Parochialism and cultural export… or why Titanic is France’s best-grossing film

I mentioned a few posts back that I found individual sentences in Paul Starr’s brilliant “ Creation of the Media ” worth remembering and exploring later. One sentence that stuck with me was his observation that, despite Thomas Edison’s role in creating a popularizing moving pictures, the US wasn’t initially the world’s biggest producer of movies: “In 1907, two-thirds of the films released in the United States were imported from Europe; Pathé-Frères alone supplied one-third of all movies shown in America, more than any domestic firm.” It’s not that US filmmakers were late to the technology - they were simply late in understanding their audience. In the early 20th century, the US was a nation of immigrants, to a greater degree than we are today. 14.7% of the US population in 1910 was foreign born (as compared to 12.5% in 2006) and the recent immigrants from Europe may have had more of a taste for European fi...