World cinema

LALITHA GOPALAN

It is commonplace in histories of cinema to see the beginning of projected moving images as the show at Salon Indien du Grand Cafe in Paris, com­mandeered by the Lumiere brothers, on December 28,1895.¹ A line up of ten short films, which the Lumieres called “actualities,” comprised the show, each seventeen meters long, which when hand-cranked through a projector ran for about forty or fifty seconds.^{[430] [431]} They were made using the cinemato­graph, a machine the Lumieres patented that combined camera, printer, and projector.

With their adherence to the concept of actuality - the depiction of real places and things - the Lumieres' shorts cast a long shadow over both narrative and non-narrative filmmaking worldwide for more than a hundred years. Newsreel footage would emulate the Lumieres' commitment to recording what film theorists call the “pro-filmic,” that is, the reality or event happening in front of the camera, and seize images of battles, events, sports, national pageantry, and so on. In a more attenuated fashion, the documentary film tradition associated with the Scottish film critic and film­maker John Grierson would build longer films composed of such short actualities.^[433] Narrative cinema wedded to ideas of realism, including Italian realism and social realism in India, would also trace its origins to notions of the duration of various activities conjured by the Lumieres.

Although their factory and home in Lyon afforded many of the scenes for the Lumieres' early actualities detailing work, leisure, and domesti­city, the world was very much present in their films, both literally and figuratively. The brothers traveled abroad with their camera and films; scenes from Paris, Dublin, and the Alps reveal an ethnographic interest in urban and rural life. In a DVD compilation of their films, Bertrand Tavernier comments that the brothers contracted camera operators to record scenes from places further afield to capture images for projection. And their films themselves traveled. The initial showing at the Grand Cafe quickly made its round to various metropolitan centers in the world, reaching Bombay in 1896. This is identified as the inaugural moment for cinema in India as well, thus stressing the simultaneous development of this art form globally.^[434]

While the Lumiere films tend to dominate the story of early cinema, historians and filmmakers also point to other competing modes of presenting the world onscreen that were not interested in recording reality but instead partial to fantastic and surreal narratives. This other origin of narrative cinema takes us to the French filmmaker George Melies, whose forays into inventing cinematograph machines were abandoned when better recording instruments were patented by others including the Lumieres. Melies was an illusionist and stage magician, whose interests in magic-shows persist in his short films, which are heavy-laden theater sets with fantastical narratives such as the trip to the moon, Voyage de la lune (1902). In this whimsical film playing with the ruse of space travel, realistic scale is dispensed with in favor of tricks of scale in the mise-en-scene.^[435] On the Moon we see outsized and outlandish objects existing beside familiar human figures, and from a point of view on Earth we see the Moon in an anthropomorphic incarnation as a gigantic ball with a face, and a rocket that lands in its eye.

Cinema is thus an example of a cultural product that spread around the world very quickly after it was first created. As it did so, it became naturalized simultaneously in dozens of cultural traditions, as local practi­tioners made movies in light of their own, often national, traditions in drama, literature, music, myths, and other cultural forms. For example, the arrival of the Lumieres' films and Edison's kinetoscope spurred filmmaking in Japan, where filmmakers produced silent films beginning in the late 1890s and a film magazine was first published in 1909. In a holdover from Japanese kabuki and Noh theater, these were narrated by benshi, men (and occasionally women) who stood next to the screen, narrated the film, voiced the characters, and provided commentary.^[436] Japanese filmmakers and studios were adept at melding technologies from elsewhere, yet fashioning them to practices of local popular arts. As it became a global art form, film styles emerged through exchange and adaption; composite and yet distinctive, filmmaking conveyed the pre­sence of local art forms as well as cinematic traditions of other nations and regions.

The advent of the twentieth century consolidated the medium of film in several ways: theatrical projection rather than individual viewing dominated the mode of presentation and silent film production spread across the globe. As Andre Bazin provocatively argued in his landmark essay, “The evolution of the language of cinema,” and as now most critics agree, as far as narrative cinema is concerned, film style was substantially established in the era of silent movies, to the extent that the arrival of sound in the 1920s did not provoke a substantial new language.^[437]

German cinema in its silent period can provide an example of the ways in which existing cultural forms were drawn upon and became a long-lasting stylistic language.

Developments in cinema studies

Cinema clearly moved across borders, and although some treatments of world cinema view this as a sum of various national traditions, others in cinema studies have become attentive to comparative or regional currents, with discussions of Asian Cinemas, Balkan cinema, European cinema, and so forth. 1³ Similarly, the study of genre films no longer focuses exclusively on Hollywood films, but rather examines the global circulation of genre styles.¹⁴ Toby Miller and many others have criticized Hollywood as an imperialist force that has strangled various national film cultures.¹⁵ In this, they draw not only on current anti-globalization sentiments, but also on a radical call to arms in the 1960s and 1970s from Latin American filmmakers known as the Third Cinema, whose vigorous polemics about colonialism, capitalism, and the Hollywood model of movies simply as entertainment to make money inspired local cinemas worldwide and continue to do so.¹⁶ Frederic Jameson's The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System brought world system theory to Film Studies.¹⁷ In this, he offered a reading of a wide range of films to explore the shape of aesthetics, bringing together Hong Kong art house films such as Wong Kar-wai, the Filipino director Kidlat Tahmik's Perfumed Nightmare, the French director Jean-Luc Godard's Passion, the American director Alan Pakula's Parallax View and All the President’s Men, and the Taiwanese director Edward Yang's The Terrorizers.

