EdelBrock wrote:
Comrade Shampanyov wrote:
Jiphy wrote:
Comrade Shampanyov wrote:
One problem with American films is that the marketing people decide which ending the film will use, based on which ending the test audiences prefer...
"Which ending"? Whatever happened to "artistic statement"?
When you have marketing people making artistic decisions that pander to the lowest common denominator, the "product" isn't likely going to be poetry.
We use a "franglish" word of slang for that : "bankable". The problem is to know whether a film is to be "bankable" or artistic.
Foreign language films rarely, if ever, become "bankable" here; they either play in what we call the "art houses"-- small theaters that play the foreign films and independent films that the larger theaters don't show, and that cater to a more intellectual audience-- or they're remade into a "bankable" film for mass distribution to a larger audience.
Or could it be that most foreign films just aren't that good?
Uh huh.
January 21, 2007
The World Is Watching. Not Americans.
By A. O. SCOTT
This month the National Society of Film Critics picked its winners for 2006 — one of the last such bodies to do so. (The Iowa and Central Ohio critics would weigh in a few days later.) The announcement of the Society’s awards followed a month of frenzied balloting by various Circles and Associations in New York, Los Angeles and just about every city, state and region in between, an annual festival of critical self-assertion — a protest against irrelevance, perhaps — before the big Oscar show on Feb. 25.
The society’s vote stands out a bit amid all this welter because its top three choices for best picture of the year were all movies in languages other than English. The third-place finisher was Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima,” which is in Japanese; the runner-up was “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” a Romanian film directed by Cristi Puiu; and the winner, by a narrow margin, was “Pan’s Labyrinth,” Guillermo del Toro’s tale of magic and malevolence in 1940s Spain.
The honors bestowed on those three movies, not only by the National Society of Film Critics, might be taken as evidence that foreign films are flourishing. So might the memory of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” which made more than $125 million here in 2001. And the proliferating Web sites and blogs devoted to the robust, often contentious discussions of movies from all over will only confirm the impression, as every imaginable form of cinema from Danish noir to South Korean horror, finds vocal advocates and analysts.
But on these same Web sites you will also find frequent, justified expressions of frustration, even despair, at the state of foreign-film appreciation in the United States. The movies are out there, more numerous and various than ever before, but the audience — and therefore the box-office returns, and the willingness of distributors to risk even relatively small sums on North American distribution rights — seems to be dwindling and scattering. For every movie that manages to solicit a brief flicker of attention, there are dozens that will be seen only at film festivals or on region-free DVD players.
Of course “foreign film” (or, as the academy prefers, “foreign-language film”) is a category so broad as to be nearly meaningless. Mr. Eastwood, notwithstanding the spaghetti westerns and the admiration of the French, is as American as, well, Mel Gibson, who also made a subtitled movie released by a major studio in 2006. (“Letters From Iwo Jima” nonetheless won the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film, from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.) And Mr. del Toro, whose current film is the Mexican selection for the foreign-language Oscar, is hardly a stranger to the world of Hollywood franchise and genre moviemaking, having “Hellboy” and “Blade 2” on his résumé along with “Pan’s Labyrinth.”
The boundaries separating national cinemas are more porous than ever. Globalization is not only the blurry subject, for example, of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Babel,” winner of the Golden Globe for best drama, but also the condition of its existence. Released by Paramount Vantage, the newly rebranded specialty division of Paramount Pictures (itself a constantly mutating satrapy of the Viacom empire), “Babel” has both English subtitles (translating dialogue from Spanish, Berber and Japanese) and Anglophone movie stars (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett). The fluency with which Mexican filmmakers like Mr. González Iñárritu, Mr. del Toro and their friend and compatriot Alfonso Cuarón (“Children of Men”) move from place to place and idiom to idiom is impressive in its own right, but it also mirrors the transnational flow of money, which is after all the universal idiom of movie production and consumption.
Few movies made anywhere these days can claim a singular national identity. “The Painted Veil,” adapted by an American director from a British novel, with American, British and Australian actors in the major roles, is nonetheless partly a Chinese movie, and not only because of the picturesque locations. As part of a complicated co-production deal, the government of the People’s Republic of China had approval rights over the final cut of the film.
More often than not, the opening titles of movies from Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa reveal the international origins of even the most defiantly local stories. French and German cable television companies, investment funds overseen by national governments or the European Union, philanthropic foundations and even American movie studios — these are some of the entities that routinely throw money into film production around the world.
Anyone fortunate enough to attend a major international film festival in the coming months — Sundance, with its expanded World Cinema programs, is already upon us, to be followed in short order by Rotterdam and Berlin, with Cannes hovering on the horizon in May — will see ample evidence of this cosmopolitanism. Especially for Americans, to step into the festival circuit is to enter a kind of parallel universe, where directors whose names are barely known in the United States are recognized as major artists, and where each day brings news of creative ferment from a different corner of the globe.
It can be hard to keep track of where the action is, or to predict where the next cinematic hot spot will be. As soon as you grow accustomed to anticipating interesting new work from South Korea or Argentina, say, you find your attention pulled in the direction of Thailand or Algeria or Portugal or Romania, and your mental map of the world is crowded with pins. Even the most worldly cinephile will succumb to a moment or two of naïve wonder. Such a big world. So many movies. Who knew?
But then, back home, nobody seems to know — or, more discouragingly, to care. The cosmopolitanism of international filmmaking is matched by the parochialism of American film culture. And this brings me back to “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” the runner-up for the National Society of Film Critics award, a fixture of end-of-the-year 10 Best lists and the winner, by a wide margin, of the first-ever online critics’ poll published on IndieWire.com. This movie, a harrowing but grimly humane two-and-a-half-hour tour of the Romanian health care system, caused a minor sensation at the 2005 Cannes festival, where Mr. Puiu won a second-tier award.
