I watch TCM almost exclusively (since my PBS is gonna be crudded up, it will be more).
I don’t stream movies. It’s not really possible here.
I do DVR a bunch on lesser channels to skip commercials when playing back.
Any way Alicia Malone, a host on TCM is always pushing the foreign films. Telling me to give them a try. I might just find them great movies.
The ones she lists as examples I’ve generally seen. And I always considered them classics. Not foreign classics. Just good or bad on their merits, otherwise.
When you live in Europe or the East (or anywhere) and see American films, do you think you’re seeing a foreign film? Do you judge it with that in mind or watch just because you think you’ll like it?
Do you have access to a library network that can send you discs? I’ve had a ton of movies that are foreign and gotten them from the library.
Oh yeah. I have a kinda library of my own. And access to DVDs from a couple sources.
I’m not looking for choices.
I was just wondering what people in other parts of the world thought “foreign” films are.
For instance Metropolis. …Early German. We all know it.
A certain classic. I guess Germans watch it with different eyes than say, Spanish speakers or Japanese. Or me.
It’s clearly foreign to me. I’ve watched it a number of times reading subtitles.
Just a guess but as ubiquitous and dominant as the American film industry has almost always been since its inception, I doubt if people in foreign countries have ever thought of American films as “foreign.” At least not the way Americans tend to think of films from other countries that way.
I might guess that someone in Egypt might consider a Chinese film to be “foreign” however. Probably someone in Nebraska would think the same thing.
When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s there was a theater in town that played “foreign” films. A lot of what they played were British movies (!) which at that time were considered “foreign,” even when the language was English. They also played a lot of Italian and French films. I don’t know if they were dubbed or had subtitles. At the time I was much too young to attend that theater.
I can attest that, at least for me personally. Except for India, no other country has a movie industry as big and globally influential as the US, so most movies that run in German theaters are Hollywood movies, and I don’t think of them as foreign, but as American. So otherwise German productions rather stand out, and I think of them especially as German. I also don’t think of films from other European countries as foreign, but as British, French, Dutch or French films. I think the closest to a “foreign film” to Americans to me as a German are films from rather different cultures, like Iranian, Bolivian or Korean films for instance.
ETA: I forgot another big difference: here, almost all non-German films are dubbed, so they don’t appear to us as foreign as subtitled films to Americans.
In Australia we’ve been receiving American films since film was invented (and singers, entertainers, travelling shows, sheet music, concerts etc etc etc for a century before that). While American films are by definition foreign, we see ourselves as part of the extended market for Hollywood. They are part of our regular movie fodder.
The Australian film industry has tried hard over decades to remain viable while also remaining commercially viable in a global movie-making economy, and does this mainly by training and exporting technical and acting talent with lesser amounts of being a film production destination and doing genre films. A key point of difference they emphasise is being able to tell distinctly Australian stories. Sometimes that can be a much harder sell with far less mass-appeal than the next padded-out CGI-driven Marvel / DC / Star Wars franchise paint-by-numbers piece of dreck with a $10M promo budget. But, it will never be thought of as a foreign film in the same way as a Bollywood production or something by Lina Wertmuller. However, independent American cinema (think films by John Waters, Hal Hartley, Guy Maddin etc) is usually grouped with foreign and cult films in smaller art cinemas. I’ve never seen any of them in a mainstream cinema complex.
Thanks @EinsteinsHund. This is what I meant.
You made me understand it.
India produces the most films per year. China produces the second most films per year. The U.S. and Japan are very close, so it can change each year as to which produces the most films.