"Is Foreign Film the New Endangered Species?" - NYTimes, 1/22/06 (1 Viewer)

[TheLongshot]

Looking at the films in question:

Insomnia: Net profit was about $19m, which means it was probably a push productionwise.

The Ring: The big winner here, $83m, and got a sequel made.

Dark Water: actually lost $5m.

Jason

 

[Michael Reuben]

The key phrase being "giving up the rights". I'm not suggesting the Bros. Weinstein would change how they treat foreign acquisitions, just that they're less likely to make them (or make as many). But time will tell.

M.

 

[Lew Crippen]

Indeed we do Edwin. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I can no longer see non-English language films in a timely manner, except for those in Español. And sadly this would not do HTF members like you, Brook and Michael much good, as almost all of those that I can see are the equivalent of Hollywood schlock.

Still, I remain interested in what you and others have to say about films that (with luck) I’ll be able to see sometime.

 

[Ted Todorov]

I haven't been posting much -- it isn't because I have stopped seeing foreign and indie films, it is because I am tired of screaming into the void -- I often (usually) seem to see them months if not years before anyone else, so what's the point? Example: I saw The Beat That My Heart Skipped last May.

Last month I saw some superb Spanish movies (including Spain's Oscar candidate for 2006), but why write if there isn't anyone else here likely to see them anytime soon?

So far as Foreign films not getting releases, as always my main problem is that I don't have the time to see all the readily available films that I can see, rather than because they are lacking distribution. I sympathize with those of you not living in NYC or some other major film center, but what can I say, this is one of those the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer situations.
In the last year NYC has added the three screen IFC (where they have been showing Ozu & Truffaut amongst others) and the Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced that they are building two new theaters to complement the Walter Reade. MOMA is back from it's reconstruction. They just had a one week run of Bela Tarr's Satantango.

Meanwhile if you live in a place where you have to depend on national distribution, you get fewer and fewer foreign films. I guess there are two options: build yourself a killer HT and import DVDs, or move to NY, Paris or equivalent (if such exists).

Ted

 

[Michael Reuben]

So did I. If you'd posted something, I'd have responded.

M.

 

[Holadem]

The point is that it informs the rest of us of what's worth watching and what to avoid, all on your dime and time. Look at it as a community service .

In the end, it's looking like HTF is not immune to the trend we're discussing.

--
H

 

[Ted Todorov]

True -- but my point is that in New York there are so many festivals and special showings that I don't really care if film X gets a distributor. And I would much rather see it at Lincoln Center with director/cast present for Q&A than at the Quad on a postage sized screen.
I take your point about the IFC, but they did have at least one release of a previously unreleased film: Pulse (Kairo). So far the Angelika, I wouldn't set my foot in that place no matter what they showed. The Lincoln Plaza, the Sunshine, the Cinema Village, the Film Forum, the Paris and the AMC 25 all show officially released, first run, foreign films.

So far as those festivals and special showings, here is a list of *some* of the ones I regularly attend, and a large percentage of the films I see there are foreign:
New York Film Festival
New Directors/New Films
Film Comment Selects (Waler Reade)
French Film Festival (Walter Reade)
Spanish...
Italian...
Latin American...
insert a half dozen more countries here -- all at the Walter Reade not only is it IMO the best theater in New York but I live nine blocks away and member tickets are $6.
Avignon/New York Film Festival
Tribeca Film Festival

We are talking 60 ~ 80 foreign films a year! After all that, who needs distributors? (OK, obviously the filmmakers do, but it doesn't enhance my movie viewing all that much). Since last year's NYFF, I can name only two foreign films I've seen or will see shortly in a regular movie house: Paradise Now & Caché, both of which I could have seen at the NYFF if they didn't have distributors lined up already. Before that, Head-On & 3-Iron come to mind as a films that I saw in regular release that made an impression.

I can name one film that came out last year that I wanted to see but couldn't:
The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang)

Ted

 

[Marc Colella]

That's extremely depressing but not surprising.

