reading

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Making of a Transnational Chinese-Language Film

The 1990s: Postmodern Horror and Supernatural Realism at the End of the Millennium

Additional resources are available at: www.wiley.com/go/costanzo

Sample Syllabi and Weekly Lesson Schedules
Questions for Discussion
Individual Student Projects: Ideas for further exploration and research
Group Activities: Short, collaborative tasks that focus on key aspects of genre, globalism, and film as a business, art, or technology
Filmographies from the text
Teachers’ Manual and other aids

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Costanzo, William V.
    World cinema through global genres / William V. Costanzo.
        pages cm
    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-1-118-71291-7 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-118-71292-4 (paper) – ISBN 978-1-118-71304-4
1. Motion pictures–Study and teaching. 2. Film genres. I. Title.
    PN1993.7.C69 2014
    791.43071–dc23

Cover image: Hero / Ying Xiong. Beijing New Picture / Elite Group / The Kobal Collection.
Cover design by Simon Levy Associates

For Diana, my cherished wife and angelic muse, whose love and

support are the foundations of this book and of my life

PREFACE

As the art of cinema advances well into its second century, filmmakers have been cutting across national boundaries toward a new internationalism. Fueled by an increasingly global economy, fostered by changes in world politics, facilitated by modern technologies, and shaped by a heightened cross-cultural awareness, the character of movies has become global as never before.

World Cinema through Global Genres addresses an important need by making the complex forces of global filmmaking accessible to students of film. Instead of tracing the long histories of cinema country by country or region by region, it uses engaging, recent films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (China), Monsoon Wedding (India), Ring (Japan), and Motorcycle Diaries (Brazil) as entry points, linking them to comparable American and European films. The book is organized around clusters of films connected by genre and theme. A section on “The Warrior Hero” includes kung-fu movies from Hong Kong, wuxia features from Mainland China, samurai films from Japan, and Hollywood Westerns. A section on “The Wedding Film” looks at films like The Wedding Banquet, Monsoon Wedding, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which dramatize conflicts of cross-cultural relationships in the context of ethnic wedding rituals. Two more sections on Horror Films and Road Movies explore what people find horrifying in other parts of the world and why they take to the road. In this way, readers learn to look for reasons behind the similarities and differences among movies. They come to understand how today’s films are part of a dynamic world phenomenon, drawing on local traditions and foreign influences to meet the needs and desires of an increasingly multicultural, globally conscious audience.

McLuhan’s vision of the global village has never been more compelling than it is today. The world in which our students are coming of age – and which they are helping to create – calls for greater international understanding and cooperation. These qualities are important factors in the new globalism of cinema, and they are strong motivating principles behind this book. By studying the cultural flows and cross-currents shaping our most popular global genres, today’s students can form a deeper appreciation not only of the films and their stories, but also of the people, societies, and beliefs behind these films – people, societies, and beliefs they will be encountering in one form or another throughout their lives.

All of these pressure points and movements have contributed to the world’s expanding storehouse of stories and storytelling styles. By exploring them beyond the familiar borders of local movie screens, students everywhere can enlarge their vision of the world and increase their possibilities for engaging with its rich diversity.

World Cinema through Global Genres provides a wide array of useful tools. Based on the premise that we live in a global culture, it approaches the world’s great stock of movies as gateways to other lives and environments. The book uses case studies, visual organizers, filmographies, selective reading lists, and focused questions to get students actively involved in examining their assumptions about the world. It helps them test those assumptions through close readings of films from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East as well as from Hollywood and familiar English language films. It helps them cross the barriers of subtitles and translation to experience the universal drama in these films while appreciating differences in culture and cinematic style. And it guides them through informed explorations of the social, economic, and political contexts of each movie text, with regular references to theory and scholarship.

For a demonstration of how such questions may be answered, please see the extended analysis of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in “Deep Focus on Chinese Cinemas” in Unit I.

Some Personal Connections

Writing this book has been a journey of connections. To be sure, it has connected me to a wider world of movies than I knew existed. It has also helped me forge new bonds with colleagues and with students while strengthening old ties. But what surprised me most were the personal affinities with each genre that I discovered along the way. Take the road movie, for example.

