.

Why expressions of cultural identity become tradable forms of difference varies according to the situation, but one ofthe strongest motivators is probably that being acquainted and at ease with cultural difference signals sophistication –a quality with which many people outside of certain parts of the United States want to be associated. At least from aWestern point of view, cultural products have to be, or should be perceived to be, either new and original orauthentic in order to be tradable. The idea of the art work – as distinguished by its novelty, originality and uniqueness– is dependent on the idea of the artist as its creator, an idea that first appears in late antiquity and reestablishes itselfin Renaissance Europe. [29] According to the Western conception of art, the value of a painting in trade, for instance,is directly related to the novelty, originality and uniqueness of the work; and on the standing of the artist as acquiredthrough a significant body of work, certified by critics, museums and other instances of critical discourse. In thissystem, copies – even well-executed ones – are relatively worthless, while forgery, i.e., the creation of supposedlyoriginal works by individuals who are not the artist to whom the work is publicly attributed, is a lucrative proposition,and has a history as long as the history of the modern idea of the original art work itself. [30] In its focus on noveltyand originality, the Western system differs from the conception of art in other cultural areas, such as Japan, wherehonka dori or “taking up the melody”, i.e., the allusive variation and emulation of the work of great predecessors,ranks among the most prestigious techniques in painting and poetry. However, in areas where the Western conceptionof the artist and the original work appear to fall short, perceived authenticity can serve as a perfect substitute forartistic innovation. A piece of furniture or a hand-woven rug are considered to be valuable as a function of the artistryof the craftsmanship, but also as a function of the perceived authenticity of the work as an expression of a specificculture. Where the idea of the artist can be traced back to the Renaissance and late antiquity, the idea of culture andcultural specificity at work here is traceable to Giambattista Vico and (German) Romanticism, and is to a certainextent co-extensive with the substantialist idea of national culture discussed above. [31]

The tradability of cultural goods as a function of their perceived authenticity is, of course, far from limited to worksof the visual art and craftsmanship. It extends to and includes cinema as well, on two levels: on the level of the filmsthemselves as works of art; and on the level of the films’ representations of culture. French historian and film scholarPierre Sorlin has pointed out that the Italian cinema of the 1950s and ‘60s is a model case for a cinema industry thatexcels in the commodification of cultural identity and the production of tradable difference – not so much with thecritically acclaimed films of Roberto Rossellini and other neo-realist masters, as with Fellini and particularly the star-



driven commercial vehicles featuring actors such as Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren. These films, we canargue following Sorlin, trade in a particular idea of Italianità, a recognisable set of cultural traits and elements of alifestyle that, certainly in the ‘50s and ‘60s, appealed to a large audience beyond the confines of Italy. [32] Thisparticular idea of Italianità, which involves a sense of voluptuousness in food and sex, can perhaps best byexemplified by the many photographs involving Sophia Loren and food – in particular, pictures of the star preparingand serving pizza.

The authenticity of these photographs is ‘guaranteed’ by the fact that the actress, although born in Rome, grew up inPozzuoli in the outskirts of Naples, the birthplace of pizza. However, the iconography of Loren and Italian foodcovers almost the entire menu of a typical Italian restaurant, including spaghetti, gnocchi, salad and, of course, theinevitable Chianti wine.



“The confusion in men’s minds as to just what they want”, states chapter 14 of the US army manual Psychology ofthe Fighting Man which was distributed in large numbers to soldiers of the US armed forces in World War II (thosewho liberated Italy among them) “is due partly to the fact that the two great desires of the flesh – hunger for food andhunger for sex – become joined or mixed in curious ways and modified and extended through experience, so thathunger for one is frequently expressed as hunger for the other”. [33] While the manual uses the Freudian argument


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about the plasticity of carnal desire to explain oral substitutes such as smoking, the iconography of Loren and Italianfood, which is coeval with this Freudian argument, may be read as a kind of Moebius strip of (male) desire, in whichthe “two great desires of the flesh” express themselves and each other in mutually exchangeable terms. Loren iscertainly the quintessential idol of consumption of post-War Italy, [34] and it speaks to Loren’s status as the iconicincarnation of Italian voluptuousness (and the consistency of her iconography) that her official autobiography waspublished in 1972 as a cook book entitled Recipes & Memories.

As for pizza, a study remains to be written at the intersection of film and food history about Loren’s contribution tothe rapid spread of pizza throughout Europe and the world in the years after 1945. More than just a side effect of themass migration of workers from Italy who brought their own foods to the northern parts of Europe, the success ofpizza may also be a case of trade that follows film. Without Loren’s ostentatious display of cultural identity astradable difference, it would quite possibly have been even more unthinkable for the Dalai Lama to walk into a pizzashop and ask the man at the counter to make him one with everything than it already is outside of the world ofAustralian humour.

