Archive for April, 2021

Bandwidth Imperialism and Small-File Media

We understand the provocation of “new filmic geographies” in two ways: as media geopolitics, explored in the first part by Laura, and as media geopoetics, explored in the second part…

The World Imagined

To see the world in a grain of sand William Blake During Oscars season 2020, the internet was abuzz with a meme of Bong Joon Ho reflecting on the widespread…

Netflix and the Transnationalization of Nollywood

In 2020, middle-class Nigerians basked in the experience of watching the latest Nollywood films on their release dates, previously exclusive to cinema- or festival-going audiences. Meanwhile, viewers in France and…

Lebanon’s Shifting Cinematic Landscape

When Lebanese filmmaker Ziad Doueiry’s feature film The Insult (2017) was nominated for an Academy Award in 2018, the Lebanese media scene was abuzz. Doueiry, whose first film, West Beyrouth…

Seven Social Landscapes

1 At the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, director Alejandro González Iñárritu led critics away from the Palais to an airplane hangar to experience his virtual reality installation Carne y Arena….

Late Transnational Cinema: James Baldwin at the Movies

James Baldwin is everywhere in the twenty-first century: circulating on Twitter and Instagram; ventriloquized by public intellectuals such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Eddie Glaude, and Jesmyn Ward; and adapted in cinema….

The Embedded World

I first saw Samuel Benchetrit’s French film Asphalte (2015) with Korean subtitles at a cinema in Busan, South Korea. I have since returned again and again to the film, and…

Toward a Geopolitical Approach to the Study of Transnational Cinema

Chong Keat Aun’s debut feature-length film, The Story of Southern Islet (Nanwu, 2020), takes place in Chong’s native Kedah in Peninsula Malaysia. The film was nominated in two categories at…

Mapping Film Traffic

That we think of national cinemas as a natural category has little to do with any quality inherent in a given filmic text. 1 In the heady early days of…

Where the World Things Are

Where does film live today?1  When Warner Bros. announced a deal with HBO Max in December 2020 — according to which its content would be released via streaming and in…