NOT LONG AGO, in a galaxy superficially similar to this one, Film-with-a-capital-F was an art form.
North American “independent” filmmakers were auteurs working outside the studio system, not merely ambitious Tarantino-wannabes trying to break into that system.
And films from other lands, made in other languages, could be regularly viewed in every major U.S. and Canadian city and many minor ones. Many of these films revealed the ways people in those other places lived and dreamed.
A reminder of this forgotten era came recently when Landmark Theatres launched a 25th-anniversary promotion, including a contest to name the best foreign-language films ever released Stateside.
Get past the address form and demographic survey (the real reasons for the contest’s existence), and you get a list of 600 films from which you can choose up to five (or write-in your own). (The list excludes many potentials, such as Sweet Movie, Princess Tam Tam, Arabian Nights, and Dreams.)
I figure I’ve seen about 120 of them, which immediately set me to compiling a list of ones I’ve gotta rent.
The list also got me thinking about the circumstances under which I’d seen the ones I’d seen.
Most of the local theaters I’d seen them in are still around (except for the Ridgemont, North End, Broadway, and University); most of the extant ones are run by Landmark. And the Seattle International Film Festival’s still going strong.
But something’s been lost. Something beyond local control.
The foreign-film marketing infrastructure’s been decimated, or at least diluted. Many of the distributors that used to nurture these precious obscurities in the domestic marketplace have either folded or become subsidiaries of the Hollywood majors. (The latter have become, in the words of critic R. Ruby Rich,“a kind of Harvey Weinstein try-out school for Hollywood.”)
The remaining second- and third-tier distributors are typically less devoted to foreign movies than to “Amerindie” movies; less interested in broadening the medium’s boundaries than in Sundance Festival deal-wrangling; less concerned about art and expression than in promoting the Next Pulp Fiction or the Next Blair Witch Project.
Video has, thus far, proved to be something less than art-film’s savior; except in a few larger stores in a few larger metro areas. Otherwise, the major studios have successfully convinced stores to order 100 copies of Analyze This and none of Black Cat, White Cat or West Beirut (two of the only three foreign-language listings on Entertainment Weekly’s current movie-review web page).
The globalization of the entertainment biz under a few conglomerates has also helped decrease the supply of non-North American films, especially from countries like Hong Kong that have seen their own international markets glutted by U.S. violence and “hip”-violence fare.
The highly-hyped Romance (the third foreign-language film on the EW review page), promising unprecedented levels of explicitly-sexual French existential ennui, can’t turn the situation around by itself. But, if we’re lucky, it might provide the necessary spark to help re-ignite hipster-America’s onetime love affair with world cinema.
MONDAY: Could direct-to-video moviemakers and new cable channels be the savior of regional humor?
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