I agree very much with your first part, but as to the second part about Tarr and Pasolini, the bigger question is does theatrical screenings matter as much. Home viewing I think has mostly replaced that and it doesn't seem right to judge a modern film by an outdated metric. Just because something today has had few theatrical screenings does not make it less popular than something that had more theatrical screenings back in the time when that was the only way to see films (if I remember correctly Pasolini was dead by the time VHS had any sort of prominence anywhere).

But it does unavoidably make its reception more diffuse - and that's true of titles that were originally created for home viewing.

By way of example, Ken Loach undoubtedly has a far greater international profile now than he had in the mid-1960s, but I'd be amazed if anything he's signed in the last 35 years was even a fraction as popular as Cathy Come Home, which was watched by 12 million people in 1966 in a single night, and consequently dominated public debate for weeks afterwards.

It's also become so firmly embedded in the public consciousness that references to it continue to this day - in fact, in the past six weeks alone it's inspired two separate high-profile national newspaper articles in recent weeks - and articles about politics, not art. It's pretty much unimaginable that a 2011 equivalent could have a similarly seismic cultural impact - the media has become much more fragmented. In Britain, an audience of 1.2 million would now be considered a pretty solid hit for something like Cathy Come Home, though it's hard to imagine a new production having anything like the same impact.

The media as a whole has become far more fragmented, and while in many respects that's a good thing, it does mean that these shared cultural experiences are inescapably becoming rarer - aside from the big blockbusters driven by gargantuan marketing budgets. My mum saw Bergman, Wajda, Fellini and Cacoyannis films in the late 1950s/early 1960s, and it's hard to imagine anyone less of a film buff - but they showed at her local cinema, and there was sufficient buzz about them to persuade her to give them a go (I mention Cacoyannis as he's a good example of someone who used to be hugely popular but has comprehensively fallen out of fashion). Conversely, my wife has to actually make an effort to see their equivalents - but because she's simply not interested in film as an art form, and the buzz isn't loud enough any more to reach someone like her, that means that she usually doesn't bother.

I don't know what you mean by more diffuse, but for the rest, well that's become a fact of life and why we need to change the metric for what's considered popular or canon. The old way of deciding can't work today for just the reasons you outlined.

I mean that not only are audiences much, much smaller, but they generally don't watch things at the same time any more. I'm old enough to remember when catching a film in its first fortnight really mattered, because there was the very real possibility that that might be your only chance to see it on the big screen (back in the days when that mattered too) - and if you wanted to have a decent chat about it, that was another good reason for catching it when it was hot.

Gotcha. Absolutely agree on that too. The Internet's made going by your own speed a lot easier amongst other things that hit home your point all of which I think makes concrete my point that we have to consider things differently when measuring popularity. Stuff like theatrical screenings don't really matter anymore (though as your Loach example proves it started to lose it's weight a long time ago).

I suppose you could currently consider Out 1 the new champion in this category of 'massively long film which due to only a few screenings of the full length version around the world has likely only been seen by audiences numbering in the low to mid hundreds', though I of course have no idea how you could go about weighing the respective "populaire"-ity (to steal from the Gorin box set thread!) of Rivette and Tarr.



I do wonder about the effect that distributors flitting about has on our understanding of filmmakers in the sense that, unless they have a huge success straight out of the gate, we may never see the first couple of films from a particular filmmaker's career that led up to the 'breakthrough' UK or US distributed hit simply because of the traction that is needed to get an international distributor's attention (for example, since I mentioned Il Divo a few posts back, it took a long time for Paolo Sorrentino's first feature length film One Man Up to get a UK release on DVD, and even then only in a boxset with the later and more celebrated works), and then when attention wanes a filmmaker's later films get overlooked as well. All of this can leave a somewhat bizarre puzzle to decipher for someone who may be interested in where a film fits into a larger career - even more so if the 'celebrated' film turns out to be one of a filmmaker's least interesting works!

And speaking as someone still waiting for Bruno Dumont's later films to get any kind of release, it can also be frustrating when a distributor's attention wanders to another eye-catching bauble (sorry I went a little Mark Cousins for a moment with the use of that term!) and you are left waving your hands and clicking your fingers in front of them to try to draw them back to the situation at hand! Which can I suppose raise ire from people at films that do get distributed that might not be of the same standard (or aimed at the same kind of cinemagoer) as those that were overlooked, since I suppose we don't often have to (or I suppose should have to, though it is an interesting subject) consider how a film fits into a certain philosophy of the times, or *shudder* business plan.



