Day for Night Magazine

The Subtitled American

BY ADAM DORSKY

In 1954, François Truffaut, along with several other French film critics, published a series of articles in the magazine Cahiers du Cinema that laid the groundwork for what became known as “auteur theory.” According to this theory, the director, over a series of films imprints his or her personality and identity into a body of work. The auteurs these critics singled out for praise, including Howard Hawks and John Ford, did not write their own films, so their creative input could be difficult to detect, but these revolutionaries found plenty of support for their thesis. The films of Alfred Hitchcock, for instance, reveal the inner workings of a man who was fascinated with voyeurism and murder; but aside from personality quirks and psychological hang-ups, one essential aspect of the directorial identity that is very rarely discussed (and inexplicably so) is that of national identity.

What force could be more powerful in shaping a directors vision of the world than the culture of the nation in which they were raised? American director John Ford was a man who believed implicitly in the promise and hope of the American dream. Likewise, Spanish director Luis Bunuel was a man whose upbringing infused him with a love for the vulgarities of the surreal. For these two directors and hundreds more, the nation in which they grew up in served as a hallmark for their cinematic style and content, and this content, in turn, has provided the filmgoer with years of insight into the nature and character of the human heart.

In October, 2005, France, with the support of much of the international community, imposed strict United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) regulations to limit the number of U.S. films that could be distributed overseas with subsidies. The move came after French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres cited what he views as a cultural invasion from the United States, which has all but quashed the French cinematic national identity. In terms of a purely aesthetic point of view, Donnedieu’s argument against the American cultural invasion may have more truth to it than the public would like to admit. For a pertinent example of his point, we need only to look back just five short years ago.
THEIn 2000, Taiwanese director Ang Lee released what remains the most successful foreign film in cinematic history, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Made in Lee’s homeland of Taiwan, the film grossed more than $100 million and received ten Academy Award Nominations, including Best Picture; but despite being a foreign language film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was not as foreign as one might think. What many Americans didn’t realize when they went to see the film is that not only had Lee lived in America for 25 years, but his cinematic vision in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is closer to that of a David Lean film than anything from traditional Taiwanese cinema.

The irony of this situation was only further highlighted by Roger Ebert’s comment in his review: “[the film] transcends its origins and becomes one of a kind.” What Ebert fails to note is that the film not only transcends its origins; its origins are hardly featured at all. Although it features many martial arts sequences, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon also has many the hallmarks of an American film in both its style and plot. It is, ultimately the vision of its director, a brilliant Taiwanese-American, whose most notable films are a British period piece (Sense and Sensibility), a suburban drama (The Ice Storm), and an unconventional western (Brokeback Mountain).

Soon after, the top executives in Hollywood took noticeof the film’s triple-digit earnings and double-digit Oscarnominations, eventually concluding that foreign films couldbe packaged for mass consumption in America, so long asthey don’t deviate too far from what defines a film as American. By this point, Hollywood had been playing with the idea for some time. Many of the most successful foreign films from the previous two decades, such as the Academy Award-winning Life is Beautiful, had all been decidedly American in their view of the world, but never had foreign film succeeded to this degree.

Today, studios pick up foreign films using Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s success as an example. The films that most often receive wide release from major studios are those that are decidedly Americanized (China’s Hero) or ones that embrace preconceived notions that Americans have about foreign nations (France’s Amelie). Whereas just 18 years ago a highly un-American film like Almodovar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (which features sexual content that would never appear in an American film) could receive a substantial release in American cinemas, today, even the most acclaimed of foreign films will not receive a wide U.S. release unless they are Americanized. Take Wong Kar-Wai’s recent film 2046 as an example. In 2005, the prestigious Cannes Film Festival chose 2046 as one of the films it would showcase for that year. Critics worldwide hailed it as a masterpiece, and the critic Manohla Dargis called it an “unqualified triumph.” Following the film’s debut at Cannes, twenty major nations across the globe, including Great Britain, Spain, France, and Germany released 2046 into theaters, but America, the economic leader of the cinematic world, chose not to. For a full year and a half, America remained silent on a film that had taken Cannes and Europe by storm.

Although 2046 eventually received a limited release in America, the message from the U.S. studios was clear. In one of the most diverse, eclectic nations on the planet, executives felt that 2046, with its existential, open-ended plot and distinctly foreign sentiment, would not attract enough of an audience to make money. This, unfortunately, is the state of the cinematic world today. In a globalized society dominated by American cinema, foreign directors are increasingly getting the message that they must bend to the pressures of American aesthetic values in order for their films to be released in the United States. The issue here is not whether Lee is a talented director, which he most certainly is, or whether he loves his homeland of Taiwan, which he most certainly does, but whether we are narrowing the range of “acceptable” aesthetic values when we bring foreign films to America and impoverishing our movie going experiences.

Perhaps this is why French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres and the nations of UNESCO chose to embargo American cinema last year, because they feared that, should their films move any farther towards the American aesthetic, they would ultimately cease to be films of their own. For years, we have embraced the idea that directors are the owners of their cinematic visions, but if the world continues to move towards this American formula, then international auteurs will, at the end of the day, no longer be the authors of their own visions, but rather owing their art to a single nation that has taken a stranglehold on the cinematic economy; and if a director does not own his cinematic vision, then we must pause and ask who does?