What Is a Foreign Movie Now?

The New York Times > Movies: "Movies, in other words, may be universal, but they are universal in radically distinct ways. Some of them we regard as foreign, a word I use with some trepidation. Though my purpose here is to wave the flag for movies from around the world, it is a banner whose slogans make me cringe a little. The phrase 'foreign film' is, after all, freighted with connotations of preciousness and snobbery, and too often accompanied by dismissive modifiers like 'difficult,' 'obscure' and 'depressing' (all of which I happen to regard as virtues, but never mind). Our own commercial cinema is increasingly devoted to dispensing accessibility, comfort and familiarity -- which can also be virtues. It is not necessary to rank, or to choose. As Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour point out in their introduction to a new collection of essays and interviews called 'Subtitles,' 'Every film is a foreign film, foreign to some audience somewhere.'

we can call the first kind of filmmaking humanist, the second modernist. Humanism's great prewar exponent was Jean Renoir, whose example and personal tutelage informed several Neorealists and also the Bengali director Satyajit Ray. Ray's "Apu" trilogy, with its meticulous attention to the details and rhythms of traditional Indian life and its quiet but unstinting concern with poverty and injustice, may well represent the apotheosis of cinematic humanism. Informed by a mild, melancholy form of Marxism, Ray's films are sad without slipping into pessimism or depression. The director and the audience, though not always the characters, are inoculated from despair by faith in the incremental but ultimately benevolent progress of history. This kind of filmmaking is fundamentally concerned with dramatizing, through close observation of individual lives, the process of historical change. Its subjects are at once dauntingly abstract -- the shift from agriculture to industry, the coming and going of colonial powers, the advent and aftermath of wars and revolutions -- and intimately concrete: a family, a child, a village.

While it is true that, on a given Friday, most of the world's multiplexes will be playing franchise products from American studios, it is not hard to imagine a future in which an American suburban marquee will boast a Chinese martial-arts picture, a Korean action thriller, a Mexican cop drama and a French romantic comedy. "