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Post by Fox in the Snow on Mar 17, 2020 2:23:40 GMT
I came to film in general quite late. I probably didn’t become what I’d consider serious or more than casually interested in film until my very late teens.
As I started researching a little and collating lists of “classic canon” and “must see” films and directors I noticed a lot of non-English language films in the mix and watched them when I could by any means I could just as I did the English language ones.
A few I saw early on that really impressed me and changed the way I look at film include:
Breathless, The 400 Blows, La Dolce Vita, L’Avventura and Persona
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Post by mikef6 on Mar 17, 2020 4:51:55 GMT
Well, it is a sad and tragical story. A French film came to town, which was unusual mainly because it was subtitled, not dubbed. This was 1963. I was a senior in high school but my younger sister, a freshman, was taking French so she could she this movie for extra credit. I think you know where I am going with this. I had to take my own sister to a movie. It was humiliating. Luckily, we didn’t know anyone at that particular showing. Also luckily the movie was the wonderful and magical Les Dimanches de Ville d'Avray (Sundays and Cybèle). Later, I realized that in the last sad moment of the movie my memory recalled it spoken in English even though I knew I must have read it off a subtitle. Also amazing was the unhappy ending which Hollywood would have never allowed. That was a key experience in my movie education.  |
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Post by marianne48 on Mar 18, 2020 0:55:48 GMT
I have a vague memory of a local TV station (maybe WNBC or WPIX in NYC) showing a "Foreign Film Festival" on weekend evenings in the late 1960s when I was a small child; some older sibling would watch these old foreign films with Italian women in bikinis being chased by Marcello Mastroianni or somebody like that. Around the same time, I was drawn to The CBS Children's Film Festival on Saturday afternoons, which featured Kukla, Fran and Ollie introducing child-oriented live-action short films from around the world (not all of broadcast TV back then was junk). Here I saw films such as The Red Balloon from France, and a
Japanese film called Skinny and Fatty, a short about two schoolboys of different sizes who become friends. These were great films which were a nice change of pace from a lot of the more cutesy/manic kiddie fare of the time.
When I was about 11, I came across the local PBS station's presentation of La Grande Illusion and I was hooked. For some reason, they showed it a few times in the course of a month or so, and I was so enamored of it that I made sure to watch it each time (this was before home video, so the only way to see a movie again was to look for repeat airings). I came late to the home video format (1992!), but it helped me to get to see a lot more foreign films. My first DVD purchase was, of course, La Grande Illusion.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 18, 2020 3:18:23 GMT
Well, it is a sad and tragical story. A French film came to town, which was unusual mainly because it was subtitled, not dubbed. This was 1963. I was a senior in high school but my younger sister, a freshman, was taking French so she could she this movie for extra credit. I think you know where I am going with this. I had to take my own sister to a movie. It was humiliating. Luckily, we didn’t know anyone at that particular showing. Also luckily the movie was the wonderful and magical Les Dimanches de Ville d'Avray (Sundays and Cybèle). Later, I realized that in the last sad moment of the movie my memory recalled it spoken in English even though I knew I must have read it off a subtitle. Also amazing was the unhappy ending which Hollywood would have never allowed. That was a key experience in my movie education.  That doesn't sound like the best of dates. At least it was in a dark theater and there was no awkward moment when you took her home. Considering you both lived in the same house! You know, I have not seen this movie. I'll need to look for this one.
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Post by Fox in the Snow on Mar 18, 2020 11:36:57 GMT
watched them when I could by any means I could A few I saw early on that really impressed me and changed the way I look at film include: Breathless, The 400 Blows, La Dolce Vita, L’Avventura and PersonaThat's kind of what it was like. I lived in a small town and had to travel quite a distance to see some of these films. Sometimes you'd get lucky and a local station would play some on a Saturday afternoon or late at night. I don't think it was until video stores opened up that I was able to really broaden my horizons. Even then there were only certain stores that carried these films. I didn't get much opportunity to see classics on the big screen. There was a local cinema that showed more "culty" stuff ( Eraserhead, A Clockwork Orange, Liquid Sky, Koyaanisqatsi). I usually relied on occasional TV screenings and the limited range available through VHS rentals. I even recall buying few, paying up to $50 for VHS copies of L'Eclisse, Week-end and Knife in the Water in the mid-90s.