In any case, Italian cinema dominated the Italian domestic market and held a strong commercial and cultural presencein the other European countries and the United States from the early 1950s until the early ‘70s. Italian stars,especially Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, became headliners in Hollywood features films such as Trapeze (USA 1956,Carol Reed, with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis) or Houseboat (USA 1958, Melville Shavelson, with Cary Grant),Italian directors such as Michelangelo Antonio directed American studio films, and studios such as TwentiehCentury-Fox produced films by Italian directors (e.g. Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard [1963]). The “conspicuouspresence in America” of Italian films at that time, write film and media historians David Waterman and KrishnaYayakar, “is indicative of a competitive balance between the Italian and American feature film industries –especially within Italy itself – that was far more favorable to Italian products than that which prevails today.” [35]This competitive balance has long disappeared; Nanni Morretti is currently the only Italian director with a significantfollowing outside his home country, and he is not known for his box office success.

But the success of Italian cinema from the ‘50s through the ‘70s may well be attributed to an aesthetic that was basedon the commodification of cultural identity traits. In terms of plot, style and the representation of culture, Italian films



were recognisable as distinct and culturally specific. They were an example of what Janet Staiger proposes to call“national cinema as genre”, and the culture that was typified and exemplified just so happened to contain elements,i.e. Italian food, that became available for consumption for audiences worldwide more or less concurrently with thefilms – with mutually reinforcing effects. The success of these films, one can argue, is directly related to the way towhich they corresponded to certain preconceived notions of cultural specificity. [36]

But cultural goods can also be tradable precisely to the extent that they downplay cultural identity, i.e., byeliminating, to the largest possible extent, any traits that could be perceived as culturally specific and as markers ofidentity. One of the key strategies of Hollywood cinema, for instance, has always been to make claims of universalityrather than aiming for the lowest common cultural denominators – to eliminate such denominators as much aspossible. Early feature film production, which laid the foundation for Hollywood’s global reach, is rife with claimsfrom producers that film constitutes an universal language. Quite in tune with early film theorists such as BélaBalázs, Hollywood producers stressed the commonality and universality of their product. But where the idea of thefilm as a universal language in Balázs, for instance, goes hand in hand with a nascent conception of cinema as anexpression of national culture – and thus with the system of national cinemas, as Mattias Frey has recently shown[37] – Hollywood cinema always addressed itself to a worldwide audience regardless of cultural specificity. Thus, atypical press release from producer Samuel Goldwyn in 1917 announced that the new marketing strategy of his studiowas that of a “comprehensive campaign” with the goal of “placing information regarding [Goldwyn’s list of starplayers] in All Civilized Countries”:

This advertising and publicity campaign is not confined to America alone, or focused upon certain picture zonesof the United States, but is under way in duplicate in every nation of importance at the same moment.…The Goldwyn idea has been to make its stars known simultaneously everywhere and be ready when itsproductions are released to have the public in all countries thoroughly familiar with its pictures at the time oftheir original release. [38]

A simultaneous star-driven presence in “all civilized countries” of the studio’s film output is the goal, and the filmsare designed in a way that will not stand in the way of achieving that goal: while this is a characteristic example ofpress agent hyperbole, it is also a programmatic statement that remains very much in tune with the strategic goals ofcontemporary Hollywood marketing campaigns, which operate with tens of thousands of simultaneous play-dates forbig blockbuster films, and a marketing campaign that covers the entire globe. While it may have taken the Hollywoodstudios until the mid 1970s and the release of Steven Spielbergs Jaws (1975) to finally design marketing campaignsthat were capable of achieving that goal, [39] the thought of what was to become known as the “wide release” and“saturation campaign” was obviously very much on the mind of producers and marketing executives in the 1910s,tied up with an idea of Hollywood cinema as a product that could travel well to “all civilized countries”.

But while, in 1917, the presence of stars may have seemed to be the obvious key to the global success of Hollywoodcinema, the reduction of cultural specificity and markers of identity was certainly as important, if not more important,in the long run. This strategy of reducing difference and specificity is perhaps best exemplified by a short animationfilm from 1986 which contains the nucleus of what is probably Hollywood’s most successful line of products of thelast three decades: the Pixar animation films.



