Ach! Foreign films, ewww! How come some people think that? I live in the USA, and I’ve come to find that the foreign films that find their way here are usually better than the ones made in Hollywood. It’s because the bad films made in foreign countries don’t get exported over here. India, for example, makes more films than most of the rest of the world combined, but the majority are terrible films and never escape the borders of the country. The old films that make here in the US and world markets are those that are either high quality films which really deserve that distinction, or they’re films that have an excellent chance of being commercially successful despite their flaws.
Plus foreign filmmakers generally are not powered by megalithic corporations whose primary concern is always the dollar. They are artists who want to produce high quality art. In some countries filmmakers even receive government funding. So, foreign films that make it to the world market tend to be much, much better than the usual crop of American films.
Of course, we have great American directors as well—Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, and a host of other names come immediately to mind. But these filmmakers either have amassed enough clout to work within the Hollywood picture industry with an unusual degree of freedom, or they have chosen or been forced to work outside it, just as Godard, de Oliveira, von Trier, Yimou, Kiarostami, Arvelo, Rhomer, Herzog, Miyazaki, Cantet, and the other great foreign filmmakers do. And while there might not be much difference between the best American filmmakers and the best foreign filmmakers, there is a huge difference between the best foreign filmmakers who make it to the world market and the studio minions who constitute most of the poor to mediocre American filmmakers you usually see represented at the local megaplex. So, yes, I think foreign film buffs are typically people with more artistic sophistication than the norm; even if they don’t start out that way, they end up that way because the foreign films which make it to our shores are typically far superior to most home-made studio fare, so viewers who patronize them grow to recognize and appreciate a better quality product.
