World Cinema: A Critical Introduction is a comprehensive yet accessible guide to film industries across the globe. From the 1980s onwards, new technologies and increased globalization have radically altered the landscape in which films are distributed and exhibited. Films are made from the large-scale industries of India, Hollywood, and Asia, to the small productions in Bhutan and Morocco. They are seen in multiplexes, palatial art cinemas in Cannes, traveling theatres in rural India, and on millions of hand-held mobile screens. Authors Deshpande and Mazaj have developed a method of charting this new world cinema that makes room for divergent perspectives, traditions, and positions, while also revealing their interconnectedness and relationships of meaning. In doing so, they bring together a broad range of issues and examples-theoretical concepts, viewing and production practices, film festivals, large industries such as Nollywood and Bollywood, and smaller and emerging film cultures-into a systemic yet flexible map of world cinema. The multi-layered approach of this book aims to do justice to the depth, dynamism, and complexity of the phenomenon of world cinema. For students looking to films outside of their immediate context, this book offers a blueprint that will enable them to transform a casual encounter with a film into a systematic inquiry into world cinema.

World Cinema: A Critical Introduction is a comprehensive yet accessible guide to film industries across the globe. From the 1980s onwards, new technologies and increased globalization have radically altered the landscape in which films are distributed and exhibited. Films are made from the large-scale industries of India, Hollywood, and Asia, to the small productions in Bhutan and Morocco. They are seen in multiplexes, palatial art cinemas in Cannes, traveling theatres in rural India, and on millions of hand-held mobile screens. Authors Deshpande and Mazaj have developed a method of charting this new world cinema that makes room for divergent perspectives, traditions, and positions, while also revealing their interconnectedness and relationships of meaning. In doing so, they bring together a broad range of issues and examples-theoretical concepts, viewing and production practices, film festivals, large industries such as Nollywood and Bollywood, and smaller and emerging film cultures-into a systemic yet flexible map of world cinema. The multi-layered approach of this book aims to do justice to the depth, dynamism, and complexity of the phenomenon of world cinema. For students looking to films outside of their immediate context, this book offers a blueprint that will enable them to transform a casual encounter with a film into a systematic inquiry into world cinema.

Michel Foucault introduced the idea that films could deliberately re-write the memory of history that people hold. Cinema has become a large apparatus, with its influence felt far beyond the texts themselves, into the fabric of everyday life. There is logic to this apparatus, which governs how reception and retention of films are shaped. Popular memory is embodied into everyday life, as part of the cinematic apparatus, according to the libidinal structures of desire and available avenues of expression. This book is an examination of how popular memory is shaped and retained under the influence of cinema. It attempts to address the microscopic implications of the theories of discourse and power at the level of subjectivity. Arguing that the work of Julia Kristeva, Pierre Bourdieu, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Fran ois Lytoard provides a way of understanding the embodied narrative resistance to the powers of the apparatus, this book provides methods of using critical theory for our understanding of the relationships between cinema and popular memory.