Network Films: a Global Genre?

Abstract

Over the past three decades there has been a boom in films which present collections of strangers whose lives coincidentally intersect, in ways unbeknownst to them but revealed to the audience. Love Actually (Curtis 2003), Babel (Inarritu 2006), Crash (Haggis 2005), and Magnolia (Anderson 1999) are among the most internationally well known examples of such films. While a fair amount of academic attention has been paid to such films, very little work has investigated whether these types of films constitute a genre in distinction to ensemble films. Furthermore, while some cross cultural comparison has been made of such films, few have considered how the films and the concept of a global genre might relate to discursive terms such as “world cinema” and “art cinema”. Drawing on the genre theory of Rick Altman (1984, 1999) and Paul Willemen's endorsement of comparative film studies (2005), I conduct a comparative genre study of seven network films: Babel, Crash, The Edge of Heaven (Akin 2007), Love for Share (Di Nata 2006), Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (Haneke 2000), Lantana (Lawrence 2001), and Mumbai My Life (Kamat 2008). I seek to identify whether these seven examples of network films, which show numerous similarities despite their international origins, share generic qualities. Simultaneously, I conduct analyses of their narrative politics in order to ultimately discuss how such a global group of films reframe notions of “world cinema” and “art cinema”.