ABSTRACT

Contemporary cinema, like other types of visual mass communication, is increasingly embedded in discourses of globalisation. However, as is the case with globalisation generally, its discrete manifestations are full of paradox and tension. They are complex, heterogeneous phenomena, caught between their national or local origin, the homogenising tendencies represented by the global village and its inroads on the particularities of the national, and the tendency for those at the receiving end of transnational cultural processes to reinterpret and reinvent extraneous cultural influences within their own field of mental vision, their own interpretive and behavioural currency. As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have put it, ‘Perception itself is embedded in history. The same filmic images or sounds provoke distinct reverberations for different communities’ (Shohat and Stam 1996:163).