The Death of Cinema pt. 94

Other than weekends before noon, most of the NYC 'plex shows are $12.50.

AO Scott still wondering why foreign films are next-to-invisible in America:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/movies/awardsseason/30scott.html

there's an essay in the most recent GQ titled 'when the movies died' or something -- it's about how hollywood is stifling creativity & will only greenlight comic book movies, sequels and adaptations -- i haven't finished it yet but it's pretty good

who wrote?

weird article by a.o. was there a time when it was not this way for foreign films?

bergman-fellini era [via every article on this topic ever]

yes, the '50s thru '70s. xp

morbs: a guy named mark harris -- story isn't online tho

xp what was different then?

Oh, he wrote Pictures at the Revolution

there's an essay in the most recent GQ titled 'when the movies died' or something -- it's about how hollywood is stifling creativity & will only greenlight comic book movies, sequels and adaptations -- i haven't finished it yet but it's pretty good

― lilwayne.quizrewards4u.com (J0rdan S.), Monday, January 31, 2011 6:41 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

i hear this a lot, but you know, bad timing. the oscar front-runners do not match this description. i guess they were greenlit two-odd years ago but still.

xp

mark harris is chill though

xp what was different then?

― call all destroyer, Monday, January 31, 2011 6:46 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

educated people had heard of bergman and fellini; they haven't heard of ___________________

I've mentioned this before: since I live neither in NYC nor LA I rely on Netflix and one local art theatre for foreign films. It was the same situation ten years ago. Nothing's changed here.

i reckon that with dvd it's technically easier to see foreign films now than 40 years ago (tony probably says this, can't remember). in england it hasn't changed much in about 25-30 years, so far as i can tell -- there were more repertory cinemas then, but video and tv have replaced them. which is a shame but there we are, and most of them were inly in london anyway.

i have a theory that in this country at any rate (not just a theory, there is evidence, but i haven't got into it enough yet) the reason for the reach bergman et al had was that the cinemas in the late 1950s had a real fight on their hands when tv came along and tried all kinds of things. and foreign films were routinely sold on the basis of (female) nudity, no matter how highbrow. but that was very much a phase.

kind of a lazy post

I've mentioned this before: since I live neither in NYC nor LA I rely on Netflix and one local art theatre for foreign films. It was the same situation ten years ago. Nothing's changed here.

― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, January 31, 2011 1:51 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah this is why i'm confused--the sitch hasn't changed in my city for at least the last ten years. i guess a.o. is saying this is a "golden age," i def don't know enough to say whether that might be true.

theatrical runs for foreign flicks have definitely declined (a lot) in LA over the last 10 years

i guess a.o. is saying this is a "golden age," i def don't know enough to say whether that might be true.

― call all destroyer, Monday, January 31, 2011 6:58 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is the real crux, yeah. he's not the only person saying it. i dunno. i don't think the EOD lists for the 2k0s really justify the claim, but i think it's partly the lack of a 'narrative'.

Harris is also Tony Kushner's partner, btw, iirc.

it's kind of lol that his example is a film that's five fucking hours long, i don't care how good it is.

cad, you watch TV series, don't you?

ppl are less interested in world cinema. it's easier than ever to see most of these films, thanks to Netflix etc, if there was demand.

also I believe foreign films grossed more (adj for inflation) and got nominated for the Best Picture Oscar more often. (The last two years there was what, District 9?)

not really morbs, why?

it's kind of a trilogy. and given most will see it on dvd anyway the run-time isn't a thing. it's kind of up to you! if you don't want to be interested in modern cinema, no-one is forcing you, it's just a bit of a shame that widely acclaimed movies don't get very much shine.

90-110 minutes each night in 3 parts isn't that tough.

yeah i hear ya, it's just that 5-hour movies are a tough sell when they're made here too!

tbf i didn't realize it was split into three parts; it was not really presented that way in reviews i read.

There is also a 2:45 theatrical cut.

ppl are less interested in world cinema. it's easier than ever to see most of these films, thanks to Netflix etc, if there was demand.

morbs half otm here... I think ppl are actually more willing to watch a "foreign film" on demand because the barrier to entry is so low, just click play and it starts

I'm not the best example cuz I'm big on world cinema, but there are a bunch in my queue I prolly would've never tracked down if it weren't so damn easy to click add/play (e.g. the maid)

also I believe foreign films grossed more (adj for inflation) and got nominated for the Best Picture Oscar more often. (The last two years there was what, District 9?)

District 9 was mostly in English. If your point is that it was non-American, then there have been no shortage of British films nominated for Best Picture in recent years, too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_foreign_language_films_nominated_for_Academy_Awards

Based on above link, it looks like four of the eight foreign-language (not foreign) films nominated for Best Picture have come within the last 16 years. In several other categories, foreign-language films have actually done better in the past 20 years than they had before (e.g., Best Cinematography and Best Song).

