Word: godard
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...foreign-language films--the '50s and '60s. Back then Hollywood was Doris Day and Jerry Lewis on the low side, Tennessee Williams and biblical spectacles on high. Meanwhile, artists in other countries were leading film to a robust maturity: Ingmar Bergman in Sweden, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard in France, Akira Kurosawa in Japan, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni in Italy, Luis Bunuel in Spain. As each director found a constituency, U.S. distributors would pick up his earlier films, as well as other movies from the same country. Americans got an informed sampling from the world's film banquet...
What Hollywood couldn't ignore it would try to co-opt. The year was 1967, the films Bonnie and Clyde (whose script was originally offered to Godard) and The Graduate (with its jazzy ransacking of the European film lexicon), and soon American directors had the auteur status that had been the exclusive province of foreigners. Then U.S. films got gamier, porno went legit, and the raincoat brigade didn't have to take its sex in Swedish...
...genre wasn't dead, it was missing. Some of the best directors died (Truffaut) or retired (Bergman). Others kept working, but in the U.S. their work was shown sporadically at best. The last films Fellini and Satyajit Ray made never opened here; neither have the most recent films by Godard, Resnais, Antonioni and Kurosawa. The Netherlands' Paul Verhoeven (Spetters) joined a century-long exodus of European talent to Hollywood (where he made Robocop and Showgirls). Denmark's Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves) stayed in Europe but made films in English. That leaves a new generation of world masters--Greece...
...hardly took the Mayflower Madam to alert the citizenry to the news that genteel women had taken up prostitution. French films had the story 20 years ago: Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour and Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her spoke of suburban housewives who supplemented their allowances by turning tricks. The twist in Lizzie Borden's new film is that its call-girl protagonist Molly (Louise Smith) uses her earnings to support her half of a lesbian relationship...
...idea of an action sequence is to have two characters walk while they talk--do a remake of the '70s kids' baseball movie Bad News Bears? It's because, although his office building off the highway in Austin, Texas, is lined with framed posters of French auteur Jean-Luc Godard movies, Richard Linklater is not a film snob. He just likes to make movies. "I would have loved to have been a '40s studio director like Vincente Minnelli. You ended up with a real diverse career," says Linklater. "Now you don't get a call from Darryl Zanuck saying, 'Come...