Tyler Cowen…argues that movies are about
familiarity. "A feeling of comfort has to be there" for a movie to
succeed, he says. That is the reason that "Americans don’t like foreign
movies," Mr. Cowen says. A Bollywood movie with Indian cultural themes
and actors sells tickets with the Subcontinent’s three-million strong
diaspora in the U.S., but not with the average American.
And will India embrace Hollywood?
…some predict that as India liberalizes, the movie landscape may
alter. "If India becomes like Bangalore then more Indians will start
watching Hollywood," Mr. Cowen explains, referring to the whiz-bang
technology capital of India, populated by upper- and middle-class
youth. As more Indians get wealthier, their tastes will reflect that
currently exhibited only by the upper classes.
Here is the whole article, most of which is about Bollywood. Here is earlier coverage on the same theme.
Not so sure about this. I – and many of my friends – like Asian cinema in general but I know nobody who could stand watching a whole Bollywood flick… It is pretty irritating to me and not because of the unfamiliarity I would say.
I love foreign films because of the unfamiliarity. Too many of Hollywood’s offerings are boring retellings of the same basic stories with the same small pool of actors.
People who watch cinema for the sake of it have varied tastes. People who watch cinema as a social event (go with a date, go with friends…) get to the lesser common denominator movie, the american one.
I’m an Indian with a strong interest in classic Hollywood cinema as well as mainstream Indian cinema.
Even after making allowances for cultural differences, I think the best of mainstream Indian entertainment do not measure up to the best that Hollywood has had to offer over the years.
Most Indian mainstream movies are lazy, overdone melodramatic musicals. Even a second rung half-forgotten Hollywood classic like say Penny Serenade is better than most of the celebrated popular Bollywood favorites.
Hence, it is perfectly understandable for an American movie buff to be put off by Bollywood productions.
I’m an Indian with a strong interest in classic Hollywood cinema as well as mainstream Indian cinema.
Even after making allowances for cultural differences, I think the best of mainstream Indian entertainment do not measure up to the best that Hollywood has had to offer over the years.
Most Indian mainstream movies are lazy, overdone melodramatic musicals. Even a second rung half-forgotten Hollywood classic like say Penny Serenade is better than most of the celebrated popular Bollywood favorites.
Hence, it is perfectly understandable for an American movie buff to be put off by Bollywood productions.
I don’t think it’s about Americans disliking foreign movies at all. I think it’s more about the fact that hollywood is good at making movies with universal appeal, while bollywood (for instance) sucks at it.
Spiderman? Universal appeal. Spiderman could be any regular guy, from anywhere.
A bunch of indians playing baseball against the british for 4 hours while singing songs and almost, but not quite kissing their girlfriends? Don’t get it.
Martial arts movies have crossover appeal because people of any nationality can appreciate Jackie Chan beating up ninjas. Anime has similar (albeit more narrow) crossover appeal. But most other foreign genre’s don’t make sense to people unfamiliar with them.
My theory is that everyone in the world likes two kinds of movies: locally-produced movies, and American movies. The United States looks odd because in the USA, those wind up being the same thing.
Are Italian movies popular in Norway? Is there a big Bollywood fanbase (outside of expat Indians) in South Korea?
Hollywood movies are often shown in India, and as more people start to understand American accents I’d expect greater popularity. There has long been an art-film scene in India — Ingmar Bergmann has depressed people worldwide!
Bollywood has been highly successful over the years outside India. I’ve run into Latin Americans, Africans, Russians who saw “Mother India” (1957) after it came out (and if motherhood and the struggles of the peasantry are not universal themes I don’t know what are); Dev Anand and Raj Kapoor were international stars in their time; folks in China today will ask visting Indians for a song because they’ve heard them in Hindi films.
So let’s put the cultures-as-compartments silliness to rest. There *are* obvious questions of language (India also has vigorous non-Hindi commercial film industries) and genre expectations.
It’s not that Americans don’t like foreign movies. It’s that _everyone_ in the world prefer American movies, so Americans aren’t that unusual from everyone else.
Take a look at the top box office hits of any country abroad, and count how many are of American origin. When a local movie is in the top 10 charts, that’s big news simply because it’s so rare, and a major source of national pride.
In 30 years when China and India run the world, I imagine that movies set in there will become a lot more popular.
Your theory is perhaps refuted by Latin American telenovelas (admittedly, not movies, but very very long mini-series), which are hugely popular worldwide… except in the US.
To follow up on Jim’s point, Europeans are no more likely to watch movies from Thailand or Bollywood than Americans. So their so-called cosmpolitanism stems solely from their watching other European movies. Moreover, in Europe, the dominant movie product is still going to be from Hollywood, with local output a strong second in markets like France.
The main difference is the greater tolerance for dubbed movies among a large section of the European urban elite. Even this is an upper class urban and not a mass phenomenon in most countries.
“As more Indians get wealthier, their tastes will reflect that currently exhibited only by the upper classes.”
Well, watching Hollywood movies does not reflect class status (income as parameter). To watch Hollywood movie, people need to understand English. And, many Indians or the whole subcontinent itself is far beyond understanding English, often with jargons that they won’t find in school books. Moreover, many middle class families do understand English but they definitely do not enjoy watching two hour long Hollywood movie as they do with Bollywood movie. The marginal utility of watching Hollywood movie would decrease at an increasing rate after some minutes of watching it. Subtitles also won’t work if we are talking about attracting movie goers to Hollywood movies in India.
