MoC Forthcoming, Wishlist, and Random Speculation

[knives]

Hence unreliable though the '70s and '80s don't really matter for the canon in today. I think you brought up something good earlier when you mentioned the years having to get older on those S&Ss. The canon of today is going to have to have some of canon of yesterday and if you impose a limit like with S&S than no matter what the canon will appear to be leaning older in raw terms, but the '92 list fir example had Raging Bull at number two and it was only twelve at that point.

[Titus]

I'd say the foreign language films today that have that sort of ubiquitous presence (Amelie, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Life Is Beautiful, Run Lola Run, The Lives of Others, Pan's Labyrinth, Oldboy, The Secret in Their Eyes, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, etc.) are occasionally of some merit but generally not that highly regarded by people championing more obscure films for canonization.

FWIW though, Diving Bell is getting a whole episode of the Simpsons devoted to it!

I think the figures more comparable to the likes of Bergman or Godard today would be people like Haneke, Almodovar, Trier, Wong, etc. You may not see parodies of them on SNL or in Woody Allen movies or something, but it's pretty much a given that every new film of their's will receive a great deal of coverage and attention, and will be locks for year-end top 10 lists, prestigious festival prizes, and Oscar consideration.

It's also worth bearing in mind that the sheer size of film history is much greater now than it was when people like Bergman and Antonioni were such giants. When L'avventura placed on the S&S list in '62, narrative cinema of any real sophistication was only around 50 years old (if we're being generous). It's now been nearly 50 years since that list. Is it really that unusual that it would be more difficult for a film or filmmaker to penetrate the canon now?

And would Satantango have been any less obscure if it had been released in 1964, rather than 1994?

[stevewhamola]

The word 'canon' has been mentioned so many times that I feel like printing this thread on a Canon printer then shooting the pages out of a cannon.

[Michael Kerpan]

The film cannon has exploded in all directions, both chronologically and geographically. All the King's horses and all the King's men -- will never reassemble a Grand Unified Canon again.

[John Edmond]

Half true. When the modern canon is fractured, the grand unified canon wins by default.

[knives]

Yeah, I think films are closing in on the situation that music, literature, ect. As to the big old canon (which I think still gets a few films added each decade) in general I think of it the same way I do Criterion, it's a nice 101 for films. I know that I found Kubrick, Bergman, ect easier to get into when I was starting out than somebody like Brakhage or whoever else you want to put in there. You want to look deeper, well there's canon for the deeper things.

[Zot!]

Also a lot of the European arthouse stuff of years past was marketed as exotica or erotica. They were also liberally edited, retitled and horribly dubbed. And while most might remember The Seventh Seal, or Breathless, because of their iconic images, many of these famous directors other works are still difficult to find, and certainly considered very obscure.

[colinr0380]

Also, I don't know where knives' ideas about Yang's reception came from. I don't think any one of his films enjoyed a commercial release in an English-speaking territory until Yi-Yi. A couple of them (I'm thinking of A Confucian Confusion and Mahjong) barely even made it out onto the festival circuit. A Brighter Summer Day, famously, has never been released in any form in the USA or Great Britain (though I believe it had a television screening in the latter). He's practically the poster child for a neglected contemporary master.

Yes, the screen caps I posted in the Edward Yang filmmaker's thread came from the single screening of the shorter version of A Brighter Summer Day on the BBC in early 1996 at the tail end of the BBC100 'Century of Cinema' season. Channel 4 also screened The Terrorisers as well in late 1996 (which I am still kicking myself over missing). Plus Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Puppetmaster screened on Channel 4 in 1998 I think (certainly the last of his films to have been shown on any UK television channel since this time).

This is one of the things that makes me worry about UK television - there used to be an (albeit late night on Sunday evenings) 'World Cinema' strand throughout the year on Channel 4 throughout the 90s screening all sorts from Sankofa and El Dirigible to Battle of Algiers and Bab El-Oued City, or an entire season of Pasolini (perhaps understandably minus Salo and Pigsty! But including The Hawks and the Sparrows) and A Song For Beko - many of which films I don't think had previously received wide official VHS release in the country. These days BBC4 does a World Cinema season for Sunday evenings for part of the year but rarely strays beyond films already commercially released on DVD - for example Mid-August Lunch or next Sunday's premiere of Il Divo - it is of course nice to see these films getting shown to a wider audience but it is still not really an adventurous programming schedule in that sense.

