This groundbreaking and innovative textbook for studies in the field re-places World Cinema in the cultural imaginary. It also repositions World Cinema in a wider discursive space than hitherto and treats it as an object of theoretical enquiry, rather than as a commercial label. The editors and distinguished group of contributors, including Laura Mulvey, John Caughie, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Ian Christie, and Paul Julian Smith, offer a range of approaches and case studies, whose organizing principle is the developing idea of polycentrism as applied to cinema. They refine and redefine key concepts in film studies, including identification, representation and identity, narrative and the everyday, allegory and referentiality, auteurism and the popular, and dominance and hegemony. They reevaluate how cinema shapes and responds to the philosophical, cultural and political effects of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism in the age of the moving image, and explore the interconnectedness of films produced worldwide, as well as the links between cinema and other visual cultural forms.