Fences, Borders
In today’s N.Y. Times, A.O. Scott has lamented with good reason “the peculiar and growing irrelevance of world cinema in American movie culture, which the Academy Awards help to perpetuate.” Diminishing education standards have surely fed into this. American backwater types have long regarded foreign-language films as too challenging or not comforting enough, but I’ve been sensing gradually lessening interest levels even among urbans over the last 20 or 25 years.
“There are certainly examples from the last decade of subtitled films, Oscar-nominated or not, that have achieved some measure of popularity,” Scott writes. “But these successes seem more and more like outliers. A modest American box office gross of around $1 million is out of the reach of even prizewinners from Cannes and masterworks by internationally acclaimed auteurs, most of whose names remain unknown even to movie buffs.
“This is less a sea change than the continuation of a 30-year trend. As fashion, gaming, pop music, social media and just about everything else have combined to shrink the world and bridge gaps of culture and taste, American movie audiences seem to cling to a cautious, isolationist approach to entertainment.”
I feel there’s a certain internal logic the the whole issue. Why bother with foreign cinema when your own gives you all one desires? This is the eloi speaking of course, not the more sophisticated cinephile. People in general don’t like to be challenged at the movies. It’s a worldwide adagium.
How are foreign language films challenging? Because of subtitles? Crouching Tiger, Apocalypto, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Passion of The Christ all were financial successes. Let The Right One In made more money here than anwhere else. No, country likes to watch movies with subtitles. That seems to be AO’s biggest complaint, once again showing that typical American insecurity we’ve become known for.
I also hate people grouping foreign films together. As if all countries have the same quality of films, or like they don’t produce their own fair share of shit.
Dubbing. Dubbing. Dubbing. DUBBING.
The U.S. is the only major movie market that INSISTS on subtitling and ONLY subtitling when presenting forieng-language films, regardless of genre or “level.” Yes, original-language is preferable to get a “real sense” of the film, but we’re not talking about critics and cinephiles here, we’re talking about the mass audience. Language is a barrier and subtitles DO spoil composition by throwing-off the eyeline.
You want Americans to “open up” to the popular cinema of, say, France? DUB THEM INTO ENGLISH… just like France dubs American movies into French.
This has been a topic for the last 20 years. The simple fact is that the art house became overwhelmed with American Indie titles so that they no longer needed to book subtitled foreign films. The rise of Sundance equaled the decline of Cannes.
Plus the new feeling in an audience – if a foreign film is good, they’ll remake it here
The idea that this is the fault of audiences or even subtitles seems like horseshit to me. The vast majority of American movie audiences can’t even see subtitled movies in a theater if they want to. This is the fault of lazy studios who see subtitles and immediately separate a movie into the same kind of reductive “foreign film” box that Scott uses here, which means they only get played in art-houses and marketed to NPR listeners. You market a subtitled film like it’s any other film and it will play to audiences like any other film – Crouching Tiger, Slumdog, Apocalypto, Passion of the Christ, Hero, etc. were all cases where movie marketing people actually went out and fucking did their job.
corey3rd pretty much nails it.
there are, however, other factors such as the Kaelian xenophobia that drove American film criticism in the 70s and 80s and persists as well as the market disruptions created by Miramax’s $750 million a year warchest to outbid, overbid, attempt to control the foriegn language film market in America which led to distortions in values and the creation of an unsustainable system that finally collapsed.
Which brings us up to date.
The new 21st century critical community can be characterized by timidity and desperation, not unfounded by the way, ie massive unemployment amongst journalists, which has led to the phenomenon of the critics’ groups uber-consensus-seeking during awards season.
To put this in schoolyard terms:
“Let’s let the bullies kick around the little kids (foreign films) on the playground and let’s give the bullies our lunch money (consensus) in the hopes they’ll decide not to kick out asses (fire us or deem us irrelevant or both).
Even better, let’s wash their cars and carry their books and do their homework for them (snipe, blog, conspire, huddle, blognosticate, etc).
If we do all that, they might even give us a sip of their cherry cokes (jobs, blog ads)….”