When I show this film in class, students will always agree on the story line, and on the fact that the two lamps arecapable of intentional action and feeling. No one has ever contested the suggestion that the little lamp is sad after theballoon is destroyed. There is always a discussion, however, about who these figures, these two lamps, are. Are theya father-and-son combo, or is it a mother and a daughter, or a grandfather-granddaughter or aunt-nephew pairing?Are they black, white, old, young? What this film offers – and this is what makes it into a model Hollywood film inthe sense evoked in Goldwyn’s 1917 press release – is a structure of feeling almost free of markers of cultural orgender identity – or rather, a structure of feeling which contains a set of default values for cultural and gender identitywhich can be supplied by the viewers themselves, according to their preferences or based on their own markers ofwhat they cannot chose to be.

Luxo Jr (1986) creates what appears to be an optimal balance of determinacy at the level narrative structure, withbasic affect and indeterminacy at the level of identity. This first Pixar film is the paradigmatic case of a story thateveryone understands in exactly the same way, but can understand each in their own way at the same time. The filmexemplifies exactly the balance of transparency and indeterminacy that allowed Hollywood to become what the lateMiriam Hansen so fortuitously called a “modernist vernacular”, or a global vernacular. [40] The secret ofHollywood’s success, then, is that it offers me the choice of becoming one or sharing a commonality with everyoneelse, while firmly and conveniently remaining who I am – and even bringing those qualities which I cannot chose tohave – into play in my experience of a film. It is quite remarkable that, in twenty-five years of its existence, and insixteen years of feature film production, Pixar has never produced a single flop. Considering that eight out of tenfilms are usually flops, this is a remarkable run of success; while Pixar has attracted the interest of managementtheorists and now serves as a case study in innovation in North American business schools, [41] the global success ofthe company’s product may well be traced to a basic strategy of eliminating, as far as possible, any marker of culturalspecificity in the look, narrative and affective structure of their films – replacing them with the principles of classicalanimation, such as “squish and stretch”, ostentation, etc. [42]

Hollywood cinema, in that sense, is fundamentally a-Hegelian in nature: rather than overcoming culturalparticularities and contingent perspectives in order to achieve the systematic unity of the Geist (spirit), Hollywoodcinema offers a basic structure of feeling, while allowing the little differences to flourish. Rather than the grandsynthesis of universal reason, Hollywood offers – if such a conflagration of Raymond Williams and post-structuralism is permitted – a heterotopic but comprehensive order of basic feelings, a structure of feeling that createsan experience that can take place everywhere and nowhere in particular – liberated not only from the constraints ofspace, but of place. Or, to put it differently, while Italian cinema of the 1950s and ‘60s engaged in the business ofliberating difference from the constraints of space (i.e., the business of trading consumable difference), Hollywoodhas been able to dominate the global trade in cultural goods by liberating the experience of cinema and the basicstructures of feeling attached to it from the constraints of identity, cultural difference and place.

By contrast, the concept of World Cinema in the sense discussed above – i.e. as a medium of transculturalcommunication – envisions cinema neither as a vehicle of tradable cultural specificity nor as a heterotopia of



experience liberated from the constraints of place, but as a space for the representation and recognition of culturaldifference. [43] While Hollywood makes one and the same film for everyone (one for everyone), World Cinemacontains everything, a potentially complete set of differences, at least to the extent that these can become salient in anoverarching process of transcultural communication. Like the pizza shop of the Dalai Lama joke, World Cinemacarries the promise of making us one with everything, transforming what basically remains a commercial good into avehicle for an intellectual transformation.

That ambition in itself is noble and good and shall not be disputed – even though much that fits into the WorldCinema category on an Emirates flight will not be included in this understanding of the term. What matters here is theepistemological dimension, the non-heterotopian concept of cinema as a unity that underlies and contains all possiblevarieties of cultural difference. In a moment when the established tools for defining the cultural object of cinemaseem to fail, in a moment when, in particular, the concept of national cinema has lost much of its force – and whenrecent substitutes like “transnational cinema” fail to provide the same coherence of vision once granted by thinking offilms in terms of great auteurs and great nations – World Cinema promises to re-establish the unity of the object ofcinema by making it one with everything. Rather than the unity of the Church of cinema, and the classic canons ofthe Catholic phase of cinephilia, the unity of the World Cinema phase lies in the heart of the cinephile and in herfaithful recognition of cultural difference through cinema. Thus, cinephilia remains a spiritual quest, a quest for theunity of cinema through the pursuit of diversity and cultural difference.

To this quest for the unity of cinema in the outside world, the realm of concrete space, corresponds a quest for theuniversity of cinema in the inner world, or for cinema as an object for perception and affect.

