Where have you gone, Jean Luc Goddard?

Samuel Goodstein Grand Illusion

Foreign films have long been a favorite play-thing for the cultural elite; since the 1930s, social critics, intellectuals and snobby-types have enjoyed few things more than pontificating on the latest Bergman, Goddard, Truffaut and the like. (I admit! This column is named for Jean Renoir's classic, "Grand Illusion.") But only recently have foreign films become the sole property of the intellectual class; while Fellini may have been a favorite topic of conversation at cocktail parties in the 1960s, he also had a following amongst the non-cocktail-party crowd.

Indeed, in 1962, foreign films comprised 10 percent of the American film market. Even 10 years ago, foreign films were a force to be reckoned with at the box office, taking up 7 percent of the U.S. market. Their decline since then has been shocking. Today, foreign films make up a paltry .75 percent of the market - an all-time low. This number is even more telling when you consider that there has been one relatively big foreign film each of the past few years (e.g. "Il Postino," "Belle de Jour," "Shine") that has taken up a good chunk of this .75 percent. The foreign film market is dying fast - and one hit per year cannot save it.

Of course, fewer viewers translates into fewer screens for those who still have an interest. The Economist (which recently published a fine article on this topic) noted that out of a grand total of 30,000 movie theatres in the U.S., only 250 regularly play foreign flicks - Ann Arborites, of course, are fortunate to have The Michigan Theater and the Cinema Guild (which, by the way, counts my father as a past president). As sure as the screens stop screening, the distributors stop distributing. New Yorker Films, once one of the most prominent foreign film distributors in the country, has seen their annual distribution fall from about 50 films in the '60s and '70s to about one in the '90s.

The decline is undeniable. What is the cause? The temptation is to blame Hollywood. After all, its an easy target: Hollywood studios generally produce garbage and spend incredible sums of money to promote it. Studio executives' careers depend on producing major box-office hits, not penetrating drama, so the tendency is for Hollywood to dumb-down their movies. However, these facts have more or less always been the reality in Hollywood; they hardly explain the almost complete disappearance of foreign films from U.S. screens. The answer lies elsewhere.

One key factor that, when combined with Hollywood's box-office mania, drove foreign movies out is the take-over of the theatre industry by major companies. Whereas small theatres (a la The State Theater, Ann Arbor 1 and 2, The Rialto, etc.) once thrived in almost every city, today's cinema market is driven by giant companies (a la Showcase). These giants have almost no financial incentive to screen a risky foreign film, and - unlike some of the old, smaller theatres - would never show a foreign movie because it happened to be interesting. They have no incentive to be experimental, because their level of dominance in the industry has grown to the point that they don't need to take any risks. Thankfully, foreign films may have gained some credibility with the Showcases of the world this year - thanks to "Shine" and a few other fine movies that were big box-office draws.

Even the changing cinema market, however, does not fully explain the trend. To a certain degree, one must assume that even Showcase would respond if there were a strong demand. One factor just might be that foreign films just aren't that good any more. This argument is based on the following logic: Old foreign movies used to grapple with issues such as God's existence, man's fate in a chaotic world, and politics. Today, the argument continues, foreign film-makers are falling prey to what Bernardo Bertolucci called "a horrible neo-conformism ... (where) the words unique and original are becoming insults instead of compliments." This, combined with the industry-driven changes in the U.S, could certainly sag the market.

Finally, it is possible that Americans just don't appreciate art-in-film like they used to. This argument, which I foolishly believed only one year ago, was triumphantly proven false by the great domestic success of fine movies such as "The English Patient," "Shine" and "Fargo." Americans still recognize good movies when they see them, they just can't see them very often.

So, when cultural critics continue to snicker that we just don't know good art when we see it and that Americans are complicit in Hollywood's assault on culture, they couldn't be further from the truth. The audience is out there; the movies - in part because of the theatres and in part because of the filmmakers - aren't.

- Sam Goodstein can be reached over e-mail at faygo@umich.edu

04-15-97