Foreign films achieved a high level of distinction and visibility in the United States this year, but the international movie scene has been long in development. The author traces the roots of this phenomenon and discusses the reasons for “the increasingly accented cinema seen in America.” Timothy Corrigan is a professor of English and director of cinema studies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the author of several books, including most recently The Film Experience (2004), written with Patricia White

Corrigan, Timothy

English

Kosmopolis

University of Pennsylvania
ScholarlyCommons
Departmental Papers (CIMS) Cinema and Media Studies Program
2007
Coming to America
Timothy Corrigan
University of Pennsylvania, tcorriga@upenn.edu
Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.upenn.edu/cims_papers
Part of the Film Production Commons
This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. http://repository.upenn.edu/cims_papers/7
For more information, please contact repository@pobox.upenn.edu.
Recommended Citation
Corrigan, Timothy, "Coming to America" (2007). Departmental Papers (CIMS). 7.
http://repository.upenn.edu/cims_papers/7
Coming to America
Abstract
Foreign films achieved a high level of distinction and visibility in the United States this year, but the
international movie scene has been long in development. The author traces the roots of this phenomenon and
discusses the reasons for “the increasingly accented cinema seen in America.” Timothy Corrigan is a professor
of English and director of cinema studies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the author of
several books, including most recently The Film Experience (2004), written with Patricia White.
Disciplines
Film and Media Studies | Film Production
This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/cims_papers/7
12 13
Foreign films achieved a high level of distinction and 
visibility in the United States this year, but the international 
movie scene has been long in development. The author traces 
the roots of this phenomenon and discusses the reasons for 
“the increasingly accented cinema seen in America.” Timothy 
Corrigan is a professor of English and director of cinema 
studies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and 
the author of several books, including most recently The Film 
Experience (2004), written with Patricia White.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the 79th Annual Academy Awards, held in February 2007, has been the multiple nominations of three 
Mexican films: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, 
Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, and Guillermo del 
Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. The fact that only the last of these 
was nominated in the best foreign film category and 
that several other foreign films appeared in mainstream 
categories—such as the nominations for best actress of 
Helen Mirren in the British production The Queen and 
Penélope Cruz in the Spanish film Volver—suggest a 
decidedly global range to what Hollywood has chosen 
to honor. Also suggestive of this foreign migration into 
Hollywood’s 2007 Oscar ceremony is that American icon 
Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima, nominated for best 
picture and best director this year, is primarily a Japanese-
language film.
Certainly the modern world has grown smaller and 
more familiar in many ways, and the allure of exotic 
populations and locales, such as the Mongolian landscapes 
in The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003), still aims to tap 
the traditional curiosity of movie audiences about other 
places and peoples. But the increasingly accented cinema 
seen in America has other, more concrete forces behind it.
      
