Amour's Oscar nod confirms golden age for subtitled films

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/jan/12/amour-oscar-nod-subtitled-films

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It was no shock to see Michael Haneke's Amour on the best foreign film list for this year's Oscars. What did surprise pundits was Hollywood's recognition of this unflinching Austrian film about ageing as a candidate for best picture, among such expected contenders as Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, Ben Affleck's Argo and Tom Hooper's Les Misérables.

Academy voters appear to be hinting at a new openness to other cultures and the growing acceptability of subtitled entertainment. "It really is unusual for a foreign language film to do this well and to be nominated in two other main categories too, for best adapted screenplay and best director," said Charles Gant, film editor of Heat magazine.

Not since Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima, shot almost entirely in Japanese, was nominated in 2007 and Ang Lee's action-packed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2001 has a work in another language stood as an equal next to the best of English language cinematic storytelling.

Audiences in Britain in particular are responding to the growing accessibility of high-quality foreign films, which are easier to access at home now.

Critically rated television shows such as the French series Spiral, Hatufim – the Israeli show Homeland is based on – the Sicilian Inspector Montalbano, and BBC Four's smorgasbord of Scandinavian shows, The Killing, The Bridge and Borgen, have allowed British audiences to appreciate foreign entertainment. Home delivery services such as Love Film, Apple TV's iTunes, Netflix and Curzon On Demand mean that viewers can download and stream new and classic foreign titles on a whim, rather than seeking out a DVD. "There was previously a real access problem for this kind of film," recalls Gant. "There was a short run at your local cinema, and that was your only chance."

Changes in technology have helped at the cinema as well as at home, Gant said. "Digital projection now means cinema programmers have a lot more flexibility. They don't just have to run a film for a week now. And with Curzon on Demand they are actually offering people the chance to see foreign films at home on the day of release."

Parents are no longer marooned at home, waiting for cultural news to reach them several weeks later. "People with kids can put them to bed and then run the new foreign language film on their television in the same week their friends are talking about it. In the past they would have had to wait four months; the usual window after a theatrical release before the DVD came out."

Lorraine Sullivan, a Frenchwoman living in London and curator of the Institut Français's season of international television this month argues that home consumption of TV series has helped. "The idea for a long time around Europe was that British television audiences didn't like anything in a foreign language. Now that has changed," she said. "It is funny, because on the political side Britain is getting perhaps more conservative, yet its attitudes to Europe in terms of an audience for culture is growing." Her festival of television, at London's Ciné Lumière, will celebrate the best TV series around Europe – a French show, Rebound, about the return of the dead, and the world premiere of Jean Reno in Jo.

The new appetite for foreign fare might have started with the mass popularity of translated Scandinavian thrillers, from Stieg Larsson to Jo Nesbø, or it may have been the accidental result of cash-strapped public television schedulers searching for new quality drama with a reasonable price tag.

For Gant, the surge of interest has an "oddly cyclical feel". He said: "Before the multi-channel era, foreign language films were regularly shown on the main television channels and this is how many people my age will have seen their first subtitled films.

"Now the film programming of the four main channels has become much more ratings-oriented and mainstream and all the foreign language films have moved out to specialist channels. An average kid today is not exposed to the same kind of wide range of films."

Gant suspects the increasing use of computers and phones for social media means that resistance to reading type while relaxing has disappeared, making subtitles less frightening.

The success in Hollywood of a genre-defying film like Haneke's Amour may still prove a one-off fluke and could be the result of recent changes to the nomination system.

"Amour is a film that had a lot of very vocal cheerleaders," said Gant. "To get a best picture nomination now you need to have 5% of the first nominations of all those voting. So as long as you have some people who absolutely love your film, you are in. And this means that highly arty films can now win a nomination," he said.

This helps to explain the other surprise nomination on the best picture list from a first time director: Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild, a fantasy response to the devastation of the Katrina flooding.

FOREIGN HITS

Hiroshima Mon Amour 1959 French director Alain Resnais's subtle dialogue about memory, credited with helping to kickstart the New Wave. Won a screenwriting nomination for Marguerite Duras and starred Emmanuelle Riva who last week, at the age of 85, became the oldest star to be nominated for a best actress Oscar for her role in Michael Haneke's Amour.

Cinema Paradiso 1988

Nostalgic Italian drama written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore and scored by Ennio Morricone. A film director remembers his childhood friendship with a projectionist. Won an Oscar for best foreign-language film.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 2000

Ang Lee's Mandarin-language film, which starred Zhang Ziyi, pictured left, and was packed with extraordinary martial arts sequences, won four Oscars.

Talk to Her 2002

Spaniard Pedro Almodóvar won a best director nomination and a best screenplay Oscar for this story of life, death, love and obsession, featuring a gored female matador and a dance student in a coma.