Cinemas of the World: Film and Society from 1895 to the Present Day

James Chapman. Cinemas of the World: Film and Society from 1895 to the Present Day. Reaktion Books, 2003. 480 pages; $29.95, £19.95.

Back into the Picture

One way of looking at the relationship between the film industry of the United States and those of other nations is to see Hollywood as an occidental Godzilla rampaging across the globe and eating up the national cinemas in its path, while those cinemas fight back, like pygmies, with futile, home crafted weapons. These consist of alternative styles, such as German Expressionism, or Italian Neo-Realism, or they are forged by great auteurs, like Ozu, Satyajit Ray and Jean Renoir. The assumption is that Godzilla is a monster of mass produced rubbish, while the trampled lands are home to a contrasting innovation and art.

Not so, says James Chapman, a senior lecturer in Film and Television at the Open University in the United Kingdom; this view overemphasizes the importance of the art house in the history of international films: "Popular genres, such as musicals, comedies, romances and thrillers have been staples of most national cinemas, produced in the local idiom for domestic consumption. Yet these indigenous traditions of popular cinema have been written out of film history due to the continuing prevalence of aesthetic assumptions about 'art' and 'quality' and cultural prejudices against the 'popular'." One of the aims of this bulky comparative analysis of world cinema is to put commercial film making back into the picture, to present a nation's output not only as a cultural, social, or political enterprise, but also as a product working...