In my younger days, the open road meant freedom. The old Vanderbilt Parkway on Long Island, once revealed, was my escape route from the dreary landscape of suburbia. My good pal Peter, a fellow inmate at the local high school, was my bicycle companion, my buddy on the asphalt road to high adventure. Along the abandoned parkway, we discovered wooded acreage, tiny refuges of green in the vast wasteland of shopping malls and parking lots, which became our private Camelot. We found a secret northwest passage to the Long Island Sound, where we imagined ourselves on board one of Melville’s whalers or Conrad’s frigates bound for islands far away. A few years later, when my dad was stationed in France, Peter shipped on board an ocean liner bound for Europe – his dad worked for Cunard Lines – and we resumed our bicycling journeys through the countryside of Normandy, the Loire Valley, the southern pasturelands of England. Now, instead of peanut butter sandwiches, our saddle bags were filled with crisp baguettes and bottles of Bordeaux. Here, in the heart of history, real history, the castles and cathedrals were authentic. The lanes and byways that led us from one French or English village to another opened our eyes to a world of vitality and beauty we had only dreamed about before. Both of us were hooked. Forever after, the open road would be our seductive siren, luring us back to the promise of exploration and excitement.

I kept packing my bags to head back across the Atlantic, hitching at first, taking buses or trains when I could afford them. One summer trip took me through Eastern Europe to Russia for a peek behind the mysterious iron curtain. The Russian word for road, doroga, became my new cry of freedom. But so did autostrada, Autobahn, camino, dromos, and many other words besides. Language had become another pathway to adventure and discovery.

This was the sixties, when a whole generation of youth was on the move. In Europe, people my age dressed in tie-dyed clothes were hitching rides to Munich, Florence, Barcelona, and destinations as distant as Afghanistan or India. I was not a hippie. My wardrobe included only two pairs of jeans and two shirts, one of them white. My bags contained a mess kit, a flashlight, and a Boy Scout knife. But most of my gear was books, paperbacks I picked up in the student section of each town. Strangely, I had not read Kerouac or Kesey. If I was part of the great movement of traveling American romantics stretching from Whitman and the Beats to the hippies and psychedelic trippers of the Magic Bus, it was news to me. All I knew is that I was on a personal quest, inventing the itinerary as I went along.

Whatever I was I looking for – escape, evasion, excitement, or identity – being on the road was liberating. The experience of stepping into unfamiliar streets, tasting new foods, trying out another language was like auditioning for a fresh personality. I could be one person in French, another in German, yet another in Italian. By casting off the burden of a suburban education and a Brooklyn accent, I could invent different versions of myself and test-drive each new model. No wonder Sartre’s existential philosophy appealed to me. Every fork in the road was an invitation to choose my very being, moment to moment, lane by lane.

But while escape or self-discovery may have driven me then, what motivates me now? At my age, I know who I am, and I enjoy the place that I call home. What calls me, then, to go on the road again, to travel to China or Africa? And what connects me to the cinematic journeys of films like Easy Rider and The Motorcycle Diaries? These are questions that I asked myself while writing, and I hope that you, dear reader, will pose questions of your own, that you will look for personal connections to each genre, to each film.

We can watch these cinematic fictions and appreciate them as cultural history, the record of a nation or a people on the move. But we can also see something of ourselves in each: who we were, who we want to be, and who we are becoming.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A textbook, not unlike a film, is a collaborative effort. My co-authors include colleagues, students, librarians, the publishing community, supportive institutions, and others who have all made valued contributions to World Cinema through Global Genres.

This book took shape with the help of two important programs that foster scholarship and teaching. I wish to thank the Rockefeller Foundation for a productive month’s residency at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy, where I made momentous progress on the manuscript that has become this book. Much of my ongoing research was facilitated through New York University’s Faculty Resource Network, which gave me access to the extensive resources of the Bobst Library and enabled me to audit a new course every semester for six years. For these invaluable opportunities, I am especially grateful to FRN’s executive director Debra Szybinski, to her gracious assistant Anne Ward, and to the outstanding faculty who specialize in the cinemas of Africa, Brazil, China, India, Japan, Korea, Europe, and elsewhere.

