Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/062992/06299932.000

Text File | 1992-09-24 | 7KB | 155 lines

                                                                                TELEVISION, Page 72

What Americans Never See


The best shows from around the world are screened each year
at the Banff Festival. Why do so few of them reach the U.S.?

By RICHARD ZOGLIN


    The heroine of Superlady truly lives up to her name. A
single mother who works in a supermarket, she struggles to
support four children while coping with a horde of distractions:
a crazy ex-husband who thinks he is being attacked by cosmic
rays, a girlfriend who shows up on her doorstep (with kids) to
take refuge from a violent lover, a government bureaucracy that
takes away her housing allowance the minute she earns a little
extra income. This made-for-TV movie has more authentic feminist
spirit than Murphy Brown, more realism and heart than The Days
and Nights of Molly Dodd, and more plainspoken charm than any
TV movie seen in the U.S. in years.

    But American audiences will probably never see it. It was
made in Denmark.

    International TV programming is the great terra incognita
for American viewers. The occasional British mini-series or
Australian soap opera makes its way to these shores, via PBS or
cable, and news sometimes filters back about the latest hit on
Japanese TV or those funny foreign versions of Wheel of Fortune.
But for most of the U.S. audience, TV in the non-English-speaking
world remains trapped in the twilight zone.

    I got a quick but intense tour of that mystery land when
I served as one of six international jurors at this month's
Banff Television Festival -- an annual get-together for
producers, broadcasters and other TV people from around the
globe, held in the picturesque Canadian Rockies. Eight days of
screening 130 programs, debating their merits and awarding
prizes in 10 categories produced three chief surprises. First,
after grueling 11-hour days of virtually nonstop TV viewing, it
was still possible to retreat to the hotel room and turn on
David Letterman without going bonkers. Second, despite the
obvious differences in national and cultural background among
the jurors (who came from Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Germany
and Japan, as well as the U.S.), there was a surprising degree
of consensus on which shows were prizeworthy and which were
zappable. Third, U.S. viewers are missing out on a lot of good
television.

    American TV, to be sure, remains pre-eminent in some
areas. Weekly comedy and dramatic series, for example, are still
largely a U.S. specialty. NBC'S I'll Fly Away was voted best
continuing series, beating out a lackluster group of entries
dominated by American shows (The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,
Northern Exposure). Watching an episode of Cheers with a greatly
amused band of international viewers, moreover, was a reminder
that despite its grinding familiarity, the American sitcom at
its best has achieved a level of craftsmanship unmatched
anywhere in the world.

    In most other categories, however, American shows look
like slick assembly-line goods compared with the richness and
handcrafted diversity of the best international fare.
Made-for-TV movies from Europe, for example, are far more
adventurous in style and subject matter than their
true-crime-of-the-week U.S. counterparts. Actors are less
glamorous, directors more imaginative, characters and themes
more subtly explored.

    Superlady, which won the made-for-TV-movie prize, is
visually unsophisticated (shot on videotape by director Vibeke
Gad), but it has a matter-of-fact delicacy that seems utterly
beyond the scope of ham-handed Hollywood. A daughter's hearing
impairment, for example, is just a fact of life, not an occasion
for sentiment or sententiousness. Le Diable au Corps, a remake
of the Raymond Radiguet novel about a teenager's affair with a
married woman (a co-production of France, Spain and Switzerland),
has the exquisite period look of an Impressionist painting yet
musters more emotion and eroticism than countless literary
"classics" that have been stuffed and mounted by TV. Even smaller
films like The Widower, a Belgian-Dutch adaptation of a Georges
Simenon novel about the suicide of a prostitute, seem fresh and
deeply felt.

    Short dramas -- a genre that has all but disappeared in
America -- are just as diverse and interesting. The Dark Side,
from Spain, spends nearly an hour with just two characters --
an admitted political torturer and his interrogator -- in a
stark and harrowing exploration of human cruelty. It won the
prize over a very different but equally fine work from Sweden:
Dear Hunter, the wry tale of a rock star and her manager who,
stranded in the backwoods by a snowstorm, try to modernize the
life of a stolid grouse hunter who puts them up for a night.

    Some of the most creative work around the world is being
done in children's television. American dramatic shows for kids
tend to be either treacly or patronizing. There is nothing
quite like The Children's Detective Agency, a delightfully droll
(and surprisingly adult) series from Sweden about a band of
youngsters who see themselves as junior Philip Marlowes. Nor
could one imagine a U.S. network turning out Une Nuit a l'Ecole,
a captivating French-Canadian short film that takes a simple
premise -- two children trapped in a school building on the
first night of Christmas vaca tion -- and invests it with the
force and conviction of epic drama.

    The finest documentary of the festival came from Germany:
The Last Farewell, an extraordinarily moving account of the
last days and thoughts of a woman dying of leukemia. The
patient's startling frankness and the filmmakers' ability to
probe without seeming to exploit make the program a revelatory,
and in the end quite stirring, document.

    But overall, the best nonfiction programming comes from
Britain. In science documentaries like The Elements (a primer
on the periodic table) and Molecules with Sunglasses (about the
discovery of a new form of carbon), subjects both basic and
complex are transformed by sheer directorial imagination. The
British knack for mordant, understated wit is on brilliant
display in Masters of the Canvas, a hilariously deadpan account
of painter Peter Blake's obsession with a masked wrestler named
Kendo Nagasaki. Just as witty and original is Dostoevsky's
Travels, which follows the novelist's great-grandson, a tram
driver from St. Petersburg, on a trek through Western Europe,
retracing the trip his ancestor made 130 years earlier. (The
younger Dostoevsky's more worldly goal: to buy a Mercedes.)

    These British programs may eventually show up on U.S. TV
screens. But foreign-language fare, no matter how good and
accessible, has an almost insurmountable problem: subtitles are
a virtual taboo on American TV. It is a terrible shame. At a
time when programmers are searching for unusual fare to attract
bored viewers, would it be too outlandish for one network to
devote a couple of hours on a slow summer evening to a
prizewinning TV movie from Europe? With cable channels
scrounging to recycle the most obscure American shows from the
'50s and '60s, has no one thought of picking up a few choice
morsels from overseas? In a cable universe that will soon grow
to 100 or 150 channels of programming, where is the
International Channel?