As you said “a feeling of comfort has to be there”…this is so true if you view this issue from Indian moviegoers perspective. Commercially, it would take decades for Hollywood to entice Indians to watch Hollywood movies!
Why don’t Americans like foreign movies?
They do — when those movies are filmed in English. Certainly there are many examples of British productions that have done well in the U.S. But film importers/distributors here don’t do subtitles (because art house movie goers would shun them–and they’re the whole foreign film audience now), and most Americans (except art-house types) don’t like films with subtitles.
But Bollywood musicals (and Mexican telenovelas) are just a poor cultural fit, language barriers aside. Americans lost their tastes for highly emotive dramatic acting, formulaic melodrama, and musicals decades ago. So it’s not that these forms are unfamiliar to Americans, but rather that they seem comically old-fashioned.
Why are American movies so popular abroad, then? To say that a culture that is made up of hundred of other cultures (America) doesn’t care for movies from those foreign cultures because they are somehow alien is close minded, I think. I would say that people respond more to the marketing and buzz surrounding the movies rather than the language or the country of origination of the movie. If Bollywood movies had $100 million marketing budgets in the US I can pretty much guarantee that a large percentage of non-Indian Americans would be going to the theater to watch these movies.
Surely the language issue is a big one. Americans in general are not particularly comfortable with either subtitles or dubbing, I think, because the former requires extra work and the latter is somewhat disorienting. Obviously people in other countries use these techniques to watch American movies, but the difference is that a) they have probably been doing this for a long time, b) they have gotten used to it because there are always American movies playing in their country, and c) they are probably more likely to understand some English than the average American is to understand a foreign language.
All of these qualities are in some ways self-fulfilling – i.e. because people in other nations have seen more American films, it makes sense to market American films in those nations. Likewise, because a lot of Americans have not seen many foreign films, it makes less sense to market them here.
In the interest of full disclosure, I watch a fair amount of foreign films but they are mostly European.
I’ve started watching my movies with sub-titles, or actually closed captioning in English, my first language. I seem to gravitate towards complex movies.
I wonder if the “familiarity” is more about the familiarity needed for the executives who green light the big budget blockbuster bets of the US market to pull the trigger.
I enjoy foreign movies, but as someone who watches most of her movies on DVD rather than in the theatre, I don’t get around to foreign movies much. The reason? If I have to read subtitles, I can’t do anything else while watching the movie. That’s fine in a movie theatre, when there isn’t anything else to do anyway. but at home on DVD, I like to do other things while watching movies and can’t if I have to keep reading the subtitles.
If there is a talented film director in France, or India, or China, they can come to the United States and be a successful “Hollywood” director. If there is a talented film director in Hollywood, they can’t leave the United States and be a successful French director, or Indian director, or Chinese director.
For example, even when a French movie has a French director, French actors, and is filmed in France by a French production company and uses the French language, if it received some capital from the United States it is no longer considered “French”. On the other hand, you can have a movie with a director from Hong Kong, the two main actors being Australian and English, adapted from a Dutch short story, and then film the movie in Francophone Canada, and it is still considered an “American” movie.
If you demanded the same sort of ethnic purity to be culturally “American” as you need to have in order to be culturally “French”, then American movies wouldn’t be that popular around the world, because there wouldn’t be that many American movies. Hollywood is really more the global cinema center than something uniquely and culturally American.
I like this site, at the dawn of Christmas, like all the sites frequented by friends sent holiday wishes ahead of time, a happy holiday.
Actually bollywood is not only the movie source in india.. bollywood means hindi movies only…
U could find the real tresure in malayalam movies.. very gud movies are there.. u might do a search for best movies n watch… For realistic movies watch malayalam movies… its gr8 compared to bollywood…
I prefer u americans to watch malayalam movies.. one of my recomendation is vaanaprastham.. u will find a gr8 actor named mohanlal there… u will love it…
the movie might not be an entertainer.. but u will know y its a good movie after a watch…
Speaking as a Chinese American, I sometimes seek out films from eastern countries such as China, Japan, and Thailand (especially Thailand lately). Echoing the sentiments of Vic’s reply, it gets tiring to see no representations, or very poor representations, of people of your ethnicity in movies. It is only so many academic, conniving, asexual Asian characters that run on AA batteries before you catch a foreign film and realize that films from other countries are portraying you realistically. To America’s credit, it has caught on that Asia makes some interesting horror or action films. But there are a lot of thought provoking dramas, or even highly entertaining lighter fare that will not be localized in America because they don’t fall under Horror or Action.
The wrench in all this is, taking Thailand for example, many of these films are not released with subtitles (even if they are shown with English subtitles in theaters!). A lot of films that I do want to watch are not really easily accessible to me. We’ll not get into the messy business of region coding or PAL vs NTSC either.
But that’s not to say America doesn’t embrace foreign. Every video store I go to these days have an Anime section. Every book store I go to has a Manga section. Japanese animation may have a bit of a niche audience. But it can’t be so niche if it is given its own section in stores (and that section is never the “Foreign Film” section)
What American cinema is though is increasingly formulaic, relying on the safe and tried and true. Sequel of successful movie after sequel. To be honest, I bet if they took a risk in promoting more foreign films in urban areas, they will actually be received well. Or really, the fans of it must demand more of it. The anime/manga fandom really began as a bunch of people buying illegal copies of “fansubs” (that is, subtitled by fans for fans). Japanese companies saw this and, for the most part, looked the other way, until finally America realized there was an actual demand for this and so they started buying the distribution rights to many shows.
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