BIRTH OF AN INTERNATIONAL MARKET
However distinctive and visible this year’s array of 
foreign films in the United States, America’s complicated 
relationship with other film cultures is hardly new. Since 
the first public projection of movies in France in 1895, 
a key dynamic in film history has been the showdowns 
Coming to America 
Timothy Corrigan
eJOURNAL USA
Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth was one of the foreign films nominated for an Academy Award in 2007. It won Oscars in 
three categories.
©
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A
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Society & Values
12 13
and negotiations 
between the U.S. 
movie culture 
and overseas 
production 
companies 
and theater 
markets. The 
establishment 
of the Motion 
Pictures Patents 
Company in 
1908, under the 
leadership of 
Thomas Edison 
(American 
inventor of the 
motion picture 
camera), aimed 
explicitly to limit 
the distribution 
of foreign films 
in the United 
States. Later, in the wake of World War I and with 
the American movie industry’s growing world 
dominance, Hollywood globalization would reach 
into a floundering German economy to create the 
1926 Parufamet Agreement. American film studios 
Paramount and MGM and the German studio Ufa 
agreed not only to allow Hollywood access to the 
German exhibition markets but also to open the 
door for German talent to immigrate to the United 
States (including Casablanca director Michael Curtiz 
and Swedish star Greta Garbo).
 As America’s cultural expansion grew after 
World War II, the Paramount Decrees of 1948 laid 
a foundation that would gradually but profoundly 
alter the 
direction 
of American 
movie culture 
and lead to the 
international film 
scene today. These 
decrees effectively 
broke up the 
monopolistic 
hold of the major 
Hollywood 
studios on the American marketplace. As a result, through 
the 1950s and early 1960s, both independent U.S. 
productions and, eventually, foreign films started to make 
their way into U.S. theaters. Led by films from Sweden’s 
Ingmar Bergman, France’s Francois Trufffaut, and Italy’s 
Michelangelo Antonioni among many others, this new 
wave of foreign films appealed especially to an emerging 
demographic of youth and academic audiences curious 
about other cultures, but over the next several decades 
interest spread through an expanding population of U.S. 
audiences.
The postwar trends in the global expansion of 
Hollywood’s market and the subsequent growing ubiquity 
and popularity of international cinema in America 
have today assumed their own specific economic and 
technological rationale and shapes. Most importantly 
perhaps, the contemporary explosion of international 
film festivals has been one of the most visible engines 
in announcing and supporting foreign films to an 
international market, most notably for the highly lucrative 
American theater and DVD (digital video disc) circuits.
The first film festival, the still influential Venice Film 
Festival, began in 1932, and today, from Cannes and 
Berlin to Toronto and Telluride (Colorado), the festival 
circuit offers anywhere from 400 to 1,000 events in cities 
around the world, where films such as Life Is Beautiful 
(1998) from Italy and Run Lola Run (1998) from 
Germany are catapulted into world markets after receiving 
awards at these festivals. Just as the original Venice festival 
aimed to promote its own and other national cultures 
through films, festivals today frequently act as conduits 
for offering insights into cultures outside national cinemas 
and Hollywood, become barometers for worldwide critical 
Society & Values
Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima was not 
categorized as a foreign-language film, despite 
being primarily in Japanese.
©
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m
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as
ah
ar
a
An international audience gathers for the film festival in Locarno, Switzerland.
©
 A
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M
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zz
in
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eJOURNAL USA
A scene from Michael Curtiz’s classic film, 
Casablanca.
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14 15
attention, and at the same time often attract funding and 
distribution for smaller, more creative films.
Contemporary Iranian and Korean cinema are a case 
in point. With little support or popularity at home, 
Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, the 1997 Grand Prize 
winner at Cannes, led a spate of contemporary Iranian 
films into Europe and the United States. After Park 
Chan-wook’s Old Boy (2003), a wildly successful example 
of “Asian extreme cinema,” garnered numerous awards 
from festivals in Hong Kong, Cannes, and Stockholm, 
the film not only found art-house distribution in the 
United States but landed Park in the New York Times 
magazine. Thanks to festival recognition, Hou Hsiao-
hsien’s films (such as 1993’s The Puppetmaster and 1998’s 
Flowers of Shanghai) found financial support and thus 
visibility in the United States, and when Walter Salles’s 
Brazilian film Central Station (1998) won a prize at the 
Sundance Film Festival, its future in America suddenly 
became brighter.  
CULTIVATING AUDIENCES
Related to these new sources for exposure and word-
of-mouth promotion is a second important factor in 
contemporary migration of foreign films to the United 
States: namely, since 1990, the growing popularity and 
profitability of the so-called New Independent Cinema 
