Global Cinema

GLOBAL CINEMA

TOPIC 1 – Images and metaphors of the global

Arjun Appadurai, “Modernity at large. Cultural dimensions of

globalization”

Electronic media decisively change the wider field of mass media

and other traditional media because they offer new resources and

new disciplines for the construction of imagined selves and

imagined worlds. Through such effects as the telescoping of news

into audio-video bytes, through the tension between the public

spaces of cinema and the more exclusive spaces of video watching,

through the immediacy of their absorption into public discourse,

and through their tendency to be associated with glamour,

cosmopolitanism, and the new, electronic media (whether associated

with the news, politics, family life, or spectacular

entertainment) tend to interrogate, subvert, and transform other

contextual literacies.

Always carrying the sense of distance between viewer and event,

the electronic media nevertheless compel the transformation of

everyday discourse. At the same time, they are resources for

experiments with self-making in all sorts of societies, for all

sorts of persons. They allow scripts for possible lives to be

imbricated with the glamour of film stars and fantastic film plots

and yet also to be tied to the plausibility of news shows,

documentaries, and other black-and-white forms of telemediation

and printed text. Because of the sheer multiplicity of the forms

in which they appear (cinema, television, computers, and

telephones) and because of the rapid way in which they move

through daily life routines, electronic media provide resources

for self-imagining as an everyday social project.

When the story of mass migrations (voluntary and forced) is

juxtaposed with the rapid flow of mass-mediated images, scripts,

and sensations, we have a new order of instability in the

production of modern subjectivities. When moving images meet

deterritorialized viewers, these create diasporic public spheres,

phenomena that confound theories that depend on the continued

salience of the nation-state as the key arbiter of important

social changes.

Electronic mediation and mass migration create specific

irregularities because both viewers and images are in simultaneous

circulation. Neither images nor viewers fit into circuits or

audiences that are easily bound within local, national, or

regional spaces. Of course, many viewers may not themsleves

migrate. And many mass-mediated events are highly local in scope,

as with cable television in some parts of the United States. But

few important films, news broadcasts, or television spectacles are

entirely unaffected by other media events that come from further

afield. Both persons and images often meet unpredictably, outside

the certainties of home and the cordon sanitaire of local and

national media effects. This mobile and unforeseeable relationship

between mass-mediated events and migratory audiences defines the

core of the link between globalization and the modern. The work of

the imagination viewed in this context, is a space of contestation

in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into

their own practices of the modern.

There has been shift in recent decades, biulding on technological

changes over the past century or so, in which the imagination has

become a collective, social fact. This development, in turn, is

the basis of the plurality of imagined worlds.

In suggesting that the imagination in the postelectronic world

plays a newly significant role, I rest my case on three

distinctions. First, the imagination has broken out of the special

expressive space of art, myth, and ritual and has now become a

part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary life from which it

had largely been successfully sequestered. Of course, this has

precedents in the great revolutions, cargo cults, and messianic

movements of other times, in which forceful leaders implanted

their visions into social life, thus creating powerful movements

for social change. Now, however, it is no longer a matter of

specially endowed (charismatic) individuals, injecting the

imagination where it does not belong. Ordinary people have begun

to deploy their imaginations in the practice of their everyday

lives.

More people than ever before seem to imagine routinely xthe

possibility that they or their children will live and work in

places other than where thay were born: this is the wellspring of

the increased rates of migration at every level of social,

national, and global life. Others are dragged into new settings,

as the refugee camps of Thailand, Ethiopia, Tamil Nadu, and

Palestine remind us. For these people, they move and must drag

their imagination for new ways of living along with them. And then

there are those who move in search of work, wealth, and

opportunity often because their current circumstances are

intolerable. We may speak of diasporas of hope, diasporas of

terror, and diasporas of despair. But in every case, these

diasporas bring the force of imagination, as both memory and

desire, into the lives of many ordinary people, into mythographies

different from the disciplines of myth and ritual of the classic

sort. The key difference here is that these new mythographies are

charters for new social projects, and not just a counteroint to

the certainties of daily life. They move the glacial force of the

habitus into the quickened beat of improvisation for large groups

of people. Here the images, scripts, models, and narratives that

come through mass mediation (in its realistic and fictional modes)

make the difference between migration today and in the past. Those

who wish to move, those who have moved, those who wish to return,

and those who choose to stay rarely formulate their plans outside

the sphere of radio and television, cassettes and videos,

newsprint and telephone. For migrants, both the politics of

adaptation to new environments and the stimulus to move or return

are deeply affected by a mass-mediated imaginary that frequently

transcends national space.

