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Birgit Kellner writes:
"While foreignness (in general) does not have quantity (much/less),
it does have characteristic qualities. The foreignness of German films is
just different from the foreignness of British films, with reference to
the US. And maybe it's more difficult to understand - not only due to the
spoken language, but also due to the visual language."
 
"Foreigness" is indeed relative.  How, for example, are the films of
Satyajit Ray received in India, where his films do not conform to dominant
genres or language?  Is it simply a matter of language, of customs and
cultures, or of particular artistic practices?  When I brought an Austrian
film to campus a few years ago, German emmigrants in the audience found
the dialect--or at least the pronounciation--difficult to follow.  What
I'm curious about is all the "foreign" films that never reach American
theaters at all, or at least achieve only very limited distribution.
What could we be learning from all those Bombay musicals, Japanese
"soft-core" films, and others?  What has been the relationship of Egyptian
Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz to the Egyptian film industry, which he has
been associated with for much of his professional life?  And so on.
 
--Don Larsson, Mankato State U., MN