and the ability of films from overseas to, in a sense, ride 
the coattails of this movement. Fostered by distribution 
(and later production) companies such as Miramax, 
films by Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch offered 
audiences stories and styles different from many of 
the tired Hollywood formulas, and as this taste for the 
offbeat, distinctive, and new grew through the 1990s, 
these companies learned to seek out (usually through the 
festival circuit), to import, and sometimes to repackage 
foreign films that would be aimed at specially targeted 
audiences. Films like The Crying Game (1992) and Il 
Postino  (1994) set new box-office records for foreign 
films in U.S. markets. The Crying Game offered a 
paradigm for a promotional campaign that turned a 
moderately successful British film about an IRA terrorist 
into a U.S. mini-blockbuster about sex and secrets.
     Following the success of companies like Miramax, 
the major U.S. studios have, not surprisingly, created 
(or re-created) their own “specialty film divisions” to 
both discover and distribute independent and foreign 
films. One such division, for example, Sony Pictures 
Classics, currently distributes Zhang Yimou’s romantic 
martial arts film House of the Flying Daggers (2004), 
Pedro Almodovar’s offbeat Spanish suspense film Volver 
(2006), and Michael Haneke’s French/Austrian/German 
thriller Caché (2005). Another company, Fox Searchlight 
(parented by 20th Century Fox), offers highly successful 
British imports like Bend It Like Beckham (2002) and 
Notes on a Scandal (2006).
Both as a product and a creator of these trends, 
contemporary movies are more and more coproduced 
by a variety of international companies, with each 
investment potentially promising a wider distribution 
around the world and in the United States. Hardly a new 
practice, coproduction frequently offers U.S. companies 
involvement in foreign movies from the ground up 
and often assures an English-language release in the 
United States. Like the Parufamet Agreement of 1926, 
coproductions and financing encourage shared directors, 
producers, technicians, and stars like Roberto Begnini, 
Ang Lee, Guillermo del Toro, Rutger Hauer, Penelope 
Cruz, and Michael Ballhaus. And with this cross-
fertilization of personnel comes more and more blending 
eJOURNAL USASociety & Values
Crowds line up to see some of the films of the Toronto Film Festival.
©
 A
P 
Im
ag
es
/C
hi
to
se
 S
uz
uk
i
14 15
of genres and plots, easily recognized, if not as exclusively 
American, at least as “international” in a sense that 
accommodates American tastes—such as Luc Besson’s La 
Femme Nikita (1990), a fast-action crime thriller.
      This is not to say, I’d insist, that recent movies from 
overseas have simply adapted to American genres. On 
the contrary, at least as important is how other national 
cinemas have offered American audiences new kinds of 
stories and characters outside the formulas of Hollywood. 
It is hard to imagine the Oscar-winning Crash (2005) or 
its critical reception without Iñárritu’s far more daring 
precedent Amores perros (2000).
DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION
A final and particularly contemporary factor in the 
accenting of American cinema is the digital convergence 
of film production and distribution. With the now 
and future digital revolution at hand, the freedoms 
and openings once offered by home-video distribution 
in the 1970s and 1980s are now being translated into 
the new opportunities of contemporary DVD and 
Internet distribution. While video and DVD sales long 
ago surpassed theatrical ticket sales, what often gets 
overlooked in this shift is how the video and DVD 
market allowed a more targetable and more open market 
for the distribution of foreign films. If most foreign films 
are rarely seen theatrically (except in the very limited art-
house circuit), the expansion of home video through the 
expansion of DVD technology makes more and more 
foreign films available to all audiences and, perhaps more 
significantly, allows distributors to target DVDs to local 
communities with particular interests in, for instance, 
Asian, European, or African cinema.
Indian cinema, the films of “Bollywood,” is an 
especially powerful example. Bride and Prejudice, an 
Indian remake of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice, 
might be seen in alternative cinemas around the country 
in 2004, and Mira Nair’s recent films, including Monsoon 
Wedding (2001), have distinguished themselves critically 
and economically in the United States during the past 15 
years. Yet it is the more-or-less open and continual access 
to a potentially unlimited variety of Indian, and other 
foreign, films through neighborhood and on-line video 
rentals that assures an accented chatter about films in 
America. With subscription services like Netflix providing 
an even easier and globally wider choice of films, which 
the inevitable Internet downloading of films will only 
facilitate in the near future, it’s difficult to resist today the 
romantic and utopian tendency to see again, as in 1895, 
the movies as, if not the universal language of Esperanto, 
perhaps a multilanguage dialogue in our homes and 
communities. 
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or 
policies of the U.S. government.
It is now possible to watch a film on a mobile phone.
Netflix distributes DVDs through the mail, revolutionizing home video 
access.
©
 A
P 
Im
ag
es
/P
au
l S
ak
um
a
eJOURNAL USA Society & Values
©
 A
P 
Im
ag
es
/Ja
e 
C
. H
on
g 
 


