Film lovers today have never had it so good, with more movies from a greater range of countries being made than ever before.
Yet for any viewer who judges the state of contemporary cinema by what is released in Australia, it is a very different story. Yearning to see something interesting or intelligent on the big screen – in other words not violent, brainless Hollywood entertainment aimed at teenage boys – such audiences have become so desperate that they resort to praising a wheezy, frankly dreadful film like The King’s Speech.
There are two distinctly different contemporary cinemas. The first is defined by the paltry selection of usually very conservative films on offer at our cities’ theatres – titles that are almost invariably European when they’re not from the US, with the occasional Chinese martial arts or period drama thrown in for colour. The second is a vibrant, incredibly diverse, and genuinely global cinema: an embarrassment of riches almost exclusively available via film festivals and digital format (DVD, Blu-ray, online).
There has, of course, always been a sizeable gap between the world of film glimpsed at major festivals versus that on offer in town on a Friday night. But for some time now local cinemas have denied us what can rightfully be called “cutting-edge”, important, or simply wonderful films from all corners of the planet. No one walks into a bookshop and only selects from titles starting with A. But such is the absurd denuding of choice if viewers conflate contemporary cinema with the white-bread menu offered by ever more cautious Australian distributors.
Ask a film scholar, serious (i.e., non Hollywood-obsessed) critic, or world cinema lover who the most influential, admired and written about contemporary filmmakers are, and you will very likely hear names such as Abbas Kiarostami (Iran), Tsai Ming-liang (Taiwan), Jia Zhangke (China), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand), Béla Tarr (Hungary) and Michael Haneke (Austria/France). Major festival and cinémathèque screenings (such as in Melbourne) aside, only films by the last of these astonishing directors regularly grace local screens. But Haneke, whose justly celebrated Hidden was the highest grossing non-English-language film here in 2006, has an advantage over the others: he is from Western Europe.
A film by Kiarostami – who has received 70 international awards, likely more than any other working director – did unusually receive a brief run in some Australian cinemas earlier this year. But why does the sneakily brilliant Certified Copy get a release when so many of his previous (and superior) works, Iranian films among which are key masterpieces of world cinema, did not? The answer is fairly simple. Set in Italy and starring Juliette Binoche, his first Western production is essentially a “European” film. After a mini Kiarostami retrospective at the Melbourne Film Festival some years ago, I asked a woman from one of Australia’s major “art-house” distributors why his work is never released in cinemas here despite its unparalleled international prestige. She responded that local audiences didn’t want to see Iranian films (unless, that is, it was a simple heart-warming drama featuring cute children).
And the other filmmakers on that list? Huge names on the festival circuit, theirs are distinct voices clearly emanating from very particular parts of the world. These directors’ films exemplify important contemporary world cinema in expressing local, national and transnational concerns, but just as importantly because they are notably distinct in stylistic character, emphasising cinema’s aesthetic potential often much more than narrative or dramatic content.
I think distributors have long chronically underestimated what local audiences could – and do – enjoy, particularly when it comes to non-Western cinema. Not only is movie-going Australia’s most popular cultural activity, but in addition to long-running major film festivals, well-patronised smaller festivals are popping up all around the country (most recently an event devoted to Iranian cinema) showing work that never makes it into commercial release. Yet outside of this diversifying local festival circuit, with some exceptions (Canberrans are to receive further consolidation of already very good ”art-film” choice), Australian cinemas offering year-long calendars of non-Hollywood fare have been steadily closing for years. So despite the ongoing popularity of going to the movies, and some evidence that audiences are keen for more challenging global fare, viewers are increasingly denuded of regular opportunities to see such films outside of one-off festival screenings.
But while we might mourn the gradual death of the neighborhood art-house cinema, the DVD revolution (which some hold at least partially responsible for this state of affairs) provides considerable compensation as an almost magic entry portal to perhaps the one truly global art. Now is the greatest time in history to be a film lover, our frustration with what’s on offer at the local cinema notwithstanding. Never before have such a great number and diversity of films been available to us from Hollywood to Bollywood and literally all over the world, in such technical quality and at an increasingly modest price. You just need to know where to find them.
Hamish Ford, lecturer in film, media and cultural studies at the University of Newcastle, will be presenting on the work of Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke at the World Cinema Now conference, Monash University, Melbourne from today to Thursday.