26 REMAPPING WORLD CINEMA CHAPTER TWO Towardsapositivedefinitionofworldcinema Lúcia Nagib Over the past decade or so film theory has been subjected to a recycling process, of- ten indicated in book titles by words such as ‘rethinking’, ‘unthinking’, ‘reinventing’ or ‘reconstructing’ (see, for example, Shohat & Stam 1994, Bordwell & Carroll 1996, Gledhill & Williams 2000 and Guneratne & Dissanayake 2003). here is a perceived exhaustion of traditional theoretical assessment of cinema, which some authors, such as David Bordwell and Nöel Carroll (1996), ascribe to petrified models based on psy- choanalysis and cultural studies. As a contribution to the debate, I would like to sug- gest that the exhaustion may well reside above all in the object that has inspired such models, that is to say Hollywood cinema. One way of reflecting on this exhaustion is to elaborate on how Hollywood relates to ‘world cinema’, an increasingly popular term highlighting the global aspect of film production. Indeed, as communication nets spread and cinema transcends national and continental borders, world cinema issues proliferate in bibliographic output and academic syllabuses, where they articulate with a wider perception of culture in the postcolonial era. However common it has become, the term ‘world cinema’ still lacks a proper, posi- tive definition. Despite its all-encompassing, democratic vocation, it is not usually employed to mean cinema worldwide. On the contrary, the usual way of defining it is restrictive and negative, as ‘the non-Hollywood cinema’. Needless to say, negation here translates a positive intention to turn difference from the dominant model into a virtue to be rescued from an unequal competition. However, it unwittingly sanctions the American way of looking at the world, according to which Hollywood is the centre and all other cinemas are the periphery. Such a binary division of the world, a convention particularly cultivated in the An- glophone countries, has been widely adopted by critics and historians as a way of orga- nising and structuring film history and geography. An example is World Cinema: Criti- cal Approaches, edited by John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (2000). his pioneer attempt to look at world cinema as an independent theoretical subject does not include American cinema, to which a separate volume of the Oxford University Press series is devoted, likewise called American Cinema and Hollywood: Critical Approaches. he procedure is justified by Hill with the argument that ‘since the end of World War I, the US film industry has been the dominant cinema in the world and this has also meant that it has enjoyed a pre-eminent position within film studies’ (2000: xiv). Indisputable though it may sound, the argument contains a few questionable gen- eralisations. It does not specify, for example, whether ‘dominant cinema’ refers to box- office revenues or number of viewers. It also fails to spell out the exact time and place of this dominance. To counter it, one could point out the fact that in the late 1930s 03 chapter2.indd 26 5/2/06 8:53:55 pm