III Cinema and the Globe of the CraneAt the beginning of this essay, I suggested that the reigning epistemology of cinema is now the topology of themoving image. Meanwhile, in an apparently unrelated development, the neurosciences have become the reigningepistemology of everything, rivaling and sometimes supplanting the claims of philosophy as the ultimate repositoryof truth. While neuroeconomics are changing the rational agent-actor models of classical and neo-classical economictheory, [44] the answer to all the big questions of philosophy – what can I know? what should I do? what is beautiful?– can now, apparently, be given through the study of the workings of the human brain by perceptual neuroscience,neuroethics or neuroaesthetics.

One particularly vocal proponent of neuroesthetics, professor Samir Zeki of the University of London, likes to claimthat all the insights of the philosophy of art (at least since the eighteenth century) are moot, now that we have thetools of neuroscience to understand what really happens when we perceive beauty (that the question of beauty ceasedto be at the heart of philosophical aesthetics around the time of Hegel is something that does not enter theconsiderations of Professor Zeki). For neuroaesthetics, art is “an extension of the functions of the visual brain”. Inneurological terms, writes Zeki in his field-defining book Inner Vision, art is defined as “that which comes closest toshowing as many facets of the reality, rather than the appearance, as possible and thus satisfying the brain in itssearch for many essentials”. [45] Thus, the enormous diversity of works created in the course of the history of art, aswell as all considerations about the mysteries of the creative process and the pleasures of aesthetic experience, can besummed up and coherently explained by studying the workings of the brain – in particular, the visual brain.

Particularly as film scholars, we would do well not to denigrate or dismiss the findings of cognitive neuroscience outof hand. Thus, for instance, in his work on mental imaging, cognitive psychologist Stephen Kosslyn hasdemonstrated that depictive representation is a mental process in its own right, working differently and independentlyfrom propositional representation. [46] Among other things, this means that not all knowledge is propositional instructure (to quote, a contre-sens, the opening sentence of Habermas’ magnum opus The Theory of CommunicativeAction), and that the visual aspects of a film (or a building, for that matter) can never be reduced to a question oftextual structure and semantics – contrary to the assumptions that guide approaches to film inspired by semiotics, orfollow in the footsteps of Ernest Gombrich and his dictum that “the innocent eye is blind”. [47]

What interests me here, however, is the work of spatial ordering in cognitive neuroscience. One of the key methodsof neuroscientific research is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), popularly known as the brain scan.fMRI traces and measures cerebral blood flows, which are taken to be indicative of neuronal activity. The results ofthese measurements are presented as images which (technically speaking) are graphs in the shape of a brain – or theslice of the brain where the activity is supposedly located. These images create a sense of watching the brain at work,



of “instant brainwatching”, as one Swedish neuro-scientist calls it.

With fMRI techniques, the neurosciences treat the brain as a spatial object, and brain activity as a phenomenon thatcan be mapped in spatial terms. The object of knowledge of the neurosciences emerges, in other words, from spatialordering. The rewards of this work are undeniable. But, as images, the fMRI scans are suggestive in themselves – bycreating the viewing position of instant brain watching, a position from which we can see what thoughts andemotions supposedly look like. By implication, brain scans suggest that we know what we need to know aboutmental processes, when we know where to locate them in the brain. If US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart oncefamously defined pornography by saying ”I know it when I see it“, brain scans suggest that we know – or at leastknow much better – what thoughts and feelings are when we see them, and when we see where they are.

The brain that we are looking at, unless otherwise specified, is the so-called normal brain. It is unmarked, at leastnominally, in terms of gender, race and other potential markers of cultural and other identity. But normal is also amedical term. The normal brain is the sane brain, undeformed and undamaged, the brain of someone who is neithercrazy nor an alcoholic, drug addict or murderer. The brain as a spatial object that we look at is usually unmarked interms of gender – unless, of course, the brain scans are supposed to show precisely a supposed gender difference in agiven brain activity. [48] The unmarked brain scan, however, works much like a Hollywood movie in the waydescribed above: it strikes a perfect balance between including everyone and allowing for their differences, theirmarkers of personal identity, to be projected onto the visible object. For if we look at a brain scan, what we look at isourselves: we see a picture of the generic brain, i.e., of what our individual brains would look like if we were able towatch our brain activity in a live stream, as it occurs. In other words, the fMRI scan shows the brain as a heterotopicspace of experience, and visualises structures of feeling liberated from the constrictions of place.

