Since the start of World War I, which coincided with the rise of Hollywood, foreign films have never accounted for a large share of business in the U.S. However, some foreign productions have been very profitable and their introduction through the art house circuit exerted a profound influence on Hollywoodespecially on the generation of filmmakers who came of age in the 1960s and ‘70s.
Tino Balio, former director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater, is pessimistic about the future of foreign film in America despite the spread of global communications and the ease with which even the most obscure movies are now available anywhere, at anytime. The dates in the title of his new book, The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens 1946-1973 (University of Wisconsin Press), bracket the era identified by Balio as a golden age, which began with the release of Rossellini’s Open City and ended with Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. He focuses on that quarter century, albeit acknowledging the existence of audiences for foreign films in the arty “little cinemas” of the 1920s and in ethnic enclaves before World War II, as well as a persistence of interest among 21st century cineastes.
There are omissions. He largely ignores the wave of post-1973 German film spearheaded by Fassbinder and Herzog, as well as other more recent success stories. And yet, the main points of Balio’s thesis will stand. A surge of artful, unconventional looking European (and some Japanese) films did find their way to new audiences of urban, sophisticated Americans after World War II.
But as he takes pains to show, the economic model was always dicey for U.S. distributors. And furthermore, a chunk of the business came from the soiled raincoat crowd, drawn by the looser censorship of Europe’s film industries. After Hollywood scraped the Production Code that severely restricted what could be shown, sex invaded mainstream American movies and subtitles were no longer necessary for audiences seeking titillation. Although the 1952 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on an Italian film, Rossellini’s The Miracle, marked the beginning of the end of American film censorship, Hollywood would be the chief beneficiary at the box office. Also, the rise of a generation of filmmakers inspired by European and Japanese models made reading subtitles less necessary. With Coppola and Scorsese, America now had its own art house directors.
And what about now? Although art house cinemas show fewer new films than in the past, the proliferation of film festivals along with Amazon.com and the brave new world of Netflix streaming means that a budding cineaste can watch foreign films without traveling faror even from his couch. But Balio aptly quotes Susan Sontag on the decline of the cinema culture of the 1950s and ‘60s, writing of fans from those years “convinced that cinema was a new art unlike any other: quintessentially modern, distinctly accessible, poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral.” Their ranks have thinned as film occupiesalong with everything elsea thinner spectrum of the popular imagination.
