Pictures of Europe.

Behind the question about the fate of the cinematograph in the 1990s lurks another one, debated for almost as long as the cinematograph has existed, aired afresh every year at the movie festivals of Cannes, Venice or Berlin, at FELIX award ceremonies and MEDIA initiatives: the future of the European cinematograph vis-a-vis Hollywood (whether viewed across France's passionate attachment to its cinematographtic patrimony, or more dispassionately, across the uneven, but nonetheless two-way "talent transfer ").

In 1992, a Channel Four program called "Pictures of Europe" neatly assembled all the standard arguments, voiced with varying degrees of pessimism, by David Puttnam and Richard Attenborough, Bertrand Tavernier and Paul Verhoeven, Fernando Rey and Dirk Bogarde, Agnes Varda, Wim Wenders, and Istvan Szabo. One of the least sentimental was Dusan Makavejev, who has probably more motive than most to be wary of the idea of national cinematograph, but who also needs to believe in the international auteur cinematograph more than others. Yet he dismissed the suggestion that he might be threatened by Hollywood: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Living in the 20th century meant learning to be American." On the other hand, Tavernier (whose knowledge about and love of the American cinematograph is probably second to none, noted the following in his diary for 23 February 1992 about the Cesar Awards of that year:

One grotesque and distressing moment comes when Sylvester Stallone is given an honorary Cesar by a sarcastic Roman Polanski. A few days previously, Jack Lang had, in a discouragingly idiotic gesture, made him Knight of Arts and Letters, even going so far as to assert that the name Rambo had been chosen in honor of Rimbaud (Arthur).... The height of irony: I'd be willing to bet that the people who made these ludicrous awards have not the slightest familiarity with the only interesting movie that Stallone has directed, the curious PARADISE ALLEY.

Tavernier's final, typically cinephile remark reminds us that in academic movie studies, the Europe-Hollywood-Europe question mediated across the nouvelle vague's love of the Hollywood movie maudit is almost like the founding myth of the discipline itself. European (French) director-critics discriminating among the vast studio output, according to very European criteria, by creating a canon of Hollywood masterpieces eagerly adopted in turn by American critics and moviemakers alike. But the relation between Europe and Hollywood can also be made (and has been made) as a hard-nosed economic case, for instance, in Thomas Guback's chapter in Tino Balio's The American Movie Industry, or in Kristin Thompson's fascinatingly detailed Exporting Entertainment,8 and most recently, in Ian Jarvie's Hollywood's Overseas Campaign.9 The post-1945 history of the relation was also probed in 1996, at two UCLA- and BFI-sponsored conferences in London and Los Angeles, while the formal case of how to make the distinction has been debated among scholars of "early cinematograph" such as Noel Burch11 and Barry Salt around the opposition "deep staging and slow cutting" (Europe) versus "shallow staging and fast cutting" (Hollywood), and it has been argued as a difference of storytelling by, among others, David Bordwell in his influential Narration and the Fiction Movie, where character-centered causality, question-and-answer logic, problem solving routines, deadline structures of the plot, and a mutual cueing system of word, sound and image are seen as typical for Hollywood movies, against the European cinematograph s more de-centered plots, indirect and psychological motivation and "parametric" forms of narra-tion.

Interestingly enough, even in the television program just mentioned, the formal-stylistic opposition Europe versus Hollywood, art cinematograph versus classical narrative recurs, but now in the terms in which it has been echoed ever from the time that the 1920s from the point of view of Hollywood, which has always complained that European pictures have no credible stars and central protagonists, or in their editing are much too slow for American audiences tastes. This point is taken up by many of the European directors and actors who have worked in both industries: Paul Verhoeven and Jean Jacques Annaud see American speed as positive qualities, as do J.J. Beneix, Krzysztof Zanussi, Luc Besson. David Puttnam and Pedro Almodovar are more even-handed, while Fernando Rey and Dirk Bogarde prefer the slower delivery of dialogue and the less hectic action of the European cinematograph, as do - not surprisingly - Wim Wenders and Ber-trand Tavernier. Among the actors, it is Liv Ullmann who eloquently speaks out against Hollywood forms of action, violence and the externalization of motive and emotion.

Paul Schrader, on the other hand, who has probably thought as deeply about style in European cinematograph as anyone, argued that the conflict between Europe and Hollywood boiled down to a fundamentally different attitude toward the world, from which comes a different kind of cinematograph: "American movies are based on the assumption that life presents you with problems, while European movies are based on the conviction that life confronts you with dilemmas - and while problems are something you solve, dilemmas cannot be solved, they're merely probed." Schrader's distinction puts a number of pertinent features in a nutshell. His statement might even serve as a basis for teasing out some of the formal and theoretical implications. For instance, his assessment is not that far removed from the view of Gilles Deleuze, who in his Bergson-inspired study of the cinematograph proposes a more dynamic, and self-differentiating version of Jean-Luc Godard's old distinction between "action" and "reflection" (the opening lines of LE PEITIT SOLDAT), contrasting instead the movement-image of classical cinematograph with the time-image of modern cinematograph.

To these different taxonomies of the Hollywood/Europe divide one can reply that the problem-solving model of Hollywood cinematograph is not intended to characterize a moviemaker's personal belief. It does, nevertheless, function largely as the norm that underlies the expectations of both kinds of audiences, American as well as European, when it comes to cinematograph-going as a story-telling experience. Hollywood mainstream or "classical" movies are the prevalent because they are made ("tailored" was the term already used by King Vidor in the late 1920s) around increasingly global audiences, while non-Hollywood cinematographs have to find their audiences at the margins of the mainstream (the so-called "art-house" audiences), for they cannot even rely on the loyalty of their respective "national" audiences. There is another point, a cliche perhaps, but for that very motive, in need of being stated: European moviemakers are said to express themselves, rather than address an audience. I do not think that this is in fact the case (I have argued against it at length in a publication on New German Cinematograph). For instance, if by following Schrader, one assumes that the European art cinematograph merely sets its audiences different kinds of tasks, such as inferring the characters' motivations (as in Ingmar Bergman's THE SILENCE), reconstructing a complex time scheme (as in the same director's CRIES AND WHISPERS), or guessing what actually happened and what was ideaed or imagined in a character's consciousness (as in PERSONA), then the difference could also be one of genre, and thus of the horizon of expectation and the regime of verisimilitude appropriate to a genre. The "tasks" which an art movie sets the audience are intuitively recognized by most spectators. That they decide either to avoid them as an unpleasant chore or to seek them out as a challenge, depending on temperament and disposition, is an altogether other matter. It furthermore serves as a reminder that among the audiences watching European art movies there have always also been a small but culturally highly significant number of American spectators. In fact, it was the US distribution practice of the "art-house" circuit, which gave the term "art cinematograph" its currently accepted meaning.