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Post by marianne48 on Mar 18, 2020 17:54:26 GMT
I have a vague memory of a local TV station (maybe WNBC or WPIX in NYC) showing a "Foreign Film Festival" on weekend evenings in the late 1960s when I was a small child; some older sibling would watch these old foreign films with Italian women in bikinis being chased by Marcello Mastroianni or somebody like that. Around the same time, I was drawn to The CBS Children's Film Festival on Saturday afternoons, which featured Kukla, Fran and Ollie introducing child-oriented live-action short films from around the world (not all of broadcast TV back then was junk). Here I saw films such as The Red Balloon from France, and a Japanese film called Skinny and Fatty, a short about two schoolboys of different sizes who become friends. These were great films which were a nice change of pace from a lot of the more cutesy/manic kiddie fare of the time. When I was about 11, I came across the local PBS station's presentation of La Grande Illusion and I was hooked. For some reason, they showed it a few times in the course of a month or so, and I was so enamored of it that I made sure to watch it each time (this was before home video, so the only way to see a movie again was to look for repeat airings). I came late to the home video format (1992!), but it helped me to get to see a lot more foreign films. My first DVD purchase was, of course, La Grande Illusion. I remember seeing The Red Balloon in school. Seems everybody got hooked on these amazing movies. We weren't watching B movies but true classics. 1992? What were you doing?  How do you watch them now? I'm not quite sure what I was doing in those years. I guess I was too busy working (two jobs) to actually watch much of anything. I had a small black-and-white TV back then (with rabbit ear antennae and VHF and UHF dials) that I'd had since the mid-'70s, and hardly ever had time to watch it. It didn't matter if the picture quality wasn't as sharp as a bigger set, or that it was not in color, since most of the classics I was watching weren't in color, and if a movie or TV show is good enough, the quality wasn't all that important to me back then. I think the TV wasn't working too well by 1992, so that's when I finally got around to getting a new set (which I still own, by the way, but don't use) and my first VCR. Then I started taping everything with a vengeance. I was such a classic movie nut as a kid that I sometimes taped pieces of movies on audio cassette tape to listen to at night. (I had the entire audio of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Horsefeathers, and the collected rants of James Cagney's character from Mister Roberts). Around 1975, I remember reading an item in Dynamite, a kid's magazine, about how in a few years we would be able to get videotape copies of movies for home use. I was so excited about this, I was looking forward to it for years. Some years later, the first movies were coming out on home video, but they were very expensive ($25 or more for the tape alone; the video machines were hundreds of dollars). I remember a college professor of mine sneering about the idea of people collecting videotapes for their private use--"that's just never gonna happen, " he predicted. There were some good classic film showings at my college ( La Grande Illusion, The Rules of the Game, and more), and a good art house cinema not too far away from my home, and I would see a good movie there (indie/foreign) at least once a month. I'm very slow to adapt to new technology; I got my first DVD player about 20 years ago, along with my first DVD ( La Grande Illusion, which had just come out on Criterion). I still have a lot of my VHS tapes, some of which I still haven't watched (especially the stuff I taped off of TV from the early 1990s. I even occasionally come across an old audio cassette from the 1970s with a commercial jingle or some comedy bit from an old variety show; it's like opening up a time capsule). I prefer to watch DVDs now, and rarely watch anything on TV. I don't see movies in theaters anymore, although that art house theater, at least, is still there.
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Post by Jep Gambardella on Mar 19, 2020 20:14:30 GMT
Where and when I grew up American movies were subtitled, so the distinction between Hollywood movies and international ones was not as pronounced. Reading subtitles has always been second nature to me.
I suppose I started really appreciating European movies in my early 20s when I started hanging out with a crowd of cinephiles. We would often go to repertory theatres to catch an Italian or French or Russian movie.
I didn’t have much exposure to Asian movies (aside from the odd new Kurosawa film) until much later, when the Fantasia Film Festival started in Montreal. That’s a festival dedicated to fantastic (horror/thrillers/science fiction) movies mostly but not exclusively from Asia.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 20, 2020 1:02:10 GMT
Where and when I grew up American movies were subtitled, so the distinction between Hollywood movies and international ones was not as pronounced. Reading subtitles has always been second nature to me. I suppose I started really appreciating European movies in my early 20s when I started hanging out with a crowd of cinephiles. We would often go to repertory theatres to catch an Italian or French or Russian movie. I didn’t have much exposure to Asian movies (aside from the odd new Kurosawa film) until much later, when the Fantasia Film Festival started in Montreal. That’s a festival dedicated to fantastic (horror/thrillers/science fiction) movies mostly but not exclusively from Asia. It still amazes me at the number of people that won't watch a movie with subtitles or black and white films for that matter. They're missing some of the greatest films ever made. It's almost like they'll never have a full glass, It'll always be half full. I still enjoy a good Asian horror movie. It feels like they're not as well done as they were 20 years ago.
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How do you watch them now? 