Contemporary cinema is a synthesis of art (progressive and reactionary), culture (original and cliche), industry (technological and economic), business (making and losing money), and politics (controlling and revolutionary). Marshall McLuhan states in Understanding Media (1964) that "The movie offers as product the most magical of consumer commodities, namely dreams. . . The world eagerly lined up to buy canned dreams." In this increasingly interconnected world, film provides one way for people to make sense of lives and cultures thrown together. People who identify with certain films often do so because they identify with the cultures that create those films. Film becomes a medium that mobilizes the distribution - and acceptance - of certain cultural values and practices. The cinema provides a feeling of community among people even as it highlights tensions arising from its colonial legacy.
In "The Cultural Flow of Food
in Cinema," April Iommazzo explores the role of food
in contemporary global cinema, as a 'magical' element of pleasure and
enlightenment and as a powerful force in bringing people together and
reawakening the passions. The consumption of food, like the consumption
of film, can generate both pleasure and understanding. From the perspective
of the study of contemporary globalization, cinema also has a particularly
important relationship to the concerns of economics. The top ten best-selling
movies around the globe are all made from major U.S. studios. Hollywood
films are known to have high budgets, strong story lines, scripts with
'universal' themes, well-known actors and directors, established technical
film capabilities and advanced technologies and a proven track record
of productions. Major U.S. studios are definitely the dream-makers who
invest as much as possible to create the fantastic world. But what about
cinema outside the Hollywood realm?
In "Taiwan and Hong Kong’s Film Industries in the Context of Globalization," Ying-Ming Chiang explores the changes affecting the contemporary film industries of Hong Kong and Taiwan in context of the larger economic and cultural trends of globalization. Her work raises a number of important questions. How are these industries increasingly incorporating local subjects, talents and tastes to create films that go beyond Hollywood, in terms of both local relevance and global appeal? At the same time, how is the industry itself - including Hollywood - changing from a strongly locally-situated one to a broader network of cross-border and cross-cultural artistic and economic cooperation and co-production? How have these changes in increasing cross-cultural exposure and communication impacted the economic viability of the creation of cinema outside of Hollywood?