That's Entertainment

I am a cinephile in the disadvantaged position of being an American. Movies weren’t invented in America, but, since the end of World War I, when American film production, untouched by the war’s destruction, emerged as the dominant force in the world, by the 1920s Hollywood had an astonishing reach. American movie stars were recognized practically all over the world.

By the time I was growing up in the American South in the ‘60s, the major Hollywood studios were in decline, thanks to a revitalised world cinema (about which I knew nothing at the time) and to the challenges of television. Needing to promise, if not always provide, audiences with things that television could not, like a wide-screen and more adult content, American movies had changed without having actually grown up. They were the only show in town whenever I went to the movies, and I ate as many Westerns, war movies, and thrillers as I could stomach. The first time I had a chance to see an actual foreign film, Roger Vadim’s Barbarella, I was turned away because it was rated M for mature audiences (I was 10).

I believed that movies were an exclusively American feat because I had been deprived of any substantive exposure to films made anywhere other than Hollywood. I knew that there was a greater world beyond America only because it had been used as a backdrop by Hollywood. My schooling had taught me the history of the world, and television had brought home America’s “military adventurism” in Vietnam. But I never knew that movies were being made, and had always been made, by French people for French audiences or Italian people for Italian audiences, Japanese people for Japanese audiences. Or, indeed, that some of these movies were being exported to other countries in versions that were “dubbed” into different languages or with translations in “subtitles.”

In April 1951, a film magazine called Cahiers du Cinema first appeared. Co-founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, it employed writers whose names have since become synonymous with the Nouvelle Vague, a movement as important to cinema history as Italian Neo-Realism: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, and Rohmer. Significantly, they had all grown up during the German Occupation (1940-44). When France was liberated, American movies could be seen again. It sounds simplistic, but it’s easy to guess how these young men, without knowing exactly how their country had been betrayed, had grown resentful of their parents’ generation. Their admiration for America was just as understandable, and their discovery of American movies was an important part of their recovery from the war. But their embrace of America was coincident with their rejection of France. Suddenly, to these young movie fans, the classic French cinema, and especially certain filmmakers, was subject to entirely new and impossible standards of virtue.

To these Frenchmen, American movies are as foreign as their movies are to me. Having imbibed Hollywood movies with my mother’s milk, I find them neither so exotic nor exceptional. I was unaware, in fact, that a movie could presume to be anything other than a diversion, like pop music, until I encountered what is now idiotically called an art film when I was 13. I have related the encounter elsewhere, but after seeing it, I realized for the first time that a movie could be as full and enriching an experience as reading a William Faulkner novel or listening to the Bill Evans Trio. I also learned that Hollywood had been actively involved in preventing me from seeing films made in foreign countries at least since the end of World War II.

Today when I have a chance to look at one of the 4K restorations of a 60 or 70 year old Hollywood movie, I can see the beauty of its design, and all the care and skill that went into its fabrication, but it invariably reminds me of what G. K. Chesterton said when he first saw Times Square: “What a magnificent sight for someone who can’t read.” American films have always been visually impressive, and they have also been surpassingly dumb.

I don’t know that I will ever escape from the conviction that Hollywood productions are products, just like every K-Pop group – an assemblage of materials drawn from a great pool of talent and artificially combined. Nothing organic, nothing spontaneous, nothing original. Hollywood directors were industrial employees, no different from their army of cutters and costumers and set dressers and hairdressers who work behind the camera. They were dependable clock-punching workers in the dream factories. Calling them artists is perhaps a little romantic but nonetheless misleading. And it’s only because of a handful of rebellious Frenchmen, reverse (and counter-intuitive) provincials, that we got in this mess in the first place.