WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

	Milos Stehlik

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In an upcoming issue of the trade journal Variety, Lisa Nesselson, the Paris critic, surveys the scene for art films in France. The 40 Year Old Virgin was on eleven Paris screens the week it opened, she says, but Woody Allen’s Match Point was on 30, including in working class neighborhoods, and this, four weeks after its release.

The Russian Ark, Alexander Sokurov’s one-shot journey through the Hermitage, has been playing for three years, and Agnes Varda’s documentary, The Gleaners and I has been showing virtually non-stop since 1999. Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny has never left Paris screens and The Rocky Horror Picture Show still plays twice each weekend at the Studio Galande.

What’s at work, writes Nesselson, is culture. Of the 52.3 million movie tickets sold in France in 2004, more one-fourth of all movie admissions nationwide were sold by art houses. Over 40 percent of the movie theatres in France are designated as art houses. This means that they have to screen innovative new films, independent films from other countries and re-releases of classics. The quality of the films is stringently regulated.

Under the French system, a percentage of every ticket sold goes into a fund managed by the CNC, the National Cinema Center. $13.2 million euros a year were allocated to support art houses. The fund also supports the production of new films.

Nesselson quotes a veteran programmer, Roger Diamantis, who runs the St.-Andre-des-Arts Cinema and said, “We’re extremely fortunate in our profession that French politicians, be they Left wing or Right, all agree that movie theaters are a crucial component of the cultural landscape and that the choice of films must be as varied as possible.”

The cultivation of audiences by nurturing them on diverse choices has led to what is probably the most educated and sophisticated film audience in the world – to be a cinephile is as hip as being a gourmand or an oenophile. “It’s quite amazing,” said Nesselson:

"to go to the 83-seat cinema that shows Rocky Horror twice each weekend (led by two DIFFERENT transvestite enthusiast groups.) as I did yesterday at 2:15 to catch Coline Serreau’s Saint Jacques….La Mecque. The 30 or so people waiting in line were all conservatively dressed Catholic-looking folks over 60 – and they laughed their head off at the anti-clerical humor. I went Sunday afternoon to see the late Richard Dembo’s The House of Nina, about an orphanage that took in Jewish children after the Liberation, and it was packed with children – for whom I imagine the film was pretty harsh – along with French people who were 70 or more if they were a day. They all walked down and up the deep narrow staircase into a theater or more if they were a day."

Elsewhere in Paris, at the senior citizens’ matinee at La Pagode – a venerable art house inside a pagoda not far from Napoleon’s Tomb – offered Jean-Luc Godarrd’s Contempt.

This audience-cultivation also translates to film production. Though American films dominate the box-office, last year France still turned out 203 feature films. Perhaps most surprising is that a good percentage – almost a third in some years – comes from young or first-time filmmakers. It is a direct result of the French subsidy system which maybe difficult to navigate, but still allows young filmmakers to make personal, artistic features. The work of these young French filmmakers, as seen in the 9th annual Chicago Festival of New French Cinema, shows a remarkable breadth. This ranges from WORK HARD, PLAY HARD, a first feature by Marc Moutout which looks at the pressured world of young executives to LOVE IS IN THE AIR, a romantic comedy set in the world of airline security.

The milieu of immigrants and their life in Parisian suburbs have been the subject of numerous films by young French filmmaker that they’ve defined a genre – the so-called “banlieu” film. If any French politicians actually watched them and seen the issues, last month’s rioting might have been averted. This year’s banlieu film, GAMBLERS by Frederick Balekdijan, is set in the garment district of Paris and follows Vahe who works in an about-to-be-shut factory and has a run-in with a gang of Armenian mobsters. Never heavy-handed, the film treats the marginal existence of immigrants with an edgy humor. LE PONT DES ARTS, the newest film from American expatriate Eugene Green, who turned to film from theater, is a hilarious and cynical send-up of the French musical and cultural establishment, while INVISIBLE, the first feature by former critic Thierry Jousse, is a film about an obsession, as a contemporary musician falls in love with a woman’s voice.

All of these films are intensely personal expressions. The fact that they could be made at all is, in itself, a miracle. Without the friendly climate toward the art of film in France, they very likely could never have been made.

Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

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