Throughout the process of writing and revising, I have relied on the expertise of distinguished film scholars. I am especially grateful to Dudley Andrew, Diane Carson, Jung-Bong Choi, Manthia Diawara, Bruce Kawin, Moya Luckett, Ranjani Mazumdar, Robert Stam, and Juana Suárez for their professional judgment and collegial good will. Other colleagues, though not film specialists, assisted me with their cultural knowledge and perceptive comments. For these contributions, I am indebted to Robert DiYanni, Zarina Hock, and Evelyn Lu.

For more than 40 years, Westchester Community College has been my academic home. I am much obliged to Dr. Joseph Hankin, WCC’s devoted president, for fostering an environment where excellence in teaching and scholarship can flourish side by side. The library staff at WCC is first rate, and I especially wish to thank Diana Matson, Chris Kern, Una Shih, and Towanda Mathurin for assisting in my many tasks. Thanks, too, to Craig Padawer, chair of WCC’s Film Curriculum and Arts Department, who well understands the intricate dynamics of writing while teaching. Finally, I am extremely grateful to the many film students who taught me so much about movies and about learning over the years. I hope they were able to take as much from my classes as I did from their lively participation.

A work like this would never see the light of day without a team of dedicated publishing professionals. I wish to acknowledge Jeanne Zalesky, who invited me to undertake the project in the first place, and Ziki Dekel, who guided my progress through most of its development with wisdom and consummate skill. It was Jayne Fargnoli, Wiley-Blackwell’s Executive Editor extraordinaire, who best understood my vision and found a way to bring it to fruition. I am deeply grateful to Jayne, to her able assistant Allison Kostka, to Joanna Pyke, an exceptionally gracious and meticulous project manager, and to Julia Kirk, Wiley-Blackwell’s hard-working and congenial Project Editor, for their collective talents, patience, and enthusiasm.

Many film teachers across the country have reviewed portions of this text and helped to shape its current form. For their generous attention and insightful feedback, I acknowledge them most gratefully.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

A unique feature of this text is its organization. In contrast to traditional approaches, which follow the cinematic history of nations or regions, World Cinema through Global Genres arranges films in units, or clusters, each cluster positioned around a central genre with formal and thematic links. This arrangement allows instructors and their students to compare films within a common framework, noting how a genre’s characters, plots, settings, and visual styles reflect the history and culture of their place of origin while addressing fundamental human needs. This also makes it easier to trace the complex webs of intertextuality by which films and filmmakers influence each other.

One of the great challenges of any film survey course is coverage. A common problem with pushing through world cinema one nation or era at a time is that some cinemas are inevitably left out. In the rush to cover more territory, some of the most important objectives may also be short-changed. The cluster-based approach reduces the anxiety of coverage. It works more like a hologram than the linear progression of a scroll. With each cluster, students may acquire a progressively sharper understanding of key concepts. They build a critical vocabulary for analyzing film texts, learn how technology and business practices contribute to film art, see how films represent cultural values and traditions, gain a working knowledge of world history, and investigate significant topics through focused projects and substantive research. Since every cluster addresses these goals, reinforced through repetition and variation, instructors can choose those modules that meet their criteria for interest, diversity, and importance. Finally, this book gives deliberate attention to the role of commercial film industries that are often slighted by art-film oriented texts. It seeks to restore some of the pleasure in watching entertaining films.

World Cinema through Global Genres includes an introduction, four main units or modules, background material on individual films, in-depth explorations of selected regional cinemas, and generous supplementary material.

A substantial Introduction identifies tools and perspectives for studying individual film texts and their broader contexts. It will help you, as a student of film, to understand both how and why movies are studied as an art form, a technology, a business, an index of culture, a social barometer, and a political instrument. This section introduces some of the key terms and concepts (nation, globalism, postcolonialism, diaspora, Orientalism, co-productions, point of view editing, myth of the hero) that you will be encountering throughout the book. It will make it easier to sort through issues like subtitles, dubbing, and global genre study. And it will show you how to read a scene with close attention to film technology and cinematic style.

