Widescreen Watching Real People Elsewhere

Traveling to Britain, Europe, Iran, India, and Mexico, Mark Cousins charts the social trends and aesthetic implications of modern cinema's major new developments: Asian filmmaking's rise in popularity; the breakthrough of documentaries; digitization and DVD and their role in reviving film history and revolutionizing film projection; the shift toward the real and the visually grainy; and the triumph of animation, which has become more popular than at any time since Disney. This volume constitutes a perceptive and timely account of the creative dynamics of contemporary global cinema.