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During the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that more and more of the movies that really surprised and thrilled me have been foreign. Some I’ve raved about to you before – like Alexander Sokurov’s fantastic Russian Ark, which really gives a sense of how the complicated history of a place like St. Petersburg lives on; or Niki Caro’s Whale Rider, which, come to think of it, does pretty much the same thing for New Zealand.
Then just the other day I noticed that three of the very best movies in theaters right now are also foreign: Goodbye Lenin, about a son and mother in East Germany during the collapse of communism; Osama, about a girl and her mother in Afghanistan under the Taliban; and I’m Not Scared, about a little boy (and his mother and father) in rural 1970s Italy.
At this worrisome moment, when it seems like America and half the world are engaged in mutual fear and loathing, I thought: hey, great, at least high-end movie audiences aren’t insular and complacent and xenophobic, they have all these great cinematic windows into places and people elsewhere on the planet….
But this hopeful glimmer was dashed when I read an article in the Los Angeles Times. It says that how just one and a half percent of movies in American theaters today are foreign-language, just 3% of “serious” novels are translations, and that even in the most universal language, music, only 8% of CDs sold here are by foreign performers.
In other words, without any government censorship, our free culture is as resistant to outside cultural influence as the most regressive, repressive, paranoiac Third World countries.
It wasn’t always so. In the late 1950s and early 60s, cool films by a new generation of French directors like Truffaut and Godard were thrilling American audiences. In order to be culturally with-it person back then, you were obliged to see them.
And a few years later U.S. readers discovered Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the embrace of Latin American fiction by North Americans.
Then came the great World Music boom in the 1980’s…
And then, sometime in the 80s, this eager international connoisseurship by
educated Americans effectively came to an end.
How come?
I think after the Vietnam War, as we shook off our national guilt and self-doubt and malaise, even the cultural elite lost its taste for the stories being told by artists abroad. Even if we weren’t Reaganites, we started celebrating American things again, and a new generation of quirky, independent American filmmakers were making challenging movies that now take the place of the Truffauts and Fellinis and Bergmans in arthouse theaters and on college campuses.
I believe – I hope -- that this closing of the American mind has now gone about as far as it can. And that now the cycle will shift, the pendulum swing back.
There are two reasons each of us ought to do our part.
First is all the amazing, enlightening, entertaining work from abroad that is just passing us by.
The other reason to include a few more foreign movies and novels in our cultural diets is because there’s no easier way to get a vivid sense of how very different people – foreign people -- are thinking and dreaming and living.
And if we want to figure out why so many people in other countries hate us, and maybe convince them to hate us a little less, shouldn’t we try to understand them first?
People are worried right now about “out-sourcing” in this globalized era, how American manufacturing and service jobs are moving overseas. But maybe we owe it to ourselves to do a little more out-sourcing when it comes to culture – to see the movies and read the novels and listen to the music created in and about places that aren’t America.