Perhaps the best UK cinema example in the last couple of weeks would be Tyrannosaur, which according to the Guardian podcast was pulled after only a couple of disappointing days of takings. It was also mentioned in this week's Radio 4 Film Programme podcast in which the City Screen distributor acknowledged that it was a great film but that the subject matter and a combination of factors (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy still going strong and the 'target audience' choosing to see that and Midnight In Paris instead, along with Tyrannosaur containing 'difficult and unenjoyable' subject matter) that weekend led to its fall off. Mark Kermode was still making it his pick of the week on his film show on the BBC News channel, but sadly it looks as if that film, which by all accounts has some challenging material to do with domestic violence, is not going to do the numbers that would make it into a big cinema success (to somewhat concur with MichaelB's point about cinema attendances, I'm waiting for the Blu-ray or, perhaps more likely, DVD release of the film).

Or Syberberg. If you make a habit of making films that are undistributable in the normal sense (because four hours is pretty much the upper limit that a theatrical distributor will take on for a conventional commercial run - any longer and you can't sensibly schedule evening shows without either requiring cinemas to pay overtime or audiences to leave work early), you're effectively confirming that you're not interested in "popularity" in the accepted sense. But plenty of artists do indeed prefer a small number of dedicated acolytes to a broader but less engaged fanbase.


The impact of decent distribution on a filmmaker's profile can't be underestimated - it's truly colossal. Sometimes, if a filmmaker has a really huge crossover hit at the mid-point of their career, their back catalogue will be mined for similarly marketable gems, and in the case of Almodóvar this really did involve all his professional features getting a proper if belated release. I nearly mentioned Kieslowski as a similar example, but in fact the British actually discovered him comparatively swiftly, with Camera Buff getting a UK release back in 1981 - though it's certainly true that 1990s rep revivals were far better attended than the original 1980s screenings.


You may well be tempted to shudder at the notion of films needing a business plan, but every single release will inevitably have something along those lines attached - unless the distributor wants to struggle from day one and fold completely after only a few months. And that applies just as much to distributors who appear to be adventurous - Second Run is clearly driven by love rather than profit, but they can only stay operational by being absolutely ruthless at controlling costs to the nearest penny.

And yes, flavours of the month can rapidly lose their lustre. I was reminded of this vividly when I was commissioned to write about the Taviani Brothers' Allonsanfàn, as they're a very good example. In fact, their filmography breaks down into an almost perfect three-act structure.

Unreleased: all five features from A Man for the Burning (1962) to Saint Michael Had a Rooster (1971);
Belatedly released: Allonsanfàn (1974), which opened in 1978 in the wake of Padre padrone's success;
Released more or less within a year of premiere: almost everything from the Palme d'Or-winning Padre padrone (1977) to Fiorile (1993) - the one exception was Il prato (1979), which went straight to TV after a gap of several years (but was at least shown to UK audiences);
Unreleased: all five features from Elective Affinities (1996) onwards.

And yet in the 1980s, they were genuine arthouse stars - in fact, during this period they had a better track record than Fellini at actually getting their films into British cinemas. But I think the last bona fide hit was Kaos (1984), with the subsequent three films all performing comparatively poorly - and after Fiorile (whose UK release I was involved with, so I remember the disappointment) distributors obviously decided that enough was enough - and I'm pretty sure that Good Morning Babylon, Night Sun and Fiorile had different distributors, which speaks volumes in itself.

And I can see their point - and also why they decided that the first five features weren't worth disinterring. The two I've seen have been terrific (Saint Michael Had a Rooster is a minor masterpiece), but not only are they extremely political in a very parochial Italian way, but films like Subversives (1967) are also very much of their time: fascinating if you're interested in 1960s left-wing Italian politics, but it honestly needs footnotes - or, in my case, the Wikipedia entry on Palmiero Togliatti that I kept open on my laptop while viewing. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to find that someone had uploaded fansubs online - so it was worth importing the Italian DVD, an option that wouldn't have been open to me in the 1980s.

