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Rise of the Fringe: Global Cinema’s Long Tail
- Wayne State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
In 2007 and 2008 I visited a variety of countries. Quite naturally for a film buff like me, I wanted to know what was at the cinemas wherever I went. The film theaters in my native city of Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, seemed to be playing mostly Hollywood films. But this seemed to be the case only in this far-flung corner of southeast Europe. In other places, Hollywood’s stranglehold seemed to be loosening. during my stay in Paris people were standing in line for tickets to see the smash hit Welcome to the Sticks. In Tokyo , all the headlines were for Japanese blockbusters such as Hero or Always, whereas in Thessaloniki, El Greco was by far the most popular film. All the film theaters in Hong Kong prominently displayed posters for Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution while the cinema in Copenhagen played the new Ken Loach, It’s a Free World. Berlin’s twenty-odd specialized cinemas could not have carried a more diverse fare, from the Chinese Berlinale-winner Tuya’s Marriage to the GdR-nostalgic documentary about American dissident singer dean Read, The Red Elvis.1 It is not the fleeting impressions of these travels on which I will be building my argument here, however. Having spent twenty years studying international film, I am more than convinced that we operate with a flawed understanding of the dynamics of world cinema, and that the field of film studies would greatly benefit from the introduction of a more acute peripheral vision. We have been led to believe that, as far as film is concerned, the world is divided into Hollywood, powerful and thriving, and the rest, weak and fading. If, however, we were to become more perceptive to the snowballing evidence coming from multiple but scattered data streams and strands of scholarship, we would finally see and acknowledge the effects of other routes 23 Dina Iordanova Rise of the Fringe Global Cinema’s Long Tail 01 Iord_Part 1.indd 23 12/17/09 10:10 AM 24 d I N A I O R d A N O V A of film distribution, we would change our view on the balance of powers and enhance our understanding of how these traditionally ignored flows are changing the global dynamics of cinema in circulation. In order to see this, one would need to consolidate the multiple peripheral circulation strands into one and juxtapose them as a solidly conjoined stream to Hollywood’s chart-buster culture.2 It is about time to acknowledge the new realities. A quarter of the world’s most commercially successful films come from sources other than Hollywood; many are more profitable and bring higher per-screen averages than the studio blockbusters. Not only are many more peripheral films being produced, many more of them are also seen and appreciated, due to the vitality of growing alternative channels of dissemination. Since the end of the Cold War, global migration and diasporic cultural consumption has intensified, and new technologies have reshaped the media worlds of people around the globe.3 Countries that used to be traditional sources of emigration have turned into countries of immigration; worlds that were unlikely to touch or collide, now intersect and overlap. Yet our concepts of the pattern of comprehensive cultural exchanges are inconsistent and patchy, and the studies that propose a comprehensive picture of the “alternative modernities” (Larkin) at the periphery are still a handful in comparison with the scholarship on mainstream modernity.4 We need a better understanding of the essence and the effects of transnational cultural circulation originating from the periphery. These are processes that one can see best if one transcends the strictly defined framework of the national, which treats national traditions as a mosaic of discrete cultural phenomena. One increasingly recognizes that the localities of production are spatially disjointed and audiences increasingly scattered around the globe. This is where studies of peripheral cinema come into the picture, with a call to approach the cycle of film production, dissemination, and reception as one dynamic process that transcends national borders, reflecting the mobility of human existence in the global age.5 The growing number of studies that highlight aspects of the complexities of global cinematic circulation allow for a fuller grasp of the situation. Besides the traditionally weak channels of ordinary commercial (theatrical and ancillary) distribution, we need to take into account several further channels that function together but are still studied as discrete phenomena and considered independently from one...