Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories

"Art cinema" has for over fifty years defined how audiences and critics imagine film outside Hollywood, but surprisingly little scholarly attention has been paid to the concept since the 1970s. And yet in the last thirty years art cinema has flourished worldwide. The emergence of East Asian and Latin American new waves, the reinvigoration of European film, the success of Iranian directors, and the rise of the film festival have transformed the landscape of world cinema. This book brings into focus art cinema's core internationalism, demonstrating its centrality to understanding film as a global phenomenon.

The book reassesses the field of art cinema in light of recent scholarship on world film cultures. In addition to analysis of key regions and films, the essays cover topics including theories of the film image; industrial, aesthetic, and political histories; and art film's intersections with debates on genre, sexuality, new media forms, and postcolonial cultures. Global Art Cinema brings together a diverse group of scholars in a timely conversation that reaffirms the category of art cinema as relevant, provocative, and, in fact, fundamental to contemporary film studies.

Rosalind Galt is a Senior Lecturer in film studies in the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex. She is the author of The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (2006), an assessment of the spaces of European cinema after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as articles in journals such as Screen, Camera Obscura, Cinema Journal and Discourse, and in the collections European Film Theory (2008) and On Michael Haneke (2010).

Karl Schoonover is Assistant Professor of film studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University. He has authored essays in the collections European Film Theory (2008), Convergence Media History (2009), and Screen Stars of the Seventies (2010), and in Art Journal. He is currently completing a book that examines corporeality in Italian neorealism.