Rather than discourse on tonight’s specific film, Francois Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows), we’d like to reflect, for a minute, on foreign film in general and its marginalized place in American movie culture. Even designating a film as “foreign” makes us a trifle uncomfortable, like when we find an eyeball floating in our chicken-noodle soup and the waiter reminds us that in some cultures such things are considered a delicacy. As long as we resort to terminology like “foreign,” those films so designated will always remain alien, outside of our experience, and the sort of thing one only finds at Landmark theaters. Yet foreign films offer something intensely valuable in the film-going experience: difference.
Cultures can become inoculated by their own narratives, and in American film, where bottom-line economics plays such a big role in how stories get told, more often than not financial success is found in the reuse of formulae. What’s that movie where a cop, who’s kinda sexist or racist or xenophobic or something, and his partner are sitting in a restaurant and the partner is musing about how close he is to retirement and then a bad guy busts in and kills the partner and the cop vows revenge but his vengeance is hampered because he’s soon saddled with a woman or a foreigner or an alien for a new partner? Oh, yeah, it’s like twenty movies. And don’t even get us started on sequels.
Foreign films, because they come from cultures with different formulae, tell stories with different textures. They tell stories that draw on different myths. They tell stories that rely on different imagery. They tell stories that reflect different values. They tell stories that don’t conform to our fetishistic expectation that all films should be roughly two hours long (unless it has lots and lots of special effects).
When we become inured to our own formulae, films lose their power except as spectacle, which may account for the rise is graphic horror films, special effects-laden but story-poor super-hero flicks, and the blunt, sketch-driven, irony-heavy comedy of the likes of Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler. We can become jaded by our own art. It’s not healthy. We need our palette cleansed from time to time.
Watching only Hollywood-produced and American independent films is like only eating pizza for dinner. Dining out once in a while at an Indian restaurant (Planet Bollywood!) or ordering out for Chinese or sampling the yak kothe and momo at Everest on Grand will make you appreciate your pizza more. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life. You like a variety of foods, right? Why not film?
We won’t generalize about the cultural traits of foreign films from specific countries, not even to ask if all French romantic comedies are required to have love triangles. Suffice it to say that these foreign traits reenergize our expectations for all the movies we see. To experience difference is to be transported some distance, no matter how small, from the familiar, and to look back at it is to see it from a new perspective.
We believe that American film-goers like this re-awakening. Look at the success of Slumdog Millionaire, from one point of view a traditional rags-to-riches story, but from another a completely fresh take on how one tells the rags-to-riches story. What may happen next is that the unfamiliar traits we associate with this film will find themselves imitated by and evolving in American film. Thus, foreign films of note can make American film fresh.
This happens all the time. Not too long ago The Matrix (1999) used martial arts style action, drawing on the influences of hundreds of Hong Kong films from the 1980s and ‘90s. A year later Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) became a huge success in America and now it’s nearly impossible to see an action film that doesn’t have some martial influenced fighting in it.
Tonight we see Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, a film that was itself in 1959 ground-breaking film-making and which influenced an entire generation of film-makers. We don’t need to get all historical to appreciate it though. All we need is to enjoy its difference, and cleanse our palette for our weekend excursion to The Watchmen.
R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser
