"Baraka": World Cinema and the Global Culture Industry

Abstract

Honey, They Shrunk Planet. Ever since Marshall McLuhan's celebrated proclamation that communications technology had electrically contracted to dimensions of a village, it would seem, earth has been shrinking: satellite TV, frequent flyer miles, and, of course, The Web are making a smaller place. Thirty years after Understanding Media, village has become a commonplace, with McLuhan himself hailed as a visionary prophet of a in which distance no longer matters. ATT IBM commercials show African tribesmen happily using laptop computers. This article considers impact of these developments in domain of film. On one hand, history of has been entangled from outset with processes, from colonialism to its postcolonial aftermath. today, most would agree, has become a cultural form, however different its local manifestations. At same time, McLuhan's trope of village both reflects and has lent further momentum to emergence of an imaginary idea of the world, and this imaginary, we will see, has assumed increasing prominence in contemporary cinema. In turn, film today plays a significant role in articulating and perpetuating what might be called mythologies: ideological discourses about and humanity's relationship to it. The growing attention to what is variously called World Cinema or global cinema in recent years might seem curious, given that film production, distribution, and consumption have long been a affair. Studies of non-Western film industries abound, and World Cinema has long been approached much as world