How film fans fell in love with subtitles

Move over Hollywood. Step aside Pinewood. Foreign films are moving into the mainstream and attracting cinemagoers as never before.

According to figures released by the UK Film Council, foreign language movies are considerably more likely to be a box office smash than a decade ago. At one time audiences were fed on a diet of Spielberg, Lucas and Scorsese. Now, they are chewing on some ballast: the names of the Spaniard Pedro Almodovar, the Austrian Michael Haneke, and the German Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck are all recent mouthfuls. The trio of directors have scored hits in Spanish, French and German respectively, and number among 23 subtitled films that have taken more than £1m in British box offices since the beginning of 2004. In the Nineties, only nine foreign-language films cleared this financial hurdle.

One of the principal reasons for this, the Film Council claims, is the growing maturity of cinema-goers. Sean Perkins, a box-office analyst, said that 25 per cent of contemporary audiences were over 45. Ten years ago the equivalent figure was a paltry 14 per cent. Such viewers are visiting cinemas after being converted to foreign films by the expanding collection of titles available on DVD, as well as being introduced to a more diverse film experience by university campus cinemas. The continuing popularity of Bollywood has equally enticed audiences to box office kiosks. "DVDs demystified the subtitled film," Perkins says. "There is now a new generation of more mature cinema-goers who have grown up watching films at home."

The revelation is a timely sop. Foreign language cinema has just lost two of its spiritual leaders, Michaelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, whose deaths both prompted acres of column inches in the press - a sign, enthusiasts may dare to hope, of these more arthouse-friendly times.

Thankfully, there are plenty of auteurs eager to follow in their footsteps. Almodovar's Volver, no doubt helped by the rather more basic attractions of the leading lady Penelope Cruz, has headed up the recent raft of foreign-language films to wow cineastes, grossing £2.9m to date. Haneke's paranoia-inducing thriller, Caché or Hidden, has pulled in £1.4m. Von Donnersmarck's Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), centred on the East German secret police or Stasi, has had receipts worth a total of £2.5m.

But it is the unlikely figure of Mel Gibson who is at the vanguard of the foreign language film frenzy. His The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto were in Aramaic, Latin and the Mayan dialect Yucatec. Between them they have earned £15m, with the former being the most successful subtitled story in recent years.

The audience is now so significant that Britain's multiplexes, which were once the bugbear of arthouse enthusiasts, have been able to capitalise on a suitably supple market. Large, multiscreen cinemas that, when they were established would have thought of a subtitled film as a quick and easy route to financial ruin, are now looking for a new way to cater for a more sophisticated - and demanding audience.

The National Film Theatre programmer Geoff Andrew agrees that the DVD has played a profound role in converting audiences. "They have encouraged people to take films a little more seriously," he says. "People are fed up of the often shoddy scripts churned out by Hollywood." He pointed to the success of "genre" films exemplified by those produced in South Korea, a raft of which followed in the wake of Park Chan-wook's 2003 revenge action caper Oldboy.

Mr Andrew highlights Tartan Video's Asia Extreme collection as key. The series of DVDs, launched in 2001, includes Korean, Thai, Hong Kong and Japanese films such as The Ring, Audition and Battle Royale, which resonated commercially and critically among western film-goers. He continues: "Very flashy films such as these do very well. But there's an awful lot of Korean cinema which you don't see a lot of."

There may be a more cynical reason for the trend, too; marketing tricks have lent a helping hand. Increasingly, foreign language films are sold to the public as thrillers, romances or comedies, rather than the latest hit from the Continent. Change the name, marketing folk will say; make it less, well, foreign. And so Caché becomes Hidden; Ne le dis a personne transforms into Tell No One, and so on and so forth.

But Mike Gubbins, editor-in-chief of Screen International, is unconvinced by the Film Council's findings. He attributes the news in part to clever scheduling, and to the continuing popularity of Bollywood. "I suspect that if you took London out of the equation it would have a huge effect on their results," he says. The growth could also be due in part to more frequent cinema-going in general. The UK's overall box office takings have jumped 56 per cent over the past 10 years, from £489m in 1997 to £762m in 2006.

For some, though, foreign film has always been a way of life. The Frenchman Damien Sanville, of Close-Up video, a specialist east London DVD rental shop, is aiming to build up a comprehensive archive of foreign cinema, and remains unimpressed by the news. "London is still poorly served by arthouse cinemas showing foreign films," he says. "There are very few places you can go to see world cinema. That will continue to drive what we do."

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Ang Lee, 2003

A dream of flying: the most obviously appealing aspect of Lee's epic of sword-play and witchcraft, with its protagonists whirring over the rooftops of old Beijing, is the utter conviction of the fantasy. But most remarkable is the way he brings to life forgotten notions: chivalry, sacrifice and chastity.

La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast)

Jean Cocteau, 1946

Magic of a very pure kind, its influence tangible in so many fantasies since, from Disney's cartoon remake (the singing, dancing furniture is a cloddish remix of Cocteau's luminous originals) to Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, last year: a fairy-tale that never feels designed for children.

Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves)

Vittorio De Sica, 1948

A father and son seek the stolen bicycle he needs to keep his job. De Sica's film foretold a new era of social realism in film - without this, no Ken Loach - but don't hold that against it: it also the most heart-wrenching depiction of fatherly love and shame yet committed to celluloid.

Alexander Nevsky

Sergei Eisenstein, 1938

While France responded to the threat of war with fatalism, the Soviet Union came up with stirring propaganda - a medieval Russian prince fights off faceless Teutonic knights, in some of the greatest battle scenes in cinema, to the music of Prokofiev. No wonder they won at Stalingrad.

Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows)

François Truffaut, 1959

On the run from a cramped, quarrelsome home life and the restrictions of school, Antoine Doinel falls foul of authority. No film has ever been so aware of the nature of childhood, with its freedom and its powerlessness.

Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows)

Marcel Carné, 1938

The term film noir is usually reserved for US films of the Forties; but there's a reason why the Americans had to go to France for the terminology. Jean Gabin is the army deserter whose escape is put on hold while he plays white knight to Michele Morgan's femme fatale. The Vichy Government blamed Carné's fatalism for French defeat in 1940.

Il Gattopardo (The Leopard)

Luchino Visconti, 1963

Visconti's saga of 19th-century Sicilian aristocracy is cinema's most powerful evocation of history, in more than one sense. A past world is brought to life in astounding depth and then shown stranded by the movement of the grand forces of nation and class.

Shichinin No Samurai (Seven Samurai)

Akira Kurosawa, 1954

Because Kurosawa is the director who, above all, showed Western audiences that there were other ways of making films - other ways of acting - and because, of all his films, Seven Samurai wins for sheer volume of rip-roaring action, broad comedy and pure beauty. Hollywood remade it, not badly, as The Magnificent Seven, but the original has never been capped.

Aguirre (Wrath of God)

Werner Herzog, 1972

Another film that sees the past as not so much a foreign country but an alien planet, illuminated by flashes of strange lightning. Klaus Kinski is on his maddest, scariest form as a 16th-century Spanish adventurer making his way down a dream-wracked Amazon, slaughtering all who stand in the way on his path to power - which here is the same thing as madness.

Det Sjunde Inseglet (The Seventh Seal)

Ingmar Bergman, 1957

A knight moves through an absurd medieval landscape, meeting witches, priests, jesters and, at regular intervals, Death. Bergman's least subtle, least characteristic film is a tragicomic masterpiece.

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