What Is a Foreign Movie Now? (1)
One night during the Toronto film festival earlier this fall, I slippedinto a buzzing multiplex theater decked out with all the amenities of 21st-century moviegoing -- stadium seating, molded plastic cup holders, digital surround sound, decent concession-stand cappuccino. I was there, along with a gratifyingly large number of curious and enthusiastic Canadians, not to catch an early glimpse of possible Oscar contenders but to see a new movie from China called "The World," directed by Jia Zhangke. I'd seen Jia's two previous films, "Platform" and "Unknown Pleasures" -- films that have won him a devoted following among critics and festivalgoers.
But his name is unlikely to be widely recognized either in the United States, where his films have received only brief, limited releases, or in his own country, where he has, at least until "The World," worked independently of the official state production system, a decision that has kept his films out of most Chinese cinemas.
Jia is the kind of director who tells small stories with big implications, examining the lives of individuals (usually sullen young women and the sullen young men who tolerate their company) in a way that suggests large, invisible forces pushing them through their passive, melancholy lives. "Platform" (2000), for example, is about a troupe of performers in a provincial Chinese city who start out, just after the Cultural Revolution, as the Peasant Culture Group From Fenyang and evolve, by the end of the 1980's, into something called the All-Star Rock and Breakdance Electronic Band, a mutation that captures, with a deadpan precision at once mocking and tender, China's awkward post-Maoist embrace of Western-style popular culture.
In "The World," which is set in present-day Beijing, that embrace, long since consummated, has taken on the weary familiarity of a long, loveless marriage. The film's title, provocative in its ambition, is at once literal and layered with metaphor. The young lovers, like the consumer goods they covet and flaunt, are products of globalization, and also of China's transformation into a largely urban, fitfully capitalist and uneasily cosmopolitan society. Without lifting his eyes from their modest, hectic daily lives and inchoate aspirations, Jia embeds these elements of experience in a vast cosmos of similar stories. Tao and her sometime boyfriend, Taisheng, the film's ordinary and unheroic central couple, are stubbornly particular and, at the same time, implicitly universal. They are the world.
They are also, more mundanely, the workers of the World, which is the name of a theme park in Beijing whose main attractions are scaled-down replicas of foreign tourist attractions -- the Arc de Triomphe, the Taj Mahal, the twin towers of the World Trade Center. ("Ours are still standing," one character boasts, in a perverse expression of national pride.) Taisheng is a security guard, while Tao is a dancer, shuffling in and out of various garish pseudo-traditional costumes for tacky song-and-dance routines. To an American viewer, the World, with its monorails and loudspeakers, is like a looking-glass version of one of our homegrown theme parks, and like those places it is at once a free-floating, featureless abstraction of what it represents and the peculiar artifact of a particular cultural situation. If "The World" is partly about the loss of a rooted, traditional identity based on kinship and place, it is also about the stubborn persistence of place in the age of telecommunications and transglobal travel. Though Tao spends her days dashing between simulacra of Paris, London and New York, neither she nor anyone she knows has ever ridden on an airplane or visited a foreign land. When she meets Anna, a Russian woman who briefly comes to work at the park, Tao expresses envy for her new friend's freedom to travel, oblivious to the fact that her globe-trotting is part of a grim international traffic in coerced labor. Not that Anna can understand a word Tao says. Since their relationship is one of the few in this bleak landscape that shows genuine warmth and fellow feeling, their mutual incomprehension is another of Jia's double-edged worldly metaphors. We can appreciate each other even -- or perhaps especially -- when neither one of us has the faintest idea what the other is talking about.
That, at any rate, might describe my own response to Jia Zhangke (whom I know only through his movies) -- a mixture of intuitive understanding and obdurate bafflement.
To me, his world, in its various meanings and dimensions, is at once immediately recognizable and emphatically strange. This paradox is part of the structure of human experience, of course -- other people are necessarily both familiar and mysterious to us -- but in its modern incarnation, it is one that film as a medium seems uniquely empowered to illuminate. Because the camera is a surrogate eye, what it captures is immediately comprehensible, even if it is nothing we have seen before. Filmed images do not require translation; we know what we see. Narratives, of course, are another story; even when they seem to be transparent, they come encrusted with local meanings, idioms and references, some of which will inevitably be lost as they move from one audience to another.
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."
In any case, I am most concerned with American audiences, and in particular with the parochialism that results from living in a country with a film industry so powerful and productive, so frank and cheerful in its imperial ambitions, that it threatens to overshadow everything else. It is not just the setting and content of a movie like "The World" that may seem foreign but also its visual strategy and storytelling methods, and above all its unsentimental commitment to the depiction of ordinary life, to a kind of realism that is in some ways more alien to us than the reality it construes. Hollywood studios, as they try to protect their dominant position in the global entertainment market, are ever more heavily invested in fantasy, in conjuring counterfeit worlds rather than engaging the one that exists, and in the technological R &D required to expand the horizons of novelty and sensation. And while we, along with everybody else, often go to the movies to escape from the pressures and difficulties of the actual world, we also sometimes go to discover it.
Whether it takes the form of armchair tourism or of a harrowing, life-altering philosophical quest, such discovery has formed part of the appeal of movies from elsewhere -- a specialized appeal, to be sure, but also a remarkably protean and durable one -- since the beginnings of art-house film culture just after World War II. In the late 1940's, foreign movies began to arrive on our shores unencumbered by the restrictions of the Production Code, promising a frankness and sophistication, especially in sexual matters, far beyond what the studios were allowed.
Even sober works of Italian Neorealism were sold with a nudge and a wink, their print advertisements featuring suggestive line drawings and breathless exclamation points: Shocking! Daring! Uncensored! There was a degree of bait-and-switch in these come-ons, which were partly a way for the independent theater operators who booked the pictures to fill up empty seats, but there was also some inadvertent truth. Moviegoers who ventured to see "The Bicycle Thief" or "La Terra Trema" would encounter shocking glimpses of urban and rural poverty, the daring use of nonprofessional actors and real-world locations and an uncensored critique of European social conditions.
Not that Italian Neorealism was the only outward-looking, far-seeing lens that curious Americans could peer through. And neither were all the vistas bleak and harsh. In any case, the art involved in capturing those images was at least as fascinating, as seductive and as new as the images themselves. Indeed, it was foreign movies that taught Americans to regard film as an art -- and, eventually, to appreciate the art that had been flourishing in American movies all along. It is hardly accidental that we still use a French word -- "auteur" -- to evoke the creative authority a director wields over his work. The film culture that emerged in the shabby art houses and cinema clubs where dubbed and subtitled prints of exotic movies were shown was organized not around the worship of stars, but around the connoisseurship of filmmakers, who became the objects of a sometimes fiercely partisan critical discourse. Were you for Ozu or Kurosawa? Antonioni or Fellini? Could you reconcile a taste for Bergman with an enthusiasm for Godard?
Why did these names have such resonance? What did these auteurs give American movie buffs -- or cinephiles, if you prefer -- that the Hollywood studios, for all their inventiveness and eclecticisim, did not? What, in other words, made the category of "foreign film" something more than a convenient, catch-all phrase? Or, to echo Egoyan and Balfour, what made these films foreign to this audience? I think there are two answers, which suggest the existence of two linked, occasionally antagonistic cinematic impulses, neither of which has quite taken root in the United States.
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