Can a mod move this conversation elsewhere? There's barely been a mention of MoC in the last three pages.

It was thirty years ago this year that I first started regularly watching foreign-language films on British TV, mainly BBC2's then Film International slot, around 9pm on a Saturday night, starting with The Lacemaker (a film which isn't on DVD in the UK). That relatively early showing time is significant - late enough to be after the watershed but not so late as to be a real issue with staying up to watch without falling asleep. (We didn't have a VCR in 1981.) But I do remember watching a non-anglophone film each week, not all of which had had UK cinema releases. Most of them were then-recent, such as the Hungarian film Angi Vera, the Finnish Flame Top, the Hungarian/Finnish Duty Free Marriage, the Filipino Bona, Kustarica's Do You Remember Dolly Bell? and Pialat's Passe ton bac d'abord, many of which I haven't seen since (and couldn't tell you much about thirty years later, to be honest)...plus some older films such as Tarkovsky's Mirror (shown twice, both times with a Gavin Millar introduction and some explanatory notes in Radio Times) and even a - gasp! - 60s black and white film, namely Le trou.

Channel 4, to this new-found fan of foreign cinema, was a goldmine when it started. I even saw that showing of the Tavianis' Il prato that Michael refers to.

I do wonder if my latterday equivalent could have had the same start. Foreign films on BBC2 and Channel 4 these days are almost always shown past midnight, though okay we do have recording devices now...and DVDs of course.

As Michael says, countries as well as directors go out of fashion. I have a big interest in Australian cinema, which started by watching the Australian seasons BBC2 showed in the late 70s and early 80s. I've had to buy DVDs blind from Australia to sustain this interest, due to the difficulty and in some cases impossibility of seeing some of this stuff in the UK.

How often does BBC Four show foreign stuff now? I don't watch TV at all hardly with being at university and out of the country a lot of the time now but don't they (or didn't they) regularly show foreign cinema and/or imported European TV dramas? It's just a pity there's so little outlets for arthouse fare on British TV.

It's kinda sad that a lot of the programming BBC 2 was famous for has now drifted over to BBC Four.

They have just started their Sunday night World Cinema seasons after the summer break (this Sunday it is Katalin Varga!), and the second series of The Killing is starting to be heavily advertised as starting on BBC4 next month (there was an interview with Sofie Gråbøl on this week's Culture Show), but I do miss the lesser known international cinema strands or the screening of the occasional classics or seasons of films that used to occur regularly.

They don't have DVR in England?

Have you followed the discussion? How does DVR help non-mainstream cinema get to a wider audience than DVD or anything else does? People used to discover this world of non-Hollywood fare as it used to regularly be broadcast on BBC 2 and Channel 4 at peak times. Now it's pushed to the graveyard slots or to channels with a far, far smaller audience. DVRs don't really help newcomers stumble upon something new.

I was speaking to Colin's problem alone and not the wider breach of the conversation, but now that you bring it up, yes I do think DVR can help newcomers. Back in the day if somebody read something in the teevee guide or whatever that sounded interesting they have to wait up for it and set aside everything else or else tape it. Now if you read a description that sounds amusing you can just DVR it and watch it at your own convenience. I'd argue in fact that it's easier now to watch oddities and obscurities than ever before because of conveniences like DVR.

If the films aren't being broadcast in the first place, I really don't see how DVR is going to be any help whatsoever.

Almost exactly thirty years ago (16 January 1982, to be exact), BBC2 showed the Czech time-travelling Nazi comedy Tomorrow I'll Wake Up And Scald Myself With Tea at 9.35pm. At that time there were just three television channels, so I imagine it had a pretty decent audience.

Now, there are God knows how many - but I find it almost impossible to imagine a film like that getting shown on any of them at all, never mind a peaktime slot like that. It's too far off the beaten track (Czech cinema has no profile outside the 1960s and a handful of auteurs like Švankmajer and Svěrák), and it doesn't have the right art-movie credentials, being essentially a very funny but often extremely silly comedy (get a load of the opening credits!).

If you already know about it, it's easy enough to get hold of an English-subtitled DVD (if you're not fazed by ordering from the Czech Republic) - but how are you going to stumble across something like this accidentally?

