The Heyday of Foreign Films

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Around the same time, the American film industry spread its power and conquered the world, dominating every market it was allowed into. And Americans became more self-centered, less interested in anything non-American, including movies. This ignorance of national, ethnic, religious and artistic cultures different from, even alien to, ours was reflected in American movie habits as well as in American foreign policy. In both cases, by wearing those blinkers we missed out on what the rest of the world thought of itself and us.

There are still foreign-language hits — the martial-arts romance Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the oh-really-it-was-French? documentary March of the Penguins, the all-Aramaic Passion of the Christ. But those are flukes. Almost no foreign films make so much as $10 million in U.S. theaters. Ask most Americans about foreign films and they'll say they don't go to the movies to read. (These are the same people addicted to the running ribbons of copy on the news channels and the glut of statistics flashed on the screen during sports events.) In a way, foreign films are back where they were 60 years ago. They are patronized by a small coterie of educated Americans, and by a significant slice of first- and second-generation foreigners: the Indian diaspora that still loves its Bollywood musicals.

I made some of these points at a Venice Film Festival panel on foreign films in the U.S. And every one of my colleagues made another point: foreign films may be dying in theaters, but they are surviving, thriving, soaring on DVD. As Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic for The Chicago Reader and DVD reviewer for cinema-scope.com, noted, there's a wealth of international cinema out there, including films that never play in American theaters or film festivals — and it's all on disc, to be rented or bought, either online or at the more comprehensive video stores.

As someone who sees most of the movies that most interest him in venues other than traditional theaters, I can't disagree. I plunder the treasures at Kim's, a Manhattan video chain that embraces both the ineffable and the unspeakable — Kenji Mizoguchi and Jesus Franco. And I scan the Internet for films other people may think of as obscure, and I call essential. Who knows what the Essential Art House movies of the next 50 years will be? Nobody knows. But we can be pretty sure that we won't see them in theaters like the Brattle or the 55th Street Playhouse, let alone your 24-screen Googolplex. The kids of the future, knocked for a loop by their own, 21st century Seventh Seal, will see it on a TV or computer screen.

Maybe it'll be beamed directly into their brains. That's how I felt when Bergman and Janus showed me what film could be.