Sunday, February 24, 2008

I Had to Laugh

"Destined to a future diet of Euroschlock where rootless characters pass through sanitized and anonymous environments of international expense-account hotels, airport lounges and offices, make love in anonymous golden cornfields as the Eurowheat waves gently in the breeze and speak to one another in any one of half a dozen badly dubbed tongues."

--Vincent Porter worrying about the future of European co-productions in 1985, quoted here.

All things considered, the prospect of plenty of Euroschlock isn't so bad at all--and is it always so anonymous, so impossible to see rooted to specific nations, particular regions, specified collective interests or desires?  The Euro co-production does represent one of the toughest puzzles but I suspect one can sort out the sediments given the time, tools, and inclination ... 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What´s funny about this quotation is that the kind of film he evokes - bad dubbing aside - could well describe most of the ´internationalist´ border-crossing films of Assayas, Claire Denis, Winterbottom ... et al. I just happened to read some other critical texts from the ´80s recently which expressed such contempt for films which "don´t speak to their indigenous audience" - even something like Hou´s JOURNEY OF THE RED BALLOON would have been a nightamre to these commentators, if they could have seen it in a crystal ball in 1985!

Frank Partisan said...

You might start a revival.