The writer’s strike and European Cinema

Here’s a quote from an article about the Hollywood writer’s strike that was in The Observer yesterday (Sunday 13th):

“For the rest of the community, there is growing unease and uncertainty. Celebrity stylist Phillip Bloch, who has tentatively started work for the Oscars, said the strike would make itself felt more and more widely. ‘Right now it affects you but doesn’t paralyse you: it’s not like the garbage not being collected or the subway [trains] going on strike. But it could go on a very long time. Imagine a world with no new movies. Then people would notice.'”

Okay, maybe we really shouldn’t pay much attention to the opinions of a ‘celebrity stylist’, but the first thing that struck me about this was the quite astounding arrogance. ‘A world with no new movies’? So no movies are made anywhere else apart from Hollywood (and by extension the US). Well, that’s news to me, and I can pretty honestly say that I could frankly live quite happily if there were no new movies made in Hollywood ever again. OK, that’s perhaps a little harsh, and I do like a lot of US cinema, even of the slickest, most brain-dead type, but virtually all the films I’ve seen recently that have made a really big impression are actually from Europe or Latin America. To give some examples: from France (Lemming, Hidden), from Germany (The Lives of Others), from the UK (This is England, Frozen), from Spain (Volver, Fragile), from Italy (The Family Friend, I’m Not Afraid). And that’s far from everything that’s out there.

The second thing that struck me was this. Isn’t the writer’s strike actually a great opportunity for non-US cinema. In a few months time, there’s going to be a complete absence of US product coming to the cinemas, which means one of two things: either the distributors will have to start releasing films that have been sitting on the shelves for some time, or there’s the potential for the US product’s hold over the distribution networks to be loosened. We may actually see some non-US films being getting being issued to more cinemas than normal, lasting more than a week or two in them and having more of a chance to hit the mainstream.

So I really hope there are some enterprising producers out there who are looking at the situation and thinking to themselves, ‘hmmm… there’s an opportunity there’. And then maybe all those celebrity stylists out there may begin to understand that there’s more to cinema than the latest Adam Sandler production.