Le bulldozer hollywoodien

Voici un extrait d'un essay que j'ai rendu le trimestre dernier pour mon séminaire graduate (j'ai eu un A), que j'ai intitulé The Franco-American War on Culture. J'ai pas mal bouquiné sur le sujet et j'ai été horrifié d'apprendre - grand naïf que je suis - qu'Hollywood avait pour but déclaré de réduire à néant les industries nationales et s'imposer sur tous les continents. La France est le pays qui résiste le mieux grâce à la taxe spéciale (sur chaque ticket acheté, quel que soit le film, un pourcentage nourrit des fonds qui servent à l'aide des films purement français); sur le marché national, les films nationaux oscillent entre 15 et 35% des parts du marché (le reste pour les films étatsuniens), alors que dans la grande majorité des autres pays, la part des films nationaux est le plus souvent inférieure à 10%, même pour des pays cinématographiques qui ont dominé à une période donnée, comme l'Italie ou l'Allemagne.

C'est très français, ce que je vais dire mais la diversité culturelle est l'essence même de l'humanité, et si on doit se battre, on se battra ! La France doit néanmoins être plus aggressive sur le marché étatsunien si elle veut grapiller quelques miettes et commencer à changer les mentalités (car, quoiqu'on dise, les médias façonnent les esprits et si la population étatsunienne ne connaît pas grand-chose des autres pays, c'est parce qu'on ne lui donne pas accès à ces informations); elle doit aussi s'engager fortement dans une coopération européenne de grande envergure.

Let’s end the discussion with the big bone of contention between France and the United States: cinema. The aim here is not to go back over the blatant and declared imperialist view of the United States through the use of their movies around the world – it is a recognized fact and we take it as such. As a matter of fact, Will H. Hays, the head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), pompously declared in a speech delivered in London in 1923: “We are going to sell America to the world with American motion pictures.[1]” After all,

 

Members of our Association have taken… definite steps to make certain that every film that goes from America abroad, wherever it shall be sent, shall correctly portray to the world the purposes, the ideals, the accomplishments, the opportunities, and the life of America.

 

Even more straightforward, the head of the BFDC’s Movie Division stated, in 1939:

 

Persistently and adroitly, we must make the foreign movie-goer acutely conscious that the American picture is a product of decidedly superior quality – of rich and varied artistry, of entertainment value unmatchable in the run of the mill output of our competitors abroad (…) We must make this high quality factor so universally recognized that local audiences abroad will have no desire to see inferior films that owe their existence simply to some government legislation or subsidy.[2]

 

Furthermore, President Wilson was well aware that cinema was “the very highest medium for the dissemination of public intelligence, and since it speaks a universal language, it lends itself importantly to the presentation of America’s plans and purposes”[3], an echo to the phrase “what is good for America is good for the whole world.” In a word,

 

No American industry was more self-consciously rivalrous about its role in shaping international cultural trends, none more engaged in reaching out, responding to, and shaping consumer tastes abroad, none more aggressive in taking on the barriers and obstacles to its installation in other societies [than Hollywood]. Economically, motion pictures were far and away the most remunerative cultural export.[4]

 

Nowadays, critics and experts seem to have reached the following consensus:

 

Hollywood did not rely on the popularity of its movies to secure its worldwide dominance, but on monopolistic trade practices and the power of the United States government – primarily through extensive collaboration with the State Department – to coerce foreign governments into abandoning the effectively similar import restrictions on Hollywood films that were privately applied to European films imported into the US (…) Ultimately, the conclusion that Hollywood’s film dominance has been the product of economic and political maneuvering on a Machiavellian scale is inescapable (…) The dominance of American films has very little to do with aesthetics and consumer preference and a great deal to do with politics and greed (…) Hollywood’s position must be considered the result of manipulation of the international political economy involving the interplay of economics and politics in the world arena.[5]

 

And since “the archive of MPPDA’s foreign office has never been available to researchers[6]”, some mystery remains.

