The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946-1973

by Tino Balio

Largely shut out of American theaters since the 1920s, foreign films such as Open City, Bicycle Thief, Rashomon, The Seventh Seal, Breathless, La Dolce Vita and L’Avventura played after World War II in a growing number of art houses around the country and created a small but influential art film market devoted to the acquisition, distribution, and exhibition of foreign-language and English-language films produced abroad.  Nurtured by successive waves of imports from Italy, Great Britain, France, Sweden, Japan, and the Soviet Bloc, the renaissance was kick-started by independent distributors working out of New York; by the 1960s, however, the market had been subsumed by Hollywood.
    From Roberto Rossellini’s Open City in 1946 to Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris in 1973, Tino Balio tracks the critical reception in the press of such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Tony Richardson, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Luis Buñuel, Satyajit Ray, and Milos Forman.  Their releases paled in comparison to Hollywood fare at the box office, but their impact on American film culture was enormous. The reception accorded to art house cinema attacked motion picture censorship, promoted the director as auteur, and celebrated film as an international art.  Championing the cause was the new “cinephile” generation, which was mostly made up of college students under thirty.
    The fashion for foreign films depended in part on their frankness about sex. When Hollywood abolished the Production Code in the late 1960s, American-made films began to treat adult themes with maturity and candor. In this new environment, foreign films lost their cachet and the art film market went into decline.
 

Genres: Film, Nonfiction

362 pages, Paperback

First published November 5, 2010

Reviews

[Joe Meyers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful account of the great influx of foreign language films in the United States in the years after World War II and the rise of art house movie theaters all over the country.
It was a heady time of influential filmmakers such as Bergman, Fellini & Godard.
The book juggles the commercial aspects of foreign film distribution in the U.S. along with the aesthetics of films that were much more adult than the Hollywood output of that period.

[Dan Lalande · Rating 3 out of 5]

History of foreign film distribution in America, from the big bang of the Italian neo-realist movement to the "succes de scandale" of 'Last Tango in Paris.' While the subject constitutes a worthy footnote in film history, the book is not much more than a long, chronological list. Its only concessions to the analytical are generous quotes from the beat critics of the day, though this does restore certain reputations (particularly the disgraced Bosley Crowther's).

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very informative on the era if a little dry and repetitive. Must be a first edition too because there are a lot of typos.