The four Units cover each genre cluster and are introduced by a core Chapter with a general discussion of its themes and history as well as the cultural and artistic traditions from which it springs. This core chapter is where you’ll learn about the elements that characterize horror movies, for example: why they arise at specific moments in a country’s evolution, how they reflect the particularities of a nation and its film industry (Britain’s gothic monsters, Italy’s giallo aesthetics, Spanish Civil War ghosts, Japan’s avenging yurei spirits, Hong Kong’s hopping vampires) while borrowing elements of style and content across geographical boundaries. Each of the four core chapters integrates relevant issues of theory, technology, history, marketing, and film aesthetics into the narrative.

The Deep Focus section in each unit probes more deeply into one national or regional film tradition that is particularly strong in the selected genre. Each of these sections centers on a body of films (Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Latin American) that tends to be underrepresented in many texts on world cinema. Here is where you’ll learn about the local history, geography, people, cultural life, and economic forces that shape the films from this part of the world.

The Close-ups in each unit (four per unit) present individual films that exemplify important traditions and trends explored more generally in the unit’s core chapter. These short takes will give you background information about the film’s production, financing, reception, cast, director, and crew. Use them as opportunities to focus closely on engaging cinematic texts, considering the various ways that individual movies develop along national or linguistic lines, grow locally around well-defined communities, or cross boundaries. You will be encouraged to view these films not as isolated texts from different places but as participants in a dynamic world phenomenon. Notice how they conform to, expand, or challenge the world’s vast repertoire of visual storytelling. Although these films have been carefully selected for their quality, diversity, and accessibility, they represent only a few among many choices. Your instructor may decide to focus on other examples that reflect more directly the scope and objectives of your course.

Throughout the text, you will find frame enlargements, questions for discussion and research, filmographies (film lists), suggested readings, maps, and timelines to help you understand key concepts and guide your further study. The book concludes with a full glossary and index. A quick glance at the illustrations will give you some idea of the kinds of films and issues explored within these pages.

Each photograph is a frame enlargement taken from an actual film. Some of these photos are paired for comparison. A shot from The Magnificent Seven is displayed alongside a comparable scene from Seven Samurai, highlighting similarities and differences between American Westerns and Japanese samurai films. Shots from the 1950 and 1991 version of Father of the Bride are shown together, inviting a comparison of wedding movies then and now. Some shots are grouped for a particular purpose. For example, a series of frames from Citizen Kane demonstrates how careful film analysis can reveal the artistry behind good camera work and editing. A sequence from Potemkin illustrates the principles of Soviet montage. A “Gallery of Movie Vampires” shows how a single movie monster can cross borders, spreading horror or delight across the globe.

The genre maps in each core chapter illustrate the point that some genres are truly transnational, showing when and where selected genre films appear around the world. The timelines in the Deep Focus sections offer side by side comparisons of a region’s film production with historical events. Use these maps and timelines as visual aids to help you navigate your way through the geography and history of global genre films. The filmographies at the end of each unit’s core chapter can also assist with global positioning. These lists are arranged chronologically within each genre for easy reference to a film’s date, country of origin, original title, and director. A quick look down one column or another will help you make connections across eras, regions, and filmmakers. Remember, though, that dates, titles, and genre labels can present problems for anyone studying world cinema, particularly in an age of global co-productions. A movie may be released at different times in different regions. It may be known by several titles. It may have been financed and produced by an assortment of companies and individuals, all with different nationalities. And with so many hybrid movies being released, it is trickier than ever to classify films by genre. How would you classify Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films, for example, when they deliberately mix elements of Westerns, samurai movies, kung fu, comedy, and horror? As you become more knowledgeable about genres, you will be encouraged to question the way certain films are linked to certain genres in the filmographies, in the media, and throughout this book.

