Dear friends and colleagues:

We are pleased to announce the publication of a 
new special issue of Situations: Project of the 
Radical Imagination entitled "Global Cinema: 
Cinéma Engagé or Cinéma Commericiale?"  This 
special issue contains ten essays on modern 
international films and cinemas, including those 
of Iran, Nigeria, Mexico, Romania, France, China, 
Argentina, and India as well as on contemporary 
film festivals and on films documenting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The special issue is available and freely 
accessible online at: 
http://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/situations/issue/view/58 .

The issue has a global reach in its coverage of 
countries and regions of the world ranging from 
Hollywood’s own “Global Gaze,” to a placement of 
Nigerian Cinema as the equal of Africa’s 
modernist cinema, to Venezuela’s difficult 
negotiation of a Bolivarian cinema in a 
neoliberal context, to a questioning of the 
radical othering of Eastern European cinema whose 
concerns now seem much closer to those of the 
West, and, finally, to a tracing of a complex 
multiperspectival fashioning of the image of the 
Chinese peasantry in a moment when the 
distinction between city and country are rapidly 
fading.  The global reach of the issue extends as 
well to the range of theoretical positions used 
to examine contemporary global cinema, be 
it:  structural-materialist aspects of the 
questioning of the Israeli-Palestinian 
problematic; the integration of economic and 
aesthetic methodologies in a post-Adornian 
examination of the Cannes Film Festival; feminist 
and subaltern theory utilized to critique the 
patriarchal aspects of what is sometimes viewed 
as India’s most politically progressive cinema; a 
rereading and deconstruction of French radical 
workerist post-1968 cinema; and a linking of 
feminist and anti-colonial perspectives to 
highlight the way that in Iran Abbas Kiarostami’s 
Ten spotlights Muslim women's emancipation.

We hope you will peruse the essays, and look 
forward to your comments and critique.

Regards,
Dennis Broe (Long Island University)
Terri Ginsberg (International Council for Middle East Studies)
Co-editors, Situations special issue on Global Cinema

----
Learn to speak like a film/TV professor! Listen to the ScreenLex
podcast:
http://www.screenlex.org