Page 599 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| World C nema

Adriana Barraza and Japan’s Rinko Kikuchi both received nominations for best
supporting actress.
The participation of global directors, talent, and locations comes at a sig-
nificant moment in America’s media culture. News reporting featuring global
events and cultures diminished significantly during the last two decades of the
twentieth century, making the filmic representation of the world all the more
important. Films are also one of the only avenues open where people from other
cultures speak in their own voices and construct their own images. In addition,
world cinema is thriving at a time of declining interest in going to the movie in
the United States, the once most dominant form of the American popular arts
experience.
Indeed, as budgets and box-office returns continue to be the measure of suc-
cess in Hollywood, critics argue that films suffer. By 2007, movie attendance
in America had reached its lowest point in 10 years. Though some of that de-
cline can be attributed to the availability of video and DVDs, the two most-
cited reasons for staying home were rising ticket prices and the quality of the
films (Gabler 2007). Hollywood features suffer, and lose some of their magic and
imagination, when marketing departments make bottom-line demands that
affect creative content. Under such conditions, going to the movies is bound
to lose some of its fascination. In the hands of many global filmmakers, the in-
spiration and practices of making movies are decidedly varied, and usually
quite distinct from commercial motivations.

see also Al-Jazeera; Bollywood and the Indian Diaspora; Cultural Imperial-
ism and Hybridity; The DVD; Global Community Media; Hypercommercial-
ism; Independent Cinema; Nationalism and the Media; Parachute Journalism;
Representations of Race; Sensationalism, Fear Mongering, and Tabloid Media.

Further reading: Béar, Liza. The Making of Alternative Cinema: Volume 2, Beyond the Frame:
Dialogues with World Filmmakers. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishing, 2007; Chanan, Mi-
chael. The Cuban Image: Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba. Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1985; Chaudhuri, Shohini. Contemporary World Cinema: Europe, the Middle
East, East Asia and South Asia. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006; Ezra, Eliza-
beth, and Terry Rowden. Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. New York: Routledge,
2006; Gabler, Neal. “The Movie Magic Is Gone: Hollywood, Which Once Captured the
Nerve Center of American Life, Doesn’t Matter Much Anymore.” Los Angeles Times, Febru-
ary 25, 2007, at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-gabler25feb
25,0,4482096.story; Hill, John, Pamela Church Gibson, Richard Dyer, E. Ann Kaplan,
and Paul Willemen, eds. World Cinema: Critical Approaches. London: Oxford University
Press, 2000; Hjort, Mette. Cinema and Nation. New York: Routledge, 2000; Hoberman, J.
Vulgar Modernism: Writing on Movies and Other Media. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1991; Nichols, Peter M., ed. The New York Times Guide to the Best 1000 Movies Ever
Made. New York: Random House, 1999; “Oscars Go Global.” The Sydney Morning Har-
old, January 24, 2007, at http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/01/24/1169594339263.
html; Zaniello, Tom. The Cinema of Globalization: A Guide to Films about the New Eco-
nomic Order. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007.
Robin Andersen