Why Don’t Americans Watch Foreign Films?
Ethan Child
At the 92nd Academy Awards, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite became the first non-English language film to win Best Picture. Yet, more significant, perhaps, than the Oscar win, Parasite was an anomaly in its entry into the American mainstream. It was not entirely alone in this success. Last year, Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma reached a widespread American audience through streaming on Netflix. But prior to that, we must look all the way back to 2000 at Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for another foreign film that found such popularity with mainstream American audiences. For the most part, foreign and non-English language films have a hard time escaping the arthouse in American cinema. This is not the case in other countries, such as China or South Korea, where American films reach widespread audiences. Hollywood’s distributors rely on these international audiences—which can be problematic. '
Last year, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood made headlines when Bona Film Group, the film’s financier in Beijing, canceled the Chinese theatrical release of the film. This would have been the first of Tarantino’s films to see a Chinese release. The director’s penchant for super-violent movies has limited his entry into the international market. Strict Chinese censors restrict the release of films that graphically depict violent and sexual content.
Presented with the option to censor the film’s violent scenes, Tarantino and Sony Pictures decided to pull the film. American headlines painted this as a story of the artist triumphing over the censor; unwilling to compromise his vision, Tarantino denied Chinese distribution of his film. But we cannot ignore the undercurrent of this publicized story: an American filmmaker refusing to kowtow to the demands of a foreign market. In the United States, we view Chinese censors as a roadblock to international cinema. These strict censors prevent the general public from enjoying theatrical releases of foreign films. But in the United States, we construct the same cinematic roadblock for ourselves; foreign films are restricted to limited releases.
With the availability of the Hollywood powerhouse, most Americans don’t have the need to turn to foreign markets for their cinema fill. And why would they? Why would Americans want to watch movies with subtitles as translation when they have access to so many high-quality English-language films? Ironically, Tarantino himself has successfully brought multilingual, subtitled films to mainstream American audiences with Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds. So mainstream cinemagoers are capable of handling subtitles, if only in moderation.
There is a flawed conflation here, though, between foreign films and foreign-language films. Such a conflation denies the multiplicity of languages spoken in the United States. An American film need not be an English-language film. Look to last year’s The Farewell, an American film, as an example. Here, Chinese-American filmmaker, Lulu Wang created a bilingual film, with most dialogue in Mandarin. The Farewell is a “foreign-language film” but not a foreign film. It received a limited release, distributed by A24. Where can movies like The Farewell find success in the United States? Apparently, not at the Academy Awards, where The Farewell received no recognition.
The Academy, however, did make a positive change this year; the “Best Foreign Language Film” category was changed to “Best International Feature Film.” In a historic achievement, Parasite claimed not only this new title but also the Best Picture title. Parasite’s triumph called attention to the Academy’s historic inability to recognize greatness in non-English language films. Unfortunately, the Academy’s failure to recognize these films has conditioned American audiences to see non-English language films as peripheral to the great cinema we have access to in the United States. Even filmmakers have been subjected to the American cinema’s homogenizing power. For example, after Ang Lee and Guillermo del Toro saw success with the American reception of their earlier films, they shifted to making English-language films. Exceptional filmmakers like Lee and del Toro deserve to find success in the American cinema market, and they have found it in making English-language films. It is unfortunate that they do not have the same opportunity for success with films in their native languages.
The United States’ obsession with English-language cinema is nothing new. The great spaghetti westerns of the 1960s were all dubbed for American releases. Italian filmmakers knew that non-English language films couldn’t hope to find success in an American market.
Meanwhile, the Italian-language films of Fellini and Antonioni were relegated to the arthouse. The arthouse, of course, is a great venue for artistic appreciation. But it does not allow filmmakers to find the same financial success as those movies in the commercial mainstream. As evidenced by the Academy’s designation of the “Foreign Language” category up until this year, American cinema sought to create a market in which filmmakers conformed to English-language preferences. This same cinematic institution, thereby, created a Hollywood that chiefly exports movies and does not import movies for mainstream consumption.
Like so many other institutions, the cinema has fallen prey to the United States’ individualist attitude. Given the novelty of the commercial cinema—a 20th-century invention—it is shocking how quickly an artform was co-opted for financial pursuits in the international market. An artform that once had the ability to transcend linguistic barriers now calls attention to and reinforces those very barriers. The silent films produced during the advent of cinema created a new media that could be shared across languages. While the introduction of sound was, unarguably, a positive artistic advancement for film, it carried with it a linguistic separation for international audiences. Fortunately, streaming services like Netflix now provide the option to turn on captions in multiple languages for most movies. But the American cinema, still a crucial determinant in films’ success in the American market, continues to resist the spread of multilingual and foreign cinema. As long as there is money to be made from maintaining an American, English-speaking institution, the cinema will likely not budge.