The state of foreign language films in Britain

"Andi Engel of Artificial eye is particularly critical of contemporary audience taste: 'The problem is not really to do with the actual number of films imported, but that those which are imported don't seem to be reaching audiences. When we started, we could bring in a film like Marguerite Duras' India Song and people would come to see it - not in vast numbers, I admit, but enough to cover our costs. If we showed a Duras film now, I'm convinced that many fewer people would come (...) People seem to have lost their curiosity about foreign films. Unless a film is really hyped by the press, what I call the Jean de Florette syndrome, they just don't want to know.'

(...)

Andi Engel is particularly scathing about the effects of what he sees as a critical bias towards Hollywood, perhaps encouraged by the way film studies have developed over the last twenty years. This is obviously most apparent in the popular press, though it also finds its critical and academic echo in other quarters. 'The term"art cinema" has become a dirty word to some people, something to be dismissed as bourgeois rubbish. Anything which is not genre cinema must be automatically bad-either it's entertaining or it's boring, there's nothing in between. It is not so much that people aren't interested in cinema, or prepared to take it seriously; it's that they are only interested in certain kinds of cinema and lack any cinematic curiosity. It's like going into a library and deciding you will only ever look at one part of it. It doesn't mean that you can't read; it means that you are not prepared to consider everything there is on offer, even out of curiosity. I find that attitude frightening.'"

What it is interesting in these quotations, apart from its content, is that they were written in 1989 (Sight & Sound - Autumn 1989).