In the eighth in a series of lectures spotlighting recipients of Academy Film Scholar grants, Tino Balio, professor emeritus of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, presented highlights from his book The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens 1946-1973.

Tino Balio

Following World War II, foreign films such as “Open City,” “The Bicycle Thief,” “Rashomon,” “The Seventh Seal,” “Breathless,” “La Dolce Vita” and “L’Avventura” played in a growing number of art houses around the U.S., which led to the creation of a small but influential art film market devoted to the acquisition, distribution and exhibition of foreign-language and English-language films produced abroad.

Balio, one of the recipients of the inaugural Academy Film Scholar grants in 2000, examined the reception in the U.S. of the works of such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Tony Richardson, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Luis Buñuel, Satyajit Ray and Milos Forman. Although their releases did not fare as well at the box office as Hollywood movies, their impact on American film culture was enormous. Balio discussed how foreign films impacted motion picture censorship in the U.S. and how they influenced theories of the director as auteur.

La Dolce Vita

Established in 1999, the Academy Film Scholars program is designed to stimulate and support the creation of new and significant works of film scholarship about aesthetic, cultural, educational, historical, theoretical or scientific aspects of theatrical motion pictures.