I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas. –Jean-Luc Godard
Ever since high school, I have been pondering the uses and disuses of government funding of the arts. With regards to film the different policies in Europe and North America have engendered two types of cinema: European art house films and American blockbusters. A quote by a certain David Carr, a libertarian:
Many years ago, not long after I had graduated from law school, I briefly succumbed to a rather silly conviction that I was a cultural barbarian and this state of affairs could be addressed by becoming an afficianado of European cinema. I should admit that this conviction was in no small measure driven by the belief that being au fait with the work of European film-makers was a surefire way to impress the girlies.
So I started to spend much of my free time ferreting out art-house independent cinemas (of the kind that sold organic brownies in the foyer instead of popcorn) and sat through endless hours of turgid, narcolepsy-inducing, state-funded, navel-gazing about the tortured psychological relationship between a middle-aged sub-postmaster and his trotskyite revolutionary girlfriend in the seedy hostel they share with a couple of Vietnamese refugees on the outskirts of Hamburg. Or something.
These films have all amalgamated in my mind and I cannot remember the name of even a single one. After about six months, I decided that no woman was worth this level of constipation so I threw the towel in and went back to watching simplistic sci-fi blockbusters and gangster movies.
While I find Carr’s position particularly barbaric, I can understand his irritation at some European directors who excel at pompousness, seriousness and pretentiousness. Also, there seems to be no popular European cinema. Dyer and Vincendeau have argued in the early nineties that the only European popular cinema is US cinema. But surely, there has been a European popular cinema in the sixties and seventies?
On different note David Lynch is someone (whose films I like) who seems to be working within this paradigm of European artsiness and I wonder: are his films making money? Where does one find this kind of info. Here?
Also, government funding is tied in with the concept of cultural significance, the rationale being that a government can fund the cultural significant products of tomorrow.
Hello
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For example, French producer Luc Besson is trying in Europe through his Europacorp studios, to duplicate in Europe the US model : he makes blockbusters (or wannabe blockbusters) and wants to finance smaller level auteur films (for exemple with the “Transporter” action films with Jason Statham, he could finance films like The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada that Tommy Lee Jones directed – if you consider it an auteur film, that is).
But is this practice a good thing? Tommy Lee Jones is not French, and the director of the Transporter films, although French, went to the US for despicable big-budgeted films. Also, the Transporter films add up to a pile of shit that was already there to begin with.
My conclusion would be that one alternative (not a solution) to this paradigm is in globalization. Co-production of talents : several producers with money from dofferent countries, cast and crew from here and there. Producer Robert Lantos tried that, the last film by Tran Anh Hung with Josh Hartnett is another example, and Sukiyaki Western Django is another example. But in this process, we lose not only the language, but also the consistency of such projects : the actors of Sukiyaki do not understand the English words they speak (and neither do the director or he would have reshot most scenes), and worse, the films would ends up not addressing anyone in particular (lost viewers looking for a film in their own language…). Marc Caro, the co-director of Delicatessen and City of Lost Children, has had to wait for several years to be able to finance his science-fiction film, Dante 01, mostly because he wanted to film it in French and with a budget. And he cannot be blamed, but in the end the film bombed.
I have always believed that the solution is just to put some sense and reason in the way “European films” are shot and sold. Isn’t it what is saving genre cinema from bankruptcy? (examples are Spain’s The Orphanage and France’s Alexandre Aja’s films, or the films Caro and Jeunet once made). Now if a Chabrol film was shot and sold the way a Tim Burton film is, would it still be a Chabrol film? That’s the question.