Historical note: To corey3rd’s point about the longevity of this dilemma, I wrote a cover story for the Los Angeles Reader in 1992 called “Death of the Arthouse Cinema.”
Some foreign movies are just shit. As much as we like to think of all French people soberly nodding in appreciation of the latest Clare Denis film, they’re all flocking to the multiplex to watch some wacky broad comedy just like they always have. Turn on the TV in Paris at any time and you’ll see some trailer for some cringe-worthy slapstick shit that’d never translate to American audiences. Every country has its own equivalent.
So what we consider “foreign film” is actually just a selection of what is, even in the country it’s produced, considered art-house. If Rabbit Hole can’t make money, some French version of the same isn’t going to do either.
When you do get a foreign film with broader appeal – and Rashad’s list has several good examples – they generally tend to do pretty well.
What’s going to really clobber foreign films is that indie distributors aren’t going to be able to get their discs inside a Red Box. The video stores that used to be able to nurture a market and create this second wave buzz for a title are shutting down as fast as Blockbuster stores. Sure there’s Netflix, but they don’t have to buy that many copies to cover America.
far as dubs go – my favorites are the ones from the ’60s that feature the same voices as Speed Racer.
I’ll tell you one “foreign” film I’m surprised didn’t even get a theatrical release over here, and that’s Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s Cemetery Junction. Cracking little dramedy, deserved a much bigger audience.
Americans don’t complain about the parts of Inglourious Basterds that are in foreign languages.
It couldn’t be that arthouse tastes over the past 15 years have moved toward anti-cinematic minimalism and obscurity?
Godard is fun. Does anyone think that about Police, Adjective?
I was by Lincoln Plaza, and I was bored so I thought I’d see a movie. The Police, Adjective poster had a gun on it so I was like fuck it, I’ll watch.
It was by far the worst theater experience of my life.
Movie houses have been driven out of the cities and into the suburbs, and sometimes the exurbs, and so have the tastes. That’s where the money is. I very rarely feel I’m getting skimped, but then I live in the DC/Baltimore nexus, not in Akron.
As a person who watches a foreign film as easily as an American one, I have to say that they just seem to be in a slump lately; and there hasn’t been a great inspirational wave of them since South Korea and Mexico had their heyday. Even with the cream of the crop making to the US, it still doesn’t send many chills down the spine of the average film buff, much less the average filmgoer. It feels like most of the movies are water treaders really.
Don’t get me wrong, I WANT to embrace foreign films with all my heart, but who’s really knocking it out of the park nowadays on a consistant basis that has appeal to more than a sliver of the viewing audience?
“and there hasn’t been a great inspirational wave of them since South Korea and Mexico had their heyday”
I mostly agree with this, but I just wanted to say that I think HK films have been making a nice little comeback lately (possibly spurred on by the return on Woo?).
I also don’t quite understand where Scott thinks foreign films used to be basking in preternatural success in the first place. Well-received subtitled films were ALWAYS outliers. “Like Water For Chocolate” did not kick any more doors down than “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon” or “Y Tu Mama Tambien” or “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”. Did ANY of the great films from South Korea ever blow up at the box office?
How much success does he think a “Dogtooth” or a “Biutiful” would find five years, ten years, fifteen years ago vs. today?
“…the peculiar and growing irrelevance of world cinema in American movie culture…”
Have you seen the international box office figures for our crappy Hollywood exports? LITTLE FOCKERS is the #1 movie this weekend in pretty much half of the international territories out there. GULLIVER’S TRAVELS disappointed in the States… but earned *$125 million and counting* in the rest of the world.
Apparently world cinema isn’t just irrelevant in America — it’s irrelevant in the rest of the world as well.
Oh where to begin…
Our TEN DIRECTORS TO WATCH team just culled dozens of films from directors all over the US, all over the world. There was so much great directing talent just from Scandinavia, it could have filled the list.
HAPPY HAPPY just won the World Cinema section at Sundance and TROLL HUNTER was one of our directors. Actually, seven of our ten filmmakers this year were from outside the US, including Baran Bo Odar of Germany, who made a remarkable serial killer film in THE SILENCE.
