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n the one hundred years since World War I, the U.S. film industry has grown into the world’s largest. It often draws more spectators to its films in foreign markets than films produced by the national film industries in those countries. In the second half of the twentieth century, various countries took measures to protect their national film industries, but they did so without coordination with other countries. Before the spread of television, the cinema had no rival as a mass entertainment medium, and many national cinemas produced waves of internationally renowned films during the 1950s and 1960s. During the 1950s, theatrical attendance reached unprecedented heights in most countries, then fell spectacularly, with Hollywood taking the first and fastest plunge. Hollywood lost almost three-fourths of its audience in theaters between 1950 and 1970; some of the largest European film industries saw audiences decline by almost 90 percent (see figures 1.1a–1.1f). Historians have identified multiple factors behind this worldwide decline, including the rise of television, the expansion of alternative leisure activities, and the introduction of VHS and DVD.1 Nonetheless, theatrical exhibition remains the crucial first window for the cinema industry, even if downstream windows now supply the bulk of revenues.2 After hitting bottom in the early 1970s, Hollywood recovered later in the decade and pressed its advantage internationally, leading to its massive domination of most national markets. Following the conclusion of the General Agreement
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Figure 1.1a Cinema attendance, from post–World War II high to low in the United States (total loss was 73%) Figure 1.1b Cinema
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(total loss was 84%) Figure 1.1c Cinema attendance, from post–World War II high to low in the United Kingdom (total loss was 96%) Figure 1.1d Cinema attendance, from post–World War II high to low in France (total loss was 72%) Figure 1.1e Cinema attendance, from post–World War II high to low in Italy (total loss was 88%) Figure 1.1f Cinema attendance, from post–World War II high to low in Japan (total loss was 86%)
on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations in 1993, many countries, led by France, managed to arrest that dominance and demonstrate that submission to U.S. hegemony was not inevitable. Even as parochial discussion in the United States prefers to stigmatize government involvement, France has shown that in the increasingly globalized and digital world, national
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industries can survive if—and probably only if—the state intervenes judiciously to support both commercial success and artistic ambition. In many ways, globalization has been driven by an ideology of free trade, dismantling barriers to trade erected by individual countries. In earlier years, countries might object to pressures to open their markets, but free trade agreements in the most recent era of globalization locked countries into commitments to lower trade restrictions. Consequently, resistance has required building counterhegemonic alliances, for globalization seeks to weaken the power of states, especially alone, to control the more harmful consequences of free trade fundamentalism. Before we look more closely at forms and sites of resistance to Hollywood hegemony, contextualizing the contours of the film industry internationally provides a needed perspective. A small number of developed countries account for most of the production, attendance, revenue, and screens across the world. It is often claimed that India has the largest film industry in the world. In certain ways, that claim is accurate but also misleading. India does produce more films than any other country, and its films draw many more spectators in theaters than any other country, as figure 1.2 indicates. Indian cinema also dominates its domestic market, capturing over 90 percent of all theatrical attendance.3 However, in other significant ways, Indian cinema pales in relation to that of the United States. In absolute terms, Indian cinema earns less than 15 percent of U.S. domestic movie revenues, even with a population four times as large and twice as many spectators. The average Indian films costs about $500,000,
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compared to an average of $60 million in the United States. More detailed comparisons are difficult to make because of the absence of available figures for Indian cinema, but it is safe to say that promotion costs in India are a small fraction of what is spent on U.S. films. Once one begins to factor in the enormous size of India’s population, the figures reveal a popular but financially modest industry compared to other countries with much smaller populations. India has over 1.3 billion people and ten thousand movie screens; with less than a quarter of India’s population, the United States has almost forty thousand screens. France, with only 62 million people, has 5,500 screens, and annual theatrical revenue of the French film industry exceeds India’s box office. With population factored in, India’s per capita box office revenue ranks below that of all other major national film industries (see figures 1.3–1.4).
