Why do few nations dominate European cinema so much?

Why do few nations dominate European cinema so much? Aug 19, 2021 21:22:53 GMT marshamae, timshelboy, and 1 more like this

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Post by london777 on Aug 19, 2021 21:22:53 GMT

Aug 19, 2021 21:00:30 GMT lune7000 said:

Film industries can rebuild at lighting speed after a war. France was occupied yet put out films almost immediately after liberation. Japanese directors were making films in the rubble of bombed out cities. Film doesn't require much as far as start up costs. Germany should have been up on their feet soon after the war- they got lots of Marshal Plan money and had a lively industry in the 20's. German is one of the most common languages on the continent and I can't believe they didn't want to watch films in their own tongue.

The lack of highly rated Spanish films is another puzzler. Given the large worldwide Spanish language diaspora, Spanish films would be second only to English in popularity. India has that massive Bollywood industry that serves the second largest national population in the world but it's films are almost never on a "must see' list.

I don't believe talent is only in France and Italy- I don't understand this.

France was making some great movies during the German occupation, some of them examples of what I wrote above about utilizing constraints.

Until joining the EU, Spain had been, in modern times, a very poor and illiterate country. I do not think it had much of a film industry before WWII. Its only world-class director fled to Mexico and other creative and technical personnel to Latin America. But Spanish cinema flowered once Franco started to lose his grip and it has made more than its share of fine fims since.

Germany had unique problems tip-toeing around issues of ideology and national identity for the first decade after WWII. It was a nation "on probation", so people were nervous about making or watching "serious" movies. But with the Wirtschaftswunder came a flowering of talent, most of it critiquing current social developments (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, Wolfgang Petersen, Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta, Wim Wenders, etc)