Mads Anders Baggesgaard

The 'World' of World Cinema remains an open question. The genre is most often taken to mean film that engenders some sort of cross-cultural understanding, but the concept of world is most often taken as a self-evident prerequisite. And the problem becomes even more pertinent when discussing cinema due to the relationship between the cinematic image and the worlds it presents and constructs.

The paper discusses contemporary representations of two classic cinematic settings, which function as spaces of reflection on the relationship between world and globe, one focusing on the opacity of the overly haptic jungle in films by Apichatpong Weerasathekul and Werner Herzog and on the other the haptic 'earthiness' of the dusty deserts of Bruno Dumont and Jia Zhangke.

This relationship will be explored drawing on two different interpretations of Heidegger's ideas of »Weltbild«. On one hand Jean-Luc Nancy argues for the ability of the image and the cinematic image to bear evidence, through the construction of worlds removed from the everyday. And on the other hand Bernard Stiegler points to the fact that the cinematic image are not only outside our perceived reality, but in fact constituent elements in the development of consciousness, the construction of our life as world.

Mads Anders Baggesgaard is assistant professor in Literature and Film Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark working on a project on contemporary, global Francophone cinema. He has published a number of articles and books, primarily on contemporary French and Francophone literature and its relation to the ideologies and realities of globalization. He is the leader of a local interdisciplinary research group on Film Culture.