> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of > Subash > > On Fri, 20 Jul 2012 20:09:59 +0100 > "Bob W" <[email protected]> wrote: > > > the most successful French cinema (critically, if not box-officely) > > exists in opposition to the Hollywood system, which is so tied to > > standard arc of the hero, and is generally pretty boring. > > though he is not french, i recently watched haneke's french movie > 'cache' and been on an european (in a broad sense) cinema binge: > almodovar, kieslowski, tarkovsky, julio medem, kiarostami..... but i do > really wonder if movies like these have a substantial market outside > the film festival circuit?
Cache is one of the best films of recent years - quite stunning and typical of French movies in many ways. It is very difficult to understand what the hell's going on until you start to link it to French culture and history, and see the parallels with the present day. There is a superb essay about the film in Unravelling French Cinema by T Jefferson Kline. A lot of European cinema is/was subsidised by the government or the EC and often made on a very small budget (at least by comparison with US production) and may not be required to do good box office in the first weekend, but they can be slow burners. People have been watching Tarkovsky's films for decades, for example, so I'd imagine they've easily covered their costs by now. For France, cinema is part of the 'exception francaise'. Their film schools and the CNC are about producing specifically French films, with everything that that implies, so that France can stand as a beacon of intellectual elitism and culture, and so that it can demonstrate that there are other ways of doing things and of thinking. This has arisen out of necessity. France used to be the world's leading film producers, but the talkies and American money put a stop to it, so French cinema had to find another role. The paradox is that American and French cinema feed off each other. The French love American cinema, and they make use of it, but they transform it - A Bout de Souffle by Godard is an easy and obvious example of a French director saturated with American cinema turning his hero worship into something utterly and unmistakably French. Similarly, Hollywood has plundered French cinema relentlessly, but transformed it for mass audiences - it can be very interesting to compare French movies with their US remakes. L'Appartement by Gilles Mimoumi, remade as Wicker Park by Paul McGuigan, is a good example, and there's an interesting essay here about them: <http://cinemademerde.com/Essay-Lappartment%20Wicker%20Park.shtml> although the writer misses the important (and sense-making) fact that L'Appartement is basically A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare - which features in the movie. B > great thing if they do of course... here > they can only be seen at special film club screenings (as good citizens > of course none of us use torrent clients). as a counterpoint, spidey > just raked in the highest ever grossings for a hollywood movie in > india. > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and > follow the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
