The above statement does non wholly reflect the world. At the degree of originative looks. the relationship between these two continents has ever been. to state the really least. a bipartisan route. The exchanges refering Hollywood and the international film scene are long-standing and profoundly frozen. During the formation of classical Hollywood film. many of its cardinal designers were in fact European emigres – Lubitsch. Dieterle. Lang. Hitchcock. Sirk. to call but a few.
More late. many of Hollywood’s finest modern-day managers – Scorsese. Altman. Coppola and others – have frequently turned to Europe. to the Gallic New Wave. Italian neo-realism and the New German Cinemas for a beginning of inspiration and influence. In the Bioscope of 8 January 1925. Joseph Schenck. so president of United Artist. commented viciously on British movie productions: “You have no personalities to set on the screen. Your phase histrions and actresses are no good on the screen.
Your effects are no good. and you do non pass about so much money. ” Similar comments can be found about about any European film in about any decennary. It is possible to oppugn the aesthetic criterions by which such ailments are made. It can be argued that slow beat. deliberate theatricality. and deficiency of star presence or of seeable production values are positive qualities which European film-makers have exploited in originative ways and which the Hollywood film is the poorer for non possessing.
How Schenk would hold hated La Regle du jeu. Ladri di Biciclette. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant or The Long Day Closes! And how incorrect he would hold been. But at the degree of mass perceptual experience Schenk was right. European film has for excessively long been hung up on impressions of quality – wrapped for penchant in a national flag. like “Belgian” cocoas. Hollywood. partially for grounds of sheer graduated table. has non had this job. It can machine-produce quality when it needs to. but it can besides unashamedly produce rubbish. European film has lost the art of bring forthing rubbish.
But it is rubbishy movies – whether “good” rubbish or “bad” rubbish makes no difference – that are the manure of movie civilization. the beginning of modern mythologies through which the film speaks to its staying audience. Europe’s merely mythology at the minute seems to be heritage. If it is to be feasible as an industrial and cultural entity. European film demands to rediscover the present. bury rural idylls and dip into urban incubuss. reconnecting with the mythologies of mundane fright and desire. If it can’t make this – and it may every bit good be excessively late – it will hold to settle for a function of lasting standby. bit-part participant in the universe game.
Therefore the division of Europe into a figure of national provinces. each with its ain cultural features. and the low distribution of European movies in Europe itself ( merely 10 per cent of European movies are screened in another European state ) make a definition of one European film excessively diffuse and heterogenous in the effort to qualify the relationship between Hollywood and European film in any other manner than already stated – in other words: industrial large concern movie production versus little. craft-based productions partially seen as “an artistic option to crass commercialism”
