MOVIES : Subtitles by the Sea : A critical overview of AFIFEST 1992, that annual window on the world of film, with 208 entries this year from 40 countries

Perhaps there’s a poetic logic to the new location of AFIFEST--or as it’s more officiously known, the American Film Institute International Film Festival. When AFIFEST starts Friday--with a two-week program of 208 features, shorts and seminars from 40 countries--it will be based only a couple of blocks from the Pacific Ocean, in Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex Theatres in Santa Monica.

Depending on your angle of vision, this could mean the fest is being shoved into the sea, or, simply, that the world and its borders have moved in closer. Walk out of the 4-Plex, and in several minutes, you’ll be looking over the beach to the ocean itself. That’s one kind of window on the world; the movies are another.

What do this year’s AFIFEST films show us? The sad, blue-gray streets of Theo Angelopoulos’ Greek-Turkish border town in “The Suspended Stride of the Stork.” The cloistered upper-class Portugal of Manoel de Oliveira. The street faces, high and low, of Mike Leigh’s class-bound London. The swiftly moving, bittersweet Paris of Francois Truffaut.

And many other countries as well, from Japan (Yoji Yamada’s “My Sons”) to Chile (Ricardo Larrain’s “The Frontier”) to what used to be Yugoslavia (Zoran Masirevic’s “The Border”); from India (Satyajit Ray’s last films) to Armenia and back to America itself--to Henry Jaglom’s “Venice, Venice,” which was partially shot just down the beach from Santa Monica. (See list of highlights, Page 30.)

Prejudices die hard. It’s been said that “no one goes to subtitled films anymore but ‘60s burnouts.” (Who went before the ‘60s?) Yet it should be obvious that audiences are greatly different from what they were five years ago, that home video, which could be a boon for foreign films, has rendered a lot of ‘80s strategies obsolete. Similarly, it’s a year of transition for AFIFEST. The Monica 4-Plex is only a temporary home; the fest’s major corporate sponsor, Interface, finished its five-year obligation. Money is tighter; in-person director appearances fewer.

Overall, AFIFEST 1992 isn’t the equal of, say, AFIFEST 1990, with its splendid Angelopoulos, Krzysztof Kieslowski and Eastern European retrospectives. But there are fine retrospectives this year too, notably the one devoted to Portugal’s octogenarian De Oliveira--who appeared, as an actor, in the first Portuguese sound film, 1933’s “The Song of Lisbon,” and hit his stride, as an international prize winner, in the 1970s. Also rewarding are retrospectives devoted to Leigh, Truffaut, Swedish documentarian Stefan Jarl and Armenian cinema. There are some sublime individual films in this year’s AFIFEST, many interesting ones--and some clunkers.

There’s one weak spot. Walk into any of AFIFEST 1992’s foreign selections, and you’re likely to be pleased, or at least interested. Walk into one of the American independent films--the fiction features, rather than the documentaries--and you have a better-than-even chance of finding a dud. Last year, we could still pick low-budget gems like “Steal America” or “A Little Stiff.” This year, the good independents are either from known quantities (Jaglom) or relatively slick and glib.

Audiences, we’re told, won’t stand for subtitles--particularly young audiences, including the college-age moviegoers who used to be the mainstays of the foreign film market. In that atmosphere, it may be tempting to see the sheer volume of AFIFEST--its greatest strength--as a flaw. Yet what better remedy could exist for the current “foreign film” crises of attendance and distribution than to premiere, as AFIFEST does, a hundred new foreign-language films every year, for local audiences?

Our perspectives on foreign cinema are almost always skewed. Today, we look back on the ‘60s as a golden age for film imports. Yet, when they were first shown, at Richard Roud’s early New York Film Festivals, the classics of Godard, Fassbinder and Bertolucci were often attacked, sometimes viciously. There are great new international filmmakers today--Kieslowski, Angelopoulos, Taiwan’s Hou Hsaio-hsien, China’s Zhang Yimou, Japan’s Juzo Itami, Yugoslavia’s Emir Kusturica, Spain’s Pedro Almodovar, Denmark’s Bille August, Czechoslovakia’s Juraj Jakubisko and Italy’s Pupi Avati, to name a few. But to some extent, they’re neglected.

So the “crisis” in foreign films, today, may not be of artistry or production--but of distribution, perception, education and, unfortunately, criticism.

For many in the current audience, international cinema doesn’t translate into a multitude of cultures and peoples. Instead, they see foreign-language films from a foreshortened view: like the famous satiric Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover, with Manhattan squashing out the rest of the country, and Los Angeles a spot on its edge.

For these skewed viewers, American pictures are probably another continent, with the rest of international cinema a tiny island, perhaps called Foreign Film Land, located off the Atlantic Coast: a place that specializes in subtitled alienation and ennui.

In this view, America’s movies blot out the world. The typical year-end movie “10 best” list includes only a single foreign-language film. This isn’t an attitude peculiar to America: overseas critics often boost their own movies correspondingly. But by embracing that stance, American critics reinforce distributors chary of subtitled films: the one kind of movie that, more than any other, needs the support of reviewers.

During the ‘80s, the heyday of “Rambo,” “Top Gun,” Schwarzenegger and the suburban sex comedies, our pop culture often became bombastically insular, chauvinistic, egoistic and self-promoting. It lost much of its melting-pot character, which was the strength of American culture, popular or otherwise.

So isn’t it strained to argue that, at the same time that purely local trends and attitudes predisposed audiences against foreign culture, foreign-language films themselves suddenly disintegrated in quality? Isn’t that a bit like arguing that, in a period of rising prejudice against blacks, Jews, Hispanics or any other group, it is the victims of prejudice that are to blame?

Similarly, it is a cliche among some moviegoing Angelenos to rate AFIFEST automatically lower than the New York equivalent, with its sellout Lincoln Center crowds; to see, comparatively, L.A.’s fest as cheaper, too crowded, less selective, far too . . . open. Yet there’s a virtue to openness, even to too much.

Every year, another cornucopia of good to excellent films spills out from AFIFEST: movies that, as a group, can help provide an antidote to prejudice and ignorance about other movies, cultures and people. We’d be better off without those prejudices--just as we’d be better off if we stopped seeing ourselves as people living on a Saul Steinberg cover, instead of people in a city on the ocean’s edge.