The second distinction is between imagination and fantasy. There

is a large and respectable body of writing, notably by the critics

of mass culture of the Frankfurt School and anticipated in the

work of Max Weber, that views the modern world as growing into an

iron cage and predicts that the imagination will be stunted by

forces of commoditization, industrial capitalism, and the

generalized regimentation and secularization of the world. The

modernization theorists of the past three decades largely accepted

the view of the modern world as a space of shrinking religiosity,

less play, and inhibited spontaneity at every level. The error

works on two levels. First, it is based on a premature requiem for

the death of religion and the victory of science. There is vast

evidence in new religiosities of every sort that religion is not

only not dead but that it may be more consequential than ever in

today’s highly mobile and interconnected global politics. On

another level, it is wrong to assume that the electronic media are

the opium of the masses. This view, which is only beginning to be

corrected, is based on the notion that the mechanical arts of

reproduction largely reprimed ordinary people for industrial work.

It is far too simple.

There is growing evidence that the consumption of the mass media

throughout the world often provokes resistance, irony,

selectivity, and, in general, agency. Terrorists modeling

themselves on Rambo-like figures (who have themselves generated a

host of non-Western counterparts); houswives reading romances and

soap operas as part of their efforts to construct their own lives;

Muslim family gatherings listening to speeches by Islamic leaders

on cassette tapes; domestic servants in South India taking

packaged tours to Kashmir: these are all examples of the active

way in which media are appropriated by people throughout the

world. T-shirts, billboards, and graffiti as well as rap music,

street dancing, and slum housing all show that the images of the

media are quickly moved into local repertoires of irony, anger,

humor, and resistance.

This is not to suggest that conumers are free agents, living

happily in a world of safe malls, free lunches, and quick fixes.

Consumption in the contemporary world is often a form of drudgery,

part of the capitalist civilizing process. Nevertheless, where

there is consumption there is pleasure, and where there is

pleasure there is agency. Freedom, on the other hand, is a rather

more elusive commodity.

Further, the idea of fantasy carries with it the inescapable

connotation of thought divorced from projects and actions, and it

also has a private, even individualistic sound about it. The

imagination, on the other hand, has a projective sense about it,

the sense of being a prelude to some sort of expression, whether

easthetic or otherwise. Fantasy can dissipate, but the

imagination, especially when collective, can become the fuel for

action. It is the imagination, in its collective forms, that

creates ideas of neighborhood and nationhood, of moral economies

and unjust rule, of higher wages and foreign labor prospects. The

imagination is today a staging ground for action, and not only for

escape.

The third distinction is between the individual and collective

senses of the imagination. It is important to stress here that I

am speaking of the imagination now as a property of collectives,

and not merely as a faculty of the gifted individual. Part of what

the mass media make possible, because of the conditions of

collective reading, criticism, and pleasure, is what I have

elsewhere called a “community of sentiment”, a group that begins

to imagine and feel things together. Print capitalism can be one

important way in which groups who have never been in face-to-face

contact can begin to think of themselves as Indonesian or Indian

or Malaysian. But other forms of electronic capitalism can have

similar, and even more powerful effects, for they do not work only

at the level of the nation-state. Collective experiences of the

mass media, especially film and video, can create sodalities of

worship and charisma, such as those that formed regionally around

the Indian female deity Santoshi Ma in the seventies and eighties

and transnationally around Ayatollah Khomeini in roughly the same

period.

These sodalities resemble what Diana Crane (1972) has called

“invisible colleges” in reference to the world of science, but

they are more volatile, less professionalized, less subject to

collectively shared criteria of pleasure, taste, or mutual

relevance. They are communities in themselves but always

potentially communities for themselves capable, of moving from

shared imagination to collective action. Most important, these

sodalities are often transnational, even postnational, and they

frequently operate beyond the boundaries of the nation. These

mass-mediated sodalities have the additional complexity that, in

them, diverse local experiences of taste, pleasure, and politics

can crisscross with one another, thus creating the possibility of

convergences in translocal social action that would otherwise be

hard to imagine.

The Theory of rupture states that:

 Electronic media and mass migration are interconnected

factors;

 Their combined effect on the work of imagination is a key

feature of modern subjectivity;

 Electronic media offer new resources for the constructions of

imagined selves and imagined worlds (scripts for possible

lives);

 Mass migration creates diasporic public spheres.

People and images often meet unpredictably.

Due to technological changes, in recent decades the imagination

has become a collective, social fact. This leads to a plurality of

imagined worlds, in which 3 distinctions can be made:

 The imagination has become a part of the quotidian mental

work of ordinary people;

 Distinction between fantasy (leads to escape) and imagination

(prepares to action);

 Collective dimension of the work of the imagination.

The 5 dimensions of global cultural flow are:

 Ethnoscapes;

 Technoscapes;

 Financescapes;

 Mediascapes;

 Ideoscapes.

