[Culture Op-Ed] Are European Films Artistic While American Films Are Commercial?

It is still, to some extent, a widely accepted perception today. Pinpointing exactly when it began is a bit complicated, but in Korea it is generally thought to date back to around the 1960s. That was when various reviews—often influenced by Japanese film magazines such as Kinema Junpo, and at times virtually copied from them—began appearing in Korean newspapers. Japan, moreover, has long had a strong cultural orientation toward Europe.

But the issue cannot be interpreted so simply. The stereotype above had, in fact, become all but universal for a very long time even within America’s own cultural world. To understand this stereotype, which spans both East and West, one needs a broader perspective. And one must go back quite far in time to find its origins. Let us examine it step by step.

First, let us consider whether this perception—or stereotype—actually matches reality. Is it really true that European cinema is regarded as overwhelmingly superior to American cinema, represented by Hollywood, in artistic terms? Of course, in culture and the arts there can be no single uniform standard of judgment, but in the field of film many people refer to the all-time best-film rankings compiled and published every ten years by the film magazine Sight & Sound.

Sight & Sound is one of the oldest film journals in the world, founded in Britain in 1932. Since 1952, it has selected a voting body of around 1,000 renowned film critics and directors from around the world and conducted polls on the greatest films in history. The most recent rankings are from 2012. Including ties, 101 films were listed, ranked down to 93rd place. It can be seen as a comprehensive collection of contemporary film experts’ judgments on which films are the greatest in history in so-called “artistic terms.”

In the 2012 rankings, first place went to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo. Second place was Orson Welles’s 1941 film Citizen Kane. Both are American films. In addition, the top 10 also includes American films such as Sunrise (1927), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and The Searchers (1957). In other words, half of the top 10 consists of American films. The picture is not much different when looking at all 101 films counted. Of the 101, 37 are American films, including two U.S.-U.K. co-productions and one U.S.-Italy co-production. That is well over one-third. By country, American films account for by far the largest share. Even France, commonly regarded as the mecca of art cinema, had only 28 films even after including all co-productions.

Of course, it is true that American cinema, and Hollywood cinema in particular, is most strongly associated with being popular and commercial. But at this point it is worth viewing the situation from a different angle. One might say that in America, “they also make popular and commercial films well.” In fact, American films account for more than 50% of the film market in most countries. By constantly shifting trends, and now by centering on superhero films, they have once again changed fashions and come to dominate the market. The point is that America not only holds an overwhelming commercial position, but also excels at making, and making in large numbers, films of high artistic value. It truly is the mecca of the global film industry itself.

In the end, compared with the United States, which in film as a genre “does everything well,” European cinema—France in particular—has much weaker commercial reach, but is better known for smaller films with higher artistic value. Thus its image has merely hardened in the direction in which it “stands out.” This is a line of reasoning first advanced by people such as MovieLine critic Stephen Farber, and it has a certain plausibility.

The American cultural world’s long-standing cultural inferiority complex toward Europe

But there is more to examine here. Another aspect mentioned above is that for a long time even the American film industry and related media nurtured the stereotype that the true mecca of art cinema was the European film world led by France.

That was roughly the case until the early 1970s. Hollywood’s worship of Europe was enormous. Countless Hollywood stars such as Ingrid Bergman, Burt Lancaster, and Robert De Niro wanted somehow to appear in European films even for low pay, while promising European directors such as Roman Polanski could break into Hollywood whenever they wished. When European directors like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard visited the United States for publicity, the entire media made a fuss as though welcoming a royal tour.

To understand this atmosphere, one must first look at 20th-century American history and its cultural mood. The cultural work that best represents this is American author F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. It has already been adapted into Hollywood films several times, so even those who have not read the book are likely to know its basic story.

The plot of The Great Gatsby is simple. A millionaire named Jay Gatsby moves to Long Island, New York, and throws lavish parties every week. It turns out he has come there to reunite with Daisy, an old lover who lives nearby in a wealthy neighborhood and who is now already another man’s wife. Gatsby, penniless at the time, had ultimately had to part with Daisy; he then made money by every possible means, including bootlegging, and finally rose to a position where he could stand shoulder to shoulder with her. From there, new conflicts and anguish begin to unfold.

