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Timothy Noah and Marjorie Williams

the breakfast table
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from: Timothy Noah

They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To

Posted Wednesday, July 22, 1998, at 8:12 PM ET

Dear Marjorie,

I knew I could count on you for a definitive interpretation of the Conde Nast disaster. I'm not sure you've let our readers know before today about your passion for disaster movies of the 1970s; my eyes mist over when I remember the weeks just before our first child (Willie) was born, which we passed unspooling disaster video after disaster video. (We called it our "Irwin Allen Film Festival.")

Thanks for forking over the Journal. Yes, that A-hed about the Albanian film biz was a keeper. The essential joke was that the Albanians have finally discarded Stalinist doctrine but can't seem to rid themselves of a dour, Stalinist mindset that makes their cultural exports...uh...unappealing. "We modeled the film program after the French," Edi Rama, Albania's culture minister (and a former anarchist painter) told the Journal. "I think we need a new model." At the risk of weighing down a light, funny piece with a serious point, Rama's comment is telling about more than just Albania's problems. World cinema--even from countries with strong filmmaking traditions, like France--just ain't what it was thirty years ago. There was a time, in the not-too-recent past, where if you didn't go to foreign films you were missing out on an important, widely-shared cultural ritual. Today, if you don't go to foreign films, it's more likely you're missing out on some mawkish piece of shit like Il Postino. What happened? I assume part of the answer is economic: Hollywood rolled over the foreign markets, killing off many overseas film industries. Today you can go watch a big, commercial Hollywood movie or you can go watch the contemporary equivalent of a 1960s foreign film--only now we call it an "independent film," and invariably it's made in English and produced in the U.S. (or, occasionally, Britain). There are a few foreign-language films trickling into the U.S. market, and it's true, they don't all stink, but let's ask ourselves: Where are the Bergmans, the Truffauts, the Kurosawas of yesteryear? True, there are a few "star" foreign-film directors--Pedro Aldomovar; whatisname who made Tampopo (and who killed himself last year, didn't he?)--but their movies don't create anything like the cultural excitement that Goddard, Fassbinder, et. al created in years past. Do you remember what movie won Best Foreign Film this year at the Academy Awards? Last year? The year before? Do you care?

David Denby wrote a piece for the New Yorker not long ago bemoaning the death of boho cineaste culture, but he got it slightly wrong. Cineaste culture is alive and well. What's dead is the boho culture of foreign-film cineastes (and hence, to some extent, the cosmopolitanism once associated with being a movie buff).

Nostalgically,

Tim

PS. We're still awaiting a Major Literary or Academic Heavyweight to come forth and manfully admit that he/she has never read Ulysses. The prize is a free paperback copy of same.

the breakfast table
entries
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from: Timothy Noah

They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To

Posted Wednesday, July 22, 1998, at 8:12 PM ET
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Timothy Noah writes Slate's "Chatterbox" column. Marjorie Williams is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.
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