ABSTRACT
In 2008, about twenty minutes into the television broadcast at the Academy Awards ceremony, actor George Clooney introduced a short film sequence honoring the eightieth anniversary of the Oscars. At the end of the piece, which highlighted moments in past ceremonies when stars were moved by the recognition of their peers and which swept to its minor epic conclusion with an aged Charlie Chaplin thanking the Academy and his fellow filmmakers over Celine Dion’s voice singing “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic, the host of the ceremony, comedian Jon Stewart, pretended to be distracted. Holding an iPhone or iPod, he announced he was watching Lawrence of Arabia, but that it was better appreciated in widescreen and so he turned the device sideways. It was the perfect joke for the film industry in the digital age, recalling the celluloid grandeur of filmmaking past, referencing, by the film’s theme of Middle Eastern wars, the current US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and deflating popular hyperbole regarding new media. Most interesting of all was the gag’s recognition, beyond the question of screen size, that questions of geopolitical scale are central to the meaning-making processes of cinema. How a film instantiates
the geopolitical imaginary of a particular historical time and place, whom the film addresses and from what geopolitical perspective, and what a film accomplishes as a narrative are understood to be the simultaneous operation of multiple scales. This popular recognition of the centrality of the question of scale has also become a concern for the discipline of film studies.
