The idea of newness haunts cinema more than any other art form or media. Film emerges as the 'new,' modern medium par excellence, with its technological otherness vividly captured in early-cinema’s commentaries and film theory (see Marcus 2003). Although its novelty eventually subsides, across its history, cinema continually finds ways to renew the allure of its images and sounds. This is most evident in the phenomenon of 'new waves' and 'new cinemas' sprouting up across the globe since the late 1950s. Originating in France, the term 'new wave,' or nouvelle vague, was famously coined by the journalist Françoise Giroud to describe an emerging young generation, but it soon attached itself to the film movement with which it is now inextricably associated. Since then, new cinemas have continued to proliferate, including the Czechoslovak New Wave and Brazilian Cinema Novo (literally, New Cinema) in the 1960s, the New German Cinema in the 1970s, the Taiwan New Cinema in the 1980s, the New Iranian Cinema in the 1990s, and more recently, the New Romanian Cinema and the Philippine New Wave, among many others.

The endurance of the concept of new cinema, however, conceals significant divergences and transformations. Whereas, as Palmer (2005, 52) notes, some new waves assume the “more definitive and self-conscious shape of artistic movements properly speaking,” others are retrospectively “characterised as a group practice only by critics and journalists.” At the same time, new cinemas oscillate between the poles of the local and the global, which can, in turn, be mapped onto issues of cultural difference and aesthetic similarity. On the one hand, these movements are historically and geographically specific, fitting comfortably into the national cinema model: they are often named after the nation where they emerge, react against a local cinematic genre or school and reveal a country’s distinctive 'face' through a turn to real-life locations and peoples. On the other hand, the consecration of a cinema as new takes place within global film culture and, more specifically, within the international film festival circuit, into which these cinemas are assimilated by adopting recognisable features and devices, including an embrace of new recording technologies and the advancement of a realist aesthetics. James Tweedie (2013, 6) sums this up nicely: “The difficult and nearly impossible task is to speak of new wave cinemas in the plural while also recognising the uniqueness of each particular situation.”

The discursive framework of new cinemas must therefore accommodate a paradox, for if the new is by definition that which evades description through its capacity to astonish, beneath its veneer of singularity often lies a string of previous iterations and variations (see Gunning 2003). As Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2006, 3) notes: “The new contains within itself repetition,” and “technology, with its endless upgrades, is relentlessly new.” In this context, the persistence of the category of newness in film culture – from film festival programming to film criticism and film scholarship – can be interpreted not only as a symptom of capitalism’s insatiable appetite for novelty. It also functions as a defence mechanism to assuage anxieties over cinema’s own obsolescence, as if repeatedly calling it new might restore some of its original strangeness as a medium and sublimate the fact that it has for quite some time now been 'old media.'