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The comparison becomes even more dramatic beyond the borders of the two countries. Plausible anecdotal evidence suggests that Indian cinema is popular in other countries, but those countries are generally poor, with small markets and film industries. Despite the critical interest in Indian cinema in more developed countries, Indian cinema barely registers in the domestic box office of the developed world.4 Even in a country like Great Britain with a considerable population of people with Indian backgrounds, and where some observers find a sizeable audience for Indian films, the market share for such films is probably no more than 1 percent.5 Indian films do attract diasporic Indian spectators, but those films rarely compete with non-Indian films in the developed world. In addition, the Hindi-speaking cinema known throughout the world as Bollywood represents less than 20 percent of polyglot India’s annual production, so most Indian national production goes virtually unseen outside its borders by nondiasporic audiences.6 The People’s Republic of China is another special case. Also with a population of more than a billion people, annual theatrical attendance reaches 400–600 million, or one-fifth of India’s total. Figures are also elusive for the PRC’s cinema industry, but revenues appear to have exploded in recent years from $455 million (2007) to $3.5 billion (2013), leaping past India ($1.6 billion).7 While estimates of the number of theatrical screens in China vary wildly, some sources indicate that the number of “modern” screens rose from 6,256 (only slightly more than France) in 2010 to 18,195 in 2013, still less than half the number in the United States. It is difficult to ascertain the export numbers for Chinese cinema, and the brief emergence of Hong Kong cinema as a phenomenal industrial success, producing hundreds of films popular throughout Southeast Asia, complicates the story, to say nothing of the film festival embrace of Taiwanese cinema in recent years. That particular constellation of three Chinas has led scholars to speak of Chinese cinemas, since the films and filmmakers increasingly cross the political borders.8 And political considerations play a critical role in the PRC cinema, for the government strictly controls the number of non-Chinese (and Chinese) films permitted to be shown in theaters. Thus, China allows only a small number of foreign films into the country each year, primarily U.S. films. In the context of this book, the Indian and Chinese cinemas each represent anomalies. Both of their cinema industries maintain large domestic market shares of the theatrical audience. Without (or with few) import
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restrictions, Indian cinema consistently draws over 90 percent of the annual attendance. With so few foreign films allowed to enter the country, China’s domestic market share also remains high, but that situation appears to be changing, as China has raised the number of films it imports, and since the domestic audience has been given the choice of watching more foreign films, the Chinese film industry’s domestic market share has begun to decline, dipping below 50 percent in 2012.9 Together, then, the two countries with the largest populations in the world produce a large number of films, seen by billions of spectators, with only modest box office revenues compared to the rest of the world. But the reach of their cinemas beyond their borders is limited to their regional neighbors or diasporic communities. In most other countries, including all the wealthiest developed countries, the U.S. cinema draws a staggering percentage of domestic viewers, and domestic market share is arguably the best single measure of the health of a national film industry.10 Setting aside for the moment technical questions regarding the nationality of films, and excluding the special cases of India and China, U.S. films garner 70–80 percent of the world theatrical cinema box office.11 However, the market shares for domestic industries have improved in many countries over the past two decades, suggesting that cinema industries may still be viable in other countries and perhaps even more significantly, that the medium of cinema, as a theatrical phenomenon, has a future, defying the many prognostications of its death in recent years. But given the massive Hollywood presence on screens in so many countries, the nature of that future remains unclear. In 1995, a famous Variety headline appeared to be true: “Earth to H’wood: You Win!”12 At the time, the Hollywood market share in the most developed countries, with the largest national film industries and the most remunerative foreign markets, stood at roughly 70 percent; the Variety article reported that Hollywood films took in 90 percent of world cumulative box office revenues of $8.34 billion (see figure 1.5). For many years, however, voices have expressed concern about this domination, often under the rubric of “cultural imperialism.” According to these critics, cultural products like movies have potentially negative effects on foreign audiences, for they spread ideological influence that both crowds out home-grown cultural expressions and imposes uniformity in the cultural sphere, which can thrive only through diversity.13 This critique has also spawned responses that question the implicit—and
