Lean Times for Foreign Language Films : A window on a world less ordinary than our own is in danger of closing; it’s up to filmgoers to keep it open

Where did you learn about life? When did you first have a glimpse that politics could be a literal life-and-death matter, and that sex could have a sheen of sophistication? For many of us, the answers to those questions are “Z,” “Jules and Jim” and a dozen other titles of provocative movies that came to us from over there.

For a lucky or daring few young Americans in the Eisenhower and Kennedy and Johnson years, the world was discovered first-hand. With knapsacks on their backs and their thumbs outstretched, and with eyes and minds open, they invaded Paris and Venice and Athens and Stockholm and allowed those cultures to soak in. For the rest of us, the window on a world less ordinary--or certainly less predictable--than our own has always been foreign films.

Intimate details of life in other countries were the riches in the background, in case your attention ever wandered from Jean Moreau or Anna Magnani or Jean-Paul Belmondo. Sexuality wasn’t the only plus to come from “The Lovers,” in spite of those edifying goings-on in the moonlight. One could also get a glimpse of the houses and the philosophy of France’s very rich and if, by American standards, those blank-faced stone country houses seemed so plain, so un-ostentatious, perhaps that was just the point.

Architecture or attitudes could be absorbed almost subliminally. The French upper-middle class was on lavish display in “Murmur of the Heart.” For Americans, it was a cinch to identify with “Murmur’s” Italian emigre mother with her sprinkle of freckles and her free-spirited behavior when the opposition was that entrenched French right wing in those days of Dien Bien Phu.

We’ve gotten information from every frame of even the most unpretentious import. “The Grand Highway” provided the color of geraniums that a French petit-bourgeois would put on her kitchen table. “Adalen ‘31” gave a feeling for the spare, scrubbed beauty of a modest Swedish villager’s house, not all that removed from the Russian summer country places in “Oblomov.” We could learn niceties of behavior that might save face: after countless public bath scenes in Japanese movies, it’s handy to have learned that one soaps first, then soaks in the tub.

There’s a gray cloud over all this free experience today. If you’ve wondered what Philippe Noiret has been up to--all these months before “Cinema Paradiso”--or hungered for the modest French policier or the satisfying small Italian comedy, you’ll realize that slowly, these pictures have been squeezed out of our movie-going menu.

We can still find the heavily promoted major interest foreign films: “Jean de Florette,” “Hotel Terminus,” “Au Revoir Les Enfants.” But the solid second-level staples, memorable but not stellar, are another matter. Moreover, there are great films from the world cinema that have either never made it here, or played so briefly that they might not have been here at all. Their disappearance feels like an affront. Haven’t these films always been part of our lives? Won’t they continue to be?

Well, that’s not the certainty it once was. Realize it or not, we’ve been sliding into the lean years of the foreign language film. At the year-end meeting of the National Society of Film Critics, the most heated discussion centered around the continuing decline of foreign-language film distribution in this country.

Robert Laemmle, whose family-owned theaters were the nurturing place of foreign cinema in Los Angeles even before the days of “Open City,” calls 1989 “the worst year ever for specialized film exhibition.” This, despite the performance of the major successes: all the Pedro Almodovar films; “Little Vera”; “The Story of Women”; and the strong showing of “Camille Claudel,” which will undoubtedly get a further boost from its pair of Academy Award nominations.

The reasons for this slump are complex and interlocking. Ever since the 1950s, foreign films were a way for Americans to measure the almost touching depths of our own innocence. Foreign films, we knew, had “adult themes,” from which one could learn an inordinate amount about life--in private and without the need of a passport.

We could find in them information that our own screens, reserved for films with behavioral seals of approval from the Production Code, couldn’t give--a view of politics and sex, poetry and philosophy older and deeper than our own. And so we flocked to “The Seventh Seal,” and “The Conformist,” to “Bitter Rice” and “The 400 Blows,” to “The Battle of Algiers” and “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday,” to “Knife in the Water” and “Hiroshima, Mon Amour.”

Also, in those halcyon times, foreign film-going was simply part of the life of a college campus. Friday or Saturday nights meant a foreign movie and hours of debate in a coffee house afterwards. More than one sophomore affected a world-weariness that was more Antonioni’s than his own. And on virtually every campus you could find a film society, whose hard seats and 16mm prints nevertheless created passionately opinionated young moviegoers.

This was a smart hard core. They knew the works of Godard and Truffaut and Rossellini and De Sica as well as they knew the movies of Howard Hawks and John Ford, and they could, and frequently would, debate the merits or the deficiencies of their idols until the sun came up.

Well, the world has turned. In the mid-’60s, the Production Code buckled and with an explosion from within, nudity and language and controversial content were no longer cinematic taboos in Hollywood. Suddenly we had films like “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Midnight Cowboy,” “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “The Graduate” and “Easy Rider” throwing a new light on our past and our present. Such film makers as Arthur Penn and Hal Ashby, Mike Nichols and Robert Altman appeared, to distract Americans from their fixation on European cinema.

At first, in spite of their gritty subjects, these films had a sleek, American-movie look, those smooth surfaces that our film makers had, after all, worked for decades to perfect. Only John Cassavetes swam against that expected perfection and you can read the outrage with which his films were greeted in the mainstream reviews of the time.