DRAGON TATTOO emerged from the Scandi region.
Smart man Scott Rudin flipped out for REPRISE a couple of years ago.
The list goes on and on and I know this first hand as Variety created our CRITICS’ CHOICE: EUROPE NOW section of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 13 years ago in order to highlight all of the terrific new filmmaking talents of the Eurozone.
My point: ponder how economics effect viewing options and how marketing affects tastes and get back to me with your “those films aren’t that good” rap.
My rap is simple and was articulated best many years ago by the great philosopher Eddie Harris:
“COMPARED TO WHAT?”
King’s Speech wins SAG. All over.
“All over.”
A good and worthy winner.
once again, the Academy will go for the safe, formulaic, traditional, heart tugging, beat the odds film. The perfect recipe for Oscar.
NIce to see CARLOS get some love in the article. the best film of 2011.
Several commentators beat me to the punch, but I’ll add my agreement that 70 to 90% of the cinema of ANY country is crap. We get the cream of their crop here, not the local low-brow turds. It’s just that our turds have the highest production value on the planet so everyone else has to suffer them too.
As to dubbing, I’m guessing it comes down to the fact they don’t want to make 2 versions for the American market and the market for subtitled (college educated, upscale, etc) is far more dependable than the masses who may or may not dig even genre pics like DISTRICT B:13.
Myself, can’t stand dubbing. The sync issue is just too distracting.
CARLOS was a great film. But how many people saw SUMMER HOURS? That was the movie that came before CARLOS by the same director. I think there’s too much competition amongst foreign language films right now so a lot of good films are being swept under the rug–like SUMMER HOURS. Or they’re just not “marketable” with a current issue like CARLOS. During the Bergman-Fellini-Kurosawa-Truffaut period, how many countries were actually making films that were screened in the U.S. I’d say a handful at best. Today we’re getting films from all over the world. So what happens? We’re seeing a lot of Hollywood-style movies like France’s HEARTBREAKERS, Japan’s DEPARTURES, Argentina’s THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES, etc. Someone said foreign language films are in a rut. I agree. There really isn’t one foreign filmmaker who I look forward to seeing his/her film regardless what the critics say as I did with Truffaut, Rohmer, Bergman, Techine, etc.
forget the whole dub business – when is the last time a film made by Canadians about Canadians and not merely Toronto as your Town-too made a box office impact South of the Border?
AS for the Reprise love, Joachim Trier has a movie coming out this year according to imdb
@the400blows: Not only did I see SUMMER HOURS (3 times at the cinema) but I also own the gorgeous Criterion BD which everyone should buy. It’s a really amazing flick and I didn’t even realized that I had seen several of this guy’s pics before that.
I seem to recall a quote from Matheiu Kassovitz or Jean-Pierre Jeunet a few years ago where he said something to the effect of “Don’t worry, Americans. 90% of French cinema is crap. We just send you the good stuff.”
I think the point here is that Americans now aren’t even getting the 5% of foreign cinema that is good.
The other point: Rashad is a little slow.
From my depressing 1992 article on the subject: foreign language cinema once represented nearly 10% of the tickets sold in America.
It currently represents about 1/2 of 1%.
Trust me, that number has not increased in the past 20 years.
Anybody watched “Idiocracy” lately?
MovieBob is right, and there’s an extra step — if you’re reading subtitles, you aren’t actually experiencing the movie as it was meant to be. First off, you’re reading it, which engages a different part of the brain. Second, even if you’re a quick reader, that’s interrupting the constant visual flow of the picture to glance down and read what’s being said. Third, it was imagined as being viewed by people in the original native language, people who speak the language. Subtitles are completely antithetical to cinema.
Further, Popcorn Eyes brings up a bunch of movies that perfectly prove my point; these are movies that are basically Hollywood movies, but with subtitles so that viewers feel smarter, because a different part of their brain is being stimulated than usual.
There’s more conversation in this comment thread about foreign films then there has been ALL GODDAMNED YEAR from the man who runs this site. So, you know, funny to see this article pop up here.