In this world’s global cultural flow both points of departure and

points of arrival are in flux and the search for steady points of

reference can be very difficult.

Ann Kaplan, “Pretrauma Political Thrillers: Children of Men”

If the powerful effects of nature’s violence in the pretrauma

climate scenarios seemed to offer a political intervention in

terms of paying attention to global warming, other dystopian

futurist films engage with politics more directly. The film

studied here raises questions about human life on the edge of

extinction because of infertility. As political thriller it

addresses the dangers that are inherent in the corporate

capitalism of the 20th and 21st centuries, capitalism that is

directly related to environmental degeneration. Historical memory

of the European fascist regimes that gave rise to World War II

haunts the film, which is a political thriller but at the same

time it offers a pretraumatic world on the brink of disaster

caused through human inattention to environmental change.

The continuum of past, present, and future seems built into our

DNA (quite literally, if we are to believe evolutionary

psychologists, who offer some evidence that, not having a basis

for planning, the future can be traumatic). It seems traumatic for

humans to be left without the sequence of past, present, and

future. But trauma time is itself ambiguous. First, trauma’s

temporality indeed collapses past, present, and future into one

horrifying and paralyzing zone of fear. Second, this collapsing of

time zones leaves humans living in a present that is characterized

by trauma, creating the “trauma culture”. Cuarón is able in the

first half of the film to demonstrate the ambiguity of trauma time

as a collapsing of temporality into one timeless present and is

then able, later, to indicate the historical moment as indeed that

of pervasive trauma.

In Children of Men Cuarón is able to achieve a very complex film

partly because of his mixture of generes in earlier projects.

Children of Men is a crossover film in a technical sense, that is,

it mixes documentary style and leftist politics with Hollywood

action conventions. Universal Pictures, evidently nervous about

Children, did not invest in elaborate marketing, and at first the

film mainly played in the UK. It then got a big boost from the

DVD, partly because of Žižek’s commentary. In adapting the elegant

1992 novel by P.D. James, Cuarón retained infertility as the

central component of the narrative, although he also provided a

political framing, a critique of capitalism that is absent in

James’s work. Coming from Mexico, where there is an overproduction

of babies, Cuarón is fully aware that in the more prosperous USA,

there is already an underproduction of children.

The main action in Children involves the protaognist Theo Faron,

who saves the rare pregnant Afro-Caribbean Kee and brings her

safely to the ship, which is aptly (and perhaps ironically) named

the Tomorrow. There is a background story that is actually the

real meaning of the film – only in this case it contains an

explicitly political theme, namely, a critique of the post 9/11

Western capitalist response to that tragedy. This critique is

visible in the images heavily oriented to UK, US, and global

political crisis – 9/11, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and Guantánamo – to say

nothing of the July 2005 bombings in London and Madrid. In

interviews, Cuarón admits that his “iconography mostly came out of

the media”.

Both Žižek and Cuarón in interviews and commentaries suggest that

there are two stories in the film – that of the foregrounded,

actio-hero, Hollywood-style story which the white male hero saves

the black woman, the first female to become pregnant in eighteen

years, and that of the background story that offers a critique of

capitalism as we know it. The latter is, at least for Žižek, the

real story of the film.

Most societies globally have already fallen apart due to

infertility, and environmental disaster is in full view. But as

the TV announcer tells us near the start of the film, “Britain

soldiers on”. Immigrants by the millions seek entry into Britain

because there is still a semblance of society there. There is

still food and shelter and a degree of order, and a nation which

is theoretically a democracy but in fact (Cuarón’s point)

essentially a dictatorship. Illegal immigrants are captured on

arrival and imprisoned in camps without rights or recourse.

Pretrauma worlds such as these produce not only horrifying images

of humans’ future, with possible traumatic effects in audiences,

but also the trauma of not having a future at all, or of there

being only a temporary one. It is perhaps this fear of the future

that binds dystopia to utopia as a powerful aspect of human

thought, repeated from generation to generation, and the binary of

utopia/dystopia is a way of thinking that constantly leads Western

culture astray.

There are three broad concepts of time in the film, each inspiring

various corresponding emotions. The first time is a dystopian

futureless present (2027), a time reflecting affects of loss,

depression, anomie, cynicism. The second time is a melancholic,

nostalgic looking-back to the utopian 1960s (when for a moment

activists thought they could build a better society) and to a

recent past in which infertility was normal. The third is a

utopian, indeed messianic future, figured in the character of the

Afro-Carebbean refugee (the “foogie”, as the film calls her), Kee,

whose miraculous pregnancy drives the action (and action-hero)

aspect of the plot mandated by Hollywood. Each set of affects is

brilliantly expressed not only through Cuarón’s much-cited

innovative technical feats but also through the powerful musical

score, which focuses especially on British composer