EuropeanArt Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesot Press, 2009); Catherine Grant and Annette Kuhn, eds., ScreeningWorld Cinema:AScreen Reader (London and NewYork: Routledge, 2006).

14 See my book Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 2002).

15 See Toby Miller et al., eds., Global Hollywood (London: British Film Institute, 2001) and Global Hollywood 2 (London: BFI Publishing, 2005).

16 For a representative selection of essays on Third Cinema and its long-term influence, see Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, eds., Questions of Third Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 1989).

17 Frederic Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

18 For a brilliant overview of these issues, see Kathleen Newman, “The geopolitical imaginary of cinema studies. Notes on transnational film theory: decentered subjec­tivity, decentered capitalism,” in World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, edited by Natasa Durovicova and Kathleen Newman (New York: Routledge, 2010). For an innovative rethinking of film styles in transnational cinemas, see Adrian Perez Melgosa, Cinema and Inter-American Relations: Trafficking Transnational Affect (New York: Routledge, 2012).

19 Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton University Press, 2001).

Among these more global views is Robert Stam and Ella Shohat's path­breaking work on the persistence of Orientalism in European and American narrative cinema.^[443] Filmmakers often inserted exotic, or allegedly exotic, themes into their works, influencing their viewers' understanding (or misun­derstanding) of remote places; thus filmmakers were participants in the politics of colonialism, race, and other issues.

Antonio Lant has proposed that American cinema in the 1910s was gripped by “Egyptomania,” a trend we can actually see in the Lumieres' short film.^[445] Lant recounts the rise of the female star Theda Bera in the role of Cleopatra (1917) as one of the many instances in which film mounted pharoanic culture with tombs, mummies, and pyramids in the early years of narrative cinema. Publicity agents for the film even invented an exotic family background for Bara (who was actually born Theodosia Burr Goodman in Cincinnati) and claimed she had grown up in Egypt. German expressionist cinema was also Orientalist. In Waxworks (1924), for example, expressionist strategies find an easy alliance with the “mysteries of the Orient,” as sketched out in sets of Arabian Nights and the decorativeness associated with Russian architecture. Avant-garde arts were not immune to either fascination with or the stereotyp­ing of cultures outside the European orbit. As Lant notes, this fascination all but faded away with the arrival of sound, shunted off to the lower rungs of B films. It does find an afterlife or rather echo, however, in the French film critic Andre Bazin's remarks about the ontology of the photographic image, which he sees in part as a “mummy complex,” a need to preserve life through mimesis.^[446]

Lant deploys Bazin's remark to great effect to suggest a return of the repressed in film scholarship, and by highlighting a marginal film in the Lumiere oeuvre, I wish to do the same, as do Stam and Shohat. Their work is a corrective to histories of cinema which evoke colonialism - and attendant Orientalism and racism - as addenda to the rise of European and American cinemas, rather than seeing how they have long insinuated their form and style, and bolstered the rise and domination of these cinemas globally.^[447] Their revisionist undertaking is most instructive in the examples they draw on that respond to Orientalist gestures. The Egyptian filmmaker Abdel Salam's The Night of Counting Years (also called The Mummy) (1969), set in 1881, the year before British rule, tells the story of a clan selling artifacts from a cache of mummies on the illegal antiquities market. It offers a response to images of Pharaonic Egypt by presenting a national culture that incorporates a heterogeneous population with varied cultural practices in the contemporary world alongside and in opposition to the presence of antiquities that are the dominion of archaeological discourse worldwide.^[448]

These more comparative, transnational, and global ways of evaluating films provide formative framing devices that allow us to approach films and decipher their varying articulations of the world, both literally and figura­tively. This essay will use these various reading strategies in the rest of the essay not to survey all of world cinema, but instead as a method to reanimate familiar film texts, especially the canon of postwar French, German, and Italian cinema, from angles that have hitherto been underexplored, thus viewing them through a world cinema lens in which themes of colonialism, Orientalism, difference, and distance gain greater prominence.