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condescending—claim that foreign audiences are incapable of deciphering the ideological influence and developing their own creative works that are not mere reproductions of the hegemonic Yanqui culture. These kinds of tensions and contradictions fuel reductive accounts describing some kind of deeply rooted French hostility to the United States, sometimes described as pathological.14 Cultural commentators in both countries pluck evidence from any number of domains, whether literature, the art world, or cinema. In 2007, a U.S. writer based in France wrote an article for Time with the Proustian title “In Search of Lost Time.”15 For the European edition, Time designed a cover with a photograph of Marcel Marceau, complete with beret, and splashed a new title across the cover, no doubt in search of French readers: “The Death of French Culture,” followed quickly by a book with the same title. The author, Donald Morrison, inventoried the alleged contemporary irrelevance of French culture. According to him, few people outside France read French books, museums showed little interest in French artists, and French cinema had produced no filmmakers of international renown since Truffaut and Godard in the 1960s. Though writing as a self-described Francophile (living in “a country I rather like”), Morrison examined the traditional arts and found no prominent contemporary French artists in any area, with the lone exception of architecture. Unsurprisingly, angry reactions poured forth in the French press.16 Morrison’s book, published the following year, included comments from Antoine Compagnon, a professor of French literature at the Collège
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de France and Columbia University, which had appeared in Le Monde. Compagnon offered an informed and balanced assessment of Morrison’s autopsy, pointing out that Morrison was only repeating what the French already were well aware of in terms of the decline of French culture on the international stage, observing matter of factly that “seen from the US, after existentialism and structuralism, after Malraux, Sartre, and Camus, or Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, the articles from France no longer inspire the intellectual avant-garde.”17 Nor did Compagnon share the anxiety many French writers expressed. With the loss of its colonies and its decline as a world power, it stood to reason that France would no longer occupy its former cultural prominence internationally either: “the influence of French culture abroad is now consistent with the geopolitical heft of France in the world, and with its foreign trade.”18 Morrison had dismissed “French films today [as] . . . amiable, low-budget trifles for the domestic market,” a market where half the audience prefers to pay for U.S. films at the box office, though he found encouraging several recent French films that enjoyed some renown beyond the borders. Compagnon took little solace in Morrison’s embrace of these popular successes, such as those he happened to see on airplanes (as they belong to “the type of films Air France shows to its captive passengers”): Amélie Poulain (Jeunet), Luc Besson’s Taxi films, L’auberge espagnol (Klapisch). Among the reasons behind the decline of French culture, Morrison pointed to the state subsidy system. Aside from finding state support disproportionately large in comparison with other countries, Morrison cited French critics who believed that subsidies ensure mediocrity, or “trifles.” While Morrison, perhaps understandably, displayed some basic ignorance about the admittedly complex French system of cultural support for cinema, he referred to a book by Frédéric Martel about U.S. cultural production as evidence for the subsidy assertion.19 In a thick volume based on research and interviews, Martel had described the extensive web of philanthropic funding for the arts in the United States. Morrison cited Martel’s admiring observation that “if the Culture Ministry is nowhere to be found [in the United States], cultural life is everywhere.”20 It is true, as Morrison said, that Martel did marvel at the efficacy of arts funding in the United States. However, what Martel found surprising was that private sources provided such largesse, not a government ministry. In fact, Morrison failed to note that Martel actually argued at the end of the book that France should take the information he had compiled
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about private funding and use that information in defense of French government funding in the recurrent trade battles with the United States over culture. Martel wrote in his preface that he wanted to try to understand better how U.S. arts funding worked, as foreigners had little grasp of its functioning. Martel was impressed with American cultural vibrancy, but he also maintained that despite the apparent lack of state funding, the government—governments, actually, for he looked at federal, state, and local funding—at all levels had established elaborate tax mechanisms for cultural organizations, which then took advantage of those breaks to distribute funds to artists and cultural institutions.21 Funding could be traced to these fiscal inducements, nonprofit tax deductions for the moneyed classes, which were, in fact, subsidies lavished by the state on the arts. In France, and Europe more generally, the equivalent of philanthropic funding often came directly from government entities (even if free trade ideologues regularly inflate the size of what they often inaccurately call subsidies).22 But contrary to Morrison’s characterization, Martel actually concludes his book with a call to use his research into U.S. arts funding to buttress the French position in favor of the cultural exception. Referring to a “certain American hypocrisy,” Martel points out that all these direct and indirect funding sources constitute public aids to culture. . . . Instead of trying to eliminate the public subsidies to culture by Europeans, in the interest of the liberalization of markets under globalization, the Americans should begin by acknowledging that they subsidize their culture as much as the Europeans. In legally dissimulating their colossal indirect subsidies, the implicit quotas which favor their citizens and the numberless regulations which exist in the cultural sector, the Americans believed they could make people forget that they also have erected a real “cultural exception.” All these types of financing described in this book can then be used to expose the American pretentions in calling for the liberalization of culture in the international negotiations.23