The one area where Channel 4 still excells is in the Indian film seasons, regularly scheduled with introductions, but I still miss the extremely wide ranging and varied film selections which used to appear. This is what I mean by getting films seen being the most important thing, because until they are seen or available in some fashion it seems wrong to complain that an audience is not aware of them (while I'm not big supporter of that trend in the US to go for DVD-R 'Archive' releases, which just seems suspicious of a cost-cutting measure more than anything, I guess it is at least preferable to a wide selection of films simply not being available at all).

[perkizitore]

It's actually not safe to assume, since Nick has specifically said twice that they aren't releasing it (materials not up to snuff).

#-o Forgot about that, i hope they release it some point on DVD though...

[colinr0380]

FWIW though, Diving Bell is getting a whole episode of the Simpsons devoted to it!

I recently had my own experience of this film having a wider reputation beyond the arthouse. A month or two ago I went on a Mental Capacity Act course (I work in a hospital, only as admin, but the patient care courses are mandatory for everyone) and the course lecturer brought up Diving Bell and the Butterfly when talking of the way that it is important to involve a patient as much as possible in making their own decisions (including giving a person the ability to make the wrong decision from our outside perspective), rather than making decisions for them because it might be quicker or easier (from an outside perspective) to do so.

(I was going to bring up Alejandro Amenabar's The Sea Inside as another example of a film in that vein, but it probably wasn't the correct cinephile crowd to do so in, so I kept quiet instead!)

[MichaelB]

These are interesting and important questions, but I'm afraid I'm one of those demented optimists who thinks that the 'rejection' of a lot of great subtitled / arthouse cinema by audiences is more a problem of the international distribution network and the media that supports it than a problem of the films themselves. The decline of serious criticism is one factor here, but so too is the widespread co-option of all media by the Hollywood publicity machine, which stipulates that for a certain internationally synchronised period, everybody is supposed to care about the Green Lantern movie. Non-Hollywood cinema is muscled out of multiplexes by the studios, and alternative venues collapse with alarming regularity; marginal films get further marginalised.

Sorry to come late to this discussion, which I somehow managed to miss until today, but this is absolutely bang on. The tastes of the public are overwhelmingly shaped by the tastes of a very small number of distributors, and in most cases there's a very strong inverse correlation between willingness to take risks and size of operating budget - and the lower that budget, the less influence you have in a fiercely competitive marketplace.

I'm not in the habit of writing letters of complaint to newspapers, but I did so in 1993 or thereabouts to the editor of the Guardian about his frankly terrifying decision to employ the wilfully ignorant and aggressively philistine Toby Young as the paper's chief film critic.

This wasn't remotely a matter of personal distaste for his work: my problem with Young's promotion to a role that he was patently not qualified to hold was that it upset a very delicate balance between small independent film distributors and sympathetic broadsheet newspapers, chiefly the Guardian and Independent. A good review from them could mean the difference between breaking even and a thumping loss, so by hiring a reviewer who stated from the outset his intention to aggressively champion mainstream entertainment, the paper was potentially doing incalculable damage to a sector already in serious decline (1992-4 was perhaps the most disastrous period for the independent film sector in my adult lifetime - everyone bangs on about the Scala closing because of A Clockwork Orange, but in fact that cinema would have closed more or less when it did even if its programming had been legally impeccable).

Thankfully, Young didn't last long: I've no idea whether my letter had any effect, but the fact that he was replaced by the infinitely more knowledgeable and serious-minded Jonathan Romney spoke volumes.

But personally, I don't see that a film like Certified Copy is any less user-friendly than any number of supposedly 'middlebrow' Europuddings, even if it does have a lot more to think about under the surface, just as I don't see why the people who used to enthuse about L'Avventura or Last Year at Marienbad couldn't be just as intrigued by What Time Is It There? or Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting.

I totally agree: it's all a matter of good distribution and intelligent marketing (the latter including the participation of knowledgeable and accessible critics). In fact, in many ways a better comparison might be between Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting and The Draughtsman's Contract - the latter was as close to a blockbuster as arthouse films get, yet it's pretty much inconceivable that a fan of the latter, or of Greenaway in general, wouldn't be able to see where Raul Ruiz was coming from.