French cinema

Among the most influential French films with a colonial setting and themes was Pepe Le Moko (1937) by the director Julien Duvivier, which tells the story of a gangster, and one of France's most wanted criminals, Pepe le Moko, on the run from police, who takes refuge in the Casbah, the old city around the fortress in Algiers, but eventually leaves it to find his lover, the mistress of a rich businessman. He is pursued by the French police, and also by a native Algerian investigator, who becomes his friend. In an elegant reading of the film, Ginette Vincendeau has commented that it combines the over-laden mise-en-scene of expressionism from earlier films about crime, and over-decorated scenes of the Orient from films about imperial adventure, grafting a crime thriller onto an Orientalist fantasy film.^[449] Images of Algeria were long available in painterly traditions and in the various world expositions staged in Paris, which Vincendeau sees as an influencing strand in Duvivier's film. Central to her reading is the way in which the thriller absorbs tenets of French colonialism so as to exploit the setting of the Casbah for its intrigue and beauty (an Orientalist gesture), but also allows the star-crossed inter-racial romance to reveal the thrust of colonial attitudes towards the stringent differentiation between races. Vincendeau makes a formidable case for the film's ambivalent relationship to colonialism, most prominently articulated in the figure of the white woman whose romantic desire will transgress boundaries, but will eventually be regulated by the film in its choice of an ending that returns her to France rather than to a union with her lover in Algiers or abroad.

Vincendeau's reading prepares us for Alan Williams' expansive evaluation of French cinema under German occupation, a period that commences a couple of years after the release of Pepe Le Moko.^[450] Williams' attention to the discursive conditions of cinema does not allow a detailed reading of film style, but he mentions a distinct shift from the fluid camera movement of an earlier period to tableau compositions, which he reads as the stifling effects of the occupation. Under German occupation, French cinema was hemmed in on several fronts, including an exodus of French filmmakers to Hollywood, negotiations with censors, and an attempt by German authorities to destroy all films made before 1937. These constraints may have led to the popularity of themes and narratives that were either allegorical or turned inwards, such as ghost and fantasy films; a world outside France would only reappear in the late 1950s.

European cinema was deeply marked by the war.^[451] Studios were bombed and film industries collapsed, giving way to the ascendancy of Hollywood in Western Europe. At the same time, the ruins of the war spurred filmmakers to reinvent styles that liberated them from the conventions of studio sets. Italian neo-realism, for example, became known primarily for its use of locations and non-professional actors, as will be discussed in more detail below. In France, an independent style was well underway in the 1950s, which would eventually coalesce in 1959 as the “French New Wave,” although scholars have remarked that this term is insufficient to describe the varying styles and themes undertaken. While there are many ways of evaluating these films, images and concerns with spaces beyond France mark many of them, as does a fascination with American films. Many of the New Wave filmmakers were influenced by the film showings at the Cinematheque Franςais, a collection and archive founded in Paris by Henri Langlois. Its programing and the pages of the Cahiers du Cinema, the most important French film magazine, bear testimony to the vibrant culture of film writing and evaluation that, in turn, influenced many other filmmaking styles.^[452] Francois Truffaut's 400 Blows (1959) and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (i960) are signal points of origin, films whose influence over film culture globally continues to endure: film taste, film schools, film studies, filmmaking, and film writing are inspired deeply by the aesthetics of the French New Wave in one way or another. While engagements with Hollywood films characterize French film culture of the i950s onwards, the postwar terrain fueled the works of other filmmakers who were coming to terms with the shock of genocide and massacre unleashed in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. An apprai­sal of films by Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda, and Chris Marker reveals an interrogation of narrative form as important to all of them; both the sequen­cing and duration of images unfolding onscreen convey the unspeakable horrors of the war.

In Resnais' Night and Fog (1955), tracking shots of Nazi camps after libera­tion combine with the voice-over enumerating with precision the various functions of the buildings to underscore the systematic program of extermi­nation of Jews by Nazis. In a recounting that is enhanced by the sequencing of images, the film impresses us with the horrors of record keeping, tabulations, architectural layout, and other techniques of modernization. Tracking shots will emerge as a motif in Renais' work, leading Godard to remark in a roundtable discussion of Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) that “tracking shots are a mark of morality.” In that film, Resnais moves beyond Europe, connecting France and Japan through the structure of a love story between Elle, a visiting French actress shooting a film about the effects of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, and Il, a Japanese architect. Their affair develops between breaks during the film shoot, but it can barely sustain the intrusions of Elle's affair with a German soldier during the occupation in the village of Nevers in France, which is rendered as long cutaway sequences. In these evocations of Nevers rendered as elaborate flashbacks, we see a young Elle absorbed in a clandestine affair with a soldier enlisted in the German occupa­tion. Later the condemnation of the affair by the village results in her head being shorn and her subsequent incarceration at home, where she goes crazy. Long suppressed, these memories, rendered as flashbacks, are reignited during her encounters with her lover in Hiroshima; the trauma of atomic bombing in Hiroshima evokes the trauma of Nevers, one loss relays the other and takes over the affair in Hiroshima, as the men replace each other. Written by Marguerite Duras, the dialogue plays with tense and address, enhancing the film's deployment of flashbacks and voice-overs to flatten the differences between different temporalities and persona, as Sharon Willis has proposed in a delicate reading.^[453] Rather than service the images so as to produce a unity between sound and image, the voice-over issues a different temporality that shuffles any firm pairing, favoring dissonance instead. In short, Resnais' film rehearses the structuring of trauma in which one event provokes another with rank disregard for temporal and spatial continuity, as it suggests that the narration of events in Hiroshima are intimately tied to German occupa­tion of Nevers. Although the deployment of flashbacks as memory had already been launched in Citizen Kane (1941) and Rashomon (1950), its articula­tion in Hiroshima Mon Amour anticipated the study of trauma in films.^[454]

