TCM Imports by Alicia Malone
'TCM Imports: Timeless Favorites and Hidden Gems of World Cinema' by Alicia Malone
Growing up in Australia, nearly every film Alicia Malone saw was foreign. Perhaps that formative insight makes her the ideal host for TCM’s “Imports” show and author of her new book, TCM Imports. She’s innocent of the American movie bias—that notion that “foreign” means impenetrable, remote from our reality. When everything is “foreign,” the playing field is levelled.
Malone writes the way she presents on screen: bright, prepared and engaged. Her book focuses on 52 films and is organized—for reasons best left for her to explain—in seasons starting with winter and winding through the calendar year. She apologizes in her intro that “the lion’s share of these movies were made in France” by male directors, but despite the disclaimer, TCM Imports trots across the globe with entries from Senegal, the former Soviet Union and the former Czechoslovakia, Hong Kong and China, Germany and Sweden, Italy and India, Spain and Argentina …
Her choices are personal yet reflect a sense of establishing a cross-section of genres and timeframes as well as nations. Malone rejects any idea of setting a roster of “greatest” films, always a dubious proposition despite the public’s appetite for listicles. Although some of the entries are widely familiar, including Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie (2001) or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), she offers many surprises. Instead of Rashomon (1950) or Seven Samurai (1954), Malone represents Japan’s Akira Kurosawa with Ikiru (1952), respected by cineastes but less known to the public.
She also raises the flag for Australia, not only with Peter Weier’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979) but posting a claim for the island continent as home to some of the first narrative movies in the early 1900s.
TCM Imports: Timeless Favorites and Hidden Gems of World Cinema is published by Running Press