I'd say the one category in which foreign-language films do worse among the Academy now than they used to is screenplay. Between both Original Screenplay and Adapted Screenplay categories, foreign-language films score 37 writing nominations in the 1960s and '70s alone and only 20 since.

The one category in which they unequivocally do worse, that is. You could make an argument for a couple other categories, like director, as well.

i have a theory that in this country at any rate (not just a theory, there is evidence, but i haven't got into it enough yet) the reason for the reach bergman et al had was that the cinemas in the late 1950s had a real fight on their hands when tv came along and tried all kinds of things. and foreign films were routinely sold on the basis of (female) nudity, no matter how highbrow. but that was very much a phase.

I like this.

I believe I have seen this theory before and more than once- I believe it is floated in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls for example.

I'm not gonna say that wasn't a thing, but there's a pretty long stretch of non-erotic bergman films between monika (1953) and the silence (1963), some of his most famous films

the guy's rep was built on this string of films, not a lot of hot stuff in there...

1963 Winter Light
1961 Through a Glass Darkly
1960 The Devil's Eye
1960 The Virgin Spring
1958 The Magician
1958 Brink of Life
1957 Wild Strawberries
1957 The Seventh Seal

I've always wanted to see brink of life after john waters wrote about it in an essay on his favorite foreign films, he said his local theater would bring it back every time a movie bombed, supposedly it's some hyper-histrionic tale about a maternity ward

he said his local theater would bring it back every time a movie bombed

ok, so I mixed up brink of life with a cold day in august here

but does this not sound grebt

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/brink_of_life_john_waters.jpg

clemenza to thread!

nitpicking: It's an essay on his favorite art films which include American films like A Cold Wind in August and Interiors (!).

i have a theory that in this country at any rate (not just a theory, there is evidence, but i haven't got into it enough yet) the reason for the reach bergman et al had was that the cinemas in the late 1950s had a real fight on their hands when tv came along and tried all kinds of things. and foreign films were routinely sold on the basis of (female) nudity, no matter how highbrow.

There already is evidence for this. See Mark Betz. “Art, Exploitation, Underground,” in Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste, eds. Mark Jancovich et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 202-222.

I believe I have seen this theory before and more than once- I believe it is floated in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls for example.

― Never Make Your Moog Too Soon (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, January 31, 2011 8:05 PM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark

sorry, yeah, i know it's kind of out there -- i guess i mean 'rigorously proven thesis' not theory, and in the uk-sphere specifically. i've heard it said but not seen it gone into. the smallness of the uk makes it a different question here. you go back to the 30s, though, and like not a single renoir (sound period) got shown till 1937. 'boudu' was not given a run in a british cinema till 1965. so far as i can tell dreyer's 'vampyr' didn't get a cinema release before the 70s (it debuted at a film society in 1935). so this is kind of what i mean wrt the 50s-70s being blippy.

xpost cool will check out, know some of betz's stuff if he's the 'small books' guy

Oh, he wrote Pictures at the Revolution

OT but that book was a brilliant read

Is this the same kind of thing as a 50s version of a 'midnight film'?

the betz chapter is on google books -- it's interesting. depending on your point of view on the value of research in this area, there's more ground to cover.

it's not unrelated to the midnight movie, i'd guess, or to the whole grindhouse phenom, which is, what?, delapidated cinemas showing spicier fare than you get elsewhere, european films included

idk, idk, 'very different in the uk' (wonder where kung-fu, exploitation, etc pix did play here)

here's a thing from an actual distributor about the state of international distribution:

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=448095905772&id=712161205

a large number of exploitation pics - particularly from europe - did actually get a release on the british circuit in the 60s and (especially) the 1970s, though they were generally censored, dubbed, retitled and given 'saucy' new soft porn titles. back issues of the monthly film bulletin are prob the best and most reliable guide for this kind of thing. plenty of kung fu flicks got shown over here in the same way, tho the bbfc had a particular aversion to nunchucks, for some reason, so even the classic bruce lee movies had whole sequences snipped by the censor.

again in the uk my guess is that the decline of the university film club, showing 16mm prints of classic arthouse fare, has played a part in all this.

Mark Harris on the new heights/depths of risk aversion in Hollywood; cites Top Gun as the start of the death spiral.

http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201102/the-day-the-movies-died-mark-harris

ie, the article J0rdan talked about above is now online

I agree for the most part, but then there's the success of The King's Speech (still in the top five, and closing in on $100 million), The Fighter, Black Swan, True Grit, The Social Network. It's been an unusual season, which Harris himself acknowledges:

During one remarkable stretch last fall, the box office was dominated, on successive weekends, by The Town, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and The Social Network

Hollywood has always churned out garbage based on existing properties afaict

aflack?

The quality of the garbage has deteriorated. Why else are The Fighter, The Town, and True Grit overpraised?

As Far As I Can Affleck

The quality of the garbage has deteriorated. Why else are The Fighter, The Town, and True Grit overpraised?

I am skeptical of such claims. it's amazing how many shitty films just disappear, never to be rereleased or remembered by anybody