Agnes Varda's film Cleo 5 a 7 (1962) brings in a different reckoning of the world by positing a relationship between present and future as seen through the frame of chance, diagnosis, and conscription. Cleo the eponymous heroine is a pop singer waiting for a diagnosis from her doctor who suspects she has cancer. She spends the two-hour waiting period, which closely matches the length of the film, wandering through Paris letting chance dictate her hours of anticipation. The film opens with her visit to a tarot card reader who offers an ominous reading that puts her in a superstitious mood until she is distracted by her own song playing on a cab radio, by clowning friends at home, and by a short film viewed from a projection room of a movie theater. The film's focus on the superficial travails of a minor pop singer is not the entire story; rather it draws us into the ambience of Cleo's loitering through the city punctuated by various signifiers of French colonialism.^[455] News of protests in Algeria against French colonialism play on the radio during Cleo's cab ride minutes before her own song; it is the latter that sparks her attention whereas our ears are tuned to both. In one of her perambulations through a neighborhood, the camera tracks her against a shop window showcasing ritual masks from Africa that are exhibited as objets d'art in France. Again, Cleo's lack of interest is at odds with the camera's slow recording of these objects. A racist gag is the theme of the black face comedy of the film-within-film that Cleo watches with her friends from the projection room; her laughter offers an analysis of the widespread and little questioned racism of the French. More pointedly, Algeria is presented to the oblivious Cleo as she wends her way to the hospital through the Luxembourg gardens and runs into a French solider who is headed off to Algeria to fight against the growing anti-colonial resistance. As the two stroll through the gardens with the hospital soon in clear sight, the film chooses to hold off supplying us with a final verdict on Cleo's condition. By chronicling Cleo's desultoriness as one grid, the film offers us another strategy of reading that solicits our keenness towards the visual and auditory registers of the film in which signifiers of French colonialism and news of Algeria proliferate. In its bifurcated concerns of the personal and colonial, the film undercuts the cohesiveness of either character-driven narratives or politically oriented films, a split one can detect in other films from this period as well, such as Hiroshima Mon Amour.

A not-so-distant comparison is Jacques Rozier's Adieu Philippine (1962) whose virtuosity has been evoked rather belatedly. The film presents a summer romance involving Michel, a TV technician in Paris about to be sent to Algeria in the army, who dates two best friends separately, which they eventually find out. He goes to Corsica to escape them, they follow, various complications ensue, and the film ends with the young women watching Michel sail away to Algiers. Despite its seeming nonchalance, the film diverges to a sympathetic engagement with the struggle for independence in Algeria; further divergence emerges from the title that offers us tropes of misrecognition, as it is Algeria and not the Philippines that offers a theater of strife. Despite the ways in which these two films shape the image of Algeria in French films, Algeria's militant struggles are best known from Gilles Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers (1966) whose head-on engagement seems to have eclipsed earlier renditions of the topic. Although an Italian, Pontecorvo had only a tangential relationship to the reigning aesthetics in Italy of neo-realism; by extension, Battle of Algiers, his best film, crosses identification with any particular national film styles, and what emerges is a subtle balance between fact and fiction.

Chris Marker's films cast a different set of strategies to engage with the events of the world, strategies that tie him to the other filmmakers yet mark him as distinctive. As a recent documentary on his works suggests, Marker's films defy classification: elements of fact and fiction collude to produce films that are deeply personal. Statues Also Die (1953), which he co-directed with Alain Resnais, presents masks, sculptures, and other art forms from sub­Saharan Africa, along with a dying gorilla and people of African descent living in Europe and the United States; it suggests that colonialism is responsible for the commercialization and demystification of African culture. Letter to Siberia (1957) also focuses on the end of indigenous cultures, examining the moder­nization of Siberia in a combination of newsreel footage, stills, cartoons, and footage that Marker himself shot in Siberia. In his review, Andre Bazin notes the film's ability to embrace a personal tone within an observational mode of filmmaking, as the film takes the form of an essay, complete with Marker's commentary as a letter.^[456] The concept of the essay film conjured initially by Bazin upon viewing Marker's film has had a lasting imprint on subsequent evaluations; Nora Alter's critical assessment gives further shape to this concept by reiterating that endless mutations of this genre are part and parcel of Marker's own experiments in each and every subsequent film.^[457] Marker's engagements with the world as evident in Letter to Siberia, Loin du Vietnam (1967) - a group protest against the Vietnam War with segments from several filmmakers - and Sans Soleil (1983) - a montage mixing documentary, fiction, and commentary, shot in Japan, Guinea-Bissau, the United States, Iceland, and elsewhere - displays a commitment to contingency in the form of presentation about places distant yet implicated in a history that is tied to Europe either through the lens of Orientalism or through the apparatus of colonialism. Contingency in filmmaking receives further support from the travelogue genre adopted by Marker whose voice-over in first person under­cuts the objective stances espoused by extant observational filmmaking practices. These are strategies that surface in Sans Soleil most forcefully where travel to Japan leads us to journeys elsewhere on the globe, as well as to Marker's own archive from which uncommon associations between ideas and objects are established: Iceland to Japan for instance.

