There is a recognized attitude for American audiences to dislike or ignore a film because it is subtitled, joked about in film and tv, it made me curious about the whole bias against international cinema in the states and why this is accepted for the average consumer of content. Why are viewers of “foreign films” classified as either pretentious or scholarly, why are more films not theatrically released like Parasite, and what does the “I can’t watch while also read” attitude imply about american’s perception of what is “foreign”? My first thought is that, of the top film producing nations, The United States is far more used to having everyone else speak english in addition to their native language. However, there is little expectation or standard for Americans to be multilingual, thus in the media consumed by Americans, we have a similar expectation for the media to be produced in our language.
One place to begin looking into this is formal recognition of a film’s excellence, aka awards. The Oscars represents the American standard for which films released each year are the “best,” and though problematic in many ways, reveal much about what America deems worthy. Steve Rose wrote for the Guardian a piece about Roma, and believes “the foreign language Oscar is already a messy afterthought. It was not created until the 29th Academy Awards in 1956, although special awards were given to foreign films before that. Only one entry per country is allowed.” It is already flawed that there is only one category which international cinema is truly addressed and it was not until Roma and Parasite that they were considered for any categories besides this. There are some other opportunities in shorts and documentaries, but feature length fiction films from other countries or in other languages are typically oddities at the red carpet. To elaborate upon what it means to be considered a “foreign film” is also an interesting and highly biased conversation. Hannah Giorgis for The Atlantic goes in depth about the very recent policy change made by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Basically, since its inception, the foreign film category required the film to have 50% of the language be not English. While on the surface this seems good in encouraging more linguistic representation, it has other downsides about how “foreign” is defined. Giorgis argues this is not considerate of films produced outside the US where English is now one of the primary languages due to colonization and globalization. She notes that Lionheart, a Nigerian film which includes many Nigerian Languages but uses English to tie them together, as well as The Farewell from South Korea, but neither were accepted as Foreign Films to The Oscars. This brings up many issues about identity, what is not foreign enough, what qualities make a film not American? Is it the amount of crew who are non citizens? Is it simply the language like The Academy likes to think? Is it any film produced and filmed outside the US or released theatrically elsewhere? There is a lot to consider, but our standard of what is foreign is flawed fundamentally. The Academy has since renamed the category best International
This brings us to the conversation about subtitles and language once again. Even if language is not a good indicator of where a film is from, it is important to recognize how rare it is for a subtitled film to succeed or be released on a wide scale. In the UK, it was 2% and shrinking of the box office, hinting to the fact that even in Europe where there is much more connection to other countries and language, exposure and mainstream viability of non english films is extremely low. For the American market, Indiewire repots a drop in revenue by 61% in the past seven years. And it has continued to decrease in popularity even on streaming, they say as well. Though there is no definite or concrete way to measure why this is, it is concerning as far as it’s impact on expanding horizons of americans during this global age. If such a tiny amount of externally produced media is reaching audiences, I am not optimistic that the american sensitivity and interest in other languages, cultures, and creators will increase.
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