These tensions over cultural policy in an era of accelerated globalization are the subject of this book. Assessing the health of a film industry entails identifying weaknesses and stresses. In the case of Hollywood, there is only one possible weakness: declining profits. All thinking in Hollywood goes into improving the bottom line. When television took off in the 1950s and 1960s, contrary to
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popular myth, Hollywood found ways of working with its perceived competitor.24 When VCRs and videotape appeared, some studio heads fought the new technology, taking Sony to court for copyright infringement.25 But others recognized that videotape, like television before it, could actually be a new source of income to replace the disappearing theatrical audience.26 Industrial histories of Hollywood, often forced to work with the meager statistics available to the public, look at gross box office numbers, sizes of production and advertising budgets, and the changes in leadership and ownership of the studios, but they say little about state funding. Douglas Gomery has written that he begins his research with an investigation of studio ownership patterns.27 He concluded his 2005 book, The Hollywood Studio System, by claiming that the “key to success remains the same: a skilled leader,” the visionaries who successfully navigated the future.28 He cites as one example Lew Wasserman, once head of Universal, who understood the potential of the blockbuster strategy and built Universal’s success around it. But Wasserman failed to anticipate the potential riches of videotape, which ended his tenure at Universal. Steve Ross, Gomery’s other example, purchased Warner Bros. as another holding in his sprawling empire, but he recognized before others that there was more upside in the strategy of “tight diversification,”29 so he sold off the nonmedia holdings and diversified into horizontal acquisitions of complementary media companies, culminating in the mega-merger of Time and Warner in 1989 and the ill-fated gamble of AOL–Time Warner in 2000.30 A small number of critics on the left, describing their approach as critical political economy, find fault with this focus on the owners. In her account of the political economy of Hollywood, Janet Wasko has tried to revive the ethical dimension of political economy, which was dropped when political economy became simply economics in U.S. academia.31 For Wasko, scholars should not stop at simple description but should bring a normative perspective to their work. They should not limit their investigations to how Hollywood has worked but should ask how Hollywood should work. Toby Miller, perhaps the most outspoken critic of a classical economics approach, has repeatedly insisted that the real key to understanding Hollywood’s long-term success is government support for the industry, which scholars refuse to probe or even acknowledge: “Contrary to the conventional view, which sees Hollywood’s success resting on the free-market efficiency and narrative transparency [of the films], we argue that its commanding position has been held for nearly a century
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thanks to various forms of aid and protection from the state, across all levels of governance.”32 Thomas Guback, also writing as a critical political economist, tried to document U.S. support for Hollywood in the postwar period, but the period covered by his major work ended in the late 1960s, before the generous tax breaks granted by the government during the tumultuous 1970s.33 At the beginning of the 1970s, Hollywood was reeling from the long-term effects of television competition and the conjunctural crisis of overproduction. Then the federal government approved tax breaks for investment in the film industry, which eased the industry through its crisis. That recovery further strengthened its position as it steadily rebuilt its international dominance after 1980. Ultimately the breaks led to so many abuses that the programs largely ended in 1976, when Hollywood had already started its recovery.34 Others, including Miller, have touched on the question, but documentation remains scarce.35 Many writers have noted the ability of Hollywood studios to practice cartelistic activities abroad that U.S. anti-trust laws do not allow domestically. The colorful, longtime Hollywood lobbyist Jack Valenti openly admitted that one such anticompetitive provision, passed in 1918, was an indispensable aid in prying open protectionist foreign markets: “Without [the 1918 Webb-Pomerene Act] the American film industry would be an invalid . . . [as it] is peculiarly vulnerable to unfavourable action by foreign governments and by foreign private interests, by industry cartels, and by an avalanche of non-tariff barriers that are both endless and ingenious . . . [Webb-Pomerene has enabled the Motion Picture Association of America] to counter these restrictions . . . and preserve the freedom of the American film industry to compete fairly in the world entertainment marketplace.”36 This book takes a political economy approach for reasons similar to, but also different from, those suggested by Wasko. Critical political economy of the media normally seeks to expose the structures hidden behind the concentration of power in the hands of a small number of companies that benefit from government policies that receive little public scrutiny. Despite its complexity, the French support system for cinema is far more accessible for examination. The following chapters look into its many moving parts, but more to explicate the system’s inherent tensions than to uncover its nefarious machinations. But the book will try to follow Wasko’s injunction that “analysis must also include an understanding of the interaction between the industry and the State.”37
