Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [59]
The Hungarian film industry, traditionally Eastern Europe’s most fecund market and still active even in the financially pinched post-Communist era, has discovered that Hungarian audiences will not support local filmmakers. Dozens of domestic films are made but only a handful are shown in a few small “art” houses in Budapest; the main screens in the large houses are entirely devoted to American product; hence, in Hungary the top eight grossing films of 1991 (as in the preceding several years) were all American (see Appendix B). American filmmakers conveniently conclude that the market has spoken; competitors fear they have been silenced by money and market muscle and the way in which markets and money privilege universal (read: bad) taste.
Even countries with aggressively protectionist cultural policies like Indonesia or France have been unable to stem the American tide. For both political and cultural reasons, Indonesia has tried to protect its cinema. The film industry has been a pawn in wider trade negotiations, however, and was recently sold down the river (or out into the Pacific Ocean) by the government in Jakarta in order to assure continued textile exports to America.4
The French have been driven to distraction by American inroads into French cinema audiences, their ire boiling over in 1991 when American films not only led domestic fare in the mass cinema sweepstakes, but—led by the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink—also managed to completely dominate the Cannes Film Festival, adding the high-culture critics’ sublimest prizes to their spoils. In desperation, the French film industry successfully campaigned to have films placed in the same category as fruit and vegetables as a vital national industry in the hope that, as with agriculture, it might be exempted from the free-trade provisions being forced on it both by the Uruguay round of GATT talks and by the Common Market. Former Culture Minister Jack Lang proclaimed all-out “war” against Hollyworld’s cultural depredations and rules were established in the early nineties requiring that 60 percent of all video programming on French television be European and 40 percent of music played on French radio and television be of French origin. Why the protectionist panic? Almost into the eighties, American films had managed to secure a purchase of no more than a third of French cinema revenues and were actually lionized by auteur critics who still revered the black tones of earlier gangster melodramas and the vaudeville antics of comedians like Jerry Lewis.
Today although the French still make 150 films a year (versus about 450 for Hollywood) almost 60 percent of revenues go to America and there is little tolerance left. America now controls well over 80 percent of the European market, while Europe has less than 2 percent of the American market.5 On its opening weekend, the American blockbuster Jurassic Park took over nearly a quarter of France’s eighteen hundred movie screens in larger towns and cities, provoking an outcry from defenders of local culture such as Lang’s successor, Culture Minister Jacques Toubon.6 Lang had prohibited non—French-language films from competing for the French Oscars (the “Césars”) even though this had meant that many French directors who made English-speaking films were shut out (including Jean-Jacques Annaud with his film of Duras’s The Lover and Louis Malle, with Damage). He declared war on American trade representatives and again got