Introduction: Four Kinds of Minor Cinema (and Some Thoughts on a Fifth)

Abstract

"The term “minor cinema” is widely used among Film Studies practitioners, and not always with the greatest amount of precision.... There is nothing necessarily wrong with the concept of “minor cinema” literally encompassing everything from Hollywood to Denmark to Egypt, but the fact that this sweep that can be evoked by only two recent articles does give some sense of the way in which the term could be seen as something of an inexact designator.
What I want to do here, then, is offer suggestions as to what a definition of “minor cinema” might look like, and how different kinds of minor cinema might connect with each other. In doing so, I am avoiding Deleuze and Guattari deliberately, in part because their sense of the term “minor” is explicitly linked to the literary. Kafka is minor for them precisely because of the way that he uses the German language, and how this connects, or more importantly, fails to connect, to a broader literary project of Euro-Modernism. That literary-linguistic sense of “minor” can be applied to cinema only by making significant conceptual stretches: not impossible, but not necessarily desirable. I think it is more useful to try to approach the matter of “minor cinema” through the lens of world cinema."