For the sake of consistency, I have chosen to use the original release dates specified in the online International Movie Database (imdb.com), which has become a standard reference point for students, scholars, and film professionals alike. I have also relied on this source for authoritative titles. In most cases, I give the English language title first, with the original language title and release date in parentheses. However, some films are better known to English-speaking audiences by their Spanish or Italian titles. For movies like Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros (2000) and Federico Fellini’s La Strada (The Road, 1954), I give the original title first.

Any field of study has its own specialized vocabulary, and film study is no exception. Some terms are strictly technical, like crane shot or aspect ratio. Other terms, like globalism and postcolonialism, have taken on particular meanings and nuances among film scholars and historians. You’ll find many of these terms explained in the Introduction, where their first appearance is marked in boldface type. Elsewhere in the book, new terms are generally introduced and explained in context. If you come across an unfamiliar term in your reading, check the Glossary or Index at the end of the book.

If some topic draws your special interest, you may want to explore it in more depth. Each section of World Cinema through Global Genres ends with a list for Further Reading. Whether you are skeptical about some questionable claim, curious about a new idea, or eager for more information, these readings will lead you to some of the best books and articles available. I hope what I have put together here will help to speed you on your journey.

INTRODUCTION

To study film is to engage with some of the world’s greatest stories. Movies plunge us into the midst of different lives, transport us to other times and places, and explore far reaches of the human heart. What do movies tell us about others and ourselves: as nations, as members of communities, as individuals? How do they reflect our cultural identity, our stage and status in life, our place in a changing world?

Whatever view you have of movies, a good map is indispensable. World Cinema through Global Genres provides a starter atlas of world cinema on which to place the films you already know and the films you will encounter. The purpose of this introduction is to offer some coordinates and tools to help you get your bearings. Film scholars have charted various courses through the terrain of global cinema, studying movies as a business, an art, and a social institution; tracing the politics behind production and the history of audience response; subjecting individual films to close analysis and taking a wide-angle view of movies as the myth-makers of our age.

To understand a movie calls for close attention to three main factors: its production (or authorship), its content, form, and cinematic style (the film text), and its reception (audience), all of which are intricately related to each other and to issues of history and culture. To understand the history of cinema itself, how movies have evolved over time since their first appearance in the 1880s, it helps to keep in mind that cinema is an industry as well as an art form, an invention of technology, and a social institution. These four strands – economic, aesthetic, technological, and societal – are woven through the tapestry of film history. While it isn’t necessary to be an economist, art critic, mechanic, or sociologist to follow the whole story, it will be useful to know something about each strand.

The Business of Cinema

Movies are big business and have been for a long time. Thomas Edison understood this back in 1893 when he patented the first Kinetoscope machine, a box that let viewers watch short films by peering through a peep hole and cranking a handle. Edison’s idea was to maximize sales by charging each customer a nickel a movie. But as Louis and Auguste Lumière soon discovered, it was more profitable to project films on a large screen for a large audience. The Lumière brothers opened their first movie theatre in Paris in 1895. Their invention, the Cinématographe, was both a camera and a projector, setting worldwide standards for motion pictures as a projected medium. In 1902, the Lumières sold their patents to the French Pathé company, which improved on the technology, set up production studios, and opened a chain of theatres stretching to Russia, Australia, and Japan. Undaunted by the success of his French rivals, Edison produced hundreds of short films in his New Jersey studio, the “Black Maria,” and even built a new camera for outdoor shooting. In those early days, the film business was a vigorous, disorderly affair, with practitioners in Europe and the United States borrowing and stealing freely from each other. In 1907, Edison helped to organize the chaos by founding the Motion Picture Patents Company. The MPPC, also known as the Edison Trust, united the major American film companies and controlled the three main links of the film chain: production (making movies), distribution (arranging for their circulation), and exhibition (showing them in theatres). This three-tiered system, called vertical integration, ensured a smooth, cost-effective flow of cinematic goods from producer to consumer. For a select number of producers, the MPPC transformed the nature of commercial cinema, setting precedents that would influence the industry for decades. Although Edison may not have invented movies, he left his mark as film’s first major businessman.