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Before considering the reasons behind the international success of the U.S. film industry in recent decades, it bears recalling that Hollywood confronted economic woes similar to those experienced by other national film industries in the post–World War II period, but it overcame those difficulties sooner. That early recovery strengthened its position as it steadily rebuilt its international dominance after 1980. As figure 1.6 illustrates, cinema attendance picked up in the mid-1970s and rose steadily through 2000. Most historians attribute the turnaround to the strategy of blockbusters inaugurated with the release of Jaws in 1975.38 While the plunge in theatrical attendance caused by television affected all countries, the chronology of television adoption varied from country to country.39 Widespread television adoption occurred first in the United States, so Hollywood weathered the drop in theater attendance first. By the 1970s it was able to reassert itself domestically and abroad at a time when other countries were continuing or entering steep declines (see figures 1.1a–1.1f). Similarly, after videotape was introduced in the late 1970s, Hollywood realized, after initial hesitation, that the new technology would boost revenues. Thus, by the 1980s, a reborn Hollywood saw its domestic revenues rise and pushed its advantage in foreign markets to phenomenal success. What explains the success of Hollywood on foreign screens? Many critics, scholars and cultural commentators have tried to answer the question.40 Tyler Cowen, an economist who often writes for the popular press, synthesized many of the conventional arguments in “Why Hollywood Rules the World, and Should We Care?”41 He begins with an excellent hypothesis. If Hollywood’s domination, contrary to the claim of
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critics, does not actually reduce diversity as it fills world theaters, then “we” should not worry about illusory harms imputed to globalization. The large and wealthy domestic U.S. market alone churns out more revenue than any other market, 50 percent more even than the combined markets of the EU5 countries (France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Spain), so the U.S. film industry can afford to produce expensive films and market them with unmatched promotional budgets. More people speak English as a second language than any other language, so Hollywood can press that linguistic advantage abroad, for it reduces the “cultural discount” that cultural goods encounter when they cross borders. Available figures support those quantitative observations.42 However, once Cowen ventures into the qualitative terrain, his argument degenerates into circularity. According to Cowen, spectators prefer films with larger budgets, and films with larger budgets are actually better films. Better in what way? Better because more people want to watch them: “more expensive movies are better movies, at least in the eyes of the audience, if not always in more objective aesthetic terms.” Once he acknowledges that these films may not actually be better in “more objective aesthetic terms,” whatever that minor reservation might mean (how can aesthetic terms be objective?), he undermines the pretensions to the superior “quality” of the expensive films. He then goes on to say that “the American values of heroism, individualism, and romantic self-fulfillment are well suited for the large screen and for global audiences,” though he fails to explain why those values are American. Cowen also repeats the familiar legend that Hollywood films must first satisfy the large polyglot domestic audience, used apparently to show the universal—not “American”—appeal of U.S. films: “Hollywood’s universality has, in part, become a central part of American national culture. Commercial forces have led America to adopt ‘that which can be sold’ as part of its national culture.”43 On the one hand, then, purportedly “American values” appeal to world audiences, but at the same time those same values are also apparently “universal,” proven by the size of the world audience for Hollywood production. A French scholar has offered another view: “It’s not because American cinema is ‘universal’ that it is present everywhere in the world; but it is because it is present everywhere in the world that American cinema is universal.”44 Such is the received boosterism recycled by a prominent U.S. social scientist seeking to explain the international dominance of U.S. cinema.45
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More expensive films are better because they attract more spectators, even if they are not better in “aesthetic terms.” American values, at once “American” and “universal,” happen to be values that audiences prefer. If that fundamentally circular argument fails to explain anything, Cowen also reassures us about why “we” should not care about Hollywood dominance. He notes that domestic and foreign writers and artists have excoriated the toxic influence of U.S. “cultural imperialism” for sucking the oxygen out of local or national artistic production, force-feeding Hollywood uniformity on captive audiences and reducing creative diversity. Cowen is pleased to report, however, that on the contrary, Hollywood actually fosters world diversity. Domestically, scaled-back studios can produce only so many blockbusters, so the large balance of releases are a variety of “microbudget,” independent productions. Abroad, countries cannot compete with blockbusters, but they should not despair. Following the sacrosanct economic law of comparative advantage, their strength, Cowen asserts with no argument whatsoever, let alone evidence, lies in producing art films, for “the natural European advantage is in making arthouse films, not blockbuster or special-effects spectaculars.” According to him, “the dirty little secret of today’s cinematic world” is that “Hollywood’s asymmetric economic strength . . . in fact supports aesthetic diversity.” While Cowen writes as a champion of free market orthodoxy—he chose Joseph Schumpeter’s famous doxa of free market capitalism for the title of his book—he recognizes that culture may be a special case that merits state