@BobbyLupo: Well, duh! of course the subs aren’t perfect to the original language but thta is the compromise one has to make, unless one speak Chinese, Spanish, French, Swedish, Russian, Korean, etc…get the idea?
Being serious: I think most subtitles are made to not invade the space of seeing a pic. the ones that I buy (mostly BDs now) seem to always be perfect and I hardly think about it at all.
Look to the success of CT, HD to see that when a film is kicking ass, the subs are perfectly done and when thinking back to a film you love, you don’t see the subs in your mind, so it all works out.
In all the comments, I’ve only seen a couple mentioning home video. It seems to me that Scott’s piece, and Jeffrey’s follow up, focus largely on theatrical exhibition. Frankly, theatrical is a dinosaur that doesn’t know its dead yet. Box office is declining across the board, not just with foreign films.
Right now in my Netflix streaming queue, I have Hidden Fortress, 8 1/2, The Host, The Orphanage, Mother and Antichrist. I’ll wager that more foreign films are being watched now in the U.S. (via home video in all its various forms) than have ever been seen before. “No one is going to see them in the theater” just doesn’t hold water any more.
I don’t wish to sound incurious here, but I’m going to play a devil’s advocate of sorts. As several people already pointed out, the experience of watching a subtitled movie is pretty different from a movie in your native language. That’s not to say it’s not worth doing, or “I don’t want to go to the movies to read”… but it IS different. You’re not getting the rhythm of dialogue (if that matters), you’re not necessarily experiencing the movie as visually, and if I’m not feeling at my most alert, I know seeing a subtitled movie will not be fair to my eyes or to the movie itself.
Also: again, this probably sounds woefully non-curious but: is it really that awful to want to know your native country’s cinema a lot better than the unsung masterpieces around the world? Not because AMERICA IS THE BEST but because, well, America is where I am, and I’m never going to be able to immerse myself in another culture to that degree — unless I want to quit watching a big chunk of U.S. films entirely, including the hundreds of important movies from the past I still haven’t caught up with! In some ways, I’m as interested in bad or middling movies as I am in great ones, and I’m not going to get that full spectrum from foreign releases without some pretty serious research and, you know, I’m not paid to watch movies all day. Given that, and given the sheer number of North American releases each year, and the sheer number of U.S. films I still need to catch up with, I’d rather immerse myself in American cinema and feel like I know a bit about it than fancy myself a worldly cinephile who can tell you all about the devastating masterpieces of 50 other countries (without much of a sense of how this actually compares to the other 95% of those countries’ films). There’s only so much time in the day/year/life/etc.
I’m sort of exaggerating to make a point, but there’s some truth to it, too. I’m really glad that I sought out Reprise and Let the Right One In and any number of others over the years. And certainly, more diversity at these multiplexes that could play 15 different movies but instead play 6 lousy ones on multiple screens would be great. I’m just not incredibly surprised that American audiences don’t seek out movies from all over. I don’t listen to pop music from all over the world, either.
>Language is a barrier and subtitles DO spoil composition by throwing-off the eyeline.
Not as much as dubbing destroys performance.
You want to dub for “the masses”? Fine, whatever. Just let me have access to subtitled versions, please. I don’t want Jason Statham reading Toshiro Mifune’s lines in Yojimbo…
Very few people have ever watched foreign movies in the United States. It’s always been a niche market for film lovers and urban cineastes. If anything, Netflix and the scattered foreign successes of the past decade have given foreign cinema an even larger audience in the United States than ever before.
There have been several foreign films the past decade and a half that achieved real success theatrically and penetrated beyond the filmblogger set (Life is Beautiful, Let the Right One In, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Girl With/Who series, and Hero).
The USA is an increasingly multi-lingual country and that is being reflected moreso in the DVD market than the cinema, but it’s showing up there as well.
I do think foreign film’s influence on mainstream American fimmaking is on the wane for a variety of reasons, but that’s a whole nother matter.
Gaydos, could you provide a link to that article?
There doesn’t seem to be much evidence of that level of success for individual foreign films online.
bluetide: unfortunately it doesn’t exist except in that old-fashioned thing called print.
