In
B. Ruby Rich's keynote address on the
State of Cinema at the 2004 San Francisco International Film Festival, she writes: "In an environment in which marketing drives film exhibition, consider the notion that film festivals have become a global circuit that competes with Hollywood's marketing juggernaut -- an alternate worldwide circuit that allows films outside the U.S. to find recognition. And Audiences. Awards. Buzz. Marketability. Fame and renown. The film festival circuit is the cultural World Cup, unpredictable in its stars and scores, exciting, with a climax of national triumph and personal victory...
Consider the film festival as a political intervention into the market monopoly, a thorn in the side of [former MPAA head] Jack Valenti, a counter-offensive of imagination and difference. And of language, above all language. Cinematic language, yes, but also the language spoken by those billions of the people in the world who do not speak English. 'Everyone in the world is basically the same,' my partner Mary's mother loves to say, she who hardly ever travels. And Mary, who has always traveled, always answers, 'No mother, they are all different.'"
"I've recently written a chapter for a new anthology,
Subtitles, edited by filmmaker Atom Egoyan and Canadian scholar Ian Balfour," writes Rich, "on the subject of
the foreignness of foreign films. I have been fascinated by a U.S. phenomenon of the past two decades: the crafting of film trailers that make it appear that films from Italy, say, or Japan, actually have English as their dialogue language. Not dubbed, but not subtitled either. What on earth do American audiences think? For that essay, I've studied the marketing habits of the '80s and '90s, interviewed some of the principals, and drawn some conclusions of my own about the connection between the monolingual habits of my country and its foreign-policy disasters."
In
Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film (Alphabet City Media book with The MIT Press, 544 pages, $35), an indispensable and provocative addition to the small canon of books dealing with cinema as a global cultural artifact, Egoyan and Balfour take B. Ruby Rich's position even further: "
Every film is a foreign film," they write, "foreign to some audience somewhere -- and not simply in terms of language, The essays, interviews, and artworks in this collection [by Russell Banks, Patricia Rozema, Claire Denis, Jorge Luis Borges, Raymond Bellour, Hamid Nanficy, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Slavoj Zizek, Issac Julien, B. Ruby Rich, Jack Lewis and John Greyson, among many others] take the figure of the subtitle as a point of departure in exploring the idea and varieties of foreignness in film."
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posted by Steve Gallagher @ 11/08/2004 03:47:00 PM
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