Not long ago I read a news online entitled, ‘​How the American Cut of the “Grandmaster” (Wong Kar-wai) ruins a Masterpiece”​ . It was mentioned that the American audiences found it palatable only after it was re-appropriated by the American distributor, the Weinstein Company, which stripped the film of its historical complexity, foregrounded a love story and stylized aesthetic of kung fu action. This shows that films can mean something different to different people, and while the global world in which films are circulated suggests simultaneity of time and space, we are in fact all situated differently.

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This is when Dennison and Lim start to situate World Cinema as a theoretical problem by questioning “what is world cinema” and “for whom it is a problem”. To perceive “World Cinema” as non-Western/non-Hollywood cinema is problematic. They fail to ​take into account the great diversity of other cinemas or the different historical trajectories of their origins and developments; they take for granted the centrality of Hollywood as the standard against which all other cinemas must define themselves; and they provide a negative definition by referring to world cinema in terms of what it is not instead of what it is.

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Concerning the idea of resistance, the notion of Third Cinema emerges as a cinema of liberation that endeavours, in one way or another, to show the world as being constructed in and through social relations and to oppose such hegemonic functionality. It cannot be wronged to adopt this approach; however it can be equally contended that the danger of it is to dissolve the specificity as a binary opposition over other dominant cultures.

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Apart from the non-Western/non-Hollywood and Third Cinema models, another way of conceiving world cinema is as the sum total of all the national cinemas in the world, which is also problematic. It denies other ways of organizing the world and may overlook other modes of film practices.

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Thus, it is essential to move beyond the “West vs non-West”, “oppression vs resistance”, “popularity vs integrity” and pay more attention to the interconnectedness of cinematic practices in the age of globalisation. Consequently, the world cinema can be looked as a discipline that bridges the divides into interdisciplinary; a methodology that investigates the interaction between film studies and area studies; and perspective that is interpenetrable. The following question is: how should we perceive the world cinema? A polycentric perspective that defies that idea of a single center (e.g. Hollywood); a polymorphic perspective that connects various forms such as national, transactional or diasporic; or a polyvalent one that requires an understanding of how each film is viewed and interpreted differently in different parts of the world. A film that travels across national and cultural borders is not dictated by a definitive or dominant interpretation and may perhaps generate a perspective of perspective. After all, how can we perceive different world cinema in different context? Or shall we keep on problematizing the concept of world cinema?