Message-ID: <ANAY3MtWsK@mb.sorostm.ro> Date: Tue, 3 Jun 1997 20:35:22 +0400 From: Florin Jurcovici <mailto:fljurcovici@MB.SOROSTM.RO> Subject: Re: American Cultural Empire Building To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
J. Sanford wrote: > I suppose the best solution would be to
> make sure young people have no money to spend for a couple decades. That
> would dry it up. But that would be very hard to do.
If young people would get the education and the possibility to gain satisfaction from other cultural products, they would spend their money on these other cultural products. However, cultural products of the sort You would call valuable are usually everywhere in the world more expensive than what You think is not representing american values.> I think that, if you want to preserve your local culture and keep out the
> importation of foreign culture, you are going to need to persuade young people
> not to listen to rock music, children not to like Disney cartoons, and others
> not to want to see and hear the products of foreign culture.
Local culture is preserved if people find out it fits their needs more than foreign culture. We romanians are usually quite happy to enjoy any sort of cultural experience. We also have our own rock music, so this is not the point. But there are a lot of factors that favorize the import of culture, altough (at least in Romania) this doesn't destroy the romanian local culture. At the first there is the money. Any artist has to live on something. Even if I like his music, or his paintings, or what he/she would produce, if I cannot afford to buy it, this person won't produce anymore. The second is the quantity. If I produce 10 movies, and another guy makes 1000, and they all go to the same market, than much more culture from this other guy will be consumed. In time, my production will become unimportant. Besides, if this other guy has the possibility to provide a wider market with his products than I am, I become even more unimportant. More, since I am a local culture producer, most often my products are linked to the local cultural, social and so on context, so this is another reason why my products won't go to another market than the local one. this is also a reason why those movies with too much violence, too much sex, superficial and so on will pass on ore markets than valuable (I won't define "valuable") products. So, in the end, nobody is represented by these superficial, unvaluable cultural products, but they sell good. In particular, I think that american actors are playing quite well. It's a pity that they are most of the times playing in movies I don't like too much. For instance, "The Silence of the Lambs" was played extraordinary, but I cannot find too much deepness or concern with human values in it. Think of the money that went into this film. Which producers except an american one would be able to raise this money for only a movie? Even if there would be someone, he would make a bad deal by this, because he wouldn't have the same market as the producers in Hollywood. A good american movie I saw in the last few months is the one made by the ex-Yugoslavian kusturica, I just cannot remember the name of the film. Why did it have to be a foreigner to make a good film at Hollywood? That's a question for you americans, for me it's only important I liked the film. To notice: the whole movie was entirely based on the american social, cultural and so on context.-- Jurcovici Florin mailto:fljurcovici@mb.sorostm.ro