Sure, there are the deliberately confrontational and aesthetically challenging 'tough films' - which have always been around (not even the Golden Age of Arthouse could make a hit out of Gertrud) - but there are plenty of great films that are perfectly accessible to moderately adventurous audiences. But those audiences have probably never heard of them, and they're getting out of the habit of seeking out interesting, challenging films.

And distributors are getting out of the habit of supplying them. It's a vicious circle that's very hard to break.

Of course, part of the problem is that people like me who spent the 80s and 90s going to at least one independent cinema several times a week have cut back their cinemagoing to once a month (if that), and are getting everything via DVD, Blu-ray and downloads. I actually have far better access to an infinitely greater range of titles now than I did a quarter of a century ago, but I'm also very conscious of the fact that my cinephilia was nurtured through media that largely no longer exist - namely, repertory cinemas and much more adventurous programming on mainstream television (especially Channel 4 in its early days).

And I have to say that my conception of the canon and knives' seem to be completely incompatible. For my money, you don't get to enter it after one well-reviewed film and a smattering of festival screenings. If it's a canon that's only acknowledged by a miniscule community of scattered cinephiles, it's not really a canon at all.

Again, I completely agree. The 1962 poll result that voted L'Avventura the second greatest film of all time when it was still almost wet from the lab is hugely anomalous in terms of the history of the S&S polls as a whole, and in general there seems to be a tendency to wait at least a decade to see if a film's reputation holds up. I suspect I'll be asked to contribute to next year's poll, and I'd be very surprised if I considered anything made in the 21st century - and gobsmacked if it was made in the last few years.

For me, a film like Satantango, which has only ever enjoyed a handful of screenings in English-speaking territories, is way too obscure to be considered canonical. Before it came out on DVD, how many people had even seen the film in the US or UK? A thousand? And if you're being extraordinarily charitable you might be able to add another thousand viewers as a consequence of the DVD releases.

I'd be astounded if the number was any more than that with regard to the UK. As far as I'm aware, the film had between two and three complete screenings in Britain between 1994 and the emergence of the DVD more than fifteen years later. So even if all of them sold out (wildly unlikely, I'd have thought), and everyone was watching the film for the first time, I reckon that's mid triple figures at most. Which is vanishingly minuscule compared to the audiences that the 1960s big hitters could attract - and indeed more recent auteurs with crossover appeal like Krzysztof Kieslowski and Wong Kar-wai. I suspect even Michael Haneke is more "popular" than Béla Tarr by several orders of magnitude.

Pasolini, on the other hand, was an arthouse star in the 60s and 70s, or near as dammit. Almost all of his features were in commercial distribution in America and Britain, and he had at least one hugely influential arthouse blockbuster under his belt (The Decameron).

And not just "in commercial distribution" - he was picked up by United Artists, who also handled other big 1960s/70s auteurs. Similarly, Warner Bros handled such titles as Day for Night and Death in Venice in the UK - I can't imagine them picking up the equivalents now (at least not through their main distribution arm).

Pasolini is a good example of a filmmaker who slipped off the international radar to a large extent after his death, however (partly because there were no more films, partly because the existing films became harder to see, and partly because he was so sui generis that he didn't have a particularly widespread influence with subsequent generations of Italian filmmakers, and even if he did, Italian cinema itself receded from view to a large extent in the 80s and 90s), which probably accounts for why you'd only heard of his most notorious film - the one which retained the most critical currency because of its extremity.

Distributors are horribly prone to fashion - the decline of interest in Italian cinema was paralleled by the rise of Spanish cinema (spearheaded by the Almodóvar juggernaut), to the extent that by the early 1990s we were getting entertaining but ho-hum Spanish fare like The Fencing Master while the work of outstanding younger directors like Nanni Moretti was largely ignored (I think the gap between his debut and his first film to get a UK release was something like fifteen years). And then Danish film and Iranian film became fashionable in the late 1990s, and more recently we've had the so-called Romanian new wave - which has produced several very interesting films and a couple of outstanding, but I don't think the likes of, say, Boogie or The Happiest Girl in the World would have been picked up ten years ago: there's nothing wrong with them, but their nationality almost certainly was a significant reason for them getting distribution now.