 

However, there is always a blank in most of the literature on the subject, and it concerns the American domestic market itself: it is very rarely mentioned that it is not very much open – to say the least – to foreign movies, whatever they are and wherever they come from. I contacted the Motion Picture Association of American (MPAA) to have some statistics, and they were unable to provide them for they do not have such statistics. Uff-Moller puts forward the number of 0,25% of the representation of foreign movies in the United States[7]. Montazani states that, because foreign movies are mostly distributed by independent distributors (more than 80% in 1998 and 1999), they are broadcast on fewer than 100 screens (94 out of 37185 in 1999)[8]! He concludes that

 

European movies only have a small market share in the United States. The market is indeed dominated by the domestic blockbusters, distributed by the majors and broadcast in most of the movie theaters. Specialty cinemas [most of them are situated in New York and Washington states and in California] and non-theatrical theaters [in universities and museums, most of the time] are the only broadcasting space for European movies.[9]

 

The European Union buys American films and audiovisual products twelve times more than it sells to the United States. 70% of films and audiovisual products broadcast in Europe are American; the opposite is less than 1%.[10] Therefore when Americans criticize “protectionist France”, as it is always dubbed in the press, it is the pot that calls the kettle black! For there is indeed here a paradox: there is no denying in the fact that the United States is made up of a cosmopolitan population which, as a UCLA professor I had was saying, is “the great strength of this country”, echoing very much Hays’ ideas:

 

There is a special reason why America should have given birth and prosperous nurture to the motion picture and its world-wide entertainment. America in the very literal sense is truly the world state. All races, all creeds, all men are to be found here…[11]

 

That may be one of the reasons explaining the so-called universality contains in American films. But why is the opposite untrue? Being from all around the world, the American population would logically be receptive of other cultures, wouldn’t they? To this question, the professor replied “American film dominates because it is the best written and otherwise crafted.” Quite frankly, I was bewildered by such a concise answer, an answer that is not even backed up by any arguments. True it is Americans make great movies, but not always – there are really bad ones coming from Hollywood. And I was surprised that such a respected professor totally left in the dark the hermetic system mentioned earlier. Despite the booming and blossoming of independent movies in the United States, it is really hard for any independent producer to make his/her movie. And when it comes to foreign films, it is quite the same. Would we go as far as saying that the American population, allegedly put off by subtitles and a culture that is too alien to his/hers, is not willing to see foreign movies? I don’t think so. During my research, I discovered that many people wanted to be offered a much larger choice, a choice that they currently do not have, even in big cities such as Los Angeles – many people told me that it was hard to find a foreign film either in a movie theater or at a video rental store. The demand does exist but nothing is done to satisfy it – it is thus stifled by the big machine that is Hollywood which dominates the national market, and if it seems legitimate to some to know the ethnicity of every inhabitant, it is unnecessary to know the percentage of foreign films broadcast in the United States. The demand is not supported by the supply, that is why it does not seem to be high, and this goes hand in hand with the very poor quality of the coverage of foreign news on television.

 

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[1] Trumpbour, John, Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European struggles for mastery of the global film industry, 1920-1950, Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, page 17.

 

[2] Grazia, Victoria de, Irresistible Empire: America’s advance through twentieth-century Europe, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005, page 333.

 

[3] Ibid, pages 298-299.

 

[4] Ibid, page 288.

 

[5] Ulff-Moller, Jens, Hollywood’s film wars with France: film-trade diplomacy and the emergence of the French film quota policy, Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2001, Introduction pages XIII, XVI and XVII.

 

[6] Ibid, page XVI.

 

[7] Ibid, page XV.

[8] “Quand l’Europe s’invite en Amérique” by Fabrizio Montanari in Quelle diversité face à Hollywood ?, Condé-sur-Noireau (France) : Corlet-Télérama, 2002, page 91.

 

[9] Ibid, page 92. My own translation.

 

[10] Creton, Laurent, Économie du Cinéma, Perspectives Stratégiques, Paris : Nathan, c1994, page 103.

 

[11] Trumpbour, John, Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European struggles for mastery of the global film industry, 1920-1950, Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, page 19.