“World cinema should let us know the territory differently, whatever territory it is that a film comes from or concerns.”
Dudley Andrew’s statement encompasses the course “Introduction to Global Cinema’s” objective to introduce key movements that inspired filmmakers across the globe to come up with their novel styles, types, and sub-genres of international films. The iconic films screened in the class were representative of a specific decade in a specific region in the world. I became familiarized with the different types of narrative film movements such as the French New Wave, Italian Neorealism, Cinema Novo, Weimer Cinema, Japanese Cinema, Indian Cinema, Cinema of Psychology, Chinese Cinema, African Cinema, Animation, and Metaphorical Extra-terrestrial Cinema.
The readings and screenings cumulated to a weekly blog post that reflected issues raised by the film in connection to the readings. The blog posts were integrated into class discussions which allowed dialogue amongst peers. A major takeaway from this course was that I developed a “mapped” understanding of the historical and theoretical issues related to the numerous modes of international filmmaking. For example, the ravages of World War II significantly affected European cinema.
Italian Neorealism was born out of the economic conditions of World War II that employed conventions such as low-budget films that cast non-professional actors and shooting on location as opposed to a set. Hence the film “Bicycle Thieves” encapsulated Italian Neorealism by centralizing on the difficulty of life post-World War II. This course taught me to correlate other developments in film history in national contexts as well as in international contexts. “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” merged two cultures under the guise of a romance evolving between a 50-year old German woman and a 30-year old Moroccan immigrant to Germany. While the overall theme was bridging two cultures, the film recognized the issues of racism by injecting xenophobic undertones to the film.
It was from this class where I cultivated the skill of analyzing cinematographic techniques whilst relating it to the director’s thoughts and further placing it in this atlas of world cinema. A realization from this course is that the issues addressed by these global films were not central to the region itself. To name a few recurring themes—hunger, poverty, oppression, competition, social segregation, gender role issues, and misogyny existed in different parts of the world but only permeated the screens at particular periods in history. This timing is largely attributed to the political and economic environment that determined what could be funded and shown to the public.
This course sparked an interest in me to find out more about film and media studies. I would have never watched the films screened in class during my free time, however, the films were stuck to me because of how relevant the film contexts were to what I was studying at Georgetown. I could say that the class opened my eyes into thinking about the significance of world cinema as a tool that brings all disciplines together; simultaneously raising broader questions while answering the question of what the concerns are at the territory from which the film is from.