Many years ago, not long after I had graduated from law school, I briefly succumbed to a rather silly conviction that I was a cultural barbarian and this state of affairs could be addressed by becoming an afficianado of European cinema. I should admit that this conviction was in no small measure driven by the belief that being au fait with the work of European film-makers was a surefire way to impress the girlies.
So I started to spend much of my free time ferreting out art-house independent cinemas (of the kind that sold organic brownies in the foyer instead of popcorn) and sat through endless hours of turgid, narcolepsy-inducing, state-funded, navel-gazing about the tortured psychological relationship between a middle-aged sub-postmaster and his trotskyite revolutionary girlfriend in the seedy hostel they share with a couple of Vietnamese refugees on the outskirts of Hamburg. Or something.
These films have all amalgamated in my mind and I cannot remember the name of even a single one. After about six months, I decided that no woman was worth this level of constipation so I threw the towel in and went back to watching simplistic sci-fi blockbusters and gangster movies.
But it is because of that brief self-inflicted nightmare that I understand exactly how these guys feel:
The survey by the Parliament’s cultural committee concluded that EU consumers prefer foreign cultural goods – such as films and music – to European products.
About 40 per cent of respondents said that, in general, European citizens do not prefer European cultural products. The situation in the European film industry is particularly bad.
By ‘foreign’ I rather think they mean Anglosphere, especially Hollywood.
Anyway, as per usual for the Belgian Empire, the answer to this problem lies in a top-down political solution. Understandably alarmed by this disturbing outbreak of free market value judgements, the EU has swung into action and established a ‘Committee on Culture, Youth, Education, the Media and Sport’ (no, really!) that has produced a ‘working document’ that reads pretty much like a script for one of the above-mentioned movies.
However, there are a few things that caught my eye:
Another challenge is how to stimulate the industrial actors to respond in time to loud-and-clear customer demand, in particular of the not-so-well-off younger generation, thereby focusing on long-term viability instead of on fast returns.
How is any ‘industrial actor’ supposed to recognise ‘loud-and-clear customer demand’ except by reference to the returns? Note how institutional the old soclialist canards have become. These people actually believe that the way to ensure an industry has long-term viability is to render it unprofitable.
The time has come to shape an inspired, efficient and democratically defined long-term cultural policy in order for the Union to make better use of its underdeveloped growth potential, as President Prodi repeatedly advocated in our House.
Right there is that sentence is an encapsulation of just about everything that is so grossly wrong with European thinking. The idea that in order to have more culture it must be defined and prescribed by a committee of appointed poobahs, pretty much guarantees that European cultural output remains as crap and unwanted as it clearly is now.
Propoganda required. They’ll be digging up Sergei Eisenstein and dragging Leni Refenstahl out of retirement any day now.
That said, Amelie and Lola rennt are both brilliant.
It’s not even socialism alone; it’s the marriage of socialism and managerialism. One has to wonder whether the EU will head down one of two routes: the incompetent and eventually harmless Austro-Hungarian Empire (Italy writ large) or Brazil (a byzantine dark world).
On a personal note, I do like to watch these films. I must be mad.
First of all, I did not realize there is just one European culture. It almost seems as if there is an attempt not to recognize various layers of history and individual countries and mass Europe all in to one.
While their goal is to search for a better artistic guide for the future of a European One, they will lose sight of real creativity which typically comes from inspired individuals.
For some reason, I can hear the song Utopia by Goldfrapp in my mind as you are searching for artsy culture. As for films, though Run Lola Run is a couple of years old – it is another good creation out of Germany.
I’d like to watch Run Lola Run myself. My Dutch girlfriend recommended it.
My own experience is that ninety per cent of films from anywhere are very bad. Both the pompous, obscurantist snobbery of the EU and the saccharine wendy-house self-love of Hollywood, consistently produce films which totally bore me.
They just bore me in two fairly different ways.
Amazing is the non-logic of the EU socialists:
1) Hollywood movies are produced mainly with an eye on the bottom line;
2) State-subsidized European movies are produced mainly with an eye to pleasing their subsidizing governments and Arts Councils;
3) Hollywood movies are much preferred by the average European;
4) Therefore, state-subsidized European movies should pay even less attention to the bottom line.