Beyond the structural analogy of the brain scan and the Hollywood film, cinema and the neurosciences converge intwo of the major strands of film theory of the last twenty years. Gilles Deleuze claimed that “the brain is the screen“,suggesting an analogy between the film image and the neuronal processes of the brain, thus setting off a flurry ofstudies into the neuronal aesthetics of the moving image. Cognitive film theory, meanwhile, argued that film maybest be understood as a matrix for information processing, moving from the classical computer model of the brain asits frame of reference to the more up-to-date brain models of cognitive neuroscience over the last few years. So far,the convergence of film theory and the neurosciences has largely been a one-way street. Neuroscientific research intothe mental processes involved in watching films is still in its incipient stages; film theorists and philosophers of film,on the other hand, have liberally drawn on neuroscientific research to understand the aesthetics of cinema. [49]

According to Deleuze, one key aspect of the relationship between brain and screen is that films can actually have alasting impact on brain activity. Good films will provoke and cultivate good neuronal connections, bad films (whichmeans, in this context, mostly bad Hollywood films) will create bad neuronal pathways, and can permanently affectthe quality of your brain activity. [50] Cognitive films theorists, on the other hand, tend to view the brain as ahardwired entity, and the perceptual schemata activated in the brain are preconstituted, rather than being flexible andmalleable. Rather than the film shaping the brain, the brain shapes the film. In fact, according to cognitive filmtheory, one of the reasons for the global success of Hollywood is that the narrative structure and stylistic patterns ofHollywood cinema are particularly well adapted to the way the brain processes information and models the outsideworld. Where Deleuze is convinced that bad Hollywood films degrade your brain, for cognitive film theory,Hollywood cinema is, in a way, the natural cinema, the one most in tune with the normal brain.

What interests me here is not so much who is right; it is the underlying conception of the brain as an epistemic objectthat allows us to map, or re-map, cinema. Potentially, the Deleuzian model of the film-brain relationships allows us totransform and transcend what Bachelard calls “the intellectual narcissism of the passionate defense of judgements oftaste”, and reach a scientific, or quasi-scientific criterion for the classifying of films, and the differentiation of goodfrom bad films. [51] The cognitive film theory model, on the other hand, allows us to draw a map of normal and notquite normal films. Either way, it seems to me that the underlying idea is that mapping brain activity will reveal



something about the essence of cinema, and that cinema can be apprehended through work of spatial orderingperformed in neuroscientific research.

In a 1988 essay about classical and psychoanalytic film theory, Noël Carroll analysed the pitfalls of the “mind-filmanalogy”, and criticised attempts by theorists such as Hugo Münsterberg and even Christian Metz to learn somethingabout the structure of the mind by studying the structure of film. [52] Here, it is the other way around: the study ofthe structure of the mind is supposed to teach us about film – cinema is a function of the brain, and what cinema iscan be discovered through the study of the topology of cerebral functions.

Once again, albeit in a different manner, one might say that this is a quest for an underlying unity – a quest for thethreatened or lost unity of the object cinema, from within an epistemological framework that is at least partiallytopological in nature, based on a “naïve realism of spatial properties” (to once again cite Bachelard). We know whatcinema is when we know where in the brain the film experience happens, and what the brain looks like when ithappens (although of course we never will, but potentially could – if only neuroscientists had enough time and moneyto find out).

It is perhaps more than a matter of coincidence, then, that parallel to, and – as far as the field of film scholarship isconcerned – in conjunction with the emergence of the category of World Cinema, we are witnessing the emergenceof two major strands of film theory that try to map cinema onto what can also be described as the globe of the humanskull. In the age of the moving image on the move, of the intensified global circulation of moving images, the brainand the globe replace the list and the map as the primary models and metaphors for defining the essence of cinema.

IV On the Geo-Temporal Construction That is CinemaSo, what lies beneath the spaces of world cinema? What are the essential relations that sustain the phenomena and thespace in which we locate them, fulfilling our task of geometrisation? What comes after what we know when we knowwhere something is?

As I have argued, the geometrisations effected by the concept of world cinema and the mapping of the brain aresustained by a desire to maintain the unity of the object cinema, both at a level of cultural objects and of the film asan object of perception and affect. But where does this desire come from, and what does it tells us about its object?

Let me try and answer this concluding question, not from the point of view of an epistemology of film theory, but byreverting to my own cinephilia – taking as my point of departure one scene from a film that has not ceased to hauntme since I first saw it. It is from the opening sequence of Wang Bing’s monumental, nine hour documentary West ofthe Tracks (2003). This is a three-part film about the slow but irreversible de-industrialisation of Shenyang, anortheastern Chinese city, a centre of steel production since the 1930s. Part I shows a group of workers in a factory;Part II focuses on family life; Part III zooms in on a father-son relationship. I have thus far only watched the film on aTV and computer screen, so it is probably not cinema. But it is certainly a film. This shot is from the beginning ofPart I:



In the terminology of early cinema, this is a five-minute ghost ride. Technically, it is a series of very long takes, aplan-séquence made up of several long takes. In an essay chapter on the long take in documentary, anthropologistand filmmaker David MacDougall argues that the long take constitutes, in a way, the essence of documentary. Longtakes, MacDougall argues, have properties that are lost in the films that are based on them. ”The question of what todo with the qualities found in the long take but not found in the films derived from them, is perhaps the quintessentialproblem of the documentary.” [54] These properties, according to MacDoguall, include: a surplus of meaning; aspace for interpretation; a sense of encounter; and internal contextualisation, i.e., time enough for an event to explainitself. Together, these properties create an excitement, the “excitement that anything can happen”. The long take thusopens up the past as a space of possibility.