[knives]

I agree very much with your first part, but as to the second part about Tarr and Pasolini, the bigger question is does theatrical screenings matter as much. Home viewing I think has mostly replaced that and it doesn't seem right to judge a modern film by an outdated metric. Just because something today has had few theatrical screenings does not make it less popular than something that had more theatrical screenings back in the time when that was the only way to see films (if I remember correctly Pasolini was dead by the time VHS had any sort of prominence anywhere).

[MichaelB]

I agree very much with your first part, but as to the second part about Tarr and Pasolini, the bigger question is does theatrical screenings matter as much. Home viewing I think has mostly replaced that and it doesn't seem right to judge a modern film by an outdated metric. Just because something today has had few theatrical screenings does not make it less popular than something that had more theatrical screenings back in the time when that was the only way to see films.

But it does unavoidably make its reception more diffuse - and that's true of titles that were originally created for home viewing.

By way of example, Ken Loach undoubtedly has a far greater international profile now than he had in the mid-1960s, but I'd be amazed if anything he's signed in the last 35 years was even a fraction as popular as Cathy Come Home, which was watched by 12 million people in 1966 in a single night, and consequently dominated public debate for weeks afterwards.

It's also become so firmly embedded in the public consciousness that references to it continue to this day - in fact, in the past six weeks alone it's inspired two separate high-profile national newspaper articles in recent weeks - and articles about politics, not art. It's pretty much unimaginable that a 2011 equivalent could have a similarly seismic cultural impact - the media has become much more fragmented. In Britain, an audience of 1.2 million would now be considered a pretty solid hit for something like Cathy Come Home, though it's hard to imagine a new production having anything like the same impact.

The media as a whole has become far more fragmented, and while in many respects that's a good thing, it does mean that these shared cultural experiences are inescapably becoming rarer - aside from the big blockbusters driven by gargantuan marketing budgets. My mum saw Bergman, Wajda, Fellini and Cacoyannis films in the late 1950s/early 1960s, and it's hard to imagine anyone less of a film buff - but they showed at her local cinema, and there was sufficient buzz about them to persuade her to give them a go (I mention Cacoyannis as he's a good example of someone who used to be hugely popular but has comprehensively fallen out of fashion). Conversely, my wife has to actually make an effort to see their equivalents - but because she's simply not interested in film as an art form, and the buzz isn't loud enough any more to reach someone like her, that means that she usually doesn't bother.

[knives]

I don't know what you mean by more diffuse, but for the rest, well that's become a fact of life and why we need to change the metric for what's considered popular or canon. The old way of deciding can't work today for just the reasons you outlined.

[MichaelB]

I don't know what you mean by more diffuse

I mean that not only are audiences much, much smaller, but they generally don't watch things at the same time any more. I'm old enough to remember when catching a film in its first fortnight really mattered, because there was the very real possibility that that might be your only chance to see it on the big screen (back in the days when that mattered too) - and if you wanted to have a decent chat about it, that was another good reason for catching it when it was hot.

[knives]

Gotcha. Absolutely agree on that too. The Internet's made going by your own speed a lot easier amongst other things that hit home your point all of which I think makes concrete my point that we have to consider things differently when measuring popularity. Stuff like theatrical screenings don't really matter anymore (though as your Loach example proves it started to lose it's weight a long time ago).

[colinr0380]

For me, a film like Satantango, which has only ever enjoyed a handful of screenings in English-speaking territories, is way too obscure to be considered canonical. Before it came out on DVD, how many people had even seen the film in the US or UK? A thousand? And if you're being extraordinarily charitable you might be able to add another thousand viewers as a consequence of the DVD releases.

I'd be astounded if the number was any more than that with regard to the UK. As far as I'm aware, the film had between two and three complete screenings in Britain between 1994 and the emergence of the DVD more than fifteen years later. So even if all of them sold out (wildly unlikely, I'd have thought), and everyone was watching the film for the first time, I reckon that's mid triple figures at most. Which is vanishingly minuscule compared to the audiences that the 1960s big hitters could attract - and indeed more recent auteurs with crossover appeal like Krzysztof Kieslowski and Wong Kar-wai. I suspect even Michael Haneke is more "popular" than Béla Tarr by several orders of magnitude.

I suppose you could currently consider Out 1 the new champion in this category of 'massively long film which due to only a few screenings of the full length version around the world has likely only been seen by audiences numbering in the low to mid hundreds', though I of course have no idea how you could go about weighing the respective "populaire"-ity (to steal from the Gorin box set thread!) of Rivette and Tarr.