In The Great Gatsby, the protagonist Jay Gatsby is well known as a personification of America’s own position in the 1920s. That is, the position of the newly rising power that began to grow rapidly after World War I. One interpretation is that the relationship between Gatsby, as “new money,” and the class symbolized by Tom Buchanan and Daisy—“old money,” meaning the European upper class transplanted directly into America—symbolizes the aristocratic European society that still held world hegemony and the many facets of American society, which felt a complex toward it and wanted somehow to stand shoulder to shoulder with it.

Strictly speaking, America began its path as the leader of the free world and a superpower only after the end of World War II in 1945. In particular, after the Korean War armistice in 1953 and the full onset of the Cold War, America’s status as leader of the free world began to solidify. So if one is being precise, America only began moving beyond the “equal footing” with Europe that Jay Gatsby dreamed of in the 1960s.

Naturally, public perceptions move more slowly than that, and cultural perceptions slower still. Until the 1960s, the dominant view was that European culture and its products were unquestionably the best, while American ones were mere entertainment that could not compare. It is no coincidence that the “British Invasion” led by the Beatles swept American popular culture in the 1960s. It became a boom generated all at once by the public and the media because they shared the perception that this was advanced culture. This European complex soon extended to content from France, Italy, Sweden, and elsewhere, and such works enjoyed astonishing box-office success by standards that would be hard to imagine today.

In the end, the perception that European cinema was supreme in artistic value while American cinema, though entertaining, was merely a kind of circus spectacle likely originated, in many respects, from an American stereotype. And it took far longer than one might think for the American cultural world to fully escape this complex. It was only around the late 1980s to early 1990s that Americans reached the stage of understanding and praising for themselves the artistic value of American films.

What is interesting is that this reversal of values, this destruction of stereotypes, was first carried out not by the American cultural world but by the French cultural world. It began when the generation behind the Nouvelle Vague, an alternative cultural movement that sought to overturn established artistic values, collectively began praising American genre films. From westerns and gangster films to horror and thrillers, young French cinephiles elevated genre films that Americans themselves had often dismissed as mere entertainment by arguing that they possessed “auteurist value,” and the mood within America gradually began to change as well.

Put another way, one might say that in order to overcome its own complex, America had no solution other than recognition from the very object of that complex.

Two stories behind the logic of disparaging American films that took shape in Korea in the 1980s

Then what about Korea’s position? As noted earlier, was the perception of Europe as art and America as commerce simply hardened by the tone of the domestic press, which copied Japanese film magazines?

The issue is a bit more complicated than that. For one thing, the perception of Europe as art and America as commerce accelerated in the 1980s. The 1980s were also the earliest days of specialized film media in Korea. The first monthly film magazine, Screen, was launched in 1984, followed by the monthly Road Show in 1989. Of course, these publications were also heavily influenced by the tone of Japanese magazines (Screen was in fact launched under a Japanese magazine license), but the problem is that by the 1980s Japanese film magazines had themselves begun gradually changing their tone.

From the late 1960s through the 1970s, helped by trends such as American New Cinema, they began to acknowledge a newly revitalized American cinema. As a new generation of directors discovered in the 1970s—Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Woody Allen, and others—set off a boom, Japanese film magazines also came out in active support of American New Cinema.

Then why was it that in Korea, even in the 1980s—or rather, even more actively in the 1980s—people asserted the “worthlessness” of American films and, by contrast, eagerly praised European films? Two major causes may be identified. The first is the extreme anti-American sentiment in Korean society during the 1980s. Consider a July 6, 2016 article in Kookmin Ilbo looking back on the period, titled, “In the U.S.-Soviet basketball semifinal... Koreans passionately cheered for the Soviet Union.”

“On September 28, 1988, at Jamsil Gymnasium, the United States and the Soviet Union faced off in the men’s basketball semifinal at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. It was a blockbuster rematch 16 years after the 1972 Munich Olympics.