As is the case with several directors of the French New Wave who were initially enamored of American films, particularly Hitchcock's Hollywood products, Marker too inserts quotations from Vertigo in his time travel masterpiece La Jetee (1962), a film composed of filmed photographs that tells of a post-nuclear war experiment. But a fascination with Hollywood soon transferred to other cinemas, and Marker's discovery of the long- forgotten Soviet director Aleksander Medvedkin is immortalized in his The Last Bolshevik (1992), a biopic that assumes the form of an essay film. Eclipsed in the historiography of Soviet Cinema by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Vertov, Medvekin's filmmaking practice receives sustained attention in Marker's film that marvels at his agility with parables and irony. Medvekin's deployment of cutouts of camels as a recurring motif in his films finds an unexpected kinship with Marker's own appearance as a cutout cat in films, thus sealing a consonance of styles between two filmmakers forged across space and time. In the case of these two films, Marker's turn is towards the cinephile's archive, which as is obvious is not limited to national cinema taste or to the dominant Hollywood but bespeaks of a fascination with world cinema. Alter's evaluation, the fullest on his work, notes Marker's de finitive move towards video installation as part of his ever-shifting relationship to the moving image. Immemory (1998), for instance, is a vertical stacking of five video monitors that bank on simultaneity and dispersal, an arrangement that barely bears a hint of his earlier work. Marker's work truly defies a unifying style.

The essay form also flourished in Godard's work starting with his colla­boration with Jean-Pierre Gorin and Anne-Marie Mievielle in the Dziga Vertov Group, a group of politically active filmmakers formed in 1968. Although the group was short-lived, there are two works worth mentioning for their stylistic innovations of the essay form: Letter to Jane (1972) used photographs and film stills to deconstruct a news photograph of Jane Fonda as a way of critiquing American war in Vietnam, and Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, 1976) used video and film footage of the lives of a French family and Palestinians to draw out the silences on the question of Algerian independence from French colonialism and also reflect on the process of filmmaking.

German New Cinema and its influence

Concerns with past horrors and with cultural difference also emerged as central issues in films characterized as German New Cinema, and colonial­ism was a theme in some of them. Accounts of German New Cinema generally begin with the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962, a declaration by a group of young filmmakers that called for a radical break from conventional styles, along with state funding for films so that they would not be under the control of commercial stakeholders. Although one is hard pressed to describe a collective filmmaking style discernible among Rainer Fassbinder, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Volker Schlondorff, Helke Sanders, Margaretta Von Trotta, and other directors associated with German New Cinema, it can be said that a preoccupation with German history, particularly the postwar reckoning of the Nazi past, would characterize this movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Such a preoccu­pation with Germany's national past generally entailed a concomitant pulling back from international interests, but exceptions are worth noting. In Fassbinder's prolific career, the German past is evoked from the vantage point of the present, which allowed him to cast North African immigrants in Ali Fear Eats the Soul (1974), a Black American soldier in Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), and so on as outsiders whose presence relays the unspeakable horrors of Nazi governance and the unbearable military presence of Americans. Riven with dilemmas of complicities, Fassbinder's films offer a sustained computation of events and incidents that mark the practice of historiography.

As is the case with the auteurs of French New Wave, we can detect an elaborate engagement with American cinema, most visible in the genre of the road movie as embraced by Wim Wenders whose Paris, Texas (1984) is both a canonical film in German New Cinema and a revisionist Western given its capacious meditation on American iconography. Wenders would exploit the travel genre more widely in his exploration of the Cuban music scene in Buena Vista Social Club (1999), or more evocatively in his exploration of the world of the influential Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu in Tokyo-Ga (1985).

In Fitzcarraldo (1982), Werner Herzog portrayed an Irish adventurer (played by Klaus Kinski) who dreamed of building an opera house in Peru, and sought to move a large steamship over the mountains to transport rubber down the Amazon in order to finance this. This involved enormous physical effort, and traveling in an area where the indigenous people were hostile; ultimately the local people assisted him and the ship was taken over the mountains, but their chief cut the rope and the ship floated, empty, back down the river. Herzog filmed without special effects, and the physical ordeal was tremendous; the situation was made more difficult by Kinski, who fought with Herzog, other members of the crew, and the local people hired as extras. Herzog collaborated with Les Blank in Burden of Dreams (1982), a documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo that reanimated the ethnographic film as a personal essay film and revised the documentary mode of presentation globally. Burden of Dreams heralded the genre of self-reflexive films on the work of filmmaking, and also included a monologue by Herzog on the destruction of the jungle. Herzog's diaries about the difficult produc­tion were published in 2009 (2004 in German) as Conquest of the Useless, with many reflections on the wildlife and people of the Amazon jungle.

