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113 Appendix Foreign Influences: The Arriflex 35 Overseas In the oft-cited 1963 article “Cinema: A Religion of Film,” Time magazine bluntly claimed that “the new status of cinema has largely been achieved by movies from abroad.” The article named Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Alain Resnais, François Truffaut, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Tony Richardson, Andrzej Wajda, Roman Polanski, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, and Satyajit Ray as central figures in “the redefinition of what movies are.” “Their imitators are legion,” the article added. “Young men at all hours of the day and night stalk through the streets clutching featherweight cameras and proclaiming a new religion of cinema.” Despite many failures , these non-Hollywood directors achieved something very important: they “have held the camera up to life and shown humanity a true and terrifying yet somehow heartbreakingly beautiful image of itself.”1 “Featherweight” cameras were indeed increasingly integral to this achievement. For professional film production outside the United States, the Arriflex 35 genuinely changed things, as did the Éclair Caméflex, especially within France. Unlike their Hollywood counterparts, however, cinematographers outside North America quickly adopted lightweight, portable cameras— and especially Arriflex cameras—for shooting feature films. This use began in the mid- and late 1950s—partly to achieve production economies, partly because there was a shortage of studio cameras in many parts of the postwar world, and partly because the enhanced realism of location shooting became increasingly in vogue. This appendix will provide a brief overview of the use of the Arriflex 35 in feature filmmaking outside North America from the perspective of works that influenced North American filmmakers, especially those who reached adulthood in the postwar era. Central to this influence was the considerable impact of foreign cinema on what Stanley Kauffmann labeled “the film generation .”2 Foreign films played to enthusiastic cinephile audiences in art houses, at film societies, and on college campuses, prompting an entire generation of 114 Appendix culturally elite film viewers to regard foreign cinema as providing an artistically and intellectually rigorous alternative to the mass entertainment supplied by Hollywood. This attitude toward foreign film was amply confirmed by the 1963 Time magazine article cited above, which championed overseas film industries as industries in which filmmakers “have been able to say what they want to say and not what some banker thinks the public wants to be told.”3 Time was far from alone in expressing this sentiment, which was echoed by many influential film critics as well as by large numbers of film instructors at American colleges and universities. Indeed, the prestige of foreign films remained very high within North America until near the end of the 1960s, by which time American films were being made that could be regarded as equal to foreign films in intellectual and artistic seriousness.4 For American filmmakers, the influence of foreign films worked on two related planes: on the one hand, the films accustomed increasing numbers of sophisticated film viewers to find acceptable and sometimes even preferable film styles that departed from the established conventions of Hollywood filmmaking; and on the other hand, it was not lost on American cinematographers , directors, and producers—especially those who regarded themselves as industry outsiders—that many foreign films succeeded without the luxuries of expensive production facilities, elaborate set lighting, large crews, and costly studio cameras. Some foreign films, including a number made overseas with American financial backing (“runaway production”), played in ordinary first-run theaters. But the bulk of foreign films, and especially those not in English, were shown primarily in art houses or on college campuses. The growth of an art-house circuit (along with film festivals) was a notable feature of the late 1950s and ’60s, particularly on the East and West coasts and on and around college campuses.5 Moreover, interest in foreign films continued to grow throughout the first two postwar decades, which had the general effect of enlarging the cultural and aesthetic horizons of those who watched them.6 Often intellectually and artistically , as well as politically and sexually, adventurous, foreign films not only influenced their viewers’ attitudes but also acquired a level of intellectual distinction and chic that was frequently combined with an anti-commercial and anti-establishment resonance that was broadly appealing to a younger generation of aspiring filmmakers. The appeal and success of foreign films throughout this period thus influenced not only American film audiences but...

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