But the game drew even more attention because it starkly revealed anti-American sentiment in Korea rather than because of the competition itself. The crowd passionately cheered for the Soviet Union. Hundreds of small red Soviet flags waved in the air. When American players shot free throws, boos poured down. When the Soviet Union defeated the United States 82-76, the arena erupted in cheers. One foreign reporter described it as ‘like a Soviet home game in Moscow.’

The Korean government and political circles even stepped in to urge restraint among the public. American media reported with bewilderment that in Korea, people were cheering for the Soviet Union, which had helped North Korea during the Korean War, while jeering at the United States, which had fought for South Korea. The U.S. government, which had worked to help ensure the safe hosting of the 1988 Olympics, conveyed its dissatisfaction to the Korean government.

At the time, anti-American sentiment was the result of multiple factors coming together. Arguments about U.S. responsibility for the May 18 Democratization Movement and American pressure to open the Korean market provided the conditions for anti-American sentiment to flare up. On top of that, incidents and accidents that gave the impression that the United States looked down on Korea acted as sparks, causing anti-American sentiment to explode.”

In addition to this broader anti-American sentiment, there was also a conflict directly tied to film as an industry: the so-called “UIP direct distribution” incident. The following is how the situation of the time is described in Jeonbuk National University Professor Junman Kang’s book A Stroll Through American History 12: The Birth of America’s “Unipolar System.”

“As a result of revisions to the Motion Picture Law at the end of 1986 under strong U.S. pressure to open the film market, UIP and 20th Century Fox were granted permission to operate in Korea in January 1988. The activities of UIP in particular, as a U.S. direct distribution company, sparked major controversy in the film industry. (Omitted) On September 2, 1988, 32 cinemas in Seoul hung flags at half-staff and closed for a day. The next day, on August 24, Fatal Attraction finally opened in nine theaters nationwide, including the Korea Theater and the Shinyoung Theater. Film figures centered on directors and producers staged demonstrations in front of the Korea Theater and the Shinyoung Theater in Myeong-dong to block the screenings, and the protests continued until October 7. On September 30, there was even an incident in which protesting filmmakers damaged the Shinyoung Theater’s screen with paint.”

Given this, related media with close ties of interest to the Korean film industry at the time had little choice but to engage in a clear-cut disparagement of American films. It was, in other words, a distinctive anti-American-film current in which the existing anti-American mood overlapped with what one might call a livelihood issue. That is why the logic of Europe as art and America as commerce—already effectively entering its final stage of extinction in other countries—retained its vitality “the longest” in Korea.

In the end, it is the public psychology of wanting at least to take away “authority” from “the strong who have everything”

As noted, by the early 1990s the American cultural world had also begun to acknowledge for itself the excellence of American cinema. There was an interesting incident in 1993. When the Hollywood film Jurassic Park threatened the box office performance of Germinal, a film ambitiously put forward by the French film world, the entire French media attacked Hollywood. An executive at Universal Pictures responded in an interview with Newsweek as follows:

“We’re not people who wake up every morning wondering how to screw over Europe today. We’re busy doing our jobs. They can work hard too, send their films to places like the Cannes Film Festival that nobody cares about, and praise one another and hand out awards among themselves.”

Yet in Korea this stereotype has proven unusually resistant to being broken. More than mere inertia in perception, it can be seen as something occurring in a context similar to the instinct to be wary of and disparage anything “big, strong, and successful” at all costs—roughly akin to anti-chaebol sentiment. People do not want to heap “authority” on top of Hollywood and show it respect when it already excels at everything else. The idea is that, precisely because it is so successful, one should withhold recognition in elevated realms such as artistic merit as a kind of “sense of balance.”

Of course, it is a bizarre idea, but our world is full of similarly bizarre phenomena on comparable levels. In any case, the phenomenon continues unabashedly even now: people who scarcely watch even one or two European films a year continue to praise their artistic merit without fail. Perhaps, at least in Korea, it may be a perception that will never change.

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Original title: [문화칼럼] 유럽영화는 예술적인 반면 미국영화는 상업적이다?

Author: Mun-won Lee

Date: 2020-05-18

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=8&idx=22633