In a manner unprecedented in filmmaking, German New Cinema was characterized by a large contingent of women filmmakers whose association with feminism was somewhat varied. Helke Sanders organized the first feminist film conference in Germany and founded a feminist film journal, Frauen und Film. Her All-Around Reduced Personality (Die allzeitig reduziert Persdnlichkeit- Redupers, 1977), in which she played the main character, exam­ines three days in the life of a woman photographer in Berlin, commissioned with other women to take pictures of West Berlin. Her examination of the situation of being a woman and of the divided city itself is a meditation on the slim line between autobiography and fiction and on the construction of identity. Margarethe Von Trotta's melodrama Marianne and Juliane (1981) portrayed two sisters who were both involved in the women's movement, but took different paths of rebellion, with one joining a violent revolutionary terrorist group and ultimately dying in prison, supposedly by suicide. The film examined political issues, but focused more on the sisters' relationship; they barely reconcile their differences between the personal and political.

Ulrike Ottinger's inventive films moved out of Germany, in both their subjects and their filming. In Joan of Arc of Mongolia (1989), a cross-section of European women, including an anthropologist who speaks Mongolian, travel by train across Siberia and the steppes of Central Asia when they are taken hostage by a Mongolian princess. The moving camera on the train gives way to a large number of still shots of the striking Mongolian landscape and episodes of interactions, thus changing in style from a travel genre to an ethnographic filmmaking mode. In its novel entwining of different filmmak­ing styles, Ottinger's film accentuates the idea of difference, both cultural and sexual.^[458] The European women are fascinated by and generally get along with their captors, a novel re-grafting of sexual difference and politics with a wide range of utopian possibilities. Ottinger returned to Mongolia to direct and photograph the eight-hour documentary Taiga (1992) that focuses on the lives of nomadic peoples. Many of her other films also examine interactions across cultures, and frequently across time: Through photographs, docu­ments, and interviews, Exil Shanghai (1996) traces the lives of six Austrian, German, and Russian Jews in World War II Shanghai and their subsequent move to the San Francisco area, combined with scenes of Shanghai in 1996, a time when the city was being transformed into a modern megalopolis. The Korean Wedding Chest (2009) examines the collision of ancient tradition and modern culture in marriage practices in Korea. The visually stunning Under Snow (2011) combines documentary sequences of the snowy Echigo region of northwestern Japan, where distinctive religious rituals, wedding traditions, and festivals have developed, with a story of two students played by Kabuki performers, who travel through time and are transformed with the help of a vixen fox.

Both French New Wave and German New Cinema had global influence. In his canonical essay “An atlas of world cinema,” Dudley Andrew remarks on the ripple effects of both as far away as Taiwan decades later.^[459] Noted for a rise of auteur-based cinema, Taiwan New Wave can be scarcely united under a single aesthetic banner. Nevertheless for heuristic reasons it is possible to see the works of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang, the chief among several others, as exploring time and space in cinema through extensive experiments of the long take. For instance, in Hou's City of Sadness (1989) and Flowers of Shanghai (1998) and in Yang's A Brighter Summer Day (1949), the long take allows for a radical reconsideration of the image of the historical event. Similar New Wave movements also began in Japan and in the enormous movie-making industries of various parts of India, in part influenced by European film and in part as independent developments.

In World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism, Lucia Nagib offers an innovative comparison, placing Francois Truffaut's 400 Blows (1959) alongside the Canadian Inuktitut Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), the Burkinabe Yaaba (1989), the Brazilian God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun (1964), a cluster of films which defies conventional classifications either along national cinema boundaries or periodization.^[460] Rather, she suggests the resemblance between the films lies in their status as forerunners of various film movements and the uncanny reverberation at the thematic register: protagonists literally take flight through the film. Nagib's analysis of the films is nestled in a book arguing for viewing realism as a conceptual peg that can be sustained both synchronically and diachronically to read world cinema, and as a productive lens to read a range of films that are in conversation with one another despite geographical and temporal distances. Realism is the operative word she privileges so as to sketch a productive archaeology of world cinema, an exercise that follows, according to Nagib, Stam and Shohat's directive to imagine “polycentric multiculturalism” against extant hierarchies and dichotomies, such as Hollywood and other, art and popular, first and third cinemas, national and global, and so on.