Coming to America

ScholarlyCommons@Penn

University of PennsylvaniaScholarlyCommonsDepartmental Papers (CIMS) Cinema and Media Studies Program2007Coming to AmericaTimothy CorriganUniversity of Pennsylvania, tcorriga@upenn.eduFollow this and additional works at: http://repository.upenn.edu/cims_papersPart of the Film Production CommonsThis paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. http://repository.upenn.edu/cims_papers/7For more information, please contact repository@pobox.upenn.edu.Recommended CitationCorrigan, Timothy, "Coming to America" (2007). Departmental Papers (CIMS). 7.http://repository.upenn.edu/cims_papers/7Coming to AmericaAbstractForeign films achieved a high level of distinction and visibility in the United States this year, but theinternational movie scene has been long in development. The author traces the roots of this phenomenon anddiscusses the reasons for “the increasingly accented cinema seen in America.” Timothy Corrigan is a professorof English and director of cinema studies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the author ofseveral books, including most recently The Film Experience (2004), written with Patricia White.DisciplinesFilm and Media Studies | Film ProductionThis journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/cims_papers/712 13Foreign films achieved a high level of distinction and visibility in the United States this year, but the international movie scene has been long in development. The author traces the roots of this phenomenon and discusses the reasons for “the increasingly accented cinema seen in America.” Timothy Corrigan is a professor of English and director of cinema studies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the author of several books, including most recently The Film Experience (2004), written with Patricia White.Perhaps the most interesting feature of the 79th Annual Academy Awards, held in February 2007, has been the multiple nominations of three Mexican films: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. The fact that only the last of these was nominated in the best foreign film category and that several other foreign films appeared in mainstream categories—such as the nominations for best actress of Helen Mirren in the British production The Queen and Penélope Cruz in the Spanish film Volver—suggest a decidedly global range to what Hollywood has chosen to honor. Also suggestive of this foreign migration into Hollywood’s 2007 Oscar ceremony is that American icon Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima, nominated for best picture and best director this year, is primarily a Japanese-language film.Certainly the modern world has grown smaller and more familiar in many ways, and the allure of exotic populations and locales, such as the Mongolian landscapes in The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003), still aims to tap the traditional curiosity of movie audiences about other places and peoples. But the increasingly accented cinema seen in America has other, more concrete forces behind it.      BIRTH OF AN INTERNATIONAL MARKETHowever distinctive and visible this year’s array of foreign films in the United States, America’s complicated relationship with other film cultures is hardly new. Since the first public projection of movies in France in 1895, a key dynamic in film history has been the showdowns Coming to America Timothy CorriganeJOURNAL USAGuillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth was one of the foreign films nominated for an Academy Award in 2007. It won Oscars in three categories.© AP Images/Mark AverySociety & Values12 13and negotiations between the U.S. movie culture and overseas production companies and theater markets. The establishment of the Motion Pictures Patents Company in 1908, under the leadership of Thomas Edison (American inventor of the motion picture camera), aimed explicitly to limit the distribution of foreign films in the United States. Later, in the wake of World War I and with the American movie industry’s growing world dominance, Hollywood globalization would reach into a floundering German economy to create the 1926 Parufamet Agreement. American film studios Paramount and MGM and the German studio Ufa agreed not only to allow Hollywood access to the German exhibition markets but also to open the door for German talent to immigrate to the United States (including Casablanca director Michael Curtiz and Swedish star Greta Garbo). As America’s cultural expansion grew after World War II, the Paramount Decrees of 1948 laid a foundation that would gradually but profoundly alter the direction of American movie culture and lead to the international film scene today. These decrees effectively broke up the monopolistic hold of the major Hollywood studios on the American marketplace. As a result, through the 1950s and early 1960s, both independent U.S. productions and, eventually, foreign films started to make their way into U.S. theaters. Led by films from Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman, France’s Francois Trufffaut, and Italy’s Michelangelo Antonioni among many others, this new wave of foreign films appealed especially to an emerging demographic of youth and academic audiences curious about other cultures, but over the next several decades interest spread through an expanding population of U.S. audiences.The postwar trends in the global expansion of Hollywood’s market and the subsequent growing ubiquity and popularity of international cinema in America have today assumed their own specific economic and technological rationale and shapes. Most importantly perhaps, the contemporary explosion of international film festivals has been one of the most visible engines in announcing and supporting foreign films to an international market, most notably for the highly lucrative American theater and DVD (digital video disc) circuits.The first film festival, the still influential Venice Film Festival, began in 1932, and today, from Cannes and Berlin to Toronto and Telluride (Colorado), the festival circuit offers anywhere from 400 to 1,000 events in cities around the world, where films such as Life Is Beautiful (1998) from Italy and Run Lola Run (1998) from Germany are catapulted into world markets after receiving awards at these festivals. Just as the original Venice festival aimed to promote its own and other national cultures through films, festivals today frequently act as conduits for offering insights into cultures outside national cinemas and Hollywood, become barometers for worldwide critical Society & ValuesClint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima was not categorized as a foreign-language film, despite being primarily in Japanese.© AP Images/Katsumi KasaharaAn international audience gathers for the film festival in Locarno, Switzerland.