People generally want mindless action, dumb comedies or dramas that tell them what to think and how to feel (aka spoonfeeding). Reading subtitles is also a major turnoff for people.

Even on this forum we find self-proclaimed film nuts who rarely ever watch a foreign film. The ones they do watch are usually of the action/horror variety.

Much of the best cinema ever created are foreign-language films. Over half my viewing is dedicated to foreign films, and would be more if I had better access to them.

I'd love to see some interest generated on this forum at least. There was an AFI Challenge on this forum, why not have a challenge to view a Top 100 list of foreign films?

 

[Ryan L. Bisasky]

I remeber seeing Hero in theaters, and as soon as someone saw subtiles, someone shouted out "What the fuck is this" and stormed out.(remeber the ad campaign, "Quinten Tarantino Presents" Jet Li, Hero, lots of action scenes ect) with no mention of dialogue at all.

 

[Andrew-V]

I guess there just isn't a large audience for original and unique foreign films anymore. It seems like the only foreign films that get any attention are those that contain the excessive sex and violence that American audiences strive for (films like "Y Tu Mama Tambien"). As mentioned above, even our independent films are becoming uninspiring.

I would love to see some Bergman-esque films come to my local arthouse theaters, but I know that will never happen.

 

[Michael Reuben]

I don't know about "uninspiring". The fact that so-called "independent" films largely dominate this year's awards season suggests that this is where much of the best work is being done in U.S. films today.

I think the problem is that these films are no longer fully "independent". Sure, they may have been made with little or no studio support or interference, but now that the studios have discovered there's money to be made on the arthouse circuit, the specialty markets are being subjected to strictures traditionally associated with the mainstream. And one of those strictures is that the audience won't read subtitles.

M.

 

[DonRoeber]

I think part of the blame for this is also on the distributors. I have a local art house theater, and if a film is doing well, their distributors require that they keep showing it. Normally this is fine, but they only have two screens, and sometimes films get stuck there for awhile. Right now they're showing Brokeback Mountain and Match Point, both of which are also playing in the megaplex a few miles away. I don't know how the screenings are doing at the local theater, but their distributors are making them keep the films until their popularity dies down a bit. In the meantime, a lot of other good films are in the queue:

The Squid and the Whale
Mrs. Henderson Presents
The World's Fastest Indian
The White Countess
A Good Woman
Art School Confidential
Deep Blue
Separate Lies
The Memory of a Killer

I realize not many of these are foreign films, but still, they're interesting smaller films that I'd like to see. Sometimes the queue gets so far backed up that by the time the film makes it to the theater, the DVD is already out (this happened with Metropolis recently).

 

[Ted Todorov]

Huh??? Did we see the same film? What violence in Y tu mamá también? And so far as the sex is concerned, it has the kind of honest depiction of sex that is impossible to find in American films.

The Y tu mamá también I saw was a startlingly original film. Sure there are are plenty of foreign films that imitate American cinema: Brotherhood of the Wolf & 36 Quai des Orfèvres come to mind, but last I checked neither one had much if any success here. An original film like Y tu mamá también on the other hand did.

Of course the larger point remains true -- U.S. audiences, as a whole, have closed their minds when it comes to subtitled films.

Two factors are at work:
- The splintering of the audience: while there are plenty of places where people love "art"/foreign film (the annual Rendezvous with French Cinema program at Lincoln Center sells out in hours) while elsewhere those same films would be greeted by empty theaters.

- The embarrassment most distributors seem to feel about foreign language films -- look at the trailers for them -- most of them appear to be about silent films, or they feature the one sentence of English dialog in the entire movie, or some internationally recognizable phrase like "mama mia". It is even more ridiculous when those trailers precede a subtitled film -- really, you don't have to lie to this audience... Often it isn't even possible to identify from the trailer the country/language of the film being advertised!

If instead of this crap distributors advertised foreign film like they were proud of them, where a film's non-English dialog and non-American setting was a feature rather than an embarrassment, maybe an audience for it would be educated and build over the years.

