The idea of world cinema has always been slippery. First cohering as an umbrella term for films made outside Hollywood and western Europe, the concept significantly evolved in the early 2000s, as postcolonialism and globalization prompted attention to the transnational circuits of (forced) migration and global capital and a rethinking of the national frameworks that had previously dominated cinema studies. This reassessment moved away from the negative, binary logic that characterized the first articulations of world cinema and the Eurocentrism implicit in this approach. Instead, the second phase embraced a positive, polycentric methodology that looked to decenter the field, a shift perhaps best encompassed in Luçia Nagib’s conceptualization of world cinema as method. At the same time, scholars employed related terms to account for the transnational modes of  production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption that were beginning to dominate some sectors of the industry. Since then, world cinema has become increasingly institutionalized both inside and outside the academy, with the emergence of multiple edited collections, journal special issues, and book series, as well as the launch of film festivals, DVD imprints, social media channels, and streaming platforms dedicated to it. 

Thus, despite the ambiguity of its referent and, for some scholars, increasing skepticism about its critical value, the concept of world cinema is, as Dudley Andrew reminds us, “now permanently with us: in our classes, our textbooks, the popular press.” Such persistence, even in the face of disagreement over its meaning and usefulness, speaks to the fundamentally international foundations of cinema and a persistent drive to unpack the evolving global dynamics of the medium. 

Taking the conjoined ubiquity and instability of world cinema as its starting point, this seminar builds on this history by reinterrogating the concept and tracking its shifting utility in light of more recent geopolitical and industrial changes. As such, it seeks papers that explore how earlier understandings of world cinema need to be rethought with regards to the complex political, economic, technological, ecological, social, industrial, and educational transformations of the last twenty years. In addition, it invites new theorizations of world cinema that expand, complicate, or disrupt existing paradigms and/or offer fresh takes on how we can understand the concept of world cinema today.

Participants are asked to develop their papers around a key word that signifies their approach to understanding what world cinema is/could be, with each paper framed as a riff on the idea of “World Cinema as ...”. The seminar is open to papers that employ a wide variety of methodologies (industry studies, digital humanities, textual analysis etc.) and theoretical frameworks (marxist, postcolonial, queer, ecocritical etc.). Innovative and provocative theorizations are particularly welcome.