I corrected what I believe was your typo - actually your Swedish example is a perfect demonstration of that lack of in-depth studies, as it betrays a lack of familiarity with both the history of Sweden (whose wartime activities included supplying war materials for Hitler's Germany, tolerating and aiding the persecution of Jews and providing railway transport routes for German troops - where do you think all those swastikas in Roy Andersson's films come from? ) and the person and films of Bergman (a self-confessed Nazi sympathizer until as late as 1946, and probably one of post-war Europe's foremost guilt-fixated filmmakers!). (And surely you can't seriously equate a nation's official position on war guilt with the personal feelings of the people of that nation, as you seem to be suggesting by saying "Germany felt" while "Japan did not"...)Trees wrote:The Swedes, for example, would not have been similarly saddled with guilt from the war, so perhaps this allowed directors like Bergman to make beautiful historical and period pieces... It's just conjecture on my part, as I honestly [haven't] studied the issue in depth.
Look, while I'm wholeheartedly of the opinion that this is exactly the sort of stuff we should all be troubling ourselves with (instead of Criterion's release plans or whatever anyone called Anderson - with one s - is up to), I think you'd be better off hitting the books (or even Wikipedia or whatever) and trying to formulate something more substantial as a basis for discussion, if only for the reason that people will probably only be frustrated by (or will simply ignore, which again will frustrate you) such untenable speculations. Personally I'm all for asking these sorts of questions aloud even as pure conjencture, if only to maybe get people to recommend some study materials, but I can understand that others might find it irritating.
But again, this only makes sense if you're exclusively interested in some kind of a narrowed-down international/universal canon of cinema that largely ignores what is actually interesting about the national cinemas themselves. The ways and vagaries of influence are infinitely more complex than what you suggest - for example Ozu and Kurosawa themselves were influenced by now-obscure films from the US and Europe (including Germany, to get briefly back on topic) that will never have any business on any canonical list of "important films". The trouble with this whole idea of "significance" is that the it makes the vast majority of cinematic history disappear as "irrelevant", and leave you with only a very general textbook-type idea of what actually went on (which I guess can be OK as a starting point, but no more than that).Trees wrote:by national contributions to "cinema as an art" or if you prefer, simply to "cinema", I am mainly talking about innovation and influence, though of course making masterpiece films is often the vessel for such
Tommaso, did you see Finsterworld? I thought that was a marvelous example of a film that rejects that customary drab realism that the financing system loves to promote (in fact the filmmakers said that that was their first decision: "no realism!") without however resorting to any kind of escapism regarding the country's recent past - definitely deserving a place high up on the list suggested by the title of this thread...Tommaso wrote:And the idea of leaving reality behind, or playfully inventing a new one, is precisely what is disliked in the German film financing system, which is why there's noone comparable to Greenaway, Tsai, or Wong in Germany.