The idea that “the bottom line” reflects the taste of the average person is hardly mentioned. Surely someone can make an argument about the importance of making movies that appeal to a different (more select, what have you) group than the average person. However, they shouldn’t be shocked when their movies, produced by ignoring what the average person prefers, are less liked by the average person.
Committees such as this set the EN 600 guidelines for rubber condoms in 1996 to establish a uniform standard across Europe. As it turned out the standard issue fell off of German …. er, condom holders. I wonder if they have fixed that in another committee?
Sounds like the usual stuff in computerdom: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
As I see it, the problem isn’t whether there are good movies produced all over the world; I’m sure most countries with ample film industries put out at least a few good movies a year. “The Nasty Girl” comes to mind as an excellent German movie from about a dozen years ago; the documentary “The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl” was also excellent.
The problem is the apparent notion that *certain* European stuff is automatically better just because it’s European. This is part of the reason why Berlin’s annual Sex Parade (er, the Love Parade) gets the coverage it does. It’s somehow trendy in a way that doesn’t make any sense to the average person, which means it *must* somehow be an in thing.
A few years ago, my parents had to replace their toilet seat, and the new one they bought had printed on the package, “with European styling!”, as though this should somehow be a selling point. Do Europeans have differently-shaped asses from us in the States?
Ted and everyone else here has an excellent point about the tragic European wannabe-power-bloc inferiority complex.
Whenever I tell my Continental friends that the euro is a kind of penis-envy pseudo-dollar (quite apart from being a concrete boot for Europe’s economies), they are literally speechless with rage. In other words, it’s close to the truth.
Wow. The exceprts of that working document read like they could have been issued by the troglodytes in the Ministry of Culture here in China where I live and work. Use of words like “inspired” and “democratically defined” are eeringly similar to the classic propaganda terms employed by the regime here. Most creepy, to me anyway, is the praiseworthy reference to Prodi. Gives me the willies.
Decisions, decisions!
Behind Door #1:
endless hours of turgid, narcolepsy-inducing, state-funded, navel-gazing about the tortured psychological relationship between a middle-aged sub-postmaster and his trotskyite revolutionary girlfriend in the seedy hostel they share with a couple of Vietnamese refugees on the outskirts of Hamburg. Or something.
Door #2: Matrix x3
Door #3: Thousands of great films, mostly by the US.
Which would you choose?
The funny thing is, one of my fav movies is “Hobson’s Choice.” Veddy, veddy British.
That’s it, you Belgio-weenies. Drive the one really dynamic director you have (Guy Ritchie) out of the U.K. We’ll be glad to have him here in the ‘States, even if he is married to Madonna.
You can keep Robert Altman tho. We don’t like him, he don’t like us, and folk around these parts reckon he’s French anyhoo…
Ps. While we’re at it, can we work out a trade for Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and about 80% of the screen actors’ guild, for draft picks and several players to be named later?
That’s it, you Belgio-weenies. Drive the one really dynamic director you have (Guy Ritchie) out of the U.K. We’ll be glad to have him here in the ‘States, even if he is married to Madonna.
You can keep Robert Altman tho. We don’t like him, he don’t like us, and folk around these parts reckon he’s French anyhoo…
Ps. While we’re at it, can we work out a trade for Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and about 80% of the screen actors’ guild, for draft picks and several players to be named later?
That’s it, you Belgio-weenies. Drive the one really dynamic director you have (Guy Ritchie) out of the U.K. We’ll be glad to have him here in the ‘States, even if he is married to Madonna.
You can keep Robert Altman tho. We don’t like him, he don’t like us, and folk around these parts reckon he’s French anyhoo…
Ps. While we’re at it, can we work out a trade for Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and about 80% of the screen actors’ guild, for draft picks and several players to be named later?
I think 90% of American cinema is utterly moronic predictable crap, some of which make money, generally aimed at viewers who think Andrew Dice Clay is actually funny.
And I think 95% of EU cinema is utterly pretentious meaningless crap, hardly any of which make money, generally aimed at veiwers who… well, it is often a something of a mystery who the hell the target audience is for most EU flicks.