Pasolini is a good example of a filmmaker who slipped off the international radar to a large extent after his death, however (partly because there were no more films, partly because the existing films became harder to see, and partly because he was so sui generis that he didn't have a particularly widespread influence with subsequent generations of Italian filmmakers, and even if he did, Italian cinema itself receded from view to a large extent in the 80s and 90s), which probably accounts for why you'd only heard of his most notorious film - the one which retained the most critical currency because of its extremity.

Distributors are horribly prone to fashion - the decline of interest in Italian cinema was paralleled by the rise of Spanish cinema (spearheaded by the Almodóvar juggernaut), to the extent that by the early 1990s we were getting entertaining but ho-hum Spanish fare like The Fencing Master while the work of outstanding younger directors like Nanni Moretti was largely ignored (I think the gap between his debut and his first film to get a UK release was something like fifteen years). And then Danish film and Iranian film became fashionable in the late 1990s, and more recently we've had the so-called Romanian new wave - which has produced several very interesting films and a couple of outstanding, but I don't think the likes of, say, Boogie or The Happiest Girl in the World would have been picked up ten years ago: there's nothing wrong with them, but their nationality almost certainly was a significant reason for them getting distribution now.

I do wonder about the effect that distributors flitting about has on our understanding of filmmakers in the sense that, unless they have a huge success straight out of the gate, we may never see the first couple of films from a particular filmmaker's career that led up to the 'breakthrough' UK or US distributed hit simply because of the traction that is needed to get an international distributor's attention (for example, since I mentioned Il Divo a few posts back, it took a long time for Paolo Sorrentino's first feature length film One Man Up to get a UK release on DVD, and even then only in a boxset with the later and more celebrated works), and then when attention wanes a filmmaker's later films get overlooked as well. All of this can leave a somewhat bizarre puzzle to decipher for someone who may be interested in where a film fits into a larger career - even more so if the 'celebrated' film turns out to be one of a filmmaker's least interesting works!

And speaking as someone still waiting for Bruno Dumont's later films to get any kind of release, it can also be frustrating when a distributor's attention wanders to another eye-catching bauble (sorry I went a little Mark Cousins for a moment with the use of that term!) and you are left waving your hands and clicking your fingers in front of them to try to draw them back to the situation at hand! Which can I suppose raise ire from people at films that do get distributed that might not be of the same standard (or aimed at the same kind of cinemagoer) as those that were overlooked, since I suppose we don't often have to (or I suppose should have to, though it is an interesting subject) consider how a film fits into a certain philosophy of the times, or *shudder* business plan.

Sure, there are the deliberately confrontational and aesthetically challenging 'tough films' - which have always been around (not even the Golden Age of Arthouse could make a hit out of Gertrud) - but there are plenty of great films that are perfectly accessible to moderately adventurous audiences. But those audiences have probably never heard of them, and they're getting out of the habit of seeking out interesting, challenging films.

And distributors are getting out of the habit of supplying them. It's a vicious circle that's very hard to break.

Of course, part of the problem is that people like me who spent the 80s and 90s going to at least one independent cinema several times a week have cut back their cinemagoing to once a month (if that), and are getting everything via DVD, Blu-ray and downloads. I actually have far better access to an infinitely greater range of titles now than I did a quarter of a century ago, but I'm also very conscious of the fact that my cinephilia was nurtured through media that largely no longer exist - namely, repertory cinemas and much more adventurous programming on mainstream television (especially Channel 4 in its early days).

Perhaps the best UK cinema example in the last couple of weeks would be Tyrannosaur, which according to the Guardian podcast was pulled after only a couple of disappointing days of takings. It was also mentioned in this week's Radio 4 Film Programme podcast in which the City Screen distributor acknowledged that it was a great film but that the subject matter and a combination of factors (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy still going strong and the 'target audience' choosing to see that and Midnight In Paris instead, along with Tyrannosaur containing 'difficult and unenjoyable' subject matter) that weekend led to its fall off. Mark Kermode was still making it his pick of the week on his film show on the BBC News channel, but sadly it looks as if that film, which by all accounts has some challenging material to do with domestic violence, is not going to do the numbers that would make it into a big cinema success (to somewhat concur with MichaelB's point about cinema attendances, I'm waiting for the Blu-ray or, perhaps more likely, DVD release of the film).

