The theme of these columns over the last two years has been the need for an internationalised understanding of films -where they come from, what they deal with, how they mean to affect us. So it might come as a surprise to regular readers that this month I argue that the flow of movies outside their own country should be stopped. Dead.
Yet this argument is, in fact, a rational proposal to stimulate world cinema. It would work like this: for two years, say 2008 and 2009, no country would export its films or import any foreign films. The mutually agreed closure of borders would be fixed five years in advance in order to allow national film industries to plan for the drastic change in domestic market circumstances. Two years of closure should be enough time to change the way producers think. It would be a period of inwardness-a detox. By 2010, after this voluntary isolation, world cinema would be immeasurably better.
It's obvious why this won't happen, but here are three compelling reasons why it should: Germany in the late 1910s, Russia in the 1910s and 1920s, and Iran in the 1980s and 1990s. Only when Germany isolated its film production between 1916 and 1921 did its filmmakers begin to become distinctive. Unable to rely on new aesthetic models from abroad, they took a think tank approach to their own work, and within a few years, world-class talents such as Fritz Lang, Robert Wiene, FW Murnau, and GW Pabst emerged. Faced with empty screens, they were forced to invent.
Despite the coercions of Bolshevism, that is what Russian and Soviet directors did too. Before 1914, Russian cinema was dominated by French products. When the country entered the first world war, most international film companies closed their Moscow offices. Almost immediately, the country's filmmaking became more distinctive. After the revolution, a group of now famous directors-Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin-answered the question: "How can we make our national cinema different from others?" by changing the way films are edited. After the Islamic revolution in 1979, Iranian directors saw few western films. The most innovative of them drew on the traditions of Persian poetry and philosophy-not cinema at all-and came up with a unique paradocumentary approach and some of the great films of the 1990s.
The idea of isolationism makes many people bristle, but I am proposing just a temporary period of celibacy. Without its imports from the US, the British film industry would have four times as much screen time to fill and, assuming that people continued to go to the movies, four times the income. The stalled talents of British cinema would have a chance to develop. Small-scale digital production would accelerate the process. The British equivalent of the Coen brothers might emerge. The big James Bond sound stages could be given over to Danny Boyle, Gurinder Chadha, Michael Winterbottom, Stephen Frears, Terence Davies, Marc Evans and Lynne Ramsay, who would have five years to plan big, imaginative, entertaining films.
Nearly every other country would undergo a similar change. With the exception of Denmark, each European country is currently punching well below its weight. Australasian cinema's two peaks were in the 1970s and 1990s, when filmmakers confidently dealt with a diverse range of ideas-racism, landscape theology and sexuality. Faced with the imaginative and commercial gap left by the temporary disappearance of US, Asian and European film, that continent's filmmakers would again be forced to look at their own societies and pleasures and find stories and styles to express them. Ditto South American cinema. The art-house directors of Taiwan, South Korea, China and Japan would suffer from the loss of their international advocates but, as in Europe, the clear demarcations between art and commercial cinema would be redrawn and new genres-think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-could emerge.
Perhaps only India would remain unaffected. Though it exports to the middle east and now Europe, its lower production budgets and complex regionalism has made it almost self-sufficient. Its current aesthetic moribundity needs a different kind of shake up-perhaps along the lines of the mega Goa film festival in which Delhi has just heavily invested.
Since America is a vast net exporter of cinema, it would be the first and most powerful country to veto the two-year detox. This would be a shame because it too could benefit. The US movies which do best at the international box office are the Ur-action blockbusters. Given five years to anticipate the cessation of revenue from these, the studios would need to look to other markets within their own country: middle-aged and old people, middle-class Hispanic, black and Asian audiences, even intellectuals.
The bonus of my proposal would come on 1st January 2010. After two years of denial, imagine the pleasures of rediscovery and re-acquaintance. Immediately after the second world war, French moviegoers were able to catch up on the treasures of American cinema, seeing Citizen Kane, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity and The Little Foxes all in the single month of July 1946. January 2010 could be even better.