That means a US film is twise as likely to be watchable for me.
But mostly, they are all just crap.
BTW… Den of Lions rocks (I saw the first pre-release screening). When it comes out, it is well worth your popcorn money.
In the entertainment arts, among which movie-making is numbered, the test of money made is the only one that stands a chance of being objective. Anyone can mouth polite insincerities about some director’s or screenwriter’s lofty visions.
American movies don’t all make money, but they do so more frequently than European movies. Moreover, American movies aren’t made with tax dollars. To me, that’s a clincher. And, apart from Run, Lola, Run, I haven’t seen a foreign movie in quite a while that had anything fresh or insightful to say.
Setting up bureacracies to fund local cinema that make really bad films that nobody watches and write mission statements that sound like they come from the Soviet Union is a global pastime. The French/Europeans may talk the loudest about it, but they certainly don’t have a monopoly on doing it. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and many of the newly developed countries of Asia all do it. Even Britain has spent an amazing amount of lottery money funding movies that are so bad that they haven’t even been released. (This is why you are largely unaware of this).
The funny thing is that quite a bit of this state funding ends up being an indirect subsidy to Hollywood. What it does is ensure that quite a few countries have skilled crews available for people who want to make films. This means that Hollywood can come along (often with the help of tax concessions) and make use of favourable exchange rates and non-union workforces to make movies more cheaply than it can at home.
(I don’t think it is just Anglosphere/Hollywood films that Europeans prefer to domestic films. There are increasing audiences for things like Bollywood musicals, Japanese animation, and Hong Kong action films. There are lots of interesting and successful cultural forces coming from a variety of places. Once upon a time, if you didn’t watch Hollywood films you probably watched French and other European films. However, they are now losing market share even as a portion of the market for non-Hollywood films).
The thing is Europeans refuse to see that culture is subject to the rules of market economy the exact same way as other commodities. We tend to consider our culture superior, and this leads to state-organized programs that mess with it.
The U.S. is one of very few countries without a ministry of culture, and Americans still excel in most disciplines of arts.
Czech moviegoers donate (=are taxed) one Koruna from every single ticket to a state film fund, and yet the 95% of new releases are “narcolepsy-inducing” crap.
The Indian film industry (Bollywood?) is huge. Is it state supported?
Also, New Zealand, on a per capita basis, makes the best films today. If Hollywood has any competition, it’s from New Zealand. And Hollywood knows it!
Expect Hollywood to try to entice those talented moviemakers to the Left Coast.
A good read on this sort of thing for those of us economically inclined is “In Praise of Commercial Culture” by Tyler Cowen.
Bollywood is not state sponsored – although it has some very interesting links to organized crime in Bombay, sorry, Mumbai. The Indian version of the ‘free market’ always has room for corruption. The interesting thing is that Bollywood films are not doing as well in India now that Hollywood films are more widely available. That has prompted some soul searching among Indian producers and directors – the answer being, well our crap is more crappy than Hollywood crap, so that’s why we are losing market share.
Greyford – I was going to make a similair comment.
The name of the committee sounds like something straight out of the DPRK. All it needs are the words “Glorious” and “Sunshine” inserted at various points.
Hey, maybe they should take a cue from the North Koreans and introduce the concept of “juche” to motivate their artists. Otherwise, they could just torture artists whose renditions aren’t pleasing to the state.
Greyford – I was going to make a similair comment.
The name of the committee sounds like something straight out of the DPRK. All it needs are the words “Glorious” and “Sunshine” inserted at various points.
Hey, maybe they should take a cue from the North Koreans and introduce the concept of “juche” to motivate their artists. Otherwise, they could just torture artists whose renditions aren’t pleasing to the state.
Greyford – I was going to make a similair comment.
The name of the committee sounds like something straight out of the DPRK. All it needs are the words “Glorious” and “Sunshine” inserted at various points.
Hey, maybe they should take a cue from the North Koreans and introduce the concept of “juche” to motivate their artists. Otherwise, they could just torture artists whose renditions aren’t pleasing to the state.