Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [60]
With its 150 films a year, of which perhaps two dozen are exportable, France still has one of the world’s great cinema cultures; indeed, it still controls nearly half of what appears on its own screens, and still makes films that are both parochially French and globally distributed as well as universally acclaimed. Compared with Berlin or Budapest, where Hollywood rules, Paris cinemas still screen a great many French films.7 But major studios are closing and for all the rancorous expletives no one knows how to stop the American tidal wave. A group of European directors wrote an open letter to “Martin” (Scorsese) and “Steven” (Spielberg) imploring them to recognize that the Europeans were “only desperately trying to protect European cinema against its complete annihilation.” If films are not exempted from free trade, they predicted, “there will be no more European film industry by the year 2000.”8 Jack Lang must have seen the writing on the screen, however, because even while he was doing battle in the name of culture against the American celluloid colossus, he was decorating Sylvester Stallone with a Legion of Honor.
Vincent Malle, Louis Malle’s brother and a producer, has also seen the future: surveying the success in France of the juvenile film that turns Beethoven into a pet Saint Bernard, he sighs: “What works in Chattanooga now works in the Sixth Arrondissement of Paris; it’s a little sad.”9 It may be as Charles Grassot, another French producer, says, that “one has to admit that American movie audiences are infantile.”10 But as a potential audience for American pop culture, the rest of the world seems bent on growing backwards into the universal childhood of Hollywood and Vine.11 Infantilism is a state of mind dear to McWorld, for it is defined by “I want, I want, I want” and “Gimme, gimme, gimme,” favorites from the Consumers Book of Nursery Rhymes. And that is not just “a little sad,” it is a lot sad.
Surveying the wreckage of Europe’s once proudly independent cinema, critic David Stratton observed bitterly that the excitement and discovery of the 1960s, when Bergman, Antonioni, Visconti, Truffaut, Godard, and Buñuel were busy at their craft in nations that possessed vibrant indigenous film industries, were gone with the wind.12 He lamented that “although probably just as many people are going to the world’s cinemas today, they’re more likely to be seeing mainstream American films than attending new works by the descendants of Bergman, Godard and the rest.”13 What remains is “the American juggernaut,” which manages to overwhelm not only local film industry but rival competitors from abroad. Thus while in 1972 only 86 or one-third of the 255 foreign films shown in West Germany were American, by 1991, 162 or nearly two-thirds of 262 foreign films were American.14 In Europe today, American films account for about 85 percent of the revenue—about $1.7 billion of the $2 billion in box office receipts.15 Europe tries as best it can: with French leadership, it passed an E.E.C. regulation requiring all national television stations to maintain 50 percent domestic programming (including movies and series). Pay TV and satellite television has paid little attention, however, and while the measure survived the 1993 GATT round it will eventually yield to market forces via satellite or home video or other new technologies. The time is not so far off when there will be one single image—an American image of America, something like Ronald Reagan’s opening shot in his celebrated It’s Morning in America