Global cinema in an era of deglobalization: trans-territorial compulsions and the plenipotentiary potential of human activities in Cloud Atlas and Okja

Abstract

Deglobalization has arrived as a symptom of globalization's overextendedness. Organized through policies and thought practices that take ideological, economic, and cultural forms as significant to the homeland — these deglobalist agendas which accord a worldwide phenomenon since the 2010s–are implemented via a decoupling from cosmopolitan outlooks, multilateral trade deals and even cross-cultural and intercultural exchanges in media. This article wishes to theorize deglobalization to shed light on how it helps us to identify the localization of capital, tariff increases, and a new phase in cinema history: ‘the deglobal cinema phase’. I will also argue that Cloud Atlas (2012) and Okja (2017) are permutations of global cinema and films that are counterhegemonic to deglobal cinema's focus on national seclusion and deglobalization's cordoning off national from global space. Thus, global cinema’s currency and the systems it builds and critiques has presupposed a pathology of the outside, to turn film into the collective life of the planet in the face of forces that now purport the inside. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.