Picturing the world—cinematic globalization in the deserts of Babel

Abstract

Globalization remains a challenge for the art of cinema. No art form is more suited to the task of showing clashes between cultures and the internal conflicts of a society, but as films are both narratively and physically dependent on locations—even if these can be multiple and dispersed throughout the world—and because of the logistics and the finances required for the production of film, cinema has almost always been placed in a national or regional framework. Reflecting the totality and networked nature of the globalized world seems more readily attainable for more conceptual forms of art. This article discusses Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu's 2006 film Babel, often cited as the “first film of globalization,” asking the question of whether this claim can be substantiated alone with reference to the networked narrative of the film and use of multiple locations, suggesting that the relationship between cinema and globalization should in fact be understood on the terms of the medium as a visual reflection of images of the globe. Drawing on theories on the visual nature of globalization by Arjun Appadurai, Martin Heidegger, and W. J. T. Mitchell, this article thus argues for a different conception of cinematic globalization rooted in the history of cinema rather than in theories of globalization.

Keywords

• visuality
• complexity
• opacity
• landscape