Now, with the energy and the direction of the American Independent movement, our screen has stretched again. Browse from among “My Dinner With Andre,” “Blue Velvet,” “Matewan,” “Dim Sum,” “River’s Edge,” “sex, lies and videotape,” “Stranger Than Paradise,” “Drugstore Cowboy,” and “Do the Right Thing” and you’ll see the themes or the visual styles that were once considered “foreign.”

Yet even at their most arresting, these films could only stand in the shadow of “Fanny and Alexander,” “Ran,” “The Makioka Sisters,” “Night of the Shooting Stars” or “Wings of Desire.”

To darken the picture, there are now far fewer companies left in the specialized film field. Many of the pioneering plungers and risk-takers, distributors and exhibitors whose fervor to bring the world’s films to American audiences was almost messianic, are dying out; among some of the few that are left there’s an alarming tendency to apply marketing surveys and bottom-line conservatism to a field where those statistics least apply.

Then there’s the matter of broad-based audiences. Schools and colleges haven’t demanded intellectual curiosity from their students for decades and so generations of kids have gotten through high school and into college quite without that spark. Among today’s television-fed, ultra-conservative college students, the ideas that created film societies are as dead as disco, and you couldn’t get them to a subtitled film. Gary Meyer, whose Landmark Theaters are in the heart of college towns nationwide, reports that it’s hard enough to lure the baby boomers, who grumble but at least still go; college and high school students absolutely balk at subtitled films.

So we have a vital age group with virtually no general knowledge about the non-mainstream movie past, with television as their only common cultural reference point, and the richness of foreign films completely lost to them. And we have just tottered out of the Reagan years, a high-water mark in the celebration of insularity and smugness. It’s not surprising to hear from a lecturer at a UCLA graduate-level film class that not one of his 28 students had ever heard of “Children of Paradise,” much less seen it.

What’s left is a broad older audience, baby boomers and their elders, apparently growing every year if one believes statistics, who are unafraid of subtitles and who think of foreign movies as old, welcome friends. However, the marketplace harbors one last sticking point before this audience gets what it has grown accustomed to.

Video companies, commercial television and pay-TV--those lucrative and sometimes lifesaving ancillary markets--are markedly disinterested in subtitled foreign films. It makes their distribution even more of a roll of the dice than in the past. According to Julian Schlossberg, president of the New York-based Castle Hill Productions which distributes both domestic and foreign-made films, “An American movie can have a limited or even a tepid release in theaters and still do well from sales to video, to cable, or to TV. But if a foreign film doesn’t do extremely well theatrically, it has virtually no life afterwards.”

Taken together, these are a few of the reasons why, within the past two years, we’ve seen less of those fine “small” films that dot film festival catalogues and provide modest runs at the box office. To have fewer films like “Angi Vera,” “Hanussen” or “Sundays in the Country” seems an unconscionable loss. Additionally, there is a backlog of world-class films, most of them festival winners abroad, that have never had theatrical release, among them: Theo Angelopoulos’ “Landscape in the Mist,” Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s “A City of Sadness” or Krzysztof Kieslowski’s towering “Decalogue,” his ten separate films on the Ten Commandments. The irony is that this is the most dynamic cultural climate we have ever lived through. What a sorry time to lose the most revealing way we have to understand the politics and the culture of the world beyond our own.

This has been our uncheerful and immediate past. The slightly brighter side is that we may, at last, have a blooming foreign film spring. From what it has been possible to see at the Toronto Film Festival and at Park City, the major imports scheduled are stronger than any time in the last 18 months. Most of them are by recognized directors: Denys Arcand’s “Jesus of Montreal,” (just chosen as an Academy Award nominee); Bertrand Blier’s, “Too Beautiful for You”; Coline Serreau’s “Mama, There’s a Man in My Bed”; Almodovar’s latest, “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down”; Bertrand Tavernier’s “Life and Nothing But.” Jane Campion’s groundbreaking “Sweetie” has just opened, and before long we’ll have the pure delight of veteran actor/director Maurizio Nichetti’s “The Icicle Thief.”

This slate looks hopeful. AFI/Fest also arrives in mid-April, and from director Ken Wlaschin’s advance word, it appears to be one of the strongest programs set for this city in many seasons. (The festival will include the Kieslowski “Decalogue.”)

But the straitened period we’ve just been through leaves one to make some cautionary observations. Most importantly, just because they’ve become integral to our lives in the past, it isn’t possible to take foreign films for granted. Those of us in Los Angeles hardly need to be reminded of that, after the disappearance of KFAC and the Z Channel.

We’ve just seen ordinary people work miracles abroad; this may be the era when the supportive foreign film audience has to turn activist, on a slightly less life-and-death scale. In the hair-trigger economics of exhibition and distribution, audiences may have to work faster too.

It may not be possible to wait for the third or fourth week before moseying out to a foreign film that sounds intriguing. And to wait for it to come to video is to risk seeing a dubbed version--or nothing. The leisurely pursuit of foreign films may have become a meaner, tougher game; more than ever, it’s going to be up to the fans to turn out or see the franchise disappear.