Has film ever been Western?

This chapter considers the comprehension of narrative film from a cognitive perspective in order to propose that a key aspect of cinema, namely movement, or what this chapter will call continuity, is universally comprehensible and that all humans, regardless of culture, can understand it. The chapter will use this as the basis for proposing that cinema exists in what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2009) might term the realm of the “common.” If cinema is understood as “common,” then this raises questions as to whether cinema is “Western” such that it needs to be de-Westernized, or indeed as to whether it has ever been Western at all.