Cinema

Limitations of the Hollywood and European Art Cinema Dichotomy

The bulk of scholarly and journalistic writings bolstered media histories and geographies in which Hollywood commercial cinema and, later, European art cinema get ensconced as the global benchmarks of two contrary modes. Overly distinguished by their imputed adherence to two polarized sets of conventions (commercial cinema's erasure of the means of production in the interest of taut, pleasurable, “slice of real life” narratives, in contrast to art cinema's reflexive, formally radical, discursively ambiguous and intellectually stimulating works), these two ideal types are then viewed as spawning their respective emulators. If Hollywood remains the undisputed model for various commercial film industries, their “derivative” status now obsessively reiterated by epithets like Bollywood and Nollywood, then more radical European formations such as Soviet Revolutionary Cinema or the French New Wave are celebrated as inspirations for Brazilian Cinema Novo or Taiwanese New Cinema.

The point is not to deny the global hegemony of Hollywood or the far-flung influences of Italian Neorealism and the French Nouvelle Vague. The point, rather, is to press for more global accounts of world cinema. If Hollywood principles of verisimilitude, continuity editing, and narrative economy are taken to be the universal standards, then Hong Kong martial arts and ghost genres or Indian melodramas with their epic digressions and musical numbers seem idiosyncratic, only partially evolved: These huge industries remain oddly marginal. What, then, is the place in global cinema of the Hindi film Awara (1951), now widely considered to be the most watched film in the world? [Page 178]How do we appreciate the penetration of Hollywood action films by martial arts gestures—a development of which the Matrix trilogy (1999–2003) may only be the most legible signpost? Even today, as Hollywood is entering all kinds of transnational collaborations, the moniker “world cinema” routinely refers to a smorgasbord of non-Hollywood cinemas (thereby rivaling the absurdity of the category “world music”). Where and what is Hollywood, exactly? In what sense is Moulin Rouge (2001), a film about a group of fin de siècle Parisian bohemians producing a stage show set in India, co-produced by Twentieth Century Fox (United States), Angel Studios (Britain), and Bazmark Films (Australia-United States), with British, Australian, and Colombian-American lead actors, and directed by the Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann, a Hollywood film?

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