As for your question, do you mean that it’s hard to imagine foreign language cinema from 1955-1975 constituted nearly 10% of boxoffice? I can probably find another source to verify that statistic, as well as the current .5%, if you like.
I don’t find it hard to imagine at all, just because I spent a fair chunk of my college life going through microfiched film reviews and was stunned at the kind of stuff that got written up even in the most mainstream publications during the ’50s-’70s. Vladimir and Rosa got reviewed in Newsweek for chrissake.
“but thta is the compromise one has to make”
Palmer – my point is that dubbing is less of a compromise overall, because it is more true to the overall intent of the filmmaker. (With the obvious caveat that neither is perfect.)
“I don’t want Jason Statham reading Toshiro Mifune’s lines in Yojimbo…”
Dubbing can impact performances, certainly, but not knowing what the people are saying means that you have no idea what the inflection they’re giving the lines means. Beyond that, any real actor worth watching, 99% of the performance has nothing to do with dialogue. This is certainly true of Mifune.
That said, though, I do agree with you that bad performances are a detriment to dubbing. However, the answer is to hire better actors. In every country beyond America, there are respected, even honored, actors who focus solely on dubbing.
The bigger elephant in it all is that proper dubbing of dialogue results in crazy out-of-sync picture, which a lot of people dislike. But, again, if the translator is truly dedicated, this is not insurmountable. Check out the DVD for ‘The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly’ where they spend several minutes talking about how difficult it was to dub one specific line of dialogue, and how good he felt when he came up with “More feeling”, which is a line that always stood out to me.
One final thing, too — if you’re watching an Italian film in its original language, guess what? It was almost certainly dubbed. For that matter, if you’re watching an American film, guess what? It has ADR in it. That’s a fancy word for dubbing. My point is, not all dubbing is bad; it has to be visible and obvious to be bad. Which is true of so many aspects of filmmaking that it’s a non-point. [To end on a note of irony -- subtitles are the only aspect of filmmaking that should be visible and obvious.]
The numbers are definitely true, but there is a context to the numbers that somewhat explains them.
In the ’50′s through ’70′s, there were a lot more independent and low-level distributors than there are today. There was a lot more experimentation in what could get released. There was a still a bit more demand than supply, especially because, over the late ’50′s and into the ’60′s, the studios slowed down their output because of television (after having already slowed it down due to not block-booking and not owning the exhibitors). It’s the same reason that so many of the movies shown on ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000′ got some form of theatrical release.
Nowadays, there are far fewer exhibitors, and even the smaller ones are still tied up with deals with the major studios. The major studios, if it’s really possible, have gotten even less interested in foreign films.
I would bet that the reason that the number used to be as high as 10% and is now as low as .5% (which, at least roughly, I believe) has more to do with the number of foreign films being shown theatrically, coupled with the overall lower grosses of studio product at the time; it wasn’t a case of individual foreign films doing significantly higher numbers then than now, but the tide has risen *and* fewer of the films are being given theatrical release (and, when given, to less theaters).
The U.S. isn’t the only country where dubbing isn’t normal — the English-speaking world in general has never been big on the practice and it’s rare in Scandinavia and the Netherlands except for children’s/family stuff. South Korea generally doesn’t do it either and a lot of other Asian countries/territories (the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia) have a double standard where Asian films are often dubbed but U.S. and European films usually aren’t.
Palmer – my point is that dubbing is less of a compromise overall, because it is more true to the overall intent of the filmmaker. (With the obvious caveat that neither is perfect.)
“I don’t want Jason Statham reading Toshiro Mifune’s lines in Yojimbo…”
Dubbing can impact performances, certainly, but not knowing what the people are saying means that you have no idea what the inflection they’re giving the lines means. Beyond that, any real actor worth watching, 99% of the performance has nothing to do with dialogue. This is certainly true of Mifune.
That said, though, I do agree with you that bad performances are a detriment to dubbing. However, the answer is to hire better actors. In every country beyond America, there are respected, even honored, actors who focus solely on dubbing.
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