The first thing that I find fascinating about Wang’s film, and this sequence in particular, is that it does not sacrificethe properties of the long take to the finished film. In fact, this opening shot announces a poetics that refuses toconcede this sacrifice.

Why is this fascinating? I need to clarify that my cinephilia is probably grounded less in love for the film object, as inwhat we might call an epistemic shock.

One of my earliest film memories is of a Swiss film, Der Erfinder (The Inventor, 1980), directed by Kurt Gloor, withBruno Granz in the title role. Ganz is a farmer from the mountain regions of Switzerland; he puts all his money andhealth into the invention of a machine meant to facilitate work on the steep slopes of the Swiss mountains. Finally, atthe point of exhaustion, he files his patent application, and then goes to the movies. It is 1918, and he sees a newsreelshowing a British tank in action on the battlefield. He realises that someone has had the same idea before him, and heloses his mind. Seeing this film at age eleven taught me that one should go to the movies often to learn about theworld, and that one should to the movies sooner rather than later – or you risk losing your mind.

So it is easy to understand why a documentary like West of the Tracks, that shows us a world entirely unknown tome, would appeal. But West of the Tracks is no ordinary documentary. Rather than merely depicting or representingthe world in decay of Shenyang, Wang’s film creates a world – or rather, a projection of the world, to use StanleyCavell’s term. The image as an aesthetic object, according to German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, has a beingin its own right (“das bild im ästhetischen Sinne des Wortes[hat] ein eigenes Sein”). [54] The image may beunderstood as an “emanation”, a surplus that adds to the world. Even the “mechanical technologies of the image”such as photography and film, writes Gadamer, can be understood in this way, as long as they get something moreout of the depicted than what we see when we merely look at it (“als sie aus dem Abgebildeten etwas herausholen,das in seinem bloßen Anblick nicht liegt”). Gadamer’s idea of the image (including, particularly, the photographicimage and the film image) as an emanation, a surplus that adds to the world, corresponds closely to André Bazin’sconception in “Ontology of the Photographic Image”.

A film like West of the Tracks gets more out of the depicted than what we see, through what we might call a



combination of emanation and duration: by transforming what is depicted into an image of prolonged duration, abeing in its own right, that adds a surplus world and creates a place liberated from the constraints of space and time.Or, in other words: through a geo-temporal construction that may provide a new point of departure from which torethink what cinema, and world cinema, means.

This text has been expanded from a Keynote lecture for the World Cinema Now conference at Monash University,Melbourne, September 2011.

NOTES

[1] Francesco Casetti, “Back to the Motherland: The Film Theatre in the Postmedia Age”, Screen, Vol. 51 No. 1(2011), pp. 1-12.

[2] Raymond Bellour, Le corps du cinéma. Hypnose, Emotions, Animalités (Paris: POL, 2009).

[3] Raymond Bellour (trans. A. Martin), “The Film Spectator. A Special Memory”, in Gertrud Koch, VolkerPantenburg & Simon Rothöhler (eds) Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema (Vienna:Synema/Filmmuseum, 2012), pp. 9-21.

[4] Malte Hagener, “Wo ist Film (heute)? Film/Kino im Zeitalter der Medienimmanenz”, in Gudrun Sommer,Vinzenz Hediger & Oliver Fahle (eds) Orte filmischen Wissens. Filmkultur und Filmvermittlung im Zeitalter digitalerNetzwerke (Marburg: Schüren, 2011), pp. 43-57.

[5] Peter Risthaus, Onto-Toplogie. Zur Entäußerung des unverfügbaren Orts (Berlin: diaphanes, 2009).

[6] Cf. Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2005); Caroline Frick, Saving Cinema (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press,2011).

[7] Marla Stone, “Challenging Cultural Categories: The Transformation of the Venice Biennale Under Fascism”,Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Vol. 4 No. 2 (1999), pp. 184–208; Francesco Di Chiara, Valentina Re, “FilmFestival/Film History: The Impact of Film Festivals on Cinema Historiography – Il cinema ritrovato and beyond”,Cinémas: Revue d’études cinématographiques | Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 21 Nos. 2/3 (2011), pp. 131–151.

