Transnational turn or turn to World Cinema?

This article considers whether the transnational turn is not, in fact, part of something much larger – a turn to world cinema ongoing since the 1980s. The reason why this may not be self-evident, the article speculates, is due to the prominence of the turn to history for how the field of Film Studies is typically understood to have been shaped since the 1980s. The obscuring of what may be a rather different emphasis takes place, in part at least, because of a historiographical emphasis in the Film Studies canon on Anglo-American scholarship exploring Western cinemas. At the very least, the turn to history, in certain respects, shares similarities with how research into world cinema is conducted. Thus, whether or not this is indeed the reason (as this article remains speculative), it is nevertheless the case – this article argues – that what may bring many scholars of transnational cinema together is a politically-engaged approach to film which is shared by much scholarship on world cinema. At the very least, then, discussion of the transnational turn should take into consideration the possibility that what is being realised may in fact be a turn to world cinema