'50's US cultural imperialism and its blowback

Teddy Boys. I think they were in the '60s, though. So called because they wore Edwardian style suits. An early attempt to parlay their enthusiasm for American youth culture into something perversely British. Photo by Stanley Kubrick.

There was a half hour NBC news show in the 1950's called Outlook which ran an episode on British teenagers and how American youth culture had taken over the country. They listened to American music. One really popular British singing sensation imitated American music. They watched Hollywood movies, wore blue jeans.

They didn't know that within ten years it would all come back on us. There'd be the British invasion, the Beatles would overwhelm everything and American bands would start singing with English accents.

At the end of World War Two, the last demand that the United States made of France before they could receive aid under the Marshall Plan was that they sacrifice their movie industry. They had to lift the limit on how many foreign films could be shown. Soon, the place was awash in Hollywood movies.

That came back on the US, too, with the French New Wave somehow being inspired by terrible American B movies.

I don't know if anything like that can happen again. American culture is like the American military---it's not very good, but they pour so many billions of dollars into it that it overwhelms everything else.

Filmmakers from other countries are taking inspiration from American movies, but no matter how good they are, can they compete with a massive ad campaign for the Tranformers?

An English critic in that NBC news show said that British movies in the '50's were imitating Hollywood movies, but they wound up with movies that weren't America, weren't British; weren't art, weren't  commercial. They didn't pull it off quite as well as the French.

Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami made a documentary called 10 on Ten. He had made a feature called Ten which took the form of ten conversations a woman has while driving. So in the documentary, he spoke to the camera about film and filmmaking as he drove to one of his favorite locations.

Kiarostami told a story, that he was at a film festival in France. He went to see an American movie shown to an enormous audience at a massive outdoor theater. They all watched the movie and when it was over, the crowd began booing. He thought Hollywood must have lost his touch.

But he went to another American movie at the festival and the same thing happened. It was got a huge audience, bigger than anything from any other country got, the audience sat through it and again they booed it at the end.

He noted that, in spite of the conflict Iran was in with the US, there was some tendency in Iran to imitate Hollywood.

And that was his advice to aspiring filmmakers. It was too late for him. He made arthouse films and he couldn't change now. But try to imitate Hollywood. Follow the Hollywood formula.

I'll mention one other thing...an article I read on art in China. In the West, the art world believes in formalism, that form, not content, is all that matters. Western art doesn't say anything. Chinese art tends to be political---not propaganda but dealing with issues in Chinese society. One that comes to mind was a series of portraits of old men called "We Are Bachelors", dealing with one consequence of the country having more men than women.

When westerners buy Chinese art, they go either for art that is purely decorative, or they go for art that is anti-Chinese which mainly take the form of paintings of corrupt Communist officials with naked ladies. It's the only kind of political art rich Americans go for.

And we're seeing the same thing with Iranian film. Iranian director Jafar Panahi was banned from working for a number of years after he supported the attempted government overthrow by Mousavi in 2009. Mousavi had suddenly announced that he was running for president three months before the election, he barely campaigned and only in two cities. But, before the polls had even closed, he announced that he won the election and called on his supporters to take to the streets to stop them from stealing the election from him. The western press, of course, sided with him.

So, banned from writing or directing movies for twenty years, Panahi filmed a movie in his apartment called This Is Not a Film. It was made for 3,200 euros and you wonder where the money went. It got an Oscar.

I don't know what it tells you that nothing happened to Panahi. He plainly violated the 20-year ban and went on to make another movie after that.

The west has no interest in anything coming from Iran unless it's an attack on the Iranian government. Millionaire Hollywood liberals are as dumb as the rest of us---they hate whoever the government tells them to hate.