Largely shut out of American theaters since the 1920s, foreign
films such as Open City, Bicycle Thief, Rashomon, The Seventh Seal,
Breathless, La Dolce Vita, and L'Avventura played after World War
II in a growing number of art houses around the country and created
a small but influential art film market devoted to the acquisition,
distribution, and exhibition of foreign-language and
English-language films produced abroad. Nurtured by successive
waves of imports from Italy, Great Britain, France, Sweden, Japan,
and the Soviet Bloc, the renaissance was kick-started by
independent distributors working out of New York; by the 1960s,
however, the market had been subsumed by Hollywood. From Roberto
Rossellini's Open City in 1946 to Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango
in Paris in 1973, Tino Balio tracks the critical reception in the
press of such filmmakers as Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard,
Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Tony Richardson, Ingmar
Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Luis Bunuel, Satyajit Ray, and Milos
Forman. Their releases paled in comparison to Hollywood fare at the
box office, but their impact on American film culture was enormous.
The reception accorded to art house cinema attacked motion picture
censorship, promoted the director as auteur, and celebrated film as
an international art. Championing the cause was the new "cinephile"
generation, which was mostly made up of college students under
thirty. The fashion for foreign films depended in part on their
frankness about sex. When Hollywood abolished the Production Code
in the late 1960s, American-made films began to treat adult themes
with maturity and candor. In this new environment, foreign films
lost their cachet and the art film market went into decline.
General
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