04 Mar 21
1 edit
The post that was quoted here has been removedNot "Best Foreign Film" but "Best Foreign Language Film" ( based on the Golden Globe rule that "any film with over 50% of its dialogue not in English is considered a Foreign Language Film" ).
On that basis, The Godfather Part II must come perilously close to being classified as a Foreign Language Film! Robert de Niro, certainly, would have been nominated as "Best Foreign Language Actor", since he plays his role speaking Italian (Sicilian dialect) more or less throughout.
The post that was quoted here has been removedActually my comment made no observation whatever about my attitude to Minari being classed as a foreign-language film. As usual, Duchess 64 takes a neutral observation and constructs it as evidence of insensitivity. In fact, a reader more sensitive to nuance would surely have construed my ironic comment about The Godfather Part II as being supportive of her position; nobody, obviously, would have argued, then and now, that Coppola's sequel was "a foreign film" or even "a foreign language film".
Most film scholars determine the nationality of a film primarily on the basis of where the production company is based. In the early years of cinema this was straightforward, since most films were produced by one firm based in one country. Since the 1960s it has become more complex, as international co-productions have become ever more common. For instance, many art house films made and set in developing countries, and spoken in the relevant national or local language, are partly funded by French interests. By this criterion, anyway, both Minari and The Farewell are of course American films, since the funding for both came from the United States.
Interestingly, while The Farewell was nominated in the Foreign Language category for the Golden Globes, it was judged ineligible for the Foreign category in the Oscars, which has different rules.
I haven't yet seen Minari. I enjoyed The Farewell when it was screened in British cinemas. Of course, if we are focusing either on the source of funding or the nationality of the director, we should think of both films as "American films". In terms of content, the two films don't seem strictly comparable in terms of how they should be classified. As I understand, Minari is set entirely in the United States, whereas the greater part of The Farewell is set in Changchun. Minari's central characters, I understand, are American citizens of Korean heritage, rather than Korean citizens; while the heroine of The Farewell and her parents are American citizens of Chinese heritage, the majority (I think) of the characters in The Farewell are Chinese citizens, including the central figure of the grandmother. (One might the added complexity that one member of the family is resident in Japan and is about to marry a Japanese woman).
What you say about Asian Americans being classed as "perpetual foreigners" until they suddenly "become American" after winning a Nobel Prize or Olympic medal does not surprise me. I can think of comparable examples elsewhere, however. Andy Murray was referred to as a "Scottish tennis player" in UK media until he became a top Wimbledon hope and, accordingly, a "British tennis player". British author Kazuo Ishiguro (who was born in Nagasaki but had lived in the UK since early childhood) was considered a foreigner in Japan, even to the extent that Japanese sources wrote his name in katakana (the script used to transliterate foreign words) rather than in the kanji (Chinese characters) normally used to write Japanese names. Once he won the Nobel Prize, he somehow became a "Japanese author" again.
14 Mar 21
The post that was quoted here has been removedSince I am fairly ignorant of the history of science, this story was new to me (though not particularly surprising). Following it up, I was pleased to discover that both these Chinese physicists are still living in their nineties, 64 years after they became Nobel laureates! This must be a record.
