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What Is World Cinema?

If we were to loosely categorise films today, they would be Bollywood (or Tollywood or Mollywood), Hollywood. But there is a section of masterpieces that shows mostly at film festivals, wins many an award (and nominations, of course!) and makes cult figures out of directors from various regions across the world. These are directors whose movies need a new name and that name is World Cinema.

Akira Kurosawa's 'Seven Samurai' is a landmark movie in the world of cinema.

Unfortunately, the beauty and exposure to cultures apart from ours and the west has not found much sway with Indian audiences at large, primarily for lack of access and the stray, pirated DVD - niche festival notwithstanding.

To sum up and make sure that the category is not confused with its clone, Foreign Films, World Cinema is differentiated by

1. The Director: These were/are men and women for whom the creative and artistic expression was/is the most important criteria. People who could have excelled at many other vocations and been immensely successful socially, but instead choose to struggle with cinema as a medium, and in the process revolutionise it completely. Though the names are endless, yet for anyone interested in a good start these names would be a good start.

Past Masters: Akira Kurosawa, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Satyajit Ray, Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Bresson, Federico Fellini, Francois Truffaut, Ritwik Ghatak, Francois Ozu, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Pierre Melville, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jean Renoir, Kihachi Okamoto and many many more…

Living Masters: Wong-Kar Wai, Gus Van Sant, Abbas Kiarastomi, Majid Majidi, Mohsen and Sameera Makhmalbaf, David Lynch, Lars Von Trier, Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, Woody Allen, Jean-Luc Godard, and a few more…

2. Nominations and Awards at festivals around the world, especially Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Toronto: In the absence of any (and sometimes this happens!), one refers to point 1.

3. The plot: Always universal. Like music (and love!), cinema speaks a universal language and the techniques perfected by some of these directors have, over the years, become art forms and are emulated, even today by filmmakers around the globe. Many a Bollywood and Hollywood influence can be traced back to movies in this category.

External Links:

World Cinema in Wikipedia.