ABSTRACT
World Cinema has thus been understood in extremely diverse and even opposite ways, and gradually came to gather under its wide umbrella earlier categories such as “foreign films,” to “international art cinema,” or to “non-Hollywood film,” and “international auteur cinema.” World Cinema films are intended, often from the level of conception, for consumption by North Atlantic audiences, financially supported through multiple phases of production largely by European funding, and distributed via the network of North Atlantic film festivals, arthouse theaters, and DVD releases. In “Film Festival Networks: the new Topographies of Cinema in Europe,” Thomas Elsaesser describes the process by which the gatekeepers of the international film festival circuit confer cultural capital on a new kind of auteur in the context of the Hollywood hegemony and the global cultural flows. “World Cinema” sometimes evokes a kind of top-down patronage of the films and filmmakers from the Global South, including the “South” of Europe itself.
