Our living room has been playing host to a mini-Steptoe and Son festival lately. I actually wasn't that crazy about the sitcom when I was growing up; now I'm hooked. We're working our way through Series Three at the moment - not as consistently brilliant as the Seventies shows, but there are lots of lovely incidental touches, Albert revealing himself as a fluent French speaker in one episode and acquiring a taste for tailored suits and canes in the programme where he wins the Premium Bonds. The picture comes from Sunday For Seven Days, wherein father and son decide to go out to the flicks. Harold, always the aspiring intellectual, wants to see Fellini's 8 1/2; his Dad is more interested in, er, Nudes of 1964. Of course, the old man gets his way in the end.
At one point, standing in the art-house queue, Harold reminisces about the joys of the monumentally inscrutable Last Year in Marienbad. According to Matthew Sweet (also a Steptoe lover, by the look of it) foreign films of that calibre have all but disappeared from terrestrial TV:
In the past few years, more foreign films have been given away with newspapers than screened by BBC2. The late-night slots on Channel 4 that once were cleared for enormous retrospectives of Tarkovsky or Godard or Eric Rohmer are, this week, the home of The Enforcer - otherwise known as Dirty Harry 3 - and Under Siege, in which Steven Seagal is a ship's cook who uses his martial arts skills to defeat a crack squad of international terrorists. Great if you like watching paunchy men in checked trousers doing kung-fu moves. Not so great if you want to know something about films that you can't find piled up in wire baskets outside petrol stations.
"I got my cinematic education from television," says Nick James, editor of the film journal Sight and Sound. "But it would be hard to imagine anyone doing that now. What you see in the schedules now is an extreme geographical narrowness combined with an extreme lack of memory. On the terrestrial channels, there's really nothing made before 1980 unless it's very famous indeed. Not much, even, from Hollywood's great golden era. And hardly anything that's in a foreign language. It's pathetic and it's parochial."
Similar thoughts from NY Times critic A.O. Scott on the shrinking market for foreign-language movies in the US. Where has the audience gone, he wonders?
I don't mean the mass public — I have never put much stock in the Utopian fantasy that, if only the multiplex chains would see reason, internationally beloved auteurs would become box-office powerhouses — but rather the aesthetically adventurous, intellectually curious segment of the population that has historically been there for foreign films.
The gap between critical approbation and cultural currency has widened, even as the number and variety of critics has expanded. The arguments are perhaps more intense and contentious than ever, but they also seem to take place in a series of echo chambers...
The result is that more difficult movies — movies without a directorial pedigree or a well- known international star — are pushed further to the margins, becoming objects of cultish adoration rather than topics of general discussion. If you have seen "Three Times" or "L'Enfant" — to name two other hits of the 2005 Cannes Festival that came and went here in the blink of an eye last year despite choruses of critical praise — then you can perhaps feel the flush of specialness that comes from belonging to an exclusive coterie.
But ultimately such snobbery is bad for the soul, and for art... The old film culture was based on hierarchical assumptions about taste and quality that have all but vanished, replaced by niches and networks of fans. You like your Romanian hospital movie, I like my Asian horror, and we have our Web sites and DVD rental queues to keep us happy; everything's cool.
I found both the Cannes films on P2P sites within 3 mins. They are available, just not via the old routes. I'm sure that any minority audience will find them if they wish to.
Note last 4 words.
Posted by: Matthew | Tuesday, February 13, 2007 at 02:30 PM
Aha! Echo chambers again! First blogs, now films; but the principle is the same -- the cultural commissars panicking as their erstwhile stranglehold on news/opinion/taste weakens, and cliques, niches, cults spring up like mushrooms after the rain. (Or something.)
I must say, however, that Amazon rental has encouraged me to experiment with dangerous foreign films as freely and recklessly as the art house cinema or BBC2 ever did.
Posted by: Witwoud | Wednesday, February 14, 2007 at 01:10 AM
Semi related manual trackback.
Posted by: Mark Holland | Wednesday, February 14, 2007 at 12:34 PM