The Edison Trust itself did not survive World War I. When a trust is abused, when it makes insiders rich by stifling all competition, it can be busted in court as an illegal monopoly, just as the MPPC was in 1915. This left the field open to independent companies. These Independents brought fresh ideas and talent, revitalizing the movie business. Many innovators were Jewish immigrants from Europe or children of these immigrants who saw the young industry as a chance to make their mark in the New World. They left the crowded streets of New York City and headed westward, where they set up operations under the sunny skies of Southern California. While Europe was preoccupied with war, the new Americans created Hollywood, what Neal Gabler calls “an empire of their own.”¹ One by one, between 1912 and 1928, the major studios – Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros., Twentieth-Century Fox, and RKO – established their power, followed by the three “minors”: Columbia Pictures, Universal, and United Artists. Part of their success was due to the studio system, an efficient method of mass producing motion pictures modeled on Henry Ford’s automobile factories. All the elements required to make movies were concentrated on the studio lot. There were pools of writers, carpenters, and set designers; warehouses filled with reusable props and costumes; special departments for handling budgets, editing, and sound recording; elaborate indoor and outdoor sets. This high degree of specialization and standardization was the equivalent of Ford’s assembly line, enabling the studios to construct movies piece by piece. Part of the “genius of the system,” as one film historian called it,² was Hollywood’s emphasis on stars and genres. Since any new film is in a sense an unknown product, unlike the relatively predictable ingredients of, say, a bar of soap or a box of cereal, studio strategists sought to minimize consumer risk by offering familiar ingredients. The star system ensured success at the box office by cashing in on the popularity of individual actors. The image of each star performer was carefully crafted and promoted by the studio that owned the actor’s contract. The genre system promised well-known story lines. Viewers could expect a certain kind of film experience from a new Western, musical, or romance. As the studios grew, they became involved in distribution and exhibition, reaping the economic benefits of vertical integration once enjoyed by the Edison Trust.

The system worked for decades. During the golden age of Hollywood, from 1929 to 1948, nearly everyone in the country from six to 60 years of age – roughly 80 to 90 million Americans – attended neighborhood theatres or the grand movie palaces of that era every week.³ At the same time, Hollywood aggressively courted foreign markets. After World War I, it competed with the most developed European film industries in France, Italy, Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia. During World War II, with Europe once again embroiled in military conflict, the American film industry looked southward, leveraging the Good Neighbor policy to sell US movies throughout Latin America. But after that war, Hollywood’s grip began to fail. New anti-trust legislation attacked the studio structure. Television was replacing motion pictures as the preferred medium of entertainment. Americans were also spending more time on the highways and taking part in more outdoor activities like gardening and fishing. The Hollywood empire fought back with a succession of new ways to watch films, including drive-in theatres, Cinerama, CinemaScope, and 3-D. But rising movie costs and falling box office revenues took their toll. By 1950, attendance had dropped to 60 million per week, slipping to 46 million by 1953 and plummeting below 20 million by the late 1960s.⁴

As we’ll see throughout this book, the film industry reinvented itself through various means in the following decades. In the United States, during the 1960s and 1970s, a fresh crop of independent-minded auteurs – directors who saw themselves as the creative authors of their films – appealed to a younger audience with different values from their parents, planting the seeds of a Hollywood renaissance. Elsewhere in the world, where government funding and legislation favored the growth of national cinemas, new waves rose up in France and Germany, Brazil and Czechoslovakia, Iran and Korea, cresting and spreading to other shores. Even regions without much state support, like India, Japan, and Hong Kong, managed to sustain vigorous commercial industries. More recently, as the term globalization has entered our everyday vocabulary, business practices have assumed a more obviously global character. If Hollywood studios of the 1930s and 1940s were run like Henry Ford’s assembly-line factories, Hollywood these days functions more like the modern auto industry, outsourcing part of the production process internationally (shooting in Budapest, editing in Britain) and sometimes offshoring the entire process to another country. Today’s Hollywood has become a system of integrated packaging, more fit for making deals than making movies.

