Moviegoing is the province of the young. Most European countries suffer twice here. First, they have older populations than does the United States. Note: x 35 Edit. Television has cut into the American and European cinematic markets in different fashion. Video rentals are a more important income source in the American market, whereas the sale of television rights plays a bigger role in most of Western Europe.
The revenue reliance on broadcast television makes European movies less suited for the export market. They do little to enforce high standards of quality production. Note: c Edit. Glitzy special effects are rare. We find these same features in made-for-TV films in the United States. The home video market, more prominent in the United States, is more competitive and demanding than television, and imposes greater discipline on the moviemaker. The roles of television and subsidies are closely linked.
Typically the stations face domestic-content restrictions, must spend a certain percentage of revenue on domestic films, must operate a film production subsidiary, or they willfully overpay for films for political reasons.
The end result is overpayment for broadcast rights—the most important subsidy that many European moviemakers receive. Audience levels are typically no more than one or two million at the television level, even in the larger countries such as France—too small to justify the sums paid to moviemakers for television rights on economic grounds.
European films receive many other forms of subsidy. In France, for instance, direct subsidies are available from the national government, regional governments, European subsidy bodies such as Eur-images and coproduction subsidies through other national governments. Often French producers need only put up 15 percent of the budget of their films to receive subsidies. Martin Dale, a cinema industry analyst, has estimated that the state provides at least 70 percent of the funding for the average continental film, Read more at location European moviemakers; rather, they have become the primary customer.
Subsidies encourage producers to serve domestic demand and the wishes of politicians and cinematic bureaucrats, rather than produce movies for international export. Many films will be made, even when they have little chance of turning a profit in stand-alone terms. The training of cinematic talent in the United States and Europe reflects these differences.
American film schools are like business schools in many regards. European film schools have become more like humanities programs, emphasizing semiotics, critical theory, and contemporary left-wing philosophies. The European directors that survive tend to be established and to have longstanding political connections; Read more at location By numerous measures, such as attendance or number of films released, the Indian movie industry is the largest and the most successful in the world.
Indian movies are frequently criticized for their generic nature or sappy plots, but in terms of music, cinematography, and use of color, they are often quite beautiful and even pathbreaking compared to Western productions.
The Hong Kong film industry has experienced export success from the s onward, mostly throughout Southeast Asia. At its peak it released more films per year than any Western country, and as an exporter it was second only to the United States. Furthermore, Hong Kong cinema arose in a market that was dominated by Hollywood up through the late s. At first Hong Kong movies focused on the martial arts, but they subsequently branched out to include police movies, romance, comedy, horror, and ghost stories, among other genres.
European cinema does appear less creative Read more at location But by most common critical standards, cinematic creativity has risen in Taiwan, China, Iran, South Korea, the Philippines, Latin America, and many parts of Africa, among other locales. Even within Europe, the creative decline is restricted to a few of the larger nations, such as France and Italy. Danish cinema is more influential and more successful today than in times past, and arguably the same is true for Spanish cinema as well.
Mexican and Argentinean film-makers are enjoying a resurgence. At the time of the transition, equipping the theaters with sound and making movies with sound were costly. To recoup these costs, theaters sought out high-quality, high-expenditure productions for large audiences. The small, cheap, quick film became less profitable, given the suddenly higher fixed costs of production and presentation. More generally, the higher the fixed costs of production, the greater the importance of drawing a large audience and the greater the importance of demand forecasting and marketing.
Today costly special effects and expensive celebrity stars drive the push for blockbusters in similar fashion, and favor Hollywood production as well. As far as the American film industry is concerned, globalization has brought into being a deterritorialized, temporally and spatially compressed economic system through which Hollywood conquers the world film market. As a cultural manifestation of American economic power, Hollywood is bound to have a deep impact on Chinese cinema, and its influence will infiltrate other arenas of social, political, and cultural life.
This is especially true if we understand cinema as a cultural product and a symbolic system that maintains a nuanced and complexly symbiotic relation with the system of values and culture of a nation. Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Skip to main content. In each of these cultural sectors, the market has room for many producers, in large part because the costs of production are relatively low. But what about film? In no other cultural area is America's export prowess so strong. Movies are very expensive to make, and in a given year there are far fewer films released than books, CDs, or paintings.
Most foreign films remain box-office busts. The Scandinavian version was perfectly good, but nobody saw it in the U. This is despite the fact that foreign-made films are gaining an increasing share of their own industries: Japanese are seeing more Japanese films than ever; so are Russians, Chinese, and Koreans. Box office is simply growing across the board in those countries. China, with a population of 1. And why should this change radically, when the U.
Without a strong export market, countries such as China are likely to resist American pressure to deal with the single biggest threat to studio revenue — piracy — which has grown rampant thanks to websites operated everywhere from Nigeria to Ukraine. One study estimated that the U. The newly signed deal between the United States and China, allowing more U. Way back at the dawn of film, the American dream was created by foreigners — people like Louis B.
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