James Tweedie,The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization.

Abstract

Judging by the capacity audience at a workshop on ‘The world cinema turn in film studies’ at the 2015 Society for Cinema Studies Conference in Montréal, debates around ‘global art cinema’ continue to be of keen interest to scholars. No doubt many had gathered to hear Dudley Andrew, who unfortunately made a last-minute cancellation. By imagining world cinema as more nuanced and multidimensional than it has traditionally been categorized, Andrew suggests in his 2004 essay, ‘An atlas of world cinema’, that ‘a wider conception of national image culture is around the corner, prophesied by phrases like “rooted cosmopolitanism” and “critical regionalism”’. 1 James Tweedie’s The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization exemplifies this new conception, connecting the core aesthetic principles of the French new wave to the new waves of China and Taiwan. Rather than thinking of the French new wave as an origin, the author sees the three cinemas as creating a feedback loop without hierarchy. This theory attempts to coalesce western and nonwestern cinemas within the same canon, disregarding national, cultural and political differences. Tweedie establishes globalization as the link that connects these cinemas, in particular the ‘urban, youth and consumer revolutions’ that formed all of them to one degree or another. In many ways this well-researched and theorized volume succeeds in breaking down old, Eurocentric taxonomies of film studies as well as bringing a fresh and welcome perspective to defining ‘world cinema’, a critical debate that continues to build interest.