This course provides a comprehensive exploration of "art cinema," which has served as a key model for audiences, filmmakers, and critics to envision cinema beyond Hollywood since the 1960s. The term "art cinema" is often associated with highly artistic textuality, art-house theater screenings, and the global distribution of "foreign" films. However, over time, art cinema has intersected with popular genres, national cinemas, experimental films, and the avant-garde, drawing on funding from corporate, government, and independent sources. Embedded in an imperialist and Eurocentric history, art cinema offers both material for critique and inspiration for diverse filmmaking practices. This course will examine art cinema as a contested, dynamic, and hybrid category that has, from its inception, created a connection between aesthetics and geopolitics, or cinema and the world. We will approach this study through a comparative, global lens, examining diverse examples of art cinema from China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Iran, Turkey, Senegal, Russia, Poland, Greece, Italy, France, Chile, Colombia, and the U.S. We will connect close readings of film texts to broader theoretical and aesthetic debates about the film image and its dispersals. By exploring the historical significance and contemporary relevance of "art cinema," we will critically engage with mainstream and avant-garde, local and cosmopolitan, historical and theoretical, as well as industry-driven and formal approaches in film scholarship and practice.

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