ABSTRACT
The discipline of comparative literature and its emphasis on ethno-linguistic units ‘to be compared’ seems quite inappropriate as a model for approaching the study of a thoroughly industrialized cultural form such as cinema. There is no need even to recall the complicity between comparative literature and comparative religion and that Goethe’s notion of ‘world literature’ gestured towards the alleged universality of Western-Christian values as the yardstick with which to measure the degree of a particular, ‘regional’ literary work’s adherence to a norm deemed to be universal. 1 Nevertheless, it is precisely the whiff of clerical thinking that attaches to comparative literature that provides a clue as to why the notion of comparative film studies may be worth considering, mutatis mutandis. In the West, the shift from religion and its professionals as the legitimators and enforcers of particular regimes of social power to a more secular notion of ‘universal values’ – a shift accompanied by the gradual transformation of clerics into intellectuals and, now, media practitioners – is the history of the emergence of the ‘public sphere’ challenging and eventually supplanting the court as the legitimate site for the discussion of issues of governance. That is the history underpinning the designation of the peculiar mix of moral philosophy and aesthetics known as ‘literature’ – ‘lit and its crit’, as Tom Nairn once put it – as the training ground for ‘modern’ state legitimators (enforcement duties have been passed on to the military and the police). Given that the force driving this change is the one identified by Karl Marx, that is to say, the gradual elaboration and spread of the capitalist mode of production that set about its triumphal globalization in the second half of the twentieth century, and given that the history of cinema coincides with the industrialization of culture enforced in the West since the closing years of the nineteenth century, it must follow that there is indeed a kind of ‘universalism’ that informs cinema as a cultural form. 2
