As an American, there are few things that I take greater pride in than our movies. I love the Hollywood machine and everything it entails. I love going to a sold-out theater on a Friday night, paying eight dollars to get in and having my senses assaulted by every advancement in audio/visual technology known to man.
However, as a film student, I also understand that Los Angeles is not the only city in the world capable of recording images onto celluloid with the purpose of distributing them for mass entertainment. I have come to appreciate both the artsy and the fartsy, hoity and toity; though, often, these unfairly pejorative descriptors are inaccurate when describing world cinema.
French films are not all about aging hipsters pondering existentialist quandaries while smoking fancy cigarettes, and the majority of Hong Kong films feature fewer hi-falutin’ explosions than John Woo would have you believe. The truth is that in many ways, foreign films are mostly like American films.
But think about that before reading into it too much. Entertainment is the United States’ second-largest export. Dozens of films are made in Hollywood every year with a relative disregard for how they will fare domestically, because their producers might think that people in Hungary will eat them up. Our cinematic influence can’t help but make its way into the filmmaking communities of other countries.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work that way when we get imports. If a foreign film reaches American shores, chances are an American distributor found it American enough to be palatable to American tastes. Therefore, nine times out of ten, we get a watered-down version of world cinema through no fault of our own.
But as the world continues to shrink into a global village, this is no longer the case. More and more foreign films are getting mass exposure in the United States, and more and more foreign sensibilities are finding their way into the American mainstream. Is the rest of the world starting to catch up with us, or has Hollywood finally run out of ideas?
Depending on your level of cynicism, you could say Hollywood ran out of ideas a long time ago. But the truth is that the rest of the world has always been on par with us (if not financially, then artistically) — we’re only now starting to open our eyes to it.
Check the next cover of your favorite entertainment publication, and I’ll bet you the pretty face on the cover isn’t a native American. This, of course, is nothing new. Would-be starlets from all corners of the world have always flocked to southern California in search of fame. Russell Crowe, Jackie Chan and Penelope Cruz are but a few of the entertainers we have come to call our own.
But look past the exotic fruit to the trees on which it grows. Foreign filmmakers and their national cinemas bring new voices and new perspectives never before seen by American audiences, spurring new movements in our filmmaking. Few of us may realize that Italian directors like Sergio Leone helped define a definitively American genre with their “spaghetti westerns,” and let’s not forget the slew of knock-offs that can be traced back to Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”
Hollywood is full of foreign directors putting out American films. Mexican director Guillermo del Toro was responsible for “Blade 2,” and next weekend will see the high-profile release of an American film (“The Transporter”) helmed by the French and Chinese (Luc Besson and Corey Yuen) and starring a Brit (Jason Statham, “Snatch”).
It seems as though when we’re not stealing away their stars, we simply snatch up their movies. “The Ring” is an adaptation of “Ringu,” a hugely popular horror flick from Japan, a nation that knows a thing or two about scary movies. Last year’s “Vanilla Sky” is an Americanized version of Alejandro Amenábar’s “Abre Los Ojos.” Amenábar, coincidentally, is now working in Hollywood, most recently with Aussie Nicole Kidman in “The Others.”
It seems the Academy loves multinationalism as well. American director Steven Soderbergh’s “Traffic” plays out about a third of its scenes in Spanish, and he’s got a Best Director statuette as a result. “Amelie” has the dizzying look of an American music video, good enough for it to be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.
This isn’t even scratching the surface of the thousands of incredible foreign films Americans are never able to see simply because they don’t have the opportunity to, or, when given the chance, opt for ho-hum Hollywood fare. But the next time you do leave the theater swelling with pride for your country’s latest cinematic triumph, double-check the ground under your feet and the name on the marquee. You might be in for a pleasant surprise.