Making movies, especially big movies with high production values, is expensive. The cost of an average Hollywood feature has risen steadily, from $11 million in the early 1980s to $50 million in the 1990s, to $64 million in 2005. And this figure represents only the negative cost – the expenses leading up to the first negative film print from which multiple copies will be made. For many productions, comparable sums are needed for advertising and distribution. This means that a studio must make three times its production cost just to break even.⁵ Although non-Hollywood films are typically cheaper to make, the budget for a French or Japanese art film may run to $10 or $15 million. With expenses like these, financing often is a filmmaker’s greatest challenge.

One important funding strategy in the global economy has been co-productions. Co-productions combine the resources of two or more film companies, often from different countries, which increases the opportunities for funding, talent, and audience appeal. Sometimes the partnership is chiefly monetary. Sylvain Chomet’s animated masterpiece, The Triplets of Belleville (Les Triplettes de Belleville, 2003), was jointly financed by French, Belgian, British, and Canadian investors, but Chomet remained in complete creative control of the film. By the mid-1990s, France was regularly releasing more co-productions than strictly national productions.⁶ Increasingly, more movies resemble The Russia House (1990). Made with European co-financing and produced by MGM-Pathé in cooperation with Star Partners III, The Russia House was based on a British novel by John Le Carré, scripted by Czech-born writer Tom Stoppard, and directed by Fred Schepisi, an Australian. Its stellar cast included actors from England (James Fox, James Mahoney), the United States (Michelle Pfeiffer, Roy Scheider), Scotland (Sean Connery), and Germany (Klaus Maria Brandauer). Its theatrical, video, and DVD distributors spanned the United States, Germany, Argentina, and Brazil. Since 1995, such cross-national affiliations have been assisted by the World Trade Organization, which has reduced trade barriers, strengthened copyright laws, and generally facilitated the flow of capital.

New trends in distribution have shifted the flow of the films themselves. Historically, the world’s largest film exporter has been the United States. Before 1914, France and Italy were the big distributors. After World War I, US studios boosted their exports to regions beyond the sphere of combat – South America, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand – gaining a competitive advantage that has rarely lost its edge. After World War II, just when anti-trust laws and the rise of television were weakening the big studios and American audiences were declining, Europe fought Hollywood’s hegemony with government subsidies, quota systems, and protectionist legislation. In the 1980s, the European Economic Community (EEC) encouraged European co-productions, enabling director, writer, cast, and crew to come from any member country. Yet, few countries were able to outgross American imports. The US industry’s economic leverage, combined with the wide appeal of the Hollywood style, continue to keep American movies on the world’s screens. The size of Hollywood’s domestic market is a key factor. Although Americans have never returned to the theatres in such large numbers as they did between 1930 and 1945, their movie-going habits have supported the enormous budgets that keep Hollywood’s production values (if not aesthetic values) high. Statistics released by the Motion Picture Association of America for 2011 gave the total box office revenue for US films as $32.6 billion. Less than a third, $10.2 billion, was collected in the United States and Canada, which means that most of the revenue derived from foreign sales. And these figures do not include income earned from DVDs, cable, streaming video, or other means of distribution.

Movie festivals have long been a prominent feature of global film economics. The festivals at Cannes, Venice, or Berlin offer a revolving showcase of the latest movies, especially art films that have limited audiences at home and small budgets for publicity. In 1932, Venice became the first city to host an exhibition of new films from other countries. When Venice became politically contentious (Grand Illusion, Renoir’s great anti-war film, was passed over for the top prize, then called the Mussolini Cup), an alternative venue opened at Cannes in 1939. Since then the number of host cities has grown, slowly at first but quite rapidly in recent years. By 2012, filmfestivals.com was listing more than 4000 festivals around the world. The number of festival films is growing too. Cannes alone shows some 1,500 films each year. The festivals provide a moveable shopping mall for distributors and convenient meeting grounds for making international deals. Festivals still offer alternatives to censorship at home. When Iranian and Chinese films were banned by local governments during the 1990s, directors like Jafar Panahi and Zhang Yimou brought or sent them to the festivals, where they received international acclaim. Iranian filmmakers won more than 100 awards in 1997 and 1998 alone, providing them with political leverage at home as well as funds to make more films. This approach, however, may have different consequences in different situations. The Chinese government approved Zhang’s later epic films and let him direct the opening ceremony at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. In contrast, Panahi was arrested in 2010, charged with producing anti-Iranian propaganda, banned from making movies for 20 years, and sentenced to six years in prison.

