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Oct 11, 2008 9:47 PM CST |
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On the occasion of each Cannes Film Festival, the venerated French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema publishes a special bilingual edition called World Cinema Atlas. It is meant to serve as an annual survey of world film. Each issue also has a theme—this year’s was public support for cinema worldwide. What is interesting about the short articles which review the state of film in some thirty-three different countries is that the perspective on the level and conditions of film production is often far different from the usual. Perhaps this is because it is the natives in those countries who were commissioned to write the articles, rather than foreigners. Foreign critics, after all, rarely see the local conditions firsthand. Their view of a country’s cinema is filtered through screenings of films they see and that were preselected for film festivals or showcases elsewhere—outside the country. So for example, the article on Brazil by Pedro Butcher doesn’t refer to the worldwide success of Walter Salles’s Motorcycle Diaries, but concentrates on the issues of political struggle over film in Brazil. The government of Lula da Silva was trying to impose taxes on all aspects of the film industry, which set the industry in revolt against the government. The biggest influence on film in Brazil was television, and the two most-watched films are ones we never heard of: Cazuca, a feature about a rock star who dies of AIDS in the eighties—which was a surprise hit, and Olga, an epic love story about the wife of Brazilian Communist leader Luis Carlos Prestes. In this recounting of a tragic event, President Getulio Vargas, flirting with Nazi Germany, deported Olga, who was Jewish, to Germany where she died in a concentration camp. Equally interesting is the situation in Burkina Faso—a poor, but cinematically rich African country. As digital filmmaking grows in Africa, two of the four feature films made in Burkina Faso last year were made by women filmmakers. In particular, The Night of the Truth, a film by Apoilline Traore, was made by the first woman director from Burkina Faso to attend an American film school. The film tells the story of a love relationship between a young African village girl and a European volunteer worker. The situation in mainland China, detailed in the article “The Double Life of Chinese Cinema,” by Zhang Xian-min, shows a picture far removed from the romanticism of House of Flying Daggers. The emphasis in China remains on producing propaganda films. Most of the government support for film goes to these projects. One of these mega-productions is Xio-Ping's Youth. Directed by Qu Junjie, it takes place in the 1920s in Paris, where it was shot. In one amazing sequence, the hero, Deng, holds a dying French worker in his arms. The worker had his legs broken by the henchmen of the capitalist car makers. Both of them shout international communist slogans as the Frenchman dies. Two hundred films, a third of the overall Chinese production, fall into this propaganda category. But capitalism is also driving Chinese film. The West is investing heavily in China. Warner Brothers and Columbia Pictures are building new theaters and pouring money into film production. But the Western capitalists are not there to spread freedom of expression for filmmakers. For the most part, they are in an alliance with the local authorities. Whatever rules of censorship may exist, the foreign investors accept them and abide by them. Columbia, for example, requires its Chinese coproducers to have their screenplays approved by the government’s Film Bureau. “This is why,” writes Xian-min, “current films are a compromise between the spirit of official propaganda and the dreariness of realism for which independent films are often criticized. Compromise often leads to self-censorship….Whereas in Chinese society at large, opposition between different social classes seems to be increasing, Chinese cinema has chosen different shades of reconciliation and compromise.” What the Cahiers du Cinema World Cinema Atlas issue shows is not only how film is so critically poised between politics and culture, but how restricted our view is from the outside looking in. This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview. Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia. |
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