Through a discussion of Ron Fricke’s global documentary Baraka, this article calls for a recontextualization of ‘World Cinema” within the larger field of the contemporary global culture industry. After three thousand years of specialist explosion and of increasing specialism and alienation in the technological extensions of our bodies, our world has become compressed by dramatic reversal. As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. -Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)’