[8] Raymond Aron, Le Spectateur engagé (Paris: Editions le Fallois, 2004), p. 245.

[9] Andrew Higson, The Concept of National Cinema”, Screen, Vol. 30 No. 4 (1989), pp. 36-47.

[10] Jean-Michel Frodon, La projection nationale: Cinéma et nation (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998).

[11] See, in particular, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley: California University Press,2004), pp. 74 ff., 80 ff.

[12] Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen, Theorising National Cinema (London: BFI, 2006), p. 33.

[13] On India see Ravi Vasudevan, “National Pasts and Futures: Indian Cinema”, Screen, Vol. 41 No. 1, (2000), pp.119-125. On China see Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, China on screen: cinema and nation (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2006).

[14] Suisheng Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 2004), p. 45.

[15] Cf. Manas Gosh, “Theorizing New Asian Cinemas: Problems of the Historicist Approach”, Journal of theMoving Image, Vol. 7 (2008) http://www.jmionline.org/film_journal/jmi_07/article_06.php#article_text_01.

[16] Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation”, Framework, no. 36 (1989), pp. 68-81.



[17] See also Mette Hjort, “On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalisms”, in Natasa Durovicova (ed.) WorldCinemas, Transnational Perspectives (London: Taylor & Francis, 2011), pp. 22 ff.

[18] See, for instance, Miriam Ross, “The Film Festival as Producer: Latin American Films and Rotterdam’s HubertBals Fund”, Screen, Vol. 52 No. 2 (2011), pp. 261-267.

[19] Allan J. Scott, “French Cinema: Economy, Policy and Place in the Making of a Cultural Products Industry”,Theory, Culture & Society February, Vol. 17 No. 1 (2000), p. 19.

[20] See Devin Orgeron, Masha Orgeron and Dan Streible (eds), Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Cinemain the United States (Oxford, New York: Oxford Univerity Press, 2011); Charles Acland, Haidee Wasson & LeeGrieveson (eds) Useful Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Vinzenz Hediger & Patrick Vonderau (eds),Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009).

[21] John F. O’Connell, “The Changing Dynamics of the Arab Gulf Based Airlines and an Investigation into theStrategies that are Making Emirates into a Global Challenger”, World Review of Intermodal TransportationResearch, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2006), pp. 94-114; Jan Vesperman, Andreas Wald & Roland Gleich, “Aviation Growth inthe Middle East – Impacts on Incumbent Players and Potential Strategic Reactions”, Journal of TransportGeography, Vol. 16 No. 16 (2008), p. 388.

[22] Dudley Andrew, “An Atlas of World Cinema”, in Stephanie Dennison, Song Hwee Lim (eds), RemappingWorld Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), pp. 19-29.

[23] Hans-J. Weitz, “’Weltliteratur’ zuerst bei Wieland“, Arcadia, no. 22 (1987), pp. 206-208.

[24] Hendrik Birus, “The Goethean Concept of World Literature and Comparative Literature”, CLCWeb:Comparative Literature and Culture, Vol. 2 No. 4 (2000), http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1090. Last accessed 2October 2013.

[25] Paul Willemen, “For a Comparative Cinema Studies”, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 6 No. 1 (2005), pp. 98-112. See also the recent issue of this journal on Willemen’s approach and ensuing debate. M. Madhava Prasad,“Singular But Double-Entry: Paul Willemen’s Proposal for a Comparative Film Studies”, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies,Vol. 14 No. 1 (2013), pp. 3-13.

[26] Gaston Bachelard, La formation de l’esprit scientifique (Paris: J. Vrin, 1934), Section 5,http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/bachelard_gaston/formation_esprit_scientifique/formation_esprit_scientifique.html

[27] See also the brillant dissection of Schultz’s play on Beethoven in an essay by Rembert Hüser, to whom I owethis example: “Adorno in Dosen”, Merkur, no. 768, Vol. 67 No. 5 (May 2013), pp. 412-428.

[28] Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”,Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 7 (1990), pp. 295-310.

[29] Ernst Kris, Otto Kruz, Die Legende vom Künstler. Ein geschichtlicher Versuch (Frankfurt: SuhrkampTaschenbuch Wissenschaft, 1995).

[30] Cf. Thierry Lenain, Art Forgery: The History of a Modern Obsession (Chicago: Chicago University Press,2012).

[31] Isaiah Berlin, Giambattista Vico and Cultural History, in: The Crooked Timber of Humanity. Chapters in theHistory of Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) pp. 49–69.

