ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that a new framework for understanding World Cinema can be predicated upon the relations between cinemas of citizens and cinemas of sentiment. Like a community of citizens, a cinema of citizens is one based upon an exchange of "political, social and economic rights and obligations". In comparison, a cinema of sentiment, like a community of sentiment, is more focused on becoming than on being and as such offers "a dynamic picture of a contested identity always being debated". A community and cinema of sentiment express themselves via a subjectivity that exceeds a legalised or politically circumscribed identity since such "identity formations consist of trying to 'pin us' to a specific, selected sub-set of the many diverse clusters we traverse in our lifetimes". The emergence and erasure of representative cinemas that are cognisant of their social, political, economic and aesthetic impact and their implications is a mostly organic occurrence moving through rigidification, dissolution and vaporisation in both directions.