© AP Images/Keystone/Martial TrezzinieJOURNAL USAA scene from Michael Curtiz’s classic film, Casablanca.© AP Images14 15attention, and at the same time often attract funding and distribution for smaller, more creative films.Contemporary Iranian and Korean cinema are a case in point. With little support or popularity at home, Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, the 1997 Grand Prize winner at Cannes, led a spate of contemporary Iranian films into Europe and the United States. After Park Chan-wook’s Old Boy (2003), a wildly successful example of “Asian extreme cinema,” garnered numerous awards from festivals in Hong Kong, Cannes, and Stockholm, the film not only found art-house distribution in the United States but landed Park in the New York Times magazine. Thanks to festival recognition, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films (such as 1993’s The Puppetmaster and 1998’s Flowers of Shanghai) found financial support and thus visibility in the United States, and when Walter Salles’s Brazilian film Central Station (1998) won a prize at the Sundance Film Festival, its future in America suddenly became brighter.  CULTIVATING AUDIENCESRelated to these new sources for exposure and word-of-mouth promotion is a second important factor in contemporary migration of foreign films to the United States: namely, since 1990, the growing popularity and profitability of the so-called New Independent Cinema and the ability of films from overseas to, in a sense, ride the coattails of this movement. Fostered by distribution (and later production) companies such as Miramax, films by Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch offered audiences stories and styles different from many of the tired Hollywood formulas, and as this taste for the offbeat, distinctive, and new grew through the 1990s, these companies learned to seek out (usually through the festival circuit), to import, and sometimes to repackage foreign films that would be aimed at specially targeted audiences. Films like The Crying Game (1992) and Il Postino  (1994) set new box-office records for foreign films in U.S. markets. The Crying Game offered a paradigm for a promotional campaign that turned a moderately successful British film about an IRA terrorist into a U.S. mini-blockbuster about sex and secrets.     Following the success of companies like Miramax, the major U.S. studios have, not surprisingly, created (or re-created) their own “specialty film divisions” to both discover and distribute independent and foreign films. One such division, for example, Sony Pictures Classics, currently distributes Zhang Yimou’s romantic martial arts film House of the Flying Daggers (2004), Pedro Almodovar’s offbeat Spanish suspense film Volver (2006), and Michael Haneke’s French/Austrian/German thriller Caché (2005). Another company, Fox Searchlight (parented by 20th Century Fox), offers highly successful British imports like Bend It Like Beckham (2002) and Notes on a Scandal (2006).Both as a product and a creator of these trends, contemporary movies are more and more coproduced by a variety of international companies, with each investment potentially promising a wider distribution around the world and in the United States. Hardly a new practice, coproduction frequently offers U.S. companies involvement in foreign movies from the ground up and often assures an English-language release in the United States. Like the Parufamet Agreement of 1926, coproductions and financing encourage shared directors, producers, technicians, and stars like Roberto Begnini, Ang Lee, Guillermo del Toro, Rutger Hauer, Penelope Cruz, and Michael Ballhaus. And with this cross-fertilization of personnel comes more and more blending eJOURNAL USASociety & ValuesCrowds line up to see some of the films of the Toronto Film Festival.© AP Images/Chitose Suzuki14 15of genres and plots, easily recognized, if not as exclusively American, at least as “international” in a sense that accommodates American tastes—such as Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita (1990), a fast-action crime thriller.      This is not to say, I’d insist, that recent movies from overseas have simply adapted to American genres. On the contrary, at least as important is how other national cinemas have offered American audiences new kinds of stories and characters outside the formulas of Hollywood. It is hard to imagine the Oscar-winning Crash (2005) or its critical reception without Iñárritu’s far more daring precedent Amores perros (2000).DIGITAL DISTRIBUTIONA final and particularly contemporary factor in the accenting of American cinema is the digital convergence of film production and distribution. With the now and future digital revolution at hand, the freedoms and openings once offered by home-video distribution in the 1970s and 1980s are now being translated into the new opportunities of contemporary DVD and Internet distribution. While video and DVD sales long ago surpassed theatrical ticket sales, what often gets overlooked in this shift is how the video and DVD market allowed a more targetable and more open market for the distribution of foreign films. If most foreign films are rarely seen theatrically (except in the very limited art-house circuit), the expansion of home video through the expansion of DVD technology makes more and more foreign films available to all audiences and, perhaps more significantly, allows distributors to target DVDs to local communities with particular interests in, for instance, Asian, European, or African cinema.Indian cinema, the films of “Bollywood,” is an especially powerful example. Bride and Prejudice, an Indian remake of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice, might be seen in alternative cinemas around the country in 2004, and Mira Nair’s recent films, including Monsoon Wedding (2001), have distinguished themselves critically and economically in the United States during the past 15 years. Yet it is the more-or-less open and continual access to a potentially unlimited variety of Indian, and other foreign, films through neighborhood and on-line video rentals that assures an accented chatter about films in America. With subscription services like Netflix providing an even easier and globally wider choice of films, which the inevitable Internet downloading of films will only facilitate in the near future, it’s difficult to resist today the romantic and utopian tendency to see again, as in 1895, the movies as, if not the universal language of Esperanto, perhaps a multilanguage dialogue in our homes and communities. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.It is now possible to watch a film on a mobile phone.Netflix distributes DVDs through the mail, revolutionizing home video access.© AP Images/Paul SakumaeJOURNAL USA Society & Values© AP Images/Jae C. Hong  

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