The critics were, if anything, even more taken with it than the jurors. As we watched, in more or less real time, the final agonies of an unremarkable middle-aged alcoholic — the movie’s title is a succinct piece of truth in advertising — we also seemed to be witnessing the birth, or rebirth, of a vibrant national cinema in a place where few of us would have thought to look. The next year this hunch was confirmed by the presence of two films from Romania, “The Way I Spent the End of the World” and “12:08 East of Bucharest,” both of which looked back, one with sentiment, the other with jaundice, at that country’s 1989 revolution.
“The Way I Spent the End of the World” is the official Romanian submission for the Academy Awards — one of 61 films, one per country, contending for five nominations, to be announced on Tuesday — but it does not have a distributor in North America. After traveling from Cannes to the New York Film Festival “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” did make it to a few American theaters last year, thanks to a small, scrappy distributor called Tartan Films, which also plans to distribute “12:08 East of Bucharest.” Which is surely encouraging: an ambitious, challenging movie with limited commercial potential had a chance to find its audience. But it is hard to celebrate when dozens — hundreds — of movies had no such chance. And it is also hard to quiet a nagging question: Where was the audience?
“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” which made all of $80,000 in its brief theatrical run, is far from the only foreign movie to open here to the applause of critics and the silence of the public. I don’t mean the mass public — I have never put much stock in the Utopian fantasy that, if only the multiplex chains would see reason, internationally beloved auteurs like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Abbas Kiarostami would become box-office powerhouses — but rather the aesthetically adventurous, intellectually curious segment of the population that has historically been there for foreign films.
The gap between critical approbation and cultural currency has widened, even as the number and variety of critics has expanded. The arguments — in the virtual salons of the Internet and the actual rooms where movie critics hold their year-end meetings — are perhaps more intense and contentious than ever, but they also seem to take place in a series of echo chambers, sealed off from wider, less specialized conversations.
Is it just me? I’m leery of nostalgia, but it does seem that things were different once. One of the big movie events of 2006 was the release, by the Criterion Collection, of the “Essential Art House” set, a home library of 50 movies distributed over the past half-century by Janus Films, accompanied by a handsome illustrated volume of learned essays and notes. At $850 it was clearly aimed at a market of connoisseurs, a luxury item that could serve equally as an emblem of taste and a resource for viewing.
The Janus box also represents a canon of masterpieces, including many of the films — L’Avventura,” “Jules and Jim,” “The Seventh Seal,” “La Strada” — that helped to make moviegoing in America a serious cultural pursuit as well as a source of entertainment. I’m skeptical of the idea that the great works belong only to the past; it is only the passage of time that consecrates some works as great in the first place. But I do worry about the conditions that would allow the great works of the present to travel into the future with some chance at recognition.
Partly it is a problem of numbers. Every year many more movies are made than can be released, and the ones that do make it into theaters have to compete with one another for a share of the audience. Except for anomalies like Mr. Gibson’s “Apocalypto” and Mr. Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima” — two in one year; what are the odds? — the major studios steer clear of subtitles, except when marketing their blockbusters overseas. And their specialty divisions are, with the notable exception of Sony Pictures Classics, generally more interested in producing medium-budget prestige pictures — in the mold of “The Queen” or “Brokeback Mountain” or, for that matter, “Babel” — than in acquiring more exotic and commercially risky fare.
There are certainly exceptions: early last year Warner Independent released “Duck Season,” a quirky and charming coming-of-age story from Mexico, and “Pan’s Labyrinth” is being distributed (and heavily advertised) by Picturehouse, Warner Indendent’s cousin within the Time Warner corporate family. Movies that have the backing of these companies have a somewhat better chance in the marketplace than those acquired by smaller distributors with less money to spend on ads and less cachet with theater owners.
And the result is that more difficult movies — movies without a directorial pedigree or a well-known international star — are pushed further to the margins, becoming objects of cultish adoration rather than topics of general discussion. If you have seen “Three Times” or “L’Enfant” — to name two other hits of the 2005 Cannes Festival that came and went here in the blink of an eye last year despite choruses of critical praise — then you can perhaps feel the flush of specialness that comes from belonging to an exclusive coterie. All the more if you are familiar with the festival-only titles on some critics’ lists of undistributed movies, like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Syndromes and a Century” or Pedro Costa’s “Colossal Youth.”
But ultimately such snobbery is bad for the soul, and for art. Movies like these, which demand close attention and serious reflection rather than passive absorption, deserve to have a skeptical audience as well as a devoted one, and to be subjects of an argument capable of expanding beyond the narrow circle of specialists. At the moment that doesn’t seem likely. It is certainly true that a limited discussion — or a small-scale release — is better than none. Perhaps the old style of connoisseurship — the idea that the hardy few who sought out movies from faraway places, or who turned the revival houses into shrines of art, were part of a vanguard — has been replaced by something more modest and democratic.
The old film culture was based on hierarchical assumptions about taste and quality that have all but vanished, replaced by niches and networks of fans. You like your Romanian hospital movie, I like my Asian horror, and we have our Web sites and DVD rental queues to keep us happy; everything’s cool. And maybe, in these circumstances, no movie is really foreign. Or maybe every movie is.
You really think the far-left runs the film industry? Is that why, as I pointed out above, they completely excised the class warfare elements from a film about class warfare? Oh, those clever lefties!
