Jeffrey M. Anderson's 400 Screens, 400 Blows - The Language of Film

When I go through each week's new film releases for my website, I have a template that lets me fill in the blanks. One line reads: "Language: [blank] with English subtitles." Lately I've noticed that I've often been deleting that line, which means that most of the new releases have been in English. This is not a new development, but it's a distressing one nonetheless. The downside is that we just don't know what we're missing. During World War II -- understandably -- the United States did not import any Japanese or German films; in the 1980s, it did not import any Iranian films. And to this day, the number of Vietnamese films shown here can be counted on one hand.

In the 1960s, however, a period of intellectualism prevailed and there was an air of excitement over the latest imports: College students, writers and journalists became entranced with the latest films by Godard, Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, Truffaut, Renais, Satyajit Ray, Chabrol, Kurosawa, Bunuel, Bresson, etc. The list goes on. To read some of the reviews and essays of the time, you sense that it was truly believed that these artists could change cinema and convert it into a genuine art form, perhaps for the very first time.

Most people know the rest of the story. The 1970s ushered in the so-called "American Renaissance," with its band of young maverick filmmakers. When we talk about the 1970s, we talk about Altman, Bogdanovich, Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola, Malick, Penn, etc., but rarely do we hear mentioned the great achievements from other countries: Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Eric Rohmer's Claire's Knee, Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating, Bergman's Cries and Whispers, Bresson's Lancelot du Lac, Tarkovsky's Solaris, Bunuel's last three films and a dozen Fassbinder films. ...

The 1970s exploration of world cinema inevitably led to the backlash of the Blockbuster System, which endures to this day. Now we get skittish distributors afraid to roll the dice on the new generation of foreign masters, and instead settling on sugar-coated, easy-to-digest "hits" like Cinema Paradiso, Like Water for Chocolate, Shall We Dance?; Life Is Beautiful or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Some of these films are enjoyable, but they're hardly masterworks.

The greatest foreign films of the past ten years (including those by Takeshi Kitano, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, Claire Denis, Alexander Sokurov, Abbas Kiarostami, Bela Tarr, Manoel de Oliveira, Jia Zhang-ke and Apichatpong Weerasethakul) have received sporadic distribution at best, opening on a couple of screens and maybe a week's run at a rep house with little or no publicity.

So what is currently populating the box office list on 400 screens or less?

There's Deepa Mehta's condescending, self-consciously noble Water (about which I went into greater detail last week). And we have Chen Kaige's ridiculous kung fu epic The Promise, which clearly tries to ride the coattails of two other art house friendly Asian directors who forayed into highbrow kung-fu, Ang Lee with Crouching Tiger and Zhang Yimou with Hero and House of Flying Daggers. And three of this year's mediocre Oscar nominees are still playing, including the insipid winner, Tsotsi, as well as the bland Joyeux Noel but also the very good Sophie Scholl.

However, of the 123 movies currently in release there are only a half-dozen promising, or at least interesting, foreign language films. Most notable is Chuan Lu's Mountain Patrol: Kekexili, with a ludicrous $131,000 gross, but still hanging on after 11 weeks. Are people telling their friends to see this amazing little film? It's a rugged, old-fashioned adventure about a band of vigilantes who try to protect the wild antelope of Tibet from poachers. It has a real sense of nature, a chilly, bone-dry texture in which the dust and ice are indistinguishable from one another. It even has a harrowing quicksand scene!

Hou Hsiao-hsien's new film Three Times -- only the second of the great filmmaker's 17-odd features to receive U.S. distribution -- is currently on 4 screens with a $70,000 gross after 5 weeks. And that's not bad for a movie that the mainstream press greeted with stifled yawns. It's hard to imagine such a reaction happening back in the 1960s to the latest Antonioni or Bergman. But those who have treated themselves to this beautiful, patient film have experienced some of Hou's loveliest moments.

Four other films of potential are showing on just a handful of screens, though none have shown here in San Francisco just yet. Park Chan-wook's Lady Vengeance is the third in his ultra-violent revenge trilogy (after the excellent Oldboy and the slapdash Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance). Apparently, it's available on import DVD for those with all-region players. Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 film Army of Shadows is opening in the United States for the first time ever, so I guess it's an official debut, and may even qualify for ten-best list consideration. The two-and-a-half-hour Romanian film The Death of Mr. Lazarescu has earned rave reviews from various Chicago critics, both mainstream and highbrow, and the new Iranian film Iron Island showed here at the SF International Film festival, but in such ridiculous time slots that I was unable to attend.

Perhaps most interestingly of all, there are two foreign films produced partially in English, Olivier Assayas' Clean and Amos Gitai's Free Zone, each presented in a variety of languages with actors from all over the globe. Could this be the wave of the future? Will we end up with a kind of international mish-mash slanguage for cinema, like the street patois in Blade Runner? Only time will tell. ...