Page 595 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| World C nema

Jane Campion went on to produce Love Serenade, the debut feature by Aus-
tralian director Shirley Barrett that won Camera D’Or at Cannes in 1997. The
film’s surreal, melancholy atmosphere seems to emanate from the small town
in the country’s south where two sisters fall for the same big-city DJ. The film
moves through the stark openness of empty, fenced yards, and these bleak spaces
make the lush, fetid swamp, the setting for the film’s finish all the more surpris-
ing. In this story of youthful passions and middle-aged dalliance, Barrett’s char-
acters embody the tension of the place and the actions of the sisters seem to
spring from the landscape itself. Nature and its atmospheres, and the characters
that come to life in its settings connect Australian films and fascinate the world.

DisTriBuTing worLD CinEma

In the pre-cable, pre-video, and pre-DVD mid-1970s, a vital repertory the-
ater circuit existed with over two hundred venues across the United States. In
those years, one notable independent distributor called Kino International was
founded to supply classic and foreign language art films to those venues. Kino
boasted a rare collection of cinematic masterworks available for theatrical dis-
tribution. Their first collection was a library of over one hundred European and
Asian art films of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. As technology and media corpo-
rations continue to transform, so does the availability of international films in
theatrical releases. Art-houses and 35 mm films are harder and harder to find.
Sometimes classic art films are shown at public theaters and film festivals, and
audiences are able to see films on the big screens for which they were originally
intended. With the transition to video and DVD, by the 1980s it became difficult

hollywood PoaChing

While world cinema often struggles at the American box office, and while—right or wrong—
American distributors often declare that Americans don’t like foreign films, Hollywood fre-
quently models its scripts off successful world cinema. Hence, for instance, 2007’s Oscar
winner for Best Picture and Best Director, The Departed (2006) is a remake of Hong Kong
directors Andrew Lau Wai-Keung and Alan Mak Siu-Fai’s Infernal Affairs (2002), numerous
Japanese horror films have been remade in Hollywood, including Dark Water (2005), The
Ring (2002), and The Grudge (2004); and even classics such as John Sturges’s The Magnifi-
cent Seven (1960) or Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (2004) are remakes of, respectively,
Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Sumurai (1954) and Yojimbo (1961).
In another form of poaching, Hollywood often woos foreign directors, cinematographers,
actors, and, recently, stunt choreographers with its larger budgets and increased glamour
and audience. Thus, for instance, from Jet Li and Chow Yun-Fat to Mike Myers and Nicole
Kidman, Peter Weir and John Woo to Alfonso Cuaron and Peter Jackson, many of “Ameri-
can” cinema’s top talents and earners are from other countries, sometimes (as with Jackson)
to the benefit of the development of local cinema, but more often at the expense of their
potential contribution to that development.