The Internet apparently is a good substitute (though I've seen real obscurities on that level before particularly on the ART channel and PBS). Even outside of this forum with more typical Internet hangouts I've bumped into and learned about real obscurities like that one than I would ever have back in the day. That's still an accidental meet up that could happen to anyone not just those actively looking. I know much more about cinema with modern conveniences than I ever would have back in the '80s or whatever. It seems that there's a lot of nostalgic hang ups on how you found out about great cinema (I'm not specifically targeting anyone with that as the you is intended more for the general argument) that you're not taking in the benefits of how people today can and do.

Yes, sorry in that last post I meant "miss" as in "remember fondy" and not "miss" as in "cannot record when they are on"!

Wasn't there some sort of change in legislation in the last few years that meant that British TV channels could not show any film that had not already received a BBFC certification for home viewing? I guess that this wouldn't affect whether material classified for that purpose could be shown (i.e. world cinema classics), but would impact on rarities or films with a cinema classification but not a video certificate being able to be screened?


Although Mark Cousins is at this very moment extolling the virtues of Hungarian and Czech cinema in his Story of Film episode. A shame no films are being shown to tie in with this though - it looks as if the Film4 tie-in film this week is Black God, White Devil.

You're still missing the point. The Internet provides far greater access to a far greater range of material than anything else before but you still have to go looking for it and no web portal still has anything like the reach and impact that the major TV channels did in the day (and still do infact). None. There can be forums dedicated to films, people can tweet about them all day and you have the option of streaming them from a dozen different websites but ultimately its nothing compared to having the films broadcast by one of the biggest TV channels.

Absolutely. The reason I brought up Tomorrow I'll Wake Up And Scald Myself With Tea is that the circumstances of what I believe was its only British screening (it may have had festival exposure, but it was never released commercially) meant that countless thousands of people would have encountered it completely accidentally - they'd channel-hop (not a lengthy process given that there were only three), exclaim "what the fuck is this?" and might well be hooked. (There are several fond reminiscences posted in the comments section under my review!)

Although potential access to films has increased unimaginably since then, and I obviously think that's a thoroughly good thing, it's been paralleled by a marked decline in the willingness of major terrestrial television channels to take similar programming risks. As already mentioned, BBC2 and Channel 4 no longer show anything not in English (or, come to that, in black and white), and while BBC4's track record is better, it strongly favours established arthouse successes - you're not going to chance upon a mainstream German or Hungarian title any more in a way that you could thirty years ago. Even twenty years ago BBC2 celebrated the end of Communism with a Czech New Wave season of both films and context-setting documentaries, which is how I saw many of the major classics for the first time - that's impossible to imagine now.

That's unfortunate for you and naturally I don't know anything about the face of British television, but here in America I catch accidentally a whole lot. For instance sometimes when I bored and there's nothing on I'll go to the on demand thing and scroll the free movie section and they'll usually have a few oddities there and I'm sure people who look that stuff up more regularly would be able to expand on the level of oddities that I can't. Even sidestepping modern tech though in favour of how you guys found things one night about a month ago as I was scrolling through the channels I stopped on PBS because to my shock they were showing A woman's Face, the original Swedish version. admittedly that's not to the level of your example, but it still shows that foreign black and white films are still shown on television. The ART channel does even more with my discovering of Diva for instance coming from it (that's actually one of their least obscure things but that's how I discovered the channel so it is memorable to me). That doesn't even get into TCM who while specializing in studio era Hollywood films does come up with several obscurities of all breeds. I think it was no more than a month ago for example when they showed a lot of rare Gabin films not to mention recent showing of Le Schpountz, Pabst's Kameradschaft, and others I've probably missed. The amount of channels available does make bumping into these things less likely of course, but people still channel hop and bumping into any of those events isn't impossible.

That's not legislation but Ofcom policy, which all the commercial channels follow - a film should be shown in the form which has a BBFC homeviewing certificate, where one exists. If it doesn't, then normal taste and decency principles apply. Also, a film which has been rejected by the BBFC must not be shown (as far as I know that includes rejections from the 70s or earlier which still apply as the film has not been resubmitted). That is presumably why Film Four have occasionally submitted films to the BBFC - to unban The Trip and to pass uncut versions of Crimes of Passion, Spetters and Taxi zum Klo.

