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in a week, without a fighting chance of reaching their potential audience. For the filmmaker then, it is back to square one, once again raising money for the next project that will barely get any release, etc.
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I believe it is important to face this impasse. I also think that to learn from what is presently going on in the industry, one needs to understand how and why these changes came about. Rather than moaning about the lack of taste of audiences or complaining about the greed prevalent in the business, one needs to go back and analyze what brought us here in the first place. But even this is difficult for there is no single nefarious decision that can be pointed to, no malevolent conspiracy between the big players in the field as would be the case in a Hollywood script. Rather, we are dealing with isolated events, each one giving rise to consequences whose exact breadth and particulars could be noted only after the fact. All together, using Wayne C. Booth's words, the circumstances we find ourselves in make up ''an
un
controlled experiment of vast proportions, the results of which we will never fully know."
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My view is that three factors contributed the most to the present situation. First, there was the rapid evolution of Hollywood into a winner-take-all economic model which made it very difficult for independents and foreigners to compete. Second, the thrust of the counterculture movement in the sixties pushed Hollywood into embracing a cinema of experience rather than one of reflection. Third, in the arts themselves, the debasement of aesthetic values made possible by postmodernism undermined both the artist's self-confidence and the value of material created outside the culture industry's immediate concerns.
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It may be true, as Perry Anderson suggests, that "no class in history immediately comprehends the logic of its own historical situation."
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Disoriented and confused we surely are. In cinema, the forces of entertainment appear indeed to have won the day. Yet, the medium is too important to be abandoned without a fight to the barons of the culture industry who see no distinction between it and Coca-Cola, popcorn, or any other product of mass consumption. My story is a rather circuitous one. Please, bear with me.
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Although Hollywood earned its global ascendancy mostly by chance—World War I devastated the European cinemas and ended their domi-
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