Foreign films will invade the Virginia Festival of American Film next October, when U.S. and Them becomes the theme of this year's four-day event. In exploring, through a broad variety of screenings and discussions, how Americans have responded to individuals and cultures they regard as "foreign," the Festival will include visions of America by foreign filmmakers. This is a noteworthy milestone for a Festival that has traditionally distinguished itself from other festivals by its emphasis on domestic productions.
How long could the Virginia Festival of American Film have been
expected to hold out against the international tide? In fact,
was the attempt to define an entity called "American Film"
without international productions tenable in the first place?
Hollywood, after all, is a multinational industry, its studios
mostly foreign-owned. Hollywood is the dominant cinema in every
country whose theaters it occupies, except India. Even France
gives up 55% of its box office revenue to Hollywood, and this
is a display of impressive self-control next to the 86% handed
over by its neighbors in England and Greece.
Additional proof of the international nature of Hollywood cinema can be found in its personnel. The moguls who "invented" Hollywood and founded its major studios were immigrant Jews, drawn to the opportunity of a new industry shunned by the WASP industrial elite.Great directors of American cinema are, very frequently, not American born. They either come knocking at the door like Billy Wilder, or, if they make a big splash abroad like the currently hot John Woo and Paul Verhoeven, they are imported (their studio recruiters could be cynically described as "buying out the competition"). Is it even possible to imagine Hollywood film without the immigrant talents of Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra, Billy Wilder, or Charles Chaplin?
The immigrant moguls and directors, in general, created the very images that teach "American-ness" (think of Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Hitchcock's vivid associations of heroes and national monuments). They faithfully reproduced the myths of the American dream and the desirability of assimilation into an ideal form of non-ethnicity. Of course, this non-ethnicity was actually White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethnicity, modeled, as sociologist Ian Jarvie has documented, by an overwhelming preponderance of WASP movie stars (or stars with non-WASP origins, like Spencer Tracy and Kirk Douglas, who effectively masked the traces of their parents' immigrant backgrounds).
Ethnic directors today share with ethnic communities in general
a stronger sense of pride in their distinctiveness and their transnational
links with their fellows (think of Mira Nair, and Spike and Ang
Lee). The metaphor of the "melting pot," and the desire
to assimilate everyone into an American monoculture, has given
way to the metaphoric ideal of an American "gumbo" of
distinct multi-cultures. While Americans have long seen themselves
as a "nation of immigrants," multiculturalists now contend
that the price of entry has been an homogenizing assimilation,
a rejection of diversity, and an insidious promotion of hatred
towards and self-hatred among those ethnics, particularly people
of color, whose features and customs could not melt away.
Yet, opponents of multiculturalists decry the effects of their rejection of assimilation-a growing balkanization of the U.S. into competing ethnic groups, each proclaiming their own "centricity" and abandoning the American project of building bridges and sharing values. They fear a proliferation of separatisms, and a social fabric unraveling. One conservative spokesman called the notion of a "multicultural nation" a self-evident oxymoron.
Some academic multiculturalists would gag at this expectation
of a single culture within a single nation, while others would
not disagree; they would point to a growing body of political
theory which questions the current viability of the concept of
"nation," a concept which emerged and became a source
of identity among people only during the previous century (see
Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities). Backing up this
critique are the stateless wanderings of multinational corporations,
defying the regulations of nations, including the U.S., and floating
across borders to wherever production costs and taxes are less
taxing. Also undermining the solidity of the concept of "nations"
are the worldwide migrations and displacements of ethnic groups
across borders, and the rise of communications and transportation
technologies, like the Internet, satellite dishes, and jet planes,
which free immigrants from the necessity to fully assimilate and
leave their pasts behind; there's even a term for this in academic
currency ("deterritorialization"). The influential anthropologist
Arjun Appadural asks us to replace the outworn concept of the
U.S. as a "nation of immigrants" with a new concept
of this country as a "node in a postnational network of
diasporas." The American Right, of course, is striving to
reaffirm the nation's boundaries by restricting these diasporas'
depositing of immigrants within our borders; yet, as Walter Russell
Mead has argued, conservatives are simultaneously contributing
to the dismantling of the nation-state through their affirmation
of states' rights over federal power. Whtat all of these startling
developments imply is that there may no longer be a "state"
of our nation to identify.
"American film" may be hard to define, in sum, because "America," like every other nation in an era of increasing globalization and balkanization, has very permeable boundaries and a rapidly changing face. The ferment accompanying the new globalization, it can be argued, is producing both the raging "culture wars" and the emergence of exciting new conceptual models in many academic disciplines. Nowhere are these ideas more apparent than on campuses, and no other film festival is as equipped as ours to tap into these debates and use films to illuminate them, as we open to question the boundaries of "America" and "American film," and how the borders of "us" and "them" are defined.