As far as I'm aware, the BBC doesn't follow this policy and simply follows its own policies on suitability etc. It showed a film without a BBFC certificate only last weekend - the Australian film My Year Without Sex. There's nothing in that film that couldn't be shown on TV, as it carries an Australian M rating, but it hasn't been submitted to the BBFC as it hasn't been picked up for any kind of British commercial release.

I remember that showing of Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself With Tea. The film has an entry in the Nicholls/Clute SF Encyclopedia (online-only third edition launched in beta version this month - here) precisely because of that TV screening.

That's great news and I'm glad that there is no specific policy which prevents the schedulers from doing that - so I suppose it is still all coming down to trying to get schedulers to be a little more adventurous with their choices, which is probably difficult now that we're living in the Age of Austerity (I like to sing the phrase to the tune of Age of Aquarius!) and the channels are getting more conservative in what they will show (It is rather upsetting that there appears to be a prejudice against black and white films being screened as well).

The prejudice against black & white films on UK TV started at least a decade ago of course, but just when you think it might actually be true that they no longer show them on the main channels they surprise you - four on BBC2 this weekend, three on Channel 4 in the afternoons next week. But the real problem is that the conservative choices apply just as much to older films now as modern ones. Three of the BBC2 b&w films are well-known British World War 2 movies (and so is one of C4's). Some weeks it's hard to find a pre-1960 film, even on Film Four, that isn't a war movie or a western - why the obsession with these genres? It has gone on for years. I wonder if there's a 1950s western that hasn't been shown on UK TV over the last few years.

There are certainly plenty older titles on UK TV that don't have DVD releases here, but those that don't nearly always are part of the RKO or Republic library for both of which I believe the BBC own permanent UK TV rights (they seem to license the Republics to C4). So the same titles are endlessly repeated. (The hundreds of more obscure RKOs seem to be ditched in the 1990s, possibly after the BBC film library flood.) We no longer get the 1930s & 40s oddities that were still popping up in the middle of the night up to around 2000. I presume they stopped transmitting actual film prints - as they did in earlier decades, when you could see the physical splices to accommodate ads and films occasionally broke during the broadcast or were shown in the wrong reel order. So a digital requirement placed another obstacle to getting more obscure films on TV. Besides the perceived need for colour, there is now also an increasing preference for widescreen films, and when HD broadcasting takes over I guess that only films considered good enough for that - technically and in terms of ratings - will get an airing.

While it's true that film buffs can now search the internet for rarities in the same way I used to search TV listings (it hardly seems worth the bother now), TV surely still has an important part to play in giving people their first, accidental exposure to older, "foreign" or non-mainstream films. I've met children who've never heard of Laurel & Hardy, because they haven't been shown on TV here for a decade. Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd are even less likely to be known by the youngest generation.

My primary concern for the disappearance of older films is of course the very opposite from the one that started this whole discussion! - yet I think that all lesser-known films, regardless of their age, are actually in danger from more or less the same forces.

I'm catching up on this fascinating conversation in between films at a film festival, which is ironic given this statement....



And, I think this statement is related...



I'm 26 and spend a lot of my time at repertory theaters and screenings. I don't think the role of the cinema or the repertory programmer is dead at all. I've made specific trips to NYC (which are time-consuming not to mention costly) to see retrospectives of Jerzy Skolimowski and Nick Zedd, NYFF's Views from the Avant-Garde and both new and obscure films that I might not be able to see in my city otherwise. I think the experience of seeing something in a theater, especially when there is a filmmaker or other qualified person in attendance to offer more context and information, is extremely relevant. Not to mention there is that the entire film industry is a delicate balance. If "theatrical screenings don't matter much anymore" and that revenue-source dries up, will distributors be able to restore older films or distribute newer films? Definitely not. We'd see less films than we do now making the rounds.

Like I said, I'm still working my way through this discussion but I'm off to see one film now and another at 10PM... in a theater.

I can't speak for NYC, but the London repertory scene is the merest shadow of what it was 20-30 years ago. Not that I have time to go to the cinema much these days (I have to factor in babysitting on top of far higher ticket prices), but even if I did there's demonstrably less to choose from - versus far more to choose from at home.

Obviously, I'd prefer to see everything on the big screen, preferably in pristine 35mm prints, but I'm enough of a realist to know which way the wind's blowing.