Realism in Italian, Indian, and Iranian cinema

Such claims about realism as a conceptual category have been made before, as film studies has focused on realism from its earliest moments with Lumiere actualities, to early ethnographic films such as Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), to the films grouped under Italian neo-realism. The received wisdom on Italian neo-realism sees this as starting with Roberto Rosellini's Open City (1945) - a drama set in Rome during the Nazi occupation - and lasting about a decade, spurred on by a set of material conditions that coincided with the collapse of the Italian film industry.^[461] Scholars have debated whether material conditions can determine style so extensively, and in an elegant revisionist book, Noa Steimatsky has recently suggested that earlier documentary filmmaking also influenced neo-realism, a point that she makes especially in her resurrection of the scant footage of Michaelangelo Antonioni's first film Gente del Po (People of Po 1942/47). She reads this persuasively as intimations of a style that was yet to arrive: focus on a flooding river, recession from plot development, and underplaying the actions of human protagonists.^[462] While this mostly lost work cannot rewrite the entire genealogy of neo-realism, we are nevertheless alerted to the force of earlier documentary footage of landscape in Italian neo-realism, a detail that is often attributed to the discovery of outdoor locations after studios were bombed. Steimatsky also considers the role of film in restoring and reinventing Italian society after the war, however. Luca's run towards a set of tall buildings in extreme long shot at the end of Luchino Visconti's Rocco and his Brothers (i960), for example, brings into focus a postwar nation ruined by war and committed to rebuilding in a climate of economic and political compromises.

Realism was not simply an Italian national style, but was also embraced in India coinciding with independence. Satyajit Ray founded a film society in Calcutta in 1947 that showed the canonical works of Italian neo-realism; he was also close at hand while the French director Jean Renoir was shooting The River (1951) in India. He directed The Apu Trilogy (1955-59) based on a classic Bengali novel, which won many national and international awards, despite their use of amateur cast and crew. Moinak Biswas draws our attention to the naturalism in Ray's recording of landscape, and the flow and sound of outdoor locations.^[463] Reviving film director Ritwik Ghatak's admiration of rhythm in Ray's Aparajito (1956), Biswas sees duration in Ray's landscape as a way of presenting cinema itself; by eschewing an actor-driven narrative, the film allows the viewer to discern the aesthetic of rhythm most evident in lengthy descriptive segments, pastoral or otherwise. Ray's films show the influence of Italian neo-realism and Renoir, and yet as Biswas reveals simultaneously offer a protracted engagement with the naturalism of the Bengali novel.

Images of ruin, particularly catastrophic detritus, that are present in much Italian neo-realism, reemerged decades later in Iranian cinema as natural disaster, particularly in Abbas Kiarostami's Koker Trilogy: Where is the Friend's Home? (1987); And Life Goes On (1992); and Through the Olive Trees (1994). In the second two of this trilogy of films, set in the small village of Koker in northern Iran, Kiarostami is concerned with indexing the events of the earthquake that struck the area in 1990, thus revealing a partiality to realism, but is equally committed to interrogating the idea of space as a compositional puzzle in cinema. For instance, Through the Olive Trees revolves around a film shoot in the environs of Koker, with particular focus on the rehearsal and retakes of a scene between a couple whose union in both the film and outside it is far from being decided, a hesitation that the film exploits to complicate the distinction between the actors and their real-life dilemmas. Sync sound is used to expand the space of the frame so that we hear off-screen sounds such as the film director's instructions, which remind us that a film shoot in progress. The end of the film further devolves the differences between fact and fiction. In extreme long shot we see the protagonists Tahreh and Hossein walk and briefly engage in conversation; previously we have seen them in medium long shot rehearsing a scene as newlyweds. Rather than divulging the contents of their exchange on the soundtrack, we instead hear a concerto piping as Hossien turns around to run towards the camera and the film closes. The non-diegetic music points to the device of closure in realism, which folds into the conventions of fiction. What is at stake, the film suggests, is for us to grasp the artifice of realism in narrative cinema, and the fact that its limits are set by the poetics and politics of composition, not by events triggered from the outside.

Conclusion

To end is often to return to the beginning, and when we are dealing with globes and circles the return seems inevitable. One version of the story suggested in this chapter begins in France and I want to end it in China. Despite significant differences in composition and sequencing, deep echoes of the Lumieres' workers leaving the factory can be found in subsequent filmmaking; film and work would long designate one image of modernity. The film with which I wish to end, a feature length narrative, opens with a steadicam moving backwards, wending its way out of a long corridor while keeping a woman's frenetic search for a pin in focus. Starting in media res, its takes a few minutes for us to figure out that the Chinese-speaking woman clad in Indian costume is part of a dance troupe working in a theme park in Beijing; to be exact, in this sequence we find her performing in front of a replica of a Taj Mahal. The Chinese director Jia Zhangke's film, The World (2004), follows the stories of migrant workers from various parts of the world whose space of labor is an actual theme park in Beijing. In keeping with its title, Beijing World Park is dotted with scaled-down replicas of various historical monuments and famous landmarks from different coun­tries and regions.