interest. For better or worse, “Once the dynamic of Hollywood export superiority is in place, most European productions, as we know them, cannot survive without governmental assistance.” But “in the long run,” European cinemas should be weaned from the public trough, “induced to make a more commercially appealing product.”46 The convolutions of Cowen’s account reflect the inherent difficulty in sorting out the strands of film’s dual status as art and industry. The U.S. film industry has always been built on the pursuit of commercial success. And the traditional narrative of U.S. cinema is set as a long battle between the aesthetic indifference of studio executives (Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn . . . ) and the frustrated aesthetic ambition of valiant artists (Erich von Stroheim, Josef von Sternberg, Orson Welles, Nicholas Ray . . . ). As is well known, a group of French critics (many of whom later turned filmmaker) during the 1950s excavated the alchemy of art and industry of Hollywood. Developing a critical practice known as “auteurism,” they
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showed how certain artists, with strong, personal, “authorial” visions managed to fight past the commercial constraints of the factory system in Hollywood to produce a body of work that deserved to be called art. These cinephile critics dared to claim this popular form of entertainment as art. Earlier writers, of course, had discerned the art behind the industry, but the French critics aggressively and polemically offered a hierarchized taxonomy filled with florid panegyrics to their favored auteurs, a hyperbole most taste arbiters in the United States found hard to apply to the weekly product they viewed more soberly as good, or bad, entertainment. One such earlier writer was the famous and dashing French novelist, art critic, aviator, freedom fighter, filmmaker, and first French minister of culture, André Malraux. At the end of an essay devoted to artistic aspects of film, Malraux concluded with a sentence that has served as an axiomatic koan for French writers ever since: “On the other hand, the cinema is also an industry.”47 Since the end of World War II, France has tried to design policy to attend to, if not submit to, the industrial requisites of cinema. Faced with the perceived invasion of U.S. cinema after the war, France negotiated an early agreement to guarantee a minimum time for screening of French films in theaters. An early law imposed a tax on theater tickets to help finance the industry.48 Several years later, in 1953, the national cinema office offered grants to filmmakers according to their “quality.”49 And one of Malraux’s first acts as minister of culture in 1959 was to institutionalize those quality grants in what is surely the most famous government (however modest financially) support mechanism in the world, the avance sur recettes, a cornerstone of French cinema that continues to this day. France’s efforts to balance both the art and industry of film production have undergirded state cinema policy since the end of World War II. Those efforts assumed greater urgency in the 1980s, in response to the travails of the film industry. With an activist minister of culture, Jack Lang, in a Socialist government, France began to devise measures to strengthen the industrial base of cinema and at the same time satisfy many noneconomic criteria, including the access to theaters in rural areas and support of quality filmmaking. As even supporters of French policy have pointed out, pursuit of these two goals can result in policies rife with contradiction.50 The economic health of the industry may require concentration of integrated firms to take advantage of economies of scale, but artistic accomplishment often depends on independent sectors of production,
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distribution, and exhibition, which the market may not sustain without government aid. The government, then, encourages concentration, a strategy of “national champions,” at the same time that it protects the smaller fish from the depredations of the market.51 In a 2006 brochure celebrating forty-five years of the avances sur recettes, Minister of Culture Catherine Colonna traced its policies to the tensions integral to the “visionary intelligence” of Malraux: “Favor innovation and creative audacity, ensure the renewal of talent, correct the influence of the laws of the market on cinematic creation, ensure the diversity of genres.”52 Critics often find fault with French policies to “correct the influence of the laws of the market on cinematic creation.” Like Morrison and many others, Cowen indicted European cinema’s dependence on state subsidies, a litany intoned by countless propagandists for neoliberalism and globalization. For Cowen, France, as the most outspoken supporter of state intervention in the film (or more generally, the audiovisual) industry, or even the culture industries as a whole, incarnates the etiology of European cinema’s failure to climb aboard the neoliberal bandwagon: “The problems of European cinema are, in large part, the problems of French cinema.” But it is precisely the difference between the French cinema industry and all other European film industries that concerns us in these pages. As we will see, the French cinema outperforms all other European cinemas on any quantitative scale. France invests more money, in more films, for more spectators, on more theatrical screens. In addition, France pours more money into European co-productions than any other European country and supports more non-French filmmakers than any other country. Furthermore, though the debate often hinges on technical definitions of terms, and contrary to the claims of ideologically blinkered critics, France has arguably fulfilled its commitment to art and industry without large state subsidies. The more pertinent question is, what is the French cinema industry doing right, and can the system behind that success be applied or adapted elsewhere?