Event
Film Festival and the “Worlding” of World Cinema
Part of a larger project on world cinema, this talk will focus on the role of film festivals in the construction and mapping of world cinema. More than just a platform for showcasing a complex world of film, festivals present a dizzying convergence site of cinephilia, media spectacle, business agenda, geopolitical purposes and city marketing. Their global proliferation since the 1980s has also made them into crucial centers for the development of global cinema networks, as well as the construction of knowledge and film practice—it is this aspect of film festivals that I’m interested in. I will demonstrate how the issues of unequal cultural exchange and power influence the festivals’ widely shared patterns of film selection and evaluation, their distribution of cultural capital, and how festivals intersect with other discourses and institutions to shape a wider construction of world cinema as a field of knowledge.
Meta Mazaj is a Senior Lecturer in Cinema Studies at Penn. She has published on critical theory, Balkan cinema, new European cinema, film and nationalism. She is the author of National and Cynicism in Post 1990s Balkan Cinema (VDM Verlag, 2008), which examines the relationship between film and nationalism in contemporary Balkan cinema, and co-author, with Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White, of Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2011). She is currently working on a book about contemporary world cinema. Her teaching and research interests include film theory and history, film and nationalism, film and philosophy, and world cinema. Her recent courses include: Film History, Film Methods and Analysis, Film Theory, Contemporary Transnational Cinema, Cinema of the Balkans, Cinema and Popular Memory, Masters of European Cinema, American Independent Cinema, Film Festivals.