Canned Cannes

With this year’s Cannes Film Festival coming to a close, a few points about the import and export of films past and present. How would you feel if you tuned in to watch the red carpet at the Oscars and instead of the usual parade of stars and celebrities you saw Bulgarian and Finnish and Japanese and Egyptian actors and directors you never heard of sashay past the whizzing cameras? And none of them was even nominated for an Oscar? Yet this is what happens every year at the Cannes Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, and the Venice Film Festival (the three biggest European festivals). Hollywood stars dominate the red carpet and the Hollywood films that are premiered there AREN'T EVEN IN COMPETITION AT THE FESTIVAL. Some film from Tunisia wins the Golden Palm/Bear/Lion but nobody sees it because they all came to see Tom Cruise, showing off his artfully augmented hair and his porcelain-crowned teeth. The cultural imperialism of Hollywood remains secure. 

The reasons for this are actually rather cut and dried. The U.S. has included the export of Hollywood films in their trade agreements with foreign countries for decades. This is in keeping with the common perception that a Hollywood film is an industrial product, no different from other commodities. But it is in direct conflict with other countries’ understanding that a film is a cultural, rather than a commercial product, that it both reflects a culture and is an integral part of it. 

Over the past century, the U.S. film industry in Hollywood has dominated the global entertainment industry. 

American films appear today in more than 150 countries, and the Motion Picture Association of America ("MPAA"), the film industry's lobbying group, proudly proclaims that the "U.S. film industry provides the majority of home entertainment products seen in millions of homes throughout the world.” (1) 

Recent statistics are astonishing: "U.S. films represent approximately 80% of the films distributed in European theaters, and over 55% of the films shown on European television networks." Try to imagine if such trade were fair – resulting in 80% of American theaters showing films exclusively from foreign countries. The facts are that the number of foreign-language films exhibited in U.S. theaters is severely limited by the dearth of venues that support such films. The very term “art house” – which used to distinguish theaters that screened foreign films – has by now become the common designation, sometimes used to denigrate, for films not originating in Hollywood. 

Approximately 85% of worldwide ticket sales are directed toward Hollywood movies, and international sales generate approximately half of the U.S. film industry's revenues. At one point the audiovisual industry was the United States' second largest export industry, following the aerospace industry. The trade flow in film is entirely one-sided; American films dominate foreign markets, but foreign films have failed to establish a significant presence in the U.S. market, accounting for only 1% of movies shown. 

Given the ridiculously tiny number of foreign-made films that the English-speaking markets choose to import, foreign film festivals have traditionally been markets in which producers have sought distribution of their films to the English-speaking market. If the film wins an award in competition, so much the better. But if a foreign-language film makes it into competition at Cannes or Berlin or Venice and it fails to win an award (regardless of the quality of the film), its failure to get distribution to the UK and North America can haunt the film for decades. 

A case in point is André Delvaux’s superb film Belle, which was Belgium’s entry in competition at the 1973 Cannes Festival. That year’s Festival wasn’t much different from this year’s. 24 films were in competition, including Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe, and Lina Wertmüller’s Love and Anarchy. All three of these got distribution to the U.S. Even the Swiss entry, Claude Goretta’s L’Invitation, landed a distribution deal. But this was because each of them won an award – for Best Actor or a Jury Prize. (La Grande Bouffe was booed during its screening and won an independent prize.) The Golden Palm was shared between the British film The Hireling, a fine adaptation of J. P. Hartley’s novel, and Scarecrow, a now forgotten starring vehicle for Al Pacino and Gene Hackman. 

Because Belle failed to either win an award or land a distribution deal, it is practically forgotten today. Of the few reviews of the film I could find online, none were very favorable, largely because no one seems to have understood it. I watched it by sheer chance some time in the early 1980s and it left such a lasting impression on me that I chose it as the subject for my very first published film essay. It was an extreme fluke that I saw it at all, since it never had a commercial release in the U.S. It was aired on a cable channel called TeleFrance. 

Belle is part domestic drama, part surrealist fantasy. It begins with Mathieu giving a lecture one night about the Belgian town called Spa and a nearby primeval forest called the Walloon Fagnard and its involvement in the lives and works of poets and other writers. His wife and daughter are in attendance and after the lecture they tell him they are catching a ride home with a mutual friend. Mathieu drives his Volvo home on a scenic route through the moors of the Grand Fagne, the very same woods about which he had been speaking. Rounding a curve, the Volvo strikes something on the road. Mathieu stops the car and gets out, checking for damage. Using a flashlight he finds drops of blood on the road. Making love to his wife, Jeanne, later that night, she tells him that he seems miles away. He tells her about what happened in the woods. 

In the morning over breakfast we learn that Mathieu’s daughter Marie is making preparations to get married. He objects to her short skirts and dark stockings. She wears them, she says, because “he” – her boyfriend John – likes them. Mathieu is a fastidious, exacting man, and his wife and daughter gently mock him. He works in the city archive, his desk directly across from a painting of a nude woman by Colette Bitker. 

After work, Mathieu drives into the forest to the spot where his collision occurred the night before. He hears the whimper of a dog from the nearby woods and fetches his shotgun from the trunk. The dog limps farther into the woods and Mathieu follows until he arrives at an abandoned farmhouse. A young woman emerges from the house and, assuring her that he won’t harm her, Mathieu stands the shotgun against the house and follows her inside. Before he knows it, she has slipped out again and seized the shotgun. Mathieu runs outside and falls when he hears a shotgun blast. Having shot the suffering dog, the woman throws the shotgun on the ground and, weeping, walks away. 

Thus initially quite straightforward, the story of Belle then cleverly bifurcates. Filmmaker Delvaux (no relation of the surrealist painter Paul Delvaux) carefully interweaves Mathieu’s domestic life with his fantasies, which, in the grand surrealist tradition, are deeply Freudian. In bald terms, Mathieu faces the imminent departure from his home of his daughter with as much stoic resignation as he is capable, but underneath this façade is passionate, anguished emotion that only shows itself in his increasingly emphatic lectures and in the fantasy life that he has constructed around the mysterious woman in the woods – who doesn’t speak his language – he calls “Belle.” How much of what Delvaux shows us is real and how much is fantasy could be the subject of more detailed study. I can only say that after many viewings, the film has got completely under my skin. As I wrote nearly 22 years ago, “It has infiltrated my dreams, both sleeping and waking, rather as Mathieu was ensnared by his strange Beauty.” But because it was passed over at Cannes in 1973 and didn’t find a distributor, Belle remains unavailable on DVD. I can just hear it, crying out from the vault in which it rots. Where is Criterion when we need them? 

(1) Lee, Kevin, "The Little State Department": Hollywood and the MPAA's Influence on U.S. Trade Relations, Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business, Volume 28 Issue 2 Winter, Winter 2008. 

[Dept. of Corrections: Belle is available in limited numbers on DVD from Amazon at $33.98 to $35.]