Transnational Geographic
Perspectives on Baraka
Contents
Preamble
World Cinema
Ciné-transe
The Global Flâneur
The Tourist with a Movie Camera
Panoramas: An Overview
Blue Planet
Event Horizon
This paper was first presented at the conference, “The Future of Media Studies,” Film & Media Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 13-15 October 1995.
The paper was accompanied by an HTML version with images posted on the World Wide Web (as it was known then), and was one of the first online conference papers of its time. The present online version was edited and adapted from the original online version in March 2021.
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Subsequent versions of the paper were presented as “Global Mythologies: World Cinema and the Transnational Imaginary” at the conference “Film | Culture | History,” University of Aberdeen, 1996; and as “Transnational Geographic: Perspectives on Baraka” at the conference “New Exoticisms in Literature, Film, and Other Media,” Universidad de Zaragoza, 1996.
A revised version of the paper was first published as “Baraka: World Cinema and the Global Culture Industry,” in Cinema Journal 37, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 62-82.
Another version was published in “Transnational Geographic: Perspectives on Baraka” in Isabel Santaolalla, ed., “New Exoticisms”: Changing Patterns in the Construction of Otherness (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000).
A Portuguese translation by Raquel Maysa Keller was published as “Baraka: o cinema mundial e a indústria cultural global” in Denilson Lopes and Andrea França, eds., Cinema, Globalizacão e Interculturalidade (Cinema, Globalization, and Interculturality) (Chapecó, Brazil: Argos Editora Universitária, 2010): 17-42.
An unpublished sequel to the original paper, “The Baraka Effect: Cinema, Modernity, & the Metaphysical Imaginary,” was presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference, Philadelphia 2008. The online version of this paper includes the original images and video clips.
Martin Roberts teaches in the Department of Visual & Media Arts at Emerson College. His publications include articles on world music, global documentary, subcultures, lifestyle television, Japanese popular music, and the books Michel Tournier: Bricolage and Cultural Mythology (Stanford French & Italian Studies, 1995) and Cornelius’s Fantasma (Bloomsbury, 2019). Email: dokoissho@sdf.org