Yet another aspect of global economics is the runaway production, an American movie filmed on foreign soil. Originally intended to circumvent domestic labor costs and taxes, such productions also serve aesthetic purposes. A location in Bulgaria or in the Czech Republic may look more like a nineteenth-century American town than the town itself today, or a mountain in New Zealand may provide the perfect setting for a Tolkien fantasy. Often, however, filmmakers choose another country because it’s cheaper. My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2003), though set in Chicago, was shot in Toronto and produced no revenue for the state of Illinois.

Perhaps the most striking development in the film industry worldwide has been the rise of global conglomerates. The big studios of old Hollywood, once the apex of a vertically integrated industry, became themselves pieces of larger media conglomerates. Of the major studios, only MGM remained independent by 2010, owned by a group of private investors after difficult bankruptcy proceedings. Columbia became part of Sony, Fox was part of News Corporation, Paramount belonged to Viacom, Universal was owned by Vivendi Universal, and Warner Bros. was a division of Time Warner. By 2012, Disney owned motion picture studios, television networks, radio stations, cable channels, publishers, retail stores, toy makers, resorts, and theme parks all over the world. The big fish keep eating little fish, a practice that continues up the economic food chain in an ever widening ocean.

Nobody knows the precise number of movies produced per year. According to one estimate, over 100 countries contribute to an average annual total of some 4,000 films, with Asia providing about half, Europe a third, and the combined nations of Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East accounting for about 10%.⁷ Surprisingly, the United States produces only 6% of the world’s total output in this calculation. Such statistics say relatively little, though, about costs and revenues. They tell us even less about the artistic merits of the films or their cultural influence. For these important perspectives, we need to look more closely at the global history of film technology, aesthetics, and reception.

The Technology of Cinema

Without technology there can be no movies. Think of all the equipment and machinery required to tell a story cinematically. There are lights and cameras on the set, devices for recording sound, machines to help with editing, computers to add digital imagery, and mechanical projectors or electronic services to bring the final movie to your screen, whether you watch it in a multiplex theatre or in the palm of your hand.

While film technology keeps changing with the times, the basic process of making a movie still can be described in four stages. The development stage starts with an idea and ends with a proposal. This is when the film concept gets worked out in enough detail to convince someone to fund it. A writer may sketch out the main idea in a brief synopsis or story outline, which may be expanded later into a treatment, a fuller version of the narrative that may contain scenes, character development, and some dialogue, much like a short story. Further along, a scenario or screenplay fleshes out the action, adding dialogue and perhaps some directions for the camera. The most complete version before production is the shooting script, which typically provides a shot-by-shot blueprint of the film. Any of these versions may be modified by other writers, who may or may not be credited in the tricky business of collaborative authorship. In addition to script development, a number of key decisions are made before a proposal gets the green light. In large studios, specialists estimate expenses, investigate the market, and consider legal risks. With so many considerations and barriers to funding, relatively few ideas make it past development to the pre-production stage. Pre-production takes the scripted concept from approval to production, getting everything in place before the actual shooting starts. Actors are cast in the leading roles. Locations are scouted. For large productions, there may be screen tests of the actors, props to make, elaborate sets to design and construct. Eventually, the producer, who bears responsibility for the final film, agrees on a budget and a shooting schedule, which sets the dates, locations, and personnel for each shot in the script.

For many, the most exciting stage of any movie is production. The set is lighted, microphones are ready, the actors are poised for action, and the camera is ready to roll. Everyone is waiting for the director’s signal to begin shooting. For the director is in charge. He or she directs the actors and supervises the technicians who manage all operation on the set. An assistant directorscript supervisorcontinuitycinematographerDPfollow focusproduction sound mixergafferbest boygripsgoferssetupshottakesmarksclapboarddailiesrushes