Jia's film rearranges the composition of actualities shot by operators retained by the Lumieres, which introduced trompe l'oeil effects. In a manner not so dissimilar, Jia's The World relays the compositional ironies through reversals that abound in the park: a miniature Taj Mahal, the human size Leaning Tower of Pisa, and the monumental Eiffel Tower whose grandeur is visible in the skyline of the Beijing World Park when seen from afar, but less so up close. But in The World and other of his films, Jia disperses his engagement with the origins of cinema, in a multiplicity of signposts that direct us to abandoned factories, drowning villages, and theme parks. Still Life (2006), for example, is set in a village that is being destroyed by the building of the Three Gorges Dam, Useless (2007), a documentary, examines China's fashion and clothing industry, and 24 City (2008) follows three generations as an aircraft factory is torn down and an apartment complex put up instead. In these films, images of work are vastly transformed not only from those of the Lumieres' workers but also from the promised utopias of communism; in their place we witness a rapidly transforming idea of work and the workday.

The distance covered between the Lumieres and Jia Zhangke is one way of narrating a story of world cinema whose varied and uneven history is hemmed in by national cinemas and studio styles, but also at other moments flung open by the promiscuous exchange of international styles at film festivals, the curriculum at film schools, and above all by the audacity of cinephiles.⁴1 It is in the spirit of cinephilia that I wish to end this chapter with my own 2012 submission to the Decade Poll solicited by the British film magazine Sight and Sound, which every decade asks an international group of film professionals to vote for the top ten films of all time. My list is a sign of my investment in the concept of world cinema. These are films that do not find a mention in my essay, but with this I hope to impress upon the reader that there are many alternative histories of world cinema, and that any single history flattens the story of world cinema.

Lalitha Gopalan's Ten Films

1. The Man with a Camera (1929) dir. Dziga Vertov

2. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) dir. Chantal Akerman

41 See my introduction in Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 2002). See more recent essays on cinephilia in Framework (Spring and Fall 2009): 50.1/2.

3. Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini

4. Amor (1980) dir. Robert Beavers

5. Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) dir. Tsai Ming-liang

6. 13 Lakes (2004) dir. James Benning

7. Tropical Malady (2004) dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul

8. Johnny Gaddaar (2007) dir. Sriram Raghavan

9. The Wire (2002-08) created by David Simon (Second season)

10. In Camera (2010) dir. Ranjan Palit

Time revises taste; time challenges love; time is cinephilia's muse. And time informs duration. Not all ten films from my list a decade ago have survived; they haven't lost their luster, but have been shunted to the archives awaiting exhumation at a later date.

Further reading

Andrew, Dudley with Herve Joubert-Laurencin, eds. Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Alter, Nora M. Chris Marker. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006.

Badley, Linda R., Barton Palmer, and Steven Jay Schneider, eds. Traditions in World Cinema. New Brunswick, nj: Rutgers University Press, 2006.

Barnouw, Erik and S. Krishnaswamy. Indian Film. 2nd edn. Oxford University Press, 1980.

Bazin, Andre. What is Cinema? selected and translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1967; rpt. 2005.

Berenstein, Mathew and Gaylyn Studlar, eds. Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Betz, Mark. Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Biswas, Moinak, ed. Apu and After: Re-visiting Ray's Cinema. Calcutta: Seagull Press, 2005. Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. 3rd edn. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Dennison, Stephanie and Song Hwee Lim, eds. Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2006.

Durovicova, Natasa and Kathleen Newman. World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2010.

Dym, Jeffrey A. Benshi, Japanese Silent Film Narrators, and their Forgotten Narrative Art of Setsumei: A History of Japanese Silent Film Narration. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003.

Gopalan, Lalitha. Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema. London: BFI Publishing, 2002.

Grant, Catherine and Annette Kuhn, eds. Screening World Cinema: A Screen Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.

Grierson, John. Grierson on Documentary, edited by Forsyth Hardy. Revised Edition. New York: Praeger, 1966.

Jameson, Frederic. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Melgosa, Adrian Perez. Cinema and Inter-American Relations: Trafficking Transnational Affect. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Miller, Toby et al., eds. Global Hollywood. London: British Film Institute, 2001.

Global Hollywood 2. London: BFI Publishing, 2005.

Myrent, Glenn and Georges P. Langlois. Henri Langlois, First Citizen of Cinema. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995.

Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton University Press, 2001.

Nagib, Lucia. World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism. London: Continuum, 2011.

Overbey, David. Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-Realism. Hamden, cτ: Archon Books, 1978.

Pines, Jim and Paul Willemen, eds. Questions of Third Cinema. London: BFI Publishing, 1989.

Rosen, Philip. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Steimatsky, Noa. Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Teo, Stephen. The Asian Cinema Experience: Style, Spaces, Theory. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2012.

Turim, Maureen. Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. New York and London: Routledge, 1989.

Vincendeau, Ginnete. Pepe Le Moko. London: BFI Modern Classics, 1998.

Walker, Janet. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 2005.

Williams, Alan. Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Willis, Sharon. Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body. Urbana-Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 1987.