The Guardian view on foreign language drama: a cultural revolution
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Version 0 of 1. Members of Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are still struggling to justify their failure, for the second year running, to nominate a single non-white actor in any of the main categories of the Oscars. On Friday, one best actress nominee, Charlotte Rampling, told a French radio interviewer that maybe there weren’t any black contenders good enough for a nomination. She may have thought she was striking a blow against political correctness (she went on to describe concern about lack of diversity as racism against white people). She was certainly reflecting the divide between mainly old and white members of the academy who believe that talent always wins through in the world of film, and the rest who think that there is a deeply ingrained problem throughout the industry. The academy president, Cheryl Boone Isaacs – who is black – says she is disappointed and promises to try to accelerate reforms to weed out the less active academicians in order to “widen their normal stream of thought”. It is hardly radical to suggest that that ought to be the minimum ambition of any creative endeavour. It is the capacity to expose the audience to an unfamiliar world without sacrificing their empathic attention that often makes quite ordinary police procedurals compelling viewing when they’re made for a Scandinavian audience. One of the great advances brought about by the adaptability of the human brain is the way everyone watches the TV news while reading the headlines rolling by on a tickertape beneath. From there it has become an easy step to watching European or Latin American TV series regardless of language capacity. And never has the audience had quite such a choice. BBC4’s Saturday night offer began eight years ago with the dark, dense Parisian crime thriller Spiral (some of whose cast have now reappeared in Spin, an equally gripping political thriller) and took off with The Killing, Borgen, The Bridge and Wallander via the rather sunnier Montalbano. From both France and Scandinavia came premonitions of the complexities of a multicultural society, a grasp of the subtleties of coalition government and a thing about thick, patterned sweaters. Channel 4, which in the days before it sold its own advertising introduced hours of heavyweight foreign drama at peak time, is back in the fray not only with Deutschland 83, which is pulling in a million viewers on a Sunday night despite being up against the glossy heartbreak of War and Peace. Its new digital strand, Walter Presents, is the home of Spin, and a host of other foreign language series including a MASH-style series set in Afghanistan. The BBC has banked up more from around Europe. It may not add up to the cultural awakening offered by 1980s subtitled TV like the German saga of everyday life, Heimat, and the Hindi series Mahabharat. But armchair exposure to an unfamiliar world at the least lends understanding to the Europe in which we all live. And, just as the era of Ingmar Bergman or Pier Paolo Pasolini subverted the postwar dominance of American culture in the 1950s and 1960s, it may herald the dawn of a more sophisticated take on Europe. Or, prosaically, viewers may just be beneficiaries in a battle between traditional broadcasters and the new digital entrepreneurs. But the hidden persuasion of a good story in an unfamiliar setting should never be underestimated. |