[32] Pierre Sorlin, Italian National Cinema, 1896-1996 (London: Routledge, 1996).

[33] National Research Council (ed.), Psychology for the Fighting Man: What You Should Know About Yourself andOthers (Washington, New York: Penguin Books, 1943).

[34] Cf. Stephen Grundle, “Sophia Loren: Italian Icon”, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 15



No. 3 (1995), pp. 367-385; Stephen Grundle, “Hollywood Glamour and Mass Consumption in Postwar Italy”,Journal of Cold-War Studies, Vol. 4 No. 3 (2002), pp. 95-118.

[35] David Waterman and Krishna P. Yayakar, “The Competitive Balance of the Italian and American FilmIndustries”, European Journal of Communication, Vol. 15 No. 4 (2000), pp. 501-528.

[36] In Germany and German culture these preconceived notions included what is generally known asItaliensehnsucht or ’longing for Italy’, another innovation of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,attributable to Johann Joachim Winckelmann (one of the founding figures of modern art history) and to Goethe, whodefined the parameters of the German variety of the Grand Tour with his Italienreise. Cf. Marino Freschi, “Diedeutsche Italien-Sehnsucht von Winckelmann bis Heine”, Studia Germanica Posnaniensia, Vol. 32 (2011), pp. 5-19.

[37] Mattias Frey, “Cultural Problems of Classical Film Theory: Béla Balázs, ‘Universal Language’ and the Birth ofNational Cinema”, Screen, Vol. 51 No. 4 (2010), pp. 324-340.

[38] Moving Picture World, Vol. 31 No. 12, (24 March 1917), p. 1937.

[39] Cf. Vinzenz Hediger, “Blitz Exhibitionism. Der Massenstart von Kinofilmen und die verspätete Revolution derFilmvermarktung“, in Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (eds) Demnächst in Ihrem Kino. Grundlagen derFilmwerbung und der Filmvermarktung (Marburg: Schüren, 2009), pp. 140-160.

[40] Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism”,Modernism/Modernity, Vol. 6 No. 2 (April 1999), pp. 59-77.

[41] Ed Catmull, “How Pixar Fosters Creativity”, Harvard Business Review (September 2008), pp. 1-13. See alsoMark Henne, Hal Hickel, Ewan Johnson & Sonoko Konishi, “The Making of Toy Story”, in Proceedings of Compcon1996 (1996), pp. 463-468.

[42] For insight into the way John Lasseter and his colleagues at Pixar drew on the aesthetics of classical animation,see Lasseter, “Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation”, Paper, SIGGRAPH 87(1987).

[43] Incidentally, World Cinema in this sense is very much in tune with the now-current concept ofcosmopolitanism. See Nikos Papastergiades, Cosmopolitanism and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).

[44] Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein & Drazen Prelec, “Neuroeconomics: How Neuroscience Can InformEconomics”, Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 43 No. 1 (March 2005), pp. 9-64.

[45] Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press,1999), p. 22.

[46] Stephen Kosslyn, Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

[47] Cf. Branko Mitrovic, “Visuality After Gombrich: The Innocence of the Eye and Modern Research in thePhilosophy and Psychology of Perception”, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, Vol. 76 (2013), pp. 71-89.

[48] Since the early 1990s, concurrently with the emergence of performance-based conceptions of gender in culturaltheory, neuroscientists have consistently researched gender differences in brain activity in a variety of fields, oftenrelating to emotional experiences such as childhood depression or sadness. One could argue, from a critical theorypoint of view, that the neurosciences thus reiterate and reinscribe the biological definition of gender that theoristssuch as Judith Butler critique.

[49] For a Deleuzian approach, see Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Filmphilosophy of Digital ScreenCulture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).

[50] Gilles Deleuze (trans. Marie Therese Guirgis), “The Brain is the Screen”, in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The BrainIs the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 366-67.



[51] Bachelard, Formation de l’esprit scientifique, Section 18.

[52] Noël Carroll, “Film/Mind Analogies: The Case of Hugo Münsterberg”, The Journal of Aesthetics and ArtCriticism, Vol. 46 No. 4 (Summer 1988), pp. 489-499.

[53] David MacDougall, “When Less Is Less: The Long Take in Documentary”, Film Quarterly, Vol. 46 No. 2(Winter 1992-3), pp. 36-46.

[54] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tübingen: MohrSiebeck, 2010 [1960]), p. 144.

About the Author

Vinzenz Hediger

Vinzenz Hediger is Professor of Film at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. He is a co-founder of NECS –European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (www.necs.org).

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What Do we Know When We Know Where Something Is? World Cinema and the Question of Spatial Ordering

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