I recently heard about an American teenager visiting Wales who insisted on calling the Welsh people she met English. When it was pointed out to her that the Welsh didn’t like being identified that way, she said she was sorry but that’s what she’d been taught in school–and it would be too complicated for her to change what she called them.
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Yet if you look at what’s been happening lately in world cinema–a subject most American critics aren’t much interested in, apart from publicity stunts like the Dogma 95 manifesto–there are signs that the bullying dominance of Hollywood is beginning to encounter some healthy resistance. First there were the controversial prizes given out at Cannes by a jury headed by David Cronenberg to serious and challenging European art movies–Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Rosetta, Bruno Dumont’s Humanity, Alexander Sokurov’s Moloch, and Manoel de Oliveira’s The Letter (the last three are showing at the Chicago festival). Rosetta–the most exciting of the lot and the most visceral filmgoing experience I’ve had all year–gives an unforgettably acute, physical, and unsentimental notion of what it means at the moment to be young and jobless in Belgium; the more mannerist, sprawling, and difficult Humanity is no less informative about working-class life in rural France. The honoring of such vibrant and troubling work–along with a thoughtful day in the life of Hitler and Eva Braun (Moloch) and a contemporary adaptation of La princesse de Cleves (The Letter)–provoked cries of outrage from the American mainstream press, who were positively livid that the jury had passed over the usual feel-good entertainments from Hollywood. A similar pattern could be discerned in the prizes given by another festival jury in Venice last month and the response to them.
Some signs of resistance are also evident in this country. In Chicago we have the prospect of more art cinemas in the next couple of years and a relocation and expansion of the Film Center. And there’s the recently announced departure of Janet Maslin as the first-string film critic for the New York Times; she’s virtually been a shill for Hollywood in general and most Miramax product in particular, and her interest in world cinema–at least in terms of art rather than business–has been minimal. (As her last Cannes coverage made painfully clear, she’s far more interested in the philistine declarations of Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein than in the artistic strategies of any filmmaker–American or foreign, dead or alive.) Thanks to the influence of the Times, Maslin’s verdicts on foreign movies have played a significant role in deciding which of them get to Chicago, a grotesque state of affairs that’s finally coming to an end; the situation can only get better–unless the Times opts for another industry apologist or a landlocked graduate from the school of Pauline Kael who mistrusts foreigners, such as Denby or Michael Sragow.
I’ve seen only a dozen of the titles that the Chicago Film Festival is offering, all of which I can recommend to some extent. (I certainly can’t say that of the nearly 30 films I saw in Toronto, which included some awful stuff, such as George Hickenlooper’s The Big Brass Ring, crudely based on a few elements gleaned from an unrealized Orson Welles script, nearly all of them mutilated beyond recognition.) In roughly descending order of enthusiasm, they are Frederick Wiseman’s Belfast, Maine, Sokurov’s Moloch, Dumont’s Humanity, Aki Kaurismaki’s Juha, John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, de Oliveira’s The Letter, Don Chaffey’s Jason and the Argonauts, Carlos Reichenbach’s Two Streams, Laurent Bouhnik’s 1999 Madeleine, Milton Moses Ginsberg’s Coming Apart, Gordon Hessler’s The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and Emilie Deleuze’s New Dawn. Not a bad list, though apart from the Wiseman none of them holds a candle to most of the major omissions I’ve cited.