Ted

 

[Haggai]

But how much of this is new? Some classic foreign films were only released with English dubs back in the '50s, as we can tell with DVDs like Rififi. And some of those classic trailers don't advertise the foreign nature of the movies either. Naturally I'm not defending the practice, I'm just wondering if we're really experiencing a trend of fewer foreign releases, or maybe just the occasional downturn in what was never more than a niche within the entire industry of domestic theatrical releases.

 

[TheLongshot]

Actually, if the subject matter is interesting to me, it does matter. There are some films which I had seen reviews on sites like AICN or here on movies that I may not be able to see for years, becuase the film may not be readily available. I tend to remember such films, and look them up when the time is right.

I think part of the problem with the studios' attitude toward foreign films is the "it wasn't made here" factor. The fact that they don't have that much invested in these films doesn't give them encouragement to push them. They also don't own these films, so any money can be fleeting, while films they do own can continue to make money for them indefinitly.

Jason

 

[Ted Todorov]

An excellent question -- I'm not much of a trailer aficionado, so I don't watch them when they are included as DVD extras. But in the '70s & '80s the only dubbed release I remember was Das Boot. Everything else had subtitles. And I have a hard time imagining that trailers in the '70s were as bad as they are now.

I can point to two things: trailers for foreign films in France have plenty of native dialog with subtitles.

I am old enough to remember when foreign films were actively marketed to a non-cinefile audience. Say Italian Laura Antonelli movies in the 70s -- they were justifiably considered sexier than their American counterparts and their very foreignness was part of the appeal.

Ted

 

[Andrew-V]

No, it doesn't contain violence. I didn't mean that BOTH of those applied to that film. Sorry for being unclear.

Do you honestly think a much tamer film would have been a sensation in America? Where are the films that are purely cerebral?

 

[Michael Reuben]

Right now, that would be Cache, which had one of the better per-theater averages out there last weekend, though the distribution is still quite limited. Whether it can reach the levels of Y Tu Mama Tambien remains to be seen; despite its (relative) success, that film never made it beyond 300 theaters.

I don't think it can be reduced to a simple formula of sex and/or violence. Memento showed that a "specialty" film could be successful without either, and 9 Songs showed that even explicit sex isn't enough to drum up the box office for an art film that's otherwise a bore.

One of the more successful subtitled films (judging by its having passed the magic $1 million mark) in current U.S. release is Paradise Now, which has no sex and mostly off-screen violence.

M.

 

[Rich Malloy]

Following on a theme that's been brought up already, I guess these ticket gross figures and distribution numbers are only dealing with theatrical releases? And aren't grosses for theatrical releases declining across the board, if not quite to the degree that foreign languange films have declined?

I ask because it seems to me that there's been a veritable boon of great foreign-language films, particularly in Asia. The measurements of failure discussed in that article don't seem to acknowledge that there has occurred an explosion in quantity and quality of world cinema over the past ten years. And if distribution/gross is measured by cross-border DVD sales, I'd wager it's through the roof compared to prior years.

My personal experience: I've lived in Boston since 1991, and there's always been a great many theaters featuring all sorts of films from everywhere. But still there were films that I'd wait years to see, if ever. About three years ago, I went all-format/all-region and suddenly had access to a great many films that previously I might never have had an opportunity to see. In the last couple of years, retailers specializing in bringing these films to the American market have made it even easier (international shipping for nearly any title, English-friendly portals, etc.). I'm awash in films like never before.

I'm not saying there's no place for the theater, and I do lament its decline. Seeing a film under such circumstances is a unique experience, though not without its own drawbacks. But in terms of simply having an opportunity to see a greater and greater slice of all films made each year (and it's still only a slice), we're living in Boomtown!

 

[David_Blackwell]

I love foreign films, but it is extremely rare to catch one in my area in theaters. I usually catch them on DVD. I have no problems with subtitles because the best way to see a foreign langauage film is in teh original langauge with English subs. Some of my favorite films are from places like France or Asia.