[MichaelB]

I suppose you could currently consider Out 1 the new champion in this category of 'massively long film which due to only a few screenings of the full length version around the world has likely only been seen by audiences numbering in the low to mid hundreds', though I of course have no idea how you could go about weighing the respective "populaire"-ity (to steal from the Gorin box set thread!) of Rivette and Tarr.

Or Syberberg. If you make a habit of making films that are undistributable in the normal sense (because four hours is pretty much the upper limit that a theatrical distributor will take on for a conventional commercial run - any longer and you can't sensibly schedule evening shows without either requiring cinemas to pay overtime or audiences to leave work early), you're effectively confirming that you're not interested in "popularity" in the accepted sense. But plenty of artists do indeed prefer a small number of dedicated acolytes to a broader but less engaged fanbase.

I do wonder about the effect that distributors flitting about has on our understanding of filmmakers in the sense that, unless they have a huge success straight out of the gate, we may never see the first couple of films from a particular filmmaker's career that led up to the 'breakthrough' UK or US distributed hit simply because of the traction that is needed to get an international distributor's attention (for example, since I mentioned Il Divo a few posts back, it took a long time for Paolo Sorrentino's first feature length film One Man Up to get a UK release on DVD, and even then only in a boxset with the later and more celebrated works), and then when attention wanes a filmmaker's later films get overlooked as well. All of this can leave a somewhat bizarre puzzle to decipher for someone who may be interested in where a film fits into a larger career - even more so if the 'celebrated' film turns out to be one of a filmmaker's least interesting works!

The impact of decent distribution on a filmmaker's profile can't be underestimated - it's truly colossal. Sometimes, if a filmmaker has a really huge crossover hit at the mid-point of their career, their back catalogue will be mined for similarly marketable gems, and in the case of Almodóvar this really did involve all his professional features getting a proper if belated release. I nearly mentioned Kieslowski as a similar example, but in fact the British actually discovered him comparatively swiftly, with Camera Buff getting a UK release back in 1981 - though it's certainly true that 1990s rep revivals were far better attended than the original 1980s screenings.

And speaking as someone still waiting for Bruno Dumont's later films to get any kind of release, it can also be frustrating when a distributor's attention wanders to another eye-catching bauble (sorry I went a little Mark Cousins for a moment with the use of that term!) and you are left waving your hands and clicking your fingers in front of them to try to draw them back to the situation at hand! Which can I suppose raise ire from people at films that do get distributed that might not be of the same standard (or aimed at the same kind of cinemagoer) as those that were overlooked, since I suppose we don't often have to (or I suppose should have to, though it is an interesting subject) consider how a film fits into a certain philosophy of the times, or *shudder* business plan.

You may well be tempted to shudder at the notion of films needing a business plan, but every single release will inevitably have something along those lines attached - unless the distributor wants to struggle from day one and fold completely after only a few months. And that applies just as much to distributors who appear to be adventurous - Second Run is clearly driven by love rather than profit, but they can only stay operational by being absolutely ruthless at controlling costs to the nearest penny.

And yes, flavours of the month can rapidly lose their lustre. I was reminded of this vividly when I was commissioned to write about the Taviani Brothers' Allonsanfàn, as they're a very good example. In fact, their filmography breaks down into an almost perfect three-act structure.

Unreleased: all five features from A Man for the Burning (1962) to Saint Michael Had a Rooster (1971);
Belatedly released: Allonsanfàn (1974), which opened in 1978 in the wake of Padre padrone's success;
Released more or less within a year of premiere: almost everything from the Palme d'Or-winning Padre padrone (1977) to Fiorile (1993) - the one exception was Il prato (1979), which went straight to TV after a gap of several years (but was at least shown to UK audiences);
Unreleased: all five features from Elective Affinities (1996) onwards.

And yet in the 1980s, they were genuine arthouse stars - in fact, during this period they had a better track record than Fellini at actually getting their films into British cinemas. But I think the last bona fide hit was Kaos (1984), with the subsequent three films all performing comparatively poorly - and after Fiorile (whose UK release I was involved with, so I remember the disappointment) distributors obviously decided that enough was enough - and I'm pretty sure that Good Morning Babylon, Night Sun and Fiorile had different distributors, which speaks volumes in itself.

