foreign films

[James Heartfield]

In message <Pine.GSU.4.21.0203011647260.5566-100000 at garcia.efn.org>, 
Dennis Robert Redmond <dredmond at efn.org> writes
>On Fri, 1 Mar 2002, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>> The US public hardly consume any foreign films, though.

Hollywood makes more in sales abroad than it does at home, I was told 
recently. My view of it would be that Hollywood _is_ world cinema. I was 
surprised a few years ago, visiting New York, to find that the leftist 
filmmaker Ken Loach had a following amongst the NY avant garde. In my 
mind Loach was in the tradition of socialist realism, meaning 'art for 
the masses', and yet over the water it was apparent that in truth it was 
art for the intelligentsia - and thinking about it, in the UK too, I 
realised that's his audience.

In most European countries, and beyond there, too, I would guess, 
working class people consume American culture and middle class people 
hang onto a high culture that is more pointedly national. Though I was 
interested to hear  that in S Korea the avant garde includes a school of 
'yBa's', i.e. 'young British artists', but not as a national 
identification, but as a style (epater le bourgeois, roughly).
-- 
James Heartfield
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