The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946-1973

Abstract

“And God Created Woman is a sex film. It's called art because it's foreign” (p. 116). This quip by an American movie theater manager gets at the heart of the “film renaissance” described in Tino Balio's book about foreign films on American screens: the conflation of foreign films with art films. The ebb and flow of the popularity of foreign film in the United States is an interesting and important subject in film history. A book such as this could have considered the notion of the art film and its reception, both critical and commercial. Or it could have taken as its topic films in languages other than English and their distribution and reception in the United States. Or it could have illuminated how and why Jacques Tati's slapstick films were grouped with the likes of Bernardo Bertolucci's psychological dramas in a move not unlike the way the Brigitte Bardot sex film became an art film. Such a study could also have described the social changes (the expansion of a college-educated audience due to the G.I. Bill, increased foreign travel, the expansion of foreign language study in the 1950s and 1960s, and changes in urban and suburban life that moved theaters from Times Square to the Upper East Side) that shaped the rise of foreign film in America.