And I can see their point - and also why they decided that the first five features weren't worth disinterring. The two I've seen have been terrific (Saint Michael Had a Rooster is a minor masterpiece), but not only are they extremely political in a very parochial Italian way, but films like Subversives (1967) are also very much of their time: fascinating if you're interested in 1960s left-wing Italian politics, but it honestly needs footnotes - or, in my case, the Wikipedia entry on Palmiero Togliatti that I kept open on my laptop while viewing. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to find that someone had uploaded fansubs online - so it was worth importing the Italian DVD, an option that wouldn't have been open to me in the 1980s.

[stevewhamola]

Can a mod move this conversation elsewhere? There's barely been a mention of MoC in the last three pages.

[GaryC]

It was thirty years ago this year that I first started regularly watching foreign-language films on British TV, mainly BBC2's then Film International slot, around 9pm on a Saturday night, starting with The Lacemaker (a film which isn't on DVD in the UK). That relatively early showing time is significant - late enough to be after the watershed but not so late as to be a real issue with staying up to watch without falling asleep. (We didn't have a VCR in 1981.) But I do remember watching a non-anglophone film each week, not all of which had had UK cinema releases. Most of them were then-recent, such as the Hungarian film Angi Vera, the Finnish Flame Top, the Hungarian/Finnish Duty Free Marriage, the Filipino Bona, Kustarica's Do You Remember Dolly Bell? and Pialat's Passe ton bac d'abord, many of which I haven't seen since (and couldn't tell you much about thirty years later, to be honest)...plus some older films such as Tarkovsky's Mirror (shown twice, both times with a Gavin Millar introduction and some explanatory notes in Radio Times) and even a - gasp! - 60s black and white film, namely Le trou.

Channel 4, to this new-found fan of foreign cinema, was a goldmine when it started. I even saw that showing of the Tavianis' Il prato that Michael refers to.

I do wonder if my latterday equivalent could have had the same start. Foreign films on BBC2 and Channel 4 these days are almost always shown past midnight, though okay we do have recording devices now...and DVDs of course.

As Michael says, countries as well as directors go out of fashion. I have a big interest in Australian cinema, which started by watching the Australian seasons BBC2 showed in the late 70s and early 80s. I've had to buy DVDs blind from Australia to sustain this interest, due to the difficulty and in some cases impossibility of seeing some of this stuff in the UK.

[TMDaines]

I do wonder if my latterday equivalent could have had the same start. Foreign films on BBC2 and Channel 4 these days are almost always shown past midnight, though okay we do have recording devices now...and DVDs of course.

How often does BBC Four show foreign stuff now? I don't watch TV at all hardly with being at university and out of the country a lot of the time now but don't they (or didn't they) regularly show foreign cinema and/or imported European TV dramas? It's just a pity there's so little outlets for arthouse fare on British TV.

It's kinda sad that a lot of the programming BBC 2 was famous for has now drifted over to BBC Four.

[colinr0380]

They have just started their Sunday night World Cinema seasons after the summer break (this Sunday it is Katalin Varga!), and the second series of The Killing is starting to be heavily advertised as starting on BBC4 next month (there was an interview with Sofie Gråbøl on this week's Culture Show), but I do miss the lesser known international cinema strands or the screening of the occasional classics or seasons of films that used to occur regularly.

[knives]

They don't have DVR in England?

[TMDaines]

They don't have DVR in England?

Have you followed the discussion? How does DVR help non-mainstream cinema get to a wider audience than DVD or anything else does? People used to discover this world of non-Hollywood fare as it used to regularly be broadcast on BBC 2 and Channel 4 at peak times. Now it's pushed to the graveyard slots or to channels with a far, far smaller audience. DVRs don't really help newcomers stumble upon something new.

[knives]

I was speaking to Colin's problem alone and not the wider breach of the conversation, but now that you bring it up, yes I do think DVR can help newcomers. Back in the day if somebody read something in the teevee guide or whatever that sounded interesting they have to wait up for it and set aside everything else or else tape it. Now if you read a description that sounds amusing you can just DVR it and watch it at your own convenience. I'd argue in fact that it's easier now to watch oddities and obscurities than ever before because of conveniences like DVR.