Review

Reviewed Work(s): Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories by Rosalind Galt and
Karl Schoonover
Review by: Lisa Patti
Source: Film Criticism , Winter, 2011/12, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Winter, 2011/12), pp. 78-80
Published by: Allegheny College

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Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories
Rosalind Gait and Karl Schoonover, eds.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Reviewed by Lisa Patti

In their introduction to the anthology Global Art Cinema:
New Theories and Histories, Rosalind Gait and Karl Schoonover
acknowledge the ambivalence that the term "art cinema" produces,
noting that "many scholars to whom we spoke about this volume
responded with perplexity that we would endorse such a retrograde
category"(5). The introduction confronts this ambivalence with
a rigorous and at times polemical argument in favor of a scholarly
reappraisal of art cinema in its past and present iterations.
The recuperation of art cinema as an industrial, aesthetic,
and critical category relies on the combination of "art cinema" with
"global" - an equally controversial term, generating the anthology's
focus on "global art cinema." In this formulation, "global" operates
not as a modifier, designating a subset of art cinema, but as an essential
element of art cinema: "The term 'global' speaks to the international
address, distribution, audience, and aesthetic language of the art
cinema. This globality is, however, enabled by the term 'art,' which
connects ideas about the status of the image to international aesthetic,
critical, and industrial institutions"(20).
The excellent introduction not only frames the anthology's
discussion of global art cinema but also offers a long-overdue account
of the aesthetic, industrial, and political contours and consequences
of art cinema. The introduction - like many of the essays that follow
- cites David Bordwell's "Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice"
(1979) - first published in Film Criticism - and Steve Neale's "Art
Cinema as Institution" (1981) - as primary critical reference points.
The anthology traces the shifting global networks of film production,
distribution, and reception in the decades since those essays were first
published, underscoring the value of issuing a new set of claims about
the status of art cinema. The introduction enlivens the discussion of
art cinema, defending art cinema's "investment in visual legibility and
cross-cultural translation"( 10) as a universality that "enables us to
think about the global"(l 1).
Gait and Schoonover buttress their definition of art cinema
in relation to the global by outlining the critical value of art cinema's

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various impurities, captured in the introduction's subtitle - "The
Impurity of Art Cinema." They argue that art cinema's impurity
assumes five forms: its occupation of impure institutional spaces,
caught between commercial and experimental or avant-garde cinemas;
its imprecise relationship to national cinemas and international cinema,
often defined as "foreign" and in transit; its ambivalent relationship to
the dominant structuring categories of film culture, including stardom
and authorship; its imperfect fit within genres or as a genre; and its
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The essays gathered in Global Art Cinema deploy a range

methodological approaches to analyze the impurities of art cinem
with contributions focused on individual directors, films, ge
and industrial formations. While the collection is divided into four
relatively coherent sections - Delimiting the Field, The Art Cinema
Image, Art Cinema Histories, and Geopolitical Intersections -
emphases on style and circulation emerge across these sections.
In the anthology's opening essay and one of its most sustained
meditations on style, Mark Betz renovates David Bordwell's definition
of "parametric narration," arguing that "local knowledges are inflected,
indeed even explicitly foregrounded as such, by parametric form,"
and locating, in the global parametric art cinema tradition (which
includes Abbas Kiarostami, Carlos Reygadas, and Abderrahmane
Sissako), "aesthetic features that attest to the persistence of cinematic
modernism, with a difference, in the so-called postmodem era of
globalization"(32-33). Betz's intervention comes alive in the closing
pages of the essay in his close reading of Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood
for Love (2000), in which he demonstrates the pleasure of "cracking"
the film's parametric codes.
The focus on style in Betz's essay surfaces in a different form
in John David Rhodes' "Pasolini's Exquisite Flowers: The 'Cinema of
Poetry' as Theory of Art Cinema." Dwelling on Pasolini's "theorization
of style as the very medium of appearance of political consciousness
in the cinema"(155), as articulated in his often-maligned essay "The
'Cinema of Poetry,"' Rhodes manages to translate some of the most
opaque moments in Pasolini's essay and uncovers the alliance that
Pasolini forges between art cinema and "the cinema of poetry."
The collected essays advance the discussion of both global
cinema and art cinema and the areas of intersection marked in the
volume's introduction. Global Art Cinema seeks to inaugurate a new

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form of scholarship on art cinema, attentive to the combinations of
industry, history, and textuality that Gait and Schoonover cite as urgent
components of any discussion of global art cinema.
Among the many fine essays in the collection, the contributions
of Azadeh Farahmand and Jean Ma stand out as exemplary for the
manner in which they seamlessly merge these modes of analysis.
Farahmand's methodologically textured discussion of the two waves
of Iranian art cinema defined by the "circuits" of international film
festivals charts the industrial and aesthetic influence of festivals on the
definition of Iranian cinema as a national cinema and the circulation
of Iranian cinema beyond national borders. The importance of
international film festivals to global art cinema emerges in other essays
throughout the collection, suggesting that an anthology devoted to that
subtopic would be a productive project.
Jean Ma, focusing on the comparative impulse within the
critical reception of global art cinema, discusses the role of the auteur
in global art cinema, examining the importance of new forms of
intertextuality in Tsai Ming-liang's films and his excessive performance
of his own authorship. She argues that the layered intertextuality
within his films "intensifies the already-heightened textual presence
of the director that marks the art film genre"(346).
While the discussion of global cinema now preoccupies many
corners of film scholarship, the sustained attention to global art cinema
in this anthology provides a welcome contribution to this expanding
field. The collection has a global reach - from Jihoon Kim's analysis
of the spatial relations within and among Thai filmmaker Apichatpong
Weerasethakul's feature films and video installations, to Dennis
Hanlon's assertion that the work of Bolivian filmmaker Jorge Sanjinés
reveals an engagement with European art cinema within New Latin
American Cinema. The range of films and national and transnational
film traditions discussed is not comprehensive (no single volume
could map the breadth of what "global art cinema" designates), but
the list of films cited is snfmestive

The otherwise very reader-friendly organization of the book

would have benefited from the inclusion of a filmography to capture the
range of films discussed in a single snapshot, not in order to formalize
an incomplete canon of global art cinema but to bring those films into
closer proximity and encourage further comparative analyses. Global
Art Cinema successfully recuperates "art cinema" and introduces
"global art cinema" as a new term for discussion and debate.

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